American Abdication?

October 10, 1960

In his speech before the U.N., President Eisenhower came close to abdicating American responsibility and power and putting our consciences in the hands of other nations. “Only through the United Nations organization and its truly democratic processes,” he declared, “can humanity make real and universal progress toward the goal of peace with justice. . . . The United States stands squarely and unequivocably in support of the United Nations and those acting under its mandate.” This seems to pledge ourselves in advance to support every U.N. decision and action, wise or unwise, moral or immoral.

On Jan. 10, 1957, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, not commonly regarded as an “isolationist,” observed to Congress, concerning what he even then considered an Administration tendency to pass the buck to the United Nations, that the U.N. is only “a forum. And if a great nation like the United States looks to the United Nations to form American policy, instead of fighting in [and outside?] the United Nations for what the American Government believes should be done, then we have committed an unprecedented abdication of responsibility and power.”

‘A FOOL’S PARADISE’

About a month before that, Viscount Cherwell, a nuclear scientist, declared in the House of Lords: “I hate living in a fool’s paradise, and though, like everyone else, I wish the U.N. could work, I have come reluctantly to the view that in its present form it cannot.” He went on to point out that in the Assembly, “the ultimate governing body of the U.N. . . . 5 percent of the world’s population can carry the day against the other 95 percent; and 10 percent could claim a two-thirds majority. . . . Half the population of the world is represented by four delegates, the other half by 75.” It is “nonsense,” he concluded, for nations to submit their “vital interests to a body so absurdly constituted.”

That the situation has been improved by the additions since that time may be doubted. Among the seventeen new nations just admitted to the U.N. are Cameroon, Niger, Gabon, and Chad. Those four can now outvote the United States, Britain, and France.

We do not need to ask, as a purely hypothetical question, what will come of putting our conscience in the hands of other nations. We already know. Going along with the Organization of American States, we have just broken off diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic, because it is ruled by a “dictator,” but have not dared to break off relations with either Castro, who daily seizes American property, arrests our citizens, and vilifies us, or with Khrushchev, the butcher of Hungary, who sanctioned, in the President’s words, “the shooting down of American aircraft last July 1 over international waters, the apparent killing of four of its crew members, and the imprisonment of two others on trumped-up spy charges.”

WHY WE LOSE FACE

Because we lack courage even to break off relations with our sworn enemies, and because they are all in the U.N., we are obliged to admit them here, give them police protection, give them use of our own unparalleled communications channels to broadcast their hate campaigns against us, and treat them with all the punctilio that protocol demands. Of course we continue to lose face in the world. Have we also lost our national self-respect? Or are we sleepwalking in some utopian dream, wandering around in a moral fog?

The only solution the Administration can seem to think of for every problem in South America, Asia, Africa, or wherever is to give away more of the American taxpayers’ money in “aid.” Now we are to give it away through the United Nations, at the behest of the Secretary-General. Meanwhile we ignore the heavy deficit in our balance of international payments as a result of our foreign aid, or the renewed outflow of our gold as a result of this and our cheap-money policies. We have forgotten that the greatest service we can perform for world economic stability is to keep ourselves strong, and to keep the American dollar above suspicion. It is a disservice to the free world to allow confidence in the dollar to be undermined.