School of War - Niall Ferguson on Cold War II and the Rise of Anti-History

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Sir Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and columnist at The Free Press, joins the show in front of a live audience to discuss the perilous moment we find ourselves in and how it all relates to history. What is the status of the Iran war? What is influencing President Donald Trump’s policymaking? How do we defeat a dangerous wave of “anti-history”? And are we on the brink of a world war, a cold war, or something in between? 03:35 - Historical analogies for today 09:51 - Short war illusion 15:14 - We’re in a Cold War II 18:12 - Putin’s essay from 2021 19:50 - Russia-Ukraine war 25:29 - The American mythos of WWII 26:58 - Anti-history 30:04 - The life work of Bill Buckley 31:37 - Return of antisemitism and socialism 32:52 - President Trump’s worldview 36:37 - The war in Iran 47:45 - The new state of warfighting 53:53 - President Trump’s treatment of Ukraine 57:17 - Risks of Taiwan conflict 01:03:57 - Limits to air power 01:06:58 - Reversal of historical revisionism 01:12:30 - Story about Aaron’s father Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more at The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Earlier this week, we did a live School of War recording in New York City with the great Sir Neil Ferguson. We talked about a lot of things, the uses and abuses of history for strategic thinking, what historical analogies might actually apply to the current moment. We talked about what Ferguson calls the New Cold War with China, about the state of play, with Iran, and about anti-history, the assault on the story of the Second World War and what it means for the future of a moment. American politics. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Let's get into it. We'll never have to tell you about a great new podcast from the free press. It's called The Lindbergh conspiracies, hosted by Joe Nossera.

And the show covers one of the most famous and controversial crimes in American history, the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby. You probably know the basic story in 1932, the infant son of Charles Lindbergh disappeared from the family's home in New Jersey. The case became a national obsession. The press covered every detail. Millions of Americans followed every development. A suspect was arrested, convicted, and eventually executed.

But nearly a century later, many people still believe the official story doesn't fully add up. The series dives into the endless theories that have surrounded the case for decades, that the wrong man was convicted, that evidence was manipulated, that authorities rushed to close the case, and even the theory that Lindbergh himself may have known more than he ever admitted publicly. It's about how a society reacts to fear, uncertainty, celebrity, and media hysteria. It's about how conspiracy theories form, why people lose trust in institutions, and why certain mysteries never really disappear.

Check out the Lindbergh conspiracies from the free press wherever you get your podcasts. It was the crime of the century. A baby kidnapped and held for ransom. Then the child was inexplicably murdered and his body abandoned in a woodland. A man was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed. But did they get the wrong man? And did this botched case spark America's obsession with conspiracies? From me, Joe Nossera, creator of the podcast-turned-Apple-TV series The Shrink Next Door,

and the team behind Audible smash hit Agatha Christie and the Dandelion Poisoner. The Free Press presents the Lindberg Conspiracies. Oh, gosh. Good evening, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. This is really quite surreal for me because the School of War podcast really did begin in the stereotypical fashion where I bought a microphone off of Amazon and plugged it into my laptop in my basement five years ago as a hobby. And here we are now.

And so I'm grateful to the free press for bringing School of War on in the first place, but also for hosting this event. And we're going to have a great time tonight. The podcast, you know, it began as a military history podcast. and as a hobby where I would invite people who had written books recently that were interesting to me, and we'd talk about this or that episode from history. And then with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and then especially 10-7, started doing more and more work on current events and bouncing back and forth between history and contemporary strategy, always trying to keep some history in mind while talking about strategy.

And the show developed a bit of a mission orientation. and I would characterize the mission as something like, or at least its principles, as one, there's going to be a war. It's impossible to say when it's going to be or what the mechanism is that causes it. And I don't mean Operation Epic Fury. I mean, there's going to be something terrible because human history continues and human history tends to produce things like that. Two, the nature of war in certain respects is constant, but in other respects is changing rapidly. And not only the professional audience, we have a lot of military listeners, but the general,

public ought to have some understanding of what in war is remaining the same and what in war is changing. And three, all this occurs within a broader geopolitical context. And we want to understand that context and understand why wars start and what ultimately brings them to their conclusions and what the forces are sort of around and behind them that matter. And that last point, I think, sets the scene well for my conversation tonight with the great Neil Ferguson.

And I'm so grateful to you, sir, for making the time. to join us tonight. We're going to go for about, I'm looking at the clock now, about 50 minutes talking the two of us, and then we're going to open it up to the room. So please to be thinking about your own questions. We build this event as an Iran event, and we will get to Iran, I promise. But we're going to start bigger picture, sort of zoom into Iran, and we'll just see where the night takes us. And, Neil, I wanted to start us with this question of thinking about history or using history to think about current events.

You dabbled in applied history in your business at Greenmantle. More than double. Indeed. You are, and by dabble I mean you are the nation's leading practitioner. Sorry, I'll get it right. And there are so many, I want to ask you about the nature of thinking by way of historical analogy, but also sort of try to pin you down a bit about which analogies or which parts of which analogies apply, to today because you have the common ones of 1939.

You've written recently about 56 in Suez, which is a harrowing one to contemplate, and we can come back to that. I sometimes, when I'm in a slightly more optimistic mood, think of 1948 in the blockade of Berlin, and are we in sort of a late 40s period? But I'm going to start you with probably the most commonly invoked one, which is are we in the years leading up to World War I?

And I'm going to set the scene by reading a passage from Winston Churchill. This is from his history of the First World War, the World Crisis, which many probably know he has a history of the Second World War. There's history of the First World War, which, characteristically, this being by Winston Churchill, is about Winston Churchill. And the world crisis as seen through the eyes of Winston Churchill. And in the first volume of that book, he writes about the period leading up to the war in the perspective of the British political elite versus the British public. During the whole of those 10 years, this duality and discordance, were the keynote of British politics.

And those whose duty it was to watch over the safety of the country live simultaneously in two different worlds of thought. There was the actual visible world with its peaceful activities and cosmopolitan aims. And there was a hypothetical world, a world beneath the threshold, as it were, a world at one moment utterly fantastic at the next seeming about to leap into reality, a world of monstrous shadows moving in convulsive combinations,

through vistas of fathomless catastrophe. Vistas are fathomless catastrophe. That sounds better in the Churchill voice. What do you think? Is this a period similar to, say, 1911, 1912? Or help us think about how to think about these questions? Well, first of all, it's a great pleasure to be with you all this evening and to be with Aaron who's doing such a good job of reawakening public interest.

in military history. That's important because it was more or less abolished at university some time ago. In fact, most of the leading university's history departments, if you look at the course catalogs, offer no courses in military history, which is a lamentable failure, which will have consequences. So this is a great opportunity to take a step back and do the kind of toggling between past and present. that I've made my life's work. One of the very first things that I wrote about was the First World War, as the Brits call it. And I wrote about it because my grandfather fought in it.

And the first question I ever asked myself of an historical nature as a boy was, how on earth did my granddad at the age of 17 end up on the Western Front fighting the Germans. And he fought in that war for three years. His military record was destroyed in World War II, so we don't know the detail. But he must have seen some horrific sites. He was certainly shot during the German Spring Offensive of 1918, after which he was sent back for training. He was no longer fit for frontline duty. So my first question was, how did that happen? And I think the only way of answering that question is to look at the decision

makers of the summer of 1914 and how in their different ways the decision makers in the European capitals including London arrived at the conclusion that it would be better to go to

war than not to. Now Churchill wrote that book as an apologia pro suavita because he had been one of the decision makers And of all the members of the Liberal cabinet of Herbert Ascot, he was the most positive in favour of war. As first lord of the Admiralty, it was Churchill who was most eager to be involved in the First World War and to took the offensive action that probably brought the Ottoman Empire in on the side of the German and Austrian central powers.

So one has to read the book, bearing in mind that Churchill was one of the people whose decisions led my grandfather to spend close to three years in the most unimaginable conditions. And he was a private soldier. And the conditions in which a private soldier in one of the Highland regiments served are very, very hard for us to imagine. And I spent a good deal of my earlier career, try to convey. what that experience was like, because it so fascinated me, that millions of men on both sides in multiple fronts, young men, boys in some cases, had endured it. And it had endured this extraordinarily prolonged period of conflict.

So I think the argument of the book The Pity of War, which was published so long ago that it makes me shudder somewhat, 1998 was the decision makers were focused on erroneous cost-benefit analysis. They thought, for example, that the war would be short. Nearly all of the decision-makers thought it would be short. No one ever makes that mistake. Yeah. Right. So the short war illusion was a term I first learned from the historian James John.

Short war illusion, think about it. How many times of you personally succumbed to short war illusion, I have, I thought at the beginning of the war between the United States and Iran that it would be a short war. I said that on a free press podcast almost the day the war began. So short war illusion, they all thought the war would be short. It would be all over by Christmas. The only people who didn't think that were the German general staff,

who knew it would be a war of attrition because they were professionals. But the amateurs, who were the decision makers in most of the European capitals, thought it would be a short war. And they thought that it would be worse not to fight. Everybody thought it would be worse not to fight. The Germans thought it would be worse to wait because the Russians would rearm and become unassailable by 1916. So they had to have the war in 1914, while they could still, quote, more or less past the test. That was Maltke's phrase. and so it goes on from there.

Once they'd made that decision, everybody else had to decide, and everybody else decided it would be better to fight than not to fight. And the result was roughly 10 million deaths in or indirectly because of the fighting

and many more deaths in the subsequent influenza pandemic that was spread by the soldiers being shipped across the seas. So the great defining catastrophe that sets the 20th century on its course of mass murder. And it comes about because men like Churchill miscalculated, as most wars come about. So you very artfully dodged the question, Neil. I thought I answered it brilliant. You gave a brilliant answer.

Well, so the reason why I read that passage is because there are days when I feel, as somebody who thinks about these issues a lot, that I can very easily imagine complete human catastrophe emerging, for example, out of the Western Pacific very quickly, very quickly. And I feel as I walk the streets of Manhattan or even Washington, D.C., that most people are living in that other world. And so for me, that seems like the salience of the potential comparison. Well, let me give you an anecdote and then I'll give you the answer that you're right I didn't give you. It's early. I'm just warming up. In January, I was in Davos, in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum,

and I was in the Ukrainian pavilion. And the Ukrainians had done a fantastic video, kind of computer-generated, AI-generated video of Shahid attacks on Brussels, Paris and Davos itself. And I'll say I quite enjoyed watching Davos being destroyed by Shahid Drash. And I said, you know, to the Ukrainian people who'd done it, I said, A, this is brilliant, and B, it will convince nobody that this could happen to their city. Nobody. Because at this point, whether you're in Paris or in Dubai, you think this can only happen to Ukraine.

think it can only happen to Kyiv and Kharkiv. That's the kind of disconnect that you're talking about. And it's still the case that all over Europe, even now, even after what has happened in the Gulf, the average citizen cannot conceive of warfare happening to their city. And I find it especially amazing that Londoners can't imagine this, that they don't think it can happen to them and that British politics can be entirely preoccupied with the kind of Monty Python-esque game of musical chairs in which successive half-wits ticket and turn to be Prime Minister and I'm like you do realize you're actually easier to hit than in the 1940s so much easier than in the 1940s so there is this disconnect

I think you're right about that but I don't think it's 1914 or 1930s or 1911. And the reason I don't think that is nuclear weapons. I think there's a fundamental difference between the origins of World War I and the predicament that we're in today because with the advent of nuclear weapons, the cost-benefit analysis changes because any nuclear-arm powers have to think much harder about going to war than the men of 1914. who underestimated the scale of the conventional war that they were starting, but did not have to contemplate the utter annihilation of millions of people with relatively small numbers

of exchanges of fire. So I do think the analogies with 1914 and 1939 fall short. And I think those analogies should be used very sparingly anyway because they've been overused. In the end, once you enter the realm of nuclear weapons, everything changes and we enter the domain of Cold War. It was Orwell who used that phrase first, and he used it within days of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an astonishing essay called The Bomb and You, which is a kind of sketch of 1984.

And Orwell saw, because he was a genius, that with the advent of these new weapons of these new weapons weapons of unparalleled destructiveness, the nature of great power rivalry changed. His argument was those powers that have nuclear weapons, he speculated there would be only three, cannot in fact fight World War III. They must engage in the peace that is no peace. That was his definition of Cold War. That is much closer to where we are today, and I've now been saying this somewhat tediously for eight years.

We're in Cold War II. And as in Cold War I, there are two superpowers with the capabilities to fight full-scale World War III, and those are the United States and the People's Republic of China. And they're in much the same relationship in military terms as the United States and the Soviet Union were. Not in the economic relationship, because that's completely different. But I think it's a much more helpful analogy to imagine and understand, I don't think it's imagination, understand that we're in Cold War II and have been for some time, the Chinese understood

it before we did, and that is why our problems are not going to be 1914 or 1939. Our problems are much more like 1950, the Korean War, and 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because as in the First Cold War, so in the second, there is a possibility of hot wars and proxy wars within the overarching structure of the superpower rivalry. And I think the war in Ukraine is the Korean War of Cold War II, the first really hot war in which the two sides have proxies. Russia is essentially a Chinese proxy, and Ukraine has been a Western proxy.

And the Cuban Missile Crisis, if it happens, will happen in Taiwan. It will be the Taiwan Semiconductor crisis. And my basic assumption has been that we will rerun the Cuban Missile Crisis, missile crisis at some point imminently over Taiwan, and that will be the most dangerous moment of Cold War II. So we Westerners sit here and think in terms of these historical analogies, not only to clarify the moment, but generally from a point of view of, gosh, how do we make sure

to prevent the war? Our adversaries also think historically and not always with the same goal. So I'm going to walk us through a Russian historical perspective and a Chinese historical perspective. These are the words of one Vladimir Putin, who's, you'll detect a difference in style between his writing and that of Winston Churchill's.

I actually think, I don't know if you agree with this, Neil, but I actually think the style tells you something about Putin. But this is from an essay he published in 2021 about the, it was entitled on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. I can't, and I printed out too much here. I'm just going to, you're get a flavor here. Russians, Ukrainians,

and Belarusians are all descendants of ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory, from Ladoga Novgorod and Bascov to Kiev and Chernigov, were bound together by one language which we now refer to as old Russian. Economic ties, the rule of princes of the Rurik dynasty, and after the baptism of Rus, the Orthodox faith. The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir, who was both Prince of Novograd and Grand Prince of Kiev, still largely determines our affinity today. The throne of Kiev held a dominant position in ancient Rus. This has been the custom since the late 9th century, and it goes on, presumably it at the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries.

I've read the whole thing. It's extraordinarily tedious. I read it on the way to Ukraine. I was traveling to Ukraine in September, I think, 2021. And I had been aware of this article. It was published July, I think, and I read it on the way to Kiev. I knew the minute I read it that Russia was going to war with Ukraine. It was already at war in a small way and had been since 2014, and I read this article and knew with certainty that Putin intended a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The article was a manifester for what was known as Anschluss in the 1930s for the annexation of Ukraine. It was an article which used tendentious historical reasoning to claim that Ukraine had no national identity, There was no Ukrainian national identity. And I remember arriving in Kiev and saying to my Ukrainian friends, I have been to Ukraine every year since I think 2010. And I said to them, this is really bad.

He's planning to invade the country on a large scale. And you're not prepared and we're not prepared. And the whole of that period from September until February the next year was an agonizing one for me because I could see a terrible failure of deterrence occurring. And Ukrainians were part of it because they couldn't believe it. They really couldn't believe that he was going to do it and were very reluctant to believe even when they were told by more authority to figures than me that this was coming.

But the United States and the Europeans failed completely to deter Putin that year. They, in fact, eased the sanctions on Nord Stream 2. They signaled that if Putin made that kind of move, they would retaliate with, you guessed it, sanctions. And I kept explaining, they're not deterred by sanctions. They're going to regard that as empty as the things that Barack Obama said in 2014 when they annexed Crimea. It was an agonizing time, and I can remember my friend and colleague at Greenmantle, Chris Miller corroborating my hunch in a tremendous piece that he wrote in December 2021, predicting with, I remember, 80% confidence, a full-scale invasion.

We couldn't get anybody to believe this. Most people thought we were over-dramatizing it. I can remember doing a show with Ian Bremmer and Fareed Zakaria in which they said it was all just some elaborate kabuki. And then, of course, we had the biggest land war since 19405. Now what nobody, including me, could foresee in February of 2022, was that war would still be going on in 2026 in its fifth year. And that's what I mean by short war illusion. Because while Chris Miller and I saw that the war was going to come, neither of us thought

that it would last long. We assumed that the Russians would win swiftly. And even after they'd failed to, after the Battle of Kiev was decisively won by the Ukrainians, the amazing thing was we kept assuming that there would be a settlement because with the failure of Putin's strategy, we couldn't believe he'd keep fighting. It took us, I think until from memory, September, to realize that it was going to be a prolonged war of attrition. And that was when I realized, ah, it's the Korean War.

That's what we're in. And it's going to be one of those wars that has a very mobile first year, and then it gets completely bogged down. So that analogy, going back to the issue of how do you work with historical analogies, illustrates the point. All the time I was trying to find the right analogy. Was it the Winter War, the war between Finland and the Soviet Union? That didn't quite work.

But once we realized, ah, it's Korea, and the Chinese are going to be the back. of Russia and the United States and the Europeans will back Ukraine. And that will keep the thing going. But it will be a stalemate. That was the important insight. And I think that's been the right analogy. It's worked well. If you read the headlines about Israel, you're only getting a tiny slice of a long,

complicated story without depth, context, or sometimes even the basic facts. I'm Norm Weissman, the host of unpacking Israeli history, the podcast that dives into the fascinating and sometimes controversial events and figures. that have shaped Israel's past and present each week on unpacking Israeli history. I explore the layers of Israeli history, debates around the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, the cultural forces at play, drawing from a variety of sources and perspectives. So if you're looking for a nuanced, thought-provoking take on Israel, one that avoids the oversimplifications and political spin, I think you'll really appreciate the show.

Find unpackings of the history wherever you listen to your podcast or on YouTube. As you know, Putin wrote another essay, I think the year before, I think it was 2020, about the Soviet Union's essentially guiltlessness in the start of the second world war. I've read that one too. It's actually funny to see Putin cosplay an historian. And so he kind of knows how to do this or maybe there is some Russian version of chat GP. that did it for him, but he kind of writes it in a history-ish way. It's sort of history-ish in the way that things are truthy. And it kind of reads, if you didn't really know anything, you'd be like, oh, it's pretty

good, this guy must have done his homework. But it makes this wildly tendentious argument that the Soviet Union, which of course was on the side of Nazi Germany. Well, they had no choice. That's the point. They were forced into this by the perfidious Poles and perfidious British and perfidious French. It's actually a masterpiece of tendentious reasoning, and young students should be made to read it

to show that you can make a really, really, really bad argument with, you know, if you have the right rhetorical flourishes. Well, I bring it up because obviously the war looms large in Putin's mind from that somewhat perverse perspective, because yes, he forgives the Maltau of Ribotrop Pact, and then towards the end it has this defense of Yolta, as a foundation for world order, which is because of the conference where Europe is carved up.

Churchill was involved there too? Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. I want to ask you about historical memory in the United States and the way in which when I was a boy, our relevant strategic myth, and I mean myth not in the sense of something implicitly false. I mean it in the sense of something is an all-encompassing story that we tell ourselves. and I have the opinion that this story is more or less true. Of the American participation in World War II,

as this episode which begins with an unfortunate isolationism and becomes this heroic national exercise, which ultimately contributes massively to the defeat of Nazism, of Japanese imperialism. It involves the Holocaust as an important theme. I grew up in the 80s. My dad actually fought in the war, And much like Afghans, if you talk to Afghans, then they, I've discovered that they believe that the British Empire stopped oppressing their country roughly the day before they were born.

Like the British Empire left and they were born. For me, I, five-year-old Aaron thought that World War II had basically ended the day before I had born. But I was born. There was this really bad guy, Hitler. He tried to take over the world. And my dad stopped him. I mean, there were other people there, like Uncle Jack was there and Uncle Frank was there. But it was mostly my dad.

And that was very unusual for someone born. born in 1981 because I was a late arrival, I'm not actually that old, but I was a late arrival in my dad's life. I still had friends who had grandparents who had fought in the war. Now of course it's all gone and I think the enemies of post-war American grand strategy, whether on the left and the right and the left wing enemies were there in my youth, but it's really the right now that's very visible in the form of say Tucker Carlson and others. I think they correctly identified this story as something that needed to be corroded away if you want to fundamentally change the course of American strategy in the world.

How are they doing at that? Are we done? Is World War II as a story of American heroism and is a grounds for thinking about America and the world? Is that a dead letter now? And if so, what are we going to do, Neil? Well, there's history and there's anti-history. History is based on scholarship.

It's based on reading the documents, the contemporary letters and the diaries, understanding the past, getting inside the minds of the decision makers. This is history and then anti-history is that you go in Tucker Carlson's podcast and he says you're a great historian, you've never written any history books and then you just make shit up. And so when a figure like Daryl Cooper is presented as a serious historian, I'm at this point convinced that podcasts must be the work of the devil. I've long had this suspicion.

I know this is a podcast, but let me... Just point out that podcasts are probably the work of the devil, and books are the work of God, and history is in books. It's only from books that you can learn history, because only in books are there footnotes, and only in the footnotes are there the references that you can check to make sure that it wasn't made up. So clearly when someone like Cooper goes in Carlson's podcast

and said, no, Churchill was the real villain of World War II, Germans, you know, they had a few Jews that they had to feed and they didn't have quite enough food and so they kind of died. When people start saying these things that are egregious lies, then you must speak out against it. This is not history, this is anti-history. And as you say rightly, Aaron, it's designed to subvert our understanding of the past. and then subtly to re-legitimize the dark side and to make national socialism somehow acceptable again because the next stage after you've done your Daryl Cooper

is the Nick Fuentes, Hitler was cool. Now transgressive behavior is normal amongst young men. I too was once a punk rocker. There is some satisfaction in your late teens to saying whatever the hell is going to piss your parents off. This one can understand. But when the transgression is to legitimize Hitler and therefore the Holocaust,

then you've entered a very dark place that is going to have unforeseen consequences that I suspect will turn out badly for those who perpetrate these lies. These demons took a long time to lay to rest. It took a long time for Bill Buckley, it was really his life's work, to drive segregationism and anti-Semitism and isolationism and John Berksism out of the American conservative movement. That was Buckley's life's work. And he achieved it. It was very hard because these things were quite deeply embedded, including in his own family.

But his success made it possible to have the Reagan administration, to have a conservative America that was entirely. detached from all the darkness of the 1930s and previous eras. I think the tragedy of our time is that all Buckley's work has been undone and that with amazing speed it's all back. The overt racism is back. The anti-Semitism is back. The isolationism is back. It's all come back and it's going to take probably as many years as it took Buckley to get rid of it. it all again. And sometimes I feel as if our fate is just constantly to repeat these agonizing processes of intellectual purification, where you kind of have to go through it all again. In Britain, we have to clearly go through the 1970s again, and we'll have to go through

Thatcherism again. I'll have to repeat all the processes of retrenchment that were necessary. In the United States, it's going to be redoing the bucket. makeover of conservatism. I mean, the one thing I would add is that to me the most disturbing feature of our time is the absence of new ideas. It is truly a sad indictment of our culture that anti-Semitism can make a comeback

on the right and on the left that socialism and national socialism are so back. These ideas are hundreds of years old. These ideas date back to the 1840s. And we can't come up with anything novel. It's 2026 and we're reaching back to the ideas of nearly 200 years ago to try and understand our world. AI is here and no, socialism. Socialism. I mean, how many times does it have to be tried? ride before we finally admit failure. When?

I mean, the definition of insanity was doing the same thing twice expecting a different outcome. With socialism, it's like, let's try the same thing a hundred and fifteen times, and we'll try it in New York. Maybe it'll work there. I mean, good luck. Of course, anti-Semitism runs back even further than the 1840s, and it does seem like time for a change. Like we could help hate the Welsh for a change or something like that. or something like that. The Welsh have been doing a job of hating the Welsh.

They don't need any help. We promised the people, Neil, that we would talk about Iran. That time has come. I will keep us in the historical vein, because if we think back to President Trump's remarks on February the 28th, framing and explaining the war to the American people, he began in a historical mode and gave an account of a Iranian U.S. rivalry from 1979 on and indeed Iranian perfidy.

And I remember liking the speech. At one point, I even said to, I could have written this part of the speech. And I thought the case he was making essentially for the evil of the Iranian regime was sort of unimpeachable. And it clearly for him, I've long nursed this pet theory about President Trump that if it was important in the 1980s, it's important to him. And it's actually a very useful tool for understanding his worldview. Can I qualify that? Please. I think you're out by 10 years.

The key to understanding Donald Trump is what happened in the 1970s. Was Andrew Lloyd Weber big in the 70s? Because that's important. I'll leave the popular culture to you. But I think there's much more of Nixon in Trump than anybody wants to acknowledge. But it's very, very important to understand that, that there is a Nixonian character to the president.

Not many people know this, but it was actually the Nixon's who identified Trump's potential talent for politics. They knew one another in the 1980s. They met. Nixon was, of course, the disgrace former president trying to rehabilitate himself as the great statesman, and Trump was the new kid on the real estate block, and they met, and they dined together. And there's a wonderful letter from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. that ends, Pat saw you on one of the late shows last night and Pat, his wife, and thinks you have a big future in politics.

So then Nixon saw it before anybody else. Trump has the same enemies as Richard Nixon. The New York Times, Harvard, the bureaucracy, the Trump calls it the deep state. And there's a part of Trump that is rerunning the Nixon presidency, but this time Nixon wins. That's a very important thing to bear in mind. Now, let me pursue this further because I think it's really important and people generally miss this. The things that Trump does, like going to Beijing for a great big, beautiful summit about it's not very clear what, is that's the desire to be Nixon.

The President wanted the summit to be a kind of display. It didn't really matter what the content was. The important thing was go to Beijing and get the red carpet treatment. And President has the same attitude to American allies that Richard Nixon had, which was they're kind of hangers on and they need to do much more of the share than they're currently doing. There are lots and lots of things that Trump does that are very Nixonian. The insistence that he's a peacemaker, Nixon did that all the time.

That was one of Nixon's recurrent tropes that he was the great peacemaker. So I get to the 70s, and it's very important this, because why? Why? After all that he'd said in the period running up to the war, why has Trump bungled it? Why did Trump hesitate when he was told, now we need to deploy special forces and the Navy to reopen the straight by force? He was made, I think, I'm fairly confident about this. He was told by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, this is what we have to do now. And when Trump assessed the project, the mission, he decided it was too risky. Why?

Fear of Carter. Fear of being Jimmy Carter. Why was he in such an agony about rescuing the pilots when they were shot down? Fear of Jimmy Carter. It's the 70s that haunts Donald Trump much more than the 1980s. He's far, far more preoccupied with those events than I think people realize. and it's crucial to explaining why we are where we are. Remember, there's a reason why no previous president

has wanted to have Richard Nixon as a role model. Think about it. Why has that not been popular? What befell Richard Nixon was, of course, Watergate, and there's always a scandal. You know, there's always a scandal in the second term. We haven't said Epstein yet, but Epstein's like, you know, it's the scandal that won't go away.

Watergate was like that. It took a long time for it to be fully. clear what the scandal was. But the other reason for Nixon's downfall is the oil shock. And why does the oil shock happen? The oil shock happens because Richard Nixon takes the side of Israel in the Yom Kippur War in October of 1973, and the Saudis imposed an oil embargo. And that oil embargo causes a roughly fourfold increase in the price of oil, which blows the US economy and indeed the world economy up. Stock market goes down 45% peak to trough on Nixon's watch.

And so Trump's tragedy is that, I think unwittingly, he's reenacting 1973, 74. Because it took Kissinger four months, more than four months, to get the Saudis to lift the oil embargo and it's going to take about that long to get the straight of Hormuz reopened. So these Nixonian parallels are the key to unethon. understanding where we are, in my view. Again, using an analogy to try to figure out what the dimensions, what the likely trajectory is, realizing that this won't be short, that you can't reopen the straight-offer and moves like that.

Not now. Not now that the Iranians have established that they control it. And not if you're not prepared to challenge that control by military force. Yeah, it's striking this fear of Carter, as you put it. I mean, of course, the rescue of that F-15 crew was in certain respect. a replay of Operation Eagle Claw, which was famously the failed operation to rescue the hostages that were being kept in Tehran. Why did it fail? Well, it was called off for a sandstorm early on, but in the midst of it being pulled out, there was a Ford air refueling point

built in the desert in Iran near Isfahan, as it happens, and an American helicopter hit an American plane, and disaster ensued. A number of Americans died, and it becomes this signal catastrophe of the Carter era. Well, the military and the Joint Special Operations Command, which is, you know, is founded in some ways in response to this tragedy, has come a long way. And we had this Ford refueling point in the desert in Iran, which was

used expertly to rescue those two crew members. I promise you, the odds that they picked that refueling point, the night before off of Google Maps, are zero. That airfield was identified, almost certainly for a nuclear raid. And it had probably been surveyed on the ground.

before they used it for that more urgent purpose. So in that respect, the curse, you know, has been excised from the Special Operations community. But then on the straight, yes, I mean, it's back to my, you know, 70s, but this question of what Trump remembers from history, I mean, the Strait of Hrabuz is a big deal in the 1980s. There's a far side cartoon that's been going around. I hope that we have Far Side fans in the room.

And it shows, you know, there we go, that shows a cruise ship going into the straight, and the caption is due to a series of unfortunate navigational errors, the love boat has sailed into the Strait of Hormuz. This is 1988 that this cartoon comes from. I think to a lot of people, the question of the pain that the closure of the strait still feels pretty theoretical. I mean, prices are somewhat elevated at the pump,

but they've been elevated to this level before and the world did not fall apart. You wrote a brilliant analysis in the free press just a couple of weeks ago, I think, within the month, where you laid out sort of three scenarios, timing-wise, one of which we're already passed. Scenario 1 was, what if we're open today?

Well, we're a few weeks past that now. And then sort of this summer and then, I think, into the fall. Just paint a picture of what we're looking at. So if you assume that things, you know, take longer to end, I have a kind of simple inversion of the old Rudy Dornbush principle about economics. And Dornbush's principle of economics was, you know, things take longer to happen than you expect. and then they happen much faster than you can imagine.

Well, it's the opposite in history, because wars start really fast, much faster than you expect, but they take much longer to end than you think. That's where we are. So in my scenarios, as you say, scenario one is now two weeks past. Scenario 2 is the straight is still closed July 4th, which I'm not even sure is my base case anymore.

Even with that, we're looking at, at four plus percent inflation, some impact to growth. If it's still closed scenario three, Labor Day, then inflation is going to be at 5 percent and we'll see a meaningful impact to growth. Bullpark. Now, why is this sort of shock not there in the equity markets? So this is the big problem if you care about these things. And we're in New York, so we all care. So it's quite a puzzle because this is a very, very big shock. This is the IEA International Energy Union. He says this is the biggest energy market shock ever.

Bigger than 73, 74, bigger than 78, 79, the Iranian Revolution. And it's puzzling that we're still close to the highs in the equity markets. And I think Tyler Cohen is here. Tyler, are you here? There you are. So we have a debate going on because we're, that's what the free press is all about. We debate. Tyler's like, the market's right. The market sees that this is no biggie, soon going to be over, believe the AI, feel the AI, feel the AGI. And I am like, the market is right the way the market was right in July 1914, the way the market was right in September 1929, the way the market was right in October 2007. These are all market highs before the fall.

And the reason I think I'm going to win, though, who knows, it's history, it's always a bit hard to predict, is that the magnitude of the shock has not yet reached the U.S. economy except in the price of gasoline. It hasn't reached the U.S. economy through the fertilizer channel, because this is a massive shock to fertilizer. Farmers know it, but the consumers of food don't know it. That's to come. The petrochemicals shock has reached Asia, but it hasn't reached Walmart, but it will, because this shock is traveling at the speed of an oil tanker or a container ship. So the full magnitude of the disruption caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has yet to be felt by Americans. Now, what is interesting is that while the equity market is a lagging indicator, the opinion

polls are a leading indicator, and the opinion polls are, they've crashed. Like the president is at really new lows. I think David Shaw had to extend the Y axis on his chart to capture the depth of the unpopularity of this administration. And on all the key issues, of course, inflation, it's in the tank. The one issue the electorate was already mad about was affordability. And I give you 200 basis points additional inflation. How is that going to go?

So I think the polls are leading the equity market, the equity market's about to correct, would be my assessment. Because it hasn't fully sunk in, but the bond market gets it. So the 30-year yield is now back where it was in 2007. 2007. Remember what happened after 2007. Yeah. And the difficult, among the many difficulties of modeling this is that the Strait of Hormuz

is not like a light switch. I mean, barring Iranian state collapse or them just walking away and saying, fine, it's open, which I find certainly the second one to be unlikely in the former. And the state collapse is supposed to happen very rapidly through Operation Economic Fury, which was going to blockade Iran and it was all going to collapse into hyperinflation while I'm still waiting for that outcome. So the clock on that is hard to, so just to talk about two different models, like trying to track out the pain in the Iranian economy.

It's an interesting question, a hard one to answer, but then, frankly, the even harder one to answer is the one that matters, which is it's not really how much. this or that costs in Iran and what they run out of. It's how does all of that affect the decision-making calculus of someone like Vahidi, the guy currently running the IRGC who is apparently the intervaced with the new Supreme Leader? How do you answer that question in any kind of model? Meanwhile, for the rest of us, for the rest of the world, the question of the closure of the strait itself, it's not like a light switch, it's a spigot.

So even if Project Freedom were to be restarted and ships were to be guided and let's say we put some Marines in on, you know, Kesham Island or something like that, which I think could be a very dramatic episode if it were to happen. You're not going to get 130 ships a day through. There's no way. Traffic wasn't running at full rates during Operation Ernest Will, which was the operation in the 1980s. It's going to be, I don't know, we can't say, 50%, 40%, 30%. Let me ask you a question, Aaron, because this is really up your street. It seems to me that when you look at the tanker war in Ernest Will, 87, 88, when, you know, the United States and other powers, re-established the flow of commercial traffic through the strait at the time of the Iran-Iraq war.

It was not without its costs, it was not without its risks, but it was successfully achieved. I begin to worry that we can't do that anymore. And if we can't do that anymore, we're not the hyper power we think we are. a defining feature of great power status is that your Navy can guarantee freedom of navigation. It can keep the choke points open. I wonder if this new, this is for you, I genuinely don't know the answer to this, but I wonder if the new asymmetry is created by drone warfare fundamentally compromise the naval primacy that has been fundamental to the Pax Americana.

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I confess when Project Freedom started, obviously I'm rooting for it. success but with my student of these things hat on I was sort of fascinated to see how it was going to play out for this precise reason because let's not forget back during the 80s Ernest Will and then of course it led to praying mantis and the Reagan sank a bunch of the Iranian Navy when an American ship worship hit a mine I mean a lot of this has happened before it was an expensive exercise it did not restore traffic to pre-Iran Iraq war levels I mean it was laborious expensive it was the Cold War Navy devoting a lot of its resources to this

By the way, well, nothing is new. The Pentagon was against it. The Pentagon was taking our focus away from the Soviet Union. We're supposed to be focused on the primary adversary totally against all this messing Iran in the Persian Gulf. But to your question- They only did it because the Soviets volunteered to do it first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

It was like, okay, if they're going to do it, we better do it. To your question, so at first glance, the new state of war fighting does seem to favor Iran. And we'll just sort of walk through that for a second. Think of Ukraine in the battle for the Black Sea. The Ukrainians, without hardly anything of a Navy to speak of in 2022, have been able pretty successfully to push the Russian Black Sea fleet, what's not at the bottom of the Black Sea now, out to the east and sort of northeast of the Black Sea where it hides.

The actual story is a little more complicated than that. The Russians have scored some hits in reverse, and it's a little bit more fluid, but that's not totally misleading as a headline. And the Ukrainians were able to do this through all the bells and whistles of modern warfare, where we think asymmetry, you think of the Viet Cong or the Taliban. No, it's a state asymmetry with a powerful, albeit smaller than its adversary state, using unmanned vehicles, unmanned surface vehicles. Data. This is the part of the war in Ukraine that I think doesn't get enough attention as people think of it as a drone war.

It is at least as much a data war. It is the fact that the drones are all networked together. that there is command and control that can synthesize all this data coming back from sensors, use AI to help identify targets and make decisions and then deploy weapons, essentially. That's what's cleared the Black Sea of the Russian fleet. So you look at that example and you think to yourself, oh gosh, that favors the Iranians, because the whole point is you don't need a Navy to clear out a body of water. What are we going to do sending our Navy into this maelstrom,

which is presumably part of the calculus back in March and April of not just sending the U.S. Navy in, and why every time we send our Navy through, as we've done a couple times in the last few weeks, it's been a shooting gallery in every direction. Now, here's the second glance, which I think this is what remains to be tested is. That new tech cuts both ways. It doesn't obviously and only favor the weaker party.

One of the most interesting things I saw in the brief period in which Project Freedom was running was, do you remember, this is a good, question. It was so brief that it may have been the shortest operation in military history, because I think it was 24 hours before it was called off.

Yeah, yeah, it was extremely brief, and you would expect that a naval command or maybe even the Marines were appointed as the masters of this operation. Do you remember, do you happen to remember at the top of your head? Which unit of the U.S. military was tasked with reopening the Strait of Formuz?

Don't know. It was the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne division. That's strange. isn't it? And I, when that got reported, I thought, well, that's absolutely fascinating. And here's why it was the 82nd Airborne Division. The 82nd Airborne Division is part of a broader organization in the Army, the 18th Airborne

Corps. The 18th Airborne Corps is the unit that in 2022 helped the Ukrainians and learned with the Ukrainians how to kill Russians efficiently. It was that unit that was closest to this data-driven, AI-centric way of warfare that being proven out in Ukraine and to an extent in the Middle East as well, though frankly it's much more sophisticated on both sides in Ukraine. And so the officers who were part of that effort in 2022 are now more senior in various parts of that Corps to include the commander of the 82nd Airborne.

And I think it was a major factor that that unit was selected from a command post that's nowhere near the water to run this operation. Why? Because in the back end, all of these fights in different domains, air fights, ground fights, maritime fights. In the back end, they all look the same now. It's all data, it's all AI, it's all connecting sensors with effectors and making decisions at scale. So Neil, to land this plane, the second glance cause for hope,

I think if you want this to succeed, which I do, but also I'm curious to see it proven out, is if you can set up a situation where you have persistent surveillance of the Iranian coast, and you have enough effectors close by to kill the threats that you see quickly. You can run that same game back on the Iranians. You will never, at pace, you will never reduce the amount of fire incoming from Iran to zero. By the way, we didn't in the 1980s either.

They were still laying mines and shooting at ships throughout Ernest Will. It is only the end of the Iran-Iraq war that ends Ernest Will, which also is presumably why President Trump doesn't want to do this, because this thing has to go as long as the Iranians want it to go. So we'll see if on the assumption that at some point we do this again, I am of the view, I agree with your analysis that we sort of have no choice. We will see how effective the U.S. military is at leveraging these new tools of war fighting to gain initiative and tempo over this very serious asymmetric threat.

And it is warfare being waged in a way that is genuinely new. open it up to the audience, it's worth adding that there's something piquant about the United States needing Ukraine's expertise in drone warfare. One of the things I find most difficult to stomach has been the derogatory attitude that President Trump has taken to Ukraine. Time and again, humiliating President Zelensky as he did last year in the Oval Office. But Ukraine is now the leading military power in drone warfare in the world. And that is why Ukraine is still able to contain the Russian invasion and indeed in recent weeks drive the Russians back.

Because the Ukrainians have shown us what it is to innovate under massive pressure. Their achievement is one of extraordinary heroism. I want to pay tribute to the Ukrainian people for their courage, but also their ingenuity. And here we are. Now we need them to help us with drone defense against Shahids. The Iranians designed. It's sold to the Russians. The Russians improved them.

Now the Russians are sending. They're improved Shahids back to the Iranians. You know, what goes around comes around, don't you think? I agree completely. I was just there. You've been numerous times since the start of the war. I've only been once, and it was incredibly impressive. I felt bad because I, without having been there thus far during the course of the war, I sort

of packed as though I were going to a battlefield, which I did. I spent a couple days out around Carqueve where my cargo pants and everything sort of fit in. But it's all I had to wear in Kyiv where mothers are taking their children to school and young people are sitting in coffee shops and you had a city that was getting droned and ballistic missileed every night. There's been particularly heavily hits in the past week or so. The statistics are shocking. I mean that there are nightly drone raids and frequent ballistic missile strikes against what

are clearly residential parts of Ukrainian cities. And this was a sign of Russia's failure that it had to resort to terror bombing of civilians because it could not win at the front line. And it could not win at the front line because the Ukrainians were able to master drone warfare. Most people in this country still don't understand the nature of the new warfare because it's partly scale that's the move towards autonomous mass. And if I ask you to guess, how many drones did Ukraine make manufacturer last year?

You'd probably be off by an order of magnitude because it was 3 million. Three million. The Russians did four, but the Ukrainians have quantitative superiority. We are far behind because when you talk to the people in defense technology in the United States, their production runs are a fraction of that. We still don't understand the mass that is involved. Now we haven't got to this yet, and maybe we will in the discussion, but when you think about a potential conflict with China,

China, one must assume, since the Chinese are the leaders in the manufacture of commercial drones, that three million for them might be a tenth of what they can deploy. So this fundamentally alters, I think, the nature of warfare in a bigger way than the revolution in military affairs of the 1990. Where are you right now, Neil, on the risks of, if not an invasion scenario of Taiwan, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a substantial turning up of the temperature in the Western Pacific. How do you think Xi is looking at the balance of power? How does AI fit into this? Where do you think we're headed?

Well, I'll keep it brief because I think it's high time we opened it up. I don't think that China will invade Taiwan. That's an extremely difficult thing to do for any military. Nor do I think that they will blockade Taiwan. I don't think they'll in fact make military moves against Taiwan. I think they will use lawfare against Taiwan. And I think much sooner than most people realize, China is going to assert its sovereignty. It's going to assert it by saying, hey, this is a province of China, right?

You all agree it's part of China. Most countries in the world will say, sure. Most corporations will say, sure. And the Chinese will say, well, we're going to collect customs on the trade of this province of China. And a lot of people will say, okay. Now, if China makes that move, which you can do by just sending a bunch of coast guard vessels towards Taipei, the United States will be in an extremely difficult position,

because if China successfully asserts its sovereignty over Taiwan's trade relations, that creates the option to cut off imports of the LNG that the Taiwanese economy runs on, and to restrict exports of the semiconductors made in the TSM fabs on which the entire AI boom depends. Because they're nearly all made there. All the advanced semiconductors, nearly all, more than 90% come from there. So we would not be able to let that stand. What we would do, I think, would be to create a kind of Berlin airlift, would be a kind of much more elaborate operation than that,

because it would be a sea and airlift, to try to keep at least some channel of commerce open to Taiwan that the Chinese did not control. This would be a massive and very challenging naval operation. The rest of the world would see the United States as escalating rather than China, and this would put us in, I think, a position of diplomatic weakness. I asked one of President Macron's advisors a year ago, how many European countries would support the United States

in a Taiwan contingency? His reply? Zero. You have to ask yourself who, in fact, at this point, would support the United States. And it's a short list, Japan, Australia. I mean, the UK might say that it supported the United States. But what would that be worth?

Because the United Kingdom essentially has disarmed itself to the level of roughly 1667. So it would be like verbal support from whoever is prime minister at any given moment. So this is a very, very, very precarious position. Now, the conventional wisdom consensus amongst the experts says, why would Xi Jinping take this terrible risk? He's just purged his military commission, nobody's there, he can't do it.

Oh, and he can wait until the time when he's election in January 2028. Why would he wait? Why wait when we have just revealed that we have a cyber nuke called Mythos? An American company, Anthropic, has announced that it has the most powerful cyber weapon ever, mythos. And just to make it clear, they then published three days ago the paper in which they say, yes, the whole point of this is to defeat China in the AI race. And we're winning because they don't have the compute. We have 11 times the compute that they have. And so we have the cyber nuke and we have the compute.

If I'm Xi Jinping, I don't find that at all reassuring. Because we have done regime change in Venezuela. That went well. Then we tried it in Iran, not so good. Got a regime change, but just more extreme regime than the one before. So that wasn't quite, but it was regime change. So if you're Xi Jinping, you've got to kind of. I kind of assume that there's a plan for regime change for Beijing too.

And maybe mythos is part of that plan. So why waste around? My view is a very out of consensus view, and I may prove to be as wrong about this as about the stock market, and no doubt I'll be point, this will be pointed out if it's true. But my sense is that he should not wait. And therefore, the Taiwan semiconductor crisis, which is, as I said earlier, the Cuban missile crisis of Cold War II, is very imminent. could happen tomorrow.

Yeah. Your riff on a British military capacity puts me in mind of another great 1980s, 1990s comedian sticking with this theme of Dave Barry, who in his, I think it's a history of the 20th century, is narrating the opening episodes of the Second World War and says, and then the Italian army invaded France and made it almost all the way to Nice before its truck broke down. And with that, let's open it to some questions. I see, I think we'll bring the lights up here. I did see a hand right here in the front right out of the gate.

So we'll start there, and we've got time for... There's a roving microphone on a swing here. Please do wait for the mic, and let us know who you are. Okay, can hear me? Good. The first and second war in wars ended because the defeated parties, as you know, came to the realization that they didn't want to take any more pain or destruction. Do you see that relevant to the Iran War? No. Because defeat in 1918 was that the German army collapsed in a massive wave of surrender,

so overwhelming that British troops couldn't cope with the number of surrendering Germans. This was the end of the war. And in the case of 1945, the Red Army was in Berlin massacring and raping the population within close proximity to Hitler's bunker. We are clearly not going to inflict a defeat of that kind on the Iranian regime. You know, may want to add to this error, there are limits to what air power can achieve.

I was with Admiral Mike Mullen earlier today who made this observation. You cannot achieve that kind of victory exclusively from the air. It's just not possible. And it's a persistent delusion of American statecraft to exaggerate the power of air warfare, as it is to exaggerate the power of sanctions. Currently, we have sanctions, we have a blockade, and we have the option to renew the air war.

These will not suffice to achieve the kind of victory that would be necessary to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and to impose on Iran a better deal than the J.C. At this point, it is highly likely that it will be a worse deal than the JCPOA that is negotiated and that we shall leave Iran with an option to close the Strait of Hormuz at will. This will be a major strategic defeat that it will be impossible to put lipstick on. I agree with the assessment of air power's limitations. The only thing I would add is there is something, there's a degree of precision available in air power now, even compared to the dawn of the sensor strike era of the 80s and 90s.

The difference in degree of precision today is so remarkable that it borders on something new under the sun. Now, let me finish this. And we see this in Israeli decapitation strikes in Tehran. We saw it in 2025 with the hits on the nuclear scientists, where the round is hitting. the northwest corner of the bedroom in the apartment and not the southeast corner because of all the stuff we've been talking about, the data and the AI,

and there's some human intelligence as well, but it's not all human intelligence. It is the collection of all these various bits of data to power this process. But I agree in the sense that, okay, that just means you can kill a lot of specific people and you can destroy very specific things at a tempo and with a kind of fidelity that was simply impossible.

But if that's not married to, dot, dot, dot, and then what? You know, you have to finish the strategic sentence, and that probably can't be done just from the air. Just in Venezuela, the strategic sentence was finished by, we have this clique of people that we're working with, and they are going to step in. That was the rest of the sentence. Yeah.

And there was no Delci. Yeah. There was no Delci in Tehran. They thought there was, but there wasn't, well, partly because the Israelis killed him. All right. Accidents will happen. Why don't we go sort of right in the middle here and then next one I'll come over to this side of the room.

I apologize. I'm not discriminating in any way here because I can't see your faces. It's all sort of blobs with hands. Okay, thanks so much for your chat. It was great to hear. So you guys talked about revisionism and the sort of the creep and danger of that. And, you know, we've all seen some of that danger with, anti-Semitism even with Maldani doing the post about the Napa the missions around that a few days ago. You also kind of talked about historical context

to lean on when thinking about war and conflict. Is there a historical context to lean on or to view this against where there was a good reversal of the kind of provisionism that we're seeing right now? Well, I think the 20th century, century was a kind of prolonged historic estriate, to use a German term. It was a prolonged conflict of the historians. The conversation began the Churchill's account of World War I.

That was not the German account of World War I. And indeed the debate on the origins of World War I and the debate on the nature of the German collapse was. was a protracted battle of the 1920s. By the 1930s, the revisionists had prevailed, and the Dolghtos Legenda became official. The stab-in-the-back theory became official, and the German government of the 1930s

was able to entirely rewrite the history of Germany's defeat, so that it ceased to be a defeat at the front, which it had been, as I mentioned earlier, and it became a stab-in-the-back in which the Jews had played, particularly malign role. That historiography was obliterated in 1945. And then there was a renewed battle over the course of German history in the wake of it. I came of age as a young historian trying to understand the great battles of the German historians. Between those on the left who

who tried to understand German history as a kind of as a disconnect, fundamental disconnect between the social order and modernization and those more conservative historians who interpreted it as a consequence of Germany's Mital Lager, its situation in the central Europe. For me, the lesson is that history is a constant argument, a never-ending argument in which certain rules of Scotland,

scholarship are sacred. That is why I say podcasts are not the way to engage in historical debate. The only way to engage in historical debate is through scholarly articles and books in which we can set out our case. And we may or may not pass the test, the test of rigorous debate. Part of what has gone wrong in my career has been the decline in the quality of the quality. of historical debate, a steep decline, which I first observed when I wrote a book about the British Empire, which is now more than 20 years ago in 2002 or 2003, and I had made, I thought, a somewhat provocative case that by the standards of most empires, the British Empire had been on balance a good empire. The benefits had outweighed the costs. I'd set out what the costs were,

as I thought fairly as I could, and I also tried to argue that the benefits had been significant. There was no good debate about that book of the sort that I had expected. What there was was an attempt to smear the author and to cast aspersions on the motives of my writing the book. And that for me was the beginning of the degeneration of our intellectual climate. Instead of debating the arguments that I had made, trying to engage with the economic arguments in particular, the critics simply said it is a bad faith project to say anything good about empire, because empire is always and everywhere evil.

I think once we've stepped away from good faith debate in which the issues are the presentation of evidence, we can't really maintain our intellectual integrity. History ceases to be a debate about evidence and becomes an exercise in propaganda. And that, I'm afraid, has been... That has been the narrative arc of my career. I have tried to uphold the standards of scholarship

that I was raised on, but I've watched them wither away at the universities and wither away in the press until we end up with the preposterousness of Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson. It's very sad. It's very sad and it will have a very high price. It'll be a very, very high price that we pay for allowing anti-history to crowd out history. It's a really thought-provoking question.

This is not an attempt at an answer, but more just a reflection that it provokes in me, which is I think part of my anxiety over the collapse of the conventional story about World War II is the fact that it's becoming history in the sense that there's really nobody around. anymore hardly who remembers it and why is it valuable to have people around who remember well I can illustrate with the story it's one of my first memories it's being I'm probably six or seven years old in this story and with my father and my mother and we are on vacation in what is then West Germany my father as a 20-year-old second lieutenant in the United States Army participated in the

liberation of Doc and we are in the lobby of the it was the General Walker Hotel a US Army run hotel in the Munich area and she's he asks the German desk clerk for directions to Dockham. And the clerk who at the time seemed like an adult to me, but who I think was a very young man, gives the directions and then says, yeah, but why do you want to go there? You know it's all just Jewish propaganda these days.

And this is one of my first memories. I remember my father who was tall like me, but also two of me duck taped together. I mean, it was an enormous man. And he had a quick temper. And he turned white, then he turned red. And then he said, I saw what happened there with my own two eyes. Don't you fucking goddamn dare tell me that it's all just Jewish propaganda.

And who can say that? Who can say the first part of that sentence anymore? Diminishingly few. One of the reasons that I embarked on this epic project of writing a life of Henry Kissinger was that 20 years ago I saw a manuscript that he had written. about the liberation of the Arlen concentration camp, which he called the essay the Eternal Jew. And it described his confrontation as a German-born Jewish soldier

with a Polish concentration camp prisoner. And I realized as I read this essay, that I had to write the life of this man, who had had the extraordinary experience of fleeing Germany to New York in 1938 as a refugee, and then returning to Germany in 1944, fighting at the Battle of the Bulge and ending up at the liberation of a concentration camp,

and then discovering later that a dozen members of his family had been killed by the Nazis. So we can't keep the greatest generation alive. They're one by one leaving and fewer now left. But we have, I think, a moral responsibility as historians to keep their experiences alive and to keep it clear to the next generation and the generation after that what it was to fight in that war

and why it's so vitally important to remember the nature of the crimes of the totalitarian regimes. We must remember the nature of the crimes. If we forget that, they will happen again. I think we'll leave it there. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining the free press. Enjoy me and thanking Neil Ferguson. One of those media strategy people,

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