The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: we are living through the golden age of conspiracy theories

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Rudyard and Andrew talk about the conspiracy moment we are living through. Why is the political right so drawn to conspiracy theories? Andrew suggests that to be conservative is to be skeptical and contrarian, which leads to questioning scientific fact and evidence. It's particularly rife at this moment, when so many people feel powerless and mistrustful of the government. Epstein is especially attractive to this crowd who want to believe the Democratic establishment is complicit in his crimes. The Epstein conspiracy was at the heart of the political movement that brought Trump to power, and the US President is finding that his followers are not falling into line the way they usually do. In the remaining moments of the show Rudyard and Andrew turn to Ukraine and an unprecedented Russian bombing campaign of Ukrainian cities in recent weeks against a backdrop of planned peace talks. Trump is giving Russia time to make concessions, and Ukraine is waking up to the realization that they can't rely on the US. In the meantime a very strange bill was introduced in the Ukrainian parliament to shut down anti-corruption agencies which provoked huge protests in Ukraine. Zelensky's signing of this bill will have important ramifications for Ukraine's image in the world and their internal desire to keep fighting the war.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.

So if you were thinking in conventional rationality terms, you would say, this is really dumb because it's going to come back to bite you. Thinking it in Trump terms, it's I'll get through these, you know, I'll get through the primer, I'll get myself elected, and I'll figure what to do about it later. And it's equally conceivable that he would hit upon the incredibly dumb, obvious stratagem once you get into power of just putting it in place a bunch of loyalists who will then announce to everyone, oh, there's nothing there. Welcome to the Muck Dialogues. I'm Roger Griffith, the chair of the Monk Debates. A pleasure to be joined in studio once again by Andrew Kroin, Globe and Mail columnist and contributor here at the Monk debates, weighing in on the kind of issues and ideas shaping the news. Andrew, thanks for coming into the studio. Good to be with you. Many things to talk about. Maybe you want to begin a little bit meadow with you, though, and have a discussion about conspiracies. They seem to be in the air one particular. conspiracy in the United States, bedeviling President Trump. You've thought about conspiracies for a while. It's not something that you write on, but you're in the news, you're of the news. What is this moment that we're in? Why do conspiracies seem to hold such a, I don't know, a kind of an attraction

for a segment of listeners and viewers, maybe not of the Globe and Mail, but a lot of the rest of, you know, the media sphere is gripped by these things. Is it something new? Are we just back in some version of the 19th century with YouTube? I mean, what's your say, what's, let's start there. What's your sense of the conspiracy moment that seems to grip us? Some version of it goes back probably hundreds of years, as you say. I think the modern age, the conspiracy theory probably gets going with the JFK in the 60s. Mark Lane, I think has a lot to answer. answer for. He was the original. You know, Oswald couldn't have done it alone kind of thing. I think it appeals to people's desire to be thought, to think of themselves and to be thought

in the know. People want to feel like no one's pulled the wool over my eyes. I've seen through the lies that the powerful are telling us. And it's a very potent drug. In its mildest form, it's contrarianism, which you and I are both guilty of, right? It's fun to be able to tweak the conventional wisdom. You shouldn't do it if you don't actually believe what you're saying. But if you come across something where everyone seems to, you know, inform the consensus on something and the consensus is wrong, then you're doing a service in a way by exploding that and saying,

well, actually, the facts are this, that, and the other thing. But it can be a hell of a drug. And if you get too addicted to contrarianism, it becomes conspiracy theory. And if you really push into conspiracy theory a long way, my theory is the ultimate expression. of it is Holocaust denial. What's the ultimate conspiracy? So you can see that kind of continuum, and most people, I think, are able to keep themselves at one end of it. But I think in this particular environment we're in right now where we have a whole political movement centered

around the idea that the powerful are in it only for themselves. In the Q&On case, they are running pedophile rings, et cetera. They are manipulating the media, the media is manipulating them. But it appeals to people who maybe don't have a lot of power in their daily lives. Maybe they don't feel particularly powerful at work. They don't feel particularly powerful in their relationships. They're not really plugged into social networks that might have kept them grounded in the past. They're now substituting for that, doing their own research online and trying to relitigate and relearn

every known fact from the ground up. that's very fertile ground for it. Now, the funny thing, funny with a bitter tinge to it, well, there's a couple of fun things. First of all, for all these people to have then hit upon Donald Trump as their savior in this is just replete with ironies, you know, that it's going to be Trump of all people who exposes a pedophile ring.

There's a peculiar irony in people, you know, seizing on these things. You know, the Epstein conspiracy is the first conspiracy I've seen, that Republicans don't believe in. They believe in every other conceivable conspiracy. You name it. But this one where it would look like it's pretty well established,

first of all, that Epstein himself was guilty of the crimes he was accused of, that Gisland Maxwell went to jail under due process, and there's no idea that this is somehow a hoax that Donald Trump is trying to claim it is now. So it is very odd that they would have picked this one to disbelieve. Why is it, Andrew, that it seems that people on the right, in some ways, the farther right from center seem to be more gripped by conspiracies? You know, I'm trying to think, does the left have conspiracies? I guess some people probably on the left, you know, as you said, you brought up the Kennedy example. I'm sure that was maybe bipartisan.

I'm sure some conspiracies are bipartisan, but it does feel at this particular moment in our culture that there's something about the right and conspiracies. What is that? My theory of it is, again, going back to contrarianism, to be a conservative is to be very skeptical of liberal nostrums, and that's fair, and that's fine, and a lot of liberal nostrums deserve challenged and deserve to be questioned, and they take on a particular patina,

if I'm saying that word correctly, when they are repeated by the media, and it's not unfairer of conservatives to say that the media tends to lean left, that a lot of these institutions tend to lean to the left. So if you're a conservative, you're starting right from the standpoint of saying, there's a vast group there that's kind of out to get me, but they're not out to get me.

I think conservatives exaggerate that. I think they take it too far, but in its base, it's not entirely wrong. So questioning liberal nostrums is fine, but it's a short hop from that if you get too deeply into that to questioning nostrums of any kind, and ultimately you wind up questioning scientific forms. fact and evidence. And we're into that now because a lot of the problems that are confronting us as a society

are problems that, first of all, that involve the whole world, working together with the whole world, not just the nation state level. Well, that's going to be right for people to be very concerned about. So if you're talking about climate change, for example, that by its nature is going to say to a certain type of version, well, who voted for this? I didn't vote for this. Do I have any control over this? And secondly, it involves, you know, complicated computer models extending decades into the future.

And none of us should accept that just without question. Everybody deserves to look at these things as closely as they can to make their own best judgments. But in my opinion, it requires almost a conspiratorial mindset to say all of these scientists who've been working on this for decades, they're all wrong or they're all in the pay of somebody or, you know, just on balance of probability. So I think it's that nature. We're confronting issues now that are really in some ways remote from everyday experience, and that challenges people. And if you've already been steeped in the idea that there are vast forces out there that are arrayed against you,

if you've come up through a tradition of skepticism, always very valid, but that can congeal into reflexive oppositionism, in almost a disorder, where you just, somebody says blue and you say red, then I think that helps to explain why so many conservatives have gone down that particular rabbit hole of like, particularly populist conservatives. Do you think, Andrew, it has something to do with the extent to which people do not want to believe things that they feel are contrary to their interests and that many of the problems that we face today, as you said, require coordinated action, that we live in a so-

called polycrisis that has many dimensions and factors and one of the biggest kind of units of organization that we have is the state and that conservatives are are philosophically skeptical of the state at best opposed at worst marching on January 6th into the Congress at the very, very worst. Is there something where this connects back to the kind of our inability to reconcile the world as we wanted versus the way the world is. Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, the left-wing traditions of conspiracy theories, which are rich enough, and there's certainly a rich left-wing tradition of we don't have to. We don't have to accept limits.

So where the right used to say there's limits on public finances, we can't just borrow without a limit, it was always very attractive to be on the left to say, no, we can have as much, we can spend as much as we like, we don't have to worry about deficits, we don't have to worry about inflation. And that used to be the tradition of the right to say we live in a role of constraints. Now the rules have flipped. If you're on the left, you're saying, look, there's limits to how much carbon we can pump into the atmosphere without it, you know, coming back to bite us. And it's very appealing if you don't want to believe that to have somebody come along and say, nah, don't worry about it.

We don't have to worry about it. You don't have to accept constraints. So there's always a constituency for the free lunch of one kind or another. The environmental free lunch, the fiscal free lunch. There's always a constituency for the politician or the political movement that comes along to say, We don't have to. You don't have to. You can do what you like.

You can continue. And again, you look at somebody like Trump. Trump is the release of all constraints. The constraints of morality. The constraints of convention, of norms, of law. If you feel constrained by anything, Trump's your man. Trump's the, you know, the loosened... Ed.

You know, you can do whatever you like on any front. I mean, it's not coincidental that he's also the guy who, wants massive deficits. I mean, it's bizarre that people who think themselves of fiscal conservatives project onto Trump, some of them do, that he's, oh, he'll balance the budget. The same way, it's bizarre that people say, and you'll hear people say this. The reason I like Trump is he'll get tough with the Russians. What? So, yeah, there is, which is a broader statement of, people always want to believe what is in their interests or their, or to their benefit to believe. they also want to believe things that make them feel wised up and smart and in the know

and they've got the jump on the smarty pants who think they're smarter than them or think they're more educated them, et cetera, and Trump appeals to that as well. Yeah. Well, let's talk about, in light of this, fascinating conversation, about the Epstein saga because it truly is bizarre that we've now reached a point where a conspiracy that was at the part of the political movement that brought him to power, especially the kind of alt-right eco-media sphere around him, the podcasters, the social media mavens and others who were all deeply invested in the Epstein conspiracy. And now out of the blue, the president comes forward

and says it's a democratic hoax. This evidence has been planted by the Democrats to discredit me. You are losers, my community for believing it. And if you continue to believe it, I as kind of self-appointed cult leader, are banishing you from the compound. I don't know, Andrew. What is this? How are we to understand? It doesn't seem to be in his political interests. It seems completely incongruent with his own dallying with the Epstein files on his own way up through the MAGA universe. Yeah. I mean, first of all, we should say there's a difference between conspiracy theories and

conspiracies. There are such things as conspiracies. What makes conspiracy theories wrong is the tendency to see them where they don't exist. My personal rule of thumb is you should tend not to believe conspiracy theories unless they involve Russia, in which case you should believe virtually all. all of them. And this is borne up by lots of historical experience. When the Soviet Union fell, and they went through the KGB files, they found that all these things that were the wildest preserves of the John Birchers turned out to be true, you know, they were funding the IRA, you know, all

these things. And similarly, you know, the more we're finding out about what Vladimir Putin's been up to and who he's been funding and who he's been paying for, including the 2016 election. The notion that that was a hoax, which is Trump's all-purpose word for things that are actually true. I think ought to have been exploded by now. We're now seeing them trying to trundle out the latest conspiracy theory that Obama, I mean, it's so nonsensical that because there was no evidence that the Russians actually hacked the voting machines, which no one ever suggested they did, and in fact, which the Obama administration explicitly ruled out. So that's all crazy. It's crazy to be thinking that somehow the Democrats contrived the Epstein files,

when it all happened when Trump was the president, and then if they came into those possession of files afterwards, that somehow they would have added information to make it incriminating to Trump, but then not released them, you know, it just makes no sense on top of it. You can see how they are flailing. And as you say, they had encouraged their followers, in some cases rightly, to be worried about Epstein in particular. It's when you extend it into, you know, pedophile conspirators that involve the entire establishment of the United States

and are operating out of pizza parlors in Washington, D.C., that it goes, runs afoul. But this, I think what you're seeing is you've got two forces within the Trump coalition that have been aligned until now. One is the cultism of Trump and the self-interest of people to ride on Trump's coattails, and the other is the people, the true believers, the Q&on people who are very concerned. understandably enough, if you believed it, that there's a vast pedophile conspiracy. And Trump is now asking or demanding that the second group give up their concerns, even when in the presence of the most tangible expression of an actual conspiracy. So that's how many layers of nuttiness that's involved here.

And lo and behold, very interesting, at least up until now, large sections of the MAGA coalition are refusing to go where Trump demands they, follow. They are truer to their fears. And it's very problematic for Trump. I was absolutely struck by some polling data I saw from CNN's Harry Anton the other day that it was something on this order is that in the 20, 24 election, Trump got 67% of the vote, I think it was, or 61% of the vote among QAnon believers or people who thought there was at least something in there. He lost by 16 points among people who rejected the Q&NONC conspiracy. Wow.

He won. Basically, Q&O and on gave him the election. Yeah. And, of course, the standard issue Republicans' conspiracy theory, slightly less limiting than that, is that the 2020 election was stolen, which vast numbers of Republicans believe to this day. So, but if this thing unravels,

If he loses the support of the conspiracy-minded, if he becomes the target of their ire, and what is he doing right now? But you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to say, sending his personal attorney to meet with Giselaan Maxwell, which is their latest non-solution to this thing, is rife with potential for witness tampering and dirty deals, which another president with another lawyer might not be so suspicious, but with this gang you have to be.

So if we were to speculate, what do you think has caused him seemingly, seemingly? I mean, who knows? Maybe he was simply ill-informed or uninformed about what was in the files. But he seems to have made this hard reversal on this. So, you know, there were promises that these would be released. This was a major part of his reelection. He appointed Cash Patel to the FBI, someone who, was a... was himself deeply invested in the Epstein files as some kind of Rosetta Stone to, you know,

a global corporatist, Wef elite who would be exposed through this, this, again, alleged pedophile ring that seems to be at the heart of the more kind of extreme conspiracies around what is, in fact, revealed in the Epstein files. Do you have any sense of what this is? Is it just his increasingly erratic behavior? I mean, is Ockham's Razor our best guide here to try to figure this out? Or is it some attempt on his part, I don't know, to think that he can, in his words, weave. He likes this idea that he can speak about multiple things at the same time to multiple audiences and somehow square what is, I think, as you say, an impossible fracturing of his coalition.

Occam's razor would certainly remind us to consider the possibility these are all not very bright people. Right. Who don't think very far ahead. Trump's whole career has been a series of petty cons where you just kind of scrape through from one to the next. And you don't think too far ahead. You don't worry too much about consequences or implications. You just get to the next day. A lot of politics is like that, frankly.

But Trump is the sort of larger. expression of that. His whole career has been based on that. So it's not inconceivable that Trump, knowing that what he knows about his own involvement with Epstein, which is at the very least is embarrassing. It's probably much worse than that. I would say the median possibility is he knew what Epstein was up to and didn't care and paled around with him anyway. And, you know, it's not at all inconceivable that he was guilty of his own crimes or sins, you know, some combination of the two. So.

But he would have known all this. So he would have known all that. In all these years that he's been trumping up Epstein as the. Exactly. So if you were thinking in conventional rationality terms, you would say, this is really dumb because it's going to come back to bite you. If you're thinking it in Trump terms, it's, I'll get through these, you know, I'll get through the primer, I'll get myself elected, and I'll figure what to do about it later.

And it's equally conceivable that he would hit upon the incredibly dumb, obvious stratagem once you get into power of just putting it in place a bunch of loyalists who will then announce to everyone oh there's nothing there Trump consistently defeats our imagination because of the crudeness of his strategies and and our own version of a wanting to be thought in the know is we always want to believe that people are doing things for sophisticated clever strategic reasons and we consistently make this mistake of attributing him to Trump and he consistently just proves it so it's it's a great superpower that you

consistently come in under people's expectations of the whatever strategy might be animating you. I think the most plausible explanation is what I'm laying out for you is they thought they could get away with this, not completely inconceivably because their followers, famously, Trump said, you know, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue. I wouldn't lose support. If you come to believe that your followers will go wherever you take them, wherever you tell them to believe, they'll believe it.

you know, they could be forgiven for having convinced themselves for that, because for so long it was true, they just happened to have run up against, it appears, the limits of credulity of a certain section of the MAGA coalition. Right. Yeah, and I think what would lend credence to your analysis, Andrew, is that, you know, Cash Patel, Pan Bondi, Bongino, this, again, former Secret Service, former New York Cop podcaster, is the deputy director the FBI, all of them, with exception maybe a bunch, you know, briefly there for a few days, happily walked the plank, came out with what were, in a sense, ridiculous talking points that were, you know, both incongrued for what they said before and stonewalled in a way that was just

completely counterproductive even to the president's own interest. It's also conceivable that they themselves believed, prior to. to assuming power, that Epstein was just all about rich Democrats. Yeah. It's possible that they had, could not bring themselves to believe that Trump was involved. That Trump himself was somehow in the files. Again, you know, you would think if you'd paid any attention to his long association with Epstein, with his long record of statements that suggested, you know, he was into something

resembling that scene. And, you know, the allegations and not proven in criminal court, but civil court of his, you know, brutal sexual harassment of women over decades. Including the one particular case, Katie Johnson, the 13-year-old who was a 13-year-old girl at the time, who alleged in a suit that she then withdrew that Trump had raped her. Yeah. Wow. This is, I don't know, maybe he's going to say.

hope that it goes away, but it seems like that the media has kind of woken up. And we're seeing a steady drumbeat of stories, the New York Times and elsewhere, as people seem to investigate further. I always find that funny that it takes a moment sometimes to, you're in the press. Why is that? Why wouldn't an enterprising journalist, the New York Times, or elsewhere, have uncovered some of these stories that we've read over the last few days of women being taken by Jeffrey Epstein into Donald Trump's offices where they are seemingly, you know, subjected to groping and other things. And it seems to these women who quite courageously have come forward and spoken out on this, that they were being kind of profiled by Epstein to Trump.

I mean, that seems to be like a newsworthy thing that should have been brought out before the last election and maybe before the election previous to that. And in many cases it was and then was forgotten. So, yeah, there is to our discredit as an industry. there does seem to be a need for a kind of a triggering event. Partly it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where people say, is there going to be public interest in this? If I publish this, is it just going to disappear without a trace

because nobody cares? And if you don't have published it, then. And it was fed in Trump's case because there were so, again, as with so many things with Trump, there was such an avalanche over months and years of revelations of Trump's bad behavior or crimes or worse, that he always seemed to get away with, that people just seem to shrug.

And at some point in the media, people just become, not inured to it, but they just say, no one's going to react, no one's, I'm not going to get any response, I'm just going to look like I'm obsessive. So he benefits from that. But particularly where Trump really broke the business, the news model is,

scandal stories depend upon the people who are the subject of scrutiny and suspicion of scandals behaving as if they are worried about that. It requires people to be trying to conceal things. It requires there to be a prior reputation for probity that is then exploded by that. And in Trump's case, there was none of that.

He didn't conceal anything. He didn't really care if it came out. Every now and then there'd be a moment when he seemed to care, like Access Hollywood tape. But he'd skate through that, and that would simply add to the impression that he was invincible, that he could say and do anything. This one you can see from his behavior is the exception.

So I think part of what's got the media's bloodlust up is Trump is evidently bloodied. Right. His followers have not all fallen into line the way that they usually do. He himself, you know, reacted enormously to the Wall Street Journal story about that really disgusting, sickening-sounding letter that he wrote to Epstein. And it really undercut some of his foot soldiers. who've been out there saying, this is a nothing burger. I read that story and I laughed at how insignificant it was. Well, Trump didn't laugh and he sued him for $20 billion.

So by doing that, he clearly, again, if he were smarter, maybe he would have underreacted rather than overre. But by reacting so strongly, he absolutely telegraphed, there's something there. And most probably there is. Most probably this is not the only revelation. Who knows where this, you know, it's always interesting to think about where do these stories come from. who leaked the information and why. Who has it? Do they have more information?

Exactly. And is this just to sort of test Trump's responses? I wouldn't be surprised if the Walsh Journal itself has more information, but there's a classic kind of editing strategy where you put out bits of it to try to get responses that then allow you to start to put together more of the pieces of the puzzle. And I don't know. I mean, why Rupert Murdoch?

Yes. agreed, you know, refused to kill the story. Yes. Credit to Rupert Murdoch. Well, had a sudden, yes, had a sudden attack of editorial integrity, maybe. Right. Despite bugging Royals' phones. But now if you want my conspiracy theory, it's not unique to me, but why was J.D.

Vance meeting with Rupert Murdoch two days before all this? Wow. Now, was it in secret in Montana? Yeah. Was that to, because he got wind of the story and he was trying to get him to kill it? Yeah. Or do you have some other agenda? Yeah.

And people are looking at JD Vance's behavior in the wake of this. Right. In a very interesting way. Where's Elon Musk and all this? Because he, he for a while has been dropping tweets that Trump is in the Epstein files. Yeah. Now, how does Elon know that if he does? Right.

So, you know, and who has had access to those files? You know, in a normal country at a normal time, you would say these are kept under close lock and key. Yeah. You know, there's a long tradition of, you know, stewardship of the evidence, and you guess, you know, because it has to stand up in court, chain of custody, as you say. Is that the case with this, you know? It's, as I say, you shouldn't believe in conspiracy theories if they're implausible and required to believe extraordinary things to believe them.

But sometimes Occam's razor points you in the direction that the conspiracy is real. Yeah. I also wonder if his wife isn't somehow. Malania isn't somehow in these files because she was allegedly introduced to Trump in no small part through the Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein says they slept together for the first time on his plane. Yeah, lovely. Lovely memories for friends to share one of them dead. The other may be facing some political slow death.

Let's shift gears in just the remaining moments of the show because I know the issue of, Ukraine and its fight for some future for its country in the face of Russian aggression has been an important theme of your column and writing and kind of public advocacy over the last couple of years. We're seeing Andrew in the recent weeks really an unprecedented bombing campaign of Ukrainian cities, including now Kiev. Each day, we're opening up our news feeds, and there are reports of hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles.

in nightly attacks. Most recently, I believe last night or the night before, there was seemingly an attack on a subway station in Kiev, probably an attempt to create a mass casualty. This is all happening, though, Andrew, against another round of meetings on so-called peace talks and statements by Zelensky, which seem to be trying to accelerate momentum for real peace talks. Where do you think we're at in this conflict? And is it acceptable for the West to have left Ukraine in a situation that it's found itself in over these last few weeks? What's our responsibility? It's utterly unacceptable. It's perhaps understandable in some of the political calculations people are making, external and internal. You are dealing with an unprecedented situation where

the quote-unquote leader of the free world gives every evidence of being on the Russian side in this. this faint, F-E-I-N-T on Trump's part in recent days where he said, I'm giving Vladimir Putin 50 days to be, or I'm going to do X, Y, and Z, well, 50 days, he's basically given 50 days license to do whatever the hell he wants to quote Trump. So I don't think there's been any real change on the Americans part. There are people within the Trump administration, I think, who are more inclined to help Ukraine, but they're at war with others in the administration who either want to tilt to China or don't want to do either of them. And it just seems to be, in some cases, it's not even who gets Trump's ear.

It's people are acting without Trump's say so. It's very clear. You know, that thing with Elbridge Colby sending that letter saying we're cutting off your supply of missiles seems to have been done all on his own. So that's concerning is that this not clear who's in charge, really, in the Trump administration on this, and Trump's moves themselves shift back and forth, but he, I think, in his heart of hearts, he just likes hanging out with other dictators. So that's troublesome. The Europeans have been slowly, and maybe lumped Canada in there as well, slowly standing up to the realization or waking up to the realization that they're going to have to do more on their own. They cannot wait for the American leadership to materialize, and

It's coming late in the game, but it is coming. But meantime, as you say, possibly driven by that 50 days notice, Russia's really stepped things up. Ordinarily, I would say, attempting to undermine Ukrainian's morale by this kind of civilian bombing campaign is not going to work. There's a flying the ointment, though, that it just emerged in the last couple of days, which is this very strange sudden bill that emerged in the Ukrainian parliament to basically shut down their independent. anti-corruption agencies. And it appears to have been, I don't know the full story, but it appears to have been at the instigation of the Zelensky administration. This has provoked furious reaction in Ukraine, among Ukrainians, for understandable reasons. And there's

street demonstrations going on right now demanding Zelensky vetoed the bill. So he'll be under a lot of pressure. Well, this is really important both for Ukraine's external reputation. The first thing that every Russian apologist talks about is. oh, they're all Nazis or they're all crooks. And indeed, there were far-right elements in the Ukraine in the past, and they did have a real problem with corruption in the past. But this is a society and a government that over the last few years has been tracing a very unusual course,

that under the most extraordinary pressure and military assault from outside, they've become more liberal, not less, more outward-looking, not less, more democratic, not less, and more attuned to fighting corruption. So for this to happen and why it's happened, and what on earth is the Zelen, He's involvement with this, I think it's just critical to get to the bottom of very quickly. But if anything could hurt morale in Ukraine.

Obviously, they're always going to want to fight to keep the Russians out because they've seen what happens if you don't. But it helps if you believe in the rightness of your cause and in the decency of your leaders. And Zolensi's going to take a hit on this. And he's going to take a hit in the court of public opinion outside Ukraine if he doesn't do the right thing quickly on this. When you think he's handing J.D. Vance a cudgel to whack away why they should not be supported. So it's just the most ill-time possible swerve. And as I say, I wish I could tell you more or knew more about exactly what underlies this. But the reaction of Ukrainians is encouraging. And then they're not shrugging and saying, well, that's the way it is.

They're saying, no, we're fighting for a democracy and a decent society. We're fighting against this very kind of thing. don't we don't want to go back to that world. So that's a, I just put that on the table. That's a, I think that is important, important ramifications beyond just the specifics of that issue, but for the, for Ukraine's image in the world and for its internal desire to fight. And just finally, I guess what I've struggled a little bit with is, you know, the world rightly came to Israel's defense in the face of the aggression that it faced from Iran.

It did that on, you know, three major occasions when Israel was subject to large-scale ballistic and drone attacks. And in many of those cases, we don't fully know because a lot of this is kind of intelligence, protected by intelligence, but it sounds like there were British and other planes and jets up in the air intercepting drones. basically limiting Iran's capacity to create the kind of large-scale carnage that Russian and, you know, Russian drone and missile attacks now are creating each and every night in major cities over Ukraine. Why is there this difference? I mean, I get that Russia is a nuclear power.

It's a large one. There are, you know, risks of escalation that have always been around this conflict. it does seem like a tale of two cities, if you want to try to be as charitable about it as possible, or it's two different standards. On one, because Iran is weak, we think we can get away with this. And on the other hand, well, Russia's pretty weak, but we don't want to do this. But we will do it in one case and not in the other. Is there a kind of moral confusion that's set in here with regards to Ukraine?

Moral or strategic confusion. Now, you know, the fullness of time will decide what was the right strategy. So if you were an optimist, you would say, we started out very timid about what kind of lines we would draw for Russia. Yeah. And eventually crossed each of them in our turn. So what will be the verdict of history was, was that sensible and prudent to ramp up gradually so that you didn't, do it so suddenly that you provoke the thing you were fearing, or was that just consigning Ukraine to the death of a thousand cuts and too little too late?

And I don't know the answer to that. I worry that it's the latter, that if we'd come in harder, faster, we would have deterred Russia more. Obviously, if we'd done the right thing back in 2008 or 2006 and admitted Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, I think it's very clear that we would be, we would not be in the situation we're now in. But having fail at that gate, when Russia launched the full-scale invasion in 2022, should we have ramped things up faster, cross-lines faster, easy to say in hindsight, maybe we should have,

but it's hard to know exactly how Russia would have reacted. And it's not crazy or stupid to worry about Russia's reaction. No. It might be an error. We might have overstated their hand. We might have been too fearful of what Putin either was capable of or was desperate enough to do. But those strike me as the kind of judgments that are easy to make in hindsight. But the concern you're raising is absolutely valid.

And we certainly, we certainly, at this point, drawing the evidence of what we've been seeing over the last months and years, be far less timid about standing up to Putin and realizing how weak his position really is in many ways. You know, if we had any kind of decent administration in the United States, the Russian economy is so weak and so hollow now that you do get the sense that a really, you know, concerted push on the sanctions front, not Trump thing where I'm going to put tariffs on exports that we don't actually receive from Russia. Right.

But full-blown sanctions. I don't think I'm being Pollyannish and think that that that could really make a difference with the state the Russian economy is in is now in. Just finally, to play the thought experiment one step further, I mean, why aren't NATO jets, maybe not American jets, but, you know, German jets or French jets over Ukrainian cities, not Russian cities. They're not crossing into Russia. They're not attacking Russia. Why aren't we offering some kind of additional defensive assistance? Germany will be sending, I believe, up to five new Patriot batteries. That's great.

But it's clearly not enough. Civilians are dying. Children are dying. The elderly are dying in these strikes every single day. Forget the Ukrainians bravely dying on the front lines. I don't know, Andrew. it seems, again, it just seems like there's, it seems incongruent with our very recent experience with regards to Israel, which I support. I think that was the right thing to do to lend

additional defense and aid to Israel in the face of that Iranian aggression. I just, I don't know, I wonder, why, why are they just, are the Germans particularly so scared of Russia that But it's just politically they would be unable to contemplate these types of actions because their own constituencies maybe wouldn't support. If you go back to 2022, this was originally litigated on the issue of closing the skies over Ukraine. And at the time, very hawkish people said this is out of the question. You would be exposing the possibility of a Russian jet and an American jet having direct conflict with each other, lies being lost in real danger getting on the escalatory ladder after that.

So it wasn't, again, I don't think it was a silly concern. There were people who I regard as being very sensible people, and I say quite hawkish as I tend to be, who are very worried about this. Have we probed and prodded enough to be able to put that concern to the rest? Can we learn from other situations, for example, I forget which war it was in Syria, where Russian and American jets were coming in close proximity and the worst did not happen. Is that a risk that can be taken?

The only pause I have on that is, are fighter jets even the issue anymore in the Ukraine war? Has drone warfare and counter drone warfare become so overwhelmingly the factor in this conflict? I can't recall last time I read about Russian jets flying over Ukraine. But we did shoot down a lot of Iranian of these large kind of Iranian drones with fighter planes, which are quite effective. We should say, I was just reading, though, recently that from what I gather, again,

I'm not the first thing from an expert of this, but from what I gather, Iran's ability to pierce the Israeli defenses got better over time. They learned what worked and what didn't work. And so what was a pretty impenetrable defense at the beginning of that conflict was starting to show holes as time. went on. So even with the support and encouragement of its allies, it wasn't fullproof. And obviously the situation is the same in Ukraine. I think what you've been seeing in the last little while is a push also, though, to take the war more to Russia, to be more daring in how far Ukraine and its supporters are willing to push missiles into Russian territory, including Moscow. And the thinking there, I guess, being to make the ordinary Muscovite more aware that this is not just some comfortable perch they have viewing a conflict far away, but that they are themselves implicated.

So I think many mornings to play. Yeah. Well, we will continue to watch it closely. Andrew Coyne, columns for the Globe Mill. Thank you for coming on the Monk Dialogues for this regular weekly appearance of really enjoying our conversations together. My pleasure. check out Andrew's latest book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy. You can do that right now. Indigo, Amazon, wherever you get your books, your local bookstore. That would be nice. Go check it out there.

I'm Rudyard Griffiths, the chair of the Monk Debates. Thank you for tuning into this edition of Monk Dialogues. We'll be back at you next week. Bye-bye. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.