Legacy

Why is a war fought 44 years ago back on the front pages?
What happens when a combative president in Buenos Aires, a friend in the White House and an oil field due online in 2028 all point at the same islands?
And, when 99.8% of the people who live there have already voted, whose islands are they to argue over?

Fresh from Sir Lawrence Freedman's two-volume official history of the Falklands campaign, Peter Frankopan takes on the question Afua Hirsch can't let go: whose rights come first?

The official record reads like a detective story: the orders, the officers' doubts, and a Prime Minister who went against some of her own senior ministers. But the argument behind it never went away. Afua sets out why the politics look upside down to someone who opposes colonialism. Peter traces Argentina's claim back to a 15th-century treaty. Then come Chagos, Guam and the British Virgin Islands, and the question of whether Britain applies its own principle consistently. There's also the odd matter of why Yair Netanyahu weighed in at all.

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[1:15] A summer with Sir Lawrence Freedman's official history of the Falklands
[2:34] Milei, Trump and oil: why a 1982 war is live again
[7:18] Inside the official records, and Thatcher's gamble
[10:54] Afua's question: whose rights?
[14:08] 99.8%, and the islanders who've been there for 200 years
[16:48] Chagos, Guam, the British Virgin Islands: is Britain consistent?
[19:47] Two wrongs, red post boxes and the Victory Pub
[24:44] Why Yair Netanyahu picked a side

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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Content warning: this episode describes torture, civilian deaths and the 2021 Kabul airport attack.

Bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda is shattered, and there was never another 9/11 — so who won?

What does a war cost once you count the hospitals that closed and the food that never arrived?

And what does it mean that the United States signed an agreement with the people it went to war to destroy?

Twenty-five years on, Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan add up the bill — and find that bin Laden had written the strategy down in advance.

February 2020: the United States signs a deal with the Taliban in Doha. The government of Afghanistan is not in the room. Eighteen months later the Afghan state collapses in a matter of days, Kabul airport fills with people willing to cling to the undercarriage of a departing aircraft, and America's longest war ends almost exactly twenty years after it began. Then comes the audit. Brown University puts the direct death toll at more than 940,000, and the total — once you count the collapsed health systems, economies and food supplies — at somewhere near 4.7 million. The attack that started it cost around half a million dollars. The response cost eight trillion. Bin Laden had a phrase for that: he called it bleeding America. The final part of three.

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[0:00] The uncomfortable question: how much of what he wanted did bin Laden actually get?
[4:25] Doha, February 2020: the deal, and the government that wasn't invited to sign it
[6:39] Not a gradual collapse — provincial capitals fall in a matter of days
[11:53] The audit: $8 trillion, 940,000 killed directly, and 3.6 million more
[14:56] "Bleeding America" — bin Laden wrote the plan down and said it out loud
[19:29] Afghan women, and the argument nobody makes any more
[30:23] What the rest of the world was doing while America looked the other way
[36:09] The question neither of them wants to answer: whose fault is Afghanistan now?

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens to a trad wife influencer when she wakes up in 1855 and has to
actually do it?

Why were film producers bidding on this novel four years before it was
finished?

And when a story about white homesteaders in pre-Civil War America contains no
Black people at all, what is it quietly telling you?

Peter asks Afua what she read over the summer and gets a debut novel, a
four-year-old email she'd forgotten about, and a criticism that has nothing to
do with the plot.

Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear drops a trad wife influencer — sourdough
starter, eight children, millions of followers — into an actual 1855 homestead
and makes her live there. Afua raced through it and gives it full marks for the
idea. Her objection sits somewhere else entirely, and it's the kind of absence
you can't unsee once someone points at it. Along the way: why publishers post
books to your house forever once you've written one, why Peter keeps being
asked to read 550 pages in ten days, and how a novel now gets optioned for film
before it has been written.

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more.
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[0:26] The one thing Afua only lets herself read in summer
[3:13] Books arrive forever once you're published, and the etiquette nobody
explains
[8:42] The novel Afua found sitting in her own inbox, four years early
[12:47] Sourdough, eight children, and a fantasy of the American past
[18:03] Peter on class and labour, and why Burke chose 1855
[20:28] Afua's real objection, and it isn't the plot
[21:13] The Legacy Book Club verdict, in three separate scores

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Content warning: this episode describes the aftermath of 11 September 2001, including torture and civilian deaths.

How does a country go from the sympathy of the entire world to invading a nation that had nothing to do with the attack?

What does a blank cheque from the UN Security Council actually buy?

And if torture only counts as torture when the pain is equivalent to organ failure, what exactly is everything below that line?

Peter Frankopan follows the response from NATO's Article 5 to the caves of Tora Bora, while Afua Hirsch — then a trainee human rights barrister — describes what the war on terror did to British law.

Within twenty-four hours, NATO invokes Article 5 for the first and only time in its history. Within three days, Congress passes a sixty-word resolution with a single vote against it; it has since been used to justify American military operations in more than twenty countries. Afghanistan is meant to be narrow and quick, and for five weeks it looks like it. Then bin Laden walks over the mountains into Pakistan, Washington's attention swings to a country with no connection to the attacks, and Colin Powell goes to the United Nations holding a small glass vial. Ten years later he is found living a mile from Pakistan's military academy — and by then the war no longer needs him. Part two of three, twenty-five years on.

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[0:00] The scorecard: two invasions, $8 trillion, 900,000 dead, and the Taliban back in Kabul
[3:56] Nous sommes tous américains — Le Monde, the Brandenburg Gate, and candles in Tehran
[5:39] Article 5, invoked once in NATO's history, to defend America from nineteen men
[12:37] Five weeks to Kabul — then a cave complex at Tora Bora, and bin Laden walks away
[18:53] "These are facts. They're not statements." Colin Powell at the United Nations
[26:32] Afua's first day as a pupil barrister, and a man accused of training the hijackers
[33:19] The torture memos: pain that only counts if it's equivalent to organ failure
[41:50] A compound in Abbottabad, a mile from Pakistan's military academy

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who taught you that the Mongols only destroyed things?

What if the empire that sacked Baghdad also invented blue and white porcelain, elected its leaders, and let the Khan's first wife decide on war?

And why do the Mongols still have a worse reputation than any other empire in history — including the ones that lasted longer and killed more?

In this Legacy Inbox episode, Peter is joined by Marie Favereau, one of the world's leading historians of the Mongol Empire, whose work has done more than anyone's to dismantle the story of a bloodthirsty wave that destroyed everything in front of it.

A small group of nomads from what is now Mongolia — probably fewer than a million people — reached Central Europe within sixty years. They did it partly by fighting in winter, when everyone else went home, and by bringing their families and their herds with them so they never had to depend on the villages they passed through. Then they stopped conquering and started building: cities, workshops, tax systems, religious debates at court, and a trade network running from Korea to the Mediterranean. Marie Favereau is co-curator of Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World, at the Royal Armouries in Leeds until 1 November — almost 250 objects out of Mongolia, most of which have never left the country before.

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[0:00] Peter introduces Marie Favereau, and the 248 objects that have just landed in Leeds
[5:48] Ridden, eaten, milked, worn — why everything starts with the horse
[9:47] Khans are elected, can be deposed, and the senior wife decides on trade, diplomacy and war
[13:22] "If you just build your empire on the family, you have a dead-born empire"
[16:44] Blue and white porcelain turns out to be a Mongol invention
[36:12] Why the Mongols get a worse press than any empire that came after them

Genghis Khan: How the Mongols Changed the World runs at the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, until 1 November 2026. Adults £9, concessions £7, under-16s free. Co-curated by Marie Favereau and Natasha Bennett.
royalarmouries.org/leeds/whats-on/genghis-khan

Marie Favereau's book The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World is published by Harvard University Press.

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.