(See Cover)
As naturally as if it were digging along an old, familiar path instead of pioneering a new trail, the U.S., with astute help from Great Britain, channeled Nikita Khrushchev's demand for a summit conference into the United Nations. In doing so, the U.S. was not merely using the U.N. as a handy device for countering Khrushchev without stomping on its allies' desires for a big-power meeting. In insisting on keeping the Lebanon crisis within the U.N., the U.S. had a positive purpose: getting the U.N. to take responsibility for protecting Lebanon—and any other country similarly menaced—from subversion fomented from abroad.
Trying to accomplish U.S. purposes through the U.N. entails complexities and limitations. Before fixing the U.S. position on such questions as where the proposed U.N. summit conference should be held, what nations should take part, and what the procedures should be, the U.S. has to heed any U.N. member with strong opinions on these points—and opinions abound in the U.N. Example: Prime Minister Nehru, as India's Delegate Arthur Lall reminded the U.S.'s U.N. delegation last week, wants to be invited to the conference, and to take part as a great power in any separate meetings of a Big Four, Five or Six. But, as Secretary Dulles pointed out in his press conference, inviting India might make it necessary to "invite so many countries that the conference would become practically unmanageable."
Perspective of History. The entangling necessity of having to take into account the desires, pride, prejudices and whims of U.N. members has become a permanent complication of U.S. foreign policy. But it is by its own choice that the U.S. meets the complication. During the years since the U.N.'s birth, the U.S., in a momentous shift of national outlook and policy, has committed itself to trying to achieve some of its national objectives through the forum that President Eisenhower called "man's best organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield."
In the perspective of history, involvement in the affairs of 81 other nations runs counter to a profound current in the nation's past. Over most of its history, the U.S. has seen overpowering wisdom in George Washington's farewell advice to take advantage of "our detached and distant situation" and "have as little political connection as possible" with foreign nations. Right down to World War II, many a U.S. citizen still believed that the nation's "distant situation," guarded from the Old World by two mighty oceans, made isolation the best policy.