Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Stephen Kotkin,

00:00:02.640 | his second time on the podcast.

00:00:04.720 | Stephen is one of the greatest historians of all time,

00:00:08.080 | specializing in 20th and 21st century history

00:00:11.320 | of Russia and Eastern Europe.

00:00:13.680 | And he has written what is widely considered

00:00:16.000 | to be the definitive biography of Stalin in three volumes,

00:00:20.300 | two of which have been published,

00:00:22.280 | and the third focused on World War II

00:00:25.280 | and the years after he is in the midst of writing now.

00:00:29.720 | This conversation includes a response

00:00:31.680 | to my previous podcast episode with Oliver Stone

00:00:34.600 | that was focused on Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.

00:00:37.960 | Stephen provides a hard hitting criticism of Putin

00:00:41.960 | and the Russian invasion of Ukraine,

00:00:44.200 | weighed and contextualized deeply

00:00:46.560 | in the complex geopolitics and history of our world,

00:00:50.240 | all with an intensity and rigor,

00:00:53.320 | but also wit and humor that makes Stephen

00:00:56.320 | one of my favorite human beings.

00:00:59.540 | Please also allow me to mention something

00:01:03.380 | that has been apparent and has weighed heavy

00:01:06.220 | on my heart and mind.

00:01:07.880 | This conversation with Stephen Kotkin

00:01:11.700 | makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Russia.

00:01:14.340 | The previous conversation with Oliver Stone

00:01:18.540 | makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Ukraine.

00:01:21.560 | This makes me sad, but it is the way of the world.

00:01:27.420 | I will nevertheless travel to both Ukraine and Russia.

00:01:31.560 | I need to once again see with my own eyes

00:01:35.620 | the land of my ancestors,

00:01:37.780 | where they suffered but flourished

00:01:40.420 | and eventually gave birth to, say, the old me.

00:01:43.580 | I need to hear directly the pain, anger, and hope

00:01:49.340 | from both Ukrainians and Russians.

00:01:51.240 | I won't give details to my travel plans

00:01:54.100 | in terms of location and timing,

00:01:56.260 | but the trip is very soon.

00:01:58.820 | Whatever happens, I'm truly grateful for every day I'm alive

00:02:03.820 | and I hope to spend each such day

00:02:06.420 | adding a bit of love to the world.

00:02:08.260 | I love you all.

00:02:10.220 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,

00:02:13.100 | and now, dear friends, here's Stephen Kotkin.

00:02:18.360 | You are one of the great historians of our time,

00:02:22.220 | specializing in the man, the leader,

00:02:24.620 | the historical figure of Stalin.

00:02:26.660 | So let me ask a challenging question.

00:02:28.820 | If you can perhaps think about the echo of 80 years

00:02:34.700 | between Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin,

00:02:40.100 | what are the similarities and differences

00:02:42.060 | between the man and the historical figure,

00:02:44.580 | the historical trajectory of Stalin and Putin?

00:02:47.060 | - Thank you, Lex.

00:02:49.500 | It's very nice to be here again with you.

00:02:52.240 | It's been a while.

00:02:54.300 | - Yeah. - Good to see you.

00:02:55.140 | - Yeah, good to see you as well.

00:02:55.980 | - You're looking good.

00:02:57.260 | - You as well. - I see this podcast stuff

00:02:59.860 | is doing you right.

00:03:01.100 | - Yeah.

00:03:02.380 | - So we can't really put very easily Vladimir Putin

00:03:06.900 | in the same sentence with Joseph Stalin.

00:03:09.160 | Stalin is a singular figure

00:03:13.620 | and his category is really small.

00:03:16.940 | Hitler, Mao, that's really about it.

00:03:21.380 | And even in that category, Stalin is the dominant figure,

00:03:25.700 | both by how long he was in power

00:03:28.620 | and also by the amount of power,

00:03:30.700 | the military industrial complex he helped build

00:03:33.220 | and commanded.

00:03:34.060 | So Putin can't be compared to that.

00:03:38.220 | However, Putin's in the same building as Stalin.

00:03:42.420 | He uses some of the same offices as Stalin used.

00:03:46.620 | And some of those, the television broadcasts

00:03:49.900 | that we see of Putin at meetings

00:03:51.780 | and Putin inside the Kremlin,

00:03:54.060 | Stalin used to sit in those rooms

00:03:57.020 | and hold meetings in those rooms.

00:03:58.860 | That's the Imperial Senate built by Catherine the Great,

00:04:02.540 | an 18th century building inside the Kremlin.

00:04:06.700 | It's a domed building and you can see it on the panorama,

00:04:11.700 | the top of the building,

00:04:13.460 | at least you can see it on the panorama

00:04:15.200 | when you look over the Kremlin wall

00:04:17.020 | from many sites inside Moscow.

00:04:20.240 | So if he's not comparable to Stalin,

00:04:26.100 | he still works, as I said, in those same buildings,

00:04:28.900 | those same offices, partly.

00:04:31.780 | And so therefore, he's got some of the problems

00:04:34.780 | that Stalin had, which was managing Russian power

00:04:38.300 | in the world from a position of weakness vis-a-vis the West,

00:04:43.580 | but from an ambition, a grandiosity, in fact.

00:04:48.580 | And so this combination of weakness and grandeur, right,

00:04:54.340 | of not being as strong as the West,

00:04:56.960 | but aspiring to be as great or greater than the West.

00:05:01.380 | That's the dilemma of Russian history

00:05:04.260 | for the past many centuries.

00:05:06.220 | It was the dilemma for the czars.

00:05:08.020 | It was the dilemma for Peter the Great.

00:05:09.700 | It was the dilemma for Alexander.

00:05:12.140 | It was the dilemma for Stalin,

00:05:14.460 | and it's the dilemma for Putin.

00:05:16.820 | Russia is smaller now compared to when Stalin

00:05:20.300 | was in that Kremlin.

00:05:22.100 | It's got pushed back to borders

00:05:25.460 | almost the time of Peter the Great.

00:05:28.040 | It's farther from the main European capitals now

00:05:31.220 | than any time since that 18th century.

00:05:34.200 | And the West has only grown stronger

00:05:39.120 | in that period of time.

00:05:40.180 | So the dilemma is greater than ever.

00:05:42.680 | The irony of being in that position,

00:05:46.980 | of sitting in the Kremlin,

00:05:48.260 | trying to manage Russian power in the world,

00:05:50.740 | trying to be a providential power,

00:05:53.740 | a country with a special mission in the world,

00:05:57.100 | a country which imagines itself to be a whole civilization,

00:06:01.420 | and yet not having the capabilities

00:06:03.540 | to meet those aspirations,

00:06:05.900 | and falling farther and farther behind the West.

00:06:09.220 | The irony of all of that is the attempted solutions

00:06:12.500 | put Russia in a worse place every single time.

00:06:17.020 | So you try to manage the gap with the West.

00:06:20.220 | You try to realize these aspirations.

00:06:23.780 | You try to raise your capabilities,

00:06:26.660 | and you build a strong state.

00:06:28.400 | The quest to build a strong state

00:06:30.460 | and use coercive modernization

00:06:33.420 | to try somehow, if not to close the gap with the West,

00:06:38.420 | at least to manage it.

00:06:39.680 | And the result is different versions of personalist rule.

00:06:45.740 | So they don't build a strong state.

00:06:48.620 | They build a personal dictatorship.

00:06:50.540 | They build an autocracy.

00:06:52.040 | And moreover, that autocracy undertakes measures

00:06:56.420 | which then worsen the very geopolitical dilemma

00:07:00.420 | that gave rise to this personalist rule in the first place.

00:07:05.020 | And so I call this Russia's perpetual geopolitics.

00:07:08.420 | I've been writing about this for many, many years.

00:07:11.380 | What's important about this analysis

00:07:14.860 | is this is not a story of eternal Russian

00:07:19.860 | cultural proclivity to aggression.

00:07:23.200 | It's not something that's in the mother's milk.

00:07:26.820 | It's not something that can't be changed.

00:07:30.300 | Russia doesn't have an innate cultural tendency

00:07:34.780 | to aggression.

00:07:35.880 | This is a choice.

00:07:37.020 | It's a strategic choice to try to match

00:07:40.660 | the power of the West,

00:07:42.540 | which from Russia's vantage point is actually unmatchable.

00:07:46.600 | But it's a choice that's made again and again,

00:07:49.040 | and Putin has made this choice

00:07:50.580 | just as Stalin made the choice, right?

00:07:52.960 | Stalin presided over the World War II victory,

00:07:56.500 | and then he lost the peace.

00:07:59.300 | After he died in 1953,

00:08:02.460 | there was of course other rulers who succeeded him.

00:08:06.700 | He was still the most important person in the country

00:08:09.460 | after he died,

00:08:11.140 | because they were trying to manage that system that he built

00:08:14.180 | and more importantly, manage that growing gap with the West.

00:08:17.580 | By the time the '90s rolled around,

00:08:21.140 | former Soviet troops, now Russian troops,

00:08:25.060 | withdrew from all those advanced positions

00:08:28.740 | that they had achieved as a result

00:08:30.520 | of the World War II victory,

00:08:32.340 | and it was Napoleon in reverse.

00:08:34.700 | They went on the same roads,

00:08:36.780 | but not from Moscow back to Paris,

00:08:39.860 | but instead from Warsaw and from East Berlin

00:08:44.460 | and from Tallinn and Riga

00:08:47.220 | and all the other places of former Warsaw Pact

00:08:50.960 | and former Soviet republics in the Baltic region.

00:08:55.520 | They went back to Russia in retreat.

00:08:58.080 | And so Stalin in the fullness of time lost the peace,

00:09:02.020 | and Putin in his own way, inheriting some of this,

00:09:07.020 | attempting to reverse it when, as I said,

00:09:11.180 | Russia was smaller, farther away, weaker,

00:09:14.160 | the West was bigger and stronger

00:09:16.380 | and had absorbed those former Warsaw Pact countries

00:09:20.820 | and Baltic states,

00:09:24.180 | because they voluntarily begged to join the West,

00:09:28.020 | the West didn't impose itself on them.

00:09:30.420 | It's a voluntary sphere of influence that the West conducts.

00:09:34.500 | And so that dilemma is where you can put Putin and Stalin

00:09:38.380 | in the same sentence,

00:09:40.180 | and the terrible outcome for Russia

00:09:43.500 | in the fullness of time also has echoes.

00:09:46.740 | But of course, Putin hasn't murdered

00:09:49.220 | 18 to 20 million people,

00:09:51.740 | and the scale of his abilities to cause grief

00:09:56.620 | with the nuclear weapons aside is nothing like Stalin's.

00:10:00.020 | And so we have to be careful, right?

00:10:02.240 | Only Mao put bigger numbers on the board

00:10:05.300 | from a tragic point of view than Stalin.

00:10:08.260 | - And numbers matter here.

00:10:10.140 | If we compare these singular figures.

00:10:12.920 | - Yeah, Mao killed more people than Stalin

00:10:16.780 | because Mao had more people to kill.

00:10:20.500 | The most amazing thing about Mao is he watched Stalin do it.

00:10:26.180 | He watched Stalin collectivize agriculture

00:10:28.700 | and famine result.

00:10:30.780 | He watched Stalin impose this communist monopoly,

00:10:34.900 | and all of those people sent to prison

00:10:37.900 | or given a bullet in the back of the neck,

00:10:40.340 | he watched all of that,

00:10:41.420 | and then he did it again himself in China.

00:10:43.700 | - Do you think he saw the human cost directly?

00:10:46.220 | That when you say he saw,

00:10:48.300 | do you think he was focused on the policies,

00:10:51.180 | or was he also aware distinctly as a human being

00:10:54.580 | of the human costs in the lives of peasants,

00:10:58.060 | in the lives of the working class,

00:10:59.940 | in the lives of the poor?

00:11:01.780 | - I think the prima facie evidence

00:11:03.820 | is that he didn't value human life.

00:11:06.040 | Otherwise, I don't think after seeing the amount of lives

00:11:10.380 | that were taken in the Soviet experiment,

00:11:13.020 | he would have done something similar after that.

00:11:16.340 | I think the answer, Lex,

00:11:17.660 | is it's very hard to get inside Mao's head

00:11:21.260 | and figure out what he was really thinking.

00:11:24.120 | But if you just look at the results that happened,

00:11:27.180 | the policies that were undertaken

00:11:29.140 | and the consequences of them,

00:11:31.240 | you would have to conclude that there was,

00:11:34.060 | let's say, no value or little value placed on human life.

00:11:38.660 | Unfortunately, that's characteristic

00:11:40.860 | not only of communist dictators,

00:11:43.020 | of post-communist dictators as well,

00:11:45.620 | but the scale of the horrors that they inflict,

00:11:50.360 | as horrific as they are, just can't compare.

00:11:54.600 | And so we're in a situation where Eurasia,

00:11:58.560 | that is to say the ancient civilizations of Eurasia,

00:12:03.040 | which would be Russia, Iran, China,

00:12:07.260 | all have some version of non-democratic,

00:12:13.400 | illiberal, autocratic regimes,

00:12:16.280 | and they're all pushing up against

00:12:18.160 | the greater power of the West in some form.

00:12:21.140 | Sometimes they coordinate their actions

00:12:23.260 | and sometimes they don't.

00:12:25.340 | But this is a very longstanding phenomenon, Lex,

00:12:28.700 | that predates Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping,

00:12:33.460 | or the latest incarnation of the supreme leader in Iran.

00:12:37.580 | - So we'll talk about this, I think,

00:12:40.780 | really powerful framework of five dimensions

00:12:44.580 | of authoritarian regimes that you've put together.

00:12:47.140 | But first, let's go to this Napoleon

00:12:49.800 | in reverse retreat from Warsaw, back.

00:12:54.800 | Putin has called, from the perspective of Putin,

00:12:59.900 | this retreat, this collapse of Stalin

00:13:02.680 | is one of the great tragedies of that region of Russia.

00:13:07.600 | Do you think there's a sense where,

00:13:12.540 | as Putin sits now in power for 22 plus years,

00:13:17.420 | he really dreams of a return to the power,

00:13:22.420 | the influence, the land of Stalin?

00:13:30.220 | So while you said that they're not in the same place

00:13:35.020 | in terms of the numbers of people

00:13:36.980 | that suffer due to their regime,

00:13:40.900 | do you think he hopes to have the same power,

00:13:44.540 | the same influence for a nation that was in the '30s

00:13:48.860 | and the '40s and the '50s of the 20th century under Stalin?

00:13:53.860 | - If he does, Lex, he's deluding himself.

00:13:56.440 | We don't know for sure.

00:13:59.680 | Very few people talk to him.

00:14:02.380 | Very few people have access to him.

00:14:05.580 | A handful of Western leaders have met with him

00:14:09.740 | for short periods of time.

00:14:12.180 | Those inside Russia barely meet with him.

00:14:14.700 | His own minions in the regime

00:14:17.540 | barely have face time with him.

00:14:19.220 | We don't know exactly what he thinks.

00:14:22.500 | It could be that he has delusions

00:14:27.500 | of reconquering Russian influence, if not direct control,

00:14:32.420 | over the territories that broke away,

00:14:34.760 | but it's not gonna happen.

00:14:36.920 | Let's talk a little bit about this guy, Nikolai Potoshev.

00:14:42.620 | Nikolai Potroshev is probably not well known

00:14:45.740 | to your listeners.

00:14:47.500 | He's the head of Russia's Security Council,

00:14:50.900 | and so you could probably call him the second most important

00:14:55.860 | or second most powerful man in Russia,

00:14:59.220 | certainly inside the regime.

00:15:01.020 | Arguably, Navalny is the second most important person

00:15:05.540 | in the country, and we'll talk about that later, I'm sure.

00:15:08.020 | - In terms of influence, yes.

00:15:09.260 | - Yes, but Potroshev is a version

00:15:14.020 | of Putin's right hand man.

00:15:15.540 | And Potroshev has been giving interviews in the press.

00:15:22.420 | You probably saw the interview with Nizavisimaya Gazeta

00:15:25.820 | not that long ago.

00:15:27.700 | He writes also his own blog-like interventions

00:15:31.620 | in the public sphere using the few channels that are left.

00:15:38.660 | And what's interesting about Potroshev,

00:15:41.460 | and this could well reflect similar thinking to Putin's,

00:15:45.860 | which is why I'm bringing this up,

00:15:47.560 | is that he's got this conspiratorial theory

00:15:53.140 | that the West has been on a forever campaign

00:15:57.940 | to destroy Russia, just like it destroyed the Soviet Union,

00:16:02.300 | and that everything the West does

00:16:04.900 | is meant to dismember Russia,

00:16:07.420 | and that Russia is fighting an existential battle

00:16:11.100 | against the West.

00:16:13.020 | And so, for example, the CIA and the American government

00:16:16.580 | wanted to bring down the Soviet Union,

00:16:19.020 | never mind that the Bush administration,

00:16:21.100 | the first Bush, the father, was trying desperately

00:16:24.500 | to hold the Soviet Union together

00:16:26.540 | because they were afraid of the chaos that might ensue

00:16:30.580 | and the nukes that might get loose

00:16:33.540 | as a result of a Soviet collapse.

00:16:37.540 | And it wasn't until the very last moment

00:16:40.580 | where Bush decided, his administration decided

00:16:44.800 | to back those Republican leaders

00:16:48.780 | who were breaking away from Mikhail Gorbachev

00:16:51.460 | and the Soviet Union, right?

00:16:53.820 | So never mind the empirics of it.

00:16:56.340 | Never mind that Bill Clinton's administration,

00:16:59.060 | following George Bush, sent boatloads of money

00:17:03.580 | Western taxpayer money to Russia.

00:17:06.660 | We don't know exactly how much

00:17:08.740 | because it came from different sources.

00:17:10.600 | People talk about how there was no Marshall Plan.

00:17:13.260 | It was tens of billions of dollars from various sources,

00:17:17.620 | from the IMF and other sources.

00:17:20.300 | And like I said, it disappeared.

00:17:22.020 | It's gone.

00:17:22.840 | Just like the German money that went to Gorbachev

00:17:25.100 | for unification disappeared even before the Soviet collapse.

00:17:28.980 | The money disappeared, but the West sent the money.

00:17:32.200 | So how is that a plot?

00:17:33.960 | And then you could go all the way, Obama's administration,

00:17:37.220 | George Bush trying to do business deals

00:17:39.860 | and reset the relations,

00:17:41.780 | and Obama administration trying to reset the relations

00:17:44.740 | and doing nothing after the Georgian war

00:17:48.060 | and slapping Putin on the wrist

00:17:51.980 | following the seizure, forcible.

00:17:55.100 | And you could go on and you could go on

00:17:56.740 | all the way through the Trump administration

00:17:59.080 | telling Putin that he's right.

00:18:01.900 | Trump believes Putin and doesn't believe US intelligence

00:18:05.100 | about Russian efforts to interfere

00:18:07.020 | in American domestic politics.

00:18:08.820 | So despite all the empirics of it,

00:18:11.760 | you have Poturchev and likely Putin

00:18:14.780 | talking about this multi-decade Western conspiracy

00:18:19.460 | to bring Russia down.

00:18:21.540 | At the same time as that's happening,

00:18:23.600 | the Germans are voluntarily increasing

00:18:27.060 | their dependence on Russian energy,

00:18:30.020 | voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russia.

00:18:33.020 | So here's the conspiracy to bring Russia down.

00:18:36.020 | The French, who fantasize about themselves

00:18:39.940 | as a diplomatic superpower,

00:18:42.180 | are constantly, the French leaders are constantly

00:18:44.700 | running to the Kremlin to ask what Russia needs,

00:18:48.220 | what concessions from the West Russia needs

00:18:50.700 | to feel respected again.

00:18:53.740 | The British provide all manner of money laundering

00:18:58.700 | and reputation laundering services

00:19:01.540 | for the whole Russian oligarchy,

00:19:03.540 | including the state officials,

00:19:05.780 | who are looting the state and using the West,

00:19:09.180 | British institutions, to launder their money.

00:19:11.980 | So all of this is happening and yet Potruchev imagines

00:19:15.740 | this conspiracy to bring Russia down by the West.

00:19:19.220 | And so that's what we've got in the Kremlin again.

00:19:22.060 | Stalin had that same conspiratorial mentality of the West.

00:19:26.900 | Everything that happened in the world

00:19:28.520 | was part of a Western conspiracy

00:19:30.540 | directed against the Soviet Union

00:19:32.340 | and now directed against Russia.

00:19:34.140 | Even though the West is trying to appease,

00:19:37.720 | the West is offering its services,

00:19:39.620 | the West is trying to change Russia through investment

00:19:42.240 | in a positive way, but instead the West is what's changing.

00:19:46.660 | The West is becoming more corrupt.

00:19:48.480 | Western services are being corrupted

00:19:50.540 | by the relationship with Russia.

00:19:52.860 | So you have to ask yourself,

00:19:54.900 | who are these people in power in the Kremlin

00:19:58.140 | who imagine that while they're availing themselves

00:20:02.300 | of every service and every blandishment of the West,

00:20:07.020 | while they're availing themselves of this,

00:20:09.220 | that they're fighting a conspiracy by the West

00:20:12.620 | to bring them down.

00:20:14.440 | So this is what they call the Abyssinia, right?

00:20:20.280 | In Russian, which is a term, as you know,

00:20:23.580 | that means those who are resentful

00:20:26.920 | or you might call them the losers,

00:20:29.200 | the losers in the transition.

00:20:31.060 | So when the Soviet Union fell

00:20:34.440 | and there was a diminishment,

00:20:36.760 | a very substantial diminution in Russian power

00:20:39.720 | and influence in the world, a lot of people lost out.

00:20:44.060 | They weren't able to steal the property.

00:20:46.980 | They weren't able to loot the state in the '90s.

00:20:50.580 | And they were on the outside.

00:20:52.820 | They gradually came back in.

00:20:55.300 | They were the losers in the transition domestically.

00:20:58.380 | And for them, right, they wanted to reverse

00:21:04.260 | being on the losing side.

00:21:06.020 | And so they began to expropriate, to steal the money,

00:21:10.140 | steal the property from those first thieves

00:21:14.940 | who stole in the '90s.

00:21:16.980 | And the 2000s and on have been about re-stealing,

00:21:20.140 | taking the losers in the transition,

00:21:23.220 | taking the money from the winners

00:21:25.940 | and reversing this resentment, this loser status.

00:21:30.660 | Those are your Patrushevs and your Putins.

00:21:33.680 | But at the same time, this blows out to,

00:21:37.460 | let's reverse the losses, being on the losing side,

00:21:41.760 | the roiling resentment at the decline

00:21:44.680 | of their power internationally.

00:21:47.040 | Let's try to reverse that too.

00:21:49.640 | So you have a profound psychological whole generation

00:21:54.640 | of people who are on the losing end domestically

00:21:58.380 | and reverse that domestically.

00:22:00.500 | That's what the Putin regime is about.

00:22:02.300 | Remember Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos.

00:22:06.200 | Remember all the companies that are now owned

00:22:09.320 | by Putin cronies because they were taken away

00:22:12.680 | from whoever stole them in the first place.

00:22:15.760 | And now they're trying to do that

00:22:17.220 | on the international scale.

00:22:19.200 | It's one thing to put domestic opponents in jail.

00:22:22.900 | It's one thing to take away someone's property domestically.

00:22:27.060 | But you're not gonna reverse the power of the West

00:22:30.060 | with the diminished Russia that you have.

00:22:33.200 | And so that project, that Patrushev project,

00:22:38.960 | which we see him expressing again and again,

00:22:42.200 | he speaks about it publicly.

00:22:43.920 | It's not something that we need to go looking for a quest,

00:22:48.920 | the secret, we can't find it, what are they thinking?

00:22:52.500 | It's right there in front of our face.

00:22:54.780 | And Putin has spoken the same way for a long time.

00:22:57.640 | People point to the 2007 speech

00:23:00.800 | at the Munich Security Conference that Putin delivered,

00:23:03.600 | and certainly your listeners could use a snippet

00:23:06.680 | or two of that, just like they could use a couple of quotes

00:23:10.000 | from Patrushev to contextualize what we're talking about.

00:23:13.980 | But it predates the 2007 Munich speech,

00:23:17.800 | the reaction to Ukraine's uprising in 2004,

00:23:22.480 | attempt to steal the election inside Ukraine,

00:23:28.640 | which the Ukrainian people rose up valiantly against

00:23:32.400 | and risked their lives and overturned.

00:23:35.000 | So there were public statements from Putin already back then,

00:23:38.480 | the statements about Khodorkovsky in 2003

00:23:41.360 | when he was arrested and expropriated.

00:23:44.080 | This is a longstanding, deeply psychological issue,

00:23:49.080 | which is about managing Russian power in the world,

00:23:53.840 | as I was saying, the gap with the West,

00:23:56.000 | but has this further dimension of feeling like losers

00:23:59.200 | and wanting to reverse that.

00:24:01.080 | That's their life experience.

00:24:03.600 | - A vision there.

00:24:04.620 | So there's that resentment that fuels this narrative,

00:24:09.620 | fuels this geopolitics and internal policy.

00:24:14.540 | But so resentment is behind some of the worst things

00:24:16.880 | that have ever been done in human history.

00:24:19.280 | Hitler was probably fueled by resentment.

00:24:22.600 | So resentment is a really powerful force, yes.

00:24:26.040 | Just to maybe not push back,

00:24:30.320 | but to give fuller context on the West.

00:24:33.320 | You said there's a narrative from Putin's Russia

00:24:38.320 | that the West is somehow an enemy.

00:24:42.240 | You position everything against the West.

00:24:44.360 | But is there a degree, and to what degree

00:24:47.920 | is the West willing to feed that narrative?

00:24:50.880 | That it's also convenient for the West to have an enemy.

00:24:54.000 | It seems like in the place, in the span,

00:24:56.780 | it seems like in geopolitics,

00:25:00.600 | having an enemy is useful for forming a narrative.

00:25:05.600 | Now, having an enemy for the basic respect of humanity

00:25:09.880 | is not good, but in terms of maintaining power,

00:25:13.000 | if you're a leader in a game of geopolitics,

00:25:15.600 | it seems to be good to have an enemy.

00:25:18.620 | It seems to be good to have something like a Cold War,

00:25:21.760 | where you can always point your finger and it says,

00:25:23.520 | all our actions are fighting this evil,

00:25:27.280 | whatever that evil is.

00:25:28.600 | It could be like with George W. Bush, the war on terror.

00:25:32.280 | Terrorism is this evil.

00:25:33.680 | You can always point at something.

00:25:35.440 | So you've made it seem that the West is trying.

00:25:38.120 | There's a lot of forces within the West

00:25:39.800 | that are trying to reach out a friendly hand,

00:25:42.700 | trying to help, sending money, sending compassion,

00:25:46.640 | trying to sort of--

00:25:48.060 | - Trying to integrate Russia into global institutions.

00:25:51.160 | - Exactly.

00:25:52.000 | - Which was a longstanding, multi-decade effort

00:25:55.220 | across multiple countries and multiple administrations

00:25:58.520 | in those countries.

00:25:59.720 | - But is there also warmongers in the West?

00:26:02.160 | - Of course, Lex.

00:26:03.040 | Of course you're right about that.

00:26:04.480 | But let's put it this way.

00:26:06.160 | People talk about the Cold War,

00:26:09.000 | and they're usually looking to assign blame

00:26:11.880 | for the Cold War, as if it's some kind of mistake,

00:26:15.220 | a misunderstanding, or a search for an enemy

00:26:18.920 | that was convenient to rally domestic politics.

00:26:22.280 | So Lex, there's a coup in Czechoslovakia,

00:26:28.160 | and somebody installs a communist regime in February 1948.

00:26:32.880 | No reaction to that?

00:26:34.880 | That's just okay?

00:26:36.680 | There's a blockade of Berlin.

00:26:39.120 | Is that cool by you?

00:26:40.720 | Where they try to strangle West Berlin

00:26:44.400 | so that they can swallow West Berlin

00:26:46.560 | and add it to East Berlin.

00:26:48.120 | You cool with that?

00:26:49.140 | How about Korean War, invasion of North Korea,

00:26:54.760 | invasion of South Korea by North Korea?

00:26:57.160 | You cool with that?

00:26:58.160 | How about the murders and the show trials

00:27:01.720 | up and down Eastern Europe in the late '40s,

00:27:05.260 | after the imposition of the clone regimes?

00:27:08.120 | You good with that?

00:27:09.820 | Yeah, it's very convenient to have an enemy.

00:27:12.360 | I agree with you.

00:27:13.760 | But there was some actions, Lex.

00:27:17.160 | There was some threats to people's freedom.

00:27:19.880 | There was some invasions.

00:27:21.880 | There was some aggression and violence on a mass scale,

00:27:25.960 | like collectivization of Eastern Europe.

00:27:28.640 | We could go on, Lex, with the examples.

00:27:30.680 | I'm just giving a few of them.

00:27:33.160 | And so the Cold War was not a mistake.

00:27:36.100 | It was not a misunderstanding.

00:27:38.520 | We don't have to blame someone for the Cold War.

00:27:41.360 | We have to give credit for the Cold War.

00:27:44.080 | The Truman administration deserves credit

00:27:47.640 | for standing up to Stalin's regime,

00:27:50.640 | for standing up to these actions,

00:27:53.440 | for saying, yeah, we're not just gonna take this.

00:27:57.040 | We're not gonna let this go on.

00:27:59.080 | We're not gonna let this expand to further territories.

00:28:02.700 | We're gonna create the NATO alliance.

00:28:05.160 | And we're gonna rally democratic, liberal regimes

00:28:09.800 | to stand up to this illiberalism,

00:28:12.200 | this violence, and this aggression.

00:28:14.440 | And so, yeah, Lex, it's always convenient to have an enemy.

00:28:19.200 | But there was an enemy.

00:28:21.960 | Nikolai Leonov, who recently died,

00:28:24.200 | he died in April, 2022, and he had a major funeral.

00:28:28.880 | He was the last head analyst of the Soviet KGB.

00:28:33.880 | And Leonov is one of the most important figures

00:28:39.320 | for understanding the Soviet collapse.

00:28:41.800 | And he has the best memoir on the Soviet collapse,

00:28:45.180 | which is known in Russian as Likha Letya.

00:28:48.100 | You will understand that.

00:28:51.000 | And you'll help your podcast listeners understand.

00:28:56.000 | There's a singularity to that kind of expression,

00:28:59.200 | Likha Letya.

00:29:00.840 | Leonov just died.

00:29:02.320 | But one of the things, and in fact,

00:29:04.980 | the people who were supposedly arrested by Putin

00:29:09.600 | as scapegoats for the Ukraine war,

00:29:12.160 | the main one, Sergei Beseda,

00:29:14.920 | gave the eulogy at Leonov's funeral in April, 2022,

00:29:19.680 | showing that it's a lie,

00:29:21.200 | that all of these people have been arrested and purged

00:29:23.800 | and other nonsense in social media.

00:29:27.560 | But to get back to what Leonov said

00:29:29.560 | and get back to your enemy point,

00:29:31.420 | Leonov said, you know, the West spent all this time

00:29:35.760 | blackening the image of the Soviet Union.

00:29:39.080 | All these resources and propaganda and covert operations

00:29:44.000 | to blacken the Soviet image.

00:29:45.840 | And they did, Lex, the West did do that.

00:29:48.200 | And then Leonov wrote in the next sentence,

00:29:50.640 | and you know what?

00:29:51.680 | We gave them a lot of material to work with

00:29:54.720 | to blacken our image.

00:29:57.240 | - Yeah, so you're saying a kind of sobering reality,

00:30:02.240 | which it is possible to some degree to draw a line

00:30:05.160 | between the good guys and the bad guys.

00:30:07.600 | - Freedom is better than unfreedom, Lex.

00:30:10.040 | It's a lot better than unfreedom.

00:30:12.840 | And a guy like you understands that really well.

00:30:15.680 | - Well, so yes.

00:30:17.780 | But those are all, you know,

00:30:18.960 | there's words like justice, freedom.

00:30:21.340 | What else?

00:30:26.240 | Love, you can use a lot of words that Hitler himself used

00:30:31.240 | to describe why he is actually creating a better world

00:30:36.280 | than those he's fighting.

00:30:37.880 | So some of it is propaganda.

00:30:39.320 | The question is on the ground,

00:30:41.320 | what is actually increasing the amount of freedom

00:30:43.440 | in the world?

00:30:44.280 | - Institutions, Lex, right?

00:30:45.920 | We're not talking about propaganda here.

00:30:48.540 | When we use words like freedom,

00:30:50.860 | we're talking about rule of law.

00:30:53.380 | We're talking about protection of civil liberties.

00:30:55.940 | We're talking about protection of private property.

00:30:59.020 | We're talking about an independent

00:31:01.260 | and well-funded judiciary.

00:31:03.500 | We're talking about an impartial, non-corrupt,

00:31:07.260 | competent civil service.

00:31:09.400 | We're talking about separation of powers

00:31:11.620 | where the executive branch's power is limited,

00:31:14.700 | usually by an elected parliament.

00:31:17.260 | In fact, yes, let's talk about elections.

00:31:19.920 | Let's talk about freedom of speech

00:31:23.000 | and freedom of the public sphere.

00:31:25.280 | We're not talking about freedom as a slogan here.

00:31:28.060 | We're talking about a huge array of institutions

00:31:31.720 | and practices and norms, ultimately, right?

00:31:35.340 | And if they exist, you know and you live under them.

00:31:39.200 | And if they don't exist,

00:31:40.440 | you fully understand that as well, right?

00:31:43.420 | Ukraine was a flawed democracy before Russia invaded.

00:31:48.420 | It's utterly corrupt, many ways dysfunctional,

00:31:55.260 | especially the elites were dysfunctional.

00:31:58.540 | The gas industry in Ukraine was absolutely terrible

00:32:02.540 | because of the corruption that it generated,

00:32:04.640 | the oligarch problem,

00:32:06.680 | a handful of people stealing the state resources.

00:32:10.260 | And yet Ukraine had an open public sphere

00:32:13.980 | and it had a parliament that functioned.

00:32:16.620 | And so despite its flaws, it was still a democracy.

00:32:21.620 | The regime in Moscow, you can't say that, Lex.

00:32:26.600 | It's not a comparable regime to Ukraine.

00:32:30.540 | You could say, oh, well, there were oligarchs in Ukraine

00:32:32.960 | and there were oligarchs in Russia.

00:32:34.540 | There's corruption in Ukraine, there's corruption in Russia.

00:32:37.240 | So really, what's the big difference?

00:32:39.300 | And the answer is, well, Ukraine had the open public sphere.

00:32:43.020 | Ukraine had a real parliament.

00:32:44.340 | Can you call Russia's Duma a real parliament?

00:32:47.700 | I don't think so.

00:32:49.400 | I don't think you can.

00:32:50.940 | Can you say that there were any checks whatsoever

00:32:54.100 | on the executive branch in Russia?

00:32:57.320 | Can you say that the Russian judiciary had any independence

00:33:01.380 | or really full level of competence,

00:33:05.820 | even compared to the Ukrainian judiciary,

00:33:08.380 | which was nothing to brag about?

00:33:10.060 | No, you can't say that, Lex.

00:33:12.020 | So we can differentiate between the very flawed,

00:33:16.860 | corrupt, oligarchic democracy in Ukraine

00:33:21.860 | and the very corrupt, oligarchic autocracy in Russia.

00:33:26.340 | I think that's a fair distinction.

00:33:29.140 | - Yeah, we should say that Russia and Ukraine

00:33:32.200 | have the great honor of being the number one

00:33:34.200 | and the number two most corrupt nations in Europe

00:33:37.020 | by many measures.

00:33:38.620 | But there is a fundamental difference,

00:33:40.220 | as you were highlighting.

00:33:41.980 | Russia is a corrupt autocracy.

00:33:44.620 | Ukraine, we can say, is a corrupt democracy.

00:33:48.000 | And to that level, there's a fundamental difference.

00:33:52.420 | - Ukraine is not murdering its own journalists

00:33:57.700 | in systematic fashion.

00:33:59.700 | If journalists are killed in Ukraine, it's a tragedy.

00:34:03.380 | If journalists are killed in Russia

00:34:05.180 | or Russian journalists are killed abroad,

00:34:07.140 | it's regime policy.

00:34:08.620 | - And the degree to which a nation is authoritarian

00:34:11.500 | means that it's suffocating its own spirit,

00:34:15.860 | its capacity to flourish.

00:34:19.180 | We're not just talking about

00:34:20.700 | sort of the freedom of the press, those kinds of things,

00:34:26.780 | but basically all industries get suffocated

00:34:30.780 | and you're no longer being able to,

00:34:33.260 | yeah, flourish as a nation, grow the production,

00:34:36.060 | the GDP, the scientists, the art, the culture,

00:34:38.260 | all those kinds of things.

00:34:39.180 | - Yes, Lex, you're absolutely right.

00:34:40.780 | And so before the invasion, the full-blown invasion

00:34:45.020 | of February 2022 into Ukraine, because as you know,

00:34:48.220 | the war has been going on for many years at a lower level

00:34:52.060 | compared to what it is these days,

00:34:54.260 | but still a tragic war with many deaths

00:34:57.340 | prior to February 2022.

00:35:00.340 | Before this latest war, we could have said

00:35:03.140 | that the greatest victims of the Putin regime

00:35:05.740 | are Russian, domestic,

00:35:08.900 | that the people who are suffering the most

00:35:11.420 | from the Putin regime are not sitting here in New York City,

00:35:15.980 | but in fact, are sitting there in Russia.

00:35:18.820 | Now, of course, with the invasion of Ukraine

00:35:21.580 | and really the atrocities that have been well-documented

00:35:26.580 | and more are being investigated,

00:35:32.100 | we can't easily say anymore that Russians

00:35:34.980 | are the greatest victims of the Putin regime.

00:35:37.300 | But in ways other than bombing and murdering civilians,

00:35:43.140 | children, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers,

00:35:46.820 | after you include that, then of course,

00:35:52.460 | the larger number of victims of the Putin regime

00:35:55.300 | are not Ukrainians, but ultimately Russians.

00:35:58.020 | And there's how many of them now that have fled?

00:36:01.700 | - So your powerful, precise, rigorous words

00:36:06.700 | are then in a stark contrast, I would say,

00:36:11.780 | to my very recent conversation with Oliver Stone.

00:36:15.100 | Now, I would love you to elaborate

00:36:17.460 | to this agreement you have here with his words

00:36:20.740 | and maybe words of people like John Mearsheimer.

00:36:25.420 | The idea is that Putin's hand in this invasion of 2022

00:36:29.540 | was forced by the expansion of NATO,

00:36:34.100 | the imperialist imperative of the United States

00:36:38.340 | and the NATO forces.

00:36:41.800 | You disagree with this point in terms of placing the blame

00:36:48.420 | somehow on the invasion on forces larger

00:36:53.100 | than the particular two nations involved,

00:36:55.340 | but more on the geopolitics of the world

00:36:59.580 | that's driven by the most powerful military nation

00:37:02.140 | in the world, which is the United States.

00:37:04.300 | - Yeah, Lex, so let's imagine that a tragedy's happened

00:37:09.300 | here in New York and a woman got raped.

00:37:12.400 | We know the perpetrator.

00:37:15.920 | They go to trial and Oliver Stone gets up and says,

00:37:19.340 | "You know what?

00:37:20.700 | "The woman was wearing a short skirt

00:37:23.860 | "and there was no option but for the rapist to rape her.

00:37:28.700 | "The woman was wearing lipstick

00:37:31.900 | "or the woman was applying for NATO membership

00:37:35.080 | "and just had to be raped."

00:37:37.700 | I mean, didn't wanna rape her, but was compelled

00:37:42.500 | because of what she was doing and what she looked like

00:37:45.580 | and the clothes she was wearing and the alliances

00:37:48.940 | that she was under international law,

00:37:51.620 | signed by Moscow, all the treaties

00:37:54.980 | that sovereign countries get to choose

00:37:57.180 | whatever alliance they belong to,

00:37:59.340 | treaties that the UN Charter signed by Russia,

00:38:04.820 | Soviet Union, the 1975 Helsinki Agreement

00:38:09.820 | signed by the Soviet Union,

00:38:13.300 | the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe

00:38:16.340 | signed by the Soviet Union,

00:38:17.700 | the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act

00:38:21.300 | signed by the Russian government, the post-Soviet Russia,

00:38:24.500 | all of those documents signed by either the Soviet regime

00:38:29.500 | or the Russian regime,

00:38:31.620 | which is the legally recognized international inheritor,

00:38:36.260 | successor of the Soviet state,

00:38:38.460 | all of those agreements are still in force

00:38:40.460 | and all of them say that countries are sovereign

00:38:44.900 | and can freely choose their foreign policy

00:38:48.340 | and what alliances they wanna join.

00:38:50.860 | Let's even go farther than that.

00:38:52.660 | I mean, you don't have to go farther than that,

00:38:55.340 | but let's go farther than that, Lex.

00:38:58.020 | Is an autocratic repressive regime

00:39:01.020 | that invades its neighbors in the name of its own security

00:39:04.820 | something new in Russian history?

00:39:07.040 | Did we not see this before?

00:39:08.620 | Does this not predate NATO expansion?

00:39:13.580 | Does this not predate the existence of NATO?

00:39:17.180 | Would Oliver Stone sit here in this chair

00:39:19.380 | and say to you, you know, they had to impose serfdom

00:39:23.620 | in the 17th century because NATO expanded.

00:39:27.740 | They had no choice, their hands were tied.

00:39:30.080 | They were compelled to treat their own population

00:39:33.520 | like slaves because, you know, NATO expanded.

00:39:37.560 | I mean, I could go on through the examples

00:39:39.620 | of Russian history that predate the existence,

00:39:43.540 | let alone the expansion of NATO,

00:39:46.100 | where you have behavior, policies, actions

00:39:51.100 | very similar to what we see now from the Kremlin.

00:39:55.700 | And you can't explain those by NATO expansion, can you?

00:39:59.980 | And so that argument doesn't wash for me

00:40:03.640 | because I have a pattern here that predates NATO expansion.

00:40:07.660 | I have international agreements, founding documents

00:40:11.020 | signed by the Kremlin over many, many decades

00:40:16.060 | acknowledging the freedom of countries

00:40:18.540 | to choose their alliances.

00:40:20.580 | And then I have this problem where when you rape somebody,

00:40:24.200 | it's not because they're wearing a short skirt.

00:40:26.940 | It's because you have raped them.

00:40:29.280 | You've committed a criminal act, Lex.

00:40:34.920 | - I think there's a lot of people listening to this

00:40:38.580 | that will agree to the emotion, the power,

00:40:41.500 | and the spirit of this metaphor.

00:40:43.500 | And I was struggling to think how to dance

00:40:46.820 | within this metaphor because it feels like

00:40:49.540 | it wasn't precisely the right one,

00:40:51.680 | but I think that it captures the spirit.

00:40:53.720 | - I'm not suggesting, Lex, that everything the West has done

00:40:58.940 | has been honorable or intelligent.

00:41:02.980 | Fortunately, we live in a democracy.

00:41:06.260 | We live in liberal regimes.

00:41:07.900 | We live under rule of law,

00:41:10.180 | liberal in the classical sense of rule of law.

00:41:13.460 | Not liberal in the leftist sense.

00:41:15.560 | We live in places like that and we can criticize ourselves.

00:41:20.420 | And we can criticize the mistakes that we made

00:41:22.980 | or the policy choices or the inactions that were taken.

00:41:26.860 | And there are a whole lot of things to answer for.

00:41:30.620 | And you can now discuss the ones that are your favorites,

00:41:35.620 | the dishonor or the mistakes.

00:41:39.420 | And I could discuss mine.

00:41:41.620 | And we could spend the whole rest of our meeting today

00:41:44.980 | discussing the West's mistakes and problems.

00:41:47.300 | - And we won't end up in prison for it.

00:41:49.700 | - Yeah, Lex, and so I'm thankful for that.

00:41:53.580 | And I'm thankful that people may disagree

00:41:55.720 | and that people make the argument

00:41:57.220 | that NATO expansion is to blame.

00:41:59.700 | But you see, I'm countering two arguments here.

00:42:02.860 | I'm countering one argument,

00:42:05.020 | which is very deeply popular, pervasive,

00:42:08.740 | about how Russia has this cultural tendency to aggression.

00:42:13.220 | And it can help but invade its neighbors

00:42:16.180 | and it does it again and again.

00:42:17.700 | And it's eternal Russian imperialism.

00:42:21.040 | And you have to watch out for it.

00:42:23.100 | This very popular argument in the Baltic States.

00:42:26.100 | It's really popular in Warsaw.

00:42:28.540 | It's really popular with the liberal interventionists.

00:42:31.740 | And it's very, very popular with those

00:42:34.400 | who were part of the Iraq War squad

00:42:36.660 | that got us into that mess.

00:42:38.220 | So I'm against that.

00:42:40.660 | And the reason I'm against it is 'cause it's not true.

00:42:43.500 | It's empirically false.

00:42:44.760 | There is no cultural trait,

00:42:47.560 | inherent tendency for Russia to be aggressive.

00:42:50.560 | It's a strategic choice that they make.

00:42:53.140 | - Every time it's a choice made,

00:42:55.060 | it's not some kind of momentum.

00:42:56.520 | Every time it's a choice that we should judge

00:42:59.500 | for the choice that it is for the decision makers.

00:43:01.300 | - And therefore they could make different choices.

00:43:03.100 | They could say, we don't have to stand up to the West.

00:43:06.020 | We don't have the capabilities to do that.

00:43:08.820 | We can still be a great country.

00:43:10.580 | We can still be a civilization unto itself.

00:43:13.180 | We can still be Russia.

00:43:15.260 | We can still worship in Orthodox cathedrals.

00:43:19.140 | We can still be ourselves,

00:43:21.940 | but we don't have to pursue this commerical pursuit,

00:43:25.960 | this elusive quest to stand up to the West

00:43:29.260 | and be in the first ranks of powers.

00:43:31.940 | So I'm countering that argument.

00:43:33.440 | I'm saying it's perpetual geopolitics.

00:43:36.820 | It's a geopolitical choice rising out of this dilemma

00:43:40.740 | of the mismatch between aspirations and capabilities.

00:43:44.960 | It's not eternal Russian imperialism.

00:43:47.980 | And I'm also countering the other argument here, Lex,

00:43:51.020 | which is to say that it's the West's fault.

00:43:53.860 | It's Western imperialism.

00:43:56.180 | I'm very popular on the left,

00:43:57.940 | very popular with realist scholars,

00:44:00.560 | very popular with some of the people

00:44:02.340 | recently on your podcast.

00:44:04.900 | And so it's neither eternal Russian imperialism,

00:44:08.460 | nor is it Western imperialism, right?

00:44:11.300 | The mere fact that the West is stronger than Russia

00:44:14.740 | is not a crime on the part of the West.

00:44:17.940 | It's not a crime that countries voluntarily

00:44:21.400 | wanna join the West, that beg to get in,

00:44:24.320 | either the EU or NATO or other bilateral alliances

00:44:29.320 | or other trade agreements.

00:44:31.660 | Those are voluntarily entered into,

00:44:34.500 | and that's not criminal.

00:44:35.900 | If the West's sphere of influence, which is open,

00:44:39.220 | an open sphere of influence, which, as I say,

00:44:42.340 | people voluntarily join, if that expands,

00:44:45.360 | that's not a crime, nor is that a threat

00:44:47.180 | to Russia ipso facto, right?

00:44:49.780 | NATO is a defensive alliance,

00:44:52.060 | and the countries are largely pacifists

00:44:54.060 | who are members of NATO.

00:44:55.860 | And NATO doesn't attack.

00:44:57.380 | It defends members if they are attacked.

00:45:00.780 | And so the idea that Ukraine, which had the legal right,

00:45:04.420 | might wanna join NATO and the EU,

00:45:08.380 | which was not gonna happen in our lifetimes

00:45:11.020 | and was not a direct threat to the Putin regime

00:45:13.420 | since the Western countries that make up the EU and NATO

00:45:18.420 | decided that Ukraine was not ready for membership,

00:45:24.380 | there was no consensus, it was not gonna happen,

00:45:26.820 | but it's Ukraine's free choice to express that desire.

00:45:31.460 | And if your government is elected by your people,

00:45:34.340 | freely elected, meaning you can unelect that government

00:45:39.020 | in the next election, and that government

00:45:41.700 | makes foreign policy choices on the basis

00:45:44.400 | of its perceived interests, that's not a crime, Lex.

00:45:48.300 | That's not a provocation.

00:45:50.220 | That's not something that compels the leader

00:45:52.660 | of another country to invade you, right?

00:45:55.960 | That is legal under international law,

00:45:59.100 | and it's also a realist fact of life.

00:46:02.100 | The realists like to tell you that Russia here

00:46:06.780 | was disrespected, Russia's interests

00:46:09.760 | were not taken into account, et cetera, et cetera.

00:46:12.340 | But the real world works in such a way

00:46:15.140 | that treaties matter, that international law matters.

00:46:19.080 | That's why people like me were not in favor

00:46:21.380 | of the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, Lex,

00:46:25.820 | because it wasn't legal, in addition to the fact

00:46:29.260 | that we thought it might backfire.

00:46:31.120 | But you know, Lex, like I said,

00:46:34.580 | there are a lot of things about the West

00:46:36.260 | that we ought to criticize as citizens,

00:46:38.940 | and we do criticize.

00:46:40.860 | But we have to be clear about where responsibility lies

00:46:45.860 | in these events that we're talking about today.

00:46:48.820 | - So you get to trouble, it's largely erroneous

00:46:51.980 | to think about both the West or the United States

00:46:56.140 | from an imperialist perspective,

00:46:57.660 | and Russia from an imperialist perspective.

00:47:00.340 | It's better, clearer to think about each individual

00:47:03.980 | aggressive decision on its own as a choice that was made.

00:47:07.360 | So let's talk about the most recent choice

00:47:10.580 | made by Vladimir Putin.

00:47:12.240 | The choice to invade Ukraine, or to escalate

00:47:17.860 | the invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022.

00:47:21.800 | Now we're a few months removed from that decision,

00:47:26.820 | initial decision.

00:47:28.660 | Why do you think he did it?

00:47:30.580 | What are the errors in understanding the situation,

00:47:35.540 | in calculating the outcomes,

00:47:37.940 | and everything else about this decision, in your view?

00:47:44.780 | - Yeah, Lex, when a war doesn't go well,

00:47:48.180 | it looks like lunacy to have launched it in the first place.

00:47:52.420 | - Does it ever go well?

00:47:54.140 | - War never goes according to plan.

00:47:56.860 | All war is based upon miscalculation,

00:47:59.940 | but not everybody is punished for their miscalculation.

00:48:03.820 | All aggressive war we're talking about, not defensive war,

00:48:07.660 | is based upon miscalculation.

00:48:10.180 | But you can adjust, you can recalibrate.

00:48:13.700 | You know, when you're driving down the road,

00:48:15.740 | and that very annoying voice is telling you,

00:48:18.420 | in a thousand feet, make a right,

00:48:23.300 | and you fail to make a right, it recalibrates, right?

00:48:26.380 | It tells you, okay, now, you know, go turn around,

00:48:29.780 | or U-turn, or make a left.

00:48:31.900 | It doesn't say you're an idiot,

00:48:33.340 | and turn around and make a U-turn, but it does recalibrate.

00:48:37.060 | So you can miscalculate, and the problem

00:48:39.260 | is not the miscalculation, usually,

00:48:41.180 | it's the failure to do that adjustment, right?

00:48:45.460 | People I know who are hedge fund traders,

00:48:49.160 | I ask them, you know, what's your favorite trade?

00:48:52.900 | And the line from the mall, and this is a cliche,

00:48:55.260 | is my favorite trade is when I made a mistake,

00:48:58.960 | but I got out early before all the carnage.

00:49:02.660 | So their favorite trade is not when they made

00:49:04.860 | some brilliant choice, but it's when they miscalculated,

00:49:08.700 | but they reduced the consequences of their miscalculation

00:49:12.140 | by recalibrating quickly, right?

00:49:14.860 | So let's talk about the calculation

00:49:16.740 | and miscalculation of February.

00:49:19.420 | Let's imagine, Lex, that you've been getting away

00:49:21.780 | with murder.

00:49:22.700 | I don't mean murder in a figurative sense.

00:49:26.500 | I mean, you've been murdering people.

00:49:28.820 | You've been murdering them domestically,

00:49:30.820 | and you've been murdering them all across Europe,

00:49:33.840 | and you've been murdering them not just with, for example,

00:49:38.540 | a car accident, a staged car accident, or using a handgun.

00:49:43.540 | You used Novichok, or you used some other

00:49:49.500 | internationally outlawed chemical weapon.

00:49:53.080 | And let's imagine that you did it,

00:49:56.680 | and nothing happened to you.

00:49:58.800 | It wasn't like you were removed from power.

00:50:01.380 | It wasn't like you paid a personal price.

00:50:04.040 | Sure, maybe there was some sanctions on your economy,

00:50:06.940 | but you didn't pay the price of those sanctions.

00:50:09.660 | Little people paid the price of those sanctions.

00:50:12.660 | Other people in your country paid the price.

00:50:15.820 | Let's imagine not only were you murdering people literally,

00:50:19.620 | but you decided to entice the idiotic ruler of Georgia

00:50:24.620 | into a provocation that you could then invade the country.

00:50:32.320 | And you invaded the country,

00:50:35.080 | and you bid off these territories,

00:50:37.440 | Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

00:50:39.940 | And what price did you pay for that?

00:50:41.740 | And then you decided, you know,

00:50:44.820 | I think I'll now invade Crimea, and forcibly annex Crimea.

00:50:49.260 | And I'll instigate an insurrection in the Donbas,

00:50:53.100 | in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk.

00:50:56.060 | Let's imagine you did all that,

00:50:58.020 | and then you had to stick out your wrist

00:51:00.220 | so that it could be slapped a couple of times.

00:51:04.300 | And you said, you know, I can pretty much do what I want.

00:51:07.580 | They're putting a sanction here and there,

00:51:10.920 | and they're doing this, and they're doing that.

00:51:13.020 | And you know what?

00:51:14.420 | They're more energy dependent on me than before.

00:51:17.380 | I got better money laundering

00:51:18.980 | and reputation services than anybody has.

00:51:21.860 | Maybe the Middle East and the Chinese

00:51:23.620 | would disagree with you that you have better than them,

00:51:26.300 | but yours are pretty good.

00:51:27.500 | And the Panama Papers get released

00:51:30.420 | revealing all of your offshoring and your corruption,

00:51:34.120 | and what happened?

00:51:35.020 | Nothing happens, Lex.

00:51:36.700 | So the first and most important consideration here is,

00:51:40.140 | in your own mind, you've been getting away with murder,

00:51:44.300 | literally, as well as figuratively,

00:51:46.860 | and you think, you know, I probably can do something again

00:51:50.340 | and get away with it.

00:51:51.400 | And so the failure to respond at scale,

00:51:55.920 | in fact, the indulgences,

00:51:58.580 | the further dependencies that are introduced,

00:52:01.700 | the illusion that trade is the mechanism

00:52:05.500 | to manage authoritarian regimes.

00:52:08.300 | You know that great German cliche,

00:52:11.120 | (speaking in foreign language)

00:52:14.540 | right, change through trade,

00:52:16.780 | or transformation through trade,

00:52:18.520 | one of Angela Merkel's favorite expressions, right?

00:52:22.480 | You're gonna get the other side to be better.

00:52:27.120 | Rather than confront them in a Cold War fashion,

00:52:31.800 | where you stand up to their aggressions

00:52:33.680 | and you punish them severely

00:52:35.240 | in order to deter further behavior.

00:52:37.700 | So that's the first and most important part

00:52:39.840 | of the calculation miscalculation.

00:52:41.680 | There are a lot of other dimensions.

00:52:43.120 | - Can we pause on that really quick?

00:52:44.920 | So this is kind of idea of it's okay

00:52:48.760 | to crack a few eggs to make an omelet,

00:52:50.880 | which is a more generous description of what you're saying,

00:52:55.400 | that you don't incorporate into the calculation

00:53:00.280 | the amount of human suffering that the decisions cause,

00:53:04.080 | but instead you look at sort of the success

00:53:08.640 | based on some kind of measure for you personally,

00:53:11.880 | and for the nation,

00:53:14.040 | not in terms of in a humanitarian sense,

00:53:17.720 | but in some kind of economic sense,

00:53:19.800 | and a geopolitical power sense.

00:53:22.440 | - Yeah, you're not sentimental, Lex.

00:53:25.640 | You say to yourself,

00:53:26.960 | the cause of Russian greatness

00:53:31.520 | is greater than any individual life.

00:53:34.080 | Russia being in the first rank of the great powers,

00:53:38.560 | Russia realizing its mission to be a special country

00:53:43.560 | with a special mission in the world,

00:53:46.280 | a civilization unto itself,

00:53:48.280 | the first rank of the great powers,

00:53:51.960 | maybe even the greatest power,

00:53:53.960 | that's worth the price that we have to pay,

00:53:58.080 | especially in other people's lives.

00:54:01.000 | We have a lot of literature on the Putin regime,

00:54:03.880 | which talks about the kleptocracy.

00:54:06.760 | The place is a kleptocracy, and it is a kleptocracy.

00:54:10.420 | We all can see that,

00:54:13.760 | and anybody in London living the high life

00:54:17.360 | servicing this kleptocracy

00:54:19.240 | can testify that it's a kleptocracy,

00:54:21.760 | and not only in London, of course,

00:54:23.660 | right here in the United States, in New York.

00:54:25.920 | But you know, it's not only a kleptocracy, Lex.

00:54:30.880 | That was the problem of the Russian studies literature.

00:54:33.960 | It wasn't just about stealing, looting the state.

00:54:38.700 | It was about Russian greatness.

00:54:41.080 | You see those rituals in the Kremlin,

00:54:44.240 | right in the Grand Kremlin Palace,

00:54:46.560 | in the St. George's Hall,

00:54:48.840 | some of the greatest interiors in the world.

00:54:52.080 | And you see award ceremonies,

00:54:54.360 | and you see marking holidays,

00:54:56.400 | and all of these looters of the state

00:54:58.680 | have their uniforms on with their medals,

00:55:01.480 | and someone's giving a speech or singing a ballad,

00:55:05.640 | and their eyes are moist.

00:55:07.220 | Their eyes are moist because they're thieves and looters?

00:55:12.440 | No, Lex, because they believe in Russian greatness.

00:55:16.920 | They have a deep and fundamental,

00:55:20.400 | passionate commitment to the greatness of Russia,

00:55:23.920 | which in unsentimental fashion,

00:55:26.600 | they're all sentimental to the max.

00:55:28.560 | That's why their eyes are moistening.

00:55:31.520 | But they imagine unsentimentally that any sacrifice is okay,

00:55:35.400 | a sacrifice of other people's lives,

00:55:38.040 | a sacrifice of their conscripts in the military,

00:55:41.600 | a sacrifice of Ukrainian women and children and elderly.

00:55:45.900 | That's a small price to pay for those moist eyes

00:55:49.920 | about Russian greatness and Russia's position in the world.

00:55:53.400 | - Well, that human thing, that sentimentality,

00:55:56.000 | is a thing that can get us in trouble

00:55:57.280 | in the United States as well,

00:55:59.080 | and lead us to wars, illegal wars and so on.

00:56:02.520 | But the United States,

00:56:03.640 | there's repercussions for breaking the law.

00:56:08.200 | You're going to pay for illegal wars in the end.

00:56:10.840 | You're saying that in authoritarian regimes,

00:56:14.440 | the sentimentality can really get out of hand.

00:56:16.980 | And by charismatic leaders that can take that

00:56:19.940 | to manipulate the populace to make that,

00:56:23.100 | in the span of history, led to atrocities,

00:56:26.340 | and in today's world, lead to humanitarian crises.

00:56:30.120 | - It's not just a kleptocracy, it's a belief system.

00:56:33.280 | It's passion, it's conviction.

00:56:35.620 | You can call them illusions, you can call them fantasies.

00:56:41.500 | Whatever you want to call them, they're real.

00:56:44.140 | They're real for those people.

00:56:45.860 | And so yes, they're looting that very state

00:56:48.980 | that they're trying to make

00:56:50.180 | one of the great powers in the world.

00:56:52.340 | And they resent the fact that the West

00:56:55.860 | doesn't acknowledge them as one of those great powers.

00:56:58.360 | And they resent that the West is more powerful.

00:57:01.200 | People talk about how Putin doesn't understand the world,

00:57:05.900 | and that he gets really bad information.

00:57:08.380 | Lex, if you're sitting there in that Kremlin,

00:57:11.860 | and you're trying to conduct business in the world,

00:57:14.260 | and you're getting reports from your finance minister,

00:57:16.940 | or your central bank governor,

00:57:18.700 | your whole economy, everything that matters,

00:57:21.900 | somehow all your trade is denominated in dollars and euros,

00:57:25.980 | do you have any illusions about who controls

00:57:30.540 | the international financial system?

00:57:32.740 | I don't think so, Lex.

00:57:34.080 | You looking over your industrial plan for the next year,

00:57:39.520 | and you're looking over how many tanks you're gonna get,

00:57:42.380 | and how many cruise missiles you're gonna get,

00:57:44.620 | and how many submarines you're gonna get,

00:57:46.740 | and fill in the blank.

00:57:49.660 | And you know what?

00:57:51.220 | It says right there in the paperwork

00:57:53.100 | where the component parts come from,

00:57:54.980 | where the software comes from,

00:57:56.900 | comes from the West, Lex.

00:57:59.060 | Your whole military industrial complex

00:58:01.260 | is dependent on high-end Western technology.

00:58:04.180 | And let's say you're in Beijing, not just in Moscow,

00:58:08.660 | and you go to a meeting in your own neighborhood.

00:58:11.620 | You're the leader of China.

00:58:13.440 | You go to a meeting with other Asian leaders.

00:58:16.920 | Do they all speak in Chinese with you?

00:58:19.940 | No, Lex, they don't speak Chinese.

00:58:22.840 | You go to an international meeting as the leader of China,

00:58:25.460 | and guess what language is the main language of intercourse?

00:58:29.120 | Yes, the same one you and I are speaking right now.

00:58:32.000 | And so you live in that world.

00:58:34.760 | You live in the Western world,

00:58:36.280 | and it's very hard to have illusions

00:58:38.620 | about what world you live in

00:58:40.620 | when you're under that, you need those Western banks.

00:58:44.300 | You need that foreign currency, right?

00:58:46.800 | You need that high-end Western technology,

00:58:49.000 | that technology transfer.

00:58:51.080 | You're speaking, or you're forced to speak,

00:58:53.280 | or your minions are forced to speak

00:58:54.960 | at international gatherings in English.

00:58:57.440 | And I could go on.

00:58:58.640 | All the indicators that you live in,

00:59:01.240 | and so Putin lives in that world.

00:59:03.000 | He's no fool.

00:59:04.520 | - Well, to push back, isn't it possible that,

00:59:07.360 | as you said, the minions operate in that world,

00:59:11.040 | but can't you, if you're the leader of Russia,

00:59:14.040 | or the leader of China,

00:59:15.200 | or the leader of these different nations,

00:59:17.240 | still put up walls where actually when you think

00:59:22.480 | in the privacy of your own mind,

00:59:24.680 | you exist not in the international world,

00:59:27.600 | but in a world where there's this great Russian empire,

00:59:30.320 | or this great Chinese empire.

00:59:32.160 | - Yes. - And then you forget

00:59:33.600 | that there's English.

00:59:34.440 | You forget that there's technology in iPhones.

00:59:36.960 | You forget that there's all of this,

00:59:38.860 | US keeps popping up on all different paperwork.

00:59:43.560 | That just becomes the blurry details that dissipate,

00:59:46.640 | because what matters is the greatness of this dream empire

00:59:51.300 | that I have in my mind as a dictator.

00:59:54.240 | - I would put it this way, Lex.

00:59:56.680 | After you absorb all of that from your minions,

01:00:01.880 | and it impresses upon your consciousness where you live,

01:00:06.700 | you live in a Western-dominated world,

01:00:09.540 | that the multipolar world doesn't exist,

01:00:12.720 | your goal is to make that multipolar world exist.

01:00:16.320 | Your goal is to bring down the West.

01:00:19.180 | Your goal is for the West to weaken.

01:00:21.960 | Your goal is a currency other than the dollar and the euro.

01:00:26.020 | Your goal is an international financial system

01:00:28.900 | that you dominate.

01:00:30.260 | Your goal is technological self-sufficiency

01:00:34.160 | made in China 2035, right?

01:00:36.860 | Your goal is a world that you dominate,

01:00:40.260 | not that the West dominates.

01:00:42.380 | And you're gonna do everything you can

01:00:45.120 | to try to attain that world,

01:00:47.700 | which is a Russian-centric world,

01:00:49.980 | or a Chinese-centric world,

01:00:52.220 | or what we could call a Eurasian-centric world.

01:00:56.180 | And it's not gonna be easy, Lex,

01:00:58.380 | just for the reasons that we enumerated before.

01:01:02.380 | But maybe you're gonna get a helping hand.

01:01:04.820 | Maybe the West is gonna transfer

01:01:06.500 | their best technology to you.

01:01:08.020 | They're gonna sell you their best stuff.

01:01:10.700 | And then you're gonna absorb it,

01:01:13.740 | and maybe copy it, and reverse-engineer it.

01:01:16.860 | And if they won't sell it to you,

01:01:18.120 | maybe you'll just have to steal it.

01:01:19.860 | Maybe the West is gonna allow you to bank,

01:01:23.740 | even though you violate many laws

01:01:27.780 | that would prohibit the West

01:01:29.140 | from extending those banking services to you.

01:01:31.620 | Maybe the West is gonna buy your energy,

01:01:35.540 | and your palladium, and your titanium,

01:01:38.260 | and your rare metals like lithium,

01:01:40.500 | because you're willing to have your poor people

01:01:44.580 | mine that stuff, and die of disease at an early age.

01:01:48.680 | But Western governments, they don't wanna do that.

01:01:51.820 | They don't wanna do that dirty mining

01:01:53.700 | of those very important rare earths.

01:01:56.500 | But you're willing to do that,

01:01:57.620 | because it's just people whose lives

01:01:59.260 | you don't care about as an autocratic regime.

01:02:02.060 | That's the world you live in,

01:02:03.480 | where you're trying to get to this other world.

01:02:07.060 | You're at the center of the other world.

01:02:09.860 | You dominate the other world.

01:02:11.220 | But the only way to get there, Lex,

01:02:13.740 | is the West has to weaken, divide itself,

01:02:18.460 | maybe even collapse.

01:02:20.700 | And so you're encouraging, to the extent possible,

01:02:25.180 | Western divisions, Western disunity,

01:02:28.700 | Western lack of resolve, Western mistakes,

01:02:33.580 | and Western invasion of the wrong country,

01:02:36.680 | and Western destruction of its credibility

01:02:39.820 | through international financial crises,

01:02:42.020 | and one could go on.

01:02:44.180 | So if the West weakens itself through its mistakes

01:02:48.020 | and its own corruption, you're gonna survive

01:02:51.200 | and maybe even come out into that world

01:02:54.420 | where you're the center.

01:02:55.940 | And so Russia's entire grand strategy,

01:02:58.660 | just like China's grand strategy,

01:03:00.540 | Iran, it's hard to say they have a grand strategy

01:03:03.100 | because they're so profoundly weak.

01:03:06.700 | But Russia's grand strategy is we're a mess.

01:03:11.740 | We don't invest in our human capital.

01:03:14.160 | Our human capital flees, or we actually drive it out.

01:03:17.900 | It goes to MIT, like you did,

01:03:21.100 | or it goes to fill in the blank, right?

01:03:23.740 | We can't invest in our people.

01:03:25.760 | Our healthcare is terrible.

01:03:27.460 | Our education system is in decline.

01:03:30.600 | We don't build infrastructure, Lex.

01:03:33.340 | We don't improve our governance.

01:03:35.980 | We don't invest in those attributes of modern power

01:03:39.620 | that make the West powerful.

01:03:42.040 | We can't because when we try, the money is stolen.

01:03:46.180 | We try these grandiose projects of,

01:03:49.260 | national projects, they're called.

01:03:50.860 | We're gonna invest in higher ed.

01:03:52.380 | We're gonna invest in high tech.

01:03:54.580 | We're gonna build our own Silicon Valley,

01:03:57.820 | known as Skolkovo.

01:03:58.820 | We're gonna do all those things, and what happens?

01:04:01.500 | They can't even build an airport

01:04:03.020 | without the money disappearing.

01:04:04.780 | The Sochi Olympics, Lex,

01:04:06.700 | officially cost them $50 billion.

01:04:11.100 | You look around at the infrastructure that endured

01:04:14.260 | from that $50 billion expense,

01:04:17.100 | and you're thinking, you know,

01:04:18.540 | that's like the Second Avenue subway.

01:04:20.980 | You get almost nothing for your money.

01:04:22.940 | And so yeah, it's corruption, Lex,

01:04:25.900 | but it's also because they don't wanna do that.

01:04:28.700 | They don't wanna invest in their people.

01:04:31.340 | They couldn't do it if they wanted to,

01:04:33.520 | and when they try, it doesn't work.

01:04:36.300 | But why invest in your own people?

01:04:38.360 | Invest in your hardware, your military hardware, right?

01:04:43.400 | Invest in your cyber capabilities.

01:04:47.440 | Invest in all your spoilation techniques

01:04:50.200 | and your hard power,

01:04:51.420 | and invest in further corrupting and further weakening

01:04:57.300 | and further dividing the West,

01:05:00.200 | because as I said, if the West is weak,

01:05:02.760 | divided, lacking resolve,

01:05:05.160 | you don't invest in your people,

01:05:06.840 | you don't build infrastructure,

01:05:08.320 | you don't improve your governance,

01:05:09.760 | but you'll muddle through.

01:05:11.640 | That's Russian grand strategy.

01:05:13.600 | - So invest in the hard power,

01:05:16.960 | weaken the West,

01:05:18.120 | those combined together means you're going to be

01:05:21.360 | subtly incentivized to escalate

01:05:24.560 | any military aggressive conflicts

01:05:27.440 | that are around you or create new ones or--

01:05:30.200 | - If you can get away with murder.

01:05:32.680 | But what happens, Lex,

01:05:34.520 | if it's a Harry Truman-like response?

01:05:37.800 | What happens if somebody says,

01:05:39.560 | you know, we're gonna stand up to this?

01:05:42.100 | We're not gonna allow this to happen.

01:05:45.480 | We're not gonna launder your money anymore.

01:05:47.780 | We're not gonna be dependent on you for energy

01:05:52.040 | in the long term.

01:05:53.160 | We're gonna make a transition.

01:05:54.920 | We're gonna punish you for that kind of behavior instead.

01:05:59.400 | And the West is now switched to that

01:06:02.920 | only because of the courage

01:06:07.920 | and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people.

01:06:10.880 | The Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression

01:06:15.080 | was one of the greatest gifts the West has ever received.

01:06:20.080 | The sacrifices that the Ukrainians are making

01:06:22.840 | right now as we speak,

01:06:25.380 | meaning they're fighting a war by themselves

01:06:31.560 | against the major military power, their neighbor, Russia.

01:06:34.820 | Nobody's fighting it with them.

01:06:37.880 | Yes, we are giving them weapons

01:06:41.300 | so they can conduct self-defense,

01:06:43.260 | which by the way is legal under international law.

01:06:45.760 | Unlike the Russian invasion,

01:06:48.120 | which is illegal under international law,

01:06:51.020 | Western supply of weapons, including heavy weapons,

01:06:54.220 | including offensive weapons to Ukraine for its self-defense

01:06:58.160 | in the invasion by Russia is actually legal under.

01:07:01.360 | And so thank God the Ukrainians surprised everybody

01:07:07.360 | they surprised me, they surprised Putin in the Kremlin,

01:07:11.160 | they surprised the Biden administration,

01:07:13.160 | they surprised the European Union,

01:07:15.880 | not with the fact that they would resist.

01:07:18.880 | We knew that we had the Orange Revolution in 2004,

01:07:23.440 | we had Maidan in 2013, 14,

01:07:26.920 | where they rose up against a domestic tyrant

01:07:30.680 | and they were willing to die on behalf of their country

01:07:34.960 | then let alone against a foreign tyrant

01:07:37.660 | invading their country, right?

01:07:39.620 | So we knew they would resist,

01:07:40.900 | we didn't know just how successful,

01:07:43.080 | certainly I didn't know they would be on the battlefield.

01:07:46.080 | It's been breathtaking to watch.

01:07:48.320 | That sacrifice, that gift enabled the West

01:07:52.480 | to rediscover itself, to rediscover its power,

01:07:55.840 | to revive itself, to say,

01:07:58.020 | the hell with this energy dependence in the long term,

01:08:00.760 | the hell with this money laundering

01:08:02.320 | and reputation laundering,

01:08:04.220 | the hell with this running back and forth to Moscow

01:08:07.280 | to try to see what Putin needs

01:08:09.200 | in order for him to feel respected,

01:08:11.640 | what appeasement he needs, right?

01:08:13.160 | So we'll see if it endures,

01:08:16.960 | but this shift comes from the Ukrainians.

01:08:21.000 | And so it's no longer getting away with murder, Lex,

01:08:23.680 | and we thank the Ukrainians for that.

01:08:25.680 | - The people and the leadership

01:08:27.740 | and the separate factions that make up Ukraine uniting,

01:08:33.640 | it's the unification, the uniting against the common enemy

01:08:37.080 | and standing up before anyone knew

01:08:40.320 | that they would be backed by all of these other nations,

01:08:43.140 | by this money and all this kind of stuff,

01:08:45.180 | standing there, especially with the President Zelensky,

01:08:49.160 | where it makes total sense to flee, he stood his ground.

01:08:54.160 | - Yes, Lex, let's take that point that you just raised,

01:08:56.920 | which is a deep and fundamental point,

01:08:58.700 | and I thank you for that.

01:09:00.640 | - Do you guys hear that?

01:09:01.920 | I think that was a compliment, there we go, let's go.

01:09:04.520 | (laughs)

01:09:05.360 | - Lex-- - Zelensky unification.

01:09:07.080 | - I'm sitting here in front of you.

01:09:08.640 | - Thank you, it's an honor.

01:09:10.360 | - And it's a mutual honor.

01:09:11.780 | So Ukraine before the war

01:09:17.020 | is run by a TV production company, right?

01:09:20.600 | You're one guy running this fantastic, incredible podcast.

01:09:24.480 | There's 20 guys or so running a country the size of Ukraine.

01:09:28.600 | And one's a producer and one's like a makeup person,

01:09:32.320 | and one's a video editor,

01:09:35.040 | and they're fantastically talented people

01:09:37.820 | if your country is a TV production.

01:09:42.120 | So before the war, Zelensky had what, 25% approval rating?

01:09:47.120 | And he couldn't get much done, and it wasn't working.

01:09:50.320 | He got elected with 73%, as you know,

01:09:53.320 | and then he was down to 20, that's a pretty big drop.

01:09:56.560 | And so you're thinking maybe having a major, large size,

01:10:01.040 | 40 million plus population European country

01:10:05.040 | run by a TV production company is not the best choice.

01:10:09.840 | And then what do we see?

01:10:11.580 | We see President Zelensky decides to risk his life

01:10:16.440 | on behalf of his country, Ukraine.

01:10:18.760 | He decides to stay in the capital.

01:10:20.960 | He's not gonna flee, they're gonna stay and fight.

01:10:25.660 | And he could be killed, he can die.

01:10:27.840 | It's a decision where he put his life on the line.

01:10:30.360 | Obviously, he's Jewish descent,

01:10:35.880 | Russian speaking childhood and upbringing.

01:10:40.920 | Russian speaking Jewish descent puts his life on the line

01:10:44.560 | for the country of Ukraine.

01:10:46.560 | It's a pretty big message, don't you think?

01:10:49.700 | And it's crucial.

01:10:51.440 | And it turns out not only that, Lex,

01:10:54.560 | but they're good at TV.

01:10:56.800 | They're good at information war.

01:10:59.040 | And in a war, it's a TV production company

01:11:02.780 | and a TV personality.

01:11:04.700 | That's exactly what you want running a country

01:11:07.960 | because they're crushing in the information war.

01:11:11.360 | And he's spectacular.

01:11:13.380 | European Parliament, US Congress, Israeli Parliament,

01:11:18.380 | there's no room on Zoom, let alone in person,

01:11:23.000 | that he can't win over.

01:11:24.640 | He's just so effective.

01:11:26.640 | This is the first time reality TV

01:11:29.720 | has been about reality instead of fake.

01:11:33.380 | Reality TV is just this completely fake nonsense.

01:11:37.120 | But Zelensky, this is real reality TV.

01:11:41.080 | And he means it.

01:11:43.280 | And the nation is behind him.

01:11:45.820 | And they're just as courageous

01:11:47.540 | and just as ingenious in many ways.

01:11:50.320 | And it's spectacular.

01:11:52.460 | And so, yeah, who saw that coming?

01:11:55.680 | I didn't see that coming, Lex.

01:11:57.760 | In fact, the Biden,

01:11:58.960 | we talk about Putin's miscalculation.

01:12:01.240 | The Biden administration, as you alluded to,

01:12:04.060 | offered him an exit from the country.

01:12:06.760 | They didn't say, you know, you wanna stand and fight?

01:12:09.320 | We'll back you.

01:12:10.640 | They said, we'll get you out.

01:12:12.560 | You wanna come now?

01:12:14.080 | And famously, you know that quote, right?

01:12:16.880 | What he said about how he doesn't need a ride.

01:12:20.700 | Remember that? - Yeah.

01:12:21.720 | - That moment?

01:12:22.720 | The Biden administration was poised

01:12:25.560 | to do another Afghanistan moment.

01:12:28.760 | That ignominious exit from Afghanistan

01:12:32.360 | was almost what happened in Ukraine

01:12:35.000 | when Biden administration offered him that ride out of there.

01:12:39.840 | And fortunately, he declined and helped rally.

01:12:43.040 | And the people from below also rallied to stop the invader

01:12:47.280 | without the presidency and without the government in Ukraine

01:12:50.840 | saving the Biden administration and the European leaders

01:12:55.280 | who latched on.

01:12:56.240 | Fortunately, they had the presence of mind

01:12:58.640 | to latch onto this gift,

01:13:00.400 | this bravery and ingeniousness of Zelensky

01:13:04.480 | and the rest of the Ukrainians,

01:13:06.160 | and flipped and decided to support Ukraine's resistance.

01:13:11.040 | You know, first with 5,000 helmets only,

01:13:13.880 | as the Germans initially promised,

01:13:16.720 | and now with really heavy weapons.

01:13:19.600 | And so that's something that wasn't foreseen.

01:13:22.880 | I certainly didn't foresee that.

01:13:24.660 | I foresaw the Ukrainian society being courageous

01:13:28.960 | and resisting, but I didn't foresee

01:13:31.920 | a television production company

01:13:34.640 | being exactly what you want to run a country in a war,

01:13:38.560 | a president Zelensky willing to sacrifice,

01:13:42.860 | lay down his life and rallying others

01:13:45.440 | in the country to do that.

01:13:47.280 | And then the country being so effective,

01:13:50.160 | not just at courage, but at battlefield resistance

01:13:55.160 | to the Russian invasion.

01:13:56.920 | So I stand corrected by the Ukrainians,

01:13:59.440 | and I'm ecstatic that I was wrong,

01:14:03.300 | that I was proven wrong.

01:14:04.520 | - And like I said, there's clear factions of the West

01:14:07.920 | and the East of Ukraine, and here's a person that,

01:14:10.640 | like you said, was in the high 20s, low 30s percentage

01:14:14.920 | approval in the country before the war,

01:14:17.760 | and now was able to use--

01:14:20.400 | - He's in the 90s now. - In the 90s.

01:14:22.160 | - He's in the 90% approval rating.

01:14:24.840 | I mean, I think they stopped doing the polling.

01:14:29.840 | Once he hit 91% or whatever it was in the previous poll,

01:14:33.640 | I think they all understood that for now

01:14:35.760 | they didn't need any more polling,

01:14:38.120 | that it's pretty clear the nation.

01:14:39.680 | So 25% to 90 something percent.

01:14:43.360 | And just like the 25% was deserved,

01:14:47.120 | the 90 something percent is also deserved, fully deserved.

01:14:50.600 | - And the question is how that all stabilizes.

01:14:53.280 | It feels like this set of events,

01:14:58.280 | I may be paying attention to Twitter too much,

01:15:02.400 | which is a concern of mine,

01:15:05.840 | whether the change I see is just surface level

01:15:09.560 | or deep level, but it seems like we're in a new world.

01:15:13.760 | That something dramatic has shifted.

01:15:15.720 | That this power that's rooted, I mean,

01:15:21.400 | in your study of the 20th century,

01:15:25.520 | it's so deeply rooted in history.

01:15:27.120 | There's this power center of the world

01:15:29.520 | is now going to, has been shaken by this event.

01:15:33.520 | And how that changes the world is unclear.

01:15:37.880 | It's unclear what lesson China learns from watching this,

01:15:40.800 | what lesson India learns from watching this.

01:15:43.080 | Both nations, as far as you can get polls

01:15:45.480 | about Chinese population, but both nations

01:15:49.240 | are largely in support of Putin.

01:15:51.760 | So Russia, India, and China are still

01:15:55.040 | supporting of Putin quietly.

01:15:57.400 | - I would maybe elaborate a little bit on that point, Lex.

01:16:02.400 | I think you're right.

01:16:04.880 | The feeling that we're in an inflection moment,

01:16:08.440 | you know, an inflection point, I think that's widespread.

01:16:12.520 | And I think it's widespread for good reason.

01:16:14.720 | We might be.

01:16:16.480 | But I also share your, let's say,

01:16:21.480 | modesty about where it's going

01:16:26.200 | and how hard it is to predict where this might go.

01:16:29.600 | It's only an inflection point if the trends continue, right?

01:16:34.080 | If the trends endure.

01:16:36.160 | There are plenty of non-inflection points.

01:16:38.960 | After 9/11, the whole world rallied around the United States

01:16:42.920 | after it was attacked, after the bombing of the towers

01:16:47.480 | here in New York City and the hitting of the Pentagon.

01:16:50.200 | And that didn't last.

01:16:53.240 | And it was not really an inflection point, was it?

01:16:56.640 | It felt like it might be, but it wasn't.

01:16:59.680 | And so this is not a comparable moment

01:17:01.880 | in terms of what happened,

01:17:04.240 | but it has the feeling that it might be a watershed.

01:17:08.120 | And maybe we'll squander it the way we squandered

01:17:12.440 | the post 9/11 rallying around the United States.

01:17:16.840 | Maybe we'll actually consolidate it and it'll endure,

01:17:21.320 | or maybe it'll endure despite ourselves.

01:17:24.160 | And we can't tell and we can't know yet.

01:17:26.800 | And it depends in part on what we do and what we don't do.

01:17:30.560 | But here's a few things that we understand already.

01:17:33.320 | The idea that the West was in decline

01:17:38.560 | and that the rest of the world had risen

01:17:43.060 | and was more powerful and that we lived

01:17:45.120 | in a multipolar world,

01:17:47.120 | that turns out to be empirically false.

01:17:49.520 | It's not true.

01:17:52.480 | I mean, it's just factually not true.

01:17:54.320 | There are no major important multinational institutions,

01:18:00.000 | organizations that are run on behalf of,

01:18:04.480 | or led by a South African, a Nigerian person from India.

01:18:09.480 | Even the Chinese don't run these institutions.

01:18:14.920 | They would like to, and they're trying, but they don't.

01:18:18.120 | And so whatever you pick, the IMF, the World Bank,

01:18:23.640 | the Federal Reserve, which is the most powerful

01:18:27.400 | multinational institution, which is actually

01:18:30.160 | only a domestic institution and doesn't have

01:18:33.140 | a legal mandate to act multilaterally, but does.

01:18:37.500 | It's got the most power of any institution in the world.

01:18:41.120 | NATO, the bilateral alliances that the US has

01:18:45.800 | up and down Asia.

01:18:47.080 | What organizations that have tremendous leverage

01:18:53.480 | on the international system, on the international order

01:18:56.520 | are non-Western.

01:18:57.520 | The UN is the most encompassing.

01:19:04.400 | And of course we know that the five,

01:19:06.360 | it has five members of the Security Council with a veto.

01:19:10.200 | One of which is Russia, one of which is China,

01:19:12.520 | and the others are the US, Britain, and France.

01:19:16.040 | Not India, not South Africa, not Indonesia,

01:19:21.040 | not all of these other countries where the people live.

01:19:25.680 | Right, the bulk of the population of the world.

01:19:28.400 | And where the population is growing,

01:19:30.160 | like on the African continent.

01:19:32.240 | So it's not a multipolar world.

01:19:34.560 | We talked already about the international financial system.

01:19:38.040 | That's the Western, not multipolar.

01:19:40.320 | We talked about the US military and NATO,

01:19:42.760 | or we could talk about the Japanese military,

01:19:45.080 | which is just very formidable.

01:19:47.320 | Enormous number of platforms.

01:19:50.040 | Even the Australian military we could talk about, right?

01:19:54.200 | And so it's a Western dominated world.

01:19:57.680 | And the West, remember, is not a geographic concept.

01:20:01.480 | It is an institutional and values club.

01:20:05.720 | The Japanese are not European, but they're Western.

01:20:10.000 | Just like Russia is European, but not Western.

01:20:14.160 | 'Cause European is a cultural category,

01:20:16.840 | and Western is an institutional category.

01:20:19.600 | Where you have rule of law, and separation of powers,

01:20:22.640 | and free and open public sphere,

01:20:24.200 | and dynamic open market economy.

01:20:27.160 | Okay.

01:20:28.280 | And then we have another thing which is pretty clear.

01:20:31.400 | The West is powerfully resented,

01:20:35.000 | powerfully envied, and admired simultaneously.

01:20:38.680 | P.J. O'Rourke, the comedian who died this year,

01:20:43.200 | fantastic, it was a big loss for the culture.

01:20:48.400 | He said, "There are two things

01:20:49.840 | "that are always characteristic

01:20:51.640 | "of any American embassy abroad.

01:20:53.880 | "One is a political protest outside,

01:20:59.320 | "and the other is the longest line

01:21:01.120 | "you've ever seen for visas."

01:21:03.600 | And those things are true simultaneously.

01:21:08.640 | And that's the world we live in.

01:21:10.400 | Meaning that non-Western countries

01:21:12.960 | envy and admire the West,

01:21:17.440 | but they also resent the power of the West.

01:21:20.760 | Western hypocrisy, right?

01:21:23.000 | The West invades countries when it wants,

01:21:26.920 | but when others do that, it's illegal, right?

01:21:30.440 | The West arrests you for money laundering,

01:21:35.440 | but it's Western money laundering

01:21:37.960 | that is where you go when you need to launder money, right?

01:21:41.760 | So they see the hypocrisy,

01:21:44.400 | they see the excessive power that the West has,

01:21:48.560 | and they resent it.

01:21:50.600 | And they say, "Who elected you to run the world?

01:21:55.240 | "We have a billion plus people,

01:21:58.420 | "or we have 200 plus million people,

01:22:02.480 | "and we don't have a say.

01:22:04.880 | "You're the self-appointed guardians of our world.

01:22:08.440 | "Who did that?"

01:22:09.560 | And so it's incumbent on the West

01:22:11.600 | not only to remember the power that it has,

01:22:15.440 | but also to exercise that power

01:22:19.000 | legally and with restraint,

01:22:21.720 | and also to think about how it can expand institutions

01:22:26.720 | to be more encompassing,

01:22:29.460 | so that other parts of the world

01:22:31.320 | are not on the outside being dictated to,

01:22:36.060 | but instead are on the inside.

01:22:39.500 | Too often, right,

01:22:41.700 | Western power is not consultative

01:22:47.360 | in a decision-making fashion.

01:22:49.800 | It's consultative after the fact.

01:22:52.680 | Okay, we got together in the EU,

01:22:54.920 | or we got together in NATO,

01:22:57.240 | or we got together at the Federal Reserve,

01:22:59.600 | and here's our decision,

01:23:01.280 | and we're announcing it today.

01:23:02.780 | And so your economy gets destroyed

01:23:06.360 | because the Federal Reserve decides

01:23:08.040 | it has to raise interest rates.

01:23:09.800 | Or you now go into default.

01:23:14.460 | You can't pay your debt

01:23:15.640 | because Western banks lent you money,

01:23:18.320 | and now the West has changed interest rates

01:23:21.640 | or other considerations,

01:23:23.960 | and you're in big trouble now.

01:23:27.720 | And so this is something which we fail to address.

01:23:32.240 | It's very hard to address.

01:23:33.480 | It's very hard to reform international institutions.

01:23:36.960 | It's very hard to share power.

01:23:39.860 | It's very hard to acknowledge

01:23:41.460 | that you have too much power,

01:23:44.200 | and that maybe having too much power is not good,

01:23:47.860 | not only for the rest of the world, but for yourself.

01:23:51.240 | And so it's great to rediscover the West

01:23:53.760 | and rediscover its values

01:23:55.500 | and rediscover its authority and credibility and power,

01:24:00.500 | but that's not sufficient.

01:24:03.000 | So we know this now.

01:24:04.680 | We know that the rest of the world

01:24:07.320 | is not necessarily jumping on the Western bandwagon, right,

01:24:12.280 | to condemn Russia for its actions,

01:24:14.960 | because the West can do things

01:24:17.380 | like sanction your central bank,

01:24:20.400 | take away your reserves,

01:24:22.640 | deny you technology.

01:24:24.600 | It pretty much can do whatever it wants,

01:24:27.160 | and it can say that it's legal,

01:24:28.760 | and it can go through various mechanisms,

01:24:30.800 | and it can freeze your property,

01:24:33.880 | and you say to yourself,

01:24:34.920 | should anybody have that much power,

01:24:37.360 | and when do they come after me?

01:24:40.440 | Now, there's a caveat here.

01:24:42.560 | And the caveat, Lex, is they don't like the West

01:24:47.320 | having all of that power,

01:24:49.240 | and they didn't join in the condemnation of Russia,

01:24:54.000 | but they also didn't join in Russia's aggression.

01:24:57.420 | So Russia's domestic civilian

01:25:02.360 | aerospace, aircraft industry, right,

01:25:07.680 | civilian aircraft industry is in big trouble now

01:25:10.720 | because of the export controls

01:25:13.880 | on spare parts and software.

01:25:17.440 | Brazil is a major power in aircraft manufacturing.

01:25:22.440 | Did they rush in and say, you know,

01:25:25.380 | Vladimir Putin, we didn't condemn necessarily

01:25:30.160 | your actions in Ukraine, okay, that's one thing,

01:25:33.200 | and how about we give you all of our aircraft technology,

01:25:37.480 | and we help you rebuild your domestic aircraft industry,

01:25:41.600 | and you can have the aviation that the West is,

01:25:43.960 | did that happen, Lex?

01:25:45.520 | Didn't happen.

01:25:47.360 | And you can look at India, and you can look at China,

01:25:50.000 | and you can look at South Africa,

01:25:51.480 | and you can look at what they've done in practical terms.

01:25:54.460 | Yes, they haven't always joined

01:25:58.100 | in a full-throated condemnation.

01:26:00.000 | Maybe they've been neutral,

01:26:01.480 | or maybe they've been playing both sides of the fence,

01:26:04.540 | like Turkey, for example.

01:26:07.300 | But are they rushing in to join Russia,

01:26:11.760 | to join Russia's aggression, to supply,

01:26:14.520 | and the answer is no.

01:26:16.600 | And the answer is no for two reasons.

01:26:19.220 | One, they actually don't wanna be party to that.

01:26:22.820 | And two, they understand that Western power,

01:26:26.240 | and they don't wanna be on the receiving end

01:26:29.360 | by crossing the West and then getting caught up

01:26:33.040 | in a sanctions regime or worse.

01:26:35.680 | - Can we go to the mind of Vladimir Putin,

01:26:37.780 | because what you just said, China, India,

01:26:42.420 | they seem to sit back and say,

01:26:45.620 | "We're not going to condemn the actions

01:26:47.740 | "of Vladimir Putin and Russia,

01:26:49.800 | "but we would really like for this war to be over."

01:26:53.460 | So there's that kind of energy of,

01:26:56.020 | "We don't just stop this,

01:26:58.040 | "because you're putting us in a very, very bad position."

01:27:00.540 | And yet, Vladimir Putin is continuing the aggression.

01:27:05.140 | What is he thinking?

01:27:06.520 | What information is he getting?

01:27:08.620 | Is it the system that you've described

01:27:10.820 | of authoritarian regimes that corrupts

01:27:13.160 | your flow of information,

01:27:14.780 | your ability to make clear-headed decisions?

01:27:17.060 | Just as a human being, when you go to sleep at night,

01:27:21.660 | is he not able to see the world clearly,

01:27:24.100 | or is this all deliberate, systematic action

01:27:27.540 | that does have some reason behind it?

01:27:31.300 | - We gotta talk a little bit about China, too,

01:27:33.340 | but let's answer your Putin question directly.

01:27:36.280 | So on Twitter, you've lost the war.

01:27:41.020 | Or as they say, there are these two Russian soldiers

01:27:45.180 | having a smoke in Warsaw,

01:27:47.020 | and they're taking a break, having a smoke,

01:27:51.100 | and they're sitting there in Warsaw on top of their tank,

01:27:53.580 | and one says to the other,

01:27:55.080 | "Yeah, we lost the information war."

01:27:57.520 | And there they are, sitting in Warsaw,

01:28:00.940 | having that smoke, right?

01:28:03.320 | So yeah, on Twitter, Russia has completely lost the war.

01:28:07.080 | In reality, they failed to take Kiev,

01:28:09.560 | they failed to capture Kiev,

01:28:11.680 | and they failed in phase two, as they called it,

01:28:15.840 | or plan B, which is to capture the entirety of the Donbas.

01:28:20.840 | We're three months into the war.

01:28:23.480 | If you had made a judgment about, let's say,

01:28:25.840 | the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union,

01:28:27.860 | a definitive judgment after three months,

01:28:30.480 | you might've got the outcome wrong there.

01:28:32.900 | If you had judged the Winter War,

01:28:34.720 | the 1939-40 Soviet invasion of Finland after three months,

01:28:39.720 | you would've got that wrong too,

01:28:41.560 | of what the outcome was gonna be.

01:28:43.080 | So we're early in the game here,

01:28:45.520 | and we have to be careful about any definitive judgments.

01:28:49.880 | But it is the case that so far,

01:28:52.560 | they failed to take Kiev,

01:28:54.160 | and they failed to capture the entirety of the Donbas,

01:28:57.600 | Luhansk, and Donetsk provinces, Eastern Ukraine,

01:29:02.040 | a part of Eastern Ukraine.

01:29:04.640 | And they've been driven out of Kharkiv,

01:29:09.040 | and the area immediately surrounding Kharkiv.

01:29:12.600 | They never captured Kharkiv, but they came close,

01:29:15.680 | but now the Ukrainians drove them back

01:29:18.520 | to the Russian border

01:29:19.560 | in that very large and important region.

01:29:22.080 | So those look like battlefield losses

01:29:25.360 | that are impossible to explain away,

01:29:28.840 | if you're the regime in Russia,

01:29:30.280 | except by suppression of information.

01:29:32.460 | And as you know from Russian history, Lex,

01:29:36.100 | leaders in Russia have an easier time

01:29:40.720 | with a state of siege and deprivation

01:29:44.360 | than they do with explaining a lost war.

01:29:46.640 | But let's look at some other facts

01:29:52.980 | that are important to take into account.

01:29:56.000 | One, the Russian army has penetrated farther

01:30:00.000 | into Ukrainian territory since February, 2022,

01:30:04.160 | including in Kherson region,

01:30:08.160 | the famous Mariupol siege that just ended.

01:30:12.800 | They have built a large presence

01:30:18.720 | in areas North of Crimea

01:30:23.920 | on the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea littoral ultimately,

01:30:28.600 | that they didn't previously hold.

01:30:30.440 | They're still fighting in Luhansk for full control

01:30:35.200 | over at least half of the Donbas,

01:30:38.560 | and Ukrainians are resisting fiercely.

01:30:41.400 | But nonetheless, you can say

01:30:44.800 | that they've been driven out.

01:30:46.540 | On the contrary, farther penetration than the beginning.

01:30:50.380 | Ukraine doesn't have an economy anymore.

01:30:54.400 | They have somewhere between 33 and 50% unemployment.

01:30:58.400 | It's hard to measure unemployment in a war economy,

01:31:02.600 | but their metallurgical industry,

01:31:04.200 | that Azov-style steel plant in Mariupol is a ruin now.

01:31:09.200 | And a lot of farmers are not planting the fields

01:31:14.040 | because the harvest from the previous year

01:31:16.120 | still hasn't been sent, sold abroad

01:31:19.440 | because the ports are blockaded or destroyed.

01:31:23.440 | And so you don't have an economy,

01:31:26.120 | and you need five billion or seven billion

01:31:28.800 | or eight billion dollars a month to meet your payroll,

01:31:33.300 | to feed your people, to keep your army in the field.

01:31:37.780 | That's a lot of money per month, and that's indefinite.

01:31:42.980 | That's as long as this blockade lasts.

01:31:45.960 | And so you don't have an economy anymore, you're indigent.

01:31:49.200 | And even if you take the lower number,

01:31:51.200 | five billion as opposed to Zelensky's ask for seven billion,

01:31:55.640 | five billion is 60 billion a year.

01:31:57.920 | That's 60 billion this year, that's 60 billion next year.

01:32:01.720 | And so who's got that kind of money?

01:32:03.560 | Which Western taxpayers are ready?

01:32:06.360 | And if you use the seven or eight billion,

01:32:08.120 | you get up to 100 billion a year.

01:32:10.480 | The Biden, just signed, President Joe Biden just signed

01:32:17.240 | the bill making it law, $40 billion in aid to Ukraine.

01:32:22.240 | It's just an enormous sum.

01:32:24.520 | The economic piece of that is a month and a half,

01:32:28.560 | two months of Ukrainians covering Ukrainian expenditures.

01:32:33.560 | That's it.

01:32:36.600 | And they're asking the G7, they're asking everybody.

01:32:40.080 | So you have no economy and no prospect of an economy

01:32:44.220 | until you evict the Russians from your territory.

01:32:47.620 | And then you have a Western unity, Western resolve.

01:32:52.620 | It lasts or it doesn't last, Lex.

01:32:56.100 | So you're President Putin

01:32:58.140 | and you've got more territory than before.

01:33:01.360 | And you've got a stranglehold over the Ukrainian economy.

01:33:05.580 | And you've got a lot of the world neutral.

01:33:10.040 | And you've got the Chinese propaganda

01:33:13.140 | supporting you to the hilt with those Oliver Stone

01:33:17.340 | and Mearsheimer lines about how this is really NATO's fault.

01:33:21.680 | And you've got Hungary dragging its feet

01:33:27.700 | on the oil embargo against Russia.

01:33:29.980 | And you've got Turkey dragging its feet

01:33:32.100 | on the recent applications of Sweden and Finland

01:33:35.880 | for NATO expansion.

01:33:36.860 | And you're saying to yourself,

01:33:38.500 | Lex, maybe I can ride this out.

01:33:40.240 | I got a lot of problems of my own

01:33:43.060 | and we can go into the details

01:33:44.460 | on the Russian side's challenges.

01:33:46.660 | But he's on Ukrainian territory unless he's evicted.

01:33:52.540 | And he's got a stranglehold on their economy.

01:33:56.060 | And he's got the possibility

01:33:58.440 | that the West doesn't stay resolved

01:34:01.960 | and doesn't continue to pay for Ukraine's economy

01:34:05.480 | or supply those heavy weapons.

01:34:08.100 | And so you could argue

01:34:09.860 | that maybe he's deluded about all of this.

01:34:12.780 | And maybe he should go on Twitter.

01:34:14.820 | I'm not on Twitter,

01:34:15.700 | but maybe Putin who famously doesn't use the internet

01:34:18.260 | should go on Twitter and see he's losing the war.

01:34:21.100 | Or you can argue that maybe he's calculating here

01:34:24.840 | that he's got a chance to still prevail.

01:34:26.960 | - Wow, that is darkly insightful.

01:34:33.500 | If I could go to Henry Kissinger for a brief moment.

01:34:38.020 | And people should read this op-ed

01:34:40.900 | he wrote in the Washington Post in March 5th, 2014

01:34:44.580 | after the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine,

01:34:49.540 | but before Crimea was annexed.

01:34:51.880 | There's a lot of interesting historical description

01:34:55.380 | about the division within Ukraine,

01:34:57.700 | the corruption within Ukraine that will,

01:35:00.940 | if people read this article,

01:35:02.300 | will give context to how incredible it is

01:35:05.860 | what Zelensky was able to accomplish

01:35:07.500 | in uniting the country.

01:35:08.460 | But I just want to comment,

01:35:10.100 | because Henry Kissinger's an interesting figure

01:35:13.540 | in American history.

01:35:14.940 | He opens the article with,

01:35:16.380 | "In my life, I have seen four wars

01:35:19.420 | begun with great enthusiasm and public support,

01:35:22.660 | all of which we did not know how to end,

01:35:25.500 | and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally.

01:35:29.820 | The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins."

01:35:35.460 | So he's giving this cold, hard truth

01:35:38.540 | that we go into wars excited,

01:35:42.220 | are able to send $40 billion financial aid,

01:35:46.180 | military aid, our own men and women,

01:35:50.500 | but the excitement fades.

01:35:53.500 | Twitter outrage fades.

01:35:56.460 | And then a country that's willing to wait patiently

01:36:00.780 | is willing to pay the cost of siege

01:36:04.340 | versus the cost of explaining to its own people

01:36:07.420 | that the war is lost.

01:36:08.860 | That country just might win, outlast.

01:36:12.460 | - Let's hope not,

01:36:14.100 | because the Ukrainians' resistance

01:36:19.100 | deserves to prevail here.

01:36:21.260 | Russia deserves to lose.

01:36:23.420 | No war of aggression like they've committed here

01:36:26.220 | against Ukraine should prevail

01:36:28.700 | if we can do anything about it.

01:36:30.740 | I support 1,000% the continued supply of heavy weapons,

01:36:35.740 | including offensive weapons, to the Ukrainians,

01:36:40.580 | as long as they're willing to resist,

01:36:42.660 | and it's their choice.

01:36:44.460 | It's their choice when to negotiate.

01:36:46.660 | It's their choice how much to resist.

01:36:48.620 | It's their choice what kind of sacrifices to make.

01:36:51.380 | And it's our responsibility to meet their requests

01:36:56.780 | more quickly than we have so far and at greater scale.

01:37:00.740 | But ultimately, wars only have political ends.

01:37:05.220 | They never have military ends.

01:37:07.620 | You need a political solution here.

01:37:10.340 | So if the Ukrainians are able

01:37:12.660 | to conduct a successful counteroffensive at scale

01:37:17.860 | in July or August, whenever they launch,

01:37:23.580 | right now the heavy weapons are coming in

01:37:26.540 | and they're being moved to the battlefield

01:37:28.820 | and more are coming, you know the dynamic.

01:37:31.580 | Russia bombs a school, Russia bombs a hospital,

01:37:35.740 | Americans and Europeans decide to send

01:37:38.220 | even more heavy weapons to Ukraine, right?

01:37:40.540 | That's the self-defeating dynamic from the Russian side.

01:37:43.860 | They commit the atrocities, we send more heavy weapons.

01:37:47.100 | Once those heavy weapons are on the battle lines,

01:37:51.780 | we'll see if Ukrainians cannot just defend,

01:37:55.020 | which they've proven they're able to do

01:37:57.220 | in breathtaking fashion, not just conduct counterattacks

01:38:01.820 | where the enemy moves forward

01:38:04.820 | and you cut behind the enemy's lines

01:38:07.860 | and you counterattack and push the enemy back a little bit,

01:38:11.260 | but whether you can evict the Russians from your territory

01:38:17.460 | with a combined arms operation

01:38:20.500 | where you have a massive superiority

01:38:22.980 | in infantry and heavy weapons,

01:38:25.500 | but more importantly, you coordinate your air power,

01:38:29.460 | your tanks, your drones, your infantry at scale,

01:38:33.940 | which is something the Ukrainians have not done yet.

01:38:36.500 | It's something the Russians failed at in Ukraine

01:38:39.420 | and they come from the same place, the Soviet military.

01:38:42.940 | We hope this Ukrainian counteroffensive at scale,

01:38:46.100 | this combined arms operation succeeds

01:38:50.420 | and if it does succeed,

01:38:51.740 | there's the possibility of a battlefield victory.

01:38:54.420 | Whether that also includes Crimea,

01:38:57.500 | which as you know, is not hostile on the contrary

01:39:02.020 | to the Russian military remains to be seen,

01:39:06.220 | but however much they regain territorially

01:39:11.740 | back towards the 1991 borders,

01:39:15.620 | which is their goal, their stated goal

01:39:18.100 | and which we support them properly in trying to achieve,

01:39:22.460 | however much they achieve of that in this counteroffensive

01:39:26.020 | that we're anticipating,

01:39:27.380 | that will set the stage for the next phase

01:39:31.100 | and either Russia, which is to say one person,

01:39:35.660 | Vladimir Putin will acknowledge that he's lost the war

01:39:40.660 | because the Ukrainians won it on the battlefield

01:39:44.460 | or he'll try to announce a full-scale mobilization,

01:39:49.460 | conscript the whole country, go back

01:39:53.500 | and instead of acknowledging defeat,

01:39:55.540 | try to win with a different plan, recalibrate,

01:39:58.620 | remains to be seen.

01:40:00.420 | Will the Ukrainians negotiate any territory away

01:40:04.020 | or must they capture also Crimea,

01:40:07.540 | which puts a very high bar on the summer counteroffensive

01:40:13.220 | that we're gonna see, which could last through the fall

01:40:15.420 | and into the winter as a result.

01:40:17.620 | We don't know the answers to that,

01:40:18.980 | nobody knows the answers to that.

01:40:21.060 | People are guessing, some people are better informed

01:40:23.820 | 'cause they have inside intelligence.

01:40:26.440 | People are also worried about Russian escalation

01:40:32.660 | to nuclear weapons or chemical weapons

01:40:34.940 | if they begin to lose on the battlefield to Ukraine.

01:40:38.380 | - Are you worried about nuclear war,

01:40:40.740 | the possibility of nuclear war?

01:40:43.800 | - I think it's necessary to pay attention

01:40:47.300 | to that possibility.

01:40:49.020 | That possibility existed before the February 2022

01:40:54.020 | full-blown invasion of Ukraine.

01:40:57.260 | The doomsday arsenal that Russia possesses

01:41:00.340 | is enough to destroy the world many times over

01:41:03.500 | and that's been the case every year

01:41:06.460 | since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

01:41:10.260 | And so of course we're concerned about that.

01:41:13.940 | We do know, however, Lex,

01:41:15.740 | that they have a system known as dual key.

01:41:18.520 | Dual key for their strategic nuclear weapons.

01:41:22.440 | Strategic nuclear weapons means the ones

01:41:27.020 | fired from silos, the missiles,

01:41:30.020 | the ones delivered from bombers

01:41:32.340 | or the ones fired from submarines, right?

01:41:34.460 | - And they're ready to go.

01:41:35.840 | - They're intercontinental.

01:41:37.720 | We watch that very, very closely.

01:41:40.500 | We watch all the movement of that

01:41:42.280 | and the alerts, et cetera.

01:41:44.440 | We have tremendously, let's say,

01:41:47.160 | tremendous inside intelligence on that.

01:41:51.120 | But dual key means that President Putin alone

01:41:53.800 | cannot fire them.

01:41:55.440 | He has one key which he must insert.

01:41:57.840 | He must then insert the codes for a command to launch.

01:42:04.200 | That then goes to the head of the general staff

01:42:07.520 | who must, has his own key and separate codes

01:42:11.600 | and must do the same,

01:42:12.760 | insert that key and codes for them to launch.

01:42:15.400 | And so will the general staff chief go along

01:42:21.120 | with the destruction of the world

01:42:23.000 | over a battlefield loss in Ukraine?

01:42:25.200 | I don't know the answer to that

01:42:27.840 | and I don't know if anybody knows the answer to that.

01:42:30.320 | Will those people flying those bombers,

01:42:33.420 | if they get the order from,

01:42:34.840 | if the dual key system goes into action

01:42:38.000 | and both keys are used and all the codes are implemented,

01:42:43.000 | will those young guys flying those bombers

01:42:46.720 | let those bombs go?

01:42:48.460 | Will those at the missile silos decide to engage and fire?

01:42:53.380 | We don't know, but you can see that

01:42:56.160 | it's more than one man making the decision here

01:42:59.300 | in a system of strategic nuclear weapons.

01:43:02.400 | As far as the tactical, the so-called low yield

01:43:05.840 | or battlefield nuclear weapons,

01:43:07.920 | we're not sure the system that they have in Russia

01:43:11.360 | these days for their implement,

01:43:13.560 | for their use of such tactical nuclear weapons.

01:43:16.860 | It could well be that Putin and just himself,

01:43:22.040 | he alone can fire them or order them be fired.

01:43:26.500 | But you know, Lex,

01:43:29.080 | there's no tactical nuclear weapon fired at Ukraine

01:43:32.720 | that's not also fired simultaneously at Russia.

01:43:36.060 | If the Kremlin is 600 miles from Ukraine

01:43:42.040 | and if the wind changes direction

01:43:46.120 | or the wind happens to be blowing east, northeast,

01:43:49.760 | the fallout hits your Kremlin, not just Ukraine.

01:43:54.520 | Moreover, you have all those border regions

01:43:58.040 | which are staging regions for the Russian offensive.

01:44:01.760 | And they're a lot closer than 600 miles.

01:44:04.160 | They're actually right there.

01:44:06.280 | And so you fire that weapon on Ukrainian territory

01:44:09.560 | and you can get the fallout

01:44:11.040 | just like the Chernobyl fallout spread to Sweden,

01:44:16.200 | which is how we got the Kremlin to finally,

01:44:20.480 | first they denied, they said,

01:44:21.720 | "Oh, we don't know why there's a big nuclear cloud

01:44:24.000 | "over Sweden.

01:44:25.200 | "We don't know where that came from."

01:44:26.960 | And eventually they admitted it.

01:44:28.620 | So Russia can't actually use a nuclear weapon

01:44:33.400 | tactical battlefield, one in Ukraine,

01:44:35.840 | without also firing it at itself.

01:44:38.960 | And in addition, it's that same dynamic

01:44:41.100 | I alluded to earlier,

01:44:42.960 | which is to say you bomb a hospital,

01:44:46.520 | you bomb a school,

01:44:48.420 | there's more heavy weapons going to Ukraine from the West.

01:44:52.600 | - You can't get away with any of the,

01:44:55.100 | there's always going to be a response

01:44:56.520 | that's either proportional or greater than proportional.

01:44:59.160 | - You could well have Europe

01:45:01.840 | signing on to NATO direct engagement,

01:45:05.200 | both Washington and Brussels direct engagement

01:45:09.080 | of the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine.

01:45:13.160 | - You think that's possible to do that

01:45:15.060 | without dramatic escalation from the Russian side?

01:45:19.320 | - Yes, I do think it's possible,

01:45:21.080 | but it's very worrisome, just like you're saying.

01:45:24.240 | But if Putin were to escalate like that,

01:45:28.280 | he's firing that weapon at himself,

01:45:31.280 | and he's potentially provoking a direct clash

01:45:34.560 | with NATO's military,

01:45:36.400 | not just with the Ukrainian military.

01:45:39.240 | If you're sitting in the Kremlin

01:45:40.800 | looking at those charts, Lex, of NATO capabilities,

01:45:45.480 | and you can't conquer Ukraine,

01:45:48.520 | which didn't really have heavy weapons

01:45:50.440 | before February, 2022 at scale,

01:45:54.360 | and you're thinking, okay, now I'm going to take on NATO,

01:45:58.120 | that would be a bold step on the part of a Russian leader.

01:46:03.960 | And let's also remember, Lex,

01:46:06.240 | that there's another variable here.

01:46:07.960 | You're a despot as long as everyone implements your orders.

01:46:16.080 | And so if people start to say quietly,

01:46:20.440 | not necessarily publicly,

01:46:22.640 | I may not implement that order,

01:46:24.920 | 'cause that's maybe a criminal order.

01:46:27.320 | Or my grandma is Ukrainian, or my wife is Ukrainian,

01:46:32.320 | or I don't want to go to the Hague,

01:46:35.580 | I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the Hague,

01:46:38.680 | or whatever it might be.

01:46:40.320 | At any point along the chain of command,

01:46:43.280 | from the general staff all the way down to the platoon,

01:46:48.280 | you're a despot provided they implement your orders.

01:46:52.760 | But who's to say that somewhere along the chain of command,

01:46:57.760 | people start to say, I'm gonna ignore that order,

01:47:02.920 | or I'm gonna sabotage that order,

01:47:05.960 | or I'm gonna flee the battlefield,

01:47:09.200 | or I'm gonna injure myself so that I don't have to fight,

01:47:13.160 | or I'm gonna join the Ukrainian side.

01:47:16.720 | And so it could be that what's left

01:47:19.720 | of the Russian army in the field begins to disintegrate.

01:47:24.640 | Even if the Ukrainians are not able

01:47:26.920 | to mount that counteroffensive at scale,

01:47:29.560 | that combined arms operation,

01:47:31.660 | the Russian military in the field,

01:47:34.840 | which has taken horrendous casualties

01:47:36.800 | as far as we understand,

01:47:38.160 | something like a third of the original force,

01:47:41.380 | so you're talking about 50 to 60,000,

01:47:45.720 | that includes both dead and wounded

01:47:48.440 | to the point of being unable to return to the battlefield.

01:47:51.820 | Those are big numbers, those were a lot of families.

01:47:55.920 | A lot of families affected.

01:47:57.640 | Their sons, or their husbands, or their fathers

01:48:02.520 | are either missing in action,

01:48:04.120 | or the regime won't tell them that they're dead.

01:48:07.000 | As you know from the sinking

01:48:08.620 | of that flagship Moskva, right, by the Ukrainians.

01:48:13.620 | And so a disintegration of the Russian military

01:48:18.500 | because there are orders that they either can't implement

01:48:21.820 | or don't wanna implement is also not excluded.

01:48:26.820 | And so you have these two big variables,

01:48:29.260 | the Ukrainian army in the field

01:48:30.860 | and its ability to move from defense to offense at scale,

01:48:35.340 | and we're gonna test that soon.

01:48:37.340 | And then the Russian ability in the field

01:48:39.580 | to hold together in a war of conquest and aggression

01:48:44.580 | where their conscripts, or they're fed dog food,

01:48:49.660 | or they don't have any weapons anymore

01:48:53.060 | because there's no resupply,

01:48:54.860 | and so the disintegration of the army can't be excluded.

01:48:59.180 | And then, of course, all bets are off on the Putin regime.

01:49:02.820 | More long-term, there are these technology export controls.

01:49:07.820 | We were talking about how the military industrial complex

01:49:10.720 | in Russia is dependent

01:49:12.140 | on foreign component parts and software.

01:49:16.660 | And so if you have export controls

01:49:19.380 | and you have firms voluntarily,

01:49:21.300 | even when they don't fall under export controls,

01:49:24.180 | leaving Russian business,

01:49:25.820 | refusing to do business with Russia,

01:49:28.860 | and we see this not just in the civilian sector

01:49:31.640 | like with McDonald's or many other companies,

01:49:35.300 | we see this in the key areas like the oil industry

01:49:40.300 | with the executives fleeing,

01:49:42.160 | that is the Western executives fleeing,

01:49:45.580 | giving up their positions.

01:49:47.940 | So Russia's ability to resupply its tanks,

01:49:51.740 | resupply its missiles, resupply its uniforms,

01:49:58.180 | resupply its food to its soldiers in the field,

01:50:01.960 | and their boots.

01:50:03.640 | We see a lot of stuff under tremendous stress,

01:50:07.880 | and in the long-term, there's no obvious way

01:50:11.220 | they can rebuild the military industrial complex

01:50:14.880 | to produce those weapons

01:50:17.840 | because they're reliant on foreign parts

01:50:20.100 | that they can't get anymore,

01:50:21.360 | and there are no domestic substitutes

01:50:23.960 | on the immediate horizon.

01:50:26.240 | That's at the earliest a two-year proposition

01:50:30.660 | to have domestic substitutes,

01:50:32.360 | and for some things like microelectronics,

01:50:35.420 | they've never had domestic substitutes

01:50:37.380 | going back to the Soviet times, as you know well.

01:50:40.740 | And so there's that pressure on Russia

01:50:43.980 | from the technology export controls,

01:50:46.820 | which if you're in the security ministry

01:50:49.820 | or the defense ministry,

01:50:51.140 | if you're in that side of the regime,

01:50:54.420 | you're feeling that pain as we speak,

01:50:57.000 | and you're wondering about the strategy.

01:50:59.060 | - Let me ask you about, again, the echoes of history,

01:51:06.500 | and it frustrates me in part when people draw these parallels

01:51:10.460 | but maybe there is some deep insight about those parallels.

01:51:14.160 | So there's a song that goes,

01:51:19.160 | (speaking in foreign language)

01:51:24.140 | So in Operation Barbarossa,

01:51:27.740 | the bombing of Kiev by Hitler,

01:51:30.840 | there is sort of an eerie parallel,

01:51:34.360 | and you have to be extremely careful

01:51:37.300 | drawing such parallels and such connections

01:51:41.980 | to this unexplainable war that is World War II.

01:51:50.380 | But is there elements of this

01:51:55.300 | that do echo in the actions of Vladimir Putin?

01:51:58.780 | And more specifically,

01:52:01.820 | do you think that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal?

01:52:04.900 | Can that label be assigned to the actions of this man?

01:52:09.500 | - A war criminal is a legal determination,

01:52:14.580 | and it requires evidence and due process

01:52:17.820 | and the ability to defend oneself.

01:52:20.200 | We don't just decide in the Twittersphere

01:52:24.860 | or on a podcast that somebody is a war criminal.

01:52:27.660 | They can be a suspected war criminal,

01:52:31.700 | and we can gather evidence to try to prosecute that case.

01:52:35.980 | And then the issue for us, Lex,

01:52:38.420 | is which court does it go to?

01:52:40.680 | What's the appropriate place?

01:52:44.100 | Does it happen in Ukraine because they're the victims?

01:52:46.700 | Does it happen in The Hague

01:52:47.940 | because there's an international criminal court there?

01:52:51.140 | Does it happen inside Russia

01:52:52.900 | because there's regime change at some point,

01:52:55.980 | and some of these people become,

01:52:59.260 | let's say they get arrested by their own people

01:53:02.780 | inside Russia?

01:53:03.700 | So those are all important questions

01:53:07.100 | that have to be pursued with resources

01:53:09.520 | and with determination and by skilled people

01:53:13.740 | who are excellent at gathering that evidence.

01:53:17.060 | And that process is underway.

01:53:18.940 | And Ukraine has a trial underway now

01:53:22.100 | of one alleged war criminal who's pleaded guilty,

01:53:26.620 | and we'll see what the outcome of that trial

01:53:29.580 | inside Ukraine is of a lower-level official,

01:53:32.100 | not obviously Vladimir Putin,

01:53:35.020 | but the commander of a tank group.

01:53:38.940 | So yes, the names are eerily familiar.

01:53:43.940 | Izum, Kharkiv, Kiev, right?

01:53:51.500 | Those are the names we know from the Nazi invasion

01:53:56.740 | and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

01:53:59.560 | And it's very deeply troubling

01:54:03.980 | to think that this could happen again.

01:54:07.060 | And there's a bizarre sense that the Russians,

01:54:11.420 | claiming, as Putin says, to denazify Ukraine,

01:54:15.620 | have invaded the same places that the Nazis invaded

01:54:20.100 | back in 1941.

01:54:21.940 | - As somebody who's working on volume three

01:54:24.580 | of your work on Stalin, going through this period,

01:54:30.500 | is it eerie to you?

01:54:32.220 | - Yes, it is, Lex.

01:54:33.540 | - That you're--

01:54:34.660 | - I've written the chapters of volume three.

01:54:37.580 | I've drafted the chapters on the war.

01:54:39.720 | And as I said, the place names

01:54:43.660 | are very evocative, unfortunately.

01:54:45.900 | But you know, the Nazis failed, ultimately.

01:54:50.860 | They captured Ukraine for a time,

01:54:57.260 | but they were evicted from Ukraine.

01:55:00.460 | And there was massive partisan

01:55:03.540 | or guerrilla warfare resistance behind Nazi lines

01:55:07.020 | the whole time that they were, allegedly,

01:55:10.740 | in control of Ukraine.

01:55:13.020 | If you look at the maps on cable TV,

01:55:15.220 | they show you the sign of Russia,

01:55:17.220 | they show you the coloring, Russian control.

01:55:19.900 | And they draw a line and then it's colored in.

01:55:22.380 | But the word control is misplaced.

01:55:24.680 | They don't actually control it.

01:55:27.140 | It's Russian claimed or extent

01:55:30.380 | of farthest Russian troop advancement.

01:55:34.660 | Because behind the Russian lines in Ukraine,

01:55:37.540 | Crimea accepted, you have insurgencies.

01:55:40.980 | You have the armed insurgency.

01:55:43.380 | In Melitopol, for example, which is a place

01:55:46.340 | that you know, in southeastern Ukraine,

01:55:49.220 | there is a guerrilla war now underway

01:55:53.480 | to hurt the Russians who are in occupation

01:55:57.880 | of that city and region.

01:55:59.280 | And we're gonna see that continue,

01:56:02.760 | even if the war becomes a stalemate,

01:56:06.580 | even if it stalemates more or less

01:56:09.720 | at the lines we're at now,

01:56:11.920 | which would mean that anticipated Ukrainian

01:56:16.080 | counteroffensive at scale proves unsuccessful,

01:56:19.460 | the Russian army doesn't disintegrate,

01:56:22.800 | and you end up with a stalemate

01:56:25.760 | where there could be a ceasefire, not a ceasefire,

01:56:28.400 | but neither side is attempting an offensive

01:56:30.600 | for the time being.

01:56:32.480 | There will be resistance behind those Russian lines,

01:56:36.320 | and it will be fierce resistance,

01:56:38.720 | the kind of resistance we saw to the Nazi occupation.

01:56:42.240 | Ultimately, it took the Red Army re-invading

01:56:48.080 | the territory of Ukraine and succeeding

01:56:52.440 | at combined arms operations at scale.

01:56:56.160 | A massive counteroffensive, much larger

01:56:58.760 | than anything we're talking about today.

01:57:01.200 | Ultimately, it required that to evict

01:57:03.360 | the Nazis from Ukraine.

01:57:05.560 | But in the meantime, they did not have

01:57:07.480 | an easy occupation regime there.

01:57:09.740 | Ukrainian partisans, Soviet partisans,

01:57:16.720 | killed Nazi officials, Wehrmacht soldiers,

01:57:21.400 | Wehrmacht officers, blew up the infrastructure

01:57:26.400 | they were using, made them pay a price

01:57:29.680 | for their occupation.

01:57:30.920 | We could well see if unfortunately this ends

01:57:35.480 | in a stalemate for the time being,

01:57:38.160 | we could well see that type of insurgency

01:57:41.360 | gain momentum behind Russian lines,

01:57:44.760 | and try to evict the Russians that way,

01:57:49.240 | and then remount the counteroffensive at scale

01:57:52.560 | later on in the future, if the first one doesn't succeed.

01:57:57.480 | So that would be further echoes

01:58:00.960 | of the World War II experience.

01:58:03.000 | The scale once again is much smaller.

01:58:05.840 | The size of the armies here, they're not in the many

01:58:10.200 | 800,000, 700,000, a million two, a million four,

01:58:15.200 | that's not what we're talking about today.

01:58:18.040 | But the weapons, the cruise missiles,

01:58:21.340 | artillery fire, artillery fire used to be very inaccurate,

01:58:27.320 | and it was like saturation.

01:58:29.400 | You would just fire towards the enemy lines,

01:58:31.880 | and if you hit something, you hit something,

01:58:33.520 | and if you didn't, you just kept firing.

01:58:36.020 | Now you have drones, Lex.

01:58:39.560 | And so artillery fire is now sniper fire,

01:58:43.060 | 'cause you can coordinate the direction

01:58:46.000 | of the artillery fire with the drones.

01:58:49.520 | The drones can take a picture and show you

01:58:52.240 | where the enemy is precisely located,

01:58:55.400 | and you can align that artillery to hit them

01:58:58.840 | instead of just indiscriminately bombing an area,

01:59:02.200 | a territory, and the NATO-supplied artillery

01:59:06.680 | goes really far, and you can fire into Russian positions

01:59:11.540 | and yourself not be exposed to Russian fire,

01:59:15.200 | because your artillery fires farther than theirs.

01:59:20.200 | So that's coming, and we're gonna see that in action.

01:59:24.640 | And so the scale is not the same, but the weapons,

01:59:28.560 | the precision of some of the weapons and some of the NATO,

01:59:31.640 | we're not sending all of our stuff,

01:59:34.000 | but as I said, the dynamic is Russia commits atrocities,

01:59:37.480 | Russia bombs schools, Russia bombs hospitals,

01:59:40.240 | Russia kills civilians, and more and heavier

01:59:44.840 | and more lethal Western weapons go to Ukraine.

01:59:48.960 | Their willingness to risk their lives

01:59:51.600 | is really so impressive, and the reason that we,

01:59:55.800 | it's our duty, we're obliged to supply those weapons.

02:00:00.800 | And so the Russians don't have that resupply,

02:00:03.560 | and the Ukrainians do.

02:00:05.000 | And so the Russians are now digging in, Lex.

02:00:09.260 | They're digging in deeply in the areas

02:00:12.020 | that they've penetrated, and they're trying to build

02:00:15.520 | unassailable positions for when the Ukrainians transition

02:00:20.520 | from mostly defense to full-scale offense.

02:00:26.440 | And we'll see if that, I mean, they're digging everywhere.

02:00:30.520 | As they say, (speaking in foreign language)

02:00:34.720 | They're digging everywhere behind.

02:00:36.400 | - Your Russian is beautiful.

02:00:37.680 | - Digging in, I wish, Lex, like yours.

02:00:41.160 | But so there are these things that we can't predict,

02:00:44.700 | but there are these things we're watching

02:00:46.300 | and watching closely.

02:00:47.600 | - And on top of that, something that's not in World War II,

02:00:53.380 | or for the most part, is cyber attacks and cyber warfare,

02:00:56.260 | which is much less, perhaps,

02:01:00.480 | convertible into human words, because it happens

02:01:06.220 | so quickly, it's such large scales,

02:01:08.280 | so difficult to trace, and all those kinds of things.

02:01:10.440 | It's not bullets, it's electrical signals.

02:01:14.660 | - Yeah, but those Ukrainian people, they're like you, Lex.

02:01:18.460 | They're young, and they're technically really proficient.

02:01:23.040 | And they've been amazing.

02:01:24.980 | You know, they spent those teenage years in the basement

02:01:28.460 | playing video games.

02:01:30.540 | - Turns out it's useful after all.

02:01:32.740 | - It turns out it's more than useful.

02:01:35.060 | You can save your country that way.

02:01:37.580 | And so they're not alone.

02:01:39.360 | They're getting support, and that support is important.

02:01:43.440 | But really, predominantly, it's Ukrainians

02:01:46.280 | on the cyber battlefield, and their skills

02:01:49.200 | have been very impressive, and they've been preparing

02:01:51.480 | for this for a number of years.

02:01:53.320 | And they have a whole army of young people

02:01:56.840 | on the cyber side.

02:01:58.560 | It's their civilian population.

02:02:00.360 | These are not people conscripted into the military

02:02:02.800 | or volunteering, wearing the uniform.

02:02:05.960 | And so even in cyber warfare, the Ukrainians

02:02:08.780 | have been extremely impressive.

02:02:11.500 | And so let's remember that all of these aspects of warfare,

02:02:16.500 | whether it's how far your cruise missiles go

02:02:22.900 | and how accurate they are, what size

02:02:25.700 | your cyber capabilities are, it's really ultimately

02:02:30.620 | about the people.

02:02:31.940 | It's about the human capital, right?

02:02:34.660 | It's about their willingness, their skill level,

02:02:39.540 | but also their willingness to fight

02:02:41.600 | and to put their lives on the line.

02:02:43.580 | And there's no substitute for that.

02:02:45.820 | And so what's called morale, or courage,

02:02:49.180 | or bravery, or valor, that's really the ultimately decisive,

02:02:54.180 | provided you have enough sufficient arms

02:02:57.920 | to conduct the fight.

02:03:01.200 | And if you don't, you use a Molotov cocktail, right?

02:03:04.600 | Grandma calls in the coordinates of the Russian tank

02:03:08.580 | on her iPhone, and you have a Molotov cocktail

02:03:13.580 | that the people who used to work in the cafeteria

02:03:18.780 | are now stuffing flammable liquid into bottles,

02:03:22.180 | and you carry one right up to the tank

02:03:23.940 | and you smash it against the tank,

02:03:25.480 | or you drop it in one of the hatches in the tank, right?

02:03:29.460 | There's no substitute for that kind of stuff,

02:03:33.140 | that level of resolve,

02:03:35.760 | willingness to die for your country.

02:03:38.200 | That's a really big lesson

02:03:40.360 | that we need to absorb in our own country.

02:03:43.700 | We've been going to war more frequently than we should,

02:03:48.260 | and like you said, without the justification all the time,

02:03:51.640 | and then like Henry Kissinger said,

02:03:53.900 | without understanding how this was gonna end.

02:03:57.060 | It's easy to start a war, it's very difficult to win a war,

02:04:00.960 | prevail in a war, end a war on terms

02:04:03.400 | that meet your original expectations, right?

02:04:07.620 | We've been fighting wars,

02:04:10.000 | but we haven't been fighting wars as societies.

02:04:13.740 | We've been fighting wars

02:04:15.100 | as a small sliver of our population.

02:04:18.460 | Something like 1% of our population

02:04:21.020 | is involved with the military

02:04:22.460 | because we have an all-volunteer force.

02:04:24.920 | And that means that it's easier for our politicians

02:04:29.020 | to go to war because they don't face conscription,

02:04:34.020 | they don't have the draft,

02:04:36.500 | which affects every family in the country,

02:04:39.620 | and because the number of people in the volunteer force

02:04:44.620 | is such a narrow stratum of the population.

02:04:49.560 | And so they've been getting away with this

02:04:51.980 | because the professional army

02:04:53.700 | is much better than the conscript army,

02:04:56.140 | and an all-volunteer force is much preferable

02:04:58.980 | from a military point of view.

02:05:01.220 | But from a societal point of view,

02:05:03.380 | it enables you to go to war too easily as a politician,

02:05:09.340 | and it doesn't engage the society

02:05:11.720 | the same way that the Ukrainian society

02:05:14.180 | is completely engaged from those young hackers

02:05:18.340 | all the way up to those grandmothers.

02:05:20.820 | - Let me ask you, you're a scholar of history,

02:05:23.380 | a scholar of geopolitics,

02:05:27.940 | and you're also a human being.

02:05:30.140 | - That's kind of you, Lex.

02:05:31.780 | I'll take that.

02:05:32.620 | - What's the value, what's the hope,

02:05:36.620 | what's the power of conversation here?

02:05:39.660 | If you could sit down with Vladimir Putin

02:05:41.860 | and have a conversation versus bullets,

02:05:46.860 | human exchange words, is there hope for those?

02:05:51.160 | And if so, what would you talk about?

02:05:53.140 | What would you ask him?

02:05:55.660 | - Well, Henry Kissinger, you alluded to his op-ed.

02:05:58.820 | He's had many private meetings with President Putin

02:06:01.620 | over a long time.

02:06:05.380 | President Biden, the previous presidents,

02:06:13.460 | secretaries of state, officials below secretary of state,

02:06:18.460 | the head of the CIA,

02:06:20.860 | evidently met with President Putin in the fall

02:06:24.580 | when he was massing the troops on the border

02:06:27.940 | before he invaded.

02:06:29.260 | And we sent the head of the CIA and Putin received him.

02:06:34.040 | Somebody he evidently respects

02:06:36.980 | or was at least willing to meet,

02:06:39.220 | unlike other members of the administration.

02:06:41.420 | So a lot of people are talking to him

02:06:45.080 | in some form or another for the 22 years

02:06:48.700 | he's been in power.

02:06:51.460 | And I'm not sure it's had what I would call

02:06:55.300 | their desired effect.

02:06:57.380 | - Well, the nature of the conversation is interesting too,

02:07:00.020 | and also the timing, which is post-February 22nd,

02:07:03.660 | is a different time.

02:07:05.340 | And also another aspect,

02:07:07.460 | which Oliver Stone mentioned, interestingly,

02:07:12.660 | that there's something about COVID and the pandemic

02:07:15.940 | that creates isolation, the distancing.

02:07:18.540 | It's such a silly little nuanced thing,

02:07:21.660 | but maybe it's actually has a profound impact

02:07:25.740 | on the human being, the human mind of Vladimir Putin,

02:07:29.180 | that there is something about an in-person meeting

02:07:32.140 | and not across a table that's far too large,

02:07:35.540 | but sort of the intimacy of a one human-to-human

02:07:38.860 | in-person conversation,

02:07:40.460 | that there's something distinctly powerful

02:07:43.820 | about that reminder there,

02:07:45.860 | that as Putin says in the narrative, in the propaganda,

02:07:50.020 | that we're all one people.

02:07:52.180 | There is truth to that,

02:07:53.980 | that this entirety of humanity is one people.

02:07:57.220 | And you're kind of reminded by that

02:07:59.580 | when you're sitting together.

02:08:01.140 | - People who have sat across the table from him,

02:08:06.420 | whether at 30 yards or at three,

02:08:10.340 | have remarked upon this feeling of isolation

02:08:15.660 | that has affected him, the pandemic.

02:08:18.860 | I think there must be something to that

02:08:21.140 | if several people who've been in the room with him

02:08:25.020 | are remarking on it.

02:08:26.180 | Everybody that I know and I've been able to talk to

02:08:31.140 | who's had a meeting with him in the past 10 years,

02:08:34.140 | including Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State,

02:08:39.460 | has said that Putin spends a lot of time

02:08:45.940 | enumerating his grievances.

02:08:47.980 | He goes through a monologue of his grievances.

02:08:52.980 | And then the West did this,

02:08:54.620 | and then the West lied to us about that.

02:08:57.500 | And then the West cheated us on this.

02:09:00.940 | And so it's not the conversation

02:09:03.660 | that you're encouraging of common humanity.

02:09:06.860 | It's that roiling resentment volcano

02:09:10.820 | that's just exploding and exploding.

02:09:13.100 | - The resentment.

02:09:14.380 | - And by the time he gets through

02:09:17.820 | the monologue of the grievances,

02:09:21.220 | the time of the meeting is expired or over time.

02:09:25.340 | - That's a brilliant statement,

02:09:26.780 | but that's where the skill of conversation comes in.

02:09:29.500 | Like when you're facing a bull with a red cloth,

02:09:32.820 | you have to learn how to avoid the long list of grievances

02:09:35.420 | and get to the humanity.

02:09:37.300 | That's a really important skill.

02:09:38.740 | - It's a skill.

02:09:39.580 | For sure it's a skill,

02:09:40.860 | and it's the highest level skill of a diplomat

02:09:44.060 | to be able to reach some type of common understanding

02:09:47.700 | when interests and worldviews clash so much.

02:09:51.540 | But here's your challenge, Lex.

02:09:53.540 | Your challenge is Russia wants to impose

02:09:59.780 | a closed sphere of influence on its neighbors.

02:10:05.220 | It wants to dictate what its neighbors can and can't do.

02:10:10.420 | It wants to exert influence,

02:10:12.840 | not by the power of its example,

02:10:15.100 | not by the freedom of its people,

02:10:18.300 | not by the dynamism of its diversified economy,

02:10:22.380 | but it wants to exert influence

02:10:24.700 | just because it deserves that,

02:10:27.300 | just because it's a great power,

02:10:30.180 | just because, and on and on and on.

02:10:33.300 | It's a civilization unto itself.

02:10:36.100 | And it wants that, and we can't give that.

02:10:40.640 | The reason that Russia was not integrated into the West

02:10:44.620 | was not for lack of trying.

02:10:46.060 | It was because Russia ultimately spurned the integration

02:10:51.860 | because it was about what terms

02:10:54.160 | the integration would come on.

02:10:56.500 | Would you come into the West and observe Western rules

02:11:00.100 | and be another country, meaning just another country?

02:11:06.060 | There's Poland and there's Austria,

02:11:10.620 | and there's little tiny Monaco, and there's Russia.

02:11:15.620 | And you're just one of those countries.

02:11:19.500 | And Russia's answer to that was no,

02:11:21.920 | we're not just one of those countries.

02:11:24.420 | We need special rules.

02:11:26.660 | We need special conditions.

02:11:29.400 | We'll integrate, but only as a special country,

02:11:33.420 | meaning like at the UN, where all countries are sovereign,

02:11:38.580 | all countries are members, but Russia has a veto

02:11:42.340 | on what countries can and can't do.

02:11:44.860 | Those were the terms on which they were willing to integrate.

02:11:48.860 | And those were the terms that no leader

02:11:51.060 | of a Western country or the United States,

02:11:54.000 | or the G7, or fill in the blank, can grant to Russia.

02:11:58.080 | It's very well known that Vladimir Putin

02:12:03.820 | was one of the first, maybe the first person,

02:12:06.460 | first leader, foreign leader, to call President Bush

02:12:10.420 | after the 9/11 tragedy.

02:12:13.420 | They didn't connect right away.

02:12:15.420 | President Bush was not in Washington,

02:12:17.860 | but eventually they did speak.

02:12:20.300 | He condemned the terrorist attack.

02:12:22.040 | He offered Russian support, which he delivered on,

02:12:26.420 | the use of some Russian logistics

02:12:28.580 | for our Afghanistan operations.

02:12:32.220 | And a lot of people point to that,

02:12:34.820 | and they say, there it is.

02:12:36.500 | Russia wanted to cooperate, and did cooperate,

02:12:41.500 | and we spurned them, or we failed to appreciate

02:12:45.780 | Russia's cooperation.

02:12:47.580 | And so therefore, Russia was cheated,

02:12:50.020 | or Russia was lied to, or Russia's grievances are legitimate.

02:12:53.540 | But here's the problem with that argument, Lex.

02:12:57.020 | In exchange for that support, Vladimir Putin

02:13:02.600 | asked in return from President Bush

02:13:05.040 | for a free hand in the former Soviet space,

02:13:09.280 | that closed hierarchical sphere of influence,

02:13:13.280 | where Russia would exert influence coercively

02:13:17.440 | over countries that were sovereign.

02:13:19.180 | And no American president could grant that,

02:13:23.480 | and President Bush was right.

02:13:25.000 | He said no.

02:13:25.920 | And so the attempted cooperation blew up.

02:13:31.900 | But who's at fault there?

02:13:33.280 | Should there be a non-voluntary sphere of influence?

02:13:40.720 | Should that be granted?

02:13:41.960 | Or should you face up to attempts to do that?

02:13:46.800 | Let's take a little detour here into China for a second.

02:13:52.460 | China had this brilliant grand strategy,

02:13:56.680 | which was, sure, America is hostile,

02:14:01.760 | because America is hegemonic,

02:14:03.580 | America wants to control the world,

02:14:05.800 | America will never let China rise,

02:14:07.840 | America will do everything it can to hold China down.

02:14:11.420 | So we're gonna have hostility from America.

02:14:14.960 | We don't wanna decouple,

02:14:16.780 | because we need that high-end technology transfer.

02:14:20.520 | Either we buy it or we steal it,

02:14:22.280 | 'cause America and the rest of the West

02:14:24.160 | has all the technology that we need.

02:14:26.660 | We have some of it domestically,

02:14:29.120 | more than before by a lot,

02:14:31.120 | but we're still dependent, so we can't decouple.

02:14:33.960 | So we'll have the hostility,

02:14:35.640 | but there'll be a line we don't cross,

02:14:37.480 | just so that we don't lose the technology transfer.

02:14:40.160 | Till made in China 2035 is accomplished,

02:14:45.660 | and we're self-sufficient domestically,

02:14:48.440 | and AI in every other area that's critical.

02:14:51.000 | But hostility from America.

02:14:53.940 | But we have an ace in the hole.

02:14:55.900 | Our ace in the hole is Europe.

02:14:58.120 | Europe hates conflict.

02:15:00.160 | They're all about trade.

02:15:01.600 | It doesn't matter how evil you are.

02:15:04.760 | They love to trade,

02:15:05.720 | because van der door handel, change through trade.

02:15:10.600 | They have this illusion

02:15:11.720 | that you're gonna become a better country

02:15:14.360 | if they trade with you,

02:15:15.560 | and you won't have conflict, war, and hostilities

02:15:18.040 | if you trade.

02:15:19.520 | And so we have this European ace in the hole.

02:15:22.480 | We're hostile with the Americans.

02:15:24.320 | We're still buying or stealing their technology.

02:15:27.880 | And better than that even,

02:15:29.680 | the Europeans are not hostile to us at all.

02:15:32.680 | They love to trade with us,

02:15:33.800 | and they wanna trade more,

02:15:35.160 | and they're our biggest trading partner already.

02:15:38.240 | And lo and behold,

02:15:39.200 | Xi Jinping sides with Vladimir Putin

02:15:41.760 | in the aggression in Ukraine.

02:15:44.280 | He doesn't side with him providing military equipment.

02:15:49.440 | He doesn't provide technology transfer,

02:15:51.960 | but he provides public support

02:15:55.640 | and massive pro-Russian propaganda

02:15:58.080 | to the whole Chinese population.

02:15:59.960 | And the Europeans say, wait a minute.

02:16:04.320 | This is an invasion of a sovereign country in Europe.

02:16:07.640 | What do you mean?

02:16:08.660 | You're not condemning Vladimir Putin's invasion.

02:16:12.960 | And so that wedge that the Chinese had

02:16:15.720 | that was the basis of their grand strategy,

02:16:18.400 | that wedge between the US and Europe

02:16:21.120 | when it came to China policy,

02:16:23.080 | that wedge is gone now.

02:16:24.880 | Xi Jinping destroyed it.

02:16:27.280 | And the Europeans and the Americans

02:16:29.240 | are coming close together

02:16:31.400 | on Ukraine and Russia policy for sure,

02:16:34.800 | but also more and more on China policy.

02:16:37.500 | And so that was a pretty big sacrifice

02:16:40.800 | for the Chinese leader to make.

02:16:42.800 | And what did he get in return?

02:16:44.320 | He gets hydrocarbons from Russia at reduced prices.

02:16:50.040 | And the Chinese get hydrocarbons from a lot of countries.

02:16:54.620 | They have a completely diverse supply chain

02:16:58.740 | for their energy.

02:16:59.700 | - So what do you think Xi Jinping is thinking now?

02:17:02.220 | Was it a mistake?

02:17:04.620 | - I'd like to know, Lex.

02:17:06.220 | I'd like you to be able to sit down with him

02:17:08.660 | across from this table here on your podcast

02:17:11.740 | and pose that same question to him

02:17:13.460 | because we have no idea.

02:17:14.860 | - There's a language barrier that's fascinating.

02:17:16.800 | By the way, you as a scholar of Stalin,

02:17:20.180 | do you think we'll ever break through

02:17:21.660 | the language barrier to China?

02:17:24.140 | Not ever, I apologize.

02:17:25.620 | In the next few years because there is a gigantic

02:17:29.260 | cultural and language barrier

02:17:30.900 | between the West and the Chinese.

02:17:32.580 | - China's a great civilization.

02:17:34.540 | China predates the United States by millennia.

02:17:39.540 | China's accomplishments are breathtaking.

02:17:42.580 | But China's also led by, let's be honest,

02:17:46.260 | a Communist Party monopoly

02:17:49.820 | which engages in a lot of criminal behavior.

02:17:53.020 | Lex, Tibet is Ukraine.

02:17:56.260 | Xinjiang is Ukraine.

02:17:59.820 | Hong Kong is Ukraine.

02:18:03.340 | Let alone support for Putin.

02:18:07.300 | This is before we've even discussed Taiwan.

02:18:09.580 | And so now the Europeans are coming to see this

02:18:13.260 | and the Americans are coming to understand this

02:18:16.360 | that maybe trading with a regime like that,

02:18:20.100 | morally, politically, criminally,

02:18:25.560 | Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong,

02:18:28.700 | how is that different from what Putin is doing in Ukraine?

02:18:31.960 | I'd be hard-pressed to differentiate that ultimately

02:18:35.760 | even though the analogies are not exact.

02:18:38.880 | And so the Chinese, it's like that guy Leonov,

02:18:43.880 | the author of "Li Xaletia," the great memoir

02:18:48.880 | of the late Soviet period, the end of the Soviet Union.

02:18:52.720 | You know that they spend all this time

02:18:55.160 | and all these resources blackening our image

02:18:58.160 | but we supply them with endless material

02:19:00.480 | to blacken our image.

02:19:02.340 | That's where Xi Jinping's regime is right now, Lex.

02:19:05.720 | And so they have a big dilemma on their side.

02:19:09.600 | It's a Western world and they've united the Western world

02:19:14.280 | and reawoken the Western world to the fact

02:19:19.280 | that China is a threat to the values,

02:19:25.380 | the institutions and values of the West.

02:19:27.680 | And that trade is not transforming China quite the opposite.

02:19:31.120 | We'll see if this endures.

02:19:34.080 | Maybe it doesn't endure, maybe it's a fleeting moment,

02:19:36.940 | maybe this is not an inflection point.

02:19:39.600 | Maybe the war in Ukraine ends more quickly than we think.

02:19:43.840 | And maybe like you said, the Chinese and the Indians

02:19:47.160 | and the rest of them, the leaders there,

02:19:49.020 | they get their wish that it ends and the world moves on

02:19:53.480 | and forgets or says, let's try again

02:19:57.760 | to resume our mutual understanding,

02:20:01.740 | our mutually beneficial trade and everything else.

02:20:04.880 | Maybe it's a passing phase, we can't exclude that.

02:20:07.420 | I'm very poor at predicting the future.

02:20:09.700 | But the moment is not a good one for the Chinese regime,

02:20:14.820 | let alone the fact that he's trying to impose

02:20:18.560 | an unprecedented in the modern era,

02:20:22.280 | third term for himself as president

02:20:25.380 | in the fall at the next party Congress,

02:20:28.420 | becoming president for life, de facto, a Mao-like figure.

02:20:34.420 | And he's now got to do that within this environment

02:20:39.420 | where he has damaged Chinese grand strategy

02:20:45.160 | and damaged the reputation of China

02:20:47.720 | and its relationships across the world.

02:20:51.040 | Maybe not permanently, but significantly.

02:20:53.820 | In addition to the problems they have at home,

02:20:57.180 | demography, as you know, a middle income trap,

02:21:02.320 | and then the regulatory insanity of Chinese communist rule

02:21:07.320 | that we've seen with the tech companies that you know well,

02:21:10.800 | where they've destroyed all of that value,

02:21:12.980 | with the blow up of their property sector,

02:21:17.180 | because it was a massive bubble and that's still playing out.

02:21:22.000 | And this time it's the same,

02:21:24.200 | meaning this time it's not different.

02:21:27.080 | When it comes to a property blowout,

02:21:29.080 | it has enormous effects on middle class balance sheets

02:21:33.260 | and their ability to remain consumers

02:21:37.620 | and drive the economy,

02:21:38.860 | which is the model that they have to share.

02:21:40.980 | So he's got a litany of challenges,

02:21:43.860 | independent even of the fact that he sided

02:21:48.220 | with his pal, Vladimir Putin,

02:21:51.700 | and their bromance is costing China

02:21:54.340 | very, very significantly.

02:21:56.060 | - If you close your eyes.

02:21:58.780 | - Yes.

02:22:00.020 | - And 100 years ago, 1922, and you think about the future,

02:22:05.020 | I wonder if you can hear the drums of war,

02:22:08.440 | predicting the 30s, predicting the Great Depression

02:22:15.060 | and the resentment that builds, the economic resentment,

02:22:20.300 | the cultural resentment, the geopolitical resentment

02:22:22.820 | that builds and leads to World War II.

02:22:26.100 | It, at least to me, when I close my eyes,

02:22:28.900 | I can hear the drums of war that are still ahead of us.

02:22:33.340 | And it's possible that we're,

02:22:36.940 | there, 2022 will materialize in a similar way as did 1922.

02:22:41.940 | - I have my eyes closed, Lex.

02:22:46.980 | - Do you hear anything?

02:22:48.060 | - And I sure hope that that's not what happens.

02:22:51.860 | But I'm looking in 1922.

02:22:54.380 | It's an epoch I know well.

02:22:56.740 | And I don't see the future that unfolds.

02:23:00.200 | I would not have predicted it had I been alive then.

02:23:02.960 | I see the war behind us.

02:23:07.580 | I see prosperity on the horizon.

02:23:10.980 | Yes, inflation in Germany and some many other

02:23:14.820 | difficult issues, but there are more democracies now

02:23:19.320 | than there were before the war,

02:23:20.720 | and the old empires are gone.

02:23:23.180 | And there's a cultural efflorescence,

02:23:25.380 | and there's modernism in the arts,

02:23:27.220 | and there's women entering the public sphere,

02:23:30.360 | and there's all this fantastic new technology

02:23:32.660 | like automobiles.

02:23:33.820 | And I'm looking at the future from 1922,

02:23:38.380 | and I'm not seeing the Great Depression,

02:23:40.700 | and I'm not seeing World War II,

02:23:42.260 | and I'm not seeing the Holocaust,

02:23:44.580 | because I don't predict the future.

02:23:48.020 | And nobody in 1922 could see that future,

02:23:51.140 | although I guess there were some clairvoyants

02:23:54.220 | who predicted it, but--

02:23:56.260 | - But you're not one of them.

02:23:57.660 | - I'm not one of them,

02:23:59.540 | but this is what I know, Lex, from studying history.

02:24:03.380 | What I know is stuff happens.

02:24:05.480 | (laughing)

02:24:07.100 | In other words--

02:24:07.940 | - Very deep insight.

02:24:09.300 | - In other words, Lex, we're watching Ukraine war right now,

02:24:13.660 | and all of our attention is focused on that.

02:24:16.060 | And it's like the economists say in their textbooks

02:24:19.580 | when their powerful models are employed,

02:24:24.060 | and there's this line that says,

02:24:26.060 | "All other factors held constant, comma,"

02:24:31.060 | and then the model works.

02:24:33.420 | And you get this really great result,

02:24:35.180 | this very powerful predictor and analysis of the model.

02:24:39.680 | And the whole game is all other factors held constant.

02:24:44.320 | So the Russia-Ukraine war that we've been discussing,

02:24:48.260 | and this could happen and that could happen,

02:24:50.660 | but you know what stuff could happen, Lex?

02:24:53.140 | For example, the Israeli government could decide

02:24:57.020 | this summer that it's gonna bomb Iran,

02:25:00.260 | because no Israeli government will tolerate

02:25:03.020 | Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.

02:25:05.900 | And since President Trump unilaterally exited

02:25:10.280 | from the multi-power nuclear agreement,

02:25:14.580 | Iran is now much closer to the bomb than they were.

02:25:18.140 | When the United States was still in that agreement.

02:25:21.260 | And you tell me the Israeli government that says,

02:25:24.220 | "Sure, it's fine, it's okay, Iran can get the bomb."

02:25:27.020 | And so maybe that happens.

02:25:29.820 | And maybe that happens as early as this summer,

02:25:31.880 | as Iran gets closer and closer and closer to the bomb.

02:25:35.780 | Maybe that guy in North Korea decides it's his time,

02:25:40.780 | just like his grandfather, right, in 1950,

02:25:45.060 | decided it's time, we're gonna reunify,

02:25:48.320 | unquote, the Korean Peninsula.

02:25:50.800 | Maybe, I don't know, Lex, fill in the blank.

02:25:56.060 | Something's gonna happen, it's not gonna be what I predict,

02:25:59.260 | it's not gonna be what I'm watching,

02:26:01.920 | it's gonna be obvious only after it happens, not before.

02:26:05.620 | And then it's gonna upend the table.

02:26:08.740 | And all of a sudden-- - Everything changes.

02:26:12.860 | - We're gonna be in a different environment,

02:26:14.700 | different circumstances, and is Ukraine still as central

02:26:19.700 | at that point as it seems to be right now?

02:26:23.220 | I don't know the answer to that question.

02:26:24.940 | - Let me ask two rapid-fire questions.

02:26:28.100 | You're only allowed to have one minute,

02:26:29.660 | and it's about predicting the future.

02:26:32.220 | Okay, question one, Vladimir Putin,

02:26:36.440 | when will he no longer be in office,

02:26:39.820 | and will he step down or be overthrown?

02:26:44.340 | What's your prediction,

02:26:46.460 | and a brief explanation of that prediction?

02:26:49.420 | Now, nobody can predict the future,

02:26:52.020 | but what's your sense now?

02:26:53.580 | Some people are saying the pressure is building,

02:26:56.900 | he's going to be overthrown or stepped down

02:26:59.540 | at the end of this year.

02:27:01.100 | And some people say, surely he's going to outlast

02:27:06.100 | Stalin's rule of 30-plus years.

02:27:09.220 | - No evidence of a coup yet.

02:27:11.980 | - None whatsoever, yet.

02:27:16.580 | He's pretty much at life expectancy for a Russian male.

02:27:22.420 | Those are bad numbers.

02:27:25.620 | He's 69, gonna be 70.

02:27:29.300 | So he's lived the life of a Russian male already,

02:27:32.660 | but he's got better doctors than the majority

02:27:36.140 | of the Russian males in that, let's say,

02:27:40.860 | comparison set.

02:27:42.740 | So he could live a very long time with good doctors.

02:27:46.380 | So there could be a coup at some point,

02:27:49.700 | but there's none today in evidence.

02:27:54.380 | He could go because he's reached the life expectancy,

02:27:58.400 | or he could stay for a long time.

02:28:01.020 | The thing to watch about this is an organization

02:28:06.020 | that nobody pays attention to.

02:28:08.580 | The FSO, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Akhranny,

02:28:12.740 | which is the Praetorian Guard,

02:28:15.140 | the self-standing bodyguard directorate,

02:28:18.700 | the only one, the only organization in Russia

02:28:21.900 | that has any access to him.

02:28:24.260 | We've seen no disloyalty, no breaking of ranks,

02:28:28.700 | no defections, nothing in the public realm

02:28:31.860 | and in open sources about any divisions

02:28:35.700 | or problems in the FSO, in the Praetorian Guard.

02:28:39.860 | So if you can't break that, change that,

02:28:43.560 | elicit defections there, you can't overturn him.

02:28:50.140 | Authoritarian regimes, Lex, they're terrible.

02:28:52.900 | They fail at everything.

02:28:54.700 | They can't feed their people.

02:28:57.500 | They have trouble achieving any goals.

02:29:00.760 | They only have to be good, however, at one thing.

02:29:04.240 | They only have to be good at the complete suppression

02:29:06.820 | of political alternatives.

02:29:09.000 | If you can suppress political alternatives,

02:29:12.440 | you can fail at everything else,

02:29:14.580 | but you can survive as an authoritarian regime.

02:29:17.680 | So you watch Navalny.

02:29:19.180 | He's still alive. - That's question number two.

02:29:21.780 | - Okay, Lex, you go for it. - That's my question number two.

02:29:23.980 | That's my second rapid-fire question,

02:29:26.800 | is what happens to Navalny?

02:29:28.420 | What are the possible conclusions of,

02:29:30.640 | what you said, quite possibly,

02:29:32.240 | the second most influential, powerful figure in Russia?

02:29:36.260 | Is he going to die in jail?

02:29:41.020 | Will he become the next president of Russia?

02:29:44.060 | Well, what are the possible--

02:29:45.860 | - I wish I knew, Lex.

02:29:47.520 | I've been surprised that he's still alive.

02:29:50.580 | I've been worried that he will be killed in prison

02:29:54.800 | in a staged fight.

02:29:56.220 | Some security officer, prison guard,

02:30:01.740 | puts on a prison outfit, takes a lead pipe,

02:30:04.420 | goes into the cell, they have a, quote, fight,

02:30:07.220 | and Navalny is killed.

02:30:08.700 | I've been afraid of that, but he's still alive,

02:30:11.640 | even though he's serving a long sentence.

02:30:14.500 | So that leads me to guess that people inside

02:30:19.140 | the Putin regime, and maybe President Putin himself,

02:30:22.020 | understand that Navalny is their ticket to lift sanctions.

02:30:29.100 | That Navalny is even more popular outside of Russia

02:30:33.740 | than he is inside of Russia.

02:30:35.180 | You know, he's the leader, in many ways,

02:30:37.580 | of the political opposition in the country,

02:30:41.060 | even while still in prison.

02:30:42.780 | His organization's been destroyed.

02:30:45.500 | But he doesn't have majority support in the population

02:30:48.740 | by any stretch of the imagination.

02:30:50.380 | But he's a big figure in the West,

02:30:52.760 | including here in the US.

02:30:55.180 | And so Navalny could be their ticket,

02:30:57.500 | their kind of get out of jail card,

02:31:00.020 | meaning they release him from prison,

02:31:02.620 | he gets appointed, I don't know,

02:31:03.980 | prime minister even by the Putin regime,

02:31:06.560 | if he were willing to accept such a position,

02:31:09.500 | and I have my doubts about that.

02:31:11.820 | And then that's how they lobby

02:31:14.500 | to remove the sanctions against them.

02:31:17.260 | So he's a card that President Putin could play.

02:31:20.440 | And so maybe that's the reason he's still alive,

02:31:24.900 | or maybe there are other reasons that we don't know.

02:31:28.540 | And so some alternative to Putin

02:31:31.860 | is more likely to arise inside his gang,

02:31:36.860 | Putin's shayka, as they say, right, inside his gang,

02:31:41.660 | where they tire of his mistakes,

02:31:45.820 | they tire of his self-defeating actions,

02:31:49.600 | and they say, patriotically for Russia,

02:31:53.260 | "We need to do something against, move against this guy,

02:31:57.020 | "because he's hurting our country,

02:31:59.960 | "and also because I could do better.

02:32:02.360 | "I'm ambitious as well as patriotic."

02:32:05.880 | But once again, the problem there, Alex,

02:32:07.960 | is Putin is surrounded by this cocoon known as the FSO.

02:32:12.960 | He meets on Zoom,

02:32:17.020 | predominantly with the rest of the government,

02:32:20.000 | including with the defense and security officials.

02:32:24.000 | They don't have frequent access to his person.

02:32:27.880 | And as you were alluding earlier to the pandemic,

02:32:31.420 | they have to quarantine for two weeks

02:32:33.320 | before every meeting with him.

02:32:35.480 | And moreover, you know, Alex, they don't know where he is.

02:32:39.680 | You see, when they're on Zoom with him,

02:32:41.680 | and the room, it's the Valdai.

02:32:47.760 | His office in the Valdai region looks the same

02:32:51.920 | as his office in Sochi,

02:32:54.440 | or his office outside of Moscow in Novoagriov.

02:32:58.400 | They're made up to look very similar on Zoom.

02:33:00.700 | And sure, some signs, they're looking, where is it?

02:33:05.760 | But maybe they don't know,

02:33:08.520 | and so you're gonna move on him,

02:33:10.900 | and you're gonna jump him in his Kremlin,

02:33:13.640 | his dacha outside Moscow.

02:33:17.240 | And it turns out he's in Sochi, or vice versa.

02:33:20.240 | And it turns out the FSO is loyal to him,

02:33:23.280 | and won't let you anyway.

02:33:24.920 | So, Alex, we don't know,

02:33:27.640 | but we watch this FSO really closely,

02:33:30.640 | and we think that the elites, if not Putin,

02:33:34.160 | but maybe Putin too, understand Navalny

02:33:37.240 | as a really big potential political card

02:33:40.400 | that they could play.

02:33:41.960 | - And one last question, the biggest question.

02:33:46.040 | You studied some of the darkest aspects

02:33:49.320 | of human history, human nature.

02:33:52.160 | Let me ask the why question.

02:33:54.600 | What are we doing here?

02:33:56.360 | What's the meaning of our existence,

02:33:59.840 | our life here on Earth?

02:34:01.840 | What are we humans trying to get at here?

02:34:04.640 | - I can't answer that question either,

02:34:07.120 | but I can say that having a purposeful life

02:34:11.360 | is actually not that hard.

02:34:15.640 | You can't, you're not Gandhi, right?

02:34:18.840 | You're not President Roosevelt.

02:34:21.480 | You're not gonna transform a country,

02:34:23.760 | or a civilization, or become immortal

02:34:28.040 | because of your courage, and your insight,

02:34:31.440 | and your genius at critical moments.

02:34:33.880 | But you live in an environment,

02:34:37.360 | you're in a school, you're in a workplace,

02:34:41.200 | you're somewhere where you can affect other people

02:34:44.800 | in a positive way.

02:34:46.680 | It can be not just about yourself,

02:34:48.700 | but it can be about them.

02:34:50.180 | And you can have a positive impact

02:34:53.320 | on other people's lives through the work that you do,

02:34:57.320 | whether that's your employment, or your charity,

02:35:00.080 | or your spare time, or your work time.

02:35:03.220 | It can be by modeling proper behavior, right?

02:35:07.240 | Admitting your mistakes, hard to do, but necessary.

02:35:12.240 | Remembering that you don't know everything,

02:35:14.660 | you can't predict the future,

02:35:16.060 | but you don't even know everything

02:35:17.500 | in your areas of expertise.

02:35:20.240 | Painfully reminded of that humility at times,

02:35:23.660 | but remind yourself to.

02:35:26.000 | So you can lead a life that can show others

02:35:31.000 | what good values are, and you can lead a life

02:35:35.480 | that dedicates yourself not only

02:35:38.360 | to your own material well-being,

02:35:40.920 | but to the well-being and to the development

02:35:43.480 | of others around you.

02:35:44.400 | And it can be on a humble scale.

02:35:47.320 | It can be in a small classroom, or a small workplace,

02:35:50.340 | a small work team, but it can be done.

02:35:54.740 | And you can be reminded that having a positive impact,

02:35:58.720 | even on one other person, gives far greater meaning

02:36:02.840 | to your own life, and is profoundly satisfying,

02:36:06.580 | much more satisfying than the attention you might get,

02:36:10.900 | let's say, on social media, or awards you might receive.

02:36:15.340 | There's nothing wrong with pursuing those.

02:36:17.760 | People pursue them, and it's a free society.

02:36:21.220 | But leading a purposeful life intentionally is possible.

02:36:27.460 | - Even just one person, I love the expression,

02:36:30.620 | save one life, save the world.

02:36:33.440 | Just focusing on the local, on the tiny little difference

02:36:38.100 | you can make in the world can somehow ripple.

02:36:40.740 | - Every day.

02:36:42.100 | If you think about that every single day,

02:36:44.540 | you're a better person.

02:36:47.700 | We're a better society.

02:36:49.540 | - And maybe you get to add a bit of love

02:36:52.220 | to the world after all.

02:36:53.820 | Stephen, this is a huge honor for many reasons,

02:36:59.220 | one of which is I can just tell how much care

02:37:02.660 | you put into this conversation, and how much,

02:37:06.980 | I use the word love a lot, but I just feel the love

02:37:11.020 | that just even the respect you give me,

02:37:14.620 | which I can't tell you how energizing that is,

02:37:17.780 | how much that gives me strength

02:37:19.900 | for my own silly little pursuits.

02:37:22.580 | Thank you so much for doing that.

02:37:24.840 | Thank you for not just talking today,

02:37:26.380 | but giving me so much respect

02:37:29.180 | just with everything you're doing.

02:37:30.660 | I really appreciate that.

02:37:32.340 | It makes me feel special.

02:37:33.780 | So thank you so much for sitting down and talking today.

02:37:35.980 | - Mutual, Lex, thank you as well,

02:37:38.500 | and thank you for the respect that you've shown me.

02:37:41.620 | These are really difficult issues

02:37:43.420 | that don't have simple answers,

02:37:45.700 | but that doesn't mean we give up.

02:37:47.360 | We have to keep thinking and learning and trying

02:37:52.980 | and finding solutions in everything we do,

02:37:56.100 | including on these big global tragedies

02:37:59.420 | that we live through.

02:38:01.100 | And it's heartbreaking what's going on.

02:38:04.620 | It just breaks my heart every day.

02:38:06.620 | A person who studies this has been studying this

02:38:09.220 | for decades and it keeps happening.

02:38:12.120 | And you think again, and yes, it is again,

02:38:16.500 | but we still have to keep trying.

02:38:19.260 | And we have to be inspired by those people

02:38:22.060 | who are more courageous than we are

02:38:24.260 | and sacrifice more than we sacrifice.

02:38:27.540 | For me, the Russian invasion of Ukraine,

02:38:30.660 | the war in Ukraine is experienced in my study at home,

02:38:35.920 | and in my office at Princeton,

02:38:37.660 | or my coming office at Stanford

02:38:40.140 | when I move full-time to Stanford in September,

02:38:43.180 | or it's experienced far away in safety and in comfort.

02:38:48.180 | And we have to remember that too,

02:38:50.860 | when we talk about these things,

02:38:52.440 | when we answer your questions, right?

02:38:55.080 | That as we speak and as we comment

02:38:58.180 | and think we're experts on these things

02:39:00.420 | from the comfort of our existence,

02:39:03.420 | that there are people in those tragedies right now.

02:39:07.320 | - With no power, with no food,

02:39:09.160 | with full uncertainty about the future

02:39:12.600 | of the health of their children.

02:39:14.320 | - That's it.

02:39:15.440 | - And I've also seen, because I have family in both places,

02:39:20.000 | homes that were home for,

02:39:24.240 | buildings that were homes for generations now in rubble.

02:39:28.420 | So--

02:39:30.520 | - Yes, Lex, it just, it hurts.

02:39:33.160 | And it's Syria, where 350,000,

02:39:38.160 | at least by UN estimates, died,

02:39:41.260 | and Russia participated in that.

02:39:43.960 | And it's Yemen, and it's so many other places

02:39:47.920 | that don't have the same degree of attention

02:39:50.640 | that a European country like Ukraine has.

02:39:53.260 | But yeah, we have to remember also

02:39:57.960 | that in addition to Ukraine,

02:40:00.560 | and then there's things right home here in New York City,

02:40:04.640 | where children are without food,

02:40:07.220 | which is just inexcusable in a country this rich.

02:40:11.000 | - So we shouldn't forget in our study of leaders,

02:40:13.560 | in our study of geopolitics,

02:40:15.080 | that ultimately it's about the humanity.

02:40:16.800 | It's about the human beings.

02:40:18.200 | - Okay, Lex.

02:40:20.760 | - Human suffering.

02:40:21.720 | Thank you so much, Stephen.

02:40:22.560 | - Thank you.

02:40:23.380 | - This is an amazing conversation.

02:40:24.800 | Talk to you again soon.

02:40:25.880 | - My pleasure.

02:40:26.780 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:40:29.320 | with Stephen Kotkin.

02:40:31.080 | To support this podcast,

02:40:32.480 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:40:35.520 | And now, let me leave you with some words

02:40:38.440 | from Mahatma Gandhi.

02:40:39.800 | When I despair, I remember that all through history,

02:40:44.880 | the way of truth and love have always won.

02:40:47.260 | There have been tyrants and murderers,

02:40:50.880 | and for a time, they can seem invincible,

02:40:54.120 | but in the end, they always fall.

02:40:56.680 | Thank you for listening,

02:40:59.080 | and hope to see you next time.

02:41:00.920 | (upbeat music)

02:41:03.500 | (upbeat music)

02:41:06.080 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #289

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