When Peacekeepers Become Predators
How reality shattered my childhood admiration for the United Nations.
When I was born, my father was an International Law Professor who deeply admired the United Nations.
Like many children raised during the optimistic decades after World War II and the Cold War, I grew up seeing the UN almost as a symbol of humanity’s highest aspirations:
peace,
international cooperation,
human rights,
and civilization overcoming war itself.
I genuinely believed in it.
Then life happened.
Years later, during deployments to post-conflict environments, I encountered a reality far darker than the idealistic Blue Helmets of my childhood imagination.
Again and again, in different conflict zones, horrifying allegations emerged involving some UN peacekeepers themselves:
human trafficking,
sexual exploitation,
child abuse,
rape,
and systemic impunity.
And what shocked me most was not merely that these crimes occurred.
It was how routinely the institutional response often seemed to work:
the contingents involved were quietly withdrawn,
sent back home,
administratively admonished,
and then largely disappeared from international scrutiny without meaningful consequences.
Conflict after conflict.
Mission after mission.
Decade after decade.
Meanwhile, the public in wealthy Western countries continued imagining UN peacekeeping almost exclusively through humanitarian slogans and ceremonial speeches.
That is why I now react very differently when traditional Leftist voices—and many NeoCon internationalists alike—speak emotionally about the dangers of reducing funding for UN peacekeeping missions.
Of course instability in fragile regions is dangerous.
Of course civilians need protection.
Of course conflict management matters.
But my mind also immediately goes elsewhere:
to the women and children who were never protected from some of the peacekeepers themselves—and to those who will be spared that abuse from UN personnel that won’t deploy where they are.
That is the part many comfortable Western conversations prefer not to confront honestly.
Because modern international institutions often survive politically through symbolism long after many people working inside the system already understand the depth of their structural dysfunction.
The recent reports showing dramatic reductions in global peacekeeping deployments reveal something larger than budgetary problems.
They reveal a growing collapse of faith in the post-Cold War multilateral order itself.
And honestly, that collapse began long before politicians admitted it publicly.
And it consolidated the moment millions of ordinary people across the world realized that institutions claiming moral authority were often incapable of policing their own abuses.
That realization changes you permanently.
It certainly changed me.
So I no longer confuse noble rhetoric with moral reality.
It is time to exit this rotten UN and start again—from scratch.
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I think that the UN would like to send peacekeepers to the United States. You may call me paranoid, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, is the old saying.
The UN is like any top heavy, corrupt bureaucracy, it has lost its vision and mission and now whose primary goal is self perpetuation and maintaining the comfortable existence of its ambassadors. It in not unlike our own federal government whose bloated structure, entitled and permanently tenured employees and self perpetuation through usurped functions never intended to be centralized.
As it grew from the progressive , leftist, eugenicist, Woodrow Wilson, who sponsored both the precursor League of Nations (global governance) and the US permanent civil service (centralized governance by administrative state), both institutions are flawed from the onset by a perverse ideology.
As for the "peacekeepers" they are simply mercenaries, "rented" to the UN to garner cash flow from 3rd world nations like Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Rwanda who are either conscripted or join to escape poverty.
These hired gun mercenaries are not elite units of highly trained, professional troops and the "hands off" rules of engagement, place them into long term garrisoned existence in a foreign land- well armed and bored garrisoned young males, what could go wrong in that devils worksop?
It is probably the first time many of these individuals have ever been in a position of power over a civilian population who are afraid, war weary and vulnerable - power corrupts and human nature being what it is, it can be akin to allowing the wolf pack to play sheep dog in the flock.
The UN has become a perfunctory, costly vestigial organ doing some good in humanitarian missions, but with its bloated structure and cost and its political in fighting among competing nations, perhaps it should limit its functions to those missions and stay out of the "peacekeeping" business model for which it is ill equipped and often dysfunctional.