404 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )United States, as objections began to surface over the country’s adherence to
human- rights treaties. Th e American Bar Association opposed ratifi cation
of the Genocide Convention because of the possibility that Americans could
be subjected to trials by a foreign court. Conservative po liti cal groups were
worried that American adherence to international human- rights treaties
would pave the way for foreign interventions of various kinds into domestic
aff airs. In the face of this mounting opposition to international human-
rights action, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in 1953, gave explicit
assurance to the U.S. Congress that his government would not seek the rati-
fi cation of human- rights treaties. Th e American policy, Dulles stated, was to
promote human rights by “methods of persuasion, education, and example
rather than [by] formal undertakings.”
International Law in a Cold War Climate
It was the Cold War, more than any other development, that ensured that
the heady atmosphere of postwar optimism would be dispiritingly short in
duration. One of the most conspicuous signs of the new atmosphere was the
paralysis of the UN Security Council, where the fi ve permanent member
states all had a veto power. Liberal exercise of that prerogative by the Soviet
Union reduced the body largely to impotence. Th e one outstanding excep-
tion was the crisis in Korea in 1950, when the Security Council mobilized
world support for South Korea against invasion from North Korea— though
it was able to do so only because the Soviet government happened to be boy-
cotting the council’s sessions at the time (as a protest over the failure of the
UN to grant China’s seat at the UN to the newly installed Communist gov-
ernment of mainland China). Th e frequent use of the veto by the Soviet
Union was widely resented by UN members (who, at this time, were heavily
Western in orientation). In 1949, the General Assembly appealed to the ma-
jor powers to refrain from “excessive use of the veto.” But this pious exhor-
tation had no practical eff ect.
Within the international legal profession, the Cold War was much less in
evidence than it was in the daily headlines. In large part, this was because
socialist international lawyers did not advance a distinct version of interna-
tional law, but were essentially orthodox mainstream positivists. Th ere