The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Stephen Walt: Surprising developments in the war between Russia and Ukraine

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

Ukraine is in ruins. Casualties are piling up on both sides. And western sanctions don’t seem to be working. As the war between Russia and Ukraine enters its 20th month, experts fear that a negotiated settlement will not be reached anytime soon. On this Munk Dialogue, we’re joined by one of the world’s leading realist thinkers in international relations, Stephen Walt, to talk about some surprising developments that have emerged from this conflict, and why it could drag on for much longer than anyone had anticipated. SOURCES: PBS, ABC News   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 Editor: Kieran Lynch  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 democracies. Hello, Monk listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here.

moderator, welcome to this, our latest continuing conversations called the monk dialogues. These are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers on each monk dialogue. We go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and shaping our future. Across Ukraine, there's been a series of attacks from both sides as the war drags on. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, roughly 13 million more displaced, including 8 million refugees across Europe now. This has been a long and brutal summer in Ukraine as Kiev's counteroffensive continues to retake its lands in the east and south, now occupied by Russia. Ukraine is in ruins while Russian casualties are piling up. In Western sanctions so far don't seem to be working

against Russia as intended. As the war between Russia and Ukraine enters its 20th month, experts fear that a negotiated settlement will not be reached anytime soon. On this monk dialogue, we're joined by one of the world's leading realist thinkers in international relations. Harvard University professor Stephen Walt, talk about some surprising developments that emerged from this conflict and why it could drag on for much longer. Stephen Walt, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. It's a pleasure to be back talking with you.

Likewise, I remember our important debate with you on the war in Ukraine, really just weeks after it broke out. We convened you, John Mearsheimer, Ambassador Michael McFaul, and Radik Sikorski, the former Foreign Minister of Poland. I want to start with you, Stephen, with that debate almost more than a year and a half ago now. What surprised you about the course of this war and your kind of specialty, great power politics? What strikes you as maybe novel or new? What's worth our attention over the last 18 months? I'd point to maybe three things that are somewhat surprising in how the war has proceeded.

I'm not sure anybody really anticipated particularly well. I mean, first, I think we underestimated early on the Russian ability to adapt and learn. Their military performance in the first months of the war seemed to be so poor. the failed assault on Kiev as well, I think there was a tendency to then denigrate Russian military capabilities. The fact that the initial Ukrainian counteroffensive in the fall of 2022 went very well, again, made people think that this was really the gang that couldn't shoot straight. And I think people have been surprised since then that the Russians have learned, they've gotten better. and that's been something I think relatively few people anticipated, particularly after the first

few months of the war. Second thing is that sanctions proved to be less effective than many people anticipated, both before the war and in the early months. What's interesting, of course, is that, in fact, the West did more in terms of sanctions than many people thought they would. The fact that Germany weaned itself off Russian oil and gas with remarkable. speed. Lots of countries in the West joined in the sanctions program. So in a sense, the sanctions were more successful in one sense, but not in terms of really weakening the Russian economy,

certainly not changing Russia's course of action, that the Russian economies managed to adapt in various ways. They've managed to continue exporting oil and gas. But I think people overestimated how effective sanctions would be. And I would count myself in that camp as well. And then third, and this is maybe the most disturbing, is I think we've all been surprised to discover how unprepared NATO and the United States, the West as a whole, were for modern industrial strength warfare. We were accustomed to fighting these short, quick campaigns against relatively weak opponents like the Iraqi army or fighting counterinsurgency campaigns like the war in Afghanistan, but not a big, you know, artillery. an armor-based war of attrition involving massive amounts of ammunition. And we're discovering, of course, that the West just isn't ready for that. Not only did we not have sufficient ammunition stocks, despite all the things that were sent to Ukraine,

but you couldn't spin up the industrial base to start producing lots of them. So the United States, somewhat surprisingly, started shipping cluster munitions to Ukraine, not because we thought that was such a great idea, but because we were running out of ammunition to send otherwise. And I think that's been a bit of a wake-up call as well, that back when we were in Toronto debating some of these issues, nobody thought about that issue. And that has been, again, one of the unpleasant surprises of a very unpleasant conflict.

One of the key premises of the key premise of the spring 2022 debate that you took part with us on the Ukraine war, was that ending the war, a solution to it would require somehow acknowledging Russia's interests. Where do you think we are at, Stephen, in terms of that conversation? Has the seeming slowness, the stalling of this counteroffensive opened the way for that argument? Because up until now, Stephen, I think you would acknowledge that very few people have been willing to really give any quarter to the idea that we should be acknowledging some of Russia's interests to find some kind of resolution stalemate at minimum

an end to the bloodshed and slaughter. Well, I'd make a general point first, that unless you can inflict a total military defeat on another country and occupy its territory in entirety and then dictate terms, at some respect, ending a war always involves to some degree accommodating each side's interests. at least the ones that are most important to them. So if you don't think you're going to be able to inflict a decisive military defeat on Russia, then at some point you're going to have to accommodate at least some of their interests as well. You know, our argument back in May of 2022 was that a fundamental cause of the war,

if not the fundamental cause, was Russia's fear that Ukraine was being absorbed into the Western security order. It was essentially a discussion about or debate about Ukraine's overall geopolitical alignment. I'll just say, by the way, that yes, that's been an unpopular view over the last 18 months, two years. It was not a radical view for many years beforehand. This was the point that Ambassador Bill Burns made in 2008 when he was ambassador to Russia and said, you know, Ukrainian entry into NATO was the brightest of all red lines for all the Russians he knew, including liberal critics of Putin and lots of other people, Secretary of Defense, William Perry. back in the 1990s, George Kennan, Angela Merkel, everyone had acknowledged that Ukraine's geopolitical

alignment was a core issue for Russia, and pushing too hard on that might provoke a conflict. It also just makes a certain amount of logical sense. Great powers tend to be very worried about their immediate surroundings. That's certainly true of the United States. We're just fortunate to have Canada as a neighbor rather than a country that might be dangerous. But all, All this means is to end the war, you know, we argued back then you had to address Russian security concerns. If you didn't, the war would go on. It would gradually escalate and Ukraine would be wrecked in the process, would be heavily damaged.

Now, that was back then. In some respects, the situation's even worse now because the discussion back then was just about this question of Ukraine's geopolitical alignment. You know, how is it going to locate itself? is it going to be a neutral country, et cetera. And there was some question about what would be the relationship of the two eastern oblast, Donetsk and Lukans, would they have some degree of autonomy? Those were the issues. The issues now are much broader and much tougher to resolve. You still have the question of Ukrainian neutrality or membership in NATO or whatever its future

is going to be. But now Russia has claimed not just those first two oblasts for autonomy. autonomy, but they've formally annexed for Oblasts as well. So you have a much bigger territorial dispute than you had a year and a half ago. And of course, on our side, on the Ukrainian side and on the western side, in some respects, our war aims have gone up too. We were originally, you know, hoping to preserve Ukrainian independence, but now it's Ukraine getting back all of its territory, including Crimea, Vladimir Putin has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, so the people who want to see Putin ousted and put on trial, in a sense, both sides now want more than they wanted when the war initially broke out. And last but not least, the level of

destruction has gone way up, especially for Ukraine, which in my view is a terrible tragedy. and one of the reasons why I hope the war ends as soon as possible. Let's just briefly think together, but what could that endgame look like? Is this something that might start to take some shape as soon as this autumn? Are you expecting instead a much longer path to even the commencement of negotiations or some kind of dialogue? What is your sense of the relative intensity, fatalities, You know, the resources of men and material. What does the equation look like right now to you, Stephen?

And what might be a timeline if you could look at past conflicts, if there are any analogies to history, to explain how this might play out? I mean, I think it's really hard to give a firm timeline. I am not optimistic that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is going to achieve any strategically significant results. It may gain bits of territory in various places, but it's doing so at an extraordinarily high cost. And I actually think Ukraine would be better served actually to shift back to the defensive, preserve the territory that they have. The problem is that you can't win a war of attrition, which is what we're in now, against a numerically larger adversary, especially if you're

fighting on the offensive where you're more vulnerable and you're going into very well-prepared defenses. The result of this is Ukraine, which is smaller than Russia by a substantial margin, is losing more than the Russians are. And that's just not a winning strategy there as well. There have been, I think, rumors of informal talks, some track two discussions, things like that. But I don't believe at this stage, the Russians are in any hurry to bring this to an end because they're not doing badly in terms of their objectives. And the question I think will be, you know, at what point do they decide that the strategic situation vis-a-vis Ukraine is sort of satisfactory enough from their point of view? And then we have to then get into all of the details that would have to be worked out. and they are considerable.

There is, first of all, the original question, what is Ukraine's geopolitical alignment going to be? Is it going to be neutral? Is it going to be in the Russian sphere? Is it going to be in the Western sphere, et cetera? There's the question of what's the territorial distribution now. Where's the line going to be drawn here? How much of its territory will Ukraine get back? Some all, not much.

You know, we don't need to determine that. we have to figure out what the shipping arrangements in the Black Sea are going to be so that these problems of shipping grain have been resolved as well. There's the question of war crimes and whether or not anyone's going to be held accountable for them, et cetera, repatriation of prisoners, repatriation of population. There's a lot of issues here that have to be sorted through. And I don't think that conversation will really begin in earnest until each side understand that they've got sort of about as much as they can reasonably get.

I also think it's going to be difficult for Americans, despite the fact that they've played a sort of leadership role in supporting Ukraine, it's going to be difficult for the Biden administration to push hard on Kyiv to start talking in a serious way, particularly in the run-up to a presidential election, and a presidential election where the U.S. has been all in, you know, for as long as it takes. So I don't see a negotiated settlement happening in the next 18 months to two years.

And again, I take no pleasure whatsoever in saying that. Yeah, great, great insights. I wonder if you just help me with one thing that I've struggled a bit with over the last 18 months, which is this inversion of roles, Stephen, in people's thinking, and some might almost say ideology, to their theory of the conflict and how this war should be persecuted. It seems that we're at a point where, to use the nomenclature of the moment, you know, the hawks are doves and the doves are hawks. And there's been this switching of people who might normally have been associated with,

let's say a more kind of liberal worldview, who traditionally would have looked for approaches of negotiation, of settlement, of certainly not a kind of maximal approach to a war and to that war's aims. And then on the other side, maybe the camp, sometimes you're associated with the realists, fairly or not, are often seen to be more the practitioners of hard power. who look at hard power as a way to as a reality of the world and a way that, you know, states solve problems. Yet now it seems that the realists are often in the so-called peace camp and the, you know, the neoliberal or whatever you want to call them are in the war camp. And is this noteworthy, Stephen, is this a some kind of switch or changeover in West.

views about foreign policy and the theories underneath them, or is this just a product of this unique conflict and what it's elicited? That's a great question. And I think it's actually not a new development at all. You go back to the 1960s. Some of the first and most eloquent opponents of American involvement in Vietnam were so-called realists. People like Hans Morgan Dow, Walter Lipman, my own advisor, Kenneth Walts, George Kennan, and others all thought the war in Vietnam was a bad idea, and it was American liberals who for a long time supported the war. You fast forward then to the war in Iraq in 2003. Again, the most visible opponents of that war were not American liberals. Lots of liberal hawks supported the war because Saddam Hussein was a

horrible tyrant and they were worried about human rights. You know, my friend and former Canadian politician, Michael Ignatyev, was a very eloquent supporter of the war beforehand. And it was realists like me who kept saying this is a bad idea, right? And similarly in the run-up to the war here in Ukraine, it's the realists who are saying, you know, if you keep poking a major power in the way the United States has been doing through NATO enlargement and a variety of other actions, eventually you're going to a reaction and you're not going to like that reaction when you get it. And it was the American liberals who thought you could spread democracy all over the world and expand NATO in an open-ended

fashion and it would never have any negative consequences who, of course, now, you know, do not wanted, they now want to deny responsibility for any of this by blaming everything on Vladimir Putin. So I think part of it is just understanding that, yes, realists do understand that hard power matters and they think international politics is mostly about the interplay of power. But that makes them respectful of what happens when power is misused, even with the best of intentions, even with the noblest of ideals behind it. And the tragedy here is it's the people of Ukraine who are now suffering most for the miscalculations that we made. To say that takes nothing away from Vladimir Putin's,

direct responsibility for ordering a war that is clearly illegal and has in some cases been fought in a quite brutal fashion. But we should have understood that that was likely to happen if we kept doing what we were doing. If you're enjoying the Friday Focus podcast as a donor, but haven't yet taken that next step of becoming a monk supporter. Now is your opportunity. For the next couple of weeks, we have a flash sale on 30% off monk supporter level membership. You get all kinds of great benefits, including a decade and a half back catalog of terrific debates and dialogues covering all the big issues of our time, commentary e-book, a charitable tax receipt for Canadian residents, and the ability to share your monk membership with friends and family. Just a few of the incredible perks of becoming a monk supporter.

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Let me pivot to China because this is another topic that you're writing a lot about. these days, and in some ways it is another great theater of great power relations. Stephen, what are you seeing right now in terms of how the contest over Taiwan is starting to shape up between China and the United States? Because there are some that are arguing that you could, if you want to be uncharitable, say that there is a pattern here of NATO encroached. around traditional Russian spheres of influence and concerns about security. And now once again, American-led ornament of Taiwan, again, for all kinds of potentially

legitimate reasons, including the freedom and independence of the Taiwanese people. But once again, encroaching deep into China's sphere of the influence, literally 100 miles off the border of mainland China sits the island of Taiwan. Do you have a concern, Stephen, that maybe we're not learning from history, that there's a risk here that the same patterns that led to this, for many of us, unexpected and calamitous war in Ukraine, could be playing out once again vis-a-vis this standoff over, you know, the future state of Taiwan? Yeah, I think there's clearly some warning signs here that one might interpret from this. I think one has to be careful to distinguish between the differences in the two cases as well.

You know, the United States has had a relationship with Taiwan and has had a military presence in East Asia for decades now. So it's not like we're suddenly moving to a closer relationship or a close relationship with Taiwan. I think one can make the argument that we may have gone a little further in the last few years, some of the statements that came out of President Biden that then got walked back, where we appeared to be leaving the so-called one-China policy in various ways, that that's something that's new. But the American presence in that part of the world is not entirely new. I do think the Ukraine analogy offers the warning.

of creating essentially a preventive war situation where China feels that we are taking steps that will render Taiwan forever out of reach, that there will be no possibility of reunification, not just by any arbitrary deadline that you might want to pick, but at any point ever. And deciding that if they don't do something now, then the opportunity may be lost for a century or more, possibly forever. And that's similar, it seems to me, to the situation that Russia and Putin felt back in 2020 and 2021, that because of the way we were arming Ukraine, training Ukraine, that if they waited five years, if they waited 10 years, Ukraine might be too tough to tackle and to address.

And there wouldn't be anything they could do about it. I think that's a cautionary, a cautionary tale. Now, a military operation against Taiwan by China is a much riskier operation. It could fail catastrophically because amphibious invasions are very difficult to do. I worry less about that than I worry about various other forms of military pressure, of blockade, starting to interfere with trade in a variety of ways and trying to force the United States to decide if it was going to resist this or not. I hope it doesn't come to that.

I think the United States should be doing more to reaffirm our commitment to the one China policy that we believe reunification should happen at some point that it should be voluntary on both sides and trying to do what we can to lower the temperature there while not giving sort of China a green light to do anything about it. And by the way, that's the other reason why some realists, I wouldn't put myself in that camp, But by some realists argue that we have to have a different policy vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine because the real challenge over the long term is China. And we're allowing ourselves to be distracted and, in fact, using up lots of equipment in a variety of ways that we might need for a more important conflict down the road.

That's one of the areas where I think, you know, you find realists actually disagreeing with each other to some degree. If you move beyond just the question of the risks associated with America's continuing armed supplies into Taiwan, and you look at the broader American strategy towards China now, especially this concerted effort by the Biden administration to remove from China or thwart their ability to master the, you know, the big technologies of the 21st century that are often. and enabled and facilitated by advanced computing, advanced computer chips. What is your view on this, Stephen? Is this a smart strategy to kind of hobble a potential peer competitor? Is it something, again, that could run unexpected risks if China genuinely feels that this is a policy of outright containment, thwarting their ability to progress as a nation, as a people, as they would think as a civilization. What's your take on both

the strategy and the intended effects? Are they calibrated properly at this moment? I worry that they are not calibrated properly. The sort of stepping back for a second, just recognize that the United States is doing something remarkably ambitious. We are essentially waging a proxy miller. military conflict against Russia, right, in Ukraine, and we are waging an economic war against China at the same time. Not surprisingly, that has further reinforced the Sino-Russian alliance or partnership, whatever you want to call it. But that's two pretty demanding tasks to take on simultaneously. Now, in terms of the actual campaign against China, the Biden administration has

tried to make it clear that this is narrow, focused, it is well calibrated, and it's focused almost entirely on strict national security concerns. Jake Sullivan's line, you know, that it's a high wall or a high fence, but a small yard that we're trying to protect here. And I think one can make perfectly legitimate, defensible arguments about how you don't want technologies that might have direct and immediate and important military applications to be sent to China in various ways. You don't want to do anything that's going to make their military substantially better in the near term. I think the problem is it's very hard to keep that yard small. You can raise the high fence, but the yard tends to get bigger and bigger and bigger because lots of these technologies have lots of

applications. And we appear to be not just focusing on sort of narrow things that might have direct military applications, but we appear to be trying to cripple their entire ability to command the commanding heights of digital technology. We want to stay ahead of them, not just in the military applications of that technology, but in artificial intelligence and the most sophisticated computer chips and down the road, 5G and 6G interfaces and interactivity. So all of that stuff appears to be designed not to crash the Chinese economy. I don't think we want to do that. It's not in our interest to do that, but to hobble it, to make sure it remains behind us

in a lot of these areas. And I think there are two great risks here. First risk is, of course, this poisons the relationship with Beijing, makes them much less likely to cooperate with us on areas where we ought to be collaborating, climate change, any number of other global issues, where our interests are in fact pretty closely aligned. But secondly, we're giving them an enormous incentive to compete with us on this and to try and become independent if they possibly can. So if you think that we can remain permanently ahead of China for the next 50 years on all

of these dimensions, maybe this would make sense, but I don't think that's likely. And meanwhile, while we are focused so heavily on this particular aspect of technology, they are forging ahead on solar. They're doing better than we are on wind technology. They're actually, I think, starting to lap us in terms of electric vehicles, and battery technology, things like that, which are also going to be pretty critical in the 21st century as well. So the idea that this economic war can sort of permanently handicap China, I think, is overly optimistic on our part.

What would you see as a potential Chinese reaction to this? What would the realist answer be to China in terms of how to respond to these pressures, technological, pressures around Taiwan in terms of perceptions of their own spheres of influence. We now know that reshoring is clearly having a non-insignificant effect on Chinese exports. They're down double digits in some of the most recent reports over the course of the last year. So would it be fair to say that China is under pressure? And I guess the question would be, how did you? How did you? The question, they think about this? And do you think that they use realist approaches to conceptualizing challenges and opportunities when it comes to their relationship with the United States and the future of

their country? So I think that under Xi Jinping, China has made a number of really serious missteps and his consolidation of power to where he is effectively unchallengable at this point has actually been a huge problem for China because he's not a genius. He's not infallible and he's made some pretty big mistakes. So he's in many respects departed from what I think most realists would have recommended for China, that China should continue to develop its economy, increase its military power as its economy developed, but not throw a lot of sharp elbows, not openly and explicitly say that they wanted to change the status quo. in Asia in a variety of ways, not proclaim lofty ambitions, that if you're going to be powerful,

you want to also sort of, you know, speak softly, but carry a big stick. And what the Chinese have done over the past 10 or 15 years is get an increasingly large stick and speak louder and louder and louder. The adoption of so-called wolf-forior diplomacy being one manifestation, the treatment of the two Michaels in Canada is a classic example of a, you know, from the Chinese point of view, self-inflicted wound, completely altered Canadian attitudes towards China. And there are other examples vis-a-vis Australia in a number of other countries as well. So the Chinese have not acted the way a realist would suggest. They've actually provoked a lot of opposition. And if I were advising Xi Jinping, I would say, look, we have to

continue to develop our economy, to continue to get stronger in a whole variety of ways. But we need to start improving our relations with other countries. We don't want to alarm others, particularly our neighbors, but we also don't want to alarm the Europeans and others, because we don't want to make it easy for the United States to win a lot of friends in various places. We want to make it hard on the United States. We want to look like the good guys. We want to make them look like the bad guys who are causing trouble destabilizing the world. And the Chinese, to America's benefit, have not been acting. in that way. They've been acting in ways that have made it somewhat easier for the United States

to win friends not everywhere, but in a number of critical places as well. So, you know, China needs to go back to realism 101. And if China, I should add, if China did that and the United States did that too, we actually, we would have a competitive relationship, but I think it would be a less fraught one, less risky one, where the conflicting interest would be managed, primarily through diplomacy, and we wouldn't have this sense that, you know, there's some possibility of a real explosion down the road. Let's try to link our two topics together, Ukraine and China. Some people have hypothesized that the path to peace that lies through and the Ukraine

conflict could start in Beijing, that China, for all kinds of reasons, would love to be perceived of as the proverbial peacemaker. It would be a major kind of coup for them in terms of international standing and their own perceived relevance and influence. And that the respective parties here, if we were going to look to a nation that certainly has Russia's attention, wouldn't that be China? And wouldn't the government of Zelensky or a future Ukrainian president, similarly, if they're going to look for security guarantees, couldn't those guarantees possibly be more meaningful coming from Beijing or refereed by Beijing as opposed to Washington? Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, I think Chinese motives are somewhat mixed here.

The point you lay out that China would love to get the credit for being sort of the peacemaker, the diplomatic leader of the 21st century, I think that's exactly right. And at some point, you know, I think they may understand that, well, they do understand that their position right now is complicating their relationships with other countries. They've wanted to reopen their economic ties with Europe, for example, and this is a real break to that because the Europeans are not happy with the position Beijing has taken. On the other hand, this is a huge distraction for the United States. That's probably something the Chinese benefit from, or at least have benefited from. So, you know, I think there have been somewhat torn on this question. I actually wrote a piece a few months ago suggesting that the United States should go to Beijing

and say we should do a joint peace initiative here. It would be a precedent for, you know, great power. cooperation. They have leverage over the Russians. We have leverage over Ukraine. So let's do this together. And I didn't think it would work necessarily, but there was very little to lose by suggesting it, and it in a sense called Beijing's bluff. In other words, they couldn't continue to float these kind of meaningless peace ideas and turn down an American proposal for a joint initiative. If they did turn it down, then it would expose that their position was sort of hollow. I do agree with one other point you made, though, that at the end of the war, both sides,

Russia and Ukraine are going to want some assurances as to the future. The assurances will take different forms. And one of the ways of making those assurances more credible is to have them ratified by as many of the other major powers as possible. So if China were involved in the process, involved in the negotiations in some fashion, if eventually a peace settlement is ratified by a UN Security Council resolution that passes unanimously with the Chinese supporting it as well, that it seems to me maybe the best one can do in providing diplomatic assurances to Ukraine, but also to Moscow. So China may have a role to play in due course. And just finally, to build on this, what do you think of this theory about this emerging block of Saudi Arabia, China, Brazil, somewhere in the orbit, maybe not tight against the nuclei, but there. Russia similarly there, not tight, but part of this group as a kind of a kind of,

Great power, I don't know, a coalition, maybe not all these entities, great powers unto themselves, but together as a coalition, acting as this wedge and frankly thorn in American interests and, you know, strategy globally. Is this a viable coalition? What would maybe just to think big, our final thoughts here, what does history say when you have a, you know, a single great power, possibly a hyper power in the form of the United States, facing off against this, the emergence of a coalition of powers that are seemingly, if not outright opposed to that preeminent power, are there actively undermining its interests in a whole variety of different ways? Yeah, I don't, I don't think, I think there is a sort of global South, call it fast. or coalition or whatever, it's not tightly aligned with Russia and China and certainly not aligned with them against the United States at this point. I think that, you know, if you look at what, we're no longer in the sort of unipolar world

with one hyperpower and a bunch of other weaker powers. What we're in is a sort of rough multipolar or rough bipolar world. And for some of those countries in the global south, Saudi Arabia, to some degree, India, to some degree, Brazil. This isn't a bad situation because they can play both sides off against each other. And the Saudis are doing that more effectively than any of the. Turkey, to some degree, has played this game as well. They have options now they didn't have when the United States was kind of the only game in town. What you asked about historical analogies, what I keep thinking about is the early Cold War, the 1950s. You had Russia and China aligned in the

communist world. You had the United States aligned with Europe and Western Europe in NATO and a set of allies in Asia as well. And then you had the non-aligned movement. Now, what's interesting is you're seeing something rather similar emerging now. There's the sort of eastern powers, Russia, China, and a few others associated with them. The United States leading the West and still tied, in fact, more deeply tied in Asia, countering China. And you have this global south where some of those states have kind of switched sides to some degree. So India was very much aligned or leaning towards the Soviet Union. Now it kind of leans towards us, not all the way.

Saudi Arabia was very much in the American camp in the 1950s. Not so much anymore. Still connected to us, but now starting to open up things with China. So I think of this world as resembling the early 1950s, but where the scorecard's a little different as to who's playing in what position. That may be the best analogy we can come up with right now. Squeeze one more question, because you mentioning the non-aligned countries of the 1950s and early 60s, Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously had, as prime minister, a very controversial tour of the unaligned, non-aligned countries. to create for Canada, this idea that we could have this other set of relationships above and beyond our relationship with the United States.

My final question to you see is, what if any advice do you have for Canada in this world? Because right now, it seems as if to many Canadians that, as you've mentioned, we have this toxic relationship with China. we have a Biden administration that is, you know, fermenting ideas around a kind of league of democracies that we're under a lot of pressure to march with shoulder to shoulder, maybe Canadians historically wanting a third option, a third way. That seems to be closing for us in this world of more intense, as you've characterized at multipolar competition

and the kind of end of that era of American, you know, hyperpower status. Unlike most of my countrymen, I tend to be reluctant to tell other countries what to do. But I'll take a swing in it. I mean, I think, you know, given Canada's geographic location, given its basic set of political values, its history and orientation, there's a limited range of options, right? Canada is not going to suddenly realign with Moscow or Beijing or suddenly decided to chart its own course. But on lots of international questions, I think the Canadian perspective is often more sensible than the American one, less prone to hubris, more mindful of some complexities as well.

So I guess what I hope for Canada is that they will remain close to the United States, continue to whisper in our ear whenever possible, and I hope we listen. We could do worse. Well, thank you so much for coming on the Monk Dialogues today. It's always a privilege and a pleasure to speak with you. Your insights get me off and thinking in a whole bunch of different directions, and I'm sure you've done that for all of our listeners today. So thank you again for coming on the program. My pleasure. It's really enjoyed the conversation. Well, that wraps up today's Monk Dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Professor Stephen Walt, he certainly gave us a lot to think about.

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