Winston Churchill: Iron Curtain Speech

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The John Findley Green Foundation lecture series at Westminster College was meant to showcase speakers talking about current political and economic events. Churchill was its seventh and most prominent speaker since the series began in 1937. President Harry Truman had persuaded him to come to the United States in lieu of a vacation trip to North Africa with the promise that if Churchill spoke at Westminster in Truman's home state of Missouri, Truman himself would introduce him. The introduction of a private citizen by a president of the United States was a clear sign of Truman's esteem for Churchill, as he made clear at the podium. Postwar enmities between the United States and the Soviet Union had not set in yet in March 1946.

Paragraphs 1–13

Churchill opens with a joke, saying that the name “Westminster”—the area of London that is the seat of government—seems familiar to him, and he thanks the president for the honor of his introduction. Then he asserts that he will discuss the problems of the postwar world and ways to preserve the peace. The United States, in his opinion, is in a position to remake the entire world in its own image, with the help of Britain, maintaining a continued union of the “English-speaking peoples.” In opposition to their designs are the two old adversaries Churchill mentions in paragraph 7, “war and tyranny,” which threaten the ability of the average person to achieve happiness, freedom from want, and progress.

The United Nations was the means to keep the peace and spread prosperity, and Churchill is determined that it have the opportunity to become—unlike the prewar League of Nations—“a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words,” as he says in paragraph 10. To him that meant that the United Nations needed the capability to use force in the defense of international justice. He states his belief, in paragraph 12, that the United Nations should have at its disposal a combined world air force, as donated by its member nations. Oddly and perhaps significantly, Churchill never says here how such an international military force would be deployed. In point of fact, the United Nations has had international military forces, but only in the Korean War has it had any sort of aggressive capacity to keep the peace.

On the other hand, the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission had just been formed two months earlier, and Churchill did not believe it should have access to the “secret knowledge” behind the making of an atomic bomb, at least until the United Nations had demonstrated its stability and progress toward world peace. This was a controversial issue at the time. Many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project (the U.S. project to design and build the atomic bomb), among them its head, J. Robert Oppenheimer, thought nuclear research should be shared across the nations so that the further use of such weapons would be impossible without threatening the annihilation of humanity.

Paragraphs 14–22

Churchill then turns from war to tyranny, asserting in paragraph 15 that “the liberties enjoyed by individual citizens throughout the United States and throughout the British Empire are not valid in a considerable number of countries, some of which are very powerful.” Choosing “the British Empire” as a home of civil liberties was somewhat deceptive, since India at the time was trying to force its way out of the British Empire for just such reasons, in the opinion of the leadership of the Indian National Congress. Nevertheless, Churchill's targets were different: namely, authoritarian states that still did not allow their peoples freedom of speech, equal justice before the law, and free elections.

How could war be prevented, tyranny opposed, and the United Nation's expansive power promoted? In paragraph 20, Churchill calls for recognition of what he termed for the first time the “special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States of America.” In 1946 Churchill envisioned a simple continuation of wartime collaboration between militaries and military bases. He puts forward the hope that in future years collaboration would be extended to the rest of the British Commonwealth—in Churchill's eyes, the white dominions—and there might one day even be an exchange of citizenship rights among them all. Churchill's vision has yet to reach fruition: The United States has long since outdistanced Britain as a major world power, and Britain's involvement in the European Union has revised any conception of Commonwealth citizenship. But in 1946 the British Empire was still largely intact, and Britain had the technical knowledge to build its own atomic bomb. The idea of Britain and the United States as equals on the world stage did not seem implausible at the time. Such a relationship would, in Churchill's opinion, guarantee the security and power of the United Nations, to whose development both nations were dedicated, as he states in paragraph 16.

Paragraphs 23–27

In fact, Churchill notes in paragraph 23 that the creation of such a formal relationship was a close necessity: “Beware, I say; time may be short.” The reason that time might be short was that despite goodwill toward the Soviet Union, an “iron curtain” had fallen across Eastern Europe, the nations the Soviet Red Army had invaded during the war. This phrase, coined by Churchill, would color the entire cold war era. At the time, Communist parties, while small in membership in Eastern Europe, had gained public credibility and support as the vanguard of the Soviet soldiers who had freed these nations from Nazi control. Furthermore, nothing had happened publicly since the war to reaffirm the idea that Stalin's Soviet Union was bent upon worldwide revolution and domination. Yet a mere month before Churchill's speech, Stalin had made a speech little heard in the Western world, claiming that Communism and capitalism were incompatible. Churchill, the venerable anti-Communist, was simply reminding many that Soviet Communist aims in the world had never changed and would return to the fore sooner or later. In point of fact, since Churchill himself had drawn up the “iron curtain” as spheres of influence on a napkin in front of Stalin in October 1944, he could hardly have been in a better place to define where it lay.

Churchill also discusses the settlement in Germany, where the Soviets occupied the territory east of the Elbe River, and the United States, Britain, and France occupied the territory west of the river. He notes in paragraph 26 that the Soviets favored German leftist politicians, expecting that they were trying to establish a Communist government in a united Germany too. Here is an example of the forcefully one-sided nature of Churchill's rhetoric, especially in the notion that the Germans could ever possibly have “the power of putting themselves up to auction between the Soviets and the Western democracies” (paragraph 27). In point of fact, the Americans and British were naturally trying just as hard to find prewar democratic politicians to establish a provisional government.

Paragraphs 28–31

“The safety of the world,” says Churchill, “requires a new unity in Europe.” There are “causes for anxiety.” He warns that the Communist parties in Italy and France were well formed and organized: “Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center.” This assertion—not entirely unfounded but certainly exaggerated—would transfer itself to politicians in the United States over the next eight years. He also addressed the situation in China, one that would come to haunt American domestic politics into the 1950s. The danger in Manchuria that Churchill refers to in paragraph 30 was a civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the nominally democratic Nationalist Party. Three years later, the Communists would win the civil war and establish the People's Republic of China in October 1949. Thus, the world's largest population would be firmly placed in the Communist camp. Anyone like Churchill who believed—wrongly, as it turned out—that Communism was a monolithic political movement directed from Moscow had to be frightened by the prospect. In the next paragraph, Churchill compares the world political situation unfavorably to the period in 1919, when the world had high hopes for the League of Nations; the League had failed miserably to keep the peace, and Churchill feared similar results now.

Paragraphs 32–35

Even so, Churchill ends on a message of hope. A new war is not inevitable, he declares; the Soviets did not want it, and it could be prevented with the same strong diplomatic measures against aggression that had been lacking in the era of appeasement. The United Nations offered the opportunity to unite the majority of the world against the designs of the Soviets. Churchill calls upon its members to hear his message as they had not in the late 1930s, to stand strong against Soviet aggression and flex “the Sinews of Peace.”