4. Postwar Agreements Confirm Baltic Annexation.
Roosevelt was dead a few weeks later — in April 1945. But his division of the world with Uncle Joe Stalin is still alive. It was in fact confirmed — openly or tacitly, but unmistakably — by the subsequent treaties and accords of the three Allied Powers among themselves.
The Potsdam Conference of Truman-Stalin-Churchill/Atlee accepted the borders imposed by Stalin according to the Teheran and Yalta agreements and thus made them definite and permanent for postwar Europe. The Baltic States were not even discussed — they had disappeared.
The policy that the United States pursued after the wartime friendship with the Soviets cooled, was properly called "Containment". The word means to keep back, restrain. The policy intended to make the postwar borders of the Soviet sphere quite permanent, it never envisaged pushing them back.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was in effect a unilateral delimitation of spheres of influence along the outer borders of the member states. The alliance did not even consider intervening in crises or conflicts beyond its sphere: neither in East Germany of Hungary in 1956; nor in Czechoslovakia in 1968 or in Poland in the later years.
The notorious "Sonnenfeldt doctrine", promulgated by US Secretary of State Kissinger in 1975/76, re-confirmed a strict hands-off policy toward the Soviet sphere in Europe.
The often praised Helsinki Accords expressly guaranteed Russian posession in perpetuity of the Baltic States by confirming the existing borders. There was no mention of autonomy or freedom.1 The solemn confirmation of Soviet rule was given in exchange for unenforceable promises by Moscow about some human rights for its subjects. The only hope was that Russian rule would become "less barbarian", not that it would end.
Let us not forget, that even neutral Sweden has for decades by its own laws forced Soviet citizenship on its Baltic residents.
None of these acts were a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact; practically all of them were a direct or indirect consequence of the treaties and agreements among the leaders of the Allied Great Powers: Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. Europe was shaped by the winners of the war, not by the losers. The division of the world plotted by them is still in effect.
1 | The Accords promised Western powers would not violate the "frontiers" of the USSR. Thus Western powers could claim they did not grant de jure recognition to "borders", that is Soviet claims of sovereignty, particularly regarding the Baltic states. Excerpts from a 1997 interview with former President Gerald Ford (available at the George Washington University web site):
Ford's optimistic retrospective on the role of the Accords in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and restoration of Baltic freedom proposes that an act which recognized Soviet hegemony in fact and in perpetuity ("The participating States regard as inviolable all one another's frontiers...") was a positive act strengthening those peoples to free themselves in some geopolitically Nietzschian manner: was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. It is true, for example, that the Accords ended Soviet radio jamming; however, we remain unconvinced that the relationship between the Accords and restoration of Baltic independence is much more than circumstantial. — Ed. |