UC Berkeley Spring 1994 UN Action in a Disorderly World Joe Clark iscussions on the United Nations occur on two levels. The other level is about whether the UN is seen as an asset or as something less. A nation like Canada sees the United Nations quite unequivocally as an asset that is essential to international security.
Most nations share that view.
Some, like the United States, and occasionally former colonial powers like the United Kingdom, are a little more skeptical. Our soldiers have been in harm's way and have died in places like Korea under United States', that is to say, foreign, command. In the eighteen UN peacekeeping operations that are now under way, some of long duration, more than seven hundred soldiers of various nations have died in the service of the United Nations. In all of those cases, the United States was a member of the Security Council which authorized the risk, and usually the governments whose citizens died were not. That is not to minimize the American concern, but to put it into perspective.