Kind: captions
Language: en
what are your thoughts on the ongoing
war in ukraine how do you analyze it
within your framework about war
how far would they go to hang on to
power
when push came to shove
is i think the thing that worries me
the most and is plainly what worries
most people about the risk of nuclear
war like at what point does that uncheck
leadership
decide that this is worth it
especially if they can
emerge
from the rebels still on top
the following is a conversation with
chris blattman professor at the
university of chicago studying the
causes and consequences of violence and
war
this he explores in his new book called
why we fight the roots of war and the
paths to peace
the book comes out on april 19th so you
should pre-order it to support chris and
his work
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's chris
blattman
in your new book titled why we fight the
roots of war and the paths for peace
you're right quote let me be clear what
i mean when i say war
i don't just mean countries duking it
out i mean any kind of prolonged violent
struggle between groups that includes
villages clans gangs ethnic groups
religious sects political factions and
nations
wildly different as these may be their
origins have much in common
we'll see that the northern irish
zealots colombian cartels european
tyrants liberian rebels greek oligarchs
chicago gangs indian mobs rwandan jenna
said dares a new word i learned thank
you to you
those are people who administer genocide
english soccer hooligans and american
invaders
so first let me ask what is war
in saying that war is a prolonged
violent struggle between groups what do
the words prolonged groups and violent
mean
i sit at the sort of intersection of
economics and political science and i
i also dwell a little bit in psychology
but that's partly because i'm married to
psychologists sometimes do research with
her
all these things are really different so
if you're a political scientist you
spend a lot of time just classifying a
really narrow kind of conflict
and studying that and that's that's an
important way to make progress uh as a
social scientist but i'm not trying to
make progress i'm trying to sort of help
everybody step back and say you know
what there's like some common things
that we know
from these disciplines
that uh relate to a really wide range
phenomenon basically we we can talk
about them in a very similar way and we
get really similar insights so i wanted
to
actually
bring them together but i still had to
like
say let's hold out individual violence
which has a lot in common but but
individuals
choose to engage in violence for
more and sometimes different reasons so
let's just put that aside
so that we can focus a bit and let's
really put aside short incidents of
violence because those might have the
same kind of things explaining them but
actually there's a lot of other things
that can explain short violence short
violence can be really
uh
demonstrative like you can just i can
use it to communicate information
the thing that all of it has in common
is that it doesn't generally make sense
it's not your best option most of the
time
and so i wanted to say let's take this
thing that should be puzzling we kind of
think it's normal we kind of think this
is what all humans do
but let's point out that it's not normal
and then figure out why and let's talk
about why and so that's so i was trying
to throw out the the short violence i
was trying to throw out the individual
violence i was also trying to throw out
all the
competition that happens that's not
violent that's that's the normal normal
competition i was trying to say let's
talk about violent competition because
that's kind of the puzzle
so that's really interesting you said
usually
people try to find a narrow definition
and you said progress so you make
progress by finding a narrow definition
for example of military conflict
in a particular context yeah and
progress means
all right well how do we prevent this
particular kind of military conflict or
maybe if it's already happening how do
we de-escalate it and how do we solve it
so from a geopolitics perspective from
an economics perspective and you're
looking for a definition of war that is
as broad as possible
but
not so broad that you cannot achieve a
deep level of understanding of why it
happens and how it can be avoided
right and a comment basically like
recognize that common principles govern
some kinds of behavior that look
pretty different like an indian ethnic
riot
is obviously pretty different than
invading a neighboring country right but
uh and that's pretty different than two
villages or two gangs a lot of what i
work on is studying organized criminals
and gangs two gangs going to where you
think is really different and and of
course it is but
but there are some like common
principles you can just think about
conflict and the use of violence
and um
and not learn everything but just get a
lot just get really really far by sort
of seeing the commonalities rather than
just focusing on the differences so
again those words are prolonged groups
and violent can you maybe linger on each
of those words what is prolonged mean
what's where's the line between short
and long what does groups mean
and what does violet mean so let me you
know i have a friend who um
someone has become a friend through the
process of my work and and writing this
book also uh who was
20 30 years ago was a was gang leader in
chicago
so this guy named napoleon english or
nap
and i remember one time he was saying
well you know when i was young i used to
i was 15 16 and he'd go to the
neighboring gangs territory says i'd go
gangbanging and i said well i didn't
know what that meant i said what does
that mean and he said oh that just meant
i'd shoot him up like i'd shoot at
buildings
i might shoot at people
i wasn't trying to kill he wasn't trying
to kill them he was just trying to sort
of
send a signal that he was a tough guy
and he was fearless and he was someone
who they should be careful with
and so i didn't want to call that war
right that was
that was
that's something different that was it
was short it was kind of sporadic
and and he wasn't
and he was he was basically trying to
send them information and this is what
countries do all the time right we have
military parades
uh and we uh we might have border
skirmishes
and uh and and i wanted to sort of so is
it what's short is is it three-month
border skirmish a war i mean i don't i
don't try to get into those things i
don't want to but i want to point out
that like
these long grueling months and years of
violence are like or the problem in the
puzzle and i just i didn't want to spend
a lot of time talking about um
the
international version of gang banging
it's a different phenomenon so what is
it about napoleon that doesn't nap let's
call him
not to add confusion yeah that doesn't
qualify for war is it the individual
aspect is it that violence is not
the
thing that is sought but the um
communication of information is what is
sought
or is it the shortness of it
is it all of those com
it's a little bit i mean he was the head
of a group where he was becoming the
head of a group at that point um
and that group eventually did go to war
with those neighboring gangs which is to
say it was just long drawn out conflict
over months and months and months
but
i think one of the big insights from my
fields is that
you know you're constantly negotiating
over something
right whether you're officially
negotiating or you're all posturing like
you're kind of you're bargaining over
something
and uh you should be able to
figure out a way to split that pie and
you could use violence
but violence is everybody's miserable
like if you're nap like if you start a
war one you know there's lots of risks
you could get killed that's not good
uh you could kill somebody else and go
to jail which is what happened to him
that's not good uh your soldiers get
killed no one's buying your drugs in the
middle of a gunfight so it interrupts
your business and so on and on like it's
really miserable this is what we're
seeing right now you know as we're
recording you know the
russian invasion of ukraine is now its
fourth or fifth week everybody's
if it didn't dawn on them before it's
dawned on them now just how brutal and
costly this is
as you describe for everybody so
everybody is losing in this war yeah i
mean that's maybe the inside everybody
loses something from war
and
there was usually not always but this
the point is there was usually a way to
get
what you wanted or be better off without
having to fight over it so there's this
it's just fighting is just
politics by other means and it's just
inefficient
costly brutal
devastating means and so that's like the
deep insight and so i kind of wanted to
say um so so i guess like what's not war
and i mean i don't i don't want i don't
try to belabor the definitions because
some some you know there's
reams and reams of political science
prof papers written on like what's a war
what's not award
people disagree
uh
the
i just wanted to say war is the thing
that we shouldn't be doing or where's
the violence that doesn't make sense
there's a whole bunch of other violence
including
gang banging and skirmishes and things
that might make sense
uh precisely because they're cheap ways
of communicating or their their way
they're
they're not particularly costly where's
the thing that's just so costly we
should be trying to avoid is maybe like
the meta way i think about it
right uh nevertheless definitions are
interesting so outside of the academic
bickering yeah every time you try to
define something i'm a big fan of it
the process illuminates
so the destination doesn't matter
because the moment you arrive at the
definition um you lose the power
yeah one of the interesting things i
mean so people you know if you want to
do you know some of what i do is just
quantitative analysis of conflict and
and if you want to do that if you want
to sort of run statistics on war then
you have to code it all up and and then
lots of people have done that there's
four or five major data sets where
people or teams of people have over time
said we're going to code years of war
between these
groups or within a country and what's
interesting is how difficult these these
data sets don't often agree you have to
make all of these the decision gets
really complicated like when does the
war begin right does it does it begin
when a certain number of people have
been killed did it begin
did it what if there's like lots of
skirmishing and sort of like little
terror attacks or a couple bombs lobbed
and then eventually turns into war do we
do we call that did do we back date it
to like when the first act of violence
started and then what do we do with all
the one the times when there was like
that low scale low intensity violence or
lob bombs lobbed and
do we do we call those wars but or maybe
only if they eventually get worse like
so you get it actually is really tricky
and the defense on the offensive aspect
so everybody
uh hitler in world war ii
it seems like he never attacked anybody
he's always defending against the unjust
attack of everybody else as he's taking
over the world so that's like
information propaganda
that every side is trying to communicate
to the world so you can't listen to
necessarily information like self-report
data you have to kind of look past that
somehow maybe look especially in the
modern world as much as possible at the
data how many
bombs dropped
how many people killed
how the number of the estimates of the
number of troops moved from one location
to another and that kind of thing and
then the other interesting thing is
there's um
quantitative analysis of war so for
example i was looking at just war index
or people trying to measure
trying to put a number
on what wars are seen as just and not oh
really i've never seen that
it's
there there's numbers behind it it's
great
so it's great because again as you do an
extensive
quantification of justice
you start to think
what actually contributes to our
thought that for example world war ii is
a just war and other wars are not
um a lot of it is about intent and some
of the other factors like that you look
at which is prolonged the degree of
violence that is necessary
versus not necessary given
the greater good some measure of the
greater good of people all those kinds
of things the then there's reasons for
war
you know looking
to free people or to
stop a genocide versus
uh conquering land all those kinds of
things and people tried to put a number
behind it and a lot based on i mean what
i'm trying to imagine is
i mean suppose i wake up and or is
whatever my suppose i think my god tells
me to do something
or or my my god thinks that uh or my
moral sense thinks that something that
another group is doing is repugnant
i'm curious like are they evaluating
like the
validity of that claim or just the idea
that like well you said it was repugnant
you deeply believe that therefore it's
just i think uh now it could be
corrected on a lot of this but i think
this is always looking at wars after
they happened
so it's and trying to take a global
perspective from all
sort of a general survey of how people
perceive so you're not weighing
disproportionately the opinions of the
people who waged the war yeah
i mean i i kind of ended up dodging that
because
i mean
one is to just point out that wars
actually most wars aren't necessary and
so
in the sense that there's there's
another way to
get what you wanted
um
and so on on one level there's no just
war now that that's not true because
take an example like the u.s invasion
afghanistan
the united states has been attacked
uh there's a
culpable agent reliable evidence that
this is al-qaeda
they're being sheltered
by in afghanistan by the taliban
and then the taliban this is this is a
bit murky it seems that there was an
attempt to
say hand him over or else and and they
said no way
now you can make an argument that
invading and attacking is strategically
the right thing to do in terms of
sending signals to your future enemies
or you just if you think it's important
to bring someone to justice
in this case al-qaeda then then you
maybe that's just war or that's a just
invasion
but it hinges on the fact that
the the other side just didn't do the
seemingly sensible thing which is say
okay we'll give them up
and uh and so so it was completely
avoidable
in one sense but if you believe and i
think it's probably true if you believe
that for their own
ideological and other reasons
um
you know mulomar in particular and
taliban in general decided we're not
going to do this
uh then then now you're not left with
very many good choices
uh and now i
you know i didn't want to talk about is
that a just war is that what's justice
or not i just wanted to point out that
like it one side's intransigence if
that's indeed what happened one side's
intransigent sort of maybe compels you
to
basically eliminates all of the
reasonable bargains that you could be
satisfied with and now you're left with
really no other strategic option but to
invade i think that's a slight
oversimplification but i think that
that's like
that's like one way to describe what
happened so your book is fascinating
your perspective on this is fascinating
i'll try to sort of play devil's
advocate at times to try to get a
clarity but the thesis is that
war is costly
usually costly for everybody so
that's what you mean when you say nobody
wants war because you're going to
from a game theoretical perspective
uh nobody wins
and so
war
is essentially a breakdown of reason a
breakdown of negotiation of healthy
communication or healthy operation of
the world some kind of breakdown you
list all kinds of ways in which it
it breaks down but there's also
there's also human beings in this mix
and there is ideas of justice so for
example i don't want to my memory
doesn't serve me well on which wars were
seen as justice very very few in the
20th century of the many that have been
there
the the wars that were seen as just
first of all the most just war seen as
world war ii by far
um it's actually the only one
uh that goes above a threshold as seen
as just everything is seen as unjust
it's it's uh less
it's like degrees of unjustness
and i i think the ones that are seen as
more just are the ones that are fast
that you have a very specific purpose
you communicate that purpose honestly
with the global community and you strike
hard fast and you pull out
uh to do sort of it's like rescue
missions it's almost like policing work
if there's somebody suffering you go in
and stop that suffering directly that's
it
i think world war ii is seen in that way
that
there's an obvious aggressor
that is causing a lot of suffering in
the world and looking to expand the
scale of that suffering
and so you strike
i mean given the scale you strike car as
hard and as fast as possible to stop the
expansion of the suffering and so that's
kind of how they see i don't know if you
can kind of
look with this
framework that you presented and look at
hitler and think
well
it's not in his interest
to attack
czechoslovakia poland
britain
france
russia
the soviet union
america the united states of america uh
same same with japan
what is it in their interest long-term
interest i don't know i i it uh
so for me
who cares about alleviating human
suffering in the world
yes it's not it seems like almost
no war is just
but it also seems somehow deeply human
to fight
and i think your book makes the case no
it's not can you can you try to like get
at that because it seems that war there
is some that
like drama of war seems to beat in all
human hearts like it's in there
somewhere maybe it's
maybe there's like a relic of the past
and we need to get rid of it it's deeply
irrational
okay so obviously we go to war and
obviously there's a lot of violence and
so
we have to explain something and and
some of that's going to be aspects of
our humanness so so i guess what i
wanted us to sort of start with
i think it was just useful to sort of
start and point out actually you know
there's really really really really
strong incentives not to go to war
because it's going to be really costly
and so all of these other human or
strategic things all these things the
circumstantial things that will
eventually lead us go to war have to be
pretty
powerful before we go there and and most
of the time sorry to interrupt uh and
that's you why you also describe very
importantly that war throughout human
history is actually rare
we usually avoid it
you know most people don't know about
the us invasion of haiti in 1994. i mean
a lot of people know about it but people
just don't pay attention to it we don't
we we're going to you know the history
books and school kids are going to learn
about the invasion afghanistan for
decades and decades and nobody is going
to put this one in the
in the history books and it's because it
it
didn't actually happen because
uh before the troops could land
the person who'd taken power in a coup
basically said fine
there's a famous story where where colin
powell goes to haiti to this new
dictator who's refused to let a
democratic president take power
and um
and tries to convince him to step down
or else and he says no no and and then
he shows him a video and it's basically
troop planes and all these things taking
off
and he's like this is not live this is
two hours ago so
it's a and and basically he basically
gives up right there
so that was that's a powerful move yeah
i think powell might have been one of
his teachers in like a u.s military
college because a lot of these military
dictators are trained at some point so
they had some there was some personal
relationships at least between people in
the us government and this guy that they
were trying to use the the point is and
that that's that's like what should have
happened like that makes sense right
like yeah i'm
maybe i can mount an insurgency
and yeah i'm not going to bear a lot of
the cost of work because i'm the
dictator and maybe he's human and he
just wants to fight or gets angry or
it's just in his mind whatever he's
doing but at the end of the day he's
like this does not make sense
um
and that's what happens most of the time
but we don't write so many books about
it
and uh
and and and now some political
scientists go and they count up all of
the nations that could fight because
they have some dispute and they're right
next to another one another or they look
at the ethnic groups that could fight
with one another because they have
there's some tension and they're right
next to one another and
and then whatever some number like 999
out of a thousand don't
don't fight
um because they just find some other way
they don't like each other but they they
just loathe in peace because that's the
sensible thing to do
and that's what we all do we loathe in
peace uh and we loathe the soviet union
in relative peace for decades and india
uh loathes pakistan in peace i mean two
weeks into the russian invasion of
ukraine again
it was in the newspapers but most people
didn't i think take note india
accidentally launched a cruise missile
at pakistan
and
common suit so they were like yeah this
is
we do not want to go to war this will be
bad
uh
we'll ex will be angry but we'll accept
your explanation that this was an
accident and so um so these things find
to the radar
until we overestimate i think how
likely it is sides are going to fight
but then of course things do happen like
russia did invade the ukraine and didn't
find some
negotiated deal and so
uh and so then the book is sort of about
past the book it's just sort of laying
out
actually like there's just different
ways this breaks down and some of them
are human
some of them are this
i i actually don't think war beats in
our heart
it does a little bit but
we're actually very cooperative we're as
a species we're deeply deeply
cooperative we're really really good so
the thing we're not we're okay at
violence and we're okay and we're okay
getting angry and vengeance and
we have principles that will sometimes
lead us but we're actually really really
really good at cooperation
and and so that's again you know i i
don't i'm not trying to write some big
optimistic book where everything's going
to be great and we're all happy and we
don't really fight it's more just to say
let's start let's be like a doctor as a
doctor we're going to focus on the sick
right i'm going to try i know there's
sick people but i'm going to recognize
that the normal state is health and that
most people are healthy and and that's
going to make me a better doctor and
that's i'm kind of saying the same thing
let's be better doctors of politics in
the world by recognizing that like
normal state is health and then we're
going to
identify like what are the diseases that
are causing this warfare so yeah the
natural state of the human body with the
immune system and all the different
parts
uh wants to be healthy and is really
damn good at being healthy but sometimes
it breaks down let's understand how it
breaks down yeah exactly so what are the
five ways that you list
that are the roots of war
yeah so i mean they're kind of like
buckets like there's sort of things that
rhyme
right in the interval you know because
it's not all the same there's like lots
of reasons to go to where there's this
great line
you know there's a reason for every war
and a war for every reason
and that's true and it's kind of
overwhelming right and and it's
overwhelming for a lot of people it was
overwhelming for me for a lot of time
and i think i think one of the gifts of
this of social sciences actually people
have started to organize this for us and
i just tried to organize it like a tiny
bit better buckets that rhyme buckets
yeah some economics before right
metaphors so so the idea was that like
that basic instead of like something
overrides these incentives and and i
guess i was saying there's five ways
there that they get overrided and three
are i'd call strategic like they're kind
of logical there's circumstances
that um and and this is they're sort of
where strategic is the strategy is like
the
the game theory is you could use those
two things interchangeably but but game
theory is sort of making it sound more
complicated i think than it is it's
basically saying that there's times when
this is like
the optimal choice because of
circumstances and and and one of them is
when the people who are deciding don't
bear those costs so
that's or or maybe even have a private
incentive that's gonna that's that's uh
if they don't if they're ignoring the
cost then maybe the costs of war are not
so material uh that's a contributing
factor another is just there's
uncertainty and we could talk about that
but there's just the absence of
information means that actually there's
circumstances where it's your best
choice to
attack there's this thing that political
economists call commitment problems
which are basically saying there's some
big power shift that you can avoid by
attacking now so it's like a dynamic
incentive it's sort of saying well in
order to keep something from happening
in the future
i can attack now and because of the
structure of incentives it actually
makes sense for me even the awards in
theory
uh
really costly or it is really costly
nonetheless
and then there's these sort of human
things
one's a little bit like just war one
sort of thing there's like ideologies or
principles or things we value
that weigh against those costs
like
exterminating the heretical idea
or standing up for a principle
might be so valuable to me that i'm
willing to use violence even if it's
costly
and there's nothing irrational about
that
and then the fifth bucket is is all of
the irrationalities all the passions and
all of the most importantly i think like
misperceptions the way we get like we
basically make wrong calculations about
whether or not war is the right decision
we get our we miss we misunderstand or
misjudge our enemy
or misjudge ourselves so if you put all
those things into buckets so how much
can it be modeled
in in a in a simple game theoretic way
and how much of it is a giant human mess
so four of those five are really
on some level easy to
think strategically and model in a
simple way
um
in the sense that any of us can do it
right we do this all the time you know
think of like bargaining in a market for
a carpet or something or whatever you're
bargained for
um
you're thinking a few steps ahead about
what your opponent's going to do
and you stake out a high price like a
low price and the seller stakes out a
high price
and you might both say oh i refuse to
like i could never accept that and
there's all this sort of cheap talk
um but you kind of understand where
you're going and it's efficient to like
find a deal and buy the market by the
carpet eventually
um so we all understand this like game
theory and the strategy i think
intuitively or maybe even a closer
example is like suppose
i don't know you have a tenant you need
to evict or anyone normal like kind of
legal or not it's not yet a legal
dispute right like we just have a
dispute with a neighbor or somebody else
most of us don't end up going to court
going to court is like the war option
that's the costly thing that we just
ought to be able to avoid we ought to be
able to find something between ourselves
that doesn't you know require this
hiring lawyers and a long drawn out
trial and most of the time we do
right and so so we all understand that
incentives and then
for those five buckets
so everything except all the irrational
and the misperceptions are really easy
to model then from a technical
standpoint it's actually pretty tricky
to model
the misperceptions and i'm not a game
theorist uh and so i'm more channeling
my colleagues who do this and and what i
know
um but but it's not rocket science i
mean i think that's what i that's kind
of
what i try to lay out in the book is
like there's this all this all these
ideas out there that that can actually
help us just make sense of all these
wars
um and just some bring some order to the
more ass of real reasons well to push
back
a lot of things in one sentence so first
of all rocket science is actually pretty
simple
people i think i'll i'll defer to you
actually well i think it's because
unfortunately it's very like engineering
it's very well defined the problem is
well defined the problem with humanity
is it's actually complicated so it is
true it's not rocket science but it is
not true it's easy because it's not
rocket science but
the
the the problem the the downside of of
game theory
is not that it helps us make sense of
the world it projects a simple model of
the world that brings us comfort in
thinking we understand yeah and
sometimes that simplification
is actually getting at the core
first principles on understanding of
something and sometimes it fools us into
thinking we understand so for example i
mean
mutually assured destruction is a very
simple model and people argue all the
time whether that's actually a good
model or not but you know there's
empirical fact that we're still alive as
a human civilization and also
in the game theoretic sense do we model
individual leaders
and their relationships
do we
the staff the generals
uh or do we also
um have to model the culture the people
the
the the suffering of the people the
economic frustration or the anger the
distrust you have to model all those
things do they come into play uh and
sometimes i mean again we could be
romanticizing
those things from a historical
perspective but when you look at history
and you look at the way wars start
it sometimes feels
like a little bit of a misunderstanding
escalates
escalates escalates
and
just builds on top of itself and all of
a sudden it's an all-out war
it's the escalation with nobody hitting
the brakes
so
so i mean you're absolutely right and
like in the sense that it's totally
possible to oversimplify these things
and take the game theory too seriously
and and some and and people who
study those things and write those
models and
people like me who use them sometimes
make that mistake i think that's not the
mistake that most people make most often
and it's actually true is i think most
people we're actually really quick
whether it's the the u.s invasion of
afghanistan or iraq we're really quick
to blame that on
the humanness and the culture and that
so we're really quick to say oh this was
george w bush's either desire for
revenge and vengeance or some private
agenda or blood for oil
um so we're really quick to blame it on
these things and then we're really
we tend to overlook the strategic
incentives
to
to attack which i think were probably
dominant i think those things might have
been true to a degree but i don't think
they were enough to ever you know bring
those wars about just like i think
people are very quick to sort of in this
current invasion to sort of
talk about putin's
um grand
visions of being the next catherine the
great or
or or nationalist ideals or
and and the mistakes and the
miscalculations were really quick to
sort of say oh that that must be and
then kind of pause and start not
possible maybe even stop there and not
see some of the strategic
incentives and so
so i i guess we have to do both um but
the strategic i guess i would say like
the
war is just such a big problem it's just
so costly
that the strategic
incentives and and the things that game
theory has given us are like really
important in understanding why
there was so little room for negotiation
in a bargain that things like a leader's
mistakes start to matter or leaders
nationalist ideals or delusions or
vengeance actually matters because those
do matter but they only matter when the
capacity to find a deal is so
narrow because of the circumstances and
so let's not
let's it's sort of like saying um like
an elderly person who dies of pneumonia
right pneumonia killed them
obviously but that's not the reason
mnemonia was able to kill them all of
the fundamentals and the circumstances
were like made them very fragile and
that's how i think all the strategic
forces
make that situation fragile
and then the miscalculations and the all
these things you just said which are so
important are kind of like the pneumonia
and let's sort of let's pay attention to
both
and you're saying that people don't
disproportionately pay attention to the
it's hard i mean it wasn't to the
leaders it took me a long time to learn
to recognize them and it takes many
people you know it took and it took
generations of social scientists
um years and years to figure
figure some of this out and to sort of
help people understand it and clarify
concepts so it's not it's just not that
easy now it's not hard i think it's
possible to just as i was taught a lot
of the stuff i write in the book in
graduate school or from reading and i
it's possible to communicate and learn
this stuff but it's still really hard
and so so so
that's kind of what i was trying to do
is like close that gap and just make it
help people recognize
these things in the wild before we zoom
back out let me
at a high level first ask what are your
thoughts on the ongoing war in ukraine
how do you analyze it within your
framework about war
a russian colleague of mine constantine
tells this story about a visiting
ukrainian professor
who's at the university and one night
he's walking down the street and he's
talking on two cell phones at once for
some reason
and a mugger stops him
and demands the phones
and it's sort of like deadpan way
constantine says you know and because he
was ukrainian he decided to fight
and
and i think that's a little bit like
what happened most of us in that
situation would hand over our cell
phones
and um and and so in this situation
putin's like the mugger
and the ukrainian people are being asked
to hand over this thing and they're
saying no we're not going to hand this
over and and the fact is
um most people do
most people faced with a superpower or a
tyrant or an autocrat or a
murderous warlord who says
hand this over they hand it over
and uh and that's why
that's why there are so many unequal
imperial relationships in the world
that's what empire is empire is
success of people saying fine we'll give
up our some degree of freedom or
sovereignty because you're too powerful
and the ukrainian said no way uh this is
just too precious and so i said one of
those buckets where that there are
there's a set of values there's
sometimes there's something that we
value
that is so valuable to us and important
sometimes it's it's terrible sometimes
it's the extermination of a another
people but sometimes it's something
noble like liberty or refusal to part
with sovereignty
and and in those circumstances people
will decide i will endure the costs they
probably i mean i think i think i think
they knew what they were probably
risking
um and so to me that that's not to blame
the ukrainians any more than i would
blame
americans for the american revolution
it's actually a very similar story you
had a tyrannical
militarily superior
pretty non-democratic entity come and
say
you're going to have partial sovereignty
and americans for ideological reasons
said no way
and that you know people like bernard
bailey and other historians that's like
the dominant story of the american
revolution it was in the ideological
origins this attachment this idea of
liberty and so i start now there's lots
of other reasons i think why
this happened but i think for me it
starts with ukrainians failing to make
that
sensible quote-unquote
rational deal that says
we should we should relinquish some of
our sovereignty because russia is more
powerful than we are
so there's a very clinical look
at the war
meaning there is
a man and a country vladimir putin
that has
makes a claim on a land
builds up troops
and invades yep
the way to avoid
suffering there and the way to avoid
death and a way to avoid war
is to
uh back down and basically let
you know there's a list of interests he
provides and you go along with that
um that's when the goal is to avoid war
uh let's do some other calculus
let's think about britain so
france
fought hitler
but did not fight very hard portugal
there's a lot of stories of countries
like this
and there is
winston motherfucking churchill
he's one of the rare humans in history
who had that we shall fight on the
beaches
it made no sense
hitler did not say he's going to destroy
britain he seemed to show respect for
britain he wanted to
keep the british empire he it made total
sense but it was obvious that britain
was going to lose if hitler goes all in
on britain as he seemed like he was
going to and yet winston churchill
said a big fu yeah
similar thing
zelensky and the ukrainian people
said fu in that same kind of way
so i think i think we're saying the same
things i'm i'm being more clinical about
it well i'm trying to understand
and we won't know this
but which path minimizes human suffering
in the long term
well
on the eve of the war ukraine was poor
in a per person terms than it was in
1990 the economy is just completely
stagnated
in russia meanwhile like many other
parts of the region sort of boomed
to a degree i mean certainly because of
oil and gas but also for a variety of
other reasons and putin's consolidated
political control and
and from a very cold-blooded and
calculated point of view i think one way
putin and russia could look at this is
this look we were temporarily weak after
the ball
of the iron curtain
and the rest in the west basically took
advantage of that like bravo you pulled
it off you basically crept democracy and
capitalism all these things right up to
our border
and now we have regained some of our
strength we've consolidated political
control we've cowed our people
we have a stronger economy and we
somehow got germany and other european
nations to give up energy independence
and actually just we've got an enormous
amount of leverage over you and now
we want to roll back some of your
success because we
we're powerful enough to demand it
and and you've been taking advantage of
the situation
which is
maybe a fair
impartial analysis
and uh in the west but more specifically
ukraine said but that's a price too high
which i totally respect i would maybe
i'd like to think i'd make that same
decision but that is that's the answer
if the answer is why would they fight if
it's so costly why not find a deal it's
because they weren't willing to give
russia the thing that their power
said they quote unquote deserve just
like americans said to the briton yeah
of course you you we ought to accept
semi-sovereignty
um but we are just we refuse
and we'd rather endure
a bloody fight that we might lose
than than take this and so
um so you need some of these other five
buckets you need them to understand the
situation you need to sort of
there are other things going on but i
but i do think it's fundamental that
there's just that this
it this noble
intransigence is like a big is a big
part of it
well let me just say a few things if
it's okay yeah so your analysis is um
is clear and objective
my analysis
is neither clear nor objective
first
i've been going through a lot i'm a
different man over the past four or five
weeks than i was before
i
in general have come to
there's anger
i've come to despise leaders in general
because leaders wage war and the people
pay the price for that
war let me just say
on this point of standing up to an
invader
that i am half ukrainian half russian
that i'm proud of the ukrainian people
whatever the sacrifice is whatever the
scale of pain
standing up
there's something in me that's proud
maybe that's
maybe that's whatever the
fuck that is
maybe that blood runs in me
i love the ukrainian people love the
russian people
and whatever that fight is whatever that
suffering is the millions of refugees
whatever this war is the dictators
come to power and the their power falls
i just love that that spirit burns
bright still
and i do
maybe i'm wrong in this to see ukrainian
and russian people as one people
in a way
that's not just cultural geopolitical
but just given the history
i think about
the same kind of fighting
when hitler with all of his forces
chose to invade the soviet union
operation barbarossa
when he went and that russian winter
and you know a lot of people and that
pisses me off because if you if you know
your history
it's not the winter that stopped hitler
it's the red army it's the people that
refused to back down they fought proudly
that pride
that's something
that's the human spirit
that's in war you know war is hell
but it really pushes people to
to stand for the things they believe in
it's the the william wallace speech from
braveheart i think about this a lot
that does not fit into your framework no
no i'm gonna disagree i i think it
totally fits in and it's it's this
there's nothing irrational about what we
believe
especially those principles which we
hold the most dear right i'm i'm merely
trying to say that there's a there's a
calculus there's one calculus over here
that says
russia is more powerful than it was
20 years ago and even 10 years ago and
ukraine is not
and it's asking for something
and and there's an incentive to give
that up
that's obvious like there's an incentive
to comply but my understanding is many
of these post-soviet republics
have appeased
right which is what we call compromise
when we disagree with it
they've
all of these other peoples in the
russian sphere of influence have
have not stood up
uh and russians
many russians have tried to stand up and
they've been beaten down
and now
people have
we'll see but people have not been
standing up very much
and so
lots of people are cowed and lots of
people have a piece and lots of people
hear that speech and think i would like
to do that but but don't
and and so and my point is that
sadly we live in a world where a lot of
people
uh get stepped on by
tyrants and empire and whatnot and don't
rise up and so so i think we could
admire especially
when they stand up for these reasons and
i think we can admire churchill for that
reason i think we could that's why we
admire the leaders the american
revolution and so on but doesn't always
happen and i i don't actually know why
but i don't think it's irrational i
think it's just it's it's something it's
about a set of values and it's hard to
predict
and it was hard for
hard i i
putin might not have been out of line
and thinking just like everybody else
in my share of influence they're gonna
roll over to
and i should mention
because we haven't that a lot of this
calculation
from an objective point of view you have
to include united states and nato into
the pressure they apply into the region
that said
i care little about leaders
that do
cruel things onto the world
they lead to a lot of suffering but i
still believe that the russian people
and the ukrainian people are great
people that stand up and i admire people
that stand up
and are willing to give their life and i
think
russian people are very much
um that
too especially when the enemy is
coming for your home over the hill yeah
sometimes standing up
to an authoritarian regime is difficult
because you don't know
it's not
a monster that's attacking your home
directly it's kind of like the boiling
of a lobster or something like that it's
a slow
control of your mind and the population
and our minds get controlled even in the
west by the media by the narratives
it's very difficult to wake up one day
and to realize
uh sort of what people call
red pilled
is to see that they're
you know maybe the thing i've been told
all my life is not true and at every
level that's the thing very difficult to
do in north korea
very in the more authoritarian the
regime the more difficult it is to see
maybe this idea that i believe
that i was willing to die for is
actually evil it's very difficult to do
for americans for russians for
ukrainians for chinese for indians for
pakistanis
for everybody i think thinking about
this
ukrainian whether you want to call it
nobility or intransigence or whatever
is is key i think um
the authoritarian-ness of russia and
putin's control or the control of his
cabal is the other thing i would really
point to is what's going on here and if
i had to if you ask me like big picture
what do i think is the fundamental cause
of most violence in the world i think
it's unaccountable power i think in fact
for me an unaccountable power is the
source of underdevelopment it's the
source
of pain and suffering it's the source of
of warfare it's basically the root
source of most of our problems
and in this particular case
it's also one of our buckets in the
sense that like why what is it that why
did russia ask these things like well it
was democracy in the uk in ukraine a
threat to an average russian
no was capitalism is nato is whatever
is this a threat to average russians no
it's a threat to
the
bullet apparatus of political control
and economic control that putin and
cronies and this sort of
group of people that that rule this
elite in russia
um
it was a threat to them and so they had
to ask
the ukraine to be neutral or to give up
nato or to have a puppet government or
whatever they were seeking to achieve
and have been trying to achieve through
other means for
decades right they've been trying to
undermine these things without uh
invasion
and they've been doing that because it
threatens their interests and that's
like one of these other logics of war
it's not just that there's something
that i value so much that i'm willing to
injure the cost it's that there are
people
not only do does this oligarchy or
whatever elite group that you want to
talk about in russia not
first of all they're not bearing
something they're bearing some costs of
war right they're very and they're
certainly bearing cost of sanctions
um but they are
they don't bear all the costs of war
obviously and so they're more they're
quick to use it but more importantly
like
in some sense it i think there's a
strong argument that they had a
political incentive to invade and or at
least to ask ukraine this sort of
impossible to give up thing and then
invade despite ukrainian
nobility and transitions
because they were threatened
um and so
so that's extremely important i think
and so that's
those two things in concert make this a
very fragile situation that's i think
why we ended up
is go go not all the way but a long way
to understanding now you can layer on to
that
these intangible incentives these other
things that are valued that are valued
on putin's side maybe there's a
nationalist ideal maybe
he
seeks status and glory like maybe those
things are all true and i'm sure they're
true to an extent
and and and that'll weigh against his
costs of war as well but fundamentally i
think he just saw his regime as
threatened that's what he cares about
and
and and so he asked he made he made this
cruel list of demands
i mean i would say i'm just one human
who the hell am i but i'm i just have a
lot of anger
towards the elites in general
towards leaders in general
that failed the people
i would love
to hear and to celebrate
the beautiful russian people the
ukrainian people and anyone who silences
that beautiful voice of the people
anywhere in the world
is destroying the thing that
i value most about humanity leaders
don't matter they're supposed to serve
the people
this nationalist idea
of a people of a country
is only makes any sense when you
celebrate when you give people
um the freedom
to show themselves
to celebrate themselves and the the
thing i imagine i care most about is
science
and
the silencing of voices in the
scientific community the silencing of
voices period
fuck any leader that silences that
human spirit
um
there's something about this it's like
whenever i look at world war ii whenever
i look at wars
it does seem very irrational to fight
but man
does it
seem somehow deeply human when the
people stand up and fight and there's
something
uh
that if you know we talked about
progress
that feels like how progress is made
the people that stand and fight so let
me read the churchill speech
it's such
i so proud that we humans can stand up
to evil when the time is right i guess
here's the thing though think of what's
happening in xinjiang in china we have
we've appeased china
we've basically said you can just
do
really really really horrible things in
this region and we're you're too
powerful for us to do anything about it
and it's not worth it
and and there's nobody standing up and
making a churchill speech
or uh the braveheart speech about
standing up for people of of xinjiang
when when what's happening is um on you
know in that in that in that realm of
what was happening in europe
and and that's happening in a lot of
places
um and then when we when when there is a
willingness to stand up
people there's a lot of opposition to
those you know people you know so there
were a lot of reasons for the invasion
of iraq
um for some it was humanitarian things
like
saddam hussein was one of the worst
tyrants of
the 20th century
he was just doing some really horrible
things you know he'd invaded kuwait he'd
you know committed domestic
attempted domestic genocide and all
sorts of repression and it was probably
a mistake to invade in spite so it's
important not just to select on the
cases where we stood up and to select on
the cases where that ended up working
out
uh in the sense of victory
right it's important to sort of try to
judge not judge but just try to
understand these things in the context
of
all the times we didn't
give that speech or when we did and then
it just went sideways well that's why
it's powerful when you're willing to
give your life for your principles
because most of the time
you get neither the principles
nor the life you