The following is a conversation with Stephen Codkin, his second time in 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 heart 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 silly 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 Stephen Codkin.

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, Lex.

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.

You as well.

I see this podcast stuff is doing you right.

So we can't really put very easily Vladimir Putin in the same sentence with Joseph Stalin.

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 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.

On some of those 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 in 18th century building inside

the Kremlin.

It's a domed building 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 an ambition,

a grandiosity, in fact.

And so this combination of weakness and grandeur, 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 Tsars, 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, its father from the

main European capitals now than any time since that 18th century.

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 father and father 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.

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

as Stalin made the choice.

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 had absorbed those former Warsaw Pact 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 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 in 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 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 and the lives of peasants and the lives of the working class and the lives of 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 Mao'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, 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 Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping

or the latest incarnation of the supreme leader in Iran.

So we'll talk about this, I think, really powerful framework of five dimensions of authoritarian

regimes that you've put together.

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 the power that influence 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 Potroshev.

Nikolai Potroshev 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.

Only 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 Potroshev is a version of Putin's right hand man, and Potroshev has been giving interviews

in the press.

You probably saw the interview with Niza Vesemaya Gazeta not that long ago.

He writes also his own blog like interventions in the public sphere using the few channels

that are left.

What's interesting about Potroshev, 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.

For example, the CIA and the American government wanted to bring down the Soviet Union.

The 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.

It wasn't 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.

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

Lexa 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 applied?

And then you could go all the way, Obama's administration, George Bush trying to do business

deals and reset the relations and Obama administration trying to reset the relations and doing nothing

after the Georgian war and slapping Putin on the wrist, following the seizure force.

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 Potoshev 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 Russian.

So here's the conspiracy to bring Russia down.

The French who fantasize about themselves as a diplomatic superpower are constantly,

the French leaders are constantly running to the Kremlin to ask what Russian needs,

what concessions from the West Russian needs 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 Potoshev 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 instead the West is

what's changing.

The West is becoming more corrupt.

Western services are being corrupted by the relationship with Russia.

So you have to ask yourself, who are these people in power in 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 Abyssinia 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 very substantial diminution in 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 re stealing, taking the losers in the transition, taking

the money from the winners, and reversing this resentment, this loser status.

Those are your Patrushevs and your Putin's.

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 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 Khodorkovsky'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 Patrushev project, which we see him expressing again and again,

he speaks about it publicly.

It's not something that we need to 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 Patrushev 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, which the Ukrainian people rose up valiantly against

and risked their lives and overturned.

So there were public statements from Putin already back then, the statements about Harkovsky

in 2003 when he was arrested and expropriated.

This is a longstanding 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.

Abyssinia.

So there's that resentment that fuels this narrative, fuels this geopolitics and 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.

Just to maybe not push back, but to give fuller context on the West.

He said there's a narrative 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 useful for forming a narrative.

Now having an enemy for the basic perspective 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.

It seems to be good to have something like a Cold War.

You 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 terrorism is this evil.

You can always point that 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, sending compassion, trying to sort of...

Trying to integrate Russia into global institutions.

Exactly.

...which was a longstanding multi decade effort across multiple countries and multiple administrations

in those countries.

But is there also warmongers on the West that would want more?

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 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 Lex, 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 was some actions, Lex.

There was 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 giving a few of them.

And so the Cold War was not a mistake.

It was not a misunderstanding.

You 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's always convenient to have an enemy.

But there was an enemy, Nikolai Leonov, 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 Leonov 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 Lycholetia.

You will understand that.

And you'll help your podcast listeners understand.

There's a singularity to that kind of expression, Lycholetia.

Leonov just died.

But one of the things, and in fact, the people who were supposedly arrested by Putin as scapegoats

for the Ukraine war, the main one, Sergei Besheda, gave the eulogy at Leonov'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 Leonov wrote in the next sentence, and you know what?

We gave them a lot of material to work with to blacken our image.

So you're saying a kind of sobering reality, which it is possible to some degree to draw

line between the good guys and the bad guys.

Freedom is better than unfreedom, Lex.

It's a lot better than unfreedom, and a guy like you understands that really well.

Well, so yes, but those are all, you know, there's words like justice, freedom.

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?

Institution's Lex, 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 parliament.

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 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 of 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, we can say, is a corrupt democracy.

And to that level, 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.

We're not just talking about sort of the freedom of the press, those kinds of things, but basically

all industries get suffocated and you're no longer being able to, yeah, flourish as

a nation, grow 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 people who are suffering the most from the Putin regime

are not sitting here in New York City, but in fact are sitting there in Russia.

Now of course, with the invasion of Ukraine and really the atrocities that have been well

documented and more are being investigated, we can't easily say anymore that Russians

are the greatest victims of the Putin regime, but 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 there's how many of them now that have fled?

So your powerful, precise, rigorous words are then in a stark contrast, I would say,

to my very recent conversation with Oliver Stone, and I would love you to elaborate

to this agreement you have here with his words and maybe words of people like John Miersheimer.

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 NATO forces.

You disagree with this point in terms of placing the blame somehow on the invasion on 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 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.

I mean, didn't want a raper, but was compelled because of what she was doing and what she

looked like 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, treaties that the UN Charter signed by Russia, 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,

being 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 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.

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.

And 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 that 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 of 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 you can now discuss the ones that

are your favorites, the dishonor or the mistakes, and I could discuss mine, and we could spend

the whole rest of our meeting today discussing the West's mistakes and problems.

And we won't end up in prison for it.

Yeah, Lex, and so I'm thankful for that, and I'm thankful that people may disagree and

that people make the argument that NATO expansion is to blame.

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 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 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 it's a 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 chimerical 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 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.

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 that's not criminal.

If the West's 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.

NATO is a defensive alliance and the countries are largely pacifist 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 in the

EU, which was not going to happen in our lifetimes and was not a direct threat to the Putin regime

since the Western countries that make up the EU and NATO decided that Ukraine was not ready

for membership.

There was no consensus.

It was not going to happen, but Ukraine's free choice to 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.

That is legal under international law and it's also a realist fact of life.

The realists like to tell you that Russia here was disrespected, Russia's interests

were not taken into account, et cetera, et cetera.

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 we have to be clear about where responsibility

lies in these events that we're talking about today.

So you get to trouble, it's largely erroneous to think about both the West or the United

States from an imperialist perspective and Russia from an imperialist perspective is

better clear 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 24, 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 and calculating the outcomes and everything

else about this decision in your view?

Yeah, Lex, 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 when you're driving down the road and that very annoying voice is telling

you in a thousand feet, make a right and you fail to make a right, it recalibrates, right?

It tells you, okay, now go turn around or you 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, I asked them, 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 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 stage car accident,

or using a handgun.

You use a novi choke, or you use some other internationally outlawed chemical weapon.

Now 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 price.

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.

You invaded the country, and you bid off these territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

What price did you pay for that?

Then you decided, you know, I think I'll now invade Crimea, and forcibly annex Crimea,

and I'll instigate an insurrection in the Donbas, in Eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk.

Let's imagine you did all that, and then you had to stick out your wrist so that it

could be slapped a couple of times.

You said, you know, I can pretty much do what I want.

I'm putting a sanction here and there, and they're doing this, and they're doing that,

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 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 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 German cliché, a Wandel durch Handel, right, change through trade

or transformation through trade, one of Angela Merkel's favorite expressions, right, you're

going to get the other side to be better.

Better 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.

Can we pause on that really quick?

So this is kind of idea of it's okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, which is a more

generous description of what you're saying, that 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, 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.

We have a lot of literature on the Putin regime, which talks about the kleptocracy.

The place is a 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 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 St. George's

Hall, some of the greatest interiors in the world.

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, Lex, 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 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 the thing that can get us in trouble in

the United States as well and lead us to wars, illegal wars and so on.

But the United States, those are precautions for breaking the law.

You're going to pay for illegal wars in the end.

You're saying that in authoritarian regimes, the sentimentality can really get out of hand.

By charismatic leaders, they can take that to manipulate the populace to make that in

the span of history led to atrocities and in today's world lead to humanitarian crises.

It's not just the kleptocracy, it's a belief system.

It's passion, it's conviction.

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

from them.

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're 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 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 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 pr...

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 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, 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.

And then you forget that there's English.

You forget that there's technology and iPhones.

You forget that there's all of this 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 it impresses

upon your consciousness where you live.

You live in a Western dominated world that the multipolar 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 and the euro.

Your goal is an international financial system that you dominate.

Your goal is technological self sufficiency made in China 2035.

Your goal is a world that you dominate, not that the West dominates.

And you're going to 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 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 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.

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.

So that's the world you live in where you're trying to get to this other world.

Or at the center of the other world, you dominate the other world.

But the only way to get there, Lex, is the West has to weaken, divide itself, maybe

even collapse.

And so you're encouraging to the extent possible, Western divisions, Western disunity, a Western

lack of resolve, Western mistakes and Western invasion of the wrong country and Western

destruction of its credibility through international financial crises.

One could go on.

So 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 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 lacks.

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 in what happens.

They can't even build an airport without the money disappearing.

The Sochi Olympic selects officially cost them $50 billion.

You look around at the infrastructure that endured from that $50 billion 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 lacks, 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, 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 civilly incentivized to escalate any

military aggressive conflicts that are around you or create new ones or just...

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 going to stand up to this?

We're not going to allow this to happen.

We're not going to 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 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 a 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 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 Biden 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 a 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, to hell

with this money laundering and reputation laundering, to 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 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 the separate factions that make up Ukraine uniting, it's

the unification, the uniting against the common enemy is 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 Zelensky, where it makes total

sense to flee, he stood his ground.

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?

I think that was a compliment.

There we go.

Let's go.

Lex.

Zelensky unification.

I'm sitting here in front of you.

Thank you.

It's an honor.

It's a mutual honor.

So 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, 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, Zelensky had what, 25% 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 Zelensky decides to risk his life on behalf of his country, Ukraine.

He decides to stay in the capital.

He's not going to flee.

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, it's a TV production company and a TV personality.

That's exactly what you want running a country because they're crushing in the information

war.

And he's spectacular, European parliament, US Congress, Israeli parliament.

There's no room on Zoom, let alone in person, that he can't win over.

He's just so effective.

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 he means it.

And the nation is behind him.

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, the Biden, we talk about Putin's miscalculation.

The Biden 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 moment?

The Biden administration was poised to do another Afghanistan moment.

That ignominious exit from Afghanistan was almost what happened in Ukraine when Biden

administration offered him that ride out of there.

And fortunately, he declined and helped rally in the people from below also rallied to stop

the invader without the presidency and without the government in Ukraine.

Including the Biden administration and the European leaders who latched on.

Fortunately, they had the presence of mind to latch on to this gift, this bravery and

ingeniousness of Zelensky 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.

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 Zelensky 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 courage, but at battlefield resistance

to the Russian invasion.

So I stand corrected by the Ukrainians, and I'm ecstatic 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.

He's in the 90% approval rating.

I mean, I think they stopped doing the polling.

Once he hit 91% or whatever it was in the previous poll, I think they all understood

that for now they didn't need any more polling, that it's pretty clear the nation.

So 25% to 90 something percent.

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 this power that's rooted, I mean, in your study of the 20th century is so deeply

rooted in history, there's this power center of the world is now going to, has been shaken

by this event.

And how that changes the world is unclear.

It's unclear what lesson China learns from watching this, what 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 feeling that we're in an inflection moment, an inflection point,

I think that's widespread.

And I think it's widespread for good reason, we might be.

But I also share your, 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 bombing of the towers here in New York City and the hitting of the Pentagon.

And that didn't last.

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 9 11 rallying around the United States.

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 multipolar 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 nonwestern.

The U.N. 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 U.S., 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 multipolar world.

We talked already about the international financial system.

That's the Western, not multipolar.

We talked about the U.S. 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 that, 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, 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, Western power is not consultative in a decision making fashion.

It's consultative after the fact.

Okay, 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

lent you money, and now the West has changed interest rates 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 it's

authority and credibility and power, but 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

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 it can freeze your property, 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, Lex, 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 airspace, aircraft industry, 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.

So 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 West is, 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

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 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 clearheaded 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 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, there are these two Russian soldiers

having a smoke in Warsaw, and 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, we lost the information

war, and there they are sitting in Warsaw having that smoke, right?

So yeah, 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 had judged the Winter 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 Donbass.

Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, eastern Ukraine, a part of eastern Ukraine.

And they've been driven out of Kharkiv and the area immediately surrounding Kharkiv.

They never captured Kharkiv, 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, like leaders in Russia have an easier time with

a 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 further into Ukrainian territory since February 2022,

including in Herson region, the famous Mariupol siege that just ended.

They have built a large presence in areas north of Crimea on the Sea of Azov, the Black

Sea latoral ultimately, that they didn't previously hold.

They're still fighting in Luhansk for full control over at least half of the Donbass,

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 any economy anymore.

They have somewhere between 33 and 50% unemployment.

It's hard to measure unemployment in a war economy, but they're a metallurgical industry

that Azov style steel plant in Mariupol 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 any economy, and you need $5 billion or $7 billion or $8 billion

a month 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 any economy anymore, you're indigent.

And even if you take the lower number, $5 billion as opposed to Zelensky's ask for $7

billion, $5 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?

If you use the $7 billion or $8 billion, you get up to $100 billion a year.

President Joe Biden just signed the bill making it law, $40 billion 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 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

Mir Sharma lines about how this is really NATO's fault.

And you've got Hungary dragging its feet on the oil embargo against Russia, and you've

got Turkey dragging its feet on the recent applications of Sweden and Finland for NATO

expand.

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 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 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, 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 an 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 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 willing 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 the 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'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 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 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 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, which is to say, one person, Vladimir Putin, will acknowledge that he's

lost the war because the Ukrainians won 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 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 the 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, et cetera.

We have tremendously, let's say, 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 has his own key and separate codes

and must do the same, insert that key and 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 implemented, will those young guys flying 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 the 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 use of such tactical

nuclear weapons.

It could well be that Putin and just himself, he alone can fire them or order them to be

fired.

You know, 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 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 we got the Kremlin to 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 and

Brussels direct engagement of the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine.

Do 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 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 let's also remember, Lex, that there's another variable here.

They'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 desperate provider

they implement your orders.

But who's to say that somewhere along the chain of command, people start to say, you

know, I'm going to ignore that order, or I'm going to sabotage that order, or I'm going

to flee the battlefield, or I'm going to injure myself so that I don't have to fight, or I'm

going to 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 husbands, or their fathers are either

missing in 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 conscripts, or they're fed dog food, or they don't have any weapons anymore

because there's no resupply.

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, to 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.

It'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 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 a song that goes, the operation Barbarossa, 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 connections to this unexplainable war 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 that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal?

Can that label be assigned to the actions of this man?

Well, 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, Alex, 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 Hague 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 by skilled people who are excellent at gathering that evidence, and

that process is underway.

And Ukraine has a trial underway now of one alleged war criminal who's pleaded guilty

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, Izyum, Harkiv, Kyiv, 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 denazify Ukraine

have invaded the same places that the Nazis invaded back in 1941.

As somebody who's working on volume three of your work on Stalin going through this

period, is it eerie to you?

Yes, it is, Lex.

I've written the chapters of volume three, I've drafted the chapters on the war, and

as I say, the place names are very evocative, unfortunately.

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 extent of farthest Russian troop advancement.

Because behind the Russian lines in Ukraine, Crimea accepted, you have insurgencies, you

have armed insurgency.

In Militopov, 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 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.

Ukrainian Soviet partisans killed Nazi officials, Wehrmacht soldiers, Wehrmacht 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 try to evict the

Russians that way and then remount the counter offensive at 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 800,000, 700,000, 1,002, 1,004,

that's not what we're talking about today.

But the weapons, the cruise missiles, artillery fire, artillery fire used to be very inaccurate

and it was like saturation.

You would just fire 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 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 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.

As they say, kapayut, kapayut, right?

They're digging everywhere behind.

Your Russian is beautiful.

Digging in, I wish, Lex, like yours.

But 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, is cyber

attacks and cyber warfare, which is 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 electrical signals and that.

Yeah.

But those Ukrainian people, they're like you, Lex.

They're young and they're technically really proficient.

And they've been amazing.

You know, they spent those teenage years in the basement, playing video games, 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 about 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 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 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 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 a war or end a war

on terms that meet your original expectations, right?

We've been fighting wars, but we haven't been fighting wars 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 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 an all volunteer force is 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, a scholar of 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 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 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's something about COVID and the pandemic that creates isolation, the distancing.

It's such a silly little nuance 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, but the intimacy of 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 is one people, and you 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 that has affected him, the pandemic.

I think there must be something to that 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 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.

It's not the conversation that you're encouraging of common humanity.

It's that roiling resentment volcano that's just exploding and exploding.

By the time he gets through the monologue of the grievances, the time of the meeting

is expired or over time.

That's a brilliant statement, but that's where the skill of conversation comes in.

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 a really important 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 worldviews 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 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 UN, 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 911 tragedy.

They didn't connect right away.

President Bush was not in Washington, 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