MP3 audio

Alan Keyes
March 9, 1989
Ashbrook Center

Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction.

I would like to thank my hosts for the wonderful introduction that I got this morning to the Ashbrook scholars and the Ashbrook scholarship program. I had a chance to hold forth a little bit and chat with the scholars about various things, and I think that this institution is very blessed to have such a fine group of bright young people who are both interested and, I think, very capable of absorbing the high quality of learning that is available here. And I want to say how happy I am to be able to be here share that.

What I'm going to talk about today, briefly--and then hopefully have a chance for a little dialogue with those of you who are here--is about the United Nations. I have to confess to you that since I left the State Department in October of 1987, I have, by and large, done my best to avoid having to talk about the United Nations. [laughter] You see, because that is one of those things that, when it is your duty, and it is for the sake of flag and country, you do it. And when it is not, you don't necessarily do it--the U.N. being all that it is. But I want to explain a little bit today why it is that I would make such a remark. And why it is that I would persist in making that remark today--even today--when, if you've been following the newspapers, there has been an attempt I think to portray the U.N. as a revised institution, which I think at the moment it is not.

But in order to understand all of that, I think we need to have a little background, at least from my point of view, on the United Nations--what it was in the beginning, what it became (I think, unfortunately became), and what its prospects are for the future, particularly in its relationship with the foreign policy of the United States. And to do that we have to go back, as often you must, to the beginning.

The beginning of the United Nations--if you want to exclude the first aborted attempts at a League of Nations, or you don't have to if you want to account World War I and World War II, as I often do in my mind, as one war but with a little break in between; a modern version of the Thirty Years War--but in any case, it was that period of conflict in which essentially the European-dominated world order of the nineteenth century self-destructed in the conflicts in which European countries basically blew themselves up a couple of times and left, at the end of it, dominating the scene, the New World child of those Old World countries, the United States.

Now, I don't think that it was any accident that when the old European system of international relations that had prevailed in the nineteenth century collapsed, and America moved to the floor internationally, the international system that emerged was an international system that in its formal presentation very much paralleled the American experiment. And in my mind that is the first clue, the first hint that one gets of the real nature of the United Nations. I was commenting to someone before I began my [unintelligible] today, the Soviets, at the time that the U.N. was founded in the early part of the fifties, were often fond of saying that the then U.S.-dominated, Western-dominated United Nations was nothing more than a conspiracy against international socialism, aimed at spreading capitalism and bourgeois democracy all around the world.

I happen to think this is true, actually, whether intended or unintended. When you look at the forms of the United Nations it is quite clear: they are western, parliamentary forms--the understanding of the way that the organization would work, the understanding of the basis of participation on the part of its members, even the notion implied in the formation of the organization that the governments represented in the United Nations were somehow representative of their people.

This was all implied in the way that the organization was put together. It was, of course, democratic in form in a modified sense--in that you have the Security Council, and the veto power, and the ability of the super powers (as we would call them today, the great powers on the Security Council) on matters of security to block action by the majority. But I would argue that even that was, at least in principle, a reflection of the American system, since as we can look at our own system, there are various and assorted mechanisms--whether it's the presidential veto or the Supreme Court--that act as a check against the abuse of majority power, and that this was adapted, if you like, to the international arena.

Now, that is the formal presentation of the U.N. I also think, by the way, that it reflected the theory of the American regime in its approach to international affairs. For that, I would argue, you have to go all the way back to the folks who--I guess in this day when we are, in some areas of this country's academic life, so prone to jump all over the western tradition--you would have to go back to some of those philosophers that some folks don't want us to read anymore, particularly John Locke and the Enlightenment liberal thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to recapture the understanding that the thinking behind the American government was actually, even its explicit presentation, a theory of international relations.

We forget that, but it is there. It's there, especially there for us in Sir Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, where Hobbes says explicitly he's talking about the state of nature--from which the thinkers derived the notion of natural rights, human rights, self-government, and the need for representation in government, all these things. They started with an understanding of what human beings were all about, and the paradigm for this was in this supposedly intellectual construct of the state of nature. And Hobbes says at one point, "Well, if you want to know where this state of nature exists, then look at the relationship among sovereigns in the world. That is the state of nature."

And what that means, of course, is that if that is the state of nature, then the theory, the liberalism of that time, was actually a description of how, in that state of nature--which is to say, what we would call the international arena--you move from a state of war, which the liberal philosophers believed was this sort of the natural tendency of things, to a state of peace and civil society. That is to say, the whole idea behind the regime was the notion that a certain approach to the problem of government would solve the problem of war. Now, therefore, when you look at it from those terms, I think it's no particular accident that at some point when we reached--as we did after World War II--a position of dominance in international affairs, what did we do? We took that theory of international relations--read, theory of American government--and we applied it to the international arena, which was, in a sense, the source of the principle in any case. That application was natural, and quite logical in a way.

Now, I don't want to argue, because it would be too complicated historically, I wouldn't even want to try to argue that Franklin Roosevelt and others who were part of putting the U.N. together sat down and thought it through this way. I did have occasion before I started my work at the U.N. to go back and read the speeches and accounts, and so forth, of the founding of the organization. And of course the emphasis of that time was not on theory and political this's and thats. It was really on, "We've had this terrible war, we want to make sure it never happens again. This is how we're going to do it, this is how we're going to make sure it doesn't happen."

But why this particular solution? That's why I was led, and am led, to suggest that this particular solution is a reflection of the American way of understanding politics--which reads, international politics as well as domestic politics. The basic idea: you're going to have a charter of laws, we're all going recognize certain basic rights on the part of particular states, which goes along, then, with a certain understanding of the inherent sort of sovereignty or dignity of those states, and on the basis of this common understanding of what politics should be about, "we are going to cooperate under this regime of laws, the charter, the Constitution, in pursuit of human progress and dignity," and so forth and so on. So, in that sense, you see, I think the Soviets were absolutely correct.

There was a problem, though. I think, that in some sense, though I guess it remains to be seen--maybe it's a fatal flaw, I haven't decided quite yet, but at least a very damaging one. And oddly enough, the fellow whom I think understood this in a philosophic way was Kant. And I always like to mention this because Kant is always understood as this abstract airy philosopher who wasn't very practical about anything, and particularly in his sort of moral principles, very often people contrast him with practical, pragmatic ones. But he wrote a book called On Perpetual Peace, in which at one point he says that a universal system--confederation, whatever you like, of the states--would only be possible if all of the states that composed it had similar kinds of governments, governments based on similar principles.

Interestingly enough, that Kantian observation was--in this case I'd sketch it up to say configured, or reflected, whatever--in the American system, because there is that sometimes much neglected clause in the Constitution that makes it a responsibility of the federal government to guarantee of the republican character of the state governments. So it was recognized by our founders that, to put it bluntly, you could not have this kind of a system--a confederation of district states, united under a single charter, dedicated to these kinds of ideas--and have monarchies and despotisms and tyranny coincide with and live in the same sort of confederation with a republic. That wouldn't work. All the governments would have to be based upon the republican principle. Now, this makes a certain amount of sense. And it makes a certain amount of sense because fundamental to this whole idea of this kind of government is the idea of representation. And from the point of view of the people as a whole, our founders would have argued, you can't have representation unless you have a republican form of government--which is to say a form of government, as they defined it, based upon election of the governors and representatives by the people.

Obviously, when you look at the United Nations, this isn't what happened. In the first instance, you had the Soviet Union, and I think that the best that one could say--and I think that this was probably in the back some minds at the time--was that you would have the United States and the Soviet Union put together in this organization in a kind of practical extension of the alliance forced by circumstances during the war, but you would put them in the context of this organization which would have a transforming effect on the Soviet Union, which would, ultimately, put it in a surrounding that would transform it over time from what it was--kind of a totalitarian despotism--to a democracy.

Now I would argue that historical circumstances then wreaked a little havoc with this hope. Because, in a certain way, the U.N. was based upon assuming that the world that it aimed for was already somehow in existence--this is always a bad thing to do at a practical level. Assuming that you've already achieved your goal as the condition for achieving it is a very bad idea.

That's what I think that was true in the U.N. And of course, history didn't cooperate. Because, in the course of the fifties and sixties, you saw coming into the United Nations a whole range of countries that had been emancipated from colonial domination, during the course of those years when the hold of Europe on the rest of the world was loosed, as a result of the debilitation of Europe by wars and kinds of other things--and I mean moral and other debilitations, as well as physical. And of course, what you found was that the U.N. started to expand, to welcome into its ranks all different kinds of members.

And despite what some might argue was maybe the intention, at least the declared intention, of some of the old colonial powers like Great Britain--I was always fond of saying, when I was working on African affairs, that in the British colonies in Africa, they were always very careful to try to leave behind them a parliamentary system with a six month guarantee. [laughter] And that's about how long it lasted. So what you gradually had was an organization which, though in form it was democratic and based upon, sort of, American republican principles, gradually came to be composed of a predominant majority of countries whose system of governments were not democratic, and who were in no way in their domestic arrangements dedicated to those principles.

Now, I would argue that if you get together a bunch of countries who are not in any way dedicated to representative government and democratic principles, and you then have a body that is run like the General Assembly, for instance, along democratic lines, are they going to vote in support of democratic and representative principles? Are they going to apply those principles in their divisions and judgment?

Once the majority principle becomes dominant, they are not. And so, when American domination of the body sort of (really at the end of the '50's, into the '60's) started to loosen, culminating finally, of course, in the early part of the '70's with the official symbol of the end of our dominance, of our ability in the end to win votes when we really wanted to with the admission of China--which we lost even though we didn't want to lose it. That happened over the years, and I think the U.N. then took on an entirely different character--a character that proceeded to do two things. At one level, it made the United Nations not what Truman wanted it to be, because he said, at one point, that the U.N. henceforth was going to be the primary instrument of American foreign policy. This obviously didn't turn out to be the case, though during the course of the Korea War we had an effort at it.

Over time, I think, and culminating probably in a symbolic sense with the Johnson administration's effort to present and justify the Vietnam War in the U.N.--it was the last time, I would argue, we really took it seriously as for providing a basis for our foreign policy [unintelligible]. It became increasingly irrelevant to American policy makers. I think, in one sense, we became impatient with that whole multilateral approach, which, after all (I'll talk about it in a minute), is very complicated and cumbersome. We had the power to do without it, and, in a certain sense, I think we came to the realization that the organization, in a way, had become endemically intractable. And so, we started going about our affairs using other instruments. And I think that the U.N. started to become, and certainly by the time I got to the State Department was--[unintelligible] that referred to U.N. matters, and it was a candidate for the circular file. You didn't talk about that too much. That was not a serious place. Serious things did not go on there. Now, obviously, there were times when, on the Middle East or this or that or the other thing, we might incidentally see some usefulness in working on the Security Council for some purpose. But overall, I think we reached a conclusion that as the major instrument of American foreign policy, the U.N. wouldn't do.

I have to make a proviso here, because, obviously, there were certain areas--international economic cooperation and development--where we did make use of [unintelligible] UN agency, and I would argue, make good use of that in some areas. You can look at the World Health Organization--eradication of small pox, the progress in spreading certain kinds of health practices, and so forth and so on. Good thing. Some of the standard-setting organizations like the World Meteorological Organization, International Maritime Organization--which, in a way, were organizations that established the traffic rules and sort of traffic-cop regulations for international trade and commerce. These were indispensable. Universal posting, and all these kinds of things. Some of them worked, and worked very well, because they did not depend for the common purpose of their membership on a political coalition. They depended on a professional or scientific coalition, and it substituted for the need to agree about large political principles. And they worked, and still work, by and large, to this day.

In the organizations that were essentially political in nature, however, it broke down. And in my opinion, the U.N., starting really in the 1960's, became what it had always been for the Soviet Union in their own description of it, simply war by other means. And the U.N. was the ideological battle, and it became an extension of all kinds of other battles.

Now, the great problem with American policy, I would argue, toward the U.N., was that our tendency not to use the tool meant that we had a tendency not to take it seriously. And since we had a tendency not to take it seriously, though there was a war going on there, we decided it didn't have to be fought.

The interesting thing about a battle of this kind is that if your enemy is fighting and you're not, then you're going to be defeated. And I think that by the time you get to the late '70's, we had reached a point where we were consistently and routinely being defeated because we refused to acknowledge that there was a battle going on. I can remember one of the first things Jean Kirkpatrick said to me when I started working with her, was to describe the situation that she had found when she got to the United Nations in 1981, where people on the staff, the career people on the staff, when we lost the vote "across the street" as we'd call it, because our mission was across the street from the General Assembly building, they would not describe it as a defeat for the United States, or a loss for the United States, or anything of this kind. It was just an "outcome," it was just a "result." You see? It was not to be understood somehow as the result of any kind of a battle.

But the other problem, of course, was this--and this is what I think the point that many people missed and that I would argue the folks in the Reagan administration understood, and it laid the basis for something of a resurgence, but I'm afraid it did no decaying of America's role in the U.N. What people forget is, that since the U.N. had democratic forms, since it was couched in terms of certain kinds of democratic principles--human rights, other things like this--our language (we're talking about politics) was, in a way, a funny kind of way, the language of the United Nations. But as time went on, what you discovered was the words were like vessels. And our enemies were coming up drilling holes in it, draining out our meaning, and pouring in their own.

And so you got the point, for instance, in human rights, where in addition to the fact that something like the Human Rights Commission was consistently used as a weapon, countries that were allies or friends or partners of the United States in the western hemisphere or elsewhere in the world, routinely condemned for human rights violations. Cuba, soviet-bloc countries, third-world countries, never condemned for human rights violations, even though I think that we would all acknowledge empirically that the most egregious violations of human rights in terms of life and suffering always occurred in those countries. Never condemned. Cuba, from the time that the U.N. was founded, until 1988 [unintelligible]--introduced by me in 1987 [unintelligible]--had never been brought to the block in the Human Rights Commission for a human rights violation. Never! You had El Salvador, you had other countries that had a sentient democratic system, but Cuba--which has no pretensions to democracy at all, and a gulag-type prison system--was never brought before the bar of the Human Rights Commission.

So, it was used as a polemical tool, but also importantly, words started to be bandied about without their proper meaning--until you finally got the point where, in the document, "The Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States," the whole doctrine of human rights was stood upon its head. And, as opposed to our understanding, which is that rights inhere in individuals who then make up and compose the societies and governments on the basis of their choice, you got a doctrine that rights were the prerogative of the state because it was the state that could act on behalf of the welfare of the whole people, and therefore, the state had the right to limit the exercise and behavior of the rights of its citizens in ways that were conducive to the good of the whole. And so the word "rights," and the theory of rights, and the doctrine of rights became the theoretical structure for the justification of despotism. See, now, that's the irony of the U.N. That, I think, is what has happened in the course of time there. And you might say, "Well, it's all just words." I always encountered people in the U.N., I mean in the U.S. government, who would [unintelligible]. I was always shocked by that--coming from Americans, that is. Because think about it. Think about it for a minute. As I look over this audience, we have people of all kinds of backgrounds, races, creeds, and religions. It is limited to this country--people came from backgrounds that might have all different languages, and so forth and so on. What we have in common is in a way neither race, nor creed, nor even language, nor history--because a lot of us who are recent immigrants [have a history of their own]. What we have in common is a certain set of ideas, and the words that express those ideas.

See, we have a stake in the words of democracy, the words in which and with which one talks about democratic life and the potential of democratic life. We have a stake that is not theoretical. If the rule of law, and human rights, and due process lose their meaning tomorrow, eighty-percent of the countries in the United Nations would be unaffected by that loss. Our system would collapse, because our basis for working with, and understanding, and cooperating, and especially compromising with one another would be gone.

So, the assault on the word, the assault on the concept, was actually a very important assault on the security of our regime. Now, unfortunately, being such practical people we didn't see that. And yes, I would argue it had some very practical effects on our politics. The one that aroused the most attention and took the first interest of the Reagan administration was the assault of the United Nations on Israel and on American policy in the Middle East--which had reached the point, by 1981, that it was coming very close to the expulsion of Israel and the total delegitimization of America's policy on the Middle East. And "delegitimization" may seem like a word, but it's not a word. Because for us, once it's "delegitimized"--as we found out during the Vietnam War--we can't do it any more because we are a country, a representative democratic system, where opinion matters, where public feeling matters, where public revulsion can become a stumbling block to policy. If our enemies can delegitimize our policies, they can destroy our ability to implement those policies. And that is what they knew.

And that is what I think the U.N. essentially became a tool for--and that, of course, invited a response which, of course, nobody took. And then finally, I would argue--starting a little bit with Pat Moynihan, and finally with Jean Kirkpatrick--people started to fight back to realize that ideas were important, that words matter, and that, win, lose, or draw, we had to stand up in UN forum and fight for the meaning of our concepts, which were, after all, the basis of this new international system, though it was failing.

And so we did fight, and I would have to argue, up to a certain point, finally culminating in the effort to use American financial leverage to improve the approach the system took to certain things, we were successful. I would have to say--by way of conclusion and opening up to questions a bit, now that I've laid that general background--that as I look at the present situation, I think that our policy-makers have had a tendency to back away prematurely from the efforts we were conducting with respect to the United Nations during those years. You kind of declare a premature victory and go home and return to business as usual. And that means, probably, that the organization is not going to be able to recapture its original purpose.

That may prove to be irrelevant, only because, depending on how you look at the Soviet Union and so forth and so on, certain kind of exigencies are now at work in the world apart from the influences of the U.N. that appear to be strengthening the prospects for democracy around the world, and for representative government and other kinds of free principles around the world. But that remains to be seen. The UN's role in all of that I think will be to register some of these changes, rather than to cause them--even as I think its role in peace-keeping and peace-making has generally been to register the exhaustion of those at war and give them a venue in which they can then register their willingness to do something other than fight. There's not a cause, therefore, but kind of an arena in which to register the exhaustion of the party. But that's where I think we are. And to me, it's kind of sad, because even though I was known during my time in the government as something of a critic of the United Nations, and a rather serious opponent of those whom I believed abused the organization for their polemical end, I actually have a great attachment to the idea. And the reason I have a great attachment to the idea is sort of clear from what I've been trying to say. The idea of the United Nations, properly understood, is the idea of the United States.

If such a universal regime based upon the understanding of the human capacity for freedom does not work, then we will not work. For, whether we like it or not, we have already gathered from the four corners of the earth the representative of every race and creed and kind there is, and we'll either live together in peace--proving that such international harmony is indeed possible--or our regime will fail, and war will come in some form, once again, amongst us.

But I think that we have a stake in that idea, and therefore I thought when I was involved with it that it was worth fighting for--the right idea, that is, that the U.N. was about. I still think it is, but these days I would have confess that it's considered to be something of an ideological notion. And since pragmatism is in vogue, we shall have to wait a while before we take up the cause again.

Thank you very much.