Historians traditionally blame the failure of the League of Nations — the post-World War I, Versailles-era dream of President Woodrow Wilson — on many things.
Its membership was small (58 nations). The League’s utopian rhetoric lacked commensurate force.
The postwar ascendant United States refused to join.
The winners of World War I, like France and Britain, were terrified of rearming, while the losers, such as Germany and Austria, were eager to.
Consequently, the League in the mid-1930s allowed fascist powers to make a mockery of the Versailles Treaty. It could never even enforce its own embargoes and sanctions.
Without big-power backup, the League soon watched the Axis powers prey on weak nations and start another world war.
In response, the post-World War II United Nations was said to have corrected the impotence of the old League.
The United States was now in. Indeed, the UN headquarters were to be in New York.
Almost all the nations of the world — currently 193 — eventually joined.
A “security council” of the great powers (and former great powers) would “police” the consensus of the General Assembly of all members.
The UN would spin off a host of subordinate globalist projects, such as the World Health Organization and World Bank, to promote peace, health and profit.
Yet the UN’s 80-year record has proved as dismal as the League’s 26 years.
Only half the UN members are free societies and true democracies.
The two greatest threats to world peace — dictatorial Russia and communist China — exercise veto power in the Security Council.
Antisemitism is now a UN brand. So are rank corruption and profiteering.
No one expects the UN to either prevent or stop a war.
Aside from serving as a platform for national propaganda, it is increasingly both impotent and toxically anti-Western.
So who or what on the global stage is dealing with the planet’s existential crises?
Who makes any effort to stop the Iranian race to get the bomb and its use of terrorist proxies?
How about the war in Ukraine? China’s serial threats to absorb Taiwan? And serial border conflicts in the Balkans, Africa, Asia and the Middle East?
As far as the West goes, who or what is warning about its suicidal trajectory of open borders, massive illegal immigration and crashing fertility rates?
Who lectures on the dangers of disarmament, green-energy mandates and attacks on international shipping in the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Straits of Hormuz and the South China Sea — along with the shaky future of the Suez and Panama canals?
So far, only the United States has stepped up — or, more particularly, its controversial president, the supposed neo-isolationist Donald Trump.
In whirlwind fashion, Trump has inserted himself into the middle of numerous border wars.
He apparently has used American economic and military carrots and sticks to achieve cease-fires for now between Rwanda and the Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, Kosovo and Serbia, Cambodia and Thailand, and Egypt and Ethiopia.
The UN has done nothing to stop the horrific fighting in Ukraine — a modern, 3½-year Stalingrad, where 1.5 million are now dead, wounded or missing.
Trump has tried everything — from engaging Russian leader Vladimir Putin to haranguing him, and from haranguing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to engaging him — while outlining a peace plan along a demilitarized commercial corridor.
Iran will not obtain a bomb for years — thanks to Trump’s 30-minute use of American bombers.
For the first time in memory, Iran’s once fearsome terrorist armies of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are nearly neutered. There is even rare talk of a comprehensive peace on Israel’s borders.
The US border is secure. Illegal entries are nearly nonexistent, offering a model for Europe, beleaguered by massive illegal immigration from the Middle East.
Trump may fail to find lasting solutions to all these horrific conflicts and crises.
But unlike the UN and the past American administrations, at least he is trying to persuade the belligerents that each has more to gain by deals than deaths.
Instead of soaring UN utopian rhetoric or fueling one side with money and weapons to win these forever wars, Trump engages both aggressor and victim — even those he despises.
He offers neither sanctimonious Wilsonian visions of universal brotherhood nor “both sides” gobbledygook diplomatese.
Instead, Trump simply appeals to their mutual economic and financial interests by offering new trade and foreign investment openings — and the present and future goodwill of the United States to help the belligerents find security and prosperity.
Always looming in the background is the superb but unpredictable US military.
The failed international community despises Trump’s mercantile approach. It hates his self-referential, one-man showmanship.
And it can’t decide whether he is a yahoo isolationist or a cunning interventionist.
But the record of sober and judicious utopian internationalists, past and present, is mostly one of failure, war, destruction — and more death.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
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