Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, delivered in the gymnasium
of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, is one
of the two or three most significant speeches of the twentieth
century. It was made at a pregnant moment in history, as America's
wartime alliance with Soviet Russia was giving way to Cold War.
Churchill's carefully wrought words bespoke a half century of study
and observation of international politics, and an underlying
philosophy whose roots can be traced to major political thinkers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The speech is remembered today as a seminal pronouncement on behalf
of the Atlantic solidarity and clearheaded realism that ultimately
carried the West to victory in the Cold War. What is less remembered
is that at the time the address brought down on Churchill a torrent
of controversy. Much of the criticism directed toward him had its
roots in philosophic assumptions at odds with Churchill's, ones that
took it as self-evident that a thorough-going transformation of the
state system was both possible and desirable. Churchill thought
otherwise.
Interest in this controversy from the chair of hindsight fifty years
later is not merely academic, for the main issues discussed by
Churchill--the role of the United Nations in what many hoped would be
a new world order, control of new weapons of mass destruction, the
efficacy of military power and alliances in ensuring peace--animate
debate in our post-Cold War world no less than they did at the dawn
of that age.
The "Iron Curtain" Speech
