Churchill’s Roosevelt

Abstract

Churchill’s ‘victory at all costs’ strategy adopted in the high summer of 1940 broke all the conventions which had governed British foreign and imperial policy during the Baldwin/Chamberlain era. Instead of recognising the gap between Britain’s commitments and her ability to meet them and covering it with skilful diplomacy, the new Prime Minister put forth the Empire’s full strength. This was not simply a reaction to the special circumstances of war. Churchill had long argued that Britain’s external policy was afflicted by the political equivalent of the palsy, excoriating the ‘mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our intellectuals’.¹ For the whole of the previous decade he had preached against the ‘defeatist doctrines’ which saw ‘Britain alone among modern States’ casting away ‘her rights, her interests and her strength’. He had prophesied that ‘developments’ would be ‘swift and evil’;² now he had the opportunity to stop the drift. If he was confident that he could do so it was because he had thrown overboard with the Baldwin/Chamberlain baggage their distrust of the United States. ‘Westward Ho!’ the land was bright, not simply for the war, but for the era that was to come. As his great but neglected speech at Harvard on 6 September 1943 made plain, Churchill’s hopes for the future of the world lay in the formation of an Anglo-Saxon federation.³ Assiduous in his cultivation of Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor, Churchill continued to align his foreign and imperial policies as closely as he could with those of the President. A firm believer in the ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ which had been intellectually fashionable in his youth, Churchill assumed a substantial identity of interest between Britain and the United States. This essay seeks to question that assumption.