The Challenge at the UN
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
COPING WITH THE NEW MAJORITY The Challenge at the UN BY RICHARD C. HOTTELET United Nations Gresham's Law seems to be in charge again at the United Nations. Naturally enough, its apparent...
...Prime movers appear to have been the PLO and Syria...
...In a precise, coldly convincing explanation of the United States presence in South Korea, he quietly played what is still the highest trump in the UN game—American power in the pursuit of legitimate interest...
...Jawboning is not enough...
...Parallel to this, Kissinger's efforts to call an international conference that would focus on the energy problem alone came unstuck in Paris in April...
...Such issues as these raise the question of U.S...
...Politics is more volatile...
...In Daniel Patrick Moynihan this country has an eloquent exponent of the belief that facts and feelings should be laid out for all to see...
...That they occurred in connection with the Middle East War of 1973 complicated things in every way...
...Moynihan's approach has a great deal to recommend it, but it requires two things for best results...
...Automatic rotation of the Presidency had put Amin in the office...
...policy behind them...
...Thus, in August, Cuba tried to get the UN's Committee on Decolonization to take up Puerto Rico as a case of Yankee Imperialism, and to endorse a "national liberation movement" as the real voice of the Puerto Rican people...
...effectiveness in the United Nations...
...The job is to guide inevitable change into constructive channels...
...The fact is that the UN has always been an untidy institution, reflecting a disorderly planet, and today it is untidy merely in a different way...
...Not only did they vote against the resolution but they decided to use their diplomatic channels to lobby against its adoption in plenary session...
...Ambassador Moynihan was outspoken as always...
...India inquired if it constituted a threat, and the reply was Yes...
...Apart from the Moslem and Communist countries, and some radical African states, Chile, Brazil, Cyprus, Malta, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain voted for the proposal...
...Many will say the UN has seen only bad politics for the past 10 years...
...Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan read a mammoth statement for Kissinger (then completing the second Sinai disengagement) promising no miracles but offering concrete U.S...
...The perception of common danger and common cause is just not that clear...
...The United States, for its part, warned the Assembly that adoption of the anti-Zionism statement would be a serious mistake, giving anti-Semitism United Nations sanction...
...South Africa, however, has been excluded from the Assembly because of its racist apartheid policy...
...The world has changed in the past 30 years, in large measure because the U.S...
...Meanwhile, Kissinger's attempt to mediate a second Sinai agreement had collapsed a month earlier...
...Since then, a breakthrough has been made on setting up a fund to increase world agricultural production...
...Instead of talking about oil (which would have found all the rest of the world, including the developing countries, ranged against the petroleum producers), the Special Session discussed raw materials in general, terms of trade, development assistance, and The New Economic Order, the bombastic project announced to correct the economic imbalance between the industrial states and the raw material exporters...
...One can imagine their train of thought...
...The first casualty of this conflict has been not truth, which everyone espouses and no one really knows, but the cardinal principle of cooperation—that politics is the art of the possible...
...Postulating this kind of confrontation overlooks the fact that democracy is relative, even in highly industrialized, culturally homogeneous Western countries...
...Moynihan himself has described the underdeveloped nations as America's natural allies...
...Nothing like the Arab oil embargo and the price increase dictated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) had ever happened before...
...Another maximum American effort has gone into the Korean question...
...All indications in early 1975 pointed to a collision in the 30th General Assembly, if not in the Seventh Special Session on economic problems just before, that would tear the United Nations apart...
...Understandably, those who want the UN to serve at least as a forum of rational debate and serious political dialogue have responded with indignation, and some who swooned over the organization in earlier times now assail it indiscriminately...
...Arguing that American forbearance is too frequently considered a sign of weakness while Soviet postures of instant rage have a Pavlovian conditioning effect, he prescribed a stance of counterattack...
...Ambassador's words must be seen to have the resources of U.S...
...Early in 1974, U.S...
...Washington cannot expect to win every trick...
...This majority, moreover, includes states—such as many Latin American nations—that used to be staunch members of the Western bloc...
...Nevertheless, even after Vietnam and Watergate, this country remains pre-eminent...
...Whether one likes or dislikes the current shape of world politics, it cannot be ignored, and one will get nowhere by cursing it...
...The nine states of the European Community, which have shown sympathy for Arab aims in the Middle East (France recently allowed the PLO to open an office in Paris), were repelled...
...Link Israel with racism, hammer away at the notion and before long the new majority may be moved to do to Israel what it did to South Africa...
...In the first half of September, the Seventh Special Session convened and it was a model of decorum, even with Algeria's young firebrand, Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika presiding...
...and he saw the UN as a body wherein the despotisms of the Left and the Right, numbering well over half the memberhip, were assaulting the democratic minority...
...representative went on to say it was no accident that Amin was President of the OAU...
...Some were privately ashamed of the spectacle, but they felt compelled to rally in defense of the OAU and, inescapably, Amin...
...Some Western countries that voted for the first resolution abstained on the second...
...The multilateral diplomacy of today's world, as it can be practiced only through the United Nations, is neither easy nor necessarily, agreeable...
...When the vote was taken, India abstained, and the committee decided to postpone action until next year...
...This mutual interest must be defined and cultivated much more imaginatively...
...New power centers demand their due...
...More responsible African states may be reproached for not having changed the rotation machinery...
...General Assembly approval of a resolution equating Zionism with racism and committee adoption of two contradictory resolutions on Korea, along with Ugandan chief Idi Amin's appearance at this Assembly—as President of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), no less—certainly continue the absurd, outrageous, unprincipled behavior of the 1974 sessions...
...The maneuver enabled the Arabs and their friends to pull off the neatest trick of the year: preserving the Third World coalition of oil producers and the countries hardest hit by the new fuel prices...
...The oil producers and their allies (Brazil, India and Zaire, countries suffering terribly from oil inflation) insisted on a much wider frame of reference...
...The U.S...
...Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, feeling the time had come to mobilize the enormous power of the industrialized nations to meet the opec challenge, summoned a conference to discuss defensive and corrective measures against the oil producers...
...From that moment on, incendiary rhetoric on the economic side of the UN's work ceased...
...In this, the last two years are instructive...
...Alas, the U.S...
...A full-scale energy and raw materials conference is to be held in Paris in December...
...Puncture the hypocrisy of the tinhorn totalitar-ians, he seems to say, and the world will reject their false appeals...
...The process of deterioration continued into 1975—with the new majority coalition indulging itself in the assertion of increasingly elaborate privileges...
...This is strong diplomatic language...
...Yet individuals and nations respond to strength that has the self-confidence to overlook the irrelevant and the will to make itself felt...
...Both resolutions were adopted and sent to the General Assembly...
...consistency was a small price to pay to avoid antagonizing Moscow and Peking...
...When Idi Amin came to the UN and suggested the extinction of Israel, many if not most diplomats —including the Africans—agreed with Moynihan's description of the man as a racist murderer...
...has been successful in defending freedom, promoting independence and stimulating growth...
...It ignores, too, the constructive relations based on mutual interest that the United States has maintained with despotisms of different stripes...
...Yet so drastic an assessment of the democracies' position in the UN is not called for...
...The final decision will come later in the session...
...Little wonder the Soviet Union's Ukraine and Cuba joined in cosponsoring the resolution...
...But Algeria outflanked him by convening the Sixth Special Session of the UN General Assembly...
...another 16 were absent...
...Actually, it was an accident...
...Yet beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
...It did so by a vote of 70-29, more than the two-thirds margin needed for adoption in the full Assembly...
...Naturally enough, its apparent resurgence has provoked an equal and opposite reaction...
...And, whether there is or is not any connection, the Executive Board of unesco backed away from last year's insult to Israel...
...Two mutually exclusive propositions were put to the Assembly's Political Committee: One?sponsored by the United States and 27 other countries—endorsed replacing the present armistice with a peace agreement to be worked out between North and South Korea...
...He saw Israel under attack because it was a democracy, not because of its politics...
...The United States sulked through the meetings, letting it be known, together with the other industrial powers, that it would not endorse the various proposals: price-fixing cartels, unilateral confiscations of foreign investments, a system of indexation for raw materials...
...Chile, for instance, reportedly supported the statement in return for Arab leniency when the question of torture comes up...
...In Kampala in July, the radical Arabs' design to get the Africans aboard any expel-Israel bandwagon came to naught, while in August, the nonaligned nations' conference in Lima fudged the issue...
...Last month, the Assembly's Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee adopted a resolution labeling Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination...
...The Communist camp applauded heartily...
...The change lies in the emergence over the last 15 years of a new majority that often annoys or infuriates the Western community...
...This new approach seemed to make all the difference...
...objections as the posture of confrontation that gave the radical leaders of the Third World the chance to turn the UN game their way...
...Rhetoric is part of the UN scene and if Moynihan has sometimes overshot the mark, he has also hit bull's eyes...
...In this climate of political warfare, with the United States doing little more than admonish, scold and warn, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) head Yasir Arafat was received demonstratively, South Africa was excluded from the Assembly, and unesco took an essentially meaningless (and consequently, all the more deliberately injurious) swipe at Israel that raised the whole question of the politicization of the UN's specialized agencies...
...The U.S...
...It was probably too much to hope that the new mood would spread to the political side of the UN's work...
...But it was not so much the specific U.S...
...The new chic is to dismiss the UN as useless, mischievous or even dangerous...
...They led the developing countries into an orgy of vituperation against real or fancied suffering at the hands of "colonialists" and "imperialists...
...In a word Washington was prepared to discuss the proposition that raw material producers should have assistance in coping with wild and ruinous price fluctuations and that industrial countries should?without in any way accepting guilt or an obligation to make reparation —help the developing countries establish a broader economic base...
...In addition, those who deal with Israel?the United States, Egypt and others —will be tarred with the racist brush...
...Still, the United States has no reason to fear or to shun it...
...The first is careful aim...
...The immediate result was widespread indigestion...
...The UN's economic discussion turned serious when it was realized that the world's problems can be solved only with the full participation of the industrial nations, headed by the United States...
...They wanted to take up raw materials as a whole, development aid and changes in the international financial structure to help the emerging countries...
...The other, advanced by the Communist camp, ignored South Korea and suggested that peace be concluded between North Korea and the United States...
...once it became plain leniency would not be forthcoming, the Pinochet government announced it would abstain in the Assembly...
...Doubtful governments were told Washington would consider their vote for any such ruling as intervention in its internal affairs and an unfriendly act...
...cooperation in solving global economic problems...
...These, of course, were exclusively Western...
...lobbied strenuously against this preposterous undertaking...
...A great power gains respect by showing that it is willing to trade off interests but not principles...
...But as the dismal spring moved on, the United States showed signs of revising its position, and in May Henry Kissinger made things official...
...Human rights provided the excuse, but the effort was entirely political...
...Expulsion of Israel through frontal attack is impossible...
...As to raw materials, there is none more precious than food, and North America is the last granary the growing number of food importing countries can rely on...
...The second requirement is skillful coordination...
...Nearly a third of the committee, 27 members, abstained...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 23
