Diplomacy in the '40s
Lukacs, John
Diplomacy in the '40s After Victory: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and the Making of the Peace,, by William L. Neumann. Harper & Row. 212 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by John Lukacs For many years...
...The triumph of Russia at the expense of Germany could not be avoided, and perhaps it should not have been avoided: but it was within the power of the Western Allies to set reasonable limits to Russian expansion in 1945 and to contribute thereby to a constructive settlement in Europe...
...This re-thinking ought not to be only the academic exercise of professional historians, Neumann's book should contribute to the process...
...In the present book he turns his attention principally to Europe, to furnish his readers with a survey of the war aims and of the wartime diplomacy of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin...
...One need not be a perfectionist to recognize that they could have done better, and that Roosevelt and American statesmanship in general must share a large portion of the blame for these failures...
...Their criticisms, while not devoid of substance, have been generally one-sided and insufficient in their argumentation...
...Reviewed by John Lukacs For many years now, William L. Neumann has been a diligent and thoughtful critic of American foreign policy...
...He thought that he could exercise his peculiarly American domestic political talents in world diplomacy, but this was a fallacy...
...This did not happen...
...Indeed, the most interesting and meaningful divergences among these three leaders were perhaps not those between Churchill and Stalin or between Roosevelt and Stalin, but between Roosevelt and Churchill, even though these seldom were allowed to emerge openly...
...The history of Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy remains not so much to be written as it remains to be re-thought by Americans...
...His main contribution has been his enlightening and unorthodox treatment of American relations with Japan...
...This is an important portion of the history of the Twentieth Century, since the origins of the cold war were effectively latent in some of these wartime arrangements...
...To meditate upon these failures is not merely academic speculation: their consequences abide with us today...
...Moreover, the division of Europe, which was the principal source and which remains to a great extent the principal condition of the cold war, sprang directly from certain arrangements made by these statesmen during World War II...
...There can be no question that, despite his enormous prestige and influence, Roosevelt was the least knowledgeable and the most superficially equipped statesman in international affairs among the three...
...The characters of the three leaders, especially during the war, may be seen from various angles, in many different lights, including that of paradox...
...Stalin, the leader of world Communism who by the end of the war extended the domains and the influence of the Soviet empire over large portions of Europe, was principally a national chieftain, motivated by a narrow but powerful sense of Soviet patriotism...
...Roosevelt, the self-professed idealist and internationalist, was by no means impervious to American strategic and global considerations...
...After Victory is admittedly not more than an intelligent survey, and there are minor errors in the text, but in comparison to Neumann's general purpose and to the exposition of his thesis, these are insignificant...
...It is refreshing to see Neumann develop his moderately revisionist thesis with much more judiciousness and on a higher moral and historical level...
...Until recently the principal critics of Allied diplomacy have been the "revisionist" historians, in reality German-ophile polemicists among the so-called "conservative" intellectuals in this country...
...Diplomacy in the '40s After Victory: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and the Making of the Peace,, by William L. Neumann...
...indeed, he was one of the great American empire-builders of this century...
...Churchill, the traditional patriot par excellence, felt it necessary to subordinate almost everything to the maintenance of American good will for Britain, whereby he effectively contributed to the liquidation of the British Empire...
...On the other hand Hitler's character made any kind of peace or armistice arrangement with Germany virtually impossible...
...It is true that the Unconditional Surrender formula was a shortsighted and shallow one...
Vol. 31 • December 1967 • No. 12
