I have the honour to present a commentary on the proceedings of the Tenth Session of the Assembly of the United Nations.

The Election of New Members:

The main achievement of the Session was the admission of the sixteen new members.¹ There can be no doubt that this achievement was due, to a large extent, to the initiative of the Canadian Government and the painstaking work of the Canadian Delegation in the Assembly itself. When Ambassador Heeney² first told me about the Canadian Resolution he emphasised that his Government, convinced that ‘the time had come to admit the excluded Nations, or as many of them as possible’, intended to drive hard for the Resolution and so break the deadlock on the membership issue. Both Ambassador Heeney and Ambassador McKay were extremely grateful to you when you did not press for a change in the wording of the Resolution that would have been difficult to carry at the stage at which we came into the discussion. The wisdom of your decision to agree to an explanatory statement as to the meaning of the expression to which we saw objection (‘about which no problem of unification arises’) became clearer still when the debate in the Assembly issued in the naming (in the Resolution finally adopted) of the names of the countries proposed for election.

The general comment here has been to the effect that American diplomacy suffered a defeat by the exclusion of Japan. You will recall from the Embassy reports on the ‘package deal’ that the State Department objected to the ‘package’ on three grounds, namely, (1) that, in view of the opinion of the International Court of Justice that each candidate for election should be considered separately, the deal was illegal, (2) that, some of the countries included in the deal were not qualified for membership, e.g., Outer Mongolia, and (3) that Japan, a country well qualified for election, was excluded. Sections of the American press were critical of the State Department for insisting on the exclusion of Outer Mongolia; but the fact was not stressed that the admission of Outer Mongolia was regarded by Nationalist China as, in a sense, the admission of Communist China.

When Ambassador Tsiang³ vetoed Outer Mongolia on the 13th December and Mr. Sobolev then vetoed the rest of the ‘package’ as was expected (for the agreement had been to elect ‘all or none’ of the 18 candidates) the view was expressed here that that could not be the end of the matter. It was thought that if the Tenth Assembly adjourned without breaking the deadlock on the membership issue, a heavy blow would have been struck at the status and prestige of UNO, and that some of the candidates might withdraw their applications in disgust at the proceedings in the Assembly and at the way in which they had been bargained for, for months, by the two Great Powers principally involved in the deal. It was apparently what Dr. José Maza⁴ (Chile) the President of the Assembly called ‘the great gesture’ of Prime Minister Nehru which finally broke the deadlock. On the night of the 15th-16th December, Mr. Nehru, at the instance of Mr. Krishna Menon, persuaded his guests, Premier Bulganin and Mr. Khrushchev,⁵ to compromise and to withdraw Outer Mongolia from the ‘package’.

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