The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Season 2, Episode 11

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

This program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week's Munk Members podcast focuses on the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Janice and Rudyard discuss how the conflict has escalated over the last ten days and why Western countries have moved so quickly to introduce some of the harshest economic sanctions ever levied against a nation state. Keeping on the economic theme, the second half of the program explores the long-term effects these sanctions could have on globalization, the future of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency and what China may do economically to lessen its dependence on a Western led global financial order.  To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.com, and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www. Monk Debates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Roger Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, This is our regular Monk members-only podcast. Comes out to you every Friday, looking at the big issues and events in the news.

We do this with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned author and scholar. Janice, great to be in dialogue with you today. Good to be here, Rudyard. And this week, it's a week like no other. Yeah, you know, I often think when we started this show over a year ago, you and I kind of thought that this would be, I don't know, just a, frankly,

a fun way to catch up on the week that was, enjoy each other's company, some conversation. But boy, you just have this feeling in the last seven to ten days that everything's taken a very, very serious turn. Absolutely. There's no question. We are just entering the more intense phase of this war. you know, any early hopes that this would not be both as brutal and as dangerous as we feared are gone. And there is just shared anxiety everywhere, Richard, and horror at the tragedy

that we're seeing unfold for the Ukrainian people. Yeah. So what we like to do in the Shogenesis, as you know, is kind of provide our members with something different than they're getting in a lot of the media, which is doing, you know, I think generally a pretty good job of covering this conflict. But we want to kind of get below or beyond the headlines. So let me start with you on this topic. I think it's something you and I have both noticed this week. An increasing divergence between what you might call the expert community, the people like you who've spent your life in the study of international relations and international security, a level of concern amongst that group about the extent of escalation, how fast it's been over the last seven days,

and the risks of escalation, versus a public sentiment that is overwhelmingly in favor of swift, rapid, and punishing actions against the regime of Vladimir Putin. So I wonder if you could talk to us a a little bit about what you see is that possibly some of the inherent difficulties of this divergence between where the public's had. There was an interesting quote I thought that got it kind of right in the Washington Post on Thursday, but an Obama official saying, you know, we need an active policy response, not a cathartic policy response. We've kind of moved in these last week to a very almost kind of cathartic. reaction to this violence and horror that we're seeing unfolding.

I'd like to hear from you, maybe some of your thoughts on the challenges this creates, both for experts to intervene in the debate and the discussion, but also for policymakers to potentially look for solutions. You put your finger, Roger, on what I think is the biggest issue in front of us right now. There is pretty widespread consensus among the expert community. frankly, that the sanctions against Russia have gone too fast. They haven't been gradual enough to allow for pauses between them. And they are overly encompassing. Now, this is going to sound shocking to people who are listening. So why is there that sense among the expert community?

Sanctions are designed to change somebody's behavior. That's what their purpose is. They're not a value in themselves. This is not punishment for its own sake. There's a strategic purpose to them. You want to change the other person's behavior. If you leave no grounds for optimism, either that there is a way out, or that these sanctions will be reversed if there's a change.

behavior. If they are so all encompassing, you actually make what already looks a little bit like a cornered actor, even more desperate. And what we know, and here's where some of the people you've talked to in your monk dialogues, Richard, there is a lot of good evidence that when people feel trapped or desperate, they do desperate things. in return. So early this morning, because I'm sure like everybody else, we're all sleeping less well than we normally do, you know, a kind of calibrated leak out of the White House. This morning, the White House officials are increasingly worried that the pace and the scope of sanctions may provoke Putin rather than lead him to pull back. This is a really delicate dance.

And anybody who thinks they can get this right, that there's a cooking cut of recipe to do this. I don't know what they're smoking is all I'll say. But it is a really legitimate concern. But here's the second part of your question. Boy, you cannot talk to a elected leader about these issues or get an elected leader to talk about these issues in public. For fully understandable reasons, as you said, Rogers. the world's sympathy is overwhelmingly and it should be with what the Ukrainian people are going through and they have an extraordinary leader who's giving voice to those concerns.

And so that desire to punish, frankly, that's what's come to the surface. And it's almost political suicide now for a leader to step out in front of the cameras and say, we want to open a back channel to Vladimir Putin to get discussions going. The only negotiations that are permissible, frankly, are the ones that the Ukrainian government and that Zelensky himself has repeatedly called for. We got the first glimmer of an agreement yesterday on humanitarian corridors. But there was so much more that could be done. There are emissaries who are connected to both sides.

And so, frankly, we're in front of a painful period that will start, I expect, in the next week or so, where we begin to see probes, those kinds of reachouts to somebody right now, Vladimir Putin, that is reviled legitimately as evil, evil to his core for what he's unresolved. unleashed on the Ukrainians. I would direct readers to, you know, an excellent piece in the usual kind of Tom Friedman away, he's catchy with phrases. He had this column in the last seven days where he coined this idea of that this is the world's first world-wired war.

Read the piece. It's worth, it's worth thinking on. I guess what I see here, Jan, is a, is an interesting kind of moment in a sense for international relations where this acute interconnectedness that we all experienced through our smartphones and social media has in a sense had an escalatory effect on this crisis in terms of the Western response. And we're not going to have a debate now about whether that response is appropriate or calibrated. I think there's a lot of data points to suggest, though, that it was more cathartic, let's say, than thoughtful,

in the extent to which swift sanctions, you know, one day are foreboughton, the next day, unanimous. We're not going to use central banks as targets. And then suddenly the Russian central bank frozen out of international debt markets, the ruble crash, the Russian stock market. You know, Richard, if I can interrupt you, just for one minute. Let's just talk about that for one minute. And I know we're going to come back to this.

We're going to do that in the second half of the show, yeah. But just think about this, a central bank, right, which is a government institution, which regulates in every country, and they are all interconnected, in a tightly connected global financial system. Once you put a central bank on the table as a target, you change fundamental levels of confidence in the stability of central banks around the way. world that happened literally in 24 hours yeah yeah and then we also saw you know a historic 40 year reversal in a matter of hours of germany's longstanding kind of non-intervention policy and there are now supposedly on their way thousands of surface to air missiles coming from germany transiting i

assume for the borders of poland from rome into the ukraine so these are i think we need to step back and just realize how radical and fast these shifts were. And this is my kind of take on it. It's, I think, in an interesting way, because of social media, we've all become, and maybe it's these Zoom calls, Janice, seeing ourselves on screens, ourselves reflected back to ourselves of the last two years, we've all kind of become public-facing brands. We all, I think, have, for better or worse, this idea of ourselves as private, private citizens, as citizens who have ideas and think about things, but generally express ourselves through elections and, you know, the democratic mechanisms that are open to us in our communities and societies. Now instead, what happens? And I think there's an interesting analog here to the Black Live Matters protest that rightly so instantaneously in a similar way, galvanized, this mass. social response that created an immediate massive political response. My note of caution, though, is that this time our opponent is different.

With Black Lives Matter rightly, it was targeting police brutality against blacks, African Americans, women, and men in the United States and around the world. In this case, our opponent isn't corrupt, racist police officers. It is a peer great power competitor run by a kleptocratic, possibly paranoid, possibly mentally unstable leader who has a terrifying assembly of torture instruments on his desk from massive conventional capacity to cyber to nuclear. And I just, I know talking to friends who are politicians that they've never seen this. They've never felt this groundswell of pressure that comes up in a wired world where we're all kind of public-facing brands. We're all signaling each other. We're all professing in this massive cathartic online experience.

Our hatred and the vileness of Putin's regime, that's great. But understand what that does to policymakers and politicians in particular and the extent to which it closes off their options. And, you know, in an interesting way, it's accelerated this crisis. And I would go further. I'd say it's escalated it in ways that are counterproductive both to the security of this moment and our own security, but also potentially for the resolution of this crisis. Am I wrong, Janice? No, I think you're absolutely right. You know, we have talked about the impact of social media in so many different contexts because social media is not a game changer in and of it.

self, but it isn't accelerated. That's what it does. If you've got a little fire going, you pour some social media on top of it, and all of a sudden you get, you know, a big blaze. And it happens over and over again. This is the first time, really, that we've seen the impact of social media in what is a grave international crisis at the very best. Even if there were no social media here, This would be a dangerous and frightening crisis in which levels of statecraft, the capacity to have a response, to measure, to wait, to let somebody else reflect, to come back. And most of that work is hard work by skilled people who do it behind the scenes. And how do we know as much about it as we do?

because we have memoirs and documents and archives and we understand the sophistication with I mean, Janice, could a George Cannon or Dean Acheson even work in this environment today? We'd be very tough and let's not think so much about George Cannon, but could a John Kennedy and a Robert Kennedy have opened the back channel, which they did to Nicky's Chris Chuff and have private back channel negotiations, which we know, and by the way, the United States made a huge concession to Khrushchev. After all, here's the narrative. Cruise chef started this. He put the world at risk. He sent nuclear missiles to Cuba. Why should we reward the behavior of a crazy person? But as that crisis got more and more dangerous, it was an exchange of letters,

letters, believe it or not, at telegrams because they had no better way to communicate. And there's one phrase, always stuck in my mind. And it's this one. And I think it's very up for now. Khrushchev wrote to John Kennedy and he said, we are pulling the thread of war tighter and tighter. We need to stop before it breaks. And that was the line that John Kennedy read. thought, there's an opening. There's an opening. And he made a concession. He agreed to pull

U.S. missiles out of Turkey. Now, if we lived in an age of social media, now, what did he do, by the way? Part of the deal was, we keep that secret, or at least we don't talk about it, right? So the public never knew at the time. But just imagine what Twitter would do with that. You crave and coward, you were rewarded an aggressor. All of that, we would be hearing all of that. I don't know if he could even have done it and survived politically in that world. But the two of them, Khrushchev, recognizing he made a mistake, Kennedy looking for an opening, were able because they had some space,

some privacy, some capacity, some time to find a way out of a crisis that would have blown up the world. how almost impossible is it to do now? And I frankly think the biggest challenge are political leaders all through Europe and North America. It doesn't matter which country you're in right now, which political party you represent. Our biggest challenge is for political leaders to start to prepare people who are beyond outraged. And I feel that myself some days, but who are beyond outrage. that there will have to be negotiated. If we're going to get out of us

without pushing everybody over a cliff, there will have to be negotiations with Putin. That is what will happen over the next two or three weeks. It's going to be hard. Well, yeah, and you get, you know, people like Senator Lindsey Graham, a senior American senator calling for the assassination of the Vladimir Putin.

You have other people on social media who are, you know, tub-thumping and, you know, chest being in ways that frankly surprise me because I know that they're big believers in the liberal international order, that these are people who've dedicated their lives to diplomacy, to dialogue. And I just feel, Janice, almost like there's a bit of the madness of crowds here that has been fired off by this. And I think Putin completely underestimated this.

And it's been his great strategic error so far. But let us not be naive about the risk of blowback and the extent to which, as you say, you know, you collapsed an economy. The effects of that are as bad as if there was a kinetic physical strike of some sort on Russia. in terms of the experience of the Russian security establishment and their feelings of insecurity. And that is the difficult thing. I agree with you.

It's horrible to think that we ultimately have to deal with these people. We ultimately have to come up with a scenario that allows them to preserve some minimum level of security in a settlement. We cannot, I don't know, engage. I think frankly in this kind of fanciful thinking that there's some Afghanistan scenario for Ukraine of a long, you know, years of civil war and weapons pouring across the border and brave Ukrainians like the Mujahideen, you know, killing thousands of Russian soldiers. I mean, this is, this is crazy talk. Well, you know, beyond that, what makes this different from all others? And this is so hard, but it is. Russia is a nuclear power.

Russia's leaders have talked five times in eight days about nuclear war or using nuclear weapons. From the first time I heard them, Roger, I sat up. Here's what we always said about nuclear weapons. Their use was unthinkable. What we already know, when we don't have to have any secret, intelligence. They are thinking about nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are now thinkable. When you're dealing with nuclear powers, there is a totally different calculus that we all have to make. And that's what makes this so hard, so excruciating. And we are

living in a situation in which there are no black and whites except avoiding, um, and all a catastrophe. Now, I can tell you that they're already, among experts, these conversations are going on. People already there, they are asking the questions, what is the exit strategy, how does this end? So all, you know, the group of people that are like me and I know, those are the conversations we're having.

But we are sobered, Richard. We are sobered by two things. We are sobered by the overarching presence of nuclear weapons in this discussion, something we haven't heard in 60 years, frankly. And secondly, we're sobered by how hard it's going to be for political leaders to bring outraged publics with them as we try to walk back from what. where we are now. Wise words.

When we come back from this short break, we're going to dig into the other big story, spinning out of this escalation over the last 10 days. What is happening to the global financial order as entirely new regimes of sanctions, of direct actions, as Janice just mentioned, against central banks are put into place? What does this mean for the future of globalization

in our lifetimes? We'll have that for you right after this break. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk Members-only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www. Wunk Debates.com. Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our Monk members podcast.

Thanks for listening.