Christopher Capozzola: World War I, Ideology, Propaganda, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #320
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Christopher Capozzola is a professor of history at MIT. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:12 - How World War I started
15:49 - US and World War I
32:46 - US Military
39:05 - War in Ukraine
43:15 - American Civil War
48:53 - World War II
1:08:00 - Nationalism
1:18:49 - US elections
1:44:56 - Donald Trump
1:59:01 - Philippine–American War
2:05:24 - Greatest US president
2:09:58 - Advice for young people
2:12:15 - Meaning of life

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 The lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that human life is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force. And at the end of the day in 1918, one side did win that. But it didn't actually solve any of those political problems. You said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US. Can you explain? The following is a conversation with Christopher Capazzola, a historian at MIT, specializing in the history of politics and war in modern American history, especially about the role of World War I in defining the trajectory of the United States and our human civilization in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the Lux Freedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Christopher Capazzola. Let's start with a big and difficult question. How did World War I start? On the one hand, World War I started because of a series of events in the summer of 1914 that brought the major powers of Europe into conflict with one another. But I actually think it's more useful to say that World War I started at least a generation earlier when rising powers, particularly Germany, started devoting more and more of their resources toward military affairs and naval affairs. This sets off an arms race in Europe. It sets off a rivalry over the colonial world and who will control the resources in Africa and Asia. And so by the time you get to the summer of 1914, and in a lot of ways, I say the war has already begun and this is just the match that lights the flame. So the capacity for war was brewing within the leaders and within the populace. They started accepting sort of slowly through the culture propagated this idea that we can go to war. It's a good idea to go to war. It's a good idea to expand and dominate others, that kind of thing. Maybe not put in those clear terms, but just the sense that military action is the way that nations operate at the global scale. Yes, yes and, right. So yes, there's a sense that the military can be the solution to political conflict in Europe itself. And the and is that war and military conflict are already happening, right? That there's war particularly in Africa, in North Africa, in the Middle East, Balkans. Conflict is already underway and the European powers haven't faced off against each other. They've usually faced off against an asymmetrical conflict against much less powerful states. But in some ways that war is already underway. So do you think it was inevitable? It was inevitable because World War I is brought up as a case study where it seems like a few accidental leaders and a few accidental events or one accidental event led to the war. And if you change that one little thing, it could have avoided the war. Your sense is the drums of war have been beating for quite a while and it would have happened almost no matter what or very likely to have happened. Yes, historians never like to say things are inevitable. And certainly, you know, there were people who could have chosen a different path, both in the short term and the long term. But fundamentally, there were irreconcilable conflicts in the system of empires in the world in 1914. I can't see, you know, it didn't have to be this war, but it had it probably had to be a war. So there was the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there's France and Great Britain, US, the USP called that empire at that moment yet. When do you graduate to empire status? Well, certainly after 1898 with the acquisition of the former territories of the Spanish Empire, you know, the United States has formal colonial possessions. And it has sort of mindsets of rule and military acquisition that would define empire in a kind of more informal sense. So you would say you would put the blame or the responsibility of starting World War One into the hands of the German Empire and Kaiser Wilhelm II? You know, that's a really tough call to make. And you know, that deciding that is going to keep historians in business for the next 200 years. And I think there are people who would lay all of the blame on the Germans, right? And you know, who would point toward a generation of arms buildup, you know, alliances that Germany made and promises that they made to their allies in the Balkans, to the Austro-Hungarians. And so yes, there's an awful lot of responsibility there. There has been a trend lately to say, no, it's no one's fault, right? That, you know, that all of the various powers literally were sleep walking into the war, right? They backed into it inadvertently. I think that lets everyone a little too much off the hook, right? And so I think in between is, you know, I would put the blame on the system of empires itself on the system. But in that system, the actor that sort of carries the most responsibility is definitely Imperial Germany. So the leader of Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph I, his nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was assassinated. And so that didn't have to lead to a war. And then the leader of the German Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm II, pressured sort of started talking trash and boiling the water that ultimately resulted in the explosion plus all the other players. So what can you describe the dynamics of how that unrolled? What's the role of US? What's the role of France? What's the role of Great Britain, Germany, and Austro-Hungarian Empire? Yeah, over the course of about four weeks, right? Following the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, it sort of triggers a series of political conflicts and ultimately ultimatums, sort of demanding sort of that one or other power sort of stand down in response to the demands of either, you know, Britain, France, or in turn, Germany or Russia, at the same time that those alliances kind of trigger automatic responses from the other side. And so it escalates. And once that escalation is combined with the call up of military troops, then none of those powers wants to be sort of the last one to kind of get ready for conflict. So even throughout it, they think they are getting ready in a defensive maneuver. And they think if there is conflict, well, it might be a skirmish, it might be, you know, sort of a standoff. It could be solved with diplomacy later because diplomacy is failing now. And that turns out not to be the case. Diplomacy fails. It's not a skirmish. It becomes a massive war. And the Americans are watching all of this from the sidelines. They have very little influence over what happens that summer. How does it go from a skirmish between a few nations to a global war? Is there a place where there's a phase transition? Yeah, I think the phase transition is in over the course of the fall of 1914 when the Germans make an initial sort of bold move into France. In many ways, they're fighting the last war, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And they really do sort of, you know, kind of want to have a quick sort of lightning strike in some ways against France to kind of bring the war to a speedy conclusion. France turns out to be able to fight back more effectively than the Germans expected. And then the battle lines sort of harden. And then behind that, the French and the Germans as well as the British on the side of the French start digging in literally, right? And digging trenches, trenches that at first are, you know, three feet deep to avoid shelling from artillery, then become six feet, 10 feet deep, you know, two miles wide that include telegraph wires that include whole hospitals in the back. And then at that point, you know, the front is locked in place. And the only way to break that is sort of basically dialing the war up to 11, right? So massive numbers of troops, massive efforts, none of which work, right? And so the war is stuck in this, but that's the phase transition right there. What were the machines of war in that case? You mentioned trenches. What were the guns used? What was the size of guns? What are we talking about? What did Germany start accumulating that led up to this war? One of the things that we see immediately is the industrial revolution of the previous 30 or 40 years brought to bear on warfare, right? And so you see sort of machine guns, you see artillery, you know, these are the kind of the key weapons of war on both sides, right? The vast majority of battlefield casualties are from artillery shelling from one side to another, not, you know, sort of rifle or even sort of, you know, machine gun kind of attacks. In some ways, the weapons of war are human beings, right? You know, tens of thousands of them poured over the top in these sort of waves to kind of try to break through the enemy lines. And it would work for a little while, you know, but holding the territory that had been gained often proved to be even more demanding than gaining it. And so often, you know, each side would retreat back into the trenches and wait for another day. And how did Russia, how did Britain, how did France get pulled into the war? I suppose the France one is the easy one. But what is the order of events here? Right. How it becomes a global war? Yeah. So Britain, France, and Russia are at this time in, they're an alliance. And so the conflicts, you know, in the summer of 1914 that lead sort of to the declarations of war happen sort of one after another, right? In August, in late August of 1914. And all three powers essentially come in at the same time, because they have promised to do so through a series of alliances conducted secretly in the years before 1914 that committed them to defend one another. Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Ottoman empire have their own sort of set of secret agreements that also commit them to defend one another. And what this does is it sort of brings them all into conflict at the exact same moment. They're also, for many of these countries, bringing not just their national armies, but also their empires into the conflict, right? So Britain and France, of course, have, you know, enormous sort of global empires that begin mobilizing soldiers as well as raw materials. Germany has, you know, less of an overseas empire. Russia and the Ottoman empire, of course, have their own sort of hinterland, you know, within the empire. And very soon, you know, sort of all of the warring powers are bringing the entire world into the conflict. Did they have a sense of how deadly the war is? I mean, this is another scale of death and destruction. At the beginning, no, but very quickly. The scale of the devastation of these sort of massive over the top attacks on the trenches is apparent to the military officers, and it very quickly becomes apparent even at home. You know, there is, of course, censorship of the battlefield, and, you know, specific details don't reach people. But, you know, for civilians in any of the warring powers, they know fairly soon how destructive the war is. And to me, that's always been a real sort of puzzle, right? So that by the time the United States comes to decide whether to join the war in 1917, they know exactly what they're getting into, right? They're not backing into the war in the ways that the European powers did. You know, they've seen the devastation. They've seen photographs. They've seen injured soldiers, and they make that choice anyway. When you say they, do you mean the leaders of the people? Did the death and destruction reach the minds of the American people by that time? Yes, absolutely. You know, we don't, in 1917, have the mass media that we have now, but, you know, there are images in newspapers. There are newsreels that play at the movie theaters, and, of course, some of it is sanitized. But that combined with press accounts, often really quite descriptive press accounts, gory accounts, reached, you know, anyone who cared to read them. You know, certainly plenty of people didn't follow the news, felt it was far away. But most Americans who cared about the news knew how devastating this war was. Yeah, there's something that happens that I recently visited Ukraine for a few weeks. There's something that happens with the human mind as you get away from the actual front, wherever the bullets are flying, like literally one kilometer away. You start to not feel the war. You'll hear an explosion, you'll see an explosion, you start to like get assimilated to it, or you start to get used to it. And then when you get as far away from like currently what is Kiev, you start to, you know the war's going on, everybody around you is fighting in that war, but it's still somehow distant. And I think with the United States, with the ocean between, even if you have the stories everywhere, it still is somehow distant, like the way a movie is, maybe, yeah, like a movie or a video game, it's somewhere else. Even if your loved ones are going, or you are going to fight. Yeah, that is absolutely the case. And in some ways, that's true even for the home fronts in Europe, you know, except for the areas where, you know, in Belgium and France where the war is, you know, right there in your backyard. For other people, yeah, there's a distance. And soldiers, of course, feel this very strongly when they, European soldiers, when they're able to go home on leave, often, you know, deeply, present the, you know, what they see as the luxury that civilians are living in during the war. So how did US enter the war? Who was the president? What was the dynamics involved? And could it have stayed out? To answer your last question first, yes, right? That the United States could have stayed out of the First World War. And the United States, you know, could have stayed out of the First World War as a military power. The United States could not have ignored the war completely, right? It shaped everything, right? It shaped trade, it shaped goods and services, agriculture, you know, whether, you know, there was a crop coming, whether there were immigrants coming across the Atlantic to work in American factories, right? So the US can't ignore the war. But the US makes a choice in 1917 to enter the war by declaring war, right, on Germany and Austria. And in that sense, this is a war of choice, but it's kicked off by a series of events, right? So President Woodrow Wilson has been president through this entire period of time. He has just run in the 1916 presidential election on a campaign to keep the United States out of war. But then in early 1917, the Germans in some ways sort of twist the Americans arms, right? The Germans sort of high command comes to understand that, you know, that they're stuck, right? That they, you know, they're stuck in this trench warfare. They need a big breakthrough. Their one big chance is to kind of, is to sort of break the blockade to push through that the British have imposed on them to break through against France. And so they do. And along with this, they start sinking ships on the Atlantic, including American ships. The Germans know full well this will draw the United States into war. But the Germans look at the United States at this moment, a relatively small army, a relatively small Navy, a country that at least on paper is deeply divided about whether to join the war. And so they say, let's do it, right? They're not going to get any American soldiers there in time, right? You know, it was a gamble, but I think probably their best chance. They took that gamble. They lost, right? In part because French resistance was strong, in part because Americans mobilized much faster and in much greater numbers than the Germans thought they would. So the American people were divided. The American people were absolutely divided about whether to enter this war, right? From 1914 to 1917, there is a searing debate across the political spectrum. It doesn't break down easily on party lines about whether it was in the U.S. interest to do this, whether American troops should be sent abroad, whether, you know, the Americans would end up just being cannon fodder for the European empires. Eventually, as American ships are sunk, first in the Lusitania in 1915, then in much greater numbers in 1917, you know, the tide starts to turn and Americans feel that, you know, a response is necessary. And the actual declaration of war in Congress is pretty lopsided, but it's not unanimous by any means. Lopsided towards entering the war. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's really interesting because there's echoes of that in later wars where Congress seems to, nobody wants to be the guy that says no to war for some reason. Once you sense that, in terms of, sorry, in terms of politicians, doesn't appear weak, but I wonder if that was always the case. So you make the case that World War I is largely responsible for defining what it means to be an American citizen. So in which way does it define the American citizen? When you think about citizenship, what it means is two things. First of all, what are your rights and obligations? What is sort of the legal citizenship that you have as a citizen of the United States or any other state? And the second is a more amorphous definition of like, what does it mean to belong, right? To be part of America, right? To feel American, to, you know, to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it, right? And both of those things really are crystal clear in terms of their importance during the war. Right? So both of those things are on the table. Being a citizen who is a citizen who isn't matters. So people who had never carried passports or, you know, anything before suddenly have to. But also what it means to be an American, right? To feel like it, to be part of this project is also kind of being defined and enforced during World War I. So project, you know, is a funny way to put a global war, right? So can you tell the story? Perhaps that's a good example of it, of the James Montgomery Flagg's 1916 poster that reads, I want you. Right. A lot of people know this poster. I think in its original form, it's memeified form. I don't know, but we know this poster and we don't know where it came from. Or most Americans, I think, me included, didn't know where it came from. And it actually comes from 1916. Does this poster represent the birth of something new in America, which is a commodification or, I don't know, that propaganda machine that says what it means to be an American is somebody that fights for their country. Yeah. So the image, it's, in fact, I think one of the most recognizable images, not only in the United States, but in the entire world. And you can bring it almost anywhere on earth in 2022 and people will know what it refers to. So this is an image that circulated first as a magazine cover, later as a recruitment poster, where the figure is Uncle Sam sort of pointing at the viewer with his finger sort of pointing and saying, I want you. And the I want you is a recruitment tool to join the US Army. And this image really kind of starts as a kind of, like I said, a magazine cover in 1916 by the artist James Montgomery Flagg. It initially appears under the heading, what are you doing for preparedness? Meaning to prepare in case war comes to the United States. And at that point in 1916, we're still neutral. In 1917, it's turned into a US Army recruiting poster. And then it reappears in World War II, reappears generations after. Like you said, it's now gets remixed, memeified. It's all over the place. I think for me, it's a turning point. It's a sort of window into American culture at a crucial moment in our history, where the federal government is now embarking on a war overseas that's going to make enormous demands on its citizens. And at the same time, where sort of technologies of mass production and mass media, and what we would probably call propaganda, are being sort of mobilized for the first time in this new kind of way. Well, in some sense, is it fair to say that the empire is born, the expanding empire is born from the Noam Chomsky perspective kind of empire that seeks to have military influence elsewhere in the world? Yes. But I think as historians, we need to be at least as interested in what happens to the people who are getting pointed to by Uncle Sam, rather than just the one, whether he's pointing at us. So yes, he's asking us to do that, but how do we respond? And the people responded. So the people are ultimately the machines of history, the mechanisms of history. It's not the Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam can only do so much if the people aren't willing to step up. Absolutely. And the American people responded for sure, but they didn't build what Uncle Sam asked them to do in that poster. And I think that's kind of a crucial aspect that there never would have been sort of global US power without the response that begins in World War I. What was the Selective Service Act of 1917? So one of the very first things that Uncle Sam wants you to do is to register for selective service, for the draft. And the law is passed very soon after the US enters the war. It's demanding that all men, first between 21 and 30, then between 18 and 45, register for the draft, and they'll be selected by a government agency, by a volunteer organization. So it's a requirement to sign up. It is a legal requirement to register. Of course, not everyone who registers is selected, but over the course of the war, 24 million men register, almost 4 million serve in some fashion. What was the response? What was the feeling amongst the American people to have to sign up to the Selective Service Act? Well, this is a bigger turning point than we might think. In some ways, this is a tougher demand of the American public than entering the war. It's one thing to declare war on Germany, right? It's another thing to go down to your local post office and fill out the forms that allow your own government to send you there to fight. And this is especially important at a time when the federal government doesn't really have any other way to find you unless you actually go and register yourself, right? And so ordinary people are participating in the building of this war machine, but at least a half a million of them don't, right? And simply never fill out the forms, move from one town to another. But you said 20 million did? 20 something? Yeah, about 24 million register, at least 500,000. Is it surprising to you that that many registered since the country was divided? It is. And that's what I sort of tried to dig in to figure out how did you get 24 million people to register for the draft. And it's certainly not coming from the top down, right? There may be 100 sort of agents in what's now called the FBI. It's certainly not being enforced from Washington. It's being enforced through the eyes of everyday neighbors, through community surveillance, all kinds of ways. Oh, so there was like a pressure. There's a lot of pressure. Interesting. So there was not a significant like anti-war movement, as you would see maybe later with Vietnam and things like this. There was a significant movement before 1917, but it becomes very hard to keep up an organized anti-war movement after that, particularly when the government starts shutting down protests. So as the Selective Service Act of 1917 runs up against some of the freedoms, some of the rights that are defined in our founding documents, what was that clash like? What was sacrificed? What freedoms and rights were sacrificed in this process? I mean, I think on some level, the fundamental right is liberty, right? That conscription sort of demands sacrifice on the behalf of some notionally for the protection of all. So even if you're against the war, you're forced to fight. Yes. And there were small provisions for conscientious objectors, solely those who had religious objections to all war, right? Not political objections to this war. And so several thousand were able to take those provisions. But even then, they faced social sanction, they faced ridicule, some of them faced intimidation. So those liberty interests, both individual freedom, religious freedom, those are some of the first things to go. So what about freedom of speech? Was there silencing of the press, of the voices of the different people that were object? Yes, absolutely. Right. And so very soon after the Selective Service Act is passed, then you get the Espionage Act, which of course is back in the news in 2022. What's the Espionage Act? The Espionage Act is a sort of omnibus bill, it contains about 10 or different provisions, very few of which have to do with espionage. But one key provision basically makes it illegal to say or do anything that would interfere with military recruitment. And that provision is used to shut down radical publications, to shut down German language publications. And this really has a chilling impact on speech during the war. Could you put into words what it means to be an American citizen that is in part sparked by World War I? What does that mean? Somebody that's should be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms to fight for their country? Somebody that's willing to fight to spread freedom elsewhere in the world, spread the American ideals? Does that begin to tell the story what it means to be an American? I think what we see is a change, right? So citizenship during World War I now includes the obligation to defend the country, to serve, and if asked to die for it. And we certainly see that. And I think we see the close linkage of military service and US citizenship coming out of this time period. But when you start making lots of demands on people to fulfill obligations, in turn, they're going to start demanding, right, to defend their country. And in turn, they're going to start demanding rights. And we start to see not necessarily during the war, but after, more demands for free speech protections, more demands for equality, for marginalized groups. And so obligations and rights are sort of developing in a dynamic relationship. Oh, it's almost like an overreach of power sparked a sense like, oh, crap, we can't centralize power to a beauty, like to drag us into a war we need to be able to. So there's the birth of that tension between the government and the people. It's a rebirth of it. Of course, that tension is always there. But in its modern form, I think it comes from this re-intensification of it. So what about the, you said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US. Can you explain? Yeah. So the Espionage Act sort of empowers federal organizations to watch other Americans. They are particularly interested in anyone who is obstructing the draft, anyone who is trying to organize labor or strikes or radical movements, and anyone who might have sympathy for Germany, which basically means all German-Americans come under surveillance. Initially, this is very small scale, but soon every government agency gets involved, from the Treasury Department Secret Service to the post office, which is sort of reading mail, to the Justice Department, which mobilizes 200,000 volunteers. It's a really significant enterprise. Much of it goes away after the war, but of all the things that go away, this core of the surveillance state is the thing that persists most fully. Is this also a place where the size of government starts to grow in these different organizations, or maybe creates a momentum for growth of government? Oh, it's exponential growth. Over the course of the war, by almost any metric you use, right? The size of the federal budget, the number of federal employees, the number of soldiers in the standing army, all of those things skyrocket during the war. They go down after the war, but they never go down to what they were before. And probably gave a momentum for growth over time. Yes, absolutely. Did World War I give birth to the military industrial complex in the United States, so war profiteering, expanding of the war machine in order to financially benefit a lot of parties involved? So I guess I would maybe break that into two parts, right? That on the one hand, yes, there is war profiteering. There are investigations of it. In the years after the war, there's a widespread concern that the profit motive had played too much of a part in the war, and that's definitely the case. But I think when you try to think of this term, military industrial complex, it's best to think of it as at what point does the one side lock in the other, right? That military choices are shaped by industry objectives and vice versa. And I do think that that was fully locked into place during World War I. I think that's really a Cold War phenomenon when the United States is on this intense kind of footing for two generations in a row. So industrial is really important there, there's companies. So before then, weapons of war were funded directly by the government. Who was manufacturing the weapons of war? Who was manufacturing the weapons of war? They were generally manufactured by private industry. There were of course, our arsenal sort of 19th century iterations where the government would produce its own weapons, partly to make sure that they got what they wanted. But most of the weapons of war for all of the European powers and the United States are produced by private industry. So why do you say that the military industrial complex didn't start then? What was the important thing that happened in the Cold War? I think one way to think about it is the Cold War is a point at which it switches from being a dial to a ratchet, right? So during World War I, the relationship between the military and industry dials up fast and high and stays that way and it dials back down. Whereas during the Cold War, the relationship between the two often looks more like a ratchet. Yeah, it becomes unstoppable. It goes up again. In the way that you start, I think the way the military industrial complex is often discussed as a system that is unstoppable. It expands. If you take a very cynical view, it creates war so that it can make money. It doesn't just find places where it can help through military conflict. It creates tensions that directly or indirectly lead to military conflict that it can then fuel and make money from. That is certainly one of the concerns of both people who were critical of the First World War and then also of Dwight Eisenhower when he's president and in his farewell address where he introduces the term military industrial complex. Some of it is about the profit motive, but some of it is a fear that Eisenhower had that no one had an interest in stopping this and that no one had a voice in stopping it and that the ordinary American could really do nothing to dial it to dial things down. Is it strange to you that we don't often hear that kind of speech today with Eisenhower speaking about the military industrial complex? For example, we'll have people criticizing the spending on war efforts, but they're not discussing the machinery of the military industrial complex, like the basic way that human nature works, that we get ourselves trapped in this thing. They're saying there's better things to spend money on versus describing a very seemingly natural process of when you build weapons of war that's going to lead to more war. It pulls you in somehow. AC Yeah. I would say throughout the Cold War and even after the end of it, there has not been a sustained conversation in the United States about our defense establishment, what we really need and what serves our interest and to what extent other things like market forces, profit motives, belong in that conversation. What's interesting is that in the generation after the First World War, that conversation was on the table through a series of investigations in the US, the NIE Committee in Britain, a royal commission, journalistic exposés. This would have been just talked about constantly in the years between about 1930 and 1936, as people were starting to worry that storm clouds were gathering in Europe again. AC Yeah, but it always seems like those folks get pushed to the fringes. You're made an activist versus a thinking leader. AC Those discussions are often marginalized, framed as conspiracy theory, etc. I think it's important to realize that in the generation after World War I, this was a serious civic conversation. It led to investigations of defense finance. It led to experiments in Britain and France, in public finance of war material. I think those conversations need to be reconvened now in the 21st century. AC Is there any parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine? The reason I bring it up is because you mentioned there was a hunger for war, a capacity for war that was already established, and the different parties were just boiling the tensions. There's a case made that America had a role to play, NATO had a role to play in the current war in Ukraine. Is there some truth to that? Is there some truth to that when you think about it in the context of World War I? Or is it purely about the specific parties involved, which is Russia and Ukraine? AC I think it's very easy to draw parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine, but I don't think they really work. The First World War in some ways is generated by a fundamental conflict in the European system of empires, in the global system of empires. In many ways, if there's a parallel, the war in Ukraine is the parallel to some of the conflicts in the Mediterranean and the Balkans in 1911 to 1913, that then later there was a much greater conflict. I think if there's any lessons to be learned for how not to let World War III look like World War I, it would be to make sure that systems aren't locked into place, that escalate wars out of people's expectations. RL That's, I suppose, what I was implying, that this is the early stages of World War III. That in the same way that several wolves are licking their chops or whatever the expression is, they're creating tension, they're creating military conflict with a kind of unstoppable imperative for a global war. Many people that are looking at this are really worried about that. Now, the stopping, the forcing function to stop this war is that there's several nuclear powers involved, which has, at least for now, worked to stop full-on global war. But I'm not sure that's going to be the case. In fact, what is one of the surprising things to me in Ukraine is that still in the 21st century, we can go to something that involves nuclear powers, not directly yet, but awfully close to directly go to a hot war. Do you worry about that, that there's a kind of descent into a World War I type of scenario? RL Yes. That keeps me up at night, and I think it should keep the citizens of both the United States and Russia up at night. And I think, again, it gets back to what I was saying, that in the summer of 1914, even then, things that looked like a march toward war could have been different. And so I think it's important for leaders of both countries and of all of the sort of related country, of Ukraine, of the various NATO powers, to really sort of imagine off-ramps and to imagine alternatives and to make them possible, whether it's through diplomacy, whether it's through other formats. I think that that's the only way to prevent sort of greater escalation. CB What's the difference between World War I and the Civil War? In terms of how they defined what it means to be an American, but also the American citizen's relationship with the war, what the leaders were doing, is there interesting differences and similarities? Besides the fact that everybody seems to have forgot about World War I in the United States, and everyone still remembers Civil War. RL I mean, it's true. And the American Civil War defines American identity in some ways, along with the Revolution and the Second World War, more so than any other conflict. And it's a fundamentally different war. It's one because it is a civil war, because of secession, because of the Confederacy. This is a conflict happening on the territory of the United States between Americans. And so the dynamics are really quite different. The leaders, particularly Lincoln, have a different relationship to the home front, to civilians than they then say Wilson or Roosevelt have in World War I and II. CB Also, the way you would tell the story of the Civil War, perhaps similar to the way we tell the story of World War II, there's like a reason to actually fight the war. The way we tell the story is we're fighting for this idea that all men are created equal, that the war is over slavery in part. Perhaps that's a drastic oversimplification of what the war was actually about in the moment. Like how do you get pulled into an actual war versus a hot discussion? And the same with World War II, people kind of framed the narrative that it was against evil. Hitler being evil, I think the key part of that is probably the Holocaust, is how you can formulate Hitler's being evil. If there's no Holocaust, perhaps there's a case to be made that we wouldn't see World War II as such, quote unquote, good war, that there's an atrocity that had to happen to make it really, to be able to tell a clear narrative of why we get into this war. Perhaps such a narrative doesn't exist for World War I, and so that doesn't stay in the American mind. We try to sweep it under the rug given though overall 16 million people died. So to you, the difference is in the fact that you're fighting for ideas and fighting on the homeland, but in terms of people's participation, fighting for your country, was there similarities there? Yeah. I mean, I think the Civil War in both the North and the South, troops are raised overwhelmingly through volunteer recruitment. There is a draft in both the North and the South, but it's not significant. Only 8% of Confederate soldiers came in through conscription. And so in fact, the mobilization for volunteers often organized locally around individual communities or states, creates multiple identities and levels of loyalty. Where people both in the North and the South have loyalty both to their state regiments, to their community militias, and as well to the country. They are fighting over the country, right? Over the United States. And so the Union and the Confederacy have conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable visions of that. But that nationalism that comes out of the Union, after the victory in the war, is a crucial force shaping America ever since. So what was the neutrality period? Why did the US stay out of the war for so long? What was going on in that interesting, what made Woodrow Wilson change his mind? What was the interesting dynamic there? I always say that the United States entered the war in the early 1900s. The United States entered the war in April of 1917, but Americans entered it right away. They entered it, some of them actually went and volunteered and fought almost exclusively on the side of Britain and France. At least 50,000 joined the Canadian army or the British army and serve. Millions volunteer, they sent humanitarian aid. I think in many ways, modern war creates modern humanitarianism and we can see that in the neutrality period. And even if they wanted the United States to stay out of the war, a lot of Americans get involved in it by thinking about it, caring about it, arguing about it. And at the same time, they're worried that British propaganda is shaping their news system. They are worried that German espionage is undermining them. They're worried that both Britain and Germany are trying to interfere in American elections and American news cycles. And at the same time, a revolution is breaking out in Mexico. So there are concerns about what's happening in the Western hemisphere as well as what's happening in Europe. So World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars and it didn't. How did World War I pave the way to World War II? Every nation probably has their own story in this trajectory towards World War II. How did Europe allow World War II to happen? How did the Soviet Union, Russia allow World War II to happen and how did America allow World War II to happen? And Japan? Yeah, you're right. The answer is different for each country, right? That in some ways in Germany, the culture of defeat and the experience of defeat at the end of World War I leads to a culture of resentment, recrimination, finger pointing blame that makes German politics very ugly. As one person puts it, brutalizes German politics. It places resentment at the core of the populace and its politics. Yeah. And so in some ways that lays the groundwork for the kind of politics of resentment and hate that comes from the Nazis. For the United States, in some ways, the failure to win the peace sets up the possibility for the next war, right? That the United States, through Wilson, is sort of crafting a new international order in order that this will be the war to end all wars. But because the United States failed to join the League of Nations, you see the United States really sort of on the hook for another generation. In Asia, the story is more complicated, right? And I think it's worth bearing that in mind that World War II is a two front war. It starts in Asia for its own reasons. World War I is transformative for Japan, right? It is a time of massive economic expansion. A lot of that sort of economic wealth is poured into sort of greater industrialization and militarization. And so when the military wing in Japanese politics takes over in the 1930s, there are in some ways flexing muscles that come out of the First World War. Can you talk about the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles? What's interesting about that dynamics there of the parties involved, of how it could have been done differently to avoid the resentment? Or again, is it inevitable? So the war ends and very soon, even before the war is over, the United States in particular is trying to shape the peace, right? And the United States is the central actor at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Woodrow Wilson is there. He's presiding and he knows that he calls the shots. So he was respected. He was respected, but resentfully in some ways by the European powers, Britain and France and Italy to a lesser extent, who felt that they had sacrificed more. They had two goals, right? They wanted to shape the Imperial system in order to make sure that their fundamental economic structures wouldn't change. And they also wanted to weaken Germany as much as possible, right? So that Germany couldn't rise again. What this leads to is a peace treaty that maintains some of the fundamental conflicts of the Imperial system and bankrupts Germany, starves Germany, and feeds this politics of resentment that make it impossible for Germany to participate in a European order. So people like historian Neil Ferguson, for example, make the case that if Britain stayed out of World War I, we would have avoided this whole mess and we would potentially even avoid World War II. There's kind of counterfactual history. Do you think it's possible to make the case for that? That there was a moment, especially in that case, staying out of the war for Britain, that the escalation to a global war could have been avoided and one that ultimately ends in a deep global resentment. So where Germany is resentful, not just of France or particular nations, but is resentful of the entire, I don't know how you define it, the West or something like this, the entire global world. I wish it were that easy. And I think it's useful to think in counterfactuals, what if. And if you believe, as historians do, in causation, then if that one thing causes another, then you also have to believe in counterfactuals, that if something hadn't happened, then maybe that would have worked differently. But I think all the things that led to World War I are multi-causal and nuanced. And this is what historians do. We make things more complicated. And so there was no one thing that could have turned the tide of history. Oh, if only Hitler had gotten into art school or if only Fidel Castro had gotten into the major leagues. Those are interesting thought experiments, but few events in history, I think, are that contingent. Well, Hitler is an example of somebody who's a charismatic leader that seems to have a really disproportionate amount of influence on the tide of history. So if you look at Stalin, you could imagine that many other people could have stepped into that role. And the same goes for many of the other presidents through, or even Mao. It seems that there's a singular nature to Hitler that you could play the counterfactual, but you could play the counterfactual that if there was no Hitler, you may have not had World War II. He, better than many leaders in history, was able to channel the resentment of the populace into a very aggressive expansion of the military and I would say skillful deceit of the entire world in terms of his plans and was able to effectively start the war. So I think that's a very interesting thing. So is it possible that, I mean, could Hitler have been stopped? Could we have avoided if he just got into art school? Or again, do you feel like there's a current of events that was unstoppable? I mean, part of what you're talking about is Hitler the individual as a sort of charismatic leader who's able to mobilize the nation. And part of it is Hitlerism, his own sort of individual ability to play, for example, play off his subordinates against one another to set up a system of that nature that in some ways escalates violence, including the violence that leads to the Holocaust. And some of it is also Hitlerism as a leader cult. And we see this in many other sort of things where a political movement surrounds one particular individual who may or may not be replaceable. So yes, the World War II we got would have been completely different if a different sort of faction had risen to power in Germany. But depression era Europe was so unstable and democracies collapsed throughout Western Europe over the course of the 1930s, whether they had charismatic totalitarian leaders or not. Have you actually read one book I just recently finished? I'd love to get your opinion from a historian perspective. There's a book called Blitz Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler. It makes a case that drugs played a very large role, meth essentially, played a very large role in World War II. There's a lot of criticism of this book saying that it's kind of to what you're saying. It takes this one little variable and makes it like this explains everything. So everything about Hitler, everything about the blitzkrieg, everything about the military, the way the strategy, the decisions could be explained through drugs, or at least implies that kind of thing. And the interesting thing about this book because Hitler and Nazi Germany is one of the most sort of written about periods of human history. And this was not drugs were almost entirely not written about in this context. So here come along this semi historian, because I don't think he's even a historian. He's a lot of his work is fiction. Hopefully, I'm saying that correctly. So he tells a really, that's one of the criticisms, he tells a very compelling story that drugs were at the center of this period and also of the man of Hitler. What are your sort of feelings and thoughts about if you've gotten a chance to read this book, but I'm sure there's books like it, that tell an interesting perspective, singular perspective on a war. Yeah, I mean, I have read it. And I also had this sort of eye opening experience that a lot of historians did. And they're like, why didn't we think about that? And I think whether he's, the author is sort of not a trained academic historian, but the joy of history is like, you don't have to be one to write good history. And I don't think anyone sort of criticizes him for that. I like the book as a window into the Third Reich. Of course, drugs don't explain all of it, but it helps us see the people who supported Hitler, the ways in which it was that mind altering and performance altering drugs were used to kind of keep Hitler's reputation alive. Were used to kind of keep soldiers on the battlefield, the ways in which, I think that we don't fully understand the extent to which the Third Reich is held together with like duct tape from a pretty early phase by like 1940 or 41 even, it's all smoke and mirrors. And I think that wartime propaganda, both Germans trying to say, we're winning everything and America trying to mobilize and the other allies to mobilize against Germany, described a more formidable enemy than it really was by 1941 and 42. Yeah. I mean, I could see both cases. One is that duct tape doesn't make the man, but also as an engineer, I'm a huge fan of duct tape because it does seem to solve a lot of problems. And I do worry that this perspective that the book presents about drugs is somehow to the mind really compelling because it's almost like the mind, or at least my mind searches for an answer. How could this have happened? And it's nice to have a clean explanation. And drugs is one popular one. When people talk about steroids and sports, the moment you introduce the topic of steroids, somehow the mind wants to explain all success in the context was because this person was on steroids. Lance Armstrong. Well, it's like, it's a very sticky idea. Certain ideas, certain explanations are very sticky. And I think that's really dangerous because then you lose the full context. And also in the case of drugs, it removes the responsibility from the person, both for the military genius and the evil. And I think it's a very dangerous thing to do because something about the mind, maybe it's just mine, it's sticky to this. Well, drugs explain it. If the drugs didn't happen, then it would be very different. Yeah. It worries me how compelling it is of an explanation. Yeah. So that's why it's maybe better to think of it as a window into the third, right? Is that an explanation of it? But it's also a nice exploration of Hitler, the man, yet for some reason discussing his habits, especially later in the war, his practices with drugs gives you a window into the person. It reminds you that as a human, this is a human being, like a human being that gets emotional in the morning, gets thoughtful in the morning, hopeful, sad, depressed, angry, like a story of emotions of the human being is that somehow we construct, which is a pretty dangerous thing to do, construct an evil monster out of Hitler. When in reality, he's a human being like all of us. I think the lesson there is the soldier incident lesson, which is all of us to some degree are capable of evil. Or maybe if you want to make it less powerful a statement, many of our leaders are capable of evil. That this Hitler is not truly singular in history. That, yeah, when the resentment of the populace matches the right charismatic leader, it's easy to make the kind of, not easy, but it's possible to frequently make the kind of initiation of military conflict that happened in World War II. But it's also a very, very dangerous thing to do. And so, yeah, I think that's a good lesson. By the way, because you said not a trained historian, one of the most compelling and, I don't know, entertaining and fascinating exploration of World War I comes from Dan Carlin. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to listen to his sort of podcast form telling of the world about Dan Carlin. You yourself as a historian who has studied, who's written about World War I, do you enjoy that kind of telling of history? Absolutely. And I think, again, you don't need a PhD in history to be a historian. Does every historian agree with that? He gets quite a bit of criticism from historians. You know, I mean, we like to argue with each other and nitpick with each other. But the one thing I have no patience for is when we pull rank on each other. I think we depend on, if you're a historian in a university with degrees and research materials, you depend on the work of people in some local community like recording oral history, saving documents. And history is a social science, but it's also a storytelling art. And history books are the ones you find on the shelves in bookstores that people read for fun. And then you can appreciate both the knowledge production as well as the storytelling. And when you get a good oral storyteller like Dan Carlin, there's a reason that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people tune in. Yeah. But he definitely suffers from anxiety about getting things correct. It's very difficult. Well, our first job is to get the facts correct and then to tell the story off of those. The facts are so fuzzy. So it's, I mean, you have the probably my favorite telling World War II is William Shire's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And, or at least not telling the Nazi Germany. And that goes to primary sources a lot, which is like, I suppose that's the honest way to do it, but it's tough. It's really tough to write that way, to really go to primary sources always. And I think the one of the things that Dan tries to do, which is also really tough to do perhaps easier in oral history is try to make you feel what it was like to be there. Which I think he does by trying to tell the story of like individual soldiers. And do you find that telling like individual citizens? Do you find that kind of telling of history compelling? Yeah. I mean, I think we need historical imagination. And I think historical imagination teaches something very valuable, which is humility to realize that there are other people who've lived on this planet and they organize their lives differently. And they made it through just fine too. And I think that that kind of meeting other people from the past can be actually a very useful skill for meeting people unlike you in the present. Unlike you, but also like you. I think both are humbling. One, realizing that they live in a different space and time, but two, realizing that if you were placed in that space and time, you might've done all the same things, whether it's the brave good thing or the evil thing. Yeah, absolutely. And you get also a sense of possibility. There's this famous line that those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it. But I think the other half is true as well, which is those who do not learn history don't get the chance to repeat it. We're not the first people on this planet to face any certain kinds of problems. Other people have lived through worlds like this one before. It's like when you fall in love as a teenager for the first time and then there's a breakup. You think it's the greatest tragedy that has ever happened in the world. You're the first person, even though Romeo and Juliet and so on had this issue, you're the first person that truly feels the catastrophic heartbreak of that experience. It's good to be reminded that no, the human condition is what it is. We have lived through it at the individual and the societal scale. Let me ask you about nationalism, which I think is at the core of I want you poster. Is nationalism destructive or empowering to a nation? And we can use different words like patriotism, which is in many ways synonymous to nationalism, but in recent history, perhaps because of the Nazis, has slowly parted ways that somehow nationalism is when patriotism gone bad or something like this? Yeah, they're different. Patriotism is in some ways best thought of as an emotion and a feeling of love of country, literally. And in some ways, that's a necessary condition to participate in nationalism. To me, I think nationalism is crucial in a world organized around nation states, and you have to believe that you are engaged in a common project together. And so in the contemporary United States, in some ways that question is actually on the table in ways that it hasn't been in the past. But you have to believe that you're engaged in a common project, that you have something in common with the person with whom you share this nation and that you would sacrifice for them, whether it's by paying taxes for them or going to war to defend them. That's a vision of what we might call civic nationalism. That's the good version. The question is whether you can have that without having exclusionary nationalism, hating the other, fearing the other, saying, yeah, you're part of this nation against all others. And I think there's a long tradition in America of a very inclusive nationalism that is open, inclusive, welcoming, and new people to this shared project. That's something to be defended. Exclusionary nationalisms based on ethnic hatreds and others that we see throughout the world, those are things to be afraid of. But there is a kind of narrative in the United States that a nationalism that includes the big umbrella of democratic nations, nations that strive for freedom, and everybody else is against freedom and against human nature. And it just so happens that it's a half and half split across the world. So that's imperialism. That feels like it beats the drum of war. Yeah. And I mean, I don't want to paint too rosy a picture. And certainly, the United States as a nation has often found it easier to define ourselves against something than to clarify exactly what we're for. Yeah. Yeah. The cold war, China today. That's not only United States, I suppose that's human nature. We need a competitor. It's almost like maybe the success of human civilization requires figuring out how to construct competitors that don't result in global war. Yes, or figuring out how to turn enemies into rivals and competitors. There's a real difference. You compete with competitors. You fight with enemies. Yeah. With competitors as a respect, maybe even a love underlying the competition. What lessons? What are the biggest lessons you take away from World War I? Maybe we talked about several, but you look back at the 20th century, what as a historian, what do you learn about human nature, about human civilization, about history from looking at this war? I think the lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that human life is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the same time, that human life is not cheap. By throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force. At the end of the day, in 1918, one side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems. In the end, the regular people paid the price with their lives. They did. People who had been told that their lives were cheap remembered that. It reshapes mass politics for the rest of the 20th century, both in Europe and around the world. Yeah. The cost of a death of a single soldier or a single civilian is not just the cost of that single life. It's the resentment, the anger, the hate that reverberates throughout. One of the things I saw in Ukraine is the birth of a scale of generational hate, not towards administrations or leaders, but towards entire peoples. Overnight, that hate is created, and it takes perhaps decades for that hate to dissipate. It takes decades, and it takes collective effort to build institutions that divert that hate into other places. One of the biggest things I thought was not part of the calculus in when the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq is the creation of hate. When you drop a bomb, even if it hits military targets, even if it kills soldiers, which in that case, it didn't, there's a very large amount of civilians, what does that do to the... Yeah, how many years, minutes, hours, months, and years of hate do you create with a single bomb you drop? And I calculate that. Literally, in the Pentagon have a chart, how many people will hate us, how many people does it take, do some science here, how many people does it take when you have a million people that hate you, how many of them will become terrorists? How many of them will do something to the nation you love and care about, which is the United States, will do something that will be very costly? I feel like there was not a plot in a chart. It was more about short-term effects. Yes, it's again, it's the idea of using military force to solve political problems. And I think there's a squandering of goodwill that people have around the world towards the United States. That's a respect for its economy, for its consumer products, and so forth. And I think that's been lost a lot of that. Do you think leaders can stop war? I have perhaps a romantic notion, perhaps because I do these podcasts in person and so on, that leaders that get in a room together and can talk, they can stop war. I mean, that's the power of a leader, especially one in an authoritarian regime, that they can, through camaraderie, alleviate some of the emotions associated with the ego. Yes, leaders can stop war if they get into the room when they understand from the masses in their countries that war is something that they want stopped. So the people ultimately have a really big say. They do. It was mass movements by people in the United States for the nuclear freeze, in Russia pushing for openness that brought, for example, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to Reykjavik to debate and eventually put caps on nuclear weapons. Those two people made choices in the room that made that possible, but they were both being pushed and knew they were being pushed by their people. Boy, that's a tough one. It puts a lot of responsibility on the German people, for example. In both wars, we fans of history tend to conceive of history as a meeting of leaders. We think of Chamberlain, we think of Churchill, and the importance of them in the Second World War. We think about Hitler and Stalin and think that if certain conversations happened, the war could have been avoided. You tell the story of how many times Hitler and Nazi Germany's military might was not sufficient. They could have been easily stopped. The pacifists, the people who believed Hitler or foolish enough to believe Hitler, didn't act properly. If the leaders just woke up to that idea, in fact, Churchill is a kind of representation of that. But in your conception here, it's possible that Churchill was also a representation of the British people, even though seemingly unpopular, that force was... They gave birth to somebody like Churchill, who said, we'll never surrender, right? Yes. She'll fight in the beaches. Yes. I think World War II Britain is a good example of that. It is clearly a dynamic leader who has his pulse on what the people want and demand and are willing to do. It's a very dynamic art of leading that and shaping those wants at the same time as knowing that you're bound by them. Well, then if we conceive a history in this way, let me ask you about our presidents. You are taking on the impossibly difficult task of teaching a course in a couple of years here, or in one year, called the History of American Presidency. What is the history of American presidents called? The History of American Presidential Elections. So if the people are in part responsible for leaders, how can we explain what is going on in America that we have the leaders that we do today? So if we think about the elections of the past several cycles, I guess let me ask, are we a divided nation? Are we more of a divided nation than we were in the past? What do you understand about the American citizen at the beginning of this century from the leaders we have elected? Yes. Obviously, we are a divided country in our rhetoric, in our day-to-day politics. But we are nowhere near as divided as we have been in other periods in our history, the most obvious, of course, being the American Civil War 150 years ago. And the distinction is not just that we haven't come to blows, but that we are fundamentally one society, one economy, and deeply integrated as a nation, both domestically and on the world stage in ways that look nothing like the United States in 1861. Will political rhetoric continue to be extreme? Of course. But we're not as divided as people think we are. Well, then if you actually look throughout human history, does it always get outside of the people, do the elections get as contentious as they've recently been? So there's a kind of perception that has been very close, and there's a lot of accusations, a lot of tensions. It's very heated. It's almost fueling the machine of division. Has that been often the case? It has. It hasn't, it hasn't. I mean, I do think right now is different. And there it's worth distinguishing, are there deep social or economic divisions, which I don't actually think that there are, versus partisanship in particular, sort of the rivalry between the two parties. And it's very clear that we are in an era of what political scientists call hyperpartisanship, right? And that the two parties have taken fundamentally different positions and moved further apart from one another. And that is what I think people talk about when they say our country is divided. So the country may not be divided, even if our politics are highly partisan, that is a divergence from other time periods in our history. So I wonder if this kind of political partisanship is actually an illusion of division. I sometimes feel like we mostly all agree on some basic fundamentals. And the things that people allegedly disagree on are really blown out of proportion. And there's like a media machine, and the politicians really want you to pick a blue side and a red side. And because of that, somehow, I mean, families break up over Thanksgiving dinner about who they voted for. There's a really strong pressure to be the red or blue. And I wonder if that's a feature or a bug, whether this is just part of the mechanism of democracy that we want to, even if there's not a real thing to be divided over, we need to construct it such that you can always have a tension of ideas in order to make progress, to figure out how to progress as a nation. I think we're figuring that out in real time. On the one hand, it's easy to say that it's a feature of a political system that has two parties. And the United States is in some ways unique in not being a parliamentary democracy. And so in some ways, you would think that would be the feature that is causing partisanship and to reach these heights. That said, we can even see in parliamentary systems and all around the world that the same kinds of rhetorics of irreconcilable division, a kind of politics of emotion are proliferating around the world. Some of that, as you say, I think is not as real as it appears on television, on social media, and other formats. So I don't know that other countries that are experiencing sort of political conflict, I'm not sure that they're deeply divided either. So I've had the fortune of being intellectually active through the George Bush versus Al Gore election, then the Obama, and just every election since. And it seems like a large percentage of those elections, there's been a claim that the elections were rigged, that there is some conspiracy, corruption, malevolence on the other side. I distinctly remember when Donald Trump won in 2016, a lot of people I know said that election was rigged and there's different explanations, including Russian influence. And then in 2020, I was just running in Austin along the river and somebody said like, oh, huge fan of the podcast. And they said like, what do you think of it? This is just not right. What's happening in this country that the 2020 election was obviously rigged from their perspective in electing Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. Do you think there's a case to be made for and against each claim in the full context of history of our elections being rigged? I think the American election system is fundamentally sound and reliable. And I think that the evidence is clear for that regardless of which election you're looking at. In some ways, whether you look at a presidential election or even a local county election for dogcatcher or something, that the amount of time and resources and precision that go into voter registration, vote counting, certification processes are crucial to democratic institutions. I think when someone says rigged, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they're coming from, they're looking for an answer. They're looking for that one answer for what is in fact a complex system. So on the left, when they say rigged, they may be pointing to a wide range of ways in which they think that the system is tilted through gerrymandering, misrepresentation through the electoral college. On the right, when people say rigged, they may be concerned about voter security, about ways in which the mainstream media may control messages. In both cases, the feeling is it's articulated as my vote didn't get counted right. But the deeper concern is my vote doesn't count. My voice isn't being heard. So no, I don't think the elections are rigged. So let me push back. There's a comfort to the story that they're not rigged. And a lot of us like to live in comfort. So people who articulate conspiracy theories say, sure, it's nice to be comfortable, but here's the reality. And the thing they articulate is there's incentives in close elections, which we seem to have nonstop close elections. There's so many financial interests. There's so many powerful people. Surely you can construct not just with the media and all the ways you describe both on the left and the right, the elections could be rigged, but literally actually in a fully illegal way, manipulate the results of votes. Surely there's incentive to do that. And I don't think that's a totally ridiculous argument because it's like, all right, well, I mean, it actually lands to the question, which is a hard question for me to ask as an optimist of how many malevolent people out there and how many malevolent people are required to rig an election. So what is the face transition for a system to become from like corruption light to high level of corruption such that you could do things like rig elections, which is what happens quite a lot in many nations in the world even today? So yes, there is interference in elections and there has been in American history, and we can go all the way back into the 18th century. You don't have to go back to Texas in the 1960s, LBJ to find examples of direct interference in the outcome of elections. And there are incentives to do that. Those incentives will only feel more existential as hyper-partisanship makes people think that the outcome of the elections are a matter of black and white or life and death. And you will see people organizing every way they can to shape elections. We saw this in the 1850s when settlers, pro and anti-slavery flooded into Kansas to try to determine the outcome of an election. We see this in the reconstruction period when the Ku Klux Klan shows up to block the doors for black voters in the South. This history is not new, it's there. I think the reason why I think that the system is sound is not or the reason when I say I believe that the election system is fundamentally sound, is fundamentally sound. I'm not trying to be reassuring or encourage complacency. I'm saying this is something that we need to do and to work on. AC So the current electoral mechanisms are sufficiently robust. Even if there is corruption, even if there is rigging, the force that corrects itself, corrects and ensures that nobody gets out of line is much stronger than the other incentives, which are like the corrupting incentives. That's the thing I talked about, visiting Ukraine talking about corruption. A lot of people talk about corruption as being a symptom. If the system allows, creates these incentives for there to be corruption, humans will always go for corruption. That's just, you have to assume that. The power of the United States is that it constructs systems that prevent you from being corrupt at scale. At least, I mean, depends what you believe, but most of us, if you believe in this country, you have to, you believe in the self-correcting mechanisms of corruption that even if that desire is in the human heart, the system resists it, prevents it. That's your current belief. AC Yes, as of today. But I do think that those, that will require oversight by institutions, ideally ones that are insulated as much as possible from partisan politics, which is very difficult right now. And it will require the demands of the American people, that they want these elections to be fair and secure. And that means being willing to lose them, regardless of which party you're in favor of. AC So what do you think about the power of the media to create partisanship? I'm really worried that there's a huge incentive, speaking of incentives, to divide the country. The media and the politicians, I'm not sure where it originates, but it feels like it's the media. Maybe it's a very cynical perspective on journalism, but it seems like if we're angry and divided as evenly as possible, you're going to maximize the number of clicks. So it's almost like the media wants to elect people that are going to be the most divisive maximizing. And the worry I have is they are not beyond either feeding or if you want to be very cynical, manufacturing narratives that lead that division, like the narrative of an election being rigged. Because if you convinced half the populace that the election was completely rigged, that's a really good way to get a lot of clicks. And the very cynical view is I don't know if the media machine will stop the destruction of our democracy in service of getting more clicks. It may destroy our entire democracy just to get more clicks, just because the fire, as the thing burns down, will get clicks. Am I putting too much blame on the media here? The machine of it. You're diagnosing the incentive structure, you're depicting that with 100% accuracy. But I think history teaches that you might be giving the media too much causal power, that the American people are smarter than the media that they consume. And even today, we know that. Even people who consume just Fox or just MSNBC know what they're consuming. So I don't think that media will be the solution. And I certainly don't think that returning to a media structure of the mid 20th century with three news channels that all tell us one story, that's no golden age that we're trying to get back to, for sure. Well, there is a novel thing in human history, which is Twitter and social media and so on. So we're trying to find our footing as a nation to figure out how to think about politics, how to maintain our basic freedoms, our sense of democracy, of our interaction with government, and so on on this new medium of social media. How do you think Twitter changed things? Do you think Twitter is good for democracy? Do you think it has changed what it means to be an American citizen? Or is it just the same old media mechanism? It has not changed what it means to be an American citizen. It may have changed the day to day sound of being and the experience of it. It got noisier, it got louder, and it got more decentered. I think Twitter is paradoxical. On the one hand, it is a fundamentally democratic platform. And in some ways, it democratizes institutions that had gatekeepers and authority figures for a very long time. But on the other hand, it's not a democratic institution at all. It's a for-profit corporation, and it operates under those principles. And so that said, it's an institution of American and global life that the people of the United States have the authority to do. And so it's a very important platform. It's an institution of American and global life that the people of the United States have the authority to regulate or reshape as they see fit, both that and other major media players. So one of the most dramatic decisions that illustrate both sides of what you're saying is when Twitter decided to ban, I think permanently, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, off of Twitter. Can you make the case that that was a good idea and a good idea? Yes. I think the simple fact of the matter is Twitter is a platform. It has rules of service. Twitter concluded that President Trump had violated the terms of service and blocked them. And if you have rules, you have to enforce them. Did it have consequences? It had direct and predictable consequences of creating a sense among millions of Americans that Twitter had taken aside in politics or confirming their belief that it had done so. Will it have unintended consequences? This is where the historian can come in and say, yes, there's always unintended consequences. And we don't know what it would mean for political figures to be excluded from various media platforms under these notions that they had violated terms of service, et cetera. I guess we'll see. Well, to me, I'm generally against censorship, but to take Twitter's perspective, it's unclear to me in terms of unintended consequences, whether censoring a human being from being part of your platform is going to decrease or increase the amount of hate in the world. So it is a strong case to be made that banning somebody like Donald Trump increases the amount of resentment among people and that's a very large number of people that support him or even love him or even see him as a great president, one of the greatest this country has had. And so if you completely suppress his voice, you're going to intensify the support that he has from just the regular support for another human being who ran for president to somebody that becomes an almost heroic figure for that set of people. Now, the flip side is removing a person from a platform like Donald Trump might lessen the megaphone of that particular person, might actually level the democratic notion that everybody has a voice. So basically, removing the loud extremes is helpful for giving the center, the calm, the thoughtful voices more power. And so in that sense, that teaches a lesson that don't be crazy in any one direction. Don't go full, don't go Lenin, don't go Hitler. You have to stay in the middle. There's divisions in the middle, there's discussions in the middle, but stay in the middle. So, I think that's sort of the steel man, the case for censoring. But I, boy, is censorship a slippery slope. And also, boys, Twitter becoming a thing that's more than just a company. It seems like it's a medium of communication that we use for information, for knowledge, for wisdom even. During the period of COVID, we used it to gain an understanding of what the hell's going on. What should we do? What's the state of the art science? Science fundamentally transformed during the time of COVID because you have no time for the full review cycle that science usually goes through. And some of the best sources of information for me, from the conspiracy theory to the best doctors, was Twitter. The data, the stats, all that kind of stuff. And that feels like more than a couple, more than a company. And then Twitter and YouTube and different places took a really strong stance on COVID, which is the lazy stance, in my opinion, which is we're going to listen to whatever CDC or the institutions have said. But the reality is you're an institution of your own now. You're kind of the press. You're like, there's a, there's a, it's a really difficult position. It's a really, really difficult position to take. But I wish they have stepped up and take on the full responsibility and the pain of fighting for the freedom of speech. Yes, they need, they need to do that. But, you know, I'm struck by some of the things that you said, ways in which, you know, Twitter has the power to shape the conversation. And I don't think in a democratic society, democratic polities should cede that power to, to for-profit companies. Do you agree that it's possible that Twitter has that power currently? Do you sense that it has the power? Because I might sense as Twitter has the power to start wars, like tweets have the power to start wars, to, to, yeah, to, to change the direction of elections. Maybe in the sense in the ways in which, you know, a wave has the power to wash away sand, right? You know, it's, it's the meat, it's still the medium, right? It's not, it's not in itself an actor. It's how actors use the platform, which requires us to scrutinize the structure of the platform and access to it. Unfortunately, it's not maybe as similar to the wave. It's not just a medium. It's a, it's a medium plus. It's a medium that enables virality that benefits from virality of engagement. And that means singular voices can, can have a disproportionate impact, like not even voices, singular ideas, dramatic ideas can have a disproportionate impact. And so that actually threatens, it's almost like, I don't know what the equivalent is in nature, but it's a, it's a wave that can grow exponentially because of the intensity of the, the initial intensity of the wave. I don't know how to describe this as a dynamical system, but it feels like, it feels like there, there is a responsibility there not to accelerate, not to accelerate voices just because they get a lot of engagement. You have to have a proportional representation of that voice. But you're saying that a strong democracy should be robust to that. A strong democracy can and should, and will be. I mean, I think the other thing a historian will tell you about Twitter is that this too shall pass, right? But, but I do think, you know, the structures of, of the, of the platform, of the algorithm, of, of this and other major players are, are eligible for scrutiny by, by democratic institutions. So in preparing to teach the course, the history of American presidential elections leading up to the 2024 elections. So one of the lessons of history is this too shall pass. So don't make everything about this is, this is going to either save or destroy our nation. That seems to be like the message of every single election as I'm doing Trump hands. Do you think Donald Trump, what do you think about the 2024 election? Do you think Donald Trump runs? Do you think the, the tension will grow? Or was that a singular moment? Do you think it'll be like AOC versus Trump or whoever, whatever the most maximum drama maximizing thing, or will things stabilize? I think I can, I can, you know, historians don't like to predict the future, but I can predict this one that it will not be a calm and stabilized election. I think as of, you know, the time that we're talking in 2022, we don't, there are too many, you know, sort of open questions, particularly about whether Joe Biden will run for reelection. He says he will, but you know, I think that's you know, but the jury I think is out on that. You know, I can't predict whether Donald Trump will run for election or not. I think, you know, we do know that, that the, that President Trump doesn't like to, to start things he can't win. And if the polling data suggests that he's not a credible candidate, he might be reluctant to enter the race and might find more appealing the kind of sideline kind of kingmaker role that he's been crafting since he left the White House. You know, I think there are plenty of people who are, you know, dreaming that there's some sort of centrist candidate, you know, whether it's a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican who will, you know, save us from, from, from all of this, either within the party or in a third party run. I don't think that's likely. Why are we getting them? Why don't you think it's likely? What's the explanation? There seems to be a general hunger for a person like this. You would, but the system sorts it out, right? You know, that the, the, the primary systems and the party, you know, party candidate selection systems, you know, will favor sort of more, you know, more partisan views, right? More conservative Republicans, more liberal Democrats, as the kind of center candidates. It seems like the system prefers mediocre, uh, executive, mediocre leaders, mediocre partisan leaders. If I take a cynical look, but maybe I'm romanticizing the leaders of the past and maybe I'm just remembering the great leaders of the past. And, uh, yeah, I can assure you there's plenty of mediocre partisans in the 19th century. Okay. And the 20th. Um, well, let me ask you about, uh, platforming. Um, do you think Donald, it's the Twitter question, but I was torn about whether to talk to Donald Trump on this podcast as a historian, what would you advise? I think, uh, I mean, you know, this is, uh, this is a difficult question, right? Um, for, for historians who want, um, you know, sort of want, uh, to make sure that they know sort of what Americans are thinking and talking about, um, you know, uh, for centuries later. So one of the things that, you know, at least my understanding is that when, uh, president Trump was banned from Twitter, his account was also deleted. Um, and that is one of the most valuable sources that historians will use, um, to understand that the era and parts of it were sort of, you know, uh, archived and reconstructed. But, um, you know, but in that sense, I think that that is also a real loss to the historical record. Um, I mean, I think that, uh, your podcast shows you'll, you'll talk to, you'll talk to anyone. Um, I'm here, right? So, you know, I'm, I'm not in the business of saying, you know, don't, don't, don't talk, don't talk to that's one of the difficult things when I think about Hitler. I think, um, Hitler, Stalin, I don't know if World War I quite has the same intensity of. Um, controversial leaders, but one of the sad things from a historian perspective is how few interviews Hitler has given or Stalin has given. And that's such a difficult thing because it's obvious that talking to Donald Trump, that talking to Xi Jinping, talking to Putin is really valuable from a historical perspective to understand. But then you think about the momentary impact of such a conversation and you think, well, depending on how the conversation goes, you can steer or, uh, flame, what is it feed the flame of war or conflict or, um, abuses of power and things like this. And that's, I think the tension between the journalist and the historian. Cause when a journalist interview dictators, for example, one of the things that strikes me is they're often very critical of the dictator. They're, they're, they're like, um, they're basically attacking them in front of their face as opposed to trying to understand. Because what I perceive they're doing is they're signaling to, uh, the other journalists that they're on the right side of history kind of thing. Um, but that's not very productive. And it's also why the dictators and leaders often don't do those interviews. Uh, it's not productive to understanding who the human being is to understand you have to empathize, um, because few people, I think few leaders do something from a place of malevolence. I think they really do think they're doing good. And not even for themselves, not even for selfish reasons. I think they're doing great for the, they're doing the right thing for their country or for whoever the group they're leading. And to understand that you have to, and by the way, a large percent of the country often supports them. I bet if you pull legitimately pull people in North Korea, they will believe that their leader is doing the right thing for their country. Um, and so to understand that you have to empathize. So that's the tension of the journalist, I think, and the historian, because obviously the historian doesn't, doesn't care. They really want to, they care obviously deeply, but they, they know that history requires deep understanding of the human being in the full context. Yeah, it's a tough decision to make. Yeah. Well, I think it's, uh, both for journalists and historians, um, the challenge is not to be too close to your subject, right? Um, and you know, not to be, um, overly influenced, uh, and used by them, right? You know, when you're talking to a living subject, which historians do, you know, um, too, um, you know, it's, it's a matter of making sure that you triangulate their story with, with the, the rest of the record, right? Um, uh, and that may paint a different picture of, of the person than, um, and will prevent you as a journalist or a historian from kind of, you know, just telling someone else's story. And so, and historians also have the benefit of going back, you know, 30, 40 years and finding all the other stories and figuring out, you know, uh, playing two truths and a lie, you know, like which parts are, you know, which parts are accurate, which are, which are not. And journalists do that work in a day to day basis, but historians, um, you know, we get a little more time to think about what we're doing. Well, I personally also think it's deeply disrespectful to the populace, to people, to, um, censor and ignore a person that's supported by a very large number of people. Like that you owe, I personally feel like you owe the citizens of this country a deep, uh, empathy and understanding of the leaders they support, even if you disagree with what they say. I mean, that's the, the, the, to me, I'm much more worried about the resentment of the censorship, that it's to having a good conversation with Donald Trump is ultimately valuable. Because he, I think, uh, especially in this case, I agree with you that Donald Trump is not a singular person. He is a, he represents a set of feelings that a large number of people have. And whatever those feelings are, you can try to figure out by talking to people, but also talking to the, the, the, the man and then seeing the interplay there. What does this really represent in this period in history and this slice of the world? Um, yeah, ultimately understanding, I think leads to, uh, compassion and love and unity, which is how this whole thing progresses. The tension between the different sides is useful to, um, have a good conversation, but ultimately coming up with the right answer and progressing towards that answer is, is how you make progress. Do you think a pure democracy can work? So we have this representative democracy with these contentious elections and so on. When we started civilization on Mars, which becomes more and more realistic technologically, we can have a more direct access to be able to vote on issues and vote for ideas. Do you think it can work? I don't think we have to go to Mars, uh, to do it. Right. Um, uh, I think, um, um, the answer is not, you know, to flip a switch and, uh, turn on something called pure democracy. Um, uh, when people are not ready for it, when their, uh, incentive structures are not, um, sort of, uh, structured for it, but you can, um, you know, experiment with more democratic forms of governance one after another, right? Whether it's, um, you know, sort of experimenting with, um, technology to find new ways of sort of, of getting, uh, greater rates of participation in democracy. Um, I think that we see some experiments in, um, sort of more complicated systems of voting, um, that in fact might actually be more reflective of people's choices than simply picking one candidate, right? Sort of rank choice voting or, uh, runoffs, other kinds of things. Um, you know, I think that we can think more, uh, creatively about something like participatory budgeting, right? In which, um, you know, uh, we put all this money into the government, um, and then, um, you know, we, we, um, you know, should as a, as a people, there are more democratic ways of, of sort of, of how we spend it. Um, and I think the most urgent in some level is a more democratic form of foreign policy making, right? That foreign policy making, decision making, um, uh, about the military, about foreign policy, um, is, is very ways insulated from, from popular participation, um, in, in modern American history. Um, and I think, you know, there, uh, technology is not the, the, going to solve this. Um, you know, it's a combination of technology and, and human creativity, but I think, um, you know, I think we can start heading that direction. Whether we get there before we get to Mars, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. What interesting lessons and thoughts, if you look at the fundamentals of the history of American elections, do you hope to reveal when you try to teach the class and, um, how would those fundamentals be met by the, by the students that received that wisdom? So w what do you think about this dance, especially such an interesting idea now, I hope you do go through with this kind of idea is look at the history while the next one is happening. Yeah. I think it's worth remembering that the students who are typical American student who's in college right now has lived their entire life after the election of 2000 and Bush v. Gore. Right. And after 9-11 probably. Yeah, absolutely. After all of these things. Right. And so on the one hand, they take partisanship and contentious elections for granted. They don't, I think, share sort of some vision that things used to be different, right? They don't remember a world that had lots of moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans and sort of running around in it. But so in some ways, it's a way of looking back into the past to find other ways of organizing our politics. It's also a way of reassuring students that we have been through contentious and even sort of violent elections before in our history. And that people have defended the right to vote, right? People have risked their lives to vote. I think they will understand that as well. And maybe knowledge of history here can help deescalate the emotions you might feel about one candidate or another. And from a place of calmness, you can more easily arrive at wisdom. That's my hope. Yeah. Just as a brief aside, you, brief aside, but nevertheless, you wrote the book Bound by War that describes a century of war in the Pacific. So looking at this slice of geography and power, so most crucially through the partnership between the United States and the Philippines, can you tell some aspects of the story that is often perhaps not considered when you start to look more at the geopolitics of Europe and Soviet Union and the United States? How did the war in the Pacific define the 20th century? Yeah. I came to this book Bound by War from a sense that our stories were too lopsided toward Europe, right? That American history, when viewed from the Pacific, specifically in the 20th century, helps us understand American power in some new ways, right? Not only American projection of power into Asia, right? But also the ways in which American power affected people in Asia, right? Either as in places like the Philippines where the United States had a colony for almost 50 years, or Asian Americans, people who had migrated over their descendants in the United States. And those linkages between the United States and Asia, particularly the US-Philippine connection, I think were something that needed to be traced across the 20th century, because it's a way, kind of a new way of seeing American power from a different angle. You see it in that way. What are some aspects that define America from when you take the perspective of the Pacific? What military conflict and the asymmetry of power there? Right. So I start in 1898 with the US invasion of the Philippines, its conquests and annexation. And I think in many ways, this is a defining conflict of the 20th century that's often completely overlooked. We're described, I think, incorrectly as merely a war with Spain, right? That the war in the Philippines is our first extended overseas conflict, our first conflict in what would come to be called the developing world or third world. It's a form of counterinsurgency. This is the US Army sort of learning lessons that are then repeated again in the Second World War in Korea, Vietnam, and even after 9-11. Is the Philippines our friends or enemies in this history? Well, that's the interesting part, right? Is that the book focuses in particular on Filipinos who fight with the Americans who fought in the US Army and Navy over the course of the 20th century. And they are in a fundamentally ironic position, right? They are from the Philippines and they're fighting for the United States, which is the colonial power occupying their country. And I think that irony persists, right? So if you look at polling data where they ask people all around the world, do you think positively or negatively about the United States? That the highest responses are from the Philippines, right? Filipinos view the United States more favorably than people from any other country in the world, including America, right? That they think more favorably of Americans than Americans do. And so, sort of unpacking that irony is part of what I'm trying to get at in the book. What was the People Power Revolution, and what lessons can we learn from it? You kind of assign an important, a large value to it in terms of what we can learn for the American project. Yeah. So in 1986, the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, is overthrown by a popular revolution known as People Power in the wake of a contested and probably almost certainly rigged election that sort of confirms his rule. When that is overturned through sort of mass movements in the Philippines, it's also sort of confirmed in many ways by the reluctance of the United States to intervene to prop up a Cold War ally. Ferdinand Marcos had supported American policy throughout his administration. The Reagan administration, Ronald Reagan was president at the time, basically chooses not to support him. That's a personally wrenching decision for Reagan himself, but he's being shaped in many ways by the emerging voices of neoconservative, political, foreign policy voices. In particular, Paul Wolfowitz and the State Department and others who see movements for democracy and democratization that then kind of take fire in the late 20th century in Latin America, in South Korea, in Eastern Europe, and all around the world until it hits the wall in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. What's that wall? What do you mean by it hits the wall? There are global movements for democratization, for opening up throughout the world starting in the 1980s. Obviously, they continue in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I say it hits the wall in China with the protests in Tiananmen Square that are blocked and that are crushed and I think represent a real sort of turning point in the history of democratic institutions on a global scale in the late 20th century. There's some places where the fight for freedom will work and some places not. That's the kind of lesson from the 20th to take forward to the 21st century. No, I think the lesson is maybe one that we talked about earlier, that there's this dynamic dance between leaders, whether totalitarian leaders or leaders of democratic movements and the people that they're leading. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Let me ask a big ridiculous question because we talked about presidential elections. Now, this is objectively definitively, you have to answer one person who's the greatest president in American history. Oh, that's easy. Abraham Lincoln. Is that easy, not George Washington? Washington had the statesman qualities. He understood his power as the first president. Also relinquished power. He was willing to relinquish power, but Lincoln has the combination of personal leadership, a fundamental moral character, and just the ability to fight the fight of politics, to play the game of it, to get where he's going, to play the short game and the long game, to work with his enemies, to block them when he had to. He gets the United States through the Civil War, so you got to give him some credit for that. And he's pretty good at making speeches. Obviously, it helps that he's a remarkable speaker and able to convey those kinds of visions, but he is first and foremost a politician and probably the best one we have. Both at getting elected and at ruling. In some ways, better at the doing than at the getting elected. The election of 1860 is a hot mess that could have worked out many different ways. Even the election of 1864, when we have a presidential election in the middle of a civil war, it was not a foregone conclusion that Lincoln would be reelected. Both times, he's not a master campaigner by any means, but he was a master politician as a governor. Sure. Do we have leaders like that today? One perspective is leaders ain't what they used to be. And then another perspective is, well, we always romanticize stuff that happens in the past. We forget the flaws and remember the great moments. Yeah, both of those things are true. On the one hand, we are not surrounded by people of Lincoln's caliber right now. That feels like the case. And I think we can say that with some certainty. But I always like to point to President Harry Truman, who left office with some truly abysmal presidential ratings, was dismissed throughout his presidency as unqualified, as not knowing what he was doing, et cetera. And then, turns out, with hindsight, we know that he was better at the job than anyone understood. Better at getting elected. You remember that sign, Dewey Defeats Truman. He showed them. And better at holding power and better at building the kind of institutions that long after he was gone, demonstrated that he won the long game. And some of that is the victors do write the story. And I ask myself very much, how will history remember Volodymyr Zelensky? It's not obvious. And how will history remember Putin? That too is not obvious. Because it depends on how the role, the geopolitics, how the nations, how the history of these nations unravel, unfold rather. So it's very interesting to think about. And the same is true for Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and so on. I think it's probably an unanswerable question of which of the presidents will be remembered as a great president from this time. You can make all kinds of cases for all kinds of people, and they do, but it's unclear. It's fascinating to think about. When the robots finally take over, which of the humans they will appreciate the most. Let me ask for advice. Do you have advice for young folks? Because you mentioned the folks you're teaching, they don't know what it's like to have waited on the internet for the thing to load up, for every single web page that's suffering. They don't know what it's like to not have the internet and have a dial phone that goes shh, shh. And then the joy of getting angry at somebody and hanging up with a physical phone. They don't know any of that. So for those young folks that look at the contentious elections, that look at our contentious world, our divided world, what advice would you give them of how to have a career they can be proud of? Let's say they're in college or in high school, and how to have a life they can be proud of. Oh man, that's a big question. Yeah, I've never given a graduation speech. This is like warm up. Let's look for raw materials before you write it. If I did, I think I would advise students that history teaches that you that you should be more optimistic than your current surrounding suggests. And I think it would be very easy as a young person today to think there's nothing I can do about this politics. There's nothing I can say to this person on the other side of the aisle. There's nothing I can do about the planet, et cetera, and just sort of give up. And I think history teaches that we don't know who the winners and losers are in the long run, but we know that the people who give up are always the losers. So don't give into cynicism or apathy. Optimism paves the way. Yeah, because human beings are deeply resilient and creative, even under far more difficult circumstances than we face right now. Well, let me ask a question that you wouldn't even dare to cover in your graduation commencement speech. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? This whole project that history studies and analyzes as if there's a point to the whole thing. What is the point? All the wars, all the presidents, all the struggles to discover what it means to be human or reach for a higher ideal. Why? Why do you think we're here? I think this is where there is often a handoff from the historian to the clergy. But in the end, there's less distance between the two than you think. If you think about some of the answers to that question, what is the meaning of life that are given from religious traditions? Often they have a fundamentally historical core, right? It's about unifying the past and the present in some other non-earthly sort of dimension. So I think there is that. I think even for people who don't have religious belief, there's a way in which history is about the shared human condition. And I think historians aspire to telling all of that story, right? We drill down on the miseries of war and depressions and so forth, but the story is not complete without blueberries and butterflies and all the rest that go with it. RG So both the humbling and the inspiring aspect that you get by looking back at human history that we're in this together. Christopher, this is a huge honor. This is an amazing conversation. Thank you for taking us back to a war that not often discussed, but in many ways defined the 20th century and the century we are in today, which is the first world war. The war that was supposed to end all wars, but instead defined the future wars and defines our struggle to try to avoid World War III. So it's a huge honor you would talk with me today. This is amazing. Thank you so much. RG Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Christopher Capazzola. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me leave you with some words from Woodrow Wilson in 1917 about World War I that haunted the rest of the 20th century. This is a war to end all wars. George Santana, a Spanish American philosopher responded to this quote in 1922 by saying, Only the dead have seen the end of war. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
 The lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that human life
 is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more
 material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force. And
 at the end of the day in 1918, one side did win that. But it didn't actually solve any of those
 political problems. You said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US.
 Can you explain? The following is a conversation with Christopher Capazzola, a historian at MIT,
 specializing in the history of politics and war in modern American history, especially about the
 role of World War I in defining the trajectory of the United States and our human civilization
 in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the Lux Freedman Podcast. To support it,
 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Christopher Capazzola.
 Let's start with a big and difficult question. How did World War I start?
 On the one hand, World War I started because of a series of events in the summer of 1914
 that brought the major powers of Europe into conflict with one another. But I actually think
 it's more useful to say that World War I started at least a generation earlier when rising powers,
 particularly Germany, started devoting more and more of their resources toward military affairs
 and naval affairs. This sets off an arms race in Europe. It sets off a rivalry over the colonial
 world and who will control the resources in Africa and Asia. And so by the time you get to the summer
 of 1914, and in a lot of ways, I say the war has already begun and this is just the match that
 lights the flame. So the capacity for war was brewing within the leaders and within the populace.
 They started accepting sort of slowly through the culture propagated this idea that we can go to war.
 It's a good idea to go to war. It's a good idea to expand and dominate others, that kind of thing.
 Maybe not put in those clear terms, but just the sense that military action is the way that nations
 operate at the global scale. Yes, yes and, right. So yes, there's a sense that the military can
 be the solution to political conflict in Europe itself. And the and is that war and military
 conflict are already happening, right? That there's war particularly in Africa, in North Africa,
 in the Middle East, Balkans. Conflict is already underway and the European powers haven't faced off
 against each other. They've usually faced off against an asymmetrical conflict against much less
 powerful states. But in some ways that war is already underway. So do you think it was inevitable?
 It was inevitable because World War I is brought up as a case study where it seems like a few
 accidental leaders and a few accidental events or one accidental event led to the war. And if you
 change that one little thing, it could have avoided the war. Your sense is the drums of war have been
 beating for quite a while and it would have happened almost no matter what or very likely to have happened.
 Yes, historians never like to say things are inevitable. And certainly, you know, there were
 people who could have chosen a different path, both in the short term and the long term.
 But fundamentally, there were irreconcilable conflicts in the system of empires in the world
 in 1914. I can't see, you know, it didn't have to be this war, but it had it probably had to be a war.
 So there was the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there's France and Great Britain, US,
 the USP called that empire at that moment yet. When do you graduate to empire status?
 Well, certainly after 1898 with the acquisition of the former territories of the Spanish Empire,
 you know, the United States has formal colonial possessions. And it has sort of mindsets of rule
 and military acquisition that would define empire in a kind of more informal sense.
 So you would say you would put the blame or the responsibility of starting World War One into the
 hands of the German Empire and Kaiser Wilhelm II? You know, that's a really tough call to make.
 And you know, that deciding that is going to keep historians in business for the next 200 years.
 And I think there are people who would lay all of the blame on the Germans, right? And you know,
 who would point toward a generation of arms buildup, you know, alliances that Germany made
 and promises that they made to their allies in the Balkans, to the Austro-Hungarians. And so yes,
 there's an awful lot of responsibility there. There has been a trend lately to say, no,
 it's no one's fault, right? That, you know, that all of the various powers literally were sleep
 walking into the war, right? They backed into it inadvertently. I think that lets everyone a little
 too much off the hook, right? And so I think in between is, you know, I would put the blame on
 the system of empires itself on the system. But in that system, the actor that sort of carries the
 most responsibility is definitely Imperial Germany. So the leader of Austro-Hungarian
 Empire, Franz Joseph I, his nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was assassinated.
 And so that didn't have to lead to a war. And then the leader of the German Empire,
 Kaiser Wilhelm II, pressured sort of started talking trash and boiling the water that ultimately
 resulted in the explosion plus all the other players. So what can you describe the dynamics
 of how that unrolled? What's the role of US? What's the role of France? What's the role of
 Great Britain, Germany, and Austro-Hungarian Empire? Yeah, over the course of about four weeks,
 right? Following the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, it sort of triggers a series of
 political conflicts and ultimately ultimatums, sort of demanding sort of that one or other power
 sort of stand down in response to the demands of either, you know, Britain, France, or in turn,
 Germany or Russia, at the same time that those alliances kind of trigger automatic responses
 from the other side. And so it escalates. And once that escalation is combined with the call up of
 military troops, then none of those powers wants to be sort of the last one to kind of get ready
 for conflict. So even throughout it, they think they are getting ready in a defensive maneuver.
 And they think if there is conflict, well, it might be a skirmish, it might be, you know,
 sort of a standoff. It could be solved with diplomacy later because diplomacy is failing now.
 And that turns out not to be the case. Diplomacy fails. It's not a skirmish. It becomes a massive
 war. And the Americans are watching all of this from the sidelines. They have very little influence
 over what happens that summer. How does it go from a skirmish between a few nations to a global war?
 Is there a place where there's a phase transition? Yeah, I think the phase transition is in over the
 course of the fall of 1914 when the Germans make an initial sort of bold move into France. In many
 ways, they're fighting the last war, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And they really do
 sort of, you know, kind of want to have a quick sort of lightning strike in some ways against
 France to kind of bring the war to a speedy conclusion. France turns out to be able to fight
 back more effectively than the Germans expected. And then the battle lines sort of harden. And then
 behind that, the French and the Germans as well as the British on the side of the French start
 digging in literally, right? And digging trenches, trenches that at first are, you know,
 three feet deep to avoid shelling from artillery, then become six feet, 10 feet deep, you know,
 two miles wide that include telegraph wires that include whole hospitals in the back. And then at
 that point, you know, the front is locked in place. And the only way to break that is sort of basically
 dialing the war up to 11, right? So massive numbers of troops, massive efforts, none of which
 work, right? And so the war is stuck in this, but that's the phase transition right there.
 What were the machines of war in that case? You mentioned trenches. What were the guns used?
 What was the size of guns? What are we talking about? What did Germany start accumulating that
 led up to this war? One of the things that we see immediately is the industrial revolution of the
 previous 30 or 40 years brought to bear on warfare, right? And so you see sort of machine guns,
 you see artillery, you know, these are the kind of the key weapons of war on both sides, right?
 The vast majority of battlefield casualties are from artillery shelling from one side to another,
 not, you know, sort of rifle or even sort of, you know, machine gun kind of attacks. In some ways,
 the weapons of war are human beings, right? You know, tens of thousands of them poured over the top
 in these sort of waves to kind of try to break through the enemy lines. And it would work for
 a little while, you know, but holding the territory that had been gained often proved to be
 even more demanding than gaining it. And so often, you know, each side would retreat back into the
 trenches and wait for another day. And how did Russia, how did Britain,
 how did France get pulled into the war? I suppose the France one is the easy one. But what is the
 order of events here? Right. How it becomes a global war? Yeah. So Britain, France, and Russia
 are at this time in, they're an alliance. And so the conflicts, you know, in the summer of 1914
 that lead sort of to the declarations of war happen sort of one after another, right? In August,
 in late August of 1914. And all three powers essentially come in at the same time, because
 they have promised to do so through a series of alliances conducted secretly in the years before
 1914 that committed them to defend one another. Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Ottoman empire
 have their own sort of set of secret agreements that also commit them to defend one another.
 And what this does is it sort of brings them all into conflict at the exact same moment.
 They're also, for many of these countries, bringing not just their national armies,
 but also their empires into the conflict, right? So Britain and France, of course, have,
 you know, enormous sort of global empires that begin mobilizing soldiers as well as raw materials.
 Germany has, you know, less of an overseas empire. Russia and the Ottoman empire, of course,
 have their own sort of hinterland, you know, within the empire. And very soon, you know,
 sort of all of the warring powers are bringing the entire world into the conflict.
 Did they have a sense of how deadly the war is? I mean, this is another scale of death and destruction.
 At the beginning, no, but very quickly. The scale of the devastation of these sort of massive
 over the top attacks on the trenches is apparent to the military officers, and it very quickly
 becomes apparent even at home. You know, there is, of course, censorship of the battlefield,
 and, you know, specific details don't reach people. But, you know, for civilians in any of the warring
 powers, they know fairly soon how destructive the war is. And to me, that's always been a real sort
 of puzzle, right? So that by the time the United States comes to decide whether to join the war in
 1917, they know exactly what they're getting into, right? They're not backing into the war in the
 ways that the European powers did. You know, they've seen the devastation. They've seen
 photographs. They've seen injured soldiers, and they make that choice anyway.
 When you say they, do you mean the leaders of the people? Did the death and destruction reach
 the minds of the American people by that time? Yes, absolutely. You know, we don't, in 1917,
 have the mass media that we have now, but, you know, there are images in newspapers. There are
 newsreels that play at the movie theaters, and, of course, some of it is sanitized. But
 that combined with press accounts, often really quite descriptive press accounts, gory accounts,
 reached, you know, anyone who cared to read them. You know, certainly plenty of people didn't follow
 the news, felt it was far away. But most Americans who cared about the news knew how devastating this
 war was. Yeah, there's something that happens that I recently visited Ukraine for a few weeks.
 There's something that happens with the human mind as you get away from the actual front,
 wherever the bullets are flying, like literally one kilometer away. You start to not feel the war.
 You'll hear an explosion, you'll see an explosion, you start to like get assimilated to it, or you
 start to get used to it. And then when you get as far away from like currently what is Kiev,
 you start to, you know the war's going on, everybody around you is fighting in that war,
 but it's still somehow distant. And I think with the United States, with the ocean between,
 even if you have the stories everywhere, it still is somehow distant, like the way a movie is,
 maybe, yeah, like a movie or a video game, it's somewhere else. Even if your loved ones are going,
 or you are going to fight. Yeah, that is absolutely the case. And in some ways,
 that's true even for the home fronts in Europe, you know, except for the areas where, you know,
 in Belgium and France where the war is, you know, right there in your backyard. For other people,
 yeah, there's a distance. And soldiers, of course, feel this very strongly when they,
 European soldiers, when they're able to go home on leave, often, you know, deeply,
 present the, you know, what they see as the luxury that civilians are living in during the war.
 So how did US enter the war? Who was the president? What was the dynamics involved? And
 could it have stayed out? To answer your last question first, yes, right? That the United
 States could have stayed out of the First World War. And the United States, you know,
 could have stayed out of the First World War as a military power. The United States could not have
 ignored the war completely, right? It shaped everything, right? It shaped trade, it shaped
 goods and services, agriculture, you know, whether, you know, there was a crop coming,
 whether there were immigrants coming across the Atlantic to work in American factories, right?
 So the US can't ignore the war. But the US makes a choice in 1917 to enter the war by declaring war,
 right, on Germany and Austria. And in that sense, this is a war of choice, but it's kicked off by
 a series of events, right? So President Woodrow Wilson has been president through this entire
 period of time. He has just run in the 1916 presidential election on a campaign to keep the
 United States out of war. But then in early 1917, the Germans in some ways sort of twist the Americans
 arms, right? The Germans sort of high command comes to understand that, you know, that they're stuck,
 right? That they, you know, they're stuck in this trench warfare. They need a big breakthrough.
 Their one big chance is to kind of, is to sort of break the blockade to push through that the
 British have imposed on them to break through against France. And so they do. And along with
 this, they start sinking ships on the Atlantic, including American ships. The Germans know full
 well this will draw the United States into war. But the Germans look at the United States at this
 moment, a relatively small army, a relatively small Navy, a country that at least on paper is
 deeply divided about whether to join the war. And so they say, let's do it, right? They're not going
 to get any American soldiers there in time, right? You know, it was a gamble, but I think probably
 their best chance. They took that gamble. They lost, right? In part because French resistance
 was strong, in part because Americans mobilized much faster and in much greater numbers than the
 Germans thought they would. So the American people were divided. The American people were absolutely
 divided about whether to enter this war, right? From 1914 to 1917, there is a searing debate
 across the political spectrum. It doesn't break down easily on party lines about whether it was
 in the U.S. interest to do this, whether American troops should be sent abroad, whether, you know,
 the Americans would end up just being cannon fodder for the European empires. Eventually,
 as American ships are sunk, first in the Lusitania in 1915, then in much greater numbers in 1917,
 you know, the tide starts to turn and Americans feel that, you know, a response is necessary.
 And the actual declaration of war in Congress is pretty lopsided, but it's not unanimous by any
 means. Lopsided towards entering the war. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's really interesting
 because there's echoes of that in later wars where Congress seems to, nobody wants to be the guy
 that says no to war for some reason. Once you sense that, in terms of, sorry, in terms of
 politicians, doesn't appear weak, but I wonder if that was always the case. So you make the case
 that World War I is largely responsible for defining what it means to be an American citizen.
 So in which way does it define the American citizen? When you think about citizenship,
 what it means is two things. First of all, what are your rights and obligations? What is sort of
 the legal citizenship that you have as a citizen of the United States or any other state? And the
 second is a more amorphous definition of like, what does it mean to belong, right? To be part
 of America, right? To feel American, to, you know, to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it,
 right? And both of those things really are crystal clear in terms of their importance during the war.
 Right? So both of those things are on the table. Being a citizen who is a citizen who isn't
 matters. So people who had never carried passports or, you know, anything before suddenly have to.
 But also what it means to be an American, right? To feel like it, to be part of this project is
 also kind of being defined and enforced during World War I.
 So project, you know, is a funny way to put a global war, right? So can you tell the story?
 Perhaps that's a good example of it, of the James Montgomery Flagg's 1916 poster
 that reads, I want you. Right. A lot of people know this poster. I think in its original form,
 it's memeified form. I don't know, but we know this poster and we don't know where it came from.
 Or most Americans, I think, me included, didn't know where it came from. And it actually comes
 from 1916. Does this poster represent the birth of something new in America, which is a
 commodification or, I don't know, that propaganda machine that says what it means to be an American
 is somebody that fights for their country. Yeah. So the image, it's, in fact,
 I think one of the most recognizable images, not only in the United States, but in the entire world.
 And you can bring it almost anywhere on earth in 2022 and people will know what it refers to.
 So this is an image that circulated first as a magazine cover, later as a recruitment poster,
 where the figure is Uncle Sam sort of pointing at the viewer with his finger sort of pointing
 and saying, I want you. And the I want you is a recruitment tool to join the US Army.
 And this image really kind of starts as a kind of, like I said, a magazine cover in 1916
 by the artist James Montgomery Flagg. It initially appears under the heading,
 what are you doing for preparedness? Meaning to prepare in case war comes to the United States.
 And at that point in 1916, we're still neutral. In 1917, it's turned into a US Army recruiting
 poster. And then it reappears in World War II, reappears generations after. Like you said,
 it's now gets remixed, memeified. It's all over the place. I think for me, it's a turning point.
 It's a sort of window into American culture at a crucial moment in our history, where the federal
 government is now embarking on a war overseas that's going to make enormous demands on its
 citizens. And at the same time, where sort of technologies of mass production and mass media,
 and what we would probably call propaganda, are being sort of mobilized for the first time in this
 new kind of way. Well, in some sense, is it fair to say that the empire is born,
 the expanding empire is born from the Noam Chomsky perspective kind of empire
 that seeks to have military influence elsewhere in the world?
 Yes. But I think as historians, we need to be at least as interested in what happens to the people
 who are getting pointed to by Uncle Sam, rather than just the one, whether he's pointing at us.
 So yes, he's asking us to do that, but how do we respond?
 And the people responded. So the people are ultimately the machines of history,
 the mechanisms of history. It's not the Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam can only do so much if the people
 aren't willing to step up. Absolutely. And the American people responded for sure, but they
 didn't build what Uncle Sam asked them to do in that poster. And I think that's kind of a crucial
 aspect that there never would have been sort of global US power without the response that begins
 in World War I. What was the Selective Service Act of 1917?
 So one of the very first things that Uncle Sam wants you to do is to register for selective
 service, for the draft. And the law is passed very soon after the US enters the war. It's
 demanding that all men, first between 21 and 30, then between 18 and 45, register for the draft,
 and they'll be selected by a government agency, by a volunteer organization.
 So it's a requirement to sign up. It is a legal requirement to register. Of course,
 not everyone who registers is selected, but over the course of the war, 24 million men register,
 almost 4 million serve in some fashion. What was the response? What was the feeling
 amongst the American people to have to sign up to the Selective Service Act?
 Well, this is a bigger turning point than we might think. In some ways, this is a tougher
 demand of the American public than entering the war. It's one thing to declare war on Germany,
 right? It's another thing to go down to your local post office and fill out the forms that allow your
 own government to send you there to fight. And this is especially important at a time when the
 federal government doesn't really have any other way to find you unless you actually go and register
 yourself, right? And so ordinary people are participating in the building of this war machine,
 but at least a half a million of them don't, right? And simply never fill out the forms,
 move from one town to another. But you said 20 million did? 20 something?
 Yeah, about 24 million register, at least 500,000.
 Is it surprising to you that that many registered since the country was divided?
 It is. And that's what I sort of tried to dig in to figure out how did you get 24 million people
 to register for the draft. And it's certainly not coming from the top down, right? There may be 100
 sort of agents in what's now called the FBI. It's certainly not being enforced from Washington.
 It's being enforced through the eyes of everyday neighbors, through community surveillance,
 all kinds of ways. Oh, so there was like a pressure.
 There's a lot of pressure. Interesting. So there was not a significant
 like anti-war movement, as you would see maybe later with Vietnam and things like this.
 There was a significant movement before 1917, but it becomes very hard to keep up an organized
 anti-war movement after that, particularly when the government starts shutting down protests.
 So as the Selective Service Act of 1917 runs up against some of the freedoms, some of the rights
 that are defined in our founding documents, what was that clash like? What was sacrificed?
 What freedoms and rights were sacrificed in this process?
 I mean, I think on some level, the fundamental right is liberty, right? That conscription sort
 of demands sacrifice on the behalf of some notionally for the protection of all.
 So even if you're against the war, you're forced to fight.
 Yes. And there were small provisions for conscientious objectors, solely those who
 had religious objections to all war, right? Not political objections to this war. And so
 several thousand were able to take those provisions. But even then, they faced social
 sanction, they faced ridicule, some of them faced intimidation. So those liberty interests,
 both individual freedom, religious freedom, those are some of the first things to go.
 So what about freedom of speech? Was there silencing of the press,
 of the voices of the different people that were object?
 Yes, absolutely. Right. And so very soon after the Selective Service Act is passed,
 then you get the Espionage Act, which of course is back in the news in 2022.
 What's the Espionage Act?
 The Espionage Act is a sort of omnibus bill, it contains about 10 or different provisions,
 very few of which have to do with espionage. But one key provision basically makes it illegal
 to say or do anything that would interfere with military recruitment. And that provision is used
 to shut down radical publications, to shut down German language publications. And this really has
 a chilling impact on speech during the war. Could you put into words what it means to be
 an American citizen that is in part sparked by World War I? What does that mean? Somebody that's
 should be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms to fight for their country?
 Somebody that's willing to fight to spread freedom elsewhere in the world, spread the American ideals?
 Does that begin to tell the story what it means to be an American?
 I think what we see is a change, right? So citizenship during World War I now includes
 the obligation to defend the country, to serve, and if asked to die for it. And we certainly see
 that. And I think we see the close linkage of military service and US citizenship coming out
 of this time period. But when you start making lots of demands on people to fulfill obligations,
 in turn, they're going to start demanding, right, to defend their country.
 And in turn, they're going to start demanding rights. And we start to see not necessarily
 during the war, but after, more demands for free speech protections, more demands for equality,
 for marginalized groups. And so obligations and rights are sort of developing in a dynamic
 relationship. Oh, it's almost like an overreach of power sparked a sense like, oh, crap, we can't
 centralize power to a beauty, like to drag us into a war we need to be able to. So there's
 the birth of that tension between the government and the people.
 It's a rebirth of it. Of course, that tension is always there. But in its modern form,
 I think it comes from this re-intensification of it. So what about the, you said that World War I
 gave birth to the surveillance state in the US. Can you explain?
 Yeah. So the Espionage Act sort of empowers federal organizations to watch other Americans.
 They are particularly interested in anyone who is obstructing the draft, anyone who is trying to
 organize labor or strikes or radical movements, and anyone who might have sympathy for Germany,
 which basically means all German-Americans come under surveillance.
 Initially, this is very small scale, but soon every government agency gets involved,
 from the Treasury Department Secret Service to the post office, which is sort of reading mail,
 to the Justice Department, which mobilizes 200,000 volunteers. It's a really significant
 enterprise. Much of it goes away after the war, but of all the things that go away,
 this core of the surveillance state is the thing that persists most fully.
 Is this also a place where the size of government starts to grow in these different organizations,
 or maybe creates a momentum for growth of government?
 Oh, it's exponential growth. Over the course of the war, by almost any metric you use,
 right? The size of the federal budget, the number of federal employees, the number of soldiers in
 the standing army, all of those things skyrocket during the war. They go down after the war,
 but they never go down to what they were before.
 And probably gave a momentum for growth over time.
 Yes, absolutely.
 Did World War I give birth to the military industrial complex in the United States, so
 war profiteering, expanding of the war machine in order to financially benefit a lot of parties
 involved?
 So I guess I would maybe break that into two parts, right? That on the one hand, yes,
 there is war profiteering. There are investigations of it. In the years after the war,
 there's a widespread concern that the profit motive had played too much of a part in the war,
 and that's definitely the case. But I think when you try to think of this term, military industrial
 complex, it's best to think of it as at what point does the one side lock in the other,
 right? That military choices are shaped by industry objectives and vice versa. And I do
 think that that was fully locked into place during World War I. I think that's really a
 Cold War phenomenon when the United States is on this intense kind of footing for two
 generations in a row.
 So industrial is really important there, there's companies. So before then, weapons of war were
 funded directly by the government. Who was manufacturing the weapons of war?
 Who was manufacturing the weapons of war? They were generally manufactured by private industry.
 There were of course, our arsenal sort of 19th century iterations where the government would
 produce its own weapons, partly to make sure that they got what they wanted. But most of the weapons
 of war for all of the European powers and the United States are produced by private industry.
 So why do you say that the military industrial complex didn't start then? What was the
 important thing that happened in the Cold War?
 I think one way to think about it is the Cold War is a point at which it switches from being a
 dial to a ratchet, right? So during World War I, the relationship between the military and industry
 dials up fast and high and stays that way and it dials back down. Whereas during the Cold War,
 the relationship between the two often looks more like a ratchet.
 Yeah, it becomes unstoppable.
 It goes up again.
 In the way that you start, I think the way the military industrial complex is often
 discussed as a system that is unstoppable. It expands. If you take a very cynical view,
 it creates war so that it can make money. It doesn't just find places where it can help
 through military conflict. It creates tensions that directly or indirectly lead to military
 conflict that it can then fuel and make money from.
 That is certainly one of the concerns of both people who were critical of the First World War
 and then also of Dwight Eisenhower when he's president and in his farewell address where he
 introduces the term military industrial complex. Some of it is about the profit motive, but some
 of it is a fear that Eisenhower had that no one had an interest in stopping this and that no one
 had a voice in stopping it and that the ordinary American could really do nothing to dial it to
 dial things down. Is it strange to you that we don't often hear that kind of speech today
 with Eisenhower speaking about the military industrial complex? For example, we'll have
 people criticizing the spending on war efforts, but they're not discussing the machinery of the
 military industrial complex, like the basic way that human nature works, that we get ourselves
 trapped in this thing. They're saying there's better things to spend money on versus describing
 a very seemingly natural process of when you build weapons of war that's going to lead to more war.
 It pulls you in somehow.
 AC Yeah. I would say throughout the Cold War and even after the end of it, there has not been a
 sustained conversation in the United States about our defense establishment, what we really need
 and what serves our interest and to what extent other things like market forces, profit motives,
 belong in that conversation. What's interesting is that in the generation after the First World War,
 that conversation was on the table through a series of investigations in the US, the NIE
 Committee in Britain, a royal commission, journalistic exposés. This would have been just
 talked about constantly in the years between about 1930 and 1936, as people were starting to worry
 that storm clouds were gathering in Europe again. AC Yeah, but it always seems like those folks get
 pushed to the fringes. You're made an activist versus a thinking leader.
 AC Those discussions are often marginalized, framed as conspiracy theory, etc. I think it's
 important to realize that in the generation after World War I, this was a serious civic conversation.
 It led to investigations of defense finance. It led to experiments in Britain and France,
 in public finance of war material. I think those conversations need to be reconvened
 now in the 21st century. AC Is there any parallels between
 World War I and the war in Ukraine? The reason I bring it up is because
 you mentioned there was a hunger for war, a capacity for war that was already established,
 and the different parties were just boiling the tensions. There's a case made that America had a
 role to play, NATO had a role to play in the current war in Ukraine. Is there some truth to that?
 Is there some truth to that when you think about it in the context of World War I?
 Or is it purely about the specific parties involved, which is Russia and Ukraine?
 AC I think it's very easy to draw parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine,
 but I don't think they really work. The First World War in some ways is generated by a fundamental
 conflict in the European system of empires, in the global system of empires. In many ways,
 if there's a parallel, the war in Ukraine is the parallel to some of the conflicts in the Mediterranean
 and the Balkans in 1911 to 1913, that then later there was a much greater conflict.
 I think if there's any lessons to be learned for how not to let World War III look like World War I,
 it would be to make sure that systems aren't locked into place, that escalate wars out of
 people's expectations. RL That's, I suppose, what I was implying, that this is the early stages of
 World War III. That in the same way that several wolves are licking their chops or whatever the
 expression is, they're creating tension, they're creating military conflict with a kind of
 unstoppable imperative for a global war. Many people that are looking at this are really
 worried about that. Now, the stopping, the forcing function to stop this war is that there's several
 nuclear powers involved, which has, at least for now, worked to stop full-on global war.
 But I'm not sure that's going to be the case. In fact, what is one of the surprising things to me
 in Ukraine is that still in the 21st century, we can go to something that involves nuclear powers,
 not directly yet, but awfully close to directly go to a hot war. Do you worry about that,
 that there's a kind of descent into a World War I type of scenario?
 RL Yes. That keeps me up at night, and I think it should keep the citizens of both the United
 States and Russia up at night. And I think, again, it gets back to what I was saying,
 that in the summer of 1914, even then, things that looked like a march toward war could have
 been different. And so I think it's important for leaders of both countries and of all of the
 sort of related country, of Ukraine, of the various NATO powers, to really sort of imagine
 off-ramps and to imagine alternatives and to make them possible, whether it's through diplomacy,
 whether it's through other formats. I think that that's the only way to prevent sort of greater
 escalation. CB What's the difference between World War I and the Civil War? In terms of how they
 defined what it means to be an American, but also the American citizen's relationship with the war,
 what the leaders were doing, is there interesting differences and similarities?
 Besides the fact that everybody seems to have forgot about World War I in the United States,
 and everyone still remembers Civil War. RL I mean, it's true. And the American Civil War
 defines American identity in some ways, along with the Revolution and the Second World War,
 more so than any other conflict. And it's a fundamentally different war. It's one because
 it is a civil war, because of secession, because of the Confederacy. This is a conflict happening
 on the territory of the United States between Americans. And so the dynamics are really quite
 different. The leaders, particularly Lincoln, have a different relationship to the home front,
 to civilians than they then say Wilson or Roosevelt have in World War I and II.
 CB Also, the way you would tell the story of the Civil War, perhaps similar to the way we tell the
 story of World War II, there's like a reason to actually fight the war. The way we tell the
 story is we're fighting for this idea that all men are created equal, that the war is over slavery
 in part. Perhaps that's a drastic oversimplification of what the war was actually about
 in the moment. Like how do you get pulled into an actual war versus a hot discussion?
 And the same with World War II, people kind of framed the narrative that it was against evil.
 Hitler being evil, I think the key part of that is probably the Holocaust,
 is how you can formulate Hitler's being evil. If there's no Holocaust, perhaps there's a case
 to be made that we wouldn't see World War II as such, quote unquote, good war,
 that there's an atrocity that had to happen to make it really, to be able to tell a clear narrative
 of why we get into this war. Perhaps such a narrative doesn't exist for World War I,
 and so that doesn't stay in the American mind. We try to sweep it under the rug given though
 overall 16 million people died. So to you, the difference is in the fact that you're fighting for
 ideas and fighting on the homeland, but in terms of people's participation,
 fighting for your country, was there similarities there?
 Yeah. I mean, I think the Civil War in both the North and the South,
 troops are raised overwhelmingly through volunteer recruitment. There is a draft in both the
 North and the South, but it's not significant. Only 8% of Confederate soldiers came in through
 conscription. And so in fact, the mobilization for volunteers often organized locally around
 individual communities or states, creates multiple identities and levels of loyalty.
 Where people both in the North and the South have loyalty both to their state regiments,
 to their community militias, and as well to the country. They are fighting over the country,
 right? Over the United States. And so the Union and the Confederacy have conflicting and ultimately
 irreconcilable visions of that. But that nationalism that comes out of the Union,
 after the victory in the war, is a crucial force shaping America ever since.
 So what was the neutrality period? Why did the US stay out of the war for so long? What was going
 on in that interesting, what made Woodrow Wilson change his mind? What was the interesting dynamic
 there? I always say that the United States entered the war in the early 1900s.
 The United States entered the war in April of 1917, but Americans entered it right away.
 They entered it, some of them actually went and volunteered and fought almost exclusively on the
 side of Britain and France. At least 50,000 joined the Canadian army or the British army and serve.
 Millions volunteer, they sent humanitarian aid. I think in many ways, modern war creates modern
 humanitarianism and we can see that in the neutrality period. And even if they wanted the
 United States to stay out of the war, a lot of Americans get involved in it by thinking about
 it, caring about it, arguing about it. And at the same time, they're worried that British propaganda
 is shaping their news system. They are worried that German espionage is undermining them.
 They're worried that both Britain and Germany are trying to interfere in American elections
 and American news cycles. And at the same time, a revolution is breaking out in Mexico.
 So there are concerns about what's happening in the Western hemisphere as well as what's happening
 in Europe. So World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars and it didn't. How did
 World War I pave the way to World War II? Every nation probably has their own story in this
 trajectory towards World War II. How did Europe allow World War II to happen? How did the Soviet
 Union, Russia allow World War II to happen and how did America allow World War II to happen?
 And Japan? Yeah, you're right. The answer is different for each country, right? That in some
 ways in Germany, the culture of defeat and the experience of defeat at the end of World War I
 leads to a culture of resentment, recrimination, finger pointing blame that makes German politics
 very ugly. As one person puts it, brutalizes German politics. It places resentment at the core
 of the populace and its politics. Yeah. And so in some ways that lays the groundwork for the kind
 of politics of resentment and hate that comes from the Nazis. For the United States, in some ways,
 the failure to win the peace sets up the possibility for the next war, right? That the United States,
 through Wilson, is sort of crafting a new international order in order that this will
 be the war to end all wars. But because the United States failed to join the League of Nations,
 you see the United States really sort of on the hook for another generation. In Asia, the story
 is more complicated, right? And I think it's worth bearing that in mind that World War II is a two
 front war. It starts in Asia for its own reasons. World War I is transformative for Japan, right?
 It is a time of massive economic expansion. A lot of that sort of economic wealth is poured
 into sort of greater industrialization and militarization. And so when the military wing
 in Japanese politics takes over in the 1930s, there are in some ways flexing muscles that come
 out of the First World War. Can you talk about the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles?
 What's interesting about that dynamics there of the parties involved,
 of how it could have been done differently to avoid the resentment? Or again, is it inevitable?
 So the war ends and very soon, even before the war is over, the United States in particular is
 trying to shape the peace, right? And the United States is the central actor at the Paris Peace
 Conference in 1919. Woodrow Wilson is there. He's presiding and he knows that he calls the shots.
 So he was respected.
 He was respected, but resentfully in some ways by the European powers, Britain and France and
 Italy to a lesser extent, who felt that they had sacrificed more. They had two goals, right? They
 wanted to shape the Imperial system in order to make sure that their fundamental economic structures
 wouldn't change. And they also wanted to weaken Germany as much as possible, right? So that Germany
 couldn't rise again. What this leads to is a peace treaty that maintains some of the fundamental
 conflicts of the Imperial system and bankrupts Germany, starves Germany, and feeds this politics
 of resentment that make it impossible for Germany to participate in a European order.
 So people like historian Neil Ferguson, for example, make the case that if Britain stayed
 out of World War I, we would have avoided this whole mess and we would potentially even avoid
 World War II. There's kind of counterfactual history. Do you think it's possible to make the
 case for that? That there was a moment, especially in that case, staying out of the war for Britain,
 that the escalation to a global war could have been avoided and one that ultimately ends in a
 deep global resentment. So where Germany is resentful, not just of France or particular nations,
 but is resentful of the entire, I don't know how you define it, the West or something like this,
 the entire global world. I wish it were that easy. And I think
 it's useful to think in counterfactuals, what if. And if you believe, as historians do, in causation,
 then if that one thing causes another, then you also have to believe in counterfactuals,
 that if something hadn't happened, then maybe that would have worked differently.
 But I think all the things that led to World War I are multi-causal and nuanced. And this is
 what historians do. We make things more complicated. And so there was no one thing that could have
 turned the tide of history. Oh, if only Hitler had gotten into art school or if only Fidel
 Castro had gotten into the major leagues. Those are interesting thought experiments,
 but few events in history, I think, are that contingent.
 Well, Hitler is an example of somebody who's a charismatic leader that seems to have a really
 disproportionate amount of influence on the tide of history. So if you look at Stalin,
 you could imagine that many other people could have stepped into that role.
 And the same goes for many of the other presidents through, or even Mao. It seems that there's a
 singular nature to Hitler that you could play the counterfactual, but you could play the counterfactual
 that if there was no Hitler, you may have not had World War II. He, better than many leaders in
 history, was able to channel the resentment of the populace into a very aggressive expansion of the
 military and I would say skillful deceit of the entire world in terms of his plans and was able to
 effectively start the war. So I think that's a very interesting thing.
 So is it possible that, I mean, could Hitler have been stopped? Could we have avoided if he just got
 into art school? Or again, do you feel like there's a current of events that was unstoppable?
 I mean, part of what you're talking about is Hitler the individual as a sort of charismatic leader
 who's able to mobilize the nation. And part of it is Hitlerism, his own sort of individual
 ability to play, for example, play off his subordinates against one another to set up a
 system of that nature that in some ways escalates violence, including the violence that leads to the
 Holocaust. And some of it is also Hitlerism as a leader cult. And we see this in many other sort of
 things where a political movement surrounds one particular individual who may or may not be
 replaceable. So yes, the World War II we got would have been completely different if a different
 sort of faction had risen to power in Germany. But depression era Europe was so unstable
 and democracies collapsed throughout Western Europe over the course of the 1930s, whether they had
 charismatic totalitarian leaders or not. Have you actually read one book I just recently
 finished? I'd love to get your opinion from a historian perspective. There's a book called
 Blitz Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler. It makes a case that drugs played a very large
 role, meth essentially, played a very large role in World War II. There's a lot of criticism of
 this book saying that it's kind of to what you're saying. It takes this one little variable and
 makes it like this explains everything. So everything about Hitler, everything about the
 blitzkrieg, everything about the military, the way the strategy, the decisions could be explained
 through drugs, or at least implies that kind of thing. And the interesting thing about this book
 because Hitler and Nazi Germany is one of the most sort of written about periods of human history.
 And this was not drugs were almost entirely not written about in this context. So here come along
 this semi historian, because I don't think he's even a historian. He's a lot of his work is fiction.
 Hopefully, I'm saying that correctly. So he tells a really, that's one of the criticisms, he tells a
 very compelling story that drugs were at the center of this period and also of the man of Hitler.
 What are your sort of feelings and thoughts about if you've gotten a chance to read this book,
 but I'm sure there's books like it, that tell an interesting perspective, singular perspective on
 a war. Yeah, I mean, I have read it. And I also had this sort of eye opening experience that a lot of
 historians did. And they're like, why didn't we think about that? And I think whether he's,
 the author is sort of not a trained academic historian, but the joy of history is like,
 you don't have to be one to write good history. And I don't think anyone sort of criticizes
 him for that. I like the book as a window into the Third Reich. Of course, drugs don't explain all
 of it, but it helps us see the people who supported Hitler, the ways in which it was that
 mind altering and performance altering drugs were used to kind of keep Hitler's reputation alive.
 Were used to kind of keep soldiers on the battlefield, the ways in which, I think that
 we don't fully understand the extent to which the Third Reich is held together with like duct tape
 from a pretty early phase by like 1940 or 41 even, it's all smoke and mirrors. And I think that
 wartime propaganda, both Germans trying to say, we're winning everything and America trying to
 mobilize and the other allies to mobilize against Germany, described a more formidable enemy than it
 really was by 1941 and 42. Yeah. I mean, I could see both cases. One is that duct tape doesn't make
 the man, but also as an engineer, I'm a huge fan of duct tape because it does seem to solve a lot
 of problems. And I do worry that this perspective that the book presents about drugs is somehow to
 the mind really compelling because it's almost like the mind, or at least my mind searches for an
 answer. How could this have happened? And it's nice to have a clean explanation. And drugs is one
 popular one. When people talk about steroids and sports, the moment you introduce the topic of
 steroids, somehow the mind wants to explain all success in the context was because this person
 was on steroids. Lance Armstrong. Well, it's like, it's a very sticky idea. Certain ideas,
 certain explanations are very sticky. And I think that's really dangerous because then you lose the
 full context. And also in the case of drugs, it removes the responsibility from the person,
 both for the military genius and the evil. And I think it's a very dangerous thing to do
 because something about the mind, maybe it's just mine, it's sticky to this. Well, drugs explain it.
 If the drugs didn't happen, then it would be very different. Yeah. It worries me how compelling it
 is of an explanation. Yeah. So that's why it's maybe better to think of it as a window into the
 third, right? Is that an explanation of it? But it's also a nice exploration of Hitler, the man,
 yet for some reason discussing his habits, especially later in the war, his practices with
 drugs gives you a window into the person. It reminds you that as a human, this is a human being,
 like a human being that gets emotional in the morning, gets thoughtful in the morning, hopeful,
 sad, depressed, angry, like a story of emotions of the human being is that somehow we construct,
 which is a pretty dangerous thing to do, construct an evil monster out of Hitler. When in reality,
 he's a human being like all of us. I think the lesson there is the soldier incident lesson,
 which is all of us to some degree are capable of evil. Or maybe if you want to make it less
 powerful a statement, many of our leaders are capable of evil. That this Hitler is not truly
 singular in history. That, yeah, when the resentment of the populace matches the right charismatic
 leader, it's easy to make the kind of, not easy, but it's possible to frequently make the kind of
 initiation of military conflict that happened in World War II. But it's also a very, very
 dangerous thing to do. And so, yeah, I think that's a good lesson.
 By the way, because you said not a trained historian, one of the most compelling and,
 I don't know, entertaining and fascinating exploration of World War I comes from Dan
 Carlin. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to listen to his sort of podcast form telling of the
 world about Dan Carlin. You yourself as a historian who has studied, who's written about World War I,
 do you enjoy that kind of telling of history? Absolutely. And I think, again, you don't need a
 PhD in history to be a historian. Does every historian agree with that?
 He gets quite a bit of criticism from historians. You know, I mean, we like to argue with each other
 and nitpick with each other. But the one thing I have no patience for is when we pull rank on
 each other. I think we depend on, if you're a historian in a university with degrees and
 research materials, you depend on the work of people in some local community like recording
 oral history, saving documents. And history is a social science, but it's also a storytelling art.
 And history books are the ones you find on the shelves in bookstores that people read for fun.
 And then you can appreciate both the knowledge production as well as the storytelling. And when
 you get a good oral storyteller like Dan Carlin, there's a reason that thousands and hundreds of
 thousands of people tune in. Yeah. But he definitely suffers from anxiety about
 getting things correct. It's very difficult. Well, our first job is to get the facts correct
 and then to tell the story off of those. The facts are so fuzzy. So it's, I mean,
 you have the probably my favorite telling World War II is William Shire's Rise and
 Fall of the Third Reich. And, or at least not telling the Nazi Germany. And that
 goes to primary sources a lot, which is like, I suppose that's the honest way to do it,
 but it's tough. It's really tough to write that way, to really go to primary sources
 always. And I think the one of the things that Dan tries to do,
 which is also really tough to do perhaps easier in oral history is try to make you feel what it was
 like to be there. Which I think he does by trying to tell the story of like individual soldiers. And
 do you find that telling like individual citizens? Do you find that kind of telling of history
 compelling? Yeah. I mean, I think we need historical imagination. And I think historical
 imagination teaches something very valuable, which is humility to realize that there are
 other people who've lived on this planet and they organize their lives differently. And
 they made it through just fine too. And I think that that kind of
 meeting other people from the past can be actually a very useful skill for meeting
 people unlike you in the present. Unlike you, but also like you. I think both are
 humbling. One, realizing that they live in a different space and time, but two, realizing
 that if you were placed in that space and time, you might've done all the same things,
 whether it's the brave good thing or the evil thing. Yeah, absolutely. And you get also a sense of
 possibility. There's this famous line that those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat
 it. But I think the other half is true as well, which is those who do not learn history don't get
 the chance to repeat it. We're not the first people on this planet to face any certain kinds
 of problems. Other people have lived through worlds like this one before. It's like when you
 fall in love as a teenager for the first time and then there's a breakup. You think it's the
 greatest tragedy that has ever happened in the world. You're the first person, even though
 Romeo and Juliet and so on had this issue, you're the first person that truly feels the catastrophic
 heartbreak of that experience. It's good to be reminded that no, the human condition is what it
 is. We have lived through it at the individual and the societal scale. Let me ask you about
 nationalism, which I think is at the core of I want you poster. Is nationalism destructive
 or empowering to a nation? And we can use different words like patriotism, which is in many
 ways synonymous to nationalism, but in recent history, perhaps because of the Nazis, has slowly
 parted ways that somehow nationalism is when patriotism gone bad or something like this?
 Yeah, they're different. Patriotism is in some ways best thought of as an emotion and a feeling
 of love of country, literally. And in some ways, that's a necessary condition to participate in
 nationalism. To me, I think nationalism is crucial in a world organized around nation states,
 and you have to believe that you are engaged in a common project together. And so in the contemporary
 United States, in some ways that question is actually on the table in ways that it hasn't
 been in the past. But you have to believe that you're engaged in a common project, that you have
 something in common with the person with whom you share this nation and that you would sacrifice
 for them, whether it's by paying taxes for them or going to war to defend them. That's a vision of
 what we might call civic nationalism. That's the good version. The question is whether you
 can have that without having exclusionary nationalism, hating the other, fearing the other,
 saying, yeah, you're part of this nation against all others. And I think there's a long tradition
 in America of a very inclusive nationalism that is open, inclusive, welcoming, and new people to this
 shared project. That's something to be defended. Exclusionary nationalisms based on ethnic hatreds
 and others that we see throughout the world, those are things to be afraid of.
 But there is a kind of narrative in the United States that a nationalism that includes the big
 umbrella of democratic nations, nations that strive for freedom, and everybody else is against
 freedom and against human nature. And it just so happens that it's a half and half split
 across the world. So that's imperialism. That feels like it beats the drum of war.
 Yeah. And I mean, I don't want to paint too rosy a picture. And certainly, the United States
 as a nation has often found it easier to define ourselves against something
 than to clarify exactly what we're for.
 Yeah. Yeah. The cold war, China today. That's not only United States, I suppose that's human nature.
 We need a competitor. It's almost like maybe the success of human civilization requires
 figuring out how to construct competitors that don't result in global war.
 Yes, or figuring out how to turn enemies into rivals and competitors. There's a real difference.
 You compete with competitors. You fight with enemies.
 Yeah. With competitors as a respect, maybe even a love underlying the competition.
 What lessons? What are the biggest lessons you take away from World War I?
 Maybe we talked about several, but you look back at the 20th century, what
 as a historian, what do you learn about human nature, about human civilization,
 about history from looking at this war?
 I think the
 lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that
 human life is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing
 more men and more material at the same time, that human life is not cheap.
 By throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems
 with military force. At the end of the day, in 1918, one side did win that,
 but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems.
 In the end, the regular people paid the price with their lives.
 They did. People who had been told that their lives were cheap remembered that.
 It reshapes mass politics for the rest of the 20th century, both in Europe and around the world.
 Yeah. The cost of a death of a single soldier or a single civilian is not just the cost of that
 single life. It's the resentment, the anger, the hate that reverberates throughout. One of the
 things I saw in Ukraine is the birth of a scale of generational hate, not towards administrations or
 leaders, but towards entire peoples. Overnight, that hate is created, and it takes perhaps decades
 for that hate to dissipate. It takes decades, and it takes collective effort to build institutions
 that divert that hate into other places. One of the biggest things I thought was not
 part of the calculus in when the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq is the creation of
 hate. When you drop a bomb, even if it hits military targets, even if it kills soldiers,
 which in that case, it didn't, there's a very large amount of civilians, what does that do to the...
 Yeah, how many years, minutes, hours, months, and years of hate do you create with a single bomb
 you drop? And I calculate that. Literally, in the Pentagon have a chart, how many people will hate
 us, how many people does it take, do some science here, how many people does it take when you have a
 million people that hate you, how many of them will become terrorists? How many of them will do
 something to the nation you love and care about, which is the United States, will do something that
 will be very costly? I feel like there was not a plot in a chart. It was more about short-term
 effects. Yes, it's again, it's the idea of using military force to solve political problems. And I
 think there's a squandering of goodwill that people have around the world towards the United States.
 That's a respect for its economy, for its consumer products, and so forth. And I think that's
 been lost a lot of that. Do you think leaders can stop war? I have perhaps a romantic notion,
 perhaps because I do these podcasts in person and so on, that leaders that get in a room together
 and can talk, they can stop war. I mean, that's the power of a leader, especially one in an
 authoritarian regime, that they can, through camaraderie, alleviate some of the emotions
 associated with the ego. Yes, leaders can stop war if they get into the room when they understand
 from the masses in their countries that war is something that they want stopped.
 So the people ultimately have a really big say. They do. It was mass movements by people in the
 United States for the nuclear freeze, in Russia pushing for openness that brought, for example,
 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to Reykjavik to debate and eventually put caps on nuclear
 weapons. Those two people made choices in the room that made that possible, but they were both
 being pushed and knew they were being pushed by their people. Boy, that's a tough one. It puts a
 lot of responsibility on the German people, for example. In both wars, we fans of history tend to
 conceive of history as a meeting of leaders. We think of Chamberlain, we think of Churchill,
 and the importance of them in the Second World War. We think about Hitler and Stalin and think that
 if certain conversations happened, the war could have been avoided. You tell the story of how many
 times Hitler and Nazi Germany's military might was not sufficient. They could have been easily
 stopped. The pacifists, the people who believed Hitler or foolish enough to believe Hitler,
 didn't act properly. If the leaders just woke up to that idea, in fact,
 Churchill is a kind of representation of that. But in your conception here, it's possible that
 Churchill was also a representation of the British people, even though seemingly unpopular,
 that force was... They gave birth to somebody like Churchill, who said,
 we'll never surrender, right? Yes. She'll fight in the beaches.
 Yes. I think World War II Britain is a good example of that. It is clearly a dynamic leader
 who has his pulse on what the people want and demand and are willing to do. It's a very
 dynamic art of leading that and shaping those wants at the same time as knowing that you're
 bound by them. Well, then if we conceive a history in this way, let me ask you about our presidents.
 You are taking on the impossibly difficult task of teaching a course in a couple of years here,
 or in one year, called the History of American Presidency. What is the history of American
 presidents called? The History of American Presidential Elections.
 So if the people are in part responsible for leaders,
 how can we explain what is going on in America that we have the leaders that we do today?
 So if we think about the elections of the past several cycles,
 I guess let me ask, are we a divided nation? Are we more of a divided nation than we were in the
 past? What do you understand about the American citizen at the beginning of this century
 from the leaders we have elected? Yes. Obviously, we are a divided country
 in our rhetoric, in our day-to-day politics. But
 we are nowhere near as divided as we have been in other periods in our history, the most obvious,
 of course, being the American Civil War 150 years ago. And the distinction is not just that we
 haven't come to blows, but that we are fundamentally one society, one economy, and deeply integrated
 as a nation, both domestically and on the world stage in ways that look nothing like the United
 States in 1861. Will political rhetoric continue to be extreme? Of course. But we're not as divided
 as people think we are. Well, then if you actually look throughout human history,
 does it always get outside of the people, do the elections get as contentious as they've recently
 been? So there's a kind of perception that has been very close, and there's a lot of accusations,
 a lot of tensions. It's very heated. It's almost fueling the machine of division. Has that been
 often the case? It has. It hasn't, it hasn't. I mean, I do think right now is different. And
 there it's worth distinguishing, are there deep social or economic divisions, which I don't
 actually think that there are, versus partisanship in particular, sort of the rivalry between the
 two parties. And it's very clear that we are in an era of what political scientists call
 hyperpartisanship, right? And that the two parties have taken fundamentally different positions and
 moved further apart from one another. And that is what I think people talk about when they say
 our country is divided. So the country may not be divided, even if our politics are highly partisan,
 that is a divergence from other time periods in our history.
 So I wonder if this kind of political partisanship is actually an illusion of division. I sometimes
 feel like we mostly all agree on some basic fundamentals. And the things that people
 allegedly disagree on are really blown out of proportion. And there's like a media machine,
 and the politicians really want you to pick a blue side and a red side. And because of that,
 somehow, I mean, families break up over Thanksgiving dinner about who they voted for.
 There's a really strong pressure to be the red or blue. And I wonder if that's a feature or a bug,
 whether this is just part of the mechanism of democracy that we want to, even if there's not
 a real thing to be divided over, we need to construct it such that you can always have a
 tension of ideas in order to make progress, to figure out how to progress as a nation.
 I think we're figuring that out in real time. On the one hand, it's easy to say that it's a feature
 of a political system that has two parties. And the United States is in some ways unique
 in not being a parliamentary democracy. And so in some ways, you would think that would be the
 feature that is causing partisanship and to reach these heights. That said, we can even see in
 parliamentary systems and all around the world that the same kinds of rhetorics of irreconcilable
 division, a kind of politics of emotion are proliferating around the world. Some of that,
 as you say, I think is not as real as it appears on television, on social media, and other formats.
 So I don't know that other countries that are experiencing sort of political conflict,
 I'm not sure that they're deeply divided either. So I've had the fortune of being intellectually
 active through the George Bush versus Al Gore election, then the Obama, and just every election
 since. And it seems like a large percentage of those elections, there's been a claim that the
 elections were rigged, that there is some conspiracy, corruption, malevolence on the other side.
 I distinctly remember when Donald Trump won in 2016, a lot of people I know said that election
 was rigged and there's different explanations, including Russian influence. And then in 2020,
 I was just running in Austin along the river and somebody said like, oh, huge fan of the podcast.
 And they said like, what do you think of it? This is just not right. What's happening in this country
 that the 2020 election was obviously rigged from their perspective in electing Joe Biden versus
 Donald Trump. Do you think there's a case to be made for and against each claim in the full context
 of history of our elections being rigged? I think the American election system is
 fundamentally sound and reliable. And I think that the evidence is clear for that regardless of which
 election you're looking at. In some ways, whether you look at a presidential election or even a local
 county election for dogcatcher or something, that the amount of time and resources and precision
 that go into voter registration, vote counting, certification processes are crucial to democratic
 institutions. I think when someone says rigged, regardless of which side of the political spectrum
 they're coming from, they're looking for an answer. They're looking for that one answer for what is in
 fact a complex system. So on the left, when they say rigged, they may be pointing to a wide range
 of ways in which they think that the system is tilted through gerrymandering,
 misrepresentation through the electoral college. On the right, when people say rigged, they may be
 concerned about voter security, about ways in which the mainstream media may control
 messages. In both cases, the feeling is it's articulated as my vote didn't get counted right.
 But the deeper concern is my vote doesn't count. My voice isn't being heard. So no, I don't think
 the elections are rigged. So let me push back. There's a comfort to the story that they're
 not rigged. And a lot of us like to live in comfort. So people who articulate conspiracy theories
 say, sure, it's nice to be comfortable, but here's the reality. And the thing they articulate is
 there's incentives in close elections, which we seem to have nonstop close elections. There's so
 many financial interests. There's so many powerful people. Surely you can construct not just with the
 media and all the ways you describe both on the left and the right, the elections could be rigged,
 but literally actually in a fully illegal way, manipulate the results of votes. Surely there's
 incentive to do that. And I don't think that's a totally ridiculous argument because it's like,
 all right, well, I mean, it actually lands to the question, which is a hard question for me to ask
 as an optimist of how many malevolent people out there and how many malevolent people are required
 to rig an election. So what is the face transition for a system to become from like
 corruption light to high level of corruption such that you could do things like rig elections,
 which is what happens quite a lot in many nations in the world even today?
 So yes, there is interference in elections and there has been in American history,
 and we can go all the way back into the 18th century. You don't have to go back to Texas
 in the 1960s, LBJ to find examples of direct interference in the outcome of elections.
 And there are incentives to do that. Those incentives will only feel more existential
 as hyper-partisanship makes people think that the outcome of the elections are a matter of
 black and white or life and death. And you will see people organizing every way they can
 to shape elections. We saw this in the 1850s when settlers, pro and anti-slavery flooded into Kansas
 to try to determine the outcome of an election. We see this in the reconstruction period when
 the Ku Klux Klan shows up to block the doors for black voters in the South.
 This history is not new, it's there. I think the reason why I think that the system is sound
 is not or the reason when I say I believe that the election system is fundamentally sound,
 is fundamentally sound. I'm not trying to be reassuring or encourage complacency.
 I'm saying this is something that we need to do and to work on.
 AC So the current electoral mechanisms are sufficiently robust. Even if there is corruption,
 even if there is rigging, the force that corrects itself, corrects and ensures that nobody gets out
 of line is much stronger than the other incentives, which are like the corrupting incentives.
 That's the thing I talked about, visiting Ukraine talking about corruption.
 A lot of people talk about corruption as being a symptom. If the system allows,
 creates these incentives for there to be corruption, humans will always go for corruption.
 That's just, you have to assume that. The power of the United States is that it constructs
 systems that prevent you from being corrupt at scale. At least, I mean,
 depends what you believe, but most of us, if you believe in this country, you have to,
 you believe in the self-correcting mechanisms of corruption that even if that desire is in
 the human heart, the system resists it, prevents it. That's your current belief.
 AC Yes, as of today. But I do think that those, that will require oversight by institutions,
 ideally ones that are insulated as much as possible from partisan politics,
 which is very difficult right now. And it will require the demands of the American people,
 that they want these elections to be fair and secure. And that means being willing to lose them,
 regardless of which party you're in favor of. AC So what do you think about the power of the media
 to create partisanship? I'm really worried that there's a huge incentive, speaking of incentives,
 to divide the country. The media and the politicians, I'm not sure where it originates,
 but it feels like it's the media. Maybe it's a very cynical perspective on journalism, but
 it seems like if we're angry and divided as evenly as possible, you're going to maximize the number
 of clicks. So it's almost like the media wants to elect people that are going to be the most
 divisive maximizing. And the worry I have is they are not beyond either feeding or if you want to
 be very cynical, manufacturing narratives that lead that division, like the narrative of an
 election being rigged. Because if you convinced half the populace that the election was completely
 rigged, that's a really good way to get a lot of clicks. And the very cynical view is I don't know
 if the media machine will stop the destruction of our democracy in service of getting more clicks.
 It may destroy our entire democracy just to get more clicks, just because the fire, as the thing
 burns down, will get clicks. Am I putting too much blame on the media here? The machine of it.
 You're diagnosing the incentive structure, you're depicting that with 100% accuracy.
 But I think history teaches that you might be giving the media too much causal power,
 that the American people are smarter than the media that they consume. And even today,
 we know that. Even people who consume just Fox or just MSNBC know what they're consuming.
 So I don't think that media will be the solution. And I certainly don't think that returning to
 a media structure of the mid 20th century with three news channels that all tell us one story,
 that's no golden age that we're trying to get back to, for sure.
 Well, there is a novel thing in human history, which is Twitter and social media and so on.
 So we're trying to find our footing as a nation to figure out how to think about politics,
 how to maintain our basic freedoms, our sense of democracy, of our interaction with government,
 and so on on this new medium of social media. How do you think Twitter changed things?
 Do you think Twitter is good for democracy? Do you think it has changed what it means to
 be an American citizen? Or is it just the same old media mechanism?
 It has not changed what it means to be an American citizen. It may have changed the
 day to day sound of being and the experience of it. It got noisier, it got louder,
 and it got more decentered. I think Twitter is paradoxical. On the one hand, it is a
 fundamentally democratic platform. And in some ways, it democratizes institutions that had
 gatekeepers and authority figures for a very long time. But on the other hand, it's not a
 democratic institution at all. It's a for-profit corporation, and it operates under those principles.
 And so that said, it's an institution of American and global life that the people
 of the United States have the authority to do. And so it's a very important platform.
 It's an institution of American and global life that the people of the United States have the
 authority to regulate or reshape as they see fit, both that and other major media players.
 So one of the most dramatic decisions that illustrate both sides of what you're saying
 is when Twitter decided to ban, I think permanently, the president of the United
 States, Donald Trump, off of Twitter. Can you make the case that that was a good idea and
 a good idea? Yes. I think the simple fact of the matter is Twitter is a platform. It has rules of
 service. Twitter concluded that President Trump had violated the terms of service and blocked
 them. And if you have rules, you have to enforce them. Did it have consequences? It had direct and
 predictable consequences of creating a sense among millions of Americans that Twitter had taken
 aside in politics or confirming their belief that it had done so. Will it have unintended
 consequences? This is where the historian can come in and say, yes, there's always unintended
 consequences. And we don't know what it would mean for political figures to be excluded from
 various media platforms under these notions that they had violated terms of service, et cetera.
 I guess we'll see. Well, to me, I'm generally against censorship,
 but to take Twitter's perspective, it's unclear to me in terms of unintended consequences,
 whether censoring a human being from being part of your platform is going to decrease or increase
 the amount of hate in the world. So it is a strong case to be made that banning somebody like Donald
 Trump increases the amount of resentment among people and that's a very large number of people
 that support him or even love him or even see him as a great president, one of the greatest this
 country has had. And so if you completely suppress his voice, you're going to intensify the support
 that he has from just the regular support for another human being who ran for president to
 somebody that becomes an almost heroic figure for that set of people. Now, the flip side is
 removing a person from a platform like Donald Trump might lessen the megaphone of that particular
 person, might actually level the democratic notion that everybody has a voice. So basically,
 removing the loud extremes is helpful for giving the center, the calm, the thoughtful voices more
 power. And so in that sense, that teaches a lesson that don't be crazy in any one direction. Don't
 go full, don't go Lenin, don't go Hitler. You have to stay in the middle. There's divisions in the
 middle, there's discussions in the middle, but stay in the middle. So, I think that's
 sort of the steel man, the case for censoring. But I, boy, is censorship a slippery slope.
 And also, boys, Twitter becoming a thing that's more than just a company. It seems like it's a
 medium of communication that we use for information, for knowledge, for wisdom even. During the period
 of COVID, we used it to gain an understanding of what the hell's going on. What should we do?
 What's the state of the art science? Science fundamentally transformed during the time of
 COVID because you have no time for the full review cycle that science usually goes through. And some
 of the best sources of information for me, from the conspiracy theory to the best doctors, was
 Twitter. The data, the stats, all that kind of stuff. And that feels like more than a couple,
 more than a company. And then Twitter and YouTube and different places took a really strong stance
 on COVID, which is the lazy stance, in my opinion, which is we're going to listen to whatever CDC or
 the institutions have said. But the reality is you're an institution of your own now. You're kind
 of the press. You're like, there's a, there's a, it's a really difficult position. It's a really,
 really difficult position to take. But I wish they have stepped up and take on the full responsibility
 and the pain of fighting for the freedom of speech.
 Yes, they need, they need to do that. But, you know, I'm struck by some of the things that you
 said, ways in which, you know, Twitter has the power to shape the conversation. And I don't think
 in a democratic society, democratic polities should cede that power to, to for-profit companies.
 Do you agree that it's possible that Twitter has that power currently? Do you sense that it has
 the power? Because I might sense as Twitter has the power to start wars, like tweets have the power
 to start wars, to, to, yeah, to, to change the direction of elections.
 Maybe in the sense in the ways in which, you know, a wave has the power to wash away sand, right?
 You know, it's, it's the meat, it's still the medium, right? It's not, it's not in itself an
 actor. It's how actors use the platform, which requires us to scrutinize the structure of the
 platform and access to it. Unfortunately, it's not maybe as similar to the wave. It's not just a
 medium. It's a, it's a medium plus. It's a medium that enables virality that benefits from virality
 of engagement. And that means singular voices can, can have a disproportionate impact,
 like not even voices, singular ideas, dramatic ideas can have a disproportionate impact. And so
 that actually threatens, it's almost like, I don't know what the equivalent is in nature,
 but it's a, it's a wave that can grow exponentially because of the intensity of the, the initial
 intensity of the wave. I don't know how to describe this as a dynamical system, but it feels like,
 it feels like there, there is a responsibility there not to accelerate, not to accelerate
 voices just because they get a lot of engagement. You have to have a proportional representation
 of that voice. But you're saying that a strong democracy should be robust to that.
 A strong democracy can and should, and will be. I mean, I think the other thing a historian will
 tell you about Twitter is that this too shall pass, right? But, but I do think, you know,
 the structures of, of the, of the platform, of the algorithm, of, of this and other major players
 are, are eligible for scrutiny by, by democratic institutions.
 So in preparing to teach the course, the history of American presidential elections leading up to
 the 2024 elections. So one of the lessons of history is this too shall pass. So don't make
 everything about this is, this is going to either save or destroy our nation. That seems to be like
 the message of every single election as I'm doing Trump hands. Do you think Donald Trump,
 what do you think about the 2024 election? Do you think Donald Trump runs? Do you think the,
 the tension will grow? Or was that a singular moment? Do you think it'll be like AOC versus
 Trump or whoever, whatever the most maximum drama maximizing thing, or will things stabilize?
 I think I can, I can, you know, historians don't like to predict the future, but I can predict
 this one that it will not be a calm and stabilized election. I think as of, you know, the time that
 we're talking in 2022, we don't, there are too many, you know, sort of open questions, particularly
 about whether Joe Biden will run for reelection. He says he will, but you know, I think that's
 you know, but the jury I think is out on that. You know, I can't predict whether Donald Trump
 will run for election or not. I think, you know, we do know that, that the, that President Trump
 doesn't like to, to start things he can't win. And if the polling data suggests that he's not
 a credible candidate, he might be reluctant to enter the race and might find more appealing
 the kind of sideline kind of kingmaker role that he's been crafting since he left the White House.
 You know, I think there are plenty of people who are, you know, dreaming that there's some
 sort of centrist candidate, you know, whether it's a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican
 who will, you know, save us from, from, from all of this, either within the party or in a third
 party run. I don't think that's likely. Why are we getting them? Why don't you think it's likely?
 What's the explanation? There seems to be a general hunger for a person like this.
 You would, but the system sorts it out, right? You know, that the, the, the primary systems and the
 party, you know, party candidate selection systems, you know, will favor sort of more, you know, more
 partisan views, right? More conservative Republicans, more liberal Democrats, as the kind of center
 candidates. It seems like the system prefers mediocre, uh, executive, mediocre leaders,
 mediocre partisan leaders. If I take a cynical look, but maybe I'm romanticizing the leaders
 of the past and maybe I'm just remembering the great leaders of the past. And, uh, yeah,
 I can assure you there's plenty of mediocre partisans in the 19th century. Okay. And the 20th.
 Um, well, let me ask you about, uh, platforming. Um, do you think Donald, it's the Twitter question,
 but I was torn about whether to talk to Donald Trump on this podcast as a historian,
 what would you advise? I think, uh, I mean, you know, this is, uh, this is a difficult question,
 right? Um, for, for historians who want, um, you know, sort of want, uh, to make sure that they know
 sort of what Americans are thinking and talking about, um, you know, uh, for centuries later.
 So one of the things that, you know, at least my understanding is that when, uh, president Trump was
 banned from Twitter, his account was also deleted. Um, and that is one of the most valuable sources
 that historians will use, um, to understand that the era and parts of it were sort of,
 you know, uh, archived and reconstructed. But, um, you know, but in that sense, I think that that is
 also a real loss to the historical record. Um, I mean, I think that, uh, your podcast shows you'll,
 you'll talk to, you'll talk to anyone. Um, I'm here, right? So, you know, I'm, I'm not in the
 business of saying, you know, don't, don't, don't talk, don't talk to that's one of the difficult
 things when I think about Hitler. I think, um, Hitler, Stalin, I don't know if World War I quite
 has the same intensity of. Um, controversial leaders, but one of the sad things from a
 historian perspective is how few interviews Hitler has given or Stalin has given. And
 that's such a difficult thing because it's obvious that talking to Donald Trump,
 that talking to Xi Jinping, talking to Putin is really valuable from a historical perspective
 to understand. But then you think about the momentary impact of such a conversation and
 you think, well, depending on how the conversation goes, you can steer or, uh, flame,
 what is it feed the flame of war or conflict or, um, abuses of power and things like this.
 And that's, I think the tension between the journalist and the historian.
 Cause when a journalist interview dictators, for example, one of the things that strikes me
 is they're often very critical of the dictator.
 They're, they're, they're like, um, they're basically attacking them in front of their face
 as opposed to trying to understand. Because what I perceive they're doing is they're signaling to,
 uh, the other journalists that they're on the right side of history kind of thing.
 Um, but that's not very productive. And it's also why the dictators and leaders often don't
 do those interviews. Uh, it's not productive to understanding who the human being is to understand
 you have to empathize, um, because few people, I think few leaders do something
 from a place of malevolence. I think they really do think they're doing good.
 And not even for themselves, not even for selfish reasons. I think they're doing great for the,
 they're doing the right thing for their country or for whoever the group they're leading. And to
 understand that you have to, and by the way, a large percent of the country often supports them.
 I bet if you pull legitimately pull people in North Korea, they will believe that their leader
 is doing the right thing for their country. Um, and so to understand that you have to empathize.
 So that's the tension of the journalist, I think, and the historian, because obviously the historian
 doesn't, doesn't care. They really want to, they care obviously deeply, but they, they know that
 history requires deep understanding of the human being in the full context.
 Yeah, it's a tough decision to make.
 Yeah. Well, I think it's, uh, both for journalists and historians, um, the challenge is not to be
 too close to your subject, right? Um, and you know, not to be, um, overly influenced, uh,
 and used by them, right? You know, when you're talking to a living subject, which historians do,
 you know, um, too, um, you know, it's, it's a matter of making sure that you triangulate
 their story with, with the, the rest of the record, right? Um, uh, and that may paint a
 different picture of, of the person than, um, and will prevent you as a journalist or a historian
 from kind of, you know, just telling someone else's story. And so, and historians also have
 the benefit of going back, you know, 30, 40 years and finding all the other stories and figuring out,
 you know, uh, playing two truths and a lie, you know, like which parts are, you know, which parts
 are accurate, which are, which are not. And journalists do that work in a day to day basis,
 but historians, um, you know, we get a little more time to think about what we're doing.
 Well, I personally also think it's deeply disrespectful to the populace, to people,
 to, um, censor and ignore a person that's supported by a very large number of people.
 Like that you owe, I personally feel like you owe the citizens of this country a deep, uh, empathy
 and understanding of the leaders they support, even if you disagree with what they say. I mean,
 that's the, the, the, to me, I'm much more worried about the resentment of the censorship,
 that it's to having a good conversation with Donald Trump is ultimately valuable.
 Because he, I think, uh, especially in this case, I agree with you that Donald Trump is not a
 singular person. He is a, he represents a set of feelings that a large number of people have.
 And whatever those feelings are, you can try to figure out by talking to people,
 but also talking to the, the, the, the man and then seeing the interplay there. What does this
 really represent in this period in history and this slice of the world? Um, yeah, ultimately
 understanding, I think leads to, uh, compassion and love and unity, which is how this whole thing
 progresses. The tension between the different sides is useful to, um, have a good conversation,
 but ultimately coming up with the right answer and progressing towards that answer is, is how
 you make progress. Do you think a pure democracy can work? So we have this representative democracy
 with these contentious elections and so on. When we started civilization on Mars,
 which becomes more and more realistic technologically, we can have a more direct
 access to be able to vote on issues and vote for ideas. Do you think it can work?
 I don't think we have to go to Mars, uh, to do it. Right. Um, uh, I think, um,
 um, the answer is not, you know, to flip a switch and, uh, turn on something called pure democracy.
 Um, uh, when people are not ready for it, when their, uh, incentive structures are not,
 um, sort of, uh, structured for it, but you can, um, you know, experiment with more democratic forms
 of governance one after another, right? Whether it's, um, you know, sort of experimenting with,
 um, technology to find new ways of sort of, of getting, uh, greater rates of participation
 in democracy. Um, I think that we see some experiments in, um, sort of more complicated
 systems of voting, um, that in fact might actually be more reflective of people's choices
 than simply picking one candidate, right? Sort of rank choice voting or, uh, runoffs, other kinds of
 things. Um, you know, I think that we can think more, uh, creatively about something like
 participatory budgeting, right? In which, um, you know, uh, we put all this money into the government,
 um, and then, um, you know, we, we, um, you know, should as a, as a people, there are more democratic
 ways of, of sort of, of how we spend it. Um, and I think the most urgent in some level is a more
 democratic form of foreign policy making, right? That foreign policy making, decision making,
 um, uh, about the military, about foreign policy, um, is, is very ways insulated from, from popular
 participation, um, in, in modern American history. Um, and I think, you know, there, uh, technology
 is not the, the, going to solve this. Um, you know, it's a combination of technology and, and human
 creativity, but I think, um, you know, I think we can start heading that direction. Whether we get
 there before we get to Mars, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't
 know. I don't know. What interesting lessons and thoughts, if you look at the fundamentals
 of the history of American elections, do you hope to reveal when you try to teach the class
 and, um, how would those fundamentals be met by the, by the students that received that wisdom?
 So w what do you think about this dance, especially such an interesting idea now,
 I hope you do go through with this kind of idea is look at the history while the next one is
 happening. Yeah. I think it's worth remembering that the students who are typical American
 student who's in college right now has lived their entire life after the election of 2000
 and Bush v. Gore. Right. And after 9-11 probably. Yeah, absolutely. After all of these things.
 Right. And so on the one hand, they take partisanship and contentious elections for granted.
 They don't, I think, share sort of some vision that things used to be different, right? They
 don't remember a world that had lots of moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans and sort of
 running around in it. But so in some ways, it's a way of looking back into the past to find other
 ways of organizing our politics. It's also a way of reassuring students that we have been through
 contentious and even sort of violent elections before in our history. And that people have
 defended the right to vote, right? People have risked their lives to vote. I think they will
 understand that as well. And maybe knowledge of history here can help deescalate the emotions you
 might feel about one candidate or another. And from a place of calmness, you can more easily
 arrive at wisdom. That's my hope. Yeah. Just as a brief aside, you, brief aside, but nevertheless,
 you wrote the book Bound by War that describes a century of war in the Pacific. So looking at this
 slice of geography and power, so most crucially through the partnership between the United States
 and the Philippines, can you tell some aspects of the story that is often perhaps not considered
 when you start to look more at the geopolitics of Europe and Soviet Union and the United States?
 How did the war in the Pacific define the 20th century? Yeah. I came to this book Bound by War
 from a sense that our stories were too lopsided toward Europe, right? That American history,
 when viewed from the Pacific, specifically in the 20th century, helps us understand American power
 in some new ways, right? Not only American projection of power into Asia, right? But also
 the ways in which American power affected people in Asia, right? Either as in places like the
 Philippines where the United States had a colony for almost 50 years, or Asian Americans, people
 who had migrated over their descendants in the United States. And those linkages between the
 United States and Asia, particularly the US-Philippine connection, I think were something
 that needed to be traced across the 20th century, because it's a way, kind of a new way of seeing
 American power from a different angle. You see it in that way. What are some aspects that define
 America from when you take the perspective of the Pacific? What military conflict and the asymmetry
 of power there? Right. So I start in 1898 with the US invasion of the Philippines,
 its conquests and annexation. And I think in many ways, this is a defining conflict of the 20th
 century that's often completely overlooked. We're described, I think, incorrectly as merely a war
 with Spain, right? That the war in the Philippines is our first extended overseas conflict, our first
 conflict in what would come to be called the developing world or third world. It's a form of
 counterinsurgency. This is the US Army sort of learning lessons that are then repeated again in
 the Second World War in Korea, Vietnam, and even after 9-11. Is the Philippines our friends or
 enemies in this history? Well, that's the interesting part, right? Is that the book focuses
 in particular on Filipinos who fight with the Americans who fought in the US Army and Navy
 over the course of the 20th century. And they are in a fundamentally ironic position, right? They are
 from the Philippines and they're fighting for the United States, which is the colonial power
 occupying their country. And I think that irony persists, right? So if you look at polling data
 where they ask people all around the world, do you think positively or negatively about the United
 States? That the highest responses are from the Philippines, right? Filipinos view the United
 States more favorably than people from any other country in the world, including America, right?
 That they think more favorably of Americans than Americans do. And so, sort of unpacking that irony
 is part of what I'm trying to get at in the book. What was the People Power Revolution,
 and what lessons can we learn from it? You kind of assign an important,
 a large value to it in terms of what we can learn for the American project.
 Yeah. So in 1986, the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, is overthrown by
 a popular revolution known as People Power in the wake of a contested and probably almost certainly
 rigged election that sort of confirms his rule. When that is overturned through sort of mass
 movements in the Philippines, it's also sort of confirmed in many ways by the reluctance of the
 United States to intervene to prop up a Cold War ally. Ferdinand Marcos had supported American
 policy throughout his administration. The Reagan administration, Ronald Reagan was president at the
 time, basically chooses not to support him. That's a personally wrenching decision for Reagan himself,
 but he's being shaped in many ways by the emerging voices of neoconservative, political,
 foreign policy voices. In particular, Paul Wolfowitz and the State Department and others who see
 movements for democracy and democratization that then kind of take fire in the late 20th century
 in Latin America, in South Korea, in Eastern Europe, and all around the world until
 it hits the wall in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
 What's that wall? What do you mean by it hits the wall?
 There are global movements for democratization, for opening up throughout the world starting in
 the 1980s. Obviously, they continue in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
 I say it hits the wall in China with the protests in Tiananmen Square that are blocked and that are
 crushed and I think represent a real sort of turning point in the history of democratic
 institutions on a global scale in the late 20th century. There's some places where the fight for
 freedom will work and some places not. That's the kind of lesson from the 20th to take forward to
 the 21st century. No, I think the lesson is maybe one that we talked about earlier, that there's
 this dynamic dance between leaders, whether totalitarian leaders or leaders of democratic
 movements and the people that they're leading. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
 Let me ask a big ridiculous question because we talked about presidential elections. Now,
 this is objectively definitively, you have to answer one person who's the greatest
 president in American history. Oh, that's easy. Abraham Lincoln.
 Is that easy, not George Washington? Washington had the statesman qualities.
 He understood his power as the first president. Also relinquished power.
 He was willing to relinquish power, but Lincoln has the combination of personal leadership,
 a fundamental moral character, and just the ability to fight the fight of politics,
 to play the game of it, to get where he's going, to play the short game and the long game,
 to work with his enemies, to block them when he had to. He gets the United States through
 the Civil War, so you got to give him some credit for that.
 And he's pretty good at making speeches. Obviously, it helps that he's a remarkable
 speaker and able to convey those kinds of visions, but he is first and foremost a politician
 and probably the best one we have. Both at getting elected and at ruling.
 In some ways, better at the doing than at the getting elected. The election of 1860 is
 a hot mess that could have worked out many different ways. Even the election of 1864,
 when we have a presidential election in the middle of a civil war, it was not a foregone conclusion
 that Lincoln would be reelected. Both times, he's not a master campaigner by any means,
 but he was a master politician as a governor.
 Sure. Do we have leaders like that today?
 One perspective is leaders ain't what they used to be. And then another perspective is,
 well, we always romanticize stuff that happens in the past. We forget the flaws and remember
 the great moments. Yeah, both of those things are true.
 On the one hand, we are not surrounded by people of Lincoln's caliber right now.
 That feels like the case.
 And I think we can say that with some certainty. But I always like to point to President Harry
 Truman, who left office with some truly abysmal presidential ratings, was dismissed throughout his
 presidency as unqualified, as not knowing what he was doing, et cetera. And then, turns out,
 with hindsight, we know that he was better at the job than anyone understood. Better at getting
 elected. You remember that sign, Dewey Defeats Truman. He showed them. And better at holding
 power and better at building the kind of institutions that long after he was gone,
 demonstrated that he won the long game.
 And some of that is the victors do write the story. And I ask myself very much,
 how will history remember Volodymyr Zelensky? It's not obvious. And how will history remember
 Putin? That too is not obvious. Because it depends on how the role, the geopolitics,
 how the nations, how the history of these nations unravel, unfold rather. So it's very interesting
 to think about. And the same is true for Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton,
 and so on. I think it's probably an unanswerable question of which of the presidents will be
 remembered as a great president from this time. You can make all kinds of cases for all kinds of
 people, and they do, but it's unclear. It's fascinating to think about. When the robots
 finally take over, which of the humans they will appreciate the most. Let me ask for advice. Do you
 have advice for young folks? Because you mentioned the folks you're teaching, they don't know what
 it's like to have waited on the internet for the thing to load up, for every single web page that's
 suffering. They don't know what it's like to not have the internet and have a dial phone that goes
 shh, shh. And then the joy of getting angry at somebody and hanging up with a physical phone.
 They don't know any of that. So for those young folks that look at the contentious elections,
 that look at our contentious world, our divided world, what advice would you give them of how to
 have a career they can be proud of? Let's say they're in college or in high school,
 and how to have a life they can be proud of. Oh man, that's a big question. Yeah,
 I've never given a graduation speech. This is like warm up. Let's look for raw materials
 before you write it. If I did, I think I would advise students that history teaches that you
 that you should be more optimistic than your current surrounding suggests. And I think
 it would be very easy as a young person today to think there's nothing I can do about this politics.
 There's nothing I can say to this person on the other side of the aisle. There's nothing I can do
 about the planet, et cetera, and just sort of give up. And I think history teaches that we don't know
 who the winners and losers are in the long run, but we know that the people who give up are
 always the losers. So don't give into cynicism or apathy. Optimism paves the way. Yeah, because
 human beings are deeply resilient and creative, even under far more difficult circumstances than
 we face right now. Well, let me ask a question that you wouldn't even dare to cover in your
 graduation commencement speech. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? This whole project that
 history studies and analyzes as if there's a point to the whole thing. What is the point? All the
 wars, all the presidents, all the struggles to discover what it means to be human or reach for
 a higher ideal. Why? Why do you think we're here? I think this is where there is often a handoff
 from the historian to the clergy. But in the end, there's less distance between the two than you
 think. If you think about some of the answers to that question, what is the meaning of life that
 are given from religious traditions? Often they have a fundamentally historical core, right? It's
 about unifying the past and the present in some other non-earthly sort of dimension.
 So I think there is that. I think even for people who don't have religious belief,
 there's a way in which history is about the shared human condition. And I think historians aspire to
 telling all of that story, right? We drill down on the miseries of war and depressions and so forth,
 but the story is not complete without blueberries and butterflies and all the rest that go with it.
 RG So both the humbling and the inspiring
 aspect that you get by looking back at human history that we're in this together.
 Christopher, this is a huge honor. This is an amazing conversation. Thank you for taking us
 back to a war that not often discussed, but in many ways defined the 20th century and the century
 we are in today, which is the first world war. The war that was supposed to end all wars,
 but instead defined the future wars and defines our struggle to try to avoid World War III.
 So it's a huge honor you would talk with me today. This is amazing. Thank you so much.
 RG Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Christopher Capazzola.
 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
 Now, let me leave you with some words from Woodrow Wilson in 1917 about World War I that haunted
 the rest of the 20th century. This is a war to end all wars.
 George Santana, a Spanish American philosopher responded to this quote in 1922 by saying,
 Only the dead have seen the end of war.
 Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.