In the Korean crisis of 1950, the United Nations served the United States, the free world, and the cause of justice remarkably well. But six years later, in the Suez crisis, the story was quite different. For it can be argued, with much supporting evidence, that neither the interest of the United States nor that of the free world, or indeed the cause of justice, was well served by the actions of the UN. From a comparison of these divergent experiences, we may be able to draw some useful conclusions.
There is a widespread notion that the UN somehow has made diplomacy obsolete among major powers, that solutions for all the large political problems in world affairs can and should be sought through the UN. But this is not the case by any means. On the contrary, it was intended by the founders of the UN that it specifically should not be required to provide solutions for those overriding problems which involve the vital interests of the major powers.
By the same logic, it is erroneous to suppose that the UN has supplanted or made obsolete the employment of military force or economic resources by the major powers in the pursuit of their valid national interests. This is an essential corollary; for diplomacy without the actual or potential support of military or economic power is rarely a diplomacy worth pursuing. We give implied allegiance to this principle by spending $35 to $40 billion a year for our military establishment. This, added to our vast economic strength, is what gives a high decibel rating to foreign policy pronouncements of the President or his Secretary of State.
This is not to depreciate the United Nations in any sense. The UN has a large and increasing usefulness. Already, after only twelve years of existence, it has come to command such a central role in the affairs of the world community that it is not easy to visualize what our world of today would be like without the UN or some equivalent international organization of worldwide scope. With good fortune, we shall see the functions of the UN broadened with the years, and its prestige and authority enhanced.
It is not a service to the UN, but a disservice, to exaggerate its present competence or to thrust upon it tasks which exceed its capacities. And the most certain way of destroying the UN before it can take truly firm root would be to require of it the solution of grave issues of vital interest among major powers. The framers of the UN charter recognized this hazard and sought to protect the infant UN against it. They did this by inserting into the charter the one-power veto provision—at the insistence of the United States as well as the Soviet Union. This provided that except on procedural matters decisions of the Security Council should be made only with the approval of the permanent members.
Five states, therefore—the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and China— were given a one-power veto, so-called. This was to insure that the UN never would be called on to try to coerce or discipline a major power when it considered its vital interests to be at stake. To phrase it another way, the area of international relations involving the vital concerns of the first-rank powers was reserved to the traditional forms of diplomacy, outside the UN.
If this has come to be widely overlooked in very recent years, it probably is because the joint intervention in Korea under UN authority in 1950 has looked so large and worked out so well, appearing to justify UN action in virtually any dispute or conflict, however large. But in reality the prompt and effective action of the UN Security Council in the case of Korea was something of a fluke—because the Soviet delegate was not present to cast a veto. And it is reasonable to assume, even though it cannot be proved, that the United States would have intervened with its military forces in Korea even if the UN had been unable to authorize such intervention. America’s vital interests were indeed involved. For various compelling reasons, we were obliged to act. By mere chance, the UN was in position to set the stage for collective action, within the framework of which the United States took its dominant part.
From the standpoint of America, the advantages of UN authorization were many and great. This brought us the active support of sixteen nations. If the contributions of some were only of a token character, it is still true that the total of assistance was quite substantial. The UN also rallied the moral support of the preponderant part of the world community—virtually all but the Communist bloc. And it brought such forces as those of Thailand and the Philippines into the action, averting the somber risk of the Korean struggle turning into a conflict of white versus Asian peoples.
Legally, the United States was the agent of the United Nations. But in the hard- boiled terms of Realpolitik, the UN was a fortuitous cloak for what was going to be American policy in any event. It was America’s good fortune, therefore, to have the benevolent endorsement of the UN, representing the world community in the main, for the prosecution of a sizeable war against Communist forces, to conserve vital American interests in the Far East.
It would be perilous, however, to conclude from this single instance that the UN always will provide the logical channel for American national policy—or for the policy of any other major power. The contrary is just as likely to be true, especially as the membership of the UN has been greatly expanded and the weight of the so-called “anti-Western” blocs has been increased. Furthermore, learning from bitter experience, the Soviet Union has not allowed its delegate on the Security Council to absent himself for extended periods, no matter how irked he may be at finding himself so often outvoted. The UN therefore is not likely to be available for action against a major power through the normal procedures, which means through the Security Council, the “executive arm” of the UN.
To circumvent the one-power veto and the resulting paralysis of the Security Council at later stages in the Korean affair, the American government took the lead in reworking UN procedures to enable the General Assembly (where there is no veto) to move in on any problem after the Security Council proves unable to act. At the time, this seemed to be a logical improvement of UN procedures. But there is increasing doubt whether it is wise to circumvent the veto. For to do so, in some conceivable situations, is to thrust the UN into dilemmas so grave as to endanger the survival of the UN itself. Further, this deprives the United States of the protections it sought when it voted to place the one-power veto in the UN charter. In addition this new reliance on General Assembly action (which is by two-thirds majority) tends to make the United States, or any great power, a creature of the rules of the majority; and a majority, even a very large majority, may not represent very much real power in world affairs.
All this is illustrated by the complicated chain of events of the second half of 1956 and the first months of 1957, attending the Middle East crisis. For this time, six years after the Korean emergency, the UN Security Council was paralyzed by the veto (British and French), and all UN action was taken in the General Assembly, by two-thirds majority. Instead of the great-Power diplomacy employed by the Council in 1950 when the Korean crisis broke, we have seen the diplomacy of whole blocs of nations, mostly small and weak, yet all enjoying equal voting power. And whereas the Korean affair found the UN serving a clear-cut American interest, it can be argued that in 1956-7 the United States found itself carried along on a course contrary to its national interest in some respects. This, as will be shown, was the result of the initial decision to put the issue before the UN, rather than handle it by great-power diplomacy outside the UN.
If the Korean Peninsula was a place of considerable strategic importance for Russia, China, Japan, and the United States, as indeed it was, then what are we to say of the corner of Egypt lying between the Suez Canal and the Israeli frontier—the Sinai Peninsula and adjacent desert northward to the Mediterranean? This quite small plot of uninviting land—barren mountains and barren desert—can be labelled without distortion of fact the most strategic small area in the world today. It lies near the junction of Europe, Asia, and Africa, at the pivotal point of the complex of continents often called the world island, in the language of geopolitics. It is the land bridge between Asia and Africa, and so is a key to all military positions in North Africa. Since those positions were developed by the United States to take advantage of the Mediterranean as a water barrier from Europe, Sinai becomes the lock on the door of America’s secondary defense line encircling Europe.
Across Sinai, at its western margin, runs the Suez Canal, the man-made link between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It is the indispensable water passage that makes the Mediterranean-Red Sea route quite possibly the most important sea communication line in the world—next to the North Atlantic sea lane itself, which makes the NATO coalition meaningful and tenable. The Sinai Isthmus also is the narrowest constriction of the Moslem world. Islam sprawls across North Africa and Asia, through 140 degrees of longitude, from Casablanca, on the Atlantic, to the eastern margins of the Indonesian Archipelago. It contains, in one vigorous religious faith, one-seventh of the world’s people. This Islamic world, in geographical terms, has the conformation of a misshapen hourglass, and the Sinai Isthmus forms a 100-mile wide neck. In the same way it divides the smaller Arab world which is the central segment of the Moslem world.
In the last decade, the Suez Canal may have lost some of the strategic importance it once had for Great Britain, as a result of the extension of independence to Burma, India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, and the reduction of Britain’s military and political responsibilities on the southern margins of Asia. Add to this the loss of French control in Indochina, and that of the Dutch over nearly all Indonesia, and Suez can be seen to have fallen away perceptibly as the life-line of three empires.
But on the other hand, the Canal in the same ten years has acquired an extraordinary new economic and strategic importance, because of the vast increase in Middle Eastern oil production and the corresponding increase in Western Europe’s dependence on that source of oil. Since the war, Europe’s energy requirements have mounted swiftly. Coal output could not be much enlarged. Water power already has been heavily exploited, and further development has to be slow and costly. Atomic energy is still to come, as a major source of energy for industry. Oil had to meet the new demand, and did.
In this one decade of amazing transformation, the oil production of the Middle East rose (1946-1955) from 696,000 barrels per day to 3,200,000 barrels per day. Fully 23 per cent of the free world’s oil originates in the Persian Gulf area. And before the interruption of oil movement in late October, 1956, the Middle East was supplying 90 per cent of free Europe’s oil imports. Of the “normal” production of the Middle East, about 800,000 barrels per day is loaded aboard tankers at Eastern Mediterranean ports from pipe line terminals. The remainder, 2,400,000 barrels per day, is loaded at Persian Gulf ports, and most of this moves (normally) through the Suez Canal.
Since our alliance system hinges on the NATO coalition, and its vitality rests on the economic health of free Europe, we may say quite honestly that NATO depends on a gigantic daily flow of crude and refined petroleum through Suez to our allies in Europe, where oil needs have been rising by 12 per cent a year. In an authentic sense, Suez, while ceasing to be the lifeline of the British Empire, has become the lifeline of the North Atlantic alliance.
A region of such enormous strategic importance as the Sinai Isthmus—with two- thirds of the world’s oil reserve nearby at stake—is bound to become the focal point of many rivalries and tensions. And this is peculiarly so of the Suez area. Factors as divergent as the growing use of oil in industry and the revival of religious faith contribute. Here are some of the conflicts of interest or emotion which center on Suez or its immediate environs:
France and Great Britain versus Egypt, over canal nationalization.
Canal users as a group, fifteen to twenty sizeable ones, versus Egypt, over the future status and management of the Canal.
The United States and Great Britain versus Egypt, for control of a sea communication line vital to the security of the two naval Powers.
The United States, Great Britain and France, as the major influences in the Middle East in years past, versus the Soviet Union, in rivalry for influence or dominance in the Middle East, because of over-all strategy and because of oil deposits.
Anti-colonial powers versus European colonial powers, on the (questionable) hypothesis that the Canal was a vestige of nineteenth-century colonialism.
Resurgent Arab and Islamic nationalism versus established Western interests, economic and strategic.
Arab nationalism versus Jewish nationalisms centered in Israel—both of them centuries-old nationalisms lately revivified and increasingly dynamic.
France versus Egypt, over Egypt’s surreptitious backing of anti-French Arab activities in Algeria and elsewhere.
These are some, not necessarily all, of the political, economic, military, and ideological rivalries and potential conflicts which find their focal point in Suez. Of them all, the most serious in terms of magnitude is surely that of the United States, Great Britain, and France versus the USSR. For this reflects the whole frowning rivalry of the free world and the Communist world. This is a specific facet of the antagonism which permeates the political life of the entire globe. This is today’s distillation of the historic Anglo-Russian rivalry in which the Russians sought access to the Persian Gulf and Dardanelles.
To put it another way, this massive rivalry is the successor to other great-power rivalries for domination of the Middle East. In the Crimean War, Britain was working to set limits on the expansion of Russia into the Middle East. Later a Kaiser’s dream of a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway symbolized the powerful bid of the German Empire for Middle East dominance. This was frustrated by Britain, with some help from its allies, France, Russia, and the United States, in World War I. Another bid for Middle East influence was made by Hitler’s Reich before and during World War II, only to be turned back again by the same allies.
In the decade since the war, Russian stabs at Iran and the Straits have been turned back, mainly by a combination of American and British efforts. French influence in the Middle East was largely dissipated before World War II, when Syria and Lebanon became independent; but British power persisted longer. However, in that post-war decade Britain lost its footholds in Palestine, Egypt (the great Suez base), and Jordan. Its military position in Iraq is reduced, and its hold on Cyprus increasingly subject to challenge from Greece and the Enosis movement on the island. Only in the smaller (but rich) sheikhdoms rimming the Persian Gulf does Britain still exercise substantial influence.
Russia’s centuries-old urge to drive southward was in abeyance for a few years, but broke out anew in 1955, with a shrewdly planned, well-supported bid for influence among the Arab states. It began with offers of modern arms to Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Egypt seized the chance, Syria delayed and then took arms, while Saudi Arabia resolutely avoided any entanglement with the Soviet Union. Moscow continued with offers of economic assistance and readjusted its propaganda line to flatter the Moslem world.
This was a drive to be taken with the utmost seriousness. For the Islamic world is vulnerable. There is much nonsense spoken and written about religion as a certain bulwark against Communist infiltration. The record shows that this should not be relied on. In the main, the Moslem world is one of poverty and underdevelopment, of great extremes of wealth and poverty, of sullen discontent from diverse causes. Such lands are vulnerable to Communism. Fortunately, however, geography comes to the rescue. For the Islamic world is open to the influence of sea power. All North Africa is flanked by the Mediterranean. And all the Asian segment faces the Indian Ocean—except Turkey and the Levant, which front on the Mediterranean. And Suez is the vital waterway by which the use of sea power in the Islamic world is made effective.
In this post-war period, the United States had emerged as the principal investor in Middle Eastern Oil (two-thirds of ownership, 58 per cent of profits). The United States became a major user of the Suez Canal. It even became an importer of crude oil from the Middle East, but only for a small part of its enormous needs. In the same period the United States came into a role of far greater influence and power in the region by its close and productive relationship to Turkey and Greece. Additionally, the United States came to have the principal military forces and bases in the Middle East—the steadily more powerful Sixth Fleet, and great air bases at Dahran and Tripoli, as well as arrangements with a rearmed Turkey. NATO planted its power at Izmir, easternmost of its various commands.
Thus the United States fell heir to, and in considerable measure assumed, the historic Western responsibility for containing Russian pressures against the Middle East, cross-roads of the world island. And this is why the Anglo-French-and-American rivalry with the USSR can quite as properly be called simply an American rivalry with the USSR. For the United States alone has the resources to make and then support a great- power policy for the area in the face of Soviet threats and infiltration. At times, in connection with this role, the United States has been embarrassed by being bracketed with the “imperialistic, colonial powers.” Nevertheless, America has found that its most basic purpose—to exclude Soviet power from the area—is shared fully by Great Britain and France. The big three of the West ought to have seen and conserved their essential unit of interest.
Although there were many diverse sources of tension, the real Suez crisis began in July, 1956, with Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. In the initial phases, it was a dispute between Egypt and the two owning countries, Great Britain and France. Without much result, the United States sought to bring the parties together and to find a compromise settlement that would insure freedom of transit to all, compensation of the owners, reasonable tolls, and proper maintenance and improvement of the canal facilities.
Up to a point, the controversy was a matter of great-power diplomacy. Then it moved beyond this area, when various canal users were brought into the conferences at London. India, as a user but also as a leading Asian power, helped to inject the special point of view of the formerly colonial peoples—emotional and ideological factors that were always in the background, but had little to do really with the canal.
The Israeli advance into Sinai late in October, quickly followed by Anglo-French air operations and troop landings, created an entirely new situation. The three nations had varying purposes. Israel was trying to protect itself against Egypt’s sporadic raids into Israeli territory and was trying also to clear away the guns which had been used for some years to deny Israeli ships the use of the Gulf of Aqaba and the Israeli seaport at the head of that Gulf. Israel also probably was trying to inflict a decisive defeat on Egypt before its military forces could master the use of the modern weapons supplied in vast quantity by the Communist bloc.
Britain and France presumably were intent on regaining de facto control of the Canal, but also were seeking to interpose their forces between those of Israel and Egypt, in the hope of protecting the canal from damage and of halting the Egyptian- Israeli fighting. France had the further motive of inflicting such damage to President Nasser’s prestige and influence as to check the flow of arms and other aid from Cairo to the insurgent Arabs of Algeria. And Britain doubtless hoped to administer a rebuff to the Nasser regime sufficient to make an end of Soviet influence in Egypt.
In the main, these purposes were in harmony with America’s overriding interest in the Middle East—the exclusion of Soviet power and influence from the area. They conflicted with America’s interest, however, in that they might create a pretext for greater Soviet intervention in the area and to the degree that they might inflame the Arab nations against the West, and thus against the United States.
All sorts of things might have been done, at this stage or earlier or later, through diplomatic channels and with or without a show of force. What did happen, however, was the placing of the problem before the United Nations, mainly at America’s insistence. From this point onwards, the Suez crisis took a totally different course from that of the Korean crisis of six years earlier. In the Security Council, Great Britain and France vetoed a resolution to disapprove and oppose the operations of the three powers in Egypt. The matter then was taken to the General Assembly, which did not have the authority to order remedies but did have the right to debate and make inquiry, and by two-thirds majority the power to recommend action.
Thus the die was cast—for the handling of a problem in American-Russian strategic rivalry by a body of eighty nations’ representatives. In terms of global strategy, of geopolitics, the basic fact for the United States was not the invasion of Egyptian soil by Israel, Britain, and France. Neither was it the future ownership and handling of the Canal. It was the arming of Egypt and Syria by the Soviet Union, and other forms of extension of Soviet power in the Middle East. The fundamental problem for America was not one of doing justice between Israel and Egypt, or of frustrating dn aggression, whether provoked or unprovoked. It was one of how best to prevent the USSR from planting the tentacles of its power on the land bridge between Asia and North Africa, and on the most strategic waterway of the Eastern Hemisphere.
But once the specific issue of conflict in Sinai was put before the General Assembly, it became a political issue in the broadest sense. At once it became entangled in all the tensions and rivalries and antagonisms listed above—mostly involving nationalism and religion. It no longer was possible to discuss and resolve the concrete question of the Canal as such, or the specific issues between Egypt and Israel. The central question became a moralistic and political one, to be threshed out in terms of how eighty large and small nations might feel about a half-dozen explosive but not quite relevant issues.
With the United States and its customary following in the UN, the Asian-African bloc and the Communist bloc had a secure two- thirds majority in the Assembly, which could and did take formal action against Israel, Britain, and France. But if the United States and its established grouping of members sought action against Egypt, also an offender in various ways, there was no majority to be had. For the Asian-African bloc plus the Communist bloc add up to thirty, and that is a secure veto power in the Assembly, in view of the two-thirds rule.
The upshot is familiar to all. The violation of Egyptian territory was remedied. But Soviet influence in Egypt and Syria was not reduced or limited. The future of the Canal was not clarified or assured. Egypt remained in substantial measure an outpost of Soviet power. British and French influence in the Middle East, already much reduced, was annihilated. Russia for the first time had the comfort and encouragement of finding the United States on its side, against Britain and France.
No action was possible either to require Egypt to allow the clearing of the Canal for traffic or to require Syria to permit repair of sabotaged pipe lines. The United Nations, although successful in stopping an armed conflict, had been converted into an instrument of unequal justice. And through it all, the United States was in the position of working in opposition to its principal allies, although as we have seen the three had and still have nearly identical interests in the area—chiefly, the exclusion of Soviet power and influence.
One further point needs emphasis. The UN was effective against Britain and France only because the United States, their ally, exerted its own great pressure, even withholding arrangements for emergency oil supplies to Europe until Paris and London complied with American demands. Israel finally bowed to UN demands, but only because the United States held the power of life and death over the tiny republic, dependent as it is on American assistance, public and private. This emphasizes a fact all too easily forgotten—that a great nation has far more influence over its friends and allies and those dependent on it than it has over its enemies or potential enemies.
One conclusion is inescapable—that the United Nations, for all its great usefulness, is not a proper or safe channel for handling problems which entail great-power rivalries in highly strategic regions of the world. A problem which at bottom is one between the United States and the USSR is not one that should be tossed into an assemblage of eighty nations with all the divisive antagonisms and feuds that they represent. Valuable though it is, the UN is not a substitute for diplomacy, or for the use of power as a supplement to diplomacy.