GENEVA/ZURICH (Reuters) - Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who travelled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday.
The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to give "full access" to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019.
In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely" as a cause.
One of the team’s investigators has already said China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic began.
"In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data," Tedros said. "I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing."
The inability of the WHO mission to conclude yet where or how the virus began spreading in people means that tensions will continue over how the pandemic started - and whether China has helped efforts to find out or, as the United States has alleged, hindered them.
"The international expert study on the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was significantly delayed and lacked access to complete, original data and samples," Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Korea, Slovenia, Britain, the United States and the European Union said in a joint statement.
"NOT EXTENSIVE ENOUGH"
Although the team concluded that a leak from a Wuhan laboratory was the least likely hypothesis for the virus that causes COVID-19, Tedros said the issue required further investigation, potentially with more missions to China.
"I do not believe that this assessment was extensive enough," he told member states in remarks released by the WHO. "Further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions."
The WHO team's leader, Peter Ben Embarek, told a press briefing it was "perfectly possible" the virus had been circulating in November or October 2019 around Wuhan, and so potentially spreading abroad earlier than documented so far.
"We got access to quite a lot of data in many different areas, but of course there were areas where we had difficulties getting down to the raw data and there are many good reasons for that," he said, citing privacy laws and other restrictions.
Second phase studies were required, Ben Embarek added.
He said the team had felt political pressure, including from outside China, but that he had never been pressed to remove anything from its final report.
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian expert on the mission, said he was satisfied there was "no obvious evidence" of a problem at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The European Union called the study "an important first step" but renewed criticisms that the origin study had begun too late, that experts had been kept out of China for too long, and that access to data and early samples had fallen short.
In a statement, Walter Stevens, EU ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, called for further study with "timely access to relevant locations and to all relevant human, animal and environmental data available".
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, John Miller and Emma Farge; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Kevin Liffey)
In Washington, Beijing and Moscow, all officials want to avoid the new Cold War.these dayspieceThe New York Times suggests that there is little reason to worry. “The competition of today’s superpowers is little like the past,” he insisted. This article points out Russia’s relative weaknesses and China’s technological capabilities to emphasize how things have changed since the late 1940s.
Of course, these differences exist. But to me, the similarities between today’s events and the early Cold War seem more and more compelling and even eerie.
Once again, you have the Russian and Chinese axes arranged against the Western Alliance led from Washington.Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden Coping EU Summit — Secretary of State Antony Blinken speech The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) called for Western unity to deter China’s military ambitions and Russia’s “aggression.” in the meantime, Sergey LavrovThe Russian Foreign Minister was in China and called on Beijing and Moscow to oppose US power.
There is growing tension between the two.The Chinese Air Force has just staged the largest air force in history Invasion In Taiwan airspace.Last week we also imposed China Sanctions About EU and British politicians who spoke about human rights in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.Russia withdrew ambassador from Washington this month Protest That’s what we called unprecedented action from the United States. The first meeting between senior Biden administration officials and the Chinese government Public Law..
The line from Beijing is that the current surge in tensions is caused by Washington’s inability to respond to the rise of China. There is a truth to the idea that the United States is obsessed with hegemony.
But Beijing’s story ignores the extent to which changes in China itself have caused changes in attitudes in the United States and Europe. Increased oppression, Personality cult The bending of the Xi Jinping around and Chinese military power of the President, the view of the hawks on China in the United States and Europe making it easier to sell much more.
As in the early days of the first Cold War, several important events embodied growing anxiety in the western capital. From 1945 to 1946, the Soviet Union imposed a satellite system on Eastern Europe, fundamentally reassessing Moscow’s intentions.
More detailed revelation over the past year about the collapse of the democratic movement in Hong Kong and the persecution of Uighurs by Chinese authorities — now labeled genocide By the US Government — played a similar role in changing Western attitudes.Increased high-pitched voice in Chinese “Wolf Warrior” Diplomacy has also sounded a warning, playing a role similar to the series of anti-Western European speeches issued by the Soviet Union in the 1940s.
Until recently, it seemed that Western Europe might try to stay out of alignment in the new Cold War. The EU’s decision to sign a trade and investment agreement with China suggested that Beijing had succeeded in opening the gap between Washington and Brussels.However, as China imposes sanctions on key members of the European Parliament, the EU ratification China’s trade agreement.
The European efforts to secure a reconciliation with Russia, strongly promoted by French President Emmanuel Macron, went nowhere. Increasing oppression in Russia, Imprisonment Opposition activist Alexei Navalny narrows the gap between European and American views on Russia.
In this second Cold War, as in the first, there are flash points in areas where conflicts can intensify. In Asia, some of these are actually the unresolved issues left by the first Cold War: the situation on the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan. In Europe, the front line has moved east. The focus of tension between Moscow and the West is now Ukraine, not Berlin.
During the Trump administration, new competition between the United States and China often lacked the ideological side of the first Cold War. Donald Trump was the trading president, with a particular focus on the US trade deficit with China.According to his former national security adviser John Bolton, Trump Personally encouraged Xi Jinping to pursue a large housing policies in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
However, with the advent of the Biden administration, ideological competition has revived.Biden said he wanted to convene Democracy summit And it is clearly intended to reassert the US claim of being a “leader of the free world.” Like Harry Truman, who was president when the first Cold War was formed, Biden was a former Vice President, Democratic Senator, and was once looked down upon by the intellectual elite of his party. ..
Technical competition is once again at the heart of superpower competition. In the first Cold War, it was a nuclear technology and space race. Today’s superpower rivals are focused on 5G telecommunications and artificial intelligence.
But the technical conflict is happening in another situation. Forty years of globalization have ensured a deep integration of the Chinese and Western economies. Whether the integration can survive the intensifying competition between the great powers is the biggest open question about the new Cold War.
China is facing mounting criticism from around the world over its treatment of the mostly Muslim Uighur population in the north-western region of Xinjiang.
Human rights groups believe China has detained more than a million Uighurs over the past few years in what the state defines as "re-education camps".
There is evidence of Uighurs being used as forced labour and of women being forcibly sterilised.
The US is among several countries to have accused China of committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its repression of the of the Uighurs.
China denies such allegations, saying it has been combatting separatism and Islamist militancy in the region.
Who are the Uighurs?
There are about 12 million Uighurs, mostly Muslim, living in north-western China in the region of Xinjiang, officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
The Uighurs speak their own language, similar to Turkish, and see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations.
They make up less than half of the Xinjiang population.
Recent decades saw a mass migration of Han Chinese (China's ethnic majority) to Xinjiang, and the Uighurs feel their culture and livelihoods are under threat.
Map of China shows density of Uighur population in Xinjiang region
Where is Xinjiang?
Xinjiang lies in the north-west of China and is the country's biggest region.
Like Tibet, it is autonomous, meaning - in theory - it has some powers of self-governance. But in practice, both face major restrictions by the central government.
It is a mostly desert region, producing about a fifth of the world's cotton.
Uighur women picking cotton
It is also rich in oil and natural gas and because of its proximity to Central Asia and Europe is seen by Beijing as an important trade link.
In the early 20th Century, the Uighurs briefly declared independence, but the region was brought under the complete control of China's new Communist government in 1949.
What are the allegations against China?
Several countries, including the US, Canada and the Netherlands, have accused China of committing genocide - defined by international convention as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has said the treatment of Uighurs amounts to "appalling violations of the most basic human rights".
A UN human rights committee in 2018 said it had credible reports the Chinese were holding up to a million people in "counter-extremism centres" in Xinjiang.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute found evidence in 2020 of more than 380 of these "re-education camps" in Xinjiang, an increase of 40% on previous estimates.
Earlier, leaked documents known as the China Cables made clear that the camps were intended to be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline and punishments.
People who have managed to escape the camps have reported physical, mental and sexual torture - women have spoken of mass rape and sexual abuse.
In December 2020 research seen by the BBC showed up to half a million people were being forced to pick cotton. There is evidence new factories have been built within the grounds of the re-education camps.
Anti-Han and separatist sentiment rose in Xinjiang from the 1990s, flaring into violence on occasion. In 2009 some 200 people died in clashes in Xinjiang, which the Chinese blamed on Uighurs who want their own state. But in recent years a massive security crackdown has crushed dissent.
Xinjiang is now covered by a pervasive network of surveillance, including police, checkpoints, and cameras that scan everything from number plates to individual faces. According to Human Rights Watch, police are also using a mobile app to monitor peoples' behaviour, such as how much electricity they are using and how often they use their front door.
Since 2017 when President Xi Jinping issued an order saying all religions in China should be Chinese in orientation, there have been further crackdowns. Campaigners say China is trying to eradicate Uighur culture.
What does China say?
China has said reports it has detained Uighurs are completely untrue.
It says the crackdown is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism and the camps are an effective tool for re-educating inmates in its fight against terrorism.
It insists that Uighur militants are waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uighurs.
China has dismissed claims it is trying to reduce the Uighur population through mass sterilisations as "baseless", and says allegations of forced labour are "completely fabricated".
Editor's comment: it is about time. Europe has been lagging in its dealing with China. When UK, US are sanctioning China over HK, Europe is still talking with China on trade deals. Stand together is the only way to deal with tyranny.
Last week’s crisis between China on the one hand, and the EU, US and their allies on the other, has helped crystallize a number of issues previously obscured by uncertainty.
This uncertainty stemmed from the EU’s decision to initial an investment treaty with China just before the new year. This raised two major questions. Was it, as many European critics have argued, a diplomatic error by the EU to give China a diplomatic victory just as the incoming team of US President-elect Joe Biden hinted that they would rather Europeans are waiting for her to take office to forge a common approach to Beijing?
And, secondly, did he pull the rug under any pretense of European “strategic autonomy” vis-à-vis China? The signing of the deal just days after Beijing’s dictatorial crackdown on dissidents in Hong Kong certainly suggested a certain European callousness in the pursuit of commercial interests. Beyond that, it has been legitimately argued that if the deal is implemented it would increase the cost for European economies to challenge Beijing on social and human rights grounds, such as its oppression in Hong Kong. and the forced labor of Uyghur citizens in Xinjiang.
On the other hand, the more optimistic stance (which I spoke about) highlighted how the EU was equipping itself, both in the investment agreement and unilaterally, with legal tools to lobby. on China. Much depends on the incentives of the EU’s internal and external political economy to use them.
If the last few days are anything to say, Europe and the West are healthier than the pessimists would like.
The imposition of sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for the persecution of Uyghurs has been coordinated between the EU and the United States, with the participation of the United Kingdom and Canada. (The EU, however, could usefully join US sanctions for abuses in Hong Kong as well.) And this coordinated stance doesn’t sound like lightning in the pan. The Biden administration has done everything it can to mend barriers with Europe after the Trump years, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken arriving in Brussels this week to re-establish a US-EU dialogue on relations with China.
This proves that the December investment deal did not torpedo a close transatlantic relationship with China. The unity of interest between Europe and the United States runs much deeper than that.
For now, at least. But what happens next? The hope of optimists has always been that the EU would find the political courage to keep China to high standards, whether by deciding to ratify the investment agreement, using the legal tools it provides, or more generally by taking autonomous measures to promote its values against a power which it recognizes not only as an economic competitor and a potential partner on issues such as climate change, but as a “systemic rival”. With the new sanctions, the EU has just done it. The question is whether this will continue.
Ironically, Beijing’s own reactions make the answer more likely to be “yes”. By launching counter-sanctions against MEPs, academics and analysts, Chinese authorities have made it politically impossible for the EU to ratify the investment deal unless it backs down. If this is how Beijing deals with what they see as a loss of face, they simply put themselves in a situation where you have to lose face twice to get back to where they were.
Behaviors such as the childish habit of having official spokespersons mocking Western leaders, or the tirade uttered by Blinken’s Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, at last week’s meeting between the two, also make any reconciliation more difficult.
For now, EU countries have allayed suspicions that European business opportunities will always trump European values in their dealings with China. Europe has a limit, although much of it depends on how far that limit is set. But it’s yet another clear sign that the bloc is ready to subordinate traditional trade policy to strategic imperatives. The pursuit or maintenance of integration with China will not come at any cost.
Much more depends on what China will do. Getting through all the great geopolitical challenges ahead is the central question of whether Beijing is ready to see some economic decoupling between itself and the West as a price to pay for resisting Western pressure.
The answer was obviously “yes” in its relations with small partners. Beijing’s intimidation of Australia, or the freezing of Norway after dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, illustrates China’s staunch desire to cut economic ties with critics. But it doesn’t cost an economy of its size anything. It’s a different issue against the US or the EU, let alone the two together. After all, Beijing made a trade deal with Donald Trump when he was president. And its attempt to divide EU member states through the 16 + 1 initiative shows that it fears EU unity against it.
It is true that the Chinese leadership aims to develop its economy towards a more self-sufficient model. The overall trade intensity of its economy is not as strong as it was a decade ago, although it is still stronger than that of the United States. A central element of President Xi Jinping’s dual circulation strategy is to strengthen the capacity of the national economy to thrive. But the key word remains “double”. As the recent signing of the Comprehensive Regional Economic Partnership Trade Agreement shows, Beijing’s economic strategy is not isolationist. Dual circulation should not be seen as a decoupling of the domestic economy from the global economy, but rather as an attempt to tie international economic activity to China’s domestic economic engines rather than the other way around, like this has been the case so far.
Any serious decoupling would undermine this strategy. It would even be a brake on deeper integration, especially in the new and growing areas of connected technology and digital services. But these are precisely the areas where the West can prevent such deep integration with China as we have seen in conventional trade, depending on Chinese behavior. Are they ready to do it? My hunch is yes: unlike China, they have the experience of being less globalized but still rich. As Beijing is well aware, China is still not a rich country. It needs the West more than the West needs.
国际诸多病毒学专家都对病毒基因增功能研究（GOF）的危险性提出警告，法国巴士德学院的病毒学家 Simon Wain-Hobson早在2015年广岛原子弹爆炸六十周年纪念日时就提出警告，病毒基因增功能研究很可能在未来造成同样的灾难性的后果。他在疫情爆发之后不久接受法广采访时表示，虽然没有任何证据，但是，他不能排除这种可能性。法国国家科研中心的另一位科学家Bruno Canard也就GOF研究担心的表示：“尽管出发点的善意的，但是，这实在太危险了，因为倘若你成功的制造了一个可以感染人类的病毒，不能排除病毒在不知不觉中从实验室泄露，通过科研人员感染他们的家属，及朋友，一场大流行病就这样爆发了……类似的研究，到自然中去寻找病毒，对它基因进行改动，以便搞清楚它的功能，这就如同用打火机来寻找煤气管道的泄露口一样。”
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden took office promising to move quickly to restore and repair America’s relations with the rest of the world, but one major nation has yet to see any U.S. effort to improve ties: China.
From Iran to Russia, Europe to Latin America, Biden has sought to cool tensions that rose during President Donald Trump’s four years in office. Yet, there have been no overtures to China.
Although the Biden administration has halted the ferocious rhetorical attacks and near daily announcements of new sanctions on China that had become commonplace under Trump, it has yet to back down on any of Trump's actions against Beijing.
This persistent state of low-intensity hostility has profound implications. China and the United States are the world’s two largest economies and the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Their power struggle complicates global efforts to deal with climate change and recover from the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden's tough stance has its roots in the competition for global power, but it's also a result of the 2020 presidential election campaign in which Trump and his allies repeatedly sought to portray him as soft on China, particularly during the pandemic that originated there. There's also little appetite from lawmakers in either party to ease pressure on China.
Thus in their first month in office, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have reaffirmed many of the Trump administration’s most significant steps targeting China, including a determination that its crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in western Xinjiang region constitutes a “genocide” and a flat-out rejection of nearly all of China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea.
Nor has the new administration signaled any let-up in Trump's tariffs, restrictions on Chinese diplomats, journalists and academics in the U.S. or criticism of Chinese policies toward Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It's also critical of Beijing's attempts to further its increasing global influence through telecommunications technology, social media and educational and cultural exchanges.
Biden's nominee to head the CIA, William Burns, was explicit about his concerns over many of these issues at his confirmation hearing Wednesday. And, the newly confirmed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, made a point of highlighting her unease with the state of affairs and pledged to combat Chinese attempts to exert undue pressure on other countries at the U.N.
The backdrop is clear: The United States is convinced that it and China are engaged in a duel for global dominance. And neither is prepared to back down.
China has sounded at times hopeful that Biden will reverse what foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said were Trump administration actions that “caused immeasurable damage to the relationship between the two countries.”
Those remarks followed a speech in which China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, demanded that Biden’s administration lift restrictions on trade and people-to-people contacts and cease what Beijing considers unwarranted interference in the areas of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.
Wang urged the U.S. to “stop smearing” the reputation of China’s ruling Communist Party. “We hope that the U.S. policy makers will keep pace with the times, see clearly the trend of the world, abandon biases, give up unwarranted suspicions and move to bring the China policy back to reason to ensure a healthy, steady development of China-U.S. relations,” he said.
But the anti-China rhetoric hasn't eased. Top Biden administration officials have vowed to use American power to contain what many Democrats and Republicans see as growing Chinese threats to U.S. interests and values in the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
They have all repeatedly referred to China as a strategic rival or foe, not a partner or potential friend, and have also evinced their belief that America must “outcompete” China.
“Outcompeting China will be key to our national security in the decades ahead,” Burns said at his confirmation hearing. “China is a formidable authoritarian adversary, methodically strengthening its capabilities to steal intellectual property, repress its own people, bully its neighbors, expand its global reach, and build influence in American society.”
“It is hard for me to see a more significant threat or challenge for the United States as far out as I can see into the 21st century than that one. It is the biggest geopolitical test that we face,” he said.
At least some Asia hands in the United States see Biden as moving slowly toward potential reengagement with China in part because he wants to shore up his domestic position and make clear the U.S. is not a victim of Chinese predation.
“They are restraining themselves from the normal syndrome of a new administration running into problem-solving with China,” said Danny Russel, who was assistant secretary of state for Asia during the Obama administration and is now vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Russel said Biden is "sending out messages that have the effect of showing he’s not soft on China, that he’s not a patsy for China, that he isn’t so desperate for a breakthrough on climate change that he’s going to trade away our national security interests.”
Chinese academics see little difference in Biden’s approach.
“Continuity takes precedent over adjustment and change,” said Zhu Feng, professor of international relations at elite Nanjing University.
Biden will have to deal with a China that is far more powerful and influential than under past U.S. administrations, said Yu Wanli, a professor of international relations at Beijing Language and Culture University.
“There has been huge deviation between what they believe China is and what China really is,” Yu said. “Their China polices are based on illusions, which must result in some bad consequences. It takes time for them to come back to reality.”
Apart from its support for Taiwan, the U.S. views China’s policies in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and elsewhere as matters of human rights, whereas China sees them as questions of sovereignty, Yu said. “Frictions will still exist, and the pattern will still be the same.”
No speech from a foreign visitor ever created a greater uproar than that delivered by Winston Churchill at an obscure Midwestern college just months after the end of the Second World War. As it turned out, no speech proved more prophetic about the deadliest assault on human freedom in the history of world civilization.
Many expected Churchill’s talk at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., on March 5, 1946 — modestly titled “The Sinews of Peace” — to reflect on the defeat of fascism by the three great wartime allies, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Instead, it was a message of foreboding. A new crisis moment for Europe, and for the world, had arrived: a struggle between communism and the democratic West. “A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory,” Churchill warned. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Left-leaning historians blame Churchill’s address as the catalyst for the Cold War. Eleanor Roosevelt, carrying on the political legacy of her dead husband, was aghast, fearing that Churchill’s message would compromise the peacekeeping mission of the newly created United Nations. The liberal press denounced the talk as “poisonous” and Churchill as a “warmonger.”
A truly noxious speech, however, had been delivered by Joseph Stalin just a few weeks earlier to Communist Party apparatchiks in Moscow. Largely forgotten today, it did about as much to expose the unbridgeable divide between East and West as Churchill’s peroration.
“It would be wrong to think that the Second World War broke out accidentally,” Stalin began. “As a matter of fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism.” Thus, Stalin repeated Marx’s assault on capitalism for distributing resources unequally. He parroted Lenin’s claim that greedy capitalist states inevitably went to war with one another. Peace was possible, he suggested, but only after communism had triumphed around the globe. The message was clear: The historic contest between socialism and democratic capitalism was at a high-water mark.
Stalin’s address was a tissue of lies and omissions. He portrayed the Soviet Union as the fierce opponent of fascist rule in Europe. In fact, Stalin made a secret pact with Hitler’s Germany to divide up the continent among themselves. The agreement allowed the Soviet Union to invade and occupy eastern Poland in 1939 as Hitler invaded from the west, triggering the Second World War. For 22 months, in fact, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies; Germany sold weapons to the USSR and the USSR sold grain and oil to Germany.
Stalin also assured his audience that the policy of collectivized agriculture was “an exceedingly progressive method” to modernize the Soviet economy. In reality, the forced collectivization of private farms, begun in 1928, created a human catastrophe. Many peasants fought to hold onto their plots of land: five million were deported and never heard from again. The government seized their grain, and the result was a man-made famine. By 1934, upwards of 13 million Soviet citizens died unnatural deaths — from mass murder and starvation — because of Stalin’s communist vision.
Ironically, Stalin spoke the truth when he boasted that “no skeptic now dares to express doubt concerning the viability of the Soviet social system.” At least 700,000 “skeptics” — anyone even mildly critical of Marshal Stalin — were murdered during the “Great Purge” of 1936–38. The secret police, show trials, assassinations, torture, prison camps, ethnic cleansing: Virtually no tool of terror was left untried to silence dissent.
All these facts informed Churchill’s assessment of the Soviet Union. But the most alarming truth about Stalin’s Russia was its forcible absorption of Eastern Europe into the communist fold. For months, Churchill had watched with growing apprehension as Stalin violated the agreements he made with the Allies at their 1945 Yalta Conference, promising free and democratic elections in Eastern Europe. Communist fifth columns were now at work, wholly obedient to Moscow.
“The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control,” Churchill said. “Whatever conclusion may be drawn from these facts — and facts they are — this is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up.”
Every description Churchill offered of Soviet designs over Europe proved entirely accurate. His judgment of communism as “a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization” was being validated in every state that fell under its malign influence.
Indeed, America’s most important diplomat in Moscow had reached the same conclusions at almost precisely the same moment. George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” arguing for a policy of “firm containment” against the Soviet Union, arrived at the State Department just days before Churchill arrived in Fulton. “It is clear that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime,” Kennan wrote. “It must continue to expect that Soviet policies will reflect no abstract love of peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s delusional portrait of Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” a cheerful partner in building a global democratic community, was dead in the water. Nevertheless, it is difficult, from our historical distance, to grasp the feeling of dread that Churchill’s words must have caused in a war-weary population. He clearly sensed the enormous task he was asking his American audience to embrace: to engage its economic, military, and moral resources to check Soviet ambitions in Europe and beyond. “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war,” he said. “What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.”
The United States, he suggested, must not make the mistake it made after the First World War, when it abandoned the League of Nations and left Europe to its fate. It must help ensure that the United Nations will become an effective force for peace and security, “and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.” Most importantly, though, Churchill called for a “special relationship” between America and Great Britain: the sharing of military intelligence, mutual-defense agreements, and strategic cooperation to support and promote democracy.
Their common democratic ideals, he explained, were the basis for a unique partnership to thwart the despotic aims of Soviet communism:
We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence. . . . Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind.
Critics denounced this language as rank chauvinism and cultural imperialism. Legendary columnist Walter Lippmann called the speech an “almost catastrophic blunder.” In an interview with Pravda, dutifully transcribed in the New York Times, Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler: “Mr. Churchill, too, has begun the task of unleashing war with a racial theory, stating that only nations that speak the English language are . . . called upon to rule the destinies of the whole world.”
Any frank assessment of how the Cold War ended, however, would admit the decisive role played by the United States and the United Kingdom, over the course of four decades, in resisting Soviet aggression. The Berlin airlift, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the defense of Western Europe, the support for the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe that brought down the Soviet empire — in each case the “special relationship” between America and Great Britain tipped the scales toward freedom.
In a remarkable moment of candor, Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, endorsed the central message of Churchill’s speech in his farewell address on Christmas Day, 1991. The Cold War, “the totalitarian system,” “the mad militarization” that “crippled our economy, public attitudes and morals” — it all had come to an end, and there was no turning back. “I consider it vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements which have been attained in the last few years,” he said. “We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the pretexts.”
Seventy-five years ago, Churchill dared to imagine such an outcome. But it depended upon these two great democratic allies, Great Britain and the United States, sharing a “faith in each other’s purpose, hope in each other’s future, and charity towards each other’s shortcomings.” And, with history as a guide, such an outcome would not arrive without a supreme effort of national will. “If all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association,” he said, “the highroads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time, but for a century to come.”
Joseph Loconte is the director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and is working on a book about Winston Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Nile Gardiner is the director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.
