Book Talk With Timothy Garton Ash: Homelands: A Personal History Of Europe

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: Thank you, everyone, for coming. I'm delighted that you could join us in the celebration of Timothy Garton Ash's new book. I'm also delighted and honored to be able to introduce to you our four fantastic panelists. And so from my left and to your right, we first have Tobias Wolf, a preeminent author of short stories and memoirs who is the recipient of the PEN Faulkner Award for fiction and the national medal in the Arts.

He is currently the woods professor of humanities here at Stanford. Next is Mike McFaul, who served as the US ambassador to Russia. And is a fellow at Hoover, a professor of political science, and the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Next to him, of course, is Condoleezza Rice, who has served as US secretary of state and national security advisor.

She has been the provost at Harvard, sorry, Stanford.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: I was looking at.

>> Michael  McFaul: They wish, they wish.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: My apologies, I was looking at a colleague from Harvard, so my mind went there. Let's just throw some salt over the shoulder and ignore that. But she is currently the director of the Hoover Institution here.

And finally we have Timothy Garton Ash, a historian of the present who is a professor of European studies, and Isaiah Berlin Professorial fellow at Oxford University. He is also a fellow here at the Hoover Institution, and he is the author of ten books. His most recent book Homelands, a personal history of Europe, is an incredibly erudite, humane and cosmopolitan account of the post-war European project.

And so Tim was going to speak a bit about his book, and then our panelists will respond. I hope very much you enjoy the conversation, and I hope you'll join me in welcoming Timothy Garton Ash

>> Timothy Garton Ash: Thank you very much, Anna. This book took me just 50 years to write.

>> Timothy Garton Ash: 50 years of traveling around Europe, witnessing great events. Meeting people, writing it all down in little notebooks like this, which I may record something about this evening, too. Also studying Europe more conventionally in libraries and archives, worrying about Europe, writing about Europe. For half that time I'm shocked to say for half that time, I've been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, coming to Stanford every year.

And I do want to start by saying a big thank you to Hoover, to Stanford, and to all the wonderful friends and colleagues here who so enriched my work. What they know of Europe, who only Europe know. And I also want to say that in all the Americas, I could not imagine a better panel to discuss this book than Condoleezza Rice, Michael McFaul, Wilson and Anna Jamala Malabusa.

So I really want to hear what they have to say as I'm sure to you. So I'm gonna confine myself to say just three things very briefly. First of all, this book is an example of a rather unusual genre, it's history illustrated by memoir and reportage. So it's not a classical literary memoir of the kind of which Toby Wolf is such a brilliant exponent, it's not a classical work of reportage.

The anecdotes, the memories, the stories all serve the history. So, for example, it's Autumn, 1991, I'm sitting opposite Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who has just united Germany. Now, for those of you who never met him, I know Conde you did many times. Helmut Kohl was the largest human being.

>> Timothy Garton Ash: I have ever met. He was enormous in both heist and girth, he was what Dr.Johnson called a mountainous man. And Kohl was towering over me in his chair in his office in Bonn, we were talking about the consequences of German unification. And suddenly he said, by the way, do you realize you're sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler?

What does one say?

>> Timothy Garton Ash: A conversation stopper if ever I heard one, if I'd been quick enough, what I should have said was, actually Hebwundersconsler, there was great Admiral Doenitz between Hitler and you, but I was much too gobsmacked to say anything. But the point that Kohl, who had a great sense of history was making was that he was very conscious of his historical responsibility as, in effect, the first chancellor of a united Germany since Adolf Hitler.

And he was going to do everything differently instead of putting a German roof over Europe. He was gonna put a European roof over Germany, which indeed he proceeded to do. So the story serves the history, or to tell just one other story. It's 1994, a German, Russian discussion meeting in St. Petersburg, and there's one man, Russian none of us can quite identify.

A rather unpleasant looking little man, slightly rat like face.

>> Timothy Garton Ash: Seems to be some sort of sidekick of the mayor, nobody knows who this guy is. And suddenly he pipes up in the middle of this conversation, which had been very harmonious. And said, we have to remember that there are territories that are outside the Russian Federation which have historically always belonged to Russia.

And the Russian Federation has a duty towards them and he specifically mentioned Crimea. You guessed, his name was V Putin, he's a guy who, 20 years later, actually did seize Crimea by force. Don't tell me that the Eastern enlargement of NATO was the cause of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

The imperialist revanchist instinct, the desire to get back as much as possible of Russian power and influence was there right back then in 1994. And maybe Mike and Conde would want to say a bit more about that. This takes me to my second point, which is this is of course not the entire history of Europe over the last 50 years.

That would be quite impossible, it's history written from a particular point of view. It's the history of Europe and freedom, the two like motifs of my work. When I first started traveling as a young man regularly to Europe in the early 1970s, most Europeans still lived under dictatorships.

We did the sums, 289 million Europeans lived in democracies, 389 million lived under dictatorships. Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, but also Spain, Portugal and Greece. And then starting in the mid 1970s with the end of the dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece. You have this extraordinary upward curve in the enlargement of freedom in Europe.

Southern Europe, East Central Europe, Southeastern Europe, the Baltic states, Ukraine. Across more than 30 years, and by the same token, an unprecedented enlargement of the geopolitical west. Six members of the european community in 19, 72, 27 by 2000, 715 of NATO, 26 by 2007, including, amazingly, the baltic states.

There has never been such a period of extraordinary progress towards the great goal of a EuroPoland free. Of course, there were setbacks along the way, five wars in former Yugoslavia, 911. But nonetheless, the general trajectory was upward. And actually, interestingly, we might want to talk about this in European history as opposed to Middle eastern and American history 9/11 doesn't with hindsight, seem such a great turning point.

The great turning point is 2008. Starting in 2008, with simultaneously the eruption of the global financial crisis and Putin's seizure of two great chunks of Georgia, you have what I call the downward turn. And from that point forward, you have a cascade of crises, sometimes called the polycrisis.

So the financial crisis segues into the great recession in many European countries, into the eurozone crisis, which lasts for many years, hitting southern Europe particularly hard. In 2010 already, Viktor Orbán starts demolishing democracy in Hungary, which by the way, he's pretty effectively done. In 2014, Putin seizes Crimea and starts the Russo-Ukrainian war in eastern Ukraine.

The Russia-Ukrainian war that, as Ukrainians remind us, has been going on for more than nine years. 2015, the refugee crisis. 2016, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Nationalist populists are doing increasingly well in european elections. Marine Le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany, the COVID pandemic.

And then on the 24 February 2022, the biggest crisis of all, Putin's full scale invasion of Ukraine, starting the largest war in Europe since 1945. So a cascade of crisis all the way down from 2008 to now actually. I argue in the book that the 24 February 2022, the full scale invasion of Ukraine, marks the end of what I call the post war era.

So we have the post war era, post 1945, and then the post war era after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I argue goes from the 9 November 1989 to the 24 February 2022. And that also creates an even larger frame for the book, because, of course, to understand the history of Europe, you have to go back to 1945.

And so the bookends are the end of a major war in Europe in 1945 and the beginning of another major war in Europe last year, a war that is still going on, which, by the way, Ukraine really has to win for reasons I hope we can discuss. The final thing very quickly, I wanted to say before going to the panel, is obviously one of the big questions we need to discuss is why this downward turn after such a long, sustained period of success and progress?

And there are many, many reasons we could adduce. There's no shortage of varieties of hubris, both in Europe and the United States. But I want to single out just one element which seems to me particularly interesting, and then go into the conversation. I think one of the most fundamental reasons was a mistake we made as Europeans, and to some extent I think Americans too, in our understanding of history.

Most simply, this was the fallacy of extrapolation. We took the way things had gone since 1989, but in a larger sense, since the mid 1970s, and somehow assumed that that was how they were going to go on. There would be setbacks, but they would be setbacks. We took the most non-linear event in modern history, modern European history certainly, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, which was a one in a million example of historical luck, what Machiavelli calls fortuna, and we turned it into a linear projection.

We took history with a small h, as it really happens, which is always the product of the interaction between deep structure and process, on the one hand, and contingency, conjuncture, choice, collective will and individual leadership on the other. And we turned it into history with a capital h, a hegelian process of the inevitable progress towards freedom.

But nothing is inevitable, and certainly not freedom. Freedom is not a process, freedom is a constant struggle. That's what we forgot, and that's what the Ukrainians are reminding us of. For me, the word of the year is the Ukrainian word volia, which is a really interesting word. It exists in Russian, but the Ukrainian meaning is quite specific.

It combines freedom and will or willpower. So it's the will to freedom. It's the will power of freedom. It's freedom as will, and that is, of course, always the way in which freedom is preserved. The good news, of course, ladies and gentlemen, is that since nothing in the upward curve was inevitable, nothing in the downward term is inevitable either.

It's up to us with that, I look forward very much to the conversation.

>> Tobias Wolff: Tim, congratulations on this book. I had the good fortune of knowing Tim for some time, and I've heard him talk about some of these things, a lot of these things over the years, and to see them come so beautifully together in homelands.

It's a wonderful, wonderful book. This depth of research and lived experience that goes into it and yet presented so naturally, there's no display of the work that went into. It makes me think of Horace's description of successful work of art, the art that conceals art. And that's very much a quality of your writing here.

It's studded with telling detail, almost novelistic, sometimes in its detail, though without the vice of that being fictional. In a work of history, I think of, for example, in Germany, the millionth Turkish Gastarbeiter was recognized by a gift of carnations and a moped. How in the world did you know that?

The title of your book itself, a personal history of Europe, it might Point to the person. Timothy Garton Nash, but in fact, the personal dimension of your book, though, encompasses experience of yours. The gaze goes outward. It is a personal history of Europe in that it captures the experience of persons, of people, not just yourself, but indeed many more said that history is understood and reversed, but lived forward.

So it is with our experience. We look back on it, but in the moment we don't know where it's going. We are in that experience at the time and sometimes feel caught in it. And you really capture that beautifully. We tend to think of history as a movement of great personalities, powerful personalities, tensions between political, ideological movements, and the tensions and wars that those produce.

But if the personal is political, the political is also personal. It is experienced by people emotionally, intellectually, morally, and you capture that internal reality very well. I think of a terrific passage in your book. Some friends of yours, East Berliners, the Kreitschels, the boy Occam has participated in a march that's gotten him in trouble in East Berlin.

And he manages to escape to the west, to West Berlin. But he comes back regularly to an S Bahn station which overlooks East Berlin, where his family comes out to wave to him. His little sister Caroline lives for these moments of greeting with her brother. It's such a poignant illustration, so personal of a reality which we just thought of so long as the wall.

I had some experience of that myself. I lived with my family for a year in west Berlin, just the year before the wall came down. In fact, we left in August of 88. So almost exactly a year before the wall came down. And we had many german, most of our friends were german, of course, and I would sometimes bring up, we would have these almost comical encounters going over to the east.

They would take our son's sandwiches apart to look for, I guess, microfiche. But why would we bringing it into the east would have been a question that you would have thought they'd have asked. And the border guards had a particular kind of glower that they had been taught clearly.

And it made my sons laugh, which didn't help us at our crossings.

>> Tobias Wolff: But we would talk to our friends about the wall and say, when do you think this is going to come down? And they say, you Americans have this idea that this wall is gonna come down.

It was just not that long after Reagan had said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, that it's then become a very convenient political football for you Americans and others to play with. But you have to understand that Germany has been historically divided into fragments of duchies, electorates, principalities.

This is not a new thing for us. It's a way of trying to gain political advantage and continually harping on this, forget about it, it's not gonna happen. And these were people who would have liked it to come down, who were telling us this. And they must have been, you know, almost as surprised as we were when it did finally come down.

So history does take these turns that we can't even begin to credit as possible. And yet, here we are in a world in which that wall doesn't exist, but in which other walls that we did not anticipate have arisen. And I think we'll certainly talk about those in our conversation.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: Thank you.

>> Michael  McFaul: Great, that was great.

>> Michael  McFaul: So Tim, congratulations on writing another book. I read my first Timothy Garten Ash book here as an undergraduate. I don't know if I've told you this story. I wrote about Soviet interventions in 56, 68 and why they didn't invade Poland in 81.

And with Alex George and Alex Dahlan were my advisors. And I stumbled across your book in green library, and it was unlike any book I had read up to that point. There were no footnotes. It's your 1983 book. It read like a living document, just like you said.

It was a story of solidarity. And I got so excited by this book. And studying Solidarnost, I started Polish. I spent two summers in Poland in 86 and 87 and went to Oxford to write my DPhil because I wanted to be just like you. And then I got off on some Africa thing that we don't have time to get into.

I got off course. But then you came to Oxford, and I was a student there, and you were bringing us the news from behind the Iron Curtain. It was either you'd just been to East Berlin. I actually think you'd just been to Poland. And it was electric. We're all these young people, 86, 87 in that era.

To most of the outside world, everything was dead. And you would come to tell us, no, it is not dead, things are alive. And I remember coming out of one of those, some small, cramped place, and I was sitting on the floor, and I just thought, man, this guy is so exciting because not only it's already been invoked, but I want to invoke it again.

And it's a great honor that I've gotten to know you. You didn't know any of this. I've never said this before to Tim. Not only does Tim including in this book, but throughout his life, been an analyst and an explainer and a historian of the present. But he also has a normative commitment to things that I have a normative commitment, too.

And the ability to combine those things is not easy. You know Condi, ideas defining a free society? That's not an easy thing to do. And you've done it again in this book. And I wanted to be like you. And in some ways, I think I have been, Tim, not exactly.

I still write with a lot of footnotes. I'd like to get away from that. But it's a real honor to be on this panel with you tonight for that reason. Second thing I want to say, it's a fantastic book. Fantastic books won't get written if you don't buy them.

So everyone in this room, we're providing the free entertainment. Free, I don't think we charge, right? We're providing free entertainment now. But I implore you, buy the book, because if we don't buy these books, future Timothy Garton Ashes are not gonna be able to publish this book. So please buy the book.

And with that, I have four really brief comments. One about history, writing about history, a reflection on counterfactuals, second. Third, a question about policy of our present day because you invoked it that I want to ask. And then fourth, one about identity. And I'm gonna do four points in four minutes.

So one, just an appreciation of. You've already invoked it. But in this book, and by the way, I'm reading this book backwards, didn't Norman Davies write a book about the history of Poland when he started with the present backwards? So I'm doing it that way because I'm more interested in the present than the past because of Ukraine.

And the deep appreciation that Tim has for a leaders, right, you write about Gorbachev and Putin, right? So the good and the bad of what you just talked about, history is not made. It's contingent, but Tim, my favorite chapter, and by the way, all these chapters are really short.

I really love that, too. Everybody should write that way. My favorite chapter is actually on Brexit because you tell this contingency of that story in a way that I just think people have forgotten. Like this is all inevitable. No, it was very contingent. And I wish more historians would think about the contingencies and path dependencies.

The way you bring out in this book, it made me wonder, by the way, are there any other great leaders, good or bad, in Europe today? Maybe you can comment on that and what you think about Zelenskyy in particular. But other European leaders, I wonder, you've described some of these other giant, mountainous men I think you just described.

Do we have any of those left in Europe today? Second, counterfactuals. This is the part that I'm most interested in, especially sitting next to Condi right now. Tim reminds us, actually, we're all together. Condi invited Tim and I to come meet with the president. It was a fantastic.

I don't know how you remember that event. I remember it incredibly well. Condi, I don't know if you know, we spent three hours afterwards talking about what we had just did with, Condi invited us to brief President Bush on his way for his first meeting with Putin, and it was about Russia and Europe.

And Tim writes about that in the book and he writes about his commitment to expanding NATO. By the way, Condi, correct me if I'm wrong, but I have a memory. The day after Boris Yeltsin was elected, didn't you write an op ed in the New York Times saying it's now time to expand?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Time to expand, yes.

>> Michael  McFaul: I'm right. So, okay.

>> Timothy Garton Ash: I don't remember that.

>> Michael  McFaul: I remember that. And I was wrestling with that when I was reading this because we were always waiting for Yeltsin, right? We had to worry about him and you time that perfectly to say, okay, let's stop waiting.

And I have two counterfactuals that I want you to wrestle with, Tim. One is, I'm thinking of Bucharest. I'm thinking of how not much has been done since Bucharest, by the way, in terms of NATO expansion. Did we go too slow even by the standards that you were talking about back when we met with President Bush?

And the counterfactual is had we just said, we're not waiting for anybody, we won the cold war, we're going in, we're going to give these, anybody who wants to join, they're going to be, and we're going to give them arms and we're going to get this deal done, not just to where the big bang was done, but all the way to Ukraine.

I see some Ukrainians here tonight. I wanna know how you would answer that question. But I'm also interested in the other counterfactual, did we not do enough to integrate Russia, Ukraine, Georgia? You tell me where we should stop when we had the moment because of what you just invoked.

I don't know if Frank is here. I know Fukuyama, is Frank here? Frank and I were walking over together. He is here. So I want Frank to get into this conversation, too, because we thought we were in this moment and the Hegelian trajectory was there. We didn't think we had to do anything right.

It was all inevitable. And then there were domestic politics. We had this very provincial governor in 1992. He was running for president and he said this, your old boss, he said, we're done with the outside world. And his slogan was, it's the economy, stupid. George HW Bush was spending too much time on the things that Condi was working on.

We have to go home. We have to do this stuff at home. Was that part of one of the counterfactuals that we got wrong and could we have done more? Would that have prevented the revanchism from Russia? I don't think so, but I'm interested in what you say.

Two other things, lessons for today, Ukraine. And it's just exactly along the lines of this. Are we going too slow? Is the European Union going too slow? My Ukrainian friends say they're deeply frustrated with the signaling they're getting from Brussels. Is that a mistake? Should we be learning from the analogy I just said.

NATO membership, are we going too slow on that for Ukraine? Are we missing the moment? I want to hear what you think about that. And most importantly, I wanna know reconstruction after the war. Halyna Yanchenko is actually here, a member of parliament from the Ukrainian Rada, by the way, it's great to have you here at Stanford.

Halyna, I just went to your talk yesterday, and you invoked Germany in 1945 in your talk and wondering, will the west, will Europe? And you also said the Americans, I think, will we be there in the way we need to, to create the miracle after 45 for your country?

And I'm wondering what you think about that, Tim, especially, you know, Europe, but also, you know, America pretty well. How do you gauge the sentiment? Are we up to the task of those really big things? Sarkozy has been quoted in the New York Times today saying, we shouldn't be.

So I'm interested in what you think of that. And the last thing, because this is a book about European, and I loved your story about your father and you going to Paris and France and identities. And my first trip to Europe was in 1983. The first city I physically went to was Helsinki, never been abroad before.

I grew up in Montana. I went abroad to come to school when I came to this communist state called California, according to my mother. But my first trip abroad, I landed in Helsinki, but I actually went to Leningrad cuz I was doing a summer language program there. And I got to Leningrad, and I subsequently later made it to Paris and Berlin and other great European cities.

But when I got to Leningrad, I was like, this was not communism. This was not the Soviet Union. For me as a country kid, not country, from a rural area of Montana, this felt like Europe to me. And then, you know, I met people that knew a lot more about, back then.

We called it western culture, right? They knew more about Matisse than I did. They knew more about Beethoven than I did. They had read Dostoevsky, I hadn't. And it made me feel like there's way more connectivity between Leningrad, it was called then, and the rest of Europe than there is between.

When I got to Oxford and Butte, Montana, where I grew up, that gap seemed much bigger. But I wonder today if that's true. Are Russians european? Can they be again? And while you're at it, are Georgians European? Thanks.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, I have to start by saying that Mike McFaul always manages to make us all feel old.

>> Condoleezza Rice: He read Tim's book when he was in college. He was a student of mine when he was in college. Thanks a lot, Mike.

>> Michael  McFaul: You wrote your first book, very young.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Of course. So, Tim, congratulations. It's a wonderful book, and I'm going to close with a couple of comments about why it's a wonderful service to education and to young people.

But let me start by saying that my favorite line in the book, and then I wanted to go and make sure that my memoir didn't fit in this category. A related danger, visible in all memoirs, is overstating the historical significance of those events in which you happen to have been involved.

>> Condoleezza Rice: So at the danger of doing exactly that, let me say that the first thing that I really loved about the book is the degree to which its vivification of people and moments just brought flooding back to me in a way that, Toby, you would be very proud of as a literary figure.

It came flooding back to me in a way that was almost cinematic. You mentioned Helmut Kohl. Marlon Fitzwater, who at the time was the press secretary to President George HW Bush, said that when Kohl walked into a room, everything else disappeared.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Your description of him brought all of that flooding back, but also that this giant of a man at that moment somehow understood the pressures of history on him.

And he made decisions that at the time were quite controversial and maybe even had unintended consequences. For instance, the decision to have the one for one Deutsche mark to Ostmark conversion, which led to the victory of the alliance for Germany, which, of course, Angela Merkel was a part of.

And by leading to the victory of the alliance for Germany in that first unified election, allowed West Germany, the FRG, to be the successor state to the Third Reich. Instead of having to merge with East Germany, it allowed an acquisition of the East German lender. As a result, with the FRG as the successor state, it was able to choose NATO as its alliance, and Germany remained a member of alliance.

So I think about a person like Helmut Kohl, this giant of a man, and his acceptance of history's calling to him at that particular moment. And it leads a little bit to Mike's question, where are those people today? Maybe Zelenskyy in Ukraine, but who are others? A second vivid moment for me you describe in Gdansk.

I went to Gdansk with President George HW Bush. And I will never forget the night before, we had been in Warsaw with the then Jaruzelski government. We had landed at the airport at night with goose stepping polish soldiers. And I was thinking to myself, nothing has changed here.

The next day, we went to Gdansk, and there were the workers, 100,000 of them, in the square with American flags saying, freedom, freedom, freedom, Bush, Bush, Bush. And your book again brings that back to me. And a third scene with this small man, this KGB officer who somehow had found common cause with the reformist mayor of St. Petersburg.

And I remember thinking at the time, because I met him on that trip, David Holloway was actually with us on that trip. Sobchak had asked some of us to come and talk about the new european university. He'd given them this wonderful reception for us at the Winter palace.

These Russians were dressed in the black of the intellectuals of the 19th century. They had taken on names like Pushkin and Tolstoy, you know, just kind of, they were all in that legacy. Sobchak's wife was wearing the biggest double headed eagle pin I'd ever seen.

>> Condoleezza Rice: In the corner was this man who looked quite out of place.

It was Vladimir Putin. And I remember thinking, what brings him? Of course, he was a royalist. And perhaps one of the things that we didn't see about Putin at the time, when he said that the tragedy was the tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, he later said, because 25 million Russians were left outside of mother Russia.

And when he talked about the great men of Russia, not, by the way, the great women, but the great men of Russia, he told me it's because Alexander II and Peter the Great, only great men like that. He didn't say Stalin had made Russia what it was. And so your vivification of these moments brings flooding back these central figures Walesa in Poland, Kohl in Germany, Putin in Russia.

We have a tendency, as political scientists, not to want to have the great man theory, that it's really history's great sweep. But I think this vivification reminds us that people actually do matter. The next point I'd like to make is that this book also, for me, the identities are great.

You know, the Italians, the Polish, etc. But I have to say there are three identities or three countries that it focused me on. One is Germany. Its centrality for now centuries to what Europe would become. The United States and Russia, which de Tocqueville said would ultimately control the fate of the world, to paraphrase him, and the degree to which Russia apart of and apart from Europe throughout its entire history.

The United States reluctantly dragged into Europe in World War I returns, dragged into Europe again in World War II, this time stays. And the question whether these three great identities, these three great countries, as we look to the future, because coming out of this war, which Ukraine must win, but coming out of this war, there is no doubt that Europe will be transformed.

And what will be the role of Germany in it? A friend of mine said Putin had managed to end German pacifism and Swedish neutrality all within one year. What role will Germany play? What role will a diminished, isolated Russia that Vladimir Putin seems to be intent on making a large North Korea?

What wither that Russia? And I think for some of us, it's particularly sad. You ask Mike, could we have integrated Russia more? I have to say, I think that the end of George H.W. Bush's term, President Clinton, then President Bush again, then President Obama, I don't think there was any lack of wanting to integrate Russia.

The question was, did Russia wish to be integrated? And all of the trying for it that somehow failed. And so that brings me to the next question about these three great identities. Democracy transformed 13 small colonies on the Eastern seaboard from a slave-holding country at its birth to a country that a century and a half later could have a black woman secretary of state sworn in by a Jewish Supreme Court justice named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

That's what democracy did for the United States over a long period of time.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Now, that's an extraordinary story, but maybe even more extraordinary is what Helmut Cole said to you. The successor state to one of the most brutal dictatorships of all times, a technocratic dictatorship in Nazi Germany, would be transformed into a democratic country that would wait its time, bide its time, until circumstance allowed it to absorb the east and to become a strong, vibrant democracy in the heart of Europe.

George HW Bush once said, he went to Germany as vice president, and people threw, as you remember, to Ronald Reagan, who wasn't all that popular in Germany, and people threw eggs at his car. And when we were talking about the unification of Germany, and he was the biggest proponent of let the Germans unify as fast as they can, it's a German decision, not an American one.

He said that the moment when Germans threw exodus car reminded him that Germany had become truly a democracy.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And that he would never fear Germany again.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And so democracy transformed Germany. It transformed the United States. Why has it not transformed Russia? I don't honestly believe there's anything in the DNA of the Russian people.

So what is it that it keeps failing in Russia? And then the final point that I'd like to make is about young people and this book. I was raised to be a concert pianist. And so when I realized that really probably wasn't going to happen, I started looking around for another major.

And I took a course in international politics by a man named Joseph Korbel, who was Madeleine Albright's father. And he vivified history for me, a former Czech diplomat who was a wonderful storyteller. You're a wonderful storyteller here. And somehow we need to get our young people, our students, to read history in this way.

History has become narrow in its scope, not broad in its scope. And I was trying to explain to a group of students why it is that I think the Europeans have reacted the way that they have to events in Ukraine. And I started by saying, well, you see, it's like the negative of an old photograph.

And then I looked out there and I realized they had no-

>> Condoleezza Rice: Idea what I was talking about. It was clearly the wrong metaphor for people who think you just take it on a phone and it appears. But I worry that they won't know this history. And so not only do I encourage all of you to buy it, but I'm going to encourage everybody under the age of 21 to buy it too.

Thank you.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: You've gotten a wealth of amazing questions. So I was wondering if you would like to engage with some of these before we continue the conversation.

>> Timothy Garton Ash: Let me try. First of all, thank you all very much. What an amazing array of comments. My blush is enveloping me.

By the way, since you mentioned the extraordinary leadership of President George HW Bush in getting German unification in the can. Of course, one of the great figures of history who wasn't so enthusiastic was Margaret Thatcher. And one of the little encounters I have in the book is when we were summoned to visit her at her country residence Chequers in March 1990, basically to explain to her that as it was put in the covering letter, the Germans were not the same old Huns.

This was the mission. And it was an amazing array of people. Gordon Craig from this university, great historian of Germany, Fritz Stern, Hugh Trevor Roper, myself and a couple of others. Six hours trying to persuade her that this was an extraordinary opportunity for the West and we should take it.

And I've never forgotten, at the end of this six hours, she sat up rather like a schoolgirl at the table and said, all right, I've got the message. I'll be very nice to the Germans.

>> Timothy Garton Ash: I'm not sure she ever really was. But anyway, but what I do want to add, cuz I'm so glad that you all picked up on this, is that the personal and the people making history in this book are not just so-called great men and women.

To quote your book title, Condi, Extraordinary, Ordinary People. And ordinary people can often be more extraordinary than most of our politicians, which may be setting the bar rather low, but that, by the way. And actually at crucial moments in this history, it is 1989 being the obvious example, it is ordinary people who drove the story, so that's point number one.

Point number two to go to Mike and Condi's comments/questions. I now think, with benefit of hindsight, that we absolutely should have gone full speed ahead for NATO membership for Ukraine, starting at the Bucharest summer in 2008, membership action plan, and go as fast as we can, which is, of course, what the Bush administration wanted.

And I think it was a huge mistake, specifically of Angela Merkel, cuz it was, above all, Germany and in the second place of France, because what we ended up with was the worst of both worlds. To say that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO but do nothing about it is the worst of all possibility.

In a way, it would even have been better, although I think this would have been the wrong path to take, to acknowledge some kind of Russian sphere of influence. At least that's a policy that this was the worst of both worlds. So I think, with hindsight, we should absolutely have gone for it.

I think it was a big mistake. And one reason for that is that Vladimir Putin, who is you know better than anyone, initially was making nice towards the West. But he had declared war on the West at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. It was already on the table.

And this goes to the questions about, did we lose Russia? Absolutely not, we did a great deal as the United States, as the West altogether. After all, taking Russia into the g seven, the top table of the west, was no small thing. We made great efforts to try and help Russia modernize.

It was a failure that, and you know this much better than I happened in Russia itself. But I think the key to understanding it, Condi, is not so much about democracy and not democracy. It's to learn another lesson of history, which is about declining empires. The thing about declining empires is they don't like it.

Ask the British, ask the French, ask the Spanish, ask the Portuguese. And what happened in 1989 to 1991 was that the last and largest empire in Europe, the russian soviet empire, softly and suddenly vanished away with hardly a shot fired in anger. And we idiotically thought that was the end of the story.

If we'd learned from history, if we'd thought about what happens with declining empires, then we should always have been on the watch out for the empire striking back. After all, there was Transnistria 1992, there were two wars in Chechnya. So when it started happening in Georgia in 2008, we should immediately have recognized what was happening and responded much more strongly, and at the latest in 2014.

For me, 2014 is the turning point at which the West failed to turn. If we'd had a different policy after 2014, we might not be in this mess. To the question about Ukraine now, actually, Mike, for the EU, the EU is moving at warp speed. The speed of the reaction has, and now that's not saying a lot, given the normal pace of the EU, but it is moving at incredible pace, it's been driven forward.

If we're talking about leaders, Ursula von der Leyen has shown great leadership on this. Emmanuel Macron has done a great world fast on this and is now supporting it. And my view is that in the world of 23, 24, 25 it should not be the United States that has to shoulder the main burden of a, quote unquote, Marshall Plan for Ukraine.

After all, Europe has an economy of comparable size, and Ukraine, last time I looked, is in Europe. And you have your own problems. I think it should be the European Union that is shouldering the main burden of economic reconstruction in the course of bringing Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and southeastern Europe into the EU and NATO.

And for me, this is the great strategic task of the next ten years. It's another great step forward towards Europol and free to bring in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and southeastern Europe into both those institutions, the two strong arms of the West, right? And actually, Heraclitus says somewhere, war is the father of all things.

And in a mysterious way, war has unblocked this process, which essentially had been paralyzed since about 2007, 2008. But, and this is the last point I want to make. Well, penultimate point, cuz you asked about Germany. That's not gonna happen unless we have German leadership, right? Cuz at the moment you have the east Europeans who are all absolutely fired up for this, and the west Europeans who aren't.

Okay, who is Europe's central power? It is Germany who has a profound national interest in this eastward enlargement, it is Germany. So if you had real German strategic leadership, that would swing it, and unfortunately, we don't yet have that from Germany. So that's what I'm looking for from Germany.

But none of this is gonna happen unless we help Ukraine to win this bloody war. I have on my phone, just as a reminder what's happening in Europe even as we speak, because I've been to Ukraine three times in the last nine months. And you have to have on your phone the air alert, the air raid alert app, which everyone has in Ukraine you probably can't see, but most of Ukraine is on the app now.

Red, that is to say, it's under attack. It's under missile attack. So every single night people are looking at this app and seeing where the missiles are flying. I think we missed a chance last year. I think we were too cautious, but I'd love to hear what particularly Condi and Mike think on this.

I think we were too cautious. I think the French have a saying, a la guerre, comme a la guerre, if it's war, it's war, you've got to win it. And I think particularly the United States. But others also have been too managerial, too crisis management in their approach.

I think we should have given the Ukrainians the long range missiles, the F16 tanks, sooner because I think last year they really had a chance to build on the haki of success and make a real breakthrough and threaten the supply lines to Crimea much more difficult now. Much more difficult now because the Russians really dug in the huge minefields, the lines of defense.

And so we really now have to stay the course. We have to rev up our defense industry, keep the supplies coming, supply them not just for this counteroffensive, but for the next counteroffensive and the one after that, and be in it for the long haul. And I have to say in this respect, my biggest worry is no longer Europe because I think on the whole, Europe is going to stay the course.

But I have to say, in all honesty, and it pains me to say this, my big worry now is the United States. If you look at the public opinion surveys on support for Ukraine, if you look at the congressional debate on Ukraine, if you think of possible outcomes of the next presidential election, one has to be really worried about sustained US support of the kind that's gonna be needed through 24, 2025.

And they're not going to win unless they have that support from the United States. Anything, any of you can do, any of us can do to explain to american public opinion that it's not just in the ukrainian interest. It's not just in the European interest. It's not just in the global interest, because if Putin comes away with anything that looks halfway like a victory, next up, Taiwan.

But it's also in the american interest for that reason. But also because if we can enable Ukraine to win, and I'd love to hear you on this side, let me stop at this point. If we can enable Ukraine to win, you will have the largest, most combat hardened army in Europe helping with the containment of Russia.

You will have the second largest army in Poland. You will have Germany if it gets up to the 2% with the third largest defense budget in the world. In other words, you will have a Europe that can actually take much more of the burden of the defense of Europe, enabling the United States to concentrate more on the Indo Pacific.

So I think there's a clear American national interest also in Ukrainian victory. But as I say, I'd love to hear you also on that.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: Proceed.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, obviously, the United States has to be front and center in the military side of this. And I think it will help, Tim, if Europe signals strongly that it believes that it is Europe's responsibility on the reconstruction side, because there is a school of thought that, well, what about Europe?

So I think that would help. I'm actually more optimistic about the American people. Remember that Ukraine has disappeared a little bit from our television screens. But when we were looking at Bucha and we were looking at a large country trying to extinguish its smaller neighbors, Americans know that that isn't a good thing.

And this is where leadership comes in. The American people carry simultaneously in their minds two contradictory thoughts. One is, haven't we done enough? Why doesn't somebody else do it? And we can't live in a world where that happens. And the american president who appeals to the, we can't live in a world where that happens will have the american people on his or her side.

Now, I think there are actually three schools or three elements in American leadership circles. There are the people who believe that we can only do the southern border. You're not going to do much with them, but I think it's a relatively small part of even the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

You have the, let me call the Reagan Republicans and the Sam Nunn Democrats, let's call them, who understand America's role in the world and believe in it. And I think that's actually still a significant part of the American political class. In the middle, you have those who are finding different arguments for why Ukraine shouldn't be our main focus.

And they range from, well, it's a small country. I think they can be one. But the argument that I think is starting to win is you remember that relationship without limits between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin? If you want to worry about China, which some people say the problem is, we shouldn't be worrying about Ukraine.

We should be worrying about China. If you wanna be President of the United States, I want you to explain to the American people what you're gonna say on the day when Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are running around on their victory tour because Putin has defeated Ukraine. Explain that to the American people.

And Xi Jinping, by the way, will be much stronger because this alliance is based on nothing but anti-Americanism. It's based on the notion that the United States is weak. It's based on the notion that the future is theirs. And so if you want to empower that stream of thought, let Vladimir Putin win.

And I think that that carries the American strategic argument. But I'm probably more optimistic that the United States will stick it out with the right leadership.

>> Michael  McFaul: I agree, with two footnotes. I mean, one, it is a debate that has to be won, right? So we can't be passive about it.

And I do a lot of speaking about Ukraine in the United States, not just on the coast. I go to places in the middle. And the people that come to my talks are like, but that's a self selected group. They're not all Democrats, by the way, I mean, to Condi's point.

But we gotta keep making the bigger argument, as both of you just did. We can't, and if I would have one criticism in addition, Tim, I share your views. We should have done more. I've written this, you know my views. We should have done more earlier. It's harder now.

I think those are tactical mistakes. And there's nothing I hate more, if I can say so, cuz I worked in the government. When anonymous people in the Pentagon tell the New York Times how the Ukrainians should be fighting, that doesn't serve the American national interest. It most certainly doesn't serve Ukrainian national interests.

And just, if you're gonna say it, say it in your own name. And we shouldn't be doing that stuff, but we have to make the argument to the American people along the ways that you should. In fact, Tim, I have a great idea for you. You need to go on a book tour in the United States of America and go.

In my last one, I went to 30 states all over. You should do that on behalf of these ideas. I'm not kidding, actually, I'm gonna help you do that.

>> Michael  McFaul: To make that argument. And the second thing I would just say to echo what Condi said about it's not just the strategic argument for how to win the argument here at home.

It also has the virtue of being true as far as I'm concerned. With respect to China, I was on a Hoover delegation in Taiwan last summer. I never met anybody anywhere in the world, including the President, and we met with everybody, who was cheering louder for the Ukrainians to win than the country and the people.

And it is not just partisan, everyone in Taiwan, cuz they understand exactly what Condi just said, that the implications for them are real. And it's the bigger things about the ideas, Tim. I think we have the better ideas, I do. I think that, but our ideas need to win.

And if our ideas win, if Ukraine wins and Europe wins and democracy wins, that will have positive consequences for small d democrats all over the world. But if they lose, it has the negative effect as well. And so I think the stakes are actually really, really big.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: Thank you so much.

So it's only, I think, opposite that a conversation about Tim's book ends with a discussion of Ukraine. There's no better way to end it. I'd like to remind you that the books are available. Tim will be signing them outside. And please join me in thanking our fantastic panelists and celebrating.