A wall of portraits of the U.N.'s secretaries-general.

No one is yet in a position to divine what Bolton’s true motives are. But this much is indisputably true: Bolton is an expert on the organization he distrusts. Even his biggest detractors concede that he knows the United Nations better than any American representative since Thomas Pickering, the legendary ambassador appointed by Bush the elder who was fluent in six languages, including Arabic and Swahili. Recently, I asked the Chilean ambassador, Heraldo Muñoz, whether his colleagues had been nervous before Bolton’s arrival. He let out a hearty laugh. “Oh, no! By no means. It was rather amusing to read the newspaper and see the television.”

Why?

“Because we know how this organization works,” he said. “It doesn’t adapt to a new ambassador. A new ambassador adapts to the organization.”

But to what pickled creation, exactly, is our new ambassador adapting? Step into the U.N., and you’ve slipped not just into another country (or 191 of them) but through a wormhole in space, where it’s 1950 all over again. One still hears plenty of French in the elevators and the halls; people still smoke in the delegates’ lounge; the committees sound as though they were named by Khrushchev. (An actual outgoing voice-mail message: “You’ve reached the office of the special adviser on the follow-up to the report of the high-level panel.”) The Security Council, with its horseshoe-shaped table and clunky plastic headsets, looks like the set of an old spy movie—Dr. Evil addressed a far sleeker room in Austin Powers when he asked for his million dollars—and the palette of the General Assembly is taken directly from an Edward Hopper painting, with plaster chairs of lime green and sky blue. On the floor, the delegates from Iran and Iraq sit next to each other—such is the tyranny of the Roman alphabet—and the ambassadors from Eritrea and Ethiopia are separated only by the gal who represents Estonia. There’s a singularly unresolved quality to the place, as if it can’t decide whether it’s a multicultural Utopia of collective action or a monochromatic dystopia of pencil-pushing futility.

People seldom make jokes about the place, even though the organization by its very nature is the setup to a joke. (A Greek, an Irishman, and an Italian all walk into a room.) Perhaps the funniest observation ever made about it is commonly attributed to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the former secretary-general from Peru. Someone asked him how many people worked at the U.N. He thought for a moment, then gave his answer. “About half.”

“I don’t think the U.N., frankly, is taken particularly seriously by anyone very much,” says Australia’s Dauth. “The problem is that there is no global consensus on anything anymore. Much as some people profess to be interested in effective multilateralism, very few countries are—particularly developing countries.”

“He said, ‘So how is the U.N.?’’’ says the Chilean ambassador. “And I said, ‘Well, it’s not as good as it was before you invaded Iraq.’’’

There is an inevitable dysfunctionality, or structural neurosis, to any place that tries to accommodate the desires of 191 nations. Countries that in other multilateral settings would be allies are in this setting nipping at one another’s skirts, because all of them (theoretically) have an equal say. What the developed world wants, the undeveloped world often does not. And no one has a clue what to do with the United States. The U.N. seems to be the one place where the rest of the world can work out its anger toward America; for some countries, humiliating America is de rigueur, a simple matter of course. This impulse is precisely what infuriates conservatives like John Bolton. “In the United States,” explains Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the appealing, highly cerebral undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations, “there seems to be a perception that the U.N. is not favorable to American interests. But the perception in many countries is that the U.N. is very close to the United States. That is the paradox you see.”

This central tension makes almost every attempt to reform the organization a ludicrous struggle. The developing countries, known as the G-77 (or Group of 77, which in fact is now a group of 132), are convinced, not unreasonably, that the U.N.’s vast bureaucracy—collectively known as “the Secretariat”—is dominated top to bottom by Europeans and Northerners. The Security Council, the only body with any real power, has just five permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia) and ten rotating non-permanent ones. In order to retain what power they have, developing countries insist that most power, especially of the purse, reside with the General Assembly. But the General Assembly tries to operate by consensus, and it’s 191 countries large. One can imagine more efficient ways of conducting business. Like underwater.

The U.N. budget is controlled by something rather ominously called “the Fifth Committee,” whose very name seems to have rolled off the loom of Terry Gilliam’s imagination, or perhaps George Orwell’s, as the preeminent example of something double-plus ungood. I have asked perhaps 50 people whether there are any good Fifth Committee jokes floating around, including how many Fifth Committee members it takes to change a lightbulb. No one could think of any. It turns out the committee more or less counts lightbulbs. This past June, the General Assembly passed a resolution, produced by the Fifth Committee, that prescribed the ratio of printers to desktop computers in peacekeeping missions (one to four).