“After sixty years, the United Nations, as we know it, is a failure. It stands as a monument to naive American idealism,” writes AEI’s Joshua Muravchik in his new book The Future of the United Nations: Understanding the Past to Chart a Way Forward (AEI Press, 2005). He offers a blunt assessment of the critical ways in which the world body has fallen short of its founding ideals and recommends comprehensive reform to make the United Nations more effective.

Muravchik concentrates largely on the UN’s role in world events of the last several decades. After the Cold War ended--without much help from the UN, in Muravchik’s view--George H. W. Bush declared that the organization had been given “a new lease on life” by demonstrating that it could provide the diplomatic framework for repelling Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. President Clinton came into office extolling the UN’s ability to handle international conflicts, but problematic missions in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda eroded such optimism.
 
The main purpose of the UN is to preserve international peace and security, yet Muravchik notes that the Security Council has voted to authorize “the use of force in response to a cross-border breach of the peace” only twice in its entire history--for Korea in 1950 and Kuwait in 1990. He blames the UN arms embargo that was enforced against all parties involved in the Yugoslavian conflict of 1991 for exacerbating the bloodshed, and he recounts how UN peacekeepers committed to defend Muslims fleeing “ethnic cleansing” were forbidden to use force unless fired upon, rather than in defense of the citizens they had been deployed to protect. Likewise, the international community failed to act in any meaningful way to stop the genocide of Hutus by Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was established to prevent nuclear proliferation, but its work has often proved no more effective than the efforts of UN peacekeepers. For example, Iraq signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 1968, yet the IAEA admitted that Saddam had come within twelve to eighteen months of acquiring the fissure material needed to produce a nuclear weapon before the Gulf War in 1991. Muravchik asks: “Is the IAEA a real barrier against the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the world’s most irresponsible regimes, or is it merely a kind of Maginot line that generates a false sense of security?”

The author describes the UN’s bureaucracy as “notorious for lethargy and featherbedding.” UN peacekeepers and aid workers have been accused of sexual misconduct on missions in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and an investigation is underway into irregularities on UN war crimes tribunals in Rwanda. The ongoing oil-for-food scandal concerning Iraq dwarfs these investigations, and Muravchik writes that we already know of “some twenty-one billion dollars in kickbacks [being] skimmed from the UN-administered oil transactions, including funds that may have gone for weapons and terrorism, and to line the pockets of UN officials.”

To confront these failures, Muravchik advocates changing the Security Council decision-making structure so that no single nation other than the United States can veto Security Council resolutions--or even abolishing the council altogether. Muravchik also recommends transforming the General Assembly into a less formal center for multilateral diplomacy, allowing nations to band together on agreements without the “spurious solemnity of the General Assembly or the paralyzing requirement of Security Council consensus.” Within this framework, groups of states could issue joint declarations to agree to common courses of action that would no longer be subject to Security Council veto. Muravchik praises alliances such as NATO as far “more effective instruments of keeping the peace than international organizations.”