Self Delusion at State on U.N. Reform

Brett Schaefer / February 02, 2011

Last week, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing titled “The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action.” At that hearing, Chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R–FL) made a statement:

Ambassador Susan Rice says that the U.S. approach to the U.N. is, “We pay our bills. We push for real reform.” Instead, we should be conditioning our contributions on “reform first, pay later.”

In the past, Congress has gone along by willingly paying what successive Administrations asked for—without enough oversight. This is one of the first true U.N. reform hearings held by this Committee in almost 4 years, but it won’t be the last. (more…)