Why Europeans Suck.

This week, the UN undersecretary for douchebaggery, Mark Malloch Brown, essentially told American conservatives to suck it, and the European press lost their hair by nodding so damn hard.

Am I the only one who gets sick and tired of people and organizations coming to our shores with their hands out for our cash, and their mouths open to tell us we're idiots?

Brown essentially said that the UN is an incompetent crap-hole, and it is the fault of the US because we're constantly saying what an incompetent crap-hole it is. Also, everyone in middle America is an idiot.

Thanks Mark.

It's not that he doesn't have a point. To some extent, he does. The truth is that we attempt to use the UN when it is convenient, and bash it at all other times. One of the many problems with Brown's commentary is that he is trying to get us to engage MORE, but reform LESS.

Perhaps I'm too stupid to understand because I didn't go to a suave European college (only three of which are on the world's top 20, while the US has 15, according to a Chinese university), but isn't that a bit self-defeating? The US is supposed to give our share to the UN this month, so this statement seems focused on making us look stupid so that we feel forced to give money and stop insisting upon reform.

At some point, we as a country need to respectfully insist that if the UN doesn't start representing democracies worldwide, rather than appointing the biggest offending autocracies to its boards, we would rather just start a club for democracies, and the rest can start their own club. We'll just go back to the mindset of NATO v. Warsaw Pact. That is what we're trying to do, we're trying to shame the UN into changing, and they're trying to shame us for not being elitist enough to simply trust that they'll do a good job, despite all evidence.

The UN does some things well. It's doing a good job in Haiti, after the US cleared out the big guns. It's doing a passable job in the Balkans, after NATO cleared out all the big guns. It generally does a pretty good maintenance job after the heavy lifting is done. It is also a decent job of diplomatic mediation, which is a valuable service.

The problem is that the UN thinks it is a world government in practice. The UN seems to believe it is uniquely placed to do most every job in the world, just like a good socialist government should. The inconvenient fact is that they have a shabby track record. All the US wants is for the bureaucratic corruption to end, for representative governments to hold more weight than autocracies, and for the UN to stick to what it does well rather than what it does poorly.

These all seem like good goals to me. If Mr. Brown disagrees, let him say so, but to bash the US for not being an effective PR department for the UN, is to act a bit grandiloquently. We are not a sub-directorate of the UN, we are a sovereign nation, and if the UN feels put upon by its largest donor country demanding performance over rhetoric, we must just apologize for not being French.

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