Western statesmen can draw a profound, though scarcely new, lesson from India's victorious aggression in Goa: that the world's newer nations are going to act in very much the same fashion as its older ones. Which is to say that the newer nations will wage nationalist wars, mask their territorial ambitions with a rhetoric of self-determination and self-defense, and go unpunished.

It is easy to see why Nehru chose this moment to invade the three Portuguese enclaves on India's west coast, though it is impossible to condone an assertion of Indian self-interest at the expense of the Goan people. The Goa adventure compensates for Nehru's failure to prevent a Chinese military occupation of some 12,000 miles of Indian Himilayan territory. Facing elections and a storm of criticism from the Indian nationalist right, the Prime Minister has taken the easy, demagogue's path of opening a new and popular anti-colonialist front.

It will also be popular abroad. The rest of the world can scarcely be expected to leap to the aid of a nation whose brutal treatment of Angola is an international scandal. With Portugal's repression in mind, no decent person will step forward to say what is, after all, the truth: that Goa is not Angola.

It is an entirely open question whether the Goans want to be ruled by India. Nearly half of them are Roman Catholics, who, like the Moslems of Kashmir and Pakistan, worry about how they would be treated in Hindu India. And there is almost no evidence that the Hindu population of the Portuguese colonies feels particularly oppressed. Native Goans have been noticeably absent from the anti-Portuguese demonstrations and marches staged by India.

But discussion of self-determination is, of course, academic. The invasion is over, and India possesses Goa by right of conquest. It is also useless to point out that Prime Minister Nehru rejected the pleas of President Kennedy, the mediation offers of Secretary General U Thant, and a Portuguese proposal that international observers be sent to Goa--though none of these things should be forgotten.

Now that the Security Council has proven itself incapable of acting, the United States must decide whether to push its condemnation of India onto the Assembly floor. Since the anti-colonialist bloc will undoubtedly vote down any motion of censure, the fight seems pointless. But Ambassador Stevenson has rightly emphasized that the real danger in India's resorting to force is the precedent it establishes; in Indonesia, on India's own borders, and in Africa, there are other nations eager to sieze land in the name of anti-colonialism. The United Nations must work some way of checking what may become a new decade of little territorial wars, wars all the more threatening against the background of the greater, colder war.