Somewhere in the United States Budget for Fiscal Year 1996 there is an entry for just about everything, from midnight basketball to research on the reproductive cycle of fruit flies. But search as you will, nowhere in that huge tome that documents the roles and responsibilities of $1.6 trillion's worth of national government is there a total for projected U.S. contributions to the United Nations.
The U.N. is not exactly a new kid on the block. It will celebrate its 50th birthday this June; and after tens of billions of dollars in U.S. contributions over the years, it might be supposed that someone would want to assess the value to us of membership in this multinational conglomerate. A total annual budget figure would help.
To get started on such an evaluation, here are the numbers for the 1994 calendar year, as best as I have been able to put them together:
- The U.S. share (25 percent) of the U.N. administrative budget, which funds all Secretariat staff and programs: $298 million.
- The U.S. share (31.7 percent) of the peacekeeping budget: $1.2 billion.
- U.S. contributions to all U.N. specialized agencies (World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, High Commissioner for Refugees, et cetera): $368 million, exclusive of capital contributions to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Cumulative total: almost $2 billion.
This total does not include the value of goods and services that the U.S. contributes voluntarily to the U.N. system as a whole. For U.N. peacekeeping operations alone, voluntary contributions in 1994 represented about $1.7 billion in "fair market" value, and some sources put the total in excess of $2 billion. (The administration claims some of this total has been reimbursed, but does not say how much.) For other programs, a reasonable estimate is even more difficult for an outsider, but there is a steady flow of experts from the Washington bureaucracy to U.N. headquarters, and similar ties with the specialized agencies. Add in these numbers, and the total approaches $4 billion.
That isn't small change. Now that we know roughly what membership costs us, the question we need to answer: What does our investment in the U.N. buy us?
