The Foreign Service Journal, June 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2023 75 We owe it to our children and grand- children to do better in our transforma- tional and evolving relationship with Russia. Joe Rice Johnson III is a seasoned Russia expert, one of the first political consultants to work there during the Gorbachev years. He led democracy promotion programs as the country director for the International Republican Institute. He has met Vladimir Putin twice (being the only American invited to a United Russia Congress twice). He also worked in the private sector for a U.S.-based oil trading company in Russia. Churchill’s Principal Weakness Churchill and India: Manipulation or Betrayal? Kishan S. Rana, Routledge, 2022, $52.95/ paperback, e-book available, 214 pages. Reviewed by EdwardMarks History is a complicated story, full of major as well as subordinate themes. The major theme of the 20th century, argu- ably, was the great global conflicts that endured for much of the century. The two world wars were the most dramatic events, but there were other major developments, one of the most notable being the end of the European- dominated colonial system. We can all recall those global maps that dramatically showed in color that, indeed, the sun never set on the British Empire. The world wars proved to be a solvent that, among other things, dissolved the colonial system. The “winds of change” were spurred by the conflicts, and within 30 years of the end of World War II, hun- dreds of years of European colonialism had ended. If the British Empire was number one among empires, British India was its “jewel in the crown.” Its independence in 1947 was the death knell for European colonialism, and how it came about has been the subject of numerous studies, articles, memoirs, books, and movies. Ambassador Kishan Rana’s book is an intriguing contribution to this literature, as it is not focused on the overall drama and scope of the Indian independence movement but rather on the role of one man: Winston Churchill. As Rana puts it: “The India story of Churchill’s extreme positions on all things that touched on constitutional changes in India, and his hatred for Gan- dhi, the Indian national movement and towards all things that he labeled ‘Hindu,’ became one of the principal weaknesses in Churchill’s public persona.” Rana shows how Churchill’s limited empathy toward India, initially based on his inherited imperial vision as a member of England’s ruling class, was reinforced by his early experience as a young soldier in India where he adopted as an article of faith the distinction between the “martial Moslem races” and the “degraded” Hindus. Although Churchill never returned to India after his military experience, his long career in British politics often touched on the questions of imperial governance in general and India in particular. This distant involvement was summed up in his statement in 1942: “I have not become the King’s First Min- ister in order to preside over the liquida- tion of the British Empire.” Rana’s analysis of Churchill’s role falls into three broad categories. First, whenever the subject of India came up throughout his six-decade political career, Churchill resisted any effort to reconsider the colonial relationship.