Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 4, Episode 7: Richard Overy, Why War?

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Season 4, Episode 7: Richard Overy, Why War? · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
0:01
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm really excited today to be speaking with one of the world's great historians, a great historian, especially of World War II, but a historian of war in general.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: We're speaking with Professor Richard Overy, the honorary professor at University of Exeter.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: He's also a longtime professor of history at King's College, London.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: He is a graduate of University of Cambridge and a great scholar.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: Professor Overy, thank you so much for the chance to speak with you about your new book, Why War.
1:01
SPEAKER_01: It's a wonderful overview and discussion of the many perspectives of why war, ranging from the biology and anthropology of our species to the motivations of war of those who take their nations into war, whether it's the pursuit of power or the pursuit, they think, of national security or the search for resources and so forth.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: So it's a great overview of this enormously complex, challenging, and central issue for humanity.
1:42
SPEAKER_01: And it seems we've been surrounded by war nonstop.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: I feel as an American, my whole life has been lived with America at war of one kind or another: proxy wars, direct wars, covert wars, overt wars.
2:00
SPEAKER_01: So I immediately uh grabbed your book as soon as it appeared to better understand this.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: So thank you for being with me, Professor Overy.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: My pleasure.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we could start off.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: Uh the book's divided into two parts.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: The first part is a kind of a fundamental view, why do we fight?
2:21
SPEAKER_01: And as I mentioned, that touches on biology, human psychology, anthropology, and ecology.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: The second part is more from the perspective of statecraft, I would say.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: What are the motivations as perceived by state leaders who take their nations to war, the pursuit of resources, beliefs, seeking power, seeking national security?
2:48
SPEAKER_01: Why did you structure the book this way?
2:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and uh, how do you feel that these two different dimensions help us to understand your big question?
2:58
SPEAKER_01: Why do we have so many wars?
3:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, the first part of the book is really aimed at the last uh, say, 100,000 years of human history.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: It's it's really to look at where the origin of our belligerents comes from.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: And we're a very belligerent species.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: Now, many historians date it really from the onset of a state, but I'm not happy with that.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: And there's plenty of archaeological and anthropological evidence to suggest that small groups, whether it's uh you know, Madic tribe or whether it's a settled tribe, from long ago were certainly capable of what we should regard as warlike violence.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: It's not war in the modern sense, but warlike violence, often exterminatory violence, where you know one village finally decides that the next village is engaged in sorcery and um and they set out to punish it.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: And so the first half of the book is really the longer perspective.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: You know, where does our urge to belligerence come from?
3:57
SPEAKER_00: You know, why do we have almost every society worldwide by say four or five thousand years ago, organized for war in some form or other?
4:08
SPEAKER_00: The roots, it seems to me, go a long way back.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: But the second part of the book is really about motives.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: Because if we think about the broader framework within which human beings have conducted warfare, we have to also look at it in terms of motives.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: And because human beings are conscious animals, you know, they have to find some way to justify what they're doing.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Seizing resources, defending belief, seeking power or security is not just a modern thing, it's not just what states do.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: It's also something that we can see tribal communities doing.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: And I think we can imagine that in all four cases, these are factors which also go deep back into the human past.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: This uh basic notion that I think runs through your first half, whether it's the biology, the psychology, the anthropology, uh, or the ecology, the four headings, is all about the us versus them mentality in some sense.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: This uh extraordinarily sophisticated in some way, uh often suicidal, but sophisticated way that human beings uh draw boundaries between the inside group and the outer group.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: Is that uh correct in in your view?
5:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that that's at the core of this?
5:32
SPEAKER_00: I think it's very, very important.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: And I think you can take it back a very long way.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, they don't even quite know why they do it, but in fact, you know, the the kin group, um whether they're nomads or it's a tribe, the kin group is what matters.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: And you defend the kin group against all comers when necessary.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that will usually or has usually involved some level of warlike violence.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: And dividing the world around you into them and us is something we still do today.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we can plenty of examples in the 20th century where people who actually live side by side as neighbors, take you know, Bosnia in the Yukasar Civil War.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: People who live side by side as neighbors can suddenly turn into the bitterest enemies, committing atrocities against each other.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: It seems extraordinary, but the human capacity to divide people into them and us, into the other and us, uh uh uh seems to be to have a long history.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: Psychologically, I think it's very important explaining how human beings are capable of being belligerent against their own species.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: I can tell you uh just a personal anecdote.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: I was asked by the last federal government of Yugoslavia, Prime Minister Ante Markovich, in 1989 to help advise on what was an economic calamity that had hit Yugoslavia, and it had turned into a hyperinflation.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: And I knew something about that, so they invited me to Yugoslavia, and I was in Belgrade, and I remember so distinctly sitting on a June beautiful day in Belgrade, flowers everywhere, people sipping coffee in this central square.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: And I was reading the International Herald Tribune as I did in those days, and there was a story that said the CIA forecasts war in Yugoslavia, civil war in Yugoslavia.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: And I read that and I turned to my friend and I said, How ridiculous.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: Look it out.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: This is so peaceful.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: Everyone's living peacefully together.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, my God, this is so stupid.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: Uh and of course, as you say, neighbors started killing each other within a year.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: No, you could take that way back in history, and you can certainly find plenty of examples.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, in the classical world, if you think about the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans, they divided the world into them, you know, Roman citizens and others.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: The Greeks, you know, divided them into citizens and uh of the of the polis and barbarians.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: You know, in social psychological terms, it's something it seems natural to human beings, but it's natural because they need some way of legitimizing what they're going to do to other people.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you wouldn't.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you know, we would all collaborate all the time.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love Greek philosophy.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm uh consider myself an Aristotelian, but the Greek view of the other, the barbarian, uh, the one that spoke bah-ba-ba-ba-ba, yeah, uh, and made no sense to the Greeks was absolutely real.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: Go conquer, we're uh in in uh, of course, uh brutal war with the barbarians, and that is a very deep view uh civilizationally.
8:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: No, it goes back right through um you know recorded history.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: So it it almost certainly is characteristic of history long before that as well.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: And we know that when we look at tribal communities in the last two or three hundred years, where anthropologists were able, or scientists were able to observe them.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: And time and again they found that neighboring villages would invade each other and massacre the entire population.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: You know, it doesn't make sense to you and I, the human beings behave like that, but that's how they do.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: And of course, we see this uh every day now, I'd say most vividly uh in Israel and Palestine, where the the level of dehumanization uh in the rhetoric and in the actions is absolutely so stark and shocking to behold.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: No, it's a textbook case, yeah.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: But also the case, you know, of the way Putin has made the Russians think about Ukrainians, as if they're they're second-class inhabitants of the continents, and you know, and they deserve what they get.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh, even the suggestion of all Nazis, in order to legitimize what it is that Putin is doing.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: But I would say the rusophobia on the other side uh is on in both directions.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: I remember uh a wonderful book.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've come uh I'm sure you have, you're a great scholar in all of this, by Gleason, uh, on the origins of rusophobia in Britain in the 19th century.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: It's a Harvard University press book from 1970.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: He observed as a historian uh the rise of uh hate of Russia in the mass media, the newspapers of the day, especially, and tried to explain it.
10:37
SPEAKER_01: In the end, he couldn't quite explain it, except that Russia was there.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: It was big, it was a competitor with the British Empire, and uh you had to hate it.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: No, I mean it you know in many ways it doesn't look rational, rational to us and say, you know, you shouldn't think about other people.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: We should try to collaborate.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: But you know, human beings are not a particularly rational species.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: Indeed.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: In the second part of the book, you go to what has been your core area of study uh throughout an illustrious career, which is uh states fighting states, basically, uh if I could interpret it that way.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: As you said, the first part deals with the hundred thousand-year history of our ancient species.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: When states form, wars become more than cooperative ventures, they become actions by states, essentially.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: So most of the wars that we're talking about, the war between Russia and Ukraine, or if you want to call it a proxy war between uh NATO and Russia, which in some ways it is, are state-led wars.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: And you divide uh the motivations by states into several categories.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh I think the tradition of doing this goes back to Thucydides, maybe longer.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: In the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides uh talked about interest, uh, glory, uh, interest, glory, and fear.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: You give us four dimensions the search for resources or the lust for resources, belief, power, and security.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: Could you give a short explanation of what these four categories mean and why they're different and how uh you use them to assess motivations for war?
12:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, it has to be said, of course, that that there are many wars in which you know more than one of these categories actually operates.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: I I've set them up into these different categories, really to be able to make sense of wars which are predominantly about the seizure of resources, or which are predominantly about defense of belief or the extension of belief, uh, or predominantly about security, but I'm conscious that quite a number of these factors can operate together at the same time.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: But they seem to me to be you know the four most obvious categories to choose.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, war for resources also has a very long history.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: It's not just you know about oil wars in the 20th century.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: It you know, it can go all the way back to you know ancient Rome and beyond.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: What is the object uh of the resource aim changes over time.
13:19
SPEAKER_01: Uh nobody cared about oil uh in in ancient times.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: They cared about land and slaves, I I uh assume uh primarily.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh and gold and some precious minerals, or maybe a fountain of youth imagined in some place and so forth.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: But the idea that, yes, we're going to war to seize something of value from others.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: No, it has a long, a very long pedigree.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: Belief is a complicated one because there are a great many social scientists are not convinced, or historians are not convinced that belief actually is what motivates war, that people use belief to mask other motives.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: But uh I I've argued in the book that belief has to be taken seriously.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: Anthropologists take it seriously when they assess the cosmology, for example, of a tribal community.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: And we need to take belief seriously, you know, really, you know, from the wars of religion all the way through to the 20th century, where belief also played an important part in motivating people for war.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: We can think about uh, well, let's think, for example, about American ideology, you know, about what America sought in the Second World War, what they thought they were fighting for in Korea or in Vietnam and so on.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, ideology is not something that just for dictators.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: Defending belief and values is is of importance to the democratic West as well.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: So I think you know we can't we can't downplay belief.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: It seems to me to be a very important element in our explanation.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: Certainly it would seem in the Western world, uh in the uh monotheistic religions uh world, Judaism, Christianity, uh Islam, there's been plenty of religious war, uh at least in part motivated by uh by religious belief.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: Could could you view the crusades in in any terms without belief playing some role in that?
15:14
SPEAKER_01: Seems impossible.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what I've argued.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: But there are many historians in the 20th century who saw the Crusades as you know, pursuit of power or, you know, the establishment of a new landed empire overseas and so on and so on, but played down the role of religion.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: I think if we if you want an example, let's look at jihad, which is still alive and well in the 21st century, with a very long Islamic tradition.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: And you certainly couldn't tell a Muslim that that his belief didn't matter.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: Of course it matters.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: And defense of belief in the Middle Ages to today has played a very important part in Islamic identity.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: In Israel today, uh while there are varied motives that include power, security, maybe resources also, uh belief certainly plays some role on the Israeli right, which says uh God gave us this land.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: That's a belief motivation of war.
16:11
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: So indeed, well, actually, Israel is quite an interesting.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: This war is quite an interesting example where, as you say, there are issues of power as well as security, uh, as well as belief.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: It's a conflict difficult to define from that point of view, and historians will have great fun, 50 years' time, trying to do so.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell It does seem to me that one aspect of politics in general, and uh therefore the politics of war, is that states run by coalitions of powers.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: So the idea that there are multiple motives, uh, you can get those who want to grab some resources, together with those who have a deep ideological belief, uh, together with those who view the issue from a security state, and you build the coalition for war among people who truly have different motives in the end.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: So you find them all there, maybe not in one person or one leader, but as kind of what puts the state over the top in saying we're going to pursue this motivation.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: I think there is usually what I regard as a primary motive.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, state security, because you could argue that security has been a feature of, you know, almost all wars.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: You know, the people who start a war, uh, or the people who are defending themselves, are very concerned about security, particularly frontier security, is I argue in the book.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: That's a a key site of potential conflict.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: But security in an anarchic world, a world where there is no some big father figure saying, you know, stop, you know, you can't do that.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: Nobody is going to stop an aggressor unless you can defend yourself effectively.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: So the pursuit of security is something that is characteristic for a great many conflicts, both sides, because you can in fact be an aggressor, and your argument is that what you're trying to do is to achieve security.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: Look at Putin in Russia and Ukraine.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: Or look at uh Latinar's Israel, too.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, security of the frontier, you know, an end to the potential violence of uh their neighbors.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: It's the it's really the key ambition for waging war.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: I think otherwise you wouldn't be waging war.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh and you can take that right the way back.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: Let's look at the outbreak of the First World War.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: Everybody felt anxious, fearful, uncertain, not quite sure what other powers were going to do, couldn't run the risk of not mobilizing, and suddenly they all the great powers found themselves in a war they hadn't expected and didn't want.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: What is the difference of the power motive and the security motive?
18:40
SPEAKER_00: Well, they can obviously go hand in hand, but I've chosen power.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: Power is a difficult thing because power is usually power for something, and uh, you know, we but it's not a commodity you can take off the supermarket shelf.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: Power is usually for you know resources or territory or security.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: Um but I've argued in the book that that one of the critical things about power is is the power-seeking leader, the hubristic leader, one who thinks that war, in fact, is the solution, not the problem, and that his power will be enhanced by waging war and waging war successfully.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: And we have you know plenty of examples.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: I've chosen Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler, but one could certainly you know choose Genghis Khan.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they were all uh not only seeking power, but actually, I think distinctively of them seeking world domination and believing they could actually achieve it.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, fantasies.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they were all three fueled by fantasy, that somehow or other, you know, that Napoleon would create a you know Eurasia that that all spoke French, that Alexander would conquer India, and Hitler, of course, that he would, you know, he would become Germany would become a new superpower.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: And that's an unpredictable source of war, but a very important one.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean fear of the in this case, fear of the biggest, longest periods of war.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: In the case of Napoleon and Hitler at terrible cost to the people that they invaded or involved in the conflict.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: Here is a factor you can't build into any analysis.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: You know, there might be a Hitler or a or a Napoleon knocking around someone in the 21st century, but we're not going to know who he is or where he is, you know, until he makes his bid for power.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: One of the uh most striking things, I think it's true, you could tell me, uh, the supposed interview of Gring uh in Nuremberg, the Nazi leader at the end of the war after being captured and in the Nuremberg trials, is interviewed by a psychologist who was uh uh making these prison interviews, and he's asked about taking nations to war.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: And uh if I have it uh correctly, uh Goring's answer was a leader can always take a nation to war because the leader just has to invoke fear, tell the population uh we're under attack, we have to go to war.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: And um then fear can always rally the population for this cause.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: And then the uh interviewer, whom I don't I don't remember the name, Gilbert, then he says, yes, but in a democracy, uh, you know, public opinion matters.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: And Goring, uh, with the back of his hand says, no, no, no, no, no.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: It makes no difference whether it's democracy or uh dictatorship.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: You just tell the public they're under attack and that it's uh traitorous uh to be against the war, and it works the same in any system.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: Quite a shrewd observation, actually.
21:49
SPEAKER_01: I thought so too, from such an evil soul.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: But I think one can exaggerate the extent of which leaders matter all the way back through the Middle Ages so that's cool.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Period.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean a lot of decisions for war are really collective decisions.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, m many of the wars waged by the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire were wars in which, you know, the Senate and the Generals all had some kind of say as well.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: In the Middle Ages, too, quite often a prince would find himself having to go to war because he's not sat around saying, you know, what are we doing?
22:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, time for a battle.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: I think it's dangerous to exaggerate the role of leaders, though I heard quite a lot of criticism in my book from people to say, well, actually it is all leaders, isn't it?
22:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, if we didn't have leaders, we wouldn't have this problem.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: That's not the case.
22:38
SPEAKER_01: It does raise the question, there's leaders, there's uh the state apparatus, and there's the general public, if one could put it that way.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: They all do play a role in different contexts.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it is a leader that can take a country to war on false pretenses or just on individual whim.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes, and I think in the uh Peloponnesian wars, the fact that uh Alcibiades, the great demagogue of Athens, rallies the population to say, let's go attack Sicily, uh Syracusa, is a good example of a demagogue winning power by mobilizing the mass population for war.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: How does that play out?
23:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, popular hatreds and prejudices can actually push a government uh, you know, to take a stance against a potential enemy that they might not otherwise have taken.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: In all these cases, the public is not passive.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: The further back you go, the more often it is that, you know, all the males almost of a particular community would have to be involved.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Think about the Vikings.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: Wasn't a question of some Viking prince saying, Come on, let's go and uh attack the coast of Ireland.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: This is what Viking communities did.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Every year they run on campaigns.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: You can find plenty of examples where the decision for war and the willingness to take part in war is is a much more collective activity than the idea that it's just leaders saying, Come on, guys, let's go and uh uh and make war.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: Did the German people want war under Hitler in 1939?
24:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, most German people did not.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: Um did not.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: Did not, yeah.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: But I mean the Hitler and Napoleon examples I used are are exceptional examples, you know, where again, you know, many French people were fed up with endless fighting to the revolutionary wars, and Napoleon was able to, you know, exploit his kind of charisma in order to get the French people to identify with his project.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: So maybe Hitler too you know tried to get the Germans to identify with his project.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: And after the victories in 1930 and 1940, that was much easier to do.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: But the problem was that Hitler then said, okay, well, now we're going to make war on the Soviet Union and then we're going to declare war on the United States.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh and that was a step that almost all Germans must have understood was too far.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: Is there something actually known about uh German opinion about that?
25:04
SPEAKER_01: Or by then was it uh so much a basically uh a state totally in uh in the Fuhrer's hands that it it didn't even matter?
25:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, I mean the the state was very worried about public opinion, spent a lot of time and effort monitoring it, seeing what the response would be.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, these reports ended up, you know, on ministerial desks in Berlin all the time.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: But by the time things had gone wrong, badly wrong, in 1942 and 43, it was too late, of course, and the German people were then ensnared in Hitler's war.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: There was no way in which the people could then disengage from it.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, and the promise that somehow Hitler would would reverse reverse disasters and would somehow find a solution actually survived right up until 1945 when disaster was inevitable.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: Can I ask you about uh the British Empire in all of this and actually going back maybe uh a century and a half before or to the Napoleonic Wars?
26:03
SPEAKER_01: It seems in history there are two quite different visions of the British Empire.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: One famously that it just kind of uh fell into Britain's lap one by one in a haphazard way, uh, and the other that it was a vision of uh British greatness, and that meant that there was a constant push, maybe uh for belief.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: I don't think security was the main issue, but belief and power were were the driving forces uh of empire, or or maybe resources.
26:35
SPEAKER_01: How do you feel about that big question?
26:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, empire changed uh uh, of course, over the a a couple of centuries.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Um and the people who were building that empire were different generation by generation.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: It was a long process.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the central things was simply economic.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, the decision to extend and extend British influence and power in India.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: A lot of that relied not just on strategic anxiety about what the French were doing or the Dutch were doing and so on, but on the realization that Britain was a very successful mercantile state.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: And the more successful Britain became, you know, the more resources she wanted to be able to control, the more markets she wanted to be able to build.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm not in favour of the kind of capitalist theory of British imperialism, but Britain's economic well-being, you know, was at the core of much of what the imperial project represented.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the British became, you know, or not not the British as a whole, but certainly the merchant class and the politicians became enormously rich in the 19th century based on the development of empire.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: There was a lot of true entrepreneurialism involved in in the particular way that Britain imperialized because it was joint stock companies, after all.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: It was uh it was actual financial ventures.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
27:57
SPEAKER_00: No, indeed.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: Well, many of the you know, well, as you know, many of the original colonies of colonial eras and so on were indeed run by chartered companies and not run by the British state.
28:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I you know, I I hadn't really properly appreciated that until I was thinking about, and I don't know if I'm right or not, but Hobbes writing about the social contract at the time that the literal colonial contract was being designed everywhere, so he was watching new states take hold literally as contracts.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, indeed, yeah.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: Though John Locke had a lot more to say about that.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, John Locke was much more interested in that, and indeed profited from it himself.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: And um by that stage, I think that you know the British Imperial Project was was really rooted in its mercantile character.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: Later on, you could you could gloss it up, of course, by saying how great the British Empire was, you know, that you know, Britannia was the waves and so on and so on, for popular consumption.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: Because the people didn't actually benefit a great deal.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they you know they got lots of sugar and cheap rum, but um, you know, the people who benefited from the imperial budget were able to persuade the British, the rest of the British people, this was a good thing.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: You know, there is uh famous or infamous or uh except their discarded theory of uh the democratic peace, which has many variants, uh, but one is that democracies don't fight other democracies.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: Another is that democracies are somehow more peaceful or self-restrained.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: But uh it has seemed to me that um in terms of how government structure changes the incentives to war, that Athens, Britain, and the United States uh are all examples of quite robust democracies that loved the imperial adventure.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, indeed.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yes.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think grouping Athens with that is an interesting uh reflection, in fact, of the extent to which you know we we make a mistake of assuming that democracies really prefer peace.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: Maybe they do prefer peace, but they've been involved in a lot of wars over the course of uh of human history.
30:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would say that the greatest democracies have been very uh eager for war often.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, certainly the two Anglo-Saxon democracies.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: Indeed, yeah.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: Britain was the lead democracy of the 19th century, America arguably of the 20th century, but very much not shy about it.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: That's the same.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: No.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: Um not at all, no.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: And indeed, you know, it could be always presented as, you know, defense of democratic values, you know, defense of a liberal world and so on.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: And that would just make it necessary to wage war every now and again.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: Do you think that things are different now because of the nuclear age, that somehow we're going to be wise enough to not have what happened so many times in history that whether for any of these motives major powers stumbled into direct war with each other?
31:06
SPEAKER_01: You've watched and looked very closely at the motives of national leaders.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: Do you trust them?
31:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, obviously not.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: You know, for many political scientists, the rational actor model exists.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: So that, you know, somehow or other, you know, whatever your political complexion, you're not going to risk nuclear war.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: And I think we all hope that that's the that that's the case.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: But of course, there are plenty of irrational actors around, and they will be in the rest of a century.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, nuclear war has been, you know, nuclear, uh sorry, nuclear war has made a difference.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: Major states don't easily reach for for war.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: And the threats that Putin has been throwing around over the course of the last two years, you know, makes it clear that, you know, this is just rhetoric.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: You know, Putin understands perfectly well that if he engages in nuclear war, that, you know, Moscow disappears just as New York.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: And I think that that deterrent stance exists even for the most irrational of politicians.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: It's very hard to imagine that we will descend into a nuclear war.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: Since I have you here, and you're one of the uh greatest historians of uh of the Second World War, delve into that a bit with you.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: Whether the war could have been avoided.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: One episode that I'm very curious about is uh at least some historians say that Stalin in 1938-39 reached out to Britain and France to try to make a uh an anti-Hitler coalition, and that he was rebuffed actually uh by the Western powers, and so that an opportunity was lost.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: And I since you've written uh in brilliantly and in a leading way about Munich, and we we hear about the appeasement at Munich nonstop.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: I would say my whole lifetime as uh basically the core model of what to avoid um in diplomacy, uh, your your take on that as well.
33:12
SPEAKER_01: And so I guess uh two two questions that I'd like to ask you about before the September 1, 1939 start of the war in the West, and then just after uh the end of the war in uh in Europe, uh another question.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: But in 1938-39, could war have been stopped either by this coalition of the Soviet Union and and Britain and France uh forming earlier?
33:42
SPEAKER_01: Was Munich the profound mistake that it is m made out to be?
33:49
SPEAKER_01: Was it right to try in any way to engage with Hitler in diplomacy, maybe not so naively as declaring peace in our time, but was there any reason to try diplomacy at that point?
34:05
SPEAKER_01: Just your help us understand whether anything could have been done by that point or whether Hitler was so determined to conquer the world that uh it was uh uh inevitable that uh the world was about to experience this disaster.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't think Hitler was uh was plenty to conquer the world at that point.
34:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have a rather different take on Munich.
34:27
SPEAKER_00: The important thing about Munich was that Hitler wanted to wage war against the Czechs and destroy the Czech state.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh he wanted to imitate the Japanese and Mussolini, they all waged war in the 1930s, Hitler hadn't yet.
34:39
SPEAKER_00: And he thought that he'd be able to do so, and he thought that the Western powers were too feeble or too preoccupied to uh obstruct him.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: And what Chamberlin does for all the venom directed at him now, what Chamberlin does is he he tries to find a way to limit Hitler's ambition against Czechoslovakia, and of course to avoid war.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, why not want to avoid war?
35:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not a bad thing to do.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: But he he limited what Hitler could do in 1938.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: And Hitler was furious.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: And he was determined in 1939 that if he engaged, or when he engaged the war again in Central Europe, uh, that he would not take any notice of the British and French.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: They wouldn't do anything.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: Uh he had their measure, he thought.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: And so war against Poland he expected to be isolated, that the British and French would not um intervene.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: But by that stage, Chamberlain um and the French ladio knew that there was no way of stopping Hitler, short of declaring war.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that's what they decided to do, and they stuck with it right the way through to September 1339.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, in the end it's very hard to see how how war could have been avoided.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: Um there's a view in Poland now that it actually it might have been better if they'd stuck with Hitler and invaded the Soviet Union together, um, because the French and the British let them down.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: Um I think that's also a delusion because Hitler had certainly plans for Poland inside a German imperial continent.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: But it's very difficult to see how how war under those circumstances might have been avoided with the Soviet Union.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, we know that the British and French simply didn't trust the Soviet Union.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: And we still don't know what Stalin really had in mind in 1939, uh, and whether it would really have achieved what so many historians I argue would have achieved.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: I I'm not persuaded.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm very uh taken with the with what you say.
36:39
SPEAKER_01: My view has always been, uh again, without uh any of the depth of knowledge, but my view has always been that Chamberlain was right to try to negotiate.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: I think his big mistake, if I could put it uh in my simple terms, was to declare rather than to say, well, we don't trust this person, but here's our agreement.
37:03
SPEAKER_01: He declared peace in our time and faced adulation for it, and so greatly overstated the case.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: But then on the balance, and you've added another point, I always felt that showing that Hitler was completely deceitful, could not be bargained with, was ready to act no matter what commitments had made, ultimately redounded to Hitler's defeat.
37:32
SPEAKER_01: As you say, by Hitler's invasion of Poland, British and French minds had been stiffened by the abusive treatment after Munich.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: But I always thought another element, and I'd like to ask you about it, was that in a way Munich made Churchill possible, because uh Churchill's argument all through the 1930s was you can't trust this man.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: Okay, Chamberlain had tried to trust him, proved that he couldn't be trusted, and that made Churchill possible in a way, because when Churchill faced opposition uh in his own cabinet in May 1940, should we make a compromise, uh, should we make a deal, Churchill was able to say, because of Munich, no, you can't trust Hitler.
38:20
SPEAKER_01: We have to fight.
38:21
SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
38:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, although we have to remember that that he was strongly supported by Chamberlain in that debate.
38:28
SPEAKER_00: I think a fact that people often overlook.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Chamberlain who didn't trust Hitler, actually, and the piece for our time is a piece of rhetoric.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunate rhetoric, I would say.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunate rhetoric, yeah.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: But he knew that Hitler could not be trusted, and as soon as Hitler broke that agreement and occupied Prague, you know, for Chamberlain, you know, who didn't want to go to war, was a man who thought that war, you know, nobody wins in a war, was his view.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: He didn't want to go to war, but he was nonetheless brave enough to take his country into war uh in September 1939 against a man who he rightly judged uh could not only not be trusted, uh, but whose ambitions were unpredictable.
39:09
SPEAKER_01: Historians, some historians argue, well, uh, by uh having those negotiations, Hitler was empowered vis-a-vis his own reticent generals uh and could never have acted uh had uh Chamberlain showed more spine before Munich.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: So that uh the counter-argument is not only was it naive, but it actually empowered uh Hitler in a way that uh otherwise wouldn't have happened.
39:38
SPEAKER_01: Does that argument make sense?
39:40
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't it doesn't make sense to me anyway.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean the opposite would happen.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Sherberlin at the moment of acute crisis sent an emissary to Berlin, and the emissary was told to tell Hitler that if he invaded Czechoslovakia unilaterally, then he would find himself at war with France and England.
39:59
SPEAKER_00: And the French ambassador arrived uh a little later to uh echo the same thing.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: But he'd also been warned about it by his uh colleagues, by his um his political um associates, uh, that he was running too much of a risk.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: So, in a sense, it was, you know, for Hitler it's a climb down, which is why uh I I've emphasized that in the crisis over Poland, he refused to climb down again.
40:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna climb down again.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: You know, I I made a mistake.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: The British and French actually aren't going to do anything, you know, they're too feeble.
40:33
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to attack Poland, build labels around, and turn around to the Vision French and say, there you are.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: That was a miscalculation, of course, of uh of very large proportions.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: But by 1940, you know, he'd achieved, you know, remarkably the defeat of Britain and France on the continent of Europe.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: It is uh in in view of your view, which makes so much sense to me, the way that Munich 1938 is treated emblematically in our public discussion, is to say, never negotiate with the other side.
41:10
SPEAKER_01: You see that's just appeasement.
41:12
SPEAKER_01: It's useless.
41:13
SPEAKER_01: Uh you can't talk to the other side, you'll just empower the other side.
41:17
SPEAKER_01: So it came to be, at least in the American context, it came to be the explanation for why one should never negotiate.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: No, no, I'm sure in England too.
41:30
SPEAKER_00: It's also uh something which has already been thrown at Trump in the last few days.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh he's an appeaser.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think you would like that accusation, but it's yeah, it's a piece of rhetoric that's become embedded in our view of international relations.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: But the history just doesn't bear out that attribution.
41:49
SPEAKER_00: I don't think so, no.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: That is a wonderful clarification for me.
41:54
SPEAKER_01: That's been my hunch, but I needed to ask the person who really knows.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: I want to ask you about the other end of the war as uh we wrap up.
42:03
SPEAKER_01: And that is uh about whether the Cold War was inevitable, the same way, you know, was Stalin the Hitler equivalent?
42:13
SPEAKER_01: Was there this uh, you know, I won't call it a marriage of convenience, but the alliance uh of necessity during World War II between uh the US, UK, and uh and the Soviet Union that it was bound to crash as soon as the Soviet Union ended, or whether there was the possibility of continued uh, I don't know, alliance, maybe too strong, but mutual recognition and accommodation.
42:42
SPEAKER_01: And a specific question that I know little about is Operation Unthinkable, which is uh something I've only read superficially about, but is supposedly a request by Churchill in the early summer of 1945 to prepare war plans against the Soviet Union immediately after Germany's surrender, essentially.
43:08
SPEAKER_01: In the end, the conclusion was it wasn't practical to fight the Soviet Union uh at that point.
43:14
SPEAKER_01: But was that just war planning and game planning?
43:17
SPEAKER_01: Or was the idea that, well, the next step inevitably is confrontation with the Soviet Union deeply felt within the British leadership and perhaps the American leadership, although I think not of FDR, but maybe of uh the people who surrounded his successor, Harry Truman?
43:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, I mean there was a strong sense in Britain and America that they were going to get back, or in Britain they were going to get back to the 1930s, where Soviet communistism had been distrusted, um, where they were not certain what kind of threat uh the Soviet Union posed to the British Empire.
43:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so Churchill really took up the cudgels again at the end of the war.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it was, you know, one of those things.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: He there's kites, he flew, he often flew a kites from the Second World War.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: And it was up to the Chiefs of Staff, his military advisers, to shoot it down, which they did very promptly.
44:10
SPEAKER_00: No sense at all in thinking about war with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1945 when he wanted the Soviet Union to contribute to the defeat of Japan uh a few months later.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: No, I mean it is operation unthinkable, but you can certainly find a strand running through strategic thinking, security thinking in America and Britain from the late 1930s onwards, which anticipated, but at some point, no, the Soviet Union would represent a much more serious geopolitical threat than it did in the 1930s.
44:43
SPEAKER_01: I was uh unhappy uh as I was reading the history of uh Operation Paperclip, which was the American operation to bring Nazi scientists to the United States immediately after Germany's surrender, that already by the summer of 1945, there was a view that war with the Soviet Union was very likely, probably by 1952, and that we had to be preparing for war.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: It seemed to me a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy if the moment, uh even before the war was over in the Pacific, you're already thinking about the war with one of your allies.
45:25
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean the for the most that I mean it was in Stalin's hands a bit.
45:29
SPEAKER_00: Stalin, you know, paid lip service to the idea that they would all collaborate after the war and that, you know, the the you know the wartime friendship would somehow or other continue.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and yet all the things that started authorized in Eastern Europe or in the settlement in Asia after the defeat of Japan uh were designed to provoke uh the Western democracies.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, Stalin was not a democrat in the Western sense, uh, and it's very difficult to see how Stalin's pursuit of security interests in Eastern Europe and uh East Asia could be compatible with the way the Americans or the British saw the post-war order.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: There's been a tendency among some historians writing about this to argue that uh again we let Stalin down, a bit like you know, we let Stalin down in 1939 and 1938.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: But I I just don't think that's true.
46:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, there wasn't a great deal of common ground between the Soviet experience and the experience in the United States and Britain.
46:31
SPEAKER_00: And the the absence of common ground uh became more and more obvious uh the longer the post-war era went on.
46:38
SPEAKER_00: By 1947-48, you know, the prospect was uh by that stage uh more or less impossible.
46:46
SPEAKER_01: One of our, of course, uh leading uh statesman historians, uh George Kennan, argued in the 1950s that uh the mistake was uh not to accept Russia's call for a neutral, demilitarized Germany.
47:03
SPEAKER_01: That that was uh what, again, was the security dilemma from the Russian point of view.
47:10
SPEAKER_01: In fact, we did the opposite, uh rebuilt a German military, made it the core of NATO, put in uh a security apparatus uh led by uh former uh Nazi uh intelligence uh leader Galen, and that in a sense we gravely unnecessarily uh exacerbated Russia Soviet's insecurity.
47:34
SPEAKER_01: Do you find any of that convincing?
47:36
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, no.
47:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, both sides had a role to play in it.
47:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's not that, you know, that you know the the West was the good guys and Stalin did all the bad things.
47:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, both sides had interests to pursue.
47:48
SPEAKER_00: Both sides uh wanted a post-war geopolitical order which suited them.
47:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh in the British case, they didn't get it.
47:56
SPEAKER_00: The Empire unraveled.
47:57
SPEAKER_00: In the American case, they got a global commitment, but it involved them almost straight away in the war in Korea and later on the war in Vietnam.
48:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, that the both for both sides, it was a difficult transition to the new super order.
48:13
SPEAKER_00: And both sides made mistakes and misjudgments.
48:15
SPEAKER_00: It's also indeed a question simply of you know Stalin uh Stalin bad, uh the West good.
48:23
SPEAKER_01: After your wonderful reflections on all of this, your profound knowledge of uh modern war history, are there any grounds for optimism that we can avoid our worst instincts, our psychology, our anthropology?
48:42
SPEAKER_01: Do you give credence that someday, somehow, something like the United Nations can actually work as an effective mechanism to stop war, that there can be collective security in some way, in some new institutional fashion?
49:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm an historic, of course, and and I can't really predict what might be the case in in a century's time.
49:07
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I am a pessimist, of course, and and uh I've been accused of that in in quite a number of the meetings and and lectures I've been giving.
49:18
SPEAKER_00: Um in fact, in one case, uh somebody uh made the point that despite the fact that I was talking about such pessimistic things and my conclusion is so pessimistic that I smiled a lot.
49:30
SPEAKER_00: I think there's their point, of course, in being miserable about this.
49:33
SPEAKER_00: It is just simply a fact, I think, that if we look at the whole course of human recorded human history in archaeological recording too, going way, way back, human beings have been a belligerent species.
49:46
SPEAKER_00: And we might all wish that they weren't, or that they were less belligerent.
49:50
SPEAKER_00: But at the moment there are few grounds for thinking that will happen.
49:54
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm gonna take a slightly different point of view, and that is that people are gonna read your book.
50:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh, they are gonna understand uh that we have these underlying tendencies and motives.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: They're going to reflect on the dangers that all of this means, especially in the nuclear age.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: And uh we're going to progress in no small part because great historians such as you uh help us to understand both the past, but also, while you say it's not the role of the historian, you do shed light on what we might do differently, uh, which is what I hope.
50:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, I hope so too.
50:33
SPEAKER_01: Let me uh thank you very, very much for a wonderful book.
50:37
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we've been speaking with Professor Richard uh Overy about his uh book, Why Wars.
50:44
SPEAKER_01: This is a remarkable synthesis that ranges from human biology and psychology and anthropology up through uh the most pressing and modern issues of statecraft.
50:58
SPEAKER_01: It's a fantastic way to join this discussion.
51:02
SPEAKER_01: So I want to heartily recommend this uh outstanding book to everybody that's listening.
51:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh, thank you for joining Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
51:12
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Professor Richard Overy, for being with us.
51:20
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
51:23
SPEAKER_01: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.