Join Paul Thomas Chamberlin, a Columbia University history professor and author of *Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II*, as he challenges the conventional narrative of WWII. He argues that the conflict was driven by imperial ambitions and survival, rather than simply a battle for freedom. Chamberlin explores the brutal realities of the war, including the violent legacies of colonialism and the true motivations behind Axis powers. This riveting discussion redefines our understanding of the war's impact on modern geopolitics and the emergence of superpowers.
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insights INSIGHT
Orthodox Narrative Limits Understanding
World War II has an orthodox narrative that frames it as democracy versus fascism, which narrows interpretation.
Paul Chamberlin argues we must widen the aperture to include imperialism, race, and colonialism for deeper understanding.
insights INSIGHT
Empire, Not Nation-States, Framed The War
Interwar international thought centered on empires and race, not nation-states and ideology alone.
Chamberlin situates WWII in the long 19th-century imperial trajectory to reveal its colonial logic.
insights INSIGHT
Imperial Ambition Fueled Genocide
Axis powers sought colonies to secure power and resist Western and Soviet threats, not merely ideological conquest.
Their imperial ambitions turned existing colonial violence genocidal and global in scale.
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In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II(Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II and recasts the war as a brutal conflict for survival and hegemony between declining and ascendant imperial powers.
Scorched Earth dismantles the myth of World War II as a “good war.” Instead, Chamberlin depicts the conflict as a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers’ dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. And World War II did not deliver lasting peace: instead, the Soviet Union and United States emerged as hypermilitarized superpowers that would create arsenals of nuclear weapons, resulting in a decades-long Cold War standoff and subsequent violence across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth offers a revisionist history of World War II, revealing it was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its execution, and imperial in its outcomes.
Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.
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