Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume XXV, Organization of Foreign Policy; Information Policy; United Nations; Scientific Matters

175. Memorandum From the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs (Cleveland) to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy)¹

Washington, July 28, 1961.

SUBJECT

• When Not to Use the U.N.

At lunch on Tuesday you asked if I thought there were any problems which should not be taken to U.N. You were called to the telephone before there was an opportunity for more than a general reply. It was a good question and deserves a more complete answer.²

There are obviously certain situations in which it is clearly in the United States interest that a problem be taken to the Security Council or the General Assembly. There are other situations in which a country, or group of countries, decides to take a question to the U.N.—and where such a move is either clearly in the U.S. interest or where it would be against our interest to oppose it with sufficient strength to defeat it.

I hope it will not surprise you if I agree that there are situations, in which it is so clear that a question could be handled better outside the U.N. that the U.S. should firmly chart that course! There are many good illustrations in the last category, of which the Antarctica Treaty and the bulk of our economic aid are two.

I don’t know that it would be useful to attempt any definitive guidelines. But one can project four general types of situations in which it would be in the U.S. interest to take a question to the U.N.

a. If a crisis arose in which it was urgent that one or more U.N. members be reminded emphatically (and publicly) of their obligations under the U.N. Charter—and it appeared that sufficient support was available to do this.

b. If a crisis had arisen, or was impending, in which it appeared that a U.N. observer, policing or military operation was both a desirable and a possible way forward. In this respect we should not underestimate the extent to which certain types of U.N. field operations serve as a “school for political responsibility” for the newer countries that provide contingents. This has been the case in the Congo.

c. If the U.S. needed to muster international support for a particular political or economic approach to a question and was convinced this could be done most effectively through the U.N. Operating through a large number of bilateral channels can sometimes be equally (or more) cumbersome.

d. If an operational program was being projected in which there was a genuine need of cooperation from a majority of the U.N. membership.

All of this raises the question as to whether once U.N. gets in on something, it ever gets out. There are some good examples:

1. In 1946 the U.N. Security Council was instrumental in getting the Soviet troops out of northern Iran.

2. During the period 1947 to 1949 the U.N. got a Dutch-Indonesian cease-fire in Indonesia, and carried through to a political settlement.

3. Between 1946–1949, a U.N. commission helped bring guerrilla activity in Northern Greece to a close.

4. In 1958 during the Lebanon crisis the U.N. went into Lebanon with a 640 member Observer Group. The operation was terminated successfully in December of that year.

We could use some more examples of U.N. getting out of a situation with the problem having been “solved”. (We are working right now on a device for dropping the Hungary item.) But in some of the places where U.N. is conducting a holding, or containment, operation (UNEF in the Middle East) it is costing the U.S. much less, financially and politically, than would be the case in any program which the U.S. could maintain by itself or in combination with its formal allies.

Even with the natural “deformation professionelle” of my present job, I would not hold that the UN should get into everything; indeed, I have frequently written nasty things about people whose one preoccupation in foreign policy discussions is to complain that “the U.N. is being bypassed.”

What I would say is this:

(a) In every major diplomatic problem these days, including every so-called “country problem”, there is a bilateral aspect and a multilateral aspect. We should therefore be tooled up to handle, on each issue, both the bilateral diplomatic operations and the multilateral diplomatic operations. On Cuba the UN aspects were not in the advance planning at all; but on Berlin, Laos, disarmament, and of course the Congo, the UN angle has been thoroughly explored well ahead of time. Sometimes contingency planning on the U.N. aspects turns out to be a dry hole; it has been so far on Laos. But it’s always a potential gusher—and on occasion it gushes very suddenly, as it did in the current case of Bizerte.

(b) Because there is potentially a UN angle to every major subject, we have a serious problem of rationing the load we place on the Organization. Up to a point, loading more onto the U.N. helps enhance its capacity to act. Beyond that point, overloading can be dangerous if it makes the machinery creak too badly or exposes the U.N. executive to too many different kinds of political attack at one time.

1. Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Subjects Series, United Nations (General), 1/61–7/61, Box 310. Confidential. Drafted by Cleveland and Elmore Jackson (IO). Copies were sent to Secretary Rusk, Under Secretary Ball, Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs Johnson, and Policy Planning Council Chairman McGhee.
2. Bundy wrote “Noted” in the margin next to this paragraph.