NationStates Jolt Archive

In the spirit of Bush's attempt to thwack the corpse of FDR once more with the rightwing stick of implied "We could have done it better" with his statement on how the 1945 Yalta conference supposedly paved the way for Soviet domination of Eastern Europe:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/07/AR2005050701232.html

I invite you all to a little session of D.I.Y Yalta. Yes, now you are FDR with a war weary nation looking to you for peacefull prosperity, you are Churchill with a thoroughly decimated nation full of wounded, tired soldiers and civilians who have been living on rations for years.

Lets hear how all you Bush supporters would have done it better. Keep in mind, for your answer to actually be valid, you must take into consideration the state of your military, your budget, and your resources.

You must realize that the only way to actually stop the spread of Sovietism at that point would have been an armed confrontation with Stalin himself, and though the Russian forces were also tired and weakened, I doubt Stalin would have given up without a fight and allowed any kind of Democratic regime to be implemented in Eastern Europe at that time.

So just how would you do it? How would you spread Democracy throughout the Soviet Union directly after the end of WW2 without grounding all of the allied forces into dust in the process?

Let's hear it.


(Oh, and as for Bush's mighty words about not appeasing dictators and tyrants....

http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/us-and-uz.htm

Um, yeah)

The thing is, Roosevelt was sick and dying at the time. He simply buckled under what Stalin wanted. More diplomatic pressure should have been applied to Stalin. While it wouldn't gain everything, it would have probably gained more favorable terms.

The occupation of Germany should not have been carried out with separate zones. The Soviets wanted to occupy the nothernmost island of Japan after the war, and McArthur feared that what eventually happened to Europe would have happened to Japan. He offered them a spot, right between two American divisions. They declined.

The issue was in simply spliting up the world. It could have and should have been done differently, including massive diplomatic protests over the control exerted by the Soviets in Eastern Europe. I really doubt that the Soviets wanted to fight another war so soon. Even when they were winning, they were losing 4 Russians for every German killed. Not to mentioned that Stalin could have gone to war over the Berlin airlift and didn't. Granted, hindsight is 20/20, but FDR still got duped.