THE NATIONS: Pledging Allegiance

The U.S. last week, more firmly than ever before, pledged its allegiance to the international community of the United Nations. When Eisenhower’s oratorical outscoring of Nikita Khrushchev is forgotten, this commitment will be remembered. U.S. policymakers reckoned finally with the fact that 1) the U.N. is an immensely valuable instrument of peace, and 2) the U.N.’s neutral and uncommitted nations, though determined to avoid entangling themselves in the cold war. nonetheless have a future ambition comparable to the U.S.’s own ultimate foreign policy goal. The goal: a world of peaceable, independent nations, free to develop politically and economically, inside a system that preserves law and order.

The speech that President Eisenhower delivered to the United Nations General Assembly at midweek showed this momentous shift of attitude—and was a far cry from the early Eisenhower Administration’s attitude toward the U.N., or toward neutrals. The President committed the U.S. to full support of the U.N., not only in the Congo crisis, but in crises to come.

Even to neutralists’ skeptic eyes, the contrast between Ike’s performance and Khrushchev’s was stark. Eisenhower’s remarks were not particularly eloquent, and invoked no propagandistic emotions: they were in West Point English, basic, clear, specific. Khrushchev (who advised reporters to “bring your lunch”) showed the bad habits of speaking to captive audiences. And in showing his underlying hostility to the U.N. as a rival world system, the Russian badly miscalculated. His audience, the new nations of Africa and Asia, is fiercely loyal to the U.N. With little room for positive proposals left to him after the President’s speech, Khrushchev—”the head of the greatest colonial empire of the present day,” as the New York Times put it—delivered a rambling 2½-hr. farrago that included a demand for a prompt end to colonial rule in the world’s remaining colonies, and a sharp attack on Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, calling for a triumvirate to take his place. Khrushchev seemed bent on destroying Hammarskjold’s usefulness (calling him a lackey of the imperialist powers), as the Soviets had destroyed the usefulness of Hammarskjold’s predecessor, Trygve Lie.

Before Khrushchev arrived in New York, people feared the great propaganda gains he might wring out of the U.N. session. They wanted to rope him off, not only to keep away assassins but to prevent him from subverting anyone. Within a few days, Manhattan’s judgment was that he was quite a character but, surprisingly, a nuisance and a roadblock as often as a threat. Khrushchev showed once again that he is half blinded by his own ideological lenses. The Afro-Asians were scrupulously neutral. Khrushchev, having put himself in opposition not only to the West but to the U.N. and its leadership, was reduced to chumming around with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and such enthusiastic courtship of Castro seemed a petty pursuit for so great a power. (Even Communist satellite chieftains resented Khrushchev’s paying more attention to Fidel than to themselves.)

Unless Khrushchev had something else to offer, he might better have stayed home.