OPINION:
Seventy years ago on Friday, 50 nations signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco. It was a document years in the making, thanks mostly to the efforts of President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, unfortunately, passed away a couple months before the historic event. FDR gave the organization not only its name but its mandate, namely, to stop aggressive military actions in and against nations “before they got started.” The U.N. document mirrored not only an American setting but even a similarity to the United States Constitution, with a Preamble that read: “We, the Peoples of the United Nations Determined.” And New York City was to be its headquarters.
Of the U.N.’s four goals, Roosevelt’s was foremost: “To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” Three remaining objectives focused on human rights, international law and quality of life.
The organization faced its first critical test of fulfilling its primary goal when in late June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea, leading President Harry S. Truman to order airstrikes against North Korean forces and to send arms to South Korea. He succeeded in getting the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution calling on member nations to utilize their troops in the endeavor. But, in retrospect, this was the first major and only successful test of the U.N.’s commitment to stopping aggression because the Soviet Union at the time was absent from the Security Council as a protest against the council’s refusal to recognize Communist China. Subsequently, veto threats from the Soviet Union and also China would make significant military commitments of members unlikely.
For that reason, the United Nations would not play an important role in easing and eliminating Cold War tensions. Instead, it focused on its other objectives designed to strengthen human rights and ameliorate disease and famine. That path resulted also in an enormous growth of bureaucracy — bringing reality to FDR’s fear that institutionalization would result in inertia and duplicative efforts. Eventually some 44,000 employees would service the organization and at a cost borne heavily by the United States. No city in the world provided a better lifestyle than the Big Apple for the bureaucrats and dignitaries of the eventual 193-nation membership in the General Assembly.
The dilemma was that long before there was a United Nations, efforts abounded from not only the United States but other developed countries to deal with elevating human rights and improving standards of living. Most were religious and private volunteer groups that relied on contributions from ordinary citizens rather than mandated government funds. Media mogul Ted Turner in 1997 may have given $1 billion over 10 years to the United Nations to advance its goals, but the truth of the matter is that private philanthropy has been a better bargain. Over the years Rotary International, for example, has volunteered its 1 million members throughout the world to immunize children in 170 countries against polio, no matter the existence of the U.N.’s World Health Organization.
The U.N. would get another opportunity to redeem its peacekeeping objective after the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Within a month, Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the U.N. would receive the Nobel Peace Prize from the Norwegian committee that declared, in the paraphrased words of The New York Times, that the U.N. “was rising at last to the mission for which it was created in 1945.”
Indeed, numerous committees and other entities, including Security Council resolutions, were quickly effected, but as the military efforts of the United States and its few other allies in Iraq and Afghanistan extended for many years thereafter, the U.N.’s commitment to a strong counterterrorism policy faded. Worse, leftist academics urged the organization to take a more “holistic” path in counterterrorism, focusing instead on improving conditions that, in their view, give rise to terrorism, such as political, economic and social grievances.
Little did such intellectuals realize that when the word “holistic” was coined in 1926, it could just as well have been “wholistic” that would have the same meaning. But because its seeming derivation from “holy” gave it an uplifting religious connotation, the word carried a higher imprimatur. Such nonsense in terms of its applicability to the U.N.’s mandate against aggression, however, was not lost on Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, who served two terms beginning in 1953, “The U.N. was not created to take humanity to heaven,” he said, “but to save it from hell.”
• Thomas V. DiBacco is professor emeritus at American University.
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