Stalin's Peace Note in 1952

too late old chap

Did you know that on March 10, 1952 Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, sent a Peace Note to the western nations to settle the Cold War? That’s what I just learned from Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy. I had no idea.

The Peace Note called for a unified, neutral Germany based on free elections, and one that would be allowed to maintain its own armed forces though all foreign troops would have to leave within a year.

But, Kissinger writes, Stalin was too late, coming after the Berlin blockade of 1948, the Czech coup of 1948, the founding of NATO in 1949, and the Korean War that started in 1950. To the West, the actions of the Soviet Union, real and imagined, after World War II meant that We had to unite to prevent the Commies from taking over the world. And NATO was the military alliance to do just that.

And anyway, Kissinger points out, the whole problem of 20th century Europe was that Germany was far and away the biggest and most powerful country, and an armed, neutral Germany in 1952 would just reset to the conditions of 1914.

As we can see today — and is true of almost all politics — one thing that politicians cannot and will not do is a do-over. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, western leaders never seriously looked at terminating NATO. Indeed, the West has expanded NATO eastward towards today’s Russia, as La Wik tells us:

In 1990, the territory of the former East Germany was added… In 1999 Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic officially joined… Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia [joined] in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020… and Finland [in 2023].

That makes 15 nations added since 1989, making a total of 31 nations. I wonder what Vladimir Putin thinks about all that. I dare say that one thing he probably doesn’t think is that the western leaders are too stupid and too much wedded to the Narrative to think of taking a bold step like winding up NATO.

For instance, my nickel says that no western leader right now is thinking: wow, if the Russians are bogged down in Ukraine, fighting against a third-rank country, why are we worried about the Russians invading Poland, Hungary or Romania? Instead, they have all known from sucking mother’s milk in their cradles, that Russia, Russia, is the big unstoppable monster. And nobody dares to break out of the Narrative and say: who cares about Russia!

Guess what: Russia is #13 in the GDP rankings as of 2022, after Britain and France, and #56 in GDP per capita rankings, behind Panama and Poland.

By the way, the US is #7 in GDP per capita, after Qatar and Singapore. Germany is #19, after Finland and Belgium.

Anyway, aside from anything else, Stalin died in March 1953. His successors were too busy deciding who was going to replace Stalin to dare to negotiate with the West about a relaxation of tensions. And so the Cold War went on for another 35 years.

One of the things I have experienced reading Kissinger’s Diplomacy is that, again and again, Kissinger shows that nearly all political leaders down the decades are idiots, imprisoned by their fears and their ignorance and the conventional wisdom.

He doesn’t actually say that; he’s too much of a diplomat for that.