Eighty years ago this week the US allies with Stalin to put the other western powers in their place

 

The foreign ministers of the US and Britain travelled to Moscow for a three power conference at the suggestion of US Secretary of State Byrnes. There was no pressing agenda. The conference discussed a number of second-tier questions touching Korea and Iran amongst others and endorsed the Soviet puppet regimes in Bulgaria and Romania. The true purpose of the meeting was to establish the US and the Soviet Union as the arbiters of any residual questions from the war; Britain was included in the hope of creating rifts with the US. The other victor powers, France and China, were entirely excluded.

The Soviet Union overplayed its hand by launching claims to massive swathes of Turkish territory, the provinces of Kars and Ardahan. These had been seized from the moribund Ottoman Empire by Russia in 1878 but returned to Turkish rule by the Treaty of Kars in the aftermath of the First World War when the Bolshevik regime was anxious to avoid Turkish participation in the civil war. The inhabitants were chiefly Armenian or Georgian by ethnicity. It is an open question as to whether the Soviet Union entertaintained any serious hopes or whether this was simply a bargaining chip in moves to weaken Turkey's formal control over the straits and thus hampering Soviet access to the Mediterranean. The US balked at supporting Stalin on this issue.

The Egyptian government formally asked Britain to renegotiate the 1936 treaty  which had cemented Egypt's status as a de facto subject state. It had given Britain extensive military bases and domination of Egypt's foreign policy ostensibly at times of internation crisis. Britain had made full use of this during the war.