David on Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The real problems lay not in negotiation but in assumptions. Churchill and Roosevelt—who were right about Hitler from afar—were both captivated by Stalin when they met him in the flesh. Hopeful that the Soviet Union was gradually shedding its revolutionary skin, they saw a man of business with whom they could conduct meaningful negotiation. Both hoped and, to a large extent, believed that he could be trusted. Whenever doubts welled up, particularly for Churchill, he looked into the abyss, recognized that confrontation, let alone war, was “unthinkable,” and pushed on with the search for cooperation. Contrary to French mythology, Yalta was not the moment when the big powers crudely divided Europe. Churchill and FDR were still resisting a stark separate-spheres deal of the sort advocated by George Kennan. Nor was Yalta a sellout of Eastern Europe to the Soviets, as claimed by the Republican right: it was already clear that the Soviet Union would be the predominant influence in Eastern Europe. That had been decided on the battlefields of Russia in 1942–3, by the Allied failure to mount a second front until June 1944, and by the understandings already reached at Teheran in November 1943 and Moscow in October 1944. When they went to Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt sought only to “ameliorate” Soviet influence.”

“Where then should be the verdict today on Yalta? Unlike the summits of September 1938, these were multifaceted negotiations from which each party came away with something. Roosevelt secured his priorities—agreement on the UN and a Soviet pledge to enter the war against Japan. Churchill managed to avoid firm commitments about Poland’s western border, German dismemberment and reparations—the latter to Stalin’s undisguised irritation. The British also secured a larger role for France in postwar Europe than either of their partners wanted. Stalin, for his part, gained acceptance of his main territorial goals in Asia and agreements that seemed to recognize his predominance in Poland. Each of the Big Three left with the belief that the wartime alliance would continue after the war. That indeed had been their major goal for the conference. Building on Teheran in 1943, they hoped to turn summitry into a process. Unlike Chamberlain’s summits, the leaders came to Yalta with detailed briefing books and a body of specialist advisors, including all three foreign ministers, and in many cases they acted on policies already laid down. The deals on prisoners of war, for instance, or Soviet territorial demands in Asia had already been established in outline, while Maisky’s presentation on reparations followed the lines of a report he had drawn up over the winter.”

“To compensate for their intrinsically weak hand over Poland, both hoped that Stalin would offer cosmetic concessions because he wanted to maintain the alliance. They were right on the latter point but wrong on the former. Poland was a fundamental, even visceral, issue for Stalin and his expectations of a free hand had been fostered by Churchill’s blatant spheres-of-influence approach in Moscow the previous autumn. He could not begin to comprehend the limiting conditions that his democratic partners wished to set on his influence in key countries in Eastern Europe. Their need for some degree of political pluralism and openness in order to persuade domestic opinion made no sense to this ruthless dictator. The misapprehensions at Yalta occurred on both sides, not just in the West. But the failures of implementation were equally important. Both Churchill and Roosevelt oversold the agreements and especially the “spirit” of Yalta when they got home. This would create grave credibility problems for them in the weeks that followed. Churchill’s desperate public hyperbole about trusting Stalin over Poland is particularly remarkable, given his trenchant critique of Chamberlain in 1938. Many were appalled by it at the time, but Churchill repackaged himself as a fierce Cold Warrior with his “Iron Curtain” speech in March 1946, whereas Roosevelt, being dead, could not retrieve his reputation. Yet Stalin overreacted as well. As the Western Allies surged into Germany in March 1945, his fears revived that they were negotiating a separate peace with the Nazis. This would threaten his position in Germany on which—portentously, it now seemed—Churchill had been so uncooperative at Yalta. Stalin knew much more about his Allies than they did about him—thanks to well-placed agents—but, as with the intelligence failures of 1938, interpretation matters as much as information. If Churchill and FDR were seduced by their hopes, Stalin was the victim of his own paranoia.”