The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Season 2, Episode 19

Episode Date: April 29, 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 topics in the news. First, what should we take away from a week of increasingly tense public exchanges between Russia and the U.S. about the future trajectory of the war in Ukraine? Are Moscow and Washington in a dangerous escalatory feedback loop? Second, the French Presidential election sees Macron reelected. What can we extrapolate from French elections to understand where European politics is headed? And, finally, as Beijing joins the rest of China in shutting down to prevent the spread of Omicron, how will Xi's zero COVID policies impact political stability and global supply chains? 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.W.Munkdebates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our regular Friday Monk members-only podcast, the program where we dig into some of the big issues and ideas in the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. We do this each week with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director, the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar and author.

Janice, great to be in conversation with you again. And great to be here with you, Roger. I want to remind our listeners that May 12th, we have an interesting. in-person monk debate, Janice, two and a half years. We're finally back at Roy Thompson Hall. A lot of interest in this debate on, obviously, the topic of the day. We're going to discuss it on the podcast, the Ukraine War, some big names who are going to come forward and debate how possibly we end this conflict. Do we have to do a deal with Russia? Is that inevitable with Russia as a great power? Or is there another path here, a way to take Russia's military, diplomatic,

economic power and permanently denuded, thereby making the world a safer place. I'm really thrilled, Janice, to be able to hand the middle of the debate over to you to moderate the panel discussion, because I think you're going to bring not just your experience, but a really great Canadian perspective to this conversation. And boy, am I excited and looking forward to this debate and having spoken in public about some of these issues, Redyard, the room sizzles, feelings are running high on both sides. And I want to remind listeners that we have a priority at the monk debates to get younger people involved with just that civil, substantive debate in person off the iPhones, off YouTube.

We want to see more young people at this monk debate on May 12th. So if you have a person in your life 25 or under who likes debate, who likes debate, who likes thoughtful conversation, we want to host them at this upcoming May 12th Monk debate. Right now, you can grab a discounted ticket for anyone, 25 or under. We're going to offer 50% off with a promo code MD 50. Just think of that. Monk debate, 50% off. You can get tickets as inexpensively as $25 using that MD50 promo code,

go to the Roy Thompson Hall box office, Google Roy Thompson Hall box office, look for the Monk Debates as a ticketed event, input your promo code for that young person in your life that you want to see in person with you, I hope, at the May 12 Monk debate, and we look forward to hosting all of you for what should be a fascinating conversation with Janice, featured prominently in the evening's proceedings. Janice, let's talk off the beginning of the show, obviously, about what the May 12th debate topic is going to be the war in Ukraine. We've been focused a lot on this program, I think to our credit, to your credit, more maybe than other people analyzing this conflict about the risks of escalation.

And boy, this was a week of escalation. Now, fortunately, Janice, it's been in the context of words, not actions. Well, a couple missiles slamming into Kiev when Gutaris, the head of the United Nations, was there. But generally, it's been an amped up week of a war of words, but, you know, words have consequences. They can lead to mistakes. They can lead to events that are just hard to imagine at this point. I want to hear from you what you thought was particularly concerning about the pull and tug, the push and shove between Russia and the United States on the rhetoric front this week. Yeah, not a good week, Roger. You are right. And it started off really badly with the Secretary of Defense from the United States. Secretary of Defense Austin, who said, and wow, just listen to this. As they say,

take a listen. Our goal is to weaken Russia so that they can never do this to anyone again. This is no longer than about defeating Russia in Ukraine, about Russia pulling its forces out of Ukraine. It is about something bigger now. It is about weakening Russia for the long term. I can tell you from friends of mine in Washington that the chagrin, even among his aides, that he said this, you can think that privately, but that he would say that, people in Berlin at Paris were not impressed by this. So this is escalation of war aims. That's why it matters.

Lavrov hit right back, warned again that the use of nuclear weapons is possible. That's the Russian foreign minister. And we finished the week yesterday with a massive, massive increase in spending, use of the Land Lease Act, which FDR used to help Britain in World War II, and a budget that is designed to go to the end of September, which tells you how long Washington thinks this war is going to go on. What a week? $33 billion.

Yeah. Putin also ending the week with this, again, kind of ominous rhetoric around, you know, a lightning response against Western powers that meddle not in Russia, but in Ukraine and explicit, once again, mention of nuclear arsenal and the intercontinental ballistic nuclear systems that Russia has. I guess I just, I wonder, Janice, you know, it's kind of chicken little. I mean, how many times can you keep going on talking about this before you start to build up a credibility issue as a country and as a leader, which in the wrong set of circumstances, let's say Russia bogged down in the Dombas heading

towards this May 9 victory celebrations that Putin in his, I'm sure, twisted mind has to somehow celebrate Russia's victory in this war. If that doesn't increasingly push us in the direction of the unthinkable. This is the worrying part here. It is the boy who cries wolf, right? This must be the sixth time that either Putin or Lavrov's foreign minister have talked and threatened to use nuclear weapons. As you do this again and again, it's inevitable that people in Washington and in other NATO capitals will just start to discount the threat. And even recently, as I was checking around. And again, to reassure our listeners just a little bit,

there is no evidence of movement of any at any Russian nuclear facility, not those early steps that you would be seeing, frankly, if they were actually getting ready or thinking

actively about getting ready to visit. But, Janice, we wouldn't know, though, if they were moving tactical battlefield weapons. No. It's quite possible those could be cloaked under the current conventional conflict, and they could be staged right now on the borders of Russia and Ukraine. That's possible, but I have to say, I am impressed by how good military intelligence is. For some reason, Russia is leaking, which you would never expect. It may be, in fact, we have dissenting military on the Russian side who,

and normally would be very certain. And they're not using encrypted communications. You and I are more careful most days than some of what we've seen over the last several weeks. So, you know, we don't have any evidence that this is imminent. But I'm worried, just like you are, that just using this rhetoric over and over again, especially if things go really badly for the Russians on the ground in the Donbass. that's what we have to watch over the next three to four weeks because we're going to see two really nasty things. We are going to see a slog. This is going to be a brutal war and it's going to

be a war for inches of the kind that we haven't seen in Europe since World War. I can almost say since World War I frankly, this kind of inch by inch forward movement. And we're going to see continued missile strikes against cities in Ukraine. And that's a good. exactly what they did yesterday in Kyiv when the UN Secretary General was there. Am I concerned? Yes, Roger, I'm concerned. Right. We're also seeing just two other developments to kind of have you touch the base.

And we're seeing increasing numbers of explosions and seemingly acts of sabotage inside Russia, which again, you could celebrate the Russians are, you know, getting some back. from somebody. But I'm working about the extent to which, again, when attacks start to unfold inside Russia, let's say some of those attacks are carried out using NATO intelligence or using NATO weapons, could that be the trigger that causes the Russians to retaliate in some way directly against NATO? And then the second question is what we see happening, Janice, in Moldova. So increasingly in the small breakaway enclave, which again, the same scenario, Russian-speaking minority,

defended by Russian, quote, peacekeepers who've been there for now over two decades, increasing number of attacks, possibly false flags, possibly created by Russian intelligence services to provide the pretext for a new security operation in Moldova. What is the, what's the consequence of that? I mean, Moldova's not a NATO member, so no tripwire there. But people saying that this is, again, a sign of this war possibly expanding, and expanding war is a dangerous war. Well, both of these are flashpoints, both of these spots.

You've just talked about Russia. And there's no doubt about who's doing this, where these explosions are coming over the border, and largely against Russian oil depots. And that is, in a sense, designed to bring the pain home to Russia. And it is Ukrainian Special Forces and others who are doing this. Now, here's what's interesting. The United States said it's perfectly okay. It's understandable.

It's fine that the Ukrainian government is taking the war to Russia. That's exactly what the Russians did to the Ukrainians. And there's certainly from both a legal perspective and international legal perspective and a military perspective, that's exactly what you expect the Ukrainians to do. But wow, is that raising the temperature in Moscow? That is for sure. in this disputed area of Transnistran, if you think about southern Ukraine,

it's like a crescent, right? That's the easiest way for people. I think like a moon crescent, and it goes through Odessa, it ends up in this disputed part of Moldova. And that is why Ukraine, Ukraine, believer in Ukraine, is now deploying forces along that border

because it knows that if Russian forces move out of that area, that is the Pinser movement on Odessa and the whole of the coast of Ukraine. The Moldovans are terrified, Roger. They see themselves as if you, you know, as the next bite that the Russians are coming forward. They are absolutely terrified. And true, they're not a member of NATO. But at the very least, wow, there is an argument. that Putin made, that we are Ukraine, and Ukraine is us, and this is an internal family fight,

if they move beyond that and it goes to another European country, as tiny as Moldova is, and it is smaller than Toronto, that's the only way to describe it, we are into the escalation that you and I have been talking about. Okay, let's come back from this short break, and we'll talk about the two remaining issues that we want to cover off in this week's podcast. We're going to dip in quickly to the fallout of the French presidential elections. What does this mean for the politics to Europe? As we've seen a new GDP print this week of a European economy seemingly skidding quickly into stagnation, if not outright recession. And then Janus, before we break, let's talk about China's COVID response.

We've had Shanghai lockdown now. Beijing controls. There's starting to be implemented. Where does this all go? Back after this short 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.wmunkdebates.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' podcasts. Thanks for listening.