Posted on by Nathan Riley

Immigration Crisis

In case you missed it, the growing number of immigrants in this country is a major political issue. Whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump becomes the new President, they and their political party must deal with the political fallout.

The arrival of hundreds of thousand of Venezuelans will move the nation to the right. They and most U.S. journalists have an easy explanation for their plight: socialism. Venezula used to be a wealthy Latin American nation until it took control away from the U.S. oil companies pumping black gold from the nation’s large reserves. This political act forced Venezuela into poverty. According to the U.S. version of events, President Nicolas Maduro led a reign of political oppression, stifling Venezuelans who supported the privileged position of the big oil companies.

It wasn’t U.S. wealth and prosperity that brought the Venezuelans to the U.S. border. It was the turmoil and economic downturn in their country that persuaded Venezuelans to make the long journey.  

A U.S. embargo against the “authoritarian” regime of President Maduro prevents the country from using U.S. dollars in its trade. Like most countries, Venezuela depends on imports for vital supplies; no dollars meant no supplies. Venezuelan doctors have complained about severe shortages of medicine. In any case, the political turmoil from the U.S. blockade has led to the emigration of seven million Venezuelans.

In Haiti, the breakdown of the government led to severe lawlessness. Gangs took over the country. Thousands fled, many reaching the United States border. These are the people Trump claimed ate the pets of Ohio residents. In Texas, the flood of Haitians has created grave tensions among Mexican Americans, many of whom have families and friends in Mexico. Border crossings that used to take a matter of minutes can now take hours.

Immigration will be a central issue in the United States, no matter who wins the election. The arrival of Venezuelans who believe their nation was ruined by socialism means they will be a conservative force. If either Democrats or Republicans make a plausible case that a new policy is socialist, we can expect the Venezuelans in the United States to oppose it. Most likely these new immigrants, like the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro, will become stalwart Republicans. Democrats will no longer assume that immigrant voters are supporters.

The point of this article is that a world government, in all likelihood, would prevent these mass migrations. The collapse of the Haitian government would automatically lead the United Nations, assuming it had become the global sovereign, to send armed forces to restore order in Haiti and provide assistance to this beleaguered nation.

The complaints of the United States about Venezuela could then be adjudicated by a world court, which could use soldiers to enforce its decisions. In this way, world government prevents crises that force thousands, if not millions, of people to leave their homes searching for safety. For example, migrations, from North Africa especially, shattered German political coalitions and forced Angela Merkel, surely one of the great leaders of this century, to resign.

It is easy to understand that Americans would be skittish about giving up sovereignty and placing it in the hands of the United Nations, whose authority would increase drastically if it became the sovereign responsible for making the Earth’s people cooperate and stop crises from developing.

Crises in far away countries are causing political turmoil in the wealthy nations. A world government can moderate, perhaps even prevent, the turmoil that convinces families to leave their native land in the hopes of finding a better future.

This is hardly the only benefit of world government. Indeed, a chief objective is preventing wars that plague the world. But by forcing nations to justify their actions and consider the impacts on other countries there would be a substantial increase in world cooperation. One obvious benefit is international cooperation to deal with climate change and reclaim desert lands. As these arid regions acquire water, transported across national boundaries, they will help feed the world’s growing population.

We live in a global economy and the advent of new information technologies like computers means that one institution, the U.N., can keep track of the world’s problems and offer assistance.

Such assistance will not always be welcome. Israel recently banned U.N. relief workers from their nation. The United States’s 62-year blockade of Cuba was recently rejected by 187 nations in the General Assembly. Only the United States and Israel supported the continued isolation of Cuba, which has found itself so short of petroleum that there have been electrical blackouts.

A major reason for the U.S. blockade are the Cuban-American votes in Florida, which are hardly a majority but are sufficiently large to make candidates lose if they support reform of U.S. Cuban policy. World government removes this obstacle.

World government is no panacea. Undoubtedly, nations will have conflicts and political groups will demand governmental reforms. But what world government promises when these conflicts occur is that the nations or their dissident citizens resolve their arguments with lawyers, not bullets. This is surely such a great benefit that the United States and other nations in the world should consider giving up their sovereignty in favor of making the United Nations the chief government in the world.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

Welcome to Freedom Democrats

This blog is about creating a new wing of Democrats, pointing the party in a new direction.

Freedom Democrats support people who party, be they drug users, sex workers, porn watchers, or porn performers. Regardless of their pleasures, everybody should be respected and have their voice heard. We are not alone. DecrimNY and other groups across the United States are working to decriminalize sex work. Freedom Democrats should have an obligation to listen and understand the proposals these specialized groups are making. They have not only the respect of Freedom Democrats, but, more significantly, they have worked on rules to help sex workers do their job with dignity. Working in a brothel is only justified if the sex worker preserves their right to stop work or reject a trick. A person’s right to autonomy over their own body means that they mustn’t be forced to accept every customer.

I believe Freedom Democrats support the right to decide if a person want to practice monogamy. Such arrangements should be made honestly and explicitly between couples. Life would be smoother if a person’s sexual escapades don’t become a source of pain and surprise to another partner. Again, like with sex work, people have understood this, and couples routinely work this out. This is not a radical idea to many Democrats and Republicans.

But life isn’t a free-for-all. The right to say no has received positive attention from the #MeToo movement. It’s one thing to ask; it’s quite another to pursue a person after they have said no. For Freedom Democrats to work well with others, they should be willing to quickly and easily accept refusals. At the same time, people who party, should have spaces where the sexually adventurous can meet, and it is not offensive for a person to make a pass or sneak into a corner for some private time.

None of these issues are new to the Democratic Party, but Freedom Democrats propose to organize by having weekly parties of persons who are comfortable around drugs and sexual activity. This special feature of a Freedom Democrats’ weekly parties holds out hopes that like-minded people can organize and become a new wing of the Democratic party.

At the same time, Freedom Democrats should oppose war because war is about the powerful imposing their will, even if it’s against the wishes of the loser; it is the opposite of freedom. International affairs exist in a state of anarchy; disagreements are all too often settled by violence.

Ending this violence has been the fond hope of thoughtful people for centuries. War is scattered all over the globe and causes sorrow on continent after continent. As President John F. Kennedy said in 1963, “peace—based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions” should be the ambitious goal. Freedom Democrats, I believe, should make it a primary objective.

I believe they should seek to turn the United Nations into a world government. Any nation that has a grievance should be able to appear before the United Nations. Lawyers and diplomats should replace soldiers and weapons. As a world government, the decisions of the United Nations would be enforced. Nations would lose the dubious ability to reject a proposal because the powerful think they can impose their plan using violence and the assets that the richer have against poorer nations.

Freedom Democrats are just taking baby steps. It is our objective to have specialists devise plans for world government. The object is to get the discussion started. World government should be debated on college campuses. It should be the subject of scholarly study. There is no reason to expect that Freedom Democrats will start a world government, but there is a hope that Freedom Democrats will start the debate.

Posted on by Nathan Riley · 4 Comments

Making the U.N. Sovereign

In the last two articles, I have shared my enthusiasm for President John F. Kennedy’s goal of strengthening  “the United Nations,” as an “instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system—a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished.”

President Kennedy wanted the U.N. to create “a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of Law.” That should be the objective of Freedom Democrats: “insuring the security of the large and small.”  The destruction of Ukraine after Russia’s attack and the gut-wrenching bloody clash between Israel and Palestine clearly demonstrate why the U.N. must protect “the large and small.”

Kennedy put his faith in the two world powers of 1963. He assumed cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States could bring peace and world disarmament.

His fear was that nuclear war would bring the end of humanity. Sixty-one years later, we believe it unlikely that atomic weapons will be used. My vision of world government goes far beyond disarmament.

In my opinion, it is likely that each nation will have armed forces, but the dominant power must be the United Nations. It should have a monopoly on atomic weapons and armed forces for enforcing its decisions. Bloody conflicts become unlikely; U.N. armed forces aren’t destroying a nation. They have a more practical objective: arrest the leaders who are fighting international decrees. Clearly, these leaders may have followers, and the U.N. armed forces, acting more like police than soldiers, must dissuade these supporters from turning to violence. Should a serious military challenge arise, the U.N. armed forces should be bolstered by calling on other nations for assistance. Just as the U.S. Constitution gives the central government the power to enhance its strength by calling on state militias.

Should a country file a complaint about another country, both nations must appear before a U.N. tribunal and make their case. It would be illegal and lead to possible intervention by the U.N. for a nation to ignore the complaint.

Minority groups, be they tribes or political parties, confronting genocide could also file complaints. Pol Pot’s mass murder of his political opponents in Cambodia should be within the U.N. jurisdiction.

In other words, the U.N. would be the Earth’s sovereign nation. Its mandate would be far larger than world peace. It would supervise the cooperation of nations confronting climate change; it would issue money and prevent countries from being unable to pay debts because the value of another country currency, like the dollar, soared, it would soften free trade’s impact on worker’s wages, and it would raise money for vital infrastructure projects. In an emergency, it would protect populations from famine. In short, the U.N. mission will be peace, “Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living,” in President Kennedy’s glowing words.

This change has historic examples: Italy in the 19th century turned its city states into one nation. At the end of the 18th century after the United States established the Constitution, the former colonies became a new nation under the authority of a central government capable of collecting taxes and organizing armed forces to protect every colony and prevent the colonies from going to war against each other.  In each case small bodies gave up their sovereignty so that a larger sovereign could improve life. A U.N. world government would yoke the separate nations into a common body that will, in President Kennedy’s glowing vision, “build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

Posted on by Nathan Riley

Through the Looking Glass

June is China Month in Washington D.C.

The G7—once the most prestigious group of nations in the globe, now reduced to an alliance of the U.S. and its allies—met in Italy and issued a communique at the end of its meeting. China didn’t attend, but it was mentioned 28 times.

In a front page New York Times story, clearly at the behest of U.S. diplomatic sources, China is described as a “malign force.” Among its numerous sins, said U.S. officials, is helping Russia build weapons to fight Ukraine and a possible threat to withhold the exotic minerals used in batteries and microchips. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has written two articles about reducing tension between Washington and Beijing.

The U.S. and China navies come dangerously close to each other in the South China Sea. Gone are the days when Apple proudly announced new sales figures from China for its products. Now the U.S. issues stern warnings trying to limit China’s alliance with Russia.

If we had a looking glass that could peer into the future, war between these superpowers is conceivable. China is protecting its borders. Its soldiers and weapons are close at hand. The U.S. is at the other side of the world and depending on its collection of bases in the Pacific for supplies to fight a war. Nonetheless the U.S. confidently assures us it can master the Chinese, who already forced U.S. troops back seventy years ago in Korea.

It is all too conceivable that war could flare up between the world’s two superpowers. This is high risk politics, and the U.S. acts like it is prepared to confront this worst-of-all possible outcomes.

The push for world government is one possible way to prevent these two atomic powers from coming to blows. If we turned the United Nations into the World Government we would have a better chance of resolving these tensions without the death and destruction of war.

Even in the unlikely event that Ukraine beats the Russians their nation is a shadow of its former self. Cities, farmlands, and power plants would have to be rebuilt. The millions of people who fled will need strong reassurances to return and are more likely to prefer the peace and prosperity in their new homes. Restoring Ukraine will take decades.

In Gaza, the destruction is even graver, and there is the strong possibility that Israel has no intention of letting the Palestinians return to their homes. Death, destruction, and possible starvation are the realities that govern Palestine. Furious at the October 7th massacre by Hamas, Israel believes that its weapons can destroy Palestinian militancy. There is widespread skepticism that this final solution will be achieved by the Israeli Defense Forces.

We should remember that the problem isn’t a Hamas massacre or an Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid. The problem isn’t separating the good guys from the bad guys by the evil deeds they commit; the problem is war. Using weapons to settle disputes will always bring war crimes. Only if we find an alternate way to resolve disputes can we stop these horrific crimes.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, coming out of the World War II victory, clearly hoped the United Nations would prevent wars from starting. He did not envision subordinating nations to an international peacekeeping force. As we approach the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the need for a world-governing body like the United Nations to control national governments persists. What was a step too far for Roosevelt can happen if Americans unite into a political party supporting this drastic solution.

World government, I believe, is one reason to support Freedom Democrats and to ally ourselves with the fight for the rights of sex workers, drug users, and people who party. We can create new possibilities and move the United States, and hopefully the world, in a peaceful and prosperous direction.  

Posted on by Nathan Riley

FDR’s Four Freedoms

It’s June and time to step back and ask what are the Freedom Democrats trying to do? The plan is that Freedom Democrats throw weekly parties to give people the opportunity to meet, become friends, and help people confront the difficulties of life. By throwing a party it doesn’t matter what people believe, just that they like to have a good time together.

This is what I propose to get the Freedom Democrats started.

  1. End illegal drug hysteria. Some people do drugs that are currently banned. It shouldn’t surprise or shock us. Drug users aren’t criminals, any more than gay men are child molesters or blacks are robbers. Drug users include Miles Davis and Billie Holiday, two users whose genius have brought beauty and goodness to the world. Other drug users are bankers, plumbers and schoolteachers whose jobs are endangered if their private habits become public. Many are unhappy and use drugs to ease depression. They all should have the right to medical care without supervision by the Drug Enforcement Agency or the criminal justice system.  A drug user should have the same access to doctors as everyone else. If that includes prescriptions for opium-based medications that is a private decision between the doctor and the patient. There should be no need for drug users to buy drugs in the illegal market.
  2. Society, which currently forces people to buy drugs illegally, should provide 24hr safer use sites allowing users to take their drugs within the sight of people who know how to stop accidental overdoses. Safe drug facilities are in place all over the world and recognize that people have always used drugs and that their lives should be protected is a fundamental belief of the Freedom Democrats.
  3. Freedom Democrats want its members to demand world peace by turning the United Nations into a world government, compelling nations to obey international laws.
  4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied public support against the dictator in World War II by calling for world government. His fourth freedom—freedom from fear—called for “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.” His other freedoms—freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom from want—added up to a program that Roosevelt believed would receive world-wide support. This program became a foundation for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly.
  5. Undoubtedly, the U.N. as world government should give equal importance to the dangers from climate change. That is one new task that wasn’t on the agenda in 1941. Supporting the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community are equally important and deserve the support of world government.

Developing the foundations of international human rights law was a major task of the U.N. in its early days in 1946 and 1947. The preamble to the universal declaration of human rights includes FDR’s Four Freedoms.

The world is not governed by human rights laws. War in Ukraine and Palestine are particularly egregious examples of violations of basic human right to be free of fear. Undoubtedly women in Iran and a sizable part of the population in Afghanistan have seen their human rights stymied.

Prisoners, drug users, and homeless persons in the United States have valid claims that their rights are violated.

The idea behind the Freedom Democrats is that supporting the rights of sex workers, porn watchers, and drug users would prove popular. The people who party become a new group advancing U.S. democracy, just as gays and lesbians did.

People who didn’t do well in school and idealists who want to change the world would find common ground by joining the Freedom Democrats. So far, this idea is a tiny infant. That is where we stand in June 2024.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

Create a World Government in the 21st Century

Turning the United Nations into a world government is a daunting task.

It’s as big a job as the one held by representatives of the 13 original states shortly after the end of the American Revolution. Chaired by George Washington, they wrote the U.S. Constitution and laid the groundwork for the Bill of Rights.

Already, the United States was dividing into free and slave states, and the primary concern of the founders of the Constitution was to create united states with a central government that could tax and wage war. The confederation that governed the 13 states during the Revolution did not have these powers, leading to constant pleas by George Washington for money, guns, and food.

The United Nations currently depends on contributions by individual states. If the United Nations was the world government, it would control the flow of funds. It would no longer depend on the voluntary contributions of the members. It would have the power to create its own budget. Obviously, existing nations would harbor great doubts about giving the United Nations this kind of power. It’s up to the public to say ending wars is more important than preserving existing national states. The United States won’t disappear. Russia and China won’t disappear. The power of these governments would be hemmed in by international law enforced by the United Nations.

The United States is the biggest contributor to the United Nations, and it should come as no surprise that it expects to influence the U.N.’s decisions.

The budget of the United Nations, if it was the world government, would be huge. For example, it would need soldiers to enforce international agreements and money to pay for emergencies all over the globe.

For example, with a world government the border between Palestine and Israel would be policed by U.N., not by Israel. These forces could be volunteers from the U.S., China, India, and other nations who stop being soldiers for a nation and swear to take their orders from the United Nations. If as expected a large number of U.N. soldiers would come from the United States, this would protect United States security.

The details must be worked out by experts from all over the world. Creating a world government would be the work of thousands from all the countries in the world.

There are elements in the current world structure that resemble world government. The International Criminal Court accepts complaints from one country about the behavior of another. Its activities are in the news. South Africa has complained that Israel and Hamas have violated international law in Gaza. Judges for the court in May of 2024 were weighing the evidence.

This is a good thing, but it is not world government. Were the United Nations to be the world government, Israel couldn’t attack Palestine, and Hamas would be hunted down as criminals.

World government means outlawing war. Nations would be required to take their complaints to the world government for adjudication. Before bullets are fired, the problems between nations would be resolved by decisions of the world government. In this light, the International Criminal Court is a disappointment. It asserts its jurisdiction after the fighting started.

To be successful, world government must assert its authority before blood is shed. In other words, don’t call out the troops, call the lawyers. It’s a system that is remarkably successful in the United States. World government must have the authority to stop groups from going to war.

This will be a massive undertaking. In this age of computers and the internet, the technology clearly exists for keeping track of the thousands of international disputes that exist all over the world. What doesn’t exist is an institution whose primary task is to resolve these disputes.

Such a government must also provide food and medical care after disasters.

Experts undoubtedly have many ideas about ways to create such an institution. It is certainly beyond my skill, but what I can do is ask my fellow citizens to get involved in asking the experts to speak up. Let’s make the 21st century, the century of world government.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

Obstacles to World Government

The rising death toll in Gaza should be linked to the tens of thousands of deaths in Ukraine. By the time the United States left Afghanistan, starvation had become a problem for the supposed victors of the invasion following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.

Syria and Iraq and various states in Africa confront persistent violence.

In my last blog, I argued that world government was the best way to end the constant eruption of wars.

A major reward of turning the United Nations into a world government is historical greatness. The change is as drastic as going from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution of 1787. From a system of voluntary cooperation to the establishment of a central government that had overall responsibility for preserving the peace of the new nation.

This has proved a daunting task: ending slavery with a bloody civil war demonstrates that the founders’ solution was far from perfect. Nonetheless, students of history still recognize the great achievements of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, to name just a few of the historically great leaders who turned victory over Great Britain into a system of united states.

Creating a world government would be just as great a historical achievement as turning the revolutionary victory into a permanent government. If you want the world to remember you for generations then you want to become a patriot establishing a functioning world government.

Overcoming the obstacles to world government will mark you as a great person, a maker of history. In this blog, we will look at what happens to U.S. power if the United Nations becomes the seat of world government.

Stated baldly, this means the United States and presumably its allies cannot go to war without the permission of the United Nations.

World government requires that before a nation can turn to mass violence it must first make its case to the lawyers and diplomats at the U.N. This system of resolving conflict is well established in the United States. Our courts are respected and there are dozens of ways that grievances can be heard without resort to violence.

Transferring this system to the United States and the world would be a stupendous achievement. To take the example of Palestine, Israeli soldiers would no longer occupy this country. Creating a safe border between Israel and Palestine would be the responsibility of the United Nations. U.N. soldiers would have the task of preserving peace along the borders between these two nations.

Recruiting troops and their supplies is expensive. If the U.N. had the taxing power to pay for an international police force, then presumably the United States would provide the cash and presumably have influence over final decisions.

Or an even more dramatic change, the U.N. has the power to directly impose taxes. The United States was broke under the voluntary system of the Articles of Confederation. Washington, Hamilton, and numerous generals constantly begged for money to buy supplies.

In the end, the United States depended on loans from European nations. Under the Constitution of 1787, the new central government was guaranteed the opportunity to raise funds, especially through the tariff and selling U.S. bonds. Revenue came from taxes and borrowing.

Making the U.N. the world government would require that it could raise billions of dollars every year.

The political problem is sovereignty or who runs the show. Right now the United States funds the U.N., but with world government it’s entirely plausible that the United States, China, Russia etc. would depend on U.N. funding.

The justification for this dramatic change in power is peace. In return for making every country, big and small, dependent on the U.N. these nations obtain the right to bring their complaints to U.N. agencies. The arguments would be settled by quasi-judicial rulings, without bullets or bombs.

What appears to be a loss of power by the United States becomes a boon to the people of the world. The risks of invasion, war, and tribal conflicts become minimized if the U.N. has the soldiers to stop another country from going to war.

Undoubtedly a major source of U.N. troops would be American soldiers who volunteered to serve as U.N. enforcers. Even with their sworn allegiance to the U.N., U.S. soldiers are unlikely to attack the United States. Thus the safety of the population of the United States can be assured. Similar considerations can be made for other large nations.

Taxes and soldiers, international cooperation to confront climate change, and using world wealth to build hospitals and schools in impoverished nations would clearly benefit from world government.

It is likely that world government would create tens of thousands of projects that would improve living conditions and put the world on the path to growth and prosperity.

Posted on by Nathan Riley

World Government Could Prevent Palestinian Crisis

No matter what happens. Freedom Democrats will grapple with the U.S./Israel invasion of Palestine.

As I write this, police across the nation are arresting protestors angered by the displacement of the Palestinians in Gaza. As you read this, it is clear I am no friend of the Israeli counterattack following the mysterious October 7th massacre by Hamas. I am no expert on the Middle East, and the U.N., which possesses such skills, is being ignored. My gut feeling is that when Israel has moved the Palestinian population Israel will move and rebuild the destroyed neighborhoods in Gaza. With this big difference, Israelis will replace the Palestinians.

My conclusion sees this conflict as a real estate deal. The Palestinians are being replaced, just as settlers replaced the American Indians.

This affects Freedom Democrats because although it is still early in this conflict, it appears that the Democratic coalition could split. The Vietnam War tore apart the Democratic Party and ended the Roosevelt coalition that started during the Great Depression in 1932. The split over Vietnam followed a split between Segregation Democrats and the progressive forces demanding that racial distinctions end and that the U.S. integrate everybody regardless of skin color. In the long aftermath following the Warren Court striking down school segregation and the passage of Civil Rights legislation, the Democrats lost the South. It became Republican, and the Democratic party gained support in the Black and Hispanic communities. Democratic hawks and peaceniks learned how to work together.

Right now, it appears that the Democrats will split over Palestine just before the election in November. Freedom Democrats, like all voters, will have to decide whether to stay loyal to President Joseph Biden, with Donald Trump as the alternative. Their other choices are staying home or hoping that Cornel West will get on the ballot. None of this is good news for Democrats.

The point is that Freedom Democrats would have serious decisions to make and be able to enter into conversations with thoughtful people. It would be a way to expand contacts and win converts.

My perspective is radical. The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is two years away, and founders like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the dozens of other people who created the first European style government without a hereditary ruler are still celebrated. The American colonists who created first the Confederacy and then drafted the Constitution of 1787 devised a system of term limits. Members of the House of Representatives would need majority approval every two years, Senators every six years, and the President every four years. In Europe, many of these positions were inherited, but the U.S. rejected this approach. The leaders of the new nation would be selected by majority rule.

Over the decades, the system has changed dramatically, but the founders of the United States are still prominent figures.

I believe it is time we find new heroes that will make the United Nations a global government. This is a daunting task. If the U.N. is the world sovereign, then the United States government becomes subordinate to this world government. A prospect guaranteed to generate hostility in the United States.

The advantage of making the U.N. sovereign is that member nations would have to hire lawyers to settle their disputes. If Vladimir Putin feels threatened by the changes in Ukraine, he can start a legal action. The United States and Ukraine would, under international law, be compelled to respond.

This is only possible if the U.N. has the troops to enforce its orders. Russia, the United States, and Ukraine lose their ability to ignore U.N. decisions. Member nations, including the U.S., must agree that their troops will be commanded by the U.N.

This is a huge step. But it holds out the promise that missiles and bullets will stop being a way to settle international disputes.

A major and immediate task of the U.N. is to protect people from being removed from their homes. Whether it’s drought, tribal hostilities, or the hope of living better in a rich country, people should not be forced to leave their homes.

The U.N. must have the funds and expertise to create stability in nations all over the world.

The people who do this will become as famous as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The reward for the creators of this new world will be that their fame lasts generation after generation.

If the U.N. were running the show, the Israelis would not be able to invade Palestine, and Hamas would be hunted by U.N. police. Their object wouldn’t be to kill Hamas or eliminate it as the Israelis wish. They would have a more reasonable goal: arrest and trial.

In short, giving the U.N. sovereign power would allow lawyers and diplomats, rather than soldiers and drones, to solve problems.