Building and Maintaining the Postwar Order: FDR to Jimmy Carter

For a generation after the founding of the United Nations, American presidents, to varying degrees, saw and employed the world body and its associated entities as critical structures in the liberal world order, meant to save the world from the scourge of world war. In the maintenance of peace and security in the nuclear age and the amelioration of the underlying social and economic causes of war, the United Nations was a useful instrument of foreign policy. Despite the cold war stalemate, presidents from Truman to Carter, buoyed by a domestic internationalist consensus, supported UN action (e.g., Korean War, Suez Crisis, Kashmir Crisis, Arab-Israeli Wars), or sought to lower the threat of conflict through UN diplomacy (e.g., arms control, Cuban Missile Crisis). Beginning with the Truman administration, for more than three decades, the United States employed the United Nations to advance its goals for international development, decolonization, and human rights, in the effort to create a world reflective of American democratic values and the peaceful resolution of disputes. However, by the end of Jimmy Carter's term in office, there was a growing public backlash to what was seen as an anti-American orientation in UN politics. In the ascendancy was a new hostility to the UN as a valued component of U.S. foreign policy. President Franklin Roosevelt must be ascribed the title "architect" of the United Nations, even if he did not live long enough to become its primary builder. The era of good feeling that came out of Yalta did not last two months. Many of the Yalta agreements concerning the governments in the liberated countries of eastern Europe were quickly violated by Stalin as the Red Army occupied the region. The failure to achieve international control of atomic weapons meant that each superpower would proceed to build strategic forces it deemed sufficient for its defense. The concern over the "communist threat" was not solely an international question in 1953. The threat of the nuclear arms race and the potential use of modern weapons of mass destruction profoundly worried Eisenhower. Reality from time to time jolts the long-held assumptions of foreign policies which have driven a country's decision-making.