Declaration of the Four Nations

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The Declaration of the Four Nations on General Security, or Four Power Declaration, was signed on 30 October 1943, at the Moscow Conference by the Big Four: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. The declaration formally established the four-power framework that would later influence the international order of the postwar world.[1] It was one of four declarations signed at the conference; the others were the Declaration on Italy, the Declaration on Austria, and the Declaration on German Atrocities.[2]

The declaration was drafted by

US State Department advisers such as Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles, who presented it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 10 August. Their proposal eschewed the regional councils, preferred by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
, in favour of establishing an international postwar organization.

It omitted any discussion of the potentially-controversial establishment of a permanent peacekeeping force after the war. Instead, its stated aim was simply the creation "at the earliest possible date of a general international organization."[3]

Roosevelt revealed the proposal to Churchill and

Great Power of the declaration, officially on the grounds that the Moscow Conference was planned as a meeting between three Great Powers (the US, UK and the Soviet Union). Roosevelt suspected that Stalin's true motivations were to avoid antagonizing the Japanese with whom they had signed a non-aggression pact in 1941. Churchill's view was that Stalin had a similar reluctance to recognize China as a Great Power.[3]

See also

References

  1. ^ Garver 1988, p. 194.
  2. ^ United Nations Documents 1941–1945. Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute Of International Affairs. 1946.
  3. ^ a b Dallek 1995, p. 420.

Sources