In arguing that Winston Churchill helped bring on World War II, Pat Buchanan aimed at the wrong target. The perniciousness of Churchill’s role lies not in his contribution to the march to war but in the way he shaped historical memory of the events of that portentous decade.

During the 1930s, Churchill was sidelined politically and had no discernible influence on British policy. By the time he joined the cabinet in August 1939, the critical decisions that led Britain into World War II had already been made. But Churchill painted an infinitely more heroic picture of his role during the 1930s: that of a modern-day Cassandra. In The Gathering Storm, Churchill alleged that—except for him—British leaders were willfully blind to the German threat and failed to meet it by rearming. Had Britain followed a different—Churchillian—policy during the 1930s, he claimed, the disasters of 1940, and possibly war itself, might have been avoided.

Of course, Churchill did not aspire to write an objective history. As David Reynolds reminds us in his splendid In Command of History, Churchill’s dominant motive was “to show that he was right, or at least as right as it seemed credible to claim.” With respect to the events of the 1930s, Churchill wanted to prove that “the Second World War broke out because his policies were not adopted.” But when the British archives were opened in the late 1960s, historians realized that Churchill’s version of events was distorted.

British leaders—especially Chamberlain—were not blind to the German threat and rearmed against it by building up the Royal Air Force and Navy. Under Chamberlain’s direction, London adopted a sophisticated strategy that aimed to combine diplomacy and deterrence to avoid war while allowing Britain to retain its empire and hold on to world-power status. Reynolds observes that during the 1930s, “Churchill was broadly at one with Chamberlain” with respect to British strategic priorities. In a real sense, therefore, The Gathering Storm was a work of self-revisionism.

The one substantive policy difference between Chamberlain and Churchill was over a possible “Grand Alliance” with the Soviet Union to oppose Hitler. Churchill advocated this, but as Chamberlain knew from British intelligence reports—the accuracy of which has been confirmed by the opening of the Soviet archives—Stalin’s plan was not to have the Soviet Union stand up to Hitler, but to pass the buck to Britain and France. For a variety of reasons, Churchill’s proposed Grand Alliance was never a viable strategic option during the late 1930s.

Chamberlain was playing a weak hand because Britain’s position was a textbook case of strategic overstretch: London had too many enemies (Japan and Italy in addition to Germany), too few allies, and not enough resources to deal with its geopolitical challenges. As the archives show, Chamberlain was never an advocate of “peace at any price.” He made clear that Britain would resist direct German aggression in Western Europe but—like all post-1919 British governments—did not regard Britain’s vital interests as being at stake in East Central Europe.

Chamberlain and his colleagues had good reasons not to go to war over Czechoslovakia during the September 1938 Munich crisis. As early as March, following the Anschluss, Britain’s highest political and military leaders had correctly concluded that there was nothing Britain and France could do to prevent Germany from overrunning the Czechs. British leaders also understood that a conflict over Czechoslovakia would not remain a limited affair but would quickly escalate into a world war that would imperil Britain’s empire. Chamberlain, his foreign secretary Lord Halifax, and the British chiefs of staff understood that taking up arms on the Czechs’ behalf was nothing more than a pretext for fighting a preventive war—an option they rejected on the grounds that, as Halifax put it, there was no sense in fighting a certain war now to avoid a possibly uncertain war later.

Buchanan stands in good company with historians in arguing that the Polish guarantee was a mistake. Strategically, the arguments against going to war over Poland were just as strong—for the same reasons—as the case for not fighting over Czechoslovakia. The British guaranteed Poland not because the geopolitical picture changed but because the domestic political balance of power in London shifted between September 1938 and March 1939, when German troops marched into Prague. In issuing the guarantee, Britain fulfilled Stalin’s fondest wishes by entangling Germany in a war with Britain and France and deflecting its expansion from east to west; allowing the Soviet Union to make territorial gains in East Central Europe; and offering the prospect that the Soviet Union’s relative power would increase as the Western powers and Germany bled each other in another great European war.

Far from being the naïve appeaser portrayed by Churchill, Chamberlain was a hard-edged realist who was willing to sacrifice small countries like Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia to achieve his larger strategic objectives. He believed that his responsibility was to uphold British interests rather than to defend abstract principles like “collective security” or normative concerns about the fates of small nations. To be sure, Chamberlain’s strategy failed. But far from proving that his approach was bad, this failure demonstrated that Hitler was a unique phenomenon in international politics: a leader who could be neither deterred nor appeased. One of the great ironies of Churchill’s legacy is that a one-off event has been transmuted into a set of universal rules of statecraft.

Long after those who made it have died, history matters. The purported “lessons of the past” derived from the 1930s have been invoked to justify virtually every major American military intervention from the Korean War to the invasion of Iraq. But these lessons have been transformed from analogy into myth. Unlike analogies—the validity of which can be contested (if not definitively resolved) by normal modes of scholarly inquiry—myths are beyond question. When elites bring myths into play, they do so not to promote debate over policy but to silence dissent by delegitimizing their opponents.

The Churchillian narrative has acquired a myth-like status in America’s foreign-policy discourse and is invoked by U.S. elites to claim that there is no alternative to America’s expansive post-1945 world role and to discredit critics by equating grand strategic restraint with isolationism and appeasement. Since 2001, the Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters have regularly invoked this myth to gain support for, and shut down opposition to, their policies on Iraq, Iran, terrorism, and their uncritical support for Israel (which they compare to 1938 Czechoslovakia).

Debunking the Churchillian myth about the 1930s—getting history right—is a vital step toward restoring intellectual integrity to the ongoing debate about American grand strategy. By rekindling interest in this period of history, Pat Buchanan has performed an important service regardless of whether one agrees with all the details of his argument.   
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