How Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech launched the Cold War 80 years ago

Churchill reminded people how in the 1930s he had warned against appeasing Hitler and Nazi Germany, but “no one listened, and one by one we all fell into the terrible whirlpool.” “We certainly must not allow this to happen again,” he added. While he did not believe the Soviet Union sought another conflict, he said they wanted “the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” He warned that if Western democracies did not stand together in defense of the UN Charter, the founding document that defines the main principles of international relations, “disaster could overwhelm us all.”

Veteran BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke recalls, 50 years later, in his long-running weekly Letter from America, how subdued the public reaction in the West to Churchill’s warning was. “Just ten months after the Nazis surrendered, this was not the time to start warning everyone about the Soviet Union as a threat,” he said. “I think most people in most free countries either sighed at Churchill’s words or went mad.” Cook said many saw Churchill as his “old, evil, warmonger self”, but “unfortunately we were wrong and the old complainer was right again”.

Establishment of NATO

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin responded to his former ally’s speech angrily, comparing Churchill to the Nazis. “Hitler began to unleash war by declaring his racist theory, declaring that only German-speaking nations were a nation of full value,” he wrote in Pravda, the official Communist newspaper. “Mr. Churchill began to unleash war, also by a racist theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations were nations of full value, called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world.”

To calm the situation, the American and British governments initially distanced themselves from Churchill’s speech. But a year later, President Truman committed the United States to the role of defender of global democracy, and pledged to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. The Truman Doctrine, as it became known, led to the creation of NATO and later US involvement in the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.

Eventually, the Iron Curtain as Churchill described it became a physical and metaphorical barrier, with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. For 28 years, the wall separated not only family and friends, but also the entire country. After the Wall finally fell in 1989, Westminster College was visited separately by the leaders of the two superpowers: a symbolic site chosen to signal that the Cold War was over. In 1990, US President Ronald Reagan marked the first anniversary of the dismantling of the Wall by dedicating a sculpture to Churchill’s granddaughter, Edwina Sandys.