Should the US Withdraw from the United Nations?

Ron Paul, other libertarians, and some conservatives talk of withdrawing the US from the United Nations. Sounds good. However, William F. Buckley and others on the right think another course of action might be better. Stay in the UN, but don't vote -- except to veto the really bad stuff.

As Willaim Rusher writes:

What to do? Pulling out of the United Nations would not eliminate it. It would keep on doing its best to body-block the United States, and hostility to this country would not only continue but increase, dramatically highlighted by our solitary absence from the organization. But staying in and doing nothing is scarcely better.

Ideally, the best course would probably be to encourage the founding and growth of a new group of the world's truly democratic nations, dedicated to addressing the world's problems with their wealth and wisdom, and gradually diminish the United Nations's pretensions. But such undeniably democratic nations as France and Germany would undoubtedly refuse to go along with such a scheme, preferring to pursue their current strategy in the United Nations.

In the circumstances, therefore, the best course may be the one proposed by the late James Burnham: for the United States to announce that it will continue supporting the beneficial activities of the United Nations in such matters as world health, but henceforth will not participate in, or vote on, its deliberations involving major political issues. (We would retain, however, our veto power, to block seriously offensive actions.) The United Nations would undoubtedly continue, and probably increase, its issuance of anti-American manifestos of one sort and another, but their essential unimportance would become steadily more apparent as the years rolled by.