Historian and culture warrior Andrew Roberts is right to rebuke the MAGA fringe and its line of attack on mid-century British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, now a figure of legend and myth. Roberts warns against the claims of historian Darryl Cooper and fellow cranks, their distorted and sinister revival of World War Two revisionism, their downplaying of Nazi atrocities and their attempt to shift blame onto Winston Churchill, the “chief villain” of World War Two. The prime mover of that war and its industrial scale genocide was Germany’s despot Adolf Hitler and his Axis bedfellows. No amount of relativism about the British empire, naive speculation about cutting a deal with Hitler in 1940, or sympathy for the suffering and grievances of Weimar-era Germany changes that. So far, so good.
Alas, Roberts also falls prey to a distortion of his own. At stake in the Churchill argument, he argues, is the whole direction of Western foreign policy. The ultra-rightists’ assaults on the great man are intended to supplant a noble “internationalism and interventionism” with “isolationism and nativism.” At stake is the “postwar international order that Churchill helped build.” MAGAs yearn for authoritarian strongmen, and by attacking Churchill, they really seek to undermine “the cause of anti-totalitarianism.”
In other words, Roberts projects his own preferred policy vision, of muscular Atlanticism and the eternal struggle of democracy versus dictatorship onto Churchill, notably with the theme of empire turned down. Churchill in his account emerges as a kind of early Tony Blair.
To put it bluntly, Churchill was not uniformly or consistently an internationalist or an interventionist
We can do better than that. Once we replace Churchill, a more complex man of many parts with large general “isms”, once we reduce postwar history to a static, virtuous and regular “order”, we do violence not only to history, but to the vital task of thinking prudently about foreign policy.
To put it bluntly, Churchill was not uniformly or consistently an internationalist or an interventionist. Even in his famous “wilderness” period, now recalled for his Cassandra-like warnings against the unchecked rise of totalitarians, his positions varied and at times, meandered. He emphatically did not call for intervention over Manchuria after Imperial Japan’s invasion in 1931. In that case, he instinctively sympathised with the idea of Japan bringing order into a chaotic periphery and valued Tokyo as an anti-communist and Britain-friendly bulwark. Besides, it was too far away for British entanglement at a time of scarcity, it would paralyse the League of Nations if they tried to intervene, and Japan posed little threat to the stronghold at Singapore. He was not always prescient. But he tried to think prudentially.
Neither did Churchill support British intervention in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. He feared both sides. Initially he sympathised more with Franco. But later with the power balance tipping under German rearmament in 1938-9, he saw fascist victory in Spain as more threatening to the British empire. He endorsed British non-intervention throughout, given all else Britain had on its hands. Ironically, in our own time when hawks invoked Churchill to denounce western passivity in the Syrian civil war, they knew not of what they spoke.
A similar reticence marked Churchill’s responses to Benito Mussolini’s rape of Abyssinia. Here is the case that Churchill and others later recalled as an early warning and a missed opportunity to intervene and roll back the coming of fascism (in the optimistic hope that Hitler would be so easily discouraged). Yet at the time, Churchill was all over the shop. As one historian noted, “Churchill delivered strong speeches on every side of the question.” While at times privately he was “gung ho” for weighing in militarily, in public he spoke in favour of the abortive Hoare-Laval plan of Dec 1935, which proposed to reward Mussolini’s aggression with territorial concessions at Abyssinia’s expense. Personal ambition also contributed to his caution, given he wanted to return to the Admiralty.
Above all, Churchill’s world view centred not on the general rise of dictators but specifically on the revival of Germany and the need to rearm to counter it. Regarding Abyssinia, it was partly a matter of Realpolitik. Italy was a potential counterweight and Churchill was anxious to help maintain the anti-German front. And it was partly Churchill’s romantic commitment to the League of Nations, which a strike on Italy might have ruptured. This was an internationalism of sorts, but not the internationalism of the neoconservatives imaginations. Even when Nazi Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, Churchill’s response was muted, urging at most for the two parties to have the issue litigated before a world court.
With regard to totalitarians in wartime, the history is also fraught. Churchill’s statecraft was more measured and prioritised. To combat or resist one totalitarian, one might have to help and appease another. Churchill’s sustained appeasement of Stalin — and Stalinism — from the day Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa is a central part of his tragic premiership. He chose to acquiesce publicly over Moscow’s lies about the Katyn massacre, to maintain the wartime alliance. “[T]here is no use prowling morbidly round the three year old graves of Smolensk”, as he wrote privately to his Foreign Secretary.
Churchill’s commitments to political liberty and to peace were in conflict
Likewise, Churchill was not straightforwardly the “internationalist” that many admirers presume. When admirers invoke the high-minded Atlantic Charter he co-created with President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, for instance, or speak of Churchill’s principled stands for democracy versus dictatorship, they leave out other central elements. Churchill energetically tried to exempt the British Empire from the Charter’s anticolonial principles.
And Churchill’s commitments to political liberty and to peace were in conflict, as they often are for all of us. It was Churchill who strived in vain to prevent or de-escalate the Cold War that followed via personal détente, by seeking a bargain and a compromise, especially after Stalin successfully tested the bomb in 1949. Indeed, men from Washington to Westminster accused him of trying “another Munich”, equating even face-to-face talks with capitulation and collapse.
In advocating German reunification in the early 1950s and seeking Moscow’s support for it, he resented Britain’s Foreign Office for its denunciations of the Soviet crackdown on the East German uprising of 1953. Where at other times he appealed to democracy over totalitarianism, on this occasion he regarded the act of Soviet suppression as a restrained police action against “anarchy and riot” in the Eastern zone. Churchill the visionary of democratic freedom collided with Churchill the figure of imperial order. This is not a simple story.
In pursuit of West German postwar rearmament, Churchill played his part in supporting the movement to rehabilitate its armed forces’ public image. Sympathisers recast the Wehrmacht as the honourable upright institution and assigned all culpability to the Nazis and the SS. Churchill interceded personally on behalf of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, author of massacres in Italy. In the Commons, Churchill denounced the “trial of aged and decrepit German field-marshals” as a pettiness that got in the way of rebuilding western Europe as an anti-Soviet bulwark. There was a better “order” erected on the rubble of World War Two. Yet it was built not only with the Marshall Plan and NATO, but with the sanitisation of history and the reputations and fates of war criminals, whether in Berlin or Tokyo. Peace, as Churchill believed, had a price.
Churchill of course contributed to the mythologising. In his memoirs, he initially encouraged the mytho-history of resolute Churchillians never giving an inch, in volume one, “The Gathering Storm,” written during the Berlin airlift crisis. But by the time of volume six, “Triumph and Tragedy”, while he advocated détente with the Soviet Union, he depicted his pursuit of negotiation from strength, centred on the examples of talks in Moscow and Yalta. To uncover the historical Churchill one must battle with the man himself.
If there is greatness to be found in Churchill, it is not that he stood for “steadfast leadership”, as Roberts tells it. Steadfastness implies constancy and an unyielding, consistent posture. Rather, it is that he tried to link means with ends and adjust his calculations accordingly, even while appealing to others’ spirit of righteous endurance. In other words, he sought out prudence, a more practical wisdom, as the only way to create and sustain power, and forge a decent peace. Foreign policy is more a tragedy than a morality play, and in practice lacks the bright clear lines of hagiographers’ depictions. That is not to suggest he was always judicious. He was not, whether in the Dardanelles or Singapore. But he was more substantial than the loveable bulldog of popular imagination. There was a time to fight. And a time to accommodate. To defend everything was to defend nothing. As we wrestle with our own predicaments abroad, the Churchill of history is a better guide than the Disney version.
