by Stephen Paul Foster, The Unz Review:
From Reuters, February 4, 2026:
GENEVA/WASHINGTON … U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is sounding the alarm on U.N. finances, warning that the world body is at risk of “imminent financial collapse” due to unpaid fees and a budget rule that forces it to return unspent funds. Guterres has repeatedly spoken about the U.N.’s worsening liquidity crisis but this was his starkest warning yet, and it came as the United States, its main contributor – and debtor – is retreating from multilateralism on numerous fronts.
Like the institution of the United Nations he represents, the Secretary-General looks to be old, tired, bloated, enervated and hopeless—a man who has largely given up and is going through the motions. Can anyone who has observed the UN in action, particularly, over the last five years not conclude that its eighty-year history is overwhelming proof that, both in theory and in practice, it was an utterly delusional, stupid idea destined to deteriorate over time and would eventually collapse under a mountainous accumulation of bureaucratic impotence, incompetence and corruption? Would it be mistaken to allege that the portended “imminent financial collapse” is the inevitable result of its failed mission, which acording to Article 1 of the UN Charter, is “to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, foster cooperation to solve international problems, and promote human rights”? If one surveys the current state of international affairs, not a single one of these four grandiose aims has come close to fruition.
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Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed spectacularly to “make the world safe for democracy.” So, twenty years later along came FDR, whose grasp on the reality of international politics may have been even more reality-averse than Wilson’s. “I think that if I [FDR] give him [Stalin] everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.”
Apparently, he believed that Stalin, who had already murdered three or four million peasants in Ukraine before WWII got started, and invaded eastern Poland in 1939, would join hands with its US partner against the vanquished Hitler to attempt a second go-around of Wilson’s fantasy of making the world into a giant “democracy.”
The United Nations would achieve world peace where the League of Nations had failed. Was Franklin Roosevelt anything other than a deluded, dilettante utopian? His treasonous collusion with Churchill turned a European war into a world war and handed eastern and central Europe as a gift package to Stalin, who we all know was a man devoted to “democracy and peace.”
Continuing with Reuters:
Guterres warned in his letter that the U.N. could run out of cash by July and cited a “Kafkaesque” requirement for it to credit back hundreds of millions of dollars in unspent dues to states each year even if it never received the money. U.N. officials hope to overhaul this “bizarre” rule, which Guterres has called “a race to bankruptcy.”
Who, one might ask, put this “bizarre” rule in place, and why can’t the UN officials get rid of it? The “Kafkaesque” dimensions are a feature, not a bug of the UN and go far beyond the financial problems. Now, contributing to what is likely the completion of the UN’s devolution into a case study of colossal institutional failure, is the astonishing megalomania of Donald Trump, “our Caligula President,” as Ron Unz has christened him.
The [financial] crunch comes at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a Board of Peace with himself as lifetime chair, which some fear could undermine the United Nations…
Are you laughing? How can anyone “undermine” the UN any more than the UN does with no assistance? Think of it as an institutional version of the Titanic, a perfect symbol of grandiosity married to hubris, its irrelevance letting it sink into eventual oblivion. As if the United Nations disappearing tomorrow would make the slightest difference to the current goings-on in the international arena. As I wrote in an earlier piece, Putin, Netanyahu & Nuremberg, “the United Nations and other international bodies that presume to police the world, operate with a pseudo-moral authority that allows the states to pretend to adhere to the norms of ‘civilized’ people everywhere while letting the strongest ones get along with pursuing their self-interest at the expense of the weaker ones.” The U.N. has always been a pretend endeavor created by pretend democrats as veneer for the exercise of raw power.
