Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
stephen codkin his second time on the
podcast
stephen is one of the greatest
historians of all time specializing in
20th and 21st century history of russia
and eastern europe and he has written
what is widely considered to be the
definitive biography of stalin in three
volumes two of which have been published
and the third
focused on world war ii and the years
after he is in the midst of writing now
this conversation includes a response to
my previous podcast episode with oliver
stone that was focused on vladimir putin
and the war in ukraine
stephen provides a hard-hitting
criticism of putin and the russian
invasion of ukraine weighed and
contextualized deeply in the complex
geopolitics and history of our world
all with an intensity and rigor but also
wit and humor that makes stephen one of
my favorite human beings
please also allow me to mention
something that has been apparent and has
weighed heavy on my heart and mind
this conversation with stephen codkin
makes it more dangerous for me to travel
in russia
the previous conversation with oliver
stone
makes it more dangerous for me to travel
in ukraine
this makes me sad
but it is the way of the world
i will nevertheless travel to both
ukraine and russia
i need to once again see with my own
eyes
the land of my ancestors
where they suffered but flourished and
eventually gave birth
to see the old me
i need to hear directly the pain anger
and hope from both ukrainians and
russians
i won't give details to my travel plans
in terms of location and timing but the
trip is very soon
whatever happens
i'm truly grateful for every day i'm
alive
and i hope to spend each such day adding
a bit of love to the world
i love you all
this is the lex friedman podcast
and now
dear friends
here's steven
godkin
you are one of the great historians of
our time specializing in the man the
leader the historical figure of stalin
so let me ask a challenging question
if you can
perhaps
think about the echo of 80 years between
joseph stalin and vladimir putin what
are the similarities and differences
between the man and the historical
figure the historical trajectory of
stalin and putin
thank you alex it's very nice to be here
again with you
it's been a while good to see you good
to see you as well you're looking good
i see this
podcast stuff is doing you right yeah
so we can't really put very easily
vladimir putin in the same sentence with
joseph stahl
stalin
is a singular figure
and his category is really small
hitler mao
that's really about it
and even in that category stalin is the
dominant figure
both by how long he was in power
and also by the amount of power the
military military-industrial complex he
helped build and commanded
so putin can't be compared to that
however putin's in the same building
as stalin he uses some of the same
offices as stalin used
and some of those
the television broadcasts that we see of
putin at meetings and
putin inside the kremlin
stalin used to sit in those rooms and
hold meetings in those rooms that's the
imperial senate
built by catherine the great an 18th
century building
inside the kremlin
it's a domed building
and and you can see it on the panorama
the top of the building at least you can
see it on the panorama when you look
over the kremlin wall from many sites
inside moscow
so
if he's not comparable to stalin he
still works as i said in those same
buildings those same offices
partly and so therefore he's got some of
the problems that stalin had
which was managing russian power in the
world
from a position of weakness vis-a-vis
the west
but from a an ambition a grandiosity
in fact
and so this combination of weakness
and grandeur
right of of not being as strong as the
west but aspiring
to be as great or greater than the west
that's the dilemma
of russian history for the past many
centuries it was the dilemma for the
czars it was the dilemma for peter the
great it was the dilemma for alexander
it was the dilemma for stalin and it's
the dilemma for putin
russia is smaller now
compared to when stalin was in that
kremlin
it's got pushed back to borders
almost the time of peter the great
it's farther from the main european
capitals now than any time
since that 18th century
and it and the west has only grown
stronger in that period of time so the
dilemma is greater than ever
the irony of being in that position
of sitting in the kremlin trying to
manage russian power in the world trying
to be a providential power
a country with a special mission in the
world
a country which imagines itself to be a
whole civilization
and yet not having the capabilities to
meet those aspirations
and falling farther and farther behind
the west
the irony of all of that is the
attempted solutions
put russia in a worse place every single
time
so you try to manage the gap with the
west you try to realize these
aspirations
you try to raise your capabilities
and you build a strong state the quest
to build a strong state and use coercive
modernization
to try somehow if not to close the gap
with the west at least to manage it
and the result is
different versions of personalist rule
so they don't build a strong state
they build a personal dictatorship they
build an autocracy
and moreover that autocracy undertakes
measures which then worsen the very
geopolitical dilemma
that gave rise to this
personalist rule in the first place and
so i call this russia's perpetual
geopolitics i've been writing about this
for many many years
what's important about this analysis
is this is not a story
of eternal
russian
cultural proclivity to aggression
right it's not something that's in the
mother's milk it's not something that
can't be changed russia doesn't have
an innate cultural tendency to
aggression this is a choice it's a
strategic choice
to try to match the power of the west
which from russia's vantage point is
actually unmatchable but it's a choice
that's made again and again and putin
has made this choice just the stalin
made the choice right
stalin presided over the world war ii
victory
and then he lost the peace
after he died in 1953
there was of course
other rulers who succeeded him he was
still the most important person in the
country after he died
because they were trying to manage that
system that he built and more
importantly manage that growing gap with
the west
by the time the 90s rolled around
former soviet troops now russian troops
withdrew from all those advanced
positions
that they had achieved as a result of
the world war ii victory and it was
napoleon in reverse they went on the
same roads
but not from moscow back to paris but
instead from
warsaw and from east berlin and from
tallinn and riga
and all the other places of
former warsaw pact and former soviet
republics
in the baltic region
they went back to russia in retreat and
so stalin in the fullness of time lost
the peace
and putin
in his own way
inheriting some of this
attempting to reverse it
when
as i said russia was smaller farther
away weaker the west was bigger and
stronger and and had absorbed
those former warsaw pact
uh countries and baltic states because
they voluntarily begged
to join the west the west didn't impose
itself on them it's a voluntary sphere
of influence that the west conducts
and so that dilemma is where you can put
putin and stalin in the same sentence
and the terrible outcome for russia
in the fullness of time
also has echoes but of course putin
hasn't murdered 18 to 20 million people
and the scale of his abilities to cause
grief
uh
with the nuclear weapons aside is
nothing like stalin's and so we have to
be careful right only mao
put bigger numbers on the board
from a tragic point of view than stalin
and numbers matter here
if we compare these singular figures
yeah mao killed more people than stalin
because mao had more people to kill
the most amazing thing about mao is he
watched stalin do it
he watched stalin collectivize
agriculture and famine result
he watched stalin impose this communist
monopoly
and all of those people sent to prison
or
given a bullet in the back of the neck
he watched all of that and then he did
it again himself in china do you think
he saw the human cost directly that that
when you say he saw do you think he was
focused on the policies
or was he also aware distinctly as a
human being of the
human costs in the lives of peasants and
in the lives of the working class and
lies at the poor
i think the prima facie evidence is that
he didn't value human life
otherwise i don't think after seeing the
amount of lives that were taken in the
soviet experiment he would have done
something similar after that
i think the answer lex is
it's very hard to get inside mal's head
and figure out what he was really
thinking
but if you just look at the results that
happened the policies that were
undertaken and the consequences of them
you would have to conclude that there
was
let's say no value or little value
placed on human life
unfortunately that's characteristic not
only of communist dictators right of
post-communist dictators as well but the
scale
of the horrors that they inflict
as horrific as they are
just can't compare
and so we're in a situation where
eurasia
that is to say
the ancient civilizations of eurasia
which would be russia iran
china
all have some version of non-democratic
you know illiberal autocratic regimes
and they're all pushing up against the
greater power of the west in some form
sometimes they coordinate their actions
and sometimes they don't
but this is a very long-standing
phenomenon lex that predates
of vladimir putin or xi jinping
or the latest incarnation of the supreme
leader in iran so we'll talk about this
uh
i think really powerful
framework of five dimensions
of authoritarian regimes that you've put
together uh but first
let's go to this napoleon and reverse
retreat from warsaw
back
putin is called
from the perspective of putin this
retreat this collapse of stalin is one
of the great tragedies
of
that region of russia
do you think
there's a sense where as putin sits now
in power for 22 plus years
he really dreams of a return
to uh
the power that influence
the
the land of stalin
so while you said that they're
not in the same place in terms of the
numbers of people
that suffer due to their regime
do you think he hopes to have the same
power
the same influence for a nation that was
in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s
of the 20th century under stalin
if he does lex he's deluding himself
we don't know for sure
very few people talk to him very few
people have access to him
a handful of
western leaders have met with him for
short periods of time
those inside russia barely meet with him
his own
minions in the regime barely have face
time with him
we don't know exactly what he thinks
it could be
that
he has delusions
of reconquering russian influence if not
direct control
over the territories that broke away
but it's not going to happen
let's talk a little bit about this guy
nikolai pottershev
nikolai patrashev is probably not well
known to your listeners
he's the head
of russia's security council
and so
you could probably call him the second
most important or second most powerful
man in russia
certainly inside the regime
arguably navalny is the second most
important person in the country and
we'll talk about that later i'm sure in
terms of influence yes but but
patrushev is
a version of putin's right hand man
and patrick chef
has been giving interviews in the press
you probably saw the interview with
nizarissamaya
not that long ago
he writes also his own blog like
interventions in the public sphere
using
the few channels that are left
and what's interesting about patrick
chef and and this
could well reflect similar thinking to
putin's which is why i'm bringing this
up
is that he's got this
conspiratorial theory
that the west has been on a
forever campaign
to destroy russia
just like it destroyed the soviet union
and that everything the west does
is meant to dismember russia
and that russia is fighting an
existential battle
against the west
and so for example the cia and the
american government wanted to bring down
the soviet union
never mind that the bush administration
the first bush the father
was trying desperately to hold the
soviet union together because they were
afraid of the chaos that might ensue and
the nukes that might get loose
as a result
of a soviet collapse and it was until
the very last moment
where bush decided his administration
decided
to back
those
republican leaders who were breaking
away from mikhail gorbachev and the
soviet union right
so never mind the empirics of it never
mind that bill clinton's administration
following george bush sent boatloads of
money
western taxpayer money to russia
we don't know exactly how much
because it came from different sources
people talk about how there was no
marshall plan it was tens of billions of
dollars
from various sources from the imf and
other sources
and lex it disappeared it's gone just
like the german money that went to
gorbachev for unification disappeared
even before the soviet collapse
the money disappeared but the west sent
the money so how was that a plot and
then you could go all the way to obama's
administration george bush trying to do
business deals and
reset the relations and obama
administration trying to reset the
relations and
and and doing nothing after the georgian
war and slapping
uh putin on the wrist
following
the seizure forcibly and you could go on
and you could go on all the way through
the trump administration telling putin
that he's right
trump believes putin and doesn't believe
u.s intelligence about russian efforts
to interfere in american domestic
politics so despite all the empirics of
it you have patricia and likely putin
talking about this
multi-decade western conspiracy to bring
russia down
at the same time as that's happening the
germans are voluntarily increasing their
dependence on russian energy
voluntarily increasing their dependence
on russia so here's the conspiracy to
bring russia down
the french
who've
fantasized about themselves as a
diplomatic superpower are constantly the
french leaders are constantly running to
the kremlin to ask what russia needs
what concessions from the west russia
needs to be filled to feel respected
again
the british
provide all manner of money laundering
and reputation laundering services for
the whole russian oligarchy including
the state officials
who are looting the state and using the
west british institutions to launder
their money so all of this is happening
and yet patrochev imagines
this conspiracy to bring russia down by
the west and so that's what we've got in
the kremlin again
stalin had that same conspiratorial
mentality of the west
everything that happened in the world
was part of a western conspiracy
directed against the soviet union and
now directed against russia even though
the west is trying to appease the west
is offering its services the west is
trying to change russia through
investment in a positive way but but but
instead the west is what's changing the
west is becoming more corrupt western
services are being corrupted by the
relationship with russia
so so you have to ask yourself who are
these people in power and the kremlin
who imagine
that while they're availing themselves
of every service
and every blandishment of the west while
they're availing themselves of this
that
they're fighting a conspiracy by the
west to bring them down
so this is what they call
the
abijania
right
in russian which is a term as you know
that means those who are
resentful or you might call them the
losers the losers in the transition
so when the soviet union fell and there
was a diminishment
of a very substantial diminution and
russian power and influence in the world
a lot of people lost out
they weren't able to steal the property
they weren't able to loot the state in
the 90s
and they were on the outside
they gradually came back in
they were the losers in the transition
domestically
and for them
right they wanted to reverse
being on the losing side and so they
began to expropriate to steal the money
steal the property
from those
first
thieves
who stole in the 90s
and the 2000s and on have been about
restealing taking
the losers in the transition taking the
money from the winners
and reversing
this resentment this loser status
those are your partnerships and your
putins
but at the same time this blows out
to
let's reverse the losses being on the
losing side the roiling resentment at
the decline of their power
internationally let's try to reverse
that too
so you have a profound psychological
a
whole generation of people who are on
the losing end domestically and reverse
that domestically that's what the putin
regime is about remember mikhail
khadarkovsky's
yukos
remember all the companies that are now
owned by putin cronies because they were
taken away from whoever stole them in
the first place
and now they're trying to do that on the
international scale
it's one thing to put domestic opponents
in jail
it's one thing to take away someone's
property domestically
but you're not going to reverse the
power of the west with the diminished
russia
that you have
and so that project
that patrick project
which we see him expressing again and
again
he speaks about it publicly it's not
something that we need to
uh go looking for
a quest the secret we can't find it what
are they thinking it's right there in
front of our face and putin has spoken
the same way for a long time people
point to the 2007
speech at the munich security conference
that putin delivered and certainly your
listeners could use
a snippet or two of that just like they
could use a couple of quotes
from potter chef to contextualize what
we're talking about but it predates the
2007 munich speech
the reaction to
ukraine's
uprising in 2004
attempt to
steal the election inside ukraine right
which the ukrainian people rose up
valiantly against and risked their lives
and overturned right so there were
public statements from putin already
back then the statements about harkowski
in 2003 when he was arrested and
expropriated
this is a long-standing
psychological
deeply psychological issue which is
about managing russian power in the
world as i was saying the gap with the
west but has this further dimension of
feeling like losers and wanting to
reverse that that's their life
experience
ibiza
so there's that resentment that fuels
uh this narrative uh fuels this
geopolitics and
uh internal policy but so resentment is
behind some of the worst things that
have ever been done in human history
hitler was probably fueled by resentment
so resentment is a really powerful force
yes uh just to
maybe
not push back but to give
fuller context on the west you said the
there's a narrative
uh from from putin's russia
that the west is somehow an enemy you
position everything against the west
but is there a degree and to what degree
is the west willing to feed that
narrative that it's also convenient for
the west to have an enemy it seems like
in the place in the span
it seems like in geopolitics
having an enemy
is uh
useful for forming a narrative
now having an enemy for the basic
respect of humanity is not good but in
terms of maintaining power if you're a
leader in a game of geopolitics it seems
to be good to have an enemy
uh it seems to be good to have something
like a cold war we can always point your
finger and says all our actions
are fighting this evil whatever that
evil is it could be like with george w
bush the war on terror
terrorism is this evil you can always
point in something so you've made it
seem that the west is trying there's a
lot of forces within the west that are
trying to reach out a friendly hand
trying to help sending money
uh sending compassion trying to sort of
trying to integrate russia into global
institutions exactly which was a
long-standing multi-decade effort across
multiple countries and multiple
administrations in those countries but
is there also war mongers on the west of
course lex of course you're right about
that but let's put it this way people
talk about the cold war
and they're usually looking to assign
blame for the cold war as if it's some
kind of mistake
a misunderstanding or a search for an
enemy that was convenient to rally
domestic politics
so alex
there's a coup in czechoslovakia and
somebody installs a communist regime in
february 1948.
no reaction to that that's just okay
there's a blockade of berlin
is that cool by you
where they try to
strangle west berlin so that they can
swallow west berlin and add it to east
berlin you cool with that
how about
korean war invasion of
north korea invasion of south korea by
north korea you cool with that
how about the murders and the show
trials up and down eastern europe
in the late 40s after the imposition of
the clone regimes you good with that
yeah it's very convenient to have an
enemy i agree with you but you know
there were some actions lex there were
some threats to people's freedom
there was some invasions there was some
aggression and violence on a mass scale
like collectivization of eastern europe
we could go on lex with the examples i'm
just given a few of them and so the cold
war was not a mistake
it was not a misunderstanding
we don't have to blame someone for the
cold war we have to give credit for the
cold war the truman administration
deserves credit for standing up to
stalin's regime for standing up to these
actions
for saying yeah
we're not just going to take this we're
not going to let this go on we're not
going to let this expand to further
territories we're going to create the
nato alliance and we're going to rally
democratic liberal regimes to stand up
to this illiberalism this violence and
this aggression and so yeah lex it it's
always convenient to have an enemy
but there was an enemy
nikolai leona who recently died he died
in april
2022 and he had a major funeral he was
the last
head analyst of the soviet kgb
and lyonna is one of the most important
figures for understanding the soviet
collapse and he has the best memoir on
the soviet collapse which is known in
russian as
yeah
you will understand that
and and and you'll help your
your podcast listeners understand
there's a singularity to that kind of
expression
leonardo just died but one of the things
he and in fact
the people who were supposedly arrested
by putin
as scapegoats for the ukraine war the
main one sergey biseyada
gave the eulogy at leona's funeral in
april 2022
showing that it's a lie that all of
these people have been arrested and
purged in another nonsense
in social media
but to get back to what leonov said and
get back to your enemy point
leonov said you know the west spent all
this time blackening the image of the
soviet union all these resources and
propaganda
and covert operations to blacken the
soviet image and they did lex the west
did do that and then leona wrote in the
next sentence
and you know what we gave them a lot of
material to work with to blacken our
image
yeah so the
you're saying a kind of sobering
reality which it is possible to some
degree to draw a line between the good
guys and the bad guys
freedom is better than unfreedom likes
it's a lot better than unfreedom and a
guy like you understands that really
well well so yes uh but those are all
you know there's wars like justice
freedom
um
what else
love you can use a lot of words that
hitler himself used to describe
why he is actually creating a better
world than those he's fighting so some
of it is propaganda the question is on
the ground what is actually increasing
the amount of freedom in the world
right we're not talking about propaganda
here when we use words like freedom
we're talking about rule of law
we're talking about protection of civil
liberties we're talking about protection
of private property
we're talking about an independent and
well-funded judiciary we're talking
about an impartial non-corrupt
competent civil service
we're talking about separation of powers
where the executive branch's power is
limited
usually by an elected parliament in fact
yes let's talk about elections
let's talk about freedom of speech and
freedom of the public sphere
we're not talking about freedom as a
slogan here we're talking about a huge
array of institutions and practices and
norms ultimately
right and if they exist
you know and you live under them and if
they don't exist you fully understand
that as well right
ukraine
was a flawed democracy
before russia invaded
it's utterly corrupt
many ways dysfunctional especially the
elites were dysfunctional
the gas industry in ukraine was
absolutely terrible because of the
corruption that it generated the
oligarch problem
a handful of people stealing the state
resources and yet ukraine had an open
public sphere and it had a parliament
that functioned
and so despite its flaws
it was still
a democracy the regime in moscow you
can't say that lex
it's not a comparable regime to ukraine
you could say oh well there are
oligarchs in ukraine and there are
oligarchs in russia there's corruption
in ukraine there's corruption in russia
so really what's the big difference and
the answer is well
ukraine had the open public sphere
ukraine had a real apartment can you
call russia's duma
a real parliament i don't think so
i don't think you can
can you say that there were any checks
whatsoever on the executive branch in
russia can you say that the russian
judiciary had any independence
or really
full level of competence
even compared to the ukrainian judiciary
which was nothing to brag about no you
can't say that lex
so we can differentiate
between
the very flawed corrupt oligarch
oligarchic democracy in ukraine
and the very corrupt oligarchic
autocracy in russia i think that's a
fair distinction yeah we should say that
russia and ukraine have the great honor
being the number one and the number two
most corrupt nations in europe by many
measures
but there is a fundamental difference as
you're highlighting
russia is a corrupt autocracy
ukraine who can say is a corrupt
democracy
and um to that level there's a there's a
fundamental difference
ukraine is not murdering
its own journalists
in systematic fashion if journalists are
killed in ukraine it's a tragedy if
journalists are killed in russia or
russian journalists are killed abroad
it's regime policy and the degree to
which a nation is authoritarian
means that it's suffocating its own
spirit its
capacity to flourish it's uh we're not
just talking about
um
sort of um the the freedom of the press
those kinds of things but basically all
industries uh get suffocated and you're
no longer being able to
yeah flourish as a nation grow the the
production the gdp the scientists the
art the culture all those kinds of
things yes lex you're absolutely right
and so
before the invasion the full-blown
invasion of february 2022 into ukraine
because as you know the war has been
going on for many years at a lower level
compared to what it is these days but
still a tragic war with many deaths
prior to february 2022
before this latest war we could have
said
that the greatest victims of the putin
regime are russian
domestic
that the the people who are suffering
the most from the putin regime
are not sitting here in new york city
but in fact they're sitting there in
russia
now of course with the invasion of
ukraine and and really
the
atrocities
that have been well documented
and more being investigated
uh
we can't easily say anymore that
russians are the greatest victims of the
putin regime
but in in ways other than bombing and
murdering civilians
children mothers
grandmothers grandfathers
after you include that
then of course the larger number of
victims of the putin regime are not
ukrainians but ultimately russians and
and there's how many of them now that
have fled
so
your powerful precise rigorous words
are uh stand in a
stark contrast i would say to my very
recent conversation with oliver stone
now i would love you to elaborate to
this agreement you have here
with his words and maybe words of people
like john
mearsheimer
the idea is that putin's hand in this
invasion of 2022 was forced
by the expansion of nato
the imperialist imperative
of the united states
and the the the nato forces
um
you disagree with this point
in terms of placing the blame
somehow on the invasion on
uh
forces larger than the particular two
nations involved but
more on the geopolitics of the world
that's driven by the most powerful
military nation in the world which is
the united states
yeah lex so let's imagine
that
um a tragedy has happened here in new
york and a woman got raped
we know the perpetrator
they go to trial
and oliver stone gets up and says you
know what
the woman was wearing a short skirt
and there was no option but for the
rapist to rape her
the woman was wearing lipstick
or the woman was applying for nato
membership and just had to be raped
there's i mean
didn't want a raper
but was compelled because of what she
was doing and what she looked like and
and the clothes she was wearing and the
alliances that she was under
international law
signed by moscow all the treaties
that sovereign countries get to choose
whatever alliance they belong to
are treaties that the u.n charter
signed by russia the soviet union
the
1975 helsinki
agreement
signed by the soviet union the 1990
charter of paris for a new europe signed
by the soviet union the 1997 nato russia
founding act
signed by the russian government the
post-soviet russia all of those
documents signed by
either the soviet regime or the russian
regime which is the legally recognized
international inheritor right successor
of the soviet state all of those
agreements are still in force and all of
them say
that countries
are sovereign and can freely choose
their foreign policy and what alliances
they want to join
let's even go farther than that i mean
you don't have to go farther than that
but let's go farther than that lex
is an autocratic repressive regime that
invades its neighbors in the name of its
own security something new in russian
history did we not see this before
is this
does this not predate nato expansion
does this not predate the existence of
nato would oliver stone sit here in this
chair and say to you you know
they had to impose serfdom in the 17th
century
because nato expanded they had no choice
their hands were tied they were
compelled
to treat their own population like
slaves because you know
nato expanded i mean i could go on
through the examples of russian history
that predate the existence let alone the
expansion of nato
where you have
behavior
policies actions
very similar to what we see now from the
kremlin and and you can't explain those
by nato expansion can you
and so that argument doesn't wash for me
because i have a pattern here that
predates nato expansion
i have international agreements founding
documents signed
by the kremlin over many many decades
acknowledging the freedom of countries
to choose their alliances
and then i have this problem where when
you rape somebody it's not because
they're wearing a short skirt it's
because you
have raped them
you've committed a criminal act lex
that's a i think there's a lot of people
listening to this
that will agree to the emotion the power
and the spirit of this metaphor i was
struggling to think
how to dance within this metaphor
because it feels like it wasn't
precisely the right one but i think this
it captures the spirit
i'm not suggesting lex that everything
the west has done
has been honorable or intelligent
fortunately we live in a democracy we
live in liberal regimes we live under
rule of law
liberal in the classical sense a rule of
law
not liberal in the leftist sense
we live in places like that and we can
criticize ourselves and we can criticize
the mistakes that we made or the policy
choices or the inactions that were taken
and there are a whole lot of things to
answer for
and and you can
now discuss the ones that are your
favorites
the dishonor or the mistakes
and and i could discuss mine and we
could spend the whole rest of our
meeting today
discussing the west's mistakes in
private and we won't end up in prison
for it
yeah alex and so that's i'm thankful for
that yes and i'm thankful that people
may disagree and that people make the
argument that nato expansion is to blame
but but you see i'm countering two
arguments here
i'm countering one argument
which is very deeply popular pervasive
about how russia has this cultural
tendency to aggression
and it can't help but invade its
neighbors and it does it again and again
and it's eternal russian imperialism
and you have to watch out for it this
very popular argument in the baltic
states it's really popular in warsaw
it's really popular with the liberal
interventionists and it's it's very very
popular with those who are part of the
iraq war squad that got us into that
mess
so i'm against that and the reason i'm
against it is because it's not true it's
empirically false there is no cultural
trait
inherent tendency for russia to be
aggressive it's a strategic choice that
they make every time is the choice made
it's not some kind of momentum every
time it's a choice that we should judge
for the choice that it is for the
decision and therefore they could make
different choices they could say we
don't have to stand up to the west
we don't have the capabilities to do
that we can still be a great country we
can still be a civilization unto itself
we can still be russia
we can still worship in orthodox
cathedrals or
we can still be ourselves
but we don't have to pursue this
chemical pursuit this elusive quest
to stand up to the west and be in the
first ranks of powers so i'm countering
that argument i'm saying it's a it's
perpetual geopolitics it's a
geopolitical choice rising out of this
dilemma of the mismatch between
aspirations and capabilities it's not
eternal russian imperialism and i'm also
countering the other argument here lex
which is to say that it's the west's
fault
it's western imperialism i'm very
popular on the left very popular with
realist scholars
very popular with some of the people
recently on your podcast
and so it's neither eternal russian
imperialism nor is it western
imperialism right the mere fact that the
west is stronger than russia is not a
crime on the part of the west
it's not a crime
that countries voluntarily want to join
the west that beg to get in
either the eu
or nato
or other bilateral alliances or other
trade agreements those are voluntarily
entered into and and that's not criminal
if the west sphere of influence which is
open an open sphere of influence
which as i say people voluntarily join
if that expands that's not a crime nor
is that a threat to russia ipso facto
right nato is a defensive alliance and
the countries are largely pacifists who
are members of nato
and nato doesn't attack it defends
members if they are attacked
and so the idea that ukraine which had
the legal right might want to join
nato and the eu
which was not going to happen in our
lifetimes and was not a direct threat to
the putin regime since it was
since
the
western countries that make up the eu
and nato
uh
decided that ukraine was not ready for
membership there was no consensus it was
not going to happen but it's ukraine's
free choice to is express that desire
and if your government is elected by
your people freely elected
meaning you can unelect that government
in the next election
and that government makes foreign policy
choices on the basis of its perceived
interests
that's not a crime lex that's not a
provocation
that's not something that compels the
leader of another country to invade you
right that is legal under international
law and it's also a realist fact of life
the realists like to tell you you know
that
russia here was was uh disrespected
russia's interests were not taken into
account etc etc but the real world works
in such a way that treaties matter
that international law matters that's
why people like me were not in favor of
the us 2003 invasion of iraq lex because
it wasn't legal in addition to the fact
that we thought it might backfire
but you know lex
like i said there are a lot of things
about the west that we ought to
criticize as citizens and we do
criticize
but but we have to be clear about where
responsibility lies
in in these events that we're talking
about today so you get into trouble it's
largely uh erroneous to think about both
the west or the united states from an
imperialist perspective and russia from
an imperialist perspective is better
clearer to think about each individual
aggressive decision on its own as a
choice that was made so let's talk about
the most recent choice
made by vladimir putin
the choice to invade ukraine or to
escalate the invasion of ukraine on
february 24th
now we're a few months removed
from that decision initial decision
why do you think he did it what are the
errors
in understanding the situation in
calculating the outcomes and
everything else about this decision in
your view
yeah lex when you don't when a war
doesn't go well
it looks like
lunacy to have launched it in the first
place does it ever go well
war never goes according to plan
all war is based upon miscalculation
but not everybody is punished for their
miscalculation
all aggressive war we're talking about
not defensive war
is based upon miscalculation
but you can adjust you can recalibrate
you know when when you're driving down
the road and that very annoying voice is
telling you in a thousand
feet make a right yeah and you fail to
make a right it recalibrates right yeah
it tells you okay now you know go uh
turn around or u-turn or make a left it
doesn't say you're an idiot and turn
around and make a u-turn but it does
recalibrate
so you can miscalculate and the problem
is not the miscalculation usually it's
the failure to do that adjustment
right
people i know who are hedge fund traders
they i asked them you know what's your
favorite trade and the line from them
all and this is a cliche is my favorite
trade is when i made a mistake
but i got out early
before all the carnage
so it's their favorite trade is not when
they made some brilliant choice
but it's when they miscalculated but
they reduced the consequences of their
miscalculation by recalibrating quickly
right
so let's talk about the calculation and
miscalculation of february
let's imagine lex that you've been
getting away with murder
i don't mean murder in a figurative
sense
i mean you've been murdering people
you've been murdering them domestically
and you've been murdering them all
across europe and you've been murdering
them not just with for example
a car accident a staged car accident or
using a handgun
you use novichok
or you use some other
internationally outlawed
chemical weapon
and let's imagine that you did it and
nothing happened to you
it wasn't like you were removed from
power
it wasn't like you paid a personal price
sure maybe there was some sanctions on
your economy but you didn't pay the
price of those sanctions
little people paid the price of those
sanctions
other people in your country paid the
prices let's imagine not only were you
murdering people literally
but you decided
to
entice the idiotic ruler of georgia
into a provocation
that you could then invade the country
and you invaded the country and you bit
off these
territories abkhazia and south ossetia
and what price did you pay for that
and then you decided you know i think
i'll now invade crimea and forcibly
annex crimea
and i'll
instigate an insurrection in the donbass
in eastern ukraine in luhansk let's
imagine you did all that and then you
had to stick out your wrist so that you
know
it could be slapped a couple of times
and you said you know i can pretty much
do what i want they're putting a
sanction here and there and they're
doing this and they're doing that and
and you know what they're more energy
dependent on me than before i got better
money laundering and reputation services
than anybody has maybe the middle east
and the chinese would disagree with you
that that you have better than them but
yours are pretty good and the panama
papers get released revealing
all of your offshoring and your
corruption and and what happened nothing
happens lex so the first and most
important consideration here is in your
own mind
you've been getting away with murder
literally
as well as figuratively and you think
you know i probably can do something
again and get away with it
and so the failure to respond at scale
in fact the indulgences
the further dependencies that are
introduced the illusion
that trade is the mechanism to manage
authoritarian regimes
you know that great
a german cliche
a van del dorjandel
right change through
trade or transformation through trade
one of angela merkel's favorite
expressions
right you're you're going to get the
other side
to be better
rather than confront them
in a cold war fashion where you stand up
to their aggressions and you punish them
severely in order to deter further
behavior so that's the first and most
important part of the calculation
miscalculation there are a lot of other
dimensions so can we pause on that
really
so this is kind of idea of it's okay to
crack a few eggs to make an omelette
um which is a more generous description
of what you're saying
that
uh you don't incorporate into the
calculation
the amount of human suffering that the
decisions cause
but instead you look at sort of
the success based on some kind of
measure for you personally
and for the nation
in not in terms of in the humanitarian
sense but in some kind of economic sense
and a power geopolitical power sense
yeah
you're not sentimental lex
you say to yourself
the cause of russian greatness
is greater than any individual life
russia being in the first rank of the
great powers
russia realizing its mission
to be
a special country with a special mission
in the world a civilization unto itself
the first rank of the great powers maybe
even the greatest power that's worth
the price
that we have to pay especially in other
people's lives right
we have a lot of literature on the putin
regime which talks about the kleptocracy
the places of kleptocracy and it is a
kleptocracy
we all can see that
and anybody in london live in the high
life
servicing this kleptocracy can testify
that it's a kleptocracy and not only in
london of course right here in the
united states in new york
but you know it's not only a kleptocracy
lex
that was the problem of the russian
studies literature
it wasn't just about stealing looting
the state
it was about russian greatness
you see those rituals in the kremlin
right in the grand kremlin palace
in the saint george's hall
some of the greatest interiors in the
world and you see awards ceremonies and
you see marking holidays and all of
these looters of the state have their
uniforms on with their medals
and someone's given a speech or singing
a ballad and their eyes are moist
their eyes are moist
because they're thieves and looters
no legs because they believe in russian
greatness
they have a deep and fundamental
passionate commitment to the greatness
of russia
which in unsentimental fashion they're
all sentimental to the max that's why
their
their eyes are moistening but they
imagine unsentimentally that any
sacrifice is okay a sacrifice of other
people's lives
a sacrifice of their conscripts in the
military a sacrifice of ukrainian women
and children and elderly that's a small
price to pay for those moist eyes about
russian greatness and russia's position
in the world well that human thing that
sentimentality is a thing that can get
us in trouble in the united states as
well and lead us to wars that illegal
wars and so on but the united states has
repercussions
for
breaking the law uh you're going to pay
for illegal wars in the end
you're saying that in authoritarian
regimes
this sentimentality can really get out
of hand and you can by charismatic
leaders they can take that to manipulate
the populace to make uh to that in in
the span of history led to atrocities
and uh in today's world lead to
humanitarian crises it's not just a
kleptocracy it's a belief system it's
passion it's conviction
it's it's it's
you can call them illusions you can call
them fantasies
whatever you want to call them they're
real they're real for those people and
so yes they're looting that very state
that they're trying to make one of the
great powers in the world
and they resent
the fact that the west doesn't
acknowledge them as one of those great
powers and they resent that the west is
more powerful
people talk about how putin doesn't
understand
the world and that he gets really bad
information
lex if you're sitting there in that
kremlin
and you're trying to conduct business in
the world and you're getting reports
from your finance minister or your
central bank governor
your whole economy everything that
matters somehow all your trade is
denominated in dollars and euros
do you have any illusions about who
controls the international financial
system i don't think so lex
you looking over your
industrial plan for the next year
and you're looking over how many tanks
you're going to get and how many cruise
missiles you're going to get and how
many submarines you're going to get and
and fill in the blank
and you know what
it says right there in the paperwork
where the component parts come from
where the software comes from comes from
the west lex
your whole military-industrial complex
is dependent on high-end western
technology
and then and let's and let's say you're
in beijing not just in moscow
and you go to a meeting in your own
neighborhood
you're the leader of china
you go to a meeting with other asian
leaders
do they all speak in chinese with you
no lex they don't speak chinese
you go to an international meeting as
the leader of china and guess what
language is the main language of
intercourse
yes the same one you and i are speaking
right now
and so you live in that world you live
in the western world and it's very hard
to have illusions about what world you
live in
when you're under that you need those
western banks
you need that foreign currency right you
need that high-end western technology
that technology transfer
you're speaking or you're forced to
speak or your minions are forced to
speak at international gatherings in
english
and and i could go on all the indicators
that you live in and so putin lives in
that world he's no fool well to push
back isn't it possible that as you said
the minions
operate in that world
but can't you if you're the leader of
russia or the leader of china or the
leader of these different nations
um
still put up walls where actually when
you think in the privacy of your own
mind you exist not in the international
world
but in a world where there's this great
russian empire or this great chinese
empire yes and then you forget that
there's english you forget that there's
technology and iphones you forget that
there's all this
uh
us keeps popping up on all different
paperwork that just becomes the blurry
details that dissipate because what
matters is the greatness
of this dream empire that i have in my
mind as a dictator
i would put it this way lex
after you absorb
all of that
from your minions
and and it impresses upon your
consciousness
where you live
you live in a western dominated world
that the multi-polar world doesn't exist
your goal is to make that multipolar
world exist
your goal is to bring down the west
your goal is for the west to weaken
your goal is a currency other than the
dollar in the euro
your goal is an international financial
system that you dominate
your goal is technological
self-sufficiency
made in china 2035 right
your goal is a world that you dominate
not that the west dominates and you're
gonna do everything you can
to try to attain that world
which is a russian-centric world or a
chinese-centric world
or what we could call a eurasian-centric
world and it's not going to be easy lex
just for the reasons that where we
enumerated before
but maybe you're going to get a helping
hand
maybe the west is going to transfer
their best technology to you they're
going to sell you their best stuff
and then you're going to absorb it and
maybe copy it and reverse engineer it
and and if they won't sell it to you
maybe you'll just have to steal it
maybe the west is going to allow you to
bank even though
you violate many laws that would
prohibit the west from extending those
banking services to you
maybe the west is going to buy your
energy and your palladium and your
titanium and your rare metals like
lithium because
you're willing to have your poor people
mine that stuff
and die of disease at an early age but
western governments they don't want to
do that right they don't want to do that
dirty mining of those very important
rare earths
but you're willing to do that because
it's just people whose lives you don't
care about as an autocratic regime right
so that's the world you live in where
you're trying to get to this other world
you're
at the center of the other world you
dominate the other world but the only
way to get their lex
is the west has to weaken
divide itself
maybe even collapse
and so you're encouraging to the extent
possible
western divisions you know western
disunity
a western lack of resolve
uh western mistakes and west invasion of
the wrong country and and western
destruction of its credibility through
international financial crises and
one could go on so the if the west
weakens itself through its mistakes and
its own corruption
you're going to survive and maybe even
come out into that world
where you're the center and so russia's
entire grand strategy just like china's
grand strategy iran it's hard to say
they have a grand strategy because
they're so
so profoundly weak
but russia's grand strategy is we're a
mess
we don't invest in our human capital our
human capital flees or we actually drive
it out
it goes to mit
like you did or it goes to fill in the
blank right
we can't invest in our people our health
care is terrible our education system is
in decline
we don't build infrastructure likes
we don't improve our governance
we don't invest in those attributes of
modern power that make the west powerful
we can't because when we try the money
is stolen
we try these grandiose projects of
national projects they're called we're
going to invest in higher ed we're going
to invest in high tech
we're going to build our own silicon
valley known as skolkovo we're going to
do all those things and what happens
they can't even build an airport without
the money disappearing the sochi
olympics
it costs them officially cost them 50
billion dollars you look around at the
infrastructure that endured from that 50
billion dollar expense
and you're thinking you know that's like
the second avenue subway you get almost
nothing for your money
and so yeah it's corruption legs but
it's also because they don't want to do
that
they don't want to invest in their
people
they couldn't do it if they wanted to
and when they try it doesn't work
but why invest in your own people
invest in your hardware your military
hardware
right invest in your cyber
capabilities
invest in all your spoilation techniques
and your hard power
and invest in
further corrupting and further weakening
and further dividing the west
because as i said if the west is weak
divided lacking resolve
you don't invest in your people you
don't build infrastructure you don't
improve your governance but you'll
muddle through
that's russian grand strategy so
invest in the hard power
weaken the west those combined together
means you're going to be
incentivized to escalate
any military aggressive conflicts
that are around you or create new ones
or if you can get away with murder but
what happens lex if it's a harry truman
like response
what happens if somebody says you know
we're gonna stand up to this
we're not gonna allow this to happen
we're not gonna launder your money
anymore
we're not going to be dependent on you
for energy in the long term we're going
to make a transition
we're going to punish you for that kind
of behavior instead and and and the west
is now switched to that
only because
of the
courage and ingenuity of the ukrainian
people the ukrainian resistance
to russian aggression
was one of the greatest gifts the west
has ever received
the sacrifices that the ukrainians are
making
right now as we speak
meaning they're fighting a war
by themselves against the major military
power their neighbor russia
nobody's fighting it with them yes
we are giving them weapons
so they can conduct self-defense which
by the way is legal under international
law
unlike the russian invasion which is
illegal under international law
western's supply of weapons including
heavy weapons including offensive
weapons to ukraine for its self-defense
in the invasion by russia is actually
legal under and so
thank god the ukrainians
surprised everybody
they surprised me they surprised putin
and the kremlin they surprised the bide
administration they surprised the
european union
not with the fact that they would resist
we knew that
we had the orange revolution in 2004 we
had maidan in 2013-14
where they rose up against
a domestic tyrant
and they were willing to die on behalf
of their country then let alone against
the foreign tyrant invading their
country right
so we knew they would resist we didn't
know just how successful certainly i
didn't know they would be on the
battlefield it's been breathtaking to
watch
that sacrifice that gift
enabled the west to rediscover itself to
rediscover its power to revive itself to
say to hell with this energy dependence
in the long term the hell with this
money laundering and reputation
laundering the hell with this running
back and forth to moscow
to try to see what putin needs in order
for him to feel respected what
appeasement he needs right so so
we'll see if it endures
but this
shift
comes from the ukrainians and so it's no
longer getting away with murder lex and
we thank the ukrainians for that the
people and the leadership
and uh
the the the separate factions that make
up ukraine uniting the it's the
unification the uniting against the
common enemy yes and standing up
before anyone knew that they would be
backed by all of these other nations by
this money and all this kind of stuff
standing there
especially with the president zelinski
where it makes
total sense to flee
he stood his ground
and selected let's take that point that
you just raised which is a deep and
fundamental point and i thank you for
that
do you guys hear that though i think
that was a compliment there we go let's
go
lex silence your unification i'm sitting
here in front of you thank you it's an
honor and and it's a mutual honor
so um
ukraine before the war is run by a tv
production company
right you're one guy running this
fantastic incredible podcast there's 20
guys or so running a country the size of
ukraine yeah and and one's a producer
and one's like a makeup person and
one's a video editor and they're
fantastically talented people
if your country is a tv production
so before the war zolensky had what 25
percent approval rating
and he couldn't get much done and it
wasn't working he got elected with 73 as
you know and then he was down to 20
that's a pretty big drop
and so you're thinking maybe having a
major large size 40 million plus
population european country run by a tv
production company is not the best
choice
and then what do we see
we see president zielenski decides
to risk his life on behalf of his
country ukraine he decides to stay in
the capitol
he's not going to flee
he they're going to stay and fight
and he could be killed he can die it's a
decision where he put his life on the
line
obviously
he's jewish descent
russian speaking
childhood and upbringing
russian speaking jewish descent puts his
life on the line for the country of
ukraine
it's a pretty big message don't you
think
and it's crucial
and it turns out not only that lex
but they're good at tv
they're good at information war
and in a war yeah it's a tv production
company and a tv personality those
that's exactly what you want running a
country
because they're crushing in the
information war and he's spectacular
european parliament
u.s congress israeli parliament there's
no room
on zoom let alone in person that he
can't win over he's just so effective
you know this is the first time reality
tv
has been about reality
instead of fake
reality tv is just this completely fake
nonsense but zelensky this is real
reality tv
and and and he means it
and and the nation is behind him
and and they're just as courageous and
just as ingenious in many ways
and it's spectacular
and so yeah who saw that coming i didn't
see that coming lex in fact dubai didn't
we talk about putin's miscalculation the
bide administration as you alluded to
offered him an exit from the country
they didn't say you know you want to
stand and fight we'll back you they said
we'll get you out
you want to come now
and famously you know that quote
right what he said
about how he doesn't need a ride
remember that yeah moment
the administration was poised to do
another afghanistan moment
that ignominious exit from afghanistan
was almost what happened in ukraine
when by the administration offered him
that ride out of there and fortunately
he declined and helped rally and the
people from below also rallied to stop
the invader
without the presidency and without the
government in ukraine
saving the biden administration and and
the european leaders
who latched on fortunately they had the
presence of mind to latch on to this
gift this this
bravery and ingeniousness of of silence
and the rest of the ukrainians and
flipped and decided to support ukraine's
resistance
you know first with 5 000 helmets only
as the germans initially promised and
now with really heavy weapons
and so that's something that wasn't
foreseen
i certainly didn't foresee that i
foresaw the ukrainian society being
courageous and resisting but i didn't
foresee a television production company
being exactly what you want to run a
country in a war
a president
zielenski
willing to sacrifice lay down his life
and rallying others in the country to do
that
and then the country being so effective
not just at
a courage but at battlefield resistance
to the russian invasion so i stand
corrected by the ukrainians and i'm
ecstatic that i didn't that i was wrong
that i was proven wrong and like i said
there's
clear factions of the west and the east
of ukraine and here's a person that like
you said was in the high 20s low 30s
percentage
approval
in the country before the war and now
was able to use in the 90s in the 90s
he's in the 90
approval rating i mean i i think they
stopped doing
the uh
the polling once he hit 91 percent or
whatever it was in the previous poll i
think they all understood that that for
now they didn't need any more polling
that it's pretty clear the nation so 25
to 90 something percent
and and and just like the 25 was
deserved
the 90-something percent is also
deserved fully deserved and the question
is how that all stabilizes
it feels
like this
set of events
i may be
paying attention to twitter too much
which is a concern
of mine whether
the change i see is just surface level
or deep level but it seems like we're in
a new world that something dramatic has
shifted
that
um this
power that's rooted i mean in your study
it
of the 20th century it's so deeply
rooted in history there's this power
center of the world
is now
going to it has been shaken by this
event and how that changes the world is
is unclear
uh it's unclear what lesson china learns
from watching this well lesson india
learns from watching this both nations
as far as you can get polls about
chinese population
but both nations are largely in support
of putin
so russia india and china are still
supporting of putin
quietly i would maybe
elaborate a little bit on that point lex
i think you're right the the feeling
that we're in an inflection moment you
know an inflection point
i think that's widespread and i think
it's widespread for good reason we might
be
but i also share
uh your um
let's say
modesty
about
where it's going
and how hard it is to predict where this
might go
it's only an inflection point if the
trends continue
right if the trends endure
there are plenty of non-inflection
points
after 9 11 the whole world rallied
around the united states after it was
attacked
after the
the bombing of the towers here in new
york city and the hitting of the
pentagon
and and that didn't last
and it was not really an inflection
point was it
it felt like it might be but it wasn't
and so this is not a comparable moment
in terms of what happened
but it has the feeling that it might be
a watershed
and maybe we'll squander it the way we
squandered the post-911
rallying around the united states
uh maybe we'll actually consolidate it
and it'll endure or maybe it'll endure
despite ourselves
and we can't tell and we can't know yet
and it depends in part on what we do and
what we don't do but here's a few things
that we understand already
the idea that the west was in decline
and that the rest of the world
had risen
and was more powerful and that we lived
in a multi-polar world
that turns out to be empirically false
it's not true
i mean it's just factually not true
there are no major important
multinational institutions organizations
that are run
on behalf of or led by
a south african
a nigerian
person from india
even the chinese
don't run these institutions they would
like to and they're trying
but they don't
and so whatever you pick the imf the
world bank
the federal reserve which is the most
powerful multinational institution which
is actually
only a domestic institution and doesn't
have
a legal mandate to act multilaterally
but does
it's got the most power of any
institution in the world
nato
the bilateral alliances that the u.s has
up and down asia
what organizations
that have tremendous leverage on the
international system on the
international order are non-western
the un
is the most encompassing
and of course we know that the five it
has five members of the security council
with a veto
one of which is russia one of which is
china and the others are the us
britain and france not india
not south africa
not indonesia not all of these other
countries where the people live
right the bulk of the population of the
world
and where the population is growing like
on the african continent
so it's not a multi-polar world
we talked already about the
international financial system
that's western not multi-polar
we talked about the us military and nato
or we could talk about the japanese
military which is just very formidable
enormous number of
platforms even the australian military
we could talk about lex right
and so it's a western dominated world
and the west remember is not a
geographic concept
it is an institutional and values
club
the japanese are not european but
they're western
just like russia is european but not
western
because european is a cultural category
and western is an institutional category
where you have rule of law
and separation of powers and free and
open public sphere and dynamic open
market economy and
okay
and then we have another thing which is
pretty clear
the west is powerfully resented
powerfully envied and admired
simultaneously
pj o'rourke
the comedian who died this year
fantastic it was a big loss for the
culture
he said there are two things that are
always characteristic of any american
embassy abroad
one is a political protest
outside
and the other is the longest line you've
ever seen
for visas
and those things are true simultaneously
and that's the world we live in meaning
that non-western countries
envy and admire the west but they also
resent the power of the west
western hypocrisy
right the west invades countries
when it wants but when others do that
it's illegal
right the west
arrests you for
money laundering but it's western money
laundering that is where you go when you
need to launder money right so
they see the hypocrisy they see the
excessive power
that the west has
and they resent it
and they say you who elected you to run
the world we have a billion plus people
or we have
a 200 plus million people and we don't
have a say
you're the self-appointed
guardians of our world who did that
and so it's incumbent on the west not
only to remember
the power that it has
but also to exercise that power legally
and with restraint
and also to think about how we can
expand institutions
to be more encompassing
so that other parts of the world are not
on the outside
being dictated to
but instead are on the inside
too often
right
western power
is not consultative
in a decision-making fashion
it's consultative after the fact
okay you know we got together in the eu
or we got together
in nato or we got together at the
federal reserve and here's our decision
and we're announcing it today
and so your economy gets destroyed
because the federal reserve decides it
has to raise interest rates
or
you now
go into default you can't pay your debt
because western banks lend you money
and now the west has changed
interest rates or or other
considerations
and you're in big trouble now
and so this is something which we fail
to address
it's very hard to address it's very hard
to reform international institutions
it's very hard to share power
it's very hard to acknowledge that you
have too much power
and that maybe having too much power
is not good not only for the rest of the
world but for yourself
and so it's great to rediscover the west
and rediscover its values and rediscover
its authority and credibility
and power
but it's that's not sufficient so we
know this now
we know that the rest of the world
is not necessarily
jumping on the western bandwagon
right to condemn russia for its actions
because the west can
do things like sanction your central
bank
take away your reserves
deny you technology it pretty much can
do whatever it wants and it can say that
it's legal and it can go through various
mechanisms and and it can freeze your
property and
and you say to yourself should anybody
have that much power and
when do they come after me
now there's a caveat here
and the caveat likes is
they don't
like the west having all of that power
and they didn't join in the condemnation
of russia
but they also didn't join in russia's
aggression
so russia's
domestic civilian
aerospace aircraft industry right
civilian aircraft industry is in big
trouble now because of the export
controls
on spare parts and software
brazil
is a major power in aircraft
manufacturing did they rush in
and say you know
vladimir putin
we didn't condemn necessarily your
actions in ukraine okay that's one thing
and how about
we give you all of our aircraft
technology and we help you rebuild
your domestic aircraft industry and you
can have the aviation that the western
did that happen lex
didn't happen
and you can look at india and you can
look at china and you can look at south
africa and you can look at what they've
done in practical terms
yes they haven't always joined in a
full-throated condemnation maybe they've
been neutral or maybe they've been
playing both sides of the fence like
turkey for example
but are they rushing in
to join russia
to join russia's aggression to supply
and their the answer is no
and the answer is no for two reasons
one they actually don't want to be party
to that
and two they understand that western
power
and and they don't want to be on the
receiving end
by crossing the west and then getting
caught up in a sanctions regime or worse
can we go to the mind of vladimir putin
because what you just said
china india
they seem to
sit back and say we're not going to
condemn the actions of vladimir putin or
russia
but we would really like for this war to
be over
so there's that kind of energy
of we don't just stop this because
you're putting us in a very very bad
position and yet
vladimir putin is continuing the
aggression
what is he thinking what information is
he getting
is it the system that you've described
of authoritarian regimes that corrupts
your flow of information your ability to
make clear-headed decisions
just as a human being when you go to
sleep at night
is he not able to see the world clearly
or is this all deliberate
systematic action that does
have some reason behind it
we've got to talk a little bit about
china too but let's answer your putin
question directly
so
on twitter
you've lost the war
or as they say you know there are these
two russian soldiers having a smoke and
warsaw
and you know they're they're taking a
break having a smoke and they're sitting
there in warsaw on top of their tank and
one says to the other yeah you know we
lost the information war
and there they are sitting in warsaw
having that smoke right
so here on twitter russia has completely
lost the war
in reality they failed to take kiev they
failed to capture kiev
and they failed in phase two as they
called it
or plan b which is to capture the
entirety of the donbass
we're three months into the war
if you had made a judgment about let's
say the nazi invasion of the soviet
union a definitive judgment after three
months
you might have got the outcome wrong
there
if you were judged the winner war the
1939-40 soviet invasion of finland
after three months
you would have got that wrong too of
what the outcome was going to be so
we're early in the game here
and we have to be careful about any
definitive judgments
but it is the case that so far
they failed to take kiev and they failed
to capture the entirety of the don bus
luhansk and donetsk uh provinces eastern
ukraine
a part of eastern ukraine
and they've been driven out of
kharkiv and in the area immediately
surrounding heart keefe
they never captured heart keith but they
came close but now
the ukrainians drove them back to the
russian border in that very large and
important region
so those look like battlefield losses
that are
impossible to explain away
if you're the regime in russia except by
suppression of information
and as you know from russian history
likes
uh um leaders in russia have an easier
time with the state of siege
and deprivation
than they do with explaining a lost war
but
let's look at some other facts that are
important to take into account
one
the russian army has penetrated father
into ukrainian territory
since february 2022
including in here son region
the famous mariuple siege that just
ended
they have
built
a large
presence
in areas
north of crimea
on the sea of azov the black sea
littoral ultimately that they didn't
previously hold
they're still fighting in lukansk for
full control over at least half of the
don boss
and ukrainians are resisting fiercely
but nonetheless
you can say
that they've been driven out on the
contrary farther penetration than the
beginning
ukraine doesn't have an economy anymore
they have somewhere between 33 and 50
percent unemployment it's hard to
measure unemployment in a war economy
but their metallurgical industry that
azov style
steel plant and marijuana is a ruin now
and a lot of farmers are not planting
the fields because the harvest from the
previous year still hasn't been
sent sold abroad because the ports are
blockaded or destroyed
and so you don't have an economy and you
need 5 billion or 7 billion or 8 billion
dollars a month
ex to meet your payroll
to feed your people to keep your army in
the field
that's a lot of money
per month and that's indefinite that's
as long as this blockade lasts
and so you don't have an economy anymore
you're indigent
and even if you take the lower number
five billion as opposed to zelinski's
ask for seven billion
five billion is 60 billion a year that's
60 billion this year that's 60 billion
next year
and so who's got that kind of money
which western taxpayers are ready
and if you use the 7 or 8 billion you
get up to 100 billion a year
the biden
uh the just signed the by uh president
joe biden just signed
the bill making it law
40 billion dollars in aid to ukraine
it's just an enormous sum
the economic piece of that
is a month and a half two months
of ukrainians
uh
covering ukrainian expenditures that's
it
and they're asking the g7 they're asking
everybody for this so you have no
economy and no prospect of an economy
until you evict the russians from your
territory
and then you have
a western unity
western resolve
it lasts or it doesn't last lex
so you're president putin
and you've got
more territory than before
and you've got a stranglehold over the
ukrainian economy
and you've got a lot of the world
neutral
and you've got the chinese propaganda
supporting you to the hilt
with those oliver stone and mere shimer
lines
about how this is really nato's fault
and
you've got hungary
dragging its feed on the oil embargo
against russia and you got turkey
dragging its feed on the recent
applications
of sweden and finland for nato expansion
and you're saying to yourself lex maybe
i can ride this out
i got a lot of problems of my own and we
can go into the details on the russian
side's challenges
but he's got
he's he's on ukrainian territory unless
he's evicted and he's got a stranglehold
on their economy
and he's got the possibility
that the west
doesn't stay resolved and doesn't
continue to pay for ukraine's economy or
supply those heavy weapons
and so you could argue that maybe he's
deluded about all of this
and maybe he should go on twitter you
know i'm not on twitter but maybe putin
who famously doesn't use the internet
should go on twitter and see he's losing
the war
or you can argue that maybe he's
calculating here
that he's got a chance to still prevail
wow that is um darkly insightful if i
could
go to henry kissinger for a brief moment
and people should read this
op-ed he wrote in the washington post in
march 5th 2014
after the start of the war between
russia and ukraine but before crimea was
annexed
uh there's a lot of interesting
historical description about the
division within ukraine the corruption
within ukraine
that will
if people read this article will give
context to
how incredible it is what zelensky was
able to accomplish in uniting the
country but i just want to comment
because henry kissinger is a interesting
figure in american history he opens the
article with in my life
i have seen four wars begun with great
enthusiasm and public support all of
which we did not know how to end and
from three of which we withdrew
unilaterally the test of policy is how
it ends
not how it begins
so he's giving this cold hard truth
that we get we go into wars excited are
able to send 40 billion dollars
financial aid military aid
our own men and women
but the excitement fades
twitter
outrage fades and then
a country that's willing to wait
patiently
is is willing to to pay the cost of
siege versus the cost of explaining to
its own people that the war is lost that
country just might win
outlast let's hope not
because
uh
ukrainians
resistance deserves to prevail here
russia deserves to lose
no war of aggression like they've
committed here against ukraine
should prevail if we can do anything
about it
i support a thousand percent
the continued
supply of heavy weapons including
offensive weapons to the ukrainians
as long as they're willing to resist and
it's their choice
it's their choice when to negotiate it's
their choice how much to resist it's
their choice what kind of sacrifices to
make and it and it's our responsibility
to meet their requests more quickly than
we have so far and at greater scale
but ultimately wars only have political
ends they never have military ends
you need a political solution here
so if the ukrainians are able
to conduct a successful
counter-offensive at scale
in july or august whenever they launch
right now the heavy weapons are coming
in
and they're being moved to the
battlefield and more are coming you know
the dynamic russia bombs a school
russia bombs a hospital
americans and europeans decide to send
even more heavy weapons to ukraine right
that's the self-defeating dynamic from
the russian side
they commit the atrocities we send more
heavy weapons
once those heavy weapons are on the
battle lines
we'll see if ukrainians cannot just
defend
which they've proven they're able to do
in breathtaking fashion
not just conduct counter-attacks
where the enemy moves forward and you
cut behind the enemy's lines
and you counter attack and push the
enemy back a little bit
but whether you can evict the russians
from your territory with a combined arms
operation where you have a massive
superiority in in infantry and heavy
weapons but more importantly you
coordinate your air power
your tanks your drones your infantry
at scale
which is something the ukrainians have
not done yet it's something the russians
failed at in ukraine and they come from
the same place the soviet military
we hope this ukrainian counter-offensive
at scale this combined uh arms operation
succeeds
and if it does succeed there's the
possibility of a battlefield victory
whether that also includes crimea
which as you know is not hostile on the
contrary
to the russian military
remains to be seen
but but however much
they regain territorially
back towards the 1991 borders which is
their goal their stated goal
and which we support them properly in
trying to achieve
however much they achieve of that in
this counter-offensive that we're
anticipating
that will set the stage for the next
phase
and either russia the
which is to say one person
vladimir putin
will acknowledge that he's lost the war
because the ukrainians want it on the
battlefield
or
he'll try to
announce a full-scale mobilization
conscript the whole country
go back and instead of acknowledging
defeat try to win with a different plan
recalibrate
remains to be seen
will the ukrainians negotiate any
territory away or must they capture also
crimea
which puts a very high bar
on the wind on the summer
counter-offensive that we're going to
see which could last through the fall
and into the winter as a result
we don't know the answers to that nobody
knows the answers to that people are
guessing some people are better informed
because they have
inside intelligence
people are also worried about russian
escalation
to nuclear weapons or chemical weapons
if they begin to lose on the battlefield
to ukraine are you worried about nuclear
war
the possibility
of nuclear war
i think it's necessary to pay attention
to that possibility
that possibility existed
before
the february 2022 full-blown invasion of
ukraine
the doomsday arsenal that russia
possesses is enough to destroy the world
many times over
and that's been the case every year
since the collapse of the soviet union
in 1991
and so of course we're concerned about
that
we do know however alex that they have a
system known as dual key
dual key for their strategic nuclear
weapons
strategic nuclear weapons means the ones
fired from silos the missiles
the ones delivered from bombers or the
ones fired from submarines right and
they're ready to go they're
intercontinental
we watch that very very closely
we watch all the movement of that and
the alerts
etc we have tremendously let's say um
tremendous inside intelligence on that
but dual key means that president putin
alone cannot fire them
he has one key which he must insert he
must then
insert the codes
for a command to launch
that then goes to the head of the
general staff
who must has his own key and separate
codes and must do the same insert that
keyan codes for them to launch
and so
will the general staff chief
go along
with the destruction of the world over a
battlefield loss in ukraine
i don't know the answer to that and i
don't know if anybody knows the answer
to that will those people flying those
bombers
if they get the order from if the dual
key system goes into action
and both keys are used and all the codes
are are implemented
will those
young guys fly in those bombers let
those bombs go
will those at the missile silos
decide to engage and fire
we don't know but you can see that it's
more than one man making a decision here
in a system of strategic nuclear weapons
as far as the tactical
the so-called low-yield or battlefield
nuclear weapons
we're not sure the system that they have
in russia these days for their implement
for their use of such tactical nuclear
weapons
it could well be that
that putin and just
himself
he alone can fire them or order them be
fired
but you know lex there's no tactical
nuclear weapon fired at ukraine that's
not also fired simultaneously at russia
if the kremlin is 600 miles from ukraine
and if the wind changes direction
or the wind happens to be blowing east
northeast
the fallout hits your kremlin
not just ukraine
moreover you have all those border
regions which are staging regions for
the russian offensive
and they're a lot closer than 600 miles
they're actually right there and so you
fire that weapon on ukrainian territory
and you can get the fallout
just like the chernobyl fallout
spread to sweden
which is how the
we got the kremlin 2 finally
first they denied they said oh we don't
know why there's a big nuclear cloud
over sweden we don't know where that
came from but eventually they admitted
it
so russia can't actually use a nuclear
weapon
tactical battlefield one in ukraine
without also firing it at itself
and in addition it's that same dynamic i
alluded to earlier
which is to say
you bomb a hospital you bomb a school
there's more heavy weapons
going to ukraine from the west you can't
get away with any of the
there's always going to be a response
that's either proportional or greater
than proportional you could well have
europe signing on to nato direct
engagement both washington oh boy and
brussels direct engagement of the
russian army on the territory of ukraine
you think that's possible to do that
without dramatic escalation from the
russian side
yes i do think it's possible but it's
very worrisome just like you're saying
but but
if putin were to escalate like that
he's firing that weapon at himself
and he's potentially provoking a direct
clash with nato's military not just with
the ukrainian military
if you're sitting in the kremlin looking
at those charts lex
of nato capabilities
and you can't conquer ukraine which
didn't really have heavy weapons before
february 2022 at scale
and you're thinking okay now i'm going
to take on nato
that would be a bold step
on the part of a russian leader and and
and let's also remember lex that there's
another variable here
you're a desperate as long as everyone
implements
your orders
and so if people start to say
quietly not necessarily publicly i may
not implement that order
because that's maybe a criminal order
or
my grandma is ukrainian or my wife is
ukrainian
or i don't want to go to the hog
i don't want to spend the rest of my
life in the hog or whatever it might be
at any point along the chain of command
from the general staff all the way down
right to the platoon
you're a despot provided they implement
your orders
but who's to say
that somewhere along the chain of
command
people start to say you know
i'm gonna ignore that order
or i'm gonna sabotage that order or i'm
gonna flee the battlefield or i'm gonna
injure myself
so that i don't have to fight or i'm
gonna join the ukrainian side
and so it could be that's what's left of
the russian army in the field
begins to disintegrate
even if the ukrainians are not able to
mount that counter-offensive at scale
that combined arms operation
the russian military in the field which
has taken horrendous casualties as far
as we understand something like a third
of the original force
so you're talking about 50 to 60 000
that includes both dead and wounded to
the point of being unable to return to
the battlefield
those are big numbers those were a lot
of families
a lot of families affected
their sons or their their husbands or
their fathers are either missing an
action or the regime won't tell them
that they're dead
as you know from the sinking of that
flagship
moskva
right by the ukrainians
and so a disintegration of the russian
military because there are orders that
they either can't implement or don't
want to implement
is also not excluded and so you have
these two big variables the ukrainian
army in the field and its ability to
move from defense to offense at scale
and we're going to test that soon
and then the russian ability in the
field to hold together
in a war of conquest and aggression
where they're they're conscripts or
they're fed dog food or or or they don't
have any weapons anymore because there's
no resupply and
so so the disintegration of the army
can't be excluded and then of course all
bets are off on the putin regime
more long term
there are these technology export
controls
we were talking about how the
military-industrial complex in russia is
dependent
on foreign component parts and software
and so if you have export controls
and you have firms voluntarily even when
they don't fall under export controls
leaving russian business refusing to do
business with russia
and we see this not just in the civilian
sector like with mcdonald's or many
other companies
we see this in the key
areas like the oil industry
with the executives fleeing
that is the western executives fleeing
giving up their positions
so russia's ability to resupply its
tanks resupply its missiles
resupply
its uniforms
resupply its food to its soldiers in the
field and then their boots
we see a lot of stuff under tremendous
stress and in the long term there's no
obvious way
they can rebuild the military-industrial
complex to produce those weapons
because they're reliant on foreign parts
that they can't get anymore and there
are no domestic
substitutes on the immediate horizon
that's
at the earliest a two-year
proposition to have domestic substitutes
and for some things like
microelectronics
they've never had domestic substitutes
going back to the soviet times as you
know well
and so there's that pressure
on russia from the technology export
controls
which if you're in
the security ministry or the defense
ministry if you're in that side of the
uh of the regime
you're feeling that pain as we speak
and you're wondering about the strategy
let me ask you about
again the echoes of history
and it frustrates me in part when people
draw these parallels
but maybe there is some deep insight
about those parallels
so there's um
there's a song that goes let's
operation barbarossa the
the bombing of kiev by hitler
there is sort of an eerie parallel
and you have to be extremely careful
drawing such parallels and such
um
connections to this
unexplainable
war in uh that is world war ii
but
is there elements
of this that do echo in the actions of
vladimir putin
and more specifically
do you think the vladimir putin is a war
criminal
can that label be assigned to the
actions of this man
so war criminal is a legal determination
and it requires evidence and due process
and the ability to defend oneself
we don't just decide
in the twitter sphere
or on a podcast that somebody is a war
criminal
they can be a suspected war criminal
and we can gather evidence to try to
prosecute that case
and then
the issue for us lex is which court does
it go to
what's the appropriate place does it
happen in ukraine because they're the
victims does it happen in the hog
because there's an international
criminal court there
does it happen inside russia because
there's regime change at some point and
some of these people become
let's say they get arrested by their own
people inside russia
so those are all important questions
that have to be pursued with resources
and with determination and and by
skilled people who are
excellent at gathering that evidence and
that process is underway and ukraine has
a trial underway now
of one
uh alleged war criminal who's pleaded
guilty and and we'll see what the
outcome of that trial inside ukraine is
of a lower level official not obviously
vladimir putin but the commander of a
tank group
so yes
the names are eerily familiar
izum
harkief
kiev
right those are the names we know
from the nazi invasion
and the nazi occupation
of ukraine
and it's
very deeply troubling to think that this
could happen again
and there's a bizarre sense
that the russians
claiming as putin says to de-nazify
ukraine
have invaded the same places that the
nazis invaded
back in 1941 as somebody who's working
on volume 3
of your work on stalin going through
this period
is it eerie to you yes it is lex that
you're
i've written the chapters of volume
three i've drafted the chapters on the
war
and and as i said the place names are
very evocative unfortunately
but but you know
the nazis failed ultimately
they
captured ukraine
for a time
but they were evicted from ukraine
there was massive
partisan
or guerrilla warfare resistance behind
nazi lines the whole time
that they were
allegedly in control of ukraine
if you look at the maps on cable tv they
show you the sign of russia they show
you the coloring russian control and
they draw a line and then it's colored
in
but the word control is misplaced
they don't actually control it it's
russian claimed or
or extent of farthest russian
troop advancement
because behind the russian lines in
ukraine crimea accepted
you have insurgencies you have the armed
insurgency
and militopol for example which is a
place that you know
in southeastern ukraine
there is a guerrilla war now underway
to
hurt the russians who are in occupation
of that city and region and we're going
to see that continue
even if
the war becomes a stalemate
even if it stalemates more or less at
the lines we're at now
which would mean
that anticipated ukrainian
counter-offensive at scale proves
unsuccessful
the russian army doesn't disintegrate
and you end up with
a stalemate where there could be a
ceasefire not a ceasefire but neither
side is attempting an offensive for the
time being
there will be resistance behind those
russian lines and it will be fierce
resistance
the kind of resistance we saw to the
nazi occupation
ultimately it took
the red army
reinvading
the territory
of ukraine and succeeding
at combined opera arms operations at
scale a massive counter offensive much
larger than anything we're talking about
today
ultimately it required that to evict the
nazis from ukraine
but in the meantime they did not have an
easy occupation regime there
uh ukrainian
partisans
soviet partisans
killed
nazi officials vermont soldiers vermont
officers blew up
the infrastructure they were using
made them pay a price for their
occupation
we could well see
if unfortunately this ends in a
stalemate for the time being we could
well see that type of insurgency gain
momentum behind russian lines
and and try to evict the russians that
way
and then remount the counter offense of
its scale later on in the future
if the first one doesn't succeed
so that would be further
echoes
of the world war ii experience the scale
once again is much smaller
the size of the armies here
they're not in the
many hundred eight hundred thousand
seven hundred thousand a million two a
million four that's not what we're
talking about today
but the weapons
the cruise missiles
right
artillery fire
you know artillery fire used to be very
inaccurate and it was like saturation
you were just fired towards the enemy
lines and if you hit something you hit
something and if you didn't you just
kept firing
now you have drones lex
and so artillery fire is now sniper fire
because you can coordinate the direction
of the artillery fire with the drones
the drones can take a picture and show
you where the enemy is precisely located
and you can align that artillery to hit
them instead of just indiscriminately
bombing an area a territory
and the nato supplied artillery goes
really far
and you can fire into russian positions
and yourself not be exposed to russian
fire because your
artillery
fires farther than theirs
so that's coming
and we're going to see that in action
and so
the scale is not the same but the
weapons the precision of some of the
weapons and some of the nato we're not
sending all of our stuff
but as i said the dynamic is russia
commits atrocities russia bombs schools
russia bombs hospitals russia kills
civilians
and more
and heavier and more lethal
western weapons go to ukraine their
willingness to risk their lives
is really so impressive and the reason
that we it's
it's our duty we're obliged to supply
those weapons and so the russians don't
have that resupply and the ukrainians do
and so the russians are now digging in
lex
they're digging in deeply in the areas
that they've penetrated
and they're trying to build unassailable
positions
when for when the ukrainians transition
from mostly defense to full-scale
offense and we'll see if that now i mean
they're digging everywhere
you know as they say
kapayut compiled right they're digging
everywhere behind your russian is
beautiful digging in i wish likes like
yours
but so so there are these things that we
can't predict but there are these things
we're watching and watching closely
and on top of that something that's not
in world war ii or for the most part
it's cyber attacks and cyber warfare
which
is uh
much less perhaps
convertible into human words because it
happens so quickly such large scales so
difficult to trace and all those kinds
of things it's not bullets it's
uh electrical signals and the that's
yeah but those ukrainian people they're
like ulex
they're young
and they're technically really
proficient
yeah and they've been amazing
you know they spent those teenage years
in the basement yeah playing video games
not turns out it's useful after all it
turns out it's more than useful you can
save your country that way
and so they're not alone they're getting
support
and that support is important
but really predominantly it's ukrainians
on the cyber battlefield
and their skills have been very
impressive and they've been preparing
for this for a number of years
and they have a whole army of young
people
on the cyber side
it's their civilian population these are
not people conscripted into the military
or volunteering wearing the uniform
and so even in cyber warfare the
ukrainians have been extremely
impressive
and so let's remember
that
all of these aspects
of warfare
whether it's
how far your cruise missiles go and how
accurate they are
what size your cyber capabilities are
it's really ultimately about the people
it's about the human capital
right it's it's about
the their willingness
their skill level but also their
willingness to fight and to put their
lives on the line and there's no
substitute for that and so what's called
morale
or courage or bravery or valor
that's really the ultimately decisive
provided you have enough sufficient arms
right to conduct the fight and if you
don't you use a molotov cocktail
right grandma calls in the coordinates
of the russian tank
on her iphone
and you
have a molotov cocktail that
the the people who used to work in the
cafeteria
are now stuffing flammable liquid into
bottles and you carry one right up to
the tank and you smash it against the
tank or you drop it in
one of the hatches in the tank right
there's no substitute for that kind of
stuff that that level of resolve
willingness to die for your country
that's a really big lesson
that we need to absorb in our own
country
we've been going to war
more frequently than we should
and like you said without the
justification all the time and then like
henry kissinger said without
understanding how this was going to end
it's easy to start a war it's very
difficult to win a war prevail in war or
end a war on terms that that meet your
original expectations right
we've been fighting wars but we haven't
been fighting wars as as societies
we've been fighting wars as a small
sliver of our population
something like one percent of our
population is involved with the military
because we have an all-volunteer force
and that means that it's easier for our
politicians to go to war
because they don't face
conscription
they don't they don't have the draft
which affects every family in the
country
and because
the number of people in the volunteer
force is such a narrow
stratum of the population and so they've
been getting away with this because the
professional army is much better than
the conscript army and in all volunteer
forces much preferable from a military
point of view
but from a societal point of view
it enables you to go to war too easily
as a politician
and it doesn't engage the society the
same way that the ukrainian society is
completely engaged
from those young hackers all the way up
to those grandmothers
let me ask you you're a scholar of
history and scholar geopolitics
and you're also a human being
that's kind of you lex i'll take that
what's the value
what's the hope what's the power of
conversation here
if you could sit down with vladimir
putin and have a conversation
versus bullets
human exchange words
is there hope for those and if so what
would you talk about what would you ask
him
well henry kissinger
you alluded to his op-ed he's had many
private meetings with president putin
over over a long time
and
president biden
the previous presidents
secretaries of
state officials below secretary of state
the head of the cia
evidently met with president putin in
the fall
when
he was massing the troops on the border
before he
invaded and we we sent the head of the
cia and putin received him
somebody he evidently respects or was at
least willing to meet
unlike other members of the
administration
so a lot of people are talking to him in
some form or another
for the 22 years he's been in power
and i'm not sure it's had
what i would call
their desired effect
well the nature of the conversation is
interesting too and also the timing
which is post february 22nd is a
different
time and also another aspect
which oliver stone mentioned
interestingly
that there is something about covet and
the pandemic that creates isolation the
distancing it's such a silly little
nuanced thing
but maybe it's actually
has a profound impact on the human being
the human mind of vladimir putin that
there is something about an in-person
meeting and not across a table that's
far too large yes but sort of the
intimacy of a one human to human
in-person conversation that
there's something distinctly powerful
about that reminder
that
as putin says in the narrative in the
propaganda that we're all one people
there is truth to that that this
entirety of humanity yes is your people
and you're kind of reminded by that
when you're sitting together
people who have
sat across the table from him
whether
at 30 yards or
at three
have remarked upon this feeling of
isolation has that has affected him the
pandemic
i think there must be something to that
if if several people
who've been in the room with him are
remarking on it
everybody that i know and i've been able
to talk to who's had a meeting with him
in the past 10 years
including uh henry kissinger the former
secretary of state
has said that putin spends a lot of time
enumerating his grievances
he goes through a monologue of his
grievances
and then the west did this and then the
west lied to us about that
and then the west cheated us on this
and so it's not the conversation
that you're encouraging of common
humanity
it's that roiling resentment volcano
that's just exploding and exploding the
resentment
and and by the time
he gets through the monologue
of the grievances
the time of the meeting is is expired or
or overtime
that's a brilliant statement but that's
where the skill of conversation comes in
like when you're facing a bull with a
red cloth
you have to learn how to avoid the long
list of grievances and get to the
humanity
that's that's a really important it's a
skill for sure it's a skill and it's the
highest level skill of a diplomat
to be able to reach some type of common
understanding when interests and and
world views clash so much
but here's your challenge lex
your challenge is
russia wants to impose a closed sphere
of influence
on its neighbors
it wants to dictate
what its neighbors can and can't do
it wants to exert influence not by the
power of its example
not by the freedom of its people
not by the dynamism of its diversified
economy
but it wants to exert influence just
because it deserves that
just because it's a great power
just because
and on and on and on it's a civilization
unto itself
and it wants that and we can't give that
the reason that russia was not
integrated into the west was not for
lack of trying
it was because
russia ultimately spurned the
integration because it was about what
terms the integration would come on
would you come into the west and observe
western rules
and be another country
meaning just another country
there's
poland and there's austria
and there's
little tiny monaco and there's and
there's russia
and you're just one of those countries
and russia's answer to that was no
we're not just one of those countries we
need special rules
we need special conditions
we'll integrate but only as a special
country meaning
like at the u.n
where all countries are sovereign
all countries are members but russia has
a veto
on what countries can and can't do
those were the terms
on which they were willing to integrate
and those were the terms that no leader
of a western country or the united
states
or the g7
or fill in the blank can grant to russia
it's very well known
that vladimir putin
was one of the first maybe the first
person
first leader
foreign leader to call president bush
after the 9 11
tragedy
they didn't connect right away
president bush was not in washington and
but eventually they did speak he
condemned the terrorist attack he
offered russian support
which he delivered on
the use of some russian logistics for
our afghanistan
operations
and a lot of people point to that and
they say there it is russia wanted to
cooperate
and
did cooperate and we spurned them
or we failed to appreciate
russia's cooperation and so therefore
russia was cheated or russia was lied to
or russia's grievances are legitimate
but here's the problem with that
argument lex
in exchange for that support
vladimir putin
asked in return from president bush
for a free hand in the former soviet
space that closed hierarchical sphere of
influence
where russia would exert
influence coercively
over countries that were sovereign
and no american president
could grant that and president bush was
right he said no
and so
the attempted cooperation blew up
but who's at fault there
should there be
a non-voluntary sphere of influence
should that be granted
or should you face up to attempts to do
that
you know let's take a a
a little detour here into china for a
second
china had this brilliant grand strategy
which was
sure america is hostile
because america is hegemonic america
wants to control the world america will
never let china rise america will do
everything it can to hold china down
so we're going to have hostility from
america
we don't want to decouple
because we need that high-end technology
transfer
either we buy it or we steal it because
america and the rest of the west has all
the technology that we need
we have some of it domestically
more than before by a lot but we're
still dependent so we can't decouple
so we'll have the hostility but there'll
be a line we don't cross just so that we
don't lose the technology transfer
till made in china 2035
is accomplished and we're
self-sufficient
domestically and ai and every other area
that's critical
but hostility from america but we have
an ace in the hall
our race in the whole is europe
europe hates conflict
they're all about trade
it doesn't matter how evil you are they
love to trade because
change through trade they have this
illusion that you're going to become a
better country if they trade with you
and you won't have conflict war and
hostilities if you trade
and so we have this european ace in the
hall we're hostile with the americans
we're still buying or stealing their
technology
and and better than that even the
europeans are not hostile to us at all
they love to trade with us and they want
to trade more and they're our biggest
trading partner already
and lo and behold xi jinping sides with
vladimir putin
in the aggression in ukraine
he doesn't
side with him providing military
equipment he doesn't provide technology
transfer
but he provides public support and
massive pro-russian propaganda to the
whole chinese population
and the europeans say wait a minute this
is an invasion of a sovereign country in
europe
what do you mean
you're not condemning vladimir putin's
invasion
and so that wedge that the chinese had
that was the basis of their grand
strategy that wedge between the u.s and
europe when it came to china policy that
wedge is gone now xi jinping destroyed
it
and the europeans and the americans are
coming close together
on ukraine and russia policy for sure
but also more and more on china policy
and so that was a pretty big sacrifice
for the chinese leader to make and what
did he get in return
gets hydrocarbons from russia at reduced
prices
and the chinese get hydrocarbons from a
lot of countries
they have a completely diverse
supply chain for their energy so what do
you think xi jinping is thinking now was
it was it a mistake or i'd like to know
alex i'd like you to be able to sit down
with him across from this table here on
your podcast and pose that same question
to him because we have no idea there's a
language barrier that's fascinating by
the way you as a scholar of stalin
do you think we'll ever break through
the language barrier
to china not ever i apologize in in the
next few years because there is a
gigantic
cultural and language barrier between
the west and the china is a great
civilization china predates the united
states
by millennia
china's accomplishments are breathtaking
but china is also led
by let's be honest a communist party
monopoly
which engages in a lot of criminal
behavior lex
tibet
is ukraine
xinjiang
is ukraine
hong kong
is ukraine
let alone support for putin ukraine this
is before we've even discussed taiwan
and so now the europeans are coming to
see this and the americans are coming to
understand this
that
maybe trading with a regime like that
morally politically criminally
tibet xinjiang hong kong
how is that different from what putin is
doing in ukraine i'd be hard-pressed to
differentiate that ultimately
even though the analogies are not exact
and so the chinese
it's like that guy leona
the author of li heletia
the the great um
memoir
of the late soviet period the end of the
soviet union
you know that they they spend all this
time and all these resources blackening
our image but we supply them with
endless material to blacken our image
that's where xi jinping's regime is
right now lex
and so they have a big dilemma on their
side
it's a western world
and they've united the western world
and and
reawoken
the western world
to the fact that china
is a threat
to the values
the institutions and values of the west
and that trade is not transforming china
quite the opposite
we'll see if this endures maybe it
doesn't endure maybe it's a fleeting
moment maybe this is not an inflection
point
maybe the war in ukraine ends more
quickly than than we think and
maybe like you said the chinese and the
indians and the rest of them the leaders
there they get their wish that it ends
and
the world moves on
and forgets or
says let's try again to to resume
our mutual understanding our mutually
beneficial trade and everything else
maybe it's a passing phase we can't
exclude that i'm very poor at predicting
the future
but the moment is not a good one for the
chinese regime
let alone the fact that he's trying
to impose
an unprecedented in the modern era third
term
for himself as president in the fall at
the next party congress
becoming president for life
de facto
a mao like figure
and he's now got to do that
with in this environment
where he has damaged chinese grand
strategy
and damaged the reputation of china and
its relationships across the world
maybe not permanently but significantly
in addition to the problems they have at
home demography
as you know a middle income trap
and then the regulatory insanity of
chinese communist rule that we've seen
with the tech companies that you know
well where they've destroyed all of that
value
with the blow up of their property
sector
because it was a massive bubble
and that's still playing out
and this time it's the same
meaning this time it's not different
when it comes to a property blow out it
has enormous effects
on middle-class balance sheets and their
ability to
to be to remain consumers and drive the
economy which is the model that they
have to share so he's got a litany of
challenges independent even
of the fact that he sided
with his
pal
vladimir putin and their bromance is
costing china very very significantly if
you close your eyes
yes
and a hundred years ago
1922 and you think about the future
i wonder if you can hear the drums of
war
predicting the 30s predicting
the great depression and the resentment
that builds
the economic resentment the cultural
resentment the geopolitical resentment
that builds at least the world war ii
it uh at least to me when i close my
eyes i can hear the drums of war that
are still
ahead of us
and it's possible that
were
there
will materialize in a similar way as the
1922.
i have my eyes closed lex do you hear
anything and i sure hope that that's not
what happens
but i'm looking in 1922 it's an epoch i
know well
and i don't see the future that unfolds
i would not have predicted it had i been
alive then i see
the war behind us
i see
uh prosperity on the horizon yes
inflation in germany and
and some many other
uh difficult issues but there are more
democracies now than there were before
the war and the old empires are gone
and there's a cultural efflorescence and
there's modernism in the arts and
and there's women entering the public
sphere and there's all this fantastic
new technology like automobiles and
i'm looking at the future from 1922 and
and i'm not seeing the great depression
and i'm not seeing world war ii and i'm
not seeing the holocaust
because
i don't predict the future and nobody in
1922 could see that future although
i guess there were some clairvoyance who
predicted it but
but you're not one of them yeah i'm not
one of them and and but but this is what
i know lex from studying history
what i know is stuff happens
in other words it's very deep insight
in other words like
we're watching ukraine war right now
and all of our attention is focused on
that
and it's like the economists say in
their textbooks when their their
powerful models
are employed
and there's this line that says
all
other factors held constant comma
and then the model works
and you get this really great result
it's very powerful predictor and
analysis the model
and and the whole game is all other
factors held constant
so the russia ukraine war that we've
been discussing and this could happen
and that could happen
but you know what stuff could happen
like
for example
the israeli government could decide this
summer that it's going to bomb iran
because no israeli government will
tolerate iran acquiring a nuclear weapon
and since president trump
exited unilaterally exited from the
multi-power nuclear agreement
iran is now much closer to the bomb than
they were
when they were still in when the united
states was still in that agreement
and you tell me the israeli government
that says sure it's fine it's okay iran
can get the bomb
and so maybe that happens and maybe that
happens as early as this summer as iran
gets closer and closer and closer
maybe
that
guy in north korea decides it's his time
just like his grandfather
right in 1950
decided you know it's time we're gonna
quote reunify unquote the korean
peninsula
maybe
i don't know lex fill in the blank
something's going to happen it's not
going to be what i predict it's not
going to be what i'm watching
it's going to be obvious only after it
happens not before
and then it's going to upend the table
and all of a sudden
everything changes we're going to be in
a different environment different
circumstances and is ukraine still
as central at that point as it seems to
be right now i don't know the answer to
that question let me ask
two rapid fire questions you're only
allowed to have one minute and it's
about predicting the future
okay
question one
vladimir putin
when will he no longer be in office
and will he step down or be overthrown
what's your prediction and a brief
explanation of that prediction now
nobody can predict the future but what's
your sense now some people are saying
the pressure is building he's going to
be overthrown or step down at the end of
this year
and some people say
surely he's going to uh last outlast
stalin's rule of 30 plus years no
evidence of a coup yet
none whatsoever
yet
um he's pretty much at life expectancy
for a russian male
those are bad numbers he's 69 gonna be
70.
so he's lived the life of a russian male
already
but he's got better doctors
than the majority of the russian males
in that
let's say
comparison set
so he could live a very long time with
good doctors
so there could be a coup at some point
but there's none today
in evidence
he could go because he's reached the
life expectancy or he could stay for a
long time
the thing to watch
about this
is
an organization that nobody pays
attention to
the fso the federal solution
which is the praetorian guard
the self-standing bodyguard directorate
the only one the only organization in
russia that has any access to him
we've seen no disloyalty no breaking of
ranks
no defections
nothing in the public realm in open
sources about any divisions
or problems in the fso in the praetorian
guard
so if you can't
break that change that
uh
elicit defections there you can't
overturn him so authoritarian regimes
likes they're terrible they fail at
everything
they not they can't feed their people
they have trouble
achieving any goals
they only have to be good however one
thing
they only have to be good at the
complete suppression of political
alternatives
if you can suppress political
alternatives
you can fail at everything else but you
can survive as an authoritarian regime
so you watched navalny that's that's
still alive okay
that's my the second rapid fire question
is what happens to navalny what are the
possible conclusions of what you said
quite possibly the second most
influential powerful figure in russia
uh is there is he going to die in in
jail will he become the next president
of russia
well what are the possible i wish i knew
lex i've been surprised that he's still
alive
i've been worried
that he will be killed in prison in a
staged fight
you know some
a security officer prison guard
puts on a prison outfit takes a lead
pipe goes into the cell they have a
quote fight
and navalny is killed i've been afraid
of that but he's still alive even though
he's serving a long sentence
so that leads me to guess
that people inside the putin regime and
maybe president putin himself understand
that navalny is their ticket to lift
sanctions
that navalny is
even more popular outside of russia than
he is inside of russia you know he's the
leader
in many ways of the up political
opposition in the country
even while still in prison his
organization's been destroyed
but it's he doesn't have majority
support in the population by any stretch
of the imagination but he's a big figure
in the west
including here in the u.s
and so navalny could be their ticket
they're kind of g
get out of jail card meaning they
release him from prison
he gets appointed i don't know prime
minister even by the putin regime if he
were willing to accept such a position
and i have my doubts about that
and then that's how they lobby to remove
the sanctions against them so he's a
card that president putin could play
and so maybe that's the reason he's
still alive
or maybe there are other reasons that we
don't know
and so
some alternative to putin is more likely
to arise
inside his gang
putin
as they say right inside his gang
where they tire
of his mistakes
they tire of his self-defeating actions
and they say patriotically for russia
we need to do something against move
against the sky
because
he's hurting our country and also
because i could do better i'm ambitious
as well as patriotic
but once again the problem there lex is
putin is surrounded
by this cocoon
known as the fso
he's he meets on zoom
predominantly with the rest of the
government including with the defense
and security
they don't have
frequent access to his person and as you
were alluding
earlier to the pandemic they have to
quarantine for two weeks before every
meeting with him
and moreover you know lex
they don't know where he is
you see when they're on zoom with him
and
and the room
it's the valdai
his office in the valdai region
looks the same
as his office in sochi
or his office outside of moscow and nova
agariova they're made up to look very
similar on zoom
and sure some signs they're looking
where is it but
maybe they don't know
and so you're gonna move on him
and you're gonna jump him in his kremlin
out his dacha
outside outside moscow
and it turns out he's in sochi or vice
versa and it turns out the fso is loyal
to him and and won't let you anyway so
lex we don't know but we watch this fso
really closely and we think that the the
elites if not putin but maybe putin to
understand navalny
as a really big potential political card
that they could play
and one last question
the biggest question
you studied some of the darkest
aspects of human history human nature
let me ask the why question
what are we doing here
what's the meaning of
our existence our life here on earth
what are we humans trying to get at here
i can't answer that question either
but i can say
that having a purposeful life
is is actually not that hard
you can't you're not gandhi
right you're not president roosevelt
you're not going to transform a country
or a civilization or
become immortal
because of
your courage and your your insight and
your genius critical moments
but you live in an environment you're in
a school you're in a workplace
you're you're somewhere where you can
affect other people in a positive way
it can be not just about yourself but it
can be about them
and you can have a positive impact on
other people's lives
through the work that you do whether
that's your employment or your charity
or your spare time or your work time
it can be by modeling proper behavior
right admitting your mistakes
hard to do but necessary
remembering that you don't know
everything you can't predict the future
but you don't even know everything in
your areas of expertise
painfully reminded of that humility at
times but remind yourself to too
so you can lead
a life
that can show others
what good values are
and you can lead a life that dedicates
yourself
not only to your own material well-being
but to the well-being and to the
development of others around you and it
can be on a a humble scale
it can be in a small classroom or a
small workplace a small work team
but but it can be done
and you can be reminded
that having a positive impact even on
one other person
gives far greater meaning to your own
life and is profoundly satisfying much
more satisfying
than the attention you might get
let's say on social media or awards you
might receive
there's nothing wrong with pursuing
those
people pursue them and
it's a free society
but leading a purposeful life
intentionally
is possible even just one person i love
the expression uh
say one life save the world
just focusing on the local and the tiny
little difference you can make in the
world can somehow ripple every day
if you think about that every single day
uh
you're a better person we're a better
society
and maybe you get to add a bit of love
to the world after all
stephen this is a huge honor uh for many
reasons one of which is i can just tell
how much care you put into this
conversation and
um how much you know i use the word love
a lot but i just feel the love
that um just even the respect you you
give me which i can't tell you
how energizing that is how much that
gives me strength
for my own silly little pursuits
um thank you so much for doing that
thank you for not just talking today but
uh giving me so much respect just with
everything you're doing is i i really
appreciate that it makes me feel special
so thank you so much for sitting down
and talking today mutual lex thank you
as well and thank you for the respect
that you've shown me and these are
really difficult issues that don't have
simple answers
but that doesn't mean we give up
we have to keep thinking and learning
and trying
and finding solutions in everything we
do including on these these big global
tragedies that we live through
and it's heartbreaking
what's going on
it it just breaks my heart every day a
person who studies this has been
studying this for decades
and it keeps happening
and you think again
and yes it is again but but we still
have to keep trying and we have to be
inspired by those people who are more
courageous than we are and sacrifice
more than we sacrifice
you know for me
the russian invasion of ukraine the war
in ukraine
is experienced in my study at home
and in my office at princeton or
my coming office at stanford when i
moved full time to stanford in september
or or it's experienced far away
in safety and in comfort
and we have to remember that too
when we talk about these things when we
answer your questions right that as we
speak and as we uh comment and think
we're experts on these things from the
comfort of our existence
that there are people in those tragedies
right now
with no power with no food with no with
full uncertainty about the future of the
house their children that's it
and uh and i've also seen because i have
family in both places
homes
that
were home for buildings that were homes
for generations
now in rubble
so
yes lex it just it hurts
and it's it's let's it's syria
where 350 000 at least by u.n estimates
died and russia participated in that
and it's yemen
and and it's so many other places that
don't have the same degree of attention
that a european country like ukraine has
but but yeah we have to remember also
that in addition to ukraine
and then there's things right home here
in new york city
where children are without food
it's just inexcusable in a country this
rich
so we shouldn't forget in our study of
leaders in our study of geopolitics that
ultimately it's about the humanity it's
about the human beings and
okay like human suffering thank you so
much thank you this is amazing
conversation talk to you again soon my
pleasure
thanks for listening to this
conversation with stephen codkin
to support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from mahatma gandhi
when i despair i remember that all
through history the way of truth and
love have always won there have been
tyrants and murderers
and for time
they can seem invincible
but in the end they always fall
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time