Child's Play

Imagine a world in which the “international community” provides universal education for all girls. Or where countries that deploy children as soldiers cease to do so as a result of moral suasion. Or where the global scourge of malaria is stopped with the passing of a unanimous resolution. Indeed, where there is no problem or crisis, no matter how seemingly intractable, that cannot be solved over the course of a lively weekend in a hotel ballroom. Welcome to the world of Model United Nations.
From the age of 14 to 18, I was an enthusiastic member of my high school’s Model United Nations (MUN) team. A lackluster athlete, I applied myself to MUN with the passion that most of my peers devoted to sports, rising to vice president by the time I was a senior. During that period, I attended at least three national conferences every year and devoted countless hours to the club. There was little I looked forward to more than an upcoming Model U.N. conference, a feeling shared by thousands of high school students across the country.
According to the United Nations, student simulations of international diplomacy began even before the world body itself was founded at the 1945 San Francisco Conference. Indeed, American high schools were mimicking the League of Nations, the U.N.’s doomed predecessor, in the 1920s. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that MUN clubs—informally sponsored by the United Nations Association of the United States, a nonprofit group devoted to evangelizing Americans in the virtues of the U.N.—became widespread. What’s more, Model U.N. isn’t just an extracurricular activity for teenagers; it is a veritable “movement,” worldwide in scope, like those calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons or protection of the whales. Though decentralized, it propounds an ideology that has shaped the worldviews of the millions who have taken part over the past half-century.
Today, most MUN conferences in the United States are organized by university undergraduates, who play the roles of U.N. officials, while the gatherings’ intended beneficiaries—high school students—adopt the parts of delegates from the U.N.’s 193 member states. More than 90,000 high school and college students participate in over 100 American MUN conferences every year. Globally, the U.N. reports that 400,000 students take part annually in some 400 MUN conferences in 35 countries. Conferences run the gamut from AMUN, the Arkansas Model United Nations, hosted by the University of Central Arkansas, to ZABMUN, held at Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology in Karachi.
On the surface, it’s hard to quarrel with earnest high school kids’ convening for weekends of geopolitical role-playing. Much like the institution whose bureaucracy it aims to simulate, MUN appears at worst harmless. “Our goal is about how the world could be if everyone got along, had fun, and used their imagination,” a student can be heard saying from the dais of a Montessori MUN Conference, in a video posted on the conference’s homepage. Where’s the danger in teaching teenagers regard for multilateralism, peace, and humanitarianism, the stated values of the U.N. Charter? In addition to the worthy ideals MUN is intended to impart, advocates say, MUN informs students about the structure and functions of international organizations and helps them develop skills like debating, public speaking, and negotiation.
If MUN were actually a straightforward simulation of the world body—warts and all—there would be no reasonable objection to the program. Yet Model U.N.’s do-gooder ideology obscures the real U.N.’s institutional limitations. By 12th grade, students ought to be capable of grasping that, while the General Assembly looks like a legislature, only some of its members practice the rule of law, much less hold free elections. Like the U.N. itself, which preaches democracy and self-determination while giving free rein to regimes that respect neither, MUN never asks its participants to wrestle with the contradiction that is a world body devoted to law, peace, and international comity made up of members representing the full spectrum from democracy to tyranny, only some of which actually feel bound by treaties they sign.
An accurate portrayal of the U.N. would demonstrate to young adults that, despite the occasionally valuable humanitarian work carried out by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and a handful of other specialized bodies, the organization has a history of massive corruption, bureaucratic incompetence, and highfalutin gasbaggery. An accurate portrayal would not conceal the U.N.’s spectacular failures. Rather, it would teach students that it was former secretary general Kofi Annan who, as director of U.N. Peacekeeping, reportedly advised against the use of force to prevent the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It would inform students about the graft surrounding the oil-for-food program in Iraq; the theft of half a million dollars by a U.N. official, who used the proceeds to buy (among other things) first-class plane tickets to Las Vegas; and the sexual abuse of children entrusted to the care of U.N. peacekeepers on several continents. The simulated Human Rights Council—whose real-life members include the likes of Pakistan and Venezuela—would be exposed for the Orwellian joke that it is. An accurate Model U.N., in other words, would display the more numerous failures in addition to the meager successes.
Far from instilling an accurate understanding of the world body as it is, however, Model United Nations elevates the global debating club to a religion. It indoctrinates impressionable teenagers in the alleged merits of world government. It stigmatizes arguments in defense of America’s freedom of action. (“No one cared about sovereignty,” a high school friend recalls from his MUN experiences. “No one could spell sovereignty.”) And for six decades, it has induced generations of Americans to view the United Nations as more than just a forum for discussion—as an unmitigated good.
A delegate’s first step in preparing for any MUN conference is to draft his country’s position paper. Every participating high school is assigned at least one country to represent, in a process generating furious competition. Typically, big, well-established schools receive the countries they request, invariably major powers, starting with the United States, Russia, and China, while newcomers and lesser schools get Slovenia and Gabon. After the countries have been doled out, students are placed on committees, ranging from the Security Council (most desirable, as the only U.N. body with any power) to the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee, always an unwieldy monster as it boasts the most members and the most banal subjects (“Recognizing the Humanitarian Need for Clean Water,” “Social and Cultural Rights of Refugees and Displaced People,” and so on). The position paper is meant to state briefly the country’s stand on issues before the committee. Once the conference convenes, delegates cooperate in small groups to draft mock resolutions to solve the problems of the world.
To discover how the jargon, triteness, and impracticality of U.N. hyperbole take hold of young minds, I had to look no further than my own high school position papers. “Throughout history, the African continent has had its share of violent conflict,” read one opening sentence. “Ukraine believes that biological and chemical weapons pose a serious threat to every man, woman, and child who lives on this earth,” I declared in another, before explaining that these weapons “are dangerous, with wide-reaching effects.” In a paper about the militarization of space, I suggested one way to stymie it would be to make countries pursuing space technology “promise to use it only for peaceful purposes.”
My position paper for the Disarmament and International Security Committee about the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention optimistically declared that “all nations which have already signed the treaty must reaffirm their allegiance to it. Without honesty, no worldwide resolution can be successful.” While I was adamant that nations violating the convention must face “consequences,” I did not specify any. Later in the paper about unconventional weapons, I recommended that the “international community,” that nonexistent entity about which high school students and world leaders alike rhapsodize, “provide humanitarian aid to countries which agree to dismantle their biological weapons arsenals. .  .  . Food and other living supplies would be given to states which cooperate with the United Nations, and perhaps moneys from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.” This has been tried, of course, with North Korea, and the dismal results are well known.
Indeed, evidence of the organization’s fecklessness is ever new—consider the violence in Syria two years into a civil war that has taken nearly 100,000 lives, despite daily cries for restraint by U.N. bodies and officials. Yet, year after year, students flock to MUN conferences; the growing global popularity of the program is in inverse relationship to the mounting evidence of U.N. impotence. “Cambodia encourages member states to pressure these uncooperative parties into signing treaties,” I wrote in an airy position paper for the Peacekeeping Committee. “How?” asked my long-suffering civics teacher in red pen. It was a good question—the kind of question that, if asked regularly of students, might turn MUN into a forum for useful learning. Most faculty advisers, however, having already embraced the U.N. gospel, steer clear of such awkward challenges to adolescent thinking.
According to the MUN mantra, no problem is beyond the world body’s reach. A 2009 Washington Post story about an elementary school MUN team quoted a 9-year-old who spoke about “the global effort of total elimination of racism and racial discrimination,” as if racism were something the U.N. had it in its power to eliminate—and as if racism weren’t the official policy of numerous member states. Yet the sentiment was not merely the naïve wish of a fourth grader. The U.N. actually has an entire bureaucracy devoted to the “Elimination of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance,” which has hosted two international conferences. The United States and its allies walked out of both in protest of the egregiously anti-Semitic nature of the proceedings. Reading my own MUN position papers of a decade ago, I see the starry-eyed musings of a teenage idealist. But I was only mimicking what I read in actual U.N. resolutions.
A decade has passed since I attended my last Model U.N. conference as a student participant. So to refresh my memory, I paid a visit to a recent Ivy League Model United Nations Conference—aka ILMUNC, one of the country’s premier MUN conferences, which I myself attended while in high school—organized by students at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia every year since 1984.
I arrived at the Sheraton Philadelphia City Center shortly before the opening ceremonies. As over 2,000 high school students (the boys in ill-fitting suits, the girls nearly all wearing pantyhose) swarmed about, I was reminded of the main motivation (aside from a precocious interest in world affairs) for most kids’ participation in Model U.N.: It’s a great way to spend a long weekend. Essentially a four-day slumber party with your friends in a major city hundreds of miles from home, MUN gives you a school-sponsored opportunity to crash at a swanky hotel, mingle with members of the opposite sex (ILMUNC even set up its own rose-gram system for amorous delegates), and eat out three times a day, all with minimal adult supervision. And don’t forget the Delegate Dance on Saturday night, a staple of every MUN conference. Even in their monkey business—passing silly notes to one another, slinking off at night to drink alcohol, and generally behaving as teenagers—the Model U.N.ers faithfully mimic the grown-up version. They unwittingly resemble the international diplomatic corps and high-priced hangers-on who descend upon Manhattan to carouse at overpriced restaurants, splurge on 5th Avenue, and neglect to pay parking tickets. Late in my weekend at ILMUNC, I encountered a bleary-eyed teacher who had sat awake in the hallway outside her students’ rooms until 2 a.m. “If they’re going to do anything bad, they’re going to have to leave their room to do it,” she muttered.
What could possibly possess the collegians running the conferences to undertake months of onerous preparation in order to spend a weekend overseeing a bunch of rowdy, overambitious, acne-afflicted high school students? Their motivation became clearer after I visited the conference “control room,” the nerve center of ILMUNC operations, where various under secretaries general and deputy secretaries general noshed on potato chips and Red Bull. “My last conference, I just BS’d it,” one Penn student confessed to a younger colleague. “NAIMUN sucks so badly,” said another, referring to the North American International Model United Nations, a rival intercollegiate conference hosted by Georgetown University undergraduates.
As I partook of the free food, Penn students buzzed in and out, communicating on Secret Service-style earpiece walkie-talkies. Over the course of the weekend, I would watch these collegiate Tracy Flicks officiously roam the hallways enforcing curfew. And in committee meetings, I would see them bang their gavels above the din as they doled out speaking slots. In the mold of the U.N. bureaucrats they’re impersonating, many of the college students who run MUN do it for the power trip. Of course, ego inflation and carnality are not mutually exclusive. The guidebook for the ILMUNC Secretariat lists reasons not to consume alcohol during the conference. Reason #9 is, “Because you don’t want to hook up with a [sic] high schoolers at the conference. Right? Right?” Reason #1 is a joke that, in my experience, is uttered in some form at every MUN conference: “Because any pickup line involving Djibouti is totally unacceptable, drunk or not.”
The opening ceremony about to begin, I ventured into the hotel’s massive main ballroom. The delegates and their faculty advisers were assembled in row after long row of chairs, the Secretariat, made up of Penn students, facing them from behind a long desk on the dais. The whole set-up had the feel of a Chinese Communist party congress. Flipping through the glossy delegate guide, featuring Philadelphia restaurants alongside the conference schedule, I came across a full-page advertisement for a “Model U.N. Summer Program” run by Julian Krinsky Camps & Programs, long a popular organizer of tennis and golf camps. Lately, Krinsky has started running “leadership” programs (“great for building your résumé”) for upper-middle-class high school students frantic about getting into the college of their choice. For the most go-getting, Model U.N. is an excellent résumé builder, demonstrating interest in world affairs and extracurricular achievement, not to mention the opportunity to win awards, in the form of honorary gavels dispensed by committee chairmen at the end of the conference.
Another person hoping to profit off these ambitions is Ryan Villanueva, a recent Yale graduate who left his lucrative job with Goldman Sachs in 2010 to start “Best Delegate,” described on its website as “an education company that helps students and teachers worldwide succeed at Model United Nations and beyond.” Best Delegate runs seminars, summer camps, and other “institutional services” for high schools hoping to win more prizes on the Model U.N. circuit. To help schools and students achieve this, Best Delegate offers private Model U.N. classes for groups or individuals, on everything from the rules of procedure to “How to Win Awards.” And if the tuition is prohibitive, the book How to Win Awards in Model United Nations can be purchased for just $19.99.
The sort of student whose parents will pay money to increase his chances of winning an award in Model U.N. doesn’t just spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for each conference; he obsesses. In my day, one high school notorious for its cutthroat MUN team would provide each of its delegates a binder featuring the name and official seal of his country. And there were always a few delegates fitted out with formal stationery, entire pads headed “A Message from the Permanent Representative of St. Kitts and Nevis to the United Nations” (below which would inevitably be written, in chicken scratch handwriting, some insight such as “Pakistan is being such a douchebag”). Especially patriotic delegates sported flag pins.
Shortly after gaveling the opening ceremony to order, a member of the Secretariat reminded the delegates that they were to be dressed in “Western business attire” throughout the weekend. The decree was a rare departure from political correctness; such colonialist dress codes, after all, do not apply at the U.N. itself, where one expects to see Africans in dashikis and Iranian delegates sans ties. Delivering the keynote address was Peter Yeo, a vice president of the United Nations Foundation, a nongovernmental organization founded with a grant from Ted Turner that advocates for greater American deference to the U.N. “For the next four days,” Yeo intoned, “you are real diplomats, dealing with real problems, coming up with real solutions.” The U.N., he said, is “promoting America’s national interest.” Lest there be any doubt about the political agenda he was trying to convey, Yeo boasted that, under the Clinton administration, in which he had served as a deputy assistant secretary of state, the United States paid its U.N. dues “in full and without conditions,” whereas by the end of the Bush administration, Washington was again in arrears. Fortunately, under President Obama, America has fully paid its debts, a statement that earned massive applause. At the end of his speech, Yeo received a standing ovation, and the secretary general presented him with an ILMUNC T-shirt.
The secretary general banged the gavel marking the official start to the conference. The students giddily dispersed throughout the Sheraton, where every conference room and banquet hall had been commandeered by a U.N. agency. I chose to attend the Disarmament and International Security Committee, or DISEC in MUN shorthand, the very first committee I ever served on as a freshman delegate to the Rutgers Model United Nations way back in 1998.
About 150 students filled the room. The first order of business was the roll call, a process briefly rescued from its tediousness when the delegate from Niger, a French exchange student, interjected a “point of order” to insist that the chair pronounce the name of the former French colony correctly (it’s Nee-jayr, not Nigh-jer). Following the roll, the delegates had to decide which of two topics the committee would discuss first, the illicit arms trade or nuclear-free zones. That these subjects were almost identical to the ones I debated 10 years ago—and a brief perusal of the ILMUNC delegate guide revealed the same about practically all the topics—is a small but telling indication of U.N. futility.
“Decorum!” the committee chair shouted over the chattering mass, banging her gavel on a conference table draped in pleated ballroom tablecloth. This is the favorite command of the MUN conference chairman and the word by which authority is exerted over the delegates. When the chair asked which countries would like to speak, nearly every hand shot up, each holding a placard bearing the name of a U.N. member state. The chair surveyed the floor and started reading off countries, while one of her vice chairmen frantically wrote them down on a dry erase board.
What followed was a series of 30-second speeches in which each delegate explained why one or the other of the topics was more pressing for the “international community” while also bearing some relation to his own country’s national interest. Determining the national interest of one’s country, however, was a highly subjective endeavor, reflecting the delegate’s personal preferences rather than any informed assessment of real-world policies, allegiances, and so on. After the delegate from Lebanon expressed support for discussing the illicit arms trade as opposed to nuclear-free zones, the representative from Finland rose to speak, and, pointing his finger at his Lebanese counterpart, declared, “How can a person in the Middle East even sleep at night knowing they may be the victim of a nuclear attack?”
Bored, I took the elevator to the top floor, where the conference was hosting a wine and cheese reception for faculty advisers. Many knew each other from the Model U.N. circuit, and the grizzled veterans traded war stories. A recent Brown University MUN, one teacher told me, had featured a Security Council simulation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “When Sunday came around, they had nuked each other,” he chuckled. A youngish math teacher at the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies admitted that some of his students joined the club to buff their “transcripts for college.” Others, however, “love the work. They want to make the world a better place. They actually have aspirations of being delegates to the U.N.” I asked him if he thought Model U.N. offered students a reasonable picture of international relations. He admitted that it’s “unrealistic that they pass all these resolutions,” and recalled an “inexperienced Italian delegate who didn’t realize she was part of NATO.” He also noticed that some delegates, “newbies” primarily, “don’t adhere” to their country’s stated policies. All in all, though, he thought MUN a positive endeavor. “It’s a learning experience.”
Other advisers were more skeptical. I met one, a recent Ivy League graduate teaching at a tony New England private school, for a drink at the Sheraton bar. “Most of the kids do it to get into college,” he explained, telling me that he had just come from a committee room where he’d watched one of his students doodling a cat. The previous year, his school had had the honor of representing Kazakhstan, and the students, predictably, “wanted to be Borat.” (Cultural stereotyping is a regular occurrence at Model U.N.; a high school friend interviewed for this piece recalled how, representing Greece before the International Atomic Energy Agency, he and his partner had donned hotel bed sheets as togas and produced a Top 10 list of Greek achievements that included “Chest hair is the best hair,” “Michael Dukakis,” and “Stamos!”) While my private school interlocutor conceded that the “conferences are like circuses,” he insisted there is an upside, which is that “the kids are learning about modern history.” Current events, maybe. But he conceded it lends itself to simplistic solutions. “I believe we solved malaria in four hours,” he said of a recent MUN experience. “We sent out nets and antibiotics.”
The next morning, I paid a visit to the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM), typically the largest at any Model U.N. By this time, the delegates were already writing resolutions. Competing groups draft formulaic documents offering solutions to the problems at hand and, through a process of diplomatic horse-trading and adolescent spitefulness, attempt to win the support of their fellow delegates. One high school friend recalled trying to form a “Bloc of the Attractive” to lure in wayward countries. “Sure, you could get resolutions drafted if you were smart and knew what you were talking about,” he wrote me. “Or you could get a couple of hot girls to help draw attention to your cause/resolution/alliance.” Whatever tactics they employ, delegates must follow official U.N. format and lingo. So, for instance, a group of nations “affirming”—or, better yet, “solemnly affirming”—the existence of water scarcity may be “fully alarmed” at the extent of the crisis and, “having examined” the issue, “deplore” its prevalence and “reaffirm” the committee’s commitment to preventing such shortages in the future.
Often, the coalitions formed in support of resolutions bear little resemblance to actual geopolitical alliances. At ILMUNC, for instance, the delegates to SOCHUM were dealing with the grammatically challenged problem of “Poverty Reduction in Women.” A motley crew including Italy, Kuwait, and Ethiopia put forth a resolution that encouraged “women to occupy positions of political power,” a nice sentiment. The resolution called for the creation of “U.N.-supported community all-in-one centers” (paid for by?) that would teach women “skills .  .  . not limited to embroidery, basket-weaving, carpet weaving, handicraft painting, processing raw materials into commercial goods.” These centers would also provide “sexual education” and “family planning.” Somehow, this resolution was sponsored by Sudan, Armenia, the Palestinian Authority, North Korea, and, what the hell, South Korea.
“People don’t act as their countries,” a sophomore from a New York-area high school representing China complained to me during a break in his committee, UNICEF. They were discussing the plight of child soldiers, he said, and all of the countries on the committee rose up to decry it, in spite of the fact that “in real life half of these countries use kids in war.” The willingness to ignore a nation’s actual record, of course, could be seen as a taste of reality, a dose of the disingenuousness of the U.N. enterprise itself. At the actual U.N, insincerity is king, and nations frequently denounce the very abuses they regularly perpetrate. Sitting in the back row of a small conference room hosting UNICEF, I listened as the delegate from the Russian Federation thundered on about how “the United States is one of two countries that have not signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child,” a pleasant-sounding document that must be pointless considering all of the authoritarian, child soldier-employing, basket-case regimes that have signed it. In a moment of perhaps unintended honesty, the delegate representing the United States channeled Obama administration thinking when he responded, “We are a very bureaucratic government and it’s taking a long time, but we do want to ratify it.”
Concerned that the high drama of global politics is not sufficient to capture the interest of high schoolers, some MUN clubs are resorting to a desperate tactic: using scenarios based not on world events but on pop culture entertainment. A recent article in the New York Times discussed the prevalence of “crisis committees,” fanciful simulations where students represent, say, gangsters in a Prohibition mafia war or characters from Harry Potter. While crisis or “historical” committees existed in my MUN salad days (I fondly recall representing the Soviet Union during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus), they usually dealt with actual events in which the U.N. played some role, not popular television series or films. The Times put a positive gloss on the phenomenon, attributing the shift in focus to the perception that “governments are no longer the only ones shaping the global order, while social-media tools provide individuals with wider platforms from which to mobilize.” Another possibility is that a growing historical amnesia and mosquito-like attention spans are at fault.
Even in my day, the seeming intractability of the world’s problems was no obstacle to their resolution at Model U.N. Rather than expose students to the rude fact that some challenges are, at best, slowly ameliorated, MUN has always encouraged fantasy remedies. I recall a delegate to UNICEF stating that “local celebrities,” and “not just Brad Pitt and Angelina” (the latter of whom is an official U.N. goodwill ambassador), should hold seminars in villages teaching the rural poor about water purification. Another delegate, asked how some vast new program should be funded, replied that “in undeveloped countries where money is extremely scarce, morality is enough to provide incentives.”
Another tried and true solution for any Model U.N. delegate is simply to call for the establishment of a new agency, committee, or working group to “address” a problem. A resolution I picked up from the Commission on Sustainable Development, for instance, opened with the nonsensical clause “Aware that the parameter of human activity is nature’s capacity,” before calling for the establishment of a “panel of experts” to “mediate between conflicting countries and regions as they assess, adjust, and improve their water practices.” And if all else fails, a delegate can always insert the word “microfinance” into a position paper, speech, or resolution. This system of small-scale, low-interest loans pioneered in Bangladesh in the 1980s is the sacrosanct panacea of Model U.N.ers worldwide, regardless of its suitability. Want to forge ethnic harmony in the Balkans? Microfinance! End the dispute over the Falkland Islands? Microfinance! Finally achieve that two-state solution? Microfinance!
As easy as it is to mock the students’ silly solutions, it would be wrong to blame them. I did occasionally hear well-reasoned arguments; for instance, the delegate from Bulgaria professed skepticism of his colleagues’ attempt to curb the illicit small-arms trade by registering every gun produced on earth: “This is the illicit arms trade,” he pointed out. “There’s a reason it’s illicit.” Yet most of what I heard at ILMUNC and throughout my own years of Model U.N. was meaningless, hopelessly earnest, and comically overwrought verbiage. What the students can’t be blamed for is that their teachers tolerate this—and that those traits reflect the U.N. itself.
“The Model U.N. phenomenon has really clouded the minds of two or more generations of young people,” Charles Hill tells me. “It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.” A former executive aide to secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, Hill held senior diplomatic postings in Israel and Taiwan during a long career in the Foreign Service. He’s also intimately familiar with the inner workings of the U.N., having served as a special adviser to former secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. In retirement, Hill settled down at Yale University, where he serves as a diplomat-in-residence (and I was his student).
What harm does MUN do students? “It creates in their minds the idea that international affairs are easy,” Hill says. “We solved the Arab-Israeli conflict last Saturday afternoon, and why can’t other people do it? It must be because they’re stupid or nefarious or in the pockets of some faction or lobbyists.” Model U.N., Hill says, “has given young people in America a completely distorted idea of what the United Nations is.”
To illustrate, he cites a Yale senior who once visited him during office hours. This individual, who Hill stresses is “very knowledgeable and mature” and has “high prospects for a terrific job in the U.S. government,” started to talk about “the U.N. sending troops somewhere.” The only problem, Hill explained, is that the U.N. cannot “send” troops anywhere. “This guy had done Model U.N. since sophomore year in high school and was simply conditioned to think of something that looks like near-world governance.” He had been persuaded of the supposedly all-encompassing, mollifying powers of the U.N., and was thus “misled,” Hill says. “It took 20 minutes to go through how the Security Council actually works, with Chapter 7” of the U.N. Charter, the article allowing the council to authorize a member state to take military action, a far cry from the U.N. deploying its own (nonexistent) army. Hill tells me that he frequently has such encounters with MUN veterans. “They look at me stunned.”
Despite its fairy-tale depiction of foreign relations, encouragement of mediocre thinking, and indoctrination of students in the gospel of world government, Model U.N. continues to grow apace, with new clubs sprouting up across the country and around the world. Greater than a mere extracurricular activity, it is a reflection of our post-national, consensus-obsessed, and credential-crazed culture. The problem with Model U.N. is not that it teaches kids about international cooperation, but that it misleads them about how the world actually works. Some students who participate in MUN grow up to see beyond its inanities and clichés, nonetheless valuing the public speaking and debating skills it helped them acquire. For me, MUN was an excellent channel for an early interest in international affairs and a nerdy habit of reading the Economist.
Yet as I entered college and began to see international relations in a more sophisticated light, I also recognized the false pieties of the U.N. Unfortunately, many of the students who participate in MUN become zealously committed to the United Nations, forever viewing it as the arbiter of international politics, and one whose pronouncements have greater legitimacy than the prerogatives of democratic governments. Model U.N. offers more than esoteric debates and weekend fun. It propounds a jejune and deceptively comforting worldview—instead of doing the serious work of education, which is readying the young to put away childish things.