Although the Cold War has been recognised as an egregious mistake for Europe, the West European genocidal, corrupt, Epstein political class appears determined to recreate it.
Geoffrey Roberts is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy; University College Cork, Ireland Emeritus Professor of History
Winston Churchill was a master rhetorician, not least as Britain’s Prime Minister during World War II.
But perhaps the most famous piece of Churchillian rhetoric was his peacetime warning in March 1946 that
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities…lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject…not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow…The Communist parties…have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control.”
In retrospect, Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech has been widely seen as the harbinger of the Soviet-Western cold war. Yet in 1946 the division of Europe into competing military-political blocs was far from being a foregone conclusion. Hopes were high that the newly created United Nations would be able to avert a third world war. There was, as yet, no nuclear arms race because only the Americans possessed atomic bombs. Millions of soldiers were being ‘de-mobbed’ from Soviet and Western armies. There were some tensions in relation to Greece, Turkey and Iran but the military confrontations and proxy wars of the cold war era lay in the future.
In 1946, it was not Churchill’s iron curtain rhetoric that garnered most attention, it was his claim there existed an Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.
Half-American himself, Churchill was obsessed by Britain’s relationship with the United States, which he saw as essential to it survival as a great imperial power. No one was happier when Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and simultaneously invaded British colonial possessions in South-East Asia. A couple days later, Hitler declared war on the United States in support of his Japanese ally. Churchill set sail for the United States, where he addressed Congress and persuaded President Roosevelt to prioritise the European theatre of operations.
Eager to appease Stalin as well as Roosevelt, Churchill also entertained hopes that the Anglo-Soviet alliance could continue after the war. But towards the end of war Churchill grew increasingly concerned about the growth of Soviet power and the spread of communist influence in Europe.
These forebodings plumbed new depths in spring 1945 when Churchill ordered his military staff to prepare an outline plan for war with the Soviet Union, but the significance of Churchill’s ‘Operation Unthinkable’ should not be exaggerated. His own Chiefs of Staff thought the idea ridiculous. In truth, Unthinkable was little more than a scenario which indulged Churchill’s fantasies about keeping the United States involved in European affairs.
When Churchill delivered the so-called “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946 he was no longer British Prime Minister, having been defeated by Labour in the 1945 General Election — a result that surprised Stalin who had confidently predicted an 80-seat majority for the Tory leader.
Churchill did not enjoy being out of power, forced to sit on the opposition benches in the House of Commons. He missed the limelight and craved publicity. His opportunity came when Westminster College invited him to receive an honorary degree.
Truman (Roosevelt’s successor as US President) returned to his home state to be with Churchill at the ceremony. His presence on the platform added political weight and ensured the event received mass coverage by newspapers and an iconic newsreel film.
A year later — in March 1947 — Truman delivered a famous speech of his own – much more radical than Churchill’s – in which he called on the US Congress to deploy American power directly to defend the free world from totalitarian threats.
The Fulton speech, typically Churchillian in its scope, was rather pompously titled “The Sinews of Peace” — a reference to the perceived need for a robust postwar peace settlement.
Churchill’s message was that the west needed to get tough with Russia before the iron curtain effectively excluded all western influence from Central and Eastern Europe.
While the anti-Soviet theme of Churchill’s speech was generally welcomed in the United States, his call for an Anglo-American alliance was criticised as a species of dangerous power politics.
Soviet newspapers reacted negatively to the speech but also published extensive extracts from it, including the bit about the iron curtain.
As Soviet commentators pointed out, the iron curtain concept had previously been used by Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, as a means to denigrate the Red Army’s liberation of Eastern Europe from Nazi occupation.
The first time Churchill utilised the term was in a telegram to Truman in May 1945 when he complained that the Soviets had drawn an iron curtain along their front in Central and Eastern Europe and “we do not know what is going on behind it”. A few days later Churchill berated the Soviet ambassador in London about the “iron screen” that Moscow had dropped across Europe “from Lubeck to Trieste”. In June 1945 he warned Truman that American military retreat to the demarcation lines that had been agreed with the Soviets during the war would bring “Soviet power into the heart of Western Europe and the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward”.
Churchill’s entreaties cut no ice with Truman, who was counting on the Red Army’s involvement in the war against Japan. Not until the successful test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico in July 1945 did Truman’s stance on the Soviets harden significantly.
In the 1945 General Election campaign Churchill had shocked the electorate by accusing the Labour Party of putting forward a socialist programme for social change that would be implemented by a de facto Gestapo. At Fulton he accused the communists of creating police states in the countries they controlled.
On 14 March 1946 Stalin entered the fray with an interview in Pravda that called Churchill a warmonger and compared Churchill’s advocacy of the English-speaking world to Nazi theories of racial superiority. Stalin did not mention any iron curtain but he asserted the USSR’s right to friendly regimes in Eastern Europe and argued that the postwar growth of communism was a popular phenomenon. He also referred to Churchill’s role in the anti-Bolshevik coalition after the First World War that had attempted to overthrow the nascent Soviet state during the Russian civil war.
Stalin interpreted Churchill’s iron curtain speech as a sign the West intended to deny the Soviet Union the fruits of its hard-won victory over Nazi Germany — a conviction further reinforced by Truman’s “free world” speech to the US Congress.
Stalin’s venomous personal attack did not stop Churchill from sending birthday greetings to Soviet dictator in December 1946, to which Stalin replied “with warm thanks for your good wishes on my birthday”. In January 1947 Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery visited Moscow and Stalin took the opportunity to give Monty a message for Churchill saying that he had the happiest memories of working with Britain’s great war leader. Churchill responded on 3 February 1947:
“I always look back on our comradeship together, when so much was at stake, and you can always count on me where the safety of Russia and the fame of its armies are concerned . . . Your life is not only precious to your country, which you saved, but to the friendship between Soviet Russia and the English-speaking world.”
As the cold war developed in the late 1940s the Soviets did seal themselves and their communists allies off from the outside world, and Churchill’s rhetoric about the iron curtain became a reality.
Churchill was far from seeing that outcome as optimal. When he denounced Stalin’s iron curtain, it was more in sorrow than anger. He did not demand a cold war with the Soviets. He called for continuing partnership with the Soviet Union based on frank negotiations about the future.
By the time he returned to power as British Prime Minister in 1951 Churchill had shed the mantle of a Cold Warrior bestowed upon him by the Fulton speech and reinvented himself as a peacemaker who preferred ‘jaw-jaw’ to ‘war-war’. In February 1950 he called for a ‘parley at the summit’ with the USSR, thus introducing yet another new word to the international political lexicon.
Eight decades later, as a new generation of Western cold warriors strives to isolate and prepare for war with Russia, the role-model of Churchill the peacemaker remains more relevant than ever.
Be the first to comment