I have to wonder where all the whining about the UN comes from. The General Assembly has all sorts of problems, and I don’t want to excuse those. Financially, we should get them to clean the mess up and we’ve taken a lot of steps to do that.
However, when it comes to the Security Council, the UN is largely a tool of US power. Of the five member we almost always have one vote locked up, one for sale (Russia), and one that bellyaches and then is up for sale as an abstention so they don’t veto a plan, and well, then the real problem France. Admittedly, France is useless and only got the seat because of postwar politics. The Security Council is deigned to hold power in those few hands and the US with decent leadership accomplishes a great deal with it.
The Council doesn’t have deal with every small country in the world and it is empowered to act easier than any other body. Even more important, any UN Military action can be vetoed by us, thus giving us a lot of control over multilateral actions when we aren’t involved.
We’ve got it pretty good. A little massaging and we do extremely well with the Security Council except on issues relating to China or Russia. Well, that and when the French get a bug up their ass. It isn’t perfect, but it provides the US an important institutional mechanism to get world support, with very little actual support from the other nations.