Andrew Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…So my first question is this: when we look at the first half of the 20th century, it seems like we got unlucky many times in a row. World War I, World War II, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Maoist Revolution in China—all those things seem like they didn’t have to happen. From reading historians about those topics, that if you reversed a bunch of contingent factors a few years back, any one of them could have not happened. And in each of those cases, tens of millions of people died. When we look at the second half of the 20th century, which you write about in these books, it seems like we got lucky again and again, right? So the Cuban missile crisis doesn’t go nuclear. We have all these proxy wars that don’t go nuclear or result in a world war. China and India liberalize, and communism falls. What explains why we had such different luck in these two different parts of the century? The invention of the nuclear bomb. It’s pretty much as easy as that. You have all these wars that take place in the post-nuclear age after 1945. And so as a result, you have an umbrella under which everybody acts. But although there are hundreds of wars that break out—about 140 wars—they have to be fought in an essentially limited way because of the existence of nuclear weapons. But couldn’t you have said the same thing before World War I, and in fact, many did say that before World War I, where we have all this heavy artillery, we have these to kill millions of people even then, and they still went to war. So how much does nuclear war explain the absence of something escalating?…

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