UN vote condemns Soviets

There seems to be a belief, both in the United Nations and out of it, that the enormous majority vote in the Assembly - 104 to 18 - condemning the Soviet Union for going into Afghanistan is something that has surprised the Russians and could change whatever plans they had for further incursions, to use the diplomatic word, in the Middle East.

Now that's a sentence which we could have said quite blandly and sincerely 30 years ago without a second thought. Some grizzled veterans may recall that the first United Nations setback to Russian plans to go south was a condemning vote against a move they made over 30 years ago against Azerbaijan in northern Iran. The Russians never again tried anything in Azerbaijan.

The point I want to make is that 30 years ago, and for many years later, United Nations votes in the Assembly did carry weight. We thought at the time that this was due to the actual prestige of the United Nations itself. It only occurred to us later, looking back on those early years, that the Russians were restrained because America alone had the bomb and because America could always rely on the support of Western Europe and of the Latin American republics and everybody else who scuttled for protection under the umbrella of the American nuclear monopoly.

The Russians used to complain in those days that the United Nations was run by the United States, Britain, France, the Scandinavian countries and what they called America's 'satellites' in Latin America. And, in fact, the Russians were right. We had the votes, we always had the votes, to defeat them in the General Assembly and when really serious matters came up and were brought before the Security Council, the only body that can order action, the Russians automatically shuffled down from their sleeve their ace, the veto, which the big five powers, the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China – in those days it was the China exiled on Formosa – these five could veto any action they disapproved of and the Russians, through the indomitable Mr Gromyko, went on vetoing everything in sight. In fact, 'pulling a Gromyko' became an idiom, so that the United Nations was in danger of permanent paralysis.

By 1950 the Security Council was so frustrated that the American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, proposed that when something important was constantly smothered in the council, it could be moved for discussion into the General Assembly and this was passed by a resolution known as the 'Uniting for Peace' resolution. The Russians were furious over this bypassing procedure but their fury was very soon softened by the thought that while the General Assembly might pass resolution after resolution condemning the Russians, the Assembly has no power to do anything but register an opinion.

And so, from then on down the years, we saw time and again that the big powers, when there were five of them, had nothing seriously to fear from the United Nations, they could use the veto in the Security Council and shrug their shoulders at a scolding resolution from the Assembly. And when there came to be only two big powers, the so-called superpowers, the same indifference to UN resolutions applied.

Once the Russians had their bomb, the many smaller nations that were being born in the breakdown of the colonial empires were able to choose up sides, to have a choice between two atomic umbrellas. And so the alliance of the Western world and Latin America lost its grip on the UN. The so-called 'Third World' nations appeared and for a time scorned either umbrella and called themselves 'unaligned'.

Then through the Sixties and Seventies a general move started which, in the happy days of San Francisco and the birth of the United Nations, we were naive enough to believe that the United Nations had been born to prevent, namely war and the making of war: conventional wars, we now call them. For the past quarter-century there have been more wars in more places than in all the years between the American Civil War and the First World War. The United Nations was able to arrest one or two and, by a freakish accident, actually waged one war, in Korea, but that was only because, when a vote came in the Security Council to go into Korea, the Russians were boycotting the council. They wanted Communist China to be the only Chinese representative and they didn't have a first-rate foreign office man in New York.

Moreover, the jet plane hadn't been invented – wasn't flying, anyway – and there wasn't time for Mr Gromyko to fly to New York in time to veto, to stop, a unanimous vote of the council to defend South Korea. Ever since then, by the way, the Russians have always had a top man in New York.

Well, what I'm saying in more brutal terms is that for, say, 20 years, the power of the United Nations to stop wars anywhere has declined to the vanishing point and the power of the Western nations to carry even their judgement of things has declined disastrously. So much so that on most issues that come up before the assembly and its committees we find that the Communist nations and their satellites and most of the Africans and Asians now form a majority which condemns or opposes us, the old masters of the United Nations.

We've got to the point where power, what used to be called 'realpolitik', goes its own way and the United Nations deplores or condemns one way or the other and nobody need care. I believe that when the Russians vetoed the overwhelming vote against them on Afghanistan in the council and the debate was moved into the assembly, I believe it would have been hard to find anyone among the cynics, even among the secretariat whose jobs depend on believing in the United Nations in the face of the facts, I don't believe anyone would have guessed at anything like the final Assembly vote – 104 to condemn, 18 to support the Soviet Union.

What happened to all those African and Asian nations who have almost automatically got up, echoed the Soviet lamentations about imperialism – ours – and automatically voted with the Soviets? Well, what happened was that there was a troop of Asians and Africans and Latin Americans, the very people who, while calling themselves 'unaligned' have regularly lined up on the Russian side. They came up to the rostrum and they spared no anger, no eloquence in turning on the Soviet Union.

A steady observer of the United Nations down many years said it in a nutshell: 'These nations now feel endangered by the superpower they had regarded as their champion and in private their diplomats say so frankly.'

I ought to say that the actual resolution that went before the assembly was drawn up not by the United States or Britain, but by 17 Muslim and Third World nations and it said that 'The United Nations strongly deplores the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan and calls for the immediate unconditional and total withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.'

The Russians parried this motion by simply saying, 'Not we, but you are the aggressors'. Their United Nations' ambassador, Mr Troyanovsky, said, 'The Soviet Union vigorously condemns the attempts of the American politicians artificially to heat up the so-called "Afghan situation" so that under cover of this they can turn the wheel of international affairs backward to the time when enmity between countries and military hysteria are instigated and whipped up.'

Well, with their colossal army always at the ready, the Russians don't need to do any instigating or whipping up. Of course, the assembly vote doesn't do anything to stop the Russians but, as a mere expression of opinion, of fear, there has not been anything so downright, so one-sided in our memory. If you talked to these Third World delegates, once so dependably on the Russian side, you can gather that they are scared and that for once they are looking to the United States to do what? That's the question and it has been for President Carter an obsessive question.

I'm at the moment, once again, in that sunny birthplace of the United Nations, in San Francisco and when I'm so far away from London – 6,000 miles – I find I'm always moved to go to the news stand of a hotel that carries the London papers. What are they saying about Afghanistan? Well, I bought one of last Saturday's issues, one of the serious London papers, and Afghanistan and Mr Carter's ordeal about it were not on the front page, the topic was tucked away inside and was presented as something – a Russian threat – that we might have to meet sometime in the 1980s. This was a shocker.

I'd lately heard from two or three old Washington reporters who've been digging for a week or more into White House doings and White House attitudes. Quite rightly, they all agreed that Mr Carter was airing no rhetoric when he said that the 85,000 Russian troops in Afghanistan were the most serious and immediate threat to the general peace than anything since the Japanese on Pearl Harbor.

The proof of his seriousness was the fact that he did something which no president I can recall has done in our time. He called to a private meeting in the White House 50 men of all sorts and stripes of opinion and experience with the Russians – Republicans, Democrats, old hawks and doves, friends, opponents and such old retired diplomats as Averell Harriman and Henry Cabot Lodge, Eisenhower's ambassador to the UN.

The question was, 'What do we do?' The consensus was that sooner than later the Soviets would have to be stopped. What is on the minds of the men in the Kremlin? Does Brezhnev still have the last word? Do they want to ensure a leftist Afghanistan and a Communist Iran? Are they headed for Pakistan? Will they move into Yugoslavia if Tito dies?

This meeting went far beyond talk of the Olympics, the grain embargo, cultural exchanges. The United States obviously cannot think of deterring the Russians with a conventional war. What then? Where can they be stopped and how?

At that moment the dread, the obvious word came up – nuclear. I don't know how that meeting broke up. The hope of it was that the massive vote in the UN might convince the Russians that they'd moved too soon and too frighteningly and mobilised most of the world against them. And would somehow bluster their way back.

But if they don't, the president is still faced with the timing, the wisdom, of the ultimate warning.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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