President Bush, Yalta and the Baltic States/Eastern Europe

BUSH'S DIPLOMATIC MASTERSTROKE
Applause Lines

by Jacob T. Levy Only at TNR Online
Post date: 05.13.05

President Bush's first term was not marked by an overeagerness to confront Russia, either on its failings at home or on its foreign policy. Especially after September 11, Bush turned a blind eye to Chechnya, Russian meddling (including armed meddling) in other former Soviet republics, corruption, violations of the rule of law, and the slow-motion destruction of the (partial) independence of Russia's press, courts, parliament, and provinces. Bush curried favor with Vladimir Putin--just as Bill Clinton had curried favor with Boris Yeltsin and Bush's father had curried favor with Mikhail Gorbachev.

But over the past few months, and especially the past few weeks, Bush has executed a remarkable turnaround. At a moment of great symbolic importance to Russia--the sixtieth anniversary of V-E Day--Bush sandwiched his visit to Moscow between trips to two of the neighbors it menaces, Latvia and Georgia. In each state he delivered tacit rebukes to Putin and affirmations of America's commitment to the region's established constitutional democracies (the Baltics) as well as its emerging ones (Georgia and Ukraine). He preceded the trip by noting that the end of World War II did not result in actual liberation for the Baltics or Eastern Europe. He visited Georgia and honored that country's recent democratic revolution--despite the Georgian president's boycott of this week's ceremonies in Moscow due to ongoing Russian-Georgian disputes. And in Latvia he delivered a genuinely stirring address on World War II, the Cold War, liberal democracy, and the legacies of the twentieth century.

For this--one of the most principled and diplomatically savvy weeks of his presidency--Bush has been condemned by many Democrats and left-liberals. In fact, he should be applauded.

In Latvia, Bush said the following:

As we mark a victory of ... six decades ago, we are mindful of a paradox. For much of Germany, defeat led to freedom. For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end oppression. The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.

He went on to commend the Baltic states for their role in bringing down the Soviet Union, saying, "And when you joined hands in protest and the empire fell away, the legacy of Yalta was finally buried, once and for all."

These passages have infuriated center-left commentators, including, among others, Arthur Schlesinger, Jacob Heilbrunn, David Greenberg, Joe Conason, and Kevin Drum.

Aggregating across these criticisms, we find the following indictment: The Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe was a fait accompli by the time of the Yalta conference in 1945 and was accomplished by the Red Army, not by diplomatic giveaways from Roosevelt or Churchill. The Western powers had no real choice about Stalin's actions, since going to war with the Soviets was an utterly infeasible option--and given that constraint, they did the best they could. Indeed, Western leaders tried to insist on free elections in Poland (the linchpin of the region), seeking a better deal than they had gotten at the 1943 Tehran conference, which envisioned an exclusive Soviet sphere of influence. (At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill succeeded in getting promises of such elections from Stalin, albeit utterly empty ones.) Moreover, talking about Yalta in terms of an American betrayal of Eastern Europe is a slander against FDR; Bush, this argument goes, was echoing the John Birch-Joseph McCarthy school of history, which alleges that FDR was a Communist sympathizer or, at best, a sap for his aide at the conference, Soviet spy Alger Hiss. All of which, according to some liberals, made Bush's speech either red meat for his far-right base at home or an attempt to discredit FDR in order to continue his assault on the legacy of the New Deal.

The assumption behind all this is that somehow the loony American right--the only domestic constituency that might still harbor passionate feelings about Yalta--must have been the target audience for this speech. For some reason a much simpler explanation has been overlooked: that the target audience for Bush's speech comprised the peoples and governments of the region where he was speaking.

Yalta may not be a reference that excites many Americans but it's hardly a forgotten word in Eastern Europe or the Baltics. The historical chords struck by the word "Yalta"--in a week that was, after all, mainly about striking 60-year-old historical chords--continue to evoke for many in Eastern Europe the West's betrayal of their freedom. Twenty years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski, hardly a right-wing nutcase, wrote in Foreign Affairs that the symbolic, as opposed to the historical, meaning of Yalta had come to serve as "the synonym for betrayal." This may be an obscure thought in America. It is certainly not in Poland or the Baltics.

It seems to me that Bush's skillful diplomacy during the past few weeks accomplished all of the following aims: communicating to Putin that the time of a free pass on either internal Russian moves toward dictatorship or external Russian threats to neighbors is over; signaling continued support and enthusiasm for democratization across the southern arc of former Soviet republics; reaffirming America's NATO security commitment to the Baltics and Eastern Europe; and at least gesturing toward key historical truths--that the Soviet Union paid most of the price in blood for defeating Nazi Germany and yet itself was a murderous totalitarian regime that occupied and oppressed the countries it liberated from Nazi rule.

Crucially, Bush accomplished all this while taking care not to provoke Putin too brazenly. For instance, he did not attribute the misdeeds of Stalin or the USSR to contemporary Russia, nor did he utterly spoil Putin's symbolically important event. As a result, Russia remains an ally in the war on terror, and Putin and Bush remain on decent terms.

This balancing act was no small feat. And invoking Yalta--the Yalta of Eastern Europe's historical memory--was a key part of Bush's success.

The Yalta reference served a number of purposes. In conjunction with the discussion of American slavery in the same speech, it showed Russians that a mature and confident democracy can bear criticism of its own historical record. In referring to Western acquiescence, it took some of the sting out of Bush's criticism of the Soviet record--that is, it took upon America's shoulders some of the blame for the evils that followed, making the speech less of an outright insult to Russia. But in linking Yalta to Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in telling a version of history that resonates so strongly with Eastern European sensibilities, Bush strongly reaffirmed his security commitment to our new NATO allies and warned Putin against expansionism.

Many pundits have assumed that Bush was mainly looking backwards--indicting FDR and standing with McCarthy and the rollback thesis of the 1950s. But this speech was about the future--about forswearing the possibility of ever again compromising the region's freedom. The memories the speech apparently stirred in America are very different from the ones it was meant to stir in Poland, Russia, and the Baltics. And surely, given the trip's diplomatic mission, it was more important to pay attention to memories there than to memories here.

For once Bush stood by our allies and stood up to a despot with whom we have been too friendly. I've rarely given Bush credit for much. But he deserves credit for this.