Opinion: The UN Has Failed

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

On the eve of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the post-World War II global order is in disarray — and the United Nations is clearly no longer part of the solution. With former President Donald Trump now favored to return to the White House, the United States may finally be able to address a critical question: Will we continue clinging to a bloated, corrupt and impotent international institution?

Today is United Nations Day — a day meant to celebrate the founding of an organization dedicated to safeguarding peace and security. Instead, the world is reckoning with wars in Europe and the Middle East and growing instability in the Far East. The UN’s inability to adapt to the evolving threats of the 21st century — from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the growing influence of authoritarian regimes — has exposed its fundamental weakness.

It also demonstrates that Trump’s past critiques of the UN were not misplaced. Decades of missed opportunities, moral contradictions and structural dysfunction signify the need for significant reform — or full-on defunding. Such actions are not an outright rejection of multilateralism, but a recognition that the current system is broken — and we have seen this all play out before.

The current global turmoil, spiraling beyond the control of the very institution designed to manage it, echoes the League of Nations‘ catastrophic failure to confront fascist aggression in the 1930s. The League, established after World War I to maintain global peace, proved incapable of preventing aggression by expansionist powers like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. Following its collapse, the world descended into a period of widespread conflict, culminating in World War II.

Like the League of Nations, the UN has proven to be helpless against modern-day expansionism. With China backing Russia militarily and economically, the idea that the UN serves as an impartial arbiter of peace is laughable. The League of Nations failed because it lacked enforcement power and moral clarity. The United Nations has failed for the same reasons, and we are on the precipice of a third World War.

At the center of the UN’s dysfunction is the Security Council, crippled by Russia and China’s vetoes, which have made meaningful action impossible and shielded violators from accountability. Russia, an expansionist aggressor, continues to occupy a permanent seat, even as they employ Iranian drones to devastate Ukrainian cities and North Korean troops prepare to join its offensive. These failures are not isolated incidents but part of a decades-long pattern. From the massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia to Somalia’s collapse, UN peacekeeping missions have repeatedly ended in catastrophe. The UN is paralytic — a relic incapable of enforcing peace or punishing those who threaten it.

Worse still, the UN’s actions increasingly contradict its stated values. Reports indicate that UN peacekeepers in Lebanon took bribes from Hezbollah, compromising their mission by allowing surveillance against Israel. Meanwhile, the organization has awarded Saudi Arabia — a regime notorious for the brutal oppression of women — the chairmanship of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2025. The irony is staggering, and the hypocrisy is undeniable. Far from being a beacon of global governance, the UN now enables the authoritarian regimes it was meant to oppose, eroding trust and betraying the principles it was established to protect.

A rejection of the UN is not isolationism but a necessary confrontation with reality that the international organization has become an obstacle to peace, not a guarantor of it. This is further evidenced by Secretary-General António Guterres’ participation in the BRICS summit — an organization openly challenging the Western-led world order. Leading members of BRICS, like Russia and China, are intent on rewriting the rules of global governance with the intent to dominate.

The 2024 election will determine whether the West continues its slow descent into irrelevance or embraces the painful but necessary changes required to restore global order. The world has split along ideological lines, and the threats posed by our enemies will not be countered by resolutions or hollow declarations. Diplomacy without power is worthless. To survive, the West must act decisively by abandoning outdated institutions which no longer represent their interests and build new alliances rooted in shared values, mutual investment and military strength.

This United Nations Day, we should not celebrate a broken institution. Instead, we must confront its failures and prepare for the future. A second Trump presidency will bring the necessary pressure to tear down the obsolete structures of the past and replace them with a stronger, clearer order — one that prioritizes accountability, strength, and action. Change is no longer optional; peace demands it.

Meaghan Mobbs, PhD, is the Director of the Center for American Safety and Security at Independent Women’s Forum.

Related Topics:#DailyCaller #UnitedNations MeaghanMobbs TheUNHasFailed

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US Halts Construction of Five Offshore Wind Projects Due To National Security

Published on December 29, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum leveled the Trump administration’s latest broadside at the struggling U.S. offshore wind industry on Monday, ordering an immediate suspension of activities at the five big wind projects currently in development.

“Today we’re sending notifications to the five large offshore wind projects that are under construction that their leases will be suspended due to national security concerns,” Burgum told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “During this time of suspension, we’ll work with the companies to try to find a mitigation. But we completed the work that President Trump has asked us to do. The Department of War has come back conclusively that the issues related to these large offshore wind programs have created radar interference that creates a genuine risk for the U.S.”

Predictably, reaction to Burgum’s order was immediate, with opponents of offshore wind praising the move, and industry supporters slamming it. In Semafor’s energy-related newsletter on Tuesday, energy and climate editor Tim McDowell quotes an unnamed ex-Energy Department official as claiming, “the Pentagon and intelligence services, which are normally sensitive to even extremely low-probability risks, never flagged this as a concern previously.” (RELATED: Trump Admin Orders Offshore Wind Farm Pauses Over ‘National Security Risks’)

Yet, a simple 30-second Google search finds a wealth of articles going back to as early as October 2014 discussing ways to mitigate the long-ago identified issue of interference with air defense radars by these enormous windmills, some of which are taller than the Eiffel Tower. It is a simple fact that the issue was repeatedly raised during the Biden Administration’s mad rush to speed these giant windmill operations into the construction phase by cutting corners in the permitting process.

In May, 2024, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) own analysis related to the Atlantic Shores South project contains a detailed discussion of the potential impacts and suggests multiple ways to mitigate for them. An Oct. 29, 2024 memo of understanding between BOEM and the Biden Department of Defense calls for increased collaboration between the two departments as a response to concerns from members of Congress and others related to these very long-known potential impacts.

The Georgia Tech Research Institute published a study dated June 6, 2022 detailing “Radar Impacts, Potential Mitigation, from Offshore Wind Turbines.” That study was in fact commissioned by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), a private non-profit that functions as an advisory group to the federal government.

Oh.

A report published in February 2024 by International Defense Security & Technology, Inc. describes the known issues thusly:

“Wind turbines can create clutter on radar screens in a number of ways. First, the metal towers and blades of wind turbines can reflect radar signals. This can create false returns on radar screens, which can make it difficult to detect and track real targets.

“Second, the rotating blades of wind turbines can create a Doppler effect on radar signals. This can cause real targets to appear to be moving at different speeds than they actually are. This can also make it difficult to track real targets.”

The simple Google search I conducted returns hundreds of articles dating all the way back to 2006 related to this long-known yet unresolved issue that could present a very real threat to national security. The fact that the Biden administration, in its religious zeal to speed these enormous offshore industrial projects into the construction phase, chose to downplay and ignore this threat in no way obligates his successor in office to commit the same dereliction of duty.

Some wind proponents are cynically raising concerns that a future Democratic administration could use this example as justification for cancelling oil and gas projects. It’s as if they’ve all forgotten about the previous four years of the Autopen presidency, which featured Joe Biden’s Day 1 order cancelling the 80% completed Keystone XL pipeline, a year-long moratorium on LNG export permitting, an attempt to set aside more than 200 million acres of the U.S. offshore from future leasing, and too many other destructive moves to detail here.

Again, a simple web search reveals that experts all over the world believe this is a real problem. If so, it needs to be addressed as a matter of national security. Burgum is intent on doing that. All half-baked talking points aside, this really isn’t complicated.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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While Western Nations Cling to Energy Transition, Pragmatic Nations Produce Energy and Wealth

Published on December 29, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Vijay Jayaraj

History will likely remember 2025 as the year energy corporatists finally stopped pretending there is a climate crisis. For a decade, a bizarre theater of the absurd played out as titans of the oil and gas industry apologized for their core business while pledging allegiance to a “green transition” that existed mostly in the imaginations of Western bureaucrats. But the curtain has seemingly fallen.

ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest energy producers, has slashed $10 billion from its low-carbon investment commitments through 2030. Simultaneously, the company announced that it expects $25 billion in earnings growth from 2024 to 2030 to be powered primarily by increases in oil and gas production, which will push daily output to 5.5 million barrels of oil equivalent by the end of the decade.

This is not a company abandoning climate responsibility but rather at last recognizing what has long been obvious: The path prescribed by the climate industrial complex is economically destructive and operationally impossible – even with massive government subsidies.

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For years, the global energy strategy has been surreal. Companies that built the modern world on the back of energy-dense hydrocarbons indulged those celebrating the arrival of wind turbines and solar panels to power civilization. But reality, stubborn and unforgiving, has interrupted the psychedelic revelry.

ExxonMobil’s low-carbon investments will be paced to policy support and customer demand, says the company. That is corporate speak meaning that spending on green projects is paused unless the government – using our tax dollars – subsidizes the risk or until a market exists.

Megaprojects, once heralded as the future, are now in line for deferral. Why? Because without taxpayer handouts, the economics of trying to bury underground a plant food like carbon dioxide simply do not work – and defy common sense.

The energy sector is pivoting from a strategy of “grow clean at all costs” to “returns first, transition last.” “Green” projects are being relegated to a secondary capital bucket – a token for good PR instead of a core activity.

Europe’s Shell and Aker BP and Canada’s Enbridge have withdrawn from the Science Based Targets initiative to establish “science-based emissions reductions.” This was a retreat from what is described as a “credible, science-based net-zero framework” because there was neither credibility nor science. It was a political suicide pact. The energy giants looked at the cliff’s edge and refused to jump.

British multinational BP, having abandoned its promise to go “Beyond Petroleum,” has raised its oil and gas spending and softened its renewable targets.

ENEOS Holdings, a Japanese refiner, has discarded hydrogen production targets, with CEO Tomohide Miyata explaining that “the shift toward a carbon-neutral society appears to be slowing.”

These U-turns represent a renaissance in policy realism. Energy needs do not disappear because politicians make speeches at climate summits or corporations allocate funds to ESG programs or governments attempt to control consumption and choices of appliances and automobiles.

Second thoughts about an inevitably doomed “green” transition is a victory for the single mother in the U.S. trying to budget for winter heating and for the small business owner in the U.K. whose margins are crushed by one of the highest commercial electricity rates in the world. And for the billions of people in developing nations, this pivot could be salvation from generational poverty.

The question now is whether governments will recognize what corporations have made clear: that the energy transition was a fantasy infused with scientific language and draped in moralistic gingerbread. Or will they continue to increase subsidies and regulations?

Very likely, there will be a bifurcation: on the one hand, western bureaucracies, particularly in Europe, continuing an economic decline under mandates and taxes, and on the other, pragmatic governments, many of them in Asia, pursuing prosperity with fuels and technologies that work.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Va. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.