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.
Our Worst Blunders in the War: Europe and the Russians
A Baltimorean who graduated from the United States Naval Academy and who subsequently saw service aboard our destroyers and battleships, HANSON W. BALDWIN has been the military editor of the New York Times since 1912, in which year his articles earned him the Pulitzer Prize. In the preparation of an extended history of the Second World War, he has added up the most costly mistakes which we made in the conflict. There are six of them; they all stem from our original misreading of the Russian mind. In prose which is absorbing if sometimes painful reading, they will be analyzed in this and the February issue.
Of course, Patton saw Stalin for what he was.
FDR ws too old to be at Yalta
I’m not so charitable to Roosevelt. I don’t think he just got “hoodwinked”. He was a radical progressive, basically a socialist himself, so he was sympathetic to the communists and probably wanted them to win, which is why he tried to hand them the world on a silver platter.
When I studied the Russian Revolution and the USSR in university, one of Kennan’s books (Russia and The West IIRC) was marked as an important reading item for the course.
Naivete. But FDR was in very poor health at Yalta and in no condition for serious negotiations. He would pass away just two months later.
Interesting history...Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin. Thanks for posting.
Roosevelt and his ilk undeniably wanted a country without our Constitution.
The totalitarian always imagines the utopia where he’s on the top of the pile rewarding those who agree with him and punishing those who don’t. They never imagine the dystopia that everyone else has to endure…
Nothing much would have changed had FDR been sterner with Stalin at Yalta. What leverage did FDR have? The Red Army of 1945 was massive, experienced, and well-led. Trying to dislodge them from Eastern Europe would have been difficult, and very bloody.
I suppose the western Allies would have won eventually due to their air power advantage. But no way would the American people have stood for it. “Your son survived fighting Nazi Germany. Now we are going to throw him into a meat grinder against a country that was our ally just yesterday.”
Typical Democrat reasoning. APPEASE AND PLEASE.
It never ever works.
A despot will sense weakness and strike while he has the advantage........................
Not to mention the both HE and his wife were socialist to the core
FDR also thought he needed Stalin’s help to finish the war with Japan. Stalin agreed to declare war on Japan 2 to 3 months after the war in Europe ended. He did keep that promise, declaring war on Japan exactly 3 months after Germany surrendered. But it turned out we didn’t need his help so much because of the atomic bomb, and that enabled Stalin to impose a communist regime in North Korea (as well as annexing a number of Japanese islands).
Thank God we didn’t need Stalin’s “help” with Japan, or else Japan would have been divided, like Korea and Germany.
He arrogantly believed he “could handle Uncle Joe.” FDR the supreme narcissist got handled instead.
What FDR and his ilk were democrats in the sense of ‘majority rule’. Stir up mob thinking on an issue get a vote Bang! a new law! Your ‘majority’ just ruled! The Founding Fathers were very suspicious of that type of political system. They knew ‘mass emotion’ was capable of overcoming any amount of ‘mass education’. They designed a system where political power was divided between ‘the mob - people’ directly and ‘the people’ corporately - the state. Almost every Constitutional Amendment since 1912 has been to upset that balance and tilt power toward mob-ocracy. The argument for doing that has always been education will make people wise and immune to demagogic appeal. You see Progressives like Wilson were far far smarter than the Founding Fathers or so they told themselves and anyone who would listen! See any evidence of that in the last 100 years that they were? Any immunity mass education has given to keep from being stampeded into a voting mob has been negated by mass advertising and made more effective by the Internet. I cringe when I see people here use the words ‘our democracy’!
Repeal the 17th Amendment!
State legislatures couldn’t do worse!
Eisenhower purposely held back "problem child" Patton who boasted he could be in Berlin in a few days. Not that impetuous Patton did not earn being disciplined, but it was Roosevelt whom Eisenhower answered to.
> Repeal the 17th Amendment! <
Totally agree. As you noted, the Founders set up the way senators were chosen as a check against mob rule. Unfortunately, that horse has left the barn. And he’s not coming back.
A hundred years from now an honest historian will identify the 17th Amendment as a top reason for the fall of the United States.
And repeal the 16th and 19th, while we’re at it.
> Patton who boasted he could be in Berlin in a few days <
Patton was certainly correct about that. By early April of 1945 the German soldiers who faced him were demoralized. Many were eager to surrender.
But what would have happened once Patton reached the outskirts of Berlin? Hitler was still alive, and he still had an iron grip on the city. The Soviets suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties taking Berlin. The Americans would have suffered much the same.
As you noted, Eisenhower held Patton back. Probably a good thing as FDR (or Truman) would have ordered a withdrawal anyway.
Germans would have been more than happy to surrender to the Americans.
By that logic, we should have simply let Germany and Hitler bash each other's brains out, and stayed out of WWII
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