Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and the United Nations have both been heavily engaged in nation-building and have developed their own distinct approaches to the conduct of such missions. In the aftermath of its early and widely publicised failures in Somalia and Yugoslavia, the UN's reputation for competent nationbuilding was seriously damaged, and demand for its services fell off noticeably. More recently, the US reputation for competence in the field has suffered as a result of setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. A new study by the RAND corporation indicates that UN-led operations tended to be smaller, shorter, less expensive and, on average, more successful than those led by the United States. This divergence in performance can be explained in part by the greater inherent difficulty of some of the US-led operations, but is also a product of the UN's greater success in learning from experience.