EDMONTON, Alberta-- The hawks in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush finally got what they wanted -- in New York, as well as in the Middle East. The U.N. Security Council is deeply divided, the U.N. system itself seems paralyzed and a preemptive war is about to win "regime change" in Iraq. Evidence in hand, Washington's isolationists proclaim that they were right all along: The United Nations is an ineffective, inefficient and irrelevant organization destined for the dustbin of history -- just like the League of Nations.
Luckily, not all Americans feel that way. Even within the current Bush administration, a dwindling group of officials still embraces the promise of multilateralism. This is founded on good sense, not sentimentality. For if the U.N. did not exist, the international community would have to construct some other institution just like it.
We still need the U.N. We will always need the U.N., because the problems faced by a complex and interdependent world are transnational in scope; they simply cannot be solved by individual states. Environmental degradation does not respect national borders. Neither do human security and state threats stemming from the spread of HIV/AIDS, new diseases, overpopulation, global warming, drug trafficking, transnational crime, the spillover of ethnic civil conflicts, refugee problems and, as the United States found out on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism.