Tomorrow, the World by Stephen Wertheim

Author:Stephen Wertheim
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press

From Four Policemen to the United Nations via American Power

Postwar planners thought they could determine the fate of the peoples of the world, but for some time they struggled to convince their boss to entertain their big idea, a new world organization, at all. In the year following the declaration of the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt inserted China and the Soviet Union into his vision of American-British world orderers, but he refused to go further. In April 1942, Welles sent him a sketch of a “United Nations Authority.” Adding five regional representatives to Roosevelt’s Four Policemen, the authority would eventually expand into a full world organization. But Welles found his proposal “summarily turned down at the highest level.”111 According to everyone who discussed postwar matters with Roosevelt in 1942, the president felt firmly that the Big Four should dictate the peace.112 The United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and perhaps China—they would police the world and “all other nations save the Big Four should be disarmed,” Roosevelt told the Soviet foreign minister.113 Roosevelt was not about to relinquish control of war and peace to another League of Nations with a hundred signatories to satisfy.

Then Welles showed him that he did not have to. In a two-hour meeting in January 1943, Welles laid out how the postwar planners had squared great-power control with universal participation.114 Embedded in a world organization, the United States could exert more control than in an informal four-power concert. Welles’s draft, like the eventual U.N. Charter, required every member nation to make its forces and facilities available to the great powers. By internationalizing colonies and strategic bases, the organization opened the world to American access.115 Welles’s detailed exposition might have converted Roosevelt; by 1943, too, Roosevelt was more willing to make territorial settlements and more suspicious of Soviet intentions, deciding to revive France as a counterweight rather than disarm it completely.116 Roosevelt clearly did not metamorphose into an advocate of subordinating American power to international law and multilateral procedures. In March he proposed a new world organization to the British for the first time and spoke in Wellesian terms. The Big Four would make “all the more important decisions,” the president said. Once a year or so, the universal assembly would meet, but not to take action. Small countries, the president said, would merely “blow off steam.”117

From 1943 to 1945 Roosevelt convinced his allies to sign up to a new world organization, which neither Churchill nor Stalin, thinking along regionalist lines, had favored.118 Without the initiative of the United States, nothing like the U.N. would have come into being. But the subsequent negotiations over the veto power, and related provisions on which historians have focused, shed dim light on why the United States made a top diplomatic priority of establishing the organization, an objective that ranked as high as any other in the horse-trading at Yalta and other summits.119 As the historian Warren Kimball points out, Roosevelt himself regarded subsequent disputes over the veto as a triviality, relevant mainly for domestic political reasons.

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