On March 5th 2021, the conservative columnist George F. Will gave the 34th Enid and R. Crosby Kemper Lecture at the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. In that speech Churchill told America and the world what it did not want to hear, that an Iron Curtain had descended on Europe and the Cold War was upon us. Churchill taught timeless lessons in the necessities of American power and responsibilities as well as its limitations. He had learned that some people in leadership had no sense of these limits.
George Will spoke with “Churchillian realism” reflecting on our history and foreseeable future. He reviewed the lessons of Vietnam which did not save us from our inappropriate interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting that the lesson of history is that we do not learn from history. Perhaps because our leaders, unlike Churchill, are not “marinated in history”. Our nation, quoting Margaret That…
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