The Peace Was Lost By Ignoring Justice And the Facts of Life
IN the year of total victory in the greatest of all wars, Winston Churchill concluded a top-secret cable to Franklin Roosevelt with this foreboding sentence: I THINK THAT THE END OF THIS WAR MAY WELL PROVE TO BE MORE DISAPPOINTING THAN WAS THE LAST. It did. Why and how the peace was lost before the war was won is revealed in the U.S. State Department's Yalta record, released ten years after the conference.
Much of last week's comment on the Yalta papers said that they disclosed "nothing new," meaning not much meat for headline writers. The memoirs of Churchill, Stettinius. Byrnes, Leahy—and calamitous events in Europe and Asia —had long since made plain the outlines of Yalta's decisions. Nor did the Yalta documents add any sensational weapons to the arsenals of those who believe that Roosevelt was infallible or of those who think he was puppeteered at Yalta by a Communist cabal among his own staff.
The truth seems to be even more grievous. What the published record does better than either memoirists or events could do is to unveil the "spirit of Yalta," which showed itself before Yalta and is not dead yet. The mark of this spirit is a stubborn refusal to face political reality. From beginning to end of the Yalta record there is an almost total absence of recognition that justice is the only enduring restraint upon power, the only basis for order. On the American side in the fateful days of conference in the Crimea, there were vague dreams, but an almost total absence of the pursuit of justice through the hard complexities of the world as it is.
The record now available is complete and coherent enough to show what was not said at the conference table and what was not attempted. The Americans were not frustrated by Communist obstinacy. They were not overborne by the implications of Communist military power. They were not hoodwinked by diabolical Communist cunning. They carried their defeat in their own heads. They bound their own hands. They delivered themselves and the peace to Stalin.
The Poverty of Totality. The spirit of Yalta as disclosed by the documents has its roots at least as far back as the mid-1930s when the U.S. and Britain refused to play the kind of practical politics, inspired by obvious considerations of world order, that would have curbed or destroyed Hitler. They thus brought on themselves the Unnecessary War, as Churchill was to call it. Swept into this vortex, the Americans and British embraced their enemies' slogan of "total war." It was so total that the future beyond the war's end seemed infinitely remote. If war aims were difficult to agree upon, then the formula for ending the war would be total, or unconditional, surrender. Alliances, too, were to be total in scope and of ever-loving duration.