) that were thought to have caused the war and allows geographically based alliances among UN members, and promotes internal self-interest by way of "regional commitments to self-defense that led to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty and other multi-lateral organizations" (Briggs 163).
The effect of this straddling was to limit inherent UN power and maximize in a structural way the powers of individual nations to assert their sovereignty in international disputes. This became most obvious in the Cold War confrontations of the US and USSR. As postwar Soviet expansionism increased through Eastern Europe and tried to blockade Berlin, the Chinese mainland experienced a communist revolution, and the USSR exploded its first atomic bomb (Goldman 96-125), "a considerable part of the [American] population evidenced little enthusiasm for the United Nations, coalition diplomacy, coalition war, or anything else which placed the United States in a position of relying on others" (Goldman 116). The formation of NATO was specifically designed for the ten nations
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