The Secrets of Statecraft

Bibi Netanyahu grew up in a household in which historical discussion and debate was constant, as his father was a distinguished professional historian. Here he discusses what effect the past has had on his life and career.

On the occasion of her unprecedented platinum jubilee, Queen Elizabeth’s biographer and star Daily Mail reporter Robert Hardman discusses her use of soft power in Britain’s unwritten constitution.

Ronald Reagan was famously known as the Great Communicator. But who helped the Great Communicator communicate? One of them was Hoover Institution Research Fellow Peter Robinson, who wrote Reagan's “Tear Down This Wall” speech — one of the most famous speeches of the twentieth century. If you have ever been asked to deliver a speech in public (or even if you haven’t), listen to a master of the genre Peter Robinson speak of the humor, honesty, and honing involved in writing over 150 speeches for a U.S. President. 

In his struggle against the FARC guerrilla movement and his efforts to transform Colombia economically, President Iván Duque has had advisors at his side who include Simon Bolivar and Winston Churchill.

Zambian-born and Harvard- and Oxford-educated economist Dambisa Moyo is the author of several important books on the interaction between finance and statecraft. Here she examines America’s Gilded Age, and finds a surprising number of comparisons with our own.

How does having made history affect one’s view of the past? The wry yet still spry 98-year-old Henry Kissinger talks about Richard Nixon, Clemens von Metternich, the Chinese view of the 19th century, why Russia invaded Ukraine, and the influence of history on his life and career.

In this episode of Secrets of Statecraft, actual historian Andrew Roberts talks to humorist and self-appointed “historian” Christopher Buckley about the faux pas and its celebrated and checkered past. This episode is brimming with witty repartee and hilarious anecdotes featuring several historically significant figures, and not one faux pas (that we know about ).

John O’Sullivan runs the Danube Institute in Budapest, Hungary. From this vantage point (Hungary shares a common border with Ukraine), he has special insights on the conflict across the border in Ukraine and on the use of statecraft to find a resolution to the conflict. 

A surprising aspect of human nature during warfare is its immutability over the millennia, as classical scholar and Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson shows in our discussion about the Peloponnesian War and the Roman Empire. He illustrates what 5th Century BC Greece can tell us about invasions, charismatic leadership, national honor and courageous resistance today.

An important part of statecraft is learning from the past, and in my first podcast I ask General David Petraeus, who commanded the US-led coalition in Iraq and Afghanistan and was director of the CIA, what he learned about the Vietnam War from his PhD studies at Princeton that helped him in the war against terror.