THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
85
go, uprooting or steamrollering everything that stood in the way. On
the American side, Roosevelt's policy-never acknowledged in so
many words, but implicit in all his actions-of reaching an under–
standing with the USSR at the price of the pelmanent partition of
Central Europe, was at first continued after his death, and indeed
came to its full flowering at a time when its presuppositions were
already beginning to crumble. Thus the British attempt to moderate
the destructive urge of the victors and preserve something of the old
European framework encountered resolute resistance from the Rus–
sians, and at best obtained only very lame support from the Ameri–
cans, who were just beginning to wonder whether the wrecking of
Germany, and the transfer of Eastern Europe to Soviet control,
were really in everyone's best interest. In the circumstances, Britain's
halfhearted resistance was foredoomed to failure, the more so since
the Polish bastion had already been surrendered at Teheran and
Yalta. But the fact that the newly elected Labour Government, whose
leaders replaced Churchill and Eden in the middle of the conference,
confirmed the decisions of their predecessors, instead of instantly
dissociating themselves from so gross a travesty of wartime promises
and declarations, lent additional significance to these transactions by
giving them a kind of moral sanction. After Potsdam it was difficult
to maintain that any sizable body of opinion in the Western world
was prepared to act on principles radically different from those pro–
fessed and practiced by the Kremlin. Liberalism and socialism had
both been compromised, along with their totalitarian ally and enemy–
to-be. This display of moral indifference was not widely commented
upon at the time; its effects only showed at a later date, when the
outbreak of the cold war led to renewed emphasis upon the general
principles so widely proclaimed by the Western democracies during
the earlier, and militarily unfruitful, part of the war.
The old balance of power having thus been destroyed, it was
dearly urgent to establish a new one, for only the more naive votaries
of perpetual peace could imagine that the San Francisco Charter
by itself would make an end of conventional diplomacy. Here the
Western powers were at first favored by their short-lived monopoly
of the new atomic weapon, a circumstance which caused some sus–
picion that the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hard on the
heels of the vital decisions taken at Potsdam, was intended at least
