The Role of the United Nations in the East-West Dispute

Abstract

The United Nations inherited the Cold War situation and has been the victim of the East-West dispute. It has adjusted remarkably well to that dispute and has played an important role in preventing the East-West conflict from turning into a third world war. The preservation and further development of its capacity to do that in the future are crucial. The great powers, around whose wartime unanimity the United Nations was built, with the partial exceptions of the United States and the United Kingdom, have proven themselves un worthy of the powers given them in the Security Council. When the Soviet use of the veto to impede action was no longer tolerable to the other nations, the locus of power in the United Nations was shifted from the Security Council to the General Assembly. Changes in the Secretariat and the General Assembly recently proposed by the Soviet Union would extend the veto to those bodies. It seems to be the overwhelming wish of the rest of the nations to prevent this; they have dem onstrated greater determination than before to support the Secretary General and to resist those changes. Inasmuch as the principal weapon of the United Nations must be moral force, it is important to prevent the crystallization in the world of blocs against which the combined forces of the rest of the nations in the United Nations could not prevail.—Ed.