During the twentieth century, American leaders twice promulgated ambitious collective security institutions for resolving international conflicts. Each time, no sooner were the projects launched than they were undermined, or transformed, from within the United States itself. Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations foundered on Republican opposition in the Senate. Roosevelt’s conception of the United Nations was aborted by the Democrat Administration of his successor. By 1950, the Truman Administration, guided by Dean Acheson, had hit upon a quite different political framework for managing world politics. This did not require dismantling the un or withdrawing from it; the world body and its agencies performed too many useful functions for the us for that. But it did mean demoting it to no more than a secondary role, as an auxiliary instrument of American diplomacy. As Dean Acheson later put it, the un was ‘certainly an American contribution to a troubled world, [but] I personally am free of the slightest suspicion of paternity’.footnote¹

The fact that American leaders had, by the end of the 1940s, sidelined the Rooseveltian project for the un was not immediately or transparently obvious. Indeed, the moment this mutation became complete was, on the surface, a triumph for Washington in mobilizing the un for its own uses: to back Western intervention in the Korean civil war. But by then the un had, in fact, been abandoned as the vehicle through which American global dominance would find expression. It had been downgraded, and folded into a strategic and institutional framework alien to Roosevelt’s initial design for the organization. By the 1960s, indeed, the un was regarded in Washington as not only a secondary but in some ways a vexatious affair, once former European colonies and other states organized themselves into the Non-Aligned Movement and used the General Assembly as a platform to ventilate opinions unwelcome to the State Department. Such developments prompted Acheson to declare publicly that ‘the votes in the United Nations mean less than nothing’.footnote² In private, Acheson’s sentiments about the organization were far more pungent. With wasp disdain for the Russian-born functionary who was the Roosevelt Administration’s encyclopaedic un technical engineer, he would refer to ‘that little rat Leo Pasvolsky’s United Nations’.footnote³

Pasvolsky is long forgotten. Yet so too is the vast two-month conclave that established the un order. There is an enormous Anglo-Saxon literature on Versailles and a very substantial one on the Congress of Vienna. Large numbers of people have heard of the treaties of Westphalia. But San Francisco? The conference launching the un Charter and the un has been largely obliterated from the public memory of the Anglo-American world. If post-war Austria’s great achievement has been to convince the world that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian, there have been periods in which conservatives in the us have achieved similar success in persuading many Americans that the un has been the work—if not the conspiracy—of foreigners. Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation reminds us in vivid detail that the un was as American in conception and construction as San Francisco itself.footnote⁴ His is the first book to supply a reasonably scholarly account of what actually happened in San Francisco between 25 April and 25 June 1945, about which there has been a fifty-year silence, even in the huge, diverse academic world of the United States.

Part of the reason why the Conference at San Francisco has not attracted much research is because so many of the key decisions on the new body had already been settled between the major powers, at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in September 1944 and at Yalta the following February. Yet an effect of this neglect has been that scholarly treatments of the whole course of the un project, from the earliest Rooseveltian planning for the post-war world through to San Francisco itself, remain lacking. Schlesinger has now given us a fairly thorough treatment—there are gaps—of the proceedings in California, but his book is otherwise a somewhat shallow work, lacking any real historical perspective on the calculations of the Great Powers that determined its outcome. In that respect, it bears no comparison with Robert Hilderbrand’s classic study of the negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks.footnote⁵ More general discussions of wartime American planning have not focused strongly on the un strand within Roosevelt’s strategy. Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War, published almost forty years ago, thus still remains the indispensable, and almost the only complete guide to the whole picture.

Roosevelt was well equipped to develop the grand strategy required by the United States, once it was clear that Stalingrad had settled the military outcome of the Second World War. Fascinated by international politics from his youth, he studied Mahan enthusiastically at school and accumulated a personal library of books on naval warfare while at Harvard. A fierce admirer of his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, whose niece Eleanor he married, fdr followed quite consciously in the footsteps of his outspokenly expansionist relative. His political career began with what, for an American of his generation, was a crucial school in military strategy: the Navy Department, where he became Assistant Secretary in 1912. There he was a Big Navy man, pushing for a fleet to rival Britain’s. In 1914, he looked forward to all-out war with Mexico to ‘clean up the political mess’ occasioned by the Mexican Revolution. In that same year he declared: ‘Our national defence must extend all over the western hemisphere, must go out a thousand miles into the sea, must embrace the Philippines and over the seas wherever our commerce may be.’footnote⁶ Contemptuous of his superior, Navy Secretary Daniels, a pacific Methodist from North Carolina, he chafed to thrust America into the First World War.

At the end of that war Roosevelt backed Wilson on the League of Nations, but also—positioning himself to shape the Democratic Party’s thinking on foreign policy—wanted to beef up American military power. Once installed in the Presidency, he sent Sumner Welles to crush the revolution of 1933 and install Batista’s dictatorship in Cuba, pampered clients like Somoza in Nicaragua and—mindful of the need for Catholic votes at home—took care to assist Franco by embargoing arms to the Spanish Republic during the Civil War. Fascism had few terrors for him. Relations with Mussolini were excellent; Vichy a normal diplomatic partner. Nazi Germany, on the other hand, fdr—although unwilling to offer any shelter to Jewish refugees—viewed as the resurgence of an unmitigated expansionist menace; much as did Churchill, also of First World War naval background. Thus once fighting broke out in Europe, and even before the us had entered the war, the Roosevelt Administration was already looking ahead to a new, American-led world beyond it.

Any grand design for us global dominance had to address one fundamental problem: how to restructure American domestic politics for such an external role. Wilson had been defeated by this challenge, but the configuration of domestic political forces had shifted by the end of the 1930s. In the first place, the dominant sectors of the American business class were now overwhelmingly wedded to the idea of us global leadership. The rise of Wilkie amongst Republicans and Dewey’s candidacy against Roosevelt (advised by John Foster Dulles) during the war demonstrated the new consensus. So too did the important group of Republicans within the Roosevelt Administration itself, among them Stimson, Lovett and McCloy. What this bipartisan coalition of big capital wanted from Roosevelt was an assurance that international expansion would be in safe hands from the point of view of American business. In these quarters the brand of internationalism represented by Vice-President Henry Wallace was judged to be unreliably liberal, so Roosevelt dumped him and picked Harry Truman for his running-mate instead, as a man unlikely to offend conservatives.footnote⁷