One Hundred Years of War, Revolution, and Peace

The Hoover Institution is the nation's leading research center dedicated to generating policy ideas that promote economic prosperity, national security, and democratic governance. Hoover's research has led directly to policies that have produced greater opportunity and freedom in the United States and the world. How has Hoover achieved this distinction? bringing together an extraordinary community of policy-oriented academics and learned professionals, offering open access to a world-renowned archival library, and focusing single-mindedly on ideas that define a free society. Herbert Hoover is the founder of the institution that bears his name after graduating from Stanford University. He pioneer class in 1895 he became a successful mining engineer, renowned humanitarian, and president of the United States while administering famine relief in Belgium during World War I and participating in the subsequent Paris Peace Conference.

Hoover recognized the importance of collecting historical material that could generate knowledge on how to prevent a recurrence of the calamities he had witnessed in Europe in April 1919, he pledged $50,000 to Stanford University to support his war collection. We celebrated this pivotal moment 100

years

ago when what would become the Hoover Institution was founded in 1929. The Hoover War Library contained 1.4 million items and had already become the largest in the world focused on the Great War and his later collection expanded to include material relating to social, political and economic change in the 20th century. The Hoover Tower was completed in 1941 to house the rapidly growing library and archive.

In 1957 the collection was permanently renamed the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. Hoover's vision for the institution was captured in a statement before Stanford's Board of Trustees in 1959; the institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its Bill of Rights, and its method of representation. government, the general mission of this institution is, from its records, to remember the voice of experience against the conduct of war and, through the study of these records and their publication, to remember the efforts of man to make and preserve the

peace

, the institution itself must constantly and dynamically point out the The path to

peace

, personal freedom, and safeguards of the American system in the 1970s, the institution was generating influential research on government regulation, fiscal policy, national security , health care, social security, energy and proposals to limit government spending.

Many innovative public policy proposals developed by Hoover Fellows were adopted in the 1980s and Hoover contributed influential policy ideas to counter communism that ultimately led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991 the all-volunteer military the flat tax rule Taylor's approach to monetary policy and school choice and accountability are all transformative policy ideas generated by Hoover Fellows Hoover's timeless core values ​​of liberty, private enterprise, and limited effective representative government derived from 100

years

of scholarship and the lessons from history, the Hoover Institution is poised to have an even greater impact in the years to come by shaping the marketplace of ideas that advise the nation's citizens. policymakers and lighting the path to prosperity and peace in the United States and around the world.

This lecture series brings together Hoover Fellows to discuss how the ideas and values ​​that have sustained the institution for 100 years remain crucial to understanding and formulating public policy in the 21st century. The Hoover Institution was created at a time of greatest global upheaval: 1919 was the year the world attempted to end the World War after more than four years of conflict in Europe and beyond Europe because it was a global conflict. salt of the peacemakers led by President Woodrow Wilson to end that type of conflict and they failed and part of the purpose of the Hoover Institution the central purpose really was to try to learn the lessons of that four year period of war and

revolution

so Herbert Hoover established this institution so there is an archive that was supposed to be learning from the mistakes of 1914 to 1918, but it turned out that they were making new mistakes in 1991.

This example was the part of the Treaty of Versailles that established the terms of the defeat of Germany in World War I and that turned out to be a very short-lived peace because 20 years later World War II broke out with the German invasion of Poland, so I think what makes this institution so important is that we have gone through a century also trying to understand the connections between conflict, war and

revolution

. like trying to understand how to make peace last and create social and political stability. If you ask me what the most important lessons we can learn from the great upheavals of the 20th century, a couple of things come to mind: One of them is that when empires crumble, that's often when conflict arises.

Surgeons The 20th century was a time of imperial collisions, the world wars were actually wars between empires, but the disintegration of the empire was not necessarily certain in the period of peace, in fact, in the end the empires of central Europe and Oriental. of World War I that began with the Russian Revolution of 1917 led to a period of instability in our people that did not really end until the end of World War II in 1945. I think the second lesson we have learned is that when to impact to any society, but especially a multiethnic society, with a major economic crisis, whether hyperinflation or depression, which can also have disastrous results and that is why much of our energy at the Hoover Institution has been dedicated to understanding the causes of economic crisis as well as the drivers of prosperity, so that's really what Herbert Hoover wanted us to do and I'm happy to say that I think for a

hundred

years we've done a reasonable job.

Hello and thank you very much for coming. I'm Eric Wakin. the deputy director of the Hoover Institution and the director of our library and archives welcome to the ninth session of our Centennial speaker series titled A Century of Ideas for the Free Society. This series features 11 panel discussions throughout the year to showcase rigorous scholarship. and research fundamental to the mission and values ​​of the institution allow me to also pause and thank the supervisors and supporters of the Hoover Institution without whom none of this activity would be possible since the institution is 100% privately funded. Today's discussion is titled Hoover's 100 Years of War. revolution and peace and features two renowned Hoover historians, Neil Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson, let me introduce you both for a moment.

Neil Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior faculty member at the Belfer Center at Harvard, where he also served for 12 years as the Lawrence to Tisch Professor of History. Neil is the author of 15 books, including The Pity of War, The Civilization of the Empire of the House of Rothschild, and Kissinger 1923 to 1968, the idealist who won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Luncheon Prize. His career has been awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service, the Hayek Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Ludwig Erhard Award for Economic Journalism. Neil's most recent book, The Square and the Tower, was published in the United States. in January 2018 and was a New York Times bestseller Victor Davis Hanson is a Martin in illy Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairs the Hoover Military History Working Group.

Victor is a military historian, columnist, scholar of ancient and modern warfare. He is also a commentator. on modern warfare and contemporary politics for a multitude of media outlets Victor was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno and has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004 received the Eric Grendel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism He was awarded the National Humanities Medal and the Bradley Prize; the winner is also a farmer and critic of social trends related to agriculture and agrarianism. Victor has written or edited twenty-four books, the latest of which is The Trump Case, published in March 2019.

Please join me in saying welcome. our dear colleagues on stage well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, it is very exciting to be with my dear colleague Victor on this stage. We thought we might start our conversation by reflecting a little bit on the Hoover Institution and its history because it's important to remember that. This institution originated with Herbert Hoover's interest in the history of his own time. I did a little bit of research for this. I had read a biography of a man named Andrew Dixon White, a Yale man who was one of the founders of Cornell.

University and this white figure who turned down an invitation to be Stanford's first president had assembled an extraordinary collection of documents related to the French Revolution that are now part of the collection of the Cornell University Library, when Hoover was working on efforts aid in Europe. During World War I, he decided to put together a similar collection of war-related documents. The war he was witnessing and the original promise of $50,000 to Stanford in 1919 was to fund that collection; It was originally called in 1922 the Hoover War Library and by 1926 it had actually become one of the most important documentary collections in the world during World War I, so the origin of the Hoover Institution is indeed historical and when became the Hoover Institution and the War and Peace Revolution Library, that was one version of its name, the archive collection that our colleague Eric now cares for was absolutely central to the mission of the institution and I'm just going to quote a few words from Herbert Hoover before turning his statement over to Victor. to the Stanford Board of Trustees in 1959, said that the general mission of this institution is, from its records, to remember the voice of experience against the conduct of war and, through the study of these records and their publication, to remember man's efforts to make and preserve peace. and uphold for America the safeguards of the American way of life, so as we commemorate the centennial of the Hoover Institution it is very important to remind ourselves that that was the original intention, so I wanted to start by asking you, Victor, how far we have lived. to that original mission and, in particular, perhaps he wanted to draw on his recollections of one of the most distinguished historians ever to be a companion of Hoover, Robert Conquest.

Yes, answer his first question first. His second question. It was my strong point. It was good luck when I arrived. in 2003 and four people I met and talked to, I thought the three people who best embodied in an academic sense the Hoover Institution and its pedigree were Robert Conquest, Tom Sol, and Milton Friedman, and there was a definite theme in all of their conversations. that there was a confrontational relationship with the trajectory of American society towards current liberal progressive manifestations. One thing to remember. The first 50 years or maybe the first 40 years it was a research institution and it was conservative, but when Herbert Hoover, I think, in his early years he felt that he was a conservative progressive, in other words, that he could transform progressivism and build on conservative ideas, and they were not antithetical so he really left after this worst war in the history of civilization 17 millions of people killed that not only a repeat of the First World War but a repeat of all wars could be avoided by sober, judicious, erudite intellectuals and researchers who could discover why wars take place in general, so that was part of the impetus for bringing this collection here.

The other thing is that it wasn't overtly political or ideological because it just took it for granted that California, as you know, Leland Stanford, being governor, was a purely conservative place and it was just the big four and the traditions of corporate capitalism would always provide an enriching outlook for Hoover and, on the other hand, he knows David Starr Jordan very well, so in his way of thinking, although he handed over this library and there were memoranda of agreements, I never really felt that I had to articulate that Hoover would always be free markets and smaller government because he assumed that California was a conservative place and Stanford especially was conservative and I think as he grew up, especially in the 1960s, in the '50s, his relationship with California and Stanford changed and he saw thatcame back and said: you know what we need, more than a library, we need a research institution in the 50s and I need to start looking very carefully at Stanford's relationship with the Hoover Institution and especially with climate change in California that doesn't mean that California was liberal in the 32 years of governor between Reagan and Jerry Brown's second term, but I think he thought it was time to take a stand and that led to the Glen Campbell appointments and then it's kind of It's strange that we We've had almost half a century with only two directors and we've never articulated exactly what our relationship with Stanford was because it had been kind of an assumption from the beginning and I think the criteria for those assumptions had changed radically over time.

Hoover's view was that there was a connection between a constitutional order that emphasized individual liberty and peace, so the underlying hypothesis, as I understand it, of his original project was that we need to simultaneously understand what constitutes a free society. If we want to understand what preserves peace or prevents war, and this seems an obvious connection to the work of conquest when I was a student at Oxford in the early 1980s, the way you studied the history of the Soviet Union was by reading a lot of books from other classmates. travelers by people who were sympathetic in one way or another to the eh car projectFor example, his incredibly tedious history of Soviet bureaucracy, but my tutor Angus MacIntyre recognized that I was a troublemaker from the beginning and after being assigned a lot of nice left-wing books on Soviet history, he said, "well, you'll probably enjoy the conquest as such." If I was being given a subversive reading assignment from Zam Start, then I went to the library and read Conquest about Stalin and Hunger and Terror and I thought it was absolutely fantastic.

Here was the scholar who was not afraid to call out the Soviet Union. Union by its real name is to characterize it as the oppressive terror-based totalitarian state that it was and I remember being amazed to discover that in the countryside he was kind of the marginal figure that I was but so talk a little bit about me me you He knew him better than me, we only met towards the end. He was a journalist, so they considered him when people couldn't refute the nature of his arguments per se, then they attacked him for not being a scholar because he wasn't in the academic community. and I think it's good to remember that Freedman, the soul and the conquest are all of us, just as they were made.

Older people on both sides of the aisle began to say, well, they're senior statesmen, but let's forget the vitriol and furor they provoked. they had to deal with most of their lives because they were iconoclasts and they were voices in the wilderness telling the truth when people, especially in the '40s and '50s, coming out of the postwar order, it was naturally assumed that America would become more and more leftists and with the government they would get bigger and then the Enlightenment would come, more bureaucracies, more think tanks, more educated people would guard Plato's guardians, so to speak, less poverty we would have from war violence and they essentially said that Human nature is immutable and the Soviet Union was a great crime of the 20th century and received a lot of pressure and I think it is important for all of us in the Hoover community to try to live up to its ideals as well as free markets. and limited government thinkers, but also the personal courage and candor that they were willing to express at a time when it was not very popular at all, it is now 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and we were very close to that anniversary and I remember that after the collapse of communism there was a period in which the Soviet archives were opened on Earth and lo and behold, all the new research that was carried out, including those carried out by Russian historians, vindicated Bob's conquest and discredited those people who, in their own way, had tried. to justify Stalin's regime, yes, and now it is not so shocking when you go back and read a work of conquest because he has been proven right, but when he published it, the criticism was often extraordinarily hostile and hurtful and we must remember that was attacked from the right.

To this, the whole animal analysis of the CIA was that the Soviet Union was quite stable and formidable until the collapse, we really had no idea of ​​the intrinsic weaknesses in its foundation, he did and that is why when he suggested that this murderous regime the genocide was inherently evil and inherently unstable, there was no one on the conservative side because that didn't quite jibe with the idea that we have to defeat this giant or he will bury us during the crucial failure, but he was always kind of saying you have reason that it is evil, but the evil is based on lies and it is not going to be sustained, that was nice, that did not necessarily win him any support nor even on the right, so one of the things I wanted to do tonight was to Talking about a particular book you wrote, you recently published World War II Plural, it's not often that you admit to a colleague that you haven't read your book, but until this weekend I haven't read it. and I thought it would be better since we were going to have this conversation why didn't he blurt out but he didn't read it when he said the manual.

I was a little busy with Henry Kissinger when you were working on the second one. world war, so I just want to tell you that if you have not bought this book and you have not read us, buy this book and read it, it is an extraordinary and brilliant work that will really make you rethink what we call the Second World War and makes you rethink it from On the first page, I'll quote that opening passage and then ask you a question. Victor cites that about 60 million people died in World War II, on average, 27,000 people died each day between the invasion of Poland and September 1, 1939. and the formal surrender of Japan September 2, 1945 bombed shot stabbed shattered incinerated gasped or infected Axis loser killed Losers killed or starved approximately 80% of all who died during the war Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers who defeated the Axis mostly civilians , this was the worst war, the largest war as far as can be established in the entire history of humanity, probably about two and a half percent of the world's population in 1938 died as a direct consequence of the war Victor, why Do you call them the second? world wars plural I think what I was trying to suggest is that in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland for the first time in September there was still something known as the Great War and that was the First World War or what you and the UK call the World War I and that remained. as the great war throughout the Polish campaign and then the following spring, the invasion of Norway and Denmark in the spring and then the invasion and conquest of Great Britain in late spring seems to reverse the Netherlands and then the Balkans and the operation in 41 in Crete.

It was still considered the Cretan War, the Greek War, and suddenly two things happened, three things happened that no one had ever imagined. Hitler turned against his former de facto ally, perhaps not even a fact of aggression, but they were de facto allies and invaded on June 22. In 1941 they invaded the Soviet Union and then six months later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and then, incredibly, on December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States and then almost immediately all these little wars broke out. became one war and mysteriously the first world war appeared in the lexicon what a war - well, first world war for the great war oh, I see people look back and say wow, that was just one and now this thing for the first time it was called suing the other thing I want to do to emphasize is that unlike the world's first war or the Civil War, where there were two or three fronts or two or three modes of fighting, you could be in the jungles of Burma, you could be at 30,000 feet in a B-29 over Japan, you could be in a submarine in the North Atlantic, you could be in the desert fighting Rommel, you could be Rommel at the Atlantic Wall a year later, but the sheer range, the The geography and type of war meant that it was almost unbelievable that a war I knew of was considered one.

As a little boy, I crawled under the table at Christmas dinners and my father was in a B-29, he flew 40 missions over Tokyo, my uncle was in a Dutch port and in the Aleutians. He had another one. I was named after a marine who was a Swedish boy. who was killed in Okinawa, my uncle and then I had a cousin who had a terrible fever in the Philippines and they were all arguing about World War II and they had nothing in common, they said their theater was the hardest or I did this or that and I thought, well, this is all one thing, but people at the time didn't necessarily think it was one thing.

It's good that we have these memories to draw on and you are touching about your family's experience. Some of you may wonder why. I am wearing a paper flower on my lapel, this of course is a red poppy to commemorate the upcoming November 11, Remembrance Day in Britain, Veterans Day, here are my childhood memories, they are of somewhat similar plots , but in our family it was my grandfather who fought against the Japanese in Burma, arguing vehemently with my great-uncle Alfred, who was a communist throughout his life and always defended the Soviet Union, even when my grandfather reminded him that the Soviet Union had been on Hitler's side at the beginning of the war, which was when it became rowdy. but the Christmas dinner table and I'm sure I became a historian because of these family discussions and the first questions I remember being asked of a historical nature were why Earth was a newspaper editor, my grandfather had been the boss sub and the Glasgow.

Herald in Burma struggling with how that could have happened to him and then how my father's father, at the age of 17, ended up fighting the Germans in Belgium and spent most of the next three years on and off the Western Front. I'm not sure our students, who are in their twenties today, have anything like that to draw on and perhaps it's worth reflecting a little on how distant these events are for Millennials and Generation Z compared to our generation we don't fight with, but we do. I grew up with war as an ever-present layer of wars as an ever-present layer and I think I'm a generation older than even you, so I'm 66 years old and I can remember World War I, my grandfather was gassed in Bella Wood. and so he was a Swedish immigrant and he was wondering why he ended up in Fresno County one day and the next day he was in Belgium fighting for what he didn't really know at the time he said, but I guess I guess you think my It's It's possible that his grandfather was there too, he was on the trip, he was actually there in early 1918 when the Germans launched their big spring offensive and he was shot in the chest and was lucky to survive, so it's possible that They were within a few miles of each other and he was a lifelong Emeril who was mustard gas but so was my grandfather.

I remember his chest wheezing, he would sit up, I would sit on his knee and his wheezing is really all I remember clearly about him. He died when I was very young. the culture also because, as you know, many of us are some of us in the audience, there were television shows at 12 o'clock, there were movies from the longest day and from the 40s, 50s and 60s and there were war surplus stories that are remembered in every small town. where you buy jackets or combat boots and then you meet these veterans everywhere and they all had some kind of code, he was in America, he was in combat and all that is gone and it makes it harder for this generation because I think in our life.

We will see the disappearance of most of the people who fought in World War II, it is happening

hundred

s a day as we speak and it will be a little more difficult and then we will have a kind of surge of the therapeutic in our schools where we have convinced ourselves in our arrogance that with enough money in education we can change human nature and we will not see a war of that magnitude. That generation had a tragic view that wars are avoided through deterrence and military preparedness, and I think that's dangerous. If we forget that tragic vision of human nature, we are not going to change, what human nature is, what it is, and one of the most powerful things about your book on World War II is that what you bring is a classicist Sensibility and I .

I'm going to embarrass you by reading another quote that captures very well how beautifully the book is written but also how original it is. You say that the conflict was fought on familiar terrain, in predictable climates and weather conditions, by humans whose natures had not changed since ancient times, and thereforeThose who went to war therefore fought and forged a peace according to time-honored presets, its origins and end following broader contours of conflict as they developed over 2,500 years of civilized history. Wars eternal elements a balance between powers deterrence versus appeasement collective security prevention and preemptive strikes and the peace brought by victory, humiliation, occupation still governed the conflict.

British, American, Italian and German soldiers are often found fortifying or destroying the Mediterranean stone of the Romans, Byzantines, Venetians and Frank Ottomans. I love that passage, it was quite different from anything I had ever known. I thought before I talked a little bit about that classic quality of this conflict because, as you say, we think of war as a kind of high-tech war in which new weapons never before seen in human history were deployed on a scale never seen in the history of humanity, but at its root at least it did not have its original phase, it was still a classic war, certainly, since it was fought in and around the Mediterranean.

I would make two observations. I think we, in the postmark era, think that materialism governs human behavior and that we all go to war for oil or rubber or something, but in the classical view, so important were human emotions, honor, fear as through the Sidda tea set and perceived self-interest, and many things happened that were irrational, such as Hitler breaking non-aggression. pact and attack the Soviet Union, but that had a lot to do with an ideology that was not included in the economy, that is important to remember. The other thing is that the ancients remind us that deterrence is a bit of an elaborate idea, it means everyone knows. in the room your relative strengths, so you all get along because you have a reputation, you have money in the bank and if there is an outlier or someone who wants to cause trouble, then people will come together and stop that person, but when that knowledge is lost and people who are weak seem strong and people who are strong seem weak so people do something they shouldn't and what happened in 1939 was that the Soviet Union signed its super law of non-aggression and that convinced Hitler that they were eager for a pact and were not that strong, at the same time it happened, Churchill was still out of power and, although Chamberlain had made adjustments, he still felt that the British Empire, but any rational observer would say that the British Empire was quite strong and had many more resources in Germany and might have been able to defeat Germany on its own eventually, but because they had not armed and Stanley Baldwin said that the bomber always gets through and that they had the potential that Hitler had to achieve was not taken advantage of. military readiness and, according to an unreliable and inaccurate assessment by the British, along with it, is a trifecta that the United States remembers once we mobilized in 1941 and 42, in 1945, the United States alone had a greater gross domestic product and Italy what was left of Italy Japan Germany the Soviet Union and Great Britain together we produced more airframes around the world together we produced more of every type of weapon around the world except tanks and artillery pieces and yet , we were unarmed, we had an army the size of Portugal's and that's why Hitler called us Cowboys, we never armed even though we had sent 2 million people in the First World War without losing one to Belgium, it was an incredible achievement, he roars, but We had disarmed ourselves, we were isolationists when you combined and combined.

Russian collaboration British appeasement American isolationism Hitler had the idea that either these powers were not powerful or would not mobilize in case of attack or did not have spiritual strength and that was a serious mistake because it led to a series of blunders that allowed those three powers to ally and once that was consolidated in December 1941 there was no way, at least he put it this way, he only had about a year to win the war before those enormous resources would come into play and they would, It's not something that is talked about. in his book, but it seems to me that it is always worth asking whether Hitler would have been arrested in 1938.

I suppose the question of appeasement has returned to the popular sphere thanks to Churchill's recent film The Darkest Hour, although it actually focuses on 1940. It seems to me that we could use a 1938 drama because in 1938 Churchill explains with extraordinary clarity of vision, as our colleague Andrew Roberts has shown in his brilliant recent biography, that the United Kingdom, the British Empire, had to confront Hitler and that playing for time in 1938 would not actually be a good strategy because Hitler would get the time; This was the central flaw in the idea of ​​appeasement: that more time was needed, this is how Chamberlain sold it, this is how his ministers and officials rationalized it as if Hitler was not given the time too Hitler's position was too much. weaker during the Czechoslovak crisis than during the Polish crisis because in September 1939 he had closed his deal with Stalin and he did not have that deal in the summer of 1938 and for me the big what if has always been what if, instead of By sticking to appeasement, Britain would have called Hitler's bluff and actually threatened a war over Czechoslovakia rather than selling the Czechs down the river, as Chamberlain did in Munich. it was a scenario in which the lawnmower could not have been avoided entirely and there you can argue on several levels: in 1939 the French tanks were defeated, it was better than anything in the German army when the yonkos and 38 tanks were produced They broke down. the Germans were inept, the siege of the Saar Fork, Rhineland, they were very afraid that when they broke the Treaty of Versailles and began to formally form the Luftwaffe, that the British who had hurricane fighters and the super Ring Spitfire were already starting Coming out in '39, it was as good, if not better, than the Me-109, remember that the United States had a four-engine bomber, the B-17, as early as '38.

Germany never built a single operable bomber for the wounded. in northern Japan, nor Italy in the entire war, which meant the Germans didn't have the rain they shouldn't have to hit key Soviet objectives, so we could have easily done it, we Americans could have easily mobilized and cattle, a mark that shows he was a brilliant Southern segregationist, although Karl succeeded in a series. of the naval acts on the 35th night 3730 we had on the drawing boards at Pearl Harbor the plan to build 26 Essex aircraft carriers, we built 146 more aircraft carriers than the entire world we put together light escort aircraft carriers and fleet, but that fleet, even as disadvantages, we were in 41 still It had the second largest Navy in the world.

Britain had the largest Navy. The only problem was that we weren't as big as Japan in the Pacific, but we would be in a year, which reminds us if we had done this two or three years earlier. Hitler. we wouldn't have been able to take over what is now the European Union and the richest part of the Soviet Union, so at the end of '41 we might find ourselves with a maniac who shouldn't say maniac in the sense that he was a vicious lunatic. and genocidal, but conniving and cunning from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert and from the English Channel, 240 miles from Moscow, we gave him that advantage by being ready, he will be again later in the book, in July By 1942, Hitler controlled much of what is now. the European Union, as you just said, almost 1 million square miles of the richest and most populated lands of the Soviet Union were under German occupation, Hitler's armies were still at the gates of Leningrad and Army Group South of Moscow was advancing seemingly unstoppable on its path. to the oil fields of the Caucasus with few enemies ahead and fewer suppliers: Rommel's advances in North Africa and the fall of Tobruk raised the specter of Africa called Panzers in Egypt and perhaps eventually beyond the sewers in terms of manpower and territory under his Third government.

The now-larger-than-Rome Reich stretched from the Arctic to the Sahara and from the Atlantic to 2,000 miles east of Berlin on the Volga River and that brings us to the key question: could the Axis have one? I once looked through the Oxford college betting books. and it was fascinating to see how uncertain our people were, particularly at that stage of the war, about its outcome. One of the reasons I believe passionately in the study of history and, in particular, in the study of history based on archival research of documents of the point is that one can recover the uncertainty of the past, we know How did it turn out not?

There's a wonderful menu that you can see if you go to the Senate dining room in Washington DC, in the back of which I think five or six. The senators bet that when the United States would enter World War II it would be in the summer of 1941, and two or three of them thought it would be that year. One of them never wrote, so in the summer of 1941 it still seemed conceivable to an elected representative of the American people the United States would never enter the war, so I don't think we can assume it was a done deal despite the great disproportion in resources clearly at the time the powers had ranked and it was the access fee allies that The allies had an overwhelming economic and demographic advantage, but could they still one axis or at least avoid the complete destruction?

I think they could have done it and we can do it through what they actually did and the counterfactual of what they could have done but what they actually did. If we take an arbitrary date of September 1942, we look at the map of Egypt with Rommels only with three divisions and yet he is all over Egypt and the only thing between them is Montgomery in El Alamein and he is trying to get to Suez and cut. eliminate all oil and imports for the British Empire in its homeland, it could have done it, but at the same time it is doing it, even after the Midway wave was supposedly the turning point, in reality it was not because five battles off Guadalcanal in September October the net result of this we only had one aircraft carrier wounded in the entire Pacific Saratoga was torpedoed the Yorktown was sunk the Lexington was sunk the Wasp and the Hornet were lost we only had one the Enterprise at the same time we are talking 42 the German army is still only 50 miles from Moscow, it is five miles from Lenin, heading towards the caucus oil fields if he and we Hitler had not intended to break away and enter Stalingrad, but it seemed more or less in that period that the Japanese and the Germans and the Italians were where we Germans are going to win and, more importantly, we didn't know how the 1st Marine Division that was formed in the '30s and '40s would hold up against These veterans of 10 years of fighting in China on Guadalcanal did not really know what would happen if an American and a B-17 could fly during the day bombing without fighter escort, they would lose between 8 and 10% of the mission and continue, so in that period and 42 what happened is that suddenly the U.S. engine of democracy arsenal was started, but more importantly the U.S. 1st Marine Division and The 2nd Marines proved not only comparable in water channel to the Japanese in jungle fire, but no one thought it possible to be superior to them and then, in North Africa, under the Under George Patton, there were times when inexperienced Americans were up to the task.

The ability of British soldiers to defeat Germany on their own terms and then when strategic bombing turned out not to be what was advertised, we didn't give up, so we lost 40,000 airmen. Britain lost 40,000 airmen to demonstrate what it takes to fly. The British have to fly at night with fighter escort, we have to fly during the day with escort, but everyone thought we had abandoned it. Guderian did a great job, the German Nazi general said that with the Das Reich division I can drive those cowboys off the beach no matter what. It was just a division and he talked as if someone had fought two or three years against the Soviet army and yet that year we showed that we could, we would mobilize and Britain would mobilize and the Soviet Union would kill three out of every four German soldiers. during the war and they didn't quit, everyone thought Hitler said you kick in the door, the Soviet Union will rise.

General Holder, head of Ok Eight, said that it is not an exaggeration to say after two weeks that the Soviet Union is defeated, and yet that was not the case. The last thing I would say is that that's what happened, it was a close situation, but if the German army had not invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and divided the majority of the people into Ok W, into Ok Age, the supreme command of The Marksee and the German army did not want to go to the Soviet Union at least they said that after the war, but if they had not gone to the Soviet Union there is no evidence and the primary sources were stolen because the rumor was going to get ahead and it was a pre and they had to get ahead of it, so I think he had the entire European continent under his control and he would have if he hadn't gone into the Soviet Union, he would have eventually been able to organize it economically in a way in a way that he never did in the Soviet Union.

An interesting question is what would have happened if there had been better strategic coordination between the members of the axis, if the Japanese instead of attacking the United States and the European empires in Asia had attacked. In the Soviet Union they probably wouldn't have fared very well. They had a certain feeling of inferiority compared to the Red Army. On the other hand, it would have forced Stalin to deploy divisions to the east. I can't think of any other way. World War II has had a different outcome than that. Yes, interestingly, you can play this as a game if you want to recreate the strategic choices of World War II.

There's a computer game, a strategic computer game called Making History, that I helped design because I thought the only way to solve these questions is to create a strategic game that has the right inputs, so unlike most of these games, we made sure we had the right capabilities for all the different players and once you start building a game you kind of realized how many players there were, so I spent some time on this when I was at Harvard because I thought it could be a useful teaching tool, but I'm not a gamer and I don't really see you ahead. of a Sony Playstation, either Victor, so I asked my teenage son, Felix, to experiment with the game and he was very interested in strategic games, so he took it to his room and I didn't think about it anymore and then , one morning, he came. running down the stairs I did it I did it I said what do you mean I completely forgot about the computer game I did it I won the second world war as a axis and I thought what have I done but the way he did it was like this After having run all kinds of differences, I repeated it about a hundred times and I came to the conclusion that if you could just coordinate the attack on the Soviet Union, then you really could do it because, I think, you could get the Soviet Union out of the war that way.

That's what I didn't mean when I said that in my infinite wisdom it was stupid for the Germans, it was stupid, but what I'm trying to say is that historians have to be very careful post facto not to judge the people who had reasons to do things that were stupid, so let's face it, but why is it stupid to think that the Soviet Union was a completely rotten, corrupt and unpopular system? Well, Mike wasn't collaborative, although, you see, we were trying to get into this horrible Nazi mentality. and the red Hitler of 1941 is June 22, his generals say, my Führer, the Soviet Union is giving us enormous amounts of oil and wheat and we have to eliminate Britain and let's not do that and he says, ah, they invaded Finland in 1939. they lost 500 thousand little Finland expelled him and then he says they said but my nephew said wait a minute they liquidated his officer corps they killed forty thousand people then they say mine Führer said listen when we divided Poland we had a demarcation line we got there in three weeks they couldn't even get there so that's what he thought and then of course Neil was referring to and according to German mythology they could see the spiers of the Kremlin and they were at the first subway station. on December 1 and suddenly 60,000 of the best Russian troops take the Trans-Siberian Railway and appear before Moscow and that offensive fades and today everyone is saying well why the Japanese didn't attack from Wladis Stovic and go east and tie up the Los Russians and there was also a reason for that and one of the things was that Japan had been fighting against Marshal Markel.Zhukov in August 1939 and he was part of it, they thought they were part of the fascist Solidarity movement and suddenly they wake up one morning and Hitler signed a non-aggression act with his enemies releasing more Russian troops against the Japanese so that the Japanese.

Say ah, we're going to do the same thing with the Germans, so in April they signed a non-aggression pact with Russia and when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in the first three weeks he told General Belmont to make sure those Japanese didn't do it. they did. He didn't want to go in and collect our loot because he thought it would be like that, then after six weeks he said why don't you come? and they said: my Führer, we betrayed them and they betrayed us. The other thing was that in terms of Japanese military capability, if you look at his navy, it was Westernized to the core, it was ship-borne, the training is good.

I'm no better than the Americans or the British in 1941, if you look at fighter aircraft, it was comparable if you look at the army, it wasn't comparable in terms of armor and artillery, from what Yamamoto and the Navy had said, look , don't go to the Soviet Union because we are not up to Western standards in the military, but leave it. My Pearl Harbor bomb made me go crazy because they are outnumbered by our aircraft carriers, the Americans and the British, so there was a reason it turned out to be flawed in retrospect, but for a while it looked like they could pull it off.

I want to spend There's still a little time before we open up to questions about the lessons of history, but before we get there I can't resist offering a kind of counterpoint to your second world war in the plural with a book I wrote about 12 years ago. years, The War of the World. What was unique about the argument was that we should consider the entire period from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to the end of the Korean War as a single period of more or less uninterrupted conflict and that when we looked at it that way you could see something that It is quite difficult to explain in any other way and that is the place of conflict.

There are really two parts of the world you don't want to live in in the first half of the 20th century: one is that triangle between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea in the Balkans, you know, Ukraine, etc., and the other is close by. of the Korean Peninsula because those places see a colossal percentage of violent deaths in the 20th century and remain theaters of violence. Ukraine is never more or less at peace, there is no end. The first world war in Ukraine continues, the slaughter continues during the so-called Russian Civil War, then Stalin continues in the form of internal politics and even at the end of 1945 there is still an atmosphere of toxic violence and Something similar is true for Korea in those parts of China and Japan nearby.

Do you think there is any merit in that conceptual framework of a long war that actually spans half a century? I would like to modify it. I think that's one way of looking at it. is that from 1871, the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany until 1945, that is a 70 75 year history that largely tells a story of how the world in general, and Europe in particular, is going to deal with what which they once called the German problem. Germany is unified, it runs into France very easily in the Franco-Prussian War, it fights in World War I, it fights in World War II, and the existential question is how do we deal with a unified, centrally located German-speaking nation? , whose population and size is greater than any other. country and does not seem to comply with the post-war agreements and has a pre-Nazi 19th century racism or at least a sense of national blood and soil that goes back to Hegel and Spangler and people like that who believe that Germany was never incorporated into the Roman Empire , so it was beyond the Danube and beyond the Rhine, it was the only country that had a racial essence, so the word Volk did not mean that you spoke German and lived in Germany, but that you were racially different. person and you were not a member of the wise Mongol Roman Empire because, as Tacitus said in Cremona, it was pristine and that was deeply engraved in the German mentality, so the question for that 75-year continuum is what do we do with Germany and that. ended at 45 when the Allies said the problem with a Treaty of Versailles was not that it was too harsh;

It was not as harsh as the September program the Germans had envisioned to end the First World War; If they were victorious, it was not as harsh as a treaty they subjected the Soviet Union to to address the poverty line. It was as harsh as the Franco-Prussian terms they dictated, but the problem with the Treaty of Versailles was that it humiliated Germany without forcing it to be weak we do not occupy the country that does We will not teach them that they had been defeated, after six months they boasted that they had surrendered in Belgium and France in the offensive, so we are not going to repeat that mistake and the irony is that if We look at the terms that the allies dictated in In 1945 they were much tougher than Versailles and they kept the peace because they understood a fundamental truth: to have peace you have to defeat the enemy, humiliate them and then show magnanimity and we did all that and I think that this conference once in Europe and a person from France said then do you think it ended in 1945 the German and I said I hope so he said he didn't say who runs the EU today who tells Eastern Europe that they have to accept foreigners illegals who tells southern Europe what the financial terms are who tells Britain what the terms of Brexit are who tells you that they are going to spend 1.3 percent of GDP on defense and that you are going to like it and I started to think like that and he said: You came back and then I said well, why don't you start a neighborhood?

You said oh, because your grandparents are much younger than you after World War II. They knew that the division of Europe would not last, but they made sure. that France and Great Britain, the two weakest powers, had nuclear weapons and Germany today does not have them, that is a rather skeptical and pessimistic view of human nature, but I will say that I just looked at the poll numbers, the international poll Pew, which surveys what we know about the nationalist sympathies of all EU and NATO countries, which country has the least positive view of the United States?

The answer is of course Germany, thirty-five percent, if you think it's just the animosity towards Trump, even under Obama it was the lowest of any European country, so it's something our ancestors understood, but Nowadays it is again not polite to say that there is such a thing as national character, so one lesson you must learn is to be careful with Germany, that is a lesson that Margaret Thatcher would have learned very interestingly since you mentioned Mito in I'll Share Something from Charles Moore's new third volume of his extraordinary and wonderful biography of Margaret Thatcher and he tells the story of how German reunification was unfolding in real time in 1989 and decisions had to be made about what to do and what to do. became It was quite clear to Margaret Thatcher that George HW Bush was not willing to stand in the way.

They all went to London and met Thatcher and the conversation was about who these terrible Germans were, I just can't trust them. a lit subway says "we, madam", which is absolutely right about those terrible people, then immediately goes to Bonn and sees Helmut Kohl and says: "You wouldn't believe what that horrible Thatcher woman says about you Germans , and that shows that the meter actually really sewed Margaret Thatcher remember Lord, your Lord Ismay NATO motto the purpose of NATO is Lord Ismay, the first secretary general said it was to keep Russia out of the United States and the Germans down and we didn't really repeat that at least until recently, any other Reflections on the lessons we can learn from the end of the world war I said there are actually three things that help predict where a massive organized lethal conflict will occur amid the volatility economic, but it is no accident that Central Europe suffered extremely severely from hyperinflation in recent years in the early 1920s and then from the severe depression of the early 1930s. ethnic disintegration multiethnic societies were the places that became most violent in the period. from 1914 to 1945 and then, thirdly, the empires and the decline, it was actually the period in which the empires of Europe collapsed, that the conflict intensified, these were somewhat contrary reflections, but they led me to warn that the place where we were most likely to see conflict escalation in our time was not Europe.

I don't think we should actually worry terribly about Germany, but it was the Middle East because there you had the combination of economic volatility, ethical disintegration, and potentially empire and decline if the United States, as a quasi-empire, just disappeared. Do you think there's something to that analogy? I believe it, but I would also add that there were peculiar situations. Unfortunately, a series of events that occurred in 1939 made this war more deadly and not just any war, but all the wars we believe combinedIn history, as far as we can gauge, it was at the peak of technology in the 20th century.

Starting to see that we had the basic designs for things like napalm and nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets and not weapons that fired three hundred rounds per second, the Sturm was going to war that could fire twelve hundred rounds and we started with tanks and armored vehicles, the second thing was The world was much bigger, it had two billion people, so there were more people to fight. It was also a long war. Most wars, I mean, thirty years war, seven years war, but they are not constant. This was a six-year war longer than a civil war. that World War I and then in this Western war story we have attack/defense cycles, by that I mean the walls could stop a Greek battering ram until you had a catapult and then when you had a torsion catapult they could destroy a city. and then they had to make a new design for the walls, but in that back and forth, this was clearly a period where there was no bald law or armor and the offensive was predominant and, finally, I think it's important , especially for our generation. children and grandchildren that we have come up with the idea that the United States should be blamed for Hiroshima or Britain for Dresden, but never forget that of the sixty to sixty-five million people who died in World War II, you can Argue that between sixty-six, almost seventy percent, up to about forty or forty-five million died in two situations: the German army killed unarmed people, whether the Holocaust was Russian civilians, they killed twenty-seven million Russians and only ten million is more. soldiers and them with the Holocaust and the other atrocities in Poland, another twelve and then 16 million Chinese civilians were killed by Japan, so if you wanted to be reductionist and someone said quickly, tell me what World War II was about, you could say which was largely a story of German and Japanese soldiers massacring innocent people in Eastern Europe, Russia and China, and we must also remember if we look at an army or army as a killing machine in terms of how many people, civilians or combatants , killed this army versus how many lost the proportions are simply astonishing that the German army in the Japanese army killed in proportions of seven eight to one we must remember when the Americans landed in detail we had d-day we had air support we had logistical superiority we had support superiority numerical and that in ten months the Germans killed 1.8 American soldiers for every one we lost, it was a formidable killing machine, so the next time someone says Dresden or Hiroshima we should say well, given the limitations of that time, How else can we stop you from killing 40? millions of innocent and unarmed people yes, I think that really changes the complex.

I think it's absolutely true. Now I would like to invite members of the audience to ask us questions. I would prefer questions to statements. In fact, I'll interrupt you if I spot a statement. There are microphones strategically placed in both hallways. If you could, please resist the temptation to give a speech because it just eats up airtime that could go to others, so it has to be one sentence and have a question mark at the end. Yes. Please sir, first thank you very much for your conversation, the situation with China is something that people will talk about, so I wanted to see what are the lessons that you have been talking about over this last century that will help us solve the Chinese conflict. problem Thanks I have been arguing recently that we are already in the Cold War; yes, and we will have to start calling the original Cold War the Cold War, just as we had to start calling the Great War World War, my opinion is that That is a preferable scenario to Graham Allison's Thucydides Trap in which we end up having a hot war with China because we make the mistakes that Britain made with Germany of not breaking it off, but Victor, what are your current thoughts on the Chinese challenge?

I tend to agree. You know, I think that despite all of Trump's erratic behavior in his foreign policy and especially Hoover, our distrust of tariffs, I think that Trump's China policy and what we have learned about the statements and the Chinese In the Party Congress is in the last few years that they really felt that there was a trajectory in which they were going to assume world hegemony and that the worldly jiminee would not work in the manner of the post-war order led by the United States, it would be a different situation. world and with technological appropriation and copyright infringement, patent theft, dumping, monetary manipulation, the Spratly Islands, had created a mentality that the United States and its allies could not or would not deny that reality was going to happen and what catches my attention is the After all the controversies of the Trump administration, this policy of confronting China has gained the most bipartisan support, so what now?

What you are seeing are people on the left or who comes up and says there are a million people in re-education camps, they are torturing people for their religious beliefs. Tibet was not an aberration, it is essentially, it is not an attack on China, but people say that the argument about trade, the economy and the military is subordinated to human rights and, believe it or not, it is an issue on which, as in the last three years, a consensus is being reached here in Europe, not entirely our people are going to say publicly "I think it's about time." challenge China and I think by this I don't mean starting a war but preventing it because there were a lot of disturbing parallels with '39 and by that I mean that any objective and realistic measure of Chinese and American comparative strength we still have almost double the GDP of China, they have three times the population and, in reductionist terms, one American produced twice as many goods and services as three of his Chinese counterparts and when you look at all aspects of China versus the United States military, we were superior and However, like in '39, China had convinced itself because of the projections that we were suffering from the Western disease or demographics, our spirituality, our competitiveness, our productivity, that they were going to be destined and I think that this is a reminder that it will be more or less likely because people tell China that they didn't really know you, that you should have kept quiet for another ten years and been able to stop bragging and cheating because then you really could have made it, but at the same time just like Germany, you rushed, there are all kinds of fascinating things. analogies I will simply mention another Hoover historian who is not here, Frank Dakota, whose books, his trilogy on Mao's China, seemed to me comparable to Bob Conquest's work on the Soviet Union because it makes very clear the nature of the state and does not We should I wouldn't be at all surprised at the way in Xin Jiang the Chinese government is treating the weaker minority.

Peace is over with the history of the People's Republic of China. Another question, yes sir, my question is about black seeds, so two questions, first, one: will it happen? and the next one. if Germany's attention and instinct to dominate everyone happened, how would that play into a past praxis a usual US scenario and effect? Could Germany be strong again? The feeling that this is more of a question for me than I have shown above. you might want to plead that it already happened that the point of Brexit was simply that Boris Johnson should become Prime Minister.

You laugh, but that's absolutely right, the reason I'm talking about Boris Johnson, who is probably the most memorable politician of his generation. With some experience, I've known him for 35 years, the reason he backed Brexit was to dislodge David Cameron from the Prime Ministership if he hadn't backed Briggs. I suspect the referendum would have gone the other way and David Cameron would still be Prime Minister and life would be pretty boring, so the point of Brexit was to dislodge Cameron from the fact that, having achieved so much in Boris's life, everything else It is collateral damage, it does not matter too much what happens next year because the process of negotiations with the Europeans will continue almost indefinitely.

There are some economists in the audience. I look to my colleague John Cochran for the way I think about Briggs. It is a flow, not a stock. There will be no final state. The negotiations will continue endlessly. as the worst divorce of all time, but the key objective was for Boris to become Prime Minister. Most British politics are like this. My old mentor at Cambridge. Morris Cowling wrote a wonderful book on electoral reform in the 19th century and another wonderful book looking at Appeasement and his central theme was whatever the British elite seem to be divided, whatever they seem to be discussing is a mere façade behind of which they are deciding which of the two should be Ian Prime Minister, since for Germany this is a way of simplifying. the whole problem if dinner parties are getting too boring just say just say what I've said and the argument will end.

As for Germany, I want to invoke the memory of a great historian, Norman Stone, who was one of the few historians Margaret Thatcher had time to consult with Norman on the subject of German reunification; He was one of the historians, chairman of the famous Checkers meeting, to advise her and while others in the room were eager to share the Prime Minister's fear that Germany would become dominant once again in Europe, Norman made the big observation that acquiring the East was like acquiring five Liverpools and this was a brilliant observation and very true as it was nothing more than economic dead weight and still is.

I do not consider that there is a new version of the Germany asks. I am a little inclined to agree with my old friend Radek Sikorski, who said that the problem in Europe today is not German power, but the lack of German power, but commitment of Germany with the weakness, the commitment to not spend enough on its own defense and the central hypocrisy that is absolutely key to understanding the Federal Republic and Viktor alluded to it the hypocrisy that Germany has depended on the United States and that it should serve it to the United Kingdom for its freedom today depends on the United States and, to some extent, on the United Kingdom for its freedom. security and yet you feel entitled to hate the United States in its domestic politics, that is a German problem, but it is not the German problem from 1914 to 1945.

Viktor, I would simply say to your question, whatever the Brexit, at least some people in Britain and the United States. I thought there was a reaffirmation of a long tradition of independence and British exceptionalism and by this I mean that the American Revolution was different from the French Revolution probably because of our British heritage, the British Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment very different from the French Enlightenment and Socialists are recalibrating, socialism in Britain, under Thatcher, had a recalibration and I think the problem with Europe is very big. We have to be careful when criticizing the EU because we have not had these three wars that we had in the past. and that is an achievement, but that being said it is increasingly undemocratic, it no longer believes in people's Clemmie sites, it has a huge bureaucracy, it has a stagnant economy, it cannot or will not defend itself, it has a declining demographic, which is really critical and fair on basic questions, if you ask someone in Europe if you are patriotic, the answer is much less than in most places in the West and if you ask them if you are religious, they will tell you that on the surface it may seem similar to the United States or places like Australia or Israel, but when you ask more and dig deeper, you pray.

I think the average European response is something like 18 percent of people versus 68 percent of everything I'm suggesting, not as a bigoted event by any means, but by traditional historical criteria: the EU has a There are many problems and I don't see it going to happen, if it doesn't change radically, not only is it not going to play an important role in world affairs and that is a shame because the world has been given the will that those countries have given it. many excellent contributions to the world, but it is going to be increasingly problematic for the United States and I think also for Great Britain, so I am grateful that the departure of Greece is not disruptive but to reestablish a British British independence that, as a great admirer of Britain, I think, has done a lot of good to the world with just one last thing.

When we talk about World War II, ultimately you know, just take Britain, it was the only country of the major powers that fought on the first day of the war and on the last day no other country did. and secondly, it was the only country that entered the war that did not attack another country or was attacked, it entered the war on the principleof Polish sovereignty and that tradition, although we have had a mixed response, is invaluable and always I think many of us did not want to see it absorbed into the continental project and that is what it was becoming, and I hope it shocks Britain by reasserting its individuality and exceptionalism .

One of the best essays on this topic was published by our friend Chris Caldwell in the Claremont Review recently, one of the most insightful essays about Greg you will read, written by an American, another question please. I flew in from Oklahoma City, so of course I was going to come out and ask a question related to the The UK does with the US having a contingency plan if Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister and the second question - Victor in - In 2016 you wrote about the United States needing to develop a strategy together with Russia to contain China in the last edition of Foreign Affairs there were two essays in there you said exactly the same thing and 2016, as far as I know, you are the only one who says that, so to get to that point, how can we contain Putinism and at the same time contain China with the help of Russia?

Fantastic questions I'll ask a quick question about Corbin, you can't rule out a nightmare scenario on December 12 in which Boris Johnson fails to achieve a Conservative majority and there is the potential for a coalition between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Scottish Nationalists and the leader of the Labor Party would be the Prime Minister of that coalition, it doesn't seem like a very likely scenario at the moment, the polls look relatively encouraging, but the fact that the Brexit party is fielding candidates all over the map is extremely bad. news and the fact that if one just looks at social media in the UK at the moment, Labor is gaining much more traction with its propaganda than the Conservatives, these things are reasons to worry, is there a contingency plan?

Well, I know many people who have done it. Of particular note is a contingency plan for leaving the UK if Jeremy Corbyn is Prime Minister, and this is no laughing matter. Jewish friends of mine who rightly discern that among his many many flaws and sins is a history of anti-Semitism is probably the most concerning, so yes, I'm not sure if the United States has a contingency plan. I certainly don't know of any, but there is every reason to be worried because this election is like the last highly unpredictable election in 2017. Early in the election campaign, the only question was how big Teresa May's magic majority would be and she proceeded to losing it on election day, so I have to say I'm a little nervous.

In fact, I will be very relieved if we survive December 12 without it. nightmare scenario and I didn't hear that was your question about our visa policy vis-à-vis Russia and Russia, yes, I mean, this was a question that interests you, he was a Kissinger scholar, do you remember, yes, that Kissinger said that one of the pillars of foreign calls? It should be that China should not be a better friend to Russia than the United States and Russia should not be a better friend to China than to the United States and we should be closer to them than they are to each other, both by I thought along these lines in 2016 because I remember writing an article about American interest saying, "Well, here's an opportunity for the United States to reconsider its relationship with Russia and, indeed, its relationship with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council because China is the big problem now has not happened and in any case there is no closer relationship in the world today than between Russia and China so I don't know what we do about it, I think we can argue about why that happened and It is no use saying that Russia has an economy 120 the size of the United States, that the United States is a great power, has 7,500 deliverable nuclear weapons and sophisticated technology, and this has been after the Nixon administration successfully removed it from the Middle East.

We invited it back in 2011 after 40 years, so it's a major threat and it's a major player and China, of course, economically is a much bigger threat, but now, how did that happen and what can we learn from it? I think Obama came into the administration and we forgot that the Geneva reset button that was pressed by Hillary Clinton was a reaction to George Bush, not very harsh, but at least he did something about the invasion of Ossetia, they said, you know , a Bush polarized Russia, so there I think it was a well-intentioned effort to reset and date a chick, but it was based on a fundamental fallacy and that was that on the one hand, you would give this bully Putin a lecture on human rights, but, on the other hand, when it came to Crimea or Ukraine or missile defense in Europe or cheating on intermediate cruise missiles in the treaty, that really wouldn't be tough and he, being Putin, saw that Magnum entity as a weakness that was to be exploited rather than reciprocated, so and then when Trump came in there was disappointment with the reset and Russia does all kinds of interference as they can and now we have Russians under every bed and only we have to take a deep breath and say this is who Putin is and we have to work with him and we want to pit him against China, we want to pit China against Russia and not in a cynical way but in a very open way and from a position of power and we are not going We are not going to lecture anyone about their moral deficiencies unless we have the military or economic willpower to impose deterrence, but this is because if we appear weak and lecture people about whether it is about red lines or human rights, that it only erodes our credibility, so what we have to do is try. as a nation come together and say that Russia is Russia before Putin and after Putin and that it is a valuable pillar of American foreign policy and Ronald Reagan and George Shultz did it brilliantly and Kissinger did it too and I don't know why how we suffer from this historical amnesia , but we've been really alone for the last six, seven, eight years.

It has to be said that it is difficult to think how we can separate them when Russia is clearly willing to be the junior partner and allow that to happen. to allow the Chinese with their "One Belt, One Road" initiative to go through everything that used to be Russia's strategic backyard, and so I think what's central to this relationship is that Putin has recognized that in order to have any kind of influence in the Middle East or even Eastern Europe has to accept China's dominance in Asia and as long as that is the case, I'm not sure what exactly we can do, another question from the side, so this is a question for VDH.

My little brother is 15 years old and lives in Fox. The population of Alaska is 417 compared to 300 and 2000 and I wanted to know who your favorite general in history is and why you want to be a military historian, favorite general, favorite general in the history, all armies or just American, well, I have a shameful affection for William Tecumseh Sherman, I know and so on. I once made the mistake of giving a lecture about him at Louisiana State University about the Civil War and they said it was pretty heated, but what Sherman understood and I think all generals there is a big divide among generals. and it goes back to Clausewitz and Dell went bankrupt and it is: do you destroy the army in the field or do you destroy the mechanism that produces the army in the field?

Grant, of course, was close to going after the army and destroying it, but he couldn't do that and so we lost more, being the North, one Union lost more men in the last year of the war than the first three combined, which which happens often, as Niels pointed out. Sherman had a different idea and that was the power of military readiness. the expression of strength is the result of a divided variety of economic, cultural and social factors, so when he dreamed of going to Atlanta and burning Atlanta and then going all the way to Savannah and then going all the way to the Carolinas, what he was saying to the people was that the Confederates have been telling us for four years that they have superior manhood and don't need resources and here I am in the middle of slave-owning Georgia and slave-owning Carolinas and this is like Cobb in Georgia and here's Wade and they he can't stop me and he killed far fewer people than Grant, but he did something the Confederates would never forgive him: he humiliated them, freed slaves, burned plantations, not like he burned houses or towns of supposed people he concentrated on.

Railroad arsenals and plantations and what I mean is that what stopped the Civil War was not the destruction of Lee's army and the taking of Richmond, he never took Richmond, it was this huge army of the West, these were the two hundred and fifty regiments . and sixteen were from four states Michigan Ohio Minnesota and Indiana and love camping out of the heat. What I'm trying to say is that Patton and others took an army and understood what their strengths were. He emphasized it and said, "I can weaken and humiliate the Confederates." ability to wage war that his army would die on the vine, so he stopped at Appomattox and had shown the south that they wanted to come home and protect their families because this madman was going crazy in their rear.

Patton had the same idea of ​​To a lesser extent and it's been the United States, we go back and forth, we bomb Germany, we bomb Japan, but then we go and fight the Ball Battle or we fight these frontal battles, but I think Sherman in a very paradoxical way and perverted, almost perverse. He has said that if you want to stop the carnage of war on the battlefield you have to address the internal enemy's ability to wage war and if you can stop the ability to unleash war then you really don't have to go out and fight forward. about Clausewitz and the collision, people kill.

I think it gives me great pleasure to know that there is someone in Alaska who wants to study military history. I may be the only kid in America who wants to study military history because, let's face it, our education system is doing the best it can. to get people out of military history. I want to make an additional suggestion, no, you can't just pass this on, don't just study the generals, my heroes are, in fact, ordinary soldiers, and I want to name a billion billion billion. He was the piper who played the bagpipes as Lord Fraser Lord Lovitz led his men ashore on d-day and he simply played the bagpipes as Lord Lovitz's men disembarked now that is heroism was brilliantly portrayed in the longest day in the longest day that has had live cameo appearances until a mature or advanced age died in 2010 I can't imagine anything more magnificent in all of military history, of course, I'm Scott, so I would say this, but to have played the bagpipes on the beaches of d- day and survived, the Germans later said they didn't shoot him because they assumed he must be angry, we only have time for one more question please Hi Victor, in your most recent book you make a very convincing and exhaustive case that Trump is a Kind of a boorish tragic hero and I wonder if you might agree with the statement that perhaps the most lasting legacy he can have is the end of the globalist economic policies that seem to be falling out of favor on both sides and in the countries. where these are not yet bipartisan, there are large movements that are too internally focused within the country economically in 20 seconds Victor, well, we are not going to talk about politics tonight, but I will say that he defeated 16 better qualified candidates in traditional terms in the primaries and defeated to someone in the electoral college who had many more resources and did it with fundamental animal cunning and was that he said that there is a vast interior of the country and that the bicycle holes of the elites are not addressing the deindustrialization of the asymmetric internal relations with China and an open border and these people didn't take opioids or make themselves deplorable or redeemable because they drove the industry away, the economic base drove them away and the answer for them is to not get out of the fracking fields well or learned to code, so He, of all people, showed empathy and came up with an economic program and even a foreign policy, whether he likes it or not, it is based on the idea that an option in which war is not necessarily in a cost-benefit analysis always worth it so That took a lot and I think it changed things so after Trump is gone whether it's 2020 I don't think we'll go back to the John McCain Romney.

I think the Republican Party, whether you like it or not, is now a solid middle class and upper middle class party and will attract things from that class that it didn't before and I'm a big fan of Hayek and creative destruction, but When you say creative destruction creates greater economic efficiency, you don't. I have to say that, but we have to have a little qualification and we are going to do something with the victims of that so that no one in their right mind would think that a storyteller from Manhattan would be the first Republican candidate to start using language like ours. farmers our veterans our lathe workers our first person plural possessive had McCain or Romney say our and show that and how can this man be empathetic but he and that isa comment on the opposition that people on the inside found him more empathetic than a traditional Republican candidate and six million of them came out to vote who otherwise hadn't voted Republican or hadn't voted at all, so that's his legacy to answer your question that he has transformed the Republican Party into at least a party of workers and also of middle class people.

As an elite, we have covered 100 years of history and, of course, we end with Donald Trump. The only surprise is that we got to Briggs early, but I hope you'll agree that this has been a fascinating opportunity for reflection. the historical legacy of the Hoover Institution and we have also had a wonderful opportunity to share some insights with one of the world's great military historians, Victor Davis Hanson, please join me in one last announcement to make there drinks, let there be a reception right outside the door and for sale there is a veteran on stage I better hand him the microphone there are copies of Bethel Patenaude turning points the first 100 years of the Hoover Institution no discussion of one hundred years of history is complete without the presence of almost a hundred years of history George Shultz Georgia thank you very much thank you very much