The main tide of international relations scholarship on the first
years after World War II sweeps toward Cold War accounts. These
have emphasized the United States and USSR in a context of
geopolitical rivalry, with concomitant attention upon the bristling
security state. Historians have also extensively analyzed the
creation of an economic order (Bretton Woods), mainly designed by
Americans and tailored to their interests, but resisted by peoples
residing outside of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. This
scholarship, centered on the Cold War as vortex and a reconfigured
world economy, is rife with contending schools of interpretation
and, bolstered by troves of declassified archival documents, will
support investigations and writing into the future. By contrast,
this book examines a past that ran concurrent with the Cold War and
interacted with it, but which usefully can also be read as
separable: Washington in the first years after World War II, and in
response to that conflagration, sought to redesign international
society. That society was then, and remains, an admittedly
amorphous thing. Yet it has always had a tangible aspect, drawing
self-regarding states into occasional cooperation, mediated by
treaties, laws, norms, diplomatic customs, and transnational
institutions. The U.S.-led attempt during the first postwar years
to salvage international society focused on the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the Acheson-Lilienthal
plan to contain the atomic arms race, the Nuremberg and Tokyo
tribunals to force Axis leaders to account, the 1948 Genocide
Convention, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the
founding of the United Nations. None of these initiatives was
transformative, not individually or collectively. Yet they had an
ameliorative effect, traces of which have touched the twenty-first
century-in struggles to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons,
bring war criminals to justice, create laws supportive of human
rights, and maintain an aspirational United Nations, still striving
to retain meaningfulness amid world hazards. Together these
partially realized innovations and frameworks constitute, if
nothing else, a point of moral reference, much needed as the border
between war and peace has become blurred and the consequences of a
return to unrestraint must be harrowing.
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