Killing Patton

Roosevelt’s decisions at the Yalta Conference would be decisive in shaping post-war Europe and the world. Perhaps suspecting that Soviet demands would be hard to prevent anyway, and needing the Soviet Union to help finish the war with Japan, FDR deferred to Stalin over Churchill, “allowing the Russians to dictate the future of postwar Europe at the expense of the British” (297). Moreover, in exchange for agreeing to the Soviet Union’s “sphere of influence” over Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, FDR got Stalin’s support for the creation of the United Nations, an organization for the protection of world peace and security.

The Conference signified a more fundamental shift in the character of geo-politics: The US and the USSR were now the world’s two key powers. This was a hugely symbolic blow to Britain’s standing in the world: “the British Empire, which has ruled the globe since the voyages of Captain James Cook in the 1770s” (297) was now a second-rate power. Britain, of course, still held overseas dominions after 1945.

The traditional powers of Western Europe were now becoming irrelevant: France had been humiliated and occupied; Germany, the continent’s pre-eminent industrial power, now lay in ruins, and would be divided for the next half century. Further, having fought a war to stop German annexations in Eastern Europe, it was hard for European powers to justify the maintenance of colonial possessions in Asia or Africa—the very concept of colonial empire, on which so much European power had rested, was discredited. India, the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire, gained independence in 1947. Most other colonies established independence by the mid-1960s.

This decline in European international influence brought a period of radical reform and improvement: the start of the European social-democratic post-war consensus. With a landslide victory, the UK Labour party promises to establish free universal healthcare, a welfare state, and full employment through state intervention. In France, West Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia parties that gain power reflect the desire of populations who sacrificed so much in the war for genuine social change. They achieve this through greater regulation of markets and progressive taxation systems which oblige the rich to pay more.

The re-alignment of geo-politics after Yalta ultimately puts the US and the Soviet Union onto a collision course. While it will be several years before the Cold War starts in earnest, the entente that characterized relations between the US and the USSR under Stalin and Roosevelt is now ending. Europe, and the world, divides into two opposed camps: the communist Soviet Union and its allies versus capitalist America and the West.