The Churchill Loop

              Whenever world events appear to border on bedlam, and our adversaries, perceived or true, appear to threaten our security or national interests, politicians and pundits reach for the time-honored historical comparisons to Winston Churchill, the British prime minister who led England and Empire through the Second World War.

            The latest iteration of the “Churchill Loop” is now being applied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who addressed Congress on March 3 to warn America about the Iranian leadership as the Obama administration negotiates with the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program. Churchill had warned his country about Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Netanyahu, well aware of our penchant of seeking comparisons to Churchill whenever we feel some sort of military response is in order, made sure he sounded Churchillian when he spoke to Congress: “Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand.”

Churchill giving his famous V for victory sign on May 20, 1940, more than a week after he became prime minister. (Credit: Imperial War Museum)

 

That was enough for pundits such as Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute to wax on about Netanyahu’s Churchill-like stance, imploring an ignorant, naive world to recognize the Iranian machinations to rule the globe, if not just the Middle East. Comparing Netanyahu to Churchill, Sowell wrote, “Both warned the world of mortal dangers that others ignored, in hopes that those dangers would go away."

The problem with this comparison is that Netanyahu, in his speech to Congress, did not tell the world anything that it doesn’t already know about Iran and its machinations. In 2015, unlike 1935, technology has made communications vast and penetrating, and America’s ability at covert operations, better known as spying, is wide reaching and effective, as is our allies.

 

We actually do know what’s going on in the world, but it’s never easy to address, or know how to address, the issues and problems that are ever arising. It’s not that the world is suddenly on fire, it has always been on fire. How could it not be with seven billion people living on the planet, all of them striving for better lives? The key is trying to keep the fire under control without creating more fire.

However, this, and the fact that the United States is the most powerful military on the planet and always on the technological vanguard with its weapons systems, blocks the narratives that pundits like Sowell and politicians like Arkansas’ U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (he of the recent letter-to-the-Iranian-leaders fame) like to tell.

In Cotton’s recent “maiden speech,” which newly elected senators give on the Senate floor, the freshman senator referred to Churchill’s “unnecessary war” quote from World War II to make a point about America’s defense.

“I know many of you in this chamber stand with me, and I humbly urge you all, Democrat and Republican alike, to join in rebuilding our common defense, so that we will not face our own unnecessary war, our own period of consequences,” Cotton said.

Earlier in the speech, though, Cotton called for American “global military dominance,” sounding less Churchill-like and more like a certain unsavory leader of that era. Despite his poor choice of phrasing, Cotton’s point is that projecting American power through its military is a stabilizing force. Perhaps, but it’s not clear how the rest of the world would feel about this. The last nation that tried global domination with its military ended up bombed to pieces and split into geographical and ideological halves for 45 years.

            It’s worrisome when politicians rush to Churchill to make their case for military intervention and condemn his predecessor, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who irresponsibly – not naively – believed a peace deal with Hitler was possible. They do so without context or reality for what really occurred in those years leading to the Second World War.

           Chamberlain was inflexible as a statesman. He refused to reconsider his policy of appeasement until it was too late. Yet, in the 1930s, British voters were unwilling to consider war, having 20 years earlier lost a generation of men in World War I. Chamberlain adhered to his constituency, but when it came time to lead, to tell voters what they didn’t want to hear, that it was time to standup to Hitler, he failed miserably.

            President Franklin Roosevelt had the same problem with American voters until that foreign war they believed was an ocean or two away came home to them at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Churchill was correct about Hitler’s ambitions, but he was hardly alone in that realization. In his January 1939 State of the Union address, Roosevelt warned Congress and the American public “of the need of putting our own house in order in the face of storm signals from across the seas.” In September of that year, Hitler invaded Poland and World War II started.

Historian James McGregor Burns wrote in Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom that FDR was relieved the night he won an unprecedented third term in 1940 because, after years of isolationism, he could prepare to fight the Nazi dictator: “There were altogether too many people, he felt, who thought in terms of appeasement of Hitler.”  

Churchill grasped the Nazi threat clearly, but he failed miserably when it came to understanding a threat just as great as Hitler, if not greater – The Japanese Empire, which had been slaughtering its way through China since the early1930s.

Churchill thought of the Japanese as a lesser race, according to William Manchester in his The Last Lion biographic trilogy. To Churchill, the Japanese were incapable of mounting an effective military campaign against the vaunted British. He often repeated this belief to his War Cabinet, and choosing, because of this belief, not fortify such colonial possessions as Hong Kong and Singapore.

But in December 1941, when the Japanese bombed the American naval fleet at Pearl Harbor and took England’s Asian possessions – as well as American and Dutch possessions – and sunk England’s two revered battleships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, the prime minister was stunned. Manchester wrote that Churchill sat for long moments “mumbling repeatedly to himself: ‘I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand it.’”

            Churchill was one of the world’s great statesmen, and a politician like Tom Cotton shows promise – as a freshman senator he ably convinced 46 other senators, most of them veterans of the chamber, to co-sign the misguided letter he wrote to the Iranians.

            Yet, politicians and pundits should watch their narratives. Churchill didn’t, and he lost a large chunk of the British Empire, two battleships that were the pride of Britain and her navy, and countless lives.