Seventy-five years after Churchill’s Fulton speech, we still need the Anglosphere

Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, delivered 75 years ago, introduced two phrases into circulation: “Iron Curtain” and “special relationship”. It is mainly remembered for the first but, in Churchill’s mind, the second was the more important, “the crux of what I have travelled here to say”. If the Iron Curtain was his diagnosis, so to speak, the special relationship was his cure.

At the end of his premiership, Churchill had been left enervated and bewildered by his rejection at the urns. He had taken some months to recover, first painting on Lake Como and then spending several weeks in Florida. Naturally, his restless mind had roamed across the geopolitical order then taking shape and by early 1946 he had come to two conclusions: that the USSR’s wartime alliance with the West had given way to revanchism and rivalry; and that the surest way to contain Soviet expansionism was “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States of America”.

Americans were generally keener on the first part of Churchill’s message than the second. There was a growing appreciation, in both parties, of what Soviet Communism meant. A month earlier, Stalin had declared that a clash between the socialist and capitalist powers was inevitable. Red Army troops were clinging on in Iran and Manchuria, and Soviet agents were seeking to establish client states across Europe and in Turkey. But, even among staunch anti-Communists, there were fears that Churchill was trying to conscript the United States into propping up the British Empire.

In Britain, it was the other way around. With D-Day a recent memory, the idea of a special relationship with the US was uncontroversial. But, though the Telegraph endorsed Churchill’s message, Leftist newspapers condemned his bellicosity. More than 100 Labour MPs signed a censure motion.

Stalin, for his part, went ballistic, describing the text as “a call to war with the Soviet Union”. In an eerie anticipation of the way woke critics attack the Anglosphere today, he alleged that Churchill’s call for “a fraternal association among the English-speaking peoples” was a form of “racial theory” that was “remarkably reminiscent of Hitler and his friends”.

Seventy-five years on, most people accept the prescience of the Iron Curtain image. The monstrousness of the Soviet system, its internal repression and its external aggression, are too thoroughly chronicled to be denied. But what of Churchill’s belief that a peaceful international order could only be upheld “by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and all its connections”?

Plenty of commentators dismiss it as a vainglorious conceit. To this day, a certain kind of Leftist feels obliged to smirk when uttering the phrase “special relationship” (or its more modern form, “Anglosphere”). To be sure, there have been strained moments – notably rivalries in the Middle East that culminated in 1956 with the Suez débâcle, which Eisenhower came to recognise as his single worst miscalculation.

Yet whenever the West has had to deploy force, from Korea to Afghanistan, English-speaking democracies have been in the front line. The Anglosphere nations have a closer relationship on the sharing of intelligence and military technology, even nuclear technology, than any other sovereign states.

That relationship does not depend on which parties are in power. It rests on a shared outlook born of a common patrimony: what Churchill at Fulton called “the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the Englishspeaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus, trial by jury and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence”.

Those principles were universalised, by – to be blunt – a series of military victories by the English-speaking peoples. Imagine that the Second World War or the Cold War had ended differently. There would be nothing universal about them then.

Now consider the world that is emerging from the lockdowns, the shifting of power towards altogether more autocratic Asian powers, and ask how secure these precepts would be without the Anglosphere. We’re not finished yet.