(CNN) — It was the speech President Franklin D. Roosevelt never gave. In a radio address scheduled for April 13, 1945, the fourth-term president would have said, “If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships — the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.”
But the day before, Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he suddenly slumped in his chair, the victim of a stroke. He didn’t live to see the allies’ victory in World War II that year or the conference in San Francisco that month that established the United Nations.
Roosevelt originally conceived of the UN as a muscular force to keep the peace, with the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom and China acting as “four policemen” to rein in nations that would otherwise go to war. He wanted, in the words of the undelivered April 13 speech, “an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples.”
The world in 2023 is a much different place, but peace, as Roosevelt envisioned it, remains elusive. A two-week-old conflict in the Middle East has already claimed thousands of lives against the backdrop of a multipolar web of alliances and rivalries in which the world’s major powers often lack the ability to restrain conflict, and sometimes even encourage it.
On Thursday evening, though, President Joe Biden, who was a toddler when FDR died, sounded a Rooseveltian tone in asserting that the US still bears a special responsibility for seeking to promote world peace. He proposed billions in new aid to both Ukraine and Israel.
“We’re facing an inflection point in history — one of the moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come,” Biden argued. “American leadership…
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