A good article posted by dailymail UK to share with all of you!
Of all the memorable speeches delivered by Winston Churchill, none was more influential than his 1946 address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Although Churchill was no longer Prime Minister by then, the speech threw out phrases that would echo down the years.
Describing a new post-war division of the world between East and West, he invoked ‘the sinews of peace’, made the first reference to a ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America, and issued a dark warning that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent [of Europe]’.
Fulton was a turning point, convincing war-weary Western leaders that the Soviet Union could not be trusted, despite its role in defeating Hitler.
Appeasing China has not worked. And that is why today, just as Churchill stood up to Stalin in 1946, Boris Johnson should take a stand and urge the West to face down President Xi Jinping’s cynical aggression, writes Tobias Ellwood President Truman, who was sitting in the audience, would recalibrate his view of Joseph Stalin and adopt a policy of preventing the spread of Communism around the world.It was in the wake of Fulton that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Nato, was created, ensuring that the West had the military strength to defend its values. How the Cold War might have unfolded had Churchill’s words gone unheeded, it is hard to imagine.
Today, more than 70 years on, the parallels are dangerously clear. A new superpower is on the march and Western democracies are once again failing to understand the threat. We have indulged China as it embarked upon its extraordinary ascent, attempting to deepen our engagement instead of subjecting Beijing to proper scrutiny.
For the past 40 years, we have somehow persuaded ourselves that an authoritarian Communist state would evolve into a global citizen embracing liberty and open trade. Today we must face the harsh reality that we’ve been duped.
