Winston Churchill was one of the great men of the 20th century. As a statesman, his most significant achievement was preventing Hitler from winning World War II outright, which might have happened in 1940 without Britain’s determination to fight on. But painful as it may be for Churchill’s admirers to acknowledge, the prevailing mythology that has shaped public perception of him is running out of true believers. The myth of Churchill can’t last, because the geopolitical order with which he has been chiefly identified is coming apart. Churchill is set to become like his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough. His statecraft may continue to be admired by specialists, but the general public will know little more than a name.
Postwar mythologies and counter-mythologies have long clashed over whether Churchill was a hero or villain. However, all the contending myths take the permanency of Anglo-American global hegemony for granted. Churchill’s devotees see him as a world-historic figure whose purity of moral principle during and after Munich kept Anglo-American hegemony true to its anti-totalitarian core. The Anglo-American hegemony is a liberal empire, a force for good in the world that resists and crushes the enemies of democracy. This myth suggests that all Anglo-American failures are failures of will. The Churchill myth is about stiffening Western resolve to fight enemies that it can always beat in a fair fight.
A left-wing counter-mythology, by contrast, sees Churchill as the chief representative of white Anglo-American imperialism, which is the eternal first cause of every problem faced by the “global majority” inside and outside the West. In this account, the British Empire is just as powerful as ever. The spots of pink on the map may be gone, but imperialism’s malignant influence persists in dusty statues and cursory selections in survey courses. Hence, the urgent need to “decolonize” everything.
There is another counter-mythology emerging out of certain factions of the right, a version of which was on display recently in Tucker Carlson’s much-debated interview with the podcaster Darryl Cooper. By this marginal but increasingly influential account, Anglo-American liberal imperialism is the source of the all-powerful egalitarian and democratic cancer consuming the West. Victories of the empire, such as World War II, are in fact defeats for Western civilization. By obsessing over Hitler’s evil, the adherents of this view believe, we distract from the evils that have overcome the West after his demise. Hence, the urgent need to find in Churchill an anti-Hitlerian scapegoat.
These myths and counter-myths all take Churchill as he appears in his memoirs when he first became prime minister: sleeping soundly for the first time in years. They don’t hear what Churchill fearfully told his bodyguard after he became prime minister: “I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is.”
Churchill’s true greatness is paradoxical. It lies in how well he played from an extremely weak hand. In September 1939, Britain began fighting a war for which it was woefully unprepared. By June 1940, it was effectively a defeated power, barely surviving thanks to the miracle of Dunkirk and an intact navy. When Churchill became prime minister, he had to make three brutal geopolitical bets.
First, he bet that defeating Hitler was more urgent than defeating the Soviet Union. In 1940, it wasn’t clear that the two enemies could or should be separated: Berlin and Moscow were allied. The unprovoked Soviet invasion of Finland had generated a massive international outcry, and it might have been possible to assemble an anti-Soviet and anti-Nazi alliance. The British had audacious plans to strike both the Germans and the Soviets at their weakest point. Churchill, however, preferred to pursue an alliance with Stalin. Stalin rebuffed him until Hitler did Churchill a favor and attacked the Soviet Union. Stalin’s tune changed, and the allies would empower Stalin to help defeat Hitler.
Second, Churchill bet that beating Hitler was worth entering into an expensive and harsh bargain with the United States. Lend-lease, the system by which Washington began supplying allies with materiel, wasn’t an act of charity; by 1944, the Americans were using it to blackmail the British. They threatened to withhold payments if Churchill did not sign off on the Morgenthau plan to deindustrialize Germany, a plan which probably prolonged the war.
“Washington used its power to accelerate Britain’s decolonization.”
Third, Churchill bet that following the end of hostilities, the Americans would want to collaborate with an intact British imperium, helping it secure its interests. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” he said in 1942. Instead, the application of lend-lease ensured that the British would abruptly pass the torch of liberal imperialism to the United States. Fewer than 1,000 days after V-E day, British India and Palestine would come to an end. Over the following years, British sacrifices would only mount. Washington used its power to accelerate Britain’s decolonization in a quixotic bid to win the Middle East and the Third World to its side.
All these tradeoffs can be justified. But as the long-term effects of those bets become clearer, the short-term gains become more ambiguous. Even the specialists capable of rerunning the complexities of Churchill’s geopolitical bets in ways that always favor him will face not Churchill’s “broad, sunlit uplands,” but a tough uphill battle. Moreover, if one stresses his geopolitical cunning in the face of constraints, it puts the man at odds with his own legend.
In the years after the war, Churchill was too successful in playing down the true source of his greatness. Only one of two wartime national leaders to write memoirs, Churchill published his shortly after the war, beginning in 1948 and finishing in 1953. From the “Five Days in May” episode to his quarrels with Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Churchill’s memoirs conceal how tenuous his position was. They hide the fissures and divides that nearly toppled him in his first month in office and demonstrated Britain’s growing impotence as the war went on.
Churchill had his reasons. One was magnanimity toward defeated opponents. Contrary to many enthusiasts of the Churchill mythology, he didn’t want to adopt the base tactic of smearing Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain as pro-peace and pro-Hitler. The second, more important task was to emphasize the perennial importance of Anglo-American cooperation. Churchill taught that when the English-speaking peoples stood together, there was no obstacle they couldn’t overcome. This was a message for his American readers. If Americans heeded Churchill, they wouldn’t retreat into their own hemisphere, but rather brace themselves for the Cold War and for the global struggle against communism. The final task was perhaps the hardest of all. Churchill wrote to reassure the English that they were still a great nation. They had performed great deeds during the war and were capable of more in their partnership with the new American empire. Churchill papered over the extent of Britain’s decline.
In postwar America, the Churchill mythology acquired the status of a foreign cult in the late Roman Empire. Talk of the trans-Atlantic alliance flattered the pretensions of US presidents and foreign-policy cadres anxious to build up coalitions. It also flattered America’s anti-imperial pride, since Churchill’s reflections on the English-speaking peoples or the Anglo-American special relationship glossed over the colossal power imbalances. But unlike the British of the 1940s, the Americans didn’t experience their own power as one subject to severe geopolitical constraints. If one tried to explain that Churchill was great in terms of how well he fought from weakness, this lesson would have been unintelligible to the world’s superpower. Moreover, the Americans had little sense of the tragedy of the postwar moment. The United States may have been anxious about the first bet Churchill made during the war, but because they benefited immensely from the other two, the war had a straightforward happy ending. As time went on, the Churchill story became a kind of clergyman’s war, stressing the themes a preacher might invoke from the pulpit and ignoring complex and delicate geopolitical judgements. Unlike Hitler and the Holocaust, these were details of history.
In Britain, the Churchill mythology had a different reception. Thanks to Churchill, the British people believed they had won the war. However, despite Britain’s unprecedented domestic prosperity, it was clear that the British had lost the will and the capacity for global geopolitical efforts. Their leaders were now managers of imperial decline. The Commonwealth, formed as an effort to carry on the spirit of British liberal imperialism after the loss of the crown jewel of India, was revealed early on to be a feeble symbol.
“The British people believed they had won the war.”
Churchill’s second term as prime minister exposed further tensions. The champion of “the grand alliance” refused to help the Americans save the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, scuppering Operation Vulture. Even with Churchill in charge, Anglo-American cooperation was now subordinate to the increasingly insular dictates of British public opinion. Then came the Suez debacle in 1956. President Dwight Eisenhower engaged in an act of economic extortion and threatened to provoke a run on the pound if the British didn’t withdraw from the canal. This showed for all who had eyes to see that America was less a friend than—to use a 1944 term—an overlord. During the Brexit debate, “remain” advocates tended to portray Britain’s decision to join the European Economic Community, the precursor of the European Union, as a choice for a globally involved Britain rather than regional isolationism. The opposite was true. Britain only began pursuing EEC membership in the early 1960s when it was clear that its days of global geopolitical engagement were over.
Americans never realized that by the 1960s, the Churchill cult at which their own foreign-policy cadre worshiped had few true believers in Britain. As the Americans relied on the language of “Munich” and “appeasement” to build a trans-Atlantic coalition for the Vietnam War, they met a cool Britannia. The British were ready to bury with great piety Churchill the statesman, but they had effectively lost their faith in Churchill the myth. Moreover, as the existential threat of National Socialism had passed, all three of Churchill’s geopolitical bets seemed doubtful.
For the British, the third bet became the most troublesome of all. Before anyone in public office outside of Enoch Powell was ready to name Britain’s “terrible enemy,” novelists and other writers were already grappling with the ramifications of yielding the title of “Western superpower” to the United States. In popular fiction—one important expression of a nation’s real character—you find not a few personalities bluntly concluding that handing the imperial torch to the Americans wasn’t worth it.
The United States isn’t yet in such dire straits as postwar Britain, but it is becoming harder to ignore the signs of decline. In the past few years, despite the ferocious efforts of the Biden administration to “restore” American global leadership, the limits of American power have been harshly exposed. Taiwan would likely prove too costly to defend. US debt is a time bomb that would blow up in any real conflict. Russia’s likely victory over NATO-backed Ukraine isn’t a military defeat on the scale of Vietnam, but this is partly because Washington has neither the will nor the strength to launch that kind of ground war in the first place. American officials are left asserting that Ukraine represents a vital national interest, while strenuously insisting the country won’t send troops to defend it. This raises uncomfortable questions about which vital national interests America would really fight for, an ambiguity America’s enemies will continue to exploit. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea shows that America can no longer guarantee safe passage in a major international waterway. This “Suez” event lacks the public disgrace of the 1956 original, because it has been carefully curated to hide American weakness. But for those who have eyes to see, the signs are there.
As these frailties become more obvious, the Churchill myth will acquire the same status it did in 1950s Britain. When America’s clergymen take to the pulpit to exhort their countrymen to fight, they will face congregations who have lost that simple faith. Problems of national volition and state capacity will become too big to ignore. Unhappy compromises in Ukraine and elsewhere around the world will upset old friends and allies, leading to further fractures and divides among the remnants of the English-speaking peoples. As with the British Empire, the costs of American empire aren’t particularly large when compared to the overall size of the mother country’s economy. However, these costs will be ruthlessly audited by a public growing increasingly hostile to the empire’s objectives and those of its imperial leadership class. Just like in Britain, America’s future leaders will find themselves managing imperial decline. Cynicism about Churchill’s second and third bets will continue to mount, but with one important difference. In 21st-century America, no politician would dare say “you never had it so good.” There is no rising domestic prosperity to mask geopolitical weakness.
As the Churchill myth fades, we can hope for two outcomes. The first hope lies in training a new leadership class that understands the mounting limitations of American power. Since acting with prudence isn’t the same as having moral principles, there is a narrow path here to transmit the real lessons of Churchill’s statesmanship: acting rightly with scarce resources. Yet there are only a couple educational institutions even capable of thinking in those terms. That’s why the second hope is more important. The fading of the Churchill myth might generate some enchanting sparks of high culture, which could, in turn, stir a deeper creed.
The greatest literary work addressing World War II is Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor, written during the 1950s. The trilogy offers a blunt analysis of Britain’s fate. Yet it bends toward a surprising spiritual denouement. Following the career of Guy Crouchback as he enlists to fight against totalitarianism, the series begins with Waugh’s familiar satire, excoriating the failures of the British leadership class. This satire takes a dark turn in the second novel. Rather than recount the war’s victories, Waugh devoted most of the novel to the humiliating British withdrawal from Crete in 1941. The theme of imperial decline is obvious, but Waugh ultimately offered a more profound lesson. As a passage toward the end of the trilogy intimates, Waugh repudiated the moral myths of the war and gestured in a different, redemptive direction.
‘Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians—not very many perhaps—who felt this. Were there none in England?’
‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’