The U.S. in the UN
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
The U.S. in the UN Nation Against Nation By Thomas M. Franck Oxford. 334 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet CBS News UN correspondent For the United Nations life does not begin at...
...sees it...
...At present, Washington is making a fresh approach to the United Nations in the person of a new permanent representative, General Vernon Walters...
...Thus the number of UN members has grown to 159, each theoretically equal in sovereignty, however unequal in size, strength and stability...
...Still the visible alternatives are not attractive...
...The international political landscape has been strikingly transformed, and the UN mirrors this world—untidy, contentious, hypocritical, and often murderous as itis...
...ambassador is to be effective, he or she must endeavor to balance the armory of sticks and carrots.' I commend this book to Walters, and I recommend it to everyone else in the UN community as well...
...To be sure, we have not had a nuclear holocaust, yet conventional wars have taken an estimated 20 million lives since 1945...
...and like-minded states had reason to believe that the Western political philosophy enshrined in the UN Charter could adequately cope with change and conflict...
...We hoped that our wartime alliances would endure and keep the peace, but a power struggle quickly developed between Moscow and Washington that has been unending...
...Then change got out of hand...
...the machinery of the principal UN organs was to function even-handedly...
...Thomas M. Franck's Nation Against Nation coolly, comprehensively and unsparingly analyzes the World Organization, and tries to save it from both its friends and enemies, who are sometimes indistinguishable...
...The identity crisis that plagued the UN at birth—is the institution an "it," a truly unified force, or a "they," a loose collection of disparate countries—has if anything intensified in the four decades since the conclusion of the founding conference in San Francisco...
...U Thant, who meddled in Vietnam, received few bouquets...
...Franck regards such rampant anti-Americanism, and the related problem of the double standard, as partly irrelevant, partly real and partly imaginary...
...Admittedly, wholesale reform is not impossible as matters stand...
...The old balance of power failed to prevent two World Wars, and exists today in uncomfortable caricature as the balance of terror...
...In the beginning, a wave of wishful thinking swept the United States into the World Organization...
...Its secretaries general have on occasion achieved considerable success (as well as spectacular near-misses) working behind the scenes...
...Nor is the UN sacred, and a time could well come when leaving it would be warranted and wise...
...The Reagan Administration has tended toward assertive, unilateral superpower action in an increasingly multilateral world...
...Trygve Lie, the first man to hold the office, generated skepticism early on, but the United States eventually made truly extraordinary efforts to retain him...
...Franck argues that playing the game of diplomacy with more muscle and greater skill would minimize damage in the UN and make better use of its opportunities...
...Franck, in command of the welter of material, makes his points bluntly, wittily and with historical depth...
...With a loud, clear voice—and policies consistent with what we say—America must ally itself with the reasonable expectat ions of peoples everywhere," writes Franck...
...One of democracy's great accomplishments, peaceful decolonization, brought a flood of new nations...
...At the same time, the harsh words gushing forth in debate and resolutions have hardly been meaningless: They helped bring down the Portuguese empire and have annoyed us profoundly in certain cases—for example, Cuba's long-running effort to show that the United States is guilty of practicing colonialism in Puerto Rico...
...Of his predecessor, Ambassador Jeane Kirk-patrick, Franck writes: "She has won grudging admiration from her colleagues for telling the unvarnished truth as the U.S...
...Instead, the Charter has been pretty freely interpreted by the members...
...Successive secretaries general have won American approval only to the extent that their views and our government's were in harmony...
...The United States, meanwhile, has come to see itself and its friends as punching bags, unfailingly pounded in the General Assembly by a monolithic, hostile maj ority that has replaced the comfortable pro-Western club of the 1940s and '50s...
...The United States has been an active applicant, too...
...American pressure—cutting aid to punish hostile votes—may have played a role, but probably a less important one than the stepped up lobbying effort that seems to have improved the climate in the last year...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet CBS News UN correspondent For the United Nations life does not begin at 40, it merely staggers on...
...In the General Assembly, the Soviet Union, attending to the minutest details, seduced the new states into playing its version of the parliamentary game, notably bloc tactics and backscratching...
...The author has no doubt that the United States should remain in the world body...
...The Soviet bloc excels at filling slots...
...It is a private meeting place (perhaps for Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev this fall...
...It is a public forum, a political barometer, a peacekeeping option...
...Moreover, universal peace was not our sole illusion...
...The UN Charter was to nourish democratic values while adapting to changing times, like the U.S...
...If aU.S...
...Constitution...
...Indeed, he is still criticized for capitulating to the demand of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser that the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) be removed from the Sinai in 1967, just before the Six Day War...
...On the other hand, the Ambassador has displayed what may be a professional penchant for gratuitous truculence, the personal put-down and indifference to the feelings of others that has made her by far the most personally unpopular representative, ever, of the U.S...
...Actually, though, today's majority is not automatically anti-American...
...the Secretariat was to be a civil service above national bias...
...In addition, cries of "neoim-perialism" and "neocolonialism" for many years rallied the so-called non-aligned group behind variations of the proposition that their troubles were wholly the fault of the West, especially the United States...
...it has voted with the United States and against the Soviet Union on a number of issues, including Afghanistan and Kampuchea...
...We have always professed "a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind, after all, and the Charter basically embodies the ideals of the Declaration of Independence...
...The Secretariat resembles an international city hall weighted down by the relatives, supporters and potential rivals of the globe's leading politicians, and by officials who in effect represent their own countries...
...Nothing has ever happened in the Assembly or the Security Council, he observes, that by itself hurt the strategic interests of the United States...
...The United States does not have to be at a disadvantage in the UN...
...Until 1960 or so, the U.S...
...You vote for my antiapartheid resolution, I' 11 back your pro-Palestinian resolution, and we'll get together on "Zionism is Racism...
...It is rather surprising, though, to see Franck join in the criticism: In reality, Thant had no choice and no member, including the United States, asked the General Assembly or the Security Council to delay UNEF's departure...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 6
