The Interventionism of the Two World Wars, Part 5

Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

I participated in the June 8, 2016 “Libertarian Angle,” webinar sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation, with the Foundation’s president, Jacob G. Hornberger, on the topic: “The Interventionism of the Two World Wars, Part 5.”

This final segment looks at the consequences of the Second World War, especially in terms of the results coming out of the wartime conferences between the Big Three – FDR, Churchill, and Stalin – at the Teheran and Yalta conferences.

Here was FDR at his worst, wheeling and dealing with Stalin over the fate of the world in the postwar period – the future division and occupation of Germany, the handing over of Eastern Europe to Stalin’s tender communist care, the trading of Japanese and Chinese territory to Stalin for Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and the setting up of the United Nations with the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as the planned senior masters and policemen of the world.

FDR naively thought person-to-person diplomacy with Stalin would win him over to working for a peaceful postwar world by giving Stalin virtually anything he wanted and asking for little in return. FDR stated that he liked Stalin more and more after every meeting, because there was something of the “Christian gentleman” in the Red Master in the Kremlin!

Stalin, on the other hand, viewed FDR as a devious manipulator trying to pull one over on him; while Stalin’s attitude was that wherever the Soviet Army would end up at the end of the war, that’s where communism would be imposed as a springboard for later conquests against the capitalist countries after the Soviet Union had recovered from the Second World War.

FDR’s and Stalin’s grand diplomacy and central planning of the fate of the world set the stage for all that followed for the remainder of the twentieth century – the Cold War, the communist conquest of China, the hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the growth and intrusiveness of the American government in the United States in the name of other foreign crusades following 1945.

The legacies of the two World Wars, and especially their impact on American foreign and domestic policy, continue to haunt and affect the world today.

The webinar runs for about 45 minutes.

Best,
Richard