The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Graham Allison: the deteriorating relationship between the US and China

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

It’s no secret that relations between China and the US are at an all time low. And at the centre of this fraught relationship is the question of Taiwan: China is moving closer to asserting its territorial rights over the island, while US President Joe Biden has pledged to defend Taiwan, even going so far as sending defensive weapons to protect the country against a Chinese invasion. How should a superpower like the US respond to a rising power like China? Foreign policy expert Graham Allison joins us for a wide reaching conversation about this important moment in history, and how shared interests in the climate, technology, finance, and health could force these powerful rivals to become unwilling partners.   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.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello, Monk listeners. here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, the latest in our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth Q&As with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. We go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and shaping our future on each and every Monk Dialogue episode. On today's program, we explore the worsening relationship between the United States and China. What happens when a rising power like China

threatens to displace a dominant power like America. Perhaps no one is more qualified to answer this all-important question than Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University. Professor Allison is a world-renowned scholar and foreign policy expert who has advised multiple U.S. governments on defense policy for the last four decades. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including Destin for War, Can America and China escape Thucydides' trap. Professor Allison joins us from Boston. Graham, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thank you very much for having me. Let's jump right in here and kind of set the scene for

our listeners. What would you characterize as the state today of relations between the United States and China? Well, it's a timely question coming right after the Bali bilateral summit between Biden and Xi, but I think the consensus judgment has been that the relations between the U.S. and China are the worst that they've been in the 50 years since the opening to China. It's hard to remember, but that was back in 1972 with Kissinger and Nixon and Mao and Sho and Lai. And I agree with the consensus judgment that they are about as bad as they have been, even though I think what happened in Bali in the bilateral summit was at least the beginning of what I hope will be an effort to build a bit of a floor under the continued deterioration. But I think that equally

important point for your listeners and for all of us is to think about why this downward spiral. And there, I think there are two big factors. The first that most people neglect is the structural reality. And then the second are the policy choices that have been made by the governments. And the structural reality is captured by Thucydides in his brilliant analysis of the rise of Athens and its impact on Sparta back in Clark. classical Greece, but at this stage I don't think anybody can deny that China is a meteoric rising power, that the U.S. is a colossal ruling power, and that the clear threat by China

to displace the U.S. from its traditional position of predominance at the top of every pecking order is creating a dynamic that Thucydides captured in what I've characterized as Thucydides' trap. Namely, when a rising power, rapidly rising power, seriously threatens to displace a major ruling power, all hell busts loose, disruption and ahead, seatbelts to be tightened, and Rocky, and typically, unfortunately, most often, a dynamic that ends up dragging the people into a war, often a war that neither of them really wanted, but which nonetheless they came from one to one choice to the next choice and felt that they had no alternative but to take a little bit greater chance and one thing led to the other. So that structural reality is the first, and I would say that accounts for more than half of the deterioration.

So in my Destin for War book published just as Trump became president, I said, expect things to get worse before they get worse. So that's for the structural reason. The second is the policy choices, and there I would say both policy choices in Beijing and in Washington and elsewhere. where finding it so difficult to deal with the reality of the, and even the shock, of a genuine rivalry, the typical reaction, again, in lucidity in terms, is to say, Shri Karo, who is this party, and what does he think he's doing? Why is he challenging me? So Washington's reactions have been rather typical, And similarly, as people say, well, but Xi Jinping seems more aggressive, more assertive, more determined to stand up for China. That's called normal for a rising power.

As, again, Thucydides explained, power that's becoming stronger, looks at the order that has been provided by the ruling power and says, will you establish this before I even got here? You didn't consult me. My interests weren't taken into account. Things need to adapt and adjust. So I think so far, the reactions both in Washington and Beijing and unfortunately elsewhere have been stumbling trying to find some way to deal with the fact that

while on the one hand, China will for the U.S. and for the West pose the gravest chat, the gravest rivalry they've ever seen. So that's baked into the geopolitics. On the other hand, equally powerful is the fact that we both live on a very small globe and that in this enclosed biosphere

we each emit greenhouse gases. And they have the same impact no matter whether they come from Canada or U.S. or Africa or China. and any parties, especially the U.S. and China, the number one and number two, can by themselves on their current trajectory, create a biosphere that none of us can live in before the end of the century. So you say, well, yikes, we have to find some way to take account of that. And it's not enough just to regard you as my rival. You also have to be my partner in trying to deal with that. Secondly, we both have nuclear arsenals that are robust enough so that if there should be a nuclear war between the U.S. and China, both societies would end up being destroyed.

So we can't have a war that becomes a nuclear war. So we therefore have a shared powerful interest that comes just from the necessity for my survival. And what about pandemics? They don't have passports. And what about financial crises that start one place and end up creating a difference? So there's a level of interdependence that's been created by a combination of nature for climate and technologies for nuclear weapons and development of modern, you know, integrated societies, that while we're rivals require us to be partners. Well, that's pretty stressful. So I would say that's the challenge that both Beijing and Washington are dealing with.

It's not surprising that in the first instance, they're having some difficulty getting their head around that. Excellent. Summing up. Thank you so much. As we think about what could be the trigger for a conflict to this point that has been largely one of words, tense nonetheless, high stakes nonetheless, as you've mentioned, climate change, pandemics, We could think of the regulation of artificial intelligence. There's so many things that China, the United States arguably urgently need to cooperate on.

But the proverbial flying the ointment, you know it well, Graham. It is Taiwan. And I wonder how you might see China going about asserting its territorial rights over Taiwan in what people are now positing an increasingly near-term scenario for such an event to occur? Well, a great question and a big one. So the fastest track of war between the U.S. and China goes through Taiwan. We should just start with what the realities are. So the differences in views between Beijing, Washington, and Taiwan are essentially

irreconcilable, but they were a irreconcilable 50 years ago. So irreconcilable does not mean unmanageable, even though managing it could require a great deal of imagination. So that's the first place to start. This is not hopeless, or any case, it's not more hopeless than it was 50 years ago. and what was created 50 years ago was a framework in which in the past 50 years people living on both sides of the straits have seen a greater increase in their well-being than any five decades in their whole history.

So that's for Taiwanese, that's for Chinese, that's for the whole area. So I would say, what a fantastic success. Don't screw it up. That's the first thing. So then secondly, well then why is this at risk of conflict? And I would say, well, China has an indelible commitment to Taiwan as an integral part of China. And any effort to separate Taiwan from China on some permanent basis as an independent country,

is something any Chinese leader would fight, go to war to prevent. Because if he failed to do so, he wouldn't be the leader anymore. Okay? So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, Taiwanese have grown up, especially, you know, now the majority of the Taiwanese population, have grown up in a free self-governing country. So they're accustomed to living in a very successful market economy that has a very lively democracy, a very vibrant 23 million people. And more and more, they cannot imagine that that's not normal.

And if you ask them, well, how would you like to live in Hong Kong? They don't want to live in Hong Kong. They want to live in Taiwan. Or how would you like to live in Beijing? They don't want to live in Beijing. They like to live free. And I would say for Americans or Canadians or others in the world that live in free societies, one has to be greatly admiring of what they've created.

And it seems quite plausible to say, well, why shouldn't they be able to live as a free country? And there's only one reason. Why is because China will not permit that happening. So can somehow the U.S. and China and Taiwan manage to sustain under some something called strategic ambiguity or some some some rapper that basically manages contradictions for some substantial period of time. Well, people said 50 years ago you can't do this. Excuse me, they did.

And we have. So I would say that's the challenge going forward. and I think the why is it now, why is there more concern about it, more alarm about it? And I would say several reasons. First, there's no question Xi Jinping has made more, more, more, spoken more about and talked more about the need not to keep passing on this problem from one generation to another, even suggesting that he needs to do it during his leadership to make sure Taiwan is reintegrated. And I think Chinese watching what's going on in Taiwan see that Taiwanese are getting less and less interested in becoming an integral part of a China that's ruled by an autocratic party-led Xi. So that's on the one hand.

On the other hand, in the U.S., as China has become identified first as a competitor and then as an adversary and then more and more increasingly as an enemy, the idea that, well, we should confront China wherever we can. and here's a good place to do so. So if they are behaving like they deserve to take over a self-governing, vibrant, market-oriented democracy, we should be standing up for them and defending them the way that we're trying to help defend Ukraine against Russia. Why shouldn't we? I mean, if we believe in the values that we say we believe in, we have a stake in this.

And beyond that, people are now making arguments about, well, there's also a military rationale if Taiwan was part of the first island chain or something. I don't find much plausibility in that, but still, that's an argument. And another is, well, Taiwan is not just a free independent or self-governing entity. It's also got a very lively technology set of companies, including the most important semiconductor company in the world, DSM. So you can see how on the U.S. side, increasingly there's an effort to protect Taiwan. And I think the danger in this is that some other, thinking, unwitting provocation creates conditions in which either of the parties feels obliged

to respond in a way that takes them to another round of this, what would be a basically vicious circle in the end that would lead to conflict. And the analogy that I think is most troubling is what happened in the period running up to 1914, which you're familiar with, and I'm sure some of your listeners are, but basically I believe you cannot study 1914 too much. I have a pretty good chapter on it, if one wants just a chapter version in my Destin for War book. But the fact is that under the conditions that had been created, something as bizarre as a terrorist killing an Archduke in Sarajevo, which was something that didn't even make the front pages in New York or Canada, you know, at the time,

within five weeks had dragged all the nations of Europe into a war at the end of which they were all basically destroyed. So the fact that parties don't want a war doesn't mean that a war can't happen. The fact that if they, if after the war, if in 1918, you would have given any of the last, leaders who were in power in 1914 a chance for a do-over, nobody would have made the choices he made, now that they could see where they led, but in the circumstances they couldn't. So I can imagine, just to go to the heart of your question, I think the great danger arises not from she waking up one day saying this is a good day to do this. I think he has such a long agenda, such an ambitious agenda at home, since he knows that the costs of this would be huge

and that there would be great uncertainties about it that would disrupt the rest of his agenda. I'm not counting on him waking up out of the blue conducting a... What I can, though, imagine is that American politics now essentially caught up in the furious competition between Republicans and Democrats could in the course of the 24 campaign

presidential campaign and then a new administration in or second term of Biden in 2025 create a political dynamic in which Republicans call for recognition of an independent Taiwan. And if that seems crazy, Mike Pompeo, who's running for nomination, has already done that. And it's not, unfortunately, just Republicans making this If you look at Menendez, who's the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,

Lindsey Graham Bill that came out of their Foreign Relations Committee just a month ago. It's called the Taiwan Policy Act. That initially called for a, quote, recognition of Taiwan as a non-NATO ally, which is like about five steps up, you know, recognition as a country. Well, my best judgment, and I've asked all the China experts I can about this, is that if that should happen, if the U.S. declared that it was recognizing Taiwan as an independent country, or even more, it's a lie. And even if the U.S. seem to be about to do that, now what will Beijing do? So I would say it's not unlikely, I would say quite likely, that Beijing will react violently, and then they have a menu of things that they could do.

But I would say that's the fastest path I can find forgetting from where we are to nuclear war. So I think crucial for the parties to recognize why war would be catastrophic for both of them. Fortunately, in Xi and Biden, you have two very sane people, and I'm confident that when they talked about this in Bali, they talked pretty candidly about the fact that neither of them wants a war. They both know that they wanted a war. They can either start it yesterday, tomorrow. They don't need a provocation,

but that they're going to be trying to work to try to constrain what are otherwise the forces that would lead either Washington or Beijing to do something that would force the hand of the other party. 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 masterclass 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 debate. Simply access via our website, Triple W Monk. Debates.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. So Graham, I think one of the questions people are wondering about is in addition to these kind of flashpoint scenarios that you've outlined, which I think are very compelling, there is under the Biden administration a commitment now to increasingly arm Taiwan and not insignificantly. We're talking about billions of dollars now of arms pledges, sophisticated defensive systems, but also now increasingly offensive weapons such as surface to ship missiles that could conceivably allow Taiwan to project force off its. coasts. How, Graham, have we gotten so far in some people's minds from the kind of one China

policy, which in a sense had embedded in it an assumption kind of non-interference, to a moment now where there is a one might characterize, least from the Chinese perspective of view, a kind of aggressive arming of Taiwan into a beachhead, a bunker. 100, 160 kilometers off its coast. Yeah. Well, Taiwan, I mean, I always try to explain to people in Washington. Taiwan is to China in distance about the Cuba from the U.S. So 90 or 100 miles.

So, you know, you can't quite see that far, but it's not very far. You can get in a boat and be there quickly. and it's very close to China and it's very far away from the U.S. So this tyranny of distance in potential military conflicts is a huge, huge, huge factor. But I think to your question, the contradictions were built into the basic Taiwan relations or the Shanghai communique and its successors in which Taiwan would be essentially. self-governing. Taiwan would not declare itself to be an independent country. The U.S. would not recognize it as an independent country. And we would let history decide or let time decide,

see what happens. So in an early stage of this, and I still like the idea of describing Taiwan as kind of a Chinese experiment or democracy. with Chinese characteristics. So part of their broader experiment, and they should take credit for that. They're trying to understand how Chinese can govern themselves. Every society is trying to understand how to do that, certainly Americans.

So in that setting, the question of what's the relative military capabilities of the parties for preventing any one of the parties attempting to move from letting history decide, to a unilateral military action that would change the conditions. The U.S. and Taiwan, well, everybody's position has been no change in the status quo by a unilateral use of military force. So then the question is, well, what are the relative

military capabilities of the parties? In 1995-96, when I was in the Pentagon, when China, when Taiwan was taking a few provocative steps and China responded to it by an effort to coerce Taiwan by brackening it with missile tests, the U.S. had overwhelming military superiority, brought two carriers up into the area and forced China to basically withdraw or to submit in a way that for them they found even humiliating for the P.S. But from that day to this day, every day they've gotten up and built up Chinese military capabilities against Taiwan to prevent that happening. So what they – arming of Taiwan or making it more like a porcupine, as people in the penning

I'd like to say, is raising the price for China of a military action against Taiwan so that it would take them a week or two weeks or three weeks. to dominate Taiwan as opposed to, you know, a few days. And similarly, the effort to build up U.S. military forces in the area is again to raise the price of a conflict and the risk that it might also ultimately involve a war with the U.S. So I still think we're in a struggle aimed at deterring conflict rather than than preparing to take the initiative. And in the case of Taiwan,

Taiwan would obviously easily be destroyed by China if it decided to destroy it. They have many ways to do that, or defeated by China if China made an all-out effort to defeat it. The question is how long, at what price, at what cost, at what risk. And the US position has been to try to keep the cost and price and risks so high that when people come to Xi Jinping

and say, this is a good day for doing this, he says, I don't think this is a good day. We have nine other things to do. Just keep working on it. And therefore, I think the challenge for both Beijing and Washington and Taiwan is to avoid some provocation that's so dramatic that any one of the parties has to depart from what they're otherwise doing.

Graham, one of the scenarios, and I think you know it well, is instead of an outright Chinese attack on Taiwan, that the PLA would look to, in a sense, blockade the island. And we certainly got a taste for what that might look like after Speaker Pelosi's visit to the island and the Chinese reaction to that. There's a lot to say about a blockade, But I wonder what you think specifically the American response to that,

because it wouldn't be an outright invasion. It wouldn't involve, you know, the targeting of Taiwan in the same horrible way that Vladimir Putin's Russia is, you know, dismembering Ukraine. Instead, it, in a sense, puts the ball in the American court to break a blockade, to put its ships its men and women in harm's way, conceivably, to, show that the Chinese blockade is ineffective. Does that scenario worry you? And what do you think the American response would be to blockade?

So good for you. I would say I have been trying to help our team, you know, work through these scenarios. And that's certainly one. In fact, I can make it a little more mischievous for you. So I think we saw in Pelosi's absolutely, the unnecessary and dangerous visit that provided a pretext for China basically

practicing the next level of what its capability, the capability it's developing, a picture of what could happen. So I think that what would happen would be, in the first instance, what they would call, as the US did in the Cuban Misses, crisis, not a blockade, but a quarantine. And they would say the quarantine is only a quarantine of illegal shipments of either by sea or by air into Taiwan. So in order to, we certainly want

the chips to keep flowing one way and the food and oil to keep flowing the other way. We're not trying to interrupt normal commercial activity. We're just interrupting the rival of arms that could be destabilizing or of drugs or of, you know, weather, whatever, whatever. So, and in order for your ships to come, they just have to be approved, the shipment by us. Okay. This is our territory. We're just simply exercising our sovereign rights over the territory. Now the question, as you put it, is, well, what the U.S. do?

And I think testing the blockade line with military ships, escorts, escorts, and, you know, a shipment that would otherwise be, quote, illegal or had not been approved. It's obviously at the top, you know, had to be on the list. And as the Soviets discovered when they were trying to test the blockade or quarantine line in Cuba in 1962, that means ship confronting ship. And then either the ships crashing into each other or firing upon each other. And then if one ship is sunk, what about tit for tat retaliation? So you pretty quickly get on an escalation ladder.

That's pretty dangerous. And the Soviets, when they looked at it carefully, thought, well, wait a minute. We're halfway around the world. These guys are right at their border. They have a lot of ships there, and we have a few. If that reminds you of anything in Taiwan, I would say it's not coincidental. So that's a very difficult case. And I think that one would try to think about, okay, well,

if I can't militarily interfere, what else could I do? Well, could I create a quarantine on Chinese shipments at some other barrier, maybe like the Malacca Straits? And so Chinese are dependent on shipments of oil to come to China and also of their goods to go to fill Walmarts and targets. So could I have some counter-quarantine? I don't know. It's complicated. And you don't want to get down to breaking up a freedom of the sea, which is, you know, an important principle. or are there other economic areas where, so I think that's extremely dangerous,

and I would hope that it would certainly become a crisis that would remind one of crises that we've seen in history that unless managed successfully, could ultimately lead to conflict. And Graham, when we think of a scenario like that, and we're in the world of hypotheticals here, But if we think of the issues that we're grappling with right now, let's say high inflation, fractured supply chains, lack of coordination on all those issues we talked about at the top of the show, climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, I guess is this worth it? I mean, is it worth the United States and China, should China, let's say, implement this quarantine, to permanently kind of fracture and tear up, you know, a relationship that is at the very heart, the very essence of the globalized world that we live in now? I mean, China has been allowed to, if we're honest with it,

ourselves to basically repossess Hong Kong with little or no serious consequences. Taiwan is different than Hong Kong. I think we all acknowledge that. But it's also different than Ukraine. It's not acknowledged in the same way that Ukraine is as an independent sovereign state, say, in the United Nations or in a variety of international laws and treaties and covenants. So I guess, Graham, is discretion the better part of valor here? Is there potentially an acknowledgement at the end of the day that this is just not a conflict, a flashpoint over Taiwan that the United States is worth having with China? Extremely hard question.

So if it turned out that by standing up for Taiwan's, the U.S. ended in a general war with China. So not just your inflation and recession and pandemics and all the other horrible things, but actually nuclear bombs landing in Boston. After the fact, I would say if I were still here, boy, that was a bad idea, okay. So, but the more complicated question is,

should the US be prepared? to run some risk of war with China in order to let this evolution continue. And is that feasible given the dynamics? And that's why I started with looking back 50 years. So 50 years ago, if one had listened initially, actually the transcripts of the the Kissinger show and lie conversations, the initial conversations have now been declassified, so you can read the conversation. And it's very clear they have irreconcilable differences about Taiwan. I mean completely irreconcilable. So you could easily have concluded from that,

well, this is hopeless, you know. We're not going to be able, they're insisting that we give them Taiwan if we're going to have a relationship. And so either we're going to do it or we're not. And ultimately was decided some way to create this strategic ambiguity in which Taiwan has been a self-governing country for all this period. So this, I think, lead me to conclude. This is not hopeless, okay?

It's quite possible. Now it's risky, it's dangerous. Now, that's point one, point two. to your point, go back to the real politic. So in the period after the communist, after Mao's communists won the civil war in China in 1949, the U.S. looked at the question of Taiwan. Shankai Shek and his forces that had been defeated, retreated to Taiwan and took it over from the Taiwanese that were living there.

and the question was, does the U.S. have a dog in this fight? We had already been earlier supporting Shankai Shik against the communists, but Truman and the Truman administration concluded, no, we're not going to defend Taiwan. So when they did their defense perimeter, Taiwan was outside it. So it was only after North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950, with at least a yellow light from Bahmah and Beijing, that Truman decided, well, okay, we're going to defend Taiwan as well. So earlier, the U.S. was prepared in terms of big geostrategic interest

to not worry about Taiwan. In the period since then, it's become a feature of the relationship. So what about today? I think that I cannot imagine an American government declaring that the U.S. has no strategic interest in Taiwan. Partly that's because in a Thucidity and rivalry ruling powers don't do that. Partly people would argue, well, if you'll do that, then you're not going to defend, you know, whatever, whatever. So there's many, many objections. So I think we're going to have to find a way to live with this and to manage it.

And I think it's extremely dangerous. And I think it'll become increasingly dangerous, as I said, as Americans go into our political season, where the detachment from reality can be quite substantial. A polite way to put it. question, you know, here at the Monk Dialogues, we care a lot about the nuclear threat and specifically the threat of the existential threat of atomic weapons. You've mentioned them a few times in this discussion. They seem just so far outside of our ability to comprehend in terms of any future

reality. But when you look at what's happening here in this potential flashpoint, this Thucydides trap that China and the United States is falling into, if you look at what's happening, in Ukraine with this increasingly loose and irresponsible language around nuclear weapons by the Putin regime. You're somebody with direct experience of the Cuban missile crisis through to today. How serious is this risk? How worried are you about breaking the nuclear taboo after 75 years? Well, again, a great question, and thank you. I think that obviously this is one that most people find so bizarre that it just seems like, as you say, this can't be real. Either they've been working to a nightmare or to they're rewatching a bad movie.

They think that somehow, that's all 20, my students say, that's all 20th century. You know, that's in the rearview mirror that nuclear weapons must somehow have been, I don't know, banished with the end of the Cold War. And remember, we won the Cold War. So, you know, we're not supposed to worry about that any longer. And I think, unfortunately, Putin in particular, with his nuclear threats in Ukraine, is giving people a painful wake-up call to the fact that the Cold War did. end and the Soviet Union did disappear, but nuclear weapons remained. Nuclear weapons at the level of thousands of nuclear weapons under the command of Vladimir Putin.

So as certainly as any leader of the evil empire had a superpower arsenal that could destroy Taiwan and Boston and New York and every other city in North America. Putin does. And as certainly as the Soviet Union ever had tactical nuclear weapons that could be used against NATO troops, Putin has. And in the Chinese case, we have something similar, but I would say there are at least several degrees removed. The Chinese have not been rattling their nuclear saber or talking about nuclear war, even though they're having a buildup of their own what's otherwise been a minimum nuclear deterrent. But the most, the gravest danger, as Biden has rightly said, that we've seen of a use of nuclear weapons that might put us on to an escalator to nuclear Armageddon is what we're now seeing play out in Ukraine. And there I would say three things.

First, is it possible that Putin would rationally choose to conduct a nuclear strike on Ukraine? And I believe the answer is yes. He frames it in the same terms as he calls it, you know, basically following the American precedent when Truman decided to drop nuclear bomb first on. Hiroshima and then secondly on Nagasaki again now you know in ancient history but it's a fact that in order to end World War II against Japan Truman rational in his view rationally and afterwards when he was asked about it he said if I had to do this I would do it again killed 140,000 people in the first strike on

Hiroshima because he didn't want to fight, you know, island to island hand to hand to defeat Japan. So Putin, I think, how could I imagine Putin would choose to use nuclear weapons in this case? I think fortunately only if he's forced to choose between humiliating defeat on the one hand and using nuclear weapons in the faint hope. Not a great hope, I would say, but a faint hope of nonetheless achieving an outcome that he can live with. In the case he's defeated, in the case, Zelensky achieves his objectives, liberate all of Ukraine.

If he were to succeed in doing that, this would be a humiliating defeat for Putin. Would it be an existential crisis for Russia? I don't think so. Russia will still survive. Would it be an existential crisis for Putin? You bet. People would say, what a colossal strategic error you made, and you've got nothing for it. And with all the impact.

So I think he believes this is existential for him. I believe it's existential for him. So if between an existential defeat, for himself and all he cares about and all his view of Russia and taking a chance with the nuclear strike, I believe there's four to one chance he would end up taking that action. So that, you think, whoa, wait a minute. Now, if he were to do that, what the consequence is? We will be living in a new world. Okay. If you say, a taboo that's now for more than seven decades, made the use of nuclear weapons, quote, unthinkable, will have been broken.

And how will the West respond? Again, the answer is, I've worked through the agenda or the menu, and it starts with horrible, and it goes to catastrophic. So there's no good response, no good response. So trying to prevent that happening is our current focus. And there, I would say one piece of good news that came out first of the meeting between Xi and Chancellor Schulz back now 10 days ago, and then reiterated at the G20 meeting in Bali was the call by leaders, including she, on all states, quote, not to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. Well, that's a pretty strong message

because there's only one guy out there doing this and it happens to be his most important ally happened to be she so if he's saying to Putin which he certainly told him before he announced it with Schultz they have a relationship where they wouldn't surprise each other I think this is a bad idea

bad idea for me that's a pretty big message So I'm for day looking for, I look for silver linings, but I would say that's a silver lining in this case. But I think it also reminds us that in the war in Ukraine, horrible as it is and remarkable as Zelensky and the Ukrainian people's response has been, that we have a stake, we all have a stake in this coming to some stalemate. a short of a humiliating defeat for Putin if the alternative is for him to conduct a nuclear strike that will put us all in a, you know, in a world that we don't want to be in. So that's not something that Zelensky and Ukrainians like to hear.

It's not something that we can force upon them. Ultimately, they have to decide, you know, about their own fate, but I think it's a reality that they have to take account of. and I have been vocal about the, just sort of, I'm just describing the, you know, the reality. I'm not necessarily saying what people should do. I'm saying down this path or this risk and down this path or other risk. But I think for Ukraine, having so successfully defeated Putin's effort to erase Ukraine from the map and having done so with such remarkable courage, They now have a claim on the world to build a successful society.

And I think that's going to be an even bigger challenge than defeating Putin. And whether there are 100 kilometers this direction or that direction from ultimately liberating all of their territory, I don't think is central to that undertaking. So I'm hopeful that maybe come winter and something like, like a stalemate along the current line of divide plus or minus a little bit this way or that way, you might see some de facto, I don't think negotiated agreement, but some de facto stalemate, in which then Ukraine would turn to focusing primarily on nation building, which is going to be a big chat,

and West would be generously supportive in every possible way. especially financially but also technically to that effort. And Ukraine never giving up the claim to recover every square inch of its territory, but, you know, West Germany didn't get back all of East Germany for a long time, and South Korea hasn't got back North Korea yet, but they've demonstrated they can build very successful societies, and then over time, history, I think, ultimately will go to the, people that can build more successful societies.

Well, you've been very generous with your time, your wisdom, and your insights, Graham. Thank you so much for coming on the monk dialogues today. I've learned a ton, and I was looking forward to this conversation, and you've done with me in the last 45 minutes or so everything that I wanted to accomplish with it. So thank you again for your insights and analysis. Greatly appreciate it. Well, thank you for such good questions, and I enjoyed that conversation, and I'll look forward to more.

So look forward to seeing you sometime. Thank you. Thank you, Graham. Bye-bye. While that wraps up today's episode, I want to thank our guest, Professor Graham Allison. He certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard or any of our other podcasts, whether it be the Monk Dialogues or our one-on-one debate series,

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