THE PEACEMAKERS AT POTSDAM
Crawford, Kenneth
The Peacemakers At Potsdam By KENNETH CRAWFORD Washington, D. C. THE big show is in Potsdam. There President Truman. Prime Minister Churchill, and Generalissimo Stalin are holding the peace...
...It is understandable why some members of the Senate proclaim the charter as the world's only hope of peace and urge Senate ratification as the most momentous step man has taken since the discovery of fire...
...But Holland, Belgium, and other nations overrun by the Nazis will get a share commensurate with the damage they suffered at the hands of the Nazis...
...potential world war...
...Yet Russia will want large pieces of Manchuria and other Japanese-held territory when this war is over...
...They defend American tolerance of it on the ground that there is no alternative save war with Russia, which they regard as an unthinkable prospect...
...The alternative to unanimity is war or international chaos...
...The whole thing, from Tito's adventurings to the trial of Polish underground leaders for the crime of being Polish patriots, has been a cruel hoax...
...Prime Minister Churchill, and Generalissimo Stalin are holding the peace conference—drawing the new maps ol Europe and Asia, creating new governments, designing the not-very-brave new world...
...As for reparations, a point system under which every known slave's labor will count for so many points and every manufactured item and commodity for so many has been worked out...
...A general tendency to transpose the order of importance of these 2 events is a little puzzling...
...And there will be questions of control of strategic places like the Dardanelles, which Russia wants to take from Turkey by the device of joint responsibility with Turkey, and like Tangier, where Russia wants a voice in international control...
...It is less understandable why serious publications underwrite this appraisal...
...A final agreement on this may be one of the principal accomplishments of the Potsdam conference...
...PLANS for completion of the Pacific war and of territorial arrangements in the Orient when it is over also will come up at Potsdam...
...But the oratory and the mockery won't alter the facts and the salient fact of the moment is that the Big 3 are starting to try to get along at a place close to Berlin...
...This revolution is new enough to have zealous adherents all over the world—as the French revolution once did and the American revolution...
...For the charter and the organization it creates are only new crepe paper window dressing for a store that sells the same old goods—domination of weak nations by strong nations...
...This will make it difficult for President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill to get along, as they must, with Generalissimo Stalin...
...rivalry between the big dominant nations...
...Russia is far and away the biggest and most aggressive of the Big 3. But the new Russia is something else too...
...The question of slave labor is another poser for the Potsdam meeting...
...A MATTER of transcendent importance in Germany is the final disposition of German scientific knowledge and skill, particularly in the military field...
...England, too, wants peace and with it restoration of her old empire, including strategic strongholds like Singapore and exploitable territory like India but nothing new...
...It is only the Communists, their open-eyed fellow travelers, the faint hearted who fear the propaganda power these elements wield and the vague political three-quarters wits who can't get over the habit of thinking of Communism as synonymous with progress who are really happy about the trend of events in Europe...
...President Truman and his advisers fall in none of these categories...
...Total reparations will be reckoned in these points and each wf the various Allies will be awarded a share...
...Here members of the United States Senate are going through the motions of debating the question whether to ratify the United Nations charter drawn up at San Francisco...
...Things have been no better in Berlin and Vienna...
...THIS world Communist cult, by Lenin out of Catherine the Great, is an important force supporting the Russian entourage at Potsdam...
...Experience with the new managers of Imperial Russia, particularly since Yalta, indicates that their word is about as good as the word of their minions abroad...
...There was to have been joint responsibility between Russia and the Western Allies in Rou-mania, Bulgaria, and Hungary but the Anglo-American missions in these countries have been little more than prisoners of the Russians...
...The one that comes to the table with the cleanest hands is the U.S.A...
...In addition it wants some bases in the Pacific to protect itself from another Pearl Harbor, access to certain raw materials like Middle Eastern oil and Malayan tin...
...In addition to these general matters, there will be specific territorial disputes to settle, as in Fiume...
...The question is how to keep control over German industry—how to keep it neutralized as a military potential—without at the same time preventing it from turning out peacetime products to supply its own people and to pay reparations...
...There may never be another...
...Thus the imperial expansion of Russia, and the incidental subjugation of people in the way of the imperial roller, becomes a sacred cause to the Russian revolutionists, particularly to those who are not Russian and who happen to be fortunate enough to live outside Russia and its sphere of expansion...
...There is, in fact, some foundation for the hope that Truman will use America's bargaining stock with a tougher kind of shrewdness than did President Roosevelt...
...These leaders know that a Communist's word can't be trusted on a stack of Das Kapitals...
...The third at the table is Soviet Eussia, the old Russian empire under new and vigorous management, flushed with-success on the battlefield, industrially and socially backward compared with its Western allies, but on the make for industrialized territory along her western frontiers and for outlets through surrounding seas...
...The Western Allies will try to make good on the Yalta promises of free elections and self-rule...
...And the great powers, for their part, are formally expressing the hope that they will be able to get along among themselves...
...There will be no more than a handful of protest votes against—perhaps none at all...
...With her own people demanding the costly security of the Beveridge Plan, England can't afford to be quite as generous as the U.S.A...
...It is highly doubtful whether all of the Allies will ever be given a chance to review the decisions made here by the Big 3. From now on, and for the duration of the foreseeable future, the world is to be run by the Big 3 for better or for worse...
...They will go no further in this direction than they consider necessary to avoid a head-on collision...
...UNDER the proposed United Nations arrangement there is no room for disagreement among the great powers about any major question...
...They realize that it is retrogressive, not progressive, in world terms...
...The problems of Austria and, for that matter, of all the nations taken over by Russia with American and British participation, in formula if not in fact, will be somewhat the same as those of Germany...
...In any case, Potsdam is the peace conference...
...The public has not yet been told how far along German scientists were with advanced military devices or whether these devices fell into Russian, British, or American hands...
...The second bargainer is England, seat of British imperialism and historic cradle of modern political liberty...
...No decision in this regard was announced after Yalta, however, and it is doubtful whether a final decision was made there...
...So far, Russia has done nothing to help the Western Allies here, even to the extent of lending air fields...
...FEW informed people in Washington, whatever their political predilections, any longer cherish any delusions about Russia's expansion westward...
...For the moment they have written off Eastern Europe...
...However, some Senators who have talked with him about the problems of Europe have been disappointed to find him over-optimistic bj their lights...
...Who are these 3 powers that must get along...
...Truman also will try to bind Russia, Britain, and France to accept uniform policies regarding fraternization and other such matters in the hope of preventing rivalry between the 4 powers for German favor...
...There is a grim realism about this that mocks most of the fine oratory...
...The feeling in Washington seems to be that opposition would be only academic—that Russia already is making away with the workers it wants from Eastern Germany and other satellite territory under cover of an information black-out...
...In accepting this charter, the small nations are formally throwing themselves on the mercy of the great powers...
...Yet this may prove, in the long run, the question on which the future of the world turns...
...This is seldom discussed but it is much thought about...
...Available evidence points strongly toward a tentative agreement to split Germany into 4 or more pieces and keep it thus divided...
...Potsdam may produce a whole new set of encouraging Russian promises but, if so, it will inevitably produce a whole new set of discouraging welch ings...
...Investigators have found the German industrial potential and therefor Germans' war-making potential much less impaired than once supposed...
...In most cases, Russia probably will have its way...
...Anybody who wants to know what is going on in the world these next few weeks, and what will go on in years to come, will do well to watch Potsdam instead of Washington...
...Russia, of coarse, will get the larger slice of this boodle...
...Apparently Truman will follow Roosevelt's lead in permitting Russia to enslave a large number of Germans for an indefinite period even though every civilized consideration argues against it...
...They realize that they are appeasing Russia as the British and French once appeased Germany...
...The answer is foregone...
...But they are hopeful that even the Poles, by their own heroic stubbornness, may yet become the masters of their own destiny...
...But how far they will get is problematical...
...It will be surprising if Truman does not come off with satisfactory guarantees in this field in view of the magnitude of Russia's stake here...
...They will try to find diplomatic policies capable of hedging in the colossus of the East and of supporting the cause of liberty and independence in Western Europe...
...Just how difficult their task is can be appreciated best by American trade union leaders who have tried to cope with their Communist membership...
...What we have here in Washington is only a side-show...
...These zealots believe Soviet rule brings a new and suaerior kind of freedom to the masses—an economic freedom on which all other freedoms flourish, even though they seem to be destroyed...
...Indeed, a large part of the Anglo-American choi'e at Potsdam will be to re-negotiate agreements made at Teheran, Cairo, and Yalta but subsequently defaulted by the Russians...
...Unless leaders of the 3 nations that own the big guns can settle some of the world's most pressing problems at Potsdam, unless they can get along as peaceful bargainers, the San Francisco charter isn't worth the paper it is written on and everything said about it on the floor of the Senate is so much wind wasted...
...Truman and Churchill will do well if they come off with a compromise giving Russia a share in control of the straits at the Western outlet of the Dardanelles...
...One of the first problems Truman must attack at Potsdam is a formula for Allied treatment of defeated Germany...
...The freedom promised peoples of the Balkan, Baltic, and Eastern European countries has turned out to be the freedom of the slave...
...The role of the United Nations organization will be to sit by and nod approval at convenient intervals...
...and world markets for enough of its products to keef) its national plant operating and its workers employed...
...Russia, in the cause of assuring itself "friendly neighbors," will hold out for domination through stooges...
...It sincerely wants to live and let live in peace...
...Stalin will make cynical use of its energies in the Western world to applaud what he wants and to condemn all else as resurgent fascism...
...It was proposed at Yalta that this be accomplished by joint Allied supervision over industry and by permanent political partition of the country...
...It is the scene of the most recent of the world's great political revolutions...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 30
