Angry Planet - "America Is an Idealist Power in a Reapolitik World"

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Over the past month, we’ve discussed a lot of specifics regarding the War in Ukraine. We’ve gone over the role of tanks, talked about Putin’s motives, and discussed War Crimes. What we haven’t done, really, is look at the big picture. What does this war mean, not just for Ukraine, but for Europe and America. What is the future of NATO? Increasingly, it feels like we’re on the precipice of something … new and, perhaps, frightening.With us today to talk through all this is Charles A. Kupchan. Kupchan is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.He’s just written an op-ed in the New York Times titled Putin’s War in Ukraine Is a Watershed. Time for America to Get Real.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason. A specter is haunting Europe. Sorry I couldn't pass up the other. opportunity. But seriously, over the past month, we've discussed a lot of specifics regarding the war in Ukraine. We've gone over the role of tanks, talked about Putin's motives, and discussed war crimes. What we haven't done really is look at the big picture. What does this war mean, not just for Ukraine, but for Europe, in America? What is the future of NATO? Increasingly,

at least to me, it feels like we're on the precipice of something new, perhaps a little frightening, flavored with some old stuff from the last century that I don't like. With us today to talk through all this is Charles Cupchin. Cupchin is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's just written an op-ed in the New York Times that caught our eye titled, Putin's War and Ukraine is a watershed, time for America to get real. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure to be with you. Okay, so I want to start with something. that happens at the end of your recent piece in the Times. And it's in the title. You know, you call Russia's war in Ukraine a geopolitical watershed. What exactly do you mean by that? It's an inflection point. As you put it in your intro, Matthew, we're crossing some kind of precipice, a Rubicon, into a world that we thought we left behind. And when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union imploded, we entered a remarkable period in international politics

in which great power rivalry was not entirely gone, but muted. And as a consequence, we lived in a world of geopolitical slack. And all of a sudden, Russia has invaded its neighbor. It's not just a little bite, because we've seen little bites over the last, couple of decades, like grabbing Crimea, grabbing South of Sietibhazi and Georgia, going into Syria. This is not a small bite. This is a major invasion, what I think looked like, an attempt to topple the regime and occupy the country. And that's the kind of behavior that we saw a lot of

in the 19th century and men repeated in the 20th century. And so, in many respects, Putin is putting history into reverse. He's bringing power politics back in. He is in the process of, I would say, pushing the world toward Cold War 2.0. What we don't know, is it just going to be Russia versus the West, or is it going to be a combined block of Russia and China versus the West? My best guess is it's the latter. And that's because, at least for now, Beijing is holding tight its partnership with Russia. So I think historians will look back at February 24th, 2022, and see it as a geopolitical turning point. What is it that you think really solidifies China and Russia in this?

Well, I think that the relationship between China and Russia is utilitarian. It's a marriage of convenience. Russia and China have a very long border. They have spent most of their shared history going after each other. There was a brief period of rapprochement and partnership in the 1950s after the communist takeover of China. It didn't last very long. By 1957, 1958, Beijing and Moscow had gone there separate ways.

Then Nixon and Kissinger come along and they put even a broader wedge into the relationship. But then after the end of the Cold War, Russia and China have been brought together in an effort to push back against what they consider to be Western hegemony, the ideological and material ambition of the liberal democracies of the world, and especially after 2014, when the United States and its allies imposed sanctions against Russia for its annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine, Russia has moved closer and closer to China. And it was unclear when this war began exactly where the Chinese would come down because this is a war that I think everything else being equal, they're not wild about. the Chinese like stability. They like globalization. This is a war that decreases stability and may

lead to de-globalization. But it looks like the Chinese on balance are going to stick by their Russian friends. And that's one of the reasons that I think we're headed to a world in which there will be a new geopolitical divide, except on the other side. Except on the other side, side of the so-called wall, there will be not just the Soviet Union, but a block that runs all the way from Eastern Europe to the Western Pacific. So something that we do on this show, or at least that we haven't done yet, because we haven't had this big conversation kind of more focused on America's role. We tended to have really focused on the Ukraine aspect of it. So I just want to throw that out there to the audience before I ask you the question I'm going to ask you. Because I think there's

been a little bit of Western chauvinism in some of the coverage of this and in some of the discussion, maybe a lot of Western chauvinism. But can, I'm interested in this thing that you do in the first half of the essay in the New York Times where you kind of lay out how we got here and how America's ideological underpinnings in the last 20, 30 years helped to get us here. Can you explain that? Yeah. I mean, let me start by saying, that this is an unprovoked war of aggression. Attrocities are being committed. Putin deserves not just to go,

but to be prosecuted for what's going on in Ukraine. But in trying to figure out how we got here, I do think that we have to go back to the 1990s. And really, in some ways, go back to 1776 because the story of ideological overreach that I'm about to tell doesn't begin with the fall of a Berlin Wall. It begins with the founders. It begins with American exceptionalism and the belief that it is America's obligation to go out and change the world and to spread Republican values and Republican institutions. And I think the United States has been a force for good in the world. It has bent the arc of history toward more justice. There are many more republics in the world today than there were in 1776. And one of the reasons is that the United States has served as both an exemplar as well as a crusader

in pushing democracy. That having been said, we at times, a lot of allow our ideological ambition to get in the way of strategic sobriety. We allow our ideological goals and aspirations to mask geopolitical realities. And I think to some extent, that has played a role in the war that we now see in Ukraine. And the story goes like this. The United States in the 1990s, in the 1990s were a heady decade. right? Frank Fukuyama told us that history was coming to an end, that all ideological competitors to democracy and capitalism were toast, and we could expect to see the universalization of the American slash European system of Western democracy and free markets. And part of that agenda was pursued through the enlargement of NATO. And the enlargement of NATO had beneficial effects.

It helped lock in democracy. It helped reverse the moral wrongs of the Yalta Agreement. The Yalta Agreement being when Winston Churchill flank Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin effectively created a post-World War II settlement that gave the Soviet Union in the sphere of influence. And a lot of countries, the polls, the Czechs, the Baltics, they were on the wrong side of that dividing line and NATO expansion was intended to reverse that and pull them on the right side of history. And so it was a noble agenda driven by lofty aspirations, but Russia objected from the get-go all the way back to 1990.

Boris Yeltsin said to Bill Clinton, don't do this. Don't take the most formidable alliance in history and roll it up to our borders because you will isolate us. You will cause nationalism. We will be forced to respond. And so that process of NATO enlargement went ahead. Five successive rounds. About 100 million citizens that used to be in the communist block are now in the NATO block. And the next targets, or at least one of the next targets, was Ukraine. And the Russians basically finally said, we're going to draw a line in the sand here, and we're going to stop Ukraine's movement toward NATO. When Ukraine in 2019 put in its constitution, its aspirations to join NATO. Now, on the one hand, you could say that, Ukraine has every right in the world to join NATO, and you'd be right. Sovereign nations should be able to choose their futures and align as they see fit. On the other hand, Russia's objections to having NATO set up shop in Ukraine are not frivolous.

And it's important for everyone to keep in mind that we, the United States, right, the exceptional nation, have spent most of our history making sure. sure that there are no competitors in our backyard. We spent the 19th century pushing Britain, France, Russia, and Spain out of the Western Hemisphere. We have intervened repeatedly in Latin America to keep others out. When Cuba was host to Soviet missiles in 1962, we almost triggered a world war over it. So it is not unusual for great powers to say, we do not want other great powers to come into our neighborhood. That is an important part of this story, and it's why this is a war that is complicated and that we need to see in this wider historical

lens. You're going to, you'll push back on me for this, I hope, which is why I'm asking it. You know, what I kept thinking about is I was reading the first half of this piece is Meersheimer, who I think you've been critical of in the past, isn't this kind of his line, too, that this is mostly about NATO and the U.S. expansionism? And that's the reason that Russia invaded? Mearsheimer has probably been the sharpest and most notorious purveyor of the line that this war is the West's fault. I would, I would, however, point out that much of the academic community was opposed to NATO enlargement at the beginning and has remained skeptical of NATO enlargement over the last several decades. And in fact, there has been a very curious divide between the

academic community, which has been very skeptical of NATO enlargement and the foreign policy establishment, which loves it and thinks it's one of the best things that's happened in a very long time. I was in the Clinton White House on the National Security Council in 93 and 94. When this enlargement of Veda was being hatched, I fought it tooth and nail. I thought it was a really bad idea. I lost that debate. And the process of enlargement really began in 1994 when Bill Clinton said it's no longer a question of if it's a question of my argument, I think, is much more nuanced and I would say balance than Mirosheimer in the sense that I attribute to the United States noble intent. I think we were putting ourselves on the right side of

history by saying that Ukraine should be able to join NATO, that Georgia should. should be able to join NATO. Why not? On the other hand, we do live in a world in which geopolitics and geography matter, in which countries don't like it when other major powers get up in their grill and bring military power to bear close to their territory. And so for me, this is a story of trying to balance idealism and realism, finding a way to stand by our values and at the same time address in a sober way geopolitical

realities. And so in some ways, what I'm trying to do here is to elucidate some of the irreconcilable tensions associated with America being an idealist power in a realist world. I'm glad that America is an idealist power in a realist world. I think we've changed the world for the better Mearsheimer is a hard-boiled, dyed-in-the-wool realist. And he thinks that the idealism, the liberal ambitions of the United States are folly. I think they're great. We just need to manage them smartly. What would the world look like if NATO hadn't expanded?

Would there be a Ukraine, period? Would there be Latvia or Estonia? As we had that debate in the early 1990s, the Clinton team came up with a proposal called the Partnership for Peace. And the idea was that we would open NATO in a more informal sense to all countries that were part of the North Atlantic space and that wanted to cooperate with NATO without formally enlarging the alliance and drawing new devices. lighting lines. And so in my own mind, we should have continued with that process and then enlarged

NATO only if Russia reemerged as an adventurous, threatening nation. My hope was that we would have been able to anchor Russia in the post-Cold War settlement, make Russia a stakeholder. And as a consequence, I think we could have, we could have, we had a chance to construct a broader European space in which, yes, the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia would have been free sovereign independent nations and in which Russia may have emerged as a stakeholder in that order. Now, obviously there are counterfactuals, and you would be right, Jason, to say to me, well, wasn't the Russian invasion of Ukraine a justification for NATO enlargement? Aren't we glad that Poland and Lithuania and Estonia are now NATO members?

Because otherwise, Russia would be going against them. And you would be right. There are two sides to this story. We'll never know the counterfactual. We'll never know what might have happened had NATO not enlarged. this is all by way of saying, hey, folks, it's complicated. We love nuance and complications on this show, actually. So I'm appreciating this conversation.

Jason, do you have a follow-up? If not, I want to start asking about some history. History is my favorite thing, as you know, so please. So something I've been thinking about a lot in regards to the early 90s and how we got here. And this idealism that America carried through with it, I think, through the, 90s and then into the early 2000s and got pretty sullied, in my experience anyway, by the wars in the Middle East. I think about Bosnia a lot. Can you, and it's something that like happened when I was a kid, but I have a pretty strong memory of it. And I think about like the characters

that came out of it and the way that America began to treat its foreign policy and its military after that conflict. Can you talk about how Bosnia may have also set us up? to go on this road? Or do you disagree with me entirely? I mean, I think Bosnia and the intervention that the U.S. led via NATO, both in the Bosnian case and in Kosovo, were effective, justified. I don't see those interventions as part of ideological overreach. And that may be because they occurred reluctantly and with restraint.

You know, this was the early 1990s. We were coming out of the Cold War. The Powell Doctrine basically said, we do big wars, but we don't do small wars. We don't do weird ethnic conflicts. We like to fight large, armored battles in the central plains of Europe and Eurasia. And so the initial reaction to the ethnic conflict as Yugoslavia started to fall apart was,

hey, not our problem. We don't have a dog in that fight. And then started in 1995 with the NATO intervention and the Dayton Agreement, and then the Kosovo War a few years later, the United States used its military force and its good offices to stop ethnic conflict. And it worked. The Balkans have been mostly at peace since then. That having been said, they succeeded in averting bloodshed, but not in solving the problem in a way that is durable. And so what we've seen over the last several months in Bosnia is in some ways the legacy of how we left things with the Dayton process in in 95, the mid-90s. Essentially, the Dayton Accords left Bosnia as a country divided between

three different communities, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian proats, and Bosnian Serbs. And there is a separate entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina called Republica Serb. And that entity is run by a guy named Millerad Dotic, who has been getting increasingly troublesome and has talked about taking steps that could potentially lead to secession. So I would not put our intervention in the Balkans in the category of ideological overreach. I would certainly put Afghanistan and, and Iraq, right? Our efforts to turn those two countries into Ohio was, I think, a rather foolhardy endeavor. And we paid the price for it. I guess the argument I'm trying to make here is that the Balkans were not specifically an ideological overreach, but they gave people proof of

concept that allowed us to do those ideological overreaches in the 2000s. Like, as you say, trying to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into Ohio. I know they're different things. They were handled completely differently. But I would see one as an extension of the other. Do you mean because our force was so efficacious and cost us so little? Correct. We could do these things from the skies.

The Balkans went so well, we said, that, well, surely we can do this again in the Middle East. And maybe we can go a little bit further this time, right? Now, maybe I'm chasing windmills or making things up. But is there a connection there at all, do you think? Yeah, I do think you're right to say that we did have what we thought was proof of concept. It worked in the Balkans. Now we can export it elsewhere. But I think that that was a misleading proof of concept because the conditions were quite different.

You know, number one, Kosovo is a small place. You know, the ratio of international presence, civilian presence, the NATO peacekeeping force to the folks on the ground that lived there was a very impressive ratio. Afghanistan is a big country. Iraq is a big country. Furthermore, the neighborhoods are dramatically different. The Balkans are in a pretty good neighborhood. Right. Their cheek and jowel by the European Union, which one is one of the great political, economic, geopolitical successes of the last 80 years. They are being magnetically pulled toward Europe. That's not the case in the Middle East, where the neighborhood is about as bad as it gets. And so I think we did borrow some lessons that we thought were applicable and found out that they that they were not. I have a Bosnia specific question just to go, we're not actually going back. I think it's actually

just a follow on. Russia made a big deal about fellow Slavs when they were talking, they were not for NATO's bombing in the Balkans. And in fact, there was some talk. that they might somehow be involved on the other side. I've also read that that is sort of the er problem, if you will, that Putin has with the United States or that Russia has to the United States. Is there some sort of connection? I mean, do they really care about the Brother Slav concept so much? Well, the Brother Slav concept does matter. and to some extent we've seen in Putin's invasion of Ukraine,

what I would call the mystical delusions of the Slav Brotherhood thing. Because I think he actually thought that behind every Ukrainian was a wannabe Russian, that the Russian soldiers would show up, the Ukrainian army would fold, and there would be a lot of hugging and kissing. He was in La La Land. Ever since 2014, 98% of Ukrainians want nothing to do with Russia. And in fact, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in 2019 as a sign of a cultural split in the Orthodox world. This was actually a huge setback for the Russians. It drove Putin crazy.

to see Ukrainian Orthodox Church become autonomous. In the case of the Balkans, I think there is a combination of that mystical Slav brotherhood, particularly with Serbia. But it's mainly used instrumentally. It's mainly used by the Russians to keep a foothold in the region. They like to foster divisions in Bosnia. They would prefer that the lack of reconciliation between Kosovo and Serbia go on for the next several hundred years because it keeps the region off balance.

But you're right, Jason, to say that the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo was in some ways the beginning of the split that we've seen emerge with Russia. And that's because the Russians were opposed to intervention. They backed Yugoslavia. There was not a UN resolution that authorized the NATO-Bowman campaign to push Yugoslav forces out of Kosovo. It was a decision taken by NATO. In some ways, you could see it as legitimate but illegal

because there was no UN authorization. And that really began a Russian narrative of the U.S. acts as it sees fit, intervenes when it sees fit. It talks about a rules-based order, but it breaks those rules whenever it feels like it. And they say the same thing about Libya, where the U.N. did authorize a mission, but it was under the auspices of the responsibility to protect. that is to say to protect civilians, particularly in Benghazi, who seemed to be at risk of being slaughtered by Gaddafi. But then the NATO mission turned into a regime change mission. And the Russians said, hey, you are changing the rules. You are moving the goalposts. Were the Russians in part right? Yes. And so there is some truth to the rules. the Russian narrative. Not that this in any way justifies their invasion of Ukraine, but I think it

helps us understand the parting of ways that we have seen between Moscow and Western NATO democracies. I want to bring it back both to the Middle East and to the kind of the conclusions of your essay. Because you're broadly arguing that America, as you say, needs to get real focus on what can be done and the real politic, right, and kind of let go of some of these ideological, maybe not let go of the ideological mission, but understand its place in relation to, you know, the greater project, right? And as you say, geography. So I think the Middle East is a really interesting case because I do feel like in the past 20 years, that is a place where we have seen both these projects of trying to turn countries into Ohio, but also

pretty realistic approaches to foreign policy. I look at, America's relationship with Saudi Arabia. I look at the war against ISIS and how it was handled and how many pieces there were on the board. You know, how many people America worked with that are opposed to us on paper, but it all worked out. Why do you think that's harder to do with Russia? Well, first of all, I'm not sure I would say it all worked out. It, it, in many respects, didn't work out. It's, it's a big hot mess. And that's just keep in mind. But the scary guys are, sorry, but the scary guys are mostly gone. Well, if by scary guys, you mean al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. And that's because the United States and its partners have taken a pretty, heavy-handed approach to taking them off the battlefield. Successfully, I might add. But if, you know, one has a somewhat higher bar, there I think it gets dicey. I mean, you know, Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban and it is suffering a humanitarian nightmare. Syria looks like

it's going to be a failed state. Iraq sort of makes it through the day, but, you know, it's touch and go. So this broader era of the post-9-11 wars has had some successes but some very serious setbacks. But I think one of the main differences is that, you know, these are wars of choice in the strategic periphery. And what we're seeing is the return of great power competition. Great power competition has been in abeyance really since the collapse of the Soviet Union. China has been too weak on some level, but also sufficiently cautious, that rivalry in that part of the world has been muted. but now we really do see a world that is starting to get kind of a mix of bipolar and multi-polar. It has been unipolar.

There's been one big gorilla, the United States. And now we see the globe heating up. And I think that great power rivalry, great power competition has historically been the dominating dynamic in global affairs. It has dominated the history of the world in many respects. And so in some ways, what we're seeing here is a return to something that looks more normal. And the United States, I believe, is going to have to reduce its footprint in places like the Middle East because it has bigger fish to fry when it comes to Russia and China. But I do think coming back to your question about Mirschimer, you know, I agree with him that the idealist impulse has been too strong. He says, cancel it, get rid of it. It's a disaster. It's naive. My view is we have always struggled to balance our idealist.

and our realist impulses. We've made the mistake in recent years of being 80% idealist and 20% realist, and it's gotten us into trouble. It's now time to shift that balance. How far, I don't know, maybe 60, 40 realist idealist, but we don't have any choice, but to go back to a world that is more realpolitik, that is more about the power politics. Because if Russia and China are doing that, we have to do it too.

And we also have, this is my final thought, Matthew. I don't know. It's a good place to wrap up if you want to take us out. Yeah. Looking to the future, we're going to be dealing with global warming and certain resource scarcities and also just resources in the wrong place, so to speak, you know, for us to build all of our electric cars and everything like that. How do you think that's going to affect the balance of things going forward? Well, you know, one of the punchlines of the New York Times

piece that I published was, yeah, we need to push back and we need to push back hard again. against Russia, probably China as well. But we need to keep in mind that we live in a world that is irreversibly, irretrievably interdependent in ways that the world was not during the Cold War. Right? During the Cold War, we stood on one side, they stood on the other side, and we glared at each other. Yeah, there were times when we teamed up to deal with vaccination. that we struck some arms control agreements to make the prospect of nuclear war less likely. But we now have a host of problems that are global in nature and that cannot be tackled unless major countries work across ideological dividing lines.

We're never going to get climate change under control if we're not working with China, in particular, but also India and Russia. We're never going to get global health and pandemics under control if we're not working in a transparent way with China. China was ground zero for COVID-19, and it's, you know, most epidemiologists tell us this, this is not over yet. What about nuclear proliferation? Iran, North Korea.

can't solve those problems without Russia and China. And so we have to go back to a Cold War type strategy that mixes containment and engagement. We're going to be in a world that will require what I would call hybridity, hybrid strategies, where we stand up, where we need to, where we reach out when we have to. That's not the neat black and white world. that I think one hears about when Biden says this is a clash between democracy and autocracy. The world is messier than that. We're going to have to work with democracies. We know how to do it.

But at times, we're going to have to work with autocracies. I would point out that many of the world's democracies today are sitting on the fence. India, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa. They're not coming down hard on Russia. And so this world that we're headed into is going to be one in which countries one day side with one party, one day side with the other. and we're just going to have to be more hard-headed, more sober, more mindful of strategic realities in navigating a world that number one is going to be more divided, but number two is also irreversibly interdependent. We are in the same boat.

I think that's both an uplifting and grim note to end on, which is kind of what we like to do here at Angry Planet. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to the program and walking us through all of this. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed the conversation. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt. Jason Fields and Kevin Nodell was created

by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we have a substack. AngryPlanetpod.substack.com. You get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes and some bonus episodes. Again, that's at angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com. Just $9 a month, it really helps us keep the show going. It's been a little crazy here in the past two months.

Lots to talk about. And also, both of us have been incredibly busy. So we really appreciate your continued support. It really helps us keep doing the show. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.