the Hoover Institution is the nation's preeminent research center dedicated to generating policy ideas that promote economic prosperity national security and democratic governance Hoover research has directly led to policies that have produced greater opportunity and freedom in the United States and the world how has Hoover achieved this distinction by assembling an extraordinary fellowship of policy oriented academics and scholarly practitioners by offering open access to a world renowned library in archives and by resolutely focusing on ideas that define a free society Herbert Hoover is the founder of the institution that bears his name after graduating in Stanford's pioneer class in 1895 he became a successful mining engineer renowned humanitarian and president of the United States while administering famine relief to Belgium during World War one and participating in the subsequent Paris Peace Conference Hoover recognized the importance of collecting historical material that could yield knowledge about preventing a recurrence of the calamities he had witnessed in Europe in April 1919 he pledged $50,000 to Stanford University to support his war collection we celebrate this pivotal moment 100 years ago as the founding of what was to become the Hoover Institution by 1929 Hoover's war library contained 1.4 million items and had already become the largest in the world focused on the Great War and it's aftermath collecting expanded to include material related to social political and economic change in the 20th century Hoover Tower was completed in 1941 to house the rapidly growing library and archive in 1957 the collection was definitively renamed the Hoover Institution on war Revolution and peace Hoover's vision for the institution has captured in a statement to the Stanford Board of Trustees in 1959 the institution supports the Constitution of the United States it's Bill of Rights and its method of representative government the overall mission of this institution is from its records to recall the voice of experience against the making of war and by the study of these records and their publication to recall man's endeavours to make and preserve peace the institution itself must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace the personal freedom and to the safeguards of the American system by the 1970s the institution was generating influential research on government regulation tax policy national security healthcare social security energy and proposals to limit government expenditures many innovative public policy proposals developed by Hoover fellows were adopted in the 1980s and Hoover contributed influential policy ideas for countering communism that ultimately led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991 the all-volunteer army the flat tax the Taylor rule for monetary policy and school choice and accountability are all transformative policy ideas generated by Hoover fellows Hoover's timeless fundamental values of freedom private enterprise and limited effective representative government derived from 100 years of scholarship and the lessons of history the Hoover Institution is poised for even greater impact in the years ahead in forming the marketplace of ideas advising the country's policymakers and illuminating the road to prosperity and peace in America and around the world this lecture series brings together hoover fellows to discuss how the ideas and values that have undergirded the institution for 100 years remain crucial in understanding and formulating public policy in the 21st century the Hoover Institution was created at a moment of maximum global upheaval the Year 1919 was the year the world tried to end World War after more than four years of conflicts in Europe and Beyond Europe because it was a global conflict peacemakers salt led by President Woodrow Wilson to bring an end to that kind of conflict and they failed and part of purpose of the Hoover Institution the central purpose really was to try to learn the lessons of that four-year period of war and revolution that's why Herbert Hoover established this institution that's why there's an archive were supposed to be learning from the mistakes of 1914 to 1918 but it turned out they were making new mistakes in 1991 of this example was the piece of Versailles Treaty that set out the terms of Germany's defeat in World War one that turned out to be a very short-lived peace because 20 years later world war ii broke out with the German invasion of Poland so I think what makes this institution so important is that we have spent a century trying to understand the connections between conflict war and revolution as well as trying to understand how to make peace endure and create social and political stability if you ask me what are the most important lessons we can learn from the 20th century's great upheavals a couple springs of mind one that when empires fell apart then often that's when conflict surgeons 20th century was a time of imperial collisions the world wars were really wars between empires but the breakup of empire did not necessarily uh sure in the period of peace in fact they're falling apart of the empires of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War 1 beginning with the Russian Revolution of 1917 led to a period of instability in our people that wasn't really over until the end of of World War two in 1945 I think the second lesson that we've learned is that when you shock any society but especially a multi-ethnic society with a big economic crisis whether it's hyperinflation or depression that too can have disastrous results and that's why quite a lot of our energy at the Hoover Institution has been devoted to understanding the causes of economic crisis as well as the drivers of prosperity so that's really what Herbert Hoover wanted us to do and I'm glad to say that I think over hundred years we've done a reasonable job doing [Music] hello and thank you so much for coming I'm Eric wakin the deputy director of the Hoover Institution and the director of our library and archives welcome to the ninth session of our Centennial speaker series entitled a century of ideas for free society this series features 11 panel discussions over the course of the year to showcase the rigorous scholarship and research central to the institution's mission and values allow me also to pause and offer thanks to the Hoover Institution overseers and supporters without whom none of this activity would be possible as the institution is 100% privately funded today's discussion is entitled Hoover's 100 years of war revolution and peace and features two renowned Hoover historians Neil Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson allow me to introduce both of them for a moment Neil Ferguson is the Milbank family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard where he also served for 12 years as the Lawrence a Tisch professor of history Neil is the author of 15 books including the pity of war the House of Rothschild Empire civilization and Kissinger 1923 to 1968 the idealist which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross prize during meals career he has been awarded the Benjamin Franklin prize for public service the Hayek prize for lifetime achievement and the Ludwig Erhard prize for economic journalism Neil's most recent book the square and the tower was published in the u.s. in January 2018 and was a New York Times bestseller Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin in illy Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairs Hoover's military history working group Victor is a military historian a columnist a scholar of ancient and modern warfare he's also a commentator on modern warfare and contemporary politics for a multitude of media outlets Victor was professor of classics at California State University Fresno and has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004 he received the Eric Grendel award for excellence in opinion journalism he was awarded the National Humanities medal and the Bradley prize the victor is also a farmer and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism Victor has written or edited or edited twenty four books the latest of which is the case for Trump published in March 2019 please join me in welcoming our esteemed colleagues to the stage [Applause] well good evening ladies and gentlemen it's a great thrill to be with my esteemed colleague Victor on this stage we thought we might begin our conversation by reflecting a little bit on the Hoover Institution and history because it's important to remember that this institution originated with Herbert Hoover's interest in the history of his own times I delved into the research for this a little he he'd read a biography of a man named Andrew Dixon white who was a Yale man who was one of the founders of Cornell University and this character white who turned down an invitation to be the first president of Stanford had assembled a an extraordinary collection of documents relating to the French Revolution which are now part of the Cornell University Library collection so when Hoover was working on relief efforts in Europe during World War one he decided that he would assemble a similar collection of documents bearing on the war on World War one the war that he was witnessing and the original pledge of $50,000 to Stanford in 1919 was to finance that collection it was originally in 1922 named the Hoover War library and by 1926 it really had become one of the world's premier documentary collections one World War one so the origin the origin of the the Hoover Institution is is in fact historical and when it became the Hoover Institution and library on War Revolution and peace that was one version of its name the collection of archives which our colleague Eric now looks after was absolutely central to the mission of the institution and I'm just going to quote some words of Herbert Hoover before I hand over to Victor from his statement to the Stanford Board of Trustees in 1959 the overall mission of this institution he said is from its records to recall the voice of experience against the making of war and by the study of these records and their publication to recall man's endeavours to make and preserve peace and to sustain for America the safeguards of the American Way of life so as we commemorate the centenary of the Hoover Institution it's very important to remind ourselves that that was the original intention so I wanted to start by asking you Victor how far we've lived up to that original mission and in particular I wanted to maybe draw on your memories of one of the most distinguished historians to have been a Hoover fellow Robert conquest yeah well answer your first your second question first it was my fort a good fortune when I came in 2003 and four to have met and talked to I thought that three people who best embolized in a scholarly sense the Hoover Institution and it's pedigree and that was Robert conquest and Tom Sol and Milton Friedman and there was a definite theme in all of their conversations that there was an adversarial relationship with the trajectory of American society towards liberal present progressive manifestations one thing to remember I think about Hoover is that we think of it today as a so-called think-tank but I think you could make the argument for the first 50 years or maybe first 40 years it was a research institution and it was conservative but when Herbert Hoover I think in his early years felt that he was a conservative progressive in other words that he could transform progressivism and grounded in conservative ideas and they were not antithetical so he really did leave after this worst war in the history of civilization 17 million people killed that you could prevent not just a recurrence of World War one but a recurrence of all war by erudite sober and judicious intellectuals and researchers could find out why wars take place in general so that was part of the impetus about bringing this collection here the other thing was he was not overtly political or ideological because he just took for granted that California you know leland stanford being a governor was a neatly conservative place and it was but the big four and the traditions of entrepreneurial capitalism would always provide a nurturing landscape for hoover and then on the other hand he news David Starr Jordan very well so in his way of thinking although he gave this library and there were memoranda of agreements he never really felt that he had to articulate that that Hoover would always be free markets and smaller government because he assumed that California was a conservative place and Stanford especially was conservative and I think as he got older especially by 1960 in the 50s his relationship with California and Stanford changed and he saw he went back and said you know what we need more than a library we need a research institution in the 50s and I need to start to examine very carefully the relationship of Stanford with who the Hoover Institution and especially the the changing climate in California that's not to say California was liberal at 32 years of governor's between Reagan and Jerry Brown's second term but I think he thought that it was time to make a stand and that led to the appointments of Glen Campbell and then it's kind of strange that we almost had a half-century of just two directors and we never really articulated exactly what our relationship was with Stanford because it had been from the very beginning sort of an assumption and those the criteria for those assumptions I think had changed radically over the Hoover's vision was that there was a connection between a constitutional order that emphasized individual liberty and peace and so the underlying hypothesis as I understand it of his original project was that we need simultaneously to understand what makes for a free society if we are to understand what preserves peace or avoids war and this seems like a an obvious connection to conquests work when I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1980s the way in which you studied the history of the Soviet Union was the you read a bunch of books by fellow travelers by people who were sympathetic in one way or another to the project eh car for example his unbelievably tedious history of Soviet bureaucracy but my tutor Angus MacIntyre recognized that I was a troublemaker from early on and having assigned a whole bunch of pretty left-wing books on Soviet history he said oh well you probably you'll probably enjoy conquest as if I was being given some Zam start subversive reading assignment so I went off to the library and read conquest on on Stalin and the famine and the terror and I thought it was absolutely fantastic here was the scholar who wasn't afraid to call the Soviet Union by its real name it's to characterize it as the totalitarian oppressive state based on terror that it was and I remember being astounded to find that in the field he was a kind of marginal figure I was but so talk a little bit of I me you knew him better than I did we only met towards the end he was a journalist so he was considered when people could not refute the nature of his arguments per se they then attacked him as not being a scholar because he was not in the the academic community and I think it's good to remember that Freedman and soul and conquest we're all as they got older people began on both sides of the aisle to sort of say well they're senior statesmen but that we forget the vitriol and the furor that they had to deal with most of their lives because they were iconoclast and they were voices in the wilderness that were speaking the truth when people especially in the 40s and 50s coming out of the post-war order it was naturally assumed that the United States would become more and more left-wing and with government would get bigger and then the Enlightenment would the more bureaucracies the more think tanks the more educated people guarded Plato's guardians so to speak the less we would have of poverty of war violence and they were essentially saying that human nature is unchanging and this the Soviet Union was a great crime of the 20th century and they took a lot of heat and I think that's important for all of us in the Hoover community to try to live up to their ideals both as free-market and limited government thinkers but also the personal courage and outspokenness that they they were willing to to voice at a time when it was not very popular at all it's now 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall ver were very close to the that anniversary and I remember how after the collapse of communism there was a period when the Soviet archives were opened on earth and lo and behold all the new research that was done including research by Russian historians vindicated Bob conquest and discredited those people who in their various ways had tried to justify Stalin's regime yeah and now it's no longer so shocking when you go back and read a conquest work because he has been proven right but when he was publishing the reviews were often extraordinary hostile and hurtful and we should remember he was attacked from the right to this all of the CIA animal analysis were that the Soviet Union was pretty stable formidable all the way to the collapse we didn't really have an idea of the intrinsic weaknesses at his foundation he did and so when he was suggesting that this murderous regime genocide was inherently evil and inherently unstable there were nobody on the conservative side because that didn't quite jive with the idea that they have that we have to defeat this behemoth or it's going to bury us during the crucial failure but he was always sort of saying you're right that it's evil but the evil is based on lies and it's not going to sustain itself that was pretty that didn't win him any adherence necessarily or on the right as well so one of the things that I wanted to do this evening was to talk about one particular book that you wrote you'll recently published the second world wars plural it's not often that you admit to a colleague that you haven't read his book but until this weekend I haven't read the book and I thought I'd better as we were gonna have this conversation why he didn't blur but he didn't read it when he was said the manual I was I was kind of busy with Henry Kissinger when you were working on the second world war so I just want to say if you haven't bought this book and read us buy this book and read it it is an extraordinary brilliant work that really will make you rethink what we call world war 2 and it makes you rethink it from the very first page I'm gonna quote from that opening passage and then I'm gonna ask you a question Victor quote some 60 million people died in World War two on average 27,000 people perished on each day between the invasion of Poland September 1st 1939 and the formal surrender of Japan September 2nd 1945 bombed shot stabbed blown apart incinerated gasped or infected the axis loser killed losers killed or starved to death about 80% of all those who died during the war the Allied victors largely killed axis soldiers that defeated axis mostly civilians this was the worst war the biggest war as far as one can establish in all of human history was probably around two and a half percent of the world's 1938 population that died as a direct consequence of the war Victor why do you call them the second world wars plural I think what I was trying to suggest is that 1939 when Germany on September first invaded Poland there was still something known as the Great War and that was World War one or what you and United Kingdom call the first world war and that stayed as the great war all through the Polish campaign and then the next spring the invasion in Norway and Denmark in the spring and then the late spring invasion and conquest of Britain looks invert the Netherlands and then into the Balkans and the operation in 41 in Crete it was still considered the Cretan war the Greek war and then suddenly it's two things happened three things happen that nobody had ever envisioned Hitler turned on his erstwhile de facto ally even maybe they were a nonaggression fact but they were de facto allies and invaded on June 22nd 1941 he invaded the Soviet Union and then six months later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and then incredibly on December 11th Germany and Italy declared war the United States and then almost immediately these all these little Wars became one war and mysteriously world war one appeared in the lexicon what war - well well world war one for the great war oh I see people look back and said wow that was just one and now this thing for the first time was called sue the other thing I want to do to emphasize is that unlike World War one or the Civil War where there were two or three fronts or two or three modalities of fighting you could be in jungles of Burma you could be 30,000 feet in a b-29 over Japan you could be in the u-boat out in the North Atlantic you could be in the desert fighting Rommel you could be Rommel at the Atlantic Wall a year later but the sheer scope the geography and the type of war meant that it was almost incredible that it was considered one war there was I know as a little boy I would crawl under the table at Christmas dinners and my father was on a b-29 flew 40 missions over Tokyo my uncle was up in a Dutch Harbor and the Aleutians I had a another I was named after a Marine who was Swedish kid that was killed on Okinawa my uncle and then I had a cousin who had dinging fever in the Philippines and they were all arguing about World War two and they had nothing in common they said that their theater was the toughest or I I did this or that and I thought well this is all one thing but people the time didn't necessarily think it was one thing at all it's good that we have these memories to draw and you top movingly about your family's experience you some of you will be wondering why I'm wearing a paper flower in my lapel this of course is a red poppy to commemorate the approaching November 11th Remembrance Day in Britain Veterans Day here are my childhood memories are of somewhat similar arguments but in in our family it was my grandfather who had fought the Japanese in Burma arguing vehemently with my great uncle Alfred who was a lifelong communist and would always defend the Soviet Union even when my grandfather would remind him that the Soviet Union had been on Hitler's side at the beginning of the war that was when it got noisy but the Christmas dinner table and I'm sure I became a historian because of these family arguments and the first questions that I remember forming of a historical nature were well why why earth was a newspaper editor my grandfather had been the chief sub and the Glasgow Herald in Burma fighting the how could that possibly have happened to him and then how did my father's father at the age of 17 end up fighting the Germans in Belgium and spend most of the next three years in and out of the Western Front I'm not sure that our students people who are circa twenty these days have anything like that to draw on and it's worth maybe reflecting a little bit on how distant these events are to Millennials and Generation Z as compared to our generation we didn't fight but we kind of grew up with the war as an omnipresent of wars as an omnipresent layer and I think I'm a generation older even than you and so I'm 66 and I can remember World War one my grandfather was gassed in the at Bella wood and so he was a Swedish immigrant and he was wondering why he ended up its Fresno County one day and the next day he was in Belgium fighting for what he didn't really know he at the time he said but I think suppose you think my grandfather may have been there too he was in the trek he was actually there in early 1918 when the Germans launched their great Spring Offensive and he was shot through the chest and lucky to survive so they may have been within a matter of miles one another and he was a lifelong Emeril that he was gas mustard gas but so was my grandfather I remember his wheezing chest he would sit I would sit on his knee and his wheezing is really all I remember clearly of him he died when I was very young it's a culture too because as you know many of us are some of us in the audience there were TV shows 12 o'clock high there were movies the longest day and from the 40s 50s and 60s and there were war surplus stories who remember in every small town where you buy pea coats or you buy army boots and then you met these veterans everywhere and they all had kind of a code he was stateside he was in combat and that's all vanished and it makes it harder for this generation because I think in our lifetime we'll see the demise of most people who fought in World War two it's happening hundreds per day as we speak and it'll be a little bit more difficult and then we have sort of the rise of the therapeutic in our schools where we've convinced ourselves in our arrogance that with enough money in education we can change human nature and we're not going to see a war of that magnitude that generation had a tragic view that wars are prevented by deterrence and military readiness and I think that's dangerous if we forget that tragic view of human nature that we're not going to change that what human nature being what it is what one of the most powerful things about your second world wars book is that you bring to is a classicists Sensibility and I'm gonna just embarrass you by reading another quotation which captures very well how beautifully the book is written but also how original it is you you say the conflict was fought on familiar ground in predictable climates and weather by humans whose natures were unchanged since antiquity and thus who went to war fought and forged a peace according to time-honored presets its origins and end still followed larger contours of conflict as they developed over 2,500 years of civilized history Wars eternal elements a balance between powers deterrence versus appeasement collective security preemption and preventive attacks and peace brought by victory humiliation occupation still governed the conflict British American Italian and German soldiers often find themselves fortifying or destroying the Mediterranean stone work of the Romans Byzantines Frank's Venetians and Ottomans I love that passage it was quite different from anything that I'd ever thought about before talk a little bit about that classical quality of this conflict because as you say we think of the war as a kind of hi-tech war in which new weapons unseen in human history were deployed on a scale unseen in human history but at its root at least didn't original phase it was still a classical war certainly as it was fought in and around the Mediterranean I would have two observations I think that we in the postmarks age think that materialism governs human behavior and that we all go to war for oil or rubber or something but in the classical view just as important were human emotions honor fear as through Sidda tea set and perceived self-interest and there were a lot of things that happen that were irrational such as Hitler breaking the non-aggression pact and attacking the Soviet Union but that had a lot to do with ideology that didn't compute into economics that's important to remember the other thing is that the ancients remind us that deterrence is a little bit of an elaborate idea it means that everybody knows in the room their relative strengths so all of you are getting along because you have reputations you have money in the bank and you if there is an outlier or somebody who wants to cause trouble then people will rally around and stop that person but when that knowledge is lost and people who are weak seem strong and people who are strong seem weak then people do something they shouldn't and what happened in 1939 was the Soviet Union signed it non-aggression super act and that convinced Hitler that they were eager for a pact and they were not that strong at the same time that happened Churchill was not empowered yet and even though Chamberlain had made adjustments he still felt that the British Empire but any rational observer would say the British Empire was pretty strong and had much more resources in Germany and might have been able to defeat Germany by itself eventually but because they had not armed and Stanley Baldwin and said the bomber always gets through and they had not used that their potential to achieve military readiness Hitler got and on an unreliable and an inexact appraisal of British coupled without is a trifecta the United States remember once we mobilized in 1941 and 42 by 1945 the United States alone had a larger gross domestic product and Italy what was left of Italy Japan Germany the Soviet Union and Britain put together we produce more airframes in the whole world put together we produced more of each type of weapon in the entire world except tanks and artillery pieces and yet we were disarmed we had an army the size of Portugal's and so Hitler called us Cowboys we never armed even though we had sent 2 million people in World War one without losing one to Belgium it was an incredible achievement roar one but we had disarmed we were isolationist when you combined and combined Russian collaboration British appeasement American isolationism Hitler got this idea that either these powers were not powerful or they would not mobilize if attack or they didn't have spiritual fortitude and that was a grievous mistake because he led to a series of blunders that allowed those three powers to ally and once that was cemented by December 1941 there was no way at least he pretty put it this way he only had about a year to win the war before those a huge resources kicked in and they would kick in it's not something you talk about in your book but it seems to me it's always worth asking the question could Hitler have been stopped in 1938 I guess the the issue of appeasement has been brought back into the popular realm by the recent Churchill film darkest hour though that really focuses on 1940 it's it seems to me we could use a 1938 drama because in 1938 Churchill explains with extraordinary clarity of vision as our colleague Andrew Roberts has shown in his brilliant recent biography that the United Kingdom the British Empire had to stand up to Hitler and that playing for time in 1938 would not in fact be a good strategy because Hitler would get the time - this was the central flaw in the idea of appeasement that you needed more time that was how Chamberlain sold it that was how his his ministers and officials rationalized it as if as if the time wouldn't also be granted to Hitler Hitler's position was much weaker during the Czechoslovakian crisis than it was during the Polish crisis because by September 1939 he had done his deal with Stalin he did not have that deal in the summer of 1938 and to me the great what-if has always been what if instead of sticking to appeasement Britain had cold Hitler's Bluff and actually threatened war over Czechoslovakia rather than sold the Czechs down the rivers as they did as Chamberlain did at Munich do you think there was a scenario in which the mower could have been avoided no absolutely and there you can make the argument on a number of levels by 1939 the French are beat tank was better than anything in the German military when the yonkos took place and 38 tanks broke down the Germans were inept the Saarland clevis site the Rhineland they were scared stiff that when they broke the Versailles Treaty and started formally forming the Luftwaffe that the British who had hurricane fighters and the super Ring Spitfire was already starting to come out in 39 it was as good if not better than the me-109 remember the United States had a four-engine bomber the b-17 as early as 38 Germany never built a single operable for injured bomber northern Japan nor didn't Italy in the entire war which meant that the Germans didn't have the rain they shouldn't have to hit key Soviet targets so we were we could have easily we the Americans could have easily mobilized and and won mark that shows that was a brilliant southerner segregationist although Karl events in a series of naval acts in 35 3730 night had on the drawing boards at Pearl Harbor the plan to build 26 Essex carriers we built 146 carriers more than all the world put together light escort and fleet carriers but that fleet even as disadvantages we were in 41 we still had the second largest Navy in the world Britain had the largest Navy only problem was we were not as large as Japan in the Pacific but we would be within a year and so it it reminds us had we just done this two or three years earlier Hitler would have not been able to take over what is now the European Union and the richest part of the Soviet Union so we could found ourselves instead by late 41 with a maniac that had I shouldn't say maniac in the sense of he was lunatic vicious and genocidal but conniving and cunning from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert and from the English Channel 240 miles outside Moscow we gave him that advantage by being on ready he you are again later in the book by July 1942 Hitler controlled much of what is now the European Union as you've just said nearly 1 million square miles that the Soviet Union's most populated in richest land were under German occupation Hitler's armies were still poised at the doorsteps of Leningrad and Moscow Army Group south was barreling forward seemingly unstoppable on its way to the oil fields of the Caucasus with few enemies ahead and fewer suppliers mind Rommels advances in north africa and the fall of Tobruk raised the specter of africa called Panzers in egypt and perhaps eventually beyond sewers in terms of manpower and territory under its rule the Third Reich now greater than Rome stretched from the Arctic to the Sahara and from the Atlantic to 2,000 miles east of Berlin on the Volga River and that brings us to the key question could the axis have one I went through the betting books of the Oxford colleges once and it was fascinating to see how uncertain our people were particularly at that stage in the war about its outcome one of the reasons that I passionately believe in the study of history and in particular the study of history on the basis of archival research of documents from the period is that one can recapture the uncertainty of the past we know how it turned out they didn't there's a wonderful menu you can see if you go to the Senate dining room in Washington DC on the back of which I think five or six senators bet when the United States would enter World War two this was in the summer of 1941 and two or three of them thought it would be that year one of them wrote never so in the summer of 1941 it still seemed conceivable to an elected representative of the American people of the United States would never enter the war so we don't I think we can't assume it was a done deal despite the vast disproportion in resources clearly by the time the powers had sorted and it was access fee allies the overwhelming economic and demographic advantage was with the Allies but could the axis yet yet of one or at least avoided complete destruction I think they could have and we can do it by what they actually did and the counterfactual what they could have done but what they actually did if you take an arbitrary date of September 1942 we look at the map there into Egypt Rommels only with three divisions and yet he's all the way into Egypt and all that's between him is Montgomery at El Alamein and he's trying to get to Suez and cut off all oil and imports for the British Empire into the homeland he could have done that that was a but at the same time he's doing that even after mid wave form Midway was supposedly the turning point it wasn't really because five battles off Guadalcanal in September October the net result of it we only had one wounded carrier in the entire Pacific Saratoga was torpedoed the Yorktown had been sunk the Lexington had been sunk the wasp and Hornet were lost we only had one the enterprise at the same time we're talking 42 the German army is still only 50 miles outside of Moscow it's five miles outside of Lenin it's headed toward the caucus oilfields had he and we Hitler did not intend to break off and go into Stalingrad but it looked pretty much at that period that the Japanese and the Germans and the Italians were that were where the German we're gonna win and more importantly we didn't know how the 1st Marine Division which was formed in the 30s and 40s would hold up against these veterans from 10 years of fighting in China on Guadalcanal we didn't know quite what would if a American and a b-17 could fly in daylight bombing without fighter escort lose 8 to 10% of mission and keep going and so in that period and 42 what happened is suddenly the u.s. engine of arsenal democracy kicked in but more importantly the u.s. 1st Marine Division and the 2nd Marine proved themselves not just comparable on water canal to the Japanese in Jungle fire but superior to them nobody thought that would be possible and then in North Africa under George Patton there were moments when the Americans without any experience were matching British soldiers ability to defeat Germany on its own terms and then when the strategic bombing sort of proved not to be what it was hyped up we didn't quit so we lost 40,000 Airmen Britain lost 40,000 Airmen to prove what that you have to fly the British have to fly at night with fighter escort we have to fly during the day at escort but everybody thought we'd quit Guderian made a great the German Nazi general said with the Das Reich division I can kick those Cowboys off the beach no matter how it was just one division and he was speaking as somebody had fought two or three years against the Soviet Army and yet in that year we proved that we could we would mobilize and Britain would mobilize and the Soviet Union would kill three out of four German soldiers during the war and not quit everybody thought that Hitler said you kick in the door the Soviet Union will climb ha General Holder the head of ok eight said it's no exaggeration to say after two weeks that the Soviet Union is defeated and yet that didn't happen the final thing I would say in that is that that's what happened it was close run but had the German army not invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd 1941 and it was split most of the people in ok W in ok aged the supreme command of the ver mark and the German army did not want to go in the Soviet Union at least they said that after the war but had they not gone on the Soviet Union there's no evidence and the primary sources that was stolen as rumor was going to preempt and it was a pre and they had to beat him to the punch so I think he had the entire European continent under his control and he would he if he hadn't gone in the Soviet Union eventually he would been able to organize it economically in a way that he never did once he would in the Soviet Union one interesting question is what would have happened if there had been better strategic coordination between the members of the axis if the Japanese instead of attacking the United States and the European empires in Asia had attacked the Soviet Union they probably wouldn't have fared very well they had some sense of their inferiority to the Red Army on the other hand it would have forced Stalin to deploy divisions to the east I can't think of any other way the there could have been a different outcome to world war 2 than that yeah interestingly you can you can play this as a game if you want to reenact the strategic options of world war two there's a computer game a strategic computer game called making history which I helped design because I thought the only way to resolve these questions is to come up with a strategic game that has the correct inputs so unlike most of these games we actually made sure that we had the correct capabilities for all different players and once you start constructing a game like that you realize just how many players there were so I spent some time on this when I was at Harvard because I thought it could be a useful teaching tool but I'm not myself a game player and I don't really see you in front of a Sony Playstation either Victor so I I got my teenage then teenage son Felix to experiment with the game and he was quite interested in strategic games so he took it off up to his room and I thought no more about it and then one morning he came running down the stairs I did it I did it I said what do you mean I completely forgotten about the computer game I did it I won world war ii as the axis and I thought what have I done but the way he done it was that that having run all sorts of difference replayed it about a hundred times and arrived at the conclusion that if you could only coordinate the attack on the Soviet Union then you actually could do it because you could take the Soviet Union out of the war that way I think that's I don't want to imply when I said that in my infinite wisdom it was stupid for the Germans it was stupid but what I'm trying to get at is historians have to be very careful post facto not to pass judgment on people who had reasons for doing things that were stupid so let's take but why is it stupid to think that the Soviet Union was a completely rotten corrupt an unpopular system well Mike collaborative wasn't though you see we were trying to put ourselves into these awful Nazis mentality and the 'red Hitler of 1941 it's June 22nd your generals say my Fuhrer the Soviet Union is giving us enormous amounts of oil and wheat and we've got to knock out Britain and let's not do that and he's saying ah they invaded Finland in 1939 they lost 500 thousand little Finland pushed him out then he says they said but my nephew said wait a minute they they liquidated their officer corps killed forty thousand people then they're saying mine Fuhrer he said listen when we divided up Poland we had a demarcation line we got there in three weeks they couldn't even get to there so there that's what he thought and then of course Neil was referring to and according to German mythology they could see the spires of the Kremlin and they were at the first subway station on December 1st and then suddenly 60,000 of the crack Russian troops take the trans-siberian railroad and they appear before Moscow and that offensive Peters out and everybody today says well why didn't the Japanese just attack from wladis stovic and go east and tie the Russians and there was a reason for that too and one of the things was Japan had been fighting Markel's marshal Zhukov in 1939 in August and he was part part of he they thought they were part of the fascist Solidarity movement and suddenly they wake up one morning and Hitler signed a non-aggression act with their enemies releasing more Russian troops against the Japanese so the Japanese say ah we're gonna do the same thing to the Germans so in April they signed a non-aggression pact with Russia and so when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union at the first three weeks he said to general Belmont make sure that those Japanese don't want to come in and get our spoils because he thought it would be then after six weeks he said why don't they come in and they said my Fuhrer we we double-cross them and they double-crossed us the other thing was that in terms of Japanese military capability if you looked at their navy it was westernized to the core it was shipped by ship training is good I'm not better than the Americans or the British in 1941 if you look at aircraft fighter aircraft it was comparable if you look at the army it was not comparable in terms of armor and artillery and so Yamamoto and the Navy had said look don't go into the Soviet Union because we don't we're not up to Western standards on the army but let me bomb Pearl Harbor let me run wild because our carriers outnumber them the Americans and the British so there was a reason why it turned out to be flawed in retrospect but for a while it looked like they could they could pull it off I want to spend a little time before we open it up to questions on the lessons of history but before we get there I can't resist offering a kind of counterpoint to your second world wars plural with a book I wrote about 12 years ago war of the world yet singular the argument there was that we should regard the entire period from the russo-japanese war of 1904 to the end of the Korean War as a single period of more or less uninterrupted conflict and that when you looked at it that way you could see something that's quite hard to explain otherwise and that is the location of conflict there are really two parts of the world where you don't want to live in the first half of the 20th century one is that triangle between the Baltic Sea the Black Sea in the Balkans you know Ukraine etc and the other is anywhere near the Korean Peninsula because those places see a colossal percentage of the violent death in the 20th century and they keep being theatres of violence Ukraine is just more or less never at peace there is no end of world war one in Ukraine it just keeps going the slaughter keeps going through the so-called Russian Civil War it then is continued in the form of domestic policy by Stalin and even at the end of 1945 there is still an atmosphere of of toxic violence and something similar is true of Korea in those parts of China and Japan close to it do you think there's any merit in that conceptual framework of a long war that extends really for half a century I would I might modify it I think one way of looking at it is that from 1871 the franco-prussian war and the unification of Germany until 1945 that's a 70 75 year history it says largely a story of how the world in general in Europe in particular is going to deal with what they call the German problem once Germany is unified it runs into France very easily in franco-prussian war fights World War One in fights world war ii and the existential question is how do we deal with a centrally located unified german-speaking nation whose population and size is larger than any other country and it doesn't seem to abide by post-war agreements and has a this is predating Nazism but 19th century racialism or at least a sense of national blood and soil that and it goes back to Hegel and Spangler and people like that who believe that Germany was never incorporated in the Roman Empire so it was beyond the Danube and beyond the Rhine it was the only country that had a racial essence so that word Volk did not mean you spoke German and you lived in Germany but you were a racially different person and you were not a member of the Mongol wise Roman Empire because as Tacitus said in the Cremona it was pristine and that was deeply imprinted into the German mindset and so the question for that 75 year continuum is what do we do with Germany and that ended in 45 when the Allies said the problem with a Versailles Treaty was not that it was too harsh it was not nearly as harsh as the September program that the Germans had envisioned for ending World War one if they were victorious it was not as harsh as a treaty they submitted the Soviet Union to address the poverty line out as harsh as the franco-prussian terms they dictated but the problem of the Versailles Treaty was that it humiliated Germany without forcing them to be weak we didn't occupy the country we didn't teach them that they had been beaten they were bragging within six months that they had surrendered in Belgium and France on the offensive so we're not going to repeat that mistake and the irony was if you look at the terms the Allies dictated in 1945 they were far harsher than Versailles and they kept the peace because they understood a fundamental truth that to have peace you have to defeat the enemy humiliate them and then show magnanimity and we did all of that and I think that I gave this lecture once in Europe and a person from France said so you think it ended in 1945 the German and I said I hope it did he said it didn't he said who runs the EU today who tells Eastern Europe that they have to take illegal aliens who takes tells southern Europe what the financial terms who tells Britain what the terms are brexit is who tells you that they're going to spend 1.3 percent of GDP in defense and you're going to like it and I started thinking like that and he said they're back and and then I said well why why aren't they going to start a ward you said ah because your grandparents are a lot smaller than you were after World War two they knew that the division of Europe would not last but they made sure that France and Britain the two weaker powers had nuclear arms and Germany today doesn't that's pretty skeptical and pessimistic view of human nature but I will say I just looked at the poll pew the Pew poll international survey polls what we about nationalist sympathies and of all the countries in the EU and NATO what country has the least positive view of the United States the answer is of course Germany thirty five percent if you think it's just the animus toward Trump even under Obama it was the lowest of any European country so it's something that our forefathers understood but in today's there again it's not polite to say there's such a thing as national character so one lesson that you draw is beware of Germany that that's a lesson that Margaret Thatcher would have would have so interestingly since you mentioned Mito on I'll share something from Charles Moore's new third volume of his extraordinary wonderful biography of Margaret Thatcher and he tells the story of as German reunification was unfolding in real time eighty nine ninety and the decisions had to be taken about what to do and it became fairly clear to Margaret Thatcher that George HW Bush wasn't about to stand in the way meet all went to London and had a meeting with with Thatcher and that the conversation went along these lines who these terrible Germans were simply can't possibly trust them a meter on says we we madam that you are quite right about that terrible people then he immediately goes to Bonn and sees Helmut Kohl and says you would not believe what that awful woman Thatcher says about you Germans and so more shows that the meter on actually stitched Margaret Thatcher up remember Lord your Lord Ismay NATO slogan the purpose of NATO is Lord Ismay the first secretary-general said was to keep Russia out America in and the Germans down and we don't really repeat that at least until recently the any other reflections on the lessons we can learn at the end of war of the world I said there are really three things that help you predict where massive organized lethal conflict will happen in economic volatility but it's not accidental that Central Europe suffered extremely severely in hyperinflation in the early 20s and then the severe depression of the early 30s ethnic disintegration multi-ethnic societies were the places that became most violent in the period of the 1914 to 45 period and and then thirdly empires and decline it was actually that the period at which the empires of Europe fell apart that conflict escalated these were somewhat contrarian reflections but they led me to warn that the place that was most likely to see escalated conflict in our time was not Europe I don't think we actually need to worry terribly about Germany it was the Middle East because there you had the combination of economic volatility ethics disintegration and potentially an empire and decline if the United States as a quasi Empire simply whips away do you think there's anything to that analogy I I do but I also would add that there were peculiar on unfortunately a bad array of events in 1939 that made this war more lethal and not just any war but all wars we think combined in history as much as we can calibrate one was that it was at the apex of technology in the 20th century we were starting to see that we had the basic designs for things like napalm and nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets and not guns that shot at three hundred bullets per second the Sturm go war that could twelve hundred bullets and we started at tanks and armored the second thing was the world was much bigger was two billion people so there were more people to be fighting it it was also a long war most wars I mean thirty years war seven year but they're not constant this was a six year war longer than civil war longer than World War one and and then in this history of Western warfare we have cycles of offense/defense by that I mean walls could pretty much stop a Greek battering ram until you had a catapult then when you had a torsion catapult they could destroy a city and then they had to make a new design for walls but in that back and forth this was clearly a period when there was no such thing as calve law or body armor and the offense was predominant and finally I think it's important especially for our generation our kids and grandchildren that we've come up with this idea that America is is to be blamed as sinful for Hiroshima or Britain for Dresden but never forget this that of the sixty to sixty-five million people that were killed in World War two you can make the argument that sixty-six almost seventy percent up to about forty million or forty-five million were killed in two situations the German army killing unarmed people whether the Holocaust are Russian civilians they killed twenty-seven million Russians and only ten million are more soldiers and they with a Holocaust and the other atrocities in Poland another twelve and then 16 million Chinese civilians were killed by Japan so if you wanted to be reductionist and somebody said quick tell me what World War two was about you could say it was largely a story of German and Japanese soldiers butchering innocent people in Eastern Europe and Russia and in China and we should also remember if you look at an army or military as a killing machine in terms of how many people this army civilians or combatants killed versus how many they lost the ratios are just astounding that the German army in the Japanese army killed at ratios of seven eight to one we should remember when the Americans landed in detail we had d-day we had air support we had logistical superiority we had numerical support superiority and that ten months the Germans killed 1.8 American soldiers for every one that we lost it was a formidable killing machine so next time somebody says Dresden or Hiroshima we should say well how else given the limitations at the time are we to stop you people from killing 40 million innocent unarmed people yeah I think that really changes the complex I think that's absolutely right I now would like to invite members of the audience to ask us questions I would prefer questions to statements in fact I'll cut you off if I detect a statement there are microphones strategically positioned in the two aisles if you could please please resist the temptation to give a speech because it simply eats up airtime that might go to others so it's got to be one sentence and have a question mark at the end of it yes please sir first thank you very much for your conversation the situation with China is something that people will be talking about so I wanted to see what are the lessons that you've been talking about for this last century that will help us to resolve the Chinese problem Thanks I've been arguing recently that we're already in Cold War - yes and we'll have to start calling the original Cold War Cold War one just as we had to start calling the Great War World War one my view is that that's a preferable scenario to Graham Allison's Thucydides trap in which we end up having a hot war with China because we make the mistakes that Britain made towards Germany of not - tearing it but Victor what's your current thinking on the the Chinese challenge I tend to agree with you you know I think for all the erratic behavior somewhat of the Trump administer Trump in his foreign policy and for all of especially at Hoover our distrust of tariffs I think that Trump's policy toward China and what we've learned about statements and the Chinese party Congress is the last few years that they really did feel that there was a trajectory that they were going to assume world hegemony and that worldly jiminee would not function in the fashion of the post-war order led by the United States would be a different world and with technological appropriation and copyright infringement patent theft dumping currency manipulation Spratly Islands they had created a mindset that the United States and its allies either could not or would not deny that reality was going to take place and what what's striking to me is that of the all of the controversies of the Trump administration this policy of confronting China has has won the most bipartisan support so now what you're seeing is people on the left or coming forward and are saying there's a million people in reeducation camps they're torturing people for their religious beliefs Tibet was not an aberration it's it's essentially it's not China bashing but people are saying that the argument on trade and the economy and the military is bookended by human rights and there's believe it or not it's about the one issue that as in the last three years it's reaching a consensus here in Europe not quite our people publicly gonna say I think it was time to challenge China and I think by that I mean not to start a war but to prevent a war because it there was a lot of eerie parallels to 39 and by that I mean by any objective realistic measurement of comparative Chinese and American strength we still have almost double GDP of China they have three times the population and reductionists terms one American was producing twice the amount of goods and services as three of his Chinese counterparts and when you look at every aspect of China versus the United States military we were superior and yet like 39 China had convinced itself because of the projections that we were suffering from the Western disease or demography our spirituality our competitiveness our productivity that they were going to be destined and I think this is a reminder that it'll make more or less likely because people are saying to China you really didn't know you you should have kept quiet another ten years and could stop the boasting and the cheating because then you could have really pulled it off but like Germany you jumped the gun there are all kinds of fascinating analogies I will just plug one other Hoover historian who's not here Frank Dakota whose books his trilogy on Mao's China seemed to me to bear comparison with Bob conquests work on the Soviet Union because he makes it very clear the nature of the state and we should not be at all surprised by the way in which in Xin Jiang that the Chinese government is treating the weaker minority it's over peace with the PRC's history another question yes sir my question is about black seeds so two questions first one will it happen and follow-up if it were to happen the attention of Germany and the instinct to dominate everybody how would that play in a past praxis a scenario and habit effect of the United States could Germany become strong again a sense that this is a question more for me than feve exhibit you may want to chip in begs it has already happened in the sense that the point of brexit was simply that Boris Johnson should become Prime Minister you laugh but that's absolutely correct the reason that Boris Johnson who's probably the most memorable politician of his generation I speak with some experience I've known him for 35 years the reason that he backed brexit was in order to dislodge David Cameron from the position of Prime Minister had he not backed Briggs it I suspect the referendum would have gone the other way and David Cameron would still be Prime Minister and life would really be quite dull so the point of brexit was to dislodge Cameron that having been achieved like so much in Boris's life everything else is collateral damage it doesn't terribly matter what happens in the next year because the process of negotiation with the Europeans will go on almost indefinitely there are some economists in the audience I see my colleague John Cochran the ways I think about Briggs it is it's a flow not a stock there will not be an end state the negotiations will go on interminably like the worst divorce of all time but the key objective was that Boris should become Prime Minister most of British politics is like this my old mentor at Cambridge Morris cowling wrote a wonderful book about electoral reform in the 19th century and another wonderful book that looks at appeasement and his central theme was whatever the British elite appears to be divided about whatever it appears to be arguing about is a mere facade behind which they are deciding which atone Ian should be Prime Minister as for Germany this is a way of by the way simplifying the whole problem if it's getting too boring at dinner parties just say just say what I've said and the discussion will be over as for Germany I want to invoke the memory of a great historian Norman stone who was one of the few historians that Margaret Thatcher had any time for and she consulted Norman on the subject of German reunification he was one of the historians president of the famous gathering at Chequers to advise her and while other people in the room were eager to share the Prime Minister's fear that Germany would become dominant once again in Europe Norman made the great observation that acquiring East was like acquiring five Liverpool's and this was a brilliant observation quite true since it was nothing but economic deadweight and still is I don't regard there as being some new version of the German question I'm somewhat inclined to agree with my old friend Radek Sikorski who said the problem in Europe today is not German power its lack of German power it's Germany's commitment to weakness commitment to not spending enough on its own defence and the central hypocrisy which is absolutely key to understanding the Federal Republic and Viktor alluded to it the hypocrisy that Germany has depended on the United States and it should be served the United Kingdom for its present-day freedom depends on the United States and to some degree the United Kingdom for its security and yet feels entitled to hate on the United States in its domestic politics that's a German problem but it's not the German problem of 1914 to 1945 Viktor I would just say to your question whatever brexit is at least some people in Britain and the United States thought there was a reaffirmation of a long tradition of British independence and exceptionalism and by that I mean the American Revolution was different from the French Revolution probably because of our British heritage the British Enlightenment the Scottish enlightenment much different than the French enlightenment and for all the Socialists creepage creeping socialism in Britain it did under Thatcher have a a recalibration and what I think the problem with Europe is and I it's very you have to be careful of criticizing the EU because we haven't had these three wars that we had in the past and that's an achievement but that being said it's increasingly anti-democratic it doesn't believe in Clemmie sites by the people anymore it has a huge bureaucracy it's got a stagnant economy it either cannot or will not defend itself it's got a declining demography that's really critical and just on basic questions if you ask somebody in Europe are you patriotic the response is much lower than most places in the West and if you ask are you religious they may say it may superficially appear similar to the United States or places like Australia or Israel but when you ask further and probe deeper you pray I think the average European response is something 18 percent of the people versus 68 percent all I'm suggesting not as a zealot event by any means but by traditional historical criteria the EU has got a lot of problems and I don't see that it's going if it doesn't change radically it's not going to it's not only not going to play a major role in world affairs and that's too bad because it's given the world will those countries have given the world a lot of great contributions but it's going to be increasingly problematic for the United States and I think for Britain as well so I welcome grexit not to be disruptive but to reestablish a Brit British independence which as a fond admirer of Britain I think has done the world so much good with just one last thing when we talk about world war two we finally you know just take Britain it was the only country of the major powers to fight the first day of the war and the last day no other country did it and secondly it was the only country that entered the war that either did not attack another country or was attacked it entered the war for the principle polish sovereignty and so that tradition although we've had a mixed response to it is invaluable and I always I think a lot of us didn't want to see it absorbed into the Continental project and it was becoming that way and I hope that it'll shock Britain to reassert its individuality exceptionalism one of the best essays on this subject was published by our friend Chris Caldwell in the Claremont Review recently one of the most insightful essays on greg's that you will read written by an American please another question they very much I flew in from Oklahoma City so I was course gonna come off and ask a question pertaining to the UK does the u.s. have a contingency contingency plan if Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister and second question - Victor in - in 2016 you wrote about that the US will need to develop a strategy along with Russia to contain China at the past issue of foreign affairs there were two essays in there that said the exact same thing and 2016 as far as far as I'm aware you're the only one saying that so to bring about that point how do we contain putinism while at the same time containing containing China with Russia's assistance - terrific questions I'll do a quick one on Corbin one can't rule out a nightmare scenario on December the 12th in which Boris Johnson falls short of a Tory majority and the potential exists for a coalition between labour the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish nationalists and the leader of the Labour Party would be the prime minister of that coalition it doesn't seem like a very high probability scenario at the moment the polls look relatively encouraging but the fact that the brexit party is running candidates all over the map is extremely bad news and the fact that if one just looks at social media in the UK right now labour is getting much more traction with its propaganda than the Tories these things are reasons to be worried is there a contingency plan well I know a great many people who have a contingency plan to get the hell out of the UK if Jeremy Corbyn is Prime Minister particularly should be said and this is no laughing matter Jewish friends of mine who rightly discern that amongst his many many many defects and sins jeremy corbyn's track record of anti-semitism is probably the most troubling so yeah I'm not sure if the US has a contingency plan I certainly am unaware of one but there is every reason to be concerned because this election is like the last election highly unpredictable in 2017 at the beginning of the election campaign the only question was how big would Teresa magic Mays majority be and she proceeded to lose it on election day so I must say I'm a little nervous I'll be very relieved indeed if if we survive December the 12th without that nightmare scenario and I didn't hear that was your question about our policy of visa vie Russian and Russia yeah I mean this was a question which interests you he was a Kissinger scholar you remember yeah that Kissinger said one of the pillars of foreign calls you should be that China should be no better friend of Russia than it is the United States and Russia should be no better friend to China than it is to the United States and we we should be closer to them that they are to one another we both for thinking along these lines in 2016 because I remember writing a piece from the American interest saying well here's an opportunity for the United States to rethink its relationship with Russia and indeed its relationship with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council because China is the big issue now it hasn't happened and if anything there is no closer relationship today in the world than between Russia and China so I don't know what we do about that I think I think it was we can argue about why that occurred and it does no good to say Russia has an economy that's 120 at the United size the United States it's a it's a major power it's got 7500 deliverable nuclear weapons and it has sophisticated technology and it's been after the Nixon administration successfully got it out of the Middle East we invited it back in in 2011 after 40 some years so it's a it's a major threat and it's a major player and China of course economically is a much greater threat but now how did that happen and what can we learn from it I think the Obama administration came in and we've we forget that the Geneva reset button that was pushed by Hillary Clinton was a reaction toward George Bush's not very tough but at least he did something about the Ossetian invasion they said you know what a Bush polarized Russia so there was an that I think a well meant effort to reset and have a date aunt but it was based on a fundamental fallacy and that was that you would on the one hand lecture this thug Putin about human rights but on the other hand when it came to Crimea or Ukraine or missile defense in Europe or cheating on intermediate cruise missile on the treaty that you wouldn't really be tough and he being Putin looked at that Magnum entity as weakness to be exploited rather than to be reciprocated so that and then when Trump came in there was a disappointment with reset and Russia does do all sorts of interferences as it can and now we're into a Russians under every bed and we've we just need to take a deep breath and say this is who Putin is and we have to work with him and we want to play him off against China we want to play China off against Russia and not in a cynical way but just in a very overt and and from a position of power and we're not going to lecture anybody on their moral shortcomings unless we have the military or economic will power to enforce deterrence but it because if we look weak and we lecture people whether it's red lines or human rights it only erodes our credibility and so what we have to do is try it as a nation to come together and say Russia is Russia before Putin and after Putin and it's a valuable pillar in American foreign policy and Ronald Reagan and George Shultz did that brilliantly and and Kissinger did too and I don't know why how we we suffer this historical amnesia but we've really alone at the last six or seven or eight years it should be said that it's hard to think how we can prize them apart when Russia is clearly willing to be the junior partner and to allow that to allow the Chinese with their one belt one Road initiative to run all across what used to be Russia's strategic backyard and so what central I think to this relationship is that Putin's recognized that in order to have any kind of leverage in the Middle East or indeed in Eastern Europe he has to acquiesce in China's China's predominance in in Asia and as long as that's the case I'm not sure what exactly we can do another question from the side so this is a question for VDH my little brother's 15 he lives in Fox Alaska population 417 up from 300 and 2000 and he wanted to know who's your favorite general from history and why he wants to be a military historian favorite general favorite general in history all armies or just American well I have a I have a an embarrassing affection for William Tecumseh Sherman I know that and so on I once made the mistake of giving a lecture on him at Louisiana State University the Civil War and they said that it was pretty heated but what Sherman understood and I think all generals there's a big divide between generals and it goes back to Clausewitz and Dell broke and it's do you destroy the Army in the field or do you destroy the mechanism that produces the army in the field and grant of course was close with you go after the army and you destroy it but he couldn't do that and so he we lost more we being the north a Union lost more men in the last year the war than the first three combined that often happens as Niels pointed out Sherman had a different idea and that was that military readiness power the expression of force is a as a result or a divid variety of economic cultural and social factors so when he dreamed up going into Atlanta and burning Atlanta and then going all the way to Savannah and then going all the way the Carolinas what he was saying to people was the Confederates have told us for four years they have superior manhood and they don't need resources and Here I am in the middle of slave-owning Georgia and slave-owning Carolinas and here's how Cobb in Georgia and here's Wade and they can't stop me and he killed far fewer people then grant did but he did something that the Confederates would never forgive him he humiliated them he freed slaves he burned down plantations he didn't burn down as alleged people's homes or cities he concentrated on rail Arsenal's and plantations and what I'm getting at is that what stopped the Civil War was not grant destroying Lee's army and taking Richmond he never took Richmond it was this huge army of the West these were of the two hundred and fifty regiments two hundred and sixteen were from four states Michigan Ohio Minnesota and Indiana and they love camping out the heat what I'm trying to say like Patton and others he took an army understood what its strengths were emphasized it and said I can so weaken and humiliate the Confederate ability to make war that its army will die on the vine so he pulled up at Appomattox and he had demonstrated to the south that they wanted to go home and protect their families because this nut was running wild in their rear Patton had the same idea to lesser extent and it's been the United States we go back and forth we bomb Germany we bomb Japan but then we go and fight the Battle of balls or we fight these head-on battles but I think Sherman in a very paradoxical and perverted almost perverse way has said if you want to stop the killing of war in the battlefield you have to address the ability of the in enemy to make war and if you can stop the ability to wake war then you don't really have to go out and fight ahead on Clausewitz and collision people kill I believe hugely pleased to hear that there is somebody in Alaska who wants to study military history he may be the only kid in America who wants to study military history because let's face it our educational establishment is doing its very best to put people off military history I I want to make an additional suggestion don't don't just you can pass this on don't just study the generals my heroes are in fact the ordinary soldiers and I want to name one bill millon bill millon was the bagpiper who played the pipes as Lord Fraser Lord Lovitz led his men ashore at d-day and he simply played the bagpipes as Lord Lovitz men went ashore now that's heroism he was portrayed brilliantly in the longest day in the longest day he has a cameo appearance live to the ripe or ripe old age died at 2010 I can't imagine anything more magnificent in all of military history of course I'm a Scott so I would say this but to have played the bagpipes on the beaches at d-day and lived the Germans said later they didn't shoot at him because they assumed he must be mad we've just got time for one more question please hi Victor in their most recent book you very cogently and thoroughly make the case that Trump is some sort of crass tragic hero and I'm wondering if you might agree with the statement that maybe the longest living legacy that he may have is the end of global globalist economic policies which seem to be falling out of favor on both sides and in countries where these are not yet bipartisan they're there large movements too focused internally within the country economically in 20 seconds Victor well we're not going to talk about politics tonight but I will say that he defeated 16 better-qualified in traditional terms candidates in the primary and he defeated somebody in the electoral college that had far more resources and he did that by a fundamental animal cunning and that was he said that there's a vast interior of the country and the bike holes to elite are not addressing the deindustrialization of the interior asymmetrical relations with China and an open border and these people did not take opioids or they were not made deplorable or redeemable because they drove away industry the economic base drove them away and the answer to them is not to go good of the fracking fields or learn coding so he of all people showed an empathy and came up with an economic program and even a foreign policy whether you like it or not it's based on the idea that an optional where war is not necessarily in a cost-benefit analysis always worthwhile so that took a lot and I think that changed things so after Trump is gone whether it's 2020 I don't think we're going to go back to the John McCain Romney I think that the Republican Party whether it likes it or not is now a solidly middle class and upper middle class party and it's going to appeal to things in that class that it didn't before and and I'm a big admirer of Hayek and creative destruction but when you say creative destruction creates greater economic efficiency it does you have to say that but you have to have a little qualifier and we're going to do something about the the casualties of that so nobody in their right mind ever thought a raconteur from Manhattan would be the first Republican candidate to start using language like our farmers our vets our lathe workers our the first person plural possessive had McCain or Romney said our and showed that and how can this man be empathetic but he and that's a commentary on the opposition that people in the interior found him more empathetic than a traditional Republican candidate and six million of them came out to vote who otherwise had not voted Republican or had not voted at all so that's his legacy to answer your question that he's changed the Republican Party at least into a party of workers and middle-class people as well as the elite well we have covered 100 years of history and of course we ended up with Donald Trump the only surprising thing is that we got to Briggs it sooner but I hope that you'll agree that this has been a fascinating opportunity to reflect on the Hoover institution's historical legacy and also we've had a wonderful chance to share some insights with one of the world's great military historians Victor Davis Hanson please join me in one last announcement to make there are drinks there is a reception just outside the door and a for sale there's a veteran on stage I better yield the mic to him there are copies of Bethel Patenaude defining moments the first 100 years of the Hoover Institution no discussion of a hundred years of history is complete without the presence of very nearly a hundred years of history George Shultz Georgia thank you so much [Applause] thank you so much [Applause]
