The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Season 2, Episode 14

Episode Date: March 25, 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 digs into the latest developments out the War in Ukraine. First up, where are we at thirty days into this conflict? Is the Russian military and resolve of Vladimir Putin crumbling in the face of what looks like an increasing statement on many of the key battlegrounds inside Ukraine? What could an end game for the conflict look like if Russian war aims are slipping away while Ukraine resolve is surging? And, finally, the economic fallout of the war is fast becoming apparent in sky high commodity prices including energy. What is the likely effects of the war on rocketing inflation levels? How are policy makers going to push back against the threat of a stagflationary future? 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, our regular monk members only podcast. This is our weekly program where we dig into the big issues and ideas moving the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. As always, we're joined by 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 this week. Great to be here with you, Richard, and with all our monk members. Well, Janice, here's what I want to do on today's show. I think we'd all be interested to get your reflections on this horrible milestone that we're observing this week, 30 days, a month of this war in Ukraine. What have we learned? And more importantly, you know, how are you feeling in terms of the risk for everyone, for NATO, for the Ukrainian people? What happens next and to what degree can you see some forest kind of through the, through the tree?

So let's start there. And then a couple of other topics will fit into our half hour together. So I did three big headliners for me as we observe the month anniversary of all this. First of all, this has been enormously destructive for Ukraine. You look at the damage that's been done to the cities of Ukraine, to the number of Ukrainian refugees. Just think a million and a half children have left Ukraine in the last month. I mean, that alone is enough to make me stop. So whatever else is happening in the big strategic picture for Ukraine, this is uniquely awful, frankly.

Secondly, there is what we call now a stalemate. The Ukrainians have fought the Russians to withdraw. Nobody expected that. Nobody expected that. No one, not in Europe, not in the United States, not in Canada. None of us expected that. But we're in what I call a stalemate, not a hurting stalemate. A hurting stalemate is when the pain,

grows enough for both sides to come to the table and recognize there just is no hope of reversing losses on the battlefield. I don't think we're there yet, unfortunately. I wish we were. We're not. And that then leads me to answer your question directly. The third headliner, we are moving into a period of heightened risk because neither us are. nor Ukraine, frankly, right now is willing to make a major compromise at the table. That's why in Brussels, people talked about chemical and biological and nuclear war and what kind of defensive actions could be put in place. The Russians have a doctrine.

It sounds like something out of Dr. Strangelove. It's called escalate to de-escalate. when you're locked in a stalemite like this, you break out by escalating in order to force the other side to the table. It was not a single NATO leader who was willing to rule that one out as possible. Well, let's talk about the two antagonists here, protagonists, Russia and Ukraine, maybe start with Russia first. I mean, as you mentioned, no one expected this result 30 days later, I guess my question for you is, I was surprised to read or just to understand that, you know, the Russians have in terms of their professional army, not their conscript army, but the army that

is paid and trained extensively to fight. They have roughly 160 combat battalions. So these are, you know, self-contained, you know, fighting groups. And it's a big number. It's, you know, approximately, let's say 200,000 odd people. They've committed roughly a hundred, of those 160 battalions to this war. And we're now seeing projections of casualties. And I think we have to feel some sympathy, actually, for these troops who've gone into this war, maybe many of them unaware of what the mission was,

what they're going to do. I mean, there's death casualties now, seven to 10 to 12,000. Generally, as a rule of thumb, you extrapolate that by three or fourfold to get to the number of wounded. And again, these are people whose bodies have been mangled and torn apart by high explosives, by just the charnel house that is modern warfare.

So suddenly you have a Russian army that has, if you do the math on that and say, okay, there's 100 battalion groups and you've got deaths and casualties upwards of 30,000 people, you've taken out roughly one fifth or more of the, entire professional Russian army. So I guess what I wonder, Janice, is, you know, could we be closer than we think maybe to the Russians in some ways having to withdraw, not maybe entirely from Ukraine? Maybe they draw back to the Oblast, the two provinces, but maybe could we, Janus, be seeing an inflection point where, frankly, the lambridge to Crimea doesn't look possible anymore. regime change in Kiev isn't on the cards because the Ukrainians have performed so well.

There's no question, Roger. You've got the numbers right. This is crippling for the professional Russian army. And Putin has very little more that he can throw at it. That's why he's been reaching out to the Belarusians. And that's not going to be a game changer, even if they join, that's not going to be a changeer. Because what we've learned, and this is astonishing really, how poor Russian logistics are, how badly maintained their equipment is, their fuel supplies. All the great generals always say over and over and over, execution, each strategy every day for lunch. It's all about logistics. And the Russians just have terrible logistics. They're soldiers. They're soldiers. were not told by and large what they were going to do.

So there's no win here through the Russian military. That's a separate question, though, from when Putin reaches the point in his own mind in a very narrow group of people around him and abandons the strategy that they've now shifted to, which is bomb and use offshore, are people. artillery fire missiles, cruise missiles against Ukrainian cities in an effort to break the will of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian military. But we know from history, Janice, that the air bombardment never works. Vietnam, World War II over and over again.

And I guess I'm just wondering, like this Russian military has been in the field for 30 days now, okay? They've they've suffered casualties of roughly one and four dead or wounded of the invading force. They are low on food. There are reports of troops, you know, succumbing to frostbite. I mean, these are like 19th century combat injuries, not 21st century combat injuries. At what point simply can this army no longer fight? I mean, you have a collapse in morale. You have a, I guess a will on the part of Putin and his inner circle to continue to persecute the war, but effectively it's over.

Well, it isn't. It isn't because in almost all those cases you mentioned, registered aerial bombardment can go on for a long time, even though we know that aerial bombardment has never really broken the morale. And I think that chances under Zelensky's leadership and a fired up Ukrainian army that is pushing back at a tactical level of them conceding under that pressure is nil. but there's no evidence yet that neither are we seeing the kind of, we've had one high-profile Russian leave the country, but there isn't the cracks yet openly that we need to see,

nor is Putin sending any signals whatsoever that he settled on. So, for example, American official said they've been trying repeatedly, Police Secretary of Defense, Chief of the Joint Chiefs, have been trying repeatedly to reach out to their Russian counterparts. No, they don't pick up the phone. It's worrying. That's worrying. Yeah. But just let me just, I'm stuck on this.

So you're helping me here. I think this through. I mean, there are going to be all of these tragically tens of thousands of Russian soldiers dead and wounded. Yeah. There are families back in Russia who probably. probably don't know the fate of their loved ones at this point. But surely the Putin government, I mean, they can't delay that indefinitely. No, there's a word is Russia is not maybe, Russia isn't North Korea. People have cell phones. There's an internet. This is a, you know,

it's not an open society, but it's certainly in a society where information flows, you know, fast, wide. So to what extent do, you know, is there a clock ticking in the background for Putin there thinking, wow, you know, in 60 to 90 days, I've got thousands of Russian mothers on the streets of all my major provincial capitals decrying my government in this war. Well, that's really the problem that there will likely not be thousands because they have clamped down so severely on any kind of dissent. There are 15-year prison terms now for people using the word war as opposed to special military operation. Journalists are the ones who are, you know, we have a large exodus, relatively speaking,

of Russians who fear the clampdown that's coming. Because this, in my view, Roger, we are on the prelude to a clampdown and a deepening authoritarianism in Russia if Putin remains in power. So he's not worried about thousands of people on the streets because he's confident that he can put these people in jail. The bigger question for me, how is he thinking forward about the Russian economy? How bad does this get for him? How quickly? And how long can he indulge in what almost every military leader does? It's a sunk cost argument. But the easiest way for me to explain this when you make a bad investment, what do you do?

You've got two choices. You can sell the investment and walk away. That's usually the smarter thing to do. But many of us double down, put more money into it in the hope that it will turn around and we will make back what we've lost. The odds are still very strong for the foreseeable future. He's going to double down. And that's why this is a period of such risk, because he not only doubles down, he could go up the ladder. Well, let's try one more half cupful argument for me, which is normally the rules are reversed here, and I'm the dyspeptic, depressive on the show.

But what I'm wondering about this threat that's been talked about a lot now, of chemical, biological, possibly even, you know, the use of an atomic weapon, just unconceivable. but it's part of the conversation now. So I want to touch on in this episode because it's, you know, filled our airwaves the last seven days. Isn't this really a tail-tale risk? And here's my thinking is right now, in a weird way, the bricks, Brazil, Russia, India, China have reasserted themselves as a separate economic and maybe soon financial and currency block from Europe, America. in Canada. India is trading with Russia this week, taking lots of oil. The Chinese are doing the same. The Brazilians have refused to engage in widespread sanctions against the Russians. In other words, if Putin's sitting there, and I agree, you're right, he's probably thinking about what are the

real economic effects here? Are they so severe that it could potentially destabilize my regime? The thing that he can be hopeful about is that the bricks have his back. And in a way, world of soaring commodity inflation, those brick nations, with the exception of China, control an immense amount of wheat, oil, rare minerals, hard minerals like nickel that we've seen explode in price, and they have this huge market, China, that they can sell into. In other words, they're kind of a closed system to a degree, not entirely because we still live in a globalized world. So if he went, and this is to finish my point, if he went to biological chemical or even ever forbid atomic, that would give the Americans, wouldn't it

Janice, such an opening to go after China, India, Brazil, and really turn Russia into a North Korea, a hermit kingdom of Europe? Well, I think there are, I am on the mildly optimistic side here that he will not do this. If he does it, first of all, it's going to be very limited. So when we talk about chemical weapons, chemical weapons can be used some chlorine too, right? There's a huge spectrum of stuff. And I think if he does any of that, that is a sign that he knows he's lost. And so what NATO's response to that will be will be very, very important and very, very tough to calibrate.

when we're talking about nuclear weapons, just for everybody to understand, it is not a Hiroshima bomb. Nobody's talking about that. In the Russian military, these are small tactical nuclear weapons. It is still horrific, and there are still radiation waves that can spread, but we are not talking about a mega nuclear catastrophe. But you'd agree, though, Janice, at that point, he's lost China. He's lost India. He's really done something that is so violent to the series of kind of norms that have evolved that at that moment, these other countries that have been sympathetic to him would just be under such

relentless pressure in that the sense of moral righteousness and earned indignation of the West and, frankly, the world against a result like that would push him into pariah status. Yeah, completely pariah. Yeah. Well, the really interesting country to watch here is China. It is absolutely fascinating. That's going to lead us into what we're going to talk about.

Next, India, you're certainly right. If that were to happen, it would be unsustainable for government of India. China is the truly interesting country to watch you. Here's a glimpse, Richard, of the world we are moving into. There's no more important country in the world today than China. The United States needs China to reach out and give Vladimir Putin exactly the message that you just articulated, along with it's probably time to stop. You're not going to get much more out of this.

Stop now while you still can. And they can do it privately with anybody knowing about it. Will they do it? We don't see any evidence yet that Xi Jinping is willing. to get off the fence. Putin desperately needs China. He has long, you know this, he has long term 10-year deals to sell Russian oil and gas into the Chinese market and to do it in Red Minbeath, which is exactly what he needs in order to withstand sanctions defectively, which close them out of the dollar and euro market. So one way to think about the world we're moving into is exactly the way

you just did. Two different economic systems, a divided global marketplace with very few countries that play in both markets at the same time. That is a very real possibility. Larry Fink yesterday, no pessimist. Just the title is worth reporting. Issued his newsletter and he said, the end of globalization, as we know it. That's the kind of argument. that he's thinking about. Yeah, let's definitely pick that up on another show. I think my quick comment on that is, you know, which world do you want to be in?

A world of, of vibrant, open societies that welcome people from around the world and are incubators and magnets for talent or a separate currency, you know, internet and, you know, economic zone that is filled with autocratic oppressive states that are using massive amounts of cyber technology to surveil and monitor and curtail your behavior. I mean, to me, as a choice, as an investor, where are you going to put your respective dollar? It's pretty obvious.

Well, that's true for investors. But if you're an autocrat, where do you want to be? It's also quite clear where you want your country to be. If you're one of those autocrats, that's attention. Well, I think we can just like we're seeing in Russia now, we can welcome the swell of talent. of human capital that will pour out of those autocratic regimes and that autocratic system into our system for our benefit. But let's take a pause here.

We'll come right back from the break. We're just going to wrap up the show with a discussion on some of the fascinating kind of economic, we can only describe as fallouts to this war and how they might play out in the months to come back after this short break. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk Members Only podcast to actually. the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www.w monk 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.