RPT - Current Western-Russian Rift Far Cry From Churchillian Iron Curtain - Experts

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 07th March, 2023) Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in Fulton brought to the fore the rift between the West and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War, however, the current tensions over Ukraine are different, experts told Sputnik.

Speaking at Westminster College in the US town of Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, Churchill, no longer UK prime minister, famously proclaimed that "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." He outlined the Soviet sphere of influence and called for new unity in Europe to counter Moscow.

"The speech given by Churchill at Westminster College in 1946 was important less for bringing about a change in Western-Soviet relations than for signaling changes that were already underway. By March 1946 relations between the future NATO partners and the Soviets has already been deteriorating for almost a year," Paul Gottfried, the editor-in-chief of "Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture" and Raffensperger professor of humanities emeritus at Elizabethtown College, said.

The scholar noted that by the time of the speech, the relations between future NATO members and the Soviet Union had already been souring for almost a year over the supervision of postwar Germany, the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, and Moscow's assistance to Communist insurgencies in Turkey, Greece, and China.

"Churchill was just describing in his characteristically dramatic rhetoric the way Western governments were coming to view Soviet-occupied parts of Europe," Gottfried said.

In a similar vein, John Mueller, a political scientist and professor emeritus at Ohio State University, said that the speech brought to the attention of the Western public the situation on the European continent after WWII.

"I think the speech was important in alerting people in the West to the fact that the Soviet Union was essentially colonizing the areas in Eastern Europe that had been overrun by the Red Army in World War II.

From the Western perspective, the war had begun with the invasion of Poland, and now that country was alarmingly being taken over by another foreign dictatorship," Mueller explained.

The expert underscored the crucial importance of the Korean War in ushering the post-WWII effort by the West to counteract the Soviet Union, as the war between Pyongyang and Seoul was seen as "a demonstration that international Communism was willing to expand by outright military aggression, not simply by class warfare."

"The feeling mostly was that Korea was a diversion while the Soviets were planning to launch a direct military invasion of Western Europe. Consequently, NATO was massively expanded to deter a threat that, essentially, didn't exist," Mueller concluded.

In the wake of Russia launching its special military operation in Ukraine and the subsequent response by Western powers, people have been suggesting that a new Cold War may be in store. However, for various reasons, the experts think that such comparisons do not reflect the current situation.

"I don't see much of a parallel in the Ukraine situation. It is sometimes argued in the West that Russia is on a westward expansion by military force. But for the most part, the mess is likely to be confined to the Ukraine area. Tensions, however, may well last for years, if not decades. Everybody loses," Mueller stated.

Gottfried, for his part, thinks that the current mood in the United States is nothing like the atmosphere during the early period of the Cold War, while also observing the division between the US Left and Right over what constitutes the bigger threat, Russia or China.

"The Right generally views China as the greater threat to the US militarily and economically. The Left by contrast is fixated on a Russian enemy for good reason. Many Democratic politicians, starting with the Biden family, have received financial gifts from the Chinese and are dependent on them to carry out the Green New Deal," Gottfried said.