Tomorrow, April 1, will be an interesting day. A headline from ABC News reads, “‘Kick Russia out of the UN’: Group prepares legal challenge as Russia gets set to take UN Security Council presidency.” The article begins,
The Russian Federation will on April 1 take over the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, a shift in power that may seem extraordinary amid the war in Ukraine.
Another paragraph:
Russia holds the power of veto on Security Council resolutions, something that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized last year, when he said the bloc should act decisively or “dissolve itself” after the atrocities committed in Bucha came to light.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, a question arose: Should Russia, in place of the Soviet Union, have a seat on the U.N. Security Council? There were great hopes that Russia would join the “family of nations,” allowing other nations to live in peace and tending to its own affairs.
In 1958, when he was in his mid-eighties, Herbert Hoover wrote a book called “The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson.” It is a very interesting book, written by one U.S. president about another. Hoover admired Wilson a great deal, as millions did. Wilson was a great influence in Hoover’s life.
Today, many can’t hear the name “Wilson” without getting the shakes. Some shake on hearing “Hoover” too. But I know that the history-minded will be interested in the following. This is for them.
In his epilogue to The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, Hoover writes,
Had Mr. Wilson lived two decades longer, he would have seen the seeds planted by the Old World statesmen at Versailles bring another, and even more terrible, World War. He would have seen the freedom of a dozen nations consumed in the vortex of Communism. Yet his ferment of freedom still survives in the revolts of their people armed only with naked hands against machine guns. Also, he would have seen the Old World of Western Europe moving into a common ground of concepts of self-government and a common front against the spread of Communism.
More:
Had he lived, he would have seen the League concept rise again from this second blood bath of mankind under the name of the United Nations. The spirit of Woodrow Wilson came to the world again.
Hoover then says,
The United Nations organization, except in one particular, follows very closely the pattern of Woodrow Wilson’s League. . . . But the admission of aggressive dictatorship to its membership would never have been accepted by Woodrow Wilson. He conceived the League as an association of free nations, not to include men and dictatorships conspiring for its ruin.
Wilson articulated “principles of peace,” which Hoover quotes:
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end . . .
A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor.
Hoover concludes his epilogue, and his book, by saying,
With his death ended a Greek tragedy, not on the stage of imagination, but in the lives of nations. And as in the tragedies of old the inspiring words and deeds of men who failed still live.
The great issues and questions that Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries wrestled with — and that Herbert Hoover and his wrestled with — never go away, although they, of course, assume new forms.
Tomorrow, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is to assume the presidency of the U.N. Security Council. Which is an obscenity.