THE U.N.'s BIGGEST MISTAKE IN THE PAST 10 YEARS HAS BEEN...

The transmission of cholera by peacekeepers in Haiti and the failure to prevent and seriously punish sex crimes of peacekeepers. -Ted Piccone • Ignoring early signs of the Rwandan genocide. -Martha Finnemore • Not doing more to address the conflicts in the DRC and Sudan and the sexual violence committed by U.N. peacekeepers. -Margaret Karns • Appeasing the North Korean regime through the UNDP and its on-the-ground country team. -Mark Lagon • The failure to put more energy toward Afghanistan and balance the U.S.'s attention on Iraq. -Michael Barnett • Becoming a party to the U.S. global war on terror, and thus embroiled in the divisive wars in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. -Rama Mani • Not responding to the Oil for Food scandal until outside investigators had been needed to reveal the whole sorry mess. -M.J. Peterson • The 2003 election of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's Libyan regime to head the U.N. Human Rights Commission. -Hillel Neuer • The Libyan operation as the first "test" of R2P. The fruit of that miscalculation is being reaped in Syria now. -Katie Laatikainen • To continue to treat Russia like a first-rate power and let it repeatedly block action in the Security Council on cases like Syria. -Richard Gowan • A lack of an agreement binding all states within the framework convention on climate change. -Abdullah Alsaidi • Not to aggressively pursue and implement the 21st-century reform agenda proposed by former Secretary General Kofi Annan. -Karl Inderfurth

THE BIGGEST THREAT TO THE U.N. IS... 

The narrow nationalism of member states. -David Forsythe • A breakdown in relations among the permanent members of the Security Council. -Jennifer Welsh • A failure to evolve. The U.N. ultimately needs to expand the number of permanent members on the Security Council, but it is a tricky task. -John Norris • Its own risk-averse culture. -Adam Smith • Notorious human rights abusers sitting on the Security Council or the Human Rights Council. -Philippe Bolopion • Veto-wielding Russia and China undermining its efficacy. -Mark Lagon • The failure of the U.S. and Russia to agree about action on many crises. -Stanley Meisler • It is an increasingly ineffective uber-bureaucracy that stymies the best and brightest international civil servants. -Melissa Labonte • That its budget continues to decline in real terms due to short-sightedness and lack of commitment from the P5, just as the need for its actions in various peace and security issues expands as never before. -George Lopez • The U.S. refusal in a budget crisis to pay its fair share. -Thomas Pickering • Isolationists in the United States who want to walk away from the U.N. -Ted Piccone • Becoming increasingly irrelevant and being bypassed by unilateral or at least extra-U.N. measures. -Nico Schrijver • The rise of the G-20 as an alternate forum for international politics. -Lise Morjé Howard • A conflict in Asia, possibly between China and India, that the U.N. would be powerless to prevent or halt, revealing its irrelevance in the Asian Century. -Richard Gowan • Gaping philosophical differences among states as to how its noble but vague objectives should be achieved. -Michael J. Glennon • The culture of moral indifference. People go along to get along. -Hillel Neuer

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND ABOUT THE U.N. IS...

It is as able as member states allow it to be. -Kantathi Suphamongkhon • It is a prisoner of its member states. It is worth quoting the late Richard Holbrooke, who argued that blaming the United Nations for lousy performances was like blaming the hapless New York Knicks on Madison Square Garden. -Thomas G. Weiss • That there is no such thing as "the U.N." The U.N. is, among other things, a Secretariat, a General Assembly, a Security Council, and a bunch of technical agencies. -Scott Smith • The U.N. is an American creature. It looks the way it does because we designed it that way, as a tool to serve U.S. interests. -Martha Finnemore • It enhances U.S. security rather than detracting from or being irrelevant to it. -Stephen Schlesinger • How underfunded it is. -Turan Kayaoglu • Compared to the costs of dealing unilaterally with poverty, climate change, violent conflict, mass atrocities, nuclear proliferation, and transnational crime, the U.N. is still the best deal around -- including for the U.S. -Melissa Labonte • It does things. In New York, the U.N. talks; sometimes it decides. But elsewhere in the world, it prevents countries from collapsing through peacekeeping, vaccinates children, coordinates the response to disasters. -James Traub • In spite of its limitations, it is an essential forum for negotiating many global issues and for giving voice especially to the weaker and poorer states of the world. -P. Terrence Hopmann • It's a representation of the world as it is, not as it should be. -Philippe Bolopion 

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