Eighty years ago this week Churchill adds the term "iron curtain" to current language

 

Churchill delivered a speech at Fulton, Missouri in the presence of President Truman under the title "The Sinews of Peace." It contained the sentence  “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent". The phrase "iron curtain" entered the language as a shorthand for the division of the world into the communist controlled area and democracies which lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Once again Churchill's gift for language had caught a fundamental development in politics.

The Potsdam conference had decided that the occupation of Iran by the Allies undertaken in late 1941 should be terminated at the end of the war in line with the initial Tripartite Alliance. The US and UK complied but the Soviet Union did not. Indeed it began to increase its military presence in the Azerbaijan region to sustain a puppet communist government. The US delivered a strongly worded note of protest in Moscow in the first step in the policy of containment advocated in Kennan's long telegram.

The French, US and UK governments issued a public call to the Spanish people to remove Franco as leader. The immediate - and remarkably hollow - pretext was the discovery in German archives of  Franco's promise in 1940 to enter war on Germany's side if certain conditions, notably the cession of Gibraltar and much of North Africa, were met.  In reality the move was designed to head off any escalation by France of tension between the countries triggered by the execution of anti-Francoists. The wording was actually milder than the a statment made at the Potsdam conference, explicitly abjured foreign intervention in Spain and was entirely toothless.