This year, as we remember the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end, we should also remember the road not taken for U.S. foreign affairs. An alternative vision for global order was developed during the war but lost during its aftermath. Although this view of world affairs—call it the “one world” vision—never cohered around a single set of precepts and never became official policy, many thousands of Americans rallied around its iconoclastic brand of popular internationalism.
The lead exponent of the one-world idea was Wendell Willkie, a charismatic speaker, business lawyer, world traveler, and bestselling author who had been the surprise Republican nominee for president in 1940. Little remembered beyond his ill-fated presidential run, Willkie should be recalled now for the picture of the world that he gave the country in 1942 and ’43, during the darkest months of World War II. His one-world ideals captured public imagination, only to be scorned as not tough-minded enough for the incipient Cold War. Recalling them now might help us unlock new ways to see our current global crisis and find responses equal to the complex interdependency that imperils the world today.
