Old Town Market Place, Warsaw in 1945. (via Wikimedia Commons)
By February 1945, the Allies were winning the war and Roosevelt looked to lock in victory and set to order a post-war world. As Woodrow Wilson did with his Fourteen Points near the end of World War One, Roosevelt was aiming high: he and Churchill had issued the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 that laid out post-war principles, including freedom for all nations to choose their form of government, an open trading system, freedom from external aggression, and a broader system of general security to prevent a return of great power rivalry and war.
At
Yalta, Roosevelt sought to apply these principles and thought he could bring
Stalin into his new, rules-based system. He achieved a lot: Stalin’s agreement
to enter the war against Japan three months after victory over Germany;
agreements about Germany’s occupation, including an occupation zone for France;
and Stalin’s acceptance of his signature initiative, the United Nations, which
was intended, as Wilson had intended for the League of Nations, to enforce the
post-War order. (To obtain Stalin’s agreement to the UN, however, Roosevelt
accepted a Soviet right of veto in the UN Security Council, a sweetener which
weakened the UN from the beginning.)
Roosevelt
also got Stalin’s agreement to a Declaration
of Liberated Europe, a document that sought to apply the Atlantic Charter’s
principles to the countries being liberated from Nazi occupation, especially
Poland, for whose sake the UK had declared war on Germany. A key passage read:
“This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter—the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live. [T]he three governments [US, UK, Soviet] will jointly assist the people in any European liberated state or former Axis state in Europe where, in their judgment conditions require…to form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of Governments responsive to the will of the people.”
But that
language met a hard reality: by February 1945, Soviet armies were in control of
most of Poland and, as Roosevelt and his team knew, Stalin was already
installing communist governments there and in other places within his control.
Whether
or not the Yalta agreements were the best Roosevelt could do for Poland at that
time, they were a bad deal. The United States accepted weak promises from a
dictator on behalf of an ally, Poland, that had fought from the first day of World
War Two to the last, on all European fronts, without surrender or national
collaboration. By extension, the United States was throwing up its hands as the
Soviet Union imposed its rule on Central and Eastern Europe.
The failure of the Declaration of Liberated Europe to provide for Poland’s and Central Europe’s liberation colors how the Yalta Conference has been regarded ever since. Roosevelt’s reputation has taken hits for Yalta.
But Yalta was not simply the failure
of one US president at one meeting. The road to Yalta was the product of the
doctrine of isolationism and the original “America First” movement that
reflected conviction by great parts of the US political left and right that the
United States had no vital interests in European security. Left and right isolationists
agreed that the United States had been tricked into World War One for no good
reason by a cabal of cynical Anglo-French politicians and arms merchants. The
default by most European powers of World War One debt to the United States
fueled the sentiment that the United States was badly treated by European
powers and that it should have nothing more to do with grand, Wilsonian
visions. Roosevelt’s foreign policy was constrained by the isolationists’
political power and, as a result, the United States left Britain and France,
weakened by World War One, to deal with Hitler and Stalin on their own.
The consequences were catastrophic. It
took the German conquest of France in June 1940 to substantially weaken the
political power of the isolationists. By then, good outcomes were unobtainable.
The United States was playing catch up from a bad position. When the United
States entered World War Two in December 1941, it needed Stalin to defeat
Hitler.
From
that point, the bad choices Roosevelt faced at Yalta were nearly baked in. The
United States might have tried to force a showdown with Stalin over Poland and
Central Europe at an earlier phase of the war. The Tehran Summit in November
1943 was one such occasion. George Kennan, the United States’ first Soviet
expert and the number two at the US Embassy in Moscow, argued that the Warsaw
Uprising, the desperate revolt against the Germans by forces of the free Polish
Government in August 1944 provided another. The United States might have presented
the Soviets with a choice of continued support from the United States, but only
under the condition that they change their direction toward Poland and Central
Europe (George Kennan, “Memoirs,” pg. 211).
Instead,
Washington stuck with a declaratory policy based on the Atlantic Charter rooted
in Wilsonian principles, but without the power to make good on it. Immediate
victory over Germany took priority, and the United States was not willing to
risk a showdown with Stalin over Poland. Perhaps to its credit, neither was the
Roosevelt administration ready to openly accept a sphere-of-influence
arrangement with Moscow, under which the United States would lock in Stalin’s
post-war cooperation by explicitly recognizing the Soviet Union’s right to “friendly,”
i.e., communist-dominated governments, in Poland, the Baltics, and elsewhere in
Central and Eastern Europe. (This was a live option at the time: Walter
Lippmann, the foremost US foreign policy journalist, had been advocating such
an arrangement as early as 1943; Walter Lippmann, “US Foreign Policy,” pg. 152).
The
United States hoped for the best and approached the Yalta Summit in February
1945 in that spirit. Given Stalin’s subsequent domination of Poland and the
eastern third of Europe, such hope seems fatuous.
Yet soon after
Yalta, Roosevelt re-raised Poland, and pushed Stalin to take seriously the
Declaration’s language about Poland. On April 1, 1945 he wrote to Stalin that a
continuation of the “present Warsaw [Communist-dominated] regime” would be
unacceptable and urged that a “new government” be established. “I must make it
quite plain to you that any such solution which would result in a thinly
disguised continuance of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable and
would cause the people of the United States to regard the Yalta agreement as
having failed” (“Foreign Relations of the United States,” 1945, Europe, Volume
V).
What did this
mean? If Roosevelt were serious about applying the Atlantic Charter principles
to Poland and Central Europe, why had he accepted such a weak commitment from
Stalin at Yalta? If Roosevelt’s agreements at Yalta were mere cynical cover for
a sphere-of-influence deal with Stalin, why was Roosevelt trying to raise the
Polish issue at all?
In dealing with
Russian leaders, Roosevelt, like many US presidents after him, appeared to
believe that gestures of good will and efforts to take account of legitimate
Russian interests, would be enough to convince Russia to take a more tolerant
approach to its neighbors. Roosevelt seemed to hope that the momentum of
wartime alliance, and the prospect of post-war entente and US support, would
appeal to Stalin as much as it appealed to him. If so, Roosevelt would not be
the last president to project his open mind to Russian leaders who did not
share it.
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. In the final weeks of his life, Roosevelt may have been coming to understand Stalin’s nature. But Yalta Europe, the divided continent that emerged from that Conference despite Roosevelt’s hopes, lasted for another forty-five years.
Yalta offers
lessons.
One is to be
operationally serious: take care when negotiating documents based on general
language of principles, like Yalta’s Declaration of Liberated Europe, with a
leader who shares neither your values nor your underlying purposes. The Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (the 2015 Iran nuclear deal), though incomplete
and flawed, was specific and enforceable. The US-North
Korea Joint Statement of 2018, however, was not; in its vague language, it recalls
the Declaration of Liberated Europe.
Another is be
realistic about relative strength, especially in the short term: in its World War Two aims, the United States
allowed a gap to develop between its principles and power on the ground. At
Yalta, that gap left the United States without good options; it relied on
rhetoric and hope instead. Yalta’s reputation for failed aspirations and naïve
(or worse) retreat reflect the baleful consequences of doing so.
A third lesson is that core values may have more viability than it seems, especially in the long term: for two generations after 1945, foreign policy professionals and scholars concluded that Roosevelt’s weak defense of Poland at and immediately after Yalta was pointless (or cynical) and that the principles of the Atlantic Charter were inapplicable east of the Iron Curtain. Soviet domination there, it was implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) accepted, was forever. But it turned out otherwise. The Yalta Conference failed but Yalta Europe was not forever. The strategic vision that Roosevelt spelled out in the Atlantic Charter and sought to realize at Yalta—even if miserably—now seems the right one.
That vision, in
fact, provided the basis for US policy toward Poland and Central Europe after
the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. That policy sought to fulfill the promise
of the Atlantic Charter for all of Europe—and this time was more successful.
Nor is that narrative over. With respect to Ukraine, a country also seeking a
future with an undivided Europe, those debates and those tensions apply to this
day.
History may have lessons; the history of Yalta surely does.
Daniel Fried is the Weiser Family distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was the coordinator for sanctions policy during the Obama administration, assistant secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia during the Bush administration, and senior director at the National Security Council for the Clinton and Bush administrations. He also served as ambassador to Poland during the Clinton administration.
Further reading:
Image: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference February, 1945 (MPTV Entertainment via REUTERS)
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Publish date : 2020-02-07 08:00:00
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