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Intelligence Squared
Can the West Hold Together? Lessons from WWII with Tim Bouverie and Michael Gove (Part Two)
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- [00:00]
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Mia Sorrenti
Where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti for this episode. We're rejoining for Part two of our recent live event with historian Tim Bouvery and Michael Gove. In September, Bouvri and Gove came to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss the state of the west today and the lessons we can take from World War II. They discussed Bouvri's new book, Allies at the Politics of Defeating Hitler, exploring how Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin all overcame ideological differences and strategic rivalries to form a fragile but ultimately victorious alliance against Nazi Germany. If you haven't heard Part one, we recommend jumping back an episode and getting up to speed. And if you'd like to listen to this episode in full and ad free, why not become an Intelligence squared member@intelligencesquared.com or tap the IQ2 extra button on Apple? Let's rejoin the conversation now live at Smith Square hall in London.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
Before we go back to Europe, just one further point about the Pacific. You mentioned American support for China. And of course America was supporting Chiang Kai Shek, the nationalist Chinese leader at the time. And Roosevelt was very attached to him and to his cause. Why did he, why did China loom so large in American thinking?
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Tim Bouverie
China was seen by America as a fellow anti colonial power that it wasn't totally colonized by the British as India was or ruled directly although all sorts of European powers and America had special extraterritorial rights. You had your own enclaves where you could be tried in your own courts. You had special commercial rights. America took a very holier than thou attitude towards China during the war and was constantly berating the British for their naked imperialism and exploitation of the Chinese. But the Americans took part in the Opium Wars. The Americans had their own concessions in China. And one of the major reasons why the Americans championed China so much was that they saw themselves as becoming the beneficiaries of all that China had to offer once the war was over. And but it isn't just as with everything with America, it is not just naked self interest and an araviste greed. Roosevelt was far more clear sighted about the future potential of China than Churchill. Churchill is very dismissive of China for lots of reasons, but again lots of them have to do with race. Roosevelt explains to Stalin at the Tehran conference. He said I don't believe that China is a major military power now. I don't believe China's great power now. But this is a country of half a billion people and they're going to count for something someday. And when they count for something, do we want them to be on our side or do we want them to be on Stalin's side or forming their own Asiatic hegemonic anti western pact out as is potentially happening today. And finally there was a great deal of misunderstanding in America about nationalist China. The Americans were told consistently, not least by Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine and great Sinophile, that China was a burgeoning democracy. In fact it was an extremely corrupt, highly authoritarian dictatorship. And when Americans actually went out there they tended to realize that. But obviously not that many Americans could go out to China in the middle of the war.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
You mentioned the Tehran conference. There were certain major moments when Britain, America, Russia and their leaders come together both to review the course of the war and also to consider what will happen after peace has been secured. Can you tell us a little bit about those conferences? What was decided and who was the winner at each one?
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Tim Bouverie
Well there are far too many to go into each of them. I think Tehran was the most important Tehran is 1943. Tehran is the first time that the big three all get together in the same place. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Churchill has met Roosevelt many times in Placentia Bay, off the Canadian coast. He's been to the White House. He's also been to the Kremlin and negotiated directly with Stalin. But this is the first time all three have got together. And this is where the Soviets and the Americans gang up together against Churchill to force him to name a spring date for the invasion of France. Operation Overlord, which is something that the British are committed to in principle, but are extremely dilatory about in practice. Most of these actual summits, I would say that Stalin emerges as the winner. Stalin was a very good negotiator. He said very little. While Churchill and Roosevelt were notoriously garrulous, he didn't try to appeal to them on sentiment. He knew that he had certain trump cards. The threat of a separate Soviet German peace and also the advance of the Red army into Eastern Europe, which was guaranteeing his future territory. He also had the great advantage that he was bugging the British and the American compounds. Every morning, 8 o', clock, an NKVD official would read him the transcripts of what Churchill and Roosevelt had said before. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were warned that their words were being overheard. Churchill's response was to make a joke about it. He said, I don't believe that the Russians would ever listen in on it. If they did such a dastardly thing, they would be no better than the ourang outang. That was his way of getting back at them. Roosevelt was so anti British in his private discussions that Stalin thought that this was deliberate misinformation. He thought that he was giving a false trail of breadcrumbs. Roosevelt and Churchill were both at their most naive about Stalin and his practice, and we could come onto that if you like. Stalin also had a great advantage that he had a huge espionage network in the west and there were more spies in America than there were in Britain. But the most famous spies are the Cambridge spies. And just to take one example, Donald Maclean, who was stationed in at the British Embassy in Washington, had all of the British and American position papers before every single conference which were on Stalin's desk. So he knew exactly what everyone was planning to do before it happened.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
And you mention Roosevelt's anti British comments and sentiment in 1943 and you also say in the book that perhaps the high point of the Churchill Roosevelt relationship was late 42, early 43, and things deteriorated after that. Why did they deteriorate do you think?
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Tim Bouverie
Lots of reasons why they deteriorated, ranging from the personal to the strategic and the political. To begin with, Roosevelt is very, very happy to go along with Churchill's vision of strategy. Churchill is a military enthusiast. He has served. Roosevelt hasn't served. But also the British have the final say. The Americans would like the British and the Americans with them to invade France in 1942, or at the very latest in 1943. And the only reason that doesn't happen is because the British veto it. And the reason they can veto it is because the majority of the participants in any invasion prior to late 1944 would be British and almost all of the shipping is British. That balance tilts by the time you get to Tehran and the Americans begin to feel their strength, Roosevelt begins to feel more comfortable being a war leader and being a strategist. He doesn't like being in Churchill's shadow. He wants to get to the main theater of operations, which he believes is Western Europe, not the Mediterranean. And he sees the decline in British power and also sees the rise of Soviet power. And it is at this stage that we may be, in Alec Cadogan's cruel but slightly apt phrase, start to stop to talk about a big three and to start to talk about a big two and a half.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
And in that sense as well, you see America flexing its muscles, developing its strength. From Russia's point of view, Russia will think we are paying a huge price, a huge blood price in this war, much greater than the British. The British think about their victory in El Alamein, it's a picnic compared to what's going on in the Eastern front and in Stalingrad. How did the Russians think about the scale of their sacrifice? And what if reward is perhaps the wrong word? What was their due as part of victory?
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Tim Bouverie
Well, their due, I mean, that's a difficult question because their due is nothing. They were invaded, they were fighting for their lives. And the demands they started to make for Western recognition of their pre war frontiers, which included the Baltic states which they had annexed, and Bessarabia and half of Poland. All of this which they had won through their collaboration with Hitler. This began immediately. Stalin was incredibly clear sighted and it's very interesting and there are various reasons for this. The Soviets had and continue to have right until the fall of the Soviet Union, a very legalistic mindset. If anything is approved, then it's banked. It's until something is recognized, it's not banked. And the British and the Americans were never going to drive the Soviets out of the Baltic states. But nevertheless, Stalin expanded enormous amount of diplomatic energy trying to get Western recognition for that. So Stalin believes that it's not so much his due, but it's his safety cordon to have a set of buffer states in Eastern Europe. He thinks of this more because of that is Russia and Soviet Russia's due, rather than because of the great sacrifices. Stalin doesn't really care very much about the blood sacrifice. He had done a very good job of murdering his own people before the Germans started to do it. And although we are absolutely right to focus on that huge number of over 26 million Soviet casualties in the war, compared to a combined total of about 750,000 British and American, a huge amount of that is to do with Stalin's incompetence as a commander in chief and also his callousness. These people are walking forward towards the German lines. If they take one step back, they're going to be shot in the back by their own secret police.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
It may have seemed inevitable, with the benefit of hindsight, that this alliance would founder after the war was concluded because of the ideological and other differences that existed. But it was the case, wasn't it, at the conclusion of the war, that both the Americans and the Russians hoped that the alliance might prevail?
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Tim Bouverie
Absolutely. There was nobody within the grand alliance that wanted it to end, but they all had very different ideas about what it stood for and how it would later develop. Stalin believed that he had come to an agreement with both Roosevelt and with Churchill that he would have a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. And people tend to focus historiographically on the infamous percentages agreement. This deal, which Churchill did with Stalin in October of 1944, but in 1942 and in 1943, Roosevelt had privately told Molotov and the Soviet ambassador to Washington that he had no problem with the Soviet Union taking over Eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia. He gave the British an incredibly tough time when they asked his permission to recognize these Soviet acquisitions, to give Stalin enough carrots to keep fighting. He called them hypocrites. He called them imperialists. He said nothing. This was totally antithetical to American war aims, to Woodrow Wilson's idea of self determination. But privately he sold the pass. And he did the same with Poland, but never would say so publicly because he was relying on the votes of some 6 million American Polish citizens, who overwhelmingly did vote for him in the 1944 general election. So Stalin thinks he's got this deal in Eastern Europe, then he finds it, to a certain extent, a Legitimate sense of betrayal when the British and the Americans start to kick up a fuss about it.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
You'll be aware, Tim, that there are some historians who look at the conclusion of the war and think, okay, so Russia gets Eastern Europe. America sees the dismantling of the British Empire very quickly after the war. Britain's out of India. Churchill is reminded he's very much the junior partner. America is the economic powerhouse of the Western world. So America comes out ahead, Russia comes out ahead, we come out diminished. Britain was actually loser. And Churchill's reputation is ripe for revision. What's your own view?
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Tim Bouverie
Well, everything you say is true. Britain didn't gain very much from her participation in the Second World War and lost a huge amount except honor a small amount of glory. The trends which you identify were happening in any case. The empire was going. The Free India movement was moving towards a crisis, much as the Irish Independence movement was heading towards a crisis before the outbreak of the First World War. But Churchill didn't have a choice. It was not a war to defend the empire, as some people have recently claimed. Poland was not part of the British Empire. It was a war to prevent any one power and a deeply, deeply sinister, the most sinister power that there has ever been from dominating the continent and threatening our own national security, just as the same reason that Britain entered the First World War. What's absolutely unfathomable to me is how members of the far MAGA right in America are arguing that America shouldn't have entered the Second World War. America gained immeasurably from the Second World War. It wasn't the New Deal that ended the Great Depression in America. It was massive, massive rearmament. The Pax Americana was born. The dollar ruled the world. All of the financial structures which we have lived with and relied on up till they're being challenged right now, but still at the present, were made by America for American commerce. America was a major gainer and you.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
Bring us right up to the present day. And of course, parallels are inevitable. You discuss the way in which there's a debate at the moment, including with people on the extreme MAGA right who are not themselves historians who are rewriting the past. But obviously, if you compare Roosevelt with Trump, it seems as though there has been a falling off, a decline in the caliber of presidents. But if you look behind that, if you look at American public opinion, as you pointed out, America was an isolationist country to a significant extent at the beginning of the Second World War and then had this responsibility thrust on its shoulders. Now we appear to be Leaving that post war world of the United Nations, Bretton woods, international institutions, and so on. Do you think that there are lessons for America from the fact that however much it might wish to withdraw, however much it might wish to be simply a hemispheric power, its interests and its people's interests will mean that it always has to be engaged internationally?
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Tim Bouverie
Absolutely. The lesson for America from the Second World War is that isolationism doesn't work. It did not stop the Japanese on 7 December 1941. It didn't make America safer, it didn't make America richer. The decade following the end of the Second World War saw incredible American foreign policy successes with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift. This made not just America, but the world stronger and more secure. That also aided America because it aided commerce. It aided and allowed America to win the Cold War, in part also because America consistently stood for a vision of life and a vision of society, which was far more appealing than the alternative. And so if America couldn't be isolationist in the 1940s and be safe, it certainly can't now when its relative power has declined in the world to then and the threats are on the Internet. There is cyber warfare, there is climate change. There are so many things which are beyond Uncle Sam's power now, which requires a multilateral approach.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
Also, Putin and Stalin comparisons are inevitable. Putin is fighting a war. You mentioned how the unprovoked war against Finland, the Winter War, was a precursor of the war in Ukraine. Russia invades a country, it assumes that it's going to roll over its neighbor. It finds itself embroiled in a conflict much more costly and lengthy than it anticipated at the beginning. But do you think that there are other lessons that we can draw about Russia? How Russians see their interests and also how power is exercised in Russia from Stalin's example, which can help us to understand how Putin operates and what we should do in the face of his actions.
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Tim Bouverie
I think there are parallels between Putin and Stalin. Stalin was, of course, a Marxist. He is an ideologue. There is nothing beyond very crude Russian nationalism to speak of, I think, as an ideology for Vladimir Putin. But they are canny, they are cautious, and they are actually conservative. What the former US Ambassador to Moscow in the period I write about in the book William Bullitt, tells FDR is that Stalin moves when there's space, he retreats when he is opposed. And that was what was shown. And I think if, if Vladimir Putin had any conception that he was going to get into the sort of difficulties that he has got into and that this war would be going on for as long as it has been going on for. He would have thought twice, but he felt there was space. The west did very little about the annexation of Crimea. It did very little about his incursions into Donbas region. It did nothing to prevent him from wreaking utter carnage during the Syrian civil war. It didn't do that much when Georgia happened. All of these are milestones, which in retrospect we can look at as the milestones that occurred during the 1930s, Abyssinia, remilitarization of the Rhineland, etc. Etc. But at the same time, right up till his death, Stalin would never own publicly a lust for conquest or anything. This was, and he was a man of peace. He abhorred war. All of the faux crocodile tears which Putin is able to shed for the benefit of his American ally in the White House are things that Stalin could bring out at any time that a Western or a journalist asks him about his aims. So there is, I think, a similarity there. And one has to look at Putin's and Stalin's actions, not at their words.
- [23:09]
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
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Tim Bouverie
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- [24:30]
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Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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- [25:49]
Host (Intelligence Squared)
The book is an absolutely cracking read. Tim has an amazing eye for the anecdote or the telling detail or the revelatory tell amongst political leaders. But the fashion often amongst sort of academic historians at the moment is to discount the role of big figures and to look at the profound forces that drive history. Tim, as you were looking at these individuals at de Gaulle, of course, who we touched on earlier, but also particularly at Churchill, at Stalin, at Roosevelt, do you think we underplay or overplay the role of individuals in history? Is there a tendency sometimes for us to succumb to the notion that one man or woman can change history? Or do you think that it's important to reassert the role of these individuals, whether heroes, villains or something in between?
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Tim Bouverie
I think it's undoubtedly incredibly important to look at individuals, but what really fascinates me is the relationship of individuals and circumstance and personalities to vast historical moments. I've often thought, I hope you won't mind my saying this, Michael, that there were obviously vast social and political forces which go back decades, which would have led to the Brexit vote and the referendum there. And yet I'm absolutely convinced that in a few decades time, if not in a few years time, students at universities will be asked Britain left the European Union because David Cameron sacked Michael Gove as Education Secretary. Discuss Something can happen Such a small moment. Was Michael Gove the decisive moment that swayed the voters? Was it Boris Johnson? Or was it the fact that you'd had decades of anti European stories in the popular press? Was it reverberations from the financial Crisis. The relationship of you to vast historical forces is the historian's job. And so I think the current trend of academics to be dismissive of great individuals when it's so obvious that there are major figures, Joseph Stalin, Michael Gove, who can shape events because they haven't either managed to realize all their ambitions in Westminster or in the Kremlin is just indubitably the case.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
I actually think if I'm remembered at all in history, it will be broadly. My role will be broadly analogous to that of a character that Tim writes about in this book, a character called Sir Dudley North. For those of you who don't know, and you can be forgiven for not knowing, Sir Dudley north was the British naval commander in Gibraltar who was charged with preventing the Vichy fleet from escaping. And when he saw the Vichy warships sailing past Gibraltar, he acted immediately by sending a signal to the ships, which was, bon voyage. So I think I'll probably end up being this Dudley north of politics and people will think about my career. Bon voyage. But now over to you and the questions that you have. And we have at least two roving microphones, and there's a gentleman just at the back there on stage left, as it were, just there. One of the key reasons the United States and the Allies triumphed was that they had a significant industrial base. So in a hypothetical Third World War, which I presume would be fought against China, what would the implications of. What would the implications of this be?
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Tim Bouverie
I don't think they'd be very good, but you're completely right, obviously, about the Allied preponderance in raw materials and industry. The only thing I will say is it doesn't always follow. Hitler really did nearly win. The Axis did nearly win, despite its massive deficit in industrial and demographic deficit as well, compared to the Allies. So it doesn't always follow that the person who has the most triumphs. It tends to depend on the length of the war. If the war goes on for a lot, lot longer, and that is what eventually happened in the Second World War, it was not because Britain and the United States had better generals than the Germans. The Germans, probably. I'm not a military historian, but I think an awful lot of people would say the Germans had better generals than the British and the Americans, but we managed to outlast them and overwhelm them.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
And. Yes. So there's a woman in the. In the row here.
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Audience Member / Guest
Thank you for such a wonderful talk and amazing book. Why did the Japanese go and do Pearl Harbor? What were they hoping to get from that?
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Tim Bouverie
It's completely mad when you think about it. You just have to look at the map. America's this big, Japan's that big. But Japan had been fighting a war against China since 1937. America was highly concerned about this, had been trying to bring that war to an end, had been trying to bring pressure on the Japanese. And In March of 1941, the US government stopped all its oil shipments to Japan. And the Japanese were dependent on US oil for 60% of its total oil. And they've thought that this was, as it indeed was, completely unsustainable. Either they had to do America's bidding and bow to American will, disengage from China, admit that China had been a great mistaken, abandoned all hopes of a new Asiatic order under Japanese suzerainty, or they had to fight. And they weren't so naive to think that they could defeat or conquer America over the course of a long war. What they felt was that they would be able to cripple the US offensive abilities by destroying the US Fleet Pacific fleet. And that Americans, and it's not just the Western powers who had highly racist attitudes, who were decadent, who were mixed race, the Japanese were far more racist than the Americans were in various regards, would quail before the idea of a long drawn out war. Which is also one of the reasons that Hitler declares war on America. Hitler thinks that this is not a pure race, it's a mongrel race, in his phrase. It's that Americans are interested in consumer goods, ice cream, not in tanks. How wrong they were indeed.
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Host (Intelligence Squared)
Sir.
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Audience Member / Guest
Lord gave Mr. Bouverie good evening. And might I say how much I enjoyed reading Allies at War. There was a tiny anecdote I think you missed out in that. I think Churchill once referred to de Cole as looking a bit like a female llama disturbed in her bath. The subject of this evening is the risks which Western democracies face in holding together. And I have a little notion that I just wanted to put to you to see what you think. I suspect the greatest danger we face Western democracy is simply going bust. And the reason for this is the fatal weakness at the heart of democracy. The seeds of its own destruction, which all organizations contain. Namely, that people discover they can vote themselves money which does not exist. And this leads to a vicious cycle of overspending, debt, inflation and the debasement of the currency which can only in the end lead to ruin. And just as a measure, I would remind people that in this country we have debased our currency by 98% since the war. There's never been a period in recorded history when the currency has been debased to such an extent within a single lifetime. So I put it that our Western democracies will not hold together and they'll collapse unless we, the electorate, learn to vote responsibly and the government restore the idea of sound money.
- [34:21]
Host (Intelligence Squared)
Tim, do you want to respond?
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Tim Bouverie
Well, I'm.
- [34:25]
Host (Intelligence Squared)
And then I will briefly.
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Tim Bouverie
I'm sure that that was a very controversial view for the editor of the Spectator to. To hear. I'm. I'm sure that sound money is. Is to be. Is to be sought. And I'm. Yeah, I think this one for you.
- [34:44]
Host (Intelligence Squared)
Yeah, no, but. But I think that's spot on. So I think that there is another historian, now sadly deceased, whose work is, I think, a very, very good guide to what happened to Britain after the war. It also touches on what happened during the war, but after the war, and that's Corelli Barnett, controversial at the time, influential on Margaret Thatcher, relevant today. He made the point that in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Britain faced significant choices and we didn't prioritize that which we should. We thought we could simultaneously at that time, maintain a huge armed presence, investment in military grandeur, investment in a nuclear deterrent, and at the same time an expansive welfare state, all at the same time as not reinvesting in our industrial capacity and not concentrating on reinvigorating our technological and innovative energy. And in particular, he looks at everything from the failure of the 1944 Education act under Rab Butler, which envisaged three types of schools. Secondary moderns, grammar schools, but also technical schools. The way in which the technical school withered on the vine, the way in which the industrial vision that might have sustained Britain's growth was abandoned. And I think that the point about inflation is very well made, but it comes back to an essential point about choices in a democracy and the difficulty when a government in any democracy attempts to say to the electorate that it can have it all. And we face a similar challenge now. So to be fair to our current government, they recognize that there would need to be reductions in welfare expenditure in order to be able to pay for the investment in the NHS and to be able to ensure that our debt payments did not become unsustainable. And the failure of the parliamentary Labour Party to allow the Prime Minister to press ahead with the quite modest changes that he's proposing to make to welfare reform augur ill for the future. And that's why international markets, looking at whether or not they should be lending to Britain worry that this government is not getting control of public expenditure. But it is also the case in the United States. There is a similar worry. And people in this audience who know much more about economics and the markets than me will observe the way in which it's not just fears about the level of debt and deficit in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States and critically, of course, in France as well, that make the question seem not just relevant historically, but potentially prescient. And the next question? Yes, the woman in the third row.
- [37:35]
Audience Member / Guest
Tim, I'm fascinated by the process of writing such a book. You would hope that anyone doing such a thing has a very good idea of history, but you seem to go beyond that. You seem to know the jokes they made, what the weather was like on certain days, what people were eating at these state meetings, and so on. Can you tell us a bit about the process of writing such a book? How do you get these insights? How do you get access to all of that, given that hundreds of books have already been written about the Second World War?
- [38:01]
Tim Bouverie
Well, the very fortunate thing is that despite a complete ban on the keeping of diaries for government ministers and employees, this was widely flouted during the Second World War. And people liked to write down what they ate a lot of the time, particularly if it was a Russian banquet, and particularly if the person slumped on your chair next to you trying to pour chili vodka down your neck is the head of the Soviet secret police. So those anecdotes can come from things like that. There are enormous amounts of papers. The great thing about these three men is that everyone knew that they were in the presence of greatness. And so everyone wrote down what they thought of them when they saw them. And I was therefore able to find new material on all of them by going to the lower levels, to people who were attaches, aides, envoys, ambassadors who attended these conferences and would write about them. And so you don't just have to write, rely on the very, very good anecdotes that are in, say, Churchill's Autobiography of the Second World War. So that's it. But it's obviously more time consuming to go and look for those things.
- [39:15]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Robert.
- [39:36]
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- [39:41]
T-Mobile Advertiser
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T Mobile commercial like you teach me.
- [39:46]
Shopify Advertiser
So, Dana.
- [39:47]
Podcast Advertiser
Oh, no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at T mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
- [39:59]
T-Mobile Advertiser
Wow, impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
- [40:07]
Audience Member / Guest
Nice.
- [40:07]
Podcast Advertiser
Jeffrey, you heard them.
- [40:08]
T-Mobile Advertiser
T Mobile is the best place to.
- [40:10]
Host (Intelligence Squared)
Get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade in in any condition.
- [40:15]
T-Mobile Advertiser
So what are we having for launch?
- [40:17]
Podcast Advertiser
Dude, my work here is done.
- [40:19]
Liberty Mutual Advertiser
The 24 month ago credit sign experience beyond for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 device connection charge. Credit send and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel Finance agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs 1099.99 and new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto PayPal taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Ooklip Speed Test Intelligence data 1H 2025 visit t mobile.com.