Sleep Well — At the UN, China, Cuba and North Korea Are Watching Over Us All

by Claudia Rosett @PajamasMedia.com

In case you missed it, we’ve just had another shining moment of your United Nations at work — the same UN that the U.S. supports with contributions that last year came to some $7.7 billion.

You remember the United Nations Conference on Disarmament? That would be the Geneva-based UN conclave that recently made news for the utterly perverse reason that it was chaired in August by Cuba, and in July by one of the world’s worst rogue proliferators, North Korea.

Out of such proceedings has now come yet another report, subject of consideration and a draft resolution Oct. 21 by the UN General Assembly’s committee on Disarmament and International Security (also known as the “First Committee“). As is customary at the UN, this draft resolution reaffirms that the Conference on Disarmament is “the sole multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community.” It goes on to lament that as such, this Conference on Disarmament has been gridlocked for years — “unable to commence its substantive work for over a decade” — and hopes for forward motion soon.

Who sponsored this draft resolution? Why, China, Cuba and North Korea.

With friends like that, maybe the best one can say about the UN Conference on Disarmament, the UN’s “sole multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community,” is that it is gridlocked. That may be one small reason to sleep better at night. But in that case, the chief service rendered by the Conference is to provide a UN body that gets chaired by Cuba and North Korea, and then yields UN resolutions lamenting not the monstrosity, but the futility of the exercise. Why do we need this Disarmament Conference at all?