“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” —Winston Churchill, 1939

“If Putin likes Trump, guess what, folks, that’s called an asset, not a liability. Now I don’t know that I’m going to get along with Vladimir Putin. I hope I do. But there’s a good chance I won’t.”     —Donald Trump, 2017

Russia National Interests

Trump-Churchill comparisons are invidious and silly. After all, we’re not working with the same raw material. But their two statements are oddly congruent. Churchill’s Russian experience has something to offer the President as he embarks on his own attempt—fraught as it may be—at a modus operandi with Mr. Putin.

In the 1930s Churchill had to decide which was the greater threat: Stalin’s Soviet Union, whose tyranny was still confined to its borders; or the Greater German Reich, which had by 1939 swallowed the Saarland, the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and was threatening Poland.

Churchill’s study of history held the answer: Britain had always backed the second strongest powers on the European continent: France, of course…and Russia.

“Historic life interests”

Ever the deft rhetorician, Churchill was unafraid to criticize “Soviet” economics, but foresaw the need to appeal to “Russian” national interests in the coming confrontation with Hitler. To paraphrase Churchill, “It cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia,” Churchill said in 1939, “that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of South-Eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.”

Accordingly, earlier in 1939, after Prime Minister Chamberlain had issued a belated guarantee to defend Poland, Churchill cornered Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador. Adopting what today seems almost Trumpist language, he asked the ambassador for his support:

Look here Mr. Ambassador, if we are to make a success of this new policy we require the help of Russia. Now I don’t care for your system and I never have, but the Poles and the Romanians like it even less. Although they might be prepared at a pinch to let you in, they would certainly want some assurances that you would eventually get out.

Maisky liked this blunt approach and conveyed Churchill’s views to Moscow. Alas Churchill was out of power, and Chamberlain—not without reason—regarded Stalin as a thug. He sent low-level negotiators to Moscow, to hint at some vague future agreement. Hitler sent his foreign minister. The resultant Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact left Germany free to attack Poland, and World War II was on.

“Favourable reference to the Devil”

When the two tyrants fell out and Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, Churchill, now prime minister, reverted to type, promising Moscow all-out support. An aide reminded him of the dreadful things he’d said about communists. Churchill growled: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” Again he pursued the main objective: victory.

Churchill’s Russian experience was stony. In the war, he failed to save the Balkans and central Europe from the onrushing Red Army. He did save Greece, and foster a semi-independent Yugoslavia. Given the military situation, it was the best he could do with the prevailing situation.

Of the Russians, he said in 1946: “There is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness. But he qualified that in 1951: “I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.”

It’s Still National Interest

Churchill never abandoned his idea of appealing to national interests. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he urged “a meeting at the summit,” but Eisenhower resisted. Russia might have a new dress, the President declared, but “there was the same whore underneath it.” Even Ike spoke like Donald Trump on occasion.

Well, it cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia that ISIS should plant itself upon the shores of the Mediterranean, or that it should overrun Syria and subjugate the Iraqi peoples. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia. There lies a Churchillian opportunity.

Mr. Trump believes he can work with the Muscovites. So too did Churchill, when his country’s fate hung in the balance. Churchill met with little enough success. But when he did, it was when he dangled “national interest” in front of the Russians.

I find the glorification of Churchill quite disgusting. It is typical British-American arrogance to ignore the outcome of WW2 for the peoples of Eastern Europe, not to speak of the Germans. Churchill knew from the beginning about the terrible fate of the Russians and many other East European peoples under Bolshevist dictatorship. He obviously didn’t care. He was obsessed with anti-German hatred. Knowing that he bombed German cities, killing thousands of civilians long before the Germans were retaliating, makes him in my opinion even worse than Hitler. Why  did he go into alliance with Stalin against the Germans? That is his crime and the recognition of it will come. —H.W. via email.

The choice before Churchill and Britain in 1939-40 was anything but clear-cut. There were good reasons, however, supporting the choice they made.

While considering the fate of Eastern Europe it is reasonable also to consider that of Western Europe, and what Europe would have looked like had Hitler triumphed, and moved on into the nuclear age.

Before assuming that Churchill didn’t care about Bolshevism, it is necessary to read a little. Read about 1919-20, when he supported the Whites against the Bolsheviks, earning no love from his practical, wise and eminent colleagues, who didn’t see what he did.

Read on into the 1930s. Who occupied the Rhineland in violation of treaties? What was the March 1938 Anschluss about? What happened at Munich? What about March 1939, and the absorption of all those Bohemians, Moravians and Slovakians into the Reich? Which country first allied herself with Russia—Britain or Germany? Cities like Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam were all hit before the RAF had dropped a single bomb on the Reich. Indeed, for many months after the war started in 1939, the most the British would drop were pamphlets. Bombing, some in the government believed, would amount to destruction of private property.

Why side with Stalin in 1941? If your back is to the wall you tend to welcome allies without being too choosy about them. It is a legitimate criticism that Churchill was too trusting of Stalin; those arguments are not coming out, they’ve been out for thirty years. But if he hated Germans, his postwar declaration that the only way to salvage Europe was through rapprochement between France and Germany was an odd way to express it. “My hate,” he wrote later, “died with their surrender.”

In 1931 Churchill wrote “Mass Effects in Modern Life”: words that still ring today:

No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

“Implicit in those words,” says Dr. Larry Arnn, “are the speeches of 1940. Churchill told the British people we must fight to the death—better to die than to give this thing up. The sin of Hitler, almost superhuman in its scale but not, is that he tried too form a polity that would eliminate the very heart of humanity. No one saw that more clearly than Winston Churchill.”