In the first part of August 1940, as Britain found itself under the Nazi blitz in the Battle of Britain, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, met secretly in the North Atlantic with the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard U.S. and British ships anchored in Placentia Bay off Newfoundland.
The two men had been in contact since Churchill’s return to government in September 1939 at the outset of WWII when he became First Lord of the Admiralty, the equivalent of the U.S. Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt had been assistant secretary of the Navy during the Wilson administration from 1913 to 1920. Both men liked ships and the sea.
On Churchill’s return to government from the political wilderness in which he had been shunned and mocked through the 1930s for harping on the threat growing in Germany, Roosevelt had instigated a private correspondence with Churchill outside regular government channels. Indeed it was a peculiar thing for an American president to engage in direct, and unofficial correspondence with a member of the British cabinet. If a president had something to say to the British he would do it from secretary of state to British foreign secretary or perhaps directly to his British counterpart, the prime minister.
But FDR had a sixth sense about politics, government and his times and their events and he believed correctly that Churchill’s greatest time lay ahead of him, not behind him, and that it would engage FDR with him in a battle to save their two nations and indeed the world from Nazism and a new Dark Age.
Each of them in fact, FDR and Churchill, had an innate sense that history brought them together to take on the greatest struggle in the history of the world, of the human race and of a common humanity — the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The world has not faced such a threat like it again until now. Not even the height of the Cold War when the U.S. and Soviet Union faced off with massive, unrestricted nuclear arsenals compared to the new and present danger the world faces with Donald Trump as president. World order is now threatened as it has not been since 1945 because of him
Of course we know that FDR and Churchill did ally their nations and that their alliance necessarily broadened to include the Soviet Union and its dictator Joseph Stalin, and that together the three nations defeated Germany.
The U.S. in the war years fulfilled FDR’s pledge to make the U.S. “the arsenal of democracy”, ultimately producing vast numbers of vehicles, armaments and planes and ships that armed the allies and at the end of the war established the nuclear age and nuclear weapons that have changed everything, with the codes for America’s 7,800 nuclear weapons now in the possession of Trump.
But all that lay ahead when FDR and Churchill met at Placentia Bay.
FDR had one fundamental purpose in taking the United States to war when war came to the U.S. at Pearl Habor and within days widened to include as our adversaries not only Japan, which attacked us on Dec. 7, 1941 but three days later also Germany and Italy when Hitler made the second of his two fated and fateful decisions that ultimately meant Germany could not win its war against the world and humanity.
Absent that declaration by Germany, the U.S. had no cause to go into a direct war against Germany although for a year and a half, since mid-1940, we had been prosecuting an undeclared naval war in the North Atlantic against the German U-boats destroying merchant vessels from the U.S. supplying Britain and after June 21, 1941 also supplying the Soviet Union — that date marking the other of Hitler’s fateful decisions, to invade the Soviet Union.
As the war developed, progressed and moved to its conclusion the formal alliance included not only the big three but representatives of all the nations that had been over-run by the Germans and the Japanese like Norway, France, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, China and others.
On Jan. 1, 1942 these 26 nations, calling themselves “the United Nations” declared together their common goal to fight together to defeat Germany and its allies. And so the term United Nations was born, giving a name to FDR’s primary post-war objective — a war that would try to make a world secure from future world conflagrations by instituting an international peace and peace keeping organization.
For FDR the ultimate objective of the war besides the obvious objective to defeat Germany and Japan, was formation of an actual United Nations that would create a forum to resolve world issues, avoid war, safeguard the world against war and provide diplomatic channels to avoid conflict and temper aggressive nations. FDR was both a realist and an optimist. He did not expect an international peace organization could or would end war but he believed it could be an instrument to moderate aggression, create a forum to avert conflict and provide a means to give diplomacy and international relations shape and form to avoid the worst.
His political mentor, Woodrow Wilson, had been a deeply flawed man, a virulent racist from Virginia who masked his racism under the thin veneer of populist progressive reform. Wilson created the Federal Reserve. He also reimposed segregation throughout Washington, D.C. Wilson sent himself to an early grave, becoming gravely ill while campaigning for the League of Nations he had insisted be part of the Treaty of Versailles.
That treaty formally ended WWI but sowed the ground for WWII with the ways in which the victors, France, Britain, Italy and the United States wantonly and indiscriminately ripped up and redrew the map of the world in their favor without regard for how they were setting nation against nation, nationality against nationality, religion against religion, or various deadly combinations of those incendiaries, inside the maps they drew and the colonies they awarded and the spheres of interest they claimed.
The treaty failed ratification in the U.S. largely because it called for creating the League, an obtruse diplomatic instrument Wilson insisted upon that he naively thought would prevent all future wars. Defeated Germany joined it (withdrawing after the Nazis acceded to power). The victorious U.S. did not join the League as the U.S. withdrew into the isolationism from which FDR carefully prodded it from the late 1930s to the Japanese attack attack at the end of 1941.
But for FDR, a Wilson loyalist, the objective of creation of an international body to be a forum to air differences, alleviate international pressure, avert war and provide a forum for wars to be mediated and, if they started then ended, remained paramount.
Throughout the war he advocated creation of such an organization after the war pressing for it in the many allied conferences that took place to develop, revise and agree on strategy for the progress and execution of the war, most notably in the conferences at Tehran in 1943 and at Yalta in February 1945. At Yalta, the last he attended before his death on April 12, 1945, he bargained with Stalin recognizing that facts on the ground across eastern Europe now counted more than five million pairs of Soviet Army boots. He got imperfect settlements and agreements and he knew that because he understood reality but he also got agreement to create the United Nations.
Before then, at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference outside Washington in the spring and summer of 1944, the ground had been laid for creation of a United Nations organization. In late April 1945 the founding nations met again in conference in San Francisco, just after FDR’s death, and there negotiated, approved and established the U.N. and its charter, establishing among other things the Security Council dominated by its five permanent veto-empowered members — the U.S., the Soviet Union (succeeded now by Russia), Britain, France and China (then Nationalist China, today the People’s Republic of China, the one and only China in the real world today).
Also in 1945, at the insistence and by design of Roosevelt and the U.S., a conference at Breton Woods, N.H. brought together key international actors to build two more parts of FDR’s post-war blueprint. At Dumbarton Oaks under U.S. leadership and direction were created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the two primary instruments used ever since by the U.S. and, by extension, western democracy to order the world’s finances, support, guide and sustain second and third world development and support and sustain the international financial structures on which the U.S. constructed its world dominance and leadership.
The World Bank and the IMF now have a Chinese rival, the “New Development Bank” formed by the stew of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), seeking to separate developing nations from the West and from reliance on and cooperation with the U.S. and other western democratic capitalist nations. The World Bank early on expressed interest in cooperating with its China-inspired imitator. The NDB is a determined expression of China’s purpose to make this the Chinese Century.
But even now or until just now, the world and international framework that FDR designed, augmented by later kindred developments like the Marshall Plan, NATO and the EU — that framework that FDR constructed and that his successors in the presidency have sustained and supported regardless of party because it sustains our world – that leadership is now being wrecked by the morally impervious imbecile in the White House.
In his rant to and aimed at the U.N., this creature did more damage to the United States in a truly remarkably ignorant, strident, empty stupid and in fact downright idiotic speech than anyone or anything has done to us on the international stage since 1945.
There is no point quoting any of it, you have seen some of it or read about it. Similarly if you want to know more of any or all this you can search WWII conferences, in particular Tehran and Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks and Breton Woods and San Francisco.
Importantly we must understand that the world shaped and bequeathed by FDR, a world that has avoided nuclear war and a third world war, is a world that began to take shape in the North Atlantic in mid-August 1940 when FDR politely and gently but firmly persuaded Churchill to sign what became known as the Atlantic Charter.
The charter famously pledged both the U.S. and Britain, then still overlord of the largest empire in the world, to respect the national aspirations of every nation by recognizing that every nation had a right to self-determination. When the U.N. began it had about 50 members. Today it has almost 200, many of them former British imperial colonies.
The Atlantic Charter set out the terms that emerged and evolved during the war years and set the course for the world for the next 72 years — until this year. This week, Trump tore up the Atlantic Charter and sprayed ignorance all across the international order it ultimately created that has kept the world safe from nuclear and worldwide war.
Let the world, let the dummies who voted for Trump, they who know not a word of what this writing talks about, let them get a good strong dose of chaos in the United States, of a U.S. without a government, without a functioning government, with no government — because that is what we have and where we are today: Let the world and 60 some million American voters find out what it is like to have no idea what the U.S. is, what it stands for, what it will do or can do and let them regret…Or let them learn, understand and …
We are a nation unmoored, adrift in and on a sea of ignorance, ravenous with vengeful animosity for everyone in the world and for one another as we and the world are torn asunder by the single most repellent, ignorant, mentally deformed creature ever chosen by the electoral college.
This is not what FDR had in mind or meant to have happen. Now, as the earth warms and the waters rise in Placentia Bay, as an ill wind blows across the nation and out into the larger world gathered in the United Nations, no one can see tomorrow much less all the years ahead that FDR could and did see.
Peeling the Onion 