Diplomacy

The Second World War began in Europe on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. While Britain and France pondered how to defend an already defeated ally, Stalin moved against eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland. In the spring of 1940, Hitler won a stunning series of victories in the West, with France itself capitulating in late June. Hitler could have gone on defense against Britain but instead pondered whether to go east or west for his next offensive. Stalin sought to expand Soviet territory while appeasing Hitler, but his position suffered an additional setback when Germany and Italy allied with Japan, opening a threat to Siberia. Hitler’s foreign minister offered Stalin to join their alliance, and Stalin sent his foreign minister Molotov to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the meeting went poorly. Germany was offering to share conquests it did not yet have, while Molotov refused to make any firm promises, instead conveying Stalin’s demand for a completely free hand in Eastern Europe. Hitler then ordered plans to invade the Soviet Union. Stalin managed to negotiate a nonaggression pact with Japan, but his efforts to dissuade a German invasion ultimately failed, and his refusal to provoke Hitler left the Soviet Union acutely vulnerable at the time of the German invasion in June 1941. Stalin’s error cost many lives, Kissinger states, “but whereas Stalin’s error was retrievable, Hitler’s [by invading the Soviet Union in the first place] was not” (368).

US President Franklin Roosevelt had an extremely difficult task of preparing a country for a war that he knew was imminent but which the public was desperate to avoid. The yawning gap between Wilsonian principles and the substance of the Versailles treaty provoked deep revulsion, and so the country largely narrowed its focus to its traditional interests in the Western hemisphere. The US still proclaimed universal principles of disarmament and peaceful resolution of disputes but refused to make any concrete commitments to enforcing those principles. When Japan conquered Manchuria in 1931, the US issued only rhetorical condemnations but failed to take any punitive measures. During Roosevelt’s first term, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts designed to prevent the US from involvement in any future war, but by the beginning of his second term, Roosevelt was publicly warning aggression was a “disease” and that the US would have to impose a “quarantine” to prevent its spread (as quoted on p. 379). This message drew a fierce rebuke from anti-interventionists, but after the Munich Conference, he was committed to assisting the democracies against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Following the outbreak of war, Roosevelt circumvented the Neutrality Acts by allowing France and Britain to buy US weapons in cash and transport them in their own ships. When France fell in 1940, Roosevelt was committed to the defense of Britain, and at his urging, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, empowering the president to provide material equipment to whomever required it in his estimation. In August 1941, Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to ratify the Atlantic Charter, a Wilsonian document pledging a new world order based on cooperation and peace following the defeat of the aggressor nations. In July of 1941, Roosevelt leveled severe sanctions on Japan for its invasion of French Indochina, placing Japan in a desperate position, which it ultimately sought to resolve with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7.

Following Germany’s defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, the allied powers (the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union) began to plan for the postwar world. Churchill “wanted to reconstruct the traditional balance of power in Europe” (395), including rebuilding Germany as a check on the Soviet Union. Roosevelt wanted the victorious powers to serve as “a board of directors of the world” (395), jointly responsible for maintaining order and security. Stalin wanted to expand the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe, establishing “buffer zones to protect Russia against any future German aggression” (395). Roosevelt and Stalin agreed on a severe reduction of German power, although Roosevelt saw it as a step toward a more peaceful world while Stalin viewed it through the lens of national interest. Britain was by far the weakest of the three, and Churchill wanted protection from both the Soviet military threat and American demands for a liberal world order, which imperiled Britain’s imperial holdings. Roosevelt found Churchill a far more reliable partner than Stalin, but wartime cooperation between the US and UK produced significant tension, particularly with Churchill’s demands for an offensive into the Balkans while the Americans insisted on a landing in France as soon as possible, which was also Stalin’s wish.

The Allies agreed on a principle of unconditional surrender, ensuring none of them would seek their own peace with Germany, but Roosevelt was reluctant to discuss postwar plans in any detail. This led Stalin to believe he could simply claim whatever his armies won for him. Roosevelt appears to have valued Soviet cooperation more than he feared its potential expansionism. Churchill met with Stalin in October 1944 and attempted a partition of influence in Eastern Europe, a tactic that seemed to belong to the 17th century rather than the 20th, but Churchill lacked the power to set the terms of Soviet influence in the region. At the Yalta Conference in January 1945, Stalin agreed to allowing free elections in the territories he controlled, but he soon broke this promise with brazen efforts to install communist puppet states in Poland. Roosevelt still opted for cooperation with Stalin in the belief that a friendly relationship would ultimately win him over to Roosevelt’s way of thinking. Churchill was far more realistic in his assessment of Stalin but lacked the power to act on his convictions even as they came true.

Roosevelt died in April 1945, passing the presidency to the largely untested Harry Truman. He began by continuing Roosevelt’s conciliatory policy toward Stalin, but the establishment of communist states throughout Eastern Europe was becoming a cause for alarm in Washington. At the Potsdam conference in July and August 1945, Stalin demanded recognition for Soviet-backed governments in Bulgaria and Romania, along with Soviet control of Italy’s African colonies and billions of dollars in reparations from Germany. These requests were rejected, but the conference divided Germany into four zones of occupation (French, British, US, and Soviet) with Berlin similarly divided, although the city lay within the Soviet portion of Germany. Stalin’s exorbitant demands likely stemmed from his recognition of Soviet weakness due to the war, which he tried to conceal “with almost reckless bravado” and eventually offset with territorial gains (439). In a frightening speech in February 1946, Stalin predicted the capitalist states would soon precipitate another world war and stated the Soviet Union would take all necessary measures to prepare itself. Winston Churchill, defeated in his bid for reelection, began calling for a US-British alliance against the emerging Soviet threat. Stalin was convinced the democracies were too weak and divided to resist him, but for once the master realist miscalculated, and the Cold War was on.

By the spring of 1946, US policymakers recognized the threat of Soviet expansionism, whether through its installation of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, its demands for access to Turkey and Iran, or its sponsorship of a communist insurgency in Greece. Truman came from a long line of Americans who tended to define such threats in universalistic moral terms rather than the balance of power. While the administration struggled to translate this impulse into policy, a telegram arrived from George Kennan, a State Department official based in Moscow. Kennan argued there was nothing the US could do to mollify Soviet behavior, as the very nature of their system demanded confrontation with the West, based on a combination of traditional Russian insecurity and a need to justify the oppressions and privations of a totalitarian regime. The Soviet leadership was too pragmatic to pursue schemes of world domination like the Nazis, but they would take advantage of any perceived vulnerability. The necessary response was “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peace and stable world” (as quoted on p. 455). The task of containment would be long and arduous, but the US could sustain it in the confidence that its own political system was far healthier and likelier to withstand the ardors of the Cold War, a prediction that seemed to come true 40 years later as the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight.

Actual US policy did not precisely match onto Kennan’s analysis. In 1947, Truman described the conflict in starkly ideological terms, requiring it to challenge communism everywhere; this contrasted with Kennan’s preference of challenging Soviet power at points of key strategic significance. The US oversaw the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, describing it as an enforcer of worldwide peace and security rather than a traditional alliance seeking to maintain a status quo in Europe. A new State Department document, NSC-68, went far beyond Kennan in proclaiming that only a fundamental change in the Soviet system would secure peace and that containment was far too limited for such purposes. Any lingering hope of cooperation with the Soviet Union vanished after Stalin attempted to blockade West Berlin and starve it into surrender, which ended in humiliating defeat after the US was able to organize an airlift of supplies into the beleaguered city. The debate would center around just how threatening the Soviets were and what combination of defensive or offensive measures were required to meet the challenge.