Editorial Note
Numerous addresses and statements relating the foreign policy of the United States to the goals and purposes of the United Nations were made in 1947 by high-ranking United States Government officials, including the President; these are printed in whole or in part in the Department of State Bulletin and in The United States and the United Nations Report by the President to the Congress for the Year 1947 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1948). These official pronouncements tended increasingly to reflect the anxiety of Government leaders concerning “the vicious circles” of deepening political and economic crises throughout the world, and came to focus specifically on the Second Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, which convened at New York on September 16. Official United States policy regarding needful United Nations action in the worsening international situation was embodied in an address made by Secretary of State Marshall to the General Assembly on September 17 (for text, see United Nations, Official Records of the General Assembly, Second Session, Plenary Meetings, pages 19 ff.). The speech, entitled “A Program for a More Effective United Nations,” outlined a series of proposals concerning how to deal firmly with actual or threatened aggression in certain parts of the world (Greece and Korea) and to cope with constitutional difficulties—within the Organization itself—that hampered constructive action by the United Nations (the voting impasse in the Security Council, the proposal to set up an “interim committee” of the General Assembly). The documents that follow are illustrative of some of the thinking that went into the United States effort to formulate foreign policy, at that time, within the context of United Nations action.