The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (17 page)

According to the
New York Times
, Article 43 on standby arrangements for the mobilization of member state forces for use by the Security Council ‘was viewed generally by delegates as “the most important single paragraph” in the whole United Nations Charter’.
⁶⁷
Some countries, such as France, would have preferred to have had established a full-time standing international force. As Maurice Dejean, the Director-General of the French Foreign Ministry, put it, France still favoured ‘an international force of all arms, always at the disposal of the Council’, though the Article 43 arrangements were ‘the maximum we could hope to achieve here at this time’.
⁶⁸
Whatever the method of mobilizing international forces, the bottom line was unmistakable to Ambassador Morgenstierne of Norway. On the Council’s capacity to take quick and effective enforcement action, he told a June 1945 public audience at the San Francisco Opera House, ‘may well depend in the future the very existence of the freedom and justice-loving nations of the world’.
⁶⁹

On one point the Big Three (the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union) never wavered: their unity was the key to world peace. Therefore, they had to be permanently represented on the Security Council, and decisions on matters of war and peace had to be subject to unanimity among them. The US State Department, in commentaries accompanying its August 1943 draft Charter, noted that the first difference between that draft and the League’s Covenant was that the new formulation ‘gives the great powers exceptional and immediate responsibility for security, and for this purpose gives them a permanent preponderance in the membership and vote control of the Council’.
⁷⁰
The 1943 draft specified the US, the UK, China, and the Soviet Union as the four Permanent Members (hereafter, the Big Four).
⁷¹
In his cover memo transmitting the Department’s ideas for a post-war international organization to President Roosevelt on 29 December 1943, Secretary of State Cordell Hull underlined that ‘the entire plan is based on two central assumptions’, as follows:

The prospects for an effective international organization, in essence, would depend on the way the Big Four would use their military assets: showing restraint in their interactions, while displaying the will to act collectively in the common good when needed.

In conveying these ideas to President Roosevelt, the State Department was – not surprisingly – preaching to the converted. The Department was largely engaged in the task of elaborating concepts already articulated by the President. In the April 1943
Saturday Evening Post
article mentioned previously based on a series of interviews with Roosevelt, Forrest Davis related that ‘the President holds that a genuine association of interest on the part of the great powers must precede the transformation of the United Nations’ military alliance into a political society of nations. The problem of security rests with the powers who have the military force to uphold it.’
⁷³
In his 1943 Christmas Eve address, a week before receiving Hull’s memo, the President pointed out that:

The evolution of the President’s notion of the Four Policemen has been traced to early musings in 1941, to the decision to have the Big Four as the first signatories of the 1 January 1942 Declaration by United Nations, and to Sumner Welles’ State Department planning group in the Spring of 1942.
⁷⁵

The President’s early and persistent advocacy of the Four Policemen strategy left little room for public dissent by American officials, though some nuances were voiced publicly and some reservations privately. Sumner Welles, the articulate and creative Under Secretary of State, preached a mix of a global and regional approach to postwar organization until his resignation in August 1943.
⁷⁶
In his subsequent book,
The Time for Decision
, published in 1944, Welles acknowledged that ‘of the United Nations, the four major powers primarily responsible for winning the war and for preventing renewed outbreaks after the armistice must necessarily assume the basic responsibility for making and carrying out all military decisions.’
⁷⁷
Under his plan, each would have a veto over any action by the ‘Executive Council’.
⁷⁸
However, in his view, other UN members ‘will never reconcile themselves to being dominated for an indefinite period by a dictatorship composed of the four great powers’.
⁷⁹
Therefore, he proposed regional cooperation as the foundation for the organization as a whole.
⁸⁰
A number of realists were concerned about the prospects for cooperation with the Soviet Union in the new enterprise. In a private memo in May 1945, for example, Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew cautioned that, given the veto, the new organization’s ‘power to prevent a future world war will be but a pipe dream’, because ‘the organization will be rendered powerless to act against the one certain future enemy, Soviet Russia.’
⁸¹
Welles, on the other hand, argued that the way relations were handled in the postwar transition period would determine whether the Russian people would become ‘the greatest destructive force in the world of the future, or whether they will become one of the most powerful constructive forces’.
⁸²

Post-war planners in London generally found the Four Policemen concept to be quite compatible with their own thinking.
⁸³
Indeed, in a July 1945 memo to the UK Foreign Office, Gladwyn Jebb claimed that ‘the very basis of the scheme, namely, continued co-operation between the Great Powers, and notably between the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom, had its origin in this country and was imparted by devious means to our two great Allies.’
⁸⁴
This claim of ownership, however, seems rather stretched and unsupported by the recollection of other British statesmen or even by Jebb’s memoirs. Lord Halifax, who had served as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington DC during the war, Chair of the British delegation at Dumbarton Oaks, and Acting Chair at San Francisco, credited President Roosevelt for conceiving of the ‘grand design’ for the ‘coequal collaboration’ of the Big Three ‘with the object of defeating the enemy and creating a United Nations Organisation for the maintenance of world peace’.
⁸⁵
Former Foreign Secretary Eden, like Jebb, contends that London let Washington take the lead in San Francisco for the sake of bolstering public and Senate support for the new body in the US.
⁸⁶
Eden, however, does not question the origins of the Four Powers concept. He provides, instead, a telling account of Roosevelt’s presentation to him in March 1943 of the concept and of US plans for ‘the structure of the United Nations organization after the war’.
⁸⁷
Once again, the President sought to persuade his British allies of the need to include China among the major powers. According to Eden, a year later, in May 1944, Churchill was still pushing for the adoption of his regional concept.
⁸⁸
During the planning process, according to Webster, the US showed much greater interest in post-war organization and had a more ‘elaborate’ planning effort, larger delegations, and the idea for a permanent council.
⁸⁹
In his
Memoirs
, Jebb is candid about how even the earliest British papers were ‘considerably influenced by what we believed to be the working of the American official mind. … The first conception was that favoured by the US administration who seemed to favour a world organization after the war based on the United Nations as a whole and directed by a small “policy committee” – probably the four Powers only.’
⁹⁰

Whoever deserves credit for the initial conception of the Security Council and its cardinal principle of great power unanimity, both the convergence in American and British perspectives and the leading role played by the US in putting the pieces together were essential to the establishment of the world body. No one wanted to chance a second experiment in world order without the US firmly embedded in its structure and operations. As a French delegate argued in San Francisco, reflecting on the League’s failings, ‘it had not been the rule of unanimity which had prevented its action, but the absence, from the start, of one great power and the later withdrawal of others.’
⁹¹
All the multilateral wartime conferences on post-war organization – at Bretton Woods, Dumbarton Oaks, and San Francisco – took place on US soil, both because it was unscathed by the ravages of the war and because of the political symbolism of planting the seeds of the next generation of international organization firmly in the American heartland.
⁹²
Stettinius, on the basis of conversations with British and Soviet diplomats in London in April 1944, concluded ‘that the United States would have to assume the initiative on the question of world organization. I am convinced that if the United States had not continually pushed the plans there would have been no United Nations by the end of the war.’
⁹³

Even before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt considered the possibility of a joint policing of the post-war world by the US and the United Kingdom.
⁹⁴
From the beginning, moreover, Churchill and Roosevelt shared the key assumption that, given the League’s inadequacies, ‘if the UN was to succeed there must be a dominant place within it for the great powers’, as Evan Luard phrased it.
⁹⁵
Though the two leaders had differences over China, the place of regional bodies, and whether to wait until after the war to convene the founding conference, there was much more that united them. Beyond their cultural and normative affinities, their armed forces had fought side by side in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. While the Red Army had carried an enormous burden on the eastern front, it had had to do so largely alone. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill were sanguine about the challenge of working with the Soviets in the post-war order, though the latter was more open and pointed in his concerns. Such was the case in a note to Eden in October 1942: ‘I must admit that my thoughts rest primarily in Europe – the revival of the glory of Europe, the parent continent of the modern nations and of civilization’, wrote Churchill, and it would be a ‘measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence’ of these states.
⁹⁶

Though they took care to avoid the appearance of an Anglo-American conglomerate, both London and Washington found it easier to face Moscow together than alone on some key questions relating to the values, principles, and purposes of the new body. As Roosevelt put it in his January 1945 State of the Union address, ‘the nearer we come to vanquishing our enemies the more we inevitably become conscious of differences among the victors.’
⁹⁷
That is why, James Byrnes noted, the President ‘was so insistent that the United Nations should be established while the war was still in progress’.
⁹⁸
Yet the task of building broad international support for the Four Policemen conception of the new body had to proceed through a series of deliberate steps: (1) frequent bilateral consultations between American and British experts over the course of 1942 and 1943, including a bilateral summit in Quebec; (2) President Roosevelt’s approach to Stalin at the Teheran summit conference in November 1943 (following the foreign ministers meeting in Moscow); (3) Dumbarton Oaks to bring in the Chinese and agree on a draft charter; (4) Yalta to iron out unsettled issues from Dumbarton Oaks, including the scope of the veto and the number of Soviet places at the table; (5) San Francisco to multilateralize and legitimize the process; and (6) ratification by the capitals. As the circle widened, of course, the views of a growing number of players had to be taken into account.

For Stalin, the notion of great power cooperation presented no problem as long as the unanimity rule was preserved. Preoccupied, as the French were, with keeping Germany from re-emerging as a security threat, Stalin saw the extension of the alliance as the best way to achieve this.
⁹⁹
Stalin, moreover, had little enthusiasm for giving much, if any, role to smaller powers. For one thing, he questioned whether they would accept the domination of the organization by the major powers.
¹⁰⁰
For another, he saw them as potential spoilers. In relenting to American pressure on not insisting that the veto cover even putting items on the Security Council’s agenda, Stalin reportedly cautioned his American interlocutors ‘against what he termed a tendency on the part of small nations to create and exploit differences among the great powers in order to gain the backing of one or more of them for their own ends’. He commented that ‘a nation need not be innocent just because it is small.’
¹⁰¹
Not surprisingly, Stettinius noted that ‘it was clear in the discussions at Yalta that Marshal Stalin was primarily interested in an alliance of Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union.’
¹⁰²