Four Policemen

The "Four Policemen" was a postwar council with the Big Four that US President Franklin Roosevelt proposed as a guarantor of world peace. Their members were called the Four Powers during World War II and were the four major Allies of World War II: the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. Roosevelt repeatedly used the term "Four Policemen" starting in 1942.^[1]

The Four Policemen would be responsible for keeping order within their spheres of influence: Britain in its empire and Western Europe, the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the central Eurasian landmass, China in East Asia and the Western Pacific; and the United States in the Western Hemisphere. As a preventive measure against new wars, countries other than the Four Policemen were to be disarmed. Only the Four Policemen would be allowed to possess any weapons more powerful than a rifle.^[2]

Initially, Roosevelt envisioned the new postwar international organization would be formed several years after the war. Later, he came to view creating the United Nations as the most important goal for the entire war effort.^[3] His vision for the organization consisted of three branches: an executive branch with the Big Four, an enforcement branch composed of the same four great powers acting as the Four Policemen or Four Sheriffs, and an international assembly representing other nations.^[4]

As a compromise with internationalist critics, the Big Four nations became the permanent members of the UN Security Council, with significantly less power than had been envisioned in the Four Policemen proposal.^[5] When the United Nations was officially established later in 1945, France was in due course added as the fifth permanent member of the Security Council^[6] because of the insistence of Churchill.

History[edit]

Background[edit]

After World War I, the United States pursued a policy of isolationism and declined to join the League of Nations in 1919. Roosevelt had been a supporter of the League of Nations but, by 1935, he told his foreign policy adviser Sumner Welles: "The League of Nations has become nothing more than a debating society, and a poor one at that!".^[7] Roosevelt criticized the League for representing the interests of too many nations. He came to favor an approach to global peace secured through the unified efforts of the world's great powers, rather than through the Wilsonian notions of international consensus and collaboration that guided the League of Nations.^[8]

The idea that great powers should "police" the world had been discussed by President Roosevelt as early as August 1941, during his first meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. When the Atlantic Charter was issued, Roosevelt had ensured that the charter omitted mentioning any American commitment towards the establishment of a new international body after the war.^[9] He was reluctant to publicly announce his plans for creating a postwar international body, aware of the risk that the American people might reject his proposals, and he did not want to repeat Woodrow Wilson's struggle to convince the Senate to approve American membership in the League of Nations.

Roosevelt's proposal was to create a new international body led by a "trusteeship" of great powers that would oversee smaller countries. In September 1941, he wrote:

American Century

Diplomatic history of World War II

Global policeman

Grand Alliance (World War II)

List of Allied World War II conferences

(2009). Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-532876-9.

Bosco, David

(1995). Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945: With a New Afterword. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-982666-7.

Dallek, Robert

(1972). The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-12239-9.

Gaddis, John Lewis

; Brinkley, Douglas (1997). FDR and the Creation of the U.N.. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08553-2.

Hoopes, Townsend

(1991). The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03730-2.

Kimball, Warren F.

Ma, Xiaohua (2003). The Sino-American alliance during World War II and the lifting of the Chinese exclusion acts. New York: Routledge. pp. 203–204. 0-415-94028-1.

ISBN

United States Department of State (1942). "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". Foreign relations of the United States diplomatic papers, 1942. Europe Volume III. U.S. Government Printing Office. pp. 406–771.

(January 1951). "Two Roosevelt Decisions: One Debit, One Credit". Foreign Affairs. Vol. 29, no. 2. pp. 182–204.

Welles, Sumner

by Stephen Wertheim

"Instrumental Internationalism: The American Origins of the United Nations, 1940–3"

by Peter Gowan