Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #289
the following is a conversation with stephen codkin his second time on the podcast stephen is one of the greatest historians of all time specializing in 20th and 21st century history of russia and eastern europe and he has written what is widely considered to be the definitive biography of stalin in three volumes two of which have been published and the third focused on world war ii and the years after he is in the midst of writing now this conversation includes a response to my previous podcast episode with oliver stone that was focused on vladimir putin and the war in ukraine stephen provides a hard-hitting criticism of putin and the russian invasion of ukraine weighed and contextualized deeply in the complex geopolitics and history of our world all with an intensity and rigor but also wit and humor that makes stephen one of my favorite human beings please also allow me to mention something that has been apparent and has weighed heavy on my heart and mind this conversation with stephen codkin makes it more dangerous for me to travel in russia the previous conversation with oliver stone makes it more dangerous for me to travel in ukraine this makes me sad but it is the way of the world i will nevertheless travel to both ukraine and russia i need to once again see with my own eyes the land of my ancestors where they suffered but flourished and eventually gave birth to see the old me i need to hear directly the pain anger and hope from both ukrainians and russians i won't give details to my travel plans in terms of location and timing but the trip is very soon whatever happens i'm truly grateful for every day i'm alive and i hope to spend each such day adding a bit of love to the world i love you all this is the lex friedman podcast and now dear friends here's steven godkin you are one of the great historians of our time specializing in the man the leader the historical figure of stalin so let me ask a challenging question if you can perhaps think about the echo of 80 years between joseph stalin and vladimir putin what are the similarities and differences between the man and the historical figure the historical trajectory of stalin and putin thank you alex it's very nice to be here again with you it's been a while good to see you good to see you as well you're looking good i see this podcast stuff is doing you right yeah so we can't really put very easily vladimir putin in the same sentence with joseph stahl stalin is a singular figure and his category is really small hitler mao that's really about it and even in that category stalin is the dominant figure both by how long he was in power and also by the amount of power the military military-industrial complex he helped build and commanded so putin can't be compared to that however putin's in the same building as stalin he uses some of the same offices as stalin used and some of those the television broadcasts that we see of putin at meetings and putin inside the kremlin stalin used to sit in those rooms and hold meetings in those rooms that's the imperial senate built by catherine the great an 18th century building inside the kremlin it's a domed building and and you can see it on the panorama the top of the building at least you can see it on the panorama when you look over the kremlin wall from many sites inside moscow so if he's not comparable to stalin he still works as i said in those same buildings those same offices partly and so therefore he's got some of the problems that stalin had which was managing russian power in the world from a position of weakness vis-a-vis the west but from a an ambition a grandiosity in fact and so this combination of weakness and grandeur right of of not being as strong as the west but aspiring to be as great or greater than the west that's the dilemma of russian history for the past many centuries it was the dilemma for the czars it was the dilemma for peter the great it was the dilemma for alexander it was the dilemma for stalin and it's the dilemma for putin russia is smaller now compared to when stalin was in that kremlin it's got pushed back to borders almost the time of peter the great it's farther from the main european capitals now than any time since that 18th century and it and the west has only grown stronger in that period of time so the dilemma is greater than ever the irony of being in that position of sitting in the kremlin trying to manage russian power in the world trying to be a providential power a country with a special mission in the world a country which imagines itself to be a whole civilization and yet not having the capabilities to meet those aspirations and falling farther and farther behind the west the irony of all of that is the attempted solutions put russia in a worse place every single time so you try to manage the gap with the west you try to realize these aspirations you try to raise your capabilities and you build a strong state the quest to build a strong state and use coercive modernization to try somehow if not to close the gap with the west at least to manage it and the result is different versions of personalist rule so they don't build a strong state they build a personal dictatorship they build an autocracy and moreover that autocracy undertakes measures which then worsen the very geopolitical dilemma that gave rise to this personalist rule in the first place and so i call this russia's perpetual geopolitics i've been writing about this for many many years what's important about this analysis is this is not a story of eternal russian cultural proclivity to aggression right it's not something that's in the mother's milk it's not something that can't be changed russia doesn't have an innate cultural tendency to aggression this is a choice it's a strategic choice to try to match the power of the west which from russia's vantage point is actually unmatchable but it's a choice that's made again and again and putin has made this choice just the stalin made the choice right stalin presided over the world war ii victory and then he lost the peace after he died in 1953 there was of course other rulers who succeeded him he was still the most important person in the country after he died because they were trying to manage that system that he built and more importantly manage that growing gap with the west by the time the 90s rolled around former soviet troops now russian troops withdrew from all those advanced positions that they had achieved as a result of the world war ii victory and it was napoleon in reverse they went on the same roads but not from moscow back to paris but instead from warsaw and from east berlin and from tallinn and riga and all the other places of former warsaw pact and former soviet republics in the baltic region they went back to russia in retreat and so stalin in the fullness of time lost the peace and putin in his own way inheriting some of this attempting to reverse it when as i said russia was smaller farther away weaker the west was bigger and stronger and and had absorbed those former warsaw pact uh countries and baltic states because they voluntarily begged to join the west the west didn't impose itself on them it's a voluntary sphere of influence that the west conducts and so that dilemma is where you can put putin and stalin in the same sentence and the terrible outcome for russia in the fullness of time also has echoes but of course putin hasn't murdered 18 to 20 million people and the scale of his abilities to cause grief uh with the nuclear weapons aside is nothing like stalin's and so we have to be careful right only mao put bigger numbers on the board from a tragic point of view than stalin and numbers matter here if we compare these singular figures yeah mao killed more people than stalin because mao had more people to kill the most amazing thing about mao is he watched stalin do it he watched stalin collectivize agriculture and famine result he watched stalin impose this communist monopoly and all of those people sent to prison or given a bullet in the back of the neck he watched all of that and then he did it again himself in china do you think he saw the human cost directly that that when you say he saw do you think he was focused on the policies or was he also aware distinctly as a human being of the human costs in the lives of peasants and in the lives of the working class and lies at the poor i think the prima facie evidence is that he didn't value human life otherwise i don't think after seeing the amount of lives that were taken in the soviet experiment he would have done something similar after that i think the answer lex is it's very hard to get inside mal's head and figure out what he was really thinking but if you just look at the results that happened the policies that were undertaken and the consequences of them you would have to conclude that there was let's say no value or little value placed on human life unfortunately that's characteristic not only of communist dictators right of post-communist dictators as well but the scale of the horrors that they inflict as horrific as they are just can't compare and so we're in a situation where eurasia that is to say the ancient civilizations of eurasia which would be russia iran china all have some version of non-democratic you know illiberal autocratic regimes and they're all pushing up against the greater power of the west in some form sometimes they coordinate their actions and sometimes they don't but this is a very long-standing phenomenon lex that predates of vladimir putin or xi jinping or the latest incarnation of the supreme leader in iran so we'll talk about this uh i think really powerful framework of five dimensions of authoritarian regimes that you've put together uh but first let's go to this napoleon and reverse retreat from warsaw back putin is called from the perspective of putin this retreat this collapse of stalin is one of the great tragedies of that region of russia do you think there's a sense where as putin sits now in power for 22 plus years he really dreams of a return to uh the power that influence the the land of stalin so while you said that they're not in the same place in terms of the numbers of people that suffer due to their regime do you think he hopes to have the same power the same influence for a nation that was in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s of the 20th century under stalin if he does lex he's deluding himself we don't know for sure very few people talk to him very few people have access to him a handful of western leaders have met with him for short periods of time those inside russia barely meet with him his own minions in the regime barely have face time with him we don't know exactly what he thinks it could be that he has delusions of reconquering russian influence if not direct control over the territories that broke away but it's not going to happen let's talk a little bit about this guy nikolai pottershev nikolai patrashev is probably not well known to your listeners he's the head of russia's security council and so you could probably call him the second most important or second most powerful man in russia certainly inside the regime arguably navalny is the second most important person in the country and we'll talk about that later i'm sure in terms of influence yes but but patrushev is a version of putin's right hand man and patrick chef has been giving interviews in the press you probably saw the interview with nizarissamaya not that long ago he writes also his own blog like interventions in the public sphere using the few channels that are left and what's interesting about patrick chef and and this could well reflect similar thinking to putin's which is why i'm bringing this up is that he's got this conspiratorial theory that the west has been on a forever campaign to destroy russia just like it destroyed the soviet union and that everything the west does is meant to dismember russia and that russia is fighting an existential battle against the west and so for example the cia and the american government wanted to bring down the soviet union never mind that the bush administration the first bush the father was trying desperately to hold the soviet union together because they were afraid of the chaos that might ensue and the nukes that might get loose as a result of a soviet collapse and it was until the very last moment where bush decided his administration decided to back those republican leaders who were breaking away from mikhail gorbachev and the soviet union right so never mind the empirics of it never mind that bill clinton's administration following george bush sent boatloads of money western taxpayer money to russia we don't know exactly how much because it came from different sources people talk about how there was no marshall plan it was tens of billions of dollars from various sources from the imf and other sources and lex it disappeared it's gone just like the german money that went to gorbachev for unification disappeared even before the soviet collapse the money disappeared but the west sent the money so how was that a plot and then you could go all the way to obama's administration george bush trying to do business deals and reset the relations and obama administration trying to reset the relations and and and doing nothing after the georgian war and slapping uh putin on the wrist following the seizure forcibly and you could go on and you could go on all the way through the trump administration telling putin that he's right trump believes putin and doesn't believe u.s intelligence about russian efforts to interfere in american domestic politics so despite all the empirics of it you have patricia and likely putin talking about this multi-decade western conspiracy to bring russia down at the same time as that's happening the germans are voluntarily increasing their dependence on russian energy voluntarily increasing their dependence on russia so here's the conspiracy to bring russia down the french who've fantasized about themselves as a diplomatic superpower are constantly the french leaders are constantly running to the kremlin to ask what russia needs what concessions from the west russia needs to be filled to feel respected again the british provide all manner of money laundering and reputation laundering services for the whole russian oligarchy including the state officials who are looting the state and using the west british institutions to launder their money so all of this is happening and yet patrochev imagines this conspiracy to bring russia down by the west and so that's what we've got in the kremlin again stalin had that same conspiratorial mentality of the west everything that happened in the world was part of a western conspiracy directed against the soviet union and now directed against russia even though the west is trying to appease the west is offering its services the west is trying to change russia through investment in a positive way but but but instead the west is what's changing the west is becoming more corrupt western services are being corrupted by the relationship with russia so so you have to ask yourself who are these people in power and the kremlin who imagine that while they're availing themselves of every service and every blandishment of the west while they're availing themselves of this that they're fighting a conspiracy by the west to bring them down so this is what they call the abijania right in russian which is a term as you know that means those who are resentful or you might call them the losers the losers in the transition so when the soviet union fell and there was a diminishment of a very substantial diminution and russian power and influence in the world a lot of people lost out they weren't able to steal the property they weren't able to loot the state in the 90s and they were on the outside they gradually came back in they were the losers in the transition domestically and for them right they wanted to reverse being on the losing side and so they began to expropriate to steal the money steal the property from those first thieves who stole in the 90s and the 2000s and on have been about restealing taking the losers in the transition taking the money from the winners and reversing this resentment this loser status those are your partnerships and your putins but at the same time this blows out to let's reverse the losses being on the losing side the roiling resentment at the decline of their power internationally let's try to reverse that too so you have a profound psychological a whole generation of people who are on the losing end domestically and reverse that domestically that's what the putin regime is about remember mikhail khadarkovsky's yukos remember all the companies that are now owned by putin cronies because they were taken away from whoever stole them in the first place and now they're trying to do that on the international scale it's one thing to put domestic opponents in jail it's one thing to take away someone's property domestically but you're not going to reverse the power of the west with the diminished russia that you have and so that project that patrick project which we see him expressing again and again he speaks about it publicly it's not something that we need to uh go looking for a quest the secret we can't find it what are they thinking it's right there in front of our face and putin has spoken the same way for a long time people point to the 2007 speech at the munich security conference that putin delivered and certainly your listeners could use a snippet or two of that just like they could use a couple of quotes from potter chef to contextualize what we're talking about but it predates the 2007 munich speech the reaction to ukraine's uprising in 2004 attempt to steal the election inside ukraine right which the ukrainian people rose up valiantly against and risked their lives and overturned right so there were public statements from putin already back then the statements about harkowski in 2003 when he was arrested and expropriated this is a long-standing psychological deeply psychological issue which is about managing russian power in the world as i was saying the gap with the west but has this further dimension of feeling like losers and wanting to reverse that that's their life experience ibiza so there's that resentment that fuels uh this narrative uh fuels this geopolitics and uh internal policy but so resentment is behind some of the worst things that have ever been done in human history hitler was probably fueled by resentment so resentment is a really powerful force yes uh just to maybe not push back but to give fuller context on the west you said the there's a narrative uh from from putin's russia that the west is somehow an enemy you position everything against the west but is there a degree and to what degree is the west willing to feed that narrative that it's also convenient for the west to have an enemy it seems like in the place in the span it seems like in geopolitics having an enemy is uh useful for forming a narrative now having an enemy for the basic respect of humanity is not good but in terms of maintaining power if you're a leader in a game of geopolitics it seems to be good to have an enemy uh it seems to be good to have something like a cold war we can always point your finger and says all our actions are fighting this evil whatever that evil is it could be like with george w bush the war on terror terrorism is this evil you can always point in something so you've made it seem that the west is trying there's a lot of forces within the west that are trying to reach out a friendly hand trying to help sending money uh sending compassion trying to sort of trying to integrate russia into global institutions exactly which was a long-standing multi-decade effort across multiple countries and multiple administrations in those countries but is there also war mongers on the west of course lex of course you're right about that but let's put it this way people talk about the cold war and they're usually looking to assign blame for the cold war as if it's some kind of mistake a misunderstanding or a search for an enemy that was convenient to rally domestic politics so alex there's a coup in czechoslovakia and somebody installs a communist regime in february 1948. no reaction to that that's just okay there's a blockade of berlin is that cool by you where they try to strangle west berlin so that they can swallow west berlin and add it to east berlin you cool with that how about korean war invasion of north korea invasion of south korea by north korea you cool with that how about the murders and the show trials up and down eastern europe in the late 40s after the imposition of the clone regimes you good with that yeah it's very convenient to have an enemy i agree with you but you know there were some actions lex there were some threats to people's freedom there was some invasions there was some aggression and violence on a mass scale like collectivization of eastern europe we could go on lex with the examples i'm just given a few of them and so the cold war was not a mistake it was not a misunderstanding we don't have to blame someone for the cold war we have to give credit for the cold war the truman administration deserves credit for standing up to stalin's regime for standing up to these actions for saying yeah we're not just going to take this we're not going to let this go on we're not going to let this expand to further territories we're going to create the nato alliance and we're going to rally democratic liberal regimes to stand up to this illiberalism this violence and this aggression and so yeah lex it it's always convenient to have an enemy but there was an enemy nikolai leona who recently died he died in april 2022 and he had a major funeral he was the last head analyst of the soviet kgb and lyonna is one of the most important figures for understanding the soviet collapse and he has the best memoir on the soviet collapse which is known in russian as yeah you will understand that and and and you'll help your your podcast listeners understand there's a singularity to that kind of expression leonardo just died but one of the things he and in fact the people who were supposedly arrested by putin as scapegoats for the ukraine war the main one sergey biseyada gave the eulogy at leona's funeral in april 2022 showing that it's a lie that all of these people have been arrested and purged in another nonsense in social media but to get back to what leonov said and get back to your enemy point leonov said you know the west spent all this time blackening the image of the soviet union all these resources and propaganda and covert operations to blacken the soviet image and they did lex the west did do that and then leona wrote in the next sentence and you know what we gave them a lot of material to work with to blacken our image yeah so the you're saying a kind of sobering reality which it is possible to some degree to draw a line between the good guys and the bad guys freedom is better than unfreedom likes it's a lot better than unfreedom and a guy like you understands that really well well so yes uh but those are all you know there's wars like justice freedom um what else love you can use a lot of words that hitler himself used to describe why he is actually creating a better world than those he's fighting so some of it is propaganda the question is on the ground what is actually increasing the amount of freedom in the world right we're not talking about propaganda here when we use words like freedom we're talking about rule of law we're talking about protection of civil liberties we're talking about protection of private property we're talking about an independent and well-funded judiciary we're talking about an impartial non-corrupt competent civil service we're talking about separation of powers where the executive branch's power is limited usually by an elected parliament in fact yes let's talk about elections let's talk about freedom of speech and freedom of the public sphere we're not talking about freedom as a slogan here we're talking about a huge array of institutions and practices and norms ultimately right and if they exist you know and you live under them and if they don't exist you fully understand that as well right ukraine was a flawed democracy before russia invaded it's utterly corrupt many ways dysfunctional especially the elites were dysfunctional the gas industry in ukraine was absolutely terrible because of the corruption that it generated the oligarch problem a handful of people stealing the state resources and yet ukraine had an open public sphere and it had a parliament that functioned and so despite its flaws it was still a democracy the regime in moscow you can't say that lex it's not a comparable regime to ukraine you could say oh well there are oligarchs in ukraine and there are oligarchs in russia there's corruption in ukraine there's corruption in russia so really what's the big difference and the answer is well ukraine had the open public sphere ukraine had a real apartment can you call russia's duma a real parliament i don't think so i don't think you can can you say that there were any checks whatsoever on the executive branch in russia can you say that the russian judiciary had any independence or really full level of competence even compared to the ukrainian judiciary which was nothing to brag about no you can't say that lex so we can differentiate between the very flawed corrupt oligarch oligarchic democracy in ukraine and the very corrupt oligarchic autocracy in russia i think that's a fair distinction yeah we should say that russia and ukraine have the great honor being the number one and the number two most corrupt nations in europe by many measures but there is a fundamental difference as you're highlighting russia is a corrupt autocracy ukraine who can say is a corrupt democracy and um to that level there's a there's a fundamental difference ukraine is not murdering its own journalists in systematic fashion if journalists are killed in ukraine it's a tragedy if journalists are killed in russia or russian journalists are killed abroad it's regime policy and the degree to which a nation is authoritarian means that it's suffocating its own spirit its capacity to flourish it's uh we're not just talking about um sort of um the the freedom of the press those kinds of things but basically all industries uh get suffocated and you're no longer being able to yeah flourish as a nation grow the the production the gdp the scientists the art the culture all those kinds of things yes lex you're absolutely right and so before the invasion the full-blown invasion of february 2022 into ukraine because as you know the war has been going on for many years at a lower level compared to what it is these days but still a tragic war with many deaths prior to february 2022 before this latest war we could have said that the greatest victims of the putin regime are russian domestic that the the people who are suffering the most from the putin regime are not sitting here in new york city but in fact they're sitting there in russia now of course with the invasion of ukraine and and really the atrocities that have been well documented and more being investigated uh we can't easily say anymore that russians are the greatest victims of the putin regime but in in ways other than bombing and murdering civilians children mothers grandmothers grandfathers after you include that then of course the larger number of victims of the putin regime are not ukrainians but ultimately russians and and there's how many of them now that have fled so your powerful precise rigorous words are uh stand in a stark contrast i would say to my very recent conversation with oliver stone now i would love you to elaborate to this agreement you have here with his words and maybe words of people like john mearsheimer the idea is that putin's hand in this invasion of 2022 was forced by the expansion of nato the imperialist imperative of the united states and the the the nato forces um you disagree with this point in terms of placing the blame somehow on the invasion on uh forces larger than the particular two nations involved but more on the geopolitics of the world that's driven by the most powerful military nation in the world which is the united states yeah lex so let's imagine that um a tragedy has happened here in new york and a woman got raped we know the perpetrator they go to trial and oliver stone gets up and says you know what the woman was wearing a short skirt and there was no option but for the rapist to rape her the woman was wearing lipstick or the woman was applying for nato membership and just had to be raped there's i mean didn't want a raper but was compelled because of what she was doing and what she looked like and and the clothes she was wearing and the alliances that she was under international law signed by moscow all the treaties that sovereign countries get to choose whatever alliance they belong to are treaties that the u.n charter signed by russia the soviet union the 1975 helsinki agreement signed by the soviet union the 1990 charter of paris for a new europe signed by the soviet union the 1997 nato russia founding act signed by the russian government the post-soviet russia all of those documents signed by either the soviet regime or the russian regime which is the legally recognized international inheritor right successor of the soviet state all of those agreements are still in force and all of them say that countries are sovereign and can freely choose their foreign policy and what alliances they want to join let's even go farther than that i mean you don't have to go farther than that but let's go farther than that lex is an autocratic repressive regime that invades its neighbors in the name of its own security something new in russian history did we not see this before is this does this not predate nato expansion does this not predate the existence of nato would oliver stone sit here in this chair and say to you you know they had to impose serfdom in the 17th century because nato expanded they had no choice their hands were tied they were compelled to treat their own population like slaves because you know nato expanded i mean i could go on through the examples of russian history that predate the existence let alone the expansion of nato where you have behavior policies actions very similar to what we see now from the kremlin and and you can't explain those by nato expansion can you and so that argument doesn't wash for me because i have a pattern here that predates nato expansion i have international agreements founding documents signed by the kremlin over many many decades acknowledging the freedom of countries to choose their alliances and then i have this problem where when you rape somebody it's not because they're wearing a short skirt it's because you have raped them you've committed a criminal act lex that's a i think there's a lot of people listening to this that will agree to the emotion the power and the spirit of this metaphor i was struggling to think how to dance within this metaphor because it feels like it wasn't precisely the right one but i think this it captures the spirit i'm not suggesting lex that everything the west has done has been honorable or intelligent fortunately we live in a democracy we live in liberal regimes we live under rule of law liberal in the classical sense a rule of law not liberal in the leftist sense we live in places like that and we can criticize ourselves and we can criticize the mistakes that we made or the policy choices or the inactions that were taken and there are a whole lot of things to answer for and and you can now discuss the ones that are your favorites the dishonor or the mistakes and and i could discuss mine and we could spend the whole rest of our meeting today discussing the west's mistakes in private and we won't end up in prison for it yeah alex and so that's i'm thankful for that yes and i'm thankful that people may disagree and that people make the argument that nato expansion is to blame but but you see i'm countering two arguments here i'm countering one argument which is very deeply popular pervasive about how russia has this cultural tendency to aggression and it can't help but invade its neighbors and it does it again and again and it's eternal russian imperialism and you have to watch out for it this very popular argument in the baltic states it's really popular in warsaw it's really popular with the liberal interventionists and it's it's very very popular with those who are part of the iraq war squad that got us into that mess so i'm against that and the reason i'm against it is because it's not true it's empirically false there is no cultural trait inherent tendency for russia to be aggressive it's a strategic choice that they make every time is the choice made it's not some kind of momentum every time it's a choice that we should judge for the choice that it is for the decision and therefore they could make different choices they could say we don't have to stand up to the west we don't have the capabilities to do that we can still be a great country we can still be a civilization unto itself we can still be russia we can still worship in orthodox cathedrals or we can still be ourselves but we don't have to pursue this chemical pursuit this elusive quest to stand up to the west and be in the first ranks of powers so i'm countering that argument i'm saying it's a it's perpetual geopolitics it's a geopolitical choice rising out of this dilemma of the mismatch between aspirations and capabilities it's not eternal russian imperialism and i'm also countering the other argument here lex which is to say that it's the west's fault it's western imperialism i'm very popular on the left very popular with realist scholars very popular with some of the people recently on your podcast and so it's neither eternal russian imperialism nor is it western imperialism right the mere fact that the west is stronger than russia is not a crime on the part of the west it's not a crime that countries voluntarily want to join the west that beg to get in either the eu or nato or other bilateral alliances or other trade agreements those are voluntarily entered into and and that's not criminal if the west sphere of influence which is open an open sphere of influence which as i say people voluntarily join if that expands that's not a crime nor is that a threat to russia ipso facto right nato is a defensive alliance and the countries are largely pacifists who are members of nato and nato doesn't attack it defends members if they are attacked and so the idea that ukraine which had the legal right might want to join nato and the eu which was not going to happen in our lifetimes and was not a direct threat to the putin regime since it was since the western countries that make up the eu and nato uh decided that ukraine was not ready for membership there was no consensus it was not going to happen but it's ukraine's free choice to is express that desire and if your government is elected by your people freely elected meaning you can unelect that government in the next election and that government makes foreign policy choices on the basis of its perceived interests that's not a crime lex that's not a provocation that's not something that compels the leader of another country to invade you right that is legal under international law and it's also a realist fact of life the realists like to tell you you know that russia here was was uh disrespected russia's interests were not taken into account etc etc but the real world works in such a way that treaties matter that international law matters that's why people like me were not in favor of the us 2003 invasion of iraq lex because it wasn't legal in addition to the fact that we thought it might backfire but you know lex like i said there are a lot of things about the west that we ought to criticize as citizens and we do criticize but but we have to be clear about where responsibility lies in in these events that we're talking about today so you get into trouble it's largely uh erroneous to think about both the west or the united states from an imperialist perspective and russia from an imperialist perspective is better clearer to think about each individual aggressive decision on its own as a choice that was made so let's talk about the most recent choice made by vladimir putin the choice to invade ukraine or to escalate the invasion of ukraine on february 24th 2022 now we're a few months removed from that decision initial decision why do you think he did it what are the errors in understanding the situation in calculating the outcomes and everything else about this decision in your view yeah lex when you don't when a war doesn't go well it looks like lunacy to have launched it in the first place does it ever go well war never goes according to plan all war is based upon miscalculation but not everybody is punished for their miscalculation all aggressive war we're talking about not defensive war is based upon miscalculation but you can adjust you can recalibrate you know when when you're driving down the road and that very annoying voice is telling you in a thousand feet make a right yeah and you fail to make a right it recalibrates right yeah it tells you okay now you know go uh turn around or u-turn or make a left it doesn't say you're an idiot and turn around and make a u-turn but it does recalibrate so you can miscalculate and the problem is not the miscalculation usually it's the failure to do that adjustment right people i know who are hedge fund traders they i asked them you know what's your favorite trade and the line from them all and this is a cliche is my favorite trade is when i made a mistake but i got out early before all the carnage so it's their favorite trade is not when they made some brilliant choice but it's when they miscalculated but they reduced the consequences of their miscalculation by recalibrating quickly right so let's talk about the calculation and miscalculation of february let's imagine lex that you've been getting away with murder i don't mean murder in a figurative sense i mean you've been murdering people you've been murdering them domestically and you've been murdering them all across europe and you've been murdering them not just with for example a car accident a staged car accident or using a handgun you use novichok or you use some other internationally outlawed chemical weapon and let's imagine that you did it and nothing happened to you it wasn't like you were removed from power it wasn't like you paid a personal price sure maybe there was some sanctions on your economy but you didn't pay the price of those sanctions little people paid the price of those sanctions other people in your country paid the prices let's imagine not only were you murdering people literally but you decided to entice the idiotic ruler of georgia into a provocation that you could then invade the country and you invaded the country and you bit off these territories abkhazia and south ossetia and what price did you pay for that and then you decided you know i think i'll now invade crimea and forcibly annex crimea and i'll instigate an insurrection in the donbass in eastern ukraine in luhansk let's imagine you did all that and then you had to stick out your wrist so that you know it could be slapped a couple of times and you said you know i can pretty much do what i want they're putting a sanction here and there and they're doing this and they're doing that and and you know what they're more energy dependent on me than before i got better money laundering and reputation services than anybody has maybe the middle east and the chinese would disagree with you that that you have better than them but yours are pretty good and the panama papers get released revealing all of your offshoring and your corruption and and what happened nothing happens lex so the first and most important consideration here is in your own mind you've been getting away with murder literally as well as figuratively and you think you know i probably can do something again and get away with it and so the failure to respond at scale in fact the indulgences the further dependencies that are introduced the illusion that trade is the mechanism to manage authoritarian regimes you know that great a german cliche a van del dorjandel right change through trade or transformation through trade one of angela merkel's favorite expressions right you're you're going to get the other side to be better rather than confront them in a cold war fashion where you stand up to their aggressions and you punish them severely in order to deter further behavior so that's the first and most important part of the calculation miscalculation there are a lot of other dimensions so can we pause on that really so this is kind of idea of it's okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelette um which is a more generous description of what you're saying that uh you don't incorporate into the calculation the amount of human suffering that the decisions cause but instead you look at sort of the success based on some kind of measure for you personally and for the nation in not in terms of in the humanitarian sense but in some kind of economic sense and a power geopolitical power sense yeah you're not sentimental lex you say to yourself the cause of russian greatness is greater than any individual life russia being in the first rank of the great powers russia realizing its mission to be a special country with a special mission in the world a civilization unto itself the first rank of the great powers maybe even the greatest power that's worth the price that we have to pay especially in other people's lives right we have a lot of literature on the putin regime which talks about the kleptocracy the places of kleptocracy and it is a kleptocracy we all can see that and anybody in london live in the high life servicing this kleptocracy can testify that it's a kleptocracy and not only in london of course right here in the united states in new york but you know it's not only a kleptocracy lex that was the problem of the russian studies literature it wasn't just about stealing looting the state it was about russian greatness you see those rituals in the kremlin right in the grand kremlin palace in the saint george's hall some of the greatest interiors in the world and you see awards ceremonies and you see marking holidays and all of these looters of the state have their uniforms on with their medals and someone's given a speech or singing a ballad and their eyes are moist their eyes are moist because they're thieves and looters no legs because they believe in russian greatness they have a deep and fundamental passionate commitment to the greatness of russia which in unsentimental fashion they're all sentimental to the max that's why their their eyes are moistening but they imagine unsentimentally that any sacrifice is okay a sacrifice of other people's lives a sacrifice of their conscripts in the military a sacrifice of ukrainian women and children and elderly that's a small price to pay for those moist eyes about russian greatness and russia's position in the world well that human thing that sentimentality is a thing that can get us in trouble in the united states as well and lead us to wars that illegal wars and so on but the united states has repercussions for breaking the law uh you're going to pay for illegal wars in the end you're saying that in authoritarian regimes this sentimentality can really get out of hand and you can by charismatic leaders they can take that to manipulate the populace to make uh to that in in the span of history led to atrocities and uh in today's world lead to humanitarian crises it's not just a kleptocracy it's a belief system it's passion it's conviction it's it's it's you can call them illusions you can call them fantasies whatever you want to call them they're real they're real for those people and so yes they're looting that very state that they're trying to make one of the great powers in the world and they resent the fact that the west doesn't acknowledge them as one of those great powers and they resent that the west is more powerful people talk about how putin doesn't understand the world and that he gets really bad information lex if you're sitting there in that kremlin and you're trying to conduct business in the world and you're getting reports from your finance minister or your central bank governor your whole economy everything that matters somehow all your trade is denominated in dollars and euros do you have any illusions about who controls the international financial system i don't think so lex you looking over your industrial plan for the next year and you're looking over how many tanks you're going to get and how many cruise missiles you're going to get and how many submarines you're going to get and and fill in the blank and you know what it says right there in the paperwork where the component parts come from where the software comes from comes from the west lex your whole military-industrial complex is dependent on high-end western technology and then and let's and let's say you're in beijing not just in moscow and you go to a meeting in your own neighborhood you're the leader of china you go to a meeting with other asian leaders do they all speak in chinese with you no lex they don't speak chinese you go to an international meeting as the leader of china and guess what language is the main language of intercourse yes the same one you and i are speaking right now and so you live in that world you live in the western world and it's very hard to have illusions about what world you live in when you're under that you need those western banks you need that foreign currency right you need that high-end western technology that technology transfer you're speaking or you're forced to speak or your minions are forced to speak at international gatherings in english and and i could go on all the indicators that you live in and so putin lives in that world he's no fool well to push back isn't it possible that as you said the minions operate in that world but can't you if you're the leader of russia or the leader of china or the leader of these different nations um still put up walls where actually when you think in the privacy of your own mind you exist not in the international world but in a world where there's this great russian empire or this great chinese empire yes and then you forget that there's english you forget that there's technology and iphones you forget that there's all this uh us keeps popping up on all different paperwork that just becomes the blurry details that dissipate because what matters is the greatness of this dream empire that i have in my mind as a dictator i would put it this way lex after you absorb all of that from your minions and and it impresses upon your consciousness where you live you live in a western dominated world that the multi-polar world doesn't exist your goal is to make that multipolar world exist your goal is to bring down the west your goal is for the west to weaken your goal is a currency other than the dollar in the euro your goal is an international financial system that you dominate your goal is technological self-sufficiency made in china 2035 right your goal is a world that you dominate not that the west dominates and you're gonna do everything you can to try to attain that world which is a russian-centric world or a chinese-centric world or what we could call a eurasian-centric world and it's not going to be easy lex just for the reasons that where we enumerated before but maybe you're going to get a helping hand maybe the west is going to transfer their best technology to you they're going to sell you their best stuff and then you're going to absorb it and maybe copy it and reverse engineer it and and if they won't sell it to you maybe you'll just have to steal it maybe the west is going to allow you to bank even though you violate many laws that would prohibit the west from extending those banking services to you maybe the west is going to buy your energy and your palladium and your titanium and your rare metals like lithium because you're willing to have your poor people mine that stuff and die of disease at an early age but western governments they don't want to do that right they don't want to do that dirty mining of those very important rare earths but you're willing to do that because it's just people whose lives you don't care about as an autocratic regime right so that's the world you live in where you're trying to get to this other world you're at the center of the other world you dominate the other world but the only way to get their lex is the west has to weaken divide itself maybe even collapse and so you're encouraging to the extent possible western divisions you know western disunity a western lack of resolve uh western mistakes and west invasion of the wrong country and and western destruction of its credibility through international financial crises and one could go on so the if the west weakens itself through its mistakes and its own corruption you're going to survive and maybe even come out into that world where you're the center and so russia's entire grand strategy just like china's grand strategy iran it's hard to say they have a grand strategy because they're so so profoundly weak but russia's grand strategy is we're a mess we don't invest in our human capital our human capital flees or we actually drive it out it goes to mit like you did or it goes to fill in the blank right we can't invest in our people our health care is terrible our education system is in decline we don't build infrastructure likes we don't improve our governance we don't invest in those attributes of modern power that make the west powerful we can't because when we try the money is stolen we try these grandiose projects of national projects they're called we're going to invest in higher ed we're going to invest in high tech we're going to build our own silicon valley known as skolkovo we're going to do all those things and what happens they can't even build an airport without the money disappearing the sochi olympics it costs them officially cost them 50 billion dollars you look around at the infrastructure that endured from that 50 billion dollar expense and you're thinking you know that's like the second avenue subway you get almost nothing for your money and so yeah it's corruption legs but it's also because they don't want to do that they don't want to invest in their people they couldn't do it if they wanted to and when they try it doesn't work but why invest in your own people invest in your hardware your military hardware right invest in your cyber capabilities invest in all your spoilation techniques and your hard power and invest in further corrupting and further weakening and further dividing the west because as i said if the west is weak divided lacking resolve you don't invest in your people you don't build infrastructure you don't improve your governance but you'll muddle through that's russian grand strategy so invest in the hard power weaken the west those combined together means you're going to be incentivized to escalate any military aggressive conflicts that are around you or create new ones or if you can get away with murder but what happens lex if it's a harry truman like response what happens if somebody says you know we're gonna stand up to this we're not gonna allow this to happen we're not gonna launder your money anymore we're not going to be dependent on you for energy in the long term we're going to make a transition we're going to punish you for that kind of behavior instead and and and the west is now switched to that only because of the courage and ingenuity of the ukrainian people the ukrainian resistance to russian aggression was one of the greatest gifts the west has ever received the sacrifices that the ukrainians are making right now as we speak meaning they're fighting a war by themselves against the major military power their neighbor russia nobody's fighting it with them yes we are giving them weapons so they can conduct self-defense which by the way is legal under international law unlike the russian invasion which is illegal under international law western's supply of weapons including heavy weapons including offensive weapons to ukraine for its self-defense in the invasion by russia is actually legal under and so thank god the ukrainians surprised everybody they surprised me they surprised putin and the kremlin they surprised the bide administration they surprised the european union not with the fact that they would resist we knew that we had the orange revolution in 2004 we had maidan in 2013-14 where they rose up against a domestic tyrant and they were willing to die on behalf of their country then let alone against the foreign tyrant invading their country right so we knew they would resist we didn't know just how successful certainly i didn't know they would be on the battlefield it's been breathtaking to watch that sacrifice that gift enabled the west to rediscover itself to rediscover its power to revive itself to say to hell with this energy dependence in the long term the hell with this money laundering and reputation laundering the hell with this running back and forth to moscow to try to see what putin needs in order for him to feel respected what appeasement he needs right so so we'll see if it endures but this shift comes from the ukrainians and so it's no longer getting away with murder lex and we thank the ukrainians for that the people and the leadership and uh the the the separate factions that make up ukraine uniting the it's the unification the uniting against the common enemy yes and standing up before anyone knew that they would be backed by all of these other nations by this money and all this kind of stuff standing there especially with the president zelinski where it makes total sense to flee he stood his ground and selected let's take that point that you just raised which is a deep and fundamental point and i thank you for that do you guys hear that though i think that was a compliment there we go let's go lex silence your unification i'm sitting here in front of you thank you it's an honor and and it's a mutual honor so um ukraine before the war is run by a tv production company right you're one guy running this fantastic incredible podcast there's 20 guys or so running a country the size of ukraine yeah and and one's a producer and one's like a makeup person and one's a video editor and they're fantastically talented people if your country is a tv production so before the war zolensky had what 25 percent approval rating and he couldn't get much done and it wasn't working he got elected with 73 as you know and then he was down to 20 that's a pretty big drop and so you're thinking maybe having a major large size 40 million plus population european country run by a tv production company is not the best choice and then what do we see we see president zielenski decides to risk his life on behalf of his country ukraine he decides to stay in the capitol he's not going to flee he they're going to stay and fight and he could be killed he can die it's a decision where he put his life on the line obviously he's jewish descent russian speaking childhood and upbringing russian speaking jewish descent puts his life on the line for the country of ukraine it's a pretty big message don't you think and it's crucial and it turns out not only that lex but they're good at tv they're good at information war and in a war yeah it's a tv production company and a tv personality those that's exactly what you want running a country because they're crushing in the information war and he's spectacular european parliament u.s congress israeli parliament there's no room on zoom let alone in person that he can't win over he's just so effective you know this is the first time reality tv has been about reality instead of fake reality tv is just this completely fake nonsense but zelensky this is real reality tv and and and he means it and and the nation is behind him and and they're just as courageous and just as ingenious in many ways and it's spectacular and so yeah who saw that coming i didn't see that coming lex in fact dubai didn't we talk about putin's miscalculation the bide administration as you alluded to offered him an exit from the country they didn't say you know you want to stand and fight we'll back you they said we'll get you out you want to come now and famously you know that quote right what he said about how he doesn't need a ride remember that yeah moment the administration was poised to do another afghanistan moment that ignominious exit from afghanistan was almost what happened in ukraine when by the administration offered him that ride out of there and fortunately he declined and helped rally and the people from below also rallied to stop the invader without the presidency and without the government in ukraine saving the biden administration and and the european leaders who latched on fortunately they had the presence of mind to latch on to this gift this this bravery and ingeniousness of of silence and the rest of the ukrainians and flipped and decided to support ukraine's resistance you know first with 5 000 helmets only as the germans initially promised and now with really heavy weapons and so that's something that wasn't foreseen i certainly didn't foresee that i foresaw the ukrainian society being courageous and resisting but i didn't foresee a television production company being exactly what you want to run a country in a war a president zielenski willing to sacrifice lay down his life and rallying others in the country to do that and then the country being so effective not just at a courage but at battlefield resistance to the russian invasion so i stand corrected by the ukrainians and i'm ecstatic that i didn't that i was wrong that i was proven wrong and like i said there's clear factions of the west and the east of ukraine and here's a person that like you said was in the high 20s low 30s percentage approval in the country before the war and now was able to use in the 90s in the 90s he's in the 90 approval rating i mean i i think they stopped doing the uh the polling once he hit 91 percent or whatever it was in the previous poll i think they all understood that that for now they didn't need any more polling that it's pretty clear the nation so 25 to 90 something percent and and and just like the 25 was deserved the 90-something percent is also deserved fully deserved and the question is how that all stabilizes it feels like this set of events i may be paying attention to twitter too much which is a concern of mine whether the change i see is just surface level or deep level but it seems like we're in a new world that something dramatic has shifted that um this power that's rooted i mean in your study it of the 20th century it's so deeply rooted in history there's this power center of the world is now going to it has been shaken by this event and how that changes the world is is unclear uh it's unclear what lesson china learns from watching this well lesson india learns from watching this both nations as far as you can get polls about chinese population but both nations are largely in support of putin so russia india and china are still supporting of putin quietly i would maybe elaborate a little bit on that point lex i think you're right the the feeling that we're in an inflection moment you know an inflection point i think that's widespread and i think it's widespread for good reason we might be but i also share uh your um let's say modesty about where it's going and how hard it is to predict where this might go it's only an inflection point if the trends continue right if the trends endure there are plenty of non-inflection points after 9 11 the whole world rallied around the united states after it was attacked after the the bombing of the towers here in new york city and the hitting of the pentagon and and that didn't last and it was not really an inflection point was it it felt like it might be but it wasn't and so this is not a comparable moment in terms of what happened but it has the feeling that it might be a watershed and maybe we'll squander it the way we squandered the post-911 rallying around the united states uh maybe we'll actually consolidate it and it'll endure or maybe it'll endure despite ourselves and we can't tell and we can't know yet and it depends in part on what we do and what we don't do but here's a few things that we understand already the idea that the west was in decline and that the rest of the world had risen and was more powerful and that we lived in a multi-polar world that turns out to be empirically false it's not true i mean it's just factually not true there are no major important multinational institutions organizations that are run on behalf of or led by a south african a nigerian person from india even the chinese don't run these institutions they would like to and they're trying but they don't and so whatever you pick the imf the world bank the federal reserve which is the most powerful multinational institution which is actually only a domestic institution and doesn't have a legal mandate to act multilaterally but does it's got the most power of any institution in the world nato the bilateral alliances that the u.s has up and down asia what organizations that have tremendous leverage on the international system on the international order are non-western the un is the most encompassing and of course we know that the five it has five members of the security council with a veto one of which is russia one of which is china and the others are the us britain and france not india not south africa not indonesia not all of these other countries where the people live right the bulk of the population of the world and where the population is growing like on the african continent so it's not a multi-polar world we talked already about the international financial system that's western not multi-polar we talked about the us military and nato or we could talk about the japanese military which is just very formidable enormous number of platforms even the australian military we could talk about lex right and so it's a western dominated world and the west remember is not a geographic concept it is an institutional and values club the japanese are not european but they're western just like russia is european but not western because european is a cultural category and western is an institutional category where you have rule of law and separation of powers and free and open public sphere and dynamic open market economy and okay and then we have another thing which is pretty clear the west is powerfully resented powerfully envied and admired simultaneously pj o'rourke the comedian who died this year fantastic it was a big loss for the culture he said there are two things that are always characteristic of any american embassy abroad one is a political protest outside and the other is the longest line you've ever seen for visas and those things are true simultaneously and that's the world we live in meaning that non-western countries envy and admire the west but they also resent the power of the west western hypocrisy right the west invades countries when it wants but when others do that it's illegal right the west arrests you for money laundering but it's western money laundering that is where you go when you need to launder money right so they see the hypocrisy they see the excessive power that the west has and they resent it and they say you who elected you to run the world we have a billion plus people or we have a 200 plus million people and we don't have a say you're the self-appointed guardians of our world who did that and so it's incumbent on the west not only to remember the power that it has but also to exercise that power legally and with restraint and also to think about how we can expand institutions to be more encompassing so that other parts of the world are not on the outside being dictated to but instead are on the inside too often right western power is not consultative in a decision-making fashion it's consultative after the fact okay you know we got together in the eu or we got together in nato or we got together at the federal reserve and here's our decision and we're announcing it today and so your economy gets destroyed because the federal reserve decides it has to raise interest rates or you now go into default you can't pay your debt because western banks lend you money and now the west has changed interest rates or or other considerations and you're in big trouble now and so this is something which we fail to address it's very hard to address it's very hard to reform international institutions it's very hard to share power it's very hard to acknowledge that you have too much power and that maybe having too much power is not good not only for the rest of the world but for yourself and so it's great to rediscover the west and rediscover its values and rediscover its authority and credibility and power but it's that's not sufficient so we know this now we know that the rest of the world is not necessarily jumping on the western bandwagon right to condemn russia for its actions because the west can do things like sanction your central bank take away your reserves deny you technology it pretty much can do whatever it wants and it can say that it's legal and it can go through various mechanisms and and it can freeze your property and and you say to yourself should anybody have that much power and when do they come after me now there's a caveat here and the caveat likes is they don't like the west having all of that power and they didn't join in the condemnation of russia but they also didn't join in russia's aggression so russia's domestic civilian aerospace aircraft industry right civilian aircraft industry is in big trouble now because of the export controls on spare parts and software brazil is a major power in aircraft manufacturing did they rush in and say you know vladimir putin we didn't condemn necessarily your actions in ukraine okay that's one thing and how about we give you all of our aircraft technology and we help you rebuild your domestic aircraft industry and you can have the aviation that the western did that happen lex didn't happen and you can look at india and you can look at china and you can look at south africa and you can look at what they've done in practical terms yes they haven't always joined in a full-throated condemnation maybe they've been neutral or maybe they've been playing both sides of the fence like turkey for example but are they rushing in to join russia to join russia's aggression to supply and their the answer is no and the answer is no for two reasons one they actually don't want to be party to that and two they understand that western power and and they don't want to be on the receiving end by crossing the west and then getting caught up in a sanctions regime or worse can we go to the mind of vladimir putin because what you just said china india they seem to sit back and say we're not going to condemn the actions of vladimir putin or russia but we would really like for this war to be over so there's that kind of energy of we don't just stop this because you're putting us in a very very bad position and yet vladimir putin is continuing the aggression what is he thinking what information is he getting is it the system that you've described of authoritarian regimes that corrupts your flow of information your ability to make clear-headed decisions just as a human being when you go to sleep at night is he not able to see the world clearly or is this all deliberate systematic action that does have some reason behind it we've got to talk a little bit about china too but let's answer your putin question directly so on twitter you've lost the war or as they say you know there are these two russian soldiers having a smoke and warsaw and you know they're they're taking a break having a smoke and they're sitting there in warsaw on top of their tank and one says to the other yeah you know we lost the information war and there they are sitting in warsaw having that smoke right so here on twitter russia has completely lost the war in reality they failed to take kiev they failed to capture kiev and they failed in phase two as they called it or plan b which is to capture the entirety of the donbass we're three months into the war if you had made a judgment about let's say the nazi invasion of the soviet union a definitive judgment after three months you might have got the outcome wrong there if you were judged the winner war the 1939-40 soviet invasion of finland after three months you would have got that wrong too of what the outcome was going to be so we're early in the game here and we have to be careful about any definitive judgments but it is the case that so far they failed to take kiev and they failed to capture the entirety of the don bus luhansk and donetsk uh provinces eastern ukraine a part of eastern ukraine and they've been driven out of kharkiv and in the area immediately surrounding heart keefe they never captured heart keith but they came close but now the ukrainians drove them back to the russian border in that very large and important region so those look like battlefield losses that are impossible to explain away if you're the regime in russia except by suppression of information and as you know from russian history likes uh um leaders in russia have an easier time with the state of siege and deprivation than they do with explaining a lost war but let's look at some other facts that are important to take into account one the russian army has penetrated father into ukrainian territory since february 2022 including in here son region the famous mariuple siege that just ended they have built a large presence in areas north of crimea on the sea of azov the black sea littoral ultimately that they didn't previously hold they're still fighting in lukansk for full control over at least half of the don boss and ukrainians are resisting fiercely but nonetheless you can say that they've been driven out on the contrary farther penetration than the beginning ukraine doesn't have an economy anymore they have somewhere between 33 and 50 percent unemployment it's hard to measure unemployment in a war economy but their metallurgical industry that azov style steel plant and marijuana is a ruin now and a lot of farmers are not planting the fields because the harvest from the previous year still hasn't been sent sold abroad because the ports are blockaded or destroyed and so you don't have an economy and you need 5 billion or 7 billion or 8 billion dollars a month ex to meet your payroll to feed your people to keep your army in the field that's a lot of money per month and that's indefinite that's as long as this blockade lasts and so you don't have an economy anymore you're indigent and even if you take the lower number five billion as opposed to zelinski's ask for seven billion five billion is 60 billion a year that's 60 billion this year that's 60 billion next year and so who's got that kind of money which western taxpayers are ready and if you use the 7 or 8 billion you get up to 100 billion a year the biden uh the just signed the by uh president joe biden just signed the bill making it law 40 billion dollars in aid to ukraine it's just an enormous sum the economic piece of that is a month and a half two months of ukrainians uh covering ukrainian expenditures that's it and they're asking the g7 they're asking everybody for this so you have no economy and no prospect of an economy until you evict the russians from your territory and then you have a western unity western resolve it lasts or it doesn't last lex so you're president putin and you've got more territory than before and you've got a stranglehold over the ukrainian economy and you've got a lot of the world neutral and you've got the chinese propaganda supporting you to the hilt with those oliver stone and mere shimer lines about how this is really nato's fault and you've got hungary dragging its feed on the oil embargo against russia and you got turkey dragging its feed on the recent applications of sweden and finland for nato expansion and you're saying to yourself lex maybe i can ride this out i got a lot of problems of my own and we can go into the details on the russian side's challenges but he's got he's he's on ukrainian territory unless he's evicted and he's got a stranglehold on their economy and he's got the possibility that the west doesn't stay resolved and doesn't continue to pay for ukraine's economy or supply those heavy weapons and so you could argue that maybe he's deluded about all of this and maybe he should go on twitter you know i'm not on twitter but maybe putin who famously doesn't use the internet should go on twitter and see he's losing the war or you can argue that maybe he's calculating here that he's got a chance to still prevail wow that is um darkly insightful if i could go to henry kissinger for a brief moment and people should read this op-ed he wrote in the washington post in march 5th 2014 after the start of the war between russia and ukraine but before crimea was annexed uh there's a lot of interesting historical description about the division within ukraine the corruption within ukraine that will if people read this article will give context to how incredible it is what zelensky was able to accomplish in uniting the country but i just want to comment because henry kissinger is a interesting figure in american history he opens the article with in my life i have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally the test of policy is how it ends not how it begins so he's giving this cold hard truth that we get we go into wars excited are able to send 40 billion dollars financial aid military aid our own men and women but the excitement fades twitter outrage fades and then a country that's willing to wait patiently is is willing to to pay the cost of siege versus the cost of explaining to its own people that the war is lost that country just might win outlast let's hope not because uh ukrainians resistance deserves to prevail here russia deserves to lose no war of aggression like they've committed here against ukraine should prevail if we can do anything about it i support a thousand percent the continued supply of heavy weapons including offensive weapons to the ukrainians as long as they're willing to resist and it's their choice it's their choice when to negotiate it's their choice how much to resist it's their choice what kind of sacrifices to make and it and it's our responsibility to meet their requests more quickly than we have so far and at greater scale but ultimately wars only have political ends they never have military ends you need a political solution here so if the ukrainians are able to conduct a successful counter-offensive at scale in july or august whenever they launch right now the heavy weapons are coming in and they're being moved to the battlefield and more are coming you know the dynamic russia bombs a school russia bombs a hospital americans and europeans decide to send even more heavy weapons to ukraine right that's the self-defeating dynamic from the russian side they commit the atrocities we send more heavy weapons once those heavy weapons are on the battle lines we'll see if ukrainians cannot just defend which they've proven they're able to do in breathtaking fashion not just conduct counter-attacks where the enemy moves forward and you cut behind the enemy's lines and you counter attack and push the enemy back a little bit but whether you can evict the russians from your territory with a combined arms operation where you have a massive superiority in in infantry and heavy weapons but more importantly you coordinate your air power your tanks your drones your infantry at scale which is something the ukrainians have not done yet it's something the russians failed at in ukraine and they come from the same place the soviet military we hope this ukrainian counter-offensive at scale this combined uh arms operation succeeds and if it does succeed there's the possibility of a battlefield victory whether that also includes crimea which as you know is not hostile on the contrary to the russian military remains to be seen but but however much they regain territorially back towards the 1991 borders which is their goal their stated goal and which we support them properly in trying to achieve however much they achieve of that in this counter-offensive that we're anticipating that will set the stage for the next phase and either russia the which is to say one person vladimir putin will acknowledge that he's lost the war because the ukrainians want it on the battlefield or he'll try to announce a full-scale mobilization conscript the whole country go back and instead of acknowledging defeat try to win with a different plan recalibrate remains to be seen will the ukrainians negotiate any territory away or must they capture also crimea which puts a very high bar on the wind on the summer counter-offensive that we're going to see which could last through the fall and into the winter as a result we don't know the answers to that nobody knows the answers to that people are guessing some people are better informed because they have inside intelligence people are also worried about russian escalation to nuclear weapons or chemical weapons if they begin to lose on the battlefield to ukraine are you worried about nuclear war the possibility of nuclear war i think it's necessary to pay attention to that possibility that possibility existed before the february 2022 full-blown invasion of ukraine the doomsday arsenal that russia possesses is enough to destroy the world many times over and that's been the case every year since the collapse of the soviet union in 1991 and so of course we're concerned about that we do know however alex that they have a system known as dual key dual key for their strategic nuclear weapons strategic nuclear weapons means the ones fired from silos the missiles the ones delivered from bombers or the ones fired from submarines right and they're ready to go they're intercontinental we watch that very very closely we watch all the movement of that and the alerts etc we have tremendously let's say um tremendous inside intelligence on that but dual key means that president putin alone cannot fire them he has one key which he must insert he must then insert the codes for a command to launch that then goes to the head of the general staff who must has his own key and separate codes and must do the same insert that keyan codes for them to launch and so will the general staff chief go along with the destruction of the world over a battlefield loss in ukraine i don't know the answer to that and i don't know if anybody knows the answer to that will those people flying those bombers if they get the order from if the dual key system goes into action and both keys are used and all the codes are are implemented will those young guys fly in those bombers let those bombs go will those at the missile silos decide to engage and fire we don't know but you can see that it's more than one man making a decision here in a system of strategic nuclear weapons as far as the tactical the so-called low-yield or battlefield nuclear weapons we're not sure the system that they have in russia these days for their implement for their use of such tactical nuclear weapons it could well be that that putin and just himself he alone can fire them or order them be fired but you know lex there's no tactical nuclear weapon fired at ukraine that's not also fired simultaneously at russia if the kremlin is 600 miles from ukraine and if the wind changes direction or the wind happens to be blowing east northeast the fallout hits your kremlin not just ukraine moreover you have all those border regions which are staging regions for the russian offensive and they're a lot closer than 600 miles they're actually right there and so you fire that weapon on ukrainian territory and you can get the fallout just like the chernobyl fallout spread to sweden which is how the we got the kremlin 2 finally first they denied they said oh we don't know why there's a big nuclear cloud over sweden we don't know where that came from but eventually they admitted it so russia can't actually use a nuclear weapon tactical battlefield one in ukraine without also firing it at itself and in addition it's that same dynamic i alluded to earlier which is to say you bomb a hospital you bomb a school there's more heavy weapons going to ukraine from the west you can't get away with any of the there's always going to be a response that's either proportional or greater than proportional you could well have europe signing on to nato direct engagement both washington oh boy and brussels direct engagement of the russian army on the territory of ukraine you think that's possible to do that without dramatic escalation from the russian side yes i do think it's possible but it's very worrisome just like you're saying but but if putin were to escalate like that he's firing that weapon at himself and he's potentially provoking a direct clash with nato's military not just with the ukrainian military if you're sitting in the kremlin looking at those charts lex of nato capabilities and you can't conquer ukraine which didn't really have heavy weapons before february 2022 at scale and you're thinking okay now i'm going to take on nato that would be a bold step on the part of a russian leader and and and let's also remember lex that there's another variable here you're a desperate as long as everyone implements your orders and so if people start to say quietly not necessarily publicly i may not implement that order because that's maybe a criminal order or my grandma is ukrainian or my wife is ukrainian or i don't want to go to the hog i don't want to spend the rest of my life in the hog or whatever it might be at any point along the chain of command from the general staff all the way down right to the platoon you're a despot provided they implement your orders but who's to say that somewhere along the chain of command people start to say you know i'm gonna ignore that order or i'm gonna sabotage that order or i'm gonna flee the battlefield or i'm gonna injure myself so that i don't have to fight or i'm gonna join the ukrainian side and so it could be that's what's left of the russian army in the field begins to disintegrate even if the ukrainians are not able to mount that counter-offensive at scale that combined arms operation the russian military in the field which has taken horrendous casualties as far as we understand something like a third of the original force so you're talking about 50 to 60 000 that includes both dead and wounded to the point of being unable to return to the battlefield those are big numbers those were a lot of families a lot of families affected their sons or their their husbands or their fathers are either missing an action or the regime won't tell them that they're dead as you know from the sinking of that flagship moskva right by the ukrainians and so a disintegration of the russian military because there are orders that they either can't implement or don't want to implement is also not excluded and so you have these two big variables the ukrainian army in the field and its ability to move from defense to offense at scale and we're going to test that soon and then the russian ability in the field to hold together in a war of conquest and aggression where they're they're conscripts or they're fed dog food or or or they don't have any weapons anymore because there's no resupply and so so the disintegration of the army can't be excluded and then of course all bets are off on the putin regime more long term there are these technology export controls we were talking about how the military-industrial complex in russia is dependent on foreign component parts and software and so if you have export controls and you have firms voluntarily even when they don't fall under export controls leaving russian business refusing to do business with russia and we see this not just in the civilian sector like with mcdonald's or many other companies we see this in the key areas like the oil industry with the executives fleeing that is the western executives fleeing giving up their positions so russia's ability to resupply its tanks resupply its missiles resupply its uniforms resupply its food to its soldiers in the field and then their boots we see a lot of stuff under tremendous stress and in the long term there's no obvious way they can rebuild the military-industrial complex to produce those weapons because they're reliant on foreign parts that they can't get anymore and there are no domestic substitutes on the immediate horizon that's at the earliest a two-year proposition to have domestic substitutes and for some things like microelectronics they've never had domestic substitutes going back to the soviet times as you know well and so there's that pressure on russia from the technology export controls which if you're in the security ministry or the defense ministry if you're in that side of the uh of the regime you're feeling that pain as we speak and you're wondering about the strategy let me ask you about again the echoes of history and it frustrates me in part when people draw these parallels but maybe there is some deep insight about those parallels so there's um there's a song that goes let's operation barbarossa the the bombing of kiev by hitler there is sort of an eerie parallel and you have to be extremely careful drawing such parallels and such um connections to this unexplainable war in uh that is world war ii but is there elements of this that do echo in the actions of vladimir putin and more specifically do you think the vladimir putin is a war criminal can that label be assigned to the actions of this man so war criminal is a legal determination and it requires evidence and due process and the ability to defend oneself we don't just decide in the twitter sphere or on a podcast that somebody is a war criminal they can be a suspected war criminal and we can gather evidence to try to prosecute that case and then the issue for us lex is which court does it go to what's the appropriate place does it happen in ukraine because they're the victims does it happen in the hog because there's an international criminal court there does it happen inside russia because there's regime change at some point and some of these people become let's say they get arrested by their own people inside russia so those are all important questions that have to be pursued with resources and with determination and and by skilled people who are excellent at gathering that evidence and that process is underway and ukraine has a trial underway now of one uh alleged war criminal who's pleaded guilty and and we'll see what the outcome of that trial inside ukraine is of a lower level official not obviously vladimir putin but the commander of a tank group so yes the names are eerily familiar izum harkief kiev right those are the names we know from the nazi invasion and the nazi occupation of ukraine and it's very deeply troubling to think that this could happen again and there's a bizarre sense that the russians claiming as putin says to de-nazify ukraine have invaded the same places that the nazis invaded back in 1941 as somebody who's working on volume 3 of your work on stalin going through this period is it eerie to you yes it is lex that you're i've written the chapters of volume three i've drafted the chapters on the war and and as i said the place names are very evocative unfortunately but but you know the nazis failed ultimately they captured ukraine for a time but they were evicted from ukraine there was massive partisan or guerrilla warfare resistance behind nazi lines the whole time that they were allegedly in control of ukraine if you look at the maps on cable tv they show you the sign of russia they show you the coloring russian control and they draw a line and then it's colored in but the word control is misplaced they don't actually control it it's russian claimed or or extent of farthest russian troop advancement because behind the russian lines in ukraine crimea accepted you have insurgencies you have the armed insurgency and militopol for example which is a place that you know in southeastern ukraine there is a guerrilla war now underway to hurt the russians who are in occupation of that city and region and we're going to see that continue even if the war becomes a stalemate even if it stalemates more or less at the lines we're at now which would mean that anticipated ukrainian counter-offensive at scale proves unsuccessful the russian army doesn't disintegrate and you end up with a stalemate where there could be a ceasefire not a ceasefire but neither side is attempting an offensive for the time being there will be resistance behind those russian lines and it will be fierce resistance the kind of resistance we saw to the nazi occupation ultimately it took the red army reinvading the territory of ukraine and succeeding at combined opera arms operations at scale a massive counter offensive much larger than anything we're talking about today ultimately it required that to evict the nazis from ukraine but in the meantime they did not have an easy occupation regime there uh ukrainian partisans soviet partisans killed nazi officials vermont soldiers vermont officers blew up the infrastructure they were using made them pay a price for their occupation we could well see if unfortunately this ends in a stalemate for the time being we could well see that type of insurgency gain momentum behind russian lines and and try to evict the russians that way and then remount the counter offense of its scale later on in the future if the first one doesn't succeed so that would be further echoes of the world war ii experience the scale once again is much smaller the size of the armies here they're not in the many hundred eight hundred thousand seven hundred thousand a million two a million four that's not what we're talking about today but the weapons the cruise missiles right artillery fire you know artillery fire used to be very inaccurate and it was like saturation you were just fired towards the enemy lines and if you hit something you hit something and if you didn't you just kept firing now you have drones lex and so artillery fire is now sniper fire because you can coordinate the direction of the artillery fire with the drones the drones can take a picture and show you where the enemy is precisely located and you can align that artillery to hit them instead of just indiscriminately bombing an area a territory and the nato supplied artillery goes really far and you can fire into russian positions and yourself not be exposed to russian fire because your artillery fires farther than theirs so that's coming and we're going to see that in action and so the scale is not the same but the weapons the precision of some of the weapons and some of the nato we're not sending all of our stuff but as i said the dynamic is russia commits atrocities russia bombs schools russia bombs hospitals russia kills civilians and more and heavier and more lethal western weapons go to ukraine their willingness to risk their lives is really so impressive and the reason that we it's it's our duty we're obliged to supply those weapons and so the russians don't have that resupply and the ukrainians do and so the russians are now digging in lex they're digging in deeply in the areas that they've penetrated and they're trying to build unassailable positions when for when the ukrainians transition from mostly defense to full-scale offense and we'll see if that now i mean they're digging everywhere you know as they say kapayut compiled right they're digging everywhere behind your russian is beautiful digging in i wish likes like yours but so so there are these things that we can't predict but there are these things we're watching and watching closely and on top of that something that's not in world war ii or for the most part it's cyber attacks and cyber warfare which is uh much less perhaps convertible into human words because it happens so quickly such large scales so difficult to trace and all those kinds of things it's not bullets it's uh electrical signals and the that's yeah but those ukrainian people they're like ulex they're young and they're technically really proficient yeah and they've been amazing you know they spent those teenage years in the basement yeah playing video games not turns out it's useful after all it turns out it's more than useful you can save your country that way and so they're not alone they're getting support and that support is important but really predominantly it's ukrainians on the cyber battlefield and their skills have been very impressive and they've been preparing for this for a number of years and they have a whole army of young people on the cyber side it's their civilian population these are not people conscripted into the military or volunteering wearing the uniform and so even in cyber warfare the ukrainians have been extremely impressive and so let's remember that all of these aspects of warfare whether it's how far your cruise missiles go and how accurate they are what size your cyber capabilities are it's really ultimately about the people it's about the human capital right it's it's about the their willingness their skill level but also their willingness to fight and to put their lives on the line and there's no substitute for that and so what's called morale or courage or bravery or valor that's really the ultimately decisive provided you have enough sufficient arms right to conduct the fight and if you don't you use a molotov cocktail right grandma calls in the coordinates of the russian tank on her iphone and you have a molotov cocktail that the the people who used to work in the cafeteria are now stuffing flammable liquid into bottles and you carry one right up to the tank and you smash it against the tank or you drop it in one of the hatches in the tank right there's no substitute for that kind of stuff that that level of resolve willingness to die for your country that's a really big lesson that we need to absorb in our own country we've been going to war more frequently than we should and like you said without the justification all the time and then like henry kissinger said without understanding how this was going to end it's easy to start a war it's very difficult to win a war prevail in war or end a war on terms that that meet your original expectations right we've been fighting wars but we haven't been fighting wars as as societies we've been fighting wars as a small sliver of our population something like one percent of our population is involved with the military because we have an all-volunteer force and that means that it's easier for our politicians to go to war because they don't face conscription they don't they don't have the draft which affects every family in the country and because the number of people in the volunteer force is such a narrow stratum of the population and so they've been getting away with this because the professional army is much better than the conscript army and in all volunteer forces much preferable from a military point of view but from a societal point of view it enables you to go to war too easily as a politician and it doesn't engage the society the same way that the ukrainian society is completely engaged from those young hackers all the way up to those grandmothers let me ask you you're a scholar of history and scholar geopolitics and you're also a human being that's kind of you lex i'll take that what's the value what's the hope what's the power of conversation here if you could sit down with vladimir putin and have a conversation versus bullets human exchange words is there hope for those and if so what would you talk about what would you ask him well henry kissinger you alluded to his op-ed he's had many private meetings with president putin over over a long time and president biden the previous presidents secretaries of state officials below secretary of state the head of the cia evidently met with president putin in the fall when he was massing the troops on the border before he invaded and we we sent the head of the cia and putin received him somebody he evidently respects or was at least willing to meet unlike other members of the administration so a lot of people are talking to him in some form or another for the 22 years he's been in power and i'm not sure it's had what i would call their desired effect well the nature of the conversation is interesting too and also the timing which is post february 22nd is a different time and also another aspect which oliver stone mentioned interestingly that there is something about covet and the pandemic that creates isolation the distancing it's such a silly little nuanced thing but maybe it's actually has a profound impact on the human being the human mind of vladimir putin that there is something about an in-person meeting and not across a table that's far too large yes but sort of the intimacy of a one human to human in-person conversation that there's something distinctly powerful about that reminder that as putin says in the narrative in the propaganda that we're all one people there is truth to that that this entirety of humanity yes is your people and you're kind of reminded by that when you're sitting together people who have sat across the table from him whether at 30 yards or at three have remarked upon this feeling of isolation has that has affected him the pandemic i think there must be something to that if if several people who've been in the room with him are remarking on it everybody that i know and i've been able to talk to who's had a meeting with him in the past 10 years including uh henry kissinger the former secretary of state has said that putin spends a lot of time enumerating his grievances he goes through a monologue of his grievances and then the west did this and then the west lied to us about that and then the west cheated us on this and so it's not the conversation that you're encouraging of common humanity it's that roiling resentment volcano that's just exploding and exploding the resentment and and by the time he gets through the monologue of the grievances the time of the meeting is is expired or or overtime that's a brilliant statement but that's where the skill of conversation comes in like when you're facing a bull with a red cloth you have to learn how to avoid the long list of grievances and get to the humanity that's that's a really important it's a skill for sure it's a skill and it's the highest level skill of a diplomat to be able to reach some type of common understanding when interests and and world views clash so much but here's your challenge lex your challenge is russia wants to impose a closed sphere of influence on its neighbors it wants to dictate what its neighbors can and can't do it wants to exert influence not by the power of its example not by the freedom of its people not by the dynamism of its diversified economy but it wants to exert influence just because it deserves that just because it's a great power just because and on and on and on it's a civilization unto itself and it wants that and we can't give that the reason that russia was not integrated into the west was not for lack of trying it was because russia ultimately spurned the integration because it was about what terms the integration would come on would you come into the west and observe western rules and be another country meaning just another country there's poland and there's austria and there's little tiny monaco and there's and there's russia and you're just one of those countries and russia's answer to that was no we're not just one of those countries we need special rules we need special conditions we'll integrate but only as a special country meaning like at the u.n where all countries are sovereign all countries are members but russia has a veto on what countries can and can't do those were the terms on which they were willing to integrate and those were the terms that no leader of a western country or the united states or the g7 or fill in the blank can grant to russia it's very well known that vladimir putin was one of the first maybe the first person first leader foreign leader to call president bush after the 9 11 tragedy they didn't connect right away president bush was not in washington and but eventually they did speak he condemned the terrorist attack he offered russian support which he delivered on the use of some russian logistics for our afghanistan operations and a lot of people point to that and they say there it is russia wanted to cooperate and did cooperate and we spurned them or we failed to appreciate russia's cooperation and so therefore russia was cheated or russia was lied to or russia's grievances are legitimate but here's the problem with that argument lex in exchange for that support vladimir putin asked in return from president bush for a free hand in the former soviet space that closed hierarchical sphere of influence where russia would exert influence coercively over countries that were sovereign and no american president could grant that and president bush was right he said no and so the attempted cooperation blew up but who's at fault there should there be a non-voluntary sphere of influence should that be granted or should you face up to attempts to do that you know let's take a a a little detour here into china for a second china had this brilliant grand strategy which was sure america is hostile because america is hegemonic america wants to control the world america will never let china rise america will do everything it can to hold china down so we're going to have hostility from america we don't want to decouple because we need that high-end technology transfer either we buy it or we steal it because america and the rest of the west has all the technology that we need we have some of it domestically more than before by a lot but we're still dependent so we can't decouple so we'll have the hostility but there'll be a line we don't cross just so that we don't lose the technology transfer till made in china 2035 is accomplished and we're self-sufficient domestically and ai and every other area that's critical but hostility from america but we have an ace in the hall our race in the whole is europe europe hates conflict they're all about trade it doesn't matter how evil you are they love to trade because change through trade they have this illusion that you're going to become a better country if they trade with you and you won't have conflict war and hostilities if you trade and so we have this european ace in the hall we're hostile with the americans we're still buying or stealing their technology and and better than that even the europeans are not hostile to us at all they love to trade with us and they want to trade more and they're our biggest trading partner already and lo and behold xi jinping sides with vladimir putin in the aggression in ukraine he doesn't side with him providing military equipment he doesn't provide technology transfer but he provides public support and massive pro-russian propaganda to the whole chinese population and the europeans say wait a minute this is an invasion of a sovereign country in europe what do you mean you're not condemning vladimir putin's invasion and so that wedge that the chinese had that was the basis of their grand strategy that wedge between the u.s and europe when it came to china policy that wedge is gone now xi jinping destroyed it and the europeans and the americans are coming close together on ukraine and russia policy for sure but also more and more on china policy and so that was a pretty big sacrifice for the chinese leader to make and what did he get in return gets hydrocarbons from russia at reduced prices and the chinese get hydrocarbons from a lot of countries they have a completely diverse supply chain for their energy so what do you think xi jinping is thinking now was it was it a mistake or i'd like to know alex i'd like you to be able to sit down with him across from this table here on your podcast and pose that same question to him because we have no idea there's a language barrier that's fascinating by the way you as a scholar of stalin do you think we'll ever break through the language barrier to china not ever i apologize in in the next few years because there is a gigantic cultural and language barrier between the west and the china is a great civilization china predates the united states by millennia china's accomplishments are breathtaking but china is also led by let's be honest a communist party monopoly which engages in a lot of criminal behavior lex tibet is ukraine xinjiang is ukraine hong kong is ukraine let alone support for putin ukraine this is before we've even discussed taiwan and so now the europeans are coming to see this and the americans are coming to understand this that maybe trading with a regime like that morally politically criminally tibet xinjiang hong kong how is that different from what putin is doing in ukraine i'd be hard-pressed to differentiate that ultimately even though the analogies are not exact and so the chinese it's like that guy leona the author of li heletia the the great um memoir of the late soviet period the end of the soviet union you know that they they spend all this time and all these resources blackening our image but we supply them with endless material to blacken our image that's where xi jinping's regime is right now lex and so they have a big dilemma on their side it's a western world and they've united the western world and and reawoken the western world to the fact that china is a threat to the values the institutions and values of the west and that trade is not transforming china quite the opposite we'll see if this endures maybe it doesn't endure maybe it's a fleeting moment maybe this is not an inflection point maybe the war in ukraine ends more quickly than than we think and maybe like you said the chinese and the indians and the rest of them the leaders there they get their wish that it ends and the world moves on and forgets or says let's try again to to resume our mutual understanding our mutually beneficial trade and everything else maybe it's a passing phase we can't exclude that i'm very poor at predicting the future but the moment is not a good one for the chinese regime let alone the fact that he's trying to impose an unprecedented in the modern era third term for himself as president in the fall at the next party congress becoming president for life de facto a mao like figure and he's now got to do that with in this environment where he has damaged chinese grand strategy and damaged the reputation of china and its relationships across the world maybe not permanently but significantly in addition to the problems they have at home demography as you know a middle income trap and then the regulatory insanity of chinese communist rule that we've seen with the tech companies that you know well where they've destroyed all of that value with the blow up of their property sector because it was a massive bubble and that's still playing out and this time it's the same meaning this time it's not different when it comes to a property blow out it has enormous effects on middle-class balance sheets and their ability to to be to remain consumers and drive the economy which is the model that they have to share so he's got a litany of challenges independent even of the fact that he sided with his pal vladimir putin and their bromance is costing china very very significantly if you close your eyes yes and a hundred years ago 1922 and you think about the future i wonder if you can hear the drums of war predicting the 30s predicting the great depression and the resentment that builds the economic resentment the cultural resentment the geopolitical resentment that builds at least the world war ii it uh at least to me when i close my eyes i can hear the drums of war that are still ahead of us and it's possible that were there 2022 will materialize in a similar way as the 1922. i have my eyes closed lex do you hear anything and i sure hope that that's not what happens but i'm looking in 1922 it's an epoch i know well and i don't see the future that unfolds i would not have predicted it had i been alive then i see the war behind us i see uh prosperity on the horizon yes inflation in germany and and some many other uh difficult issues but there are more democracies now than there were before the war and the old empires are gone and there's a cultural efflorescence and there's modernism in the arts and and there's women entering the public sphere and there's all this fantastic new technology like automobiles and i'm looking at the future from 1922 and and i'm not seeing the great depression and i'm not seeing world war ii and i'm not seeing the holocaust because i don't predict the future and nobody in 1922 could see that future although i guess there were some clairvoyance who predicted it but but you're not one of them yeah i'm not one of them and and but but this is what i know lex from studying history what i know is stuff happens in other words it's very deep insight in other words like we're watching ukraine war right now and all of our attention is focused on that and it's like the economists say in their textbooks when their their powerful models are employed and there's this line that says all other factors held constant comma and then the model works and you get this really great result it's very powerful predictor and analysis the model and and the whole game is all other factors held constant so the russia ukraine war that we've been discussing and this could happen and that could happen but you know what stuff could happen like for example the israeli government could decide this summer that it's going to bomb iran because no israeli government will tolerate iran acquiring a nuclear weapon and since president trump exited unilaterally exited from the multi-power nuclear agreement iran is now much closer to the bomb than they were when they were still in when the united states was still in that agreement and you tell me the israeli government that says sure it's fine it's okay iran can get the bomb and so maybe that happens and maybe that happens as early as this summer as iran gets closer and closer and closer maybe that guy in north korea decides it's his time just like his grandfather right in 1950 decided you know it's time we're gonna quote reunify unquote the korean peninsula maybe i don't know lex fill in the blank something's going to happen it's not going to be what i predict it's not going to be what i'm watching it's going to be obvious only after it happens not before and then it's going to upend the table and all of a sudden everything changes we're going to be in a different environment different circumstances and is ukraine still as central at that point as it seems to be right now i don't know the answer to that question let me ask two rapid fire questions you're only allowed to have one minute and it's about predicting the future okay question one vladimir putin when will he no longer be in office and will he step down or be overthrown what's your prediction and a brief explanation of that prediction now nobody can predict the future but what's your sense now some people are saying the pressure is building he's going to be overthrown or step down at the end of this year and some people say surely he's going to uh last outlast stalin's rule of 30 plus years no evidence of a coup yet none whatsoever yet um he's pretty much at life expectancy for a russian male those are bad numbers he's 69 gonna be 70. so he's lived the life of a russian male already but he's got better doctors than the majority of the russian males in that let's say comparison set so he could live a very long time with good doctors so there could be a coup at some point but there's none today in evidence he could go because he's reached the life expectancy or he could stay for a long time the thing to watch about this is an organization that nobody pays attention to the fso the federal solution which is the praetorian guard the self-standing bodyguard directorate the only one the only organization in russia that has any access to him we've seen no disloyalty no breaking of ranks no defections nothing in the public realm in open sources about any divisions or problems in the fso in the praetorian guard so if you can't break that change that uh elicit defections there you can't overturn him so authoritarian regimes likes they're terrible they fail at everything they not they can't feed their people they have trouble achieving any goals they only have to be good however one thing they only have to be good at the complete suppression of political alternatives if you can suppress political alternatives you can fail at everything else but you can survive as an authoritarian regime so you watched navalny that's that's still alive okay that's my the second rapid fire question is what happens to navalny what are the possible conclusions of what you said quite possibly the second most influential powerful figure in russia uh is there is he going to die in in jail will he become the next president of russia well what are the possible i wish i knew lex i've been surprised that he's still alive i've been worried that he will be killed in prison in a staged fight you know some a security officer prison guard puts on a prison outfit takes a lead pipe goes into the cell they have a quote fight and navalny is killed i've been afraid of that but he's still alive even though he's serving a long sentence so that leads me to guess that people inside the putin regime and maybe president putin himself understand that navalny is their ticket to lift sanctions that navalny is even more popular outside of russia than he is inside of russia you know he's the leader in many ways of the up political opposition in the country even while still in prison his organization's been destroyed but it's he doesn't have majority support in the population by any stretch of the imagination but he's a big figure in the west including here in the u.s and so navalny could be their ticket they're kind of g get out of jail card meaning they release him from prison he gets appointed i don't know prime minister even by the putin regime if he were willing to accept such a position and i have my doubts about that and then that's how they lobby to remove the sanctions against them so he's a card that president putin could play and so maybe that's the reason he's still alive or maybe there are other reasons that we don't know and so some alternative to putin is more likely to arise inside his gang putin as they say right inside his gang where they tire of his mistakes they tire of his self-defeating actions and they say patriotically for russia we need to do something against move against the sky because he's hurting our country and also because i could do better i'm ambitious as well as patriotic but once again the problem there lex is putin is surrounded by this cocoon known as the fso he's he meets on zoom predominantly with the rest of the government including with the defense and security they don't have frequent access to his person and as you were alluding earlier to the pandemic they have to quarantine for two weeks before every meeting with him and moreover you know lex they don't know where he is you see when they're on zoom with him and and the room it's the valdai his office in the valdai region looks the same as his office in sochi or his office outside of moscow and nova agariova they're made up to look very similar on zoom and sure some signs they're looking where is it but maybe they don't know and so you're gonna move on him and you're gonna jump him in his kremlin out his dacha outside outside moscow and it turns out he's in sochi or vice versa and it turns out the fso is loyal to him and and won't let you anyway so lex we don't know but we watch this fso really closely and we think that the the elites if not putin but maybe putin to understand navalny as a really big potential political card that they could play and one last question the biggest question you studied some of the darkest aspects of human history human nature let me ask the why question what are we doing here what's the meaning of our existence our life here on earth what are we humans trying to get at here i can't answer that question either but i can say that having a purposeful life is is actually not that hard you can't you're not gandhi right you're not president roosevelt you're not going to transform a country or a civilization or become immortal because of your courage and your your insight and your genius critical moments but you live in an environment you're in a school you're in a workplace you're you're somewhere where you can affect other people in a positive way it can be not just about yourself but it can be about them and you can have a positive impact on other people's lives through the work that you do whether that's your employment or your charity or your spare time or your work time it can be by modeling proper behavior right admitting your mistakes hard to do but necessary remembering that you don't know everything you can't predict the future but you don't even know everything in your areas of expertise painfully reminded of that humility at times but remind yourself to too so you can lead a life that can show others what good values are and you can lead a life that dedicates yourself not only to your own material well-being but to the well-being and to the development of others around you and it can be on a a humble scale it can be in a small classroom or a small workplace a small work team but but it can be done and you can be reminded that having a positive impact even on one other person gives far greater meaning to your own life and is profoundly satisfying much more satisfying than the attention you might get let's say on social media or awards you might receive there's nothing wrong with pursuing those people pursue them and it's a free society but leading a purposeful life intentionally is possible even just one person i love the expression uh say one life save the world just focusing on the local and the tiny little difference you can make in the world can somehow ripple every day if you think about that every single day uh you're a better person we're a better society and maybe you get to add a bit of love to the world after all stephen this is a huge honor uh for many reasons one of which is i can just tell how much care you put into this conversation and um how much you know i use the word love a lot but i just feel the love that um just even the respect you you give me which i can't tell you how energizing that is how much that gives me strength for my own silly little pursuits um thank you so much for doing that thank you for not just talking today but uh giving me so much respect just with everything you're doing is i i really appreciate that it makes me feel special so thank you so much for sitting down and talking today mutual lex thank you as well and thank you for the respect that you've shown me and these are really difficult issues that don't have simple answers but that doesn't mean we give up we have to keep thinking and learning and trying and finding solutions in everything we do including on these these big global tragedies that we live through and it's heartbreaking what's going on it it just breaks my heart every day a person who studies this has been studying this for decades and it keeps happening and you think again and yes it is again but but we still have to keep trying and we have to be inspired by those people who are more courageous than we are and sacrifice more than we sacrifice you know for me the russian invasion of ukraine the war in ukraine is experienced in my study at home and in my office at princeton or my coming office at stanford when i moved full time to stanford in september or or it's experienced far away in safety and in comfort and we have to remember that too when we talk about these things when we answer your questions right that as we speak and as we uh comment and think we're experts on these things from the comfort of our existence that there are people in those tragedies right now with no power with no food with no with full uncertainty about the future of the house their children that's it and uh and i've also seen because i have family in both places homes that were home for buildings that were homes for generations now in rubble so yes lex it just it hurts and it's it's let's it's syria where 350 000 at least by u.n estimates died and russia participated in that and it's yemen and and it's so many other places that don't have the same degree of attention that a european country like ukraine has but but yeah we have to remember also that in addition to ukraine and then there's things right home here in new york city where children are without food it's just inexcusable in a country this rich so we shouldn't forget in our study of leaders in our study of geopolitics that ultimately it's about the humanity it's about the human beings and okay like human suffering thank you so much thank you this is amazing conversation talk to you again soon my pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with stephen codkin to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from mahatma gandhi when i despair i remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won there have been tyrants and murderers and for time they can seem invincible but in the end they always fall thank you for listening and hope to see you next time