the answer to your last question can be found here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304141/

thus France got the northern band of territory, effectively setting them up as the allied trip wire against Ivan’s ambitions southward, in search of warm water ports….

as for Ossetians and Abkhazi, suffice it to say that they just “don’t like them revenuers” round those parts… (say it with a hillbilly accent and a shotgun and you’ll get the flavor)

As for the decolonizing, well you are right. Not every little slip of real estate should be its own nation. FDR let that genie out of the bottle and Churchill warned him about it at the time.

What the hell is an Ossetian (or Abkhaz) anyway?

I haven’t made a study of it but was not the Balfour declaration dated 1917? Perhaps it was related to great power tradesies from WWI and only WWII forced the ‘great power’ to move forward and acknowledge its prior agreement?

I suspect that there was a huge amount of angst from the ‘great power’ and its allies as they were forced to face the realization that their failure to provide refuge for jews as the nazis built up to a full scale extermination could be traced back, in some small way, to the failure of the UK to do what it had promised. Nobody would take the jewish refugees fleeing the holocaust. By 1948 most of the grown ups at the UN had to accept that facts. Of course they were also watching the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Europe as every german was expelled from any country that was not named germany. There was a lot of acceptance of the idea that every ethnic group deserved a place to go where, when the chips were down, they had to take you in.

Just looking at the original goals of the UN decolonization program made that clear. It was amusing to watch its corruption over the years as it succumbed to the UN blight and the UN started to turn its back on self-determination.

For one thing World War II brought in Israel-without it Britain would have been able to keep the Mandate.

Second Britain stumbled into the ethnic violence of the last of the Mandate days because it never could decide if it wanted Balfour’s Palestine or Churchill’s.