Churchill made strategy for the greatest maritime power of his age de Gaulle needed to defend a land power, once dominant but now threatened by a larger land power, Germany. Here again, they faced sharply contrasting circumstances. The second section of the book offers the geopolitical strategies the two statesmen formulated-the means to their ends. Churchill thus stood on a fundamentally sound political foundation-one, moreover, perfectly suited to his skills as a parliamentary orator-whereas de Gaulle, a republican military officer-needed to re-foundFrench republicanism in order to establish a firm basis for any consistent foreign policy at all. The British enjoyed a relatively stable tradition of political liberty, while the French suffered from serious factionalism based on substantial blocs that aligned themselves with the several regimes France had experienced since the Revolution: two legitimist monarchies, several republics, and Bonapartist despotism. I show how each man understood his own regime: its institutional structure, the character of its people.īoth Great Britain and France were commercial republics, but they had noticeably different civic histories. The first is the goals or purposes of their statecraft, seen in a section that summarizes the principles Churchill and de Gaulle set out to defend and advance.

By bringing the reader to think along with Churchill and de Gaulle as they enunciated these policies, I argue that citizens can learn more from the practitioners of statecraft than from any university-bred theory.Īccordingly, the book comprises six main sections of two chapters each, setting up comparisons and contrasts between the two leaders. My book shows that these masters of statecraft defy such categories by focusing instead on framing foreign policies that successfully defended political regimes of liberty in a world of geographical and military “givens” or necessities. Statesmanship implies the liberty to choose, whereas geopolitics points to the realm of necessity these two features of statesmanship often attract intellectual partisans-members of the academic schools of “foreign-policy idealism” and “foreign-policy realism,” respectively. This study compares and contrasts the geopolitical strategies of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle as seen in three crises: the two world wars and the Cold War.

Churchill and de Gaulle: The Geopolitics of Liberty, by William Morrisey.

Charles de gaulle and winston churchill