using the United Nations to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals. The Clinton administration, through its policy of assertive multilateralism,” has tried to increase American participation in the U.N. Clinton argued that the U.S., as the world’s sole remaining superpower, cannot afford to assume the role of global cop and must act in concert with other powers in the multilateral body to keep the peace. (2)Supporters of a strong U.N. agree with this assessment. “You may not like the U.N., but the truth is that some kind of organization of this kind is absolutely vital,” says Brian Urquhart, a British scholar at the Ford Foundation in New York who began his forty-year career as chief aide to U.N. secretaries-general at the organization’s founding in 1945. “We really don’t need a third world war the prove that.”Supporters say the crisis in Bosnia should not detract from the U.N.’s successes. “There is a lot of shared embarrassment in the mess that is the dormer Yugoslavia,” says Edward C. Luck, president of the United Nations Association of the United States, a New York-based research and educational organization. “But no one is paying attention to the new U.N. peacekeeping operations in Angola and Haiti, which are unfolding on a very businesslike basis.”For U.N. peacekeeping to work, Luck says, “you have to have consent and cooperation” from all parties, which is the case in Angola and Haiti. In Bosnia, however, “everyone thinks they have more to gain on the battlefield, and no one is really ready for peace, so [peacekeeping is] just not going to work.”Even some of the U.N.’s harshest critics think the international body is being blamed unfairly for the failure to bring peace to Bosnia. “In some ways, the strongest supporters of the United Nations have been the organization’s worst enemy,” says Ted Galen Carpe...
