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Kissinger, however, had a hand in recruiting Moynihan. Early last year, in the wake of a number of foreign policy embarrassments—the fall of Cambodia, the Communist takeover in Saigon, the temporary collapse of Kissinger's Cairo-Jerusalem peace shuttle—Kissinger and President Ford were looking for someone to shore up the U.S.'s increasingly defensive position in the U.N. Moynihan got the job, quite literally through a magazine article—a lengthy analysis of what he called "the massive failure of American diplomacy" published in the once liberal but increasingly conservative monthly Commentary. In it, Moynihan argued that the U.S. was singularly inept at coping with the rapid change that has expanded the U.N. since its founding in 1945 from a manageable round table of 51 nations, with Western democracies in the majority, to a sometimes brawling arena of 144 delegations, more than 100 of which are hostile Third World or Communist countries.
Under the management of an anti-Western General Assembly President, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the 1974 session saw overwhelming votes to suspend South Africa from the Assembly, grant observer status to the P.L.O., and encourage the creation of raw materials cartels similar to OPEC. At the 1974 special assembly on a new economic order—a meeting occasioned largely by the devastating impact of that year's oil-price increases—the U.S. maintained a hangdog silence while it was accused of wasting energy, warmongering, polluting and eating too much.
After berating the West in public, Third World delegates would often privately explain that only bloc solidarity had motivated their diatribe and that this should not inhibit Western economic aid. As Moynihan put it, "For too long we have been given private assurances that public obscenities were not meant."
Rather than turn a deaf ear—much less another cheek—Moynihan suggested the West start fighting back. He urged:
"It is time that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tell."
The most notable truths—his critics would say half-truths—Moynihan has told concern the poor nations of the Third World. He concedes that in the past there has been exploitation by the West but perhaps, he suggests, economic inequality in the world is less a matter of capitalist rapacity than of the Third World's own economic inefficiency—an inefficiency rooted in history, geography and socialism. The plain, observable facts are, he says, that socialism has proved to be "a distinctly poor means of producing wealth" and that high living standards are associated with relatively free market economies.
Moynihan would concede that planned or mixed economies may be necessary in many underdeveloped nations. Nor does he think that socialism is inherently incompatible with American values. He makes the obvious distinction between totalitarian and democratic socialists. The latter, "closely involved with the labor movement, committed to long perspectives in politics," he feels, should be more heavily wooed and relied on by the U.S. in the common cause.