America should not support the United Nations because it is unproductive

Greetings zimmer, hopefully this will be a lively and well-reasoned debate. I will comment on all of your relevant claims, but first I want to set the historical scene necessary to understand the purpose and the workings of the United Nations, mainly because your laconic introduction was riddled with slovenly generalizations and was completely devoid of context. The twentieth century was a momentous period for humanity; the chief events of the era, the two world wars, restructured international relations in an unprecedented fashion. The pain and turmoil wrought by conflicts that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people had a profound impact on human thinking about global governance and cooperation. The kernels of international treaties and agreements - epitomized by the Geneva and Hague conventions concerning the treatment of war prisoners and the uses of weaponry - sprouted before the world wars, but those conflicts gave added momentum to the idea that nations should discuss and resolve their problems through international organizations. The First World War led to the League of Nations, but the egregious failures of this body prompted the creation of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War. Both entities were part of this broader push to eliminate unilateralism and to achieve consensus for global development; they hoped to create a forum to redress grievances and, ultimately, to maintain world peace. Other major global organizations, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, were conceived in the same geopolitical cauldron, hoping to attain financial growth and stability for the world through friendship and coordination among nations. We should all be familiar with these historical intricacies because they help indirectly explain why the United States cannot simply "break off" from the UN: the UN is a fundamental part of our modern, globalized world, and any nations seeking prosperity and goodwill in that world must work within the cooperative international frameworks established after the Second World War. Now that we understand the historical reasons for the creation of the United Nations, let's analyze some of your statements. Your first major assertion is that the UN "has done hardly anything in helping better the international community." This is quite an astounding comment when we look at the extensive record the UN has with global aid, relief, and peacekeeping efforts. Too often the media portrays the "big dogs" in the UN, the Security Council, without tending to the fact that the UN is a gargantuan organization with several other branches and sub-organizations. Among the latter would be the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund, which have provided food, clothes, shelter, and health care to millions of people throughout the world. Sure, it's easy standing at the comfort of your chair and writing on debate.org from your computer about how worthless the UN is, but for scores of people out there the UN means the difference between life and death.....every day. Besides aid and relief, the UN has made major strides in global peace and security since the Second World War. It is true that the amaranthine human dream of warless societies has not yet materialized, people still commit heinous acts of mass violence, but it is also true that no two major powers have openly warred against one another since 1945, an absolutely jarring fact when we consider history before that date, when European powers, among others, were regularly and frequently locked in conflict. In 1914 or 1939, few could have been shocked that nations like France and Germany were at war with each other. Now, however, the two are friends, a friendship rooted and strengthened in supranational organizations like the European Union and the United Nations. The UN has not given us permanent peace, but it generally has given the world a relative level of desirable stability. The UN also played a pivotal role in the decolonization process of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, especially in Africa. Its security forces and local administrations combined well together to create a more placid environment for the success and establishment of new African countries. Africa as a continent still has a plethora of geostrategic and sociopolitical problems, but these would have been further accentuated without UN guidance. Even greater evidence for the centrality of the UN in global security was given in the "Human Security Report" of 2005, an authoritative document from the Human Security Centre. There is much in the report that can be questioned, but its generally high value is unmistakable. The report detailed the state of global security following the Cold War, covering the period from 1990 to 2003. The report, which you can read at humansecurityreport.info, said that "the number of genocides and politicides plummeted by 80 [percent] between 1988 and 2001," while also finding that "the number of armed conflicts around the world has declined by more than forty percent since the early 1990s," that "international crises, often harbingers of war, declined by more than 70 [percent] between 1981 and 2001," and that "the number of refugees dropped by some 45 [percent] between 1992 and 2003, as more and more wars came to an end." The report also analyzes trends dating back to the 1950s, even mentioning something about my snippet above regarding the relatively harmonious relationships between the major powers: "The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval of uninterrupted peace between the major powers in hundreds of years." And who was a crucial component - indeed, the crucial component - in making this happen? The United Nations! The report credits the UN with "[spearheading] a veritable explosion of conflict prevention, peacemaking, and post-conflict peace-building activities in the early 1990s." Some of these concrete efforts featured everything from a "sixfold increase in the number of preventive diplomacy missions mounted...between 1990 and 2002" to a "fourfold increase in the number of...peacekeeping operations between 1987 and 1999." The report then states that "as the upsurge of international activism grew through the 1990s, the number of crises, wars, and genocides declined." The UN was an integral part of that activism; it served as the conduit through which other nations and organizations could act and deliberate on how to tackle some of the world's most pressing problems. I also take umbrage with your claim about the United Nations existing only because the United States provides it with financial and military assistance. This is quite a fallacious statement. The vast majority of all UN peacekeepers are not American, precisely because the latter follows the unilateral and interventionist route that you appear to champion so dearly. Furthermore, although the annual bulk sum of US financial assistance to the UN is higher than that of any other nation, it is fairly paltry when adjusted for standard of living and GDP disparities. Japan, for example, gives nearly as much money to the UN as the US despite the fact that its economy is three times smaller than that of the latter. The story is similar with other affluent countries: they give disproportionately more to the UN than the US does. I hope this post has given skeptical readers a few more reasons to believe in the capacity of the United Nations to effect real change in our world while also realizing that it has had an illustrious, albeit imperfect, history in dealing with humanity's major challenges. The United States should be proud to be in this organization.