Whether to sign the attached reply.
Tab 1
Letter From Secretary of State Shultz to the President of
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Buckley)5
Washington, November 5, 1984
Dear Jim:
I very much appreciate your August 31 letter recounting your
experiences as Head of Delegation at the World Population Conference
in Mexico City. Public focus on extraneous issues at that Conference
has tended to obscure its record of achievement, including the 87
recommendations based on honest consensus.
Your letter discussed our role in preparing for future multilateral
conferences, participation in preparatory committees, and
backstopping in the Department. We have reviewed our preparations
and current practices. The preparations for this conference involved
careful work by many Department officials, including specialists in
UN political issues, over a
period of nearly three years. We take seriously the need for close
political oversight of technical conferences of specialized UN agencies. The kind of difficulties
you encountered in Mexico City are, unfortunately, not unusual in
UN conferences. In this regard,
we continue to update, and have reissued, our general guidance on
political issues for U.S. delegations at all international
conferences.
Finally, you raise a most interesting point about the dilemma we face
in combatting non-germane political issues in essentially technical
conferences. As you know, one of our major policy goals is to resist
politicization of the UN system, and
to eliminate it wherever possible. In pursuit of this goal, we have
a range of options including whether to join or deny consensus or to
abstain. Our review of precedent and practice suggests that an
abstention does not necessarily mean acquiescence. Its significance
depends on the context of the tactical situation
[Page 830]
and our explanatory statement. There
is no single strategy to protect USG interests. We must chart our course on a
case-by-case basis, taking care to balance our domestic and our
foreign policy concerns. That balance was, as you know, crucial to
the President’s decision to join consensus on the Final Declaration
of the World Population Conference, after we had explicitly and
repeatedly disavowed and voted against Paragraph 34.6
We continue to work hard at purging the UN system of extraneous politicization. All of us in
the Department of State share your regret that so much time in
Mexico City was consumed by extraneous issues, but we are firmly
convinced that the final result was an advantage for the United
States. You have my appreciation for the patience and tact with
which you dealt with them.
I am sending Jeane a copy of this letter for her information.
With warm personal regards,
Sincerely yours,
Tab 2
Letter From the President of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty (Buckley) to Secretary of State Shultz and the U.S.
Representative to the United Nations (Kirkpatrick)8
Munich, August 31, 1984
Dear George and
Jeane:
I would like to record a few observations on the recent Population
Conference (and, by extension, the UN conference phenomenon) while my impressions are
still fresh.
1. Preparatory
Committee:
The preparatory work for the Conference was entrusted to a
Preparatory Committee. After several weeks’ work, the Committee
produced 85 specific recommendations for consideration by the
International Conference on Population in Mexico City. All but one
were adopted
[Page 831]
by consensus.
The exception (which was bracketed in the Committee text) was an
irrelevant, politically loaded Soviet proposal concerning
disarmament.
Unfortunately, Western delegates to the preparatory conference
consisted largely of specialists on population and related subjects
to the apparent exclusion of any with a sensitivity to the
extraneous political issues endemic in the UN system. As a result, the United States and others
failed to catch the political significance of a last-minute Arab
recommendation dealing with settlements in occupied territories.
This consensus Arab recommendation and the bracketed Soviet
recommendation were to plague the Mexico City Conference and consume
an inordinate amount of the time and effort of our delegation and
many others. We were ultimately able to neutralize the Soviet
thrust. We failed in our efforts to defang the Arab recommendation
in significant part because our less stalwart allies (that is to
say, everyone except Israel) were able to assert that the
Preparatory Committee had legitimized it.
While this was the most critical oversight of the U.S.
representatives to the Preparatory Committee, there were others
which we were able to defuse either through amendment or by taking
specific reservations to the final text—e.g. a recommendation urging
all nations to implement the International Code of Marketing of
BreastMilk Substitutes which the United States had so strongly
opposed two years earlier.
All this suggests the need to ensure that future U.S. teams preparing
agendas for conferences of specialized UN agencies contain at least one member with the
broader political knowledge required to prevent such oversights.
2. Conference
Preparation:
When I arrived in Washington the week before the Conference opened, I
found that precious little preparatory work had been done. The State
Department briefing book contained competent papers on a few key
issues,9 but there was nothing to
suggest a detailed examination of the entire agenda. No amendments
to the Preparatory Committee’s recommendations were prepared, and we
were provided with no analyses to back the U.S. policy. All of this
work was done by our delegation and support staff which had its
first full meeting in Mexico City the day before the Conference
opened.
[Page 832]
I have a feeling that conferences of this type may fall within a very
large crack between the State Department and USUN. If so, I strongly recommend
that something be done to make sure that future delegations have the
benefit of the kind of thorough preparatory work I found so helpful
when I was an Under Secretary.
3. The UN Conference Dilemma:
The Mexico City Conference (as well as the UN Conference on the Environment I attended in Nairobi
in 1982) operated on two quite different planes, each with its own
dynamics. The first involved the substance of the
Conference—population, in the case of Mexico City, and the
environment in Nairobi. In each case, most of the delegates were
concerned with the substantive issues, and viewed their particular
conference as a distinct and isolated meeting having large symbolic
importance for the subject under review.
At the same time, and on the other plane, each conference was just
one in a continuing stream of UN
meetings in which American political interests of a wholly different
order are very much engaged—usually in the form of extraneous,
politically-charged matters introduced by the Soviets and members of
the Third World.
Thus, at such conferences, the U.S. delegation is faced with twin
agendas; and how it handles its responsibilities will have an impact
not only on the substantive matters before the conference, but on
the ability of other U.S. delegations to deal with extraneous issues
at future conferences.
On the substantive plane, we accomplished far more at Mexico City
than we had reason to expect. Our amendments were carefully selected
and the majority found their way into the final text in one form or
another. As a result, the final report reaffirms the primacy of
parental rights, condemns coercion, and contains a far more balanced
presentation of progress to date and problems remaining to be
addressed than would otherwise have been the case. We even succeeded
in insinuating the phrase “entrepreneurial initiatives” into a
UN document! But on the other
plane, the one important to our ability to be effective at future
conferences, we lost ground and, I suspect, needlessly so.
In accordance with our instructions, we went all out in our efforts
to eliminate or neutralize the Soviet and Arab intrusions. We
hammered away at the theme that the UN system was in danger of destroying itself if it
allowed such blatantly political side issues to disrupt fora
intended for the sober discussion of basic human problems in which
all nations had a common stake; and we could point to the enormous
diversion of attention from substantive issues at Mexico City to
prove our point.
[Page 833]
But after we had expended considerable political capital, after we
had gone to the mat and suffered public bruises in the attempt, we
in the end voted against the Arab recommendation, recorded our stern
reservations . . . . and then joined the consensus. The first
question asked me by a reporter after it was all over was, “Why did
you cave?” His assessment was not unique.
This Administration may be the first in a couple of decades to truly
take the UN seriously. But to be
effective, we must also make sure that the UN takes us seriously. From everything I have been able
to read and hear, we have been making headway over the last couple
of years in this regard. After the Mexican experience, however, I
would anticipate that at future UN
conferences we will find the Arab and Soviet blocs even less willing
to talk reason, our Western allies more reluctant to lean on Third
World delegations, and the UN
Secretariat itself more complacent. And here we must be willing to
face up to the tensions that will inevitably appear between the two
planes on which such conferences currently operate.
In Nairobi as well as Mexico, there was enormous pressure on the
United States not to cause the conference to end in a “failure” by
insisting on an important point of principle. This reflects the
assumption (which I gather has assumed the status of a UN mystique) that the mere failure to
achieve consensus on a final conference document somehow negates the
agreement on all of the substantive matters that may have been
achieved in the prior days. Yet if I understand UNese correctly,
this is analytical nonsense. An abstention will deny consensus, but
at the same time it is taken as an act of acquiescence in everything
as to which a formal reservation has not been taken.
In the case of the Population Conference, and again as I understand
it, a U.S. abstention would in practical terms have had the effect
of a U.S. acceptance of every substantive recommendation that had
been adopted by the Conference. Abstention would not have reduced by
one hair America’s continued undertaking to support voluntary family
planning programs, nor would it have affected the obligation of
other nations to honor the results of the Conference.
But because consensus holds such symbolic importance within the
UN, had we been able to
demonstrate that the United States will withhold consensus in
support of a strong point of principle, we would not have lost any
substantive ground, but we would have enhanced the ability of
American delegations to future conferences to excise the kind of
gratuitous mischief that increasingly plagues such meetings.
Given this experience, I would urge the two of you to hammer out some
sort of policy to govern the conduct of U.S. delegations at whatever
conference next comes over the horizon. It is my recommendation that
if we do not intend to back an important U.S. position with the
[Page 834]
only kind of action which
will make an impression on the UN
fraternity, the U.S. delegation should be instructed to do no more
than make the necessary pro forma objections for the record, and to
concentrate its time and political capital on more fruitful matters.
On the other hand, if we are serious about being taken seriously,
the delegation must be armed with the only ammunition that
apparently counts.
With the best personal regards to you both,
Sincerely,
