The online space (Reddit, HN, others) is so deeply embedded with groupthink that people have lost the ability to see other points of view or debate topics of interest.
To me it's very clear why the government is leaving UNESCO (and over time the UN at large). The UN is dysfunctional and does not work. It used to be a source of soft power for the States, but hasn't been so for the better part of this century. Meanwhile, the US continues to fund it even though it is currently running a massive deficit. It doesn't make sense to continue throwing good money after bad, especially when funds are scarce. Let other nations pick up the funding slack. Likely they will not and the UN will collapse, as it should. Something new can be built from its ashes. Many people agree with this rather pragmatic view.
If you want to have a discussion, debate the points I made above instead of hurling insults and ad hominem attacks.
The US budget is ~$7T annually. There is $50B to spend deporting critical parts of our workforce. There is $1T in defense spending to ensure that we spend more than the next 9(!) militaries combined*. Et cetera.
The US spends ~$18B supporting UN programs. This is ~0.003% of the federal budget.
The point here is funds are not scarce, and in any case to the extent that one is concerned about spending, the UN spend is not the driver. The rest of your point is consistent, there's no need to use the red herring about lack of money.
* I'm old enough to remember the end of the Cold War. Americans were told that as the Soviet threat withdrew, we could expect a "peace dividend" now that we didn't need to spend so much on defense. Inflation-adjusted, we spend more now than at the peak of the Cold War.
Given the threat matrix today that includes fantasies such as "US land war against its third-largest trading partner" and the absurd "protracted war against a developing nation currently being fought to stalemate by a country smaller than California," I am not sure this increased spend makes sense. Seems like the only scenario that justifies our military spend is when a President decides to blow a wad of lives & cash in some utterly wasteful conflict.
The US ran a $1.8T deficit in 2024. That's objectively scarce funds. Even if the UN doesn't drive a significant portion of the spending, they do not serve the people that are going into debt to fund it.
The US just signed a new law that will expand the deficit further. (I'll leave as an exercise to determine whether the increase from the law is > or < than the UN spend.) Your argument would have more purchase had not the administration committed to many years of larger deficits only a few weeks ago.
A government that does not collect sufficient taxes to fund its priorities can somehow always claim that funds are scarce. But that's a) a choice and b) can be rectified any time by shifting priorities (see: military budget, for ex.) or collecting more revenue.
It's fine to say "I don't care that there is a body where nations can defuse conflict without war," but it's disingenuous to pretend there simply is not money for it.
I still intellectually can't parse the argument: yeah, we're in debt therefore it's fine to spend on stuff we don't need.
If you're ok with increasing debt to fund UN (and thousand other things) then come out and say so.
BTW: I would love to hear which wars did UN stop?
It seems to me that recently US, not UN, stopped Houthis from bombing ships, stopped India-Pakistan conflict, derailed Iran's nuclear plans and is making progress on Israel-Palestine conflict.
All I hear from UN is pro-palestine, anti-israel virtue signaling and zero action or even a realistic plan to help end those conflicts.
> If you're ok with increasing debt to fund UN (and thousand other things) then come out and say so.
Yes. I am okay with increasing debt (currently costing 2% after inflation) to increase long-term US stability and competitiveness. I am not okay with increasing debt to decrease long-term US stability and competitiveness, as we are doing now.
- nobody was endorsing the OBBBA or saying that it’s good.
- some spending is objectively more necessary than other spending. Funding UNESCO is not that important. I detailed why we shouldn’t do so even were we running a $1T budget in another comment.
- UNESCO is not responsible for “defus[ing] conflict without war.” The vast majority of the UN is not.
OBBA is important context because it was just enacted this month and it demonstrates clearly that the deficit and debt are not political priorities. Any argument put forth by the administration that enacted the OBBBA concerning debt is transparently facile given its demonstrated actions of increasing the rate of increase of the debt.
It's fine to say we should not participate in the UN/UNESCO for ideological reasons, but we don't have to take leave of our faculties and engage with the silly notion that this administration cares about the debt or deficit.
No, they obviously aren’t. I don’t think we’ve had an administration or congress that cares one bit in my living memory.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to quit supporting removal of pointless spending any more than it means I’ll support the OBBBA. I’m not going to adopt a sunk-cost fallacy that “well, they just pissed away even more money, so throwing the UN a few billion to further chicom propaganda and political narratives I oppose is fine.” That’s not a facile position.
I agree it’s not going to make a huge difference in the debt but we don’t have the money to burn. The fact that congress and the president ignored that doesn’t make it less true or compel me to do so for this case. There isn’t this bargaining thing happening where trump’s OBBBA pisses away trillions more therefore now it’s acceptable to piss away billions on anti-american global organizations.
I think the parent post was saying the money is not well spent, not that the US can't afford it. We could clearly throw a lot more at the UN, but that would just be doubling down on a bad investment. At least thats how I read it - better to just pull the plug.
The U.S. is $35 TRILLION in DEBT. It's on a fast path to very high inflation which will be bad for everyone.
U.S. can't afford $18 billion of non-essential spending. It can't afford $1 billion of non-essential spending. In fact, it can't afford $1 of non-essential spending.
The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it" is just incomprehensible to me.
And it's not just UN. It's $47 billion to USAID, $9 billion to NPR, $10 billion to California's "never gonna happen" rail, $1.3 billion to Harvard and that's just a small part of spending.
US government still needs to go on a serious spending diet. But every cut gets people to catastrophize how the world will end if US doesn't fund UN or Harvard.
As here, is often ignored are two levers available to resolve our debt.
> The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it"
This is not the argument. The argument is more along the lines that our leadership just weeks ago rallied around a sharp increase in the rate of our debt accretion, so obviously erasing the debt is not a political priority at this time.
Given that erasing the debt is not a political priority, good stewardship demands that deficit spending should align with uses that will generate positive long-term financial returns to Americans (e.g. cancer research) instead of negative returns (deporting agricultural and construction workforces).
Making cuts that will have the effect of slowing the long-run growth rate of the US economy and its overall competitiveness will also make it harder to erase the debt should that ever become a political priority.
What’s the counter to the standard “nation-states do not run like family budgets, especially when the nation-state is the global hegemon”? Or “Owe your banker £1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed.”?
That at every point in the past and almost certainly in the future, global hegemons don't stay that way once their currency is sufficiently devalued and no longer held as the reserves of other nations.
This is true and correct, but none of it will matter if we keep letting the olds bleed the last drops from our country and continue pissing away the majority of our budget on social security and medicare. Until those are gone and the majority of the federal budget thereby removed, this remains an intractable problem.
You say “the UN doesn’t work” apparently because “working” means it being a source of soft power for the US.
It had several remits, but its most important is probably the one to prevent a world war. It’s designed specifically as a talking shop to help countries find other ways of resolving disputes than kill people - and promote international understanding . It’s far from perfect, but in general it does a pretty good job.
The UN didn't prevent another world war. If you'd want to include an organization, it'd be the UN security council, but not anything else of the UN. And realistically, it's nukes that prevented WW3. It's not a coincidence that the permanent members of the security council, the veto powers, all have nuclear weapons.
American dollars shouldn’t go to things that aren’t sources of soft or hard power for us, and they should be clawed back from things that are sources of soft power for china.
> American dollars shouldn’t go to things that aren’t sources of soft or hard power for us, and they should be clawed back from things that are sources of soft power for china.
Fair enough. It's worth noting though, that China benefits when the US withdraws from stuff like this.
China has already thoroughly captured most of the whole UN. They would benefit if this weren’t already the case, which means stuff like closing VoA is still dumb. But UNESCO is among those they’ve captured. All removing funding does is reduce the power of a chinese agent.
You took out the comment about people howling about change. Why? That seemed the central thesis of your statement.
I would argue that it's not practical to burn the current system down without a plan at all for the next system (like the ACA a few years ago. . .)
My concern isn't change. My concern is the complete lack of concern for consequences. Like it or not, the US is and has been on the decline in terms of world authority. Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in. You think that country has any amount of give a crap about humanity as a whole? Not even a little, I would argue.
So, again, for many people, it's not that the UN is perfect (or even functional in my opinion). It's that there is, has been, and seems like there will never be an actual plan. Am I wrong?
> Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in. You think that country has any amount of give a crap about humanity as a whole? Not even a little, I would argue.
If China wants to foot the bill, let them. As I pointed out, the US hasn't been getting anything in return for the last 25 years of footing the bill, basically since 9/11. China cares about its people. They are currently fighting back against privilege and conspicuous consumption by the elites [1]. The CCP knows that an open revolt would destabilize their grip. After all, they themselves rode a populist wave into power.
I think of it like the Tour de France. Sometimes to win the race you need to move into second place, conserve your resources, and let someone else face the headwinds.
The comment about change felt like an ad hominem attack.
Would you really liken the recent US approach to international relations to a peloton? Seems rather more like the race leader stopping his bike, chucking it off a cliff whilst hurling insults at all the contestants a lap or two behind, including the teammates offering him an alternative bike
Thoughtful, conservative isolationists don't mix up their questions about how important soft power is really with threats to annexe Canada or attempts to get the Brazilian Supreme Court to drop a case through tariff policy. Or indeed rant incessantly about how much of a threat China is whilst doing everything possible to drive the rest of the world into their arms.
Throughout much of its history, the US has been conservative and isolationist. The post-WW2 era was an aberration, not the status quo. I see these actions as the US returning to its roots. Whether the US annexes Canada is up to the US and Canada. Other parties only get an opinion when either of those two decides to involve them.
And the Tour de France is not a Peleton. You are being disingenuous.
> Throughout much of its history, the US has been conservative and isolationist
Even if this were true - and Commodore Perry, Manifest Destiny, and our zealous pursuit of trade among other skeletons of history fly in the face of this - why would we want to return to a status quo when we are so far removed from it now? The global landscape has changed, and we were the primary motivator of that change. After decades of assassinations of political leaders abroad and shock doctrine economic policies, we are to pack up our bloody toys and go home? The moral objections aside, this is a foolish and shortsighted policy that leaves only chaos. We will not preserve anything about our way of life, because it's been spliced with the genes of a globalized, post ww2 administrative world we created.
> And the Tour de France is not a Peleton. You are being disingenuous
A peloton is a line of cyclists with riders taking it turns to voluntarily relinquishing the lead to conserve energy. Happens a lot in Tour De France. Pretty much exactly the situation your analogy attempted to describe. (If you're only aware of the branded exercise equipment, maybe don't use cycling race analogies and definitely don't confuse people possessing knowledge you lack with disingenuousness)
Got to enjoy the irony of someone accusing me of being disingenuous for knowing slightly more than zero about cycle races, whilst simultaneous arguing that a mad child shouting about annexing Canada is either isolationism or the "US returning to its roots" though.
I mean, I guess the US did have a mad king once and, separately, an attempt to annex Canada. Neither of those had anything even slightly to do with the principle of isolationism either, and I don't think either of them were successful enough for any sane Americans to want to return to them :D
China especially cares about its Uyghur people, providing them with paternal supervision, excellent vocational camps, and even providing guests to live with families.
Sure, and it’s usually more conducive to do so under the aegis of an international body that can claim some measure of neutrality, rather than as a private individual from a rival nation-state.
> Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in.
The UN has no power, so dismantling it cannot leave a power vacuum. The US abandoning its overseas policies, that'd leave a power vacuum, because the US has power and projects it. But the UN has no power - it's some UN member states that have power.
Case in point: the general assembly demanded Russia withdraw all military forces from Ukraine. But what are they going to do about Russia ignoring that demand? Nothing, they're powerless.
The UN was founded in the shadow of WWII to prevent further global conflicts. It also established a global standard for human rights and to provide a forum to uphold international law. It has also taken on roles to provide development and humanitarian assistance.
Whether the UN works or not is largely dependent upon whether the five powers that granted themselves veto power (the P5: the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia) allow it to work. They are largely the source of its funding.
With that context in mind, it's difficult to understand your perspective. You've only thrown out your opinion instead of facts, and then - in a preemptive defensive posture - claim any criticism will be insults or ad hominem attacks.
You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)
If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.
> Whether the UN works or not is largely dependent upon whether the five powers that granted themselves veto power (the P5: the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia) allow it to work. They are largely the source of its funding.
The US is responsible for more than 25% of the UN's funding and is ~5-6x more than other members of the Security Council [1]. This is disproportionate to its obligations or its population.
> You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)
Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.
> If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.
If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this. Truth is it never changed. It is still very much regional hegemons governing their parts of the world. The only difference being that the hegemonic boundaries are not defined by homogeneous geographic regions. If you read the world news carefully, you will realize that all conflicts are tied to the boundaries between two or more hegemons.
> The US is responsible for more than 25% of the UN's funding and is ~5-6x more than other members of the Security Council [1]. This is disproportionate to its obligations or its population.
Fact. Another fact: this is a rounding error for the US government's budget. The total spend is under $15b. Government spending has been $5t to $7.5t in the last decade. Why is this particular spending line item of such interest to you? Do you truly see zero value derived from investment in the UN? Is that perhaps because you require some benefit to Americans from the investment? About 2/3rds of UN spending is on development and humanitarian assistance. Is helping the rest of the world raise the standard of living a laudable goal for the richest country in the world to contribute to or not, in your eyes?
> Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.
Perhaps one root difference in belief is that I don't believe the UN is an alliance, and you do. It is a forum for countries that belong to different alliances to have a forum to talk to each other. It also is a forum to build temporary alliances for military intervention (e.g., Iraq War I) across such boundaries. The US failed miserably at building such a consenus for Iraq War II and has been
> If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this.
Thank you. I understand your zero-sum argument and realpolitik in general, both from an academic and personal perspective. I grew up in a third-world country, so - perhaps, unlike you - I'm intimately familiar with the impact of Great Power games in the post-Cold War era. You are unfortunately correct; I wish that the US (my home for several decades now) tried harder to move away from such thinking and utilized the UN for more win-win scenarios, but we're moving away from such liberal thinking, and so my wish will probably remain unfulfilled.
While UN is not optimal and needs a revamp, it is an organization that has almost all countries of the world as members. There is no guarantee that a new organization is going to be any better. Once US leaves UN, why would any other country believe in US to build a better organization, especially seeing that the existing administration in US itself is chaotic.
^ This is the primary meta argument against Trump foreign policy.
If you screw your counterparty over in every negotiation, you erode trust and end up without allies.
That’s fine in a business setting, if you’re self-capitalized (although Trump famously ran into issues after burning bridges with most banks), because you can do without them.
It works less effectively in a forum of sovereign nations, where you’re going to need to deal with CountryX tomorrow and ten years from now.
The US is ceding the soft power and web of alliances that are the basis of its economic and hard power.
The US, without allies, loses to China strictly on the basis of population.
“America first” is “America alone” with an orange spray tan.
I used to say that HN was a place where very controversial opinions were respectfully discussed. Granted with some bias, but still a lot of tolerance for unpopular views. Even climate change skepticism or 2020 election skepticism. What got voted down was unwanted tone, essentially.
Now it seems that the current administration is too much for people here to handle. I wonder if the mods have noticed the same thing, or maybe they support it at this point.
You don’t think China, the Gulf states, hell, oil-rich Azerbaijan won’t pick up the slack for international legitimacy or national glory? And you think U.S. isolation from the League of Nations was the right move, too?
Probably not, as even this administration is unlikely to leave the U.N. altogether. Withdrawing from UNESCO feels like “slashing the NPR/PBS budget” virtue-signaling.
The surface arguments for abandoning these kinds of programs (also USAID, recalling diplomats, bunch of research funding) seem straightforward: "there is a deficit, why pay all this money for ostensibly wasteful work, etc."
Where I get frustrated is when the admin turns around and massively expands the deficit by throwing cargo ships full of money at other wasteful, in my opinon, programs. That tells me the fiscal responsibility talk was just a pretense to do another kind of money grab and "own the libs" at the same time. And at the end of the day the argument reduces to opinions on what is wasteful and what is not.
Example: you claim UN hasn't been a source of soft power "for the better part of this century." Well, says you - I think it has done a great job. Now what?
Yes, they are spending funds on things that matter to those that voted for them, and removing funds from things that don't. Sounds like a standard thing that happens in a democracy. When someone you vote for is in power, they will spend on things you prefer to fund instead.
> Example: you claim UN hasn't been a source of soft power "for the better part of this century." Well, says you - I think it has done a great job. Now what?
Okay, what has it done that has aligned with US interests?
They... don’t. The ICC sought warrants for both Israeli and Palestinian leaders (at least one of the Palestinian leaders was subsequently killed by Israel, rendering any charges moot, but the ICC wasn't ignoring the alleged crimes.)
Similarly, many countries have sanctioned both Hamas (and/or other groups like PIJ, etc.) and/or individual Palestinians for acts against Israeli civilians as well as Israel and/or Israeli politicians for acts against Palestinian civilians.
For instance:
Both Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have been sanctioned by the UK, Norway, Canada, New Zealand and Australia for “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian civilians."
And yet all of these countries also condemn Hamas and their atrocities....
The State of Israel literally created the main “monster” it claims to be fighting (Hamas), abd did so for the specific purpose of splitting Palestinian opposition and having a less sympathetic enemy to weaken international criticism of its campaign to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians, which has been fairly overt policy since the occupation began.
They should put that UN money where it belongs, the MIC and more bombs for Israel, and why not add more the deficit. This isn't even a joke, its just what they're doing.
I am not sure it was ever very functional. I am not an expert on it at all but it seems like it had two purposes for the US. 1) prevent Nazis (i.e. another world war which metaphysically it seems people believe Right wing views are responsible for war which leads to very specific outcomes we see today) and 2) prevent countries from becoming communist by opening discussions with them.
This article makes the case that the 1965 Immigration Act happened not because anyone in the US wanted it but because the State Dept. pressured Congress to pass it in order to make more allies with Third World countries https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/geopolitical-origins.... Basically the UN was used as a forum by countries to trash the US which it still is. The USSR propagandized against the US in the Third World.
So honestly the whole UN experiment seems like it was kind of a foreign policy wonk experiment that didn't really serve the interests of US citizens especially now that the USSR fell. But I think the philosophical ideas behind it run very strong in elitist thought in the US. These are that 1) Nationalism is an ever present threat to global peace 2) social engineering should be used to prevent Nationalism/Nazis/etc. 3) Immigration is a tool for statecraft and limiting Nationalism in certain countries. 4) an enlightened class of smarter, educated people should be used to counter Nationalism.
If any of these goals or assumptions are false the whole thing becomes useless.
The UN is dysfunctional because the US blocks every good thing it tries to do like the abomination of the security council vetoing resolutions to stop the US backed genocide in Gaza.
It’s a bit incomplete to bring up Security Council vetoing without mentioning Russia (currently at war with a sovereign nation) and China (intent on war with a sovereign nation).
The UNSC isn’t an arbitrator of good, but an alignment of hard UN outcomes with the first countries to have nukes (and therefore the ability to force the issue militarily if they disagreed with the UN).
This is not proven. Why would China want to wreck Taiwan? Official US, Taiwanese, and Mainland China policy is that there is one China. Taiwan is like Texas being a breakaway republic run by confederates in the USA, though the culture has evolved in a more progressive direction (more progressive than USA) since the original breakup.
> It’s a bit incomplete to bring up Security Council vetoing without mentioning Russia (currently at war with a sovereign nation)
I'll give you that's bad, but at least it's a fight between nations and not a genocide. I believe the U.S. instigated this fight by advancing NATO territory eastward and my position is there should be peace negotiations immediately.
For the same reasons most wars have been fought: belief (primacy of CCP), resources (uncontested access to the Pacific), and the economy (don’t worry about that, ra ra flag).
> [Russia and Ukraine] not a genocide
One of the definitions of genocide is forced relocation of children and eradication of culture, both of which Russia is doing in the Ukrainian territories it occupies.
I clicked on one of the ones where Russia and China vetoed.
Among other things, it called for Yemen to stop attacking Israeli shipping, which is one of the few acts by a country that is fulfilling its international obligation to intervene to stop genocide. Yemen has repeatedly stated that it will stop when Israel stops its genocide in Gaza and proved it when it stopped during the ceasefire.
It is also the place where world opinion is shaped. West has majority of veto powers which it used to its advantage. West had also condemned other nations in the same forums in the past.
To me it's very clear why the government is leaving UNESCO (and over time the UN at large). The UN is dysfunctional and does not work. It used to be a source of soft power for the States, but hasn't been so for the better part of this century. Meanwhile, the US continues to fund it even though it is currently running a massive deficit. It doesn't make sense to continue throwing good money after bad, especially when funds are scarce. Let other nations pick up the funding slack. Likely they will not and the UN will collapse, as it should. Something new can be built from its ashes. Many people agree with this rather pragmatic view.
If you want to have a discussion, debate the points I made above instead of hurling insults and ad hominem attacks.