Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, later commented that "Tito was next on Stalin's list, after Korea."
Tito would not have been so easy to defeat. He was bold and audacious--and utterly determined not to be bullied, whether by his erstwhile friend (who had become his enemy), Joseph Stalin, or by anyone else.
Now, let us be clear: Tito was not a nice guy. In fact, he seems almost to have been a cross between Stalin and Hitler; which is certainly no compliment. (He was a thoroughgoing nationalist--just as Hitler was--yet he somehow merged his nationalism with communism. In the end, Stalin and Tito were about as different as Lenin and Trotsky had been, a generation earlier.)
About 1950--when Stalin was attempting to have Tito assassinated--Tito sent a brisk letter to Moscow, reading as follows:
Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle. ...If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second.
If there is anything at all to be admired about Tito, it is the fact that he was entirely unwilling to succumb to the bullying of others, no matter how powerful they might be.