Eighty years ago this week, following the most devastating war in human history, the United Nations General Assembly convened for the first time. Delegates from 51 nations gathered in the hope that amid the wreckage of World War II they might find a way, in the words of the new UN Charter, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.”

The anniversary coincides with fresh controversy over America’s relationship with the UN. In an executive order last week, President Trump directed the United States to withdraw from dozens of international organizations and bodies, more than 30 of them associated with the UN. The move reignited the familiar — and very old — argument over whether Washington should lean in to international institutions or steer clear of them.

Bills proposing a wholesale US withdrawal from the United Nations have repeatedly been introduced in Congress. In 2023, for example, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposed a bill severing all ties with the UN and revoking the agreement that established its headquarters in New York. There is a better approach: The United States should continue engaging at the UN but stop voting in the General Assembly.

The fundamental problem with the world body is structural. It is an organization of governments, not of nations, still less of free peoples. Within the General Assembly, all states have an equal vote and no distinction is made between the most brutal tyranny and the most liberal democracy.

Under such an arrangement, the UN Charter’s noble aspirations were never going to be fulfilled. In the General Assembly, right and wrong are determined by roll call. The votes of repressive dictatorships like North Korea and Afghanistan count exactly as much as those of free societies like Japan and the Czech Republic, and tyrannies have always constituted a significant bloc of the UN’s membership.

None of this would matter much if General Assembly resolutions were treated for what they are: expressions of opinion with no legal force. But the act of voting itself confers a seriousness the institution does not deserve. Each roll call reinforces the pretense that moral authority emerges from a numerical majority of governments, regardless of their character. By participating in that ritual, the United States helps sustain a fiction it knows to be false.

There is a more honest course. Were it my call, the US ambassador to the United Nations would make a point of never casting a vote in the General Assembly.

The suggestion isn’t original. It was proposed in the 1960s by the political theorist James Burnham, and echoed by William F. Buckley Jr. in “United Nations Journal,” a book he wrote in 1974 after serving as a member of the US delegation to the UN. Today, when the General Assembly is filled with authoritarian regimes hostile to democratic liberties, there is less reason than ever to participate in the moral wasteland of the UN plenary as if majority support conferred truth or legitimacy.

Abstention need not mean disengagement. American diplomats would continue to speak, argue, and defend US interests and principles. Nor would it diminish the importance of other UN bodies where decisions may carry legal force — notably the Security Council, where resolutions matter and the United States has veto power.

What a standing policy of abstention would do is strip away the General Assembly’s phony moral gravitas. It would signal that while the United States remains willing to make its case before the world, it refuses to ratify outcomes that reduce questions of liberty, justice, and sovereignty to a show of hands. That posture is neither isolationist nor hostile. It is simply realistic.

A permanent policy of abstention would carry other, quieter advantages. It would deprive the General Assembly of one of its most familiar rituals: staging votes designed less to settle questions than to berate the United States and condemn America’s friends. When everyone knows in advance that the US ambassador will not participate in the tally, the incentive to choreograph such exercises diminishes.

This isn’t a proposal rooted in knee-jerk hostility to international cooperation or the United Nations. The United States would continue to speak out and to make the case for freedom and human rights. But it would no longer solemnize outcomes that are foreordained.

The delegates who gathered 80 years ago doubtless hoped to build something better than what emerged. That hope need not be abandoned, but neither should it be indulged with false ceremony. American abstention from General Assembly votes would be an act of clarity, not contempt — a recognition that moral authority cannot be manufactured by roll call and that the United States serves its principles best by refusing to pretend otherwise.