Model UN and Internationalist Blather

All this grandstanding and empty rhetoric about “red lines” and the “international community” in Syria reminds me of my high school days in Model UN. In fact, James Kirchink has a great piece, called “Child’s Play,” in the Aug. 19 Weekly Standard on the internationalist propaganda  that is the Model United Nations.

As Kirchink writes:

If MUN were actually a straightforward simulation of the world body—warts and all—there would be no reasonable objection to the program. Yet Model U.N.’s do-gooder ideology obscures the real U.N.’s institutional limitations. By 12th grade, students ought to be capable of grasping that, while the General Assembly looks like a legislature, only some of its members practice the rule of law, much less hold free elections. Like the U.N. itself, which preaches democracy and self-determination while giving free rein to regimes that respect neither, MUN never asks its participants to wrestle with the contradiction that is a world body devoted to law, peace, and international comity made up of members representing the full spectrum from democracy to tyranny, only some of which actually feel bound by treaties they sign.

As “Secretary General” of my high school club, I mostly enjoyed MUN for the public speaking, opportunity to meet students from other schools, and the sound of those wooden gavels banging the podium. Simulating the General Assembly in a hotel ballroom, I joined other 16 year olds in eradicating land mines, admitting the Baltic nations into the EU, solving child hunger, doing away with Somali pirates, and ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a few times over.

All of this was great fun, but even then I was slightly suspicious that a combination of hyperbole and ad hoc committees over three days could usher in world peace. In the many hours I spent drafting position papers or driving to conferences with my social studies teacher, I was never taught that there are other schools of thought besides liberal internationalism. Kirchink says, “Far from instilling an accurate understanding of the world body as it is…Model United Nations elevates the global debating club to a religion. It indoctrinates impressionable teenagers in the alleged merits of world government.”

Let’s just say no one in our MUN club had read the Melian Dialogue or Machiavelli. Perhaps President Obama and John Kerry haven’t either.