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While a large part of the western world was paying tribute this week to the sacrifices made by men and women of the Allied forces, fighting continued in Washington on whether the U.S. will help pay the cost of ensuring that we never again have a world war.
By United Nations estimates, the U.S. owes $1.8 billion US as its share of the world body's operating costs. Unless $350 million of that is paid by Dec. 31, the Americans will forfeit their seat at the UN General Assembly.
Some months ago, President Bill Clinton's administration managed to wrangle $926 million to help pay off its debt, but that promise quickly became mired in Senate politics. A New Jersey senator has made a lot of headlines by managing to hog-tie the UN bill with a condition that the UN not allow any of that money to flow into family planning programs which include access to abortions.
The real opposition to paying up, however, has nothing to do with abortions and everything to do with power and isolationalist politics.
The Americans are largely responsible for setting up the United Nations in the first place. Now, 55 years later, there are some in the U.S. who believe their nation's ability to set the agenda for the UN is steadily eroding. For example, despite U.S. objections, the UN is continuing efforts to establish a world court with the powers to try military and political leaders for war crimes.
Many U.S. opponents of that effort view their government and their courts as being supreme authorities and the only organizations with the right to judge the conduct of American leaders. There are even some who fear the United Nations is moving toward becoming a world government.
A good part of the opposition to paying the UN arrears also stems from sheer exhaustion. Americans may enjoy their profile as the world's most powerful nation, but they are growing weary of the job of being the world's police officer. They're not willing to shed the blood of their sons and daughters in countries they didn't even know existed until they were asked to go there and fight.
They worry, too, about the global economy and seeing their own markets eroded by free-trade agreements that will give access to cheap goods made in developing countries.
But it's too late to pull up the drawbridge and lock out the rest of the world and its problems. Thanks largely to the values and free market system Americans have exported in the last 50 years, the globe has shrunk.
The UN has problems. It's a bloated bureaucracy which is costly to operate. It's slow, inefficient and large parts of it are poorly managed. There are also constant charges of corruption. But it is difficult to find any system of government which doesn't constantly battle these same issues, including the U.S. Senate.
What those same senators need to ask themselves is what the world might look like without the United Nations.
For all its faults, the UN continues to provide the only forum where 188 member states can debate and exchange ideas. It provides the platform for not only airing problems but finding solutions. It has helped establish basic human rights which have become the measure by which a nation's leaders are held accountable by their own people and the world.
Entry into the UN is recognition that a nation exists -- no small matter for people who lived through the repressive Soviet Union and now see their countries represented at the UN table as independent nations.
There are 17 UN-sponsored peace missions currently under way in the world, including East Timor. There has been a UN operation at the ceasefire line between India and Pakistan since 1949. And while the UN hasn't been able to make real peace between these two nations, it has helped keep the situation from exploding.
Though the UN has not lived up to some of the hopes that it would be able to prevent all wars, it continues to win battles on the humanitarian front through its own agencies and those with which it's affiliated.
While politicians have wagged their fingers and tongues about what to do in the Middle East, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has provided free schooling and essential health services to four generations of Palestinians. Through its vaccination program, the World Health Organization has wiped out smallpox and still hopes to have polio defeated in the next few years.
In 1974, UN figures showed that only five per cent of children in the developing world were immunized against polio, tetanus, measles, whopping cough, diphtheria and tuberculosis. Today, through programs operated by UNICEF, 80 per cent of children in that part of the world are vaccinated.
None of this would have happened without the support of the U.S., which pays 25 per cent of the cost of operating the United Nations. The U.S. may have an argument that it's time countries such as Britain and Japan paid more.
American politicians are extremely good at pontificating about the forces of evil in the world. If they mean what they say in those lofty speeches about peace and freedom, they need to back it up with their share of the resources to accomplish these goals.