The New Yorker Radio Hour - What Trump Has Got Wrong—and Right—About the War in Ukraine

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Since emerging on the national political scene a decade ago, Donald Trump has openly admired the dictatorial style of Vladimir Putin. Trump’s lean toward Russia was investigated, it was psychoanalyzed—yet many were still shocked when recently Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine, in the Oval Office, and seemed to be taking Putin’s side in the conflict. When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, one of David Remnick’s first calls was to Stephen Kotkin, a historian of Russia and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He speaks with Kotkin again, as Trump is pressuring Ukraine to accept a “deal.” Kotkin doesn’t endorse Trump’s position, but notes that it reflects real changes in America’s place in the world and the limits of American power. “You can say that Trump is wrong in his analysis of the world, you can say that Trump’s methods are abominable,” Kotkin says. “But you can’t say that American power is sufficient to meet its current commitments on the trajectory that we’re on.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. From his emergence on the political scene a decade ago, Donald Trump displayed what you could call a curious admiration for the Russian president and dictator Vladimir Putin. It was baffling, and it was ominous, too. It remained so. Trump's lean toward Russia was investigated and it was psychoanalyzed. And his affinity for Putin is as vivid as his disdain for Ukraine's democratically elected leader. Volodymyr Zelensky. So now we're reckoning with a distinct possibility that the leadership of the United States

has taken a moral and a strategic turn that puts us all on the side of Russia and blames Ukraine for provoking the invasion in the first place. That's how the Kremlin sees it as well. Over a week ago, Trump and J.D. Vance absolutely berated Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House. And then they announced a pause in military aid to Ukraine

and a freeze on intelligence sharing. Those are moves that will surely hobble Ukraine's ability to defend itself. Zelensky is now trying to bolster more and more support from the leaders of Europe who met last week at a defense summit. For more than 30 years, since I was a reporter for the Washington Post in Moscow, I've been talking about Russia over and over again with Stephen Kotkin. Stephen Kotkin is a biographer of Joseph Stalin and a fellow at Stanford's Whover's institution. Three years ago, when Russia first launched this invasion of Ukraine, Steve was my first

call. And this is the third time that we're talking here on the radio hour since the war began. Steve, let's begin with the most obvious thing. What did you make of that dramatic Oval Office encounter between Trump and Zelensky? As I understand what happened based upon the commentary is that Trump's AIDS set up a situation where there was going to be a deal over minerals, and the minerals deal was going to work because it was going to give the U.S. a vested interest in Ukraine. And in their mind, Putin was going to do the rest of the work. Because Putin is as nasty as nasty comes.

he was going to continue to overreach and behave the way he's behaving, which was going to push Trump in the direction of not just protecting the minerals deal, but investing more and more in Ukraine because Russia was nastier and nastier. Anyway, this was the plan that the AIDS thought they had worked out and that had been pitched to Zelensky prior to the setting. And then what happened evidently is J.D. Vance is trying to preempt a Republican primary in 2028. And so he made some provocations. And Zelensky took debate and proceeded to stake out a position claiming that they didn't understand a deal with Putin was not really a deal with Putin. So how do you manage Trump? Trump has certain views.

He's the elected president of the United States. The aides might or might not share those views. Some do and some don't. But they're not the president. Trump is the president. So from their point of view, the Minerals deal was an ingenious option. I thought the plan made sense. You're hardly a fan of Donald Trump,

but your tendency has been to try to look past or around his performances that you've compared to professional wrestling. When it comes to Ukraine and American policy, though, what's behind the performance? What do you think Trump actually wants in Ukraine? Or is that too hard to discern? Trump's style is very off-putting. Some would say disgraceful.

Trump behaves in ways that diminish American soft power, which is a usually important dimension of American power. In his mind, the means don't matter as long as you get to the ends, which is a massive rebalancing of U.S. relationships across the world. Do you not share the view, and it's my view, that if taken to its logical or worst extent, that the events in the White House last week could constitute a moral and strategic U-turn for the United States, which would be a disaster? There. Presidents rarely turn a ship as big as the United States during a four-year term.

I'm not validating anything here, but Trump has revealed some truths about American power and America's place in the world and European place in the world here that are valuable truths, and he did it in his Trumpian fashion. What are those truths? Zelensky is looking for security guarantees, which means that. that not just Ukrainians will die, that people from other countries, European countries especially, will die. The Europeans have not sent a single soldier to the front during the war. Poland, which is Ukraine's biggest backer, has refused to agree to promise to send peacekeepers

after the fighting stops, let alone during the fighting. So Europe, God bless, is playing charades. Trump nonetheless, he has shown that it's put up or shut up on the European side. Now, would I have done it, Trump's way? Do I appreciate that Trump is hurting American soft power? Yes, I get all of that. But I'm in the world that I'm in. I have the president that I have.

And I have the Europe that I have. That's not to say that Trump is going to solve anything. And it could well be that Trump's actions produce the perverse and unintended consequences that we often see in politics. And it could be that the situation worsens. But the situation was not going well. The Biden policy had dead ended long before Biden left office. Something needed to be done. The trajectory we were on was failing.

And let's get on a trajectory that's succeeding. You've written and talked extensively about the dementia. and resiliency of American power since as early as 1880. When you hear people, including me, say that the encounter between Trump and Zelensky in the White House could really take us to a horrible place. Do you think that's alarmist, then? Yes. I mean, you know American history.

You know the presidency of Andrew Jackson. You know that we had the Civil War. I mean, America has been berserk for as long as anybody, Philip Roth, the indigenous American berserk, right? And so now we have social media and it's more visible than it was before. Not only is it surfaced, but it's encouraged because it's the business model, right? Extremism, outrage, performance, all of this is now how you make money. And so, you know, America is a place that few people are willing to, to admit is the most powerful country ever in recorded history across all dimensions.

Hard power, economic power, innovation power, energy superpower, soft power, alliance power, and we could go on plus their interaction. There's never been a power in world history on this level. The U.S. is 5% of global population and 25% of global GDP since 1880, more or less. There have been times when it's been 22. Right now it's actually about 26. There was a brief time after World War II when it was 50%. That wasn't caused by government.

It wasn't caused by presidents. It can't be suppressed and strangled by – no matter what they do and they do a lot of things that I think are detrimental to the American standing in the world. And so the question for us is going forward, right? How much of this American power is going to be used effectively, competently, as the world is changing, and how much can America rely on others? Because let's be honest, European power has declined.

Japanese power has declined. It's not American power that's declining. It's our alliances, our allies who are declining, and our adversaries are not necessarily declining. We can argue about Russia, how deep its decline might be. But on the China case, we clearly have a peer adversary. There's unlimited demand for American power. Hey, let's bring Ukraine into NATO. Hey, let's do a security treaty with the Saudis.

Hey, everybody wants more and more American power. but American power can't fulfill all its current commitments, let alone make new ones. You remember when our strategic doctrine was, let's fight two major wars in two major theaters simultaneously, and then Obama comes to office, and he reduces that to 1.5. Have you ever seen a 0.5 major war? I haven't. You know, it's like socks. You got two feet or you got 1.5 feet.

And then Trump comes along and he reduces it to one major war and one major theater. So we have alliance commitments in at least three major theaters. And our strategic doctrine is we can do one at any one time. So Trump is revealing and in some cases accelerating a process where America's commitments exceed our capabilities, not because we're in decline, but because the alliances that we're in, are those countries, Germany, Japan and a few others, are not punching their weight. So now, you can say that Trump is wrong in his analysis of the world. You can say that Trump's methods are abominable,

but you can't say that American power is sufficient to meet its current commitments on the trajectory that we're on, and we didn't even get to the fiscal situation. I'm speaking today with Stephen Kotkin, whom I've known for a very very very long time. He's a superb historian of Russia, and he's a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. How is Vladimir Putin reading this situation? How is he watching Washington and what does he want? Russian grand strategy for, I don't know, three centuries, take your pick, has been the following. West decline, West decline, West implode, West collapse. West collapse. and then we'll survive.

That's Russian grand strategy. Things are bad in Russia. They're horrible in Russia. But hey, if the West defeats itself, then Russia will be okay. So this is your fear. This is what you're talking about, that Trump is doing Putin's work for him. My argument is that that might be true,

but I wouldn't trade U.S. power for Russian power in any dimension. And I wouldn't necessarily trade our political system for their political system because the voters punish the Democrats in the previous election big time. And they're going to punish anybody else who's incompetent, fails to deliver, and wrecks either our institutions, our economy, inflation, the stock market. Americans hate war and they hate losing war even more than they hate war. than they hate war. So, you know, Trump is playing with fire here, and also politics is much shorter than the longer-term trajectories I'm talking about, though. You not only follow the statements

and thinking of the Russian leadership, but you're reading every day sources like Signal in Russian. And what does that tell you? That they're hoping that this abominable war ends. Everybody wants... Who is they, Steve? The Russian population. Since the fall 2020, when the Russians were evicted from Kharkiv, since that time period, Russia has controlled 19% roughly of Ukrainian territory, more or less. They've lost 700,000 people gaining nothing in those two plus years.

Now, you ask you. yourself. How sustainable is that over the really long term? And the answer is Putin keeps throwing lives into the meat grinder, now North Korean lives, because the Ukrainians have fewer lives to throw up against him. Russia needs the same thing. They need either to get Ukraine to capitulate, which they've refused to do remarkably, or they need to get others to force Ukraine to capitulate, which I don't think anybody can do. So Russia's in this holding action. Come on, come on, come on, you guys collapse, you guys collapse.

How much longer do we have to do this? Putin is willing to go as long as it takes, but Russian society maybe not. Then how does this end? Yeah, who thinks it's going to end? You know, it started under Catherine the Great when in 1783 she conquered Crimea. people think this is going to end you know Ukraine can take some territory back and Russia's going to

capitulate they're going to win on the battlefield the primary problem of this from the beginning has been the idea that Ukraine was going to win this on the battlefield rather than somehow apply the kind of political pressure to force an armistice that was favorable to Ukraine invest in reconstruction and attempt the kind of South Korean trajectory from the armistice in the Korean War. That's been the play from the beginning. It's still the play now. It's really the only play available to, you and I have been talking about this for three years now. That's right. So in other words, the outcome that's possible and that ends the meat grinder is like a divided Korea, a divide. did Ukraine? That's the good outcome. The bad outcome is Ukraine loses its sovereignty. And that's not

peace. That's peace on the knees. That's what Putin is now, quote, willing to negotiate. And so he was not willing to negotiate a peace that Russia kept control over Ukrainian territories, but nobody recognized them as Russian. Ukraine put no limits on its military. So it's, could defend itself if fighting resumed. And Ukraine could join any organization that was willing to take them and that they were qualified for. That's the favorable armistice that we've been hoping enough political pressure on Putin would deliver.

We're nowhere near that right now. We should have been working towards that for years now, and we haven't been. What would be the nature of that political pressure that you clearly think Biden administration fail to administer, and what would it be now? Authoritarian regimes can fail at everything, and they often do. But they survive as long as they succeed at one thing. And that one thing is suppressing political alternatives. A lot of people would like to see a different future for Russia, but they don't have that on the horizon,

and it's too risky to step out for nothing. My understanding of political alternatives of Russia are the following. You have on one hand the kind of dissidents, pro-democratic dissidents that were embodied by Alexei Navalny. And we know that story. And also, we have to admit how limited that is. It is small a number, and the willingness of the regime to crush it knows no end.

there's a different kind of dissent or alternative in Russia that's harder for, I think, Americans to see. And these are not Democrats. These are not Navalnyites. They're quite different, but maybe more in number and maybe more significant in some ways. Yeah, you're right. I mean, again, we've been talking about this for, what, three years now. We're 30. Yes.

Yeah. So Navalny, unbelievably impressive. The charisma, yes, but the organizational skills. Figuring out how to win elections where they were contestable. But you also have a lot of people who are the regime, who don't care about Ukraine, but who are hurting for Russia. They think Russia is on a failed trajectory, that Russia has mortgaged its future,

that Russia's military, economy is not sustainable, that the banking system is basically a fiction now because they've made massive loans to the military industrial complex that are never going to be paid back. There is almost no investment in the civilian economy. And so let's end the war in Ukraine and have a rapprochement with Europe. Russia's never been prosperous without a deep and multi-layered relationship with Europe. And so those people, People are kind of what we call internal defectors, and they make up a significant part of the security and military establishment. But they're not going to go out on a limb in a situation where there's nothing on offer.

There's no sanctions relief on offer to them. There's no protected exile, government and exile offered to them. Nothing's on offer to them except support for Putin or a bullet in the neck. How do we reach such people and who are they? In other words, they're embodied by who exactly? So the KGB brought Gorbachev to power. And Gorbachev gets inserted into the leadership because the KGB is worried about the trajectory of the Soviet Union and the widening gap and capabilities with the U.S. and others.

These are the hard men of the regime did this. And so these people exist. Now, you're going to tell me that they're hard to find. Well, we recruit them to be information suppliers to us. If we can recruit them to supply the same information to the CIA that I read on the telegram and signal channels every morning, maybe we can recruit them to form some type of pressure group, fly them to Warsaw, fly them to Helsinki, link them up with each other, figure out how to build political pressure against the Putin regime to show that there are alternatives,

which are Russian nationalist patriotic alternatives, to rescue the country from its current trajectory. Now, even if it doesn't work, it puts the pressure on the regime to come to the table and say, I'm going to preserve the regime over continuing the self-defeating war. But wait a minute, some would say, Steve, let's get back to real life here. Real life is Donald Trump is the president of the United States, and his affections are almost personal toward Vladimir Putin, that when he speaks of Russia, he doesn't speak in the complexities that you've mapped out. He likes the guy.

He has an affinity for the guy. He feels much closer to him than not only Volodymyr's a lot of him. Lansky, but conceivably the leaders of Western European nations. Trump plays good cop with all your strong men and foe strong men. And he then has his staff, right, play bad cop with them. And he plays bad cop with all of our allies, our treaty allies, and he has his staff, right, play good cop with them. That seems like an awfully optimistic reading of Trump's,

strategic wilds. Again, Trump, this is, this is world wrestling entertainment, right? This is television. This is a version of government that's attention driven, that's Trump-centric. And so that's the reality that you have, some of which is sincere and some of it is reversible, even in sometimes the same news cycle. You work with that. That's what you have. Now, again, Trump was elected in our system, rightly or wrongly. There isn't a mirror on the planet big enough for the Democrats in the left to look into to see all the ways that they elected Trump. This is what we have.

And so there are people in the Trump administration who are highly qualified on the national security side and who understand these issues at least as well may be better than I do. But again, we have this larger problem where there's not. enough American power in the world. And hard choices have to be made, not because America's in decline, but because 40 years ago, 30 years ago, the G7 was 70% of the global economy, and now it's under 40%. The plan was for the rest of the world to rise up in the American-led order, and it worked. And now we're not ready for that success.

You mentioned in passing what I think is a big theme of yours, and that is whether or not the United States is in decline. It's been axiomatic from time to time for decades now that the United States is in decline, and that somebody else, most recently China, is the ascendant power. I want to ask about that, and I also want to ask about how China is watching the U.S.-Ukraine Russia drama. China's a really impressive country. Now, they went into the tank around 1800 for 170 years. That happens to coincide with the rise of America to superpower status. So the world before 1800 was a China-centric world. The Europeans but in the British took over India.

Nobody ever managed to take over China, but China got roughed up by the imperialists. The U.S. rose in that world until China started to come out of the tank in the late 1970s, but especially in the 90s and 2000s. And now for the first time in recorded history, China and the U.S. are powerful at the same time. And so now you look and see that there's this U.S. dominated world order. Now, China is not going to like that. and they're going to behave in such a way to push against that to shape the world order, not for U.S. interests, where China's a junior partner, but for China's interests. So the irony for China is now they want to push the U.S.-led order first out of East Asia

and then we'll see the appetite grows in the eating. But that's been the basis of their success of coming out of the tunnel. if the Chinese lose the U.S. led order, you know, be careful what you wish for. What is their pathway forward for continued prosperity? And who supplies the global commons? Who defends the global commons on which everyone's prosperity, world trade and security depend on, right? So that's the world we're in now. And they're looking at Trump and they have no idea what's coming next.

They don't know. They're off balance because of Trump. Remember, Putin thought Trump was going to deliver everything to Russia in his first term, and Trump was much harder on Russia than Obama was. So you tell me that you can predict what's going to happen Trump vis-a-vis China, and I'll crown you king of the world. Following our behavior with Ukraine last week and not only last week, what signals does that send to China and how it might? proceed with Taiwan.

China has been strangling Taiwan for years and years now. Information warfare, practicing, actually rehearsing a massive quarantine or blockade of Taiwan, even as we speak on your show. Cutting the cables around Taiwan to,

there are only 14 cables that connect Taiwan to the global network. and they can be cut. And then you're left with Musk and Starlink, aren't you? You know, so this is underway already. It was underway during Obama's administration, when they built the military bases on the coral reefs in the South China Sea, and Obama shrugged.

We're in this situation again where war is catastrophic. Xi Jinping is making the decision, and I have no idea his thought processes, and I don't think anybody else does. So the goal is Taiwan is looking at Ukraine and seeing that Trump understands investment. He understands economic ties, economic benefit, and you heard TSM announce with Trump that they were going to not double down, not triple down, but maybe quadrupled down on their investments in Arizona and elsewhere, and build an economic relationship with the U.S. that was favorable to the U.S. to tie Trump to the fate of Taiwan in ways that Trump understands,

maybe not the same way that you understand or I understand. So this is the strategy. So it could well be that Trump has achieved something quite strange. He has made Zelensky popular in Ukraine again. He has turned the Europeans into such a peasant. panic that maybe finally, maybe not, but maybe finally something really comes from European military conversations. And he's turned Taiwan into, oh my God, we have to get ready now in more serious ways and we have to do the kinds of things that Trump values. Will it succeed? I mean,

who knows? Most things in politics fail, David. But will it? Is it potentially going? going to succeed? I don't know, maybe. So it's not a disaster a priori. I don't quite understand why Xi Jinping, in the current circumstances, would not make a move on Taiwan. It's not entirely clear that the United States would rush to defend Lithuania or Estonia or Poland, NATO countries. why would it intervene with Taiwan, so many thousands and thousands of miles? Because Xi Jinping knows more about the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, than you do. And the PLA is corrupt, top to bottom, inside out, left to right, right to left. Is it a reliable instrument?

When you roll the iron dice, as Bismarck called them, and you launch a war, you better be sure that you can win the thing. He's rolling the iron dice with the fate of the communist regime in China. Everybody says he wants to go into the history books as the man who unified China. How about going into the history books as the guy who rolled the iron dice and lost the Chinese communist regime the way Gorbachev peacefully lost the Soviet Union and the communist regime there? So you're talking about the ultimate risk that's existential. and I got to tell you, a lot of people been getting fired for corruption, including people he recently appointed. And so how certain is he of success, which is why many analysts, and I sign on to their analysis,

are more worried about quarantine than they're worried about amphibious attack across the strait. The Taiwan Strait theater is the same size as the Mediterranean. And let's remember Hitler couldn't cross the channel, right, what we're talking about here. So this is the hardest military operation to do. So the more we can focus on their vulnerabilities and talk about the existential risk to that regime, the more we can enhance deterrence. Deterance is not just tomahawk missiles in Japan. Again, it's the political dimension.

That regime has to be afraid for its existence. and therefore maybe it won't do those kinds of things to put its existence at risk. A final question. You, as a historian, look at the United States through the lens, very often in our conversations, of institutions, its past, its resilience, and not through the lens of the worldwide wrestling federation. Fair enough. But in the real world that we're living in, both you and me and everybody else, you have a government leadership now that is staffed by, that is led by not only Donald Trump, who has his own character, but Cash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and on and on. Does your confidence in the stability and the resilience of the system survive that kind of leadership?

My view is pretty clear. The society is unbelievably strong, resilient, and dynamic. It's incredible what you can get with American society. That's not going away. American institutions are phenomenal, and they've lasted a really long time. And, of course, there are a lot of times we don't live up. to our promises. My point being is that we've been through a lot before. We need to remember that. That's not necessarily an excuse for incompetence, violation of the law, or anything else.

But we have this inbuilt radicalism now where you win an election by 10,000 votes in some state called a swing state. You get a 50-50 senator close to it and you decide to reinvent the American. system, whether you're going to do a Green New Deal or whatever. And then the other side wins, also by the skin of its teeth, and it comes in and it decides it's going to reinvent America again, you know, because otherwise we'll lose our country. We clearly need to get back to something where we have the berserk because that's just inherent in who we are as a nation and a people. But we also have a middle ground where common sense prevails. where coalitions are necessary, where legislation passes not with 51 votes, but with 70 votes,

or not with 219 votes, but with 300 or 400 votes, right? It's not going to be easy and simple because the media environment has been radicalized. We went through this when radio was invented. People thought it was the end of civilization because they could just broadcast anything into people's living rooms, and nobody could stop them. They could broadcast New Yorker radio hour with some bozo sitting in the Hoover Tower at Stanford University in the middle of Silicon Valley

and nobody could stop them. But we mastered radio as an open society. We got Roosevelt. Same thing happened with TV, which was even worse because it was not just voice, but images. And it was the end of civilization because you could show anybody and you could deceive

and it wasn't the truth, and nobody could stop them. And we got Kennedy and then Reagan. Now we have the social media, which is much, much more radical and disruptive because everybody is a publisher now. Everybody has a megaphone now. Everybody has a podcast and a newspaper and a magazine.

If it's not called in New York or it's called something else. And it's been massively destabilizing. And we're worried that the authoritarian are gaining the upper hand. and just like happened with Mussolini and Goebbels and radio. Just like happened with television. And it turned out we mastered and assimilated those as a free society. Now we have to do the same with social media. It first produced Obama and then it produced Trump.

And so how do we keep a free society while assimilating this massively disruptive technology? I don't know the answer to that. But I believe that, you know, in the short run, we're all dead. China attacks, Russia attacks, Iran gets the bomb. But in the long run, we're good because we have the better system. We have corrective mechanisms. We have a free and open society. We got a judiciary that still works.

And we can do this because we've done it before and we've come from depths. I mean, the Civil War. Andrew Jackson. There's a lot in American history that is not necessarily. optimistic for the future, and yet we made it through to the other side. And it's quite possible we'll make it through the current epoch that we're in. And certainly I wouldn't bet on the authoritarian's in the long run, even if the short run can be very messy and maybe worse than messy. Stephen Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. And you can find coverage

of Russia's war in Ukraine from Luke Mogulsson, Joshua Yoffa, and many others at New Yorker.com. You can also subscribe to The New Yorker at the same website, New Yorker.com. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Bolton,

Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccate. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.