The Yalta summit was sixty years ago today. The Germans had been defeated in the Battle of the Bulge a couple weeks before, and the end of the Nazi regime was clearly only weeks or at most months away. Much of the damage of that conference was undone in the late eighties, as the Wall came down. But Arthur Herman says that President Bush should (as he implied in his inaugural address) finish the job.

The fallacies he presents are worth discussing:

Fallacy 1: Collective security is more important than democracy and human rights.

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin

Fallacy 2: Multilateral bodies can generate common purpose among nations with conflicting interests.

Although, the real fallacy should be "can reliably generate common purpose..." Because parliamentary systems do work some of the time. (Even a broken clock is right twice a day.) They just don't work well, and they tend to be easily monkeywrenched.

America's best postwar ally must be Europe.

This isn't the same kind of philosophical principle as the other two, though I think it is as demonstrably false. Would it be better to say "When making alliances, principles should trump geography" instead?

Of course Churchill himself was given The Order Of The Boot even before Japan surrendered.

The UK then became a Communist country for awhile in all but name, but without a change to the basic constitutional system.

It didn't last : the Soc-ialist Utopia never delivered on its promisses, and the Nationalistion (State Confiscation) of Railways, Coal mines etc didn't do any good, while the introduction post-war of bread rationing, the shortage of building materials for reconstruction, and the marking of all but the shoddiest goods as "for export only" with stiff penalties for any domestic possession were most unpopular.

(See what I mean about "Communist in all but name"?)

The UK had operated as a totalitarian regime during the war, under a bipartisan "War Cabinet", with accountability to Parliament, but still not a full Democracy. It was a Planned Economy, with compulsory soc-ialism.

This worked. It worked so well during the war, that many people who could remember the incompetence and shilly-shallying of the 1930s thought it would work in peacetime too.

Needless to say, it didn't. Though the times and conditions meant that most of the really unpopular measures (Did you know that rationing of sweets such as sugar only ended in 1952? That the sale of sliced bread could get you 6 months in jail in 1948?) were probably neccessary. The UK pissed away the equivalent of the entire GDP from 1815 to 1914 between 1914 and 1918. It spent even more 1939-1945. Full economic recovery was completed in the later Thatcher years, not before.

That brings us to Yalta. All we can say is that hindsight is a wonderful thing; that the Soviet prisoners should never have been handed over; and that the UN was a worthy experiment whose demise IMHO owes more to the admission of dozens of Kleptocracies and Dictatorships than to the failure of the Security Council due to US-USSR conflict.

(BTW Soc-ialism is spelt that way because your content filter prohibits the string c i a l i s.)

Herman summarizes common criticism of Yalta, but does not offer any suggestions of a realistic alternative path Roosevelt and Churchill might have followed to prevent Soviet expansion.

If Stalin was prepared to use military force to further his aims -- not an unreasonable assumption at the time -- then the U.S. and the UK would have to have been prepared to respond ind kind. In effect, this would have meant the continuation of the war. I think it is reasonable to ask if the Allies in 1945 thought themsevles prepared -- logistically, politically and emotionally -- to sustain the occupation of Western Europe and simultaneously engage militarily with Stalin. (Remember, this was happening at a time when an invasion of Japan seemed to be in the cards, requiring the shift of troops from Europe to the Pacific.)

I don't question Herman's interpretation of Yalta's impact, or his critique of the UN and similar organiztions, but he is actually playing a simple game of "what if" and assuming his side would have emerged victoriously.