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Four Policemen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Four Policemen" was termed coined by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to refer to the four major Allies of World War II and founders of the United Nations (UN): the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Republic of China.
Roosevelt's phrase symbolised his conception of the UN,[1] which emerged following the Declaration by United Nations of January 1, 1942. 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." 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.
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- ^ Brian Urquhart, "Looking for the Sheriff" (New York Review of Books, July 16, 1998) Access date: February 14, 2007.