Churchill's Soviet warning and the Chinese threat - 8 March 1996

Some days you, I, wake up in the morning and the first thing I notice is the date, especially if this talk is coming up in a day or two. I'm not thinking of personal dates which we all cherish: the first tooth of the first born, our mother in law's birthday and so on, but dates that strike a chord in history and might come to be memorised by students. Last Monday was the 4th of March and in this country for many people who were not yet born, the 4th of March 1933 is such a date.

In those days and for long before, the 4th of March, every fourth year was the day on which a new president was inaugurated. It's now the 20th of January for reasons we don't have to go into. But the 4th of March 1933 was not only the day of Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural, it was the day before he'd even taken the oath, that he closed every bank in the country. It marked in a very dramatic way, the pit of the Great Depression and in the really terrible winter of 1932-3 a fearful nation had let loose its fears, in too many states by starting a run on the banks, at the very end of February.

Roosevelt, on the eve of his inauguration declared a moratorium on all the banks, which stayed in place till he'd decided which ones should go under and which deserved to be backed by federal funds. Which left us only to use whatever cash we had or to take advantage of "scrip", which several states hurriedly printed and circulated or, as I well remember, you paid taxi drivers, bell boys, shoeshine boys, everybody with a cheque. March 4th 1933 became known as the day the money stopped.

But that was 63 years ago and we don't tend to celebrate the 63rd of anything. But last Tuesday was, was it not, naturally, the 5th of March, which in itself means nothing special but 50 years ago to the day, on the 5th of March 1946, that's different.

That's a date always to be recalled as a turn in history, if not as a memorable warning. It was the day in a small college town in Missouri that Winston Churchill stood up with President Truman sitting by his side and intoned a sentence or two that would echo round the free world, and the enslaved world, and arouse mostly furious or critical comment. These were the sentences:

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended on the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe - Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Sofia. All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere....I do not believe that the Russians desire war, rather the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and their doctrines".

Well now consider the Second War had ended less than a year before. We'd won it, the Nazi empire which was to last a thousand years, had been shattered in five years of war. Russia had been the ally that lost more humans than the millions of casualties of the other Allies put together. Only 10 months after the Nazi surrender was surely no time to start warning everybody about the Soviet Union as a threat. Most people I think, in most free countries either sighed at Churchill's words or got good and mad.

It's hard to credit now but the left everywhere, at that time and for many years to come, looked on Stalin as a strong, perhaps ruthless leader, but essentially humane, not in the same street with Hitler as a tyrant. And the liberals lamented that Churchill, admittedly the single hero who held Britain together when any other of his colleagues would have yielded to Hitler's attractive terms, but now Churchill was being his old cantankerous self, the warmonger, which is what the Labour opposition in Parliament, including some good men and true, Atlee, Cripps, called him in the 1930s, until Hitler was practically on his way to Poland. But don't tell us, we all groaned, that Russia has wicked military designs on anybody. Unfortunately, we were wrong and the old growler was right again.

The behaviour of the Soviets in the United Nations was a first dismaying sign. Their automatic vetoing of Security Council resolutions that would have authorised a United Nations force to help a threatened member. Soon the European nations that Churchill had listed were no longer in the Soviet sphere, but under Soviet domination. Poland was lost even before the founding conference of the United Nations was over. Stalin threatened to break the UN in its cradle if he could not enforce a puppet government on Poland, which he did. Within a year of two of the Missouri warning, and thanks mainly to the similar unblinking vision of President Harry Truman, the Marshall Plan and the North American Treaty Alliance and America's possession, sole possession of the atomic bomb, stopped the westward and southern march of the Soviets in their tracks.

I don't know how it was in your country, but here in the United States I read only one commemorative piece about the 5th March 50 years ago in Fulton, Missouri. But when last Tuesday came and I thought back to Fulton, I couldn't help feeling that it cast, what Churchill would have called, a sombre shadow on two items of news that same day that come into focus on another great power which for 40 years or more has appeared to us as a slumbering giant.

I mean Communist China. The two items are these. Prime Minister John Major in Hong Kong declaring a moral responsibility for the colony when its rule passes over to China, and, it was well noted in American dispatches from Hong Kong, the Chinese indifference to Britain's views, as they go briskly about replacing Hong Kong's elected legislature. Also well noted was the uncomfortable fact that more than half of Hong Kong's 6.2 million people are refugees from China. Many refugees from torture and imprisonment, who put no trust in a protected future, protected from whatever extremity of communist rule the Chinese care to impose.

The other item coming, surely not by accident, during Mr Major's visit, was an official announcement on Tuesday that China would hold missile tests at sea but just offshore from the prosperous island nation of Taiwan whose independence the United States is more than less committed to defend and which communist China, since it took over the mainland in 1949, has always regarded as a renegade province.

It has kept up a monotonous bark about absorbing Taiwan for three or four decades but there's never been any bite to it. Lately though, much has been happening to support the theory that China is now determinedly engaged in extending its sphere of influence far beyond Asia, in Africa and throughout the Caribbean, by way of strangling the trade and other ties that Taiwan has with these far-flung countries. There are 31 of them in all. As for China's active intentions toward Taiwan, I believe that a January speech by the Chinese prime minister, Li Peng, is the first public declaration that China has a definite date with Taiwan. The premier said once Hong Kong reverts to Chinese rule and then two years later, Portuguese Macao, Beijing will turn towards the annexation or acquisition, conquest perhaps, of Taiwan by 2010.

All this takes us back to the day 24 years ago, when to the astonishment of the American people, their president suddenly arrived in Beijing, which was then Peking, not only arrived but behaved like a long-lost brother being reunited with his family. The big surprise, more than the fact that a United States president had, for the first time, visited communist China, was the fact that it was Richard Nixon, who made his political reputation for his unceasing and vocal detestation of communism.

But the early 1970s were a time when a nightmare haunted the makers of American foreign policy. It was the prospect that the two communist giants, the Soviet Union and China, that they might decide they had more to lose by being at odds, than by being together and that if the worst came to the worst, they might conclude a pact as unthinkable as the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939, which guaranteed the Second World War.

I think it can be fairly said that Mr Nixon's bold attempt to make China a sympathetic nation, at least to break the Pacific cold war and woo them away from the idea of a Soviet alliance, well if it didn't work, history has gone along as if it had worked. Today the Soviet threat to Europe or anywhere, we've been saying, has gone and maybe it's time to define a positive policy towards Beijing and Taiwan. Senator Dole who suddenly looks as if he's going to be the Republican nominee, was asked on Sunday what would happen if Beijing threatened the island. "We'd tell 'em," he said promptly, "to think again."

As for no more threat of an imperial Russia, we've stopped reassuring each other on that point, since the strong possibility has arrived of either a neo-communist or a fascist nationalist being the next president of Russia. The Iron Curtain could throw its shadow again while thousand of miles away, China weaves across three oceans, a Bamboo Curtain.

The most influential American journalist of the generation between the wars died about 20 years ago, Walter Lippmann. When he was asked, at the end, when we were obsessed with the Soviet Union, what was the worst thing the world had to fear? He said, after a long pause, "China on the loose".

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