3 Takeaways - It’s Time We Take A Good, Hard Look At War (#200)

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

As war rages in Ukraine and Gaza, these questions are being asked: Are wars inevitable? Where will the next major conflict break out? Are the U.S. and China headed for war? Are women leaders less warlike than men? Can wars be avoided? Listen, as Margaret MacMillan, one of the world’s leading war historians, provides answers. Don’t miss this one.

We tend to avert our eyes from war because it's so destructive and so barbaric. And we think of war as an aberration. But war is not an aberration. It's peace that actually is the aberration. There's been not a single year since 1945 in which there has not been fighting in one part of the world or another. And depending on how you count them, there have been between 150 and 300 armed conflicts since 1945. There are currently wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, and there are other countries such as Taiwan,

which are threatened by powerful neighbors. What's changed is not the ongoing presence of war, but terrifying new weapons such as nuclear bombs, bioweapons, killer robots, and automated killing machines, and soon artificial intelligence. Since war is very much still with us, and we now have weapons that can end humanity, it is not the time, our guest today says, to avert our eyes from war because we find it abhorrent. We must, more than ever, think about war and try to understand it. Is war inevitable, and how can we better avoid or mitigate it? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways.

On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today's guest is Margaret MacMillan. She was head of St. Anthony's College at Oxford University and is an emeritus professor at both Oxford and the University of Toronto. She is one of the world's most eminent war historians and the author of a series of books on war. She is interested in why people make decisions for war or peace, whether wars turn out as expected, and how wars have successfully been ended and peaceful societies created. Welcome, Margaret, and thanks so much for

joining Three Takeaways today. Thank you for having me and thank you for that nice and rather gloomy introduction. Thank you for taking the time. I will come back to whether I'm wrong to be gloomy further into our discussion. Are wars predictable? Do past predictions of war offer a history of leaders getting it right or wrong? Well, we've seen wars in the past where people have been expecting them. And sometimes that expectation actually makes them more likely. If you think a war is likely, you have crossed a psychological barrier in your mind. And you have perhaps accepted that a war is going to break out. Before the First World War in Europe, there was a lot of talk about how the storm clouds were

gathering, about how the tensions were rising. And when war broke out, in fact, a number of people said it's rather like a thunderstorm finally happening. We've been waiting for it. And now there's almost a relief that it's happened. And so while I don't think wars are predictable, I think they can be expected. And we can see signs in the past which have tended to lead to wars. If you get rivalries, national or economic, or for colonies between two great powers led by people who don't want to back down, then you're more likely to get war. If you get powers trying to assert themselves in the same space, often parts of the world can be very dangerous because you get two great powers whose interests clash and overlap. And so while I don't think history can ever be

useful in accurate predictions, it can give us warnings that the situation is getting a bit difficult. So all the talk about potential war between China and the US you think is harmful because it could make it easier for an actual war to start? I think it's the ways in which you begin to think. And I was struck, I sometimes go to Washington and do a seminar with mid-career military people, which is very interesting for me because I learn a lot from them. And I was struck in one of these seminars when one of them said, when we fight China, not if. And I think from what I've heard, that is a fairly common view in both Beijing and Washington, that sooner or later there's going to be some sort of conflict between the two powers.

Now, I think a lot of people, including me, hope that that will never happen. But I think it makes for more likely if you begin to think that another side is going to be your enemy, and then you begin to project onto them or read in what they do, that other side, things that look menacing. You begin to interpret everything in terms of the scenario you've developed. That is scary. Are wars started by individual leaders or by aggressive warlike societies? And has that changed over history? I think it's both. Quite often you've had powers where a single person or a single group of people has had great influence and great decision-making capacity. I mean, the medieval states in Europe or the dynasties in China were groups of people who had tremendous power to decide on war

or peace. But always, I think, they have to take into account if those who are actually expected to do the fighting are going to do it. And so those who are in charge of countries, even if they have great power, who cannot be sure that their people will fight, I think are less likely to go to war than those who think they can take their people in with them. And sometimes, yes, you do get what are warlike societies where fighting is seen as a noble profession, particularly for those in the upper classes, in the elites in that society. You think of ancient Sparta, where the free Spartans, not their slaves, not the helots, but the free Spartans were expected, the men were expected to fight, train, be prepared to die. And I think you do get societies in which such militaristic values are very dominant. And that perhaps makes it easier for leaders who would like to go to war

to take those societies to war. And how about in recent history, have wars been started more by individual leaders or aggressive warlike societies? It's usually a combination. I mean, it doesn't even have to be an aggressive warlike society, but a society which, for example, is very nationalistic and which feels that perhaps a neighbor is not sympathetic to it or is a different sort of people. I mean, I think nationalism can be a very powerful motivating force. If you think we are one people and those on the other side of the border are another people, the danger is you will begin to think that your interests are not shared. And so you've got, say, between France and Germany before the First World War, eminent people, professors like me, unfortunately, talking about

how the French and the Germans were each other's hereditary enemies. And when you think of hereditary enemies, then you don't see any possibility of reconciliation, do you? No, you really don't. It comes back to your comment about if we believe the other country or people is belligerent or a threat, that we will frame it and see every action that way. Yeah. And I think that is happening. I mean, you know, it doesn't happen everywhere. And societies change. Let's remember that. I mean, Sweden used to be a very warlike society. And now it is, I think, widely regarded as a peaceful society dedicated to the cause

of peace. But I do think you get societies in which it's a feeling, sometimes it's fear. It's a feeling that we have enemies we're going to have to fight before they fight us. And I think that can make countries more likely to go to war or groups of people more likely to go to war. It's well known that the U.S. lacked clear goals after toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Is it more common than one would imagine for countries to have given little thought to what happens after a war? I think it is quite common. I think you're so focused or the leaders of the country can be so focused on a war,

they're focused on winning it. And if it's a bitter and desperate and long drawn out struggle, of course, they're going to have to concentrate on how to avoid defeat or how to achieve victory or how just to end the war. And so often they don't spend enough time or very much time at all in thinking about what happens next. During the First World War, I think the leaders on both sides really did not give much attention to what was going to happen when the war finally ended. And when it did end, pretty much sooner than anyone expected. I mean,

most people on both sides thought it would go on and It ended in 1918. They thought it would go on into 1919, possibly even 1920. Case of the war, Second World War in the Pacific, the Americans who were doing the branch of the fighting there thought that it would probably go on until 1946 or possibly later when, in fact, it ended in 1945. And so often wars will end unexpectedly on the one side or the other collapses. And then suddenly the very people who've been focused on the making the war have to think about making peace. Sometimes they prepared a bit, but often they haven't.

There have often, unfortunately, been atrocities in war, such as the wounded knee slaughter of Native Americans by U.S. soldiers, the Malay massacre by American soldiers in Vietnam, atrocities by Germans under Hitler, and the sacking of Nanjing, China by the Japanese. When does war tip over into atrocities? It's a very delicate balance in war because, and it's a dilemma, I think, that all military face, and particularly soldiers on the ground, what you're doing is training them to apply violence, if necessary, to inflict death and wounds on those on the other side. But what you want to do is have them do it in a controlled way. And I think it often happens, and we can understand why it happens. It's not forgivable. We can understand why it happens that that

controlled violence tips over into something else, that those who've been trained to kill simply run out of control. In some cases, they're encouraged by their own officers. I mean, it seems to me quite clear that the Russian officers have been encouraging, or at least not stopping their soldiers from carrying out atrocities in Ukraine, such as were carried out at Bukha. And such atrocities against civilians are often used as a way of intimidating and bringing them under control. I think in the case of my lie, everything I've read about it was that you had a group of soldiers who were not well disciplined under an inexperienced officer who simply ran out of control. And there was no one there. There were a couple of people who tried to stop them. There was a very brave helicopter pilot who tried to stop them, but their own authorities were not trying to stop them.

And it is perennially a problem in war. And I think, yes, sometimes it's encouraged by the authorities. The Germans treated the Russians in the Second World War and the Ukrainians in the Second World War as subhuman. And so what you did to things, they thought things, they thought they didn't think they were people, they thought they were beings who were subhuman. It was forgivable. I mean, you look at the language, the language dehumanized them. They called them vermin, they called them diseases, they called them plagues. And I'm afraid this is all very much a part of war. What does history tell us about attacking civilians as part of war? Generally, there have been attempts made to stop that. It's been regarded as often going

beyond the bounds of what is permissible in war. There've been many attempts down through the centuries to try and spare civilians, partly out of self-interest. In the feudal wars in Europe, in the Middle Ages, you didn't go around killing each other's peasant farmers because someone would kill yours and then you'd all be in trouble and wouldn't be able to get the food that you needed. And so there have been various attempts made to protect civilians from wars for whatever motives. And so there've always been attempts made to protect civilians, not very successfully. And civilians have often borne a very, very hard penalty for being involved in war, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How about bombing of civilians to disrupt enemy war efforts and weaken the will to fight? Bombing of housing and city centers?

Well, that has become part of warfare, and it's partly because of the nature of war itself. With the advent of modern war, with these complicated modern societies capable of assembling very large armies, very large navies, and then eventually very large air forces. It became not just important, but it became essential to keep the supplies coming. And so it could be argued and was that those in the factories working for the supplies, those making sure that they got to the right railways or got into the right trucks and got onto the right ships were as an important part of the war effort as those actually doing the fighting. And so what became permissible in attacking civilians widened a lot thanks to modern technology and the modern nature of war. And it became permissible to kill women and children because doing that, you'd break the will and the morale of the enemy you were fighting.

Do you think the world would be as warlike if women were in charge? Yes, I do think it would be as warlike. I think there is this belief, and it's very nice that we are natural peacemakers, that we're the nurturers, we're not the warriors. I don't think that actually is borne out by history. Women have fought in the past, but as importantly, they have encouraged men to fight and they've pushed often towards war. In publics age, well, Margaret Thatcher, who took Britain to war against Argentina. Golda Meir, who fought her Arab neighbors in Dirigandi. I don't think the record shows that women are any less warlike than men when it comes to, they just had less opportunities to do it. So interesting. How manageable or controllable is war once it starts?

That's the problem. I mean, we like to think we can control it, and we have tried, and we've built up a huge body of international law and ethical restraints and conventions and norms about how we fight wars. I mean, they're meant to be, what, Geneva Conventions about how you treat civilians, Geneva Conventions and Hague Conventions about the sorts of weapons you can use, about the sort of targets you can hit, and conventions about how you treat prisoners of war. But once a war starts, the primary goal is to win or avoid defeat. And it's very hard, I think, in many cases to avoid breaking some of those boundaries. Some countries have managed to keep to them more successfully than others. The United States, I think, has been quite open about some of the things that have gone very wrong in its wars. And there have been trials of American soldiers for what happened in some of

these dreadful episodes in Vietnam and also at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. It is possible for countries, if they have the will to turn, obey the rules of war, but it doesn't always happen. Could recent wars have been avoided or mitigated? And if so, how? I think sometimes wars start by accident. I think the First World War could have been avoided. I think people on both sides didn't particularly, a lot of people didn't want it to happen. But there was the accident of the Archduke, the heir to the Austrian throne, getting himself assassinated in Sarajevo. It gave Austria the excuse it wanted to try and crush Serbia, Germany, for its own reasons, didn't stop Austria, which it could have done. And so sometimes things just happen and people reach a point where they say there's not much we can do.

Sometimes you get those in command or groups of people who really want the war. I think it probably would have been impossible to stop Hitler going to war. He regarded it as a highly honorable activity, an activity which would bring the German people to their peak. He was really disappointed, apparently, when he got a large part of Czechoslovakia through peaceful negotiations. He was furious. He had wanted war, and he got the war about a year later.

So yes, wars can be stopped, but you have to have people on both sides who are prepared to make the compromises necessary. How do you see the Russia-Ukraine war? Well, in many ways, it is an act of unprovoked aggression. There is absolutely no excuse, no justification for it on the part of the Russian side, in spite of the increasingly improbable excuses that President Putin seems to give. And I read his essay, which he wrote before the war, in which he claimed that the Ukrainians and Russians were one people and always had been. It's a very bad essay, and it, of course, makes no justification for what's happened.

It's been a real shock to Europe. It's the first major war in European soil since 1945, although there was the breakup of Yugoslavia. But this is a real shock. It's the first major war in European soil since 1945, although there was the breakup of Yugoslavia. But this is a real shock. It's also a shock to the Western alliance. Will we hang together and resist Russian aggression? If Russia gets away with this, what will its next steps be? It's very, you know, there are lots of really worrying questions. The one that I'm thinking about a lot at the moment is how will it end? And it is not clear how it will end. You know, there are a number of possibilities. It is possible that there will be a clear military decision that Russia may win,

Ukraine may lose. It's possible indeed. It is still possible that Ukraine will manage to hold the Russians off and the Russians will eventually decide it's not worth the cost that they're paying. It's very hard to see it ending with any sort of compromise. I don't think Russia is willing to compromise at the moment and they're not making any signs that they are. And very hard to see it ending with any sort of compromise. I don't think Russia is willing to compromise at the moment. They're not making any signs that they are. And very hard for Ukraine to accept the loss of a great deal of its territory and the terrible damage done to its infrastructure and its society and the deaths of its people. And the other possibility, I suppose, that there'll be a frozen conflict, as we have

in Korea, which means that nothing is settled and the possibility of war breaking out again will always be there. How do you see the Gaza war? Well, I see it as a tragedy. The people of Gaza who have been under Hamas rule, I don't think always willingly, nevertheless, were the home of Hamas and Hamas committed atrocities when it invaded Israel. So I think if you look at it in the very short-term context, the original cause for the war is what Hamas did. And I think the Hamas leadership knew perfectly well that they would get a reaction from Israel. How could they not know that? Israel has always responded to attacks on its soil. And this was a particularly dreadful one.

And the taking of hostages, of course, has kept that issue alive in the minds of, well, Israel will never forget it, but the taking of the hostages remains a constant reminder of just what Hamas has done. And I don't think Hamas cares at all about what happens to the people of Gaza. They've tyrannized over them ever since they won an election. They've never held another one. On the other hand, the punishment and the suffering of the people of Gaza is now beginning to see disproportionate and is now beginning to cause Israel real problems with its allies. When the United States government openly is critical of Israel, that is something that has not happened for a very long time indeed. The United States has

always been Israel's staunchest supporter. So it's a tragedy for both the people of Israel and the people of Gaza. I don't see any signs again that it's going to end. I don't know how it's going to end. My own feeling is that until there is a willingness to compromise on both sides, there is not going to be peace anytime soon in that very troubled part of the world. So where are we today? Are wars inevitable or are we any closer to a peaceful society and a peaceful world? I never want to say wars are inevitable because once we say that, we just throw up our hands and give up. And I don't think they are. I think it's human agency that does it. Human foolishness, human greed, human fear, whatever. I mean, whatever bundle of emotions.

And as we know, there are people who want war, who think that it's stimulating, they think it's good for societies, or simply because they think they can gain something from it without losing too much in return. It's a cost-benefit analysis. Putin, I think, thought he could take Ukraine easily, wouldn't cost him very much. Of course, once you're in, it's then much more difficult to get out. And so I think the possibility of war is present. And that's why I think we need to keep our eye on it. We need to think about it. I mean, there's been a trend in a lot of universities to move away from studying anything to do with war because it's seen as a somewhat

distasteful subject, which it is, but war itself is much more distasteful. To say we don't want to study it because we don't like it doesn't seem to me a very good argument at all. I mean, we study lots of things we don't like or approve of, and war is one of the things that we ought to know about. How can we avoid or mitigate wars and become a more peaceful world? We need some sort of world organization, which represents all parts of the world, which represents pretty much every country, good, bad, or indifferent, or whatever. You know, it is a place where they meet. I think we have to continue to try and build international laws, international norms, international institutions. I think that's absolutely

crucial because in the end, and I think we're realizing that and perhaps we need to realize it more, we live on a not very big planet, which is under threat. And if we're not careful, we'll blow the whole lot up or we'll simply allow climate change to happen. And none of that is going to be something that humanity wants. And so I think we have to remember that in fact, we're all in it together and we have to somehow get along with each other. And I think we're going to, you know, I think there is some realization of that, certainly with climate change and let us hope with the prospects of ever increasing violent war. Margaret, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? I think try and understand, as we do in our own lives, those we're dealing with,

just as it's important to understand our neighbors and understand those we work with, it's also important, not in members of our own families, it's very important for one group of people, a nation perhaps, to understand other nations. Try and understand that they have their own views and try and learn about them. I think knowing history is very important because it helps in that understanding. It helps to remind us that other people have other interests. We're not all exactly the same, but in some ways we can reach out, we can find common ground. And I think that is important.

And where history, I think, is important is that it can help us ask good questions. What if? If we do this or our leaders do this, what is likely to happen? And we don't have much evidence. We can't predict the future. And so the past is pretty much all we've got to try and figure out what is likely to happen if we follow a certain course of action. And I guess the final thing that I would perhaps take away, which is also tied up to history, is that we should have a certain amount of humility. We're not the smartest generation in the world. We don't know everything. Every generation has tended to think that. Think a bit of humility is always good when you're

dealing with yourself and the world. Margaret, thank you. Thank you for an enlightening conversation. I also learned so much from your book, War. Thank you very much. As I say, not a cheerful subject, but thank you for reading it. Thank you for your questions. Margaret Macmillan is the author of the book, War. If you're interested in war, you might also be interested in our two episodes

with General David Petraeus. That's episodes 128 and 129. And if you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. You can find our episodes grouped by category as well as our featured guests, such as General Petraeus on our website at 3takeaways.com, where you can also sign up for the 3 Takeaways newsletter so you don't miss new episodes. If you'd like, you can also follow us on LinkedIn,

Instagram, X, and Facebook. I'm Lynne Thoman and this is 3 Takeaways. Thanks for listening.