Roosevelt used self-determination against imperial restoration

The charter's self-determination language became leverage inside the wartime alliance. Roosevelt continued pressing Churchill over imperial questions, opposed a Mediterranean strategy that he believed would strengthen British positions in the Middle East and Far East, and resisted returning French Indochina to France. In this interpretation, Stalin recognized that Roosevelt was also using Soviet pressure to constrain Britain. Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union each tried to play the others against one another while protecting its own postwar position. Universal principles could serve diplomatic bargaining before they became a programme for decolonisation.