since the Suez crisis to keep that web of tension from exploding in spontaneous combustion. In the Southwest Pacific, mediation by the United Nations recently helped avert a war over West New Guinea. On Wednesday of last week [May 1] a special United Nations team of civilian administrators, backed up by a battalion of Pakistani troops, completed the delicate and dangerous task of transferring the territory to Indonesian administration, while reserving the right of the Papuan people to decide their own destiny later on. In Rwanda and Burundi, in the darkest middle of the Dark Continent, the United Nations helped two more nations to make the transition from trusteeship to independence. A United Nations administrator on the ground is now helping these newest African nations to get used to nationhood. Even that doesn't complete the inventory: In Cambodia, Yemen, and the Malaysia area, United Nations conciliators have worked quietly in recent weeks to substitute talk for fighting as a means of settling disputes. U.N. Financial Problem Each month, each week, almost each day brings a new piece of business for the world's only general-purpose peace agency. The handling of trouble is never without cost. But neither is the cost of overwhelming dimensions. This year the U.N. system spent rather more than half a billion dollars in all currencies. Total U.S. contributions to all U.N. activities, including specialized agencies and special programs like Palestine refugees and the Children's Fund, was $235 million in 1962. It seems and it is a great deal of money. Yet it would buy only one-half of a nuclear powered aircraft carrier; it would pay for storing less than one-half of our surplus food and fiber for 1 year; it would cover less than 2 percent of the cost of the Marshall Plan and less than one-half of 1 percent of our defense budget for next year. It is instructive to reflect that the total cost of the UNEF in the Middle East, in the 62 years since Suez, is just about the same amount-$120 millionthat it cost us to put U.S. armed forces ashore in Lebanon during a few weeks in 1958. There is a financial problem in the United Nations, of course, and a most serious problem it is. Too many countries are not paying their dues on time; too many countries have made no payments to the Congo operations. The biggest delinquents, of course, are the Soviets and their satellites; they figure the U.N. has cut across their vital interests, and they may be right in their analysis. Thirty-three other countries are also delinquent. We have said repeatedly that we will take a very narrow view of our "fair share" of U.N. operations as long as the other members of the group are not paying the shares they themselves have voted to pay. Yet there are some curious and disturbing themes in the public debate on this important issue of U.N. financing. There is, for example, the notion that we should never pay more for any international activity than the 32.02 percent we pay for the regular housekeeping budget of the U.N. There are two kinds of cases to which this notion cannot, in conscience, be applied. One is the case of an international aid program, where the cost cannot of course be shared by all members of the U.N., since most members of the U.N. are recipients, not contributors. That is why our contribution to enterprises like the U.N. Special Fund, the Expanded Techni cal Assistance Program, and the Children's Fund are typically around 40 percent rather than 32 percent. The other case, under ở bate at this moment, is major peace and security operations. Many members of the U.N. feel, and not without reason, that the U.N. Charter made the larger countries largely responsible for peacekeeping. They resist paying their regular budget share for operations remote from their own interests which do touch the interests of great powers like ourselves. It is an unattractive position on their part, perhaps, considering the "all for one and one for all" philosophy which permeates the charter. But it is a political fact of life in the General Assembly of the United Nations. An equally immutable fact of political life is a vocal concern in our own country, as reflected in the Congress, that the United States is being "had" and that we should not pay as large a portion of the U.N. peacekeeping costs as we have been paying. The actions of U.S. delegates to the U.N. reflect this growing sentiment. Our task is to find a solution to this complex problem that takes into account both the strong American desire to reduce the American share and the strong desire of the poorer countries to have the richer countries pick up the check. We will have to find a way of reconciling the realities of international politics with the realities of American domestic politics. For if we do not, we will force the U.N. to abandon the Congo and Middle East operations. With a stroke of our dry fountain pen we could thus open another opportunity for the Soviets in the Congo and remove at great peril the cooling hand of the United Nations on the feverish brow of Middle Eastern politics. I cannot say what the U.S. position eventu ally will be. But one thing I do know: It would be plain silly to cease participating—a proposal that has been seriously made by people who see in the U.N.'s financial crisis another handle for their permanent and unremitting hostility to the development of international institutions. It was even seriously proposed last year in Washington that we should not make any payments to the U.N. unless the Soviets did. It would be hard to contrive a quicker or more effective way to deliver the U.N.'s future, and our own foreign policy, into the hands of the Communists. We also see a growing discussion in this country of instances where a U.N. agency failed to do precisely what we wanted it to do. There is a curious and, so it seems to me, unnatural assumption in some quarters that if we join a club and contribute one-third or two-fifths of its resources, that should give us 100 percent of the control over everything it does. I am not aware of any club, group, or association here in the United States that operates on this "40 gets you 100" theory. Yet we have heard it seriously proposed that if the U.N. Special Fund approves a single project for Cuba, we should vent our quite understandable spleen, not on Cuba or the Communists, but on all our friends around the world, by removing support from a U.N. agency which is mostly helping our friends. (We should also consider that, in the Special Fund as in the Children's Fund, the political balance of payments is still quite favorable. The "developed" countries of the Soviet bloc have put considerably more money into both these U.N. funds than the "less developed" Communist countries have got out of them in the form of technical aid projects.) I certainly share, as I am sure we all do, the deep sense of frustration and embarrassment that has produced the Cuba pathology in our politics this year. But surely we cannot afford to be so naive as to think that we can make fractional contributions to international agencies and have total control of every decision these agencies make. And even if we were that naive, we are surely not ready to throw in the sponge and abandon these useful organizations because, taking the U.N. Special Fund as an example, they only help the people we are also helping in 286 cases out of 288. American Ability in International Politics These matters are well worth discussing. They go to the root of responsible action in international affairs. The world of international organizations has never been an easy one; it just happens to be absolutely necessary that we build a web of international institutions if we are going to establish, as we must for elementary reasons of survival, a growing sense of international community with law and operating agencies to match. Because there are more countries than ever, and more of them are acting more independent than ever, we just have to be brighter and more effective politicians than ever in this tough and endlessly fascinating game of multilateral diplomacy. It is time for us to stop having a crybaby reaction on those very few occasions when, in the international free-for-all, somebody lands one on us. about We know as much we know more politics than any other people in the world. We should; we have so much of it in our own communities and in our States and in our national government. We therefore have excellent training for international politics. So let us hear no further suggestions that Americans should quit in the middle of the game, no |