State of the Union: Luna’s lessons will have increasing relevance in the era of mass-migration.
Florida’s Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a rare foreign policy realist on the right, has advocated for defunding the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Luna wrote recently in an op-ed for Newsweek that the U.N. should not be getting a single American dollar and that she has introduced a bill to withhold funds from the UNHRC. The bipartisan bill currently has 17 cosponsors, including Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida.
The bill is about withholding funds as the U.N. failed to condemn HAMAS, but what is interesting in her op-ed is a short history lesson, which will eventually have increasing relevance on the right, in an era of mass migration.
Luna writes,
The entire global “Human Rights” framework, rooted in the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention and made up of nebulous NGOs and institutions, is a construct of an earlier era. Immediately after WWII, there was righteous anger at tyrannical forces committing gross violations on defenseless populations. There were also fears that a rival authoritarian power such as the USSR or Communist China would harm U.S. interests and perpetuate tyranny like the Third Reich had. Most importantly, the global balance of power was different: America’s GDP dwarfed that of the rest of the world, making it an international leader, and Europe still held some political sway over a significant part of the globe.
All of this changed with time.
Many countries did not share the same interests as the West in institutions like the U.N.; in fact, they mostly opposed and formed coalitions against our interests. The focus on human rights created a bloated bureaucracy of trans-national groups that undermine democracy and take advantage of America’s goodwill. Promoting human rights through such institutions or taxpayer funding never was the most important national interest of the U.S. But now it is an albatross on our exhausted neck. It has resulted in mass migration to our borders and depleted national resources in meaningless foreign wars. Worse, it has handcuffed America from taking action. When a mob of institutions decides there is only one way forward, democracy loses meaning. Reversing this problem will not be easy, but defunding the UNHRC is a start. The money we send to the U.N. could easily be reoriented to protect Americans—instead of tearing down our allies and wasting resources on virtue-signaling. This is why I introduced a bill to defund the UNHRC.
Readers will remember that, on the other side of the moat, the British Home Secretary Suella Braverman has sounded similar alarms about the “weaponized human rights” complex that will lead to a conquest of the West by a horde of migrants and their backers in the international NGOcracy. As our southern border grows increasingly lawless, and Mexico hosts Latin American leaders as a bloc to claim mass migration as a basic human right—which is to say, there is a human right to relocate, settle, and demand jobs—Luna’s history lesson will be increasingly more relevant. This is a new Westphalian moment, and unless the translational human rights cartel is destroyed, the nation states of the West will have no future and sovereignty itself will lose all meaning.
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