The Peace Was Lost By Ignoring Justice And the Facts of Life

The Peace Was Lost By Ignoring Justice And the Facts of Life

IN the year of total victory in the greatest of all wars, Winston Churchill concluded a top-secret cable to Franklin Roosevelt with this foreboding sentence: I THINK THAT THE END OF THIS WAR MAY WELL PROVE TO BE MORE DISAPPOINTING THAN WAS THE LAST. It did. Why and how the peace was lost before the war was won is revealed in the U.S. State Department's Yalta record, released ten years after the conference.

Much of last week's comment on the Yalta papers said that they disclosed "nothing new," meaning not much meat for headline writers. The memoirs of Churchill, Stettinius. Byrnes, Leahy--and calamitous events in Europe and Asia --had long since made plain the outlines of Yalta's decisions. Nor did the Yalta documents add any sensational weapons to the arsenals of those who believe that Roosevelt was infallible or of those who think he was puppeteered at Yalta by a Communist cabal among his own staff.

The truth seems to be even more grievous. What the published record does better than either memoirists or events could do is to unveil the "spirit of Yalta," which showed itself before Yalta and is not dead yet. The mark of this spirit is a stubborn refusal to face political reality. From beginning to end of the Yalta record there is an almost total absence of recognition that justice is the only enduring restraint upon power, the only basis for order. On the American side in the fateful days of conference in the Crimea, there were vague dreams, but an almost total absence of the pursuit of justice through the hard complexities of the world as it is.

The record now available is complete and coherent enough to show what was not said at the conference table and what was not attempted. The Americans were not frustrated by Communist obstinacy. They were not overborne by the implications of Communist military power. They were not hoodwinked by diabolical Communist cunning. They carried their defeat in their own heads. They bound their own hands. They delivered themselves and the peace to Stalin.

The Poverty of Totality. The spirit of Yalta as disclosed by the documents has its roots at least as far back as the mid-1930s when the U.S. and Britain refused to play the kind of practical politics, inspired by obvious considerations of world order, that would have curbed or destroyed Hitler. They thus brought on themselves the Unnecessary War, as Churchill was to call it. Swept into this vortex, the Americans and British embraced their enemies' slogan of "total war." It was so total that the future beyond the war's end seemed infinitely remote. If war aims were difficult to agree upon, then the formula for ending the war would be total, or unconditional, surrender. Alliances, too, were to be total in scope and of ever-loving duration.

But all wars, however total, must end, and by February 1945, when the Yaltamen convened, the military situation was so far advanced toward victory that the future could no longer be brushed aside. From the preconference cables, extending over seven months, Franklin Roosevelt seems to have had the greatest sense of urgency about the meeting, although he never expressed a clear idea of what the agenda was to be. In preparation for the conference, the pharaonic hosts of specialists who toiled in the American bureaucracy sent up to the top of the pyramid briefing papers giving facts and recommendations on various points of policy.

The briefing was little used at Yalta.

What kind of a postwar world did Roosevelt want to make in a week? The record shows a shocking poverty of proposals. Some Roosevelt attitudes and aims, disclosed at Yalta:

P: A United Nations organization to keep the peace must be established. In the Yalta argument about U.N. Charter details, Roosevelt and Stalin put the emphasis on the big power approach, leaving it for Churchill, the "imperialist," to defend, sometimes warmly, sometimes cynically, the rights of small nations before the law. Russian objections to U.S. voting-procedure sections of the draft charter foreshadowed the lawless future course of Communist policy; but all arguments over the charter came back to the familiar door, the necessity of total Big Three cooperation and agreement.

P: A settlement of the Polish question must be found--not because the principles on which the Western powers entered the war would be violated by a Communist slave state in Poland, but because the question embarrassed Roosevelt in domestic politics. He did not make the case for justice to Poland. He never used in the Polish bargaining the enormous leverage given him by Russia's economic need or by prospective U.S.-British control of West Germany. He simply begged Stalin, as one politician to another, not to embarrass him with the Polish voters of the U.S.

P: The future of Germany was central to every proposal affecting any part of postwar Europe, yet Roosevelt was not prepared for serious discussion of a German peace. At the Quebec Conference of September 1944 he had fallen for the Morgenthau plan for a "pastoralized" Germany. At Yalta he abandoned pastoralization in favor of dismembering Germany into "five or seven parts." But he had told Secretary of State Cordell Hull a few months before that no plans for Germany should be made until "we get into Germany--and we are not there yet."

P: On the Far East, Roosevelt had Stalin's 1943 promise, first given without any mention of a price, that Russia would go into the war against Japan soon after the conclusion of the German war. The question of a price to Russia entered the negotiations later, partly at Stalin's initiative, partly at Roosevelt's. At Yalta, there was no haggling about Stalin's price; he got all he asked, without argument. Roosevelt apparently welcomed the expansion of Russian power in the Western Pacific. Behind Churchill's back, Roosevelt offered Stalin participation in a Korean trusteeship from which Roosevelt proposed to exclude Britain; Stalin disdained the bait. Behind Chiang Kai-shek's back, Roosevelt gave Stalin his view of China's internal strife: "The fault lay more with the Kuomintang [Chiang's party] . . . than with the so-called Communists." Stalin did not argue. If this was Roosevelt's view, then world Communism would know how the U.S. stood when the Red Axis began to destroy Chiang with the concessions in Manchuria that Roosevelt made at Yalta--also behind Chiang's back.

Prelude to Discord. U.S. apologists for Yalta have said for years that its mistakes are only apparent by hindsight, that the circumstances of 1945, especially the brave and loyal Russian record of cooperation in the war, made reasonable the assumption that Russia, Britain and the U.S. could act in postwar concert. The record as now revealed undercuts this argument. Stalin, at least, kept his head above the tide of comradeship. He defined his national and party objectives, studied them carefully, defended them with lucid (if dishonest) arguments, and attained them. Some of his aims seemed quite limited when compared to the ballooning notions of world reorganization cherished in Washington; Stalin fought for one river boundary of Poland against another with the myopic pertinacity of a 17th century diplomat arguing over a second-string fortress. But of these small, ignoble chunks of reality was the actual postwar world built. _ Nor did Roosevelt at Yalta act and talk like a man who wholly believed in the future concert of the Big Three. He and Churchill did not talk to Stalin in their natural voices; they descended again and again to the level of cynicism on which they knew Stalin to be morally at home.

Far from wholly trusting their Russian wartime comrades, Churchill and Roosevelt did not even trust each other. Roosevelt and many of his entourage believed that there would indeed be a postwar struggle. They saw the antagonists as Communist Russia and imperialist Britain. Roosevelt saw his own role as balancing between them, thus keeping the Grand Alliance intact through his own skillful brokerage. Aware of what Roosevelt and his advisers were doing, Churchill had to half-muzzle himself. If he opposed the Russians too strongly, Roosevelt would swing to their side. At one point in the Yalta proceedings, the record shows that Harry Hopkins slipped Rcosevelt a note: "The Russians have given in so much at this conference that I don't think we should let them down. Let the British disagree if they want to." Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential chief of staff, who attended the conference, said that Roosevelt at Yalta "showed great skill and his personality dominated the discussions. Since he was the presiding officer and most of the arguments were between Stalin and Churchill, he played the role of arbiter."

From the record, the conclusion can hardly be escaped that neither the British nor the Americans believed in their hearts what they kept telling themselves: that the postwar world could be organized on a rock of unity with Russia. They knew that democracy and Communism would not blend, but they could not find any other assumption upon which to face the postwar period. Communist propaganda, then very powerful in the U.S. and Britain, contributed to the myth that all but the Communist leaders half believed. But the main damage for which Yalta stands was not contrived by the Communists. It began in the marriage of political dreaming and political cynicism, in the notion that the world is what the powerful want it to be.

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