Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Bonus: Michael Kimmage, Obama's Ukraine Chief

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Bonus: Michael Kimmage, Obama's Ukraine Chief · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Some conversations are worth having, but not all the time.
• 0:06
  And maybe Ukraine is one of those conversations.
• 0:10
  It's something I don't want to abandon.
• 0:12
  It's something I want to keep understanding.
• 0:14
  It's something about which there are so many experts that it would be foolish
• 0:17
  to think that any single guest has been able to give us the entirety of the information.
• 0:21
  So I want to keep talking to Ukraine experts.
• 0:25
  But I also don't want to overwhelm you with exclusively Ukraine content.
• 0:29
  Because curious as I am in that story, it shouldn't suck all the oxygen out of the room.
• 0:35
  It shouldn't be the only thing we focus on.
• 0:37
  And frankly, if I have Ukraine fatigue, then I imagine that you probably do too.
• 0:42
  So rather than continue pursuing different perspectives on exactly what Putin is doing
• 0:47
  and what Russia's game plan is and the extent to which the West is responsible
• 0:50
  and what the West should do and what the likely outcomes might be
• 0:53
  and what the humanitarian catastrophe if Ukraine will be
• 0:56
  and what they should do, et cetera, et cetera.
• 0:58
  Instead of putting all of that into the conventional feed with the once a week main episode,
• 1:03
  I will just throw these in as free bonus episodes.
• 1:07
  If you like this, let us know.
• 1:09
  If you don't like this, let us know.
• 1:12
  In fact, as we look forward and try to construct what the next few years of this podcast will be,
• 1:17
  I'd like to know what you like anyway.
• 1:20
  Either tweet at me at Josh Seps or better still send an email to uncomfyconvose at gmail.com
• 1:29
  and my producer will get it, we'll collate them all and we will help you will help form the trajectory of the direction of the show.
• 1:37
  Uncomfyconvose is UNCOMFYconvose, C-O-N-V-O-S at gmail.com.
• 1:45
  It doesn't have to be a long email, just tell us what your favorite episode is
• 1:49
  and maybe in a word or two, what you'd like to see more or less of on the show.
• 1:53
  The more we can crowdsource this, the better a sense I have of what's working and what's not.
• 1:58
  Listen to downloads are one data point, but I'd much rather hear from the actual people
• 2:03
  who can be bothered pulling their thumb out, getting their phone out of their pants, opening an email
• 2:08
  and writing to me because if you do that then that means you are a part of the community
• 2:12
  in a way that some random download setting on someone's smartphone does not necessarily indicate they are.
• 2:19
  So shoot us an email, what's working and what's not working?
• 2:23
  What do you want to hear more of and what do you not want to hear more of?
• 2:26
  This particular episode, as I mentioned, not one of the conventional weekly flagship episodes
• 2:32
  but an important conversation and these little nuggets will continue to drop into your feed every so often
• 2:38
  whenever I have the bandwidth and the time and the information that you provide them to.
• 2:43
  4-3.
• 2:53
  This one's a quicky bit of goody, a quicky because you can't always convince people
• 2:59
  who are very, very important and sought after to sit down with you for a interminable period of time.
• 3:04
  But it's nonetheless lovely to pick their brains for even just half an hour.
• 3:08
  Michael Kimmich is a professor of history and he's department chair actually at the Catholic University of America
• 3:14
  and he's a fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
• 3:17
  He's a specialist in Cold War history in the 20th century US diplomatic and intellectual history
• 3:25
  and specifically in US Russia relations since 1991.
• 3:30
  He's a reasonably young guy born in 1970 so you know it was only what in his early 20s late teens
• 3:37
  as the end of the Cold War unfolded and he got interested in all of that stuff.
• 3:41
  But his real claim to fame is that he joined the State Department's policy planning staff
• 3:46
  examining Ukraine Russia issues in 2014.
• 3:50
  And this was just after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
• 3:55
  He was brought in under John Kerry as Secretary of State in the Obama administration
• 4:00
  and needless to say he left the State Department on the day that Donald Trump took office
• 4:05
  as one does when there's a change of administrations.
• 4:09
  But he was there during that very pivotal time and his portfolio in the State Department
• 4:15
  specifically the Russia Ukraine portfolio.
• 4:18
  He was the man in the Obama's second term who held the portfolio that figured out
• 4:23
  what the hell to do about Russia and Ukraine at precisely the time that Putin was annexing Crimea out.
• 4:31
  So I wanted to have a chat to him.
• 4:33
  I tracked him down in Rome.
• 4:35
  He is not normally there but he was there on business and also enjoying some delicious Italian food.
• 4:41
  And so he was kind enough to give us his time and his thoughts about what the hell is going on.
• 4:49
  Enjoy this conversation with the one and only Michael Gimic.
• 5:03
  The enrollment predictor has jealousy and losing.
• 5:06
  It's a tough life isn't it?
• 5:09
  I was actually I was just in Rome for my first post pandemic trip in December January.
• 5:16
  It was great.
• 5:18
  It is extraordinary, it's so beautiful and yeah wonderful place.
• 5:23
  What takes you to Europe?
• 5:26
  I gave a lecture at King's College London last week and then I was at a conference here on Mediterranean security in Rome.
• 5:32
  So you know work related but staying on as long as as long as you care too.
• 5:38
  Right, right, try to have some fun too.
• 5:41
  Excellent.
• 5:42
  What tell me about your your first jobs in in government and what interested you and how you got into it?
• 5:50
  Sure, so I was at the office of policy planning, which is an office at the State Department created in 1947 by George Cannon to deal with long term thinking about US foreign policy.
• 6:02
  And I held the Ukraine Russian portfolio from 2014 to 2016.
• 6:07
  So at that time it was dealing with the first phase of this conflict, the military phase in 2014, early 2015 and then we did quite a bit of work on reform in Ukraine, you know, the changes to the Ukraine traditional system and policing and democracy promotion writ large.
• 6:26
  And then, you know, the final year of that job was taken up my Syrian civil war Russia's role in that.
• 6:32
  And then at the very end, Russia's election meddling in 2016.
• 6:35
  So it was a really remarkably dramatic time.
• 6:39
  Those two years and a lot of the issues that we're contending with at the moment have their origins at that moment.
• 6:44
  What were you advocating we should do about Syria?
• 6:49
  Well, that's a torturous question for the Obama administration because there was the famous comment about the red line.
• 6:57
  And you know, there was a strong desire in the part of the White House, the Obama White House for Assad to go at the same time President Obama didn't really want to get involved.
• 7:07
  So we were in a, in a tough place, we didn't quite have the leverage that we needed to do what we wanted.
• 7:14
  And so it was a game of inches between Foreign Minister Lavrov and Secretary Kerry at that time to see if there could be any kind of diplomatic or political settlement in Syria.
• 7:23
  So that's something that we were exploring, but none of that worked out in the least.
• 7:27
  And how did you feel about the red line situation and the criticism that Obama got for that?
• 7:32
  I think it's overblown. I mean, I think it was a foolish comment and you don't want to open yourself to the kind of criticism that he that he got.
• 7:40
  But you know, I think that the position of the Obama administration on Syria was consistent with American public opinion and in the shadow of the Iraq war, it made sense not to get heavily involved.
• 7:52
  You should have just stuck with a more cautious life.
• 7:55
  But the overall policy was was was agonizing, but it made a kind of sense.
• 7:59
  If I'd asked you at the time when you were just sort of starting with the Ukraine portfolio, whether or not you thought that Ukraine was going to become a flashpoint in the next decade, what would you have said?
• 8:11
  I think I would have felt then I wouldn't want to overly credit my analytical abilities. I would have said then that it's plausible in the sense that you have a situation that's very difficult to explain logically between 2014 and 2016.
• 8:28
  Russia has a series of battlefield successes starting in August 2014 and going until January, February of 2015.
• 8:36
  They kind of show that they have a superior degree of military force.
• 8:41
  And then they come to the table and negotiate something that's very unpleasant for Ukraine.
• 8:46
  And then it becomes a kind of battle of words and a battle of widow between Russia and Ukraine as to how those negotiations get implemented.
• 8:54
  And so it's never done to Russia's satisfaction and you can completely understand the Ukrainian position. They didn't want to compromise on their sovereignty if they hadn't been really defeated in some way on the battlefield.
• 9:04
  So it was a band-aid that was put on to a wound. And maybe you could be hopeful. I think we were that over time the wound would heal by itself, but you could look at it differently and say, well, we've just postponed this conflict and it will recur in certain points.
• 9:19
  But I never imagined it would recur in the awful terrible radical form it has in the last couple of weeks. That was beyond my imagination for sure.
• 9:27
  What exactly do you think is happening?
• 9:32
  Well, I think we need to go through two iterations of the war to get a good sense of what's happening.
• 9:39
  I think Russia had the intention, if we look at them through a rational lens, which is only part of the story, but they had the intention of solving the problem that I've just described that they have certain military advantages.
• 9:51
  They want to have leverage over Ukrainian politics over Ukrainian foreign policy. They want to render the country neutral. They want to sort of pull it into the Russian orbit.
• 10:01
  And I think Putin made a gamble, made a bet that he could do all of those things through a very brazen display of military force.
• 10:09
  And he thought that the Ukrainians would fold that it was a house of cards that the Western commitment to Ukraine was moderate and not serious.
• 10:18
  And so with one fell swoop, he could get what he wanted in Ukraine. That's the first generation of the story that we see unfolding before our eyes, but none of that occurred according to plan or according to Putin's plan.
• 10:30
  And so he's now stuck in what is for Russia, an exceptionally difficult situation in the sense that yes, they can push forward on the battlefield. They can continue bombing as they have.
• 10:40
  They can continue torturing the Ukrainian civilian population. They have the military means to do that. And neither Ukraine or the United States nor the sort of partners and allies of Ukraine can do very much to stop that aspect of the war.
• 10:55
  But it's highly unclear what any of that brings Russia at this point. It certainly will be better than Ukrainian population toward Russia forever for our lifetimes.
• 11:04
  It's not going to bring Putin the political sort of goods that he wanted to secure with the war.
• 11:10
  And Russia is paying a huge cost in the terms of sanctions and loss of life and material on the part of their military.
• 11:18
  So what began as Putin dies of brilliant plan has resulted in a massive strategic blunder.
• 11:25
  You said that Putin wants to render Ukraine neutral. And that's interesting to me because I guess there's neutrality and then there's autonomy and the two unaways the same.
• 11:36
  Right, like a neutral Ukraine to me is in one sense a Ukraine that is able to make its own decisions about the world and is able to constitute itself however it wants to and make whatever alliances it wants to.
• 11:49
  Of course, that's not neutrality in the geopolitical sense, but it's the neutrality that is a sort of partner with autonomy.
• 11:57
  What kind of neutrality and what kind of autonomy does Putin think that Ukraine should have?
• 12:04
  You know, this is really the key question. We don't have good evidence to know what Putin's thinking is he's verbally pulled back some of his demands. He began the war on the premise of denocifying the country and demilitarizing it, which suggested regime change or some substantial kind of Russian domination of Ukraine who seems to have pulled back from that in the last week was statements from the Kremlin about how they appear to accept the Zelensky government.
• 12:30
  So he may be moderating. It's of the essence because there are ongoing negotiations between Ukrainians and Russians in the best case scenario would be that Russia can accept Ukrainian statehood can accept Ukrainian sovereignty and can accept that Ukraine will have some kind of security relationship with NATO with Western Europe with the United States that this can be worked out in some mutually acceptable way.
• 12:57
  That's, you know, the most that we can hope for from these negotiations and that if would come to pass with results in a substantial de-escalation of regional tensions, it seems very hard to me to believe that this can happen in the next couple of weeks and months, although I hope for the sake of Ukrainians and for all of us that that it might.
• 13:15
  But, you know, that would require a Putin, a kind of discipline, a kind of moderation, a kind of tolerance of things in Ukraine that you show no evidence of possessing.
• 13:26
  So why does he show no evidence of possessing that? I mean, I know that there's a lot of psycho, there's a lot of Monday morning quarter backing and there's a lot of psychoanalyzing of Putin.
• 13:36
  But, you know, if it's true what some of the Putin observers say that he sees Russia's future as a, you know, a Putin-esque authoritarian state genuinely threatened by the existence of flourishing democracies right on its border.
• 13:53
  But, you know, if he cannot tolerate, if his sense is that a Ukraine that is democratic and liberal and Western oriented is a fundamental threat to Russia and that that makes it only a matter of time before there's some color revolution in Russia and, you know, Hillary Clinton and her Western cronies all somehow managed to do him in.
• 14:12
  And that's the end of everything that he cares about and everything that he cares about Russia being, then he's not going to tolerate, you know, Ukrainian independence to the extent that Ukrainians actually want to orient themselves towards the West.
• 14:25
  That's very possible. It's not quite my reading of Putin, although it's certainly a common one and it's very possible, you know, it's very possibly the the correct or accurate reading.
• 14:36
  What's your own Putin? I mean, we can indulge a small data point from recent history that at least complicates that narrative, which is that you had a democratic, you know, quasi-color revolution in Armenia.
• 14:49
  That Russia did nothing to oppose because Armenia stayed not entirely willingly with the Russian security orbit, so that at least suggests that democracy may not be the heart and soul of the question for for Putin in my interpretation.
• 15:06
  Maybe marginally eccentric, but I will stand by it. I don't think Putin believes in democracy as such.
• 15:12
  I think he sees the US as a country run by powerful figures that just uses democracy and these uses these democratic uprisings, whether it's in Belarus or Ukraine or other countries, just uses them as a kind of smokescreen for their power.
• 15:26
  The CIA stands behind these movements and it's it's power politics just by another name. So I think you can't be threatened by what you don't think exists.
• 15:35
  And that's my sense of how Putin looks at democracy, but he's threatened by many things in Ukraine for sure.
• 15:42
  And I think the core thing that he's threatened by is the growing military relationship between the US and Ukraine on the one hand.
• 15:49
  And you're up in Ukraine on the other. Now, of course, in a kind of nightmare of way, the thing that he feels threatened by is the thing that he's contributing to by the way he approaches Ukraine.
• 15:59
  And certainly by the way, he's fought the war. You see the US blowing by all kinds of barriers and restrictions in the last couple of weeks providing ever more sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine.
• 16:11
  So that's a very negative outcome for Putin's consequence of his own invasion of the country, but you know, I think the core for Putin is just this fear that Ukraine will serve as a platform for the US military in particular.
• 16:24
  And he's fighting the war to reverse that to reverse that outcome, but at the same time he's contributing to that outcome by the very fighting of the war.
• 16:32
  So it's a certain situation in that in that respect, but I think his calculus is primarily military and not political.
• 16:38
  Doesn't that then lend credence to the criticism that some on the left and on the right? I mean, you hear this from Tucker Carlson as much as you do from John Pilger and Glenn Greenwald that ultimately this is all the fault of the West for having having tried to assert.
• 16:52
  Well, not not tried to, but having accepted the overtures from Eastern European countries for security guarantees.
• 16:59
  I don't think so. It's not by reading of the situation at all. I mean, I think it's a very complicated question. The enlargement of NATO and there were some mistakes that were made especially after 2008 when promises were made to Georgian to Ukraine about joining NATO that were not sincere and that put Ukraine in a very difficult position and have been part of the Russian narrative in a way that's that's unproductive.
• 17:22
  That was a mistake in 2008 and it's good to acknowledge that and factor that in, but it would be ridiculous, I think, to conclude from that that this particular war is the fault of the West or the fault of NATO or even follows from the enlargement of NATO after the end of the of the Cold War.
• 17:43
  I think Putin had a great opportunity a couple of months ago or a couple of weeks ago before the war. If he had scaled back, if he had not invaded, if he had maybe pulled a few Russian military forces from the east of Ukraine and suggested that he was willing to seriously discuss questions of European security and perhaps even of NATO expansion, NATO enlargement.
• 18:02
  I think he would have had a very receptive audience in Europe, even within NATO in the United States. He wouldn't have gotten all that he wanted, but he might have gotten something quite considerable.
• 18:13
  So he missed a huge chance there and this war has to fall in terms of its moral responsibility, political responsibility. It has to fall on the conscience of Putin and on the conscience of his closest survivors. It's a war of aggression. It's a war of choice.
• 18:28
  It's really only one political entity that's responsible for it and that's the Kremlin. So we can have a broad historical conversation about NATO and the stakes that were made and good decisions, bad decisions, that's worth doing.
• 18:39
  I would detach that from the conversation that we're having now about the war and the ethics of it and the politics of it, politics of it. These two major two separate storylines.
• 18:48
  Do you like Dr. Kraus and consistently merge blend and confuse them?
• 18:54
  Yeah, I take that point, but I mean, I even think that I suspect that they're even wrong on the big geopolitical questions in the sense that when you talk to people who...
• 19:02
  Well, they're wrong to the extent that if you believe in any autonomy or self-reliance or independence for Eastern European countries, if you give even the slightest flying F about that, then...
• 19:15
  If you're factoring that into the calculus, then the Carlson analysis is wrong, even just strategically.
• 19:22
  Definitely no. It's a very important part of the equation.
• 19:27
  You know, a country like Ukraine, we could, in an academic way, say that it has complete freedom and autonomy to choose.
• 19:32
  In reality, there are constraints that a country like Ukraine faces because it has Russia as its neighbor, but we don't have to fetishize those constraints and say that Ukraine is just going to do what Russia tells it to do, not at all.
• 19:45
  And we see that in the last couple of weeks, Ukrainians are very willing to fight for the outcomes that they wish to see for their country.
• 19:52
  You can only respect it. You can only respect their right to nationhood as every people, every group is entitled to nationhood.
• 20:01
  It doesn't mean it's going to be easy for the Ukrainians, but to sort of sail over their heads and make this all about great power relations is a greatest disturbance, disservice to countries like Ukraine.
• 20:11
  Just going back a bit earlier than the expansion of NATO and whatever promises might have been made in 2008, at the very end of the Cold War, I was just reading a piece by Matt Glacier, which was interesting where he was saying that actually Nixon at the end of the Cold War said we should have a martial plan for Russia.
• 20:30
  We should basically pour a huge amount of money in there in order to strengthen democratic institutions and make sure that the place has enough carrots to encourage development in the way that we want to see it developed and George H. W. Bush said there wasn't enough money for that sort of thing and that there was no point.
• 20:47
  One of the people who supported the Nixon plan I hadn't realized was the chairman of the Senate Europe subcommittee at the time who was Joe Biden, Senator Joe Biden, who thought it was a great idea to put a lot of money into Russia.
• 21:03
  I liked that, I thought that was a fascinating little tidbit of history, but if you roll the tape back and you replay it with some kind of aggressive Western overture to rebuilding democratic institutions or perhaps building for the first time democratic institutions in post-Soviet Russia, do you end up with a different playbook?
• 21:26
  Yeah, it's an excellent question. I think that I would want to qualify it in one way that there was a lot that was done on Russia's behalf by the United States and by Europe in the 1990s.
• 21:37
  Russia was eventually welcomed into the World Trade Organization to the G8, which is now since the war in Ukraine is now the G7 after Russia got kicked out.
• 21:46
  Bill Clinton met with Boris Yeltsin more than any two US and Russian leaders have ever met. There was a lot of respect shown to Yeltsin, a lot of encouragement that was given.
• 21:59
  So it's not purely a story of the predatory West and of the mistakes that were made. There were substantial serious efforts and quite a few lone guarantees and injections of cash into the Russian economy.
• 22:13
  So that too was an important part of the story, but I think that there were, if you want to go back historically, which is really worth doing at the moment and think about mistakes, there were two cardinal mistakes that were made in the 1990s and continued to a degree after 1990s when Putin came to power in 2000.
• 22:31
  The first was exactly as your question indicates to offer Russia a very radical platform of free market reforms, shock therapy, which did embed a lot of Russians toward their image of the West.
• 22:50
  You could sort of build capitalism overnight and not have some of the social network that you would see throughout Western Europe and to a lesser extent in the US.
• 23:01
  And I think that a lot of American advisors pushed theories of economics on Russia that wouldn't have been tolerable in the United States.
• 23:11
  So there is this sort of negative story of Western involvement in the Russian economy, which is important for understanding Russia's grievances toward the West.
• 23:20
  That was one mistake, another mistake was to build security architecture for Europe, this goes beyond the question of NATO, but build a security architecture for Europe in which there wasn't really a natural place for Russia.
• 23:32
  Was that possible? I don't really know, you know, what's the hypothetical alternative to the situation that we have now.
• 23:38
  Again, I don't really know, but there wasn't enough thought devoted to that. What is what does it look like when Russia revives militarily? What's its place going to be in Europe?
• 23:48
  Can we accommodate it? Can we not accommodate it? I don't think we were creative enough. We sort of kept these World War II institutions like NATO up and running and thought that they could resolve all the problems, but in the end they couldn't.
• 23:59
  I mean, people even mooted the possibility of Russia being part of NATO. Would that have made any sense?
• 24:04
  I think it's impossible in practice. I mean, Putin himself suggested it. I think it was in 2002 that he made the suggestion. My office, my State Department Office of Policy Planning had a memo on NATO inclusion of Russia in NATO.
• 24:18
  I think also around 2002, this is the high watermark of before the Iraq War of Putin's positive relations with the United States, but I think Russia is too big and too proud to join a security alliance that's under American leadership.
• 24:31
  So it's interesting to think about what might have happened had this gone forward, but I think it's pretty improbable.
• 24:36
  In 2014, when you started working on the Russian portfolio in the State Department and Ukraine, what was your sense of the direction that Russia was heading in? Like over the course of your evolution as a thinker and an analyst since the end of the Cold War, where did you see things going?
• 24:55
  I think I got it somewhat wrong between 2014 and 2016, at least judging from very recent events.
• 25:05
  We of course knew that Russia was not democratic, bars in South was assassinated 2015 right in the middle of my time at the State Department, and we knew that Putin had liquidated many important.
• 25:18
  Newspapers and institutions of civil society in Russian life, and of course we knew that Russia had annexed Ukraine and territory invaded, that it moved in into Syria, that it was militarily aggressive, and that it was positioning itself against the United States.
• 25:33
  In 2016, the election meddling and that came as a complete shock, but I think that where we got things wrong was not in those data points, which are just the facts of the story.
• 25:44
  We got things wrong, I think, in underestimating maybe two things.
• 25:48
  Under estimating the degree to which Russia was bearing into dictatorship, I don't think that's a word I would have used in 2015 or 2016, personalist autocracy authoritarian system for sure.
• 25:59
  But it didn't seem to me then, as it does at the moment, like dictatorship in Russia, and I think also sort of consistent with an American outlook toward Russia, there's just a tendency to underestimate, you know, we think of Russia as economically weak, as kind of decrepit, falling apart, not a power blocked in the way that China is and doesn't have the dynamism of the European Union, etc.
• 26:23
  But one tends to forget, if you subscribe to that view of Russia, that is nevertheless a country that can close a great deal of harm, it does have the biggest conventional military in Europe, and we see ways in which Putin is now using Russia's nuclear arsenal to intimidate and threaten Russia's opponents.
• 26:40
  And so just the formidable nature of the country, and now that plastic dictatorship, I think we were behind the curve in 2015, 2016 when it came to those assessments.
• 26:49
  And then 2016, where were you on election night and what did you make of Trump's win?
• 26:57
  Well, I didn't believe then and don't believe now that Russia had a great deal to do with it.
• 27:03
  You know, the 80,000 votes that gave Trump his electoral college, when maybe they came from Russian meddling in Facebook and from the hacking of the DNC and Don Podesta's emails maybe, but I really doubt it.
• 27:16
  And you know, I think that we engaged in a lot of hysteria in the US after the election on that point and really exaggerated the role that Russia played what I didn't quite see on election night, but did become more clear to me afterwards was that the goal of Russia's meddling.
• 27:32
  Sure, they wanted Hillary to lose and Trump to win, but the other thing they, they themselves thought they could engineer that outcome.
• 27:39
  I think the goal of the meddling was to undermine faith in the American political system, and I think there they scored some pretty considerable successes.
• 27:47
  And what is my great regret is I think that we, you know, American experts, journalists, many who sort of led the public conversation on this question of Russia Trump in the 2016 election.
• 27:59
  We built Russia up into something bigger than it was, and by doing so, we diminished in some ways the agency and vitality of American democracy.
• 28:07
  So that story to me still feels like it's ongoing, maybe we're pulling out of it, but we granted Russia far too much power over our thinking, over our minds, not over the electoral system per se that they had, but it was that was moderate.
• 28:20
  But that diminishment of faith in American democracy is something that can be almost endlessly stoked by more and more bullshit online and more and more social media meddling and more and more hacking and whatever it is that Russia seeks to do.
• 28:35
  So what does America's relationship and the West relationship with Russia end up being in like 20 years time, if Putin doubles down on that in the absence of any effective military strategy, you know, if he resorts to well, if I can't have Ukraine, if I can't have my way, then they're going to pay in the way they're going to pay is I'm going to do everything within my power to corrode liberal democracy and to turn them into basket cases.
• 29:02
  Well, let me offer you a sort of vigorous opinion and answer to your question, I don't think that this works anymore for Russia.
• 29:09
  I think they could do this when the US was preoccupied with itself when it had these internal divisions, which it still has.
• 29:15
  And you know, the US gave Russia or Putin a lot to work with in terms of meddling and disinformation and all of that, but I think Putin has put an end to that that capacity of is with the war.
• 29:27
  Russia is now widely reviled across the United States, Republicans and Democrats agree, maybe on little else, but they agree on the terribleness of Russia's war in Ukraine.
• 29:37
  There's just no way, I think, that they can insert themselves into the process as they did before this before this war.
• 29:45
  And you see that Putin has no control over the narrative about the war in the US and Europe and internationally.
• 29:53
  So he has deprived himself of what he had before this sort of far right far left political figures who had different views on sanctions on Putin on Ukraine, and you still see a bit of that in the US, but I think it's really been, I think it's really been marginalized.
• 30:08
  So yes, I'm sure he'll find ways to contribute to those things that endanger American democracy.
• 30:14
  He may have successes here and there, but I think if he's going to meddle in the United States going forward, it's going to be in critical infrastructure, you know, it will be the electrical grid, it will be cybersecurity and those things.
• 30:25
  And that's a serious enough topic, but I think he's effectively destroyed his political influence outside of Russia.
• 30:33
  All right, I'll take the win. Michael, it's great to talk to you. Thanks. Thanks for your time.
• 30:37
  Michael, I really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was fantastic.