welcome to amanpour on pbs. tonight, people, power and conflict. my conversation with the reno renowned military historian margaret mcmillan on humanity's complicated relationship with war and how throughout history we are repeatedly dro lly drawn into it despite the horrors. welcome to the program, everyone. i we're often warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. the message holds particular resonance today with nationalism

on the rise across europe, democracies changing into autocracies and civil war plaguing africa and the middle east. old alliances appear strained, so, too, is the past 70 years of geopolitical stability that many of us have benefitted from. it's perhaps, therefore, argues paradox. we are appalled by it by entranced by it. it brings about huge social invention. war appeals to the worst of human straits but inspires ideals and qualities that are rarely seen in peace time. above all, war is what happens when the things that we want to live for are worth dieing for. i sat down with professor

mcmillan to discover why war is such an integral part of our human experience. professor, welcome to the program. >> thank you very much. >> you have named your lectures mark of cane. >> i think what we were trying to get at and i was trying to get at was whether we are so deeply attracted to war and whether war is so ingrained in human nature and society that we can't escape it. the mark of cane is, are we doomed to fight? >> you go back to cane and able. >> yes. and fighting between two people who were brothers. you could argue that is one of the earliest civil wars. so i suppose what i was really trying to engage in was this long, long debate about is it part of human nature or not. >> is it? what have you come up with? >> well, human nature i won't go into in a way. i'm not a biologist. there are certainly those who

would argue it is. i think we have to protect ourselves. fear is an important motivator. we will do things because we are frightened. i think we have those instincts. we are creatures, after all. but i think what is more interesting is whether human society itself is deeply engaged with war and vice versa. once we get organized, we seem to have ended up fighting each other. >> you say that it inescapable. wherever we go, especially here in great britain and england, on the couldnntinent, every villags a monument. war is venerated. >> i find it myself -- i don't think i could ever be a soldier. i'm much too cowardly. i do have admiration for people who do this. what war can bring out is some of the worst qualities in people.

it can bring out brutality, malicious cruelty. it can bring our sacrifice, nobility, comradeship, which makes it fascinating. >> it's something we admire. it's something that we fear. it's something that's with us. let's just get to recent history and let's just get to what president trump and president putin were discussing, which by the way we do not know in a closed room with only translators, we have no idea what deals were or were not made. afterwards in the press conference, president putin described the world order like this. let's just play a little bit of his sound bite. >> translator: the cold war is a thing of past. the era of acute ideological confrontation of the two countries is a thing of remote past, it's the vestige of the past. >> has the situation changed? the hope and promise the world

had for a massive peace dividend after the fall of the soviet union, the end of the koerld co cold war, has it come true? >> running for years. syrian civil war, afghanistan has been rumbling on for almost two decades, yemen is a country in crisis. we have the possibility of wars among other countries. we have an awful lot of preparation for war. that doesn't mean we're going to fight. but it's very much there in our world. >> i was struck by what you said in one of the lectures. usa jus the big powers, big nations are preparing for a massive war, even though most of war right now is at a lower level. >> i think we have this very interesting situation where we have a lot of very lower level wars where, in fact, you don't need sophisticated weapons. a lot of the fighting was done with hose and shovels and what happened to the row rohingya

were primitive weapons. we have killer robots and killer drones and the possibility of artificial intelligence making it possible to fight wars with planes that don't need pilots. the british said the next generation of pilot planes won't need a pilot. >> not needing a pilot leads us again to what president putin said and whether we should believe that the great power rivalry is over. because we know that he wants his sphere of influence, he has bases all over the place. we see the very harsh rhetoric of war coming out of president trump before he then turns on a dime and does other things. do you see -- what is the biggest threat? is it cyber? is it -- where is the biggest threat? >> i think it's very hard to say where the big -- cyber i think is the new frontier, one of the new frontiers. the military in all the advanced country are worried about it.

they are investing heavily in it because so much of our societies depend on the electronic networks and electronic devices we take for granted. the possibility of suddenly cutting it off, cutting off the power, cutting off the transmission between different devices, the things that we use our phones for, it would bring our societies to a standstill. i think what is also always worrying is that whether you get great powers preparing for war, they think of it defensively. i'm defending myself. it doesn't look like that from the other side of the border. what i think is a real worry in human affairs is sheer accident and people acting out of fear and misapprehension. >> i'm fascinated by what you say about the motivation for war on a personal level. the sense of honor, either a president or a government thinking they are defending their people, defending their country. you sort of describe that sense of honor as if it was on a local lev level, it's what gangs do in l.a. or elsewhere. it's the same kind of motivation. >> i think it is.

in gangs, you have people that would rather die than be disrespected. that has drive an ln a lot of warriors. think of people in the first world war, they would rather die than lose their honor. i think nations are still impelled by this. one of the reasons the united states is so obsessed with iran is because the iranians humiliated them when they took hostages at the end of the 19190 1970s. >> i was going to bring this up. we have a series of sound bites on this issue from president trump. you know, you are talking about honor and disrespect. both president putin and president trump believe that they and their countries are disrespected by whoever. i don't know. the rest of the world or by each other. i want to play you these sound bielt bites using war-like trumpian rhetoric. >> north korea best not make any

more threats to the united states. they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. they're not going to be restarting anything. they restart, they will have big problems, bigger than they have had before. you can mark it down. they restart their nuclear program, they will have bigger problems than they have ever had before. the united states has great strength and patience. but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy north korea. >> two bits about north korea. the middle bit about iran, after he pulled out of the nuclear accord and said they best not start up again. i was struck again by what you said in your lectures, that the more inevitable -- once you accept something is inevitable, like that kind of language does, you really risk bringing that kind of conflict closer, actually making it happen. >> i think so.

because you start planning for it. you start looking at the other side. one of the things that often goes wrong is you look at the other side and read the signals wrong. one of the things that seems to be dangerous is both in china and the united states, you have policy planners and states people saying things like rising and declining nations are bound to fight at some point. you have brought it closer. >> that is a big worry with china. >> yes. >> they were always -- as you say, the whole athens rising power, risen power, conflict. we see what china is doing to fill a vacuum that it thinks american is leaving in the pacific and spreading its might around and upping its navy and military power. >> the chinese say they're doing this for defensive purposes. they have this rhetoric which they view for a long time that we have been a defensive nation. we have never waged war in other nations, which doesn't explain how the borders of china

expanded over the centuries. there was a lot of fighting going on there. i think it's dangerous. from the united states' point of view, that doesn't look like defensive. it looks like a threat. if the united states tries to enhance its power in the pacific, how will the chinese see it? they won't see it as the united states defending itself. they will see it as a threat. >> let's go back way -- let's go back hundreds of years when war first started or maybe thousands of years ago when war first started. you describe in the lectures how this was linked to the nature of communities. >> we will never know for sure. a theory which i find persuasive is that when you were a nomad, you could always move away. there was somewhere else to move. if someone threatened you, you could get out of the way. once you settle down, you have something you have to look after, you have to defend and something someone else wants to raid. the more complicated societies became, the more they became settled, the more they fought. >> you talk about how war

changes from the early agriculture ing aku agriculture communities to when it became different and the citizen was implicated, the leaders talked about waging war on behalf of their citizens. >> there's an important shift. war is always -- reflects the war -- it reflects the society you are. when it was a knight society, fighting was done by the knights. it reflected their goal s and aims. what happened was you got not -- you got a transformation of subject into citizens. once you are a citizen, you have a share in your own country and your own society, but you also have an obligation. the government can call on you to support it because it is your government in a way. what was also happening in the 19th century was war was getting complicated because of the industrial revolution and the scientific and technological revolution. we were getting better at killing each other. >> run through. you did put out some amazing statistics about what it looked like the first time a big war --

there were -- >> the size of our armies was limited by how much they could eat. in the old days, they would eat everything in the surroundings and have to move on. you couldn't have big armies. with the railway it became possible to have bigger armies and keep them there longer. napoleon took to russia in 1812. of course, we know what happened. most of them died there. in 1870 when the german confederation attacked france, it was 1.2 million people. in 1914, when germany went to war, it could put 3 million men into the field and keep them there. which is why the first world war lasted so long. >> i'm struck by one line in your biography that your great grandfather was david lord george who was the prime minister of great britain during the second part of world war i. how is that sort of -- how did that inform your study and affected you? >> i don't know. i grew up in canada where he

wasn't as much of a figure. at one point someone said i never knew you were descended from boy george. so there wasn't that much knowledge. i think if i had grown up in the uk, it might have been different. i was always aware of history. i was always aware of politics, because my family talked about it. i suppose more importantly, i think both my grandfathers fought in the first world war and my father and my uncles fought in the second world war. it was something you just learned about if you are someone of my age. pro you probably have someone who fought in a war in your family. >> do you think that people don't know enough about it? people don't remember enough. there isn't enough present day reminders of what could lead to war and how dreadful it can be. >> i think generally we don't know enough history. history is useful. it helps us to understand how we got here and what mistakes we might avoid. with war, we don't understand enough that it can come suddenly. people in europe in 1914 thought we don't do war anymore.

we are too civilized. we haven't had a major war since 1815. it took them less than five weeks to get into a major war. i think we need to be careful. we shouldn't be too smug. wars can start for very trivial reasons or they blow up suddenly. then, of course, they're out of anyone's control. >> one of the things you say about war is that it has -- like many seismic events -- necessity is the mother of invention. you talk about some of the really important things that we have today coming out of wars. everything down to penicillin. >> it's one of the great paradoxes of war. we see it as wasteful and destructi destructive. but it can produce changes. it can speed up scientific advances, jet engine, penicillin, these were things talked about but became possible as a result of the war. splitting the atom would not have happened without the second world war. there are huge social changes. the position of women changed in

western societies as a result of the first and second world wars because women showed they could do the jobs that had been said before they can't do that, let men do those jobs. women did that. if you were male politicians, you can't say, they can't vote. women got the vote. very much because of what they had done in the wars. >> a recent novel by a great american young novelist has come out called "manhattan beach." that's all about women who were forced to do work that men couldn't do because they weren't there, they were at war in the naval dockyards. then they had to go back to their homes and their factories and their little lives after the men came back. >> it's always two steps forward, one step back. women gained a lot during the wars. then they did tend to go back. they never quite lost it. women gained confidence that they knew they could do these things. you got an interesting thing in society as a result of both world wars. you got a compression between the rich and poor. the times of greatest equality were during and after the world wars.

you won't fight a war to achieve that. from my point of view, it was a benefit. >> i came of age covering wars when they were not big set pieces. they were not army against army. last one of those we saw was the first gulf war. that's the only one of those that i covered. it was all civil wars, whether rwanda, bosnia, wherever we went, somalia, haiti, all those places. the citizen, the civilian, the ordinary man, woman and child are much, much worse off in today's kind of wars. >> i think so. we have always tried to have rules about civilians. it's another oddity. you have rules of how to fight wars. we have had rules about not attacking women, children, the old, not sacking cities, although it did happen. because societies have become much more integrated and because the war effort society is

engaged in -- the mystery they are inflicts on civilians, often the recruits, is appalling. i see no end to it. that's what's so depressing. >> you see no end to it. we thought the united nations and the great institutions that grew out of the second world war were going to be precisely that, the accountability, the negotiated peace in our time. it hasn't happened. >> no. it's happened a bit. the u.n. has been very successful in cease-fires and monitoring cease-fires. it's been successful in rebuilding post-conflict societies. what is difficult is to bring conflicts to an end. i read a book recently by peter wilson on the 30 years war in the 17th century. it took on a momentum. people switched sides and they had different motives. once you get that level of violence and you get the degradation of society where it's permissible to beat other people up and kill them, then it's very difficult to put it back in the box. >> i was struck -- we were

talking about civil war and rules about civilians. i was struck by one of these -- again, from one of your speeches when civilians became legitimate targets once they were embedded in the war effort. for instance, the raf over dresden. this is one of the bombers said. the aim of our bombing is not to knock out specific factories. the aim is the destruction of the german citizen. the killing of german workers and the disruption of civilized community life throughout germany. that to me is really shocking. >> it means you have no limit on what the targets are. the limits have expanded so that anything that is part of a society that's your enemy is now a legitimate target. it's okay to kill babies. that will make people -- the mothers not want to work as hard. it's okay to kill old people because that will cause suffering. it's okay to disrupt everything that makes life possible.

it is terrifying. >> i was really struck as well when you read about the u.s. military during the vietnam war when reporters discovered the torching of villages. and the army was, like, yeah, that's what we do. that's how we pacify. that's how we win. >> it's always so difficult. you want -- what an army is about is discipline and about the disciplined application of force. there's always that narrow line. armies can go over it. they can simply become brutal. i was reading a description of a massacre the other day. it makes the most appalling reading. there was no military purpose in it. it had no justification. something had happened to them. the sold hiers had become brutalized. >> that's something that really fascinates me, the brutalization of otherwise normal people. whether it's young americans in

vietnam, young british bombings and particularly young germans and those called up and served in the worst military enterprise we have seen in any kind of modern warfare. i wanted to read this to you. it's just so awful. the dehumanization which is an effective tool of warfare. it makes it easier to kill. honor in murder. th most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side or 500 or 1,000. to have stuck it out and at the same time to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. if you didn't know it was hitler, you would think this is a commander telling his soldiers, war is tough. he is talking about the murder of jews. a lot of those people were decent germans, nice people. there's that wonderful and chilling thing that one of the mothers said of her son.

i sent my son to war. you send him back a killer. >> it's really -- it really hits you right here, particularly if you are a mother and you know that that happens. we are in a moment right now where democracies are under assault, where dictator ships keep flourishing, where truth is indistinguishable from lies, fake news, bots, hacking, where politics, even in our democracies, is so poisonous and so partisan that you can call it warfare, war by other means and people are using that language. >> they are talking about have always used military language, but it seems to be more. i find it poisonous. what you have to accept in a democracy is someone may have a different opinion but that opinion has to be respected. you have to be able to talk to people. what we see particularly in the united states and it's happening in britain is people socializing only with those who share their

views. this is very destructive. we need a middle ground. >> where do you think that's going to take our societies who are not formally at war but are by other means? >> i hope what we will do is recognize what it's doing to us and recognize that the level of rhetoric and the mistrust is in the end going to poison it for all of us. you don't want -- none of us want to live in a society where you can't trust your neighbor. we should look at other societies where that happened. beirut is very tense, lebanon is very tense. does anybody really want to live like that? what's happening is the young lebanese are leaving because they don't want to live there. a lot of the young have left northern ireland. i do think it's incumbent on us all to build bridges and try to understand the point of view of others. it doesn't help that so much of the news now is -- the mainstream media aren't trusted. the blogs, the right -- these are trusted more by people who think they're tell the truth.

th this is dangerous. >> what surprised you the most. >> i was surprised by touched by the concern people had. what i found was that people asked thoughtful questions. they were very concerned. they were asking questions you were asking, how do we avoid war, build a society as war isn't seen as a default? a lot were young which i found encouraging. >> do you as we sit here today and we see what's going on between trump and putin and the other big powers, china, do you feel fear another big power war? >> i don't want to but i do sometimes. i just think it's dangerous when people start talking in terms of its possibility. when you get the united states and china -- i have heard too much of people on both sides saying, we may well have to fight one day. that really does worry me. if you start preparing for it -- just the smallness of the area

where the united states and china now in a strategic struggle -- it will take one plane to be shot down, one boat to be rammed and then you get the nationalist feeling on both sides. that's what happened in the first world war. >> just expand a little bit on that. the difference between china and russia? the narrative in the west is that russia poses the biggest threat to the west. >> i think russia poses a threat to the values of western society. i think what putin -- russia is using the tools of a weak power. economically, it's a disaster. the standard of living is going down. it depends too much on oil and the price of oil is down. it hasn't managed to build up a modern industry. demographically, it has problems. its birth rate is lower. it has a huge china sitting here on its southern border which isn't going to be a friend for very long, i don't think. i think what russia is doing is making mischief where it can. that's very destructive. the fact people are talking

about the possibility of the russian swinging the last presidential election or the russians swinging the ref erendm vote in the uk is worrying. the subversion, the support for far right parties that's coming from the russia across europe. >> these are scary times. it's fascinating to listen to your lectures and to talk to you now. professor mcmillan, thank you so much. >> thank you. >> war from the battlefields to the political and even the personal front lines, a timely reminder. that is it for our program tonight. thanks for watching amanpour on pbs. join us again next time. >> you are watching pbs.

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