The folly of the United Nations was on full display this week. France committed a major faux pas: Its embassy posted on X that “the US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore. Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated.” The French went on to say “the world no longer listens” to the US.
The American delegation walked out of a UN meeting in protest, and now the State Department is considering how to punish both Paris and Turtle Bay. Washington is reportedly weighing a rejection of President Emmanuel Macron’s new pick to be his country’s ambassador in DC. The French are reportedly miffed about that — but why should they care about an ambassador to a country no one listens to?
This diplomatic slap is a good step, but it does not impose real costs outside the imaginary world of diplomatic dignity. Moreover, simply blocking the ambassador is not enough in light of Macron’s persistent attempts to undermine Trump’s foreign policy.
Macron has consistently thrust himself into diplomatic issues where he has no business. He defied Trump by announcing he would recognize an imaginary “State of Palestine” in 2025 and organized a conference of other countries to do the same. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, this blew up negotiations between Israel and Hamas, which rightly recognized France’s moves as a de facto reward for their Oct. 7 invasion. Macron delayed the ultimate cease-fire by months, causing additional deaths and suffering to the hostages.
France’s role in Lebanon has been even more disastrous. France still fancies itself as having a special say in the fate of its former colony. But Macron has done nothing to keep the country from being taken over by Hezbollah — which France does not even fully recognize as a terror group.
Worse, Paris was the major supporter of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a failed peacekeeping mission that ignored Hezbollah’s burgeoning missile arsenal. Indeed, sometimes Hezbollah hid behind UNIFIL the way Hamas hides behind Gazan civilians.
President Trump took an important step by finally terminating UNIFIL after nearly 50 years. But France has not given up. It is trying to keep some kind of international presence in the country even after UNIFIL leaves in December. The Trump administration should block this effort.
France’s bad behavior is just a symptom of the sick institution that is the UN, an institution absolutely insulated from any kind of accountability. This was highlighted last week by the reappointment of Volker Turk to serve as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Turk constantly bashes America for controlling its own borders while giving a pass to Iran and other rogue regimes. He has turned the Human Rights Council into a permanent anti-Israel bureaucracy.
His reappointment by the outgoing secretary general shows that the UN’s pretenses at reform are just a charade. The entire institution works against American interests. The US is the UN’s single biggest funder. It is responsible for 22% of the organization’s regular budget and 26% of the peacekeeping budget. And yet it is on the losing side of about two-thirds of all General Assembly votes over the last two decades.
There is no justification for the structure of the Security Council. The five veto-bearing permanent members — the US, France, UK, Russia and China — were picked 80 years ago based on the global powers at the end of World War II. France and the UK are no longer empires or even leading military powers capable of global force projection. And as the latest flap shows, they are not necessarily reliable US allies.
US Ambassador Jeff Bartos has threatened there would be “consequences” if Turk won reappointment. It is time to deliver those consequences — and they must be powerful and permanent. The UN knows how to wait out the occasional reformist American president.
The US could start by quitting the Convention on Privileges and Immunities. This gives the UN greater immunity from lawsuits than any other international organization or sovereign state. It has been used to shield UNRWA from justice for supporting Hamas. And we can leave agencies such as the International Organization on Migration and the International Maritime Organization that increasingly work against American interests.
The UN knows that it is totally insulated from accountability roughly half the time — when there is a Democrat in the White House. That means President Trump must come down twice as hard.
Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom.
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