It's taken 70 years, but the New York Times has finally seen the light on the matter of Yalta.
Or at least the editor of its editorial page has. That's what I gather from a post by Andrew Rosenthal at "Taking Note," the blog of the Times editorial page. As part of a long list of "most destructive foreign policy decisions," Mr. Rosenthal lists "the decision to carve up Europe with Stalin, creating the Soviet bloc, sparking a nuclear arms race and leaving entire nations in bondage to the Kremlin for a half century."
It's terrific that the senior editorial leadership of the Times has come around to this view of the agreement struck by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in February of 1945. It's been a long time in coming. In its post-Yalta editorial of February 13, 1945, headlined "For Victory and Peace," the Times pronounced that "the first glance" at the "long and detailed agreements" indicated that they "show the way to an early victory in Europe, to a secure peace, and to a brighter world." The Times editorial described Yalta's resolution of the "troublesome problems represented by the names of Poland and Yugoslavia" as "a compromise that will have to be accepted on all sides as the best that can be obtained in the present troubled world."
A year later, in a February 12, 1946 editorial headlined "The Yalta Bargain," the Times backed away, but just slightly: "Probably it will not be until many years have passed, when the events of 1945 can be viewed from a better perspective than is now possible, that an objective appraisal can be made. Right now many will say the Soviet received a great deal for the promise of very little."
Even as recently as 2005, when President George W. Bush criticized Yalta, the news columns of the Times were trotting out left-wing historians to condemn him. From that 2005 Times article:
Robert Dallek, a Boston University historian and an expert on Roosevelt's foreign policy, agreed. "Republicans have been beating on this issue since the end of the Roosevelt presidency, and they have been consistently off the mark," he said. "This idea that Roosevelt and Churchill gave away Eastern Europe to the Soviets is nonsense."
David M. Kennedy, a Stanford historian, put it this way: "This was a stick to beat the Democrats up with in the McCarthy era."
It would be nice if the Times made the acknowledgement of its Yalta error in print and in the editorial column rather than just in a blog posting by the editorial page editor, but the blog post may be, well, "the best that can be obtained in the present troubled world."
While acknowledging a past error, the Times seems bent on committing a new one, issuing an editorial hailing the agreement on Iran's nuclear weapons. There are certain parallels between Yalta and this Iran deal — carving up the Middle East with Iran the same way Roosevelt split Europe with Stalin, consigning Iranians to bondage, the talk of the best available compromise, the war-weariness. This deal, too, meets with initial praise from the Times. One hopes it will take less than 70 years before some editor realizes that the New York Times got this one wrong, too.