Why Is America Going It Alone?

HUGH EAKIN

Margaret, it’s been wonderful to have your series of pieces over the last couple years bringing historical perspective on tectonic events happening. I should say we’re recording on Monday morning, August 18, and some of the events we discussed may even evolve in the coming hours and days.

I want to get right away to your most recent article about alliances and how they end. But before we do so, I thought we might start with what has happened this weekend: Alaska. Here we have a U.S. president welcoming a Russian adversary on the red carpet, and now today, as we speak, European allies rushing to Washington to try to pick up the pieces. How should we think about this?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think it’s a question we’re all struggling with. Very little has come out about what was actually said, although there have been rumors and some leaks, I think. But it was a very strange occasion. It’s unlike, I think, most summits I’ve ever been able to think of. It was not prepared. It happened at very short notice, and usually summits take a great deal of preparation. They take experts, they bring along people who really know the subjects. And this seems to have had a very ad hoc flavor to it.

And the optics were really, I think, striking. I mean, [U.S. President Donald Trump] greeted [Russian President Vladimir Putin] as a long lost friend. Aircraft flew overhead. He shook his hand several times, he took him off in the car. That is an extraordinary way to greet someone who started a war unprovoked in Ukraine. And then the press conference at the end, I found very weird. The meeting didn’t go as long as it was scheduled for. There was very little at the press conference that was said about the meeting. And President Putin spoke first, which is unusual—normally the president of the United States would be in charge of the meeting. And Putin spoke for much longer than President Trump was going to speak for.

So what does it all mean? It’s very, very difficult to understand. I mean, I have a very nasty feeling that this is going to turn out like Munich in 1938 and result in the betrayal of Ukraine. But we won’t know, I suppose, until after meetings have taken place. There’ll be subsequent meetings in Washington and perhaps elsewhere. So the outlines will emerge, I think, fairly slowly.

HUGH EAKIN

And a key point here was, coming into this summit, we had the U.S. president saying, “We have to have a ceasefire,” and this was the sort of starting point. And we have emerged, at least at this point, in which that position has been entirely given up. And there’s a call for what Putin has said, “Let’s have a comprehensive agreement,” which could be months and months of negotiation, buying Russia the time that it wants. How does this compare to 1938? What was it that happened at Munich that we sort of have this idea in our head of appeasement?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

What happened at Munich was an attempt—and I don’t think it was a dishonorable attempt—by the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, with support from a lot of his own cabinet and the British public, and also support in France, to avoid another catastrophic war in Europe. I mean, these were people who had come through the First World War. They’d seen what it had cost Europe. Many of them had lost family members. Some of them had actually been injured in the fighting. So they knew what war was like, and they were doing their best to avoid it. And unfairly or not, they were prepared to sacrifice a part of Czechoslovakia.

What Chamberlain thought he had got was appeasing the appetites of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler. And he came back to London bearing this infamous bit of paper in which the British and the Germans pledged never to go to war with each other again. And of course he didn’t get it. But what he was also doing, to be fair to him, was upping British defenses. He didn’t trust Hitler. He thought this was the last chance to try and make peace. But he was understanding that he was dealing with someone who was untrustworthy. And that of course turned out immediately to be the case in 1939, when Hitler, in spite of his promises, annexed what was left of Czechoslovakia. So I think it was a meeting in which a lot was given away, but it was I think more of a careful meeting and a worry about what would happen next and preparations being made for that.

HUGH EAKIN

A more direct parallel, it seems also is a question of territory, and the indication or intimation from the United States that it’s prepared to have Ukraine give up territory in the supposed interest that this will resolve the conflict. And give up territory that it has fought valiantly for for more than three years and which Russia has been unable to conquer on the battlefield, which may seem astonishing. Is there a history there that we should be concerned about?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think we should be very concerned. And in fact, the Czechoslovak example in 1938 is a good one, because what Czechoslovakia gave up when it gave up the Sudetenland, which was in the western part of the country, was extremely well-prepared defences against a possible German attack and a great deal of its very efficient arms industry.

And if Ukraine gives up the territory that Russia’s demanding—some of which Russia is not even occupying—it’s also giving up well-prepared defensive positions. And it’s giving up territory, which has, pre-war, included a lot of Ukraine’s natural resources and industries. And what strikes me about what the American position seems to be, as it’s emerging, is that it’s really accepting the Russian interpretation of the war and prepared to go a long way to meet Russian demands, and seeing Ukraine as something of an obstacle in the road to some sort of peace.

And President Trump a while ago was saying that he was fed up with Russia, and he was going to put sanctions on, and that talk seems to have disappeared. And he seems to be accepting, and his administration seems to be accepting the idea that somehow the war just started or that somehow it was Ukraine’s fault, when it was an open act of aggression by Russia against Ukraine. And even this talk of land swaps—there’s nothing to swap. What Putin has done is take land that belongs to Ukraine. He’s violated internationally recognized borders. So there’s no swap here. What it would be is simply confirming conquest by one power over another power and seizing that power’s land, which is a very, very dangerous precedent for the rest of the world.

HUGH EAKIN

I think this brings us directly to your wonderful piece from about a month ago, “Making America Alone Again,” in which you were exploring the sort of astonishing reversal of a way of dealing with allies and the Western alliance that has endured for 80 years. I would love to understand the current events in light of your analysis. And it seems that not only the Russia summit, but we have a spat with India—another ally that five administrations have cultivated assiduously—now being trashed with higher tariffs, I believe, than China, which was the original source of the supposed reason for having a tariff war. How do we read this new era in which allies are treated in this way, and what are the implications?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

It’s not difficult to work out where it’s coming from, but to understand it, I find difficult. I mean, part of it, I think, is an impulse to reassert American power and make the United States central in the world, the dominant power in the world, on which all other powers have to depend or all other powers, including China, have to deal. It’s part of the “make America great again.” I think there’s a strand, also, of American isolationism in there: “We don’t need other nations. We can pick and choose who we deal with. We won’t be obliged to deal with anyone.”

But I think also, and this is what makes it particularly confusing, I think a lot of it depends on the preferences and whims and changeable attitudes of one man, and that is the president. The whole sudden switch about India is extraordinary because the United States, as you pointed out, has spent at least 20 years trying to gradually detach India from its friendship with Russia, and suddenly they’re casting it back into Russia’s arms. The Indians have just announced that they’re going to be trading with Russia more, getting more Russian oil. And this is presumably not a result that a lot of Americans, even the MAGA Americans or the isolationist Americans, would want.

And I speak as a Canadian, we are absolutely dumbfounded. I mean we have been a very reliable ally. Of course we’ve had our differences; allies do have their differences because they have different national interests. But we’ve been very reliable. We’ve fought with the United States in a number of wars. We joined the coalition in Afghanistan, for example. We fought in Korea. We have been, I think, a loyal ally, and we’re absolutely bewildered by this. Why alienate us when you’re already getting from us what you need? And we would of course negotiate on tariffs because we have to, but you’re getting our raw materials, you’re getting access to our water.

And so it’s really extraordinary. I mean, I have not been able to think—and I’ve consulted all my fellow historians who I’ve talked to—about another example where a power gets rid of dependable allies so cavalierly. And we all do—we get rid of people we don’t trust anymore. We no longer count them as allies. But to get rid of ones that you can trust seems to me really damaging to the United States. I mean, it’s going to need friends. It still is a great power—perhaps not as great as it once was, and not as dominant as it once was, but it’s going to need friends. It’s going to need other countries to work with. And it seems to be making it more and more difficult for that to happen.

HUGH EAKIN

The history here is so interesting, and this was sort of the starting point of your piece, that there weren’t historical examples that could sort of make sense of these current moves by the United States. And it really asks one to look more closely about how alliances are formed and what is their purpose and why do they endure? And many of these lessons appear to be ignored right now. But just walk us briefly through some of the historic examples which show alliances have broken over time when they no longer serve a purpose.

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Alliances, I think—I mean, if you think of it in terms of human relationships, they’re rather like any human relationship, like a friendship or like a business partnership. They rely on a certain amount of trust. They rely on a certain amount of melding of objectives, even though each party will have different long-term interests. But they can be sometimes brought together, and countries and individuals can work together even if they have differences over where their interests lie.

I mean alliances, I think, in the past and in the present come together often to provide common defense against an enemy. I mean, it’s not always about war. Alliances come together for other purposes. They come together to try and prevent wars from happening. They come together to try and keep control over a troublesome nation that is threatening everyone. And so you get different sorts of alliances, but the most common, I think, in history has been a defensive alliance against a threatened enemy. And if and when that enemy is defeated, then the alliance does sometimes fall to pieces, but not always.

I mean when there’s been a very great conflict, I think people in an alliance do begin to worry about what next. They don’t want another conflict like this. I mean, after the Napoleonic Wars, the Grand Alliance that defeated Napoleon gradually transformed into the Congress of Europe, which tried to smother revolution—you can disagree or not with that—tried to deal with issues that could have caused war because they had just come through a war, and they didn’t want to have another one. And the same thing happened after the First World War, when the victorious Allies tried to set up a new international order, set up the League of Nations, with the hope that it would prevent conflict like the war that had just come through.

And so alliances can exist to project into the future the vision of a world that you might want, and they can exist sometimes to try and prevent the causes of a conflict. And so they are, I think, very important. And yes, they do fall to pieces. And there’ll always be differences, and there’ll always be tensions. And even Canada and the United States, or the United States and Britain, which have been very close allies, have had their moments. But the alliance has lasted. And probably, I mean, I always think, it’s like again, another human relationship, like a marriage for example, or a partnership. You have to work at it. You can’t just say, “Now we’ve got an alliance and we can relax. It’s all going to be okay.” You keep working at it. You keep trying to understand each other. You keep building those links, which are so important.

HUGH EAKIN

And you have some great examples of this. And one could imagine a world that didn’t have [British Prime Minister Winston Churchill] and [U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt], but two other leaders, that alliance might not have worked so well. The United States was very isolationist coming into the war, and it took a lot of effort to bring all of that about. And these human relations are maybe part of the kind of question around the current moment where we don’t see a lot of that between the current U.S. president and the core allies in Europe or Canada or Mexico, or for that matter, the Asian allies.

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Yeah, I think human relations can be very important. I mean, sometimes I think alliances depend too much on human relations, because you’d like to think the alliance is strong enough that it will be carried forward by all sorts of people and by mutual respect between countries. But they can be extremely important. And I think Winston Churchill’s—who was the prime minister of Britain from 1940 onwards—relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, who of course was the president for so much of that period, that relationship was critical. And the two of them managed to deal with issues that came up between them because they trusted each other. I mean, often there were big disagreements over which theater of war they should deal with first. Should they deal more with Japan and defeat it first, or should they defeat Germany first? How should they deal with both those countries? What should the strategies be? How should they deal with the war at sea? All of these things. How should they deal with Joseph Stalin who became a new ally to them when Germany invaded Russia in 1941?

And so that personal relationship, I think, was very important. The two men corresponded a lot. They talked to each other. Churchill laid himself out, as he said, to woo the American president, he said, like a suitor. And he did. He understood just how important it was. And Roosevelt responded to it. He always played his cards very close to his chest, but I think he did establish a relationship with Churchill, and I think it was a very important relationship.

HUGH EAKIN

And we can think of so many of those pairings throughout the late twentieth century, and [U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger] and [Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai or [British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher] and [U.S. President Ronald Reagan]. And here in our current moment, I think of an interview that President Trump gave to the BBC, I think a month ago, in which he said, “I trust almost [nobody].” Which I think was a quite candid comment of where he sits in these relations.

Is this part of the essence of alliances that we are losing now, that there is this breakdown in trust? And you do see the European allies making this effort to establish some kind of rapport, or Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, or your Canadian prime minister. So we have these efforts on one side. But can an alliance work where it’s not mutual?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

It’s very hard, I think. And it’s not just the leaders who count—it’s the people who work in state departments, foreign offices. It’s the business people who work with each other. I mean, I’ve been talking to a lot of Canadians, and we’ve always, for obvious reasons, laid ourselves out to get on well with the United States. We have to. You’re much bigger and more powerful than us, and you are right there on our borders.

And I think there’s a feeling that in Washington, with what’s been happening in the State Department or the National Security Council and elsewhere, those who understood Canada and had relationships with Canadian diplomats and Canadian business people, have been fired or have been marginalized. And I think that is going to be costly. Perhaps more to Canada than to the United States. But if any relationship is going to work, you need to understand what it is that motivates the other. And it’s not always just naked self-interest. I mean, I think too many around President Trump, and I think the president himself, seem to think that everyone is motivated by economic gain. It’s all a business deal. And that really doesn’t get at what motivates people in many cases. I mean, I don’t think President [Volodymyr] Zelensky of Ukraine is motivated by looking for a good business deal. He’s motivated, as many Ukrainians are, by a desire to save their country. And that’s very different.

And I think without that knowledge and understanding, which you can’t develop quickly—it develops over the years—it makes it much more difficult to have good relations. I mean, even simple understandings; I mean, when the British and Americans first started having to really deal with each other in the Second World War, the Americans felt the British were being snobs and looking down on them. And the British probably were snobs, but also felt the Americans wouldn’t listen to advice. I mean, these things caused tensions. And they were gradually worked out, and they got to know each other. But you can’t just do it overnight.

HUGH EAKIN

There’s such an interesting example here with Canada itself, and I thought maybe you could talk about this. There was a survey this summer that had this astonishing finding that I think close to 60 percent of Canadians now view the United States both as the most important ally and the country they fear most. And this kind of paradox I believe is also true now in Mexico in the same survey. And one can imagine the Danes coming to the same conclusion, and perhaps Germany and the United Kingdom as well, certainly in terms of how the United States is dealing with Ukraine. What happens when the leader of an alliance—of course the United States being the dominant power, not just building these alliances, but really running them through the postwar era—what happens when that leader becomes an antagonist within the alliance?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Hugh, that’s what we’re all asking ourselves. The feeling in Ottawa, I’ve heard from people, our capital city, is one of complete shock. That everything we had based our foreign policy on, all the assumptions we’ve been making, has suddenly gone away. It’s ground shifting under our feet. And I think we’re really bewildered by it. I mean, I think there’s a lot of thinking going on, and there’s certainly a lot of discussion. But where do we go and what do we do?

And I think what gets us particularly nervous is the unpredictability. And again, I think it comes from the president, but there are others, again, around him. And then we don’t know who he’s taking advice from. Is he taking advice from Laura Loomer? Is she suddenly deciding that Canada is something she doesn’t like? We just don’t know. It’s very hard to make policy when you don’t have any surety that agreements are going to be kept. You don’t know where things are going to happen.

I mean, we’ve been doing trade negotiations with the United States for many years. And over the years, we’ve developed great respect for American trade negotiators because they’ve known their briefs, as we have. And now it’s not clear who’s in charge and who’s doing the negotiating, and how much they actually know about the issues. And so I think we do see the United States as an ally, but we also see it as one that, increasingly, we just don’t know where it’s going. And that’s a very uncomfortable position for us, certainly. Maybe not for the United States, but it certainly is for us.

HUGH EAKIN

You have this wonderful line in your piece, I think you said, “Canada has never been a threat to the United States, except in hockey.” And there is a sense that, where does this animosity come from? But we see that over and over again with other allies. And here, I think, comes back to your point that alliances are built on more than just a particular strategic goal—that the ones that endure have something else. And here the paradox is, the Western alliance is one of the most successful in history in this regard. That there was more to it than just power. There was this ideal of Western democracy—values, we might say. And I wonder, are we in an era now where this idea of values is really declining, that there isn’t a shared, at least obvious shared system of values that are governing the current decision-making or direction in which the United States seems to be leading its interests?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

It’s very hard, I think, at the moment for those of us who are outside the United States to know what it is that the United States wants the world to be like. From various statements that are made, it seems to be that the administration is thinking in terms of a new world of spheres of influence, where three or four dominant powers dominate their own surroundings, and somehow, goodness knows how, deal with each other in a way that doesn’t lead to war. But it’s not, I think, a formula for a very stable international order. Spheres of influence have always in history tended to lead to clashes. And the spheres of influence are going to have different interests, and they’re going to compete to gain in the borderlands, the shatter zones, as historians often call them. In the borderlands, they’re going to try and establish dominance or protect themselves. And there will always be the uncommitted countries who may swing between one or the other, or be wooed by one or the other, which will also lead to instability.

But it’s very hard to see any sort of coherent vision. I mean, there’s a series of statements. You get tweets; they don’t really explain what the policy is. I mean, you only have so many characters, and they seem to be more statements or headlines than substantive explanations. And so I’m not sure. And I don’t know how sure you in the United States are about what the United States’ vision of the world actually is. As I say, it seems to be some sort of spheres of influence and dominance by great powers. If so, I think that is potentially a very dangerous way of dividing the world up.

HUGH EAKIN

Another perhaps different historic strand to this that you also pointed out in your piece is that the United States does have a particular history in coming late to the world of alliances and European diplomacy. And because of its geography, was able to survive much longer into the modern era as, you might say, isolated power. And that belated emergence, I wonder if that plays into this strand of American thinking that continues today to be isolationist, skeptical of entanglements. Do you see that as part of the dynamic now?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Yeah, I mean, I think that countries, much like individuals, have memories. And we have visions of ourselves and we have ideas about where we came from. Maybe not always very coherent ones, but we do. And I think the United States has a very strong isolationist strand. I mean, you go back to the famous warning of George Washington against entangling alliances. And the fact that the United States was born in an act of rebellion against a European power and a suspicion which was there, and I think continued to be there, of Europe and its machinations and its attempts to get back the rebellious colonies. I think that has shaped American attitudes toward the world.

The growth of U.S. power has made it possible for the United States to need the world less than other countries might. And I think you also have geography—that Canada on the whole has never been a threat. I mean, the United States has been a threat to us; we remember a few invasion attempts from the United States. But we have never really threatened to invade the United States. Mexico has not been a threat, not really, to the United States. And those two huge oceans have kept the United States safe. And so I think geography plus history have played a part. It’s not the only strand in American thinking, but it’s certainly a very important part.

But the development of technology, the changes in armaments, the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles are now increasingly fast—subsonic and supersonic missiles, the use of space—means that the relative isolation of the United States is much less than it was. And that while the United States, or the people in the United States, may prefer to disregard and ignore the rest of the world, the rest of the world is not going to disregard and ignore them. And I do think that’s something that in the future is going to matter more and more to the United States.

HUGH EAKIN

And the more important parallel here might be the British Empire in the nineteenth century, which as you described, discovered the vulnerability of not having strong alliances. Can you just tell us a little bit about that?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

There’s a very good phrase that Paul Kennedy, the international historian at Yale University, uses, and that’s “imperial overstretch.” You build a great big empire, but that means you have a lot more to defend, and you have to spend a lot linking it up. You have to look after the supply routes, in the case of the British Empire, largely by sea, although later on air became important.

And the United States with its worldwide commitments, I think, is feeling something of that burden, that overstretch. And understandably, I think, a lot of Americans are saying, why are we doing all this? Why do we have troops stationed in South Korea? Why do we have troops in Germany? Why do we have all these bases around the world? Why are we propping up these countries and giving them assistance and so on? And I do think that empires reach a point where the burden begins to be too much, whether it’s a psychological burden, people at home just don’t want an empire and they don’t want their children dying in its defense, and the financial burden that it gets to be, or it can be, very expensive. Empires are not always profitable. And what the British were finding was that they had huge responsibilities, and that they had stirred up resentment and opposition, and that a great deal of the world didn’t like them and wasn’t prepared to cooperate with them. They reacted by, in fact, building alliances and settling differences with some of their most prominent rivals.

At the moment, the United States doesn’t seem to be doing that, although I think President Trump hopes for some sort of relationship with China and seems to have some sort of relationship with Russia. So possibly what the United States will do is begin to try and look for allies to take some of the burden away from managing this very large global—it is in some ways an empire—but these very large global interests it has. And from the sound of it he would like, and those again, advising him, some of them would like to withdraw U.S. involvement. Some have talked about getting out of NATO, bringing the troops back from South Korea. So I think it’s going to be a very interesting period in U.S. foreign policy, and in fact in international relations, because it’s not at all clear how this is going to play out. I mean, we’re living in a time of great uncertainty and a time of transition, but we’re not sure toward what.

HUGH EAKIN

I wanted to ask you about your previous piece, which was a longer essay you did in the magazine right after the U.S. election. And this was of course before we had seen any of the second Trump administration, so you were raising a series of questions. And one of them, given all the focus at the time on the Trump administration was, well, how will the order react? Will it withstand all sorts of new pressures? And I think as you put it, a more important question may be how well American democracy and the international order can withstand the stress. And I can’t help but wonder how, now seven months into the new administration, you assess that test has gone.

MARGARET MACMILLAN

It’s always hard when you’re in the middle of events, but I think I’m echoing a fairly common view that there has been much more change and more radical change both within the United States and in its relationship with the world than we had expected. And we knew, I think, that if Donald Trump was elected to be president for a second term, that he would bring about change, that he would try and do some of the things that he felt he hadn’t been able to do in his first term. But I think I speak for a lot of people—I mean you may have foreseen this, I didn’t—that it would be quite so quick and quite so radical. And that the federal government itself would’ve come under such attack and so many of its functions would have been compromised by very rapid change. I mean, if you want to speak to someone on a particular subject, it’s not clear you can find them easily. They may have been moved, they may have been fired. There may be someone in the office who doesn’t know anything.

And I think the worsening relationships of the United States with its allies, again, has happened more quickly. Speaking as a Canadian, we, I don’t think, imagine that we would have an existential threat, which we take seriously. I mean, I don’t think if people say, well, it’s just a joke when President Trump talks about the 51st state. That’s not how we see it. And I think we are very, very concerned. You’ve probably talked to other Canadians, but it’s something we haven’t had to face. And I think the Europeans are sharing some of the same concerns and bewilderment. And I guess we’re all wondering where next and what if?

That’s, I suppose, partly why we go back to history because history doesn’t offer clear lessons, it never has done, I think. But what history offers is sort of what ifs. What is likely to happen in circumstances like these? There have been other examples in the past of moments of great transition ,of people saying the old order is dead. And we had it after the Napoleonic Wars. We had it after the First World War. And it is happening. And I think a lot of the international institutions will not survive, or survive in a very much weakened form. And I fear that we’re heading into a world where power matters. And if you’re a country, you try and get away with whatever you can get away with. And that seems to me a disastrous way of running the world because it will provide, as it is already providing, conflicts which go on and on and on. I mean, we focus perhaps on what’s happening in the Middle East and Ukraine at the moment, but there are all those other conflicts which are unresolved and show very little sign of being resolved.

HUGH EAKIN

You could say, well, the United States hasn’t withdrawn from NATO. It’s forced the other members to cough up much more, NATO defense spending by country is higher than it’s been ever. The president, for all his bluster, really does want peace deals. He covets the [Nobel] Peace Prize. Maybe something good will come of all this disruption and chaos. Is there a merit to that? Certainly there were issues within the existing order. Things could have been better, NATO members could have spent more on defense, could have been more prepared for an invasion of Europe. Is there another way of looking at this moment of uncertainty?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Well, there is that argument—yes, but, say what you will, President Trump has done this and done that. I agree that NATO was in trouble because its members were not spending enough on defense, apart from the United States. Although a lot of U.S. defense expenditure was on things not connected with NATO—Americans have other interests around the world than just merely NATO. You can say that it is important for NATO to have spent more and that President Trump has pushed them in that direction. But I think it comes with a cost.

I think there were other ways of pushing NATO members to up their defense spending. But what has happened, I think, the way he has done it, and the public way in which he has—I think, unnecessarily in my view, but of course people will disagree with me—unnecessarily alienated long-standing allies has left its mark. And I think a lot of European nations are thinking, and Canada’s thinking that, yes, we will remain in NATO. We’re going to make other arrangements. We’re going to make agreements among ourselves. We have realized that we can no longer count on the United States. And so you can agree with the goal of getting NATO to increase its defense spending, but the way in which it was done, I think, has been needlessly harmful.

HUGH EAKIN

As we enter what could perhaps be an era of a post-alliance world, in which the alliance, maybe it continues, but in a less manifestly strong way, so it’s just existing the way of the United Nations or other international institutions that have far less power—what would that world look like? And are there other moments in history where you could say, well, there really wasn’t a strong order contributing to, whether it’s more conflict or other kinds of competition?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

There are other examples. I mean, I think the power of example or precedent is very important. So if you have a world order in which, for example, you don’t attack your neighbors unprovoked, then if people start attacking their neighbors unprovoked, then others will do it.

To give you one example, before the First World War, this notion of a Congress of Europe where the great powers got together to try and maintain peace and stability and order, which had lasted for most of the nineteenth century, with some exceptions, really broke down just before the First World War, when in, I think it was 1911, Italy, unprovoked, breaking an international understanding, attacked the Ottoman Empire and seized territory in North Africa, which eventually became Libya. And that encouraged Balkan nations, also in 1912 and 1913, to attack the Ottoman Empire and seize territory from it. And so a very important taboo, if you like, was broken. And others were encouraged by this.

And we saw the same thing before the Second World War. Once you got the aggression by Italy, unprovoked attack on Ethiopia; or Japan making an unprovoked attack on China and seizing Manchuria; and then of course Hitler himself seizing Austria and then seizing Czechoslovakia—this all encouraged the dictators to think they would get away with it because the rest of the world complained and said this is not very good, but did in fact very little.

And I think what we’re seeing now is the idea—and it was a very strong idea and a very strong taboo, if you like, in international relations since 1945—that a country that seizes land from another country without justification, without any reason—well, they may give reasons but not good reasons—that seizure will not be recognized by other nations. It will not be accepted as legitimate. And that’s now been broken. Putin got away with attacking Ukraine in 2014 and took Crimea. And that has more or less been recognized. You could argue it was broken before, when China seized Tibet. But for the most part, since 1945, the idea that seizing territory by force would not be recognized and was illegitimate held. And now it’s gone. And I think we will see other nations beginning to do that as well. Why not?

HUGH EAKIN

In fact, could you argue that we’re already seeing this effect? Of course, we have the talk about the Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada, this was all rhetoric from the administration. But in these last six months, we have Israel in the Golan Heights, Rwanda has entered eastern Congo. There’s been a border dispute in Thailand and Cambodia. It’s hard to say how much these are connected, but it does seem that there is a new understanding of—I mean, Ethiopia has made claims about having a seaport again on the Red Sea. Do you actually see this issue of sovereign boundaries, this taboo as you call it, sort of already eroding?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Absolutely, absolutely. There’s been a lot of public rhetoric about this. I mean, President Trump, again, has said that the border between Canada and the United States is artificial. “It was drawn badly. We should rectify that.” And I do think we are seeing the emboldening of those who want to use military force to get what they want. And they’re not going to pay a penalty. I mean, Russia—well, yes, there have been sanctions, and the rich Russians haven’t been able to buy some of the luxury goods that they want, although they’ve, I think, found ways around that. But I don’t think Russia has really been slapped with serious sanctions. Its tankers, sailing under false flags, are still shipping oil around the world. And I think others will think that the international order is toothless, and increasingly it is.

HUGH EAKIN

And if you’re [Chinese leader Xi Jinping], do you think that all of this provides more of an opportunity for China? Do you see the Taiwan question becoming more acute in this era of declining understandings and rules?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Look, China has already been pushing quite aggressively in the seas around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. It’s apparently ordered an American warship out of those waters, even though they’re international waters, just fairly recently. And there has been talk, and Xi Jinping has made it clear that he sees “reuniting,” as he puts it, Taiwan with the rest of China, as his legacy.

It’s always a dangerous moment, I think, when leaders begin to get a bit old because they start thinking of history, and they start thinking of how they’re going to be recorded. And this is, I think, on the whole not a good thing. And I think as far as we can tell from Xi Jinping’s public remarks, he really wants to get the Taiwan issue settled and is prepared to use military force. I mean, China has been making a great deal of military preparations, including building landing craft and including practicing seaborne landings, which would of course be necessary if they’re going to seize Taiwan.

And so yes, I think we are in a period where China is asserting its relevance, its muscle, it’s asserting its claims. And I think as far as China’s concerned, the disarray in the Western alliance and the disarray among U.S. allies and the United States, and U.S. allies in the Pacific is, from its point of view, a very good thing. When the United States falls out with Vietnam, for example, or falls out with India, which is a rival to China—this only, I think, is good for China.

HUGH EAKIN

The idea about leaders and their place in history—it’s interesting to think also now, you do see this in the second Trump administration: more thinking about history, how the story of the United States should be told. We see this as a pattern among strong leaders or autocratic leaders in other countries. Putin, of course, this was the beginning of the Ukraine war, his historic manifesto about greater Russia. Xi Jinping, as you have just said.

Is this something that has always happened in history, that powerful leaders will want to shape, not just the present but the past? Or are we in a kind of new moment of historical rewriting? One might never have expected this from a democratic country. And I’m just curious how you would read that.

MARGARET MACMILLAN

History has so often been used in the past. I mean, we know that it was used in the Classical world, it was used in the Middle Ages. But in the past, I think there were also other sources of authority. History did not, I think, in the past have quite the dominant authority, which it seems to have now in justifying what nations are doing. In the past, people would use religion more, for example. When the Crusades were launched, the grounds for those were religious, to recover the holy places in the holy land. Or simply dynastic claims were very important.

But I think as other sources of authority, I mean, have fallen away—I think religion is no longer, except by some fanatical religious groups, used as a justification for waging war—history has come to take its place. And for some reason, we seem to think of history as this gray-bearded, probably gentleman, sitting there saying, “You’re right, you’re wrong.” When people say, “History will judge,” that seems to me a very dangerous idea. History is not a judge. History is a record of the past which we try and understand. And when people say, “I want to be on the right side of history”—there isn’t a right side and a wrong side. There’s right and wrong, but not a right history and a wrong history in that sense.

And so I think history is being used more and more as justification. And I think we see this with the Trump administration, that they’re calling on an American past, which is a very one-sided version of the American past. They’re using it partly to attack their domestic enemies. They’re saying there’s been far too much wokeness in the history and far too much concentrating on the dark side of American history. “We want to elevate American history, want to make it glorious again.” But I think it’s also used as justification for the way in which the United States deals with the rest of the world.

And you’re right, I mean, Putin used history to justify his claims to Ukraine. I mean, I read that manifesto he wrote, which I think by all accounts, he wrote himself and took very seriously. And I’m a teacher, I’ve been a teacher all my life, and I try to encourage students. So if I’d been grading it, I would’ve said, you’ve done a lot of work, but you haven’t really used the evidence and your analysis is pretty bad. I mean, it’s a bad essay. And the arguments are tendentious. And he keeps making them. You know, that the Ukrainians—he did it in the press conference recently in Alaska—“Ukrainians are our brothers.” Well, tell that to the Ukrainians. They don’t see it that way. So I think history is becoming justification more and more because we have fewer other sorts of justification.

HUGH EAKIN

Margaret, this has been a wonderful conversation. I can’t wait for your next essay. I’m sure this story, as so many in history, will have another very unexpected chapter.

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Thank you, Hugh. And I’m sure two days from now we’ll be looking at things and saying it’s all completely different now.