The global order they created has lasted an unprecedentedly long time. As Kevin Rudd points out in our cover story, this is a historical anomaly. The rise of China now presents a challenge to the post-1945 order and reforming it to include the world’s rising powers will require the same far-sightedness by China and the US as exercised by the United Nations’ creators.
Trawling though 70 years of archives can be dispiriting. Many of the issues which featured in The World Today in the 1940s are addressed with equal vigour today – nuclear weapons, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the place of Germany in Europe and Russia’s determination to create buffer zones. As Patricia Lewis remarks, the ingenuity shown by scientists in creating the atom bomb has not been matched by policymakers seeking to curtail its spread.
