In recent years, the statue of Sir Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square has become a target for defacement. In 2020 it was covered in graffiti accusing the wartime prime minister of racism. And just last week, a Dutch leftist was accused of covering it in anti-Zionist and antisemitic slogans. For these vandals, and their equivalents among conspiracy theory-mongering “historians,” Churchill is a symbol of everything that is wrong with Anglo-American internationalism.
Despite this relentless—and often irrational or ahistorical—criticism, Churchill’s legacy endures. Across the globe, he is memorialized for his prophetic opposition to appeasement and bold resistance to Nazi terror. Compared to Churchill, the politicos running the world today seem small. While they practice “low intrigue” and “the little arts of popularity,” Churchill is remembered as the “Last Lion,” a statesman committed to an older view of service to country. For him, the British Empire was not a tool for oppression but rather a bulwark for ordered liberty. Churchillian leadership is better understood not as privilege, but as a noble burden.
Today marks the eightieth anniversary of one of Churchill’s finest speeches, “The Sinews of Peace,” originally delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946. It is perhaps most famous for Churchill’s description of “an iron curtain” descending “across the Continent” to divide the free world from the Soviet empire. But beyond the rhetorical flourishes, the speech communicates a wisdom we need for a world on fire today. Churchill warned his audience, and the generations to come, that freedom requires eternal vigilance.
In 1946, the Anglo-American alliance might have seemed totally dominant to many observers in the West. It had vanquished the Axis powers in World War II, and U.S. President Harry Truman’s decision to end the conflict with nuclear strikes on Imperial Japan seemed to send fear into the hearts of Soviet leaders. Many political leaders, including the Labour government, which had unseated Churchill just months before, wanted to shift the focus to domestic issues. They believed that the wartime partnership with the Soviets could be sustained, and that the world might enter a new era of peace and prosperity.
Churchill, though, knew that such optimism was misplaced. “When the designs of wicked men or the aggressive urge of mighty States dissolve over large areas the frame of civilized society, humble folk are confronted with difficulties with which they cannot cope,” he told the audience. “For them all is distorted, all is broken, even ground to pulp.” Churchill possessed no Hegelian faith in the inevitable progress of history. He understood the unavoidable fact that the strong will always seek to exploit and oppress the weak, and therefore the principal task of free government is to protect the innocent and secure justice. Just because the Allies had defeated fascism did not mean that the specter of totalitarianism had abated.
Unlike many of the liberals or left-wing politicians involved with the war effort, Churchill was always wary of the Soviet Union. From the outset of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he was an unrelenting critic of Bolshevism, and while he worked closely with Josef Stalin to confront Adolf Hitler, he harbored no illusions about the dictator’s true character. Churchill saw the ways that the messianic promise of ideology, whether fascist or communist, led to expansionist ambitions that threaten Western security. Even when few politicians on either side of the Atlantic were willing to say it, Churchill knew it was essential to identify the fundamental tyranny at the heart of the Soviet system that would lead to conflict with the West.
Despite earlier assurances, Stalin refused to remove the Red Army from the Eastern European countries he had “liberated” on the road to Berlin. As Churchill pointed out in the speech, Stalin not only occupied these nations but was also in the process of transforming them into police states enthralled to Moscow. “A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory,” he said. “Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies.”
But as Larry P. Arnn ably explains in his book Churchill’s Trial, the statesman’s goal was not to plunge the free world into a war with the Soviet Union. He aimed, rather, to prevent one from breaking out at all. Churchill frequently called World War II “the unnecessary war” because he believed the appeasement policies of the Conservative government in the 1930s produced the very conditions necessary for Hitler’s invasion of Europe. Even in 1946, Churchill insisted that he did not believe “that a new war is inevitable; still more that it is imminent.”
Churchill’s vision of “peace through strength” is rooted not in bellicosity but deterrence. Only by showing that our civilization is willing to fight for survival can we demonstrate to our enemies the profound seriousness of our position. His diagnosis of the situation was clear: “From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.” What was most needed, then, was an effort to deny the Soviets a chance at a “trial of strength” by presenting a united front amongst the free peoples of the world.
There were two principal institutions Churchill believed were instrumental in averting war: the United Nations, and the Anglo-American “special relationship.” Churchill’s commitment to the UN was not inspired by some sort of Wilsonian idealism, but rather the hope that it might provide what he once called a “constabulary power” to the free peoples of the world that could effectively combat totalitarian expansionism. But, as Arnn points out, Churchill also said he opposed arming the body with atomic weaponry. “There would be a United Nations, but the nations it included were of different kinds and not ready, therefore, to unite toward a common end,” he writes. “It would be ‘criminal madness’ to arm such a group with the ultimate weapon.”
Where, then, did Churchill seek to lodge the postwar international system’s real power? In the alliance between Great Britain and the United States. Today this is treated as a given, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the two countries often antagonized one another. Churchill was able to turn that rivalry into a lasting friendship, however, because he helped the peoples on either side of the Atlantic understand the shared roots of their common liberties. As he put it at Westminster College:
“It is not our duty at this time when difficulties are so numerous to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries which we have not conquered in war. But we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.”
Churchill had no revolutionary vision for imposing parliamentary democracy across the globe. He certainly hoped that the cause of free government would spread, but he held no utopian ambitions. Churchill was painfully aware, though, that these traditional liberties were threatened by all forms of totalitarian ideology—and that there could be no peace to enjoy freedom without victory, whether over fascism or communism. What he articulated in Fulton that fateful March day was nothing less than a strategy for attaining that end.
Sadly, neither the United States nor Great Britain wholly adhered to the sound strategy of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech for the duration of the Cold War. Some statesmen, including Churchill himself, did what they could to strengthen the West in its confrontation with the Soviets, but there are just as many sorry stories of betrayal and appeasement as there are tales of courage. Britain saw her empire recede, and a litany of American presidents failed to truly contain Soviet aggression. It would not be until 1989, 43 years after that speech in Fulton, that the Iron Curtain would be torn down after two of Churchill’s greatest students, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, implemented a grand strategy to undermine Soviet communism once and for all.
Like the statesmen who won the Cold War, we today can look to Churchill’s vision to avert the storm of war in our own time. “Beware, I say; time may be short,” he said in Fulton. “Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late.” The axis of aggression formed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the Chinese Communist Party poses the single greatest, most complex threat to global order since the end of the Cold War. But their victory is by no means inevitable—indeed, as recent events have shown, their very grasp on power is remarkably brittle. By acting with strategic imagination and civilizational confidence, the West might overcome this peril and secure the blessings of liberty for another generation.
