al or one aircraft carrier, I can tell you which one I prefer to keep the peace in a dangerous world.” (5)Bob Dole, R-Kan., offered a similar view. “A strong military is far more important to the nation’s ability to protect its interests and retain its global leadership role than additional foreign aid grants and subsidies for questionable multilateral activities,” he wrote in a recent op-ed column. (6)Bills now before Congress would further reduce U.S. funding of U.N. operations and condition future payments on the enactment of reforms to improve the U.N.’s accountability and management. (7)“I think these proposed cuts are fully warranted,” Carpenter says. “In fact, one could make the argument for even deeper cuts. The organization needs to slim down, and it needs to eliminate the pandemic corruption that has occurred in the bureaucracy. It also needs to focus on a small number of reasonable functions and not have delusions of being a de facto world government. It was never meant to be that, it’s not going to become that and even the more vague notions in that direction ought to be discouraged.”The bottom line for many Republicans is that Americans should work through the United Nations only when it directly serves U.S. interests. “If it suits our interests to make the United Nations effective, then we should do so, and if it doesn’t, then we shouldn’t,” Bolton says. “What we need is a decision [by the administration] in each case whether using [the U.N.] is better for American interests than not using it.”Supporters of the United Nations say it provides a priceless service by spreading the responsibility for global peacekeeping – a role that in the U.N.’s absence would even fall more heavily on the United States. “Despite the many inefficiencies in the U.N. system, the burden sharing with so many other countries st...
