The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Patriots vs. Putin – Effective Altruism

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

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 off the program with a look at the latest developments in the Ukraine War. Will American Patriot missile systems make a difference? What is the rationale behind a new Russian offensive in early 2023? In the second half of the show, available to donors to the Munk Debates, Janice and Rudyard unpack the philosophy of effective altruism as espoused by its now notorious proponent, Sam Bankman Fried, the now criminally indicted founder of the crypto exchange FTX. What do we owe the future morally? And how do we balance the value of humanity’s future potential versus its immediate needs? To access the full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. 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 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. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, the regular Friday Focus podcast, where we dig into the big issues. and ideas in the news. We do this each and every week with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs,

an internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, we are convening today. I want to know the status of your Christmas shopping list. It's Friday the 16th. You've got a week to go. How are you doing? I, on the scale, Reddard, I am at point zero one. It is terrifying.

That's all I can say as I think about what I've got to get done. in the next week before people leave their offices. Well, I recommend Amazon.ca. It's a bit of a cop-out, but boy, you can get out there as long as you've got prime and you can kind of watch the delivery dates. But really, after this weekend, Prime's no good. You're not going to get it up for the 22nd, 23rd. So I'm clicking.

I'm browsing and clicking this weekend. I am in big trouble, it's all I can say. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, oh, my God, it is. the 16th of December and I have not focused. Okay, well, let's dig into Friday focus. Great segue, Janice. And talk about two stories in the news. Up first, I want to spend the beginning of the show here with an update on the Ukraine

war. We haven't talked about it in a while. And there were some big developments this week that suggest a path for this conflict that unfortunately says maybe the winter isn't going to be this period of, of not de-escalation, but a frozen conflict in more ways than one. What are you seeing here, Janice, that makes you think that the next 30 to 60 to 90 days could be a period of heightened risk of heightened conflict in this war? Well, there was a very pessimistic statement made by Vladimir Zelensky.

yesterday, two days ago, Redyard, in which he says the, and he has no reason to exaggerate by much here, because that's not what Ukrainians want to hear from him, in which he anticipates that the Russians are going to throw up to 200,000 newly mobilized troops. There were only 175,000 in the original attack in February, that they have not given up on. taking Kiev, that there may be a multi-pronged attack that would come from the north, from Belarus, as well as from the south. So he clearly is trying to get Ukrainians ready for a very, very rough goal. And frozen is the right word here, Redd, because the ground is now frozen in Ukraine. It's so cold. So armored vehicles, tanks, artillery can move. which they can't do in the muddy shoulder season,

which is really November and March. That was pretty, I think that was the grimmest assessment I've heard from him since this all started. Yeah, in fact, saying that this new offensive could begin as early as January as late as March. So in effect, the first quarter of next year, I guess I struggle a bit, Janice,

to think why the Russians would believe that this time, there would be a different result. I mean, the first time they went in with their professional army, with that army in the best possible shape or condition it could be in. It turned out it really wasn't an effective fighting force. The Russians think that, oh, well, rinse and repeat, at this time we're going to use conscripts. We've only trained them for 90 days.

We're running out of critical munitions. We're having to beg to the likes of North Korea and Iran for drones and even artillery shells. I don't know, Janice. I struggle here. Try to get me inside Putin's twisted mind here to defy Einstein's definition of insanity, which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Yeah, it's a great point, really, Roger. I guess the only way you can think about this from Putin's perspective, it's sunk costs.

So for our listeners, it's when you've invested in a stock in the stock market. and it goes down. You have to make the decision. Do you sell, walk away and take your losses? Or do you, especially if it's on March and do you put more in and more in and more in? And we have a huge amount of evidence that people put more in, put more in, try to postpone that moment where the loss is real. I think there's something of that going on with Putin right now.

He realizes that right now. His forces have been pushed back, especially worried because the Ukrainians have said they're going to advance towards the south, really in an effort to cut Crimea off to divide the Russian forces in two. And there must be a sense on his part. He's taken, and this is always a bad sign, he's got more operational control. Now he's involved in the command decisions. every time you get a civilian leader doing that, you know, you're in big trouble. And, you know, Linda Johnson did that in Vietnam.

We know what came out of that one. So there's a sense I'm going for it because otherwise I'm going to lose this. I'm going to throw what I have at it. And you're right. Those troops that are going in, badly trained, conscript, just astonishing audio tape release last. night of a soldier talking to his father in which he said, you know, we have nothing here.

We are not connected. We don't have proper food. We're not trained. They are just, he said they are treating us like donkeys. So this is a huge gamble. If this is correct that the Russians launch one more offensive, I agree with you. I do not think they will do much better than they did the first time, but they will inflict horrible damage on society and economy that is already large parts reduced to rubble. So, Janice, the other big news this week was the growing U.S. press reports that the U.S. government is now considering sending Patriot missile systems into Ukraine to provide air defense. These are kind of sophisticated, long-range. missile launchers that can intercept not only drones and cruise missiles, but airplanes, bombers.

And they can do this at a distance that is significantly more than anything that's been deployed into Ukraine to date. I guess, Janice, one has to wonder why now. And then what are the risks of this? On I think of show two episodes ago, I was advocating, in fact, for just this big. very strategy because the punishing attacks on the Ukraine electrical and public infrastructure or civic infrastructure just seemed unbelievably cruel, inhumane and demanded some kind of response. Now that it's happening, I'm starting to wonder to myself, well, what next now? I presume these systems would be key targets for Russian air defense, for their own maybe hypersonic missiles. Again, you get a feeling here of another escalatory step down the road

to this growing risk of a possible war conflict between Russia and NATO. You're watching this in real time, as we say. And if we look back over this terrible year, Roger, Biden drew some red lines and his whole goal was to prevent. any direct contact between any American forces and Russian forces, but also between any advanced American equipment. Now, what you've seen over these last nine months, Russia escalates its attacks on civilian infrastructure, which is what you found so outrageous two weeks ago, frankly, got you going.

And there's pressure to respond, and there's pressure to respond. And over these nine months, seeing the ceiling go up and up and up and up. And each time Putin threatens escalation, hints at nuclear weapons, you know, grave consequences. The escalation goes forward. The weapons are sent in. And in fact, he doesn't respond. Now, this is a very dangerous game we're playing because at some point Biden will cross the line, which he doesn't know.

He doesn't know where the line is. And in fact, I doubt honestly that Putin knows where it is. He'll only know it when it happens. We call this learning through self-discovery, right? You don't know what's going to push you over the edge until the thing happens and you're pushed over the edge. Why this worry about Patriot missiles? It's after all a defensive weapon, right?

You're going to send something at me right here, and I'm going to use that to shoot it out of the sky. So it's not an offensive weapon. It's hard to say it's escalatory, except it has a long run. range. And what's bothered the Biden administration right from the beginning is providing any weapons that can cross the Russian border. These can, depending on where they're deployed. That's for the issue. We're going to have to see we don't know yet because there are three different ranges that

Biden could be providing. We don't know which ones. They haven't told us. But we're getting closer and closer to where Ukrainians are adopting weapons so that they can hit behind Russian lines. They did it two weeks ago. They are hitting Russian bases from which these missiles are being launched. And they're getting the license to hit back because people are so outraged at this really criminal destruction of infrastructure inside Ukraine. Just imagine we Canadians probably can empathize with them more than anybody else. It's freezing. It's freezing. And there's no heat.

There's no electricity. And people have to get through these next three months. That's what's driving it, frankly. It's outrage at what's going on. Yeah. So I just urge listeners, you know, the Canadian Red Cross continues to have a campaign to assist in Ukrainian humanitarian relief.

And I think of all of us are thinking about a cause. something to give to at the end of this, the calendar year and the spirit of the holiday season. I just urge everybody to go to the Canadian Red Cross website, make a donation to humanitarian relief in Ukraine. We dedicated the proceeds of the spring monk debate to that very cause, raising over $100,000 for Ukraine relief. I'm going to make a personal donation this year. I think it's something if we all step in together, we can help the people of Ukraine in a really desperate, desperate moment. So let's take a pause here, Janice, and say goodbye to our Freemunk members. We'll reconvene on the other side of the break with our donors to talk about Sam Bankman-Fried and an interesting philosophy that he exposes that has kind of claim center stage in the public debate as a

result to the meltdown of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. We'll bring that exclusive conversation for our donors right after this 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 monkdebates.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 not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates at TripleW,

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