July 7, 2024

Anthony Tucker-Jones, Cold War Warrior: Winston Churchill and the Iron Curtain, Frontline Books, 2024, 224 pages, $49.95 / £23. ISBN 978–1399047456

Review by Alastair Stewart

Anthony Tucker-Jones’ latest book is very much like The Godfather: Part III in its grand narrative of scale, irony, and tragedy. Like with the movie, it is up to the reader to decide if Winston Churchill’s third act after his electoral defeat in 1945 is a fitting coda for a remarkable career or a bitter failure as the Cold War took root.

Cold War Warrior considers whether communism was enabled as a global threat by Churchill when he presented his percentages agreement to Josef Stalin in October 1944. It insinuates that the wartime prime minister bears some responsibility for a menace he helped legitimise by creating a “grand alliance” with the United States and Stalin’s Soviet Union against the Axis powers in 1941. At best, it makes the case that Churchill was guilty under the law of unintended consequences when he said in 1933: “I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism.”

Cold War Warrior is not a game of joining the dots, but it excels in charting Churchill’s total connection to communism. The author challenges preconceived notions about the genesis of the Cold War, as well as the limits of Churchill’s political powers and when his influence on Allied and Western policy started to wane.

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For this, Tucker-Jones should be commended: too often, Churchill’s life is demarcated by his departure from office in 1945. The reality is much more complicated when one considers Churchill as a Conservative politician, a household name, and a global figure with presidents and premiers in his Rolodex. Churchill the staunch critic of communism versus Churchill the pragmatist will be a hard pill to swallow for those who only look at the former prime minister as a diehard defender of democracy: Churchill was a pragmatist, but one who thought he could do a deal with Stalin to obliterate the Nazi regime.

The author gives us Churchill the principled defender versus Churchill the politician living with the consequences of the Second World War and the perils of atomic war. As Secretary of State for War in 1918, Churchill controversially spearheaded the British government’s material support of the White Russians against the Bolshevik Reds during the Civil War from 1917 until 1921. Churchill never stopped despising communism, nor was he hoodwinked about Soviet intentions. The prime minister lived realpolitik, as Tucker-Jones shows, and expands the narrative from Churchill versus the USSR to explore his total connection and dealings with communist threats worldwide.

The book provides a linear timeline but is punctuated geographically, making it enjoyable and easy to reference. Tucker-Jones is superb in tapping into forgotten areas of Churchill’s involvement, hidden in plain sight, including the Korean War, East Africa, and the Suez Crisis. As a note of caution, the subtitle “Churchill and the Iron Curtain” is woefully misleading, for this is a book of global proportions that drills to a granular level of Churchill’s lifetime views on communism.

Underpinning this book is a candid exploration of the gulf between power, policy politics, and personal reputation. Tucker-Jones makes a compelling case that Churchill’s influence was more symbolic than practical in the final years of the Second World War, and not just after he lost office. The Prime Minister could prescribe policy but do little about implementing or changing it. Churchill was a global superstar, as confirmed by his “Sinews of Peace” address on 5 March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He may have popularised the term “iron curtain” in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, but Churchill was increasingly lower down the ladder of people who could tackle Russians.

As Tucker-Jones strongly implies, Churchill’s ego hindered efforts to do just that. Valuable time was lost by clinging onto power and not making way for Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Beyond ailing health and the challenges of age, Churchill laboured under the intense belief that only he could bring about peace in the atomic age, as sure as he had turned the tide in the Second World War. For fifteen years, both in and out of office, he became a glorified intermediator in the personal politics of the post-war world that would be dominated by the United States and the USSR. After Stalin died in 1953, Churchill, with some irony, had even less sway.

The Bermuda Conference of 1953 is something of a punchline for Tucker-Jones:  Churchill had suffered a severe stroke in June, and the meeting with President Eisenhower and French Premier Joseph Laniel had to be delayed until December. Laniel’s predecessor originally requested the meeting to restrain the British premier’s eagerness for talks with Russia following Stalin’s death.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 may have finished Eden, but as Tucker-Jones superbly highlights, it was not as though Churchill had simply disappeared to Chartwell after his resignation as Prime Minister in 1955. His shadow and influence often had a subtle and direct impact, especially on foreign affairs, and it is a tremendous read to see how and where.

Churchill’s third and final act is tinged with historical ironies as the old warlord relentlessly sues for peace in the nuclear world.  This is a more tragic Churchill—a victim of the Allied train he put in motion, which won the war but decimated the British Empire and made his personal power illusory and ineffective until his death in 1965.

If there is a criticism to be made, it is that the book does not quite capture the legitimate claim to manifest destiny Churchill had. He genuinely had extraordinary prescience about the dangers of technology and ideology, notably when he warned in his 1931 essay, “Fifty Years Hence,” that “Robots could be made to fit the grisly theories of Communism. There is nothing in the philosophy of Communists to prevent their creation.” A mishmash, perhaps, but a telling insight into Churchill’s clairvoyance.

Tucker-Jones’s conclusion that Churchill is something of a cause, but not the root cause, of how quickly the Second World War shifted to the Cold War overlooks that Churchill may just have been the best chance Britain had to retain post-war influence. It is a chicken-and-egg fallacy to pretend that communism was not waiting for its moment to spill over from Russia’s borders.

Much like his successes, Churchill’s failures must be contextualised, with no more, and no less, agency given to what he could and could not actually control. Tucker-Jones’s book is never niche, and it is very much a must-read for some fresh thinking.

Alastair Stewart is Chair of ICS Scotland