Four Policemen
[4] As a compromise with internationalist critics, the Big Four nations became the permanent members of the UN Security Council, with significantly less power than had been envisioned in the Four Policemen proposal.
[5] When the United Nations was officially established later in 1945, France was in due course added as the fifth permanent member of the Security Council[6] because of the insistence of Churchill.
He came to favor an approach to global peace secured through the unified efforts of the world's great powers, rather than through the Wilsonian notions of international consensus and collaboration that guided the League of Nations.
[8] The idea that great powers should "police" the world had been discussed by President Roosevelt as early as August 1941, during his first meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
In September 1941, he wrote: In the present complete world confusion, it is not thought advisable at this time to reconstitute a League of Nations which, because of its size, makes for disagreement and inaction...
[10] Following the Atlantic Conference, a directive on postwar planning was prepared by the State Department by mid-October, which was delivered to the President in late December.
[12] This would not preclude the eventual formation of a worldwide organisation of nations "for the purpose of full discussion" provided "management" was left to the Four Policemen.
[2] He presented his postwar plans to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov,[13] who had arrived in Washington on May 29 to discuss the possibility of launching a second front in Europe.
[17] The President believed that a pro-American China would be useful for the United States should the Americans, Soviets, and Chinese agree to jointly occupy Japan and Korea after the war.
[18] When Molotov voiced concerns about the stability of China, Roosevelt responded by saying that the combined "population of our nations and friends was well over a billion people".
[19][20] Churchill objected to Roosevelt's inclusion of China as one of the Big Four because he feared that the Americans were trying to undermine Britain's colonial holdings in Asia.
In October 1942, Churchill told Eden that Republican China represented a "faggot vote on the side of the United States in any attempt to liquidate the British overseas empire.
[25] In a broad sense, Roosevelt believed that the UN could solve the minor problems and provide the chief mechanism to resolve any major issues that arose among the great powers, all of whom would have a veto.
[5] US President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered his most important legacy the creation of the United Nations, making a permanent organization out of the wartime Alliance of the same name.
[29] In the words of a former Undersecretary General of the UN, Sir Brian Urquhart: It was a pragmatic system based on the primacy of the strong – a "trusteeship of the powerful", as he then called it, or, as he put it later, "the Four Policemen".
