Rarely do I see eye to eye with someone from the political far right. Yet it was all I could do not to nod in agreement this week when I chanced upon a suggestion by US Republican Party stalwart Mike Huckabee that the United Nations headquarters be moved out of New York to another country. The anti-American rants that featured so prominently at the opening last week of the UN General Assembly prompted his call, but there is a far sounder reason for relocation. In a nutshell, it is neutrality.
Here I hasten to admit that I had caught Huckabee in mid-flow. While surfing television channels, I had briefly settled on the deeply conservative Fox News. There, the one-time presidential candidate and former Arkansas governor was advising in regular commentary that the UN should be cut loose with jackhammers from its location beside the East River in Manhattan and floated to a more suitable nation. He was speaking figuratively, of course, but the concept made sense. Alas, he then veered to la-la land by suggesting that Saudi Arabia or Iran would be perfect places to park the 39-storey building.
What had riled him - and captivated many, me among them - were the speeches given by Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Each used the opportunity of addressing the world forum to give flight to all manner of anti-Western, and particularly anti-Washington, thoughts. Gaddafi excelled with a one hour, 36 minute diatribe. That, on top of the controversy over his presence in New York - he was behind terror attacks on US targets in the 1980s and 1990s - was bound to give rise to questions about whether the US was the best country to host such a gathering.
Huckabee lost my attention when he veered back to traditional Republican ground. The UN had lost its way and was now consumed with corruption and cowardice, he said. Dictatorial leaders like Gaddafi had no right to address its members. The US paid 22 per cent of the UN's operating budget and funded 27 per cent of its peacekeeping missions; Washington should think again about the US$5 billion it handed over each year. I had wandered into his argument as he was concluding that the US was better off having nothing or little to do with the UN.
The reasoning behind the UN is sound. There has to be a forum at which the world's nations can meet to find solutions to mutual problems. There is no better way to ensure peace and security, provide humanitarian help and protect human rights. Challenges like climate change and disease would be dealt with piecemeal without the steering of such a grouping.
This said, the world could do with a better UN. Reform to make it more effective and efficient is urgently needed. At the heart of the problem is the Security Council, one of the central points of Gaddafi's speech. He rightly pointed out how unrepresentative it is of the world in the 21st century.