at Lake Success that Sunday afternoon, the Council met. Some members protested about the short notice, which had preventedthem from receiving instructions from their governments. The Yugoslavs demanded that if the South Koreans were to be heard by the Council, no resolution should be passed until the North Koreans had also attended to put their case. They were outvoted. On 13 January, the Soviet delegate, Yakov Malik, had walked out of the Security Council in protest against the UN’s refusal to seat communist China in place of the Nationalists. On 25 June, he was still absent. In these extraordinary circumstances, at 6 p.m. a UN resolution condemning the North Korean attack, and calling for the withdrawal of Kim Il Sung’s forces south of the 38th Parallel, was passed by a 9–0 vote.
The UN resolution on Korea passed into history. It was a landmark event, probably never to be repeated in the history of this, or any other world body. Here, for once, was no mere vote for a peace-keeping force, a body to intervene between two warring parties; but unequivocal support for one combatant against another. Many times since 1950, nations have committed flagrant acts of armed intervention in the affairs of others: in many cases, the victim has appealed to the United Nations for military protection, and heard this refused. Whatever excesses states commit against their neighbours – Russia in Afghanistan, Libya in Chad, Israel in Lebanon – the issues are adjudged too confused, the tangle of international loyalties and hostilities too great, to achieve a consensus for international military action. The UN intervention in Korea was a fluke of history, made possible by the unique accident of the Russian boycott. In the absence of the Soviets, the United Nations in 1950 was still overwhelmingly the instrument of the Western democracies and their clients. In that last period before the rush of colonies to independence multiplied the UN’s size and its dissensions, it possessed only fifty-eight members. Many of these cherished a sincere crusading enthusiasm that the new body should prove capable of more than the sterile debates of the interwar League of Nations.
Most international disputes are shrouded in such a fog of claim and counter-claim, outrage and reprisal, that it is difficult tosubject them to any absolute moral judgement. In less dangerous times, the questionable legitimacy and obvious unpleasantness of Syngman Rhee’s regime in Seoul would have made many nations reluctant to come to his aid. There were few illusions about this in informed circles in the United States. ‘The unpopularity of the Syngman Rhee government and the questionable political and military reliability of the army and police force’, wrote Hanson Baldwin in the New York Times on 27 June, ‘are the greatest weakness of the defending forces.’ But it was not only the United States, in the summer of 1950, which saw in Korea an extraordinary opportunity to draw the line against communist aggression. In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Latin America, the advance of communism – nourished if not directed by the agents of Stalin – was seen not as an abstract problem, but an immediate physical menace. The spectacle of Eastern Europe, the heart of such gaiety and culture for centuries, disappearing into the dark fog of totalitarianism, had not only dismayed, but frightened a host of citizens of free nations. Not merely Greece, but France and Italy, seemed close to falling under communist rule. The vision of Russian armies storming across the post-war occupation lines to assault Western Europe appeared perfectly plausible. It was a British socialist Member of Parliament of that period who said, thirty-five years later: ‘People have forgotten just how indescribably bloody the Russians were at that time. Because the Soviets have now become more reasonable, less frightening, we should not lose sight of how ruthless and immediate a threat they then
The UN resolution on Korea passed into history. It was a landmark event, probably never to be repeated in the history of this, or any other world body. Here, for once, was no mere vote for a peace-keeping force, a body to intervene between two warring parties; but unequivocal support for one combatant against another. Many times since 1950, nations have committed flagrant acts of armed intervention in the affairs of others: in many cases, the victim has appealed to the United Nations for military protection, and heard this refused. Whatever excesses states commit against their neighbours – Russia in Afghanistan, Libya in Chad, Israel in Lebanon – the issues are adjudged too confused, the tangle of international loyalties and hostilities too great, to achieve a consensus for international military action. The UN intervention in Korea was a fluke of history, made possible by the unique accident of the Russian boycott. In the absence of the Soviets, the United Nations in 1950 was still overwhelmingly the instrument of the Western democracies and their clients. In that last period before the rush of colonies to independence multiplied the UN’s size and its dissensions, it possessed only fifty-eight members. Many of these cherished a sincere crusading enthusiasm that the new body should prove capable of more than the sterile debates of the interwar League of Nations.
Most international disputes are shrouded in such a fog of claim and counter-claim, outrage and reprisal, that it is difficult tosubject them to any absolute moral judgement. In less dangerous times, the questionable legitimacy and obvious unpleasantness of Syngman Rhee’s regime in Seoul would have made many nations reluctant to come to his aid. There were few illusions about this in informed circles in the United States. ‘The unpopularity of the Syngman Rhee government and the questionable political and military reliability of the army and police force’, wrote Hanson Baldwin in the New York Times on 27 June, ‘are the greatest weakness of the defending forces.’ But it was not only the United States, in the summer of 1950, which saw in Korea an extraordinary opportunity to draw the line against communist aggression. In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Latin America, the advance of communism – nourished if not directed by the agents of Stalin – was seen not as an abstract problem, but an immediate physical menace. The spectacle of Eastern Europe, the heart of such gaiety and culture for centuries, disappearing into the dark fog of totalitarianism, had not only dismayed, but frightened a host of citizens of free nations. Not merely Greece, but France and Italy, seemed close to falling under communist rule. The vision of Russian armies storming across the post-war occupation lines to assault Western Europe appeared perfectly plausible. It was a British socialist Member of Parliament of that period who said, thirty-five years later: ‘People have forgotten just how indescribably bloody the Russians were at that time. Because the Soviets have now become more reasonable, less frightening, we should not lose sight of how ruthless and immediate a threat they then
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