THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL From the Cold War to the 21st Century Edited by David M. Malone Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 740pp, US$65.00 cloth (ISBN 1-58826-215-4), US$29.95 paper (ISBN 1-58826-240-5)AN INSIDER'S GUIDE TO THE UN Linda Fasulo New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xx, 245pp, US$27.00 cloth (ISBN 0-300-10155-4)THE UN'S ROLE IN NATION-BUILDING From the Congo to Iraq James Dobbins, et al Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005. 318pp, US$35.00 paper (ISBN 0-8330-3589-4)A MORE SECURE WORLD Our Shared Responsibility-Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change New York: United Nations Publications, 2005. 142pp, US$15.00 paper (ISBN 92-110-0958-8)Now is make or break time for the United Nations. Member states will have to shoulder the burden of reform, but the leadership opportunity is Secretary General Kofi Annaris alone. It is his responsibility to provide direction and offer cohesive strategy if the UN is to make itself relevant to the threats and inequalities of the modern world.There are those in the US who would like to see the UN go the way of the League of Nations. The perceived failure of the security council on Iraq, the oil for food scandal, and the recent sexual exploitation by Congolese peacekeeping forces have intensified attacks from some American quarters on the institution as whole. Critics see cabal of weak and venal states seeking to use the UN to constrain American power.Now some of these fringe views sit squarely in the Bush administration and congress, and are trying to skew international discourse on UN reform to their hidden agenda of eviscerating the institution. These critics should not drive the process of reform, but they must be taken seriously, since they are not likely to go away soon.The key test of the UN's modernization efforts will be its ability to mobilize an increasingly silent majority of supporters. At various times the UN has inspired leaders and captured the imagination of the masses, but now is at risk of becoming the province only of elites. Have no better arguments than the inherently defensive ideas that is nothing better, we would have to invent if did not exist, and it is only as good as its members allow to be? There is an affirmative view and the UN must seize it.To do so, the institution will need to revisit its original mission and mandate. Postwar powers believed there was more gained than sacrificed through the use of global agreements on collective security. Enlightened self-interest was the rule, and has been largely obeyed since World War II. International self-restraint has been the hallmark of stability, and this growing interdependency has made world war less likely than 60 years ago. The UN was part of that success.The problem today is the changing nature of the threats facing the 191 countries of the world, where the primary menace is no longer always the risk of attack by foreign nations. The strategic imperative of the US since 9/11, for instance, has been to protect its homeland from non-state actors seeking to launch terrorist attacks, particularly those involving weapons of mass destruction. In Africa, meanwhile, the HIV-AIDS pandemic has the potential to become vital issue of national security for many of the hardest hit countries. It is clear that even within the industrialized world, there is no longer shared perception of what the primary hazard to collective security is.Enter the recent UN report, A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, by the secretary general's high-level panel on threats, challenges and change. The report offers broader paradigm for understanding a threat to one is threat to all, in which an increasingly interconnected world has cast AIDS and other more traditional development challenges as threat to the industrialized north, just as terrorism and the potential breakdown of world economic order is threat to the developing south. …