MASSOUDIEH, LEBANON — The United Nations is like a Hollywood starlet without make-up. From afar, the aura overshines any blemish. Bump into her on the street, however, and the illusion quickly fades away.
Idealistic students and activists might embrace the United Nations as a bulwark of principle, but only those inside see the stifling bureaucracy, wasteful spending among upper management, and the sacrifice of principle for politics. The Saddam Hussein-era Oil-for-Food corruption scandal was an exception only in that top bureaucrats got caught before the institution and those investing in the status quo could circle the wagons until public attention moved on. Secretary-General António Guterres likes to jet-set the world and virtue signal on the U.N. dime as much as Kofi Annan did, but he has done little to streamline U.N. functions or focus more on managing a multibillion-dollar organization than profiting from its perks.
But while the Trump administration prefers to address the UN’s inefficiencies with axes rather than scalpels, conservatives are wrong to ignore the good work the United Nations can do.
First, for all its grandstanding and antisemitism, there is value in the United Nations General Assembly if only to allow all members an opportunity to backchannel with each other.
Second, while UN peacekeeping is prone to zombie missions that continue long past their natural expiration — think Cyprus and Morocco — peacekeepers did succeed in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte D’Ivoire. When the U.N. does peacekeeping right, it saves the United States money as it can operate more efficiently than a U.S. military deployment.
Third, the World Food Programme (WFP) is the largest U.N. agency, delivering food in more than 120 different countries, and often allowing other organizations to piggyback on its logistical networks. Ironically, its UN affiliation does not taint the WFP because it is one of the few UN agencies that does not have UN in its title.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is also among the UN’s most irreplaceable and cost-effective programs. When crises erupt, UNHCR can respond almost overnight. When pogroms erupted targeting Syrian Alawis and Druze, UNHCR scrambled overnight to register and receive 90,000 refugees; it does not do so alone, but coordinates with governments at the national and local level as well as other aid agencies to make sure families receive shelter and emergency rations. It helps organize refugee leadership in both formal camps and informal settlements to coordinate with local security and political leaders, resolve tensions with locals, organize vaccinations, and, more importantly, organize refugee return.
Recently, however, in refugee hubs like Tripoli and Massoudieh, Lebanon, budget cuts are curtailing essential services like registrations of new refugees and births. Dislocation is bad enough for children, but now a whole generation faces an inability to get to school for lack of transportation and even access emergency medical care. In Syria, UNHCR’s pending takeover of the high-risk Al-Hol camp, where Islamic State veterans remain confined, adds a security dimension to the 30% or more budget cuts.
The problem with UN budget cuts is bureaucracy. Inefficient administrators protect their inefficient fiefdoms and blame accounting mechanisms as other agencies take the hit. UNHCR relies on voluntary contributions and so has less institutional buffer from the main UN budget. Hence, when the United States and other countries slash the UNHCR donation out of pique at UN waste, they are disproportionately harming the ability to protect the status quo.
UNHCR’s budget is between three and five times that of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees (factoring the latter’s emergency appeals), yet UNHCR works in more than 130 countries to UNRWA’s four. UNHCR cares for more than 40 million refugees while UNRWA serves just a fraction of that. With the end of the Gaza conflict, UNRWA is losing much of its mandate for food, shelter, and relief, and instead focusing mostly on an education system riven with indoctrination and incitement.
If fiscal hawks and UN reformers are serious about refugees, aid, and efficiency, the answer is clear: Bolster UNHCR to maximum capacity by shifting UNRWA funding to its coffers. Bureaucrats may suffer, but refugees will find relief.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.