Global leadership is missing in action

A FEW WEEKS after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, Winston Churchill was a guest at the White House. President Franklin Roosevelt was so eager to tell him he had come up with a name for what would become a new world security organisation that, the story goes, he hurried into Churchill’s bedroom, to find the prime minister naked save for a bathrobe. What is striking about the origins of the “United Nations”, Roosevelt’s choice, is not this unorthodox manner of communication (a modern American president might have tweeted his idea) but that, in the midst of war, statesmen were already planning for the peace.

On the economic front, this led to the creation, in 1944 at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). On the security side, plans for the UN were fleshed out at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, agreed to in outline by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in the Crimea and finalised at a conference in San Francisco after Roosevelt’s death. “Oh what a great day this can be in history,” proclaimed President Harry Truman at the concluding session on June 26th 1945, when the founding charter was signed. Countries had put aside their differences “in one unshakable unity of determination—to find a way to end wars.”

Euphoria soon gave way to frustration as the cold war...

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