Why America Still Needs the United Nations

Shashi Tharoor

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003

Summary:  Multilateralism is a means, not an end, and there is no more multilateral body than the UN. That may make it unwieldy at times, but the UN's inclusiveness is the key to the legitimacy only it can confer. The organization thus remains an essential force in international politics, and one the United States benefits from greatly.

Shashi Tharoor is UN Undersecretary-General for Communications and Public Information and the author of eight books, including the forthcoming Nehru: The Invention of India. These are his personal views.

The UN, from the start, assumed the willingness of its members to accept restraints on their own short-term goals and policies by subordinating their actions to internationally agreed rules and procedures, in the broader long-term interests of world order. This was an explicit alternative to the model of past centuries, when strong states developed their military power to enforce their politics, and weak states took refuge in alliances with stronger ones. This formula guaranteed large-scale warfare; as Franklin Roosevelt put it to both houses of Congress after the Allied conference at Yalta, the UN would replace the arms races, military alliances, balance-of-power politics, and "all the arrangements that had led to war" so often in the past. The UN was meant to help create a world in which its member states would overcome their vulnerabilities by embedding themselves in international institutions, where the use of force would be subjected to the constraints of international law. Power politics would not disappear from the face of the earth but would be practiced with due regard for universally upheld rules and norms. Such a system also offered the United States -- then, as now, the world's unchallenged superpower -- the assurance that other countries would not feel the need to develop coalitions to balance its power. Instead, the UN provided a framework for them to work in partnership with the United States.

This is the system to which the world must now rededicate itself. Votaries of the UN have long argued that if the world body did not exist, we would have to invent it. Sadly, it is hard to believe that today's leaders could manage such a feat. Hammarskjöld once described the UN as an adventure -- a Santa Maria battling its way through storms and uncharted oceans to a new world, only to find that the people on shore blamed the storms on the ship itself. Five decades later, Hammarskjöld's metaphor still holds true: the UN continues to sail in turbulent waters and is still blamed for the squalls that assail it.

This brings to mind another metaphor: if international institutions serve principally as ropes that tie Gulliver down, then Gulliver will have every interest in snapping the ropes and breaking free of the constraints imposed on him. If, however, these institutions constitute a vessel sturdy enough for Gulliver to sail, and the Lilliputians cheerfully help him man the bridge and hoist the mainsail because they want to travel to the same destination, then Gulliver is unlikely to jump ship and try to swim on alone. So the world should similarly hold fast to its determination to live by shared values and common rules and to steer together the multilateral institutions that the enlightened leaders of the last century bequeathed to us. Only by doing so will our ship best the storm -- with Gulliver still on board.