Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech at 80
In recent years, the statue of Sir Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square has become a target for defacement. In 2020 it was covered in graffiti accusing the wartime prime minister of racism. And just last week, a Dutch leftist was accused of covering it in anti-Zionist and antisemitic slogans. For these vandals, and their equivalents among conspiracy theory-mongering “historians,” Churchill is a symbol of everything that is wrong with Anglo-American internationalism.
Despite this relentless—and often irrational or ahistorical—criticism, Churchill’s legacy endures. Across the globe, he is memorialized for his prophetic opposition to appeasement and bold resistance to Nazi terror. Compared to Churchill, the politicos running the world today seem small. While they practice “low intrigue” and “the little arts of popularity,” Churchill is remembered as the “Last Lion,” a statesman committed to an older view of service to country. For him, the British Empire was not a tool for oppression but rather a bulwark for ordered liberty. Churchillian leadership is better understood not as privilege, but as a noble burden.
Today marks the eightieth anniversary of one of Churchill’s finest speeches, “The Sinews of Peace,” originally delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946. It is perhaps most famous for Churchill’s description of “an iron curtain” descending “across the Continent” to divide the free world from the Soviet empire. But beyond the rhetorical flourishes, the speech communicates a wisdom we need for a world on fire today. Churchill warned his audience, and the generations to come, that freedom requires eternal vigilance.
In 1946, the Anglo-American alliance might have seemed totally dominant to many observers in the West. It had vanquished the Axis powers in World War II, and U.S. President Harry Truman’s decision to end the conflict with nuclear strikes on Imperial Japan seemed to send fear into the hearts of Soviet leaders. Many political leaders, including the Labour government, which had unseated Churchill just months before, wanted to shift the focus to domestic issues. They believed that the wartime partnership with the Soviets could be sustained, and that the world might enter a new era of peace and prosperity.
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