The Future of the United Nations

Rocked by scandal and divided by the smoldering enmities unleashed by the Iraq war, the United Nations faces its most critical hour. The secretary general and other leaders have offered their recipes for reform; in The Future of the United Nations, Joshua Muravchik argues that only far more radical reforms can salvage the UN as a useful institution.The central cause of the UN's failure, Muravchik says, is that it was structured as a proto world government, with the power to make law and enforce peace. Member states were asked to yield a measure of their independence in return for the protections that the UN would offer them. But Muravchik shows that this global social contract was a dead letter from the start, because the protections were illusory.