The 2026 Iran War & the End of the United Nations
From Reuters, February 4, 2026:
GENEVA/WASHINGTON … U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is sounding the alarm on U.N. finances, warning that the world body is at risk of “imminent financial collapse” due to unpaid fees and a budget rule that forces it to return unspent funds. Guterres has repeatedly spoken about the U.N.’s worsening liquidity crisis but this was his starkest warning yet, and it came as the United States, its main contributor – and debtor – is retreating from multilateralism on numerous fronts.
Like the institution of the United Nations he represents, the Secretary-General looks to be old, tired, bloated, enervated and hopeless—a man who has largely given up and is going through the motions. Can anyone who has observed the UN in action, particularly, over the last five years not conclude that its eighty-year history is overwhelming proof that, both in theory and in practice, it was an utterly delusional, stupid idea destined to deteriorate over time and would eventually collapse under a mountainous accumulation of bureaucratic impotence, incompetence and corruption? Would it be mistaken to allege that the portended “imminent financial collapse” is the inevitable result of its failed mission, which acording to Article 1 of the UN Charter, is “to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, foster cooperation to solve international problems, and promote human rights”? If one surveys the current state of international affairs, not a single one of these four grandiose aims has come close to fruition.
Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed spectacularly to “make the world safe for democracy.” So, twenty years later along came FDR, whose grasp on the reality of international politics may have been even more reality-averse than Wilson’s. “I think that if I [FDR] give him [Stalin] everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.”
Apparently, he believed that Stalin, who had already murdered three or four million peasants in Ukraine before WWII got started, and invaded eastern Poland in 1939, would join hands with its US partner against the vanquished Hitler to attempt a second go-around of Wilson’s fantasy of making the world into a giant “democracy.”
The United Nations would achieve world peace where the League of Nations had failed. Was Franklin Roosevelt anything other than a deluded, dilettante utopian? His treasonous collusion with Churchill turned a European war into a world war and handed eastern and central Europe as a gift package to Stalin, who we all know was a man devoted to “democracy and peace.”
Continuing with Reuters:
Guterres warned in his letter that the U.N. could run out of cash by July and cited a “Kafkaesque” requirement for it to credit back hundreds of millions of dollars in unspent dues to states each year even if it never received the money. U.N. officials hope to overhaul this “bizarre” rule, which Guterres has called “a race to bankruptcy.”
Who, one might ask, put this “bizarre” rule in place, and why can’t the UN officials get rid of it? The “Kafkaesque” dimensions are a feature, not a bug of the UN and go far beyond the financial problems. Now, contributing to what is likely the completion of the UN’s devolution into a case study of colossal institutional failure, is the astonishing megalomania of Donald Trump, “our Caligula President,” as Ron Unz has christened him.
The [financial] crunch comes at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a Board of Peace with himself as lifetime chair, which some fear could undermine the United Nations…
Are you laughing? How can anyone “undermine” the UN any more than the UN does with no assistance? Think of it as an institutional version of the Titanic, a perfect symbol of grandiosity married to hubris, its irrelevance letting it sink into eventual oblivion. As if the United Nations disappearing tomorrow would make the slightest difference to the current goings-on in the international arena. As I wrote in an earlier piece, Putin, Netanyahu & Nuremberg, “the United Nations and other international bodies that presume to police the world, operate with a pseudo-moral authority that allows the states to pretend to adhere to the norms of ‘civilized’ people everywhere while letting the strongest ones get along with pursuing their self-interest at the expense of the weaker ones.” The U.N. has always been a pretend endeavor created by pretend democrats as veneer for the exercise of raw power.
Every day, the absurdities mount. UN member-country representatives huff and puff about “genocide,” “war criminals,” and “unprovoked aggression.” The “official” discourse coming from the “leader of the free world” resembles the crude idiom of gangsters, replete with threats, braggadocio, and adolescent posturing. In January at a Ford plant tour Trump gave the finger and yelled obscenities at an auto-worker who heckled him.
What does the creation of the Board of Peace portend for the future of the UN?
A senior [unnamed] State Department official did though say that “the U.N. needs to get back to basics” and accused it of wasting money. ‘We have no interest in continuing to spend American tax dollars on such waste, fraud and abuse,’ the official said.
So, what are “the basics” of the U.N.? Here is a hint from the header on their web site – “Peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet.” In other words, nothing remotely connected with the “planet” as we currently survey it. To this soothing “we are the world” vibe, I observed this pic on the web cite that says. . . “Wouldn’t it be swell if this lovely couple moved in to diversify your neighborhood?”
And if the “waste, fraud and abuse” were suddenly eliminated, how would all those program management officers, human rights officers, political affairs officers and information officers spend their time and what would the staff at the UN be doing that differs from what we see now?
Here though, is the perverse irony in Trump’s “Board of Peace” with him reigning at age 79 as dictator for life, staffed with cronies whose careers are completely defined by their “business” interests. Trump to his credit seems to recognize the UN’s resounding failure to maintain international peace, cultivate friendship, and ensure cooperation, and that it is a money pit to give voice to the ravings of tinpot, third world racketeers and to churn out righteous resolutions that no one pays attention to because they are unenforceable and target those countries and their leaders selected by the power brokers who sit on the Security Council.
But Trump is guided by a massive ego and beset by the world’s severest case of attention deficit disorder. He cannot simply do the obvious and sensible thing: pull US funding and support and let it, like its predecessor “the League” sink into deserved non-existence, and worry about Americans. His so-called Board of Peace appears to be a ham-fisted UN work-around to let him turn Gaza into the Jewish Riviera. On the BoP Executive Board are two Jews with zero diplomatic knowledge and experience, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff; one of our former Senators from Tel Aviv, Marco Rubio, the least qualified Secretary of State in memory; and Marc Rowan, another Jewish billionaire, CEO of Apollo Global Management, whose interest in Gaza is, of course, achieving a peaceful resolution to the conflict that meets the needs of the Palestinians.
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Trump had promised to be a President for Americans, to shut down American involvement in foreign wars, and make life better for people who live in places like Ohio, South Dakota and West Virginia. Instead, he sends American dollars to war lords like Netanyahu and Zelenski who currently operate the killing machines that drive the death tallies into the hundreds of thousands of people. Meanwhile, the troglodyte Secretary of War has our navy blowing up the boats of Venezuelan fishermen. Trump probably doesn’t remember his campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine one day after taking office, but then how much does he remember from one day to the next? What happened to Greenland? The “peace deal” to end the Ukraine-Russia war late, last December that was “95% done”? Bibi has been flying in every couple of months to remind Trump who his paymasters are, who is calling the shots, and what “peace” is supposed to look like in the Middle East once he has finished bombing Iran.
The US-Israeli attack on Iran has begun, and Trump, the peace-candidate, his megalomania combined with the solipsism of what is essentially his amoral personality has, indeed, managed to accelerate what will be the collapse of the UN.
From The Hill:
“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump told the The New York Times on Wednesday night when asked if there were any limits on his international power… “I don’t need international law,” he said. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Trump doesn’t offer any hints as to what that thing he calls, “my own morality,” tells him when and why he should “stop” doing what he is doing. It’s a good guess that if pressed, his response would be his usual superlative overdose of “greatest,” “biggest,” “most beautiful, “most powerful” with no coherent conclusion that gives a clue as to what moral principles might be at work beyond self-interest and a desperate yearning for adulation. “I’m not looking to hurt people,” sounds rather threatening, a line you might hear from a mob boss suggesting that refusing the “deal” he is offering you will not be a “healthy” decision.
The UN is on life-support, and now with a regional war breaking out in the Middle East instigated by a man whose moral compass appears to spin around like a ball on a roulette wheel.
Below is a retrospective glance at how the United Nations historians document the public relations proclamation for the future of the UN from three of the most cynical, conniving men who have wielded power. From UN Charter History:
From 28 November to 1 December 1943, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and the Premier of the USSR, Joseph Stalin, met at a conference in Tehran, where they again confirmed their common policy, notably expressing their determination that their nations ‘shall work together in war and in the peace that will follow”, recognizing “the supreme responsibility resting upon us and all the United Nations to make a peace which will command the goodwill of the overwhelming mass of the peoples of the world and banish the scourge and terror of war for many generations.’ They further announced their intention to ‘seek the cooperation and active participation of all nations, large and small, whose peoples in heart and mind are dedicated, as are our own peoples, to the elimination of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance’ within a ‘world family of Democratic Nations’ (Declaration of the Three Powers, Tehran, 1 December 1943). (italics added)
Things didn’t exactly work out as promised. It is unlikely that Joseph Stalin, the Marxist, and Winston Churchill, the colonialist, believed any of this. As for Franklin Roosevelt, he was in his last years of office a dead man walking, ravaged by cardiovascular disease, uncontrolled hypertension, and possibly a brain lesion causing his fatal cerebral hemorrhage. In 1944, FDR’s reelection to the Presidency was a travesty carried out by a desperately sick, incapacitated man who could not bear to relinquish power. Who knows what axioms of political philosophy he was independently capable of operating with. His closest advisors were Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie (Soviet spies) while Harry Hopkins and his wife Eleanor were communist sympathizers.
Who, of any of the American Presidents after FDR, took the democracy and human rights hocus pocus of the UN seriously? What major conflicts since WWII—Korea, Vietnam, the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq 2003-2011, Afghanistan—did the UN end? It has taken Donald Trump, the immoralist, to make it obvious that the United Nations was, from the beginning, an elaborate, costly drama production created and run by cynical opportunists.
https://counter-currents.com/2026/03/the-2026-iran-war-and-the-end-of-the-united-nations