d’s first attempt to coordinate political and military activity in the search for peace. Its predecessor, the League of Nations, was created in 1919 at the close of World War I. But the league had barely opened its doors in Geneva, Switzerland, before its inability to prevent military aggression became apparent.Japan withdrew from the league in 1931 after invading Manchuria; Adolph Hitler pulled Germany out in 1933. Although it continued to exist until it was replaced by the United Nations in 1945, the league ceased to exert any influence after Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the subsequent outbreak of World War II.The idea of a successor to the league was discussed long before the war ended. Representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China, allies in the fighting in Europe and the Pacific, met several times in 1943 and 1944 to draw up proposals for the new international body’s purposes and organization.The U.N.’s founders had clear ideas about what the new organization was to accomplish. In the preamble of the U.N. Charter adopted in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, they set out four primary goals: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetimes has brought untold sorrow to mankind…; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights…; to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained; and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”To promote those goals, the founders established distinct bodies within the U.N. system – which came into being when the charter was ratified by the fifty-one original members on October 24, 1945. The Security Council, made up of the five permanent and ten rotating member countries, was given primary responsibility for international peace...
