Lawrence Freedman

And-

That's, that's like kind of a Lo- Lawrence Friedman

It's, it's Lawrence Friedman.

Yes.

Yeah.

My name is Peter and we are back with someone who we've had on the show quite a few times, but there was a bit of an extended period due to one reason or another.

But I'm delighted to have Sir Lawrence Friedman back, Emeritus Professor of the Department of War Studies at King's College London in the UK.

and someone who is, I think, considered a preeminent voice on military strategy and history.

Professor Lawrence, it's delightful to have you back.

So, to use your word, cautiously optimistic?

Very cautiously.

Well, everyone, that is Lawrence Friedman, Professor Emeritus of King's College London.

And can I say regular? Sort of a regular when you have the time, Lawrence.

But the point is that a school like mine would expect the, the lads in the E stream to get a decent bunch of A levels and go to university and, and we're going back now to the late 1980s, early 1990s, and as I, I said at the outset, things have really changed, um, and get a job commensurate with their academic qualifications.

So if Andy Burnham, and I, and I'm glad he doesn't, 'cause I, I want him to govern for the majority, but if Andy Burnham had been to a school like mine, if Andy Burnham's social circle was the same as, for example, as Boris Johnson's or David Cameron's, I don't think he would have met many people who said, "School wasn't really for me." The only fellow I can remember, his, his, his, his, his granddad owned half of Hampshire, and all he wanted to do was farm.

So he just didn't see any point at all in engaging academically.

But if his grandfather hadn't owned half of Hampshire, um, uh, uh, property to which he would eventually inherit, then the school would have actually turned him into somebody for whom school, school d- He's still got A levels, and I think he went to Cirencester Agricultural College, if memory serves.

And to say at fourteen you're not just seems to me to be a shame.

But I see it's hard to separate that from the idea that what you end up doing as a consequence of being told at fourteen that A levels aren't really for you is i-i-it could sound like I'm looking down on that, but I'm not.

My granddad was, was-- worked in a workshop.

My, my maternal granddad was the head of maintenance in Sheffield three, Sheffield Steelworks.

Dr. Esfandira, you're at King's College, which is foundational in this study of war folks.

Sir Lawrence Friedman owns the high ground on this.

Out of the debris of King's College, how do you perceive our military? I guess it's Secretary of War, Secretary of Defense.

Yeah.

And all of this comes as the Trump administration dismantles key pieces of the international system and technology scrambles expectations about how wars start, unfold, and end.

No one has left a greater mark on our understanding of wars past and present than Lawrence Freedman.

Freedman has written a slew of definitive books on military strategy and history, and he has offered some of the most penetrating analysis of Iran, Ukraine, and more in the pages of Foreign Affairs and elsewhere.

I spoke with Freedman on Monday, September fourteenth, about the course of today's conflicts, about what is and is not changing in the nature of war, and about why policymakers, military officers, and strategists so often start wars based on bad assumptions, and how those bad assumptions explain some of the biggest calamities in global security today.

I think we'll reflect on the last few years and come to conclusions about the limitations as well as the possibilities of deterrence.

But sadly, I think we're just stuck in the nuclear age.

We'll return to my conversation with Lawrence Freedman after a short break.

[upbeat music] Do you worry about a failure of, of deterrence in the Indo-Pacific in the, the, the coming years? There's obviously been lots of reporting on the lack of serious American weaponry in ships and air defense and everything else in the region because of, of Iran and also Ukraine to some extent.