World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

by Henry Kissinger

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s and by now a historic third-term President) and Winston Churchill met for the first time as leaders in Newfoundland aboard HMS Prince of Wales in August 1941, they expressed what they described as their common vision in the Atlantic Charter of eight “common principles”—all of which Wilson would have endorsed, while no previous British Prime Minister would have been comfortable with all of them. They included “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”; the end of territorial acquisitions against the will of subject populations; “freedom from fear and want”; and a program of international disarmament, to precede the eventual “abandonment of the use of force” and “establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.”