United Nations

United Nations (est. 1945). President Franklin D. Roosevelt foresaw the need for “Four Policemen”—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China (France was added later)—to order the post–World War II world and repel all attempts at aggression and violence. Meeting in San Francisco in 1945, the founders of the United Nations tried to fulfill that vision by creating a Security Council with five permanent members charged with saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

The UN Charter set up a military staff committee—consisting of the chiefs of staff or their representatives from the five permanent members—to take over the strategic direction of any military operation of the Security Council. Although this committee has met regularly for more than a half century, it has never directed any UN military operation. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union could never agree sufficiently on military issues to share a joint command. Even after the Cold War, this kind of cooperation proved impractical. Yet, despite an inert military staff committee, the United Nations has been heavily involved in military action.

In one instance, the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950, the Security Council did act like a team of Roosevelt‐inspired policemen. The Council condemned North Korean aggression, called on the world to aid South Korea, and authorized a UN command under U.S. Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur. But the United Nations managed to do all this only because the Soviet Union was boycotting sessions of the Security Council to protest the denial of a Council seat to Communist China. Although fifteen other countries dispatched troops or air support to Korea under a UN flag, the Americans commanded and dominated the UN force and fought the three‐year Korean War as if it were their own.

Aside from the accident of the Soviet boycott during the initial Korean crisis, the United Nations had no significant role in dealing with the Cold War. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, for example, the United Nations served as no more than a theater as U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson displayed photographic evidence of the Soviet Union installing missiles and launchers in Cuba. And Secretary General U Thant earned only contempt from President Lyndon B. Johnson during the late 1960s for trying to mediate an end to the Vietnam War.

The United Nations dealt instead with crises on the periphery of the Cold War. A major innovation in UN work arose from the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Looking for a way to ease the British, French, and Israeli troops out of Egypt after their ill‐fated intervention, Dag Hammarskjold, the urbane Swedish bureaucrat who headed the United Nations as secretary general, persuaded all sides to accept UN troops in their place. That had never been done before. In a remarkable feat of management and energy, Hammarskjold and his chief aide, the African American Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche, put together in one week the United Nations' first peacekeeping force—6,000 troops from 9 countries. The United States offered surplus helmets, which were quickly painted blue and passed to the troops, the first “Blue Helmets,” as UN peacekeepers would come to be known.

In 1960, the United Nations dispatched Blue Helmets to the former Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to restore law and order out of bloody chaos and replace the Belgian troops, who no longer had any place in an independent African country. Hammarskjold, who would die in a plane crash while on a Congo mission, interpreted Security Council resolutions as broadly as possible and directed his troops to put down the secession of Katanga. The suppression was so controversial and bloody, however, that UN peacekeepers would not engage in military offensives for another thirty years. Quiet patrolling of cease‐fire lines in trouble spots like Cyprus (between Greek and Turkish Cypriots), the Sinai (between Egyptians and Israelis), and the Golan Heights (between Syrians and Israelis) would become the hallmark of UN peacekeepers, earning them the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.

The character of UN peacekeeping was transformed by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War. Euphoria over the Persian Gulf War of 1991 contributed to the change. Although this war was not officially declared a UN war as the Korean War had been, the Security Council played a key role with resolutions authorizing the United States and its Coalition partners to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. The war persuaded UN diplomats and bureaucrats that the Security Council, as long as the United States and Russia agreed, could now literally attempt anything. Some analysts felt that Franklin Roosevelt's dream would be realized at last.

The United Nations found itself dealing with a host of crises in different ways: monitoring human rights violations, supervising elections, creating democratic institutions, feeding the hungry, as well as policing the peace in such flashpoints as El Salvador, Cambodia, Angola, Haiti, and Rwanda. But its new confidence was swiftly shattered by ill‐fated missions to Somalia and Bosnia.

When eighteen U.S. Army Rangers died in Mogadishu in October 1993 during their abortive manhunt for a Somali warlord, President Bill Clinton decided to withdraw all U.S. troops, crippling the mission. Although the fallen rangers had operated outside UN command, aides of Clinton unjustly put the blame on Secretary General Boutros Boutros‐Ghali, despoiling the image of the United Nations in American eyes. That image worsened in the Bosnian crisis (1992–95). The United Nations proved incapable of halting Serb aggression and protecting Muslim civilian populations from massacre in towns that had been designated “safe areas” by the Security Council. This impotence stemmed from the failure of the United States and its European allies to agree on a strategy for dealing with Serb aggression. UN peacekeepers found themselves patrolling Bosnia under the authority of scores of contradictory toothless resolutions from the Security Council. When the United States brokered a peace agreement at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, NATO troops supplanted the UN peacekeepers and enforced the agreement.

The animosity toward the United Nations so intensified in the United States that Congress refused to pay all the assessments that Washington owed, precipitating a financial crisis. UN diplomats and officials commemorated the fiftieth anniversary in October 1995 in a depressed mood, convinced that the United Nations no longer would have the funds or public support to mount many peacekeeping missions.
[See also Berlin Crises; Internationalism; Somalia, U.S. Military Involvement in.]

Bibliography

Brian Urquhart , Hammarskjold, 1972.
John Bartlow Martin , Adlai Stevenson and the World, 1977.
Robert J. Donovan , Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1982.
Brian Urquhart , A Life in Peace and War, 1991.
Brian Urquhart , Ralph Bunche: An American Life, 1993.
Stanley Meisler , United Nations: The First Fifty Years, 1995.

Stanley Meisler