Voices of Freedom - Interview with Lord Andrew Roberts

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Interview with Lord Andrew Roberts The state of democracy, upcoming elections, the economy and political discord are just a few of the many issues that are top of mind among Americans today. Yet, as history reminds us, these same challenges have confronted the country since its founding. Looking to history can help inform leaders, communities and citizens on how to navigate times of upheaval with greater confidence and even optimism. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Andrew Roberts, a distinguished scholar who has brought some of history’s most prominent figures to life through his many books, publications, and his podcast. Roberts shares some of the lessons learned from the past and how to apply them to today’s environment. Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a visiting professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College in London and the Lehrman Institute Lecturer at the New York Historical Society. He has written or edited 20 books and is an accomplished public speaker. Topics discussed on this episode:  How Andrew chooses his topics and his approach to writing about them His latest book, co-authored with General David Petraeus, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine Vladmir Putin and how history may view him Andrew’s take on the level of engagement America should have in current conflicts Key differences in how war is waged today versus during World War II Universal characteristics of good leaders Andrew’s service in the House of Lords How the study of history has changed his life In 2022, Andrew was elevated to the United Kingdom’s House of Lords as Baron Roberts of Belgravia. He is also a 2016 Bradley Prize winner.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. History reveals important lessons from the past and often provides the context necessary to make informed decisions. It's also the foundation for understanding global and domestic affairs, providing insights in how to achieve stability and advance freedom. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Andrew Roberts, a distinguished scholar who brings history to life

through his many books and a podcast about statecraft, diplomacy, and world leaders. Andrew's the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King's College in London, and the Lerman Institute lecturer at the New York Historical Society. In 2022, and this is really exciting, Andrew was elevated to the UK's House of Lords as Baron Roberts of Belgravia. He's also a 2016 Bradley Prize winner. Andrew, it is wonderful to spend some time with you. Thank you very much indeed. It's very kind of you to have me on the show, and thanks for all those kind words.

Absolutely. Let's jump right in. Andrew, you're a truly prolific author. You've written 20 books, most or all of which have received high honors and praise from world leaders. You're a subject matter expert on historical figures, on statecraft, leadership, and much, much more. Talk to us a little bit about your process for writing a book. Do you go where your curiosity takes you, or do you have a much more methodical approach where you have a pretty good idea idea what you're going to write about and how you'll write it. In other words, do you know before you start writing where it's going to go? No, you don't. You shouldn't know certainly where it's going to go, because if so, you're not being led by the evidence. And the key thing of being an historian is, of course, you are led

by the evidence you uncover. I don't really know which book I'm going to be writing in five years time. I always know which book I'm going to be writing next, but I don't have a sort of grand plan. I always wanted to write biographies of Napoleon and Churchill. But beyond that, I didn't really have an idea. And I actually thought I was going to write both of those books in my 70s as the sort of capstone of a writing career. But it was pointed out to me by my publisher and indeed my wife, that it would be much more profitable to write both of those books whilst I was at the peak of my abilities, at least, but also when they'd be able to get down to selling them. So it wasn't going to be the capstone.

It was going to happen midway through my career. And I'm very pleased that they were absolutely right. Of course, I should have written both of those when I could. The very process of visiting 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields was something that was not, it was much easier to do in my 50s, I think, than it would have been in my 70s for some of them. Other people tend to come up with ideas for my books, including a gentleman I sat next to at a lunch in Wisconsin a few years ago, who came up with the idea for George III. My wife, my parents on one occasion, my publishers,

my literary agents, they come up with ideas and some of them really work. I, for some reason, have only come up with two, but luckily those were Napoleon and Churchill, which are the best selling and most translated of my books. So I don't really have a process. Of course, I have a process when I sit down and write a history book, which is to put chronology above all. I think the reader wants to know what happened next. All the way through history, people have wanted to know what happened next. And I don't believe in thematic history, where you suddenly go all around somebody's life and you don't put things into context. Context is all, narrative is all, chronology is all. So what I do is to set out a timeline of, if I'm doing an individual biography, birth to death, and I slot in various thematic files into the key moments of the life when and where the reader needs to know

it. You shouldn't tell the reader too much too early. And obviously, you shouldn't tell the reader anything too late for the narrative. So I pretty much do the same kind of thing for each of my books, but I've no idea what I'm going to be writing in sort of five or 10 years' time. Fascinating. Let's talk a little bit about your current book, Conflict, the Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, which you co-authored with General David Petraeus. Two-part question. How did that partnership with General Petraeus come about? And secondly, you've studied generals, you've written extensively about generals. What was it like now to actually co-author with an actual general? Well, it was shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I got on to David, who I knew

pretty well. And I said, look, there are going to be lots of political books and geopolitical books about the invasion of Ukraine. Why don't we write a purely military book, placing the invasion in its historical context as a military operation, and also having a look at the future of war, telling us what this war is going to tell us about wars in the future. Because we both agreed that it was going to be, and as it's turned out to be, a real scene-shifting kind of paradigm-changing war. And so we got a publisher, and the publishers, not unnaturally, said, how are you going to divvy up the chapters? And I said, well, David's going to write about all the countries he's invaded.

And I'll do the rest. He also did the Vietnam chapter, which obviously is a tremendously important chapter in the whole concept of the evolution of wars post-1945. To answer your second part, essentially, what's it like writing with a general? Well, it's the first time I've ever co-authored a book. Generals tend to be strong-willed. And you don't say. You don't say. Yes, absolutely. say you don't say uh yes absolutely well david you know he's commanded uh 160 out to 190 000

men in two um in two theaters uh and um and so you know he's not a man to uh to take on lightly the good thing is that he's also an intellectual he He's a soldier scholar, really. And he got a PhD at Princeton in international relations. He's written a lot, obviously, including the counterinsurgency manual of 2006. So this is a guy who cares about thoughts and about ideas and about how they're expressed. And so what we did essentially was to write our own chapters and then send them backwards and forwards in literally thousands of emails between each other. So for me, it was a profoundly intellectually stimulating experience because I've written about generals in Churchill and Napoleon and any number of history books that I've written. Actually, to work with one and to be able to

sort of get into the mindset of one was a really useful experience for me, I think, for future books that I write. Really interesting again. I mean, let's stay on this theme. So, whether it's Napoleon or Churchill or King George III, you're really good at demystifying some of history's leading figures and really debunking misconceptions about them. Your current book takes a hard look at Vladimir Putin. Did you discover anything about him that runs contrary to public opinion? I don't think that many people know that Vladimir Putin is a historian monke. He'd love to have been a historian, I think, if he wasn't a dictator. He likes thinking about history, talking about history. He wrote just before the July of 2021, he wrote a 6,500 word essay entitled On the Historical Unity of the Ukrainian and Russian Peoples, trying to argue I've taught history in the past. I taught a semester in Cornell

a few years ago. That essay would have got a C minus from me. It really was, it wasn't up to scratch as a history essay. But as a political essay, it was an invaluable mind, an insight into the mind of the dictator, because on no fewer than 17 occasions, he mentions Lithuania in this essay. So for me, it's pretty clear that if he were allowed to win in Ukraine, the Baltics might well be next and the Baltics all mulled over. I had a little experience during my time as ambassador to the Czech Republic, dealing from afar with the Putin regime. As you recall, George Bush was trying to put a missile defense system into Czech Republic and Poland. And the Russian response was organized, effective, and ultimately successful in killing that idea. American presidents forever have tried to appease Putin, and it never works.

And do you think they'll ever learn? Yes, yes, I think they've learned now. I think it's pretty clear to the West that he's an unappeasable opponent and that he has to be defeated. But you're right. I mean, we should have learned that. Certainly, we should have learned that by 2014 when he annexed Crimea and moved into Donbass. You know, that was a classic sort of red light signal, which which was not picked up effectively in the West. Related question. I mean, you and General Petraeus identify lessons that Putin should have learned from the past. What what are those lessons? Oh, well, if you're going to invade Ukraine, you don't do it on five axes with a force of 160 or so thousand trying to invade a country of 44 million.

You know, that's the first pretty obvious one. And there are many others. You know, you do need the three to one or so advantage. You've got to try to take advantage of the surprise, which you're not going to get in the attempt on Kiev. You know, that enormous long, 30 mile or so long armour convoy that he moved towards Kiev was done on one road, was held up brilliantly by the artillery fire and the drones of the Ukrainians. And so the absolute massive levels of incompetence and negligence and corruption and so on that were

exhibited by the Russian army, which we go into in some way, as you say, in Chapter 9 of this book, do show that Putin had failed to learn a lot of the most important military lessons of history, the evolution of warfare, really. Do you think he's intimately involved in directing his troops? Does he try to play general? We don't know. He's a he's I would guess from history that he's a bit like Stalin. I mean, obviously, he's like Stalin in many ways, but I would suggest that he leaves the actual minutiae to the to the generals. But he keeps a very, very firm hand on the tiller when it comes to overall strategy. That would be my guess, but I'm not going to pretend to know anything about the intimate details between him and his generals. Yes. How will history view Putin?

They'll think of him as a sort of 18th or 19th century would-be czar who was, you know, not up to understanding the 21st century military conditions, I think. That's what they'll think. Somebody who wants to make himself another Peter the Great or Catherine the Great or even Ivan the Terrible, but actually didn't work out what the innate nature of his opponent was like. Whereas all three of those people actually spend a lot of time and effort thinking about their enemy. He just wrote off President Zelensky. He had no idea that President Zelensky had within him

the wherewithal to do the exact opposite of the President of Afghanistan a few months earlier, who just jumped into his helicopter with a suitcase full of, you know, millions of US dollars and fled the country. Well, that was not the kind of person Zelensky was. And yet an awful lot of Putin's plans were based on the idea that he was going to be able to take Kiev in a matter of hours, if not days. Let's stay for one more question on a question that continues to be related to Ukraine. You're a world history scholar, you're a political leader in Britain. From your vantage point, do you believe that the United States should be more or less engaged in global conflict? And as you know, there's a debate going on about whether

or not the United States should even be engaged in Ukraine. Well, the good thing, I mean, the whole point of deterrence is that if you're fully engaged, you don't need to get involved in conflict. There are no American soldiers on the ground in Ukraine any more than there are in Gaza. And so, you know, what is needed from the United States is its extraordinary arms capacity, the attackings, for example, the long range strategic missiles, which can really make a difference, the Abraham's tanks, and so on. You have given a lot already, but the recent counteroffensive, the autumn counteroffensive that happened in the fall and the winter of last year, would have been much more successful had there been a proper and huge reinforcement by the

Americans. And also, of course, the Europeans. The Europeans now have actually given more than the Americans. But so they should. You know, they have a ridiculously low percentage of GDP that they pay. They have been bumping it up. 18 out of 31 of them now do pay the 2%. But 2%, frankly, is not enough in a world that is now dominated by a serious threat to the international rules-based order, which the United States, for historical reasons, but also in its own interests, needs to lead. The free world needs leadership from the United States. No one else can quite do

it in the way that you can. And you were the people who set up the international rules-based order with Dunbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods and the United Nations and NATO in the 1940s. And therefore, I do think that you have a profound moral responsibility to ensure that it's not just ripped up by a very, very sinister combination of Russia and China, who have publicly stated that they have no limits to their friendship, of countries like Iran and North Korea that are clearly very bad actors on the world stage. And without the United States playing a leading role, I think all of these hard-won achievements are in danger.

And also, of course, the other thing is just looking from a purely sort of financially return on investment attitude. Look, to pay the 60 billion that you've got held up in Congress at the moment is likely to actually give you some fantastic returns already. What you have paid already, about 76 billion, has won the extraordinary ability for the Ukrainians, not obviously American boots on the ground, but the Ukrainians, to destroy 3,000 Russian tanks.

Now, if you'd ever asked, it's almost their entire tank fleet that they attacked with, of course, they're rebuilding and reinforcing. But if you asked any American president whether they'd have paid 60 billion or so to destroy every Russian tank, they would have leapt at the chances, especially as 60 billion out of a two-year defense budget of yours of 1.8 trillion is a very, very small proportion. Yes. Well, let's switch gears and talk about some bigger picture questions, a couple of them. Talk to us a bit about the differences in how war was engaged during World War II and how it's waged today.

Well, technology, certainly, of course, back in 1945, when we were fighting Hitler, we didn't have to worry about the space outer outer space aspect, the cyber aspect, there was no such thing as drones, the discovery of AI and robotics is going to change warfare in the future in a way that Adolf Hitler, thankfully, had no chance of getting his hands on. Nuclear, of course, is the other great aspect, although he did see that at the very end of World War Two, of course, because that's what ended World War II. So all of these technological advances are there. You don't have the same kind of fighting with the great divisions and cause in the way that you do in some occasions, like the Gulf War, you did see that. But overall, you have a lot more sort of counterinsurgency kind of struggles post-1945 that are not state-on-state actors necessarily, or they are by proxy. And they're fought in every

kind of sort of lesser than cross-border invasions. So actually, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is relatively rare in terms of the 400 or so wars that we've seen since 1945. So yeah, everything's different. And the good thing is that overall, the West has managed to adapt. Sometimes there have been really big paradigm shifting wars like Yom Kippur in 1973. And I believe this Russo-Ukrainian war is a real paradigm-shifting one as well. And the key thing is that the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defense and so on must keep learning the lessons of conflict. It's fair to say that there's some serious questions about leadership from and in the United States, particularly as we head into an election year. We're already well into it. This will be a long, long process this year.

What are some universal characteristics of leaders that have been true throughout history? Good. I'm very pleased that you haven't actually asked me to wade into your actual election struggle, because as an Englishman, I wouldn't even so much as try to tiptoe into that mind. If you want to alienate 50% of your listeners immediately. That's the way to go about it in quick order. But to answer your question, you need, and I very much came away from these books on Napoleon and Churchill thinking about this, as you can imagine, you need courage.

Both moral and physical courage is an important aspect of leadership. So is foresight, the capacity to actually see what results you're going to get from what you're doing, but also the way in which your opponent is likely to move. That's a very important aspect of it. You should be a genuine leader. The opinion polls are useful, but they should not be the deciding factor on what you say and do. There's a great line of Winston Churchill's when he said that he heard that it was very important for leaders to watch the opinion polls and keep their ears to the ground. He said that he didn't

believe that the British people would look up to a politician caught in so ungainly a posture. And that's true as well. You know, you have to show genuine leadership. I think personal honesty is an important aspect of leadership. People have to know that they have in their leader somebody that they could admire on a personal level as well as on a political one. You've got to get the big ideas right. This is the absolute key thing that's the takeaway really from our book with regard to the military leadership is that you can lose wars

even if you start off with many more men controlling the cities, better equipment and so on, if you don't have the right kind of big ideas about the nature of the struggle that you're engaged in so i think that also it's true of military but it's also true i think of political leadership um and then finally and you're going to say i would say this wouldn't tie but it's important i think that these um that that modern day leaders should have studied history or should continue to study history in the way that they do. I was tremendously impressed when I learned that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had a sort of history reading competition when Bush was in the White House.

And I had a chance to actually sort of see this for myself back in 2007. And it's true. He was a man who was very, very interested in and I think affected by the study of the past. And I think that's another important thing. I don't know whether President Biden and President Trump ever read history books, but they certainly should. A couple more questions. And we've got a little bit of time, as I said, for just a couple more. But talk to us about your service in the House of Lords. Oh, well, it's a great pleasure. I think it's just very exciting and fun.

Thank you. Yes, it is. I mean, mentioning earlier about history, the building every brick of it just exudes history as you can imagine you know it's uh yes it goes back to originally it goes back to the 12th century but the uh the modern building uh came about after the destruction of a fire of most of the palace of westminster in 1834 so you have this gorgeous fusion um gothic architecture with the most wonderful paintings and the chamber itself has this hundred foot ceiling which um i worry it would be a problem with regard to acoustics but it isn't at all because of the way that the microfes work and this gorgeous golden throne that you see on the state opening of parliament and the doorkeepers are dressed in white tie and and look magnificent they're usually ex-military

or ex-police and they're splendid fellows and ladies you so there's all the panoply and the pomp and everything and the circumstance of it. But also, you have these experts, top experts in their fields. We had a debate on Ukraine quite recently. We had a former chief of the defence staff, a former chief of the general staff, the head of MI6 and MI5, ex-heads, and GCHQ, all were speaking, you know, to try to get a sort of conference with all of those kinds of levels of people. Former First Sea Lord also spoke in that. And foreign secretaries and Chancellor of the Exchequer and so on, they each put their own point of view from their own expertise.

And you just think, there's nowhere else in the world that I could get, nowhere else in Britain at least, that I could get that kind of level of knowledge and expertise, very often also of eloquence, in debating the great issues of the day. So I'm pretty much in heaven there. I speak about once a month there. It can be a bully pulpit. We had a debate on Gaza recently, and the speech that I they only because there were so many speakers we were only allowed 60 seconds each but nonetheless my 60 second speech has now been downloaded 575 000 times wow you know to have half a million over half a million people listen to a you know important point that you're trying to say is frankly not something that I could get, maybe this podcast, Rick, but not something that you'd normally be able to get in British politics.

The House of Lords can provide you with that bully pulpit. Fascinating. Sorry, the other thing is, of course of course the people there as well as these great experts and serious uh substantial figures you also uh i don't know how much longer this is going to last should the labour party win the next election you have the hereditary element of the house of lords who because they um are only there because of who their fathers and grandfathers in some cases their great great great great great great great great great and grandfathers, in some cases, their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers were, they put in much more effort, in fact, than the life periods such as me.

They are the people who are on the front benches very often. They're the people who have a proportionately much larger place in the select committees and all the important committee work that gets done. So you are rubbing shoulders with the Duke of Wellington or the Duke of Somerset or whoever, the Earl of Leicester, whose families are part and parcel of British history. So you can imagine, for me, that's a very exciting aspect of it as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. Last question.

You have a podcast that's called Secrets of Statecraft, which explores the effect that history has had on public figures, including historians. And the title is taken from Churchill's reply to a young American who asked for some life advice. And Churchill replied, study history for therein lie all the secrets of statecraft. So let's turn the table a little bit, Andrew, and ask the question of you. What impact has the study of history had on you?

It's completely changed my life, completely changed my life completely changed my life um i can't um remember a time when history hasn't been important to me so uh it has my father read history at oxford we talked about history when i was growing up you know he'd take take me around castles and so on and battlefields. And so my late father was a tremendous influence, as you can imagine, but so were certain teachers. There's a man called Christopher Perry at my prep school who was a truly inspirational history teacher. And so all of my life, it's been an important part. But at Cambridge in particular, when I went to Cambridge University, the intellectual stimulation I got there from my from my doms, including famous ones like Norman Stone and Maurice Cowling, were really life changing. You know, they made me recognize that history is a central part, as Churchill was saying, in learning about the world. And it's what turned me change, but also a very optimistic one, because it's when you look at the past that you see how human beings have again and again

got over through the invention of technology or through different parts of the ingenious human condition and got over the problems that they've faced. And so I'm a rational optimist because of history. And I'm also an Atlanticist because of history. One of the reasons I love America is because I know that together the English-speaking peoples, including, of course, the Canadians and New Zealanders, Australians, and so on,

have been able to carry the torture freedom forward. So that's also, history's also made me an Atlanticist. My wife would say that it's also made me the most terrible pedant, because she won't go and watch history movies with me at all. You know, the recent Napoleon movie that had so many factual errors in it. All I do is I sort of sit there and go, tusk, tusk, and complaining endlessly about that. So there are downsides as well as upsides, Rick. But overall, I would say

that the upsides have far outweighed the downsides. Very well said. Lord Andrew Roberts, thanks so much for your incredible contributions to a free society. It is always just a great pleasure to spend some time with you. If I can just add also how proud I am to be a Bradley Prize winner and how proud I am also to be connected to an organization which has done so much for freedom and liberty in America and because of America throughout the world. Thank you very much. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom.

Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. Thank you.