G. Edward Griffin - The Fearful Master - PDF Archive

from an executive agreement, a higher source than Congress, and, as such, must be
supported. 14
Some Americans, as they see their country gradually becoming more and more helplessly
ensnared in this web of foreign entanglements, seek comfort in the thought that the real
power of the United Nations supposedly resides in the Security Council where we have
the right to veto anything that we dislike. As long as this is so, they reason, we have
nothing to fear. But these people are in for a rude awakening. For one thing, as we have
already pointed out, the Secretariat or full-time staff of the UN wields a dominant influence
amounting to virtual effective control from behind the scenes. Aside from that, however,
thinking strictly in terms of the theoretical power structure, it is true that the original setup
was supposed to place the authority to wage war and other important matters in the hands
of the Big Five in the Securitv Council, each with the protection of a veto. The General
Assembly was supposed to be merely a world forum where nations could express their
views and pass harmless resolutions. In fact, it is doubtful that the American people would
have accepted the United Nations on any other basis. But the UN Charter is a remarkable
document and, as we shall see, things are not quite the same today as they were in 1945.
As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles put it:
If a situation is arrived at where you can't accomplish a reasonable fair
result through technical Charter amendments, it may very well be
possible to agree on procedures which would get a very large part of the
desired result. Now it would be much neater and cleaner to do it by
Charter amendment, but if that process is frustrated by the fact that the
five permanent members have the veto power on amendments, then
other ways could be found. [Italics added.]
He said that the United Nations Charter was sufficiently unspecific and flexible to allow
evolution in this direction, and concluded that, for this reason "future generations would be
thankful to the men at San Francisco who had drafted it." 15 Trygve Lie expressed the
same sentiment when he said:
. . . there has been a healthy shift in power from the council to the vetofree
General Assembly Thus, progress by no means alone depends
upon textual revisions of the Charter. A continued liberal construction of
the Charter we now have holds out great promise, and perhaps is the
more practical way to strengthen the bonds of the world community. 16
This philosophy, of course, is not original with Mr. Dulles or Mr. Lie. Centuries earlier
Napoleon wrote: "A constitution should be short and obscure." While the United Nations
Charter is anything but short, it certainly is obscure. A smart politician with a flair for legal
language could justify almost anything on the basis of its provisions. As Dulles admitted: "I
have never seen any proposal made for collective security with 'teeth' in it, or for 'world
government' or for 'world federation,' which could not be carried out either by the United
Nations or under the United Nations Charter." 17
What has all this got to do with our veto in the UN? Simply this: We do not have it any
more! When the United Nations called for military action to repel the Communist invasion
of South Korea, technically speaking it was violating the terms of its own Charter. This has
never slowed the UN down in the past, but this time the issue was important enough to
demand the pretense of legality. The difficulty arose due to the Soviet's absence from the
Security Council. When the United Nations was formed, it was understood that a Big Five