The emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly, in progress this morning, is only the 11th in the existence of the world body. It comes after President Biden’s baffling decision to break with Ukraine over Russia’s very standing at the UN.  The administration’s blunder emerged yesterday, when our ambassador,  Linda Thomas Greenfield, told CNN flatly, “Russia is a member of the Security Council” and asserted, “That’s in the UN Charter.”

Ambassador Greenfield is wrong on some points and the others are a matter of dispute. Since the outbreak of the war, Ukraine has been frantically calling attention to this head. It points out that the current wording of the UN Charter lists the permanent members of the Security Council as “the Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States.”