Criminalizing Conquest: 80 Years of the UN Charter’s Abolition of Wars of Aggression
The UN turns 80 today. Awful though it may be, its founding marked an astonishing global milestone: the abolition and widespread rejection of wars of conquest.
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by Rod D. Martin
June 26, 2025
Eighty years ago today, the leaders of the allied powers that won World War II met in San Francisco to sign one of the most consequential treaties in history: the Charter of the United Nations.
The UN itself, of course, has been a disaster: a cacophonic corrupt talking shop that accomplishes few of its stated aims while giving dictators a global stage. Who could have seen that coming? Clearly not FDR.
But the motivation of the participants, ravaged by a war that had nearly destroyed most of them and had threatened the world with subjugation and slavery, was sound. What Roosevelt and Churchill had dubbed “the United Nations” — the Allied powers in World War II — came together in San Francisco to form a more permanent institutional stru…