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

**Andrew Roberts** (0:00)
One of the reasons I'm proud to be an historian is that Churchill was one.
History was a constant echo for him. It gave him endless signposts.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:08)
In the startup community, there is a cult of Napoleon that is solely murdered. Is there?

**Andrew Roberts** (0:13)
I didn't know that. Seriously, is there?

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:15)
Your biography is the part of the canon here.

**Andrew Roberts** (0:19)
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 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.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:50)
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 this book is like Churchill's 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 US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as one of her co-authors. And speaking of Churchill, 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.

**Andrew Roberts** (1:36)
Thank you very much indeed, Dwarkesh. It's an honor to be on your show.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:40)
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 know, 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 liberalized, communism falls.
What explains why we had such different luck in these two different parts of the century?

**Andrew Roberts** (2:27)
The invention of the nuclear bomb.
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 existence of nuclear weapons.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:56)
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, you can kill millions of people even then, and they still went to war. So how much does nuclear war explain the absence of something escalating?

**Andrew Roberts** (3:11)
Well, you're right that the First World War did come about in part because of the arms race.
But the knowledge that the nuclear bomb could obliterate the entire planet is something that has always managed to make wars limited post-1945. What happened in 1914? The most people you could kill in a single moment would be as the result of an artillery shell, and that's nothing like a nuclear bomb, frankly. So it's apples and pears, I think.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:49)
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 and the Taliban get to say that they're the legitimate forces fighting for their country, or how does that determination get made?

**Andrew Roberts** (4:20)
Yes, that's a very good point. I mean, I think in both cases, obviously Ho Chi Minh and the Taliban both were local inhabitants in a way that the United States obviously wasn't in either place.