In February of 1945 the president of the United States was a dying man. Democrat party insiders had suspected his diminished capacities the year before, when he was elected to a fourth term. But the exigencies of winning WWII and party power demanded the president once more step into the breach. He did. And Franklin Roosevelt was dead by April 1945.
In 2022 we have in office a president with diminished capacities. Will Ukraine pay for that disability at the eventual conference table? A friend of mine recently said, “Hoping that Biden does not become our Roosevelt at Yalta. Giving away that which is not his. My father, from Lithuania, cursed him for the loss of his homeland.” But let us digress.
Knowing their president was physically and mentally failing, party pros had dumped Henry Wallace, the pro-communist veep, at the 1944 convention and replaced him with Harry Truman, a stalwart Senator from Missouri. It was in that situation that FDR set off for the last big wartime conference in February at Yalta, in the Crimea. There, with Churchill and Stalin, the fate of the postwar would world be decided. And remember, Roosevelt was a dying man.
As such, when he got there he ignored Churchill’s warnings about Stalin’s nefarious designs after the war. Charles Bohlen, the president’s interpreter, harshly criticized FDR at Yalta: “I did not like the attitude of the president, who not only backed Stalin but seemed to enjoy the Churchill-Stalin exchanges. Roosevelt should have come to the defense of a close friend and ally, who was really being put upon by Stalin. . . . [Roosevelt’s] apparent belief that ganging up on the Russians was to be avoided at all cost was, in my mind, a basic error, stemming from Roosevelt’s lack of understanding of the Bolsheviks. . . . In his rather transparent attempt to dissociate himself from Churchill, the President was not fooling anybody and in all probability aroused the secret amusement of Stalin.”
W. Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Soviets, said that Roosevelt had “no conception of the determination of the Russians to settle matters in which they consider that they have a vital interest in their own manner, on their own terms. . . . The President still feels he can persuade Stalin to alter his point of view on many matters that, I am satisfied, Stalin will never agree to.”
Roosevelt actually said about Stalin, “I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” We are talking about Joseph Stalin, a man who murdered many more than Hitler. But Roosevelt wanted to give him everything. Well, he did. And Eastern Europe was in chains for 45 years.
Are we facing this issue again? Do we have a seriously enfeebled president who will sit down, when the Ukraine War is over, at a conference table with Putin and sell out Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine? Will Joe Biden’s past in Ukraine, his son’s financial dealings there, and the president’s deteriorating mental condition compromise him to such an extent that Ukraine will be put back in chains for further decades? After their brave defense of their homeland, are the Ukrainians facing a sequel to Yalta?
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Yup—– and his bank account will grow by leaps and bounds.
Liberals will always sell out to Communists. And they will always do it for the simple reason is that at heart they’re Communists themselves.
Yes if use FDR guide to Stalin, then FDR very ill for Yalta meeting then
Biden is no FDR. And Putin is no Stalin. Both are, at best, wannabes. But this doesn’t matter because Congress is an entirely different mess, this time. The Russian “leaders” are thugs. The American “leaders” are playboys. Take your pick as to who will walk away with the goods.
Absolutely correct! Had Roosevelt listened to Patton there would have been no
“Cold War” no Hungarian Revolt, no arms race and thousands of Russians murdered under Stalin would have had the life they deserved among many other things