Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Putin's War Will End

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Quagmire. Regime change. Conquest. Empire. World War III. Derek considers five ways that the war in Ukraine could end with Paul Poast, a professor of foreign policy and war at the University of Chicago. This is Part 2 of our two-part Ukraine coverage today. For more on why Putin attacked and how war could change the world, check out the previous episode in this feed. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Paul Poast Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Head into the Ringerverse to stay up to date with all things superheroes and nerd culture entertainment. Hosted by a rotating lineup of superfans at the Ringer, including Mallory Rubin and Van Lathen, shows will provide instant reactions to blockbuster releases, insightful backstories on canon, and mind-bending theories, as well as fresh takes on the latest news and rumors. Check out the Ringerverse on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today is our second episode in 24 hours on the war in Ukraine. Our last episode was about how Russia's war will change the world. This episode asks a simpler question.

How will Russia's terrible war in Ukraine end? This week, Paul Post, a professor of war in foreign policy at the University of Chicago, wrote that he envisioned several scenarios for Putin's military campaign. The scenarios ranged from failure and quagmire to the conquest of Ukraine to essentially World War III. in this episode we talk about each of these scenarios in depth, the major factors that will shape the outcome of this war, the Biden administration's response to Putin, why this war really is reminiscent of both Hitler in Czechoslovakia

and Japan's attacks on Pearl Harbor, and the most important things to watch out for in the coming week. No big speech for me today. This is very much a listening and learning episode for me. I hope you take as much as I did from this conversation. I'm Derek Thompson, and this is plain English. My guest is Professor Paul Post. He is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago,

where he teaches classes about foreign policy and war. Professor, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. You laid out several scenarios for how Russia's invasion of Ukraine might play out. What I'd like to do today is to walk through those scenarios, And then I'd like you to tell us which of those scenarios is most likely to you and the key factors that will determine which scenario is most likely. My only request, Professor, is that you explain this to me like I am a freshman in your 101 international relations class. Is that all sound okay to you?

That sounds great. Okay. Let's start with the scenario that assumes the least amount of success for Russia. And then we'll build toward the scenarios that assume more ambitious and potentially more disastrous plans for Russia. in Europe. Scenario number one is that this is just a disaster for Vladimir Putin. It is a quagmire. It is like the Iraq War for the United States on speed, that what presented itself to the U.S. in the 2000s in Iraq, the Russians essentially find happening in a matter of days. There are already protests across the country. Russian celebrities have spoken out against

the war. Russia's stock market is tanked. The rubble, Russia's currency, has cratered. And the pain might just be beginning if sanctions bite down on Russian oligarchs and businesses. So tell me what you see as plausible and implausible about a scenario in which Russia reassesses this invasion and dramatically scales back its ambitions. So this is indeed a scenario that a lot of analysts have been predicting because of exactly what you said, looking at the Iraq War, the U.S. experience with the Iraq War, U.S. experience with Afghanistan. And let's be honest, we could go further back, the Soviet experience with Afghanistan, that these are all scenarios that we label a quagmire, a mess. The regime is,

maybe the objective was to change the regime of the country, and that seemed like a good idea at the time, and then suddenly there's resistance to that, and the military forces are bogged down. And indeed, for all of the things that you just laid out, this just looks like a bad idea. in hindsight. Is this plausible? And what would Russia do if this were to happen? First of all, yes, this is very much plausible. As you said, there's already a lot of resistance. If you want to talk about the notion of will, obviously, you have the Ukrainians. They are fighting for their country. They are probably more motivated. They have more morale than the Russian troops. And so these would all be contributors to making this very tough for Russia to accomplish.

The big thing would be what happens if that occurs? How would Putin respond? How would Russia respond? And that's something that we can talk about. But I see it as going one of the two ways. It could be something where it does indeed lead Russia to scale back, maybe even recognize this was a bad idea, perhaps going all the way out of the country, or at least going back to the eastern province.

the ones that Putin just recently declared independent, or the other one is it could actually lead Russia to lash out further. And that's something that we can talk a little bit more as we get into some of the other scenarios, but it is something that could potentially happen. So you're saying that the scenario of the quagmire is extremely plausible, but what remains unknown is whether a quagmire state in Ukraine either causes Putin to totally rethink his strategy

and maybe retreat to the Dunbass region in eastern Ukraine, or rather he'll say he's become so frustrated by the Ukrainian fight back, by the Ukrainian reaction to his invasion, that he doubles down in some way that could become more chaotic and catastrophic. Is that a fair summary? That is an absolutely fair summary. And that can lead into one of the other scenarios that we can talk about here. Let's talk about scenario number two then. You called this the scenario of foreign imposed regime change.

Tell me about scenario number two. So scenario number two would be very similar to what we just talked about, except that in this case it would be successful, that this would be a very quick operation. The objective is to simply remove the existing government in Ukraine and put in place a government that's friendly to Russia. In other words, Russia is trying to turn Ukraine into the kind of relationship that it currently has with Belarus. or Belarus, under Lashenko is very much in line with Russia. You could even say it's a subservient state to Russia. Ukraine is not that way, but this would be the objective. And this scenario too would be that this works, right?

That they go in, they're able to depose the existing government. Zelensky's out. He's in exile. They put in a friendly government. And then the forces could either leave or they're able to stay there by invitation of this new government, you know, it opens up a whole bunch of possibilities for Russia and for Putin at that point. So again, it's very similar to the first scenario, except that this one would presume that it's successful. The big difference between this and, say, other scenarios we'll talk about is that

the aims are more limited. It's just simply about putting in this other government, and then at that point, stopping. And so this wouldn't be about conquering the entire country, so to speak. This wouldn't be about using Russian forces to essentially patrol all the major cities, major towns, intersections, et cetera, of Ukraine. Instead, this would be an effort to essentially just decapitate, install a pro-Russia regime in Kiev, and use a smaller number of Russian forces to essentially support the pro-Russian regime in that capital so that the Russian forces would be rather more limited to Kiev itself?

Absolutely. That is exactly the scenario. And this is the scenario that I think, If you go back and draw on that Iraq war analogy, I think this was the scenario that the U.S. was hoping for with Iraq. It would be a friendly government. Maybe the U.S. could maintain some sort of presence there. But otherwise, it would be a peaceful existence, at least from the perspective of the two governments, in the case of the Iraq, the example, the United States and Iraq, or in the case of, we're talking about Ukraine, the new Ukrainian government and Russia, it wouldn't be this protracted resistance and.

quagmire that we talked about in the first scenario. So in a way you could sort of say that scenario number one is that the war in Ukraine could be like an unsuccessful American war in Iraq. And scenario number two is like what if the Iraq war was more successful? What if we successfully deposed of Saddam Hussein installed a pro-American regime? And basically there were no insurgents. There were, there was no years and years of America fighting to tamp down the flames of insurgency throughout Iraq. Let's move on to scenario number three. You call this state death. What is state death and how does it represent a notch beyond scenario two's regime change? The state death is a phrase that I borrow from the work

of Tunisia Fizal. She's a professor of international relations at the University of Minnesota. And she wrote this very well-received book several years ago called state death. Now, what is state death? Well, state death is when a state no longer exists. And so specifically, it's about annexation. It's about conquering the country and having it ceased to be an independent state. So in this case, what that would mean is that Russia's objective is not just to put in a new government, like in scenarios one and two, but it's to actually take over the entire country and make Ukraine actually part of Russia to where Ukraine would no longer exist as an independent state. And of course, there is some precedent for this because this is exactly what Russia did with Crimea.

Russia went into Crimea, took control of Crimea, and then made Crimea part of Russia. And so they've already done this with part of Ukraine. This scenario envisions that the objective is to do this with all of Ukraine. And based on what Putin has said so far, based on just his rhetoric, not looking what happened on the ground, not looking at probabilities, just his rhetoric. Is he talking about this invasion as being more of a scenario two, Iraq war invasion, or more of a scenario three, state death, the end of an independent Ukraine, folding essentially this land into what becomes an enlarged Russia? If you really look carefully at his words, I would be honest, you don't even have to look

that carefully at his words. It very much implies that he's thinking about making Ukraine part of Russia, that he has this desire to recreate the Soviet Union, maybe even the Russian Empire that preceded the Soviet Union. And in both scenarios, Ukraine would be part of that. Ukraine would no longer be an independent state would actually be part of this new, whatever Putin wanted to call it, the new Russian Empire. Yeah, exactly. But it would now become part of that. So let's go to scenario number four. And at this point, I imagine some listeners are like, scenario number three is going to be bad enough. That's probably a campaign that's going to result in thousands and thousands of deaths, a protracted campaign in order to defeat the Russian people entirely to fold this country into the Russian Empire. But scenario four goes one step further. This is what you

call imperial overreach. Describe this scenario for us. What would the imperial overreach situation look like? The imperial overreach builds directly on what we were just talking about, that if you take seriously what Putin was saying in these speeches, this desire to recreate the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, well, that shouldn't end with Ukraine. There are many other states, former Soviet republics, Moldova. Of course, Belarus is one, even though they have good relations. They're technically not part of Russia. You could look at Georgia, a country that Russia, of course, in invaded in 2008. You can even go as far as the Baltic states. They will come back to the Baltic states in one of the other scenarios for specific reasons. But there are these countries that are

currently independent states that used to be part of either the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire. And so this next scenario envisions that Putin's objective is to only start with Ukraine. And once he successfully conquers Ukraine, the next step is to go further and bring these other former Soviet republics into Russia and to truly recreate the Russian Empire. Now, the reason why this is called imperial overreach is because a common thing that happens with a lot of empire endeavors, if you will, is indeed overreaching. You overextend yourself. You go too far. And then you end up creating an entity that you can't govern, that you can't control. And so that is the risk that this scenario poses, let alone the fact that there's the risk of even trying to accomplish the

conquering itself. But this scenario envisions that Putin's vision is much greater than just Ukraine. I think it's important to tease out two things from scenario number four, which is that in the short term, scenario number four assumes some level of extraordinary Russian success. It implies that Russia has been extremely successful at essentially conquering the country of Ukraine, not only installing its own pro-Russia leader in Kiev, but conquering the entire country and essentially running the country as an extension of the Russian empire.

But scenario four also implies that the confidence that that gives Vladimir Putin encourages him to keep going, to move east and south of Ukraine into countries like Moldova, to move south into countries like Georgia, and that those further invasions, even though they are the fruits

of success in Ukraine could result in what you call imperial overreach, could create their own enormous headaches for an enlarged Russian empire. Is it fair to say that there's a sort of short-term success, long-term complication inherent in this scenario? Absolutely. And you put your finger on exactly one of the key things that I think has to happen for this type of scenario to play out, which is success, that he has to become overconfident because he had success in Ukraine. You can almost draw an analogy back to Hitler in a comparison to Hitler when he was trying to create the Nazi empire and that he had this initial success. Of course, he waltz right into Austria. There was no resistance in that case. Then things got a little bit more difficult with Czechoslovakia. And indeed, a lot of the buildup to Ukraine was very much being compared to the buildup to Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, that scenario.

Then you have, of course, Poland. And then because the Polish invasion by Germany was so successful, he continued to say, I could keep going. I can keep going. And so that's the concern with this one, is that if he's had success, which he has had, he took Crimea, if Ukraine ends up being relatively easy, would he continue to go, just as we saw Hitler do 80 years ago? So that leads us to the final scenario that you envision.

scenario number five involves not just war in Moldova and Ukraine and Georgia, but also war in the Baltic states, that is Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Why is scenario five its own distinct catastrophic scenario? This final scenario, I'm calling the major power war scenario. So in all the other scenarios. This is about Russia attacking the smaller states that used to be part of the Soviet Union. But, and this is a key but, all of these states are not part of NATO, not part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is this massive alliance that is comprised of many of the Western European countries, Eastern European countries, and of course the United States and the U.S. being the key player in NATO. That becomes relevant with this next scenario because the Baltic states,

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they are also former Soviet republics, but they are the former Soviet republics that were able to join NATO and they were able to join the EU. You also have countries that were not former Soviet republics, but were very important to the Soviet sphere during the Cold War, most notably Poland. And they are also a member of NATO. And they also border Ukraine. This scenario envisions that Russia and specifically Putin decides to go further from Ukraine, but not towards the other former Soviet republics, but into these NATO countries. And he could do this for any number of reasons.

One of them could be because of the Baltic states being former solar republics and his desire to rebuild the empire, he decides, you know what, I think I can take them. Maybe again, because he had success in Ukraine, perhaps he feels like the resolve of the West is not very great that he could take the Baltic states. The other scenario with this one could be that he attacks Poland. Not so much that he wants to make Poland part of the new Russian Empire. But one thing we know is a lot of Ukrainian refugees are going into Poland. And if he does face some resistance or he does feel that Poland is somehow enabling some resistance in Ukraine, he could feel like I need. need to invade Poland to stop this. But if that happens, he's now attacking a NATO country.

And the key to NATO is what we call Article 5. Article 5 is a mutual defense clause, which is that an attack on one is an attack on all. If that happens, and President Biden has made very clear that he's willing to do this. But if this happens, then the other NATO countries would come to the defense of that NATO country. And then you could have war between NATO and specifically the United States against Russia. So putting this all together, just giving it my own names, the ways that I'm thinking about these five scenarios. It seems to me that these five scenarios are something like, number one, an unsuccessful Iraq

war equivalent in Iraq. Number two, a successful Iraq war equivalent in Iraq, deposing of the central government, but not going further to absorb the entire state. Number three, the successful conquering of Ukraine, folding an impover. to Russia. Number four is a Russian empire, a new Russian empire, essentially, not just conquering Ukraine, but also conquering Moldova or moving into Moldova and Georgia, even with the risk of what you call imperial overreach. Number five, am I wrong in thinking that this is just World War III? This seems to me like World War III. That is indeed World War III scenario. And we can now

start talking about the likelihood of all these scenarios. But I think one thing, given that we're about this World War III scenario is even though I would say this scenario is the least likely of the scenarios, it is not unlikely. It is much more likely than it was, say, a week ago. It is much more likely and much more realistic than it has been in 80 years. And so I think that that's something that should give a lot of people pause when thinking about that, wow, we really could be on the brain. There is a plausible path in which a World War III could take place. So let's talk about plausibility. You write that in determining which of these scenarios is most likely to come to pass, it depends on two factors. Factor number one, you say, are Putin's aims

maximalist or limited? What do those words mean in this context? Maximilist aims versus limited Ames? So maximalist aims in this context very much refers to kind of these scenarios where he's trying to recreate the Russian Empire, that it is about more than just Ukraine. He has these maximalist views of creating the greatness of the Soviet Union again, the greatness of the Russian Empire, and that means he has to seek out and conquer all of these various countries. And indeed, that ends up, we use that term in political science and in international relations, largely to explain the behavior of someone like a Hitler, where Hitler did, at first it was a question of, was Hitler limited in his aims, that he just simply want to say, unify the German people, which was what he

was trying to say, he was saying, well, you know, there's German people in Austria, there's German people in Czechoslovakia, I simply want to bring them together. Or was he maximalist, which is he wants to conquer further lands and try to create a massive German empire? And eventually we found that he was more maximalists than limited. So in the case of Putin, that would be maximalist. Limited would be his earlier scenarios, which would be, no, his objectives are really just about Ukraine and not even about trying to conquer Ukraine, but just put in a new government, put in a friendly government. That would be a much more limited aim. And the conquering of Ukraine, the state death scenario is kind of in between the two, right? Because it's definitely more than just simply putting in a new government,

but it's not at this scale of trying to then go further in conquering other countries. So these, you know, you can say the words limited and maximalist is kind of like there's two categories, but it's really more of a spectrum. A spectrum. It's like you could go more limited all the way to even more maximalist. It seems to me that factor number two is really the key factor here, because, as you say, limited versus maximalist aims can be something that Putin expresses from the safety of his bunker or office, but it's also responsive to real-world events.

It is easier. This is true of Hitler, was true of Hitler, it's true of Putin, easier to be maximalist when your armies are extremely successful in their early campaigns. So the second factor seems really critical, and that is what you call operational ease. What is this term operational ease and how could the operational ease of invading Ukraine be potentially the critical factor here?

So operational ease is referring to just, if you will, the facts on the ground. This is referring these are the things that military analyst study, these are the things that if you were to go to a military academy you would be learning about is actually the conduct of the military campaign itself. how is it going, how successful, how quickly, all of these very fine-grained details about the military campaign, how many casualties are you incurring, how quickly are you covering ground, how well are you able to hold the ground, these are the things that really factor into the operational success, how expensive does this end up being? That's another key factor to it. So this is really about those nitty-gritty details, if you will, about the military campaign itself. But the reality is, as you were just pointing out, these very much feed into then the political aims,

right? If you are having success on these military details, if you are making progress, if you're holding territory, if you're not experiencing a lot of resistance, then that could lead you to update your political aims of saying maybe we can go further. Maybe we can go further. And so that is what we mean by operational ease. Given everything that we know from what's happening on the ground right now. The feedback that we're getting from news reports, CNN, social media, anything that you're seeing from the Russian side of the Ukrainian side, what is the operational ease so far of advancing in Ukraine? Has this been a, is this beginning to look like a difficult campaign, a long campaign, or is this beginning to look like a campaign that is, sorry that I don't have another metaphor

top of mind here, but is a little bit more like the American invasion of Iraq where the the government was toppled with extraordinary ease. It was merely the years after that became the quagmire. What are we starting to see here from the first week of war? I mean, it's obviously we're still very early. But one thing that has jumped out at me right away, and there's still a lot of uncertainty about these reports. But at least reports that I've seen from reported by Ukraine itself

is the number of casualties, the number of fatalities that have already been experienced. And if these numbers are accurate, apparently on the Russian side, there's already been about a thousand fatalities and similar fatality levels on the Ukrainian side. To put that in perspective, most wars are not like World War I World War II. Most wars that we've studied, and we have these data, there's scholars like myself, we'll collect these data and look at them. Most wars, you see about 50 battlefield deaths a day. That's most wars. So to have a war, we're on the first day, you're talking well over a thousand fatalities. That tells you how intense

the fighting is. This is an extremely intense war. And it's unclear about how many days it's going to last. But that intensity, I think, is both a function of the speed and scale by which Russia has gone about carrying out their campaign. I mean, they were hitting all of these cities, coming from multiple angles, invading from the north from Belarus, coming in from Ukraine, coming from the east. It was a massive scale invasion. I think that's one factor. But it also points to that there is resistance, and there's going to be growing resistance by Ukraine. So I don't think this is going to be a simple scenario, but it does, what we can see so far is that whether you want to classify it as easy or whether it will eventually be classified as hard, it is absolutely devastating what we're witnessing. Given everything that we know now, which of the scenarios, one through five, do you consider most likely at this moment?

I think one thing I can share is kind of where my expectations of this conflict have gone and have evolved over the past few weeks. So I, and I'm very much on record for having said that I thought Putin would invade. I did think that there would be an invasion and I've been thinking this for weeks and I've been saying this for weeks. Having said that, I actually thought that his invasion, I thought that his invasion would be a limited invasion. I thought that he would maybe take some small slices of territory mostly as a way to save face to say, yes, I've done this. Maybe he goes, he moves troops into eastern Ukraine, into the contested territories, and that's it. So I will admit that I have had to update over the past week as I've been hearing his rhetoric, as I've been seeing the further mobilization to say, wow, no, this is going to be actually a large invasion.

And so I've had to update quickly on that. And what that means is given the size and scale of this invasion, and then when you couple that with the rhetoric, I really do think that his objective is some form of annexation. And so I think at this point, that is the scenario that he is most seeking out. Now, whether that will be what he can accomplish is another matter, and it does depend on that operational ease. So I think that that is the scenario that is he's most desiring. I think that is one that we have to put quite a bit of probability on,

that that's what he's trying to achieve. But if I had to put a number on it, I think the most reasonable thing that we could be expecting right now is he is trying to achieve regime change. So I'd say it's somewhere between scenario two of achieving regime change and then annexation scenario three. And I can tell you that there's some people who are debating about whether kill annex the whole country, part of the country, or not. So I think right now your two most likely scenarios is something between the regime change and the annexation scenario. Right. somewhere between scenarios number two and number three.

Is there any way, you know, the way that we set this up made it sound like there's sort of this very linear decision tree. If he gets this far, there's this outcome. If he gets that far, there's that outcome. Is there any way the tree could get a little bit tangled where, for example, Putin fails to conquer the country? And it is seen both within his country as a, within people within Russia, as a wonderful, thing that he failed. It's seen as a huge embarrassment for his regime. But because of that failure, because of that embarrassment, it causes him to strike out in some other way that we're not currently seeing such that he moves right on to scenario number four. He starts to invade Georgia. He starts to

create some other mess because he's built up this enormous military appetite to cause some kind of destruction to annexation. But the Ukrainian people thwarted his appetite in in that country specifically. Kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier, when we were talking about the World War III example, or the scenario. And I said that this is suddenly more plausible than it has been in 80 years. And I think part of the reason is because there's actually two paths to which we could reach this. The first path is indeed what we were talking about, kind of this linear,

there's success, and that breed success, and he keeps going further. But the other thing that makes this a very scary scenario and gives it more plausibility than we have had in a long time is exactly what you're talking about, which is that we could still jump to that scenario if, first of all, he's having a lack of success in Ukraine. Secondly, if he's experiencing so much economic hardship at home due to say the economic sanctions that are being imposed,

that he could end up in a scenario where essentially he feels like his back is against the wall. He has no other options. He has no other choice. So he lashes out, kind of in a desperation move. In our discipline, we call this gambling for resurrection, right? That you're worried that you're going to be deposed. And so the only way to save yourself, prevent that, is to take this high-risk gamble.

Now, there's other ways that this has been referred to. I think it was Bismarck, who back in 19th century said something to the effect of it's committing suicide out of fear of death. But basically it's the idea that you just feel like you have no other choice, so you're going to go for this and hope that it works out for you. That's a scenario that in many ways we have to take very seriously. And I also think that this feeds into why the U.S. and the Biden administration is very cautious in their usage of sanctions

and doing anything that can make Putin feel like he's being cornered. Interesting. That's so interesting because there's a lot of people that I see, and look, I'm not a military historian. I'm not a military strategist, but there's a lot of people that I follow that I find very smart who say something along the lines of, why aren't we going hard enough?

Isn't it embarrassing that we're not shutting down Swift in their payment system? Isn't it embarrassing that we're not using energy sanctions, that we're not truly trying to punish Putin maximally right now? And what you're saying is, and I'm just thinking about this out loud, well, of course we want to save lives in Ukraine. Of course we want to thwart Putin in Ukraine. But we also don't want to corner Putin in a way that encourages him in whatever state he's in to, as you said, gamble for resurrection, to commit suicide for fear of death, which in this case when you have a nuclear arsenal at your disposal, committing suicide. suicide for fear of death involves the suicide of lots of people who aren't just you. So that's such an interesting, maybe just expand on that a little bit, just the U.S.

calculus here, the U.S. strategic calculus, to punish Putin enough that we deter him and other actors that might be thinking like him in the future, but not to hit him so hard that he reaches a level of desperation that causes something even more catastrophic. The best way that I've thought of to explain this to people that I think they'll have some familiarity with is, especially to, of course, American listeners, is Pearl Harbor. So Pearl Harbor was exactly one of these scenarios that what had been happening was back in the late 1930s into 1940 is Japan had invaded Manchuria and were engaged in a war with China. and the U.S. was supporting China at the time. What the U.S. did was they imposed an oil embargo on Japan and started squeezing the government, squeezing the country economically to the point to where the Japanese government realized

they only had about a year and a half of resources of oil supplies left. And at that point, they were desperate. And they needed to do something to try to get the U.S. to stop the oil embargo, which, of course, was being imposed by the U.S. Navy. So that's where they took the gamble of Pearl Harbor. And they said this, and at the time, and we now know this because of various documents have been released, but a lot of Japanese military planners knew that this could just end poorly for Japan.

They were like, if we do this, you know, they knew the potential industrial capacity of the United States. You know, like, this is just a high risk move, and it's likely not going to work out, but they did it. And, of course, we know the aftermath of that, is that it didn't lead to the way. war in the Pacific. That's indeed a scenario that has a lot of eerie similarities to thinking about U.S. economic pressure on Russia now. And instead of it being Japan invading China and us putting an oil embargo, it's Russia invading Ukraine. If we put the same type of economic pressure, could it lead

Russia to make a similar calculus to what Japan made back in the 1940s? That's so interesting. And it creates a real dilemma because obviously the United States government doesn't want to be in the position when we say we have all these weapons that we can use on the shelf, but we don't want to piss off Putin that much. As a result, we're going to let Ukraine suffer and thousands of people die. That seems monstrous. That seems inhumane. But within the broader calculus, I can see how it makes a kind of sense. Putting all this together, you have Biden's ear, you have Blinken's ear, let's assume that they give you an audience, what do you tell them to do? What do you tell them or NATO more broadly to do,

that is most likely to stop Russia in Ukraine without funneling this kind of militarism somewhere else where Putin continues this disastrous campaign? What you're putting your finger on is the fact that when it comes to really any policy space, but I think especially in foreign policy in national relations, you're often facing all bad options. And so your objective is simply to pick the least bad option. And I think that this is indeed one of those scenarios where the Biden administration needs to pick the least bad option. I think they are doing that. I do think that this explains why they're not putting all the sanctions on the table yet, where they haven't put them all in place. I think part of that is to

avoid this nightmare scenario. I think also part of it is so that they have some additional, if you will, instruments to use if Putin does start to push further. I think that they need to do more to mobilize forces into Poland, into the Baltic states, to put in place more than what we would call a tripwire force. You know, there's this idea that if you put a few troops in the way of a potentially imposing army and they die, then that will compel the side that put the troops there to come in and, you know, avenge their deaths. But the reality is that that doesn't really work. work. What you have to do is you have to have enough troops on the ground that it just completely convinces the potential aggressor that this is not going to work. And so if you go back to like the

Pearl Harbor example, part of the reason why Japan thought this could work is because the ship's were all docked and it's like they're not really paying attention so we can do this. So you have to have those troops on the ready. This is something that the Biden administration has been starting to do they need to do more of is that unfortunately it's not just a matter of diplomacy, which the Biden administration recognized, right? They said we're not talking to Putin right now. It is a matter that you have to have, if you will, that hard power on the ground show that it's ready to go.

And that's something that has to be in full force. So that's the key thing to be emphasizing with the Biden administration. As for Putin, I don't know if he can be breached. I really don't know. If you go back to earlier this week when he had the, meeting of his security counsel. He basically had all the people who do have his ear. They were all just coming up and essentially telling him what he wanted to hear, which is that it is time to invade Ukraine. It is time to take this measure. So I don't know what could be said to Putin to

convince him to not pursue any of these options. I think it's really about ensuring that the other sides, don't put Putin in a situation, and it's a fine balance to reach, but don't put him in a situation where he feels like either, A, it will be easy to go further, or B, that he has no choice but to go further. You've been so helpful and so clear in laying out these scenarios. Tell me what you are looking for in the next week, the next two weeks, to determine the most likely outcome of this war. So the first thing I'm going to be looking at is what we've been talking about, How is the actual military campaign going? Does Russia seem like they're achieving the success quickly that they want to be able to achieve?

Because that's going to inform a lot of which of these scenarios, obviously between like scenario one and two, most apparently. Secondly, is what is their, once they've captured Keith, what are they going to do? Are they going to then put in place a new government? What's the response of the existing government? What does Zelensky do? That's something else we have to pay attention because that's going to inform about this regime change, foreign imposed regime change idea. So those are going to be two things of me paying attention to it. But the other one is going to be what is NATO doing? What are they

putting in place? Are they moving these military assets into the east? And in particular, what does the situation look like in Poland? Because as I highlighted, I really do think that Poland could be the flashpoint. What's the refugee situation look like there? Is what does Russia saying about that refugee situation? Could that give us hints that Russia might be thinking about invading into Poland? Because again, that is going to be, in my view, the potential, what could potentially bring about that nightmare scenario? You said something that I want to ask about, which was once Russia conquers Kiev. I don't know if that was a slip of the tongue or a revelation of the fact that you think it is just a matter of time before Russia, California.

captures the capital of Ukraine? It's not necessarily going to be easy because any time you try, I mean, the capital is where usually forces try to have their last stand. But I do think that they, that is one of their primary objectives. I think they will try to accomplish that primary objective. And what we've seen so far is despite the casualties that Russia has been incurring, they've been achieving their aims. We, yesterday on one of the first things that got a lot of people's attention was that Russia went for the Chernobyl nuclear facility, and they were able to quickly accomplish that objective. Same thing with the airport, the major airport outside of Kiev. They were able to

accomplish that. So they've been able to accomplish their objective so far. And you can tell if they're setting up then for this campaign on the capital. So I do think it'll be a matter that now how that campaign looks, we don't know, will end up being some sort of siege, will be urban warfare. That'll be the key thing to observe. But I do think that Russia is making that a primary objective. Professor, this was a little bit scary, but also extremely helpful. And I really, really appreciate you walking me through the scenarios and helping me think more clearly about this. I hope to have you back in the podcast very soon. Thank you so much for having me. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like what you hear,

please follow, rate, and review us. New episode drops on Tuesday.