A UN Policy for the Next Administration

Charles William Maynes

From Foreign Affairs, July 1976

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Summary:  The power center of American foreign policy has seldom taken the United Nations very seriously. It has used the organization when convenient as an instrument for the pursuit of traditional foreign policy goals. Pursuing a global policy, U.S. officials may even have been surprised at the number of times they found a global body of use. Nevertheless, their resort to the United Nations was episodic, and they continued to regard it as marginal to the conduct of international relations.

Charles William Maynes is Director of the International Organization Program and Secretary of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The power center of American foreign policy has seldom taken the United Nations very seriously. It has used the organization when convenient as an instrument for the pursuit of traditional foreign policy goals. Pursuing a global policy, U.S. officials may even have been surprised at the number of times they found a global body of use. Nevertheless, their resort to the United Nations was episodic, and they continued to regard it as marginal to the conduct of international relations.

That attitude is now changing. Slowly, a realization is spreading among U.S. policymakers that even a debating society-and the United Nations is more than that-can have a very significant impact on international relations depending on the subject debated and whether those speaking have influence on actions outside the forum of discussion. U.S. officials increasingly realize that U.N. debates do have this impact. As a result, whatever their private feelings or public statements, American officials are taking the United Nations much more seriously than in the past.

All of which poses a dilemma for the United States: we are taking the United Nations more seriously precisely at a time when our prestige there has never been lower. Thus, what we need to do is to develop a strategy for increasing U.S. influence in an organization that will continue to affect American foreign policy.

To begin with, Washington must make an effort to understand an apparent contradiction in American attitudes toward the United Nations, a body we dismiss in one breath as powerless and denounce in the next as dangerous. An explanation for these conflicting attitudes can be found if we face up to the fact that on some subjects the United States now has no choice but to take the United Nations much more seriously whereas on other subjects it still has considerable discretion. The difference between disarmament issues on the one hand and economic issues on the other illustrates this point.

In the disarmament field, U.N. debates continue to have little impact outside the United Nations, principally because the superpowers maintain a virtually unchallenged monopoly of real power. It is a relatively futile exercise for the smaller powers to denounce the major powers, because the latter, if offended, will simply refuse to take the views of smaller states into account in their own bilateral negotiations. Everyone understands that U.N. debates have little leverage in the "real world" of disarmament talks. No one, therefore, gets terribly excited about "irresponsible" resolutions or debates in the General Assembly.

If we turn to economic issues, the United States is faced with a completely different reality. There, because of increased resource dependence, the rise of multinational corporations (now vulnerable to expropriation), and much greater interdependence in trade, the former economic hegemony enjoyed by Western countries like the United States has been significantly weakened (though not destroyed). The gap between U.N. rhetoric and the "real world" has significantly narrowed as a result. American policymakers are increasingly aware that U.N. debates can have a major impact on ...

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