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In February 1945, the three leaders of the Allied war coalition—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union—met in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta in Russian Crimea to make preparations for the postwar order. By then, Germany, Italy, and Japan were losing the war. The three men had different visions of how a war-torn world should be reconstructed. Roosevelt anticipated a world of independent states, kept at peace by an international body. He had no interest in restoring the old European empires, which he believed had been ruled selfishly with little commitment to a civilizing mission. New nations then should take the place of old empires. Roosevelt had high hopes that China would emerge under the guidance of Chiang Kai-shek as the leader of Asia after the anticipated downfall of the Japanese empire. The American president requested that the Soviet Union enter the Pacific war on the American side, and Stalin agreed. But Britain’s Churchill had no intention, as he so aptly put it after the war, of presiding over the liquidation of the British empire. Finally, just what Stalin wanted was not clear, though the Soviet leader’s negotiations at Yalta left no doubt that he intended to secure influence in Eastern Europe and Asia and to weaken Germany so that it could never again menace the Soviet Union. In short, as the end of the war approached, these contrasting visions of the postwar world order threatened to usher in a contentious era.
Chapter Objectives
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