The United States has said that the United Nations must become better at solving problems and more responsive to American concerns, else Washington will seek other venues for international action.
The Bush administration requires nothing less than a "revolution of reforms" at the world body, encompassing everything from UN Security Council engagement to management changes to a focus on administrative skills in choosing the next secretary-general, US Ambassador to UN John Bolton told The Washington Times Tuesday.
The UN, he said, "has got to be a place to solve problems that need solving, rather than a place where problems go and never emerge."
"In the United States there is a broadly shared view that the UN is one of many potential instruments to advance US issues and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the UN or best done through some other mechanism," Bolton told the paper.
"The UN is one of many competitors in a market place of global problem solving" and this realisation itself should be an "incentive for the organisation to reform," he said.
"It's exactly what I expected. It does move in many ways that lead you to think it's caught in a time warp with discussions they could have had in the 60s,70s, 80s," he said.
"The biggest change that we should try and make is to have the Security Council play a larger role in solving these problems, rather than turning them over to the Secretariat and special envoys," he said.
