About face?: the United States and the United Nations

Abstract

In the wake of Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in the summer of 1990, the United States assiduously courted the support of the international community for a policy of sanctions, and later, of military action against Iraq. The primary venue for that successful diplomatic effort was the UN Security Council; in effect, the United States made the United Nations a critically important pillar of its foreign policy and, in the process, helped to give the UN the most favourable press it had had in decades. This is a situation rich in irony, for it was only a few short years ago that the United States treated the UN with ill-disguised contempt. During the Reagan administration, US-UN relations reached a 40-year nadir, yet, under George Bush, these relations have been very nearly euphoric. There has been a dramatic about-face in US policy. Telling the story of this policy reversal, About Face looks in depth at the period of UN-bashing in the '80s and courtship of the UN in 1990 and analyses the forces that produced first one and then the other of these latest phases in the tumultuous US-UN relationship. The book concludes with a critique of the thesis that, with the Cold War over and collective security rediscovered, the UN will at last assume the role envisioned for it by its founders and the United States will find in the UN a congenial vehicle for the pursuit of its foreign policy objectives.