This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, where diplomats from the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China met to negotiate a settlement of the postwar world. Their deliberations and eventual agreement laid the foundation for what would become, by the summer of 1945, the United Nations Organisation.

Though the contemporary world looks very different from that of 1944, there are some distinct echoes from that tumultuous period in world history. Major tensions between the great powers in Europe and Asia, along with emergent regional conflicts and rapid technological innovations, have upended our notion of a stable international system.

In this period of uncertainty and transition, scholars, analysts, and leading statesmen and women are questioning whether the United Nations, and international organisations more broadly, remain fit for purpose. In his speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2022, US President Joe Biden stated that ‘the time has come for this institution to become more inclusive so that it can better respond to the needs of today’s world’. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the world faces a choice between ‘a breakdown or a breakthrough’. In January 2024, he announced that a ‘Summit for the Future’ will be held the following September as a way of moving towards reform of outdated financial institutions and security mechanisms. ‘We can’t build a future for our grandchildren with a system built for our grandparents’, he said.

But what exactly was this system inaugurated in the final years of the war, and can knowledge of this process help us in our efforts today? Returning to these original conceptions and the diplomacy that brought them into existence helps us to better understand what is a perennial issue of modern statecraft – namely, whether and to what extent nation-states, each with their own vision of an ideal world order, should combine for common purposes.

At the Moscow Conference in October 1943, the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union had signed an agreement stating their intention to set up a world organisation after the war. In the months that followed, each government (along with the Chinese, who eventually signed this four-power declaration) set out to deliver more formal plans for a postwar institution. By late July 1944, the four governments shared their planning documents with one another in advance of meetings in Washington that were set to begin the following month.

To grasp the British approach to what would become the United Nations Organisation, it is necessary to understand its larger postwar grand strategy as it developed during the first years of the war. A power in relative decline and facing the risk of Germany achieving dominance over Europe for the second time in a generation, the United Kingdom needed allies and the first choice was the United States. The key moment in the early phases of British planning during the war, between 1940 and 1941, is when a world organisation comes to be seen as the vehicle to get the United States committed to Europe and the world.

This does not mean that the British plans for a world organisation were driven solely by narrow considerations of national interest and that wider international values were ignored. Rather, such moral or ethical considerations were fused onto a starker calculation about how to secure British interests while maintaining its position and influence as a world power.

In terms of more detailed planning, the United Kingdom’s approach was coloured from the beginning by a desire to establish an organisation that was less rigid, more flexible, and more powerful than the League of Nations. Cumbersome voting processes (namely, all League Council members retaining a veto), stipulations in the Covenant (especially the guarantees of territorial integrity), and inaction by its most powerful members had stifled the efficacy of the organisation.

The original idea that emerged in the Foreign Office, the engine of postwar planning during the war, was to have regional organisations with a council of great powers (including France) sitting on top. This ‘Concert of the World’, as it was originally described by Foreign Office planners, would be primarily responsible for the maintenance of peace and security throughout the world.

The regional framework was an important aspect of early British planning. The idea here was that countries cared more about what happens in their neighbourhood than outside it. This regional approach eventually changed once the British learned of American plans (which came to be more universal in scope), but a key feature remained: the United Kingdom must have regional order (and be a leader in its region) as opposed to relying solely on an international framework. This drove the thinking behind how regional groupings would relate to the international organisation – they would be able to act in self-defence without approval of the Security Council, for example – and it laid the groundwork for later thinking around the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

The more advanced stages of British planning put forward a model that was remarkably similar to the League. Foreign Office officials recommended an assembly, a council, a secretariat, and a court. The major difference between the defunct carcass of the League and a new world organisation, however, would be a council both more powerful and less constrained. Importantly, British plans imagined a world organisation concerned with more than simply security issues. The League’s social, economic, and humanitarian functions were considered to be the great successes of the organisation, something that helped to remedy what were thought to be the underlying causes of modern war. For many British intellectuals and politicians in the first half of the 20th century, world peace was dependent on closer – and more just – economic relations between countries.

One of the more curious features of the British plans for a world organisation – something that separated it from American thinking which, for the most part, was along similar lines – was the idea that a future organisation would be dependent on a balance of power between the great powers at its centre. Though much of the promise of the new organisation was dependent on the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States remaining allied and active in their efforts to suppress aggression, British planners thought that a key to the Security Council remaining functional was a balance between the principal powers. Ironically, as American leaders such as Secretary of State Cordell Hull were speaking of a new world organisation putting an end to ‘balance of power politics’, such an arrangement was seen by British officials to be an essential feature if the security council was to function properly.

The Soviet Union has often been portrayed as the disinterested great power that signed up to Anglo-American plans for a world organisation. More than an internationalist impulse, the typical narrative runs, the Soviets were interested in retaining a top seat in the organisation and one with veto power.

This older version of the history obscures what were relatively well-developed ideas among officials in Moscow, ones shaped by the Soviet experience of the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s. Absent from the 1919 Paris Peace Conference negotiations over a future world organisation, the Bolsheviks under Lenin were highly suspicious of the nascent League, seeing it as an alliance of capitalist powers. It was not until 1934 that the Soviet Union joined the organisation, a main reason being Germany’s exit the year before.

Under the leadership of the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim Litvinov, Soviet presence in Geneva was strong and Moscow displayed public support for collective security for a period in the mid-1930s. The League was considered by Soviet officials to be a framework which, if effective, could succeed in countering German, Italian, and Japanese aggression and, on the whole, help to protect Soviet interests. This collapsed with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 and the Soviet invasion of Finland (a League member) just months later.

By the third year of the war, with the Soviet Union now a member of the wartime United Nations alliance, officials in Moscow had established a grouping to consider postwar questions. There was no substantial progress made until the summer of 1943, although there were indications of Stalin’s thinking. After Roosevelt had explained his idea of an international ‘police’ force to the foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov during their discussions in Washington in June 1942, Stalin expressed strong agreement, calling the suggestions ‘absolutely sound’.

Later, at the Tehran Conference of December 1943, Stalin spoke with Roosevelt about a future world organisation. Where Roosevelt laid out his idea for an international organisation with an executive council and police force, Stalin suggested two different organisations – one for Europe and another for the Far East. He eventually changed his view and adopted Roosevelt’s idea for one world organisation (the US President had pointed out that the American public would not sign up to two organisations).

In the days after Stalin had returned from the Tehran Conference, Soviet officials drew up their first substantive planning document. It described the need for a general assembly, a secretariat, and a council made up of the four great powers which would act on the principle of unanimity – in other words, any member of the council could veto collective action. One of the more interesting proposals, albeit one ultimately not accepted by the Soviet government, came from Litvinov, the Soviet diplomat with arguably the most experience of the League. He thought that the core feature of the organisation should be an alliance of the great powers working to maintain security; but key to this, he believed, would be the great powers reaching bilateral and multilateral agreements between themselves, ones which should include some reference to spheres of influence in particular regions.

Soviet views of a world organisation were, like the British, shaped by their own grand strategic aims. Russia must be one of the world’s key powers, leaders in the Kremlin believed, and this reality could be aided by its inclusion in any exclusive council atop a world organisation. Further, the Soviets insisted on the world council operating on the principle of unanimity – a point that would prevent the organisation from taking action that leaders in Moscow opposed. Generally speaking, Stalin and other Soviet officials were strong supporters of the great powers working together to maintain peace, something they believed would help prevent future German or Japanese aggression, in particular.

The plans that the Soviet delegation carried with them to Dumbarton Oaks included recommendations for an assembly, council, secretariat, and court. While much shorter and direct than either the British, American, or Chinese plans, the Soviet document had two noticeable suggestions, ones at odds with the other delegations. First, the Soviets were adamant that the future world organisation be focused primarily on security issues. Economic and social organisations (like those of the League) were of secondary importance in their eyes, and consisted of issues that should be taken up by other international organisations. The second distinctive feature was a suggestion for the creation of an International Air Force. Though a popular interwar idea dating back to French proposals at the Paris Peace Conference, this had come to be considered and ultimately rejected in American and British planning efforts.

Chinese proposals for a world organisation, similar to the Soviet Union, tend to be overlooked given the secondary and largely forgotten role the country played at the Dumbarton Oaks conversations. Yet the plans submitted by the Chinese government ahead of the Dumbarton Oaks conversations were built on two decades of active experience with the League of Nations.

An original member of the League, the Republic of China was nonetheless treated as a second-tier power at the Paris Peace Conference. Worse, the League’s infamous inaction after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 seemed to solidify Chinese distrust of that institution and its promises of collective security. Yet Chinese diplomats remained active in the League throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with some seeing it as a vehicle for the Republic of China to achieve legal parity and gain political recognition from the great powers.

During China’s experience of the League, there developed among its diplomats a desire for more robust and extensive international law. According to one scholar, Chinese diplomats held that ‘global peace and global lawfulness were closely connected, and thus the best way to ensure peace was to construct a system of international law that could accommodate changing global circumstances to accurately and equally reflect the needs and aspirations of all countries, weak as well as strong’.

This particular vision of international order animated the Chinese proposals for a future world organisation in 1944. Indeed, as compared to the plans of the other three powers, the Chinese suggestions placed far greater emphasis on moral principles and international law. Notably, the Chinese government was the only one of the big four to explicitly call for the equality of states and races, and they made reference to the need for advancing social welfare through internationalist means. The American and British delegations tended to think that the Chinese plans were far too ‘idealistic’ and reliant on an ‘excessive faith in the rule of international law’. One member of the State Department, however, noted that where the Soviet’s plans were very basic and only concerned with security issues, the Chinese proposals were far reaching, even representing the ‘ideal maximum’. The Americans and British, on the other hand, were somewhere in between, he thought.

Turning to more specific recommendations within the Chinese plans, they were similar to the great powers in that they called for an assembly, an ‘executive’ council, a court, and a secretariat. Like the British, the Chinese proposed that any nation (including the great powers) involved in a dispute would not be able to vote on the matter. Their view was shaped, in part, by their experience of the Japanese invasion in 1931 and the inaction of the League in its aftermath. Furthermore, like the Soviet plans, the Chinese called for the creation of an international air force that might serve as the enforcement mechanism of the organisation. The Chinese documents also contained a number of unique suggestions for commissions that would sit under the proposed executive council. These included a Military Commission, an Economic Commission, a Commission on Territorial Trusteeship, and an International Law Codification Commission, an International Labour Office, a Social Welfare Office, and a Cultural Relations Office that might be responsible for producing literature and propaganda espousing a common humanity.

For the Roosevelt administration, the organisation was seen to be the cornerstone of a new world order – one based on principles of self-determination, sovereign equality, non-aggression, and free trade – that would usher in a new era of international relations in Europe and East Asia. Some of the more recent historical literature has argued that plans for a world organisation were simply a mask for world domination, but this overstates the aims of the Roosevelt administration. There was undoubtedly an effort to increase the United States power and responsibility in world affairs, and there was undoubtedly a more expansive conception of national security that developed during the 1930s, but there was also a strong idealistic and internationalist impulse behind their thinking, one that went well beyond narrow interpretations of national interest.

A core idea in the American plans for a future world organisation was Roosevelt’s concept of the ‘four policemen’. Peace, in his mind, was indivisible – violence anywhere could spark conflict everywhere. The remedy was what Roosevelt described as a ‘quarantine’ approach. More specifically, he suggested that a decisive and overwhelmingly powerful group of states should be responsible for suppressing unlawful aggression where it sprang up. It was an idea that went on to influence both British and Soviet planning from 1942 onwards.

Importantly, Roosevelt’s vision of a powerful group of states to maintain international order would be part of a larger three-tiered organisation comprising a general assembly, which he characterised as a place for smaller countries of the world to ‘blow off steam’; an ‘executive committee’ of the four great powers that would hold the real authority; and an ‘advisory council’ that would sit between the general assembly and executive committee and include some medium and smaller powers (their selection dependent on population size). There would not be a secretariat but rather an individual or ‘moderator’ of the organisation, Roosevelt suggested.

A key feature of American thinking in these early phases of planning was that an organisation would need to be worldwide in scope, as opposed to one that was built upon regional structures. Though several influential State Department officials, including Sumner Welles, who was close to the president, favoured regional structures sitting below a world council, these were ultimately rejected. One of the key reasons for this was that Roosevelt and several members of his State Department (including Secretary of State Hull) believed that the American public would not sign up to an organisation deemed to be upholding a Council of Europe (one of Churchill’s ideas) or a Council of Asia.

By the spring of 1944, the American plans for a postwar organisation were the product of nearly five years of continuous debate. Because of their numerous conversations with their British counterparts, the American plans resembled those of their ally in many ways. Though slightly different from Roosevelt’s earlier outline, the plans called for the creation of an assembly, an executive council, a world court, and a secretariat. The world organisation would undoubtedly be concerned with security issues, but it was essential, State Department planners insisted, for the organisation to have strong social and economic organs. Similar to the British, the Americans had also entertained ideas for an international police force, but ultimately came to reject it. One of the major concerns for the Roosevelt administration was that an international police force would present major problems in terms of congressional authorisation for military use.

The ‘Washington Conversations on International Organization’, as the meetings were more formally known, opened on the morning of 21 August 1944. The setting was the Dumbarton Oaks mansion, located on the northern edge of the Georgetown neighbourhood of Washington, DC. Once the home of Robert Woods Bliss, formerly the American Ambassador in Buenos Aires, it was now owned by Harvard University and made available to the State Department for the conference. Though as hot and humid as any time of year in the American capital, the spacious rooms and large gardens surrounding the mansion were expected to provide a comfortable environment for the travelling diplomats.

The delegations approached the forthcoming conversations with a confidence that the tide of the war in Europe was turning decisively in their favour. These weeks were once described by the historian Michael Howard as ‘halcyon days’. German forces were staring defeat in the eyes, as scores of American, British, and Canadian troops, having landed in northern France in early June, had liberated Paris and were now advancing through Belgium and Holland. Meanwhile, the Red Army had driven German forces out of the Soviet Union and were now steadily advancing westwards across eastern Europe.

At the opening session of the conference, the heads of the delegations from the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union gave their opening remarks. ‘No one wishes to impose some Great Power Dictatorship on the rest of the world’, Alexander Cadogan, the head of the British delegation explained to the journalists assembled, ‘but it is obvious that unless the Great Powers are united in aim and ready to assume and fulfill loyally their obligations, no machine for maintaining peace, however perfectly constructed, will in practice work.’ Though he spoke of the four powers, there was notable absence from this round of talks – namely, the Chinese delegation. The Soviets had refused to negotiate on equal terms with the government of Chiang Kai-shek. In their eyes, the Republic of China was not a great power but a pet project of the United States.

Over the following six weeks, as the Chinese waited in the wings, the British, American and Soviet delegations hammered out the basic structures and functions of a future international organisation. Broadly speaking, their plans were remarkably similar – a product, in part, of their earlier discussions on the subject. In what became the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals, the three powers agreed to establish an organisation made up of a General Assembly, a Security Council, an International Court of Justice, and a Secretariat, all of which would operate according to the ‘principles’ of the organisation.

The Assembly was to be responsible for budgetary questions, the acceptance of new members into the organisation, the election of non-permanent members of the Security Council, issues relating to disarmament and the regulation of armaments, as well as the work of the Economic and Social Council. Though the Soviet delegation had desired an organisation focused solely on security issues, they eventually came around to the British and American view that a future institution should deal with economic and social questions. The Secretariat, though it was provided only a short description in the final proposals, would be led by a Secretary-General who, based on the original British recommendation, have the power to introduce matters into the Security Council.

The Security Council itself was by far the most important subject of negotiations. The three powers ultimately decided that the council would be comprised of 11 members, including five permanent members (the three powers along with China and France), and six non-permanent members. It was considered the primary arena of action in the world organisation, and the proposals gave the council expansive authority to deal with any matter it deemed to be a threat to international peace and security. In terms of the organisation’s enforcement mechanism, the Security Council was to work in conjunction with a Military Staff Committee, made up of the chiefs of staff of the permanent members. This body would be in charge of coordinating a number of national forces, including from members of the Security Council as well as the World Assembly.

Given the position and importance of the Security Council, the question of how exactly it would arrive at collective decisions became the most hotly contested issue of the entire conference. The key question and source of disagreement was whether the permanent members of the Council could retain a vote (and hence a veto power) when they themselves were involved in a dispute. The British, from the start of the conference, held to the principal that a great power could not vote in such instances, whereas Soviet officials insisted that this power must be protected. The United States had initially been more favourable to the Soviet position on this question, but after consultations with their British colleagues, the American delegation was convinced otherwise. What developed was a split between the British and Americans on one side, and the Soviet delegation on the other – a division that at one point threatened to dissolve the negotiations entirely. The three powers ultimately decided to leave the issue open – in other words, it was a question to be decided at a later date.

After the conclusion of the British, American, and Soviet discussions, the Chinese were invited to put forward their proposals with the American and British delegations. Though this portion of the conference was considered productive from the standpoint of the Chinese expressing their views on certain matters – notably, the question of voting in the Security Council – there was nothing of substance added to the final proposals. For better or worse, at this stage, it remained a UK-US-Soviet creation.

Despite being billed as an international organisation, other countries had no say in the development of the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals. Instead, it was a document devised by the great powers presented to the medium and smaller powers of the world, with the promise that, at a future date, they would be able to offer comments and proposed amendments to the document.

When the three-powers made the proposals public on the 9 October, the reactions were mixed. Many judged that it was the best that could be hoped for at this stage in the war. Writing from the United States, Walter Lippmann said as much, noting that the wartime alliance of the great powers would need to be carried over into the peace, at least for a time. It was a great improvement, he believed, that the new organisation would give as much power to the Assembly as it did. Within the United Kingdom, leading organisations like the League of Nations Union expressed their broad support, though they suggested that elements of the proposals could and should be improved prior to the creation of a new organisation.

The real sticking point was the power given to the permanent members of the Security Council.  The American journalist and commentator Dorothy Thompson called this aspect of the plans ‘an intolerable travesty on the ideals for which we are fighting’. Other governments, too, expressed their dismay. The Polish government in exile responded to the proposals writing that: ‘While the League suffered from an anaemia of authority and power, the new organisation may suffer from a hypertrophy of these elements.’ Canadian and Australian officials wrote to their colleagues in London that the great powers should never be able to retain the veto when they were parties to a dispute.

British and American diplomats tended to agree on this point, and throughout the autumn and winter of 1944, they worked to offer compromises on the veto question. Eventually, at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the great powers resolved the issue which had caused so much divergence of opinion between them. Permanent members would be able to use the veto to prevent decisions taken by the Security Council, but they would not be able to use the veto to prevent discussions of certain issues.

At the San Francisco Conference which began in late April 1945, delegations from over 45 countries met to debate the Dumbarton Oaks proposals. Despite heated discussions, especially over the voting rights afforded permanent members of the Security Council, the United Nations Charter was eventually signed in June 1945. In its most basic structures and functions, it remained virtually the same as what had been agreed with between the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union nearly a year before.

In 2024, a mix of officials and organisations will meet to discuss the future of the United Nations Organisation. While this ‘Summit of the Future’ is unlikely to result in major structural reform – and it appears not to have meant to coincide with the 80^th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks – those gathered for the occasion may benefit from even a brief return to this foundational moment eight decades ago. The point of such historical knowledge is not simply to boost powers of recall but to understand, on a deeper level, the intellectual and diplomatic forces that gave life to an institution.

Engagement with these purposes, and they were different for each delegation, helps us to grasp certain essential dilemmas of internationalism throughout the 20^th century and into our present day. Chief among these are the balance between more narrow national interests and wider moral or ethical constructions; the question of whether more global, regional, or purely functional structures can deliver security and prosperity for the nearly 200 nation-states in our international system; and, finally, the timeless, inescapable, yet insoluble dilemma of power and ethics in the political realm. Understanding how others have wrestled with these issues gives us a solid starting point for the decisions that must be taken in our own day.