United Nations officials remain in a panic about President Donald Trump’s budget cuts. For decades, the United States talked about reform and even took aim at its contribution to the U.N.’s budget, but most administrations used a scalpel. More populist politicians recommended taking a cleaver to U.N. bloat. Trump’s team comes armed with an axe in one hand and a chainsaw in the other.
Trump and the U.N. could save billions by eliminating failed peacekeeping operations.
Some peacekeeping works. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, and Côte D’Ivoire, peacekeepers provided space for governments to solidify and turn the page on conflict and civil war. Other missions, however, are not only expensive failures but may actually preserve conflict. Take the Western Sahara, a sparsely populated territory on the northwest coast of Africa. The U.N. Security Council established the U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara in 1991. Its goal was simple: Organize a referendum among the territory’s Sahrawi to determine if they wished to join Morocco or establish their own country. Thirty-four years and billions of dollars later, MINURSO has not even conducted a census. It makes excuses, some valid and others not, but time marches on.
The U.S. today recognizes Western Sahara as part of Morocco, thus subsidizing an organization that represents a betrayal of an Abraham Accords participant that constantly has America’s back. The Sahrawi themselves also wish to join Morocco. This is why the Algerian-backed Marxist Polisario Front, which claims to represent the Sahrawi, will not allow refugees from the camps they control in Algeria’s Tindouf province to travel to Morocco with their families; they hold wives and children as hostages to prevent refugee resettlement. By funding these camps and inflating Polisario legitimacy, the U.N. perpetuates the problem. Today, the best way to find MINURSO officials in Western Sahara is to visit one of Laayoune or Dahkla’s bars, where MINURSO vehicles are ever-present.
An even greater waste of money at a cost of more than $1 billion a year is the U.N. Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rather than bring peace, MONUSCO actively undermines it. It has allowed the armed perpetrators of the 1994 Anti-Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda to take over refugee camps, turning them into terrorist camps and indoctrinating second and third generations into genocidal hatred. It is safe to say that MONUSCO’s corruption, malfeasance, partisanship, and propaganda have encouraged war rather than brought peace closer. U.N. experts opine on human rights and smuggling from 1,000 miles away, simply repeating propaganda fed to them by government officials, little of which has any bearing.
THE UNITED NATIONS NEED DOGE EVEN MORE THAN THE US GOVERNMENT
Then, there is the U.N.’s Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, now entering its seventh decade. That is no record; it is the organization’s third-longest peacekeeping mission. Rather than bring peace, it has provided a shield behind which Turkish occupiers can sink roots, pour in settlers, and change demography. The Multinational Force and Observers in the Sinai was successful because it did not operate under U.N. constraints; perhaps it is time for the European Union to test its European Army concept by replacing the U.N. along Cyprus’s line of control. The Argentines, Brits, and Slovaks staffing the U.N. Cyprus can enjoy the beach on their own dime.
If the U.N. does not want to suffer Trump’s chainsaw, Secretary-General António Guterres should waste no time: It’s time to end legacy peacekeeping missions that, at best, do nothing and, at worst, preserve and provoke conflict. Trump and Congress should insist they will no longer tolerate peacekeeping operations that are self-licking ice cream cones; rather, it will always be 10 years or out, with no extensions. If additional time is needed, a decade is enough to organize ad hoc operations unconstrained by U.N. bureaucracy.
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.