Forty years later, Gregory J. Newell of the U.S. Department of State said: “The cause was oversold: disappointment was inevitable.”

Like the League, the UN has accomplished a great deal in social fields. But it has neither guaranteed peace nor stopped war. Former prime minister Harold Macmillan of Britain told the British House of Commons in 1962 that “the whole foundation on which the United Nations was built has been undermined.”

However, as the UN reached the age of 40, historian Thomas M. Franck said that “it is . . . much less effective than we had hoped in 1945.” As U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz commented: “The birth of the United Nations certainly did not transform the world into a paradise.”