The Council on Foreign Relations has just issued a report advocating that Washington get out ahead of the demands for adding more permanent seats to the UN Security Council by advocating an enlargement plan of its own. The Alice-in-Wonderland quality of this document is revealed in the second paragraph, which asserts that “Few subjects arouse as much passion as altering the size of the UNSC.” Right, except maybe curling, philately, and whether I should wear black socks or navy today.

Like the figures in Plato’s parable of the cave, the authors of the CFR report seem to have read the UN Charter but never observed the UN in action — or followed any other real world events of the past 65 years. The report warns that without enlargement, the Security Council will become “increasingly ineffective in addressing today’s security challenges,” which is like saying that without a paint job, Grant’s Tomb will become increasingly immobile.

In design, the UN, spearheaded by the Security Council, was to serve as the bulwark of world peace. Each nation was supposed to designate elements of its armed forces to stand at the disposal of the Security Council with which it might quash any breaches of the peace. Immediately after the UN’s founding, negotiations commenced about how the Military Staff Committee (MSC) envisioned in the Charter, and the forces it was to command, would be organized. The US representative to these talks, General Matthew Ridgeway, eventually reported to his boss, General George Marshall: “The MSC has dogged along like a hound on a dusty country lane. You are sure by watching him that he has some purpose and distinction, though neither are apparent. He attracts little attention and the dust he raises quickly disappears.” Within two years these desultory negotiations were abandoned, and the entire theoretical edifice of the UN’s peace-maintenance function was stillborn.

This, however, will apparently come as news to the CFR authors, who maintain that the Security Council “is indispensable to the pursuit of U.S. national security and the maintenance of world order.” The reality, of course, is almost exactly the opposite. Insofar as world order has been maintained these last 65 years, it has been almost entirely the doing of the United States, with contributions from NATO and other alliances. The UN has been an obstacle more often than a help, as in Bosnia in the 1990s. As for the UN’s contributions to US national security, this is rather like the Mad Hatter’s offering Alice another cup of tea. The pressure to work through the UN has complicated the tasks of national security more than it has facilitated them. For example, our ever-cautious European allies have been reluctant to impose sanctions on Iran without the cover of a Security Council resolution, so as a result the sanctions have been weak as water.

The report acknowledges that the Security Council’s strongest actions, “those imposing sanctions and other punitive measures,” are often flouted. But these, it argues, “are cases less of weak implementation than of political defiance.” Follow that? The council’s measures are perfectly adequate; the problem is that the targets ignore them. “Are their heads off?” shouted the Queen. “Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!” the soldiers shouted in reply. But all the while the condemned gardeners hid in the flower pot where Alice had concealed them.

Having painted the rose of the Security Council such a beautiful shade of red, it’s a wonder the authors would risk changing the numbers, where the Mock Turtle’s four “branches of arithmetic — ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision” — are often evident. But the report predicts that states added as permanent members will thereby acquire “a stake in the current order.” This will serve the purpose of “‘socializing’ today’s regional leaders into ‘responsible’ global actors.” Perhaps they will become as responsible and socialized as Moscow and Beijing, which already hold permanent seats. For that matter, these selfsame “regional leaders” already sit as members of other august UN bodies, such as the Human Rights Council, where they routinely act to absolve Sudan of all guilt in Darfur and to excuse the likes of Syria, China, Zimbabwe, and Saudi Arabia from least hint of reproach over their human rights records, meanwhile treating Israel according to the Queen’s dictum: “sentence first — verdict afterward.”

If the CFR were to crawl back out of the rabbit hole, the picture it would see would be this. The UN has failed utterly to fulfill the important role envisioned for it. The Security Council, with five veto-wielding members, has contributed mightily to this paralysis. Adding more vetoes would only worsen this condition. In practice, the benign exercise of American power has kept the peace, in so far as it has been kept, since 1945. To dilute America’s power further, by making it one among eight or ten rather than one among five, would weaken world peace, not strengthen it.

A far better reform would be to abolish the Security Council and along with it the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, and all the other voting bodies of the UN. Some critics complain that the UN is a “talk shop.” But that is exactly what it should be. It is useful for the states of the world all to talk to each other. But when they pass resolutions and “laws,” when they play at being a world government, as if at croquet with flamingos as mallets, they do more harm than good, impeding America and the voluntary coalitions of states that do the heavy lifting of maintaining a modicum of “world order.”

The UN should abandon that pretense and devote itself to what it does best — blather. And as for modernizing, why not turn the whole organization into a website? Each member state could have its own blog. The effusions of the likes Castro and Qaddafy might make Lewis Carroll seem pale in imagination and humor.