Five Questions for Stephen Kotkin: Advice for the New Administration (and the Rest of Us)

>> Peter Robinson: Whenever this remarkable historian and I get together, the rules are always the same, I get to ask any five questions I want. He has no idea what I'm going to ask. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure myself. Stephen Kotkin on Uncommon Knowledge now.

>> Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.

I'm Peter Robinson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution here at Stanford. Stephen Kotkin represents one of the nation's most accomplished historians and one of its most fascinating analysts. The author of half a dozen major works of history, Dr. Kotkin is now at work on the third and final volume of his definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, a new year, a new administration.

Today five questions for 2025. Stephen let's start with the presidential election. Two arguments, here's one, Donald Trump's reelection was a one off. A weakened Joe Biden remained in the race until he couldn't. He handed the nomination to an even weaker candidate, Kamala Harris. Trump wins the Electoral College in the popular vote, but you know what?

His polls never break 50%. He wins the popular vote, but again with a smidgen of under 50%. It's a one off, a fluke. Here's the second argument, this follows analyst Henry Olson, exit polls showed that more voters identified themselves as Republicans than as Democrats for the first time since 1932.

Donald Trump won a full one third of the non-white vote, a historic margin for a Republican. In heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County, Florida, which Biden carried with 54% of the vote four years ago, Trump wins with 55% of the vote. In Starr County, Texas, a county that is 98% Hispanic, Trump defeated Kamala Harris by 16 points, which is the first time a Republican presidential candidate carried Starr County in a century.

Something big happened. It wasn't a one off. Which argument is right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Peter, it's great to be back.

>> Stephen Kotkin: It's been too long.

>> Peter Robinson: It has been too long, Stephen.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you for bringing me back.

>> Peter Robinson: It has been too long.

>> Stephen Kotkin: It's wonderful. That's the question I would have asked you.

I'm not good enough to be sitting in your chair. I don't have the interviewing skills. I mean, I can do some of the prep like you do, but I don't have the skill set you have. But if I had been in that chair and you had been in this one, that's what I'd be asking you.

So let's pan out. You know my style. 2024, one of the greatest years for democracy is in recorded history. Eight of the ten most populous countries voted in national elections, the only two that didn't vote of the most populous were China, which of course has no system of allowing the people to choose their leaders, and Brazil, because Brazil had had their national election before 2024.

But otherwise everybody went to the polls. Sure, in some cases, the polls aren't real, like in the case of Russia, but in most cases they were. So you had half of the adult population of the planet was able to voice their views this year. So if you are a proponent of democracy, you just live through one of the great fantasy years of all time.

And yet a lot of the conversation is about crisis of democracy, threats to democracy, democratic erosion or democratic backsliding. And so what's going on here? And then let's get to the American case, a lot of analysts confuse rejection of their preferences at the polls with some kind of crisis of democracy.

>> Peter Robinson: Do they ever?

>> Stephen Kotkin: That's a sad but pervasive phenomenon. There can be crises in democratic governance, and there were some issues for sure this year that are really important. But when that many people, eight of the ten most populous countries, more than 2 billion adults, half the adult population of the planet gets to vote, something good has happened.

And so that's the first and deepest and most important point. Sure, we could look at Venezuela and how the election was won by the opposition, but the regime in power falsified it and refused to admit, even though the opposition proved with the numbers that they had won. And Venezuela is a challenge for the incoming administration, especially today as we speak, one of the leaders of the opposition, Machado, was arrested in Venezuela today.

So there's a lot of that stuff, but let's be honest, it was a great year for democracy. And the democratic erosion, backsliding narrative took a beating. The other people who took a beating were incumbents. Incumbents of all kinds took a beating. And that's because government is not working that well.

It's not working that well for majorities of people. It's working for some, but not for enough. And so incumbents on the right and incumbents on the left, the Tory Party in the UK.

>> Peter Robinson: The Tory has been blown away in Britain.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Their worst loss ever in almost 200 years of the existence of that fantastic party, probably the oldest party still in existence in the world.

And in the US the Democrats got punished, and they got punished brutally, and they deserved that punishment. And the vehicle for that punishment at the national level was Donald Trump. But it happened not just nationally at the federal election level, you had in Ohio, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, an incumbent was punished.

You had in Pennsylvania the victory of McCormick, who had lost the last time around in the primary process on the Republican side, he won in Pennsylvania, okay, by the skin of his teeth but nonetheless, he won. And we could point to other examples. Not every case were the incumbents punished, but in many, many cases.

The thing about democracy is voters cannot always get what they want, but they can punish what's in front of them for failing to deliver. And we had that election. So millions of people voted for Donald Trump because of who he is and what he represents and what they think, or at least hope he might do.

And millions more punished the Democrats for who they are, what they've been doing, or what they've been failing to do. Whether that punishment sinks in remains to be seen. Now, as far, As far as your question, was this a Trump victory and is it an enduring shift?

>> Peter Robinson: Correct, yes.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Well, we don't know yet. Too early to tell, as Zhou Enlai supposedly said about the French Revolution more than a century afterward. So it could well be that Donald Trump is able to consolidate some new quasi-organization of American politics the way Roosevelt did in 1932 and after until Reagan, as you pointed out in your question.

Is Trump capable of that? Is the country on the cusp of that? Those are questions more for people like yourself. Remember, I'm only a voter. My expertise on American politics as you know, is really just two days a year, that first Tuesday in November and April 15th when I become expert on America.

So Trump could well misread his mandate. So Biden comes into office, narrow election, a few swing states, a few tens of thousand votes in the swing states, a 50-50 Senate, and he decides he's the incarnation of LBJ or maybe FDR. And of course, we know what kind of majorities they had in this congress.

And so that was a delusion on the part of Biden and his team. And that delusion was punished as we just said. It was punished in the form of his vice president. But the punishment might even have been greater for him had he stayed in. So now Trump is in a position where how does he read what happened?

Does he overreach? Does he decide that several ten thousands of votes in the seven swing states, all of which he won, indicates that America is ready for an enduring, multi-generational grand transformation? Or are we still a 50-50 country where the voters are poised to punish the incumbents should they fail to deliver at the first opportunity they have to punish them.

We'll live to see that soon. I hope I'm on your show again before we live to see that. But it's coming. And so one can be optimistic about the larger trajectory of America and still be cautious about any massive realignment. You live through a realignment. You had a front row seat.

You know what a realignment really looks like. And so you're in a good position. You have an intuitive feel for this. So it's possible. I mean, it's there. It's there for the potential taking, but it doesn't happen automatically, as you know.

>> Peter Robinson: Right, Russia and Ukraine still. It's still going on.

Through last September, the United States had appropriated more than $180 billion in military and other aid to Ukraine. And yet the war has for something like two years now represented a stalemate. Russia holds about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, and there seems to be nothing Ukraine can do to expel Russia or that Russia can do to beat the remaining four-fifths of Ukraine into submission.

The casualties have proven just staggering. The Economist magazine estimates between 60 and 100,000 Ukrainians killed and some 400,000 wounded. And between 100,000 and 140,000 Russians killed, with something upward of half a million wounded. President Trump has promised to deliver a ceasefire, but in a recent press conference he gave another one yesterday.

This is a couple of days, a week or so before yesterday, he seemed to suggest that one aspect of the deal would be a promise to deny Ukraine entry into NATO. Putin seemed to laugh that off, as if he's going to hold out for a much better deal than that. How will this end? What will Putin take? And is that a deal Donald Trump should make?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, we've been around the bush on this question, you and I, a little bit over the years. Now, this is the third year of the full-scale invasion coming up in a few weeks, the third year anniversary.

Again, I think we need to step back a little bit here. On the one hand, we have this television show known as The Court of Mar-a-Largo. And right now the ratings are really good. Everyone's watching the show. You have this court society with an American TV version of European Castle filtered through Vegas, right? It's kind of like a casino meets Hill Castle in Italy, right?

>> Peter Robinson: Yeah, okay.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Right, and there are all these big personalities there besides King Donald, or would be King Donald, and they're jockeying for airtime. And some of them own the air that they can not just jockey for, but command that they're the center of attention.

And so it's a show. And now there's gonna be government, there's gonna be a congress with razor-thin majorities on the Republican side. There's gonna be complex issues like budgets, which they haven't been able to do since you and I had black hair. There's gonna be world events that impinge on them that they don't control. And you remember well, from the White House what that feels like. The best-laid plans, as it were, that's all coming, and that's coming very soon. So now we're in the TV show phase of this where we have news cycles, and we have ratings, and we have this Court of Mar-a-Largo.

You can't be a king in the American system because it was designed precisely, as you know better than anybody, to prevent that eventuality. So there's all sorts of ways that the executive branch is tied up in knots trying to get things done. So they can gain people's attention.

And certainly, Donald Trump has done that. He has people's attention. But now he's got to govern, he's got to deliver. And these are intractable problems domestically and internationally. Let's remember that President Obama wanted nothing to do with Ukraine. It was so low down his list of priorities after Putin seized Crimea that Obama gave the Ukraine portfolio to the vice president, Joe Biden. Funerals and Ukraine.

>> Peter Robinson: And Ukraine.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Those were Biden's portfolios. Biden wanted to wash his hands of Ukraine. He had bigger fish to fry. It interceded on his presidency. Putin interceded on by Obama's White House. So now we have President Trump, and he's not very invested in Ukraine.

He'd like it to go away. He'd like to pull that proverbial chain that we all remember on the toilets growing up. Now, there's a handle, but back in the day, it was a chain, and you pulled it, and sound, and things went away. So Trump has that view, and it's the same view that Obama had, vis à vis Ukraine ironically.

He'd like it to go away. But here's his problem. Joe Biden fled in the middle of the night from Afghanistan, and his presidency never recovered.

>> Peter Robinson: It never did recover.

>> Stephen Kotkin: His ratings tanked immediately after the withdrawal from Afghanistan and stayed down. Maybe that wasn't the only cause.

There were probably many causes to that, but sure looks more than coincidental. Americans hate war, but if you're in a war, they hate losing even more. And so Donald Trump risks becoming the Joe Biden of Ukraine, having his own Afghanistan, where Trump began to withdraw from Afghanistan before Biden came in.

Biden inherited the problem, made it worse, and took the blame. And Trump got none of the blame, even though he was also responsible. And now Putin has a chance to humiliate America and Ukraine on Biden's watch, he hands it over to Trump. And now Trump, if he leaves in the middle of the night, the way Biden did of Afghanistan, what does that do to his presidency?

Think about Nixon. We all remember Nixon. Well, some of us remember Nixon.

>> Peter Robinson: Some of us remember. You and I do.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I played Nixon in school during the school debates when we were young. I was the only one, everyone else wanted to play the Democrat. And I volunteered to be Nixon in the mock debate that we had.

>> Peter Robinson: Nixon, some other kid played Humphrey?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Some other kid, the rest of the class played Humphrey.

>> Peter Robinson: So you've been swimming against the stream a long time, Stephen.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Well.

>> Peter Robinson: All right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I was young then. I didn't really know what I was doing.

I'm older now. I still don't know what I'm doing. And so what happened with Nixon? He promised to end the Vietnam War. He wanted out. It was tearing the country apart. It was clearly not going well. He wanted out. He gets elected. He comes into office, turns out the North Vietnamese don't wanna negotiate with him.

He's promising to get out, and the other side says, screw you. Literally. So what does Nixon do? He decides to bomb the Smithereens out of the North Vietnamese and the adjacent countries.

>> Peter Robinson: He mines Haiphong Harbor?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Because he's escalating to deescalate. So Trump now is confronted with either a Joe Biden-esque, middle of the night, fleeing from Ukraine and bearing the burden of that loss on his presidency on American prestige.

Or a kind of Nixon-esque, well, if the other side won't talk and do what we want, we'll have to escalate to deescalate. So that's a really big dilemma for Trump. So when he promises to end in the war in 24 hours, what's he really talking about when he says now it's 100 days?

His announced special representative, Keith Kellogg, retired military officer, has now elongated that to 100 days, and now they are elongating it to six months. They may elongate it to four years of his presidency before too long. And it's because, as in the case of the North Vietnamese, it's not clear that President Putin wants to deliver some type of victory to incoming President Trump.

Why would he do that? There's insufficient pressure on Putin to force a deal.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so here's where one of the many places you are expert, and that is the workings of the Russian government. I don't understand how a president of any country. I know, I know, it's not really a democracy, but still, he has to have the support of a lot of people to continue to operate that chain of command, to continue to supply his generals at the front with fresh soldiers, even holding a fifth of the country, even in a stalemate.

He's losing a lot of people every week. His navy's been humiliated. I don't understand why there isn't pressure on him, why he doesn't feel pressure. He's got to wrap this up or what? He's not gonna lose an election. Will his generals turn on him? I guess the man who did try to turn on him.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Prigozhin.

>> Peter Robinson: Prigozhin, ends up with an unfortunate airplane accident.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Somehow that plane blew up.

>> Peter Robinson: So essentially we're talking. So he has all the levers of power. There's no one who can put pressure on him. Is that the way it works?

>> Stephen Kotkin: You got a couple of things going on here.

First, there's a collective action problem in authoritarian regimes. Suppose you and I get together and we say that. I say to you, Peter, President Putin is ruining this country and we have to do something about it. Your first instinct is that Putin has sent me to test your loyalty.

Even if you think the same thing that I think, you think he's ruining the country, the first thing you do is stand up and say, how dare you say that? And the second thing you do is you run to Putin's staff and you tattle on me.

>> Peter Robinson: Rat on you.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Because you're trying to protect yourself. You assume that it's a provocation to test your loyalty. So how do you overcome that level of distrust inside an authoritarian regime like that? It's really, really hard.

>> Peter Robinson: You're essentially saying that the best way to understand the Russian government is to watch old episodes of the Sopranos. It's a thug regime.

>> Stephen Kotkin: The best way to understand old episodes of the Sopranos is to study the Russian government. I'm with you on that. So that's one piece.

>> Peter Robinson: All right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: The other piece is something we call negative selection. Negative selection is a term, it's a jargon from sociology. It means I'm going to appoint people to top positions precisely because they're stupid. They're too stupid to figure out how to overthrow me, and so I'll be safe if I appoint the stupidest people I can find to the highest positions. This is typical for authoritarian regimes. So your defense minister is a construction foreman.

He finally got cashiered after mishandling the war. The cost of negative selection is you get imbeciles in positions like defense minister, which is fine in peacetime, but once you go to war, you've chosen loyalty over competence again and again and again. And you've done this on purpose, this negative selection.

War has a way of auditing people's capabilities. It's kind of like doctors. All doctors are amazing, until you get sick.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And as soon as you get sick, it turns out that some doctors aren't very good. Well, as soon as you go to war, it turns out that your loyalists aren't very good in many cases, but they're loyal, and they're also incapable of figuring out how to take you down.

Now, remember, he controls the military. He controls forces that are a threat to your regime. So actually, the worst people, in terms of competence, are often in the most powerful positions in these regimes. So that mitigates against taking Putin down, making him pay a price for his mistakes.

In addition to the fear, the collective action problem, remember Mubarak's regime? It was a military regime.

>> Peter Robinson: Egyptian Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, and he's old, has cancer. His son Gamal is not taken seriously by anybody as a successor. But the military guys that he has appointed, they're really unimpressive, that's why he promoted them.

And they wait and they hesitate and they do nothing. And they can't move against Mubarak to save the country, even though, to save the country from their point of view, even though he's 80, has cancer, and his son is a non-entity, why? Because they are non entities. And so that's the second problem.

And the third problem of why this persists on the Russian side, despite the costs, is that this is who Putin is. This is his life work. He has dedicated himself heart and soul to this. This is not something that he did and can walk away from. Everything, sometimes you walk into that casino and you push all the chips onto one little tiny double zero or zero or red or black, that's what he's done.

So what's Putin doing here? He wants to eliminate Ukraine as a viable state. This is not about NATO expansion and him being under threat from NATO expansion. As you know, NATO is an alliance of pacifist countries with small defense budgets that don't ever wanna fight a war again. And they threaten nobody but themselves.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And so he's wants to eliminate Ukraine. Look at this thing, he's talking to the Poles and the Romanians from 2014, 2016. Why don't you take the pieces of Ukraine you used to control? Why don't we just dismember this thing together?

And they look at him like, what century do you live in? But that's his mentality. And so he wants this Ukrainian state to go away and become just a rump. If the Poles and Romanians, quote, won't take their peace, he'll take his peace and leave just an unviable rump, that's the goal here.

And so for him, it's not about winning and losing the war in some military sense, where you get this much terror. It's about destroying the viability of a Ukrainian state forever. He's bombing museums, cultural centers. They're looting all the cultural artifacts that prove Ukraine is a separate nation from Russia.

That's what this is about. And so where do you compromise with that, where's the deal with something like that? The Ukrainians are fighting an existential struggle for their existence. Whether one thinks America should be involved in that or not is a debate that you've had with many people on your excellent program.

But that's incontrovertible, that's the struggle for them, it's existential for them. By the way, look at this, America was inert. The Russians were salaaming, salaaming, salaaming America.

>> Peter Robinson: Ukraine.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Everywhere in the region, Georgia, everywhere. And it wasn't until the Ukrainians stood up that we stood up next to them.

Same thing happened in the Middle East. Iranians salaming, salaming, salaming American power in the Middle east everywhere. And finally, for the country for whom it was existential, they couldn't take it, they stood up.

>> Peter Robinson: Beebe said, that's enough.

>> Stephen Kotkin: They stood up, and then we stood up kind of alongside them, not maybe full throttle, not maybe understanding what was at stake and what the Israelis were gonna do.

But in both the case of Ukraine and in Israel, it was existential for the country on the front line that pushed America and Europe in the case of Ukraine, but America and other Sunni Arab states in the case of Israel in the Middle East. And so this was not a plan that we had to succor Russia into this.

When this was about to hit, we evacuated our embassy. We destroyed up to $70 million worth of equipment at our embassy in Kiev before fleeing. We weren't ready to stand up for this. And so the Ukrainians did that all credit to them for their courage and ingenuity. This is their survival at stake.

So on our side, if you think about it, Putin will continue until he's afraid for his regime. He will choose his regime over his version of victory in Ukraine. So if his regime is at stake, if he feels a threat to domestically, to his regime, then you could see an armistice, a deal that was acceptable to Ukraine and our European partners.

But what did we take off the table from the get go, pressure on Putin's regime.

>> Peter Robinson: Russia.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We took that off the table because it was escalatory. It could potentially lead to a conflict directly, between the US And Russia, US, NATO, and Russia. So let's take that off the table.

We escalate on the battlefield, where Putin is stronger, he's got more people. And he doesn't care about their lives, and so he can throw them to their deaths. And so we're in a war of attrition, with an authoritarian regime that doesn't care about the value of life. And we escalate on the battlefield, maybe slowly, according to some critics.

Maybe not everything we could have done according to those critics. But we incurred the escalatory risk on the battlefield, in a war of attrition, on the side of a smaller country against a larger country. A quasi democratic country, against a clearly authoritarian regime. And we refused to escalate in the political space, cuz we were afraid that that escalation would be too dangerous.

As a result of which, where are we now in the war? And so until we apply pressure to his regime. Now remember, we're getting accused of regime change 24/7 in Russian propaganda. So we're being charged with the crime, while doing nothing for that regime change. And so we're getting accused anyway.

We're escalating on the battlefield anyway, and yet here we are.

>> Peter Robinson: So, Stephen, are you saying,

>> Stephen Kotkin: So this is three years now.

>> Peter Robinson: Would your advice to Donald Trump be, to take a page from Reagan and apply new pressure, even if at least initially, it's only rhetorical or diplomatic?

Is it time to give speeches calling Putin, in effect, the leader of an evil empire? Is it time to do what Bibi Netanyahu has done, at least according to my Twitter feed. Two or three times now, he's recorded speeches with social media, you can do this now. In which he's directly addressing the people of Iran, he's talking to the people of Iran, past their leaders.

>> Stephen Kotkin: That's right.

>> Peter Robinson: Donald Trump should talk to the people of Russia and say, we have no quarrel with you. You're the inheritors of a great civilization and culture. Begin planning, Vladimir Putin will not live forever. That kind of thing?

>> Stephen Kotkin: You said a page from Reagan.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Stephen Kotkin: How about the whole book? How about everything? The entire book and then some.

>> Peter Robinson: All right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: So yes, yes, and yes again, here's the thing. We often think that pressure on Putin's regime comes from the democratic opposition. Usually they're in exile, or they're in prison if they didn't get out, or refused to leave and were willing.

>> Peter Robinson: Where accidents happen.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Willing to go to prison for their beliefs, and oppose the regime. Several of them have died in mysterious circumstances, most prominently Alexei Navalny, who died in a prison. We think about those people. Many of those people are unbelievably courageous. We know them from the Soviet times as well.

And Reagan paid close attention to them, you were there. Met with them when he went to Moscow, as well as meeting with Gorbachev, despite the fact that there was pressure against him from our own State Department not to do that. Reagan instead did the right thing. I'm saying something slightly different.

Our best hope in the short term, are the Russian nationalists who are hurting for their country. They're not democrats, they're not pro Western, they're not big on human rights. But they don't want their country blood white. And they are hurting for their country, because they're patriots. And they're those guys that I alluded to, that know that Putin is ruining the place, but can't discuss it among themselves and survive.

So not only does Donald Trump have to speak directly to the Russian people about how this guy is ruining your country, he's gotta offer a deal to elites who might displace Putin. They might not have read the notes on the Constitutional Convention. They might not be familiar with the writings of Thomas Jefferson.

Checks and balances may be anathema to them. But they love their country, and they see it has mortgaged, if not abandoned its future entirely to a chimerical pursuit that everybody is losing, including Russia and the Russians. And what's on offer for them if they act? If they move?

What's the package of rehabilitation, of diplomacy, of deal making? Not to reward the aggression, but to reward a retrenchment from the aggression. It doesn't solve your long term trajectory of Russia. For that, you need that Reagan esque approach to the democratic opposition in certain forms. But it does solve your immediate problem of this terrible war that's so costly and so devastating to the Russian people, as well as in the first instance, the Ukrainian people who are on the front lines.

And so this is a sophisticated political gambit. It requires, like Reagan understood, investment in deterrence. You always have to cast the shadow of your military might over the negotiating table, as George Shultz put it more eloquently than I did. And that is Reagan understood better than anybody in his administration, employing Schultz as an instrument in this regard.

You build it up, and you negotiate simultaneously. You appeal to the Russian people. But there's a deal on offer for the retrenchers who are your instrument, domestic, they exist. We're recruiting them, our intelligence agencies are recruiting them, so that they can deliver inside information to us about what's going on.

That's information you can read on the Russian telegram channels.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Every morning as I do.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I don't know how valuable it is, maybe it's more valuable than I'm guessing. We need not to recruit them to deliver information, but we need to recruit them for an alternative Russia that doesn't threaten its neighbors, even if it's authoritarian at home.

>> Peter Robinson: We need to help them save their own country.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes, we do. Now, ultimately, they're the ones that have to do this.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: It's on them, just as it is in Iran. Just as it is anywhere else we could name, and we've seen in Syria very recently, we've seen in Syria that these regimes are all powerful and brittle simultaneously.

And they one moment they look impregnable, and in the same moment they can be undone, implode, like in a bank run. And so that vulnerability is deep, it's entrenched, it's endemic, and it's always there. Every day is existential for Putin's regime, even though he's got the levers of power, the repressive apparatus, that stuff can flip.

We've seen it in Syria recently, we saw it in the Soviet case when you were writing those important speeches, the one that you alluded to, write that speech for Trump. Go down to that Las Vegas Tuscan villa.

>> Peter Robinson: Mar-a-Lago.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And see if you can meet with them and offer them a version of that speech.

>> Peter Robinson: They need you, Steven Israel this past summer, Antony Blinken, our own Secretary of State, said that Iran's breakout time. The time needed to produce enough weapons grade material for nuclear weapons, and now I'm quoting him. These are his words, is now probably one or two weeks, Iran already possesses ballistic missiles.

On October 1st, they demonstrated that they were willing to use them against Israel with a ballistic missile attack. So you've got ballistic missile technology done a week or two to fissile material, done another year, maybe two, to develop deliverable warheads. Is that state of affairs acceptable to the state of Israel?

And recently on this program, I asked that very question to Natan Sharansky.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: And he replied, quote, that state of affairs is absolutely unacceptable to the state of Israel. In Israel, I'm quoting Natan Sharansky, in Israel, everyone is asking one question. When we have to take out Iran's nuclear program, not if, when will the United States go in with us?

>> Stephen Kotkin: I saw that program, you've had many great programs since the last time I was on this show.

>> Peter Robinson: It's been too long.

>> Stephen Kotkin: That's not the point, the point is that you've had many great programs. So let's think this through, what direction is that Iranian regime headed, are they on an upward trajectory?

They are toast, could be tomorrow, could be a generation from now, they have no legitimacy at home, they are despised by their people, despised. There's not ambivalence, there's hated for that regime, that regime is not very young. Their supreme leader, I mean, he could run for president of the United States, he's old.

>> Peter Robinson: He's that old.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah. I mean, he is done, and they face a succession struggle of who might Take over for him. Which is a moment of enormous vulnerability for them, they have their own security apparatus. Their own generals, their top generals talking about the defeat that they suffered in Syria and the terrible consequences.

What happened to their proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, their own top people in the highest jobs, responsible for the military, secret police, the paramilitaries, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij. They know the handwriting is on the wall, again, it doesn't necessarily mean we get a democratic government in Iran. That would be the hope, we would love to see that in the first instance for the Iranian people, not just for the neighbors in the region.

It's a tough region, there aren't very many democracies in that region. So that remains to be seen what the outcome might be, what might replace this regime. We could well get a military security regime without the mullahs that resembles the Shah's regime.

>> Peter Robinson: Which we'd take.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes.

So the question then for Israel and for the United States is, should we do something which turns the Iranian people against us? Should we risk wrecking that country so that, for example, they don't have electricity, they don't have water supply, they're starving, there's no food. Should we act in such a way when we're trying to punish the mullahs, the Islamist regime.

And we punish the civilian population so that the civilian population, which is now on our side. And on Israel's side to an extent that was unimaginable not that long ago, openly so. Should we give them reasons to rally around the flag and potentially be angry at us because of the grief that we caused.

Or should we maintain the external pressure, ratchet up the external pressure, watch this thing implode. Have the Iranian people do it themselves and thank us for assisting them in taking their country back? That's the question, if you act against that nuclear threat, what else do you get in the bargain?

What other unintended consequences, potentially perverse in unintended consequences, come along with that? And so, I'm not answering that question because I don't have the full access to intelligence that the Israelis, the Americans have, I have no security clearance at all. They may know things that are material that I don't know about the state of play, and you alluded to Blinken's public remarks.

There's a credibility issue there for me when the Biden administration is speaking about foreign policy. Issues that they were not front and center on for a long time or very effective on. But let's take him at his word, and let's say there is that real threat, the vulnerabilities of that regime are so grave.

And the possibilities in a positive sense of the implosion are so enticing that I would carefully weigh action internal to Iran versus external pressure. Now, again, I could be wrong because I'm not as well informed as some others who are closer to this. But let's think about what Israel has achieved already.

>> Peter Robinson: An enormous amount.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Right. Dragging us along kicking and screaming the same way the Ukrainian thing happened, where we wanna take credit for the actions, the courage and the ingenuity of the locals. And some credit is deserved on our part, but it's clearly the locals that are driving this.

So the Palestinian Arabs, they've lost the war. They've lost this war again and again and again. And each time they lose the war, they lose it worse. And their civilians pay the price for this.

>> Peter Robinson: Their civilians pay.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Those elites continue to refuse to accept defeat, and the consequences are that in 1937, they could have had approximately 75% of historic Palestine.

And they said, no, we want 100%. And in 1947, 48, they could have had 55% approximately, of historic power, said, no, we want it all. And then you have 67 and 73. And by the time you get to the 2000s, 22% of historic Palestine is now on offer.

Now we're in 2025, what percentage of historic Palestine is on offer?

>> Peter Robinson: Under BB Netanyahu, zero.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Correct, so they've lost the war again and again, worse each time. And their civilians pay the price. And people over here, people over here are siding with Hamas and the Palestinian leadership.

You can side with the Palestinian people as the victims in the middle of this. Those children, those mothers, the place is at ruin and will be at ruin for the rest of their lives. And that hurts to see that. So they've lost the war, they refuse to accept defeat, but what about the Israelis?

They've won the war. They've won the war again and again and again. And each time they win the war, they win it bigger than the last time. When are they gonna win the peace? What's the plan for winning the peace? They've proven that they can win the war, but where's the long-term strategy for winning the peace?

It doesn't matter if you win the war and you don't win the peace. America did that in Afghanistan, we won the war, we lost the peace. We lost the peace.

>> Peter Robinson: We lost the peace.

>> Stephen Kotkin: In fact, Peter, you can lose the war and win the peace, which is what we did in Vietnam.

There's no way to describe Vietnam other than a loss for America. But in the fullness of time, despite the atrocities we committed there, it's a pro-American country. You can argue that in the fullness of time, we won the peace in Vietnam without winning the war, we lost that war.

So how do the Israelis win the peace? That's the question in front of the Netanyahu government and the Israeli establishment. And it's been that question for our entire lifetimes and they haven't had an answer. And so I need an answer. I know about the Hamas side, the Palestinian Authority.

I understand losing the war and fighting it again and again. I understand how suicidal that is for their civilian population. Those people have only one life to live and it's been sacrificed on their behalf. But I need Israel to win the peace, I need a plan that makes sense.

Not win the war in the next incarnation, but end the war, consolidate a peaceful settlement that works for everybody. And instead, what I'm seeing is incursion into Syrian territory, which is not Israeli territory, and could be argued is a violation of the ceasefire agreement that the Israelis have.

They argue that it's been rendered null and void because of the overthrow of Assad. Again, these are arguments that have deep and profound sets of questions that are not easy to answer and that there are multiple sides to the issue. But I need to see the Israelis moving towards a strategy, not a tactics, but a strategy of winning the peace in the region, because they're the ones that need the peace.

Israel is the success.

>> Peter Robinson: Here's the answer, I have no idea whether I'm right about this, but here's an answer. Here's what we Israelis can do. And this is all we can do, but it's not nothing. We can become so strong that we can enforce peace in this region for two generations.

And then we have an opportunity when these horrible hatreds begin to be forgotten, when they begin to fade from the memory of the Palestinians or these poor people in southern Lebanon, the civilians who are the casualties.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Then we can begin talking about an expansion of a region-wide marketplace, then we can have peace.

But right now, all that history is giving us the opportunity to do is defend the state of Israel with such strength that we are unquestionably unassailable. And then wait, two generations. Is that an answer?

>> Stephen Kotkin: I'm 100% in favor of Israeli strength and defending their security. And it's been very impressive to watch.

>> Peter Robinson: It has been.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Very impressive. Kudos to them, to that whole national security establishment, to that whole society, cuz they fight as a whole society, not just as a separate 1% military. It's amazing, just as it's been in Ukraine, but in different ways and a different scale, it's been amazing to watch. 

The courage and ingenuity, the strength, the brilliance of the intelligence and some of the tactical things that they've pulled off. Breathtaking and gonna be studied for a really long time. And so hats off to them. Okay, what are the costs to all of that? The costs not just two generations from now, but every day during those two generations of yours.

Those cost to Israeli society, they're militarized. Everybody serves in the military there, and everybody's in the reserve on call at any moment. Even if they run businesses, they have bakeries that feed the people. They can get called up in a second for the model that you're talking about.

The impact on their lives, the impact on the GDP of the country, what they've built in the desert.

>> Peter Robinson: Amazing.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, and so why isn't that also part of the calculation, the strength part for sure, but what else in addition to that? Again, let's take more than a page from Reagan, it's the strength plus the diplomacy, right?

It's the deal making, if you're strong enough to get a good deal, that's great, but you got to get the good deal.

>> Peter Robinson: You gotta get the.

>> Stephen Kotkin: You actually have to want to negotiate, and you got to pocket the concessions that your strength is eliciting. So you need a vision of where you're going, again, let's take that book, you need a vision of where you're going.

And you need to be able to take less than 100% in negotiations, because nobody ever gets 100% in a negotiation. You got to do a deal, what's the deal? So I agree with you, the investment in the strength has paid off, it's been necessary, and it's paid off in space, I just need more.

Maybe the answer would be that this is as much as you can get in that region.

>> Peter Robinson: Mm-hm.

>> Stephen Kotkin: You can't hope for more, and that could be true, but let's test that theory. There's a lot of theories I wanna test, people say money can't buy happiness. I wanna test that theory.

>> Peter Robinson: Stephen, a couple of last questions here, let me return you to the President Elect of the United States, Donald J Trump. Here's a tweet by Donald Trump 72 hours ago as we record this conversation. Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if and when it becomes part of our Nation, Make Greenland Great Again. 

I'm giving you first Donald Trump, and then I want to come to Richard Nixon. Add to that tweet President Trump's recent comments that he wants to return the Panama Canal to the United States. And add to that tweets and comments that Canada should consider becoming the 51st American state, that's Donald Trump.

Now, let me give you Richard Nixon, this is Nixon as quoted in his chief of staff Bob Haldeman's memoir, it's Nixon talking to Haldeman. Since you did Nixon in a debate, I feel myself slipping into my Nixon here, I call it the madman theory, Bob.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I remember-

>> Peter Robinson: I call it the Madman theory, Bob, I wanna the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point, I Nixon. I've reached the point where I might do anything, we'll just slip the word to them that we can't restrain Nixon when he's angry and he has his hand on the nuclear button.

And Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for Peace. Greenland, are we seeing the madman theory of international affairs in Donald Trump, what is going on?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Again, it's a great TV show. The Court of Mar-a-Lago, King Donald, you're probably not gonna be shocked to learn that I'm not watching, I'm not on social media, I don't watch television.

Sometimes it's on in the gym, but I, with no sound, and I see the screen, of course, it's red army channel, 10 screens long, MSNBC. So I don't know really what's going on with that, because I'm not paying attention. Let me just say that the madman theory for Nixon, it didn't work.

So whether it was true or not, if it were true, it still didn't help him very much, did it? I mean, after all, we know the results of Vietnam, the madman theory, so here's your challenge, it's a big one. There's not enough American power in The World, that's your problem.

That's your number one problem in The World today, insufficient American power. That's going to sound paradoxical, the left blames America for everything right and wants America overthrown at home, let alone abroad. And the right doesn't like America getting involved abroad in other people's business because it feels there's enough business at home for us to get involved in.

So the left and the right, in horseshoe fashion, are coming together on this critique of American power. Which we're hearing not from everybody in the orbit of Court of Mar-a-Lago? But we're hearing it from some of them and some of the more prominent members of that group. But Donald Trump, he wants to play the strongman, he wants to be taken as a strongman.

And part of the strongman is to bluff and bully and that's what he's doing. And the interesting thing about American power, where does it come from, where does American power come from? Well, it comes from our political system, which is immortal, the institutions are so rich and so deep and so fabulous.

That no matter how many times we try to ruin them, they prove their durability and they prove us wrong. It comes from the institutions, it comes from the free and open society and the dynamic market economy. No matter how many times we wanna regulate it to death and strangle and suffocate entrepreneurialism.

And tax it till it can't breathe, it finds a way and produces the wealth that no other country in recorded history has ever produced. And I could go on, but American power also comes from our friends, from our allies, from our partners. You see, they multiply our power, we have almost 80 treaty relationships with other countries globally.

Those are voluntary and legally binding, other countries have come to us and said, we want mutual obligations with you. We wanna partner with you, we wanna be friends, we wanna be allies with you, imagine that.

>> Peter Robinson: Including Canada.

>> Stephen Kotkin: It's just stunning, no other power in recorded history has ever had that number of treaty relationships with other countries.

Again, this is not a sphere of influence that we're imposing by force, these are voluntary relationships of mutual benefit. They're win win, they're not zero sum, and we have them all over, you alluded to Israel, you could have added UAE and Saudi, and we could go on. So it's not just the transatlantic alliance, it's also the Pacific.

And so that's a superpower of our superpower.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We would want to deepen those relationships. In some cases, they could use a little renovation, like our kitchens or our bathrooms or things that still work but maybe they were built in a different epoch under different circumstances. Maybe the aesthetics are not as pleasing as they once were, right?

And so you renovate, you improve, you bring them up to date. And so if you had that degree of amplified power through relationships, again, it's based upon our system of government. It's based upon our free and open society, dynamic economy, but it's also about our soft power, our cultural power, our attraction.

Why are people trying to cross the border illegally? Are they trying to cross the border illegally because they're all terrorists trying to destroy the country? Some of them are, but the vast majority of them, they're coming because the streets are paved with gold, figuratively speaking, and so we need to fix that.

And it's been partially fixed by, of all people, the Democrats, who exacerbated the problem by going from 50,000 illegal border crossings to 250,000 or 300,000, and now we're back more towards 50,000. They've instituted a Trumpian-like border policy even before he gets in office. My point is just that we have a good thing going here and we got a lot of friends.

You know from your own life that when you need a favor, you've done other people favors and they're ready to step up for you. You know that when you get in trouble, there's somebody you can text message with your thumbs, and they're gonna be right there for you.

Because you were there for them or because they're aligned with you in terms of values, right? And so, wow, how do you manage that better? Clearly, there are imbalances, clearly, there's some free riding, we could go back to every president from your lifetime, how they've complained about the imbalances and the free riding?

And we're partially at fault for encouraging that behavior and rewarding it in some cases. So I agree with President Trump that some of these relationships need a rebalancing. They need updating for the 21st century, the free riding has got to end in the cases where it's happening. Let's not accuse our friends of free riding when they're not free riding.

So on the Greenland thing,-

>> Peter Robinson: Yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I've never been to Greenland.

>> Peter Robinson: Imagine that.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I've been around, but not to Greenland. There are 57,000 or so people who live in Greenland. If I were Trump, would I be threatening them with military force, or would I be bribing them?

$50 billion.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Seems like a lot of money, not compared to our federal budget, not compared to a couple of toys in the Pentagon. $50 billion is a million dollars per Greenlander, think about that. Think about the kind of bargain you could strike using your soft power, your attractiveness, your deal making.

And saying you have rare earths and other valuable minerals underneath, let's develop them together, we'll benefit and you benefit. You sit on the Arctic waterway, which potentially transforms international trade and geopolitics. Let's maybe see the kind of deals that we can do that benefit you and that benefit us.

That would be an interesting proposition, and then we would have to see what they say because they're a sovereign nation. Yes, technically, their security policy is under Denmark, but Denmark does not own them and control them. And we don't have to do a deal with Denmark necessarily, we can do it with the Greenlanders if there's mutual benefit.

If Trump is up to the task of his art of the deal and his deal making, there's a deal to be had that could attract the Greenlanders instead of repelling them. And so why repel them, why threaten? I understand the ratings go up for the show, Court of Mar-a-Lago, but there's a better way to enhance our security through mutual benefit with a population there that might be interested in a deal.

But I don't think we're gonna get to a deal this particular way. I remember the schoolyard when I was growing up, and I made friends with some people and they generally weren't the ones who beat me up.

>> Peter Robinson: Stephen, question five.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay.

>> Peter Robinson: Last question, give me a moment to set this up.

>> Peter Robinson: A tale of two decades, in the 1970s' economic stagnation, the erosion of our position in the Cold War, the humiliations of Vietnam and Watergate, the 1980s' economic expansion. The rebuilding of our military, the reassertion of national morale, so effectively that 1984 re-election campaign slogan, morning again in America, may sound very sappy today.

But it sounded true enough to voters that they gave him 49 out of 50 states. One decade, 1979, this country is so weak that the Soviets feel free to go into Afghanistan and the Iranians to take Americans hostage. 1989, one decade later, we've undergone such a renewal that it spills over into the rest of the world and the Berlin Wall falls.

Now, we have this election, the re-election of Donald Trump. And a lot of people, as you know, I just taped an interview with Marc Andreessen, he's one of them, impressive, accomplished people. Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Vivek Ramaswamy, not to mention the millions of Americans who voted for him.

Now, some people voted for him as least bad, but a lot of people have their hopes up.

>> Stephen Kotkin: 75 million people voted.

>> Peter Robinson: 75 million people voted for him, he won the popular vote.

>> Peter Robinson: National renewal, should we have our hopes up? Can we do it again? Does this feel to you like such a moment, or are we gonna be muddling through the way we have been for decades?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, you're returning to your first question here in some ways, and it's exactly the right question, unsurprisingly from you. Let's think of the landslides in American history, just the modern American history. The landslides, more or less. Four Roosevelt.

>> Peter Robinson: 32.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Landslide which was enduring.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, it was.

>> Stephen Kotkin: The country was changed. It was not just realigned politically, but it was fundamentally changed in its institutions. One can argue for better or for worse, that's a worthy question of debate. But it was big. The next one, Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson, massive landslide. Remember 64.

>> Peter Robinson: 64.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Barry Goldwater.

>> Peter Robinson: Got buried.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Completely. Lyndon Johnson didn't even run again. He was gone. He's a one term president. What kind of landslide was that? In some ways it was a false landslide. Because it was the end. Not yet, but it was the coming of the end of the Roosevelt realignment, domestic transformation.

Because the next big landslide turns out to be Reagan and it's the Goldwater platform that is on the other side of the landslide. Not 100%, of course, Reagan was not Goldwater. You know better than I do what the differences were. But there's enough overlap between 64 and 84 where one is a landslide one way and the other is a landslide another way to think.

That's interesting. And that was another realignment, a fundamental realignment of the political structures in the US And a partial, not a complete but a partial change, fundamental change of the domestic institutions. There was deregulation, tax cuts, commitment to free enterprise, commitment to strength abroad. For some people it didn't go far enough.

But there are constraints on politicians, as we know. And so you have your two big fundamental transformations, realignments. We could have talked about Nixon's landslide and he resigns not long after his landslide. So LBJ and Nixon gone in a flash and FDR and Reagan much more enduring different ways one way and then the other way.

So fundamental realignments in political terms and even bigger in institutional and socioeconomic, they don't happen very often. They happen less frequently than landslides. And landslides are also infrequent. Certainly nothing since Reagan. Okay, so it would be a tall order for us to have a Reagan esque moment in that direction that you're alluding to.

It would be a really tall order. It would be about Trump being Reagan esque and it'd be about real policies getting through the political system. Not executive orders, but laws passed by the Congress. It would be about renewing community ties across the country at all levels. It would be about so many things we're seeing some of that at the state level, below the state level, in the counties.

There's a lot of optimism in many places across the country. Ironically, the tech revolution has not just empowered the coasts, but moved beyond the coasts into the interior, empowering a lot of places in the interior in extremely positive ways.

>> Peter Robinson: Things are happening in Texas and Tennessee and Florida.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes, and in places that you're surprised but shouldn't be surprised when you get there. And so there's a lot of renewal underway. And there's a hunger for renewal. Is there the political entrepreneurialism, which requires not just a president. Remember, Reagan's partner was Tip O'Neill from the other party.

It requires a lot. But the system has delivered this before and it can deliver. We were at a much lower point in the 70s than any time we've reached since then. Whether you're talking about polarization, violence in the society, economic stagnation, inflation, things have been imperfect more recently, but there has nothing been.

Been Nothing like the 70s, which of course, Reagan reversed not alone, but he was a huge part of that. So one can be optimistic about the possibility. But it doesn't happen automatically. It requires agency. It requires that deaf touch, that political entrepreneur, the person with a vision, not just with a news cycle.

It requires cooperation across the aisle. In political terms, it requires so many things. Success is about competent and compassionate leadership and social solidarity and trust. Competent and compassionate leadership, social solidarity and trust. It's in the society, it's there. It has not been to the forefront. This morning I did something that I usually don't do.

I watched some television. Not an actual television, but C span. Because Jimmy Carter was memorialized in that Grand Cathedral in D.C. that you know really well. And it was a special moment. Five living presidents, all in the same aisle of the cathedral. And Jimmy Carter's casket with the flag over it just a few feet away.

It was solemn, it was dignity, and it was spiritual. For believers and unbelievers, the spirituality was unmistakable. Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school for more years than most people live on this planet. He taught Sunday school while president, including before being president and after president. And he read those Bible verses on Sunday and talked about the lessons from the Bible.

I don't know if there was a president ever in United States history who was. Readier to meet their God than Jimmy Carter was today. It was very inspiring moment. Yes. The sitting president made a speech. I stopped watching at that point. I wanted the better parts of the event to be stuck in my memory.

There were some illusions to partisan politics that I didn't think were appropriate. But Gerald Ford's son read a eulogy that Gerald Ford had composed before his own death, because Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford had promised each other that they would each read eulogies at their funerals. And Ford had an inkling.

He was 10 years or so older than Carter. He had an inkling that he might go first. Carter was alive when Gerald Ford died. I guess it was 2006, maybe. But obviously Gerald Ford was not there today. But his son read the text, and it was a beautiful text about their friendship, which they had forged on Air Force One when President Carter brought former President Ford to Anwar Sadat's funeral in the Middle East.

>> Steven Ford: We told reporters on the plane that a lasting Middle east peace would require the United States to make tough decisions like confronting the Palestinian issue directly, thereby building on the work to which President Sadat had literally given his life.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And, of course, Carter had done the deal with Sadat, bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, which has lasted to this day and is a foundation of Middle Eastern policy.

And Ford and Carter became friends, bitter enemies. You know what the campaign was like, you know, the mudslinging, you know, the disappointment in Ford, in losing. All presidents are failures because that's how our system is designed. Even Ronald Reagan, to an extent, didn't achieve everything, but the system is a success.

And that was shown today in that cathedral. And that renewal is in there. It's in those leaders who can be competent and compassionate like they were at the funeral today. And it's in the society that can regain the social solidarity and trust. And maybe it doesn't happen and we're disappointed again, but let's give it a try.

>> Peter Robinson: Stephen Kotkin, thank you for Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson.