Failing to Face the Issues

...To be sure, the revisionists, such as Gar Alperovitz, have been only too willing to search for hidden meanings, but they have also given the impression of knowing the answers even before they started looking...

...Yet the victorious leaders assembled at Potsdam-Churchill, Truman, Stalin-were not...

...They were both eager to exacerbate their difficulties...

...Of the three main components of their final "package," two had in effect been settled earlier: Poland's western frontier, and Soviet domination of the former enemy countries in Eastern Europe...

...Underestimation, after the overestimation, could be seen both in Stalin's occasionally condescending behavior at Potsdam and in the new aims beyond those already on record that he enunciated...

...Iran meant more than just Iran...

...Mee presents this thesis exceedingly well-with force, elegance and a special flair for pertinent and entertaining detail...

...The bomb, therefore, not Potsdam, irreversibly destroyed the precarious detente of mid-1945...

...The official Soviet reaction to the bomb was remarkably mild and devoid of any reproaches to the West for trying to keep its development secret...

...These were American initiatives that Churchill resented but was unable to prevent...

...Was this a real or an imaginary threat...

...Mee, not an ideological crusader, conveys no such impression but he has his own shortcomings...

...At the same time, the Soviets began efforts to redress matters by every means at their disposal...

...Having been proved wrong on this, he was then treated to the comforting spectacle of the Anglo-American rift, culminating in the debacle of Churchill's hard-line schemes-a spectacle that made the West appear a much less threatening opponent than it really was...

...Mee's account shows vividly how ill-prepared, inconsistent and, consequently, ineffective Churchill was there...

...But instead of indicating clearly to each other where their interests began and ended, the conferees at Potsdam wasted their time on largely fictitious issues...

...Above all, America's public demonstration of its new power over Japan upset the conventional balance of forces on which Stalin's concept of detente hinged, for the bomb revolutionized ideas of national security...

...In the last days of the War, he had extravagantly overestimated the hostility of his allies, even expecting them to join with the Germans against him...

...This new policy was aggressive, arrogant and irresponsible-certainly compared with anything the Western powers did at that time...

...Reviewed by Vojtech Mastny Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Here is a book that professes to have, finally, the answer to the question of why the Cold War started...

...it meant, too, the Middle East and the Mediterranean...

...They exist to drive home Mee's message that all "high politics," democratic no less than Communist, is one big fraud perpetrated on honest people who would rather be left alone...

...It was important for reasons apart from the Potsdam discussions...

...As a result, he came to Potsdam a mere shadow of his previous formidable self...

...But Stalin did not panic...

...At the end of May, he sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow to revive the spirit of Yalta...

...And the main developments preceding Potsdam suggest that the case is not nearly as clearcut as Mee would have us believe...

...This kind of indiscriminate philosophy may reflect certain experiences of the Nixon era, but it neither helps us gain a fair appreciation of the past nor provides us with a useful inspiration for the future...

...To Mee, the question is irrelevant and absurd, for Truman and Stalin "fairly tripped over one another to be the first with a new charge against the other...

...Another four years would elapse before the fronts hardened, but the trend was clear...

...Stalin's attitude changed too, but in the opposite direction...

...At times every person in the book reminds one of those Georg Grosz caricatures of the powerful, popular in the twenties...

...Stalin threatened Western Europe, and Stalin threatened the Mediterranean...

...Yet whether it was regarded in Moscow as likely to produce confrontation is another question...

...His unsupported advocacy of a "showdown" with the Kremlin highlighted basic Anglo-American disagreements, and his feeling of impotence was compounded by his correct premonition that he was about to be voted out of office...

...Meeting at Potsdam produces this effect by showing how often the Big Three tried to appear more accommodating than they intended to be...

...Still, the bomb neither altered the participants' actions appreciably, nor added any substance to their meager accomplishment...

...For different reasons, but ultimately because of their perverse love of power, they all preferred conflict to harmony, and they deliberately tailored their agreements to make conflict inevitable...

...Yet what about the advent of the atomic bomb...

...and asked for trusteeship over ex-Italian Libya...

...The third-the delivery of reparations from the Western occupation zones to Russia...

...At the end of Meeting at Potsdam, the author's analytical vigor-the book's greatest asset-gives way to rhetoric concealing a genuine unwillingness to face the issues...

...was contingent upon a common policy on Germany, something that never existed...

...If accomplishment-positive or negative-is a measure of importance, then Potsdam should surely rank as the least rather than the most important of the great Allied gatherings...

...Ironically, the weapon that set the Cold War in motion also helped determine its limits...

...Although not a professional historian, he knows his sources and treats them with respect...

...In emphasizing this, those "wanton murders" may not have been in vain...

...Mee ridicules George Kennan for suggesting in the "long telegram" that the Soviet Union "was very dangerous indeed...

...In fact, he had proposed the Potsdam summit for that very purpose...

...The calculation worked...

...It doesn't, really, but the twist it gives to the old controversy is original enough to warrant a close examination (and, apparently, a high-powered advertising campaign from the publisher...

...Truman, who had displayed a disposition to wave a big stick during his stormy interview with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov on April 23, 1945, succeeded in suppressing this tendency...

...From these misjudgments it is but a short step to assuming that the participants actually wanted events to turn out the way that they later did...

...after all, a Soviet spy had been on the test site at Alamogordo to observe the first explosion...

...In particular, the Soviets rattled their sabres to wrest territory and military bases fom Turkey...

...witness, especially, the opaque Herbert Feis...

...He imputes superhuman foresight to the protagonists, and he overrates the importance of a gathering where illustrious men behaved importantly...

...Churchill told the Communist leader he would like to see a strong Soviet naval presence in the world, despite his deep desire to check the spread of the USSR's power...

...His predecessors of the "traditional" school never tried hard enough to penetrate the conferees' frequent doubletalk...

...Nonetheless, he assigns the Prime Minister the role of chief architect of the "deliberate discord...

...Without doubt, his analysis of the conference is the most serious so far...

...Then, a mere two pages later, he cites Kremlin policy in Iran, apparently to show that "the Soviet readiness to use the brute force of its Army seemed very ominous indeed...

...Like many others, Mee sees this as being inextricably linked with the issues of the conference...

...In an even more tangible act of deference to the USSR's wishes, Anglo-American forces vacated large portions of the Soviet zone of Germany so speedily that Stalin himself was taken by surprise...

...Mee's argument is as ingenious as it is simple: In 1945, people all over the world were ready for peace...

...Truman talked as if he favored a peace conference, while he wanted to do without any...

...In agreement with most revisionists, he has harsh words for the American leaders responsible for letting the demon out of the bottle...

...demanded a share in the control of Tangier, opposite Gibraltar...

...In short, all three Potsdam powers were bent on avoiding conflict albeit for very different reasons: the United States because it felt strong enough to be conciliatory, Britain because it was too weak to risk a confrontation without American backing, and Stalin because the situation seemed to offer the possibility of expansion without serious opposition...

...Although we do not know whether anyone in the Kremlin dared to criticize the Soviet dictator for having won the War while losing the peace, it was enough that he now became vulnerable to such criticism...

...Mee's principal thesis, no matter how alluring in its starkest simplicity, simply fails to do justice to all these considerations...

...The estrangement among the Allies that followed Yalta shifted, with the end of the European war, into an unmistakable detente...

...The chief product of that mission was Western recognition of Stalin's puppet government in Warsaw after a few cosmetic changes...

...Demonstrating that the three leaders were apt at deceiving each other, however, is not in itself proof that they were trying to sacrifice peace to "deliberate discord...

...For the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so vivid it left no room for any doubt about the dangers of another war...

...that is how the Cold War started...

...He condemns as "wanton murder" the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and cites with indignation those men of high rank who thought of brandishing the weapon at the Russians...

...Thus Stalin professed concern for civil liberties in Poland, though he was bent on destroying them...

...At least some readers might want to know...

...Aside from accelerating their own nuclear program, this meant ruthlessly consolidating their power in the areas already in the Soviet orbit and seeking to extend their influence where the lines had not yet been clearly drawn...

...Rakosi explained to a closed meeting of high Party officials that the Anglo-American rivalry would permit gradual growth of the Soviet orbit, but that precipitate action had to be avoided lest the capitalists come back together again...

...If a speech by the Stalinist boss of Hungary, Matyas Rakosi, in May 1945, is any indication, the Soviet Union believed in expansion without risks...