Making Sense with Sam Harris - #301 — The Politics of Unreality: Ukraine and Nuclear Risk

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Timothy Snyder about the ongoing war in Ukraine. They discuss the effect of Russian propaganda, Putin’s motives, whether the US and NATO bear some responsibility for the war, widespread calls for de-escalation, nuclear blackmail and nuclear risk, 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.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay. Well, I should say something about my last podcast with Meg Smaker. As you might recall, Meg is a documentarian who had her first feature-length documentary accepted more or less everywhere, including Sundance and South by Southwest. And then she got attacked by identitarian grievance entrepreneurs and promptly defenestrated by Sundance and the other festivals. And this really was a case of picking absolutely the wrong target.

You just have to listen to Meg for about 10 minutes and you realize she's pretty much the last person who should have been canceled for making the film she made. Anyway, she has a GoFundMe page to support her ongoing efforts to get the film Jihad Rehab, now known as The Unredacted, the film Jihad Rehab, now known as The Unredacted, distributed. And when we recorded that episode, her GoFundMe had raised $3,000. But at the end of that episode, I asked you all to contribute if you could. And now Meg has raised over $600,000 in one week. So needless to say, her situation has completely changed, and it will be fascinating to see what happens next. So thank you all for supporting her. Beyond changing the material prospects for the film, your notes of encouragement, I know, have made a tremendous difference over there. I mean, the outpouring of love and support was tremendous,

and it was really, really gratifying to see. I love seeing a podcast guest supported in that way. So thanks again for showing up. And on the topic of love and support, I can't say I received much for tweeting into the Kanye West, I guess now known as the artist, known as Ye, formerly known as Kanye, controversy with respect to his recent eruptions of anti-Semitism. I haven't focused much on anti-Semitism in the past. I think I've devoted exactly one podcast to it out of 300. I've noticed it on the extreme right and the extreme left, obviously.

Briefly, the way this breaks down is that on the extreme right, Jews are not considered white, and therefore they fall within the scope of white nationalist racism, with the added spin of various conspiracy theories. But on the extreme left, Jews are considered extra white. They get something like double the white privilege points, so they fall within the scope of anti-white bigotry and activism. So you move far enough left or right as a Jew, and you meet fairly stark expressions of hatred. So I've been aware of that, but it's not something that has been a big deal in my life, certainly, and has not been my focus. Kanye's statement on this one podcast, I believe it was the Drink Champs podcast,

I believe they've pulled down their version of the interview, but I think it's up on other channels. His remarks went on at such length, and they so assiduously connected all the traditional dots for the anti-Semitic worldview, that it was fairly breathtaking. I mean, it was really a Protocols of the Elders of Zion level confabulation about the Jewish control of everything. Unfortunately, there's enough truth in what he said, which is to say there are prominent Jews who have made a lot of money in the recording business and in Hollywood and the other sectors of the economy that he was whinging about, it will seem all too plausible in many quarters to say that he is just calling balls and strikes as he sees them, right? This wasn't hatred. This is just the facts. You have an extremely famous, popular, and influential

artist truly exploding with anti-Semitism. Many people thought I was reacting to something he had tweeted that got him kicked off Twitter. No, that's not what I was reacting to. I was reacting to the interview, which was truly awful. Awful as much for the fact that he received basically no pushback from the hosts, and at least in the original comment thread on YouTube, he received nothing but adulation from his fans. he received nothing but adulation from his fans. And when I tweeted about this, pointing out how despicable it was, what I got back was pretty amazing. You know, I have a fairly thick skin at this point. I don't expect a lot from Twitter comments, but the torrents of hatred and cynicism I received out of Trumpistan were fairly amazing. Some of it was overtly anti-Semitic. Some of it was just expressions of hatred for what I had said about Hunter Biden's

laptop. I got some pain from the left as well. People claiming that after all that I've said about Islam, I'm in no position to criticize someone for their bigotry. Obviously, this just voices frank confusion about the meaning of what I've said about Islam. Perhaps I should spell this out once again so it's fresh in everybody's mind, because the degree of dangerous idiocy that swings on this fulcrum is hard to exaggerate. I have said some extremely

critical things about Islam as a system of ideas. I've said extremely critical things about Judaism as a system of ideas. In fact, I even made Judaism to some degree culpable for the Holocaust. That sounds like a neo-Nazi position, if you don't understand what I'm saying. So I've said a lot about ideas that I think are terrible and divisive and producing unnecessary harm. This is quite different from talking about people as people, especially for characteristics they can't change. If you listen to Kanye's statements about Jews, it's absolutely clear he is not talking about the religious ideas of Jews. He's not talking about Judaism. He's not talking about ideas at all. He's talking about Jews much more as a race,

and it's Jews as a race that are the targets of virtually all anti-Semitism. When I talk about Islam, I'm talking about the beliefs of people to the degree to which they believe them. Yes, occasionally I will talk about Muslims because I can't keep saying people who believe in Islam to whatever degree, but it's always clear in context what I'm actually talking about. There is zero xenophobia implied by my criticism of Islam. And what's more, I have said that with respect to immigration, there are no people I would rather have given green cards than moderate Muslims. I said that in response to Trump's idiotic Muslim ban. So, you just have to follow me long enough to know what my attitude actually is toward Muslims as people. And I've regularly pointed

out that there's nobody who suffers the consequences of the idiotic ideas contained within traditional Islam more than Muslims, more than Muslim women and apostates and aspiring intellectuals. Once again, if this is at all confusing, please recognize that criticizing Islam is like criticizing Marxism or Scientology. is like criticizing Marxism or Scientology. We're not talking about skin color or country of origin or anything else than the consequences of a specific set of ideas. And what I've criticized in Islam again and again and again, really, I will admit ad nauseum, are the consequences of specific beliefs about jihadism and martyrdom and apostasy and blasphemy, and none of that entails bigotry against people. And yet I was inundated with moronic allegations of bigotry, even by some well-known people, in response to my criticism of Kanye's absolutely crystal clear anti-Semitism. Yes, Kanye's bipolar. I'm sure he suffers from

that. Being bipolar doesn't make you anti-Semitic. That particular problem doesn't come with ideological content. So this struck me as genuinely new. Having a star of Kanye's size express that degree of anti-Semitism and to have it be celebrated at the level that it was seems genuinely new to me. This is not Mel Gibson on the side of the highway raving at the cops while getting arrested for drunk driving. So it seemed like a cultural moment worth addressing and clearly condemning, and I'm pretty surprised at the people who couldn't quite manage that.

Anyway, for my troubles there, I got an extraordinary amount of hatred directed at me, For my troubles there, I got an extraordinary amount of hatred directed at me, mostly from Trumpistan, which provides further indication, as if one were needed, that there's a fair amount of anti-Semitism to be found there. I suspect this problem isn't going away anytime soon. We'll see what happens if the orange menace runs for president again. And perhaps I'll say something more on this topic at some point. One thing to notice over at Waking Up, we built a live audio feature, which allowed me to do a Q&A live earlier this week. I think something like 14,000, 15,000 of you showed up for that. That was great.

And I think we'll be building out that feature and using it more going forward. So if you follow me on Twitter, you might occasionally see me say, I'm on the app for the next hour. Ask me anything, and hopefully we'll all find that useful. Okay, today I'm speaking with Timothy Snyder. Tim is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of many books, among them On Tyranny, Black Earth, Bloodlands, and The Road to Unfreedom. His work has received many prizes, and Tim has distinguished himself as a remarkably clear and urgent voice on the topic of fascist and quasi-fascist propaganda, the way in which it seeks to erode democratic freedom globally. And he is especially an expert on Ukraine. And so I wanted to get his point of view on what's happening there in its ongoing

war with Russia and its implications for nuclear risk. And in particular, I wanted him to address much of the commentary I've been seeing online from non-subject matter experts, people like Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sachs, the physicist Max Tegmark, the economist Jeffrey Sachs. There are many people who've been calling with increasing urgency for a reset of our approach to supporting Ukraine. They've been calling for de-escalation. They have been, to the eyes of many, dignifying Putin's claims about the provocations of NATO and NATO expansion. So I wanted to get a clear statement from Timothy about all this. I have no illusions that this is the final word on the matter, but it is, as you'll hear, a deeply informed word,

and it's one that echoes many of my far less informed misgivings about what I've been hearing largely on social media from, again, very prominent people who are speaking very much in the vein of what I've called the new contrarianism. You know, everybody with and without a platform is now doing their own research and promulgating their resulting opinions however they can. And the results on many topics is a cacophony of unqualified voices, whether we're talking about COVID or climate change or the war in Ukraine. This is just now the new norm to have anti-establishment voices create more and more noise. And sometimes this is to the good. I'm not saying it never makes sense to do your own research. But there is something to be said for expertise now and again. So I wanted to get an

expert on Ukraine to come on the show to give us the lay of the land as he sees it. And that's what I've done. So now I bring you Timothy Snyder. I am here with Timothy Snyder. Tim, thanks for joining me again. Really glad to be with you again. So I've really been eager to talk to you. First, I should say that you've been on the podcast at least once before. We spoke about your book on tyranny, which you've recently updated in audio format to cover the war in Ukraine. And I've listened to that audio and it's really fantastic. So I recommend that people download that. Now, you are a genuine subject matter expert on Ukraine and Russia, unlike many people who are spending a lot of time online at the moment telling the world what we should all think about the war in Ukraine. Before we jump in, can you summarize your engagement with this topic? How have you come to know about Ukraine and Russia?

Well, first of all, I want to thank you for remembering that. I mean, the things that I maybe understand about America, I probably got my intuitions from other places. I've been working on East European history my entire adult life. It was beginning more than 30 years ago. I went to Kiev for the first time almost 30 years ago. I've been speaking Ukrainian in Kyiv and Ukraine for more than half my life, working in Russian and Ukrainian sources for more than half my life. And I've been to the country regularly for the past quarter century. I've written six books that are Ukrainian history or that bear on Ukrainian history, the most well-known of which is probably Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

Yeah, and would I be right to assume that you currently know people who are fighting in this war or certainly experiencing its results firsthand in Ukraine? Yeah. I mean, I know hundreds of people in Ukraine. And I mean, just to give one little tiny example, on the Monday before the war started, I was doing a doctoral exam and the student passed. He has a wonderful, wonderful dissertation. And the next day, he signed up for the territorial defense. Everybody I know in Ukraine is involved in the war somehow. A large number of men and women whom I know are in the army or in the territorial defense. And those who aren't are generally all doing something, which is, of course, part of the reason, part of, resolves part of the

mystery as to why the Ukrainians are winning this war, is that people are so active in civil society looking to fill the gaps that the state can't fill. That's a story which is kind of hard to write, but it's a fundamental feature of Ukrainian society. I really want to target a specific audience in our conversation. I think we'll take a few passes over the terrain to actually get down to bedrock. But here's what I most want to address. I know you're going to have to cover a fair amount of history before we get there. But what I most want to cover are the doubts and fears of very bright, rational people who, at this point, think that U.S. and EU support of Ukraine

has gone too far, right? And that we're running the risk of plunging into something like World War III quite unnecessarily. And that we, in some sense, provoked Putin, right? Or at least we're culpable for our own failures of diplomacy. And that, you know, that NATO, essentially, and the United States has backed him into a corner and put him in a position where his behavior is now pretty rational and even defensible from some non-sinister angle. And again, you'll be familiar with much of this, but if I look at my Twitter experience, I'm seeing many smart, well-connected people, some of whom have very large platforms, as I've said, none of whom are subject matter experts, but they're not dummies. And yet,

they're speaking as though Putin has some kind of reasonable, as I said, non-sinister claim upon the patients of the world at this point, and that we should step back and get Ukrainians to step back, and that there has to be some kind of path to de-escalation here that isn't an abject capitulation to the threats of a tyrant. And, you know, just to kind of round this out, I mean, the cynical take here is that most Americans can't find Ukraine on a map, right, and still can't. And yet many are speaking about the Donbass as though the blood of Ukrainian mothers runs in their veins, and that we've been propagandized to by a weird union of a neoliberal, neoconservative order. And all doubts about the wisdom of this project and the wisdom of going all in on Ukraine,

they're being silenced. And this is all kind of an escalatory ratchet towards something awful, the true awfulness being a proper exchange of nuclear weapons between the US and Russia. So that's where I want us to defuse all of that. And I know you have to get into some relevant history before we get there, but that's where I want to put that flag on the horizon and I want us to aim at it. Yeah, I mean, that's fine with me. I think you'll probably have to break it up into little pieces. Yeah, I will. Because what you're talking about is kind of, you know, you're giving a take on a bunch of takes which are pretty far away from any recognizable empirical reality having to do with Russia or Ukraine. Or for that matter, the U.S. Or if I could, I'll just say a little bit of the US. I mean, before we get into the other parts, the idea that the US was expecting

this scenario and is somehow behind it is not only wrong, but deeply colonial. The US expected that this war was going to be over in three days. That was the official American position. And that was the basis for our actions at the beginning of the war. Very important to understand that the Ukrainians are people who have agency and who have taken risks and decisions. And the risks and decisions that they have taken have in turn affected Russia and America. I think a lot of the thinking or some of the problems in the thinking that you're describing starts from the unspoken assumption that places like America and Russia are real countries, and Ukraine is not.

And once you start from there, you then have to twist yourself around an awful lot to try to understand what's happening. So I think, I mean, that's a base I would start out with. I think the idea that somehow America is behind all of this is, you know, it might be left-wing imperialism, but it's imperialism because it's overlooking the agency that small and medium-sized countries can have. And it's overlooking the decision, the ethically-based decision that Ukrainians took when they decided they would defend their country from this atrocious war. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's go back in time, however far back you think we need to go to get to the present. I think the question I would give you to frame this part of the conversation is to

describe the reality of Ukraine and Crimea and their relationship to Russia. Because obviously, what is being said by Russia and being taken at face value by many critics of our support of Ukraine is that Ukraine was always part of Russia or has been part of Russia for so long that it is some kind of ahistorical obscenity to consider it its own real country, as you just described it to be. So how should we think about Ukraine and Crimea, I guess it should be separated there, and Russia? Well, I guess the first point, which is really important, is that, I mean, I might know more history than other people, and I might have interesting things to say in response to your

question, and I'll try to say them, but it is actually irrelevant. The border between the Russian Federation and Ukraine was agreed upon by both parties in December of 1991. Both parties are signatories of the basic conventions involving borders. And it may seem like a really banal point, but history doesn't actually give you a reason for invading someone else's territory. If it did, there essentially is no border in the world, including the American-Canadian border or the American-Mexican border, which you could say is somehow perfectly legitimated or justified by history. That's just not the way that history works. History and law are two different things. And so the unspoken assumption here is that if Russia had some kind of historical claim,

then it would be okay to invade. But I would start by pointing out that that assumption is 100% wrong. And if you want to make that assumption about Russia, you should be saying in general, well, we would like for there to be warfare on every continent except Antarctica, because everywhere in the world, there are disagreements about history, which would then justify war. So the history is interesting. It's a lot more interesting than listening to Mr. Putin would get you to think. You used an interesting word, which is always. And always is, whenever everyone says always in these things, what is happening

is that an imperial claim is being made. It's imperial powers who say things like always and never. And what they're doing is they're asserting their right to control the forms of knowledge, which get the rest of us to thinking that, wow, there isn't really something there. So in the case of Crimea, there was a state in Crimea which lasted for six centuries, which is much longer than the United States or Russia in any recognizable form. And that state existed for two years as part of the Golden Horde, sorry, two centuries as part of the Golden Horde, four centuries as part of the Crimean Khanate, which was defeated and eliminated as a political unit by the Russian Empire in the late 18th century. So that's not always, first of all,

that's an awful lot of centuries before anything Russian power gets there. It's defeated by a bunch of Ukrainian Cossacks in the Russian service, by an empress, Catherine the Great, who's German, and by a state, the Russian Empire, which is nationally speaking or linguistically speaking, majority not Russian, that state ceases to exist in 1918 or 1917, sorry, and is not the same state as today's Russian Federation. The native people of Crimea, who were almost 100% of the population not so very long ago, were dispersed by first the Russian Empire and then Stalin in 1944. In 1944, the NKVD, the Stalinist secret police, forcibly deported every single man, woman,

and child who was a Crimean Tatar, thereby leaving open an awful lot of space for Russians and other people from the Soviet Union to move in. That's 1944. That's not always. In 1956, the Crimean Peninsula, still inside the Soviet Union, was given from the Russian part of the Soviet Union to the Ukrainian part of the Soviet Union. Because there were no longer any Crimean Tatars there, there was no longer a special status for the place. It was no longer an autonomous region as it had been. It was given to Ukraine for the very banal reason that from the point of view of Ukraine, Crimea is a peninsula. There's a land connection, so you can supply it with water and you can use electricity grid. From the point of view of Russia, Crimea is an island.

There's no land connection. But Khrushchev in 1954, when he made this change, dressed it up because of course, there's always difficulty with Ukraine in the Soviet Union. So he dressed it up as some kind of great gift from the Soviet Union to Ukraine. And they had lots of celebrations and they printed cigarette packs and they printed nightgowns celebrating all this stuff. And so then some people now in the Soviet Union remember this as this great gift, especially Russian nationalists, but at the time it was a purely pragmatic decision. So that's Crimea. The idea that Crimea is always Russian is A, imperial, B, wrong, and C, silences the history of the genocide of its native population. You know, I really, I mean, the history is very interesting. And again, you go into it at considerable length in both your reissue of the audio of On Tyranny and also in a, I believe,

a 10-part lecture series on YouTube on Ukraine that people can watch from your Yale class. But I really love the point you made about the disjunction between the stories we tell about history and the legal and political reality that enforces any national border at this moment in time. And it's always hard to know where to start the clock, except when you have a treaty or when you have a border that has been ratified by both sides of that border, that is a very reasonable place to stop your wayback machine. So perhaps let's start with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. What's the significance of that for the present moment? And I guess if you want to bring the character of Putin into the conversation at this point, that might be appropriate because Putin is very much driving

the show here. And it's his decisions that we're living with the consequences of and trying to figure out how to respond to. And he has evolved as a person and as a leader over these last decades. Tell us about the fall of the Soviet Union and how that is setting the stage for where we are now. Yeah. I appreciate, Sam, you're reinforcing the point about law, because it really is a very important point. I mean, we can choose to sympathize with anyone we want who is violating law. But as a result of the Second World War, as a result in part of Hitler making exactly the kinds of arguments that Putin is making now, the principle was accepted that

we're going to have sovereign borders, and the sovereign borders are not going to change. And that's a principle which has generally been of great benefit, especially inside Europe. I'm going to start this answer by making a similar distinction between Putin and the end of the Soviet Union. Putin says a lot of things about the end of the Soviet Union now, which he wouldn't have said then. And he says a lot of things now, which people find plausible because he says them over and over again, but which are simply not true. One of them is that the end of the Soviet Union was somehow an American plot. I was there at the time. I mean, that wasn't of any significance, but I was in Washington, DC working on foreign policy stuff

at the time. I was helping to run conferences at the time. U.S.-Soviet relations was what I did at the time. I was going to Moscow at the time. It was American policy to preserve the Soviet Union, Moscow at the time. It was American policy to preserve the Soviet Union. And that's clear from the American archival material. It's clear from the open source material about Bush's visit to Kiev in September of 1991, which is remembered as the chicken Kiev visit. We were actually trying to hold the thing together. It was the Russian Federation, the country that Putin now rules, which brought the Soviet Union to an end. And that's a kind of fundamental fact which tends to get overlooked in all of this because Putin starts his story from such completely outrageous places, knowing that there will

be people out there who will somehow meet him halfway. But that's not really how one should treat the historical record. So the end of the Soviet Union, I mean, one thing which is interesting about the Soviet Union is that its very existence is a recognition of the existence of the Ukrainian nation. The reason why the Soviet Union was founded as the Soviet Union in December of 1922 was that the people who founded the Soviet Union, Bolsheviks and cosmopolitans, though they were, were familiar from several years of civil war inside Ukraine that the Ukrainian nation was a real thing. As a result of that, when they won and they established their larger unit, they made it a

unit of nominal federal republics. So Ukraine actually decides the form of the Soviet Union because of the obvious, even to people like Stalin and Lenin, existence of the Ukrainian nation. And even though Ukraine inside the Soviet Union suffers more than any other republic from Soviet policies, in particular, the famine of 1932 and 1933, there's never actually a moment in the Soviet Union where the existence of a Ukrainian nation is denied. And I stress this because the phenomenon that we see now with Russian nationalism and Mr. Putin at this point is actually quite radical and barely new. And insofar as it has a precedent, its precedent is with right-wing, is not really the Soviet Union, it's rather with right-wing and fascist Russian intellectuals of an earlier period.

But the thing then which is worth stressing, kind of bringing two points together now, is that when the Soviet Union falls apart, it's also taken for granted that the borders of the republics will be the borders of independent states. In December of 1991, the leaders of the Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian republics meet and agree to dissolve the Soviet Union. The reason why it's those three is that those are the three republics which existed in 1922 when the Soviet Union was founded and which still existed in 1991. And so they agreed that the borders as they were would be their borders, at which point these states become sovereign states governed by the same conventions that govern everyone else's borders. And those things aren't contested. in which not only do 90% of Ukrainians, and this is 31 years ago, not only do 90% of Ukrainians vote for independence, a majority in every single region of Ukraine also votes for independence.

And in those intervening 30 years, the drift has been, and I say this with great understatement, the drift has only been in one direction, and that direction has been in favor of the notion that there is a separate Ukraine that deserves to have a Ukrainian state. Okay, so let's bring Putin into this. How has his thinking evolved here? Because he was, I guess he came back in 2012, correct me if I'm wrong. And there's a kind of crazy-making degree of unreality to his politics, right? I mean, this is a quasi-fascist regime. Maybe it's just appropriate to just call it a fascist regime. It's definitely a single-party state that, on your account, which I agree with, is engaged in an imperialistic war against a democracy, and yet is framed rather often from Putin's side as a war of denazification of Ukraine, right? So he's the good guy going against the Nazis. It's probably inconvenient for that thesis that the president of Ukraine is Jewish, but, you know, that's really not an obstacle to the claim. And while I haven't noticed many high-profile people on our side dignify the Nazi part of it,

actually, there is at least one exception to that. There's something happening in America in fairly high-profile right-of-center or even centrist circles where the perversity of Putin's framing is not only not noticed, it is denied, at least implicitly. I mean, it's just, I'll bring in one specific claim here just so that you have something to react to. But for instance, I noticed the economist at Columbia, Jeffrey Sachs, on some podcast talking about this. And it's hard to imagine the Kremlin not liking anything he said, right? He essentially said that the US and NATO have been provocative all along and that the off-ramp for Russia was always obvious. We just have to declare the neutrality of Ukraine and give an assurance that they'll never join NATO, because that

obviously impinges on Russia's core security concerns. How would we feel if we had a Russian client state in Mexico or Canada? And there are many people saying things like this. And I mean, one thing that's perverse about that, which I'll just point out before you give me the rest, but I mean, immediately what strikes me as perverse is that it conceives that we are the moral equivalent of Russian despotism, right? And that the spread of democracy is no better than the spread of fascism. If you try to flip things around in that way, it's just, you know, who's to say anything is better than anything else

in terms of spreading a political orientation over the surface of the earth? And that's just so dishonest and ethically upside down that it's just amazing to see academics in America talking that way. You know, this is something you speak about in your book, I mean, this, I think you call it, you know, schizofascism, the condition in which fascists themselves are claiming to be at war with fascists and Nazis, and it's pretty much pure fiction. So thanks for mentioning that. The book in question is now Road to Unfreedom, where I do a very careful and slow dissection of all of this on the basis of the Russian primary sources, on the basis of everything that Putin said that I could track down over the period of his two presidencies. And in starting thinking of your question, it's clear that there was a kind of

evolution with Putin. Putin, number one, his first couple of terms in office was perhaps sincerely trying to carry out what he called a dictatorship of the law and centralized power. But it turned out that in centralizing power and doing away with the other oligarchs, he and the people around him just became the chief oligarchs. So what Putin ends up with is a dysfunctional state, the most interesting feature of which is the extreme economic inequality. And that is a point which is really worth dwelling on for a minute, because it's only when you have the kind of power that he has, and the kind of money that he has, that you're allowed to get away with the sort of lunatic ideas that he expresses. I mean, it may seem like a simple thing, but the fact that he's been in

power for 20 years and controls the five television networks and has lots of money to spread around among influential people around the world, without those things, I mean, he's just a guy on a street corner, probably with a pretty tattered looking soapbox. Because his ideas in themselves are neither original nor particularly convincing. But anyway, my point was that in Putin's stage two, when he comes back, he's recognized that he can't make the Russian state function, or at least making it function is inconsistent with him being the chief oligarch and being able to give his friends billions of dollars if he wants to.

And so he moves to a politics of spectacle, where of course, Russia is always right, whether it's intervening in Ukraine in 2014, or intervening in Syria in 2015, where everything becomes a kind of show where Russia is always innocent and the other side is always to blame. And he develops, from about 2011 forward, ideas about how Russia doesn't have to follow the rules because Russia has a special destiny, and Russia has a special mission, and Russia has a special civilization, and no one else can, of course, understand this, but Russia has the right to do whatever it likes. And this fundamental challenge to international order, Western, non-Western, any kind of order,

he's been espousing for about a decade. He made it very clear on September 30th, talking about the annexations, when he said, what are the rules? Who made up the rules? Russia has a millennial mission, right? And these ideas are already more than tinged with fascism. A person that he cites regularly, and who probably by no coincidence, he also cited on September 30th this year, Ivan Ilyin, is the chief Russian fascist thinker. And he became essentially the house philosopher. Putin was citing him all the time. But not only him, contemporary Russian fascists began to get airtime on television and became part of the mainstream Russian discussion, which leads me to, I mean,

the thing about the schizofascism. Actually, Tim, can you just define fascism? Yeah. Fascism is the idea that it's not rationality that's the basis on which we build politics. It is will and imagination, that rules are not the basis upon which we interact. We interact on the basis of strength. Strength is always proven as a matter of practice. Therefore, endless conflict is entirely normal. And given all of that, politics begins not with any kind of mutual recognition, but with the choice of an enemy. When I choose my enemy, then I know who I am. And the moment that I've chosen an enemy, that's when politics can actually begin.

And that takes you pretty far actually towards understanding the Russian attitude towards Ukraine. Because one of the problems with Putin's rule is that he has no definition of Russia at all. He has no notion of what the future of Russia will be, nor can he from the state of oligarchy. Therefore, Russia is defined as the anti-Ukraine, and it takes this arbitrary choice of an enemy in order to give meaning, which is also related to NATO. Now, I mean, I'm just going to be very straightforward about this. Russia is not afraid of NATO at all. Had they been afraid of NATO, they certainly wouldn't have undertaken an invasion like this, right? And had they been afraid of NATO, they wouldn't be moving the bulk of their troops from the actual NATO borders in order to fight in Ukraine,

which is what they have done. They're not afraid of a NATO invasion. They've never been afraid of a NATO invasion. This is a giant guilt-making factory. They're not afraid that NATO is going to invade them. Putin himself until very late in the day did not say anything to the effect that he was afraid of NATO. This is something he came up rather late so that we could have a guilt trap for ourselves. I mean, your point about there being a difference between spreading democracy and not spreading democracy is well taken. But I think perhaps an even more fundamental point is that it's not that NATO or the European

Union in large. NATO and the European Union take on new members when sovereign states backed by their populations would press themselves in democratic elections, choose to join those institutions. The reasons why Poland is in the European Union or NATO do not have to do with Brussels or Washington. They fundamentally have to do with the Poles. And the reasons why Ukraine would like to join institutions doesn't have to do with Brussels or Washington. It has to do with the lived experience of the Ukrainians themselves. And it seems to me that, if anything, that's an even more fundamental difference, that what Russia is trying to do is expand an order illegally by force, whereas the European Union

and NATO take on new members when independent states choose to join them. Yeah, well, let's cycle on that point one more time because I think it's crucial. So you're saying that Putin and Russia have no fear of invasion from the West, right? I mean, it seems completely crazy to me that any Western power would want to invade Russia, but a person could be forgiven for believing that Putin might believe such a thing would be possible and that

he therefore would want Ukraine as a buffer between him and an antagonistic Europe. But you're saying that's just not the case. Well, that option was available to Putin, and he chose not to take it. Ukraine had agreed to Russian bases on the Black Sea for decades when Russia invaded in 2014. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, it was giving up, as a result of its own decision, the possibility of a friendly Ukrainian buffer to the West. When you invade a country, you no longer have the option of treating it as a friendly buffer. When you invade a country, you're making an enemy of it. That was a choice that Moscow made on its own. One can decide that it was a mistake or not a mistake, but that option was available.

They have pushed Ukraine to the West again and again with their own decisions. Before 2014, a majority of Ukrainians were against joining NATO. After Russia invaded in 2014, a majority of Ukrainians unsurprisingly decided that they were in favor of joining NATO. That's a result of Russia's choices. So that option was there, but that's not what they want. What they want to be able to, I mean, and this is what they say openly, day in, day out, on television, from the foreign ministry, from the president's office, from the Security Council, day in and day out, what they say, the commander in chief of the operation just said it yesterday, what they say is they want a Ukraine where they are in control. That's something completely different. That means invading the country, occupying it, replacing its leadership with someone else. That's not a friendly buffer. That's a genocidal aspiration.

That's what they care about. Again, to repeat the point, if they cared about security from NATO, which they don't, but if they cared about security from NATO, they would be dispersing their armed forces around the Finnish border, around the Polish border. They'd be concerned about places like that. That's not what they're doing. What they're doing is they're throwing an absurd, an obscene amount of their available firepower into the project of destroying Ukraine as a country, which I'm just going to take a big step back here, makes zero geopolitical sense. It is weakening Russia extraordinarily. And the reason I'm taking a big step back here, makes zero geopolitical sense. It is weakening Russia extraordinarily. And the reason I'm taking a big step back is that one of the assumptions

that we're making in this conversation, or at least one of the assumptions that's made in the views that you're presenting, is that Putin actually cares about the interests of Russia. I think that's an assumption which should be made explicit and questioned. I see very little reason to think that Putin is a geopolitician who cares at all about the interests of Russia. If he were, he would be much more concerned about the fact that there is a great power on Russia's border, which in fact does have designs, unlike the United States, on Russian resources, which unlike the United States, invests more in the Asian part of Russia than Russia does itself, and that is China. But rather than being concerned about China,

what Putin has done with his entire anti-Western turn is to create a situation in which future rulers of Russia will have little choice but to be vassals of China. And the invasion of Ukraine has only accelerated this process. Troops that might have been defending the border with Russia have been brought west to fight a losing and pointless war in Ukraine, while Beijing just watches as the power relationship with Russia, which was already very much in its favor, accelerates to the point where it's just hard to imagine that Russia is going to be able to get out from under it. A Russian leader who cared about geopolitics, who cared about geopolitics,

who cared about Russian interests, would be balancing between the West and Russia. It is geopolitically absolutely idiotic to go so far in one direction that you can't come back, but that's what Putin has done. I don't think he's an idiot. I think he simply doesn't care about Russian interests. So what does he care about? He cares about dying in bed. He cares about being a legacy. I mean, when we, I appreciate your earlier questions about Putin, which, you know, lead in profound directions, which I haven't always been able to follow in my answers. We have to think of this person as someone who's been in power for the lifetimes of many people who live in Russia. Many people in Russia can't remember anyone else. This is someone who's been in power for the entirety of this century. This is someone who is on a classical, as described by Plato,

as described by Shakespeare, tyrannical trajectory, where at a certain point, he's no longer able to hear the advice of others. At a certain point, his own fantasies start to become realer than the reality around him. I think there's no question that his obsession with Ukraine is real. I think he really thinks something along the lines of his historically weird fantasies that he projects. I think he really thinks that somehow, somewhere, there really are Ukrainians down there who believe that they want to be invaded by him. But I think that that is a classical tyrannical mistake. And he is doing that thing that tyrants

do when they're in power for too long, which is they commit state resources to their own fantasies. That's the tragedy of tyranny. And that's where Putin is right now. So right now, he's in the grip. He's in a grip of a fantasy, which doesn't have anything to do with interests or with geopolitics. I think if we take a deep breath and look coldly at Russia's geopolitical position, we can generally agree that this has been an asinine move. He is in the grip of something which can't be reduced to interests, or it doesn't have much to do with the state. What he thought he was doing in invading Ukraine was leaving a legacy. What he thought he was doing in invading Ukraine was leaving an indelible mark, his own mark on history, where he would be remembered as the person who united what he

thinks of as the Russian lands, as Peter the Great did, as Catherine the Great did. I think that's what he thinks he was doing. He's not going to be able to do that because the world is just not the way that he thinks the world is. But I, there's been this, I believe you call it a hybrid warfare at various points where the goal seems to be to destabilize democracies generally. Perhaps now is a good moment to say something about that and what we've seen of that since, I guess, and what we've seen of that since, I guess, 2014 in the first war in Ukraine. I appreciate that question. And I appreciate your earlier remark about there being a difference between democracy and other systems. And I guess I rather wish that in these conversations, which seem to be about Putin, I don't mean yours and mine. I mean, the kinds of discussions that you are refereeing here. People would admit which of three positions they take, because I think there are a lot of people

out there who just like fascism. And I think they should just up and own it that they like fascism, and that's why they like Putin. And I think that would clarify matters. I think a second position is, I really don't believe in anything. I'm a complete nihilist. I have no preference between democracy and other things. In that position, you can also say, well, Putin is fine because there is no truth or no values, yada, yada, right? And then there's a third position. I'm sure there are others, but there's a third position which says, actually, people seem to like to vote, whether they're in Iran or whether they're in Russia or whether they're in Portland, Oregon, they seem to like to vote. And in countries where people are able to vote and are represented seem

to be peaceful and prosperous and freer, and people seem to live lives where they're more satisfied and so on. I think it would be kind of like, in some way, this discussion about Putin is a proxy for all of that, where the people who are slightly afraid to say, yeah, I'm a fascist, or yeah, I'm a nihilist, are willing to say, well, I think maybe Putin's okay, or I think maybe what's happening here is fine. And now Sam, I've forgotten where you went. Well, actually, let me add one more cohort there, because I guess it's nihilist adjacent, but they certainly wouldn't think of themselves as nihilists. And these are all the people, most of whom are in Trumpistan. And so I think I'm talking about maybe 40% of American society.

I think that more or less everything said about Russia attempting to destabilize democracy, in particular our own, and especially their attempt to hack the 2016 presidential election, amounted to a lie, you know, just a pure confection of the Democratic Party. Wherever it is true, you know, even if some are going to concede that some aspects of those allegations are true, it's unimportant because we do the same thing to other countries, right? I mean, this came out explicitly when Trump himself said, well, you think our hands are so clean? You know, we've been pretty bad too, right? And so we had the spectacle of a sitting U.S. president who said he trusted Putin and his intelligence services over his own intelligence services. And something like half the country was happy to go

with that. And they think that basically, I mean, this all gets summarized under the rubric of the Russia collusion hoax, right? Anywhere right of center now, all you need to say is the Russia collusion hoax to discredit any concern about Russia's misinformation campaign that's happened on dozens of fronts for years, which has created a politics of unreality within our own society in large part. So anyway, we might call that nihilistic, but I think most of these people think that they're not nihilists. They want to put American interests first. They want us to pull back from our engagement with a fairly crazy world and

close our borders. And they want to get back to the good things of making America great again. That's not nihilism. It's a kind of delusion. And it's a complete loss of contact with certain moral imperatives of the moment, I would say. But I think it is a different cohort. And there's a fair amount of evidence at this point that Russia has had more than a little bit to do with creating these perceptions. No, there's a deep philosophical consistency here because what happens in Russian domestic politics is that Putin finds himself in a place where he can't

meaningfully promise Russians a better future. And one of the moves he makes at that point, very effectively, helped by a very intelligent propagandist called Ladislav Surkov, is to argue that, well, actually, things may seem lousy in Russia, and maybe we closed down your small business for no reason, and maybe there's very little social mobility, and maybe wealth is horribly, badly distributed, and maybe your vote doesn't really count. But if you look around the world, the Putin line, it's actually all the same everywhere. It's the same in Britain. It's the same in the United States.

And so the move that their propaganda makes is very different from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union actually still said there are good things and we're moving towards those good things. That might have been a lie, but it was a lie in a world where there was still truth. What the Putin propaganda does is that it says, look, nothing's really any good. Russia's rotten, we admit it, but Britain is just as bad and America's just as bad. And then they just hit on the things which are bad about us and they put them right in the center and they make them the absolute essence of our countries. So that is a kind of programmatic nihilism. It's

a way to stay in power when you can no longer actually operate a state in the way that it's normally thought of as being beneficial to people. And so that connects with where we are in our politics, where we begin to doubt that the state can do things for us or that the state represents us. And then we are captured. And I'm not saying that the Russians are do things for us or that the state represents us. And then we are captured. And I'm not saying that the Russians are the only ones responsible for this. I'm saying what the Russians are doing is they're pushing forward, like they're the avant-garde in this general tendency to say, well, who knows whether our system is better than their system, right? Who knows whether it was better, you know, whether Russia does this and we do all this.

And so when Trump says, you know, I trust their services more than our services, he has a good, he has good reason to trust their services because his services did much more for him than our services ever could do. But when Americans follow that and they say, well, it's kind of all the same, then that's not just, you know, adjacent to nihilism. That actually is nihilism because what you're doing and you're reasoning that way is you're saying, well, no matter how bad something is, it's probably just as bad somewhere else. You can't really build up a democracy on that basis. To build up a democracy, you have to have some notion that you have, that you can improve things, that some values are real, that law does matter, that we can organize ourselves

in ways that are better than other ways. And, you know, at the practical level, you're speaking of the right here, but at the practical level, this kind of posture also turns up on the left where, you know, the existence of Russia just becomes an occasion to point out that America did things which was bad. And of course we did, right? But that doesn't actually answer the question. I mean, did things which was bad. And of course we did, right? But that doesn't actually answer the question. I mean, if Russia's committing a genocide in Ukraine, and we say, well, yes, we did terrible things in Iraq, okay, that's fine. That means that countries shouldn't carry out illegal wars. So there's a principle there. And I'm happy to defend that principle.

But the way it goes illogically, and I think politically destructively, is for people to say, well, on the one hand, on the other hand, as though that were dispositive. And that just brings us to this nihilism. And with the nihilism, Russia wins because they're not aiming for anything else. They don't really need for us to believe that the Ukrainians are Nazis, right? They obviously don't believe that themselves. They don't really need for us to believe that Ukraine doesn't exist. They just need for us to be somewhere in nowhere land where we shrug our shoulders and we say, well, who knows? Maybe we did something like that at some point. That's all they're aiming for. That's really all they're aiming for. And unfortunately, they're getting a

lot of it. Okay. Well, I know you have a hard stop in about 40 minutes now. So I don't want us to be short on time to address the nuclear elephant in the room, right? So many people think that we are running an intolerable risk by not doing everything we could possibly do to de-escalate the situation. I want to give you some examples of this from what I've seen on social media. And I want us to analyze them because if you're not someone who's been as you have been really in the weeds of Ukrainian and Russian history and politics, it's easy to think, well, there's got to be a reason why Ukraine is not a NATO state, right? And we're not treaty bound to defend it like it is one. a NATO state, right? And we're not treaty-bound to defend it like it is one. It's not, therefore, a core American national interest. So how is it that we are not doing everything we can do to mollify Putin at this point, right? I mean, because this is a situation of nuclear blackmail.

Right. I mean, because this is a situation of nuclear blackmail. It even gets worse somehow if we exceed to the idea that, you know, he doesn't even have Russia's interest at heart. He's just a tyrant who's psychologically unraveling. And he's given some speeches of late which suggest a kind of unraveling of a quasi-religious sort. He gave one speech about a month ago where he sounded practically like a jihadist in terms of the otherworldliness that was creeping into his claims. So why are we just not doing everything we can to get off this ride? And so I'll give you just a few examples of this. The venture capitalist David Sachs has been making a lot of noise about this, and he wrote an op-ed in Newsweek recently, and this is a quote. The online mob has decided that any support for a negotiated settlement, even proposals that Zelensky himself appeared to support at the beginning of the war, is tantamount to taking Russia's side, denouncing voices of compromise and restraint as Putin apologists. This removes them from acceptable discourse and shrinks the Overton window to those advocating the total defeat of Russia and an end to Putin's regime, even if it risks World War III. Anyone who suggests that NATO expansion could have been a contributing factor to the current Ukraine crisis,

or that the sanctions imposed on Russia are not working and have backfired on a soon-to-be shivering Europe, or even that the U.S. must prioritize avoiding a world war where the nuclear-armed Russia is denounced as a Putin stooge. So let's take that. How would you respond to that? Well, I mean, first of all, I really don't know what it means. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at I really don't know what it means. up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.