U.S. Gap at the U.N.

There is a glaring gap between American commitment and American performance at the United Nations that threatens a significant compromise in the way the world organization draws its budgets.

President Reagan, as he should have, hailed the compromise and promised, in a call on Dec. 22 to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, that he would ask Congress to make up the arrears owed by the United States. The new financial arrangements were cited by the U.S. Mission to the U.N. as the outstanding American success of 1986.

Since then no request for supplementary funds has been made, the 1988 budget has been issued with no change in U.S. funding, and the leader of the congressional action to mandate cuts in U.S. support of the U.N., Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.), has said that she needs more information before she moves to lift the sanctions that she designed. This is not the kind of coherent, forceful response that the reforms deserve.

It can be argued, of course, that Congress did not get what it wanted when it adopted the Kassebaum legislation. Under that legislation, U.S. payments to the world organization were to be capped at 20% until the charter was rewritten to permit voting weighted to reflect dollar contributions. It was an impossible dream that raised as many questions as it sought to resolve--among them the equity of making money more important than population.

In the end the General Assembly, working overtime, gave the United States more than anyone had expected. A consensus formula for the budget was approved--in effect permitting the major donors, through their dominant role on the 21-nation Committee for Program and Coordination, to set budget ceilings. In the words of Vernon A. Walters, head of the U.S. delegation to the U.N., the “impossible has been achieved.”

Maybe. No face will be redder than that of Walters if the silence in Washington persists. In the State Department the Bureau of International Organization Affairs said that no decision had been taken on a supplemental appropriation for the current year, in which the United States owes the U.N. more than $100 million--to say nothing of overdue obligations to the specialized agencies, some facing crippling cutbacks as a result. The 1988 budget reflects no increase in support, it was explained, because it was drawn up before the compromise was struck and while the Kassebaum legislation was still in place. Kassebaum herself plans to meet with State Department officials later, but has not yet made any commitment to lift the sanctions.

A sound argument can be made that the new budget approach will strengthen the U.N. even though it was extracted by using illegal actions that can only encourage other nations to defy their obligations under international law. But there will be a weakening, not a strengthening, unless there is prompt action to suspend the Kassebaum legislation and to meet U.S. obligations for the current year with a supplemental appropriation.