No one need pretend all is well with the fiscal and organizational house of the United Nations. It is still, as Ambassador Albright describes it, "a work in progress." But it works better than did the League of Nations, the Congress of Vienna or any of its other peacekeeping predecessors.
Yet the House bill (cutting support of peacekeeping) could mean the end of small but crucial peacekeeping contingents in hot spots like the Golan Heights, the Iraq-Kuwait border, Croatia, Lebanon, Angola, the Republic of Georgia. It's hardly farfetched to believe that stability in such places is indeed in our national security interest.Americans don't limit our global responsibilities just to security interests. In a poll conducted by an international policy institute at the University of Maryland last month, 77 percent of those quizzed rejected the notion that we should "only send aid to parts of the world where we have security interests."
Dues to the U.N. make up less than a tenth of the 1 percent we dedicate to foreign aid of any kind. Now that the bipolar world is a thing of the past, our U.N. contributions may be the best national security bargain we've got.