President George W. Bush was a lot closer to right than he usually manages when he placed the Yalta agreement, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, in the context of the agreements that viewed “the freedom of small nations [as] somehow expendable.” What Bush, like most Republican critics before him, misses, however, is that the deal with the Soviets was inevitable. Roosevelt was forced to recognize the realities of the postwar map. Indeed, the cause of much bitterness and confusion arising from the Yalta deal in the decades that followed flowed from FDR's unwillingness to admit what he had done.
