{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"<iframe src=\"https://embed.acast.com/$/9a03fe9e-1ff0-4dcc-b3f6-50bd1f016ea4/494b42dd-a44e-4218-ba12-c4355a5f1d2c?\" frameBorder=\"0\" width=\"700\" height=\"250\"></iframe>","title":"War: What Is it Good For?","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6195701f2eacc3a36070252a/619570bccb3c660012e3ceb4.jpg?height=200","description":"<p>We talk to the historian Margaret MacMillan about the changing character of war, from the ancient world to the twenty-first century.&nbsp;Do we still understand the risks?&nbsp;Where are the conflicts of the future likely to break out?&nbsp;And how can we reconcile the terrible destructiveness of war with its capacity to bring about positive change?&nbsp;Plus we talk about why war produces so much great art.</p><p><br></p><p>Talking Points:</p><p><br></p><p>Is the way we commemorate war distancing us from the reality of it?&nbsp;</p><ul><li>Those who have seen war tend to be wary of it.</li><li>There is complacency in a number of countries that war is something that ‘we’ don’t do anymore.</li></ul><p><br></p><p>War is terrible, yet so much of the innovation that we value seems intertwined with it.</p><ul><li>For many people WWI exemplifies the futility of war, yet many of the things we value came out of that war, particularly political and institutional change.&nbsp;</li><li>WWI essentially gave Europe modern welfare states and universal suffrage.</li><li>The two world wars also led to much greater social equality.</li><li>There seems to be a deep connection between peace and inequality, and violence and equality. But it might depend on what countries and what wars you look at.</li></ul><p><br></p><p>If war is connected to innovation because it is so wasteful you cannot recreate those conditions.</p><ul><li>Perhaps we are doing something similar with COVID, but climate change is the true existential crisis.</li><li>Climate change does not seem to be a unifying crisis.</li><li>Declaring ‘war’ on an abstraction is dangerous. How do you know when it’s over? Wars on abstractions are wars without limits.</li></ul><p><br></p><p>Templates from the past don’t fully apply to the US-China relationship.</p><ul><li>There is the nuclear element, which should hypothetically rule out war.</li><li>There’s also the energy resource conflict question: China has been able to take responsibility for its own energy security.</li><li>In the long run, it is in the interests of both the US and China to cooperate with each other. The problem is the political factor.</li></ul><p><br></p><p>Mentioned in this Episode:</p><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.waterstones.com/book/war/professor-margaret-macmillan/9781788162562\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Margaret MacMillan, <em>War: How Conflict Shaped Us</em></a></li><li><a href=\"https://news.sky.com/story/risk-of-new-world-war-is-real-head-of-uk-armed-forces-warns-12126389\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">General Nick Carter’s interview with Sky News</a></li><li><a href=\"https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/the-great-leveler\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Walter Scheidel, <em>The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century</em></a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674984264\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Rana Mitter, <em>China’s Good War</em></a></li><li><a href=\"https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/greatest-films-all-time/great-escape-la-grande-illusion\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">‘La Grande Illusion’</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-things-they-carried/tim-obrien/9780008329693\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Tim O’Brien, <em>The Things They Carried</em></a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/07/apocalypse-now-final-cut-review-francis-ford-coppola-dennis-hopper\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">‘Apocalypse Now’</a></li></ul><p><br></p><p>Further Learning:&nbsp;</p><ul><li><a href=\"https://bookshop.org/books/paris-1919-six-months-that-changed-the-world/9780375760525\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Margaret MacMillan, <em>Paris 1919</em></a></li><li><a href=\"https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Talking Politics History of Ideas: Max Weber on...","author_name":"David Runciman and Catherine Carr"}