The Road Around Stalemate

In his short story, "The Bear," William Faulkner wrote that sometimes a dog has to be brave "so she can keep on calling herself a dog." At the Sixteenth Session of the General Assembly this fall, the United Nations will have to be brave so it can keep on calling itself the United Nations.

Almost all the major issues of American foreign policy are before the Sixteenth General Assembly, for every international trouble that remains unsettled in lesser forums gets into the United Nations sooner or later. We will cheerfully confront them there-because our foreign policy, unlike the Soviet Union's, is rooted in the conviction that the United States has serious business in the United Nations. We are not out to destroy other governments, so we must negotiate with them.

In the public prints, the September song in the General Assembly promises to sound like standoff and stalemate. The broadcasts and the banner headlines will be about Berlin and about plans to arm, disarm and rearm. The General Assembly will meet in the shadow of these questions, but will not make decisions about them. It will, however, make decisions about next steps in building international institutions with the power to act on behalf of all nations, the weakest as well as the most powerful.

In his speech before the National Press Club on July 10, Secretary of State Dean Rusk restated our commitment to "the survival and growth of the world of free choice and the free coöperation pledged in the United Nations Charter." Most countries are joined with us in this commitment. Not to be so joined is folly for a small nation, which has no alternative, and criminal folly for a great one, which has.

In the same speech, the Secretary of State said: "All nations have commitments arising out of their own interests and out of their own hopes for the future. In the United Nations commitments to the Charter can weave the fabric of common interest which, by reaching beyond the cold war, may determine its outcome." The citizen, watching the United Nations at its complex work, will be less baffled if he keeps in mind the distinction between the issues which the U.N., reaching beyond the cold war, can do something about, and the issues on which U.N. action is necessarily limited to talk-useful, clarifying talk sometimes, but talk nevertheless.