Sasha Polakow-Suransky reviews Five to Rule Them All and No Enchanted Palace and argues that early conflicts over colonialism and genocide explain many of the United Nations’ modern-day failures:
In April, as earnest diplomats puzzled over Polisario‘s latest moves
in the Western Sahara and the most recent developments in Darfur, a
visibly shaken news anchor reported that a Ugandan had seized control
of the United Nations, threatening to reduce agricultural funding to
any country opposing his rule. The self-appointed secretary-general
refused to step down — unless he was offered a more powerful position
as a little league coach or small-town mayor. So ran a newscast by the
Onion News Network, an offshoot of the satirical newspaper The Onion, deriding the U.N. more effectively than a position paper from the Heritage Foundation.
Hard though it may be to remember today, the U.N. was once seen as agreat step forward for humanity. In the heady postwar years, as DavidL. Bosco recounts in his engaging history of the U.N. Security Council,
the new parliament of nations was initially an object of great respect
and curiosity, and its televised sessions became an international
spectacle, culminating in U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson‘s dramatic J’Accuse
speech to the General Assembly during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
But as Soviet vetoes piled up during the Cold War and the U.N. failed
to fulfill its mission of maintaining the peace, its credibility waned.
