Efforts to resolve the recent India-Pakistani crisis were hampered by the veto in the Security Council. This caused the Pakistani Foreign Minister to cry out during a session of this council: “We have been frustrated by the veto. Let’s build a monument for the veto. Let’s build a monument for impotence and incapacity.”

Well, is there any hope that real changes will be made to improve the U.N.? What does the past record show? In 1966 an editorial in the Washington, D.C., publication Human Events warned that “only drastic reform will save [the United Nations] from the fate of the League of Nations [which failed in 1939].” In 1970 that call was still going out, for the New York Times published an article entitled “A Call for U.N. Reform.” It asked for a consideration of “how [the United Nations] can best be dismantled and reconstituted.”

Additionally, the comments made by this same newspaper at the close of the U.N.’s twenty-sixth session last December are not very hopeful. “There was no one at the end of the session who could honestly say that a promising new start had been made. . . . There was a strong feeling that the United Nations would go on, as it has in the past, busily attending to secondary issues but paralyzed or ignored by the big powers when big questions are involved.”

Why are more significant changes not being made? J. Russell Wiggins, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, answers: “Efforts to change the system would create ever bigger problems.”

In 1965, the Saturday Review magazine bemoaned the fact that the U.N. “is having trouble bridging the moat that separates the ‘have’ from the ‘have-not’ nations. Sadly, the moat grows wider every day.” And if you review last year’s press reports about famine, poverty and disease riddling India, Pakistan and certain African nations, you could say that that moat still is not being bridged.

There are those who claim that a great achievement of the U.N. is that it has prevented a major war from breaking out. This is because the U.N. provides a place for men to talk things over. And, as Winston Churchill once said, “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” While this might sound reasonable, former Secretary-General U Thant once warned that the United Nations was headed toward becoming “merely a debating forum, and nothing else.”

As one writer observed, “So long as the U.N. is composed of men with the limitations inherent in the human mind, it will talk peace and prepare for war.”

The late Adlai Stevenson described the problem in this way: “The central question is whether the wonderfully diverse and gifted assembly of human beings on this earth really knows how to run a civilization.”