Polly Toynbee
Hello and welcome. I’m Polly Toynbee. I write for The Guardian. I have a special attachment to Chatham House. My grandfather, Arnold Toynbee, worked here for very, very many years and also particularly relevant to what we’re talking about today, he was at the Paris Peace Conference and was appalled by the Treaty of Versailles and came away from it deeply disillusioned and depressed. He was a young Aide at the time. So, it has a special resonance, as, here we are, 100 years, or almost, to the end of the First World War and Paris Peace Conference for next year, and we have a very good panel to discuss preventing another World War. We have Selika Ducksworth-Lawton, who is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Santanu Das, who is a Reader in English Literature from King’s College London, and Jonathan Powell, who is a CEO of Inter Mediate, Chief – and was Chief Exec – Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair, from 95 to 2007. And Peter Apps, who is Global Affairs Columnist for Reuters, Future of War Fellow, New America, Executive Director of the Project for the Study of the 21st Century.
We’re going to start with each them taking whatever aspect they like about this enormous subject. I think those of us who were brought up under a cloud of believing that nuclear holocaust was going to happen at any moment, which was very much my background, wondering whether we are in more dangerous times, or less dangerous times, as things stand, and I hope we will get some clarity from our speakers. We’re going to start with Selika, who’s going to begin.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
Thank you. I was asked to talk about lessons of the World War I Versailles Treaty and 14 points for this modern limited war environment, and I wanted to talk about how some things will stay the same, some things will change, and some things will boggle us all entirely.
So, the things that will stay the same include nationalism and the nation state, because every time we think the nation state has died, it roars back to life with a vengeance. Ideology and for my country, the United States, the idea in war that we can substitute technology for the boots on the ground. This is an idea that has backfired on us many times and yet, we still like it, because the American public likes it. So, if you look at the Korean conflict, the Vietnamese conflict and the conflicts we have today, many of our problems have stemmed from that idea.
The idea of religious extremism, religious dominionism, whether I’m talking about Christian extremism in the US, or Islamic extremism in other places, or other forms of extremism, as we are seeing in Myanmar. And finally, one thing that stays the same is no matter how much a battlefield changes, somehow, we always wind up with trenches and tunnels. Ask the Israelis.
Would you believe that in 2018 they would be chasing down tunnels? There is an American – there is a human impulse to fortifications. Now, imperial overstretch is also something that stays the same and World War I saw imperial overstretch and especially for the UK, the difficulty of defending a far-flung empire, and this is something that we are definitely seeing today. Economic and physical destruction causes instability, just as the Versailles Treaty wrecked economic destruction on the German state and economic destruction, that is one of the reasons for the rise of Hitler and the rise of authoritarianism. We see that kind of economic and physical destruction today and the power vacuums that come from it. The Iraq II, which is how we refer to the modern Iraq war in the US, is an example of such a power vacuum.
But there are things that will change and one of the things, as a Historian, I like to talk about, is the fact that our perceptions and our assumptions are key. Our perceptions, in many ways, are more important than the reality on the ground and that idea of perception leads us into perhaps the most dangerous way that the face of battle is going to change. Technology is going to change the face of battle in ways that we do not want to see. We already are seeing conflicts where there is no front and there is no rear. Modern nation states like the US, the UK, France, Germany, want a Clausewitzian world with two armies on a field, combatants in uniforms. That world may be over. I would posit, it’s going to be far more rare in the future, and one of the big lessons of the 20th Century is that asymmetrical warfare will probably be more common.
Today we stand in a cyberwar, at least where I am in the United States, and yet, many of my fellow Americans do not understand that we are in a conflict, do not recognise that there is a battlefield, because they don’t see tanks and they don’t see Soldiers. And that cyberwar, which is new to us, which has weaponised our culture, which has weaponised our protected speech against us, which uses the United States media’s template for conflict as a way to create disunity and subversion, is a new battlefront and is a battlefront that we did not envision when the internet arrived on the scene.
War is moving – it always does come back to Clausewitz, but it’s moving in a more Sun Tzuvian way. Subversion is a face of battle that the United States, the UK and the EU will have to face and subversion has changed, although the principles of subversion stay the same. To weaponize the biases and the weaknesses and the marginalised peoples of a culture against it are the keys to subversion. Marginalised peoples hold the key to stability in this new world. In a world of cyberwar, we like to believe that the realm of the internet and the realm of in the real world is different. But as we can see, the trolls are moving out of the computer and they used cars at Charleston to kill a young woman. They carried tiki torches. Here, they have killed people as well. We can no longer draw that separation between the cyber world and the real world.
There are a number of missed opportunities that we’ve had because we have looked at marginalised peoples and not recognised what they wanted or who they were. If you look at the Versailles Treaty, probably the most famous missed opportunity, with not allowing Ho Chi Minh in and not taking seriously the wish of Indo-Chinese people for self-determination, mistaking their alliances with Communists for them being Communists, mistaking nationalism and ethnicity for ideology.
Today, the key to dealing with terrorists and subversion in the US, the UK and in the European Union, lies in the US, the UK and the European Union. Our countries face a critical choice: will we continue to indulge supremacists and nationalists who attack our marginalised people, and who turn those marginalised people into assets against us, or will we choose integration? The US faced this in the 1960s, in the fight for African-American freedom and liberation. As colonies decolonised, they looked at the US and said, “Why should we join your side? People who look like us are not free in your country,” and we had to choose integration. It is a choice that we will have to continue to make in this world about immigrants and refugees, because immigrants and refugees are our best intelligence assets, are our best bulwark against subversion.
Asymmetrical warfare will be the framework for the 21st Century. Just as technology and mobility did not make war short on Oman, war will be less decisive today. Dropping bombs from aeroplanes will not end a war. The days of Napoleonic warfare will be fewer and shorter. Assumptions about groups by race, assumptions about groups by technology, will not be effective and having overwhelming technology will not always be an advantage. In Iraq we saw technology used against the US. Our cellular networks, our computers, when they’re knocked offline, they work against us, when people hack into them, they can now gain our information more easily when – than when that information was on paper.
The biggest key, and this is where I’ll leave you, to this new century, is respecting our peoples and respecting opposing forces. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu argued that you had to respect the enemy and know the enemy. We face, within our people, a group that is wilfully ignorant and proud of its anti-intellectualism, proud of its refusal to look outward and proud of the fact that it does not want to look at the world. And I think that getting that group to understand the threats we face and what we have to do to give up their xenophobia, is the greatest threat we face in this 21st Century.
Polly Toynbee
Thank you very much. Now we’re going to get quite a different window on the world from a different discipline and Santanu Das is going to talk.
Santanu Das
Thank you. After Selika’s, kind of, wonderfully encyclopaedic kind of view, I’ll take you back again to the Versailles Treaty and I’ll start with a quotation. “Woodrow Wilson, in Paris, was like an ant on a hot skillet. He didn’t know what to do. He was surrounded by thieves, like Clémenceau, Lloyd George, Makino and Orlando. He had nothing, except accounts of receiving certain amounts of territory and of preparations worth so much in gold. One day a Reuters telegram read, “President Wilson has finally agreed with Clémenceau’s view that Germany be now allowed into the League of Nations.” When I saw the words ‘finally agreed’ I felt sorry for him for a long time, poor Wilson.” Any guesses who this quotation? This is – yes?
Polly Toynbee
Yes?
Member
John Maynard Keynes?
Santanu Das
No, no. No, it’s Mao Zedong, the revolutionary leader and the future father of People’s Republic of China. As a 25-year-old student in 1919, Mao Zedong hear voices a tremendous sense of disappointment that was shared by the majority of the world’s people and none, kind of, more than across Asia and Africa. And the sense of disappointment was in direct proportion to the sense of euphoria that swept across this land in early 1918, particularly after Wilson’s famous speech about self-determination, and I just quote another line. This is, kind of, delivered on February 11th, kind of, just 100 years back. “National aspiration must be respected. People may now be dominated and governed only by their consent,” and this was an elixir to these colonies thirsting for their independence.
In the First World War four million non-white men were recruited into the armies of different – the three European Nation States and America and most of them fought for just one reason, for a validation of their racial and political equality. And yet, at the end of the war, what they get is Amritsar, the Jallianwala massacre in India, where people were herded into this little space and gunned down, or for example, there are race riots in London or Liverpool, or the lynchings in Arkansas, Chicago and Washington, as one conflict bleeds into the other. Now we speak of the First World War not just confined to 1914 to 18, but rather, maybe 1908 to 1921.
Now, one of the greatest legacies of this tsunami of centennial commemoration of the war that we are seeing for the last three years, would be a greater recognition of this non-white and colonial contribution to the First World War. I think that after three years the colour of First World War memory is no longer just white. So, there’s a wonderful expansion there, but also, I think, there’s a complete sanitisation in the way the centennial commemoration is being, kind of, undertaken.
The First World War is largely being reinvented as a grand stage to blow the trumpet of multiculturalism, ignoring many of the problems that feed on beliefs, and I’ll lead to another quotation, this from the Former Tory Minister, Sayeeda Warsi, who, in fact, led the Commonwealth commemoration in 19 – in 2014, and this is from an article she wrote for the Telegraph in July 1914 – sorry, 2014. It’s just Freudian trying to send her back to 1914. “What makes a hero? It’s a question that has been on my mind recently, particularly as we celebrate Armed Forces Day today. For me, anyone willing to risk their lives to serve their country is a hero. As we mark the centenary of the start of the First World War, the word has even greater meaning. Few of us realise that our Tommies were fighting side-by-side with Tariqs and Tajinders. These men felt a connection to Britain that was forged without having set a foot on these shores. With today’s debate on Britishness, it’s more important than ever before that young people, of all faiths and backgrounds, learn that their ancestors also fought for King and country a century back. I’ve an incredible sense of pride knowing that it was the same loyalty to Britain that inspired both my grandfathers to fight for Britain in the Second World War.” And then she concludes, “Just as 100 years ago our forefather had a duty to act, we have a duty to act today, to ensure that your sacrifices are remembered. Today I urge every Teacher, every parent, every faith and community leader, to hear those remarkable and heroic stories.”
Now, Warsi here is challenging the colour of memory, which is all, kind of, well and good. But also, what is being validated, in the guise of colonial recovery of First World War memory, is a narrow nationalist and warist culture, those values of heroism, valour, sacrifice, that led the path to the First World War. And it is being insidiously equated with Britishness and again, predicated on a rhetoric that we Historians, kind of, working on the First World War, are too familiar.
So, in the name of colonial recovery, we seem to have gone back 100 years back, because it is exactly these qualities that exploded amidst the mud and blood of the trenches. For example, if you think of Wilfred Owen and if you think, kind of, the jolt of, kind of, blood gushing out, you’d not say to your – you’d not say to people desperate for some ardent glory the old lie, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” And even more, in 2014 for Armistice Day, I was doing an interview and then this, kind of, Sikh gentleman turned up and I think he was, kind of, working for, kind of, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London then. And he’s, kind of, begun on the colonial front of the Sikh contribution to the First World War, which flowered, without any break or mediating force, into this call for ethnic minorities to join the Army. So, on the – on 2014, 11th of November, we have the ethnic contribution being, kind of, used to get more people into the Army and prolong war.
Preventing Another War is the title today. I don’t know how much we are able to prevent. We can only try. For Virginia Woolf, photographs of mutilated bodies should be published every day, so as to, almost, kind of, defence – sorry, so as to make us, kind of, aware of the cost of warfare at an everyday experiential level. Organisations such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, they’re incredibly important, but at the same time, also what is needed, I think, is a psychological and social cultural shift of perception that Selika touched upon.
The foundational text in conflict and peace studies remains the German Philosopher, Immanuel Kant’s, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, in 1795, written in the context of another war and for Kant, particularly for his famous dictum that, “The law of world citizenship shall be limited to the conditions of universal hospitality,” that is predicated on something that Kant didn’t find in his world, other than now –we have it now, and that is symmetrical relationships between nations. For Kant, this principle of citi – world citizenship, based on hospitality, is not possible in an asymmetrical world order. And it’s exactly this point that the Indian Humanist and Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, was voicing during, and immediately after, the First World Wars, as he toured America, some 20 cities during the First World War. He went to Japan. He was quite appalled by the military aggression of Japan at that time. Immediately after the First World War, he was lecturing, both in Germany and in England, and I’ll end with some, kind of a short extract from Tagore, because I think it’s so pertinent today, in our context, as we have another, kind of, fresh, kind of, burst of, kind of, xenophobic nationalism.
For Tagore, the main – the root cause of the First World War was nationalism and by nationalism, he didn’t mean just Western nationalism. Tagore was one of the few people who was anti-imperialist, but also anti-nationalist. He had very little time for Indian nationalists and I’ll just quote, “This European war of nations is the war of retribution. The time has come, when for the sake of the whole outraged world, Europe should fully know, in her own person, the terrible absurdity of the thing called the nation. The nation has striven long upon mutilated humanity. Men, the fairest creations of God, came out of the national manufacturing in huge numbers, as war-making and moneymaking puppets, ludicrously vain of their pitiful perfection of mechanism. Human society grew more and more into a marionette share of politicians, soldiers, manufacturers and bureaucrats, pulled by wire arrangements of wonderful efficiency.” And Tagore here is talking in the context of colonialism, nationalism and industrial modernity and we can, I think, say very similar things, in the context of today’s world, in the context of, kind of, nationalism, new imperialism and Brexit Britain. Thanks.
Polly Toynbee
Thank you very much indeed. Sorry, I’ve been rather derelict as Chair. I should’ve said that this is – this event is being – is on the record and it is being live streamed. I should also say that if you want to tweet about it, it’s CHevents, #CHevents. Now, very pleased to be hearing from Jonathan Powell next.
Jonathan Powell
Well, thank you very much. I’m going to approach the subject from the point of view of a Practitioner. When I left Government, I set up a small charity to work on armed conflicts around the world, on the basis of my experience in Northern Ireland, and we’re now working on 11 different conflicts, and I’ll take this issue of preventing another World War. Now, of course, prevention is what we always want. Ideal, mainly, we’re trying to resolve conflicts and you really don’t want to find yourself doing that. If you look at Colombia, where a 60-year war left nearly a quarter of a million dead and millions displaced. In Burma, a 70-year war has left similar numbers displaced and killed. But it’s very easy to talk about preventing, but much harder to do. I’m going to approach it through three different conflicts, which, in my view, could turn into a World War, any one of them, and what one can do to try and prevent them.
The first I want to posit is North Korea, the Korean Peninsula, where we’ve heard terrifying rhetoric from both sides, from President Trump and from Kim Jong Un, throwing verbal bombs at each other. I think my position would be that both sides are perfectly rational. Neither side wants to die. Neither side therefore, wants to start a war. But a bit like the beginning of the First World War, the danger is, that people trip into war by accident, by miscalculation, by misunderstanding. Take, for example, the ‘bloody nose’ strategy that we read about in the New York Times, that was supposedly adopted by the US Government, when they want to teach the North Koreans a lesson, not to start a war, but simply to hit them. The danger with that is that your bloody nose may not be understood by the other side. They may see it instead as an all-out attack, rather than simply a bloody nose and that will lead to a response of a massive nature that you simply won’t be able to cope with.
The UN has not been able to get any traction on the subject. It’s provided the pressure on North Koreans through sanctions, but provides nothing by way of trying to actually resolve the conflict. There is no military-to-military contact between the North Koreans and the Americans, so no way of avoiding a mistake of an aeroplane flying into another aeroplane or into its face, and there is no political communication, there is no full understanding of the other side and what they mean. For example, the North Koreans find it very difficult indeed, to understand Trump’s America, what is his intention? When Tillerson says something and is contradicted by Trump, or by McMaster, what does that mean? Who should they really be listening to?
So, you find yourself, in the case of North Korea, a bit, again, like the First World War, without a framework, with misunderstandings, with every ability to tip into a conflict very quickly and unintentionally. I’ll come back to the possible solutions at the end, just for purposes of time. So, that’s North Korea, a crisis that would drag everyone in. It would drag China in, if it were to kick off, and you’d find yourself in a real conflict, and the danger, as I say, as the First World War, that misunderstanding and miscalculation, that would lead you into it.
The second is Syria, which at the moment looks increasingly like Bosnia in 1914. You have the Russians obviously, involved on the ground. You have Iran fully involved on the ground. You have Hezbollah. You have the Saudis in the Gulf. You have the US and now you have Turkey, as well, on the ground. So, you have a whole series of both regional and great powers involved in Syria and actually, beginning to hit each other. Because the most worrying incidence has been one over the weekend, last weekend, the one before last weekend, when the Iranians flew a drone into Israel, Israel hit back, a plane was hit, they then hit the air defence system of the Syrians. They ended up killing an unknown number of Russians. The Americans, very shortly before that, had also killed an unknown number of Russians in responding to attack. That is the sort of political maelstrom, the military maelstrom, that could lead you into a conflict entirely unintentionally.
You have countries in there with interests that they are pursuing. You have no real military way of avoiding them and tripping into each other and you have the UN unable to act. Ever since we said that we had a red line and then failed to enforce that red line, we had no real way of using the UN to actually pull things back. So, we had plenty of resolutions, so again, a bit like the League of Nations at the time of Abyssinia. We have plenty of resolutions, but no will to enforce those resolutions. If you’re not going to enforce those resolutions, they become meaningless, the body itself becomes meaningless. What is the point, if you’re going to vetoed in anything you do, in resorting to the UN to try and get to a conclusion?
The UN negotiations in Geneva are clearly going nowhere, unless Assad is prepared to negotiate, and so far, he’s even refused to turn up. Again, it’s a bit like Mussolini’s attitude towards Abyssinia, he wasn’t prepared to take seriously any of the resolutions of the League of Nation, or any of the pressure and the great powers weren’t prepared to really push him hard. As the French Ambassador said yesterday, in the UN Security Council, “If the UN is not prepared to stand up on issues like this, what point is there of the UN when you see what’s happening to the people in Eastern Ghouta?”
The third conflict, and I’m going to run out of time, so I’ll be very brief on this, although it’s a huge potential one and people have written many very good books on the subject, of course, is US-China, and this is the Thucydides Trap of the idea of a rising power running into an established power, in the way that Germany ran into the United Kingdom in the First World War, and in many other cases, as the Graham Allison book catalogues. Again, here we have, very clearly, a rising power running into an existing power. We have a President, whose rhetoric is not always entirely unguarded on the subject and who is pushing a whole series of different interests, including trade interests, in a way that may well be misunderstood on the Chinese side as a debate. We do, in this case, have military-to-military channels, and thank goodness we do, so that you can avoid a pure accident of a plane running into another, or a 25-year-old Pilot pulling a trigger by mistake. There are ways of avoiding that. But what it seems, to me, is lacking is any political framework to avoid the mistakes of a great power being challenged by a rising power and falling again into a First World War type of conflict. The UN has precisely no role in that at all and we’re left at the mercy of Mar-a-Lago dinners and chocolate cake as the only way of resolving it.
So, if I’m right in presenting these three, what seem to me extremely dangerous situations that could all tip into another world war, what do we have left to try and deal with it? And I think the danger is of the UN turning into another League of Nations, as the French Ambassador said, it seems to be frozen and unable to adapt. If you think of the debate on R2P, the Right to Protect, what, ten years ago, no, a bit more, 15 years ago now, it failed to actually change the UN. They were – could not be adopted, the UN could not take the decision to act where it had to, for example in Kosovo. And because it was unable to act in Kosovo, we found a coalition of the United States, United Kingdom and others acting, because they knew they faced a Russian veto.
We – you had an even worse situation, of course, of Iraq, where people pushed ahead, even though they were being voted down, including me, I should say, in the United Nations. So, in essence, it seems to me imperative that the United Nations find some way of adapting, finding some way that it can act, that it can stop escalation of the sort that we’re seeing in Syria and that the vetoes don’t simply become a block to any action. ‘Cause if they do, we will then face unilateral action of the sort that we could face, for example, between China and the United States.
I think there is a second way of looking for a salvation and that is through regional organisations. I worked for a long time in the 80s on the CSCE, which pulled together all of the European countries and Russia and the United States and provided a very good framework for avoiding conflict between those countries of the Warsaw Pact and of NATO. That lacks in places like North East Asia. If you had a CSCE in North East Asia you would have some sort of framework that could pull the issues of security, of nuclear weapons, of economics and of politics together. There will be some sort of framework into which the Korean Peninsula conflict fitted. So, it seems to me you can also look for answers there.
But thirdly, and lastly, the key, it seems to me, is about communication and about dialogue. The failure to have that communication with North Korea, the failure to have that communication inside Syria and the failure to have the sort of communication we need between China and the United States and that doesn’t necessarily depend on institutions. It can depend on individuals and NGOs. They can play that role of generating back channels, discussions, communication, that can really make a difference. So, I don’t want to end, sort of, feeling too depressed about all of this. It is not inevitable that any one of these turns into another World War. We don’t have to make the mistakes again that we made in the First World War, but we are lacking the institutions, we are lacking the framework and most of all, we’re lacking the dialogue to try and avoid it.
Polly Toynbee
Thank you very much. Now, Peter Apps.
Peter Apps
First of all, I shall be quick and swift, as I’m aware that I’m the only thing between you guys, a panel discussion and then drinks. I’m going to take a fairly personal view at this. My name’s Peter Apps. I’m 33. So, I came of age in 99, just as the Kosovo war was starting. I’m also an Army Reservist, so I’m going to give a Sultan’s eye view on the panel. And I’m an Army Reservist, because, having been in the Reserves at university, I was recalled voluntarily, ‘cause they gave me a choice, two and a half – just over two years ago, to advise the British Army on hybrid warfare, information warfare, and this kind of stuff, because Russia had invaded Crimea. And I was very struck, when I came back to my parents’ house in Essex after my first three days back in uniform in 15 odd years. I never expected to wear a uniform again. I broke my neck, covering the Sri Lanka war, and that was a good decade in the past. And I was sitting there with my couple of nieces and my grandmother had died about a year before and we were going through the family photo albums and you realise that World Wars punctuate family history, in this country, but also, in a very large – huge swathes of the planet. Probably less Latin America, interestingly enough. They don’t last very long. Less than nine years of the 20th Century was taken up with wars. That’s almost half the length of the Afghan War that began on Jonathan’s watch. But they produced massive – sorry, I hadn’t meant to put it in quite those terms.
Jonathan Powell
And you could mention a few others as well.
Peter Apps
But they produced massive societal change, on an unimaginable level. A couple of years ago, I wrote a book about Winston’s Churchill’s time in the trenches and one of the things I was struck by, the soldiers he was serving with, many of them had never seen a car until the beginning – or barely would’ve seen a car until the outbreak of the First World War and suddenly, they’re in a world where they are surrounded by tanks, where they’re surrounded by light aircraft, where they’re surrounded by belt-fed machine guns, where every piece of technology they had ever dreamed of, and a very large number they hadn’t, were ripping their world apart, and it happened very, very suddenly, and the world was never the same again.
I was sitting at RUSI a few weeks ago at a conference on urban warfare and I was struck by the fact that actually, the uniform – the dress – the fut – why do they call it the future Army dress for the British Army? Because ironically, it’s unchanged since 1919. That is the same of period that elapsed between the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War. The societal change between the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War was, in many ways, much, much, much greater than that we have seen over the last 100 years. But I think the thing that is really worth remembering is, we may be about to enter another period of that technological shift.
When I’m training the soldiers that I work with in the British Army these days, I sort of, feel a bit like I’m an Army Officer in about 1910. I can’t quite see the new technology coming over the horizon. Some people can. The British Army’s got some incredibly good people, who do thinking that I can’t get my head around on things like artificial intelligence. But, you know, as battery life gets quite better, as drones get smaller, different, they walk, they can dig their way into the ground, they can float in the sea, all kinds of tools get better, and as several panellists said before, the way in which we fight is changing.
I suspect that if we do have a Third World War, the Historians, who write the history afterwards, will probably claim it started around 1999, you know, the invasion of Kosovo, which very quickly, and very nearly, led to direct conflict between NATO troops and Russian troops at Pristina Airport, was, as far as the way the Russians see it, the beginning of a longer confrontation. You know, they – that was followed by the Georgia war, where they felt that they’d pushed back a little bit. They proved that if we could take bits of countries off people and rebrand them, in the spirit of Right to Protect, so could they. They did that in Georgia. They’ve obviously done that again in Ukraine. That has fundamentally changed the way in which we approach warfare in Europe and it’s put warfare in Europe back on the agenda.
I was in Narva early this year, a Russian speaking city on the front between the Baltic States and Russia and I don’t think anyone in that town had even dreamed, until two and a half years ago, that they might be a place where a – firstly, where a Third World War might start, but even more worryingly for them, where it might not, where a limited war in the Baltic States might go on, as it’s going on in Ukraine, forever. That we might not have the guts to blow up the world by having a war between Russia and the United – and NATO, but we might just have a small war in their hometown. And of course, that is exactly what has happened in Syria, and by far the bloodiest war of the 20th – of the 21st Century so far, and one of the bloodiest, if you go back into the latter bits of the 20th. You know, the Syrian dynamics of that war would probably have been likely to burn out quite a long time ago. Instead, various different players have pushed things and you get – and then when you bring in cyberspace, you get a whole bunch of different kind of spaces.
Now, does that mean we’re heading towards a new World War? Almost certainly not, certainly not definitely. The reason that we haven’t had a World War, in the last 75 years, is incredibly simple. We may not know what the route to a Third World War looks like, but we know what the last day looks like and that means that it becomes quite easy not to start. The reason why NATO and Russian troops didn’t pile into each other at Pristina Airport, in the way they unquestionably would’ve done in 1925, was that it was very, very clear to people, sitting on both sides, where things would go, and it was very clear to their civil populations.
The downside is, that as Jonathan said, Jonathan sketched out three routes, Europe is clearly not that much safer. There are a whole bunch of other ways in which the world could fall apart, if you want to go into a bit more blue-sky thinking. My instinct is that the next ten/15/20/30 years will see at least two or three Cuban Missile Crisis type scares and we may well see a limited exchange somewhere that kills a lot of people.
We were sitting earlier this afternoon in a discussion of, you know, what would it take to have a new 14 points from Woodrow Wilson? I suspect we will have them in the next century. I suspect my niece, who’s now four, will see something like that happen in her life. I suspect she will see it happen after something horrific has happened. Now, whether that is something horrific that is a limited confrontation, where everyone realises that we nearly had a nuclear war and we backed down. If you look at some of the Russian doctrines around pre-emptive nuclear strikes, if they were to fight a war with us in Eastern Europe, their doctrine is very simple. They would then threaten to either attack a single city or ship, or formation, with a nuclear warhead, or they would do so and then they would dare us to back down. The Chinese have different approaches to this, but, you know, everyone has their models. We may go over the edge into that. We may go quite a long way over the edge. We could easily go so far that we basically lose half the planet.
The reason wars start, though, and I think this applies to every war I’ve ever covered, whether I’ve been on the ground or anywhere else, is that at least one side thinks they can win. You know, I would argue that is probably true of the Afghan War, it’s probably true of the Iraq War that the UK was involved in launching over the last 20 years, but it’s also true of the Sri Lankan War that I was involved in. Both sides thought they could win. It is very difficult to delude yourself of that in the 21st Century. However, military power works.
The Russian economy is the size of the economy in New York State. The North Korean economy is the size of Jacksonville, Florida. Those two countries are both major global powers and I don’t think anyone would deny them that status, but they hold that status because they have a lot of people in uniform, they have a lot of big rockets. Other countries may well take that lesson over the next 100 years. It would be amazing if they did not and that means we will have some fairly alarming afternoons to come. And I’m going to hand back to Polly.
Polly Toynbee
Thank you very much. Well, there’s plenty to be afraid of and plenty to think about. I’m going to start, though, by calling Patricia Lewis, who is going to – because there’s been an all-day discussion and perhaps some of you have been here all day, looking at Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points and she’s collated seven that have been – seven new ones that have been added. So, let’s hear them.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Oh, thanks, Polly, and thanks to all the great speakers. So, we’ve been, all day, a group of young people and older people, people from all over the world, looking at Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points. We were doing this with the Meridian International Center in Washington DC. It’s a partnership that we have with them, looking at the lessons we can learn from World War I, funded by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. So, thanks to everyone in that regard, and we’ve come up in this group with seven points. So, two points for – Woodrow Wilson came up with 14. We came up with half that number, okay?
So, number one, “We shall prioritise diplomacy. As one of the most important ways to prevent conflict, we shall ring fence public diplomacy spending in the way that we do for defence and international aid.” We shall – number two, “We shall establish global norms for tax structures, so that every member of every country are subject to fair taxation and inequalities are reduced.” Number three, “We shall re-double global efforts to address climate change and ensure that the Paris Agreement is implemented as fully as possible.” Number four, “We shall reorder and reframe the international system to be more representative. Representation for sub-state groups and minority peoples will be included at all levels at the UN and its associated institutions.” Number five, “We shall recharge the United Nations Security Council to ensure that new mechanisms can be established for agreement and ensure that interventions can only take place with full agreement throughout the whole of the UN system.” “We should set up” – number six, “We shall set up in place further measures to prevent conflict and curb military aggression, including increased emphasis on disarmament and arms reduction and controls, including controls on cyber weaponry.” And number seven, finally, “We shall increase the international emphasis and commitment to sustainable development and education for all and we shall support good governance practices and funding for education, particularly for girls.” So, there’s our seven Woodrow Wilson points for the 21st Century, devised by a whole group of people working hard at them today. So, thank you very much for that opportunity, Polly, too.
Polly Toynbee
Thank you very much.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thank you.
Polly Toynbee
That’s very interesting and encouraging. I suspect there must be a lot of would be diplomats here, because I can’t think of anywhere else where I’ve been where somebody has suggested the top priority should be ring fencing the budget of the Foreign Office. But high time that we did and a very good idea too. Now, it’s your turn and so, let’s hear from you questions from the floor and points. Put your hand up if you’re – may put my glasses on, see who’s around. Yes, I’ll start with you there, then I’ll come to you in the front.
Emily Hall
Hi there, so I’m Emily Hall, Ministry of Defence. You were talking about how – the importance of, sort of, cohesion and the US posture at the moment talks a lot about strength and this, sort of, seems to be at odds with what you were talking about. Is that just my perspective, or do you think we can, sort of, marry the two, so that we can, at the same time, be very strong and defensive, if you like, but also not xenophobic and very inclusive, was the word you used?
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
There are different groups within our political structure and within our population and right now, because of gerrymander and because extremists are more likely to be elected, the group that is in power is disproportionately isolationist and disproportionately America First. We have a group that has always been – it has always been represented in both parties, in the Democratic and the Republican Party, white supremacists. But now they have been emboldened by this election to be much louder and much more demanding. Xenophobia and America First go together hand-in-glove. If you read Hamby’s classic Liberalism and its Challengers, it’s – that impulse has always been there in the US. So, their vision of strength is, in part, based on that xenophobia.
Emily Hall
But it’s also, the strength is also a word that NATO uses and talking about strength and cohesion between nations and so, it’s slightly different from just xenophobia, but this idea of, kind of, everybody rallying together and yeah, there…
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
You can…
Emily Hall
…just doesn’t sort of…
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
You can be strong, but xenophobia is a weakness that allows subversion. You cannot be strong if xenophobia drives your policy. That is the problem. So, you can have a whole lot of technological weapons. The US has always assumed that we would continue to maintain a monopoly, in many ways, on global power, and that assumption is slipping in China and that assumption is beginning to slip in Russia. If strength is technology, you can be strong and xenophobic, but if strength is the ability to project power into places like the Ukraine and Georgia, then you need allies. So, I – the US has choices to make in the mid-term elections, will tell us what those choices will be. There has always been an internationalist group and there have always been immigrants in the US. The US, despite what it may seem, has always been a immigrant friendly country. We’re going to have to decide what that word ‘strength’ means.
Emily Hall
Can I be really cheeky and extend my question to Peter and ask what he…?
Polly Toynbee
Well, no, I don’t think you can, actually.
Emily Hall
No, okay.
Polly Toynbee
‘Cause we’ve got quite a few people.
Emily Hall
Sorry, fair enough. Fair enough.
Polly Toynbee
And we’re already a bit late. I would like to say, though, you started off with your talk by saying, you know, nationalism is there everywhere and ready to leap out again at any time. So, it’s not just America. That happens to be a particular mood in America at the moment, but it’s endemic in every nation and it’s held down, with any luck, but it’s ready to leap out.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
We are seeing it resurging across the globe, nationalism and populism, and this xenophobia. Every country is having to deal with this fear of the refugee and this fear of the immigrant and it’s, in part, because technology is challenging our ideas of what citizenship means, it’s challenging our culture, it’s challenging our idea of what being male, and female is. And when, in history, when we’ve seen those sort of challenges, at the turn of the century we saw those challenges, people turn inward. The good news is, history is a cha-cha, it’s two steps forward, one back, two steps forward, one back.
Polly Toynbee
Sometimes it feels the other way around. But I hope you’re right. We have to travel in hope. Yes, in the front here we’ve got somebody. Who else is there who wants to come to – just so, I can see who’s around for the microphone next time? We’ll take that young man there next time.
John Wilson
John Wilson, a member of this institute, a Journalist and a Guide at Bletchley Park, the home of the codebreakers. My question is this, mankind is fundamentally selfish, greedy, slothful and hypocritical. Nation states are but extensions of their populations. I believe that a Third World War is inevitable and therefore, only the dead have seen the end of war. Does the panel agree?
Polly Toynbee
There’s a misanthro – let me go – I have to go to somebody else. There is a misanthropic question, if ever there was. Peter, are we that bad?
Peter Apps
I mean, is it – one of the Junior Officers that I train with told me a great quote, which is that, “Intelligence is a – a measure of intelligence is holding two conflicting ideas, or opposite ideas, simultaneously.” Yes, human beings are all of that. However, I know quite a few and lots of them are lovely, in a very wide variety of ways, and actually, the same is true of nation states. You know, I am alive today to, you know, drink my gin and tonic, because I live in a nation state that went to quite a lot of effort, over quite a long time, over quite a lot of Governments of every political persuasion, to build structures that meant that if someone like me wakes up over the front end of a vehicle and they can’t feel everything below their shoulders, that they can still have a fighting chance of being a productive member of society. You know, I think, you know, most countries like to believe that they stand for doing the right thing on a bad day, even if that opens the door to all kinds of massive – you know, countries like to think, and it’s definitely true of the UK, but also true everywhere else, I think, that they are, at the very least, in the better third of countries worldwide, and you can play off that quite a lot, I think. I mean, you may be right, and the future is a bloody long time and we may have a Third World War in it, but I think there’ll be a lot of effort put in by a lot of people to avoiding it.
Polly Toynbee
Jonathan, are we that bad?
Jonathan Powell
That’s a brilliant answer. I can’t top that. I don’t – the point is that of course, there is the danger of a Third World War, as I described. The question is, can we put our efforts into stopping it happening and can we develop the institutions, the frameworks, most of all the dialogue that does that? And we can. It’s not inevitable there’ll be a Third World War, any more than it’s inevitable that anything else will happen and we should put our efforts into doing that.
Santanu Das
That’s very Hobbesian, but I think on – this is one of the situations where you also get to see the nicer qualities, like vulnerability, helping each other, like, if you read the French accounts of people. So, I think war is one of those strange things that you get to see the good qualities. And yes, if nation state – you know, the one who say that’s selfish, nasty, I think I take, at the moment, a kind of, consolation from New Zealand and the Jacinda, when you see some of the nicer qualities, maybe.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
Indeed, absolutely. I was going to ask if you were a Historian?
Polly Toynbee
A Historian?
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
But I was going to – a Historian.
John Wilson
I am, yes.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
Because Historians tend to believe human beings are irrational and motivated by selfish urges. But what – it’s what separate us from Economists, who think human beings are rational.
Polly Toynbee
Or bad.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
And if you’ve lived with any other human being, you know that’s just – and it’s tough. I’m going to pull out the Tesla/Oppenheimer quote, which is that, “The Third World War will be fought with nukes and the Fourth World War will be fought with rocks.” And I’m going to hope that this essential selfishness of humans will be what will prevent us from having that Third World War. Although I did tell my children one time that the reason why I believe in God is that we have not blown up the planet, given how crazy humans are on a regular basis.
Polly Toynbee
So you’re with Peter, really, that it’s the nuclear bomb that I was brought up in terror of, is actually the safest?
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
In rational actors. You know, the problem with my own thesis would be if a non-state actor, who is a Dominionist and a religious extremist, got a nuclear warhead, or if a religious extremist infiltrated one of the P5 countries, and the Vice President of my country is a religious extremist, who believes that Armageddon would bring the Messiah back. Pray.
Polly Toynbee
There was a young man over there, next. Have you got the microphone? Yeah, and then I’ll come to you next, gentleman in the second row.
Joe Mansour
Hi, Joe Mansour from the Ministry of Defence. I was just wondering what role you think Sub-Saharan Africa would play in any developing World War, or the development of any World War?
Peter Apps
Fantastic question.
Jonathan Powell
Yeah.
Peter Apps
I would like to think they would be one of several voices of sanity. I mean, I used to be based in Southern Africa and if you were knocking around Southern – if you’re a bit older than me and you were knocking around Southern Africa in the early 90s, everyone in South Africa believed that the South African Apartheid system would collapse in a truly genocidal cataclysmic conflict, and there are many things wrong with South Africa. There are many things wrong with Southern Africa. But one of the things that has been massively impressive, to me over the last 15 years, is that virtually, none of those problems ever looked close to being solved through – being solved with military conflict. The same is increasingly true of Latin America. You know, now you – if you go far enough North, you start running into the same wars we have in the Middle East, the Boko Haram stuff, the East Africa, you know, and stuff that you are – you know, that is not – you know, and I would view that as being a part of the Middle Eastern mess, rather than being a part of the African mess. I would like to think that one of the places one might find a bit of last minute leadership, saying do not do this because the rest of us will all suffer, might well be the South in general, and possibly, Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular.
Polly Toynbee
Jonathan, would you agree with that?
Jonathan Powell
Yes, I mean, there are plenty of wars in Africa of their own, and including in Southern Africa and really, if you look at Mozambique, where the RENAMO/FRELIMO conflict started again. But I do think one of the things we don’t have, from the First World War or the Second World War is, global alliances that will all pile in. That is one advantage that we have. So, there isn’t an alliance that cobbles together Africa, etc. So, if you had a World War that started in North Korea, it might involve China and the United States and that would drag in NATO allies and would drag in others in Asia but might not drag in Africa and we might not drag in Latin America. So, I suppose, from that point of view, there is some salvation that there’ll be bits of the world that’ll still be liveable in in those circumstances. But they have plenty of wars of their own, so it’s not that they’re un-bellicosed. They’re just not part of alliances.
Polly Toynbee
Thanks. I’ll get you two to answer the next question. Gentleman here in the white jacket. Who have we got? Sorry, who have we got?
Euan Grant
Yeah, we’re…
Polly Toynbee
Somebody there, who else? Are there any other women anywhere here? Yes, we’ll come to you next. Yes.
Euan Grant
Yeah, thank you. Euan Grant, former Law Enforcement Intelligence Analyst covering the ex-Soviet Union and a former pupil of the school where the Head Teacher’s Professor at the LSE was one of the Sarajevo assassins in 1914. Like Peter, I’ve worked, but on a separate occasion, at Narva in Estonia, where the Head of the Border Guards there looked at me and said, “Do you know what happened here in 1944?” And the clear implication in his – the look on his face was, too many people who’d come from Brussels either have forgotten, or never knew in the first place. My question is, to the rest of the panel, “What do you have to respond to Peter’s comment that, for better or for worse, military power works and that North Korea, with such a tiny economy, is such a major player? And for Peter himself, how do you find the Economists, the people who are not Strategists, like yourself, and are perhaps rational Economists, how do they react to what I regard as a very uncomfortable, but very realistic, message you’re sending? Thank you.
Polly Toynbee
Thank you. Power works.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
Military power…
Polly Toynbee
Military power.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
…is important and power works. I’m not going to say that I believe that we could get every country to disarm. I come from a people, I was born in Louisiana and the reason why segregation and terror were imposed on my people in that area is because we were stripped of guns. Power works, terror works. So, you have to keep a certain amount of weaponry to protect yourself and to…
Polly Toynbee
So, it wouldn’t be…
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
…deter irrationality.
Polly Toynbee
There wouldn’t have been segregation if you had guns?
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
I’m not suggesting that. Several Historians are. If you look at the White Leagues, who merely staged a coup in Louisiana in 1878, if you look at the Battle of Tangipahoa Parish, and if you – the book that I am writing write now is an armed – about an armed militia in Louisiana in 1965, that fought the original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to force the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To a certain extent there are a set of people in this world that the only thing they will understand is power. The only thing they will understand is force and we hope that as we move forward, that group becomes smaller and smaller. But to imagine that they are not there is naïve. So, you have to have force in order to have peace.
Polly Toynbee
How do you feel about that, Santanu?
Santanu Das
Uh-huh, interestingly, it’s immediately after the First World War that people were thinking quite actively about powerlessness, like starting with – I mean, the intellectuals. It’s a very, very small group, but I was thinking of Virginia Woolf when she writes a Room of One’s Own, that we’re just going to talk of the I, “As a woman, I want no country. I have no country. The whole world is my home, because I don’t have power.” Tagore in India is saying exactly the same thing, but they are a very small quota. So, yes, power works. But I think part of our effort to prevent another war is to begin the journey towards powerlessness, or to be happy with a set of powerlessness. But then, that’s quite Utopian. I completely agree with that.
Polly Toynbee
Do you want to come in?
Jonathan Powell
Well, just to say that I don’t think it’s about military power necessarily. There are many countries that have very large armies, who are no particular threat. It’s the – I think the point we’ve been talking about is about nuclear weapons and it’s not necessarily having nuclear weapons. It’s what you threaten to do with them. So, the reason North Korea gets attention is really more to do with terrorism, rather than to do with its large armies, that it is threat – it appears to be threatening the outside world and that’s why people give it attention.
Polly Toynbee
Peter?
Peter Apps
I mean, I think a couple of – right, so military power works, but mainly as long as you don’t use it. You know, as soon as you actually try and use it, you tend to often demonstrate the limitations of it. I mean, the best example of this would be – I mean, yeah, both Napoleon and Hitler built phenomenal military machines and then delivered a masterclass in overstretch. You know, the truth is that military power works, but everyone who has tried to, firstly, take over a country and then used that country to take over the world by military force, has faced a hard stop from everyone else, who would just rather they didn’t. And that is a, you know, that is an abrupt warning to anyone who is – who feels tempted to do that.
On the Economists side, I think one of the things Economists are often very good is spotting the bigger picture. Jim O’Neill, at Goldman Sachs, came up with his BRIC thesis on 9/11 itself, because he was thinking about how Al-Qaeda had taken advantage of the various systems of globalisation, particularly airlines and he thought, who will the real beneficiaries be of globalisation? And his conclusion was that it would be the BRICs. So, I think Economists are often very good at looking past that. Where all the Governments, particularly in the US and UK, were getting very – you know, very much looking at the problem in front of them, they’re looking for everything through a very counterterrorism perspective, he took a step back and, I think, delivered one of the most, kind of, compelling early arguments of how the century was going to progress very quickly from that point. So, I think Economists have a lot going for ‘em.
Polly Toynbee
Well, it looked so then, when you said it. It looks quite a lot so now, in terms of economic powerhouses.
Peter Apps
I mean, up to a point, but if you come…
Polly Toynbee
Brazil, Russia and China, yes. South Africa, not so much.
Peter Apps
Come back to the world in 2100 and you will see a planet where the amount of economic power that has leached from the White Anglo-Saxon Centres to other places will be substantial, even if it hasn’t happened quite as quickly as he thought.
Polly Toynbee
No. There was, who was it, over here, sec – third row.
Anna Willis
Hi, Anna Willis, Chatham House member and Journalist for the Young European, and this is actually a question for all five of you, including Polly. So, you’re all writers, readers and communicators, and so, how much power do you believe that you have with the written word, particularly in relation to what we’ve been discussing with preventing World Wars?
Polly Toynbee
I think The Guardian is a very long way away from ruling the world. I, you know, I think, as a Journalist, one doesn’t think in terms of what power you have. So, when you do look at things like the Daily Mail and think yes, there are other people who do have huge cultural influence and you hope you have a little yourself. But I think you mislead yourself very quickly as a Journalist if you delude yourself into thinking you are writing because you are influencing the world, as opposed to describing the world as you think it is, or you think you seek the report.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
And I think that academe is probably the worst place to be if you want power and influence. As a Historian, I have the power to shape worldviews, but the thing that I’m always conscious of is that half of the students that come into my class will be Liberal, half will be Conservative and then as they go out, half will be Liberal, and half will be Conservative. People will take what they need and their confirmation biases will lead them to what they believe. If I can nudge them…
Anna Willis
And do you…?
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
…a little bit, yeah.
Anna Willis
Do you think you do, too?
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
I think I do, too.
Anna Willis
Do we all cherry pick our favourite facts?
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
I think we do, too. But I think being an academe means that I am more conscious of it and feel more guilty about it and I have colleagues who will be louder and more obnoxious and obstreperous about telling me when I’m cherry picking.
Polly Toynbee
Oh, right. Anu, how influential do you feel?
Santanu Das
No, I largely agree with, you know, Selika, as my subject is English literature. So, I hope that, kind of, half would be Liberal, half would be Conservative and the leave is slightly more than half would be Liberal. Just before the discussion, you mentioned that Cassandra, like the academics sound like Cassandras, like we see it coming and yet, we can’t do anything, and I think that’s a wonderful image.
Polly Toynbee
And you’ve been very powerful in your time.
Jonathan Powell
Well, yeah, powerful…
Polly Toynbee
Maybe you still are, because…
Jonathan Powell
No, there’s a power to persuade and there’s a power to explain and that belongs to those Politicians who are really able to lead. If you’re in power, if you go into Number 10 Downing Street, you actually have very fewer levers on power. You have very few Civil Servants. You have very little by way of budget. The only way you can lead is by inspiring other people and you have to do that with words, whether they’re your Cabinet colleagues or the country as a whole. So, whether you’re a Politician, or frankly a Soldier, trying to lead men either, it’s all about the power to persuade and the power to explain, just done in different ways.
Polly Toynbee
Reuters is powerful.
Peter Apps
Well, I have a backdoor key to the Reuters website, so I know exactly how many people read each one of my columns, and believe me, it has not improved my self-esteem. So, I mean, which I think, in itself, is quite an important point, which is that it used to be that if you got a job as Global Affairs Columnist, Reuters, you know, Commentator The Guardian, that bought – that was the price of a ticket to – or an MP, or whatever, to reaching a large number of people. I think, though, that is gradually breaking down. It’s not breaking down completely, by any stretch of the imagination. But I think the, sort of, democratised nature of social media means that it is much harder to say that – you know, there are very few must read Columnists on the planet now, with the greatest respect to Polly, or at least who are viewed that way, compared to, say, 20 years ago. You know, there’s a lot more people and it’s a lot more different outlook. So, I look at what’s getting read and linked to – you know, they may be smaller websites and they may not be true. You know, there’s – you’ve got a much broader form of democratisation.
I think where things make a difference is – I mean, and this probably goes for being a Politician or a Soldier or a Journalist, there are times when being in the right – in a particular place at a particular time, means that you can achieve effect. The only times I’ve ever achieved anything, as a Journalist, are when I have been in a place that means that I have been able to say that something happened and nobody else has been able to stop me, because I was there. Particularly a good example, the killing of 17 aid workers in Eastern Sri Lanka in 2006. A month before I broke my neck, so I’m not that much reporting like that. But I was there. I was able to demonstrate, not quite who killed them, but that at the time they were killed, ‘cause I was in the autopsy, that a certain – well, the Sri Lankan military, held that area of the town. That had a very limited, but real, effect, because that allowed people like – you know, much higher up various chains, to say okay, we can work from that. And if a Journalist had not gone to the trouble of going there – it’s one of the reasons why Journalists get killed so quickly. It’s one of the reasons why people kill Journalists, ‘cause they want to shut them up. Journalists who stay this is how the world should be, probably achieve very little most of the time. Journalists who say this is what happened, and also can give a voice to people who would not otherwise have a voice, particularly people in the sharp end of conflicts, can, on occasion, change things very limitedly. And it didn’t make a huge difference. 30,000 people died on a beach about two – three years later. But that’s where you could at least change history, ‘cause history is just people doing stuff and people who are powerful one day, are not powerful the next. So, there are windows where you can achieve stuff.
Polly Toynbee
Now, can I have some advice as to how long we can go on for? ‘Cause we started late. What…?
Member
Ten minutes.
Polly Toynbee
Oh, another ten? Okay.
Member
We’ll give you an extension.
Polly Toynbee
Oh, fine, because we all want a drink. Right, who have we got here? Somebody at the back and then somebody here at the front.
Chris
Oh, hi. Oh, sorry. My name’s Chris. I’m a political economy student from King’s College London, so fellow person from the Chair there. But my question is basically, so, we have this world, which has the 14 points and it’s got, sort of like, a collection of nation states, which obviously – so, I haven’t really asked questions like this before, so I’m quite nervous. But my basic question…
Polly Toynbee
Keep going.
Chris
…is, we have nation states, we obviously have institutions, which are designed to bring about peace, like the League of Nations, United Nations, NATO, SEATO, but obviously, World Wars still continue and everything and conflicts still continue. And one of the points of conflicts, which we talked about, was America versus China, which is obviously, a rising power, but it’s also one which has emerged after we’ve had the, sort of, the heteronomic world, which is obviously Western oriented around America after the collapse of Communism. So, obviously, you went from a bipolar world to a heteronomic world. But I think that what we really should be asking is, how we can have a multipolar world. So, rather than establishing institutions, which are supposed to encompass all countries, because I believe that as nation states, that’s why we always have the issue of vetoes limiting their effectiveness, rather we should have a multipolar sort of setup of nation states, where they’re obviously allowed to act independently of one another, without, sort of, imposing the rules and so forth. So, I think what the West often tries to do and leads to conflict. So, I think that instead of looking to Woodrow Wilson and the 14 points, perhaps we should consider a person like Gorbachev, who envisioned a multipolar world, where you don’t really have predomination of one style of governance over the rest of the world. I was just wondering what you guys thought about that.
Polly Toynbee
How do you feel about that?
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
There’s a lot there. Peace and history of the world and be specific, yes. We are in a multipolar world. We live in this post-Cold War multipolar world and that’s what makes the 14 points both interesting and frightening, because applying the mult – applying the 14 points to a world where multiple countries have nuclear warheads is quite a scary exercise. Your question really is asking, how can we have a world without super powers? And that is a harder question. Human nature has, and human history, has moved towards super powers, starting with the Greeks and the Greek nation states.
As – one of the things that the UN does is it reins in the super powers. Rather than have a colonial world, like we had in the 19th Century, our default has moved to the idea that countries should have self-determination, countries should have some sort of control. What you articulated would not have been articulated in this place in 1856. So, I would say individual education and these contexts, these cross-cultural, cross-country contexts, may not replace super powers. We may always have super powers but will lead us to that more peaceful world.
Polly Toynbee
That’s optimistic. I’m going to ask just one person to put a – we get more questions in and one person to answer each one.
John Warren
John Warren, Physician and member. At Versailles, a lot of the elected leaders had considerable intellectual prowess and yet, you still had the treaty as it was. What would some future Versailles look like if a lot of the leaders were elected on the basis of them being populist and widespread exposure to low quality TV programmes, say, like The Apprentice?
Polly Toynbee
Alright Jonathan, that’s for you. Would a Versailles type treaty drawn up now be significantly worse, or as you’re suggesting, that you had these big brains and they came up with something not so good?
Jonathan Powell
Well, it would certainly be a lot shorter. If Trump was negotiating it, you’d get it in however many words it is you’d get into a tweet. So, it would – luckily, actually, it’s not leaders who normally negotiate treaties. It’s people lower down the food chain who do it. So, you might still have intellectual input. I don’t think the problem with Versailles was the intellectual fire power of the leaders. It was more the – their inability to see beyond the self-interest of their nations and see the rather longer-term mutual self-interest that might’ve led to a treaty that might’ve been more effective at preventing another war quite so rapidly. Because although we’ve been talking about another World War coming, it is remarkable how long we’ve managed to avoid one this time, and that is, in part, because the people who remember the last war are no longer really with us. So, we have managed to get beyond the memory that stop – prevented the Second World War from happening for a long period of time. Now we have to actually have the understanding of why the institutions that were created after the war were important, which is why I think the EU, for example, is so important and why our continuing membership is important, long after people have forgotten about the Second World War.
So, the negotiation will be done by different people, not by the leaders. So, the fact that Trump is President makes no difference to the treaty. What we do need though, is leaders who have some sense that self-interest of a nation is more than just the very short-term interests of that nation and has some rather longer-term components.
Polly Toynbee
Thank you. Who else have we got? Woman right at the back there and a man there and that’d better be enough, I think.
Abigail Watson
Hi, Abigail Watson, the Remote Warfare Programme.
Polly Toynbee
Can you hold it right up? Hello. Oh, yeah.
Abigail Watson
I just wondered, Jonathan, your talk and the comments from leaders recently, have focused on major powers. But I wonder how much that is important when non-state actors joined the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also, the reason that the US is now deployed in, like, 147 countries across the world. Do – should we be looking to large states to work out how to prevent World Wars, or should we be looking to non-state actors?
Jonathan Powell
Well, I was answering a question about the repeat of a World War and I don’t think that it is likely that non-state actors that aren’t groups will lead to another World War. They will probably lead – if we have managed to avoid a World War, they’ll certainly lead to many more dead people and therefore, we should be concentrating increasingly, on internal wars, because it is more – more people are dying in internal wars than they are wars between states. And one of the interesting things that’s happened is, the UN has been unable to deal with the role of mediating in those, sort of conflicts. The UN is not allowed into any conflict inside a state. It only really operates in failed states, places like Libya, South Sudan or Somalia. So, there needs to be a better calibre of NGOs, individuals, non-state actors, who can go into those conflicts between armed groups and Governments, where so many people are dying, and do something about ending them. But that means they have to have the resources, they have to have the people with the skills to do it and that’s the thing that’s lacking.
Polly Toynbee
Last question over there and then I’m going to ask each of you to do one minute each, either in response to that or just your final thought.
Tom Brown
Tom Brown. One quick question about institutions and the role that – and I invite any one of you to answer this, the role that NATO should be playing going forward? I mean, it was a construct as part of the Cold War. Does it still have a relevance to play within the context of the great power conflicts that may be coming up, or is it actually as likely to be a source of instability, in the coming years, rather than a source of stability that it provided during the 60s, 70s and 80s?
Polly Toynbee
So, you feel it has done good in the past. You’re not an anti-NATO person?
Tom Brown
So, it did a brilliant job during the Cold War. Does it still have the same sort of role to play today?
Polly Toynbee
Very good question to end up with. So, each of you, I’m going to ask you each.
Selika Ducksworth-Lawton
Okay. I would say that NATO still has a role to play. I think that we are closer to the proxy wars and an asymmetrical war will be proxy wars and NATO has been involved in a number of those. The question for me is what will the United States’ role, in the future, be in NATO? Will Germany leave NATO? Will the UK? Will the EU? Right now, the Major General, who is in charge, always comes from the US. Will that continue? So, the question is, where will NATO go? I believe that NATO will always be here. As long as there’s a Fulda Gap, I believe there will be a NATO and a need for a NATO.
Polly Toynbee
Alright.
Santanu Das
Exactly.
Polly Toynbee
Do you feel as positive?
Santanu Das
I think it’s, kind of, how NATO will, kind of – whether it can evolve and how it will evolve and that will, kind of, determine its, kind of, existence or its utility in the changing world, rather than what it is at the moment.
Jonathan Powell
I think that NATO depends on the promise of United States defence within Europe and the problem for NATO at the moment is that has been undermined by President Trump coming in and saying that he wouldn’t necessarily defend the Baltic States that you were just talking about. So, unless that conviction that the United States is going to come to the defence of Europe is reapplied in a convincing way, then NATO certainly won’t work. But as I said earlier about conflicts, it – none of these things are inevitable, but nor are they necessarily going to happen. They would depend on political will, that depends on people. So, it depends on whether the United States, as a whole, is prepared to make that commitment to Europe in the future, or not.
Polly Toynbee
Peter, you get the last word.
Peter Apps
Okay, I mean, I would say, I’d tie together this and Abigail’s question. I think NATO is, you know, invaluable and it’s a good thing we’ve got it, not least because it puts clearly defined lines in the sand and that makes life a lot easier and it also makes life a lot easier for the Russians when they are working out what they can and cannot do. If the Russians had to look at Europe and work out which countries they could interfere with and which countries they couldn’t and they had to work that out themselves, then the odds of them making a cataclysmic error would quite possibly be a lot higher. Because, to come back to Abigail’s point, the First World War was not started by big countries.
The First World War was a limited conflict in the Balkans that ran out of control. I mean, Jonathan’s right, a non-state actor probably isn’t necessarily going to start a Third World War, but it might destabilise a country or a region in a way that sucks in a bunch of other countries, that then make mistakes. I mean, you can see this is where we’re skirting around in Syria. So, I think NATO, is, which is essentially a structure of Western democracies plus two in North America, that say you’ll go to war with all of us if you invade one of us, is one of the very few clearly understood facts in the world, and I think that makes life a lot easier.
Polly Toynbee
Very good. Thank you very much indeed. Thank all of you too for your excellent questions and for the seven points, which have come out of today, which were very interesting. So, let’s [applause] congratulate you as well. If you could all just wait a moment, so we can get out first.
Member
If you want to just all go to get drinks first and then we can,
Peter Apps
Yeah, alcohol and stuff.
Polly Toynbee
Really? Okay.
