Plain English with Derek Thompson - When Will the Ukraine War End? (Plus: 10 Good Minutes on What the Hell Elon Musk Is Doing With Twitter)

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

On today's show, we start with Ten Good Minutes on the extremely funny and very chaotic saga of Elon Musk vs. Twitter. Last week, Musk bought enough Twitter shares to become the company's largest individual shareholder. Then, Twitter announced that Musk would become a board member. Then, Musk tweeted a bunch of embarrassing things about Twitter, suggesting the platform was "dying" and that its headquarters should be converted into a homeless shelter. Then, Twitter announced that Musk would not be a board member. What is happening?! Casey Newton, the author of the 'Platformer' newsletter, joins the show to share his reporting and speculation. Next, we welcome back Paul Poast, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, to talk about why we should fear Russia even though its military has "stunk" so far, why the next chapter of the war could be even bloodier, and when the war might finally end. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Casey Newton & Paul Poast Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Dave Chang and Chris Ying. We are the hosts of Recipe Club. You may have listened to it before, but we are now back on the air, new and improved, with the same host that lose every week. I still don't know what the rules are because they've changed as well. Chris, can you give a quick rundown? Every week, we debate the best way to cook the things you want to eat. We take a user, listener submitted recipe, and we all cook it with our friends,

Priya Krishna, Rachel Kong, Brian Ford, and John DeBerry. and then we talk about what went right and what went wrong. No, I actually really don't want to do this podcast. And they are hardly our friends. They are enemies. They are enemies. It's Dave's civil disobedience. If you want to see Dave Chang in an act of civil disobedience,

tune in to Recipe Club where he will not follow the recipe. I'm contractually obligated to make this podcast. But I'm here to have a good time. So listen to Recipe Club every week on the Ringer Podcast Network. Today's episode is a special two-parter. We're going to welcome back to the show a fan favorite University of Chicago professor Paul Post to talk about the war in Ukraine. If you have been a bit out of the loop on Ukraine recently, I do not blame you. There is a lot of news coming out of that war, a lot of microdevelopments.

And this, I think, is a really perfect interview to get up to date. In the last week, Russia has announced a critical shift in strategy. Putin has withdrawn the bulk of troops from the area surrounding Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. He seems very likely to now be focusing his military arsenal on eastern and southern Ukraine, where his army has made some headway, despite being rebuffed by a resilient Ukrainian defense. And Paul Post and I talk about where this war is headed from here, and why the next chapter of the war might be even bloodier and more violent, than the already very bloody and extremely violent first act of this conflict.

But before that interview, I didn't want to let another podcast go by without commenting on the absolutely fascinating showdown between Twitter and its new single largest individual shareholder, Tesla CEO, SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk. Now, my feeling about this story is that sometimes the story deserves an hour of our time. Sometimes it only deserves a half hour of our time. Sometimes the story only needs 10 good minutes of our time. So today we're introducing a new segment called, wait for it, 10 good minutes.

And it's appropriate that our maiden voyage for TGM is Musk's utterly bizarre and extremely funny, honestly, saga with Twitter. And for that conversation, I'm very glad to have the great Casey Newton who writes the platformer newsletter about tech and society. So that is today's episode. A fun tech skirmish that means just about nothing for the world, at least yet. And a big important war that I believe still is the single most important story on the planet. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Casey Newton, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Derek. So last week, Elon Musk announced that he had become the largest individual shareholder of Twitter. The company made it known that he would be joined. the board of directors in exchange for not buying up more shares of the company. And joining the board of directors would theoretically also keep him from firing off a barrage of embarrassing tweets about the company. Immediately after that, Elon Musk started firing off barrage of embarrassing tweets about the company,

including one about how none of Twitter's biggest accounts like Justin Bieber do any tweeting. He appended to that observation, the question, quote, is Twitter dying? He then wrote that Twitter's headquarters were basically empty and should be converted into a homeless shelter. And the third step of this domino effect was that the CEO of Twitter announced Sunday night that surprise surprise, the guy tweeting about how Twitter is dying is not going to join the board of directors at Twitter. Casey, what did this letter say?

What were the most interesting, bizarre, funny parts of this letter? I mean, it was all sort of interesting and funny and insane into sort of keeping with the general outlines of the story. But, you know, you go through it line by line and there are weird things that stand out. I think the line that raised people's eyebrows the most was the idea that Twitter had told Elon he was going to need to take a background check, you know, and that that might have inspired some fears in Elon, although it's like Elon has done so many insane things in the foreground that I don't

know what was going to come out in the background check that was really going to scuttle this whole thing. But that was sort of thing number one. But really like the wording of all of it is strange, you know, Parag says like, well, here's what I can share, you know, which suggests that maybe there was more that was happening behind the scenes. Parag also says there will be distractions ahead, you know, suggesting that maybe we're expecting some more hostilities from Elon toward Twitter. So a lot's still up in the air, but in the annals of Twitter history, this is truly a historical milestone of absurdity. This letter from the CEO of Twitter, from Paragagagawal.

It really is like a corporate iceberg. Like for the 5% that you can see in this letter, you're like, what is the 95% that we cannot see? I love the fact that it says, as you mentioned, quote, we announced on Tuesday that Elon we appointed to the board contingent on a background check and formal acceptance. Like, why put that in the letter

unless you want to very subtly shiv, Elon? I thought this is my favorite part. I'm quoting from two different parts of the letter. Part one, quote, the board and I had many discussions with Elon about joining the board. We were excited to collaborate and clear about the risks, yada, yada, yada, in part two. Elon shared that morning he would no longer be joining the board. I believe this is for the best.

Within approximately five sentences, he says, we're really excited about Elon Musk joining our board. Also, Elon Musk didn't join our board. Also, it's good that Elon Musk didn't join. Like, pick a door here, man. What did you make of that? I mean, I think that mirrors the experience that most people have about Elon Musk doing things. Just like, oh, that sounds good. And then you think about it for five seconds.

Like, actually, is there anyone else who could do this? So I think Paragg sort of being very relatable there. I'm interested in what you think Musk's own motivations are here. My sentence is that he was offered a choice. And the choice was something along the lines of. Elon, you can join Twitter as a formal and respectful member of the board of directors, or you can tweet whatever bullshit you want about the company. And Elon was like, that is the easiest decision of my life. I am going to enjoy my 9.x% of this company and I choose to

tweet. I mean, how much of this do you think is just Elon not wanting to be tied down, tethered by the rules that naturally come with the sort of fiduciary obligations of being on the board of directors? Yeah, I mean, I think that's obviously true, but all that was obviously true before he bought 9% of Twitter and before he agreed to join the board, right? So, you know, folks keep calling me up and asking me to explain Elon's rationale here. Like, the only thing I'm convinced of is that there actually was no rationale. You know, when this first happened, I compared the whole thing to like, loki buying an ant farm, you know, just like a mischievous trickster god who, like, wanted to run experiments on some, you know, population of puny creatures.

And to me, that is what this entire thing has felt like. There has not been one logical thing that is connected. It is just a series of events and a bunch of journalists trying to impose some sort of narrative on it that seems remotely plausible. I do think it's important to say that when you're talking about the richest people, not only in the world, but the richest people that have ever existed in the history of the world, they will make some decisions that might seem important to us, but these decisions are made with an amount of money that's approximately 0.5% of their wealth, which is like a normal person buying a book. It's like, oh, what did they mean to do when they bought that? But, well, it was 0.5% of their wealth.

I mean, I wonder whether, it seems to me there's sort of like three different doors in terms of the explanations for what he's doing. Number one, I guess is what you just said. There is no plan. He's rich. He likes Twitter. Rich people buy stuff they like. He bought Twitter the same way people buy like stamps or like Jasper John's American flags. Like he just bought some of the thing that he likes.

Number two is that he really loves tweeting. And all his decisions regarding Twitter sort of revolve around the sun, which is his just adoration of using Twitter to tweet. and this is about preserving his right to tweet and sort of striking fear into the heart of anyone who would push him off Twitter for saying things that are inappropriate. And then I guess door number three, and this really is one that people are starting to talk about seriously,

is that this is the opening inning of a hostile takeover. Do you think... It sounds like you think option number one was the sort of initial... the initial motivation here. What's the possibility, though, that for whatever reason, he ends up in a situation

where he sees value in actually buying a controlling stake of Twitter. You can't rule it out. When I was writing about this last week, I wrote, like, Parag Agarwal should watch his back. There is something a foot here or there could be. You know, some people may not know that Twitter sort of survived a somewhat hostile takeover attempt about two years ago. These activist investors, Elliott Management came in. They put three people onto the board.

they wanted Jack Dorsey out. They eventually left the board, but I believe that the reason that Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO in November had a lot to do with the fact that those activist investors wanted Twitter to hit a bunch of growth of revenue targets that they are still very far away from hitting. So Prague-Aarwal was in a really tough spot. And one of the interesting things about the way that this was all announced last week with the Musk stuff was this strong assertion from Parag, from Jack Dorsey, and from Elon,

that they were all working as a unit. And I thought, hmm, you know, maybe the benefit to Twitter here will be that with these kind of forces aligned, they will be able to resist Elliott or whoever comes back to them and say, hey, you didn't actually add 100 million daily active users the way you told us you were going to. So now those bets are kind of off. And I think we just have to wait and see, does Elon buy more stock? Does he start to sell some of his stock? I still have a hard time believing that he really wants to run this company when he is CEO of two other companies, has leadership positions at three more. but anything is possible with this man. Yeah, it's sort of like that saying,

if he wants something done quickly, give it to a busy person. Like, he's already the CEO of, by market cap, the largest car company in the world and the most advanced space technology company in the world. He, I suppose, is partially in charge of running a bunch of other companies

that are in the green energy space and in the boring tunnel drilling space. His plate is quite full. Running Twitter does seem like giving another job to an extremely busy person. Enough speculation. You have talked to people inside the company. What are people who work at Twitter saying about the prospect,

about the reality of Elon Musk being the largest private shareholder in their company and the prospect of him starting to play with them the way that a Norse god would play with an ant farm? So last week when I was speaking to folks, they were spooked. That was the word that came back to me. People weren't sure what his intentions were. Twitter has been on a good run of shipping product over the past year. This is a notoriously slow company that had suddenly gotten pretty quick. And there was a feeling that there were a lot of pieces in place

and that they were starting to make some progress. With Elon Musk coming in and trying to product manage the entire company by tweets, you just had a series of enormous distractions. So you may remember that he tweeted, should Twitter have an edit button? And then it turned out that Twitter had been working on that for a year. And they sort of had to get out in front of him and say, wait, wait, wait, like, we've actually been working on this, right? And so you can imagine what that was going to be like for them

over the next six months or a year or five years, as Elon sort of did this over and over again. So they were just really nervous about that. I actually heard the news which broke on Sunday night from a Twitter employee. And, you know, their feeling about this was basically LMAO. You know, like, here we go again. There's this famous Mark Zuckerberg line that, you know, Twitter, the company was like if a clown car fell into a gold mine. And like, everyone is back in the clown car.

And we are headed into deep down the shafts. Well, it's like, it's like the clown king is now like repelling himself down the shaft in order to stand on top of the clown car that has fallen into the gold mine and creating even more drama in this in this cave um so final outlooks you know what what are you looking what news are you looking for in the next week i think elan technically is still on the hook for a possible a m with twitter employees is that's still going to happen what is what is a shoe to drop that you were looking for in the next week you know like i can report the a m has been canceled which is tragic i think we would have learned a lot from it um you know what am i looking for well one i assume

there will be some insane tweets from Elon about this situation. So that's thing number one. And then thing number two is does, you know, he take any action beyond a tweet? Does he buy some stock? Does he sell some stock? Does he announce some intention to do, you know, something with the company? I mean, you know, he does own, you know, more than 9% of the company. Now he does have a really big voice and he's made it extremely clear that he is going to use it.

And so now all of us puny ants can do is just sort of sit back and wait to see what he does with all of us. Yeah, I want to do like a sort of sophisticated breakdown of his. motivation, but like a part of me is trying to evaluate his motivations as if like he's just going about this as a strategic genius. He is a strategic genius, but here he's just a prankster, I feel like. He's just doing this because he loves this company and wants to cause a little bit of trouble and adores the combination of his troublesomeness and the effect it can have on Twitter and his enormous audience. Anyway, Casey, we'll have you back next time. Elon makes

even more news on Twitter, but I really appreciate you helping us out with the news. Hey, thanks for having me. That's Casey Newton. Check out his newsletter platformer, which is really excellent, excellent newsletter on tech, society, and culture. And now for today's main course to talk about the Ukrainian war and where Putin's war goes from here, we welcome back to the show. Professor Paul Post. Professor Paul Post, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for having me back. So this is your third time on the show. And after the last episode, it's interesting. Several people reached out to me with some. some variation of the following statement. I loved your guest on the Ukrainian war, and I had no idea that Owen Wilson knew so much about foreign affairs. Has anyone else ever told you that you sound like a long-lost Wilson brother?

Like, do you in fact have a cameo in Bottle Rocket? Is there something we don't know about your extended family? Or you just happen to sound a bit like Owen Wilson to a bunch of listeners of the show? You know, I've never heard that before, but I got to say, the movies that Owen Wilson makes, a big fan of those. I've never seen any of them, but the fact that he makes them,

I have a lot of respect for that. See, there you go. Making the meta Owen Wilson references, even though you claim not to be blood relation, I am absolutely positive now that you're keeping some secret from me, and I don't know whether that should update my trust with you. But anyway, just an amazing observation.

I got like five emails from our last interview that were like, wow, that guest really sounds like Owen Wilson. Wow, that University of Chicago professor It really sounds like Owen Wilson. It was extremely funny. All right. So in all serious, is now. My first question for you is a two-parter about the Ukraine war.

One, what did you, Paul, personally get most wrong about the Ukraine war? And two, what did the foreign policy community, the community of experts, get most wrong about this war up to now? That's a question that a lot of people have been thinking about. And I think a key way to kind of answer that. is to start with the second part, which is what is the foreign policy community gotten wrong, or at least what they've said that they've gotten wrong. And I think that a lot of us have observed time and time again that they totally misread the condition of the Russian military, right? The ability of the Russian military to be able to carry out operations. I mean, this has even led

to, at the extreme, discussions about, well, maybe NATO doesn't have to worry about spending as much money, right? Because the whole idea, if you go back to like 2014, with this thing called the Wales pledge. The Wales pledged was this commitment by the NATO allies to all of them would get their spending up to 2% of GDP. And of course, the big reason why is because, well, we're going to need military forces to be able to take on Russia if they become aggressive. But that was all predicated on the idea that Russia would be able to have this war machine

that could just go through and plow through the Eastern European countries and make its way potentially to Western Europe and take on NATO directly. And of course, what we've been observing in Ukraine is not consistent with that type of formulation of the Russian military. Then instead, they've seen it bogged down. Now, having said that, there's a big reason that they've gotten bogged down. And actually, this came up last week during some congressional testimony by Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, where he talked about how the reason why, and just as context, maybe people saw this or they didn't, but Representative Matt Gates was saying to Secretary of Defense Austin was saying, like, you got this wrong. Your intelligence was totally off

on Russia and they're bogged down in Ukraine, and that was a complete oversight. And I think Secretary of Defense Austin answered it very well. where he said, well, has it occurred to you that maybe part of the reason why they are bogged down is due to the assistance that we're providing? So there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of it's not fully just that the Russian military is inept, you know, that obviously there's been all this assistance going to it. But nevertheless, I would say that's the number one thing that has surprised a lot of analysts. Now, for me, I would admit that I'm also surprised by it to a degree, but that's not the thing that is most surprising to me. The thing that was most surprising to me goes back to,

and I think we talked about this before, but was really the scale of the operation that Russia tried to pull off. I had viewed Russia as likely to invade prior to the actual invasion, but I thought that they would go for something more limited. I thought they would go for something you could call like a salami tactic, where maybe they would just try to take a little bit of territory in the east just kind of as a face-saving measure to just a just to just a having amassed all these troops. But then they went all in and went for this large-scale invasion, but doing so with a force that's not really at mass necessary to pull off such an invasion.

And again, we talked about this before on the podcast, that it seemed like they were trying to do what they did in Crimea in 2014, which was move in quickly, barely have any shots, fire, maybe just limited fighting, and immediately take control of territory and be done with it. And that didn't happen. And then they started to get bogged down. And at that point, they're now starting to pivot. And what you're starting to see now is it seems like they're starting to move back to maybe what they probably should have tried to do in the first place, right? Which is concentrate on the east.

So I would say that's the biggest thing that I misread is I really didn't think Russia was going to try to go all in, all at once in the way that they did. And what we're now witnessing on the ground is showing that that indeed probably was not a good idea from Russia's standpoint. So one thing that I'm starting to see from some of the, I don't know if you would call it pro-Russia Russian sympathetic analysts out there, is that this was all part of Putin's plan, that he only pretended to try this massive invasion, not the salami plan, but like the whole Bratworth plan, try to take the whole damn thing. he only tried to siege Kiev and only tried to take the whole country as a faint, as a means of distracting Ukraine's forces so that he could establish himself in the south and the east and that this is all going according to Putin's original plan. What's your reaction to that? How do we know that those Russian sympathizers are wrong?

Well, we ultimately don't know and we won't know until we could somehow someday actually have insight into the internal deliberations. But I think that we can have a pretty high confidence that those comments are just simply face-saving comments. And indeed, I've seen those as well. They say, well, we have now completed phase one of our military operation. And so now we are shifting to phase two. But it doesn't make sense because of something that I've seen time and time again, people have kind of overlooked about this conflict. And that is, this conflict didn't come. out of nowhere. This is actually an escalation of an existing conflict that there had been war, there's actually been war going on in Ukraine and eastern Ukraine since 2014 following the taking

of Crimea and that there's Russia has been involved in backing separatists in the eastern provinces since that time there has been fighting. This was the basis of the first impeachment of President Trump was about disputes over that type of aid coming in. And so as a reason, And just to pause you there, just for people who need a little bit of the 101 there, was it not the case that the U.S. had a policy after 2014, after the initial Russian invasion of southeastern Ukraine, that we were giving lots of military aid to Ukraine to help them stand up against Russia? And indeed, that military aid might be responsible or partially responsible for why Ukraine has held up so well in 2022. Trump wanted to pressure the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, to help him uncover evidence that would embarrass Hunter Biden and the Biden family during the election and withheld military aid until Zelensky gave smoking gun evidence over to the administration. So he was interrupting the flow of military aid to Ukraine, even as we were trying to reinforce their efforts to rebut the Russians in the South and the East. Is that that's what you're referring to, yes?

Absolutely, yes. That is the full context. And I think that that's important is to realize that, wait a minute, that was back during the Trump administration, the first impeachment. And as you point out, that was about interrupting a flow that had already been happening of military aid to Ukraine. And so what that highlights is that there had been conflict going on there for a while. And so if Russia's objective was just to, say,

fully take control of those provinces or even go a little bit beyond it, then they were already positioned to be able to accomplish that without having to pull off some sort of rope-a-dope type operation. They could have just simply moved more troops into those eastern provinces, moved further west. And in that sense, probably my view is they could have been quite successful in doing that. And I think that it would have led the Ukrainian government and even NATO to say, whoa, I mean, we can't really stop this. This is something that if they want to do it, they can do it, where I think they misjudged was trying to go for the whole Bratworth, if you will, and trying to do so with using really the wrong utensils. If we really want to put it further,

you know, they're trying to go for the whole Bratwurst with a toothpick instead of having, you know, the steak knife and everything else that you need. Let's go a little bit deeper into this. I want your analysis of why Russia's military has, to use a technical term, stunk. Like, there's a lot of people that are really surprised by the poor performance of Russia's military in Ukraine. But you've pointed out that when it comes to fighting wars, Russia has always kind of stunk. What does that mean? Like, when I look at Russia's like win-loss record, I'm like, all right, Russia versus Napoleon. Russia won. Soviet Union versus Hitler. The Soviets won. What does that win-loss record conceal in terms of the efficiency

and effectiveness of Russia's military historically? Absolutely. This is the technical word, as you say, is stunk. But of course, we need to unpack exactly what's meant by stunk in this case. And I should point out that this is part of the reason why I wasn't fully surprised by the poor performance or relatively poor performance of the Russian military. And the reason why is because if you look back and you don't even have to go back to World War II, you don't have to go back to Napoleon, you can even look at just more recent operations in Chechnya, Syria, so forth. What I mean by Stunk is not necessarily that the Russian military is. isn't innovative, that they don't come up with innovative tactics. They can, and indeed they have,

and there's been great generals who have served for the Russian military and have come up with, you know, terrific tactics. Also, not necessarily that they don't have the best weaponry. I mean, Russia is a major arms exporter around the world because of the quality of a lot of their weaponry. What I really mean by Stunk is they're not worried about efficiency, meaning they are not loss of verse. So one of the big things to contrast it with would be the United States military, where the U.S. military goes to great lengths to ensure that our troops, when they're fighting, are not killed. And if they are injured in battle, some of the greatest innovations in medicine have been battlefield medicine as a way to be able to save lives on the battlefield,

to quickly evacuate troops. This is part of the reason why the Iraq war and the Afghanistan wars had such a high casualty to death ratio. So during World War II, the U.S. casualty to death ratio was about two to one. And as research of a colleague of mine, Tunisia Fuzal, has shown, is that that ratio went to about 9 to 10 to 1. Wow. During the wars in Iraq.

in Afghanistan. And the reason why is because just much better at saving lives on the battlefield. The Russian military is not as concerned about that. They're not as concerned about trying to save lives on the battlefield. They're much more tolerant of high casualty rates. And this is something that has been the case going back to World War II. But even more recently, if you want at the end of the Cold War, when they were invading Afghanistan, much more willing to tolerate casualties. The wars in Chechnya willing to tolerate casualties, the warrants in Syria, where they've had, of course, major military operation in Syria, much more willing to tolerate casualties. Also, much more willing to inflict indiscriminate casualties, right? And so those models not just point to the fact that they

are much more willing to put their own troops at risk, but they are, and of course, we can go into this and we want to talk about war crimes and things of that nature, but much more willing to target civilians and cause casualties that way. And so in that sense, the right, Russian military has always lacked the same precision and efficiency that maybe a lot of us from looking at it from a U.S. perspective would expect from a military. And so that's what I mean by it stinking. And so hence, when you see these high casualty rates for the Russian military, and they've been quite high. And it talked about like the mobile crematorias that have been going around to try to remove evidence of troops being killed. So they don't have to notify families. I mean, these things are. are not from a historical perspective, that's surprising when you look at the Russian military. Right. So stated a little bit differently, Russia has very little regard for, like, loss exchange ratio. How many forces you lose versus how many forces your opponent loses. Russia essentially has a

kind of pour it on fixed strategy. They lose a lot of forces. Their opponent loses a lot of forces. It very quickly becomes a battle of attrition. What do we do with that information? Like, all right, once we know that, once we take this fact that is born. out of Russian military history and is very clear even from the last 20, 30 years of Russian military history from the war in Afghanistan, the war in Chechnya, the war in Syria. What do we do with it? What does it mean for the future of this war? I can imagine some people saying, oh, this is the fact that Russia is ineffective is partially good news for the Ukrainians because it suggests that, you know, Ukraine's army with its resolve, with a lot of help from the West, from NATO,

billions of dollars of help in the U.S. since 2014 can stand up against a strategically ineffective military. At the same time, you could take the totally opposite view, I think. You could say, this is all evidence that Russia can let this go forever. They can pour tens of thousands and tens of thousands of people into eastern Ukraine, the Donbass region, and we could just see bloodshed go on and on. So where does it cash out for you? How long can this war last? That's exactly. where this cashes out, is that for me, this points to why this is, people need to start to become comfortable with a very uncomfortable fact, which is that this is going to be a long, drawn out war. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One of them is exactly what we're talking

about, which is that Russia is that historically, and I think we could even say Putin directly, is not as concerned about these high casualty rates. And so willing to tolerate those and tolerate those for much longer than, say, a U.S. president would be willing to tolerate it. And you could even talk about that maybe this points the differences between an autocratic regime, which is Russia versus a democracy, right? And this is something that scholars in my area of research have pointed out many times is that democracies tend to be more risk-averse because you're accountable to voters, right? and you're like, oh, well, voters are going to get mad if they start seeing, to be blunt about it, they start seeing body bags versus an autocratic leader is not going to be as sensitive to that. So that's one reason, and Russia is the prime example of it, of why seeing these losses doesn't

pretend to suddenly Russia just saying, okay, fine, we're done, we're done fighting here. So I think that's one reason that this could go for a while. The other reason, though, is I can't see a situation. scenario where Ukraine is able to, the Ukrainian forces are able to, say, push out Russia. So on the one hand, you have Russia willing to just take these losses, hold their territory, whatever those gains are, be able to hold it and continue fighting. And at the same time, you have the Ukrainian forces that are trying to push out Russia, but they're not going to be successful in pushing Russia out. This is not going to be a scenario like, for example, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, where you had a massive coalition led

by United States, authorized by the UN that pushed Iraq's forces out of Kuwait, literally pushed them out of Kuwait. That's not going to happen here. And a big reason why is because, and we could talk about this, and indeed, I think we have talked about this on the podcast, is the nature of the assistance that Ukraine is receiving. Yes, they're receiving a lot of weapons. They're receiving these arms. They're receiving money. But there's. There's not NATO troops coming across the border directly fighting. That would be what would be necessary to push Russia out. So it's the combination of these two things that are going to pretend to this being a long war.

Right. So it's going to be a long war about Ukraine trying to push Russia out of the territory that it's gained in the east and the south. And Russia pouring in forces as it has historically done into those regions in order to hold its ground. So I just want to make sure that I have you nailed down on a prediction here because it's one that we can revisit in a future episode. That your outlook for the war in the next few months is a drawn-out battle over the territory that Russia has already gained in the south and the east. It seems to be a very violent battle because we're already talking about war crimes that Russia has committed in these regions, a violent bloody battle in those areas where we don't necessarily see the territory gained line move very much toward. Russia. Can Ukraine win? There are people talking about Ukraine winning this war. Sometimes they define it by a scenario that you just said is very unlikely, which is Ukraine literally pushing out Russia.

If Ukraine does win, if they do manage to end this war and minimize territory losses, what will that look like? What kind of settlement will that look like? So I think this is the second uncomfortable thing that people need to start to get comfortable with. And that is that the ultimate ending of this war is not going to be the scenario of Ukraine pushing out the Russian forces, declaring victory, the equivalent of VE Day at the end of World War II, and you've got people in the streets cheering and so forth. It's highly likely it is not going to end that way. And the reason why is because wars don't usually end that way. Wars end with an agreement. They end with some sort of settlement. And that's another reason to expect this war to go on

for quite some time, because currently what would such a settlement look like? And that settlement would likely be Ukraine willing to give to Russia control of these eastern provinces, say the Dombas, recognizing their annexation of Crimea from back in 2014, which of course they had. haven't recognized, but being willing to do that. Perhaps also making a pledge to never join NATO, to never join the EU, something of that nature. Those could be the kind of things that they could put forward that I think Russia would potentially find acceptable. Now, of course, from Russia's standpoint, you could say that's a bit of a compromise because at least initially, given what we were just talking about, it seemed like Russia was going for way more than that. They wanted to

control the entire country, regime change, et cetera, et cetera. So this would actually be Russia coming back from those maximal goals. Now, first of all, it's not clear that Russia is yet ready to come back from those maximal goals, right? It still seems like, especially with some of the rhetoric that we're seeing out there, it still seems like Russia has ambitions of perhaps resupplying themselves and giving in another go to try to take the entire country. So it's not yet clear that they're ready to accept a more limited outcome. And moreover, would you Ukraine, could we picture President Zelensky, given the type of things he's been saying, would he be willing to put that kind of offer on the table? And I just don't see it. And even if he is willing to put that kind of offer on the table, would his supporters, the countries that are helping him, such as the NATO countries, would President Biden be willing to say to Zelensky, yes, that's a good deal. Go ahead and take it. I could see them saying, we don't want you to offer that because that is now rewarding, if you will, bad behavior. That is setting a a bad precedent that we're worried about Russia revisiting or even other countries taking advantage of.

So for all those reasons, even though I think we can see what a settlement would look like, I don't think we're anywhere near close to that settlement. Can you do a cost-benefit analysis of the U.S. and other NATO countries doing more? You know, there are calls for, we talked about this in the podcast before, a no-fly zone, which would be a very dramatic step forward because that means not only American and German, British planes flying over Ukraine, but also very likely bombing in Russia

to prevent Russian anti-aircraft missiles to bomb those sites in Russia. You talked about the fact that the U.S. is very unlikely to support Ukraine in the east, the same way that we supported Kuwait, where we sent in forces literally on the U.S. is literally on the ground to push back the Iraqis. Very important difference.

Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons. Putin has a gazillion. Is there something that the United States isn't doing right now in terms of its support for Ukraine that you think should at least be on the table? Some kind of military assistance that you think should be on the table that today we are not offering. I think you've highlighted all of the complications with trying to not give an answer to this question, but to actually point out what could be given. So the short of my answer is, no, I don't think there's something else that the United States could give,

given the concerns about escalation, right? And this is really the key. Yes, there's a lot of things the U.S. could do. But of course we saw where with most notoriously these migs, right, there was this whole attempt to try to convoluted like, okay, we're going to send Migs, but we're not going to send them from Poland. And just explain to listeners very briefly what Migs are and what that, what the 101 of the MIG controversy. Yeah, so Migs are fighter jets. They are Russian-produced fighter jets. And of course, we have a lot of the Eastern European countries actually have these as part of their air forces. And in this case here, Poland, who has been a key conduit of arms to Ukraine, they had make fighter jets, they wanted to be able to allow Ukrainian pilots to be able to fly to carry

out sorters and operations against Russian forces. But they had reservations about these taking off from Polish territory because that would observe, even though it would be Ukrainian pilots, these are Polish jets coming from Polish territory. And so the concern would be that Russia would perhaps try to attack that airbase. So there was this idea of, well, we'll have them take off from Germany. We'll have them take off from a U.S. airbase in Germany, still being flown by Ukrainian pilots. Eventually, you can already see this is like getting way too complicated and complicated. And so they just called the whole thing off. But what it points to is those are the kind of measures you're trying to go to to try to like not have

direct or at least be able to plausibly deny that. there's direct fighting between a NATO country and Russia. I just saw recently where there's reports about U.S. special forces being on the ground in Ukraine. And that apparently Russia is aware that there's U.S. special forces on the ground in Ukraine. But everybody's kind of agreed to, like, let that be, right? That it's like, okay, they're there. That's fine, but they're not directly, overtly attacking Russian forces. So maybe it's okay. They're just providing training. assistance in that nature. But it just points to that NATO is taking great steps to try to avoid direct confrontation with Russia. And that severely constrains the type of assistance they can provide.

But what you're also seeing is, at least from my vantage point, it seems like Russia is also willing, if, for example, if it's indeed the case that there are U.S. special forces on the ground and that Russia is aware of them, they're willing to kind of go along. with this. To be able to say, you know what? Okay, we see that, but we're not going to interpret it as direct confrontation because we ourselves are also worried about escalating this to the next level. But because of this game, it really makes it difficult to envision what further assistance could be given to Ukraine. Let me express a viewpoint that I don't necessarily share and then have you evaluated. That viewpoint is we're being chicken shit. Putin doesn't want to die. He cares

about his legacy, he cares about his life, he cares about the life of at least some Russian people theoretically, he cares about the existence of Russia as an entity. He's not going to nuke Paris. He's not going to nuke Kiev. He's not going to nuke anyone, really. We are chicken shit by refusing to put forces on the ground, by refusing to establish a no-fly zone over Donbass. We could, with all the forces at our disposal effectively end this war, this war in a week. We could enter this war and it could be over in a week and tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians that will almost inevitably die in a war of attrition that lasts months or years, their lives will be spared. What are we doing? why don't we just call Putin's bluff and end this war?

I would say a couple reasons. Number one, if we were to do exactly what you're saying, which is we send in all the troops, we start pushing, we push these forces out, and then we're pushing them back into Russia, that puts Putin in a situation where he may feel like he has nothing to lose, right? He has nothing to lose,

especially when you couple that with the type of economic pressure he has, the fact that he is now an international war criminal, so there's no place for him to go. There's nothing. There's no outlet for him. When you put someone in that type of situation, you could be very concerned about what they might do as an act of desperation to try to save themselves, right? Gambling for resurrection, as you put it in a previous episode. Exactly. I will not forget because it is very eerie. Yes, exactly. Gambling for resurrection. That's exactly what you're concerned about. So that is number one. Number two, yes, when you're dealing with nuclear weapons, you're dealing with low probabilities.

But as a colleague of mine, Nicholas Miller at Dartmouth College said, he said, when you're dealing with low probability, when you're dealing with nuclear weapons, those low probabilities matter. And so that is number two is you have, when you're dealing with nukes, it is true. It is unlikely that one would be used, but you have to take that probability seriously. And the reality is, it is more probable now than it was, say, two months ago that a new number, nuclear weapon would be used. And number three, no, I don't think, I don't think anyone expects Putin to nuke Paris or New York or any major city that's a NATO ally or Warsaw for that matter since we're going back to Poland, right? But the concern is about the use of, say, a tactical weapon, right? And these are, of course, tactical nuclear weapons. They've been around for a long time. They're considered safer nuclear weapons, right? But there's the idea is that they can be.

used on the battlefield and they are smaller, lower yield. This would be exactly what you would potentially see used if suddenly Russian forces are being pushed back, push back, push back. And indeed, there was discussions back during the Korean War. There had been discussions by the United States about at the time when the U.S. troops, so a little bit of quick, very, very, very quick history. Of course, Korean War, U.S. troops are pushing north. They're assisting South Korea, because South Korea has been attacked by North Korea. They're pushing north. And then suddenly they push so far north that China gets involved. And the Chinese troops are coming down and they're pushing U.S. troops all the way back, back, back, back, back, back. During that time, there were serious discussions

within the U.S. military policy decision-making circles about should we use a tactical nuclear weapons to try to stop China's forces. So this is not something that's just a uniquely Russian type of discussion. The concern would be that even if they use a small nuke like that, first of all, what would be the response? It would put NATO in this situation of, oh, my gosh, they just used a nuclear weapon. Do we just let that go?

Do or do we launch some sort of strike? But should we launch strike? Because it was just a limited nuclear weapon, right? Is that really so bad? I mean, it starts to lead into these like... It's a Pandora's box. It's a Pandora's box. And this leads to a key.

idea that Nina Tannenwald, a professor at Brown University, is called the nuclear taboo, right? She's talked about this. And this is the idea that the use of nuclear weapons is just taboo. You don't even consider it. Well, suddenly if one's used, that just changes everything and it opens up this Pandora's box. Exactly. Right. Once the seal is broken, you just don't know what comes out of that box later. One last question for you, and it's related to President Biden's comments about Vladimir Putin. During a recent speech in Warsaw, Biden said that Vladimir Putin, quote, cannot remain in power, end quote. And then a few days later, he clarified it to say that he was nearly expressing outrage and cannot remain in power, did not literally mean cannot remain in power.

It was more of just a vague expression of anger rather than a new policy aimed at toppling Russia's leadership. I think that the fact that Biden made this error is not just further evidence of his foot and mouth disease, but also evidence of the fact that there is this deep ambivalence, I think, among American intelligence about, on the one hand, Putin obviously establishing himself as a war criminal, committing utter atrocities, destroying cities, killing dozens of citizens as they escape cities he's already destroyed. There's this deep and profound moral outrage. combined with this felt effectiveness, this feeling that we can't do anything about it. We have all this outrage to express and nowhere for the emotions to go because we can't put

troops on the ground. We can't establish a no-fly zone for all the reasons that you and I have gone over. This is a bit of a difficult, open-ended question, but it's like, what do we do with Putin now? What do we do with our language and with our policies now that we have economically sieged the Russian economy, put all these sanctions on Putin and all of his oligarchs, try to find ways to constrict his ability to buy military equipment, to continue the war, given Ukraine, all of this military equipment, what is left for us to do between where we are now and some faint red line beyond which we are potentially prying open Pandora's box? This is where international politics is messy.

Because on the one hand, as you said, there's this moral outrage about what we're witnessing in Ukraine, about the actions. This is why people are referring to it as Putin's war, right? They're referred to it as, you know, not just the Russo-Ukrainian war. They're calling it Putin's war. So there's this outrage about it. And of course, we're witnessing this. We're seeing these images. And it's understandable to then say a lot of things.

Number one, you know, we're not going to give Russia anything, right? We're because that's unacceptable. We cannot award, reward these war crimes. We want, hence President Biden's comment. We want Russia. We want Putin out of office. He can't stay in office. He needs to go.

These kind of comments are understandable. But the reality is Putin's not going anywhere. He is going to remain in office. I can't see a scenario where he is deposed. I can't see a scenario where there's suddenly like a revolution within, you know, the Russian populace comes up and overthrows him. That's not how most leaders are deposed. They're usually deposed by a palace coup, the internal circle.

And I just can't see the conditions for that. a lot of people who say, study the oligarchs much more closely than I do, and all of Putin's supporters are very skeptical of this because they point out that they're very reliant on Putin himself for their wealth, for their position. So it's very unlikely he's going anywhere, which means you somehow have to work with him. You have to somehow to find this settlement that we were talking about earlier. It's going to have to somehow involve him. And where the moral outrage, though understandable, can make things complicated, is several ways. First of all, because of what we're witnessing, these atrocities that we're witnessing in Ukraine,

of course, now he's being put out as a war criminal, and there's the potential for prosecution at the International Criminal Court, for example. Where that makes things complicated is if he's now potentially liable to being prosecuted to an international criminal court, how do you go about maybe offering him some sort of, if you will, golden parachute? Look, if you leave office, extradite, you can go to, you know, Dubai and maybe they work out something with the government and you can live there and it'll be fine. Can you do that if he's now under, you know, potentially being prosecuted by the international criminal court?

It complicates that ability to do it. So this is where the moral outrage can actually, though understandable, make things more difficult in terms of achieving and ending outcome. Of course, the other part of it is just those very statements by Biden, and this is why they were walked back, is now how willing is Putin going to be to take a phone call from Biden, right? That before, remember, they've had summits. They've met face-to-face.

They've talked. And that's important for them to be able to perhaps reach this type of settlement, for Biden to be able to play maybe some sort of role in this. but hearing those kind of comments, how willing is he going to be to be able to take that phone call now? I mean, Anthony Blinken has already talked about how he has not talked to his Russian counterpart since this thing has started, right? So not having that dialogue is another thing that makes this complicated,

and yet another reason why this conflict, I think, is going to be protracted and continue to go. So that is where this moral outrage about Putin, though understandable, can create conditions that can actually make the conflict protracted. Yeah, one way I'm thinking about summarizing our interview up to this point is that there are roadblocks on every potential off-ramp. There's a roadblock on the diplomatic off-ramp because we're talking about Putin being a war criminal, and that's not typically the thing that you say just before you offer someone a golden parachute to live off the coast of Dubai. There is a roadblock on the military off-ramp because as valiantly and brilliantly as Ukraine has. fought, they are now going to be engaged in a war deep attrition in the east and the south against the weight of the Russian military and a desperate Russian military that does not want

to be defeated, not only around the suburbs of Kiev, but also in the regions it's already taken. And there's no clear off-ramp in the economic sphere as well, because Russia has made it clear that even though the economy is probably going to crash this year by 10, 20%, they're willing to let it crash and continue to wage a war for the greatness of Russia and Putin's perception thereof. So all those, all the roadblocks, the diplomatic, the military, the economic, the off-ramps, the economic, the military, and diplomatic, they all have roadblocks in front of them. Is that a fair summary of where we are right now? 100% a fair summary. And again, this is why international politics is just a messy business

a lot of times. And this is why, you know, when we study it, a lot of times it is not, I'll say it like this. A lot of times I feel like a negative Nelly, right? I'm just coming in and saying, look, you know, there's just, this is, I know people want a positive so outcome here. I know people want to hear good news, but a lot of times international politics, especially when we're talking about war, it is, and we've talked about this before on the podcast, it's about choosing among bad options. And you're trying to pick the least bad option. And that's exactly what it means to try to end this war.

Well, yeah, it's tough medicine to swallow, but it's made so easy easier by the fact that you do sound just like Owen Wilson. And so it's negative news delivered with the most affable accent. Professor, I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming back. We'll have you back soon to explain the war in a few more weeks, I'm sure. But I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

Planning this with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. Thank you so much for listening to this show. If you like us, follow us on Spotify, rate and review on Apple Podcasts. We will be back with our second episode this week on Friday. We will see you then.