Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 4, Episode 3: Prof. Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order

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Season 4, Episode 3: Prof. Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Today I'm absolutely delighted to have as our guest one of the leading political scientists of geopolitics in the world today, in my opinion, Professor Glenn Deesson, who is professor at the University of Southeastern Norway.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: He's written a very important book, a very helpful book for people to read, to understand the dynamics of global change and the reasons for the Ukraine war.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: The book is called The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Glenn, thank you so much for uh coming on book club.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's it's great to be with you.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh yeah, a great privilege to be on your book club.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks again.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you're watching events, in my view, with the clarity and a perspective and knowledge of Russia, Western Europe, the United States, uh the world that is very, very rare.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh therefore I think you get things so right and help us to understand uh these events uh in a very important way.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to add, the book is very clearly written.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a great text also for teachers uh that are aiming to teach international relations, but teach it the right way, not from a very biased way, but from an international way.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to help the uh listeners to uh understand uh your book, why you wrote it, what it means.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to start with the uh a very basic point, which is foundational for the book.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: The book is entitled The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: What is a world order?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's uh the centerpiece of your analysis.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: I agree with it completely, but I think it's a concept that is not perhaps well understood because it's not an intuitive concept.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's only if you study history that you can uh see that concept.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, I defined world order as uh consisting mainly of two components.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: So one will be the international distribution of power and uh the rules that gives it legitimacy.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: So uh world order is effectively the rules we have.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh if we really go back to defining the modern world order, it has to be the at a piece of Westphalia.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: As uh this is when the world order was established according to the international anarchy.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So there was instead of having one hegemon, we had then many centers of power.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if if any one uh state would seek hegemony, the others would then collectively balance it.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the rules that legitimize it kind of reflects this balance of power.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it promotes a sovereign equality, for example, for the main actors.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, this is what we always had, but as we know, there was a huge disruption after the Cold War.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: So let's before we jump to the Cold War, uh actually I I want to uh make sure that people are following the uh basic uh concepts because the audience is very diverse.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's not international relations specialists.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we talk about all sorts of uh issues of politics, sustainable development, uh, climate, uh, geography, history, culture, and so on.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh to come back to uh the first of these world orders that you described.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, it wasn't really a world order, it was a European order, and uh you call it the order of the peace of Westphalia.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: The Westphalian peace was the treaty that ended the European 30 years' war between 1618 and 1648, and it concluded with the Treaty of Westphalia.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that treaty gave certain recognition to independent sovereign states at the time.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: They could be kingdoms or principalities uh and so forth.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the Treaty of Westphalia ended what was a very bloody war of religions in part between Protestantism and uh Roman Catholicism, but it had many other dimensions to it also, geographical, historical.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was a really bloody uh war in Europe.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And what came out of the treaty of 1648?
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because we refer to it a lot, that we're in a Westphalian system.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is something that a student in international relations would hear repeatedly, since it's a treaty that is uh almost 400 years old now.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: What did it say, and why do we regard it as a core benchmark of the modern system?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it uh effectively set up the system as being based on uh international anarchy.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when we say international anarchy, it sounds very chaotic, but the only uh thing it means effectively is that there's no world government, so every state is uh well effectively on its own.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And um, this has set out the main challenge we also have in international security, that is uh the security competition.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So if uh yeah country A increases security, it tends to come at the expense of country B.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: So this is really the main reason why we have these conflicts.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, I just want to add uh one of the reasons why we ended up with this system was uh because of the 30 Years' War.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: As you mentioned, no one state was able to establish dominance to become a new hegemon.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this uh every time this seemed like one state might prevail, the others began to balance it.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it showed that the the values of the Catholics, for example, the uh French were willing to go against the Habsburgs, align themselves with uh Protestant Sweden uh just to prevent the Habsburgs from dominating.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it showed that we didn't really have that many universal values anymore that uh that legitimized the hegemon.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the distribution of power no longer uh favored a hegemon, and uh legitimacy for ruling over others also no longer existed uh after the Reformation.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So for this reason, we ended up then with an international system with uh many centers of power, and this is uh usually been the main uh challenge in world order.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: That is, we either have a balance of power or we lean towards uh one state dominating, and this is the main tensions we have.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So you go through uh several uh world orders, which are to some extent, at least the first couple are mainly European uh orders, because uh China and India and so forth don't really show up as part of the story, say in the uh Westphalian treaty.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: This was really about continental Europe.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're very correct, it was a European system, but because the Europeans from there on began to dominate the world, it was effectively imposed on the rest.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: However, it was not the sovereign equality, it was a foundation between the states of Europe, but it was a European system, so sovereignty was deemed to be only civilized states were considered to have the responsibility to be sovereign.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that meant uh European uh you know, Christian countries.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the rest of the world fell then under what's referred to as a jungle or uncivilized, which meant they did not have the responsibility uh capable of being responsible for sovereignty.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: This was the assumption.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so it created an international system based on sovereign inequality because exactly as you said, it was a European system.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Then the second world order that you describe is at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, uh, the Congress of Vienna and the concert of Europe.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: So could you uh say what happens between 1648 and 1815?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: This second order, if I have it correctly, uh in your uh chronology?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, obviously we have the Napoleonic Wars.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So uh after the French Revolution, uh the French had their own uh format of idealist internationalism, so they try to use universal values to legitimize their dominance uh across Europe.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this is uh yeah, one effort to establish, uh overcome the international anarchy by establishing one dominant force.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And uh as we know, this was uh defeated, and um by the by 1815 we went with a new world order, which is uh the concert of Europe, and it lasted all the way from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until the first world war.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's also quite uh interesting because it recognized the need to preserve this balance of power by actually bringing in the French, so the defeated power still had a seat at the table, so there was no effort to perpetuate the weakness of the of the defeated state who was you know evil or something.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they recognized this pragmatism that this is a world order based on balance of power, and the French were an important part of this.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea is in revolutionary France, uh, and uh as uh led by Napoleon, France said, we have the right ideas, uh liberty, equality, fraternity.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we're going to spread uh French revolutionary values everywhere.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Britain said, No, thank you.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we will oppose you, we will fight you, we will align with uh other countries, maybe with very different political systems, uh, the Russian Empire, the the uh Habsburgs, and so forth, and we will balance uh France and uh ultimately uh defeat Napoleon uh at Waterloo in 1815.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: After that, then the major powers said we need to keep the peace, so it was more than anarchy, it was a kind of called a concert of Europe, which included Britain, France, Prussia until Germany was unified, the Habsburg uh Empire, and Russia.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh these uh empires were to be in concert to stabilize Europe and actually to prevent revolutions, to prevent Marxist revolutions or popular revolutions or God forbid democracy as well in countries.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the idea of this second world order.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that brings us to the third world order, because that world order, as you say, continued for a century basically, from 1815, the year of Waterloo, the defeat of Napoleon, to 1914, uh, the year of the outbreak of World War I.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Interpret for us why World War I happened if there was a concert of Europe, and then what was the world order that emerged out of that disaster?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I argue that the concert of Europe began to weaken already at the end of the 19th century, given that you had all this development of peacetime alliances.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's important to realize that peacetime alliances can be quite destructive.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's it can be a useful tool during war to balance a hegemon, but during peacetime they have a tendency to undermine the principle of uh indivisible security, so instead they promote the security of some at the expense of others.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: So you have the formation then of different uh alliance systems, and yeah, also uh a key aspect which you saw throughout the 19th century as well was after the Napoleonic Wars, you it was a bit of a strange victory for the Russians because yes, they defeated Napoleon, but this ended the rivalry between the French and the and the British, and then they effectively began to ally also as well against the Russians.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: But towards in the beginning of the 20th century, we saw that this began to fall apart, and you have then these alliances building up against each other.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the factors that's very important and uh familiar to us today is that the initial concert of Europe was based on not only a system, but based on the relative power of the countries uh at the time.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Britain was predominant but in the oceans, not on the continent.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and the powers on the continent uh were roughly in balance.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: By the end of the 19th century, there was one very marked development, and that is Germany became a major industrial power.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh Russia was starting to industrialize rapidly as well by the end of the 19th century.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And uh with the rise of Germany, the German leadership, if I'm not mistaken, Kaiser Wilhelm II uh began to view Germany as not in concert with Britain, but as the rival to Britain.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Why should Britain have all that hegemony uh and power?
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: We are now the major industrial force.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're actually a larger economy.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he dismissed the the great uh genius of balance of power, Bismarck, and embarked on a uh competition with Britain in naval arms race, actually, which uh was definitely destabilizing.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, Russia was developing and Germany was afraid of that huge country to its east starting to uh be a threat to Germany.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: So am I correct that the changing economics led to new fears and new instability?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: So what had been a balance of power became an imbalance of power.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, very much so, because it's important to realize that uh the German states, there were you know many weaker ones, and this effectively functioned as a buffer to some extent between some of these great powers.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: But you're very correct, with the unification of Germany in 1871, it suddenly instead created this uh very powerful state which began to disrupt it.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And uh again, Bismarck was yeah, great at geopolitics, but uh he had a tendency to dismiss the need for the balance of power as well.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, and you saw the economic rise of Germany, which was quite spectacular.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh often was measured at the time in, for example, steel production, but you saw suddenly Germany beginning in 1871, very much weaker than Britain, and by 1914 that overtaken the British.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, effectively, what you had was a very powerful Germany locked in a Europe which was British-dominated.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit like having uh Asia run by the United States with uh China which is more economically powerful.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: It it simply outgrew the system, uh the regional system, and uh this began to create tensions.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And even the Germans they created this uh because they had prospered somewhat under the Napoleonic system, the continental system.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: So they began to recreate some of these things, like the German customs union, but uh they kept having tensions because they never had the physical infrastructure to connect with the rest of the world, which is probably why the Chinese also have their Belt and Road Initiative, because the the Germans tried to access the seas to have reliable transportation corridors.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: The British uh were able to counter this.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to have railroads going into the Middle East from Berlin to Baghdad.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: This also threatened the Russians, the French, and uh the British colonialist interests.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it it began to really disrupt all the major powers.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, so this obviously built up to the collapse of this entire system.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: One episode that I very much like, if it's true and not apocryphal, is that the Kaiser uh on the verge of dismissing Bismarck says we need to build the navy to compete with the Britain, and Bismarck uh is not interested in building the navy.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the Kaiser supposedly says to him, but what if uh the uh British land on our shores in the North Sea?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And Bismarck's answer is, well, then I will arrest them.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh completely downplaying uh the real risks.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, the Kaiser dismissed Bismarck, went on a major uh armaments buildup.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: As you said, the alliances uh hardened, secret alliances, open alliances, and then the the two sides clashed and went to this disastrous war in 1914.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: So uh talk us through between 1914 and 1945, there was only world disorder, I assume.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that we could say that there's a new world order until after World War II.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: No, they they tried to establish this uh League of Nations, but obviously by this point, you only you have a huge disruption in the international distribution of power.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: But on top of this, as well, you have more uh ideological rivalries beginning as well.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously the the Russians had uh turned to well the Soviets at the time then provided uh yeah ideological alternatives.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: So uh overall this was a very disruptive period.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, and also uh the new system which was put in place after the First World War, it didn't reflect anymore the realities or the sensibilities we had after the Napoleonic Wars, because when uh Germany was defeated, uh much like the French had been, instead of giving them a seat at the table, there was the assumption that they would have to be the weakness would have to be perpetuated because uh again, having this powerful Germany in the center of Europe without uh reliable access to international markets and the rest of the world, it would always put it in conflict with other powers as it tried to break out from this containment.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this attempt to perpetuate the weakness of Germany really laid the foundation for the next world war.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, just to uh also put it in context, the treaty that ended the First World War, the Versailles Treaty, was a very harsh piece vis-a-vis Germany.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Germany was punished with huge burdens of reparations, payments, war blame, and uh great restrictions.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: John Maynard Keynes, who was my hero uh as a political economist, uh kind of the kind of economist that I uh most admired as I was a student in learning economics who could look at politics and look at economics uh and join them together, wrote a book of great disgruntlement after having been on the British uh commission to the negotiations of the Versailles Treaty.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: That book was hugely influential for me, uh, called The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: And Keyn said these terms are so onerous against Germany, they will lead, in less change, to a massive political backlash in the future, and the specter of war will haunt us, and uh we will face disaster in the next generation.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and indeed he uh called that uh exactly correctly.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but a key lesson from this as well, because uh I mentioned before the idealist internationalism of the French revolutionaries.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: We to some extent saw this as well from the Wilsonian government.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, one can talk about the Bolsheviks as well, but from the United States, we saw uh Wilson arguing that you know this war was the war to make uh the world safe for democracy.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: He effectively also made it a civilizing mission almost, or um emboldening effectively crusader mentalities to some extent.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of being, you know, a very great example at the time to be the United States to be copied by the rest of the world, he instead took it from a passiveness to be emulated to more active to go out in the world to make it safe.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it was also this contrast that you know, if you have if you really believed that the democracies would keep the peace and the Germans were the opposite, they were the Huns, these were the you know the brutal ones, then this was a good way of mobilizing the public against the Germans by presenting this as a struggle between good and evil.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem then as well was uh that workable peace, uh which was many opportunities for were rejected.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, it had to be fought to the end.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And once the Germans were defeated, it also incentivized this uh more very extraordinary and punitive peace uh settlement in which Germany was to be kept weak forever because it was this German problem.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it uh again, that's we can see this is also a problem we have today.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a it is very much relevant to our uh discourse today, which we'll get to shortly.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Again, a US vision of there's good, that's us, there's evil, that's them.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all a battle of good and evil.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And in a way, I guess we are still speaking uh Wilson's language, Woodrow Wilson, the president uh during uh World War I, that took the US into World War I in order to make the world safe for democracy and so forth.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, as you point out, ironically, uh it created the conditions for a treaty that was the opposite.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh the Versailles Treaty, sometimes called uh the peace to end all peace, because it was a peace agreement that ended the possibility of peace and led to the Second World War within one generation.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: So let's uh take take the story, if we can, up to the end of the Second World War.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, Hitler rose to power in the chaotic environment of the Great Depression and the backlash and the claim that Germany had been stabbed in the back, and the harsh Versailles Treaty uh was viewed as a cause for German and revenge.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Hitler led the world to utter disaster of the Second World War.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Tens of millions of people died in that war.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: 1945, the war ended.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: The United States, UK, and Russia in an alliance have defeated Hitler's Germany.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: What comes next in terms of the world order then?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let me just say one of the lessons as well, as you mentioned before, with uh with this good versus evil.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, Hans Morgenthau, he wrote in the 1940s about this warning, a caution, if you will, that if we see the world as being countries with national interest, we create peace through mutual understanding and compromise.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: But he warned about uh the dangerous morality as it could uh fuel these uh crusader missions in which uh if it's good versus evil, peace is not created through mutual understanding.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: You don't understand the evil, instead you defeat it.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: So peace is created when good defeats evil, as uh compromising with evil is effectively a piecement.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: So this is obviously yeah, just to point out why it's very dangerous.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: No, very, very important because I think it explains what happens uh starting in 1945.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, exactly in 1945, the war had barely ended when a new Cold War erupted.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: So take us through that because that brings us up to uh the story that leads to the Ukraine war, which is central to your book.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, we were able to establish the United Nation, obviously, so one international system which uh reflected, which was based on the modern world order, that is, it's uh a balance of power between sovereign equals.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: However, it also created two worlds, because it was a bipolar world, so you had a West versus the East.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's important that in this era, which we now refer to the as the liberal international system, it existed because of a very unique situation.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: That is, uh there was one center of power, economic power, in the capitalist world, which was the United States.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw that because of the rivalry with the communist world, uh it demanded the Western countries prioritized the security competition with the East.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, a lot of the economic competition within the West was mitigated exactly because of the military conflict.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And also the main adversaries were communists, so they're largely decoupled from international markets.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: So this peace or political West which we created, it existed under very specific uh conditions, which also required uh perpetuating the conflict.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we often saw this as well, uh not just in the West, but also with Japan.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: If someone got too close to the Soviets, uh too close to making a peace agreement, the threat was of peace breaking out, in which the alliance system is weakened.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this is why uh, you know, once you have peace, you can't contain the adversary and your allies will become less obedient, less loyal.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so, yeah, so this is why these peace alliances they really require the perpetuation of conflict, something that Gorbochev also said towards the end with to the Americans that if we do bring an end to this Cold War, we have to understand the ramifications.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: The whole power structures would start to come apart.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't sure if the Western side was quite ready for this.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think uh yeah, he was uh probably correct on that point.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: So the the the point that you're making is uh the US became uh the dominant country, of course, uh in the North Atlantic region.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it created NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to be the military alliance to confront the Soviet Union.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the U.S.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: uh was uh definitely uh by far first among equals.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: You can't even say equals, it was the dominant power by far.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: But part of that dominance, which the U.S.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: came to like, depended on uh essentially the ongoing fear of the other.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh a kind of perpetual war environment actually uh builds dominance within your side of uh the conflict.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: And um the Cold War in that sense played into the U.S.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: power-seeking hands.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: What impresses me about the Cold War, the more I've come to understand the specific events, when I learned about the Cold War as a student decades ago, I was told that Stalin was uh a madman, that he was ruthless, that he wanted to take over the world.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so the United States uh reluctantly had to take the mantle and defend Europe and to defend the free world against international communism.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: The more uh I grew up and the more I saw one of the striking things about the Cold War is that the US, Soviet Union, and UK were allies during World War II.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: They jointly defeated Hitler, but that alliance fell apart, not even years afterwards, or even based on what the Soviet Union did, but rather by the middle of 1945, weeks after the end of the fighting in Europe, already Churchill was envisioning maybe we'll have a war with Russia or with the Soviet Union, uh Operation Unthinkable, which uh got batted down as unworkable.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: But there was already talk in Britain of why don't we go to war next with our ally that we just uh allied with for many years to defeat Hitler?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: And in the U.S., the powers that were already there and that came to dominate the U.S.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: were virulently anti-Soviet from the first moment.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, in fact, many had large business dealings with Germany and were actually not even antagonistic to the Nazi regime for a long period of time, the famous case of the Dulles brothers.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: One became the head of the CIA in the 1950s, the other became the uh Secretary of State, and they were lawyers in a law firm that represented large German corporations right during the Nazi period.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And uh at the end of 1945 of the fighting in Europe, they reverted to a rabid anti-Soviet attitude before, in my view, the Soviet Union had actually done anything to justify that.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder what your view of that is, because you've obviously studied this uh intensively.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and this is the the problem with uh uh historical narratives afterwards.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: That is, uh, we had a peace with the Soviets, but then they began to become expansionists, so we had to contain them.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: But you're very correct.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think we this ign this neglects the kind of pragmatic uh power politics which was also played by the West.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: For example, in 1941, you had Harry Truman suggesting uh what is pragmatism that uh how he would run the presidency, which he then got later.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he he argued, as was also published in the New York Times, that if Germany is winning, we should help Russia, if Russia's winning, we should help Nazi Germany, and then let them kill each other as many as possible.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: This was uh yeah, more or less the quote.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's effectively if you have two sides, you help the weaker one because you don't want to help the more powerful defeat the weaker.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: So this is always why one supports the weaker and have them both kill each other.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: So this already sounds very familiar.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, this is why the British, even the the Nazi Germany, they surrendered to the Soviet Union on the 9th of May.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think it was like uh less than two weeks later, the um this is when the British had a plan to attack the Soviet Union because they had been exhausted from defeating the Nazis, and immediately after the war, the plan was to invade.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, even immediately as the war ended, the Nazis were defeated.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: We also saw Western powers, uh, then as you mentioned as well, the United States uh specifically, or particularly, but also Canada, Britain, who began then to recruit a lot of Nazis, uh also from Eastern Europe, Ukraine, because if you wanted to weaken the Soviet Union, then the Nazis they were very fervent anti-communists, they were loyal partners.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: So this infiltrated the also the CIAs, Christopher Hitchens complained later about, and yeah, they they really embraced the fascists uh thereafter, simply because pragmatism.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we when we have this value-based historical narrative which we create afterwards, it almost sounds as if we're fighting for some specific values, but it is destroy the main rivals.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: So this is the Cold War and this uh fervent competition with many proxy wars uh in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, in Africa, that are essentially rivalries between uh the US and the Soviet Union for power.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: It brings us up to Gorbachev and the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: The Soviet system was not effective economically in competition with the U.S., and the U.S.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: did everything possible to stop the flow of technology to the Soviet Union to further weaken the Soviet Union.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't just the system, but it was the active containment policy, so-called, by the United States to try to bring the Soviet Union to its knees.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: A reformer arose, uh, Mikhail Gorbachev, and uh he proposed a new approach to end the Cold War and an approach to peaceful cooperation, reform of the Soviet system, integration between the Soviet Union and the West.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and that was from roughly 1986 until uh the end of the Soviet Union until 1991.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: What happened in that attempt by Gorbachev?
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we ended up in yet another world order, which you label this liberal hegemony so-called, or unipolarity, take us through those critical transitions uh from the bipolar Cold War to uh what America interpreted as the new unipolar America-led world.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as I said before, you have two possible world orders, either the one where you have a balance of power or one when you recreate uh Rome, if you will, so another hegemon.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: And what's interesting is towards the end of the Cold War, we were seemed like we had both because uh from the Helsinki Accords in 1975, we began to uh develop the foundation for cooperation between East and West.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this is uh motivated, as you mentioned, with Gorbachev, this idea that you could reform, and he spoke about this common European home which would transcend this uh or end this bloc politics.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, when the Cold War was announced over in 1989 in Malta, uh we effectively came with an agreement, the Charter of Paris for New Europe in 1990, which were built largely on this idea of having an inclusive European security architecture.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: So one Europe uh according to the common European home that Gorbachev had envisioned.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 1994 we even translated this into an actual institution, which is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: So then we already began to lay the foundation for an inclusive Europe based on the Westphalian system.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: However, this was one of the worlds which would be uh which would unite, but this is not a world that could accommodate uh a hegemon, that is a Pax Sam Ricana or one based on dominance.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: So at the same time, they began to speak of how how we can preserve the dominance of the United States.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and this requires an alliance system, because alliance systems tend to divide the world into weakened adversaries and loyal uh allies.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh uh this is when you began to already start a discussion immediately, uh within the first uh few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union that uh perhaps we should start expanding NATO.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: Even one month after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you already, one or two months, you already had uh uh discussions about uh establishing um well the Wolf Wolfowitz doctrine of uh how to make sure that no possible rival would emerge.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Even one month after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bush Sr.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: gave his uh State of the Union, explaining that since the Soviet Union was gone, uh America was now he went from being the leader of the West to being the leader of the world.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: So this uh this uh aspiration for global dominance, uh it was there immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this uh demand or aspiration for hegemony was immediately in direct conflict with this uh inclusive Europe, which we agreed and this uh with to build with the the Russians, because now it's uh people often focus on yes, we did give promise to Gorbachev not to expand one inch to the east, but people often neglect that we also signed this pan-European security institutions, which was premised on indivisible security, a Europe without dividing lines, sovereign equality.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: These are all the concepts from uh Westphalen's system, and uh we effectively cancelled all of this when we instead decided to expand NATO.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: This has a very uh personal aspect for me because I was a young economist at the time and uh had helped uh Poland's reforms.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: I made a number of uh recommendations which were adopted by the United States on how to help Poland, uh, and uh they worked by and large.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so I was contacted by Gorbachev's uh economic team, and I made similar recommendations, and they were all rejected by the United States, the very ones that the U.S.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: had accepted in the case of Poland, it rejected in the case of the Soviet Union.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Then President Yeltsin asked me to also help the new independent Russia in 1992, and I again made recommendations on how the West could help Russia, and they were once again rejected.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I was very uh unhappy and very puzzled at the time.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was a believer in the common European House.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: I was a believer in indivisible security.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Gorbachev was a kind of hero for me, uh, even if the Russian people were very disgruntled about the worsening economy.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: I thought Gorbachev was a great visionary statesman and man of peace.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Yeltsin said to my face, we want to be a normal, cooperative, peaceful country and a partner with your country.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: But the United States, as you say, in the end, was interested in something else.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was interested in dominance, not interested in indivisible security.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it's true, I don't mention that part as much.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: I do mention the NATO enlargement issue.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: People should recall that NATO was established to defend Western Europe against a potential Soviet invasion.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there was no potential Soviet invasion at the end of the 1980s, and there wasn't even a Soviet Union after December 1991.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so one could ask, what is NATO still doing there?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I think there were very good arguments for disbanding NATO in favor of this framework of the OSCE that you mentioned, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: But the United States was having none of it.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Quite the contrary.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: And amazingly, as you point out, immediately the United States started to expand NATO rather than dismantle it.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, what is the mindset there?
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: The mindset is global hegemony, which is what they announced, and they believed it.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and this is one of the puzzles which we should really explore because keep in mind that from the early 1990s, the main foreign policy of the Russians and the Chinese for that sake was to get as close with the US as possible and the West to pursue peaceful cooperation.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but uh in our narrative, we keep saying that, well, we try to reach out to the Chinese and the Russians.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: However, how can we explain that both the Russian and Chinese leadership have more or less consistently argued since the 1990s that they were still being contained, that we never gave up on the alliance systems and that we kept balancing them.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, of course, they reacted in different ways.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: The Russians were faced with an expanding NATO, so they tended to punch above their own weight.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: While the Chinese didn't uh experience an expanding military alliance, so they could uh take their time and build internal strength and try to cooperate with the US and uh negotiate an end to this uh containment, but uh neither side were successful.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what is remarkable in these days, now that obviously we have a war in Europe, you're not allowed to criticize NATO expansion, but it's worth noting that even Bill Clinton himself, as I cite in the book in January of '94, recognized: well, if we do start expanding NATO, it could redivide the continent, obviously, and uh recreate the logic of the Cold War.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: And this is uh this was common sense.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: This this should have been common sense.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, William Perry, his uh the Secretary of Defense under Clinton, he he said the same thing.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: He considered quitting over this, and he argued everyone in the administration agreed.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, of course, this is a betrayal of the Russians.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna cancel the entire world order, the European uh common European home or inclusive system, and instead revive the Cold War.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, and uh as he said, everyone in the administration recognized that, of course, this was a betrayal, but as according to Perry, who cares?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: They said, you know, Russia's weak, they're getting weaker, we don't have to take into consideration their security anymore.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: So all the things we now denounce as Russian propaganda, it's it's already been confirmed by all of our leaders consistently.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's overwhelming evidence, uh, but you we are still not allowed to actually cite their actual words.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's um yeah, it's quite an absurd situation.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think if Clinton expressed this awareness that maybe this is going to recreate the Cold War, they did it anyway?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think um if they can uh weaken, if Russia is weak, it doesn't really matter if some of the Cold War dynamic uh re-emerges, as uh Baker argued at the time.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: James Baker, uh, he warned against you know recreating another Cold War.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he also argued against this mentality that we should have NATO as an insurance guarantee against future conflicts with Russia.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: And and everyone recognizes, even people like Madeline Albright, who was very favorable of expanding NATO, argued, well, it might create conflict with Russia, but at least if we'll have a conflict with Russia, we'll have them surrounded by NATO.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's I also it's fascinating to go through the the Senate debates, uh, because you know these are all in the archives now, it's all accessible.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And when they debated expanding NATO in the 90s, the word uh or the phrase security guarantee.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: Security insurance.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: Security insurance, yeah.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: This yeah, sorry, uh this word comes up over and over again.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and indeed it's not that bad if the Russians lash out a little bit, because if they do lash out, then uh it's it will only convince the Europeans to further accept uh American leadership in case we'll have problems with the Russians in the future.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: So all of this was so obvious and so predictable.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, the American uh architect for the contained policies, George Kennan, he he even outlined it all in an interview in uh 1998, where he said, Well, of course this is gonna start a new Cold War, and predicting once the new Cold War begins, we're gonna blame the Russians for their you know imperialist nature.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, you know, this is all nonsense, this uh makes no sense.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: Even uh, you know, Jack Matlock, which I all spoke to many times, he argues the same thing.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, we betrayed the Russians.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: We negotiate an end to the Cold War, we're gonna have a common peace, and we betrayed it.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: The historical revisionism is just shocking.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: So and it's so weird because all the evidence is there, which is why the book is very heavily cited, but it's appears in debates these days.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no one really cares anymore about the facts.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're so committed to the narrative that we're willing to reject uh facts even though they're not disputed.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh yeah, again, quite extraordinary.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially 1991, the Soviet Union ends, and the US could pursue a policy of indivisible security, a common European home, but it decides to pursue a policy of global hegemony, and that involves expanding its military reach, expanding NATO, essentially dismissing Russia's uh security interests entirely.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: As you say, the American view was based on the attitude: well, if Russia objects, what can they do?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: They're so weak anyway.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: And my experience, just uh looking back, because I wasn't aware of it at the time, China played very little role that I know of, and I never heard concern about China.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing I heard about China was that the East Asian miracle is a myth, uh, was the uh predominant view in the 1990s.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry about China, they just are villagers growing rice, uh, and uh nothing much to worry about there.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: So there was an enormous amount of American hubris, and it led to continued expansion of the military, continued growing insecurity of Russia.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: Take us just in a in a quick moment how that led to the breakout of uh the Ukraine war.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then I want to ask you a question about European views about all of this.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, let me just say first, uh, I don't dismiss the idea that many in Washington perhaps have the good intentions because under the idea of liberal uh hegemony, the assumption was if there's one center of power, it will mitigate the international anarchy.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: There will be no great power rivalry if no country can even have the aspirations to rival the United States.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: Also, with the dominance of the US as the new Pax Romana, they can uh elevate the role of liberal democratic values in the system.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: So many people probably believed in this, but as we know, Over time, the old values become corrupted when they're only in service of uh building this dominance.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, this is what we also saw in in Ukraine, because many of the countries in Europe, from the Baltic states to Poland, they obviously had good historical reasons to fear Russia.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if they were given the option of having a common Europe, removing the dividing lines of Europe, or instead moving the dividing lines eastward, so they end up on the right side of this bloc politics, they favored the bloc politics.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't dismiss this.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: But Ukraine was different.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: Between '91 and 2014, every poll, doesn't matter who did a poll, every poll showed that barely 20% of Ukrainians would want to join NATO.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: NATO owns documents even suggest this was a great problem.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: What can we do?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: How can we improve our relationship with Ukraine when the people don't want it, uh, when their own legal system uh opposes it?
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this was a huge problem for NATO if you want to expand.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: And not only did we know that Ukrainians did not want to be a part of NATO, but uh, as we learned from uh many people, from uh Merkel, from the various European ambassadors, they also the same thing that if we try to bring this reluctant Ukraine into NATO, we're gonna have civil war and likely uh Russian invasion.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: Even the CIA director of the United States, William Burns, he wrote this in 2008 when we began to roll the ball by pushing for uh when we promised the Ukraine future NATO membership.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: He at the time was ambassador, US ambassador to Russia.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so now he's the CIA director.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: At the time, he was right there in Moscow as the US ambassador, and he sent home a memo.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is very dangerous.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not only would Russia invade, but at the end he adds, this is a decision Russia does not want to make.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this kind of goes strictly against our argument about a non-provoked Russian invasion, because if it's how can you say it's not provoked, if Burns himself recognizes Russia would have to invade, even though it would doesn't want to do so, it's responding to NATO.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: Even the former British ambassador to Moscow, Roderick Lyne, he also argued the same that in 2020, if we want to start a war with Russia, he said this is the best way to do it.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: Pull in a Ukraine which never wanted to be a part of NATO to begin with.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was very predictable.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: But again, our narrative has become completely immune to facts.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: So let me ask you, we're in the middle of this war that you and I see, and uh I have seen a lot of it close up, came from the US relentlessly pressuring Russia, relentlessly pressuring Russia, and not only in what we've talked about, but also new missile systems uh put in, uh U.S.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: leaving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, uh, U.S.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: leaving the intermediate nuclear force treaty, and so forth.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: The U.S.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: participating in the overthrow of a neutral government in Ukraine after all in 2014.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the European leaders seemed to know all of this was provocative and dangerous all along.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: I remember speaking to Norwegian leaders uh during this period.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: They were very much upset with George W.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: Bush for pushing NATO membership.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: We know that Mrs.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: Merkel, Chancellor Merkel, was warning the United States don't provoke a new division in Europe.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the risks were known to Europe.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: The worst cases emerged.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: But now we don't hear this debate in Europe other than by uh brilliant analysts like you.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: But we don't hear it from the political leaders of Europe.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: Almost none.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: There are a couple.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: Viktor Orban in Hungary and uh Fito in Slovakia, but very, very few.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: So why is Europe so much on the narrative right now?
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm not sure how they ended up so extreme.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: But but you are right, in 2008, not only did the Europeans uh resist it, in Angela Merkel's own words, if we offer a NATO membership to Ukraine, the Russians will uh will interpret it as a declaration of war.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: But even within uh the American camp, you had people like Kondalisa Rice and even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who also recognized this was not a good idea.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: But again, Bush, he pushed for it, and the Europeans they knew it did it was dangerous, but they accepted it anyways at the end.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: They allowed themselves to pressure by Washington.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then gradually, of course, you have then the conflicts beginning, and uh and even by 2014, the instinct of the Europeans, the the Germans and the French, at least was to negotiate an end to this.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, when war predictably broke out, as everyone had predicted, they negotiated this Minsk Agreement to get an end to this, so uh give some autonomy to Donbass, which could also prevent NATO expansion, so we could have a peaceful settlement.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they they negotiated this.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone in uh the whole United Nations confirmed yes, this is the only path to peace.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Every meeting we have, we keep saying this is the only path to peace.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: And later on, we learned that the Europeans even themselves uh only saw this as an opportunity to re-arm Ukraine.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if you forward all the way to now to see what's happened in Europe, now we have uh the new incoming foreign policy chief of the EU, Kaya Kallas, who calls for breaking up Russia in small pieces.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't want diplomacy with Russia because they are war criminals.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's when people like Orban travels to Ukraine and Russia and China to try to start some diplomacy, uh, they call him a Russian puppet and try to punish him for trying diplomacy.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it's quite extraordinary to sit here in Europe and you know I watched the EU for years and years always have the same solution to any conflict around the world, which is at least sit down and start to talk.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: And now we have two and a half years where we criminalize diplomacy.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're not allowed to talk to the adversary.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: And as my former prime minister and now former NATO Secretary General uh Jens Stoltenberg argues, you know, weapons are the path to peace, while uh diplomacy is a piecement.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we completely lost our minds, and uh no one even defines what it means to defeat the world's largest nuclear power who considers this to be an existential threat.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's uh complete madness, and uh it's yeah, it's very frustrating because old evidence is there, but no one is allowed to reference it uh unless they want to be accused of uh you know carrying water for Putin or you know, this kind of rhetoric.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you point out well, this is uh not sitting still, uh the war does not go in Ukraine's favor to say the least, but this is leading to a new Eurasian order.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: So uh can you tell us what that means and and what could be the Eurasian order?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the Eurasian order it uh was spearheaded first by China and Russia by in in terms of building a new alternative economic structure.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: So they look for their own uh industries, their own uh technological hubs, developing more um cooperation in natural resources, for example, grain corridor, they're setting up this new transportation corridors, development banks, use of uh local currencies, digital payment systems.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, across the board they have a lot of different initiatives.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the economic platform, but it uh reflects uh a wider uh political system, which they want to uh accommodate.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, what they're looking for is effectively a new Westphalian international system.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, whenever we talk about the Chinese trying to replace the American hegemon, I would reply that there's no evidence for this because if you want a hegemon, you have to do what the Americans did.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: If you know you have to try to cut China off, sorry, Russia off from the Turks, from Central Asia.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever we reach out to a country, be it Georgia, Ukraine, we always try to sever them from Russia because we want to weaken adversaries.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how does the Chinese respond to Russia trying to diversify, not to be too dependent only on China when they reach out to India or Iran or Korea, any other country?
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: China does nothing.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why we assumed 10 years ago that the Russians and Chinese would clash over Central Asia, but none of them are pursuing hegemony there.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: So they're both a bit able to accommodate each other.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: And even in the Chinese rhetoric, are they talking about universal values in which they can represent other peoples?
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: No, they talk about a multitude of civilizations co-harmonizing.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: Every civilization has their own path to development.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we should embrace this.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this is very different because if they wanted hegemony, they would say this one universal path, we are the leader of this path, and so we will help you by representing your people.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this is, you know, replicate effectively the liberal uh hegemonic order in which the United States says liberal democratic values are universal, we are the champion of it, which means we can effectively use this to promote sovereign inequality, in which we can police the rest of the world and represent other peoples, you know, like the French or the Bolshevik.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's a fascinating insight uh that China's not behaving that way as a would-be hegemon.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you also make a fascinating aside that a sea-based hegemon like Britain, or uh you could argue the United States with its dominant navy uh for the last half century and more, governs by divide and rule.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas uh you say that land-based powers press more for cooperation.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: Could you just say a word about that difference as you see it?
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that builds on some of the ideas of Mackinder, of course.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: But this is uh if you're the sea-based, you control the Great Eurasian landmass or any continent from the periphery, and you maintain your maritime hegemon if you're able to keep division between the others.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're a land power, be it China or Russia, you're often dependent on having uh well, physical connectivity across land, then you're more pressured to instead of uh divide and rule to accommodate other states.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, China and Russia have have different visions of Eurasia, but they both need each other to achieve each other's vision.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if China alienates Russia, even though Russia's weaker, Russia can create a lot of trouble.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: They are, you know, they're connecting all of Eurasia, they can create problems everywhere.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the Chinese know if they want their vision of Eurasia, they need to cooperate with the Russians.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so everyone's kind of looking to accommodate and harmonize.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a very different system.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think very, very believable that an outside power like Britain or the United States, which is trying to balance uh a continental power, goes from the outside in.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so uh you're trying to divide the land mass, whereas uh the inside power needs connectivity, and so you actually need to cooperate.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you see the evidence is there as well, because when the Chinese negotiated, because they want to get as close as possible with Iran, but they didn't want to alienate the Arabs.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do they do?
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: They promote a peace between the Arabs and Iranians.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: When this happens, what does the United States do?
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's it panics a bit because now it loses an ally to contain the Iranians, and also without a conflict, suddenly the Arabs aren't as obedient and loyal anymore, suddenly they start trading with China, Russia.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is not uh acceptable.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is also why I see whenever there's conflict between India and uh some tension between India and China, how excited the media gets.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because now the Indians might uh begin to give up on this uh non-alignment and uh pledge some loyalty to the West and help us contain the Chinese.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, and it's of course, uh we saw the same with the Europeans uh during the uh post-Cold War era when there was no more conflicts, uh peace broke out.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they began to pursue strategic autonomy through the European Union, they talked about European independence, uh strategic autonomy, this kind of things, sorry, European sovereignty, and now no one does anymore.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're retreating back under the US.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we they can contain the Russians, the Europeans are back at their obedient self.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, but you don't see the same coming from China now.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: They they're actually encouraging cooperation now, peace between the different countries because if there's too much divisions on this greater Eurasian continent, their ability to cooperate with any one of them is diminished.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's uh as we're convinced by leaders all the time, the world is divided between the good liberal democracies and the evil authoritarian.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's good to have some more nuance to see actually what what the countries are promoting and why.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: Glenn, uh, you've been uh spreading these very wise ideas and this knowledge of history, and suddenly, suddenly, you're off of YouTube.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it was a shock.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: What happened?
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was a shock to me as well, because uh, well, uh it was a few days ago I got an email, email from uh YouTube saying that their um their uh artificial intelligence or their yeah automated systems had detected uh hate speech on my YouTube channel, and uh they had therefore deleted the channel.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you you know you're allowed to uh contest it, but then you get another automated uh email saying, well, we have decided this is the case.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there's not actually any people involved.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very, very dystopian.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh of course, the the reason for deleting uh this as well has been uh quite extraordinary because uh hate.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I must have recorded hundreds of hours with different you know economists, political leaders, and military leaders.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm it's unclear to me who I would actually hate.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't have any I I've never never heard a word of hate from you.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Period.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh very calm, if I may say, Norwegian, measured, uh analytical, never a word of venom or hate.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: Only explanation.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm I'm gonna do my little bit to see if I could uh in any way get past the machine there uh at uh Google and talk to somebody.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we need you back very much uh online in every way.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I'm very grateful for your analysis and uh for this book.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: I want to thank you for joining the book club.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: We've been speaking with the Professor Glenn Deesson and his book, The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order, is is must-reading if you want to understand the world we're in, the dangers, and how events must unfold.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: Professor Deeson provides uh absolutely uh striking and evidence-rich and very wise analysis.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to thank you and uh hope that you have a very wide readership for this important book.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: Great to be with you.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: And uh thank you.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that is uh Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 58:43
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