After a senior official of the UN Secretariat gave a speech June 6 calling for more consistent and less hostile engagement from Washington, a furious Bolton predicted that the institution would suffer "grave harm" unless Secretary-General Kofi Annan "personally and publicly" repudiated his colleague's remarks. Annan, to his credit, refused.

We have, of course, been here before. During the late 1990s, congressional conservatives in the US vowed to starve the UN unless it acceded to a long list of "reforms." In September 2002, President George W Bush asserted that the United Nations would become "irrelevant" should it fail to join the US in disarming Iraq.

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You have to wonder why the UN is still in business.

The short answer is: because the United States can't do without it. I spent the period from June 2004 to September 2005 inside the UN while writing a book about it, and I was always struck by how much business the US and the UN transacted with one another, and how routinely they did so. Crisis brewing in the Horn of Africa? Let's bring in the State Department because only the US can talk sense to both Ethiopians and Eritreans.

And the need ran both ways. In December 2004, with the right-wing press baying for Annan's blood over the Iraq oil-for-food scandal, Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of State-designate, met with Annan and thanked him profusely for organizing a peacekeeping force in Haiti and elections in Iraq, neither of which the White House could have done by itself.

This is, ironically, precisely the point that Mark Malloch Brown, deputy secretary-general, made in his now- notorious speech. Malloch Brown, who over the last year has absorbed tremendous abuse inside the UN for championing Washington's point of view, accused the White House - but not only this White House - of practicing a "stealth diplomacy" that kept Americans in the dark about the UN's day-to-day utility, because "to acknowledge an America reliant on international institutions is not perceived to be good politics at home."

This formulation seems to me exactly right. Why else was Rice willing to generously thank Annan in private while remaining publicly mum as his career hung by a thread? The UN, as Malloch Brown also noted, is a cherished whipping boy for Fox News and its ilk. Why take on those who hold the whip in order to defend an organization with no constituency of its own?

This time around, the confrontation involves reforms, originally proposed by Annan himself, which would liberate the secretariat from the micro- management of the 191 members and allow the members to hold managers accountable for their performance. The United States is entirely on the right side of this issue.

Third World nations, many of which seem to prefer micro-management to effectiveness, are blocking change. Why are they so dug in?

In part, Malloch Brown observed, because of the increasingly common view that "anything the US supports must have a secret agenda aimed at either subordinating multilateral processes to Washington's ends or weakening the institutions."

I would put it less charitably: That view serves as the perfect pretext for Third World obstructionism.

In effect, a very real and troubling UN divide between developing and developed countries is being superimposed on a divide of Washington's making - between the United States and everyone else. Of course, the US will always stand apart at the UN; it is, as Madeleine Albright used to put it, "the indispensable nation." But, in the past, it has accepted modest limits on its freedom of action as the cost of keeping everyone else embedded in multilateral institutions. Now it doesn't. It holds on to "maximalist positions," as Malloch Brown asserted, when it "could be finding middle ground."

And now it is paying the price. The reform process has dissolved into an unsightly mess owing in part to deep differences among members over what the UN is for. But the United States' dismal standing in world opinion has tempted otherwise moderate nations to play to the gallery at home by twisting the lion's tail, and Washington's grudging or uncompromising position on issues has almost invited defiance from others.

Bolton insinuated that the administration was prepared to withhold a portion of US dues to the organization. Is that so - and all because a UN official had the moxie to criticize the White House?

In the past, Secretary of State Rice has quietly intervened to defuse crises provoked by her bellicose UN emissary. Will she do so this time? Or will she provide the definitive proof that Malloch Brown was right? LOS ANGELES TIMES

James Traub's latest book, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power, will be published in November