The U.N.: a love-hate affair: sixty-five years after its founding, the U.N. remains controversial, even as it continues to embody the world's collective desire for peace.

• Author: Paul, Laurence M.
• Position: TIMES PAST - United Nations

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It was a long flirtation but a short romance.

For a year and a half, President Barack Obama wooed his fellow Presidents, Hu Jintao of China and Dmitri Medvedev of Russia. He soothed them with encouraging words and warm gestures. They shared meals and long talks.

Obama's goal was to persuade the two nations to join him at the United Nations in trying to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Finally, this past June, he appeared to have won their hearts. China and Russia joined the United States and a majority of others on the U.N. Security Council in passing tough new sanctions to restrict Iran's ability to conduct business with the rest of the world unless it halts its suspected nuclear weapons program.

Then, before even a month had passed, both China and Russia broke Obama's heart--symbolically speaking--when they announced new or continued Wade deals with the Iranians.

It was a familiar story in the history of the United Nations, the international body that the world--and America in particular--both loves and hates. Supporters say the U.N. can make the world a better place; skeptics argue that it's so big, bureaucratic, and political that it can never live up to its goals.

Yet for all its flaws and failures, the U.N. endures, and when international disputes arise, it's a place to which nations can turn, just as Obama and much of the rest of the world did in hopes of stifling Iran's nuclear ambitions. The outcome of that effort illustrates both the power and the limitations of the U.N.

The Leaque of Nations

Founded 65 years ago this fall, the United Nations has a primary goal of fostering world peace--essentially to make war obsolete.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-60) said in 1953 that the U.N. "represents man's best organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield."

That, of course, has not happened.

But the U.N.'s founders had other aspirations as well: feeding the hungry, combating disease, ensuring human rights, regulating commerce, promoting and providing education. In those fields, the U.N. has become one of the most important organizations in the world.

The term "united nations" was first used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45) to refer to the countries allied against Germany, Japan, and Italy in World War II. The name was adopted by world leaders during the closing months of the war as they planned a new organization to succeed the League of Nations, which had been founded at the end of World War I with the similar goal of fostering peace.

The League failed at...