The Folly of the UN: Wilson Promised Peace, Truman Promised Order—Instead America Got Collective Hostility

On January 5, 2026, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O'Neill confirmed what many suspected: Somalia's UN Ambassador and President of the Security Council, Abukar Dahir Osman, is "in fact associated with Progressive Health Care Services, a home health agency in Cincinnati." The agency was convicted of Medicaid fraud, and HHS "has previously taken action against Progressive in response to a conviction for Medicaid fraud."

Let that sink in: The man currently overseeing security at the world's "supposed" premier international body was running a healthcare scam out of Ohio while working in Ohio's Medicaid system. This isn't an aberration. It's a perfect encapsulation of what the United Nations has become—an institution that puts fraudsters from failed states in positions of moral authority while American taxpayers foot the bill.

Woodrow Wilson promised us that international bodies would usher in an era of enlightened cooperation and perpetual peace. Harry Truman assured us the United Nations would maintain global order and prevent future wars.

So, how did we get here? The answer requires going back a century, to when America's leaders first decided that national sovereignty was an outdated concept and "international cooperation" was the enlightened path forward.

Wilson's Arrogance, Lodge's Prescience, Truman's Surrender

The seeds of today's UN disaster were planted over a century ago by a president who believed himself too enlightened to heed the warnings of America's Founders.

Woodrow Wilson, former Princeton professor and progressive intellectual, was convinced that he possessed insights that had eluded Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe. In his view, the world had evolved beyond their antiquated warnings about foreign entanglements and European alliances. The modern era—Wilson's era—demanded a new approach: international cooperation managed by enlightened experts and bound by collective agreements. National sovereignty was provincial thinking. "Internationalism" was the future.

After World War I, Wilson championed the League of Nations as the centerpiece of his utopian vision. In his 1919 address to Congress, he argued that only through permanent international entanglements could future wars be prevented. His Fourteen Points promised a new world order where disputes would be settled by international bodies, not through American independence and strength.

Standing against Wilson's grandiosity was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lodge understood what Wilson's academic arrogance had blinded him to: that surrendering American sovereignty to unelected international bodies contradicted the very foundation of the American experiment.

On February 28, 1919, Lodge delivered a devastating critique of Wilson's League on the Senate floor. "We abandon entirely by the proposed constitution the policy laid down by Washington in his Farewell Address and the Monroe doctrine," Lodge warned. He understood the stakes: "The Monroe doctrine is based on the principle of self-preservation… The real essence of that doctrine is that American questions shall be settled by Americans alone."

Lodge saw clearly what Wilson refused to acknowledge—that pooling American sovereignty with other nations wouldn't create enlightened cooperation, it would create mechanisms for foreign powers to constrain American action while facing no reciprocal constraints themselves. "Europe will have the right to take part in the settlement of all American questions," Lodge observed, "and we, of course, shall have the right to share in the settlement of all questions in Europe and Asia and Africa."

The Senate, still elected by state legislatures and thus more responsive to foundational principles than popular enthusiasms, rejected Wilson's League. The professor-president's vision died in the legislature, a humiliating defeat for a man who had lectured the world on the obsolescence of American constitutional principles.

But Wilson's ghost won in the end. In 1945, President Harry Truman—a more humble man but equally misguided—succeeded where Wilson had failed. The United Nations Charter was ratified, establishing the very international body Lodge had warned against. The structure was modified to address some of Lodge's concerns—the Security Council veto power was added specifically because of his reservations—but the fundamental flaw remained: the United States had subordinated its sovereignty to an organization where adversaries could claim equal moral standing.

Truman promised this time would be different. The UN would maintain order, prevent aggression, and secure peace. Eighty years later, we can assess whether Truman's promise or Lodge's warning proved correct. The evidence is damning.

Funding Our Own Antagonist

The United States provides 22% of the UN's regular budget—more than the next three contributors combined. When you include peacekeeping operations and voluntary contributions to UN agencies, American taxpayers contribute roughly $18 billion annually to the UN system. That's approximately one-quarter of the organization's entire funding.

What do we get for this extraordinary investment? A General Assembly where members routinely vote against U.S. positions, international courts that target our allies while ignoring atrocities committed by our adversaries, and "human rights" bodies stacked with the world's worst human rights abusers.

This wasn't what Truman promised when he championed the UN Charter in 1945. He sold Americans on the vision of collective security—nations working together to maintain peace and prevent aggression. What we actually got was collective freeloading. The nations that benefit most from the international order America built and maintains contribute the least, while using their UN votes to condemn American actions and shield adversaries from accountability.

This is the same playbook we've seen with NATO, where until recently, only a handful of members met their 2% GDP defense spending commitment while expecting American military guarantees. The UN takes this dynamic and makes it worse—we're not just subsidizing "allies," we're subsidizing an institution actively working against Western interests while elevating nations like China, Russia, Iran, and Somalia to positions of authority.

Which raises the obvious question: How do hostile nations end up in positions of moral authority? The answer reveals the UN's institutional corruption.

The Adversary Paradox: Rogue States as Moral Arbiters

In 2021, the UN elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women—a country where women are beaten to death by morality police for wearing their hijab improperly. After the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini sparked nationwide protests in 2022, the regime killed hundreds of protesters and imprisoned thousands more, many of them women and girls. The UN's own Special Rapporteur reported that Iranian authorities have "weaponized criminal law to control and punish women" on a systematic basis.

Iran was eventually expelled from the commission in 2022—but only after international outcry. The fact that they were appointed in the first place tells you everything about the UN's moral compass.

Then there's China, which served on the UN Human Rights Council while operating what the UN itself describes as "serious human rights violations" in Xinjiang. Credible estimates suggest over one million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in "re-education camps" featuring forced labor, sterilization, and cultural destruction. China's response? To lecture the West about human rights while touting its own council membership as proof of international legitimacy.

And now Somalia—a nation that has required UN Security Council authorization for foreign forces to pursue pirates in its territorial waters because it cannot control its own coastline—holds a rotating presidency on that same Security Council. The irony would be comic if it weren't so expensive.

This is the inevitable result of Wilson's vision and Truman's implementation: an organization where membership, not merit, determines moral authority. Where failed states and authoritarian regimes receive equal standing with functioning democracies. Where America's enemies don't just get a seat at the table—they get to run the committees that judge American conduct.

But the adversary paradox isn't just about who sits on which council. It's about how "international law" itself gets weaponized against Western democracies while giving hostile regimes a pass.

The Selective Justice System: Prosecuting Allies, Excusing Enemies

Nowhere is the UN's institutional corruption clearer than in its "justice" mechanisms, particularly the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. These bodies don't pursue justice—they pursue ideology.

Consider the charges of "genocide" against Israel. Since October 7, 2023, the ICC and ICJ have launched extensive proceedings against Israel over its response to Hamas's terrorist massacre. The legal gymnastics required to claim that Israel's defensive war meets the legal definition of genocide are stunning—especially when experts note that genocide requires "specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" and Israel's actions, whatever you think of them, demonstrably don't meet that standard.

But here's where it gets truly insidious: When UN officials refused to declare Israel's actions genocide, they were systematically pressured and even hounded to change their assessments. A former UN advisor on genocide prevention described being "hounded day in, day out" to declare genocide in Gaza despite his professional assessment that the situation didn't meet the legal threshold. The conclusion was predetermined; the only question was whether officials would comply with the political mandate.

Meanwhile, the ICC shows zero interest in investigating Hamas's October 7 massacre, which involved systematic rape, torture, kidnapping of civilians including babies and elderly Holocaust survivors, and the murder of over 1,200 people—acts that unambiguously constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nor do they care that Hamas routinely diverts humanitarian aid, with UN reports showing that 88% of aid trucks slated for delivery in Gaza since May have been looted by Hamas-linked gangs along delivery routes.

This selective application isn't new. The ICC has faced sustained criticism from African nations for disproportionately targeting their leaders while ignoring atrocities committed by major powers. When it comes to Russia and China, the court is functionally paralyzed. Russia violates international law daily in Ukraine, yet faces no serious consequences from international courts—partly because Russia and China routinely veto any UN Security Council resolutions that would refer their allies (or themselves) to the ICC for investigation.

The pattern is unmistakable: Western democracies and their allies are held to standards that authoritarian regimes simply ignore. And the UN system enables this asymmetry. This is "international law" as Wilson imagined it—enlightened global governance adjudicated by experts. In practice, it's a weapon wielded against America and its allies while our adversaries operate with impunity.

So if the UN is corrupt, expensive, and hostile to American interests, what's the alternative? The answer requires rejecting two equally dangerous impulses that have dominated the foreign policy debate.

Rejecting Both False Choices: Strength Without Subordination

The foreign policy debate in America is dominated by two equally flawed positions, and the UN's failures illustrate why both are wrong.

On one end sits the isolationist impulse—a horseshoe where far-left progressives and far-right populists meet in their opposition to American engagement abroad. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch opposed aid packages to Ukraine and Israel, with Sanders citing concerns about funding foreign conflicts while domestic needs go unmet. On the right, Matt Gaetz introduced a "Ukraine Fatigue" resolution to end military and financial aid to Ukraine, with Marjorie Taylor Greene declaring "Ukraine is not our ally." The arguments differ in rhetoric but converge on the same dangerous conclusion: America should withdraw from the world stage.

This is naive fantasy. Global trade doesn't stop because we pretend it doesn't exist. Security threats don't respect our desire to ignore them. Forty-one percent of Americans now believe the U.S. is spending too much supporting Ukraine, up from 24 percent in 2022. But withdrawing American power from the global stage doesn't create peace—it creates a vacuum that hostile powers eagerly fill.

On the other end sits the neoconservative trap—the Bush-Cheney-Clinton doctrine of intervention everywhere, nation-building in cultures incompatible with Western governance, and open-ended military commitments with no clear objectives or exit strategies. The results speak for themselves: Over $8 trillion spent on post-9/11 wars, 900,000 direct deaths, and 38 million people displaced. Iraq and Afghanistan combined will cost $4-6 trillion when long-term care for veterans is included—most of which hasn't been paid yet.

These weren't wars fought for clear American interests with defined victory conditions. They were exercises in ideological nation-building, attempting to impose Western democratic systems on societies with fundamentally different cultural foundations. The neocons promised we'd be greeted as liberators and democracy would flourish. Instead, we spent two decades, trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives creating power vacuums that bred more instability.

The real choice isn't between isolationism and endless intervention. It's between strategic strength and strategic confusion.

Ronald Reagan understood this. His doctrine of "peace through strength" was both strategic and moral. "We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak," Reagan declared. "It is then that tyrants are tempted." In 1983, he elaborated: "American strength is a sheltering arm for peace and freedom in an often dangerous world. And strength is the most persuasive argument we have to convince our adversaries to give up their hostile intentions, to negotiate seriously, and to stop bullying other nations. In the real world, peace through strength must be our motto."

Reagan's approach wasn't isolationist—he maintained overwhelming military capability and demonstrated willingness to use it when American interests were threatened. But it also wasn't the neocon model of occupation and nation-building. Reagan intervened in Grenada with clear objectives and rapid execution. He struck Libya to send a message about terrorism. He built up military strength that ultimately bankrupted the Soviet Union without fighting a Vietnam-style quagmire. He won the Cold War through demonstrated capability paired with strategic clarity.

That's the framework America needs now: strength without subordination to international bodies like the UN. We don't need UN permission to defend American interests. We don't need to apologize for American power. But we also don't need to occupy nations for decades in pursuit of vague "democracy promotion" goals that even we can't define clearly.

The UN represents the worst of both worlds—it constrains American action when our interests are at stake while providing no meaningful capability to actually maintain order. It's the institutionalization of strategic confusion.

This Reagan synthesis finds its proper application not in Wilson's failed internationalism, but in the doctrine that Lodge defended a century ago—and that the Trump administration has now revived.

Lodge Was Right: The Alternative to UN Subordination

Henry Cabot Lodge saw this coming a century ago. When Wilson's international bodies first emerged, Lodge understood that "The Monroe doctrine is based on the principle of self-preservation… The real essence of that doctrine is that American questions shall be settled by Americans alone." Lodge wasn't arguing for isolation—he was arguing against subordinating American sovereignty and interests to unaccountable international bureaucracies.

Lodge warned the Senate in 1919 that joining the League meant abandoning Washington's foreign policy and the Monroe Doctrine: "Europe will have the right to take part in the settlement of all American questions, and we, of course, shall have the right to share in the settlement of all questions in Europe and Asia and Africa. Europe and Asia are to take part in policing the American continent and the Panama Canal, and in return we are to have, by way of compensation, the right to police the Balkans and Asia Minor when we are asked to do so."

He understood what Wilson's academic arrogance couldn't grasp: that pooling sovereignty doesn't create cooperation among equals—it creates mechanisms for weaker powers to constrain stronger ones while facing no reciprocal constraints themselves. "The United States is the world's best hope," Lodge declared, "but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her power for good, and endanger her very existence. Leave her to march freely through the centuries to come."

The Trump administration's return to Monroe Doctrine principles isn't nostalgia—it's recognition that Lodge was right. In December 2025, the National Security Strategy explicitly declared "a 'Trump Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine," describing it as "a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests."

The strategy is clear: "We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere." Trump himself rebranded it the "Don-roe Doctrine" and declared: "Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again."

This represents a fundamental shift in priorities—from Wilson's global entanglements to regional focus, from seeking UN approval to asserting American First directly. The strategy marks a move away from the "pivot to Asia" and endless Middle Eastern commitments toward recognizing that instability in Latin America—mass migration, drug trafficking, hostile foreign influence—poses more immediate risks to American security than conflicts in distant regions.

Critics call this unilateralism. They're right—and that's the point. Bilateral and coalition-based cooperation works when it's based on actual shared interests and reciprocal burden-sharing. NATO functions when members commit to it. Regional security partnerships like AUKUS, the Quad, and bilateral alliances with Japan and South Korea provide real strategic value without empowering adversaries.

Economic partnerships based on reciprocity rather than subsidy can advance both American interests and global prosperity. Before the UN existed, the United States managed international relations through direct diplomacy and strategic alliances. Those tools worked then, and they'd work now—probably better than filtering everything through an organization where Somalia's UN representative ran a Medicaid fraud scheme.

The alternative to the UN isn't chaos. It's clarity. It's distinguishing between actual allies who share our values and bear their share of burdens, and hostile actors who use international institutions to constrain American power while we pay for the privilege. It's recognizing that American questions should be settled by Americans, just as Lodge argued.

Which brings us back to where we started: a fraudster from a failed state presiding over UN security. This isn't a bug. It's exactly what Wilson's vision and Truman's implementation set the stage for.

The System Working as Designed

When news broke about Ambassador Osman's healthcare fraud, the reaction from UN defenders was predictable: this is just one bad apple, not indicative of systemic problems. But that's exactly wrong.

Abukar Dahir Osman's journey from Medicaid fraud in Ohio to President of the UN Security Council isn't a bug in the system—it's the system working exactly as designed. An institution that puts Iran on women's rights commissions, China on human rights councils, and convicted fraudsters in positions of authority isn't suffering from occasional lapses in judgment. It has fundamentally corrupt priorities baked into its structure.

This is what happens when you build an organization on Woodrow Wilson's premise that enlightened international cooperation transcends national interests, and Harry Truman's belief that American power is best exercised through collective institutions rather than sovereign action. The result isn't cooperation—it's a platform for America's adversaries to claim moral authority while we pay the bills.

Wilson promised perpetual peace. Truman promised global order. What we got was an $18 billion annual subsidy for an organization that:

• Elevates human rights abusers to human rights councils
• Prosecutes democracies while ignoring authoritarian atrocities
• Enables hostile powers to shield themselves and their allies from accountability
• Claims jurisdiction over American sovereignty while providing zero meaningful capability to maintain actual order
• Employs fraudsters from failed states in positions of authority over global security

The United Nations was created in a different era to solve different problems. Whatever value it once provided has long since been eclipsed by the reality of what it has become: an expensive mechanism for hostile nations to claim moral standing while America provides the funding and military muscle.

Henry Cabot Lodge warned us in 1919 that surrendering American sovereignty to international bodies would fetter our power for good and endanger our existence. The Senate listened then. We should have kept listening.

Ronald Reagan showed us the alternative: peace through strength, strategic clarity paired with overwhelming capability, alliances based on shared values and reciprocal commitment. Not isolation. Not endless nation-building. Strength without subordination.

The Trump administration's reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine and rejection of UN constraints on American hemispheric interests represents a return to Lodge's wisdom and Reagan's framework. It's a recognition that American questions should be settled by Americans, that our interests are best served through direct action and strategic alliances rather than filtering everything through bodies where our enemies have equal votes.

The question for American policymakers isn't whether the UN serves our interests—it manifestly doesn't. The question is whether we have the clarity and courage to stop pretending otherwise, to stop funding our own antagonists, and to stop subordinating American sovereignty to institutions that have become weapons against the West.

Lodge was right. Wilson was wrong. And after 80 years of evidence, it's time we admitted it.

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