Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is The West To Blame For Ukraine?" with Eliot A. Cohen

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"Is The West To Blame For Ukraine?" with Eliot A. Cohen · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  While I'm out, I'm out of COVID isolation. I'm out, baby. I made it. I did it. I came out the other side.
• 0:07
  Here I am in the rain, which is what Sydney and much of the East Coast of Australia is enduring
• 0:15
  in ridiculous quantities at the moment. This is the thing about Australia. We are either on fire
• 0:20
  or underwater. Those are your two options. That's all you get. Maybe an occasional third option
• 0:26
  is being eaten by a crocodile or bitten by one of the world's deadliest spiders or snakes.
• 0:32
  But that's really infrequent. What we are not doing is writing to work or school on the back of
• 0:39
  kangaroos. That's a popular misconception. But what we are doing is either self igniting in an
• 0:46
  ungodly firestorm or being swept away by flood waters as we currently are. And this is summer,
• 0:54
  ladies and general persons, summer. So my thoughts go out to everyone around Australia if you're
• 1:00
  being affected, if you're home or you're livelihood is affected by the floods. I think it's a first world
• 1:07
  problem for me to winch about being stuck inside in the rain with COVID, but allow me to winch
• 1:12
  nonetheless. It's my damn show. I winch about what I want. Been interesting having COVID?
• 1:18
  It was mild. Very mild, as I hope yours was as well, if you've had it.
• 1:24
  Nonetheless, unpleasant. A lot of tiredness, fatigue, grouchiness, grumpiness, irritability.
• 1:34
  Those last three factors might just be my personality. I'm not sure. But the disease certainly
• 1:39
  didn't help. Let's put it that way. I certainly feel like I'm living in a position of enormous
• 1:47
  privilege in comparison to the calamity of the Tom folding on the other side of the planet,
• 1:52
  which is going to be the subject of not only this episode, but a number of episodes
• 1:58
  in the near future. I'm trying to line up as many interesting voices about Ukraine as I can,
• 2:03
  as many interesting voices about the mindset of Monsieur Putin as I can.
• 2:10
  I certainly don't think that this is a time for us to be engaging in second guessing, whether or not
• 2:18
  the West has inadvertently caused this crisis by not having been nice enough to Vladimir Putin
• 2:24
  over the years. It's certainly not a time for us to be cletching about our own geopolitical
• 2:31
  involvement. I won't get into all this now, but suffice it to say I saw a great tweet
• 2:36
  by a libertarian writer named Jen Monroe who said, I don't want to hear a single, but it's not
• 2:43
  our problem from the crowd who just absolutely lost its shit over the Canadian trucker protest.
• 2:49
  And that's sort of how I feel. Ukraine is not some geopolitical abstraction. It's 44 million
• 2:57
  people who get up in the morning and scratch their bumps, just like 44 million people anywhere else.
• 3:02
  It's 44 million people who have had a realistic expectation that their country is on a
• 3:07
  trajectory to becoming a cosmopolitan and open and urban and sophisticated member of the European
• 3:13
  Union. They have a reasonable expectation that they're about to become Poland and beyond Poland,
• 3:21
  maybe who knows someday, maybe even Austria. And all of that has just been designated overnight.
• 3:29
  So now is not the time for us to be talking about this as if we're chess pieces on a chess board.
• 3:39
  It's been interesting convalescing in bed with COVID and seeing the Twitter storm,
• 3:48
  not just about Ukraine, but the persistent Twitter storm about vaccines and COVID whenever I say
• 3:53
  the slightest, tiniest thing about it. And let me just address two things that have come up
• 4:00
  because I haven't been able to, I haven't, you know, I made a decision on about day number two of
• 4:03
  COVID that the worst thing, the only thing worse than having COVID while your city around you
• 4:10
  floods and Ukraine gets invaded is having COVID while your city around you floods and Ukraine gets
• 4:16
  invaded and spending your time with COVID arguing with shitwads on Twitter. So I decided not to,
• 4:21
  but allow me to address a couple of their points in as New Arms and sophisticated manner as I can
• 4:27
  right now. Firstly, fuck off. Secondly, all I did was tweet the following. I said thank God for
• 4:36
  vaccines or rather thank God for scientists, researchers and drug companies. Countless people like
• 4:43
  me are experiencing COVID as a mile cold right now. Without the jab, many of us would be choking
• 4:49
  on our own lungs. Not all of us, I wrote, not most of us, I wrote, but many millions, I am grateful.
• 4:58
  That's all I tweeted because that's how I felt. I felt an enormous sense of deep gratitude to people
• 5:06
  who devote their lives to the science of infectious diseases that what started two years ago as a real
• 5:14
  boogie man is now something that I was just never worried about. There was no point at which
• 5:20
  after testing positive, I thought, fuck, maybe I could end up in hospital, maybe I could end up
• 5:25
  on a ventilator. Now admittedly, I'm young-ish and healthy, so that was never a high risk in the
• 5:32
  first place, but when you multiply a not very high risk by billions of people, that's a lot of
• 5:40
  body bags. Needless to say, that tweet did not go down so well with a number of tweeters.
• 5:48
  On the more whimsical side, someone tweeted back at me and said mildly incorrect,
• 5:54
  Omicron without the vaccine is an upper respiratory tract infection and acts like the cold in
• 6:00
  the vast majority of cases. Vaccination is one of the lesser important variables, obesity,
• 6:06
  vitamin D deficiency and dysglycemia are better predictors of poor outcome,
• 6:14
  which I retweeted with the exchange, me, thanks for the gift. You, you're welcome.
• 6:24
  Him, actually of all the variables that could have made you happy, a physical gift is less
• 6:28
  impactful than a healthy diet, a good night's sleep and correct posture. Your gratitude is mildly
• 6:33
  incorrect. Anyone else started piling on? One person made a legitimate point. Look, all of these
• 6:40
  points are vaguely legitimate. I think people are being motivated by their sense that people
• 6:45
  have become way too obsessed about the vaccines, especially people who think that everyone should
• 6:51
  be vaccinated. And may I say right now, I have never been in favor of universal mandatory
• 6:56
  vaccination. I believe in mandating vaccination for everybody. I believe in strongly encouraging
• 7:02
  it. I believe in mandating it for certain industries like health care and the police.
• 7:07
  My uncle just celebrated his 90th birthday. I don't think it's reasonable to put him in a situation
• 7:14
  where the next time he encounters a health care professional, he doesn't know whether or not
• 7:18
  they're vaccinated. He doesn't have a choice but to encounter them or for him to feel like if he
• 7:24
  ever needs the police, the police might come in bearing what for him would be quite probably deadly
• 7:30
  virus. He should know that members of the state are not going to infect him with a deadly pathogen.
• 7:35
  But overall, I don't believe in forcing people to do things. So I understand the
• 7:41
  reticence about that. And one person tweeted at me and said, in 2020 when no one was vaxed,
• 7:45
  the percentage of asymptomatic positive cases was 30% likely much higher. Now in 2022,
• 7:53
  anyone positive who has mild symptoms feels certain that it was the vaccine that saved them.
• 7:58
  Even after the Pfizer CEO stated that the jabs do very little for the current strain.
• 8:04
  Let me just address that particular misconception. A furry, as we call it in Australia,
• 8:09
  a furry is Australian slang for a bit of nonsense. I take the point that now everybody who
• 8:18
  experiences COVID as a cold who's vaccinated attributes to the vaccines when they don't necessarily
• 8:22
  know that they themselves, specifically, benefited from the vaccine in terms of it being milder.
• 8:29
  What we're talking about is aggregate numbers, which I'll get to in a sec. But let me just address
• 8:33
  this this furry about the Pfizer CEO stating that vaccines do very little because this has become
• 8:39
  something that the vaccine hesitant wheel out at every opportunity. The Pfizer CEO didn't say that.
• 8:47
  Here's what he said, verbatim, I looked it up. He said, we know that the two doses of the vaccine
• 8:55
  offer very limited protection if any. The three doses with a booster, they offer reasonable
• 9:00
  protection against hospitalization and deaths. Against deaths, he said, I think the three doses
• 9:05
  are very good and they provide less protection against infection. Now we're working on a new
• 9:09
  version of our vaccine that will cover Omicron as well and of course we're waiting to get the final
• 9:13
  results, but the vaccine will be ready in March and the vaccine will be able to produce it on a
• 9:17
  massive scale. He was winging it in a live interview English is his second language. He didn't make
• 9:23
  himself perfectly clear, but it's obvious that the gist of what he's saying is that because the
• 9:28
  vaccines were developed before Omicron, two doses doesn't really cut it. It's a three dose
• 9:33
  regimen now, but he's just saying that he needs to tweak the vaccine before he can be as confident
• 9:38
  about it against Omicron as he was against previous variants by all measurements, including
• 9:45
  infection. It's not true that the Pfizer CEO said that it doesn't work against the current variant,
• 9:51
  so there's that. Now let's loop back to this question of aggregate statistics because this is one
• 9:57
  of two issues that people keep raising with me on Twitter about vaccines that I want to put to rest.
• 10:02
  I tweeted out about what my COVID symptoms were, which if you're interested, I tweeted
• 10:09
  my COVID is mild, but to those who've been asking, it has so far unfolded as day one did a rodent
• 10:16
  poo in my mouth. Day two, I have jet lag yet no airplane. Day three let there be be flam. Day four,
• 10:26
  an army of throat pixies has hijacked my cough reflex. Day five, a donkey sits on my chest.
• 10:35
  Now admittedly, it was a small donkey. It didn't feel like a very bad weight on my chest,
• 10:41
  but it was a significant weight on my chest nonetheless, and it caused one person to tweet at me,
• 10:47
  thinking he's very smart, saying, say the line, it would have been far worse without the shot.
• 10:53
  Laughy face, laughy face, laughy face. To which I said, we know that when 1,000 vaccinated people
• 11:02
  catch COVID, 10 to 30 times fewer of them get seriously sick than the group, the same group
• 11:08
  unvaccinated, and this experiment has been replicated in real life millions of times all over the
• 11:13
  globe. So luckily science works, whether I say your stupid line or not. And then someone else said,
• 11:21
  given that the vast majority of under 50s without comorbidities had asymptomatic or mild cases
• 11:27
  without vaccines, how do you know that the vaccine helped you? And someone else parachute it and
• 11:32
  said, this is the argument that nobody touches. To which I replied, nobody touches it because it's
• 11:40
  an argument nobody denies. Of course, I don't know that the vaccine helped me, just as you don't
• 11:45
  know that washing your hands after you shit definitely saved you from disease. Public health
• 11:50
  measures function in the aggregate. And this guy came back and said, in the aggregate, you were
• 11:57
  unlikely to have more than mild symptoms. To which I said, that's not what an aggregate is.
• 12:04
  It's sort of immaterial whether or not I would have been worse off if I hadn't had the vaccines.
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  It's a counterfactual that we'll never have the answer to. What we know is that if you multiply
• 12:13
  a thousand mes and you put them through the experience of having COVID and a thousand and 500 of
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  them are vaccinated and 500 of them are unvaccinated, you get a very different result.
• 12:26
  It is like washing hands. I mean, everyone, you can always say, oh, my uncle Herbie always used
• 12:31
  to wash his hands, but you know what? He's been on the shitter for a week. He's had explosive
• 12:35
  diarrhea. Clearly, there was no benefit to washing his hands. No, it just means that washing his hands
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  weren't 100% effective, which brings me to the second criticism that people have on Twitter and
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  everywhere, which is that it's not a real vaccine because it doesn't actually stop me from getting it.
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  Tons of people, thousands of people have hit me up saying, whoa, you must be eating humble pie now
• 13:01
  that you got COVID up. You've been banging on about how effective vaccines are. I mean, if it was
• 13:05
  actually a vaccine like the smallpox vaccine or the polio vaccine and not an experimental therapy
• 13:10
  that Bill Gates is injecting us all with, then you wouldn't have caught it in the first place.
• 13:15
  Obviously, the vaccines don't work. I'd love to know where this idea came from.
• 13:21
  Can someone trace the etymology of this or if you know of where it comes from, can you
• 13:26
  can you point it out to me on Twitter or send an email to uncomfyconvosegmail.com and my producer
• 13:31
  will pass it along because it's a fascinating thing. Where does it, where does the idea come from
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  that if a vaccine is not 100% perfect, then it's not a vaccine. Like, is a seatbelt not a seatbelt
• 13:43
  if you die in a car accident while you're wearing a seatbelt? Why does something have to be 100%
• 13:49
  perfect? There are some vaccines that eliminate transmission and there are some vaccines that reduce
• 13:53
  transmission. The coronavirus vaccines roughly have transmission. That means that I had to
• 14:01
  I went through a number of scenarios over the past six months in which I was exposed to coronavirus
• 14:09
  almost certainly. I was standing in security lines at Austin Airport and at La Guadilla. I'm sure
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  I was exposed to coronavirus and the dosage was not enough to infect my vaccinated body but would
• 14:22
  have been enough in some of those scenarios quite likely to infect my unvaccinated body.
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  It's not a perfect vaccine. It's an effective vaccine nonetheless.
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  And so here I am surrounded by flooding rain waters. I've just broadcast my first show back on the
• 14:42
  air. I have a radio show on ABC radio in Australia in the afternoon. So I've been off for a week
• 14:49
  in isolation, in recuperation and I'm not allowed back into the studio. So I've had this broadcast
• 14:56
  kit that they've sent to my home and I'm broadcasting remotely. I feel completely out of my element.
• 15:02
  A very difficult show to do away from all of the support structures that I have in the studio where
• 15:07
  I have command of all the buttons that I'm used to. Here I'm just cast a drift. I felt like an
• 15:12
  astronaut in a spaceship just floating off through space. Just me and my microphone and Sandra Bullock
• 15:20
  looking at each other. Me complementing her on her outstanding plastic surgery. Very convincing
• 15:28
  nose. And her saying, I can't believe you are broadcasting like this all alone from a broadcast
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  kit without the normal support structures of your studio. Joseph and I said, thank you Sandra.
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  And then we kissed in a in a violent embrace. An embrace born of my week of isolation. Perhaps
• 15:47
  that's just me getting carried away with my fantasies. But there you go. Back on the air,
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  as I alluded to earlier, I want to find as many people who are interesting about Ukraine as possible.
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  And we will release episodes in dribs and drabs. So hopefully you'll find those in lightning.
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  I think now more than ever is a time when we have to have conversations with each other that are
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  informed conversations with each other that come from a bunch of different perspectives from not
• 16:14
  just the American security establishment and not just the self-flagulating extremes of the kind
• 16:21
  of extreme left and extreme right course to ends who end up saying exactly the same thing,
• 16:26
  both blaming the West for everything that goes wrong in the world. But conversations that are
• 16:30
  informed by the reality of central Europeans having agency, by the reality of Ukrainians
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  deserving our consideration as autonomous human beings, not just as pieces on a grand geostrategic
• 16:43
  chess board. Conversations that are smart, thoughtful, diverse, and yes, sometimes conversations
• 16:51
  that are a bit uncomfortable.
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  Today on the show, what does the United States really think about Putin and Ukraine?
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  If it is even possible to generalize about what Uncle Sam is thinking, what does that even mean?
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  I can't think of anyone else who embodies that worldview better than Elliot Cohen.
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  Elliot is, you might call him a neo-conservative. He's been influential in foreign policy
• 17:26
  circles and military thinking for decades. He's a Harvard grad originally way back.
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  Got a PhD in political science in 1982. Then went to MIT and did the Army's ROTC program,
• 17:47
  which is the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Subsequently, he has served in
• 17:54
  well-work for the Secretary of Defense, taught the Naval War College, ended up in the George W. Bush
• 18:01
  administration working for the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. After 9-11, he was a big booster
• 18:09
  of the war in Iraq, a proponent of regime change in Iran, and generally embodies an American
• 18:16
  worldview that stands in contrast to realism. And if you're a bit sort of dusty on your geopolitical
• 18:25
  strategy, terminology, it's worth just remembering what realism is in the context of international
• 18:33
  affairs. It basically says that it's a mistake to look at whether or not a country is doing good or
• 18:40
  bad things domestically or whether it's leader is nice or not nice, whether it's a democracy or
• 18:45
  a dictatorship. At the end of the day, the world consists of countries who are jostling for power
• 18:51
  and only by understanding the jostling for wealth and power. Are you going to understand the way
• 18:56
  that states behave? So we shouldn't be idealists. We shouldn't try to spread democracy in any way.
• 19:02
  We shouldn't judge a country's actions on the basis of whether or not it's leader is a good guy
• 19:07
  or a bad guy or whether we associate ourselves with the kinds of world views that that leader has.
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  At the end of the day, a power is going to behave as a power will behave and we should just
• 19:17
  accommodate that and live in the real world. Elliott thinks that's a stupid point of view. He thinks
• 19:25
  that the ideas that motivate and energize political leaders matter deeply in terms of the way that
• 19:32
  they behave on the international stage. So the two things are inseparable. You will hear him launch
• 19:37
  a criticism, a scathing criticism of realism. And I just want to make sure that we're on the
• 19:42
  same page about what it is that he's talking about. I'm interviewing him because he wrote a piece
• 19:47
  in the Atlantic recently where he is a contributing editor. Oh, I should give you his proper titles.
• 19:53
  Now he's a contributing writer at the Atlantic, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School
• 19:58
  of Advanced International Studies and he holds the Ali Burke Chair in strategy at CSIS, the Center
• 20:08
  for Strategic Independent Studies. He is book is the big stick, the limits of soft power and the
• 20:15
  necessity of military force. You can tell from that that he's no wilting flour when it comes to
• 20:19
  military force. And I basically wanted him not only to give me his perspective about what's going
• 20:27
  on in Ukraine and what's motivating Putin, but also to sort of respond to something that I'm seeing
• 20:33
  floating around a lot on social media, which is a kind of a kind of worldview of like is this
• 20:40
  really our fight? Isn't it kind of understandable that Russia would want to have influence over
• 20:46
  its neighbors? What exactly did we expect when we allowed new countries to join NATO after the
• 20:54
  fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War? Isn't this Putin's understandable retaliation
• 21:00
  against feeling like he's boxed in? I'll be having conversations with people who hold that
• 21:05
  worldview or some freeriant of it in coming days and coming weeks. This is not a topic that's
• 21:11
  going to go away on this show, but I just wanted to begin with someone who very much doesn't hold
• 21:16
  that point of view and who can articulate the position if there is one of Uncle Sam in all his
• 21:23
  patriotic glory. Enjoy this conversation with Elliott Hill.
• 21:38
  Let's kick things off by giving people a sense of who you are and what your background and interests
• 21:44
  have been. So I'm a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies,
• 21:52
  which is a professional school of international affairs, and I also am the holder of the Arleigh
• 22:00
  Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, which is
• 22:06
  the leading international security think tank in Washington. I've done, I've mainly been an
• 22:14
  academic most of my life, but I've done other things. I've served sporadically in the United States
• 22:21
  government to include two years as the councillor of the Department of State for the last two
• 22:26
  years of the George W. Bush administration. So I was a senior officer of the department
• 22:33
  working directly for Secretary Rice, mainly on Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea nuclear reactors
• 22:42
  and Syria, host of issues like that. I've been a dean. You're one of those people with a
• 22:51
  biography too long to bother reading things in too much detail. But basically I'm a professor,
• 22:59
  my interests are military history of international affairs, foreign policy, and don't ask me to explain
• 23:09
  it, but I'm writing a book about Shakespeare. No, fantastic. I wish we had time to talk about that as
• 23:15
  well. Elliot, when the Russian forces were starting to amass on the border of Ukraine in recent
• 23:24
  months, what did you think was happening? Well, that's actually an interesting question, because
• 23:32
  there were obviously the person in charge and that's the Russian side is Vladimir Putin.
• 23:39
  There were two different ways of reading him, one as this very careful chess player who has
• 23:46
  objectives that we can understand in terms of weakening Ukraine, dividing NATO and so forth,
• 23:52
  which would have implied a fairly limited kind of strategy of taking bits and pieces,
• 24:01
  driving Ukraine into a corner, but not provoking the United States and Europe too much. The other
• 24:07
  view though, which is actually the view I took, was this is a guy who's been in power for 20 years,
• 24:14
  he is getting old, he's almost 70, he does not believe that Ukraine has right to exist as a state,
• 24:22
  he thinks the West is weak, he has been physically isolated from people for two years,
• 24:30
  he has a very, very narrow codery of people around him who's backgrounds are just like his,
• 24:35
  and that's, and he's somebody who we know has a high tolerance for risk and for danger,
• 24:43
  and you add all that up, and my hunch actually from fairly early on was that this is a man who
• 24:51
  was would be willing as the German chancellor in said in 1914 to roll the iron dice, and that's
• 24:59
  what he's done. You said he thinks the West is weak, are we? No, actually I think, look this is a
• 25:07
  horrible situation, this is, it's a humanitarian tragedy, there's an enormous amount of civilian
• 25:14
  suffering, and there's also, by the way, the lives of hundreds, if not in the thousands of Russian
• 25:20
  kids that are going to get thrown away on this stupid evil venture, but having said that,
• 25:28
  you know, one of the things that striking is the strength of the West, and I think people,
• 25:33
  we've gotten so used to obsessing about the weaknesses of democracy, the undermining of democracy,
• 25:40
  that we don't marvel enough at what's happened. The United States, led by an administration,
• 25:47
  which is not particularly distinguished, and which badly botched the Afghanistan withdrawal,
• 25:52
  it's done a marvelous job of pulling together a coalition leading NATO to rediscover its old mission.
• 25:59
  The states of Europe have behaved with very few exceptions, really an exemplary way. I have to
• 26:07
  say, for example, I was struck by the Germans. I had always thought of the Germans as being
• 26:13
  willing to accommodate the Russians for a variety of reasons. Some semi-reasonable, some decidedly
• 26:20
  not reasonable. And all of a sudden, a SPD chancellor turns around and says, okay, we're going to cancel
• 26:28
  Nord Stream 2. We're going to begin shipping thousands of weapons to the Ukrainians,
• 26:33
  and we're going to spend some of money that's twice as large as our entire defense budget
• 26:40
  on rearmament. And I think what we're seeing here is proof of the underlying vigor of democracy
• 26:48
  and democratic ideals. And the West owes a deep debt of gratitude to the Ukrainians,
• 26:56
  because their courage in standing up to the Russians has brought this out of us. And we're,
• 27:07
  as I have a piece coming out very shortly, which I say, we're at a moment where we can actually see
• 27:13
  the hinge of history turning, and it's a remarkable thing. So, no, I don't think we're weak at all.
• 27:20
  Elliot, you write in your piece in the Atlantic that you tell the anecdote of, as you were leaving
• 27:26
  the State Department and you were a council of there, and you and Condi Rice, who was the Secretary
• 27:31
  of State, at the time, went to a NATO meeting. This is the very, very end of the George W. Bush
• 27:36
  administration before the Obama administration. And you guys were on the way out, and Condi Rice had
• 27:42
  some words for her counterparts, for her European counterparts in NATO. Tell us about that.
• 27:49
  Sure. So, we were actually just on our way back from Georgia. We've been into BLEC. This is
• 27:54
  during the 2008 crisis. And we end up in Brussels, and there's a meeting of the foreign ministers,
• 28:02
  the NATO foreign ministers. And she says to them, look, next year at this time, I'm going to be playing
• 28:09
  golf in Palo Alto, California. But if you don't do something, you'll be here talking about Ukraine.
• 28:18
  Her timing was off by a number of years, but the basic point was correct. I mean, we got to this
• 28:24
  place by looking the other way over Georgia, over Crimea, over the Donbass, and now we have this.
• 28:35
  So you can understand why Putin formed the judgments that he did.
• 28:40
  But I think, you know, at the 11th hour, people have woken up to what the parallels are.
• 28:48
  Let's talk about those events that led up to this, because there are various different ways of
• 28:54
  interpreting them. And I think a lot of listeners will have vague recollections of Georgia, vague
• 28:59
  recollections of Crimea. They'll have heard the word Donbass. We've all been doing a lot of
• 29:04
  Googling lately about all of this, all this stuff to refresh our memories. But take us back to
• 29:08
  the timeline. You guys were talking about Georgia. What did Putin do in 2007, 2008, and heard that
• 29:15
  next to what he later did in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine? So I think let's go all the way back to
• 29:21
  the beginning, which is the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989 to
• 29:29
  1991. And I think the thing to understand is that for somebody like Vladimir Putin, who was a
• 29:35
  trained as a KGB agent, who had served in the Soviet Empire, this was a shocking terrible event.
• 29:45
  Not so much the end of communism per se, but the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
• 29:51
  and in particular the secession, as it then seemed, of a whole host of national republics,
• 30:00
  which under communism had very, very limited autonomy. They had some.
• 30:08
  And I think he and others like him, regarded that as completely illegitimate.
• 30:14
  And they also viewed it as a certain amount of fear, because these states, there were several
• 30:20
  things going on. One, of course, was the fear that they would join NATO, and that that alliance
• 30:24
  would end up on their borders. I think the more serious fear for them is that basically they would
• 30:31
  become aligned with the West, that they would develop advanced open economies, that they would be
• 30:36
  democratic and have democratic norms, and that there was a serious risk of contagion into Russia.
• 30:45
  And sorry to pause you there earlier, is the fear there? Do you think that the contagion
• 30:50
  somehow de-rucifies Russia and turns everyone into a homogenous Levi jeans wearing
• 30:57
  sort of ramp of American hegemony, or is it that Putin doesn't get to be an authoritarian,
• 31:03
  if there are examples of flourishing, Russo-adjacent ethnicities who are democratic, and the
• 31:10
  color revolution is going to come for him? It's very much that the color revolution will come to him.
• 31:15
  You know, if you read Russian writings, including some very sophisticated writings by people
• 31:21
  like the chief of defense staff, Valerie Grasimov, you see that they interpret the so-called color
• 31:28
  revolutions, these democratic revolutions in these successor republics, as having been orchestrated
• 31:38
  by the West. Now they weren't. They were as spontaneous, but they're fearful of them.
• 31:43
  Do we know that, Elliot? Because even some people in the West sort of suspect that there's probably
• 31:47
  some assistance from the CIA in getting these things off the ground? You know, people have all kinds
• 31:52
  of fantasies about what the CIA can do, and I only wish they could.
• 32:01
  The fact of the matter is you have populations of young people who don't want to live in the
• 32:07
  kind of system that Russia is. I doubt that any of your listeners would like to live in that
• 32:14
  system. We want to live in a system which is not a police state, where you have freedom of speech,
• 32:21
  where you have multiple political parties, and if you don't like the people in charge, you can
• 32:25
  throw the bums out. That's the essence of what democracy is all about. And they were in almost all
• 32:33
  these cases, the successor regimes were fairly corrupt. They were old-style operatics. They might
• 32:40
  be nationalist operatics who didn't want to be part of the Russian Empire, but they were kind of
• 32:45
  thuggish and kleptocratic, and people didn't want them. So the basic Russian approach has been
• 32:55
  to destabilize some of these republics by supporting, and you really see this in both Georgia and
• 33:04
  Ukraine, supporting either minorities or Russian-speaking populations. And so making it very
• 33:17
  difficult for these states destabilizing these states, kind of keeping them off balance,
• 33:23
  preventing them from really being able to successfully align with the West. They did that
• 33:29
  with regard to Georgia, with regard to two regions, Abkhazia, which is a very difficult place,
• 33:36
  even for them to manage, and South Asetia. And the Georgians really fell into a trap, because the
• 33:43
  South Asetians seceded, and we tried to persuade the Georgians not to intervene militarily, and they
• 33:52
  did, and that was the supposed provocation that the Russians were waiting for. In a similar vein,
• 34:00
  that's the way they operated in Crimea, and it's also the way they operated in the Donbass,
• 34:06
  where you have Russian-speaking minorities, which are quite substantial. Now, the thing that's
• 34:12
  interesting- Just to remind people, the Crimea issue, so obviously Georgia and Ukraine were part
• 34:17
  of the USSR. They came apart when, at the end of the Cold War, Russia has presumably never
• 34:23
  quite accepted that, at least the Putin mindset hasn't quite. And Crimea is this bit the dangles
• 34:28
  off the bottom of Ukraine that Russia essentially carved off? Well, it's a bit more complicated
• 34:35
  than that. Actually, Crimea had been part of Russia in the mid-1950s. Nikita Khrushchev,
• 34:42
  who himself was Ukrainian, made it part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
• 34:50
  It has the largest Russian naval base in the Black Sea, which is very historic,
• 34:57
  Sevastopol. So, the first Russian movement was to take that, but then to push
• 35:07
  and help along separatist movements in the Donbass, which is this mining area, which has had a
• 35:14
  lot of Russian immigrants, and was Russian-oriented. Now, one thing that people may not fully understand
• 35:21
  is that, I mean, Ukraine is an incredibly, incredibly complicated place. But one of the things that's
• 35:29
  clearly happened is that there was same ambivalence among some of these populations
• 35:37
  about being in an independent Ukraine versus Russia. That has steadily shifted.
• 35:45
  And so, for example, even as we speak, the Russians are besieging Kharkiv, or, as the Russians
• 35:53
  would call it Kharkiv, which is predominantly a Russian-speaking city, and they're meeting
• 36:00
  enormous resistance. They're not being greeted as liberators. And one of the consequences,
• 36:06
  actually, of what the Russians have done, is to strengthen the Ukrainian sense of national
• 36:12
  identity, no matter what language people speak. And Ukrainian is close to Russian, but it's not the
• 36:17
  same thing. So, there's another layer of this, which is Ukraine is very important in Russian
• 36:27
  history. This is the location of the first Slavic kingdom that really converts to Christianity.
• 36:37
  Historically, many Russians claim it as sort of the founding site, particularly Kiev,
• 36:45
  of modern Russia. Others, particularly Ukrainians, don't view it that way at all. They say,
• 36:52
  this is actually this Ukraine is historically much more part of the West. And the state we know
• 36:58
  as Russia is really an outgrowth of Muscovy and of the interaction that the populations there had
• 37:08
  with the Mongols. So, this is very disputed history, but the main point, I think, is this.
• 37:17
  Ukraine has been an independent country for 30 years. It has been moving closer and closer to
• 37:23
  the West. It's been moving closer and closer to democratic norms, imperfectly, but still moving
• 37:30
  there. And I think one of the things that troubled Putin deeply is the sense that Ukraine really was
• 37:37
  going to end up in the Western orbit, because that's what the population of Ukraine wants.
• 37:44
  And he decided he was going to put a stop to it by force, which I think will turn out to be
• 37:50
  a catastrophic mistake for him, but it's unfortunately catastrophic for the Ukrainians as well.
• 37:57
  When we think about the trade-offs, I was very confused, Eliot, in the lead up to all this,
• 38:02
  just understanding what exactly he was playing at. And then when the invasion launched
• 38:09
  in the scale that it launched at, I was even more confused because I couldn't see how you
• 38:15
  wouldn't notice that the downsides are very high. And I couldn't see what the upsides were,
• 38:21
  until a friend of mine who works in intelligence in Europe said that basically Putin doesn't really
• 38:29
  see an alternative because he thinks that, I mean, my friend jokingly said that Hillary Clinton
• 38:33
  is going to orchestrate a move to topple him using Hillary Clinton as a shorthand for all the
• 38:40
  kind of nefarious ways in which the West is able to insinuate itself into opposition to Russia's
• 38:48
  affairs. And that either it's this big role of the dice or it's an inevitable decline
• 38:55
  and the end of the Russia that he loves. Do you see that being his perspective, and is there any
• 39:02
  validity in that? I think there's some, but I don't think that's the dominant part of this.
• 39:08
  One thing that strikes me is that they expected that this would be wrapped up
• 39:14
  within about four or five days. I think he actually, yes, I think he actually believed,
• 39:21
  I think they were prepared for it not to be, but I think they expected this,
• 39:26
  they expected to be greeted as liberators or at least as brothers. They expected to be able to
• 39:32
  roll into Kiev, get rid of President Zelensky and not have to face what they're facing,
• 39:42
  which is going to be a deep, deep-seated, popular resistance movement in addition to the actual
• 39:48
  fighting. On what basis would Putin not think that Ukrainians absolutely hate him after 2004?
• 39:56
  I think people can convince themselves of all sorts of things. And I think that is what happened.
• 40:08
  It's also the case that the Ukrainian military at the beginning of the Donbass conflict in 2014
• 40:17
  was not particularly effective. They quickly got a lot better and in the eight years since they've
• 40:23
  gotten much, much better. And I don't think he fully took that on board. I suspect he also may have
• 40:29
  been, you know, he has poured a lot of money into the Russian military over the last 20 years.
• 40:35
  And I suspect that he's not a military man. He's certainly not a military historian.
• 40:40
  I think he's intoxicated by some of the technology that they have, some which is quite impressive.
• 40:46
  And he has completely underestimated the human factor. You know, things like determination,
• 40:55
  will, small unit leadership, those kinds of things. And, you know, if the Ukrainians have one
• 41:04
  advantage over the Russians, it is that they are powerfully motivated and will get even more so,
• 41:11
  the more destruction is levied on them. And the Russians have a bunch of 18 and 19-year-olds
• 41:18
  who don't quite know why they're there, don't want to be doing this in a system which still has
• 41:26
  a lot of abuse, rather little initiative. And just a lot of things that don't make it a
• 41:35
  particularly effective military when you're up against a serious opponent. You know, they've been,
• 41:40
  they've been fighting opponents who really couldn't offer them a fair fight in places like Syria,
• 41:48
  and even in places like Georgia. And where they did, as in Chechnya, they could just overwhelm them
• 41:54
  with a huge amount of firepower, and nobody would particularly care. This is different. You know,
• 41:59
  Ukraine is bigger than France, and it's got 42 million people, and it has a history of irregular
• 42:07
  warfare to include an insurgency that went on for almost a decade after World War II.
• 42:14
  My worry is that if that turns into an insurgency that, well, I don't even want to go down,
• 42:19
  we can leave, you know, that you end up with a Grozny, or you end up with Putin feeling humiliated
• 42:25
  and just flattening whole civilian cities. They've begun doing it. You know, if you look at what
• 42:31
  they're doing right now in Harkiv, if you look at the kind of weapons systems they bring in,
• 42:36
  they're going to level a lot of firepower in these big,
• 42:40
  creative cities. There are problems going to be, A, the cities are very big.
• 42:46
  B, they will be facing much more sophisticated resistance that is much better armed.
• 42:51
  And remember, there's a long border with NATO countries, which are going to be funneling in
• 42:56
  large quantities of weapons. And he's got a force which, given what he's trying to do,
• 43:05
  I mean, in the one hand, you know, it's large, or 150, 200,000 troops. That may be enough to conquer
• 43:13
  Ukraine, it's certainly not enough to hold it. Right. And we've seen with America in Iraq and the
• 43:19
  Soviets in Afghanistan, the trouble of trying to control something that even if your initial
• 43:24
  invasion phase was successful, what the hell you do with it then. Let's talk about the geopolitical
• 43:30
  causes of this, Elliot, because there's a point of view that I'm hearing a lot in the states.
• 43:37
  It was put perhaps most articulately by Jack Matlock, who was the last U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.
• 43:44
  R. And he sort of represents this old diplomatic view that is basically, this is chickens coming home
• 43:50
  to roost. And a kind of a, what on earth did you expect Putin to do? Narratives. At the end of the
• 43:58
  Cold War, the West made the terrible mistake of expanding NATO. We thought we could
• 44:05
  pour an infinite amount of shit on Putin and make him eat it and like it. And at some point,
• 44:10
  he was going to retaliate. And now he's retaliating. And, you know, as a second component to this
• 44:16
  argument, sometimes here, people say, you know, Ukraine is in its, is in Russia's sphere of
• 44:21
  influence. The U.S. had the Monroe doctrine where basically no one could fuck with any country in
• 44:26
  the Western hemisphere at all. We had the Cuban missile crisis, like we have never granted to
• 44:32
  small countries on our doorstep, total autonomy in their geopolitical posture. There's no reason
• 44:38
  why we should expect Putin to do the same. Ukraine's only been a country for 30 years. It's always been
• 44:44
  a bit of another empire, like this is basically our fault. I hear this from people as diverse as
• 44:49
  Taka Carlson, Glenn Greenwald on the left, Tulsi Gabbard. What's your response to it?
• 44:55
  Well, that's a club I would be ashamed to be part of. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's
• 45:02
  apologetics for a guy who let us remember poisons his opponents, who crushes independent
• 45:11
  organizations, including some which are just trying to keep track of Stalin's crimes.
• 45:16
  I think it's rubbish. Let me just pause that. The point that a mere shimer style realist would make
• 45:24
  is, yeah, Putin might be an asshole domestically, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't behave
• 45:29
  as a country in the same way that countries behave. It doesn't really make a difference whether
• 45:33
  or not a country's democracy, whether it's led by a good guy or a bad guy, it's basically going to
• 45:37
  take its own strategic perspective as paramount. You know, I think George Orwell nailed it when he
• 45:44
  said there are some ideas that are so ridiculous that you have to be an intellectual to believe them.
• 45:49
  And so-called international realism, international relations realism is part of it. It's the belief
• 45:56
  that individuals that don't matter, that values don't matter, and it's nonsense. You know, Winston
• 46:04
  Churchill would have been contemptuous of this, so in any other leader you'd want to be associated
• 46:09
  with. So let me just run through why I reject all this. First, I think there's something
• 46:13
  unseemly about people using this crisis in which Ukrainian women and children are being massacred
• 46:20
  in which a completely unprovoked war is being launched. For people to say, well, you should have
• 46:25
  listened to me 20 years ago. That's contemptible. Second thing is, it is clear that, you know,
• 46:32
  NATO expansion stopped two decades ago. So the idea that he's invading Ukraine today because
• 46:39
  Poland joined NATO, really? I don't think so. Furthermore, I would say the threat that he is
• 46:51
  reacting to is the threat of liberty. It's the threat of democratization. It's orange revolutions.
• 47:00
  Well, I'm sorry if people want to be free, they want to be free. And countries like the United
• 47:06
  States and Australia should have some sympathy with that. Furthermore, I mean, the people who
• 47:11
  talk this way don't actually know a whole lot of Ukrainian history. It has been part of the West.
• 47:15
  It has been part of Western Europe for a long time. And by the way, NATO expansion is a good thing.
• 47:21
  What do you mean by that that it's been part of Western Europe for a long time? You mean
• 47:24
  pre-the end of the Cold War? Yes. I mean, if you go, look, if you go back to the history of this
• 47:31
  part of the world, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when it was actually earlier,
• 47:37
  before that it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, which is, you know, this is history,
• 47:43
  and nobody studies history, you know. It was actually one of the more tolerant, open
• 47:50
  entities that was out there. You know, you see that this was part of trade routes that were running
• 47:56
  from Scandinavia all the way to China. It was certainly tied in to the economies of central Europe.
• 48:07
  And, you know, it is European, but in general, I think the idea that we give up on any kind of
• 48:13
  self-determination is nonsense. And if we exercise the kind of willingness to, you know, crush
• 48:22
  local governments that we didn't like, we would have invaded Cuba long ago. We would have
• 48:29
  we did we did try in this. We did not excuse me. That's nonsense.
• 48:34
  You know, we hold on. We let a bunch of Cuban revolutionaries try it. They got hammered,
• 48:42
  and thereafter we left them alone. We did not end in the 82nd Airborne Division.
• 48:47
  No, fair enough. We didn't hurl 170,000 troops across the border, you know, massacring civilians as
• 48:55
  they did so. No, of course. I'm not saying that there's an equivalence. What I'm saying is that
• 49:00
  from the perspective of the realist, the realist will say, no, it's terrible. The realist,
• 49:04
  Josh, the realists are idiots. The realist think that World War II is doesn't have anything to do
• 49:11
  with this guy named Hitler and this guy named Churchill and this guy named Stalin and this
• 49:15
  guy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's a bunch of states which they think of his billiard balls
• 49:20
  and you got to be an idiot to believe this. I mean, it is from what is remarkable to me is the
• 49:25
  is the erasure of the lives of the people who are actually bearing the brunt of this in all of
• 49:30
  our conversations about the geopolitical billiard balls. I mentioned Tulsi Gabbard on the 24th
• 49:36
  of February, the day of the invasion. It was literally as, you know, people were enduring their
• 49:43
  first onslaught in Ukraine. She tweets, this war and suffering could easily have been avoided if
• 49:48
  the Biden administration and NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns
• 49:52
  regarding Ukraine's becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US NATO forces right on Russia's
• 49:56
  border. I tweeted that. It's incredible. We're speaking as if this is a chess game between
• 50:03
  Russia, the US and Europe, ignoring that Ukrainians exist. They have a right to run their country,
• 50:07
  however they want. Stop the project, you're grandstanding and have some bloody empathy.
• 50:11
  Ukrainians matter here, not you. Look, it's no accident that Tulsi Gabbard is also somebody who
• 50:18
  was, you know, very close to the Assad regime in Syria. Right. So, you know, I mean, that's bad
• 50:28
  company. And, you know, in any case, at the end of the day, it's marginal. I think one of the
• 50:35
  things that's heartening is if you look around the democratic world, that includes Australia,
• 50:41
  you know, what you see is people recognizing that this is a country that wants to determine
• 50:46
  its own future, that wants to have free elections, and wants to have the things that we have.
• 50:51
  And, you know, the idea that they should be consigned to kind of cluptocratic remote control for
• 50:59
  Moscow is obscene. And it really ignores the reality of what Vladimir Putin has done. I mean,
• 51:07
  this is a guy who assassinates his opponents. That's, and not just his opponents. He assassinates people
• 51:14
  in, say, Great Britain. You know, so the, I mean, this is another part of the idiocy of so-called
• 51:20
  realism is the idea that there's a compartment called domestic and a compartment called international
• 51:28
  and never the twain shall meet. And that's ridiculous. I guess the concern, I mean, would we at least
• 51:34
  grant them the point that just because you run a good democratic house at home doesn't mean that
• 51:41
  you don't do barbaric things abroad. That you don't say that again? That you don't do barbaric things
• 51:46
  abroad. The chances are less that you're going to do barbaric things abroad or that they'll be
• 51:53
  mitigated or that you'll stop doing them sooner. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you know, I, I mean,
• 51:59
  again, people love false dichotomies. I mean, does the United States, for that matter, does Australia
• 52:06
  or Great Britain or, you know, any of these countries occasionally do terrible things abroad? Yes.
• 52:12
  Unquestionably so. Are they more likely to come to terms with it than a regime like Putin's Russia
• 52:20
  or is Xi Jinping as China? Absolutely. And does it, does it excuse you and allow you to say,
• 52:28
  well, I'm not going to take a stand because, you know, my country's done terrible things in the past.
• 52:34
  Therefore, I don't have to take any moral stance. It's a coward's way out. Yeah. No, I mean, I
• 52:38
  think, I think this is where the conversation sometimes gets derailed though as well, Elliot,
• 52:42
  because people, people who point out what they regard as being Western hypocrisy on this can
• 52:47
  sometimes be understood to be saying that we shouldn't, therefore, do anything to help Ukrainians.
• 52:51
  But I do think the two points can remain distinct. One can have one can hold both ideas at the same
• 52:57
  time that we, given the position that we're in, should do everything we can to help Ukraine and
• 53:02
  oppose Russia. And also that we find ourselves historically being somewhat hypocritical on this,
• 53:10
  the point of respecting the sovereignty of all other countries and never breaching international
• 53:14
  law and we invade other countries, never supporting dictatorships abroad, like expecting there to
• 53:22
  be a sphere of influence in our own hemispheres that, you know, like it's a little bit cute for us to
• 53:28
  go, I can't understand why Putin feels so threatened by the enlargement of NATO when we have felt
• 53:34
  threatened. Hold on, Josh. Josh. I said, the issue is not, I think, the expansion of NATO. It's
• 53:41
  the contagion of democracy. That's his real worry. And one way, previously, the countries,
• 53:48
  the countries are complicated and have complicated histories. Well, it's the same thing as saying
• 53:54
  individuals are complicated and have complicated histories. And it's just being adult to recognize that
• 53:59
  that's the fact, but to get the vapors over the fact that there are terrible things in the American
• 54:05
  past as in the Australian past and say, well, that means that, therefore, we shouldn't move out
• 54:10
  smartly. When you face something that is just so clearly, so clearly evil as this is, it's shameful.
• 54:20
  And it, you know, and if you begin to believe it, it paralyzes you.
• 54:25
  And to take, I mean, you know, yeah, the US didn't invade Cuba, but the US had a completely
• 54:32
  clear position that that Russian meddling and communist meddling in the Western hemisphere was
• 54:39
  not going to be acceptable to it. And it's right. I mean, we, there was, there was, there was a
• 54:46
  Soviet garrison in, or, yeah, I'll say garrison in Cuba throughout the Cold War. We certainly lived with
• 54:53
  it. Well, you live with what you're going to live with, don't you? I mean, you know, you know,
• 55:01
  you're not, there was no appetite for war three. Excuse me, we could have taken Cuba
• 55:08
  without risking world war three. What? Without risking world war three? We could probably so,
• 55:16
  but that really wasn't the point. I, you know, I find, I honestly, I find these kinds of arguments
• 55:24
  obtuse. I really do. Because it's a way of avoiding the fact that we are looking at a country that
• 55:32
  wants to be free with a democratically elected president, get ripped apart by people who have no
• 55:38
  problems, showering missiles, and bombs down on apartment buildings. And this allows us to be
• 55:44
  clever and sophisticated, and they're dying. No, I take, I take the point about the timing of it
• 55:50
  being off being naf, but I also take the point, but I also want to think that it's important for us
• 55:55
  to be able to talk to people who hold this worldview in America, and Australia, and the West,
• 56:00
  in ways that don't seem likely, where, where, there's no point in talking. No, but there was,
• 56:06
  no, but there is a point in having an argument about her ideas that resonates with people who might
• 56:11
  think that she has, I'm sorry, I don't think she has ideas that are worth considering.
• 56:17
  Okay, well, take, take Australia, then. Let's, let's move it out of, like, Cuba, the,
• 56:20
  the Horeal cliche of Cuba. You know, Australia had a strong alliance with the Indonesian dictatorship,
• 56:26
  Sohato supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. This is the, this is, you know, talk about
• 56:32
  bombs raining down. This is a quasi genocide, and the horrendous thing, Australia was standing up
• 56:37
  in the United Nations in the 70s and 80s defending. It's, you know, it's friend, the dictator of
• 56:43
  Indonesia. That's just one example of many, many occasions on which we in the, the West have,
• 56:48
  have made calculated strategic decisions to not give a shit about people having bombs raining
• 56:53
  down on them. So, I think the Putin, you know, the, the sort of the Glenn Greenwald attitude is like,
• 56:59
  it's a little bit rich for us now to be taking the moral high horse about bombs raining down.
• 57:03
  There have been a lot of, again, if you shift the discussion to, well, you shouldn't be taking
• 57:08
  the moral high horse. It's a way of avoiding the situation. It's a way of avoiding talking about
• 57:13
  Ukraine. It's a way of shifting the discussion to, well, it's all about us. I mean, it's narcissistic
• 57:20
  among, among other things. But, but look, I mean, you know, all countries face attention between
• 57:27
  their interests and their values. Australia is where it is. It's Indonesia's the size that it is,
• 57:33
  with the population that it is. And so, period, you know, throughout its whole history,
• 57:37
  Australia kind of navigates its way through that. That still doesn't mean that you shouldn't do
• 57:46
  anything about Ukraine. It means, I mean, all, all that is, it's a way of manipulating guilt and
• 57:52
  doubt. And it has nothing to do with actually confronting a real situation where real people
• 57:59
  are dying even as we speak. I mean, I think what it can be at its best is not a way of
• 58:09
  playing what aboutism and not a way of sort of self-flagulating, but potentially a way of trying
• 58:15
  to understand the worldview of people who seem completely alien to us. I mean, the perspective,
• 58:21
  if the perspective, if our understanding of Putin's mindset, and I'm not saying this is yours,
• 58:28
  but the layperson's understanding of Putin's mindset is he's an evil dictator and all evil
• 58:33
  dictators are basically Hitler. And so, there's nothing to understand here. Then don't we potentially
• 58:38
  miss a lesson about his, the way that he thinks that his worldview is structured, the way that he
• 58:44
  thinks that he's just about. So, I'll say two things. You know, you, you want to empathize with
• 58:50
  evil people. John Lukash, a great historian once said, wrote a wonderful book called The
• 58:56
  Dual about Hitler and Churchill in kind of the crisis of 1940. And one of the points he makes is
• 59:03
  that Churchill was a much greater strategist because although Hitler was in many ways very smart,
• 59:15
  Churchill could imagine what it was like to be Hitler and Hitler could not imagine what it
• 59:19
  was like to be Churchill. So, about the fundamental point of empathy, absolutely, one should absolutely
• 59:24
  empathize with this guy who is what he is. On the other hand, this is why people like Orwell and a
• 59:32
  certain kind of conservative would say, you know, the guy in the street who at least says he's an
• 59:38
  evil dictator, understands something that Tulsi Gabbard and Glenn Greenwald and a bunch of other
• 59:45
  marginal characters don't understand about the world. And so, I'll go, I'll, I'm willing to start
• 59:50
  with that man in the street view that yeah, he's a, he's an evil dictator. And yes, you want to
• 59:57
  understand him. But let's start with first things first. Let's say, and you know, you can go back to
• 1:00:03
  the 1930s. You can start the discussion by saying, this guy Hitler is really evil and he wants to
• 1:00:08
  do monstrous things where he could say, well, let's talk about the Versailles treaty and,
• 1:00:14
  you know, should you really, should the border have been drawn where it was and what about the guilt
• 1:00:19
  clause, all of which is perfectly true and does help explain some not all of Hitler's behavior.
• 1:00:25
  But your point of departure should probably be, is yeah, he's an evil dictator who's willing to
• 1:00:29
  kill people and it was a very dangerous guy. And that's a much sounder way to begin.
• 1:00:34
  Hmm, certainly in terms of the timing, it makes sense to do the, the Monday morning quarterbacking
• 1:00:40
  after the fact rather than during the heat of the, of the battle. In which case, let's talk about
• 1:00:45
  the heat of the battle. But what do we do now? Well, I think we're, you know, on the whole,
• 1:00:52
  actually, I think the Biden administration, the Europeans and dare I say it, the Australian
• 1:00:56
  government as well, which has pitched in, I think, and I'm glad to see it do so.
• 1:01:03
  Are doing the right things, which is, we're not going to send troops into Ukraine, but we are
• 1:01:08
  going to arm them and then putting an enormous amount of economic pressure on Russia and supporting
• 1:01:16
  the exposed members of NATO's Eastern flank. And because this won't stop there, I mean, if
• 1:01:24
  Putin does believe that, in fact, Putin believes that NATO itself is an illegitimate alliance,
• 1:01:30
  that it should have gone away the way the Warsaw packed it, although his actions, of course,
• 1:01:36
  show why you need it, because Russia is what, what, what, what Russia is. So there's, there,
• 1:01:43
  you know, I think that course of action is basically right. And I think it's also extremely important
• 1:01:48
  to be very clear about what he's doing and to document it and to make Russia a pariah.
• 1:01:58
  I think that's really the only choice, the only choice that we have. I doubt very much that this
• 1:02:04
  is one that you can negotiate your way out of. I don't think so. I think for Putin, actually, I don't
• 1:02:10
  think it's a, an acceptable option, because at some point, he is going to be worried about his
• 1:02:17
  ability to survive what could be a very deep economic crisis at home, and even a certain amount
• 1:02:25
  of domestic revulsion, which of which, you know, there's some very early signs, which have
• 1:02:34
  immediately gotten snuffed out by, you know, by the police, but which are clearly, are clearly
• 1:02:42
  there. So I think on the whole, we're doing the, the right things. One of the things that people say,
• 1:02:48
  or that people are worried about is, are we really committed to NATO? Like, is it actually true that
• 1:02:54
  if he started pussy-footing around with the borders of another country after this? Let's suppose
• 1:02:59
  that, that Ukraine is not a complete calamity for him, and he managed to save face in some way,
• 1:03:05
  or it's, it's just enough of a calamity that he feels like he has to go further and reassert
• 1:03:10
  Russian influence elsewhere. Is it really true that the full weight of the US and Western
• 1:03:18
  European armies come down on Russia if it attacks a NATO member? So I think that on the whole,
• 1:03:29
  you know, you can never be sure until it actually happens, that part is really quite heartening.
• 1:03:33
  Let's remember the United States has now dispatched thousands, thousands of troops to the front line,
• 1:03:39
  and there's no clear sign of commitment that when you take young men and young women,
• 1:03:45
  and you put them into harm's way. The front line meaning the eastern border of NATO?
• 1:03:49
  The eastern border of Poland, but also, you know, what's striking is the Baltic states too,
• 1:03:54
  you know, the Germans have sent in sending troops, the French, the British. You have actually
• 1:04:00
  multinational units of different kinds. We've alerted the NATO response force, which is a 40,000
• 1:04:06
  person force, and that's being stood up, I believe, for the first time. No, it's actually quite,
• 1:04:13
  it's quite impressive. And when he's done some nuclear saber rattling, the French Chief of Staff
• 1:04:19
  said, well, we have nuclear weapons too. So I think on the whole, people have been quite,
• 1:04:26
  quite staunch, you know, what Putin has done. I mean, this is, you know, for all the people
• 1:04:31
  say, well, we should understand him. We should understand him making a huge mistake.
• 1:04:36
  Part of his huge mistake is he has given new life to NATO, I mean, in a profound way. And secondly,
• 1:04:42
  he has guaranteed that Ukrainians will hate him and will probably hate Russia forever.
• 1:04:50
  And so, you know, this is, you know, once people can get by trying to sympathize and feel sorry
• 1:04:57
  for him, they should notice that actually what he's done is something that's enormously self-destructive.
• 1:05:04
  Are you worried about the Baltic states? Yes. You know, there are Russian speaking minorities
• 1:05:10
  in Estonia, for example, in town called Narva, in Lithuania and Latvia as well.
• 1:05:17
  And, you know, I can imagine Putin, you know, particularly if he's getting, either if he's
• 1:05:23
  getting desperate or if he's feeling very self-confident, wanting to see if he can kind of crack
• 1:05:30
  NATO open by putting them in a position where they declare article five and attack against one
• 1:05:36
  as an attack against all, and the cavalry don't actually show up at the rescue. But I think at
• 1:05:43
  this point, actually, he would, that would be a misplaced confidence. The real problem is that
• 1:05:48
  the Europeans in particular have been letting their military power atrophy, although to give them
• 1:05:57
  credit over the last seven or eight years or so, actually, European defense budgets have begun
• 1:06:03
  going up. And in the wake of this, it's clear they're going to go way up. And people in the
• 1:06:07
  Germans, it's quite stunning. By the way, the Germans are really interesting because they've gone
• 1:06:13
  through a much more sophisticated version of the stuff you were throwing at me earlier. We're
• 1:06:20
  saying, well, we have such a terrible, we have such a terrible record who are we and all that.
• 1:06:27
  And I think they properly turned around because, you know, that you don't honor the victims of
• 1:06:34
  Nazism by saying, well, we're going to cut deals with aggressive dictators.
• 1:06:43
  It's quite a remarkable turn of that. I mean, it's really, I mean, part of the problem is though
• 1:06:47
  that they find themselves in a real pickle with regard to their energy dependency on Russia,
• 1:06:51
  isn't it? I mean, one thing that infuriates me is that we've sort of seen, since 2008,
• 1:07:00
  what Putin's grievances are and what his goals are. And he's telegraphed to us on a number of
• 1:07:06
  occasions in Georgia and Crimea and in Ukraine that, you know, this was certainly on the cards and
• 1:07:12
  this was an aspiration of his. And we've done, it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong,
• 1:07:17
  essentially zero in Western Europe to to cleave off his, that the Western European
• 1:07:22
  dependence on Russian energy, which is what lines his pockets and what gives him the ultimate
• 1:07:27
  trump card if he can turn off the heaters in the middle of winter in Berlin.
• 1:07:31
  Right. So it's, that's true. But the story's a little bit more complicated than that.
• 1:07:35
  There are countries like Poland, for example, which really have diversified their energy resources.
• 1:07:42
  So I think the polls only get about 10% of their energy from Russia. But parenthetically,
• 1:07:50
  I'd say they are willing to defend themselves and they're quite happy actually to be a democracy
• 1:07:55
  in NATO rather than an extension of Russia. The German, this is what makes the German willingness
• 1:08:01
  to cancel the Nord Stream 2 project, this direct pipeline from Russia that would have come to them.
• 1:08:08
  And then the other thing which they just announced which didn't get as much attention is that
• 1:08:12
  they're building two LNG terminals. I mean, the solution for them is clearly going to be
• 1:08:19
  imported LNG. Now this is, this is all for now. You know, there, I mean, who knows what energy
• 1:08:26
  technologies await, particularly in the area of fusion. So I don't think we're stuck with this
• 1:08:32
  forever. So they, this has been a wake up call for the Europeans and, you know, to, again,
• 1:08:38
  to my astonishment, they're, they're finally stepping up. And that does sort of restore one's
• 1:08:46
  confidence a bit in the power of, the power of democracy.
• 1:08:51
  If we fast forward to, let's say the end of the decade, Elliot, and we talk again in 2030,
• 1:08:56
  what does Ukraine look like? God only knows. I mean, you know, we're in, this we're in flux.
• 1:09:05
  You know, I would, obviously, what I would like to think that it's a country that's, you know,
• 1:09:11
  kind of where Poland is today. You know, I doubt that it'll be part of NATO, but I can
• 1:09:18
  imagine it being part of the EU. But we don't know. I mean, it's, I don't know how much devastation
• 1:09:25
  is going to be unleashed by the Russians. Unfortunately, it looks like that's really the next stage
• 1:09:30
  since they're, you know, they haven't done tactically all that well against the Ukrainian
• 1:09:35
  military and the Ukrainian national guards. You know, I don't know if we will continue to be as
• 1:09:46
  staunch as we've been thus far. I don't know what kind of leadership they'll have. That's why,
• 1:09:53
  you know, the decisions you make now are really important. Let me say, by the way, one thing for,
• 1:09:58
  you know, I know I'm speaking to an Australian audience here. I was just at the Munich Security
• 1:10:03
  Conference and I have a, I have a lot of Australian friends in the military and intelligence
• 1:10:08
  establishment and the foreign policy establishment. I was talking to one of them. He said, you know,
• 1:10:14
  my country has only faced an existential crisis once. That was in 1942. And that was because the Asian
• 1:10:22
  security order had broken down. And the Asian security order broke down because the European
• 1:10:29
  security order broke down. And that's why it's really important for Australia that the Russians
• 1:10:38
  be stopped in Ukraine, that NATO be strong and that you people do the things you've been doing.
• 1:10:46
  It's a good point. And I would add that although you're talking to an Australian host,
• 1:10:50
  you are talking to a majority American audience still. I just can't shake you, American
• 1:10:55
  listeners. God bless you for hanging in there. Elliott, it's terrific to talk to you. Thanks for
• 1:10:59
  such a clear-eyed defensive that position. Go and go and have a lovely dinner. Yeah, thanks very
• 1:11:04
  much. Good to talk to you, Joshua. Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma. Follow
• 1:11:14
  me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest. May your day be fruitful, your mind,
• 1:11:20
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• 1:11:25
  delectably, uncomfortable.