Pod Save the World - Putin’s Choice: War or Peace

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Ben reviews the latest developments in Ukraine, including President Putin’s shifting tone and President Biden’s warning of the risk of war. Then he chats with the New Yorker's Moscow correspondent Joshua Yaffa on the ground in Kyiv amid fears of an imminent Russian invasion. Ben also talks with radicalization and extremism expert Amarnath Amarasingam about Canada's trucker protests, how American right-wing media helped fuel their momentum, and how they could impact Canada's politics longterm.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Welcome to Pod Save the World. I'm Ben Rhodes. And Tommy is still out. As you know, taking some needed time off. So continue to keep the chair warm for him. But we have a great show today. We have two guests with us, Joshua Yaffa, who's the New Yorker's Russia correspondent, who talked to us from Kiev, where he's observing firsthand, the preparations being made for potential invasion in the country of Ukraine. And then we talked to Amarnati. Amr Asingham, who is an expert on radicalism and extremism in Canada. So he's the perfect guy to talk to you about the continuing insane trucker, freedom convoy, far-right, mishmash, QAnon, mess up in Canada. Some connection between these two topics and that the same kind of far-right, ethno-nationalist force that Putin himself represents is, as you'll hear from our guest, creeping into our usually much more peaceful and civilized neighbor to the north. But first, let's catch up a little bit on the main story, which we've all been following, which is the situation in Ukraine.

The United States continues to prepare for a potential invasion at any moment, taking a very dramatic step in closing the embassy in Kiev and essentially moving that diplomatic representation to a city far, far to the west of Ukraine, closer to the Polish border. We've also heard from the administration that they're preparing tabletop exercises to be ready for a potential Russian invasion, one including cabinet members, walking through the scenarios. I used to do these in government. What do you do the first hour, the first day, the first week of a potential scenario? And so, you know, for all intents and purposes, the U.S., Ukraine, the world remains on high alert.

NATO's Secretary General has said that members of the alliance have not seen any sign of de-escalation from Russia. President Biden, as I'll get to later, even mentioned today that the number of Russian troops around Ukraine is 150,000, which is a higher number than we've heard. While the U.S. and NATO continued to sound the alarm, Putin began to sound something of a different note. He appeared on television this week, including one appearance at a very large and long table with his foreign minister who was briefing him on the diplomacy around Ukraine. Putin said that Russia is, quote, ready to continue on the negotiating track, but will keep pushing

for a rollback of the NATO presence in Eastern Europe and a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO. We've also seen some announcements of the Russian government that they're prepared to begin to pull back some of those troops that have been encircling Ukraine, but we've yet to actually see that pull back happen. And I can tell you from first-tend experience as much as I hope that that is the case and that those troops begin to pull back. It is not above or beyond Vladimir Putin or Sergey Lavrov to just lie in the things that they say. So we'll have to monitor what happens. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, President Zelensky declared a day of unity on February 16th, the day that this podcast comes out, and the day that some experts have identified as a potential start date of a Russian invasion.

With all that going on, all those mixed messages from all over the place, we heard in what was a previously unscheduled speech on Tuesday afternoon from President Biden, who updated the country on the situation in Ukraine. Here's a little bit of what he had to say. To the citizens of Russia, you are not our enemy. And I do not believe you want a bloody, destructive war against Ukraine. War II was a war of necessity. But if Russia attacks Ukraine, it would be a war of choice,

or a war without cause or a reason. The world will not forget that Russia chose needless death and destruction. invading Ukraine will prove to be a self-inflicted wound. The United States and our allies and partners will respond decisively. The West is united and galvanized. Okay, so there's something of a darker take-on events from the President of the United States. You know, I think that a few things stood out to me from Biden's speech. And we do talk later when I talked to Joshua Yaffe about the possibility.

that Putin is climbing down and there could be a diplomatic resolution. But if you listen to President Biden's speech, he indicated he's open to diplomacy, once resolved this through diplomacy, but he did not seem particularly optimistic. It sounded more like a speech that was preparing people in the United States and in Russia, as we heard in that clip, and around the world for a potentially very damaging and destructive war in Ukraine and a lot of fallout consequences from that, which I'm going to unpack in a second here. You also heard Biden really reiterate his point that he's not going to negotiate Ukrainian membership in NATO with Russia, underscoring his view of the principle that nations should be able to choose whatever alliances

they want. So it was not an olive branch on the core thing that Putin's been seeking, which is that assurance that Ukraine won't ever join NATO and that NATO itself will kind of pull back from Russia's border. Instead, you heard, heard Biden reiterate things that have been said before about the U.S. being willing to negotiate around transparency and arms control, you know, being upfront about troop deployments, missile deployments, military exercises. Thus far, that hasn't been enough for Vladimir Putin. We'll see if he takes that off ramp in the days to come. But then I think a lot of Biden's speech was meant to prepare people for the worst case scenario of a Russian invasion.

In that clip we played, he's speaking directly to Russians. And I thought that that was an important kind of rhetorical tack he took. As a speechwriter, I used to do that sometimes, you know, have President Obama addressed directly a foreign audience. And if you listen to what he said, he was really speaking to the cost that Russia would face of an invasion, speaking to the fact that it would be bloody, that Russia would likely be taking significant casualties this time around, unlike Crimea, where they they faced no resistance because they're moving into a part of Ukraine where they already had a

military base and you had a pretty large pro-Russian population and there wasn't a lot of resistance. This time, if he invades Ukraine, it would clearly be different. And Biden spoke to the fact that this would be a war of choice, as you heard him say. I think this is of a piece with how transparent this administration has been about the intelligence they have about invasion. If you're watching and thinking, why do these guys keep talking about this? Why do they keep telegraphing what they know about this. I think one of the core reasons is they're seeking to deny Vladimir Putin the play that he would always try to run, which is to frame anything he does as defensive to kind of invent a pretext, you know, in a Ukrainian attack on Russians in eastern Ukraine

or some provocation from the Ukrainians or even the United States that kind of forced him Putin to invade this country. You know, I think Biden smartly, both in terms of what he said today and what he's been doing with his administration over the course of the last several weeks, is making it impossible for Putin to be anything other than the aggressor here. And essentially being the play-by-play announcer for this Russian military buildup, he's leaving no room, little room, at least, for any capacity of Putin to manipulate global public opinion. And keep in mind, it's not just the American audience or even just the Russian audience, which Putin can shape a lot through propaganda, but essentially that international audience that Biden really wants to see Putin as the aggressor in

event of an invasion. And, you know, the Russians, too, as we hear from Joshua Yoffa today, we heard from Zanemsova a couple weeks ago, you know, the Russian people are not quite as geared up for this thing as they were for the annexation of Crimea, in part because this is a harder endeavor and they know it will be, in part because sanctions have already taken a toll on their economy and they don't want to face more sanctions. But you heard from Biden today kind of an indication of what could be really the scenario of an invasion and the negative consequences it can flow. And so I think we should just kind of go through those, just so we're prepared for that psychologically.

You know, first of all, if you're talking about the scale of invasion that 150,000 Russian troops could bring into Ukraine, this is something that dwarfs anything that we've seen in the past in eastern Ukraine or Crimea. This is a land war like we haven't seen in Europe since, you know, if not the Balkans, all the way. back to World War II. And you know, you've seen estimates that 50,000 people could be killed, you know, that's just a rough number, but tens of thousands of civilians could be killed in bombing

and fighting, a significant number of casualties among the Ukrainian military, the Russian military. This would be a really deadly and destructive war. And that would just be the first phase. If Russia does succeed in potentially dismantling or dislodging the Ukrainian government and install some puppet regime, I think we could expect law. long-term resistance from within Ukraine, ongoing fighting, an insurgency or a civil war of sorts that could drag this out. Wars, once they begin, can lead to much more deadly and damaging consequences than were envisioned at the beginning. Even the relatively low-grade conflict in eastern Ukraine has taken over 10,000 lives to date. And that's a relatively concentrated area of fighting

that hasn't been anywhere near the full scale that we're looking at here today. And that's just the military aspects. Then you talk about the U.S. and NATO response. You know, as Biden indicated today, the sanctions that they're envisioning would include cutting off Russia from certain technologies through export controls, the United States preventing the export of certain technologies to Russia. The United States sanctioning the key Russian banks essentially trying to cut off the Russian economy from the international financial system so they can't conduct kind of basic transaction and access currency. This would hit the Russian economy really hard. Vladimir Putin does have a very large war chest of reserves, I think over $600 billion that they've kind of stored away for a rainy

day. But make no mistake, this would impact ordinary Russians. It would lead to shortages, it would lead to economic hardship there. I think what it will also do, and Biden references today, is it'll hurt the U.S. and European economies as well. I mean, make no mistake, if we're taking a large amount of Russian energy off the market, energy prices are going to go up. Gas prices are going to go up. It's going to have impacts on markets that go beyond just energy prices. If Russia wants to reciprocate, it has a lot of raw materials, for instance, that feed into global supply chains. Russia can disrupt those supply chains. And as we've all learned this year, that can drive up inflation even more. So the consequence to U.S. sanctions is not just going to be

felt in Russia. It could be felt in the global economy, and it could exacerbate some of the economic challenges that we're having here in the United States. It's also been the experience with Putin that if he feels like the United States is contributing to efforts to, say, kill Russian forces by arming the Ukrainians or supporting a potential insurgency inside Ukraine, there are other types of responses that Putin could do. One, which Biden kind of alluded to today, is he could target Americans in Ukraine. There are a significant amount of Americans in Ukraine. Second, he could launch cyber attacks into the United States to talk. try to mess with, disrupt, cripple aspects of our economy, targeting private companies, targeting

critical infrastructure, denial of service attacks, hacks into the U.S. government. We've seen Russia have this capacity. If they kind of fully weaponized it, we could be facing a degree of cyber assault that we haven't experienced before in this country. And in that case, I think, you know, the U.S. would likely respond with its own cyber attacks on Russian critical infrastructure. And we could see a tit for tat escalating where we're living with a different kind of cyber war than we faced to date. I think those Russian disinformation campaigns that we've all lived with where they fueled everything from political polarization in the United States to anti-vax efforts in the United States, including the kind of efforts that spill across the border into Canada. You could see a pretty dramatic escalation in Russian information and disinformation campaigns into the United States into the United States. the United States and efforts to kind of disrupt politics in the West generally.

So we're talking about a conflict, again, if it's the full Russian invasion of this country, that is not going to feel as isolated from us and the rest of the world as the events in Crimea or eastern Ukraine felt. You're talking about real warfare on the ground. You're talking about economic warfare through these sanctions. It's going to have ripple effects. You're talking about potentially asymmetric and cyber warfare back and forth. You're talking about potentially escalating disinformation campaigns. This is what we could all be dealing with over the course of the year if, and I stress if the worst case scenario of a large-scale Russian invasion moves forward. I think part of what is sunk in for everybody is that this would be bad for everybody.

It'd be bad for Ukrainians, first and foremost, because they're right there in the crosshairs. it would be potentially very bad for Russians who would suffer directly in the war, but also suffer a lot of economic impacts, and that could lead to its own kind of instability in Russia. It could hurt the European and American economies. It could raise tensions along NATO's border with Russia and the potential incident of a direct confrontation between Russian and American forces. That's the supreme worst case scenario here. So this is a big deal.

And I know people, you know, may be tired of hearing about. you know, the invasion that hasn't happened yet, let's hope it doesn't happen. Let's hope there's an off-ram. Or even if something does happen, there are scenarios that are far less catastrophic than what I just outlined. You know, Russia could choose to formally recognize the two chunks of eastern Ukraine that it de facto occupies or could annex those territories or try to bite off another smaller chunk of Ukraine. That would be very bad, too. But I do think it's worth getting our minds around the really extreme scenario of what could happen if those 150,000 troops move in in a fully mechanized invasion. And frankly, I think that's what President Biden was trying to prepare people for

today, despite the recent olive branches or at least change in tone coming out of the Kremlin. Only man who knows what's going to happen is Vladimir Putin. That's the way he likes it. I'm sure he likes it. Everybody's talking about him. And up next, I'm going to talk to Joshua Yoffa, who knows a lot about Vladimir Putin. has lived and reported from Putin's Russia and is reporting from Kiev today. After the break, we'll hear from Joshua. Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by Joshua Yaffa, who's a correspondent for the New Yorker, who's been based a lot in Moscow over the years. He's also the author of a really tremendous book, Between Two Fires, Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia,

which gives you a flavor of how Russians have experienced Putin's time in office and what Russia is like. I found it incredibly illuminating to read when I was working on my book and actually just a really fun read, too, great characters. So Joshua, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, glad to be here. Thanks for the generous introduction. So you are in Kiev, I should have said, and you just recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker about how people there are dealing with this constant warning of the imminence of war. I guess I'd just start there. Like, what is what is the mood like? What are you? I detected some fatalism in the attitudes of the people in your peace. But how would you describe it? Yeah, I've been here about a week. And when I arrived,

I felt like people still weren't quite believing the talk of war, at least not the way it was being discussed in the West. And that was a narrative that had been picked up on by many of my colleagues who had been here much longer before, before I, and we saw this in the statements of Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, himself, who seemed to be taking issue with the degree of certainty or alarmism, you might say, in some of the U.S. assessments that have been coming out in previous weeks. And that felt like an attitude I was picking up not just among people in the Zelensky administration or, you know, close to government, but everyday Ukrainians who felt like the idea of a full frontal Russian assault on Ukraine, you know, potentially trying to take Kiev felt difficult

to imagine. Of course, difficult to imagine doesn't mean impossible to happen, right? So it's hard to locate that point on which people are being, you know, naive about the threat or on the opposite, people are, you know, avoiding the kind of alarmism or hysteria that perhaps took over some quarters of the American media. You know, those are debates that Ukrainians themselves were having, right? That's the best way I can answer. The question is to say that people themselves were trying to figure out where is the right place on that spectrum to be. I think the most important kind of underlying or historical factor we should keep in mind is what war, especially brought and instigated by Russia means for Ukraine. Nothing new in the sense that,

you know, this began, well, one point we can pick to in history, right? We can go all the way back, I don't know, to, you know, Middle Ages or at least, you know, the Foundation of the Soviet Union, but let's just pick 2014 to not get completely kind of lost in the back history. But that was the time when Russia annexed Crimea and launched a kind of foe, would-be separatist conflict in the Dunbass region in eastern Ukraine, a grinding war that continues to this day, very much backed by Russia, including the Russian military. So the notion of a Russian invasion, of course, we were talking about something of a different scale that has been happening in Dunbas and Readers. But the idea of a Russian military operation against Ukraine was something that Ukrainians felt like they had been living with for a long time and had heard episodic warnings over the past eight years that it was about to get bigger.

The Russian invasion force or Operation Force in Dunbas was about to expand. was about to go out from Dunbassan to capture more Ukrainian territory. So there is an element of, I'm not sure fatalism is the right word to describe it, but definitely people being a bit inert to war talk and feeling like they've heard talk of war and have learned psychologically to live with talk of war over the course of many years. Yeah. Well, and I want to get into some of the kind of specifics that might be on the table and any possible de-escalation because there's some developments today.

but I wanted to ask one other bigger picture question, drawing on your experience in Russia and Ukraine, which is that there's kind of two ways of looking at what's happening. They're overlapping, but they're somewhat distinct. One is there's a competition, a conflict between Russia and the U.S. and the West, right? This is Putin saying these big strategic issues have to be resolved. to my liking on issues like NATO enlargement and, you know, the post-coble order that America constructed that kind of rubbed Russia's face in it. So there's this, there's a world in which Ukraine just happens to be the bystander, the hostage in this conflict between

Putin and the United States, really, and the order that it represents. And then there's a separate way of looking at it where people like Putin, you know, never accepted that Ukraine is truly an independent country. And Putin himself has kind of made comments to that regard and that there's this kind of, you know, the ancient history of Kiev-Rousse and the cultural and linguistic ties, and this is an effort to write an historical wrong that is very much about Ukraine and not just the United States and kind of Russia's claim to some extent on Ukraine. How do you see people in both Russia and Ukraine? I know this is a big question, but do Ukrainians feel like they're caught in a proxy war, or do they feel acutely the kind of Russian imperial desire kicking in again?

You know, like, how should we think about that aspect of it? Is this about Russia and the West, or is this about Russia and Ukraine? Or I suspect it's about both. But how do you unpack that? Right. I'm afraid your suspicion is correct. And I don't mean to kind of give a squishy answer. So I'll try to kind of be more precise than just saying, you know, it's both the first

and the second. And it very much is about Russia's big picture historical grievances, Putin specifically. It's very clear that on an individual level, Putin feels really aggrieved and offended and injured, almost in a moral way, by the way that the West treated Russia in the 90s and beyond and created that post-Cold War security architecture that you alluded to and feels like Russia's interests very much were not respected. and also feels like that's in a way almost a historical, right? This period in the waning years of the Soviet Union as the Soviet Empire was collapsing in the late 80s with Gorbachev in charge.

And then once it finally gave way, and we had independent Russia in the 90s and of Boris Yeltsin, Putin sees that period not entirely incorrectly as a relatively short-lived period of a historical Russian weakness. And feels like in that short period, the West took advantage of Russia and was able to force through various agreements and arrangements that then became quasi-permanent. And now that Russia is no longer in this position of weakness, now that Putin, in his own mind, has righted the ship, it's only correct that he go back and try and relitigate some of these questions where he feels like Russia's interests were not properly or fully considered in where Russia wasn't able to stick up for itself to make sure that those interests were listened to. So that's the big picture issue driving what's happening now and Putin trying to reopen these old debates that for most politicians

in the West feel like pretty settled, but for Putin feel like open history or history that can and should be readdressed. How that actually happens, like the canvas where that takes place, very much is Ukraine. So I think, you know, this idea of a proxy is correct. I mean, it's unfortunate and unfair for Ukraine to be trapped in this position. But I think that Ukraine is first and foremost where Putin sees this larger battle being waged. It's the place where he can draw his own red lines, you know, pick your metaphor for what's going on here, but it's the place where he can say, enough is enough, you know, this is the issue or this is the set of issues that is critically important to me. You know, Ukraine in NATO is something intolerable to Russia, at least as Putin sees it

from a security standpoint. And I think importantly, Putin came to see that even short of official or formal NATO membership, the idea of NATO weaponry and NATO troops, you know, building up in Ukraine was equally threatening. You know, you saw Turkey sending armed drones to Ukraine. The United States has supplied javelin anti-tank missiles. There was a giant arms contract signed by the UK last year. And at a certain point, Putin thought maybe not also entirely incorrectly, that Ukraine was becoming a kind of de facto NATO member, or that rather there wouldn't be that much of a

difference between NATO formally accepting Ukraine and NATO sending arms and soldiers to Ukraine. And so those issues that felt really big to Putin on the kind of historic frame that we talked about a second ago began to manifest in Ukraine. And Putin felt like they were becoming acutely threatening and acutely intolerable in Ukraine. through Ukraine and essentially threatening to invade Ukraine, which is, you know, although Russia says that's not what it's doing, that's very much what 130,000 Russian troops surrounding Ukraine on three sides are doing, that he could use the threat of Ukraine invasion to get the West to talk about the bigger issues that have bothered Putin, not just for the past months,

but really for the past years. And an open question that we can talk about is like, is that working, right? Is the Biden administration engaging on that? Should the Biden administration engage on that, right? Should the West be willing to reexamine some of the previously settled questions of the Cold War under the threat of Russian invasion? That's the drama we're essentially seeing play out now. So I wanted to get into NATO then because, you know, my experience, you know, with this in government was you had a NATO membership action plan offered to Ukraine. So that's like the formal step that initiates the possibility that a country like Ukraine could become a NATO member. In 2008, Georgia's offered a NATO membership action plan at the same time.

Within a year, Georgia's been invaded, and two territories have been de facto, not formally annexed, but kind of de facto recognized by Russia. What was interesting is that then when Yanukovych, pro-Russian politician, becomes the president of Ukraine again, and kind of commits, and neutrality kind of takes off the table NATO membership. You know, there wasn't geopolitical tension around Ukraine, but he's a corrupt character who's beholden to Russia. And that sparks the made-on protests in 2013. It leads to Yanukovych's ouster in the return of a government that wants to pursue NATO membership, and we've been in this state of conflict ever since. So whether you agree with Putin or not, it's pretty clear that he really does care about this issue of NATO membership. There have been some noises the last couple days that perhaps there's been some give

on the NATO issue from Ukrainians or maybe from Europeans because you've had Macron and now Schultz there. What is your sense of how important NATO membership is to Ukrainians? You're in Kiev. Whether or not Ukrainians might accept the trade of committing to neutrality in return for those 130,000 troops going back to their barracks? Because it feels like, you know, it's hard to see this getting resolved just with the United States saying it'll be transparent about some military exercises, which is essentially the kind of proposal, one aspect of the kind of proposals Biden was making. If NATO membership is the thing that has to be traded away, is that something you think that your sense is that Ukrainians would be open to? Or is this

so embedded in their desire to break away from Russian dominance that it's a concession that Zelensky couldn't make. I'd say a few things about NATO and Ukraine. The first is the way that Putin is his own worst enemy. There's been so much ink spilled in the U.S. and so much kind of hand-wringing about how Putin is this great strategic genius playing 5D chess, whatever that means, you know, running circles around American politicians. And sure, there are ways and which, you know, being both an autocrat with singular control of your country's politics and, you know, Putin's maybe indeed geopolitical skills have allowed him to sort of outflank or maneuver the West in certain questions. But at the same time, he can make awfully kind of self-injurious

mistakes just like any other politician. In fact, maybe even, you know, all the more, given the nature of his rule and the fact that there aren't internal checks on his decision-making. And we can see that very well in the context of nature. in Ukraine, before 2014, there was something like low single digit support for Ukrainian membership in NATO inside Ukraine itself. If you ask the question, I forget the exact formulation, but it was basically, you know, how would you like to see Ukraine's security guaranteed? It was like a common, is a common poll question that's asked repeatedly of Ukrainians.

And pre-2014, that number was in the low single digits, the teens somewhere. Now it's above 50%. And the only person who can take credit, as it were, for that number, that incredible shift in support for NATO is Vladimir Putin. So he has brought about the very thing that he has been afraid of. And I don't think that's the mark of a great strategic geopolitical thinker, but rather someone who has made a series of self-injurious mistakes on the geopolitical front. That said, now we are left with the situation where it, where NATO membership is a much more core issue for Ukraine than it was eight years ago.

The eventual, you know, ascension to NATO is now embedded in the Ukrainian constitution. For Ukraine to declare there is no longer interested or no longer aspires to join NATO would require a constitutional change, which would we can kind of speculate or argue about the degree, but would certainly kick off some kind of political crisis. The other thing we should remember is Ukraine is a democracy, an imperfect democracy.

A democracy is still very much doing battle with corruption and insider dealing. But it's a democracy, a boisterous, you know, heterogeneous democracy with lots of different factions and lots of different political camps. And for Zelensky at this point in his presidency, and although he was elected with 73% of the vote, a really large majority in mandate, that support has been falling steadily. I think it's at or below 50% these days. For him to make a move to change the Constitution and publicly deny this aspiration to join NATO

would kick off a political crisis that could see Zelensky swept from office. We don't know exactly how it could play out, but it wouldn't be this easy snap of the fingers. It's not just like Zelensky could meet with Biden and NATO leaders in Brussels and make a deal and say, okay, fine, you know, I'll give up on NATO if I can keep the Russian troops. He would have to get that through Parliament.

I mean, I don't have to tell you about the difficulties of getting a treaty signed by a president through a domestic legislature, right? Like, that's not always a guaranteed flam dunk, and nor is it, you know, it wasn't in the case of Obama and the Iran deal, and it wouldn't be the case in Zelensky and sort of giving up on NATO aspirations. That said, I'm sure there are all sorts of clever workarounds and formulations that talented statesmen and women and diplomats can come up with. You know, the question is there the political will for that in Ukraine, in Washington, you know, what would be acceptable to Russia? I mean, one thing that Putin and others have been saying since the beginning of this current crisis is because they felt like they were manipulated in the 90s.

and we can argue endlessly about, you know, were they and who misled whom? I don't, I think the Russians have a little bit of a case, but not nearly as strong as the one they make about Russia being misled about NATO expansion. Being promised that there wouldn't be expansion east. Correct. Correct. But nonetheless, what I think is genuine is the degree of distrust on the part of Putin, almost trauma, I think it's fair to say in the case of some officials about that experience.

And so they're demanding really ironclad assurances. So it's possible that the kind of clever workaround that might be politically possible in Kiev wouldn't suffice Putin and maybe NATO and Washington wouldn't go for it either. The other issue is that from the Ukrainians I've spoken to, and these are people inside the Zelensky administration or close to it, people with government experience, they're really frustrated that this is on them to solve. In other words, they feel like Russia's beef is really with the West writ large. NATO is an institution. Ukraine is essentially the kind of sacrificial victim here. Why can't NATO or the U.S. come out and say, in the interest of peace, we are declaring,

we are retracting that 2008 agreement, and we are no longer considering, Ukraine for membership in the near future. Why does Ukraine have to be the one to make that decision unilaterally risk political crisis internal turmoil? Some people, you know, it's convenient for them to say politically, but some people in the Zelensky administration are talking about civil war if they were forced to go not for such a measure. I mean, that's in their interest to sort of kick the can or whatever, the metaphor is back to the U.S. and NATO, but they're not entirely wrong about the political threat that they would face. So why should they do it? Why can't NATO or the U.S.? come out and make that announcement. But, you know, neither NATO or the U.S. wants to do it for the

precedent-setting reasons. I think, you know, you might even be able to speak to more clearly than I, but that's, you know, neither Biden nor NATO, other NATO leaders want to be in the position of in the, you know, under the barrel of a Russian gun to, you know, be starting to rejigger what NATO is promising and its general, you know, security posture. So nobody really wants to do it. It's a solution that's in the air and you would think could be obvious, but when it gets to the point of, who actually should do it in what form it should take, it gets a lot more complicated. Yeah, no, that's a good, good point. It is, it isn't, but that ball could be in NATO's court, though, because you need consensus among the lines to admit new members. And I don't see any NATO

member that would raise its hand today to say that they'd fight a war with Russia over Ukraine. So it does kind of beg the question of what this is, is about. I did want to just ask you, too, about Russia, you know, you've spent so much time there. And I noted you and I both noticed something in common on this Putin. There was a great quote that embodies kind of this fixation with Putin's genius. It was from, of all people, a former CIA station chief, which made me a little concerned about our station chiefs saying, I think in the Times, remember Vladimir Putin is a KGB guy. He doesn't think like Biden does. Putin comes from Mars and Biden's from Venus. Vladimir Putin is playing his own game and his chess game may be a little different than ours.

So you have chess and KGB and Mars and Venus in there. But part of what this fixates on is we look at Russia as just Putin. You know, he's just as if nobody else lives in the country in the way it's covered in the United States at some point. What is your sense of how Russians are looking at this today? You know, we had Jean and Msovon a couple weeks ago. One of the points she made is that one of the reasons Crimea was so popular, apart from the fact that pretty broadly speaking, Russians feel like, you know, Crimea is part of Russia more than they would think that about all of Ukraine. It was pretty pain-free, too. There wasn't much resistance. There wasn't a lot of casualties. How are Russians, in your view, and your contacts,

kind of experiencing this moment? And are they worried about this possible war? Do they think it's not going to happen? What's the Russian version of the question of where the public mood is at? And what risks does that potentially pose to Putin or opportunities? You know, does he see this as a way of cementing his political standing even further? Or does he face the risk that this could all backfire on him? Well, first, I'd say I completely agree with Jono Namsova's analysis there. And I would only add that if you look at what's happened to the post-K Crimea, euphoria, as some sociologists were calling it in Russia, it's really collapsed.

In other words, this spike in rally around the flag, patriotic. sentiment that benefited Putin personally in terms of his own support rating in Russia has really cratered. And by 2022, you know, eight years later, there's not much left of this post-K Crimea patriotic boom for Putin. And I'm not clear that that's a card he could play twice anyway. And it's all the more complicated by the fact that Crimea was a unique situation. And there's no other place in Ukraine that Russia could take by military force so painlessly and bloodlessly. any other sort of military campaign, as we saw in 2014 and 15 in the Donbas, a region that is Russian speaking, historically very close to Russia, much more kind of oriented around the

shared Soviet past with Russia than other parts of Ukraine. Even that turned out to be a conflict that neither Russia nor its proxies could win, at least when it came to the hearts and minds of the local population. So I think, you know, expanding beyond that would really be a costly and difficult enterprise for Russia. Maybe not so much militarily. I think that in terms of just pure military power, there's not much doubt about Russia's ability to overwhelm Ukrainian forces pretty quickly.

But then what, right? It's like the Iraq problem for the United States. It wasn't very difficult for Iraq to overthrow Saddam or defeat him militarily. But how do you then manage the country, rebuild on your terms, install a government that you think is, you know, in accordance with your interests in the long term, that became a horrifically and disastrous enterprise.

And I think we could expect, you know, I don't know how analogous or not, but it would be certainly very difficult for Russia to install and maintain a pro-Kremlin regime in Ukraine, even after a, in quotes, successful military campaign. What Russians themselves think about that is interesting. And here you get a little bit of, this so-called wily man or wily woman that I write about in between two fires, the book that you mentioned I wrote about Putin's Russia, which gets at this idea of the way that double-think still is very much alive in Russia and the way people think about themselves and their relationship

with the state, the way that people are willing to be misled or mislead themselves about the nature of their own relationship with the state and how the state is both treating them and how they in turn treat the state. But here what that means is that if you look at survey data, an overwhelming majority of Russians who are asked believe that the party to blame here and this current standoff is the West. It's NATO.

You know, Russia is essentially either the victim or playing defense or, you know, merely trying to restore what is justly owed to it. And it's the West that has been serially and again right now. either treating Russia with less respect than it deserves or trying to, in other ways, undermine Russian interest. So you have Russian people very much in line with the overall narrative that Putin puts out and you hear on state television and from politicians at all levels in Russia. At the same time, there's very little, as kind of little appetite for their, in understanding or

or rather kind of seeing this crisis through the Western prism, there's as little interest in Russia fighting a military campaign or entering into a war to defend those interests. In other words, people may think that Russia is essentially in the right here, but very few people want to see Russia go to war to defend that cause, even that people may think is just. And that is among many reasons, a result of people feeling really, I think, alienated and disconnected from the state.

There isn't a lot of earnest, genuine kind of raw, raw buy-in to the Putin project at this point. I think there's a lot of people who tolerate the Putin system, who believe that an alternative to the Putin system would be worse. But it's hard to find people who are real, full-throated, enthusiastic supporters of the system now, which is a change. which is a change over the past five or 10 years. So that's a system that can't really tolerate losses, especially the human losses that would occur in any sort of large-scale military conflict. Russians coming back dead, you know, in bodybacks.

Russia went through extraordinary lengths to hide military losses, both in Ukraine in 2014 and 15 and in the year since in Syria. It's a really taboo subject in Russia. I suspect because the Kremlin knows that even as the public may have supported the idea of those campaigns in Ukraine and Syria, no one is so bought in to that worldview or to that system to want to see or to be willing to tolerate the cost of Russians dying in those wars. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, it's interesting to sum up our conversation. It's like, you know, this war would be a disaster, obviously, for Ukraine. It would, I think, be quite bad for Russia. And it would be quite bad. for the United States and the West. But the fact that a war would be bad for everybody hasn't always prevented wars. To just end here, I mean, you're in Kiev. Are your plans to stay? I mean, what would happen, you know, if I think some people don't know the life of a foreign correspondent.

I mean, what happens if there is a military conflict and you're, do you stick around with the U.S. embassy closed and evacuated, or do you plan to come back to the U.S.? Well, supposedly, right? It'll be an interesting day tomorrow. If some of these reports are you believed, Biden briefed, you know, other NATO allies that the potential day of invasion is Wednesday. I don't know when this podcast will air. You know, I don't know if listeners will be able to fact-check themselves,

whether or not that turned out to be true. But, you know, as here we are speaking, we're, you know, less than the way I didn't ask you to make a prediction, you know. Right. Predictions are dangerous. I will make a prediction that I could come to regret, both personally and professionally, in just a few hours. But I think that even in a completely centralized authoritarian system like Russia,

Putin would have to create some sort of narrative for why he would be launching, especially we're talking about a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, because he would have to explain it in some form to the Russian public. And also, I think, justify it even however transparently, flimsily on the world stage. There would be some effort to make this seem like Russia was either acting defensively or at least, you know, in some accordance with principles of just war, however, you know, silly or difficult that looked. And we're just not seeing any of those any of those preparations in place. In fact, the last two days, Monday and Tuesday of this week,

we've seen kind of the, you know, green shoots maybe of Putin and other top officials around him wanting to lower the temperature. Putin today, we're speaking on Tuesday. said that some Russian divisions and troop battalions were coming home, that were finishing exercises on the border. I mean, we'll see if that actually happens, the people who are watching things like open source satellites and tracking Russian troops on TikTok, which has become another hobby of journalists and analysts these past months, are not necessarily seeing that in action. But nonetheless, the rhetoric has shifted slightly, you know, one small degree.

But nonetheless, we're not seeing more of a ramp up toward invasion, but rather at least the temporary, I think, stepping away from it. So it would be hard to imagine, you know, Russian missiles flying through the sky tomorrow in Kiev. If that were to happen, you know, I'm here. My job is to cover that to the best of my ability. I'm not, you know, I'm not a, I don't think, sort of adrenaline junkie to the point of yourself. injury rights. I don't necessarily need to be like at the spot that missile where to land. But I'm certainly, you know, engaged and interested and sort of motivated to cover this story wherever it goes. So to the degree that that would be, you know, both safe and feasible,

that's what I'm here to do. Great. Well, we're so glad you could join us from there and share this perspective. And, you know, we'll see what happens, but stay safe and well. And we're hopeful that the same can be true for the people of Ukraine there. Thanks so much. Very glad to talk. When we come back, we will talk about the far-right movement in Canada that is getting a lot of support in the United States,

including talking to a leading expert on the radicalization and the Canadian far-right. So now we will turn our attention back to our neighbor to the North, Canada, where a group of truckers continues to wreak havoc across the country. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday that he's invoking something called the Emergencies Act, which gives the Canadian government the authority to take steps to, quote, restore order amid the blockades by truckers and others,

who continue to protest COVID-19 restrictions and all manner of far-right causes. Trudeau, sounding a tougher note, said these blockades are illegal, and if you are still participating, the time to go home is now. He did make clear that this emergency order, which gives the government pretty extraordinary powers, will be time-limited and geographically targeted to try to reassure people. This isn't some Canadian power grab up there. But we have started to see some of these protesters arrested and some of this dispersed.

Just give you a flavor of the mood up north, Dian Deans, the chair of Ottawa's police board, said the protests have turned into a, quote, nationwide insurrection. And I have to add, I've heard from many people up north, including in Ottawa, saying that it was basically terrorizing to have horns honking all night. People kept up that this was not in any way like a cookout, as the truckers were sometimes trying to portray it, but really, really disruptive and damaging to people's lives. The Ambassador Bridge, which ties Windsor-on-Terror to Detroit, and is a key note of trade between the United States and Canada,

particularly for the auto industry, was blockaded for almost a week, but it was reopened on Sunday, raising hope that industries could come back to life after a near standstill. But the protests grind on into their third week, and there's no sign of a lack of fervor among the truckers who found many fellow travelers in the American right wing, including white wing media outlets that are eating the protest up,

Tucker Carlson in a 10-minute monologue called the protest, quote, the single most successful human rights protest in a generation. I'm very pleased to be joined by Amarnath Amarasingham, who is a professor at Queens University in Ontario, Canada, and a researcher of radicalization and extremism. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, a big fan of the podcast. That's great.

I'm so glad that we can get some Canada coverage here. I want to start with a basic question. Who are these truckers? What are these protests? You've written and talked extensively about both the populism of the movement itself, but also some of the transnational elements. We obviously see a lot of U.S. support from our right-wing crowd or far-right crowd. how would you describe to a global non-Canadian audience who these people are that have

shown such havoc in Ottawa and at the border? Yeah. So, I mean, I think one thing to understand more broadly is, you know, Canada is coming out of its fourth lockdown at the moment. We have masks mandates still. We have to show vaccine passports when we go to restaurants. The lockdown has had a massive impact on small businesses, on children who've been kept out of school for a long time. And so there's this kind of broad grievance that has popped up over the last

two years or so, which is now morphed into a kind of populist movement, anti-government movement, and so on. And I think part of the organizers, the organizing people who have been behind this convoy, we've known for a long time, right? So they initially tried to organize an earlier convoy in 2019 called United Re-Role, which didn't really go anywhere. They've been part of have other militia movements. They've been part of other conspiratorial movements. They have a history of white nationalism, anti-Semitic views. One of them went on a kind of Holocaust denial tour across Canada a while back. And so the organizers are one part of the conversation. They're quite seedy characters. They're the driving force behind some of this mobilization.

But I think to dismiss... And are they truckers? I mean, like a simple question, I guess, Because you seem to be describing, you know, really political actors more than just like a bunch of angry truckers. Yeah, some of them are definitely truckers, but others are kind of identified broadly in terms of the working class in Canada, particularly the West Coast of Canada, who've been involved in a lot of activism that is not only anti-Trudeau, but generally around this sense that Ottawa doesn't care about the West Coast, Ottawa doesn't care about us. all these elites in the capital don't care about the west coast etc so that that kind of popular sentiment is very old in canada and it's very vibrant it's it's now all kind of grouped together with this anti-lockdown sentiment which is really brought all of this into the mainstream right so they've they've gathered more money than ever before they've gotten a lot of people out of their seats in the dead of Canadian winter which in itself is a achievement and and so there is a

there is a kind of mass mobilization that they've been able to accomplish, which we haven't necessarily seen a lot of before. I mean, Canadian politics is generally pretty boring. And to see, you know, tens of thousands of people drive across Canada and kind of mobilized this much has been something to watch in and of itself. So now I want to kind of break this into pieces. The Canadian piece, the kind of broader political piece and then the global piece. So just starting at the Canadian kind of far right, and you know, you've researched radicalization and extremism. What is the nature of that community? I mean, how big is it? How mobilizes it? How organized is it? What do you guys deal with north of the border in terms of a far right extremist movement

that may be reaching some new level of prominence. Yeah, I mean, compared to the U.S., it's obviously much smaller, much less noisy, much less organized. We do have groups like the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, Adam Woffin Division, the base, and a lot of different accelerationsist groups. But they're generally fairly fringe, don't have really kind of, they haven't mobilized to the same extent that we've seen in the U.S. where there's literal plots to kidnap the governor and governor of Michigan and plots to blow up community centers and things like that.

We've seen some violence here, but it's generally been less popular, has less of a following. I think again with the COVID pandemic, it was a real shift and a real boon to a lot of these movements because they all of a sudden found themselves with a common cause, right? the anti-government movement, the hardcore far-right movements, the general kind of people with general anxiety around COVID and what the vaccines might mean, Q&ON supporters, which has been a Canadian import from the United States,

all kind of found themselves in the same room together, arguing against the same thing, rallying around the same thing. And so COVID, and we saw this, even if you look at the online data, a kind of drastic spike around March 2020, where COVID conspiracy theories went through the roof. And following along with the rise of COVID conspiracy theories, all of these movements also blew up, right? And because they were all, if you were just a fringe white nationalist,

and now all of a sudden, you're also talking about COVID conspiracy theories, you attract a lot more following. So they kind of rode the wave of COVID conspiracy into, I wouldn't say mainstream, but into a bit more popularity than, they had before. But it's definitely has a presence here. It's organized.

We've listed as terrorist entities, several far-right groups, including the proud boys. Yeah. And so it's definitely here, but it's not to the same size or intensity, I would say, as in the U.S. And I want to come back to the kind of the future of Canadian politics. But first, you kind of mentioned this spike on Andy Vax, and you mentioned the import of Q&N. and I've seen in some of the research, including your own, that it feels like there's, you know,

financial support for this movement from the U.S. and other places. Clearly there's online support and kind of social media amplification. What is your sense of how much of the energy behind this financing or social media kind of turbocharging is coming from outside of Canada? How much is this a foreign force coming into Canada versus? the kind of indigenous movement you described. Yeah, I mean, that's been a vibrant debate here for a few days now. And I think there's a few different pieces to this.

One is the kind of mainstream American media approach, right? When BJ Dichter, who's one of the organizers of the convoy, went on Tucker Carlson's show, he was noticeably giddy with excitement. He loved the fact that Tucker Carlson was interviewing him. And I remember texting a friend of mine saying, you know, this is going to be a game changer. Like these people who are nobody's, basically, are now going to be minor celebrities.

They're going to be influencers overnight, thanks to this Fox News attention. I know Media Matters did a report recently saying Fox devoted something like nine hours of coverage to the Canadian convoy over the last couple of weeks. And so, of course, Tucker Carlson doesn't care about Canadian truckers. He finds in that message, something that's feeding into his broader kind of anti, you know, populist rhetoric that he's been

involved with, right? So I think American media is always going to see the trucker convoy through the lens of its own culture wars and through its own politics. It's not, it's not something about Canada specifically. And so that support has been major, which I think is closely related to the second one, which is the fundraising component. And so when GoFundMe, when they set up the GoFundMe campaign, it attracted close to $10 million, which was then taken down. They moved to GiveSEN Go, which has now become a kind of right-wing platform in itself, much like Gab and Parlor were for fundraising.

And even there, over a couple of days, they were able to raise very quickly $8 or $9 million, right? And so a lot of that funding, which was leaked a couple days ago, about 92,000 donations, about 56% of them came from the U.S. And so there is a kind of important foreign component to this in terms of media attention, in terms of ramping up the kind of culture war polarization narrative, and also with respect to fundraising. The third thing, which I'll say,

which I think is in its infancy in terms of reporting, but it's also kind of an important element of this, is how much of the online activity isn't organic, right? There's been some reporting of hacked accounts on Facebook, content farms out of Vietnam and Bangladesh and Romania, which have been pushing a lot of this trucker narrative kind of artificial amplification of some of these accounts. And so I think all three of those are important elements of this kind of foreign interference or influence that we're seeing. Yeah, no, I mean, you're kind of between Tucker Carlson and the online farms and the donations, it's kind of in miniature study. of the global far right today. You had an interesting piece in the global mill about what is the future impact on Canadian

politics and will this movement, this freedom convoy, kind of play the role that the Tea Party did in the United States in the sense that Tea Party started as this kind of populist movement that took over really the Republican Party. I mean, by 2011, that's what the Republican Party was. The Canadian conservatives have not been, you know, as crazy. in my, you know, do use my words as a Republican Party or as extreme or as radical in their leadership, although I've found much to criticize about them in recent years. What do you think the potential is for this to become the mainstream of the Canadian right? Do you see this

as something that is still a fringe movement or do you see this evolving? What would it be going to be the factors, I guess, that could determine whether this kind of becomes the Canadian conservative movement or whether it kind of becomes a bunch of crazy people that are part of this global far-right vanguard. Yeah, I mean, I don't think this has any potential to become that mainstream. I mean, we have to keep in mind that about, you know, 90% of Canadians are double triple-vaxed almost. And so there's no real resonance for this becoming a majority kind of movement.

But having said that, I think, and I should also say are right, the rightest parties in Canada, the conservative party of Canada and the People's Party of Canada are also split, right? And so they themselves are kind of wrestling for this kind of conservative base and so on. So which I think is just going to keep the liberals in power definitely as the right gets divided. But what I think so to answer your question, I don't think there's any potential of this becoming some sort of mainstream movement. However, I think the intensity of this protest, the intensity of this moment for them, the celebrities that have been made of these people, the money that they've shown that they can raise very quickly, they've shown that they can mobilize very quickly. I don't think all of that ends as the trucks leave, right?

I think that kind of movement will have a voice and we'll have momentum going forward. What form that takes, whether it becomes organizational, whether it becomes kind of attached to a kind of political party of some kind, whether they run candidates like the Tea Party did, it remains to be seen, but I think this doesn't simply end with the Trump. trucks going home. I think there's too much energy, too much momentum, too much kind of reputational and reputations and credibility now linked in with this that it will have a lasting impact

in some way. So it seems like, you know, Prime Minister Joe has been trying to find the right formula to deal with this, I think criticized for being, you know, too passive for a time. And now he's invoked the Emergencies Act to give greater authority to kind of break up these protests. You're starting to see police arrest people. You know, what do you make of the Canadian government response to date? How important is this invocation of the Emergencies Act? And I guess most importantly, though, what would you be advising political leaders to do about

this, particularly that you're a prime minister? I mean, this was difficult from the very beginning. I mean, they, I kind of knew, much like after January 6th, what we, you know, everyone was like, we never saw this coming, right? And I knew that the same talking points were going to be again thrown about, oh, we never saw this coming. They couldn't have been more open about what they were going to do, right? On Telegram, on their kind of alternative streaming platforms or live streams on Facebook,

they were planning this well, you know, from early January onwards. But I think what happened from a policing perspective is that Ottawa police in particular saw this as our January 6th moment. And so they, I know, you know, I have friends who are members of parliament who were basically told to kind of stay indoors. I think they tried to protect the parliament buildings itself. And in the process, forgot about the streets and let the streets kind of just kind of carry on. And so what these these trucks basically just parked in the downtown core of Ottawa, started having cookouts and started having dance parties. You know, one in four trucks, there were some reporting that said one in four trucks have

children sleeping in them. And so it became a kind of long-term occupation, which immediately led to different levels of government in Canada passing the buck, right? So the municipal government, which is at the mayoral level, didn't want anything to do with this. They kept saying, we need the federal government, we need the federal government. Doug Ford, who's the premier of Ontario, didn't want to deal with it. because it's an election season and he's going up for re-election in June.

Trudeau didn't want to deal with it because they were carrying signs that said hanged Trudeau. And so it's very hard to kind of go have a rational conversation with people who are calling for your head. And so it just kind of sat there and nothing happened politically for a long time and they just became kind of baked into the city. So but from a policing perspective, other cities learned a lot from, I don't want to say the failure of Ottawa police, but It's more the kind of blind, how they were blindsided. So Toronto, for example, we didn't have a similar occupation here because the Toronto police basically learned from what happened in Ottawa and said, you're welcome to protest here on foot,

but we're not going to allow trucks in the neighborhood, right? In the downtown court, the Toronto downtown has about 10 or 12 hospitals that are massively important for all of Canada because there's kind of very rare medical issues that are treated in Toronto that aren't treated anywhere else. and so we can't just have you park and stay here forever and have cookouts. Yeah. So all of that, I think, it happened with the policing situation.

The Emergencies Act, I think, had a lot to do with what happened in Alberta yesterday. So the Alberta protest, which is at the Coots border, which is right across from Montana, basically had 13 arrests yesterday. They searched three trucks and found kind of a cache of weapons. And so eventually, I think some of the organizers of the protests that, oh, I think we've been co-opted. I think part of our movement has been co-opted by extremists and we're planning on leaving. And so they're planning on leaving today. But that kind of, what happened in Ottawa shifted, I think, some of the fears that were going on in Ottawa to kind of take a much, much stronger approach,

which was also contributed to by what happened at the Windsor Detroit border, which was a major, major, major problem. Because about several hundred billion dollars of goods and trade go through that Windsor border every day. And they just wouldn't leave, right? And I think probably some angry calls came from the governor of Michigan to Canada saying, you better get this out of the way. So eventually that also was met with the more fierce response. I think there was like 46 arrests and about 40 vehicles were towed away.

The mayor estimated that there's about a $3 billion cost to the city just from that small block, just from that blockade over a couple of days. So all of that, I think, came to a head to kind of force a federal response. So just sort of kind of wrap this up in context. I mean, how big an event is this in Canadian history? And what do you think the lessons are that should be taken away about, is there something broken that needs to be fixed here in the society? Is this the inevitable fate of democracies at a time of a kind of radicalizing global far right? You know, how should we see this in the broader sweep of what's happening in Canada and how should we, how should people, you know, think about the steps that are necessary to prevent these. kinds of things from happening again. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think there is a lesson

there is a lesson here in the sense that we know that these kind of major crises are always followed by misinformation, by conspiracy theories, by a collapse in trust in institutions like media, academia, science, medicine, et cetera. And so that's kind of the large, you know, second and third order consequences of COVID in a sense. Like we've become, we've become conspiratorial in our thinking. And I think that has as a long-term impact. We know, you know, we know that as people become more conspiratorial, they vote less, they donate money less, they volunteer less, they tend not to vaccinate their kids. And so there's all kinds of consequences for post-fact thinking, which I think is

now seeping into Canada much more, you know, much more strongly thanks to kind of COVID and the response to it. How that kind of plays out over the long term will be the question. I think the kind of takeaway, you know, I think there's a, there's, there's, there's a conversation in the Canadian government about a decade ago, which said, you know, are we just one crisis away from our social fabric being torn apart? And everyone at that time said, no, no, you know, we're pretty, we're pretty good here. We're not, we're not the United States, you know, we'll be fine. But I think what COVID taught us is that's not true, right?

I think we handled it horribly. I think everything, we managed to politicize everything from masks onwards. Yeah, we kind of turned everything into an ideological conflict, turned everything into us versus them and good versus evil. And that happened very quickly. It didn't take very long from the first instances of a COVID case to kind of just turning on each other. And so if that's how we responded to a global crisis, what happens next when there's a climate

change crisis or an inevitable next pandemic and so on. And so I think, you know, this idea that like in the movie Armageddon, we would just all rally together against the common enemy just didn't happen. And so that that worries me a bit that we're so quick to polarize and so quick to turn against each other when the opposite should be the case. But we'll, I mean, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. Well, warnings to heed in Canada and the U.S. and everywhere else.

Thanks so much for joining us. Where can people kind of follow your work? I mean, most of what I write, I put on Twitter. So my Twitter account is at Amar Amrissingham. So anything academic that comes out usually is posted on there anyway. And so that's probably the best point of contact. Great. Well, it's been fascinating to kind of follow your research because it both illuminates this happening Canada, but also I think it's a part of this global issue of extremeism and radicalization we're dealing with. So thanks so much for joining. And hopefully, you know, hope that the trucks go home and something. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great. Thanks so much to Amarnath Armarossingham. Thanks also to Joshua Yaffa. Hope he stays safe in Kiev.

Thanks to you for listening. And we will see you all next week. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford,

who film and share our episodes as videos. each week.