Diplomacy

Whereas Hitler was an ideologue, in Kissinger’s view, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was “the supreme realist—patient, shrewd, and implacable, the Richelieu of his period” (333), whose Marxism dovetailed with his geopolitical calculations. Armed with an ideology that promised to chart the future with scientific precision, he looked past his ideological differences with Hitler to see the broader problem of a capitalist alliance against the Soviet Union. At first, Stalin tried to build ties with France and Britain by joining the League of Nations and promoting collective security, signing a treaty with France that lacked a military component. With the Munich Conference, however, Stalin was convinced that the Western democracies were trying to recruit Hitler as an ally against the Soviets, and Soviet propaganda proclaimed it saw no difference among the capitalist states. When Britain and France dropped their appeasement policy after the annexation of Czechoslovakia, they tried to solicit the assistance of the Soviet Union along with Poland and Romania, who were at least as afraid of Moscow as they were of Berlin. They then offered a security guarantee to Poland and Romania, expecting automatic Soviet support. Instead, Stalin backed off, now certain “not only that Great Britain would fight for his Western frontier but that the war would start 600 miles to the West, on the German-Polish frontier” (343).