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Peter Robinson: If you want to understand the present, ask a man who has devoted his life to studying the past. On the war in Ukraine, the historian, Stephen Kotkin. Uncommon Knowledge now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. A professor of history at Princeton and a fellow at the Hoover institution here at Stanford. Stephen Kotkin grew up in New York City, received his undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester. Then took his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of nine works of history. Nine big works of history, including the first two volumes of his biography of Joseph Stalin, "Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928" and "Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941." Professor Kotkin is currently working on the third and final volume of this definitive biography of Joseph Stalin. This past January professor Kotkin and I sat down in his studio together to discuss Russia, China, and the nature of modern war. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I have received request after request after request to ask professor Kotkin what he makes of it all. So joining us from his study on the upper west side of Manhattan, while I'm here with a fake background, because I'm using a spare bedroom at home by Zoom, it is literally true to say, Stephen, that you are back by popular demand. Stephen, welcome.
Stephen Kotkin: Thank you so much, Peter.
Peter Robinson: On February 24th, Russian forces invade Ukraine. You and I are speaking on day eight of this war. I'd like to come to the particulars of the war in a moment, but first the entire event seems so shocking, nine days ago, so unthinkable. Maybe Putin would try to nibble off a piece of Ukraine, maybe he might even move into the Donbas region, the extreme Eastern portion of Ukraine, but a full invasion of the entire country. So first I'd like to begin simply by asking you to make this coherent for us, to help us to understand what the Russians could possibly have been thinking. Henry Kissinger in 2014, "The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, even such fame dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted the Ukraine was an integral part of Russia." Is Kissinger right?
Stephen Kotkin: Far be it for me to disagree with Henry Kissinger. But Ukraine is a separate country. It's a separate nation, an independent and sovereign nation, and it is no longer part of Russia. And that's been true since 1991. And it should be true going forward. So Peter, war is always a partial or full miscalculation. You miscalculate how strong you are. You miscalculate how weak the enemy is. You miscalculate how easy it's gonna be, how low the costs are gonna be, how great the benefits are gonna be. It's very rare that people understand the complexities and their own weaknesses and the other side's strengths before they launch a war. Let's think about Stalin and North Korea in 1950, just for one second.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Stephen Kotkin: So we can understand this. Stalin had said no many times over when Kim Il-sung, the Soviet supported dictator of North Korea begged him to allow North Korea to invade South Korea and "Unify the peninsula." In other words, to conquer and annex South Korea. Finally Stalin said yes. And normally people consider Stalin to be a person who calculated risks really well was cautious in the sense of never incurring crazy risks, but taking advantage opportunistically of things, where he could extract great advantage at low cost. However, that's not an accurate picture of Stalin. What he did in the Korean case was he thought the U.S. wouldn't fight. He thought the U.S. wasn't for real. He thought America would not stand up to him nor did he think the South Koreans would put up a fight. And so he massively miscalculated the power and resolve of the West and the U.S. For Stalin he got himself out of the situation in part by dumping the war on Mao and the communist Chinese. Putin doesn't have that option, right? The opposite in fact, in the current situation. So it's very clear that Putin understood wrongly just how strong Russia was, how weak Ukraine was and above all, what the Western response might be. And so it looks like it's irrational only because we know what we know. But prior to the war, many people underestimated Ukrainian society. Many people underestimated the president of Ukraine. Many people thought the Europeans would not stand up here and rally and make sacrifices. Many people thought that president Biden wasn't up to it, especially after the fiasco Afghanistan. And many people thought the Russian military is a serious military, well run and modernized. So there are a lot of assumptions on which a war has based and when those assumptions are wrong, it can look insane retrospectively. And you're right, he had another option. And that's the option we talked about on your previous show.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Stephen Kotkin: And that other option was pretty straightforward. Use techniques and dirty tricks and destabilization short of full scale invasion to weaken the Ukrainian government and maybe collapse it, but especially to widen the fishers, the disagreements in the west, because if it wasn't a full scale invasion, should they really respond in a big way? Or as Biden said in his PEF, a minor incursion might be ambiguous for our response, we might not be able to rally it. So we have the option and in fact, he still has that option of hurting Ukraine, destabilizing Ukraine widening the differences in the west piece by piece salami tactics. Instead he chose the full scale invasion. Now he telegraphed that he might do the full scale invasion, and you have to admit that U.S. and UK intelligence were not surprised.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Stephen Kotkin: Yes, all the capitals in Europe were surprised. All the capitals in Asia were surprised. The chattering classes were surprised. The establishment in Russia, which was out of the loop, they were also surprised. And of course, many people in the American establishment were surprised, but not the intelligence agencies. And what we did through the intelligence agencies was we shared real time intelligence with our European allies, showing them Russia's capabilities and possible intentions and predicting that they would invade. And it turned out that our intelligence agencies, along with the British nailed this and their sharing of information first with our allies and then publicly rallied the support of the West in a really big way. And so kudos to the intelligence agencies who've taken a beating lately in the past couple of decades, over the rock and many other issues. They nailed this one, they had Putin's number and that's a really big story, not just for Russia, but also for China. How did the U.S. and the UK intelligence agency seem to know so much?
Peter Robinson: So Stephen, that actually, I hadn't thought of that. Of course, the reason to talk to you is because of, I haven't thought of any of this. But that, right from the get go, the United States appeared something it hasn't appeared for a long time, competent, competent. Our guys knew what they were doing. That turns out to have been important for the whole psychology of this from the very get go. Is that right?
Stephen Kotkin: Yes. First of all, let's admit that everything here is about the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government in the first instance. They're on the front line, they're dying, the Russians are bombing children's hospitals, that's what's going on. And the Ukrainians refuse to capitulate they're resisting, they're outgunned, but they have the resolve to fight for their own country. And that backbone of the Ukrainians, which surprised the Russians, surprised the Europeans, surprised many people in Washington who had a low opinion of Ukrainian society and of Zelensky. That has been the bedrock on which everything else was built. So on the American side, the debacle in Afghanistan, and actually the debacle of the rollout of a very good policy when we made the deal to sell nuclear submarines to the Australians and share greater intelligence, which was rolled out poorly and offended our allies in Europe, especially the French. Those big mistakes turned out to be learning moments for the Biden administration. And in some ways, in some ways, the fact that they made those terrible mistakes made them better in this particular crisis, more prepared, more serious. And finally, the mistakes over 2014. Let's remember that president Obama was in power then and Joe Biden was the vice president.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Stephen Kotkin: And many of the current members of the U.S. administration were in that Obama administration when they were taken by surprise by Russia's forcible annexation of Crimea, a territory that belonged to Ukraine. And so, the reaction was not good enough. The surprise was terrible. And so they learned from that episode as well. So that's the great thing about our democracy. It can learn, it can improve. And even people who perform poorly, they can get better. There are what we call corrective mechanisms in a democracy whereas in an authoritarian regime, they get worse. They get narrower and narrower. And the information doesn't get through because people are afraid to bring bad information to the autocrat. And the autocrat thinks he knows better than anybody else anyway. And the autocrat starts to believe his own propaganda. And they lack the corrective mechanisms of elections, real markets, wise men behind the scenes who come up and say, "You know, Mr. President, this may not be a good idea." Who does that in the Russian or in fact, the Chinese case right now? Nobody. And so that's a big strength for democracy. It doesn't have to be that we have smarter people.
Peter Robinson: So, Stephen.
Stephen Kotkin: Corrective mechanisms.
Peter Robinson: Stephen, on American democracy and on the wise men, the wise men and women, we should say, does this event settle a debate that's been taking place in foreign policy circles for two decades, and the debate is over NATO expansion. In 1998, we bring in, we and our NATO allies, but the United States and president Clinton are the primary actors. They bring into NATO, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. And then in 2014, I beg your pardon, in 2004, we bring in the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which of course, border Russia. George Kennan who was an old man, but still kicking in 1998. "Don't people understand our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet communist regime. And now we're turning our backs on the very people," democrats in Russia, "who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime." Jack Matlock, ambassador to the Soviet Union under president Reagan and a great Cold Warrior. This is not a softy. "NATO expansion was the most profound strategic blunder since the end of the Cold War." One last quotation, if I may. And this comes from Stephen Kotkin in an email he sent to me a couple of days ago, "Nothing like admitting Poland and the Baltics to NATO to transform it from a motley bunch of pacifist nations that spend nothing on their militaries to a real alliance again." Now, if that, I know you being you, you were being partly, you were being impish, but even when you're being impish, you make a point, explain yourself if you would.
Stephen Kotkin: This is a fundamental debate about which there's a great deal of confusion because some of our biggest authorities, just like you quoted them, people deserving of immense respect, impeccable reputations. Ambassador John Matlock one of the best people ever to serve in the embassy in Moscow. George Cannon, what can you say about George Cannon, right? And so their critiques need to be taken seriously. So let's unpack a little bit what's going on here. First they used the word Democrats in Russia. I wouldn't use that word for many other people who were quote self style Democrats. Yeltsin was a self style Democrat and he appointed president Putin to power. Yeltsin's Constitution in 1993 was the constitution used by Putin to make an autocratic regime. Boris Yeltsin brought to power before Putin members of the KGB on MOS, including Putin. So there's a misunderstanding of quote democracy in Russia in the nineties. In addition, we had this debate in the early part of the Cold War, Peter. We had this debate where people said, you know, we didn't respect Soviet's sensitivities. We didn't respect Stalin psychology. And so look what happened. He conquered all his neighbors because he was disrespected. He conquered Eastern Europe. He conquered Northeast Asia. We should have respected him more. Peter, I'm sorry, that argument is bunk. There are internal processes in Putin's Russia, which started in Yeltsin's Russia, which predate both of them by a long, long time where the recourse to autocracy, the recourse to repression, the recourse to militarism, the suspicion of foreigners, these are not reactions to something that the West does or doesn't do, these are internal processes that had a dynamic of their own, and that NATO expansion became a pretext or an excuse post-facto. For many years we've now been having this I would say self-flagellation. Let's imagine that we don't expand the security perimeter and the realm of freedom. Where would those countries be right now? Where would Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, where would they be right now? They would potentially be in the same place as Ukraine. So the causality is the opposite here. Moreover, another thing that the analysts, once again, we respect them and this is an important debate, and there are some arguments on the other side, we did make many mistakes as we do in policy. And we did sometimes prevaricate and mislead the Russians when we shouldn't have. And the Clinton administration has a lot to answer for in not always being straight with the Russians, which led to some of their grievances. But the Russians are responsible for their internal development. But the biggest mistake of all is when we conflate Russia with the personalist regime. So Putin feels insecure and NATO threatens him personally, in his mind. The EU threatens Putin. Democracy threatens him in his personalist regime. Does this threaten Russia? Does it threaten Russian security? Does a flawed democracy like Ukraine threaten the security of a giant nation, a full civilization like Russia? Let's be honest, it does not. It never did. And so it's a fictitious threat and it's a conflation of a country and its security with an individual and his personalistic, kleptocratic, gangsterist regime. And so I'm sorry, but I must disagree with those eminent analysts and say NATO is not responsible for the Putin regime or for the war in Ukraine. Should we have promised NATO membership in 2008 when we were not gonna deliver on it to Ukraine and Georgia under the George W. Bush administration? I think there's a worthy debate to be had there that that promise, which was an empty promise.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Stephen Kotkin: And when we made it, it was an empty promise and we knew it was an empty promise. Was that a good idea? And the answer is probably not. But once again, the ability of countries to choose their foreign policy and their alliances voluntarily is written into the UN Charter. It's written into the 1975 Helsinki Act. It's written into the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe. And it's written into the 1997 NATO Russia Founding Act. Russia's signature is on every one of those documents. Moscow signed the UN Charter, it signed the Helsinki Final Act in 75. It signed the Charter of Paris in 1990. It signed the NATO Russia Founding Act, which puts no limits on NATO expansion and Boris Yeltsin's signature is on that. And so, you know, Peter, international obligations and freedom and the defensive freedom are on one side and Vladimir Putin and his gangster regime and his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is on the other side.
Peter Robinson: Stephen, I wanna pursue that point one step further. You wrote, this is quoting you in an article you wrote in foreign affairs six years ago in the spring of 2016. "Russia is right in thinking that the post-Cold War settlement was unbalanced, even unfair." And I have sat in a lecture hall when you said that there were aspects of the post First World War settlement Versailles that were mistaken because Germany was bound to become a great nation again. And likewise, the post-Cold War settlement was at least shortsighted because Russia had all the capacity to become, not technologically, a great nation perhaps, but still an enormous, a seventh or an eighth of the Earth's land mass, Russia in one way or another was likely to rise again and it was going to need, and we didn't take that into account. Is that right?
Stephen Kotkin: That's correct. That's 100% correct. I stand by that. And so, Peter, there's a way in which you can defend principle, but you can do it in practical and realistic ways. You don't have to say, you know, they're weak, let's just put our boot on their neck. You can say, okay, they've agreed to allow us to expand NATO with no limits. That's what the NATO Russia 1997 Founding Act says. But does that mean that we cancel all the treaties we have? We cancel the INF treaty. We cancel the conventional forces in Europe treaty. We cancel the open skies treaty. We cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel because we love to cancel as a culture. And because we can do it, we can get away with it. So once again, to say that NATO expansion worked positively for the West is not to say that NATO expansion alone was the smart policy. The problem with our policy vis-a-vis Russia as always was Pygmalion syndrome. You see, we were gonna go in there and make them, transform them, transform their personality, make them like us. We always like to think that if another country gets the opportunity, it's just dying to become like America. And China will become like America and fill in the blank. Russia will become like America, every country and that's not true, Peter. They have their own history, their own culture, their own institutions and their own pride. And so when our Pygmalion effort in Russia predictably blew up in our face, which was parallel with our NATO expansion, we dropped the Pygmalion but we continued the NATO expansion and there was no real diplomacy taking account of any interests, strategic interests that Russia might have as they rebuilt the power to push back. And so we left ourselves open to the surprise that Putin had the power to do something about the unfair settlement and he did. But that's not to conflate it with NATO expansion.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Stephen Kotkin: Moving the borders of freedom when you have the opportunity to do so, when countries are begging to get in and are willing to make all the sacrifices to do so, when you're willing to make those commitments and stand by those commitments, as they were, it's hard to say the door to the West is closed to you because we're afraid we might offend somebody in another country as they get more powerful again. And so here, Peter, I'm left with walking and chewing gum at the same time. Remember, Reagan's and the Reagan Sults approach, get strong and get a diplomatic channel at the same time. And so, you can negotiate because you have to talk to the other people. You may not like them. They may not like you, there are fundamental differences in values and culture, but they live on the same planet as you. And they have a lot of things they can do you harm, which we could talk about and should talk about at length, if we get the opportunity. And so, ignoring them , let's hope they go away, we tried that a couple of times, they interfered in our election. Let's try to quote, reset relations with them without much of an agenda, but you know, let's be friends, let's overcome the misunderstanding. We've had a lot of naive approaches after the Pygmalion self destruction, self destruction of our Pygmalion policy after that blew up in our face. And so one track kept going forward with the NATO expansion and the other track kept going like this and feeding on itself and mistake after mistake. And so we're left where we are now, where Russian elites need a stake in the international order. And that stake would mean that instead of being incentivized to disrupt and overturn, they would be incentivized to help that international order be stable. But we can't allow the price for that incentivization for that stake in the international order to be the freedom of other countries. We can't give away other countries' freedom. We protect, we protect the principle, but we're more practical in terms of a stake in the international order. I've been arguing that Peter since, oh, maybe since kindergarten, if I could.
Peter Robinson: Stephen, from Russia to the rest of the world, again, we're speaking on day eight, just day eight, one week and one day since the war began, but the response of the United States and its allies has been dramatic. Thousands of weapons shipped to Ukraine, heavy economic sanctions on Russia. I haven't looked at the markets today, but yesterday the value of the ruble was down 30%. The value in the Russian stock exchange capitalization was down by almost half. And that's not all. We're also hearing leaders say things that would've been again unthinkable just nine days ago. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, who as best I can tell is the grand old man of Japan now As best I can tell Shinzo Abe has more standing than any other figure in Japan short of the emperor. And he gave a speech in London saying that Japan should consider nuclear sharing, that's the phrase of the kind under which NATO countries permit American nuclear weapons on their soil. He also urged the United States to drop our policy toward Taiwan of strategic ambiguity, publicly committing ourselves to the defense of Taiwan. This is a diplomatic world turned upside down. Even more striking, German chancellor Ola Schultz, the leader of the SDP the center left German party just listen to this, in the last eight days, he shut down Nord Stream Two, by halting the certification, the pipeline from Russia to Germany. He's agreed to exclude German banks from the SWIFT international settlement system. He's announced that Germany, Germany would send a thousand anti-tank weapons and 500 stinger missiles to Ukraine. He summoned the Bundestag to an emergency session, the first time ever met on a Sunday in history to announce that Germany would spend 100 billion euros this year, additional euros on its defense. And that from now on Germany would finally honor its NATO commitment of spending 2% a year on GDP. And that the German Air Force was going to buy American F-35 fighter arc aircraft, the most sophisticated fighters in the world. Foreign Policy magazine quote, "Decades of German taboos dissolved amid the applause from the Bundestag and the pro-Ukrainian chance of upwards of half a million demonstrators throughout central Berlin." Step outside Ukraine for a moment, has Vladimir Putin created a new world?
Stephen Kotkin: Potentially. This is an enormous opportunity for us. Now, let me answer by talking about something I got right and then something I got wrong. I've been arguing for a really long time that the West is unbelievably powerful, that the West has all the institutions, all the human capital, all the technology, all the power and yet, it doesn't understand that. Here we are in the West and we're talking about how we're in decline. We're talking about how transatlanticism isn't necessary or doesn't work anymore. We're talking about how flabby NATO is, and maybe it's brain dead and maybe should go away. We're talking about how we can't teach Western Civ at our universities, because it's just too much a story of genocide and other crimes. We're flagellating ourselves for years about the rise of China, about the supposed rise of a multi-polar world and all other stuff which turns out to be nonsense. It turns out that the West is unbelievably powerful. It just needed to remember that. It turned out that the United States is a superpower. It just needed to remember that. We have the financial system, we have the deepest, most liquid markets. We create the technology and that includes the biotech as well as just about any other sphere you could name. We have the institutions of separation of powers, limited government, rule of law, We defend liberty. We have defensive private property. My God, I could go on, we're the West. And so I've been saying, let's wake up one day and be the West. And let's cut the nonsense, the self-flagellation, the talk about a multipolar world that doesn't exist. The talk about how we need to be embarrassed for our civilization, no. Because the West, Peter, is not a geographic term, it's an institutional package. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan, which you mentioned and our friend Shinzo Abe, they're Western, but not European. The Australians are Western. All those who share our values and above all our institutions are part of the West, and it's the strongest voluntary sphere of influence that's ever existed in world history. And Vladimir Putin, but more so the Ukrainian people, the resistance of Ukrainian society and military, and the performance of the Ukrainian government under stress, where president Zelensky, in great personal danger is remained in Kiev to lead the war effort. That has galvanized us to remember who we are. And that heroism, that incredible gift of heroism under those very trying circumstances, it's extremely early in the war and we don't wanna exaggerate, who's winning and who's losing, but we must say that it has tripped something fundamental and deep in us, which is that we are the West and more and more powerful. The mistake that I made, so I think, I've always believed that the West was powerful and needed to be reminded. Mistake I made was not understanding that a little reminder, like a miscalculated invasion of a terrifically heroic people could trip all of this latent power and identity and institutions and strength in a few days. I did not expect that. I expected Europe to have a lot of trouble rising to the occasion. I expected to seeing people in Washington be very divided about the wisdom of supporting Ukraine against Russia. Instead I was proved wrong and thankfully so, that the West, which I always knew to be strong, did rise to the occasion. But here, Peter, we have a contradiction. It's not just about the West. You see, there are two views of global order operative in the American context. And they derived from the Roosevelt era, the Roosevelt administration inherited by president Truman, one was the United Nations, the Global Commonwealth. We are all part of the world in the sense that we can all become democracies sooner rather than later, by doing economic growth and adopting certain institutions and the growth of a middle class and modernization theory. And so we should build an inclusive order where everybody gets in a Global Commonwealth. And then there's another order, which was the West. And that was galvanized by the Cold War. And it should stand up to our freedom and the enemies of freedom at all costs. And it should do so sometimes by supporting even dictatorial regimes like Gene Kirkpatrick once argued, that there are two kinds, dictatorships and totalitarianism. And so, there should be a West, which is fundamentally values in institution based, and then there should be partners sometimes don't belong in that category of rule of law, democratic orders, but they are important for opposing totalitarianisms. And so that was the West. And so you have the West on the one side and United Nations, Global Commonwealth on the other. And so in the nineties, we forgot about the West because it seemed the Cold War was over. And the Global Commonwealth, the Roosevelt everybody's included in the United Nations took over. And so China and Russia, and everybody was gonna be transformed by us Pygmalion style through globalization and the WTO accession and everything else. Well, that blew up in our face. That turned out to be not the way the world works, but we resurrected the notion of the West. Here we have a fork in the road. During the Cold War, the U.S. was predominantly a status quo power. A status quo power meant that we built the world and it was the world in which we wanted stability. And so, we didn't try to overthrow anti-communist dictatorships. We didn't try to democratize the whole world because we were up against communism. Once we were no longer up against communism, we ceased to be a status quo power. And then everybody had to behave a certain way to be our friend, and that wasn't gonna work in the middle east. And it wasn't gonna work actually in a lot of places in the world that we needed to have quote onsite end quote. And so the Global Commonwealth, United States being a revisionist power, being a democracy promoting power, because those are our values. Rather than being an example of democracy at home, that others be inspired by, trying to democratize other nations directly, either through invasion or through aid and other tools. So now we have to have a reexamination not of NATO expansion, in my view, but of the notion of United Nations, Global Commonwealth, one world, WTO, where people admitted don't play by the rules. They cheat, they sign agreements that they don't live up to. They steal your intellectual property. They bite off other country's territory, versus the West. And the West will include places like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam and Singapore, and lots of places that might not get an A or an A plus under the rule of law, democracy, political system, grading, right? And so this is a big moment for us, a huge opportunity to recalibrate and take this galvanized West and expand it as a voluntary sphere of influence, which can stand up to those significant threats to our way of life and our values.
Peter Robinson: Stephen, China, let me, an event and then a quotation. Here's the event, Taipei 101, which is this tallest building in Taiwan illuminated in blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Now that, of course, if you're in the middle of Taiwan, you don't illuminate your tallest building in blue and yellow, just to support Ukraine. You do that as an act of defiance, against the people's Republic of China. Second, here's the quotation. This again comes from an email by a certain Stephen Kotkin of a couple days ago. "The implications for dealing with Taiwan, fight back, kick China out of the global financial system, close your airspace to its plane, sanctions top officials. What do you know? An entire playbook." Now, again, you were being ambish in that email, but you were suggesting that what has taken place already in these first few days gives us something that we can use in parallel if China moves on Taiwan. You, Xi Jinping, you see blue and yellow on Taipei one, yes, Taipei 101 is the name of the skyscraper. You have an intellectual like Stephen Kotkin saying, look at this, how does Xi Jinping respond? How should he respond?
Stephen Kotkin: It's very interesting, Peter. And it's the biggest part of the story. 95% percent of this right now is about Ukraine and Russia. 95% of this long term is about Taiwan and China. War is tragic and the Ukrainians are paying a very high price. And we must admit that many people in Russia, including Russian conscripts put their families back home are also paying a very high price for this war and would rather the war didn't happen and are against the war. Some are courageous enough to protest and others don't, not everyone can be, let's say Andrei Sokolov in a crisis. So it's tragic, but tragedy is also opportunity and it's also opportunity in multiple directions. So in a war, you get to test out your weapons. You get to test out stuff and see how it works. Not in a tabletop exercise, not in a computer simulation, but in the real world. Can you sanction the central bank of a very large economy and not destabilize your own international financial system? We're just, we're experimenting with that right now. And we're learning the answer to that. And so many of the techniques that we're now employing against Russia potentially could be employed against China. And we know that, and the Chinese know that. moreover Xi Jinping is now a dictator, an autocrat like Putin and he may not get information delivered to him that he doesn't wanna hear. We don't know what it looks like on the inside in China. But we do know what happens retrospectively with autocracies that fall, that they get narrower and narrower, people don't bring the bad or negative information to the ruler and the ruler begins to make even more mistakes. The corrective mechanisms aren't there as they are in collective rule, even under an authoritarian system. And so the Chinese elites can see this and they can ask themselves the question, well, is it possible, Xi Jinping miscalculates because he's making decisions by himself without consulting? And without considering the full range of information? Is it possible the West is not a paper tiger, but is actually pretty strong? And that the West can do things that we didn't fully understand they could do? And moreover they have the resolve to do that. Is it possible that Taiwanese might not capitulate, but might resist an invasion? Is it possible that that resistance by the Taiwanese might galvanize the rest of the world? And so, yeah, this is an opportunity, a lesson for everyone in real time. There are some differences though, Peter. Ukraine is a 40 million Taiwan is this 20 something million population. Ukraine is connected by Russia as well as Belarus, Crimea, by land. And so this is a land invasion we're seeing here. Taiwan is an island. And so you're talking about an amphibious landing, which is a much different proposition than just rolling across someone's border, tanks and artillery and armored personnel carriers. Amphibious landings fighting on the water is the hardest thing to do. And we know know that not just from World War II. we think Normandy was easy and went really well because it succeeded. But if you were involved in the planning and if you were there on the beaches, you know how difficult to pull off something like that is. And so there are differences. We wanna be careful not equating the situation. Ukraine's economy was maybe 180 billion prior to the invasion. Taiwan's is over 800 billion. Taiwan supplies 93% of high end chips globally, 93% share of the high end chips. Ukraine doesn't have an industry like that to compare it to. Taiwan is very far from Poland, which is stood tall, from Germany, which as you said, is transformed and I could go on. And so it may not be the same, but it does give a lot of food for thought in Washington and Beijing. It's very important that Taiwan's freedom be defended, but the status quo is our power. The status quo is failing for Beijing, but it's working for the free world. Because the mistake that we made, that we would integrate China, communist China economically and it would transform them politically modernization style, which of course didn't work. They're still the communist Chinese regime. The communists in Beijing made the same mistake vis-a-vis Taiwan. We'll integrate them economically and they'll get to love us and wanna be part of us. And in fact the opposite has happened. And this is even before the crushing of freedom in Hong Kong, which we've all witnessed and the Taiwanese have witnessed living right there. Even before that, the polls had indicated that on the island of Taiwan, fewer and fewer people identified as Chinese. Fewer and fewer people identified as Chinese-Taiwanese combination and more and more identified as solely Taiwanese and wanted to have nothing to do with mainland China. And so-
Peter Robinson: The Chinese thought time was on their side and they were exactly wrong. Time was moving against them in Taiwan. Is that correct?
Stephen Kotkin: Yes. What Xi Jinping did in Beijing is what Putin did in Moscow. Putin made Ukraine more nationalist, less pro Russian for the first time in its history Putin created a consolidated Ukrainian idea across all of Ukraine in ways that had been ambivalent before and split, divided, partly pro Russia. And Xi Jinping's repressions have done the same on Taiwan. He's done the opposite of what he intended. And so, Peter, my point is this, he's made Taiwan more Taiwanese. And so the status quo is working for us. Strategic ambiguity is working for us. It's the communist Chinese who need to change the status quo, which is failing for them. They wanna be revisionist. They wanna get back Taiwan. We want Taiwan to continue to be self-governing and continue to be moving farther and farther away from association with Beijing. And so, let us not upset the status quo, let us defend the status quo and let's accuse Beijing of being the ones that wanna upset the status quo.
Peter Robinson: Back to Ukraine, Stephen. And now we come, we're on day eight. Things are changing hour by hour. I'm very conscious that you're a historian, not a newscaster. I'd like to ask you questions that elicit answers that have some permanent value. Even so, there are events taking place today that I have to ask about. The Russians, I almost said Soviets, the Russians, their initial offense, if it seems to be the case, this is a layman speaking, and if I'm wrong, of course correct me. It seems to be the case that they were depending on some notion of shock and awe, that in the first couple of days they did airstrikes, the main purpose of which seems to have been to scare everybody to death. They did airstrikes as far west is Lviv which is only miles from the Polish border. Now that it comes to Ukrainian resistance and the hard military work of occupying ground, the Russian advance seems to have slowed down. How do they respond? Well, the Red Army in the spring of 1945 has a problem with Berlin. Do they go in and engage in street to street fighting? No. They reduce Berlin to rubble. It's an artillery army. In Grozny the current Russian army has the same choice. Do they go in and fight street to street? No. They stand at a distance and just reduce the city to rubble. And it looks as though the Russian army is, and the Russian military is beginning to engage in something like the same tactic, they're opening on civilian structures. The Wall Street Journal today, "The nuclear risk existed throughout the Cold War, and the two sides avoided a direct confrontation. The U.S. doesn't want to fight the Russian army and air force, but the moral and political price will be high if it watches from the sidelines as Ukrainians die by the thousands." What should we do today and tomorrow, and next week?
Stephen Kotkin: We're in a situation where we've done a lot. The sanctions that we've imposed on the Russian economy were far greater than we anticipated would be imposed. And that the Russians anticipated be imposed. There are not enough to melt down completely the Russian economy. People are exaggerating the effects. There are many carve outs, would you have to read the fine print. The biggest story so far has been the carve out for oil and gas exports, which we haven't touched. That's the nuclear option in sanctions, economic sanctions against Russia. If we stop them from being able to sell their oil and gas, and if the Chinese don't buy it, if they go along with the sanctions, 'cause they don't wanna pay a price, it's game over for the Putin regime. So there are a lot of additional sanctions that can be imposed that haven't been imposed yet. The SWIFT evictions have been partial. And so there's more that could come in a pressure leveraged situation. We're not there yet. And this big variable about whether the Chinese wanna be seen as full accomplices of Putin's murderous rampage or the Chinese are gonna continue to try to play both sides of the fence here and see if they can get away with it. But if the Chinese begin to feel that this is something they didn't bargain for and that they risk their trade relationship with Europe, then we could potentially see the Chinese, maybe putting pressure on Russia, or maybe enforcing some of the sanctions, including oil and gas embargo. There's a high price for Europe to pay for that. Europe cannot survive next winter without if oil and gas is shut off from Russia Europe cannot survive next winter without reviving coal and nuclear power. That's a really high price we gotta see if people are willing to pay. Finally, I should say Peter, that we're early in the war and there's a lot of weapons that the Russians have not used yet, that are in their arsenal. You know, artillery and reducing cities to rubble, which we're watching in real time now and which breaks everyone's hearts and is killing all those civilians could just be the beginning of it. We shut down their banking system, we say, you can't bank. Well, Peter, we talk about how communications are in the cloud. The Internet's in the cloud, it's actually in the ocean. 99% of all communications are in the ocean. And those undersea cables are mapped and Russia has a submarine force. And so I can't bank, you can't bank. They can escalate. They can cut those cables between Europe and the east coast of the U.S. and Asia and the west coast of the U.S. And the ocean is a big place. And you can cut the cables in many areas. And then when they're fixed, which takes a lot of time, you can recut them. And so short of nuclear exchange, God forbid, we have the problem that Russia has tools that could really hurt, really damage us. The international financial system is worth a lot more to us, Peter, than it is to the Russians. European energy security, the energy security of our allies and the second largest economy in the world. That's worth a lot more to us than it is to the Russians. So we need a diplomatic process somehow, which does not compromise Ukraine, but allows us to get out of a mutual Maximalist escalation. We need stability more than Putin needs stability. Of course, everything in the short term is dependent on the heroism of the Ukrainians. But we need a process here that acknowledges that heroism, but also acknowledges the potential damage that being caused to us. I see a couple of scenarios, if you'll permit me.
Peter Robinson: Yes, of course.
Stephen Kotkin: People talk about Putin occupying Ukraine. He cannot successfully occupy a country that big. When Stalin took only Western Ukraine in 1939, when he forcibly annexed it from Poland, Eastern Poland became Western Ukraine. Tens and tens of thousands of functionaries had to be shipped in to run Western Ukraine. And now we're talking about not just Western Ukraine, but all of Ukraine. When the Nazis conquered much of Ukraine, they didn't really administer it. You see these maps on the territory when Russia forces territory and they color it in as Russia, that's actually not Russian controlled. That's the penetration level of Russian activity, military activity, but they don't control that territory. They're not administering that territory. That territory is subject to rearguard action, like happened to the Nazis. The Nazis took Kiev. They grabbed all the luxury hotels. It was fabulous. They were luxuriating. And three days later, the booby traps began to go off and started killing them in Kiev. And in fact, Hitler decided he wouldn't take Leningrad because of what happened. The booby traps going off and killing the Nazi hierarchs in Kiev that instead they would surround Leningrad and starve it to death, and the same plan for Moscow. And so you're an administrator in occupied territory and you have a beautiful office and you don't know if it's safe. And you don't know if the woman making your tea is putting something in your tea. And you don't know if you walk out on the street, if there's something underneath your car that may not be friendly towards you if you turn the ignition. And so you have a situation where there's no way for Russia to successfully occupy Ukraine, absolutely excluded, because of the scale, the size of it. We know this from the Iraq war. You can knock over a regime, but occupying and running a country is a different proposition, sadly. And so we're not gonna have that. What I fear is the outcome is Putin says, "Well, I can't have Ukraine. You can't have it either. I'll just break it. I'll just shatter it. I'll just smash it. I'll keep the Black Sea , that beautiful coastline all the way through Odessa, and that piece of Moldova known as Transnistria, and then a little bit beyond even, the Danubian Basin, the Danubian Delta, the Dnieper Delta, land bridge to Crimea all the way through to Eastern Ukraine, the so called Donetsk, Lugansk, , that Putin recognized. Maybe he keeps that, maybe he tries to kill the Ukrainian government, and then he just shatters everything and says, "Okay, you can have it back now, except for the parts that are really valuable." That coastal area on the Black Sea, making Ukraine landlocked. I fear that kind of outcome, Peter. Because he doesn't need to reconstruct it. He doesn't need to own it. He just needs to shatter it, unfortunately. And so we need a situation where we not only can reverse any gains they have on the ground, but we can reconstruct or disincentivize the Russian troops. The big stuff, that they're watching our defections, Peter.
Peter Robinson: I see.
Stephen Kotkin: Defections in Russia. It's one thing when an artist defects, when a filmmaker defects, when a literary critic defects, but what happens if a general defects? Gets on a plane and flies to Brussels and has a press conference and says, "You know what, we don't all support Putin. This is a bad war. And we're against it. And many people in the military feel the same way I do." Or in the security services, the areas he cares about. So right now, Putin is clamping down, watching really closely his own security and military officials to prevent that kind of defection, which would be a massive blow to his regime and potentially embolden others. And so the game now is not just over Ukraine, but it's over the potential defections on the inside from Putin's regime. And just a handful, even one defection can be devastating for the image of a strong man regime. And as people get courage from those who step out first, the first want to show courage can potentially make the others, remind the others of their courage. That's a variable that we're encouraging right now, our intelligence services are encouraging and it's one to watch really closely just as we watch the resistance. We'll arm that resistance we'll take the risks of arming that resistance as we're doing now. Poland is not afraid to take those risks because it knows it has the NATO article five guarantee, thank God. And so those risks are being incurred and will be incurred and that Ukrainian resistance will be supported and humanitarian assistance is crucial, absolutely crucial, humanitarian assistance on massive scale, billions and billions, a logistical challenge. But we're the West.
Peter Robinson: Stephen, a couple of final questions here. I'm not even sure I know how to frame this one, but it's question about history. The Chinese, still attempting to live down humiliations they suffered in the 19th century. The Germans, up until nine days ago, almost neutral. They almost become what Stalin failed to achieve. They'd almost become a neutral power. And this of course is because they're so acutely aware of what they did seven decades ago. Russia, you wrote in your foreign affairs piece six years ago, "Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles a day for hundreds of years eventually covering one-sixth of the earth land mass." And so you have Vladimir Putin behaving in the year 2022, roughly the way Ivan the Terrible behaved five centuries ago. And I keep thinking of William Faulkner's famous line, the past is never dead, it's not even past. How is it that we poor, feeble creatures, we, human beings, find ourselves so enthrall to the past? How is it that certain patterns perpetuate themselves even in what we consider a completely changed because modern world.
Stephen Kotkin: Peter, the Anglo-American sphere, which rose to power first with the British Empire and then with the break off piece of the British Empire known as the United States gave everyone a lesson in modern power, it was about the sea and it was about trade and it was about effective governance. You invested in human capital, you created the technology, you built the infrastructure and you had good governance. And you did it with trade because trade with other rich countries is how you get richer. A free and open system at home and a free and open international system with the Navy to defend it. That's world power. That's the modern world. That's modern history. And if you are in charge of that, you better not mess up. And some people do it better and some do it worse, but that's the kind of . That's the inheritance you get when you're in the West to manage. Eurasia is different, Peter. Eurasia is a land mass. It's not all open oceans. It doesn't have Canada, Mexico, fish and fish, as its neighbors, the Atlantic highway, the Pacific highway. The Chinese have only one coast and it's an Eastern coast that's hammed in and it's hammed in by U.S. allies and military bases. And they have no west coast, the Chinese have no California, which is the fifth largest economy in the world. and a highway back and forth to the Indo Pacific. And Eurasia is different and the trouble comes out of Moscow and the trouble comes out of Beijing and the trouble comes out of Tehran because they're weaker. And they're trying to make up for this weakness. They're trying to manage the gulf between themselves and the West. They're trying to overcome that gulf or manage it in a way that's not so devastating. And so they try to divide the West because it's so strong. And they try to use state power and coercion to force their people to modernize and to force their people not to be attracted to the Anglo-American model and the transatlanticism and Europe. They try to force their people because that other side is more powerful and Eurasia is weaker. And the leaders in Eurasia have to play a game not being in charge in London, not being in charge in Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles, or Silicon valley, but being in charge in Eurasia with less of an inheritance, worse institutions, use of the state to try to coerce that can't make up that gulf, that can't substitute for the freedom, the openness, the corrective measures and institutions. And so this is a problem. And when people talk about bad leaders, Xi Jinping, Putin, those in Tehran, the systems select for those kind of people. Those of people keep appearing again and again, and again. Our leaders come and go. Most of them are mediocre or worse. And yet, we go on and we're still strong and we overcome our mistakes and we correct for them. And in the east, everything, and Eurasia, everything is existential. They make some big mistakes and their whole civilization is at risk all of a sudden. So it's a problem that Eurasia is land not the sea, is coercion, not openness. It's just a different package of economics and politics. It's not the same 500 years. It evolves tremendously. There's incorporation of that part of the world into the Anglo-American sphere. There's all sorts of tremendous achievements in Russia as a civilization, in China, in Iran as a civilization. We must share the world with them. They're not going away, even when they collapse, they come back. And so that's why I say stand strong as the West, make sure the West institutions, human capital, technology, infrastructure, alliances keeps getting better and better, but figure out how to live on the same planet with those who have a weaker hand that they were dealt and they play it very similar ways unfortunately because of that weakness in the face of our massive strength.
Peter Robinson: Stephen, last question, I'm gonna take a moment to set it up and then just hand it to you. Here's Joseph Nye, former Dean of the Kennedy School, he wrote this just earlier this week. "The U.S. possesses power advantages compared to China and Russia, in terms of geography, friendly neighbors, demography, a growing population, finances, the role of the dollar, and so on," a number of the points you've made. Then he says, "The major threat to American power comes from its internal divisions." All right. And then Robinson here, just giving you a layman's observation, listened to president Biden in the state of the union address the other evening, and it breaks into two pieces, very cleanly, distressingly cleanly. The first piece is about Ukraine and it's thrilling. It's a reassertion of the West, of our values, it's remarkably unapologetic and for the first half or so of the speech, I find myself thinking, well, this may work out all right. And then he comes to the second half of the speech and it's the same old game. Your politics may not be exactly coincidental with mine, so I may say something here that you wanna correct, but it's the same old game we make, we placed in moderate sounding language, the same old agenda of wokeness, green policies, government expansion, nothing new at all. So you've got a speech in which you think the whole country has awakened. And then you get the second half of the speech and it's the same sleep walking. All right, George Ken in 1953, 1953, "The issue of Soviet American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States. To avoid destruction, the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation." We won one Cold War, can we do it again?
Stephen Kotkin: Jonah is right. George Cannon is right and you're right, Peter. So, Zelensky the president of Ukraine, two weeks ago had a 25% approval rating and it was earned. The place was poorly governed, terrible corruption. I could go on. Now his approval ratings are the 90, 90%, 91, 92%. And that's earned. That's fully earned, just like his 25% was earned a few weeks ago, that 91 or 92, that's earned now. And so, a lot can happen. So Joe Biden, I didn't watch his speech. You're gonna be shocked, but I don't watch speeches by presidents in the United States. Actually, I should say that I haven't watched one since there were better speech writers. I'll confess to having watched some given by Ron Reagan during the end of the Cold War, or I should say what we thought was the end of the Cold War, but the Cold War never ended. So this is the problem, Peter. And we've talked about this many times and many people on your show have talked about it, it's exactly right that the only threat to America is America. It's exactly right that China could never take us to down, Russia could never take us down, Iran, North Korea, all of those areas which we feel are very threatening are not as threatening as the possibility that we weaken ourselves. But, once again, the incentives are all misaligned. The incentives are, you play to the narrow base. 7% of the country is progressive, but if you go to a democratic primary, it looks like 110% of the country is progressive. Those incentives are the wrong incentives. And so we need less democracy when it comes to selecting candidates. So that tiny portions of our electorate through primaries don't give us candidates who are far outside the mainstream. And then that happens on both sides. And then of course, with the gerrymandering and with various other problems inherent in the political system, those are tweaks, those are tweaks that can be made.
Peter Robinson: You're actually making, you're making a practical political suggestion of reviving the role of the parties. Fewer primary, right? I mean, tweaks, things that could actually be done.
Stephen Kotkin: There's a huge reform agenda that some DUVAL 11 is put out that many people in Congress have put out, that many excellent smart people have put out, which re-empowers us as a nation, finding the middle again, where we're not getting 50 plus one of percent of the votes, and then trying to radically restructure the entire system we have at home, and instead, only defeating ourselves, getting kicked out, in some cases we don't even, they don't even get 50%. They get less than that. They barely, because of electoral college or pluralities. And so, we can't have this. We instead wanna remember, Ronald Reagan with no conservative television got 59% of the vote when he was reelected. As you know, in 1984.
Peter Robinson: Before talk radio, no Fox News. He did it.
Stephen Kotkin: How did he do that? 59%. You hear the conservatives complain, all the media's liberal, it's all biased, conservatives don't have a chance. And so explain Ronald Reagan to me. Explain to me how the Republican party, one of our great parties has now spent how many months living inside a universe, where they somehow won the last election, presidential election, that they lost, that their attorney general said they lost, that everybody in a position of power said they lost, that all the courts said they lost, how was one of our great parties still living in that universe? And it breaks my heart to see that. So maybe if I had seen that speech the other night, my heart would've been broken, but I didn't watch it. But I see a lot of things that can be corrected. There are corrective mechanisms as I repeat ad nauseam here, which is what makes us strong and what makes us great. And we can make mistakes like Vietnam. And then we can rebound from those mistakes and we can make mistakes like the withdrawal from Afghanistan in the middle of the night. And then we can figure out how to stand up to Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine. And so, we're America, we can figure this out. Let's invest in our people. Let's invest in our R&D. Let's invest in our governance, right? That's what a superpower. Those are the characteristics. Human capital, technology, infrastructure, and governance, we win on all of those, but it's constant, to invest them, to make them better, not make them worse. And then you can fight all the battles you want over this kind of bathroom or that kind of bathroom. Because you have serious people in power elected by the mainstream, not by small, very small, vanishingly small people who vote in primaries and are known as activists or the base.
Peter Robinson: Stephen, are you optimistic?
Stephen Kotkin: Yes. Living in this country can only make you optimistic. Living in this country, seeing what's happened in the West, right, we forget how hard the Cold War was, Peter. We forget that the America didn't wanna fight the Cold War. America didn't wanna have troops overseas. Didn't wanna have to stand up to authoritarian powers and build a big military in peace time. And all sorts of sacrifices had to be made. But lo and behold, Eurasia kept reminding us that we had to do this. And so, what happened to Poland? One day it was liberated and the next day there's a communist colon regime there. What happened to Czechoslovakia? What happened on the Korean peninsula? How come they're trying to close off Berlin? Why did the communists win in China in 1949? Again and again, we got reminded that we had to do this, that we had to bear this burden, that we had to stand up for freedom. And we made mistake after mistake, after mistake. And we learned, and we corrected and we did it. And it was very impressive and it was over multiple generations. And it was over Democratic and Republican administrations. And that's America. That's our history. That's recent history. That's not ancient Greece. And so, yeah, let's get that again, Peter. Let's teach civics again. Let's get history back again. Let's do all the stuff we did only yesterday. Of course, I'm optimistic because we've done it before. And you know what? The Chinese and the Russians, they're afraid of us and they're afraid of us for good reason, because our model works.
Peter Robinson: Stephen Kotkin, of Princeton University and the Hoover Institution, thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
