more efficiently.“If you look at the U.N. as an entire system and not just as a cluster of individual agencies you can assess where there is duplication and overlap,” Bolton says. The World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, for example, both address the related issues of nutrition and health. “Under a unitary U.N. approach we would have tried to rationalize their operations to reduce the duplication in the work of the two agencies.” With the election of President Clinton, Bolton says, “this policy of looking at the U.N. as a system has now fallen by the wayside.”CLINTON VS. CONGRESSAs part of his policy of “assertive multilateralism,” President Clinton supports the goal of reforming the United Nations. “Those of us who most respect the U.N. must lead the charge of reform,” he said at a June 26, 1995, ceremony in San Francisco commemorating the signing of the U.N. Charter. “Over the years it has grown too bloated, too often encouraging duplication and spending resources on meetings rather than results.”But some reform advocates saw the United States under President Clinton has been no more effective than other member governments in pushing for real change at the U.N. “There is a lack of political will on the part of the member states to actually follow through on reform,” Thornburgh says. “They’re all pretty much the same, and the United States is no different.”Indeed, lawmakers in Washington seem more interested in reducing U.S. commitments to the United Nations than in strengthening its ability to carry out American foreign policy. This attitude is especially apparent among Republicans, who in 1994 won the majority in Congress for the first time in forty years.“Peacekeeping cannot solve the world’s problems and should not be expected to,” said then Senate Foreign Relations Committe...
