February 11, 2005, 7:37 a.m.
Under Yalta’s Shadow
The forgotten legacy.

By Arthur Herman

On February 11, 1945, World War II's "Big Three" — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin — ended their final summit in the Crimean seaside town of Yalta. President Bush never mentioned Yalta in his inaugural address or in his State of the Union speech; but the truth is that his vision of the future means undoing what happened at that meeting 60 years ago. Happily, two parts of Yalta's legacy — the Cold War and a Russian empire in Eastern Europe — are already history. But we are still haunted by the rest, from the prison camps of North Korea to a discredited United Nations, and the diplomatic fallacies that spawned them.

The first of these fallacies was that collective security is more important than democracy and human rights. In spite of the high-minded principles of their Atlantic Charter, both Churchill and Roosevelt arrived at Yalta believing that the price of future peace was allowing Stalin to dominate his neighbors in Eastern Europe. To his credit, Churchill still hoped American and British armies might be able to push far enough east to prevent Soviet occupation of countries like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; he even tried to negotiate an influence-sharing plan over Romania and Hungary with Stalin himself.

But in the end, both he and Roosevelt accepted the dictator's promise to allow free elections in the countries his armies overran. Roosevelt, ill and frail, may have believed Stalin; Churchill knew better. But neither was ready to hold Stalin to his pledge, then or later. The result was the enslavement of upwards of 80 million people within the Soviet orbit, as an "iron curtain," as Churchill called it a year later, came to divide Germany and Europe — and divide the people of Poland and ten other countries from control of their destiny for another 40 years.

British and American diplomats also agreed to hand over 1.5 million former Soviet POW's to Russia, although they knew it meant death in the gulag for almost all of them — once again, everyone believed, the necessary price of peace. Then, over Churchill's objections, Roosevelt encouraged Stalin to join the war in the Pacific. Stalin's last-minute effort against Japan never affected the final outcome. But it did enable Russia to become a major power in Asia again, and to provide Mao Zedong's Communist forces what they needed to win the Chinese civil war that broke out two years later.

The result was that by 1950 the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was matched by a Communist empire in Asia, led by China and North Korea, who would plunge their people into a totalitarian nightmare costing more than 40 million lives. Far from making the world more secure, the stage was set for another major war, this time in Asia, which would kill 54,000 Americans. Even today, 60 years later, a nuclear-armed North Korea stands as a stark reminder of how Yalta's emphasis on security over democracy backfired.

Roosevelt and his advisers could justify all this because they were staking their hopes for future peace on the new institution created at Yalta, the United Nations. This was the second Yalta fallacy: multilateral bodies can generate common purpose among nations with conflicting interests. By including both the United States and the Soviet Union this time, they thought, the United Nations would succeed where the League of Nations had failed. Instead, the U.N. would prove to be just another theater for superpower conflict over the decades — and by including two of Stalin's puppet Soviet republics as members, Yalta fatally blurred the distinction between democratic and despotic regimes as legitimate voices of the "world community." Stalin had originally wanted twelve puppets; but he could hardly complain. The U.N.'s temporary first secretary-general would be Alger Hiss, a Soviet spy.

As for Churchill, he believed that whatever happened, the world would still be made safe by the Anglo-American "special relationship" and strategic partnership. Yalta disabused him of that illusion. In his own mind, Roosevelt had moved on. Britain seemed finished as an equal partner; Roosevelt believed close cooperation with Stalin and the United Nations could do the world's heavy lifting from now on. "He won't take any interest in what we are trying to do," Winston grumbled — or in supporting Britain.

Instead, a new notion was taking hold of American policymakers: America's best postwar ally must be Europe. It would turn the necessity of a U.S.-armed presence in Western Europe (to balance Stalin's occupation of Eastern Europe) into a virtue. The result would be a NATO sprawling from the Pyrenees to the Dardanelles, and politicians from Truman to John Kerry talking about France, Italy, and even Germany as America's "traditional allies," while treating Britain as just another European country.

Churchill left Yalta in a state of despair, and Roosevelt and advisers such as Harry Hopkins in a state of euphoria. Hopkins, Churchill's doctor concluded, "is firmly convinced that a new Utopia has dawned." Today, 60 years later, we know who was right and who was wrong.

— Arthur Herman is the author of To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, published by Harper Collins.

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