"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty,
and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its commonwealths last for a thousand
years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" It's Monday, May 13th, 2024, and welcome back
to Goodfellas, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic,
political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow. I'll be your moderator today, joined by
two or three of our usual Goodfellas. Sitting next to me, the international man
of history himself, in California for some explained reason. If you bet Niall be in
California, you won the bet. Congratulations. Of course, Niall Ferguson. Sitting at the other end of the stage is the
economist John Cochrane, a Californian, though he may not always cop to it. You may have noticed, by the way,
a bit of an unusual setting for us. We're coming to you live from the newly minted,
newly opened George P. Schultz Building here on the campus of Stanford University
at the Hoover Institution. We are without H.R. McMaster today, but
more than filling in for H.R., I think. The preeminent historian, Hoover Senior
Fellow, the one and only Stephen Kotkin. You've asked for him, you've begged for him,
you've nagged us to no end to get him, and now you got him. Steve, welcome back to Goodfellas. Thank you so much for the return invitation. I don't get so many of those. I get a lot of first invitations. But substituting for H.R., I don't think we
should tell the audience that I'm going to be in any way a substitute for H.R. We hope he gets back as soon as possible. So we're going to do something a
little different today, gentlemen. We're going to talk about counterfactuals. And what do we mean by counterfactuals? Historical what-ifs. Now, it's easy to get very goofy about this. I remember when I was a very young man, I
was watching Saturday Night Live, and this was in January 1978, it was an episode,
and the segment was called "What If?" And it was "What if Napoleon
had a B-52 at Waterloo?" And there was John Belushi dressed up as Napoleon
inside the cockpit of a B-52, and it came to the remarkable conclusion after five
minutes, he probably would have won the battle. So we can agree, that's a pretty goofy what-if. But there's a serious side to this, and here
I want to refer to something that Niall wrote in preparing for this show. Quote, "I'd rather start by saying this is one
of the biggest methodological and philosophical divisions within the historical profession." Dr. Kotkin, could you translate from the Fergusonian to explain to a
non-historical PhD, non-PhD like myself, what does Niall mean here when he
talks about methodological and philosophical divisions within the field of history? Yes, well, you'll forgive
me that I did come prepared. For those who don't always do their
homework, I did mine from 1997. And we'll be talking about this in a moment. All causal explanations are
counterfactual by definition. It's very hard to understand how you could
be for causal explanations in history, but against counterfactual explanations. For example, Hitler caused World War II. You could get a room full of historians who
would line up with that statement, "Hitler caused World War II." What they're saying is, "No
Hitler, no World War II." So they're stating a counterfactual. If you then say to them, "Oh, you mean
you're in favor of counterfactuals?" They might object. They might say, "Geez, that's speculation. I don't go there. I stick to the facts. I stick to history." And then you say, "But are you
in favor of causal explanation?" "Oh yeah, of course I'm in
favor of causal explanation." So for reasons that shouldn't happen, it can
be controversial to get into the what-ifs. Part of the problem is what we
call miracle counterfactuals. Miracle counterfactuals are
the Napoleon with the B-52. So many people object to miracle
counterfactuals because they're not plausible. But if you stay within the realm of the evidence
and you stay within the realm of plausibility, then all you're doing is arguing about causality
and different causal explanations, which is completely fair game in all
disciplines, not just in history. If you say, for example, but sometimes, by the
way, miracle counterfactuals can be helpful. I'll give you one example. Let's ask Niall Ferguson what he
would do as prime minister of the UK. What would be his policy? And the objection would be there's no way that
Niall Ferguson could ever be prime minister of the UK. Actually, the B-52 at Waterloo is more likely. Right, which is why I
introduced the magical version. It would be a miracle though. It would be a miracle, and miracles do happen. You know, just the other day I parted the
sea, for example, just outside my office. Actually, it was the fountain,
and actually I didn't part it. But in any case, if Niall became prime
minister, what would his policies be? It's a magical thought experiment, but it
can enable you to understand his views about current policy in the UK. So even miracle counterfactuals
can have significant value, but I generally prefer to stick with the evidence-based, plausible counterfactuals,
which should not be controversial, because all historians do that by implication,
so you might as well be explicit. Amen. And I wish I'd invited you to contribute to
that book, but back in those days we didn't know one another, and the circle of historians
who were willing to write counterfactual essays was in fact quite small. So what Steve has shown is that there's a problem. He understands the philosophy of history, he
understands the nature of causal explanation, but a really substantial proportion of people
who say they're historians appear not to. And I have been engaged in an on and off debate
for 30 years with eminent historians who refuse to accept that there can be legitimate counterfactual questions
in historical explanation. And the problem is that they don't understand
the simple point that's been made here. Any statement of a causal
nature implies a counterfactual. Why would you keep it hidden from the audience? But there's another point, which I'm going to add. You killed them all off, though. E.P. Thompson, dead. Richard Evans is alive and well. I saw him the other day. A.J.P. Taylor, dead. They were all... The entire group of the anti-counterfactual
people, you killed them all off. But in the British historical profession,
and also in the American, a new generation came along, equally hostile
to counterfactual questions. The now emeritus Regis Professor of Modern
History at Cambridge, Richard Evans, wrote an entire book explaining why it was wrong,
philosophically and methodologically wrong, to ask counterfactual questions, and then
wrote a three-volume history of the Third Reich in which he could not help
asking counterfactual questions. Now, there's a second point which is really
important, and it goes back to a brilliant philosopher of history in the
1930s called Collingwood, R.G. Collingwood, who said the purpose of historical
scholarship is to, is to find out and reconstitute past thought. We're trying to work out what
people in the past thought. That's really what we're about. And then we're going to juxtapose what they
thought with what we think, and we will learn something from this. It's a very profound insight. People, at the time, of any event that you
care to name, let's call it the eve of World War II, did not know exactly when it would
break out, if it would break out, and they certainly didn't know how it would end. So if we want to understand the thought of
people in 1939 or in 1941 in the United States, we have to understand the things that
they thought might happen but didn't. That's as much a part of historic,
historical experience as what did happen. I remember being struck by this when I was
sitting in the dining room of the U.S. Senate. There on, in a glass case, there's a menu
on which a group of senators wrote on the back of the menu their predictions
for the outcome of World War II. This was in 1941, and that's a wonderful historical document because
it shows you people don't know the future. They don't know how events will turn out. Nobody knew how World War II would end. They didn't know when it would end. They didn't know who would win. So how can you write the history of the past? How can you understand the experience of human
beings if you don't capture that uncertainty? The great problem with most historical
writing is that it tells you a just-so story. It tells you a story that you
know how it's going to end. You never have any doubt. You pick up the book about the Russian Revolution. It's called A People's Tragedy. It's not going to end well,
but that's not real history. That's literature. Now, I like literature. I'll yield to nobody in my admiration of the
great novelists, but we are not writing novels. We're trying to explain what it
was like to be alive in 1939. And that's the, to me, more powerful and
compelling argument for counterfactuals. They are very real to contemporaries. And if you just shove them aside and say,
"Well, it's not worth asking what would have happened if there had been no
Hitler," you're missing the point. You're missing the openness of historical events. At some point, the future becomes the present
and then the past, but when it's the future, there's no such thing as the future. That's singular. There are many futures, and we're all sitting
there trying to choose, trying to figure out which one we like, which one we
think is most likely to happen. And if we lose that, then we lose
the historical process itself. John? Well, let me ask this. My job is to be every man or simplicio. Every economist. And of course, I come as an economist. We do nothing but cause and effect, and we
regard ourselves as the queen of social sciences. You disagree, but the job of the social scientist
is to disentangle causation from correlation one way or another. In fact, to some extent, economists might
be obsessed with causal inference, even when it's hard to do. But I want to phrase the question in a
different way, which might be useful. One way of seeing the question from a dynamic
economist point of view, is history-- well, when is history stable or unstable? I'm using a word from dynamic systems. A stable dynamic system, perturbed, comes
back to where it was going to go anyway. An unstable one, perturbed slightly, goes
off onto a different path, never to reemerge. The famous butterfly wing is a good
example of a chaotic or unstable system. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I mean, you know, the Hitler question, you
said, well, somebody might argue, well, yes, if he hadn't done it, the forces of history
were German expansionism, someone else would have done it. And that's an argument that
this is a moment that's stable. The grand forces of history-- I
think Marxists like this idea. The grand forces of history are moving, and
it doesn't really matter who is the person implementing them. So when is history stable when it is unstable? When are the decisions of particular
people of import to history? Or when, if Einstein hadn't invented the theory
of relativity, it's pretty clear somebody else would have done it 10 years
later, brilliant contribution. You got there first, but
there was no sense of history. So when is it stable when it's unstable? When do individual people, their characters,
their personalities and decisions really matter versus when are they just
instruments in what would happen? And I just want to echo what Niall said, because
my father was a historian and very much of your ilk, that one of the jobs of history
is not just to understand cause and effect, but to understand the mentality of people
in the past and to understand why they made the decisions they did, as opposed to one of
the trends I see in modern history is that our job is to look back in history
and judge who is good and who is evil. And our understanding of their decisions is
limited to these were the good people, those were the bad people, they did what they did
because they were bad, whereas instead, if as you brilliantly said, if you put yourself
with the knowledge they had, if you understand the contingency and unforecastability of history,
that there are sometimes big forces, sometimes people saw them, sometimes they didn't, you
can see, you could try to understand why they made the decisions they made, given what they
knew and given how they thought the cause and effect department of the
world worked at the time. The fun thing is that in a sense, you're working
both with individual agency and what you call the sort of great forces of history. I can never quite see these great forces. I think they're imaginary. But from Marx to Tolstoy, I mean an entire era
of thinkers in the 19th century were convinced the historical process was deterministic
and that there really was no agency. I think one can show that that's not true
without throwing the historical forces out. I'm an economic historian by training and
one of the great questions that we used to grapple with when we were
getting more quantitative back in the 1980s was what would the history of the United States have been like without the
railroad and that might be a kind of miracle or the opposite of a miracle counterfactual. It doesn't have a lot of plausibility because
the resistance to building railroads was fairly weak. So it's quite hard to imagine a world in which
the technology is not imported from the United Kingdom, but it was a worthwhile exercise
to calculate what the relative importance of railways were to American industrialization. Nobody says let's industrialize America, well
maybe Alexander Hamilton does, but it's not really an individual decision that produces
the industrialization of North America. The historians interested, I think, in the
points at which those forces that produce the industrialization of the United
States interact with decision makers. Sometimes there isn't a big role for human agency. I mean those railroads were getting built. Even if you'd taken out the chief executives
of all the railroad companies in a succession of carefully targeted assassinations,
the railways would still have got built. So I think this is a false... Because there were Chinese coolies,
that's why the railways got built. The structural forces supplied the labor,
the resources of the United States supplied the hardware, the technology from the Industrial
Revolution in Britain supplied the technology. So you couldn't stop it really. And I think that's what we're really trying to do. We're trying to tease out the interaction
between human agency when it counts and these forces of history. By the way, Tolstoy writes War and Peace
partly to prove that history is deterministic. And what he says constantly is Napoleon has
the illusion that it's all him, rather like the movie that we just saw about
Napoleon, it's all about him. And Tolstoy says this is a complete delusion. The forces that cause the French to invade
Russia and cause acts of violence and so on, all of this has got nothing
really to do with Napoleon. That's the real point of the novel. And ordinary people's lives are turned
upside down by these forces of history. I became a historian after reading that book
and reading the historical essay at the end in which he says it's all deterministic. And I remember thinking that can't
be right, that just can't be right. So we're having an argument that has been
going on for a long time about the relationship between individual decision-making,
individual agency and historical forces. And I think there is and must be a role for
individual agency, for Napoleon, for Hitler. I have nine counterfactuals in front of me. I know you guys want to keep talking about
this, but we're going to run out of time here. So I thought the answer, because Arden's maybe
interested, the answer to that one I thought was if absent the railroad, we would have
built trucks and highways a lot sooner. We would have built more canals and our
cities would be located closer to oceans. And it's an interesting speculation, but you
can see why it's in the miracle category, because there really isn't anybody forcefully
and powerfully arguing not to build railroads. If the UK had not invented the railroad, which
itself is, I don't know how deep, Bill's not going to let us go into it, that was, well,
the economic history of it is just a litany of improbable contingencies
that the UK went that direction. And so, but here's the challenge for you. You say if Einstein hadn't invented relativity,
someone else would have come along and done it 10 years later. That is a theory about things in reality. In other words, you haven't maybe discovered
all of how nature works, but you're working to discover nature. Then you're analogizing to processes where
human beings are not discovering laws of how the universe works, but they're pursuing self-interest or
whatever motivational theory of behavior you prefer. And so with human beings, you have what you
call the landscape, the existing landscape. So for example, you can't change
the geography very easily. The oceans are in certain places,
the mountains are in certain places. You can't change commodity prices
very easily as a single human being. So if you're a commodity exporting power,
you're beholden to decisions made by people who look like Niall but
wear red suspenders, right? I mean, so there's this full landscape
of possibilities that you're acting in. And so your ability to alter the landscape for
yourself and for others is severely constrained, but it does exist. And we can give examples, as we now will do, of
when some choices are made, it has consequences by constraining other possible choices, by
changing the landscape for the other people in the situation. So that's a different version of
agency from Newton or Einstein. We'd like to think that they're responding to
nature and discovering something that exists rather than trying to seize moments inside
a landscape that's much larger than they are to try to turn it. And I'm mostly on the, there are times when
individuals and decisions send us off onto alternative histories. I just wanted to give one example
of one that didn't seem that way. The last theoretical thing, and then we get
back to the examples, is, and you touched on it, John, it's really important, that the
world of humans is a complex system, and it actually behaves with all the
characteristics of complexity. Relatively small perturbations, the butterfly
flaps and swims can have huge consequences. But there are these periods
in which relatively small perturbations have enormous and disproportionate consequences. And I think the notion that the system is
deterministic in a predictable way was one of the great delusions of Marxism. It's deterministic, but in a non-predictable
way because of all the non-linearities of the complex system. We could easily delve into
chaos theory, but let's not. Thank you. All right, gentlemen, first counterfactual. This is for Professor Kotkin. Envision a coordinated access
attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. By that, I presume not just Germany
attacking, but Japan as well. What happens? So here we are, World War II. We know the outcome, just like
Niall was alluding to earlier. We have information that the actors didn't have. And so we're tempted now to go back and redo
it for them so that they can get the outcome that they desired, given what we know. And so the question is, well, could the
Nazis have won on the Eastern Front? That's the question. We'll get to the point where winning on the
Eastern Front, could that have determined the outcome of the war? Because Germany won on the Eastern Front in
World War I, but of course didn't win the war. So what does winning look
like in the case of Russia? Remember, you can get all the way to Moscow,
you can take Moscow, and you cannot win. We have our French friend, actually
Corsican friend, to thank for that lesson. So to win the World War II,
you need to kill Stalin. That's the only way you're going to
achieve a victory on the Eastern Front. You need the other side to stop fighting. So when you take their capital, they
don't necessarily stop fighting. You can take Moscow, and they can
decide they can continue the war. As long as they have the capacity to fight,
which is industrial production, and the will to fight, which is the leader's commitment to
the war plus the population's buy-in, which the Germans continually fortified,
they continually fortified Soviet morale by being exterminations. So your option is killing Stalin. Even if the Japanese come in and open up a
second front in the Soviet Far East, it doesn't solve your problem that you need to
take out the guy who is the system. So here we have this episode in 1941,
where Stalin stays in the capital. It's October 1941, the Germans are just
outside Moscow, they're not very far away. There's chaos. The regime is beginning to unravel. And Stalin gets credit for staying there,
not abandoning the capital, and for holding the Revolution Day parade on November 7th,
which was mere miles from the front, and then sending those soldiers who
paraded with their weapons on Red Square right to the front immediately, where they had come from. And so yes, but think about that contribution
to the potential victory by rallying morale and showing they wouldn't give up the capital. That was Hitler's moment. Because if he lands paratroopers behind the
lines, and they capture or kill Stalin, he gets victory that way. He doesn't need to capture Moscow. He needs to capture this guy. So that's the counterfactual. But Hitler doesn't understand that. He doesn't have a theory of victory that there
is this one guy on the other side who is your problem. He comes to that much later in the war
when it's too late and he has no chance. And then they fantasize about assassinating
Stalin with all sorts of ridiculous, unfeasible methods. The other thing is Stalin could
just have died some other way. So for example, the dacha where Stalin lived,
so-called nearby dacha, just outside of Moscow, was mined because they didn't want to let
it fall into German hands, and the German front was really close to the dacha at this point. So Beria, the head of Stalin's secret police,
goes and mines the dacha to blow it up so that this trophy doesn't fall into Hitler's hands. Stalin decides one night he's
going to go to the dacha. He's been living in the bunker in the Kremlin,
in the Ministry of Defense, because they don't have a bunker in the Kremlin yet. They're building the bunker in the Kremlin. He says he's going to go out to the dacha,
and Beria says, "I don't think that's a good idea." He doesn't know where the mines are. Exactly. So Stalin could have gone to the dacha and
could have stepped on a mine and blown himself to smithereens. So without Hitler having to do anything,
Stalin could have taken himself out of the war. How do we know that this is significant? Six days into the war in June,
June 28, Stalin leaves the war. What happens is the Germans take Minsk
just a mere five, six days into the war. It's just incredible, and
it's on the pathway to Moscow. And it's not defended, because the Red Army is
predominantly in the south defending Ukraine, because that's where the Germans, using disinformation, say that
there's main axis of attack. Their main axis of attack is the central axis. They've got Minsk. Smolensk is next. Moscow is after that. Stalin understands this very well. He calls the defense commissariat,
"What's happening in Minsk? Can you report?" And they say, "No, we've lost contact with Minsk." So he takes the cronies. It's kind of like a Goodfellas show. He puts them into the Packard. They go. He doesn't have the Packard yet. I'm a little bit ahead of the story. He gets the armored Packard from Roosevelt. Anyway, he puts them into the car. They go to the defense ministry. He has a showdown with the guys,
and he says, "What's happening?" And one of them says to him, "The Germans
are on the eastern side of Minsk." And so he has this infamous outburst where
he says, "Lenin built this amazing state, and we effed it up." "Abbasralis," you'll excuse the Russian. "We effed it up." And then he goes to the Dacha. This is June 27th, 28th, 29th. He goes to the Dacha. He doesn't come back to the Kremlin. What do the other guys do? It's like HR is not here. You bring me in. But what should you have done? What they do is they get up the courage to
go out to the Dacha and beg him to come back to the Kremlin. >> And he thinks maybe they've come to arrest him. That's the sweet moment. >> That we get from Mikoyan's memoirs, which
is an invention, but nonetheless, too great a story to check. But Stalin doesn't know why they're there. He's a suspicious guy, so
that's a plausible story. So they begged him to come back instead of
saying, "Oh, we're going to survive now. We'll take over. Molotov number two will run the war." They know that they can't run this regime
or the war or survive without Stalin. And so they beg him to come back, and he does
come back, and they form this new administrative unit. And so they're proving in June when Minsk
falls, begging him to come back, what Hitler didn't understand. So the great counterfactual that you posed,
what if the Japanese had opened up that front on the eastern side, the Red Army could
have beaten the Japanese back over there. The Japanese Army did not have
weapons that were as modern. Japanese tactics were not as
sophisticated as the Red Army tactics. And so the issue really was, the counterfactual,
can we take Stalin out of the picture, and if so, how, either by assassination or
by natural causes or by something else? And so now we understand, which Hitler didn't
understand in Niall's prospective in real time, how he could have won the war. If you want to add something, then
I want to get to the next topic. Okay. I'll be quick, because I think this is a good
one to debate the grand question, what is stable and unstable? World War II, of course, for World War II
buffs, which I am one too, is full of little things that could have gone differently. But I like this one, because maybe it isn't. Tokyo is a long way from Moscow,
a long, long way from Moscow. Japan did not even invade and conquer all
of China, let alone, you know, Russia didn't have to fight. They could have said, okay, see you when you
get to Moscow, you got a long walk through Siberia, buddy. But all they had to do, John, was they had
to, if they'd launched a simultaneous offense against the Red Army, Stalin could not have
moved the divisions that were out there for Japan to the other end of the Soviet Union. And of course, the Japanese thought about it. And that's the important point. But this was not a miracle. But those divisions never moved. That's another one of those
stories too good to check. None of those major divisions moved
because Stalin didn't trust the Japanese. He thought they were going to do it to him anyway. And so he kept those, who defended Moscow
were raw troops from the interior of Russia who had been conscripted at the last second. It wasn't the crack Siberian troops. They were still in place to defend against. And so the Japanese could not garrison China. That was a crazy idea and they
broke their teeth in China. And the idea that they could have marched
through Siberia, I don't think is plausible either because Tokyo is very far from Moscow,
but the Stalin thing, where are you going to come down on that? No, you're making my point. Had Japan declared war, those divisions,
they were tying down those divisions anyway. In fact, the war might've ended sooner because
Japan would have lost to the U.S. all that more quickly had they been embroiled. They knew very well why they didn't because
they had some other problems to deal with. So the grand forces of World War II and the
Germans and Japanese losing, I think would have been just the same with minor
differences had they done it. This is a case of no. Yes. Structuralist John Cochrane. No. In this case. So therefore. I think sometimes it's divergent,
sometimes it doesn't change. So here we have to go back to Niall because
let's suppose that Stalin is killed or dies and the Germans win on the Eastern Front somehow. What then happens to the
larger outcome of the war? Is it a John Cochrane story where it doesn't
matter, the Axis can't win anyway, even if they win on the Eastern Front, that's
the implication of what you just said. Or can the British blow this? I don't think the Americans can blow it. I mean, the key point is once the United States
is in the war, if you just want to be an economic determinist, it's easy because the U.S. economy
is so dominant relative to the other economies that there's just no contest after the U.S. is in. So Hitler's decision to declare war on the
United States looks with hindsight like one of the great blunders. But it is a blunder. He has a choice. He doesn't need to do it. And there are key choices at each stage
in World War II that have consequences. It's still hard to imagine a different outcome
once the United States is fully engaged. And if you play, here's where you can
actually test this out, Goodfellas fans. If you get a good strategy game, whether it's
a simple one like Axis and Allies or a more complex one like the video game Making History,
and you play World War II a hundred times and you make different decisions along the
way, it is exceedingly hard for the Axis to win in almost any conceivable scenario. Except for one way, which I want to ask. This is a good one. Yeah, go for it. War is a means to a political end. I'm sorry, I'm going to get
my Clausewitz quote wrong. You're good. Hitler never had a when do we stop. He never had a political end short of conquering
the whole world, which is not going to happen. And unless you have a political end, this
is where we stop, and you're Germany. It's hopeless. America had a political end,
unconditional surrender. That one works. And we had the means to do it. But the only way for them to win in the end
was to have a political end, a point where we can say that's enough. We sue for peace. At the risk of taking ours entirely off script,
the counterfactual that's most chilling, if one's talking World War II, is before any of this. It's before Barbarossa. It's before the United States comes
into the warts, before Pearl Harbor. It's the Battle of Britain. And it's whether or not the
Germans can defeat Britain in 1940. France, they overrun. Britain faces the threat of invasion. And there is, I think, a tremendous power
in Len Dayton's novel, SSGB, that imagines a successful invasion and the defeat of the
Churchill government, indeed the death of Churchill. And that, I think, is a counterfactual that
has much more plausibility, because it was much more finely balanced between the two. This is what crossfire looks like, by the way. On the butterfly wings. If you've never fought in war, and I haven't. Here's a mute button. The butterfly wings isn't the decision. The UK bombed a German city, I forget which one. Hitler said, stop bombing the
airfields, go bomb London. That gave the RAF time to breathe. That strikes me as one of those butterflies. Had he said, screw it, we're
going to go after the RAF. There are a number of those decisions, John. The decision not to annihilate the
British Army at Dunkirk is another. I know you've got to get to your agenda. There are butterfly wing moments. You win if the other side decides to give up. That's the thing. You might not be supposed to win, and the
two of you can do the charts on who's got which capacity, but the French capitulated. That's why Hitler won in six weeks there. The French had as good an army, they had a
better air force, they had superior intelligence, and they capitulated. Their elites threw in the towel on the French
Republic, on the Third Republic, and were only too happy in some cases, not in all cases,
to have a collaborationist regime, so-called Vichy regime. Britain could have capitulated, for
example- Plenty of people were ready to. Yes. But it could have fought
on, moved to the colonies. Their descendants are still there, by the
way, and the US could have decided to go in only in part, let and lease,
but no more than that. There are decisions of not deciding to fight
whole hog, despite having the capability to fight, and that's the contingency that I think
fills in your argument, because the French did show you that if you capitulate, it doesn't
matter if you're a match for the German army, and the British showed you the opposite. They were not a match for the German army
on the battlefield, except for air force and sea, but not on land, but they didn't capitulate. And so the decision not to capitulate in the
British case is a decisive decision that's not necessarily part of the structural forces
that a guy who's maybe named John Cochrane would bring in and trump us with the decision-
At this point, who could really be against counterfactual history? It's by a clear margin more fun
than any other fun of history. Way more fun. Okay, Bill. Except for poor Bill. So let's stick with World War II,
and Niall, you proposed this one. If Churchill had been killed in New York in
1931, the Germans would probably have won the war. What you're referring to, Churchill was in
New York that year, and I believe the story, Niall, correct me if I'm wrong, he is in
a cab going, I think, up Fifth Avenue. I think he's going to have
dinner with Bernard Baruch. That's correct. He doesn't know where he's going. He's just looking- He's somewhat lost. He's somewhat lost, and he decides to
get out in the middle of the street. And makes a mistake that all British people
are prone to make in the United States. He forgets which way- Looks the wrong way. Which side of the road the car's driving on. We don't have this lovely look
both ways that they have on the- The UK, the cars go on the
other side of the road, right? And he gets hit, and he suffers, I think,
a couple of broken ribs and a scalp injury. He's very lucky. He gets hit, and he could,
of course, have been killed. And this is a very good
example of a counterfactual. We've talked a minute ago about
what happens if Stalin's killed. What if Churchill's killed
is interesting, because- We're killing a lot of people on this show. Well, they killed a lot more, at least Stalin did. So let's remember that in one case,
we're talking about a dictator. And some listeners might have thought, "Well,
of course it matters if the dictator's alive or dead, because the dictator's all-powerful." What's interesting about the Churchill case
is that he ends up being the prime minister in a democracy, but he still matters. To go back to what Steve was just
saying, why does Britain not fold? Because Churchill is there, and Churchill
has been vindicated by everything that has happened in the course of 1938, '39,
and 1940, and becomes prime minister. But his position in 1938 had
been deeply unfashionable. He'd been a warmonger, he'd been shunned, but
the key to Britain's survival, and I believe the survival of Western civilization, is that
Churchill's vindication gives him the power to lead, even after the defeat of 1940, even
after Dunkirk, to lead Britain into a war in which it's completely alone, in which the
odds are against it, at a time when many members of the British establishment, including members
of his own party and the aristocracy, are ready to make, to cut a deal with Hitler. And Churchill overrides them. And that's the turning point of World War II. That's the moment at which things could have
gone differently, because if he'd not been prime minister, and let's say Lord Halifax
had been prime minister, it was a close-run thing, I think the outcome would
have been profoundly different. Why is this interesting to me? Because it's Churchill's leadership of a free
people that is the magical thing that changes the outcome. It's only through Churchill's extraordinary
capacity to rally morale after the humiliation, and it was a humiliation, of Dunkirk, that
Britain is able to fight on, and its morale doesn't fold, even when
things continue to go wrong. I mean, they continue to go wrong. Singapore falls. Britain doesn't look to be getting anywhere
in the war for quite a long time, and yet morale holds up. And I think that that is one
of the best illustrations of the argument that the individual really does matter in history. Even A.J.P. Taylor, who didn't like counterfactuals, as
you mentioned earlier, acknowledged in his history of England that Churchill was the
savior of his nation, and that wasn't something that Taylor, who was no Tory, must
have enjoyed writing, but it's true. So I think when one thinks about the contingencies
and counterfactuals of World War II, that moment in 1931, it's a banal moment, where
Churchill's not killed, is absolutely crucial. Because if he's not there in '38, '39,
'40, Halifax is probably prime minister. This is an argument for assassination. I can look over the world today, and I can
see where the West has certain good leaders and certain not-so-good leaders. And if I'm an adversary of the West, I'm going
to start picking them off, based on what Niall Ferguson is saying. I'm just seeing the Stanford Daily headline
now, "Hoover Fellows Come Out in Favor of Assassination." When push comes to shove, those people are
going to rally the nation against my aggression, so I'd better get ahead of history here
a little bit, knowing my counterfactuals. Well, assassinations are, actually, there's a
good paper that shows how often assassinations do have meaningful consequences, and that's
why, throughout most of history, assassinations are not a bug, but a feature, particularly
of how republics run themselves. Thankfully, we've stopped doing that
in the United States in recent years. Niall, I want you to skewer the counterargument. This is an invitation to
skewer what I'm going to say. Had Churchill been killed in that car accident,
somebody else would have been writing about the menace to Hitler. Somebody else would have been in Parliament. They would have, clearly, the minute Chamberlain
came home with "Peace in Our Time" and was proved to be a fool, they would
have voted somebody else in. So, is the personality and intelligence of
one human being crucial to this, or would someone else have filled in the gap? Well, this is a good way to put the question,
a good way to test the counterfactual. Of course, there were people who agreed. You mentioned Halifax. I don't know who he is, other
than the name of a bomber, so. Or Halifax. He was somebody who was an obvious contender
for the role of Prime Minister when it was clear that Chamberlain had to go. The point that you're right about is that
there were plenty of people who agreed with Churchill. He had his own circle of people who hated
the appeasers and, for a variety of reasons, took his side. But it's hard to think of any of them
as having his, uh, capacity for oratory. Read Andrew Roberts's, uh, fellow, fellow
Andrew Roberts's brilliant biography and you see that Churchill was sui generis. There really was nobody like him. Nobody could have written those speeches. And the speeches are amongst the most
powerful in all of Western history. Everyone should listen to them at least once
a year because you realize the extraordinary power of one man's literary ability. Notice also that he was an exceptionally
well-read, historically-minded individual. Churchill studied history and saw himself
as applying it, including the history of his own family, to contemporary situations. There is nobody in his league in his circle. And so in the counterfactual that he's dead
and somebody else has to be Churchill, I think they quite plausibly fail. Remember, the arguments for doing a
deal with Hitler are very tempting. They're very appealing. You've just been routed. You're, unlike in 1914-18, your army has been
turned around and has had to flee across the channel leaving all its equipment behind. They're demoralized so badly so that you have
to kind of cut them off from the civilian population. The arguments for cutting a deal, which Hitler
makes sound quite plausible, I don't really have a grievance against you people,
this is a tempting deal to cart. And if one looks at the attitudes of people
in 1940 who would have been the alternate Churchills, most of them
are ready to take that deal. There are two parts to your question, John. You said how great a historian is. I must say, if he'd known a little more economics,
things might have turned out even better. Well, that's another counterfactual. There are two parts to your question. One is, was there another political
entrepreneur to fill the space? And the answer is, of course, there were many
political entrepreneurs to fill the space. In other words, the establishment was behind
appeasement because they wanted to defend the empire at all costs and many other
considerations, which we won't go into. But that leaves open the possibility that you
could rise to power with opposite arguments against that establishment
and play the political game. The question that Niall is posing is, were any
of those good enough compared to Churchill? And so that gives you what
would have been good enough. Did you need a person at the level of Churchill
to rally the cause of confronting Hitler? Or could you have gotten away with someone
who was on that side, but let's say not... Leo Emery, for example. Not world historical level,
but could have pulled it off. And so there it's very hard to tell what level
of confrontation with Hitler was, what skill level was necessary on the
confrontation team to pull this off. Now in the case of Stalin, where you embody
the regime, you build the regime, and the people around you are pygmies, you can see
that substituting for that is really difficult. But in a democracy where you have a strong
establishment, you have a lot of people from different walks of life, okay, they all went
to one school, I get that, you know, they're all chums. Still true. They're all chums. We understand that. But still, it's a robust size crowd. And so I would be of the opinion that we didn't
need a Churchill level figure to fill that entrepreneurial space. So without Churchill, it's plausible that
the UK could have still decided to stand up. But I can't know that, and it's very hard to
prove that, because I can't rerun the experiment now, which is why counterfactual history is hard. Let's move across the ocean to another
counterfactual, courtesy of Brother Cochrane. He writes, would a failed American revolution
have really stopped the emergence of liberty, or would we just be Canada? Well, this is one of the chapters in virtual
history by J. C. D. Clarke, and my favorite of the chapters, actually, because no contributor
other than Clarke shows all the problems with the methodology and explores the different
paths that plausibly one could have gone down. Now, I think the key argument here is that
without French intervention and without British half-heartedness, there you are, British America,
what if there'd been no American revolution? He looks at various different moments
at which it could have been aborted. I think the interesting one is, you know, the
revolutionary armies are definitely beatable if Britain wholeheartedly commits to
beating them and fights a large-scale war. And I think the lesson of the French revolution
is that if you're in a large-scale war, liberty lasts not very long. But they'd never have to fight a large-scale
war because Britain's half-hearted about it, and then the French come in and sort things
out, and you get the outcome that you get. So I think it's a really interesting question
because it gets us to why does liberty survive in a war that's quite protracted? If it had been a really large-scale war, if
Britain had... if both parties in Britain had wholeheartedly wanted to win it, and there
had been a full-scale deployment of forces, I'm not so sure that the ideals of the
American revolution would have held up. The ideals of the French revolution did not
because they had to fight a much bigger war, and you have no idea, it's like an order of magnitude or more bigger in
terms of the mobilization, in terms of the casualties,
in terms of the economic cost. The American Revolutionary War is small by
comparison with the French Revolutionary War. Yeah. So this is one of those where here you are
today, you have a nation of 330 million people, the largest economy in the world, 25 percent
more or less of the global economy for more than 100 years now. You're 5 percent of global population, you're
25 percent of GDP, and you're almost 50 percent or around 50 percent of global military. So this American superpower, for which there's
no equivalent in recorded history, is what we have now. Let's go back to the 18th century. Instead of 330 million, you've got million. That's the population of the colonies. You have these 13 forlorn colonies on the
eastern seaboard that are a bit of a flyer. You don't know where, if anywhere, this is going. The so-called indigenous peoples, the ones
that they encountered who are already there, they're dominating this continent
well into the 19th century. The maps that show America are false impressions
of what the colonies on the eastern coast actually controlled. It wasn't until the last third of the 19th
century that there was a decisive shift. So you would not have predicted, had you been there at the time,
had you been Bill Whalen—remember, he doesn't have California yet, he doesn't have
the Louisiana Purchase, he's got no Chicago, forget about railroads—I mean, he's got
nothing but this tiny little eastern seaboard. That becomes this world-historical superpower,
not foreseeable in any way except retrospectively. Now the piece inside that John is
interested in is the liberty piece. In other words, there's a political project inside
that future superpower that's unforeseeable. The political project is foreseeable at the time. It's the political project, the norms, the
values, all the associationalism, what Tocqueville will see when he steps into the picture in
the first part of the 19th, in the first third of the 19th century, in that
famous democracy in America. He's looking at those traits and norms and
values, what he calls mores, what we would call values, as well as institutions,
and he's seeing what you're seeing. He's seeing the liberty picture and he
understands that that's the power of America. And so in some ways the implausible superpower story is related to the more
foreseeable understanding of what you're looking at. I don't think without French participation in
the war we have a successful American victory against the Brits. Now, Niall has articulated why the Brits weren't
not all in and not very effective, but the French support of the U.S. is
definitely really, really important. But this leads to the larger story. Okay, suppose the Americans had lost the war. Wouldn't Einstein have come along 10 years
later and created the American republic in some other way anyway? In other words, was there another pathway,
given that the values and the mores, why they fled the U.K. in the first place, why they
came there, I'm sorry, why they fled England and Scotland and Wales, why they came there
in the first, given that all that was in some ways the DNA, would the circumstances have
contrived to produce an outcome that wasn't dependent entirely or even predominantly on
that conjuncture of the Revolutionary War period? That's where you're going in some ways. I ask this because I am, of course, so impressed
with our founding generation, their understanding of history that what they created is just amazing. Washington, as a commander, understood his
job was not to lose, and he brilliantly did not lose, something that Lee didn't understand. And clearly in the 19th century, the model
of, "Oh, there is a successful republic," was very important. On the other hand, our ideals, what they wanted
was their rights as British citizens, and the enlightenment, the gradual improvement
of rights, that had, from Magna Carta through the Glorious Revolution, that was a British thing. Surely, the U.K. would have
come to an understanding with its colonies that allowed them much, as they did afterwards. Now, Canada, of course, wouldn't be
Canada without the American Revolution. But this is the point. If one looks at the trajectory of Canada,
it's not as if Canadians are dirt poor and look longingly across the border
to a much wealthier United States. In reality, the economic paths that the two
countries have taken are remarkably alike. And that's because liberty was not something
that the Founding Fathers just invented. There was already a strong tradition of liberty
that the settlers had brought over from the British Isles and established in their colonies. And so it's a modified version of British
conceptions of liberty that produces the American Revolution. And I actually don't think that North America
looks radically different if the revolutionaries are defeated, and it just is a big Canada. I don't think that produces a dramatically
different outcome economically and socially. After losing the Revolutionary War, the U.K.
said, "Oh," and granted a lot more autonomy and dependence to Canada, to Australia,
to New Zealand, and so forth. So had they won and we remained colonies,
yes, there would have been some delegation of authority, but Canada was not the Canada. And the great thing is
contemporaries talked about that. The great thing is that all the opponents
of fighting the American revolutionaries, all the people who were on their side back
in London, made this point that ultimately the potential on the other side of the Atlantic,
this was a point that Adam Smith made, is so enormous that it's stupid to
get into a fight with these people. Even if you win, eventually the center of
gravity is likely to move across the Atlantic. So I think this is where your structural
version of history is quite compelling. There are so... This is a demographic story. There are lots of people being produced in the
British Isles in the 18th century, a substantial oversupply of people. And this is part of the reason why there's
so many more people crossing the Atlantic from Britain than from France or Spain. And that's something that doesn't have
anything to do with individual agency. It's just that the age of marriage falls
and everybody has way more children. But like Churchill, I still have to believe
that the brilliance of the founding generation mattered. I'm going to get a word in edgewise. Good luck. That's my job. I was invited. I didn't invite myself. So this is a deep point about counterfactuals that
Niall just made in response to your intervention. Can you actually change just one thing? Because when you change one thing, you're
changing the sequence of things that follow. You're changing the consequences. So Niall pointed out that Britain changed policy
vis-a-vis Canada because of the outcome of the revolutionary events. So the Canada that we think was a possible
outcome for the U.S., even if they had lost the revolution, might not have
been the outcome for Canada. Of course, Canada is in the north. So Canada is, again, geography is
just a really big thing to overcome. It's a very successful nation, very high
standard of living, very well governed. But they just put it in a place that's really
hard to get the 330 million people the way that we were able. And, of course, there are other northern countries
with a larger population based upon geographics. So it's not impossible. But this idea of counterfactuals where, oh,
we're only going to change one thing and then hold everything else constant and run the
experiment that way, that's not actually a good version. We call that the general equilibrium response,
and I want to congratulate you as economists. We have about five minutes left, so let's
see if we can do two counterfactuals. And Niall, I'm going to challenge you to
a 30-second counterfactual, which is this. In honor of your recent 60th
birthday, Steve, you missed the show. It was a wonderful tribute. We put him on a scale and
weighed gold against him. It was quite fantastic. I went back and I looked at April
1964, Niall, and you know what I found? You were born at the height
of the British Invasion. Beatlemania had just kicked off. They had done the Sullivan
Show in February that year. Here's a question, my friend. What if Paul McCartney and John Lennon never
crossed paths and there's never a band called the Beatles? Is there still the British Invasion,
and if there is, whose media is it? 30 seconds. It's an easy one. The Stones have an even faster track to glory,
but even if the Stones don't make it, what's amazing about this is there are so many young
British men in 1964 forming bands that it really was only...and they were
quite interchangeable in reality. Sure, you can say Lennon and McCartney were
fantastically gifted songwriters, but so were Jagger and Richards. And I think this is one thing that would have
happened because something very peculiar had taken place. American music, American black music, had
been imported to the UK and fused with folk music traditions in the British Isles
to produce something called pop. And it was irresistible everywhere. So I don't think you need
Lennon and McCartney to meet. You have, you're bound to have, pop music. I'll do it. 30 seconds. Anybody want to add to that? I'm on the Beatles versus Stones side of the
debate, but this is Einstein who 10 years later someone else would have invented it. Or Newton and Leibniz. I was at the farmer's market on California
Avenue yesterday and there were a bunch of people who looked like they were already adults
when the Beatles came around playing music for the crowd there, and they said,
"Has anybody heard of the Beatles?" And nobody said yes. California Avenue, farmer's market,
Palo Alto, California, 2024. So how consequential in the sweep of history in
Niall Ferguson's career, which is the measurement here, how consequential were the Beatles,
except for the people who were there at the time who were influenced and sing
those songs now at the farmer's market. There are others. My kids don't sing Beatles songs, they sing
other songs, and they're kids and I don't know. The answer is I don't know. I definitely don't know. Actually, the amazing thing about our culture
now is how little it has changed, how many young people... I was by a fraternity and they were playing
Tommy from The Who outside and the speakers outside. Thanks to the internet, they have way more
access to 60-year-old music than anybody in the 1960s who was not playing jazz. I knew you'd get the techno-optimism
in there, so good work. By the way, Stanford teaches, I think,
not one but two classes on Taylor Swift. Four classes on Taylor Swift and not another
Vietnam War because they're just trying to balance kids' education. We have five minutes left. One final counterfactual. Are you heading over to the
encampment with me after this? I'm trying to get the Qataris to contribute
money so they can build tunnels underneath the... You know what? The great counterfactual is what if you had
been National Security Advisor instead of HR? Let's just think about that for a moment. Oh, boy. He's a better tank driver. Final counterfactual and I apologize for the
brevity, gentlemen, we only have five minutes left. It comes from Niall. What if Trump had won in 2020? No Russian invasion of Ukraine. No October 7th. I like this counterfactual because
he himself has proposed it. So at least it has the... We can quote it. We have a source for this, which was Trump
on the telephone in 2022 telling one of his golfing buddies that if I'd been president,
none of this would be happening because, and this is a great line, "I said to Putin,
'If you go into Ukraine, I'll bomb Moscow. All those lovely domes will be gone.'" Now, we don't know if he ever really said that
to Putin, but I do remember asking someone in the administration who said, "Niall,
he said that stuff all the time." So I like the idea that there would be a very
different world if he'd won the election. I think he lost the election
because of COVID mostly. I think he would have won without the pandemic. And I don't think this administration has been
nearly as good at deterring our adversaries as Trump was, if only because
Trump was madman theory. You did not really know
quite what his move would be. So I think there's a lot of plausibility
to this, even though he said it himself. Shoot me down. I think the big counterfactual of Trump winning
in 2020 would not be that much in foreign policy, though there are plenty, and I guess
our current administration is on track to lose three wars, which is a little bit different,
but on what's happened in domestic policy. And I won't go on a litany of what's happened
under the Biden administration, but we would have not had fill in all the things that
have happened under the Biden administration. We would not have a resurgent Trump. We would not have the exposure of what the
progressive left is really all about in this country. And we'd possibly be, of
course, he would now be losing. We'd be voting Democrats back in again, but
in a much, much different world, largely on domestic policy issues. And in the interest of time, I won't give
you a litany of all the things that would not have happened. Well, let's add on to that also in 2020. What if there's no COVID? Do you write DOOM? I probably do. I actually had started work on it before the
pandemic and had persuaded my reluctant editor that a book about the history
of catastrophe was a good idea. I don't think he would have published it until
without the pandemic, but I would probably still have written it. But I want to hear Professor
Kotkin on a different 2020. And a no COVID Trump wins 2020, does it have
the geopolitical consequences that I think it does? Remind me who's Trump. Some guy. I deal in big historical questions. But if I may just, you wouldn't have sold
so much of DOOM if they hadn't had COVID and hence inflation, I wouldn't be selling copies
of The Fiscal Theory at the highest price level. So, you know, it's worked out well for both of us. There were some silver linings in that play. I got to figure out how to monetize much better
compared to you guys if I'm ever going to come on the show again. Fuck. You guys are monetizing. You can't duck the tough political questions. And you can answer in a non-partisan way,
because that's really a question about Putin. Does Putin act differently if
Trump is still in the White House? That's really the question. Trump wanted to give away what
Putin now has to take militarily. That's the answer to the question. And Putin was waiting for Trump
to hand it to him in some fashion. And Trump proved to be disorganized, attention
span was complex, his administration didn't seem like it had a single
policy or a single direction. And Putin was waiting for the
gift that never came from Trump. That's I think a realistic picture of
what it looked like on the Moscow side. Who is this guy Trump? Is he crazy? Is he really going to do what
he says he's going to do? And they couldn't never really get
a handle on what he was offering. But this is the thing about the world. The Russia-Ukraine thing has
nothing to do with Trump. It's got nothing to do with Biden. It's got nothing to do with ephemeral people. Stalin, maybe. That's right. It doesn't have anything to do with the ephemeral
nature of some of contemporary American politics. We're now going to have a lame duck second
term which is going to look one way or the other way. And a lot of people are going to think it's
the end of the world if it goes the opposite way from their hopes. And then we're going to be on the other side
of that four years later and it's not going to be an apocalypse, it's
not going to be existential. It's just going to be American
life in the 21st century. The Ukraine-Russia thing is about much deeper,
century-long processes having to do with stuff that predates the American
republic and unfortunately will post-date whatever administration is elected. In our closing moments, this is great because
you started off on kind of the butterfly theory and now we're on to kind of the grand. I had the landscape of structures. Half of our country, no matter what happens
in a year, half of our country is convinced this is the end of democracy,
the great butterfly moment. And you're saying calm down, the great forces
of history are moving along, it's going to be okay. Or it's not going to be okay. We had four years of Trump. As I recall, it's a very faint recollection,
we've now had almost four years of Biden. And so we've proven that we're on the other
side of Trump and we'll prove soon that we'll be on the other side of Biden, potentially. We may end up with eight years of that. I don't know what the life expectancy is these
days in America, I heard it's going down. But anyway, the point being is
that it's both, obviously, right? There are moments in which agency is decisive. Those moments are fewer than we
think and fewer people than we think. And there are moments that are not inflection
points that look like inflection points to us because we live in the moment. And as Niall started us off, we can't
see outside of the moment that we're in. If we could, we would not be on this show. We would work for Goldman Sachs or we would
work for somebody where you could make money knowing the future instead of doing a show. I'm so sorry we ruined your agenda here, Bill. But I got to say, that was the
one thing that was predictable. That was the future I could have
foreseen before the show started. It was foreseen. That's a Goodfellas counterfactual,
we stick to the script. What if we stuck to the script? All right. And a miraculous one at that. Yeah. Very miraculous. Gentlemen, great conversation. John Cochrane's got a meeting to get to. Steve, you've got books to
go by from Niall and John. Let's not forget his biography of
Stalin, available in all good bookstores. And if you want to know how The Death of Stalin
works out, I can recommend a wonderful movie. I watched it last night, actually. He's still writing that. He does die, but it's not as
consequential as people think, his death. End of the Korean War, though, no? My biography does not end with his death,
because he's still the most consequential person in the country, even
though he's not there anymore. Okay. Guys, great conversation. Dr. Kotkin, please come back soon. Thank you for the invitation. Deeply appreciate it. And that's it for this episode of Goodfellas. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. We didn't get to lightning round
this week, for obvious reasons. That shouldn't stop you from sending in questions. Go to hoover.org/askgoodfellas and write away
to Niall John H.R., Dr. Cochrane, if you want to. And yes, you can start pounding the drums. I have him back on the show. I know he loves the attention. We'll have another episode of Goodfellas
at the end of May, early June. That's going to be a retrospective, I think,
on the year so far, because we're going to go into our summer schedule very soon,
which means you won't be seeing much of us. So don't freak out if we're
not back every two weeks. On behalf of my colleagues, Niall Ferguson,
John Cochrane, the great Stephen Cochrane, we hope you enjoyed the conversation. Thanks again for watching. We'll see you soon. If you enjoyed this show and are interested in
watching more content featuring H.R. McMaster, watch Battlegrounds, also available at hoover.org. [END] [END] [END] [END] [END] [END] [END] [BLANK_AUDIO]
