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Annan warns against go-it-alone diplomacy
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Annan renewed a call to expand the 15-nation Security Council and took a dig at U.S. opposition to a plan to add 10 seats.
Bush administration officials have argued Washington should use the United Nations only to serve its national interests.
But Annan said it was crucial to organize U.N. bodies "in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong."
"It is only through multilateral institutions that states can hold each other to account," he said.
The United States has historically been a leader in human rights, noted Annan.
"When it appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused," he said in an apparent reference to charges of abuse at U.S. prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq's Abu Ghraib.
Truman, who ordered two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, learned from that experience that security from then on "must be collective and indivisible," Annan said.
"All civilization is at stake, and we can save it only if all peoples join together in the task," Annan said.
"You Americans did so much, in the last century, to build an effective multilateral system, with the United Nations at its heart. Do you need it less today, and does it need you less, than 60 years ago?"
(Additional reporting by Irwin Arieff at the United Nations)
