Saturday, September 26, 1998

We should pay U.N. dues to keep promises

A country club has a member, a valuable member, a club founder, active on committees, a can-do guy. Unfortunately, the member is years behind in his dues and assessments and the arrears are really beginning to hurt the club.

The member says he might pay up - if the club shortens the golf course from 18 holes to 15, fires the tennis pro, removes prime rib from the Sunday menu and, oh yes, gives the member a 25 percent dues reduction.

There you have the United States and the United Nations, to whom it owes more than $1.5 billion and where it may lose its vote if the arrears aren't paid soon. The United States is booming, but Japan, which is not, is now the U.N.'s largest supporter.

The United States promised to pay up if the U.N. got rid of its secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and replaced him with our guy, Kofi Annan. The U.N. did; the U.S. didn't.

Now some in Congress are back with a promise of money if the U.N. cuts its payroll, cuts America's dues and enacts other constricting "reforms." The money is also tied up in unrelated differences between some Republicans and the Clinton administration. The president, perhaps because of his scandal problems, seems unable to resolve the disputes.

Some of the U.N. budget is undoubtedly wasted, but most of our arrears are for peacekeeping operations that we sought in the first place. As a matter of national pride, we should keep our promises, and we should be conscious - as Congress is not - of the resentment our high-handed tactics cause in other countries.

Finally, there is a larger trend at work. With its refusal to make good on U.N. dues, to fund the IMF, to pass fast-track trade authority, with its steady expansion of punitive sanctions and down-sizing of our diplomatic establishment, Congress seems to be falling victim to an insidious kind of isolationism.

Isolationism, cloaked as it is in the rhetoric of the 1990s, is still a policy that has failed us disastrously in the past.