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I'm not seeing a failure mode for Mamdani voters here. As far as they are concerned their moral principles are the reason the UN exists in the first place. If the UN is not serving those principles then what's the point of venerating it? Create a migrant hotel for Palestinians out of the headquarters instead. Host an annual anti-zionism conference. Do something that lines up with the morals of the demos.
To steelman the lefty base, Israel has been waging its ethnocentric terror campaign against the Palestinians for decades. The time to invoke the sanctity of our international institutions passed us by a long time ago. The moment Israel stopped pulling their punches after Oct.7 and the UN did nothing, any surface argument for maintaining the pretense that these institutions matter went out the window.
The UN is not and can not serve as the world police enforcing what the US wants and thinks is moral on everyone else, because a UN that does it is a UN no more. The only reason it can exist is precisely because it doesn't get involved if any of the major players in the world don't want it to. If it ever did, those major players leave and it becomes yet another generic partnership between allies, which we have plenty of and keep creating more, rather than an international conference between opposing nations which we have a scant few.
The UN's best point is not in forcing our own desires onto Russia or China or India or whatever else, but coordinating with them to achieve the few goals that all of us can agree on regardless of our difference in values.
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Wouldn’t the same logic apply to North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and many more members of the UN? If the UN’s purpose is to “do something” when states violate moral principles, then there won’t be many member states left.
If we care about doling out equal punishment to all at the same time based on nothing but moral intuition then the same logic applies. Doubly so if we pretend we are not human beings with agency and capacity for strategy and understanding of context but instead mindless automatons that have to follow every possible strand of 'logic' to its conclusion or our heads blow up. But that's obviously not the case so no.
The current issue being focused on is Israel. The current strategy is aimed at disrupting and ultimately stopping the regime. If the power of anyone relevant can be leveraged to that end in any relevant way then that should obviously be done so long as it's beneficial to the cause. To that extent everything that's going on with this political theater is 'logical'. Mamdani has to demonstrate ill intent towards zionists at the behest of his electorate. And if you asked the NYC electorate if risking the sanctity of the UN was worth disrupting the Israeli government that is terrorizing Palestinians then the answer would be yes.
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The UN rather uniquely tried to do something about North Korea, but this was the one time in the cold war that the communists forgot to veto action and it was not a mistake they repeated.
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