hat 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.”CONCLUSIONIf 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. ...
