NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {A} s President Biden visited New York last month to attend the United Nations General Assembly, the U.N. system proved itself as broken as ever — continuing to bite the U.S. taxpayer hand that feeds this giant bureaucracy and proving once again that engagement for engagement’s sake is not a viable strategy for U.N. reform.

Two days before President Biden delivered his remarks to the U.N. General Assembly, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee met in Riyadh, adding a Bronze Age settlement located outside the ancient city of Jericho to its list of World Heritage Sites. The listing’s summary claims the ruins “provide unquestionable testaments of . . . one of the most important Canaanite city-states in Palestine” and UNESCO classifies the site as being located in the “State of Palestine.” Words like “Israel,” “Joshua,” and “Jewish” do not appear in the documents accompanying the new World Heritage Site. UNESCO’s action is deliberately calculated to chip away at the Jewish connection to the Holy Land. Indeed, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas exposed the ploy when he praised UNESCO’s decision to recognize Palestinians living in Jericho for “1000s of years.”

This isn’t the first time UNESCO has tried to erase Jewish history — but it’s the first time since President Biden decided that the U.S. would rejoin the agency, promising that an American presence would help reform it. In 2016, UNESCO adopted an antisemitic resolution denying the Jewish people’s historic ties to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount — the holiest site for Jews. In 2017, UNESCO declared the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron — where all matriarchs and patriarchs of the Jewish people are believed buried — to be an endangered Palestinian site. The Trump administration withdrew U.S. participation in UNESCO the following year.

Rather than insist that UNESCO repeal that resolution and acknowledge Jewish historical ties throughout the Land of Israel before the U.S. would reenter, the Biden administration lobbied Congress for a change in law allowing a resumption of U.S. funding despite UNESCO’s recognition of Palestinian statehood in the absence of peace with Israel. The U.S. rejoined and began paying down more than $600 million in arrears in July, only to be sucker-punched with another antisemitic act as the president arrived in New York last week.

For more than two years now, the U.N. has repaid the Biden administration’s conciliatory gestures with broken promises. The administration rejoined the U.N. Human Rights Council claiming that U.S. participation in a kangaroo court of human-rights abusers would eliminate anti-Israel bias and advance American interests. Nearly two years into America’s term on the council, an antisemitic commission of inquiry seeking to delegitimize Israel’s existence continues — with Washington never introducing a resolution to end its mandate. Renewed U.S. aid to the World Health Organization and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency has delivered negative return on investment — with UNRWA refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon becoming hubs of terror activity while the WHO boasts North Korea as its newest executive-board member.

The administration had demanded the legal ability to rejoin UNESCO, claiming it necessary to counter China within the U.N. system. But at the recent World Heritage Committee meeting in Riyadh, Beijing’s own agenda of historic revisionism pressed on, with UNESCO adding tea forests in southwest China as a World Heritage Site.

The Biden administration’s track record of countering China at the U.N. is abysmal. Earlier this year, the State Department failed to field any candidate to run against the Chinese head of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization — giving Beijing a major victory in its quest to solve one of its greatest strategic vulnerabilities: food insecurity. The administration didn’t even try to challenge the WHO’s Beijing-influenced director general despite China’s continued cover-up of Covid-19’s origins. A U.S. attempt to hold China accountable inside the Human Rights Council for its genocide in Xinjiang failed. And China still works with Russia to stymie Washington in the Security Council. The goal of countering China within the U.N. system is noble. Believing that it can be achieved by abandoning U.S. leverage is woefully misguided.

Countering China, however, is not the real reason the U.S. has rejoined a U.N. organization that continues to spew antisemitism. The real reason is the Biden administration’s unshakable ideological belief in the utility of U.N. engagement for engagement’s sake — the notion that swimming against anti-American currents in a sea of dictators will produce positive results for U.S. national security. The overwhelming evidence suggests the opposite is true. By unilaterally giving up the leverage that would be needed to achieve reforms, American diplomats are essentially swimming without a life preserver, overtaken by the authoritarian currents, and leaving American interests at the bottom of the sea. It’s up to Congress to rescue those interests by reverting U.S. law to prohibit funding for UNESCO — and withholding U.S. assistance to all U.N. bodies that subvert our national security.

Richard Goldberg is a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Enia Krivine is the senior director of FDD’s Israel Program and National Security Network.