trengthen its power to influence events given the new political realities. With the world no longer divided into two blocs supporting the United States or the Soviet Union, conflicts are breaking out between rival ethnic and religious groups. Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia are but a few examples of what many experts predict will be the scourge of coming years—highly lethal, localized civil wars between groups bent on their rivals’ extinction.“One of the major obstacles to successful operation of the U.N. in the 1990s is the rapid, almost overnight, change in its responsibilities that occurred with the end of Cold War,” says Dick Thornburgh, a former governor of Pennsylvania (1979-87) and former U.S. attorney general (1988-91) who served as U.N. under secretary-general for administration and management in 1992-93.“For the first forty-five years of its existence, the U.N.’s operational responsibilities were very much limited by the confrontation of the two superpowers,” Thornburgh says. “Then, almost overnight, it was asked to become operational in a wide variety of situations around the world, becoming a kind of worldwide 911 emergency number, and it was simply not geared up for that kind of activity either in terms of resources or in terms of mindset. Those growing pains are still evident.”To deal with the changing international realities, reformers say, the United Nations must become more efficient, shedding redundant and marginal agencies. It also must face up to its increasingly vocal critics, who say the organization squanders its 185 members’ contributions through corruption and mismanagement of its vast bureaucracy.“Purely and simply,” Thornburgh says, “people are not as much interested in supporting an organization that doesn’t have a capability to deal with allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse as they would be if that were in place.”But...
