9781422282823

THE UNITED NATIONS

The League of Nations was established after World War I as a shared forum for nations to cooperate on shared challenges. However, the League had proved unable to play that part effec- tively in the 1920s and 1930s, in part because the United States did not join it. After World War II, the found- ers of the UN sought a balance between internationalism, where nations subordinate their own interests to those shared by all; national sovereignty, which guards the independence of in- dividual nations; and the special role played by the great powers. The UN’s Security Council would be the organ to pass resolutions binding for all nations, but it could only do so if none of the five permanent members—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Great Britain, and France—used its veto power. In the contentious world of the Cold War, this meant that the UN would often be at the sidelines in international disputes.

agreed to let the Soviet Union join the new United Nations organization. He declined participation in the financial-eco- nomic bodies (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) organized at the Bretton Woods Conference of the same year. More than the UN, Bretton Woods represent- ed America’s vision for a new world order along liberal-dem- ocratic lines, with market economies and open societies. Sta- lin’s vision was close to the opposite. Ideology drove the two sides apart after 1945, despite the potential benefits of cooperation. Just as U.S. leaders believed liberal democracy was destined to spread to more and more countries, Stalin believed that history was inev- itably moving in the direction of a communist world. Not only that, he believed that the alternative—capitalism—was Leaders of the major Allied forces during World War II—Soviet premiere Joseph Stalin, U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, and British prime minister Winston Churchill (seated, left to right)—meeting for a conference in Tehran, Iran, in 1943.

relentlessly hostile to the Soviet Union and its allies. Communist-capitalist relations were a zero-sum struggle for power and ultimately survival, he was convinced, with no coming out ahead: a gain for one side automatically meant a setback for the other, and the two sides could not permanently coexist peacefully. Stalin was also a pragmatist , however. He understood that the Soviet Union was weaker and needed time to recover from the war; in 1945 he was not looking for a new one. Instead, he hoped to continue the cooperation begun during the war—without

11

CHAPTER 1