Churchill's Realism: Reflections on the Fulton Speech
Mini Teaser: The speech is remembered today as a seminal pronouncement on behalf of the Atlantic solidarity and clearheaded realism. What is less remembered is that at the time the address brought down on Churchill a torrent of controversy.
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
Following his unexpected and personally devastating defeat in the
British general election in July 1945, Churchill received hundreds of
invitations to lecture. One came to him in October 1945 from
President Truman, who forwarded a letter from Franc L. McCluer,
president of Westminster College in Truman's home state of Missouri.
Truman wrote on McCluer's letter, "Hope you can do it. I'll introduce
you." When the Attlee government gave its approval, Churchill sent
Truman his tentative acceptance in November. He arrived in New York
with his wife, Clementine, on January 14, 1946.
After a seven-week holiday in Florida, Churchill joined Truman in
Washington for the rail trip to Missouri. Disembarking at Jefferson
City, the state capital, following a journey that took a day and a
night, they drove the twenty-four miles to Fulton. On reaching the
town, whose population of 6,500 had swelled to 30,000 for the
occasion, they proceeded through crowded streets in an open
limousine. Following a luncheon, both donned academic gowns and
followed a procession into the college gymnasium, where two thousand
dignitaries, faculty, students, and other guests were seated, joined
by a national radio audience.
Churchill first set the scene, observing that "The United States
stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power", and that "It is
a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power
is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future." He
spoke of the paramount goal of protecting the people in their "myriad
cottage or apartment homes" from the "two giant marauders, war and
tyranny." He then turned to the need to prevent, first, war--by means
of the new "temple of peace", the United Nations:
"We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality
and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a
frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the
shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a
cockpit in a Tower of Babel."
Churchill continued:
"Before we cast away the solid assurances of national armaments for
self-preservation we must be certain that our temple is built, not
upon shifting sands or quagmires, but upon the rock."
Churchill's rock was, above all, organized armed force. Just as
courts cannot function without sheriffs, the UN "must immediately
begin to be equipped with an international armed force." As a first
step, he suggested that each state delegate a certain number of air
squadrons to the UN; they would remain national forces but be
directed by the world body.
But when he then turned to another major issue of the day, Churchill
unhesitatingly endorsed the Western monopoly of the atomic bomb,
emphasizing his opposition to entrusting U.S. and British knowledge
of its secrets to the UN. "It would be criminal madness to cast it
adrift in this still agitated and UN-united world", he warned. No
country had slept less well because the secrets of the bomb were held
in American hands, but this would not have been the case had "some
Communist or neo-Fascist State monopolised for the time being these
dread agencies." Churchill went on:
"God has willed that this shall not be and we have at least a
breathing space to set our house in order before this peril has to be
encountered: and even then, if no effort is spared, we should still
possess so formidable a superiority as to impose effective deterrents
upon its employment, or threat of employment, by others."
The atomic secret could be confided to the UN, said Churchill, "when
the essential brotherhood of man is truly embodied" in that
institution, "with all the necessary practical safeguards to make it
effective." President Truman was among those applauding at this point.
Prevention of tyranny, the second of the two marauders, was
Churchill's next subject. He alluded to Russian-sponsored repression
in Eastern Europe, where "the power of the State is exercised without
restraint, either by dictators or by compact oligarchies operating
through a privileged party and a political police." Churchill
acknowledged that the United States and Great Britain could not
interfere forcibly, but insisted that "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." He noted that the Magna Carta and the other great symbols of
English liberty "find their most famous expression in the American
Declaration of Independence." These "title deeds of freedom", he
proclaimed, should be "the message of the British and American
peoples to mankind."
Political liberty also rests on economic well-being. Churchill
observed that poverty and privation were to many the "prevailing
anxiety" in that bleak first postwar year. He foresaw that "science
and co-operation" would bring in the next few decades "an expansion
of material well-being beyond anything that has yet occurred in human
experience." The "hunger and distress which are the aftermath of our
stupendous struggle" will pass, he averred, "and there is no reason
except human folly or sub-human crime which should deny to all the
nations the inauguration and enjoyment of an age of plenty."
Now Churchill reached the first crucial message of his address:
"Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world
organisation will be gained without what I have called the fraternal
association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special
relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the
United States."
He then outlined his concept of this relationship in terms of
continued wartime military cooperation and joint use of military
bases. The principle of the Permanent Defense Agreement between the
United States and Canada should be extended to all in the
Commonwealth, leading eventually, he hoped, to common citizenship.
Until that happened, Churchill was concerned to build a special
Anglo-American relationship both to ensure continued worldwide U.S.
involvement and to maintain the position of a depleted and exhausted
postwar Britain.
A good argument can be made that in looking across the sea to
maintain Britain as a great power, as he had done with such success
in the war, Churchill overlooked a more realistic role for postwar
Britain as the leader of a revived Europe, when such a role was there
for the asking. Britain finally joined Europe a quarter century later
under much reduced circumstances, having missed the opportunity to
shape the new community at its birth. Churchill's romantic vision
(which the Attlee government essentially shared) came to grief in the
Suez debacle of 1956.
Churchill pursued his theme at Fulton with delicacy. He knew his
American history, and the country's idealistic, decidedly UN-British
tradition in foreign affairs. He had been a senior member of the
British government twenty-seven years before, when America and the
world stood at another "solemn moment" in history. He had recounted
in The World Crisis, his history of the First World War, how
President Wilson's dream of a new world order, in which alliances and
power politics would be abolished in favor of a world organization,
had ended in bitter failure. He knew the United States had never
joined a peacetime alliance, and had little appetite for entanglement
outside the Western Hemisphere. He also knew well the immense
difficulty with which President Roosevelt had endeavored to break
down his people's isolationist impulse, on which effort Britain's
very life had depended in 1940-1.
Thus mindful of the sensibilities of his audience, Churchill never
used the word alliance. Instead, he subtly joined the concept of the
"special relationship" with the budding American romance with the UN.
Rejecting the view that such a relationship between the two countries
would contradict the principle of world unity through the UN, he
insisted that, "on the contrary, it is probably the only means by
which that organisation will achieve its full stature and strength."
He then listed at length U.S. ties to the South American republics
and Britain's twenty-year treaty with Russia to emphasize that
special, non-aggressive associations are both unthreatening and
"indispensable."
Slightly more than halfway through his speech, Churchill suddenly
turned from metaphors of hope to specters of darkness. If an
Anglo-American "special relationship" did not come about, then the
temple [of peace] may not be built, or, being built, it may collapse,
and we shall all be proved again unteachable and have to go and try
to learn again for a third time in a school of war, incomparably more
rigorous than that from which we have just been released. The dark
ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of
science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings
upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction.
Clothing himself in the prophetic mantle he had worn in the 1930s,
Churchill then reached the second message of his address: to sound an
urgent alarm--"Beware, I say; time may be short"--at the threat posed
by the two countries' wartime ally, Russia:
"A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied
victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist
international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or
what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising
tendencies."
Churchill then paused to express his "strong admiration and regard
for the valiant Russian people" and his "wartime comrade, Marshal
Stalin." He accepted the "Russian need to be secure on her western
frontiers" against Germany and welcomed "her rightful place among the
leading nations of the world."
Having made the requisite bow, Churchill cast aside all indirection
to set forth certain "facts" about the present situation in Europe:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron
curtain has descended across the Continent." The Russians had imposed
police states in every East European country except Czechoslovakia,
and their communist parties were "seeking everywhere to obtain
totalitarian control." He then noted Moscow's pressure against both
Turkey and Persia [Iran]. Churchill also charged the Russians with
building a pro-communist regime in their German occupation zone, when
what was really needed was a "new unity in Europe"--including
prostrate Germany--within, he was again careful to add, "the
structure of the United Nations." (A reconciliation between France
and Germany within the framework of a united Europe was to be a major
Churchillian theme in the next few years.) He then listed other
threats: communist strength in Italy and France; communist fifth
columns in many countries far from Russia taking direction from
Moscow; and the continuing Red Army occupation of Manchuria.
But war was not inevitable, or even imminent. "I do not believe that
Soviet Russia desires war", said Churchill, "What they desire is the
fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and
doctrines." A "settlement" was needed, Churchill asserted, as he
turned to his third message, his philosophy of power. Of the
Russians, he maintained, "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. For that reason the old
doctrine of a balance of power is unsound."
In thus dismissing the key concept of traditional diplomacy, was
Churchill agreeing with the Wilsonian rejection of Old World power
politics? Hardly. He had in mind a concept of power neither fully
traditional nor Wilsonian:
"We cannot afford. . . to work on narrow margins, offering
temptations to a trial of strength. If the Western Democracies stand
together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations
Charter, their influence for furthering those principles will be
immense and no one is likely to molest them."
Churchill was adamant that an understanding with Russia could only be
achieved through Anglo-American partnership:
"If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths be added to
that of the United States with all that such co-operation implies in
the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and industry,
and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of
power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the
contrary, there will be an overwhelming assurance of security."
In short, Churchill's idea of power--"an overwhelming assurance of
security"--meant an Anglo-American superiority over Soviet Russia,
legitimated through the UN. This idea rested on a simple observation:
the balance of power had twice broken down in Europe within a quarter
of a century; superiority, then, was the best safeguard against a
third breakdown, which would end in atomic catastrophe.
Churchill found it impolitic to invoke "superiority" in his wind-up,
but he did employ it earlier in the speech with reference to atomic
weapons. And in May 1944 he had said the new world body should be
armed to ensure that "within the limits assigned to it, it has
overwhelming power." He concluded thus:
"If we adhere faithfully to the Charter of the United Nations and
walk forward in sedate and sober strength seeking no man's land or
treasure, seeking to lay no arbitrary control upon the thoughts of
men; if all British moral and material forces and convictions are
joined with your own in fraternal association, the high-roads of the
future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our
time, but for a century to come."
The combined strength of the English-speaking peoples constituted
"The Sinews of Peace", Churchill's title for his address.
The Reaction
Churchill spoke in a climate of increasingly anxious U.S.-Soviet
relations and changing American policy. On February 9, 1946, Stalin
had made a speech that was seen as hostile in Washington and London,
and on February 15, news of a Russian atomic spy ring in Canada
became public with the detention of twenty-two persons. George
Kennan's subsequently famous Long Telegram had been sent to the State
Department from Moscow on February 22 and was receiving wide
circulation in the government. President Truman himself was among its
readers.
These and other events were having a sharp impact on government and
public opinion. The first meeting of the UN General Assembly had
recently ended in London. Secretary of State James Byrnes, who headed
the U.S. delegation, had been under pressure for being too soft on
the Russians. He signaled a more robust U.S. attitude in a February
28 speech, criticizing the continuing Russian occupation of northern
Iran and the confiscation of industrial equipment in Eastern Europe
and Manchuria. But Byrnes avoided criticizing the Soviet Union by
name and continued to stress the importance of maintaining the "unity
of all great powers" and of preventing "exclusive blocs or spheres of
influence." "We must live by the Charter", he insisted, "That is the
only road to peace." The day before, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a
critic of Byrnes, had made a Senate speech urging a stronger U.S.
stand against the Soviet Union. The Sunday New York Times' "Week in
Review" section of March 3, 1946 headlined its analysis, "Is Our
Policy Changing?" and James Reston's article was titled, "Have We a
New Foreign Policy? Capitol Asks."
In retrospect, it appears that Truman was using Churchill--with the
latter's understanding--to crystallize opinion on behalf of a new
American policy already taking effect. Churchill had discussed his
speech with Truman at the White House on February 10, and also with
Byrnes and Bernard Baruch in Florida on February 17. Truman saw the
text on the train journey to Missouri, and Byrnes had read it in full
before their departure.
But Churchill's harsh and somber tone, and the breadth and detail
with which he made his case--the first strong criticisms of Russia by
a Western leader since the Nazi invasion of Russia in June
1941--brought down on him a torrent of criticism, thus restoring him
temporarily to the position in which he had spent most of his career.
Senators Pepper (D-Fl.), Kilgore (D-WV), and Taylor (D-Id.), issued a
joint statement claiming, "Mr. Churchill's proposal would cut the
throat of the United Nations Organization." Representative Patterson
(D-Ca.) railed against the speech, claiming that Churchill was asking
"that we should revert to the reactionary and self-destructive...
old idea of balancing of one power or one group of powers against
another group. . . .Blocs of powers against powers in this atomic age
can only bring world war and total destruction to the human race."
Nobel laureate Pearl Buck called Churchill's visit a "catastrophe."
George Bernard Shaw believed that Churchill's speech was "nothing
short of a declaration of war on Russia", and that Churchill was
proposing a "recrudescence of the old balance of power policy. .
.with a view to a future war." Marquis Childs wrote in the Washington
Post that the speech "overlooks a vital truth, [t]hat. . .you cannot
fight the 'Communist menace' by armed alliances." Rather, Childs
maintained, the world needed to address the root economic and social
causes of popular discontent (as if security and socio-economic
measures were mutually exclusive). In the House of Commons, one
hundred and five Labour mp's introduced a motion condemning the
speech and affirming the view "that world peace and security can be
maintained, not by sectional alliances, but by progressively
strengthening the power and authority of U.N.O. to the point where
it becomes capable of exercising. . .the functions of a world
government."
Leading liberal newspapers and magazines also attacked Churchill for
relying on the old power politics, endangering the UN, and wrongly
blaming the Russians. Norman Cousins wrote in the Saturday Review
that "Russian unilateralism today is not the disease; it is a product
of the disease." The danger "is the centuries-old problem of
competitive national sovereignties. . .the race for security, each
nation deciding for itself what is necessary for its own security."
Proclaimed The New Republic: "Security is found in the hatred of all
peoples for war, and the demand of all peoples that all issues
between nations be resolved through the U.N.O. . . . .One standard
must be raised now. . .Stand by the Charter."
For their part, conservative critics were more agitated by
Churchill's proposal of a peacetime Anglo-American alliance than by
his attacks on Soviet policy. Senator Taft (R-Ohio) agreed with much
of Churchill's criticism of Russia, but opposed his proposed
solution, maintaining that "it would be very unfortunate for the U.S.
to enter into any military alliance with England, Russia, or any
other country in time of peace." Similarly, Senator Aiken (R-Vt.)
commented, "I'm not ready to enter a military alliance with anyone.
Britain, the United States and Russia should pull together to make
the United Nations work."
Others, like Walter Lippmann, expressed concern about placing the
United States in the position of backing British imperialism. He
favored Western rearmament, but in private regarded Churchill's call
for an alliance as "a direct incitement to a preventive war" and an
"almost catastrophic blunder." The British embassy in Washington
found in its mail that the main criticism was not Churchill's warning
against Soviet Russia, but his call for what was seen as American
support of British imperialism.
While support for Churchill came from the New York Times, the
Christian Science Monitor, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Time, and from
columnists such as Ernest K. Lindley of Newsweek and George Fielding
Eliot of the New York Herald Tribune, the speech ignited so much
controversy that Newsweek described it as the "worst diplomatic storm
of the postwar period."
At a press conference three days after the speech was given,
President Truman refused to endorse it and wrongly denied that he
knew its contents in advance. Prime Minister Attlee refused to
comment on the speech in the House of Commons. When Churchill visited
New York for Churchill Day and a Broadway ticker tape parade on March
15, he was greeted by hundreds of protesters. Undersecretary of State
Dean Acheson abruptly bowed out as the U.S. representative at an
address Churchill was to give at the Waldorf Astoria--an address
which, in the event, was characteristically unrepentant.
A Philosophy of International Politics
Churchill's speech at Fulton was not something pulled together from
the headlines and opinion pages of the hour, but the product of
mature reflection and an impressive consistency of outlook dating
back to his youth. In 1897, at age twenty-two and serving with the
British Army in India, he wrote to his mother of his efforts to
"build up a scaffolding of logical and consistent views" to be
constructed of facts and "muscles", or principles. Nearly forty years
later, in 1936, in the midst of controversy about the Nazi danger, he
asserted:
"Those who are possessed of a definite body of doctrine and of deeply
rooted convictions. . .will be in a much better position to deal with
the shifts and surprises of daily affairs than those who are merely
taking short views, and indulging their natural impulses as they are
evoked by what they read from day to day."
And near the end of his political career, in 1953, he maintained that:
"True wisdom is to cultivate a sense of proportion which may help one
to pick out the three or four things that govern all the rest and as
it were write one's own headlines and not change them very often."
Among the beliefs governing Churchill's outlook were that unchanging
human nature uneasily joins a lust for power with an impulse for
liberty; that superior power in the hands of civilized countries is
the best guarantee of peace and freedom; and that politics is a
natural, evolutionary process, best learned through careful attention
to history.
On human nature
Churchill was persuaded of man's inherent moral and intellectual
limitations, and skeptical of rationalistic utopian solutions to
age-old problems. Like Edmund Burke and others in the empirical
conservative tradition, he saw politics as an organic process in
which concrete facts and human nature--as embodied in custom,
tradition, and experience--counted for far more than man-made
theories, ideological constructions, and legalistic formulae.
Churchill's philosophy in this respect is illustrated by his
confidently repeated predictions of communism's failure. As early as
January 1920, he asserted that Bolshevism would fail in Russia
because it was "fundamentally opposed to the needs and dictates of
the human heart, and of human nature itself." He denounced it as a:
"[R]ule of men who in their insane vanity and conceit believe they
are entitled to give a government to apeople which the people loathe
and detest. . .the attempt to carry into practice those wild theories
can only be attended with universal confusion, corruption, disorder,
and civil war."
In 1931 he wrote that Bolshevism would never work because it was at
war with "intractable" human nature and would be unable to control
"the explosive variations of its phenomena." In the midst of the
Great Depression, when many in the West looked longingly at the
promise of rationalist central planning, Churchill wrote that not
only had communism "lost the distinction of individuals", it had "not
even made the nationalisation of life and industry pay. We have not
much to learn from them, except what to avoid."
Later, in January 1952, at the height of the Cold War, he told a
joint session of Congress, "I am by no means sure that China will
remain for generations in the Communist grip. The Chinese said of
themselves several thousand years ago: 'China is a sea that salts all
the waters that flow into it.'" Similarly, of the subjugated states
of Eastern Europe, Churchill predicted in February 1954:
"Time may find remedies that this generation cannot command. The
forces of the human spirit and of national character alive in those
countries cannot be speedily extinguished, even by large-scale
movements of populations and mass education of children."
Finally, in the 1957 epilogue to the one-volume edition of his World
War II memoirs, Churchill wrote that in Russia:
"[P]eople experience every day. . .those complications and
palliatives of human life that will render the schemes of Karl Marx
more out of date and smaller in relation to world problems than they
have ever been before. The natural forces are working with greater
freedom and greater opportunity to fertilise and vary the thoughts
and the power of individual men and women. They are far bigger and
more pliant in the vast structure of a mighty empire than could ever
have been conceived by Marx in his hovel."
Churchill's philosophy thus enabled him to foretell the collapse of
communism when it was at its zenith (and even at its birth), whereas
most academic specialists, with all their detailed study, failed even
to conceive of this as late as the mid-1980s.
On international organization
Churchill viewed the UN, as he had its predecessor, the League of
Nations, with skepticism, seeing each as a supplement to national
power, a means of organizing and legitimizing the collective power of
states, but not as an alternative to it. He differed sharply from
those who saw first the League and then the UN as ushering in a new
age of cooperation and harmony that would eliminate the requirements
of national power.
From the start, Churchill emphasized that the League did not alter
the traditional practices of power politics. Two weeks after the end
of the First World War, in November 1918, he told his Dundee
constituents that he was all for the League but that it was "no
substitute for the supremacy of the British Fleet." As chancellor of
the exchequer, in December 1924 he told the Committee of Imperial
Defence that he "had never considered that the League of Nations...
was in a position to preserve peace", something that "could only be
obtained by the maintenance of good understandings between various
groups of Powers, possibly arrived at under the auspices of the
League."
During the 1930s Churchill naturally turned to the League, and those
of its supporters who favored rearmament, as allies in his resistance
to Hitler. He began to speak more strongly in favor of the world
body, stressing that with force behind it, the League could buttress
national power. Contrarily, many League supporters, including most of
the Labour Party, saw the League's multilateralism as a substitute
for force and national strength, and opposed rearmament.
Essentially, Churchill saw the League as a kind of twentieth-century
Concert of Europe. He viewed the crises of the 1930s through the
prism of the power balance, advocating collective security insofar as
it advanced British security, not as an abstract principle. Thus, in
the Abyssinian crisis of 1935-6, he favored League sanctions against
Italy as a means of strengthening the League against Hitler, but he
had misgivings about alienating Mussolini, who at the time was not
yet in Hitler's camp. Hitler, not Mussolini's African aggression, was
the danger.
Later, as wartime prime minister, Churchill generally disparaged
British planning for a postwar organization to succeed the League,
dismissing "these speculative studies" and recommending the
well-known advice to cooks, "First catch your hare." He was more
interested in furthering Anglo-American ties and in a Council of
Europe, which he saw as a means to contain Russia with the assistance
of American power and a revived France. He continued to prefer the
regional concept he had advocated in the 1920s.
During the course of the war he eventually acquiesced in the American
desire for a worldwide postwar body, but never had any illusion
concerning what it could achieve. He also strove to ensure that close
British ties with America not be jeopardized by the new world
organization. With reason, he feared the two were seen by some as
incompatible. According to Averell Harriman, at a dinner at Hyde Park
in August 1943 with President Roosevelt, Churchill spoke of
perpetuating the "fraternal relationship" in peacetime, at which
Eleanor Roosevelt expressed her fear that this might "weaken the UN
concept." Interestingly, in a speech to the House of Commons on
November 7, 1945, which was a preview of Fulton, Churchill virtually
ignored the UN as he dwelled on Anglo-American collaboration and U.S.
monopoly of the atomic bomb.
Churchill consistently saw first the League and then the UN as
abstract ideals that were secondary to concrete questions of power
and interstate relations. Both in the case of the League in the 1930s
and the UN after the war, he worked to use the international bodies
to buttress policies guided by traditional calculations of power
politics and national interest