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2 Toward Ratification April–July 1949 The Treaty in the UN Before the treaty could undergo scrutiny by the Senate, it had to meet a more immediate challenge in the UN General Assembly. By unhappy timing, the Assembly convened on April 5, the day after the treaty was signed where it could expect attack not only from the Soviet bloc but from U.S. friends worried about the treaty’s compatibility with the UN Charter. The framers of the treaty were well aware of its vulnerabilities, and took steps to thwart criticism. It was no coincidence that four of the fourteen articles of the treaty invoked the name of the UN Charter and either implied or directly asserted that its purposes were to serve, as the preamble stated, the purposes and principles of the United Nations. Article 7 was entirely an expression of devotion to the UN: “This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.” Article 5 specified that “any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to reassure and maintain international peace and security.” The linkage between treaty and charter seemingly could not be more intimate. Yet only one article of the charter, Article 51, was identified—the right of individual and collective self-defense, embedded in the treaty’s Article 5, without observing that the right of self-defense was independent of any of the charter’s articles. What was missing in the text of the treaty were the key passages in the charter’s articles 52, 53, and 54, which defined the obligations of a regional organization in the service of the UN and which was the treaty’s stated objective. These articles required reporting all activities to the Security Council where the Soviet Union had a seat and a veto. Since NATO came into existence to circumvent the Soviet veto that had rendered the UN impotent to maintain peace and international security, there 9 10 nato before the korean war was no way of fitting the treaty legally into the charter as a regional organization in support of its objectives. It required, then, an exercise in casuistry—and an element of hypocrisy—to fit the two documents together. The United States, no more than its adversary, had any intention of giving up its veto power, or of allowing the smaller nations to remove the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war. This had been a critical factor in the Senate’s defeat of the League of Nations a generation before. The veto power in this context was as much appreciated in the Pentagon as in the Kremlin. There was still another dimension to the veto issue: namely, the Soviet recognition that its voice would not be heard in a Western-dominated General Assembly , or even in the Security Council, where the other members would be in the Western European or Latin American camps, hostile to Soviet interests. The USSR could count only on the three votes in the General Assembly it had been allotted at the Yalta conference in 1945 and three from Communist Poland, Czechoslovakia , and—less reliably—Yugoslavia. It was understandable that Communist nations regarded any deviation from the understandings of 1945 to be a subversion of the UN. Without the veto power, the Soviet Union, like the United States, would not have approved the charter.1 But the veto became the symbol, in the eyes of the West, of Soviet obstructionism and, even more, as an instrument for advancing Communism worldwide. Frustration over Soviet policies in Iran, Greece, and Germany accounted for the recognition that the UN was an insufficient bulwark against Soviet-led Communism. The formation of a military alliance in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty was the end product of this understanding. The mission of this action was to embrace the goals of the charter without the constraints imposed by the veto power of the four victors of World War II. The text of the treaty itself implied that the pact not only shared the purposes of the charter but that it also conformed to the letter of the charter. These objectives confronted...

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