This reminded me of David Frost saying that in England we have the best secret service in the world. Unfortunately it belongs to Russia.
Churchill suddenly said to Harold Macmillan during the Cairo Conference in 1943 late one night:
'Cromwell was a great man, wasn't he?''Yes, sir, a very great man.''But he made one great mistake. Obsessed in his youth by the fear of the power of Spain he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?
Whether it is said of Churchill or not, it should be.
Germany was not a threat to the British Empire and would not have been a threat to France had France allowed her a free hand to erase the borders in Central and Eastern Europe created at the Paris Peace Conference. France, of course, had no means of preventing this, even with England's support.
Bolshevik Russia was to be much less of a threat to Western Europe than Germany. Stalin never had any desire to extend his rule beyond the countries which his army occupied. As for Khrushchev, in 1955 he offered to allow a demilitarised Germany to be reunited, with free elections. Eisenhower and Adenauer turned the offer down.
Now Russia is a declining power, not a threat outside her own backyard, not able to impose order in Nagorno-Karabakh now any more than 30 years ago.
China is a threat but where exactly do her interest and Europe's conflict except in economic competition? Islamic terrorism a bigger one of a different kind, but illegal immigration and massive numbers of asylum seekers are a bigger threat and Islamification the biggest of all, as the late Bernard Lewis and the late Neagu Djuvara warned us.
Both centenarians who died recently thought it inevitable that Europe would become Islamic, but as AJP Taylor said, nothing is inevitable until it happens.
Churchill's greatest fault was that he failed to perceive that by far the biggest threat to the British Empire (and to Britain's status as a Great Power) was the United States.
ReplyDeleteOr perhaps, being half-American, he simply didn't care if Britain became an American vassal.
Today of course the greatest threat to Britain is - the United States. The Americanisation of Britain has utterly destroyed Britain as a nation.
Hyperbole but it is certainly very saddening how my country is an obedient vassal of the US and a cultural colony when it used to be vice versa.
DeleteYou are wrong about Stalin. He (despite revisionist historians saying otherwise) was a pretty traditional Marxist in many ways who wanted to export the revolution around the world. He practiced in Spain before World War 2. However, he was more patient and was willing to wait longer than the earlier bunch of revolutionaries, but let's not assume he wasn't interested in further expansion.
ReplyDeleteI agree that he wanted Marxist revolutions around the world but he did not plan on attacking those countries which his armies did not already occupy. He said that England would never permit Greece to go Communist and did not expect Communists take power in France or Italy in his time. Enoch Powell repeatedly made the point that the difference between Hitler's Germany and Communist Russia was that the former was aggressive and attacked countries - the USSR did not.
DeleteSo Spain, Finland, Poland, Romania don't count as countries? The Soviet Union had a long aggressive history before and after WW2, Enoch Powell ignores that.
Delete