150 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: January 1983 Hardcover ISBN: 0-8447-1361-9

As the author--President Reagan's appointee as United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations--observes in the preface to this collection of speeches, "Fewer than half were presented in the United Nations itself, but the focus of others was largely determined by the problems before that body, and also by my efforts to understand how the Unitd Nations works, what shapes its agenda and outcomes, and why the United States was (and is) so lacking in influence in that global arena."

Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick brings to the contents of this volume not only her twenty-four months' experience at the UN but also, and more important, an incredibly active and productive lifetime of study and teaching, research, political analysis, and political activism. Her several careers--scholar, teacher, writer, lecturer, participant in the American political process, and not least, wife, mother, family member--converge here in an astonishing range of interests and depth of insight. 

The diversity of subjects addressed in these speech/essays is indeed great: she describes, assesses, and articulates the foundations of what she terms "the Reagan phenomenon" (as it relates to the liberal tradition, to Western values, to America's goals, and to U.S. foreign policy in particular); she reveals her passionate concern for human rights, and evaluates their present status in El Salvador, in Nicaragua, in Afghanistan; she analyzes this nation's role in the United Nations, and the UN's own growing schizophrenia as the agent of conflict resolution or (all too often) conflict exacerbation; she devotes extensive and penetrating attention to Israel as "scapegoat" at the UN, to the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, to the problems of southern Africa in the search for Namibian independence, and to the Central American cockpit of conflict, social evolution, and Soviet-sponsored subversion. She combines to an extraordinary degree the roles of observer and participant, commentator, and activist.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at AEI.