On December 2

On this day in ...
... 1946, The New York Times reported that the United States had "formally offered to turn over the historic Presidio in San Francisco to the United Nations as its permanent world capital." The offer came after U.N. delegates had visited potential sites in Philadelphia, Westchester, and New York City. In the end U.N. headquarters would be established in the last of those cities, a decision decried in chapter 13 of the memoir of then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson:

When later the United Nations was looking for a site, I believed that it should be in Europe and favored Geneva or Copenhagen, but pressure grew for its headquarters to be in the United States. President Truman’s offer of the beautiful Presidio site on the shore of the Pacific at the Golden Gate seemed a perfect one, establishing its home in the city of its birth. The misplaced generosity of the Rockefeller family, however, placed it in a crowded center of conflicting races and nationalities.

Decades later a proposal to move part of UNICEF's operations to the Presidio (above left), a longtime Army base, also would go nowhere.

(Prior December 2 posts are here and here.)

On September 1

On this day in ...
... 1951, diplomats signed the Security Treaty between Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America, better known as the ANZUS Pact, at San Francisco, California (right). As detailed at the U.S. State Department's website, this mutual defense treaty, designed to ensure security in the Pacific region, did not include Great Britain notwithstanding the Commonwealth status of 2 states parties. However, Britain and the ANZUS states all joined the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization in 1954. Three decades later, "the ANZUS Treaty began to unravel when New Zealand declared its country a nuclear-free zone and refused to allow U.S. nuclear-powered submarines to visit its ports," a move that led eventually to U.S. suspension in 1986 of "its treaty obligations toward New Zealand." Bottom line:

Although the agreement has not been formally abrogated, the United States and New Zealand no longer maintain the security relationship between their countries.

(credit for photo of John Foster Dulles, the U.S. negotiator who would become Secretary of State in 1953, signing the ANZUS Treaty while others, including the Secretary of State at that time, Dean Acheson (far right), look on)

(Prior September 1 posts are here and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'We have never before been so keenly aware that in this world of ours we need cooperation as intimate as that among the cells of one body.'

-- Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, in an April 3, 1952, speech before Congress (right), as quoted in ch. 66 of Present at the Creation (1st ed. 1969), the memoir of Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State (prior post). The Dutch monarch was the 2d woman to address a joint session of Congress. (credit for Life magazine photo) The 1st had been her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, in 1942. Juliana's statement serves to remind that neither global interdependence, nor globalization, is a new phenomenon. Nor, indeed, resistance to same. For Juliana's speech fell short of its intended purpose, to persuade a protectionist Congress to aid Europe's postwar reconstruction by easing U.S. restrictions on international trade. As Acheson put it:

[H]er words did not soften opposition to imports of Dutch cheese.

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

[M]ore alert American and British governments might have brought science and technology to their aid in mitigating some of the problems presented to them by Egypt, the Suez Canal, and the dependence of Western Europe on the oil of the Middle East. A fraction of our investment in the space program put into the development of a practicable electric automobile and of nuclear power plants here and, with European cooperation, in Europe could do much to solve our air pollution problems and free Europe from dependence upon the Middle East .... The investment still seems to me a profitable one for Europe and the United States for their own welfare and security and for world peace.

-- Thus declared former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (left) in 1969, concluding ch. 58 of the 1st edition of his memoir, Present at the Creation. Subtract some of his optimism about the promise of nuclear power. Multiply "the Middle East" beyond Egypt. And add China, India, much of the developing world, and the United States itself to the list of oil-thirsty countries. The sum of those parts? A statement that stands pretty much on its own fully 4 decades after it was written.

(credit for 1938 photo at top left of 1st successful Saudi oil gusher; credit for photo at top right of Mercury missile launched by NASA in 1959)