This is Democracy – Episode 112: From Churchill and Roosevelt to Trump and Brexit: What Have We Learned?

[0:00:05 Narration] This Is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, inter-generational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy way.

[0:00:20 Jeremi Suri] Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. Today we have with us another very special guest on individual who I think is one of the foremost of figures in American letters today. Writing about history, politics and many related issues. It’s Ian Buruma. Ian is a leading writer, as I said, writing about issues that range quite quite widely, including human rights, democracy, international affairs, of the history of various societies in Asia and in Europe. In the United States, Hey is a prolific author. It in so many books, so many more. Ah, then most of us have, and in fact, it’s hard to keep up with all of his books. Some of my favorites are the era of zero Occidental ism on the wages of guilt on. Many of these books actually surround ah, World War two. In that moment in the last century, Ian’s most recent book, which I just finished reading and really enjoyed and highly recommend to you, has ah, wonderful title. It’s called the Churchill Complex. The Curse of being special from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit. And that book has just come out. And it’s really a a major re examination of us British Anglo American relations over the last 70 years or so. Ian, thank you for joining us.

[0:01:39 Ian Buruma] Thank you.

[0:01:41 Jeremi Suri] So before we turn to our discussion with Ian, we have, of course, are seen setting poem from Mr Zakari. Siri. What’s the title of your poem? Zachary.

[0:01:50 Zachary Suri] The Greeks have seceded from the continent.

[0:01:52 Jeremi Suri] Let’s hear it.

[0:01:54 Zachary Suri] The Greeks, the Greeks, their history. It reeks of the conquering soldiers of Rome of the big bad and his cigar foam. When they were bailed out by the pioneers and after they had won, they had to ration their buns and beg for loans from the people of Rome. The Empire had fallen giving way to Stalin, and the Greeks were rebuilding their home. But then they did rise like help on the tides up onto the beaches of Port side the Empire. It was condemned, but no one told them and thought they could get what they pleased. The Messina had come and gone on some patio or Sicilian lawn, and the plans they were made for the Europe. We had prayed while the Greeks were still plugging their ears. When they needed to play ball. There was Charles DeGaulle and twice they were left in the dust. And then they opened the door and let them take the floor of Europe and a system of trust. On the day of the Brexit, the force feeding of the competent, it was reportedly quoted from the ghosts of the bloated The Greeks have seceded from the continent.

[0:02:59 Jeremi Suri] Zachary, I love the way you ah used the Greeks to stand. And, of course, for British claims to being the legacies of the Greek civilization in many ways and the way you take us through that history, what is your poem about?

[0:03:12 Zachary Suri] My poem is really about Britain’s complex relationship with its empire and its history as a great empire after the Second World War. In many ways, it it declined in power, even after its moment of greatest success during World War Two.

[0:03:30 Jeremi Suri] That’s fantastic, Zachary and I think that takes us right into the heart of Ian’s Book E. And how do we understand that this moment where your book begins at the end of World War Two. I know that’s also where you’re personal connection. At least in the in, the book begins. How do we think about this moment of what it meant for Great Britain and its relationship with United States at the end of World War Two?

[0:03:52 Ian Buruma] Well, they were, of course, the two great victors of World War Two as well as Stalin’s Soviet Union. But I grew up in a country that had bean occupied by Nazi Germany. I was born after the war, but still very much in its shadow. And like many people of my generation, we sort of looked up to the English speaking world, particularly Britain and the United States and Canada, because they were our Liberators and look where they are now with Trump and Brexit. And that’s really what what gave me the impulse to write this book. And I think the paradox of the story rarely is that moments of glory in history can often put down the basis for future disasters. And that’s what the title the Churchill complex really refers to in that I think it was definitely glorious and a good thing that the allies, the Britain, British and the Americans defeated Nazi Germany and the Japanese empire. But out of that, all kinds of problems grew among them. The fact that Britain could never see it’s way to play the role it should have played in Europe and that too many American presidents tried too hard to be like Winston Churchill and embark on Foolish were wars, too. Ah, to to to protect the world for democracy. Sometimes well intentioned, sometimes less so. But it it ended up in a disastrous manner. I think, especially in the Iraq war.

[0:05:38 Jeremi Suri] Right, right, and we’ll get to that part of the discussion. But first, let let’s let’s come back to the figure, of course. Who who shadow overhangs the entire book? Winston Churchill. How do you think about Churchill now? And how do you think? Particularly our American listeners should understand Churchill’s place in history and and and his lessons for us today?

[0:05:59 Ian Buruma] Well, I think Churchill in peace time is it is a terrible role model for politicians to follow. He’s not the kind of man you want a toe head of it to lead a country in normal times, but in May 1940 he was exactly the right person because he had the kind of bloody minded romantic patriotism and the sense of theater that was necessary for him to raise the morale of a country that was in dire peril. And through his speeches and sewn, he managed to get the British population behind him and face down Germany for a least a year without many allies, even though they did, of course, have the entire British empire to fall back on, which was a big thing. But, hey, he knew in May 1940 that compromise with with Hitler was impossible. And other politicians like Chamberlain, who’s gone down in history as a sort of cowardly appeaser. Um uh, natural compromises were natural compromises, and that is what peacetime politics is all about. But a two. That particular moment in a moment of existential crisis for a country you need a Churchill. But those moments, thankfully, are very few.

[0:07:34 Jeremi Suri] One of the really interesting points you make in the book, however, is that Ah Churchill, for all of his unwillingness to compromise with the Nazis and his steadfastness in that domain, made a lot of compromises with Franklin Roosevelt and then after World War two and his second prime ministership in the early 19 fifties had to do the same again. So So how do we understand that shift in Churchill?

[0:07:58 Ian Buruma] Well, he knew that without the United States, the war could not be won. And eso he was in a fewer businessman. You’d say he was in a very weak negotiating position. And hey, had to do what the Americans who were fast becoming, ah, much more greater power than the British Empire. You had to do what the Americans wanted. And so he had no choice but to make compromises which were often very painful economically, Andi. But they had to be made because without, um, American participation, it was a hopeless, hopeless cause to fight Nazi Germany on D. Roosevelt knew that Roosevelt also knew that probably until the last minute until Pearl Harbor. The majority of the American people were not in favor of getting involved in the year, another European war. But hey knew that he had the upper hand with the British.

[0:09:06 Jeremi Suri] You remind us in the book that Churchill coined the phrase special relationship. What did he mean by that? And then what do you do? You mean by it when you invoke it thereafter?

[0:09:18 Ian Buruma] Well, first of all, the special relationship, I think, was always more special from the British perspective than it was from the American one. I don’t think that many Americans feel deeply sentimental about Britain after all, many Americans have. No it don’t it don’t have any family roots in Britain either. But for Britain, and especially in the beginning of World War Two, it was absolutely vital. And it was a typical example of how Churchill found a rather grand, delicate way to describe the relationship at the beginning. He was not, I don’t think one of those romantics who go back a long way on both sides of the Atlantic, who saw a kind of racial, um, alliance of the English speaking peoples and even suggested one point in the 19th century that America and Britain might sort of merge into one great Anglo Saxon nation. He wasn’t really like that, even though his mother was was American, but I think he saw more and more that it was a necessity to think of that in that sort of rather sentimental way. But But I think because of World War two, he evoked that kind of feeling of kinship and the English language in Milton and sold and in Churchill’s case, also, I think he was genuinely romantic about the palate, the democratic tradition, which he saw as a typically sort of Anglo Saxon thing, which is questionable. But he did see it that way, and he took Parliament very seriously. You took democracy seriously, and he took political freedom seriously, even though he did not extend that to the colonial subjects of the British Empire, which annoyed Rose filled, who had romantic notions of the United States being the great defender of people who want to do be free from empires.

[0:11:21 Jeremi Suri] And one of the themes I thought in that you weave beautifully through the book and one that that all of us who write about this and teach these topics struggle with Is this balance between, shall we say, somewhat crudely race and democracy and ah, heightened moment of racial awareness today? I think it is something we need to talk about. To what extent was this Anglo American special relationship really about democracy? And to what extent did it carry in perhaps vestiges of racialized thinking that that also undermined democratic principles.

[0:11:55 Ian Buruma] Well, Churchill, in today’s terms and even in the terms of his own lifetime to many people, was certainly a racist. Hey, certainly did believe that the Europeans that the Americans, the white people, Australians and son had a superior civilization to Indians and Chinese and other nonwhite peoples when he clearly did believe that. And so did many people at the time, even though some people did not, and not everybody believed it as fervently as Churchill did. And whether that really played a major role in the wartime alliance is something else that is perhaps more dubious. I think there it was. It was also very much a question of standing up for democracy against what we’re after all Dictatorships, which were a really direct threat, t both countries and had already overrun Europe and parts of Asia. So I think the racial aspect can be overdone. But it was definitely there, and it came up in particular during 1941 when Churchill and Roosevelt devised the Atlantic Charter, which was a kind of blueprint for the post world war world and one of the things that the goals was national independence. But Churchill did not believe that countries like India should be independent from the British Empire. Rose Felt did. And I think that a certain kind of racism did play a part in church, was thinking about the Empire, and the other thing was perhaps more practical zone that he said he’d. He realized that without an Empire, Britain, Britain would no longer be a great global power.

[0:13:59 Zachary Suri] So in your book, you write of the seminal importance of Postwar policy in the Middle East to Anglo American relations, in particular in regards to the Suez Canal crisis, which is really one of the centerpieces of your book. How has the image of Churchill and the shadow of Munich shaped policy in the Middle East and, more broadly, throughout the Cold War?

[0:14:19 Ian Buruma] Yes, I mean not just in the Middle East, and not just during the Cold War. I think that the image of Churchill, you know that is bust in the Oval Office is an example of it, and then the first made over when Trump became president over the allegation that somehow Obama had discs Churchill by removing the bust and self the symbolic role that Churchill was played, I think has bean on the whole a negative one because, as I said earlier, too many presidents try to sort of live up to his image. But the other great symbol that which is linked to this eyes. Indeed. Munich, 1938 when Chamberlain received the promise of peaceful time in exchange for letting the Germans overrun Czechoslovakia and every single time there was a foreign crisis after the war. Andi, the question of whether or not the United States in particular, should intervene or not, the ghost of Munich was raised, and the British and American leaders were so obsessed with this and so frightened that they would make the same mistake as Chamberlain and go down in history as appeasers that they would embark on military conflicts that they shouldn’t. And you find this in the Suez crisis. When Anthony Eden, who was then prime minister, compared Nasser to Mussolini and the Fascist Threat and told people on the radio that we know what it’s like when we appease and accept dictator and then decided to go to war in the Middle East, you find it during the Korean War, you find it during the Vietnam War when when Lyndon Johnson compared the South Vietnamese president to Churchill, you find it and the Gulf wars away up to Tony Blair and George W. Bush. When Blair relates in his memoirs how we read Chamberlain’s diaries on and realized that he could not make the same mistake again and therefore have to stand by President Bush and invading Iraq. So it’s it’s It’s something that is haunted leaders in Britain and America ever since.

[0:16:51 Jeremi Suri] And one of the really poignant parts of your book, Ian, is that section where you discuss Ah, the Tony Blair George W. Bush relationship, and I thought we could drill down on that for a second. And it comes back to Zachary’s poem also. I mean, if if the British see themselves as the Greeks to the American Romans providing us knowledge and wisdom, and we have the muscles in the money and the Brits have the knowledge and the wisdom, why didn’t that work out that way with regard to the Iraq war? You show that in some ways Tony Blair and those around him were trying to prepare him to play that role. But then you talk quite poignantly about how, in fact, he didn’t play that role.

[0:17:33 Ian Buruma] No, I think also that there is a generational difference, of course, between Harold MacMillan, who coined that phrase at the end of the wall. Andi Tony Blair. Tony Blair was not, even though he talks a great deal about reading up on history and being conscious of history and so on was not all that historically literate. I mean, he in the right it just before the Iraq war, and he had to explain, I think, in the United States why he felt that Britain had to stand with the United States. He talked about the one people who stood by Britain in its in its hour of greatest peril. In 1940 was the Americans Well, they weren’t in. The Americans only joined the war right at the end of 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. And so he He’s very superficial in that way, but I think the most the biggest reason why he was different and why he was so so quick to join George W. Bush was that he had he I call him or somebody else probably called him, and I quoted it, but the most American prime minister since the walls. And one reason, I think, was that he not just his his, uh, attraction to spin and showbiz and all that that he had in common with with Bill Clinton. But he was a very religious man. And like George W. Bush, who was a born again Christian, I think he saw politics, foreign policy, military intervention and so on in in Messianic terms in a way that’s very unusual for British politicians, less unusual in America. And he saw it as a question of good against evil and, uh, really like Bush. That’s why they got on, even though they politically didn’t have all that much in common. But they both have this sort of Messianic way of seeing Anglo America as being the forces of good against evil and people who really saw themselves as the Greeks like McMillan. I think we’re much more sophisticated and skeptical and did not think in those terms.

[0:19:50 Jeremi Suri] It is quite striking and you describe it so well. There does seem to be such a superficial veneer of what sounds like historical learning and the discussions between both the American president and the British prime minister. But it does seem so shallow in retrospect as you just pointed out.

[0:20:06 Speaker 3] Yes, and people didn’t didn’t see it often because George George W. Bush was was so in eloquent. I mean, he like his father, he had trouble stringing an English sentence together properly, whereas Blair was, was very eloquent and gave very good speeches. And I think again, especially in the United States. This gave him the image of being a sort of tremendously sophisticated sort of European figure, which he wasn’t really. So, Ian, do you think

[0:20:39 Jeremi Suri] So, Ian, do you think–I wasn’t clear from the book–Do you think that, um, the horrible consequences of the Anglo American co operation in the Iraq war and the horrible consequences of that war did that mark the rial end of the post war era for us British special relations?

[0:20:59 Ian Buruma] Well, it’s always difficult to say whether something marks the end, because then it begins again. I mean, some people thought it was The end was during the war, the Balkan war. When was the British who resisted any kind of intervention? And it was the Americans, in the end, who who did into the and there was complete contempt in Washington, then for the British, and the Cold War is over. And it was felt that this was also the end of the special relationship, since there was no more need for it. But then, you know, under Bush and Blair, the relationship had a second life. And who knows with Trump and Brexit? In a way, the two countries, in a negative sense, are rather close again to eso. I don’t know the beginning. You can say that there was a beginning or an end. In some ways, I think probably Theo, End of the Cold War made this so called special relationship more more redundant. But one never knows these things

[0:22:02 Jeremi Suri] Right. And it certainly lives on in James Bond movies and various other cultural forms, doesn’t it?

[0:22:07 Ian Buruma] Yes, but of course, the James Bond was a figure of the fifties and the movies where Heyday were really in the sixties and seventies. And yes, it lives on, but as a very vague echo of what it wants, what it wants. Waas and I think James Bond, I bring him in because he was very symptomatic in a way of the decline of British power in that in the fifties is really when most of the empire began to dissolve into independent states. Britain lost its sort of global reach and was very much the junior partner of the United States and as a sort of way to both star British a more proper in a way, Ian Fleming imagined this sort of sophisticated British hero who exemplified all the virtues that had once been glorified during, you know, Britain’s heyday and it was it an act of nostalgia ready, and so were the films. And of course, they were never meant to be Knife the books and all the films were meant to be realistic. But I think nostalgia was the main thing behind them.

[0:23:28 Jeremi Suri] Right, and of course, MI6 and James Bond in those films and books, they’re the Greeks to the overly muscled pea brain, CIA in the United States of Felix Unger and others,

[0:23:42 Ian Buruma] Very much so, and James Bond knew how to dress in fine suits, and mix a cocktail, and was kind of sophisticated, and so on, whereas the cousins on the other side of the Atlantic were always rather crass. So that that’s very much, I think, a sort of idealizing, nostalgic self image of the British at the time that they felt that that appealed precisely because they were losing so much.

[0:24:15 Jeremi Suri] Right. So how on earth Ian do we get from that world to Boris Johnson and Donald Trump? You close your book there and you have a lovely chapter, but it still is not clear to me how the lines connect.

[0:24:29 Ian Buruma] Well they’re different in different countries. But I mean, just like fascism was different in different countries because different countries have different histories. Populism is not quite the same. Doesn’t have the same style in the United States that it has in Britain, or, indeed, Austria or France or other countries, I think, in the United States. The great irony, of course, is that even though Trump talks about American greatness, he stands for everything that Franklin Roosevelt deplored. The main East at the America first slogan was devised by the by people like like Lindbergh, who were against American intervention in World War Two and rather sympathetic to the Nazis, Right? It was exactly what Roosevelt was trying to fight against, but I do think in that in prompt Trump’s case, it was partly not not only but partly the result of too many reckless adventures culminating the Iraq war. I think people in in the United States were heartily sick of interventions like that which hugely expensive on bloody. And so the America first thing began to appeal. In Britain. It’s a little bit different, I think, in Britain since the nineties, in particular, there’s been a lot of resentment whipped up by the popular press, the tabloids, about the fact that the Germans were doing so much better than the British that they were richer, more modern, more powerful, and so on in the the feeling was was, was in among a lot of tabloid readers, people who felt they were left behind, that they were not doing so well anymore, that they were losing their jobs and so on and so forth that this wasn’t fair. You know, we’d won the war. I’ll come that, you know, the Germans were doing so much better than we are. And out of that too, came a different kind and more toxic nostalgia, which was, you know, if if only Britain could go it alone again and have another finest hour and free the nation from foreign tyranny, meaning the European Union, which of course was never a tyranny in Britain played a very major part in running it. But that that sort of sentiment played a big role in producing Boris Johnson, who was also fanning the flame flames himself. And it’s not for nothing. That part of the Brexit campaign was, Ah, a lot of references to Spitfires and Churchill and Finest Hour and telling the so forth,

[0:27:05 Jeremi Suri] you know, as I was reading your book on thinking about this and listening to you now, I mean, there is another side of this, right? It’s the sort of George Orwell’s road to Wigan Pier, right of these communities in both societies in Great Britain and the United States that in many ways never bought into the international ism that you had a maybe a set of leaders over the course of 50 years who were way ahead of where their publics were. And in a certain way this might be a return to some kind of normal. Do you see it that way?

[0:27:37 Ian Buruma] Well, I think that those things wax and wane. There isn’t one public opinion ever and public opinion changes. And I think in certain periods all over the world, certainly in the in the fifties and sixties there was almost a consensus. I mean, there were those who cause who were deeply doubtful about it. But there was almost a consensus that internationalism and cooperation and a better world and so on were necessary because they still had memories of the of the catastrophe of World War Two. And those sentiments have definitely changed. I mean, not just in Britain. There’s It’s harder now to get young people to support the EU, the European Union thing out because the argument that we needed to prevent another world war in Europe ready doesn’t cut much ice anymore because nobody is afraid of it. And so, yes, it’s possible that globalization three idea that globalization was the only way to go that near liberal economics were three only kind of economics that we could have and so on. That’s certainly created a backlash, and not just in these countries. Andi laws. The populism we see in America, in Britain and elsewhere is a reaction of people who say, Well, this is a very fine for the 1% and the bankers in the bureaucrats since run the U and so on. But we’re not getting any advantage out of it.

[0:29:17 Jeremi Suri] You close your book on a sad note that echoes what you just said of of how the memories that that you had in the knowledge that your generation has is in some ways lost on younger citizens in in both societies today. But we always like to put clothes our podcast on a forward looking, hopeful note. What hope do you see? What lessons do you see that could be productive for our societies. For young people who were interested in these issues, who read your book and care about transatlantic relations, what are the hopeful lessons they can take away?

[0:29:51 Ian Buruma] Well, the hopeful lesson is that however much mankind screws up, people are resilient and come out of these disasters and often build something new and better. And it may be that we need a very bad period like the one we’re going through now. Uh oh. Perhaps one hopes it doesn’t have to get very much worse for people to realize that, you know, we have to start really rethinking things and doing things differently and one hopes in a better way, as happened after 1945.

[0:30:31 Jeremi Suri] And so, if I could follow on that do you see this moment living through this now and having lived through at least the end of World War two? Ah, the aftermath of it and knowing as you do so much about World War two in the Great Depression, do you see this on the same scale? How do you compare the two periods?

[0:30:49 Ian Buruma] No. Clearly, Trump is not Hitler and COVID-19 is not a holocaust, and you cannot possibly compare what we’re going through now to what people went through in the forties. It could, of course, get a great deal worse, and there could be more wars in that kind of thing. Let’s hope that won’t happen. But I think if one is e, I think historical comparisons are always risky because history never repeats itself in exactly the same way. But there are ominous signs that certain things we’re seeing in politics today are rather like what happened in the 1930s, where people are beginning to doubt democratic institutions where they’re getting to think that certain authoritarianism might be what we want, where foreigners and immigrants have blamed for all our problems and and so on. And this is, of course, a deeply worrying phenomenon.

[0:31:54 Jeremi Suri] Yeah, but you also believe it could trigger some of the hopeful actions that you also see at the beginning of your book as well.

[0:32:02 Ian Buruma] Yes, it could. And I think in the United just speaking of the United States, I think the fact if you look at the Democratic Party, people often worry about the fact that it’s so divided that younger generation of more radical politicians I have so little in common with the older generation represented, I suppose, by Joe Biden himself. But in a way, you could also say the very the very fact that so many young idealist, more idealistic people still want to be politicians in the Democratic Party is a good sign, because it means that all confidence in the democratic system itself has not yet been lost. It becomes much more ominous if people have no more confidence in the institutions, and they think violence in the streets is the only other option.

[0:33:06 Jeremi Suri] This is, I think, the central theme that comes up week after week in our podcast. This tension that we’re living with now that’s not historically unique to this moment. Attention between on the one hand the evidence of democratic decline and challenges to democracy, but also the evidence of energies for renewal. New actors, new new approaches. And that’s a lot of what you’re talking about in your book as well, I think.

[0:33:31 Ian Buruma] Absolutely no, I think that’s absolutely right.

[0:33:35 Jeremi Suri] Zachary, how do you and other young people in so far as you ever think about the U. S. British relationship? Anglo American relations? To what extent does this help you to think about our world today as you look forward and try to make sense of this terrible pandemic we’re living through, but also the hopeful signs of change around racial awakening and political movements and things of that sort. How does this conversation connect to the conversations? Young idealists like yourselves, Like yourself or having

[0:34:05 Zachary Suri] I think it connects very clearly. It shows us that democracy and, uh, and democratic institutions are messy, and that change takes a long time. I think too often we end the history with the heroic Americans and British landing on the beaches of Normandy. Instead of actually examining what led up to that moment and then what followed? I think that this is really a call to action to, ah to re examine the history of the latter part of the 20th century thing into the Anglo American relationship, in regards to that.

[0:34:38 Jeremi Suri] that’s great. And I think Ian’s book opens up so many interesting conversations we can have about this vitally important history, a history that’s often over simplified, as in points out, Ah, and then the meaning and relevance of that history for today. Ian, Thank you so much.

[0:34:53 Ian Buruma] Thank you. No, and I’d like to just add that I agree with every word, Zachary said. And he summed up my book much better than I have.

[0:35:04 Jeremi Suri] Well, he read it, as did I, and I encourage all of our listeners to read your book. And I do think the history of Anglo American relations has so much to teach us today, not because we’re going to replay that history is you and said, but because many of those issues are alive and well today as relevant today as they were in 1945 where 1956 or 1991. Ah, thank you again, Ian. Thank you, Zachary, for your poem. And most of all, thank you to our listeners for joining us on this week of This Is Democracy.

[0:35:42 Narration] This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Theme music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke. You confined his music. Harrison Lemke dot com Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy.