Clear some space in the trophy case

Presidential hopeful Biden has announced that upon inauguration he will restore America's place at the table of the Paris Climate Treaty and rejoin the World Health Organization (and perhaps other pieces of the United Nations bureaucracy). The Left rejoices, and it's possible that the Swedish Academy has called in their engraver for another peace prize commission.

This is why I flinched hard before dropping my ballot into the dropbox with the circle for Biden/Harris filled in. Even allowing that much of the substance of these premature policy pronouncements might be sound, the process is flawed. These organizations have gone out of their way to disadvantage the United States and support our economic competitors and political opponents.

In the Paris Climate Treaty case, we had accepted pressure to pledge billions of dollars to the Green Climate Fund to help developing competitors implement climate standards that would be less burdensome than those imposed on our enterprises. I'd rather direct the billions to American workers and enterprises than to an organization that has been alleged to have insufficient operational transparency and financial accountability.

WHO and the rest of the UN apparatus would make part of a good leftish case for not having representation by state as is the case in the US Senate. The principle of one nation, one vote is a huge problem in the offended-by-America world of the UN bureaucracy. And there is no House of Representatives allocated by population or, better yet, contribution. All that aside, Red China stole our lunch in the political system that actually exists and cashed in a few of our sandwiches to hobble WHO when the world needed to be responding to an outbreak of a new, flu-like virus in Wuhan.

Simply asking nicely to be let back into these clubs with our hat in our hands and their hands in our pockets looks like diplomatic malpractice to me. Don't declare now that you'll rejoin because whole hat-to-hands-to-pockets scenario will definitely play out. Negotiate some conditions that recognize the outsized financial, scientific, and technical contributions that will have to come from the United States to address climate policy (broadly construed to include the economic impacts) and international public health.