Creating History

Episoder

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  Summitry: Trumpery 2.0 & Conclusions 22.05.2025 34min

  In this conclusion to Creating History’s series on international summitry,  we dissect how Donald Trump has returned with a vengeance, turning summitry into something like a high-stakes reality show.  As the old rules-based order crumbles, we ask whether this is the death of diplomacy… or its reinvention. Creating History joins the dots - the privatization of statecraft and the rise of a new “transactional world disorder.”  History is being rewritten.
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  Summitry: Trumpery 1.0 15.05.2025 43min

  In the first of a double Creating History episode, we dissect Donald Trump’s unorthodox first-term foreign policy through the lens of historical analysis. How did a reality-TV mogul turned commander-in-chief rewrite the rules of international relations? From his “fire and fury” theatrics with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un to the clandestine charm offensives with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, we unpack Trump’s summit diplomacy.
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  Summitry: Bushwhacking 08.05.2025 54min

  We dissect one of the most consequential - and controversial - political partnerships of the 21st century: the alliance between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
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  Summitry: End of the Evil Empire part 2 01.05.2025 31min

  When history hinges on a handshake...  Concluding a double episode on Reagan and Gorbachev’s high-stakes diplomatic dance, Creating History explores a series of summits in the late 1980s that defied the odds, helped end the Cold War and dismantle the nuclear nightmare.
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  Summitry: End of the Evil Empire part 1 24.04.2025 42min

  In the first of a double episode charting the end of the Cold War, we go behind the scenes of the dramatic 1985 Geneva Summit, where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev - ideological archenemies - met and glimpsed humanity in one another.
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  Summitry: Cabin Diplomacy 17.04.2025 44min

  Thirteen days. Three leaders. One impossible goal. In 1978, Jimmy Carter corralled Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin at Camp David, demanding an end to 30 years of Middle East war. Tempers flared, talks collapsed, and Sadat nearly stormed out - until Carter brokered a fragile truce: Israel would return the Sinai, Egypt would recognize its enemy, and both sides ignored the Palestinian question entirely. The agreements reshaped alliances, won Nobel Prizes and lit a slow-burning fuse for future conflict. In this episode, David Reynolds and Russell Barnes tell the story of a peace made… and peace postponed.
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  Summitry: Nixon Dances 10.04.2025 35min

  In this episode of Creating History, we unravel the paradox of Richard Nixon’s 1972 summits in Beijing and Moscow, where his political cunning and outsider ambition inspired America’s most daring Cold War diplomacy and reshaped global power dynamics. How did such a flawed US president, often so consumed by paranoia and insecurity, broker historic détente with Mao’s China and Brezhnev’s Soviet Union?
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  Summitry: Nutcracker 03.04.2025 49min

  Step into the pressure cooker of Cold War diplomacy as we dissect the explosive 1961 Vienna Summit - a face-off between John F. Kennedy, America’s untested young president, and Nikita Khrushchev, the coarse and caustic Soviet leader hardened by years in Stalin’s shadow. These two leaders collided in a high-stakes game of brinkmanship. Kennedy sought to project strength; Khrushchev aimed to dominate. But beneath their polished façades lurked brittle egos, domestic pressures, and fatal miscalculations. Over two fraught days, their clash of personalities spiralled into a diplomatic disaster, setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis and America’s plunge into Vietnam. This wasn’t just a summit—it was a tinderbox. Why did talking nearly ignite a war? How did ego and insecurity rewrite the course of history? “Nutcracker” unpacks the perilous dance of power, revealing how the wrong words, at the wrong time, can push the world to the edge.
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  Summitry: Big Three 27.03.2025 39min

  In this episode: we dissect the Tehran and Yalta summits between the so-called ’Big Three’ of Allied leaders in World War Two, American President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin. At Tehran in late November 1943, the Allies hammered out their strategy for defeating Nazi Germany. At Yalta in February 1945, they attempted to lay the groundwork of a post-war world as the war entered its final months. So these were the most consequential summits of World War II, arguably of the 20th century. They resolved some key disagreements among the Allies, but they also exposed deep tensions that would go on to shape the Cold War and the entire post-war order.
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  Summitry: Peace for Our Time part 2 20.03.2025 42min

  In this second episode dissecting the tense negotiations of September 1938, when Neville Chamberlain raced against time to prevent a war with Hitler’s Germany over Czechoslovakia, historian David Reynolds and producer Russell Barnes unpack the dramatic backstory of the Munich Agreement. While Munich is often remembered as a capitulation to Nazi aggression, the reality was messier - a labyrinth of diplomacy, desperation, self-delusion and high-stakes brinkmanship. Discover the zigzagging drama behind the infamous pact and why its legacy remains so fiercely debated. Was it a surrender... a product of hubris ... or a strategic bid to buy time for rearmament?
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  Summitry: Peace for Our Time part 1 13.03.2025 39min

  Step into the high-stakes world of 1938, where peace in Europe hung on a series of summits between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, culminating in the notorious Munich Agreement of 30th September. Historian David Reynolds and producer Russell Barnes dissect Neville Chamberlain’s desperate bid to avoid war, 20 years after WW1’s ”war to end all wars”, and explore the clash of wills between a democratic leader and a dictator hellbent on conflict. From tense negotiations to the birth of modern summitry, this is diplomacy under a microscope - raw, risky and relentlessly human.
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  Inventing Summitry 06.03.2025 31min

  In episode 1 of Summitry, producer Russell Barnes and historian David Reynolds explore the backstory of high-stakes diplomacy on the world stage, from the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520)—where Henry VIII and Francis I staged the ultimate power flex—to the Congress of Berlin (1878), where Europe’s balance of power was redrawn. Fast forward to today: with seismic shifts in world affairs, the rise of digital diplomacy, and Trump’s dramatic, unpredictable summits, understanding the history of summitry has never been more urgent.
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  Creating Churchill: CONCLUSIONS 30.11.2024 39min

  In the final episode of the series, published on the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth, David and Russell bring together the main themes of the podcast, discussing Churchill’s positive and negative character traits as seen through his contemporaries’ eyes and responding to questions and comments sent in by listeners.
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  Creating Churchill: DEVOTED CRITIC 28.11.2024 47min

  In this episode, we come to the person who knew Winston Churchill better than any other, and for the longest time - his wife of 56 years, Clementine. Their marriage was a stormy but very successful double act. Through Clemmie’s eyes, we see Churchill at his most vulnerable and insufferable…
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  Creating Churchill: OPPOSITION 21.11.2024 30min

  In this episode, we explore Winston Churchill’s relationship with his political opponent Clement Attlee: Labour leader, wartime coalition colleague and eventually Churchill’s successor as Prime Minister in 1945.
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  Creating Churchill: NEMESIS 14.11.2024 37min

  Exploring Winston Churchill’s spiky relationship with the Indian nationalist, Mohandas Gandhi - a relationship that shows up some of Churchill’s blind spots and arguably puts him on the ’wrong side’ of history. Churchill notoriously described Gandhi in 1931 as ‘a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a well-known type in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the Vice Regal palace’. Why was Gandhi such a bugbear for him?
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  Creating Churchill: THORN 07.11.2024 38min

  In this episode: one of Winston Churchill’s most prickly and turbulent relationships - with the leader of the Free French during World War Two, and later French President, Charles de Gaulle. Were De Gaulle and Churchill, both men with explosive tempers and a deep pride in their respective national histories which for centuries had been at loggerheads, always bound to clash?
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  Creating Churchill: ALLY 31.10.2024 40min

  In this episode: a fateful relationship, that shaped millions of lives in Eastern Europe after the Second World War... Churchill’s relationship with Britain’s wartime ally, the Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
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  Creating Churchill: FRIEND 24.10.2024 48min

  In this episode: Winston Churchill’s relationship with the leader of Britain’s closest ally during World War Two, the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, and what it reveals about Churchill’s political skills and also about his very human side.
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  Creating Churchill: ENEMIES 17.10.2024 31min

  In this episode: we look at Winston Churchill through his relationship with the adversaries Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who, in many ways, would define his place in history…