All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're streaming live from ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And introducing our guest today, it's Pat Buchanan.
He's an analyst for NBC News, MSNBC, former Nixon speechwriter, and author of Where the Right Went Wrong, Day of Reckoning, A Republic, Not an Empire, The Death of the West, and the brand new one is Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.
Welcome back to the show, Pat.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Delighted to be here.
Well, I'm very glad to have you on here, and you're really kind of playing with fire writing a book like this.
This is an act of heresy against the founding myth of our state religion.
It's no longer George Washington and the American Revolution.
It's World War II, and you're trying to rewrite the history.
I guess I'm used to hearing some revisionist arguments about America shouldn't have fought World War II, but this book is about how Britain shouldn't have fought World War II, how actually they blundered into World War II.
Is that right?
Well, I think that's right, but as we're playing with fire, I've had a long career as an arsonist, so I'm not too worried about that.
But yeah, what the book is about is the series of colossal blunders made by the British statesmen and the British Empire between 1905 and 1939 that led them to declare war twice on Germany, both of which were unnecessary wars that resulted in the collapse of the British Empire, the utter destruction of Germany, and the stalinization of half of Europe.
And I go through a number of episodes and decisions that were taken, each of which I think by many folks at the time and in retrospect were really colossal blunders.
And of course, the major one in World War II was, before World War II, was giving the war guarantee to Poland to go to war on behalf of Poland in a dispute over Danzig, where the British thought, in reality, the Germans were right.
Now, I want to put off the details of that for a moment here, and in the larger sense, you say that future historians will look back at the world wars and they'll call this the Great Civil War of the West.
This was the end of Western hegemony on Earth.
I think if you take the war of 1914, 1918, and 1939 to 1945, they're really two phases of a gigantic war of Western civilization, where all the European empires and monarchies in effect went to war against each other, slaughtered each other in enormous numbers.
And at the end, Europe was in ruins and all the empires were collapsing.
I think historians will see the Second World War, and many already do, as having emerged inexorably out of the First World War and its consequences in the Versailles Treaty.
And I think that is an accurate perception.
And of course, at the end of World War II, it was sort of the extra-European powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, that dominated the world.
Now, let's talk about World War I here.
This is actually one of my favorite things to do on Earth, is to blame Woodrow Wilson for everything.
Now, obviously, the European politicians created this disaster.
If you'd like to talk a little bit about the secret war guarantee to France and how that played into it, that's good.
But then the consequences of American entry into World War I in direct contravention of the advice of George Washington.
Well, I wrote about the American intervention in World War I in A Republic, Not an Empire in that chapter on there on Woodrow Wilson's intervention.
This book deals with the beginnings and the origins of World War I, which clearly lay in the alliances, the Germans, Italians, and Austrians versus the Russians and French, and the British coming into the war because of a secret war guarantee, and because the Germans crossed over into Belgium on their way into France.
But let me talk briefly about Wilson.
Wilson had kept the United States out of World War I.
And he did so effectively despite the pressure from Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans like Lodge and Roosevelt.
And also despite the fact that in his inner core, the four principal individuals who made the decision were basically Wilson, House, Colonel House, Walter Hines Page, the Ambassador to Great Britain, and Lansing, the Secretary of State.
Now, all three of the latter were much more pro-war than Wilson.
He ran on a platform of he kept us out of war.
But the Kaiser stupidly ordered or accepted the demands of the German General Staff for all out submarine warfare on February 1, 1917.
And that gave Wilson the excuse to go into war, which is where he was tending in any event.
And so he took us into war that April.
And 18 months later, there were two million American soldiers in France and two million more on the way.
And clearly, Wilson and the Democrats took us into war.
But I would not exonerate Theodore Roosevelt and the Republicans totally.
Right.
Yeah, I know that TR pushed for it for a long time before they finally did.
But you cite Jim Powell actually in the book, and we've talked to him on the show before.
He's the author of Wilson's War.
And he explains how the war basically was coming to an end as a stalemate.
And that because of American intervention, the Russians stayed in the war long enough for Kerensky to be overthrown on Lenin's fourth try to create the Soviet Union.
And then, of course, the Versailles Treaty, which we'll have to cover in depth here.
But also the breaking of the Ottoman Empire and the turning over of that part of the Middle East to the British and the French to draw the borders that we're dealing with today.
Well, that's exactly right.
Had the United States stayed out of the war, I think the war would have come to a bloody stalemate in 1917, or maybe the German offensive in 1918 would have prevailed and Germany would have overrun Paris.
There would have been an Allied surrender, as there had been at Brest-Litovsk by the new regime of Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky.
And in that event, if the Germans had prevailed in the West and there'd been no Versailles Treaty, I think you would have at least have a great powers there that could have dealt with Lenin and Stalin as they rose, basically, in power and strength, which would have gone in and hung all the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg.
But what you did when you destroyed Germany, and in this vindictive Versailles Treaty, which tore it apart, you basically amputated the strongest power in Central Europe and the bulwark against Russia.
And then you gave it an enormous motivation for revenge.
And this is what Adolf Hitler built upon in his rise to power.
He gave a speech a thousand times that was titled simply, The Treaty of Versailles.
And Wilson was responsible for it, because he had given the Germans, when they quit the war, these guarantees under the 14 points, that those would be the terms of peace.
And he allowed them to be trampled all over by the British and French, and he went along with it.
And, you know, I think when people talk in America, when we talk about the Treaty of Versailles and what it had to do with the lead up to World War II, often the focus is on the war reparations and the hyperinflation and the economic circumstances during Hitler's first try, the Beer Hall Putsch, and how that was caused by the Treaty of Versailles.
But I think people often neglect the dismemberment of Germany, as you describe it in the book, where, in all directions, all the countries neighboring Germany got big pieces of it.
Exactly.
Now, if you take the defeated powers, Austria-Hungary, and you take Germany, now what happened?
Germany lost northern Schleswig to Denmark, it lost two small areas, Eupen and Malmedy, to Belgium, it lost Alsace-Lorraine to France, its entire western Rhineland was demilitarized, it lost south Tyrol to Italy, which was an Austrian-German enclave there on the other side of the Alps, Hungary was torn to pieces, part of it, Transylvania given to Romania, which was with the Allies, the Banat region was given to the Serbs, Hungarian ancestral lands were given to the Czechs, Slovakia and Ruthenia were torn out of Hungary, and of course you lost, the Germans lost Danzig and Memel and the Polish Corridor, and parts of Silesia to Poland.
So this was an enormous amputation of lands from Hungary, Austria and Germany to these new nations, basically Poland and Czechoslovakia in the east, and while Hitler agreed that he would not get back the lands in the west, he pretty much ceded them, because he didn't want another war in the west, he was determined to get back the lost lands in the east, and it was his desire to get back the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia for Germany, and also the desire to get the return of Danzig, which was a small town, German town of 350,000, to put a German flag over it again, that was the cause of World War II, and the British had no vital interest in whose flag flew over Danzig, none whatsoever, indeed they thought the German claim was strongest to Danzig because it was an entirely German city, 95% German, it had a Nazi legislature, they were all voting Nazi there, there were enormously enthusiastic Nazis in Danzig, and so the British gave a war guarantee to Poland that it would back it up whatever stance it took against the Germans in these negotiations, and the Poles decided not to negotiate, and that led directly to the war and the British declaration of war, and Hitler had not wanted war with Poland, and he certainly never wanted war with Great Britain.
Right, now here's where we've got to stop and do the disclaimer, and I guess I really should have said that at the beginning of the show, because already I've mentioned the premise of your book, the Polish war guarantee, and the war should have been against the Russians, not the West, and already I've had actual grown adults say, oh well, Hitler was a real bad guy, this, that, so I guess we need to go ahead and make it clear that both of us, particularly you, since you're the one making the case here, you do understand that Hitler was an evil guy, you're just saying that he wanted to project all his evil to the East, and it was British blundering that basically put him in the position of forcing his war against the democracies of the West.
This is the point, I mean there's no doubt, Hitler's crimes are scarlet, they're horrid, and no one defends what he did or what the Nazis did or what many of them were hanged for and shot for, and they deserved what they got, and he deserved his death in the bunker.
The point I'm making is simply this, that in his foreign policy, as he wrote and said, and has his behavior indicated, the last nation he wanted war with on earth was Great Britain.
He admired the British Empire, he wanted it preserved, he thought the Kaiser had made a terrible mistake in building up a high-seas fleet to challenge the British Empire.
He wrote off Alsace-Lorraine for the simple reason, first, he didn't care about Alsace-Lorraine that much, secondly, he knew to get it back from France would mean war with Britain, and he was willing to make concessions to avoid war in the West, that's why he didn't demand Shleswig back, he didn't demand Eupen and Malmedy back from Belgium.
He ceded the South Tyrol to Mussolini, why?
Because he wanted Mussolini as an ally.
What he wanted even in Poland, he didn't want war with Poland, he said five days before the war guarantee, I don't want this settled by force.
And the reason is, Hitler was building an anti-comintern, basically, alliance with Germany at its head, it already included Franco, and Spain was clearly his friend, Mussolini was already a partner, the Japanese would become so, and he wanted the Poles included in this anti-comintern alliance, and he believed the Poles would be receptive, first because they were deeply anti-communist, they had fought the Soviets at the Battle of the Vistula, in 1920, the miracle of the Vistula, and driven Trotsky's army back, and he thought there was no real dispute between the two countries that could not be resolved.
He was willing to let the Poles keep the corridor to the sea, which had been taken from Germany, as long as he could have a rail and road corridor across to East Prussia, which had been cut off from Germany.
Again, no one says that Hitler was a wonderful fellow, he was a liar, he was a deceiver, he was a thug, he had been a bully, he had murdered his own comrades, he would murder millions of people, but what I'm talking about is his foreign policy was not designed to threaten any interest of the British Empire.
Indeed, he was willing to go out of his way to appease the British, he had no claims on Western Europe, and why the British would step in and declare war on Germany, that always astounded him, and he never tried to end that war, and failed to do so, and that's why he was brought down.
The British held on until Stalin gained his strength and was aided by Britain and the United States, and the United States came fully into the war, and that brought down Hitler, and it brought down the British Empire with it.
Well, so why did the British give the war guarantee to Poland?
You quote people in the book, the English so-called statesmen, telling each other, oh boy, oh boy, this is a big mistake, why have we turned over our decision about war with Germany to these insane colonels over in Poland?
It's exactly right, Lloyd George said the decision was demented, that the General Staff, if they approved it, should be put into an insane asylum.
You had all these British statesmen, including incidentally, Churchill, in 1948, but he almost alone of British statesmen in 1939, hailed the war guarantee to Poland, now he said, you know, we're all united, but British statesmen left, and historians, and British historians as well as Americans, and all of them, say here was an act of insanity, giving a Polish regime of colonels, who had participated in the rape of Czechoslovakia, the power to draw the British Empire into a war to the death with Nazi Germany, over a matter, Danzig, which was of no interest to Great Britain.
I mean, the British didn't give a hoot, whether it was a German flag or a Polish flag over Danzig, they thought Germany should never have lost Danzig, and so this, the stupidity of the decision, I think is a given, I don't find anyone defending it, the question is why did the British do it?
They did it because when Czechoslovakia came apart, and Hitler walked into Prague, frankly, when it was signed over to him by the President of the Czech Republic, the British felt humiliated and disgraced, and Chamberlain himself was under threat from the backbenchers to be thrown out, and so Halifax pushed him, and so Hitler then demanded the return of Memel, and the Lithuanians gave it back in an instant, and all these rumors spread in London that Hitler was going to attack Poland, and he was going to attack Romania, he didn't even have a border with Romania, all these things were racing through British diplomatic circles in the two weeks between March 15th and March 31st, and Chamberlain suddenly gets up and announces he has given an unsolicited war guarantee to the Polish regime, and even Germans were saying this is the same stupid mistake we made before World War I, giving a war guarantee to Austria, a blank check, and so that's the origins of it, I think Churchill and Chamberlain both came to recognize the stupidity of the decision, but once made, they could not draw back, and Hitler kept trying to negotiate with the Poles, because he didn't want war with the Poles, he didn't want war, certainly, with Great Britain.
The whole idea of the Hitler-Stalin pact was obviously aimed militarily against Poland, but politically and diplomatically it was aimed at Britain.
When Hitler got the agreement to the pact, he thought the Brits would say, OK, we can no longer maintain a commitment to Poland, and they would back off, but the British renewed their alliance, so Hitler called off his invasion for one week, to try to figure out how he could get back what he wanted in Poland without going to war with the British.
He failed, he went to war, the British declared war, they refused twice, on two occasions, offers of Hitler to end the war, because Churchill wanted to hold on until the United States came in, and he did, until he was the indispensable man in bringing down Nazi Germany, but he was also the indispensable man in ensuring that the war went on for five more years.
OK, so Chamberlain was embarrassed, humiliated over Munich, he had agreed, you can take the Sudetenland, but leave the rest of so-called Czechoslovakia alone, and then when Czechoslovakia fell apart, Hitler went ahead and took the rest of it.
Well, here's what Hitler did to me, this is very important.
Hitler did not take the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia began to fall apart in March 10th, or March 11th of about 1939, six months after Munich.
What happens was, the Slovakians and the Ruthenians to the east, a small enclave to the east of Slovakia and Slovakia, they declared independence.
The Hungarians began to move on both provinces, because they had been under the Kingdom of Hungary when it was part of the Habsburg Empire.
Hitler told the Hungarians, stay out of Slovakia, he guaranteed the independence of Slovakia, and then the Ruthenians asked him for the same thing, and he said no.
And the Hungarians moved into Ruthenia, and took that over.
Then the Czech president came to Berlin to see Hitler.
He wanted the same deal, basically, as Hitler had given the Slovakians, which is an independent country, whose independence Germany would guarantee.
That's exactly what Hitler should have done.
Instead, he bullied President Hacha and the foreign minister, Chelvalsky, into ceding, basically, the Czech, what was left of the rump of Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, as a protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a protectorate of the Germans.
So they lost their independence, and Hitler got into Prague the next morning before President Hacha had even made it back.
It was peaceful, but it was also brutal diplomacy.
And that is what did it.
That final Hitler in Prague did it with the British, because it had so humiliated Chamberlain, who bet everything, and who had told the world, you know, I'm the one person who can deal with Hitler, he doesn't want anything more in Europe, I'm the statesman that cut the Munich deal, the Munich deal guaranteed peace for our time.
He was made into a fool, and he was an object of ridicule by the backbenchers and the laborites and all the others.
And it was in that mood of hysteria and anger and rage, humiliation and panic, that he handed the war guarantee to Poland.
And see, what he thought was that that would make Hitler think twice or something, because now we have him surrounded or whatever, but didn't realize the consequences.
And now, I want to make sure people understand about Danzig, because I'm not certain I do.
I wish I had a map of Europe in front of me here, but I guess if I flip through your book I'll find one.
Basically, Danzig, you say in the book, was always a German city, and was 95% German.
This was a city, and the corridor to it was basically just taken from Germany in the Versailles Treaty, and the British, you say in the book, and I guess you've already said in this interview, the British wanted the Poles to give it back, but in the book you say that after the war guarantee, Chamberlain, realizing what he'd done, told the Poles, hey, seriously, I want you to negotiate with Hitler over Danzig here.
And they said, tough luck, we already got your war guarantee.
We're not negotiating anything.
They felt like the big man, because the British had their back, whereas without that war guarantee, they probably would have just negotiated Danzig, and then the war would have been against the Soviet Union, not Britain and France and Denmark and everybody else.
Well, that's close.
Here, close to what I'm saying.
Here's what basically happened, was that at Versailles, all these, as we talked about, all these territories were stripped from Germany, Austria, which was Hitler's native country, and Hungary, and the Germans had pretty much written off all the territories they had lost in the West, to France, Belgium, Denmark, and Italy.
However, in the East, they wanted them back.
Now, Danzig was their strongest case, because Danzig was a, basically, it was a Hanseatic League city.
It was always German, it was 95% German, a Baltic Sea port.
And what the Allies did, was they gave Poland a corridor to the sea, but instead of just road and rail, they gave them a large strip of German land that divided Germany in half, between Prussia in the East, and the rest of Germany in the West, this Polish corridor divided in half.
They made Danzig a free city under the League of Nations, but Polish administration.
So what that did, in effect, they did that because Poland needed a port.
When they created the new Poland, they didn't want it landlocked, they wanted to give it a port on the Baltic Sea, so they took that from the Germans.
And Hitler's offer to the Poles was, look, you can maintain economic control, but we want it to be under the political control of Germany, it's a German city, and we want it back.
And Hitler had said, you can keep the corridor, but we want a corridor across it.
Now, what would have happened if the British hadn't given them the war guarantee?
I don't know the answer to that question.
The Poles had seen what happened to the Czechs, and they might well have said, look, that's the first bite that Hitler wants.
The second bite will be the corridor itself, so why don't we stand and fight right now?
The Poles were very romantic about how strong they were, how tough they were, how big an army they were.
They had defeated the Soviet Union, after all, in 1920 at the Vistula, driven Trotsky's army back, and taken lands from the Russian Empire.
So they had an exaggerated notion of how tough they were, and how modern and capable their army was.
Their bravery was never in doubt.
So I don't know what would have happened.
I do know this, that by the time that Britain had no vital interest in whose flag flew over the darn Polish corridor or Danzig, the British had never fought in that part of Europe before.
It had always been, before 1918, for 120 years, Poland had been under Russian, German, and Austrian-Hungarian rule.
And it wasn't until 1919 at Versailles that the new Poland was formally created and its borders established.
And the Allied statesmen at Versailles almost came to recognize the insanity of what they were doing at the conference.
But after it, Churchill even said, you know, the Polish corridor doesn't make any sense.
Back in 1932-33, and the British, and the others said, I mean, Lloyd George said, the next war is going to come out of this corridor we've created.
And so they began to recognize the stupidity of taking land and peoples away from the most powerful, potentially, nation in all of Europe, and handing them over to these new regimes of countries that had never existed.
And what an enormous problem they were creating for themselves, when, as was certain to happen, the Germans got back on their feet.
And now, how are you so sure that if the British hadn't given the war guarantee to Poland, whether the Poles had fought or not, whether they'd gone along with Hitler in the anti-Soviet pact or not, how can you be so sure that it would have been Stalin next on his hit list?
The point is, I'm not even sure it would have been Stalin on his hit list.
If he had had to deal with Poland, suppose Poland had agreed to the road and rail corridor across the Polish corridor, and to give back political control of Danzig, I mean, why would Germany, how could Germany attack the Soviet Union if it didn't have a border with the Soviet Union?
There was no frontier.
It had a border with Poland.
It had a border with Russia.
It had a border with the Baltic states.
So there might not have been a World War II at all, not just...
That's exactly my point.
And as a matter of fact, and I quote a number of historians, some of whom are not fans of mine, the reason Hitler went to war with Russia after he'd had a border in Poland with Russia was to knock Russia out as a potential ally of Britain.
He wanted to end the war in 1941.
He said, the British are holding on for the United States to come in, and he was right, and for the Russians to come in, and he was right.
And he said, if we can knock, nothing we can do about the Americans, but if we can knock the Russians out of the war, even, you know, just knock them out as a potential ally, then the British will see that they've got no choice but to come to terms, and they will end this stupid war, which Hitler wanted ended.
But good heavens, what more did he want?
And so that's why he invaded the Soviet Union.
When he did, he found out the Soviet Union was far more powerful, that the Russian Red Army had been developed enormously beyond what he had imagined.
And when his troops were halted there, in Moscow, and Leningrad, and in eastern Ukraine, at Stalingrad, he realized he had lost the war.
And frankly, that is when they began to move the people to the camps.
Well, and see, that's the next big point, is the Holocaust.
That's got to be addressed.
Well, you argue in the book that the Holocaust only started, as you just said, once they realized they'd lost the war against the Soviet Union.
That's when they resorted to the so-called final solution.
Well, yeah, there's two dates that people give for the beginning of the Holocaust.
The first is the invasion of Russia, when the Einsatzgruppen followed the German troops, the German Wehrmacht, into Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic Republics, and into the Soviet Union generally.
And they were executing commissars, and communists, and Jews.
And so, some say it began then, which would have been 1941, in June.
That's two years into the war.
Others say it did not begin, if you want to call it the deportations to the camps, until the final solution was decided upon at the Swansea Conference.
But that was not until the end of January 1942, almost two and a half years into the war.
And at this point, again, Hitler, as of January 1942, was making all these morose statements if the German people aren't strong enough, then they deserve to pass from the earth.
And he clearly had come to see the possibility of ultimate defeat.
General Jodl testified at Nuremberg that Hitler knew that Germany could not win the war as of January 1942.
Now, the trains began to roll in the early spring of 1942, to places like Treblinka, and Sobibor, and places like that, which were the original camps that were built in Poland.
And so, what I'm saying, quite simply, is, you know, no war, no Holocaust.
No British war guarantee.
No war.
Well now, what about Mein Kampf, and Hitler's dreams of not just reuniting all the lost provinces, but all that breathing room, or living space, or whatever he called it, to the east there?
You know, there's another thesis, of course, the icebreaker thesis, which is that Hitler attacked Russia because he realized Russia was about to attack him, and that's why he caught all those prisoners, millions of them, because they were ready to march into Germany.
I don't buy the Lebensraum theory for this reason.
Look, Hitler, let's see what he took over.
When he got back to Austria, that was, of course, German.
Then he got to Sudetenland.
This is German Bohemia.
So he annexed that.
He didn't annex the Czech Republic.
He made it a protectorate.
He didn't annex Slovakia.
He made it independent with a German guarantee.
He didn't annex Ruthenia, he gave that to Hungary.
As for Poland, that was the general government.
He didn't annex these and make them part of Germany.
I don't believe he wanted to move Germans into these territories, because there's no evidence he did it.
He withdrew the Germans from South Tyrol.
He said, look, either Italianize your names and become Italians, or come back to Bavaria, because I'm not going to save the South Tyrol.
So my view is what Hitler wanted more was he wanted a series of states surrounding him which were part of an anti-comintern pact, which were basically fascist, neo-fascist, friendly to him.
You take Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, you take Mussolini in Italy, he annexed Austria, Admiral Horthy in Hungary, the leaders of Romania, even the Poles.
Pilsudski was a right-wing dictator.
Colonel Beck, this was a dictatorship of colonels.
It was very right-wing.
He saw these as natural allies.
I don't think he had an idea of annihilating them when he became a statesman, or became I wouldn't call him a statesman, that's probably going to get me in trouble.
When he became the leader of the German Reich, I think he became more of a figure in terms of German history, much like the Kaiser and much like Frederick the Great on a far larger scale and like Bismarck.
But I don't think he had any idea of overrunning the British Empire or the French Empire or the United States of America.
I think he would like to have eradicated Soviet Bolshevism, which he considered Judeo-Bolshevism.
But if Poland hadn't gone to war with him and agreed with him, he would have had no border with the Soviet Union.
How do you attack the Soviet Union in a surprise attack when you have no border with them?
Well, you know, if he didn't want world war to overextend and destroy his empire, I guess that would make him smarter than the average imperialist in the world, because it seems like that's the whole deal, murder-suicide.
Well, I mean, I think Hitler realized, I mean, he was not a stupid man.
He was a student of history.
And he looked at the Kaiser as a real blunderer because the Kaiser had gotten into a two-front war, first with the West, and the Kaiser had lost all his colonies instantly because despite the fact he had a mighty fleet, it was no match for the Royal Navy and certainly no match for the Royal and the French Navy and the American Navy.
And so he lost all his colonies.
And he said to his advisors, look, there's no sense us having colonies overseas.
If we get into a war with the Anglo-Saxon powers, we'll lose them because we have no navy.
We're bottled up here in the Baltic Sea.
You got a little tiny narrow straits to get out into the oceans, and then we can never get back.
And as soon as your ships are out on the high seas, I mean, they're at the mercy of the Americans and the British who have greater navies.
So right off that direction for the German Empire, we're going to build our own, if you will, our imperial domain in the east and the center of Europe, which is what he was all about and what he was doing.
But you take A.J.
P.
Taylor and B.H.
Liddell Hart.
These are great British historians.
Both say point blank, and I quote them, that Hitler never wanted a world war.
He just never prepared for a world war.
At the beginning of World War II, his expenses on defense were 15% of GDP, the same as the British.
He had 27 ocean-going submarines.
Only nine could be at sea at once.
He had an air force of two-engine bombers.
They were non-strategic bombers.
They were bombers built to aid the army in its advance, flying artillery.
He built a west wall, the Siegfried Line.
Why would he build a west wall if he were going to invade France from the beginning the way the Kaiser was, under the Schlieffen Plan?
The Kaiser never built a west wall, but Hitler did, because it was his Maginot Line, as he moved eastward.
So all of these things, when he went to Paris, he went to the Pyrenees and asked permission of Franco to march across Spain to take Gibraltar, Franco said no, and Hitler ground his teeth and left.
I mean, this is not a world conqueror.
Well now, the major consequences of this war are that America inherited almost all the empires in the world, except what the Soviets got, and turned our country from a republic to an empire, and as you describe, I forget the numbers of millions of people who were then turned over to communist slavery.
Well, yeah, what happened was that, what did Britain say?
Churchill wanted to go to war for Czechoslovakia, that wound up in the hands of Stalin.
They did go to war for Poland, Poland was torn to pieces, millions of Jews and Christians murdered, Poland was torn to pieces and wound up in Stalin's slave quarters, the Red Army was in Berlin, the Red Army was in Prague, the Red Army was in Vienna, Russian armies had never gotten that far west ever before, all of China, for which America went to war, that fell to Chinese communists, who murdered probably ten times as many people as the Japanese had.
The Japanese were kicked out of Korea and Vietnam and China, and the United States had to fight in Korea and Vietnam and contain China, and the United States inherited the remnants of the British Empire, the dominions like Australia and Canada turned to the United States for leadership, and the British basically transferred their empire to the United States of America, and they had failed to keep a single hostile power from dominating Europe.
So I think they failed all the way around, the British did.
I mean, I'm not saying they weren't heroic, but it's a question I ask, were their statesmen wise when in 1914 Britain was mistress of the greatest empire the world had ever seen and a navy unlike any the world had ever seen, and 25 years later, Great Britain's living off American food stamps.
Now what about the lessons of Munich, because what we learn is that when people are evil you have to start a war against them right now before they conquer the world.
The truth was, and I'm going to be writing this in September, which will get me in some trouble, the truth is it was nothing Chamberlain could do.
Look, by 1938, what was the situation?
Three and a half million Germans in 1919 had been put under Czech rule, of seven million Czechs.
They didn't want to be put under that rule, they were denied the right of self-determination, they had never been under a Czech regime before.
They were very favored people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they had a wonderful industrial economy, and they were simply put under Czech rule because the Czechs had been faithful allies in World War I to the West, and because of Venice and Masaryk, the Czech leaders, were great favorites of Paris.
I mean, Wilson was Gaga over Masaryk, what a great hero he was, George Washington, and all that.
So here these Germans were put under Czech rule, and by 1938 they were agitating to return to German rule.
They had been put there wrongly, they wanted to exercise their right of self-determination.
The British had no alliance with Czechoslovakia, so will somebody explain to me why the British should go to war with Germany, a war to the death, in order to keep three million Germans under a Czech rule they had never asked for and that had been imposed upon them against their will?
I mean, why should people go to war for that?
And the truth is, the British couldn't win the war, they couldn't even fight it.
They had no draft, they could not put a single division into France, they didn't have any to put into France, they had no hurricanes and no spitfires.
The Americans said, if you go to war, we won't even sell France the planes that have already been ordered and paid for, because that would violate the Neutrality Act.
The Canadians and Australians and Indians and South Africans would not have supported the British, and so they declared a war they could not win for a cause in which they did not believe.
Now that's what all the people say, that they should have stood up to the Nazis at Munich or asked them to do, and that's an absurdity.
Now where Chamberlain's blunder was, he comes home after this humiliating acceptance of Nazi terms that the Sudeten Germans, everywhere there are 50% or 51% that goes to Germany, and so after accepting that he comes home and says, it's peace for our time, and he's hailed as the great, you know, the savior, the prince of peace, and Hitler's seething because he had wanted to walk in there, march in there, he hated Venice, he'd wanted to march in, but so he comes home and then he says, I'm the only guy that can deal with Hitler, and he keeps praising this agreement, and Churchill said, the agreement stinks.
And so, but you know, Churchill wanted war, but even John Lukacs said it would have been a war, insane war, because the British would have lost it.
So but then when Hitler walks into Czechoslovakia, into Prague, as we discussed six months later, then Chamberlain suddenly reversed, he's humiliated, and so then the decisions are set in train that set off the Second World War that destroyed Britain, everybody was going to be saved, the British, the Germans, the Poles, and the Czechs, all were smashed and destroyed, and the Soviets wound up with Europe all the way to the Elbe River.
Could it be that part of the reason you wrote this book was to try to demolish that Lessons of Munich myth and perhaps inject into the discussion from now on the lessons of making promises that you can't keep and entangling alliances with states that you can't protect without endangering your own interests, etc.?
Exactly.
What I've said is, every nation, you've got to draw a red line around what is vital, and you have to let other nations know what that is.
But if you keep handing out war guarantees in an imperial fashion, willy-nilly, to nations or parts of nations that are not in your vital interest and you can't guarantee, you're inviting what happened twice in Europe.
And this is just what the United States is foolishly doing today.
I mean, there's talk today of giving a war guarantee to Georgia, which is in a dispute, which has a dispute with two of its breakaway provinces of Casia and South Ossetia, and the Russians are meddling there, and it used to be, I mean, good heavens, understandably, Georgia used to be the birthplace of Stalin and Beria, so they have some connection with it.
But we're not, I mean, and the Americans just sent a thousand troops in there, they're helping to train the Georgians.
Now, you have a war break out there, there are many people, McCain included, who want to give, who want to bring Georgia into NATO.
There's a December meeting of NATO, on which they're going to try to put Georgia and Ukraine on a fast track.
That is a fast track to war.
It is an act of insanity.
I mean, Ukraine, God bless them, they're free and independent.
I never thought it would happen, as for Georgia, I never believed it would happen, and it happened.
And that's a wonderful thing, but we cannot lay down a marker that we're going to go to war with a nuclear power to ensure that that situation endures forever.
Well, you know, in the press this morning, Agence France-Presse is reporting that Russia is considering putting bombers in Cuba, or putting a refueling base for bombers in Cuba, quote, in response to America putting anti-missile missiles in Poland.
I've got a column I wrote, it'll come out tomorrow for Friday, which says, look, you know what the Poles are doing now, God bless them, Mr. Tusk, the foreign, the Prime Minister, he says, well, let's put in 10 anti-missile missiles on Polish soil, but you've got to provide hundreds of millions of dollars for an air defense for Poland.
We are being held up for the privilege of defending Poland.
I would tell the Poles, we've changed our mind, we're not going to put the missiles into Poland, we're not going to put the radars into Czechoslovakia, we're going to restore our relations with Mr. Putin's and Mr. Medvedev's Russia.
So no, we don't accept this shakedown, goodbye and good luck.
And that's what I would do.
I would never, frankly, we should never have given the NATO war guarantees to the Baltic States.
We can't defend those countries.
I mean, if a Russian militarist regime came to power, and overnight they walked into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, what in heaven's name would we do?
Does anybody think the Germans, or the French, or the Italians, or the Spanish, all members of NATO are going to declare war on Russia, a nuclear-armed nation?
Anybody think the Brits will?
This is, to me, the country's following the same stupid pattern of every other people before it, and it is, and you can see what the Brits did.
But, I mean, everybody said, what a wonderful man Churchill was.
Look at what he wound up with.
He wound up with the empire in ruins as an island dependency of the United States, about three decades after he entered the first Lord of the Admiralty, of the greatest naval power and world power in history.
Well, let's hope it doesn't take a world war to get us to give up our empire.
Well, it will be gone if there's a world war, that's for sure, and the United States is already.
There are people pushing for war on Iran, and a third front.
It's good to see that there are people in the administration, like Gates, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who are trying to talk that down, and damp that down.
But you've got the neocons, who are just livid over the fact that some second-level State Department guy showed up at talks with the Iranians.
So, Scott, there's a lot of folks, I mean, look, the only lesson you learn from history is that you do not learn from history.
Yeah, that seems to be the way it is.
All right, I've got one more question for you real quick, Pat, before I let you go.
Where do you read your foreign policy news?
Where do I read my foreign policy news?
Oh, anywar.com.
I was going to see if I could trick you into saying that.
Thanks a lot.
Well, no, I just got up and I read it this morning.
I'm down here at the beach.
It's after drudge, after drudge, and it's, I would say, after drudge and looking up how my book's doing on Amazon.com, it's the very next site.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot for your time today, everybody.
Pat Buchanan.
He is the author of Where the Right Went Wrong, Day of Reckoning, A Republic, Not an Empire, The Death of the West, and the new one, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Well, thank you, Scott.
