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The United Nations: After the Cold War
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18284 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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10 / 1990 |
1,845 Words |
| Author
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Michael Lind
Michael Lind, a foreign policy analyst in Washington, D.C.,
writes frequently on American diplomacy. |
The end of the Cold War has brought hopes for a rebirth of the United Nations. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Soviet Union joined the United States in Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq and imposing global sanctions. In the past year, the General Assembly, encouraged by the United States and the Soviet Union, has made some important concessions to Western interests, such as endorsing the importance of democracy and free markets in development. Soviet-America cooperation in the Security Council, and more moderate behavior by the Third World majority bloc in the General Assembly, suggests to some observers that the United Nations can at last undertake the mission of global crisis management and global cooperation for which it was designed.
There can be little doubt that the worst days for the organization are behind. During the Cold War, the Security Council could never function as intended, because the Soviet Union used its veto power as a permanent member of the Security Council to thwart actions opposed by its client states or by General Assembly blocs that Soviet diplomacy sought to estrange from America and the West.
Deadlock in the Security Council was not the only result of the Cold War. A “nonaligned” bloc of Asian, African and Latin American countries sought to exploit the rivalry between the Western alliance and the Soviet bloc. As long as their defection to the Soviet camp was a credible threat, Third World countries could attempt to extort concessions from the United States and its allies. These concessions might take the form of Western economic subsidies to the Third World (such as the tax that the Law of the Sea treaty would have levied on Western business concerns) or Western acquiescence in measures promoting the interests of particular influential Third World countries (such as India, which would gain in military influence from the adoption of General Assembly resolution calling for a “Zone of peace” without Soviet or American forces in the Indian Ocean).
The Third World bloc in the UN also sought to portray the West and the Soviet bloc as morally equivalent, distracting attention from Soviet imperialism - and the dictatorial and repressive nature of many Third World governments - by ritually denouncing Israel and South Africa and mechanically opposing U.S. military action.
For these reasons, successive U.S. administrations treated the United Nations with disdain, if not contempt. Indeed, two U.S. ambassadors to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick became heroes to
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