The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: NATO Fallout – Google Thuggery

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard start the show with a discussion of what we learned from this week’s big NATO summit. Why was Ukraine not given a timeline for NATO membership? What are the new weapon systems the Biden Administration is promising, and what is the risk they will cross a Russian “red line”? The second half of the program debates Google’s ominous decision to include Canada with the likes of Russia and Afghanistan as one of the few countries worldwide who currently don’t have access to the company’s powerful new AI chatbot. What exactly is Google doing, and why? How should the Canadian government respond? And what does this bizarre development forewarn about a world where powerful AI is controlled by Big Tech companies seemingly willing to use it to reward their friends and punish their enemies? This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website in just a few. you simple clicks, triple W the monk debates.com. Look for the Friday focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk listeners. Rodger Griffiths here, the executive director of the Monk Debates.

Welcome to this, our regular Friday Focus podcast on the 14th of July. As we are each and every edition of Friday Focus, joined by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director, the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, great to be in conversation with you. How's your summer going? Is your July living up to expectations? Not yet. Roger, not yet. I think August is going to be better than July this year.

Okay. To explain to explain why to our devoted. listeners, I have a cast on my arm, which is getting in the way of my summer leisure activities, but it should come off very soon. Excellent. Well, wishing you a speedy recovery on that. And thank God you're not an avid golfer yet, so you don't have to torture yourself looking out over golf legs.

You can watch baseball, which you love. Yeah, that's right. And that's coming back tonight, by the way. Oh, and we had, by the way, for all our listeners, we did have one great. moment at Toronto Blue Jays star won the home run derby. Now on the international roster of great sports events, the home run derby is at the very bottom if it even makes it. But we still want it.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the champion of the home run derby for at least a year. Nice. I learned something new every day. Well, let's start Janice with a debrief on what happened at NATO, the kind of fallout from the meeting, a series of new, seemingly portentious decisions for the Biden administration, the allies related to the future course of this war. What was your big takeaway from the summit in terms of something we've learned, something new that could give us a sense of the shape of the conflict to come? You know, sitting back for just a minute and looking at the results of that summit, you have to say the Biden administration and many NATO allies are between Iraq and a hard place here. And they are looking for an inch to maneuver within Biden adamant that Ukraine cannot come into NATO.

of let's be blunt. And he won't. You won't even consider it because he said really clearly the United States is going to war with Russia. And we do not want to preside over the outbreak of World War III. Okay. But then you have to find some formulation. And here's where they were dancing on the edge of a pin.

Yes, Ukraine, you will be a member of NATO. when the conditions are right and you meet them? When is that? I don't know. Have we been talking about this for 13 years? Yes. Has much changed? No. It left everybody frustrated and out of it came an outpouring of commentary from Raiders, both in the United States and the Baltics. what a cowardly solution this is. On the one end, two, he made the only decision that he could make. Now, I'm in that second camp, but I'm not blind to how agonizing this is, most of all for Ukraine, frankly. James, maybe explaining people that, you know, to qualify for NATO is not simply about how many tanks or airplanes or troops you have. there are a whole series of prerequisites, a bit like EU membership around transparency,

democratic processes and institutions. And demonstrably, Ukraine struggled on those fronts before the war. They're non-existent right now because there is a war. And I was just struck by just the extent to which the commentary just thought, well, you know, let's use whatever rules existed, NATO and just chuck them out the window and give Ukraine membership, as you say, to then what, have Ukraine invoke Article 5 the next day and require NATO troops to cross the Ukrainian NATO border to then face off against Russia? It's just, it's crazy, this chest thumping and frankly, kind of war mongering,

not on the part of the traditional hawks that are out there that I would expect from this, you know, in the past that Donald Rumsfelds of the world, But instead, the people that I once thought were the doves, people like Michael McFall, who's former monk debater, former ambassador to Russia, Stanford, celebrated Stanford professor of international relations. There's all these people that I just, I feel have done this bizarre flip-flop in their whole view of international relations, America's role in the world, the desirability of, you know, an aggressive, you know, stance on the part of the West vis-a-vis its perceived enemies.

It really is striking. If you, Nicholas Christoph, whom I think most of us would put on the left and the center left came out with this logic-defying belief suspending op-ed in the New York. times, as you described Richard. We just need to admit Ukraine to NATO. That is the only way we can guarantee Ukraine security.

Nothing else has worked. We tried everything else. And here's the one, he didn't make the point, but he shut up. Here's the one argument I'm sympathetic to Ruddard. We would almost have been better off never discussing this than what we did,

frankly. We're in the worst of three worlds. One is, in the door. That's the worst for the reason you just mentioned. In the door, go to war. Simple, six words. That's what that one means. There's not a lot. You have to, many blanks, you have to fill in.

Second one, where we are now, which is, okay, you're not coming in until this war is over. Because that's really what we're saying. Ooh, says Vladimir Putin, as he sits in the ground. What he does not want is Ukraine and NATO. Okay, I get, I get how I get there. keep this war going forever. And what we did, that's why I'm unhappy. What we did in Vilnius is fix that in his mind and in his calculation.

Just keep it going at whatever level you can sustain because as soon as it ends, Kiva's in the door. The third, my far biggest preference would be, don't talk about this. But you can't do that. among democratic states you have to have a conversation and we landed in the worst possible spot i think except the first now one of the fallout it seems from the summit is that as a as a not an alternative but as some kind of succor to ukraine for not being in any way explicit or clear about membership the bide administration is back at mulling over the transfer of, we can talk about cluster munitions because that's now agreed,

but they're now mulling over the transfer of longer range missile systems that previously, even just a matter of a few weeks ago, they indicated that they opposed sending on the basis that they, because their range is so long, they could be used to attack within Russia or the somewhat untested, you know, flashpoint of this whole conflict really could be Crimea. And if there were large-scale missile strikes deep into Crimea, the Russians may look at Crimea in ways that the rest of the world doesn't, i.e., this is the territory of Mother Russia, and we perceive attacks on Crimea as the same as attacks on the motherland. So I want to get your sense of where this is going.

And Janice, isn't there, I don't know, is it logical to assume that one can steadily escalate again and again and again. And I don't mean escalate in an overt and aggressive way, but escalate in terms of the scale and the sophistication and the power of the weapon systems that you're transferring and not at some moment understand that you're going to. going to get closer and closer and then potentially cross a red line that you may not be aware of what that red line is. Are we getting closer here, Janice, your view to a red line? Hi, Monk listeners. A friendly reminder that our Monk debate on artificial intelligence is now

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live streaming of two annual debates. And of course, our much-inticipated weekly Friday Focus podcast. Get all this right now on triple W monkdebates.com and learn about the future of AI. That's been a worry of mine all along with an administration that is a cautious experimenter, moves a little bit, H moves a little bit. But you can unknowingly cross the red line, and you only find out after you crossed it right here. That's the problem.

The attackums, ATACAMM, so the missiles you're describing, Zelensky has one of these and asked for them, and you're absolutely right. Up until now, the Biden administration said, no way. Well, I'll bet you anything. They're going to say yes now. And again, it's in this context of not being able to meet that demand that Ukraine come in to NATO. So let's do something else that will, in a sense, quiet the clamor.

The only mildly comforting story here, Red Yard, is that what Britain and France have already sent Ukraine, their missiles have a range of about 150 kilometers. these American missiles, 190 kilometers. We're talking about 40 kilometers more. Now, it's material in sense of that it can, as you rightly say, reach Crimea, but it's not a huge difference. My senses we're reaching the end of the road here now with a strategy by the Biden administration. There's not much more they can provide. And you put your finger on a big one. The cluster munitions, these are bomblets that when you drop them, they explode into multiple clusters.

And they're really terrible. We banned them, Canada, because not all of them explode. They're duds. They stay in the field and they injure and main people three years later. And that's why we banned them. Why did the Biden administration agree to that? because they're out of ammunition, the Ukrainians. And the Western world does not have the industrial capacity, the manufacturing capacity,

kind of the oldest stuff you could talk about to manufacture rounds of ammunition. The war is eating up ammunition at such an incredible rate that if the Biden administration had not agreed, it was conceivable that the Ukrainian army would run out of ammunition in the next few months. So they were driven to the wall on that. But we're at the end of this. There's nothing more. They've agreed to jet fighters. They're going to agree to the missiles.

There's literally nothing more qualitatively that the United States and NATO can do. They can, and how fast can you amp up your manufacturing capacity? You know, that's slow. That's an industrial strategy. And manufacturers want some guarantee that somebody's going to buy that ammunition two or three years from now, not just now. Really tough. What, Janice, do you think a red line could be for Russia? We've seen Lavarov recently, the Russian foreign minister, expressing the view that the transfer of F-16 fighters to Ukraine,

fighters that Lavrov contends and I think what I've seen from defense analysts, his claim is supported that these fighters are configured in such a way that they have the technical capacity

to carry a nuclear weapon, a missile or a bomb. So in effect, they are a delivery system for a nuclear attack that could be carried out using these fighters into and on Russia. Now, it's not as if anyone's transferring a nuclear weapon to Ukraine anytime soon, but don't the Russians in a sense have a little bit of a point here,

which is that with something like these fighters, you're introducing greater levels of uncertainty into the power relationship and relative balance of forces, not simply between Ukraine and Russia, but between NATO and Russia. Is that a red line? Is Crimea, would large-scale rocket attacks on Crimea be a red line? Where do you think we could be starting to push up against a risk that there would suddenly be a Russian reaction to something, which again, we may not understandably be able

to anticipate. It's a great question, Reddard. And the honest answer and very few advisors give political leaders an honest answer when they're asked that question. The honest answer is nobody knows, not even sure that Putin himself knows until he's very close to the situation. Nobody really knows what his red line is, and it's a movable target. What I can't tell you is what I'm most worried about is we're seeing an increasingly loud morale crisis in the Russian Army among the senior generals. There was an incredible speech that General Popov gave after he was fired by the chief of the Russian general general. staff Gerasimov in which she said these, they traitorously stabbed you in the back from far behind the lines. Now, you have to be worried about this when you're put, never mind prognosis.

You have to be worried about this is a decorated commander that is so well regarded. The thing that I think would most likely push Putin to do something, frankly stupid, is if he's worried about morale in the army, if he's worried about the loyalty of commanders, if he wants some big major distraction, which he thinks might unify the commanders. So if you put that together with some new longer range weapons that might conceivably attack Crimea,

that to me. And I can't tell you. tell you this with confidence. I haven't talked to Putin lately. I'm not close to anybody who's talked to him lately, which is what we really need to do to get a better sense of where the guy is. Lavrov doesn't speak for him. Frankly, nobody speaks for him. That's really the problem. And he deliberately plays on the uncertainty and the worry that everybody has. So I can honestly say we're just in uncharted territory here. But I am paying attention. to what these Russian generals are saying and doing, that's not always scares authoritarian leaders.

Yeah. And a number of them are being questioned or, quote, taking arrest. Detained. Yeah. Euthivism. Yeah. So that's pretty remarkable. It's not just the general Armageddon, the Syrian commander who seems to be, have been in

on lines of way with progoshan it seems that there are others that have been caught up in this questioning which then goes back to what we discussed in the previous show which is that the progosion march on moscow wasn't just a crazed lone you know mercenary commander it he knew that he had some tacit and high level support within the broader military probably around commander's frustrations with with how the one war was proceeding and either the lack of strategy, munitions, all the things that, you know, generals in the field complain about. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back on the other side with our monk donors to

have another chapter in the ongoing saga of government of Canada, VS, big tech. There are some new interesting developments that for me and what your take on this too, Janus, suggest a kind of dystopian world. emerging as big tech flexes its AI muscle over national governments. We've got this for you right after the break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, triple-w-the-munk debates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year or 50 cents an episode and we'll send you

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