The Evening Star (February 15, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Yalta secret pact brings up new problems
By Dorothy Thompson
Most important about the Yalta secret agreement are its manner and its establishment for Americans of a precedent. To persuade the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan, the American president made concessions in disagreement with principles previously signed by the Big Three heads of the states – the Atlantic Charter.
The agreement was entered into without the knowledge of the American secretary of state, to say nothing of the Senate, which shares treaty-making powers. Exactly as at Munich, which sets the pattern for all successive conferences, territory was disposed of without consultation with the most interested party – in this case China. Though the agreement was qualified by the words “it is understood that the agreement will require concurrence of Chiang Kai-shek,” circumstances reduced it to an ultimatum.
The agreement is of vital importance especially as regards Manchuria, whose invasion, like the invasion of Poland, was an original cause of war. Dairen Port becomes practically Russian under the phrase “internationalization” with pre-eminent rights of Russia safeguarded. Port Arthur becomes a Russian naval base. The Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian railroads will be operated by a Soviet Chinese company also with Russian rights guaranteed as “pre-eminent.” Thus the promise of “China’s full sovereignty in Manchuria” is entirely dependent of Russia’s whim and is exactly as meaningful as the promise of a “strong, free, and independent Poland.”
Just why the Soviets should have been bribed by prodigious gains of territory and power to enter a war in which the Allies “sought no territorial aggrandizements” and when it was already almost over, remains an open question. The Soviet Union alone has collected territory and an extended sphere of influence as a result of every international agreement she has made since 1939.
In return for her pact of benevolent neutrality with Hitler, Russia received part of the Baltic states and took all of them, part of Finland and part of Poland. When attacked by Germany she insisted that the Atlantic Charter prohibiting territorial gains dates from 1941 instead of 1939 and thus her gains under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was confirmed by the Allies. As “compensation” Poland was then handed, this time without the agreement of either the United States of America or Britain, approximately one-fourth of Germany – an act which amounted to the first partition of Europe, and will prove fateful.
Under whatever device of annexation or of “friendly governments” Russia has thus picked up most of Hitler’s conquests in Eastern Europe and perhaps eventually will Inherit the bulk of Japan’s conquests on the Asiatic mainland. In the meantime, while successfully maintaining that in these areas other Allies may not interfere, in every other part of the world – Western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the South Pacific island countries – Russia demands to be heard.
Another angle, however, must engage Americans. Russian expansionism, direct or Indirect, involves new definitions of democracy, and effects radical changes in. the systems under which people live, or hoped to live. Hundreds of thousands of Poles, for instance, and tens of thousands of Yugoslavs fear to return home or are escaping from their countries. In Eastern Europe millions, native to towns and villages for centuries, are forcibly uprooted.
All this is incompatible with western concepts of democracy, and defense of these policies force our own people to re-define what they mean by “democracy.” Probably Lincoln’s Gettysburg formulation, “Government of, by, and for the people,” has hitherto been the simplest and truest description but the “new,” and, apparently, to some of our liberals, superior “democracies” are, at best, governments “for” the people – neither “of” nor “by.” We used to have an accurate name for this. It was not called “democracy” but “benevolent despotism.”
Now, a nation cannot forever divorce foreign and domestic policies nor define democracy one way abroad and another at home. If in over half the globe we accept as democracy despotic leadership, provided it rests upon indoctrinated masses, brutal purging of all dissident minorities, and reducing the concept of elections containing the element of free choice to plebiscites which are nothing but the duty to confirm, we shall soon be put to it to explain why what we support for others is not good for ourselves.
The decline of a nation always sets in when it falls out of its own character. The Russians are not falling out of character. Despite their radical revolution Russia remains what she has always been; imperial, tyrannical, egalitarian and messianic. It is the west that is falling out of character and especially the United States… that “sweet land of liberty” whom once we adjured in song to be ever-ready to die “to make men free.”