The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (48 page)

Why did the United States go to the Security Council first? After all, prior US action on Korea at the United Nations had been in the General Assembly. The answer here is also obvious:
Chapter VII
of the UN Charter grants clear priority to the Security Council in dealing with ‘threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression’.
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In September 1947, when the United States took the Korean issue to the General Assembly, there was neither a breach of the peace nor an act of aggression; rather there was a diplomatic stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union over how to bring about the independence and unification of the peninsula. Under the circumstances the United States could have gone to either UN body, but the existence of the veto in the Security Council steered it in the direction of the General Assembly, where at that time it consistently mustered large majorities in its favour. Now, in June 1950 a clear breach of the peace had occurred and, in the minds of American officials, so had an act of aggression; so the first stop was the Security Council.
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Why did the United States consider North Korea’s action aggression? Why didn’t Washington regard the crossing of the thirty-eighth parallel as merely another act in an ongoing civil war that had raged in Korea off-and-on since at least early 1948? The reason is that the new North Korean action was a large-scale, conventional military attack rather that a mere border raid or infiltration of guerrillas as had occurred in the past; it was into a state, the ROK, that had been recognized by the United Nations; and it could not have been executed without major outside assistance, especially from North Korea’s sponsor, the Soviet Union.
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US President Harry S. Truman believed that if North Korea was not repulsed, the Soviet Union and its allies might be encouraged to undertake a series of other aggressions, just as the Japanese, Italians, and Germans had during the 1930s, when their first moves were not effectively contested.
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Since the United States and the Soviet Union had been direct competitors in Korea since their occupation forces entered the peninsula in 1945 and the former had been the leading promoter of the Republic of Korea at the United Nations, a failure to rise to the challenge also might undermine America’s credibility with key allies, most notably in Europe where the balance of military forces was distinctly to Soviet advantage.
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Despite the absence of the Soviet Union, not all Security Council members were totally uncritical of US proposals. The body contained six Non-permanent Members serving two-year terms. Of these, Cuba, Ecuador, and Norway were firmly in the American camp, but Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia were not, although none were allied to the Soviet Union. The first resolution introduced was passed by a vote of 9 to 0 with Yugoslavia abstaining. However, the wording of the US draft did not go unchallenged. In fact ‘armed invasion’ in the original American version was changed to ‘armed attack’. When US delegate Ernest Gross tried to strengthen ‘cease hostilities’ to ‘cease aggression’, he was overruled. These decisions reflected the belief that the information available based on cables from the UN commission stationed in Seoul, the US ambassador to the ROK, and the ROK government remained too fragmentary to justify the stronger language. The delegate from Yugoslavia believed that even the toned down language was unjustified and proposed a resolution, which gained no support, calling only for a ceasefire, a withdrawal of forces to the thirty-eighth parallel, and an invitation to North Korea to send a representative to present its case before the Security Council.
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(An ROK representative already had been invited and, since it had formal relations with the United States, its ambassador was present at the meeting.)

The second resolution, passed shortly before midnight on 27 June, also received considerable, if hasty, scrutiny. Again the Yugoslav delegate presented a substitute resolution, which was overwhelmingly rejected, reiterating the call for a ceasefire and renewing the invitation to North Korea as well as proposing mediation. By this time four more reports had arrived from the UN commission in Seoul and these provided much additional evidence that North Korea had initiated an all-out attack on South Korea and had no intention of stopping in the face of the first Security Council resolution.
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Still, the resolution was passed by the bare minimum of seven affirmative votes, with Yugoslavia opposing and Egypt and India abstaining. Despite the expressed unwillingness of two members to assent to a resolution calling for military action without instructions from home, the Americans pressed for an early vote. Indeed, President Truman had authorized air and naval action in support of ROK forces the previous evening. The United States much desired the official stamp of approval of the Security Council for its actions, but its timetable was dictated by military developments in Korea, which were not favourable to the ROK.
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The last two resolutions on Korea passed by the Security Council also demonstrated how Washington could use the international body as an instrument of US policy. The first of the resolutions did not begin circulating among Security Council members until early July. By then the pressures of time seemed less compelling and private discussions went on for several days.

Years before, the Security Council had struggled to agree on a formula for designating armed forces from individual countries for use by the United Nations in cases of breaches of the peace. Articles 46 and 47 of the charter provided for a Military Staff Committee, among other things, to ‘advise and assist the Security Council’ on the ‘military requirements for the maintenance of international peace and security… [and] the employment and command of forces placed at its disposal’. This committee was formed in early 1946 and held meetings into 1947, but a variety of divisions among representatives of the great powers, especially between the West and the Soviet Union, prevented agreement; the Security Council itself did no better.
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In the summer of 1950, with the Security Council having called on member states to contribute to a venture in Korea, military action under the UN banner had to be organized ad hoc, with units from nations willing and able to provide them. Prevailing conditions in Korea necessitated the immediate reinforcement of the ROK army if it was to have any hope of preventing North Korea from overrunning the entire peninsula, and the United States was the only nation with major forces nearby, namely in Japan. Fifteen other nations would eventually commit armed units to the UN enterprise in Korea, albeit small ones compared with the United States, but the immediate circumstances put Washington in a position largely to define conditions under which its forces would fight in Korea, and it took full advantage of that position.

In early July UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie circulated a draft resolution that included a call for creation of a ‘Committee on Coordination of Assistance for Korea’ to be made up of several Security Council members. Lie later explained that the committee’s

Security Council delegates could not agree on its membership, however, and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff viewed the committee as a potential threat to military efficiency, leading Washington to block its creation.

In addition, the Americans prevented any explicit statement in the resolution that UN action was limited to Korea. In response to the North Korean invasion, the United States had announced on 27 June that it would prevent attacks across the Taiwan Strait in the Chinese civil war, a move not supported by most of its European allies and India. Some Security Council members feared that the phrase ‘to restore peace and security in the area’ in the draft resolution implicitly endorsed the action and that this and other moves outside Korea might lead to an expanded conflict. Washington preferred that intervention in the Taiwan Strait be seen as protecting the southern flank while fighting raged in Korea and it accepted only a small change in wording, thus retaining a measure of ambiguity on the matter. The resolution was passed by the minimum of seven votes, as India, Egypt, and Yugoslavia abstained.
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The fourth resolution was passed, with nine affirmative votes and Yugoslavia’s abstention, late on the day before the Soviet representative returned to the Security Council. Here, too, though, the United States pushed to keep UN operations in Korea, this time in the area of relief, under its own control through the United Nations Command (UNC), now headed by General Douglas MacArthur. In this case the Americans feared either a reappearance of the idea of a Security Council committee, which, if accepted, might encourage members to push again for a similar instrument regarding military assistance, or pressure from the Secretary-General or the Secretariat for a major role. Apparently, the second possibility assisted the United States in avoiding the first, as other members of the Security Council believed that the Secretary-General and the Secretariat already had exceeded their authority in their Korean activities and that direct involvement of the latter, not to mention the Economic and Social Council, might lead to a chaotic administration. Since the relief dimension of the United Nations did not hold the risks of expanded fighting as high as did the military, members were less inclined to want explicit Security Council oversight.
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At the same meeting at which the fourth resolution was passed, the United States rushed to introduce another measure in an effort to establish the lead agenda item for August. The initial State Department draft condemned North Korea’s ‘continued defiance of the United Nations’ and called on members ‘to prevent the spread to other areas of the conflict in Korea’.
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The American mission at the United Nations informed Washington that Security Council members would view the latter provision ‘as committing them in advance to use their armed forces to prevent [the] spread of conflict to areas other than Korea, and particularly to Formosa, and [it] therefore would be quite unacceptable to them’.
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Washington got the point and by the time Ambassador Austin introduced the resolution the objectionable clause had been dropped.
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Since the Soviets had made clear their plan to return to the Security Council on 1 August, US officials recognized that the resolution was unlikely to be passed. In fact Malik’s determined efforts to manipulate the agenda during August prevented its discussion until September, when the Norwegian Arne Sunde assumed the president’s chair. The Soviet delegate vetoed the resolution on the sixth.
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If the Soviet return prevented the Security Council from passing resolutions, it did not eliminate behind-the-scenes manoeuvring on Korea. This manoeuvring foreshadowed later activities in the General Assembly that played a significant role in limiting the war. The leader was Sir Benegal Rau, who, as the delegate of India, possessed excellent contacts with representatives of other members of the British Commonwealth and delegates of an emerging Arab–Asian group at the United Nations of which his country was a leader. In July India had explored the possibility of a trade-off of Taiwan and China’s seat in the Security Council in return for a North Korean withdrawal to the thirty-eighth parallel, but the Americans rejected the idea. Then, during the second week of August, Rau used an informal meeting of non-Communist members of the Security Council to propose creation of a commission of Non-permanent Representatives to that body to study all recommendations for a peaceful settlement in Korea. Rau assumed, he told his colleagues, that proposals would be based on the premises that North Korea would withdraw behind the thirty-eighth parallel and that there would be a ceasefire.
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Despite encouragement from Canadian and Australian delegates outside the Security Council, Rau never formalized his commission proposal, as Malik threatened to veto any measure that made binding the resolutions of 25 and 27 June, which he claimed were illegal, and Austin expressed concern that any step failing to reaffirm them would imply they were invalid.
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Yet the deeper reason for US opposition to the Indian initiative was that Washington desired to keep the option open for a UN ground campaign in North Korea. A day after Rau aired his proposal, Sir Gladwyn Jebb, the British delegate, told Ernest Gross that his Foreign Office was pressing him to interject ‘some positive language’ in his upcoming Security Council speech and that this meant something about a peaceful settlement consistent with Rau’s premises. Gross cautioned Jebb that suggestion of a ceasefire would be unwelcome, as the United States eventually might want to move ground forces well beyond the thirty-eighth parallel and thus preferred to avoid any prior commitments.
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In his speech before the Security Council on 11 August, Ambassador Austin indicated that the United States would push the United Nations for an effort to unify the peninsula. Although nothing explicit was said about military operations in North Korea, the context indicated that he was not entertaining the idea of negotiations with the Communists to achieve unification.
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Three more times during the month, leading US officials made public comments similar to Austin’s, while in private they talked increasingly seriously about a ground campaign north of the thirty-eighth parallel.
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As in the earlier cases involving Korea, the United States was determined to retain the initiative and, apart from the Soviet Union, others were insufficiently discontent with the direction of events to take it away.