The UN and the Postwar Global Order: Dumbarton Oaks in Historical Perspective after 75 Years

The history of ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ is overshadowed in the formation of the postwar order, most notably by the San Francisco conference of April 1945 that gave birth to the United Nations Organisation. Yet in a number of important ways it was the Dumbarton Oaks conference, or the ‘Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization’ to give it its full and formal title, that fundamentally shaped a ‘postwar international organisation’. In other words, the United Nations that has been an omnipresent feature of international affairs since 1945 owes a considerable debt to the gathering in the late summer and early autumn of 1944 in Washington DC. The conversations took place in stressed circumstances, with the ongoing military campaigns, ¹ individual national interests, and competing viewpoints on a new international organization in the aftermath of the League of Nations all influencing the proceedings. Nonetheless all present understood the opportunity that existed. That the United Nations Organisation has had a mixed record since should not cloud assessments of the scale of the achievement at Dumbarton Oaks to produce a meaningful blueprint for a new form of global governance.

Dumbarton Oaks' place in the panoply of wartime conferences has suffered in comparison with other UN-related gatherings such as Bretton Woods and Hot Springs that led to more readily identifiable results. Dumbarton Oaks, in contrast, was an interim meeting on the way to something bigger, a ‘pre-summit meeting'. ² The value of the accounts of Dumbarton Oaks presented here is that they reveal the essential wider context and the broader implications to those policy negotiations. It was the practical policy outcomes that were so important to the delegates from the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States as they gathered in their secluded Washington surroundings from 21 August to 28 September (the Chinese nationalist delegation joined the second phase of the conversations from 29 September to 8 October). The articles collected here indicate how the scope of those talks had a profound influence on how national interests both shaped and were shaped by the development of a new structure for global governance.

This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History addresses the significance of those meetings in the Georgetown suburbs of Washington DC for the history of global governance. The Dumbarton Oaks estate provided a suitable retreat for the delegates in 1944 who deliberated on the future international organization. The estate had been donated to Harvard University by the Republican career diplomat, Robert Woods Bliss, and his wife Mildred in 1940 for use as a research institute primarily devoted to Byzantine and other ancient cultures. The Bliss’s explicit purpose, inscribed in a plaque adorning the building to this day, was that by exploring the past it would help ‘clarify an everchanging present and to inform the future with wisdom’. Such a mantra underpins the reappraisals presented here.

Previous explorations of Dumbarton Oaks have been limited in both focus and scope. The narrative of the United Nations Organization typically begins with the Conference in San Francisco in the aftermath of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, on the verge of Victory in Europe Day (8 May). ³ Much of the literature on the Second World War, and separately the Cold War overlooks the links between strategic military and political thinking that came together at Dumbarton Oaks. This was a panoptical diplomatic moment, with the participating delegates simultaneously looking in all directions. It was a critical juncture in connecting the pre-war, wartime and postwar eras.

The relative absence of Dumbarton Oaks from literatures on the Second World War and the Cold War is surprising. It is worth noting its twin conference, Bretton Woods, or ‘The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference’ (1–22 July 1944), has received far greater attention in recent scholarship, with extensive studies of both the main protagonists and the wider diplomatic and policy implications. ⁴ This can partly be explained by the relative success of Bretton Woods in laying the groundwork for a stable postwar global economy with the USA at its centre, as opposed to Dumbarton Oaks that is associated with the failure of the subsequent United Nations to establish an equally stable international political framework. Nevertheless, this should not undermine historical investigation of the Washington Conversations as a seminal moment for framing international security and global governance, and one that should not be solely coloured by the Cold War. Is the historical record exhausted?

The official record of US involvement in Dumbarton Oaks can be found in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, published in 1966. ⁵ Since then, Dumbarton Oaks has only received occasional interest from international historians. Robert Hilderbrand’s 1990 book, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security, places considerable emphasis on postwar security and the United Nations. ⁶ Written at the end of the Cold War, it is a detailed account of the negotiations between the protagonists. However, Hilderbrand’s account is now almost 30 years old. Likewise, Ernest May and Angeliki E. Laiou’s collection of conference proceedings commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks is more than 20 years old. Like Hilderbrand, it reflects the post-Cold War moment of the 1990s, calling on contributors to re-evaluate the conference’s significance without the weight of Cold War divisions clouding the analysis. A more holistic view of wartime planning was provided by Georg Schild, who combined his study of Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks to argue that US views of postwar security should be viewed simultaneously in both economic and political terms. ⁷ Dumbarton Oaks makes a significant appearance in a number of broader survey pieces, but equally is overlooked in others. It is treated with some depth in Robert Dallek's unparalleled grand study of FDR's foreign policy in focusing upon the President's proposal for the ‘Four Policemen’. ⁸ Andrew Preston's comprehensive look at religion and foreign policy also includes a section on philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr's realism, and the skepticism he shared with foreign policy advisor John Foster Dulles over the workability of an international peace organization in a selfish world. ⁹ On the other hand, Dumbarton Oaks is absent from Frank Ninkovich's Modernity and Power and Andrew Bacevich's studies of American empire and the American Century. ¹⁰ Neither does it surface in Norman Graebner's collection of essays from the 1980s on America as a world power or in the most recent edition of Stephen Ambrose's (with Douglas Brinkley) Rise to Globalism. ¹¹ Scattered articles have appeared over the years, and memoirs have added more details to the historical record, but the literature is still relatively thin. ¹²

The articles collected here present new directions for exploring the historical significance of the Dumbarton Oaks moment. First, there is the issue of periodization. Recent historical writing has challenged the neat book-ends of 1945 and 1989 for the Cold War, and the Dumbarton Oaks conference can likewise be situated within an emerging international history that transcends the interwar, world war, and Cold War periodisations. This provides a new context for the conference which recognizes the ‘moment’ that existed in August 1944 for strategic thinking about the future amid the fulcrum of global conflict. ¹³ Second, there is a decentring of the US role as the central player in international history. Whereas this has taken place in Cold War histories authored by the likes of Odd Arne Westad and Lorenz Luthi, the articles here push the process further back to emphasise the important involvement of others – particularly the Soviet Union, and, with China, what would become the non-aligned nations – in defining terms and outlining pathways for the future international order. ¹⁴ Third, there is the intermestic angle. US public opinion had to be acclimatised to another venture for setting the terms for world order, following what has often been perceived as the failed Wilsonian gambit of 1918–20. ¹⁵ The US government could not step out without ensuring that the American public – read, the electorate – was on board. ¹⁶ Fourth, there is the issue of the global impact. Similar to Versailles 25 years earlier, the negotiations of Dumbarton Oaks were followed by many around the world who were not present but who had a definite stake in, and opinion on, how the postwar world should be transformed and organised. Gender and racial equality were very much an issue, in terms not only of the future of the European empires but also of who was deciding on that future. ¹⁷ The Washington Conversations resonated far beyond their Washington DC location as Stefanie Wichhart explores here. Lastly, there is the institutional history. Dumbarton Oaks laid out a blueprint for a global international organization that would be finalized at San Francisco over eight months later. The security challenges of the postwar world, particularly once the anti-fascist coalition broke into opposing spheres of influence, forced the nascent UN to adopt, in difficult circumstances, a role that was diminished from the one envisaged at Dumbarton Oaks. Nevertheless, those who ran the UN adapted to these difficult circumstances in order to give meaning, purpose, and identity to the new organization in world politics. ¹⁸

Any reappraisal of the significance of Dumbarton Oaks must take into account not only the clash of realist and idealist interests involved, but also how they were combined within a vision of international order. A realist perspective that focuses on states' self-interest, ¹⁹ sees only the predominance of Great Powers. Those who had led the United Nations forces against the Axis powers -- the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, along with the secondary power of China -- dominated the process. George Kennan wrote from Moscow to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull that a realistic foreign policy must prevail; ‘we must not fail the people of the Western nations with UN plans from Dumbarton Oaks that failed to occupy ourselves seriously and minutely with the sheer power relationships of the European peoples.' ²⁰ It is instructive to recall that at the same time the Washington Conversations were occurring, FDR and Churchill were meeting at their last bilateral summit, the second Quebec conference. For four days in September, this meeting, code-named Octagon, focused on hard-headed postwar topics like occupation zones in defeated Germany and the Morgenthau Plan for the ‘pastoralization' and demilitarisation of Germany, as well as on strategic decisions about the ongoing war in Europe and Asia. Following Quebec, Churchill and Roosevelt met at the President's home in Hyde Park, New York to collaborate on the atomic bomb, and did so in secret, as representatives of two Great Powers practicing traditional secret diplomacy. Two days after the conclusion of the Dumbarton Oaks talks, Churchill travelled for a ten-day visit with Stalin for the fourth Moscow meeting, the ‘Tolstoy Conference', to deal not only with Soviet entry into the war against Japan but also about the future of Poland. Most famously, the two realist statesmen sketched postwar spheres of influence in Eastern Europe through their infamous ‘naughty document', in Churchill's words, otherwise known as the ‘percentages agreement', that divided the region between Great Britain and the USSR. ²¹

Dumbarton Oaks itself was not a sideshow in this theatre of formal and informal great power summits. After all, the most famous occurrence during the conference was the request by Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Andrei Gromyko, for the seating of all Soviet Republics in the postwar security organization. That bombshell has been interpreted by some as an expression of Russian fear of being outnumbered by the capitalists after the war. After all, the British had their dominions and the Americans could muster their western hemisphere neighbours to vote their way. Stalin needed obedience from some reliable bloc, and thus he had Gromyko issue his bold demand, one that nearly derailed the negotiations before a compromise deal was made later to his satisfaction. This was a harbinger of things to come, and indicated a great power divide that had been conspicuously absent at Bretton Woods. ²²

Such a hard-nosed approach was perhaps unsurprising given that as the Conversations began, military matters were still to the fore. The ferocity of the fighting as the Allies made progress through Northern France, on the Eastern front (most tragically in the Warsaw uprising), and in the Pacific as US Forces island-hopped their way towards Japan, fundamentally challenged thinking on a peaceful post-war world. The context for Dumbarton Oaks, in other words, included war and its spoils. Idealism was not foremost in the minds of leaders as the war ground on, and as big powers eyed territory for future profit, influence, and security. The idealism of achieving a breakthrough for a new institutional framework for global governance was therefore severely tempered by realist goals on the ground.

The articles that follow here recognise this tension between the ideal of a United Nations and one governed by balance of power politics amongst the Great Powers. Stephen Wertheim presents the case that the emergent United Nations Organisation was a means to facilitate US leadership of a ‘postwar world’. In making this argument Wertheim ties together two important dimensions of the postwar world, US foreign policy and the importance of domestic public opinion. Conditioned by the experience of the American public's reaction after the First World War, policy makers wanted to ensure that US postwar leadership would be accepted, if not welcomed.

Andrew Johnstone’s article further augments our historical understanding of the role of US public opinion. His article addresses the concerted but distinct efforts of US officials and unofficial private internationalists to present Dumbarton Oaks to the American public. The efforts to educate public opinion revealed tensions in both government circles and among private internationalist bodies over differing interpretations of how the international organization sketched at Dumbarton Oaks would function.

While these two articles have a US focus, Geoffrey Robert’s article draws upon previously unavailable sources to reveal Soviet thinking on an international organization that was framed around postwar collaboration of the Great Powers. It exposes the influence of Soviet foreign commissar Vyacheslav Molotov in relation to Josef Stalin, and points to the former’s consideration of a unified Germany and possibilities for a pan-European collective security system.

An equally innovative approach is provided by Stefanie Wichhart’s analysis of the influence of Dumbarton Oaks upon the formation of the Arab League in March 1945 through the Alexandria Protocol. The inspiration to pursue a pan-Arab nationalist cause by those gathered in Egypt can clearly be sourced back to the negotiations that took place in the Washington suburb the previous year. Drawing upon Arab sources alongside those from Britain and the United States, Wichhart’s analysis points to how small, medium and regional powers saw potential in the unfolding international organization. Disappointment with the short-term outcome of Dumbarton Oaks manifested itself in Arab approaches in San Francisco and to overall frustration with the United Nations as the Cold War took hold later in the 1940s.

Moving attention to the internal mechanisms of the future organization, Robbie Barnes focuses upon the shape of the Secretariat and the Secretary General as conceived in 1944 and how it later faced its first substantial security challenge in the case of the Korean War. The distance between what was proposed in 1944 and the reality of a United Nations, which failed to maintain great power cooperation into the postwar world, becomes evident here. Equally, exploiting the absence of great power dialogue in the United Nations, the first Secretary-General Trygve Lie established efforts for postwar reconstruction in Korea through the UN Commission for the Unification and Rehabilitation of Korea and the UN Korean Reconstruction Agency, which set a precedent for subsequent UN endeavours.

These articles provide a reappraisal of the Dumbarton Oaks moment 75 years on, positioning it within a broader international historical context than has up till now been the case. In doing so they contribute to the ongoing revisionism in UN history, reinterpreting the origins of this much maligned but nevertheless essential apparatus for international diplomacy. ²³