Giving the UN Its Due(s)
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
AFTER THE COLD WAR Giving the UN Its Due(s) BY RICHARD C. HOTTELET AS THE United Nations General Assembly opened its 50th annual session in September, members heard British Foreign Secretary...
...Before long it had a two-thirds majority in the Assembly, and could enact expanded budgets full of pet programs that the big contributors had to finance...
...The reversal of our Revolutionary slogan must have rolled sweetly off a British tongue...
...a longtime NL contributor, was CBS News' UN correspondent from 1960 to 1985...
...Constitution...
...The Third World was transformed from a Greek chorus to a diverse collection of developing countries asking for help yet also assuming responsibility...
...It was a propitious time to revive the Wilsonian idea of a League of Nations, albeit in much improved form...
...But Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf, Haiti and possibly Bosnia, suggest that peace can be enforced by members acting as a posse under UN auspices—if they have the political will...
...And last year 39 countries did not pay a penny...
...In 1956, for example, the General Assembly, sidestepping a French and British veto following the invasion of Suez, created the United Nations Emergency Force (UN EF) as a buff-er between Egypt and Israel...
...The main structural alteration in 50 years has been the expansion of the Coun-cil's rotating membership from six to 10 countries...
...Unfortunately, the process for emendation written into the Charter rests on the past illusion of unanimity...
...THE END of the Cold War cracked the mold of 20 years...
...The East-West contest that had distorted everything faded away...
...Nevertheless, there is no denying the achievements of the United Nations in the field of peacekeeping and in conflict resolution through quiet diplomacy...
...or in 1945...
...Or that the efforts of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, making the difference between life and death for 27 million displaced human beings, are phenomenal...
...the political reality is acted out by politicians who seem to profit from bashing it...
...Protection of both, said Kant, should not be entrusted to government, which tends to enlarge its power, but to an alert public ready to protest against violations wherever they take place...
...There is no user manual...
...Taken into camp by the Soviet Union, the movement was egged on to ferocious rhetoric and wild resolutions equating Zionism with racism as well as denouncing "neocolonialism...
...When North Korea, with Soviet backing, invaded South Korea...
...What a change from 1945 when the UN...
...It acted through the Non-Aligned Movement, which soon showed itself to be "nonaligned" against the West, especially the United States and its friends...
...The problem lies largely with politicians grubbing for pork and pandering to voters by pressing for tax cuts and other variants of the proverbial free lunch...
...But the UN Charter was written in and for the world of 1945...
...A profound miscalculation was the assumption that the victorious wartime coalition would remain united to preserve the peace...
...The same year, however, the UN could do nothing about the Kremlin's intervention in Hungary...
...At the same time, it demanded economic, financial and political preferences...
...Inserting a peacekeeping force where there is no peace has proved a painful paradox...
...Also withered is the Military Staff Committee, intended to be the UN's arm against breaches of the peace...
...It has not worked...
...Rifkind did casually mention at one point that the total annual cost of the UN (roughly $9 billion) was one thirtieth of the United States defense budget...
...Perhaps most important, the UN has been the means for placing human rights on the international agenda...
...Certainly these pose danger enough to warrant determined collective action...
...But the so-called enemy states articles in the Charter, excluding Japan and Germany from the protection enjoyed by every other sovereign nation, are anachronisms that have been allowed to atrophy...
...disengagement is reflected in shrinking contributions for most UN activities, including some Washington had specifically endorsed...
...Troop contributors to peacekeeping operations await nearly $1 billion in reimbursements...
...Indeed, the UN hasneverpreventedtheUS...
...Representing the P5, as the permanent Council members are called, it meets for about 30 seconds once a month and does nothing...
...The UN is owed S3.78 billion in unpaid dues...
...Pearl Harbor had extinguished the old isolationism...
...If the American people are unaware that national effort is needed on a multinational scale to avert harm and serve the general welfare, it is because their leaders have not adequately explained what is at stake...
...from taking steps it deemed necessary, or forced it to act against its wishes...
...Consider climate change and environmental protection, population growth, resource depletion (particularly clean water), migration, resistant diseases, narcotics trafficking, to name only a few...
...Both it and the Assembly still operate under provisional rules of procedure adopted half a century ago...
...Moscow's stupidity in boycotting the Council over the refusal to admit Communist China made it easy for the United States to bring about the UN's first enforcement action...
...In his essay "On Perpetual Peace," Im-manuel Kant saw two keys to peace within states and among them...
...The United States, producing something like half the world's GNP and now its greatest military power, spoke for the West...
...No longer obsessed with averting world war, the UN now found itself coping with internal struggles, as in Yugoslavia, and the collapse of nations, as in Somalia and Rwanda...
...Not that the voters themselves are blameless...
...Shortly scores of new nations—former colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean—joined the UN and established a Third World bloc...
...mainly an American initiative, was launched with broad public approval...
...Or that the UN provided the framework to keep the historically unprecedented process of decolonization from exploding in disorder...
...Mission to the UN...
...It would seem...
...Rifkind went on...
...Despite polls showing broad popular support in the United States for the UN...
...U. S. administrations and public opinion grew increasingly critical...
...Suddenly everything seemed possible: peace making, peace keeping and peace enforcement...
...Once that proved not to be so, the Soviets tried to wreck onuc and to replace Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold with a troika...
...The other was civil rights: the right to share in political authority...
...The Security Council, where the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China were named permanent members and granted veto power, was given prime responsibility for maintaining international peace...
...All is trial and error...
...To be sure, the UN has managed some successful improvisations, notably in the area of peacekeeping...
...Moreover, the attitude extends beyond situations involving military commitment...
...Although too professional to name names...
...Such cases, though, further indicate that United States leadership is indispensable, and experience shows that American resolve ranges from unpredictable to nonexistent...
...AFTER THE COLD WAR Giving the UN Its Due(s) BY RICHARD C. HOTTELET AS THE United Nations General Assembly opened its 50th annual session in September, members heard British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkmd outline the organization "s sorry fiscal state...
...One was human rights: the right to life, individual dignity and nondiscrimination...
...In practice, too, the Charter requirement of a wide geographic mix on the UN Secretariat staff produced a sinking level of competence...
...Its central theme...
...No money" is a threadbare excuse...
...that an appropriate policy might be "no representation without taxation...
...This is no less true today than it was when Kant wrote 200 years ago...
...The European intrigues that had stifled the League were obsolete...
...to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," meant preventing World War 111...
...The West still controlled the chamber—although not for long...
...In 1960, when the Security Council authorized the United Nations Operation in the Congo (onuc), Moscow mistakenly saw it shoring up the regime of radical Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and providing a foothold in Africa...
...All 51 founding members accepted the veto as a condition of unity...
...Or that it has gotten people thinking about global concerns and has tugged at the world's conscience concerning ecology, the status of women and the plight of children...
...That the Kremlin had its own agenda complicated the situation immeasurably, but did not damage vital American interests...
...and subsequently seized as Press and Public Affairs Counselor at the U.S...
...Years earlier Franklin Delano Roosevelt had coined the name "United Nations," not out of sentiment but as a matter of coolly reasoned interest...
...Nikita S. Khrushchev threw the Assembly into an uproar by banging his desk with his old brown shoe while upbraiding Hammarskjold, but the troika effort failed...
...The U.S...
...again with American leadership, witness Eleanor Roosevelt and her advocacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...This at a time when new global challenges demand broad cooperation and coordinated responses...
...Had he wanted to be blunt, he could have noted that nothing so clearly expresses what has happened to the UN as the fact that the United States is today by far its biggest deadbeat: We are well over a billion dollars in arrears, and Congress continues to cut various contributions?including, as of the new fiscal year, a reduction of payments for peacekeeping costs from 31.7 to 25 per cent...
...President Harry S. Truman envisioned the document having the adaptability of the U.S...
...Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would have joined without it...
...But then, a free society gets the leaders and the government it deserves...
Vol. 78 • October 1995 • No. 8
