Andrew Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…I think it’s really interesting in this book you write about all these conflicts that have happened since World War II, and in many cases, they’re counterinsurgencies or civil wars. And it’s interesting when one side gets to say that they’re the legitimate force fighting for the country’s independence against foreign aggressors when both sides are getting foreign funding and support. So I’m curious, how come the US has been bad at the propaganda here, where Ho Chi Minh or the Taliban get to say that they’re the legitimate forces fighting for their country, or how does that determination get made? Yes, that’s a very good point. I think in both cases, Ho Chi Minh and the Taliban both were local inhabitants in a way that the United States obviously wasn’t in either place. But whether they represented the majority of the people in either North Vietnam or Afghanistan is a completely different issue. So it’s much more a question of whether or not they are totalitarian powers who are able to establish dominance and keep it in a difficult and dangerous part of the world. And that’s what both of them were able to do. It didn’t mean that they have a legitimacy in the kind of Jeffersonian democracy that one would like in a utopian world. But if they are the people that are wielding power in the sense of a Marxist-Leninist clique, of course, in North Vietnam, you have to deal with them, and they are the established government. But it’s interesting that South Vietnam or the government in Afghanistan didn’t seem to have that same sort of legitimacy that these other insurgencies had, even though they were still local governments.…

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