David Kennedy, Andrew Roberts and Stephen Kotkin Discuss the Big Three of the 20th Century

welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson in this episode we recorded a live show at the hoover institution's hauck auditorium dedicating the show to franklin delano roosevelt winston leonard spencer churchill and joseph visarianovic jugashvili better known as joseph stalin the big

three

the leaders who crushed nazi germany at the beginning of world war ii what roosevelt churchill and stalin wanted what national interests each man pursued and what these

three

men do with each other consider this, for example, this is churchill writing about franklin roosevelt in 1945 he was the best American friend we've ever known, and yet just a year earlier one of Churchill's aides wrote that quote privately: Winston is very bitter about Roosevelt and isn't so sure he really likes FDR talking about the three greats

david

kennedy

professor emeritus of history at stanford David is the author of Freedom from Fear, The American People in Depression and War, a classic work in which the central figure is, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, Andrew Roberts, a historian of the Hoover Institution and author of Churchill Walking with Destiny, published last year unanimously. excellent reviews and

stephen

cotkin, a historian at princeton and again at the hoover institution,

stephen

is the author of stalin's paradoxes of power and stalin waiting for hitler these are the first two volumes of his projected three-volume work on joseph stalin and his times, three of the most accomplished historians of our day speaking of three of the most important figures of the

20th

century

rare knowledge now June 21, 1941 in violation of the Molotov Pact Ribbontrop hitler launches operation barbarossa named after the german emperor medieval that invades the Soviet Union with about 4 million soldiers it is in response to this Barbarian operation that the Great Alliance arises the alliance between Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union led by the Big Three Great Britain immediately signs a treaty of mutual aid with the soviet union president roosevelt and prime minister churchill meet in canada issue a declaration of war threatens the atlantic charter that stalin still in moscow immediately approves although the united states will not enter the war until the japanese attack pearl harbor and three days after hitler declares war on the united states in december 1941 president roosevelt joins prime minister churchill and prime minister stalin in an exchange of cables that will continue throughout the war what they wanted when they responded to the barbaric operation when the big three they became the big three what each man wanted what national interests he intended to pursue

andrew

roberts

writing about churchill the british empire was his creed churchill's interest so

andrew

had to preserve the empire well first of all of course it was survival only national survival 11 months had passed under the threat of invasion of Germany from the time of the Dunkirk retreat onwards and so it was just a case of exhale that Hitler had unleashed this massive invasion, the largest invasion in the history of mankind, three million men, 160 divisions or so across Russia, and that allowed him to realize that, of course, Heckler was in a two-man situation. war on the front and at least Britain, at least in the short term, was going to survive as an independent entity.

Then, in the long run, he wanted to make sure the Russians stayed in the war as long as possible and bled Germany dry. So he wanted to ensure that the Americans, when they finally entered the war in December 1941, were guided toward a Mediterranean strategy rather than a too-early cross-Channel attack. We will get to the Mediterranean strategy in a moment. David Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. He may have reasoned that Operation Barbara Rose presented him with an opportunity to consolidate the tenuous logic of his short war strategy. We'll ask you again, David, at a time when the United States is at war, what the objectives of FDAR are, but right now the operation. barbara rose the united states is not at war what does the president want?

Well, I think I can sum it up most easily with reference to a familiar but often misunderstood phrase that Roosevelt would have deeply understood from the pen of Woodrow Wilson in his war speech in April. 6 1917 April 2, 1917 when he said that we seek to make the world safe for democracy, in particular he did not say that we seek to make the world democratic but to create an international environment where those societies that had already organically established democratic practices and institutions could survive without becoming heavily militarized and disciplined in the way that a militarized society had to be, so I think at the highest principled level that was Roosevelt's goal, okay, Stephen, I want to know Roosevelt's war goal.

Stalin and the most loved ones in a moment, but first briefly if you want. How is it possible that Stalin took a nap when Hitler betrays him and invades with almost four million men? So Stalin was ready for war. The Soviet Union actually had the largest army in the world. It had the largest tank farm. He had the biggest plane. Park, already had gigantic forces, not including those he could still summon. Hitler, of course, had arranged this huge force along the border with Stalin. They had a new border because of that Hitler and Stalin pact, but German misinformation made Stalin believe that Hitler would not actually attack, he was just gathering troops to blackmail Stalin.

He wanted to get concessions from Stalin in Ukraine and other territories without having to fight, so Stalin was sitting in his office waiting for an ultimatum, waiting to attack. prolonging the negotiations hoping that if he could prolong the negotiations beyond a certain date he could be safe for another year while continuing his military buildup instead of the ultimatum which was a ruse planted, as I said, by German disinformation that misled the majority of Instead of the world's intelligence services being attacked at the time of the attack, Stalin was still waiting for the ultimatum, which is one of the reasons why he did not give the order to counterattack immediately.

Okay, Stalin, what are Stalin's war goals? when you recognize what is happening, what your war objectives are, well yes, as it was for the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union's main war objective is survival, survival, no one had ever seen an invasion force like it is before. Thousands, more than three thousand modern tanks, motorized infantry right behind the tanks. a huge attacking air force combined ground and air operations. It was impressive what the Nazis invaded and from June 22, 1941 until December 1941 it was not clear that the Soviet Union was going to survive once survival was possible and then its war.

The objectives changed to aggrandizement, he wanted to recover all the territories they had lost in the revolution and the civil war, the Baltic states, Poland, part of Romania known as Bessarabia and, of course, in the Far East, those territories lost to Japan in previous wars, so the aggrandizement of survival and then like any good communist who projects his power to all corners of the earth tehran churchill and roosevelt meet 11 times during the war churchill and stalin meet three but the big three They meet only twice The first meeting is the Tehran conference which lasts from November 28 to December 1, 1943, when the big three meet in Tehran, the military situation, the Americans and the Americans are now at war , the Americans, the British, and their Western allies have recaptured North Africa, liberated Sicily, and begun the invasion of Italy in the east. the soviets have become their big counteroffensive and have forced the nazis back to a line that goes roughly from leningrad leningrad is still under siege but the line goes roughly through leningrad smolensk and then into the deepest part

david

i told him i I would give this a second chance Now the United States is at war What is Roosevelt thinking What are his war goals now that he is at war? well, no, no, no, no, renounce the high general principle of making a safe world for democracy, an open world, non-mercantilist, non-imperialist, etc.

In keeping that focused but at what we might call a tactical level, Roosevelt's goal is to put the American weight in the balance to ensure the defeat of Germany and Japan at the lowest possible cost to the United States. Well, now we come to this Mediterranean. strategy it will take me just a moment to set this up but then i will reveal to you three the central strategic question in tehran how and when the western allies would open a front in western europe to relieve pressure on the soviets in the east led by general george marshall the planners US military insists on devoting all resources to a cross-Channel invasion Churchill had other ideas for months Lobbied the Americans for an operation in the Eastern Mediterranean perhaps advancing through Italy perhaps landing near Trieste to advance through from the balkans to vienna maybe advance to turkey andrew

roberts

will now defend these crazy plans well first of all you have to see germany's first policy that was adopted from the beginning in its proper context i think it is one of the great statesmanship moments of the

20th

century

, when Roosevelt and the United States team up with the British to go for Germany first, it's Klaus' victim that you do, you're strong, the stronger your opponent is, so Europe gets about 70 percent of American resources.

While the Japanese conflict in the Pacific accounts for about 30 percent, then what Marshall wanted to do as early as the fall of 1942 was to cross the Channel and attack Germany that way before winning the Battle of the Atlantic in August 1943 and also, crucially, before we won the war in the air and that would have been disastrous, we would have ended up with another, um, another Dunkirk evacuation on our hands, so what, um, general brooke, uh, the boss of the imperial staff and winston? What Churchill did in many of those meetings that you talked about was to persuade the Americans to adopt the Mediterranean strategy that had been very successful at the time of the fall of Rome on June 5, 1944, and the next day they found themselves the channel in the successful operation, but I also want you to be aware that franklin roosevelt is looking more and more doubtful as you talk absolutely not, I assume, I will accept it, um, I would expect nothing less, in fact, um, but, um, when it comes to going. to capture Vienna and also in his enormous opposition to the anvil attack in the south of France which also took place in Churchill's opposition which also took place in August 1944 what Churchill was trying to do by then was to keep most of possible of Eastern Europe into the Western bloc, the Western sphere, and prevent it from falling under the Soviet wasteland, but the problem was that the Americans not only, of course, rightly wanted the war to end as soon as possible, but, secondly, the actual strategy and tactics were not right, they were not impossible, you had to get through something called the Ljubljana gap, which is not a gap, and the Germans proved time and again in the Italian campaign to be absolutely excellent at defense and counterattack. -attack when I was on my first day at university in Cambridge, my don told me that I never tried to use the word inevitable in history, he said that you should never use the word inevitable in history, except in the German counterattack, but you know ,uh.

In Churchill's memoirs, I think in volume four, you'll know the quote better than I do. He tells us his state of mind at the time he found out about the attack on Pearl Harbor and says something like, then, the United States was in the war. in the neck and in death uh england was saved i went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and the grateful now that's not especially word for word well done but it's a misleading statement because what he actually did wasn't exactly go to bed and sleep the savior's dream and fortunately he came to washington dc to ensure that the americans were not going to reverse germany's first strategy and pursue a war of revenge against the japanese in the pacific and abandon europe first or germany by your strategy now you quickly discover when you arrive that that's not going to happen gentlemen I return you to tehran where franklin roosevelt does something amazing to me we have this debate between churchill and the british general staff and the american military planners roosevelt stay away from him, But now in Tehran he turns to Joseph Stalin and says: What do you think let Joseph Stalin, in fact, cast the deciding vote? what were you doing? what is roosevelt doing there? intelligence will simply take a step back, surely roosevelt had promisedto the Russians a second front in 1942 and that we, the West would set up a second front before the end of 42.

Quite irresponsibly, yes, I thought it was stupid to say because it was impossible to execute and fulfill exactly that promise. We did not have the strength to be of a size that would have had any consequential effect, but Stalin is continually repeatedly begging the West to open a front on the western side of Europe. that would take at least 40 German divisions out of the eastern front, which was a charnel house, so Roosevelt goes to Tehran hoping that they will have to appease Stalin once again about the fact that there is still no second front open at the end of 1943 and just before him. arrives in tehran there is an intelligence report coming from john dean, the military attaché at the moscow embassy, ​​reporting that perhaps the russians are no longer interested in a second western front because they now have the advantage on the eastern front and If the West simply delays the Second Front long enough for the Red Army to advance deep into Western Europe, Roosevelt fears in Tehran that perhaps the Russians have lost interest in the Western Allies and Stalin will align with Churchill and encourage more so than the US military.

The planners call peripheral pecking that is attacking in the Mediterranean basin in North Africa and so on, but places that really had no strategic consequences when it came to the final defeat of Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin, what do you think of this dispute between these two American intelligence services? He is not always correct in his assessments of Soviet motivations or even Soviet capabilities, so the reason Roosevelt promised Stalin the second front was because he did not promise to accept the pre-June 1941 Soviet borders, which They involved the Soviet annexation of countries that had been independent. before the war and so, instead of accepting Stalin's territorial aggrandizement, Roosevelt felt he had a promise of something and the second front that some of Roosevelt's military advisors supported, Stalin had won the battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43, so when the people showed up in Tehran November first day of December 1943 the momentum of the German offensive had ended however the Germans still had a gigantic occupation army in Soviet territory and they were not giving up Stalin he still felt at this point that the second front was necessary for him, I don't know.

I think Dean, the military attaché, was right. It was also a matter of promises made. he or could trust them, he was still doing most of the fighting against Stalin when the invasion of Normandy occurred, the landings in June 1944, there were approximately 30 German divisions deployed in the west and there were over 220 German divisions still deployed on Soviet territory and that is June 1944 let alone November 1943. So I needed the relief of the second front and I was happy for the promise but of course the promise was not fulfilled once again, the second front was delayed, so the central strategic question was decided against and for Churchill. of the American planners and we have what we now know as an operation, since the invasion of Normandy takes place in 44 Overlord, second point, if I may, in Tehran, by which I mean, I tend to think of Yalta as the place where Europe is divided.

The status of Europe in the postwar period is

discuss

ed. David Kennedy corrected me a couple of weeks ago and said no, no, there was a lot of

discuss

ion in Tehran and there were important concessions or at least recognitions of reality in Tehran and, in particular, Roosevelt has already recognized that. that the soviets are going to be in possession of poland now roosevelt something i would like to ask andrew to respond to in a moment the personal dynamics here in tehran roosevelt stays in the soviet embassy rejects churchill's efforts to have one a- a meeting between roosevelt and churchill but he has individual meetings with stalin and here are the official notes about one of those meetings that takes place between franklin roosevelt and joseph stalin on december 1 the president told marshall stalin that he would hold an election in 1944 in the that there were between six and seven million Americans of Polish origin in the United States and, as a practical man, he did not wish to lose their vote, said that he personally agreed with Marshall Stalin's views on Poland, he hoped, however, that the marshal understood that for political reasons he could not participate in any decision about Poland here in Tehran, the president went on to say that there were several people of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian origin in the United States and added jokingly added jokingly This is in the official record , not in the memoirs of some right-wing nut who jokingly added that when the Soviet armies reoccupied these areas, he had no intention of going to war with the Soviet Union at this point.

Close quote from Stephen Cotkin, what would be that remarkable explanation of Franklin Roosevelt to Joseph Stalin? How would that have affected Joseph Stalin's calculations? Roosevelt was cultivating Stalin. He was under the illusion that he needed to earn Stalin's trust rather than Stalin's respect. Therefore, he blatantly attempted to make derogatory references to Churchill to curry favor with Stalin. I don't think this affected the overall strategy much because the events on the ground were very decisive, but it was a curious moment when Stalin was evaluating them and, like anyone trained in Marxism-Leninism, he was looking for contradictions and tensions. between the imperialists in order to exploit any difference between Churchill and Roosevelt, he already had good secret information about their positions from his agents and he also had an intuition that was quite sophisticated, he captivated them while pitting them against each other, I'm not Sure, though, how much that mattered in the end and if Roosevelt's mistake in trying to gain Stalin's trust had been better, it would have led to a different result if, for example, he hadn't made David Roosevelt under the illusion that he is cotkins word there and then he made a mistake but it made no difference you didn't say this so it may be a little off but there is a story that has been around for over 70 years where Roosevelt naively tried establish a personal relationship.

With Stalin I called him Uncle Joe and did all kinds of things just to be friendly with him, thinking that based on his personal charm I could win Stalin over to be a good partner in the family of nations, I never believed that. history uh I don't think there's much merit to it and let's go back to the periphery choosing the British strategy versus the American grand strategy whose code name was bolero, which was meant to have a staged buildup in the British Isles and then eventually an invasion across from the channel of the event we know as d-day, but d-day occurs in June 1944, it was originally scheduled for July 1, 1943 and one of the reasons it was delayed was due to peripheral pecking in the Mediterranean .

So when Dwight Eisenhower learned of the decision to invade North Africa in 1942, he said in his diary that this is the darkest day in the history of our nation because we are making a huge strategic mistake by putting resources into this theater that It really doesn't. It has no material consequence for the outcome of the world or the church, yes, and then, and then the next thing Eisenhower said in that diary entry, he said that we must never lose sight of the fact that the great prize that we seek is to keep eight million Russians in the war to know where the true military weight of the opposition to the Germans was, so it was not with the British, but with the Russians.

Now hold on, which is an argument for four out of every five Germans who are dead in the war are killed by the Soviets the Soviets pay a price of 20 million dead not wounded but 20 million dead during the war 25 million dead during the war and then the argument would be that if Roosevelt is trying to play Stalin, he actually played him. pretty good, heh heh, he made the soviets okay, so there's that argument, but on the other hand, here he is approaching joseph stalin and saying, "you understand, of course, that i have political limitations, but could you help me here by simply sinking Poland?" the bus in Tehran happened at least according to the official notes Poland was under the bus this pool is already in the world now now Churchill is fine unfortunately Poland got a raw deal being located between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, it would have would have been better if Poland had been located, for example, on the west coast of the United States, what is the title of Norman Davies' book?

The devil's playground. Andrew has heard David use the term pecking periphery a dozen times and can no longer contain himself. Wow first, the US military was not there. ready in 1942 or early 1943 to cross the channel and take on what was still the best army in the world. It is true and it can be seen that from the wasted resources he did not waste resources in the slightest, he helped capture a quarter of a million axes. troops who surrendered in Tripoli in May 1943, then were able to take 18 divisions out of France, by the time the big blow was going to cross the channel into Italy, it was a uh, it was nothing like The selection of the periphery was bloodying the American army , yes, but not in such a negative way that he could not cross D-Day with 156,000 men and deliver a final blow to the Germans.

This wouldn't have been possible until he had had some defeats like the Kazareen Pass and so on, he also had a problem of course, Italy was a terrible place to fight, but he was taking out another of the Axis powers in September anyway. The wrong thing would have been to have taken the Ljubljana breach route because, but that depends entirely on political strategy, of course, it would have been fantastic, but ultimately the generals like Marshall and Eisenhower were right not to go the Churchillian route, so US Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King was in disgusting Anglophobe, yes, but he said in a discussion in July 1942 that Winston Churchill would invade Europe only behind a band of Scottish pipes.

Well, of course, Churchill had commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in the First World War. so I knew what good fighters they were, very good guys, the problem was that the problem with 1942 was that the British would have had to fight when the Americans decided they would want a second invasion of the front through France in 1942, it was the army British land that would have to do most of the fighting at that time in the war that was not going to happen and when we attempted an attack, certainly a small attack, but more than five thousand Canadian men in August 1942 we lost 3500 dead and wounded yalta la Second and final meeting of the Big Three takes place in Yalta from February 4 to 11, 1945.

The leaders meet in a labyrinthine villa that Nicholas II had built overlooking the Black Sea. The military situation when the United States meets in the west. the united kingdom and its allies have liberated all of france and belgium and are preparing to cross the rhine into the heart of germany they will encounter resistance the battle of the squirrels will take place but they are still preparing to cross into the heart of germany in the east The Red Army has already driven the Germans out of the Soviet Union and across Poland and while the big three gather, the Red Army is only 50 miles from Berlin.

Among the Yalta agreements, Roosevelt wins Stalin's commitment to participate in the United Nations. Stalin promises to enter the war against Japan a few months after Germany's defeat and the leaders agreed to divide Germany into occupation zones but perhaps the main topic of discussion in Yalta is the unluckiest country in the world Poland historian Christopher Andrew cites having already granted soviet rule over poland in tehran roosevelt and churchill make belated attempt to secure restoration of polish democracy and a guarantee of free elections andrew roberts described churchill's efforts well, they were naive um you got over it, of course they had the theirs to defend their money, they were naive in the best way possible, as Steven has pointed out, they know they have over a million Red Army soldiers in Poland at the time, the best Churchill and indeed FDR could do is Have hope.

For better, the other things you mentioned they wanted, such as the organization of the United Nations and the declaration of war against Japan by Russia three months later, were both considered very important and so the best thing they could do was to maintain their Let's cross our fingers and hope for the best and when Stalin made his promises about the integrity and independence of Poland, which he did again and again at Yalta, in this case they had to naively believe him and, of course,I was lying through my teeth. naïve, very, very, David, so I'm going to keep pressing this David because I'm going to go back to what Stephen said about the facts on the ground.

It is not only a Marxist phrase, it is a question of realism and, to repeat it, Poland was already doing well. In fact, under the bus, I would say that behind the back wheels of the bus, by the time all of these events unfold well, there is really little in practice that the Western allies, the British and the Americans, could have done at that time. Yalta and these agreements are agreements on paper, verbal agreements that are not worth it, oral agreements are not worth the paper on which they are not written and Admiral Leahy Roosevelt's chief of staff said as they left Yalta, he said Mr.

President with the things we don't agree with here these agreements are so elastic that they can be stretched to the end the russians can stretch them from the altar to washington d.c without breaking the agreement and roosevelt said: I know, bill, I know, but it's the best thing I can do for Poland at the moment. Well, then what happens is that they put pressure on Stalin and Stalin agrees to reorganize the arrangements of the Lublin government. They have set up a communist government and over the next few weeks after Ulta, they effectively expand membership, but retain communist control of Poland, so they get essentially nothing from Churchill and Roosevelt gets essentially nothing.

The other aspect of the high agreement there is a long communiqué that talks about the united nations and poland and so on, but in the middle of this communiqué there is something called the declaration on liberated europe and let me tell you a couple of excerpts the establishment of order in Europe and the reconstruction of economic life national must be achieved through processes that allow liberated peoples to create democratic institutions of their own choosing restoration, including the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government close quote and that declaration was signed by the three men, in fact, in the Libya Living Palace, I'm pronouncing it wrong, but today in the palace there is a Russian translation with the three signatures of Stephen Cotkin.

Historian Ann Applebaum, the Soviets quoted, thought from the beginning that it was only a matter of time before they and their ideas were popular, so one of the reasons they held elections and there were some free elections in the region, this was after the war, particularly in Hungary. And in East Germany and also in Czechoslovakia very early it is because they thought they would win the elections. close quote Is it conceivable that Joseph Stalin signed the declaration on liberated Europe in good faith that he actually thought would hold elections that would be recognisably democratic? back up just a second before I can answer, you know, every time I ask a question I lose about two years, the focus on Yalta is understandable, but Hitler invaded the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany, unconditional surrender, what were the The terms offered and the fact that the Nazi regime and Vermont didn't give up meant that someone had to get all the way to Central Europe because of Hitler's invasion, so Stalin didn't do that, but he was able to take advantage of it.

I know Chamberlain in 1938, when his critics were saying to stop appeasing Hitler, make a deal with Stalin, form an alliance and go to war and defeat Hitler, as we know, Chamberlain appeased Hitler returned from Munich having reported Czechoslovakia without compensation to a country that doesn't know Hitler, but Chamberlain wrote to one of his sisters and said, "You know, if I make a deal with Stalin and form a military alliance and we go to war and defeat Hitler, "How can I get the communists out of central Europe?" Chamberlain wasn't a very effective leader and he made a lot of mistakes, but that was the point and if you were going to go to war against Hitler you would end up with Stalin in much of Europe, so it's 1938, as opposed to February 1945.

Now Let's fast forward to 1945 to answer your question. There was debate in both the American and British delegations about how to characterize the Soviet regime and how to characterize Stalin personally. Many people thought that he was no longer a communist. He had evolved more nationalist than communist. This was the argument that Riben Trump had made to Hitler in 1939 to get Hitler to sign the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Every time there was some nationalist outbreak in the Soviet Union, Ribbon Trump would run up to Hitler and say, "Look." They are no longer really Judeo-Bolsheviks, they are actually nationalists. Hitler did not believe it, but many people in the Nazi regime did believe it and many people within the American and British delegations in Yalta also wondered about this question because if he was a nationalist if he were just another tsar like the tsars in the past maybe we could make deals with him and maybe the post-war could be managed remember that Stalin captivated them he is very charming when he wants to be he is a bloodthirsty and cruel tyrant who will kill you for nothing in cold blood but he can also activate the charm and that is why They found him a quite interesting person face to face and they also asked Stalin for three things and he granted them one of them and they looked at each other and said, Did Stalin just make a concession?

His reputation is that he murders everyone he disagrees with and here he is making a concession, so they were also delighted by the fact that he made occasional concessions, which meant that they would not abandon the negotiation process with him. So what alternative did they have? It was Stalin who was fighting the German ground army and it was Stalin who was expected to be a nationalist, rather than a communist, to make more concessions and potentially honor the agreement, so yeah, it seemed. Since Stalin made these promises in good faith, let us remember Stalin's motivation. His country is destroyed because the war took place on its territory.

He had territorial ambitions that still needed to be legalized in the international order, such as reacquiring the Baltic states and territories in the far east. , like southern Sahlin and the Korean islands, wanted help for reconstruction. The land lease was still ongoing at this time and how long would it continue? He would continue in the postwar period, for example, to have tremendous ambitions that required some kind of working relationship with the Americans. especially and with the British and the Americans and the British understood this, so they felt like they had some influence, so Andrew, go ahead, I think it's also worth noting that the two things that, as you say, he gave to FDR namely, the declaration of war against Japan three months after Germany's defeat and the construction of the United Nations were actually going to work in his favor too, in favor of Stalin, he would end up being on the winning side against Japan, as it was of course.

He only needed to do it for a few days, but because of the nuclear bomb, but he still did what he promised and also, of course, especially if the United Nations was going to leave Moscow with the veto and the security council . That was also going to work in Russia's favor. I want to go back to something Stephen mentioned about unconditional surrender in the context of his question about acting in good faith, so let's remember when the unconditional surrender formula was enacted or announced. at the casablanca conference in january 1943 the date is important because roosevelt's decision and roosevelt and churchill are there but it was mainly roosevelt and churchill agreed yes, roosevelt, as I understand it, you can correct me if I'm wrong, churchill was a little surprised a little by this yes, that roosevelt announced that more or less unilaterally and churchill of course exceeded but the moment is important january 1943 there is still no second front and roosevelt has not delivered the last church delivered on the second front and they are about to announce that there will not be a second front in all of 1943 because they are going to redeploy the North African force to invade Italy, which again is not a strategically important place as far as Stalin is concerned and it is in that context in that context that the unconditional surrender formula is announced and one way to read that and understand what was happening is that this is the consul, a consolation prize for no second front, we will declare that there will be no unconditional surrender as a result of this war and then what will happen . the allies the western allies invade sicily and proceed to negotiate a conditional surrender by the italian government so let's talk in bad faith there's plenty to go around ok i want to go back for a moment to the declaration on liberated europe and the question What Stephen has just asked us is what Stalin is up to: is he a nationalist or a communist?

And let's go back to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who after all are leaders of democracies and what they say to their own people is very important. After Yalta Roosevelt returns home and delivers a speech to a joint session of Congress portraying that the agreement is being carried out in good faith, I am convinced that the agreement on Poland, under the circumstances, includes a small The room for maneuver clause is the most hopeful agreement possible for a free, independent and prosperous Polish state. That's Roosevelt. He comes to you. This will take a moment to set up, but then I'll release it before the high conference time the polls had. suffered an invasion by the red army in 1940, an invasion and occupation from 1939 to 1941, the forced deportation of one and a half million poles to camps in the soviet union, the catin massacres and the horrific episode in which the red army stopped its advance towards warsaw to allow the nazis to put down the warsaw uprising and raise two thirds of the city winston churchill reporting on all of you to the house of commons on february 27, 1945 the polls will be free as we do in great britain and the united states and france are free or are they going to become a mere projection of the soviet state forced to adopt a communist or totalitarian system the most solemn declarations have been made by marshal stalin and the soviet union that the sovereign independence of poland must be maintained The impression What brought me from Crimea is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honorable friendship and equality with the Western democracies.

I feel like his word is his bond. I don't know of any government that fulfills its obligations more solidly than the Russian Soviet government close quote Andrew, are you completely happy with that clearly not like me, like I said before, he was naive and you actually have to do it, he really believed it like he says because and we know this because when he returned to um to london to report to the cabinet when i found in 2016 the verbatim accounts of the war cabinet meetings, he was saying exactly the same thing that no, it wasn't about him saying one thing to the cabinets and another partly to parliament and the press. and the public really believed it, but he was also planning something whose name tells us something important: unthinkable operation, yes, which was a counterblow to the Russians in central Europe, yes, it was literally unthinkable, okay, absolutely, the last days of war, spring. 1945 in the west the americans and british are accelerating their advance as they advance towards germany while the german resistance begins to collapse in the east the red army is bogged down as the germans at least in part because they are aware of the brutality of the army red the red army has already committed tens of thousands of violations as it advances it advances through poland romania bulgaria yugoslavia hungary the germans fight fiercely the red army stagnates there is movement in the west and at least a temporary stagnation in the east and opening of the Churchill Season Churchill to Eisenhower March 31, 1945 Why shouldn't we cross the Elbe and move as far east as possible? churchill to roosevelt on april 1st i think that from a political point of view we should march as far east as possible towards germany and that should be berlin within our reach, we should certainly take churchill to eisenhower on april 2nd.

I think it is very important that we shake hands with the Russians as far east as possible now that Churchill just told the Commons a few months earlier that the Russians are standing. to his word and now he says that we must advance them in these objectives, yes, unfortunately, they had already agreed on all these demarcation lines that the European advisory council established much earlier in 1944, in fact, in order to push the um the borders of the free world were as far east as possible um he knew that would involve a clash with the Soviet Union now this had nothing to do with whether the nuclear bomb was going to explode or not, it was simply an attempt to break agreements that had already been signed with the Soviets , he was never a runner, Americans were never going to accept that and, um, and it was, I think, I think he was making those, those statements more with an eye on history than politics oh, really okay, I'm going to do it. , I want to press one last time, this is my last offensive, uh, I'm going to press this, this is my battle against the lumps, my last offensive against you three here in this question.

Okay, so the argumenthe says Poland was already thrown under the bus, the Red Army was where it was, there was nothing anyone could do about it and Roosevelt may have seemed naive, he may have been playing a deep game, whatever, it doesn't matter. the facts on the ground were what mattered and what roosevelt said and what churchill said they seemed to be pleased with whether they carried the cold question of charm and naivety is beside the point, okay maybe, but let me try one on you and the other. I want to try Czechoslovakia, the coup did not take place until 1948 and, writing 20 years later, Eugene Rossdale, a fairly intelligent analyst, says that the failure of the American rendezvous to deter the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 was one of the biggest mistakes serious aspects of our foreign policy since the war close quote now I think you know Igor Lucas in his book on the edge of the cold war in Czechoslovakia the argument is that vigorous diplomacy in Czechoslovakia by the United States would have prevented the coup why not was There is vigorous diplomacy and the argument could be that because FDR is whitewashing Stalin by telling the American people that we have this great alliance and one of the people who really buys it is Harry Truman, who takes a couple of years to find out what really is plotting. against in the Soviets, so the argument would be if Roosevelt had been more realistic in reporting to Congress, if Churchill, if both men had kept their feet on the ground at all times and had not given in to naivety, at least Czechoslovakia could have been saved.

I don't get anything from any of you three about that, it's worth remembering, I think it's worth remembering, although three years before we thought we were going to lose Greece and, largely thanks to Churchill, in his words we caught the ember. from the burning and saving Greece during the Greek civil war in December 1944 to early 1945. um, it wasn't all, it wasn't all, um, it went the Soviet way, David, whoever you quoted about vigorous diplomacy could have prevented , uh, Czechoslovakia, yes, I would. Put the question back to eugene rostow, if you were here among us, what exactly do you mean by vigorous diplomacy?

What were the effective tools that the United States or the West in general had to avoid that outcome if Roosevelt had returned from Yalta and Given that remarkable speech at the joint session of Congress that you mentioned, which he delivered by the way sitting for the first time in his presidency and who made, I think, the only public reference to the 10 pounds of steel braces on his legs, which is why I was sitting, the only public reference to his polio, that I know of, if he had said on that occasion, My fellow Americans, members of Congress, I am here to tell you that the strategy that we have followed throughout this war that is now coming to a successful conclusion has put us in a position where we now have a second adversary that we are going to face. , it's called the Soviet Union, they have been our allies.

They have helped us so far but we are going to keep our troops in Europe and we are going to march another hundred miles east and I hope that you will all support me in this effort. been kicked out of office, I mean that was an absolutely implausible thing to say and what the facts on the ground contradict, even to use your phrase, is that the American grand strategy that I said before was designed to achieve whatever you'd like to say. Let's find victory at the lowest possible cost to the Americans meant that the United States did not have the resources or the political will at that stage of the game to effectively counter the Russian advance into Central and Eastern Europe, it simply was 'No way, neither Britain did, you would have had to deploy the threat of nuclear attack, which would not have worked well at the national level either, okay, we didn't do it, the first nuclear test was not until July 1945, that is, five months later. imagine 1948. well, another impossible scenario, let's be realistic once again about these things, then stalin says elections and roosevelt and churchill say elections, they don't have the same definition of elections, if stalin has elections and doesn't win, he cancels them or remakes them or change the results that are reported a good sovereign country stalin has the idea of ​​a sovereign country that obeys a dictator of the soviet union the roosevelt and churchill have a different vision of what a sovereign country means so stalin signs these agreements that roosevelt and churchill come home and exaggerate because they are politicians in a democracy where we have real elections and then stalin signs these agreements because he can interpret these terms as he sees fit because he is the one who has the troops on the ground and, by the way, when he shows up to reelection the result is predetermined, so it is not Czechoslovakia or Poland those places were tragic in what happened to them, although they were also complicit in their own result, we have to say that to a certain extent because Poland had communists and Czechoslovakia had communists , but the place is East Asia, this is where everything is really the most important and where Roosevelt's strategy is the biggest failure, not in Europe but in East Asia, and we are living with that today and that is why that this is so relevant to us right now, Stalin makes a lot of concessions, he abandons northern Iran, he could have held onto northern Iran, he doesn't support the communists in Greece, he could have supported the communists in Greece and I think they could would have won if he had supported them.

Truman sends him a telegram and tells him not to go below the 38th parallel in Korea and that there are no American troops on the Korean Peninsula and Stalin stops at the line he wrote that Truman asked him Stalin is prepared to invade Japan Hokkaido the main islands and maybe go to honshu which is north of tokyo truman says don't do that and stalin doesn't do it even though he has the strength to do it so when they are with stalin on these various issues he is not one- on the side where stalin it's taking absolutely everything and that's why they want this to work with him because they don't have many options and some things are working, but the china piece is where they ruined everything.

Roosevelt decided on his own that China was a great power and would be one of the great powers after World War II. He called them the four policemen in 1942, when he had a face-to-face with Molotov, who was the Soviet foreign minister. It would be the United Kingdom, the United States. the soviet union and china and he wanted to elevate china the uk churchill wanted to elevate france so we ended up with five veto members on the security council in a deal but china was inserted into that because of roosevelt now in china chiang kai- shek el The nationalist Guoman Dong had a government that controlled between 60 and 80 percent of the territory, depending on how you measure control at the end of the war, and then there was a communist insurgency in the interior.

The agreement was that Stalin would destroy the Chinese communist insurgency in In exchange for the things he wants in East Asia, we would not send troops to China or garrison China with one hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand soldiers because American domestic policy would not do this. So what if Stalin killed the communists? he killed more german communists than hitler, so stalin knew how to kill communists. If we had asked Stalin to end the communist insurgency in China and, therefore, to support Chiang Kai-shek, then we would have been able to avoid the aforementioned loss of China. in October 1949 and remember now that will affect that UN veto seat eventually when we get to the right Nixon Carter years, so we have settled things with Roosevelt elevating China to this position but not getting Stalin to do the same. dirty. job that we could have negotiated given the pieces that were offered to Stalin and that he desperately wanted, which was the recovery of the succulent south, the recovery of the Curiel Islands, the leases or control of the ports in northern China, the recovery of the railways there, was asking for the moon. and we didn't get much in return in terms of the political equation because we asked for military material, so that was the mistake and that mistake is both Roosevelt's and Truman's.

Can I add a word to that? Yes I believe. I think I have to stop for a moment longer on East Asia. One of the four big items on the agenda at Yalta, of course, were these terms and dates of Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Japan and the Soviet Union were not at war until the end of the day, in the summer of 1945. And on the American side it was thought that the weight and impact of a Soviet declaration of war against Japan would make it abundantly clear that Japan was totally isolated. and now he had yet another adversary, a historical adversary who was mobilizing in East Asia against him, so the seemingly greater logic of bringing the Soviets into the Pacific or Asian war was to hasten the end of that war against the Japanese, reminding them that even in Yalta there is still no certainty that the atomic device will work, so it was thought that the Soviet declaration of war was one of the big pieces that we had to play to take Japan towards surrender.

It's number one, but number two, let's go back to Europe because there is a European logic for involving the Soviets in the East Asian war and this refers to the tools that were available to stop Soviet penetration into Central and Eastern Europe. were to force them to fulfill the commitment to deploy substantial resources in Asia that were not then available. in Europe, so it was a way to reduce to a certain degree, not to a great extent, certainly, but to reduce to a certain extent the weight of Soviet military force in Europe itself, so, given the tools available , it was used to slow down the Soviet penetration into Eastern Europe moving towards some final questions now who won this is the last question that will make me huff and puff just to prepare you who won a couple of ways to look at it Churchill wanted to defend the British empire the empire british begins to crumble almost immediately a british withdrawal from the eastern mediterranean in 47 india achieves its independence in 48 so on that argument churchill failed roosevelt wanted to establish a new international order based on the united nations the united nations becomes a platform for four decades for tin dictators our colleague here at the hoover institution neil ferguson quotes the main beneficiary of the second world war was stalin's soviet union the appeal of war the alliance with stalin despite its inevitability and strategic rationality was, however , a truly Faustian pact his The man Roosevelt and his man Churchill really made a pact with the devil and it was a costly one.

This is the other way of looking at it, as best I can tell, and Andrew Roberts will have the first opportunity to correct me or describe the correct way. To see this, we begin this conversation in June 1941 with the Germans invading the Soviet Union on three fronts. Britain in danger. The Germans besieged Leningrad. They come within sight of Moscow. We end with Hitler dead. Great Britain and all of Western Europe liberate the United States. states in a position to lead a long and peaceful struggle for a long time Stalin occupies Eastern Europe but has lost 20 million or closer to 25 billion according to David Kennedy's figures the United States suffers less than 500,000 deaths and in the end the war cold would go to the west no way, not the soviet union way, churchill and fdr may have proven naive here and there, they may have made mistakes, but they won, andrew certainly, churchill did not personally win in any way because, of course, he was forced out of office on July 26, 1945. um, when his wife Clementine said that it might prove to be a blessing in disguise, Churchill responded well, from where I'm sitting, it seems pretty well disguised as far as um is concerned. , as far as Britain was concerned, we were totally exhausted from being the only nation. who fought the entire war along obviously with the rest of the countries of the empire from the first day to the last, we had spent a third of our net assets on that fight, by the way, in my opinion, they couldn't have done it.

It has been spent in a more honorable way than uprooting the most evil regime the world has ever seen. um, it was um, if you're going to lose an empire, that's the honorable way to do it, but we did it and um, so it can't be Britain. The United States, on the other hand, as you point out, had already begun to become the American century, but certainly the next 50 or 70 years continued to be the American century, so I think by any long-term measure it will. . Um, you have to see that maybe if you make the mistake of ceding your primacy to China in the rest of this century, then that could be the end of the American century, but wow, did World War II start you off right? is the architect of the american century david look peter with all due respect to our colleague and my friend neil ferguson um you have a heavy burden of evidence to carry if you want to argue that stalin was themain victor of World War II uh losing 25 million Soviets is not an acceptable price to pay for any result he achieved.

He managed to use his term even against a great game that was the aggrandizement of the Soviet-dominated sphere, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Europe to a To some extent, I suppose in that qualified way one could say that he emerged victorious, but I remember something that Stalin said directly to Franklin Roosevelt. He said that it seems that in the midst of the war that he sees, it seems that you Americans have decided to fight this. war with American money and American machines and Russian men and that was a cynical but absolutely accurate summary that one of the great dimensions of American grand strategy was to delay the second front in the cross-Channel invasion a year after the original intention to Reduce the planned mobilized force from 215 divisions to 90 divisions to fight primarily from the air and not have to have an occupation scale force on the ground in Europe at the conclusion of the war.

This was all part of the grand strategic geometry of the American war. effort yes, yes to be sure that the Americans could have put more resources into the scale Churchill came down to yes, but so did we, yes, well, he actually made the joke in um, in Tehran, of course, how he was sitting among the uh, the Russians. the bear and the American buffalo and he was the simple English donkey but he was the one who knew the way home but you know, to go back to your question who won the war in my undergraduate classrooms, I especially like to start the discussion on the war with it. question, of course, the automatic answer is well, we did well, yes, that is an acceptable answer, but if by question who won the war we mean which society paid the greatest price in blood and treasure for the final result, no It was the United States, it was the Soviet Union without a doubt, but if by the question we mean which society which belligerent emerged at the end of the conflict in the best position and particularly in a better position than at the beginning of the war, those are the United States, the war raises the United States, emerging from the depression, has the only intact large-scale industrial economy left on the planet and is in a position to exercise hegemonic dominance over the international system and, in fact, to reshape it With new institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and so on for the rest of the century and perhaps beyond, in the sense of long-term consequences for its society and its position in the world, the United States is unequivocally the winner, but did not pay the highest price and I think there is a relationship between those two observations: we managed resources, we maintained 115 divisions of labor at home that was originally intended to be mobilized and we dismantled the production lines and we were humming in 1945.

Steven Stalin dominates the negotiations in Tehran and even more so in Yalta but you know what Franklin Roosevelt took uh Franklin Roosevelt died within two months two months after Yalta uh God bless him so we have to understand how the Soviet Union won the war over the terrain in Europe not alone but predominantly and He did it because Stalin did not care about the lives, there are 27 million that he lost. Some estimates are 33, but I stand by 27. He didn't care, so if he sent a million of his enslaved collective farmers into battle and they were surrounded. and he killed he would send another million of his enslaved collective farmers into battle or plunge into his gulag labor camps for a couple hundred thousand to send to the front, that's how totally totalitarian regimes can fight.

Democracies can't fight like that, they can't just say "oh, you know." That we're going to send a few hundred thousand of our boys to their deaths to take Prague before Stalin takes Prague? Democracies don't fight that way for a reason because we are better and the Soviet Union fought that way and we had to live with the consequences the two long term winners of the war are the anglo-americans on the one hand and china on the other china is belligerent the war begins there first not in Europe and China emerges on the winning side and as we are living with If today they are clearly one of the big winners, Stalin wins the war and loses the peace.

China and the United States win the war and win the peace. However, the problem arises because we have the same difficulty in understanding that the current Chinese regime is communist. the communists are not nationalists they are not charming they are not going to be our friends and we are not going to earn their trust the same problem that we had in tehran and in yalta and in potsdam and after wanting to look communism in the face and make it disappear and become something else, evolve in a direction where we can work with it, a traditional nationalism that we just lived through 20 years of this with the Beijing regime and now we have woken up and I have discovered, you know, maybe all this time it has been a communist regime and maybe their values ​​are different from ours and maybe they treat their people differently than we treat our people, so they also won the war, but it's not clear that they will. to gain the long-term peace that is in our power to ask two last questions, both brief seventy years later, something is happening eighty years later, all of you here, we are sitting in the middle of a major university, the students here, the students who just graduated last June.

They had no memories of World War II They had no memories of the Cold War Why does it matter? What can you say to a young man of 20 or 22 years old who has all the technology ahead of him? What can you tell him? How can you make him understand? why does this matter Stephen briefly well do you want to work for Stalin or do you want to go work for the evil empire Google those are your options David could you redeem this question please? Well, I think there are lasting lessons from this whole sorry episode, one being me.

I just want to state the obvious: it is the most formative colossal cataclysmic event of the 20th century and it left a legacy for states and peoples that continues to this day, as Stephen has just very elegantly pointed out today's China in a sense. Could we trace the genealogical line from the outcome of the war to China's position in the world today? But there is another, broader set of lessons here. I think about what happens when an international system that is supposed to maintain peace between nations breaks down. and how terribly cataclysmic the consequences of that can be, particularly when a potential actor with the clout, influence and moral values ​​to try to maintain at least a semblance of international peace withdraws from the system, in many ways, that was the lesson of the interwar period, when the United States was essentially absent from the international system and, although, consequently, the causes of the Second World War were very complicated, to be sure, the fact that the United States was missing, one could say which was undoubtedly one of them, for example, he cited a document that Historians of this period are well aware of the so-called hosp memorandum where Hitler in 1937 I think he outlined the geostrategic future to his senior military political leaders and goes country by country predicting what What will happen when you take this initiative and what the response will be. be and then how he's going to counter and so on, he goes into this long recital and it's a work of dark genius trying to predict the future, but he never mentions the united states, the united states doesn't even figure in his thinking about what the geopolitical future, it was an important lesson for this society to learn that if we want to live in a world beset by those kinds of monsters and tyrants, we need to get involved, Andrew, why does it matter?

You are absolutely right that students don't know. A few years ago a very large survey was carried out among British teenagers, 20 of whom thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. character even though 47 of them thought Sherlock Holmes was a real person and 53 percent of them thought Eleanor Rigby was a real person, so we have a problem here. I would like to remember you. It'll remind you of what Stephen said about how Stannin wasn't paying much attention to the election. He reminded me a little of the attitude that Brussels has adopted towards a certain British referendum in which they did not pay attention to the situation. majority votes, but what really underlies it is the importance of the Second World War, that is, several lessons about the 15 million people who died in China in the course of this war, which is half of what Russia lost , but much, much more than Well, the nine million that Germany lost, for example, has a psychological effect on them, especially in their hatred of Japan, and that is something that, of course, is a day-to-day thing .

I think what you said about American isolationism and The dangers of this are obviously very true, um and maybe we also have something to continue to learn about the settings from Bretton Woods to the United Nations. You know a lot of them are still floundering, but they're still there. with us um but but really the underlying point, I think, is that the Western democracies and this is something that is learned from the '30s, as well as the forces, obviously, the Western democracies, your country, my country, the rest of Western civilization, so to speak, must recognize that they cannot stop being strong and they cannot stop spending money on defense because the outside world is a deeply unpleasant place and what is national socialism in Nazi Germany and essentially national communism in China and God knows what you would call it in Russia, they really are.

I want to get the last question out of you Claire Booth Loose used to say that history would grant even the greatest figure just one sentence Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves gentlemen one sentence this will test his powers of concision david

kennedy

franklin roosevelt what sentence will grant him the history if history would grant him, he positioned the United States to transform and lead the international system for the better part of a century after his death. well done, stephen, a phrase for joseph stalin, he created a superpower with feet of clay and lack of morals, andrew churchill never hit on the three most important figures of the last century, three of the most distinguished historians of our days, I don't know if you feel the same way I do, but I am amazed by your mastery of the material and the moral sensitivity you bring to Join me in thanking David Kennedy, Stephen Cotkin, and Andrew Roberts.