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Article Excerpt
According to The Economist, "The United Nations was above all an American creation." It was the pet project of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"The most striking aspect of this tale," the magazine reported in 2005, "is that in 1945 America's global dominance was even greater than it is today.
"All other great powers lay in ruins, while America itself was unscathed by bombing or invasion. America's factories were working at full tilt. Its armed forces were the most powerful in the world by far, and it was only months from unveiling a terrible new weapon, the atomic bomb, which no other country possessed. America's economic output, by some estimates, was half of the world's total.
"At the peak of America's powers, in other words, its leaders were determined to create a multilateral institution involving as many nations as possible as a primary mechanism for ensuring American, as well as global, security."
In his speech before the San Francisco conference, U.S. President Harry Truman said: "We all have to recognize--no matter how great our strength--that we must deny ways as we please."
That's the polar opposite of today's U.S. attitude as expressed by John Bolton: "If I were redoing the Security Council today," he said on National Public Radio in 2000, "I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world." No prizes were offered for guessing that the "one permanent member" Mr. Bolton referred to was the United States.
And, this comment came from the man U.S. President George W. Bush appointed as his ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Bolton also has given it as his view that: "There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an...
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