nter, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. “They’ve tried to have it do too much. They’ve tried to have the organization perform functions for which it was never designed.”“There is a curious attempt to use the United Nations as a scapegoat,” Carpenter adds, “as though it were truly an independent actor, as though the U.N. were responsible for what has occurred in Bosnia. In truth, it’s mainly the five permament members of the Security Council and what they are asking the United Nations to do.”“If Bosnia proves anything,” Urquhart says, “it has proved that the Western allies don’t have the stomach for fighting. But what else is new? Of course they don’t”Where friends and critics of the U.N. part ways is over the organization’s proper role in world affairs. Critics say the crisis in Bosnia is only the latest failure among many. “If you look at the ups and downs at the U.N. over the past fifty years, it started with very high promise, but got locked into the Cold War gridlock very early,” says John Bolton, assistant secretary of State for international organizations in the Bush administration and now president of the National Policy Forum, a Republican think tank in Washington.In Bolton’s view, the U.N. can point to only one great military success—the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when the Security Council supported the U.S.-led military coalition that successfully repelled Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. That victory, Bolton says, led to unwarranted expectations of what the U.N. could accomplish in the post-Clod War era. “Now,” he says, “there was a sort of sour, moody environment at the fiftieth anniversary that was a result of earlier, misplaced euphoria.”For the U.N. to work effectively, experts agree, it must undergo reforms to s...
