Chapter OneAverting World War III

At 2:30 p.m. on October 24, 1962, Acting Secretary-General U Thant, sitting at his desk on the 38th floor of United Nations headquarters in New York, sent an urgent message to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy, appealing for a moratorium to halt further action in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thant, a Burmese diplomat, had suddenly been thrust into the UN’s top job the year before, when his predecessor Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash in Africa en route to negotiate a truce in the Congolese civil war. Even though Thant had not been confirmed as secretary-general, he realized he had to act. His action to defuse an explosive crisis by using the authority of his UN office has never been given the historical acclaim it deserves.

At first, both Kennedy and Khrushchev reacted negatively and were even hostile to Thant for proposing that — in order to end the crisis caused by the Soviets secretly sending nuclear arms to Cuba — the Soviets must voluntarily suspend shipments and the United States lift the naval quarantine it had imposed. Thant made his message public. Tensions rose through the night as cables flew back and forth between Washington, Moscow, and New York.

Suddenly, Kennedy saw a way for the Soviets to stop their shipments without looking like they had capitulated to the United States. He asked Thant to send a second message to Khrushchev stating that if the Soviets would hold up shipments, the United States “would be glad to get into conversations about how the situation could be adjusted.” Meanwhile in Moscow, Khrushchev was also having second thoughts about the value of Thant’s first message and sent the secretary-general a cable stating that he accepted the UN intervention, “which is in the interest of peace.”

Diplomacy was moving fast and Thant stepped up the pressure. On October 25, at 2:26 p.m., just before the Security Council took up the issue at what became one of the most famous UN meetings ever held, Thant sent out his second set of appeals. He asked Khrushchev to instruct Soviet vessels en route to Cuba to stay away from the quarantine area; he simultaneously asked Kennedy to instruct US vessels to avoid direct confrontation with Soviet ships. To both leaders, he stated, “This would permit discussions of the modalities of a possible agreement which could settle the problem peacefully.”

Down in the Security Council chamber, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson confronted Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin with photographic evidence of the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Stevenson thundered: “Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no — don’t wait for the translation — yes or no?” When Zorin refused to answer, Stevenson’s blistering attack ricocheted around the world: “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over.”

The public and backroom negotiations intensified. On October 27, The New York Times blared: “UN Talks Open: Soviet Agrees to Shun Blockade Zone Now.” The crisis ended a few days later when Khrushchev agreed to verifiably remove his missiles from Cuba in return for a United States non-invasion pledge. There was also a deal, kept secret at the time, in which Kennedy agreed to decommission aging US Jupiter missiles from Turkey six months later. Thant, who had been keeping in touch privately with Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, flew to Cuba to try to establish a UN mission to ensure no further work would be done on the nuclear sites. But a humiliated Castro refused to permit entry to UN inspectors. American and Soviet negotiators, meeting regularly at the UN headquarters over the next few weeks, completed the process of getting the missiles out of Cuba.

This diplomatic manoeuvring became the UN’s finest hour. Had the United States and the Soviet Union not come to a negotiated settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is little doubt that World War III would have begun, with nuclear missiles raining down on the American and Russian populations. It would have been a catastrophe of epic proportions. Fortunately for the world, both Kennedy and Khrushchev seized the opening Thant had provided. When it was over, the United States and Soviet governments sent a letter to Thant expressing, in diplomatic understatement, “appreciation for your efforts in assisting our Governments to avert the serious threat to peace which recently arose in the Caribbean area.” President Kennedy added his own note of praise: “U Thant has put the world deeply in his debt.”

Though Thant’s intervention was the crucial act in resolving the crisis, the American government took the credit. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the media, “We were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy blinked.” In other words, all this had been a game of nuclear chicken. The American public loved it. Thant, never a showman, returned to his duties.

Roosevelt Started UN

Thant’s decisive involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis came at a time when the prestige of the United Nations was still at the high point it enjoyed from its birth in 1945. The American government and people, except for a small band of hardcore isolationists, loved the UN. Their affection stemmed from the faith that two of their presidents, Roosevelt and Truman, put in the organization even before the UN Charter was adopted in San Francisco on June 26, 1945.

Without the extraordinary vision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United Nations would never have originated. In the darkest days of World War II, Roosevelt sold the idea of a permanent body of states to avert future wars to his war-time allies, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin. The failure of the League of Nations, started after World War I, was fresh in everyone’s minds. But Roosevelt persisted and assembled a team to start writing a charter for the new organization.

When he died suddenly on April 12, 1945, plans were well advanced for the launching of the organization at a conference in San Francisco only a few weeks later. The advisors of Harry Truman, who, as vice-president, succeeded Roosevelt, tried to persuade the new president to postpone the event to give himself more time. But Truman was just as enthusiastic as Roosevelt and ordered the conference to proceed on schedule. When all the deliberations had finished, Truman flew to San Francisco for the final plenary session and proclaimed: “Oh, what a great day this can be for history.”

The battles over the charter, composition of the membership, and rights given to the Security Council were blistering. Fifty-one countries were admitted as original members. Eleven (now fifteen) of them were given seats on the Security Council, which was charged under the Charter with “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” The major powers — the United States, the Soviet Union (now Russia), the United Kingdom, France, and China — gave themselves permanent seats on the Council and the power to veto any substantive resolution, an act criticized to this day. The veto provision has been used 234 times (mostly by the former Soviet Union and now Russia and the United States) since the UN officially came into existence on October 24, 1945. There is no doubt it gives these states unwarranted power, but it is virtually certain that, fearing that any one of them could be overwhelmed by a vote forcing them into unwanted action, they would not have joined without it. On the other hand, because Security Council resolutions are binding with the power of international law, they take on great weight with the power of the permanent five members (P5) united behind them.

The United States, continuing to display a dynamic faith in the organization, agreed to pay 25 per cent (now 22 per cent) of the organization’s bills. John D. Rockefeller, the American financier, donated the land on which the UN headquarters in Manhattan stands. At first, there was a reasonable amount of harmony. The General Assembly’s first resolution established a commission “to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy.” But the United States and Soviet distrust of each other, never far beneath the surface in the negotiations over the Charter, burst out into the open as each side struggled to maintain superiority in the burgeoning nuclear arms race. The UN, still in its cradle, had to contend with the new Cold War.

Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld became the leading diplomat in the world, respected by East and West as he tried to contain small wars in Africa. Shortly after his sudden death, President Kennedy, paying tribute to him in the General Assembly, said the UN was “the only true alternative to war.”

Cooperation Lost As World Changed

Though the Security Council was often paralyzed, UN peacekeeping, started in the Suez in 1956, was beginning to take hold. The mood was bright in 1961. Kennedy and Khrushchev authorized their principal arms control negotiators, John M. McCloy and Valerian Zorin, to negotiate a framework for comprehensive disarmament. In five months, the American and Soviet teams produced a document, known as the McCloy–Zorin principles, which committed the two superpowers to negotiate an agreement to “ensure that disarmament is general and complete and war is no longer an instrument for settling international problems.” Arms would be reduced, in a reliable and verified way, to the level needed to maintain internal order. In addition, they agreed to “support and provide agreed manpower for a United Nations peace force.” The framework document, agreed to by both the United States and the Soviet Union, was unanimously endorsed by the General Assembly.

But cooperation dwindled as the world changed dramatically in the 1960s. President Kennedy was assassinated, as were his brother Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The mood turned downward in the United States as the Vietnam War escalated, the UN’s de-colonization processes brought into the organization many small states with new demands, and the clamour of the “developing” countries for economic equity grew louder.

In the early 1970s, the UN, with non-aligned states — those in neither the Soviet nor American spheres of influence — now in a majority, took an action that tarnished its reputation in the West. With growing Arab membership and the Palestine Liberation Organization granted observer status, the General Assembly adopted a resolution that determined “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The non-aligned states insisted that the displacement of Palestinians, and Israel’s refusal to allow refugees to return, violated UN principles, but key Western states held that the resolution questioned Israel’s very legitimacy. The resolution was rescinded in 1991, but not before poisoning relations between some Western states and much of the rest of the UN. Tempers also flared when the developing countries began to push back at what they considered an economic stranglehold maintained by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the UN’s chief financial instruments. OPEC’s big jump in oil prices in 1973 sent shivers down the spines of Western leaders, who were now becoming fearful that their control over the UN’s direction was being challenged.

By the 1980s and the election of Ronald Reagan on a right-wing wave, United States’ disenchantment with the UN set in. Critics painted the UN as an anti-Western, Third-World club. They began to characterize the UN as, in US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase, “tyranny of the majority,” which described how the new nations were regularly outvoting the West. Reagan’s ambassador to the UN, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, conveniently forgetting the United States possessed a veto preventing the Security Council from doing anything the United States didn’t like, complained that the American position is “essentially impotent, without influence, heavily outvoted, and isolated.” One of her associate ambassadors, Charles Lichenstein, shocked the assembly by declaring that the UN ought to get out of the United States, insultingly adding: “We will be at the dockside bidding you farewell.” This broadside was made worse by Reagan stating that Lichenstein’s remarks reflected the feelings of most Americans.

Congress began delaying payment of the United States’ dues to the UN, crippling the organization’s ability to do sound planning. For years, this sourness went on and probably reached its peak when US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, piqued that Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had answered her claim that the United States was the “indispensable nation” by saying the UN was the “indispensable organization,” convinced President Bill Clinton to veto Boutros-Ghali’s second term.

When Clinton withdrew American troops from a peacekeeping mission in Somalia in 1994 after the American people expressed outrage at photos of dead US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the UN suffered another setback. The harrowing images were a significant factor in Clinton’s reluctance to have the UN put a strengthened military force into Rwanda to stop the genocide in which 800,000 people were killed in 100 days.

The mass slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda by the Hutu majority was the worst atrocity since the Holocaust of World War II. The Canadian general, Roméo Dallaire, commanding a small UN peacekeeping force on the ground, appealed in vain to headquarters for a stronger contingent. Later, after becoming secretary-general in 1997, Kofi Annan acknowledged the failure of the UN and the international community in Rwanda: “The international community and the UN could not muster the political will to confront [the evil]. The world must deeply repent this failure.”

Tragically, another UN failure followed Rwanda. Although the Security Council had declared Srebrenica a “safe area” in the Bosnian War, Bosnian Serb forces massacred 7,000 Muslim boys and men and expelled 20,000 civilians in a crime of “ethnic cleansing.” Years later, a civil court in The Hague found Dutch UN peacekeepers guilty of turning over hundreds of Bosnian Muslim men over to Serb forces, who then slaughtered them. Again Annan wrote: “Through error, misjudgement and an inability to recognize the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the [Bosnian] Serb campaign of mass murder.”

Recovering Its Strength

The crucible of Rwanda and Srebrenica proved a turning point for the UN. Under Annan’s decisive leadership, tribunals were established to convict and punish the guilty, the International Criminal Court was formed, a high-level panel led by the distinguished Algerian diplomat, Lakhdar Brahimi, set new standards for peacekeeping in the post–Cold War era, a new approach to peacebuilding was developed and, most importantly, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine adopted. As well, the Millennium Development Goals to eradicate the worst forms of poverty were established.

All this work, which I will describe in greater detail in later chapters, lifted up the UN and set it on a new trajectory. The clumsiness and uncertainty of UN efforts have been replaced with a greater sense of confidence that the organization can indeed build the conditions for peace in the world — even if the selfish interests of the P5 still hold back strong collective action. Kofi Annan was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership, and this honour may well have given him the strength to state — to the chagrin of the Bush Administration — that the 2003 US War in Iraq was “illegal” because it was not authorized by the Security Council.

Under Ban Ki-moon, who became secretary-general in 2007 after serving as South Korea’s foreign minister, the UN has settled down and regained its stability. It is not as dynamic as some would want, but its critics have trouble faulting it. When President Barack Obama chaired the unprecedented Security Council summit on nuclear weapons in 2009, the full involvement of the United States in using the UN to deal with the greatest threat to human security was on dramatic display. It was a striking illustration of the confidence the UN has regained from the American government and people. A 2013 global survey by Pew Research showed 58 per cent of Americans have a favourable view of the UN, an increase since Obama’s election. The favourable rating was almost twice the 31 per cent of Americans who disfavoured the UN.

Pew surveyed 39 countries and found a median favourable rating of 58 per cent. In Russia, however, the favourable rating was only 28 per cent with 53 per cent of Russians dissatisfied. The UN, it seems, still has a lot of work to do to prove itself to all the world’s people.