Was Yalta a Betrayal?
George W. Bush in Lativa earlier this week: "The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable."
Heady stuff. "Newsweek's" Howard Fineman found it "incendiary" and then went on to explain it in terms of the supposed pathologies of "Bushworld."
The tendency to see every event in the entire world in terms of the dark mental clockwork of one's evil nemesis is a sign of a mind gone bleakly mad. But that's how the big media treat the world these days. And that's why I don't pick up a "Newsweek" anymore except to read Fareed Zakaria and flip through for pictures of Lebanese protest babes.
Going to Eastern Europe, at this point in history, to address the end of World War II -- how could he not have talked about Yalta? He was going to be asked about it anyhow -- as he was in a May 5 interview at the White House with the Russian television network NTV. Before Bush even got on Air Force One bound for Europe, the Russian interviewer understood perfectly well the centrality of Yalta.
What he said in Riga was only a more articulate form of that answer.
As Anne Applebaum points out, Bush should address Yalta, like Bill Clinton, when he goes to Africa, must at some point talk about American slavery.
On the nominally sane left, Kevin Drum disappoints me, as he does about three times out of five, in prefering to dogpile on the right's reaction to the remark rather than go read up on some history and have an honest opinion on it.
The post-war fate of Poland revealed the sham in the "Grand Alliance" of USSR, UK and USA. It had been useful propaganda for Britain and America during the war, a convenient fiction, but Roosevelt seemed to really believe it. It was a sham. The Soviet cooperation in the war on Hitler was a matter of pragmatism and a mere interruption in the long-term Soviet goal, as outlined in Lenin's historical determinism, of subverting or defeating the capitalist powers.
The experience of Poland after the war punctured the bubble. Bush might have spared Churchill from his condemnation, for Churchill was never glamoured by Stalin the way Roosevelt was. Yet the Prime Minister was a realist, and Churchill, in a secret 1944 deal with Stalin, already had bartered away Romania and Bulgaria to give Britain and America a free hand to save Greece and Italy for the West. The "proportion of interest" of Great Britain and the Soviet Union in Hungary and Yugoslavia was to be "50-50." The Baltics were never mentioned. They presumably were considered a lost cause, though their present leaders seem not to think it was so.
But by the end of the war an exhausted Brtain had no power to pursue even the partial interests Churchill had reserved in Eastern Europe. "The responsibility lies with the United States," he wrote, "and my desire is to give them all the support in our power. If they do not feel able to do anything, then we must let matters take their course."
The British historian Paul Johnson, in his account of the summit, shows why Bush's statement was right -- Yalta was an American failure:
Churchill sent Roosevelt a stream of warnings and messages about Stalin that spring. Admiral Leahy, part of the U.S. delegation at Yalta, complained that the Poland agreement was "so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it."
Stalin ran roughshod over it from the start. On March 23, Molotov announced that the elections would be held Soviet-style. Roosevelt seemed genuinely shocked. When Harriman sent him news of this development, Roosevelt "banged his fist on his wheelchair: 'Averell is right. We can't do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.' "
It was almost the last act of Roosevelt's life, and it was a sad closing chapter. He went to Georgia to die, muttering that Stalin was "not a man of his word."
On the paleo-right, Pat Buchanan observes Bush's comment with the pithy observation that, if the Nazi attack on Poland was what precipitated World War II in Europe, the war was a failure for the Western Allies because it ended up -- via Yalta -- continuing the Poles in subjugation to a ruthless alien dictatorship.
People are dismissing Buchanan for going off the deep end and revealing his anti-Semitism. I think he's really connecting World War II to the war in Iraq, which he bitterly opposed. Yalta does offer a warning lesson in putting idealism and wishful thinking over hard-headedness.
But the case of Poland also shows how great wars begin over specific local matters and acquire larger purposes as they go. Say "Nazi Germany" and among the first images to spring to mind are the death camps and the Holocaust. That's what makes it the "Good War" for the Allies. But that was not what drew Britain or France into the fight. Even after Pearl Harbor, America didn't declare war on Hitler -- he declared war on us.
Britain did, in fact, go to war against Germany over its treaty obligations to Poland. Then, after hell and high water, with freedom and liberty at stake, Nazi Germany lay in ruins and Britain and its way of life had survived. In 1946, at a beautiful society wedding in London, a Tory MP remarked to Lady "Emerald" Cunard how quickly life had returned to normal. "After all," he said, gesturing to the crowded room, "this is what we have been fighting for."
"What," she replied, "are they all Poles?"
Buchanan asks whether the whole war against Germany was a mistake. People who dismiss that as an illegitimate question fall into his trap. The answer to him -- and I think it's an argument worth having -- comes down to this: A war may begin through diplomacy, and transform itself into a conflict between right and wrong having little to do with the details that brought it on. The legitimacy of the cause is strengthened, not weakened, by that. It is an argument that bears on modern Iraq as well as 1939 Poland.
Heady stuff. "Newsweek's" Howard Fineman found it "incendiary" and then went on to explain it in terms of the supposed pathologies of "Bushworld."
Boy, it's been a long time since Yalta made news—a half century or so. And yet if George W. Bush's trip to Europe is to be remembered for anything, it will be for the incendiary speech about Yalta he gave in Riga, Latvia, accusing FDR and Churchill of having agreed at the Crimean summit in 1945 to abandon Eastern Europe to Soviet communism.
Anybody who was surprised at Bush's audacity doesn't understand his presidency—how it sees the world, who it cares about (or doesn't care about), how it operates diplomatically and politically.
The tendency to see every event in the entire world in terms of the dark mental clockwork of one's evil nemesis is a sign of a mind gone bleakly mad. But that's how the big media treat the world these days. And that's why I don't pick up a "Newsweek" anymore except to read Fareed Zakaria and flip through for pictures of Lebanese protest babes.
Going to Eastern Europe, at this point in history, to address the end of World War II -- how could he not have talked about Yalta? He was going to be asked about it anyhow -- as he was in a May 5 interview at the White House with the Russian television network NTV. Before Bush even got on Air Force One bound for Europe, the Russian interviewer understood perfectly well the centrality of Yalta.
Q: The after-war Europe has been reshaped according to the Yalta Conference of 1943 [sic], by the decision of three very important personalities of this time, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill, and Mr. Stalin. How fair is it to hold only Russia responsible for all the misfortunes of Eastern Europe and Baltic states over the last --
THE PRESIDENT: That's a very fair question. Obviously, it was a decision made at the end of the war. I think that the main complaint would be that the form of government that the Baltics had to live under was not of their choosing. But, no, there's no question three leaders made the decision.
Q: So not only Russia the bad guy of history?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think everybody ought to bear the -- as historians look back at Yalta -- got to recognize that it was -- you're rightly so in pointing it out -- it was not only the Russian leader, but the British and American leader were at the table and agreed on the agreement.
What he said in Riga was only a more articulate form of that answer.
As Anne Applebaum points out, Bush should address Yalta, like Bill Clinton, when he goes to Africa, must at some point talk about American slavery.
And no, the U.S. president does not have to talk about Yalta every year, but when he goes to Latvia to mark the anniversary of the end of the war he should -- just as any American president visiting Africa for the first time should speak of slavery. No American or Russian leader should appear unpatriotic when abroad, but at the right time, in the right place, it is useful for statesmen to tell the truth, even if just to acknowledge that some stretches of our history were more ambiguous, and some of our victories more bittersweet, than they once seemed.
On the nominally sane left, Kevin Drum disappoints me, as he does about three times out of five, in prefering to dogpile on the right's reaction to the remark rather than go read up on some history and have an honest opinion on it.
Yalta lives! For those of you who have never read anything about postwar history, this is pretty typical of the wingnut right in the late 40s and 50s. They routinely tossed out bizarre conspiracy theories suggesting that easily understandable actions — like, say, bringing troops home after a long war — were actually the result of some dark and treasonous cooperation between liberal Democrats and the Comintern.
The post-war fate of Poland revealed the sham in the "Grand Alliance" of USSR, UK and USA. It had been useful propaganda for Britain and America during the war, a convenient fiction, but Roosevelt seemed to really believe it. It was a sham. The Soviet cooperation in the war on Hitler was a matter of pragmatism and a mere interruption in the long-term Soviet goal, as outlined in Lenin's historical determinism, of subverting or defeating the capitalist powers.
The experience of Poland after the war punctured the bubble. Bush might have spared Churchill from his condemnation, for Churchill was never glamoured by Stalin the way Roosevelt was. Yet the Prime Minister was a realist, and Churchill, in a secret 1944 deal with Stalin, already had bartered away Romania and Bulgaria to give Britain and America a free hand to save Greece and Italy for the West. The "proportion of interest" of Great Britain and the Soviet Union in Hungary and Yugoslavia was to be "50-50." The Baltics were never mentioned. They presumably were considered a lost cause, though their present leaders seem not to think it was so.
But by the end of the war an exhausted Brtain had no power to pursue even the partial interests Churchill had reserved in Eastern Europe. "The responsibility lies with the United States," he wrote, "and my desire is to give them all the support in our power. If they do not feel able to do anything, then we must let matters take their course."
The British historian Paul Johnson, in his account of the summit, shows why Bush's statement was right -- Yalta was an American failure:
But at the critical meeting at Yalta in January 1945, Roosevelt deliberately blocked Churchill's attempts to co-ordinate Anglo-American policy in advance: he did not wish, said Averell Harriman, to "feed Soviet suspicions that the British and Americans would be operating in concert." When Poland came up, Roosevelt settled for a Russian agreement to elections in which "all democratic and anti-Nazi parties shall have the right to take part," but he did not back the British demand for international supervision of the poll. Instead he produced a typical piece of Rooseveltian rhetoric, a "Declaration on Liberated Europe," with vague commitments to "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." The Russians were happy to sign it, especially after they heard Roosevelt's staggering announcement that all American forces would be out of Europe within two years: that was just what Stalin wanted to know." ["Modern Times," p.435]
Churchill sent Roosevelt a stream of warnings and messages about Stalin that spring. Admiral Leahy, part of the U.S. delegation at Yalta, complained that the Poland agreement was "so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it."
Stalin ran roughshod over it from the start. On March 23, Molotov announced that the elections would be held Soviet-style. Roosevelt seemed genuinely shocked. When Harriman sent him news of this development, Roosevelt "banged his fist on his wheelchair: 'Averell is right. We can't do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.' "
It was almost the last act of Roosevelt's life, and it was a sad closing chapter. He went to Georgia to die, muttering that Stalin was "not a man of his word."
On the paleo-right, Pat Buchanan observes Bush's comment with the pithy observation that, if the Nazi attack on Poland was what precipitated World War II in Europe, the war was a failure for the Western Allies because it ended up -- via Yalta -- continuing the Poles in subjugation to a ruthless alien dictatorship.
People are dismissing Buchanan for going off the deep end and revealing his anti-Semitism. I think he's really connecting World War II to the war in Iraq, which he bitterly opposed. Yalta does offer a warning lesson in putting idealism and wishful thinking over hard-headedness.
But the case of Poland also shows how great wars begin over specific local matters and acquire larger purposes as they go. Say "Nazi Germany" and among the first images to spring to mind are the death camps and the Holocaust. That's what makes it the "Good War" for the Allies. But that was not what drew Britain or France into the fight. Even after Pearl Harbor, America didn't declare war on Hitler -- he declared war on us.
Britain did, in fact, go to war against Germany over its treaty obligations to Poland. Then, after hell and high water, with freedom and liberty at stake, Nazi Germany lay in ruins and Britain and its way of life had survived. In 1946, at a beautiful society wedding in London, a Tory MP remarked to Lady "Emerald" Cunard how quickly life had returned to normal. "After all," he said, gesturing to the crowded room, "this is what we have been fighting for."
"What," she replied, "are they all Poles?"
Buchanan asks whether the whole war against Germany was a mistake. People who dismiss that as an illegitimate question fall into his trap. The answer to him -- and I think it's an argument worth having -- comes down to this: A war may begin through diplomacy, and transform itself into a conflict between right and wrong having little to do with the details that brought it on. The legitimacy of the cause is strengthened, not weakened, by that. It is an argument that bears on modern Iraq as well as 1939 Poland.
Labels: World War II, Yalta
