Churchill: An Iron Curtain Has Descended

The setting

Voted out of office in July 1945, Winston Churchill accepted an invitation to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and President Harry Truman sat on the platform beside him. Under the title 'The Sinews of Peace', Churchill warned that Soviet control was hardening over Eastern Europe and called for a special relationship between Britain and the United States.

Key passage

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

'The Sinews of Peace', Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946. Quoted briefly: the full text is still under copyright.

What followed

Stalin denounced the speech as a call to war, and many in the West thought it alarmist. Within little more than a year the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan had committed the United States to containing Soviet power in Europe, NATO followed in 1949, and the 'iron curtain' gave its name to the dividing line of the Cold War for more than forty years.

Connected