oct 24, 1945 - The United Nations (UN) is founded to help ensure international peace and security following WWII

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"Although the US and the Soviet Union were founding members of the UN, they each reserved the right of veto within the Security Council, the body charged with enforcing its resolutions. Great Britain, France, and China (still under Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists) received the same privilege. This means that the UN could act only when its most powerful members agreed on the action, an arrangement that obscured the distinction between might and right…The veto-empowered members of the council were unlikely to reach such agreements because they differed so widely on how to define Justice...the UN functioned more as a debating society than as an organisation capable of defining principles and holding states accountable to them." (Gaddis 2006, p. 159)

"Entrenched in the organisations charter and in its practices was the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states – even when the most powerful of these states violated that principle. There would be, this, no UN condemnation when the Soviet Union used military force to suppress dissent in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, or when the US employed covert action to overthrow the governments of Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and attempted to do so in Cuba in 1961 and in Chile a decade later." (Gaddis 2006, p. 160).

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