The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Gideon Rachman: The Age of the Strongman

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

2022 was not a great year for the world’s so-called “strong men”. The defeat of Bolsonaro in Brazil, the political isolation of Donald Trump, the military miscalculations of Putin and the disastrous COVID policies of Xi Jinping has weakened the hold these men had over their parties and institutions. On this episode of the Munk Dialogues, we’re joined by chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, whose latest book, The Age of the Strong Man, was named one of the top books of 2022 by The Economist and Foreign Affairs Magazine. He argues that while the trend towards autocracy has slowed, and the people living in autocratic regimes like Iran and China have shown a desire for freedom, the spread of communications technology is making overthrowing dictators much more difficult.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events.This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz 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.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracy. Hello, monk listeners. Rudyard Griffith here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this. Our regular conversations called the monk dialogues. On each and every monk dialogue, we go in depth with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers, exploring the big issues and ideas that are transforming our world and shaping our future.

2020 was not a good year for some of the world's so-called strongmen. Bosonaro, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping all faced pushback at home and abroad. On this episode of the Monk Dialogues, we're joined by the Financial Times Gideon Rackman, whose latest book, The Age of Strongman, was named one of the best nonfiction publications of 2022 by the Economist and Foreign Affairs magazine. He talks to us about what we can expect from strongmen like Putin and Xi Jinping in the year ahead, and why overthrowing dictators has become, in some sort of. something close to impossible in our hyper-connected digital era. Gideon Rackman, welcome to the Monk Dialogues.

Pleasure to be with you. Looking forward to this conversation, it could not be more timely as we start 20-23 and think about the shape of the world as it appears before. As a world, as you've written about in your most recent book, in no part shaped by the rise of strong men. What are you seeing right now, Gideon, as we kind of have put 22, two to bed. We're now looking ahead the next 12 months, award Ukraine continuing. Chairman Xi Jinping, leading China in his new unprecedented role. What's captured your attention?

Well, I think that the last year 2022 was a year in which some of the myths around Strongman rule were displaced or damaged. But I don't think that the trend towards strong man rule has been decisively reversed because these kinds of leaders are very hard to get out of power. But what I mean by the mythology being punctured is that I think that leaders in particular, Putin and she, had argued for some time that their style of leadership was actually more effective or more suited to their countries, but often just more effective generally, than Western liberal democracy, which was kind of prone to indecisiveness, captured by special interests or crazes, ideological crazes, and so on. And here were these strong, decisive leaders who were in power for a long time,

who could think long term, who could do decisive things like, say, annexing crime. or in Xi's case he would say, you know, clamping down on COVID in a way that the West had failed and the Chinese used to boast that they had had very, very few deaths compared to over a million in the United States. And I think that in particular for Xi and Putin, the last year has not been great, to put it mildly, Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, which had it worked and, you know, had he six run over Ukraine in five days, as I think he intended. to and expected to, would I think have given a further boost to the whole kind of cult of strongman leadership around the world, which incidentally was entering the West. I mean, people

like Donald Trump had been quite explicit in their admiration for Putin. A couple of days before the invasion, Trump calls Putin a genius. And that myth of Putin's genius, well, that's gone. And simly, I think she, although, as he mentioned, he has secured this unprecedented third term and is probably setting up to rule for life. The idea that he had sort of been a brilliant leader, well, that's been punctured again because most obviously with the incredibly rapid reversal around COVID-19, which may lead to deaths on the kind of Western scale. But also, I think he got too close to Putin. He messed up the whole Ukraine issue. The Chinese economy is not so good. So on a range of issues, she's not doing well, but nonetheless, I think that, as I was

saying, the fact that these leaders claim to greatness has been punctured doesn't mean that their longevity is necessarily going to end. I mean, I think that, you know, in the West, we've all been waiting for somebody to tap Putin on the shoulder and say, you know, you've messed up, you've got to go. But that doesn't seem to be happening. I mean, maybe one day it will and we'll turn on the TV or the radio one morning and find he's gone. But for now, he seems pretty entrenched because these leaders are good at that. You know, they centralize power. They think about their own security.

And they are very, very hard to remove, certainly in autocracies. I mean, one of the claims I'm making the book is actually you've had this style of leadership entering the West as well. But if you're a strong man in an already existing authoritarian system, you are very, very hard to remove. Let's talk about the bigger tide, because as you mentioned in your book, the stats on democracy are not great over the last few decades. The trend seems to be against more open liberal societies. It seems to preference more illiberal and closed regime.

So do you think getting we're at some kind of inflection point is the tide turn, the pendulum swung, you know, pick your analogy. Where do you think we are in that tension between democracy versus autocrity? in 23 and beyond. Well, I mean, I would like to believe it's an inflection point, but I think it's too soon to tell. I mean, I think that Biden actually is correct to say that this is a kind of pretty important era

in the battle between authoritarianism and democracy and both domestically in the United States and around the world. I think he saw connection between those two. and that, you know, in the US, I think things have been going better, but it's not at all clear to me that Donald Trump may not make a comeback in 2024.

If you look at the Republican polls, he actually is ahead of Desantis. And I think he revealed on January the 6th by encouraging the storming of the capital that he, you know, he is, if anyone had any doubts, he's not a Democrat, you know, he is, his personal goals are more. important than the health of American democracy. So that battle is not decisively won within the

United States. And that's obviously critical because the US is the world, you know, self-starved leader of the free world and all of that. Around the world, I'm not sure what the latest Freedom House numbers would show, but I suspect that probably they indicate that if anything, the trend towards autocracy is slowed, but I'm not sure it's yet gone into reverse. Because as I was saying earlier, I mean, I think that you can see that people do want freedom, that they, you know, they come out on the streets in Iran, in Belarus. They eventually revolted against the COVID-19 restrictions in China. And there are some pretty brave Democrats in Russia. I hesitated to say they're a majority, but there are people like Navalny and the people who come out on the streets and Moscow. But it's

incredibly hard to overthrow these regimes. I mean, I think the last big sort of surge of people power was in the Arab world in 2011, you know, Egypt, Tunisia, etc. But all those countries, Tunisia just last year, have now reverted to some kind of form of autocracy. And I think if you look at say at Egypt, what happened there was that initially Mubarak, and I don't mean this negatively,

but he lost his nerve in the sense he didn't shoot people in the streets. But if people are prepared to do that, as Lukashenko was in Belarus, I think then it's very, very, very hard to overthrow them. And one of my fears is that things may be getting even more difficult because of the spread of communications technology in the smartphone.

Because now in China, basically, you cannot exist without a smartphone. Your money's on it, your IDs on it, your COVID passes on it. But if you have it on, you're very, very traceable. So they know if you're going to a demonstration, they know what messages you're exchanging. And they can freeze the other society. They can either just physically arrest you, or if they want to do, they could freeze your electronic wallet, and you can't buy anything.

So I am concerned that this technology, which a lot of us thought was liberating, may turn out to be actually something that strengthens autocracy. So, Gideon, that's exactly where I wanted to go with you next. There is an argument out there that these powerful new stacked technologies of mass surveillance, big data, ever-increasing, you know, computer speeds, supercomputing, quantum computing. You put that all together, and it's a kind of autocrats dream. It's the antithesis of everything that Silicon Valley promised us in terms of the technological revolution.

It sounds like you're concerned about this. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think we've got to remember the technology is evolving all the time, and it's also double-edged it's so it's clear that it does have some effects that are not palatable to autocracies the you know you can capture the tv station now as you would have done in an old-fashioned coup and that doesn't go anywhere towards stopping the free circulation of ideas through social media uh you can see for example navalny in russia used youtube investigative videos to great effect you know put and controlled state TV but those videos were downloaded so it's double-edged but I do think that

the ubiquity of smartphones in particular and of the need to be online all the time means that privacy is is eroded and that is fatal to political freedom in it or what remains a of political freedom in an autocracy, because if you, if you use the Orwellian phrase, Big Brother is watching you, you're in trouble. And in fact, it's very striking, Dina. I don't know if you've ever read, reread 1984 recently. But a lot of what Orwell was, had as science fiction, is reality now. The screen that watches you while you watch the screen. You know, that's what's happening. And he was writing that in 1948. And it's only really just become reality now. And the Orwellian nightmare was that there was nowhere for him to hide.

You know, he at some point believes that he's discovered a private apartment and some privacy and where he can have free discussions and a Samistat book that he doesn't. But in fact, he's under observation the whole time. And I sort of worry that that Orwellian nightmare is actually kind of coming true. There's discussion giddy to about the export of these technologies, that China, for instance, is taking that stack and giving it to its so-called allies in the developing South. To what extent is that really a profound kind of challenge? If one thinks that you can simply take a series of zeros and ones that are much more than a series of zeros or ones, they literally become a way to organize a society in Africa. and, you know, pick your geography.

You know, what is the answer from democracies to that challenge? To me, it seems like, well, I don't want to say it's existential, but it seems like it is a significant one. Absolutely. I'm not sure what the answer to that is. And you're right that China, which tends to deal very pragmatically with whoever's in power, you know, government to government. They don't care about civil society.

So if part of the deal, and a lot of governments in Africa and some in Asia, are authoritarian governments who don't particularly like the West because of its tendency to moralize or occasionally put pressure on you and say, you know, you can't do this. Well, the Chinese are not going to say that. So they will offer you as part of the package deal. Some of the surveillance technology, they did it with as a. in Zimbabwe, for example. But frankly, it's not just the Chinese. It's also private Western

companies. I mean, one of the most important surveillance technologies and breakthroughs was NSO, this Israeli company, which sold ways of cracking people's mobile phones, including WhatsApp, every message you have, every conversation you have, the ability to turn your phone's microphone and camera on and off without you knowing, just everything. They sold it all over the world. I mean, there's a case now of a Rwandan dissident who was followed around, essentially by the Rwandan government, courtesy of the NSO's technology that they had sold to Rwanda. So that, you know, when she was, her father was a dissident who's now in prison in Rwanda, the famous Miel Colleen Hotel, you know, from he ran it. And she found that, you know, when she was going to

go and see the European Parliament the day before she had gone, the Rwandans had already sent in briefs countering all her arguments to the people she was going to see, and that's because her phone was hacked. And that's, you know, just a case that happens to be in the news right now. But NSO sold that tech all over the world. You know, the editor of the FT's phone was hacked with it, I think, by Middle Eastern country. So, yeah, the Chinese don't have many compunctions, but, you know, the profit motive and also sometimes the diplomatic motive. I think for Israel, which is keen to make friends around the world, you know, break house bust out of its isolation.

Being able to offer this kind of technology has been quite valuable. Hey, Monk podcast listeners, I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program. It's called Friday Focus. And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday. It's half an hour long and it provides you with a master class on international events, all the big issues and ideas shaping our world. We've got that for you each and every Friday here at the Monk Debates. Simply access via our website, triplew monkdebates.com.

Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. You'll get all the details or check out a sample of the program in the same podcast feed as the main Monk Debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the Next edition of the Friday Focus podcast, now back to our program. Right now, we're seeing the government of South Africa cooperating with China and Russian naval exercises. There's people who've hypothesized this kind of return of the bricks as a kind of authoritarian thugs club. Now, I don't know if that's exactly fair characterization, but you do put it together, Modi in India, Putin and Russia, Xi in China, something less than a fully fledged flourishing democracy in South Africa. Brazil, we've seen a notable change, but there was Bosnaro there before.

Do you see the bricks, Gideon, as something that is a kind of coherent authoritarian bulwark, a geopolitical kind of wedge against Western democratic power? No, I don't actually. But I do think you're right to point to the fact that they're totally not on board with the Western view on Ukraine. but I don't think they're coherent or uniformly authoritarian bloc. It's a bit more diffuse than that. So what I think they do represent is that very, very widespread skepticism in the non-Western world, both in authoritarian countries and in democracies about the arguments we're making about Ukraine.

So that, you know, Lula, who seems to be more of a Democrat, Bolsonaro, but on Ukraine, as if anything, even less on board with the US kind of Europe-EU view, because, you know, Brazil has its own history. He's on the left, the left of traditionally being suspicious of American global power, particularly the Latin left, so that's where he's coming from. South Africa the same. I mean, you know, I was there last year. And Ramaphosa, actually, he's not as much of a thug. He's not as corrupt as Zuma, who he replaced. although you're right, that the South African economy and the ANC are in trouble. But I mean, I think that he has to reflect the political culture of the place he's in,

and the ANC's roots go back to the Cold War when the Soviet Union was their ally. And, you know, there are liberals in these countries who don't like the position they're taking on Ukraine, but they're not the majority. So I remember South African saying to me, you know, bemoaned black guy, Songeo Zibi, bemoaning to me the position that South Africa was taking, sympathetic to Russia. And he said it's completely anachronistic. They're not actually even supporting Russia. They're supporting the Soviet Union because this is their personal history. And he may be right, but they happen to be in power. India again is an interesting one. It does go back to the Cold War.

The Indian were closer to the Soviet Union. Pakistan was closer to America. As a result of that, India has a lot of Russian weaponry. And so they don't want to break with the Russians because it's the Russians who maintain their military. On the other hand, the Indians are increasingly concerned about Chinese aggression more than anything else, which means that the bricks are never going to be a coherent bloc. But they are, unfortunately, united by a sense that some sympathy for the Putin-esque arguments that this is actually a sort of semi-legitimate Russian response to Western aggression. NATO expansion, his arguments about NATO expansion do resonate. and also just a sort of anti-colonial

were fed up of being pushed around by the US because I remember again, someone in South Africa saying to me rather bluntly, she said, the reason we like Putin is he tells the West to F off. That was basically it, you know? And there are a lot of people around the world who unfortunately have that instinct. Yeah, I'm fascinated that almost all of Africa

has remained either neutral or conspicuously silent on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite God knows how many billions of dollars of USA8 going into that continent over the last preceding decades. It is amazing. Another country I want to touch with you on, because it fascinates me in terms of its outsized role, is Saudi Arabia. MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, seems to certainly have a lot of the attributes that would model him into one of your prototypical kind of strong. men. Yeah, he's in the book. Yeah. So how do you see him playing? I mean, there's a, there seems to be an incredible man of ambition there that, you know, collaborations with China, Russia, this idea possibly of, you know, de-dollarization, challenging the supremacy

of the US dollar, a new kind of order or nexus of which Saudi Arabia, little Saudi Arabia, is somehow a key player. Are these castles? built from desert sands or is there something more real here in terms of an authoritarian challenge? Oh, I think there's something very real there. I mean, I think that, you know,

the Saudis are having a great year partly because of the high oil price. You know, there suddenly is huge amounts of money rushing into the Gulf again and the Saudis most of all. And MBS, having been a kind of pariah in the West, after the murder of Khashoggi, is enjoying the fact that everybody is having to pay court to him.

But it's not like he's going back to the way it was. I think in the sense that he is kind of a vengeful guy and I think was very, very angry about the way that he was treated in America as he sees it. And therefore is making a point that he has other options. You know, during the World Cup, for example, Xi Jinping was visiting Saudi Arabia. Arabia. So he's playing court to the Chinese or allowing them to pay court to him.

He's quite close to the Russians at times over OPEC and so on. So I think he's making the point that he has options and that you can't do without me. And also I think he's a strange figure in the sense that he's both an autocrat and a modernizer. So that he's is in some ways he's made Saudi Arabia a more liberal place again you know during the World Cup they had this big rock festival out in near Riyadh which you know you wouldn't wouldn't have happened in old style Saudi Arabia women can drive etc etc and he was also trying to open the country up to mass tourism in a way that would just never have happened in the old conservative state and I think he sees he has a vision of Saudi Arabia as a kind of

above all, membership of the G20 is what matters to him. He wants to be one of the top 20 countries in the world. You know, that they'll bid for the World Cup, I think, as well. They want big events. They don't want to be a hermit kingdom anymore. But at the same time, he is massively autocratic. He's liberalizing on cultural freedoms, but politically they keep locking people up,

executing people, as far as we know, also murder. them overseas in the case of Khashoggi. So he's a paradoxical figure, and potentially a rather dangerous one, because he's going to be, he's very headstrong, very ruthless, very rich, and he's going to be around for a long time. Do you give any credence to this idea of, you know, a petro-wan, that they're going to start trading oil and currencies other than the US dollar and that autocratic, these collection of autocratic regimes together will ban, um, um, um, you know, and to create, in a sense, an alternative, a competitor to the exorbitant privilege that the United States enjoys as a result of being the world's reserve currency.

Well, I think I'd certainly like to, because it is the case that America's, the dollar, is, you know, almost as much as the American military, a huge source of American power, because it's the currency you do. global trade in and it's the currency that your reserve currency so that even when there's a financial crisis that began in the United States the dollar strengthened because weirdly the rush to safety was to buy US treasuries and that makes authoritarian governments very vulnerable in all sorts of ways so that you see Russia having half its assets frozen you know overnight as an American official put it to me sort of half laughing we just stole half their money you

know, they just locked it up. And, you know, that's a country, but also individuals. Do you remember when half the committee of FIFA were arrested in Switzerland and extradited to America? Well, how could that happen? Because by using the US dollar for their corrupt dealings, they'd had to use American banks, and therefore they become subject to American law. So it gives America an amazing extra territorial reach and it's something that authoritarian governments have been looking for a way around for a very long time. The difficulty is that even though China has to say a massive economy, its currency is not internationally tradable. They still have currency controls and so one of the attractions of reserve currencies you should be able to move it around and you should be,

you know, if you get paid in dollars, you should be able to switch it to another currency without any problem. You can't do that in the UN because the Chinese are very reluctant to free up their capital account. I think largely because they feel massive capital flight from their own country. Because, you know, and again, this is one of the Achilles heels of autocracies. People don't ultimately feel secure there. They want a hedge. You know, they don't know what tomorrow might bring. And so, you know, I remember talking to a... I'm a recent trip to Shanghai, not so recent, it was pre-pandemic, but to people about how they got their money up to the company.

And there are exchange controls, but, you know, families grouped together, they can all take the requisite amount out, and then they can maybe buy a flat in London or Toronto or wherever, just because they want that nest egg. And because of that, the government is very reluctant to say, well, you can take however much you want out, because they don't know what's going to happen. So that's a roundabout way of saying,

yes, I'm sure they would love to do it, and maybe they'll find a way. You know, people are saying maybe crypto was the way of doing it or something like that. But it's actually quite hard. But I don't think America can be complacent. I mean, the fear is that America overuses its economic weapon and therefore too many people gain an interest in finding an alternative to the dollar because it is meant to be a global public good. and so if it's constantly kind of used as a weapon,

then maybe you begin to undermine the dollar. Well, let's move back to the democracies because I'm going to spend a remaining time trying to think about what is in a sense the pushback. How do the democratic society is primarily the West, but not entirely, confront this authoritarian order? And I wonder maybe to start with just what your thoughts are

on Biden's and his administrations, I don't know, seemingly kind of almost kind of comic book moniker of a league of democracies that will, you know, ban together and purposely face off a line against these autocratic regimes. Is that a viable strategy? It's one certainly in a country like Canada, which is much, in a sense, smaller, diminutively on a variety of levels, whether it's a projection of military, soft power, economic power, we'd certainly like to have our cake and eat it too. We'd like to be able to trade with China and have a functioning relationship with China

as well as the United States, but increasingly smaller powers like Canada are being wedged somewhat explicitly by the United States and this League of Democracy's kind of concept facing off primarily against China as the global enemy. Yeah. Look, I'm ambivalent about the whole League of Democracies thing. I think it's, as soon as you float the idea, you can start picking holes in it. It's never quite as consistent and sometimes even as useful as you would like it to be.

On the other hand, I think that if you look at the response to the Ukraine war, who has pushed back? Basically, the world's advanced democracies. So it's not a meaningless concept. The countries that have come together to try to support Ukraine, and to hit the Russian economy are, I would say, the single strongest common denominator is that they're wealthy democracies. It's not regional because they've got the United States and Canada,

you've got the European countries who, okay, they feel directly threatened, but you also have Japan, South Korea, Australia. And these countries are not threatened, but they feel some kind of that they have skin in this game, you know, and that there is a kind of liberal, democratic order that needs supporting. So I don't think, I think, you know, as much as proclaiming a league of democracies, it kind of came together over the Ukraine war. But equally, if you're sort of trying to face down a dangerous autocracy like Russia and increasingly

China, well, you need allies. And not all of your allies, the people that you need. are necessarily going to be democracies, but you can't afford to just push them into the other guy's camp. And Saudi Arabia is the classic example, where Biden had said, you know, we might turn them into a pariah state, and Khashoggi has to be answerable,

and then he has to go there and make nice. But India's the other classic swing state, I think that, you know, scholars of democracy and scholars of India will all tell you that there are big concerns about Indian democracy, although it's obviously a much more open society than China or Russia, it's not going in the right direction. You know, I think that Freedom House now classifies it as only partially free

based on their range of indicators and so on. And, you know, just at the moment, there is a film about Modi made on the BBC which has been banned in India. So, you know, it's not perfect freedom of speech by any means. But we need them. You know, if America is going to try to balance off China, well, the only other come to you with a population of over a billion people in the world and in that region is India.

So they give India a lot of leeway and they try to charm the Indians. And so it's never perfect. But it doesn't mean it's meaningless, I suppose, I would say, on the whole League of Democracies thing. I think finally, though, the way you were angling the question about allies of America slightly uneasy about the direction they're going in on China,

I think is clearly right. that for a lot of allies, particularly the Asian ones, but also European ones, they are concerned that America, in a maybe typical way, when it gets an idea, it becomes very, very kind of manician, and everybody got to go in one direction. And the struggle with China, you know, in America, it's now bipartisan that China's a bad place

and we've got to hammer it, basically. I mean, I'm simplifying, but not much. but the tech export restrictions have implications for companies all over the world and China is a crucial market for you know a company like you know Volkswagen it's their biggest market for Australia which actually is pretty bloody hawkish you know it's they've signed a pack with the US because they're very concerned about China's military activity but the fact remains that you know selling minerals to China's Australia's single most economic proper important

economic proposition you know iron ore is is key so yeah people are are slightly concerned about the direction it's going in I mean I think that you know one thing that might save or make mean that it doesn't become a sort of cripplingly a crippling contradiction is that firstly that the Biden administration people are bit subtler than the Trump people so as long as they remain in power they are capable of understanding the arguments of allies. They take the importance of keeping allies on board seriously and they may adjust a bit in a way that, say, the Trumpians might not have.

But also, I think that America is living with this contradiction as well. I mean, Apple is one of their most valuable companies and it's completely dependent on manufacturing out of China. And that's just the most obvious contradiction in this policy. So they're going to have to live with the contradiction to some extent and with the tensions that go with it. So just to bring this conversation home, I think in a fascinating point,

I hadn't really thought about the extent to which the Ukraine war is more than just a fight over, you know, important principles like the sovereignty of state borders and punishing unwanted and unwarranted aggression. In some ways, this could be getting a sense from you a bit of a litmus test, a moment for that the democracies feel that they in a sense have to prevail because it is part of

this bigger frame, this frame of a competition between two systems. I think so, very much so. I mean, I think that, you know, the Russians will say the West was trying to pull Ukraine towards it in a pure geopolitical sense. It's got nothing to do with liberal values. It's just about, you know, hemming Russia in. I actually don't think that's how the Ukrainians see it, and I don't think it's how the West primarily was treating it.

I think that Ukraine was clearly a flawed democracy. I mean, it was corrupt in various ways, but it had real elections. Zelensky was elected in a way that Putin was not elected in a proper election, had a relatively free press and so on, and they aspired to join the European Union and to join NATO, and not only for economic and security grounds, but because it was a sort of club of Western values around,

you could see Russia becoming more and more autocratic, and Ukraine not wanting, you know, wanting to be more like Germany than like Russia, frankly. And I remember, you know, at the time of the first European enlargement when the Poles were waiting outside, and as one Polish, when I was trying to get a Polish diplomat to sort of sum up for me what it was, why they needed to join the EU. And he said, imagine there's a big river running through Europe.

And on one side's Russia and the other side is the European Union. We know which side we want to be on. And I think the same for the Ukrainians. And I think that for the West, as you say, they're fundamental principles about sovereignty, territory, etc. But also, Putin had increasingly set himself up as a sort of ideological opponent to the West. He gave an interview to the F.T. in 2019 when he said the liberal era is over, you know, democracy is collapsing, American democracies collapsing. You know, liberalism is full of contradictions. People don't even like it. Whatever. And he had a lot of admirers in the West. You know, I mentioned Trump, but, you know, Le Pen in France, the Russians even lent them money. And Nigel Farage in Britain, who was the leader of the Brexit campaign when he was asked which politician in the world he was. most admired, he said Putin.

You know, and then he quickly said, oh, you know, I don't share his values, but you've got to admire his leadership. And Giuliani, you know, Trump's lawyer said after the crime annexation, that's what you call leadership. And so, and I think that's, you know, similarly even in the authoritarian world, MBS was a huge admirer of Putin. She had described Putin as his greatest friend on several occasions, visited him more than any other leader. So Putin had become a sort of rallying point for anti-liberal, anti-democratic

ideas in the world. And his victory in Ukraine would mark a victory for those ideas. And so I think that is a very important part of the struggle. Final question, Gideon, do you worry, therefore, that escalation is probably more likely the future path of this war in Ukraine, if indeed there are, and I think it's an important contribution you're making here, that there's a series of other kind of heuristics going on around this conflict that, again, are about a lot more than what's happened and happening in the Donbass. I mean, does this kind of have shadows, echoes of, you know, the last great conflagration in Europe, the Second World War, where again you had very much a sense of democracy facing off fighting against national social.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that, look, nobody sensible isn't worried about escalation, you know, from the White House to Downing Street or the Elysee or Berlin, obviously. They're right to worry. But get in, you know, heavy tanks are now going in, advanced Western systems. Yeah, yeah, no, sure. That doesn't mean that you say, well, in that case, we're not going to do anything. you know each of these decisions is weighed very carefully and they may you know we may look back

in five years time and say well we got that wrong we either gave them too little or too much but so yes of course there's a danger of escalation but the danger of allowing Ukraine to be defeated is also high

not least because you know the Ukrainians will argue albeit self-interested but I don't necessarily wrong that you know if you won in Ukraine it wouldn't necessarily stop there I mean, the relationship between Russia and the West has broken down so definitively that, you know, okay, let's say a pro-Russian government is installed in Kiev. Do you think we just go back to a kind of working relationship with Russia? I don't think so.

So it's hard to know how it's going to turn out. I mean, I think the best hope, you know, in the sense that anyone in the West has a plan for how this is going to end is that if you, allow the Ukrainians to escalate now, they get to a point on the battlefield where it becomes more feasible to have peace talks, where the Russians decide that, okay, we're not going to win, and we may lose quite badly, and the Ukrainians can be prevailed upon probably not to go on the way into Crimea, which, although the West won't say that explicitly, that is the position. I don't think the US wants them to go into Crimea and they're relatively hardline.

So the hope is that maybe in six months' time, a year's time, you might get to peace negotiations, but there's so many variables that to say, yeah, that's how it's going to work out, who knows? I mean, and escalation is one of those variables. I mean, I think that, unfortunately for them, the Russians have made the nuclear threats so many times now that people are beginning to discount it.

But you can't assume that if the situation really goes pear-shaped as far as they're concerned, that they would never do it. But equally, we just don't know how things are going to pan out in Russia, whether Putin does hang on or whether he's replaced by someone. And if that's somebody who replaced him would be more hard line or less hardline. I mean, I think, you know, my last thing on that, though, I think that even if they were a very, very hard-line nationalists who shared his kind of dislike of the West,

his feeling that Ukraine should be Russia, any new leader would be able to start again in the sense that the disaster decision to invade Ukraine would not have been their decision. So they might even, on a nationalist grounds, be able to say, you know what, let's call a halt now. But obviously getting somebody of that nature into power, that's not in our control.

Well, Gideon, thank you so much for this far-reaching conversation. It was exactly what I hoped we could provide among listeners. And again, we're going to give more details on your book, how to get it. I strongly urge people to take it on, put it on their essential reading list for 2023, because this issue of strong men and let's hope someday some strong women, too, of a different type. And the face-off against democratic regimes and democracies is really, I think, one of the great access points, focal points of the global conversation.

So Gideon Rackman, thank you so much for coming on the Munk Dialogues today. Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed it. Well, that wraps up today's Munk Dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Gideon Rackman. He certainly gave us a lot to think about it. If you have questions or feedback on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast.

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