The United Nations is at death’s door. That’s not news; the U.N. always seems to be on the brink. This time, however, it’s our very own ambassador, John R. Bolton, who’s preparing to unplug the respirator.

After a senior official of the U.N. 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 led by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., vowed to starve the United Nations unless it acceded to a long list of “reforms.” In September 2002, President Bush asserted that the United Nations would become “irrelevant” should it fail to join the United States in disarming Iraq.

You have to wonder why the United Nations 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 United Nations while writing a book about it, and I was always struck by how much business the United States and the United Nations 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 United States 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 United Nations for championing Washington’s point of view, accused the White House – but not only this White House – of practicing a “‘stealth’ diplomacy” that kept the American people in the dark about the U.N.’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 United Nations, 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 United States 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 United Nations 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 U.S. will always stand apart at the United Nations; we are, as Madeleine Albright used to put it, “the indispensable nation.” But, in the past, we have accepted modest limits on our freedom of action as the cost of keeping everyone else embedded in multilateral institutions. Now we don’t. We “hold on to maximalist positions,” as Malloch Brown asserted, when we “could be finding middle ground.”

And now we are paying the price. The reform process has dissolved into an unsightly mess owing in part to deep differences among members over what the United Nations 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.

Lest anyone think that he was kidding, Bolton insinuated that the administration was prepared to withhold a portion of U.S. dues to the organization. Is that so – and all because a U.N. 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 U.N. emissary. Will she do so this time? Or will she provide the definitive proof that Malloch Brown was right?