United Nations and the International System: A Balance Sheet of Challenges and Responses

摘要

The intertwined relationship between the international system and the United Nations has become such that it would be difficult to understand or analyse one without the other. The evolution of the UN as a working system is a story of the changing nature of the larger international system. The relationship between the United States and the UN has closely intersected with the place of the former enjoyed in the international system over the past seven and a half decades. The trajectory of the relationship reveals the limitations and latitudes the UN experienced through the different defining eras of the post-War international system - from bipolar through unipolar to the present flux in the potentially post-Westphalian multipolar system.