27
The containment order, of course, was not planned or even fully anticipatedduring the war, although Churchill and other British and Americanofficials began to have their doubts about the Soviet Union’s postwarintentions even then. Roosevelt, however, remained convinced until hisdeath in March 1945 that he could handle Stalin and pave the way towarda postwar order where the United States and the Soviet Union engaged incooperative management of global interstate relations.
28
As Wheeler-Bennettand Nicholls note, From the earliest period of the war, when neitherthe Soviet Union nor the United States was a belligerent, he had visualizedan American-Soviet partnership for peace in the then uncertain shaping ofthe post-war world. When later they become comrades in arms, this con-
THE SETTLEMENT OF 1945 175
cept increased rather than diminished. Russia and America were to be castin the role of two super-policemen, supervising East and West, under theaegis of the United Nations. . . . President Roosevelt was immutably convincedthat he, and he alone, could bring about this unlikely miracle.”
29
In a series of allied summits Teheran in 1943 and Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 the allied leaders attempted to coordinate their military operationsand negotiate on the terms of the settlement, including territorialissues, the treatment of Germany, and the shape of a postwar internationalpeacekeeping organization. Roosevelt’s goal up until Yalta was to maneuverthe allied victors into a great-power peacekeeping organization. Britainand China would join Russia and the United States, and they would enforcethe peace on the basis of regional responsibilities.
30
FDR’s idea rested onthe ability to maintain cooperation among the great powers. This becamean immediate casualty of the end of the war. As the world war turned intoCold War, the two postwar settlements began to take shape. Yet even asthe prospects of cooperation with the Soviet Union faded, the Americanagenda of promoting stable economic openness enshrined in the Atlantic
Charter remained at the center of postwar order building. After 1947, itwas an agenda pursued more narrowly among the Western democracies,and involved more direct American involvement and elaborate institutionalstrategies.
COMPETING AMERICAN VISIONS OF POSTWAR ORDER
During and immediately after the war, American officials and policy expertsadvanced and debated a wide range of ideas about postwar order. Asthe war ended, some of these ideas found their way into policy and othersdisappeared. Domestic opposition, European weakness and resistance, andrising tensions with the Soviet Union all exerted an impact on the viabilityof particular grand designs. The result was a sort of rolling process whereby different policy ideas gained ascendancy and lost support, anddifferent coalitions of policy thinkers and bureaucrats formed and reformedaround postwar policies. In the end, the United States embraced apostwar policy orientation committed to economic openness and pluralisticdemocracy among the Western great powers and Japan, reinforced by arange of international and regional institutions across the areas of economicand security relations. The shifts in American policy reveal the waysin which the United States attempted to foster both a postwar order thatwould lock the other major industrial states into an open order and also one that was mutually acceptable to them. This involved agreeing to insertitself into elaborate intergovernmental institutions and relationships, includinga binding security commitment.
Groups advocating six kinds of grand design competed for primacy asthe United States grappled with postwar order. One group of advocatesarticulated ambitious ideas and plans for what might be called global governance.”
These were proposals that supported the creation of governinginstitutions that would be supranational and universal. Some proposalswere advanced by scientists and other activists who sought internationalcontrol of atomic weapons and new global security institutions.