Реферат: United Nations Essay Research Paper INTRODUCTIONTHE ISSUESThe
“The United States must be prepared to act alone when necessary, but we dare not ignore the benefits that coalitions bring to this nation,” Clinton said at the San Francisco commemoration of the U.N. Charter. “We dare not reject decades of bipartisan support for international cooperation. Those who would do so, these new isolationists, dismiss fifty years of hard evidence.”
Republicans reject these charges. “Neo-isolationism is a scare word that doesn’t capture even somewhat fairly what we’re talking about, which is trying to analyze what concrete U.S. national interests are and how to advance and defend them,” Bolton says. “Simply to say that not being willing to engage in assertive multilateralism is the same as neo-isolationism reflects a profound misunderstanding of what American foreign policy interests are, as well as the shallowness of their own intellectual thinking.”
“Part of the problem in improving the United Nations’ ability to act now is that the majority in Congress sees undermining the organization as a way of going after the president and his weaknesses in foreign policy,” Luck says. “The United Nations has become a vehicle for that.”
CONCLUSION
If the United Nations is to continue to play a role in world affairs, it has to take account of the changes that have occurred in the world over the past half-century.
“Fifty years ago, you didn’t see the Rwanda genocide in your living room while you’re having a drink in the evening,” Urquhart says. “Fifty years ago, there wasn’t this sort of global society with global capital markets and instant electronic circulation of money. There are a whole lot of things which didn’t exist in 1945 when the charter was written. Now we’ve got to really face up to them.”
Whatever new peacekeeping roles the United Nations takes on in the near future, they are likely to be less ambitious than envisioned in the heady days after the Cold War’s collapse. Plans to beef up peacekeeping missions, as outlined in the secretary-general’s 1992 report to the General Assembly, have been sidelined. Following setbacks in Somalia and Bosnia, peacekeeping operations already have been scaled back, as the belated and undermanned mission to Rwanda demonstrates.
“Once an organization’s reputation is badly damaged, as the U.N.’s reputation has been in Somalia and now, even worse, in Bosnia, people begin to question everything about it,” says Carpenter at the Cato Institute. “Even the worthwhile functions it has served, the achievements it has had in Namibia, for instance, are going to be far less impressive than they might otherwise have been.”
With the United States especially reluctant to support efforts to strengthen the U.N., some diplomats are prodding Europe and Japan to pick up the slack. “It’s a foolish idea to assume that every time anything happens the only country that can do anything is the United States,” Urquhart says. “It isn’t like 1945, when the United States was the only country still on its feet. There are some nice, big, grownup countries out there, some of which are quite rich. But there remains this hopelessly defeatist attitude that if the United States doesn’t want it, it won’t happen.”
There is another reason, Urquhart says, why the United Nations’ member governments should not allow the confusion over the U.N.’s role as global peacekeeper to undermine its place in world affairs. “In fifty years’ time, the United Nations won’t be judged on having failed in Bosnia,” he says. “It will be judged on whether it did anything about poverty, economic imbalance, and the environment. Those are the forces that are going to shape the future one way or another, not what happens in Bosnia.”
NOTES
1. Carroll J. Doherty, “Congress’ Foreign Policy Role At Issue in Veto Override,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, August 5, 1995, 2386-2387
2. For background see, “Foreign Policy Burden,” The CQ Researcher,
August 20 1993, 721-744
3. For background see, “A Revitalized United Nations in the 1990s,” Editorial Research Reports, July 27, 1990, 429-444
4. For background on the U.N. budget, see Jeffrey Laurenti, National Taxpayers, International Organizations: Sharing the Burden Of Financing the United Nations, United Nations Association of the United States, 1995, 29
5. Speaking at a June 11, 1995, press conference with President Clinton in Clairmont, N.H.
6. Bob Dole, “Who’s an Isolationist?” The New York Times, June 6, 1995
7. For background, see Carroll J. Doherty, “House Approves Overhaul of
Agencies, Policies,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, January 28, 1995 291-292
8. Speth spoke June 25, 1995, before the United Nations Association of the United States’ National Convention in San Francisco, Calif.
9. For background, see “Non-Proliferation Treaty at 25,” The CQ Researcher, January 27, 1995, 73-96
10. See the United Nations Association of the United States, The United Nations at
40, April 1985
11. Material in this section is based on Sandrine Teyssonneyre, How to Do Business with the United Nations (1995) 7-10
12. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Back to the Womb? Isolationism’s Renewed Threat,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995, 2-8
13. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, June 1992
14. Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighborhood
(1995), 236-237