The Political Spectrum

The past few days have seen the emergence of a historical debate over the Yalta agreements thanks to this speech that President Bush delivered in Latvia during the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. The key remarks:

As we mark a victory of six days ago -- six decades ago, we are mindful of a paradox. For much of Germany, defeat led to freedom. For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end oppression. 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. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.

Bush is, in effect, apologizing for the allies' complicity in the Soviet suppression of Eastern Europe. This has drawn both criticism and applause from all corners of the political spectrum.

Today alone on Real Clear Politics there are several commentaries on the subject. Jonah Goldbergtakes a cautious approach which seems to support the President's position, while Pat Buchanan uses Bush's speech to question whether World War II was even worth fighting. More on that in a bit. On the other side, Rob Robb and Joe Conason are extremely critical of Bush's interpretation of history. Robb rebuts Bush thusly:

This is a gross distortion of the historical record. In fact, the Yalta agreement - reached between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in 1945 - explicitly committed the allies to establishing free, democratic governments in liberated countries. In his war memoirs, Churchill said that Stalin indicated that elections could be held in Poland within a month.

As George Kennan, the recently deceased diplomat and historian, concluded in his book, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, the United States and Britain did not agree to Soviet domination in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. That resulted from the military conditions on the ground and Soviet intent and duplicity.

The outcome was predictable, as Kennan points out. But changing the course of events would have required opening the Western assault earlier than Britain in particular thought prudent, or confronting Stalin after the defeat of the Nazis was more certain. At the time, Russia had 12 million troops mobilized, while the United States had just 4 million in Europe, with Japan left to defeat. The British had just 1 million soldiers in the field.

In one breath Robb completely contradicts himself. The allies were committed to establishing freedom in the Eastern European states, and yet the predictable outcome was Soviet betrayal of the agreements. So either the Allies were duped, or they willingly entered into an agreement that they knew would not be honored. In either case they acted no more courageously or wisely than Dalladier and Chamberlain at Munich, and deserve no less scorn for entering into an agreement with a tyrannical con man. They transferred one set of shackles for another, and it no exculpation of their behavior to state that they thought they were not handing over Eastern Europe to Soviet domination.

Conason, meanwhile, seems more upset at the mere thought of any criticism of Saint Franklin. After several paragraphs of doing little more than spewing vitriol at the President, he finally gets around to offering something of a cogent defense.

The fundamental fact of the moment was the presence of seven million Red Army soldiers in Central and Eastern Europe. Western leaders had been forced to acknowledge that reality years earlier, when the outcome of the war against Hitler was still in doubt. To dislodge Stalin’s troops would have required F.D.R. and Churchill to be willing to contemplate war against their Soviet ally long before World War II had ended.

As the late Roy Jenkins bluntly observed a few years ago in his biography of Churchill: "Declaring war on Russia, over Poland, in the spring of 1945, was simply not a feasible policy."

Nothing that the democratic leaders might have said would have stopped Stalin’s troops from occupying Eastern Europe. The first experimental atomic-bomb test was still six months away; both F.D.R. and Churchill believed they needed Russian help not only to complete the conquest of Nazi Germany but to defeat Imperial Japan.

At Yalta, Stalin committed to abrogate his non-aggression pact with Japan. American military strategists hoped that Soviet intervention would reduce the human toll of the expected invasion of the Japanese mainland, which they estimated would cost a million U.S. casualties over the course of a brutal, 18-month campaign.

What the democratic leaders did insist upon—in direct contradiction of the Bush slur—was the Declaration on Liberated Europe, including a written promise from Stalin to permit free and fair elections in the occupied nations. Poland was to be reconstituted as an independent democratic state, with an interim government that included both communists and democrats.

According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Soviet foreign minister urged Stalin not to sign the declaration. The dictator signed anyway, presumably in full knowledge that he wouldn’t honor its provisions. But as Mr. Schlesinger also notes, his aggressive domination of Eastern Europe meant that he was abrogating rather than affirming the Yalta agreement. Those violations confirmed Stalin’s duplicity and provided lasting moral authority to the Western democracies.

The first part of Conason’s argument is a fair one, and the best defense of Chruchill and FDR . The allies were not prepared to fight another war, and they were ready to stop fighting after many years of bloodshed. Whether or not the allies could have none more is certainly a debatable point. But unfortunately Conason slips into the same defense that Robb attempted to make, and once again seeks to exonerate FDR and Churchill whole tacitly admitting their naivety. Once again, why should we excuse FDR and Churchill any more than Dalladier and Chamberlain? If they were duped, then don’t they deserve criticism for their poor judgement? And if they knew that they would be betrayed, don’t they deserve even more condemnation for signing a worthless agreement?

Pat Buchanan argues from the opposite end, questioning whether the entire war effort was even worth it.

Bush told the awful truth about what really triumphed in World War II east of the Elbe. And it was not freedom. It was Stalin, the most odious tyrant of the century. Where Hitler killed his millions, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Castro murdered their tens of millions.

Leninism was the Black Death of the 20th Century.

The truths bravely declared by Bush at Riga, Latvia, raise questions that too long remained hidden, buried or ignored.

If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR? At Yalta, this pair secretly ceded those small nations to Stalin, co-signing a cynical "Declaration on Liberated Europe" that was a monstrous lie.

As FDR and Churchill consigned these peoples to a Stalinist hell run by a monster they alternately and affectionately called "Uncle Joe" and "Old Bear," why are they not in the history books alongside Neville Chamberlain, who sold out the Czechs at Munich by handing the Sudetenland over to Germany? At least the Sudeten Germans wanted to be with Germany. No Christian peoples of Europe ever embraced their Soviet captors or Stalinist quislings.

Fairly reasonable points. But then Buchanan decides to deride all of the accomplishments of the war.

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.

Was that worth fighting a world war -- with 50 million dead?
The war Britain and France declared to defend Polish freedom ended up making Poland and all of Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. And at the festivities in Moscow, Americans and Russians were front and center, smiling -- not British and French. Understandably.

Even if one concedes all this, isn’t there something missing? How about a little thing called the Holocaust? It seems that even if we accomplished nothing else, stopping the extermination of an entire body of people made the war worth it. But maybe that’s just me.

In the end, we must be careful to not run to opposite extremes. As much as we may rue the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe that took place after Yalta, we must confess that only in hindsight can we criticize the allies for making assumptions that proved to be false. But this seems a worthy historical debate to me, and I applaud President Bush for acknowledging at least partial US guilt in Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and for stating what is historically true: the allied victory in World War II was no victory for millions of people who went from being under the thumb of one murderous tyrant only to be caught under the rule of another.