Adversaries and Critics

Abstract

When Sir Winston Churchill wrote the sixth and final volume of his history of the Second World War, he took as his theme: ‘How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life’. These words were written in 1953: that is to say, in the year Stalin died, six years after the ‘Cold War’ may be said to have started and seven years after Churchill himself had spoken, in Fulton, Missouri, of an ‘Iron Curtain’ descending across the continent of Europe. How far has his forecast proved correct? Had the democracies learned nothing from their experience? Since he wrote these words, the democracies have committed plenty of follies: misjudgements, missed opportunities and just plain mistakes. There is nothing very novel or surprising about this. Such follies abounded in the 1920s and 1930s, but the democracies had perhaps learned one thing: the need jointly to devise in advance means for managing, and as far as possible, guarding against, their more serious consequences. The lesson was forced upon them by the circumstances in which they found themselves in 1945. The principal means devised was the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in 1949, by which the North Atlantic Alliance was created.