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Speaker 1

02:00:00

American projection of power into Asia, right, but also the ways in which American power affected people in Asia, right, either as, you know, in places like the Philippines where the United States had a colony for almost 50 years, were Asian Americans, people who had migrated or their descendants in the United States. And those linkages between the United States and Asia, particularly the US-Philippine connection, I think were something that needed to be traced across the 20th century, because it's a way, kind of a new way of seeing American power from a different angle. You see it in that way.

Speaker 2

02:00:39

What are some aspects that define America from when you take the perspective of the Pacific? What military conflict and the asymmetry of power there?

Speaker 1

02:00:50

Right, so I start in 1898, you know, with the US invasion of the Philippines, its conquest and annexation. And I think in many ways, this is a defining conflict of the 20th century that's often completely overlooked. We're described, I think incorrectly, as merely a war with Spain.

Speaker 1

02:01:10

That the war in the Philippines is our first extended overseas conflict, our first conflict in what would come to be called the developing world or third world. It's a form of counterinsurgency. You know, this is the US Army sort of learning lessons that are then repeated again in the Second World War, in Korea, Vietnam, and even after 9-11.

Speaker 2

02:01:33

Is the Philippines our friends or enemies in this history?

Speaker 1

02:01:36

Well, that's the interesting part, right, is that the book focuses in particular on Filipinos who fight with the Americans, who fought sort of in the US Army and Navy over the course of the 20th century. And they are in a fundamentally ironic position, right? They are from the Philippines and they're fighting for the United States, which is the colonial power occupying their country.

Speaker 1

02:01:59

And I think that irony persists, right? So if you look at sort of polling data where they ask people all around the world, do you think positively or negatively about the United States, that the highest responses are from the Philippines. Filipinos view the United States more favorably than people from any other country in the world, including America, right? That they think more favorably of Americans than Americans do.

Speaker 1

02:02:27

And so, you know, sort of unpacking that irony is part of what I'm trying to get at in the book.

Speaker 2

02:02:32

What was the people power revolution and what lessons can we learn from it? You kind of assign an important, a large value to it in terms of what we can learn for the American project.

Speaker 1

02:02:47

Yeah, so in 1986, the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, is overthrown by a popular revolution known as people power in the wake of a contested and probably almost certainly rigged election that sort of confirms his rule. When that is overturned through sort of mass movements in the Philippines, it's also sort of confirmed in many ways by the reluctance of the United States to intervene to prop up a Cold War ally. Ferdinand Marcos had supported American policy throughout his administration.

Speaker 1

02:03:26

The Reagan administration, Ronald Reagan's president at the time, basically chooses not to support him. That's a personally wrenching decision for Reagan himself. But he's being shaped in many ways by the emerging voices of neoconservative political, foreign policy voices, in particular Paul Wolfowitz and the State Department and others, who see sort of movements for democracy and democratization that then kind of take fire in the late 20th century in Latin America, in South Korea, in Eastern Europe, and all around the world until it hits the wall in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

Speaker 2

02:04:09

What's that wall? What do you mean by it hits the wall?

Speaker 1

02:04:15

So there are global movements for democratization, for opening up throughout the world, starting in the 1980s. And obviously, they continue in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I say it hits the wall in China with the protests in Tiananmen Square and that are blocked and that are crushed and I think represent a real sort of turning point in the history of democratic institutions on a global scale in the late 20th century.

Speaker 2

02:04:50

So there's some places where the fight for freedom will work and some places not. And that's the kind of lesson from the 20th to take forward to the 21st century?

Speaker 1

02:05:06

No, I think the lesson is maybe 1 that we talked about earlier, that there's this dynamic dance between leaders, whether totalitarian leaders or leaders of democratic movements and the people that they're leading. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Speaker 2

02:05:24

Let me ask a big ridiculous question because we talked about sort of presidential elections. Now this is objectively, definitively, you have to answer 1 person, who's the greatest president in American history?

Speaker 1

02:05:36

Oh, that's easy.

Speaker 2

02:05:37

Yeah.

Speaker 1

02:05:38

Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker 2

02:05:41

Is that easy, not George Washington?

Speaker 1

02:05:45

You know, Washington had the statesman qualities. He understood his power as the first president. Also relinquished power.

Speaker 1

02:05:54

He was willing to relinquish power. But Lincoln has the combination of personal leadership, a fundamental moral character, and just the ability to kind of, to fight the fight of politics, to play the game of it, to get where he's going, to play the short game and the long game, to kind of, you know, make, to, you know, to work with his enemies, to block them when he had to. And, you know, I mean, he gets the United States through the civil war. So you gotta give him some credit for that.

Speaker 1

02:06:32

And he's pretty good at making speeches. Obviously it helps that he's a remarkable speaker and able to convey those kinds of visions, but he is first and foremost a politician and probably the best 1 we had.

Speaker 2

02:06:48

Lex Doppelganger Both at getting elected and at ruling.

Speaker 1

02:06:51

Peter T. Leeson In some ways, better at the doing than at the getting elected, right? You know, that he, you know, the election of 1860 is a, it's just a hot mess, you know, that could have worked out many different ways.

Speaker 1

02:07:06

And even the election of 1864, when we have a presidential election in the middle of a civil war, it was not a foregone conclusion that Lincoln would be reelected. So both times he sort of, he's not a master campaigner by any means, but he was a master politician as a governor.

Speaker 2

02:07:29

Do we have leaders like that today? So 1 perspective is like, leaders aren't, ain't what they used to be. And then another perspective is, well, we always romanticize stuff that happens in the past.

Speaker 2

02:07:42

We forget the flaws and remember the great moments.

Speaker 1

02:07:46

Yeah, both of those things are true, right? On the 1 hand, you know, we don't, we are not surrounded by people of Lincoln's caliber right now.

Speaker 2

02:07:58

That feels like the case.

Speaker 1

02:07:59

And I think that, I think we can say that with some certainty. But I always like to point to President Harry Truman, who left office with some truly abysmal presidential ratings was dismissed throughout his presidency as unqualified, as not knowing what he was doing, et cetera. And then, it turns out, with hindsight, we know that he was better at the job than anyone understood.

Speaker 1

02:08:32

Better at getting elected, right? You remember that sign, Dewey defeats Truman, right? He showed them, right? And better at holding power and better at sort of, you know, kind of building the kind of institutions that long after he was gone, demonstrated that he won the long game.

Speaker 2

02:08:51

And some of that is the victors do write the story and I ask myself very much, how will history remember Volodymyr Zelensky? It's not obvious. And how will history remember Putin?

Speaker 2

02:09:07

That too is not obvious. Because it depends on how the role, the geopolitics, how the history of these nations unravel, unfold rather. So it's very interesting to think about. And the same is true for Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and so on.

Speaker 2

02:09:37

I think it's probably an unanswerable question of which of the presidents will be remembered as a great president from this time. You can make all kinds of cases for all kinds of people and they do, but it's unclear. It's fascinating to think about. When the robots finally take over, which of the humans they will appreciate the most.

Speaker 2

02:09:59

Let me Ask for advice. Do you have advice for young folks as they, because you mentioned the folks you're teaching, they don't even, they don't know what it's like to have waited on the internet for the thing to load up. For every single webpage is suffering. They don't know what it's like to not have the internet and have a dial phone that goes, and then the joy of getting angry at somebody and hanging up with a physical phone.

Speaker 2

02:10:29

They don't know any of that. So for those young folks that look at the contentious elections, that look at our contentious world, our divided world, what advice would you give them of how to have a career they can be proud of, let's say they're in college or in high school, and how to have a life they can be proud of.

Speaker 1

02:10:50

Oh man, that's a big question. Yeah, I've never given a graduation speech.

Speaker 2

02:10:56

This is like warm up. Let's look for raw materials before you write it.

Speaker 1

02:11:01

If I did, I think I would advise students that history teaches that you should be more optimistic than your current surroundings suggest, right? And I think it would be very easy as a young person today to think there's nothing I can do about this politics. There's nothing I can say to this person on the other side of the aisle.

Speaker 1

02:11:29

There's nothing I can do about the planet, et cetera, and just sort of give up. And I think history teaches that, we don't know who the winners and losers are in the long run, but we know that the people who give up are always the losers, right?

Speaker 2

02:11:50

So don't give in to cynicism or apathy. Yeah. Optimism paves the way.

Speaker 1

02:11:56

Yeah, because human beings are deeply resilient and creative, even under far more difficult circumstances than we face right now.

Speaker 2

02:12:07

Let me ask a question that you don't even need to, that you wouldn't even dare cover in your graduation commencement speech. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here?

Speaker 2

02:12:19

This whole project that history studies and analyzes as if there's a point to the whole thing. What is the point? All the wars, all the presidents, all the struggles to discover what it means to be human or reach for a higher ideal, why? Why do you think we're here?

Speaker 1

02:12:43

I think this is where there is often a handoff from the historian to the clergy. Right? But in the end, there's less distance between the 2 than you think, right?

Speaker 1

02:13:03

That, you know, if you think about some of the kind of answers to that question, what is the meaning of life that are given from religious traditions, often they have a fundamentally historical core, right? It's about unifying the past and the present in some other non-earthly sort of dimension. And so I think there is that. I think even for people who don't have religious belief, there's a way in which history is about the shared human condition.

Speaker 1

02:13:41

And I think historians aspire to telling all of that story, right? You know, we drill down on the miseries of war and depressions and so forth, but the story is not complete without, you know, blueberries and butterflies and all the rest that go with it. So

Speaker 2

02:14:08

both the humbling and the inspiring aspect that you get by looking back at human history that we're in this together. Christopher, this is a huge honor, this is an amazing conversation. Thank you for taking us back to a war that not often discussed, but in many ways defined the 20th century and the century we are in today, which is the First World War.

Speaker 2

02:14:35

The war that was supposed to end all wars, but instead defined the future wars and defines our struggle to try to avoid World War III. So it's a huge honor you to talk with me today. This is amazing. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2

02:14:48

Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Christopher Capozzola. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Woodrow Wilson in 1917 about World War I that haunted the rest of the 20th century.

Speaker 2

02:15:07

This is a war to end all wars. George Santana, a Spanish-American philosopher, responded to this quote in 1922 by saying, only the dead have seen the end of war. Thank you for listening. I hope to see

Speaker 1

02:15:30

you