Tensions on the Korean peninsula are as heightened as they have been since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Yesterday, North Korea responded to a long planned South Korean amphibious naval exercise by firing a thousand missiles and artillery rounds at South Korea, forcing the evacuation of five South Korean towns.
The crisis in Ukraine intensifies as Russia masses up to 60,000 troops on its western border, while ominously pre-positioning huge stockpiles of spare parts and fuel while securing communication lines back to Russia as if preparing for an extended ‘incursion’ in easter and southern Ukraine. Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin muses to a Swedish newspaper that Finland is really more Russian than European.
The primary organization that many in the West, particularly President Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry regard as essential to securing the very global order that is so rapidly disintegrating, the United Nations was busily preparing an emergency response – not to those problems, but to climate change.
Sunday’s release of its latest dire report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted massive global calamity if trillions of dollars are not immediately transferred from the rich countries the UN says caused climate change, to the poor countries that are victims of it, with the UN taking its own hefty cut.
It is hard to remember a point at which the UN’s utter irrelevance has ever been seen such starker contrast. It is because the UN is incapable of dealing with the very matters it was created to address that it now directs its energies and resources to areas relevant only to its own self-funding elites?
The UN’s rules of the glorious new world order being drafted before our eyes are such that events like Russia’s invasion and annexation of large chunks of Ukraine; Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, North Korea threatening Northeast Asia with nuclear weapons of its own pale in importance to the people of the world compared to the problem of determining how much Americans’ taxes should be raised for exhaling carbon dioxide.
The UN was established at the end of the World II to insure the world had a meaningful collective security mechanism to preserve the peace by preventing aggression. It was not, so far as anyone familiar with its founding has been able to recall, created to protect or direct let alone “change” the world’s climate.
Gone are the days – if ever there were such days – when the UN thought its mission was to police trouble spots, push back against lawless aggressors, or to provide a forum for the nation’s of the world to peacefully hash out their differences. Taking from the rich and giving to poor is much more fun.
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