Was he so unguarded toward Stalin because he believed that he himself held the strategic advantage?
July 17, 2018
The following is from a featured dialogue between Terumasa Nakanishi, professor emeritus at Kyoto University, and Soki Watanabe, a researcher of modern Japanese-American history, published in this month’s issue of Voice, one of the monthly magazines the Japanese people should read, under the title “Now Is the Time to Redress the Injustice of Yalta: The Root Cause of Today’s Turmoil in Asia.”
This is a feature that every Japanese person, including students studying history, and people throughout the world should read.
The Folly of “Sharing a Bed” with Stalin
Watanabe:
In February 1945, the Big Three—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and J. Stalin—met in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula, then Soviet territory, for what became known as the Yalta Conference.
Secret agreements were concluded providing for “the Soviet Union’s use of German prisoners of war as forced labor” and “the cession to the Soviet Union of the Kuril Islands, southern Sakhalin, and various rights and interests in Manchuria.”
The contents of the secret agreements were not disclosed to the American people until February of the following year, 1946, when the New York World-Telegram criticized the government as follows.
“The United States resorted to bribing Russia to induce it to join the war against the Japs.
It was entirely unnecessary.
Has there ever been such a pointless bribe?”
Nakanishi:
In fact, Prime Minister Churchill was also well aware of the injustice of the secret Yalta agreement.
In February 1946, about six months after the war ended and immediately before the secret agreement was made public, the British Foreign Office sent a cable to all its overseas diplomatic missions expressing deep doubts about the validity of the Yalta Agreement, noting that President Roosevelt’s signature promising the transfer of Japanese territory, including the Kuril Islands and the Northern Territories, to the Soviet Union exceeded the powers of an American president, particularly given that the agreement had not been ratified by the U.S. Congress.
In other words, the British government questioned the legal validity of the secret Yalta agreement from the outset.
Yet Churchill signed it despite knowing this, without even informing his own cabinet, in order to maintain smooth relations with Roosevelt, so we can say that both the United States and Britain had very serious moral failings in this matter.
From the beginning of the twentieth century, Churchill and other members of Britain’s elite began to harbor grave concerns about the decline of the British Empire.
One of the currents that emerged from this was “Anglo-Saxonism,” the attempt to preserve British hegemony by drawing the United States into its orbit.
Yet this was also the process by which the British Empire was absorbed into Pax Americana—American domination.
In other words, the would-be captor became the captive: the British Empire, which had sought to draw America in to serve its own ends, was instead destroyed by America, and this can be regarded as the world-historical significance of the twentieth century’s two world wars.
And I believe that the Yalta Conference was precisely the final historical moment of “Britain’s sunset.”
Watanabe:
In March 1946, about a year after the Yalta Conference, Churchill declared in his “Iron Curtain” speech that “the Western democracies, especially Britain and the United States, must restrain the Soviet Union’s relentless expansion of its power and ideology,” but British conservatives who had understood perfectly well even before the war what “sharing a bed” with Stalin would lead to must have thought, “You’ve only just realized that, you idiot?” (Laughs.)
Nakanishi:
Roosevelt affectionately called Iosif—Joseph—Stalin “Uncle Joe.”
But this was merely a performance intended to present friendship with the Soviet Union to the American public; America’s ruling circles never dropped their guard against the Soviet Union.
How, then, should we explain Roosevelt’s extraordinary concessions to Stalin at Yalta?
From time to time, one encounters the argument in Japanese conservative commentary that “Roosevelt had been brainwashed by communists,” but the matter was surely not that simple.
Although he was not as cultivated as Churchill or Stalin, I believe Roosevelt’s abilities as a strategist were nevertheless first-rate, as demonstrated by the skill with which he promoted American entry into the Second World War in pursuit of global American hegemony.
Watanabe:
To begin with, there is no evidence whatsoever that Roosevelt read books about communism.
He probably never even looked through the basic writings of Marx or Lenin.
The difficulty of interpreting Roosevelt lies in the fact that, despite his lack of cultivation, one cannot help regarding him as “a first-rate strategist in terms of the results.”
Nakanishi:
It was actually his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, nicknamed the “Red First Lady,” who avidly read books about communism.
Watanabe:
My view is that Roosevelt had confidence—or rather, overconfidence—that he could manipulate Stalin as he pleased.
At the Tehran Conference in November–December 1943, which brought together the same American, British, and Soviet leaders who later met at Yalta, Roosevelt stayed at the Soviet embassy.
According to a paper from the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, conversations inside the embassy were comprehensively bugged at the time, and the paper discusses how dangerous and foolish Roosevelt’s decision was from a security standpoint.
Roosevelt exposed information from within his administration to the Soviets almost like an “exhibitionist.”
Yet that is precisely why I cannot fully accept the view that “Roosevelt was being manipulated by Stalin’s communist spies.”
On the contrary, Roosevelt may have thought that he was manipulating the Soviet Union by deliberately allowing confidential information to leak.
Was he so unguarded toward Stalin because he believed that he himself held the strategic advantage?
Nakanishi:
Ultimately, Roosevelt’s aim was to destroy the British Empire and establish American global hegemony, and Japan and the Soviet Union were merely pawns toward that end.
And this aim was partly achieved: after the war, the United States became the world’s hegemonic power.
The Cold War can be described as the price paid for that.
Perhaps we could say that he successfully brought Japan into the American fold but found the Soviet Union more difficult to handle than expected.
In that sense, too, the claim that Roosevelt was being manipulated by the Soviet Union must be mistaken.
Roosevelt’s Underhanded Treatment of Japan
Nakanishi:
Similarly, the view advanced by historians of the left-wing progressive school—that “because the Roosevelt administration was receptive to socialist policies such as the New Deal, a certain sympathy for socialism led to its lenient treatment of Stalin”—is also mistaken.
To begin with, Roosevelt’s words and actions showed no moral sincerity whatsoever in pursuing policies according to any consistent doctrine or ideal other than American hegemony.
On August 9, 1941, Roosevelt held secret talks with Churchill on the Atlantic, already clearly preparing to enter the Second World War, and announced the “Atlantic Charter,” propaganda that itself amounted to a declaration of war aims, stating that “neither country [Britain nor the United States] seeks territorial aggrandizement [in this war]” and that they “desire no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned [national self-determination].”
Around the same time, Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, seeking to avert war between Japan and the United States, proposed a summit with Roosevelt through Joseph Grew, the American ambassador to Japan.
However, the Americans dragged out their response while giving the impression that they might be interested, and then rejected Konoe’s proposal outright.
In fact, it was during that interval that Roosevelt held the aforementioned Atlantic meeting with Churchill.
Including this episode, throughout the Japanese-American negotiations of 1941, the United States repeatedly dealt with Japan in a profoundly insincere, almost deceptive manner.
And what it ultimately presented was that high-handed ultimatum, the “Hull Note.”
I find it utterly baffling that postwar Japanese historians do not point out Roosevelt’s underhanded treatment of Japan.
Watanabe:
I am currently translating Back Door to War by Professor Charles Tansill of Georgetown University’s history department (scheduled for publication by Soshisha this autumn as Entering the War Through the Back Door: The True Nature of Roosevelt’s Diplomacy, 1933–1941).
According to this book, when Prime Minister Konoe proposed a meeting with Roosevelt, he stipulated that it must not be disclosed to the media, yet the Roosevelt administration leaked the request.
Konoe wanted to proceed cautiously with the negotiations so that domestic hard-liners toward the United States would not discover what he was doing.
If his moves were “exposed,” his downfall would be certain.
I can only conclude that the leak was intended to sabotage the Japanese-American summit.
Nakanishi:
From America’s perspective, the entire series of Japanese-American negotiations from the spring of 1941 to the “Hull Note” was itself “fake”—in other words, a deception operation to buy time to prepare for war against Japan.
From the very beginning, Roosevelt had absolutely no intention of reaching an accommodation with Japan to avoid war.
The Northern Territories Are “an Issue Between Japan and the Allied Powers”
Watanabe:
The Yalta Conference also issued a declaration calling for the restoration of sovereignty and self-government taken away by aggressor nations.
The qualification “by aggressor nations” rested on the reasoning that the Soviet Union, as one of the Allied powers, was not an aggressor nation, and that the declaration therefore did not apply to countries deprived of their freedom by the Soviet Union.
The treatment of Poland is the focal point here.
The Second World War began when Nazi Germany violated the independence of Poland, whose security Britain and France had guaranteed.
At the time, there was a Polish government-in-exile in London, and Britain had guaranteed Poland’s independence.
Churchill therefore had an obligation to protect the Polish government-in-exile.
Roosevelt, too, promised to restore Poland’s freedom in the November 1944 election in order to win the votes of Polish-American voters.
By the time of the Yalta Conference, however, a communist organization had already been established in Poland with Soviet backing.
Worse still, Churchill and Roosevelt endorsed this situation.
The two men accepted the communization not only of Poland but of Eastern Europe because they clearly recognized that they could not have defeated Nazi Germany without the assistance of Soviet military power, and they felt a profound sense of indebtedness.
Nakanishi:
During the Second World War, the Pacific theater was overwhelmed by America’s superior military power.
In the European theater, however, an Allied victory would have been impossible without the Soviet army’s four-year struggle to the death against Nazi Germany and its enormous sacrifices.
Certainly, following the Normandy landings in June 1944, the Anglo-American forces opened the Western Front and began advancing toward Germany, but their casualties were incomparably smaller than the deaths in the German-Soviet war up to that point.
This was because the greater part of Germany’s capacity to resist was directed toward the war against the Soviet Union—that is, the Eastern Front.
Watanabe:
The Soviet Union lost as many as twenty million people in the Second World War.
The sheer scale of these losses must also have placed Roosevelt and Churchill at a “psychological disadvantage” in their negotiations with Stalin.
Nakanishi:
These two American and British leaders, who possessed both the ability and the vantage point to view the war on a global scale, understood the essential nature of the Second World War as an imperialist war fought to seize rights and interests, and must therefore have recognized that they had no choice but to give the Soviet Union an appropriate “share.”
In other words, they “handed over” Poland and Eastern Europe to Stalin while knowing that these countries would be placed under oppressive communist regimes.
This, too, demonstrates that the policy of “no territorial aggrandizement” in the Atlantic Charter was merely propaganda directed at the Axis countries or at their own populations.
Another point that Japanese people today should reconsider is the relationship between the secret Yalta agreement and the Northern Territories dispute.
American historians make excuses such as “Roosevelt did not know of the existence of the Treaty of Shimoda of 1855 or the Treaty of Saint Petersburg of 1875,” but this is, of course, a lie.
Not only the U.S. State Department but Roosevelt himself knew perfectly well that the Kuril Islands, and especially the four Northern Islands, were inherently Japanese territory, yet they ceded them to the Soviet Union—in other words, the Allies collectively carried out territorial expansion as a conqueror’s prerogative.
The Japanese government’s demand for the return of the Northern Territories, on the grounds that they are “unjustly occupied by Russia,” rests chiefly on the aforementioned Atlantic Charter, in which Roosevelt and Churchill proclaimed “no territorial aggrandizement.”
Yet when we examine in detail the actions of the American and British leaders during the war leading up to Yalta, we must not forget that it was precisely these two countries, the United States and Britain, that created the Northern Territories problem.
In other words, the Northern Territories are not an issue between Japan and the Soviet Union—or Japan and Russia—but “an issue between Japan and the Allied powers.”
Watanabe:
As you point out, there is no doubt that the Northern Territories dispute, which continues to trouble Japan today, stems from the folly of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s decisions at Yalta.
The first step toward resolving this issue would be to acknowledge the failure of the secret agreement reached at the Yalta Conference.
However, that recognition would also mean revising the conventional interpretation of the war—the apologetic interpretation—which holds that “Britain and America fought the totalitarian states to defend democracy.”
I cannot help concluding that resolving the Northern Territories dispute will be difficult unless historical revisionism that takes a skeptical view of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s diplomacy becomes the mainstream of historical interpretation.
Nakanishi:
On this point, the Putin administration has stated that “the Northern Territories became Russian territory as a result of the Allied victory in the Second World War,” and this is, in a sense, an expression of its true thinking—or, historically speaking, a more accurate view—and can be said to accord with … the true character of that conflict as a traditional “war of conquest.”
It is telling the Japanese that, because the Northern Territories were taken from Japan according to the fundamental norms of international politics—that is, the legitimate “rules of the game”—there is no need to return them, and that, if they wish, they should ask America and Britain what those countries really think.
As victors in the Second World War, the United States and Britain also carried out de facto territorial expansion after the war at numerous strategic locations, including islands in the Pacific.
In this respect, they were “birds of a feather with the Soviet Union.”
Of course, Japan must firmly maintain its position demanding the return of all four islands in accordance with the principles of “law and justice,” and, as a defeated country, must continue to demand their return as a protest against the unjust postwar settlement imposed by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.