End of Empires: who and what was responsible? (post WW2)

[JMA]

So, JMA, please consider the alternative that FDR at Yalta was "dotty as hell". It does open up some vistas.

Yes, he was as crazy as a coot by Yalta. It is important to look at his state of mind before Tehran as to understand how his arrogant self confidence was to lead to great Soviet (and communist Chinese) advances post WW2.

FDR expressed the belief that if he could establish close personal relations with Stalin, he could exert a positive influence on the Soviet leader directly to Churchill in a message on March 18, 1942: Source

I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you I think I can personally handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.

Footnote on that source:

5. Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence.Vol I, (Princeton University Press, 1984), 421. It should be noted, however, that as the war progressed, FDR told his son, James, that "Uncle Joe is smarter and tougher than I thought he was." James Roosevelt (with Bill Libby), My Parents: A Differing View (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), 203. But James Roosevelt has also written that FDR "never gave up the conviction he could convince old Joe to go our way". Ibid., 167.

Then the step before Yalta was Tehran. That set the ball rolling.

I thought the matter of an ill/sick/incapacitated President had been dealt with after Woodrow Wilson?

These matters keep rearing their ugly heads because it has been reported that JFK was ill at the Vienna in 1961 when the wily and experienced Khrushchev in Kennedy' own words "beat the hell out of me."