Andrew Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…Before we return to conflict, I do want to ask you some questions about Churchill and World War II. And in fact, this is actually a good jumping-off point because speaking of rational leaders, I’m struck when reading your biography of Churchill of how much of his thinking is more emotive, less probabilistic, much more principled. And when I try to backtest how I would have reacted, given my mindset to World War II if I was in Britain, I have to admit I like to think in terms of probabilities and expected value. I would have said, what’s the expected value of fighting Germany in 1938 over Czechoslovakia? What would happen if he just didn’t? Looks like probably, it probably might just be best to run our odds with appeasement. And I wonder if this is just a one-off case, or do you think in general that illustrates a weakness in the more sort of probabilistic way of thinking about geopolitics compared to Churchill’s more emotional, oratorial, principled way? I don’t really agree with you. I think, with the premise because I think that Churchill, yes, he was emotional and principled but also he recognized that the advance that the Germans made between the Sudeten crisis, which ended in Munich in September 1938, and the outbreak of war a year later in September 1939, was so huge, especially in their creation of bombers and tanks and so on. And also it was helped so much by taking the Skoda factories of the Czechs from Czechoslovakia and churning out tanks for Germany, that it was a rational thing to have tried to have stopped Germany invading Czechoslovakia. So what Churchill was doing, yes, he was emotional and a great rhetorician and so on, but he was also making a very, very hard-nosed decision with regard to the balance of power, recognizing that in fact, Germany was in a much stronger position a year later than it had been at the time of Munich. Now, it’s remarkable to what extent Churchill had read, and not only read but written a tremendous amount of history. And I’m curious how concretely that history informed his decision-making as a leader. Was it at the level of tactics and geography, where you see how old battles in the same places are fought? Was it at the level of grand strategy? Was it at the understanding of human nature? What level did that understanding of history help him?…

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