To Create a New World? American Presidents and the United Nations

To Create a New World? describes the influence of U.S. presidents from FDR to Bill Clinton on the creation, development, policies, and reform of the United Nations. This book highlights idealism, American exceptionalism, and realism as motivating ideas in each president's approach toward the world body. From the moment of Woodrow Wilson's efforts to breathe life into the League of Nations at Versailles to the onset of the new millennium, presidential administrations have had to balance instinctive American idealist notions of international cooperation with realist concerns to defend and preserve U.S. interests. The resultant tension in U.S. policy toward the United Nations provides the book's motif.