See, you just hit on the two biggest problems in the whole deal.
1. How do you enforce Stalin’s agreements? He never intended to keep them. They were window dressing. The only thing Stalin respected was force and power. So long as he had his army in Poland, it wasn’t going to leave without greater force being applied to it. He knew damn well the West had no stomach for it. Poland wasn’t Pearl Harbor. I don’t see how you get enough Americans fired up to fight the USSR. Stalin didn’t, either.
2. You used the one term that has bothered me the most when I see this debate: that we “handed over” Poland to Stalin. No, we didn’t. You assume Poland was “ours” to “hand over.”
It never was. Our army never occupied it for us to be in position to “betray it.”
The Cold War was as much of a PR battle than anything....there was the real possibility of the Communist Party ruling France after the war, through elections....anything we could do to blacken Stalin’s eye would have helped.
Huh? I wrote: “Eastern Europe, remember, wasn’t just unconditionally handed over to Stalin”
How is that saying or assuming that Poland was handed over to the Soviets?
That might have been the effect, though. At least that, correct or not, is how many people think. Poland was our ally, no?