Historian Lord Andrew Roberts joins Mitch Daniels to challenge one of America’s most enduring narratives: that King George III was a tyrant. Drawing on his book The Last King of America, Roberts argues for a more complex (and surprising) view of the monarch at the center of the Revolution. The discussion explores constitutional government, the power of political myth, and the lasting significance of the American founding for liberty today.
Historian Lord Andrew Roberts joins Mitch Daniels to challenge one of America’s most enduring narratives: that King George III was a tyrant. Drawing on his book The Last King of America, Roberts argues for a more complex (and surprising) view of the monarch at the center of the Revolution. The discussion explores constitutional government, the power of political myth, and the lasting significance of the American founding for liberty today.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to The Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:18):
Welcome to the latest edition of The Future of Liberty podcast. We've been graced on this program by several eminent historians, but no list of the great historians of our day, however short, would be complete without the name, probably at the top, of today's guest, Lord Andrew Roberts. I double-checked my protocol before addressing him that way. He is the author of a host of very important works of history, including biographies of Napoleon and Churchill, and most recently a fascinating book which needs no help from me to sell, I'm sure, but which I do recommend to anyone who hasn't read it: The Last King of America. I'd like to start there, because the book teaches us not only a great deal about English history, Lord Roberts, but also a lot about our own. So the court recognizes counsel for the defense. The court understands you to assert that your client has been very misunderstood by Americans. How is that?
Lord Andrew Roberts (01:30):
Oh, he's the most misunderstood monarch in British history as well. He's misunderstood by Britons as well. He's thought of very widely as a man who was mad, of course, and was dictatorial and vicious, and through his own stupidity, lost America. And none of that is true. He did have bouts of manic depression, but none of them had any effect at all on any decision making with regard to the Americas, because they didn't happen and they didn't start until after America was lost.
(02:13):
He was also probably our most cultured monarch, certainly one of our most intelligent, a pious, decent and upstanding, personal figure who had no animus whatsoever against Americans. He wanted to be as good a king to Americans as he could, but he was king at a time when you had 2.5 million population, 8% growth year-on-year, and quite rightly wanted to become independent. It wasn't his viciousness that led to your wanting to be independent. It was your desire to be independent, which is a wholly positive and rational response.
Mitch Daniels (02:59):
Yes. Although he was denounced at the time and remembered today over here as a tyrant, and we'll come back to that notion two or three other ways, but the book teaches, you say, that his first concern was not the Crown's prerogative, but actually the rights of individuals. And that's a new insight for many of us. Tell us more about that.
Lord Andrew Roberts (03:24):
Well, yes. He was a supporter of the concept of the common law, the law that both you Americans and we share. He never did any of the dictatorial things, at least in peacetime. And once the war had broken out, of course, it became a very different matter. But apart from sending troops to Boston in 1768, he did not send troops to any other American city. He did not try to stop the Stamp Act Congress from meeting. When one looks at the actual tyrants of the day in France, Russia, Prussia, or Austria, he did none of those things, because he had a respect for the law.
(04:13):
He also didn't act unconstitutionally. Every decision that was taken with regard to the colonies, later the United States, were parliamentary decisions. They were packed by the parliamentary majority. A dictator takes no notice of parliament. He didn't act except through his ministers and through the majorities in the House of Commons. So in no sense was he a tyrant. He never closed newspapers, arrested journalists, did any of those things that tyrants did do in those days.
Mitch Daniels (04:46):
Yeah, it was ironic. And just very recently, it seemed timely to read that a central dispute leading up to the Revolution concerned who could tax the colonies. There were some in the colonies who asserted that he could do it unilaterally. He disagreed and said that only Parliament could impose those taxes. We've just come through a situation in which our Supreme Court has told our chief executive, “You can’t impose tariffs unilaterally.” But I have to confess, that was a new insight to me, and a very important one, I thought.
Lord Andrew Roberts (05:32):
George III never imposed any tariffs that weren't passed by our parliament, our equivalent of your Congress. And when your founding fathers drew up the Constitution, it strikes me that they made it abundantly clear that they thought that the setting of tariffs should be something that was undertaken by the Congress and not by the chief executive. In your case, the president, obviously, in our case, the king. So in that sense, he was acting very much in the same way that the founding fathers considered it right to act.
Mitch Daniels (06:10):
Well, an American reading this wonderful book comes away feeling something like an ingrate. I want to go through a couple of the particulars that you lay out for us. This whole business, all this noise about sugar, stamps, tea and so forth. Really, we should have recognized those as proper user fees, I suppose, for the protection that the British and their military had provided us all those years.
Lord Andrew Roberts (06:43):
Well, it was the French and Indian War, as you call it, the Seven Years’ War, as we call it, that led to an enormous financial outlay for the British taxpayer in ensuring that the Americans, the Britons in America, as many of them saw themselves, won that war. And once it had been won, the British Parliament wanted to try to recover a fairly small proportion, only about 20 percent, of that financial outlay from the Americans. And therefore they imposed these taxes, the famous ones being the Tea Act, the sugar duties, attempts to tax rum, and the Stamp Act.
(07:34):
And stamps weren't just postage stamps, of course, it meant absolutely anything that was printed material. And the trouble was that that in particular landed on lawyers and journalists, the two most outspoken sets of people in society who could cause the most amount of upset. And boy, did they.
Mitch Daniels (08:01):
We wrote the third of our Bill of Rights specifically to preclude the quartering of troops, but King George hadn't actually done that, you teach us.
Lord Andrew Roberts (08:15):
Well, he did once the war had started, of course. But as I say, then all bets were off really pretty much after Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. But I think it's also worthwhile pointing out that the Continental Army imposed troops on people. George Washington courted more troops on Americans than George III ever did.
Mitch Daniels (08:41):
You sum up, I think, a great deal of the discussion of our revolution by pointing out that a true tyrant would've won the war. Make that case.
Lord Andrew Roberts (08:57):
Well, he would have been tremendously vicious. That’s essentially the case. If you look at Catherine the Great, for example, she killed 100,000 people during the Pugachev uprising in the late 1760s. There were some appalling war crimes that the British were responsible for in the American Revolutionary War, the burning of Norfolk, for example. But overall, had he fought the same kind of war that, say, the French were fighting in Corsica, where no quarter was given and no prisoners were taken, then he might have broken the will of the rebels. It’s estimated that one third of Americans supported the Revolution. Another third were loyalists who opposed it, and the final third were watching to see which side would win, which is often the case in most wars, especially wars in the eighteenth century.
(09:57):
So yes, had he been the monster he is made out to be in the Declaration of Independence, that beautifully written document, which is nonetheless essentially a propaganda weapon. It is a manifesto and not to be taken as literal truth, apart from those wonderful opening phrases. Of the twenty-eight accusations made against George III in the Declaration of Independence, only two of them actually hold water. But the two that do hold water are significant: the claim that there was taxation without representation, that Britain was taxing the colonies without their consent, and that the colonists were not represented in the House of Commons. Those were enough to spark a revolution. As I say, by the 1770s the Americans were ready for self-government. And I see America as all the more remarkable because of it. Your Founding Fathers were an extraordinary, unbelievably talented group of people. You were tremendously fortunate to have them all in the same place at the same time in history, frankly. But none of that makes George III into a tyrant. He was not one.
Mitch Daniels (11:19):
I was going to come to the Declaration, but since you took us there, I have to quote for our audience a fascinating line that I’ve been sharing with many friends, when recommending your book. Having summed up, as you see it, the falsity of thirteen fourteenths of the indictments that Jefferson packed into the document, you describe the Declaration of Independence as“hypocritical, illogical, mendacious, and sublime.” What a wonderful description.
Lord Andrew Roberts (12:02):
It's the fourth adjective which is the one that matters.
Mitch Daniels (12:06):
It sort of redeems the rest in a way, but it's lovely and I think it's a memorable description. Could you talk about it just for a second?
Lord Andrew Roberts (12:18):
Well, I've noticed that Walter Isaacson just brought out a book saying that that first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is the most important sentence ever written. And I think he's right. The way in which it has inspired, obviously, not just your country's independence, but also a whole new way of thinking about the relationship between rulers and ruled and between God and man and between the people and the concept of the sovereignty of the people. No, that sentence absolutely does say it all. And it was profoundly revolutionary because it didn't involve a king, of course.
(13:03):
However, as I say, if you take out those opening lines, which are sublime and vital and do justify the revolution, if you then go into all of the reasons Jefferson gave, he's a lawyer. It's his job to pack out a case. And boy, does he. He involves things that George III never did, other things that every ruler of America had done before, and by the way, which most of them have done since as well. And it's a hodgepodge, really, of accusations. And the personal ones are the worst in a way, because they're completely unfair for the poor old George III.
(13:51):
The other point, and obviously it's been made on a very regular basis from Samuel Johnson onwards, that I think is worth pointing out about George III is that he never owned a slave, never bought or sold a slave in his life, whereas 47 of the 62 signatures of the Declaration of Independence did do that. When he was Prince of Wales, George III wrote a treatise denouncing slavery. So there is an element, I think, also of hypocrisy there.
Mitch Daniels (14:26):
It's just fascinating as we move through this 250th year, we've already heard genuinely mendacious, ahistorical attacks on our founders, on the institutions they created and so forth, but it's illuminating to read them from someone who's so friendly and supportive of those institutions. And this is a great contribution you've made.
Lord Andrew Roberts (14:55):
Well, I’m certainly not, I hope, critical of the Founding Fathers for their immense courage. Gosh, it was gutsy to take on the most powerful empire in the world at the time. And to think that while we had a series of completely useless prime ministers, one after another, you had a draftsman of the genius of Jefferson, an absolutely magnificent military leader like George Washington, and minds like Alexander Hamilton, with his financial acumen. There was Monroe, the polymath, Franklin, and so many others as well, all of them together. Madison, too. They were able to create a country. That’s something very rare in history.
(15:56):
You do see it, of course, in fifth-century BC Athens with the people around Pericles, and culturally as well in Queen Elizabeth I’s England with Shakespeare, Marlowe, and others. But overall, it is very difficult to find moments in history when so many talented people come together to produce something in such a short span of time. And I think that is something I try to point out in this book. Your Founding Fathers were giants. The idea that their statues are now being pulled down is, in my view, an act of national cultural suicide.
Mitch Daniels (16:39):
Well, I hope we're on the backside of that particular pernicious trend, but only time will tell us that.
Lord Andrew Roberts (16:53):
Sorry, Mitch, you're not putting the statues back up, are you? The statue that was in New York of Thomas Jefferson, you should be taking that out of wherever it is, some museum, I think, and putting it back into whichever capital building that it was wrenched out of.
Mitch Daniels (17:15):
Yeah. Well, I hope we outgrow this period that we've been in. But you were rough on the Sons of Liberty. They basically come off as not these heroes we were taught in third grade, but the henchmen of smugglers, basically.
Lord Andrew Roberts (17:32):
Well, quite a lot of new research has been done on this, and they've worked out that easily the majority of the people who attacked the ships at the time of the Boston Tea Party were basically employees of just five or six big, rich Boston smuggler merchants who were obviously financially going to do very badly out of the Tea Act. Ordinary Americans actually were going to have the cost of tea was going to be brought down, and the consumer was going to get a good deal if that tea had been landed, but the smuggler merchants weren't going to. So I think it's worthwhile pointing out that they had a big financial interest in carrying out the attack.
Mitch Daniels (18:23):
One comes away from those chapters musing that the creation of conspiracy theories to achieve victim status is a practice people may be perfecting in this day and age, but it was not without precedent.
Lord Andrew Roberts (18:45):
No, that's right. And actually, there were lots of very weird conspiracy theories. One of them was that George III was going to try to impose Catholicism on the American colonies, just because he had allowed Catholics to have freedom of worship in Quebec. But the difference was, of course, he was a complete Anglican, a true believer in Protestantism.
Mitch Daniels (19:08):
Deeply devout.
Lord Andrew Roberts (19:10):
Deeply devout. The other point was that, of course, the Quebecois were the majority in Montreal and still are today. And so it would have been very difficult to have run Quebec as a British colony without having given religious freedom to the Catholics there.
Mitch Daniels (19:30):
I think the fundamental lesson that comes from that entire chronicle is that the real issue was westward expansion and the British reluctance to see an opposition to the eventually inexorable pressure of the Americans to move west and grow.
Lord Andrew Roberts (19:54):
That's right. We were standing very much in the way of manifest destiny, the westward push. And if George III had been this kind of amoral figure, well, he'd have just ripped up the proclamation, allowed the Americans to have gone westward and ignored all the treaties and peace agreements that he'd had with the Native Americans. But because he was a man of his word and had a moral core to him, he didn't want to do that. And the result was obviously disastrous for him.
Mitch Daniels (20:31):
What is a patriot king? George saw himself, he'd been taught or raised to see himself that way. It's a term maybe Americans are less familiar with, but it's an important one in understanding his view of these questions.
Lord Andrew Roberts (20:47):
Yes. There’s a book called The Idea of the Patriot King, written by Lord Bolingbroke, who was a supporter of George III’s father, the Prince of Wales. The idea was this. First of all, of course, as a Hanoverian, whose family had only come over to Britain in 1714, some forty years before he became king, there was this notion of the Hanoverians as foreign implants, Germans who therefore were not natural patriots, not truly English patriots. So when he became king, in the first speech he gave to Parliament, his equivalent of the State of the Union, he said, “Born and bred in England, I glory in the name of Britain.” And this was essential to him. He was the first King of England in years who did not speak German as his first language, but actually spoke English.
(21:54):
And the Patriot King is a concept that Bolingbroke created in which the king speaks for England. He sees England as his first priority. He puts English priorities above his role as Elector of Hanover and concentrates on the empire rather than on European politics. You maintain a strong navy in order to protect the country and sustain high defense spending. At the same time, you try to keep taxation as low as possible. These are strong ideas, obviously, and they have lasted to this day. I’m a British conservative, and I very much agree with them even now.
Mitch Daniels (22:44):
England operates, and has since 1066, I suppose, under what is always described as an unwritten constitution. I think that is something of a mystery to many Americans. We wrote ours down, and we have trouble interpreting it and yet yours seems to be at least as good a guarantor of freedoms and rights as what we have. How does it work?
Lord Andrew Roberts (23:09):
Well, it works because, although we call it an unwritten constitution, that just means that we haven't got a document saying, "This is the Constitution." We have hundreds upon hundreds of documents that go to make up the Constitution, however, which is our common law and our practice of centuries. And because your country started from a sort of year zero revolution, you needed a constitution that would explain everything to everybody. Because ours goes back 1,000 years essentially to the Saxon times, we have a massive body of practice, law, assumptions and prejudices, I suppose, also, and various things that we know we can do and can't do. Not because they're written down, but because of the sanctity of ancient practice.
Mitch Daniels (24:13):
A side note, but not an unimportant one. You mentioned among those indicia that George was no tyrant, he tolerated a great deal of criticism, satire and humor directed at him, which I've always thought is a critical sign of a healthy democracy. You say at some point, or someone back there said, "If people are allowed to laugh at their masters, they're less likely to cut off their heads."
Lord Andrew Roberts (24:48):
Yes, well, that’s right. He was unfortunate in a sense because his reign coincided with the period of the greatest caricaturists. You had Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, and George Cruikshank. These were giants of caricature, and they portrayed him in the most terrible ways, really, him and his entire family. But he actually bought the cartoons themselves. He made a collection of these horrible cartoons about himself, which I think shows a good sense of humor, if nothing else.
Mitch Daniels (25:29):
I want to bring the conversation closer to the present. In fact, very current. You were very recently made a member of the House of Lords. Congratulations. You are a baron, I believe, formally. Lord Roberts, we now address you as, about the same time you Brits have, as I understand it, completely ended the practice of hereditary nobility in the House of Lords. Is that a big moment in British history or a small one that's been coming for a long, long time?
Lord Andrew Roberts (26:13):
Both, actually. It has been coming for a very long time. It has been in the Labour Party’s manifesto since 1899. So in that sense, we have been quite lucky to have put it off for a century and a quarter. But finally it has happened. The Labour Party won a massive majority at the last election, and they decided that one of the most important things they wanted to do was get rid of the forty-seven or so Conservatives and about thirty others who were in the House of Lords because of heredity, because of their fathers and grandfathers. In some cases, these titles go back four, five, or six hundred years.
(27:02):
I sat next to somebody a couple of days ago whose ancestor was one of the barons of the Magna Carta, which goes back to 1215. So there is basically a cutting of history, that historical link, that living personal historical link that we have in the House of Lords is by the time of Easter, the third reading of the hereditary's abolition bill before Easter is going to come to an end, which as an historian, of course, I consider it to be a very sad moment to think that these people who actually, when it comes to speaking, voting, sitting on committees, becoming deputy speakers and so on, they actually do harder work than the rest of us, than the appointed peers.
(27:55):
They turn up more often and they contribute more. As I say, they put in the hours more than we do. And yet it's us who are going to be getting rid of them. And people say, "Well, it's undemocratic to have them." It's undemocratic for me to be there. I was appointed by the prime minister and the king. Nobody voted for me to be there either. So I don't think this is some great act of democracy that they're all being chucked out. What it is, in fact, instead I think is a massive act of historical vandalism.
Mitch Daniels (28:30):
You teach us in the book that George's largest fights, biggest fights may not have been with the Americans or others, but with the Whig Oligarchy, which thought it was in charge of the country at the time. And many of his toughest moments came in dealing with them as they came in and out of government or tried to.
Lord Andrew Roberts (28:59):
That’s right, yes. The people who very much believed they should run the country were the Whig elites, those who had backed the Revolution of 1688, the so-called bloodless and Glorious Revolution. These same families very much believed they should continue to run the country. So when the Tories, the opposition party, occasionally won elections, they considered it an abomination and did not really put up with it.
(29:38):
And so the king continually found himself more on the side of the Tories, the country party, the rubes, I suppose you might call them in America, as opposed to the urban elite and the upper classes. It is a very interesting political situation, because one tends to think of the king as the most elevated of the upper classes. But in fact, he was looked down upon as a kind of foreign interloper by many of these elite Whig families who, as I say, had run the country for eighty years before he even came to the throne.
Mitch Daniels (30:23):
Is the monarchy itself in some kind of crisis? As we speak today, there have been difficulties, of course, and more recently even the arrest of a member of the family. There seems to have been a step change in scrutiny and perhaps a growing readiness to make some changes.
Lord Andrew Roberts (30:51):
Yes, you’re right. I think it’s a scandal rather than a crisis, although the latest popularity figures for the monarchy are the worst they’ve been in a generation. Support is down to 45 percent; usually it is around 70 percent. So the arrest a couple of days ago of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, has made the whole issue a very hot topic here. It is being talked about almost constantly and is leading the news agenda at the moment. I think the British people are smart enough to appreciate that there is a significant difference between one errant member of the family and a constitutional system that has served our country very well for the past 350 years, certainly since the Glorious Revolution, and one that has ensured we have not had a revolution since.
(31:59):
In my view, constitutional monarchy is a genius idea, whereby you place a family that does not seek to exercise real power at the apex of nominal power. Everyone, including the police, judges, civil servants, and soldiers, gives their oath to a monarch who has no intention of using that power, thereby keeping it out of the hands of politicians who might. So I think it is a brilliant system, and one that suits the temperament of the British people, who are, frankly, very doubtful about politicians. But as I say, at the moment, the popularity of the monarchy has declined, even though there is absolutely no indication that Prince William or King Charles, or anyone around them, had any knowledge of what the Epstein files have revealed.
Mitch Daniels (33:00):
One of George III’s most revealing comments, I thought, and one that has been widely quoted throughout history, was his remark that if Washington declined absolute power, if he chose not to continue in office when he easily could have, probably for life, he would be the greatest man in the world. I think that says a great deal about that monarch, and presumably about most British monarchs’ understanding of their proper place.
Lord Andrew Roberts (33:29):
And also of George Washington. It was a fantastic act of self abnegation, wasn't it?
Mitch Daniels (33:34):
Yes.
Lord Andrew Roberts (33:34):
So yes, all in all, I think that's one of those moments, and it wasn't the only very positive thing that George III said about George Washington, that shows his grace and general graciousness, but also did have a useful thing to say about not just George Washington himself, but about the way in which your constitution works.
Mitch Daniels (34:05):
Yes. And the proper attitude of people entrusted temporarily with public authority to see it as a duty to be exercised and then relinquished at some appropriate moment. A year ago, our then new vice president, Vance, gave a very tough speech in Europe, I guess, at the Munich Conference, very critical of the way in which he saw liberties being infringed across Europe, but some of his examples were aimed at the UK. Was that a fair criticism or was it overstated?
Lord Andrew Roberts (34:52):
I think he was absolutely right when he said that it was vital for the non-U.S. members of NATO to spend much more of their own money on their own defense. That is something I have certainly been saying for years, and that most defense hawks like me in Britain have also been saying for years. It has been outrageous the way in which we have expected the American taxpayer essentially to subsidize our defense. So when he told the securocrats that at the Munich Conference, I was cheering.
(35:30):
However, some of his other remarks were frankly quite hyperbolic. We do have a freedom of speech issue in this country; we certainly do. I’m on the advisory panel of the Free Speech Union, which is an excellent organization that works, and quite successfully at the moment, to get rid of the concept of non-crime hate incidents, under which people can face consequences for things they tweet. But he wildly over exaggerated the situation by arguing that we were no longer a free country. I seem to recall a reference equating us with China when it comes to free speech. That is, frankly, rubbish. We are not teetering on the brink of totalitarianism in Britain. We have also moved away from these non-crime hate incidents, so the situation is much better than when he spoke. He overstated the case, frankly. The two or three examples he gave were not entirely accurate and did not fairly represent what was actually happening in Britain.
Mitch Daniels (36:54):
Your previous book, equally epic alongside The Last King of America, was the magnificent biography of the magnificent Churchill. A recent phenomenon, which I still believe is largely confined to internet loudmouths, though a poorly educated country might be taken in by some of it, is the attack on Winston Churchill from the right in recent days. What do you make of those attacks, and how do you respond to them?
Lord Andrew Roberts (37:34):
I’m very worried about them, frankly. I think that the various remarks made by Darryl Cooper on Tucker Carlson’s show some time ago, I believe over a year ago now, nevertheless received 33 million downloads, in which he claimed that Winston Churchill was the greatest villain of World War II. Now, I don’t think you or I need to think too deeply, Mitch, to come up with a few people far more villainous than Winston Churchill in World War II.
(38:13):
And so what one sees there, as well as in other remarks, especially from Nick Fuentes, who seems, frankly, to be an apologist for the other side in World War II, is truly disgraceful. And it is not just morally disgraceful, but factually disgraceful as well. Quite simply, the things that Churchill is accused of doing are not true. For example, in that Tucker Carlson interview, Darryl Cooper accuses him of deliberately maneuvering Britain into the Second World War and then making the situation worse. That is simply not the case.
(39:01):
He wasn’t even in the government, or in the Cabinet, at the time the Second World War broke out. And although, of course, he hoped that Britain would fight against Hitler, he was not the decision-maker in any of this. You could hardly make the situation worse than Adolf Hitler invading. Churchill did not become prime minister until after Hitler had invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland, and so on. So it really is troubling to see people assume they can simply twist the facts and that others will accept it as acceptable to say anything at all about someone who was, in fact, one of the great heroes of the Second World War, alongside American policymakers and generals.
Mitch Daniels (40:03):
Well, one would hope that rubbish like this will eventually end up in history’s dustbin, where it belongs. But if it does not, and does not do so fairly quickly, I suppose it will say something about the jeopardy in which truth itself finds itself in this age.
Lord Andrew Roberts (40:21):
Yes, but it is our job, our duty. It is the duty of educators and politicians to teach the truth about this, to make sure that people understand the clear, straightforward evidence, the facts about who did what, when, and why between 1933 and 1945. These are really important moments in world history. Unless we understand what genuinely happened, we are going to find ourselves in a very dark place.
Mitch Daniels (40:54):
My penultimate question. You touched on this issue briefly in a previous answer. I believe I’m quoting Churchill correctly when he said, “The only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting without them.” You have made some comments recently, when asked about the so-called transactional approach that the current administration and president have taken toward our allies. Is it unwise? Are we making a mistake? It is one thing to ask for fair contributions and an end to free riding and so forth, but quite another to risk the kind of estrangement we may now be seeing.
Lord Andrew Roberts (41:47):
Yes, I do fear this. I think one of the great achievements of the United States, and the way it has managed to help keep world peace since 1945, has been its ability to leverage its power through alliances.
Having the NATO countries on its side, and far beyond NATO as well, has allowed the United States to sustain peace and prosperity in the world for an unprecedentedly long period of time, historically speaking, more than 80 years.
(42:27):
And so I think to jeopardize that seems remarkably unwise, especially when nothing clearly better is being gained in return. It strikes me as both unnecessary and risky. So when, for example, your president talks about Greenland, I hope he appreciates the long-term danger that poses to trust in the United States, which has been the foundation of everything related to your national security, and obviously ours as well, for the past eight decades.
Mitch Daniels (43:13):
I said I had one question after that one, and we've made a practice on this program of asking each guest the same one to conclude. In the year 2050, will our nation and your nation and the allied nations be more free or less free?
Lord Andrew Roberts (43:33):
Golly, what a good question. I think it does ultimately come down to China, to whether it has the same ambitions as other nations that have threatened peace and democracy throughout history. If it turns out that modern-day China opposes democracy to the extent that Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany did, or Adolf Hitler’s Germany, or Stalin’s Russia, and to some extent the Islamic fundamentalist movements that also pose threats around the world, then I would fear for freedom in 2050. We might look back on today as a kind of golden age, one that should have continued but perhaps did not because we let our guard down. We may have become too hubristic and too complacent.
Mitch Daniels (44:48):
Lord Andrew Roberts, you’ve reminded us of our common duty to learn and then to teach the truth. You have been doing that, without parallel, for a very long time. We thank you for renewing that pursuit during this conversation, and for a lifetime of great scholarship and contributions to our understanding, and to our own commitment to the liberties we hold most dear. Thank you for being with us, and thanks to our audience for joining us on this latest edition of The Future of Liberty.
Outro (45:24):
The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.