United Nations Day is October 24, 2008 ... Let's Celebrate!

What would the world look like without the United Nations? You can partially answer that question by looking at the world before the U.N. was established in San Francisco in 1945. In the 30 years prior to the founding of the U.N., more than 75 million people perished in two world wars fought among the great powers. The U.N. was established in response to these three decades of violence and cataclysm. President Franklin Roosevelt, who coined the term “United Nations,” pushed for a world organization to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Since 1945, there has not been a major war among the leading nations.

The United Nations can do things that its predecessor organization, the League of Nations (1919-1939), could never have envisioned. The United Nations, with nearly 200 member states, is a much more universal body than the League, which never had more than 58 members. The U.N. has proven more successful in its pursuit of collective security, bringing nations together to prevent wars and to promote global harmony. The U.N. also engages in international peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and weapons inspections, and its global economic institutions have a reach and impact that the League could never have imagined.

There is no doubt that the U.N. has achieved much since its birth in 1945, but it is often difficult to measure the U.N.’s accomplishments because its work is primarily about prevention: the prevention of wars, famines, infectious diseases, and even the prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons. For example, the U.N. Security Council is committed to collective security, but the very nature of this objective often means that when the U.N. is most effective, it receives no notice. Moreover, United Nations peacekeepers are often sent to prevent conflicts from worsening, or to prevent wars from ever erupting at all.

The United Nations does much work no one else can do. United Nations agencies provide ongoing humanitarian assistance, health care and support for economic development. These agencies have demonstrated success halting the spread of epidemics, eradicating smallpox, wiping out polio, pressing for universal immunization, providing emergency relief during natural disasters and helping refugees.

Beyond maintaining security, making peace, preventing nuclear proliferation and combating terrorism, the U.N. has a strong record of postwar reconstruction and nation building. The struggling American occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated that this is never an easy task, but the U.N. has a more successful record than most, even in such complex conflicts as those in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. Even under the best of circumstances, the challenges can be daunting because peacekeeping, peacemaking and postwar reconstruction require experience, knowledge of history and an understanding of complex cultures and languages.

For those worried about the increasingly open-ended and costly nature of American military interventions, U.N. collective security and peacekeeping offers an alternative. United Nations peacekeeping operations are far less costly than U.S. endeavors, and the multilateral nature of peacekeeping also blunts the desire toward unilateralism and weakens the imperial impulse, while spreading out costs and sharing burdens.

For example, during the 1990-1991 war with Iraq, the United States, working with a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions, ultimately incurred no expenses thanks to creative burden sharing and alliance politics. During the current Iraq War (2003- ), the United States proceeded without U.N. support, and the American taxpayer may ultimately be on the hook, according to Nobel Laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz, for nearly $3 trillion. It is no coincidence that during the two most controversial American wars in recent decades, in Vietnam and Iraq, the United States decided that the U.N. would play almost no role. In both conflicts, the US had difficultly establishing legitimacy for its actions and was overwhelmed by the challenges of creating viable political entities in Saigon and Baghdad.

The dues the United States pays to the United Nations have often provoked controversy, but some perspective is required. The US has paid $453 million in yearly dues to the U.N.’s regular budget for 2008. This is an astonishingly good bargain. Compare this with the $12 billion the United States spends in Iraq every month. Recent public opinion polls reveal that a majority of Americans favor the US paying its U.N. dues in full, including its peacekeeping dues, which are seriously in arrears. This majority rises to three of four Americans when given information about the cost of U.N. dues relative to other American budget priorities. American political candidates who favor paying U.N. dues are viewed more favorably than those who do not. Moreover, with its dues, the United States gets the power of collective security, collective burden sharing and, something that cannot be measured by simple cost: the legitimacy that the U.N. confers on any American foreign policy endeavor.

The United States has a choice. Great American statesmen such as Franklin Roosevelt built the United Nations, and the fledgling U.N. received support from Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt. Dedicated public servants such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Adlai Stevenson and Andrew Young have served as ambassadors to the U.N. Presidents such as Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush have made effective use of the organization and have demonstrated that working with the United Nations is in no way contrary to the pursuit of American interests, or a successful foreign policy.

The United Nations has received 11 Nobel Peace Prizes -- three during the current Bush administration -- for its efforts ending wars, promoting peace, the protecting refugees and, most recently, combating the global climate crisis. These Nobel Peace Prizes have illuminated the U.N.’s many contributions toward alleviating the suffering of the world, but have also drawn attention to the U.N.’s potential to prevent crises. This was once underscored by former U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who was fond of saying that the U.N. was not created to help mankind ascend to heaven, but was created to prevent mankind from descending into hell.

It has been said that if the U.N. did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. Many of the challenges the world faces today, such as global climate change and nuclear proliferation, will require creative diplomacy of the highest caliber and are challenges that the United States can only successfully address by working with the United Nations. Nuclear proliferation has also demonstrated the necessity of the United Nations to aid in the resolution and avoidance of war. On a host of issues -- from climate change, to managing the impact of globalization, to terrorism -- the U.N. is, as Abraham Lincoln once said of the United States, the last best hope of the earth.