The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War / Edition 1

by Fraser J. Harbutt

Overview

It was forty-two years ago that Winston Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he popularized the phrase "Iron Curtain." This speech, according to Fraser Harbutt, set forth the basic Western ideology of the coming East-West struggle. It was also a calculated move within, and a dramatic public definition of, the Truman administration's concurrent turn from accommodation to confrontation with the Soviet Union. It provoked a response from Stalin that goes far to explain the advent of the Cold War a few weeks later. This book is at once a fascinating biography of Winston Churchill as the leading protagonist of an Anglo-American political and military front against the Soviet Union and a penetrating re-examination of diplomatic relations between the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. in the postwar years. Pointing out the Americocentric bias in most histories of this period, Harbutt shows that the Europeans played a more significant part in precipitating the Cold War than most people realize. He stresses that the same pattern of events that earlier led America belatedly into two world wars, namely the initial separation and then the sudden coming together of the European and American political arenas, appeared here as well. From the combination of biographical and structural approaches, a new historical landscape emerges. The United States appears at times to be the rather passive object of competing Soviet and British maneuvers. The turning point came with the crisis of early 1946, which here receives its fullest analysis to date, when the Truman administration in a systematic but carefully veiled and still widely misunderstood reorientation of policy (in which Churchill figured prominently) led the Soviet Union into the political confrontation that brought on the Cold War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195054224
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/13/1988
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	8.16(w) x 5.58(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Emory University

Table of Contents

	Introduction	vii
1	Churchill and America	3
2	Churchill, Bolshevism, and the Grand Alliance	23
3	Churchill Faces Postwar Problems: Teheran to Yalta	52
4	Yalta to Potsdam	81
5	Anglo-Soviet Cold War, United States-Soviet Rapprochement	117
6	Churchill and Truman	151
7	The "Iron Curtain"	183
8	The Making of a Showdown	209
9	Confrontation	242
10	Aftermath and Conclusion	267
	Notes
	Bibliography
	Index

Editorial Reviews

"This is a lucid and sophisticated analysis, which makes thorough use of British and American archives and integrates the results effectively with press releases from both countries and Russia....A stimulating and important contribution to the debate about the origins of the Cold War."—Times Literary Supplement

"Gives significant insight into the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes toward Stalinist expansion....A solid work."—Library Journal

"Tightly argued.....This work provides an interesting closer look at a period that was indeed a turning point."—The New York Times Book Review

"Harbutt's judicious and well-written account of the fateful international realignment of 1946 will surely influence profoundly our understanding of this critical period."—Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

From the Publisher

For most Americans the origins and images of the Cold War are limited to U.S.-Soviet interaction since 1945. British historian Harbutt argues, however, that the Cold War actually began as the result of long-standing Anglo-Soviet differences, the most crucial of which concerned the limits of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Iran. The United States, he says, was a rather reluctant Cold warrior and took up the British cause only after persistent lobbying by Winston Churchill and a series of provocative Soviet moves in the Near East. The work is highly analytical in nature (there is an excellent analysis of Churchill's famous ``Iron Curtain'' address) and gives significant insight into the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes towards Stalinist expansion. Though at times a bit too speculative, the narrative is basically well substantiated. A solid work suitable for most academic libraries. Joseph W. Constance, Jr., Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta

Library Journal