For decades, the world’s most brutal regimes have used the United Nations and its affiliated institutions to bash Israel while turning a blind eye to their own crimes. Likewise, as the new American ambassador to the UN has stressed, Russia and China have become adroit at manipulating the body to their advantage. Richard Goldberg outlines the problem, and what can be done about it:

At the annual assembly of World Health Organization (WHO) member states, politically driven denunciations of Israel distract from more pressing business. At this year’s assembly, the members elected Syria to the WHO’s executive board, even though the WHO itself has documented the regime’s bombing of hospitals. But it is Beijing’s influence over the WHO that has emerged as a unique threat. The agency all but allowed China to set the terms for dealing with the current pandemic. Whether the lab-leak theory proves true or not, one thing is certain: China covered up the origins and seriousness of COVID-19, and the WHO has largely gone along with it.

However, not all agencies can be fixed, and the United States needs a better strategy for handling these as well. . . . Two examples are the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the UN Human Rights Council.

UNRWA was established in 1950 to care for Arab refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Had it adopted the mission of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)—to resettle refugees if repatriation proves impossible—or had UNRWA been incorporated into the UNHCR after it became clear repatriation was unlikely, the agency would no longer exist. The few hundred thousand refugees of 1950 would have been resettled decades ago. Instead, the agency today claims to serve millions of people and demands hundreds of millions of dollars annually from U.S. taxpayers—all with no board of governors or mode of institutional oversight led by major funders, such as the United States.

Whether working with allies or mounting the fight alone, Washington must wage a campaign of reform battles, agency by agency.

Goldberg, Nikki Haley, and other present a detailed assessment of these problems here.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.