Winston Churchill: Iron Curtain Speech

Impact

Churchill tends to be credited for recognizing the changing nature of the relationship between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union; because he helped design the “iron curtain” to a minor extent, such is hardly a surprise. The “sinews of peace” was a concept for which he deserved far greater credit, though few people read or heard the entire speech. In effect, the last nineteenth-century imperialist transformed himself into the first credible twentieth-century internationalist.

The “special relationship” Churchill defined as central to the “sinews of peace” was hardly the given that Americans see it as today. In the nineteenth century, cultural affinities between Britain and the United States were recognized, especially as immigration changed the nature of American citizenship and intellectuals began to define the world in terms of “races.” Yet at the same time, no American forgot that the United States was originally a rebellious colony that had freed itself from the mighty and hegemonic British Empire. Well into the 1930s, Roosevelt's first vice president, John Nance Garner, claimed that he would like to meet the British king and punch him in the nose, and many a senator and representative, especially those of Irish origin, made a political name by denouncing British imperialism. The most contentious arguments between Roosevelt and Churchill during the war had been over the idea that fighting for world freedom involved the ending of colonialism.

For Churchill to decide at the end of the war that a “special relationship” with the United States needed to be maintained and enhanced to the point of exchanging citizenship rights was not merely a concession to the inevitable; it was to some extent also a bold prophecy. His notion that such a relationship would support the growth in power of the new United Nations proved to have greater limits. So far, no nation on earth has willingly surrendered its national interest in the name of a greater internationalism.

Meanwhile, “The Sinews of Peace” is known mainly for its prediction of the coming cold war, and Churchill's outlining of the next forty years of diplomatic conflict could not have been more correct. One year after the speech, in March 1947, President Truman was concerned enough about a possible Communist win in the civil war in Greece that he called on Congress to lend a massive sum of money to support the non-Communist (and Fascist-sympathetic) monarchy. Then, too, Churchill noted several times that Europe was desperate, impoverished, starving, and despairing at the end of the war. In June 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlined the details of the European Recovery Program, which came to be referred to as the Marshall Plan, a $13 billion stimulus package meant to allow Europe to rebuild its nations' economies. The result was just the sort of internationalist integration Churchill had asked for in his speech.

Soon after, the cold war solidified in Europe and around the world. In 1946, Churchill claimed that behind the “iron curtain” only Czechoslovakia maintained a “true democracy.” The Czech Communist Party was still popular, and several of its members achieved elected office. But as events unfolded in the rest of Eastern Europe, the Czech voting population became more uncomfortable with the intentions of its own Communist politicians and ministers. Before they could vote the Communist Party out of government, a coup took place in February 1948. The Communist Party formed a one-party government, and as if to underscore the shocking nature of the change, the Czech foreign minister was found dead in his pajamas beneath a window in the Foreign Ministry, an apparent suicide, though many still believe that he was murdered. His death at least provided symbolic entry into the era of Communist domination of the Eastern European states.

In Germany, where Churchill accused the Soviets of trying to promote their own politicians, the British and U.S. zones introduced their own currency in early 1948, the first violation of the postwar agreement over the provisional arrangements made before Germany was reunited. The western zones' currency was much stronger than that in the eastern Soviet zone; along with the Marshall Plan, it seemed as if it was put forward specifically to show up the Soviets' poorer economic reach. Stalin decided he would challenge the West's commitment to Germany. Overnight in June 1948, all roads were cut off to the joint U.S., British, and French zone in West Berlin; in the midst of rebuilding, the people of the city faced starvation. Effectively, Stalin expected the West to abandon Berlin to the eastern zone after this show of force. Instead, the Truman administration organized an airlift to bring supplies to Berlin, daring the Soviets to shoot down the planes. This game of diplomatic chicken lasted an entire year; by the end of it, permanent governments were in the making in West Germany and East Germany, and the two halves would remain divided for the rest of the cold war.

Finally, in August 1949, the world was shocked to discover that the Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb. Churchill warned that nuclear technology should not be shared between nations or come under the control of the United Nations; now, the point was moot. Using plans cribbed by Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist, the Soviets had matched the U.S. trump card in the military competition between the two powers. In October the Communist Party took power in China as well, and suddenly the “special relationship” was resisted by two Communist powers as opposed to just one. In June 1950 the cold war turned hot, not in Eastern Europe but in Korea, when the Communist north invaded the U.S.-supported south and nuclear war seemed right around the corner. Churchill's warnings could not have seemed timelier. Not only did an “iron curtain” fall over Eastern Europe, but a Communist bloc had been created as well, and only a united international opposition, forged in the democracy that Churchill championed, seemed capable of stopping it.