The Three Historians: Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Andrew Roberts | Uncommon Knowledge | Peter Robinson | Hoover Institution - Uncommon Knowledge

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>> Peter Robinson (00:00):
Three of the most accomplished historians of our time, or
any time, Niall Ferguson,Victor Davis Hanson,
and Andrew Roberts onUncommon Knowledge now.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.

(00:21):
I'm Peter Robinson, a native of Glasgow.
Sir Niall Ferguson holds BA and DPhilDegrees in History from Magdalen College,
Oxford, now a Fellow atthe Hoover Institution here at Stanford.
Sir Niall has published well overa dozen major works of history.
From his classic study of the FirstWorld War, the Pity of War to Doom,
the Politics of Catastrophe.

(00:42):
He is currently working, orso we are led to believe,
on his second volume of hisLife of Henry Kissinger.
You are at work on it, are you not?

>> Niall Ferguson (00:50):
We're not being interviewed by you, Peter.

Thank you.
The classicist and military historianVictor Davis Hanson grew up on a ranch in
the San Joaquin Valley of California.
Then earned his undergraduatedegree at UC Santa Cruz and
his Doctorate in Classics righthere at Stanford University.
Currently again,a Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Professor Hanson is himself the author ofmore than a dozen major works of history,

(01:15):
including his definitive study of thePeloponnesian War, A War Like No Other.
A native of London, Andrew Roberts,the Baron Roberts of Belgravia,
holds undergraduate and doctoral degreesfrom Gonville and Keys College, Cambridge.
After a brief careerin investment banking,
imagine what you'd be ifyou'd stuck with it, Andrew?

>> Andrew Roberts (01:36):
I'm broke.

Really? [LAUGH].
That bad?

I was totally useless.

All right, after a brief career in investment banking,
Lord Roberts turned tothe writing of history.
And he, too, has again producedwell over a dozen major works,
including biographies of George III andNapoleon and Churchill.
Walking With Destiny, his acclaimedbiography of the wartime Prime Minister.
Professors Ferguson and Hanson,

(02:00):
Lord Roberts is now a fellowat the Hoover Institution.
All right, general conversation ina moment, gentlemen, but I'd like
each of you to answer this first questionbriefly, one word would be plenty.
In your lifetime, has the writing ofhistory improved or deteriorated?

(02:21):
Andrew?>> Andrew Roberts: Deteriorated.
Victor?

>> Victor Davis Hanson (02:24):
Much worse.

Naill?

Apart from Andrew and Victor, it has deteriorated.

All right, so it's unanimous.
The 1619 Project, a group of essayson slavery in American history,
produced by the New York Times andnow used in schools across the country.
Nicole Hannah Jones,the principal author, quote,
one of the primary reasons some ofthe colonists decided to declare their
independence from Britain was to protectthe institution of slavery, close quote.

(02:55):
Now, that's as good a place as anyto begin with a question of what one
does with history that just isn't history,Andrew?

Well, you go back to the sources, go back to the original
documents and the archives, andyou tested against the facts and
when you do that, I'm afraid herargument completely collapses.
It simply was not the driving force.

Completely collapses,
she's not even onto a little shredof a sliver of an argument there.

Some of the southern planters, some might have for
a short period of time believed that,that was going to help them.
But frankly it was sominuscule as to be negligible and
therefore shouldn't have been made.
The central thesis of this,in my view, completely absurd book.

Matthew Desmond, another essayist in the 1619 Project,
quote, the large scale cultivationof cotton hastened, this one is for
you, Naill.
The large scale cultivation of cottonhastened the invention of the factory,
an institution that propelledthe Industrial Revolution.
American capitalism, American capitalism

(04:03):
was founded on the lowest road there is,close quote.

Well, American capitalism was an import from Britain in
the sense that the Industrial Revolutionbegan in Britain.
And the technology ofthe Industrial Revolution,
which included machinesthat did spinning and
weaving, that all originated inBritain where there was no slavery.
And the technology was then largelypirated and taken across the Atlantic.

(04:31):
So I'm afraid that doesn't work eitheras economic history, that's just wrong.

We'll see if we get them out on strikes,
Victor here's the third one.
This is historian Gordon Wooddissenting from the 1619 Project.
The American Revolution unleashedantislavery sentiments that led
to the first abolition movementsin the history of the world.
That is a breathtaking claim,let me reread that.
The American Revolution, far frombeing flawed, irredeemably racist from

(05:00):
the American Revolution unleashedantislavery sentiments that led to
the first abolition movements inthe history of the world, close quote.
Victor?

I agree with the sentiment, I think maybe you could
argue that people in Britain a littleearlier were organized to stop slavery.
But we should remember the Declaration ofIndependence, all men are created equal.
It was sort of a suicide pact with slaverybecause what the ultimate logic of that is
that slavery would not exist,it was incompatible with that sentiment.

(05:32):
And if you look at why they didn'teliminate slavery in the beginning,
that is oppose the slave owners.
They had just come off a revolution,they had just been at war with Britain for
over eight years and they needed unity.
So from the very beginning they hadthis problem and that is there was
an institution that was incompatible withthe ideals of the American Revolution.

And they all knew it.

They all knew it, at least the people in the north and
even people like Jefferson knew it.
But they didn't have the wherewithalto go out from one war and
then go what would turn out tobe the worst casualties and
losses in the history ofthe American Republic.
700,000 people in the Civil War, andthey didn't want a preliminary version of
that right on top ofthe Revolutionary War.

(06:15):
They were human, they weren't gods.

So it's worth adding that the abolitionist movement's origins
were in fact likethe Industrial Revolution in Britain.
And it really emanated fromthe evangelical movement,
religious movement, andthat's the real origin of abolitionism,
which came relatively laterto the United States.

And I just make one point, in antiquity, remember,
slavery was not based on race.
It was based on the misfortune of being inthe wrong place at the wrong time if your
city was taken or birthed.
But Alcidamas was a famous rhetorician,
he said somewhere around 370,God made no man a slave.
It was a refutation of the Aristotelianidea that slavery is wrong.

(07:01):
[INAUDIBLE].
Yeah, Aristotle said slavery was wrongonly because the wrong people were being
enslaved.
Sometimes he tried to link it with agenetic inferiority of natural slaves and
people in the antiquity.
They didn't eliminate it because itwas an equal opportunity oppressor.

Sorry, can I also add something else that Naill just mentioned
that I think is veryimportant about religion,
is that actually religion played a hugepart in the American Revolution.
The Low Church, the evangelicals,the people who genuinely feared
that Catholicism was goingto be imposed on America.
Because of the Quebec Act of 1774 and

(07:40):
the fear that George III wasa sort of crypto Catholic.
That conspiracy theory was incrediblywidespread in the colon is in 1776.

Andrew, can I get you in your biography of George III,
it is quite clear that you'rean Englishman who's still a little sore
about the American Revolution.
But can I get, Is this the fair summary ofwhat the three of you have been saying?
That if it didn't eliminate slavery the Declaration of
Independence at least lit a fuse.

(08:10):
That went over several a number ofdecades maybe too many decades but
it burned directly to the Civil War andexploded at that point is that fair?
Far from enshrining slaveryit set in motion what would
ultimately destroy the institution, fair?

Yes, there were, I mean, of those 28 articles clauses of
course most of them I thinkdon't hold water intellectually.
They were going to impose one thatmentioned slavery it was cut out in the in
the discussions beforehand.
But as Victor says those openinglines are in themselves a time.
Well, how can you possibly in thatcase have slavery in the long term?

We should remember it was never a blood and soil country.
There was never the logic of thedeclaration would ensure that the people
who eventually became Americans would notnecessarily look like in superficial sense
the founders.
They knew that from the beginning thatpeople were gonna come to this country and
they were not going to come from theBritish Isles they were gonna come from

(09:12):
Europe and then perhaps Asia.
But there was nothing inthe constitution that mentions black or
white in racial terms.
There was slavery but not racial.
So and that was deliberate.

The biggest problem with the 1619 project though
is that it misses the fact that slavery
was almost ubiquitous inthe world of the 18th century.
And it was not something unique towhite settlers from Western Europe
in fact slavery was thrivingwithin Africa in the Arab world.

(09:43):
And the interesting thingabout British expansion and
the British Empire which ultimatelyproduces the United States.
Is that it's least original feature ofslavery the least interesting thing
about British expansion intothe Americans is slavery.
And the most interesting thing isthe way in which institutions of law and

(10:04):
governance evolve in the coloniesthat ultimately produce
the American Revolutionthat's what's important.
And to write the history of the UnitedStates as if it's origins lie in slavery
is a gross distortion.
Precisely for that reason it's the leastinteresting thing not the most interesting
thing about American history.

Thank you Jim, it was all Churchill's fault.
Last September Tucker Carlson interviewedthe podcaster Darryl Cooper on
the Tucker Carlson Show.
Carlson introduced Cooper,I'm Quota Carlson as quote the best and
most honest popular historianin the United States.
Take that Hanson,
more than 30 million people appearto have listened to this interview.

(10:45):
Cooper argued that the Second World Warwas not the fault of Adolf Hitler but
of Winston Churchill he really truly did.
The Cooper interview still appearsunder on Tucker Carlson's website under
the headline howWinston Churchill ruined Europe.
Darryl Cooper explaining himself onX-Quote my contention is not that
the Third Reich was peaceful.

(11:07):
Are you reassured?
Or that Germany did not kill Jews mycontention is that the war was not
inevitable.
That in fact almost no one butChurchill's faction wanted it and
that the atrocities could not havehappened in the absence of a world war.
Darryl Cooper to Tucker Carlsonquote Churchill was the chief

(11:29):
villain of the Second World Warclose quote.
Where to begin?

Exactly where do you start on that?
And actually it's very much what Isaid earlier about the 1619 project.
You've got to just go backto the original facts.
The war broke out becauseHitler invaded Poland.
And in the April of 1939 five monthspreviously the British government
which Churchill wasn't in at the time,of course, by the way,

(11:57):
gave a guarantee to Poland that itwould go to war if Germany invaded it.
So Churchill can't be blamed for that.
He certainly can't also be blamedlater for not making peace
because he wasn't in the governmentuntil September 1939.
He wasn't prime minister until May 1940 bywhich time Hitler had invaded Holland and

(12:19):
Belgium and shortly later wasgoing to invade France as well.
So just the sheer chronology the datesdo not fit this insane thesis.

Victor, on October 6, 1939 so now we're a month and
six days after Hitler invades Poland.
Hitler gives a speechoffering peace to Britain and
France if they would acceptGermany's conquest of Poland.
And in July 1940 after invadingFrance Hitler again gives
a speech this time offering peace terms toBritain France has already been conquered.

(12:52):
So Cooper argues thatHitler offered peace.
He offered to permit the warto remain limited and
Churchill turned down the chance.
He turned it down because heknew Hitler by this time.

He had said that he was not going to militarize
the Rhineland, he did.
He said he was not going tocommit the Anschluss, he did.
He said he was not going to gointo the Sudetenland, he did.
He said that was his last territorialambition in Europe, he went into Poland.
So in Churchill's mind andby the way Chamberlin as well,

(13:27):
I mean, we blame Churchill.
But Chamberlin was as Andrew pointed outdeclared war on because they all knew
all the responsible leaders in Britainknew he was a pathological liar and
he was always negotiating froma perceived position of strength.
We should also remember thathe lost almost 20,000 dead and
maybe as many casualties in Poland.

(13:50):
And when he went in there he did take,-German he took heavy German casualties in
the invasion.
One of the reasons why he did is thatwas a strategic pause to recoup and
get his army ready to go into Denmark andNorway.
And when he did that and he took themeventually when he went into France.
We all think the French armycollapsed in six weeks it did but

(14:12):
it actually fought pretty heroically.
And they lost another 20,000 plus dead.
And they lost probably six orseven hundred tanks.
They lost sizable numbersof tactical aircraft.
So he was strategically pausing aswell to reformulate the Wehrmacht.
And we had this ideathat he was indomitable.

(14:32):
But at this point when you look atthe Mark 1 tank, the Mark 2 tank,
they were inferior tothe French chart tank.
The BF109 was not any much better infact you can make the argument that
the Spitfire was a better plane.
So he didn't have much.

The peace offers were just blathered to cover the German army
while it regrouped.

Yeah, well not just that but
he was willing to accepta peace on his terms.
And the peace would have beena permanently inferior position of Britain
and maybe for a time being allowance tokeep part of it's imperial possessions.
But during that gestation hewould he thought he would be so
much powerful that eventuallyhe would deal with Britain.

(15:13):
It was all operational itwas all something that was
contingent on his own agendanot any fairness about it.

Once again Darryl Cooper this is for you Niall.
The Nazis launched a war.
I'm quoting Darryl Cooper the Nazislaunched a war where they were completely
unprepared.
Millions of prisoners of warof local prisoners and so
forth that they weregoing to have to handle.
They went in with no plan forthat and they just threw these people
into camps andmillions of people ended up dead there.

Well it happens to the best of us.
You invade the Soviet Union andyou just find all these prisoners and
how do you feed them?
And there's no Trader Joe's.
Well, this is the kind of imbecilelevel of argument that I'm almost
impatient to have to engage with.
Because it's an absolute fantasy.
The reality is, that the plannedinvasion of the Soviet Union

(16:07):
included orders to carry out executions,first of commissars,
that's to say,Communist officials within the Red Army.
And pretty quickly, the orders extended toinclude Jews in the occupied territories,
as well as prisoners of war.
These documents exist.
An Oxford undergraduate who took thespecial subject with me in the 1990s would

(16:30):
know about those documents.
Why are we wasting our time talking aboutthe ravings of somebody who clearly
has done no serious research,
not even at the undergraduate level,on the history of the Second World War?
I find it really frustrating that we'reeven having to have this discussion
about somebody who clearlyis an ignoramus, at best and

(16:51):
at worst is an apologist for Nazism.

Remind me never to cross you, Niall.
All right, boys.

Can I just say, of course, you called him a historian, or
at least you quoted.

I quoted, he has written one book.
What was it about?

Twitter.

Twitter.
He's written one book on Twitter.
We must have written, what,50 plus books together.
And yet he is called a historian,whereas, in fact, he's just a podcaster.

All right, just a, excuse me, that cuts a little close to
the quick, [LAUGH] you'rea broadcaster piece, it's different.

Thank you. Thank you.
Some of the Reich ministers wrote outa hunger plan, and it was deliberate that
the idea was that when they went intoRussia, they were going to starve people,
tthe first winner, even General Halder,who was, you know, he wasn't hanged.

He was the humane one.

Yeah, he was the head of Wehrmacht Chief of staff.
He wasn't hanged at Nuremberg.
He was considered the morereasonable of the Nazis.
He did cut a deal after the war, but
he said that it's gonna be inevitable thatwe're gonna have to starve these people.
Not just because we're unorganized, but
because we want to get ridof the Red Army A, and
we want to take the food of the Ukraineand ship it back to Germany.

Then they shot the 14,000 Polish officers at Katyn as well,
which proves exactly 1940.

1940, all right, so, okay,
we advanced decades now,a few decades now.
The Cold War, Max Boot on the endof the Cold War, quote, one of
the biggest myths is that Reagan hada plan to bring down the evil empire and
that it was his pressure that ledto US victory in the Cold War.

(18:28):
In reality, [COUGH] pay attention,this is reality, in reality, the end of
the Cold War and the fall of the SovietUnion were the work of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev ended the Cold War andReagan had nothing to do with it, Victor?

Well, that's a perverse interpretation of what happened.
Gorbachev didn't do the perestroika and
glasnost because he wantedto weaken the Soviet Union.
He wanted to reform it, he thought,and make it more powerful.
And it turned out to be, and it turned outto be something that once he unleashed
the spirits slightly of freemarket capitalism and freedom,

(19:05):
it took a life of its own andweakened the Soviet Union.
But why did he want to reformit in the first place?
Because he, his central plannershad come to him and said,
the United States, technologically,economically, is so
far ahead of us that the Cold Warmentality will not work.
And why was it so far ahead of us?
Because Reagan had reversedmuch of the Carter doctrine and

(19:27):
not the doctrine officially,but he had rearmed.
He increased the Navy to 600 ships,he talked about whether it was fantasy or
not, it didn't matter.
The Soviets took himliterally about Star wars,
that he was gonna build this antiballistic missile system, that was so
sophisticated it was beyondtechnology available to the Russians.

(19:47):
So in conclusion, they realized thatthe Cold War was going to be lost by
a new dynamic kind of renaissanceAmerica that was determined to win it.
Reagan said, we win, they lose,that was his definition of the Cold War.
And so he tried to reform Russia,either to appease the United States, but
more likely to improveits competitiveness.

(20:10):
And once you start to tamper withcommunism and give people a taste of
entrepreneurship, even a tiny one andfreedom, that takes a logic of its own.

So [COUGH] it is strictly speaking accurate,
to say that it was Gorbachevwho cried uncle, but
it was after Reagan in the United Stateshad slammed him against the wall.
Is that crude but fair?

Yeah, I think so, I mean,
that was the purpose Reagan said that.
People hated Reagan in 1980 because,he said that he was going to win
the Cold War, and Carter andpeople said that's not possible.
That'll lead to World War II.
He'll put pushing missiles andGermany will have Armageddon.

From Max Boot on the end of the Cold War to
William Appelman Williams on the wayit began, now, this is an old text.
The tragedy of Americandiplomacy goes back six decades,
but do you know that it is still taughtin universities across the country?
I'm quoting William Appelman Williams,quote, "Stalin's effort to solve Russia's

(21:09):
problem of security and recovery, short ofwidespread conflict, short of widespread
conflict with the United States,was not Matched by American leaders.
The Americans proceeded rapidly andwith a minimum of debate to a series of
actions which closed the door to anyresult, but the Cold War." Close quote.
The Cold War was our fault,not Stalin's, Niall?

It's almost quaint to hear these arguments in 2024.

It is but there's still, go ahead.

Well, I mean, there have been so
many subsequent publications basednot least on the Soviet archives,
that show the very reverseto have been true.
Interestingly, the United Stateswas quite inclined after 1945
to try to maintain the wartimerelationship with Uncle Joe,

(22:01):
who was given quite a positiveprofile in the American media.
The American response toWinston Churchill's observation that
an Iron Curtain was being drawn acrossEurope was, in fact, quite negative.
The New York Times gaveit a very bad press.
It really wasn't until 1950, when Stalinauthorized the invasion of South Korea,

(22:22):
that most Americans realized thatthey faced a new adversary, a new and
aggressive adversary that also hadambitions in the Middle east as well,
of course, as in Europe.
So I find it kind of fantastic thatanybody ever believed this stuff,
it was excusable before the Sovietarchives were accessible.
But everything that's becomeavailable since the collapse of

(22:44):
the Soviet Union confirms,how aggressive Stalin was and
how ready he was to risk another worldwar, in pursuit of Soviet expansion.
John Gaddis work, just to give a singleAmerican historian, has exploded all this.
And the recent work of someone like SergeiRadchenko, again completely destroys
the notion that the United States,somehow was the aggressor in the Cold War.

(23:08):
Containment was the containment of theSoviet Union's expansionist tendencies.
And that word was adopted as reallythe leitmotif of American foreign policy,
after George Kernan coined it fora very good reason.

And in this started right from 1945 onwards, by 1946,
with obviously the Red armyin control of Eastern Europe.
You have bishops beingarrested in Hungary and
opposition leaders being arrested,of course, in 1947.
Niall's totally right, when Churchillmade the Iron Curtain speech in

(23:42):
the March of 1946, he was denouncedin both Congress and Parliament.
There were lots of letterswritten to the press,
there were the Truman administration.
People refused to officiallyrefuse to go to receptions of.
Churchill in New York City and so on.

(24:03):
But we have in Stalin's own handwritingorders for the Berlin Airlift.
For example, in 1949, a classic exampleof attempting to squeeze Berlin.

The Berlin blockade.

Sorry, the Berlin blockade.
And the airlift was our response,apologies.
And the Berlin blockade,which led to the Berlin Airlift.
But the orders forit are in Stalin's handwriting [LAUGH].
It's difficult to knowwhat more people can want.
But the idea that this is taught inAmerican schools and universities,
that's the worrying thing, I think,
rather than the argument [CROSSTALK]which is a Soviet talking point.

Do you wish to rise in defense of Gorbachev at all?

Well, we were lucky that in a way that he wasn't Ceausescu,
somebody who was goingto fight to the end.
But the fact is that he had been socompletely and
brilliantly outmaneuvered by Reaganmeant that he had little choice.

I would just add that it's kind of ironic that Stalin kept
every word that every pacthe made with the Axis.
He had a non-aggression pactthat he honored to the letter.
Hitler attacked him->> Peter Robinson: All the time.
He had a non-aggression pact in April of 1941
with the Japanese to the extentthat we were sending liberty ships

(25:17):
through the Pacific to Russia.
And the Japanese could have sunk them,they wouldn't touch them because of that.
And he only broke thatthe last month of the war.
He broke every word andagreement with the people who helped him.
Britain and the United States supplied 20to 25% of his wherewithal in World War II.
He broke every agreement at Yalta andPotsdam that the Eastern European-occupied

(25:40):
countries and the former Axiswould have democratic elections.
Worse, the deal was that he had made thispact under The Molotov Ribbentrop August
23rd Agreement, 1939, to divide up Poland.
So now he's an ally of the Allies afterhe's been attacked by his former partner.

(26:00):
And at Potsdam they say, well,we're going to restore Poland and
of course you're gonna give back.
Hitler is gone, so we're gonna giveback Poland what he stole Germany, but
you're gonna give back what you stole.
And Stalin basically said,how many divisions does the Pope have?
Meaning we're going to take Roman Catholicand Polish Poland, and we're

(26:23):
gonna keep it in Ukraine, which is WesternUkraine today, and parts of Belarus.
So he never gave it back.
And he said, get it from Prussia.
So 13 million Germans,not that anybody had sympathy for
them after what Germany had done.
But 13 million people walked backwestward, 2 million starved to death.
And that became the land that wascompensated most part from what he

(26:47):
would never give back after stealing it.

Gentlemen, the meaning of your work.
The meaning of history as a discipline.
Niall has expressed frustration, in whichI'm sure the two of you share, that some
of these arguments are just so puerile,so utterly unsupported by any evidence.
Then it's maddening thatsomebody like me would

(27:11):
ask professional historiansto respond to them.
All right, let me quote Ecclesiastes.
This is a mood, if nothing else.
Nothing is new under the sun.
There is no remembrance of men of old,nor of those to come.
Will there be any remembranceamong those who come after them.
It's all just pointless anyway.

(27:31):
Now, there's that argument orat least that mood.
I'm sure we've all at least felt the mood.
But then, the three of you,I don't know, 60 important works,
50, 60 really important, serious works.
Among the three of you, you have.
I don't know that I've ever readany one of you saying it this way.

(27:52):
But you have, it seems to me,dedicated your lives to the proposition
that it does matter, and in particularthat it matters to democracy.
You are writing, all three of you forordinary, educated laymen.
You are not professionalhistorians writing monographs for
other professional historians.

(28:13):
Every one of you, I think, takes it asa kind of implicit duty to explain,
to tell the story to your fellow Britishsubjects, to your fellow Americans.
And I would like to know why.
What difference does it make?
How can history help us?

Well, we're the anti-amnesia shock troops.
Our job is to fight againstthe human propensity to forget.
The United States isextremely bad at remembering.
It has a kind of permanentstate of amnesia.
It's not even clear that oneadministration is aware of what
the previous one did.

(28:52):
And so the historian's roleis to try to supply that
collective memory thatwe would otherwise lack.
It was when I was an Oxford undergraduate,fashionable to say that one could learn
nothing from history excepthow to make new mistakes.
That was AJP Taylor's line.
I disagree with that, I think we must.
We have an absolutely clear obligationto try to learn from history.

(29:13):
And that's what motivates me every day.
It's sometimes rather tedious work.
I'm not sure if I'd understood at thestart how much history would just involve
plowing through the letters of dead peoplethat I necessarily would have spent 40 or
50 years doing it.
But it is a very necessary task,and all the more necessary,
when Charlatans like Daryl Cooper,legitimized by Tucker Carlson,

(29:35):
tell outright lies about the past to theAmerican public and indeed to the world.

And are being downloaded by 33 million people.
Because unless you do fight back onevery front, who's to say whether
these absurd and very dangerousconspiracy theories won't take root?
And so I think Niall's right.
And one doesn't want tosound too pious about it.
It's a wonderful job being a historian.

(30:00):
It's great fun and everything, but thereis a moral aspect to it all, I think.

I think also every historian, whether they're overt about it,
assumes that human nature staysconstant across time and space.
And it's sort of the tragic viewof history versus the therapeutic.
In other words, in our modern age, webelieve if you give people enough power,
enough technology, enough improvement inthe material conditions, they can alter,
make a new man like the Soviet Union.

(30:27):
And therefore, history is not necessarybecause the new man reacts so
differently from the past manthat it would be useless.
But we go back, I think all historiansgo back to the seminal text of
Thucydides when he says this historywill be of value in time to come.
Not that the wars will be the same, buthuman nature is unchanging, and the same

(30:48):
principles and the same ideas and agendaswill reappear in different contexts.
And that, I think, is what allhistorians believe, that human nature,
even though it's technology and wealth andall different types of environments and
landscapes change.
And it's almost unrecognizable, that we'restill the same people as the Greeks or
the Romans, andour appetites are what drives us.

(31:10):
And so if you can capture a war ofthe past or a diplomatic crisis or
a presidency or what Andrew does,a great biography, then that is gonna be.
We don't say that we're gonnabe didactic or utilitarian, but
that's an implicit idea, that we're gonnahelp people understand the present by
elucidating the past becausewe're the same people.

(31:32):
Okay, Niall, you're developingthis concept of applied history,
so it cannot be the case.
I think that Cold War history can beapplied in some one-to-one mechanical
way to this new Cold War that seemsto be taking shape with China.
Just explain how tight is thisconcept of applied history.

(31:56):
It seems to me you haveto be a professional,
it implies Applies an enormous amountof reading to develop the judgment,
almost the taste to say what appliesfrom the past to the present and
what the proper lessons are to be drawn.

Yes, but what else do we have to go on?
There isn't a wonderful politicalscientific model that will tell you
how great power conflicts will turnout if you just feed in enough data.
Those don't work, sowhat we've got to go on is history.
That is the only thing we really can workwith when we're trying to understand

(32:35):
a problem like the currentUnited States China relationship.
I've argued for the last six yearsthat it's like a Second Cold War.
That's not to say it's the sameas the First Cold War, but
World War II wasn'tthe same as World War I.
The nomenclature still made sense becausethey're recognizably similar phenomena.
And I use the term applied history todistinguish it from the study of history,

(32:56):
which is really antiquarian.
That studies of the pastbecause it's interesting,
because it's simply absorbing.
There are plenty of academics who wouldtell you there's no other reason for
studying the past other thanits intrinsic interest.

Which it does possess.

Sure, but I think that's actually too easy.
What we're really engaged in is tryingto learn from that past experience.
I really agree withsomething Victor just said,
it's amazing that we can understandthe people of Thucydides time.

I agree. >> Niall Ferguson
amazing that we can understandShakespeare's characters.
There are certain things that donot change over the millennia,
love, the ambition that leads to power.
These things are constant, sowe can understand the ancients,
we can understand the peopleof the Renaissance.
But what does change is technology, whatdoes change is our scientific knowledge.

(33:43):
There were no nuclear weaponsin the time of Thucydides.
And the historian's task is thereforeto solve simultaneously for
that which is perennial in humannature that we must only and
can only understand by looking atthe experiences of the past and
that which is novel, that whichdistinguishes our age from the past.
And applied history is that juxtaposition.

(34:04):
The great Oxford philosopher of history,R.G. Collingwood, said that what
history consists of is the reconstructionor reconstitution of past thought and
then its juxtaposition against the thoughtof our time to illuminate our time.
That seems to me the essenceof applied history.

I can give you a real example in the real illustration,
in the real-world of what Nailljust said we've been discussing.
When I was six years old,I live on a farm.
And my grandfather said,someday you're gonna run this farm,
you have to take care of it and keep it.
And I said, I don't know anythingabout farming, I was 6 or 7.
So he took me out to electric pump, turnedit on, it was 1500 gallons a minute.

(34:48):
And he said,someday it will be even better.
So then we went back and
he had the original pump thathis grandfather had did.

Wow. >> Victor Davis Hanson
a minute.
Wow.

And I said, see?
And then he said, taste the water.
Does it taste any different than the pumpthat you tasted 10 minutes ago that was
1500 gallons than the wateryou're pumping at 3 gallons?
And his point was that water iswater forever, like human nature.
But the delivery system,the technology changes so
radically that people get fooled.
And so, he was trying to tellme farming is pretty simple,

(35:21):
I'm not quoting Michael Bloomberg,you just drop a thing in.
But he said it's basically cultivation,irrigation, thinning,
harvesting, and you can master that.
The technology confuses you,but the water stays the same,,
it's the same essence, andthat's what human nature is.
It just manifests itself different inthese conditions that confuse us into

(35:43):
thinking that human nature has changedbecause of the Internet or TikTok or
something.
It hasn't.

I have bad news for you.
These gentlemen, all three of you,
have mounted a stirring defenseof the way you spend your lives.
And yet we began the program,all three saying,
the writing of history has deteriorated.
And I would also argue this isdifficult to get at statistically.

(36:11):
But the writing of the kinds ofhistories that the three of you write,
which is to say narrative historiesthat are accessible to ordinary readers.
Narrative histories you'retelling stories for
ordinary readers are becoming orhave become in
recent decades,very unusual in the academy.

(36:35):
So, I mean, I was trying to get at this,trying to come up with some statistics,
extremely difficult to do.
But I looked at history books thatI considered really useful, good,
well written history books overthe last couple of years on Amazon, and
three quarters were written byhistorians outside the university.
So here we have these acrossAmerican University in Britain as well,

(36:59):
I confess, I'm less aware ofthe situation in Britain.
But we have these people on whom resourceshave been lavished across their careers,
highly trained.
And they're sitting around writingmonographs for each other instead
of telling big, important stories fortheir fellow citizens.

(37:20):
Is that correct?
And why?

Because people over specialize in the academy and
it's better for their careers to do so.
They're going to take lessrisks if they write about,
I don't know, turnpikes in Hampshirein the turn of the 17th century
than if they're talking about the rise andfall of great powers.

(37:44):
And it's all very risk averse.
They don't care at all,of course, about sales,
about actually having the people outsidethe academy read what they're writing.
In fact, if anything, it can be bad foryour career to be popular as an historian.
And instead you shouldjust get into smaller and

(38:05):
smaller ecosystems andnot care at all about the public.

I don't think that's terribly new though, I mean,
Gibbon->> Peter Robinson: You do not?
Gibbon didn't write the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire asa fellow of an Oxford college.
He described his time at Oxford asthe most profitless of his life.
And so, there's a long traditionof universities killing
the vitality of history, and the besthistorians in fact addressing the public.

Weren't there Blake?

Robert Blake was, of course, an Oxford don.
And there was a generation inthe mid 20th century of Oxford and
Cambridge historians who wrote brilliantlywhile holding down academic jobs.
But I think that's->> Peter Robinson: That
was rather unusual.
I mean, the professionalization of history in the 19th
century, which was rathera German led phenomenon,
produced some wonderfullyunreadable turgid stuff.

(38:52):
I mean, I think, history has always beenin some tension in the sense that it
wants to be an academic discipline andtherefore to use arcane language.
One sees that all the time in the academy,the adoption of unintelligible vocabulary.
But there's also a historythat needs the public,
that needs a wider readership andthat tends to produce the better books.

(39:14):
I don't think that's new.

That's new.

I think that people they're not arguing you shouldn't
have the academic training tounderstand source material or
where sources come from orto evaluate comparative sources.
But to be frank, the academic world isnot one of rich practical experiences.
Probably, the best historythat's ever written of Greece
was written by George Grotto,a British banker, London banker.

(39:38):
And that expertise of dealingwith loans and defaults and
banking was invaluable when he lookedat the finance of the Athenian empire.
And what happens, I think Andrew reallyhit it on the head about risk averse.
You get, we're now into the secondcentury of this Germanic PhD program and
publication to get tenure.
So, So you get narrower and narrower andnarrower and then you get safer and

(40:01):
safer because youare the expert on a narrower.
You spin your life and you don't spin.

No one can refute you.

You have no breath.
It's just more and more depth andyou can't be refuted and then more.
I think it's really sad that you usea type of vocabulary and grammar and
syntax that is almostlike a foreign language.
It's a cult.
You're part of a cloister,
a high priesthood that the generalpublic can understand.
But within this cloister, if youmaster the diction of the vocabulary,

(40:30):
then you're considered somehow to behonored or you're a guardian of history.
And these people are oblivious becausethey don't go out in the general public
enough or have to be refuted oras Andrew said, Niall,
they don't depend on book sales fora livelihood.
And the result is that they definethemselves out of business.
They're all failing.

(40:51):
The history departments are collapsing.
And the reason that history is survivingare people who may have had PhDs that
were valuable or masters, butthey did learn the craft.
But they had to survive by enlighteningmore people than just this
cloister with a vocabulary anda syntax and a style that average people,

(41:11):
normal people, could read andunderstand and appreciate.

The historical errors we discussed.
16,19 project, the United States wasfundamentally racist from its founding.
Darryl Cooper Churchill, not Hitler,was responsible for the war in Europe.
Max Boot and William Appelman Williamsthe United States started the Cold War and
the Soviets ended.
Where does all this selfloathing come from?

(41:36):
Isn't that the through line here?

I think one of the distinguishing features
of the English speaking worldhas been self criticism.
And consistently think back to thecriticism of the East India Company and
of British rule in the Americas bythe great Whigs in the late 18th century.
Consistently the people of the Englishspeaking world have been critical of

(42:03):
themselves.
Now at times that habitbecomes a pathology.
And I think the hatred of America, that'sa characteristic feature of the left
in the United States today, likethe hatred of Britain that you encounter
in the UK is no longera healthy self criticism.
It's a destructive, nihilistic desireto reject all the legacy of the past.

(42:26):
And that's the distinctionthat I think we need to draw.
It's right that we should look backcritically on those that we study.
I wrote a history of the British Empirewhich included its many blemishes as well
as its achievements.
But these days you're not allowedto consider the achievements,
you can only write about the evils.
Nigel Biggar,an eminent Oxford theologian,

(42:49):
was more or less cancelled forpublishing a book that argued that there,
in fact,were moral aspects to the British Empire.
So we can be critical.
I think that's part ofthe historian's function.
But we can't be completelynihilistic about the past.
I think part of what's striking aboutthe young generation and the generation of

(43:09):
radical leftist professors today isthat they actually hate the past.
They regard the past as reallya distillation of all that is racist and
sexist and transphobic and Islamophobic.
Why is that?
Because they take a completelyanachronistic approach to the study of
the past.
They study the past and ask the questionwhy are these people in the past so

(43:30):
benighted?
Why are they not woke?
Why haven't they come tosee the world the way I,
a progressive on the Stanfordcampus in 2024 see the world?
This is completely the wrong approach.
We studied the past trying tounderstand what it was like
to be a man of the 1770s or, forthat matter, of the 1st century AD.

(43:54):
And that's the thing that's been lostin many modern history departments,
this sense that one must studythe past in its own terms rather than
judge it by our 2020s terms.
I'm not certain that it's cuttingthrough to every part of the country.

In Britain at least it's very much seen as a sort of elitist
thing to hate Britain actuallywhen you look at ordinary British
people they don't.
And so you can appeal to patriotism.
Put politicians do it all the time andit still works.
You still have more and more peoplego to visit Chartwell for example.

Is that so?

Yes, and it's seen as very much an elitist thing.
If you go to Oxford or Cambridge,
you're going to be taught allthis anti-British stuff and
I don't think it's cuttingthrough to everyone.
Now, having said that->> Peter Robinson: Are in the past?
There has been.

(44:55):
One hopes so.

Is itself corrected?

I'm not sure about that but
there has been a bit ofa drop in patriotism.
They've done a recent survey saying howmany people are still proud to be British?
It's well over two-thirdsof people who are but
it was higher in the near 20 years ago sothere is an aspect of it but

(45:18):
when you look at where it'scoming from it always seems to
come from the top andnot the bottom of society.

I'd say that the university by its structure was always
utopian because you take a group of peopleand you're the only profession really
in America where, after six years, yougive them lifetime employment with tenure.
And then you give them summers off and
a ten-hour teaching loadis considered onerous.
So that creates a sense of utopianism.

(45:49):
You're sheltered from economic downturn,or job losses or being fired.
But in the 60s, nevertheless,that system did create
a classical liberal tolerance andalmost it was inductive.
But during the Vietnam War andthe protest in this country, and
maybe in the west in general, they grewtheir sense in the cultural evolution

(46:12):
that it was determined that the family,that religion,
that the community,that the government were all prejudiced.
They were all brainwashing peopleinto this right wing, patriotic.
And only the university was an at all.
And so we decided in the university thatwe didn't have to be inductive anymore.
We could be deductive, we could beprejudicial, we could be biased

(46:35):
because we were surrounded by theseother majority points of view and
we would be the counterpoint.
And so it was an insulated arrogancethat we were going to teach
people from a deductive premise.
If you take a class andsay climate change,
you were going to just tell everybody thatclimate change is only one view of it,

(46:57):
and same thing with slavery andwho started that?
Not mention the Arab world for example.
But all of these topics would be taughtin the sense that we were speaking truth
to power.
And if we have to be deductive,it's only because we're so outnumbered.
But the problem was that,as they were saying that in time and
distance from an idea inthe faculty lounge until it was

(47:20):
institutionalized in popularculture was very quick [LAUGH].
So some of all of the pathologiesthat we're seeing today,
in my view, whether it's we get intothe third sex, or biological men and
women's sports, or some of ourforeign policy ideas, they originally
started in the university as utopian,idealistic, but non proven theories.

(47:44):
But this institution has become sopowerful, the university, and
it really affects the bureaucracies andpolitics.
And you can see it today when people say51 experts intelligence, say this lap.
Or 16 Nobel Prize winners.
But we never say, well,maybe a person who runs a 7-Eleven and

(48:05):
has to balance the books and inventory andsecurity might know more about
economics than a guy ina university that's secluded.
But we don't.
So the university now is notthe antithesis to the government,
it is the conventionality,it is the status quo.

(48:25):
The university's ideas not amongthe people, Andrew's right, but
I mean the popular culture,Hollywood, K-12 academic,
the foundations, they all mimic andecho the university's idea.

I think social media has sped this up enormously, the kind of-

The transmission belt.

The transmission belt, the memes that can go out and
go viral, even thoughintellectually they have nothing
to back them up apart from a joke orsort of play on words.
That is something that we didn't haveto deal with in the immediate postwar
period or any time up till 2000, andthat's had a deleterious effect, I think.

Gentlemen, last question for conversation.
Not that you need to answerthis one in one word, but
give me a moment to set this up becauseit's a question of applied history,
at least as I understand applied history.
And the question is,simply put, where do we stand,
how do we locate ourselvesin history right now?
All right, another way of puttingit is how do we go from Reagan and

(49:33):
Thatcher to Biden andStarmer without supposing that that
indicates an irreversibledecline of some kind?
Listen to a few statistics andthen a couple of quotations.
Here are the statistics.
Federal debt in this country underReagan 30% of GDP, today 120% of GDP.
Reagan 600-ship Navy is now down to 219,

(49:55):
which gives us a smallernavy than that of China.
Raphael Cohen of RAND writing last year,
for years American defense strategyargued for a two-war construct.
This is the argument that our forcesshould be arrayed such as to be able to
fight two major conflicts intwo separate theaters at once.
Over the last decade, though, asAmerica's military shrank in size and its

(50:15):
adversaries grew increasingly capable, theUnited States backed off such aspirations.
It seems to be now the idea that weought to be able to fight about 1.5,
one major conflict in one theater anda holding action in a separate theater.
However, Ukraine and the Baltic,the Middle East and the Eastern Med,
Taiwan and the Pacific, that's three andthey're all extremely dangerous.

(50:38):
I think you'd agree?

Yes, well, it wouldn't be the first time that a great power had
won a war as the United Stateswon the Cold War and
then lapsed into a kind of complacency.
The peace dividend, the idea thatthe end of history had arrived,
that there could be globalization andeverybody would be a winner.
These ideas in the 1990s and the 2000swere intoxicating, and they created

(51:05):
a political consensus within the elitethat endured right down until about 2016.
And I think it was only really thenthat the backlash against that
post-Cold War era happened.
It's taken time to realizethat we're now in as dangerous
a situation as we were in the 50s and 60s.

(51:26):
But we now face in China an adversarythat is in many ways economically and
technologically superiorto the Soviet Union.
And China has formed a kind of axiswith the Russians, the Iranians, and
the North Koreans that may pose as biga threat as the Axis of the later 1930s.
So, best case,it's a Cold War, worst case,

(51:46):
we're on a path to World War III,that's how I think about it.

So, to me, I could be wrong about this, and of course,
you should disagree with the premise,I'm gonna put one last question.
To me, the deep question, the sortof substrate question of the current
election is whether we're doomed orwhether empires do end,
all human constructs do come to an end.
And yet in the West, we often seerenewals, sudden renewals, sometimes,

(52:12):
renewals that nobody could have expected.
The 1970s seemed dire in this country,and then in the 1980s, we have a renewal.
Two quotations, and then I'd just likeyour own sense of where we stand and
how you think about it as a historian.
Here's one, Malcolm Muggeridge,the late British journalist,
he's writing in 1980 afterthe bleak decade of the 70s.

(52:33):
I am personally convinced that our Westerncivilization is approaching its end.
I think of St. Augustine when in AD 410,the news was brought to him in
Carthage that Rome had beensacked by the barbarians.
As he explained to his flock,all earthly cities are vulnerable.
Men build them and men destroy them.

(52:55):
William F Buckley, Jr, at what seemedanother low moment in the Cold War,
this is 1960,another dangerous moment in the Cold War.
Khrushchev cannot takepermanent advantage of our
temporary disadvantage, forit is the West he is fighting.
And in the West there lie,however encysted,

(53:16):
the ultimate resources,which are moral in nature.
We take heart in the knowledge that itcannot matter how deep we fall, for
there is always hope.
In the end, we will bury him.
Doom or some sense of renewal?

Niall mentioned critical self criticism,
we have a critical consciousness,it goes back to the Greeks,
that we are able to pick apart.
Sometimes, as Niall said,it gets pathological and self-destructive.
But it does give you the opportunity to,in a disinterested and
empirical fashion, see what's wrong withyour society and count on the goodwill and
intelligence of people.

(53:56):
In 1939, the American army wassmaller than Portugal's and
by 1945 we were creating more GDP than allof the belligerents in the war combined.
That was just five years,they said it was impossible.
If you would, and
there's no greater pessimist thanI am about where we are right now.

(54:19):
But it seems to me if I had said oryou had said or anybody at this table,
three years from now,let's say in 2021, the United States,
albeit via Elon Musk,is gonna launch a rocket.
It is the most powerful rocketin the history of the world.

Stunning. >> Victor Davis Hanson
come back anda mechanical arm is gonna catch it, and
on the first try people would say,that's impossible.
And you mentioned this election.
I think the election's boiling down toone side is used to lecturing people
about the shame they should feel andthat you were flawed at the beginning,

(54:58):
you got worse during your maturity andnow you're completely pathological,
versus the other side, that's optimistic.
And they basically have something alongthe lines of we don't have to be perfect
to be good, we're better thanthe alternative and that's good enough.
And that's good enough.
And that's good enough.

And we are self-correcting and
we're going to enter anothercycle of improvement.
And you can make fun ofMake America Great, but
that was borrowed from Ronald Reagan,and he did do it.

So you position yourself, Victor,
in the pessimistic wingof the optimistic party.
[LAUGH] Enter doom orsome possibility of renewal?

No, there are always some good things to look out for.
The fact that we're democracies andthat we are innovative obviously
sets us in a much better positionthan these totalitarian powers.

Even China, even with its 1.4 billion people?

Yes, absolutely, but
Because of the free exchange of ideasin the west actually works better.
Capitalism works better thanthe National Socialist China.
What Niall's absolutely right about withthe concept of the axis of ill will.
But actually overall,in the future people now already they

(56:18):
do prefer the concept of democracythan being pushed around and
bossed around and spied on and so on.
And when one looks at the, the axisof ill will, yes, there are four or
five of them if you include Belarus andValenzuela and so on.
But actually look at all the countriesthat cleave towards America that much

(56:41):
prefer America,that want to be friendly with America.
And that is because America is an open andgreat and
democratic society which hasgot a belief in the future.
So I am optimistic we can get overthis one, but we do need leadership.
Sometimes America can go withoutleadership, you didn't have a great

(57:02):
leader, frankly, from the assassinationof Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt.
And that's what, 40 plus years when youbecame the richest power in the world.
So maybe you don't need leaders,but when they come along,
people like Margaret Thatcher andRonald Reagan, who as we mentioned,
Winston Churchill, of course, in 1940.

(57:22):
Then we've got to grab them andhang on to them.

Last word, Niall.

I wrote a book called Doom.

You did.

The Politics of Catastrophe.
But the point of that bookwas that we're not doomed,
we're very attracted to the idea thateverything is going to hell in a handcart,
the world's gonna end in 12 years orwhatever it is.
That's actually not the problem,the problem is just that we have to
manage disasters, andmost of them are to some extent man made.
Think of COVID which of course turned outto originate in a laboratory in Wuhan,

(57:50):
within a totalitarian state.
I don't think there's a cycle of history,I don't think there's an arc of history,
I don't think there's a law that saysthe United States was bound to rise,
reach its zenith and now it's declining.
I don't think there's anythingin history to support that.
Actually, empires have ups and downs,they can last a thousand years,
they last just a few years,think of how short lived Hitler's wars.

(58:11):
American power is more resilientthan its critics understand,
you remember the 70s, so do I.
And we also remember how in the 1980sthe United States bounced back in
a spectacular way.
And it's actually inthe midst of bouncing back,
despite the ineptitude of its leaders,despite the poor quality of governance,

(58:32):
not only in Washington,but also in Sacramento.
Look at the incredible strides theAmerican economy just keeps making despite
the incompetence of its political class,and that's the thing.
The business of America, as one oncewas famously said, is business, and
that is the superpower.
And as long as we're attractingthe entrepreneurs, and

(58:53):
Elon Musk is only one of many fromthe rest of the world to come here and
do what they can only do here,there's really no stopping this country.

Sir Niall Ferguson, Dr.
Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew,Lord Roberts of Belgravia.
Gentlemen, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Peter.

For uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation,
I'm Peter Robinson.
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