- Four Policemen
"The Four Policemen" was a term coined by U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt , to refer to four majorAllies of World War II and founders of theUnited Nations (UN): theUnited States ,United Kingdom ,Soviet Union , and China.Roosevelt's phrase symbolized his conception of the post-World War II world, though idea would not come to fruition until the establishment of the UN, [ [http://www.globalpolicy.org/reform/sheriff.htm Brian Urquhart, "Looking for the Sheriff" ("New York Review of Books", July 16, 1998)] Access date: February 14, 2007.] which emerged following the
Declaration by United Nations ofJanuary 1 ,1942 . In the words of a former Undersecretary General of the UN, SirBrian Urquhart ::"It was a pragmatic system based on the primacy of the strong — a "
trustee ship of the powerful," as he then called it, or, as he put it later, "the Four Policemen." The concept was, as [Senator Arthur H.] Vandenberg noted in his diary in April 1944, "anything but a wild-eyed internationalist dream of a world state.... It is based virtually on a four-power alliance." Eventually this proved to be both the potential strength and the actual weakness of the future UN, an organization theoretically based on a concert of great powers whose own mutual hostility, as it turned out, was itself the greatest potential threat to world peace."ee also
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Allies of World War II Footnotes
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