America should not support the United Nations because it is unproductive

Thank you for your reply. To save space, I will not quote you; I'll just reply to your points in succession. First off I must correct some inaccuracies in your post that I'm surprised to read. You said that all the major powers after the Second World War capable of conducting war were democratic, but this is obviously not true. The Soviet Union was not a democracy. I think you are also confusing the specific issue we are talking about when you mention that "no one major power has wanted to go to war." Major powers since 1945 have been at war quite frequently: France in Algeria and Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Britain in the Falklands, and the United States in numerous areas across the globe. You mention the Soviet Union (Russia) and the US after the Second World War, but you do so at the whims of your own strawmen arguments; yes, the Soviets and the Americans were involved in indirect conflict against each other, but they never engaged in open war. The significance of these last six decades partially lies precisely in the fact that these major powers have not gone to war with each other. That's the amazing part, simply because it runs against the hitherto ill tidings of history. The United Nations has had many failures in its history, yes. What exactly are you implying by this? That some failures should justify its eradication? And what of the higher number of successes? Do we ignore those? Your list has one error that I can immediately spot: Kosovo definitely was not a failure; it was a major success. In fact, it's expected to gain independence next year. Kosovo has also only been under the administrative auspices of the UN; it was actually NATO that won the war in 1999 and drove the Serbs out. Nevertheless, the UN administration and NATO forces combined have done a satisfactory job at holding the province together and establishing democratic institutions. The reason for this relative stability is not democratic peace theory. That's a perversion of historical reality. Democracies existed long before the latter part of the twentieth century, yet there were still tensions and conflicts among nations; that is, among democratic nations. Certainly the rise of liberal democracies has contributed to the comparable global peace and stability that we enjoy now, that's virtually undeniable, but to suggest that factor as "the reason" is a terrible disservice to non-turbid and thoughtful analysis. Clearly I mentioned that the United Nations has not stopped war as an instrument of national policy after the Second World War. That's a tall order; just think about what you're asking and how incredibly difficult it would be to achieve. If that's your standard for adjudicating the UN's success, then the UN is a failure. But all that means is that your inquiry is baseless; obviously the UN cannot stop all wars. However, what it can do and has done is create a legitimate international forum for dialogue and negotiation, something lacking for most of human history. And the very existence of that forum, where nations can discuss their problems and try to resolve them together, actually does help in ratcheting down tensions and even preventing wars. Resolutions and sanctions are often effective; not always, of course, but again bear in mind that to demand perfection in global politics would be a severe misprision of reality. The rest of the arguments in your post run into familiar dead ends and jumbled statements. The UN cannot possibly stop every horrific thing from happening; again, that's an unreasonable expectation. We should hope the UN to be generally effective at deterring violent mass actions, but it cannot stop everything. This is not a legitimate complaint on your part; it seems more like an effort to list every UN peccadillo in the hopes that you can taint the organization. This push apparently falls under the 90-10 rule: use the ten percent to represent the ninety percent, right? Find some UN failures, while ignoring all the enormous and innumerable successes, and paint the organization as ineffective. Nice try, but it's futile. Now, without question, the United Nations needs the "big nations," as you call them, to cooperate, and mostly they do. Once again, you're falling under this 90-10 trap; you're looking at a few moments of disharmony and neglecting all the other points of congruence. You mention the UN fallout over Iraq, but you don't mention UN solidarity in driving the Syrians out of Lebanon, or UN solidarity in restoring and maintaining peace between Israel and Lebanon since 2006. For every case that you can list to support your argument, I can give many more. You aver, or imply, that the United States succeeds by doing its "own thing," but you don't really show how. There is much that the United Nations can teach the US in, as an example, nation building. Our dereliction of the latter partly sparked the mess known as Iraq. The UN has far more experience with nation building than the US, and it only makes sense that they are delegated those kinds of projects. This is a crucial point: there are limits to UN power (force projection among the primary ones, which is where the US is strong), but there are also limits to American power (nation building and reconstruction, where the UN is strong). Iraq has given us a rather unwelcome taste of the latter fact. By working together, the UN and the US can overcome those weaknesses since the strengths of the other simply compensate for the weaknesses. The US does not "dictate" policy to the UN; it does not have that much influence. Certainly the US is the most important and most powerful member in the organization, but it cannot run roughshod over everything whenever it wants: it has been stifled before. The United States has had a rocky relationship with the United Nations under the Bush Administration, but the proposition that we can just withdraw entirely from the organization borders on the ridiculous. Few serious diplomats actually consider that a viable option. Some corruption exists in the UN, a situation no different than that found within any major enterprise of comparable size and stature. Once again, your comments here perpetuate the 90-10 mistake: use isolated examples to characterize the behavior of the entire organization. When will your analysis start to consider the germane patterns and trends? On top of this, you still have outstanding issues from my first post that you did not address.