Plane Introductin

5. Leader of Opposition
In 1946, Churchill was in America for nearly three months from early January to late March.^[526] It was on this trip that he gave his "Iron Curtain" speech about the USSR and its creation of the Eastern Bloc.^[527] Speaking on 5 March 1946 in the company of President Truman at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declared:^[528]

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.

The essence of Churchill's view was that the Soviet Union did not want war with the western Allies but that its entrenched position in Eastern Europe had made it impossible for the three great powers to provide the world with a "triangular leadership". Churchill's desire was much closer collaboration between Britain and America, but he emphasised the need for co-operation within the framework of the United Nations Charter.^[