TRANSCRIPT: The Three Historians: Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Andrew Roberts

And they didn’t want a preliminary version of that right on top of the Revolutionary War. They were human. They weren’t God.

NIALL FERGUSON: So it’s worth adding. Yes. That the abolitionist movement’s origins were in fact like the Industrial Revolution in Britain and it really emanated from the evangelical movement, religious movement and that’s the real origin of abolitionism, which came relatively later to the United States.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I’ll just make one point. In antiquity, remember, slavery was not based on race. It was based on the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time if your city was taken or at birth. But Academus was a famous rhetorician. He said somewhere around 370, “God made no man a slave.” That was a very, it was a reputation of the Aristotelian idea that slavery is wrong. Yeah.

Aristotle said slavery was wrong only because the wrong people were being enslaved sometimes. He tried to link it with a genetic inferiority of natural slaves and people in the antiquity, they didn’t eliminate it because it was an equal opportunity oppressor.

ANDREW ROBERTS: Sorry, can I also add something else that Niall just mentioned that I think is very important about religion is that actually religion played a huge part in the American Revolution. The low church, the evangelicals, the people who genuinely feared that Catholicism was going to be imposed on America because of the Quebec Act of 1774 and the fear that George III was a sort of crypto-Catholic. That conspiracy theory was incredibly widespread in the colonies in 1775, 1776.

PETER ROBINSON: Andrew, can I get you, in your biography of George III, it is quite clear that you’re an Englishman who’s still a little sore about the American Revolution. Can I get you, is this a fair summary of what the three of you have been saying? That if it didn’t eliminate slavery, the Declaration of Independence at least lit a fuse that went over a number of decades, maybe too many decades, but it burned directly to the Civil War and exploded at that point. Is that fair? Far from enshrining slavery, it began, it set in motion what would ultimately destroy the institution. Fair?

ANDREW ROBERTS: Yes. Of those 28 articles, clauses, of course, most of them I think don’t hold water intellectually. They were going to impose one that mentioned slavery. It was cut out in the discussions beforehand, but as Victor says, those opening lines are in themselves a time bomb. “All men are created equal.”

PETER ROBINSON: Well, how can you possibly, in that case, have slavery in the long term?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We should remember it was never a blood and soil country. There was never, the logic of the Declaration would ensure that the people who eventually became Americans would not necessarily look like, in a superficial sense, the founders. They knew that from the beginning, that people were going to come to this country and they were not going to come from the British Isles. They were going to come from Europe and then perhaps Asia, but there was nothing in the Constitution that mentions black or white in racial terms. It was slavery, but not racial. And that was deliberate.

NIALL FERGUSON: The biggest problem with the 1619 Project, though, is that it misses the fact that slavery was almost ubiquitous in the world of the 18th century. And it was not something unique to white settlers from Western Europe. In fact, slavery was thriving within Africa, in the Arab world. And the interesting thing about British expansion, the British Empire, which ultimately produces the United States, is that its least original feature is slavery. The least interesting thing about British expansion into the Americas is slavery.

And the most interesting thing is the way in which institutions of law and governance evolve in the colonies that ultimately produce the American Revolution. That’s what’s important. And to write the history of the United States as if its origins lie in slavery is a gross distortion precisely for that reason. It’s the least interesting thing, not the most interesting thing about American history.

ANDREW ROBERTS: Thank you, John. It was all Churchill’s fault.

How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe

PETER ROBINSON: Last September, Tucker Carlson interviewed the podcaster, Darryl Cooper, on the Tucker Carlson Show. Carlson introduced Cooper, I’m quoted Carlson, as, quote, “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”

Take that, handsome. More than 30 million people appear to have listened to this interview. Cooper argued that the Second World War was not the fault of Adolf Hitler, but of Winston Churchill. He really, truly did. The Cooper interview still appears on Tucker Carlson’s website under the headline, “How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.” Darryl Cooper explaining himself on X, quote, “my contention is not that the Third Reich was peaceful,” are you reassured? “Or that Germany did not kill Jews. My contention is that the war was not inevitable, that, in fact, almost no one but Churchill’s faction wanted it, and that the atrocities could not have happened in the absence of a world war.”

Darryl Cooper to Tucker Carlson, quote, “Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War,” close, quote. Where to begin?

ANDREW ROBERTS: Exactly. Where do you start on that? And actually, it’s very much what I said earlier about the 1619 project. You’ve got to just go back to the original facts. The war broke out because Hitler invaded Poland, and in the April of 1939, five months previously, the British government, which Churchill wasn’t in at the time, of course, by the way, gave a guarantee to Poland that it would go to war if Germany invaded it. So Churchill can’t be blamed for that.

He certainly can’t also be blamed later for not making peace, because he wasn’t in the government until September 1939, he wasn’t prime minister until May 1940, by which time Hitler had invaded Holland and Belgium, and shortly later was going to invade France as well. So, you know, just the sheer chronology, the dates do not fit this insane thesis.

PETER ROBINSON: Victor, on October 6, 1939, so now we’re a month and six days after Hitler invades Poland, Hitler gives a speech offering peace to Britain and France if they would accept Germany’s conquest of Poland. And in July 1940, after invading France, Hitler again gives a speech, this time offering peace terms to Britain. France has already been conquered. So Cooper argues that Hitler offered peace. He offered to permit the war to remain limited, and Churchill turned down the chance.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: He turned it down because he knew Hitler by this time. He had said that he was not going to militarize the Rhineland. He did. He said he was not going to commit the Anschluss. He did. He said he was not going to go into the Sudetenland. He did. He said that was his last territorial ambition in Europe. He went into Poland.

So in Churchill’s mind, and by the way, Chamberlain as well, I mean, we blame Churchill, but Chamberlain was, as Andrew pointed out, declared war on, because they all knew, all the responsible leaders in Britain knew he was a pathological liar. And he was always negotiating from a perceived position of strength. And Hitler, we should also remember that he lost almost 20,000 dead and maybe as many casualties in Poland. And when he went in there, he did take…

He took heavy German casualties in invasion. One of the reasons why he did, that was a strategic pause to recoup and get his army ready to go into Denmark and Norway. And when he did that, and he took them eventually, when he went into France, we all think the French army collapsed in six weeks, it did, but it actually fought pretty heroically and they lost another 20,000 plus dead. And they lost probably six or 700 tanks.

They lost sizable numbers of tactical aircraft. So he was strategically pausing as well to reformulate the Wehrmacht. And we had this idea that he was indomitable, but this point, when you look at the Mark I tank, the Mark II tank, they were inferior to the French Char tank. The Bf 109 was not any much better. In fact, you can make the argument that the Spitfire was a better plane. So he didn’t have overwhelming…

ANDREW ROBERTS: The peace officers were just blathered to cover the German army while it regrouped. Yeah.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, not just that, but he was willing to accept a peace on his terms and the peace would have been a permanently inferior position of Britain and maybe for a time being, allowance to keep part of its imperial possessions. But during that gestation, he thought he would be so much powerful that eventually he would deal with Britain. It was all operational. It was all something that was contingent on his own agenda, not any fairness about it.

The Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union

PETER ROBINSON: Once again, Darryl Cooper, this is for you, Niall. “The Nazis launched a war,” I’m quoting Darryl Cooper, “the Nazis launched a war where they were completely unprepared. Millions of prisoners of war, of local prisoners and so forth, that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there,” close quote.

NIALL FERGUSON: Oh, and it happens to the best of us. You invade the Soviet Union and you just find all these prisoners and how do you feed them? And there’s no Trader Joe’s. Well, this is the kind of imbecile level of argument that I’m almost impatient to have to engage with because it’s an absolute fantasy.

The reality is that the planned invasion of the Soviet Union included orders to carry out executions, first of commissars, that’s to say communist officials within the Red Army, and pretty quickly the orders extended to include Jews in the occupied territories as well as prisoners of war. These documents exist. An Oxford undergraduate who took the special subject with me in the 1990s would know about those documents. Why are we wasting our time talking about the ravings of somebody who clearly has done no serious research, not even at the undergraduate level on the history of the Second World War?

I find it really frustrating that we’re even having to have this discussion about somebody who clearly is an ignoramus at best and at worst is an apologist for Nazism.

PETER ROBINSON: Remind me never to cross you, Niall. All right, boys. Can I just say, of course, you called him a historian, at least you quoted Tucker Carson.

ANDREW ROBERTS: He has written one book. What was it about? Twitter.

PETER ROBINSON: Twitter.

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

PETER ROBINSON: Just a podcaster.

ANDREW ROBERTS: Excuse me.

PETER ROBINSON: Cut a little close to the quick. You’re a broadcaster. Thank you. Thank you.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank you. Some of the Reich ministers wrote out a hunger plan, and it was deliberate that the idea was that when they went into Russia, they were going to starve people the first winter. Even General Halder, who was, you know, he wasn’t hanged at Nuremberg.

ANDREW ROBERTS: The humane one.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, he was the head of Wehrmacht, chief of staff. He wasn’t hanged at Nuremberg. He was considered the more reasonable of the Nazis. He wasn’t, you know, he did cut a deal after the war. But he said that it’s going to be inevitable that we’re going to have to starve these people, not just because we’re unorganized, but because we want to get rid of the Red Army, A, and we want to take the food of the Ukraine and ship it back to Germany.

ANDREW ROBERTS: And they shot the 14,000 Polish officers at Katyn as well, which proves exactly that.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: 1940.

ANDREW ROBERTS: 1940.

The End of the Cold War

PETER ROBINSON: All right. So, OK. On to, we advance decades now, a few decades now, the Cold War. Max Boot on the end of the Cold War, quote, “one of the biggest myths is that Reagan had a plan to bring down the evil empire and that it was his pressure that led to US victory in the Cold War. In reality,” pay attention, this is reality. “In reality, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were the work of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev ended the Cold War and Reagan had nothing to do with it.” Victor?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, that’s a perverse interpretation of what happened. Gorbachev didn’t do the perestroika and glasnost because he wanted to weaken the Soviet Union. He wanted to reform it, he thought, and make it more powerful. And it turned out to be something that once he unleashed the spirits slightly of free market capitalism and freedom, it took a life of its own and weakened the Soviet Union.

But why did he want to reform it in the first place? Because his central planners had come to him and said, the United States technologically, economically is so far ahead of us that the Cold War mentality will not work. And why was it so far ahead of us? Because Reagan had reversed much of the Carter doctrine, and not the doctrine officially, but he had rearmed, he’d increased the Navy to 600 ships. He talked about whether it was fantasy or not, it didn’t matter, the Soviets took him literally about Star Wars, that he was going to build this anti-ballistic missile system that was so sophisticated, it was beyond technology available to the Russians.

So in conclusion, they realized that the Cold War was going to be lost by a new dynamic kind of Renaissance America that was determined to win it, you know, Reagan said, “we win, they lose.” That was his definition of the Cold War. And so he tried to reform Russia either to appease the United States, but more likely to improve its competitiveness. And once you start to tamper with communism and give people a taste of entrepreneurship, even a tiny one, and freedom, that takes a logic of its own.

PETER ROBINSON: So it is, it is, strictly speaking, accurate to say that it was Gorbachev who cried uncle, but it was after Reagan in the United States had slammed him against the wall. Is that crude, but fair?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, I think so. I mean, that was the purpose Reagan said that. People hated Reagan in 1980, because he said that he was going to win the Cold War and Carter and people said, that’s not possible. That’ll lead to World War Two. He’ll put pushing, he’ll put pushing missiles in Germany, we’ll have Armageddon.

The Origins of the Cold War

PETER ROBINSON: From Max Butte on the end of the Cold War to William Appleman Williams on the way it began. Now, this is an old text. The tragedy of American diplomacy goes back six decades. But do you know that it is still taught in universities across the country? I’m quoting William Appleman Williams, quote, “Stalin’s effort to solve Russia’s problem of security and recovery, short of widespread conflict, short of widespread conflict with the United States was not matched by American leaders. The Americans proceeded rapidly and with a minimum of debate to a series of actions, which closed the door to any result. But the Cold War close,” quote, the Cold War was our fault, not Stalin’s. Niall?

NIALL FERGUSON: It’s almost quaint to hear these arguments in 2024. Well, I mean, there have been so many subsequent publications based, not least on the Soviet archives that show the very reverse to have been true. Interestingly, the United States was quite inclined after 1945 to try to maintain the wartime relationship with Uncle Joe, who was given quite a positive profile in the American media.

The American response to Winston Churchill’s observation that an iron curtain was being drawn across Europe was in fact quite negative. The New York Times gave it a very bad press. It really wasn’t until 1950 when Stalin authorized the invasion of South Korea that most Americans realized that they faced a new adversary, a new and aggressive adversary that also had ambitions in the Middle East as well, of course, as in Europe. I find it kind of fantastic that anybody ever believed this stuff.

It was excusable before the Soviet archives were accessible, but everything that’s become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union confirms how aggressive Stalin was and how ready he was to risk another world war in pursuit of Soviet expansion. John Gaddis’s work just to give a single American historian has exploded all this. And the recent work of someone like Sergey Radchenko again completely destroys the notion that the United States somehow was the aggressor in the Cold War. Containment was the containment of the Soviet Union’s expansionist tendencies. And that word was adopted as really the leitmotif of American foreign policy after George Kennan coined it for a very good reason.

ANDREW ROBERTS: It started right from 1945 onwards. By 1946, with obviously the Red Army in control of Eastern Europe, you have bishops being arrested in Hungary and opposition leaders being arrested, of course, in 1947. Niall’s totally right.

When Churchill made the Iron Curtain speech in the March of 1946, he was denounced in both Congress and Parliament. There were lots of letters written to the press. There were the Truman administration. People refused to officially refused to go to receptions of Churchill in New York City and so on.

But we have in Stalin’s own handwriting orders for the Berlin airlift, for example, in 1949, a classic example of attempting to squeeze Berlin, the Berlin blockade, sorry, the Berlin blockade. And the airlift was our response, apologies. And the Berlin blockade, which led to the Berlin airlift. But the orders for it are in Stalin’s handwriting.

It’s difficult to know what more people can want. But the idea that this is taught in American schools and universities, that’s the worrying thing, I think, rather than the argument, which is all Soviet talking point.

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

ANDREW ROBERTS: We were lucky that in a way that he wasn’t Ceausescu, you know, somebody who was going to fight to the end. But the fact is that he had been so completely and brilliantly outmaneuvered by Reagan meant that he had little choice.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I would just add that it’s kind of ironic that Stalin kept every word that he, every pact he made with the Axis. He had a non-aggression pact that he honored to the letter Hitler attacked him. He had a non-aggression pact in April of 1941 with the Japanese to the extent that we were sending Liberty ships through the Pacific to Russia and the Japanese could have sunk them.

They wouldn’t touch them because of that. And he only broke that the last month of the war. He broke every word and agreement with the people who helped him. Britain and the United States supplied 20 to 25 percent of his wherewithal in World War II.

He broke every agreement at Yalta and Potsdam that the Eastern European occupied countries and the former Axis would have democratic elections. Worse, the deal was that he had made this pact under the Molotov-Ribbentrop August 23rd Agreement 1939 to divide up Poland. So now he’s an ally of the Allies after he’s been attacked by his former partner and it costs him, they say, well, we’re going to restore Poland and of course you’re going to give back, Hitler is gone, so we’re going to give back Poland what he stole, Germany, but you’re going to give back what you stole. And Stalin basically said how many divisions does the Pope have, meaning we’re going to take Roman Catholic and Polish Poland and we’re going to keep it in Ukraine, which is Western Ukraine today and parts of Belarus.

So he never gave it back. And he said get it from Prussia, so 13 million Germans, not that anybody had sympathy for them after what Germany had done, but 13 million people walked back westward, 2 million starved to death and that became the land that was compensated most part from what he would never give back after stealing it.

The Importance of History

PETER ROBINSON: Gentlemen, the meaning of your work, the meaning of history as a discipline, Niall has expressed frustration in which I’m sure the two of you shared that some of these arguments are just so puerile, so utterly unsupported by any evidence that it’s maddening that somebody like me would ask professional historians to respond to them. All right, let me quote Ecclesiastes, this is a mood, it’s nothing else, “nothing is new under the sun. There is no remembrance of men of old nor of those to come. Will there be any remembrance among those who come after them?” It’s all just pointless anyway.

Now there’s that argument or at least that mood, I’m sure we’ve all at least felt the mood. But then the three of you, I don’t know, 60 important works, 50, 60 really important serious works among the three of you. You have, I don’t know that I’ve ever read any one of you saying it this way, but you have it seems to me dedicated your lives to the proposition that it does matter. And in particular that it matters to democracy.

You are writing, all three of you, for ordinary educated laymen. You are not professional historians writing monographs for other professional historians. Every one of you, I think, takes it as a kind of implicit duty to explain, to tell the story to your fellow British subjects, to your fellow Americans. And I would like to know why. What difference does it make? How can history help us?

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, we’re the anti-amnesia shock troops. Our job is to fight against the human propensity to forget. The United States is extremely bad at remembering. It has a kind of permanent state of amnesia. It’s not even clear that one administration is aware of what the previous one did. And so the historian’s role is to try to supply that collective memory that we would otherwise lack.

It was, when I was an Oxford undergraduate, fashionable to say that one could learn nothing from history except how to make new mistakes. That was AJP Taylor’s line. I disagree with that. I think we must, we have an absolutely clear obligation to try to learn from history. And that’s what motivates me every day.

It’s sometimes rather tedious work. I’m not sure if I’d understood at the start how much history would just involve plowing through the letters of dead people, but I necessarily would have spent 40 or 50 years doing it. But it is a very necessary task. And all the more necessary when charlatans like Daryl Cooper, legitimized by Tucker Carlson, tell outright lies about the past to the American public and indeed to the world.

ANDREW ROBERTS: And they’re being downloaded by 33 million people. Because unless you do fight back on every front, who’s to say whether these absurd and very dangerous conspiracy theories won’t take root? And so I think Neil’s right, there is a, and one doesn’t want to sound too pious about it. It’s a wonderful job being a historian. It’s great fun and everything. But there is a moral aspect to it all, I think.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think also every historian, whether they’re overt about it, assumes that human nature stays constant across time and space. And it’s sort of the tragic view of history versus the therapeutic. In other words, in our modern age, we believe if you give people enough power, enough technology, enough improvement in the material conditions, they can alter, make a new man like the Soviet Union. And therefore, history is not necessary because the new man reacts so differently from the past man that it would be useless.

But we go back, I think all historians go back to the seminal text of Thucydides when he says, “this history will be of value in time to come. Not that the wars will be the same, but human nature is on changing and the same principles and the same ideas and agendas will reappear in different contexts.”

And that, I think, is what all historians believe, that human nature, even though it’s technology and wealth and all different types of environments and landscapes change and it’s almost unrecognizable, that we’re still the same people as the Greeks or the Romans and our appetites are what drives us. And so if you can capture a war of the past or a diplomatic crisis or a presidency or what Andrew does, a great biography, then that is going to be, we don’t say that we’re going to be didactic or utilitarian, but that’s an implicit idea that we’re going to help people understand the present by elucidating the past because we’re the same people.

Applied History

PETER ROBINSON: Okay. Neil, you’re developing this concept of applied history. So it cannot be the case, I think, that Cold War history can be applied in some one-to-one mechanical way to this new Cold War that we seem to be taking shape with China. Just explain, how tight is this concept of applied history? It seems to me you have to be a professional. It implies an enormous amount of reading to develop the judgment, almost the taste, to say what applies from the past to the present and what the proper lessons are to be drawn.

NIALL FERGUSON: Yes, but what else do we have to go on? There isn’t a wonderful political scientific model that will tell you how great power conflicts will turn out if you just feed in enough data. Those don’t work. So what we’ve got to go on is history. That is the only thing we really can work with when we’re trying to understand a problem like the current United States-China relationship.

I’ve argued for the last six years that it’s like a second Cold War. That’s not to say it’s the same as the first Cold War, but World War II wasn’t the same as World War I. The nomenclature still made sense because they’re recognizably similar phenomena.

And I use the term applied history to distinguish it from the study of history, which is really antiquarian, that studies the past because it’s interesting, because it’s simply absorbing. There are plenty of academics who would tell you there’s no other reason for studying the past other than its intrinsic interest, which it does possess. But I think that’s actually too easy. What we’re really engaged in is trying to learn from that past experience.

I really agree with something Victor just said. It’s amazing that we can understand the people of Thucydides’s time, just as it’s amazing that we can understand Shakespeare’s characters. There are certain things that do not change over the millennia, love, the ambition that leads to power. These things are constant.

So we can understand the ancients, we can understand the people of the Renaissance. But what does change is technology. What does change is our scientific knowledge. There were no nuclear weapons in the time of Thucydides.

And the historian’s task is therefore to solve simultaneously for that which is perennial in human nature that we must only and can only understand by looking at the experiences of the past. And that which is novel, that which distinguishes our age from the past and applied history is that juxtaposition. The great Oxford philosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood, said that what history consists of is the reconstruction or reconstitution of past thought and then its juxtaposition against the thought of our time to illuminate our time. That seems to me the essence of applied history.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: You know, I can give you a real example and the real illustration, the real world of what Niall just said and what we’ve been discussing. When I was six years old, I live on a farm and my grandfather said, “someday you’re going to run this farm. You have to take care of it and keep it.” And I said, “I don’t know anything about farming.” I was six or seven.

So he took me out to an electric pump, turned it on. It was 1,500 gallons a minute. And he said, “someday it will be even better.” So then we went back and he had the original pump that his grandfather had, three gallons a minute. Wow.

And I said, see? And then he said, “taste the water. Does it taste any different than the pump that you tasted 10 minutes ago that was 1,500 gallons than the water you’re pumping at three gallons?” And his point was that water is water forever, like human nature.

But the delivery system, the technology changes so radically that people get fooled. And so he was trying to tell me, farming is pretty simple. I’m not quoting Michael Bloomberg, you just drop a thing in. But he’s saying it’s basically cultivation, irrigation, thinning, harvesting.

And you can master that. The technology confuses you, but it’s the water stays the same, the taste, it’s the same essence. And that’s what human nature is. It just manifests itself different in these conditions that confuse us into thinking that human nature has changed because of the internet or TikTok or something. It hasn’t.

The State of History Writing

PETER ROBINSON: I have bad news for you. I have bad news for you. These gentlemen, all three of you, have mounted a stirring defense of the way you spend your lives. And yet we began the program, all three saying the writing of history has deteriorated. And I would also argue, this is difficult to get at statistically, but the writing of the kinds of histories that the three of you write, which is to say narrative histories that are accessible to ordinary readers, narrative histories, you’re telling stories for ordinary readers are becoming, or have become in recent decades, very unusual in the academy. Very unusual in the academy.

So I mean, I was trying to get at this, trying to come up with some statistics, extremely difficult to do, but I looked at history books that I considered really useful, good, well-written history books over the last couple of years on Amazon. And three quarters were written by historians outside the university. So here we have these across American university, in Britain as well, I confess I’m less aware of the situation in Britain, but we have these people on whom resources have been lavished across their careers, highly trained, and they’re sitting around writing monographs for each other instead of telling big, important stories for their fellow citizens. Is that correct? And why?

ANDREW ROBERTS: Because people over-specialize in the academy, and it’s better for their careers to do so. They’re going to take less risks if they write about, oh I don’t know, turnpikes in Hampshire in the turn of the 17th century, than if they’re talking about the rise and fall of great powers. And it’s all very risk-averse, they don’t care at all, of course, about sales, about actually having the people outside the academy read what they’re writing. In fact, if anything, it can be bad for your career to be popular as an historian.

And instead, you should just get into smaller and smaller ecosystems and not care at all about the public. I don’t think that’s terribly new, though. I mean Gibbon didn’t write The Decline that Followed the Roman Empire as a fellow of an Oxford college. He described his time at Oxford as the most profitless of his life.

And so there’s a long tradition of universities killing the vitality of history and the best historians, in fact, addressing the public. Robert Blake was, of course, an Oxford don, and there was a generation in the mid-20th century of Oxford and Cambridge historians who wrote brilliantly while holding down academic jobs. But I think that’s rather unusual.

The professionalization of history in the 19th century, which is rather a German-led phenomenon, produced some wonderfully unreadable, turgid stuff. I mean, I think history has always been in some tension in the sense that it wants to be an academic discipline and therefore to use arcane language. One sees that all the time in the academy, the adoption of unintelligible vocabulary. But there’s also a history that needs the public, that needs a wider readership, and that tends to produce the better books. I don’t think that’s new.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think that people are not arguing you shouldn’t have the academic training to understand source material or where sources come from or to evaluate comparative sources. But to be frank, the academic world is not one of rich practical experiences. Probably the best history that’s ever written of Greece was written by George Grotto, a British banker, a London banker. And that expertise of dealing with loans and defaults and banking was invaluable when he looked at the finance of the Athenian Empire.

And what happens, I think Andrew really hit it on the head about risk-averse. You get, we’re now into the second century of this Germanic PhD program and publication to get tenure. So you get narrower and narrower and narrower, and then you get safer and safer because you are the expert on the narrower. You spend your life and you don’t spend your life, you have no breath, just more and more depth and you can’t be refuted.

And then more, I think it’s really sad that you use a type of vocabulary and grammar and syntax that is almost like a foreign language as a cult. You’re part of a cloister, a high priesthood that the general public can understand. But within this cloister, if you master the diction of the vocabulary, then you’re considered somehow to be honored or you’re a guardian of history.

And these people are oblivious because they don’t go out in the general public enough or have to be refuted or, as Andrew said and Neil, they don’t depend on book sales for a livelihood. And the result is that they define themselves out of business. They’re all failing. The history departments are collapsing. And the reason that history is surviving are people who may have had PhDs that were valuable or masters, but they did learn the craft, but they had to survive by enlightening more people than just this cloister with a vocabulary and a syntax and a style that average people, normal people, could read and understand and appreciate.

Self-Loathing in History

PETER ROBINSON: The errors, the historical errors we’ve discussed, 1619 Project, the United States is fundamentally racist from its founding. Darrell Cooper, Churchill, not Hitler, was responsible for the war in Europe. Max Boot and William Ackleman Williams, the United States started the Cold War and the Soviets ended it. Where does all this self-loathing come from? Isn’t that the through line here?

NIALL FERGUSON: I think one of the distinguishing features of the English-speaking world has been self-criticism. And consistently, think back to the criticism of the East India Company and of British rule in the Americas by the great quakes in the late 18th century. Consistently, the people of the English-speaking world have been critical of themselves.

Now, at times, that habit becomes a pathology, and I think the hatred of America that’s a characteristic feature of the left in the United States, very like the hatred of Britain that you encounter in the UK, is no longer a healthy self-criticism. It’s a destructive, nihilistic desire to reject all the legacy of the past. And that’s the distinction that I think we need to draw.

It’s right that we should look back critically on those that we study. I wrote a history of the British Empire, which included its many blemishes, as well as its achievements. But these days, you’re not allowed to consider the achievements. You can only write about the evils. Nigel Biggar, an eminent Oxford theologian, was more or less cancelled for publishing a book that argued that there, in fact, were moral aspects to the British Empire.

So we can be critical. I think that’s part of the historian’s function, but we can’t be completely nihilistic about the past. I think part of what’s striking about the young generation and the generation of radical leftist professors today is that they actually hate the past. They regard the past as really a distillation of all that is racist and sexist and transphobic and Islamophobic.

Why is that? Because they take a completely anachronistic approach to the study of the past. They study the past and ask the question, why are these people in the past so benighted? Why are they not woke? Why haven’t they come to see the world the way I, a progressive on the Stanford campus in 2024, see the world? This is completely the wrong approach. We studied the past to try to understand what it was like to be a man of the 1770s, or, for that matter, of the first century AD. And that’s the thing that’s been lost in many modern history departments, this sense that one must study the past in its own terms rather than judge it by our 2020s terms.

ANDREW ROBERTS: I’m not certain that it’s cutting through to every part of the country, in Britain at least. It’s very much seen as a sort of elitist thing to hate Britain. Especially when you look at ordinary British people, they don’t. And so you can appeal to patriotism, politicians do it all the time, and it still works.

You still have more and more people go to visit Chartwell, for example.

PETER ROBINSON: Is that so?

ANDREW ROBERTS: Yes. And it’s seen as very much a sort of elitist thing. If you go to Oxford or Cambridge, you’re going to be taught all this anti-British stuff. And, you know, I don’t think it’s cutting through to everyone. Now, having said that, there has been, one hates it, but I’m not sure about that. But there has been a bit of a drop in patriotism.

ANDREW ROBERTS: They’ve done a recent survey saying how many people are still proud to be British. It’s well over two thirds of people who are, but it was higher in the, like, 20 years ago. So there is an aspect of it. But when you look at where it’s coming from, it always seems to come from the top and not the bottom of society.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I can tell you that the university by its structure was always utopian, because you take a group of people, and you’re the only profession really in America where after six years you give them lifetime employment with tenure. And then you give them summers off, and a 10-hour teaching load is considered onerous. So that creates a sense of utopianism. You’re kind of sheltered from economic downturn or job losses or being fired.

But in the 60s, nevertheless, that system did create kind of a classical liberal tolerance, and almost it was inductive. But during the Vietnam War and the protests in this country, and maybe in the West in general, there was, they grew their sense in the cultural evolution that it was determined that the family, that religion, that the community, that the government were all prejudiced. They were all brainwashing people into this right-wing patriarchy. And only the university was an atoll.

And so we decided in the university that we didn’t have to be inductive anymore. We could be deductive. We could be prejudicial. We could be biased, because we were surrounded by these other majority points of view, and we would be the counterpoint.

And so it was kind of an insulated arrogance that we were going to teach people from a deductive premise. We were going to, if you take a class and say climate change, you were going to just tell everybody that climate change is only one view of it. And same thing with slavery and who started that, not mention the Arab world, for example. But all of these topics would be taught in the sense that we were speaking truth to power.

And if we have to be deductive, it’s only because we’re so outnumbered. But the problem was that as they were saying that, the distance in time and distance from an idea in the faculty lounge to it was institutionalized in popular culture was very quick. So some of, all of the pathologies that we’re seeing today, in my view, whether it’s we get into the third sex or biological men and women’s sports, or some of our foreign policy ideas. They originally started in the university as utopian, idealistic, but non-proven theories.

But this institution has become so powerful, the university, and it really affects the bureaucracies and politics. And you can see it today when people say 51 experts, intelligence, say this, laptops, or 16 Nobel Prize winners. But we never say, well, maybe a person who runs a 7-Eleven and has to balance the books and inventory and security might know more about economics than a guy in a university that’s secluded, but we don’t. So the university now is not the antithesis to the government. It is the conventionality, it is the status quo, the university’s ideas, not among the people, Andrew’s right, but I mean the popular culture, Hollywood, K-12, academic, the foundations, they all mimic and echo the university’s ideas.

NIALL FERGUSON: And I think social media has sped this up enormously. The kind of transmission belt, the means that can go out and go viral, even though intellectually they have nothing to back them up apart from a joke or a sort of play on words. That is something that we didn’t have to deal with in the immediate post-war period or any time up, you know, till the 2000s. And that’s had a deleterious effect.

Where Do We Stand in History?

PETER ROBINSON: Gentlemen, let me, last question for conversation. Not that you need to answer this one in one word, but give me a moment to set this up because it’s a question of applied history, at least as I understand applied history. And the question is, simply put, where do we stand? How do we locate ourselves in history right now?

All right, another way of putting it is, how do we go from Reagan and Thatcher to Biden and Starmer without supposing that that indicates an irreversible decline of some kind? Listen to a few statistics and then a couple of quotations. Here are the statistics.

Irreversible debt in this country. Under Reagan, 30% of GDP, today, 120% of GDP. Reagan 600 and ship Navy is now down to 219, which gives us a smaller Navy than that of China. Raphael Cohen of RAND writing last year, “for years, American defense strategy argued for a two-war construct.”

This is the argument that our forces should be arrayed such as to be able to fight two major conflicts in two separate theaters at once. Over the last decade, though, as America’s military shrank in size and its adversaries grew increasingly capable, the United States backed off such aspirations. It seems to be now the idea that we ought to be able to fight about 1.5, one major conflict in one theater and a holding action in a separate theater. However, Ukraine and the Baltic, the Middle East and the Eastern Med, Taiwan and the Pacific, that’s three. And they’re all extremely dangerous. I think you’d agree.

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that the great power had won a war as the United States won the Cold War and then lapsed into a kind of complacency. The peace dividend, the idea that the end of history had arrived, that there could be globalization and everybody would be a winner. These ideas in the 1990s and the 2000s were intoxicating and they created a political consensus within the elite that endured right down to about 2016.

And I think it was only really then that the backlash against that post Cold War era happens. It’s taken time to realize that we’re now in as dangerous a situation as we were in the 50s and 60s. But we now face in China an adversary that is in many ways economically and technologically superior to the Soviet Union.

And China has formed a kind of axis with the Russians, the Iranians and the North Koreans that may pose as big a threat as the axis of the later 1930s. So best case, it’s a Cold War, worst case, we’re on a path to World War III. That’s how I think about it.

PETER ROBINSON: So to me, I could be wrong about this and of course, you should disagree with the premise. I’m going to put one last question. To me, the deep question, the sort of substrate question of the current election is whether we’re doomed or whether, empires do end, all human constructs do come to an end. And yet in the West, we often see renewals, sudden renewals sometimes, renewals that nobody could have expected. The 1970s seemed dire in this country and then in the 1980s, we have a renewal.

Two quotations and then I’d just like your own sense of where we stand and how you think about it as a historian. Here’s one. Malcolm Muggeridge, the late British journalist, he’s writing in 1980 after the bleak decade of the 70s.

“I am personally convinced that our Western civilization is approaching its end. I think of St. Augustine when in AD 410, the news was brought to him in Carthage that Rome had been sacked by the barbarians. As he explained to his flock, all earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them.”

William F. Buckley, Jr., at what seemed another low moment in the Cold War, this is 1960, another dangerous moment in the Cold War, “Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however insisted, the ultimate resources which are moral in nature. We take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. And in the end, we will bury him.” Doom or some sense of renewal?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Niall mentioned critical self-criticism. We have a critical consciousness, it goes back to the Greeks, that we are able to pick apart, sometimes, as Niall said, it gets pathological, self-destructive, but it does give you the opportunity to, in a disinterested and empirical fashion, see what’s wrong with your society and count on the goodwill and intelligence of people.

In 1939, the American army was smaller than Portugal’s, and by 1945, we were creating more GDP than all of the belligerents in the war combined, combined. That was just five years, they said it was impossible. If you would, and there’s no greater pessimist than I am about where we are right now, but it seems to me, if I had said, or you had said, or anybody at this table, three years from now, let’s say in 2021, the United States, albeit via Elon Musk, is going to launch a rocket, it is the most powerful rocket in the history of the world, and it’s going to come back and a mechanical arm is going to catch it, and on the first try, people would say that’s impossible.

You mentioned this election. I think the election’s boiling down to one side is used to lecturing people about the shame they should feel, and that you were flawed at the beginning, you got worse during your maturity, and now you’re completely pathological, versus the other side that is optimistic, and they basically have something along the lines of, “we don’t have to be perfect to be good, we’re better than the alternative, and that’s good enough.”

And we are self-correcting, and we’re going to enter another cycle of improvement. And you know, you can make fun of it, “make America great,” but that was borrowed from Ronald Reagan, and he did do it.

PETER ROBINSON: So you position yourself, Victor, in the pessimistic wing of the optimistic party, and standard doom, or some possibility of renewal?

ANDREW ROBERTS: No, there are always some good things to look out for. The fact that we’re democracies, and that we are innovative, obviously, sets us in a much better position than these totalitarian powers. Even China, even with its 1.4 billion people.

PETER ROBINSON: Yes, absolutely.

ANDREW ROBERTS: Because of the free exchange of ideas in the West actually works better, capitalism works better than the National Socialist China. That’s what Neil’s actually right about with the concept of the axis of ill will.

But actually, overall, in the future, people do, I mean, now, already, they do prefer the concept of democracy than being pushed around, and bossed around, and spied on, and so on. And when one looks at the axis of ill will, yes, there are four or five of them, if you include Belarus and Venezuela, and so on. But actually, look at all the countries that cleave towards America, that much prefer America, that want to be friendly with America. And that is because America is an open, and great, and democratic society, which has got a belief in the future.

So I am optimistic we can get over this one, but we do need leadership. Sometimes America can go without leadership. You didn’t have a great leader, frankly, from the assassination of Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt. And that’s what, 40 plus years, when you became the richest power in the world.

So maybe you don’t need leaders, but when they come along, people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as we mentioned, Winston Churchill, of course, in 1940, then we’ve got to grab them and hang on to them.

PETER ROBINSON: Last word, Neil.

NIALL FERGUSON: I wrote a book called Doom.

PETER ROBINSON: You did. It was a catastrophe.

NIALL FERGUSON: But the point of that book was that we’re not doomed, we’re very attracted to the idea that everything is going to hell in a handcart, the world’s going to end in 12 years, or whatever it is. That’s actually not the problem. The problem is just that we have to manage disasters, and most of them are to some extent man-made.

Think of COVID, which, of course, turned out to originate in a laboratory in Wuhan, within a totalitarian state. I don’t think there’s a cycle of history. I don’t think there’s an arc of history. I don’t think there’s a law that says the United States was bound to rise, which it zenithed, and now it’s declining.

I don’t think there’s anything in history to support that. Actually, empires have ups and downs. They can last 1,000 years, they can last just a few years. Think of how short-lived Hitler’s was.

American power is more resilient than its critics understand. You remember the 70s, so do I, and we also remember how in the 1980s the United States bounced back in a spectacular way. It’s actually in the midst of bouncing back, despite the ineptitude of its leaders, despite the poor quality of governance, not only in Washington, but also in Sacramento.

Look at the incredible strides the American economy just keeps making, despite the incompetence of its political class, and that’s the thing. The business of America, as once was famously said, is business, and that is the superpower. As long as we’re attracting the entrepreneurs, and Elon Musk is only one of many from the rest of the world to come here and do what they can only do here, there’s really no stopping this country.

PETER ROBINSON: Sir Niall Ferguson, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, gentlemen, thank you.

ANDREW ROBERTS: Thank you.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank you, Peter.

PETER ROBINSON: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I’m Peter Robinson. Thank you.

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