Imagine a guy bursts into your hospital room, reeking of tequila, clad in dirty and torn clothes, bruised and wounded, cigarette dangling from his lips, his unshaven face loudly barking incoherent commands as he stumbles about the place with bloodshot eyes barely half-open.

Imagine if this same guy, puffing himself up with great moral authority and booming voice as he turns to address the wall, insists that he’s your doctor, and brusquely demands that you submit to an amputation of your head as the only possible remedy for your illness, even though you’re just in for observation of your little snoring problem.

Now add a big goofy mustache to this picture and you have a pretty good sense of what the UN must be feeling these days.

Yes, the good doctor is in, and he’s brought with him lots of great ideas about how the United Nations can be made healthy. All it has to do is listen to the wise counsel of Dr. Bolton, and the UN too can be just like the United States someday.

But why would it want to? Notwithstanding the need for real reforms which would truly benefit the organization (not a few of which – like more democracy and more genuine authority – the US would be the first to veto), why on earth would anyone there want to follow contemporary America as a model for what the UN can become?

Even as Uncle Sam badgers and bullies, and even as he threatens to find ‘alternatives’ to the United Nations, other countries no doubt wonder what the heck arrogant America could possibly teach them about how to run a polity.

After all, America loves to shout about UN spending excesses, despite the fact that the entire budget for the organization and all its programs – this is the ‘world government’, mind you – is less than one-fourth that of its host city, New York, a paltry $12 billion. So, what then? Should the UN be more like the US government, and amass staggering annual budget deficits?

And while we’re on the subject of public sector efficiency, how about the US performance in the Iraqi occupation, or the drowning of New Orleans? Isn’t that also a better model? Americans understand that it actually is quite important for key government officials to find a proper meal during a crisis involving (other people’s) life and death. If the UN were more like the US, Kofi Annan would spend less time worrying about Iraq, and more thinking about rack of lamb.

Should the UN also follow America’s lead on democracy, and encourage only one-third to one-half of the world’s eligible voters to turn out for most elections? Should tainted elections employing obvious tools of race-based voter disenfranchisement become the world standard?

Do we need an international death penalty (again, with loads of racial bias), just like the American one? Or should we just let torture, imprisonment without trial, extraordinary rendition and illegal wiretaps become the global norm for civil liberties?

And what about war? If the UN would follow the US model, there would be no need for pesky Security Council resolutions authorizing the use of force. Talk about your governmental efficiency. Countries could make up any old pretext to invade another sovereign state, just like America did to Iraq. Unless, of course, the US says it’s a bad invasion, like what Iraq did to Kuwait. That’s different.

The United States has recently been blocking, violating, abrogating and otherwise shredding every international treaty it can get its hands on, ranging from nuclear weapons to land mines to protections for women and children to international law enforcement to global warming. Perhaps other countries have something to learn here. Really, isn’t that whole mutual cooperation thing a bit twentieth century?

Shouldn’t the world adopt the US social model, too, so that they can also double their health care expenditures in order to be ranked 37th in quality, just above Slovenia, Cuba and Brunei? So that one-sixth of their population can be uninsured? So that their citizens can live shorter lives than those of almost every other developed country?

Perhaps the world organization will also want to emulate its richest member-state in terms of promised development aid actually delivered, though of course it is logically impossible for all countries to simultaneously be the least generous of the pack. Sorry, there’s only room for one at the very bottom.

And while they’re at it, other countries might also want to follow the US model of environmental citizenship. It’s actually not that hard. All you have to do is get five percent of the world’s population together and have them produce twenty-five percent of its greenhouse gases. Then, just be sure to scuttle any international solutions to deal with the problem you yourself are most responsible for creating, and voila! (But please, no more French words allowed – too snobbish and cowardly.)

Does this not sound like an attractive plan for reform at the UN?

The sad truth is that today’s America is hardly the model for anybody in the world community, on any issue. Not for developed countries, and not for developing ones either. Not on health, environmental or human rights issues, and not on fiscal, legal or security ones either.

What makes this especially sad is that it wasn’t always this way, but it is a special gift of the conservative revolution in American politics this last quarter-century.

Nobody would ever say it at the UN, because they know how easily the thin-skinned Yanks might decide take their ball and go play somewhere else, just as they did throughout much of the 1990s when the Republicans in Congress blocked payment of US dues for years on end.

But here’s what they’re really thinking (well, at least the printable version) when the US sends the likes of John Bolton there to trash the organization and arrogantly prescribe the remedies for all that ails it (and for much more that doesn’t).

They’re thinking, “Physician, heal thyself.”

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (pscdmg@hofstra.edu), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.

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