The long shadow of Yalta
The Russians are second to few when it comes to defending national interests. The whole history of their diplomacy is nationalist-centric. Stalin was perhaps the greatest master of the art of negotiation, naturally excluding the pontifex maximum of discipline, Donald Trump.
At the Yalta Conference, seventy-five years ago, the Soviet leader got everything he wanted by rewriting the globe according to his vision for decades.
He obtained the go-ahead for the Sovietization of all the territories that the Red Army had occupied according to the principle that everyone gass whoever they want at home. He made some controlled concessions to the idealism of Roosevelt and his Mrs. Eleanor. She also made it to the imperialism of Churchill worried that the sun would stop setting on some small strip of land of the British Empire.
The French, who thought they still had the Grande Armée, had not even received an invitation to Yalta. Stalin didn't want them and neither did Churchill. And the French did not forgive the British for this. An original sin of the relationship between the British Isles and the European continent.
In Asia, Stalin accepted Roosevelt's pressing invitation to go to war in the Pacific. When the war was practically over, he invaded Korea. Here he replaced the Japanese with the red dynasty of the Kims, which is still raging badly.
Because of this long shadow of Yalta, Diana Preston, who teaches Modern History at Oxford, in a speech on the The New York Times a fundamental question arises in this regard from Yalta, 75 years after that event. He wonders: "Are we still living in Stalin's world?"
Well, it sure looks like it.
Yalta, Crimea, 1945
If we were to ask global security experts today what keeps them up at night, the unanimous answer would be: “Ukraine and Crimea, the Korean Peninsula and post-Brexit Western Europe”. Coincidentally, all three problems can be traced back to a short conference that began on a Tuesday in late January seventy-five years ago.
The meeting took place in a Crimean resort town named Yalta. The three Allied leaders, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin gathered there. The war was ending and they were there to decide what would come next.
Among the most pressing issues on the agenda were Poland's borders and democratic institutions, which Roosevelt and Churchill pledged to secure. By February 1945 the Red Army was in control of much of Eastern Europe. As Stalin liked to say: "Whoever occupies a territory imposes its own social system on it".
The Soviet Union was simply too powerful to resist them.
Unthinkable operation
Roosevelt and Churchill fought for the self-determination of Poland and other Eastern European countries, but in the end they only secured vague promises that the West had no way of enforcing and which Stalin broke only a few weeks later.
Poland was the reason Britain went to war in 1939; a fact Churchill had not forgotten. Shortly after returning from Yalta, he asked his generals to evaluate the cost of using force to force Stalin into making a fair deal with Poland.
The answer was that 45 Anglo-American, several Polish and 100.000 rearmed German troops were needed. The commanders dubbed the idea of going to war against the Soviet Union "Operation Unthinkable." Of course it was. A year later, Churchill declared that an Iron Curtain had come down across Europe.
Eastern Europe
Even though the Soviet Union collapsed thirty years ago, the divisions and criticisms remain unchanged. It is no coincidence that the crux of the division between Russia and the West is in Ukraine and Crimea, annexed by Vladimir Putin. Just as in 1945, Western leaders knew they had few viable options other than moral pressure on the Russian occupiers. Stalin once said: "If you are afraid of wolves, stay away from the woods." Entering Putin's forest seems no less dangerous.
The Yalta Conference has left a legacy of other disturbing issues. One of Roosevelt's main goals at Yalta was to secure Soviet entry into the war against Japan in order to save the millions of American lives he believed would be the cost of invading the country.
A timely Soviet entry into the war could have forced Japan to surrender. The American president readily agreed to Stalin's requests for territorial and other concessions at the expense of his American ally and China. Stalin also demanded future concessions from a defeated Japan.
Asia and Korea
Just five months later, the United States would test an atomic bomb. Within a couple of weeks they dropped two on Japan. The availability of a powerful new weapon, first doubted by many, including Roosevelt and Churchill, rendered Soviet intervention in the Pacific theater pointless.
Grasping the situation quickly, Stalin hastened his plans to attack Japan. On August 6, 1945, three days after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the same day the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the Red Army cleared Japanese forces from Manchuria and North Korea, held by Japan since 1910. It rapidly advanced towards the thirty-eighth parallel.
In a loose and hasty agreement with the American military command, Soviet forces collected the surrender of all Japanese troops north of that line, while American forces, with some delay, did so to the south.
Shortly thereafter, despite Stalin's pledges of support for a free and independent Korea, Soviet troops sealed off the XNUMXth parallel. Korean Communist leader Kim Il-sung arrived in Pyongyang in the uniform of a Red Army major.
With Soviet support, he settled in the northern part of the country. These developments led to the establishment of North and South Korea, the Korean War and the region's endemic instability, as well as the establishment of the Kim dynasty.
The Kims are still there.
Brexit
Another, albeit less obvious, legacy of the Yalta Conference is the nature of Britain's often problematic relationship with France and, by extension, with the European Union. General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French forces, had insisted on being at the conference, but Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin objected. So great was the haughty de Gaulle's resentment that, during the conference, he solemnly communicated to the French people that France would not feel bound by the decisions of the conference. Rather, he would have sought an independent policy.
De Gaulle's exclusion from Yalta fueled France's growing distrust of what it saw as Anglo-American hegemony over the postwar world. In 1963, and again in 1967, he vetoed Britain's entry into the European Community. In 1966 he pulled France out of NATO's operational command structure.
Finally, in 1973, Great Britain joined the European Union. Had he done it sooner, he might have blended better into the block. While it's impossible to know for sure, forty-three years later, the Brexit referendum might not have been called.
Many consider Yalta a compromise, even a betrayal. In 2005, George W. Bush compared Yalta to the Munich Agreement of 1938. A surrender to dictatorship. Undoubtedly Yalta left the peoples of Eastern Europe at the mercy of the Soviet Union for nearly half a century. But Western leaders had little influence over Stalin, mostly due to the morale and popularity of the Soviet Union. The latter had suffered immensely, more than any other nation, during the war.
Roosevelt and Churchill
For their part, however, the Western allies achieved many of their objectives. One could argue about the farsightedness and durability of these goals.
Roosevelt secured the deal for his long-awaited dream of the United Nations. The veto agreements agreed in Yalta often paralyzed and still paralyze the Security Council on disputes between the great powers. Any of its five permanent members can veto a certain action. However, the organization is an effective global peacekeeping force. Many of its agencies, such as the World Health Organization and the High Commissioner for Refugees, do valuable work.
Churchill achieved his goal of retaining the British Empire. It was a Pyrrhic victory, in the very short term, and, according to modern thought, immoral. Retaining control of Hong Kong, Britain maintained a western outpost on China's shores for many troubled years. The consequences of this are being seen today.
The Personalities of Yalta Leaders
The transcripts of the Yalta Conference reveal as much about the personalities of the leaders as they do about the politics of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. The cracks in the once very close relationship between the cold and aloof American president and the emotional and aloof British prime minister flamboyant, became evident.
For Roosevelt, it was the last chance to appear on the world stage. Already in visible physical decline, he died two months later. Churchill attended the next Allied conference, in Potsdam, Germany, to be replaced a few days later by the new Labor prime minister, Clement Attlee.
Only Stalin remained.
Geopolitical negotiations always revolve around the personalities and strategies of the leaders involved. Those with the clearest goals, vision and determination to achieve them have an almost unbridgeable advantage.
At Yalta, Stalin displayed an accurate knowledge of all the scenarios under discussion, a strong determination and the ability to identify and exploit the weaknesses of others.
A senior British official described him as "the most extraordinary of the three men" and also "very quiet and sober".
Three-quarters of a century later, Stalin is still shaping global affairs.
