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History As It Happens
1945: America's Global Age
00:34:31
Note: Following this episode, History As It Happens will be on hiatus. Stay updated on the podcast's status by subscribing (free) on Substack. This is the final episode in a 5-part series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World...
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- [00:01]
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- [00:28]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens August 19, 2025America's global age and indeed the hope of.
- [00:35]
Harry Truman
All mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from warmth and freedom from fear are from the point of view of the United States, the fundamental freedoms which encompass all other and freedoms. War is not inevitable. We do not believe that there are blind tides of history which sweep men one way or another. In our own time, we've seen brave men overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable and forces that seemed overwhelming. Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny.
- [01:21]
Martin DeCaro
The United States emergence as the most powerful nation after the Second World War made possible the New World Order built atop the graves of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. New institutions and international laws were designed to preserve peace and punish aggression. Imperfect as it was, this rules based order appears to be coming to a cadence, if not a conclusion. In the words of David M. Kennedy, who joins us next as we look back on the American century as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:52]
David M. Kennedy
The dominant salient characteristic of the world the war created was not only America's this country's emergence onto the world stage, permanent and lasting long term wave, not only becoming a player in the international system, but becoming the hegemonic power in that system. And it's been clear to a lot of observers that the degree of hegemony that the United States enjoyed for at least one full, if not two full generations after 1945 has been eroding for all kinds of quite anticipatable and natural reasons that we don't have the dominant role in the world economy. We've long since lost the nuclear monopoly that we've enjoyed for a few years after the war. We have rival powers, most notably China, who are fixing themselves and putting themselves in a position to challenge American leadership and domination of international institutions. So this is a process that's been going on for a long time.
- [02:46]
Martin DeCaro
As I was putting this podcast together, an important meeting was happening at the White House.
- [02:50]
David M. Kennedy
NATO like protection in order to get.
- [02:53]
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President Zelensky to a deal today?
- [02:55]
Donald Trump
Well, I don't know if you define it that way, but NATO like, I mean, we're going to give, we have people waiting in another room right now. They're all here from Europe, biggest people in Europe, and they want to give protection. They feel very strongly about it and we'll help them out with that. I think it's very important.
- [03:11]
Martin DeCaro
President Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the leaders of the United States European allies were discussing the path to peace following Trump's meeting in Alaska last week with Vladimir Putin. Now, some analysts, journalists and commentators say the terms of any deal here will determine whether there's still something called a rules based order. In other words, Russia cannot be rewarded for its aggression. And if Ukraine must cede territory, then it has to receive security guarantees from the west in exchange. Well, whether the fate of the rules based order will be determined by a war over 20% of Ukraine's territory, that is debatable. But there are important principles at stake. The UN charter outlawed aggressive war after World War II. The nations of the world were supposed to be free to chart their own courses. In this case, that means if Ukraine wants to join the west, it should be allowed to join the West. Harry Truman's remarks at the signing of the north atlantic Treaty in 1949 resonate today.
- [04:13]
Harry Truman
The nations represented here have known the tragedy of these two wars. As a result, many of us took part in the founding of the United Nations. Each member of the United nations is under solemn obligation to maintain international peace and security. Each is bound to settle international disputes by peaceful means, to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territory or independence of any country, and to support the United nations in any action it takes takes to preserve the peace.
- [04:50]
Martin DeCaro
So if the global order is fraying, if US Hegemony is waning for some reasons that are outside the White House's control, let's remember there was a time when no one would have expected the United States to ever embrace such a role to begin with. But allied victory in 1945 changed everything. With it came the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, NATO and more, the structures that help produce prosperity and peace for the better part of the next 80 years, or at least no more. World wars, the past eight decades were hardly peaceful. This is the fifth and final episode of my series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. And David M. Kennedy will be here in a moment. But first about my podcast. I've been hosting History As it happened since January 2021. That is close to 470 episodes. But after this episode, the podcast is going on hiatus and I don't know when I'll be able to start producing new episodes again. But there is a very easy way for you to stay updated on my status. Go to Substack and subscribe to History As It Happens. Just search for History As It Happens and click the subscribe button. It is free and when I have news about my future, I will share it. David M. Kennedy is one of my favorite historians, now professor Emeritus at Stanford University, the author of over the First World War in American Society and Freedom from the American People in Depression and War, one of my favorite books. It is part of the Oxford History of the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize. Our conversation Next History is defined by.
- [06:39]
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- [07:07]
Martin DeCaro
David Kennedy, welcome back to the podcast.
- [07:10]
David M. Kennedy
Happy to be with you, Martin why.
- [07:12]
Martin DeCaro
Do you think this war still fascinates us as Americans?
- [07:16]
David M. Kennedy
Well, I think it fascinates us as Americans as well as a lot of other people around the planet. First of all, because it was simply a cataclysmic catastrophic event in world history. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 70 million people perished. It's one of the great wars of all time in terms of just the degree of destruction, human casualties, and to use an overtired phrase, it's the mother and father of all kinds of both fictional and non fictional literature ever since. So it's just a huge event in human history, but also I think it continues to fascinate us because the war is the definitive shaping event that gave us the world we've lived in for the last three or maybe even four generations. And a question now circulates amongst a lot of people who think about these things as to whether we're coming to the end of the era, that we can ascribe its shaping to the effects of the war. There's a famous remark of the great German philosopher George Friedrich Hegel. He says something to the effect that the owl of Minerva takes Flight only at dusk. In other words, we can really only see the shape and character and consequence of an era in human history as it comes to an end. So there's a case to be made that the post World War II era is coming to some kind of cadence, if not conclusion. And naturally, therefore, we're looking back on it to the era of my lifetime, essentially, and asking this what its essential characteristic is and how it will be recorded in the history books a century or two centuries hence.
- [08:47]
Martin DeCaro
You know, I think about that stuff a lot too. And one of my recent podcast episodes had the title Owl of Minerva. I spoke to a couple of Soviet historians, but you know, about the war itself. And we're going to be speaking more about its legacies here, not the six years of combat. But the war still does have a hold in popular imagination, pop culture. I don't know if that goes for the youngest generation. I grew up with Saving Private Ryan. That same year, 1998, Tom Brokaw's book came out, the Greatest Generation, with all that mythology. Not that there's not some truth to it, but you know what I mean? And all that World War II and pop culture and the heroicizing of that generation that won the war. So there's the war, but there is now the era it produced, the American century, which was Henry Loos, 1941, actually during the war. And as far as whether this era is coming to an end, use the term cadence, if not conclusion, I mean, yeah, how do you know when an era ends? It just doesn't end Tuesday and then a new era starts on Wednesday. Right. There are always continuities, but I would agree that I do sense we are moving into a new chapter, if you will, in international relations. For sure.
- [09:59]
David M. Kennedy
Yeah. The dominant salient characteristic of the world the war created was not only America's, this country's emergence onto the world stage, permanent and lasting, long term way, not only becoming a player in the international system, but becoming the hegemonic power in that system. And it's been clear to a lot of observers that the degree of hegemony that the United States enjoyed for at least one full, if not two full generations after 1945 has been eroding for all kinds of quite anticipatable and natural reasons that we don't have the dominant role of the world economy. We've long since lost the nuclear monopoly that we enjoyed for a few years after the war. We have rival powers, most notably China, who are fixing themselves and putting themselves in a position to challenge American leadership. And domination of international institutions. So this is a process that's been going on for a long time. And whether this country can manage the transition to a world in which we are a major power, but not the major power. It's a really interesting question. My successor, generations of historians are going to be worried about this for a long time to come.
- [11:08]
Martin DeCaro
Well, the dollar still reigns supreme and other countries are still buying our debt. So I guess that hasn't changed years ago because I'm a big fan of your work. I don't know. Fan is more for sports. I'm a reader of David M. Kennedy's canon and I've listened to a number of your lectures on YouTube. You told this story, if you were to stop some fella on the street in any American city in 1940, a full decade into the Depression, and you told this guy, hey, you know what? I know times have been tough, but just wait, in five years, you're not going to believe what the United States and the world looks like. Tell us this story just to, I guess, give us a sense of how dramatic this change was.
- [11:54]
David M. Kennedy
Well, you've recapped it very nicely, Martin. Thank you. Proof you were paying attention. But yes, it's a device one can use is to grasp the revolutionary character of the war in terms of the domestic characteristics of this society. And it's the place of the United States in the international system. So as you rightly say, 1940 is by some calculation the 10th or even the 11th year of the Great Depression. Unemployment rate was still in the 14 or 15% range, which is something that today we would think of as politically and socially absolutely intolerable. And let's not forget, with respect to the international system, the United States had refused to join the League of Nations at the end of World War I. And it retreated into what's arguably the most isolationist phase of its long isolationist history in the 1920s and 30s. Five discrete pieces of so called neutrality legislation in the 1930s, we just refused to really play a role in the international system for quite a while. And there's an interesting index of this, if I can open a little bit of a parenthesis.
- [12:54]
Martin DeCaro
Sure.
- [12:54]
David M. Kennedy
This may dissipates something else that's on your mind, but there's a famous document called the Hossbach Memorandum, recorded by a German officer by the name of Hossbach of a meeting that Hitler convened of his senior, both political and military officials in 1937. This is an extraordinary document because Hitler, in a long presentation to these people, laid out what he thought the future would look like. We'll mobilize in such and such a way. We'll invade these countries first and then we'll wait for the reaction and then we'll invade these other countries. We'll wait for their reaction. We'll take them on one at a time, so on and so forth. Very, very detailed prediction of how he was going to behave. Hitler anticipates what will be the reactions of the various countries that he's going to deal with. He never once mentions the United States. So it's just a dramatic reminder in the documented record of how an aggressor with the ambitions of somebody like Hitler in that era could proceed without even taking into account what the reaction of the United States might be. The United States simply was not regarded as any kind of consequential player on the international stage. And this reflects a long isolationist history going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, no entangling alliances, so on and so forth. Temporary departure from that in 1917, 1918, and a great disillusionment about the involvement of this country in World War I. So the detachment of the United States from the whole arena of international affairs in the 1930s was really pronounced. So our hypothetical speaker on this hypothetical street corner in 1940 telling his fellow countrymen that five years hence the United States would emerge not only as a player in the international system, but as the dominant player and would reshape the whole character of international politics and geopolitics. Then it would do so by founding an array of new institutions, some of which were quite novel, like the International Monetary Fund to stabilize exchange rates. The International bank for Reconstruction and Development, better known as the World bank, which would invest a lot of mostly American money in reconstructing war torn Europe and for that matter Japan as well. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which was meant to liberalize international commerce, which morphs into the World Trade Organization a few decades later. I mean these were all enormously innovative institutional initiatives on the part of the United States. And anybody who in 1940, looking back over almost two centuries worth of isolation and the deepest trough of isolation, the in the 1920s and 30s. Anybody who predicted in 1940 that this was what the future held would have been certifiable. But that's exactly what happened. And it's a major turning point in the history of this society as well as the international system as a whole.
- [15:42]
Martin DeCaro
Ideology played a role too because of the start of the Cold War and anti communism and containment. But at the level of ordinary Americans, did they undergo some kind of outlook change or was it simply this was necessary in the ashes of the Second World War and after of the world did not take Hitler seriously enough. And with Europe prostrate and Asia, of course, in the condition that it was in a communist revolution in China that the United States had to do this.
- [16:11]
David M. Kennedy
Well, here you entered into some very controversial territory. The leadership of this country at the end of World War II, indeed during the war, even before the war, certainly at the end of the war, the beginning of the so called Cold War era was extremely worried that the American public would not get on board with a more sustained international posture on the part of this country. And there's a passage in Secretary of State Dean Acheson's memoir, modestly entitled Present at the Creation, actually a title that does capture the innovative character of that moment, despite its kind of arrogant whiff about it. But he says something in there about how when they presented with the Truman administration, presented its case for rearmament and joining NATO and putting the economy at least on a partial wartime footing again and so on, he says something, I can quote it almost exactly. He said, we had to make the case clearer than truth. In other words, they didn't trust the public to really understand just the factual basis of why it was necessary to do this. They had to exaggerate the danger that was being faced. And that, I think, infused this moralistic and highly ideological element into the conduct of American foreign policy. And it gives an opening to people like Senator McCarthy and so on to really amplify the ideological dimensions of the conflict. That makes international relations that much more difficult for a generation or two after the war.
- [17:36]
Martin DeCaro
Henry Luce, 1941. He wrote an op ed or an essay in one of his publications, Life magazine, Life magazine, American Century. His argument was that the United States actually had a responsibility to be a global leader, wasn't it?
- [17:53]
David M. Kennedy
Well, that's part of it. Interestingly, the date of that. It's interesting focus a little more tightly on the date of that publication. It was February of 1941. So it's before the United States entered the war. And that essay is part of a general discussion that was going on about what would be the war was already well advanced. It was nearly two years old by that time in Europe or a year and a half old and depending on how you date it, at least four years old in Asia. His essay is part of a discussion about what does the future hold for the United States with respect to the ongoing conflict that we know as World War II. So he lays out a pair of cases, you might say, one, as you just mentioned, what is the responsibility of the United States in the face of this international catastrophe that we know as World War II? And the other is, what's the opportunity that this catastrophe might offer? And this is where he's particularly prescient, I think, because he envisions a world in which the United States takes part in the war, fights it in a way that conserves its resources in the most efficient way possible, and emerges at the conflict's end as the dominant player capable of reshaping the whole order of geopolitics. And that essay is often mocked as a kind of arrogant piece of nationalism. But actually, I think on careful reading, it's a rather prescient peace about what the future actually held.
- [19:13]
Martin DeCaro
These were novel ideas at the time that the United States was supposed to have this role or would even be capable of doing it. It used the term isolationism before. Certainly when it came to the Western Hemisphere, the United States was not isolationist. Right. Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines into Haiti, just to cite one example. But certainly when it came to Europe neutrality, the idea of having Americans permanently stationed in bases in Europe or the Middle east or elsewhere in Japan. Japan was bas, basically an aircraft carrier for the United States during the Korean War and the Vietnam era. These are all novel ideas. But we take this for granted today. Maybe that's not so good. A foreign policy that has less military adventurism would actually be a positive.
- [19:57]
David M. Kennedy
Now, just a slight correction or argument with what you just said.
- [20:02]
Martin DeCaro
Sure.
- [20:02]
David M. Kennedy
I think for a couple of generations after World War II, we did take as a people, we did take for granted the system that we presided over. But particularly in the last several years, not least of all with the oncoming of the Trump people, there's been a lot of questioning about the price that's being paid for this hegemonic role. Hegemons leave difficult lives. It's just a fact of life. If you really want to dominate a system as big and complicated as that of planet Earth, you're going to pay a cost. And we're now, as a people, certain elements of political leadership, questioning whether the cost we have paid or anticipate paying in the future is really worth whatever benefit we're getting from it. Probably there's some version or fraction, let's say, major fraction of the price we've paid that is worthwhile and it can be justified just in dollar and cents terms. But I think it's an interesting argument to have and a legitimate argument to Have. It'll be too bad if the argument becomes one about internationalism versus isolationism. I think isolationism is simply a really poor if not impossible choice for a country like this in the modern world. But some redimensioning maybe of the degree of commitment we make to the rest of the world, the recognition that there are other powers that have legitimate claims. I think all that's a very good discussion to have.
- [21:21]
Martin DeCaro
You just said that it shouldn't be isolationism versus interventionism. Right. Also it shouldn't be liberal rules based order versus well, we don't have that order anymore. Even during the heyday of the liberal rules based order, if there ever were one, there was plenty of disorder and criminality and awful behavior on the part of the United States in the Soviet Union. I mean, to put it briefly, I don't want to start pontificating here. The strong still did what they wanted and the weak still did what they had to take on the chin, if you know what I mean.
- [21:52]
David M. Kennedy
That's even more colorful than Thucydides, which.
- [21:56]
Martin DeCaro
I tried to read a couple years ago and I had to put it down. It was interesting, but I had other stuff I had to get to. You say here on page 856, 856 of Freedom from Fear, your conclusion, the way FDR had prepared or didn't prepare the American people set the stage for some of what we're talking about here. Because we have to remember World War II ended, but there was no peace. Well, there was peace in some parts of the world, but there was plenty of fighting for generations after and a cold war. You say here how poorly Roosevelt prepared for the post war era. How foolishly he had banked on goodwill and personal charm to compose the conflicting interests of nations. And how little he had taken his countrymen into his confidence, even misled them about the nature of the peace that was to come. On how they had abandoned the reforming agenda of the New Deal years to chase in wartime after the sirens of consumerism, and how they alone among warring peoples had prospered, emerging unscathed at home while 405,399American soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen had died. There's a lot there, but really we should focus on the first few clauses of that paragraph. What do you mean about FDR poorly preparing the country for the peace?
- [23:09]
David M. Kennedy
You have the text in front of you, so how can I argue with you? I can't do it from memory, but I think there's some qualifiers that follow that long periodic sentence. But what I principally had in mind there is the fact that the way the United States mobilized for and fought the war on the timetable that it adopted and with the various use of armed forces that it deployed, left the Red army, the Soviet Union, in possession of a lot of Central and Eastern Europe. And that was a natural consequence of the fact that the United States downscaled its original mobilization target from 215divisions to 90divisions, delayed the anticipated date of D Day from originally targeted for July 1, 1943, to almost a year later, June 6, 1944. And when Roosevelt met with Stalin for the first time face to face In Tehran in 1943, the first thing he does, the first evening of that encounter, he has a private one on one meeting with Stalin. Churchill is not present. And Roosevelt essentially tells Stalin that he knows. He. Roosevelt knows that at the end of the war, the Soviet Union is going to be militarily well into Eastern and Central Europe. And the United States will not and cannot do anything militarily about that. And he asked for some political. Very cynically, he asked for political cover. He says something to the effect that I have a lot of Polish voters in Chicago and they'll need reassurance that Poland has a democratic government, so at least make it. I'm paraphrasing here, but at least make a gesture toward giving Poland some voice in its own future, and so on and so forth. But this was a natural, unavoidable consequence, this military situation at the end of the war, 1945, in Europe, an absolutely unavoidable consequence of the timetable and character of American military mobilization and fighting. That's what I mean when I say in that sentence you quoted that Roosevelt really was not altogether candid with the American people about what were the implications of fighting the war. I was about to say on the cheap. That's not the right phrase. But fighting the war the most cost efficient way possible. Let me give you again some numbers about that. The United States is the only major belligerent country, World War II, that grew its civilian economy. During the war, we grew by about 15% in the civilian sector. Americans were actually better off in wartime than they had been in peacetime. This is not true of any other country. Both the Soviet Union and the British, for example, the republic suffered losses in the civilian sectors of their economy of 30 to 35%. Huge difference. So we prospered during the war, and that gave us the strong economy that we were able to use as a political instrument in 1945. And our military losses, though not trivial, I Don't want to be understood as trivializing them. You just go to the number 405,399 is the official count. When you figure that the Soviets lost something like, I think the number is about 12 or 13 million military and about 16 million civilians. If you ask the question, who won the war? And if by that you mean who paid the greatest price in blood and treasure for the ultimate victory, it's not the United States, it's the Soviet Union. If when you ask the question who won the war? You mean what country emerged from the conflict in the most advantageous position, then it's the United States, clearly. And those two facts are related.
- [26:28]
Martin DeCaro
You talk about the difference between the war that was fought and our memories of it, which of course, contribute to this idea of American exceptionalism and the American century, the global age. Maybe the idea, too, that the United States could have guns and butter permanently. Guns and butter?
- [26:49]
David M. Kennedy
Well, yes and no. We did for a long time after 1945. But you know, the hinge here, the turning point, is a document prepared in the Truman administration called National Security council document number 68, and it's prepared in 1950, and it advocates moving the American society and economy onto a semi or quasi war footing. A lot of rearmament, big appropriations for the Department of Defense and so on and so forth. And the Trump administration originally shelved that proposal because they thought they couldn't sell it politically. And then in June 1950, the Korean War breaks out. And again, as Dean Acheson recorded in his memoir, another very candid moment. He said, korea saved us, quote, unquote, Korea saved us. The Korean War gave us the opportunity to convince the American public that we were in a long term struggle against Soviet and Chinese communism and that we had to go back onto at least a partial war footing. So the 1940s themselves, the late 40s 45 to 50, are a period of disarmament in the hope that maybe we could revert to some kind of peacetime status permanently. The Korean War changes that and allows the political leadership to sell to the public at large a program of military mobilization and going back to some version of a wartime footing, that's when we get the Cold War really crystallizing.
- [28:15]
Martin DeCaro
So we mentioned some of the new institutions, the new structures that were formed after 1945. GATT, which is now the World Trade Organization, the World bank, NATO, the UN with its charter sanctifying national boundaries, national borders and universal human rights, the whole list of institutions. Maybe we just need new institutions now. Maybe that's our problem. And I'm not smart enough to know what those would be. Or maybe we need to reform the old ones. But as you said at the top of this conversation, David M. Kennedy, as we begin to wrap up here, if we're moving into a new, a new era in international relations, maybe we don't just need to scrap everything, maybe we just need to reform them. But that's a tough one for me to answer.
- [28:59]
David M. Kennedy
It is a very tough one. And these moments of great political, or I dare say geopolitical creativity, such as we saw in 1944, 1945 with the creation of the institutions you just mentioned, they're rare, they're very difficult to pull off. It takes an extraordinary constellation of forces and circumstances to allow that kind of thing to happen. So we shouldn't kid ourselves about how difficult it would be to either reform or add to the existing set of institutions that have more or less kept the international system peaceful and prosperous for the last three quarters of a century and more. But I'll tell you just a personal anecdote about this. I once was privileged to have a conversation with President Obama about this very matter. And this, this conversation would have been in approximately 19 pardon me, 2010 or 11. And I said something to him exactly along the lines that you were just proposing, Martin, that it's time to revisit the array and the functionality of the international institutions that we helped put together after World War II and update them and streamline them for the modern era and maybe think about some new ones. And he said, without hesitation, he said, you're absolutely right. And that's one of my principal objectives in my second term, which, of course, he hadn't secured yet. Well, the second term came, and frankly, from my point of view, I didn't see much initiative in those directions. So again, this is maybe too sweeping a statement, but it seems to me that our political leadership over the last 20 years or more has really lost the opportunity to update these institutions in timely and efficient fashion. And we now see them challenged very, very severely. And maybe they might lose their function altogether. That would be a great tragedy.
- [30:43]
Martin DeCaro
Institutions are unpopular these days and for good reason, because of the failures. But, you know, my earlier comment notwithstanding about all the bloodiness and criminality that took place during the Cold War, we still have had something called a world order post 1945 that has, you can say, prevented another world war despite many wars in the meantime. We haven't had another world war. We haven't had the type of cataclysm that occurred between 1937. If you date the start of World War II, Japan and China were 1939 to 1945. Keeping civilians safe from indiscriminate violence has always been difficult, always will be difficult. There are many horrors unfolding in the world today that the world is not acting to stop. If you know, another legacy of 45 was never again. But all that notwithstanding, we've had free trade for 80 years, and more people have been moved out of poverty than ever before in human history. So there's been a lot of good with the past 80 years. And that seems to be, I don't know, not discarded, but obscured. Would be my last.
- [31:45]
David M. Kennedy
Yes. If you use a phrase that you used a moment ago. Let us not take that for granted. It didn't just happen that we see no great power, direct conflict for three or more generations, and that globally we've lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, not least of all in China. 800 million Chinese have entered the global bourgeoisie in the last couple of generations. And as we've seen, an era of great global prosperity and innovation, technological innovation and other kinds of innovation. And that did not just happen. It happened within the framework of stability, predictability, pacification that comes out of World War II, the architecture of the international system of which the United States was the principal architect. So, yeah, that's something absolutely not to be taken for granted. And as George Shultz, Secretary of State and Secretary of virtually everything else over the course of his career, used to say, diplomacy or that is, the conduct of foreign policy, is not high stage or high concept drama. It's like gardening. You've got to be out there every day pulling weeds and cultivating the plants and taking care of the acreage and mending the fences and so on. It takes constant, vigilant effort to maintain the kind of relatively benign international environment that the planet saw over the last several generations.
- [33:06]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I would add, pruning the tree of nuclear warheads as well. We're going in the opposite direction on that front as well. I didn't even bring up nuclear weapons, but David M. Kennedy, thank you so much.
- [33:16]
David M. Kennedy
Thank you, Martin. Always a pleasure talking with you.
- [33:18]
Harry Truman
War is not inevitable. We do not believe that there are blind tides of history which sweep men one way or another. In our own time, we've seen brave men overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable and forces that seemed overwhelming. Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny. They can choose slavery or freedom, war or peace. I have no doubt which they will choose. The treaty we are signing here today is evidence of the path they will follow. If there is anything certain today, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.
- [34:11]
Martin DeCaro
And this is when I usually tell you it's coming up on the next episode of History As It Happens. But as I mentioned at the top of this episode, I do not know when the next episode is coming, but please go to Substack and subscribe to History As It Happens. It is free. I will keep you updated on my status. In the meantime, enjoy past episodes. They will remain up Wherever you find this podcast.
- [34:48]
Harry Truman
Sam Sa.