The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (49 page)

Such efforts from other states would come only from the end of November 1950 onward, when the dangers of an expanded war became manifest. By this time the Chinese Communists had intervened in Korea en masse and sentiment against them in the United States was highly inflamed. On 30 November the Security Council voted on a six-power resolution introduced eleven days earlier calling on China to withdraw its forces from the peninsula. Although nine members voted for it, the Soviet Union vetoed the measure (India did not participate), thus largely eliminating the Security Council as a serious force in the evolving crisis.
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On the same day, however, President Truman engaged in some loose talk at a press conference about the possible use of atomic weapons in Korea and this brought to a head determination among allies and neutrals to restrain the United States.
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The General Assembly played a key role in the effort. Facing an insurmountable roadblock in the Security Council, the Americans took their six-power resolution to the larger body. Now, however, NATO allies led by the United Kingdom and Canada, and Arab-Asian states led by India, exerted sustained pressure on the United States to avoid an expansion of the war. They lacked confidence in General MacArthur, whose only concern appeared to be complete victory in Korea even if the fighting extended into China, and they justifiably feared that Washington wanted passage of the six-power resolution to pave the way for another measure labelling China an aggressor and calling for sanctions. Fortunately for them, a delegation of the PRC had recently arrived in New York to discuss the Taiwan issue. Their effort focused on getting the PRC and the United States to accept a ceasefire. The latter seemed willing to consider such a step based on the thirty-eighth parallel, but the former, with events on the battlefield going their way, demanded a variety of conditions ranging from the withdrawal of US troops from the peninsula to a resolution of such issues as the fate of Taiwan, Chinese representation in the United Nations, and a Japanese peace treaty. With the United States unwilling to link a deal on Korea with concessions elsewhere, there was no hope of direct talks between the combatants, but the efforts of US allies and neutrals did produce a resolution calling for creation of a ceasefire group.
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The president of the General Assembly, Nasrollah Entezam of Iran, quickly constituted the group with himself and the Canadian and Indian delegates. On 15 December they succeeded in getting from the Americans ‘a generalized statement of conditions’ for a ceasefire that included establishment of ‘a demilitarized area across all of Korea approx[imately] 20 miles in width with the southern limit following generally the line of the 38th parallel.’
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This formal expression reduced prospects that, later on, Washington would submit to the temptation of another effort to unite the peninsula by force.

The process of the General Assembly also soaked up time. So long as the military situation deteriorated in Korea, to be sure, pressure would grow in the United States to expand the war. The worst conditions for the United Nations Command developed at the beginning of 1951, when Chinese forces launched an offensive southward across the thirty-eighth parallel and quickly recaptured Seoul. Yet this occurred while the United States was still bogged down in the General Assembly trying to push through a resolution condemning the PRC as an aggressor. That resolution finally was passed on 1 February, but in a form that postponed sanctions indefinitely and by which time the UNC had halted the Chinese advance and was executing limited counter offensives.
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This outcome kept the United Nations engaged in the diplomatic processes of seeking a ceasefire and, failing that, of considering additional pressure on China. It was not until 18 May that the General Assembly adopted a measure to apply such pressure, and that pressure amounted merely to a limited embargo.
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However, the measure, passed only under intense pressure from the United States, gave the Truman administration a victory of sorts at virtually no risk of military escalation beyond the peninsula and at a moment when domestic pressure was again at a peak in the face of General MacArthur’s dismissal and the Chinese spring offensives.
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The United Nations was only one of several factors in explaining why the war did not escalate beyond Korea. Of greatest importance was the fact that the top leadership of neither of the superpowers wanted such escalation, as they were uncertain of the outcome of a direct Soviet-US military clash and considered Korea to be of less importance strategically than Europe.
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On the other hand, had the Chinese succeeded in driving UN forces out of Korea, it is doubtful that the Truman administration would have resisted pressures to attack China, at least by air bombardment and naval blockade. Thus battlefield events, rather than UN diplomacy, were indispensable to American restraint.

Still, when the United States went to the United Nations in response to the North Korean attack in June 1950, it committed itself to a process that could not be lightly abandoned, especially given the overriding foreign policy objective of creating an orderly world and the multilateralism regarded as essential for its achievement. This process proved to be an added source of restraint through the darkest days of the war in late 1950 and early 1951. By giving American allies and neutrals a common venue through which they could engage and exert pressure on the United States, the United Nations helped to weigh the scales toward containment rather than escalation.

The General Assembly turned out to be a more critical setting than the Security Council simply because the absence of the veto in the former gave the Americans hope that, with patience, they could forge agreements that, however restrictive, represented more effective instruments of US interests than would emerge from a more independent policy. Such patience was far from universal in the United States among military professionals, legislators, or the general public, but President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson held to their course under sometimes extraordinarily intense pressure.

It is important to acknowledge, nonetheless, that insofar as the United Nations served as a source of restraint on the United States in Korea, it also encouraged the Communist powers to play hardball in negotiations for an end to the fighting. During the summer and autumn of 1951, the UNC was somewhat stronger than its enemy in Korea as is demonstrated by the gains it registered in limited offensives during September and October. Yet with the tentative agreement on an armistice line in November, it halted offensive action on the ground and, by the time the talks became stalemated on the prisoner-of-war issue in the spring of 1952, the Communists were well dug in and reinforced by expanded Soviet aid. A significant factor in American restraint within Korea during the previous autumn was pressure exerted by US allies at the UN General Assembly’s annual session, which opened in Paris in November.
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During the late summer and autumn of 1952, the Communists were encouraged to hold firm on the prisoner-of-war issue by the manoeuvres of several nations in search of a compromise, which culminated in the passage of an Indian resolution at the General Assembly in early December.
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The Soviet Union sharply rejected that resolution, but the overt pressure placed on the United States by the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and even some countries in Latin America, undoubtedly heartened the Communists in their hope for concessions later on.
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Ultimately it was the Communist side that made the key concessions, but only in early June 1953 after the new Dwight D. Eisenhower administration in Washington threatened in the face of allied and neutral opinion to the contrary to break negotiations and escalate the war both within and beyond Korea.
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One final point bears pondering in relation to the roles of the Security Council and the General Assembly. The presence of the veto in the Security Council unquestionably explains why from late 1950 onward the Korean crisis ended up in the hands of the General Assembly; however, one other difference between the two bodies raises the possibility that, even absent the Soviet presence, the former would have had difficulty sustaining the kind of intense bargaining that occurred in the latter during the winter of 1950–1 and the autumn of 1952. This difference is the non-permanent nature of a majority of the membership of the Security Council. India’s delegates were the most consistent strivers for mediation between the Soviet Union and the United States and between the United States and its allies and neutrals, yet India left the Security Council at the end of 1951. Another consistent activist, Canada, never served on the Security Council. Mexico, Peru, and Indonesia – none of whom were on the Security Council – all participated actively in negotiations on Korea during the autumn 1952 session of the General Assembly. India and Canada enjoyed extra weight because of their membership of the British Commonwealth, which facilitated diplomatic cohesiveness. Mexico carried considerable influence with Latin American delegations as the largest of the countries of Central America and the Caribbean. In 1952 its chief delegate, Luis Padilla Nervo, was president of the General Assembly.

This point can easily be magnified out of proportion. Certainly the fact that the top leadership of the Soviet Union and the United States wanted to avoid an expanded war is the leading explanation for that outcome. Furthermore, it is likely that delegates of the countries mentioned above would have been active even had they not been members of the Security Council – as was Canada during the summer of 1950, for example.

Yet outcomes in international politics are not always dictated solely by broad strategic calculations, and leaders are sometimes carried along by forces they would prefer to resist. Sometimes the institutional frameworks available to diplomats enhance their efforts in achieving important objectives. In the General Assembly every UN member possessed a vote and this fact provided extra motivation for governments to send top diplomats to its sessions and to watch its deliberations closely. The multilateral context of those deliberations facilitated communication among nations and the kind of ad hoc alliances often seen in legislative bodies within nations. Those alliances, in turn, provided an important instrument for exerting pressure on others. In the specific circumstances of the Korean War, the General Assembly, with a membership less than a third of what it is today and generally though not automatically sympathetic to the United States, may have contributed significantly to preventing a bad situation from becoming a lot worse.

Ironically, while from the autumn of 1947 through most of 1950 the United States used the United Nations largely as an instrument of its own policies in Korea, the war led ultimately to a surge in the influence of middle and smaller powers that survived the armistice. Although that surge was inevitable at some point, given the nature of the General Assembly, its manifestation in late 1950 and early 1951 in the midst of a crisis that threatened to escalate into another world war added dramatically to the sense of purpose of nations other than the superpowers in participating in the international organization.

Even before the crisis sparked by Chinese intervention, the Soviet Union had become persuaded of the utility of its participation in the United Nations. The Soviet boycott of the Security Council prior to the outbreak of war in Korea could easily have turned into an extended absence or even a permanent withdrawal from the entire organization. The Security Council’s response to the North Korean attack, however, persuaded Moscow once and for all of the advantages of full participation. Until the United Nations expanded drastically during the late 1950s and 1960s, to be sure, the Soviet Union would most often find itself in the minority in both the Security Council and the General Assembly. Yet its presence in the Security Council gave it the veto power there and its participation in the General Assembly enabled it to manoeuvre in a way that often exacerbated divisions among non-Communist governments.

If the war provided the occasion for a return of the Soviets to full participation in the United Nations, had it not broken out when it did the stated reason for the
boycott might soon have disappeared. That is, the United States had decided earlier in the year that the issue of which government – the Communist or the Nationalist – should hold China’s seat at the United Nations was procedural rather than substantive and thus not susceptible to the great power veto in the Security Council. On the eve of war the United Kingdom actively sought to cobble together a majority in the Security Council to vote to replace the Nationalists with the Communists. The United States never explicitly reversed itself regarding the use of the veto, but the outbreak of war in Korea led it to take a more active role in opposition to the PRC. (For one thing, the key resolution passed on 27 June was passed by a minimum of seven votes, with Nationalist China being one of them.) That opposition became all the stronger after the PRC intervened directly in Korea. Once the PRC was fully engaged on the peninsula, its prospects for assuming China’s seat in the United Nations virtually disappeared for the foreseeable future.
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So the Korean War proved decisive in freezing out of the United Nations for an entire generation the actual government of the most populous nation on earth.

In the end the Korean War established the United Nations neither as a reliable instrument of collective security nor as an effective arbiter of international disputes. In the first area, action through the Security Council was unlikely to be replicated because of the end of the Soviet boycott. In passing the ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution in November 1950, the General Assembly established a Collective Measures Committee, but its activities over the next year proved no more successful than the Security Council’s Military Affairs Committee before it in designating military forces from national armies that would contribute to future UN efforts against aggression.
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The Korean War suggested that as the Cold War persisted, future UN efforts against aggression would have to depend on improvised action in specific cases through the General Assembly. Yet the Soviet Union was a consistent and aggressive opponent of an expansive role for the General Assembly; and the United States, though the initiator of the ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution, was far from uniformly positive about its experience in Korea, where UN members often joined efforts to restrict American manoeuvrability while remaining content to saddle the United States and the ROK with over ninety per cent of the military burden. During the conflict Washington went to great lengths to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and to enter into security pacts with nations in the western Pacific, an effort that continued after the armistice. These alliances provided much more convenient instruments for future multilateral action than the unwieldy General Assembly.