Editorial: The Yalta agreement
The Big Three agreement at Yalta was a compromise in which Marshal Stalin dictated most of the terms, and the Atlantic Charter pledges – other than German disarmament – came off second best.
The biggest thing in its favor is that it ties the Big Three together for continuation of the war until unconditional surrender; that it proposes a post-war security organization, and pledges a United Nations meeting in San Francisco in April to open up general discussion among all the Allies.
Like most compromises, it isn’t satisfactory; but it does lay a groundwork for future effort to bring about an eventual settlement worked out in a more democratic manner than is possible in the critical stages of the war.
In justice to the President, it should be recognized that he has much less bargaining power than Marshal Stalin in any Big Three meeting now.
Marshal Stalin enjoyed actual possession of part of eastern Germany and all of Eastern Europe, except Greece, and the strongest military force on the continent. He had secured Prime Minister Churchill’s prior acceptance of Russian claims and sphere of influence, and agreement that these decisions should be made by the Big Three (or four) instead of the United Nations. And, thirdly, he had the power to help us, or not help us, lick Japan later.
As a result, Stalin got what he wanted at Yalta with few exceptions.
The most important exception was his agreement that the entire German military system, as Well as Nazism, must be eliminated permanently. Earlier he had publicly favored a post-war German Army.
Since most of the other terms to be imposed on Germany were kept secret pending unconditional surrender, they cannot be evaluated now. Though war criminals would be punished, no specific reference was made to the Junker generals on Marshal Stalin’s “Free Germany Committee.” Germany must pay reparations in kind – Stalin wanted that, while other Allies have been undecided or divided at home.
Mr. Roosevelt got reaffirmation of the Atlantic Charter pledge of self-government for liberated peoples. first by broadening the representative base of the Russian puppet provisional regimes of Poland and Yugoslavia, and by promising later free elections, But of course the territories taken by Russia will have no such elections.
Nominally, the President won a point in getting a United Nations conference called for April in San Francisco. But whether Marshal Stalin will have veto power over any league action relating to Russia, as he insisted at Dumbarton, is still a secret. Anyway, according to the Yalta plan, the San Francisco conference will not consider the peace settlement but only the machinery for a later security league. It is supposed “to prepare the charter of such an organization along the lines proposed… at Dumbarton Oaks.”
The Polish settlement was the payoff. Mr. Roosevelt agreed to Russia taking eastern Poland up to a slightly modified Curzon Line; whether to include additional southern Polish cities and oil fields, as previously agreed to by Mr. Churchill, was not stated. Poland is to get “substantial” territory in the north and west – the original Stalin plan to load her with large slices of Germany, making Poland a perpetual Russian puppet for defense of a larger “Alsace-Lorraine.”
The Yalta settlement is, after all, simply a Big Three agreement. Perhaps that is all it could possibly be under present war conditions.
The other United Nations have had no voice in the settlement. We hope that they will have an opportunity to be heard and to make their voices effective at the San Francisco meeting.