The Third World's War

ideas Neil as you may know is the fourth holder of the of this particular chair first just give you a little bit background was Paul Kennedy one of the best-known public intellectuals in the world today the second holder of the chair was Professor Chang Chen probably the greatest historian and China in the Cold War and the third shield propelled the internationally renowned French expert on Islam made possible by very generous donation by Emmanuel Roman the chair named after his father has as you can see brought really world-class scholars to the LSE but I should add but not of the reclusive or retiring variety as you will discover the moment neo of course is one of those academics whom other scholars over the age of 55 find especially difficult to deal with not only is he a mere slip of a boy but people actually know who he is they've heard of it a rare feat for most academics one reason for Neil's favorite courses is extraordinary output over the last 15 years but I hasten to add Neil there's something else too he is a controversial Asst in the very best sense of the word I think Neil himself would be the first to admit that like any good scotch he loves a good scrap scraps that have involved him over the years and debates about the era that was world war one the importance of doing virtual or counterfactual history an attack on the age car the positive role played by the British Empire in the creation of the modern world think about that one the failure in the United States to own up to the fact that it is indeed an empire and more recently about whether as he now seems to believe the West is in decline and will gradually be replaced by a rising East and all this before he turned a fire on for in his first lecture in the series Neal took an old problem the old problem being the end of the Cold War and typically through new light on the very complex part played in this least expected events the end of the Cold War by political economy in general by the great political shifts that brought us the liberal economic revolution of the 1980s and of course by the impact of Asia tonight he remains of the Cold War but looks at it from another angle how it was experienced fought and finally brought to an end in a part of the world that contained most of humanity all of these serious revolutions out of 1945 and as a result suffered the most namely the third world Neil thanks again for doing us the honor of being here at the LSE it is wonderful having you around and we're all very much looking forward to hearing what you have to say tonight in your second ideas lecture entitled the third world war LSE please welcome well thank you very much indeed Mick it's a great pleasure to be here again I was reading the newspaper on my way here which claimed that I am rarely seen on the campus of the London School of Economics it's rather unfortunate timing for the authors of that piece since I had just come from me to our panel discussion on the first world war and they're better given my second public lecture and tomorrow I will be lecturing on the Scramble for Africa in a history course on the history of the British Empire this article also managed to inflate my my salary by a factor of more than five I can assure you if I was being as well-paid as the Beiber believes by other members of the LSE faculty so this is a nice opportunity to set the record straight one reason that I have been keeping a somewhat low profile over the past couple of weeks there's been that I'm trying to finish a book anybody who's ever written a book will know that this is not a collective endeavor to which you invite people this book was in fact in the hands of my publisher so I'm feeling a little tense nevertheless here right now and what I want to do this evening is to develop an argument that I made in a book entitled the war of the world world singular which was published in 2006 and it's an arguments about the nature of the Cold War how cold it actually was and I hope you'll see that it follows if you were here my last lecture somewhat logically from the phrase the third world's think and the phrase is designed to play on the idea that there was in fact of world war after World War two but it didn't happen in the places that the previous world wars had happened in what was then called but we no longer call the third world and so in the conclusion of the world I had a kind of of epilogue reflecting on this third world war which was really a down payment on a future project one reason that I'm delivering lectures on this subject is that my principal concern while I am here that LSE is to begin writing the biography of Henry Kissinger which I've been researching assiduously for the last four years and in order to begin writing that book I need above all else to get my framework right to understand as well as I possibly can the context within which he lived his life and made his contribution for better or worse to American foreign policy and that takes me to some unusual places took what a man for example this picture which appeared in the war of the world shows some soldiers being trained to fight against the so-called guerrilla army of the poor which was seen as a pro communist army by the the right-wing regime that have come into power in Guatemala in the 1950s but which had become particularly hostile towards the left within in the later 1960s the war was waged in Guatemala was an especially bloody war that continued on into the nineteen eighties with a but higher death toll than I suspect anybody here is aware of what is important about the warrant well tomorrow is its location and its time and also as you can tell from this photograph the relatively primitive military technology with which it was waged its Wars like these the historians of the Cold War with a few honorable exceptions that are mentioned not least LSE Zone on Western have neglected and by neglecting the third world war they have massively understated the magnitude of the human calamity that the Cold War produced in an essay published in 1986 well of course the Cold War showed no sign my good friend John Gaddis of Yale University which I believe is somewhere Connecticut wrote as follows it is the case that the post-world War two system of international relations which nobody designed or even thought could last for very long which was based not upon the dictates of morality and justice but rather upon an arbitrary and strikingly artificial division of the world into spheres of influence and which incorporated within it some of the most bitter and persistent and tagging isms of the 20th century of the short war in history survived twice as long as the far more carefully designed World War one settlement this is really the key passage in what this it became a book of essays entitled the long piece in the essay Gaddis makes the argument that there was no third world that there was a long peace after 1945 because of secret using the language of systems the Cold War was a self-regulating system which was always highly unlikely to go critical the reasons that he advances for this 7 foot first he argues that the Cold War because of its bipolar character was more stable than previous international orders in particularly has in mind a comparison with the period after 1918 where a multipolar world proved to be highly unstable and no self-regulating system established itself not only did the pipe Allah ordered correspond to the realities of military and economic power period but it was simple and his very simplicity he suggest was one reason for its stability the Soviet Union and the United States were not interdependent but rather independent of one another they had historically before and during the call relatively little contact with one another and this gannets points out lemony flies in the face of an entire body of liberal theory going right back to the 18th century which posits that it is through contact through intercourse the peace between powers is likely to be maintained on the contrary gather says most conflict arises where countries have too much to do with one another and one of the benefits of the Cold War system was that the two potential antagonists in fact were relatively separated the third reason Gaddis gives for the fact that there was no third world war is that there were domestic constraints in position in place in both of the superpowers that lower the probability of they're taking hostile action the United States had long before the or developed a theory variously known as the open door policy of of how it could informally export its culture but above all its capital and establish a kind of de-facto Empire in orbit name without mass the whole theory of the open door love later evolved during the Cold War was precisely to export American institutions to engage in American economic activity without the need for major conflicts Charles Mayer my colleague at Harvard wrote in my view the best essay on post-war peace which compares 1918 and 1945 and argue that it was the corporatists institutions of the United States exported to Western Europe and indeed as I argued last time to Asia that created that peace which had been so absent in the interwar period Gaddis adds that from the Soviet point of view to the appetite or risk in foreign policy had been massively reduced by the traumatic experience of total war and near defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany despite their bluster he suggests the Soviet leaders really have no desire to get into a hot war in that sense both of the superpowers were inwardly constrained the fourth and most obvious reason why there wasn't a hot war in gallus arguments is that deterrence really works in a nuclear age paranoia and prudence can coexist he says and I think if we were to have a quick vote on this question a majority of you would probably say that the reason the cold water was precisely that nuclear arms existed and had they existed in 1914 or for that matter in 1939 there would have been far less appetite for risk particularly on the part of the leaders of Germany so deterrence gannets as a fifth and interesting argument when he says that the reconnaissance revolution and particularly the advent of satellites but also spy planes reduce that uncertainty which had characterized superpower or great power relations in the first half of the 20th century they knew much more about what one another we're doing that had been true of the great past in the 1930s much less in the 1910s and that knowledge reduces the risk of misunderstanding misunderstanding of course persisted but the striking thing about the Cold War is how much the two sides knew about the other's movements and those actions those movements may have been misinterpreted but the fact that they were known gathers suggests made the world a less dangerous place than it had been before the sixth reason he says there was no third world war is that there was in fact a distinct stepping down in the aspirations of the superpowers after 1945 the notion of fighting a totalitarian state until it surrendered unconditionally was in fact dropped from the menus of American foreign policy having been the organizing principle of the war that the United States of waged after Pearl Harbor and that meant that ideological moderation on the United States their side but also on the Soviet side meant that the stakes were significantly lower than if they had been between 1941 and 1945 finally he argues the Cold War self-regulating system had rules they weren't written down there wasn't a rulebook but they work student both sides respected the others spheres of influence they tried to avoid direct confrontation they certainly have no great hungers used nuclear weapons they accepted weird and wonderful anomalies like Cuba a Soviet satellite just off the coast of Florida with weirdly an American base there went animal village exists to this day anomalies like West Berlin a little tiny zone of Western influence in the very heart of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe above all else they sought to stabilize implicitly one another by not tried very hard to destabilize one another's regimes regime change was not really an integral part of policy on either side gas suggests now there are many ways with which I could disagree with goddess's essay in the war of the world I argued that the risk of a nuclear war was much higher than his point for implies and that in many ways we owed more to luck than design but there was not the hot war the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is only the most famous moments when the great powers came the superpowers came very close to the brink of Armageddon and one of the great dangers it seems to me in writing the history of any conflict or any period of peace is this post hoc propter hoc pub just because there wasn't a nuclear exchange between the superpowers doesn't mean the probability was really low I believe the probability wasn't that quite high and that there is ample evidence that military and non-military theorists including it should be Kissinger himself made the argument for the limited use of nuclear weapons on numerous occasions in the 1950s in particular the temptation was very strong for the United States to contemplate exercising the nuclear option when it was still clearly far ahead of the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race but that is not the argument that I want to make tonight I could also make the more general about the probabilities of war and there's some fantastic work that dates back to work by Lewis Richard actually a meteorologist - after he had left the field of atmospheric physics devoted his retirement to studying the statistical incidence of conflict Richardson's statistics of deadly quarrels is a very wonderful thing to read one of the things that he points out is that the probability distribution of conflicts is highly abnormal so much so that in fact follows a Poisson distribution and in effect has a random character it's extremely hard he concluded to say anything at all about the probability of war on the basis of past data and he gathered vast quantities of data about conflicts of every size between 1815 and 1945 he and others who force about these statistics of war discovered something very disconcerting war is random there is no trend you only need to look at the anomaly of the world wars to see that up until 1914 the world appeared to be moving in the direction for less war more peace fewer smaller no great conflicts between the great powers if you had as of course Norman Angell did on the eve of the First World War tried to conclude from the past then there was a trend in the direction of peace you look like it can be idiot within just a few years as the two biggest conflicts in all recorded history exploded into life the fact that there is no statistical pattern in the incidence of war that it is entirely random makes it highly implausible to me that we can describe the Cold War in goddess's terms the the likelihood that there would be in other words another massive conflict in the second half of the 20th century was higher than Gaddis implies although not something to which anybody could attach probability to be absolutely wars follow a power-law distribution like forest fires and earthquakes that makes it is literally impossible to predict their magnitude and timing so the notion that there was some kind of low probability of a third world war is I think logically and defensible but that's not what I've been sick gannets lists 15 crises that failed to produce a war I conclude from this as I have said that the Cold War was a stable system but you know what I could miss 15 crises that didn't produce a war between 1900 and 1913 and then along came a crisis that produced a world war as I speak an American battle group aircraft carrier vessels are cruising towards the Yellow Sea in response to a bizarre active aggression by the rogue state of North Korea against America's South Korean ally who of us knows whether this will be just another little little difficulty on the Korean Peninsula all the origins of another world war none of us the lesson of history is that it could be either and we have no way of attaching a probability all I can tell you is that as I was preparing to come here I checked the Financial Times my paper of choice and its report is that Beijing is registering its alarm at the American response to North Korea's aggression so the fact that there were 15 crises in no world war between 1946 and 1983 tells us precisely nothing about the probability of a third world war nothing for my friend and colleague iOS that I think was the first order fully to grasp the biggest flaw in the gas long piece in his seminal book the global cold war professor Western argues and I quote the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means you will all of course get the allusion to closes superpower interventions helps put a number of third-world countries in a state of semi-permanent civil war against the peasantry the realization which any reader of this wonderful book has that there was in fact a great deal of war during the long piece is really very powerful indeed not only that but one realizes the nature of the war was being waged its location in the third world and it's character as a continuation of the Wars of the colonial era this seems to me to be the most important insight of this of this excellent book that it was the peasantry of the third world the were the problem in the eyes of both these strange anti-imperial empires at the heart of the Cold War and this was an argument that I've made in colossus published in 2004 was a massive paradox to giant and - both proclaiming their hostility to imperialism behaved exactly as empires that previously behaved in precisely the same places in the case saying of Indochina or in the case so one way of thinking of Gaza's argument is flawed it's not the focus of that did a moment ago on the probability of an appeal but so look at the reality the actuality of a non-nuclear series of pretty low-grade conventional Wars often but not always civil wars waged by de facto empires against third-world peasants in the war of the world I made a a similar argument though there I tried to emphasize the character of ethnic conflict that was such a distinctive feature of the third world war the ribbond bloody third war war war was in fact fought in the third world itself where the strategic stakes they're not the human costs were lower one of the really fascinating things about the conflicts I've been to talk about it is that they were at some level ideological conflicts between elites aligned with the capitalist West and peasantry is often aligned with the communist East but they were also on closer inspection often continuations of ethnic conflict which predated the Cold War and guess what continued after the Cold War ended I began with Guatemala a lovely country but one with an almost oppressive sadness about it as I found when I visited is about five years ago what went on in Guatemala and it really can be said to have begun in the 50s with the overthrow of the ardennes regime but didn't get as it were momentum until the late citizens was nominally the cold war being played out in a small latin-american country but in practice it was a civil war between Latino Lutheran disturb the people who owned the vast estates and predominantly Mayan peasants it was an ethnic conflict and that ethnic conflict is still visible if you visit a Guatemala today visible not only in physiologies but also in the clothes that people wear we don't exactly know how many people disappeared because disappearance was not peculiar to Argentina and Chile in Guatemala but it was a large number since the Civil War ended an extensive effort has been made by the Guatemalan authorities to arrive at some approximate death toll and to recognize the victims huge multi-volume studies have been produced the total death toll was in the region of 200,000 people it is a relatively small country what happened in East Pakistan before it became Bangladesh in 1971 is part of the same story Mohammed I have can essentially waged a genocide war as he put it he wanted to prevent the secession a beast Pakistan from West Pakistan by quote reducing this majority into a minority we're all of course familiar with the story of what happened in Cambodia but no movie can quite prepare you for the reality of what you see if you visit that country and visit memorials to the victims of huge surely the most ghastly and murderous regime of the entire Cold War period with a an estimated number of victims somewhere between one and a half and two million people in the war of the world I try to show how this apparently extreme version this hyper Marxist regime in practice also pursued genocide or policies disproportionately the ethnic minorities were victims of Pol Pot's policies which were offensively genocide the father's Cambodian ethnic minorities and then as I go the biggest and longest of all the civil wars waged during the Cold War the Battle of wheat or Nevada is a fascinating event Africa perhaps putting it a bit strongly but certainly the biggest conventional thought in Africa perhaps anywhere in the Cold War period what happened near the Namibian border with Angola was a huge and wonderfully characteristic encounter between the Angolan government forces those of the rebel Unisa and the the Angolan government was a force not only with Soviet manufactured equipment but with a very substantial Cuban presence there are all kinds of extraordinary pictures of Cubans at this at this battle and it was Castro more really than anyone in Moscow who willed the intervention in Angola but took place the other side had a substantial number at least 3,000 South Africans fighting for them and this battle was in some ways a perfect illustration of how the third world's war was fought a war of proxies and even proxies and proxies and how else to understand the phenomenon of Angolans fighting angolans in soviet manufactured tanks with cuban crews this was the real Cold War and if you think that's cold you have a very different notion of temperature for me and so on The Listening of tragedy goes Khalistan 1988 can be I think understood as part of the same story we all were reminded over and over again of the extent to which Saddam Hussein became an American plant had meetings much photographed with Donald Rumsfeld and used American military aides to conduct the genocide of war against the Kurdish people using notoriously poison gas to wipe out whole villages cold a long piece so how peaceful was the Cold War II well not very some of the biggest conflicts of the Cold War era are listed here biggest being the Korean War but there were very large Wars that I haven't even mentioned for example the civil war in Sudan so it's obvious prima facie obvious the the long peace was not very peaceful for a very substantial part of the world's population it's only a long peace if you talk exclusively about relations between the superpowers and their closest allies one thing is very clear the first half of the 20th century was more violent than the second half that much we have to concede to join guys here are the numbers taken from the great University of Michigan correlates of war project if you just add up all the different kinds of wars interstate extra states as they call them which is is really a fancy word for colonial war and interesting which is similar add them up and look at estimated battle deaths I think the figures for 1949 are on that on the low side frankly even with conservative estimates for the world was casualty list you have a difference of a factor of three but when you look at the duration of wars a very different story emerges in the second half of the 20th century wars lasted on average a whole lot longer than the big Wars of the first half of the 20th century these are average durations of war in dates and you can see that the average second half of the 20th century war lasted a whole lot longer than the average first half and so it goes on there were many more Wars too and so one of the striking features of the Cold War or perhaps to be more precise of the second half of the 20th century is that there are more longer but smaller wars during the first half of the 20th century and that seems to characterize rather nicely the difference two euros but would the violence have happened anyway that's the obvious question you have to ask unlike the last discussion about the post-world War I participated in you'll see at once that you have to ask a counterfactual question to understand the phenomenon that you're discussing would the conflicts that I am talking about have happened anyway and is it an illusion to interpret them as a proxy wars in the Cold War well we have to ask that question otherwise we're going to find ourselves very far up the creek without a paddle to be precise how big a contribution did the superpowers make in fermenting the many long small Wars that was 1949 and promoting that really seems to me to be the key question the answer is a lot it's not plausible in my view that all this stuff would have happened anyway even if Roosevelt and Stalin had lived into the 1980s the best of friends but counterfactual that it was just going to happen that way in the third world I don't find Klaus a book because the Soviets did so much and here's the evidence starting with the authorization to the North Koreans to invade Korea through the Cuban Revolution through the Vietnam War through Angola and Mozambique the zombies consciously sought to pursue opportunities when they present themselves in third world and even when they didn't the Americans thought they were doing it that's the real significance of the story in Guatemala and of course the story in Chile which as you can well imagine will form a very important chapter of my Kissinger biography the Soviets thought this is a great line from the mid truckin archive the world was going our way and they were right peasant revolts were happening all over the decolonizing world and these peasant revolts clearly were more favorable to the communist pardon to the capitalist power the Americans were presented with unpalatable bedfellows at every turn massive estate owners generals not terribly nice people to put it mildly but they were the alternative to popular revolts armed with Kalashnikovs the key weapon of course of this era more importantly turned out the northern nuclear warheads in all the answers the Americans responded to every threat real or imagined they made so many treaties of alliance they made Neville Chamberlain in 1938-39 look parsimonious 48 different countries had treaties of alliance with the United States there were at least 168 instances of American armed intervention between 1946 and 65 our low earners Westerners pointed now most of this failed I said in my last lecture that the things that succeeded succeeded really well and it was crucial that they did but it has to be acknowledged that Taiwan and South Korea are the outliers most American military intervention did not produce rapidly growing capitalist economies capable of transitioning to democracy why but why don't buy so unsuccessful you see the key question is did the United States intervene too much as most people assume of course they have grown up in the shadow of supposed to be a critique of America or did the United States in fact intervene too little a shocking proposition that I made in my hugely unpopular book Colossus a book that was unpopular but at the left and the right it should be said because in pointing out that the United States was an empire I upset my colleagues and friends on the right and in pointing out that it could actually have been much more successful as an empire they upset all my colleagues and friends on the Left one of the interesting things about the US during the Cold War is that after the spending a lot of money on waging the Cold War at the time of Korea in fact the u.s. kind of tapered off its military that that's reading the crocks of Nixon's concept in Vietnam ization so although the average of 7.5% of gross domestic product is way higher than anything since the Cold War ended it's really not an evenly distributed consistent seven-and-a-half percent and when you look at US economic and military aid as a percentage of GDP the striking thing is how little of it there is not how much it's huge at the time of Marshall a more or less disappears yes the economic aid for most of the Cold War is greater the military raid and it also turns out that the military aid goes disproportionately to a relatively few quiet states I don't think anybody can claim on the basis of these data that the United States was engaged in massive intervention in other people's quarrels rather the reverse which Brinkley's agree agreed the problem with American foreign policy during the Cold War and after it is beautifully characterized in Green's novel the quite America pile whose the loathsome exponents of covert operations was talking about the old colonial past this to the jaded British journalist who is the narrator pol was talking about the old colonial powers in Dan in France and how you couldn't expect to win the confidence of Asiatics that was where the American came in now we've seen hands Hawaii Puerto Rico I said New Mexico he said that was always a third force to be found free from communism of the taint of colonialism national democracy he called you only had to find a leader keep him safe from the old colonial powers you have to imagine Michael Caine saying the mixture because Caden played the part in the movie that was released with perfect timing on the eve but I know that our liberals do we have a Liberal Party anymore liberalism's infected all the other parties we all either liberal conservatives or liberals socialists we all have a good conscience we go and invade the country they try to support us we are victorious but in Burma we made peace left our allies to be crucified and sawed in two they mercy they thought we'd stay that's the problem only data as well as accents there's a pretty interesting correlation between the duration of an American occupation and per capita income today and the problem is that by not staying in the wake of most interventions the United States consistently fail to achieve its objectives when it's staid which of course it did in Japan in South Korea if much more success though when it went in beat the bad guys installed the puppet and then went home with a clear conscience and that's really the beauty nail of the defect in American strategy which has persisted after the Cold War to the state and which we are currently seeing not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan when was the Cold War most hot because of course the Cold War is is not some homogenous thing phases distinct phases well you probably think I'm just guessing it was in the 1970s and the reason that you probably think that is that if we had to think of conflicts in the Cold War nasty conflicts we probably all put Vietnam fairly near the top of our list and the nineteen seventies certainly have a good claim to be considered at least in terms of violence the high point of the Cold War here incidentally is the key showing the percentage approval of the war slipping below half on the eve of 1968 as the casualties reached around in front of 30,000 mark compare that with what happened in Korea when public support remained about 50% right through the time of bitterest fighting well there were lots and lots of flash points are in the 1970s and I've just listed 13 here which I'm sure if John cows were here he would point out did not produce the third world war but then they nevertheless produce a lot of war and these third world wars are the thing that I'm interested in something like the fall of South Vietnam see it up on the memory of anybody who was old enough to watch TV in 1975 others we scarcely give Authority like the Revolution in Ethiopia in 1974 the October war that followed in 1977 lots of geopolitical crises lots of heads of state assassinated the 1970s really were a great time for assassins and in many ways Richard Nixon was lucky to leave the White House in a helicopter rather than in a box how much war per decade was there well what's interesting is that when you do the numbers that does not turn out to be a significant spike in the 1970 but most you can say is that there was slightly more war in the 1970s that 50 60s or 80s and slightly more deaths due to war relative to the world's population if you just look at the second table the far right column you'll see that the magnitude of battle related death goes up a teeny tiny bit in the 1970s relative to global population but you can't actually claim then there was a spike the reality about the Cold War is that in fact there was a pretty consistent level of third-world ones right the way from the beginning to the end what's more certain forms of violence grew over time and reached a peak after the Cold War terrorism being the obvious example scarcely any international terrorism happened prior to the 1970s more what happened in the 1990s and more recently about even in the 1980s could each are by contrast follow the pattern of the earlier slides there's not really more instability at least only slightly more than seventies then in the 1960s and there are more coos in the nineteen eighties than the nineteen seventies I want to conclude by offering you a brief explanation of why we tend to exaggerate how bad the seventies were and why it is that we have a mental image of the 1970s as the decade of malaise and disaster and helicopters lifting people off embassy rooms I think the answer is that there was a war with him and the war within the to super part blocks really had its climax in the 1970s though it began in 1968 or thereabouts this is also true it's not often that we think of them in the same breath but what happened in Pryor in 1968 was obvious crushed of the Prague Spring what happened in Chicago have some common features in both cases and there are many more out of sight it was students who were having their heads bashed in by working-class people either in uniform as policemen or soldiers now that this is actually a characteristic feature of the late 60s and early 1970s within the super park or here I'm not talking about the third world war I'm talking about the wars within that really broke out in 1968 they happens because of a strange generational quirk that we know is debatable the population aged between 15 and 24 as a share of total population reached a great peak in the 1970s this is especially true in North America but not uniquely so as you can see from this chart in fact the percentage of people in that age but was even larger in South America and this produces a particular form of internal crisis within the core of the Cold War system which broadly takes the place of takes the form of generational conflict here in the US data just illustrated what also happens this is highly relevant to the London School of Economics undergraduates what also happens is that people like you grow massively the percentage of the population in all developed countries there's a huge expansion of higher education here's 1928 from 1968 compared its university students as a percentage of the population as you can see in 1928 actually hardly anybody went to university the shares have massively increased by 1968 though by our standards this still actually amazingly low the sixty-eight errs are super elite that's of course why the police likes beating them up clacks war can take many different forms the foreman circa 1968 was working-class cops beating the crap out of privileged students dodged the draft while the cops brothers were in Vietnam nowhere was this more true than in the United States which was the first Society massively to expand higher education that's why the campuses explode in the United States more than anywhere else they'd never have been so many people in college as there were in the United States in 1968 anywhere in any society at any time that I think is why we have a peculiar view of the Cold War it's a view form from the campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s a view performed by students like the ones who at this institution and elsewhere organized their generational conflict into an anti-war process that focused principally but not exclusively on the war in Vietnam I want to try and suggest you Oh an incident a crisis took the form not just of Rights on campuses but also to the form of a great crime wave and this crime wave of course is is another kind of violence very different from war but a kind of violence that makes many people are uneasy watch these crime rates by the way in the wake of the Great Recession the number of armed robberies in the Harvard campus this semester I think must be equal to all the armed robberies of the previous decade put together I think I may stay here just to be safe actually final thought was there a post-war peace dividend that's kind of crucial if I'm right and the Cold War did matter and these wars wouldn't have happened quite as they did with out of the Cold War then there should have been a peace dividend when the Cold War ended if there was everywhere if you look at percentage changes in real inflation adjusted defense spending the biggest peace dividend was in Europe which basically demilitarized itself then came the Americas and then Africa but in the Middle East and even also in Asia there was no peace dividend on the contrary military expenditure increased and substantially by a quarter in the case of Asia when the Cold War had ended and that brings me to a conclusion I think we can see from this evidence why we think of the Cold War as either a long peace between the superpowers or a kind of generational existential crisis that culminated in 1975 of the fall of South Vietnam we think of it that way because our understanding of the Cold War that's basically the product of the generation of 68 and they're the kind of preoccupations have skewed our understanding of what happened if the baby boomers who write the history folks and that's why you actually need youthful figures like me to revise which I think also did increase the amount in for the in Asia but the larger questions about question of uncertainty I want to bring you into a bit more that's kind of you don't know until until the fat lady sings you don't quite know what the outcome is going to be until the outcome happens and for some odd reason I was reading Lee Kuan Yew whose memoirs the other day Rob good and he said in the middle of the second volume on this he said it was far from clear which side would win and he was talking of the 60s in the in the seventies and I'd like to change that one out on your on the question of uncertainty principle it was there a tipping point okay we never have a tipping point could be ever predict at any point which of the two or three sides or force five but take the two we're actually with start with that one and then open it up to people could start indication me alone to you thanks book that's that's a great question actually because what I'm saying in in response to John Gerdes is that it wasn't a stable system at all it was a complex adaptive system on the edge of chaos that's really how we should understand the Cold War and probably how we've done Stan most international quote-unquote orders and probably how I want you to understand most political organizations from the city state all the way up to the Empire it's only an illusion that they're in equilibrium they're actually complex systems in which there's constant adaptation by the component parts and they are on the edge of chaos this is an argument I made in an essay in foreign affairs earlier this year to try and give an insight into why when something collapses when a an empire collapses it happens really fast really suddenly and it's surprising and then once it's happened these people called historians arrive on the scene and they say are for this great calamity had deep roots stretching back many decades these deep roots and only stories of conceiving his contemporaries at the time were completely unaware and that makes me more and more suspicious actually of the traditional historical method something happens in the tail of the distribution of revolution an empire collapse as a massive war breaks out to contemporaries it's nearly always a total surprise and then historians have done up and say ah here are the causes of war I don't think that's actually how the historical process at all I think if you understand most historical events as as as complex systems tipping over the edge of chaos like earthquakes like forest fires historical fat tail events like wars are not predictable they are in fact randomly distributed and this is really troubling for most historians if any traditional stories start to weep at this point a strong drink if needed you have to recognize that are elaborate chains of causation or justice stories they really don't explain because these clapper collapses into disorder are in fact not determined by the stories they're determined when a tiny tiny perturbation tips the complex system over the edge of chaos and that's why you don't need an enormous theory of the causes of the first world war all you need to recognize is that print ships bullets were the perturbation that tipped the 1914 order over the edge of chaos everything else Tibbits is navy forget about it in us not relevant and the Cold War it seems to me is very like this to the end of the Cold War is posed by Mikhail Gorbachev that's it what he does when he quite randomly becomes the leader in charge of the Soviet Union as a result of two deaths what he does is the perturbation that tips the Soviet empire over the edge there's really nothing much else to explain because it is a highly fragile items nobody even writing in 1986 Gaddis Wars nobody anticipated that I'm aware the Gorbachev's reforms would cause the disintegration not just of the Soviet empire but the Soviet Union itself within five meters so we didn't here with something very very startling about the historical process which is that very large events can have very trivial or relatively small causes that really upsets us because we have as human beings an involved predisposition to tell stories about bad stuff when something traumatic happens we we have to have a story this will be true of you the next time you crash your car you tell some elaborate story to expose about why it happened then you just basically miscalculated three seconds before the crash that's how we should understand the end of the Cold War as something that was as surprising as any of the major events of the 20th century and it might not have happened there at that time in that way but the uncertainty is certainly the key most participants in most of the great events we study are deeply uncertain about the future most of the time and then once you armed believe in some mad ideology it seems to me that the what delightful to have Kennedy get us people among us please let me emphasize my great respect something I come from a culture where there is relatively little aggression but a great deal of retaliation offensive this also was a passive for thinking in the Cold War the game theorists who started to think about the nuclear arms race would play it erased prisoner's dilemma he probably study this with John Pollan bit the strategy that works best is in a great book by Geico Axelrod is is tit for tat plus in tit for tat plus you never take the initiative by defecting until you all kinds of party defect and then you retaliate with double the force of the initial offense this is the most successful strategy of decolonization should have been more prominent in that presentation I think I kind of was implying more than I I meant to when I quoted a Weston's argument that it's really the continuation of colonialism by other means absolutely that that's the key to understanding what is going on the Cold War and decolonization are often treated as if they're separate subjects and I remember teaching as a separate that's two separate topics at Oxford having different reading lists and so I had to start really thinking about this period when I when I realized that they were in fact two facets at the same process of post 1945 a period of crisis and I think of anything it's the breakdown of the European empires that is actually the really big story here what is going on and goal is the fast twitching Empire did I prefer the Soviet Union is the last European Empire in Asia to go down and the whole notion of East and West is a total confusion when we talk about the Cold War it was all the West including the Soviet Union which was run by Europeans as much as any Empire has been run by Europeans and it's the last of all so as somebody who's primarily a store in an empire rather than superpowers I much prefer that perspective the beauty of the Great Green quotes is that they absolutely enable the point but in the eyes of the British and even more so in the eyes of the French remember the great cut scene from Apocalypse Now which didn't make it into the movie houses but is the director's cut with his this extra you see them know you should see that I don't expurgated Apocalypse know the best movie of the entire Cold War there's a scene when they Martin Sheen ends up implausibly at dinner with a group of French colonialists plantation owners and they have a totally strange and highly didactic conversation about the nature of imperialism I can kind of see why the studio dropped it but I love so a point from both the British and French perspective was that the Americans were essentially entering the Empire game or continuing a process that had begun you know in 1819 in 1899 the young the interesting thing though is that this is hiatus and that's particularly important in those times when rather than simply keeping the British Empire and French Empire going the Americans let them die and then they realize somewhere in around about 1958 oh dear the Nationalists are not going to behave themselves and be our friends in fact British and French weren't so bad after all but too late by that time when things start to really go go pear-shaped in Iraq for example I think that's a really critical moment of truth in a counterfactual policy world the Americans could have simply from the outset 1945 onwards said these European empires it's so bad that it's bankrupt we'll take them over let's not take a chance with these with these nationalists who may turn out others to be friends of the Soviets or just great so that's that's how I would think of this story but it's the continuation of colonialism by other means but after a hiatus in which the Americans fault that they didn't need colonial structures to maintain their the second question was about her ethnic conflicts and and class conflict interact and the answer of course is that they one can't really explain one without without the other when I was writing about Guatemala and also trying to understand Cambodia and other conflicts where there was a substantial death tolls I spend a lot of time reading some pretty obscure stuff about but the ethnic dimension because that's so much less so much less discussed that's funny because the theme of war of the world is that ethnic conflict is the thing that really kills people the thing really has pure class conflict doesn't tend to kill people have so much as when it's got an athlete there was somebody of the bank is that one pleased as I can is anybody else on the back hand up from the very beginning I just think that's okay sure one and then two I'm on Tyra from Chinese newspaper I'm also a close relative here and our question for professor Fergusson you can't committee that the worst Asia anyway would happen no matter whether there was a couple opportunities and United States but but other words other continents or not could you do more great talk professor Fergusson interesting paradigm shift if we adopt your model that they're proxy wars in decolonization and the Cold War were driven by the superpowers I see that we can take this in two ways then the superpowers must have had core interests at stake you have to deal with the thesis that well the Americans armed to the teeth the Mujahideen so that it would cause the Soviet Union to bust by defense spending or were there other interests at stake other than these Star Wars let's spend them into the grave analysis and I think that in fact this proves the idea that Gorbachov himself cause they follow the Soviet Union because there are key interested in the Wars of decolonization well that's a great question and I think it's it's kind of something that hit me when I looked at the data then that implies that there's a potential that the superpowers didn't particularly need to to inflate I think that certainly plausible with respect to Korea I mean there was civil wars gonna happen there at some point what the Americans and the Soviets did was to make those Wars bigger I think certainly in the case of Korea in Vietnam it's hard to imagine civil wars in those in those countries when the United States became involved so I think that's a qualification that's very important the the fact that there's an arms race it goes on to this day is one of the the less well appreciated facts about Asia in the world today one has in fact to spend a bit of time talking to either the Australian maybe to have a sense of just how far a new kind of multipolar world is emerging in in post-cold-war a kiss indeed actually wrote about this quite soon after the end of the Cold War in a foreign affairs piece in which he argued that that Asia in the post-cold war period was coming to resemble Europe in the late 19th century with the combination of strongly antagonistic sovereign states and an arms race and I think recent events in Asia where that analysis out and to me make somewhat absurd any notion that there could be a european-style integration process in which Asian states pooled their sovereignty every time I hear any anybody ask about that I'm very very skeptical indeed because I don't see any evidence of sovereignty in that way so I think that would have been war in Asia and there may yet be more information but what the Cold War did was to make Asian wars bigger than they would be that makes that makes sense the question of what the relationship was between American policies say in Afghanistan or in anywhere else for that matter and the collapse of the Soviet Union is I think still in a good question I was certainly somebody who at the time passionately believe that that Reagan's arms build-up was a strategy designed to tip the Soviet Union over the edge and that it worked but with the clearing of of the smoke and the passage of time I become less and less sure about that and suspect increasingly though the decisions to reform were actuated not by a sense that the arms race was was being lost but both had more internal considerations I think that's the gist as deep popkins recent work actually so this seems more like an endogenous story than one that that we can credit to Ronald Reagan or for that matter the poem incidentally if you read Gaddis most recent book of the Cold War he ends up saying that the Cold War ended because of Ronald Reagan and I just don't find that a compelling argument or at least it sounds too much like a certain journalistic story that I was prepared to buy in 1989 but you know it's 2010 and I think I think we may have a slightly better understanding now for words of what was going on and I do think the internal dynamics within the interior of the driver and their reasons Orbital's reasons for Bristol reform I think we're very distant from yeah after that I'll take that one on chaos theory Luke Smolinski and does the notion of empire clash fundamentally with values of democracy I think I'll take those last two meters a lot of hands we're reaching okay there's two questions I deserve an apology from the beaver I'm looking for in the next scene no no no no that fine fine and upstanding newspaper empirically have to do with fact the young chaos theory became a hugely important part of my thinking when I was writing a book called virtual history and that was back in the early 90s when I was coming to grips with the origins of first world war and seeing the most models of causation used by historians either explicitly or implicitly were actually philosophical about 100 years earth date his stories were still in some kind of strange laplacian universe and everybody else had left that far behind in other fields whether you looked at the philosophy of law or causation the Natural Sciences it was obvious that the linearity was was really rather the exception particularly in the world of man-made institutions with with really very high levels of complexity so I think it's highly relevant yet and since virtually I've been doing a lot of work on complexity theory because I do think that offers really very important insights into the ways in which human institutions function and malfunction that's true in financial markets which is where I've done a lot of work recently and I think it applies as well to complex political organizations like super powers or or empires so I think that the way I would think about it is that both the Soviet Union and the United States were as it were internally complex systems and they interacted in the Cold War in a way that was in fact highly unstable but at the time and it's really rather amazing actually they didn't end up exchanging issues to me the really remarkable thing about the Cold War is not the decision that standard to the remarkable thing is Truman's decision not to use nuclear weapons which of course is what mikata that was all set to do with considerable support from other military and strategic thinkers and it would have been all over if they thought they could have probably overthrown the regime to the really interesting thing about the Cold War is that the United States does not exploit its massive edge that's the surprising thing and that brings us of course to the final questions which don't relate terribly directly to my talks well answer them very briefly is the notion of empire compatible with democracy isn't the case however what is true that certain empires in the way that they operated we're actually quite good at establishing the foundations without which democracy can't function democracy is a luxury good you can in fact have it and make it work until certain things are already in place of which the rule of law support and the British Empire was particularly good at creating those institutions and other empires were very bad acid which is why the fate of the country's post-colonial era is heavily dependent on the kind of empires that they had you stood a much better chance if you were a British colony than if you were a Belgian colony as from gana Stan well it's appropriate perhaps to end on that since of all the Cold War's surprises none really was bigger than the events of of 1979 with China I think we're much more important in the events of 1989 and 1979 two things changed that two things happened that completely changed the game one was the the Iranian Revolution and the other was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which then implicated the Soviets in that new war the war that Samuel Huntington called The Clash of Civilizations that would ultimately supplant the Cold War of ideologies that war shows very little sign of ending in the foreseeable future and we can set all the deadlines we like for withdrawing from Afghanistan whatever date we choose and it seems to bear it from week to week piles law still applies as enunciated by Graham Greene if you intervene in the country and then announced your intention to depart do not be surprised if the institutional foundations of democracy fail to take root I know that Nina's doing two more lectures in this series that are 150,000 pounds of time I need a three ready camera valuable money but I need has his own titles but I've got two for you Neil just to try your your third lecture would be Michael Caine and the building of the Berlin Wall and I knew Pope John Paul and John Gerdes and neither

Channel: LSE

Views: 35,502

Rating: 4.6825395 out of 5

Keywords: LSE, London, School, of, Economics, London_School_of_Economics, Public, Lecture, Event, Professor, Niall, Ferguson, Niall_Ferguson, humanities, socialscience, history, geography, third, developing, world, third_world, war, Africa, Asia, conflict, US, USA, Interventions, Third_World's_War, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Russia, Soviet, Union, Soviet_Union, superpower

Id: nku0u45oCtE

Length: 82min 48sec (4968 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2011