Big Four (World War II)

The Four Policemen refers to a post-war council consisting of the Big Four that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed as a guarantor of world peace. The members of the Big Four, called the Four Powers during World War II, were the four major Allies of World War II: the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. The United Nations envisioned by Roosevelt consisted of three branches: an executive branch comprising the Big Four, an enforcement branch composed of the same four great powers acting as the Four Policemen or Four Sheriffs, and an international assembly representing the member nations of the UN.

The Four Policemen would be responsible for keeping order within their spheres of influence: Britain in its empire and in Western Europe; the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the central Eurasian landmass; China in East Asia and the Western Pacific; and the United States in the Western hemisphere. As a preventive measure against new wars, countries other than the Four Policemen were to be disarmed. Only the Four Policemen would be allowed to possess any weapons more powerful than a rifle. The Four Policemen came into fruition as the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, but its powers were significantly diminished as a compromise with internationalist critics.France was later added as the fifth member of the council in 1945 due to the insistence of Churchill.

During World War II, President Roosevelt initiated post-war plans for the creation of a new and more durable international organization that would replace the former League of Nations. Prior to the war, Roosevelt had initially been a supporter of the League of Nations, but he lost confidence in the League due to its ineffectiveness at preventing the outbreak of the second World War. Roosevelt wanted to create an international organization that secured global peace through the unified efforts of the world's great powers, rather than through the Wilsonian notions of international consensus and collaboration that guided the League of Nations. By 1935, he told his foreign policy adviser Sumner Welles: "The League of Nations has become nothing more than a debating society, and a poor one at that!"

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