Making Sense with Sam Harris - #277 — How Does the War in Ukraine End?

Episode Date: April 3, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Ian Bremmer about the ongoing war in Ukraine. They discuss the current state of the war, the power of sanctions, Biden's "gaffe" about regime change, fear of nuclear war, the logic of mutually assured destruction, the role of China, the most likely outcomes of the war, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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Okay, well, this is yet another episode in what is becoming a series on the Russian war in Ukraine. Like almost everyone else, I'm still thinking a lot about this, not just for what's happening in Ukraine, but for the risk it poses for the rest of the world. We're in, I think, the seventh week of the war, and as you'll hear, I find myself still somewhat confused about what we should and shouldn't be doing in response. To help me sort it out this time, I have brought on Ian Bremmer. Ian's been on the podcast before. He is a political scientist who founded the Eurasia Group, which is a political risk research and consulting firm. Ian is the author of 11 books. He has a new one coming out next month

titled The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. He holds a doctorate in political science from Stanford, and he was once the youngest ever national fellow at the Hoover Institution. Anyway, it's always great to talk to Ian. Here we cover the state of the war and the state of our response, sanctions, Biden's gaffe or so-called gaffe about regime change, fear of nuclear war, the logic of mutually assured destruction, the role of China in all this, the most likely outcomes to the war as Ian sees them. Anyway, the world is a mess, and we are here to talk about it. And now I bring you Ian Bremmer.

I am here with Ian Bremmer. Ian, thanks for joining me again. Sam, great to be back with you. So, you know, I thought we're going to talk about the issue that is really the issue of the day, and it's been the issue of the day for the last, I guess, seven weeks now. We can talk about anything else that might be pressing, but certainly the ongoing war in Ukraine is pressing. Before we jump in, just remind people what your background is. What do you spend your days doing? I'm a political scientist, and I started this firm that does global political science about, oh, I don't know, 24 years ago now. I look at global issues, but my background actually is on Russia and Ukraine. My PhD actually spent a year living

across Ukraine looking at issues of Russians living there, kind of back in 1992, 93, for heck's sake. And so this is something that even though I haven't spent as much time on it in the last 10 years, you never quite let it go. Great. Well, so this is your wheelhouse. So I've had two conversations so far about this ongoing topic. I mean, it's evolved a little bit since I started. I had an early conversation with Gary Kasparov, and then I had one with Yuval Noah Harari, taking different aspects of this. But it's amazing to see how public opinion domestically and abroad gets blown around. And in the background here is this completely understandable fear, strangely resurrected by these events, but it really should have been a fear we've had for our entire lives, of World War III, right? Doing something so stupid or

ungovernable as to start the slide into an exchange of nuclear weapons or some other catastrophe of that magnitude. And that's really making it hard to recommend things in any kind of straightforward way. And so when I had Garry Kasparov on the podcast, the implications of what he was saying, I don't remember him saying it as starkly as this, but it was just, you know, now's the time to have a conventional war with this crazy dictator, Vladimir Putin. I mean, that's just,

if you're not going to draw the line right here, you're really, NATO doesn't mean anything. So all of this squeamishness around, you know, enforcing a no-fly zone and the implications of all of that, that kind of talk is for cowards, right? I mean, I'm giving this more topspin, much more topspin than Gary gave it, but that was certainly the kind of implication one could have drawn from his side of the conversation. And of course, many people find that absolutely terrifying. And we have domestically a kind of horseshoe structure to our politics where you have people on the far left and the far right more or less agreeing that we should go nowhere near talk of that kind, right? This is just, it's insane. You know, we should, you know, so essentially someone like Noam Chomsky and someone like Tucker Carlson could be expected

to agree on this topic, which is the U.S. has no business getting mired in a conventional war that could go anywhere near Armageddon, and we should be rethinking all of our promises to the rest of the world and clean up our own house and all of that. So before we get into the minutiae here, I just want to take your temperature on the big picture here. How concerned are you about all of that, and what through line have you found in terms of, you know, if you were in charge held ideological position vis-a-vis Russia, and he comes to it honestly. If you think about the way he's been treated as a former opposition member, incredibly brave as well on the ground in the former Soviet Union and Russia, there's a reason he's not there right now. And so I don't want to criticize his feelings about Russia and his courage and his bravery about Russia. I don't think he's an armchair pundit that's saying we should go to war and is willing to send your kids there. I think this is a guy who has the courage of his convictions, but I am very, very adamantly not with him analytically.

I mean, for example, you said that NATO doesn't mean anything if we don't have a conventional war with Russia. No, no, NATO means something precisely because we're not having a conventional war with Russia. Ukraine isn't in NATO, and we have not given them even a membership action plan. And by the way, nobody seriously thinks we should. That was true before the crisis, and it's true now. So, I mean, the very fact that we are saying we are not prepared to actively defend a non-NATO ally, and we are prepared to defend NATO allies. President Biden said it when he was in Warsaw a week ago. Does anyone believe that? I mean, does anyone believe we would defend Lithuania? Yes. We have troops on the ground in the Baltic states. And I think people absolutely

believe that the United States, and not just the United States. They believe that NATO would actually defend collective security, other NATO countries. I think the amount that has been done for Ukraine, despite the fact that they aren't a NATO member, is kind of astonishing. It's certainly shocking to Putin. I think it's shocking to Xi Jinping. And here I'm talking about the destruction of the Russian economy, including freezing a majority of their central bank assets. There was no one credible on this issue that believed that the United States would do that before this invasion occurred. The level of military support that's being provided to the very bravely fighting Ukrainians, as well as the intelligence support that's being provided to the very bravely fighting Ukrainians, as well as the intelligence support

that's being provided to the Ukrainians as to the disposition of Russian forces on the ground. And all of that is part of the reason why Zelensky is still there today, and part of the reason why Putin is losing and losing big. So I'm quite aligned with most of what the NATO alliance has done in response to this Russian invasion since it's happened. I'm not aligned with many things that happened before the invasion that got us into this position, and you and I can talk about that. But the challenge that we have right now is that Putin's misjudgment was so vast that his position and the position of his country under any scenario is going to be vastly worse than it was before he invaded.

And yet he's probably still going to be in power. He's very likely still going to be in power. And he's still going to have 6,000 nuclear warheads. And this is not just a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. It is a conflict between Russia and NATO. It will be a conflict between Russia and NATO, even if we get to the point, hopefully soon, that we can have a ceasefire, that we can freeze the conflict on the ground in Ukraine. and that's going to be a hard thing to manage. And that makes things like another Cuban Missile Crisis thinkable, even though you and I clearly had hoped that 30 years ago when the wall came down, we had a peace dividend and we could stop worrying about that. I mean, the reality of this war in Ukraine is that the peace dividend is over. And that's a truly tragic thing.

Yeah. Maybe define peace dividend. I think that phrase has been spoken a lot of late, but it's not something anyone has heard, I think, in living memory. What do we mean by peace dividend? We mean that we used to have a Cold War in every corner of the world, and we fought over every piece of land, and it was either ours or it was theirs. It was Warsaw Pact or it was NATO. It was aligned with the United States or not. There's a global policy of containment. And that was more important than any idea of globalization. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, most importantly for Europe, the EU

expanded right up to Russian borders. NATO expanded right up to Russian borders. And the belief was that you didn't have to pay as much attention to national security. You didn't have to spend as much money on defense. And that you could focus on the social contract and on economic policy, and you could build your countries, and that we didn't have to worry about World War III. Now, the Americans, of course, pivoted more sharply from that after the attack on 9-11, but the Europeans never did. Of course, under Clinton, and under Bush, and under Obama, and under Trump, and under Biden, the Americans have been trying to convince the Germans to spend more money on their own defense, and they refused. That is structural, that no matter what happens in Ukraine, the Europeans are going to focus on national security and defense as a top priority for the foreseeable future. This will be a

generational coming of age for anyone living in Europe. In the way that 9-11 and the wall coming down has been for a lot of Americans, this war in Ukraine will have that impact on the entirety of the European continent. And the EU is the world's largest common market. It matters a lot. And I guess, given the necessity of the moment, we think that's a good thing, albeit an unfortunate one. It'd be great to not need to think about European countries individually arming up, but it seems like they should have done it before this, and we might not be here if they had done it before this. I think that it is a good thing that Europe is together, no question. And by the way, Europe was coming more together over the last decade. The nadir was the Greek crisis and

the EU almost falling apart back in 2009, 2010. But since then, we had Brexit, and Brexit clearly taught the EU that none of them wanted to go through that. It helped strengthen the core European membership. We had the pandemic, and with the pandemic, a recognition that the wealthy countries needed to actually ensure that the poor countries were taken care of, and a massive fiscal transfer from countries like Germany and the Netherlands to countries like Greece and Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland, even countries that weren't as aligned with the EU at all politically. And then, of course, you have the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where a country like Poland and Hungary are actually doing the leading. They're taking the most refugees on the ground. They're deeply concerned about what this means for their security. And it's bringing the EU strongly together.

But of course, it's also happening precisely because there will be a new Iron Curtain. And on the other side of the Iron Curtain will not be Eastern Europe. It'll be Russia, Belarus, a small rump piece of Russian-occupied Ukraine, and a breakaway Russian republic inside Moldova, something probably no one's talked about on your podcast before. And that's not a fight. That is a disaster. That is a small group of population, badly treated, kleptocratic governance, massively authoritarian, and heading for ruin, but armed to the teeth, armed to the teeth, and led by Putin. And that is when people ask me, what's going to happen? How does this end? My view is it's not going to end. What do you mean end? What's going to happen is we're going to have a much more unstable global order with this really angry sort of Russia faux empire that has been cut off from the West and is angry about it. That's where we're heading. Okay. Well, let me kind of cycle through this morass again, because unlike many topics

I touch here, I feel genuinely confused about what I think we should do, what I think would be the likely outcomes of any given set of choices we might make. And it's uncomfortable to be confused about what is perhaps the most important risk we run as a civilization. On the one hand, it seems to me totally untenable that we still live in a world where a single lunatic, however amenable to a psychological diagnosis he might be or not, I mean, a single autocrat, a single kleptocratic maniac who has less and less to lose when his back is against the wall, can threaten everyone in sight with death by fireball, right? And so we have a crazy autocrat problem that, globally speaking, we have to solve. The technology is too powerful to have one person who can decide to hold the entire globe for ransom.

It's just not a stable situation for us. We have to figure out some way to close that version of Pandora's box. And I could be convinced, I think, that this is the moment to do that. Yes, we're running a risk of him going completely berserk, but he's not a jihadist, right? He's not ideological in the way that would make him patently suicidal. He's somebody who has been rational or apparently rational up until this moment. between Lithuania and Ukraine is less interesting to me. Why not really arm the Ukrainians, you know, fully? Why not possibly enforce a no-fly zone for humanitarian purposes? Why not play the edge of this and unleash 100% of all possible sanctions so that we truly beggar Russia? I mean, the idea that we're still, the Europeans are still buying gas from him seems just ludicrous. And why not maximize the chance that there could be some internal revolt

against him, right? I mean, this is really, the person who would solve this problem for us in the entire world is an assassin, right? I mean, the assassination game is the game we should be playing here. And so in this frame of mind, I'm thinking, okay, Biden's gaffe in talking about regime change is a gaffe I can live with, right? Because this is the vocalization of what every sane person is thinking at this moment. And is there a path here to make such an example of an autocrat, right, that closes the door to this sort of thing happening in the future? I mean, is that one possible path there? Now, again, I can argue the other side of this entirely, right, which we will probably do, but just give me a reaction to that fairly hawkish frame of mind.

Well, one, we all want Putin out. There's no question. And if there was a reaction to that fairly hawkish frame of mind. Well, one, we all want Putin out. There's no question. And if there was a way to actually accomplish that, that actually was feasible and didn't run existential risks, I think anyone in their right mind would be thinking about it. And Lord knows the Russian people have been suffering in some ways the most through all of this. And I don't mean in the last five weeks, I mean, for the last 15 years. So, you know, this is not a leader who is in any way fit for purpose in his country. Now, we don't need to talk about all the

problems that American regime change has experienced over the past decades. And the fact that the Americans being responsible for such a thing would not be received well all over the world. But leaving that aside, before we get to what can or can't be done to remove Putin, let's talk about the initial steps that you mentioned. You said, well, shouldn't we be arming them to the teeth? I think we're coming very close to doing that. that. The only reason, there was an argument inside the White House about these MiGs. Everyone talked about the Polish MiGs. We give them the Polish MiGs. There was a willingness to do it. It was not because the point was we were scared of Putin's response. It was an open question about whether the Ukrainians would be able to fly them. And secondly, the considered view by the US administration that they would be knocked, they would be blown up before they had a chance to fly from whatever Ukrainian bases they would be running their sorties out of, that the Russians just have too much control of the air to be able to make that work. And the view was that if you decide to give the Ukrainians,

after all this debate, these couple dozen MiGs, and then the Russians blow them up, that's worse for everybody. It makes Zelensky look weak. It makes the NATO looks weak. So you shouldn't do that. That's number one. I think that the military support that came from NATO should have come sooner and should have been stronger. I agree with you on that point. I think we were late on it. Part of the reason we were late is because the Europeans were completely unconvinced by American intelligence that war was coming. And the Ukrainians, of course, were actively undermining it. They were saying, you're catastrophist, you're putting us in a box, you're making this more likely. Everyone calm down. That was Zelensky

saying that. That didn't make life easier either before the war actually started. I think that on the economic side, you said that it's ludicrous that the Europeans are buying gas from Russia. I'm going to take the other side of that. I will say that let's keep in mind the Chinese, the Indians. I mean, every developing country around the world is doing some business with the Russians. And in fact, the Indian government, not only just, remember, our friends, erstwhile allies in the Quad, not only welcomed the foreign minister, the Russian foreign minister, Lavrov, to Delhi, but he actually met with Prime Minister Modi. What the hell is that?

That's a problem, right? While the Europeans are actually doing everything they can, they're the ones who have all of the economic dependence on Russia. Many of those countries with over 50% of their energy coming from Russia, and they are taking it in the teeth to unwind that as fast as humanly possible. The Germans are saying that they will have two-thirds of their dependence on Russian energy gone by next winter, and I think they'll get close to coming there. They just put an emergency in place that will allow for rationing to start of the German people. Now, I mean, we're saying in the US we're willing to take higher gas prices, but the Europeans, after decades of ignoring this problem, out of decades of wrongly allowing their

policy to become beholden on core strategic supply from Russia, which they never should have done, they are now en masse, all together, moving away as fast as they possibly can. I actually think the Europeans are doing a lot here. And I think the Biden administration is trying very hard to, after a disastrous execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and after big embarrassment on AUKUS, and after four years of America First, where the Europeans really didn't think they could trust the Americans at all. I think Biden has actually managed a pretty strong, coordinated policy set, not easy to do, where the Europeans are sacrificing a lot more, but we're leading. And if that means that the sanctions have taken a little longer, and that means the weapons have taken a little longer, I mean, I'm prepared

to make that trade. So that addresses, I think that addresses everything you were talking about before we talk about regime change in Russia. So you're saying that the Europeans are still buying gas because it's just not actually feasible for them to zero out their dependence on Russia today. They actually need the energy and they can't get it some other way. They are working so much harder and faster to get themselves out of that dependence than anyone would have expected. And I think that within three years, by the end of 2024, there will be no more Russian energy delivery to Europe. And I think it'll be permanent. I think they're cutting it off. I think it's a very, very big

deal. And there is no path back, right? You're going to get out of Ukraine eventually. The ruble is going to be used for toilet paper, and we're going to destroy you economically. Europe is going to get off your pipeline as quickly as possible, and you don't make anything anyone else wants apart from fertilizer. We're going to solve that problem too. And you are now the new North Korea. Congratulations. Yeah. So the last few sentences are where you veered away from reality because they can't become North Korea. They won't become autarkic because they have an enormous amount of stuff that lots of countries around the world will buy. And as I mentioned, the Indian prime minister just met with the Russian foreign minister. He didn't need to do that. He did. And it's not just India, it's China. China's going to be the largest economy in the world by 2030. And Xi Jinping publicly is fully aligned with Putin's worldview. He's fully aligned with the idea that American policy towards Russia and Europe is analogous to American policy towards China and Asia, the Quad, the Indo-Pacific

strategy, AUKUS, you name it. So Russia will become completely cut off from the advanced industrial democracies of the West. And that is it. We had 141 democracies that voted to censor Russia in the United Nations General Assembly. But in terms of support for sanctions, it's only the rich democracies. That's it. That's a significant minority of the world's population, of course. I guess one question there, why didn't the alignment with China convince India that they should move toward us here? Because I'm given India's adversarial relationship with China. Because these aren't all coordinated moving pieces of one global puzzle. The Russians have been selling significant defense componentry to the Indians for decades. And that's a perfectly

functional relationship. There's a lot of energy supply that goes from Russia to India. Now they can get it cheaper. The Indians are historically non-aligned and they like being a part of the quad vis-a-vis China, but Russia has never been featuring a part of that conversation. And by the way, the Chinese foreign minister just went to Delhi, and he didn't get a meeting with the Indian prime minister. So the Indians know who they prefer here. And I think the United States has a better relationship with Modi than we have with previous Indian PMs. It is becoming more strategic. But remember, when the pandemic hit and the Indians were providing all of those vaccines for the rest of the world that were coordinating with the US, then suddenly they had a huge problem and they asked, please send us one plane of vaccines. And the United States didn't do it when they had a real crisis. And so now we're having a crisis, which has nothing to do with India from their perspective. And we're going to tell them, don't buy oil, gas, and military

componentry from the Russians. They're going to tell us to screw ourselves. So they're not part of NATO. And I think it's important from a Western perspective, like you watch it, it looks like the whole world is with us. No, a very small number of advanced industrial democracies, largely rich white people and Japan are with us. We're together on this, but that's it. And that's not the world. It's not even close to the world. It's not even close to the world's economy, nevermind the world's population. So you don't think the sanctions even ramped up to their absolute loudest volume, are sufficient to harm the Russian economy enough to dictate any kind of outcome here? Because there's just going to be enough leakage with China and the rest of the world, the developing world, such that you can't actually

beggar Russia as a result of this? Well, I mean, here's the interesting thing, and this may surprise you, and I'm arguing the other side of my point for a second here. But it's interesting, China's trade with Russia in the last five weeks has actually gone down. And that's because China's economy has a hell of a lot of private sector companies, and they have lawyers, they have general counsels, and they understand trade law, they understand sanctions law. And so they look and they say, look, we don't care how friendly Xi Jinping is with Putin, but we don't want to fall afoul of American secondary sanctions against us. So they are reducing their exposure to Russia. But what I am saying, what I'm reacting strongly against is that Russia will not become North

Korea. They have way too much critical mineral wealth. They are way too important in terms of defense export. They're the second largest defense exporter in the world after the United States. The world is too divided. The United States is no longer seen as the global policeman. We are not the architect of global trade. We are not the architect of global trade. We are not the cheerleader of global values. And so just saying that we want people

to do this, we do have the global reserve currency. We are going to hurt the Russian economy structurally. I mean, they will be in a depression on the back of this. Their GDP will probably contract by 10% to 15% at a minimum. That's a big deal. But you said, will the maximum sanctions be an action-forcing event? That implies to me, will Putin be forced to behave differently in Ukraine and more broadly? Will he need to capitulate because of the sanctions? And I think the answer to that is clearly no. Interesting. Okay, so now to talk the other side of my intuitions here. One thing that concerns me about any discussion of regime change, right, and therefore about Biden's now very famous gaffe, is that, you know, insofar, I mean, it doesn't matter how rational Putin has been up until this moment. If we begin talking as though any feasible resolution of this conflict is going to entail his ouster, that becomes synonymous with, you know, at minimum, you know, him being tried for a war crime somewhere or him being, you know, hung up by his heels in Red Square by his own people.

I mean, there's just, you know, there's no good outcome for someone if we're saying, you know, that whatever happens when this game is over, you, Vladimir, are not going to be among the players. And so putting his back that squarely against the wall turns him into, you know, functionally a martyr, right? I mean, it's like he's now not incentivized to do anything other than cause intolerable pain for everyone in sight. And so I have a fairly strong intuition that if we're worried about that, we shouldn't be doing that, and we should be building him some kind of off-ramp. And I'm wondering what you think about that and what an off-ramp would look like. This is why I'm so pessimistic about where this crisis is going,

is because I increasingly don't see a feasible off-ramp. Any off-ramp I see, because Putin's misjudgment was so bad on the reaction of the West, on the willingness of the Ukrainians to fight, on the readiness and capacity of his own military. I mean, he is just, as a consequence, he's in such a worse position. I don't know what an off-ramp would look like that could be remotely acceptable to Putin. So, I mean, look, he's already, he's backed away from Kiev because he can't take it. And it is possible that he won't be able to take the occupied territories of the Donbass. Remember, he recognized that whole Donbass territory, that's two-thirds greater than what the Russians were occupying after 2014 and what they continued to occupy when the war started.

I think the best way to lead to an off-ramp is to not allow the Russians to create facts on the ground that are unacceptable. And so this is the time to give the Ukrainians a lot more military capacity to prevent the Russians from taking all of the Donbass, keep them in the territory that they formerly occupied. They've been blowing up Mariupol now for almost four weeks. It was a city of 430,000 Ukrainians. It's been completely devastated. Probably 20,000 Ukrainian civilians are dead. And the Russians have destroyed it. It's taken them a lot longer, and they're still fighting there. As of right now, they're still fighting there. And if you can keep that fight going for another week or two, and you can show Putin that he's incapable of taking more territory in the southeast of Ukraine, the Donbass, well, then you kind of have the old 2014 status quo ante, plus a whole bunch of dead Ukrainians and destroyed architecture, infrastructure, all the rest, but they haven't

taken more land. Where if he takes additional territory and he annexes it into Russia, it's impossible to restart a negotiations process there. It's impossible to at any point talk about how you get any sanctions removed or reduced. And I agree that the fact that Biden has called him a war criminal. is a gaffe, where he said, whatever it was, my God, how can this man stay in power? We cannot let this man stay in power. I don't think it was a gaffe. And what I mean by that is I think if you had asked Biden after the speech was over, was he happy he said it, he would have said yes. I think the reason it became a gaffe is because his overly cautious staffers watching him ad lib through the speech and seeing the reaction it got immediately put out a that's not our policy. And as you know, if you're on defense, if you're explaining, you're losing, right? And I don't think Biden needed to explain. I thought the statement he made the next day, which was this was a moral

position. That's exactly the way he feels, the way he felt. And it's completely consistent with saying that Putin is a war criminal. But when you say Putin is a war criminal, I mean, you are saying I can't deal with this guy going forward. That's very clear. We're going to get this guy in the Hague if we have the power to do it. This guy can't show up for a meeting because we're going to arrest him, right? I mean, that's yeah. So it's absolutely right. So we have right now we have the Americans and the Europeans all together. But the farther we go, the harder it is to maintain that. that you've got the French government that is desperately looking for an off-ramp. Any negotiation with Putin at any point on any discussion, doesn't matter how much he's lying, let's just find a way to get a negotiated settlement, move this through. Biden doesn't feel that way. Biden thinks that there isn't actually an overlap in the Venn diagram between the West and Russia, the West and Putin.

And so there's really, at this point, even though we prefer negotiations, there's not much utility in negotiations. While the Baltic states and Poland and the United Kingdom actually don't want the war over because they want to see much more damage done to the Russian military and economy, so they can't do this again. And the longer this persists, the greater those latent frictions, which haven't mattered much in the first weeks of the war, because we're all just on offense all the time, trying to put Putin in a box and trying to support the Ukrainians. Suddenly the step two and step three and different approaches to those steps becomes more significant. And that's going to make this more challenging to manage precisely because, Sam, as you mentioned, because it's hard to imagine how this possibly looks from the Putin perspective other than I'm on offense,

other than I've got to find a way to bloody these guys because they want to take me out. I've got to find a way to bloody these guys because they want to take me out. So then how concerned are you, given the logic there, that he is going to escalate to the point of using tactical nukes or chemical weapons or some other weaponry, which is just on its face, totally anathema to the laws of conventional war as we currently conceive them. And therefore, it would do something that's going to force a response from us that is now taking us far closer to something like World War III. So, I mean, never say never, obviously, in this environment. But that's not what I'm worried about. I'm worried about something else. The questions that you just raised are all about escapism. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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