When President George W. Bush's administration said it would bypass a U.N. Security Council resolution guiding its actions in Iraq, many wondered what the decision would mean for the United Nations as an effective international diplomatic body. University experts' opinions differed, but most said the U.S. decision would not necessarily spell doom for the United Nations.
The United Nations has played a pivotal role in world politics since its inception in 1945, mediating international disputes in addition to working on economic development and human rights issues. Particularly since the early 1990s, with the Gulf War and the end of the polarized international atmosphere of the Cold War, the United Nations has been increasingly active.
"It's almost inconceivable to imagine a world without the United Nations," said Michael Byers, associate professor of law, adding that it is too soon to tell if the United Nations is in any real danger of becoming obsolete. "We don't know yet if the U.S. government is prepared to make the U.N. work," he said.
Byers noted that the United States has always recognized the long-term value of the United Nations, including over the past seven months, when Bush began talks of using force in Iraq.
"Months and months of serious effort have been put into getting the Security Council to
Robert Keohane, James B. Duke professor of political science, agreed that the future of the United Nations will depend upon U.S. willingness to "accept others as true participants, not just expecting people to sign checks and go along with everything we say." But he painted a somewhat grimmer picture of what recent administrative decisions will do to the organization.
"What we see is a wanton weakening of an institution that has been a linchpin of world order since 1990," Keohane said. "The U.N. won't disappear, but it could go back to a situation that looks like the Cold War, in which the United Nations was deadlocked on security issues but significant as a forum for negotiation and on a variety of social and economic issues."
Keohane explained that although the United States acted in Kosovo in 1999 without U.N. support, this action strengthened rather than weakened the organization because the Kosovo intervention was legitimate - 12 of the 15 members of the Security Council supported it, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization supported it unanimously.
By contrast, he said, the current military operations in Iraq weaken the United Nations because the United States has been unwilling to frame its resolution so as to secure the support of a majority of the Security Council.
Bruce Jentleson, director of the Sanford Institute of Public Policy, echoed Keohane's sentiments that the United States has acted rather insensitively toward the United Nations of late, saying recent U.S. decisions will seriously damage the role the United Nations can play in future matters of international security.
"You have to have the combination of American power and U.N. legitimacy," he said. "Right now, we have American power without legitimacy, and that combination is problematic and in fact weaker."
The most optimistic opinion on the future of the United Nations came from Bruce Kuniholm, professor of public policy. "There will be some people who will argue that the U.N. is toast, but I think that's nonsense... especially because the world still has enormous problems outside of Iraq, and these problems must be dealt with multilaterally," he said.
Kuniholm explained that the difficulties the United States encountered in trying to secure U.N. cooperation were not a matter of the irrelevance of the United Nations but of the limitations of the charter. "When the Security Council votes, to the extent that there are vetoes, there are constraints to what the council can do."
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