Tucker Carlson recently had Darryl Cooper on his podcast to discuss history. The most prominent talking point of Cooper, a historian of sorts, was the ostensibly avoidable nature of the Second World War. It’s not a new thesis; there has always been an American polemic that the United States’ involvement in WWII was unnecessary and unwinnable. Charles Lindbergh and the 1930s America First movement did not think the United States’ involvement was inevitable. A long and often-times inconsistent tradition of Anglophobia convinced many Americans—Lindbergh being the most notable—that Great Britain was tricking the United States into a war it had no stake in. What makes Cooper interesting, and worrisome, is the way he sees Winston Churchill as a primary aggressor in the Second World War instead of the nakedly genocidal, tyrannical, and racist Führer of Germany, Adolf Hitler. Churchill’s warmongering—if one insists on calling it that—was in the defense of the conservative and even nationalist European system against Nazi imperialism.
The British Empire in 1939 had by then spent multiple generations steadily devolving itself into what would become the Commonwealth of Nations. Amid this already occurring devolution, European states fought the Great War. Germany’s treatment in the aftermath of its military defeat was admittedly shameful, and Churchill freely admitted as much. Undoubtedly Churchill was a man who believed war was a political necessity. He was called a warlord in his own time, perhaps even with good reason, but his warmongering was consistently against totalitarians who acted to destroy the broad European settlement of power. In the 1920s he wanted Great Britain to go to war against the Soviet Union, which he believed represented the greatest threat to the West. The USSR’s agents operated in major European capitals and emboldened Communists and the rising fascist movements in order to destabilize what were then still conservative, non-revolutionary governments.
One of the governments Churchill worried about, and wanted to strengthen, was that of Weimar Germany. During WWI, Churchill believed the British government was being negligent in its treatment of German civilians, and he rebuked the British cabinet for maintaining its blockade of Germany after the military defeat of the German Empire became inevitable. He wrote to Prime Minister David Lloyd-George on the matter in 1918. “All the soldiers are agreed that the most important military action required from the allies is to feed Germany, not only with food but with raw materials, and to raise the blockade. They think that Germany is on the verge of a complete collapse.”
Churchill worried that the material conditions of the German civilian population were not being taken seriously enough and that the impending economic disaster might lead to another continent-wide war. Churchill “was anxious that a wise and humane policy should be adopted toward the Germans in the zone of our occupied armies.” He was a leading voice asking Britons to have a “more humane feelings about the Germans.” Churchill’s dispositional conservatism and devotion to monarchy allowed him to conceive of Germany as a proud country deserving of a place of honor in the family of European nations. In 1946 he retrospectively explained his vision for Europe post-WWI: “If the Allies at the peace table at Versailles had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittelsbach and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler. A democratic basis of society might have been preserved by a crowned Weimar in contact with the victorious Allies.” Churchill’s vision for Europe was conservative, democratic or even populist, and monarchical. The chief enemies of that conservative order were the Soviet Union and the burgeoning fascist movement in Italy.
Germany remained unsettled throughout the 1920s. The tumultuous nature of Weimar politics bred a distinct form of resentment that, interestingly enough, largely exempted Great Britain. France remained the chief object of nationalist ire in Germany. Territorial reconstitution was not a chief desire for German right-wing movements, many of which simply hoped for a revived German monarchy and military. The fever dreams of Adolf Hitler, however, were centered on empire. In his 1925 Mein Kampf, Hitler foresaw an expanding German empire that would eventually include all “Aryan” peoples. These Aryans needed an imperial geography—living space, or “lebenspraum”—to make their envisioned empire livable. Hitler wanted to create an empire and, in doing so, overthrow the existing order in Europe. Hitler, notes philosopher of nationalism Yoram Hazony, “was frank in disseminating the view that Germany ‘must someday become lord of the earth.’” Germany was the warmongering expansionist power of the 1930s. Nazi Germany, writes Hazony, “was, in fact, an imperial state in every sense, seeking to put an end to the principle of national self-determination of peoples once and for all.”
Churchill, nearly alone in the British Parliament, understood the threat Nazism posed. Imperialist, statist, and progressive in the sense of seeking to bring about radical world-altering change, they represented an existential menace to the conservative democratic (and nationalist) order. Churchill’s warnings went unheeded, as did his pleas for Great Britain to take more seriously its own treaty obligations to the nationalist government in Poland. Churchill also rightly diagnosed the essential unity between the war aims of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and he believed—not without cause—that the former’s existence had helped create the latter.
When the Second World War began in September 1939, Churchill was not yet Prime Minister and wouldn’t be for another ten months. His first significant military act as Prime Minister was not, it should be noted, to shore up support for the British Empire. Rather, it was to send British troops to fight in Norway against German invaders. Norway’s King Haakon VII was determined to resist Hitler, telling the German ambassador that his was a sovereign independent nation, but would cease to be if it acceded to German demands. Norway would not be the only national government to look to Churchill and Britain for leadership. Poland, the Netherlands, Greece, Czechia, and France all relied on Britain for national salvation. Churchill might have been a war-mongering imperialist, but only in the sense that he decided to use the empire he led to fight against the Nazi’s progressive imperialism. Niall Ferguson notes that Churchill, “staunch imperialist that he was, did not have to think long before rejecting Hitler’s squalid offer” to let the British Empire “survive alongside a Nazified Europe.” Churchill, argues Ferguson, ultimately sacrificed his empire to keep the Nazis from destroying the principle of conservative nationality. One would think that a national conservative like Tucker Carlson would appreciate that.