The United Nations came into official existence on October 24, 1945, two months after the end of the Second World War. Fifty countries were members, including the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Both the genesis of the institution and its name came from the nations united as Allies against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The organization was tasked with maintaining international peace and security in the post-war world.
The US and USSR emerged from the war as the world’s strongest powers. Though uneasy allies during the war, relations turned into conflict and often paralyzed the UN during the long Cold War. So why did both these powers push for a UN to begin with? Two historians examine the origins of the UN from US and Soviet perspectives.
Stephen Wertheim argues that the US saw the UN as an “indispensable tool for implementing US postwar world leadership.” What he calls “instrumental internationalism” quickly surpassed the general sense in 1939 that “few Americans imagined the United States would soon join a general organization of nations, let alone become the principal author of a new one.” But within a year of the American entry into the war, the US was planning a successor to the League of Nations, which had been called for by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 but which the US had not joined.
A “revolution in American thinking” took place between 1940 and 1942, Wertheim writes, as a “commitment to US political-military preeminence in global affairs” swallowed whole the old isolationism. Between 1942 and 1943, this revolution shifted from a notion of “great power exclusivity” focusing on American–British global leadership to a “wider world body.” As Wertheim writes,
If American privilege could be reconciled with universal form, a new international organization could both facilitate US global supremacy and command the assent of the American people, as well as allay the suspicious of other states. Channeling their legacy of opposing power politics, internationalism and international organization would legitimate the American domination of power politics like no lone nationalism or limited alliance could. [italics in original]
Since the UN’s founding, the US has used “it when convenient and bypassing it when necessary.”
Geoffrey Roberts writes that the USSR saw the UN as a necessary successor to the League of Nations and thus as a stabilizer of great power relations. The Soviets were particularly keen on the Security Council and especially concerned with making sure Germany and Japan were no longer threats to peace.