Learning the Real Lessons of Yalta to Prevent World War III

The revered enormous, sprawling Versailles endless peace conference in 1919 was a catastrophe. It plunged Europe into 20 years of economic crises, poverty and misery for hundreds of millions of people amid endless ugly feuding national and civil conflicts like all fueled by US President Woodrow Wilson’s witless, stupid and impossible-to-truly-implement principle of national self-determination.

Even at the time, the so-called Big Four Powers at Versailles – the United States, the British Empire, France and Italy – lacked the sheer military capability and even political unity and will to enforce their endless micromanaging decisions on the ground.

By contrast, Yalta’s proceedings were concluded in only a week. Two of its three participants, President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain, would lose power through death and elections within six months. Yet the decisions they took with Soviet Premier Josef Stalin stuck and ensured the peace of Europe and the great Powers with each other for close to 80 years.

Politically aware Americans, especially self-proclaimed “tough” neo-liberals and neo-conservatives have had a hate obsession with Yalta for 80 years since proclaiming the myth of an “evil” sell-out of Eastern Europe that supposedly took place there.

Instead, as is often the case in the age of George Orwell’s “big lie” in modern America and Britain, the opposite was the case. The Yalta conference was a triumph of realpolitik that kept the global peace between the superpowers almost three quarters of a century so far.

But far from being evil, this was a highly moral, responsible and pragmatically successful proceeding. It stemmed from the clear realization of all the Big Three Participants in the Yalta Summit that it was the great powers that needed to agree with each other, compromise over and then jointly enforce the great, lasting issues of War and Peace.

This was a Commanding Heights geostrategic reality that such master-strategists and diplomats as US Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan all clearly recognized in their time. And so did those masters of diplomatic achievement and lasting peace systems Klemens Von Metternich of Austria, Otto Von Bismarck of Germany and Henry Kissinger of the United States.

Woodrow Wilson along with Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France totally failed to recognize and implement these realities in the endless, sprawling, chaotic ungainly diplomatic proceedings at Versailles in 1919.

It is noteworthy that the leading justifier and defender of the appalling Versailles snakes-nest of lousy settlements was Lloyd Geroge’s own granddaughter, Professor Margaret MacMillan of Canada whose shameless bias has gone unchallenged and uncorrected now for decades.

By contrast, FDR, Churchill and Stalin at Yalta never repeated the catastrophic errors of Wilson and Lloyd Geroge especially at Versailles. They all refused to allow any partiality for weak, jumped up, hungry, ludicrously over-ambitious little local leaders like Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Josef Pilsudski of Poland, the leaders of Serbia, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos of Greece and Thomas Masaryk of Bohemia carve out absurd little miniempires for themselves and their followers.

It is, therefore, enormously ironic that the peace of the world should now be threatened over US and United Kingdom (UK) continuing to blindly and madly support a totally non-democratic, harshly dictatorial regime in Kiev that has sent at least 700,000 Ukrainians to their deaths in a totally needless and avoidable war against Russia over the past three years.

These kneejerk US and UK reactions ever since the shameless 2014 Maidan coup toppled the genuinely democratic and lawfully elected government of Ukraine in 2014 when it refused to accept economic enslavement at the hands of the Brussels-based European Union.

Underlying the mindless embrace of these wicked, suicidal and plain stupid policies lay the dead hand of mindlessly swallowed generations of dangerous mythmaking by both Republicans and Democrats in the United States and by the revered demigod Winston Churchill in Britain. For it was Churchill who created the Big Lie that the by-then dead and unable to defend himself Franklin Roosevelt had “sold out” Poland and the countries of Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta – and thereby threatened the survival of the West.

This myth was created by Churchill in Volume 6 of his enormous war memoirs, “The Second World War”. (Most of it was in fact written for him by a huge team of British historians and bureaucratic researchers. This did not stop Churchill from happily accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature on the entirely false grounds that he had written all of it.)

Churchill blamed Roosevelt for selling out Eastern Europe at Yalta in his discussions with Stalin. By then FDR was long since dead and so were Harry Hopkins, his de facto national security adviser at Yalta and Major General Edwin “Pa” Watson, his closest personal aide.

The next US president, Harry Truman made no secret in later years of his deep, abiding jealousy for President Roosevelt and was happy to scapegoat his dead predecessor for the outcome of Yalta.

Truman’s successor, President Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander actually worked sympathetically and closely with the Soviet Union to prevent any clash between the Western and Soviet armies knowing that only the Nazis could benefit from such a disaster.

But by 1952, running for president himself, Eisenhower did not dare to acknowledge his own key role in accepting Soviet control of half of Europe, so it made perfect sense for him to slander the late FDR as well.

In fact, Yalta was a triumph for FDR in everything that really mattered: The division of Europe agreed there by the “Big Three” was based on realities of power and could therefore be upheld and maintained for many decades and it was.

By contrast, the hyped, gargantuan Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 led to the rise of Adolf Hitler within 14 years and another, even worse world war only 20 years later. Versailles was a catastrophe. Yalta, where it really mattered, was a lasting triumph.

Because of the great Soviet victory in June 1944 in the Battle of Belorussia, it was inevitable that all of Central Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to the borders of Greece would fall under Soviet control before the Anglo-American armies driving in on the Third Reich from the West could get there. That was why the American Republican criticisms of the dying Franklin Roosevelt for “selling out” Central Europe at the 1945 Yalta conference were so unfair. There was nothing in practical terms FDR could have done otherwise.

And in any case, FDR did not make the key concessions to Stalin on Central Europe at all. It was Churchill, the British statesman who has become the icon-hero of American internationalist conservatives, who made them.

Churchill, at his meeting in Moscow with Stalin in October 1944 approved the famous agreement on the back of a napkin at a drunken banquet that acknowledged the Soviet dominant role in all of the Balkans, except for Greece. Roosevelt was outraged when he learned about it. By then, Churchill knew that Poland, Hungary and most of the rest of Central Europe would fall to the Soviet armies too. The Battle of Belorussia had ensured that.

As US senators and pundits vie with each other now to push President Donald Trump towards yet another potentially enormously dangerous confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, it is more important than ever to recover and teach the true lessons of Yalta.

In February 1945 a dying but clear-headed Franklin Roosevelt opted for continued respect and dialogue with the Soviet Union to prevent world wars and preserve the peace of the world. His wisdom lasted 77 years.

Yalta was never a naïve sellout and Roosevelt gave away nothing. After he died, Winston Churchill and the US Republicans successfully slandered his good name for their own glory and lying gain.

To restore US-Russian trust, dialogue and respect, it is vital Americans are educated at last to the true story. For the time is short and the dangers great. Those Big Lies about Yalta have already flourished far too long. And they may well totally destroy us yet.