Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I see a lot of parallels of going back to the time of the Cold War. And the bipolar world that emerges, it's not anymore the world focused on Washington and Moscow. It's more like a world focused on Washington and Beijing. And then there are countries in between. There are countries in between that join one bloc or another bloc that is emerging that is not fully formed.
This is, in my opinion, makes the task of us historians to really go back to the Cold War and look through a new perspective on the history of that conflict because there is a lot of things that we can learn.
The hopeful trajectory is... really trying to be as wise and as lucky as our predecessors during the Cold War were. Because the dominant discourse so far about the Cold War was, what a horrible thing that Cold War was. What did we do wrong? How did we end up in the Cold War? And I think especially today, this is a wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is, how did it happen?
What did we do so right that for now more than 70 years we don't have a World War? How come that after World War I, World War II came within 20 years? What helped us to keep the world on the brink but still away from the global war for such a long period of time? how to keep the Cold War cold. That's the biggest lesson that the history of the Cold War can give us.
And I don't think we ask the question quite often enough, ask the question that way. And if you don't ask right questions, we don't get right answers.
Luck is clearly, clearly one of the factors in life. Cuban Missile Crisis, because what happened there, and there is one of the lessons, is that eventually the commanders at the top, they believe that they have all the cards. They negotiate with each other. They try to see who blinks first in the game of nuclear brinkmanship. The trick is that they don't control fully people on the ground.
One of the most dangerous moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the Soviet missile shooting down the American airplane, killing the pilot. An act of war. Technically, we're already in war. The order to shoot the missile was given with Moscow having no clue what was going on the ground. Moscow never gave approval for that.
Again, I described that in the book many times about Kennedy bringing back his wisdom from World War II years. There always will be SOB who didn't get the order or missed things, and that was happening on the American side as well. People who believe that they're in control really are not in control, and that can escalate very often against their wishes. So that is one lesson.
But going back to why we're still here, and why the world didn't end up in 1962, is that the leadership, and I come to the issue that you strongly believe in, that people, personalities matter, leaders matter. They were very different, right? Age, education, political careers, understanding what politics are, and so on and so forth.
Khrushchev and Kennedy, yes. But they had one thing in common, that in one way, they belong to the same generation. That was generation of the Bikini Atoll. That was the generation of the hydrogen bomb. The bomb that, unlike the atomic bomb, they knew could destroy the world. And they were scared. They were scared of the nuclear weapons.
And they tried to do whatever they could, pushing against their advisors or allies. were trying to deal with their anxieties. The first is true for Kennedy, later maybe for Khrushchev, to make sure that the war between the United States and the Soviet Union doesn't start because they knew that That war would be a nuclear war. So we have a very, very paradoxical sort of situation.
The crisis occurred because of the nuclear weapons, because Khrushchev put them on Cuba. But the crisis was resolved, and we didn't end in the Third World War because of the nuclear weapons, because people, leaders, were afraid of them. That's where I want to put emphasis. It's not that the nuclear weapons created crisis or solved the crisis. It's basically our perception of them.
We are now in the age after the Cold War era, with the new generation of voters, with the new generation of politicians. We don't belong to the generation of bikini at all. We maybe know what bikini is, but we think that this is something else. And it's very important.
Yes, we can.
Thank you very much, Lex. It was a pleasure.
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