 The following is a production of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library. Sponsored by Colonel Illinois Jennifer N. Pritzker, Illinois National Guard, retired. Bringing citizens and citizen soldiers together through the exploration of military history, topics, and current affairs. This is Pritzker Military Presents. Welcome to a special episode of Pritzker Military Presents with British historian Sir Michael Howard, a recipient of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library's 2015 Founders Literature Award, interviewed by Sir Max Hastings. I'm your host, Ken Clark, and this program was filmed at Howard's home near London and features a discussion of Howard's life and career along with a variety of subjects ranging from World War II to the present. Sir Michael Howard has been called Britain's finest living historian, best known for his ability to expand his writings about military history beyond the facts and figures and into an examination of this sociological significance of war. A decorated veteran of the British Army, Howard was awarded the nation's military cross for distinguished service as an infantry officer with the Cold Stream Guards during the Italian campaign of World War II. Following the war, he completed his education at the University of Oxford and began a career as a historian and professor in the late 1940s. As an educator, Howard has held professorships with All Souls College, the University of Oxford, where he served as Regist Professor of Modern History from 1980 to 1989, Yale University, and King's College London, where he was credited with founding the Department of War Studies in 1962. As an author, Howard has produced or contributed to important writings on subjects ranging from war in European history to World War I and II and the Franco-Prussian War, which is the title of his most famous work. He is also an editor and translator of the most widely read version of Carl von Klauserwitz's masterpiece On War. Sir Max Hastings is an award-winning author, journalist and broadcaster, whose work has appeared in every British national newspaper and who now writes regularly for the Daily Mail in the Financial Times. Winner of the 2012 Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, Hastings is author of more than 20 books on military history and affairs, including Inferno, The World at War, 1939 to 1945, Catastrophe, 1914, Europe Goes to War, and most recently The Secret War, Spies, Cifers and Gorillas, an exploration of espionage during World War II. And now, Sirs Michael Howard and Max Hastings. Hi, I'm Max Hastings, and it's a huge honour for me to be here today to interview Sir Michael Elliot Hard, a recipient of the 2015 Pritzker Military Museum and Libraries Founder's Literature Award. Sir Michael was selected by the Museum and Libraries' founder, Colonel Jennifer N. Pritzker, to receive this award for his immense contribution to furthering the public understanding of military history and military affairs. Sir Michael, warmest congratulations. Now, you've got an enormous number of letters after your name, and I think for an American audience, we ought to start by explaining how some of them came about. Now, first of all, there's MC. Now, that's Military Cross, one with the Coldstream Guards in Italy during the war? That's right. I was with the unit that landed at Cilerno at the bottom of Italy, and I stayed with them until we got up to the top to Trieste. And I got my Military Cross through the most old-fashioned way possible. That is leading a Bernard charge. I think I was probably the last person who did that. It was certainly the last time I would ever going to do it. If you're going to be brave, you've got to do it when you're very young. And once you've done it, be very careful after that to survive so that people will be around to congratulate you afterwards. Yes, I remember hearing you once say that when you're 20, it's amazing how stupid you can be to win a Military Cross. Now, your next set of initials are CH, which means companion of honour, which is a British state honour, which is given to a pretty limited number of very successful high-functionaries in Britain. Well, I think I got it from my work as a historian, basically, because it does go, as you're quite rightly said, to a rather small number of people. Quite often, there are senior, very distinguished politicians who can't get peerages for some reason or another, but there are also a number of other people who've got it through sheer hard work at their own job. But the last one is the most distinguished of all, that the Queen has in her personal gift, the Order of Merit, 24 members, and you are one of those 24. And I think everybody realises this means you were recognised as the foremost academic, and certainly the foremost historian in Britain. Well, it is not for me to comment upon the Queen's choice. I need to hardly say overwhelmed to find myself in that kind of distinguished company of people like the musician Simon Rattle, the architect Norman Foster, the great musician, director Neil McGregor, I could go on, but there are only 24 of us. This is a great honour to be a part of it. Now, your career really started in the Second World War. You were a student at Oxford when it started. And I think you could have become a musician rather than a fighting soldier. I was a quite accomplished oboist, and I was approached by the Royal Air Force, which for some reason was recruiting a number of musicians to boost its morale, I suppose, to join as a trainee oboist. And I thought this was a brilliant idea. I'd be able to go on being a musician throughout the war. And I consulted my professor, who was a wise old bird who puffed at his pipe and who looked at me and had a bad stammer. He said, yes, Howard, I can see the attraction of that. But after the war, when they asked what were you doing during the war, I was playing the obo for the Royal Air Force. I didn't have to go any further than that. I joined the army instead. So your time in the Coldstream Guards in Italy had obviously had a tremendous effect on you, was how could it not? How did it affect you in your life, would you say, those years with the Coldstream Guards? Well, it made me interested in war, apart from anything else. It gave me all kinds of experiences which I wouldn't have had, otherwise unpleasant, unpleasant. But it did mean that when I went back to civilian life, to do what I'd always wanted to do, which was to be a professional historian, I was much more interested in war than I ever thought I would have been before. And because I had already started writing a little regimental history of one kind or another, I was given the job at King's College London of being a lecturer in military studies. And I started, as I say, not from war, but from history in general. And when I was asked whether I'd become a military historian, I said, yes, so long as I'm regarded as a historian of war, rather than an operational military historian, because one of the things I find most interesting about war is the way in which wars have been shaped by the societies that fight them, and the way in which the societies which fight them determine what kind of war is going to be. So although I have enormous respect for operational historians... Right about which divisions, which way, all that sort of thing. Yes, and you're right, basically, about battles and things. They've done wonderful work, and very interesting indeed, but they've got to be set in the context, not only of the wars which they're fighting, but of the societies and the cultures that are fighting them. And that made it for me a far more interesting topic than if I had simply devoted myself to military history as such. Now in your early years, you travel quite a lot in the United States, and you've always had very close connections with the United States. I think this had a terrific formative influence on you. Oh, indeed. Well, I think that anybody who's visited the United States is changed by their experience of being in touch with this great, strange society out there. But I travelled then in the early years of the Cold War, as it was, because I was one of the very few people at that time in England who was trying to understand the nature of nuclear weapons and the difference which nuclear weapons was going to make, not only to the conduct of war, but to the conduct of international relations. And as a result, I got invited to a number of seminars and conferences which were attended by all the great men of that time, by Henry Kissinger, Tom Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter, the founders, as it were, of thinking about nuclear war. And that moulded my thinking, sometimes agreeing with them, sometimes disagreeing with them, but being at the centre of what seemed to me the most important debate which was going on in the world at that time. So one of the things that's always made you so unusual is that you're not only a hugely distinguished historian writing about the past, but you've always been hugely engaged with military affairs of the present and what's going on in the world today, and that was true back in the 1950s. And of course you were one of the founders of what's today, I suppose, the world's foremost strategic think tank, the International Institute of Strategic Studies. What made you decide that we needed an Institute of Strategic Studies? Well, I was one of a number of people who, when the debate about nuclear weapons started, whether we should have them or not, how they should be used, there seemed to be nobody who knew anything about this, except a very small number of people in Whitehall who did know all about it and a certain number of retired service people who may or may not have known anything about it but wanted to learn. And so we reckoned that we would create an Institute rather along the lines of the Council for Foreign Relations in New York or Chatham House in England, whose job, they saw their job as to educate the public as far as one could on the facts and the problems of the whole question. And that was what the ISS started as being. It's now expanded itself enormously and wonderfully, but it did start by studying the problem of nuclear weapons, and that is why its periodical still is called survival. That was, we were in the business of seeing how survival could be ensured in a nuclear age. Now, while nobody could ever have called you an ardent Cold Warrior in the sense that you were never a hawk, at the same time I've thought that all your life you've been amazingly excited about the Soviet Union and the threat it presented. I don't think you were ever in any doubt about which side you were on at a time when so much of the academic world on both sides, the Atlantic, did incline to the left. I had no doubt about which side I was on. I found myself, that was my lot, the West. I am part of the West, my thinking is molded by the West. But I'm also sufficiently a member of the West, I think, to understand what the Soviet Union was on about, what communism was all about, and to try to put the threat in its context, to realize that one was dealing not simply with the Soviets, but with Russians. And in order to deal with them, you understand what it was like to be a Russian, you still do, that their background is different from ours, our history is different from ours, their threat perception is different from ours. And one has got to understand why they think the way they do, understand why they think the way they do. I never forgot about 25 years ago, I was doing a television interview with you, not unlike this one, and I said, are we doomed forever to have the Russians as our enemies? And you were inclined to think that we were, because you said they will always resent our success and their failure. Well, I think that that is probably the case, that being situated where they are, in the middle of a huge, great plane, they are very conscious of threat, both from the East and from the West. Well, we won't talk about the problem of the signing of Soviet relations, but the history of Russia's relations with Europe have always been of seeing the threat coming from Europe, extending their frontiers as far as they can to be safe. And on the other hand, the Europeans, seeing the Russians as being a threat, going right back to the days of either the terrible or elsewhere, and trying to push them back as far as possible. It has been going on for 300 years, it is going on today. Now, the books that made your reputation in the 1950s, the Franco-Prussian War, I suppose the history of the Franco-Prussian War, was the book that today everybody associates with you and says this was one of your masterpieces. How did you get into that? What made you decide to write that book? Well, the first thing that struck me when I started studying the history of war in general was a transformation that occurred in Europe between war in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo and war in 1916, the Battle of the Somme. What was it to transform the whole nature of war in such a catastrophic fashion? And I therefore looked at the development of warfare in Europe and saw that this tipping point was the wars of German unification. Especially in 1870-71, whereby when the Prussians defeated the French unified Germany. Now, in fact, a far more important war globally speaking, of course, was the American Civil War. And people often wonder why it was that the Europeans had learnt so little from the experience of the American Civil War. And the short answer was that shortly after the American Civil War, there was a Franco-Prussian War. And the Franco-Prussian War was far more influential, far more relevant to what the Europeans were doing, fought on the same battlefields they were going to be fought with very much the same kind of weapons. And so in 1914, when people began to fight, or just before to plan for the coming war, it was through 1870 that they looked back, that sudden catastrophic transformation which occurred with the Prussian victory. How did that happen? And what was the influence of that victory on the thinking in Europe and elsewhere which led to the wars of the 20th century? Now, you wrote a very important volume of the British strategic history of the Second World War, in which I think you were one of the first to make plain that although Churchill and Roosevelt created this wonderful rhetoric about the Grand Alliance, that indeed in truth the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and Britain during the Second World War were far, far more difficult than all that wonderful Churchillian rhetoric suggested. Well, you're going to attribute it to my volume in fact. I think that particular illusion had been shattered long before my book appeared, which was in the early 1970s. But certainly the further one did get into the documents and studied the exchange reviews which took place which formed the actual strategy, the grand strategy in Europe and elsewhere, how far apart the Americans on the one hand and the British on the other were at the beginning. And what an enormously difficult job it was for them to get together, to argue, to sort things out and eventually end up with a common and agreed strategy. Well, no, it was never an agreed strategy that practically every new initiative had to be fought through and discussed, not always with very good will one must say. But basically with the Americans who at the very beginning said the way to defeat the Germans is to, in one great battle which has got to be fought in Northwest Europe, that means that we've got to get over to Britain, we've got to invade Normandy and there will be the great Armageddon which will destroy everything. Well, the British for a number of reasons thought that this was rather oversimplifying the issue. Apart from anything else, we were already fighting the Mediterranean in various other places. With apart from anything else, we had first of all to win the battle of the Atlantic. We then had to destroy the German capacity to prevent us from landing which meant acquiring command of the air. It meant making use of the armies which you already had in the Mediterranean, so-called Mediterranean strategy. And so bit by bit the thing was put together with a great deal of misunderstanding on both sides and a great many terrible mistakes which were made on both sides. But it was therefore a far more interesting, involved business, the making of Allied strategy than the, as you quite like to say, the rather romantic view about the special relationship indicated. But another part of, to me, your clear sightedness is even at the moments in post-war history when the United States has been least loved in the world, let's say, after Vietnam, I remember you were saying to me again, many years ago now, we should never forget that whatever the United States gets wrong, the United States is the only nation that can get anything done in the world and I think you still feel that's true today, don't you? I'm afraid not it's an exchange except one thing which is the American attitude to this, that there was during the Cold War an American not only determination to put things right in the world, but the belief that they could. Now, since then, a lot of unfortunate things have happened, rather the dissolution, both the United States about its capacity to do so of its allies also, the realization that the world is a far more complicated place, that American power on its own can achieve far less than it was believed, the experience of Vietnam was the first shattering revelation of this, the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, another one. So the United States is understandably, and I think rightly, much more cautious about what it can really do with its enormous power and the rest of the world is far more mistrustful of what the United States does with that power when it uses it. But nonetheless, this fact does still remain that the United States is the only country with the economic, the military and the soft power to really achieve global results. I was very surprised when you said to me a few weeks ago that you felt the world was in a worse mess today than for a very long time you can remember. And I tried to dispute that with you. I said, is it maybe that as one gets older is that you take a glumier view that in the end, if you look at where the world is now compared with, let's say 1914 or whatever, surely it's not that bad. When one looks at these threats today with your extraordinary reach, do we feel, I mean, Putin is not Stalin, ISIS is not Hitler? I don't know. How should we see the threats that the world is facing today in the great perspective of history? Max, I doubt whether there's been anybody in their 90s as I am who has not believed that the world is going to hell in a handcart. So I do accept that there is a certain sort of personal attitude to all this. But I would say not so much that the world is in a worse mess or a better mess. It's in a different kind of a mess. As you're quite right to say, Putin is not Stalin. Russia is not the Soviet Union. But they nonetheless present a different kind of problem. A far less significant problem than Stalin the Soviets. But nonetheless, the nearer you'll get the Soviet to Russia. I'm sorry, I mustn't refer to the Soviet Union. The more you realize that there's this continuing problem about Russia and Russian power. Putin is comparable to, and he would love me for saying this, to the great SARS of the 16th and 17th century. He emphasizes if the Russians something they need, need very much to have a sense of self-confidence, a sense of the superiority of their culture to others. And they suffer from a considerable inferiority complex which Putin is doing his damnedest to put right. So the business of putting it right does present problems of security to its neighbors. There is a different kind of problem to that which Stalin and the rest of us presented. It's not an existential threat to us. It is not an existential threat in the terms in which a nuclear-armed Soviet Union was. But never forget they still have nuclear weapons. And I suppose you can say that any country which has nuclear weapons can present an existential threat to its rivals. I can't help thinking that we shall never live comfortably with the Russians until they achieve some degree of economic success, until they've got something to take pride in themselves other than oil, gas and fear. Well, the Russians have so much to be proud of. The communists and Stalin in particular had a great deal to be proud of in the way which they did build up between the wars. They took a defeated, backward country and they turned it into one of the leading industrial powers in the world at terrible cost, at the cost of millions of lives of starvation, but they did it. And with that they were then able both to resist and ultimately to destroy the German Nazi power and never forget that it was the Russians who destroyed the German army. Help from us, the Americans and the British, but it was the Red Army which tore the tribes out of the Germans. So that was something to be proud of. In the 1950s they produced nuclear weapons in a way to terrify the Americans and the rest of us. And then suddenly the whole thing collapsed. Overnight almost it collapsed. This great achievement, nothing left of it at all. And now Putin and his colleagues are trying to pull the thing up, put it together in some way. So not an existential threat, no, but still a problem. What about ISIS? How should we view ISIS and the great scheme of the world? I see ISIS as a disease of the Enlightenment. That is to say it is a reaction against everything which has been achieved by the Enlightenment, by which I do mean our scientific industrial democratic societies. Because we have produced, how can I put it, societies which are immensely successful in producing peace, tranquility and order. Within societies which represent peace, tranquility and order, a lot of people get very bored. They want excitement. They go out looking for excitement. If it isn't at home they will go and find it elsewhere. That's one thing. The other thing is that the enormous mixture of populations now is making it very much more difficult to create cohesive societies out of all the hundreds and thousands of millions of people who are moving around the world. Now the great achievement of the United States is it did take in immigrants from all over the world and turn them into Americans. It's amazing how successful you have been at doing that and continuing to do it. But one of your most brilliant observations, it seemed to me, in 2007 lecture you gave at Oxford about Islamic fundamentalism, is you said it's a great delusion to believe that we all share a common enthusiasm for freedom. Well, I know. But if I could just continue a little about what I was saying first. What the Americans have achieved, the British have failed to achieve notably. And nobody else is much good at it. That is to say there are large numbers, not simply of Islamists, of people in our societies who cannot fit in, who feel that they are rejected and react against it. Now, I think it was President George W. Bush who at one moment said, he believed fundamentally that in every person's heart there was a burning desire for freedom. Absolute nonsense. In everybody's heart there is a burning desire to belong to a group, to belong to a gang, to belong to a tribe. If they haven't said President Bush belonged to the Scull and Bones League at Yale. Those who didn't belong to it felt rather rejected. I was at Yale myself, I know, but seriously. The first desire when it goes to a school is to fit into a gang, fit into a group. And those who don't fit in feel rejected and bitter. And this rejection and bitterness feeds in on a large scale with these immigrant groups who just feel left out. And where do they look to? They look to those who are promising a group which they will fit into, where they will feel wanted, and where they will get adventure. And where, if you are that way inclined, you're going to be able to kill people. So that's what I meant when I said that ISIS is a disease of Western civilization. It's a distortion, it's a reaction against it. Existential threat now. It's a long-term disease which is very difficult to kill, which we may just have to live with indefinitely. So when people promise victory over ISIS, they're not going to get it. What we may get is stabilizing the thing, making it acceptable, putting it into remission. How far is a Western military response to ISIS credible? I think you'll have to split it up into bits. I mean, on its own, it's obviously totally inadequate and everybody agrees that we have got to use our economic power and our soft power, particularly our soft power, as well as our military power. The military power is probably credible under limited circumstances when it is able to confront ISIS military power. And that, if it can do that and limit it, probably not destroy it, but keep it under control, keep it limited, then the military power is going to be effective. But basically, it has got to be the soft power, which is going to convince these people they're not getting anywhere and whether they're going to try to get is not worth getting to. Let's go back and talk a little more about your career as a historian, that you also, with Peter Barrett, have translated and edited Klauswitz. Should soldiers and historians today still be reading Klauswitz? Is this early 19th century Prussian still got important things to teach us? Well, they should certainly be reading it. They should be buying it because it's a nice little source of income for me, so you're not going to get me saying anything against Klauswitz at all. But yes, they should, because the thing, Klauswitz understood war. He realized it was not a broad game of simply one person against others using their intelligence and their wits to know how to feed the other one than God. I think the most interesting that Klauswitz said about war, and I think it was the first person who said, is this bloody dangerous? In fact, when you're getting involved in a war, you're liable to get killed. You'll certainly get liable to get badly hurt. And so the first thing that you've got to have in war is the moral strength to be able to stand up to that. Not simply the dangers, but the uncertainty, the mess which war is. I mean, one of the things which I learned more or less on my third day on the landing at Salerno was that everything that you plan, nothing you plan is going to work. We got lost. Well, that great line of tatters, war is organized confusion. You saw that at first hand. So that was Klauswitz's starting point, that in order to wage war successfully, war is a moral conflict. And therefore, the first thing that you'll need is somebody in general, is somebody who can keep their head in all this and think clearly in all this and provide moral strength for the people who is commanding to put up with it all. From that, he goes on to develop ideas which are not necessarily original about how to wage battles and how to deploy forces, all that. But that is the fundamental thing which Klauswitz should be read for. And also, sorry, he said war consists of three factors. The armies that are fighting it, the governments that are fighting it and the peoples behind them who are fighting it. And so to regard it simply as a matter of cash of armies is totally inadequate. The army that the war, he said, is a continuation of state policy by other means. And state policy is determined by the governments. So the governments determine what the kind of war it is going to be and the soldiers how to fight it. But more important than any of the people. Klauswitz is writing at the beginning of the days of national wars that Napoleon was so successful because he was able to mobilize the entire French people behind him to form these huge armies motivated by desire for glory which simply overran the traditional armies of the 16th century. And once you do get the force of people, the moral strength, the enthusiasm, the fanaticism of people, then war does become something very different. Now all through the Cold Warriors you were an unswerving supporter of a very strong NATO posture in the confrontation with the Soviet Union. But now today, are we living in a new world? What was seeing happening on both sides of the land and I think we're seeing a very sharp reduction of conventional forces. How worried should we be about the reductions in the US Army, about the reductions in the British Army and conventional armed forces? Is the world changing in such a way that we need completely different defence responses? Well, certainly wars are no longer one or it will be fought by large armed forces. But if you do reduce them below a certain level they can't function at all. That is what worries me a great deal about what we're doing in my own country, in England at the moment, that we're ceasing to provide kind of armed forces which will enable the United States to regard as worth having as allies at all. But do we think that the nature of war is changing fundamentally? You were saying the other day that in some respects you found the threat of cyber warfare almost more alarming than nuclear war because everybody knows that nuclear weapons are things you can't use, whereas cyber warfare is something it can but you will put it much better than I have. Well, certainly the nature of war has changed it has always changed. War is no longer going to be fought by the great armies which it was in the 20th century. If I were a new state starting out without any armed forces at all not very much money I'd go for three things. I'd go for spooks, geeks and thugs. Go on. I would have the spooks of the most important of all intelligence, the best, I'd set out to have the best intelligence in the world. Geeks, people who know about cyber war apart from anything else. The importance of cyber war cannot be overestimated. It's hard to see what its limits are going to be but it should not be impossible within a very short time if it is not already for some young man typing away in a back bedroom in a little back town in Virginia or somewhere to bring the entire infrastructure of a large town crashing down. Now a state which has that capacity doesn't need nuclear weapons. It can paralyze its adversaries. It could simply pull the plug on them as well for and keep it plugged for a matter of days or weeks and then plug in again perhaps by which time the place would be at its mercy. No need for nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a waste of space so you need pretty good geeks. You also need, I call, thugs which is unfortunately a way to always say special forces, experts in what I think the American army calls kinetic activities that I call killing. Capacity to get at whoever they want to and kill them. Not necessarily very large numbers but selectively. Now in order to get the thugs they've got to be well trained they've got to be highly intelligent. For that you really do need an army to produce them from but never mind. That would be my minimum requirement. What about drones? Do you have a moral problem with drones? I have no moral problem with drones at all. This is a continuation of a sort of taboo which started way back in the Middle Ages when a pope excommunicated archers because they were able to kill people from a distance rather like real men fighting them hand to hand. The same thing occurred rather more recently at the end of the 19th and 20th century when artillery which previously had always had to be fighting and firing within sight of the enemy developed the capacity of the range for indirect fire. But it was regarded by real artillerymen and it was unfair to do that and that you always had to have your artillery up with the infantry to give the infantry courage. Now exactly there was this prejudice against being safe while killing other people. I see no moral objection whatever to being safe if you're going to kill other people. I mean their moral objection is how you'll kill them, where you'll kill them, why they'll kill them but not whether you are safe or not whether you'll do it. But especially in the United States following Edward Snowden's defection to Moscow and his very public proclamation about the state of surveillance a substantial number of libertarians in the United States feel that Snowden has revealed the United States government engaged in a level of electronic surveillance that's unacceptable in a free society. What was your own attitude? I think there's a real moral problem here. I think that the government has not only the right but the duty to gather as much intelligence as it can from whatever source it gets it and to keep it private to itself in order to be able to function effectively at all. I think on the other hand there is a civic duty that as many people as possible if not indeed everybody should have access to material which is going actually to affect their own livelihood, lifestyle or existence. There is I think absolutely no single definitive argument on one side or the other that has simply got his word to be fought out. It's a political problem. It's got to be sold or somehow made liveable with by ongoing politics and discretion. It seems to me that it's almost impossible in this age of the terrorist threat from within. One can't imagine other than by bulk surveillance of electronic data that the security services have any chance at all of keeping tabs on a lot of these people who want to do us harm. I absolutely agree. The left-wing writers talk about the security state dismissively. All states are security states. Security is what the state exists to provide. So again I have no problem there. How should we view China? Is this going to be the existential threat of the middle years of the 21st century? Not an existential threat, no. A major problem in international relations to be managed. It is people quite often use the analogy of Germany and Britain in the 19th century with China and the United States. There was Britain, a dominant global power, maintaining its values, spreading them wherever possible, but above all it was dependent upon our naval power, particularly to do this, creeping up on us with the Germans. And the Germans were seen by us as a threat. The Germans saw the development of their power and capacity to do it as the natural right of any growing state, like the United States, indeed. The question is whether the relationship between the United States and China is going to be that between Britain and Germany at the end of the 19th century, or is it going to be that between Britain and the United States at the early part of the 20th century, where the British realize that the United States are going to become effectively and quite properly of power in their own right, and we've got to get along with it. Now, I don't think there will likely to be a special relationship between China and the United States, but there could be and should be, and I hope will be, a civilized understanding and adjustment of power to power. I think we are now a very old-fashioned Henry Kissinger power politics. Power rivalries do not necessarily end in war. They can always be managed, and I see no reason whatever why Chinese and American relations should be managed. There will be frictions, there will be nasty little encounters, but with goodwill and understanding on both sides, then I think that's perfectly possible and certainly no existential threat. It's quite scary how certain militarily or rather enable terms, the Chinese were starting to be in the South China Sea and the East China Sea and so on, that one's always worried that as they become more capable of their armed forces that they miscalculate. No, they may, exactly. The Americans may miscalculate as well. As I said, it does need wisdom, good intelligence, mutual understanding to be able to avoid miscalculations or if they occur to limit the danger they've done. Now, in the course of your very long life and having been a player on the strategic scene for, goodness, about 60, 70 years yourself, that you met some of the great figures of the 20th and early 21st century that who are the ones, I mean, I know about your relationship with Henry Kissinger and so on, but who are the great men, great women who made the most impact on you over all these years? I'm afraid, although I've pressed the flesh with a certain number of receptions and things, I haven't got to know any of them really well. Who are the ones that impressed you most? I think the one who impressed me most was Dean Atchison, who came to a couple of conferences in Britain discussing Anglo-American relations in his later years, impressed his splendid man, the power of his personality, the width of his knowledge, his wit, a formidable person. I think probably the most formidable and the most impressive and the most attractive that I have met. I remember when I was saying some of those things and praising Dean Atchison's extraordinary role in the Korean crisis in 1950 and so on, and an American diplomat said to me, remember, Max, that Dean Atchison never achieved any elective office in the United States despite repeatedly trucking. Well, I think that that may be a reflection on the United States electorate rather than on Atchison, I'm afraid. Margaret Thatcher, I got to know rather better, a formidable woman. Say a bit more about Thatcher. Well, I have so many Thatcher stories. The one that I remember particularly was when I was invited to a dinner party together with my colleague, former tutor, the great historian Hugh Trevor Roper. He was then, for reasons of himself, known as the Lord Dacre, the kind of thing which happens in England. It hasn't happened to me yet. And the lady was in furious temper. The other members of the party were all rather senior officials who very overworked, very unhappy. And the prime minister started to make conversations where to go round the table one after another and said, well, Sir Edward, when are we going to get some good news from the home office? And that poor man was stuttered and go round one after another and beating them down. She came to Hugh Trevor Roper sitting opposite her and said, well, Lord Dacre, when are we going to get another book from you? To which Hugh replied, well, prime ministers, one on the stocks, one on the stocks. On the stocks is in the shops. That's very what they have to do. And I looked at her and I thought, thank God that we have a constitution which will prevent her from doing what she really wants to do, which will take us all out and have a shot on the spot. Which we admire enormously. I admire her enormously. I really did. Who were the historians whom have impressed you most over your life influenced you most? Influenced? Actually, this is so difficult to know because there are so many, they're all so mixed up. Actually, the one I think who I've learnt most from was not a historian at all but a sociologist, the German Max Weber, with his understanding of the way in which societies have developed and what does hold them together. Jakob Buchhardt, that Swiss historian who wrote a lot about history and at the end of it said, ultimately, remember the whole point of history is not to make you clever for next time. It's to make you wise forever. And I frankly think that you can't be very wise if you don't know any history. Knowing a lot of history is not necessarily to make you wise. Forgive me, I can't go into further details. We're living in an age when people seem to know less and less history. They know little bits of history, but they might know about the Holocaust and actually quite a lot about the Second World War. But history in general, there seem to be fewer and fewer people, especially politicians who know any history at all. Well, they know less and less about the Holocaust because the professional historians will specialize on some little detail about the Holocaust, about the gas which was used, about the nature of the railway trains that drew them there and make their reputation by writing a thesis about that. Now, the trouble is that within the academic world now, you can only get on as a young person writing a thesis. And theses in their nature have really got to be on a rather small subject. So they grow up and achieve eminence in their field through knowing a great deal about a very little, and I'm afraid there are other people to do the same. Most of the broad histories now, broad readable histories, tend to be written not necessarily by professional historians at all, but by intelligent journalists, if I may say, like Max Hastings. You were a Regis professor of history at Oxford, which made you... It was a job that made you one of the most senior historians, if not the most senior in Britain. I remember hearing you say once that anybody who was going to have that sort of title at a great university ought to be capable about talking about history in the round, and that was, I think, part of your deploring, this over-specialization. There was... Well, I still think that that is the case, but I'm not sure that all my successors have actually lived up to that. What is history going to make of the wars of our own time of Iraq and Afghanistan, that we perceive them today as defeats, and in some degree, humiliations for Western military power? And we look at the mess that the whole of the Middle East is in. How do you think in 50 years people are going to look back on these engagements? Max, the only wise thing that I've ever said, or the wisest thing I've ever said, is there's no such thing as history. History is what historians write, and historians will write what interests them specifically. So there's not going to be a verdict of history on these things, but many historians will read into what they want to read into them. All I can say is what I would read into them is that with the growing involvement of peoples in war, wars no longer fought by small armies, the importance of understanding the society that you're fighting, what you're up against, it becomes absolutely overwhelming. That's where intelligence and understanding in history does come in. Because ultimately, again, Klaus Wittchen's conclusion, what one is fighting for is not victory. What you're fighting for is a stable peace, which you can live with. And therefore, when people talk about victory over ISIS or anything else, it makes no sense. You're never going to get victory over ISIS. You've got to learn to live with it. Victory may, as victory in 1815 did at the end of the Great War at Waterloo, that produced a stable society that lasted for the best part of 100 years, thanks to the wisdom and understanding of the people who produced it. The First World War ended in 1918 with a crushing victory and a catastrophically unstable society. So to understand your enemy, understand what you're fighting about and realize that the end process is a better piece rather than the victory is only a way to this. What we seem to have found in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the soldiers can win all the firefights. And yet it means nothing because I haven't forgotten a very distinguished American soldier, H.R. McMaster, saying after talking to me one day about what his arm and cavalry regiments have been achieving in Iraq, and he said the trouble is there was nothing to join up to. And I thought, isn't it a problem for the West in these engagements, finding anything to join up to? Well, that is so. But you've got to be a political context, which is what he really was saying, that your victory is going to produce a situation where you can see the situation you're trying to produce and you will fight or you'll conduct your armed forces in order to get to that particular situation, which is going to be a stable piece, stable because the bad guys have been destroyed and everybody is now cooperating on creating peace to create to or at least the bad guys have learned not to be bad guys any longer. All that has got to be borne in mind during the course of fighting. Are we fighting this war in such a way that we're going to produce a better peace? The great Christian theologian, Augustine, who founded the whole idea of a just war, made the point that a war is just if it produces a better peace after it. And I think one can say that the second world war was a just war, not simply because all the bad guys seem to be alongside the other, but because we were able after it to create a stable society. The first world war, although fought with a profound sense of justice on both sides, ended up as a profoundly unjust war because it created a worse situation than being produced before. Now you just mentioned Saint Augustine and you yourself have been a practicing Christian all your life and you were certainly in the 1950s and 60s, a prominent member of some Christian academic organizations that how far has that been a part of, how important a part of your life and how did it fit into the rest of your life, your Christian belief? As far as this is concerned, so far as being a historian or a student of war, it fits in. Of course, A, having been brought up as a Christian, I have got a Christian sense of morality and the Christian sense of morality has got to be brought into action when you are asking, is this a just war? Am I entitled to be killing people to do this? And if it is a just war, what killing is legal and what is not legal? I think that everybody in the West, not so much because we're Christians, because a lot of us aren't, but because we're children of the Enlightenment, do have this profound moral sense one should not kill people and the situations under which one is entitled to kill people, which is in order to produce a better piece must be really thought about and internalized. And the Christian church, one of the major problems it has always been wrestling with has been precisely this, what is a just war, the Christian doctrine of a just war, which has, I think, been taken over and absorbed into a contemporary United Nations and other things where they don't refer to Christianity for it, but the Christianity is there in their guts. So to that extent, yes. I think my Christian beliefs have permeated into my thinking about war. Is the West now engaged in what is going to become a historic confrontation with Islam? Well, it is an renewal, in a way, of a historic confrontation. For a thousand years, from the 7th until the 17th centuries, Christian, Christchristendom and Islam were fighting a continuous uninterrupted war virtually in the Mediterranean and in southeast Europe, one which overlapped into Spain because at the turn, at the beginning of the second millennium, the thousand or so, Islam was actually dominating the Mediterranean, dominating the Middle East and going to dominate Europe and reached its climax in the 16th and 17th centuries and then slowly ebbed and Christchendom and the Enlightenment won and Islam became a pamphlet for everybody, a historical curiosity. One went to mosques, mosques and thought of how absurd that nobody could really believe in this nonsense. However, Islam is now coming back as a serious world, not only as a serious world religion which it always has been, but in certain elements of Islam, at least a confrontation, a sense of war with Christchendom and with the West, that the traditional Islamic idea that Islam is a land of peace, that is the land of war against the wage of jihad and we are seeing the revival of the whole jihad concept which was endemic in Islamic civilization for a thousand years. And yet it's very hard for most of us in the West to grasp this, to come to terms with it because militant Islam seems to have nothing at all to offer any citizen of the 21st century. It seems an entirely brutalistic concept. Well, I think that is undoubtedly the trouble and that is why I think that the West will ultimately win because in fact Islam is divided between those who do actually accept not Christian doctrine but nonetheless the general morality and attitude towards life and politics, et cetera, of the West. Most of them do without any trouble and there is this growing minority who do want jihad and they want jihad and they recruit from all those people that we were talking about earlier who are discontented for one reason or another with what the West has to offer. On the United States in the 21st century that I remember again about 1990 about the end of the Cold War and I was saying to an American diplomat it's going to be a remarkable world in which the United States is the only superpower to which he said, well, that depends on whether the United States is willing to exercise the role of the world's unique superpower but I don't know, I still have an abiding belief in the American genius somehow that I feel when people say China's going to overtake the United States America's power to reinvent itself is still very remarkable, I think, isn't it? Oh, I know, I know. The 50, 60 years in which I have been interacting with American friends they tend to be oscillating between a sense of immense well-being power, generosity, saving the world on the one hand and on the other despair what has gone wrong with us? I was doing things so badly and so this oscillation, I think, will continue so much does depend on good leadership and wise leadership and that depends on elections and American elections to the foreign I'm afraid seem a total mystery Michael, having had the pleasure and privilege of knowing you for about four decades now but I've known so many brilliant historians and clever people and yet you mentioned earlier that we talked about wisdom and the wise and to me, what's always been so extraordinary about you is that you're not only a brilliant historian but you've also again and again over so long displayed this quality of wisdom which is so rare in government, so rare in academic life and I think in this conversation which has certainly given me such enormous pleasure that you demonstrated again that you're a supremely wise historian whom it's been a privilege to know and to read over all these years so thank you so enormously for the pleasure of your company in conversation today, Sir Michael Howard Max, you do say the sweetest things Thank you to Sir Michael Howard and Sir Max Hastings for a brilliant discussion and to Colonel Jennifer N. 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