At no time in the twentieth century did South Africa stand taller on the world stage than at the end of World War II. It had been part of the winning war coalition, was a linchpin of the world financial system, and had a prime minister in Jan Christian Smuts who was a confidant of Churchill and had been a member of the Imperial War Cabinet in both world wars. Smuts, like Cecil Rhodes before him, saw the world as his oyster: throughout the war he had spoken to prominent audiences of the problems of postwar reconstruction, and with the end of the war he became a leading figure in postwar deliberations. At the founding conference for the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, he was appointed president of the Commission on the General Assembly, and drafted much of the preamble to the UN Charter.

The specific postwar order that Smuts and his British allies had expected and planned for did not come to pass. Smuts had promoted a central place for Britain and the British Commonwealth, composed at war's end of just five white-dominated states: Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Britain was to lead in the reconstruction of Europe and, through her empire and the Dominions, manage relations between Europe and the rest of the world. Recognizing Britain's economic weakness, Smuts proposed the reorganization of Britain's many colonial territories into “less costly” regional groups, which would then be placed under the tutelage of one of the white Dominions.