This book is about American perceptions of the United Nations and international collective action. More specifically, it is about a particular perception that became increasingly vivid in the course of the 1990s and came to dominate American foreign policy in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. It is about the processes that granted this perception wide-spread acceptance and transformed the United Nations, once a policy instrument of the United States, into a negative symbol in neoconservative iconography. This story does not, however, begin on 11 September 2001. The U.S. abandonment of the United Nations, despite its apparent suddenness and violent consequences, was very long in coming. The profound scepticism and symbolic hatred that the United Nations inspired in certain U.S. political circles in the last decade is not of recent vintage and can be traced to long-standing doubts about the legitimacy of the UN. Since its inception, the organization has, at crucial points, been treated as a symbol of anti-Americanism, as an amorphous but very dangerous threat to American interests.
