What to Do About the U.N.. Claudia Rosett

has long been a no-go zone. It’s been 34 years since the Cold War diplomatic fracas of the Reagan era in which Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s deputy, Charles Lichenstein, dared to tell U.N. members that if they did not like the way America was treating them, they and the U.N. were welcome to leave; not only that but “the members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations will be down at the dockside, waving you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset.”

      Today, in the wood-paneled realms of America’s foreign-policy shamans, the 72-year-old U.N. ranks as a totem of international order, a permanent fixture, and – among select inner circles both within and surrounding the U.N. – a font of jobs, consulting contracts, influential connections, and per diems. Any attempt to suggest the U.N. might be past its shelf date invites being elbowed off the stage. The usual argument is that the U.N. may be imperfect, but it’s all we’ve got.

       America has been the mainstay of a U.N. at which venally corrupt and morally malign behavior is a chronic near-certainty.

      The imperfections are by now so acute that the retort ought to be, If the U.N. is all we’ve got, it’s time we came up with something else.

      Long gone is the heady post–Cold War glow of the early 1990s, and gone with it should be any illusions that the U.N. is the vehicle to carry a post-Soviet brotherhood of man into a new golden age. That notion was eclipsed in short order by the genocidal slaughters of the mid-1990s, while U.N. peacekeepers looked on, in Rwanda and at Srebrenica. Any lingering faith in the U.N. as a guardian of world integrity should have been smothered by the global cloud of graft that mushroomed out of the U.N.’s 1996–2003 Oil-for-Food relief program for Saddam Hussein’s U.N.-sanctioned Iraq.