Force for U.N.

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PEACE, one might think, is not the sort of human occupation which should normally require supervision. Yet the United Nations, instead of concentrating on more positive and progressive activities, has ever since its inception been engaged in supervising a kind of peace which has been not much more than the absence of fighting--and not always even that. Now policing a peace--or an armistice--can be an essential international function, at times a dramatic one. It cannot be denied that the United Nations has been successful in this function in some important cases. However, action in this field has been largely pragmatic and ad hoc. I believe--and recent events have strengthened my belief--that the time has come when we should seek ways to enable the United Nations to pursue this work in a more organized and permanent way.

The world's alarm last November over events in Egypt--intensified, if that were possible, by the frustrating situation in Hungary--galvanized the General Assembly into establishing a United Nations Emergency Force, an action which until then had not been thought practicable or probable. We must now do everything possible to ensure that this action is successful in achieving the desired results. If we fail in this, a damaging blow--perhaps a fatal one--will be dealt to the whole concept of supervising the peace and avoiding hostilities through the United Nations Assembly. If we succeed, then we must build on that success so that when we are faced in the future with similarly complicated and dangerous situations we can avoid the hasty improvisations of last autumn.

The United Nations was brought into being primarily as a cooperative endeavor on the part of many nations to seek in collective action the security for which mankind hungered and which the facts of life in the modern world denied to each nation individually. To achieve this the founders of the United Nations recognized the necessity of having military forces at its disposal and they wrote into the Charter provisions which they hoped would bring them into being. Over the years, however, these provisions have developed in ways far removed from the intentions of their authors...