Hits and Misses: A 25-Year Box Score

AFTER a quarter-century, the U.N. survives, but the question remains of how much it accomplishes beyond that. Secretary-General U Thant's own assessment is that "the U.N. has done well, but it has not done well enough." Certainly it is no longer a defense of the U.N.'s record merely to recall Adlai Stevenson's remark that if the U.N. were to disappear, something very much like it would have to be created. One of its most useful functions remains as a place for hostile big powers to meet and, if they so desire, to use U.N. machinery to carry out the results of their compromises or deals. The U.N. can no doubt be credited with numerous successes, but its failures have been discouragingly frequent. In the process, it has all too often raised hopes falsely and generated cynicism with its impotence.

Some of the U.N.'s more important hits and misses:

KEEPING THE PEACE: Kashmir, Cyprus and the Congo have all been U.N. successes. In the Middle East, a U.S.-backed General Assembly resolution successfully cooled the Suez crisis of 1956, but that plus was wiped out in 1967. When Cairo demanded that the U.N. pull out its 3,400-man Emergency Force, U Thant swiftly complied rather than try to stall for time. It was one of the more spectacular misjudgments of Thant's flaccid, nine-year stewardship. As a result, Egypt began mobilizing near Israel's borders, and the Six-Day War was on. In the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Nigerian civil war and the war in Indochina, U.N. impact has been nil.

DECOLONIZATION: Again some hits, but a few strikeouts.

The U.N.'s existence has smoothed the transition of new nations from colonial status to independence. But U.N. condemnations have had no effect on white-minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa; Pretoria has ignored resolutions canceling its mandate in South West Africa.

DISARMAMENT: Though the U.N.'s Geneva Disarmament Committee has sponsored treaties on the peaceful uses of the seabed and outer space, the major milestones of arms control--the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968--were initially worked out by the U.S. and the Soviets. The prospects for future arms control depend on initiatives by Washington and Moscow, not the U.N.

ECONOMIC ASSISTANCE: A hit. Attempts to cajole the developed nations into committing 1% of their G.N.P.s to economic aid have not been entirely successful (only France, surprisingly, meets the goal; the U.S. figure is closer to one-half of 1%). But donor nations, among them the U.S., are more and more willing to channel aid funds through multinational organizations like the World Bank.

FOOD: A qualified hit. New seeds and techniques promoted by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization have helped increase world food production by 50% since the end of World War II. But close to 50% of the world's 3.5 billion people are still under-or malnourished.

HEALTH: More hits. The World Health Organization's global disease-eradication programs have made considerable progress in the control of malaria and other diseases.

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