Bush steps up to plate on Yalta

By BETSY HART
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
So maybe President Bush's foreign policy isn't all about oil after all.
That's been a charge of many American elites when it comes to Bush and the Middle East: That he's really trying to stabilize Iraq in order to have better access to the region's oil -- for all those gas guzzlers back home in America, they implicitly add.
But the president's speech in Latvia last weekend shows otherwise. In Russia to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, the president stopped in neighboring Latvia to make yet another gutsy move: In the Baltic republic once dominated and brutalized by the Soviets, he denounced the 1945 Yalta agreement signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. That accord gave Eastern Europe to the Soviets after the war.
Great wrong
As Bush lamented, "once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable." He called Yalta "one of the greatest wrongs of history."
No other American president has gone nearly so far in denouncing that pact.
The left in the United States has consistently argued that the Soviets' takeover of Eastern Europe after World War II was inevitable, partly because they were physically in so much of it at the end of the war.
But with Yalta, in a very real way America did hand over certain countries and, almost as horrifying, gave an overt blessing to the Soviet takeover of others. We gave no hope whatsoever to Eastern European democrats. In openly partnering with the Soviets, we doomed them instead.
Today the left argues that "we didn't know how bad the Soviets were then" (funny, they never did seem to figure that out until the Soviet Union was broken up, then suddenly they were anti-communists all along) or "we needed the Soviets on our side to finish off the Japanese threat" -- which is not the case.
American betrayal
In any event, hindsight is 20/20 -- and Bush has it. And in repudiating the overt American complicity at Yalta -- complicity ordained by its very president -- this president has rightly admitted to an American betrayal in war far more shameful than anything committed by rogue sadists at Abu Graib prison.
Talk about stepping up to the plate.
It was also clearly a warning shot at Russian President Vladimir Putin to be "careful" how he handles the young democracies on Russia's borders. Putin is being a little too friendly to authoritarianism lately -- and a little too reminiscent of the old Soviet empire. He recently called the breakup of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."
Bush clearly wanted Putin to hear him when he said: "We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. ... we have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others."
Bush has a vision of seeking freedom and democracy for oppressed peoples around the world, and not just when there is oil at stake.
There are many in the United States who apparently don't like that vision, so they paint it as being about money or some other greedy end. (Then there are those who like the vision but not always the execution of it. I'm in that quarter at times, but that's another column.)
It's not always clear what the United States should do for those people living under totalitarian regimes. I'm the first to argue we cannot send American men to die in every oppressed nation in the world.
But too often we forget (and many simply don't like) the sheer moral power of America. By denouncing Yalta, by issuing the powerful clarion call for freedom he did last week -- and from a country once hidden behind the Iron Curtain -- Bush put that power to its best and highest use. He encouraged those oppressed people everywhere who seek freedom.
X Betsy Hart is the author of the forthcoming "It Takes a Parent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting is Hurting Our Kids -- and What to Do About It."