The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Season 2, Episode 17

Episode Date: April 15, 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 explores three stories in the news. First, Russia suffered a series of setbacks in its war aims this week from the sinking of a flag ship to overt signals by Finland and Sweden that they are joining NATO. How is Putin likely to react to these reversals? Where does the war go from here? The program rounds off with a discussion on the runoff elections in France for president and what Elon Musk is up to with Twitter.  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 Friday monk members only podcast. This is the program where we dig into the big issues and ideas in the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. Each and every week, we do this with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School

of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar, author. Janice, great to be in dialogue with you again. Great to be here, Rudyard, and happy Easter, happy Passover, and happy Ramadan. to all our mug members. Yes, it is that time of year. Spring is in the air. A renewal is before us. So let's enjoy hopefully warmer weather to come. But on the show today, half an hour,

let's go through three topics. I think there's three important issues for us to address and kind of get your thoughts and reaction to. First, another could only be characterized as disastrous week for President Putin and the Russians in terms of setbacks on multiple fronts in the Ukraine war. Then I want to go, Janice, to the French election, which I know you've been following French politics closely

over the last number of months, and we have this now runoff election between Marie Lapin and President Macron, so a high-stakes European election. And then finally, if we got the time, Janice, I'd love to just talk a little bit about Elon Musk and Twitter and the state of free speech billionaires owning broad swaths of the media. The whole thing is just a kind of wild set of, I think,

contradictions and potential conflicts of interest and everything else. So three topics, but let's start with your thoughts on the week that was in Ukraine. What a god-offa week for Putin, as you just said, Roger. The Russian Navy lost their flagship carrier, likely sunk by Ukrainian fire. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. And this news will not be hidden from the Russian public.

There's no way you hide a story like this. This has got to say to Putin, this war is in trouble. This war is in trouble. You look at the asymmetry of value. They're the biggest flat. I am still. astounded their biggest flagship carrier sunk by relatively inexpensive artillery fire missiles fired from

onshore this is a losing proposition and all this as they're getting ready to launch one more big offensive on the ground and do this again also news this week janice uh Finland Sweden seeming to now not just simply open the door to NATO, but openly talk about a timeline to join the alliance. The Russians counteracting here with threats to deploy hypersonic and atomic weapons into Kalinagrad. So maybe you can just explain to us why that piece of real estate is important. And what you think, again, the risk here, it's a theme we've been talking about over the last, this is 51 days. that this war has been ongoing, the risks of escalation here as the Russians are increasingly faced with the fact of a war effort that is stumbling and that is actually causing reversals in the very policies such as NATO expansion that they had hoped to advance at the war's outset. This is just a real-time example of an incredibly stupid strategic. decision that Putin made.

If you think about even the most minimal conception of war objectives, he is in fact gotten everything he feared and everything he hated. NATO expansion to two states, Finland, that has stayed neutral in a sense or not officially neutral, but in a zone where it has accommodated Russian interests

ever since 19, 13, Frankly, it's understood that it lives next to a powerful neighbor and we better be polite. That's fundamentally the finished policy. We Canadians, we get that one in space, frankly. We do it all the time. Sweden neutral. They are so frightened by what they have seen Putin's Russia do that they are now on a fast track to get into NATO. Inevitable response.

We're going to escalate this and we're going to know station as you put an atomic and hyperestrian. atomic missiles. And Cleaningrad is just like to think of it as a long middle finger inserted between the Baltic states. So it's an anomaly that it exists that way. But the bigger problem is he Putin is saying we're going to militarize the Baltic Sea, forget the Baltic Sea being free of atomic weapons. This has been the big picture here, the big headline, and this is why, frankly, it's worrying that the war is going badly. The worse this gets for Putin, the greater the risk of escalation. And if you put this week together, NATO expansion, his nightmare, loss of his flagship carrier, nightmare, still stymied on the ground with no clear

path ahead. This is going very, very badly for Russia. And he camped back down now. Very tough. The obvious thing is it's like the best way I think we can understand this, if you're gambling and you lose and you face two choices. You have cash in your chips and you walk away. Some sensible people do that, but most people don't because I think the next spin of the wheel is going to be better than the last. And they double down. And that's what we're seeing him doing. Well, the CIA director burns out with his first kind of major speech actually really since becoming the CIA director this week. Touching just on this very topic, you know, this is, he's an interesting figure in that he was a former ambassador to Russia. So he has a deep knowledge.

He revealed in that speech that he had actually made. with Putin on that trip to Moscow that had been reported on. And he had said at the time, it was interesting that Putin, you know, believed, A, that it was going to be a quick victory, B, that he had the foreign reserves capital and other bank accounts of other central banks around the world to weather the storm economically and see that the European allied powers were amashed in their own kind of internecine political, disputes getting all of that wrong every bit burns says though that and just comes out i mean the

the cia has been remarkably um accurate frankly this time and in terms of intelligence on this war publicly expressing a worry that uh atomic weapons tactical atomic weapons could be that escalatory event in the face of a war that is demonstrably as you just said on every front moving in the wrong way for Putin. So interesting to have the CIA director, Janice, publicly flag this. That kind of worries me and maybe makes me think that they're pre-pre-pre-positioning the public

for this potential shock. I think you're absolutely right. The CIA has done outstanding before. It's been outstanding. And you know, one of the problems with intelligence agencies, when they succeed, we never know. When they mess up, we all know. And so we study all the failures and the scrubs.

I do that for a living. But I don't get my hands on all the successes because they won't reveal their sources. We have to take extremely seriously what Burns is saying. It is the best way to put this, it's not an accident that they are so right. Their information goes way beyond intercepting communications and satellite photographs. They are almost, they got one thing wrong in this whole store. They underestimated the Ukrainian army. Everything, and overestimated the Russian.

Everything else they got right. And Burns and the CIA has been saying repeatedly, they are worried about escalation. They are worried about escalation. And there's a tiger team, what they call an alternative team now, stood up in the National Security Council, gaming out what the U.S. response would be. to use by Russia of chemical weapons or tactical nuclear weapons.

So they are planning for that eventuality and coordinating with allies. We would be foolish not to think about this as a real possibility. Well, let's just, so I just want to go one question longer before we go to break, which is so hypothetically, what could that response be? Because the moment either chemical or even worse, an atomic weapon is used, surely Janice, you know, then the risks of escalation begin to become mirrored. In other words, you know, NATO could then take an action that causes a further reaction. And then you're so far already up the escalatory chain that this war has the potential to

explode outside of literally Ukraine's borders. That's the big worry. And so I think the planners are looking hard now for a response that would not do that. So let me go out on a limb because I do not know. I do not know. Let me make that really clear. I have no access to any kind of information when I say this. Let me go out on a limb.

We would not see a responsive kind. We would not see coming from NATO any use of even the lowest level. tactical nuclear weapon in response precisely for the reasons that you mentioned. The problem is how much work can you do on sanctions? There's some room for sure. It's on gas and oil, as we know. There's secondary sanctions, but there's not a lot more that you can do on sanctions. So were this to happen, that would be, I think, the toughest moment. for NATO to craft a response which doesn't take everybody over the edge. I understanding that they're all reading Barbara Tugman, the guns of August. Everybody is aware of the risk that we're

talking about. And they're living it now in real time. My final thought on that is just I hope that, A, he wouldn't consider doing it because the smartest allied Western NATO response would be to use an event like that to peel China, India, Brazil, all these countries that have not sanctioned Russia away from Russia and truly isolate the Russian economy and the Putin regime. So you have to hope that that is hanging out there as a deterrent for Putin to take that escalatory step. Well, let's take a quick break. One quickie before we take the tech break. Can't resist it. Interesting comment by Putin yesterday. He's going to shift oil and gas exports from the West. East, he's going to get, he's going to denominate those payments in rubles.

So that, in fact, is his escape hatch, he thinks, from all of this. So the biggest pain that can be inflicted now on Putin is not from NATO. It's from China. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Okay, quick break. I'm back on the other side.

We're going to talk about elections in France and what the heck is Elon Musk up to with Twitter. We'll have that for you in just a moment. moment. 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.munkdebates.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.