How Winston Churchill Can Save Us-Again
Arnn, Larry P.
How Winston Churchill Can Save Us-Again By Larry P. Arnn The passing of the Soviet menace has proved a strangely mixed blessing in the United States. It has tended to unite liberals in pursuit of...
...We cannot understand the importance of the speech without recalling these events, each a hammer blow that shaped the postwar world...
...Here America had preeminence...
...He had coaxed and begged America into the war, knowing that American intervention was the only hope, and knowing that it might not come...
...They are right, then, to consult their interests as they do their duty in the world...
...He had watched socialism take root in the soil prepared by the British class system...
...Churchill came to Fulton, then, not to denounce the Soviet Union, but rather to praise, and also to guide, the greatest power in the history of the world...
...In a miracle deliverance, it had come, and with it had come certain victory...
...Government exists "to secure these rights...
...Finally, Truman began immediately after the speech the series of maneuvers that built the postwar foreign policy of the United States...
...How then could an American empire maintain its power...
...Thus, the idea of the common bond between the "English-speaking peoples" was born early in Churchill's career and was consistently applied...
...America was best able to "proclaim in fearless tones" the basis of just government, "the great principles of freedom and the rights of man...
...In it he presented a plan for the new world, the world created by the world wars, by technological conflict, and by the preeminence of American power and principles...
...Recall the background: Britain, led by Churchill, had fought alone against Hitler for a full year after the fall of France...
...The earth is a generous mother...
...We must begin with the fact that it is addressed to the American people...
...And he met with Truman on February 10, 1946, less than a month before he spoke, to discuss what he was going to say in Fulton...
...Larry P. Arnn is president of the Claremont Institute and an academic adviser to the International Churchill Society...
...In it Churchill announced the beginning of the Cold War and described a policy by which it could be fought...
...The Labor government in London that had supplanted Churchill was made uncomfortable by strong protests from the socialist rank-and-file...
...We were sheltered in our hemisphere, preeminent, unassailable, preoccupied with our own affairs public and private...
...Welfare for the world...
...By applying its principles and learning its lesson we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas...
...This is the language of American internationalism, a 20th-century construct...
...It has tended to unite liberals in pursuit of a sentimental foreign policy that matches what they wish to do at home...
...To do it well, they must have courage and persistence, for the world still presents awful dangers...
...Stalin attacked it bitterly...
...That was also the part that received the most dramatic, and the most negative, comment at the time...
...Yet Churchill, who had prayed for that deliverance, found himself fretting when America would not listen to his advice about the prosecution of the war or the peace to follow it...
...For this reason we held back from securing the peace after the first war...
...This advice may now seem dated...
...The war was won by these allies...
...But they are not the kind to lead to empire...
...A commemoration is upon us on March 5, one that can solve some of these dilemmas, if only we will ponder it well...
...Churchill had warned Truman that an "iron curtain" was being drawn across Europe almost a year earlier, two days after the end of the war in Europe...
...They must turn from this and face up to a higher calling, a calling that emanates from the principles that made our nation what it is...
...By it we lost an Empire, but by it we also preserved an Empire...
...Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union, and Stalin had joined Churchill in the war against Hitler...
...Churchill spent much of his life encouraging American leadership in world affairs-encouraging it often in vain, encouraging it often to the derision of his countrymen who said it would not come...
...What if the people of an imperial domain withheld or withdrew their consent from the empire...
...In America, both the isolationist and the liberal press denounced the speech, if for different reasons...
...they tinker with protectionism...
...It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded...
...For a model to follow, America could only look back to antiquity...
...America's principles have indeed a global, or rather a universal, reach...
...Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples...
...The Declaration sprang from a well that "is here on the banks of the Thames, in this island which is the birthplace and origin of the British and American race...
...At the same time its reach, as its meaning, he thought universal: "All this means that the people of any country have the right...
...For with primacy in power is also joined an awe inspiring accountability to the future...
...That relationship forms the "crux of what I have come here to say...
...It may seem a deft maneuver, to adopt as a source of unity between two countries the document that wrought their violent separation...
...Every man would have a living, even if that living must come at the expense of another...
...He knew them in their full dimension, as elements of politics more generally...
...If we are to be worthy of the place we hold, we must learn from him, and soon...
...Her model must be that greatest of empires, Rome...
...A few days later Churchill would say a startling thing: "I come to you at a time when the United States stands at the highest point of majesty and power ever attained by any community since the fall of the Roman Empire...
...This relationship required a full cooperation on matters military and economic...
...The two Democratic presidents who articulated that language brought to foreign policy the same utopian vision, the same bent for engineering the new man, that inspired them in politics at home...
...Power has arisen in countries all over the world, many of them friendly, and it has declined relatively in Britain...
...On the other hand, conservatives have been divided by the victory we have won...
...The nations who have it carry a responsibility to the world, and also to themselves and to their posterity...
...They found their "most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence...
...It is no exaggeration to say that he conceived this as his highest remaining task, in the years left to him...
...The United States still faces the challenge laid down for it in the Iron Curtain speech...
...Our half brother, he also proved the most profound student of the American mission in the world this century has seen...
...Liberals know how they wish to respond to that challenge...
...He studied the problems of security and foreign policy for a lifetime...
...For this reason we were able to sit out much of both world wars...
...Let's help our neighbors abroad, just as we help them here at home...
...Their mother earth has a generous nature to those who "cultivate her soil in justice and in peace...
...We can for this reason learn its highest lessons as well today as we could 50 years ago...
...Woodrow Wilson led us into a war "to end all wars...
...Churchill dwelled famously in the Fulton speech on "the special relationship" between Britain and the United States...
...These friends in the cause of free government, who had demonstrated their ability to practice it, must hold real power and must use that power for good...
...Churchill, relentlessly wooing a reluctant America, had built with FDR an alliance that became a full partnership after the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's astonishing declaration of war upon America...
...They are gladly free of the paradox presented by the Soviet Union, whose socialist vision they admired as they might an overzealous sibling, even as the horrors of that sibling plagued them...
...The problem of economic want could be solved once and for all, and universally...
...But that public distance was belied by Truman's private conduct...
...They toy with isolationism...
...It is decisively a statement of policy and principle for democratic nations, beset with aggressive modern tyranny, menaced by weapons built with advanced technology...
...it derives its "just powers from the consent of the governed...
...They strove, said Churchill, to "bring their family up in fear of the Lord," or "upon ethical conceptions which often play their potent part...
...Truman traveled down to Fulton on a train with Churchill, where he read the speech and made only approving comments...
...For most of American history, foreign policy had been a small concern...
...to choose or change the character or form of government under which they dwell...
...Truman had also received on February 22 the famous "long cable" from George F. Kennan, then American ambassador in Moscow, that called for a new American policy toward the expansionist Soviet Union...
...But for Churchill, this connection reached much farther merely than the nations who still salute the Queen or join in the Commonwealth games...
...It included all those nations who shared in the British heritage, either by former political connection or by proven friendship to the ideas that emanate from it...
...Franklin Roosevelt laid out as his war aim a new "Bill of Rights," based upon the acceptance of new "self-evident truths" in the economic realm...
...In the Iron Curtain speech, given less than seven months after the end of hostilities, Churchill made the separation a recognized fact...
...It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands...
...Consider even now to whom we would turn with confidence in any moment of extreme peril...
...Nor was this the only reason...
...Churchill, half American himself, held an unshakable faith in America all his life...
...Duty and interest alike encourage them to shoulder the burden of their own defense and the defense of their cause among men...
...They have not united upon any doctrine of international action, nor even upon the idea that international action is vital...
...The power of Britain-a mini-state even then compared to the behemoth nations-depended upon its connection with the "children," with the "kith and ken" around the globe in the Commonwealth...
...The United States was born with a statement of rights that belong to every man, in every country, in every time...
...The policies of containment, of American commitment to Europe and other key strategic points, and the decision to maintain a dominant nuclear and conventional defense in peacetime followed naturally from the pronouncement at Fulton...
...she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace.'" The mission of the American empire may well be the "safety and welfare" of all the homes and families in all the lands, but the people who live in those homes will be obliged to win their welfare for themselves...
...That embarrassment removed, they know what to do: The whole nation can be a village, and so can the world...
...Even President Truman kept a public distance from the content of the speech...
...At the same time, it has sown division in conservative ranks...
...In his one and only Fourth of July speech, given also at the end of a world war, Churchill said in 1918: "The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document...
...It required the jealous guarding of the "secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb," which at that time was thought to belong only to America, Britain, and Canada...
...The empire is gone, the Commonwealth more form than substance...
...It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy...
...Supporting the British Monarchy and Empire as he understood them, still he held no principles incompatible with this task...
...They came to us "through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law...
...Churchill, that lion of Britain, was the first to declare that America was even greater than Britain at her peak, greater than any other nation in modernity...
...It required a close coordination of diplomacy...
...Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind...
...March 5 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Winston Churchill's appearance in Fulton, Missouri, and the delivery of what became known as the "Iron Curtain" speech...
...We remember the speech most for its bold condemnation of Soviet policy in Eastern Europe: "From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent...
...But it was one Churchill practiced consistently in British politics for more than four decades...
...That language, as it first developed here, is concocted from the theories that underlie modern liberalism...
...But if the dangers of war and tyranny are removed, there is no doubt that science and cooperation can bring in the next few years to the world, certainly in the next few decades newly taught in the sharpening school of war, an expansion of material well-being beyond anything that has yet occurred in human experience...
...Here is what he said: "I have not yet spoken of poverty and privation which are in many cases the prevailing anxiety...
...Then he stood on the platform and introduced Churchill in Fulton, an extraordinary fact given that Churchill was out of power...
...In order to guide America, Churchill proposed "an overall strategic concept...
...The world he described is our world, even now...
...If we listen to Churchill, we will follow that calling...
...He chose one of breathtaking reach: "What then is the overall strategic concept which we should inscribe today...
...He had seen the remedy in the "equality of rights," which is "the whole basis of our political system...
...The dictates both of revelation and of reason spoke to all of them in a common fashion, and it was upon the basis of these dictates that the "overall strategic conception" had to be pursued...
...The United States was not, Churchill argued, the inventor or the sole inheritor of these principles...
...It was not by happenstance that Churchill mentioned the Declaration as the great flowering of the English-speaking world...
...To cultivate this doctrine, to plant it deep in the interests of a broad middle class, to make it flourish in that old soil of English history until it choked out the socialist weed-this was the work of his life...
...Yet toward the end strains began to appear in their alliance, strains that soon became cracks and finally a full-fledged fissure that separated the eastern from the western allies...
...What conception of justice could these people, spread "through all the lands" and answering to many creeds and codes of law, share with one another...
...How, in contrast, would Churchill achieve the "safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands...
...We will recall as we do that self-government is an entitlement of all, and yet its achievement and sustenance are the highest-and the rarest-political accomplishments...
...And yet America, unlike Britain and Rome, had never been forced to assume such a grand role...
...Yet recall the cooperation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the massive good it achieved...
...Yet the greatest significance of the speech does not rest in its relation to these immediate incidents...
...And he quoted Bourke Cochran, the anti-progressive Democrat who was one of his oldest friends: "'There is enough for all...
...This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States...
...Those rights define both the scope and the purpose of government...
...The speech rises to a place above defense and foreign relations, to that summit "where true politics and strategy are one...
...They must also cultivate that high prudence that was Churchill's hallmark...
...By 1946, it was a faith that had weathered many storms of experience...
...They belonged to all, but they were the special bequest of the "English-speaking world...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 24
