One lesson is that core values may have more viability than it seems, especially in the long term: for two generations after 1945, foreign policy professionals and scholars concluded that Roosevelt’s weak defense of Poland at and immediately after Yalta was pointless (or cynical) and that the principles of the Atlantic Charter were inapplicable east of the Iron Curtain. Soviet domination there, it was implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) accepted, was forever. But it turned out otherwise. The Yalta Conference failed but Yalta Europe was not forever. The strategic vision that Roosevelt spelled out in the Atlantic Charter and sought to realize at Yalta—even if miserably—now seems the right one.