I feel bad for Bulgaria and the Balkins who have two enemies: the Nazis and the Russians. You feel like, at a certain point, it’s not the Nazis, but the Soviets that pose the greatest threat to free countries.
Although I don’t think we’re at that point yet, I’m not sure why we had to ally ourselves with the Soviets in such a way as to agree to anything other than what we were doing: liberating countries and turning the countries back to their own governments and people. I think we should have demanded the same from Stalin. I mean, it wasn’t like they would get mad and go home - they were fighting for their own country.
Seems like our next priority after beating the Germans was ensuring the freedom of Allied-occupied countries. I don’t think “politics” should have stood in the way of ensuring peoples lives would not go from German totalitarianism to Soviet totalitarianism.
Of course this contemplates another war. The only people who would have wanted that were the people who were about to be enslaved by the Soviet regime. I don’t think it was a secret how many millions of Russian citizens Stalin had killed or banished to Siberian desolation.
From the beginning, we should, IMO, have had the foresight to set our expectations that the the Russians stay permanently within its own pre-war borders and negotiate with them along those lines. You get the feeling that instead, Stalin is dictating post-war terms to Roosevelt and Churchill (I think Churchill had a clearer idea of Stalin than Roosevelt).
The eastern Europe “buffer” thing was an obvious excuse for territorial expansion by a clearly dangerous government. In that sense I think Patton was right. Nevertheless, it seems that Roosevelt the socialist was “soft on communism” and probably not enough people could see past the exhausting victory we had just won. One notable exception was Patton.
It sometimes seems more difficult to win a just peace than to win a war.
If Homer wants to continue this after the War (ha!) we would see the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe happens in slow motion. Churchill didn't give his Iron Curtain speech until almost a year after the end of the war in Europe. Czechoslovakia didn't go communist until 1948.
I agree with you that the only way to stop it would have been war with Russia. Very, very few Americans had any appetite for another European war in May 1945.