Americans Rate the U.N.

It's not surprising that after Sept. 11, Americans are more willing to support the United Nations -- after all, the organization's core mission is to promote peace and human rights. But it may surprise some people to learn that the U.N. currently enjoys the highest rating it has received in the five decades that Gallup has been asking the public to grade its performance.

Since 1953, eight years after the U.N. was formed, Gallup has been asking Americans if they think the U.N. is doing a good job or a poor job solving the problems it has had to face. The lowest "good job" rating came in 1985, when Cold War tension between the United States and the former Soviet Union was very high. At that time, only 28% of Americans felt the U.N. was doing a good job, while 54% thought it was performing poorly.

Ratings spiked in the early 1990s following the Persian Gulf War, but dropped again in the mid-'90s as the U.N. grappled with complex and treacherous situations in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. In 1995, only 35% of the American public believed the organization was performing well, and about two in five Americans (39%) believed the U.N. did not have enough power. In the ensuing years, however, the U.N.'s image steadily improved. In 1997, 85% of Americans said they believed the U.N. played a necessary role in the world.

This month*, a record 58% of Americans say they believe the U.N. is doing a good job, an increase of four percentage points from February 2001. The increase follows a general historical pattern regarding the public's reaction to broad-based military action. The two previous high marks of U.N. support were seen in 1953 following the Korean War (55%) and in Oct. 1990 (54%), soon after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Another possible factor is the prestige of current U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Since Annan took office in 1997, the U.N.'s job-performance ratings have been steadily increasing. Only 1% of the public recognized him as Secretary General in 1997. In December 2001, when Annan was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he ranked in 10th place on Gallup's list of the nation's most admired men, tied with former South African President Nelson Mandela and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

A majority of Americans also currently favor a role for the U.N. as a strategic presence in global policy-making, but not necessarily as the dominant power. In February 2001, about one in five Americans (19%) said the U.N. should "play a leading role, where all nations are required to follow U.N. policy, "49% said it should play "a major role, where it establishes policies but other nations who disagree may act independently," and 28% said the U.N. should play a "minor role, where it mainly serves as a forum for communication among nations but with no policy-making role."

*Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,011 adults, aged 18 and over, conducted Feb. 4-6, 2002. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points.