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Hello and welcome to the law fair podcast. The special book review editor

discusses his own book edition. I'm Benjamin Wittes and I'm here today in

beautiful Palo Alto with law fair's own Ken Anderson who is out here at the

Hoover Institution with me. We're taking a break from a meeting of the Hoover

Institution Task Force on National Security and Law to discuss Ken's new book

Living with the UN American Responsibilities and International Order. Ken certainly

requires no introduction to the law fair readership so I will offer none. The book

published by the Hoover Press is an incisive look at the relationship between

the United States and the United Nations at when and how the United States

should engage with the UN and indeed a look at the UN itself as Ken writes,

why is there still a United Nations at all? How has it managed to survive over

time from 1945 down to the present given its long record of underperformance,

frequent outright failure, and even more frequent irrelevance? Why has not the

ruthless evolutionary logic of history pruned it as a failed institutional sapling

in a relentlessly competitive forest as the League of Nations was pruned?

So Ken, what's the book about? Well, Living with the UN is an attempt to find

a way that the United States can live with the UN over the long term and that

means two things. It means understanding that the UN is here and it's here to

...