School of War - Ep 128: Stephen Kotkin on Russia and Ukraine (War in Ukraine #1)

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Stephen Kotkin, Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and contributor to War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, joins the show to talk about the war in Ukraine and what the endgame might look like. ▪️ Times      •      02:24 Introduction      •      05:09 Four victories     •      11:48 “Winning only on Twitter”     •      22:36 10/7 and Ukraine     •      28:27 Regime change in Russia       •      37:03 Keeping allies       •      45:24 Renting land armies         •      55:01 “European culturally but not Western”     Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack Follow the link to buy the book - War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World

Today's discussion about Russia in the war in Ukraine with the great Stephen Kotkin is the first installment in a miniseries we're doing on the war in Ukraine this summer. We've got a fantastic lineup of guests. As with our first mini series, which ran last year focused on the volume New Makers of Modern Strategy, we have again cheated and just invited a bunch of folks who contributed to Hal Brand's new volume focused on this war, which has just come out this year. War in Ukraine, conflict strategy, and the return of a fractured world. By the way, it's not clear to me that Hal Brands ever actually sleeps. If anyone has ever witnessed him doing so, I invite you to reach out. With Kotkin today, we'll cover how Russia's character and history influence its goals and conduct in Ukraine.

We'll talk about potential resolutions to the war. And then in subsequent episodes, we'll continue to discuss the effect of nuclear weapons on the war, conventional battlefield developments and innovations, and much more. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

We'll fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Stephen Kotkin, who is the Klein Hines Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's also a senior

fellow at Stanford's Freedman Spokely Institute for International Studies. He's the Berkland Professor in History and International Affairs Emeritus at Princeton. He's the author of many, many articles and books. He is Stalin's biographer, which is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand, not just Stalin. but Russia and I'd argue the 20th century, we all eagerly await its conclusion. And most relevantly for our discussion today, he is a contributor to war in Ukraine, conflict strategy and the return of a fractured world, which is a book that this will be the first episode in a series we are doing this summer with different contributors to the volume. So Stephen, thank you

so much for joining the show. Thank you for the honor of the invitation. Well, look, I also, I have to make a confession, which is even though I never attended Princeton University, I did have the pleasure once of being taught by you. When I was an undergraduate, my best friend was an undergraduate at Columbia, and his girlfriend went to Princeton. And I got into the rhythm of driving from Maryland where I was in college, and I would get a parking pass from the girlfriend and stash my car at Princeton before I'd take the train in for misbehavior in Manhattan. And one time for reasons that have been lost to me in the midst of time, both my friend and I were at Princeton with the girlfriend at loose ends and didn't know what to do, and she was in your class. And I actually remember,

I remember parts of your lecture that day. This is 20 plus years ago now, 25 years ago, I actually think, where I was sitting there in the back of a relatively small room in Princeton. I remember you saying about pre-revolutionary Russia. You had this line that you could wander all day. I'm not going to do justice to what your actual phrasing was, but you could wander all day through the Russian countryside, and the only time you would see the color red would be if you saw your own blood. And that has stuck with me all this time. So it's a pleasure to finally get to talk to you. Aaron, it just goes to show there's just, there's not a lot to do in Princeton, New Jersey, that you and at that age are showing up at lectures for a class you're not enrolled in at a

university you're not enrolled in. Yeah. But yeah, those were great. I was there 33 years of Princeton, a life of Jesus, we call it. And I left just before I was crucified. Well, I'm glad you got out, better than the other guy in improvement. Well, look, let's get to your chapter in the brands volume. And I actually, I have to say, and this is not, this is meant to be high praise, not fame praise, but I feel like I have a fresh perspective on the war, having read it, which is not, I mean, that's, you know, the war's been underway for for over two. years now. So it's hard to write something, I think, that generates that. So it's kind of a humdinger of an essay, and it doesn't, you don't fit neatly, I think, into any box of analysts on the war. You, you, you hold positions that that cut across boxes. And I want to get into that. And the question that I want is ultimately to get to, of course, is the sort of version of the David Petraeus question during the invasion

of Iraq, which is tell me how this ends, which is in a way what your chapter is about. You open by describing 2022 as a year of four victories. Why don't we start there and start with your periodization of the war so far? What were the four victories and what should we reflect on about what has gone well as a consequence of the war? You know and your listeners know that war is very surprising. It all makes sense retrospectively. It's prospectively that it's really hard. So when the war broke out, We saw several things. First, Ukraine succeeded in defending its sovereignty. Russia didn't capture the capital, Kiev. So Ukraine won a big victory, defending its sovereignty. The second big victory that we saw was that the West, including NATO, the West in the broad nine geographical sets of a group of countries,

united in their values and their institutions, which would include the first island chain, as we call it in East Asia, which would include Israel. We saw the West consolidated, revived. After all the talk about NATO being brain dead and the West being decadent, it turned out none of that was true. The West is still for real, still critical. And the Transatlantic Alliance still critical. That's the second big victory. The third big victory is what I call the strategic humiliation of Russia. Wasn't a strategic defeat. It's way premature to use that kind of language.

But nonetheless, Russia was humiliated. Biggest army in Europe against a much smaller country that was given up for dead even before the war started. And it turned out that Russia was a mess, incompetent, corrupt, a very poorly organized war plan. as well as the bravery and ingenuity that we saw on the Ukrainian side, delivering their strategic humiliation. And then the fourth one, which potentially was even the most consequential, as consequential as these first three are, the fourth one was the consolidation of a European and American position on China. China had been able to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe, on China policy. Europe always prefers trade, detests conflict, likes to try to separate itself

strategically from the United States sometimes. And so the wedge between Europe and the U.S. on China policy was destroyed when China backed Russia first rhetorically and more and more with the dual-use goods that are critical to Russia's war effort, which drove the Europeans, not completely, but considerably, back into the arms of the Americans, on China policy. The wedge that China had benefited from between the transatlantic partners was destroyed by China's behavior. So if you look at those four big victories, as I call them, Ukraine defense of its sovereignty, revitalization of the West, strategic humiliation of the West, strategic humiliation for Russia and consolidation of a position on China between the U.S. and its

partners, including, again, the East Asian partners, those are gigantic victories. And I did not foresee, and I don't know anybody else I've ever talked to who foresaw those four big victories from those first few months. We were just a couple of months into the war when we had achieved all this. Again, thanks to the Ukrainians' courage and ingenuity on the battlefield, as well as some of our intelligence help and some of the weapons we began to send. But of course, at the beginning, the Ukrainians had very, very few Western weapons. And so thinking about that kind of situation as a strategist, Aaron, you'd say, those victories

are so big, I'd want to take them off the table. I'd want to consolidate them. I wouldn't want to keep them at risk. I'd want to figure out how to remove them and pocket them and say, okay, let's keep them as is. Why would we continue to risk those four big victories? Because every one of them, including even Ukraine's sovereignty, the first one, could be reversed in the fullness of time. And so I thought to myself, it would be really smart to begin to think about how to consolidate

those four victories. Stop gambling with them. Take them off the table. But of course, that's not what we did. Right. That fall, the fall of 2022, I have a vivid memory of attending the Halifax Security Forum, which is in November every year, and being kind of appalled at the sentiment of triumphalism. I mean, it's reasonable. I mean, things had gone sort of surprisingly well, as just outlined. So it's reasonable to be pleased with that. But there was this general sense of foot at the conference speaker after speaker panel after panel that Vladimir Putin had failed to take Kiv. And so basically everything we had all believed in all along, the whole the whole catechism of Western liberalism was winning and going to win. Putin had gotten himself into a quagmire,

etc, etc., etc. The only person at the conference I remember actually taking a different tack was Walter to Russell Mead, who I'm a great admirer of, who at a breakfast session just laid in, laid into the room and pointed out the various ways in which, in fact, Westernism and democracies had some pretty significant liabilities here. And we were engaged in some giant exercises in question begging and we were whistling past various graveyards, much to our peril. And of course, moving to 2023, that seems to be what happened. Talk about the strategic logic. of the counteroffensive that, you know, from where I said, it sort of seems like the United States,

I know if it's fair to say the United States pushed it on Ukraine, but the United States certainly wanted it to happen. The Ukrainians seemed to want it to happen, and it didn't get very far. You cite John Mearsheimer in the chapter, in a great phrase, is quote-unquote, typically brutal assessment of the failures of this counteroffensive. I'm not a huge fan of Mearsheimer.

I wrote it some length last year in Engelsberg ideas about why not, But I read that piece that you cite in your chapter and it's irrefutable, essentially. I mean, it's a very good breakdown of why this was almost destined to fail. Can you kind of walk us through your view? Yes, I wasn't at that Halifax conference that you attended. But already before that Halifax conference, I was arguing in public in every venue I could access that Ukraine was winning the war only on Twitter, not on the battlefield. And I've held to that line for the two years plus. A couple of things happened. First, there was the Ukrainian success in Harkev Oblast, or Harkeef Province, which borders on Russia,

where Ukrainians evicted the Russian presence, pushed them back across the original 1991 border there. Now Harkev is under pressure again in the news as we're speaking, you and I. And what happened in that fall 2020 offensive fooled everybody. So the Ukrainians went in against the Russian riot police for the most part, guys with pistols and trunches, so-called Roskwardia, Russian National Guard, a riot police. And it was billed in the information war as a combined arms operation offensive, where the Ukrainians were able to mount this very complicated military. operation that really only the U.S. military can successfully implement at this point, which never

happened in reality. What happened was the eviction of the riot police who were already leaving the province to go back to Russia because they couldn't defend it. There were tanks that had been disabled and were in the workshops at Harkeef, Russian tanks, and the Ukrainians rolled them out of the workshops into the street and then Instagram them as tanks. captured on the battlefield. And they Instagram, the entire operation, and people with big audiences like Lawrence Friedman and others, tweeted about this massively successful, offensive, combined arms operation. Combined arms, of course, as your listeners, now means air war, artillery, tanks, infantry, to take and hold that territory. None of that happened. But it led to the

illusion that Ukraine could win this on the battlefield, that this was a war in which they could retake all of their 1991 borders back from Russia. Crimea, eastern Ukraine, known as the Donbos, because of this success, but it was misportrayed. It was a piece of information war. Ukrainians were unbelievably successful at information war, and this was maybe the peak of that. So that led to the notion that they could win this militarily. The Ukrainians then took a little bit more territory in the south, pushing the Russians across the Denepro River. The Russians got out all of their troops in the south, across the Denepro,

and all of their heavy weapons. So it was an extremely well-organized, well-carried out Russian retreat. They retreated behind the river, and they proceeded to build these defense lines, these multi- echelon, three- echelon defense lines, straight out of the playbook for the Korsk, July, 1943 battle between the Vermacht and the Soviet Army, the Red Army, multi-escaloned, three-deep, concrete emplacements,

using Chinese excavators. And so the illusion that the Ukrainians could win on the battlefield didn't correspond to reality, but shaped policy not just with Ukraine internally, but with all the supporters outside Ukraine, including those people, you heard the predominant voice in Halifax and everywhere else. And then there was an argument that if we armed Ukraine with our sophisticated weapons, including Western tanks and armored personnel carriers, that they could pull this off. They could conduct a combined arms operation in the South, the counteroffensive of 2023, and clear the Russians out.

Despite the fact that we could see from open source satellites, just how dug in the Russians were, and how successful that Russian retreat was to a more in the South, to a more defensible line, and how much of information war nonsense, the Harkeith province, the victory of Ukraine, Ukraine was. So I was never a partisan of the counteroffensive. I understood the logic behind it. I heard the arguments for it. But in my view, if the Ukrainians had advanced on the 600-mile front and retaken the territory in sort of Hail Mary fashion, they would have obtained a 1200-mile front, which would have been the 1991 border with Russia. Russia is not defeated. just because you take territory back. All wars of maneuver when somebody attacks become wars of

attrition within a few months. And wars of attrition are about your capacity to fight and your will to fight. So if you still have the arms, you still have the soldiers, right? You got the artillery, their munitions, the missiles, the anti-aircraft, the helicopters, the attack helicopters. And you got the troops and you're replacing your casualties, as the Russians have been, and Putin wants to continue to fight, it doesn't matter if you take territory from him. It doesn't prevent him from continuing the fight. The idea that the counteroffensive would somehow collapse the Russian war effort in a cascade,

right? Collapse the Russian battlefield, maybe. They would run. They would flee like happened in Harkeef, province with the riot police, from these triple echelon, deeply dug in defenses with all of these weapons that they had in surplus, and that they would just give up. I didn't understand the logic of that. And so my view was that the Russians would give us a Tet offensive.

In other words, I warned in real time about how the Ukrainian counteroffensive, if it was not successful, and that was a possibility. war is always like that. I said, for those who were proponents, I said, if it's not successful, what's the next step? Ukraine is not dug in. Russia still has capabilities. It's replacing one-to-one effectively. It's high casualties with new recruits. And if Ukraine is not dug in, what if Russia moves forward on the battlefield, 25 miles or 15 miles, no great success, but some success, wouldn't not have the effect of the TED Offensive in 1968 when everybody dismissed the South Vietnamese

and North Vietnamese support as not capable of an offensive. And then during the TED holidays in the winter of 68, they mounted the offensive, which was no great success. In fact, it was a failure on the battlefield, but was a political success just because they could pull it all. And our friend, Uncle Walter, Walter Cronkent, and CBS, said this war is not winnable anymore. And Lyndon Johnson announced that he wouldn't run for re-elects. And I said, we're setting ourselves up for a TED offensive. And lo and behold,

unfortunately, that's the situation we're in right now. So we were at a high watermark for Ukraine. General Millie, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in October 2020, privately got this right. It was a big moment for us to cash in those four victories that I lose. Oucidated at the beginning, at your prompt. Threatening the counteroffensive would have been more efficacious than conducting it. Of course, this is obvious in hindsight, now that it's failed, but I don't think it was only in hindsight, because Millie got this right, as I said in real time. So therefore, we had the opportunity to obtain an armistice with Russia, where the terms

would have been favorable to Ukraine in the following sense. Putin is demanding an armistice where Ukraine recognizes Russian annexations, where Ukraine gets limits on the size of the army. It can have, you know, Versailles treaty style. And where Ukraine renounces intert treaty, its right to join international organizations, such as NATO, should it be invited to join. So that was Putin's version of an armistice. The Ukrainian option there was no recognition of Russian and Russian. annexations, whether you could evict them or not, you didn't concede that that was still your territory, even if it was an occupation. No limitations on your armed forces. And no signing away

your sovereignty of joining international organizations. All of that, in my view, was obtainable because of the favorable position of Ukraine in fall 2022 when you were at that Halifax Conference. and we might have gotten those concessions, an end to the fighting, not a peace treaty, but an end to the fighting, a chance to rebuild Ukraine to bring its exiles and refugees back to start a potential EU-European accession process, to talk about a security guarantee without signing off on the possibility that one day Ukraine could get that territory back should things change. and they do change over time, as we saw in the case of East Germany. So this was more of a Korean peninsula suggestion,

but the Ukrainian president was against such an option. Ukrainian public opinion was against it because the president hadn't prepared them for. And the U.S. administration and the Europeans supporting Ukraine were under the belief that Ukraine could win this, so why not try? Unfortunately, here we are now. So I want to get to your thoughts on how to drive towards a more favorable armistice, which you discussed in the chapter. But just before we do, there's a third marker, a third dividing point in your periodization,

which is Hamas' attack on Israel on the 7th of October, which brings us into the current moment that we are in on top of everything else you just outlined. What is it about what happened in October that fundamentally changed? changes, at least the context of the war in Ukraine. Yeah, you're right, Aaron. So people maybe have heard me say this before that I love economics. They have very powerful models.

The models explain everything. But there's a little fine print. And the fine print says all other factors held constant comma, and then you're off with the model with its explanatory power. Well, as you know, in war in geopolitics, All other factors can never be held constant. Something is going to happen. Something is going to change.

I predicted at the beginning of the war that something big would happen in the world. I didn't know what would happen, where it would happen, when it would happen. I mentioned Iran and the Middle East. I mentioned North Korea, you know, all the obvious things, but I admitted that it might be something unobvious, something I didn't foresee and didn't know about. And I had to admit for quite a long time that I was wrong. Something did not happen around the Ukraine war for quite a long time until, of course, October 7th, 2023, when Hamas rampaged across the Gaza border into Israel.

And that definitely changed the context for Ukraine in significant ways. And so what I was saying, something would happen. It did happen. and now we're not in the same conjuncture. The Biden administration position on Ukraine has sometimes been misunderstood, but it's as follows. Deny Russia a victory over Ukraine, but prevent a NATO-Russia direct confrontation or direct war over Ukraine.

In other words, no Russian victory, but no wider war. I support that policy of no wider war. I don't think we should be taking risks, which could likely lead to a much wider war, including direct NATO-Russia confrontation. There are nuclear weapons involved and opportunity costs and trade-offs and all the things that you understand it. The problem with that policy is, well, okay, no Russian victory, no wider war, but what about Ukraine? What's the end game there? What's the outcome that we would prefer? is it no Russian victory and no wider war forever until end times or is there something better?

Now if you look at the Middle East, we have a very similar policy. We support Israel, but at the same time we don't want a wider war there in the region. We don't want the whole region to blow up. And I can say that that's a supportable policy. Whatever you think about the way we're supporting Israel, whatever you think about how Israel is fighting, whatever you think about Hamas and its genocidal aims, right in its charter, I don't think that a wider war in the Middle East is in U.S. interests.

And so here we are. Now we've got two situations where we're trying to prevent a wider war, and yet they feed into each other, and of course we have the China story, the South China Sea, and Taiwan. So if you look at all three of these pieces together, Aaron, the U.S.-led international order is vulnerable in three places. This was true for 30 years,

and anybody could have looked on a map and seen this. Crimea, Ukraine, which was not inside the Western protective envelope, and borders Russia, revisionist power. Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and Iran's proxies as well. And then South China Sea Taiwan. So this was not a big shocker in many ways. However, here we are, and we're concerned about how they play in with each other. So how will the Middle East affect Ukraine and vice versa? What happens if we go from hybrid war to direct war, kinetic war in the China theater as well? So all this is extremely concerning, and it makes even more important to get clarity on your question. you cited General Petraeus on your question of, tell me how this ends.

Well, then let's get right to that. So you have a proposal in the chapter that illustrates what I said at the outset of our conversation that you don't really fit into a neat box here or a camp of commentators on the war. You've said several times here in our conversation, you argue in the chapter that an agreement, an armist disagreement of some sort is how this needs to end. That is a position held by many. A lot of the people who hold that position tend to be people who favor restraint and caution more generally. In their view of foreign affairs and this war specifically, they're very concerned about

escalation and the threat of escalation. I'm not saying you're not concerned about escalation. We all are, but they would prioritize that concern over other things. But your plan, your proposal to drive towards a more favorable kind of armistice for Ukraine at the expense of Russia is to quote unquote open, I want to make sure I get the words exactly right, open a more decisive political front. Yes. Which is to say to make Putin and the Putin regime fear for its existence. That is to say the regime's existence. Now that, of course, is potentially quite escalatory. It's an extremely aggressive step. And to the extent that it's held by a camp of people is held by a camp of people who tend to find the people who are worried about escalation

to be misprioritizing the things themselves. So you hold both views. Walk us through why this is the Kotkin plan. Yeah, so I don't claim to be, have some answer that nobody's ever thought of before. And if they had only listened to me, well, the world would be hunky-dory, scooby-doo. Right? I don't claim anything like that. But I wonder, I wonder why it is that we get accused every single minute in Russian propaganda of promoting regime change in Russia, of trying to undermine Russia, of trying to dismember Russia, of trying to crush Russia like the Soviet Union. Why we get accused of that relentlessly on the Russian side? And our answer to those accusations, Aaron, is we're not doing that. And so here we are accused of the crime. And our answer is,

we won't go near that. And I said to myself, that's interesting. Why not? Now, a lot of people argue that it's risky. It's escalatory. And I've admitted, both in print and now with you, that I too am concerned about escalation. And I think anybody who sits in the situation room and is mulling over the war plan with Russia. I've never seen the war plan. I don't have security clearance. But I can deduce what the war plan. is. Russia attacks us. We're winning. They nuke us. We nuke them. Russia attacks us. They're winning. We nuke them. They nuke us. They nuke us. They nuke us. We nuke us. We nuke us. We nuke them. If you're in the situation, Aaron, that's not a conversation you want to have. That's a conversation not only on behalf of the American people. That's a conversation on behalf of one 1.4 billion people in India and hundreds of millions of people, Mexico and Indonesia. And so the president of the United States, unelected by all of those people, is now going to make a decision of that level consequence for the planet for global humanity.

I don't think we want to be in a situation where that's a conversation and you have to make a decision like that. So I get the escalatory argument. Don't get, don't get me wrong. You write about that. I am not someone who thinks you just bang around and everything is going to be great. There's risk, and that risk is serious risk. Frank Gavin has a brilliant chapter in the book, the War and Ukraine book edited by Hal Brands, on this very point. And of course, Frank is perhaps the global expert on this question, so not surprising. And I've learned a lot from Frank.

But here's the deal. We're incurring escalatory risk on the military battlefield right now. At first we said we wouldn't send stuff that was offensive, only defensive, and then we changed our money. And we started to send offensive weapons. At first, it was javelins and stingers, the shoulder-fired stuff. Eventually, it was tanks and some aircraft that are finally going to get to Ukraine. You know the story. And so we escalate on the battlefield where Russia is much stronger.

Russia is much stronger than Ukraine on the battlefield. It's got more of everything, especially munitions and missiles and anti-aircraft, but also soldiers. And so there we escalate. We incur the escalatory risk on the battlefield where they're potentially stronger. And here we are with this regime that's full of contradictions and full of tensions and full of corruption and full of disaffected and full of defectors. But we don't escalate there.

because that's too risky. And yet we get accused of it anyway. So my proposal has been from day one that we operate in the political space, not just in the military space. We don't need to go all-out regime change. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is making him uncomfortable, making him feel that his regime could fall, could suffer if he continues along the lines he's continuing. So I want to get that armistice on terms favorable to Ukraine, and I can't get that so easily on the battlefield, and I'm not fighting in the political space. Remember, Aaron, Russia is fighting in our political space. They interfere in our elections. They interfere in our social media, public sphere. They're sabotaging various different entities, infrastructure in Europe as we speak.

So it's not like their side is not doing this already, as well as accusing us of doing it when we're not. And so I want to see us step it up. Authoritarian regimes can fail at everything. They can fail across the board. As long as they succeed at one thing, they can survive. And Aaron, that one thing is suppression of political alternatives. If they can suppress political alternatives domestically, they can survive lost wars. So our job is to encourage political alternatives inside the Russian space to weaken, destabilize, get the attention of, make uncomfortable Putin.

That's my definition of deterrence. It's the same thing for the regime in Beijing. If they feel comfortable, they'll get away with murder, literally. If Putin loses more soldiers on the battlefield, does that concern him? Is he some kind of humanitarian? He's only concerned with Russian human rights abroad. He doesn't care anything about Russian human rights at home, with the soldiers he sacrifices or shaving points off his GDP.

He doesn't pay that price personally. But if he's afraid for his regime, he'll choose the survival of his regime over the war. So we have various tools overt and covert that we can employ. We're afraid of the escalatory risk. there, but we're not afraid of it on the battlefield. And so I'm saying, okay, I worry about escalation too. But if you're going to cross the boundaries on the battlefield where we're weak, I want you to do the same in the political space where we're potentially much stronger. And it's the Russian

nationalists, the ones who bleed for Russia, who are worried that Putin's regime as corrupt and incompetent as it is, is hurting Russia's long-term strategic fundamentals. It's the nationalist, the anti-Western, anti-American Russian nationalists. They care not a wit about Ukraine, but they want to save Russia. They want to rescue Russia. Our job is to drive a wedge in the Russian nationalist base. The same people who could appeal to Putin's base, anti-Western Russian nationalists, but they say the war in Ukraine is hurting Russia. So let's retrench, do the armistice, and invest in Russia again and save Russia, reorganize Russia's long-term trajectory, whether that's in the tech sector, investing in their human capital or everything else.

I think we have opportunity there, Aaron. So just last week, we had on the show Robert Blackwell and Richard Fontaine, who have this new very interesting book out on the history of the failed pivot to Asia and also an argument for why we still need to pivot to Asia. And we talked about this precise issue of essentially regime bringing pressure to bear on the Chinese regime as an element of American strategy. As you may have seen, Mike Gallagher and Matt Pottinger wrote a piece in foreign affairs not that long ago now, but a month ago, essentially calling for a victory strategy for China and advocating directly, I mean, they're in agreement with you, advocating for applying pressure

on the Chinese regime as an element of American strategy, not regime change in the sense of troops marching on Beijing, which is obvious insanity, but just precisely in the manner you described. And Blackwell and Fontaine both quite hostile to the notion. And their main counter argument is we would lose our allies. They made a series of, they gave a series of reasons for why they rejected, but that was the one they, I think, came back to most strongly, that America would, we would frighten off all of our friends. by doing that. They were talking about the China context. I suspect they would say the same thing in the Russia context. So in fairness, I didn't ask them directly. What is your response to that,

that objection? They're both very authoritative people, like the others you mentioned. And so we must take seriously those arguments. And they're correct that without allies, this is a lot harder, maybe not even possible to stand up to these authoritarian regimes that are revisionists to varying degrees. I share that view. Keeping the allies on side is mission critical. But let's think about this. I'm not advocating solely or even predominantly a hawkish policy here. I'm a peace through strength type. I'm sitting in an office here at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where not long ago, George Schultz, after his centenary, passed away. George was an institution here within the institution. And the piece to the strength idea, Aaron, is negotiation. It's where you have the best

diplomacy in the world, where you have a diplomatic core and a diplomatic strategy such that when you build your strengths, you're also talking to the other side to make sure that they understand that you want a deal, that you want a deal not on their terms, but on terms again that are favorable to you. But you're not going to wipe them from the planet. As I tell everyone, we have to share the planet with China. China is not going away. They can't get rid of us and we can't get rid of them. So the question is, Aaron, what are the terms of sharing the planet? Are the terms going to be Xinjiang and Tibet and Hong Kong and the South China Sea militarization? Are those the terms? the 14 demands imposed on Australia, the eviction of Lote and other South Korean companies from Chinese market

because the South Koreans decided to deploy the anti-missile technology against North Korea. Are those the terms? Because if those are the terms, Aaron, I don't want those terms. But again, I want to share the planet. But like George Schultz, I need diplomacy, I need negotiation. but as Schultz said time and again, it's very important for diplomacy if the shadow, right, of strength, of force is cast over the negotiating table.

So I'm with Blackwell and Fontaine that allies have to be on side and that negotiations have to take place and diplomacy, our diplomacy has to be as good as our F-35s, as our submarines, the Columbus-class submarines, right? That's how good our diplomacy has to be, and they have to be in tandem and with allies.

So this is not an idea that we go after the Chinese risking World War III, losing all of our allies. I wouldn't sign on to that. Reagan and Schultz wouldn't have signed on to that. I don't think that's what Gallagher and Pottinger are arguing for,

even though their rhetoric is about victory. They're borrowing rhetoric from Reagan, and Schultz. So I'm not afraid of confronting these regimes, provided I'm bargaining with them, which means sometimes we have to compromise. We have to compromise to keep our allies on side. We have to compromise because the other side won't capitulate. But I still think we can get better terms, favorable terms to sharing the planet. Let's remember, Xi Jinping is doing our work for us, just like Vladimir Putin is doing our work for us. We've been reliant for the past five years on the other side running our Russia and China policy

and consolidating these alliances, getting the bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. If you ask, who gets the gold medal for U.S. national security policy the last five years as Xi Jinping gets the gold medal? And who gets the silver? It's Putin gets the silver. And the bronze is up for grabs. There's a lot of Hamas and the Ayatollahs and the Kim dynasty. There's a lot of people competing for the Bronx.

I'm not ready to give that one out yet. But I'm just saying that we can expect their behavior to continue to help us on our side consolidate our relationships alliances. We just need to raise our game so that it's a combination of strength, force, building back our defense industrial complex, deploying 21st, not 20th century weapons, and all the things that your audience knows about from your shows. But let's reinvest in our diplomacy.

Let's get skilled again at the Schultz level in a diplomacy so that people like Blackwell and Fontaine, some of our best national security people, and Gallagher and Pottinger, again, two of our best national security people, certainly on China, as well as those people on the other side of the aisle from them can have this shared bipartisan, successful peace through strength policy in all the theaters in which we operate. We don't want war. War hurts us because we have more to lose. We have the bigger economy. We have the free and open societies. We're prosperous. We don't

want to lose that. Look at Ukraine being destroyed as we speak. Russia wins the war by destruction. I can't have it. Nobody can have it. They can gauzify Ukraine and make Ukraine look like the Gaza moonscape that we have now as a result of Israel's response to Hamas's atrocities and nihilism. So I understand those arguments and I accept those arguments, but I still think we can do what I'm advocating, provided we combine the force investments with the diplomacy. It's not rocket science there. I'm torn here because we have about 10 minutes left, but there are two big issues I want to get to, both of which flow from what you were just saying. The first is at the end of your chapter, you have this really interesting riff that is the clearest expression of something. I think I've only, well, no doubt exists in other places, but the only other place I am familiar with it being so clearly expressed is in a favorite book of mine, T.R. Ferenbach's this kind of war about the Korean War. You reflect on a kind of American way of war and how there's something about, well, there's something Anglo-American about this. There's something about large ground deployments in Eurasia that don't seem to go well for the United States or don't somehow seem to be in our strategic DNA, which seems to somehow be more involved.

in technology, air, sea, etc. And I want to ask you to expand on that and how it intersects with your thinking on what to do in Ukraine and what to do in the Pacific. So that's issue. I think what I'm just going to do is ask you both and then you take them as you please. So that's issue one that I want to try to unpack a bit. And then the other one is, of course, you wrote this fantastic foreign affairs article. It came out in April, the five futures of Russia and how America can prepare for whatever comes next. And everyone should read it. It was genuinely fascinating. And when you were talking about applying pressure on Putin's regime and the kinds of unsavory sorts, frankly, that you would use in applying such pressure, these are not the Navalny's

necessarily or even likelyly. These are Russian nationalists. These are anti-Americans, all your words. But for whatever reason, they don't love the war and they think Putin's gone wrong. Well, that suggests that you're opening a space for a post-Putin Russia there that whatever it is, isn't liberal. It isn't France to use the first of your five options, but something, something else. So my other big issue that I want to unpack here is hard as it is standing amidst the chaos of 2024. How do you think about the Russian future and its possibilities? What do you think the likely scenarios are? So you take that as you please, sir. We can go left. We can go right. We can try to do both. Big and important questions. Thank you for that. Aaron.

So the United States is the greatest military the world has ever seen. We all know some of the limitations. We know some of the weapons systems that don't work that well. We know the fact that we don't have enough this and we don't have enough that. All of that's important. We need to correct some of those challenges. But if you zoom out and take the big picture, this is just an awesome military. It's an expeditionary military. It can project very great force at breathtaking distance quickly relative to historical expeditionary forces or projection or force power. It can reach every corner of the globe with great lethality in a short period of time. It just takes your breath away to see this military force. Land war is not our forte.

We're unbelievable in the air. We're incredible on the water. We're even better under the water than on the war. We're incredible in space. Land war is a different proposition. Maritime powers, expeditionary armies, those kind of wars are not land war, Eurasian-sized casualties. They're in the tens of thousands or the hundreds of thousands for a great power war if you're a maritime power, but they're in the tens of millions if you're a land power. And so that's our challenge. In World War II, we rented land armies. We rented the Soviet land army against the Germans. And the Soviets, as you know, took 27 million casualties, 11 million of the military, fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front. I don't think a democratic country, an expeditionary force like the United States, would have been ready to absorb 27 million casualties in a land war. We rented that land army. And in the Pacific theater, we rented the Chinese land army. They took at a minimum 13 million casualties in World War II against Japan, which started earlier. The Japanese broke their teeth in China before the United States

defeated China in the island hopping, defeated Japan in the island hopping camp. So you put the rental of the Soviet land army and the rental of the Chinese land army. army together, and you're at 40 million casualties at a minimum. 13 million in China is the minimum number. 40 million of the 55 million World War II dead. On the winning side, Soviet Union in China, that's on the winning side lost 40 million. We rented that land army, literally. Of course, we supplied the expeditionary power, the airlift, the sea lift, we supplied the intel, we supplied the lend lease, all of the goods, massive, productive economy to produce all of those planes and all those boats and all those trucks and all those radios, right? Mobility on the battlefield, communications

on the battlefield. The United States contribution was massive and decisive, but not in the land army sets. So then you look at the wars where we fought the land army, Korea, stalemate, Vietnam, Defeat. There's no other way to describe it. The first Gulf War, the 1991 Gulf War, that we fought that in expeditionary style. That was a whizbang war, not a land army war. Who are we going to rent now, Aaron? Who are we going to rent? Right now we're renting the Ukrainian land army against the much bigger Russian one. And how's that going? And which land army are we going rent in East Asia if we end up in a land war with China. I don't know the answer to that. And so the proposition for us is not solely can we invent drones that can work in swarms with AI, not susceptible

to jamming. Can we keep our communications in low Earth orbit through Starlink and other ways operational during war? Those are all big and important questions. Can we rebuild a Navy? of unmanned vessels in the thousands, not just in the tens of the hundreds, even. Big questions, we have to solve all of that. But just as big, maybe bigger, is can we actually fight this big land war? And if not, who can we rent for that? And if there's nobody to rent, we better get our act together to make sure such a war doesn't happen on our watch without capitulating.

There's that fine line between capitulation and provocation. We don't want to provoke World War III, but capitulation, like Churchill said, you have a choice between dishonor and war and you choose dishonor and you get war anyway. So capitulation actually appeasement doesn't work. But provocation of World War III is not something I want to be involved in, which is why so much I want this deterrence plus diplomacy, the peace through strength option. And I think it's possible. I think we moved a long way from some of our illusions, beginning with the Trump administration big pivot against China. Remember, the pivot to

Asia that Obama talked about, it happened, but it happened through the transatlantic alliance revival. The pivot through Asia happened in Europe. When we got Europe on side vis-a-vis China, that was a massive pivot in China policy and really strengthened us tremendously. We still have a lot of work to do in theater. Shipbuilding is our number one challenge in many ways. The world is an ocean, and we don't have shipbuilding capacity. But the pivot through Asia that Obama talked about and that Blackwell and Fontaine eloquently write about in their book, that actually happened,

and it happened surprisingly through a revival of transatlanticism, that fourth big victory that we started your show with today. So we're on a better path now than we were before. But here's something that you and your listeners know. Wars often begin just when you're rebuilding your capacity. Your adversary looks at you and sees that you're getting your act together. And so in 10 years or maybe even in five years, you're going to be more formidable, maybe even too formidable,

to attack. So ironically, from the hawkish point of view, the hawks introduce massive vulnerability doing what we need to do, which is rebuilding our strength. But if I'm looking at the rebuilding of strength, I'm going to say, now is a more propitious time for me to attack because I'm going to have a worse strategic situation when those Americans have rebuilt. So it's this moment of vulnerability that we've put ourselves in. And the hawks ironically, unintentionally exacerbate it by talking about the need to rebuild and how we're going to rebuild. And by fill in the blank 2030, 2035, we're going to be ready. So if we're going to be ready then and too strong to attack then, well, isn't now the moment, isn't that an almost invitation? And that worries me a lot that those

people that I side with in demanding a rebuilding of American strength, we are potentially making ourselves more vulnerable in the short term. That's what happened in World War I. That's what happened in World War I. And arguably, you could, you could say that Putin, that entered into his calculations in Ukraine, Aaron, because he saw he was losing Ukraine and the strategic situation was getting worse and worse every day. So now or never. I'll ask you to close with thoughts on Russia's future at whatever length you want to.

And if you can go a few more minutes, I can. But just in response to your points on the need to avoid both war and capitulation, and so the thoughts that follow from that on the right attitude towards escalation, I want to write a piece, just a short piece somewhere in which I propose or even demand that the word appeasement be reintroduced

into polite society because the problem in our debates, among the many problems in our debates, is the word is so toxic because of its association with the 1930s that nobody who believes that in a given situation we ought to pursue something close to or even just straightforwardly a policy of appeasement can use the word. Even though appeasement, in historical terms, I don't need to tell you, it's a policy choice. It's a policy choice that may be reasonable under the circumstances, there are points in the 1930s where you could make a very straightforward case that it's reasonable or even necessary, certainly politically necessary for the democracies. But no one feels like they can use the word. So we end up wrapping ourselves and just tying ourselves in pretzels

basically talking about appeasement when we talk about avoiding escalation, et cetera, et cetera, but the conversation lacks clarity. This is becoming a hobby horse of mine. You write that piece, Aaron. You go right ahead and write that piece. You know, the problem with appeasement in the 30s, it's not the word. It was the execution, because what appeasement meant was rebuilding your deterrence, rebuilding your military, your armaments, and engaging in diplomacy. That's what it meant before it became completely pejorative. In fact, Baldwin, the Prime Minister in the UK, he failed to rebuild the British defense. So it was only diplomacy. And diplomacy without strength is what it is. And then when Chamberlain came in, he recognized that they

needed to rebuild on the armament side in addition to the negotiation, but he was too slow. He was way too slow on the rebuilding. So the deterrence was lost. The diplomacy was used. So the appeasement became one-sided and it failed. It failed miserably. But if appeasement means deterrence plus diplomacy, that just is another word for strategy. Right. Okay. You know, a final point on this Russia thing, we don't really have time,

but let me just say this so that your listeners understand. Russia is European culturally, but it's not Western, because the West is an institutional matrix. It's rule of law, free and open society, market economy. It's all the things that we stand for,

and we sometimes forget how valuable they are until we lose them. And sometimes we bash ourselves so much that we risk losing them. The West is something that Russia is not, even though it's European culturally, because the West, as I said, is in it. Japan is not European culturally at all, but is completely Western institutional. Russia is not Western today and not on a pathway to becoming Western. So how can Russia develop a modus vivendi with the West while not being Western. Because being non-Western doesn't automatically mean anti-Western.

That's a policy choice that they made. They can be themselves, they can be non-Western, and they can have a relationship with the West. In fact, you can argue over the last 300 years that Russia has thrived the most when its relationship with Europe, especially Germany, but not only has been strongest. And so this is a dilemma for Russia to find a way to be itself, to be non-Western,

and yet to have a peaceful coexistence of Modus Vivendi with the Western powers. Otherwise, they become potentially a Chinese vassal where they're separated culturally because they're European in culture and where they don't have the strategic autonomy that they see, because they're in an asymmetric relationship with chyke. So that's a very simplified, short version of a larger argument in the foreign affairs of May-June issue that was published online in April that five futures of Russia that you referred. Stephen Kotkin, contributor to war in Ukraine, conflict strategy and the return of a fractured world, genuinely fascinating conversation that has taught me how to better understand the war in Ukraine and the stakes,

your chapter, as does the book as a whole, I encourage people to read it. So thank you, sir, for joining. Great show, Aaron. We're all listeners. Keep it up. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.