Lessons of Winston Churchill’s River War

The Nile is the river in question. Without it, no war. “It is the cause of the war,” Churchill writes. “It is the means by which we fight, the end at which we aim.” On the Nile, the British could run their formidable gunboats into their enemy’s territory, upriver to its stronghold at Khartoum, itself located at the geostrategic chokepoint where the Blue and White Niles meet: “the great spout through which the merchandise collected from a wide area streams northwards to the Mediterranean Sea.” Just as the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, connected Europe to Asian ports beyond the “Mideast,” so the Nile, originating in smaller rivers that flow into Lake Victoria far to the south of Egypt and Sudan, connects Europe with the heart of Africa. Americans will think of their great Mississippi River, which allows farmers in the Midwest to ship their produce to the Gulf of Mexico and from there to the rest of the world. Today, when it’s easy to imagine that we live in “cyberspace,” Churchill reminds us that geography matters.