Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Michael McFaul: Ukraine and Showdown Between Democracy & Autocracy

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

As the Russia-Ukraine war still rages on, so does the debate surrounding its root causes. Is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine more complex than a mere issue of sovereignty? And, furthermore, how will its resolution impact the future of democracy? Join Stanford Professor Michael McFaul, who serves as the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and former U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation, for a deep dive into the underlying causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Hosted by Gita Wirjawan, an Indonesian educator, entrepreneur, and current visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #MichaelMcFaul -----------------SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] | admissions.sgpp.ac.id | wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: Global Thinkers | Wandering Scientists | The Take Visit and subscribe: SGPP Indonesia | Visinema Pictures

I don't think, you know, the war in Ukraine is not about NATO expansion. It's not about threats from military threats from the West. It's about threats from democracy. He's afraid of democratic expansion, not NATO expansion. And what threatens him in Ukraine is a functioning democracy. The depression that we suffered in the 1930s was three times greater in Russia in the 1990s. We didn't do enough to help that suffering. And that suffering happened right at the same time that democracy was introduced in Russia.

So most Russians associate democracy with depression. And we should have done more to help alleviate that poverty. I think that was a, on our side, that was the critical mistake. Hi, friends and fellows, welcome to this special series of conversations involving personalities coming from a number of campuses, including Stanford University. the purpose of the series is really to unleash thought-provoking ideas that I think would be of tremendous value to you. I want to thank you for your support so far, and welcome to the special series. Hi, today we're with Mr. Professor Mike McFaulh, who is the director of the Freeman Spokly Institute at Stanford University.

He's also a professor of international studies at Stanford, and he's famously known as the former U.S. ambassador to Russia. Mike, thank you so much for your time. Glad to be here. I'd like you to spend a couple of minutes, if I may, on your growing up, and how you became interested in Russia? Well, I grew up in a state called Montana,

which is a very rural state. It's one of the most rural states in America. It's on the Canadian border. My father was a country western musician. My mom was a secretary, So it wasn't from family that I got interested. But my junior year in high school, I joined the debate team. And the topic that year was how to improve U.S. trade policy.

And so my partner and I chose a case. This is 1979-80, so I'm very old. So this is still the Soviet Union. And our case was to expand trade to the Soviet Union. And through that year, I got interested in Soviet Union and Russia. And then I came here two years later to Stanford as a freshman. And that year, that was my first trip to California, by the way, I'd never been abroad. But I started first year Russian.

And I took a class called PolySci 35, political science 35, how nations deal with each other. And it was at that moment, Ronald Reagan had now been elected president. there were lots of tensions between Moscow and Washington at the time. And I had heard and read about what the Soviet Union was, but I wanted to see it for myself. I didn't trust what I read, and I wanted to test the proposition that I had as a kid back then. And I had it for most of my career until recently with respect to Russia, which is that if we could just talk to each other and get to know each other, we might be able to reduce. tensions. I most certainly avoid worst case scenarios like war. And so in the summer of 1983, I took my first trip abroad. You know, most Stanford students, they go to France or England or

Italy. I went to the Soviet Union, which back then was called the evil empire. And it was basically from those set of experiences that have been involved one way or another with Russia ever since. You wrote a book entitled from Cold War to Hot Peace With everything that would have transpired until today What you've seen, I mean, you're one of the few experts on the Soviet Union and Russia Anything that you would have wanted to revise onto the book? Well, the book's a tragedy, right? Yeah.

Because I went to the Soviet Union as a kid. Then there was an opening. And I was there for that opening. I was there for the democratization process inside the Soviet Union. And I think that's important to remember because a lot of my students here at Stanford, because it's so long ago, they've forgotten it. But there was a very hopeful time. First with Gorbachev, then with Yeltsin.

I lived in Moscow in 1990, 91. That's the year the Soviet Union collapsed. And there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets who wanted democracy and they wanted to be part of Europe. And they just wanted to live in a normal, boring, democratic country. That's what they wanted. And there was that opportunity. And in the book, I explain why we miss that opportunity.

And I go through some mistakes that we in the West made. I go through mistakes that the Russians made, and particularly Vladimir Putin, who was an accidental president. circumstances. Actually, they have to do with Southeast Asia. There was a, if you remember, in 1998, there was a financial crisis started in your part of the world. It spread to Russia. And when it got to Russia, it collapsed the economy. That meant the government that was in power in 1998 had to resign because Russia was still a democracy. And the person that everybody thought was going to be president had to resign. His name was Boris Namsov.

And instead, it's a very complicated history, but Putin took over first his prime minister, then acting president, then was elected president. And as a result of those tumultuous two years, pushed Russia in this more autocratic direction and then basically in a more confrontational relationship with democracies in the world, Europe, and the United States. You know, the tragedy of that period for me is that we didn't do enough to help democracy back in the 90s. That was a mistake we made. And I don't think we realized how far Putin would go. If I were going to write another chapter to that book, I would have amended it to say, we've been underestimating the risky kinds of decisions that he's willing to take. And the older he gets, the more isolated he gets,

He doesn't talk to many people around him. You know, he doesn't talk to many world leaders either. Shijingpings, basically the only one he respects in the world today. That wasn't true 20 years ago when he first started his president. But even I underestimated, I would say, in terms of things that got wrong in that book, how committed he was to, you know, ultimately revising the borders of Europe. That's what he's trying to do in Ukraine today. And you would claim that.

There was no way to expect him to change the way he has in recent years. Yeah, that's a hard question. That's a good question. You know, I would say two things about him. One, you know, I met him a long time ago. I met him 1991. So we go way back. And many times they're after.

Yes. Not exactly Facebook friends anymore. But I'm now on the sanctions list. I haven't been since 2014. And that's a real tragedy. I don't want to joke about it because I used to, I lived seven or eight years of my life in that country. I used to have many friends in Russia and now I've been cut off. But, you know, on the mistakes, I would say, I think we made our biggest, we in the West made our biggest mistake in the 90s, where we thought, you know, I know you've interviewed Frank Fukuyama before, right?

Frank wrote a very famous article called the end of history. And we all thought it was the end of history. All countries were going to become democratic and market-oriented it and war was a thing of the past. And so we got too relaxed in the 90s. And I think in retrospect, we should have done more to try to help consolidate democracy. And two, to help alleviate poverty. You know, the introduction of markets in Russia and Ukraine and Estonia and Poland, every post-communist country, it was the same. They all took these deep dips.

Three times the recession, the depression that we suffered in the 1930s was three times greater in Russia in the 1990s. We didn't do enough to help that suffering. And that suffering happened right at the same time that democracy was introduced in Russia. So most Russians associate democracy with depression. And we should have done more to help alleviate that poverty. I think that was a that on our side that was the critical mistake with respect to Putin

I just I don't know I mean I don't think you know the war in Ukraine is not about NATO expansion it's not about threats from military threats from the West you know it's about threats from democracy he's he's afraid of democratic expansion not not NATO expansion and what threatens him in Ukraine is a functioning democracy. Because back in his own country, he tells people that we Russians were different. We're not like those Western people. I've heard him say it many times, personally. I remember vividly he explained this to then-Vice President Biden, who's now President Biden. Right. And it was a meeting we were in 2011. He said, you know, you guys make a mistake. You look at us and he went like this. He said, you see. Same color. Same color.

and we think we think like us, but we don't. We think differently, right? And he wanted to say, we're not part of the West. We're not, we're not part of this democratic, liberal world you're in. But if Ukrainians, who he says are just like Russians, they're just, they're just, they're just Russians with accents. That's what he says, right? If they can practice democracy, well, that undermines his argument back home, right?

So that's the part that's threatening to them. And I just, you know, I don't, I can't think of a scenario under which we could have done something different that would make him think differently about Ukraine. You've explained a couple of times in the past the three reasons or main reasons as to why Putin would have invaded, right? Great power politics, NATO expansion and domestic politics of Russia. Explain those. Yeah. So in my world, both academia but foreign policy world, I still have lots of friends in the Biden administration. Those are the three big arguments, right? So let's walk through them. Great power politics. When I teach here at Stanford, I start my lecture with a six-minute video. And it's a video of a thousand years of history in Europe. And what does it show? It's in six minutes, by the way. It goes really fast. What it shows? It shows countries getting bigger. and then countries getting smaller. Countries invading their neighbors,

annexing them, and losing territory. Sometimes, you know, through the course of that history, whole countries disappear. So Poland's on the map for a while, and then Poland disappears and then pops back up later, right? And that's just to show my students that, you know, for thousands of years, powers have been invading each other and annexing territory.

And that's part of the explanation here. Right. Soviet Union collapsed. Russia was very weak, but then 30 years later, Russia obtained more military capability and had the ability to the capacity to invade its neighbors again like Russia had done many times before. So power is part of the explanation, but I don't think it's the whole explanation for a couple of reasons.

One, I can think of some great powers that are next to weaker neighbors that don't invade their neighbors. So I grew up on the Canadian border, right? The United States is way more powerful than Canada. If we wanted to, we have the military capacity to take Saskatchewan. That's the province right above Montana. But we haven't done that. No, we have in the past, a hundred years ago. We were in the annexation business too, but today we're not. And so it's not inevitable that great powers need to attack smaller, lesser, weaker powers. And then number two, there have been countries like Japan and Germany that have much more powerful today than they were 70 years ago, but they're not attacking their neighbors. And even China, people like to compare

China and Russia a lot today. But maybe it'll happen in the future. We'll talk about that in a minute if you're interested. But so far, China's not invading Russia. China's not invading its neighbors did in the past. So it's not inevitable that that happens, right? So it's a condition, but it's not the whole explanation. Second argument's about NATO expansion. This is an argument popular in Moscow and Beijing, but it's also popular in certain circles in Washington as well

and certain universities here in the United States. And it says Russia was weak, and we in the West, we took advantage of that, right? We expanded NATO the first time. and then we expanded NATO a second time to include parts of the former Soviet Union. And finally, Putin just said, enough is enough. I have to stop NATO expansion. I have to invade Ukraine.

And to that, I would say, again, it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, NATO expansion has been an issue for decades with respect to the Soviet Union and Russia, an issue to be managed. But U.S. NATO relations with Russia have gone up and down. It hasn't been a steady state always conflictual. And I witnessed it myself. I was at a NATO summit in 2010 in Lisbon. Dmitri Medvedev, the president of Russia, was there. And he had nothing but kind words to say about NATO.

So hold on. How can this thing that's supposed to be so threatening just a few years ago you were looking to cooperate with them. So I think there's got to be something more to the story. And that's why I think the third story is really about inside Russia, where Russia became more autocratic. And as Russia became more autocratic under Putin, he became more threatened by democracies in general, tensions between the United States and Russia rose as Russia became more autocratic. And then second, when there were these democratic breakthroughs in his neighborhood, that's when he got nervous. So first there was Serbia 2000, follow of the dictator, Milosevic.

Then Georgia, they call it the Rose Revolution in 2003. Then the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. Then the Arab Spring, 2011. And then inside Russia, the end of 2011, parliamentary election. happened. It was falsified, kind of like normal falsification levels. We didn't think that much of it. I was working at the White House, but this time around, Russians documented it. So smartphones, that's something

they didn't have before. And then they put it on Facebook and Twitter and Vukkontakté and there was mass mobilization against falsified elections. And that threatened Putin. And he blamed us for that. He said, this is the Americans that are trying to foment revolution against me. And by the way, right after that started, that's when I became the U.S. ambassador. 2012. Right in the wake of all that drama, that's when I showed up.

And that's why he blamed me personally for trying to foment revolution against him. How would you contrast or explain the difference between your thoughts, vis-a-vis the thoughts of some of the people that you've alluded to? in Chicago and also at Harvard without mentioning names. Well, I don't mind mentioning. John Bersheimer is the name you're leading to. I'm going to the University of Chicago tomorrow, in fact. So that perspective is the second explanation where... And by the way, that's an argument popular all over the world, right?

In my part of the world, unfortunately or fortunately. Yes. Yeah. He has a lecture that I think has 20 million views, Professor Mearsheimer. And so their argument is we provoke this, right? We supported NATO expansion. We pressed to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. And Putin finally said, you know, if you're going to do that, I have to push back.

But let me go into, in more detail, I think that argument is incorrect. First, in the lead up to this war, I think it's very important for everybody to remember. There was no progress on Ukraine joining NATO. It'd been, you know, diplomats talk about aspirations, right? Ask the people in Turkey about, you know, nice words about, you know, aspirational stuff. with regards to the European Union. I think they're on their fifth decade of joining the European Union.

So that was always there. And NATO has a open-door policy that anybody can join. That's a democracy in Europe. By the way, I used to write in the 90s when Russia was a democracy that Russia should join. That was logical. But in the weeks leading up to Putin's invasion, there was no imminent threat of Ukraine joining NATO. And Putin knew that. And President Biden knew that.

And Brussels knew that. And President Zelensky knew that. I hosted him here at Stanford the day after he met with President Biden. And we discussed this issue at length. There was no moment that that was going to happen. Number two, Putin said that he wanted to renegotiate European security architecture. And the Biden administration was ready to negotiate with him. And I think that's something that the NATO expansion argument forget, is that he made their proposals.

It was rather unusual, by the way. I've negotiated treaties with Russians. Usually, you publish the treaty at the end of the negotiation, not at the beginning. And I think that Putin published those treaties about the new European security architecture ahead of time, showed that he wasn't serious, right? It's like you and I doing a business deal and you getting on Twitter and publishing what you want before, we've had a chance to negotiate. So I don't think he was serious. And I think the fact that he did it that way should he wasn't.

But the Biden administration was ready to talk to him about that. But third, ironically, his invasion of Ukraine actually has expanded NATO. There are now two new member states, Sweden and Finland, that are about to join. And so if the theory is true that Russia has to invade countries in order for them to stop from joining NATO, why hasn't he invade Finland? They're right there. They've got a much smaller army than Ukraine. And of course, they're not going to invade Finland because this is not about NATO expansion. It's about imperialism.

I think that's what I, in my frustration and talking to friends of mine that used to be colonization. of empires, that's the framework that I think is the right way to understand this. Ukraine used to be a colony of the Russian Empire, right? They didn't even dress it up like United Kingdom or France or, you know, they used the word empire. They were a colony. Then they got their freedom for a little bit. And then the Soviet Union took over.

And the Soviet Empire brought them all back in through force. There was no voting. It was, you know, the Bolsheviks came and through force compelled them to join the Soviet Union again. And then they got there to independence again. 1991, Soviet Union collapsed. Right. And all 15 republics became independent countries. And for 30 years, Ukraine was independent.

And now Putin has reinvated. He's re-colonizing the former colony and he's annexing that territory. So imagine if, you know, 30 years after leaving India, the British said, you know, we changed our mind. We're coming back. Imagine if, you know, the Portuguese left Angola in 1976. Imagine in, you know, 30 years later, it said, you know what? We found out you guys have a lot of oil and you have a lot of diamonds. So we're coming back.

And so we want to recolonize you, Angola. Oh, and by the way, we're going to take 20% of your territory. when we're going to do it, and we're going to call it Portugal. The fact that it's contiguous, I think, confuses some people in the world, whether they're right next to each other, but the Austro-Hungarian Empire was also right next to each other. My family's from Ireland.

We used to be part of the British Empire. We gained our independence. We're still next to them. And I think that's the right way to think about it. But you don't need to believe me. Just listen to the way Putin talks about it. I think one of my frustrations with some of my academic colleagues is they don't listen to the whole speech of Putin. They just pick out the pieces that support their hypothesis.

But if you listen to what he says, he spelled it out very clearly. He does not believe that Ukraine is a real country. He says partly from the West, but he also blames Lenin, by the way. He also blames the Bolsheviks that they artificial. divided the Slavic nation, the one nation that should be united. And so now his mission in life is to reunite the one Slavic nation. That has nothing to do with NATO expansion. When he talks about it, he goes back hundreds of years before NATO had even existed

to talk about his mission statement to bring all the Slavic people together. So the Chicago argument in that there needs to be a buffer state. is somewhat misplaced because he could have used that same argument for Finland. Correct. Sweden and any neighboring state that needs to be buffer state, right? Okay. Well, and let's dig into that a little bit more. First of all, the concept of buffer states is one that comes from the 19th century, right?

Spears of influence. if the United States of America ever wanted to attack Russia, we can attack Russia in five minutes. We don't need to march our armies through buffer states, right? So that's an antiquated idea that, tragically, we live in a world of ICBMs and SLBMs, submarine-launched weapons and cruise missiles, that the concept of buffer states just doesn't make any sense anymore. But number two, it's a very important point that I'm glad you reminded me of. NATO has never attacked the Soviet Union.

NATO has never attacked Russia. And NATO will never attack Russia, at least because these are democracies that are beholden to their societies. And that would be crazy. We don't have any national security reason to launch a war against Russia. It's suicidal. They have nuclear weapons. That would be crazy for us to do that.

And so, you know, I think of it this way. You know, we just recently bought a new house, and we have a new security system for our house. And we turn it on to protect our house. And my neighbors are not threatened by that security system unless they want to break into my house. That's NATO. So as long as you're not attacking a NATO country, it's not going to bother you. It's only when you have plans to attack a NATO country that you might be bothered by the NATO alliance. And the other thing I would say is, you know, Putin has his military friends and allies.

He has something called the CSTO. Why don't we ever talk about that? Like why, you know, Belarus borders countries that are part of NATO, well, if we're all going to have buffer sites, Well, then you got to create buffer states for NATO countries as well. And when you start to dig into it, you just realize how antiquated those kinds of ways of thinking about security are. Okay. I just think it's important to clarify that. Yes, I do too.

Thanks for some of our friends in Southeast Asia. Yeah. And you tweeted earlier today in that citing an opposition, you know, to the invasion of Iraq, about the U.S. It's not an argument to defend the invasion of Ukraine by Putin. Explain that. Well, first let me say, I was not a supporter of that war. Yeah.

And I joined a presidential campaign in 2006. And the candidate's main foreign policy message at the time was he was against the war and he was going to end the war. His name was Barack Obama. Senator Obama, he later became president, and he did end that war. He kept his promise. And I many times, you know, I worked with him in the White House, and traveled around the world with him, and I remember him saying,

the American people voted for me to end this war, and we're going to end the war, because some of our generals weren't so keen on ending that war, if you remember that history. Having said that, I also think it's a false equivalency between the war in Iraq, and the war in Ukraine, we invaded, the United States invaded Iraq on a false claim about weapons of mass destruction. And I think that was wrong. And that was a tragic war that need not have fought, in my view. But it was not a war of a democracy, of a dictatorship invading a democracy.

It was not a war of imperialism. There's no, you know, we're not there. It's not our, Iraq is not a colony of the United States. And most different, we didn't annex territory of Iraq. That's how it's different. In fact, to me, the parallel war is the first Iraqi war, where in Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, tried to annex Kuwait, and the Western world repelled him to preserve.

what are not American norms, but their norms embedded in the United Nations charter, which is about sovereignty and decolonization. So I think the wars are different fundamentally. But even if you disagree with me, right? Let's say, you know, America, what about? Well, what about Iraq? What aboutism, right?

What about, because when I was ambassador well before the war in Ukraine, I was asked this all the time about our, that war. And so let's say you think you want to compare them. Well, if you think the war in Iraq was wrong, and now you're saying, well, then this war has to be wrong too. You can't invoke the war in Iraq as being wrong as an excuse for Putin to invade Ukraine. The logical thing is, you know, my mom taught me two wrongs don't make a right, Michael. You said that in a tweet. Yeah, so you've got to, you've got to, if one is wrong, the other one has to be wrong too.

So I want to be clear, I don't think it's a false equivalency. But even if I accepted that, then you've got to, if you think one war is a war of imperialism, then how can the other war not be a war of imperialism? You know, I come from a country that's supposedly the third largest democracy in the world. And, you know, in the last few years, we've seen how democracies, seem to be struggling with their failings. And they're not uniquely within the developing economy space. They're quite pervasively all across.

How important do you think, you know, the resolution in Ukraine is for purposes of making democracy right? That's a great question. I think it's really important. I don't want to exaggerate it. Right. And I don't want to pretend to know the politics of your country or Southeast Asia or other places. Generally. So I'm generalizing.

But the way I look at it is in the following terms. There was this horrific event called World War II. How did it start? It started with an unprovoked invasion, followed by annexation. Well, there were some annexation before the war and then other annexation. by two countries, by the way, people don't forget, the Soviet Union also invaded Finland and annexed the Baltic states. And more people died in that war than I think any other war in history, right?

And so in 1945, when it finally ended, the world got together, even the autocrats, right? Solland was there too. And we decided we're going to try to set up some basic rules about sovereignty, territorial integrity, and later decolonization. If you look at that those are the big, there are many other principles there.

I'm going to get to democracy in a minute. But I wanted to start with them first, because if we let that break down and we just allow big countries to invade whenever they want and no respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, then the world becomes, anarchic and Abysian and everybody loses as far as I'm concerned. And, you know, in Asia, there's a, there's a rising power. It's called China. Do we really want China to be able to march into anywhere

they want because might makes right? I mean, that to me is a really bad world. And we don't, we can look, we have historical examples of how bad it can be. So I would start first just with the principle of sovereignty. We cannot allow Russia. We cannot allow Putin to get away with invading and violating sovereignty and then annexing territory, because that, I think, sets a bad precedent that would have implications all over the world. Because there's a lot of borders all over the world. I don't need to tell you that are very contested that if we begin to start redrawing them would lead to a lot of chaos, a lot of war. But then you asked about democracy, and that's another layer. I also think this is a war between it. I don't think. I know it's

a war between a dictatorship and a democracy. And if Putin wins, that is going to involve other autocrats around the world. And it's going to feel like the trend that you mentioned rightly that we've been in for 15 years of democracy recession. It's going to feel like, oh, here's another setback, right? This weak democracy, this new democracy in Europe has now been. been disassembled by an invading autocrat, that sends a bad signal to other autocratic countries around the world in the Middle East, in Asia especially. Conversely, if Ukraine can push back and defeat

and regain its sovereignty, I think that sends a signal to the other autocrats around the world of the costs of using military force. You know, I worry most about a war over Taiwan that would drag my country into that war. That scares me to death. I do not, I do, I want to do everything we can to try to avoid that conflict. And I think a defeat of Putin in Ukraine will cause Xi Jinping to think a little bit harder about the cost of invading Taiwan, both on the military side, but also on the economic side. Yeah. So I think the stakes are pretty high. As an Asian, we're vested in seeing the great powers of the United States in China, being vested in Southeast Asia or Asia, right?

And some of us in Asia see this coupling of Russia and China as being a little bit concerning. Number one, I think there seems to be misallocation resource by the U.S. And that might tilt the balance. Right. For Asia purposes. Explain why or how it's not going to be like that. Well, first, I share the concern. Yeah.

You know, Russia and China today are probably closer than they've ever been in their long, long histories that both countries have. China's got a lot longer, but Russia has a thousand-year history or hundreds of years history. It's contested, you know, when Russia really started, and that's a contest, a contest with Ukrainians right now. But let's leave that ancient history aside. You know, maybe for a couple weeks when Mao took over, right? There was a little honeymoon period when the communists took over in 49, but it didn't last very long. He went to Moscow and Stalin treated him poorly, and, you know, there was the famous Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War.

But it is close today. Putin and Xi Jinping have a close personal relationship. They've met 40 times. I just met this week because they're both, in both countries feel like they're threatened by the United States and our allies. And now that Putin is at war, he's desperate for expanding ties to China. And Xi Jinping is taking advantage of that in my mind. He's, they're buying oil and gas from Russia at a 30% discount. Not exactly so friendly, by the way.

You know, I hope my friends wouldn't exploit me like that when I was in trouble. But you see Putin doesn't have a choice, right? Because his oil and gas markets in Europe have been cut off. So I think it is troubling to watch it. I think we, we in the West, and I shouldn't say we in the West. the United States and all democracies and our partners around the world, I think we need to up our game in terms of our cooperation. If they're cooperating so closely, I call it the autocratic international, right?

There used to be the socialist international. This is now the autocratic international. Well, then the Democratic international, I think, needs to do more to support each other. Right. And, you know, I give the Biden administration a lot of. credit for the way they responded to the war in Ukraine with military assistance, with economic assistance, bringing NATO together. None of this was preordained. It could have gone a different way. And so I give them a ton of credit on that. They need to do more, but what they've done so far is

impressive. Where I score them lowest is in public diplomacy around the rest of the world. I don't think they've done enough to explain why we're fighting, why we're health. helping the Ukrainians fight for freedom in their country. I don't think they've done enough to bring together the democracies of the world and the small D Democrats of the world, right, inside autocracies that are fighting for the values that they claim to support. And if they're going to be organized together, we've got to be better organized together ourselves. But is it safe to assume that the relationship between China and Russia is such

One is subordinated to the other as to give us Asians or Southeast Asians some comfort that there's not going to be any tilting in the balance of geopolitics in Asia. I think that's a good way to describe it. And let me expand about on that a little bit. You know, the relationship has always been asymmetric. Right. But it's become more asymmetric because of the war. So, you know, Russia is basically supplying raw materials to China. And China's not providing much back.

And strikingly, you know, Xi Jinping was just in Moscow this week. He could have announced a big new military assistance package. He didn't. He could have announced a big new economic assistance package. He didn't. You know, you think about what Biden announces for Ukraine compared to what China announces for Russia. That's a dependency. In fact, you know, not to go back to my own.

old, you know, I used to read a lot of Marx and Lenin, but, but, you know, during the Cold War, Soviets would have written about this is classic imperialism, right? They used to call it the third world. The third world would supply raw materials to the first world and the first world would exploit them. Well, that's kind of what China's doing with Russia today, right? I mean, it is a very imbalanced relationship, especially when you add to it, this incredible thing that today, it varies every day, but Russia is forced to sell to China, and India, by the way, but to China first and foremost, their energy at prices well below the market rate. That sounds like exploitation to your point about comfort, which I think is a good one. I don't see Russia playing a more

expanded military role in Asia. I think it's highly unlikely that they would be a use of ally or partner to China if there was any conflict that China had in Asia. Do you see the visit by Xi Jinping to Moscow as some sort of a catalyst for a quicker resolution to the war in Ukraine? I don't know. That's a good question. The Chinese published their 12-point peace plan. I really like the first point. I'm not so enthusiastic about the rest, but the first point was a good one, which is that all countries should respect the sovereignty of all others. There's no way you can read that and not think that that is aimed at Putin because nobody

was attacking the sovereignty of Russia. And remember, you know, the Chinese just brokered a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore their diplomatic relations. That's a new role that the Chinese have not played in the past. Having said that, I'm not optimistic that there's an easy. mediation path for Xi Jinping for two reasons. One, I listen to Putin pretty closely.

I know, you know, I try to follow what he says about the war. And last fall, in a very fancy ceremony in the Kremlin, he signed a piece of paper annexing four territories of Ukraine, all the four. Donbos and two others, right? But he doesn't control them on the ground. So he did it on paper, but not on the ground. And I just don't see a scenario in which he stops fighting until either he's conquered those four places or his military has just run out of ammunition on soldiers, right?

So I don't think he's looking for a peace deal right now. And when I look at what President Zelensky in Kiev says, he says he wants to liberate all of his territory. So I don't see where the overlap is in terms of those two positions. What could change that would be, you know, a real successful counteroffensive on either side. So the Russians suddenly, I don't predict this, but I think it's highly, highly unlikely, given how poorly they're fighting right now. But say they begin to really make inroads and they're on the road to Kiev, maybe then the Ukrainians would reconsider and vice versa, which I think is a more probable outcome,

which is that the Ukrainian counteroffensive this spring and summer divides the Russian army, begins to threaten Crimea, which Putin annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and then maybe Putin might sue for peace to try to hold the territories he has today. But we're very far from that right now. I know we're almost out of time, but this is going to be my last question, and it relates to how long do you think this is going to take? And this is related to a number of factors. The resilience of Zelenskyy, the resilience of Putin, the resilience of Russian domestic politics, and the fact that there is no mutually assured destruction between Ukraine and Russia, which makes it a little bit more nuclear

from a tactical standpoint. What is your recipe for achieving success for the world? That's a great question. How do you see the war ending? Another hard question that I don't have a good answer for. I mean, I know how I want it to end, which is for the Russians to stop occupying Ukraine and for Ukraine to be free and independent again.

And by the way, it could in a heart, if Putin wanted to, he could leave, remember, if you watch Russian television, this is not a war between Russia and Ukraine. On Russian television, the way Putin speaks, it's a war between Russia and NATO. So he could tomorrow say, I defeated NATO in Ukraine so that they didn't invade us, right? It's complete nonsense, of course, but everything that he's. says that his propagandists say is nonsense it's not based in reality and he could declare victory and he would be fine i i honestly think he'd be fine this notion that he needs to save face in front of who like you know who's he got to save face in front of like some dictator some general or some fascist no he doesn't need to save face in front of anybody i just don't think that's likely right

uh you ask me how it likely ends um i fear it's going to grind on for a long time because Ukrainians are not in a mood to settle right now. I talk to Ukrainians every day. The devastation, the killing that Putin has done, the way especially kidnapping children, bombing civilians, as a result of that, that has just put the Ukrainians in a frame of mind that they're going to fight to the end.

And even if Putin, God forbid, could march his army into Kiev, they'll just continue a guerrilla fight against. They're not going to capitulate ever. I just don't see capitulation on their side. And I don't see yet a scenario where Putin is ready to compromise. So tragically, I think it grinds on with one big wildcard, and that's us. That's the United States.

And those that are supporting Ukraine militarily, that could change because we are a democracy. We're going to have a big debate about this war in the run-up to our presidential election. There are already major candidates in the Republican Party. Mr. Trump being the loudest, but Mr. Dissantis, the governor of Florida, also who are questioning whether we should be supportive. And if that changes in the next 18 months or so, that might compel some kind of negotiated settlement that Ukraine. might not like, but may have to support. But that's in the future. I think the drama, I think there's going to be a lot of drama in the next six months.

I think there's going to be a lot of drama on the battlefield. We have grossly underestimated the Ukrainian military many times before, including at the beginning of the war, where our intelligence community and I think the rest of Europe thought that Putin would be in downtown Kiev within a matter of days. and we were wrong about that. We were then wrong about the counteroffensive's last fall, where the Ukrainians proved to be much more adept at these, at liberating territory than we thought.

So I think we should wait and see what they plan to do in the coming months. The last bit on your assessment with respect to the possibility of tactical nuclear engagement. Yes. I avoided that question, answering that question. You know, I'm guessing just like everybody else is. Nobody knows whether Putin will use nuclear weapons or not. And when I read people that say definitively, he will do it if this happens. I want to ask them, well, how do you know?

Did Velodja, Vladimir Putin, call you up and tell you? And, you know, I interact with my government fairly often. They have better intelligence than I do that they can't share with me. but I get the sense they're guessing too. So I want to be humble about predicting the future. I think it's a low probability event, very low probability event, for the simple fact that Putin, if he's rational,

and I do think he is, I don't think he's crazy, has to calculate the cost-benefit of using a nuclear weapon, and there's very little military utility. He uses a nuclear weapon, and then what? he thinks the Ukrainians are going to stop fighting. This is not Japan in 1945. That's the mistake, I think some people think, oh, then they're going to quit.

They won't. They're going to fight with more ferocity. I think they'll try to take the war to Russia if that happened. Number two, would Xi Jinping support that? No. Would anybody support that in the world? No. So Putin, right now, he's got his buddy Xi Jinping coming to Moscow and giving him a pat on the back.

He's got a lot of the rest of the world sitting on the sidelines. I think that changes if he uses a nuclear weapon. And three, I don't even think he can count on his own generals. He's got to worry about will they follow that kind of order? I think that's another concern. And then finally, remember, Putin is actually achieving a very concrete military objective by threatening to use nuclear weapons. He is deterring principally the United States, but other countries as well, from giving more offensive

capabilities to the Ukrainian army. We're not giving jets. We're not giving attack them, these long-range missile systems, right? These are the weapons that if Ukraine had them, they could use to attack Russia and to attack Crimea. If Putin uses a nuclear weapon, then we're no longer constrained. then I think there will be a lot of push for us to provide those kinds of weapons. And that means the war comes to Russia. So I think even from his own calculations kind of cost-benefit analysis, there's not a lot of payoff to using the weapon. And there is payoff to continue to threaten but not use the weapon.

Last bit. Is there hope for multilateralizing the effort beyond NATO? There's hope. there's and and I I actually welcome Xi Jinping's involvement most Americans don't the you know secretary Blinken said this is all hocus pocus it's all cover for Putin my view is a little different

they're already together so I don't see like what hocus focus you know what cover this has been given to Putin they've already been that way but by getting him more involved by putting out a peace plan that pulls him in. And with the deal that they did with Saudi Arabia and Iran, I said that's not so bad for the rest of the world because that may help keep the war in Yemen from exploding again.

And now they're tied to keeping the peace there, right? It's like, knock yourself out, guys. We haven't been doing such a good job. So, you know, good luck with that. And I'm cautiously optimistic that that could be a good thing. I don't think we should just uniformly dismiss it because it's not an American idea. And I would welcome the Indians.

There are other countries that have relations with both countries that could also be useful. Amen. Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you. Thanks for having me. That was Mike McFaul

from the director of Freeman Spokly Institute at Stanford University. Thank you. This is Endgame.