The modern age might be described as the age of the secondary objective. Bureaus are set up in national capitals to do specific jobs, but they remain on the scene to preserve themselves as bureaus. The League of Nations was established to save the peace, but it was always afraid to make a real attempt to carry out its mission for fear of losing its precarious identity. The same is true of the United Nations: it is doomed to impotence because its objective is not the primary one of justice but the secondary aim of mere existence as an organization.

Chesly Manly, author of “The Twenty-Year Revolution” and a long-term UN reporter, has documented a full decade of UN futility in The UN Record: Ten Fateful Years for America (256 pp., Chicago: Regnery, $3.95). But Mr. Manly sees more in the UN than futility; he thinks of it in terms of active, overpowering malignancy. To him, as to Professor Orval Watts, the UN is a trap, a planned device for world enslavement to socialism. The very circumstances of its creation (it was sired, in part, by Alger Hiss) look suspicious to Mr. Manly. He thinks it significant that UNESCO, the subordinate cultural arm of UN, has recommended books, pamphlets and articles written by Fabians and members of the socialistic League for Industrial Democracy. The clincher is the UN conception of human rights, which would plow under the U.S. Bill of Rights. The proposed UN Convenant would end freedom of the press as we know it in America, and it would also threaten a lot of other freedoms as well. In default of the Bricker Amendment, the United States would be committed to the Covenant by virtue of the Constitutional provision that treaties become the supreme law of the land.

For myself, I can follow Mr. Manly’s reasoning for part of the distance. The UN could become a tyrannical instrument if its supporters were to have their way. But I have never believed for a moment that the UN could really grow teeth. None of its important member states is ever going to relinquish the power of the veto, which means that each great national entity will remain the judge of its own behavior to the last. As a matter of strict analysis, the UN has no corporate reality. It is a battleground rather than an organism, a place of meeting rather than a constitutive body. Important decisions may be announced through the UN, but they are not made by UN personnel save in those rare cases when unanimity among the great powers is a pre-established fact.

The toothlessness of the UN is amply proved by Mr. Manly when he runs over the list of its so-called “successes.” Did the UN, as has been claimed, force the Russians out of Iran in 1946? Well, it is true that the Russians did withdraw their troops, but the withdrawal did not take place until after the Soviet Union had “negotiated” a deal giving it 51 per cent of a joint stock oil corporation with powers broad enough to control the province of Azerbaijan. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State in the Roosevelt Administration, said the UN Security Council “simply whitewashed a Persian concession to the Soviet Union.”

Did the UN have anything to do with ending the communist guerrilla war against the government of Greece? Mr. Manly makes the point that UN General Assembly resolutions calling on the Soviet satellites to cease aiding the guerrillas were ignored completely. Greece was saved by American money and military assistance in combination with the Yugoslav defection from the Comintern.

In the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, the UN has been unable to force a plebiscite. As Mr. Manly says, Nehru refuses to support a UN resolution calling Communist China an aggressor in Korea but never tires of berating the UN for its failure to label Pakistan an aggressor in Kashmir.

The UN has done little to mitigate nationalist tensions in North Africa, or in the Middle East where Israel and the Moslem states are at swords’ points. Nor could the UN solve the problems of Indonesia or Indo-China. As for the Korean War, that was fought primarily by U. S. and South Korean forces. All the UN managed to do was to confuse the issue, lead the Red Chinese to believe they could interfere without undue penalty, and prevent MacArthur from getting anything more than a bloody stalemate.

If the UN has been a most feeble reed when it comes to forestalling or settling small disputes, it has been utterly powerless to mitigate or stop the Cold War. The reason is so obvious that a three-year-old child ought to be able to grasp it: an enemy remains an enemy even though he may sit in the same room with you or belong to the same club. No mere mechanical contrivance for bringing opponents into a posture of confrontation can end a dispute when the will to accommodation is lacking. Conversely, if the United States and the Soviet Union had reason for getting along with each other, it would not matter where or how their diplomats arranged to get together. Only an age of secondary objectives could think a device for staging a meeting is more important than having something to say.

Mr. Manly has assembled a good deal of useful information bearing on such topics as spies and subversive characters within the UN. He has shown how the socialists make use of UN commissions, committees and propaganda outlets. But as long as the United States and the Soviet Union have the power to veto each other’s proposals, there is little danger that the UN will prove an engine for forcing tyrannous international commitments. If the United States goes all the way to socialism, it will be because of a weakness at home, not because the UN puts it over on us. The UN isn’t that good.

Indeed, the real danger of the UN is something that Mr. Manly touches upon tangentially. The danger arises from the fact that the UN is considered in many influential quarters to be a sacred cow which should never be criticized. This does not give the UN any positive power of its own to disturb us, but it is not conducive to good muscular thinking about the realities of life in a divided world. Simply because the UN is supposed to be sacrosanct as an idea, the teachers of “social studies” in American schools seldom presume to look at historical crises in their true light, as the result of breakdowns in the effort to balance the power. The UN lacks the teeth to force Americans to do anything they don’t want to do. But its propaganda threatens to make a mishmash of the American mind.

Mr. Manly speaks of the “myth” of the UN’s “moral authority.” It has no moral authority because it is not an entity, but merely a method of bringing several competing moral systems into contact with each other. Mr. Manly sounds as though he wishes the UN could have a satisfactory moral authority. But if he really prizes freedom for the United States in particular and the Western world in general, he should be thankful that the UN has no power to enforce a single moral standard. If it had such power, the standard might not be our own. And if it happened to be our own, we would stand convicted of tyranny if we were to use the UN to impose our morality on others.

Mr. Manly is on firm ground when he recites the failures of the UN to handle or contain the Cold War. But he doesn’t make enough of the complementary fact that all of the big decisions since 1945 have been reached as a result of the same kind of old-fashioned diplomacy that pertained in the days of Bismarck or John Hay. To the extent that the Russians have been contained at all, it has been done by a combination of straight-out alliances, armaments, bribery and the uncomplicated bravery of men like Adenauer, Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee, to say nothing of the Turks and the Greeks and (on occasion) the Iranians.

Mr. Manly knows all this, but he doesn’t apply his knowledge to his study of the UN. If he had, he would have treated his subject with disdain instead of passion. He would have seen that it doesn’t make much actual difference whether the UN is dynamited today, or whether it peters into nothingness tomorrow, or whether it persists for a generation or more as a crossroads where diplomats can get together.

But if Mr. Manly makes the mistake of exalting a powerless talk-shop into a major devil, his book nonetheless performs the useful function of proving that not all writers are taken in by UN propaganda. The fact that Mr. Manly has the audacity to think for himself is a good deed in a naughty world.