By Andreas Kluth

Copyright channelnewsasia

It suits the mighty to use the UN as their scapegoat, Anjali Dayal at Fordham University told me: “We call that laundering dirty politics. The UN is very good at laundering their dirty politics for them.” The UN’s apparent failure to pacify the Syrian civil war over the past decade is an example. The simple explanation was that Russia did not want the UN to act in Syria, Dayal says, but to much of the world it looked as though the UN was failing Syrians.

Americans are not the only ones who “get this the wrong way round,” Gowan told me. “The UN does not shape the world. The world shapes the UN.”

When the Cold War was ending and something resembling harmony briefly reigned, the great powers on the Security Council often agreed, as in condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Later during the 1990s, American diplomats such as Strobe Talbott rhapsodised that “the United States defines its greatness not as an ability to dominate others but as an ability to work with others in the interest of the international community.”

WHAT DONALD TRUMP AND MAGA DON’T GET

Such breathless idealism sounds otherworldly today. But the American leaders who midwifed the UN as World War II was still raging were sombre realists, not utopians. In April of 1945, four months before he dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and with the old and failed League of Nations still on the books, Harry Truman exhorted delegates to the San Francisco Conference to create the UN to “provide sensible machinery” to settle disputes without “bombs and bayonets.”

This world-weary and worldly-wise pragmatism is reflected in the UN’s unofficial motto, a quote by an early secretary general that today graces the hallway through which delegates walk into the general assembly: “The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”

This is what Trump, Waltz and MAGA don’t get.

Truman would never have harangued the international community that America is First, or obstructed every effort to better the lot of humanity by asking what’s in it for the US, not in coming decades but during this news cycle. Truman understood what eludes Trump: that the alternative to cacophony is violence, and violence in the modern world can mean nuclear hell.

That’s why every US president saw America’s interests as overlapping with those of the world and the UN. Until Trump.