Dissimulating Global Dominance: Why the US created the UN - Stephen Wertheim
Location:
Virtual Event
Date/time
Thu 1 April 2021
14:00-15:30
The Edinburgh Centre for Global and International Law presents
Dissimulating Global Dominance: Why the US created the UN
Dr Stephen Wertheim, Deputy Director of Research and Policy, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Research Scholar, Columbia University
About the seminar
In his pathbreaking book, Tomorrow the World, historian Stephen Wertheim challenges the conventional understanding of the foreign policy thinking underlying the United States’ entry into World War II, and its reasons for proposing the creation of the United Nations. Wertheim shows that US planners – and the US public’s – wariness about joining the UK in its conflict with Nazi Germany stemmed not from “isolationism” but from the expectation that by fighting its second conflict on European soil in 20 years, the US would have no option but to commit itself to global military dominance to preserve any subsequent peace. This startling evanescence of a global – rather than merely hemispheric – imperial role was expected to be unpopular at home, and among some of its political establishment. In response to this expected backlash, US foreign planners sought to create a world organization that they hoped would provide a means for managing public opinion and projecting military power.
About the speaker
Stephen Wertheim is a historian of the United States in the world. He is Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which he co-founded with a mission to move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war. He is also a Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
He is author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020) and academic articles on such topics as grand strategy, international law, world organization, and humanitarian intervention.
Wertheim regularly writes about current events in Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Prospect magazine named him one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age.”
He previously held faculty positions in the history departments of Columbia University and Birkbeck, University of London. He received a PhD in History from Columbia in 2015.
This event is free and open to all but registration is required (link below).
Image Credit: By Groov3 - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60449329