The U.N.'s Mid-Life Crisis

By Evan Thomas.

When the representatives of 50 nations gathered in San Francisco four decades ago to create the United Nations, they invested the newly begotten global organization with the dreamiest hope of mankind: "To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Some 130 wars and more than 16 million fatalities later, the question is not whether the U.N. can fulfill its utopian promise--all too obviously it cannot--but what role, if any, it can play in the future.

The organization's continuing symbolic importance will be reaffirmed this week, when the largest gathering of world leaders in history--some 80 heads of state and government, including President Reagan, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India --congregate at U.N. headquarters in New York City to honor the 40th anniversary of the ratification of the U.N. Charter. Reagan and about 25 other leaders are expected to sit down together on Wednesday at a diplomatically designed round table in the delegate lounge for what may be the ultimate power lunch. Throughout the week, the visiting potentates will deliver uplifting speeches and debate such pressing matters as arms control and the upcoming Geneva summit. They will surely create a security nightmare for the thousands of U.S. Secret Service men and police arrayed to protect them, as well as tie up Manhattan traffic with their motorcades. Less certain is whether they can breathe new purpose and vigor into an institution that many observers believe is slowly slipping into polarized irrelevance.

The U.N.'s birthday commemoration is "not a celebration," insists Ambassador Herbert Okun, one of ten U.S. delegates. "The United Nations is in a mid-life crisis." Though the organization's welfare and development agencies have done much to relieve human suffering around the globe, its core political institutions, the Security Council and the General Assembly, have degenerated into forums for ideological posturing.

As often as not, the tirades are aimed at the U.S. Fed up, the Reagan Administration has moved to distance itself from the world body. In the past year, the U.S. has threatened to slash its hefty contribution to the U.N.'s budget unless it gains more control over how the money is spent, has dropped out of the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and has refused to submit to the jurisdiction of another U.N. offshoot, the International Court of Justice. Last week the White House almost canceled President Reagan's speaking engagement at the U.N., scheduled for this Thursday, after some Third World nations demanded that Palestine Liberation Organization Leader Yasser Arafat be invited to speak as well. Only when a confrontation threatened to wreck the festivities did Arafat's sponsors relent.

The U.S. itself is largely to blame for the unrealistic expectations that greeted the birth of the U.N. during the last days of World War II. Ashamed that Washington's refusal to join the League of Nations after World War I had doomed that earlier bid for collective security, American leaders lavished praise on the new global body. The U.N. Charter "can be a greater Magna Carta," intoned John Foster Dulles, a delegate to the San Francisco conference.

Under the charter, the responsibility for keeping peace lies with the Security Council, whose permanent members are the five wartime allies--the U.S., the U.S.S.R., Britain, France and China.* The cold war, however, quickly deadlocked the meetings, as the Soviet Union routinely vetoed U.S. initiatives. When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Moscow happened to be boycotting the Council. Only because of that Soviet blunder was the U.N. free to raise a force, mostly U.S.-manned and U.S.-led, to drive out the Communist invaders. Since then, the U.N. has never forcefully intervened in a war to restore peace.

Today the Security Council exists mostly as a place to let off steam. Former Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick has called it a "Turkish bath." Laments Brian Urquhart, Under Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs: "There are moments when I feel that only an invasion from outer space will reintroduce into the Security Council that unanimity and spirit which the founders of the charter were talking about."

Blue-bereted U.N. peacekeeping forces do serve as a buffer between potential combatants in a few global hot spots. Multinational U.N. forces patrol the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, as well as the no-man's-land between Greek and Turkish Cyprus. But U.N. peacekeepers have failed to cushion nations from attack on several occasions, most infamously when the U.N. pulled its troops out of the Sinai Peninsula at the insistence of Gamal Abdel Nasser just before the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel in 1967. Scoffed former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban:

"The U.N. is an umbrella which folds up every time it rains." The superpowers, meanwhile, have brushed aside the U.N. in waging their bloody conflicts in Viet Nam and Afghanistan.

In the early days, the U.N. was dominated by the Western powers. But as fading empires shed their colonies in the '60s, the developing world gained a greater voice that the U.S. was often slow to acknowledge. Says former Ambassador (now U.S. Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "Our biggest failing at the U.N.. . .is that we have never been able to think in terms of political coalitions." In the U.N.'s General Assembly, dubbed a "town meeting of the world" by former Secretary-General Trygve Lie, each nation--from the Seychelles (pop. 65,000) to China (pop. more than 1 billion)--has an equal vote. As the number of U.N. member nations mushroomed from 50 to 159, the so-called nonaligned nations ganged up on the U.S. and its surrogates, most notably Israel, while the Soviet Union sat back and cheered. The Israel bashing reached grotesque heights in 1975 when the General Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. The U.S., in the meantime, became "essentially impotent," as Kirkpatrick put it, "without influence, heavily outvoted and isolated."

Reagan Administration officials have been openly scornful of the U.N. Former U.S. Alternate Delegate Charles Lichenstein publicly invited the Soviets and other member states "seriously to consider removing themselves"--and the U.N. itself--"from the soil of the United States. We will put no impediment in your way," he acidly continued, and the U.S. delegation "will be down at dockside waving you fond farewell as you sail into the sunset." President Reagan chimed in that Lichenstein's remark had "the hearty approval of most people in America," although he quickly backtracked and declared that the U.S. had no intention of dropping out of the U.N.

Paring the U.S. financial contribution to the U.N., long a pet cause of right-wing politicians, has now become official U.S. policy. Unless the U.N. agrees by the end of 1986 to weight voting in the General Assembly according to the financial contribution of each member, the U.S. will cut back its share of the U.N.'s annual $806 million budget from 25% to 20%. When Secretary- General Perez de Cuellar protested to U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz that the organization could not afford such a drastic reduction, the normally diplomatic Shultz was uncharacteristically brusque. "That's too bad," he shrugged. "It's your problem."

The U.S. is hardly alone in its reluctance to pony up U.N. dues. The Soviet Union, for instance, refuses to pay for any peacekeeping forces. Nonetheless, critics charge that Reagan has gone too far. "This Administration couldn't care less about the U.N. or any multilateral institution," charges former U.N. Ambassador Donald McHenry. Particularly during the tenure of McHenry's predecessor, former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, the Carter Administration was somewhat more patient with the demands of the developing world. The departure of the highly outspoken Kirkpatrick and her replacement as U.N. Ambassador by Vernon Walters, a cagey old diplomat, may serve to smooth U.S. relations with fractious Third World envoys (see box).

Defenders of the U.N. maintain that its real work is accomplished not in windy debate in the General Assembly but through the U.N.'s many far-flung agencies. Some deal with such mundane but important matters as the collection of weather statistics (by the World Meteorological Organization) or the standardization of international mail delivery (by the Universal Postal Union). Other U.N. agencies directly save lives. The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees claims that it has helped place some 25 million stateless people. The World Health Organization has eradicated smallpox from the planet and considerably reduced malaria in many tropical countries.

The money from U.N. welfare and development agencies, however, does not always reach its intended beneficiaries. Some African nations draw up "shopping lists" under the guise of program proposals, confident that U.N. officials will not probe deeply enough to find out that much of the aid for the rural populace is being siphoned off by the urban elite. In Third World countries, well-paid U.N. staffers tend to hole up in expatriate ghettos and rely on overly optimistic government status reports on their projects.

As in any other institution, bureaucracies become entrenched in the U.N. With only a handful of colonies left in the world, it would appear that the time has come to fold up the Decolonization Committee. Instead, that body voted itself $1.5 million last year for a series of junkets to the Third World to celebrate the 25th anniversary of a U.N. declaration calling for an end to colonialism.

The U.N. has made at least some small efforts to render its bureaucracy more efficient and less bloated. At the badly managed, Marxist-oriented UNESCO, "there is a breeze of change but not yet a wind," says a British diplomat. At U.N. headquarters, Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar has tried to cut down on the endless polemics: he has pleaded with the members of the Security Council to stop debating all the world's ills and address one or two global issues every year. He has tried as well to limit official reports to no more than 32 pages in an attempt to hold down the U.N.'s vast paper flow (last year, more than 1 billion pages).

Even at its talkiest, the U.N. does serve a useful purpose. It is an essential meeting place for the many countries that cannot afford to maintain embassies all over the world. Says a West German diplomat: "You can't invite 40 foreign ministers to Bonn." Apart from its function as a kind of global senate, Urquhart notes, the U.N. is ideally positioned to deal with "a whole series of new global concerns, on environment, water, food, women's rights, human rights."

Public opinion polls around the world show that while many people are disappointed by the U.N.'s performance, few would like to see it disband. Still, unless the U.N. tones down its rhetoric, it risks becoming "a poor- nations club that has seen better days," says Indian Diplomat Rikhi Jaipal. In the end, the U.N. is no better than its member nations. The institution will never begin to realize the dreams of its founders until its members devote less time and energy to airing differences, and more to resolving them.

FOOTNOTE: *Nationalist China was replaced on the Security Council in 1971 by the People's Republic of China.

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo and Marcia Gauger/ New York