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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

You say “the UN doesn’t work” apparently because “working” means it being a source of soft power for the US.

It had several remits, but its most important is probably the one to prevent a world war. It’s designed specifically as a talking shop to help countries find other ways of resolving disputes than kill people - and promote international understanding . It’s far from perfect, but in general it does a pretty good job.

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The UN didn't prevent another world war. If you'd want to include an organization, it'd be the UN security council, but not anything else of the UN. And realistically, it's nukes that prevented WW3. It's not a coincidence that the permanent members of the security council, the veto powers, all have nuclear weapons.

American dollars shouldn’t go to things that aren’t sources of soft or hard power for us, and they should be clawed back from things that are sources of soft power for china.

> American dollars shouldn’t go to things that aren’t sources of soft or hard power for us, and they should be clawed back from things that are sources of soft power for china.

Fair enough. It's worth noting though, that China benefits when the US withdraws from stuff like this.

China has already thoroughly captured most of the whole UN. They would benefit if this weren’t already the case, which means stuff like closing VoA is still dumb. But UNESCO is among those they’ve captured. All removing funding does is reduce the power of a chinese agent.

If they managed to capture it, how did they manage to capture it? And what will be the impact of the US surrendering?

And that’s fine, if that’s what you believe. But that has nothing to do with whether the UN has worked or not.

“ This pick-up truck is dreadful as a tool for peeling bananas “

> It’s far from perfect, but in general it does a pretty good job.

The current state of the world would definitely beg to differ

Prior to the creation of the UN we had 2 world wars in 25 years.

And post the creation of the UN we have still had hundreds of wars (conveniently termed "armed conflicts") resulting in uncountable deaths.

It really wouldn’t

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