The Unlikely Peace: How World War II Created a New Conflict

The Unlikely Peace: How World War II Created a New Conflict

Introduction: The Paradox of Victory

On May 8, 1945, crowds gathered in Times Square, Trafalgar Square, and Red Square to celebrate what seemed like the dawn of eternal peace. The most destructive conflict in human history had finally ended. Nazi Germany, the fascist monster that had plunged Europe into darkness and murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust, had surrendered unconditionally. Victory in Europe was complete. Just a few months later, on September 2, 1945, Japan would follow, ending the Second World War once and for all. For millions of exhausted soldiers, displaced refugees, and war-weary civilians, this moment represented the end of an nightmare and the beginning of a new era of international cooperation and lasting peace.

Yet within merely a few years, the euphoria of victory would evaporate like morning dew under a harsh sun. The very alliance that had vanquished Hitler and Tojo would fracture along invisible but insurmountable ideological fault lines. The United States and Great Britain, on one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other—partners who had fought side by side against a common enemy—would become suspicious rivals, then open adversaries, and finally protagonists in a new kind of conflict that would shape the entire second half of the twentieth century. This new confrontation, which historians would come to call the Cold War, would define international politics for nearly half a century, reshape the maps of Europe and Asia, create nuclear weapons that threatened all of humanity with annihilation, and influence everything from the economies of developing nations to the cultural products Hollywood would produce.

The central paradox of this chapter—and indeed of this entire book—is that the very victory that should have usher in an era of unprecedented peace instead planted the seeds of a new and potentially even more dangerous global conflict. Understanding how this transformation occurred requires us to travel back to the final months of World War II, to the great conferences where Allied leaders mapped out the post-war world, and to trace carefully the series of decisions, misunderstandings, and fundamental ideological incompatibilities that transformed wartime partners into Cold War adversaries.

The Wartime Alliance: A Marriage of Convenience

To understand why the wartime alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union broke apart so dramatically, we must first appreciate how improbable that alliance had been in the first place. In the years before World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had regarded each other with deep suspicion. American political culture was saturated with anti-communist sentiment, viewing Stalin's regime as a totalitarian abomination that had betrayed the revolutionary promise of the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union, for its part, had been deeply disillusioned by the failure of communist revolutions in Western Europe and viewed capitalist democracies as irredeemably hostile to socialist states. The British, with their vast empire and conservative establishment, had even less in common with either communist Russia or republican America.

Yet when Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, attacking the Soviet Union without warning, the geopolitical landscape transformed overnight. Suddenly, the Soviet Union found itself fighting for survival against the very same enemy that threatened Britain and would soon threaten the United States. Joseph Stalin, the paranoid Soviet dictator who had purges his own military officer corps in the late 1930s, killing thousands of experienced commanders, now desperately needed Western aid to survive. The British, standing alone after the fall of France, needed Soviet participation to create a truly global coalition against Hitler. And American strategists, looking at the global picture, recognized that the Soviet Union was the only power capable of tying down millions of German soldiers on the Eastern Front.

The alliance that emerged from these circumstances was always more strategic convenience than genuine friendship. Winston Churchill, the indomitable British Prime Minister, famously declared that he would be willing to "make alliance with the devil himself" if it helped defeat Hitler. When pressed on whether he included Stalin's Soviet Union in such a category, Churchill replied that he would cross that bridge when they came to it. American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, more optimistic about the possibilities of post-war cooperation, worked assiduously to cultivate a personal relationship with Stalin, believing that personal diplomacy could bridge ideological divides. Yet even Roosevelt, the architect of American wartime diplomacy, recognized the fundamental tensions underlying the alliance.

The famous "Big Three"—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—met several times during the war to coordinate strategy and, increasingly, to plan for the post-war settlement. These conferences would prove crucial in shaping the world that emerged from the war's ashes. At Tehran in November-December 1943, the three leaders met for the first time together, agreeing in principle that Germany should be divided after the war and that the Soviet Union would regain territories lost to Japan in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. At Yalta in February 1945, with the end of the war in Europe clearly approaching, the Big Three negotiated the detailed terms of Germany's surrender and the political future of Eastern Europe. And at Potsdam in July-August 1945, with Roosevelt dead and his successor Harry Truman now in office, the Allied leaders confronted the reality of implementing the agreements they had made and began to sense the emerging tensions that would soon tear the alliance apart.

The Yalta Conference: Building the Post-War Order

The Yalta Conference, held from February 4 to 11, 1945, in the Crimean resort town of Yalta on the Black Sea coast, represented the high-water mark of Allied cooperation. By this time, the Soviet Red Army had advanced deep into Eastern Europe and stood poised to liberate Berlin. American and British forces had established footholds in Western Europe after the D-Day landings of June 1944. The war's outcome was no longer in doubt, but the precise boundaries of the post-war settlement remained to be negotiated. The three leaders met with the knowledge that whatever agreements they reached would shape the political geography of Europe for generations.

The most contentious issue at Yalta was the future of Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, which had been invaded and partitioned by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in 1939 under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Poland had suffered enormously—it was estimated that one-sixth of the Polish population, some six million people, would perish during the war. For Churchill, maintaining Polish independence was a matter of both strategic interest and moral principle. Britain had gone to war in 1939 specifically to defend Poland against German aggression, and Churchill could not imagine accepting a settlement that betrayed that commitment. For Stalin, however, Poland was not merely a strategic buffer but an existential security concern. The Soviet Union had been invaded through Poland twice in the twentieth century—in 1914 during World War I and most catastrophically in 1941 during Operation Barbarossa—and Stalin was determined to ensure that a future invasion would have to cross multiple layers of Soviet-controlled territory before reaching the Russian heartland.

The agreements reached at Yalta attempted to reconcile these competing imperatives through careful diplomatic language that would prove, in retrospect, to be dangerously ambiguous. The three powers agreed that the governments of Eastern European states should be "friendly to the Soviet Union," a phrase that would be i