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Both leading presidential candidates promise a new emphasis on multilateral engagement and problem solving, but Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama have sharply different views on the relationship between the U.S. and the United Nations.

Obama has promised to work through the UN to address problems ranging from poverty reduction to peacekeeping to constitutional reform in Iraq, while McCain wants to create a new League of Democracies. Although he says that the new organization “would not supplant the UN or other international organizations,” McCain believes that a League of Democracies, led by the U.S., would be more effective than the UN at dealing with difficult issues. “It could act where the UN fails to act, to relieve human suffering in places like Darfur,” McCain says.

Rather than circumventing the UN, Obama says that “the United States should play a leading role in the United Nations, including by pushing to implement important reforms. I believe our ability to effectively lead the UN is undermined when we do not fulfill our financial obligations to the UN.”

Not only is the U.S. sometimes slow to pay its dues to the UN, but it is also hundreds of billions of dollars short of meetings its obligation to pay its share of UN peacekeeping operations that have been so important in helping to restore order in places like Liberia.

Obama has also embraced the UN’s Millennium Development goals, which promise to make major reductions in extreme poverty, hunger and child and maternal death rates by 2015. “When I’m president, they will be American goals,” Obama has said.

I realize that few, if any, voters will base their vote on a candidate’s policies toward the UN. But the candidates’ views on the UN illustrate how they see America’s role in the world. Obama wants to use American leadership to reform and improve the UN, strengthening its ability to find cooperative, multinational solutions to problems. McCain wants to use American leadership to work around and overshadow the UN by working primarily with our democratic allies to resolve problems in Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe and other countries that aren’t democracies.

Of course, neither candidate rules out unilateral action when necessary to keep the U.S. safe and secure. Both candidates call for an increase in the size of the U.S. military, although the need to use U.S. troops could depend on America’s ability to resolve problems diplomatically, either working alone, with our allies or through the UN.

There are many things to criticize and to change at the UN, but for all of its frustrations and foibles, it remains the best-positioned organization to craft multi-lateral solutions to trans-national problems, such as climate change and nuclear proliferation, as well as difficult regional issues involving conflict, refugee flows and disaster response.