Butterfly Wings & Hurricanes: The GoodFellows & Andrew Roberts Revisit Historical Counterfactuals

>> Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, October 17th, 2024, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow, and I'll be your moderator for the course of the next hour. Looking forward to a spirited conversation featuring not one, two, but all three of our Goodfellows, as we jokingly refer to them.

That would be the economist John Cochrane, historian Niall Ferguson and former presidential national security advisor, geostrategist, and all around institutional nice guy, Lieutenant General HR McMaster. All three are Hoover Institution senior fellows. Now, before we go any further, you notice we have a different look and feel to this show.

That's because we're recording live here at the fall retreat at the Hoover Institution, here on the lovely campus of Stanford University. Special occasions call for special guests, and that's what we have today. We're joined by our Hoover colleague, the Lord Andrew Roberts, prominent historian, expert on Winston Churchill.

And today we're gonna talk about, of all things, historical counterfactuals. Now, we did an episode similar to this early in the spring with the great Stephen Kotkin. Audiences liked it, so we're gonna do it again. Each gentleman has brought a counterfactual with them. Before we get into them, though, Niall, I'd like you to spend a couple of minutes and explain the value of counterfactuals.

Because within your profession, and Lord Roberts and HR's profession, you're all historians, this is a bit of a controversial topic. Some historians think counterfactuals are valuable, others don't.

>> Niall Ferguson: What if questions are, I think, part and parcel of life. And we've spent much of today not really knowing what's going to happen in just a few weeks.

I mean, our experts don't really know what's gonna happen in the election. So we all living under uncertainty. There are at least two futures before us, the Harris future and the Trump future. That's the essence of life, uncertainty. For some weird reason, professional historians for centuries have said that we shouldn't think about those what if questions.

We shouldn't think about the things that didn't happen. We should only study the things that did happen. And I have been arguing throughout my career that that's absurd. If our goal as historians is to capture what it was like to live in the past, then we have to recapture the uncertainty of not knowing who's going to win the war, not knowing who's gonna win the election.

That's the essence of the human condition, that uncertainty. That's why counterfactual questions, it sounds a bit pretentious, what if questions, are so interesting and, I think, important?

>> Bill Whalen: Does anyone dare counter?

>> John H. Cochrane: I wanna welcome our historians to the world of economists.

>> John H. Cochrane: Because, of course, what we do is try to study cause and effect in human affairs.

If you put in a rent control law, here's what will happen. We digest the many lessons of history filtered through some theory, and that is, of course, what we do as humans. We try to understand cause and effect in human affairs, and that is inherently the counterfactual question.

>> Niall Ferguson: And it's worth adding that I'm sure there are some lawyers here. You don't need to reveal yourselves. But at the heart of causation in the law is the, but-for proposition. But for this act, the following things wouldn't have happened. So I think in most walks of life, the counterfactual approach is readily accepted, but professional historians have a prejudice against it, including some of our arch enemies, who shall remain nameless.

>> Andrew Roberts: I don't mind naming them.

>> Niall Ferguson: Go on. Okay.

>> John H. Cochrane: He's already drinking.

>> Niall Ferguson: He's got his martini. So he's gonna name the name?

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, no, exactly, do you mind if I name a few names? Yeah, they're basically the Whigs, the determinists, and the Marxists. And when it comes to the Marxist, EP Thompson said something about what if history that I'm not going to mention in front of the family audience.

>> Niall Ferguson: Is how he described it. Which is German for something terribly rude and unpleasant.

>> Andrew Roberts: EH Carr denounced it, actually, Simon Sharma called them parlor games and fairy tales. And obviously the Whig and determinists all thought it was a terrible thing to do. Partly because they all believe that history is going on a path you're moving towards, well, in the Marxist sense, of course, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And if you come up with an alternative thesis, you are therefore going against the grain of history. And as I'm sure Niall and I, I know Niall and I feel there is no such thing as the grain of history.

>> Bill Whalen: Before we go any further, there is a very bad UK/US discrepancy on this stage, Lord Roberts, and you may not be aware, Sir Niall Ferguson.

Why is that bad? John doesn't have a title. HR doesn't have a title.

>> Andrew Roberts: Become British.

>> Niall Ferguson: In the land of the free, these feudal relics have no significance.

>> Niall Ferguson: But back in England, he outranks me in a really annoying way.

>> John H. Cochrane: We did fight a little war about getting rid of all this stuff, I might remind you.

And we won it.

>> Niall Ferguson: The segue into the first counterfactual.

>> Bill Whalen: I dubbed the Earl of economics. I dubbed the baron of Bald.

>> Bill Whalen: All right, so let's commence with the counterfactuals. And the first one comes from General McMaster.

>> Bill Whalen: On this day in 1777, October 17, 1777, the British army surrenders at what is called the battle of Saratoga.

A pivotal moment in the revolutionary war, because the continental army needed a morale boost and Benjamin Franklin and Paris needed the talking point to convince the French to come into the war. HR's counterfactual is the British win the battle, not the Americans. So questions for the panel. If the British win that battle, does the revolution fail?

Question for the panel. If the revolution fails, is there another revolution over taxation down the road? Or is there an alternate universe in which the United States of America is the commonwealth of America under UK umbrella? Gentlemen, have at.

>> HR McMaster: Yeah, this is why I love what I prefer to call contingency in history.

By the way, I thought I was doing Civil War, but I'll pivot back to Saratoga. I gave too many contingencies. But I think Saratoga is an immensely important battle. But what's really important when you consider contingency in history is to recognize that it really helps reassure us that we actually have agency over our future.

If you believe only in impersonal forces and a Marxist view of history, what are we all doing? What are we doing here at Hoover, trying to do research and scholarship that can inform policy decisions that build a better future? So I think what brings history to life is contingency.

And in this case, in the battle of Saratoga, it was a battle that quite easily could have been lost by the continental army. If it wasn't for Benedict Arnold, who turned out to be not super reliable in the future.

>> HR McMaster: Thanks to Peggy Shippen, supposedly, I mean, because males always, we have to blame women for everything, right?

So it was Peggy Shippen's fault for turning him to be an agent of our enemies, the British. But he violated house arrest and led a counterattack during that battle that really turned the tide of the battle. And it was this battle that reversed the narrative that the continental army was on an inextricable course toward defeat, right?

And that led to the success of a diplomatic effort by Benjamin Franklin and others to bring the French in, quite solidly, very solidly on the side of the colonials. And if it was not for the French Support, we could not have won the war. I mean, I think that's pretty clear, not only from a military perspective, with the naval support, but the heavy army support, which Rochambeau, but then also the financial support, which you may be able to talk more about, Niall, than I can, or John.

And so I think that it's one of these great examples in history that had it gone the other way, we might be living quite a different experience in our country. But really, when I taught military history at West Point, I loved using contingencies. And I sent a whole bunch of these to Bill.

I used the Battle of Gettysburg and its coincidence with the victory at Vicksburg, and that is a turning point in the civil war. But of course, with that example, and with Saratoga, when we look at contingencies, we don't wanna say that that victory at Saratoga was in itself decisive.

Because if Washington hadn't had a successful attack the previous December at Princeton in Trenton, we might not have even gotten to Saratoga. So it's important to understand these periods and these shifts and the role of individuals. And I think what that does for us is help us understand the complex causality of events.

People wanna reduce our understanding of our experience down to simple causal factors. There's never a single causal factor. And I think it's for this reason that the study of history is an exercise in humility and very important for building our strategic competence today. Because I think so many of the problems that we have today are based on people assuming that there's a single cause for something, or to have a narcissistic view of the world and believe that the future depends on what we do or choose not to do.

And that, of course, neglects the authorship over the future that others enjoy.

>> Niall Ferguson: I think it's a great example that HR has picked, because in many ways, the outcome of the American Revolution is the low probability scenario. And 20% of British colonists were loyalists, wanted to stay loyal to George III.

Joseph Galloway was one of them. He has a terrific quotation from the period. And I think it's important to go back to documents from the time to recapture the uncertainty I was talking about. How then, since the British commander had a force so much superior to his enemy, has it happened that the rebellion has not been long ago suppressed?

That the cause, my lord, however enveloped in misrepresentation on this side of the Atlantic, is no secret in America. Friends and foes unite in declaring that it has been owing to want of wisdom in the plans and of vigor and exertion in the execution. I.e, the British generals were bunglers and Burgoyne was one of the bunglers who blew it.

I think it's very plausible that the American war of independence fails and you end up living in a giant Canada.

>> Niall Ferguson: Which is, of course, the best illustration of the plausibility of the counterfactual. There is an entire chunk of North America that stayed loyal. The loyalists mostly moved there.

And it's not such a bad place, I have to say.

>> HR McMaster: But I have to point out, I mean, just I have to take exception to Niall's interpretation because I think the continental army had something to do with the outcome as well, not just the British bungling. And this harkens back to Gettysburg, which I was going to talk about as another counterfactual.

There was this huge debate on who lost Gettysburg on the side of the South-

>> Niall Ferguson: And it was blaming-

>> HR McMaster: Clear me of one of these. Longstreet, but Pickett famously said, I think the Yankees had something to do with it. So I think also the continental army had something to do with it.

>> Niall Ferguson: And the French.

>> Bill Whalen: Later, for sure.

>> John H. Cochrane: I want to jump in here and take sort of the next step. I mean, it's not obvious, even refusing that battle, the Americans might have refused to lose and we go on for a long guerrilla war. But let's suppose that the British win.

How does the world look after that? And here I may channel my distant ancestor, Peggy Shippen, I must have to admit.

>> HR McMaster: Is that right?

>> John H. Cochrane: Some of us have skeletons in our closet.

>> HR McMaster: She was known as the most beautiful woman in the colonies, and she was from Philadelphia.

>> Niall Ferguson: There you go. That's the most beautiful of the good-

>> HR McMaster: Now we know.

>> John H. Cochrane: Would it have been so terrible? What do you guys see? And I'll phrase this as a question. Certainly the United Kingdom would have devolved power, as they did to Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

They clearly did so more quickly after saying, let's not lose any more. But that would have happened. That's the only sensible. We would have become a part of the large British Empire. Trade would have been much better. We wouldn't have fought a war of 1812. We wouldn't have had big tariffs.

US might have developed more quickly. Slavery would have certainly gone away more quickly in the US. It's not so terrible, at least till you get to 20th century. On the other hand, we would not have the first successful republic, the example that we do not need monarchy. We would not have our written constitution.

It's that wonderful document. And our written Bill of Rights, which, when I compare to the UK, I am so grateful that they thought to write down a few things, like the First Amendment. So where do you guys see us, the 19th century and the awful 20th century, if the US had been like Canada?

>> Andrew Roberts: Okay, sorry, no, the answer is that clearly, is that if you don't have the American Revolution being successful and we stay as one country, there is simply no way that the Kaiser invades Belgium. Then you don't get the Russian Revolution, the Nazis, or the Holocaust. It's a much happier world.

>> HR McMaster: Says the man who tried to rehabilitate George III.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, I'm George III.

>> John H. Cochrane: The Empire sticks together now. Now, somebody else might have blown up later, but-

>> Andrew Roberts: Absolutely clearly. But I don't see anybody ever taking on an empire that is both Britain and America and Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and so on.

The second thing to remember is that the key thing about Saratoga, and you're quite right, it could have been lost so easily. If Burgoyne had just gone north after the Battle of Freedman Hill, you'd have had this fantastic moment where gates and Arnold weren't talking to each other anyway.

There's no reason why he couldn't have gone back to Canada, and the germane plan would have stayed in existence. But what happens when they do win, the Americans do win in the October of 17? You get the French coming in, of course. The French are always there when they need you.

>> Andrew Roberts: And then after that, you get the Dutch coming in in 1779. Sorry, the Spanish in 1779, the Dutch in 1780. And suddenly Britain is fighting a world war, essentially, everywhere, from sort of India to the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, and so on, and it becomes unwinnable. So you are absolutely right.

I think that that's a key moment.

>> HR McMaster: And I would also say, I mean, it may be that the French Revolution doesn't happen if the American Revolution doesn't succeed. I'm thinking of that great book by RR Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, and the degree to which those ideas of the American Revolution migrated to France, largely through those who had fought in North America.

>> Andrew Roberts: And the money spent by the French in fighting that war, if they'd actually managed to keep that enormous treasury, then Necker and others would have been able, maybe, to have stopped the French Revolution.

>> John H. Cochrane: The economist needs to point out the French Revolution was precipitated by a debt crisis.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah.

>> John H. Cochrane: Just remember that.

>> Niall Ferguson: Caused by helping. That is why this conversation is not some kind of arcane academic debate. John mentioned tariff. In the counterfactual that the American Revolution's defeated. North America remains primarily agrarian. There's no industrialization of the Northeast because Britain's model was to make the industry in Britain and the rest of the empire produce the commodities.

So it's without the tariffs that Hamilton and others envisioned, it's not clear that the industrialization of the Northeast would have happened.

>> John H. Cochrane: Don't you see the resolution of the American Revolution is, boy, we better treat these people more like British citizens and not like extractive empire. And so maybe we need to have the US Build up as another manufacturing, free trade between the US And Britain as well.

>> Niall Ferguson: But it's not clear that under conditions of free trade there would have been such rapid industrialization of the Northeast of what had become the United States. And that's why this debate about tariffs, which is front and center in the election today, it has deep historical roots. The thing that the United States could do that it was much harder to do if you stayed in the British Empire, was have protectionism, have tariffs, rather than submit to the empire of free trade, which was what Britain became in the 19th century.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, there's another counterfactual. Would the US have industrialized without tariff protection? I think yes, but we'll fight.

>> Bill Whalen: We need to move on to quick.

>> HR McMaster: Did Niall just make the case for a servile relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, you would have, at least, you could have got titles if it had just been one large Canada.

>> HR McMaster: They were called the Intolerable Acts for a reason,that's what I was saying.

>> Andrew Roberts: The great thing about counterfactual history is you can't be wrong.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall, a very quick exit question. If America is a commonwealth, not an independent nation, do we still have baseball and football, or is our director, God forbid, have a share of a soccer team?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, that's a great question because cricket was being played in the American colonies in the late 18th century. And I think there's no doubt that America pursues its own sporting path, partly because it becomes politically independent. That gives rise to such perversions as the game you call American football.

>> Andrew Roberts: No, but also.

>> Bill Whalen: Last word.

>> Andrew Roberts: George III played baseball and George Washington never did. There you go.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay. On to our second counterfactual. This comes courtesy from Lord Roberts. It's April 3rd, 1917, Vladimir Lenin steps off a train in St. Petersburg and he is gunned down.

Question. Does the revolution continue? Are the Romanovs still doomed? Does communism still take root around the globe? Is it possible to have Leninism without Lenin?

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, the Romanovs were already doomed, of course, they had been overthrown in the March of 1917. So you instead have a Kerensky government that, as well as the Bolsheviks, don't have Lenin.

But also in the May of 1917, when Trotsky comes back from America, he's also banged up in the Peter and Paul Fortress, as are Cameron, Evans and Av, and the whole of the Bolshevik Party is essentially decapitated politically. And so instead of this very small minority of people taking over Russia in 1917, you have a republican form of government that survives and prospers, especially when it signs the Brest Litovsk Treaty with the Germans, and is therefore able to provide peace as well as land and bread.

So instead of having this horrific dystopian world where the Communists have managed to kill 100 million people in the 20th century, you have a world where Russia does not go Communist and therefore nobody else does either.

>> Niall Ferguson: So this is both plausible and implausible, in my view. It's plausible because, in fact, there were multiple assassination attempts against Lenin, and one of them, in fact, really impaired his health.

They happened a bit later.

>> Andrew Roberts: I was about to say, they're too late, though, aren't they? You need it on in April 1917.

>> Niall Ferguson: But it's plausible, it was a very, very dangerous place at that point. Russia was in a state of turmoil, so it's very easy to imagine Lenin being taken out.

But what's implausible about it, I think, is the notion that the government of the Provisional Government would have stabilized, and I think it was profoundly unstable. And having to sign a treaty like Brest Litovsk would almost have been impossible for it. Indeed, the Provisional Government would have kept fighting.

Remember, the Bolsheviks campaigned. One of the reasons they came to power was that they promised peace, bread and all power to the Soviets. So I think what's implausible about this counterfactual is that I don't think the Russian Revolution entirely hinged on Lenin. Why? Because when he was out of the picture, his health has basically failed by 1920, it kept going.

They won the civil war, and the really key figure in the Bolshevik Party came to power not long after Lenin's death, namely Stalin.

>> Andrew Roberts: But they'd already overthrown the Provisional Government by then. I'm talking about the Provisional Government not being overthrown.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, I think it's very, very hard to imagine the Provisional Government surviving cuz it couldn't have made that peace.

It would have kept fighting. And under those conditions, I think it would have been chronically unstable, John?

>> John H. Cochrane: So there was in Russia before World War I, there was a lot of movement towards becoming A constitutional monarchy towards liberalization, becoming more like Western Europe. I think the question we're asking here is whether really Lenin himself was the crucial feature or the disaster of World War I.

Suppose, as Niall has asked in other works, the Germans win, we stop World War I, then the issue for Russia, is it in some sense ripe for revolution? And had it not been Lenin, it would have been somebody else. And we certainly did see Germany and Italy turn towards totalitarianism.

So the ripeness towards a totalitarian takeover does seem to have been there. And a lot of that is the aftermath of the disaster of World War I, cuz this whole scenario of Russia becomes a regular constitutional monarchy. All the nephews and nieces of Queen Victoria have a parliament.

That's a lovely thing, but that, I think, none of that happens in the wake of World War I.

>> HR McMaster: I think what's material to this as well is not only just the revolution itself. Would it have happened? But could the Bolsheviks have consolidated power because of the deep divisions they have within themselves, as well as the alternative ideas about what governments should succeed the czar.

So our colleague Stephen Cocken often makes the point that authoritarian regimes don't need to be that strong, they just need to be stronger than any organized opposition. And the charismatic nature of Lenin, his ability to have to coalesce the movement, was critical not only to the revolution, but maybe even especially to the consolidation of power.

>> Niall Ferguson: I keep expecting Steve Copen to stand up at the back and start heckling us.

>> HR McMaster: I know, is he here?

>> Niall Ferguson: I'm kind of nervously waiting for that impersonation. What you don't seem to understand, Lord Roberts.

>> Andrew Roberts: You could imagine, by the way.

>> John H. Cochrane: I knew that was coming.

>> Bill Whalen: Andrew, What? But, Andrew, what is the future of communism if the Russian experiment does not work?

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, there isn't one. This is the great thing you don't. I mean, communism today only really exists in some portions of Albania and lots of British and American universities. And because these ideas are.

They are actually, it's very interesting because we're talking about imaginary futures, which of course, the Marxists constantly denounce, and they're very much against these kind of histories that we're talking about. The imaginary Imaginary histories, but who comes up with the most imaginary future more than the communists? The idea that we're all gonna be equal, we're all gonna be happy, there's gonna be liberty, fraternity, and equality.

Despite the fact that you can't have all three, because if you've got two of them, then you don't get the third. So actually, there's something inherent in the concept of communism which ensures that it will never work in any country ever.

>> John H. Cochrane: But is the ideology that important?

I mean, there are many other totalitarian movements who function in many of the same ways. The will to power grabs, crazy ideology and making people repeat obvious nonsense is part of that structure. So there were fascists too, and they might have been a little more competent than the communists, but looked a lot the same.

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, you get fascism, of course, with the whites who are fighting in the civil war, there are essentially many of them are not that different from Avant Oletre fascists. However, with regard to all of the things that we equate with communism, the concepts of collectivization and of the use of enforced starvation in Ukraine and so on, I don't think those happen without Lenin and Stalin.

>> HR McMaster: And just on the role of ideology, to go back to the American Revolution, there is this big debate among historians as to whether or not the war is best understood as a war of American independence and not that radical, or is it a war that's radical in its idea?

And I believe, and it's an ideology, and I kinda tend to go toward that Gordon Wood School of the Radicalization of the American Revolution or the radical nature. Because it was based on this new idea that sovereignty lies with the people, not with the king, not even with the parliament, it lies with the people.

And I think that that was in the 18th century, a radical idea that sparked the French Revolution as well.

>> John H. Cochrane: That was an idea percolating up from our British ancestors.

>> HR McMaster: That's right, yeah, going back to the Magna Carta.

>> John H. Cochrane: Christian for Russia, yes, it would not have happened without the ruthlessness of Lenin and Stalin.

But could it have happened without Marx? Would they not have come up with some other ideology to justify exactly the same barbarism?

>> Andrew Roberts: No, I do think you need Marx because he comes up with the underlying concepts that they are promoting. I'm not saying for a moment that you don't get extremely unpleasant people come forward in 1917, absent Lenin and Trotsky.

However, what you don't have is this small cadre of highly committed and aggressive revolutionaries who are able to take over the state in the October of that year, five or six months after Lenin returns to the Finland station.

>> Niall Ferguson: The nightmare scenario of your counterfactual, Andrew, if one follows it through, is that fascism wins.

Because remember, Marx predicted that the revolution would become an industrial societies, not in a predominantly agrarian place like the Russian Empire. It was sort of an accident that the Bolsheviks succeeded where they did. When they had a revolution in Germany, it failed, they had a revolution in Austria, it failed.

 

The left was crushed in Europe in the early 1920s. And I think your vision of White Russia is more fascist than liberal and democratic, isn't it?

>> Andrew Roberts: No, I don't think it is. Because I think what understood by people is what actually Marx understood of Louis Napoleon. Later Napoleon III, is that the peasants, essentially a peasant society, which Russia very much was in 1917, can be conservative if you give them peace, land bred.

And if Kerensky and Prince Lvov were able to pull that off between the assassination of Lenin in April 1917. And the peace that they make with the Germans, then you have a conservative Russia rather than the fascist.

>> Niall Ferguson: But you still get the rise of Hitler under that scenario.

And who then resists the Third Reich? It's not Stalin.

>> Andrew Roberts: Untune one string, and as Ulysses says in Troilus and Cressida and Hark, what discord follows? Everything follows in mere oppugnancy. A oppugnancy, what a great word, we need to use it more.

>> Andrew Roberts: And all it means is opposition, after all.

But the interesting, what Shakespeare's trying to say there is you only need to untune one string, change one tiny thing. And, of course, then after that the butterflies cause the tsunami. And what happens with regard to Adolf?

>> Niall Ferguson: It's a hurricane, butterfly can't cause it tsunami.

>> Andrew Roberts: Precisely, okay.

Hurricanes, of course, hurricanes, how can I have mistaken one of that. Don't hurricanes cause tsunamis?

>> Niall Ferguson: No, butterflies cause hurricanes.

>> Andrew Roberts: Got it.

>> Andrew Roberts: Anyhow, the key thing is to go back to Shakespeare rather than chaos theory of history is that you can't go on to Hitler cuz that happens 1933 is years after 1917.

And so, the key thing about counterfactuals is that you can untune one or two strings. You can't do the whole of history.

>> Niall Ferguson: Can we sell our book briefly, 30 years ago, you won't believe it was 30 years ago. 30 years ago, Andrew and I collaborated to produce a book called Virtual Alternatives and Counterfactuals.

And it contains essays, some of which we're alluding to here, which I highly recommend.

>> Andrew Roberts: Fabulous, what a plug, by the way, no, hang on, if he's gonna do his plug. I also edited a book called what Might Have Been, also a series of essays. This is the most shameless plug that I've ever come across.

>> John H. Cochrane: So I wanna take the Andrew Roberts side of this. If without Lenin, without communism, you asked, who defends against Stalin? If I can remind you, Stalin, sorry, who defends against Hitler? Stalin was all with Hitler until just about the moment the troops kept going across the Polish border.

So a healthier, more prosperous, whether fascist or whether developing sort of along Western lines, Russia they might have found a Winston Churchill in there somewhere who might well have defended against Hitler.

>> Niall Ferguson: I think the ghost of historians past, including historians of the left, would rise up at this point and say, there's no way that Russia would have been able to industrialize the way it did under Stalin, under any conceivable form of government arising from Andrew's counterfactual.

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, no capitalists could have done it. Capitalists taking over in 1917, by 1933, would have been able to have created a really impressive Russian economy.

>> John H. Cochrane: And Steve Kotkin is here to tell us capitalists did it.

>> John H. Cochrane: So his wonderful book on the steel mill. Says, they brought in US industrialists, said, here's how you build a steel mill and Western capitalists.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's move on to our third counterfactual, all right, this comes from Sir Niall.

>> Bill Whalen: It's November 22nd, 1963, and John Kennedy, like Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, is shot at and receives only a minor wound to his ear. So, the Kennedy presidency goes on, so for the panel to discuss, John Kennedy survives as president.

What happens to Vietnam? John Kennedy, let's assume as a second term he is not Lyndon Johnson when it comes to coercing Congress. Does he get a voting rights bill? Does he get a Civil Rights Act? And the 1960s, absent that jarring incident, is the 1960s still is countercultural.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I've been thinking a lot about assassinations funnily enough. Nothing illustrates better the way history can turn on a dime than the closeness of the shot that brushed, indeed, cut, Donald Trump's ear earlier this year. What if Lee Harvey Oswald had been as bad a shot and had just missed with his two shots, John F.

Kennedy's head? Now, Kennedy, subsequent to his assassination, was in some ways deified by the liberals of the time. And we still in a sense, have this afterglow of Camelot affecting the way we think history would have been if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated. There are even movies like Oliver Stone's which imply that there was a kind of sinister conspiracy to off Kennedy.

The interesting thing is that if you look closely at Kennedy's record on civil rights and on Vietnam, it's very clear that the civil rights legislation that subsequently was passed by Lyndon Johnson would not have prospered under Kennedy. Kennedy was far less committed to the cause than Lyndon Johnson was.

And in fact, the Dixiecrats stood in the way of major civil rights legislation. It's not clear to me that if Kennedy had survived, he would have been anything like as committed to pushing through the civil rights legislation. The other fascinating thing is that Kennedy is the one who begins the escalation in Vietnam.

And HR of course, is an authority on this subject. But Kennedy creates the task force in Vietnam. He sends Lyndon Johnson to South Vietnam. There's a report that recommends increased involvement. The number of military advisers goes up from 3,000 to 9,000 and then finally to 16,000.

>> HR McMaster: So 800 when he took office.

>> Niall Ferguson: Right. So Kennedy, despite the mythology, in fact, if he lived, would not have delivered a radically different or better future for the United States. In some ways, it might have been worse.

>> Bill Whalen: HR how does Vietnam play out under Kennedy and not Johnson?

>> HR McMaster: Yeah well, I think there are a lot of historians and people who were initially around Kennedy who wrote that it would have been a fundamentally different course that Kennedy would have selected or chosen on Vietnam.

But I'm persuaded by historians like Fred Logoval, who point out what Niall has pointed out, that Kennedy deepened our involvement there quite significantly. And of course, it's not just Kennedy doing this on his own. It's very important, I think, to remember the interactive nature of history. It wasn't until 1959 that the communist plenum and Ho Chi Minh presiding over it decided to intensify their support for Vietnamese Communists in the South.

So Kennedy takes office as the Vietnamese communist insurgency is intensifying with much greater support from the north as the situation deteriorates, Kennedy authorizes the deployment of advisors to South Vietnam. Beyond the number that was allowed under the Geneva Accords that ended the first Indochina War in 1954. That's 800 by the time, as Niall pointed out of Kennedy's assassination in November of 1963.

There are 16,500 advisers in Vietnam and they're doing a heck of a lot as much fighting as they are advising. Really a lot of people have made arguments that Kenny was going to withdraw because he reduced the number of forces in Vietnam just before his assassination. He was doing this as kind of leaning toward the election in 1964 ploy.

What he essentially did is brought temporary duty people back from South Vietnam to give the impression of a reduction in the force. So I'm in the school that the course would not have been reversed by Kennedy. Specific decisions could have been taken much differently by Kennedy. We don't really know how he would deal with the Gulf of Tonkin, for example.

But I also agree with Niall that probably the civil rights legislation would not have gotten passed for the reasons that Neil cited, but also because Lyndon Johnson's persuasive nature. The fact that he had these relationships with Richard Russell and others who were the main obstructionists were the Southern Democrats.

And he also had the partnership with Republicans like Everett Dirksen, who was very critical in getting that civil rights legislation passed. So I think it would have been a lot different. I don't know exactly how, but it would have been different in 63 and 64. But not, I don't think, a fundamental difference in our approach to the Vietnam War.

>> Niall Ferguson: Just one tiny data point. Great quotation. The speech that Kennedy never gave on 22 November 1963, said Americans, quote, dare not weary of the task of supporting South Vietnam, no matter how risky and costly it might be. And they have a great example of something that nearly happened.

That was the speech that he was going to give that day. Certainly not indicating any change of direction in Vietnam.

>> John H. Cochrane: So if I may, I don't less about Vietnam, but just let's think about the alternative history. Clearly Kennedy, he was at the peak. We all know what happens later in any administration.

Things kind of settle down and are not as Camelot as beginning Johnson. It's not just persuasion. The Johnson biographies are wonderful about what the Johnson treatment involves. To call it persuasion is being very polite about it. He also, he was Southern. So it took Nixon to go to China.

Sometimes it takes a Southerner to get the civil rights through. But civil rights, the federal civil rights legislation would undoubtedly have been stalled. But civil rights was clearly such a strong moral imperative in the U.S. i cannot imagine Jim Crow would have gone on 20 more years. And in fact, had it been voluntary three years later, under the tremendous opprobrium of the world and the rest of the US perhaps it might have stuck a little bit better rather than imposed from the federal government.

Johnson also, so undoubtedly Nixon might well have won the next election or it might have gone Republican. So we would not have had Johnson winning the next election. The Great Society is much less obvious that Johnson would have passed it through. And from an economist, this expansion of the welfare state as large or larger than what Franklin Roosevelt put through was, you know, that the tension of Vietnam was.

There was a budgetary tension of the Great Society and the Vietnam War. That is usually considered what led to inflation, malaise, the tearing apart of our society in 1968. We think things are partisan and well, they may get worse this fall. But 1968 was a really bad year and you know, had a Republican won the election and we hadn't had the Great Society and the tearing apart, you know, that could have all come out far, far differently.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, it's important to remember that if Kennedy had lived, he would have probably won in 64, but the interest.

>> John H. Cochrane: Less overwhelming. It would have been a small majority. We would have been still talking to each other. There would have been much more back and forth. Certainly he would not have gotten through a Great Society.

>> Niall Ferguson: But to just address one of Bill's questions, the 60s would still have happened despite all of this because it was really invented in Britain. The Beatles had nothing to do, nothing to do with the United States. The Beatles would still have happened and so the 60s would still have happened.

>> John H. Cochrane: Do you agree, Lord Roberts? The music, he's a big Beatles. The music would have happened all except give peace a chance. Because there may not have been the anti war movement.

>> Niall Ferguson: No, no, there would have been the war with Kennedy. The war would have still have happened.

It might have been a bit different, but it would still have happened. And so all of that, I think would have been much the same.

>> Bill Whalen: Most importantly, but most importantly, tell us we'd still have Austin Powers movies.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, baby.

>> Andrew Roberts: You might not have got. I tell you what, you might not have got one of the things great blights, I think, in modern American politics, and British to a lesser extent, is the endless conspiracy theories that are causing so much trouble in politics today.

And without the who shot JFK? Did JFK get killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? Was it a group of people, Jack Ruby, all of those endless, endless conspiracy theories, you wouldn't have necessarily have had them. And also, therefore, you wouldn't have had RFK junior in this election, who we heard earlier, didn't we, this morning about the effect of where his votes go to and so on.

None of that would have happened. And we're assuming also that therefore RFK might not have been assassinated, as well. And so I think that terrible period in the 1960s of American assassinations and the knock on effects that are still seen today in politics, of that terrible day in Dallas in November 1963 would not have happened.

>> Niall Ferguson: And that reminds us, doesn't it, just how close we came this year to a terrible political disaster? I do not like to think where the country would be today if Donald Trump had been killed in Butler, Pennsylvania. It is an almost unimaginable nightmare. Can you imagine how toxic politics would have become in the wake of that?

I shudder every time I think of how close we came to another reprise of that cycle of violence that characterized the mid-1960s. And the role of contingency in history, right?

>> John H. Cochrane: Exactly.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's roll onto our fourth counterfactual. This comes from the earl of economics, John Cochrane.

It is December 1978, and the 3rd plenum of the 11th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party's underway. Deng Xiaoping decides to use this occasion to announce that rather than reforming China's economy, that he wants to go in the other direction. He wants to turn his nation into a supersized North Korea.

So to be discussed, the impact on America's economy, John, and the world economy. What happens to Chinese ambitions around the world? I assume there's no Belt and Road initiative. Who's making cheap goods? Do we still have a Walmart and Amazon? is there still a showdown in Tiananmen Square?

Niall, is there still Cold War II?

>> John H. Cochrane: So I'll start with, I had a hard problem with this cuz our game turned not just into counterfactual history, but find one little butterfly wing that caused a hurricane. Those are clearer in military affairs. In political affairs, you know, a bullet goes two inches right or left.

Those are harder to identify in economic affairs. So, yeah, China did open up internally and externally. This was the greatest improvement in human well being in all of history that I know of. A billion people are rescued from abject poverty. I mean, imagine yourself and a billion other people trying to scratch out a living from a quarter acre plot that you plant with rice by hand.

And the commissars are always coming along. $200 a year of GDP now up to, on average middle income level, $20,000 a year with parts of it that look a lot more modern than the US. So it's really a remarkable thing that has happened inside China. It has also been good for the US.

Now we're going to start up the China trade strategic fight that we always have. Is trade good or bad? I looked up, some of the estimates are typically on the range of 5% of GDP benefit to the United States. I think the benefits are actually larger of trade.

Yes, there was cheap stuff in Walmart that really helped lower income Americans. This doesn't look like a Walmart crowd. Go to Walmart sometime. It is just amazing. And even I just learned that Trump's bibles are printed in China because they cost 50 cents to print in China and he sells them for 50 bucks a year.

MAGA hats are made in China. And when you don't just denigrate consumer goods, which I think is a mistake. The average drill, the AAA battery powered drill is a wonderful device. In 1990 they cost a lot of money. Now they're cheap. And, you know, that is a device that comes in and then makes, you know, building a house cheaper.

So the intermediate goods are where it's really. But I'm just gonna defensive cuz I know we're gonna get to how terrible it was. This was great for China, great for world, the biggest decline in inequality you've ever seen if you worry about that sorta thing. And I think great for the US and the western world as well, subject to certain strategic geopolitical issues that these.

>> Niall Ferguson: You're being very defensive, but I think it's a great counterfactual, John, because- Actually it's really surprising that Deng Xiaoping is even alive in 1978.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, let me get to that.

>> Niall Ferguson: Never mind in a position of power.

>> John H. Cochrane: The possibility, of course is China turns into North Korea, which they easily could have done.

And I thought of that as a more good possibility to consider. Imagine still incredibly poor, probably with nuclear weapons if North Korea can do it. Well, China already had them. So we have a poor and bellicose nation, undoubtedly still is bellicose. And who knows if they could go after Taiwan.

But they could certainly cause trouble in the South China Sea. All in all, a very dismal look. Now, was that just one man's decision? We sorta thoughts on our discussions. But then I remembered, of course, Frank Decoder's wonderful book I just read about the end of the cultural revolution that said, basically this was not Deng Xiaoping from on top saying, capitalism, let them have capitalism.

It was inevitable. He was facing a revolution. And basically they had to give up on the cultural revolution anyway. Now, maybe they didn't have to liberalize as much as they did, but it's not obvious they could have created North Korea. And now here I have historians who know more about China than I do.

But was some liberalization, some opening, inevitable, or was this one decision that really saved a lot of people?

>> Niall Ferguson: I love it. I don't think it's inevitable at all. I mean actually that Deng Xiaoping is able to do reform and opening up is completely against the grain of the way most communist regimes evolved.

The interesting thing is that the opening to China by the United States would still have happened because it predated Deng Xiaoping's reforms. It's in 71, 72 that Kissinger, then Nixon go to Beijing. So in your scenario, this kind of permanently crazy north korean style China is still in a relationship with the United States because, and this is a really interesting feature of the cold War, the really big schism of the cold War is not between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It's been between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. So I think that geopolitical shift where the US and China would have found common ground against the Soviets, that would have happened anyway, even if none of the economic reforms had happened from the late 70s onwards.

But you're right, it's definitely a poorer world because a billion plus people are a lot poorer for a lot longer. I agree with that.

>> Bill Whalen: Andrew.

>> Andrew Roberts: I think the really surprising thing is that in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, Chiang Kai shek and the Kuomintang have all of the big cities.

They have an army five to six times larger than the Maoist army. They have a huge amount of weaponry that they've taken off the Japanese and still they managed to lose that war by 1949. And so the really surprising thing is that the communists even win the Chinese Civil War, which, of course, would never have taken place if Lenin had been shot in the Finland station.

>> Niall Ferguson: Or if Burgoyne had won at Saratoga.

>> Andrew Roberts: Exactly.

>> John H. Cochrane: Or if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon.

>> Andrew Roberts: Okay, you've made my point.

>> HR McMaster: I would just like to qualify this a little bit. I mean, I think this is one of the benefits of contingency in history, is to try to really examine causality.

I would not credit Deng Xiaoping or the Chinese Communist Party with the great achievements of the Chinese people. And I think this is one of the points that comes out in one of the themes, actually through all five volumes of Frank Decoder's magisterial study of the Chinese Communist Party, is that a lot of these reforms, the lifting of people up from poverty, happened despite the Chinese Communist Party, not because of the Chinese Communist Party.

And I think that's been a fundamental misinterpretation that has led to a lot of our reluctance to compete more effectively against a hostile authoritarian regime that is actively weaponizing its state as mercantilist economic model against us.

>> John H. Cochrane: I just wanna emphasize what you said. The Chinese Communist Party didn't direct a reform.

They just got a little bit out of the way. They said, farmers can sell their stuff in the city and farmers start planting more and selling. You can start a little. You just got out of the way. It was not a state directed reform.

>> HR McMaster: Or they just disobeyed the CCP directives to not allow the market.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, some of it was inevitable. What I got out of Dakota is that the party was losing its power to control. And they understood that if we tell people to do stuff and they are able to violate it, then that's worse for us than if we say, you're allowed to do it now.

>> Niall Ferguson: But then the surprising counterfactual becomes 1989. Because really, the odd thing is that whereas the communist regimes in Europe collapsed in 89, and then in Russia itself, the thing that didn't happen was the collapse of communism in China. And I look back on that time when I was working in Oxford and traveling often to Germany, I thought so much more about what was happening in Russia and what was happening in Eastern Europe.

And I paid far too little attention to Tiananmen Square. But with the benefit of hindsight, Tiananmen Square is the really decisive event that shapes our era because it's the fact that the CCP does all that economic reform, brings people out of poverty, but it doesn't lose its grip on power.

It doesn't go the way of the Russian Communists. That's actually the critical hinge moment of.

>> HR McMaster: Gorbachev was visiting at the same time in China during the time of Tiananmen Square. And of course, then the Chinese Communist Party becomes obsessed with not doing what Gorbachev did.

>> Niall Ferguson: And I think they are still obsessed.

They're still obsessed. When they talk about a China dream, I've realized, going recently to Beijing, I was there in May, when Xi Jinping talks about the China dream, he really means the China nightmare. And the China nightmare is being Gorbachev, is being the dissolution of the regime.

>> HR McMaster: The ambition derives from fear, I believe.

The extreme ambition is related to the obsessive kind of fear of losing the exclusive grip on power. The party's exclusive grip of power.

>> John H. Cochrane: You are exactly right. Russians have lost faith in their own state religion. People understood this was all nonsense. And so the ideological campaign makes sense and also makes sense of where China is stuck right now.

There's a limit to how you can grow so much while keeping power over people. And in 1989, they realized, we gotta clamp down on power. And they're realizing now, again, if we let them get any richer, they won't tolerate this anymore. And that's why their economy is stalling.

And that's the conundrum of running a totalitarian regime.

>> HR McMaster: If they grow wealthy in the tech sector, for example, or in the tutoring sector, then they could be an alternative source of power. So let's crack down on what's generating economic growth, or the zero COVID policy.

>> John H. Cochrane: But that means you crack down on growth.

You cannot have economic growth unless you let people innovate and create wealth and then they start to demand their representation.

>> Andrew Roberts: This is why, sorry, this is why counterfactual history has got a profound moral element, because you can't disassociate it. You can't say que sera, sera, you have to actually act.

On a moral basis, you can't just sit back and allow things to happen because you have a profound responsibility to history and the future to do something.

>> Niall Ferguson: So we all believe in human agency on this platform. We all regard human decisions, not just the decisions of great leaders, but also the decisions of ordinary Chinese farmers.

>> Andrew Roberts: Cuz that's what history is.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, absolutely.

>> Andrew Roberts: History is the decisions, hundreds of decisions taken every day by billions of people.

>> John H. Cochrane: But you observe this sort of like predestination versus free will, an argument that our ancestors had. And we're all on the side of free will.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes.

>> John H. Cochrane: It's not the Marxist march of history that would happen everywhere.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, free will is one.

>> John H. Cochrane: Every little decision, every business that gets made, every innovation that gets made, those are all. And they're all interacting amongst the other billions of people every day as well.

>> Andrew Roberts: And I think that's a profoundly liberating concept.

>> HR McMaster: I think so, too. And just so you know what kind of conversations happen here at Hoover routinely, I was with Jonathan Bew today, talking about contingency in history, and he brought up Machiavelli and virtue and the idea that we do have agency.

And it's not just the hand that we're dealt or the impersonal forces that we can.

>> Andrew Roberts: He's also worked for four British prime ministers. So if you don't believe in Machiavelli, then what the hell do you.

>> Bill Whalen: So our producer is waving two fingers, which means we have two minutes left.

So let's just quickly get on the panel here. What did we learn today? HR what did you learn today?

>> HR McMaster: Hey, I think that we learned about the value of history and the importance of contingency in history and how exciting contingency is, and it can make history accessible to people.

I'm thinking of MacPherson's book, which, again, I should have boned up a little bit more on Saratoga. I remember one of my advisors at UNC Chapel Hill, the fantastic historian, Don Higginbotham. When I finished my exams, he said, congratulations, H.R., you now know more history than you will ever know.

>> HR McMaster: And so I boned up on the wrong war. But I had picked up an old book by John McPherson, the great historian of the Civil War, called Drawn with the Sword. And there are some really great essays in there about contingency history, much like along the same thing of Niall's and Andrew's book, Virtual History.

>> Niall Ferguson: Niall, the Hoover Institution is about history as it was always intended to be. That's why we have an archive. That's what this place is about. And the fact that we can gather here and have a conversation like this. Yes, I know you're ready for dinner, but we're nearly done.

That's what this institution is about. Thinking about historical decision making, thinking about it in terms not only of the past, but about the present and the future, and realizing that our decisions as individuals as well as as leaders simply do shape the future. We're not at the mercy of the vast impersonal forces that the left has for so long fantasized about.

>> Bill Whalen: John.

>> John H. Cochrane: I will just advertise what I think my field of economics is, is simply a way of organizing the lessons of history about cause and effect in human affairs. And that's why I love hanging out with historians. What have I learned? I think your last point was the bottom line, which I just want to celebrate.

That we are not part of an inexorable movement gives us each opportunity and responsibility. Everything we do counts. We might flap our wings and change the world in a way that the Marxists deny us. That's a deep, deep insight. Thank you.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, Roberts, you get the last word.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you. I'm gonna take all this very, very much further down intellectually by mentioning the movie Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow. And in that show, you see when the doors slide and she doesn't catch her boyfriend in bed with her best friend, you see the difference between what happen, what nearly happens, what doesn't.

Every single day you can bifurcate with decisions, decisions, decisions, or luck, as in the Sliding Doors. And the key thing is to remember this concept of individual responsibility. As you say, it's so easy to just assume that there are, as T.S. Eliot called them, vast impersonal forces. But also we know from our own lives, if you hadn't gone to that party, you might not be married to your spouse.

If you hadn't gone to that or spice, you know though-

>> Andrew Roberts: Spicy spouse.

>> Niall Ferguson: Spicy spouse, that makes it better and better, doesn't it?

>> Andrew Roberts: Exactly, if you hadn't picked up the newspaper that day and looked through the situation of and Colin, you might not be doing the job you do.

The whole thing is down to luck and chance and contingency, which is why we've got to be better people.

>> Bill Whalen: And I've learned something important. We can actually do a show on time and have a very hungry audience get to dinner. So that's it for this episode of GoodFellows.

I'd like to thank my colleagues for a great conversation.

>> Bill Whalen: On behalf of my colleagues, Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, HR McMaster, the Lord Andrew Roberts, if you can hear me out there, we appreciate your watching the show, your support over the years. Take care. We'll see you soon.

>> Presenter: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch Battlegrounds, also available at hoover.org.

>> Austin Powers: Yeah, baby.