John McCain's Secretive Plan to "Kill the UN"

Johann Hari
The Huffington Post

Does John McCain have a "hidden agenda" to "kill the UN"? That's what the man who devised McCain's big set-piece foreign policy proposal says -- and he's delighted it is sailing silently through the presidential election campaign towards success.

This story begins with a Republican presidential candidate who, despite the hype, doesn't seem to know much about foreign affairs. McCain recently talked at length about problems on the "Iraq/Pakistan border". The countries are a thousand miles apart. Asked how to deal with Darfur, he mused about his desire to "bring pressure on the government of Somalia" Uh -- it's Sudan, Senator McCain. He keeps expressing his desire to build up US relations with Czechoslovakia, a country that hasn't existed for fifteen years.

But McCain does know one thing: he doesn't like the United Nations. He championed George Bush's appointment of John Bolton as the US Ambassador to the UN -- precisely because Bolton scorns the UN as "irrelevant" and "a twilight zone". He even announced "there is no such thing as the United Nations." It was like appointing Marilyn Manson as Ambassador to the Vatican. This is part of a long seam of thinking on the American right: they opposed the UN's creation by Franklin Roosevelt as an unacceptable fetter on American power, and have never been properly reconciled to it. Republican congresses have refused to authorise US dues to the UN -- so there is now a backlog of $2.8bn outstanding.

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