For citation, please use:
Ivanenko, V., 2025. Si Vis Pacem: How to Pay for Global Security. Russia in Global Affairs, 23(4), pp. 91–103. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2025-23-4-91-103
The 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference that took place on 4-11 February 1945 has passed almost unnoticed in the Western media. The reason for such oblivion is obvious: for many years ‘Yalta’ was a catchword for the ‘betrayal’ of Poland (the rest of Eastern Europe was already divided into spheres of influence by the British), and this perception relegated the Conference in Western opinion to the same type of ‘dirty deals’ as the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. At least, this is what the winning side of the Cold War believed in.[1]
Normally, the public is receptive to the idea that ‘history is written by the victors’ and since the U.S. prevailed over the USSR, this interpretation of Yalta seemed persuasive. However, the ‘betrayal’ of Poland is not what U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered the most important outcome of the Conference: he believed that it would be remembered for the establishment of the United Nations (UN.) Albeit the UN did not materialize in the form that Roosevelt envisioned, the organization turned out to be the pivot around which global affairs rotated at least until 1999 when it was finally overcome by its eternal antagonist—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—that Roosevelt was resolutely against.
However, to get to the root causes of the issues that have arisen along the way and with which the current U.S. administration tries to deal, one needs to understand why Roosevelt considered the UN to be a structure best serving both the global and American interests alike, and why his plan failed to materialize.
Strength through Peace or Peace through Strength?
When Roosevelt reported to the Congress on the Yalta Conference on 1 March 1945, he summarized its main achievement as follows: “The Conference … ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.”
This noble but fuzzy plan was not what the other two Conference participants—British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin—desired to hear. Churchill had already agreed with Stalin on a so-called ‘Percentage Agreement’ in October 1944, dividing South-Eastern Europe into Soviet and British spheres of influence without Roosevelt’s knowledge and thought that molding a Western European-American alliance intended “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” was the way forward. As for Stalin, he thought that the agreement with Churchill was the first step towards establishing his own cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe that would protect the USSR from any future European aggression. Poland was not a part of that agreement, but the Soviet troops had already controlled the entire Polish territory and Stalin was intent on maintaining their presence there. Both leaders considered the UN to be Roosevelt’s ‘pet project’ that would fail “to spell the end of … the exclusive alliances,” especially if they both play against it for different reasons; however, they had to agree to the UN—albeit with reservations—as Roosevelt was the strongest leader of the Allied forces.
Churchill recognized that the Atlantic Charter that he agreed on with Roosevelt in 1941 effectively transferred control of the British Empire into the American hands and he reasoned that from now on only the U.S. possessed the force (and could foot the bill) capable of stopping the Soviet Union from dominating Europe. The UN seemed to him a hopeless enterprise that could be torn apart when internal contradictions among the ‘four policemen’, suggested by Roosevelt (USA, USSR, UK, and China), flare. Churchill was intent on making the UN as ineffective militarily as possible and wanted, first, to dilute its unity by pressing Roosevelt to expand the list of ‘policemen’ to include France, which was already a minor partner in the Anglo-French Alliance (aka l’Entente cordiale) since 1904.
Stalin respected Roosevelt personally, but also feared that Churchill would work behind his back, while in agreement with the Americans, to make the UN a “Western plot against the USSR.”
Roosevelt responded to these demands with his usual flair. To avoid confrontation among the Allies after the war, he agreed with Churchill to add France to the list of Allied powers and suggested to include Brazil as a sixth policeman for Latin America as well. He found Stalin’s request for the veto power in the Security Council to be “a fair solution of this complicated and difficult problem,” but bargained to reduce the number of Soviet votes to three (that is how Ukraine and Belarus became “UN founding members”). However, Roosevelt failed to budge Stalin on the question of democratic government in Poland and for decades after, Roosevelt’s political adversaries attacked his conduct at Yalta as a product of naiveté regarding Stalin or worse. Yet, this critique does not square well with Roosevelt’s character and his expertise.
Roosevelt started his career as a young idealistic reformer and grew up to be a seasoned politician who won impressive battles against formidable political opponents. He was equally insightful in planning strategic operations aimed at consolidating his control over the American political machine. As per his naiveté regarding Stalin, Walter Lippmann, an American political journalist, once mentioned dryly: “Roosevelt was too cynical to think he could charm Stalin.” But, more importantly, Roosevelt experimented happily with means and methods and was intent to uncover a cost-effective way of tackling the eternal problem of War and Peace.[2]
In this respect, Roosevelt relied on the insight he got from another U.S. president (and his fifth cousin), Theodore Roosevelt, who became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his efforts in ending the Russo-Japanese War. Theodore Roosevelt did not shy from using military force when deemed necessary for the American national interests—the appearance of Panama as an independent country proves the point,—but he was equally perceptive to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, a Chinese general, who said centuries ago: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,”—i.e., with the minimum costs necessary to maintain your own army.
The problem with “the system of … the exclusive alliances” that Roosevelt disliked is the overburdening costs for its strongest member. Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser, American economists, used NATO as an example to show that the organization of joint defense is a special case of the provision of the public good. Thus, they argued, by joining an exclusive alliance the U.S. encounters the well-known problem of free-riding, common to public goods. In such alliances, the optimal strategy for the leader is to pay the necessary costs regardless of the contribution of others and it is optimal for smaller members to reduce their military expenses to zero.[3] And this is what they did.
Roosevelt could not know this theory, but his instincts told him to avoid being committed to “the exclusive alliances,” especially because “the United States will not always have its way a hundred percent,” as he stated to Congress. These instincts moved him towards the idea of ‘the International Security Organization’ where the strongest global players share willingly in military expenses to preserve their status of a ‘superpower’ to be able to police their respective parts of the world without being prodded to serve as arbiters in conflicts among the smaller players. As for the issue of ‘who would control the policemen,’ Roosevelt thought that if one of them would start behaving inappropriately, the rest of the policemen would form a coalition strong enough to prevent the ‘bad guy’ from becoming aggressive. In this scheme, the policemen minimize military expenses as a group—since the war among them would be unwinnable—and smaller players stop investing in the military altogether. But two operational issues proved to be insurmountable for Roosevelt’s plan to succeed.
The first was to find a way in which America would stick to the idea of the United Nations. The country at the time was leaning towards isolationism as the Americans found the idea of becoming one of the ‘global policemen’ unappealing. Common belief among American politicians was that their cannier European colleagues would find a way to involve their country in perennial European wars. Roosevelt had to press with the idea that “a peace … rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world,” including America, and pleaded with his compatriots to accept a self-imposed moral obligation for global peace. However, in this case, the continuity of American foreign policy was required and here, as Phillips Payson O’Brien, an American historian, says, Roosevelt showed ‘selfishness’ for choosing Harry Truman to be his running mate for the election held in 1944. The problem was that Roosevelt never wrote down his concrete vision for the post-war world and when Roosevelt died suddenly in 1945 and Truman was sworn in as the President, he had to intuit the meaning of the deals Roosevelt had made worldwide.
The second problem was with American voters of Polish descent who supported Roosevelt during the war and wanted Poland to be run by the Poles without foreign interference. Unfortunately, Roosevelt could not help in this respect as Stalin, who fought personally in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, was resolutely against including in the new Polish government those very same Poles who had shot at his troops when they moved through Poland while fighting the Germans in 1944.
These two factors—the break in policy continuity in the U.S. government, and bad publicity initiated by the American Poles and amplified during the years of the Cold War, rendered the UN—the crown jewel of Roosevelt’s strategic acumen—to look like a failure of American foreign policy. It was the British variant of the global policing system that displaced the original American version.
The Tail Wagging the Dog
NATO did not come out of the blue: this organization was grafted on already existing structures such as the Atlantic Charter of 1941. However, the Charter was a statement of general principles that could not serve as a basis for a military Western alliance. Roosevelt’s hope “to see a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries”—expressed in the Charter—and his idea to go for “the disarmament of nations that threaten aggression outside of their frontiers” were steps in the wanted direction, but the phrase “pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security” used in the same Charter had to be dropped as it precluded the establishment of a separate military bloc with the Americans and the British at the helm.
Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, was an honest but simple man who followed his own sense of moral duty with little concern for what side effects his actions might have.[4] He was irritated watching how the USSR installed ‘friendly’ governments in Eastern Europe and when the British Foreign Office informed in February 1947 that their troops had to abandon Greece due to the dire financial situation in Britain, Truman was ready to act. After the American ambassador in Athens, Lincoln MacVeigh, informed that a communist takeover of Greece was imminent, Truman immediately came with what later became known as the Marshall Plan—an initiative to provide aid to Western Europe and to counter the spread of communism.[5] At that time, Truman continued to believe that the American “help should be primarily through economic and financial aid,” which fell short of accepting the duty to become engaged militarily as the British hoped for. However, he added that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” which was already a step towards accepting the American moral duty to intervene militarily.
These words were not lost on Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, who was alarmed that the current military balance in Europe was well in the Soviet Union’s favor. Bevin sought ways to convince the Americans to lead a military alliance and he thought that stressing “the basic freedoms and ethical principles for which we all stand” would fall on fertile ground.
For this purpose, Bevin established within the Foreign Office a working group on ‘spiritual union’ that he believed should be the basis upon which to unite the West. The group approached Isaiah Berlin, a Russian-British philosopher, who suggested avoiding any mention of Hegel because liberal capitalism was as much Hegelian in its roots as Marxism. Instead, Berlin suggested emphasizing civil liberties indispensable to life in the West where individuals would supposedly prefer to die rather than have their liberties trampled upon, especially in favor of some state-directed aim such as building a communist utopia.
The Czechoslovak Crisis of February 1948 that led to the establishment of a communist government in Czechoslovakia prompted Truman to harden his approach further. Addressing the Congress on 17 March 1948, he stated: “… the free nations of Europe are drawing closer together … for the common defense of their liberties. … I am confident that the United States will, by appropriate means, extend to the free nations the support which the situation requires.”[6]
To this end, a secret series of negotiations took place in Washington the same month, during which the North Atlantic Treaty was effectively conceived by the representatives of the UK, the U.S., and Canada. Their final document was presented to Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who expressed its main points in Senate Resolution 239 passed on 11 June 1948 that urged the “progressive development of regional and other collective arrangements for individual and collective self-defense in accordance with the purposes, principles, and provisions of the (UN) Charter (and) Association of the United States, by constitutional process, with such regional and other collective arrangements.” The Resolution opened the way for negotiations regarding the Western military alliance that the British longed for and led to the formation of NATO on 4 April 1949.
NATO was born, but its founding document was still subordinated to the UN Charter, particularly to Article 51, which provided for the right of ‘collective self-defense.’ One more step was needed to cut the umbilical cord linking NATO to the UN and make it an organization entitled to conduct aggressive operations.
From then on, emphasis was placed not on following international agreements, but on the sheer belief that America plays an indispensable role as the only global policeman. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed neatly that feeling by concluding her interview held in February 1998 with the words: “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy, and the American way of life.” [7]
That belief led the United States to interpret its leading role in NATO—‘an exclusive alliance’ that Roosevelt warned about—as the right to start wars at will, first against Serbia in 1999 and later to conduct military operations in Asia and Africa bypassing the UN Security Council altogether.
Moreover, the path chosen by Truman in 1949 infected the American political class with ideological constraints designed specifically to contain the Soviet Union that have mutated after the demise of this strategic adversary in 1991 into increasingly self-defeating forms of liberalism. The U.S. policy stagnated and was in need of structural change, but the force of bureaucratic inertia and exuberance of the ruling elite kept it moving in the same direction.
Perestroika, American Style
The role of an individual in history is a debatable topic, yet it is generally agreed that important personalities (or ‘heroes’) appear in societies after a strong internal or external shock weakens the power of old institutions and warrants a decisive action. Thus, when Donald J. Trump stunned the American ruling class by first winning the U.S. presidential election in 2016 and then breaking through institutional barriers hectically erected against him in 2024, the local society was already in need of radical change. However, the nature of the shock that brought Trump to power is still unclear and has to be divulged on the basis of proxy data that show what the U.S. ruling class is concerned about.
First, the fact that the new president comes directly from the financial elite and not from the pool of professional politicians reveals a sense of urgency felt by the American rich. The obvious infighting among the wealthiest Americans—like Elon Musk, who clashes with Trump over his tax policy, or Rupert Murdoch, who questions the moral integrity of the new president due to his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child sex offender—can be interpreted as the inability of the rich to precisely define that critical issue. Especially telling is Trump’s feud with Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, over the interest rates, as it reveals two competing versions of how to respond to this shock. The new president assumes that America is capable of re-establishing itself as a global manufacturing power, whereas the Federal Reserve’s chair defends the role of the U.S. as the safe haven for global wealth.
Second, the general perception of China as their primary adversary and not Russia, which is already challenging the U.S. militarily through a proxy war in Ukraine, indicates that the U.S. elite are concerned about America’s economic supremacy and not the global respect for its armed forces. Therefore, talk about the necessity of raising military expenses emanating from the White House can be viewed as an attempt to stimulate the American military-industrial complex as part of the drive towards re-industrialization.
Third, Donald Trump’s style to express what he believes needs to be done in the U.S. national interest may be considered outlandish, but the public acceptance of his disregard for the established norms of liberal ideology indicates that the Cold War—seen as a clash of competing ideologies—is finally over. The Cold War brought to life a host of unconventional power instruments—called ‘hybrid warfare techniques’ in modern parlance—to deny the enemy the means of achieving his political or strategic goals without resorting to a ‘hot’ war. These tools were presented as social examples aimed at showing that the American lifestyle was superior and, hence, deserved being emulated worldwide. While their original raison d‘être had become irrelevant, the tools survived, creating a headache for the country that begot them.
Consider the immigration problem. Years ago, liberal ideologists concluded that the communist idea of social justice could be successfully countered with the capitalist idea of individual freedom. Later, this argument was refined by rationalizing that since the Soviets were opposed to legal emigration, opening the American borders would raise the global esteem of America. Initially, the U.S. accepted with open arms the émigrés from the Eastern bloc countries, then the migrants from all “authoritarian” countries and, in the end, the idea of individual freedom became such an established cliché that U.S. politicians had to observe it diligently until Trump came to power.
Wokeism, which combines attitudes or practices alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice, also has roots going back to the Cold War. It was decided that since the Soviet leadership opposed free speech and freedom of individual expression, then the encouragement of the diversity of ideas, particularly in student campuses, would be the right way to impress the youth to choose the American way of life. However, that freedom eventually encroached on topics previously held as taboos and presented a danger to the American elite.
Even the climate change agenda that led the United States to sign the 1992 climate change convention in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was inspired during the last gasps of the Cold War. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s report on ecological damage incurred by the presence of Soviet troops in Poland came to the attention of the Clinton Administration. The latter, seeing the excitement that the Poles expressed when sensing the possibility of being compensated by the “Soviet occupiers,” decided to employ the global environmental issues as a hallmark of a “new global order,” without much regard for how it would affect the American industrial might.
The new administration can now put aside the decade-long dichotomy between ‘democratic’ and ‘authoritarian’ regimes and concentrate on its own vision of how the world needs to be governed. The liberty to revise the course represents a structural break within U.S. politics, but how far and in what direction the country can go is not a trivial issue. It is not by accident that Trump has a public permission to experiment with formerly hushed try-outs. However, he has to use all his skills as a negotiator to come up with results that the average American can accept.
International politics is no exemption. Many believe that Truman’s scheme to back up NATO is still appropriate as it worked before. Less popular is Roosevelt’s idea to go back to the UN—as the most respectable world organization—to resolve disputes among the great powers. Others prefer old-style isolationism.
Trump navigates among competing visions—battling his political opponents and consolidating power on the way—working on a new international architecture. He supports NATO but is reducing U.S. commitments and asking other members to build up their own military strength. The new administration is reaching to great powers outside of NATO, notably China and Russia, trying to cut a deal with these potential competitors. In parallel, the new administration plans to raise custom duties to resolve long-standing issues with frail public revenue. This plan will necessarily strain international trade and lead to global compartmentalization so dear to the heart of the isolationists.
Trump likes to say that he is capable of separating ‘good deals’ from ‘bad deals.’ His approach—discernable from the book entitled The Art of the Deal (that he co-authored in 1987)—can be characterized by three keywords: bravado, caution, and delivery. Trump is not afraid of exaggerating, or to use “truthful hyperbole” as he calls it, to promote eccentric ideas, but he never commits himself to (or goes against) any investment opportunity that they lead to.
These three features of the new president suggest the following path that Trump will lead by essentially attempting to break apart and reorganize on new terms the whole international system that the U.S. has built meticulously after 1945. First, NATO members are asked if they can demonstrate their real worth as great military powers. If they fail, so be it: America will not commit resources to their rescue. Second, the emerging challenges, codenamed by the previous administration as the ‘Axis of evil’, are invited to negotiate a new bargain, preferably on terms that allow America to retain its hegemonic status. If the deal does not come true, the wrongdoers will be hurt by whatever means available to the new administration. Finally, the U.S. Treasury plans to raise additional revenue through higher customs duties, thus penalizing the countries that have built their wealth by exporting to America. These tariffs will lead to fragmentation of existing production chains and to development of new trade routes.
This latter approach reminds of the path chosen by another political leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who decided to reorganize the Soviet Union along the lines of new policies that he envisioned for the USSR. The challenges that Trump will meet on the way towards a new global equilibrium remain the same: reconfiguration of existing production chains, formation of ideologies that can co-opt main stakeholders and adaptation of existing forms of governance to emerging patterns. Suddenly, the study of economies in transition—a niche research area, in which only a few scholars were interested—is gaining greater significance.
[1] Speaking in Riga on 7 May 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush said: “the Yalta Agreement followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.”
[2] Walter Lippmann said that during the Presidential campaign of 1932, he found Roosevelt to be a “pleasant man” but doubted that Roosevelt had any strong convictions: “Just look at his campaign—180 degrees opposite to the New Deal. The fact is that the New Deal was wholly improvised after Roosevelt was elected.”
[3] See their article “An Economic Theory of Alliances” published in 1966.
[4] When Tom Pendergast, Truman’s former political boss later convicted as a criminal, died in January 1945, Truman decided without further consideration that he would attend the funeral. That struck large numbers of people as outrageous behavior for a Vice President, but Truman publicly replied to the accusations: “He was always my friend, and I have always been his.”
[5] MacVeigh’s assessment of the political situation in Greece in 1947 was overly alarmist. In reality, the communist forces were mainly reacting to acts of violence committed by right paramilitary groups against communist sympathizers and were never close to seizing power.
[6] “The free nations of Europe” that Truman referred to were Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom that signed the Brussels Pact, on 17 March 1948 on the British initiative, to guard against possible German or Soviet aggression.
[7] A parallel with Russian Tsar Nicholas I, who was proud to be labeled as ‘le gendarme d’Europe’ in the foreign media, is appropriate in this context. The tsar believed that “Russia is a military power, and its purpose is to be a terror to the rest of the world” comes close to the definition of a hegemonic power expressed by Madeleine Albright.
