The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s bid for full U.N.
membership was dead on arrival in New York. So why bother even
raising the subject? The answer: to drum up international
sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. Yet other defeated
peoples have suffered far more than they. Think only of how—and
at whose expense—the U.N. itself began. Born in the gently foggy
city of San Francisco, the U.N. was conceived in the Ukrainian
resort of Yalta. Though nestled amid the green Crimean hills and
lapped by the Black Sea’s languid waves, the city was severely
battle-scarred in February 1945; Winston Churchill dubbed it
“the Riviera of Hades.” Its diabolical master was the Soviet
despot Joseph Stalin, who acted as host to Churchill and the
ailing American President Franklin Roosevelt. Of the Big Three,
as Sergei Plokhy shows in his riveting study Yalta: The Price of
Peace, Roosevelt alone truly believed in the dream of a world
parliament, and even he knew the U.N. would need to give greater
weight to the great pow