>> You're a world leader.
You're facing incredible devastation at home.
Lots of people are hungry.
People are displaced.
Why on Earth would you come up with some sort of airy-fairy institution that's
supposed to promote peace?
But actually, when you put the UN into its context and
you've done a lot of work on this.
And you see it as something that was part of a wartime alliance.
I think it makes much more sense because then, it isn't just some sort of
idealistic institution becomes a very pragmatic response to war.
It's a way of binding countries permanently into this wartime alliance,
creating a set of rules for them to observe and
a much more sort of promising platform for peace.
I think it was very important to see it as that sort of pragmatic response.
So it's not just about the ideals, it's also about saying,
what are the costs of war?
And what are the costs of compromise and cooperation?
And clearly there was a very, I think smart calculation made,
that compromise and cooperation would be much better.
>> Well, the UN really emerges quite literally out of the ashes,
out of the ashes of World War II.
And out of the ashes is really of the failure of the League of Nations earlier.
There was,I think, an emotional and political need not to
repeat that experience of world war which we'd seen twice within a generation.
>> We got the UN, obviously, out of the brutal circumstances
of the Second World War, a war which made many statesmen and
politicians realize that they'd taken the world to the brink.
And this in a sense was the institution that came out of that, and
the fact that over many decades since people have occasionally considered it and
quickly given up the prospect of strengthening the UN by charter change.
The fact it's not happened shows what a disruptive
moment 1945 and the end of the second World War was.
You were able to dream as visionaries of a possible
world of multilateral structures which before and
since has seemed unrealistic.
It took that war purportedly to end all wars to make statesmen
reach the leap if you like of imagination to do something as bold as the UN.
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