Leadership Quote by Sam Farr

There’s a sly bit of legislative jujitsu in Sam Farr’s line: it turns a lumbering, often-mocked institution into a practical inevitability. “If the U.N. didn’t exist” invites the listener to indulge the familiar critique - bureaucracy, gridlock, toothlessness - then flips it with “we’d be inventing it right now,” a phrase that sounds less like idealism than like a procurement order. The rhetoric is deliberately contemporary: “right now” drags lofty postwar architecture into an era of pandemics, cyberattacks, mass migration, and climate shocks, problems that don’t respect borders and don’t wait for perfect consensus.

Farr, a politician, isn’t writing a love letter to multilateralism; he’s arguing against the easy, domestic applause line of withdrawal. The subtext is defensive and anticipatory: yes, the U.N. is flawed, but the alternative isn’t some clean return to sovereignty. It’s improvising ad hoc coalitions, duplicating humanitarian pipelines, and reinventing dispute-resolution mechanisms under worse conditions, with less legitimacy. The quote reframes the U.N. not as a moral project but as infrastructure - like sewage systems or air traffic control: unpopular until you lose it.

Context matters because the U.N. tends to become a punching bag whenever international cooperation feels slow or humiliating. Farr’s move is to make the critics own the replacement plan. If you don’t like this version, fine - but you’re still going to need a version.