The Stakes at the UN

...It would reflect the bankruptcy of Soviet Communism as an ideological system, and the unreliability of the fearful men in the Kremlin as joint senior partners in preserving the peace...

...The commercial aviation agreement, the consular convention, cultural exchange, the nuclear nonprolifera-tion treaty, and his own public restraint in discussing the Soviets while official Soviet organs reviled his motives and actions—these and other examples speak for themselves...

...but, since the President sets the course of foreign policy, one may justifiably start with him...

...How will the United States respond to the challenge...

...and the manner in which two of the most resourceful and hardnosed negotiators on both sides, Ambassador Goldberg and Deputy Foreign Minister Vassily Kuznetsov, marshalled an endorsement of the treaty at the resumed 22nd Genera) Assembly last spring, have provoked outcry and anguish in those nations whose full support is needed to make it work...

...AS THE 23RP GENERAL ASSEMBLY CONVENES The Stakes at the UN By Richard C. Hottelet United Nations The tragedy of Czechoslovakia hangs over the United Nations and may come to dominate the 23rd General Assembly, which begins its work on October 1. Whether it does, and in what manner, will say a great deal about today's world and about the UN machinery devised to keep the peace and to further human rights...

...imperialism...

...Over the past 14 months, since the Glassboro meeting of 1967, he has worked for practical and political measures that would create or expand common ground...

...The cardinal principles of the United Nations Charter are the peaceful settlement of international disputes, the inadmissibility of intervention in another nation's internal affairs, and the right of self-determination,- Every state outside the Communist camp considers the invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia a flagrant violation of these principles...

...In addition, Rumania and Yugoslavia have deplored the intervention...

...In theory, of course, Czechoslovakia's fate should be more passionately the concern of the other European nations...

...In either case, Soviet Ambassador Jacob Malik has already threatened that, as he put it, any further attempt to drag the Czechoslovak question into the United Nations "would only deal a grievous blow to its authority and prevent its normal operation...

...Taking the prime exhibit, the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, there is no reason to believe that the Soviet Union has the slightest interest in spreading nuclear warheads around...

...Arabs who excoriate Israel for its occupation of their territory were not prepared to draw any parallel of principle...

...They should take the initiative and start the diplomatic spade-work needed for political counteraction...

...a move to consolidate peaee and freedom in Central Europe in the face of imperialist subversion...

...Any man with the responsibility that rests on the White House will seek peace, and he will seek it with the only other power capable of upsetting the world balance...

...Is there any significant gain to outweigh this loss...

...Only the Soviet Union and its hard line friends dispute any need to consider the matter, which they describe as Richard C. Hottelet is the United Nations correspondent for CBS News...

...In a back-handed way, this is a testimonial to the UN's value as a forum of world opinion even when it is incapable of taking action against a violation of the Charter...

...Little or nothing can be said against the purpose of this treaty...

...No responsible American could afford to ignore the prospect that the relaxation of tension with the Soviet Union through various measures and attitudes might indeed lead to a decent end of an excruciating commitment...

...The fact that this is not true?and I have never heard anyone in authority in Washington claim that it was—does not make it politically less real as a suspicion or fear in the minds of foreign leaders whose nations' interests and security are linked more or less directly to the United States...

...It would conclude that if peace is to be assured until such time as the Russians can take their responsible place in a world system of law, all the other nations must join to build that system, inside the United Nations if possible, outside if necessary...

...Ambassador George Ball wielded words like rapiers as he punctured the Soviets' clumsy agrumentation in the Security Council...

...The nuclear nonproliferation treaty may have overshot the mark in a manner the Czech crisis makes sadly evident...

...The challenge facing the United States as it goes into the 23rd Assembly may be summed up in this choice: to continue with the illusion that despite momentary trouble there is a detente, or to find a new reasonable basis of hard reality on which to stabilize peace and restore the United Nations...

...In the 1964 financial crisis, the Charter was fractured when the Soviets imposed on the membership the principle that Moscow need not pay for what Moscow does not like...

...and had argued, possibly with reason, that forcing the issue in the United Nations might only aggravate the rage or the fear in the Kremlin responsible for the invasion...

...Since the Security Council is still seized of it, as the expression goes, any turn for the worse in Prague could bring it back to the Council without delay...

...To mention only one possible explanation—big enough, by the way —the Administration appears to have been convinced by direct high level assurances from Moscow, or in some equally persuasive fashion, that the Soviet Union wants to help bring the Vietnam war to a political settlement...

...As the Czech question headed for a Soviet veto in the Security Council on August 23, Chile's Ambassador Jose Pifiera applied all his peripatetic energy to promoting a Special Emergency General Assembly...

...even Cuba has been forthright enough to justify it in strategic terms alone as a necessary act of international piracy...

...All the while, they browbeat or bemused the large increment of young African and Asian nations that has changed the political makeup of the organization in the past eight years, both in the General Assembly and the Security Council, as the Western nations continued with the genteel diplomacy of yesterday...

...These are the issues, crystallized by the Czech crisis, now looming over the UN...

...He had no mandate to make policy, though...

...This is no time to revive obsolete rituals of the cold war, but a time to draw up a balance sheet of the new political world that the Czech crisis has revealed...

...It is not easy for an outsider to uncover the roots of this dilemma...

...There is then no safety for a country lacking adequate military strength or protective alliances...

...The Western nations, sharply and eloquently outspoken in the Security Council against Soviet aggression, saw no point in forcing a Special Assembly...

...But Washington has not conspicuously exercised leadership...

...There is no question that Johnson has assiduously pursued every last chance of an honorable understanding with the Soviet Union...

...At a time, then, when the logic, or illogic, of events highlights the cleavage of principle in a disorderly world, the United States finds itself whirling around the diplomatic dance floor with the Soviet Union in an old-fashioned waltz...

...The dilemma of the U.S...

...Much depends on how the United States faces up to this problem...

...Since Nikita Khrushchev pounded his old brown shoe in the 20th General Assembly in 1960, the Soviets have consistently and relentlessly worked to cut down its peacemaking and peacekeeping power...

...Nevertheless, as this is written, no one has yet made a move to add the case of Czechoslovakia to the agenda of the coming Assembly...

...One might expect the smaller nations—and the not so small, such as India—to be alarmed and outraged by this new fact of international life that makes them all the more vulnerable with their boundary disputes and their internal political, tribal and minority problems...

...the annual Soviet attempt to secure an unsafeguarded ban on the use of nuclear weapons and on underground nuclear testing—these and other agenda items seem more than usually routine...

...Fidel Castro will bear that out...

...He was doing his elegant best to ride the horns of an American dilemma that must be resolved in this coming Assembly, unless Washington wants to help the Kremlin show aggression does pay...

...Yet this hope could be pursued too far...

...They maintained—probably quite rightly—that so many countries would abstain from whatever toothless resolution of censure the Assembly might pass as to deprive it even of moral sanction...

...The Soviets never hesitated to use the threat that thwarting their desires would send the United Nations to join the League of Nations in the garbage can of history...

...lies in the need to oppose a regime now mangling the United Natons Charter, on which American policy is based, while indulging in the temptation to cultivate a private, not to say intimate, relationship with that regime for their mutual benefit and, hopefully, also for the world's...

...peacekeeping, now just the theoretical wisp of the central problem besetting the organization...

...In that furioso, the office of Secretary General was hamstrung, its initiative reduced to the vanishing point...

...Naturally, the subject has been discussed...

...Last year, his upswing in the public opinion polls after Glassboro may have suggested to the full-blooded politician that such a course was profitable...

...The Charter structure has no meaning when self-defense is expanded to cover the Soviet action...

...These countries have too much concern for their security to think it adequately safeguarded by a joint Soviet-American declaration in the Security Council resting largely upon a vague reference to the collective right of self-defense...

...And his Secretary of State is still pressing the Senate to ratify the most important Soviet-American joint effort of recent years, the nuclear nonprolifera-tion treaty...

...On the other hand, there is no reason to believe that if strategic consideration or fear of irrationality or whatever it is that moves Moscow's policy machinery dictates the contrary any treaty will be allowed to stand in the way...

...There is no doubt that the integrity of the organization is very much at stake...

...Today they apparently seek to insure that the UN cannot even discuss something against their will...

...What gives this hypothesis a practical bite is its corollary, that the Big Two—or at least the mysteriously motivated American partner —will not hesitate to sacrifice the interests of small nations to their own overriding needs...

...He failed utterly because of an overwhelming disinclination to become involved...

...The Soviets had, in fact, interestingly betrayed extraordinary sensitivity to any treatment of the crisis in the UN, making it one of the major and public points of the Moscow diktat that it be removed from the agenda, and snarling at all references to it in the Security Council...

...Korea, a subject the Communists will try to turn into an orchestrated attack on U.S...

...India, Japan, West Germany, Brazil, Switzerland, Italy and others have criticized it bitterly as discriminatory and oppressive...

...The former can only further corrode Western solidarity and corrupt the UN...

...Whether or not the issue of Czechoslovakia is formally placed on the agenda, it will figure prominently in debate...

...Not that one can see...

...It is certainly in the world's interest to create a legal system blocking the spread of nuclear weapons to the dozens of nations already technologically capable of developing them and, beyond that, to the scores more whose external troubles make them eager potential customers or clients...

...But the question legitimately arises whether this particular treaty serves the purpose best or even at all...

...They dwarf the other matters on the agenda, which, incidentally, do not include Vietnam because the Soviet Union opposes its inscription...

...Above all, and here the political effect is felt immediately, these countries take the conscientious collaboration of Washington and Moscow as a strong indication of a much farther reaching community of interest...

...The President's motives are probably more complex than the LBJ haters on the Right and the Left would concede...

...So far, however, their rather empty indignation and platonic protest have merely emphasized the leadership responsibilities of the United States...

...Moscow appears bent on neutralizing or destroying this forum, as it has crippled the other dynamic functions of the UN...

...Czechoslovakia and the shreds of the Warsaw Pact between Socialist brothers clearly make that point...

...So the treaty provides no net gain...

...The way it was drafted, in close, almost exclusive concert by the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Many Africans who rage against neo-colonialism and concealed aggression in Africa expressed little more than polite regret over Czechoslovakia...

...Rhetoric and rage would be out of place...

...At the United Nations, that multiple barometer of crisis and confidence, diplomats representing allies and friends, not to mention the non-aligned, accept as a reality the notion that the two superpowers have entered into a marriage of convenience, dividing the world between them, staying out of each other's sensitive areas, such as Vietnam, the Middle East, Czechoslovakia and Cuba...

...This year, since March 31, he has been a lame duck concerned only with his place in history, which, in itself, is no small consideration...

...They may, this view goes, scold each other—after all, this is no love match—but they are working out practical cooperation ranging from scheduled airlines to anti-ballistic missiles and nuclear monopoly...

...Whatever Washington's efforts at detente have done for world peace, they have certainly created the widespread impression that a very special and cozy superpower arrangement has been established with the Kremlin...

...They also pointed out that, albeit under pressure, the Czechs themselves had demanded the matter be dropped...

...And, unfortunately, it is not enough to put on a disgusted look, or- to sniff in disapproval by cancelling a university band's visit to the Soviet Union and by pulling out of satellite trade fairs...

...They also persist in believing that the treaty restrictions imposed only on the non-nuclear nations relegate them to second-class status in nuclear research and technology...

...The anxiety neurosis and disorientation evident in the Western camp following upon this conclusion are genuine enough...

...Apparently, Johnson was willing to persist in the quest at personal meetings with Soviet leaders even after the invasion of Czechoslovakia...