July 5, 2013

FINEST HOUR 128, AUTUMN 2005

===================

RIGA, LATVIA, MAY 7TH— The President of the United States said today that “The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.”

This was a remarkably incorrect statement, given that the President, as historian Jon Meacham said, has generally been accurate in his historical references. Triumph and Tragedy should be in the Oval Office, alongside the bust of Sir Winston.

2025 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 42nd International Churchill Conference. Washington, DC | October 9-11, 2025

2025 International Churchill Conference

The Anglo-Americans left Yalta in February 1945 holding certain guarantees with respect to Polish self-determination, which was about all they could hope for. It is true that Yalta confirmed Soviet rule in the Baltic States and much of Eastern Europe. With the Red Army occupying half the continent, there were few alternatives except war with Russia. And as conservative John O’Sullivan wrote, “Neither Bush nor any other Western statesman would have launched such a war in those circumstances….Bush’s criticism is therefore exaggerated and unfair.”

Things could have been worse. Greece—thanks to Churchill’s oft-denounced “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin in 1944—was liberated. So in the end was Austria. Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan. All these were promises he kept.

But his Polish guarantees proved worthless, and Churchill and Roosevelt were in communication about what to do next when FDR died in April 1945. President Truman moved with caution, unwilling to upset what seemed to him a vital ally. Churchill lost the July election and was replaced at Potsdam, the last wartime conference, by Clement Attlee.

In Triumph and Tragedy Churchill wrote that had he returned to Potsdam, he would have forced a “showdown” over Poland. What the result would have been is a matter for conjecture. Much of Eastern Europe, given reality, had no chance for liberty at Yalta; but this should not be an excuse to denounce the efforts of Roosevelt and Churchill as another Munich. (See, e.g., “Churchill and the Baltic,” FH 53-54 or on our website.)

Granted, the President was speaking in the capital of a country which has its own view, based on its own experience. I recall a conversation with the Mayor of Liepaja, the southernmost Latvian port, on a visit to my ancestral land in 1995. “You should have nuked them in 1945,” he said of the Russians, telling us about the Soviet occupation he had endured as a boy. I said the British and American public in 1945 would never have stood for such a thing. The Mayor persisted: “You should have nuked them. Think of how much blood and treasure you would have saved yourselves, not to mention us.”

As in many things, what you think often depends on where you grew up. —Editor