The United Nations was forged in the waning months of World War II, largely due to the will of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was made up of the “victorious nations” of the Allied side, and aimed to use their power in concert to promote and maintain the peace.

Churchill went along mostly because he already realized the UK’s shrunken role in the new world, and to help maintain the “special relationship” with the US. Strangely enough, Stalin was completely uninterested, but was eventually brought on board with the promise of three votes, instead of the customary one nation, one vote rule. (Little Known Fact: The USSR got a vote, but so did the supposedly “independent” SSRs of Ukraine and Byelorussia. That was Stalin’s price to join, and FDR paid it.) China hopped on board because UN membership would guarantee her borders against future European or Japanese colonialism. France joined because, hey, someone was willing to call them a victor.

Supposedly, Germany, Italy, Japan and the minor Axis powers were conquered by these new United Nations. In reality, each individual nation set up shop pretty much wherever they found they had soldiers when the fighting stopped. Russia didn’t get a say in Japan because there weren’t any Russian boots on the Home Islands. We didn’t get any say over Poland, because there was nothing but Russian soldiers there.

“Nobility,” the victors must have thought, “and a truly united effort can wait until after the next war. You know, after we get an ugly headquarters built in New York and throw away thousands of parking tickets with a Gallic shrug.”

And so we got ourselves an Iron Curtain, a Cold War, a nuclear-arms race, a semi-remilitarized Japan, wars in Vietnam and Korea and Afghanistan and. . . well, you know the rest. It was a bad fifty years, with some really scary times, and a lot of people killed for some questionable reasons.

But it could have been worse. Lots worse.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Germany and Japan had been placed under a UN mandate, rather than governed directly by the victors.

There would never have been a West Germany to act as the economic powerhouse driving Europe’s postwar boom – the Soviets would have vetoed any attempt by Britain, France, and the US to merge their Occupation Zones into the new Bundesrepublik. Building a West German army to act as the first line of defense against possible Soviet aggression would have been almost impossible. The Marshall Plan would have missed the heart of Europe. (Marshall Plan dollars were offered in equal measure to Eastern Europe, but Stalin refused.) In fact, if all of Germany were under UN mandate, there might have been no legal reason to keep Russian soldiers in their Zone – the Red Army could have marched to the Rhine without having had to fire a single shot. If you think France is bad today, imagine how France would behave with Third Shock Army at their doorstep.

There would have been no NATO, for what is NATO without West Germany, and a France that had given up before the Cold War started? Britain would have been our Cuba off the coast of very Red Europe.

And Japan? No Japan, Inc. No Sony, no Nintendo, no Honda, no Mitsubishi. Could a free, inventive economy really have prospered in a nation where the Soviets could veto every new measure of Macarthur’s postwar constitution? And without free use of Japanese bases, the Korean War would have ended in weeks, with a North Korean victory. With no South Korea, and with a muddled Japan, we would have found ourselves greatly weakened in the north Pacific. Forget Korea’s DMZ – we’d have been too busy patrolling Alaska.

I’ll let you figure out the rest of the repercussions on your own – but I dare you to find any realistic positive outcomes.

Perhaps in 1945 a moral case could have been made in allowing the United Nations to run the peace. We fought, if not under the UN banner, then at least under the UN name. Or so FDR kept insisting in his public addresses. Perhaps -- in 1945. But not today.

This month the UN failed in its duty to find a peaceful solution to the crisis in Iraq. Having failed in that, it also failed to do anything to support the necessary war. And now Kofi Annan wants a say in how we run postwar Iraq. France wants US dollars to pay for UN projects, in a country where US blood was spilled to liberate.

That makes about as much sense as it would have if we’d turned over Germany and Japan to the UN back in '45. The United Nations is a lousy way to run a war – and an even worse way to run the peace.