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The United Nations faces serious problems: it has a hide-bound organizational edifice in which, for example, there are overlapping agencies for development and humanitarian assistance; a patronage system that allows member states to appoint supporters and hence encourages incompetence and waste; inadequate financial discipline; and an often indistinct vision. Its record of past successes, such as ending apartheid in South Africa, moderating the nuclear arms race, instituting democracy in El Salvador and Haiti, and bringing peace to Guatemala and Angola, has been tarnished by such persistent bureaucratic and political defects. Indeed, the organization's vexing and long-running fiscal and political crises have for the first time raised questions about its ability to survive into the next millennium.
Recent efforts to assess and fix its flaws have come up against serious impediments, not least of which is bureaucratic inertia. But a good many of the United Nations' shortcomings are rooted in its beginnings, at the San Francisco Conference of 1945. That remarkable event shadows and marks the United Nations, for good or ill, over a half-century later.
Most Americans, much less most foreigners, and even many U.N. delegates, have little knowledge, or at best a distorted sense, of the basic elements that went into shaping the U.N.'s basic architecture at San Francisco. Such ignorance complicates any realistic attempt to make significant reforms in the organization today. It is also why the most recent U.S. proposal for the payment of America's past dues (over $1 billion), one that comes with many conditions, has raised hackles inside the United Nations. In order to better understand why the United Nations is in such bad shape today and how it must eventually be reformed, it is first necessary to identify some of the most prevalent current myths surrounding the U.N.'s creation. I count ten major misconceptions that tend to blur the vision of even the most...