UN: Deaglán de Bréadúnexamines the outlook for the United Nations as it faces tough challenges in 2007
Senior American statesman John Foster Dulles once said that the United Nations was the most important foreign policy instrument of the United States. But since the foundation of the world body in the aftermath of the second World War, membership has increased fourfold and America's writ doesn't run at the imposing skyscraper on New York's East River.
The US-UN relationship has been particularly fraught since George Bush took over the White House and the Iraqi invasion started brewing.
Famously - or notoriously, depending on your point of view - the Security Council was split over the war and failed to give backing to the Bush administration's plans.
It was generally taken as a slap in the face to the mainstream UN membership when the president nominated a leading neo-conservative ideologue John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN. A longtime UN critic, he once said that, "the secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
As well as being on the hard right, Bolton is highly-intelligent and it was not long before he started to get up the noses of other member-states, particularly when he put forward a staggering 750 amendments to the principal document on UN reform and poverty issues for the World Summit of 2005.
The price the US paid for all this was even greater isolation in the General Assembly. Historically, there was great enthusiasm among Americans when the UN was founded and given its headquarters on US soil, but that has waned considerably.
The appalling mess in Iraq vindicates the reservations expressed by the UN and the reluctance of leading members such as France and Germany to get involved in that blood-drenched imbroglio. This massive failure has had domestic repercussions at the polling-booth and the takeover of the House of Representatives and the Senate by the Democrats means that Bush will preside over a lame-duck administration for the next two years.
The first consequence of the election results for the US-UN relationship was the immediate departure of Bolton, whose chances of having his appointment confirmed by the Senate had now vanished entirely. At time of writing, no successor has been designated but it is difficult to imagine the president sending another hardliner to the Turtle Bay district where the UN building is located.
It has been said that the UN was established, not to get us into heaven but to save us from hell. But as always in world affairs, the gates of hell yawn threateningly in the face of the international community and the UN faces huge challenges in its efforts to avoid the infernal fires. There is little the UN can do to remedy the situation in Iraq. This is a problem, initially, for Bush who will probably have to pull US troops out on a phased basis or at least re-deploy them to the borders with Iran and Syria.
One of the key recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, made up of leading old-guard establishment figures such as former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, was for opening up a channel of communication to the Syrian and Iranians in the hope that they could help extricate the US from the Iraqi quagmire.
The UN could perhaps provide a framework or platform for this interaction but, as part of the price, the Iranians would doubtless seek freedom to pursue their nuclear ambitions unimpeded.
Fear of what those ambitions might be continues to haunt the international community, particularly Israel and the US. By all accounts there is still a school of thought, in and around the Bush administration, which argues that the president should ensure his place in the history books and remove a major security threat by bombing Iran's nuclear installations.
In the absence of clearcut evidence that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, such a move by the US or its Israeli allies would generate shock and horror at the UN and plunge relations between the US and the rest of the world into an even worse crisis than the one precipitated by the Iraqi invasion.
Internally, the UN has much to do to put its house in order. The much-heralded Human Rights Council, which took over from the discredited Commission on Human Rights, is failing to live up to its initial promise.
Outgoing UN secretary general Kofi Annan - shortly to be succeeded by South Korea's Ban Ki-Moon - expressed concern in early December at its conduct, including an over-emphasis on Israeli human rights failings while playing down other areas of conflict such as Darfur.
Ireland has been heavily involved in the UN Internal Reform Process, first with the Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern serving as a special envoy of the secretary general on the reform process and now with our UN ambassador David Cooney as co-chair of the General Assembly working group on Management Reform and Mandate Review.
More broadly, the Iraq conflict is not the only dark cloud on the horizon although at this writing there are positive indications of a move towards dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian front. Less attention has been paid to developments in Afghanistan which is deteriorating in an alarming fashion. A major crisis still threatens in the Sudanese region of Darfur as the Khartoum government continues to resist the presence of UN peacekeepers and the North Korean nuclear threat remains unresolved.
Many critics say the UN will never become really relevant and effective until there is reform of the Security Council to make it more representative. But there was little or no movement on that score in the past year and it looks as if the UN will remain in its present form for some time yet.