Politics & Power Quote by Cliff Stearns

The number-drop is the point: 22 percent, 27 percent. Stearns isn’t offering a civics lesson about multilateralism; he’s staging a leverage argument in the clean language of accounting. By framing the United States as “the biggest donor,” he converts a messy geopolitical relationship into a simple power dynamic: pay the bill, call the shots. It’s a patriotic appeal that sidesteps ideology and goes straight to a taxpayer’s reflexive question: if we’re funding this much, why don’t we get more in return?

The phrasing also quietly narrows what the UN is. Not a forum for diplomacy or a mechanism for burden-sharing, but an “operating budget” and a “peacekeeping budget,” like a government agency with line items that can be audited, trimmed, or threatened. That bureaucratic diction is doing political work: it primes listeners to see the UN less as a collective project and more as a cost center ripe for oversight and conditionality.

Context matters because these figures typically surface when Congress debates UN dues, arrears, or reforms. Citing the U.S. share can signal frustration at perceived inefficiency, anti-American voting blocs, or missions viewed as misaligned with U.S. interests. The subtext: we’re being taken advantage of. The strategic intent: justify demands for reform, funding caps, or a tougher negotiating stance by making the UN’s legitimacy feel contingent on American subsidy rather than mutual consent.