Conclusions: the First Decade

Abstract

The shape of the UN in its first ten years was inevitably largely dictated by the political environment in which it existed: an environment of bitter distrust and hostility between the two super-powers and the nations which surrounded them, of competition for hearts and minds all over the world, of fanatical faith among the members of each group that they, and the things they believed, were right, while their enemies were the embodiment of evil — in a word, an environment of cold war.