It was above all to avoid the recurrence after World War II of threats to world peace and order that the United States set out to design and bring into being the United Nations and the congeries of related agencies. “From the very beginning,” says the report of the American delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco, “the problems of post-war peace and security were paramount.” This seemingly obvious observation is not as trivial as it may sound, for it is a benchmark by which to measure the transformation that has occurred in the character, emphases, and achievements of the United Nations. It will no longer do to say, as was once possible, that the UN's value can be judged solely by its success in avoiding international conflict. Today, the United Nationsvery likely would command American attention and participation even if it had no utility in the realm of peace and security.

The decision of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to occupy Czechoslovakia in August 1968, while it represents a fundamental turning point in Soviet foreign policy, most of whose implications are ambiguous yet ominous, should not be permitted to obscure the fact that the Soviet regime remains confronted with a wide array of postponed internal and external problems that demand action and yet defy resolution. The decision to arrest forcibly the processes of liberalization in Czechoslovakia stands out as an uncharacteristic act of will on the part of a regime whose four years in power have been marked by drift, indecisiveness, vacillation, paralysis, and “muddling through.” For five years the government of Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin has postponed action on painful problems, has permitted events and situations to accumulate dangerously, and in general has allowed itself to be dominated by events rather than domesticating them. During its first two years in office the regime's inaction was perhaps inaccurately ascribed to prudence, caution, and calculated restraint. It now appears in retrospect that paralysis was confused with prudence, inertia was mistaken for caution, and factional indecisiveness was accepted as self-restraint.

This essay is addressed to the issue of the extent to which and the ways in which the United Nations may serve the interest of the United States in the maintenance of world peace during the decade that lies ahead. It rests upon two assumptions, both of which require careful qualification: first, the assumption that the United States has, and recognizes that it has, a fundamental interest in international peace; second, the assumption that the United Nations is in principle an organization dedicated to the promotion of international peace.

A visitor from another, more advanced, planet would find many extraordinary paradoxes on earth, but surely the most extraordinary would be the fantastic destructive potential of nuclear weapons which contrasts starkly with the primitive and near-impotent institutions of global peacekeeping. He might marvel that a breed capable of producing the wealth for a $185 billion armory of lethal devices, let alone the technology for killing several hundred million humans in a single exchange of nuclear weapons, had not also produced a workable international order capable of regulating such apocalyptic man-made power.

“International-Law-and-Organization” has become a hyphenated conception but the implied interrelations are assumed rather than explored. All international organization, of course, may be seen as an aspect of law partaking of its forms and sharing its purposes. Law and organization have in common that, in both, nations eschew laissez-faire and “going it alone” and identify and prefer common interests. Often, on the other hand, one thinks of international organization in contradistinction to law as making different promises, suffering different limitations, evoking different loyalties.

Toward the end of the Administration of Lyndon Johnson it became briefly popular to talk about programs for eliminating poverty at home versus programs for mitigating poverty abroad. But it can also be argued that the two are sides of the proverbial coin and that the experience of rhe one has meaning for the other. The present troubles of the domestic “war on poverty” do not diminish the value of the comparison. If anything, they enhance the need to consider the programs together.

Peaceable relations between states require that each nation affected by another's acts be induced to acquiesce in all those acts, but this acquiescence may take many forms. It may be quite positive, involving affirmation and, at times, concerted action, or it may be negative, involving mere silence or pro forma protest and, most importantly, total abstinence from countervailing acts. Economic and financial relations between states display all forms of acquiescence and too often demonstrate the sad results of failure to obtain consent. Their history, however, manifests gradual progress from an erratic reliance on tacit consent to a wide-ranging reliance on positive, explicit undertakings frequently accompanied by concerted action. Increasingly, moreover, that concerted action has been multilateral, not just bilateral. The tariff warfare of the twenties and earlier decades has now given way to the formal regulation of tariff policies, and the bilateral trade agreements of the 1930's, covering exclusively tariff reductions, have been replaced by a single comprehensive multilateral arrangement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) dealing with all aspects of commercial policy. The competitive exchange-rate depreciations of the thirties have likewise given way to formal regulation, beginning with the Tripartite Declaration of 1936 involving the United Kingdom, France, and the United States and culminating in the Articles of Agreement adopted by the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 establishing the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Regionalism has a long history as an important instrument of American foreign policy. Yet such a statement does not do justice to the variations in goals, means, and settings that have affected United States policy toward participation in and cooperation with regional organizations. These differences have been the cause of serious debate in the past and are becoming so again as we approach the 1970's.

The argument whether the United States in the conduct of foreign policy should lean toward multilateral or unilateral action tends to revolve in the stratosphere. Proponents of each course cite the conspicuous failures of the other and submit wishful designs varying from triumphant world government to uninhibited national sovereignty. Unfortunately, the range of real choices confronting the policymaker is very much narrower. Constraints on decisionmaking in a democracy, even in a dictatorship, are very strict and nowhere more so than on issues having to do with sharing among nations decisions affecting major national interests.

This review essay will focus on four central questions which the author believes to be closely related to the problem of progress in the study of international organizations. These questions, narrowed to fit the scope of this essay, are the following: 1) What has been the role of international organizations in the national security strategy of the United States; 2) what has been the impact of the United States in the international organizations of which it is a member; 3) what has been the impact of participation in international organizations on the range of United States choices and methods in the foreign policy area; 4) what impact have changes in the shape of the international political system had upon United States participation in international organizations and upon those organizations' impact on the United States. This analysis will concentrate only on studies relevant to these themes.