Claudia Rosett, Fellow of the Hudson Institute, formerly writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal
Since its creation in 1945 with a charter mission to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” the UN has expanded its activities to seventeen agencies, fourteen funds, forty thousand people, and over $40 billion in revenue.
We’ve not had a global conflagration since the UN’s founding, and many of its personnel are doing good things for needy people often in remote and dangerous places.
However, the UN has numerous critics who cite issues including ineffectual peacekeeping efforts, slow progress on climate change, and widespread fraud, waste, and abuse. Reform efforts through the years have had little impact. Several observers argue that the very structure of the UN, including Russia’s and China’s security council vetoes, guarantees ineffectiveness.
Our January speaker, Claudia Rosett, is well positioned to comment on the UN’s dysfunction, the potential to reduce it and the options for the US if it persists. She is an award-winning journalist, widely credited with groundbreaking reporting on corruption at the United Nations. Her investigation of the UN’s Oil for Food program earned the Eric Breindel Award, and the Mightier Pen Award. In 2020, she published a book, “What To Do About the UN,” arguing its very structure made significant reform impossible.
From 1984-2002 Ms. Rosett was a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, with posts including member of the editorial board in New York, bureau chief in Moscow, and editorial-page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. Since then, she has contributed to numerous outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, City Journal, New York Sun, and Dallas Morning News. She is a contributor to a book on “Defending Against Biothreats,” published in 2020.
Ms. Rosett is an adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute and also a foreign policy fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum.
Ms. Rosett has appeared before six U.S. congressional committees to testify on topics such as U.N. corruption and reform, and the Iran-North Korea strategic alliance. For her reporting from China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, she was awarded an Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence. In 1994, writing for The Wall Street Journal, she broke the story of North Korean labor camps in the Russian Far East, reporting from the camps.
Ms. Rosett holds a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. in English from Columbia University, and an M.B.A. with a specialization in finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.