In October 1944 Winston Churchill traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. The third member of the wartime Big Three, Franklin Roosevelt, was not present. Churchill intended that he not be. The three had met the previous year at Tehran. They would meet in a few months at Yalta. Churchill wanted a tete a tete with Stalin ahead of that meeting.
The Anglo-American landing in France had succeeded. The British and American armies were advancing on Germany from the west. Their second front had greatly eased the pressure on the Soviet army, which pushed toward Germany from the east. Churchill wanted to talk with Stalin about the shape of Europe after the war.
"Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans,” Churchill said, according to his memoir of the war. “Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?"
The translator conveyed this to Stalin. While he did so, Churchill jotted the figures on the memo that appears above.
“I pushed this across to Stalin, who by then had heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.”
A silence ensued. “The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table,” Churchill wrote. “At length I said, ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.’ ‘No, you keep it,’ said Stalin.”
Churchill was right that his agreement with Stalin would seem cynical when it became public. This was why he hadn’t wanted Roosevelt in Moscow. The American president could never agree to such a division of Europe. Roosevelt had preached the war effort as a struggle for the “four freedoms” — of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Consigning millions of men and women to rule by the Soviet Union would make a mockery of Roosevelt and America.
Roosevelt’s alternative to the spheres of influence favored by Churchill and Stalin was the United Nations, based on national self-determination and guaranteed by the principle of collective security. The spheres approach of Churchill and Stalin was indeed cynical, in Roosevelt’s view. And it was dangerously anachronistic, having produced the two world wars. Roosevelt had no intention of letting it produce a third.
Roosevelt never saw the Moscow memo. He died soon after the Yalta meeting of February 1945. Yet at that meeting he sensed what Churchill and Stalin had been up to, and he realized that the United Nations might not become everything he hoped for.
Roosevelt had one aim at Yalta above the others: to win Stalin’s agreement to enter the war against Japan as soon as possible. If the Soviet army could tie down Japanese forces in China, America’s invasion of Japan would be much swifter and less deadly than otherwise.
Stalin’s agreement — to enter the Asian war ninety days after the defeat of Germany — came at a price: a free hand for Russia in Poland. Poland had been the starting point for invasion of Russia three times since the early nineteenth century. The Soviet army currently occupied Poland, and Stalin wasn’t going to evacuate and risk letting Poland fall into unfriendly hands again.
This posed a problem for Roosevelt, for it contradicted his four-freedoms pledge. Yet he deemed Soviet participation in the war against Japan a higher immediate priority than Polish independence. So he settled for a vague statement that free elections would be held in Poland at some time in the future.
It was the best he could do. And when, to no one’s great surprise, it turned out to be unenforceable, it represented a tacit admission that the spheres of influence approach was unavoidable, at least in territory considered crucial by Russia.
The spheres approach broadened as the Cold War set in. The United States built a sphere in the Western Hemisphere, Western Europe and offshore East Asia. The Soviets occupied Eastern Europe and formed alliances with China, North Korea and North Vietnam. (Britain faded from the picture as its empire dissolved after the war, which had bankrupted Britain itself.)
The bipolar division of the world had the great merit of helping prevent World War III. The United States, for the most part, didn't meddle in the Soviet zone. And the Soviets mostly stayed out of the American zone. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was an exception that proved the rule — almost provoking a nuclear war but not quite.
The bipolar division had the serious drawback of leaving millions of unwilling people under Soviet domination. Poland and the other countries of the Warsaw Pact had to make the best of a bad situation. Not until the Cold War ended in the early 1990s was the Yalta promise of democracy for Poland fulfilled.
Briefly the globalist vision of the United Nations appeared to be take hold around the world. The breakup of the Soviet Union created fifteen republics, most of which seemed to head in a democratic direction. The demise of the Warsaw Pact added several more to the democratic ranks. China was growing rich, and many outsiders hoped it would begin to grow free.
The democratic moment passed. Authoritarianism reemerged in several countries of the former Soviet sphere. Russia invaded Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine.
The United States objected to Russia’s moves, most notably by sending tens of billions of dollars of aid to Ukraine.
But last week Donald Trump spoke with Vladimir Putin about how the Ukraine war should end. Ukrainian officials did not take part in the conversation. They complained at their exclusion, much as Polish leaders had complained at their exclusion from the Yalta conversations that determined Poland’s fate.
There’s no indication Trump scribbled a memo defining percentages of influence in different countries. Yet the Ukrainians aren't unreasonable to suspect what Churchill called the cynicism of a spheres-of-influence solution.
Will a settlement made over the heads of the Ukrainians bring peace? Perhaps, but only perhaps. The Ukrainians might fight on without American aid.
Will it resolve the underlying differences between the American approach to world affairs and the Russian approach? Maybe. But if so it will be because the American approach has become more like the Russian approach.
Possibly the Churchill-Stalin approach is inevitable. Perhaps in the end the strong do what they can and the weak what they must.
Still, one would hope for a voice proclaiming the opposite. For the time being, it's not coming from America.
Ukraine possesses several “rare earth” elements, including gallium, lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, samarium, yttrium,and scandium, found in various deposits across Ukraine, particularly in the eastern regions. A significant portion of these deposits are located in areas currently under Russian control. Were I a betting man, my bet on what the memo looks like that Trump pushes across the table to Putin will look very similar to a current geologic map showing where these deposits are located.
Valuable real politick, balance of power, historical context for the apparent return of the cynical big game to the stage of the world in the 21st century. We'll see how it goes this time around.