John Bolton shared with a John Locke Foundation audience last night his concerns about Iran, North Korea, and the United Nations.

Among the key themes was the need for fundamental reform of U.N. operations. Bolton says his work as U.S. ambassador convinced him marginal efforts to reform the U.N. organization were doomed to failure.

But Bolton still advocates one type of reform:

Our experience has been that the agencies that are voluntarily funded are generally the most efficient and most effective of the U.N. programs, and if you think about that for a minute, it’s not hard to understand why. If an agency doesn’t know where its money is going to come from, then it has to perform in order to get countries to make an appropriate level of voluntary contributions. If it thinks it’s going to get 22 percent of its budget from Uncle Sam — no matter what it does — it creates an entitlement mentality, just as welfare does.

So I think the only step that remains that can help reform the U.N. system … is to eliminate the entitlement mentality of the U.N. and substitute (for) the system of assessed contributions … a system of voluntary contributions, meaning that the effectiveness of the U.N. would have to be demonstrated to us before we contributed our money.

I’m now down to one reform for the U.N. There’s one reform we should push, and if we can’t get it, then we csn consider the consequences — one reform that we need, and that’s to shift to voluntary contributions. If we could get that, a lot of these other things would fall into place.