The Counterfactual Show: Reimagining History, with Stephen Kotkin | GoodFellows

"Let us therefore prepare to do our duty and ensure that, though the British Empire and its republics last a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" It's Monday, May 13, 2024. and welcome back to Goodfellas, a broadcast from the Hoover Institution that examines social, economic, political and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen. I am a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow. I'll be moderating it today, accompanied by two or three of our regular Goodfellas. Sitting next to me, the international man of

history

, in California for some explained reason. If you bet that Niall will be in California, you won the bet.

Congratulations. Of course, Niall Ferguson. Sitting at the other end of the stage is economist John Cochrane, a Californian, although he doesn't always accept it. By the way, you may have noticed a bit unusual surroundings for us. We'll be coming to you live from the newly opened George P. Schultz Building here on the Stanford University campus at the Hoover Institution. Today we are without H.R. McMaster, but I think more than replacing H.R. The preeminent historian, Hoover Senior Fellow, the one and only Stephen Kotkin. You've asked for it, you've begged for it, you've pestered us endlessly to get it and now you have it.

Steve, welcome back to Goodfellas. Thank you very much for the invitation back. I don't get that many of those. I receive many first invitations. But replacing H.R., I don't think we should tell the audience that I'm going to be in some way a replacement for H.R. We hope he returns as soon as possible. So today we're going to do something a little different, gentlemen. Let's talk about

counterfactual

s. And what do we mean by

counterfactual

s? What if historic. Now, it's easy to get silly with this. I remember when I was very young, I was watching Saturday Night Live, and this was in January of 1978, it was an episode, and the segment was called "What If?" And it was "What if Napoleon had a B-52 at Waterloo?" And there was John Belushi dressed as Napoleon inside the cockpit of a B-52, and he came to the surprising conclusion after five minutes: he probably would have won the battle.

So we can agree that it's a pretty ridiculous situation. But there is a serious side to this, and here I want to refer to something that Niall wrote while he was preparing for this

show

. He quotes: "I would prefer to start by saying that this is one of the major methodological and philosophical divisions within the historical profession." Dr. Kotkin, could you translate from Fergusonian to explain to a non-historical, non-PhD like me what Niall means here when he talks about methodological and philosophical divisions within the field of

history

? Yeah, well, you'll forgive me, he came prepared. For those who don't always do their homework, I've done mine since 1997.

And we'll talk about this in a moment. All causal explanations are counterfactual by definition. It is very difficult to understand how one can be in favor of causal explanations in history, but against counterfactual explanations. For example, Hitler caused World War II. There could be a room full of historians who would side with that statement: "Hitler caused World War II." What they say is: "Without Hitler, there will be no World War II." So they are posing a counterfactual. If you then say to them, "Oh, you mean you're in favor of counterfactuals?" They could object. They might say, "Wow, that's speculation.

I'm not going to do that. I'm sticking to the facts. I'm sticking to the story." And then you say, "But are you in favor of a causal explanation?" "Oh yes, of course I'm in favor of the causal explanation." So, for reasons that shouldn't happen, it can be controversial to get into the what ifs. Part of the problem is what we call miraculous counterfactuals. The miraculous counterfactuals are Napoleon with the B-52. Many people oppose miraculous counterfactuals because they are implausible. But if you stay within the realm of evidence and within the realm of plausibility, then all you are doing is arguing about causality and different causal explanations, which is completely fair in all disciplines, not just history.

If you say, for example, but sometimes, by the way, miraculous counterfactuals can be useful. I will give you an example. Let's ask Niall Ferguson what he would do as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. What would be his policy? And the objection would be that there is no way Niall Ferguson could become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Actually, the B-52 at Waterloo is more likely. Well, that's why I presented the magic version. Although it would be a miracle. It would be a miracle and miracles happen. You know, the other day I parted the sea, for example, right outside my office.

It was actually the source, and I didn't actually separate it. But in any case, if Niall became Prime Minister, what would his policies be? It's a magical thought experiment, but it may allow you to understand his views on current politics in the UK. So even miraculous counterfactuals can have significant value, but I generally prefer to stick with plausible, evidence-based counterfactuals, which shouldn't be controversial, because all historians do it by implication, so it's better to be explicit. Amen. And I wish I had invited you to contribute to that book, but in those days we didn't know each other and the circle of historians who were willing to write counterfactual essays was, in fact, quite small.

So what Steve has

show

n is that there is a problem. He understands the philosophy of history, he understands the nature of causal explanation, but a really substantial proportion of people who claim to be historians seem not to understand it. And I have been engaged in an on-again, off-again debate for 30 years with eminent historians who refuse to accept that there can be legitimate counterfactual questions in historical explanation. And the problem is that they don't understand the simple point that has been made here. Any statement of a causal nature implies a counterfactual. Why would you keep it hidden from the audience?

But there is another point that I am going to add. But you killed them all. EP Thompson, died. Richard Evans is alive and well. I saw him the other day. A.J.P. Taylor, dead. They were all... the whole group of anti-counterfactual people, you killed them all. But in the British historical profession, and also in the American one, a new generation emerged, equally hostile to counterfactual questions. The now emeritus Regis Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Richard Evans, wrote an entire book explaining why it was philosophically and methodologically incorrect to ask counterfactual questions, and then he wrote a three-volume history of the Third Reich in which he could not help. to ask counterfactual questions.

Now there is a second point that is really important and it goes back to a brilliant philosopher of history in the 1930s called Collingwood, R.G. Collingwood, who said that the purpose of historical scholarship is to discover and reconstitute past thought. We're trying to find out what people in the past thought. That's what it's really about. And then we're going to juxtapose what they thought with what we think, and we'll learn something from it. It is a very deep perception. People, at that time, of whatever event you want to name, let's call it the eve of World War II, didn't know exactly when it would break out, if it would break out, and they certainly didn't know how it would happen. would end.

So if we want to understand the thinking of people in 1939 or 1941 in the United States, we have to understand the things that they thought might happen but didn't happen. That is as much a part of the historical experience as what happened. I remember this striking me when I was sitting in the dining room of the United States Senate. There, in a glass case, is a menu with a group of senators writing on the back their predictions about the outcome of World War II. This was in 1941 and it is a wonderful historical document because it shows that people do not know the future.

They don't know how events will turn out. Nobody knew how World War II would end. They didn't know when it would end. They didn't know who would win. So how can you write the history of the past? How can you understand the experience of human beings if you don't capture that uncertainty? The big problem with most historical writings is that they tell you a regular story. It tells you a story that you know how it will end. You never have any doubt. You pick up the book about the Russian Revolution. It's called A Popular Tragedy. It's not going to end well, but that's not the real story.

That's literature. Now I like literature. I won't give in to anyone in my admiration for the great novelists, but we don't write novels. We're trying to explain what it was like to be alive in 1939. And that is, to me, the most powerful and compelling argument for counterfactuals. They are very real for contemporaries. And if you just put them aside and say, "Well, it's not worth asking what would have happened if Hitler hadn't existed," you're missing the point. You are missing the opening of historical events. At some point, the future becomes the present and then the past, but when it is future, there is no future.

That is unique. There are many futures and we're all sitting there trying to choose, trying to figure out which one we like, which one we think is most likely to happen. And if we lose that, then we lose the historical process itself. John? Well, let me ask this. My job is to be all man or simple. Every economist. And of course, I come as an economist. We do nothing but cause and effect and we consider ourselves the queen of the social sciences. You don't agree, but the job of the social scientist is to disentangle causation from correlation one way or another.

In fact, to some extent, economists might be obsessed with causal inference, even when it is difficult to do. But I want to ask the question in a different way, which might be helpful. One way to look at the issue from the point of view of a dynamic economist is history...well, when is history stable or unstable? I'm using a dynamical systems word. A stable, disturbed dynamical system still returns to where it was going to go. An unstable, slightly disturbed one takes a different path and never re-emerges. The famous butterfly wing is a good example of a chaotic or unstable system.

Sometimes yes sometimes no. I mean, you know, on the Hitler question, you said, well, someone might argue, well, yeah, if he hadn't done it, the forces of history were German expansionism, someone else would have done it. And that's an argument that this is a stable moment. The great forces of history... I think Marxists like this idea. The great forces of history are moving and it really doesn't matter who the person implementing them is. So when is history stable when it is unstable? When are certain people's decisions important to the story? Or when, if Einstein hadn't invented the theory of relativity, it's pretty clear that someone else would have made it 10 years later, a brilliant contribution.

You got there first, but there was no sense of story. So when is it stable when is it unstable? When do people, their characters, their personalities and their decisions really matter and when are they just instruments of what would happen? And I just want to echo what Niall said, because my father was a historian and very much of his ilk, that one of the tasks of history is not just to understand cause and effect, but to understand the mentality of people in the past. and understand why they made the decisions they made, as opposed to one of the trends I see in modern history is that our job is to look back at history and judge who is good and who is bad.

And our understanding of their decisions is limited to that these were the good people, those were the bad people, they did what they did because they were bad, whereas, on the other hand, if as you brilliantly said, if you go with the knowledge that they had, If you understand the contingency and unpredictability of history, that sometimes there are great forces, sometimes people saw them, sometimes they didn't, you can see, you can try to understand why they made the decisions they made, given what they knew and given how they thought the cause and effect department of the world worked at the time.

The fun thing is that, in a sense, you're working with both individual agency and what you call the kind of big forces of history. I can never see these great forces. I think they are imaginary. But from Marx to Tolstoy, I'm talking about an entire era of 19th-century thinkers who were convinced that the historical process was deterministic and that there really was no agency. I think that can be shown not to be true without discounting historical forces. I'm an economic historian by training and one of the big questions we used to deal with when we became more quantitative in the 1980s was what would American history have been like without the railroad and that could be some kind of miracle or the opposite of a counterfactual miracle.

It doesn't have much plausibility because the resistance to the construction of railroads was quite weak. Therefore, it is quiteIt is difficult to imagine a world in which technology is not imported from the UK, but it was a valuable exercise to calculate what the relative importance of railways was to American industrialisation. No one is saying to industrialize the United States. Well, maybe Alexander Hamilton is, but it is not really an individual decision that produces the industrialization of North America. I think historians are interested in the points at which the forces producing American industrialization interact with decision makers.

Sometimes human action does not play an important role. I mean those railroads were being built. Even if the CEOs of all the railroad companies had been eliminated in a succession of carefully targeted assassinations, the railroads would still have been built. So I think this is false... Because there were Chinese coolies, that's why the railways were built. Structural forces provided the labor, America's resources provided the hardware, the technology of the Industrial Revolution in Britain supplied the technology. So you couldn't really stop it. And I think that's what we're really trying to do. We are trying to discover the interaction between human action when necessary and these forces of history.

By the way, Tolstoy writes War and Peace in part to demonstrate that history is deterministic. And what he constantly says is that Napoleon has the illusion that everything is him, like in the movie we just saw about Napoleon, everything is about him. And Tolstoy says that this is a complete deception. The forces that caused the French to invade Russia and cause violence and so on, all of this really has nothing to do with Napoleon. That is the real point of the novel. And the lives of ordinary people are disrupted by these forces of history. I became a historian after reading that book and reading the historical essay at the end where he says everything is deterministic.

And I remember thinking that can't be right, it just can't be right. So we're having a discussion that's been going on for a long time about the relationship between individual decision-making, individual agency, and historical forces. And I think there is and should be a role for individual agency, for Napoleon, for Hitler. I have nine counterfactuals in front of me. I know you want to keep talking about this, but we're running out of time. So I thought the answer, because Arden may be interested, the answer I thought was that without the railroad, we would have built trucks and roads much sooner.

We would have built more canals and our cities would be located closer to the oceans. And it's an interesting speculation, but you can see why it's in the miracle category, because there's really no one arguing strongly and powerfully not to build railroads. If the United Kingdom had not invented the railway, which itself is, I don't know how deep, Bill is not going to let us get on it, that was, well, its economic history is just a litany of improbable contingencies that the The United Kingdom went in that direction. And so on, but here's the challenge for you.

You say that if Einstein hadn't invented relativity, someone else would have come along and done it 10 years later. That's a theory about things in reality. In other words, you may not have discovered all of how nature works, but you are working to discover it. So you are making an analogy with processes in which human beings do not discover the laws of how the universe works, but instead pursue self-interest or whatever motivational theory of behavior you prefer. And so, with human beings, we have what we call the landscape, the existing landscape. For example, you can't change geography very easily.

Oceans are in certain places, mountains are in certain places. You can't change commodity prices very easily as a single human being. So if you're a raw materials exporting powerhouse, you're beholden to decisions made by people who look like Niall but wear red suspenders, right? I mean, there is a landscape full of possibilities in which you are acting. And so your ability to alter the landscape for yourself and others is severely limited, but it exists. And we can give examples, as we will now, that when some decisions are made, it has consequences by limiting other possible options, by changing the landscape for the other people in the situation.

So that's a different version of agency than Newton or Einstein. We would like to think that they are responding to nature and discovering something that exists rather than trying to take advantage of moments within a landscape that is much larger than them and trying to transform it. And I mainly mean that there are times when people and decisions send us to alternative stories. I just wanted to give an example of one that didn't seem like that. The last theoretical aspect, and then we go back to the examples, is, and you already mentioned it, John, it's really important, that the human world is a complex system, and it actually behaves with all the characteristics of complexity.

Relatively small disturbances, such as the butterfly's flapping and swimming, can have enormous consequences. But there are periods when relatively small disturbances have enormous and disproportionate consequences. And I think the notion that the system is predictably deterministic was one of the great deceptions of Marxism. It is deterministic, but in a non-predictable way due to all the non-linearities of the complex system. We could easily delve into chaos theory, but let's not. Thank you. Alright, gentlemen, first counterfactual. This is for Professor Kotkin. Let's imagine a coordinated access attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. With that, I assume that not only Germany will attack, but also Japan.

What happens? So here we are, World War II. We know the outcome, as Niall referred to before. We have information that the actors didn't have. So now we're tempted to go back and redo it so they can get the result they want, based on what we know. So the question is: could the Nazis have won on the Eastern Front? That is the question. We will reach the point where winning on the Eastern Front could have determined the outcome of the war. Because Germany won on the Eastern Front in World War I, but of course it did not win the war.

So what does winning look like in the case of Russia? Remember, you can go all the way to Moscow, you can take Moscow, and you can't win. We have to thank our French friend, actually a Corsican friend, for that lesson. So, to win World War II, it is necessary to kill Stalin. Only in this way will you achieve a victory on the eastern front. You need the other side to stop fighting. So when you take away their capital, they don't necessarily stop fighting. You can take Moscow and they can decide they can continue the war. As long as they have the ability to fight, which is industrial production, and the will to fight, which is the leader's commitment to the war plus the acceptance of the population, which the Germans continually strengthened, they continually strengthened Soviet morale by being exterminators. .

Then your option is to kill Stalin. Even if the Japanese were to come in and open a second front in the Soviet Far East, that doesn't solve the problem that you have to eliminate the guy that is the system. So here we have this episode from 1941, in which Stalin remains in the capital. It is October 1941, the Germans are on the outskirts of Moscow, not far away. There is chaos. The regime is beginning to crumble. And Stalin is credited for staying there, for not abandoning the capital, and for holding the Revolution Day parade on November 7, which took place a few kilometers from the front, and then immediately sending the soldiers to the front. soldiers who paraded with their weapons in Red Square. , where they had come from.

And yes, but think about that contribution to possible victory by boosting morale and showing that they would not give up capital. That was Hitler's moment. Because if he sends paratroopers behind the lines and they capture or kill Stalin, he will achieve victory that way. He does not need to capture Moscow. He needs to capture this guy. So that's the counterfactual. But Hitler doesn't understand that. He doesn't have a theory of victory that there's a guy on the other side who is your problem. He comes to it much later in the war, when it's too late and he has no chance.

And then they fantasize about assassinating Stalin with all kinds of ridiculous and unfeasible methods. The other thing is that Stalin could have died differently. So, for example, the dacha where Stalin lived, the so-called nearby dacha, on the outskirts of Moscow, was mined because they did not want it to fall into German hands, and the German front was very close to the dacha at that time. . Then Beria, the head of Stalin's secret police, goes and mines the dacha to blow it up so that this trophy does not fall into Hitler's hands. Stalin decides one night that he will go to the dacha.

He has been living in the Kremlin bunker, in the Ministry of Defense, because they don't have a bunker in the Kremlin yet. They are building the bunker in the Kremlin. He says that he is going to the country house and Beria says: "I don't think that's a good idea." He doesn't know where the mines are. Exactly. So Stalin could have gone to the dacha and stepped on a mine and been blown to pieces. Then, without Hitler having to do anything, Stalin could have withdrawn from the war. How do we know this is significant? Six days after the war in June, on June 28, Stalin abandons the war.

What happens is that the Germans take Minsk just five or six days after the war starts. It's just amazing and it's on the way to Moscow. And it is not defended, because the Red Army is predominantly in the south defending Ukraine, because that is where the Germans, using disinformation, say there is a main axis of attack. Its main axis of attack is the central axis. They have Minsk. Smolensk is next. Moscow is behind it. Stalin understands this very well. He calls the defense commissariat: "What is happening in Minsk? Can you report?" And they say: "No, we have lost contact with Minsk." He then takes the cronies away.

It's kind of like a Goodfellas show. He puts them in the Packard. They go. He doesn't have the Packard yet. I'm a little ahead of the story. Get Roosevelt's armored Packard. Anyway, he puts them in the car. They go to the defense ministry. He has a confrontation with the guys and says, "What's going on?" And one of them tells him: "The Germans are on the east side of Minsk." And that's why he has this infamous outburst where he says, "Lenin built this amazing state and we ruined it." "Abbasralis", you will excuse the Russian. "We ruined it." And then he goes to the dacha.

This is June 27, 28 and 29. He goes to the dacha. He does not return to the Kremlin. What are the other kids doing? It's like HR isn't here. You bring me But what should you have done? What they do is muster up the courage to go to the dacha and beg him to return to the Kremlin. And he thinks maybe they've come to arrest him. That's the sweet moment. We get that from Mikoyan's memoirs, which is a fabrication, but nonetheless a story too great to prove. But Stalin doesn't know why they are there. He's a shady guy, so that's a plausible story.

So they begged him to come back instead of saying, "Oh, now we're going to survive. We're going to take control. Molotov number two is going to run the war." They know that they cannot run this regime or the war or survive without Stalin. So they beg him to come back, and he comes back, and they form this new administrative unit. And so they are demonstrating in June, when Minsk falls, begging him to return, what Hitler did not understand. So the big counterfactual that you raised, what if the Japanese had opened that front on the eastern side, could the Red Army have defeated the Japanese there?

The Japanese army did not have such modern weapons. Japanese tactics were not as sophisticated as those of the Red Army. And so the question really was, the counterfactual, can we get Stalin out of the picture and, if so, how, whether by murder or by natural causes or by something else? And now we understand, which Hitler didn't understand in Niall's real-time perspective, how he could have won the war. If he wants to add something, then I want to move on to the next topic. Well. I'll be quick, because I think it's good to debate the big question: what is stable and unstable?

World War II, of course, for World War II fans, as I am myself, is full of little things that could have been different. But I like this one, because maybe it's not. Tokyo is very, very far from Moscow, very, very far from Moscow. Japan didn't even invade and conquer all of China, let alone Russia didn't have to fight. They could have said, okay, see you when you get to Moscow, you have a long walk through Siberia, friend. But all they had to do, John, was that they had to do it, if they had launched a simultaneous offensive against the Red Army, Stalin would not have been able to move the divisions that were available to Japan to the other end of the Soviet Union.

And of course, the Japanese thought of it. And that is the important point. But this was no miracle. But those divisions neverthey changed. That's another one of those too-good-to-check stories. None of those major divisions moved because Stalin didn't trust the Japanese. He thought they were going to do it to him anyway. And so he maintained that those defending Moscow were raw troops from inside Russia who had been recruited at the last second. They were not the best Siberian troops. They were still in place to defend themselves. And then the Japanese could not garrison China. It was a crazy idea and they broke teeth in China.

And the idea that they could have marched through Siberia, I don't think it's plausible either because Tokyo is very far from Moscow, but with Stalin, where are you going with that? No, you're making my point. If Japan had declared war, those divisions were tying them up anyway. In fact, the war could have ended sooner because Japan would have lost to the United States much more quickly if it had been involved. They knew very well why they didn't do it, because they had other problems to deal with. So I think the great forces of WWII and the German and Japanese defeats would have been the same with minor differences if they had.

This is a case of no. Yes. Structuralist John Cochrane. No. In this case. So, therefore. I think sometimes it's divergent, sometimes it doesn't change. So here we have to go back to Niall because suppose Stalin dies or is killed and the Germans win on the Eastern Front somehow. What then happens to the broader outcome of the war? Is it a John Cochrane story where it doesn't matter, the Axis can't win anyway, even if they win on the Eastern Front? That is the implication of what he just said. Or can the British screw this up? I don't think the Americans can screw it up.

I mean, the key point is that once the United States is in the war, if you just want to be an economic determinist, it's easy because the American economy is so dominant relative to the other economies that there is simply no competition after the United States United is at war. So, in retrospect, Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States seems like one of the great mistakes. But it is a huge mistake. He has a choice. He doesn't need to do it. And there are key decisions at every stage of World War II that have consequences.

It is still difficult to imagine a different outcome once the United States is fully engaged. And if you play, this is where you can try it out, Goodfellas fans. If you get a good strategy game, whether it's a simple one like Axis and Allies or a more complex one like the video game Making History, and you play World War II a hundred times and make different decisions along the way, it's extremely difficult for the Axis win in almost any scenario imaginable. Except for one way, which I want to ask. This is good. Yes, go ahead. War is a means to a political end.

Sorry, I'm going to get my Clausewitz quote wrong. Are you OK. Hitler never had a when to stop. He never had a political goal other than conquering the entire world, which is not going to happen. And unless you have a political agenda, this is where we stop, and you are Germany. It's useless. The United States had a political goal: unconditional surrender. That one works. And we had the means to do it. But the only way for them to win in the end was to have a political end, a point where we could say enough is enough.

We sue for peace. At the risk of going completely off script, the most chilling counterfactual, if we're talking about World War II, predates all of this. It's before Barbarossa. It's before America got into trouble, before Pearl Harbor. It's the Battle of Britain. And the question is whether or not the Germans will be able to defeat Britain in 1940. They invaded France. Britain faces the threat of invasion. And I think there is tremendous power in Len Dayton's novel, SSGB, which imagines a successful invasion and the defeat of Churchill's government, indeed Churchill's death. And I think that's a counterfactual that has much more plausibility, because it was much more balanced between the two.

By the way, this is what crossfire looks like. On the wings of the butterfly. If you have never fought in war and neither have I. There is a mute button here. Butterfly wings are not the decision. The UK bombed a German city, I don't remember which one. Hitler said: "Stop bombing the airfields and go bomb London." That gave the RAF time to breathe. That looks like one of those butterflies to me. If he'd said "screw it", we'd go after the RAF. There are several of those decisions, John. The decision not to annihilate the British army at Dunkirk is another.

I know you have to get to your schedule. There are moments of butterfly wings. You win if the other side decides to give up. That's the thing. They may not have been supposed to win, and you two can make the charts about who has what ability, but the French capitulated. That's why Hitler won there in six weeks. The French had an equally good army, they had a better air force, they had superior intelligence, and they capitulated. Their elites threw in the towel before the French Republic, before the Third Republic, and were very happy in some cases, not all, to have a collaborationist regime, the so-called Vichy regime.

Britain could have capitulated, for example; many people were willing to do it. Yes. But he could have continued fighting and moved to the colonies. By the way, her descendants are still there, and the United States could have decided to enter only partially, rent and lease, but nothing more than that. There are decisions not to decide to fight completely, despite having the ability to fight, and that is the contingency that I think fills your argument, because the French showed you that if you capitulate, it doesn't matter if you are a rival for the German army, and The British showed you otherwise.

They were no match for the German army on the battlefield, except in air and sea power, but also on land, but they did not capitulate. And so the decision not to capitulate in the British case is a decisive decision that is not necessarily part of the structural forces that a guy perhaps called John Cochrane would bring and overtake us with the decision. At this point, who could really be against it? Counterfactual history? It is by far more fun than any other entertainment in history. Much more fun. It's okay, Bill. Except for poor Bill. So let's move on to World War II, and Niall, you proposed this one.

If Churchill had been assassinated in New York in 1931, the Germans would probably have won the war. What you mean, Churchill was in New York that year, and I believe the story, Niall, correct me if I'm wrong, I think he's in a taxi going down Fifth Avenue. I think he's going to dinner with Bernard Baruch. That's right. He doesn't know where he's going. He's just looking... He's kind of lost. He is a little lost and he decides to get off in the middle of the street. And he makes a mistake that all Brits are prone to make in America.

He forgets which direction. Look in the wrong direction. Which side of the road the car is driving on. We don't have that beautiful two-way look that they have in the UK, cars go on the other side of the road, right? And they beat him up and I think he suffers a couple of broken ribs and a scalp injury. He is very lucky. They beat him up and of course they could have killed him. And this is a very good example of a counterfactual. A minute ago we talked about what would happen if Stalin was killed. What if Churchill's assassination is interesting?

Because... We're killing a lot of people on this show. Well, they killed many more, at least Stalin did. So let's remember that in one case we are talking about a dictator. And some listeners might have thought, "Well, of course it matters whether the dictator is alive or dead, because the dictator is all-powerful." The interesting thing about the Churchill case is that he ends up being prime minister in a democracy, but he is still important. Going back to what Steve had just said, why doesn't Britain withdraw? Because Churchill is there, and Churchill has been vindicated for everything that happened over the course of 1938, 1939 and 1940, and he becomes prime minister.

But his position in 1938 had been deeply unfashionable. He had been a warmonger, he had been rejected, but the key to Britain's survival, and I think to the survival of Western civilization, is that Churchill's claim gives him the power to lead, even after the defeat of 1940. , even after Dunkirk. , to lead Britain into a war in which it is completely alone, in which the odds are against it, at a time when many members of the British establishment, including members of its own party and the aristocracy, are willing to do, to close distances. deal with Hitler. And Churchill cancels them out.

And that is the turning point of World War II. That is the moment when things might have been different, because if he had not been Prime Minister, and let's say Lord Halifax had been Prime Minister, it was a close issue, I think the outcome would have been profoundly different. Why is this interesting to me? Because Churchill's leadership over a free people is the magical thing that changes the outcome. It is only thanks to Churchill's extraordinary ability to regain morale after the humiliation, and it was a humiliation, of Dunkirk, that Britain can continue fighting and its morale does not give way, even when things continue to go wrong.

I mean, they keep going wrong. Singapore falls. Britain appears to be getting nowhere in the war for quite some time, and yet morale remains. And I think that's one of the best illustrations of the argument that the individual really matters in history. Even A.J.P. Taylor, who didn't like counterfactuals, as you mentioned before, recognized in his History of England that Churchill was the savior of his nation, and that was not something that Taylor, who was not a conservative, should have enjoyed writing, but it is TRUE. So I think that when you think about the contingencies and counterfactuals of World War II, that moment in 1931, it's a banal moment, in which Churchill doesn't die, is absolutely crucial.

Because if he's not there in '38, '39, '40, Halifax will probably be prime minister. This is an argument in favor of murder. I can look at the world today and I can see where the West has certain good leaders and others not so good. And if I'm an adversary of the West, I'm going to start eliminating them, based on what Niall Ferguson says. I just saw the Stanford Daily headline: "Hoover Fellows Come Out in Favor of Assassination." When the time comes, those people are going to unite the nation against my aggression, so I better get ahead of the story a little, knowing my counterfactuals.

Well, actually murders are, there's a good article that shows how often murders have significant consequences, and that's why, throughout most of history, murders are not a mistake, but a mistake. characteristic, particularly, of how republics are managed. Fortunately, we have stopped doing this in the United States in recent years. Niall, I want you to deflect the counterargument. This is an invitation to thread what I am about to say. If Churchill had died in that car accident, someone else would have been writing about the threat to Hitler. Someone else would have been in Parliament. Clearly, by the time Chamberlain came home with "Peace in Our Time" and he was proven to be a fool, they would have voted for someone else.

So, is the personality and intelligence of a human being crucial to this, or would someone else have filled the gap? Well, this is a good way to ask the question, a good way to test the counterfactual. Of course, there were people who agreed. You mentioned Halifax. I don't know who he is, other than the terrorist's name. Or Halifax. He was someone who was an obvious candidate for the Prime Minister's job when it was clear that Chamberlain had to go. The point you are right about is that there were a lot of people who agreed with Churchill.

He had his own circle of people who hated the appeasers and, for various reasons, sided with him. But it is difficult to think that any of them have his oratory skills. Read Andrew Roberts' brilliant biography and you will see that Churchill was sui generis. There really was no one like him. No one could have written those speeches. And the speeches are among the most powerful in all of Western history. Everyone should listen to them at least once a year because they realize the extraordinary power of a man's literary ability. Note also that he was an exceptionally cultured and historically minded individual.

Churchill studied history and saw himself applying it, including the history of his own family, to contemporary situations. There is no one from his league in his circle. And so, in the counterfactual that he's dead and someone else has to be Churchill, I think it's quite plausible that they will fail. Remember, the arguments for reaching an agreement with Hitler are very tempting. They are very attractive. You just got defeated. Unlike 1914-18, your army has turned around and had to flee across the channel, leaving all its equipment behind. They are so demoralized that they have to be isolated from the civilian population.

The arguments to reach aagreement, which Hitler presents, sound quite plausible: I really have no resentment against you, it is a tempting agreement. And if you look at the attitudes of those who in 1940 would have been the deputy Churchills, most of them are willing to accept that deal. Your question has two parts, John. You said what a good historian he is. I must say that if he had known a little more about economics, things could have turned out even better. Well, that's another counterfactual. His question has two parts. One is: was there another political entrepreneur to fill the space?

And the answer is, of course, that there were many political entrepreneurs to fill that space. In other words, the establishment was behind appeasement because it wanted to defend the empire at all costs and many other considerations, which we will not go into. But that leaves open the possibility that you can come to power with opposing arguments against that establishment and participate in the political game. The question Niall poses is: were any of them good enough compared to Churchill? And that gives you what would have been good enough. Did I need a person of Churchill's level to rally the cause of confronting Hitler?

Or you could have gotten away with someone who was on that side, but let's say no... Leo Emery, for example. Not on a world-historical level, but it could have been achieved. And so it is very difficult to say what level of confrontation with Hitler it was, what level of skill was necessary in the confrontation team to achieve it. Now, in the case of Stalin, where you embody the regime, you build the regime, and the people around you are pygmies, you can see that replacing that is really difficult. But in a democracy where you have a strong establishment, you have a lot of people from different walks of life, okay, they all went to one school, I get it, you know, they're all friends.

It's still true. They are all friends. We understand that. But still, it's a sizable crowd. Therefore, I would be of the opinion that we did not need a figure of Churchill's level to fill that business space. So without Churchill, the UK may still have decided to rise. But I can't know, and it's very hard to prove, because I can't rerun the experiment now, which is why counterfactual history is difficult. Let's cross the ocean to another counterfactual, courtesy of Brother Cochrane. He writes: Would a failed American Revolution really have stopped the rise of freedom, or would we just be Canada?

Well, this is one of J. C. D. Clarke's virtual history chapters, and my favorite of all the chapters, actually, because no contributor other than Clarke shows all the problems with the methodology and explores the different paths one could plausibly have followed. . Now, I think the key argument here is that, without French intervention and without British lukewarmness, there's British America, and what if there hadn't been an American Revolution? Look at several different times when an abortion could have occurred. I think the interesting thing is that the revolutionary armies are definitely beatable if Britain wholeheartedly commits to defeating them and fights a full-scale war.

And I think the lesson of the French Revolution is that if you're in a large-scale war, freedom doesn't last long. But they would never have to fight a full-scale war because Britain is not very enthusiastic about it, and then the French come in and fix things, and you get the result you get. So I think it's a really interesting question because it leads us to wonder why freedom survives in such a long war. If it had been a really large-scale war, if Britain had... if both sides in Britain had wanted with all their hearts to win it, and there had been a large-scale deployment of forces, I'm not so sure that the ideals of The American Revolution would have continued.

The ideals of the French Revolution didn't do it because they had to fight a much bigger war, and you have no idea, it's like an order of magnitude or bigger in terms of mobilization, in terms of casualties, in terms of economy. cost. The American Revolutionary War is small compared to the French Revolutionary War. Yes. So this is one of those countries that we find ourselves in today, a nation of 330 million people, the largest economy in the world, 25 percent or so of the global economy for more than 100 years. You are 5 percent of the world's population, you are 25 percent of the GDP, and you are almost 50 percent or about 50 percent of the world's military.

So this American superpower, for which there is no equivalent in recorded history, is what we have now. Let's go back to the 18th century. Instead of 330 million, you have millions. That is the population of the colonies. You've got these 13 desolate colonies on the east coast that are kind of flyaway. You don't know where this is going, if it's going anywhere. The so-called indigenous peoples, those who found and are already there, dominated this continent until well into the 19th century. Maps showing America are false impressions of what the eastern seaboard colonies actually controlled. It was not until the last third of the 19th century that a decisive change occurred.

So you wouldn't have foreseen it, if you had been there at the time, if you had been Bill Whalen (remember, he doesn't have California yet, he doesn't have the Louisiana Purchase, he doesn't have Chicago, forget about the railroads). I mean, he has nothing but this tiny east coast. That becomes this world-historical superpower, not foreseeable in any way except retrospectively. Now, the interior piece that John is interested in is the freedom piece. In other words, there is a political project within that future superpower that is unpredictable. The political project is predictable at that moment. It is the political project, the norms, the values, the entire associationism, what Tocqueville will see when he enters the scene in the first part of the 19th century, in the first third of the 19th century, in that famous democracy of the United States.

He is looking at those traits, norms and values, what he calls customs, what we would call values, as well as institutions, and he is seeing what you are seeing. He's looking at the landscape of freedom and understanding that that's the power of America. And so, in some ways, the implausible story of the superpower is related to the more predictable understanding of what we are seeing. I do not believe that without French participation in the war we will have a successful American victory against the British. Now, Niall has explained why the British weren't fully involved and weren't very effective, but French support for the United States is definitely very, very important.

But this leads to the larger story. Well, suppose the Americans had lost the war. Wouldn't Einstein have come along 10 years later and created the American republic in some other way? In other words, was there another way, given the values ​​and customs, why did they flee the UK in the first place, why did they come there, sorry, why did they flee England, Scotland and Wales, why did they come there? in the first, given that all of that was somehow the DNA, would the circumstances have managed to produce a result that did not depend entirely or even predominantly on that conjuncture of the Revolutionary War period?

That's where you go somehow. I ask this because of course I am so impressed with our founding generation and their understanding of history that what they created is simply amazing. Washington, as commander, understood that his job was not to lose, and brilliantly he did not lose, something Lee did not understand. And clearly, in the 19th century, the model of "Oh, there's a successful republic" was very important. On the other hand, our ideals, what they wanted were their rights as British citizens, and the enlightenment, the gradual improvement of rights, which there was, from Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution, was a British thing.

Surely the United Kingdom would have reached an agreement with its colonies that would have allowed them much, as they did later. Now, Canada, of course, wouldn't be Canada without the American Revolution. But this is the point. If you look at Canada's trajectory, it's not that Canadians are very poor and look longingly across the border to a much richer United States. In reality, the economic paths the two countries have taken are remarkably similar. And that's because freedom wasn't something the Founding Fathers simply invented. There was already a strong tradition of freedom that the colonists had brought from the British Isles and established in their colonies.

And so it is a modified version of British conceptions of freedom that produces the American Revolution. And I actually don't think North America will look radically different if the revolutionaries are defeated, and it's just a great Canada. I don't think that will produce a dramatically different outcome economically and socially. After losing the Revolutionary War, the United Kingdom said, "Oh," and granted much more autonomy and dependence to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. So if they had won and we had remained colonies, yes, there would have been some delegation of authority, but Canada was not Canada. And the good thing is that contemporaries talked about it.

The good thing is that all the opponents of the fight against the American revolutionaries, all the people who were on their side in London, pointed out that, ultimately, the potential across the Atlantic, this was a point that Adam Smith made, It's so huge that it's stupid to fight with these people. Even if it is won, the center of gravity will likely shift across the Atlantic over time. So I think this is where his structural version of the story is quite compelling. There are so many... This is a demographic story. In the British Isles in the 18th century there were a lot of people, a substantial excess of people.

And this is part of the reason why there are so many more people crossing the Atlantic from Britain than from France or Spain. And that is something that has nothing to do with individual agency. What happens is that the age of marriage decreases and everyone has many more children. But, like Churchill, I have yet to believe that the brilliance of the founding generation mattered. I'm going to say a word. Good luck. That's my job. I was invited. I didn't invite myself. This is a profound point about counterfactuals that Niall just made in response to his intervention.

Can you really change just one thing? Because when you change one thing, you are changing the sequence of things that follow. You are changing the consequences. Niall then pointed out that Britain changed its policy towards Canada due to the outcome of the revolutionary events. So the Canada that we think was a possible outcome for the United States, even if they had lost the revolution, might not have been the outcome for Canada. Of course, Canada is in the north. So Canada is, again, geography is a really important thing to overcome. It is a very successful nation, with a very high standard of living and very well governed.

But they just put it in a place where it's really difficult to reach 330 million people the way we could. And, of course, there are other northern countries with a larger population depending on their geography. So it's not impossible. But this idea of ​​counterfactuals where, oh, we're just going to change one thing and then hold everything else constant and run the experiment that way, is actually not a good version. We call that general equilibrium response and I want to congratulate you as economists. We have about five minutes left, so let's see if we can make two counterfactuals.

And Niall, I'm going to challenge you to a 30-second counterfactual, which is this. In honor of your recent 60th birthday, Steve, you missed the show. It was a wonderful tribute. We put him on a scale and weighed gold against him. It was pretty fantastic. I went back and watched April 1964, Niall, and do you know what I found? You were born at the height of the British invasion. Beatlemania had just begun. They had performed on the Sullivan Show in February of that year. Here's a question for you, friend. What if Paul McCartney and John Lennon never crossed paths and there was never a band called The Beatles?

Is there still a British Invasion and if there is, whose media is it? 30 seconds. It is easy. The Stones have an even quicker route to glory, but even if the Stones don't make it, the amazing thing about this is that there are so many young Brits in 1964 forming bands that it was really just... and they were quite interchangeable. In fact. Sure, you can say that Lennon and McCartney were incredibly talented songwriters, but so were Jagger and Richards. And I think this is something that would have happened because something very peculiar had happened. American music, black American music, had been imported to the UK and fused with the folk musical traditions of the British Isles to produce something called pop.

And it was irresistible everywhere. So I don't think it's necessary for Lennon and McCartney to get together. You have, you surely will have, pop music. I will do that. 30 seconds. Does anyone want to add anything else? I'm on the side of the debate between the Beatles and theStones, but this is Einstein, who 10 years later someone else would have invented it. Or Newton and Leibniz. Yesterday I was at the farmers market on California Avenue and there was a group of people who looked like adults when the Beatles came in playing music for the crowd and said, "Has anyone heard of the Beatles?" And no one said yes.

California Avenue, farmers market, Palo Alto, California, 2024. So how momentous were the Beatles over the course of the history of Niall Ferguson's career, which is the measure here, how momentous were the Beatles, except for the people who were there at the time and who were influenced and I sing those songs now at the farmers market. There's others. My children don't sing Beatles songs, they sing other songs, and they are children and I don't know. The answer is I don't know. I definitely don't know. Actually, the amazing thing about our culture now is how little it's changed, how many young people...

I was in a fraternity and they were playing Tommy by The Who outside and the speakers outside. Thanks to the Internet, they have much more access to music from 60 years ago than anyone from the 1960s who didn't play jazz. I knew you'd catch the techno-optimism, so good job. By the way, I think Stanford teaches not one, but two classes on Taylor Swift. Four classes on Taylor Swift and not a single Vietnam War because they're just trying to balance educating the kids. We have five minutes left. One last counterfactual. Will you go to camp with me after this?

I'm trying to get the Qataris to contribute money so I can build tunnels under the... You know what? The big counterfactual is what if you had been national security advisor instead of human resources? Let's think about that for a moment. Oh boy. He is a better tank driver. Final counterfactual and I apologize for the brevity, gentlemen, we only have five minutes left. It comes from Niall. What if Trump had won in 2020? No Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not on October 7th. I like this counterfactual because he proposed it himself. So at least he has the... We can quote him.

We have a source for this, which was Trump on the phone in 2022 telling one of his golf buddies that if I had been president, none of this would be happening because, and this is a great line, I said to Putin, "If you go to Ukraine, I will bomb Moscow. All those beautiful domes will disappear." Now, we don't know if he ever actually said that to Putin, but I remember asking someone in the administration who said. "Niall, he said those things all the time." That's why I like the idea. that there would be a very different world if he had won the election.

I think he lost the election primarily because of COVID. I think he would have won without the pandemic. And I don't think this administration was as good at deterring our adversaries as it was. Trump, if only because Trump was a crazy theory. You really didn't know what his move would be. So I think this is very plausible, even if he said it himself. I think the big counterfactual of Trump winning in 2020. it would be both in foreign policy, although there are many, and I suppose our current administration is on track to lose three wars, which is a little different, but in what happened in domestic policy.

And I won't do a litany of what happened under. the Biden administration, but we wouldn't have had to count all the things that happened under the Biden administration. We would not have a resurgent Trump. We would not have the exposure of what the progressive left really is in this country. And possibly, of course, now he would be losing. We would vote Democratic again, but in a very, very different world, largely on domestic policy issues. And for the sake of time, I won't give you a litany of all the things that wouldn't have happened. Well, let's add that in 2020 too.

What if there is no COVID? Do you write DOOM? I probably do. In fact, I had started working on it before the pandemic and had persuaded my reluctant editor that a book on the history of disasters was a good idea. I don't think he would have published it even without the pandemic, but I probably still would have written it. But I want to hear from Professor Kotkin about a different 2020. And a Trump without COVID wins 2020, does it have the geopolitical consequences that I think he has? Remind me who Trump is. Some boy. I deal with big historical questions.

But if I may, they wouldn't have sold as much of DOOM if they hadn't had COVID and therefore inflation, I wouldn't be selling copies of The Fiscal Theory at the higher price level. So, you know, it worked out well for both of us. There were some positive aspects to that play. I have to figure out how to monetize much better compared to you guys if I'm ever going to get back on the show. Shit. You are monetizing. The difficult political questions cannot be avoided. And you can answer it impartially, because this is actually a question about Putin.

Does Putin act differently if Trump is still in the White House? That's really the question. Trump wanted to give away what Putin now has to take militarily. That is the answer to the question. And Putin was waiting for Trump to deliver it to him somehow. And Trump proved to be disorganized, his attention span was complex, his administration didn't seem to have a single policy or a single direction. And Putin was waiting for the gift that never came from Trump. I think that's a realistic picture of what the Moscow side looked like. Who is this Trump guy?

Is he crazy? Is he really going to do what he says he's going to do? And they could never really understand what he was offering them. But this is what happens with the world. The Russia-Ukraine issue has nothing to do with Trump. It has nothing to do with Biden. It has nothing to do with ephemeral people. Maybe Stalin. That's how it is. It has nothing to do with the ephemeral nature of some of contemporary American politics. Now we are going to have a second outgoing mandate that will go in one direction or another. And many people will think it's the end of the world if it goes in the opposite direction to their hopes.

And then we'll be on the other side of that four years later and it won't be an apocalypse, it won't be existential. This is what American life will be like in the 21st century. The Ukraine-Russia issue has to do with much deeper, century-long processes that have to do with issues that predate the American republic and, unfortunately, will come after any administration that is elected. In our final moments, this is great because you started with a kind of butterfly theory and now we move on to a kind of grandiose theory. It had the landscape of structures. Half of our country, no matter what happens a year from now, half of our country is convinced that this is the end of democracy, the great butterfly moment.

And you're saying: calm down, the great forces of history are moving forward, everything will be okay. Or it's not going to be good. We had four years of Trump. As I recall, it's a very vague memory: we're almost four years into Biden. And so we have shown that we are on the other side of Trump and we will soon show that we will be on the other side of Biden, potentially. We could end up with eight years of that. I don't know what life expectancy is currently in the United States, I heard it's decreasing. But anyway, the point is that it's obviously both, right?

There are times when agency is decisive. Those moments are fewer than we think and fewer people than we think. And there are moments that are not turning points and that seem like turning points to us because we live in the moment. And since Niall started us, we can't see beyond the moment we're in. If we could, we wouldn't be on this show. We would work for Goldman Sachs or we would work for someone where you could make money knowing the future instead of making a show. I'm so sorry we ruined your schedule here, Bill. But I must say that that was the only predictable thing.

That was the future he could have foreseen before the show started. It planned. That's a Goodfellas counterfactual, we're sticking to the script. What if we stick to the script? Alright. And a miraculous one at that. Yes. Very miraculous. Gentlemen, great conversation. John Cochrane has a meeting to attend. Steve, you have Niall and John books to check out. Let us not forget his biography of Stalin, available in all good bookstores. And if you want to know how The Death of Stalin works, I can recommend a wonderful movie. In fact, I saw it last night. He's still writing that.

He dies, but his death doesn't have as many consequences as people think. But the end of the Korean War, right? My biography does not end with his death, because he is still the most important person in the country, even though he is no longer there. Well. Guys, great conversation. Dr. Kotkin, come back soon. Thanks for the invitation. I deeply appreciate it. And that's it for this episode of Goodfellas. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. This week we were unable to participate in the lightning round for obvious reasons. That shouldn't stop you from submitting questions. Go to hoover.org/askgoodfellas and write to Niall John H.R., Dr.

Cochrane, if you wish. And yes, you can start playing drums. I have it back on the program. I know he loves attention. We'll have another episode of Goodfellas at the end of May or beginning of June. I think it will be a retrospective of the year so far, because we will be entering our summer program very soon, which means you won't see us much. So don't be scared if we don't come back every two weeks. On behalf of my colleagues, Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane and the great Stephen Cochrane, we hope you enjoyed the conversation. Thanks again for watching.

We will see you soon. If you enjoyed this show and are interested in seeing more content starring H.R. McMaster, check out Battlegrounds, also available on hoover.org.