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Discussion Question: Did We Need to Ally with Stalin?
There’s a line you get all the time in debates: “After all, we allied with Stalin to beat Hitler.” I don’t like it much as an argument because the implication is that anyone who isn’t worse than Stalin is fair game, and there are very few people who can’t clear that bar. But never mind that, what about it as a historical question; should we have allied with Stalin?
Take the same history right up until June 22, 1941. The Wehrmacht rolls Panzers into the Soviet Union. Roosevelt cables Churchill, “The important thing is to beat Hitler, but do we really need to supply the communists?” Churchill cables back, “If Hitler invaded hell, I wouldn’t invite the devil to tea.”
What happens from there? How do you think history would run? Do the allies still win the war? Spin out your own alternate history and let me know what you think.
Published in History
Don’t ascribe to malice what is easily explained through incompetence.
About the commanding general, are you thinking of Zhukov?
About Khalkin Gol, do you think that the Russians performed well, or that the Japanese performed poorly? My impression is that it was poor Japanese performance, especially in tanks. Japan had pretty pitiful tanks, I think, though I haven’t studied this issue much — because I don’t think that there were any significant Japanese tank battles other than Khalkin Gol.
I don’t have the impression that FDR was incompetent, though.
Also, I didn’t ascribe my suspicion about FDR’s motives to malice. Why would you assume that it was malice?
I’d actually like an answer to this question, if you don’t mind. Assume, for the sake of argument, that FDR deliberately provoked both Japan and Germany into war with the US, principally to overcome public resistance to intervention in the European war against Germany. Would you find such an action malicious, or morally objectionable?
It strikes me that it might be good statecraft, depending on the circumstances. The issue, for me, would be whether vital US interests would be advanced by the defeat of Germany, and if the benefit of such a result would be worth the expected cost.
It wouldn’t be appreciably different from what is suspected over US involvement with Russia.
The US population’s taste for blood is non-existent and is even costing politically. Instigate war between Russia and a sympathetic underdog, increase American appetite for it.
I think FDR manipulating public perception to go to war is only morally repugnant if you think fighting Nazis was a bad thing. The US was more isolationist then than it is now. And after our last intervention, I can’t imagine public sentiment was in favor, regardless of rumors coming out of Europe. I think most here would view such manipulations more positively than they view our intervention with Ukraine and Russia.
I think Roosevelt and the government basically ignored Japan, short of freezing them out of fuel supplies. They discounted the Japanese for racial and historic reasons. That is what I would call incompetence.
In general, I hate politicians manipulating the populace. The ends can justify the means (the Torah makes that clear), but I still hate it.
Jerry, I don’t think there’s much moral or political distinction between being a co-belligerent and an ally. There’s some, sure; but realistically, withholding the blessing of calling someone an ally is trivial compared to the practical effects of giving them ships, material, and hundreds of thousands of army vehicles. If the USSR had truly been an ally, we would not have kept the Manhattan Project a secret. If the Soviets thought we were an actual ally, they would have disbanded their espionage network in the US.
Spies we were keeping an eye on via a tap on their communications, a tap that didn’t come to light until the Venona transcripts were declassified.
Did you ever wonder how a drunken stumblebum like Joe McCarthy maintained such a high accuracy rate? Someone at the FBI must have been feeding him.
I miss the days when the FBI was on America’s side.