The greatest statesman of the 20th century, Winston Churchill was also a wise historian, and a witty, humorous, and insightful essayist. He accepted the realities of power and the immanence of evil, but remained, at heart, a long-term optimist, animated as he was by the belief that in the end, the ideals of liberty, if defended resolutely, would win.
Sharing the same hope in a different age, I have named this column “The Sinews of Peace.” It is the title of a speech remembered for a still more electrifying phrase: the famous “iron curtain.” So it often was with Churchill. Only a fool would claim to imitate him; but it is open to all to be inspired by his deeds and words.
And particularly so in our darkening times. We live in a disordered world, in so many ways—a world in which the unrestrained and cynical dictators leading several of the great powers are thrusting aside the norms of decent international politics, in which religious fanaticism flares into massacre and chaos turns loose millions of refugees, in which belief in the old verities of representative government are under attack, and in which not a few citizens of this country have given up hope in the elementary competence of their own government. In one way, ours is not nearly as bad as Churchill’s time—there is nothing (yet) to match the malevolent power of the Nazis or the Soviet Communists, or the depth of economic collapse that helped create the political crises of the mid- and late 1930s. Yet the situation is bad enough. It is not 1940, to be sure, but there are more echoes of 1932, say, than one would wish.
Churchill’s arguments carried through only until the beginning of the nuclear age. He would have been shocked to contemplate the security of a Western world in which Kim Jong-un and the Supreme Leader of Iran could, under the noses of knowing Presidents and Prime Ministers, steadily advance to become nuclear powers. He would have been appalled by feckless and spineless Western leaders who have trouble distinguishing between friend and foe, and whose aspirations to world order unsecured by ample power he would have thought dangerously naive. “Arms and the Covenant” was his motto in the 1920s, meaning no grand schemes without the muscle to support them. Twice in his life he witnessed the trahison des clercs, the rise of intellectuals who not only apologized for but argued strenuously on behalf of regimes that preached lies and practiced murder on a vast scale. But at least then there were voices of equal eloquence on the other side—the George Orwells, to take but one iconic name—who saw the truth and spoke it, as did he.
This is, to repeat, a dark time, and much of the matter of this column will be about the way in which the United States and like-minded countries can navigate their way through it—as well as stringent criticism of leaders who make choices that seem to me foolish, or immoral, or both. But I would like to write about much more than that.
For one thing, I am a curious hybrid of political scientist and historian, occasional government official and polemicist. I intend to write about topics that range well beyond politics, and reach back beyond the present. Do not be surprised if occasional columns pop up about teaching Shakespeare to aspiring bureaucrats, re-reading Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, the joy of magic (conjuring, not occult practices), and the leadership insights to be derived from children’s literature. Not the least among Churchill’s armaments of sanity were his sense of whimsy and his realization that public people should have cultural interests independent of politics. I intend to indulge the former and explore the latter.
For the most part, though, this column will deal with current politics and, frequently, what history has to say about it. Anniversaries will be the occasion of reflections on, say, the legacies of World War I, or the meaning of moral as well as physical rearmament. (Expect a reflection on the column’s namesake speech when its 70th anniversary comes around in March.) Much of the writing that I would normally pour into op-eds will end up here, where the constraints of time and space and formality are fewer, and the range of topics more ample.
I am deeply grateful to my friends and colleagues here at The American Interest for this opportunity. I helped found this magazine, and it has lived up to my hopes in many ways—in its tolerance of a range of views; the breadth of its intellectual reach; and not least, the spriteliness of its prose. I look forward to writing here often—at least once every two weeks for starters—and to reaching out to new readers as well as old. I hope you will look forward to reading.