In Churchill's footsteps - speech by Margaret Thatcher echoes one made by Winston Churchill 50 years prior

National Review, April 8, 1996 by Spencer Warren

'LIFE is good," sagely commented the conductor, as I leaned back in the cushy splendor of my 1940s Union Pacific parlor car. I was one of several hundred passengers on the special train journey from St. Louis to Jefferson City, Missouri, following the route that Winston Churchill and President Truman had taken fifty years ago to Westminster College in the small town of Fulton. There Churchill had denounced the "iron curtain" that our wartime ally, the Soviet Union, had drawn down across Eastern Europe, and there he had proclaimed Western resistance against Communist expansion.

We were attending the commemoration hosted by the Churchill Memorial and Library and the International Churchill Societies, led by the indefatigable Richard Langworth. The first highlights were the talks on Sir Winston's paintings and his early life by two of his granddaughters, Edwina and Celia Sandys.

I had the unenviable task of following these ladies with a talk on Churchill's philosophy of politics and how it was reflected in his famous address. The Fulton speech was a lesson in power. True, Churchill felt compelled to dress up his message in the elaborate garb of the new United Nations, which a still naive America saw as the embodiment of its hopes for a new world of cooperation and harmony, replacing the bad old "power politics" of the past. But his meaning was clear. Communist expansion had to be checked by 1) the United States and the combined power of Britain and her Commonwealth, working closely in a unique alliance he called the "special relationship"; 2) Western monopoly of the atomic bomb; and 3) Anglo-American military superiority. These were the "Sinews of Peace," Churchill's title for his address.

Revered today, Churchill's address at the time was engulfed in a storm of controversy. By telling the truth about Russia and by invoking the demands of power, he challenged the utopian views of many who passionately believed that atomic weapons had made a transformation of world politics crucial to survival. At the time, Senator Claude Pepper complained: "Mr. Churchill's proposal would cut the throat of the UNO." Bernard Shaw said that Churchill was proposing a "recrudescence of the old balance-of-power policy . . . with a view to a future war." In the House of Commons, 105 (mostly Labour) MPs (including the young James Callaghan) introduced a motion condemning the speech and any idea of alliances. The "realist" Walter Lippmann wrote in private that the speech was "a direct incitement to a preventive war" and an "almost catastrophic blunder." Such was the controversy that, three days later, President Truman felt compelled to deny (inaccurately) that he had known in advance what Churchill would say.

Yet within a year Churchill's position was settled U.S. - UK policy, supported by 81 per cent of Americans in one opinion poll.

The next day we drove from Jefferson City the 24 miles to Fulton, leaving the modern highway in favor of the narrow road Churchill and Truman had taken half a century before. Fulton's population, then 6,500, is not much larger today, nor is the classic main street, with its low, early-century buildings much different, except for the merchants' names. The renowned guest Lady Thatcher, accompanied by Sir Denis and local dignitaries, paraded along Churchill and Truman's route to the college, which sits on a hill to one side of the town.

Just as Churchill had broken the euphoria and warned of dangers in the aftermath of the Second World War, his heir -- in terms of successful leadership, political principle, and personal fortitude -- warned of dangers in the aftermath of the Cold War. There would be no utopian new world order: like Churchill, Lady Thatcher spoke about power and military superiority.

"The world remains a very dangerous place," she said, "menaced by more unstable and complex threats than a decade ago." Besides instability in Russia, she emphasized radical Islam and the threat posed by the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to rogue states like Iraq, Iran, and Libya. A "direct threat to American shores is likely to mature early in the next century." She alluded to the value of pre-emptive attacks by the West, but recognized they are not realistic "given the intellectual climate today."

Despite these dangers, "we have run down our defenses and relaxed our guard," increasingly placing "our trust in international institutions." But two of these organizations have failed their post-Cold War challenges: the UN in Somalia and Bosnia, the European Union in failing to incorporate Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia into the democratic and economic institutions of Western Europe. Rather than meeting this "explicit duty laid down by history," Lady Thatcher said, the EU has been chasing after the doctrinaire scheme of building a European state among its existing members through centralizing power with Brussels bureaucrats.

One institution that can meet the new security challenges, Lady Thatcher argued, is NATO. If, through NATO, "America remains the dominant partner in a united West, and militarily engaged in Europe, then the West can continue to be the dominant power in the world as a whole." The superiority of NATO, led by the U.S., is Lady Thatcher's twenty-first-century equivalent to Churchill's "special relationship."