UNITED NATIONS: Into the Open

The creeping crisis in Greece last week (see FOREIGN NEWS) threw its reflection across the Security Council table at Lake Success. Those who asked "How much good is U.N. in a showdown?" might soon have an answer. Russia's Gromyko had vetoed the mild U.S. resolution to set up a two-year border watch there. He threatened now to veto every other scheme the Council could invent to fasten the blame where it belonged—on Greece's Sovietsupported Balkan neighbors. What, then, could U.N. do?

Said U.S. Delegate Herschel Vespasian Johnson in the Security Council last week: "Greece's right to exist is involved. . . . The continued failure of the Security Council to take effective action in this case because of the Soviet veto cannot . . . preclude individual or collective action by states willing to act. . . ."

Grimly, Johnson said that the U.S. was ready, if the Russians continued to deadlock the Council, to throw the whole case into the 55-nation U.N. General Assembly this September. There, unhampered by the veto, the majority of nations might pronounce an overwhelming moral judgment which would support U.S. aid to Greece. With such a mandate, said Johnson, the U.S. and "like-minded members of the United Nations" could join "in taking any steps which might become necessary . . . to afford Greece the protection to which she is entitled under the Charter."

This step might become one of the most significant landmarks in U.N.'s constitutional development. If Russian abuse of the veto could be countered through Assembly action sanctioning peace-enforcement by individual states, then U.N. would have made a long step toward world government. Would the U.S.S.R. stay in a U.N. which could be used to oppose Russian policy as long as the U.S. had a majority in the Assembly? And was the U.S., which at San Francisco had favored the Big Power veto, really ready to submit all future security cases to the will of the majority of nations? These questions had always been implicit in the Charter; the Greek case was forcing these basic issues into the open.