Download Fraser J. HarbuttYalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads

1096
Reviews of Books
1980s took a traditional approach: An Officer and a
Gentleman (1982) honored traditional martial values,
and Tom Cruise displayed a cavalier attitude as he flew
rings around America’s adversaries in Top Gun (1986).
Shaw and Youngblood remind us that there was a “second Cold War” during the Reagan years, represented
by Sylvester Stallone’s chauvinistic Rambo series. Further reflecting the Cold War mindset, Sean Connery, as
commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine named Red
October, succeeded in thwarting his own country’s firststrike strategy by hijacking his own vessel. Ironically,
“By the time Red October was released in 1990 . . . the
Eastern bloc had disintegrated . . . and Americans
could watch the movie knowing they had effectively
won the Cold War” (p. 36).
The shared fear of nuclear war in the 1960s leads the
authors to conclude that, at least on this topic, “the Soviet and American cinema had a good deal in common”
as they make clear through several aptly chosen comparisons (p. 127). Jumping ahead to the 1970s, the authors compare Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971) with Officers (1971), its Soviet counterpart, noting the obvious
contrasts between the loyalty shown toward the government in the Soviet version and a U.S. approach that
“skewered contemporary America,” especially its foreign policy. For the “second Cold War,” Stallone’s
Rambo : First Blood, Part II (1985) is compared with
Incident at Map Grid 36–8 (1982), a Soviet production
in which World War III is averted due to the moral vision of Soviet leaders.
This book is a fascinating study reflecting substantive
research in distant archives. There is a sophisticated
linkage made between Cold War cultures and their
movie productions. Readers will be pleased to know
that, in the core chapters, film plots are sufficiently detailed to help those who may have seen only one of the
two productions. This book should be in every college
library and would be an excellent text for classes studying the Cold War(s) or, more generally, the relationship
between governments and the motion picture industries.
PETER C. ROLLINS
Oklahoma State University
FRASER J. HARBUTT. Yalta 1945: Europe and America at
the Crossroads. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2010. Pp. xxx, 438. $36.00.
In this ambitious and wide-ranging book Fraser J. Harbutt seeks to overturn what he regards as widespread
popular misconceptions concerning the “meaning” of
the Yalta accords as presented in “conventional” histories. The misconceptions are many, but the most
prominent of them is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt
betrayed the West to Joseph Stalin at Yalta and/or that
his naı̈veté concerning Soviet expansionism was responsible for creating the conditions that produced the Cold
War.
The book is organized according to Harbutt’s definition of “Yalta” as a three-stage, “politically transfor-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
mative event”: the preparations for the conference; the
conference itself; and the immediate aftermath. This
tripartite division does not reflect the actual attention
that Harbutt offers to each stage. Nearly three quarters
of the book address only the first stage. Those looking
for a detailed reconsideration of the conference itself
will be disappointed.
Redefining Yalta as an “event” lasting four years reflects Harbutt’s interpretation. The narrative begins
with Anthony Eden’s secret negotiations with Soviet officials in 1941, which led ultimately to the emergence in
1944 of what Harbutt calls the “Moscow Order,” consisting of a “mutually satisfactory division of Europe”
(p. 399) between Britain and the Soviet Union. This
order left Poland as a Soviet client and Eastern Europe
under Soviet domination in return for leaving France as
a British client with Western Europe and the Mediterranean under British domination. This bargain, Harbutt argues, indicates that, prior to Yalta, Winston
Churchill and Stalin looked to each other rather than
to the United States as “the prospective postwar political partner in Europe” (p. 80), and the two of them
“exhibited a common interest in resisting potential
American political intrusions” (p. 88). Thus, Churchill
was not the transatlantic Anglo-American romantic of
popular imagination but a traditional European statesman apprehensive of American hegemonial ambitions;
Stalin was not a expansionist bent on world conquest
but a traditionalist who sought to dominate Eastern Europe through an “emollient, evolutionary approach” (p.
105).
Harbutt then argues that it was this traditional European deal making that began to produce public disillusionment among the American public with the allies
of the United States. This, in turn, pushed Roosevelt at
Yalta to focus on the “presentational” aspects of summit diplomacy that gave Yalta its peculiar character and
historical significance. FDR, a reluctant convert to the
cause of the United Nations, came to view it as an alternative to the traditional European politics that the
Anglo-Soviet collaboration promised to re-establish. A
“Europhobe,” FDR sought to avoid American entanglement in European politics while seeking to entangle
Europeans in a very different, American-devised system. His primary objective at Yalta was to sell his postwar “utopian” vision to the American people through
the high-sounding rhetoric and moral appeals of devices such as the Declaration of Liberated Europe. In
order to achieve this goal, he had to convince Stalin to
sign on to the ideals of the new order. Rather than a
naı̈ve, unsophisticated FDR who was outmaneuvered
by Stalin, Harbutt describes FDR as a “radical statesman” who won the image war at Yalta by fixing his liberal imprint on the proceedings.
The evidence that FDR’s diplomacy at Yalta was
aimed at producing something inspirational to eradicate an American predisposition to distrust the United
Nations and internationalism more generally is exceedingly thin. While there is evidence of concern with image and opinion, it is neither clear enough nor coherent
OCTOBER 2011
Comparative/World
enough to provide proof that this was FDR’s objective.
Nevertheless, Harbutt argues that he succeeded at
Yalta because the Soviets surrendered “definitional authority” to him—and this produced the predicament
that led to the Cold War: Stalin could either live up to
the liberal image in which he had been cast, or he could
reject this at the cost of international opprobrium and
a serious confrontation with the United States.
But Yalta’s connection with the Cold War was less
significant than the structural changes that it produced
in the relationships among the three great powers: the
United States became engaged with Europe’s future,
contrary to the dictum of avoiding entangling alliances
and to FDR’s own proclivities; it pushed the Soviet
Union into “an American-shaped web of moral codes
and opinion-molding institutions”; and it led to the
breakdown of the Anglo-Soviet collaboration and the
Moscow Order, as Churchill began to take a more
“transatlantic and less European view.” Before Yalta,
it had appeared that Britain and the USSR would guide
Europe’s future with a benevolent but detached United
States on the sideline; after Yalta an embryonic AngloAmerican nexus began to confront an alienated Soviet
Union.
An interesting argument, but not a compelling one.
In spite of its size and scholarly apparatus, the evidence
to sustain the critical elements of the argument is weak,
and it is too discursive, and contains too many contradictions, to be persuasive.
GORDON MARTEL
University of Victoria
RICHARD J. WALTER. Peru and the United States, 1960–
1975: How Their Ambassadors Managed Foreign Relations in a Turbulent Era. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press. 2010. Pp. vii, 333. $75.00.
Past historians of U.S. foreign relations were often criticized because their work analyzed international relations solely from the perspective of the United States
and relied principally on U.S. archival sources. Notable
scholars of inter-American relations, including Kyle
Longley (1997), Piero Gleijeses (2002), Alan McPherson (2006), Jana K. Lipman (2009), and James F. Siekmeier (2011), have helped to transform the field by
conducting multi-archival research and immersing
themselves in the historical literature of Latin America.
Their labors have demonstrated that U.S. diplomats often misinterpreted domestic developments in Latin
America and that even weak Latin American nations
could at times manipulate the powerful United States.
Richard J. Walter joins the list with this analysis of the
activities and dispatches of Fernando Berckemeyer and
Celso Pastor de la Torre, Peru’s ambassadors in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Tension characterized U.S.-Peruvian relations between 1960 and 1975. At first the United States hoped
that the Alliance for Progress, a twenty-billion-dollar
foreign aid program to underwrite democracy and socioeconomic development in Latin America, would di-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1097
minish the appeal of communism. President Richard
Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger adopted
a different approach to the region in the late 1960s, positing that military rule in Latin America would better
protect U.S. interests. Peruvians hungered for economic development but on their own nationalistic
terms. President Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1963–
1968) sought to curb the prerogatives of U.S. corporations in Peru and to establish a 200-mile national zone
for fishing off Peru’s coast. In 1968, a leftist military
contingent, led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado
(1968–1975), overthrew Belaúnde and intensified Peru’s nationalistic policies. The new government expropriated the International Petroleum Corporation, a
subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and seized
U.S. fishing boats. Tensions with the United States increased as General Velasco, contrary to U.S. wishes,
established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union,
China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Walters argues that,
despite its leftist and nationalist tendencies, Peru was
able to avert direct confrontation with the United
States during this period because of the extraordinary
efforts of Peru’s ambassadors and those of U.S. diplomats John Wesley Jones (1963–1969) and Taylor
Belcher (1969–1974). In 1974, for example, special emissary James Greene of the United States concluded an
agreement that preserved the U.S. principle of just
compensation for expropriated properties while simultaneously awarding the affected U.S. corporations relatively little money. Notwithstanding the excellent work
of the respective ambassadors and special emissaries,
Peru probably avoided hostility like that directed at Salvador Allende’s Chile (1970–1973) because both President Belaúnde and General Velasco repeatedly emphasized the non-Marxist nature of their economic
policies.
Contemporary historians of inter-American relations
will surely appreciate Walter’s prodigious research. Because scholars have extended the field of foreign relations to include all contacts between peoples, not just
official exchanges, some may find the book’s analytical
scope too narrow. Walter concedes that his book focuses on “relations at the executive level” (p. 312) and
acknowledges that he has not examined the role of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Peace Corps, or
the American Institute of Free Labor Development in
Peru, or the “soft power” of the United States that manifested in cultural and educational exchanges and
through television, films, books, and magazines. At various points, Walters notes that Peruvian leaders accused the CIA of interfering in their domestic affairs.
He either dismisses the allegations or admits that he
lacks the documentary evidence to sustain or refute
charges of CIA meddling. Had Walter resorted to the
mandatory declassification process to obtain documents that would depict more clearly the CIA’s role in
Peru, his book would have been stronger. U.S. officials
who were active in Peru also participated in counterinsurgency efforts in other countries. Ernest V. Siracusa, for example, served as Ambassador Jones’s chief
OCTOBER 2011