World Organization After the War

Report Outline
War Aims and the Organization of Peace
United Nations as Basis of New World Order
Plans for Regional and World Organization

War Aims and the Organization of Peace

Writings and speeches of Hitler and other Nazi leaders, and the experience of the occupied countries of Europe, leave no doubt that an Axis victory in the present war would result in imposition of a “new order” that would subject the defeated nations of the West to the will and service of the German “master race” with the Japanese exercising dominion over East Asia. Under such a Pax Germanica, world peace would be enforced by a military dictatorship, ever alert to crush acts of rebellion or resistance to its authority. Secretary of the Navy Knox, in an address on October 1, 1941, suggested that defeat of the Axis should be followed by a sort of Pax Anglo-Americana, under which peace would be maintained by “a justly conducted, peace-loving force” based primarily on control of the seas by the United States and Great Britain. He voiced what he said was “the hope of the world” that such control would endure “for the next hundred years, at least.”

Atlantic Charter and War Aims of United Nations

While there is widespread agreement that when victory over the Axis gives the United Nations the opportunity to reorganize world society, provision must be made to restrain potential aggressors and Keep the peace by force, the kind of force generally contemplated is not the armed might of one or two dominant nations but an international force under the collective control of nations freely associated in a new world organization. What form that organization will take remains a matter of speculation. Nona of the governments of nations in conflict with the Axis has yet ventured to specify details of the international structure it desires to see erected after the war. All have confined their official utterances on the general post-war settlement to statements of broad principles and aims.

The leading statement of such principles is the Atlantic Charter, issued by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, August 14, 1941, at the conclusion of their celebrated North Atlantic meeting. In that document the President and the Prime Minister enunciated eight “common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world”: