America and the Postwar World: Remaking International Society, 1945-1956

This book examines Washington in the first years after World War II in which the United States sought to redesign international society. While that society was amorphous, it drew self-regarding states into occassional cooperation, mediated by treaties, laws, norms, diplomatic customs, and transnational institutions. The U.S. led attempt during the first postwar years to salvage international society focused on the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the Acheson-Lilienthal plan to contain the atomic arms race, the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals to force Axis leaders to account, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the founding of the United Nations. Mayers argues that none of these initiatives from the US was transformative, yet they had an ameliorative effect, traces of which have touched the twenty-first century --- in struggles to curb the profileration of nuclear weapons, bring war criminals to justice, create laws supportive of human rights, and maintain the United Nations. (Routledge)