Josh Marshall, an historian by academic training, is also taking issue with Bush's bizarre position on the Yalta Agreement that I mentioned in the posts and comments of 05/08/05 and another on 05/08/05. And he really gets it right:
To compare the results of the Yalta Conference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the key element of which was a secret agreement by which the 20th century's two great dictators agreed to carve up the defenseless neighbour between them, is truly unconscionable. And to compare it to Munich is little less so.
In making this argument the president joins a rich tradition of maniacs who believe that at the end of World War II we should have joined with the defeated remainder of the German army and fought our way through Eastern Europe to the border of Russia and, in all likelihood, on to Moscow to overthrow the Soviet Union itself -- certainly not a difficult proposition considering what an insubstantial land Army the Soviet Union had at the time.
Just to be clear, his comment about the Red Army being "insubstantial" in February 1945 is meant to be obviously ironic.
He also calls the ideological implications of Bush's statement for American politics just right:
The president also makes common cause, though whether he's familiar with the history he's wading into I don't know, with those who argued before the war and after that the US and the UK made their fundamental error in the war itself, by allying with the Soviets against Nazism rather than with Nazism against the Soviets.
Now, no one can expect that Latvians or Poles are going to have warm or cordial feelings about the Great Power agreements at the end of the war. The plain fact is that the outcome of the war led to the imposition of Communist dictatorships across Eastern Europe that lasted for more than forty years. But one cannot assess the morality or political insight of American and British decision-making in the late stages of the war without standing them up against the real alternatives they faced. Anything else is just cheap posturing or folly. In the president's case, perhaps both.
What he's saying there is both correct and important: that there's is a common link between the hyper-nationalism of the rightwing isolationists (many of whom favored a pro-German foreign policy in the 1930s and 40s) and today's "unilateralists," or "democratic nationalists" or "neoconservatives" or whatever you want to call them.
Marshall also links to this article: Know Thy Allies: What Bush got wrong about Yalta by David Greenberg Slate 05/10/05
Now, on his Baltic tour, [Bush] has endorsed a [revanchist] view of the Yalta accords, that great bugaboo of the old right.
Bush stopped short of accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill of outright perfidy, but his words recalled those of hardcore FDR- and Truman-haters circa 1945. ...
Because FDR kept many details of the Yalta agreements under wraps, people in Washington began whispering conspiratorially about "secret agreements." Soon, critics, especially on the far right, were charging that FDR and Churchill had sold out the people of Eastern Europe—charges that Bush's recent comments echo. They asserted that the ailing Roosevelt—he would die only weeks later—had come under the malign influence of pro-Communist advisers who gave Stalin the store.
But Yalta did not give Stalin control of the Eastern European countries. He was already there. Moreover, as Lloyd C. Gardner has argued, it's possible that postwar Europe could have turned out worse than it did. For all its evident failings, Yalta did lead to a revived Western Europe, a lessening of open warfare on the continent, and, notwithstanding Bush's remarks, relative stability. Without Yalta, Gardner notes, "the uneasy equilibrium of the Cold War might have deteriorated into something much worse—a series of civil wars or possibly an even darker Orwellian condition of localized wars along an uncertain border." Such "what if" games are generally pointless, but they can remind us that the harmonious Europe that Yalta's critics tout as a counter-scenario wasn't the only alternative to the superpower standoff.
Greenberg in turn links to this comment by FDR biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., at Ariana Huffington's new blog: Yalta Delusions 05/09/05.
The American president is under the delusion that tougher diplomacy might have preserved the freedom of small East European nations. He forgets the presence of the Red Army. No conceivable diplomacy could have saved Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation. And military action against the Soviet Union was inconceivable so long as the Pacific War was still going on. Our military planners, in order to reduce American casualties, counted on the Red Army to enter the war against Japan . At Yalta Stalin promised a firm date in August. And in February the atom bomb seemed a fantasy dreamed up by nuclear physicists.
As for Eastern Europe, Stalin "held all the cards" in the words of Charles E. Bohlen, the Russian expert. But FDR managed to extract an astonishing document – the Declaration on Liberated Europe, an eloquent affirmation of "the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live." Molotov warned Stalin against signing it, but he signed it anyway. It was a grave diplomatic blunder. In order to consolidate Soviet control, Stalin had to break the Yalta agreements – which therefore could not have been in his favor.
Bush's version of Yalta is yet another milestone in the transformation of the Republican Party 2005 into the John Birch Society 1965.
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