Leslie H. Gelb Memorial Event: Common Sense and Strategy in Foreign Policy
Margaret MacMillan discusses how history helps us to understand the present, how the past affects the decisions nations make about their interests and strategies, and why alliances matter in a changing world order.
The Leslie H. Gelb Memorial Event honors the memory of Leslie H. Gelb, CFR’s president from 1993 to 2003 and a dedicated member for forty-six years. Gelb modernized the institution to reflect the changing realities of the post-Cold War era, and was a passionate advocate of common sense and strategy in U.S. foreign policy.
FROMAN: Good evening, everybody. It is really a great pleasure and honor to welcome you all here for the Leslie H. Gelb Memorial Event, “Common Sense and Strategy in Foreign Policy.” We’ve got a full house this evening. In addition to the 150 or (1)60 people here, we’ve got over 300 people on Zoom.
And I’d like to start by thanking the Gelb family. Judy is listening on Zoom and we have Adam, Caroline, and Allison here with us. Thanks very much for—thanks very much for being here. (Applause.) I’d like to thank especially Judy, Win Lord, and the late Frank Wisner for helping us organize tonight’s event. In many ways, the three of them have really served as the trustees of Les Gelb’s legacy here at the Council, and played a major role in developing this memorial lecture series.
We’re very much saddened to have lost Frank Wisner this past week. Judy Cormier, his wife, and Caroline, his daughter, are here with us tonight. Thank you for joining us, and our thoughts are very much with you. Frank devoted his life to this country. He served as ambassador to some of the most difficult countries on Earth—India, Egypt, the Philippines, all at critical times. He was a source of wise counsel to Republican and Democratic presidents alike. And I was personally fortunate that he would occasionally share his wisdom with me over the years. That’s a gentle way of saying he would come in and tell me what I was doing wrong in government. And whether it was in government or here at the Council—an institution that he loved and was devoted to—Frank was very much a presence.
And he was also very close with Les Gelb. And I’m delighted to see so many of Les’s friends here tonight. Today is actually Les’ eight-eighth birthday. So we will sing Happy Birthday later, I suppose. When I think about Les’ legacy here at the Council, I think of two things tonight. One is, he really set the Council on the mission of helping to identify, promote, and develop the next generation of diverse foreign policy experts. And the Term Member Program, which grew to be so strong under his leadership and now has had 4,400 people go through it, have produced a pipeline of people into government, into the private sector, and into the nonprofit sector. I myself got my start as a term member, so you can judge whether it was successful or not. (Laughter.)
But the second area is that Les presided over the transition of the Council at an absolutely critical time in history, the end of the Cold War, the emergence of global economics, the merger of geopolitics and economics. And he was trying to position the Council for the future. And we find ourselves at another inflection point like that—like that now. And it’s in that context that I was so excited to have our event here tonight. Les was very much committed to pragmatism in politics. In his last book, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, he argued that American leaders should recognize, and I quote, “American leadership power is based primarily on our capacity to galvanize coalitions to solve or manage major world problems.” As he said, if we do, they will follow. If we don’t, they won’t. And so in many ways Les’ words still very much ring true today.
The parallels of the gravity of the moment to history is very much present in Margaret MacMillan’s highly acclaimed book, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which included a treatment of serious questions around international cooperation, shifting global power dynamics, European security architecture. It’s one of the great things about historians that they do such a wonderful job of teasing out these lessons from history and making them directly applicable to our current challenges, something we could very much use. So I’m delighted to welcome Margaret McMillan and Max Boot, and we look forward to their conversation. They will chat for about thirty minutes. They’ll open it up for questions from people in the room and on Zoom, I assume. And then we hope you’ll all join us for a reception afterwards elsewhere in the building. Thanks very much. (Applause.)
BOOT: Thank you very much, Mike. And it’s truly a pleasure for me to talk with one of the world’s most eminent historians. And before I start peppering Margaret with questions I just want to say a very brief word of my own about Les Gelb, because I would literally not be sitting here tonight if it were not for Les because I was one of many people who was recruited to the Council by Les, originally as a term member but then in 2002 as a very junior senior fellow. And I had no idea that I needed to be at the Council at that point, because I was then the op-ed editor of The Wall Street Journal. But I published this book on The Savage Wars of Peace, and Les got into his head that the Council could no longer continue to function without having me on its staff. (Laughter.)
And I was somewhat wary, and it was—it was very hard for him to win me over. But, man, am I glad that he did, because this has been my life, this has been my career. And I’m very grateful to Les, as I am to Richard Haass and to Mike, for keeping me around. But it was really Les’ initial impetus. And I think that’s a reminder of one of his greatest legacies, which is the mentorship and how many young people he helped along the path. And so I will always have a warm spot in my heart for Les Gelb. And it’s great to see his family here. It’s great to see Win and Frank Wisner’s family. Very sorry about Frank’s loss. I mean, these are really the giants of the Council and the giants of American diplomatic history here.
So with that, let me—let me turn it over to another giant of history, Margaret McMillan. I assume all of you are familiar with her dazzling resume, her tremendous books—Paris 1919, Nixon and Mao, The War That Ended Peace, War: How Conflict Shaped Us. Former provost of Trinity College, Toronto, former warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. We could go on and on. But let me—because it is such a pleasure to talk to such an eminent historian—let me ask you about kind of the uses and abuses of history in trying to understand the current moment. Because we have certainly—you know, those of us who are in the historical game like to suggest that studying the past helps to prepare you for the future. And yet we see pretty regularly, at pretty regular intervals, massive disconnects between past and present.
We saw it obviously with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, which almost nobody saw coming. We saw it again just a few months ago with the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, which, again, almost nobody saw coming. And now we’re seeing it on an almost daily basis coming out of the White House—(laughter)—where things that nobody has ever seen before—no American president has ever done before, the current president is doing, with alarming regularity. So, you know, to what extent is history truly a valuable guide, when so many things seem to be happening in such a haywire fashion?
MACMILLAN: Thank you for starting with such an easy question. (Laughter.) And may I just echo what you said about what an honor it is to be here, and be thinking about Frank Wisner and Leslie Gelb, as you say, giants. And I’ve been lucky to read one of them and meet the other, and feel very privileged.
I think history doesn’t offer blueprints, and we should never think it does. And it won’t tell us what to do. But what it can do is help us think constructively about what we’re facing. It can help us understand those with whom we’re dealing. And we know with individuals that they are partly made up by their own histories. Metternich always said, tell me what someone was thinking and doing when he was twenty, and I’ll tell you about the person. People’s histories matter. Histories of countries matter. And histories of groups matter. I think Putin is very much guided by his own experiences and his own view of Russian history, and what he’s—it affects what he’s trying to do with Ukraine and other neighboring countries. So I think history is for understanding. I think it’s for asking questions. If we don’t ask questions about the present, we don’t have any hope of finding answers.
So what is likely to happen? What is likely to happen if, for example, the United States becomes best friends with Russia? What is likely to happen? It won’t tell us—
BOOT: That’s too crazy. That can’t possibly be happening.
MACMILLAN: Sorry. Sorry. I picked a ridiculous example. (Laughter.) But I think—I think it helps us. We need everything—I mean, we need political science, we need anthropology, we need sociology. I think we often need literature. I think you understand something about a culture and its attitudes if you read its great works of literature. And so I think history can help. I think it can also be very dangerous. And we’ve seen it being used so often to stir up enmity against others, to justify seizure of territory, to justify dreadful actions against others. And there seems to be a sort of sense, perhaps more than in the past, that history is some sort of impartial judge. I get very worried when people say, history will judge me, or, I want to be on the right side of history. It’s not, but we tend to give it more weight, perhaps, than it should have. So it’s an important, but I think potentially dangerous, subject.
BOOT: Reminds me of Churchill’s famous quip about how history would approve of him because he intended to write the history. (Laughter.)
MACMILLAN: Yes. Yes.
BOOT: Let me ask you about another kind of perennial of historical debate, which is the great man theory of history, the notion that history is kind of the combined biography of, quote/unquote, “great men”—heavy quotes about both “great” and “men.” But it certainly runs counter to—as we were discussing earlier—to the view one often hears from political scientists, and economists, and others that—but also, you know, there’s also the substantial segment of historians, social historians and others, who argue that it’s all these underlying forces rather than the actions of individuals that shape what’s happening. And I guess the question, how does one apply that debate to what we’re currently seeing emanating from Washington, for example?
MACMILLAN: Well, I’m going to come down with somewhere in the middle. Like a good Canadian, I like compromise. (Laughter.) But I think that, yes, of course, there are currents in history. And factors such as resources matter, geography matters, the nature of society matters, its religious beliefs matter, its economic relations matter. All these things, I think, are right. And what’s happening sometimes under the surface can change slowly until suddenly it becomes obvious, and a regime collapses, or something changes dramatically.
But I do think at certain points in history it matters who’s in power, particularly if they have great power. So when Adolf Hitler took charge of Germany, which sat at the center of Europe, strategically probably the strongest power in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, and still with a very strong economy, it mattered. If he’d taken control of Austria or Albania, it wouldn’t have mattered so much. And I think when Mao Zedong took charge of China, it mattered because of what he was able to do with that power and with that country. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, I think, again, it made a great difference in the United States because he had the authority and the power to try and bring about changes.
Whether or not you approve of what people do, I think the fact remains that we do get, at moments, people of great power who have the ability to push their societies in one direction or another. Just one more example, I think, but if there’d been someone else in the office of prime minister in Britain in 1940, when France fell and Hitler was prepared to make some sort of deal with the British and their empire, other than Winston Churchill, I think the answer might have been different. So I do think—not all the time. And I think we’d rather live in worlds where it doesn’t actually matter who’s prime minister, or who’s president, or who’s chancellor. But sometimes it actually matters, because it’s a combination of the circumstances. In moments of great crisis, it matters who’s actually making the decisions.
BOOT: As we are being reminded on a daily basis. One of the—one of the words in the title of this talk has to do with strategy. And I guess, let me ask you about strategy. How are national strategies made?
MACMILLAN: I think they’re often made—sometimes they’re just what’s inherited. And nations will have strategies without really thinking through, unless they’re confronted by the need to make change. I don’t think nations often sit down and say, what should our strategy be? I mean, they do defense reviews and they do foreign policy reviews, but often governments don’t pay much attention to them. Or sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But I think there are moments when nations really have to think what they need to do to continue to exist. And perhaps we should be thinking about it more than we do. What is the best option for us? What should we be doing long term? You know, there will be changes in politics, but what is our long-term interest?
I mean, for Canada, I think, for a long time our long-term interest has been—certainly since 1945—that the United States is the most powerful and important country in our universe. And that therefore we have to get on with it. Before that, it was—it was Britain and the British empire. And so that that did become our national strategy. And I think it made a great deal of sense. I mean, you temper your strategy to what your actual situation is.
BOOT: I want to—I want to get in a second to what the strategy of Canada, and Europe, and others should be now, but let me segue there by asking: What do you see as being the strategy of the Trump administration? And what are the precedents for its actions?
MACMILLAN: I think, like everyone else, I’m wondering what the strategy is. And it’s only been, what is it, five weeks. And this is an administration which does things very publicly and does them by tweet. I’m not—I’ve never tweeted, so I don’t really know—you know, I don’t really know how it works. But it seems to me, if you tweet something it becomes fixed. It’s out there, and you can’t then say, well, I didn’t mean it, or you can’t pull back as easily. And it seems to me this is administration—it always happens—which has internal debates, presumably, and internal divisions over what American strategy should be. But much of that becomes public, which I don’t think is necessarily good because those debates sometimes need to take place in privacy so that people can speak freely and maybe some sort of agreement can be reached.
So at the moment I’m finding it very difficult to discern what America’s national strategy is. It seems to be one which—I’m trying to think of precedence in history, and I’m having trouble, of alienating your allies and making friends of your enemies. And this doesn’t seem, to me, workable in the long run. I’m trying to think of a polite word for it.
BOOT: I think many people share your consternation and befuddlement. I mean, you’ve written definitive histories of the of the Paris peace conference, of Nixon’s trip to China. So obviously you’ve written a lot about how one makes peace and how one reaches out to enemies. So, based on all of that, what do you make of, I guess, first, the way that Trump is approaching ending the war in Ukraine? And, second, his approach towards ending the war in Gaza? In both cases it can be described as somewhat idiosyncratic and unconventional.
MACMILLAN: I think he does want peace. I mean, he said this repeatedly. And he has talked about the Nobel Peace Prize, I believe. (Laughter.) And I didn’t mean that as a joke, actually. I think it’s an admirable thing to want. But peace—I mean, it’s the old thing. It takes two to tango. You have to know about who you’re dealing with on the other side. And you have to let them have something. And you have to think also about what the longer term consequences will be because a ceasefire is not peace. Even an agreement signed is not peace. I mean, peace is something that is very difficult to build, after a dreadful war. And what you have to think about, I think, is what next. And there has to be sustained efforts to make that peace work.
And, again, I worry about the public aspect of it. You know, we don’t do labor negotiations publicly for very good reasons, because both sides are trying to sort of pressure the other, and they’re trying to figure out what the other side wants. And so I think there are times for confidentiality, where you can talk more freely, and you can try out ideas—as they did at Dayton, for example, you know, where there was a media lockdown. And I just—I’m not sure that this method of getting peace—and doing it without the involvement of key players. I mean, if Russia and the United States managed to come to some sort of agreement that will allow Ukraine to survive as an independent country, then I think we would all applaud it. But to leave the Europeans out and to leave Ukraine out seems to me to be giving hostages to Fortune, that it’s making it more difficult to get peace rather than easier.
And I think the same thing with Gaza. That there so far haven’t been—as far as I can see, but maybe there are being mooted—realistic plans for what will happen to Gaza. I mean, this is a piece of territory which is being largely destroyed, which is going to take years, I imagine, to get rid of all the armaments and to rebuild, and to be reconstituted. And ideas are thrown around, but is there the will to do the very hard work of rebuilding and building a peace? And I’m not clear there is, at the moment.
BOOT: You’re skeptical of the dream of turning it into the Riviera of the Middle East?
MACMILLAN: Yes. (Laughter.)
BOOT: I mean, it’s funny just listening to you talk about the need for confidentiality in negotiations. It occurs to me, thinking about what’s going on with the negotiations over the Ukraine war, there actually is confidentiality in the U.S. dealings with Russia. We don’t really know what’s going on between Trump and Putin and Trump’s envoys. But on the other hand, the Ukrainian side of the story is playing out in full view, including that extraordinary confrontation on Friday between Zelensky Trump and Vance at the White House, in full view of the cameras.
MACMILLAN: The trouble with public confrontations is they’re very hard to back away from, aren’t they? You know, once you’ve had a very bad public display like that, it becomes harder, I think, to talk, because both sides get embedded in their own ideas. Again, we’ve seen it in other sorts of negotiations, once people begin to take firm positions. What I do find, and it must be bewildering for the Russians as much as anyone else, is who is actually speaking for the Trump administration, because you have the special envoys. You have the—you know, you have Mario (sic; Marco) Rubio. You have people talking. You have the vice president getting involved. Who is actually speaking for the administration? And is there coherent administration policy? Perhaps it’s evolving, but it does give—it is difficult to try and guess what it means.
BOOT: Yeah, especially when the negotiations kicked off in Riyadh with Trump’s Middle East envoy, rather than the Ukraine envoy sitting at the table. But how do—I mean you—I think you’re expressing a common frustration and bewilderment with what’s going on. But, you know, we get to be kind of observers here. But how do other countries—which have their own strategies—how do they deal with it? Beginning with, I guess, the land of your birth, which has now been slapped with 25 percent tariffs by the United States, but also Europe and many others?
MACMILLAN: I think, again, we’re somewhat bewildered, because we like to think of ourselves as good allies. And I think the Europeans—you know, there are always differences in alliances. And alliances are like any other sorts of relationships. They have their ups and downs and you have to try and deal with those ups and downs. But when you get to a point where the alliance is publicly falling to pieces, that becomes very difficult to overcome in the future. I mean, it’s—the memory, the lack of trust, the lack of—the lack of respect, I think, will last. And, you know, great powers are reasonable. They recognize they can’t allow hurt feelings to guide their thinking. But alliances, particularly in democratic countries, depend at least in part on public support as well. And I think how deep the disillusionment goes—in Canada it’s very interesting. I mean, I don’t think I’ve seen my fellow Canadians as really angry as they are at the moment. I mean, in a very Canadian way. You know, they’re not shouting.
BOOT: A very polite anger.
MACMILLAN: It’s a very polite anger. People are not buying American wine anymore, which is a considerable sacrifice. (Laughter.) But so, I know it is—I think, but it’s like faith or trust. You know, it’s easy to destroy and harder to build again. It takes a while to build. And I’m working a bit on the grand alliance in the Second World War. And the British and American alliance took a lot of work. I mean, Churchill talked about, you know, the special relationship. It was a very difficult relationship, but it took work on both sides, not just by the two leaders. Not just by Roosevelt and Churchill, but by thousands of other people. And, you know, to reconstitute all that will take a lot of work again.
And it’s not clear to me—I mean, I think the Europeans are bewildered. They’ve tried a variety of ways of trying to deal with it. You know, they’ve tried to show that they, you know, understand American aims. They understand the desire for peace. I think everybody wants peace in the center of Europe. I mean, it’s been a dreadful and punishing war. But the ways in which it’s going about and the ways in which Europe is being marginalized I think is difficult for Europeans to deal with. And there’s been increasing criticism in Britain—I mean, Keir Starmer was hailed as something of a hero when he went back on Wednesday or Thursday. By Friday evening he was being accused of being a patsy, being too willing to flatter and appease Donald Trump. Who’s right, I don’t know. But it is—you know it is—it becomes a matter for domestic politics as well.
BOOT: And it’s very hard, obviously, to judge the moment that we’re in. Much easier to look back with the advantage of hindsight. But, I mean, do you think this is truly an epochal shift in global history? Is the transatlantic alliance dead? Or is this just merely another controversy that will be papered over in a few years’ time, and we’ll all move on?
MACMILLAN: I don’t know. I mean, it’s tempting to judge when you’re in the middle of things, and we should be cautious. And historians, as you know, are very cautious about this. But I tend to think it really is a turning point. I mean, there have been strains in the alliance before, goodness knows. You know, there were strains with de Gaulle. There were strains when France ordered NATO troops off French soil, although it didn’t leave NATO and it continued to cooperate with NATO. There were strains over the Vietnam War. There were disagreements over Afghanistan. But the alliance itself held. And it’s not clear to me that it’s going to hold.
And it’s not clear to me—and perhaps he hasn’t made up his mind yet—what your president is going to do. Will he—and the possibility is now open, and people are talking about it openly, that United States will leave NATO, which would be a tremendous shift in the world. And the possibility of the United States becoming much closer to Russia, particularly Putin’s Russia, is something that is, I think, a huge shift. You know, it is not something I expected to see. I think a lot of us didn’t.
BOOT: And we also seem to be shifting into another era of territorial annexation, of kind of a new imperialism—whether it’s China with Taiwan, Russia with Ukraine, or now the U.S. with, you know, Greenland and the Panama Canal. I mean, what is—it seems like we’ve kind of—we’re leaving behind that post-1945 norm of respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity.
MACMILLAN: Yeah. It’s been under threat for some time. I mean, you could argue that China’s takeover of Tibet was a violation of that norm. But it somehow managed—and when Saddam Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait at the beginning of the 1990s, the world responded, including Russia. And it was seen. I think what Putin has—what he did in Georgia and what he did in Ukraine in 2014, and the world didn’t really respond, I think helped to break that norm. And as we know from other periods of history, once people start breaking norms, others will follow in their way. And I suspect we’re going to see more of it now. I mean, for a long time the world simply did not respect claims to land that were seized by force. And I think now it’s probably going to.
And so I do think that we are seeing the breakdown of an international order. And I think we’re also seeing the abandonment, perhaps, or the undermining of the idea that the nations of the world, the powers of the world, plus the smaller powers, can work together for the common good of the world. I fear that what we’re seeing more now is a world being divided into spheres of influence, which are inherently unstable. You know, spheres are always moving, and powers will lose partners, gain new ones. And there are always the edges where the spheres clash. You know, there will be these danger zones in the world, which we had during the Cold War, of course. But we I think I see more possibility now of competition for territory, for land, for influence. And there will be these points where they clash—in the Pacific, for the U.S. and China, on the land for Europe and Russia. And I think this is going to be a more unstable era.
BOOT: Well, one of many, many tremendous books that you’ve written was on the march to World War I. Are we kind of returning to a pre-1914 world of spheres of influence, and great-power competition, and imperial annexation, with nuclear weapons added into the mix?
MACMILLAN: I think we are. And I think what we’re also seeing is—what happened before the First World War is accumulation of hurts and resentments. The Russians felt very, very badly done by when Austria-Hungary sees Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. And the czar, who did have great power, wrote to his mother and said: I will never forgive Wilhelm. Never. I will never let this happen again. You know, we’re getting a feeling that we’re not going to be pushed around, which is understandable but potentially very, very dangerous.
What we’re also getting, I think, is nations fearing that they are under pressure, that they’re declining. I mean, I think Russia probably fears this. And it’s got a declining birth rate. Its economy is, what, 1/18th the size of Europe’s? I can’t remember the exact statistic, but something. I think nations in that position can do foolish things to show that they still can. And Austria-Hungary was fearing its own disintegration before the First World War, which made it more reckless in the Balkans, I think.
BOOT: I mean, in some ways you can make the case that Putin is trying to make up for Russia’s rapidly declining population by annexing the population of neighboring countries. That could be part of the motive.
I mean, I see that we’re roughly at the half-hour mark, and I should be opening up to questions. So I hope that all of you will think of good questions to ask. And I’m going to ask Margaret one or two more as you’re preparing to raise your hands or to hit your icons on the Zoom screen.
Back to history, I mean, do you think that in general we suffer from a lack of historical knowledge? And if so, whose fault is that and what do we do about it?
MACMILLAN: I think it’s funny, because history is—I don’t quite understand it myself. History is very popular. It’s popular on television. It’s popular on the History Channel. If you go into bookstores, there are, you know, scores of books coming out about history. But I think it’s being taught—it depends on the school system—but in a number of school systems I think it’s been carved up and it’s taught as part of civics, or part of something else. And I think there’s something to be said for giving students a chronology, giving them a framework within which they can fit other things. You know, too often I think—I’ve seen it in Canada—students come out with knowledge of episodes, but they don’t know how they fit together.
And for a while in Ontario the fashion was to study revolutions. So they studied the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese revolution, but none of the bits in between. (Laughter.) So, you know, it didn’t give them much sense of how the world came to be what it is. And I think if history is useful, it helps us to understand how we got here and why we became the way we are. And there’s been—I think there’s also been a bit of a turn. It’s now reversing itself, I think, against political history, which is seen as dealing with power, and military history, which is seen as dealing with war. But these are facts in our world. And I think we need to know about them. And I think knowing history and knowing history of the others is important, because it helps us to understand them. It really does.
BOOT: Well, what’s your view of President Trump’s historical education initiative, the patriotic history?
MACMILLAN: Well, I’ve never liked it when governments try and tell teachers and universities what they should be teaching. And I never liked the idea that you’ve got one version of history which is the good version. I mean, this is—you know, before the First World War virtually every European country was teaching national history, and showing the great moments of their own country’s history, which was a very limiting history and didn’t show the bonds and the influences between European countries, didn’t talk about European civilization as a whole. And I think it’s very dangerous. And the Chinese have had patriotic education campaigns for years now. And Putin has taken a very direct interest in Russian education. You know, from the ’90s he’s been addressing conventions of schoolteachers and telling them what sort of history to teach. And it’s usually they do it with a very heavy hand. I mean, the governments aren’t very good at laying down what sort of history should be taught, in my view.
BOOT: I mean, one of the more ominous applications of history was this deranged treatise that Putin produced about six months before the invasion of Ukraine, in which he tried to argue that Ukraine as a country did not exist and was a mere minor province of Russia. And using that to justify his horrific assault.
MACMILLAN: Yeah. I’ve read it. I read the English language version. And, no, it wasn’t good. It was bad history. (Laughter.) And, well, and if I’d been grading it I would have probably failed it. But I’m usually too kind to do that. I probably would have said, you know, you need to go back and rethink this, because his use of evidence was very bad. I mean, what history should do is open our minds, not close them.
BOOT: Well, I wish he were merely an errant student in your class instead of the absolute dictator of this country with nuclear weapons. (Laughter.) With that, let me—I’d love to get some questions from the audience. Sir, over there.
Q: Thank you. Whitney Baxter, at Paramount Television.
A question about the role of public opinion. We live in a moment where it’s quite easy for individuals to get information and affirm a prior opinion. It feels as if people have a lot of conviction. And so looking backwards, are there moments where there was a very convicted public and, you know, the state or other actors had to change it? And are there any lessons to think about the tactics they used that could apply today?
MACMILLAN: Yeah. I think the power of social media is so much greater now, and the power of the internet, that you can find almost anything you want to back up your arguments. You know, you can decide what your arguments are going to be, and then you can find the evidence—which isn’t the way it should be. It should be the opposite way around. And I think, at the moment—I mean, when printing first appeared I think there was a lot of worry that people would read books and get the wrong ideas. And gradually, we got the editorial function. And we got people critiquing out each other’s books. And we got a sense of what was reliable and what wasn’t. And that’s not happening yet with the Internet.
Apparently, a lot of university students are now getting information from YouTube. They watch lectures, but they need to know whether the lecturer has a good reputation, is reliable, which is what we’ve done with books, and journals, and newspapers. You know, the editorial function, I think, is very important, and the peer review. And we don’t always get it right, but being read by those who actually know the subject matters. I always worry when people say to me I believe such and such, and I’ve been doing my own research. (Laughter.) And, you know, can they judge it? Maybe they can, and maybe they can’t. And that’s what worries me. And I think eventually, I suppose, we’ll come to terms with this new technology, although AI seems to be outstripping us, and lots of students are simply relying on it to write their essays.
It’s good, but what it will do is it’ll incorporate—because it scrapes the internet—it will incorporate the mistakes. And how will they know if there’s a mistake or not in there? And this is what worries me. And the—you know, the polarization, the way in which we only read the things that appeal to us. And I’m guilty of that too. I mean, I read certain Substacks and not others because the others infuriate me so much. (Laughter.) But I probably should read the others because you need to be challenged and you need to defend your views. And I regret the disappearance, because of COVID partly but also because of the technology, the disappearance of face-to-face classes. I think they really do make a difference, when you sit down and you have to argue out your position. Not violently, but you have to defend it and you have to try and explain it. And you have to listen to others.
BOOT: Yeah, and I’ll work my way over here.
Q: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to see you in person, Professor MacMillan.
I want to go back about a hundred years and ask you about the period in history that you’ve written such great books about, World War I. Not to exclude the others, but those in particular. It’s more than a hundred years ago. And even in the last few years several new books have come out about World War I. So I wonder if you can enlighten us a little bit of why World War I holds such a fascination for historians and what, if anything, have you learned from some of the new research that has come out from Christopher Clark or Sean McMeekin. Thank you.
MACMILLAN: Yeah. Thank you. It is perennially fascinating. And I think, you know, you notice it when you go into bookstores or libraries. There are shelves on the—shelf after shelf of books on the origins of the First World War, and a very short number on the origins of the Second World War, because there’s very little disagreement. I mean, occasionally someone comes along and says it was all the fault of Britain for starting the Second World War, but most people don’t believe it.
But the First World War there were so many causes and so many possible causes, and it could have happened at different points. I mean, there were—there were a series of crises in Europe from about 1904 onwards, when a general war could have broken out. If it had broken out earlier, the causes would have been different. There were different factors at play. And some were important at a particular period and some—I mean, imperialism, imperial competition was very important, in my view, earlier on, but less so later on. The growth of—the growth of public opinion, the growth of nationalism, I think these became more and more important. You got more and more public engagement in the policies of their countries, often vociferous organizations pushing for bigger navies, more armies, more colonies, whatever.
The other thing I think with the First World War that we still puzzle about is we have this awful sense that it may all have been an accident. You know, that—you know, if you go back and look at the assassination in Sarajevo, it was a series of accidents that day, June 28, 1914. And the archduke never should have gone on that day, because that’s the great Serbian national holiday, and the Serbs were furious that Austria had taken over Bosnia and Herzegovina. So could it have been an accident? I mean, the tinder was there, but if it hadn’t happened in 1914 the whole international situation of Europe could have looked very different.
The British had an understanding with Russia which was due to be renewed, I think, in 1916. And they were very worried it wouldn’t be renewed. They had an agreement over the colonial imperial struggles. And that agreement was due to be renewed. And there was already tension along the borders with India. And Afghanistan, of course, always a target of both sides. And it might have been that the British-Russian friendship wouldn’t have lasted. Very difficult to tell. The British had also been talking to Germany. I mean, there were those in both countries who said, look, Germany has the biggest land army in Europe. The British have the biggest Navy in the world. It’s a natural alliance. And, you know, we’re not like those frivolous French. We’re a sober, hardworking people.
You know, there’s lots of stuff—(laughter)—nonsense like this. You know, but there was—you know, so it’s not clear that Europe would have had the same alliance system the next year. So it is—I don’t think we’ll ever come to any agreement. I mean, I’ve had discussions with Chris Clark, who I like enormously. I think we disagree on what caused it, but only—it’s the emphasis you put. And it is—I think we’ll go on puzzling about it. And, you know, the things that come in—social historians, actually, have contributed a lot. There’s a very interesting book on the hold of dueling over the upper classes of Europe, and those who wanted to be part of the upper classes. Dueling was seen as manly and it proved something, and it reflected the national spirit. And that, I think, probably fed into a sense that war would be a good thing, and that war was ennobling, and that it was good for the country. And there was a professor of war history at Oxford, who I always say unkindly was well past the military age, who kept on talking about a healthy bloodletting. (Laughter.) It wouldn’t have been his blood. (Laughter.)
BOOT: Exactly right. Ma’am, back there.
Q: Hi. I’m Leslie Vinjamuri, American in London at Chatham House.
I know you’re a historian, and a wonderful one, but I was wanting to ask you a follow up to what Max had asked you about whether this is a moment where we’ll sort of move back to the normal or whether we’re in a more existential and transformative moment, and we’re moving into a world of spheres of influence. I was fascinated by your answer. Not happy about it. But I want to ask you where you think Europe fits in that scenario. So if you suspend your historical—or, perhaps, draw on your historical analysis, where is Europe in a world that divides along spheres of influence? Which way does it lean? Or is something transformative going to happen within Europe? And also, if you would—I know it’s a very unfair question—what, in your view, should Europeans be doing now, if that’s the future, other than the obvious, which is spend more on defense?
MACMILLAN: Yeah. I think what happens in Europe will be crucial. And a lot of it, I think, will be domestic politics, as it so often is. You know, what happens domestically can be crucial. And there are a number of countries—I mean, the AfD is now the second-largest party, the Alternative für Deutschland, in the German parliament. It will not be part of a coalition, I think the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats and some of the smaller parties are very clear on that, but it’s there. And goodness knows what will happen in the French elections. So that I think—I think what’s going to happen domestically is going to matter. And whether Europe can hang together—you know, I think there’s less—I would have less concern about the eastern part of Europe, the Baltic countries and Poland, because they are right on the frontlines and then they know what an expansionist Russia could be. I mean, they’ve suffered from that in the past.
But whether Europe will hold together, and whether the British will still continue what, in my opinion, is a flawed policy of being neither in or out of Europe and refusing to talk—the present government is refusing to talk about reapplying to be part of the European Union. I mean, they have a defense relationship, but that defense relationship, I think, has been weakened and compromised by Brexit. And I think the British—you know, still—I mean, again, I’m wondering if this will survive what happened at the end of last week—but the British still have this view that they can be a bridge between Europe and the United States, and this will give them sort of leverage. I don’t think so. You know, I think the Europeans—and it’s certainly coming out in the European press. They’re going to have to take a very hard look at themselves and what they do. And perhaps it’s overdue.
I mean, they’ve tended to rely too much on the umbrella provided and the information and the technology provided by the United States. And this is overdue. So has my own country, Canada. We’ve coasted. What’s certainly happening in Canada is a very serious discussion. We’ve been talking for years about getting rid of interprovincial trade barriers. People now want to do it in a month. You know, we’re beginning to look at ourselves and how efficient we are, and how inefficient we are. And we’re beginning to talk about alternative markets, alternative trading partners, because, you know, what has happened to us has really shaken our confidence. You know, it may be a new administration comes in, but we won’t forget this period. And I don’t think the Europeans will forget it either. So I do think it’s forcing a number of parts of the world to take a very serious look.
Asia as well. I mean Japan, Australia, some of the other neighbors of China are clearly going to be rethinking, and are rethinking, what their position is going to be in the world. If the United States divides up the world into—or, presides over the world being divided up into spheres of influence, that would leave China dominant. And that is something Asian neighbors of China don’t particularly want, but they may feel they have no alternative but to compromise with China. So I do think it’s a very serious moment. And how it plays out will depend partly on what plays out in domestic politics, and on leadership. You know, we can’t rely on leaders to come and save us from a complicated world. We shouldn’t. But I do think who’s in office is going to matter a great deal.
BOOT: And I actually had a piece today in the Washington Post arguing that because Europe is feeling abandoned, I think rightly so, by the United States, perhaps this is a moment when, just as previously you saw European economic unification, now it’s time for European defense unification. That we need to move towards more of a European joint military and end the redundancies which plague the twenty-nine European members of NATO. I mean, do you think that’s a pipe dream? Or do you think there’s a chance that we could actually move in that direction?
MACMILLAN: Well, they’ve got to think about it, I think. And because also they’re wasting their resources. I mean, when you have, what, eighteen different kinds of artillery shells—I mean, you know more about it than I do—but it just seems to me, it—weapon systems that aren’t interoperative and training that is different in different countries, this is criminal waste, it seems to me. That’s perhaps too strong a word. But it is a terrible waste of resources.
BOOT: Absolutely.
Q: Hi. My name is Imran Riffat.
And my question is about the situation in Ukraine. At the end of the Cold War the then-Soviet empire, as it was crumbling, was given an assurance by the West that there will be no expansion of NATO east of Germany. And within a few years, you know, new countries started becoming members of NATO, all the way to, you know, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and now this most recent conflict concerning Ukraine. You know, there was a lot of talk about Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. So my question is, to what extent did this aggravate whatever was going on in Putin’s mind?
MACMILLAN: It’s a much debated topic, what sort of promise was given—what was offered and what was actually given.
Q: It’s written even in Bill Burns’ book on American diplomacy.
MACMILLAN: It was—there’s a very good book—sorry to interrupt you—but there is a very good book by Mary Sarotte in which she goes into—
BOOT: I was just about to say that.
MACMILLAN: Yeah. It’s one of those tricky things, is who was listening and who gave it and who—there was no formal agreement. It may well be that Putin resented it enormously, and I think did. But the promise—at the time, the Soviets—or, sorry, the Russians—did not make a big deal of it. And there was real pressure on the West—and maybe they made a mistake. There was real pressure on the West—but you can understand why—there was real pressure on the West from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, the first three countries to come in. Poland was threatening to develop its own nuclear weapons, apparently—I’ve heard on very good authority—which would have been even more destabilizing than letting it into NATO. So it was one of those very tricky situations. And there was this offer of friendship to Russia, the Partnership for Peace, where it was hoped that—in those days, in the ’90s, it was still hoped that Russia—this was before Putin was in power—it was still hoped that Russia would come into the community of nations.
But it has become something, I think, that the Russians have used as justification. But there was never a formal promise. You know, it was—I think something was said—there was a conference in Moscow, I think, in 1991. You may remember better than I do. And I think—was it, James Baker was secretary of state. And he said something—there is a transcript. He said something about, what if we said to you we wouldn’t expand NATO one inch further west? And the Russians never picked up on it. And one of his aides said, they didn’t say anything. They didn’t even notice we’d said it. So the Americans, perhaps, can be forgiven for thinking that it wasn’t anything that was that important to the Russians. In retrospect, it has become very important to them. It’s been used as an excuse. But I think letting Ukraine into NATO now is off the table. I think even Ukraine accepts that this is not a possibility at the moment.
BOOT: Yeah, and there was certainly talk over the years of admitting Ukraine, but it wasn’t as if there was a sudden push to admit them in 2022, and therefore Putin felt compelled to invade. It was—I don’t think anybody really thought Ukraine was on the verge of joining NATO. I just think that’s another historical pretext that he uses to justify his aggression, which is more about expanding the Russian empire, swallowing this people that he doesn’t recognize as being independent, all these other kinds of things.
MACMILLAN: Yeah. And Russia is one—it’s curious, because often empires are very rich and they expand out and acquire more rich territory. Russia was not rich to begin with, and when it expanded out a lot of the steppe territory it acquired wasn’t particularly rich. But Ukraine was always a prize. You know, that famous black soil, the resources, you know, the more educated population, especially the poets that had lived under Austria-Hungary—in parts of Austria-Hungary. And so I think it was a prize.
I think, in a curious way—and I’ve only been to Ukraine once since the war started—but when I talk to people there, I mean, they said, Putin has done more to create a sense of a Ukrainian nation than he realized he was doing. But, you know, that even, you know, people living in the east feel themselves to Ukrainian rather than Russian.
BOOT: Right, which is why it won’t be so easy to end this war, even if we cut off U.S. arms shipments, because Ukrainians are literally fighting for their lives and the life of their nation. They’re not going to give up easily.
MACMILLAN: No. No. I mean, Putin will get—if he gets—he’s demanding bits of Ukraine that he’s not even occupying at the moment. But if he gets it all, he will get a very disaffected population, a very unhappy population. A lot of people will leave, as they already have.
BOOT: Ma’am, back there.
Q: Thank you. This was a great conversation. Elise Labott. I’m the Edward R. Murrow press fellow here at the Council.
I’d like to finish the thought about what my colleague from Chatham House was asking about what happens to Europe. I mean, what happens to the United States if—as you say, if we move towards, you know, more malign figures like Russia and China and carve up in spheres of influence. Does the world then become run by those spheres? Or, because the U.S. allies abandon us, does the U.S. cease to become a great power in the future? Are we, like, you know, a Japan or Germany, you know, twenty, thirty years from now? What do you—what do you think happens?
MACMILLAN: I don’t—it’s difficult to know. Well, I mean, one element is what actual vision the present administration has for another sort of world. And that’s emerging by bits and pieces. So I think it’s difficult to get a full sort of picture of it. What will happen in the future is a matter of guesswork, and trying to figure out what a reasonable guess is. I mean, it seems that sometimes the message coming from the administration is that we don’t need the rest of the world. We have an ocean on either side, which is an old argument. I mean, it goes back, and it’s—you know, it’s very reasonable. It’s based on geography. And we have, well, you used to say a friendly Canada to the north. You now say the 51st state. (Laughter.) And you’ve got Mexico to the south, and Greenland. You know, we’ve got the whole of the Western Hemisphere, potentially, so do we need the rest of the world?
And that did make a sort of sense up until the Second World War. And even by the Second World War, with the development of long-range aircraft and submarines that could go further, it was becoming questionable just how secure the United States was from outside attack. But now, with, you know, supersonic rockets, with intercontinental ballistic missiles, with the militarization of space, no part of the world, no matter how good its geography, can be safe from an attack. And these attacks can come from the other side of the world. And they come—or can come potentially very quickly. And we’ve also got the problem of subversion—you know, the use of the internet, again, to interfere in domestic politics, to spread false rumors, to try and shake the confidence of people in their own institutions. This is going on all the time.
And there seems to be evidence too that the Russians are, you know, doing some of their old tricks, you know, things—there was this peculiar episode of things exploding on airplanes. How long ago was that? Before Christmas?
BOOT: Yeah, that was just a few months ago.
MACMILLAN: Just a few months ago, which looks like the Russians had put them there. But, of course, they denied everything. But the possibility—you know people being assassinated in Western countries. You know, the ways in which Russia is using black arts and often, apparently, and Iran is doing the same, hiring local gangs to do their work for them.
BOOT: Right, hybrid warfare.
MACMILLAN: Yeah, yeah.
BOOT: But, I mean, to your point about how no nation can be secure in the age of the ballistic missile, I mean, this is why the Trump administration is pushing forward with this Iron Dome for America, which I don’t think is practical and it’s going to be very costly, but that’s kind of the dream is to somehow make us truly secure.
MACMILLAN: Well, it would put a—I mean, Israel’s Iron Dome is over a very small country, and not against the best missiles in the world.
BOOT: And it covers, you know, missiles with a range of about forty miles, which is not very useful unless Canada starts shooting at us, which the way things are going, they actually like might. (Laughter.)
MACMILLAN: No, no. No, no. No, no.
BOOT: Ma’am, yeah. Right there, yeah. Oh, we have one—OK.
Q: Thank you. Cynthia Roberts, a political scientist. I’m guilty.
MACMILLAN: I apologize.
Q: Let me ask—let me ask you a question.
BOOT: We take it all back.
MACMILLAN: Yes.
Q: Many of your historical colleagues—or, at least some of your historical colleagues in this country, like Hal Brands, Phil Zelikow, smart people who also look to the past to guide us in some respects for patterns to understand the present and into the future, are emphasizing the problem of gathering coalitions of our adversaries working together. In even opportunistic ways, this can cause a lot of problems for the United States. And one, perhaps rational, reason that some people who might, if they get approved, work for the Trump administration have made the argument that now we have the resources, at least according to the Pentagon, to fight only one war at a time, not two or three. And yet, we see China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, kind of coalescing. Even without a firm alliance, that kind of coalition can pose all sorts of problems. So what historical lessons would you draw for the present on that? Thank you.
MACMILLAN: Well, if you see a group of nations coalescing against you, of course, what you have to try and gauge is how strong that alliance is. And, you know, the interests of China and the United—and Russia—rather—are so different, I think, that I can’t see a long-term friendship. I may be completely wrong, but given their history, given the fact that there are far more Chinese living in the far east along that common border than there are Russians, and the Russian demographic problem is particularly acute in the far east, given the fact that Chinese maps often show territory that is part of Russia still as being part of China—you know, the Chinese memories, like other memories, are powerful.
So you have to try and figure out how strong this coalition is. And where does Iran fit in? I mean, its relations with Russia have been, in the past, very difficult. Russia has tried to seize parts of the north of Iran and has meddled in Iranian politics. So difficult to tell. But it seems to me that if you are facing an alliance of potentially hostile nations, then you probably want to build your own alliance. You know, this is a way of kind of—but alliances are tricky. I mean, anyone who’s worked on—any diplomat, I think, will tell you this. That, you know, there are misunderstandings, there are ways in which you irritate each other, there are different national interests, as there are bound to be. And building and creating and maintaining alliances is very tricky. It takes a great deal of work.
And I would put in a plea for diplomats and diplomacy. You know, the tendency in recent years, the past two or three decades, to say, who needs diplomats? I mean, we had a prime minister in Canada who said, all they do is stand around and eat canapés at cocktail parties, which, you know, completely gets wrong what good diplomacy can do. It can act as a conduit between nations. It can act to build relationships. It can act to try and remove some of the irritants between nations. But you can’t just bring an alliance into being. You know, it seems to me it has to be nurtured, and maintained, and worked upon.
Again, I think of other sorts of human relationships. You know, relationships between owners of factories and those who work in them. I mean, these—the factory works better if the relations are good and they’re working in the same direction. But that takes often a great deal of work. So, you know, I think the United States, I can see, you know, the concern that you can only fight one war, but that seems to me should lead it to try and find ways of compensating for that.
BOOT: Well, I feel that, since we are sitting at the Council on Foreign Relations, a tribute to the power and necessity of diplomacy is a very appropriate note on which to end this wonderful conversation. So thank you very much, Margaret. (Applause.)
MACMILLAN: Thank you. Thanks, it was really—thank you. Very nice questions, thanks.
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This is an uncorrected transcript.