The United Nations came into official existence on October 24, 1945, two months after the end of the Second World War. Fifty countries were members, including the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Both the genesis of the institution and its name came from the nations united as Allies against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The organization was tasked with maintaining international peace and security in the post-war world.

The US and USSR emerged from the war as the world’s strongest powers. Though uneasy allies during the war, relations turned into conflict and often paralyzed the UN during the long Cold War. So why did both these powers push for a UN to begin with? Two historians examine the origins of the UN from US and Soviet perspectives.

Stephen Wertheim argues that the US saw the UN as an “indispensable tool for implementing US postwar world leadership.” What he calls “instrumental internationalism” quickly surpassed the general sense in 1939 that “few Americans imagined the United States would soon join a general organization of nations, let alone become the principal author of a new one.” But within a year of the American entry into the war, the US was planning a successor to the League of Nations, which had been called for by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 but which the US had not joined.

A “revolution in American thinking” took place between 1940 and 1942, Wertheim writes, as a “commitment to US political-military preeminence in global affairs” swallowed whole the old isolationism. Between 1942 and 1943, this revolution shifted from a notion of “great power exclusivity” focusing on American–British global leadership to a “wider world body.” As Wertheim writes,

If American privilege could be reconciled with universal form, a new international organization could both facilitate US global supremacy and command the assent of the American people, as well as allay the suspicious of other states. Channeling their legacy of opposing power politics, internationalism and international organization would legitimate the American domination of power politics like no lone nationalism or limited alliance could. [italics in original]

Since the UN’s founding, the US has used “it when convenient and bypassing it when necessary.”

Geoffrey Roberts writes that the USSR saw the UN as a necessary successor to the League of Nations and thus as a stabilizer of great power relations. The Soviets were particularly keen on the Security Council and especially concerned with making sure Germany and Japan were no longer threats to peace.

Roberts counters the oft-repeated claim that the UN was a mostly Anglo-American production with the Soviet Union “playing at best a secondary part in the process” of creation.

“Far from being unimportant to Moscow,” he writes, “the creation of a successor to the League of Nations was a central preoccupation of Soviet postwar peace planners.” For the Soviets, the wartime alliance of the US, USSR, and Britain against Germany and Japan “had to be transformed into a peacetime grand alliance, and the UN was seen as a crucial institutional form of that alliance.”

The Soviet concept of postwar security was enshrined in Security Council, above all in the veto powers of its five permanent members. A single power could thus prevent Security Council resolutions—by November 2024, the USSR (and its successor, the Russian Federation) had used its veto 129 times, the most any of the five permanent members. For comparison, the US, the second highest veto-er, has used its veto eighty-seven times.

“The veto system was devised to foster great power unity, but in practice became a mechanism used by all the permanent members to protect their vital interests from UN encroachments,” writes Roberts.

During the Cold War, it was much believed in the West that the Soviets had no interest in collective security during either the pre- or post-WWII period, Roberts notes. Post-Soviet archival research has shown this wasn’t true during the middle 1930s, and, as Roberts documents, the forging of the UN was very much part of Soviet planning at the end of the war.

However, “disillusionment with the UN was not long in coming” for the USSR. In the first ten years of the Security Council existence, the only member to use the veto was the USSR: they did so fifty-seven times by 1955. The resolution to authorize a US-led coalition to counter the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 passed because the USSR was boycotting the UN at the time.

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