Churchill

THE UN WILL FAIL TO MEET EXPECTATIONS

One of Churchill’s great disappointments of the interwar years was the failure of the League of Nations to fulfill its mission as a force for collective security, and he hoped its successor, the United Nations, would learn from the mistakes of the past. Looking back during World War II, Churchill concluded that the League had failed “because it was abandoned, and later on betrayed.” But Churchill never let his idealism conquer his realism, and he was one of the first statesmen to declare plainly that the United Nations was a failure.

Churchill had supported the creation of the United Nations in the hope that it would prove more effective than the League of Nations. In 1943 he wrote to his foreign minister, Anthony Eden, “We hold strongly to a system of a League of Nations, which will include a Council of Europe, with an International Court and an armed power capable of enforcing its decisions.” He was less certain that an effective global organization could be cobbled together quickly. President Roosevelt had originally hoped that a United Nations would emerge from the Yalta conference in 1945, but Churchill was skeptical: “I don’t see any other way of realizing our hopes about a world organization in five or six days,” he wrote to FDR. “Even the Almighty took seven.”

He was correct. The final drafting of the UN Charter was put off to a special conference in San Francisco in May, by which time Roosevelt was dead. Looking forward to the San Francisco conference, Churchill wrote, “It will embody much of the structure and characteristics of its predecessor. All the work that was done in the past, all the experience that has been gathered by the working of the League of Nations, will not be cast away.” But even as he was supportive, he sounded a wary note about the prospects for success: “We must labour that the World Organization, which the United Nations are creating at San Francisco, does not become an idle name, does not become a shield for the strong and a mockery for the weak.”

Churchill had two concerns. The first was that the UN would try to solve too many world problems at the global rather than the regional level. He thought the UN should be an umbrella organization, with most conflicts mediated by regional organizations and “kicked upstairs” to the UN Security Council only when those regional bodies failed. His second concern was that the UN would succeed only so long as the major powers—the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union—worked in harmony. “What happens,” Churchill asked in May 1946, “if the United Nations themselves are sundered by an awful schism, a clash of ideologies and passions? What is to happen if the United Nations give place, as they may do, to a vast confrontation of two parts of the world and two irreconcilably opposed conceptions of human society?”

By 1948 Churchill was already noting how the UN had been “reduced to a mere cockpit in which the representatives of mighty nations and ancient States hurl reproaches, taunts and recriminations at one another, to marshal public opinion and inflame the passions of their peoples in order to arouse and prepare them for when seems to be a remorselessly approaching third world war.” The Cold War division of the world created the very deadlock that Churchill feared, with the notable exception of the Soviet boycott of the 1950 Security Council resolution that authorized UN intervention in the Korean War.

Despite these publicly expressed misgivings, Churchill also kept faith with the original vision of the UN throughout the late 1940s. In 1947 he said, “We accept, without question, the world supremacy of the United Nations organization,” but the following year he observed that “it is still struggling for life and torn with dissention.” Churchill praised the importance of the UN at length in his Iron Curtain speech in 1946, endorsing especially one feature that was and remains highly controversial with Americans—a UN armed force:

The United Nations Organization must immediately begin to be equipped with an international armed force. In such a matter we can only go step by step, but we must begin now. I propose that each of the Powers and States should be invited to delegate a certain number of air squadrons to the service of the world organization.... [T]hey would be directed by the world organization.¹

As late as 1950 Churchill still expressed hope that the UN could provide genuine collective security through its own armed forces: “We are all agreed that the only hope for the future of mankind lies in the creation of a strong effective world instrument, capable, at least, of maintaining peace and resisting aggression. I hope we shall pursue... the idea of a United Nations armed force.”

Apart from American objections to an independent UN armed force under its own command, the Soviet veto ensured that UN-led collective security would seldom succeed. Early on, Churchill decried the Soviet “abuse” of its Security Council veto: “[I]t was never contemplated at any time that the veto should be used in the abrupt, arbitrary and almost continuous manner that we have seen it used.”

Churchill reiterated his fears about the United Nations in 1947 in a speech in New York, where he was the guest of Henry Luce, the president of Time, Inc.

The League of Nations made a far better start than the present UN, and the prospects for peace were brighter ten years after the first world war than they are now, only two-and-a-half years after the second war. But the lack of willpower and conscious purpose among the leading states and former allies drew us upon those slippery slopes of weak compromises, seeking the line of least resistance, which surely led to the abyss. The same thing is happening now with greater speed, and unless there is some moral renewal and conscious guidance of the good forces, while time remains, a prolonged eclipse of our civilization approaches.

Even then, Churchill offered public support for the UN, insisting, “We must not allow ourselves to be discouraged by the difficulties. Nor must we become impatient at the shortcomings of this United Nations conception in these early days.”

But after the UN’s repeated failure in the 1950s to fulfill its mission and the decline of the General Assembly, dominated by autocratic or non-democratic governments, into an anti-Western forum for Third World radicalism, Churchill concluded that the organization’s inherent flaws—and not just the Soviet veto—guaranteed its failure. In a widely noted speech to the American Bar Association, meeting in London in 1957, Churchill declared,

I do not throw in my lot with those who say that Britain should leave the United Nations. However, it is certain that if the [General] Assembly continues to take its decisions on grounds of enmity, opportunism, or merely jealousy or petulance, the whole structure may be brought to nothing. The shape of the United Nations has changed greatly from its original form and from the intentions of its architects.... There are many cases where the United Nations have failed.

The end of the Cold War has not changed the United Nations. Russia, which inherited the Soviet Union’s permanent seat on the Security Council, has continued to block effective collective security actions. Today, the “oil for food” scandal in Iraq, the brutality of UN observers in Africa, and the spectacle of tyrannical states entrusted with responsibility for human rights vindicate Churchill’s prophecy of five decades ago.