Cold War Origins with Sean McMeekin | BRI Scholar Talks: Cold War & The Presidency Series

0:00 there has always been this argument about roosevelt and especially his death in april 1945 had roosevelt lived what might have been different would there have been a cold war at least would it have kind of emerged in the way that it did um i think some kind of cold war would have emerged eventually the question was just was the u.s going to actually counter the soviets and their moves in europe and asia

0:25 [Applause] hi this is tony williams senior fellow at bri and we are pleased to bring you the first episode in our new series on the cold war and the presidency and we’re really pleased to have sean mcmikin on fdr in the origins of the cold war in this series our our main question that we’re going to ask will really be

0:46 how individual presidents shaped executive powers during the cold war now by way of introduction sean mcmikin is a professor of history at bard college he’s a prize-winning and best-selling author of numerous books including the russian revolution a new history and most recently stalin’s war

1:09 a new history of world war ii which is the basis for today’s discussion sean uh thank you very much for joining us uh and and launching this series really appreciate it well thanks for having me on tony this is a great honor and a privilege sure uh you know stalin’s war is a really magnificent book and and i was really excited to to talk about it today

1:31 because you know sort of really confirms everything we’ve always thought about stalin with just a tremendous amount of evidence really presenting this very persuasive case uh about your main arguments in the book so so really a fabulous book thank you well let’s dive right in uh so

1:52 uh before we get to fdr let’s look at the intentions of stalin and the soviet union at the beginning of world war ii now you argue in stalin’s war uh that you know he really had sort of a plan for world domination for world revolution and really wanted the capitalist nations of the world to to go to war with each other and sort of

2:13 destroy each other and bleed each other dry uh and that stalin would kind of come in and pick up the pieces and really aggressively and even murderously expanded russian borders uh at the beginning of world war ii uh you know he expands into the baltic states uh most notoriously also into poland

2:36 uh tried to expand the borders into finland uh also in asia as he’s stirring up the the sino uh japanese war and and even into the territory around the the the black sea uh is this a fair assessment of stalin’s intentions well i think so i mean your phrase world domination of course is so dramatic it

2:57 almost calls to mind this kind of image of a james bond specter type agency on the other hand the thing is a lot of people will always discount these type of claims and and yet then to discount it entirely you have to ignore the existence of the communist international which was after all a conspiracy devoted to world revolution and if you actually look at its

3:18 conditions among them where the communists across the world were supposed to render selfless assistance to the soviet union and its foreign policy needs obviously they’re aiming to topple governments around the world to expand the boundaries of communism so that part isn’t really a mystery i think where the controversy tends to come in is that a lot of western scholars have

3:40 tended to accept uh soviet propaganda almost at face value it was a peace-loving empire that for example that the soviets had some interest in preserving the peace and equilibrium of europe whereas of course they had no such intention or no such interest even the idea that the soviets were devoted to collective security a term you’ll hear again and again in the diplomatic literature on the origins

4:01 of the war there’s no evidence for this um now it’s true that veenoff uh the foreign affairs commissar did from time to time talk about uh the need for a kind of alliance against hitler and he was a sort of a useful front man for stalin but stalin himself never really talked about collective security he talked about the second imperialist war this war that he thought was kind of almost

4:22 fated to happen and again this goes back to the interpretation of the first world war uh the contradictions of capitalism uh the highest stage of imperialism all this language going back to lenin and his views on imperialism lenin’s views on revolutionary defeatism uh and then lenin and stalin’s interpretation of really how the russian revolution come about which is of course by

4:42 the the clash between the capitalist powers which have made the basically the birth of communist impossible so stalin’s expecting this to happen he wants to make sure that the soviets are ideally positioned that the fighting ideally happens between let’s say nazi germany in the west rather than between nazi germany the soviet union some of that is simple common sense but of course it’s also tinged with this kind of almost communist

5:02 paranoia and the expansionism that you’re talking about i mean it really wasn’t a great secret that stalin wanted to expand the boundaries of communism by whatever means necessary uh whether it was again by toppling governments internally through agents of influence communist parties subversion or in the case of 1939-41 the expansion

5:23 uh militarily um which actually turned out to be easier than perhaps might have been expected because of stalin’s deal with hitler which gave him a free hand to expand into those countries you mentioned poland the baltic states finland romania so yeah i think overall it’s a fair characterization i mean it’s not that there was kind of a five part or ten part plan for world domination rather than stalin wanted to maneuver the soviet

5:45 union in as favorable a position as possible in order to expand the boundaries of communism i don’t think there was any great mystery there right great well well a lengthy comment on on my part leading to my question um so when the nazis made the soviet union fdr unilaterally decided to send len lease aid from pretty incredibly a neutral america

6:06 all right which is the arsenal of democracy in in his phrase and it eventually totals some 11 billion dollars which i think you point out in the book would total uh you know approximately a trillion dollars today uh with really without demanding or maybe should i say gaining really any leverage over uh soviet aggression and expansion

6:27 especially over eastern europe and you portray the roosevelt administration giving the soviets essentially a blank check uh to requisition and and even demand american industrial and military goods uh and that the soviet uh the civilian spies and agents were were stealing american industrial and

6:47 military technology uh secrets uh and the soviets are essentially making very few to no concessions during the course of war in exchange for this aid uh you know what does uh the the len lease program uh specifically uh ascent to the soviet union what does this show about american executive power during the war

7:08 uh and really maybe even some of the failures of wartime diplomacy well it’s interesting to use that phrase blank check it wasn’t just a blank check in the metaphorical sense but also quite literally blank requisition forms that were identical to those being used by the us armed forces where effectively the soviets had legal writ over u.s foreign supplies or even put at

7:28 the front of the queue with a1 priority ratings um now as far as executive power now it’s true if you go back to the original lindley statues i mean to begin with it was an astonishing break from prior foreign policy tradition it was effectively a repudiation of the neutrality acts passed by congress um and updated several times in the 1930s um you know which really had tied the hands

7:49 of the president roosevelt as we know had been really intending to get involved certainly to support britain vis-a-vis nazi germany you know as early as perhaps 1939 definitely about 1940 where eventually you got the basis for destroyers deal but len lease went much further i mean it really did give the us president almost this unilateral authority to simply vacuum up uh to tap the vast

8:12 hydraulic forces of the us economy really for the benefit of almost any power he so chose there was a debate in congress and and several congressmen including many in afghanistan policing senators actually raised the objection uh specifically saying that they wanted to exclude the soviet union from this the soviet union then being this is march 1941 or the debates began even earlier than

8:32 that then still of course allied to nazi germany effectively they were partners and carving up europe europe together britain being the the prime kind of intended beneficiary at least in the early sense also china eventually some of the other countries occupied by nazi germany such as greece um and so there were a lot of a lot of people already alert to this in congress and they raised these

8:53 objections but they were all eventually defeated the amendments were defeated and roosevelt’s advisers and lawyers all just basically said look we have this good faith clause we could pretty much do whatever we want um what’s interesting though is that for the first five months or so after the german invasion of soviet they actually kept this secret from the public they did not cut into the fact they were actually using the len lee statute to send aid to

9:13 the soviet union and in fact some of the u.s diplomats such as the ambassador to moscow lawrence steinhardt were specifically told to basically keep their mouths shut about this and warned not to talk to the press not to talk to reporters maybe some of this was that it was also iffy still whether the soviets would actually survive and once it looked like they maybe had a fighting chance by november they finally kind of revealed

9:35 to the public that they’d made this decision but what’s really remarkable is that although there was a sort of sunset clause in the statute where uh they were congress was eventually supposed to be able to step in and either block the program stop the program or kind of reapprove it eventually because all the different countries got rolled into it it was a single congressional resolution

9:57 um you had to basically vote the whole thing up or down as a whole you know there was no line item veto as we might call it in later congressional parliaments and so that gave the president astonishing authority um again i mean it comes in in the form of not just this vast aid you’re talking about to the soviets but even as far as reshaping the domestic economy the whole u.s pork industry is reshaped to meet

10:17 soviet needs uh americans are told to eat margarine because the soviets need butter um you know they’re actually butter shortages by 1943. uh pork even fish i mean i was astonished that there was this scandal that actually reached the halls of congress that soviet fishermen were actually given this kind of carte blanche right to fish the the waters off the pacific northwest

10:37 between oregon and alaska they ended up fishing out king crab among other things um they were given this right because it was determined by the fdr administration this was a program of military necessity um which was again the the kind of the language used to justify all of this you know these vast requisitions including as you suggest industrial property industrial espionage what was amazing was that after june

10:58 1941 it was no longer espionage it wasn’t spying these these soviet agents who previously had been spies were simply allowed to go and inspect whatever facilities they wanted to order whatever they wanted a lot of them would just walk into the u.s patent office and kind of make carbon copies of various patents they walked around sensitive u.s

11:20 military facilities r d facilities and just basically took whatever they wanted they were given even literally intellectual property in the form of rights and processes of various kind of rubber companies firestone you’re talking about the petroleum industry uh refining of oil into into aviation fuel and gasoline and so on um they were simply given these things i

11:41 mean they’ve given them i mean the the the bill was footed by the u.s taxpayer of course and so that was the other really amazing thing is that the roosevelt administration sort of arrogated to itself the right to spend taxpayer dollars on giving all of this stuff uh for free basically to stalin and his armies um and you know every so

12:01 often someone might raise an objection in congress but you know in the end these these are all just kind of subsumed in the good faith clause um and it was determined for example when someone objected to the the transfer of intellectual property uh technology transfer intellectual property rights that uh they used the principle of eminent domain um it was kind of an

12:21 interesting interpretation of eminent domain uh that effectively they could do this because that’s the power granted to the president by the len lee statute and the good faith clause um it really is it becomes stranger and stranger the closer you look at it very very interesting um and and how do soviet agents and and soviet sympathizers

12:42 uh you know within the administration really shape administration war time uh you know diplomacy and policy towards the soviet union well some of them did so quite directly i mean in the case of harry dexter white there’s a lot about this in the book the kind of assistant secretary of the treasury right-hand man of heaven more than we now know he was regularly reporting to

13:03 soviet intelligence um you know so that you know he would sometimes meet with soviet diplomats or officials they would let him know what the priorities were he would kind of uh give the necessarily approval some of this was done for the treasury department it wasn’t exclusively the treasury department uh there were obviously a lot of soviet agents in the state department i mean alger has perhaps been the most famous and notorious of them but

13:23 i really think a lot of it comes down to this i mean harry hopkins plays a huge role in the book and there is a little bit of an argument among specialists about hopkins and you know whether he might have been uh forgetting the number i think it might have been agent 19 mentioned in some of the bonona decrypts i’m not convinced that he is i don’t think there’s any clear evidence that harry hopkins was either

13:44 regularly meeting with a kind of a soviet handler reporting to them to some extent it was just at a much higher level um he was what you might call an agent of influence just in the sense that he had vast power i mean he was basically running the len lease program and he was quite open about the fact that he was doing everything he could to support the soviets and he would get asked again and again and again you know

14:04 should we ask as early as 1941 when he’s in moscow on his first visit and and ivan keaton the u.s uh military attache asks can we at least get something in return can they at least let us go to the front and see how they’re using our equipment and hopkins says no you know there won’t be a quid pro quo as late as 44 when uh some of uh i mean um avril harriman the new ambassador to the soviet union

14:26 and some some of his aides begin asking can we get something in return hopkins says no he’s quite open but he doesn’t hide this again whatever his motivations might have been i don’t think he was a spy i don’t think he was literally reporting to soviet intelligence but i also think that’s kind of a little bit of a of a semantic question that to some extent is is beyond is kind of

14:46 it misses the point the point is what he did uh why he did it you know like it might have been just a kind of a general sympathy with the soviet union he had relationships with with stalin molotov and other soviet leaders they seemed to like him he seemed to like them he was kind of devoted to their cause he obviously thought nazi germany needed to be defeated and he thought the soviets were the best way

15:07 to do it and he thought the soviets would be powerful after the war this way he would explain it you could of course make the exact opposite argument because they would be so all-powerful after the war the u.s should be far more wary and careful about uh supplying the soviet uh war machine the red armies uh so so generously and lavishly but um you know his

15:28 argument was they’re gonna be all powerful so we better do whatever they want um and you know it’s to me that’s a questionable way of doing business but he didn’t hide it he wasn’t shy right great and and the uh you know the the post-war world is a great segue into my next question um you know fdr really seems to have

15:48 thought that he could manage stalin that his charm could uh you know affect this this personal diplomacy uh and shape their relationship at tehran at yalta and and really seems a thought that stalin he can make stalin amenable to his view of the world his his vision

16:09 uh and uh of the post-war world uh and so what what role does this have to play in in sort of the origins of the cold war well it’s a great question there there has always been this argument about roosevelt and especially his death in april 1945 had roosevelt lived what might have been different would there have been a cold war at least would it have kind of

16:29 emerged in the way that it did um i think some kind of cold war would have emerged eventually the question was just was the us going to actually counter the soviets in their moves in europe and asia um under roosevelt effectively the us was not countering them at all the us was was actually aiding them i mean as early as tehran roosevelt gave stone this massive sphere of influence in asia

16:50 at a time when the soviets weren’t just neutral vis-a-vis japan when they were actually arresting and in turning hundreds of u.s pilots who happened to crash land on soviet soil after bombing raids in japan so stalin was effectively actually collaborating with the japanese and roosevelt actually promised him a sphere of influence in manchester all these other places now truman you know we do know truman was was tougher

17:10 um he did eventually put his foot down when stalin demanded for example he demanded hokkaido one of the the main japanese home islands and he said no they wanted to share about half of hokkaido and um you know he put his foot down uh regarding further soviet expansion north of japan um he obviously kind of made sure that the service wouldn’t expand beyond the

17:31 agreed parallel in korea um roosevelt hadn’t even really gone that far there’s an argument about how much rosa could have done to stem the the soviet advance in europe um i certainly think he could have done far more and again the question about the origins of the cold war i think it’s mostly just a matter of whether the us was actually going to counter soviet moves i think stalin was going to try to

17:52 do what he was going to try to do uh the difficulty is that roosevelt was was not simply making things easier for him i mean he was literally signing off on these vast spheres of influence i mean tehran he signed off effectively on the soviet control of the baltic states of the the the ability to uh manipulate the borders of poland spheres of influence

18:12 in eastern europe and this was at a time when the soviet armies were still 600 miles and more from the old reich soviet border so as far as the early cold war it’s i think it’s mostly a matter of when the u.s was going to kind of cut into what was going on and fight back and i think that roosevelt’s death maybe to some extent in april 1945 accelerated this because i think truman

18:32 to some extent kind of woke up a bit more quickly i mean churchill had already been trying to wake roosevelt up to the threat as early as tehran certainly came back certainly at yolta um i think it really wasn’t i think even roosevelt would i mean he was he was concerned even right before his death when stalin accused him of double dealing with the germans he hadn’t actually broken with stalin yet but i

18:53 think he had come to become a little bit more concerned about stalin’s moves in eastern europe so i think some type of cold war was probably inevitable it was just a matter of when and how the us would counter these aggressive soviet moves in europe all right uh final question uh so how does fdr’s unilateralism uh diplomatic relations with the soviet union

19:14 uh during the war shape executive power during world war ii and then for its successors uh in the cold war well i think it it established a fairly clear precedent we just to say this extremely powerful executive and not completely running roughshod over congress in every sense

19:34 but certainly dismissing congressional objections and using kind of whatever legal and administrative means were necessary to bypass congress now it is true that eventually in 1950 congress did pass uh that that kind of resolution and the c-68 enabling a far greater spending on the kind of security infrastructure of europe

19:56 and truman did at least pay congress the compliment of asking of course in 1947 for funds to carry out the initial kind of policies of what would later become known as the truman doctrine um but that said i do think the president was established that uh that the president really did have this more or less unilateral authority over foreign policy i mean if we just if we look back to even the

20:17 the original congressional uh duty really uh role in declaring war uh you could correct me if i’m wrong because i’m by known as a u.s political or presidential historian but i don’t believe we’ve had a formal declaration of war since 1941 um and so even that kind of basic power you might save the presidency you could say that even predates pearl harbor i think to some

20:38 extent it goes back to len lease which to me was kind of belligerence and all but name the president had already effectively chosen sides in the war and decided to line up the united states alongside any country which either was or was potentially going to be an opponent of nazi germany uh i think that the glen lace act of march 1941 really marked um the kind of point of no return um

21:00 that to somebody said it was implicit that the us would no longer go about declaring war in the old-fashioned way but the president would just determine determined foreign policy on his own sean mcmikin uh thank you very much for uh joining us to help launch the cold war in the presidency series and thank you for your remarkable remarkable book stalin’s war

21:23 thanks so much tony thanks for having me on thank you for joining us on our conversation uh in our mini curriculum video series on the cold war and the presidency check out our other episodes on truman on kennedy and nixon and kissinger and also ronald reagan with interviews with several

21:43 distinguished historians on this very very important topic thank you