THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VII, Issue # 23, January 28, 2005
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE CHURCHILL DOCTRINE
By Daniel Mandel
THE CHURCHILL DOCTRINE ON CONFRONTING TOTALITARIAN THREATS TO WORLD PEACE, WESTERN CIVILATION, &
ANGLO-AMERICAN LIBERTY -- THE RELEVANCE OF THE EARLY 20TH. CENTURY STATESMANSHIP & INTERNATIONAL STRATEGIC
DOCTRINE OF WINSTON CHURCHILL TO THE ROLE OF AMERICA & ITS ALLIES IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS DURING THE
CONTEMPORARY ERA OF ISLAMIST TERRORISM & JIHADISM
FULL STORY:
Just over 130 years ago, a boy christened Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was delivered at England’s Blenheim Palace. He
survived the trenches of France, political reversals, and even being struck by a New York City cab to lead Britain from its greatest
peril in May, 1940, to victory over Nazism five years later. Monday, January 24, 2005, marked the 40th anniversary of his death. In
the age of Islamist terror, can we draw inspiration from his career?
Yes, but only, it seems, from his finest hour. Until his moment arrived in 1940, Churchill was frequently dismissed even within his
own political party, the British Conservative Party, as an imperialist adventurer with baroque ambitions, a throwback to an earlier
epoch, an author of military debacles out of touch with a supposedly emergent world of international comity. In short, he was
regarded then as most contemporary Liberals might view George W. Bush or Ariel Sharon today.
And yet, if Churchill had faltered, bowing to party consensus in the 1930s or to counsel urging that Britain sue for peace in 1940,
world history might have been very different. Assuming Western civilization had survived, he would have joined the ignominious
company of men like Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain.
Instead, he sacrificed high office for years to sound the warning against appeasing the violent forces of totalitarianism. There was
no one, save he, who foresaw the danger so far ahead and was fit to lead when the supreme test arrived. And lead he did, for 18
months, when Britain stood alone with but a slender lifeline to an isolationist United States of America. His mistakes were legion
and often costly, but his leadership carried the allied cause.
Churchill was guided by a few elementary ideas: that Britain and the Anglosphere more generally was a force for good; that its
division and vacillation invited destructive forces to fill the vacuum; and that “democracy is the worst form of government, except
all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Together, these ideas might even be called the Churchill Doctrine.
Once stated, it is easy to see his political descendents. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan faced down another totalitarianism
that Churchill had galvanized an ascendant United States into opposing in 1946 with his memorable “Iron Curtain” speech. In the
end, decades of vigilant containment produced a relatively bloodless victory, which suggests that some of the lessons of the 1930s
had been learned.
But have they and, if so, how widely? The American public knows an enemy when it sees it crashing planes into skyscrapers or
kidnapping and gruesomely beheading Westerners. It disdains the idea that the aggression of someone like Osama bin Laden is a
ny more rational than Adolf Hitler’s, which also came deftly packaged in grievances supposedly amenable to negotiation.
Hitler decried encirclement of Germany and claimed a place in the sun for Germany as a passport to dominating a continent and
perhaps the world. In the end, after averting eyes and handing him victims on a platter, Western publics turned and fought, harder
and longer than would have been necessary if the revelation had come even a year earlier. It took Hitler’s occupation of Prague in
March, 1939, for Britons and Frenchmen to repudiate the seductive illusion that they could control Hitler’s aggression by
conceding to his demands.
In the case of militant Islam, it was another long awakening: from the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran in 1979 to the mass-
homicides in Manhattan and Washington, D.C. The U.S.A. decamped from Lebanon (1983) and Somalia (1993), and responded
with rhetoric-coupled-with-pinpricks to the terrorist outrages of the 1990s. Only after September 11, 2001, did the U.S.A. raise a
posse to confront the latest totalitarianism, which has had decades to consolidate, plant terrorist cells, and orchestrate its deeds.
Three years later, it is all too apparent that we are also in for a longer war than would have been otherwise necessary. Yet,
Americans, like the rudely awakened Europeans of 1939, have also rejected al-Qa'ida’s psychological warfare. By and large, they
understand that they face an unappeasably cruel enemy. The understanding has dawned that utopian political claims – and here
is where Islamism takes up company with Nazism and Communism – are violent doctrines, achievable purely by unbounded force.
For all that, today, the Churchill Doctrine – embodied, in effect, in the “Coalition of the Willing” – is denigrated or even despised
in various polities, especially in Europe, but also here in the U.S.A.. In confronting assorted totalitarianisms, Churchill and his
disciples have been subjected to charges of warmongering, charges whose sources have not been confined to totalitarian
opponents alone.
The Nazi propaganda machine railed against Churchill as a fanatic bent on destruction. But so did some of Churchill’s colleagues,
not least Stanley Baldwin, who sedulously locked Churchill out of assorted cabinets throughout much of the 1930s.
Likewise, Cold Warriors such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were cordially detested and denigrated at home. Britons
will remember the Marxist firebrand labor unionist Arthur Scargill deriding “President Ray-Gun.” (Fewer will remember that Scargill
also condemned Poland’s brave anti-Communist trade union movement, Solidarity.) Here, the Democratic Party eminence grise
Clark Clifford described Reagan as an “amiable dunce.” Today, comparable slights are leveled at George W. Bush, a Churchill
admirer.
Contemporary political passions across a range of policies make denigration of a Bush or a Reagan an easy trick. But Churchill
cannot die so easily a death by a thousand cuts. In particular, his astonishing literary and oratorical attainments make it
impossible for opponents of muscular anti-totalitarianism to level convincing charges of stupidity. This has presented them with a
problem. Diminishing the Churchill Doctrine has usually demanded more subtle portraiture: a whisky-sodden brooder, an
unrestrained military enthusiast, an imperialist. And there is truth in all this, although these critics have also been unscrupulous,
inasmuch as they do not acknowledge his enormous industry, corrective high sense of purpose, and overriding desire to avoid
still greater bloodbaths, whether in Europe or India.
Some are less scrupulous still. In a frantic effort to discredit Churchill, Michael Lind, writing in the British Spectator last
year, gleefully quotes Churchill from 1919, “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour
of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” Crows Lind, “citing Churchill to support Bush’s war to rid Iraq of alleged
weapons of mass destruction was particularly ironic.”
In fact, the full quote reveals that Lind has lifted two isolated sentences from a passage indicating the very opposite: Churchill
believed in upholding the ban on Weapons of Mass Destruction, but favored the use of non-lethal agents:
"I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted
the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favor of the retention of gas as a permanent
method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a
bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am
strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be
so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only
the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would
spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those
affected.
More significant than the sleight of hand and the implicit contradictions in Lind’s demolition job – either Bushies are untutored
militarists, or they wrongly claim descent for democratic and humane ends from an imperialist Churchill – is the clear urge to
invalidate the Churchill doctrine by besmirching the man as a potential war criminal.
Others have also tried to burrow into the doctrine. Radical British historian A.J.P. Taylor argued once to the late Churchill
biographer, William Manchester, that Churchill’s Anglosphere “had few merits...he never considered how far England and
America had been associated, which was very little, and – particularly – how far they could be associated in the future.” Yet,
post-war history has vindicated Churchill’s unfashionable view. Surely Korea, the Falklands, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq
suggest the opposite?
Though an anti-appeaser in the 1930s, Taylor wrote his Origins of the Second World War (1961) in part to discredit the cause of
confronting the Soviets in the present. And indeed, it is risky to argue from historical analogy, if only because history never
exactly repeats itself. It is perfectly possible to argue that dispatching troops to the Rhineland in 1936 was imperative, whereas
dispatching them to Iraq in 2003 was not.
The Iraqi campaign might prove ultimately an important or negligible factor in the war against militant Islam. Yet, American power
remains indispensable in securing the world from a new totalitarianism. Whatever the strategic judgment on Iraq, Saddam’s
removal is a boon for human prospects – which is why the totalitarians and their fellow travelers revile it and seek to discredit the
Churchill Doctrine that inspires it.
What would Churchill counsel today for America if it had to stand alone? Here, we do not need to hypothesize. In 1938, at a
dinner party, the American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, an appeaser through and through, predicted to Churchill
that England would go under. It drew from Churchill an impromptu oration that included these words:
"It will then be for you, for the Americans, to preserve and maintain the great heritage of the
English-speaking peoples. It will be for you to think imperially, which means to think always
of something higher and more vast than one's own national interests."
This counsel is risky, hard to execute, and liable to earn unpopularity. But it remains the indispensable meaning of the Churchill
Doctrine today.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
The Middle East & the Arabs
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
The foregoing article by Daniel Mandel was originally published in FrontPage Magazine, January 26, 2005, and can be
found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum.
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
January 26, 2005
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