Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Stephen Kotkin,
00:00:02 his second time on the podcast.
00:00:04 Stephen is one of the greatest historians of all time,
00:00:08 specializing in 20th and 21st century history
00:00:11 of Russia and Eastern Europe.
00:00:13 And he has written what is widely considered
00:00:16 to be the definitive biography of Stalin in three volumes,
00:00:20 two of which have been published.
00:00:22 And the third focused on World War II
00:00:25 and the years after he is in the midst of writing now.
00:00:28 This conversation includes a response
00:00:30 to my previous podcast episode with Oliver Stone
00:00:33 that was focused on Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
00:00:38 Stephen provides a hard hitting criticism of Putin
00:00:41 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
00:00:43 weighed and contextualized deeply
00:00:45 in the complex geopolitics and history of our world,
00:00:49 all with an intensity and rigor,
00:00:52 but also wit and humor that makes Stephen
00:00:55 one of my favorite human beings.
00:00:59 Please also allow me to mention something
00:01:02 that has been apparent and has weighed heavy
00:01:05 on my heart and mind.
00:01:08 This conversation with Stephen Kotkin
00:01:11 makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Russia.
00:01:15 The previous conversation with Oliver Stone
00:01:18 makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Ukraine.
00:01:21 This makes me sad, but it is the way of the world.
00:01:25 I will nevertheless travel to both Ukraine and Russia.
00:01:30 I need to once again see with my own eyes
00:01:33 the land of my ancestors, where they suffered but flourished
00:01:38 and eventually gave birth to say the old me.
00:01:44 I need to hear directly the pain, anger and hope
00:01:47 from both Ukrainians and Russians.
00:01:51 I won’t give details to my travel plans
00:01:53 in terms of location and timing,
00:01:55 but the trip is very soon.
00:01:57 Whatever happens, I’m truly grateful for every day I’m alive
00:02:03 and I hope to spend each such day
00:02:05 adding a bit of love to the world.
00:02:08 I love you all.
00:02:10 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:02:12 And now, dear friends, here’s Stephen Kotkin.
00:02:17 You are one of the great historians of our time
00:02:20 specializing in the man, the leader,
00:02:22 the historical figure of Stalin.
00:02:24 So let me ask a challenging question.
00:02:27 If you can perhaps think about the echo of 80 years
00:02:34 between Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin,
00:02:38 what are the similarities and differences
00:02:40 between the man and the historical figure,
00:02:42 the historical trajectory of Stalin and Putin?
00:02:46 Thank you, Lex.
00:02:47 It’s very nice to be here again with you.
00:02:51 It’s been a while.
00:02:52 Good to see you.
00:02:53 Yeah, good to see you as well.
00:02:54 You’re looking good.
00:02:55 You as well.
00:02:56 I see this podcast stuff is doing you right.
00:02:59 Yeah.
00:03:00 So we can’t really put very easily Vladimir Putin
00:03:05 in the same sentence with Joseph Stalin.
00:03:07 Stalin is a singular figure
00:03:10 and his category is really small.
00:03:14 Hitler, Mao, that’s really about it.
00:03:18 And even in that category, Stalin is the dominant figure,
00:03:22 both by how long he was in power
00:03:25 and also by the amount of power,
00:03:27 the military industrial complex he helped build
00:03:30 and commanded.
00:03:32 So Putin can’t be compared to that.
00:03:34 However, Putin’s in the same building as Stalin.
00:03:39 He uses some of the same offices as Stalin used.
00:03:43 On some of those television broadcasts
00:03:46 that we see of Putin at meetings
00:03:48 and Putin inside the Kremlin,
00:03:51 Stalin used to sit in those rooms
00:03:53 and hold meetings in those rooms.
00:03:55 That’s the Imperial Senate
00:03:57 built by Catherine the Great in 18th century building.
00:04:01 Built by Catherine the Great in 18th century building
00:04:04 inside the Kremlin.
00:04:06 It’s a dome building and you can see it on the panorama,
00:04:12 the top of the building,
00:04:13 at least you can see it on the panorama
00:04:15 when you look over the Kremlin wall
00:04:17 from many sites inside Moscow.
00:04:21 So if he’s not comparable to Stalin,
00:04:26 he still works, as I said, in those same buildings,
00:04:28 those same offices, partly.
00:04:31 And so therefore, he’s got some of the problems
00:04:34 that Stalin had,
00:04:36 which was managing Russian power in the world
00:04:39 from a position of weakness vis a vis the West,
00:04:43 but from an ambition, a grandiosity, in fact.
00:04:49 And so this combination of weakness and grandeur, right?
00:04:54 Of not being as strong as the West,
00:04:56 but aspiring to be as great or greater than the West.
00:05:01 That’s the dilemma of Russian history
00:05:04 for the past many centuries.
00:05:06 It was the dilemma for the Tsars.
00:05:08 It was the dilemma for Peter the Great.
00:05:09 It was the dilemma for Alexander.
00:05:12 It was the dilemma for Stalin.
00:05:14 And it’s the dilemma for Putin.
00:05:16 Russia is smaller now
00:05:18 compared to when Stalin was in that Kremlin.
00:05:22 It’s got pushed back to borders
00:05:25 almost the time of Peter the Great.
00:05:28 It’s farther from the main European capitals now
00:05:31 than any time since that 18th century.
00:05:35 And the West has only grown stronger
00:05:39 in that period of time.
00:05:40 So the dilemma is greater than ever.
00:05:43 The irony of being in that position,
00:05:46 of sitting in the Kremlin,
00:05:48 trying to manage Russian power in the world,
00:05:50 trying to be a providential power,
00:05:53 a country with a special mission in the world,
00:05:57 a country which imagines itself to be a whole civilization
00:06:01 and yet not having the capabilities
00:06:03 to meet those aspirations
00:06:05 and falling farther and farther behind the West.
00:06:09 The irony of all of that is the attempted solutions
00:06:13 put Russia in a worse place every single time.
00:06:17 So you try to manage the gap with the West.
00:06:20 You try to realize these aspirations.
00:06:23 You try to raise your capabilities
00:06:26 and you build a strong state.
00:06:28 The quest to build a strong state
00:06:30 and use coercive modernization
00:06:34 to try somehow, if not to close the gap with the West,
00:06:38 at least to manage it.
00:06:40 And the result is different versions of personalist rule.
00:06:46 So they don’t build a strong state.
00:06:48 They build a personal dictatorship.
00:06:50 They build an autocracy.
00:06:53 And moreover, that autocracy undertakes measures
00:06:56 which then worsen the very geopolitical dilemma
00:07:00 that gave rise to this personalist rule in the first place.
00:07:04 And so I call this Russia’s perpetual geopolitics.
00:07:08 I’ve been writing about this for many, many years.
00:07:11 What’s important about this analysis
00:07:14 is this is not a story of eternal Russian
00:07:20 cultural proclivity to aggression, right?
00:07:24 It’s not something that’s in the mother’s milk.
00:07:26 It’s not something that can’t be changed.
00:07:30 Russia doesn’t have an innate
00:07:33 cultural tendency to aggression.
00:07:35 This is a choice.
00:07:37 It’s a strategic choice
00:07:39 to try to match the power of the West,
00:07:42 which from Russia’s vantage point is actually unmatchable,
00:07:46 but it’s a choice that’s made again and again.
00:07:49 And Putin has made this choice,
00:07:50 just as Stalin made the choice, right?
00:07:52 Stalin presided over the World War II victory,
00:07:56 and then he lost the peace.
00:07:59 After he died in 1953,
00:08:02 there was, of course, other rulers who succeeded him.
00:08:06 He was still the most important person in the country
00:08:09 after he died,
00:08:11 because they were trying to manage that system
00:08:13 that he built, and more importantly,
00:08:15 manage that growing gap with the West.
00:08:18 By the time the 90s rolled around,
00:08:21 former Soviet troops, now Russian troops,
00:08:25 withdrew from all those advanced positions
00:08:28 that they had achieved as a result
00:08:30 of the World War II victory,
00:08:32 and it was Napoleon in reverse.
00:08:34 They went on the same roads,
00:08:36 but not from Moscow back to Paris,
00:08:39 but instead from Warsaw and from East Berlin
00:08:44 and from Tallinn and Riga and all the other places
00:08:48 of former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics
00:08:53 in the Baltic region.
00:08:55 They went back to Russia in retreat,
00:08:58 and so Stalin, in the fullness of time, lost the peace.
00:09:02 And Putin, in his own way, inheriting some of this,
00:09:07 attempting to reverse it when, as I said,
00:09:11 Russia was smaller, farther away, weaker,
00:09:14 the West was bigger and stronger
00:09:16 and had absorbed those former Warsaw Pact countries
00:09:22 and Baltic states,
00:09:24 because they voluntarily begged to join the West.
00:09:27 The West didn’t impose itself on them.
00:09:30 It’s a voluntary sphere of influence that the West conducts.
00:09:34 And so that dilemma is where you can put Putin and Stalin
00:09:38 in the same sentence,
00:09:40 and the terrible outcome for Russia
00:09:43 in the fullness of time also has echoes.
00:09:46 But of course, Putin hasn’t murdered 18 to 20 million people
00:09:51 and the scale of his abilities to cause grief
00:09:56 with the nuclear weapons aside is nothing like Stalin’s.
00:09:59 And so we have to be careful, right?
00:10:02 Only Mao put bigger numbers on the board
00:10:06 from a tragic point of view than Stalin.
00:10:08 And numbers matter here,
00:10:10 if we compare these singular figures.
00:10:14 Yeah, Mao killed more people than Stalin
00:10:16 because Mao had more people to kill.
00:10:20 The most amazing thing about Mao
00:10:22 is he watched Stalin do it.
00:10:26 He watched Stalin collectivize agriculture
00:10:28 and famine result.
00:10:30 He watched Stalin impose this communist monopoly,
00:10:34 and all of those people sent to prison
00:10:37 or given a bullet in the back of the neck.
00:10:40 He watched all of that,
00:10:41 and then he did it again himself in China.
00:10:43 Do you think he saw the human cost directly
00:10:46 that when you say he saw,
00:10:48 do you think he was focused on the policies
00:10:51 or was he also aware distinctly as a human being
00:10:54 of the human costs in the lives of peasants
00:10:58 and in the lives of the working class and lives of the poor?
00:11:01 I think the prima facie evidence
00:11:03 is that he didn’t value human life.
00:11:07 Otherwise, I don’t think after seeing
00:11:09 the amount of lives that were taken
00:11:11 in the Soviet experiment,
00:11:12 he would have done something similar after that.
00:11:16 I think the answer, Lex,
00:11:17 is it’s very hard to get inside Mao’s head
00:11:21 and figure out what he was really thinking.
00:11:24 But if you just look at the results that happened,
00:11:27 the policies that were undertaken
00:11:29 and the consequences of them,
00:11:31 you would have to conclude that there was,
00:11:34 let’s say, no value or little value placed on human life.
00:11:38 Unfortunately, that’s characteristic
00:11:40 not only of communist dictators, right,
00:11:43 of post communist dictators as well,
00:11:45 but the scale of the horrors that they inflict,
00:11:50 as horrific as they are, just can’t compare.
00:11:54 And so we’re in a situation where Eurasia,
00:11:58 that is to say the ancient civilizations of Eurasia,
00:12:02 which would be Russia, Iran, China,
00:12:08 all have some version of non democratic,
00:12:13 illiberal autocratic regimes,
00:12:16 and they’re all pushing up against
00:12:18 the greater power of the West in some form.
00:12:21 Sometimes they coordinate their actions
00:12:23 and sometimes they don’t.
00:12:25 But this is a very longstanding phenomenon, Lex,
00:12:28 that predates Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping
00:12:33 or the latest incarnation of the supreme leader in Iran.
00:12:37 So we’ll talk about this, I think,
00:12:40 really powerful framework of five dimensions
00:12:44 of authoritarian regimes that you’ve put together.
00:12:47 But first, let’s go to this Napoleon
00:12:49 and reverse retreat from Warsaw back.
00:12:56 Putin has called, from the perspective of Putin,
00:12:59 this retreat, this collapse of Stalin
00:13:02 is one of the great tragedies of that region, of Russia.
00:13:09 Do you think there’s a sense where as Putin sits now
00:13:14 in power for 22 plus years,
00:13:16 he really dreams of a return to the power,
00:13:25 the influence, the land of Stalin?
00:13:31 So while you said that they’re not in the same place
00:13:35 in terms of the numbers of people
00:13:38 that suffer due to their regime,
00:13:40 do you think he hopes to have the same power,
00:13:44 the same influence for a nation
00:13:47 that was in the 30s, in the 40s, in the 50s
00:13:51 of the 20th century under Stalin?
00:13:54 If he does, Lex, he’s deluding himself.
00:13:57 We don’t know for sure.
00:13:59 Very few people talk to him.
00:14:02 Very few people have access to him.
00:14:05 A handful of Western leaders have met with him
00:14:09 for short periods of time.
00:14:11 Those inside Russia barely meet with him.
00:14:13 His own minions in the regime barely have FaceTime with him.
00:14:19 We don’t know exactly what he thinks.
00:14:21 It could be that he has delusions
00:14:26 of reconquering Russian influence,
00:14:29 if not direct control over the territories that broke away,
00:14:34 but it’s not gonna happen.
00:14:36 Let’s talk a little bit about this guy, Nikolai Patrushev.
00:14:40 Nikolai Patrushev is probably not well known
00:14:43 to your listeners.
00:14:45 He’s the head of Russia’s Security Council.
00:14:49 And so you could probably call him the second most important
00:14:53 or second most powerful man in Russia,
00:14:56 certainly inside the regime.
00:14:59 Arguably, Navalny is the second most important person
00:15:03 in the country and Russia is the second most powerful man
00:15:06 and we’ll talk about that later, I’m sure.
00:15:08 In terms of influence, yes.
00:15:09 Yes, but Patrushev is a version of Putin’s right hand man.
00:15:17 And Patrushev has been giving interviews in the press.
00:15:22 You probably saw the interview
00:15:24 with Nizavisimaya Gazeta not that long ago.
00:15:27 He writes also his own blog like interventions
00:15:31 in the public sphere using the few channels that are left.
00:15:38 And what’s interesting about Patrushev,
00:15:41 and this could well reflect similar thinking to Putin’s,
00:15:45 which is why I’m bringing this up,
00:15:48 is that he’s got this conspiratorial theory
00:15:53 that the West has been on a forever campaign
00:15:57 to destroy Russia,
00:15:59 just like it destroyed the Soviet Union
00:16:02 and that everything the West does
00:16:04 is meant to dismember Russia
00:16:07 and that Russia is fighting an existential battle
00:16:11 against the West.
00:16:13 And so for example, the CIA and the American government
00:16:16 wanted to bring down the Soviet Union.
00:16:19 Nevermind that the Bush administration,
00:16:21 the first Bush, the father,
00:16:23 was trying desperately to hold the Soviet Union together
00:16:26 because they were afraid of the chaos that might ensue
00:16:30 and the nukes that might get loose
00:16:33 as a result of a Soviet collapse.
00:16:37 And it wasn’t until the very last moment
00:16:40 where Bush decided, his administration decided
00:16:44 to back those Republican leaders
00:16:48 who were breaking away from Mikhail Gorbachev
00:16:51 and the Soviet Union, right?
00:16:53 So nevermind the empirics of it.
00:16:56 Nevermind that Bill Clinton’s administration
00:16:59 following George Bush sent boatloads of money,
00:17:03 Western taxpayer money to Russia.
00:17:06 We don’t know exactly how much
00:17:08 because it came from different sources.
00:17:10 People talk about how there was no Marshall Plan.
00:17:13 It was tens of billions of dollars from various sources,
00:17:17 from the IMF and other sources.
00:17:20 And next it disappeared, it’s gone.
00:17:22 Just like the German money that went to Gorbachev
00:17:25 for unification disappeared
00:17:26 even before the Soviet collapsed.
00:17:28 The money disappeared, but the West sent the money.
00:17:32 So how was that a plot?
00:17:33 And then you could go all the way, Obama’s administration,
00:17:37 George Bush trying to do business deals
00:17:39 and reset the relations and Obama administration
00:17:43 trying to reset the relations
00:17:44 and doing nothing after the Georgian war
00:17:48 and slapping Putin on the wrist,
00:17:51 following the seizure force of Putin.
00:17:55 And you could go on and you could go on
00:17:56 all the way through the Trump administration
00:17:59 telling Putin that he’s right.
00:18:01 Trump believes Putin and doesn’t believe US intelligence
00:18:05 about Russian efforts to interfere
00:18:07 in American domestic politics.
00:18:08 So despite all the empirics of it,
00:18:11 you have Patrushev and likely Putin
00:18:14 talking about this multi decade Western conspiracy
00:18:19 to bring Russia down.
00:18:21 At the same time as that’s happening,
00:18:23 the Germans are voluntarily increasing
00:18:27 their dependence on Russian energy,
00:18:30 voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russia.
00:18:33 So here’s the conspiracy to bring Russia down.
00:18:36 The French who fantasize about themselves
00:18:39 as a diplomatic superpower are constantly,
00:18:43 the French leaders are constantly running to the Kremlin
00:18:46 to ask what Russia needs,
00:18:48 what concessions from the West Russia needs to be filled
00:18:51 to feel respected again.
00:18:53 The British provide all manner of money laundering
00:18:58 and reputation laundering services
00:19:01 for the whole Russian oligarchy,
00:19:03 including the state officials who are looting the state
00:19:07 and using the West British institutions
00:19:10 to launder their money.
00:19:11 So all of this is happening and yet Patrushev imagines
00:19:15 this conspiracy to bring Russia down by the West.
00:19:19 And so that’s what we’ve got in the Kremlin again.
00:19:22 Stalin had that same conspiratorial mentality of the West.
00:19:26 Everything that happened in the world
00:19:28 was part of a Western conspiracy
00:19:30 directed against the Soviet Union
00:19:32 and now directed against Russia.
00:19:34 Even though the West is trying to appease,
00:19:37 the West is offering its services,
00:19:39 the West is trying to change Russia through investment
00:19:42 in a positive way, but instead the West is what’s changing.
00:19:46 The West is becoming more corrupt.
00:19:48 Western services are being corrupted
00:19:50 by the relationship with Russia.
00:19:52 So you have to ask yourself,
00:19:54 who are these people in power in the Kremlin
00:19:58 who imagine that while they’re availing themselves
00:20:02 of every service and every blandishment of the West,
00:20:07 while they’re availing themselves of this,
00:20:09 that they’re fighting a conspiracy by the West
00:20:12 to bring them down.
00:20:14 So this is what they call the Abyssinia in Russian,
00:20:21 which is a term, as you know,
00:20:23 that means those who are resentful,
00:20:26 or you might call them the losers,
00:20:29 the losers in the transition.
00:20:31 So when the Soviet Union fell
00:20:34 and there was a very substantial diminution
00:20:38 in Russian power and influence in the world,
00:20:41 a lot of people lost out.
00:20:43 They weren’t able to steal the property.
00:20:46 They weren’t able to loot the state in the 90s.
00:20:50 And they were on the outside.
00:20:52 They gradually came back in.
00:20:55 They were the losers in the transition domestically.
00:20:59 And for them, they wanted to reverse
00:21:04 being on the losing side.
00:21:05 And so they began to expropriate, to steal the money,
00:21:10 steal the property from those first thieves
00:21:14 who stole in the 90s.
00:21:16 And the 2000s and on have been about restealing,
00:21:20 taking the losers in the transition,
00:21:23 taking the money from the winners
00:21:25 and reversing this resentment, this loser status.
00:21:30 Those are your Patrushevs and your Putins.
00:21:33 But at the same time, this blows out
00:21:36 to let’s reverse the losses, being on the losing side,
00:21:41 the roiling resentment
00:21:43 at the decline of their power internationally.
00:21:47 Let’s try to reverse that too.
00:21:49 So you have a profound psychological whole generation
00:21:55 of people who are on the losing end domestically
00:21:58 and reverse that domestically.
00:22:00 That’s what the Putin regime is about.
00:22:02 Remember Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos?
00:22:06 Remember all the companies that are now owned
00:22:09 by Putin cronies because they were taken away
00:22:12 from whoever stole them in the first place.
00:22:15 And now they’re trying to do that on the international scale.
00:22:19 It’s one thing to put domestic opponents in jail.
00:22:22 It’s one thing to take away someone’s property domestically,
00:22:27 but you’re not gonna reverse the power of the West
00:22:30 with the diminished Russia that you have.
00:22:33 And so that project, that Patrushev project,
00:22:37 which we see him expressing again and again,
00:22:41 he speaks about it publicly.
00:22:43 It’s not something that we need to go looking for,
00:22:48 a quest, the secret, we can’t find it.
00:22:50 What are they thinking?
00:22:51 It’s right there in front of our face.
00:22:53 And Putin has spoken the same way for a long time.
00:22:56 People point to the 2007 speech
00:22:59 at the Munich Security Conference
00:23:01 that Putin delivered, and certainly your listeners
00:23:04 could use a snippet or two of that,
00:23:06 just like they could use a couple of quotes
00:23:09 from Patrushev to contextualize what we’re talking about.
00:23:13 But it predates the 2007 Munich speech,
00:23:16 the reaction to Ukraine’s uprising in 2004,
00:23:22 attempt to steal the election inside Ukraine,
00:23:27 which the Ukrainian people rose up valiantly
00:23:31 against and risked their lives and overturned, right?
00:23:34 So there were public statements from Putin already back then,
00:23:38 the statements about Khodorkovsky in 2003
00:23:41 when he was arrested and expropriated.
00:23:44 This is a longstanding deeply psychological issue,
00:23:51 which is about managing Russian power in the world,
00:23:53 as I was saying, the gap with the West,
00:23:55 but has this further dimension of feeling like losers
00:23:59 and wanting to reverse that, that’s their life experience.
00:24:03 I’d be a zhenei.
00:24:04 So there’s that resentment that fuels this narrative,
00:24:09 fuels this geopolitics and internal policy.
00:24:14 But so resentment is behind some of the worst things
00:24:16 that have ever been done in human history.
00:24:19 Hitler was probably fueled by resentment.
00:24:22 So resentment is a really powerful force, yes.
00:24:26 Just to maybe not push back,
00:24:30 but to give fuller context on the West,
00:24:33 you said there’s a narrative from Putin’s Russia
00:24:39 that the West is somehow an enemy,
00:24:42 you position everything against the West,
00:24:45 but is there a degree and to what degree
00:24:47 is the West willing to feed that narrative?
00:24:50 That it’s also convenient for the West to have an enemy.
00:24:53 It seems like in the place, in the span,
00:24:58 it seems like in geopolitics,
00:25:00 having an enemy is useful for forming a narrative.
00:25:06 Now, having an enemy for the basic respect of humanity
00:25:09 is not good, but in terms of maintaining power,
00:25:12 if you’re a leader in a game of geopolitics,
00:25:15 it seems to be good to have an enemy.
00:25:18 It seems to be good to have something like a cold war.
00:25:21 We can always point your finger and says,
00:25:23 all our actions are fighting this evil,
00:25:27 whatever that evil is.
00:25:28 It could be like with George W. Bush, the war on terror.
00:25:32 Terrorism is this evil.
00:25:33 You can always point at something.
00:25:35 So you’ve made it seem that the West is trying.
00:25:38 There’s a lot of forces within the West
00:25:39 that are trying to reach out a friendly hand,
00:25:42 trying to help, sending money, sending compassion,
00:25:46 trying to sort of.
00:25:48 Trying to integrate Russia into a global institution.
00:25:51 Exactly.
00:25:51 Which was a longstanding multi decade effort
00:25:55 across multiple countries
00:25:56 and multiple administrations in those countries.
00:25:59 But is there also warmongers on the West?
00:26:02 Of course, Lex.
00:26:03 Of course you’re right about that.
00:26:04 But let’s put it this way.
00:26:06 People talk about the cold war
00:26:08 and they usually looking to assign blame for the cold war
00:26:12 as if it’s some kind of mistake, a misunderstanding,
00:26:17 or a search for an enemy that was convenient
00:26:20 to rally domestic politics.
00:26:23 So Lex, there’s a coup in Czechoslovakia
00:26:28 and somebody installs a communist regime in February 1948.
00:26:33 No reaction to that?
00:26:34 That’s just okay?
00:26:36 There’s a blockade of Berlin.
00:26:39 Is that cool by you?
00:26:40 Where they try to strangle West Berlin
00:26:44 so that they can swallow West Berlin
00:26:46 and add it to East Berlin.
00:26:48 You cool with that?
00:26:50 How about Korean War, invasion of North Korea,
00:26:54 invasion of South Korea by North Korea?
00:26:57 You cool with that?
00:26:58 How about the murders and the show trials
00:27:01 up and down Eastern Europe in the late 40s
00:27:05 after the imposition of the clone regimes?
00:27:08 You good with that?
00:27:09 Yeah, it’s very convenient to have an enemy.
00:27:12 I agree with you.
00:27:13 But you know, there was some actions, Lex.
00:27:17 There was some threats to people’s freedom.
00:27:19 There was some invasions.
00:27:21 There was some aggression and violence on a mass scale,
00:27:25 like collectivization of Eastern Europe.
00:27:28 And we could go on, Lex, with the examples.
00:27:30 I’m just giving a few of them.
00:27:33 And so the Cold War was not a mistake.
00:27:36 It was not a misunderstanding.
00:27:38 We don’t have to blame someone for the Cold War.
00:27:41 We have to give credit for the Cold War.
00:27:44 The Truman administration deserves credit
00:27:47 for standing up to Stalin’s regime,
00:27:50 for standing up to these actions,
00:27:53 for saying, yeah, we’re not just gonna take this.
00:27:57 We’re not gonna let this go on.
00:27:59 We’re not gonna let this expand to further territories.
00:28:02 We’re gonna create the NATO alliance.
00:28:04 And we’re gonna rally democratic liberal regimes
00:28:09 to stand up to this illiberalism,
00:28:12 this violence, and this aggression.
00:28:14 And so, yeah, Lex, it’s always convenient to have an enemy.
00:28:19 But there was an enemy.
00:28:21 Nikolai Leonov, who recently died,
00:28:24 he died in April 2022, and he had a major funeral.
00:28:28 He was the last head analyst of the Soviet KGB.
00:28:36 And Leonov is one of the most important figures
00:28:39 for understanding the Soviet collapse.
00:28:41 And he has the best memoir on the Soviet collapse,
00:28:45 which is known in Russian as Likholetya.
00:28:49 You will understand that.
00:28:50 And you’ll help your podcast listeners understand.
00:28:56 There’s a singularity to that kind of expression, Likholetya.
00:29:00 Leonov just died.
00:29:02 But one of the things, and in fact,
00:29:04 the people who were supposedly arrested by Putin
00:29:09 as scapegoats for the Ukraine war,
00:29:12 the main one, Sergei Beseda, gave the eulogy
00:29:16 at Leonov’s funeral in April 2022,
00:29:19 showing that it’s a lie that all of these people
00:29:22 have been arrested and purged
00:29:23 and other nonsense in social media.
00:29:27 But to get back to what Leonov said
00:29:29 and get back to your enemy point, Leonov said,
00:29:33 you know, the West spent all this time
00:29:35 blackening the image of the Soviet Union.
00:29:39 All these resources and propaganda and covert operations
00:29:43 to blacken the Soviet image.
00:29:45 And they did, Lex, the West did do that.
00:29:48 And then Leonov wrote in the next sentence,
00:29:50 and you know what?
00:29:51 We gave them a lot of material to work with
00:29:54 to blacken our image.
00:29:57 Yeah, so you’re saying a kind of sobering reality,
00:30:02 which it is possible to some degree to draw a line
00:30:05 between the good guys and the bad guys.
00:30:07 Freedom is better than unfreedom, Lex.
00:30:10 It’s a lot better than unfreedom,
00:30:12 and a guy like you understands that really well.
00:30:15 Well, so yes, but those are all, you know,
00:30:18 there’s words like justice, freedom.
00:30:24 What else?
00:30:26 Love, you can use a lot of words that Hitler himself used
00:30:31 to describe why he is actually creating a better world
00:30:36 than those he’s fighting.
00:30:37 So some of it is propaganda.
00:30:39 The question is on the ground,
00:30:41 what is actually increasing the amount of freedom
00:30:43 in the world, human prosperity?
00:30:44 Institutions, Lex, right?
00:30:45 We’re not talking about propaganda here.
00:30:48 When we use words like freedom,
00:30:50 we’re talking about rule of law.
00:30:53 We’re talking about protection of civil liberties.
00:30:55 We’re talking about protection of private property.
00:30:58 We’re talking about an independent
00:31:01 and well funded judiciary.
00:31:03 We’re talking about an impartial, non corrupt,
00:31:07 competent civil service.
00:31:09 We’re talking about separation of powers
00:31:11 where the executive branch’s power is limited,
00:31:14 usually by an elected parliament.
00:31:17 In fact, yes, let’s talk about elections.
00:31:20 Let’s talk about freedom of speech
00:31:22 and freedom of the public sphere.
00:31:25 We’re not talking about freedom as a slogan here.
00:31:28 We’re talking about a huge array of institutions
00:31:31 and practices and norms ultimately, right?
00:31:35 And if they exist, you know, and you live under them.
00:31:39 And if they don’t exist,
00:31:40 you fully understand that as well, right?
00:31:43 Ukraine was a flawed democracy before Russia invaded.
00:31:50 It’s utterly corrupt, many ways dysfunctional,
00:31:55 especially the elites were dysfunctional.
00:31:58 The gas industry in Ukraine was absolutely terrible
00:32:02 because of the corruption that it generated,
00:32:04 the oligarch problem,
00:32:06 a handful of people stealing the state resources.
00:32:10 And yet Ukraine had an open public sphere
00:32:13 and it had a parliament that functioned.
00:32:16 And so despite its flaws, it was still a democracy.
00:32:23 The regime in Moscow, you can’t say that Lex.
00:32:26 It’s not a comparable regime to Ukraine.
00:32:30 You could say, oh, well, there were oligarchs in Ukraine
00:32:32 and there were oligarchs in Russia.
00:32:34 There’s corruption in Ukraine, there’s corruption in Russia.
00:32:37 So really what’s the big difference?
00:32:38 And the answer is, well, Ukraine had the open public sphere.
00:32:43 Ukraine had a real parliament.
00:32:44 Can you call Russia’s Duma a real parliament?
00:32:47 I don’t think so.
00:32:49 I don’t think you can.
00:32:50 Can you say that there were any checks whatsoever
00:32:54 on the executive branch in Russia?
00:32:57 Can you say that the Russian judiciary had any independence
00:33:02 or really full level of competence
00:33:05 even compared to the Ukrainian judiciary,
00:33:08 which was nothing to brag about?
00:33:10 No, you can’t say that Lex.
00:33:12 So we can differentiate between the very flawed,
00:33:16 corrupt oligarchic democracy in Ukraine
00:33:21 and the very corrupt oligarchic autocracy in Russia.
00:33:26 I think that’s a fair distinction.
00:33:29 Yeah, we should say that Russia and Ukraine
00:33:32 have the great honor of being the number one
00:33:34 and the number two most corrupt nations in Europe
00:33:37 by many measures.
00:33:38 But there is a fundamental difference,
00:33:40 as you were highlighting.
00:33:42 Russia is a corrupt autocracy.
00:33:44 Ukraine, we can say, is a corrupt democracy.
00:33:48 And to that level, there’s a fundamental difference.
00:33:53 Ukraine is not murdering its own journalists
00:33:57 in systematic fashion.
00:33:59 If journalists are killed in Ukraine, it’s a tragedy.
00:34:03 If journalists are killed in Russia
00:34:05 or Russian journalists are killed abroad,
00:34:07 it’s regime policy.
00:34:08 And the degree to which a nation is authoritarian
00:34:12 means that it’s suffocating its own spirit,
00:34:15 its capacity to flourish.
00:34:19 We’re not just talking about sort of the freedom
00:34:24 of the press, those kinds of things,
00:34:26 but basically all industries get suffocated
00:34:30 and you’re no longer being able to,
00:34:33 yeah, flourish as a nation, grow the production,
00:34:36 the GDP, the scientists, the art, the culture,
00:34:38 all those kinds of things.
00:34:39 Yes, Lex, you’re absolutely right.
00:34:40 And so before the invasion, the full blown invasion
00:34:45 of February 2022 into Ukraine, because as you know,
00:34:48 the war has been going on for many years at a lower level
00:34:52 compared to what it is these days,
00:34:54 but still a tragic war with many deaths
00:34:57 prior to February 2022.
00:35:00 Before this latest war, we could have said
00:35:03 that the greatest victims of the Putin regime
00:35:05 are Russian, domestic, that the people
00:35:10 who are suffering the most from the Putin regime
00:35:13 are not sitting here in New York City,
00:35:16 but in fact are sitting there in Russia.
00:35:18 Now, of course, with the invasion of Ukraine
00:35:21 and really the atrocities that have been well documented
00:35:28 and more are being investigated,
00:35:32 we can’t easily say anymore that Russians
00:35:34 are the greatest victims of the Putin regime,
00:35:38 but in ways other than bombing and murdering civilians,
00:35:43 children, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers,
00:35:49 after you include that, then of course,
00:35:52 the larger number of victims of the Putin regime
00:35:55 are not Ukrainians, but ultimately Russians,
00:35:58 and there’s how many of them now that have fled?
00:36:02 So your powerful, precise, rigorous words
00:36:07 are then in a stark contrast, I would say,
00:36:11 to my very recent conversation with Oliver Stone,
00:36:15 and I would love you to elaborate this agreement
00:36:18 you have here with his words and maybe words
00:36:21 of people like John Mearsheimer.
00:36:25 The idea is that Putin’s hand in this invasion of 2022
00:36:29 was forced by the expansion of NATO,
00:36:34 the imperialist imperative of the United States
00:36:38 and the NATO forces.
00:36:43 You disagree with this point in terms of placing the blame
00:36:48 somehow on the invasion on forces larger
00:36:53 than the particular two nations involved,
00:36:55 but more on the geopolitics of the world
00:36:59 that’s driven by the most powerful military nation
00:37:02 in the world, which is the United States.
00:37:04 Yeah, Lex, so let’s imagine that a tragedy’s happened here
00:37:09 in New York, and a woman got raped.
00:37:13 We know the perpetrator.
00:37:15 They go to trial, and Oliver Stone gets up and says,
00:37:19 you know what?
00:37:20 The woman was wearing a short skirt,
00:37:23 and there was no option but for the rapist to rape her.
00:37:28 The woman was wearing lipstick,
00:37:31 or the woman was applying for NATO membership
00:37:35 and just had to be raped.
00:37:37 There’s, I mean, didn’t want to rape her,
00:37:41 but was compelled because of what she was doing
00:37:44 and what she looked like and the clothes she was wearing
00:37:47 and the alliances that she was under international law
00:37:51 signed by Moscow, all the treaties
00:37:54 that sovereign countries get to choose
00:37:57 whatever alliance they belong to.
00:37:59 The treaties that the UN Charter signed by Russia,
00:38:04 Soviet Union, the 1975 Helsinki Agreement
00:38:11 signed by the Soviet Union,
00:38:13 the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe
00:38:16 signed by the Soviet Union,
00:38:17 the 1997 NATO Russia Founding Act
00:38:21 signed by the Russian government, the post Soviet Russia.
00:38:24 All of those documents signed by either the Soviet regime
00:38:30 or the Russian regime,
00:38:31 which is the legally recognized international inheritor,
00:38:36 right, successor of the Soviet state.
00:38:38 All of those agreements are still in force
00:38:40 and all of them say that countries are sovereign
00:38:44 and can freely choose their foreign policy
00:38:48 and what alliances they want to join.
00:38:50 Let’s even go farther than that.
00:38:52 I mean, you don’t have to go farther than that,
00:38:55 but let’s go farther than that, Lex.
00:38:57 Is an autocratic repressive regime
00:39:01 that invades its neighbors in the name of its own security
00:39:04 something new in Russian history?
00:39:07 Did we not see this before?
00:39:08 Is this, does this not predate NATO expansion?
00:39:13 Does this not predate the existence of NATO?
00:39:17 Would Oliver Stone sit here in this chair and say to you,
00:39:20 you know, they had to impose serfdom in the 17th century
00:39:25 because NATO expanded.
00:39:27 They had no choice, their hands were tied.
00:39:30 They were compelled to treat their own population
00:39:33 like slaves because, you know, NATO expanded.
00:39:37 I mean, I could go on through the examples
00:39:39 of Russian history that predate the existence,
00:39:43 let alone the expansion of NATO,
00:39:46 where you have behavior, policies, actions,
00:39:51 very similar to what we see now from the Kremlin.
00:39:55 And you can’t explain those by NATO expansion, can you?
00:39:59 And so that argument doesn’t wash for me
00:40:03 because I have a pattern here that predates NATO expansion.
00:40:07 I have international agreements, founding documents,
00:40:10 signed by the Kremlin over many, many decades
00:40:15 acknowledging the freedom of countries
00:40:18 to choose their alliances.
00:40:20 And then I have this problem where when you rape somebody,
00:40:24 it’s not because they’re wearing a short skirt.
00:40:26 It’s because you have raped them.
00:40:32 You’ve committed a criminal act, Lex.
00:40:35 That’s a, I think there’s a lot of people listening to this
00:40:38 that will agree to the emotion, the power,
00:40:41 and the spirit of this metaphor.
00:40:43 And I was struggling to think how to dance
00:40:46 within this metaphor because it feels like
00:40:49 it wasn’t precisely the right one,
00:40:51 but I think it captures the spirit.
00:40:55 I’m not suggesting, Lex, that everything the West has done
00:40:59 has been honorable or intelligent.
00:41:03 Fortunately, we live in a democracy.
00:41:06 We live in liberal regimes.
00:41:07 We live under rule of law,
00:41:10 liberal in the classical sense of rule of law,
00:41:13 not liberal in the leftist sense.
00:41:17 We live in places like that and we can criticize ourselves.
00:41:20 And we can criticize the mistakes that we made
00:41:22 or the policy choices or the inactions that were taken.
00:41:26 And there are a whole lot of things to answer for.
00:41:30 And you can now discuss the ones that are your favorites,
00:41:36 the dishonor or the mistakes.
00:41:39 And I could discuss mine and we could spend
00:41:42 the whole rest of our meeting today
00:41:44 discussing the West’s mistakes and problems.
00:41:47 And we won’t end up in prison for it.
00:41:49 Yeah, Lex, and so I’m thankful for that.
00:41:53 And I’m thankful that people may disagree
00:41:55 and that people make the argument
00:41:57 that NATO expansion is to blame.
00:41:59 But you see, I’m countering two arguments here.
00:42:02 I’m countering one argument,
00:42:04 which is very deeply popular, pervasive,
00:42:08 about how Russia has this cultural tendency to aggression.
00:42:13 And it can help, but invade its neighbors
00:42:16 and it does it again and again.
00:42:17 And it’s eternal Russian imperialism
00:42:21 and you have to watch out for it.
00:42:23 This very popular argument in the Baltic States,
00:42:26 it’s really popular in Warsaw.
00:42:28 It’s really popular with the liberal interventionists
00:42:31 and it’s very, very popular with those
00:42:34 who were part of the Iraq war squad
00:42:36 that got us into that mess.
00:42:39 So I’m against that.
00:42:40 And the reason I’m against it is because it’s not true.
00:42:43 It’s empirically false.
00:42:44 There is no cultural trait,
00:42:47 inherent tendency for Russia to be aggressive.
00:42:50 It’s a strategic choice that they make.
00:42:53 Every time it’s a choice made,
00:42:55 it’s not some kind of momentum.
00:42:56 Every time it’s a choice that we should judge
00:42:59 for the choice that it is for the decision.
00:43:01 And therefore they could make different choices.
00:43:03 They could say, we don’t have to stand up to the West.
00:43:06 We don’t have the capabilities to do that.
00:43:08 We can still be a great country.
00:43:10 We can still be a civilization unto itself.
00:43:13 We can still be Russia.
00:43:15 We can still worship in Orthodox cathedrals
00:43:18 or we can still be ourselves,
00:43:21 but we don’t have to pursue this chimerical pursuit,
00:43:25 this elusive quest to stand up to the West
00:43:29 and be in the first ranks of powers.
00:43:31 So I’m countering that argument.
00:43:33 I’m saying it’s perpetual geopolitics.
00:43:36 It’s a geopolitical choice rising out of this dilemma
00:43:40 of the mismatch between aspirations and capabilities.
00:43:44 It’s not eternal Russian imperialism.
00:43:47 And I’m also countering the other argument here, Lex,
00:43:51 which is to say that it’s the West’s fault.
00:43:53 It’s Western imperialism.
00:43:56 I’m very popular on the left,
00:43:57 very popular with realist scholars,
00:44:00 very popular with some of the people
00:44:02 recently on your podcast.
00:44:04 And so it’s neither eternal Russian imperialism
00:44:08 nor is it Western imperialism, right?
00:44:11 The mere fact that the West is stronger than Russia
00:44:14 is not a crime on the part of the West.
00:44:17 It’s not a crime that countries voluntarily
00:44:21 wanna join the West, that beg to get in,
00:44:24 either the EU or NATO or other bilateral alliances
00:44:29 or other trade agreements.
00:44:31 Those are voluntarily entered into and that’s not criminal.
00:44:35 If the West’s sphere of influence,
00:44:37 which is open, an open sphere of influence,
00:44:41 which as I say, people voluntarily join,
00:44:43 if that expands, that’s not a crime,
00:44:46 nor is that a threat to Russia, ipso facto, right?
00:44:49 NATO is a defensive alliance
00:44:52 and the countries are largely pacifists
00:44:54 who are members of NATO.
00:44:55 And NATO doesn’t attack,
00:44:57 it defends members if they are attacked.
00:45:00 And so the idea that Ukraine, which had the legal right,
00:45:04 might wanna join NATO and the EU,
00:45:08 which was not gonna happen in our lifetimes
00:45:10 and was not a direct threat to the Putin regime
00:45:13 since the Western countries that make up the EU and NATO
00:45:21 decided that Ukraine was not ready for membership,
00:45:24 there was no consensus, it was not gonna happen,
00:45:26 but it’s Ukraine’s free choice to express that desire.
00:45:31 And if your government is elected by your people,
00:45:34 freely elected, meaning you can unelect that government
00:45:39 in the next election,
00:45:40 and that government makes foreign policy choices
00:45:43 on the basis of its perceived interests,
00:45:46 that’s not a crime, Lex, that’s not a provocation,
00:45:50 that’s not something that compels the leader
00:45:52 of another country to invade you, right?
00:45:55 That is legal under international law,
00:45:59 and it’s also a realist fact of life.
00:46:02 The realists like to tell you that Russia here
00:46:06 was disrespected, Russia’s interests were not taken
00:46:10 into account, et cetera, et cetera,
00:46:12 but the real world works in such a way
00:46:15 that treaties matter, that international law matters.
00:46:19 That’s why people like me were not in favor
00:46:21 of the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, Lex,
00:46:25 because it wasn’t legal, in addition to the fact
00:46:29 that we thought it might backfire.
00:46:32 But you know, Lex, like I said, there are a lot of things
00:46:35 about the West that we ought to criticize as citizens,
00:46:38 and we do criticize, but we have to be clear
00:46:42 about where responsibility lies in these events
00:46:47 that we’re talking about today.
00:46:48 So you get into trouble, it’s largely erroneous
00:46:51 to think about both the West or the United States
00:46:56 from an imperialist perspective and Russia
00:46:58 from an imperialist perspective.
00:47:00 It’s better, clearer to think about each individual
00:47:04 aggressive decision on its own as a choice that was made.
00:47:07 So let’s talk about the most recent choice
00:47:10 made by Vladimir Putin.
00:47:14 The choice to invade Ukraine, or to escalate
00:47:17 the invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022.
00:47:22 Now we’re a few months removed from that decision,
00:47:26 initial decision, why do you think he did it?
00:47:30 What are the errors in understanding the situation,
00:47:35 in calculating the outcomes, and everything else
00:47:40 about this decision in your view?
00:47:42 Yeah, Lex, when a war doesn’t go well,
00:47:48 it looks like lunacy to have launched it in the first place.
00:47:52 Does it ever go well?
00:47:54 War never goes according to plan.
00:47:56 All war is based upon miscalculation,
00:47:59 but not everybody is punished for their miscalculation.
00:48:03 All aggressive war we’re talking about, not defensive war,
00:48:07 is based upon miscalculation.
00:48:10 But you can adjust, you can recalibrate.
00:48:13 You know, when you’re driving down the road
00:48:15 and that very annoying voice is telling you
00:48:18 in a thousand feet, make a right,
00:48:23 and you fail to make a right, it recalibrates, right?
00:48:26 It tells you, okay, now go turn around,
00:48:29 or U turn, or make a left.
00:48:31 It doesn’t say you’re an idiot in turn around
00:48:33 and make a U turn, but it does recalibrate.
00:48:37 So you can miscalculate, and the problem
00:48:39 is not the miscalculation usually,
00:48:41 it’s the failure to do that adjustment, right?
00:48:45 People I know who are hedge fund traders,
00:48:50 I ask them, you know, what’s your favorite trade?
00:48:52 And the line from the mall, and this is a cliche,
00:48:55 is my favorite trade is when I made a mistake,
00:48:58 but I got out early before all the carnage.
00:49:02 So their favorite trade is not when they made
00:49:04 some brilliant choice, but it’s when they miscalculated
00:49:08 but they reduce the consequences of their miscalculation
00:49:12 by recalibrating quickly, right?
00:49:14 So let’s talk about the calculation
00:49:16 and miscalculation of February.
00:49:19 Let’s imagine, Lex, that you’ve been getting away
00:49:21 with murder, I don’t mean murder in a figurative sense.
00:49:26 I mean, you’ve been murdering people,
00:49:28 you’ve been murdering them domestically,
00:49:30 and you’ve been murdering them all across Europe,
00:49:33 and you’ve been murdering them not just with, for example,
00:49:38 a car accident, a staged car accident,
00:49:41 or using a handgun, you use Novichok,
00:49:47 or you use some other internationally outlawed
00:49:51 chemical weapon.
00:49:54 And let’s imagine that you did it
00:49:56 and nothing happened to you.
00:49:58 It wasn’t like you were removed from power,
00:50:01 it wasn’t like you paid a personal price.
00:50:04 Sure, maybe there was some sanctions on your economy,
00:50:06 but you didn’t pay the price of those sanctions.
00:50:09 Little people paid the price of those sanctions.
00:50:12 Other people in your country paid the price.
00:50:15 Let’s imagine not only were you murdering people literally,
00:50:19 but you decided to entice the idiotic ruler of Georgia
00:50:24 into a provocation that you could then invade the country.
00:50:30 And you invaded the country
00:50:31 and you bit off these territories,
00:50:33 Abkhazia and South Ossetia,
00:50:36 and what price did you pay for that?
00:50:39 And then you decided, you know,
00:50:41 I think I’ll now invade Crimea and forcibly annex Crimea,
00:50:45 and I’ll instigate an insurrection in the Donbass
00:50:49 in Eastern Ukraine.
00:50:51 In Luhansk. Let’s imagine you did all that
00:50:54 and then you had to stick out your wrist
00:50:56 so that, you know, it could be slapped a couple of times.
00:51:00 And you said, you know, I can pretty much do what I want.
00:51:05 They’re putting a sanction here and there
00:51:07 and they’re doing this and they’re doing that.
00:51:09 And you know what?
00:51:11 They’re more energy dependent on me than before.
00:51:14 I got better money laundering and reputation services
00:51:17 than anybody had.
00:51:18 Maybe the Middle East and the Chinese would disagree with you
00:51:21 that you have better than them, but yours are pretty good.
00:51:24 And the Panama Papers get released,
00:51:27 revealing all of your offshoring and your corruption
00:51:31 and what happened, nothing happens, Lex.
00:51:33 So the first and most important consideration here is,
00:51:36 in your own mind, you’ve been getting away with murder,
00:51:41 literally, as well as figuratively,
00:51:43 and you think, you know,
00:51:44 I probably should have done that.
00:51:47 You think, you know, I probably can do something again
00:51:50 and get away with it.
00:51:52 And so the failure to respond at scale,
00:51:55 in fact, the indulgences,
00:51:58 the further dependencies that are introduced,
00:52:01 the illusion that trade is the mechanism
00:52:05 to manage authoritarian regimes.
00:52:08 You know, that great German cliche,
00:52:11 Wandel durch Handel, right, change through trade
00:52:16 or transformation through trade,
00:52:18 one of Angela Merkel’s favorite expressions, right?
00:52:21 You’re gonna get the other side to be better
00:52:26 rather than confront them in a Cold War fashion
00:52:31 where you stand up to their aggressions
00:52:33 and you punish them severely
00:52:35 in order to deter further behavior.
00:52:37 So that’s the first and most important part
00:52:39 of the calculation, miscalculation.
00:52:41 There are a lot of other dimensions.
00:52:42 So can we pause on that really quick?
00:52:45 So this is kind of idea of it’s okay to crack a few eggs
00:52:49 to make an omelet, which is a more generous description
00:52:53 of what you’re saying,
00:52:55 that you don’t incorporate into the calculation
00:53:00 the amount of human suffering that the decisions cause,
00:53:04 but instead you look at sort of the success
00:53:08 based on some kind of measure for you personally
00:53:11 and for the nation, not in terms of in a humanitarian sense,
00:53:17 but in some kind of economic sense
00:53:19 and a geopolitical power sense.
00:53:22 Yeah, you’re not sentimental, Lex.
00:53:25 You say to yourself, the cause of Russian greatness
00:53:31 is greater than any individual life.
00:53:35 Russia being in the first rank of the great powers,
00:53:38 Russia realizing its mission to be a special country
00:53:44 with a special mission in the world,
00:53:46 a civilization unto itself,
00:53:49 the first rank of the great powers,
00:53:51 maybe even the greatest power.
00:53:53 That’s worth the price that we have to pay,
00:53:58 especially in other people’s lives, right?
00:54:00 We have a lot of literature on the Putin regime,
00:54:03 which talks about the kleptocracy,
00:54:06 the place is a kleptocracy, and it is a kleptocracy.
00:54:11 We all can see that, and anybody in London,
00:54:15 living the high life, servicing this kleptocracy
00:54:19 can testify that it’s a kleptocracy,
00:54:21 and not only in London, of course,
00:54:23 right here in the United States, in New York.
00:54:27 But you know, it’s not only a kleptocracy, Lex.
00:54:30 That was the problem of the Russian studies literature.
00:54:33 It wasn’t just about stealing, looting the state.
00:54:37 It was about Russian greatness.
00:54:39 You see those rituals in the Kremlin,
00:54:43 right in the Grand Kremlin Palace,
00:54:45 in the St. George’s Hall,
00:54:47 some of the greatest interiors in the world,
00:54:50 and you see award ceremonies, and you see marking holidays,
00:54:55 and all of these looters of the state
00:54:57 have their uniforms on with their medals,
00:55:00 and someone’s given a speech or singing
00:55:03 a ballad, and their eyes are moist.
00:55:07 Their eyes are moist because they’re thieves and looters?
00:55:11 No, Lex, because they believe in Russian greatness.
00:55:15 They have a deep and fundamental passionate commitment
00:55:20 to the greatness of Russia,
00:55:22 which in unsentimental fashion,
00:55:25 they’re all sentimental to the max.
00:55:27 That’s why their eyes are moistening.
00:55:30 But they imagine unsentimentally that any sacrifice is okay,
00:55:34 a sacrifice of other people’s lives,
00:55:36 a sacrifice of their conscripts in the military,
00:55:40 a sacrifice of Ukrainian women and children and elderly.
00:55:44 That’s a small price to pay for those moist eyes
00:55:48 about Russian greatness and Russia’s position in the world.
00:55:52 Well, that human thing, that sentimentality,
00:55:54 is the thing that can get us in trouble
00:55:56 in the United States as well,
00:55:58 and lead us to wars, the illegal wars and so on.
00:56:01 But the United States,
00:56:02 there’s repercussions for breaking the law.
00:56:07 You’re going to pay for illegal wars in the end.
00:56:09 You’re saying that in authoritarian regimes,
00:56:13 the sentimentality can really get out of hand,
00:56:15 and you can, by charismatic leaders,
00:56:17 they can take that to manipulate the populace to make,
00:56:21 that in the span of history led to atrocities,
00:56:25 and in today’s world, lead to humanitarian crises.
00:56:30 It’s not just the kleptocracy, it’s a belief system.
00:56:33 It’s passion, it’s conviction.
00:56:35 It’s, you can call them illusions,
00:56:39 you can call them fantasies,
00:56:41 whatever you want to call them, they’re real.
00:56:44 They’re real for those people.
00:56:45 And so yes, they’re looting that very state
00:56:48 that they’re trying to make
00:56:50 one of the great powers in the world.
00:56:52 And they resent the fact that the West
00:56:55 doesn’t acknowledge them as one of those great powers.
00:56:58 And they resent that the West is more powerful.
00:57:01 People talk about how Putin doesn’t understand the world
00:57:05 and that he gets really bad information.
00:57:08 Lex, if you’re sitting there in that Kremlin,
00:57:11 and you’re trying to conduct business in the world,
00:57:14 and you’re getting reports from your finance minister
00:57:16 or your central bank governor,
00:57:19 your whole economy, everything that matters,
00:57:21 somehow all your trade is denominated in dollars and euros.
00:57:27 Do you have any illusions
00:57:29 about who controls the international financial system?
00:57:32 I don’t think so, Lex.
00:57:34 You’re looking over your industrial plan for the next year,
00:57:39 and you’re looking over how many tanks you’re gonna get,
00:57:42 and how many cruise missiles you’re gonna get,
00:57:44 and how many submarines you’re gonna get,
00:57:46 and fill in the blank.
00:57:49 And you know what?
00:57:51 It says right there in the paperwork
00:57:53 where the component parts come from,
00:57:54 where the software comes from,
00:57:56 comes from the West, Lex.
00:57:59 Your whole military industrial complex
00:58:01 is dependent on high end Western technology.
00:58:05 And let’s say you’re in Beijing, not just in Moscow,
00:58:08 and you go to a meeting in your own neighborhood.
00:58:11 You’re the leader of China.
00:58:13 You go to a meeting with other Asian leaders.
00:58:16 Do they all speak in Chinese with you?
00:58:19 No, Lex, they don’t speak Chinese.
00:58:22 You go to an international meeting as the leader of China,
00:58:25 and guess what language is the main language of intercourse?
00:58:29 Yes, the same one you and I are speaking right now.
00:58:32 And so you live in that world.
00:58:34 You live in the Western world,
00:58:36 and it’s very hard to have illusions
00:58:38 about what world you live in.
00:58:40 When you’re under that, you need those Western banks.
00:58:44 You need that foreign currency, right?
00:58:46 You need that high end Western technology,
00:58:48 that technology transfer.
00:58:51 You’re speaking, or you’re forced to speak,
00:58:53 or your minions are forced to speak
00:58:54 at international gatherings in English.
00:58:57 And I could go on.
00:58:58 All the indicators that you live in.
00:59:01 And so Putin lives in that world.
00:59:02 He’s no fool.
00:59:04 Well, to push back, isn’t it possible that,
00:59:07 as you said, the minions operate in that world?
00:59:11 But can’t you, if you’re the leader of Russia,
00:59:14 or the leader of China,
00:59:15 or the leader of these different nations, still put up walls
00:59:20 where actually when you think in the privacy of your mind,
00:59:24 you exist not in the international world,
00:59:27 but in a world where there’s this great Russian empire,
00:59:30 or this great Chinese empire,
00:59:32 and then you forget that there’s English,
00:59:34 you forget that there’s technology and iPhones,
00:59:36 you forget that there’s all this US keeps popping up
00:59:41 on all different paperwork.
00:59:43 That just becomes the blurry details that dissipate,
00:59:46 because what matters is the greatness of this dream empire
00:59:51 that I have in my mind as a dictator.
00:59:54 I would put it this way, Lex.
00:59:56 After you absorb all of that from your minions,
01:00:01 and it impresses upon your consciousness where you live,
01:00:06 you live in a Western dominated world,
01:00:09 that the multipolar world doesn’t exist.
01:00:12 Your goal is to make that multipolar world exist.
01:00:16 Your goal is to bring down the West.
01:00:19 Your goal is for the West to weaken.
01:00:21 Your goal is a currency other than the dollar and the euro.
01:00:25 Your goal is an international financial system
01:00:28 that you dominate.
01:00:30 Your goal is technological self sufficiency
01:00:34 made in China 2035, right?
01:00:36 Your goal is a world that you dominate,
01:00:40 not that the West dominates.
01:00:42 And you’re gonna do everything you can
01:00:45 to try to attain that world,
01:00:47 which is a Russian centric world,
01:00:49 or a Chinese centric world,
01:00:52 or what we could call a Eurasian centric world.
01:00:56 And it’s not gonna be easy, Lex,
01:00:58 just for the reasons that we enumerated before.
01:01:02 But maybe you’re gonna get a helping hand.
01:01:04 Maybe the West is gonna transfer
01:01:06 their best technology to you.
01:01:07 They’re gonna sell you their best stuff.
01:01:10 And then you’re gonna absorb it,
01:01:13 and maybe copy it, and reverse engineer it.
01:01:16 And if they won’t sell it to you,
01:01:18 maybe you’ll just have to steal it.
01:01:21 Maybe the West is gonna allow you to bank,
01:01:23 even though you violate many laws
01:01:27 that would prohibit the West
01:01:29 from extending those banking services to you.
01:01:32 Maybe the West is gonna buy your energy,
01:01:35 and your palladium, and your titanium,
01:01:38 and your rare metals like lithium,
01:01:40 because you’re willing to have your poor people
01:01:44 mine that stuff and die of disease at an early age.
01:01:48 But Western governments, they don’t wanna do that.
01:01:51 They don’t wanna do that dirty mining
01:01:53 of those very important rare earths.
01:01:56 But you’re willing to do that
01:01:57 because it’s just people whose lives you don’t care about
01:02:00 as an autocratic regime, right?
01:02:01 So that’s the world you live in
01:02:03 where you’re trying to get to this other world.
01:02:07 You’re at the center of the other world.
01:02:09 You dominate the other world.
01:02:11 But the only way to get there, Lex,
01:02:13 is the West has to weaken, divide itself,
01:02:18 maybe even collapse.
01:02:20 And so you’re encouraging, to the extent possible,
01:02:25 Western divisions, Western disunity,
01:02:28 a Western lack of resolve, Western mistakes,
01:02:33 and Western invasion of the wrong country,
01:02:36 and Western destruction of its credibility
01:02:39 through international financial crises,
01:02:41 and one could go on.
01:02:44 So if the West weakens itself through its mistakes
01:02:47 and its own corruption, you’re gonna survive
01:02:51 and maybe even come out into that world
01:02:54 where you’re the center.
01:02:55 And so Russia’s entire grand strategy,
01:02:58 just like China’s grand strategy,
01:03:00 Iran, it’s hard to say they have a grand strategy
01:03:03 because they’re so profoundly weak.
01:03:06 But Russia’s grand strategy is, we’re a mess.
01:03:11 We don’t invest in our human capital.
01:03:14 Our human capital flees, or we actually drive it out.
01:03:17 It goes to MIT, like you did,
01:03:21 or it goes to fill in the blank, right?
01:03:23 We can’t invest in our people.
01:03:25 Our healthcare is terrible.
01:03:27 Our education system is in decline.
01:03:30 We don’t build infrastructure, Lex.
01:03:33 We don’t improve our governance.
01:03:35 We don’t invest in those attributes of modern power
01:03:39 that make the West powerful.
01:03:42 We can’t because when we try, the money is stolen.
01:03:46 We try these grandiose projects of national projects,
01:03:50 they’re called.
01:03:51 We’re gonna invest in higher ed.
01:03:52 We’re gonna invest in high tech.
01:03:54 We’re gonna build our own Silicon Valley
01:03:57 known as Skolkovo.
01:03:58 We’re gonna do all those things, and what happens?
01:04:01 They can’t even build an airport
01:04:02 without the money disappearing.
01:04:04 The Sochi Olympics, Lex,
01:04:08 officially cost them $50 billion.
01:04:11 You look around at the infrastructure that endured
01:04:14 from that $50 billion expense, and you’re thinking,
01:04:18 that’s like the Second Avenue subway.
01:04:20 You get almost nothing for your money.
01:04:23 And so, yeah, it’s corruption, Lex,
01:04:25 but it’s also because they don’t wanna do that.
01:04:28 They don’t wanna invest in their people.
01:04:31 They couldn’t do it if they wanted to,
01:04:33 and when they try, it doesn’t work.
01:04:36 But why invest in your own people?
01:04:39 Invest in your hardware, your military hardware, right?
01:04:43 Invest in your cyber capabilities.
01:04:47 Invest in all your spoilation techniques and your hard power,
01:04:52 and invest in further corrupting, and further weakening,
01:04:57 and further dividing the West, because as I said,
01:05:01 if the West is weak, divided, lacking resolve,
01:05:05 you don’t invest in your people,
01:05:06 you don’t build infrastructure,
01:05:08 you don’t improve your governance,
01:05:09 but you’ll muddle through.
01:05:11 That’s Russian grand strategy.
01:05:13 So invest in the hard power, weaken the West.
01:05:18 Those combined together means you’re going to be
01:05:21 heavily incentivized to escalate
01:05:24 any military aggressive conflicts that are around you,
01:05:28 or create new ones, or just.
01:05:30 If you can get away with murder.
01:05:32 But what happens, Lex,
01:05:34 if it’s a Harry Truman like response?
01:05:37 What happens if somebody says,
01:05:39 you know, we’re gonna stand up to this?
01:05:43 We’re not gonna allow this to happen.
01:05:45 We’re not gonna launder your money anymore.
01:05:49 We’re not gonna be dependent on you for energy
01:05:52 in the long term, we’re gonna make a transition.
01:05:56 We’re gonna punish you for that kind of behavior instead.
01:05:59 And the West is now switched to that
01:06:02 only because of the courage
01:06:07 and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people.
01:06:10 The Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression
01:06:15 was one of the greatest gifts the West has ever received.
01:06:20 The sacrifices that the Ukrainians are making,
01:06:23 right now as we speak,
01:06:25 meaning they’re fighting a war by themselves
01:06:31 against a major military power, their neighbor Russia.
01:06:36 Nobody’s fighting it with them.
01:06:37 Yes, we are giving them weapons
01:06:41 so they can conduct self defense,
01:06:43 which by the way is legal under international law.
01:06:46 Unlike the Russian invasion,
01:06:48 which is illegal under international law,
01:06:50 Western supply of weapons, including heavy weapons,
01:06:54 including offensive weapons to Ukraine
01:06:56 for its self defense in the invasion by Russia
01:06:59 is actually legal under,
01:07:01 and so thank God the Ukrainians surprised everybody.
01:07:08 They surprised me, they surprised Putin and the Kremlin,
01:07:11 they surprised the Biden administration,
01:07:13 they surprised the European Union,
01:07:15 not with the fact that they would resist.
01:07:18 We knew that.
01:07:20 We had the Orange Revolution in 2004,
01:07:23 we had Maidan in 2013, 14,
01:07:26 where they rose up against a domestic tyrant
01:07:31 and they were willing to die
01:07:33 on behalf of their country then,
01:07:35 let alone against a foreign tyrant
01:07:37 invading their country, right?
01:07:39 So we knew they would resist.
01:07:40 We didn’t know just how successful,
01:07:43 certainly I didn’t know,
01:07:44 they would be on the battlefield.
01:07:46 It’s been breathtaking to watch.
01:07:48 That sacrifice, that gift enabled the West
01:07:52 to rediscover itself, to rediscover its power,
01:07:55 to revive itself, to say to hell with this energy dependence
01:07:59 in the long term,
01:08:00 to hell with this money laundering and reputation laundering,
01:08:04 to hell with this running back and forth to Moscow
01:08:07 to try to see what Putin needs
01:08:09 in order for him to feel respected,
01:08:11 what appeasement he needs, right?
01:08:13 So we’ll see if it endures,
01:08:16 but this shift comes from the Ukrainians.
01:08:20 And so it’s no longer getting away with murder, Lex,
01:08:23 and we thank the Ukrainians for that.
01:08:25 The people and the leadership
01:08:27 and the separate factions that make up Ukraine uniting,
01:08:33 it’s the unification, the uniting against the common enemy
01:08:37 and standing up before anyone knew
01:08:40 that they would be backed by all of these other nations,
01:08:43 by this money and all this kind of stuff,
01:08:45 standing there, especially with the president Zelensky,
01:08:49 where it makes total sense to flee, he stood his ground.
01:08:54 And…
01:08:55 Let’s take that point that you just raised,
01:08:56 which is a deep and fundamental point,
01:08:58 and I thank you for that.
01:09:00 Do you guys hear that?
01:09:01 I think that was a compliment.
01:09:03 There we go.
01:09:03 Let’s go.
01:09:05 Lex.
01:09:05 Zelensky or unification, what do you say?
01:09:07 I’m sitting here in front of you.
01:09:08 Thank you.
01:09:09 It’s an honor.
01:09:10 And it’s a mutual honor.
01:09:13 So, Ukraine before the war
01:09:17 is run by a TV production company, right?
01:09:20 You’re one guy running this fantastic, incredible podcast.
01:09:24 There’s 20 guys or so running a country the size of Ukraine.
01:09:28 And one’s a producer and one’s like a makeup person
01:09:32 and one’s a video editor.
01:09:35 And they’re fantastically talented people
01:09:38 if your country is a TV production.
01:09:42 So before the war, Zelensky had what, 25% approval rating
01:09:47 and he couldn’t get much done and it wasn’t working.
01:09:50 He got elected with 73%, as you know,
01:09:53 and then he was down to 20, that’s a pretty big drop.
01:09:56 And so you’re thinking maybe having a major,
01:10:00 large size, 40 million plus population European country
01:10:05 run by a TV production company is not the best choice.
01:10:09 And then what do we see?
01:10:11 We see President Zelensky decides to risk his life
01:10:16 on behalf of his country, Ukraine.
01:10:18 He decides to stay in the capital.
01:10:21 He’s not gonna flee, they’re gonna stay and fight.
01:10:25 And he could be killed, he can die.
01:10:27 It’s a decision where he put his life on the line.
01:10:32 Obviously, he’s Jewish descent,
01:10:36 Russian speaking childhood and upbringing,
01:10:40 Russian speaking Jewish descent puts his life on the line
01:10:44 for the country of Ukraine.
01:10:46 It’s a pretty big message, don’t you think?
01:10:49 And it’s crucial.
01:10:51 And it turns out not only that, Lex,
01:10:54 but they’re good at TV.
01:10:56 They’re good at information war.
01:10:59 And in a war, it’s a TV production company
01:11:02 and a TV personality, that’s exactly what you want
01:11:06 running a country because they’re crushing
01:11:09 in the information war.
01:11:11 And he’s spectacular, European Parliament,
01:11:15 US Congress, Israeli Parliament.
01:11:18 There’s no room on Zoom, let alone in person
01:11:22 that he can’t win over, he’s just so effective.
01:11:26 You know, this is the first time reality TV
01:11:29 has been about reality instead of fake.
01:11:33 Reality TV is just this completely fake nonsense.
01:11:37 But Zelensky, this is real reality TV.
01:11:41 And he means it and the nation is behind him
01:11:45 and they’re just as courageous and just as ingenious
01:11:48 in many ways and it’s spectacular.
01:11:52 And so, yeah, who saw that coming?
01:11:55 I didn’t see that coming, Lex.
01:11:57 In fact, the Biden, we talk about Putin’s miscalculation.
01:12:01 The Biden administration, as you alluded to,
01:12:04 offered him an exit from the country.
01:12:06 They didn’t say, you know, you wanna stand and fight,
01:12:09 we’ll back you.
01:12:10 They said, we’ll get you out, you wanna come now?
01:12:14 And famously, you know that quote, right?
01:12:16 What he said about how he doesn’t need a ride.
01:12:20 Remember that moment?
01:12:22 The Biden administration was poised
01:12:25 to do another Afghanistan moment.
01:12:28 That ignominious exit from Afghanistan
01:12:32 was almost what happened in Ukraine
01:12:35 when Biden administration offered him
01:12:38 that ride out of there.
01:12:39 And fortunately, he declined and helped rally
01:12:43 and the people from below also rallied
01:12:45 to stop the invader without the presidency
01:12:48 and without the government in Ukraine,
01:12:50 saving the Biden administration
01:12:53 and the European leaders who latched on.
01:12:56 Fortunately, they had the presence of mind
01:12:58 to latch onto this gift,
01:13:00 this bravery and ingeniousness of Zelensky
01:13:04 and the rest of the Ukrainians and flipped
01:13:07 and decided to support Ukraine’s resistance,
01:13:11 you know, first with 5,000 helmets only
01:13:14 as the Germans initially promised
01:13:16 and now with really heavy weapons.
01:13:19 And so that’s something that wasn’t foreseen.
01:13:22 I certainly didn’t foresee that.
01:13:24 I foresaw the Ukrainian society being courageous
01:13:28 and resisting, but I didn’t foresee
01:13:31 a television production company being exactly
01:13:35 what you want to run a country in a war,
01:13:38 a president Zelensky willing to sacrifice,
01:13:42 lay down his life and rallying others
01:13:45 in the country to do that.
01:13:47 And then the country being so effective,
01:13:50 not just at a courage, but at battlefield resistance
01:13:55 to the Russian invasion.
01:13:56 So I stand corrected by the Ukrainians
01:13:59 and I’m ecstatic that I was wrong,
01:14:03 that I was proven wrong.
01:14:04 And like I said, there’s clear factions
01:14:07 of the West and the East of Ukraine
01:14:09 and here’s a person that, like you said,
01:14:11 was in the high 20s, low 30s percentage approval
01:14:16 in the country before the war
01:14:17 and now was able to use in the 90s.
01:14:22 He’s in the 90% approval rating.
01:14:24 I mean, I think they stopped doing the polling.
01:14:30 Once he hit 91% or whatever it was in the previous poll,
01:14:33 I think they all understood that for now
01:14:35 they didn’t need any more polling,
01:14:38 that it’s pretty clear the nation.
01:14:39 So 25% to 90 something percent.
01:14:43 And just like the 25% was deserved,
01:14:47 the 90 something percent is also deserved, fully deserved.
01:14:50 And the question is how that all stabilizes, it feels
01:14:55 like this set of events,
01:14:58 I may be paying attention to Twitter too much,
01:15:02 which is a concern of mine, whether the change I see
01:15:08 is just surface level or deep level.
01:15:11 But it seems like we’re in a new world,
01:15:13 that something dramatic has shifted.
01:15:15 That this power that’s rooted,
01:15:21 I mean, in your study of the 20th century,
01:15:25 it’s so deeply rooted in history,
01:15:27 there’s this power center of the world
01:15:29 is now going to, has been shaken by this event.
01:15:33 And how that changes the world is unclear.
01:15:37 It’s unclear what lesson China learns from watching this,
01:15:40 what lesson India learns from watching this.
01:15:43 Both nations, as far as you can get polls
01:15:45 about Chinese population, but both nations
01:15:49 are largely in support of Putin.
01:15:51 So Russia, India, and China are still
01:15:55 supporting of Putin quietly.
01:15:57 I would maybe elaborate a little bit on that point, Lex.
01:16:03 I think you’re right, the feeling that we’re
01:16:06 in an inflection moment, an inflection point,
01:16:10 I think that’s widespread.
01:16:12 And I think it’s widespread for good reason, we might be.
01:16:16 But I also share your, let’s say, modesty
01:16:23 about where it’s going and how hard it is
01:16:27 to predict where this might go.
01:16:29 It’s only an inflection point if the trends continue,
01:16:33 right, if the trends endure.
01:16:36 There are plenty of non inflection points.
01:16:38 After 9 11, the whole world rallied
01:16:41 around the United States after it was attacked,
01:16:44 after the bombing of the towers here in New York City
01:16:48 and the hitting of the Pentagon, and that didn’t last.
01:16:53 It was not really an inflection point, was it?
01:16:56 It felt like it might be, but it wasn’t.
01:16:59 And so this is not a comparable moment
01:17:01 in terms of what happened, but it has the feeling
01:17:06 that it might be a watershed.
01:17:08 And maybe we’ll squander it the way we squandered
01:17:12 the post 9 11, rallying around the United States.
01:17:17 Maybe we’ll actually consolidate it and it’ll endure,
01:17:21 or maybe it’ll endure despite ourselves.
01:17:24 And we can’t tell and we can’t know yet.
01:17:26 And it depends in part on what we do and what we don’t do.
01:17:30 But here’s a few things that we understand already.
01:17:33 One, the idea that the West was in decline
01:17:39 and that the rest of the world had risen
01:17:43 and was more powerful and that we lived
01:17:45 in a multipolar world, that turns out
01:17:47 to be empirically false.
01:17:50 It’s not true.
01:17:52 I mean, it’s just factually not true.
01:17:55 There are no major important multinational institutions,
01:17:59 organizations that are run on behalf of,
01:18:04 or led by a South African, a Nigerian, person from India.
01:18:11 Even the Chinese don’t run these institutions.
01:18:14 They would like to and they’re trying, but they don’t.
01:18:19 And so whatever you pick, the IMF, the World Bank,
01:18:25 the Federal Reserve, which is the most powerful
01:18:27 multinational institution, which is actually
01:18:30 only a domestic institution and doesn’t have
01:18:33 a legal mandate to act multilaterally, but does.
01:18:37 It’s got the most power of any institution in the world.
01:18:41 NATO, the bilateral alliances that the US has
01:18:45 up and down Asia, what organizations
01:18:51 that have tremendous leverage on the international system,
01:18:54 on the international order, are non Western.
01:19:00 The UN is the most encompassing.
01:19:04 And of course we know that it has five members
01:19:07 of the Security Council with a veto,
01:19:10 one of which is Russia, one of which is China,
01:19:12 and the others are the US, Britain, and France,
01:19:16 not India, not South Africa, not Indonesia,
01:19:21 Indonesia, not all of these other countries
01:19:23 where the people live, right?
01:19:25 The bulk of the population of the world
01:19:28 and where the population is growing
01:19:30 like on the African continent.
01:19:32 So it’s not a multipolar world.
01:19:34 We talked already about the international financial system.
01:19:38 That’s the Western, not multipolar.
01:19:40 We talked about the US military and NATO,
01:19:42 or we could talk about the Japanese military,
01:19:45 which is just very formidable, enormous number of platforms.
01:19:50 Even the Australian military
01:19:51 we could talk about, Lex, right?
01:19:54 And so it’s a Western dominated world.
01:19:57 And the West, remember, is not a geographic concept.
01:20:01 It is an institutional and values club.
01:20:06 The Japanese are not European, but they’re Western.
01:20:10 Just like Russia is European, but not Western.
01:20:14 Because European is a cultural category
01:20:16 and Western is an institutional category
01:20:19 where you have rule of law and separation of powers
01:20:22 and free and open public sphere
01:20:24 and dynamic open market economy, okay.
01:20:28 And then we have another thing which is pretty clear.
01:20:31 The West is powerfully resented,
01:20:34 powerfully envied and admired simultaneously.
01:20:39 P.J. O Rourke, the comedian who died this year,
01:20:44 fantastic, it was a big loss for the culture.
01:20:48 He said, there are two things
01:20:49 that are always characteristic
01:20:51 of any American embassy abroad.
01:20:54 One is a political protest outside
01:20:59 and the other is the longest line you’ve ever seen for visas.
01:21:05 And those things are true simultaneously.
01:21:08 And that’s the world we live in,
01:21:10 meaning that non Western countries
01:21:14 envy and admire the West,
01:21:17 but they also resent the power of the West.
01:21:20 Western hypocrisy, right?
01:21:23 The West invades countries when it wants,
01:21:26 but when others do that, it’s illegal, right?
01:21:30 The West arrests you for money laundering,
01:21:36 but it’s Western money laundering
01:21:37 that is where you go when you need to launder money, right?
01:21:41 So they see the hypocrisy,
01:21:44 they see the excessive power that the West has
01:21:48 and they resent it.
01:21:50 And they say, who elected you to run the world?
01:21:56 We have a billion plus people
01:21:58 or we have a 200 plus million people
01:22:02 and we don’t have a say.
01:22:04 You’re the self appointed guardians of our world,
01:22:08 who did that?
01:22:09 And so it’s incumbent on the West
01:22:11 not only to remember the power that it has,
01:22:16 but also to exercise that power legally and with restraint
01:22:21 and also to think about how we can expand institutions
01:22:26 to be more encompassing
01:22:29 so that other parts of the world
01:22:31 are not on the outside being dictated to,
01:22:37 but instead are on the inside.
01:22:39 Too often, right, Western power is not consultative
01:22:47 in a decision making fashion.
01:22:49 It’s consultative after the fact.
01:22:52 Okay, you know, we got together in the EU
01:22:54 or we got together in NATO
01:22:57 or we got together at the Federal Reserve
01:22:59 and here’s our decision and we’re announcing it today.
01:23:03 And so your economy gets destroyed
01:23:06 because the Federal Reserve decides
01:23:08 it has to raise interest rates
01:23:10 or you now go into default.
01:23:14 You can’t pay your debt
01:23:15 because Western banks lent you money
01:23:18 and now the West has changed interest rates
01:23:21 or other considerations and you’re in big trouble now.
01:23:27 And so this is something which we fail to address.
01:23:32 It’s very hard to address.
01:23:33 It’s very hard to reform international institutions.
01:23:36 It’s very hard to share power.
01:23:39 It’s very hard to acknowledge that you have too much power
01:23:44 and that maybe having too much power is not good,
01:23:47 not only for the rest of the world, but for yourself.
01:23:51 And so it’s great to rediscover the West
01:23:53 and rediscover its values
01:23:55 and rediscover its authority and credibility and power,
01:24:00 but that’s not sufficient.
01:24:02 So we know this now.
01:24:04 We know that the rest of the world
01:24:07 is not necessarily jumping on the Western bandwagon
01:24:12 to condemn Russia for its actions
01:24:14 because the West can do things like
01:24:17 sanction your central bank, take away your reserves,
01:24:22 deny you technology.
01:24:24 It pretty much can do whatever it wants
01:24:27 and it can say that it’s legal
01:24:28 and it can go through various mechanisms
01:24:30 and it can freeze your property.
01:24:33 And you say to yourself,
01:24:34 should anybody have that much power?
01:24:37 And when do they come after me?
01:24:40 Now there’s a caveat here.
01:24:42 And the caveat, Lex, is they don’t like the West
01:24:47 having all of that power
01:24:49 and they didn’t join in the condemnation of Russia,
01:24:53 but they also didn’t join in Russia’s aggression.
01:24:57 So Russia’s domestic civilian aerospace,
01:25:03 aircraft industry, civilian aircraft industry
01:25:07 is in big trouble now
01:25:09 because of the export controls on spare parts and software.
01:25:15 Brazil is a major power in aircraft manufacturing.
01:25:21 Did they rush in and say,
01:25:23 you know, Vladimir Putin, we didn’t condemn necessarily
01:25:28 your actions in Ukraine, okay, that’s one thing.
01:25:31 And how about we give you all of our aircraft technology
01:25:36 and we help you rebuild your domestic aircraft industry.
01:25:40 And you can have the aviation at the West,
01:25:42 did that happen, Lex?
01:25:44 Didn’t happen.
01:25:46 And you can look at India and you can look at China
01:25:48 and you can look at South Africa
01:25:50 and you can look at what they’ve done in practice
01:25:52 and what they’ve done in practical terms.
01:25:55 Yes, they haven’t always joined
01:25:58 in a full throated condemnation.
01:26:00 Maybe they’ve been neutral
01:26:01 or maybe they’ve been playing both sides of the fence
01:26:05 like Turkey, for example.
01:26:07 But are they rushing in to join Russia,
01:26:12 to join Russia’s aggression, to supply?
01:26:15 And the answer is no.
01:26:16 And the answer is no for two reasons.
01:26:19 One, they actually don’t wanna be party to that.
01:26:22 And two, they understand that Western power.
01:26:26 And they don’t wanna be on the receiving end
01:26:29 by crossing the West and then getting caught up
01:26:33 in a sanctions regime or worse.
01:26:35 Can we go to the mind of Vladimir Putin
01:26:37 because what you just said, China, India,
01:26:42 they seem to sit back and say,
01:26:45 we’re not going to condemn the actions
01:26:47 of Vladimir Putin in Russia,
01:26:49 but we would really like for this war to be over.
01:26:53 So there’s that kind of energy
01:26:55 of we don’t just stop this
01:26:58 because you’re putting us in a very, very bad position.
01:27:00 And yet Vladimir Putin is continuing the aggression.
01:27:05 What is he thinking?
01:27:06 What information is he getting?
01:27:08 Is it the system that you’ve described
01:27:10 of authoritarian regimes that corrupts
01:27:13 your flow of information,
01:27:14 your ability to make clearheaded decisions
01:27:17 just as a human being when you go to sleep at night?
01:27:21 Is he not able to see the world clearly
01:27:24 or is this all deliberate systematic action
01:27:27 that does have some reason behind it?
01:27:31 We gotta talk a little bit about China too,
01:27:33 but let’s answer your Putin question directly.
01:27:37 So on Twitter, you’ve lost the war.
01:27:41 Or as they say, there are these two Russian soldiers
01:27:45 having a smoke in Warsaw,
01:27:48 and they’re taking a break, having a smoke,
01:27:51 and they’re sitting there in Warsaw on top of their tank
01:27:53 and one says to the other,
01:27:55 yeah, we lost the information war.
01:27:59 And there they are sitting in Warsaw
01:28:00 having that smoke, right?
01:28:03 So yeah, on Twitter, Russia has completely lost the war.
01:28:07 In reality, they failed to take Kiev.
01:28:09 They failed to capture Kiev.
01:28:11 And they failed in phase two, as they called it,
01:28:15 or plan B, which is to capture the entirety of the Donbass.
01:28:21 We’re three months into the war.
01:28:23 If you had made a judgment about, let’s say,
01:28:25 the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union,
01:28:27 a definitive judgment after three months,
01:28:30 you might’ve got the outcome wrong there.
01:28:32 If you had judged the Winter War,
01:28:34 the 1939, 40 Soviet invasion of Finland after three months,
01:28:40 you would’ve got that wrong too
01:28:41 of what the outcome was gonna be.
01:28:43 So we’re early in the game here,
01:28:45 and we have to be careful about any definitive judgments.
01:28:49 But it is the case that so far, they failed to take Kiev
01:28:54 and they failed to capture the entirety of the Donbass,
01:28:57 Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, Eastern Ukraine,
01:29:01 a part of Eastern Ukraine.
01:29:05 And they’ve been driven out of Kharkiv
01:29:08 and the area immediately surrounding Kharkiv.
01:29:13 They never captured Kharkiv, but they came close,
01:29:15 but now the Ukrainians drove them back to the Russian border
01:29:19 in that very large and important region.
01:29:22 So those look like battlefield losses
01:29:25 that are impossible to explain away
01:29:28 if you’re the regime in Russia,
01:29:30 except by suppression of information.
01:29:33 And as you know from Russian history, Lex,
01:29:37 leaders in Russia have an easier time
01:29:40 with the state of siege and deprivation
01:29:44 than they do with explaining a lost war.
01:29:49 But let’s look at some other facts
01:29:52 that are important to take into account.
01:29:56 One, the Russian army has penetrated farther
01:30:00 into Ukrainian territory since February, 2022,
01:30:05 including in Kherson region,
01:30:09 the famous Mariupol siege that just ended.
01:30:13 They have built a large presence
01:30:20 in areas north of Crimea on the Sea of Azov,
01:30:25 the Black Sea littoral ultimately
01:30:28 that they didn’t previously hold.
01:30:31 They’re still fighting in Luhansk for full control
01:30:35 over at least half of the Donbass
01:30:38 and Ukrainians are resisting fiercely.
01:30:41 But nonetheless, you can say that they’ve been driven out
01:30:46 on the contrary, farther penetration than the beginning.
01:30:51 Ukraine doesn’t have an economy anymore.
01:30:54 They have somewhere between 33 and 50% unemployment.
01:30:58 It’s hard to measure unemployment in a war economy,
01:31:02 but their metallurgical industry,
01:31:04 that Azov style steel plant in Mariupol is a ruin now.
01:31:11 And a lot of farmers are not planting the fields
01:31:14 because the harvest from the previous year
01:31:16 still hasn’t been sent, sold abroad
01:31:19 because the ports are blockaded or destroyed.
01:31:24 And so you don’t have an economy
01:31:26 and you need 5 billion or 7 billion
01:31:28 or $8 billion a month to meet your payroll,
01:31:34 to feed your people, to keep your army in the field.
01:31:38 That’s a lot of money per month and that’s indefinite.
01:31:42 That’s as long as this blockade lasts.
01:31:45 And so you don’t have an economy anymore, you’re indigent.
01:31:49 And even if you take the lower number, 5 billion,
01:31:51 as opposed to Zelensky’s ask for 7 billion,
01:31:55 5 billion is 60 billion a year.
01:31:57 That’s 60 billion this year, that’s 60 billion next year.
01:32:01 And so who’s got that kind of money?
01:32:03 Which Western taxpayers are ready?
01:32:06 And if you use the 7 or 8 billion,
01:32:08 you get up to 100 billion a year.
01:32:10 The Biden just signed, President Joe Biden just signed
01:32:17 the bill making it law, $40 billion in aid to Ukraine.
01:32:22 It’s just an enormous sum.
01:32:25 The economic piece of that is a month and a half,
01:32:28 two months of Ukrainians covering Ukrainian expenditures.
01:32:35 That’s it.
01:32:36 And they’re asking the G7,
01:32:37 they’re asking everybody for this.
01:32:39 So you have no economy and no prospect of an economy
01:32:43 until you evict the Russians from your territory.
01:32:46 And then you have a Western unity, Western resolve,
01:32:51 it lasts or it doesn’t last, Lex.
01:32:55 So you’re President Putin,
01:32:57 and you’ve got more territory than before,
01:33:01 and you’ve got a stranglehold over the Ukrainian economy,
01:33:05 and you’ve got a lot of the world neutral,
01:33:09 and you’ve got the Chinese propaganda
01:33:12 supporting you to the hilt with those Oliver Stone
01:33:16 and Mearsheimer lines about how this is really NATO’s fault.
01:33:22 And you’ve got Hungary dragging its feet
01:33:26 on the oil embargo against Russia,
01:33:29 and you’ve got Turkey dragging its feet
01:33:31 on the recent applications of Sweden and Finland
01:33:35 for NATO expansion, and you’re saying to yourself,
01:33:37 Lex, maybe I can ride this out.
01:33:39 I got a lot of problems of my own,
01:33:41 and we can go into the details
01:33:42 on the Russian side’s challenges,
01:33:45 but he’s on Ukrainian territory unless he’s evicted,
01:33:51 and he’s got a stranglehold on their economy,
01:33:54 and he’s got the possibility that the West
01:33:58 doesn’t stay resolved and doesn’t continue to pay
01:34:02 for Ukraine’s economy or supply those heavy weapons.
01:34:06 And so you could argue that maybe he’s deluded
01:34:09 about all of this, and maybe he should go on Twitter.
01:34:13 You know, I’m not on Twitter, but maybe Putin,
01:34:15 who famously doesn’t use the internet,
01:34:16 should go on Twitter and see he’s losing the war.
01:34:19 Or you can argue that maybe he’s calculating here
01:34:23 that he’s got a chance to still prevail.
01:34:28 Wow, that is darkly insightful.
01:34:31 If I could go to Henry Kissinger for a brief moment,
01:34:36 and people should read this op ed he wrote
01:34:39 in the Washington Post in March 5th, 2014,
01:34:44 after the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine,
01:34:48 but before Crimea was annexed.
01:34:51 There’s a lot of interesting historical description
01:34:54 about the division within Ukraine,
01:34:56 the corruption within Ukraine that will,
01:34:59 if people read this article, will give context
01:35:03 to how incredible it is, what Zelensky was able
01:35:06 to accomplish in uniting the country.
01:35:08 But I just want to comment because Henry Kissinger
01:35:12 is an interesting figure in American history.
01:35:14 He opens the article with, in my life,
01:35:17 I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm
01:35:21 and public support, all of which we did not know
01:35:24 how to end, and from three of which
01:35:27 we withdrew unilaterally.
01:35:29 The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.
01:35:35 So he’s giving this cold, hard truth
01:35:38 that we go into wars excited, are able to send $40 billion,
01:35:45 financial aid, military aid, our own men and women,
01:35:50 but the excitement fades, Twitter outrage fades,
01:35:55 and then a country that’s willing to wait patiently
01:36:00 is willing to pay the cost of siege
01:36:04 versus the cost of explaining to its own people
01:36:07 that the war is lost, that country just might win, outlast.
01:36:12 Let’s hope not because the Ukrainians,
01:36:18 resistance deserves to prevail here.
01:36:21 Russia deserves to lose.
01:36:23 No war of aggression like they’ve committed here
01:36:26 against Ukraine should prevail
01:36:28 if we can do anything about it.
01:36:30 I support 1,000% the continued supply of heavy weapons,
01:36:37 including offensive weapons, to the Ukrainians
01:36:40 as long as they’re willing to resist, and it’s their choice.
01:36:44 It’s their choice when to negotiate.
01:36:46 It’s their choice how much to resist.
01:36:48 It’s their choice what kind of sacrifices to make,
01:36:51 and it’s our responsibility to meet their requests
01:36:56 more quickly than we have so far and at greater scale.
01:37:01 But ultimately, wars only have political ends.
01:37:05 They never have military ends.
01:37:07 You need a political solution here.
01:37:10 So if the Ukrainians are able to conduct
01:37:14 a successful counteroffensive at scale
01:37:17 in July or August, whenever they launch,
01:37:23 right now the heavy weapons are coming in
01:37:26 and they’re being moved to the battlefield
01:37:28 and more are coming, you know, the dynamic.
01:37:31 Russia bombs a school, Russia bombs a hospital.
01:37:35 Americans and Europeans decide
01:37:37 to send even more heavy weapons to Ukraine, right?
01:37:40 That’s the self defeating dynamic from the Russian side.
01:37:43 They commit the atrocities, we send more heavy weapons.
01:37:48 Once those heavy weapons are on the battle lines,
01:37:51 we’ll see if Ukrainians cannot just defend,
01:37:55 which they’ve proven they’re able to do
01:37:57 in breathtaking fashion, not just conduct counterattacks
01:38:02 where the enemy moves forward
01:38:04 and you cut behind the enemy’s lines
01:38:07 and you counterattack and push the enemy back a little bit,
01:38:11 but whether you can evict the Russians
01:38:15 from your territory with a combined arms operation
01:38:20 where you have a massive superiority
01:38:22 in infantry and heavy weapons,
01:38:25 but more importantly, you coordinate your air power,
01:38:29 your tanks, your drones, your infantry at scale,
01:38:33 which is something the Ukrainians have not done yet.
01:38:36 It’s something the Russians failed at in Ukraine
01:38:39 and they come from the same place, the Soviet military.
01:38:42 We hope this Ukrainian counter offensive at scale,
01:38:46 this combined arms operation succeeds.
01:38:50 And if it does succeed,
01:38:51 there’s the possibility of a battlefield victory.
01:38:55 Whether that also includes Crimea,
01:38:58 which as you know is not hostile on the contrary
01:39:02 to the Russian military remains to be seen.
01:39:06 But however much they regain territorially
01:39:13 back towards the 1991 borders,
01:39:15 which is their goal, their stated goal,
01:39:18 and which we support them properly in trying to achieve,
01:39:22 however much they achieve of that
01:39:24 in this counter offensive that we’re anticipating,
01:39:28 that will set the stage for the next phase.
01:39:31 And either Russia, which is to say one person,
01:39:35 Vladimir Putin, will acknowledge that he’s lost the war
01:39:40 because the Ukrainians won it on the battlefield,
01:39:44 or he’ll try to announce a full scale mobilization,
01:39:49 conscript the whole country, go back,
01:39:53 and instead of acknowledging defeat,
01:39:55 try to win with a different plan,
01:39:57 recalibrate, remains to be seen.
01:40:00 Will the Ukrainians negotiate any territory away
01:40:03 or must they capture also Crimea,
01:40:07 which puts a very high bar on the summer counter offensive
01:40:13 that we’re gonna see, which could last through the fall
01:40:15 and into the winter as a result.
01:40:17 We don’t know the answers to that,
01:40:18 nobody knows the answers to that.
01:40:20 People are guessing, some people are better informed
01:40:23 because they have inside intelligence.
01:40:28 People are also worried about Russian escalation
01:40:32 to nuclear weapons or chemical weapons
01:40:34 if they begin to lose on the battlefield to Ukraine.
01:40:38 Are you worried about nuclear war,
01:40:40 the possibility of nuclear war?
01:40:44 I think it’s necessary to pay attention to that possibility.
01:40:49 That possibility existed before the February 2022
01:40:54 full blown invasion of Ukraine.
01:40:57 The doomsday arsenal that Russia possesses
01:41:00 is enough to destroy the world many times over,
01:41:03 and that’s been the case every year
01:41:06 since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
01:41:10 And so, of course, we’re concerned about that.
01:41:13 We do know, however, Lex,
01:41:15 that they have a system known as dual key,
01:41:19 dual key for their strategic nuclear weapons.
01:41:23 Strategic nuclear weapons means the ones fired from silos,
01:41:28 the missiles, the ones delivered from bombers,
01:41:32 or the ones fired from submarines, right?
01:41:34 And they’re ready to go.
01:41:35 They’re intercontinental.
01:41:37 We watch that very, very closely.
01:41:40 We watch all the movement of that and the alerts, et cetera.
01:41:44 We have tremendously, let’s say,
01:41:48 tremendous inside intelligence on that.
01:41:51 But dual key means that President Putin alone
01:41:53 cannot fire them.
01:41:55 He has one key, which he must insert,
01:41:57 he must then insert the codes for a command to launch.
01:42:04 That then goes to the head of the general staff,
01:42:08 who must, he has his own key and separate codes,
01:42:11 and must do the same,
01:42:12 insert that key and codes for them to launch.
01:42:16 And so will the general staff chief go along
01:42:21 with the destruction of the world
01:42:22 over a battlefield loss in Ukraine?
01:42:25 I don’t know the answer to that,
01:42:26 and I don’t know if anybody knows the answer to that.
01:42:29 Will those people flying those bombers,
01:42:32 if they get the order from,
01:42:33 if the dual key system goes into action
01:42:36 and both keys are used and all the codes are implemented,
01:42:42 will those young guys flying those bombers
01:42:45 let those bombs go?
01:42:47 Will those at the missile silos decide to engage and fire?
01:42:52 We don’t know, but you can see that it’s more than one man
01:42:55 making the decision here
01:42:57 in a system of strategic nuclear weapons.
01:43:00 As far as the tactical, the so called low yield
01:43:03 or battlefield nuclear weapons,
01:43:06 we’re not sure the system that they have in Russia these days
01:43:10 for their implement, for their use
01:43:12 of such tactical nuclear weapons.
01:43:15 It could well be that Putin and just himself,
01:43:20 himself, he alone can fire them or order them be fired.
01:43:27 What you know, Lex, there’s no tactical nuclear weapon
01:43:31 fired at Ukraine that’s not also fired simultaneously
01:43:35 at Russia.
01:43:38 If the Kremlin is 600 miles from Ukraine
01:43:43 and if the wind changes direction
01:43:46 or the wind happens to be blowing east, northeast,
01:43:51 the fallout hits your Kremlin, not just Ukraine.
01:43:55 Moreover, you have all those border regions
01:43:58 which are staging regions for the Russian offensive
01:44:01 and they’re a lot closer than 600 miles.
01:44:04 They’re actually right there.
01:44:06 And so you fire that weapon on Ukrainian territory
01:44:09 and you can get the fallout
01:44:11 just like the Chernobyl fallout spread to Sweden
01:44:16 which is how we got the Kremlin to finally,
01:44:20 first they denied this at all.
01:44:22 We don’t know why there’s a big nuclear cloud over Sweden.
01:44:25 We don’t know where that came from
01:44:26 but eventually they admitted it.
01:44:29 So Russia can actually use a nuclear weapon
01:44:33 tactical battlefield one in Ukraine
01:44:35 without also firing it at itself.
01:44:38 And in addition, it’s that same dynamic
01:44:41 I alluded to earlier
01:44:42 which is to say you bomb a hospital,
01:44:46 you bomb a school, there’s more heavy weapons
01:44:50 going to Ukraine from the west.
01:44:52 You can’t get away with any of the,
01:44:55 there’s always going to be a response
01:44:56 that’s either proportional or greater than proportional.
01:44:59 You could well have Europe signing on
01:45:02 to NATO direct engagement,
01:45:05 both Washington and Brussels direct engagement
01:45:09 of the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine.
01:45:13 You think that’s possible to do that
01:45:15 without dramatic escalation from the Russian side?
01:45:19 Yes, I do think it’s possible
01:45:21 but it’s very worrisome just like you’re saying.
01:45:24 But if Putin were to escalate like that,
01:45:28 he’s firing that weapon at himself
01:45:31 and he’s potentially provoking a direct clash
01:45:34 with NATO’s military,
01:45:36 not just with the Ukrainian military.
01:45:39 If you’re sitting in the Kremlin
01:45:40 looking at those charts, Lex, of NATO capabilities
01:45:46 and you can’t conquer Ukraine
01:45:48 which didn’t really have heavy weapons
01:45:50 before February 2022 at scale
01:45:55 and you’re thinking, okay, now I’m gonna take on NATO,
01:45:59 that would be a bold step on the part of a Russian leader.
01:46:03 And let’s also remember, Lex,
01:46:06 that there’s another variable here.
01:46:08 You’re a despot as long as everyone implements your orders.
01:46:16 And so if people start to say quietly,
01:46:20 not necessarily publicly, I may not implement that order
01:46:24 because that’s maybe a criminal order
01:46:27 or my grandma is Ukrainian or my wife is Ukrainian
01:46:32 or I don’t wanna go to the hog.
01:46:36 I don’t wanna spend the rest of my life in the hog
01:46:38 or whatever it might be.
01:46:40 At any point along the chain of command
01:46:43 from the general staff all the way down, right,
01:46:46 to the platoon, you’re a despot
01:46:49 provided they implement your orders.
01:46:52 But who’s to say that somewhere along the chain of command
01:46:57 people start to say, I’m gonna ignore that order
01:47:03 or I’m gonna sabotage that order
01:47:05 or I’m gonna flee the battlefield
01:47:09 or I’m gonna injure myself so that I don’t have to fight
01:47:12 or I’m gonna join the Ukrainian side.
01:47:16 And so it could be that’s what’s left
01:47:19 of the Russian army in the field begins to disintegrate.
01:47:24 Even if the Ukrainians are not able to mount that
01:47:27 counter offensive at scale, that combined arms operation,
01:47:33 the Russian military in the field,
01:47:34 which has taken horrendous casualties
01:47:36 as far as we understand, something like a third
01:47:39 of the original force, so you’re talking about 50 to 60,000
01:47:45 that includes both dead and wounded to the point
01:47:49 of being unable to return to the battlefield.
01:47:51 Those are big numbers.
01:47:53 Those were a lot of families, a lot of families affected.
01:47:58 Their sons or their husbands or their fathers
01:48:02 are either missing in action or the regime won’t tell them
01:48:05 that they’re dead, as you know from the sinking
01:48:08 of that flagship, Moskva, right, by the Ukrainians.
01:48:15 And so a disintegration of the Russian military
01:48:18 because there are orders that they either can’t implement
01:48:21 or don’t wanna implement is also not excluded.
01:48:26 And so you have these two big variables,
01:48:29 the Ukrainian army in the field and its ability
01:48:32 to move from defense to offense at scale,
01:48:35 and we’re gonna test that soon.
01:48:37 And then the Russian ability in the field to hold together
01:48:41 in a war of conquest and aggression
01:48:44 where they’re conscripts or they’re fed dog food
01:48:49 or they don’t have any weapons anymore
01:48:53 because there’s no resupply,
01:48:55 so the disintegration of the army can’t be excluded.
01:48:59 And then, of course, all bets are off on the Putin regime.
01:49:02 More long term, there are these technology export controls.
01:49:07 We were talking about how the military industrial complex
01:49:10 in Russia is dependent on foreign component parts
01:49:15 and software, and so if you have export controls
01:49:19 and you have firms voluntarily,
01:49:21 even when they don’t fall under export controls,
01:49:24 leaving Russian business, refusing to do business
01:49:27 with Russia, and we see this not just in the civilian sector
01:49:31 like with McDonald’s or many other companies,
01:49:35 we see this in the key areas like the oil industry
01:49:40 with the executives fleeing,
01:49:43 that is the Western executives fleeing,
01:49:45 giving up their positions.
01:49:47 So Russia’s ability to resupply its tanks,
01:49:51 resupply its missiles, resupply its uniforms,
01:49:58 resupply its food to its soldiers in the field
01:50:01 and in their boots, we see a lot of stuff
01:50:05 under tremendous stress, and in the long term,
01:50:08 there’s no obvious way they can rebuild
01:50:12 the military industrial complex to produce those weapons
01:50:17 because they’re reliant on foreign parts
01:50:20 that they can’t get anymore,
01:50:21 and there are no domestic substitutes
01:50:23 on the immediate horizon.
01:50:26 That’s at the earliest a two year proposition
01:50:30 to have domestic substitutes,
01:50:32 and for some things like microelectronics,
01:50:35 they’ve never had domestic substitutes
01:50:37 going back to the Soviet times as you know well.
01:50:40 And so there’s that pressure on Russia
01:50:43 from the technology export controls,
01:50:46 which if you’re in the security ministry
01:50:49 or the defense ministry,
01:50:51 if you’re in that side of the regime,
01:50:54 you’re feeling that pain as we speak,
01:50:56 and you’re wondering about the strategy.
01:51:01 Let me ask you about, again, the echoes of history,
01:51:06 and it frustrates me in part
01:51:08 when people draw these parallels,
01:51:10 but maybe there is some deep insight about those parallels.
01:51:14 So there’s a song that goes,
01:51:18 Dvata Teroviy Uniya Rovnovshchitya Chisa
01:51:21 Kiev by Bitya Nama Bitya Shtanochilai Svaina.
01:51:24 So Operation Barbarossa, the bombing of Kiev by Hitler,
01:51:31 there is sort of an eerie parallel,
01:51:34 and you have to be extremely careful
01:51:37 drawing such parallels and such connections
01:51:42 to this unexplainable war that is World War II.
01:51:50 But is there elements of this that do echo
01:51:56 in the actions of Vladimir Putin?
01:51:58 And more specifically, do you think that Vladimir Putin
01:52:03 is a war criminal?
01:52:06 Can that label be assigned to the actions of this man?
01:52:10 A war criminal is a legal determination,
01:52:14 and it requires evidence and due process
01:52:17 and the ability to defend oneself.
01:52:21 We don’t just decide in the Twittersphere
01:52:24 or on a podcast that somebody is a war criminal.
01:52:28 They can be a suspected war criminal,
01:52:31 and we can gather evidence to try to prosecute that case.
01:52:36 And then the issue for us, Alexis,
01:52:39 which court does it go to?
01:52:41 What’s the appropriate place?
01:52:44 Does it happen in Ukraine because they’re the victims?
01:52:46 Does it happen in the Hague
01:52:47 because there’s an international criminal court there?
01:52:51 Does it happen inside Russia
01:52:52 because there’s regime change at some point?
01:52:56 And some of these people become,
01:52:59 let’s say they get arrested by their own people
01:53:02 inside Russia.
01:53:05 So those are all important questions
01:53:07 that have to be pursued with resources
01:53:09 and with determination and by skilled people
01:53:13 who are excellent at gathering that evidence.
01:53:17 And that process is underway.
01:53:18 And Ukraine has a trial underway now
01:53:22 of one alleged war criminal who’s pleaded guilty.
01:53:26 And we’ll see what the outcome of that trial
01:53:29 inside Ukraine is of a lower level official,
01:53:31 not obviously Vladimir Putin,
01:53:34 but the commander of a tank group.
01:53:38 So, yes, the names are eerily familiar.
01:53:46 Izium, Kharkiv, Kiev, right?
01:53:51 Those are the names we know from the Nazi invasion
01:53:55 and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.
01:54:00 And it’s very deeply troubling
01:54:03 to think that this could happen again.
01:54:06 And there’s a bizarre sense that the Russians
01:54:10 claiming as Putin says to deNazify Ukraine
01:54:14 have invaded the same places that the Nazis invaded
01:54:19 back in 1941.
01:54:21 As somebody who’s working on volume three
01:54:26 of your work on Stalin going through this period,
01:54:30 is it eerie to you?
01:54:32 Yes, it is, Lex.
01:54:33 That you’re.
01:54:34 I’ve written the chapters of volume three.
01:54:37 I’ve drafted the chapters on the war.
01:54:40 And as I said, the place names
01:54:43 are very evocative, unfortunately.
01:54:45 But, you know, the Nazis failed ultimately.
01:54:52 They captured Ukraine for a time,
01:54:57 but they were evicted from Ukraine.
01:55:00 There was massive partisan or guerrilla warfare resistance
01:55:05 behind Nazi lines the whole time
01:55:08 that they were allegedly in control of Ukraine.
01:55:13 If you look at the maps on cable TV,
01:55:15 they show you the sign of,
01:55:17 they show you the coloring, Russian control.
01:55:19 And they draw a line and then it’s colored in.
01:55:22 But the word control is misplaced.
01:55:25 They don’t actually control it.
01:55:27 It’s Russian claimed or extent
01:55:30 of farthest Russian troop advancement.
01:55:34 Because behind the Russian lines in Ukraine,
01:55:37 Crimea accepted, you have insurgencies.
01:55:40 You have the armed insurgency.
01:55:43 In Melitopol, for example,
01:55:45 which is a place that you know in Southeastern Ukraine,
01:55:50 there is a guerrilla war now underway
01:55:53 to hurt the Russians who are in occupation
01:55:57 of that city and region.
01:56:00 And we’re gonna see that continue
01:56:02 even if the war becomes a stalemate,
01:56:07 even if it stalemates more or less
01:56:09 at the lines we’re at now,
01:56:11 which would mean that anticipated
01:56:15 Ukrainian counteroffensive at scale proves unsuccessful.
01:56:19 The Russian army doesn’t disintegrate.
01:56:22 And you end up with a stalemate
01:56:25 where there could be a ceasefire or not a ceasefire,
01:56:28 but neither side is attempting an offensive
01:56:30 for the time being.
01:56:32 There will be resistance behind those Russian lines
01:56:36 and it will be fierce resistance.
01:56:38 The kind of resistance we saw to the Nazi occupation.
01:56:43 Ultimately, it took the Red Army
01:56:46 reinvading the territory of Ukraine
01:56:50 and succeeding at combined arms operations at scale.
01:56:56 A massive counteroffensive,
01:56:57 much larger than anything we’re talking about today.
01:57:01 Ultimately, it required that
01:57:02 to evict the Nazis from Ukraine.
01:57:05 But in the meantime, they did not have an easy occupation
01:57:08 regime there.
01:57:11 Ukrainian partisans, Soviet partisans
01:57:17 killed Nazi officials, Wehrmacht soldiers, Wehrmacht officers
01:57:22 blew up the infrastructure they were using,
01:57:28 made them pay a price for their occupation.
01:57:31 We could well see if unfortunately
01:57:34 this ends in a stalemate for the time being,
01:57:38 we could well see that type of insurgency
01:57:41 gain momentum behind Russian lines
01:57:45 and try to evict the Russians that way
01:57:49 and then remount the counteroffensive at scale
01:57:52 later on in the future if the first one doesn’t succeed.
01:57:57 So that would be further echoes
01:58:01 of the World War II experience.
01:58:03 The scale once again is much smaller.
01:58:05 The size of the armies here,
01:58:08 they’re not in the many 800,000, 700,000,
01:58:13 a million two, a million four.
01:58:15 That’s not what we’re talking about today.
01:58:18 But the weapons, the cruise missiles, artillery fire.
01:58:24 Artillery fire used to be very inaccurate
01:58:27 and it was like saturation.
01:58:29 You would just fire towards the enemy lines
01:58:31 and if you hit something, you hit something
01:58:33 and if you didn’t, you just kept firing.
01:58:36 Now you have drones, Lex.
01:58:39 And so artillery fire is now sniper fire
01:58:44 because you can coordinate the direction
01:58:46 of the artillery fire with the drones.
01:58:49 The drones can take a picture and show you
01:58:52 where the enemy is precisely located
01:58:55 and you can align that artillery to hit them
01:58:58 instead of just indiscriminately bombing an area,
01:59:02 a territory.
01:59:03 And the NATO supplied artillery goes really far
01:59:08 and you can fire into Russian positions
01:59:11 and yourself not be exposed to Russian fire
01:59:15 because your artillery fires farther than theirs.
01:59:20 So that’s coming and we’re gonna see that in action.
01:59:24 And so the scale is not the same,
01:59:27 but the weapons, the precision of some of the weapons
01:59:30 and some of the NATO.
01:59:31 We’re not sending all of our stuff,
01:59:34 but as I said, the dynamic is Russia commits atrocities,
01:59:37 Russia bombs schools, Russia bombs hospitals,
01:59:40 Russia kills civilians and more and heavier
01:59:44 and more lethal Western weapons go to Ukraine.
01:59:48 Their willingness to risk their lives is really so impressive
01:59:53 and the reason that it’s our duty,
01:59:58 we’re obliged to supply those weapons.
02:00:00 And so the Russians don’t have that resupply
02:00:03 and the Ukrainians do.
02:00:06 And so the Russians are now digging in Lex.
02:00:09 They’re digging in deeply in the areas
02:00:12 that they’ve penetrated
02:00:14 and they’re trying to build unassailable positions
02:00:18 for when the Ukrainians transition
02:00:21 from mostly defense to full scale offense.
02:00:26 And we’ll see if that now,
02:00:28 I mean, they’re digging everywhere,
02:00:31 as they say, Kapayut, Kapayut, right?
02:00:34 They’re digging everywhere behind.
02:00:36 Your Russian is beautiful.
02:00:37 Digging in, I wish Lex, like yours.
02:00:41 But so there are these things that we can’t predict,
02:00:44 but there are these things we’re watching
02:00:46 and watching closely.
02:00:47 And on top of that, something that’s not in World War II
02:00:53 or for the most part is cyber attacks and cyber warfare,
02:00:56 which is much less perhaps convertible into human words
02:01:05 because it happens so quickly, it’s such large scales,
02:01:08 so difficult to trace and all those kinds of things.
02:01:10 It’s not bullets, it’s electrical signals and that.
02:01:14 Yeah, but those Ukrainian people, they’re like you, Lex.
02:01:18 They’re young and they’re technically really proficient.
02:01:23 And they’ve been amazing.
02:01:25 You know, they spent those teenage years in the basement
02:01:28 playing video games.
02:01:30 Nothing.
02:01:31 Turns out it’s useful after all.
02:01:32 It turns out it’s more than useful.
02:01:34 You can save your country that way.
02:01:37 And so they’re not alone, they’re getting support
02:01:41 and that support is important,
02:01:43 but really predominantly it’s Ukrainians
02:01:46 on the cyber battlefield.
02:01:48 And their skills have been very impressive
02:01:50 and they’ve been preparing for this for a number of years.
02:01:53 And they have a whole army of young people on the cyber side.
02:01:58 It’s their civilian population.
02:02:00 These are not people conscripted into the military
02:02:02 or volunteering wearing the uniform.
02:02:05 And so even in cyber warfare,
02:02:07 the Ukrainians have been extremely impressive.
02:02:11 And so let’s remember that all of these aspects of warfare,
02:02:18 whether it’s how far your cruise missiles go
02:02:22 and how accurate they are,
02:02:24 what size your cyber capabilities are.
02:02:29 It’s really ultimately about the people.
02:02:31 It’s about the human capital, right?
02:02:34 It’s about their willingness, their skill level,
02:02:39 but also their willingness to fight
02:02:41 and to put their lives on the line.
02:02:43 And there’s no substitute for that.
02:02:45 And so what’s called morale or courage or bravery or valor,
02:02:51 that’s really the ultimately decisive
02:02:54 provided you have enough sufficient arms, right?
02:02:59 To conduct the fight.
02:03:01 And if you don’t, you use a Molotov cocktail, right?
02:03:04 Grandma calls in the coordinates of the Russian tank
02:03:08 on her iPhone and you have a Molotov cocktail
02:03:13 that the people who used to work in the cafeteria
02:03:18 are now stuffing flammable liquid into bottles
02:03:22 and you carry one right up to the tank
02:03:23 and you smash it against the tank
02:03:25 or you drop it in one of the hatches in the tank, right?
02:03:30 There’s no substitute for that kind of stuff,
02:03:33 that level of resolve, willingness to die for your country.
02:03:38 That’s a really big lesson
02:03:40 that we need to absorb in our own country.
02:03:43 We’ve been going to war more frequently than we should.
02:03:48 And like you said, without the justification all the time,
02:03:51 and then like Henry Kissinger said,
02:03:53 without understanding how this was gonna end.
02:03:56 It’s easy to start a war,
02:03:58 it’s very difficult to win a war, prevail in a war
02:04:01 or end a war on terms that meet
02:04:05 your original expectations, right?
02:04:08 We’ve been fighting wars,
02:04:09 but we haven’t been fighting wars as societies.
02:04:13 We’ve been fighting wars as a small sliver of our population.
02:04:18 Something like 1% of our population
02:04:20 is involved with the military
02:04:22 because we have an all volunteer force.
02:04:25 And that means that it’s easier for our politicians
02:04:28 to go to war because they don’t face conscription,
02:04:33 they don’t have the draft,
02:04:36 which affects every family in the country.
02:04:39 And because the number of people in the volunteer force
02:04:45 is such a narrow stratum of the population.
02:04:49 And so they’ve been getting away with this
02:04:51 because the professional army
02:04:53 is much better than the conscript army.
02:04:56 And an all volunteer force is much preferable
02:04:58 from a military point of view.
02:05:01 But from a societal point of view, it enables you
02:05:05 to go to war too easily as a politician.
02:05:09 And it doesn’t engage the society the same way
02:05:12 that the Ukrainian society is completely engaged
02:05:16 from those young hackers all the way up
02:05:18 to those grandmothers.
02:05:20 Let me ask you, you’re a scholar of history,
02:05:23 a scholar of geopolitics, and you’re also a human being.
02:05:28 You’re also a human being.
02:05:30 That’s kind of you, Lex.
02:05:31 I’ll take that.
02:05:33 What’s the value, what’s the hope,
02:05:36 what’s the power of conversation here?
02:05:39 If you could sit down with Vladimir Putin
02:05:41 and have a conversation versus bullets,
02:05:47 human exchange words, is there hope for those?
02:05:51 And if so, what would you talk about?
02:05:53 What would you ask him?
02:05:55 Well, Henry Kissinger,
02:05:57 you alluded to his op ed,
02:05:58 he’s had many private meetings with President Putin
02:06:03 over a long time.
02:06:06 And President Biden,
02:06:11 the previous presidents, secretaries of state,
02:06:16 officials below secretary of state,
02:06:18 the head of the CIA,
02:06:20 evidently met with President Putin in the fall
02:06:24 when he was massing the troops on the border
02:06:27 before he invaded.
02:06:30 And we sent the head of the CIA and Putin received him,
02:06:34 somebody he evidently respects
02:06:36 or was at least willing to meet,
02:06:39 unlike other members of the administration.
02:06:42 So a lot of people are talking to him
02:06:45 in some form or another for the 22 years
02:06:48 he’s been in power.
02:06:49 And I’m not sure it’s had
02:06:53 what I would call their desired effect.
02:06:57 Well, the nature of the conversation is interesting too.
02:07:00 And also the timing, which is post February 22nd,
02:07:03 is a different time.
02:07:05 And also another aspect,
02:07:09 which Oliver Stone mentioned interestingly,
02:07:12 that there’s something about COVID and the pandemic
02:07:15 that creates isolation, the distancing.
02:07:18 It’s such a silly little nuance thing,
02:07:21 but maybe it’s actually has a profound impact
02:07:25 on the human being, the human mind of Vladimir Putin,
02:07:29 that there is something about an in person meeting
02:07:32 and not across a table that’s far too large,
02:07:35 but sort of the intimacy of one human to human
02:07:38 in person conversation,
02:07:40 that there’s something distinctly powerful
02:07:43 about that reminder that as Putin says
02:07:48 in the narrative and the propaganda
02:07:50 that we’re all one people, there is truth to that,
02:07:53 that this entirety of humanity is one people.
02:07:57 And you’re kind of reminded by that
02:07:59 when you’re sitting together.
02:08:02 People who have sat across the table from him,
02:08:06 whether at 30 yards or at three,
02:08:11 have remarked upon this feeling of isolation
02:08:15 that has affected him, the pandemic.
02:08:18 I think there must be something to that
02:08:21 if several people who’ve been in the room with him
02:08:25 are remarking on it.
02:08:27 Everybody that I know and I’ve been able to talk to
02:08:31 who’s had a meeting with him in the past 10 years,
02:08:35 including Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State,
02:08:39 has said that Putin spends a lot of time
02:08:45 enumerating his grievances.
02:08:49 He goes through a monologue of his grievances
02:08:52 and then the West did this,
02:08:54 and then the West lied to us about that,
02:08:57 and then the West cheated us on this.
02:09:00 And so it’s not the conversation
02:09:03 that you’re encouraging of common humanity.
02:09:06 It’s that roiling resentment volcano
02:09:10 that’s just exploding and exploding.
02:09:13 The resentment.
02:09:14 And by the time he gets through the monologue
02:09:19 of the grievances, the time of the meeting
02:09:22 is expired or over time.
02:09:25 That’s a brilliant statement,
02:09:26 but that’s where the skill of conversation comes in.
02:09:29 Like when you’re facing a bull with a red cloth,
02:09:32 you have to learn how to avoid the long list of grievances
02:09:35 and get to the humanity.
02:09:37 That’s a really important skill.
02:09:39 For sure it’s a skill,
02:09:40 and it’s the highest level skill of a diplomat
02:09:44 to be able to reach some type of common understanding
02:09:47 when interests and worldviews clash so much.
02:09:51 But here’s your challenge, Lex.
02:09:54 Your challenge is Russia wants to impose
02:09:59 a closed sphere of influence on its neighbors.
02:10:05 It wants to dictate what its neighbors can and can’t do.
02:10:10 It wants to exert influence,
02:10:12 not by the power of its example,
02:10:15 not by the freedom of its people,
02:10:18 not by the dynamism of its diversified economy,
02:10:22 but it wants to exert influence
02:10:24 just because it deserves that,
02:10:27 just because it’s a great power,
02:10:30 just because, and on and on and on.
02:10:33 It’s a civilization unto itself.
02:10:36 And it wants that, and we can’t give that.
02:10:40 The reason that Russia was not integrated into the West
02:10:44 was not for lack of trying.
02:10:47 It was because Russia ultimately spurned the integration
02:10:51 because it was about what terms
02:10:54 the integration would come on.
02:10:56 Would you come into the West and observe Western rules
02:11:01 and be another country, meaning just another country?
02:11:06 There’s Poland, and there’s Austria,
02:11:10 and there’s little tiny Monaco, and there’s Russia.
02:11:16 And you’re just one of those countries.
02:11:19 And Russia’s answer to that was no,
02:11:21 we’re not just one of those countries.
02:11:24 We need special rules.
02:11:26 We need special conditions.
02:11:29 We’ll integrate, but only as a special country,
02:11:33 meaning like at the UN, where all countries are sovereign,
02:11:38 all countries are members,
02:11:40 but Russia has a veto on what countries can and can’t do.
02:11:44 Those were the terms on which they were willing to integrate.
02:11:48 And those were the terms that no leader of a Western country
02:11:52 or the United States or the G7 or fill in the blank
02:11:56 can grant to Russia.
02:12:00 It’s very well known that Vladimir Putin
02:12:03 was one of the first, maybe the first person,
02:12:06 first leader, foreign leader to call President Bush
02:12:10 after the 9 11 tragedy.
02:12:13 They didn’t connect right away.
02:12:15 President Bush was not in Washington,
02:12:17 but eventually they did speak.
02:12:20 He condemned the terrorist attack.
02:12:22 He offered Russian support, which he delivered on
02:12:26 the use of some Russian logistics
02:12:28 for our Afghanistan operations.
02:12:33 And a lot of people point to that and they say,
02:12:35 there it is.
02:12:36 Russia wanted to cooperate and did cooperate
02:12:41 and we spurned them or we failed to appreciate
02:12:45 Russia’s cooperation.
02:12:47 And so therefore Russia was cheated or Russia was lied to
02:12:51 or Russia’s grievances are legitimate.
02:12:54 But here’s the problem with that argument, Lex.
02:12:58 In exchange for that support, Vladimir Putin asked
02:13:03 in return from President Bush for a free hand
02:13:07 in the former Soviet space,
02:13:09 that closed hierarchical sphere of influence
02:13:13 where Russia would exert influence coercively
02:13:17 over countries that were sovereign.
02:13:19 And no American president could grant that.
02:13:23 And President Bush was right.
02:13:24 He said no.
02:13:26 And so the attempted cooperation blew up.
02:13:31 But who’s at fault there?
02:13:35 Should there be a nonvoluntary sphere of influence?
02:13:40 Should that be granted or should you face up
02:13:45 to attempts to do that?
02:13:47 You know, let’s take a little detour here
02:13:51 into China for a second.
02:13:54 China had this brilliant grand strategy,
02:13:57 which was sure, America is hostile
02:14:01 because America is hegemonic.
02:14:03 America wants to control the world.
02:14:05 America will never let China rise.
02:14:07 America will do everything it can to hold China down.
02:14:11 So we’re gonna have hostility from America.
02:14:14 We don’t wanna decouple because we need
02:14:17 that high end technology transfer.
02:14:20 Either we buy it or we steal it
02:14:22 because America and the rest of the West
02:14:24 has all the technology that we need.
02:14:26 We have some of it domestically,
02:14:29 more than before by a lot,
02:14:31 but we’re still dependent so we can’t decouple.
02:14:33 So we’ll have the hostility,
02:14:35 but there’ll be a line we don’t cross
02:14:37 just so that we don’t lose the technology transfer.
02:14:40 Till Made in China 2035 is accomplished
02:14:45 and we’re self sufficient domestically
02:14:48 in AI and every other area that’s critical.
02:14:52 But hostility from America.
02:14:53 But we have an ace in the hole.
02:14:55 Our ace in the hole is Europe.
02:14:58 Europe hates conflict.
02:15:00 They’re all about trade.
02:15:02 Doesn’t matter how evil you are.
02:15:04 They love to trade because Wandel durch Handel,
02:15:09 change through trade.
02:15:10 They have this illusion
02:15:11 that you’re gonna become a better country
02:15:14 if they trade with you
02:15:15 and you won’t have conflict, war and hostilities
02:15:18 if you trade.
02:15:19 And so we have this European ace in the hole.
02:15:22 We’re hostile with the Americans.
02:15:24 We’re still buying or stealing their technology.
02:15:27 And better than that even,
02:15:29 the Europeans are not hostile to us at all.
02:15:32 They love to trade with us
02:15:33 and they wanna trade more
02:15:35 and they’re our biggest trading partner already.
02:15:38 And lo and behold,
02:15:39 Xi Jinping sides with Vladimir Putin
02:15:42 in the aggression in Ukraine.
02:15:45 He doesn’t side with him providing military equipment.
02:15:49 He doesn’t provide technology transfer
02:15:52 but he provides public support
02:15:55 and massive pro Russian propaganda
02:15:58 to the whole Chinese population.
02:16:01 And the Europeans say, wait a minute,
02:16:04 this is an invasion of a sovereign country in Europe.
02:16:07 What do you mean?
02:16:09 You’re not condemning Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
02:16:12 And so that wedge that the Chinese had,
02:16:15 that was the basis of their grand strategy,
02:16:18 that wedge between the US and Europe
02:16:21 when it came to China policy,
02:16:23 that wedge is gone now.
02:16:24 Xi Jinping destroyed it.
02:16:27 And the Europeans and the Americans
02:16:29 are coming close together
02:16:31 on Ukraine and Russia policy for sure,
02:16:34 but also more and more on China policy.
02:16:38 And so that was a pretty big sacrifice
02:16:40 for the Chinese leader to make.
02:16:42 And what did he get in return?
02:16:45 He gets hydrocarbons from Russia at reduced prices.
02:16:49 And the Chinese get hydrocarbons from a lot of countries.
02:16:54 They have a completely diverse supply chain
02:16:58 for their energy.
02:16:59 So what do you think Xi Jinping is thinking now?
02:17:02 Was it a mistake or?
02:17:04 I’d like to know, Lex.
02:17:06 I’d like you to be able to sit down with him
02:17:08 across from this table here on your podcast
02:17:11 and pose that same question to him
02:17:13 because we have no idea.
02:17:14 There’s a language barrier that’s fascinating.
02:17:16 By the way, you as a scholar of Stalin,
02:17:20 do you think we’ll ever break through
02:17:21 the language barrier to China?
02:17:24 Not ever, I apologize, in the next few years
02:17:27 because there is a gigantic cultural and language barrier
02:17:30 between the West and the Chinese.
02:17:32 China’s a great civilization.
02:17:34 China predates the United States by millennia.
02:17:39 China’s accomplishments are breathtaking.
02:17:42 But China’s also led by, let’s be honest,
02:17:46 a Communist Party monopoly
02:17:49 which engages in a lot of criminal behavior.
02:17:52 Lex, Tibet is Ukraine.
02:17:57 Xinjiang is Ukraine.
02:17:59 Hong Kong is Ukraine,
02:18:04 let alone support for Putin, Ukraine.
02:18:07 This is before we’ve even discussed Taiwan.
02:18:10 And so now the Europeans are coming to see this
02:18:13 and the Americans are coming to understand this,
02:18:16 that maybe trading with a regime like that,
02:18:22 morally, politically, criminally,
02:18:25 Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong,
02:18:28 how is that different from what Putin is doing in Ukraine?
02:18:31 I’d be hard pressed to differentiate that ultimately,
02:18:35 even though the analogies are not exact.
02:18:38 And so the Chinese, it’s like that guy Leonov,
02:18:43 the author of Licheletia,
02:18:46 the great memoir of the late Soviet period,
02:18:50 the end of the Soviet Union.
02:18:52 You know that they spend all this time
02:18:55 and all these resources blackening our image,
02:18:58 but we supply them with endless material
02:19:00 to blacken our image.
02:19:02 That’s where Xi Jinping’s regime is right now, Lex.
02:19:05 And so they have a big dilemma on their side.
02:19:09 It’s a Western world
02:19:11 and they’ve united the Western world
02:19:14 and reawoken the Western world
02:19:19 to the fact that China is a threat
02:19:23 to the values, the institutions and values of the West.
02:19:27 And that trade is not transforming China quite the opposite.
02:19:32 We’ll see if this endures.
02:19:34 Maybe it doesn’t endure.
02:19:35 Maybe it’s a fleeting moment.
02:19:36 Maybe this is not an inflection point.
02:19:39 Maybe the war in Ukraine ends more quickly than we think.
02:19:43 And maybe like you said,
02:19:45 the Chinese and the Indians and the rest of them,
02:19:48 the leaders there, they get their wish that it ends
02:19:50 and the world moves on and forgets
02:19:54 or says, let’s try again to resume
02:19:59 our mutual understanding,
02:20:01 our mutually beneficial trade and everything else.
02:20:04 Maybe it’s a passing phase.
02:20:06 We can’t exclude that.
02:20:07 I’m very poor at predicting the future.
02:20:10 But the moment is not a good one for the Chinese regime,
02:20:14 let alone the fact that he’s trying to impose
02:20:19 an unprecedented in the modern era third term
02:20:23 for himself as president in the fall
02:20:26 at the next party Congress,
02:20:28 becoming president for life de facto, a Mao like figure.
02:20:35 And he’s now got to do that within this environment
02:20:41 where he has damaged Chinese grand strategy
02:20:45 and damaged the reputation of China
02:20:47 and its relationships across the world.
02:20:51 Maybe not permanently, but significantly,
02:20:54 in addition to the problems they have at home,
02:20:57 demography, as you know, a middle income trap,
02:21:02 and then the regulatory insanity of Chinese communist rule
02:21:07 that we’ve seen with the tech companies that you know well,
02:21:10 where they’ve destroyed all of that value
02:21:14 with the blow up of their property sector
02:21:17 because it was a massive bubble
02:21:19 and that’s still playing out.
02:21:21 And this time it’s the same,
02:21:24 meaning this time it’s not different.
02:21:27 When it comes to a property blowout,
02:21:29 it has enormous effects on middle class balance sheets
02:21:33 and their ability to remain consumers
02:21:37 and drive the economy,
02:21:38 which is the model that they have to share.
02:21:40 So he’s got a litany of challenges independent even
02:21:45 of the fact that he sided with his pal Vladimir Putin
02:21:51 and their bromance is costing China
02:21:54 very, very significantly.
02:21:55 If you close your eyes.
02:21:58 Yes.
02:21:59 And a hundred years ago in 1922
02:22:03 and you think about the future,
02:22:05 I wonder if you can hear the drums of war
02:22:09 predicting the 30s,
02:22:11 predicting the great depression and the resentment
02:22:16 that builds the economic resentment,
02:22:20 the cultural resentment, the geopolitical resentment
02:22:22 that builds and leads to World War II.
02:22:26 At least to me, when I close my eyes,
02:22:28 I can hear the drums of war that are still ahead of us.
02:22:33 And it’s possible that 2022 will materialize
02:22:36 in a similar way as did 1922.
02:22:45 I have my eyes closed, Lex.
02:22:46 Do you hear anything?
02:22:48 And I sure hope that that’s not what happens.
02:22:51 But I’m looking in 1922, it’s an epoch I know well
02:22:56 and I don’t see the future that unfolds.
02:23:00 I would not have predicted it had I been alive then.
02:23:02 I see the war behind us.
02:23:06 I see a prosperity on the horizon.
02:23:10 Yes, inflation in Germany
02:23:11 and some many other difficult issues,
02:23:15 but there are more democracies now
02:23:18 than there were before the war
02:23:19 and the old empires are gone.
02:23:22 And there’s a cultural efflorescence
02:23:24 and there’s modernism in the arts
02:23:26 and there’s women entering the public sphere
02:23:29 and there’s all this fantastic new technology
02:23:31 like automobiles.
02:23:33 And I’m looking at the future from 1922
02:23:38 and I’m not seeing the Great Depression
02:23:40 and I’m not seeing World War II
02:23:42 and I’m not seeing the Holocaust
02:23:44 because I don’t predict the future
02:23:48 and nobody in 1922 could see that future,
02:23:51 although I guess there were some clairvoyants
02:23:54 who predicted it, but.
02:23:56 But you’re not one of them.
02:23:57 I’m not one of them.
02:23:59 But this is what I know, Lex, from studying history.
02:24:03 What I know is stuff happens.
02:24:05 In other words, in other words, Lex,
02:24:10 we’re watching Ukraine war right now
02:24:13 and all of our attention is focused on that.
02:24:16 And it’s like the economists say in their textbooks
02:24:19 when their powerful models are employed
02:24:24 and there’s this line that says
02:24:26 all other factors held constant, comma,
02:24:31 and then the model works.
02:24:33 And you get this really great result.
02:24:35 It’s very powerful predictor and analysis, the model.
02:24:40 And the whole game is all other factors held constant.
02:24:45 So the Russia, Ukraine war that we’ve been discussing
02:24:48 and this could happen and that could happen,
02:24:50 but you know what stuff could happen, Lex.
02:24:53 For example, the Israeli government
02:24:56 could decide this summer that it’s gonna bomb Iran
02:25:00 because no Israeli government will tolerate Iran
02:25:03 acquiring a nuclear weapon.
02:25:05 And since President Trump exited,
02:25:08 unilaterally exited from the multipower nuclear agreement,
02:25:14 Iran is now much closer to the bomb than they were
02:25:18 when they were still in,
02:25:19 when the United States was still in that agreement.
02:25:22 And you tell me the Israeli government that says,
02:25:24 sure, it’s fine, it’s okay, Iran can get the bomb.
02:25:28 And so maybe that happens.
02:25:29 And maybe that happens as early as this summer
02:25:31 as Iran gets closer and closer and closer to the bomb.
02:25:35 Maybe that guy in North Korea decides it’s his time
02:25:40 just like his grandfather, right, in 1950 decided,
02:25:45 you know, it’s time, we’re gonna quote reunify,
02:25:48 unquote, the Korean peninsula, maybe, I don’t know, Lex,
02:25:54 fill in the blank, something’s gonna happen.
02:25:57 It’s not gonna be what I predict.
02:25:59 It’s not gonna be what I’m watching.
02:26:01 It’s gonna be obvious only after it happens, not before.
02:26:06 And then it’s gonna upend the table.
02:26:10 And all of a sudden.
02:26:12 Everything changes.
02:26:12 We’re gonna be in a different environment,
02:26:14 different circumstances, and is Ukraine still
02:26:18 as central at that point as it seems to be right now?
02:26:23 I don’t know the answer to that question.
02:26:24 Let me ask two rapid fire questions.
02:26:28 You’re only allowed to have one minute
02:26:29 and it’s about predicting the future.
02:26:32 Okay, question one, Vladimir Putin,
02:26:36 when will he no longer be in office?
02:26:39 And will he step down or be overthrown?
02:26:44 What’s your prediction and a brief explanation
02:26:48 of that prediction?
02:26:49 Now, nobody can predict the future,
02:26:52 but what’s your sense now?
02:26:53 Some people are saying the pressure is building.
02:26:56 He’s going to be overthrown or step down
02:26:59 at the end of this year.
02:27:01 And some people say surely he’s going to last,
02:27:06 outlast Stalin’s rule of 30 plus years.
02:27:09 No evidence of a coup yet, none whatsoever, yet.
02:27:18 He’s pretty much at life expectancy for a Russian male.
02:27:23 Those are bad numbers.
02:27:25 He’s 69, gonna be 70.
02:27:29 So he’s lived the life of a Russian male already,
02:27:32 but he’s got better doctors than the majority
02:27:36 of the Russian males in that, let’s say comparison set.
02:27:42 So he could live a very long time with good doctors.
02:27:47 So there could be a coup at some point,
02:27:49 but there’s none today in evidence.
02:27:54 He could go because he’s reached the life expectancy
02:27:58 or he could stay for a long time.
02:28:00 The thing to watch about this
02:28:04 is an organization that nobody pays attention to.
02:28:08 The FSO, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Akhrani,
02:28:12 which is the Praetorian Guard,
02:28:15 the self standing bodyguard directorate,
02:28:18 the only one, the only organization in Russia
02:28:21 that has any access to him.
02:28:24 We’ve seen no disloyalty, no breaking of ranks,
02:28:28 no defections, nothing in the public realm and open sources
02:28:33 about any divisions or problems in the FSO,
02:28:37 in the Praetorian Guard.
02:28:39 So if you can’t break that, change that illicit defections
02:28:47 there, you can’t overturn him.
02:28:50 Authoritarian regimes, Lex, they’re terrible.
02:28:52 They fail at everything.
02:28:54 They can’t feed their people.
02:28:57 They have trouble achieving any goals.
02:29:00 They only have to be good, however, at one thing.
02:29:04 They only have to be good
02:29:05 at the complete suppression of political alternatives.
02:29:08 If you can suppress political alternatives,
02:29:12 you can fail at everything else,
02:29:14 but you can survive as an authoritarian regime.
02:29:17 So you watch Navalny.
02:29:19 He’s still alive.
02:29:21 Okay, Lex, you go for it.
02:29:23 That’s my second rapid fire question
02:29:26 is what happens to Navalny?
02:29:28 What are the possible conclusions of what you said
02:29:31 quite possibly the second most influential,
02:29:33 powerful figure in Russia?
02:29:38 Is he going to die in jail?
02:29:41 Will he become the next president of Russia?
02:29:44 Well, what are the possible?
02:29:45 I wish I knew, Lex.
02:29:47 I’ve been surprised that he’s still alive.
02:29:50 I’ve been worried that he will be killed in prison
02:29:54 in a staged fight, some security officer,
02:30:00 prison guard puts on a prison outfit,
02:30:03 takes a lead pipe, goes into the cell.
02:30:05 They have a quote fight and Navalny is killed.
02:30:08 I’ve been afraid of that, but he’s still alive
02:30:11 even though he’s serving a long sentence.
02:30:14 So that leads me to guess that people inside
02:30:19 the Putin regime and maybe President Putin himself
02:30:22 understand that Navalny is their ticket to lift sanctions.
02:30:29 That Navalny is even more popular outside of Russia
02:30:33 than he is inside of Russia.
02:30:35 He’s the leader in many ways of the political opposition
02:30:39 in the country, even while still in prison,
02:30:42 his organization’s been destroyed,
02:30:45 but he doesn’t have majority support in the population
02:30:48 by any stretch of the imagination,
02:30:50 but he’s a big figure in the West,
02:30:52 including here in the US.
02:30:54 And so Navalny could be their ticket.
02:30:57 They’re kind of get out of jail card,
02:31:00 meaning they release him from prison.
02:31:02 He gets appointed, I don’t know,
02:31:03 prime minister even by the Putin regime
02:31:06 if he were willing to accept such a position.
02:31:09 And I have my doubts about that.
02:31:11 And then that’s how they lobby
02:31:14 to remove the sanctions against them.
02:31:17 So he’s a card that President Putin could play.
02:31:21 And so maybe that’s the reason he’s still alive,
02:31:24 or maybe there are other reasons that we don’t know.
02:31:28 And so some alternative to Putin is more likely to arise
02:31:34 inside his gang, Putin’s Shika, as they say, right?
02:31:39 Inside his gang, where they tire of his mistakes,
02:31:44 they tire of his self defeating actions.
02:31:48 And they say, patriotically for Russia,
02:31:52 we need to do something against, move against this guy
02:31:56 because he’s hurting our country
02:31:58 and also because I could do better.
02:32:01 I’m ambitious as well as patriotic.
02:32:04 But once again, the problem there, Lex,
02:32:06 is Putin is surrounded by this cocoon known as the FSO.
02:32:11 He meets on Zoom, predominantly with the rest
02:32:15 of the government, including with the defense
02:32:17 and security officials.
02:32:20 They don’t have frequent access to his person.
02:32:24 And as you were alluding earlier to the pandemic,
02:32:27 they have to quarantine for two weeks
02:32:29 before every meeting with him.
02:32:31 And moreover, you know, Lex, they don’t know where he is.
02:32:36 You see, when they’re on Zoom with him,
02:32:38 and the room, it’s the Valdai.
02:32:44 His office in the Valdai region looks the same
02:32:48 as his office in Sochi,
02:32:51 or his office outside of Moscow in Novogorod.
02:32:54 They’re made up to look very similar on Zoom.
02:32:58 And sure, some signs they’re looking, where is it?
02:33:02 But maybe they don’t know.
02:33:05 And so they’re not sure.
02:33:06 Maybe they don’t know, and so you’re gonna move on him,
02:33:10 and you’re gonna jump him in his Kremlin,
02:33:13 his dacha outside Moscow.
02:33:17 And it turns out he’s in Sochi, or vice versa.
02:33:20 And it turns out the FSO is loyal to him
02:33:23 and won’t let you anyway.
02:33:24 So Lex, we don’t know, but we watch this FSO really closely,
02:33:30 and we think that the elites, if not Putin,
02:33:34 but maybe Putin too, understand Navalny
02:33:37 as a really big potential political card
02:33:40 that they could play.
02:33:41 And one last question, the biggest question.
02:33:46 You studied some of the darkest aspects
02:33:49 of human history, human nature.
02:33:52 Let me ask the why question.
02:33:54 What are we doing here?
02:33:57 What’s the meaning of our existence,
02:33:59 our life here on Earth?
02:34:01 What are we humans trying to get at here?
02:34:04 I can’t answer that question either,
02:34:07 but I can say that having a purposeful life
02:34:12 is actually not that hard.
02:34:15 You can’t, you’re not Gandhi, right?
02:34:18 You’re not President Roosevelt.
02:34:21 You’re not gonna transform a country or a civilization
02:34:25 or become immortal because of your courage
02:34:30 and your insight and your genius at critical moments.
02:34:35 But you live in an environment,
02:34:37 you’re in a school, you’re in a workplace,
02:34:41 you’re somewhere where you can affect other people
02:34:44 in a positive way.
02:34:46 It can be not just about yourself,
02:34:48 but it can be about them.
02:34:51 And you can have a positive impact on other people’s lives
02:34:55 through the work that you do,
02:34:57 whether that’s your employment or your charity
02:35:00 or your spare time or your work time.
02:35:03 It can be by modeling proper behavior, right?
02:35:07 Admitting your mistakes, hard to do, but necessary.
02:35:12 Remembering that you don’t know everything,
02:35:14 you can’t predict the future,
02:35:16 but you don’t even know everything
02:35:17 in your areas of expertise.
02:35:20 Painfully reminded of that humility at times,
02:35:23 but remind yourself too.
02:35:25 So you can lead a life that can show others
02:35:31 what good values are,
02:35:34 and you can lead a life that dedicates yourself
02:35:37 not only to your own material wellbeing,
02:35:40 but to the wellbeing
02:35:42 and to the development of others around you.
02:35:44 And it can be on a humble scale.
02:35:47 It can be in a small classroom or a small workplace,
02:35:50 a small work team, but it can be done.
02:35:54 And you can be reminded that having a positive impact
02:35:58 even on one other person
02:36:00 gives far greater meaning to your own life.
02:36:04 And it’s profoundly satisfying,
02:36:06 much more satisfying than the attention you might get,
02:36:10 let’s say on social media or awards you might receive.
02:36:15 There’s nothing wrong with pursuing those.
02:36:17 People pursue them and it’s a free society.
02:36:21 But leading a purposeful life intentionally is possible.
02:36:27 Even just one person, I love the expression,
02:36:30 save one life, save the world.
02:36:33 Just focusing on the local,
02:36:36 on the tiny little difference you can make in the world
02:36:39 can somehow ripple.
02:36:40 Every day.
02:36:42 If you think about that every single day,
02:36:44 you’re a better person.
02:36:47 We’re a better society.
02:36:49 And maybe you get to add a bit of love to the world
02:36:52 after all.
02:36:55 Steven, this is a huge honor for many reasons,
02:36:59 one of which is I can just tell
02:37:01 how much care you put into this conversation
02:37:04 and how much, I use the word love a lot,
02:37:08 but I just feel the love that,
02:37:12 just even the respect you give me,
02:37:14 which I can’t tell you how energizing that is,
02:37:17 how much that gives me strength
02:37:19 for my own silly little pursuits.
02:37:23 Thank you so much for doing that.
02:37:24 Thank you for not just talking today,
02:37:26 but giving me so much respect
02:37:29 just with everything you’re doing.
02:37:30 I really appreciate that.
02:37:32 It makes me feel special.
02:37:33 So thank you so much for sitting down and talking today.
02:37:36 Mutual, Lex, thank you as well
02:37:38 and thank you for the respect that you’ve shown me.
02:37:41 These are really difficult issues
02:37:43 that don’t have simple answers.
02:37:45 But that doesn’t mean we give up.
02:37:48 We have to keep thinking and learning and trying
02:37:52 and finding solutions in everything we do,
02:37:56 including on these big global tragedies
02:37:59 that we live through.
02:38:01 And it’s heartbreaking what’s going on.
02:38:04 It just breaks my heart every day.
02:38:06 A person who studies this,
02:38:08 I’ve been studying this for decades,
02:38:10 and it keeps happening.
02:38:12 And you think, again, and yes, it is again,
02:38:15 but we still have to keep trying
02:38:18 and we have to be inspired
02:38:20 by those people who are more courageous than we are
02:38:23 and sacrifice more than we sacrifice.
02:38:26 For me, the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
02:38:29 the war in Ukraine is experienced in my study at home
02:38:34 and in my office at Princeton
02:38:36 or my coming office at Stanford
02:38:39 when I moved full time to Stanford in September.
02:38:41 Or it’s experienced far away in safety and in comfort.
02:38:48 And we have to remember that too
02:38:50 when we talk about these things,
02:38:52 when we answer your questions, right?
02:38:55 That as we speak and as we comment
02:38:58 and think we’re experts on these things
02:39:00 from the comfort of our existence,
02:39:03 that there are people in those tragedies right now.
02:39:07 With no power, with no food,
02:39:09 with no, with full uncertainty about the future
02:39:12 of the health of their children.
02:39:14 That’s it.
02:39:15 And I’ve also seen, because I have family in both places,
02:39:19 homes that were home for,
02:39:24 buildings that were homes for generations now in rubble.
02:39:29 So.
02:39:30 Yes, Lex, it just, it hurts.
02:39:33 And it’s, let’s, it’s Syria,
02:39:36 where 350,000 at least by UN estimates died
02:39:41 and Russia participated in that.
02:39:43 And it’s Yemen.
02:39:45 And it’s so many other places
02:39:47 that don’t have the same degree of attention
02:39:50 that a European country like Ukraine has.
02:39:54 But yeah, we have to remember also
02:39:57 that in addition to Ukraine,
02:40:00 and then there’s things right home here in New York City
02:40:04 where children are without food.
02:40:07 Which is just inexcusable in a country this rich.
02:40:10 So we shouldn’t forget in our study of leaders
02:40:13 and our study of geopolitics
02:40:15 that ultimately it’s about the humanity.
02:40:16 It’s about the human beings and.
02:40:18 That’s it.
02:40:19 Okay, Lex.
02:40:20 Human suffering.
02:40:21 Thank you so much, Stephen.
02:40:22 Thank you.
02:40:23 This is an amazing conversation.
02:40:24 Talk to you again soon.
02:40:25 My pleasure.
02:40:27 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:40:29 with Stephen Kotkin.
02:40:31 To support this podcast,
02:40:32 please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:40:35 And now let me leave you with some words
02:40:38 from Mahatma Gandhi.
02:40:40 When I despair, I remember that all through history,
02:40:44 the way of truth and love have always won.
02:40:48 There have been tyrants and murderers
02:40:50 and for a time they can seem invincible,
02:40:54 but in the end, they always fall.
02:40:56 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.