‘A devil’s bargain’ Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko explains why talk of a ‘New Yalta’ between Putin and Trump misses the mark
Ahead of a call between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on March 18, a Russian state media reporter asked Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov if the two leaders planned to discuss a “new Yalta.” Peskov said that no, “global reorganization” wasn’t on the agenda — though he acknowledged that there were “emotional expectations” surrounding the call. Indeed, following Trump’s reelection last November, the Russian president immediately reiterated his vision for a “new world order” and tasked state media with hammering it home, echoing his past calls for a “new Yalta” agreement. In the months since, the Trump administration’s drive to repair relations with Moscow and end the war in Ukraine has led to a flurry of comparisons in Western and Russian media to 1945, when Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Yalta to draw up plans for the post-World War II order. For insight into whether or not this historical comparison holds, The Beet editor Eilish Hart spoke to historian Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the author of To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.
The following Q&A has been lightly edited and abridged for length and clarity.
— The Trump administration’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine negotiations has provoked a lot of historical comparisons, including to the 1938 Munich Agreement. But the one that seems to predominate among Russia experts is the Yalta Conference. What makes this a helpful parallel for understanding what’s happening right now?
— Yalta was a moment in 1945 when the United States and the Soviet Union still seemed to be on parallel trajectories. Stalin wanted to have Great Power cooperation with the United States; Roosevelt wanted Stalin’s cooperation, as well. In fact, he needed the Soviet Union to help out the United States in Asia, where the Americans were still fighting the war against Japan. So Roosevelt approached this conference with this attitude of: What can we give to the Soviets? What concessions can we make to get their cooperation in Asia?
To make a parallel to the present day, you could look at Trump’s policy and ask yourself, does Trump need Russia’s help in some way? Why is it that he’s reaching out to Putin with this proposal for Great Power cooperation? I think the answer is partly yes, because I think he does want to see Russia as more or less on his side in a Great Power relationship that also involves China. The question is what concessions he’s willing to make — and this is where the differences are stark.
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One of the reasons that some historians, especially Polish historians, have criticized Yalta is that — according to them — it effectively sold out the Polish. Stalin was determined to keep Soviet control of Poland for strategic reasons. (He thought that Russia’s enemies had historically used Poland anytime they wanted to invade. Whether it was Napoleon or the Germans, the invasions took place through what Stalin described as the “Polish corridor.”) But in reality, by February 1945, Soviet forces had already pushed through and had effectively already established their own government to run Poland. So, when we talk about a sellout, I don’t see what the Americans could have realistically done not to allow Poland — or any [other country] in Eastern Europe, for that matter — to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence, simply because Soviet forces were already on the ground. Could you fight a war with the Soviet Union to prevent that? Nobody in the U.S. wanted to do that; nobody in their right mind would do that.
Now, if you take that parallel to the present, we can see that the Russians do not control Ukraine. They have not overrun Ukraine or established their own government there. In fact, they’re stuck fighting a war of attrition in the eastern part of Ukraine. From that perspective, then, do you really want to concede Ukraine to Putin out of the goodness of your heart? I don’t know if this is what Trump wants to do. But I think this is where the Yalta parallel doesn’t quite hold, because the circumstances are very different.
— In your book, To Run the World, you focus on legitimacy as a motivator in Soviet foreign policy. Why was this important in the context of the Yalta Conference?
— For Stalin, lesser gains with greater legitimacy were more important than greater gains with lesser legitimacy. He could have pushed his luck further in various places, relying on power alone. But he also valued America’s recognition of those gains because that made them more secure and more long-term. If you hold a piece of territory or [some other] gain and others do not recognize it as legitimate, you stand to lose out in the long term because people will challenge your possession of it. So, you rely on external recognition. For Stalin, that sort of legitimation by the United States was important — and this is what Yalta was supposed to do. Yalta gave an aura of legitimacy to Soviet gains in Eastern Europe but also in Asia, which was another important theater for Stalin.
I think it’s the same, frankly, for Putin. He wants a “new Yalta” or something like that precisely because he values American recognition of his territorial conquest, which would make it permanent. Because if nobody recognizes Russian possession of Crimea or eastern Ukraine, then there’s the likelihood that if Putin dies or Russia is weakened, there’s going to be an opportunity for the Ukrainians to claw back [occupied territories] from the Russians. And so Putin wants to avoid that by creating a legitimate framework, which would assign those territories to Russia effectively, and perhaps leave all of Ukraine within Russia’s sphere of influence implicitly. That is how you would understand, I think, this idea about Ukraine not joining NATO in any shape or form. If the Americans recognize this as a key issue, then this also legitimizes Russia’s indirect political control over Ukraine over the long term.
— You said that at Yalta, Stalin was willing to accept lesser gains with greater legitimacy. It doesn’t seem as though Putin has abandoned his maximalist goals in Ukraine, but do you think there’s a chance he’d also accept lesser gains with greater legitimacy? Is legitimacy still that important to him?
— I think it is, but it’s something that remains to be seen, really, because Western recognition of territorial conquest by Russia would be a pretty tall order. It’s something that is very difficult to actually carry out in practice because all of the historical experience speaks against this. Here, Yalta is not the parallel — it’s Munich, really: this idea of “peace for our time,” that you give away a part of somebody else’s territory and hope that this stops the aggressor. I think there’s great reluctance in the United States and certainly in Europe, where nobody’s even considering the idea of official recognition of those territories as somehow being part of Russia or falling into the Russian sphere of influence.
So, what we’re talking about here is maybe some kind of implicit [or] de facto recognition as opposed to de jure recognition. Although, all of those things do actually matter quite a bit. If you have an agreement on Ukraine’s permanent neutrality, let’s say, with provisions that only apply to the part of Ukraine that is under Ukrainian control, that amounts to a kind of implicit recognition of the fact that the Russians hold those territories and likely will for a long time. By the same token, if you have, let’s say, sanctions relief and that also applies to Crimea or eastern Ukraine while it is still under Russian occupation, that also amounts to de facto recognition of those territories as Russian, which is another possibility.
Putin will want all of those things. Even if he cannot secure an outright recognition by the West of his territorial conquest, Putin can at least try to secure de facto recognition, which is also very important to him and could be the basis for some kind of a settlement in Ukraine. I think this is where we get into the nitty-gritty details of what could actually happen in the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, and whether any viable basis can be found for limiting Putin’s control, somehow, in return for a degree of legitimation that would come with sanctions relief and other things that the Americans could try to arrange.
— If we’re talking about degrees of legitimacy or recognition, the direction U.S. foreign policy is taking seems important here, because Europe and the U.S. don’t appear to be on the same page. I don’t know if we can really talk about “Western recognition” in terms of a bloc anymore.
— Sure. I mean, it’s obviously much more difficult for the Europeans than the Americans. But we’re not even talking about actual de jure recognition or having a peace conference that would redraw borders. That’s not in the cards. Putin may want that, but I don’t think anybody in their right mind would actually agree to this because it would set a very disturbing precedent.
What I think could happen is de facto recognition of some kind. For example, if you’re looking for comparisons, there are a couple from the Cold War. One is the American non-recognition of the Soviet annexation of the Baltics. That continued throughout the Cold War, even though basically the United States had normal diplomatic relations with Moscow and anybody who traveled in the USSR could also go [to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania] without any special restrictions. America followed a policy of non-recognition but there was de facto recognition.
Another interesting example would be the One China policy, this idea that was arrived at through consultations with the Chinese in 1972 (known as the Shanghai communiqué), where basically the Americans and the Chinese agreed that on each side of the Taiwan straight — i.e., in Beijing and Taiwan — they claim there’s only one China and America does not dispute this interpretation. Maybe they could use this sort of strange language where America would not dispute something or other in order to provide de facto but not de jure recognition.
The question is, what do you get in return for this? Does it mean that Putin will agree to a viable Ukraine? A viable Ukraine can be only effectively guaranteed if it’s able to defend itself. So Putin will have to agree to a whole bunch of things and then, in return, Ukraine and its Western partners — or at least some of them — could provide a degree of legitimation for Putin’s hold on Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Obviously, it’s a devil’s bargain, but that’s the idea underlying those negotiations.
— Some experts have taken the parallels to Yalta even further, arguing that a new “Big Three” — in this case, Putin, Trump, and China’s Xi Jinping — are preparing to carve up the world and that we’re witnessing the return of spheres of influence. Do you think this is a bridge too far?
— I think people who argue that don’t quite understand the nature of what was happening at Yalta and the differences between then and now. Yalta ultimately did not hold, [and] there was the Cold War. In other words, there was no acceptance of the legitimacy of Soviet gains or control of Eastern Europe.
Stalin and the Americans had a very different vision of the world. And, by the way, Stalin and the British had a very similar vision of the world. That is why they could actually agree to divide up southeastern Europe in the so-called “percentages agreement” in 1944. Stalin and Churchill were 19th-century imperialists; that’s how they thought about the world. The Americans had a different vision: They thought of the world as being whole — not divided into spheres of influence — and open to American business and involvement. In other words, [it was] the very opposite of what Stalin was trying to accomplish. And so, for that reason, you had a clash of visions in 1945 that, I think, helps us understand how we ended up in the Cold War.
Today, you might actually have a situation that’s different from Yalta, but also perhaps more resilient and more stable for that reason. It seems that Trump thinks about the world in those 19th-century terms that Stalin and Churchill used in their understanding, and Putin also has the same approach. So effectively, [from their perspective,] America is for the Americans, including Greenland and Panama; Asia is for the Chinese; and then Europe, you might say, is for the Russians. But this is where the parallel does not hold. In Asia, the Japanese, for example, might have something to say about this idea of “Asia for the Chinese.” And in Europe, you have Russia that is weaker economically, militarily, [and] technologically than the combined power of Europe.
Europe is not prostrate like in 1945, when the Soviets could just say, “Look, this is a vacuum; we can basically carve it up the way we want because we control the situation on the ground.” Now, [Russia’s] fighting a war in Ukraine, but it cannot even go beyond controlling 20 percent of the country. They’re trying now to do through diplomacy what they could not accomplish through military means, so what kind of “Yalta agreement” are we talking about here? What kind of division of the world into spheres of influence are we talking about when the Russians cannot [achieve] it through military force? They’re hoping and praying to God that Trump is going to be stupid enough to buy into that and help them somehow to browbeat the Europeans into some kind of submission. But that’s not going to work because the Europeans are not stupid. And the Ukrainians are not stupid; they’re fighting the Russians on the ground. So, that’s where the limitations of the Yalta framework become apparent, to my mind.
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Interview by Eilish Hart