The Munk Debates Podcast - Summer Reads

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Munk Members Podcast provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.   This edition of the Munk Members Podcast features Janice and Rudyard’s recommendations for great summer reads. What are the books you should be including on your reading list for the beach, the cottage and your favourite hammock? Janice and Rudyard share their suggestions for big, meaty non-fiction reads that are going to expand listeners’ thinking on some of the key issues of our time. Also, what is a fun summer book that you shouldn’t miss out on as an indulgence? We have all your summer reading needs covered in this special edition of the Munk Members podcast.   This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue.   More information at www.munkdebates.com. Rudyard’s Picks: Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World, a 10,000 Year History by Ian Morris. 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and James G. Stavridis All That Is Solid Melts Into Air by Marshall Berman   Janice’s Picks: The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David Chalmers The Magician by Colm TóibínBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.Munk Debates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudier Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, the Monk members only podcast, our weekly program where we normally dig into the big issues and ideas in the news.

But this is the summer and it is the time to look at that bedside table of yours. Maybe you've got a big stack of books like I do. And think about adding to it for either that vacation coming up, the time at the cottage, or just a few moments of peace and quiet on the couch to break a new book. to hopefully think some big thoughts about some new ideas. So what we're going to do for this episode of the Munk Members podcast is talk to Janice Gross Stein about her recommendations for three great summer reads. I'm going to give you mine also. And yeah, we hope this just gives you some book ideas to while away these wonderful weeks of July and August 2022. Janice, great to be in conversation with you for this special.

summer episode of the Monk Members podcast. Great to be here, Roger. And imagine having to pick only three cruel and unusual punishment. So here's what we're going to try to do. We're going to try to give our listeners a bit of a buffet here. We're going to pick one serious. Okay, serious. This book's just going to make you better type of nonfiction read, like an important read. Maybe not an easy one, but an important one. And then a second suggestion, which would just be for you, Janice and me too, to go back over the last decades of reading. And what is that one nonfiction book that if you haven't read it? It's got to be, you know, in your magnum opus and get it there this summer.

And then finally, a fun book, a book for the beach or something a little more frivolous to enjoy with a Campari and soda. So, Janice, you're up first. What's your serious book that you want to recommend that, you know, people not be necessarily intimidated by, but that they spend some serious time with, try to wrap their heads around something important? So this one is by Carter Malkasian. And it's called the American War in Afghanistan.

It's the winner of the Lionel Gellberg Prize this year. And it's not a heavy lift at all, Richard. Carter is a wonderful writer. So it's almost a page turner. But why did it leave such an impression on me? He takes us through 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and he was up close. He was in the White House on the National Security Council staff. He was on the ground at the ballot.

And he has one big question he asks, what happened? How did the system fail? How did we go through 20 years of fighting and surgeons and readjustments and surgeons? How did president after president approve all this when it should have been obvious that this was not a winnable war? What a great question, really. And when I finished it, I sat back and I thought, I wish more people read this book because we tend to think that the advice that presidents and prime ministers get from the intelligence agencies and from the military

and from their senior advisors, so good. and they know so much more than you do. They must know what they're talking about. But this book blows that myth apart, really. And it's a message, I think. I certainly took that away. It's a message to all of us. Think about this really hard.

You bring a perspective that's just as important as all the experts. because one of the problems is the experts talk only to other experts, and you can be in a bubble. It's really a great book to read. Can you give us just a quick tease about some of the key kind of insights, the conclusions that he came to? Well, he looks really carefully. One of the really gripping descriptions in this book is Obama's agonizing.

decision about whether to surge forces. And it's such an interesting, interesting discussion because here's your hyper-rational president. He's the model, right, of what we chattering classes want in a president. Somebody who sits there and seeks advice and reads a lot and actively considers, does all those virtuous things that we all talk about. when we talk about improving decisions. So Obama did all of that,

but ultimately could not resist. And Joe Biden, who was his vice president, opposed to that search, did not believe it would matter, did not believe it would make a difference. And finally enough, Joe Biden came at that, really just with instinct, much less attentive to all these briefings.

Obama could not resist the concerted pressure of all the generals at that time and approved, you know, a surge of almost 100,000 troops in what he, I think, suspected, but couldn't fully dump your grips with was a losing effort. He approved it anyway. That has to sober everybody out, frankly, when you read that story. And Carter tells the story. There's no jargon. It's just this gripping narrative of how people caught up at the very top, caught up by competing advice from experts, deferred experts. Here I'm saying, you know, here I'm contradicting everything I live by.

So it was just an eye-opening book for me. It's a big, fat book, and it looks weighty, but it's actually a very easy read, surprisingly enough. I learned a lot. One of the things we have to think about is what happened in Afghanistan, because it was Janice, you know, a major effort of Canadian, you know, defense and foreign affairs policy for almost two days. decades. And we share with our NATO allies, with our Western allies, a bit of a reckoning. We've talked about this on the program before, a need for some real introspection here, which I feel hasn't frankly happened. I think it's been a bit more acute in the United States because of the shimbalic withdrawal of U.S. troops and the political debate around that. But, Janice, would you

say it was fair in Canada that so far we've kind of elided this debate? And, and that's a bit of, And if so, why? Yep, for sure. And, you know, Richard, I wrote that book that actually took apart Canadian decision making on Afghanistan. And we had all the same problems. You know, it's in the book, but I'll say it a little more graphically. Prime Minister Paul Martin, new to the file, as they say, very do. Ruby is very skeptical.

And a new chief of the defense staff, General Rick Hillier, charismatic, comes in and does a 45-minute briefing to the new prime minister. And he proves. You have to ask, and that's what led to our engagement in Kandahar, which killed more Canadian soldiers. then we had lost since the Korean War. And I think the former prime minister has wondered, look back at that and said, what happened there? But it's a very similar pattern to what Carter Malkasian describes in the book. But you're right, we haven't had the same kind of hard look back.

Where did we get it wrong? Now, one thing was different in our case, and it's interesting. A conservative prime minister comes to office, Stephen Hartford. And in many ways, more conservative than the conservatives who'd been in office before. All in on that war, all in on that war, becomes really skeptical as time goes by. And despite the briefings. of all the experts, he came to the conclusion, this was not going to work.

And unilaterally ended our involvement in Afghanistan six years before the United States. So none of it works, none of it works, the way all the public policy experts believe it should work and tell you it does work. And that's why these books are so, Interesting to me. It's really humbling for people like me. I walk away. Very humbled. It's always good to be humbled. Always good. And just a reminder to our listener, we will have these book titles in today's show notes. So don't feel you need to grab a pen and pencil right now and try to scribble them down.

Simply go to the monk member's website, your profile on your monk member's page and click through to the episode page. And it'll all be there for you. My choice for a kind of serious substantive book to dig into is Ian Morris's latest work. It's called Geography is Destiny, Britain's Place in the World, a 10,000-year history. And for regular listeners of the Monk debates, you know that we've been talking with Ian Morris over the last couple of years on Monk Dialogues, on our podcast. I think he's one of the more interesting historians out there. he writes big history. So as the title suggests, 10,000 years, this is not somebody who's looking at the history

of the spinning wheel in Belleville from 1864 to 1867. He's a trained archaeologist, a Stanford professor of classics, hails from the United Kingdom. And in this book, you can just tell his love, his passion for British history. And describing a gym, and as someone who has trained also as a geographer.

So it's a fascinating combination, as all of his books are, of geography, history, and archaeology. And in this case, as a young archaeologist, in the United Kingdom, he participated in a lot of the digs that he references in the book, going back and starting with the earliest parts of British history and moving through to try to answer the question. question that frames the entire book is why Brexit and how does Brexit fit, not in the context of the 24-hour news cycle or the rise and fall of Theresa May or David Cameron or maybe Boris Johnson,

but in the context of Britain's relationships with the continent, with world history, with world geography over 10,000 years. It's just a wonderful, beautifully written, lovely tour through yeah, some important history. It reminded me a lot of why I love history as a discipline. And he's also, Ian, you're right, is kind of Paulineh, because he's grounded in archaeology, loves history, but has this deep interest in geography. And what a great reminder, Roger, to everybody.

Geography matters. It matters where your country is in the world. we've all watched what Ukraine has suffered over these last three months. But Ukraine lives next door to Russia. And that is the driving force of its history, frankly. It's geography is really destiny. You know, for weak Canadians. We live next door in the United States in many ways.

It made us as a country, frankly. That's what shaped us as a nation. the people who left the United States and came north because they didn't want to live in the United States. And it's shaped us as a country through coming up to Canada today here in the summer. Geography really matters. So despite all, despite the next book I'm going to talk about, I really believe that geography matters. And Ian gets that so right. Yeah. And it just, it reminds you of how, British, I would almost say British civilization, because when you think of it in 10,000 years,

it really does come across as more than just a peoples and a series of nations. It is, in a sense, a civilization is shaped by repeated waves of invasion from the continent. So the Romans, the, you know, the Celtics, the, the, the, the Saxons, the, you just, it goes on and on, you know, wave after wave after wave until Britain finally establishes control over the channel and is able to kind of effectively begin to master its destiny through naval power and through the organization of its own state to a level where its self-defense becomes possible using its own people, its own economy, its own geography. And that process literally takes a couple of millennium

before Britain even gets to the moment where you could say it's kind of sovereignty is established. And it's a reminder just of how most of the world's nations, and you're right, Canada, an odd exception, have been shaped by insecurity. And that at the core, and it's fascinating because he goes into a lot of DNA analysis and how these different waves of invaders,

their DNA is reflected. in the samples that they're taking from the bodies that they're finding in bogs and burial mounds. But it reminds you that just how odd in a sense Canada's experience and identity is the vast majority of the world's nations have been shaped over centuries, and in this case, millennia, Britain, by instability, insecurity, invasion in some cases, just profound, rapid, collapse, implosion, rebuilding. It's a very dramatic portrait that he paints. Maybe that's why we're nicer in this country,

because we have not list with this constant fear of invasion. Of course, that's not true for our indigenous founders who were invaded and displaced in the most dramatic way. And that explains so much. of their experience. But for those of us who came to this country as immigrants, whether it was 400 years ago or 100 years ago or a year ago, we came here to escape insecurity.

And we're able to live, frankly, under the shelter of an American security umbrella once they gave up all five. Well, a British umbrella. and then an American one. Yep, yeah. So anyway, listeners, check it out. Geography of Destiny by Ian Morris, well worth to read. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk Members Only podcast.

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