ADDRESS BY THE HONORABLE HENRY A. KISSINGER, SECRETARY OF STATE, BEFORE THE INSTITUTE OF WORLD AFFAIRS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MARC PLAZA HOTEL, MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, JULY 14, 1975

GLOBAL CHALLENGE AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

Ten days ago our nation entered its two hundredth year. We begin our Bicentennial with justifiable pride in our past, a recognition of the challenges of the present, and great hope for the future.

The world in which we live is poised uneasily between an era of great enterprise and creativity or an age of chaos and despair. We have, on the one hand, developed weapons that could destroy us and our civilization; we have, on the other, created a world economy that could-for the first time in history-eradicate poverty, hunger and human suffering.

This complex of unprecedented opportunity and unparalleled danger is at the heart of the great challenge that has faced the United States with increasing urgency since the close of World War II. And it is our generation that must make the choices which will determine succes or failure. It is a burden that we can shoulder with fortitude or ignore with peril-but it is a burden we cannot shed.

Our nation has come to symbolize man's capacity to master his destiny. It is a proud legacy that has given hope and inspiration to the millions who have looked to us over the past two centuries as a beacon of liberty and justice.

Today's generation of Americans must be as true to its duty as earlier generations were to theirs. When weapons span continents in minutes, our security is bound up with world peace. When our factories, farms and financial strength are deeply affected by decisions taken in foreign lands our prosperity is linked to world prosperity. The peace of the world and our own security, the world's progress and our own prosperity are indivisible.

The Structure of Peace

We have a proud foundation on which to build. We have maintained stability in the world, ensured the security and independence of scores of nations and expended blood and treasure in the defense of freedom. Our economic support helped our major allies regain their strength; we contributed to a global trading and monetary system which has sustained and spread prosperity throughout the world. With our encouragement, the new nations took their place in the international community and set out on the path of economic development. At our initiative many long-standing disputes were settled by peaceful means. Conflicts were contained and global war was avoided.

We have provided more economic assistance than any other nation in history. We have contributed more food, educated more people from other lands, and welcomed more immigrants and refugees. We have done so because we are a generous people for which we need not apologize—and because we have understood that our self-interest is bound up with the fate of all of mankind.

These successes have brought great change. The rigidities of the Cold War period have fragmented. Power and wealth, ideology and purpose have become diffused and have transformed the international scene. The reemergence of Europe and Japan, the rivalry among the Communist powers, the growth of military technologies, the rise and increasing diversity of the developing nations have produced a new global environment—a world of many centers of power, of persistent ideological differences clouded by nuclear peril and struggling for economic security and advance. The central focus of United States foreign policy is to help shape from this environment a new international structure, based on equilibrium rather than confrontation, linking nations to each other by practices of cooperation that reflect the reality of global interdependence.

Our task begins at home. To be strong and effective abroad, we must be strong and purposeful at home.

To preserve peace, our military strength must be beyond challenge.

To promote global prosperity our domestic economy must prosper.

To carry forward our international efforts we must be a united people, sure in our purposes and determined to build on the great achievements of our national heritage.

1 Secretary Kissinger declined the Committee's invitation to testify. This address is being printed in lieu of his personal testimony.

Our first responsibility abroad is to the great industrial democracies with whom we share our history, our prosperity and our political ideals. Our alliances across the Atlantic and with Japan are the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Today they are more than responses to military threat, they are instrumentalities of social and economic cooperation as well.

The ultimate objective of our alliances has always been to ease, not to freeze, the divisions of the world. In the past few years the United States has taken a number of steps to resolve concrete problems with the Soviet Union and lay the basis for more positive endeavors. We have also forged a new relationship with the People's Republic of China. There can be no lasting international stability unless the major powers learn habits of restraint and feel a stake in international peace; all our hopes for a better world require that they use their power for the benefit of mankind.

The scores of new nations that have become independent since the Second World War are now major actors on the world scene. In their quest for their own progress, they present a challenge to the rest of the world-to demonstrate that the international structure can give them a role, a fair share, dignity and responsibility.

All of us-allies and adversaries, new nations and old, rich and poor-are part of a world community. Our interdependence on this planet is becoming the centeral fact of our diplomacy. Energy, resources, environment, population, the uses of space and the seas-these are problems whose benefits and burdens transcend national boundaries. They carry the seeds of political conflict over the coming generation; they challenge the capacities of the international community with new requirements for vision and statesmanship.

Much of our current agenda is therefore global in nature and must be dealt with on a global basis. Within a few weeks there will be two major meetings of the most prominent international organization, the United Nations. A Special Session of the General Assembly will be devoted to economic issues and the 30th regular session of the General Assembly will address the broad range of international problems.

Therefore, I would like to use this occasion to place before you and our fellow members of the United Nations a candid assessment of how the United States Government views the contemporary UN-its capacities and its limitations, its promise and the trends which threaten future progress.

The record of the United Nations

Thirty years after the founding of the United Nations, is achievements have been substantial and its promise is great. Most of the world is at peace. Beyond the absence of armed conflict, there has been a transition from a preoccupation with security to a new concern for the economic and social progress of all mankind. Yet, at the very time when interdependence impels international cooperation and when the membership of the UN is most universal, the international organization is being tested by a new clash of ideologies and interests, and by insistent tactics of confrontation. Such tendencies diminish the prospect for further achievement and threaten the very institution itself.

Let me place these tendencies in historical perspective.

The end of the Second World War brought on a period of idealism and hope. Victory in war against tyrannical regimes-by nations united for that purposeseemed as much a triumph for liberty as for peace. The end of the colonial era was shortly to begin, and was clearly in prospect. The awesome power of nuclear weapons ironically gave hope that the imperatives of collective security and peaceful settlement of disputes would at least impress themselves on mankind. The League of Nations had failed, but the cost of another failure now seemed so overwhelming that it was possible to hope that the nations of the world would be obliged to make the United Nations succeed.

No nation embraced this hope more genuinely than the United States. No country more seriously looked for the United Nations to replace force and domination with cooperation. No government more earnestly sought to create a world organization with a capacity to act. It is worth recalling that a year after the San Francisco Conference, when the United States was the sole possessor of nuclear weapons, we offered to turn this entire technology over to the United Nations.

Even then American spokesmen were careful to insist that there were realistic limits to the scope of the new organization. Of these limits the most important, even if perhaps the easiest to overlook, is that the UN is not a world govern

ment; it is an organization of sovereign states. It is not an entity apart from its membership. It reflects the world context in which it operates: its diversity, its imperfections, its many centers of power and initiative, its competing values, its worldly compound of nobility and tragedy.

The founders' hope for peace rested not on a naive belief in the perfectibility of man but on the hope that the major powers, given a dominant role in the Security Council, would be able to concert together to keep the peace. This hope, of course, proved stillborn when the UN became an arena for the confrontations of the Cold War.

A generation later, its record in maintaining the peace shows both success and failure. There have been local wars, yet there has been no general war. More than once, small conflicts which had led in the past to great ones have been contained through the efforts of the United Nations.

Time and again-in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Middle East, in the Congo, in Kashmir-the peacekeeping role of the UN has proved indispensable for settlement, guarantees and prevention of major power intervention. While a far cry from the concept of collective security orginially envisioned, these operations have proven valuable and increasingly indispensable. They represent the most advanced manifestations of international cooperation for security yet achieved.

The United Nations has understood the principle that peace is not the same as the status quo, but must embrace procedures for peaceful change. Whether by special commissions or mediators or through the expanded role of the Secretary General within his broad responsibilities under Article 99 of the Charter, the UN has offered a flexible instrument of pacific settlement on a score of occasions since its founding.

The UN has provided a forum for debate and negotiation on regional or global problems and for multilateral efforts for arms control and disarmament. The talks provide a safety valve and a sounding board; in the corridors quiet progress is often being made.

We found early on that there were limits to United Nations action on behalf of peace and security. Its writ can run no further than the agreement of its members. And on the sweeping issues of war and peace, it is the great powers, by virtue of their size, military strength, economic power and political influence, who bear the principal responsibility for world stability and security. Of late, as the great powers are learning the practices of coexistence there is hope that the UN can find renewed possibilities for effective action in accordance with the vision of its founders.

The United Nations, originally concerned primarily with issues of peace and security, has been the focus of increasing attention to economic and social issues. The UN Charter contains a commitment "to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples." Today, roughly nine-tenths of expenditures within the UN system relate to economic and social cooperation. We welcome this evolution and have contributed generously to it.

Indeed it is in these fields, that the work of the UN has been most successful and yet the most unheralded. Its specialized agencies have been effectively involved with countless areas of human and international concern: speeding decolonization; spreading education, science, and technology; organizing global cooperation to combat hunger and disease, to protect the environment, and to limit population growth; regulating international transport and communication and peaceful nuclear power; advancing human rights and expanding international law among nations and in outer space and on the seas; preserving the priceless cultural heritage of mankind. It is striking, and of great importance for the future, that the United Nations has been able to respond creatively to so many of the challenges of the modern age.

Thus the UN is of considerable importance for the world's future. It has accommodated our traditional security and political concerns to the new conditions of international diplomacy; it has extended its reach-even before most nations did toward the new agenda that now confronts the world community. The UN is both a symbol of our interdependence, and our most universal instrument for common progress.

In this connection, I want to pay tribute to the outstanding leadership given to the UN by its Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. He is tireless and totally dedicated to peace, fairness and the future of the United Nations. The rapidity and efficiency with which he organized and dispatched peacekeeping forces to

the Middle East in late 1973 was but one example of the many services he has rendered the organization and the international community.

The United States and the United Nations

Yet with all these achievements, the future of the United Nations is clouded. Much that has transpired at the United Nations in recent years gives us pause. At the very moment when great power confrontations are waning, troubling trends have appeared in the General Assembly and some of its specialized agencies. Ideological confrontation, bloc voting, and new attempts to manipulate the Charter to achieve unilateral ends threaten to turn the UN into a weapon of political warfare rather than a healer of political conflict and a promoter of human welfare.

The UN naturally mirrors the evolution of its composition. In its first phase it reflected the ideological struggle between the West and East; during that period the UN generally followed the American lead. Time and again in those days there were some 50 votes in support of our position and only a handful of communist bloc members against.

Ten years later when membership had grown to more than 80, our dominance in the General Assembly no longer was assured. Neither East nor West was able to prevail. In the Security Council the American position was still sustained, while the Soviet Union was required to cast veto after veto in order to protect what it considered to be its vital interests.

But with the quantum leap to the present membership of 138, the past tendencies of bloc politics have become more pronounced and more serious. The new nations, for understandable reasons, turned to the General Assembly in which they predominated in a quest for power that simply does not reside there. The Assembly cannot take compulsory legal decisions. Yet numerical majorities have insisted on their will and objectives even when in population and financial contributions they were a small proportion of the membership. In the process, a forum for accommodation has been transformed into a setting for confrontation. The moral influence which the General Assembly should exercise has been jeopardized and could be destroyed if governments-particularly those who are its main financial supporters-should lose confidence in the Organization because of the imposition of a mechanical and increasingly arbitrary will.

It is an irony that at the moment the U.S. has accepted non-alignment, and the value of diversity, those nations which originally chose this stance to preserve their sovereign independence from powerful military alliances are forming a rigid grouping of their own. The most solid bloc in the world today is, paradoxically, the alignment of the non-aligned. This divides the world into categories of North and South, developing and developed, imperial and colonial, at the very moment in history when such categories have become irrelevant and misleading.

Never before has the world been more in need of cooperative solutions. Never before have the industralized nations been more ready to deal with the problems of development in a constructive spirit. Yet lopsided, loaded voting, biased results and arbitrary tactics threatened to destroy these possibilities. The utility of the General Assembly both as a safety valve and as an instrument of international cooperation is being undermined. Tragically, the principal victims will be the countries who seek to extort what substantially could be theirs if they proceeded cooperatively.

An equally deplorable development is the trend in the Specialized Agencies to focus on political issues and thereby deflects the significant work of these agencies. UNESCO, designed for cultural matters, and the International Labor Organization have been heavily politicized. An egregious recent case came in the World Food Council in Rome where the very nations who desperately need, and would most benefit from food assistance, threatened to abort its work by disruptive tactics unworthy of an international organization. This Council grew out of the American initiatives at the World Food Conference last year.

It reflects our deepest humanitarian concerns; it represents a serious effort on our part to eliminate hunger and malnutrition. Abuse by those whom we are trying to help, attacks on our motives by the beneficiaries of our efforts threaten to undermine the very fabric of cooperation in a field of crucial long-range importance to mankind.

We realize that those of us who wish to surmount the current crisis must show some understanding of its origins. The major powers have hardly always set a consistent example of altruistic or benevolent behavior. The nations which

would seek to coerce the industrialized countries have themselves been coerced in the past. History haunts us all. But it is precisely to transcend that history that the United Nations was founded. And it is precisely to arrest such trends that the United States is calling attention to them today.

The process is surely self-defeating. According to the rules of the General Assembly, the coerced are under no compulsion to submit. To the contrary, they are given all too many incentives simply to depart the scene, to have done with the pretense. Such incentives are ominously enhanced when the General Assembly and Specialized Agencies expel member nations which for one reason or another do not meet with their approval.

Our concern has nothing to do with our attitude towards the practices or policies of the particular governments against which action is being taken. Our position is constitutional. If the UN begins to depart from its Charter, where suspension and expulsion are clearly specified prerogatives of the Security Council, we fear for the integrity and the survival of the General Assembly itself, and no less for that of the Specialized Agencies. Those who seek to manipulate UN membership by procedural abuse may well inherit an empty shell.

We are determined to oppose tendencies which in our view will undermine irreparably the effectiveness of the United Nations. It is the smaller members of the Organization who would lose the most. They are more in need of the UN than the larger powers such as the United States which can prosper within or outside the institution.

Ways must be found for power and responsibility in the Assembly and in the Specialized Agencies to be more accurately reflective of the realities of the world. The United States has been by far the largest financial supporter of the United Nations; but the support of the American people, which has been the lifeblood of the organization, will be profoundly alienated unless fair play predominates and the numerical majority respects the views of the minority. The American people are understandably tired of the inflammatory rhetoric against us, the all-or-nothing stance accompanied by demands for our sacrifice which too frequently dominate the meeting halls of the UN.

The United States despite these trends intends to do everything in our power to support and strengthen the United Nations in its positive endeavors. With all its limitations and imperfections the world body remains an urgent necessity. We are eager to cooperate, but we are also determined to insist on orderly procedures and adherence to the Charter. The UN was never intended as an organization of like-minded states, but rather an arena to accommodate and respect different policies and different interests. The world needs cooperative, not arbitrary action; joint efforts, not imposed solutions. In this spirit the United States will do what it can to make the United Nations a vital hope for a better future.

The agenda before us

This then is the promise and the problem of the United Nations. We must ensure that the promise prevails because the agenda we face makes the institution more necessary than ever before.

The United Nations, first, faces continuing and increasing responsibilities in its mission, in the famous words of the UN Charter, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

One of the central issues of our time is the Middle East conflict, and the UN Security Council continues to play a vital role in the quest for a solution. Resolution 338 of 1973 launched a negotiating process which has borne fruit and proved durable. Security-General Waldheim convened and addressed the first session of the Geneva Conference. Resolution 242 of 1967 stated general principles for a comprehensive peace. The stationing of United Nations forces was an indispensable element of the recent disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria in 1974.

But despite these and other real achievements, the global perils of local conflict continue to loom large. The world has dealt with them as if it were possible to contain conflict perpetually. But such tolerance tempts conflagration. That is how the first two world wars began. We must not have a third, with modern weapons there would not be a fourth. It is not enough to contain the crises that occur; we must eradicate their causes. President Ford is therefore determined to help bring about a negotiated solution in the Middle East, in Cyprus, and in other areas of dispute. And peacekeeping and peacemaking must be a top priority on the United Nations agenda.