We have posted many articles about the United Nations Organization and its corruption. (Put “United Nations UN” into our search slot to find them.) And we have routinely ended them with these words: The U.N. must be destroyed.

Is there a possibility that President Trump will fulfill our wish and banish the U.N. from Turtle Bay? It could find refuge in some dying European country or Third World hellhole, there to pant for a while on life-support, exuding its stink of corruption, until it finally expires, dissolving in its own putrescence.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

President Trump will present a set of wide-ranging reforms for the United Nations this week that will actually force the dysfunctional organization to begin living up to its lofty ideals. This may be the corrupt, badly disorganized U.N.’s final chance at survival.

Trump had harsh things to say about the U.N. during last year’s election. Sadly for the U.N., none of them was fake news or an exaggeration. The U.N. is corrupt. The U.N. is ineffective. The U.N. is wasting billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Trump — and his able ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley — have proposed a 10-point reform plan that could be the last chance for the U.N. to ditch its legacy of failure and actually become a responsible global organization. Right now, the U.S. is footing the bill for the U.N.’s ongoing extravaganza of waste and corruption. American taxpayers fork out 22% of the U.N.’s operating budget, and an estimated 28% of its peacekeeping tab. There are 193 members of the U.N., virtually all of the world’s nations. The U.S. spends more than 176 of them combined on the regular budget, and more than 185 on the peacekeeping budget.

The U.N.’s reliance on the U.S. must end. The U.N. likes to say its budget is just $9 billion or so. In fact, it’s vastly larger than that. As it admits in its own budget documents, in 2016 it spent nearly $49 billion, which represented a rise of $10 billion during the Obama years. The U.S. is putting up about $10 billion of the total. And what do you get for your money? Let’s just say that incompetence can be very expensive.

There are over 22,000 U.N. workers, most of whom get tax-free money, lavish benefits and such perks as immunity from parking tickets in New York. U.N. employee crimes are almost never prosecuted. The perpetrators are usually just sent home.

The average U.N. employee makes about a third more than others doing the same job. These are cushy positions, with virtually no accountability.

This theme shows up in how the U.N. does its own job. As has been noted elsewhere, the U.N.’s poor performance as an organization is well-documented. An academic study that looked at the best and worst practices by aid organizations ranked the U.N. near the bottom. OK, but how about the peacekeeping function, for which the U.N. often comes in for praise? To be polite, it’s not exactly keeping the peace. For instance, studies and audits have discovered rampant mismanagement, fraud and corruption in U.N. peacekeeping procurement. And in a study conducted by the U.N. itself, eight of nine peacekeeping operations charged with protecting civilians didn’t even respond to 406 of 570, or 80%, of incidents “where civilians were attacked”.

As Heritage Foundation Fellow Brett Schaefer, who has documented these and other U.N. excesses in damning detail, noted back in 2015: “U.N. personnel have been accused of sexual exploitation and abuse in Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. [See this appalling report from South Sudan dated April 2016 – ed] Recent news stories from the Central African Republic and Haiti indicate the problem is still far too common and the U.N. is more interested in concealing the issue than in confronting it.”

Given all this, it’s pretty clear this is not an aid organization. It more resembles a criminal enterprise.

It didn’t start this way. It began its institutional life with the highest of ideals and the loftiest of ambitions in the aftermath of World War II. But an organization is only as good as its members and its leadership. Given that many members of the U.N. are corrupt dictatorships, and that the body’s own top leadership has included both former Nazi war criminals and far-left apologists for terrorists, it should be no surprise that the U.N. is as bad as it is. In recent years, the U.N. has shown a bizarre fixation with condemning Israel, the only true democracy in the Mideast, as an impediment to peace. 

This shouldn’t, and can’t, go on. That’s where Donald Trump comes in. Along with greeting world leaders and delivering a much-anticipated speech to the U.N. on Tuesday, he’s meeting behind the scenes with leaders on his 10-point reform plan. Among other things, the plan seeks to end the needless duplication of various U.N. functions by others, while pushing more action away from the U.N. itself and into the field. It will also give U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres authority to reform and streamline the U.N.’s bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House also has let it be known that it would like the fiscal burden to be spread more evenly among members. The U.S. can’t be the world’s Sugar Daddy forever. Maybe it’s a positive sign that more than 100 of the U.N.’s 193 members have signed on to Trump’s reforms. Maybe they too see this as a last chance. Maybe. And if nothing happens? In the past, Trump has suggested that, absent action by the U.N. to reform, he might cut U.S. contributions sharply. Carrot and stick. Whether this will work or not isn’t clear. Anne Bayefsky, a longtime critic of the U.N., is skeptical. At Fox News she wrote: “It’s an old U.N. game trotted out whenever Americans get fed up with throwing money down the U.N. drain or paying for a global platform used to trash the USA’s best interests and spew anti-Semitism. It goes by the name of ‘U.N. reform’.  And President Trump appears to have taken the bait — hook, line and sinker.”

Perhaps so. But Trump says he wants to “make the U.N. great”. He’s giving the U.N. the chance to reform.

If it refuses — or goes back to its anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western ways — don’t be surprised to see Trump defunding the U.N. and asking it politely to leave.

What a splendid surprise it would be! And although the U.N. does not deserve politeness, smiles and waves would be fine just so long as the filthy thing keeps moving away over the far horizon.

The U.N. must be destroyed.