Posted on 04/11/2024 5:32:29 AM PDT by daniel1212
Roosevelt, argues Arnold Beichman, misread Stalin—and proved naive about communism itself....
Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who has argued that the 1989 counter-revolution in Central Europe vindicates President Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy,...
However, I argue that, from the time he took office in 1933, FDR ignored informed assessments from within the State Department of the nature of Soviet diplomacy and that, consequently, the peoples of Central Europe for some four decades paid the price....
In the early years after the Bolshevik revolution, some U.S. diplomats who had begun to specialize in Soviet affairs believed that we should have as few dealings with the USSR as possible. Loy W. Henderson, a longtime career diplomat and one of the principal architects of twentieth-century U.S. diplomacy...was concerned that Lenin’s revolutionary ambitions had rendered the USSR institutionally incapable of fulfilling the international accords it had signed, let alone of abiding by the private assurances it had given. He wrote:
It was my belief that since leaders of the Kremlin eventually were intending to contribute to the violent overthrow of all the countries with which the Soviet Union maintained relations, they considered Soviet relations with every country to be of a temporary or transitional character, subject to change at any moment...
The United States government was fully warned, almost prophetically, by its diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and understood what recognition entailed. As late as 1953, George Kennan wrote that the United States “should never have established de jure relations with the Soviet government.
Yet FDR, with willful ignorance, embarked on a recognition policy without even seeking an enforceable quid pro quo. American recognition of the USSR, formally announced on November 16, 1933, only strengthened that totalitarian state.
What else but this same willful ignorance would account for the foolish White House statements about Stalin during World War II? What else but a frightening opportunism could account for President Roosevelt’s silence on the Katyn Forest massacre when he knew from Winston Churchill that Stalin was responsible for this atrocity? Despite Professor Schlesinger’s ex post facto apologia, one observer at Yalta, Charles Bohlen, the president’s interpreter, sharply criticized FDR:
I did not like the attitude of the President, who not only backed Stalin but seemed to enjoy the Churchill-Stalin exchanges. Roosevelt should have come to the defense of a close friend and ally, who was really being put upon by Stalin. . . . [Roosevelt’s] apparent belief that ganging up on the Russians was to be avoided at all cost was, in my mind, a basic error, stemming from Roosevelt’s lack of understanding of the Bolsheviks. . . . In his rather transparent attempt to dissociate himself from Churchill, the President was not fooling anybody and in all probability aroused the secret amusement of Stalin...
Had political leaders like President Roosevelt (who, at war’s end, held the world in his hands) and his éminence grise, presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, understood Lenin’s revolution, they would have understood Stalin’s resolution. Thus they would not have mindlessly and naively misjudged the imperialist treaty diplomacy of the Soviet Union, quondam ally of Nazi Germany...
And listen to the words of FDR himself talking about Stalin: “I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” Noblesse oblige, indeed!
By the time FDR realized he had failed at Yalta, it was too late to do anything about it. On March 23, 1945, nineteen days before he died, President Roosevelt confided to Anna Rosenberg, “Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” In other words, FDR had really believed that Stalin would keep his promises and treaty engagements.
“I can’t believe Brezhnev lied to me!” Jimmy “the idiot” Carter.
L
FDR was far too leftist and had no great love of constitutionality but the man was at death’s door during the Malta meeting... I can cut him some slack on what happened there... the VP should have already taken over as president long before Yalta.
Several able historians have remarked on FDR's egotistical belief that he could smooth-talk anybody into anything. He also had a cabal of Stalinist "influencers" in his administration, right up to Harry Hopkins, as we now know from reading the KGB files in the 1990s. Lastly, he was in no shape to negotiate with Stalin at Tehran, never mind Yalta. Churchill was furious with him, but by then Britain was so deeply in debt to the USA that he had to let FDR run the show.
Honestly, as much as people talk about Yalta, there wasn’t much FDR and Churchill could have done. The Red Army was already in central Europe by that point. The real mistake was in giving the Soviets too much help earlier such that they could project power that far from their supply bases. Specifically, if the US and Canada had not supplied them with 2,000 locomotives, a bunch of rolling stock and half a million trucks, they could never have pushed that far Westward. They would have been relegated to using horses to supply their armies the further West they went. Everybody saw how well it went for the Germans when they tried to do that.
A retired Secret Service man who was in his cups, told my dad that Roosevelt shot himself because he was so depressed about Yalta. FDR died from a “cerebral hemorrhage”.
My senior seminar history paper was on Yalta. My conclusions were that Stalin kept the territory occupied by Russian troops. FDR had no way to change the reality on the ground. FDR wanted Russia’s help ending the war with Japan. FDR was sick and exhausted at Yalta. The idea that FDR could have gotten a better deal at Yalta is wishful thinking.
FDR looked like he had terminal cancer at Yalta.
He was virtually unfit to be President because of the polio he had. He was unable to do more than stand and was taken everywhere by wheelchair, and the news media intentionally hid this from the public in most every article, photo op, etc. it published.
FDR was only 63 years old but his health had been undermined with many conditions— very high blood pressure, congestive heart failure and stress. He died of a stroke.
It’s a little more complicated than that. He was too trusting of the Soviets and saw them as a souped up version of the New Deal (thanks to a massive US media campaign, spearheaded by the NYT and his own State Department)
But there is another element, a healthy justified suspicion of the British.
During the war, the Brits wanted the Germans defeated, but in the process they were VERY willing to harness US force and diplomacy to maintain their colonies. Our leaders were not supportive of the Mediterranean and African operations and wanted to go directly into Europe much earlier. People can debate whether that was good or not, but the reason Churchill pushed for it so hard is that the Med was filled with British Empire interests.
In post war Europe, the Brits crushed a nationalist uprising in Greece. And then the communist Greek civil war was launched.
But Roosevelt was playing a bit of chess as far as who was going to get what. Short of us going to war with the Red Army, eastern Europe was going to be soviet controlled. So playing at the margins was all that was realistically possible.
Where I fault Roosevelt AND Churchill most was operation Keelhaul. That was truly depraved and they both knew to a certainty what would happen to those guys.
But back then, British friendship very transactional for DC. As late as Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis, we did not rush to help them with colonial problems. They resented that American forces were not committed.
That was before Globalism. I also wonder how much Roosevelt’s infirmity was a contributor. I think being helpless made him lean towards liberalism, and the lack of mobility meant he could basically only consider what people would bring to him. But he could not walk down the hall, etc. That makes him very dependent upon hyper lib-Eleanor and the staff that controlled him. That position had to narrow his understanding.
In some ways he did a great job during the war, especially in the ramp up before Pearl Harbor. He managed the British well. And he let Marshall run the military. Henry Stimson was another fantastic pick.
Unfortunately with our expansion into the Pacific, after the Spanish-American War, we relied on the Royal Navy to help guard the Atlantic Ocean, as we moved Naval resources to the Pacific, to counter the threat of a rising Japan.
Putin can achieve almost everything he wants by renouncing Stalin’s annexation of Eastern Poland.
The A-bomb had not yet been tested. Had the bomb been a failure, or the fanatical Japanese STILL not surrendered, we would have needed the Soviet Army to help finish Japan.
yes, we probably could have done it alone. But to kill a half million US soldiers when you could throw red Army into the fight would have been pig headed stupid.
Like in Berlin for example. Ike was fast to pick up on that and give the Red Army “the honor” of taking Berlin. That was 81,000 dead and 280,000 wounded we avoided.
I think Stalin tried to get an occupation zone in Japan, but had to settle for getting back the territories Russia had to give up in 1905 (but Japan still claims a few islands off of Hokkaido occupied by Russia should belong to Japan).
“Germans would have been more than happy to surrender to the Americans.”
Possibly.... but they hadn’t yet fully demonstrated that. Anyway, they deserved no special consideration at that point after their rapey murderous genocidal rampage in the east, the death camps, etc. We shouldn’t have risked a single American GI’s life in the interest of protecting Germany from Russian revenge. Ike saw that.
Besides, we got Bavaria and the Rhine areas. We got the cool stuff.
We didn’t have any realistic Atlantic threats and had little interest there beyond protecting a few hundred miles off the coast. trade with Europe was small, and we had no colonies out there.
But we did not fully trust the British even then. The Washington Naval Treaty showed they still thought that the USA was a threat to manage (from the Brit perspective).
That “special relationship” crap was not at all in full swing.
Meanwhile, during WWI the Brits demanded we risk our ships to supply them, while the Royal Navy was blockading Germany and not allowing US ships to go there.
No, as the Americans did not consider mass casualties of their own soldiers to be much just a statistic, while from what I read, Hitler feared the Soviets the most, and Germany was hoping to work out a conditional surrender - which Patton would be in favor of, in order to deter the "greater enemy" of Stalin - and it was the latter who insisted on unconditional surrender of Germany, as he had his own plans for domination. Lying to Roosevelt.
You mean Russia and Hitler. Too many ifs. And if the US did not provide aid to the UK and USSR, staying out of WW2, and if Hitler attacked the USSR before the UK and controls the Baltic, and then defeats the resource deficient UK and obtains its Navy and military, and allied with Japan, largely control the seas, as well as and the Middle East and Africa. And as the US has less incentive to develop its military than if it was fighting a two-front war, and the UK develops the A-bomb, then it controls the world.
Misread hell, HIS WHOLE AMINISTRATIOM WAS CRAWLING WITH SOVIET SPIES. He was a Traitor.
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