Andrew Roberts — Why Hitler lost WWII, Churchill as applied historian, & Napoleon as startup founder

One of the reasons I’m proud to be a historian is that Churchill was one. History was a constant echo for him, it gave him endless signposts.

In the startup community, there is a cult of Napoleon that- that has slowly emerged.

Is there? I didn’t know that. Seriously, is there?

Your biography is- is part of the canon here.

(laughs) If MacArthur had used nuclear weapons against the Chinese crossing the Yalu River, then yes, he might well have actually won that war, but it would have lowered the- the moral barrier so significantly that nuclear weapons would have been used an awful lot more. In the future, war will be fought between two sets of drones, and the humans won’t be in the loop because decision-making has to take place far, far faster than the human mind can work.

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Andrew Roberts, who is most recently the author of Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. And, um, this book is like Churchill’s, uh, histories of the Second World War, the First World War, in that one of the principal actors in the conflicts discussed here is the co-author, General David Petraeus, who commanded the, uh, US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as one of your co-authors. And speaking of Churchill, uh, Andrew is also the author of some superb and magnificent biographies of Churchill, Napoleon, King George, and an excellent book about World War II. But first, let’s begin with Conflict. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much indeed, Dwarkesh. It’s a, uh, honor to be on your show.

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, you- you know, World War I, World War II, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Maoist revolution in China. All those things, um, 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, they- 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. Communism falls. What explains why we had such different luck in these two different parts of the century?

Um, the invention of the nuclear bomb.

(laughs)

Uh, it’s- it’s- it’s pretty much as easy as that. You have all of these wars 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 a essentially limited way because of the, uh, existence of nuclear weapons.