The Role of the Great Powers in the United Nations System

The world into which the United Nations was born twenty-five years ago was a world divided, almost as summarily as Caesar's Gaul, into three parts. Never had there been seen such a picture of the domination of virtually the whole globe by a few great powers. To mark the distribution of real power at the end of World War n, you needed only three flags. If you then travelled round the northern part of the globe, from the central European dividing line between the spheres of American and Russian power, to where those two spheres met on the other side, in China and Korea, you could make the whole journey whether you chose to go east or west under the protection of one flag. Southward, the Russians had spilled into the Balkans, Iran, Sinkiang. The Americans were in the western Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the south Pacific. As for the British, their military presence in northwestern Europe looked small on the world map by comparison with their wide sprawl across the southern regions. With their Indian, African, and other imperial armies, they straddled the whole area from the West African coast, by way of the Middle East, to the South China Sea. Their sphere bordered Russia's in the Balkans and Iran, that of the United States on the Burma-China border. Such were the crude facts of 1945 life. The Axis powers lay prostrate. France and other countries just freed from Axis occupation were only beginning to pick themselves up again. Civil war loomed in an already ravaged China. It would soon be seen how the war had accelerated the Asian and African drive to independence, but this was not immediately suggested by the actual state of things at the time of the birth of the United Nations

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