That is the title of an address given to an audience at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri on 5 March 1946. The orator? British WWII Prime Minister Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.
He had been invited to speak at Westminster by President Harry Truman. He had lost the UK general election a year before the speech, as the average Brit was tired of war and all that went with it. Churchill had been the embodiment of the UK war effort.
The nearly hour long speech covered a wide array of topics, but it is best known for the following lines and what followed.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone — Greece with its immortal glories — is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation.
Sinews of Peace– Winston Churchill
The speech is widely regarded as one of Churchill’s best. The former Prime Minister, with President Truman at his side, articulated the threat that the Soviet Union and communism posed to peace and stability in the post-war world. It not only made the term “iron curtain” a household phrase, but it coined the term “special relationship,” describing the enduring alliance between the United States and Great Britain. It is a speech that offered a blueprint for the west to ultimately wage – and win – the Cold War.