All the talk at the United Nations for the past year has been about reform at September's World Summit. The campaign was ardently pushed by Secretary General Kofi Annan after the UN was ignored by the United States in its 2003 invasion of Iraq. Annan's ambitious reform agenda, designed to make the UN more indispensable, centered on the Security Council's role, genocide, nuclear threats, terrorism, pre-emptive war, human rights abuses, economic needs and UN management problems. Unfortunately, Annan's crusade came to a jolting halt at the recent gathering in New York.

The unexpressed hope had been that the leading liberal democracies of the world, drawing on Annan's proposals, would exchange their help in alleviating Third World poverty for the developing world's acceptance of the security, human rights and UN management changes they wanted. This would mean passing some or all of the following reforms: authorizing more direct UN intervention to stop genocide, nuclear proliferation and terrorism; restructuring the UN's lame Human Rights Commission; reorganizing the UN's faulty internal management system; and expanding aid abroad. But all these ran up against barriers of one sort or another.

First, the UN got waylaid by a fracas over the issue of expanding the Security Council. For most of the past six months, the controversy converged on a subject peripheral to the North-South deal but far more glamorous to the media. One group of nations--Japan, Germany, India and Brazil--made a joint effort to get onto the Council. However, the African Union rejected the initiative, and China, one of the Council's five veto-bearing countries, also objected to the quartet, especially to Japan. The United States, another permanent member, had reservations about Germany. If Japan and Germany couldn't make it, it seemed unlikely that any other states could gain permanent membership. And even if any did, would they also get the veto? And would expansion impede the effectiveness of the Council? Because of these nagging questions, Annan eventually decided to put off the issue until December. It is now unlikely that Security Council reform will happen at all.

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