Almost 80 years later: Why Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech still resonates in modern Russia-Europe relations
It has been nearly 80 years since Winston Churchill delivered his ‘Iron Curtain Speech’ but the message in it still resonates to this day.
Less than a year after the guns had fallen silent with the end of World War II, Winston Churchill was invited to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. There, on 5 March 1946, he gave one his most famous speeches titled “Sinews of Peace,” which is better known today as the “Iron Curtain Speech.”
It would mark the official beginning of the Cold War between the United States and its allies in western Europe, and the Soviet Union and its satellites for Russian historians. But many in the United States, including then-President Harry Truman, already felt the same about the message Churchill delivered that day.
That the Soviet Union was determined to expand and only a firm stand could deter it. But there was more to Churchill’s message in the ‘Iron Curtain Speech’ that still rings true today with “the freshness of morning, the crispness which has not wilted through the years,” as Ambassador Pamela C. Harriman put it in a speech in 1986.
Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ nearly 80 years on
While the Soviet Union no longer exists, with the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in 2000 Russia has been trying to reclaim its standing as a superpower on the world stage. In 1991, the USSR broke up into 15 independent countries which Russia has been working to maintain in its orbit either through economic pacts or in many cases meddling in their affairs or outright invading them.
President Putin, having asserted absolute control over his own nation, has become bolder in projecting Russian power further afield as well. Efforts have been ongoing to destabilize the Western Alliance through misinformation campaigns as well as financing movements and political parties that are today’s version of the “fifth columns” that Churchill spoke about in 1946.
This time though, it is not communism that they are spreading but an ideology of defending “Western Civilization” moral principles and traditional identities based on national and Christian values against the liberal freedoms of modern western nations, which Putin views decadent and immoral.
Churchill saw European unity and a trans-Atlantic alliance as a way to prevent a new war
Churchill also talked about the need for the US and Britain to form a strong alliance, not just the two through their “special relationship,” but also with a united Europe. In his speech he sought to dissuade the US from retiring from the world stage as it had after WW I.
Like in that conflict and in WW II, “against their wishes and their traditions, against arguments, the force of which it is impossible not to comprehend,” the US was drawn “by irresistible forces, into these wars in time to secure the victory of the good cause, but only after frightful slaughter and devastation had occurred.”
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.
Winston Churchill
Neither appeasement nor rigidity against negotiating, but stand firm
Churchill was very much against the appeasement afforded to Hitler, and warned against doing the same with the Soviet Union. That said, he wasn’t against negotiating with the Russians either.
However, he said: “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.”
“I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we have to consider here to-day while time remains, is the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries,” Churchill said in his 1946 speech.
“Our difficulties and dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them. They will not be removed by mere waiting to see what happens; nor will they be removed by a policy of appeasement. What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed, the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will become.”
Ambassador Harriman told the Friends of the Memorial, New York City Branch in 1986 that “yes, you can deal with the Russians but only if you have both strength and suppleness, a willingness to stand your essential ground, and yet to see a great common interest which transcends inevitable rivalries, regional conflicts, and petty quarrels.”
Beware, I say; time may be short. Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late.
Winston Churchill
We need to build a Temple of Peace to avoid World War III
When Churchill gave his speech, the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. However, the fear of the destructive powers they could unleash upon the world made it ever more urgent to make sure that the work of a ‘Temple of Peace’, referring to the newly established United Nations, be “fruitful” and “that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words.”
He called for the mutual sharing of tools to build that temple, otherwise “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.” This one, however, would be “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,” Churchill warned. “Beware, I say; time may be short. Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late.”
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