The New Year Quote by Robert Foster Bennett

Bennett’s line is a pitch for adult supervision in foreign policy: unsentimental about the U.N.’s shortcomings, but wary of the swaggering alternative. The sentence is built on a deliberate imbalance. He leads with “frustrating” and “impotent,” blunt words that signal he’s not selling a utopia. That initial concession isn’t humility; it’s inoculation. By voicing the standard critique himself, he tries to disarm domestic skeptics who hear “United Nations” and think bureaucracy, vetoes, and paralysis.

Then comes the pivot: “valuable forum.” Bennett doesn’t claim the U.N. is a world government or a moral tribunal. He frames it as infrastructure for diplomacy - a place where conflicts can be aired, managed, and occasionally solved. “Forum” is the key term: it lowers expectations and raises the bar for alternatives. If you abandon the forum, you’re not opting out of dysfunction; you’re opting into a world where problems are handled bilaterally, ad hoc, or militarily, with fewer witnesses and fewer off-ramps.

The subtext is aimed at a recurring American temptation, especially in late Cold War and post-Cold War politics: treat multilateral institutions as failed products, return them for a refund, and reclaim “freedom of action.” Bennett argues that “failed to live up to its promise” is not a reason to quit; it’s the normal condition of institutions tasked with containing sovereign states and their egos. The intent is pragmatic internationalism: stay in the room, because walking away doesn’t punish the U.N. so much as it reduces your leverage when the next crisis inevitably demands a table.