The Rise of the American System - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 137

Constructing Security Relations
In security affairs, America's policies and commitments traveled a similar course. The
Roosevelt administration's wartime vision was for a global organization in which the leading
world powers would collectively preside over the international system. At the Atlantic
Charter conference in 1941, FDR was hesitant to endorse the idea of an international security
organization, but after Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war, he became determ-
ined to build a framework for postwar security cooperation. As the historian Warren Kimball
writes, “by mid-1942, much of Roosevelt's plan for the postwar political system was on the
table. The great powers would act as 'guarantors' of the peace, colonial empires would be
disbanded, postwar reconstruction would be capitalized, and the rest of the world would be
disarmed.” 76 Over the next year, FDR continued to refine his notion of a security organiza-
tion in which an executive committee of the Four Powers would act together as “policemen”
to ensure peace and stability.
Roosevelt's insistence that American troops would leave Europe after the war was based
on the assumption that a system of cooperative great-power relations was possible. The great
powers would not divide the world into spheres of influence but do what they had failed to
do after 1919: forge a working system of collective security. The embodiment of this system
would be the United Nations. In the summer of 1944, negotiations over the organization of
the new global body took place at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington, D.C., cul-
minating in blueprints for a multilayered organization. The General Assembly was to embody
universal principles of membership and sovereign equality, while the great powers would ex-
ercise special rights and responsibilities in the Security Council. 77 The architects of the Un-
ited Nations worked in the shadow of the failed League of Nations—and its charter reflected
efforts to accommodate the realities of power politics. Unlike the League's council, which
worked on the basis of consensus, the U.N. Security Council limited the veto to the perman-
ent members while making these decisions binding on all states. The charter also limited the
nature of obligations to uphold political and territorial guarantees in reaffirming the sover-
eign rights of member states to make decisions about the collective use of force.
The founding meeting of the United Nations took place in San Francisco in the spring
of 1945. Already there were worries that Soviet-American discord would undermine great-
power cooperation upon which the United Nations depended. At the University of California
in Berkeley, Secretary of State Stettinius reaffirmed the “fundamental unity” of the Big Four.
“It is upon this strong and steady rock of unity that our work at San Francisco is firmly
based.” At the close of the San Francisco meeting, President Truman affirmed the central no-
tion of great-power restraint that lay behind the organization's design. It is the duty of the
powerful nations, Truman said, “to assume the responsibility for leadership toward a world of
peace. . . . We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength—that we must deny