The Paul Wells Show - Democracy under threat: Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Two acclaimed historians talk about the state of democracy and freedom in the world today. In her latest book, Autocracy Inc., Anne Applebaum writes about a group of dictators who share a bond that’s not based on ideology, but on their ability to help each other gain wealth, power and impunity.  Yale historian Timothy Synder argues in his new book On Freedom that freedom is more than the absence of oppression. He shares his vision for freedom in the wake of a recent trip to Ukraine. Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

I want to take a moment to thank the people who support this show. Tackling the complexity of global challenges demands a different approach to public policy. The Max Bell School of Public Policy's teaching, research, policy engagement, and public outreach develops the skills and understanding to solve the most important issues facing Canada and the world today. They offer several public lectures and conferences throughout the year on current policy conversations and provide an 11-month intensive master's program to prepare the next generation of policy leaders. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxbellschool. How do you spread freedom in a world where more and more regimes are working to spread chaos? They have a very different vision of the world. They have different aesthetics.

The one thing that unites them is their common desire to stay in power and to rule without checks and balances. PAUL WELLS Today, two great historians on a historic challenge to democracy. I'm Paul Wells, the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. There's no way to fly into Kiev because no civilian aircraft is safe in Ukrainian skies. So on my first trip to Ukraine in September, I rode a bus from Warsaw to the Polish border and then switched to an overnight train for the 12-hour ride from the border to Kyiv.

My destination was the so-called YES conference, Y-E-S for Yalta European Strategy. It used to actually be held in Yalta until Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea a decade ago. After he expanded his attack on Ukraine in 2022, the YES Conference has become an annual strategy session for people who want Ukraine to defeat the Russian invasion. Two of the people at the conference were American authors who have new books about the global struggle for democracy. I talked to Anne Applebaum before the conference in Kiev and to Timothy Snyder after it was over.

Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-winning historian. Her new book is called Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. She says tyranny in the 21st century is starting to act more like a business than an ideology. It's a new kind of threat that she says requires a new response from Western democracies. Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian and the author of a pile of books about Central and Eastern Europe, especially his absolute classic history of the region, Bloodlands, Europe between Hitler and Stalin. His latest book is called On Freedom. It's designed to answer a basic question, What are Democrats fighting for?

Snyder isn't really impressed by definitions that treat freedom as an absence of obstacles to a good life. He's way more interested in freedom as a presence of conditions, often built and defended by governments, that make a good life possible. I'm very pleased to be able to bring you these conversations with two of the world's leading advocates for democratic rights. I caught up with Anne Applebaum in Toronto. Anne Applebaum, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. You've written this essay, Autocracy, Inc., which has actually been out for a little while.

And it's different in kind from the sort of book that you had been writing for a long time. It's not a reported history. It's a kind of an essay and an exhortation to Democrats, letting us all know about some trouble that democracy is in around the world and an increasingly organized threat. What led you to write this book? What led you to write this book? This book is actually genuinely inspired by friends of mine who are part of democratic opposition movements in the autocratic world. So the people who understand the autocratic world best are its opponents. So it was the Russian opposition who explained to me how kleptocracy works and how the Western world, which lectured them about human rights, allowed Russian oligarchs to launder money. It was a friend of mine in the Venezuelan opposition who explained to me how the Venezuelan regime, which should have collapsed a long time ago. It's catastrophically bad for the

country. It took the richest country in South America and made it into the poorest. It's very unpopular and nevertheless has been supported for a couple of decades now by Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and others through money, through secret police assistance, through surveillance technology and so on. And also by a friend of mine who somewhat by accident became a Zimbabwean opponent of the regime, wound up being in exile and who experienced really the modern form of autocratic repression. So they didn't kill him, but they crushed him and they tried to destroy his movement and they tried to destroy any sense of hope or optimism around him. It was really those people from whom I came to understand how not all the world's dictatorships, but how one group of them

who are not ideologically unified, but are led by people with a similar desire to rule without checks and balances and without scrutiny and without transparency, have become determined both to crush their own liberal democratic oppositions, but also to fight those ideas around the world. And that was the purpose of the book, was to explain what that group was and how it functions and how it operates. You say these regimes are not ideologically united. That's an understatement. Is it overreach to even paint them in the same brush or put them in the same basket? So to be clear, they are not an alliance. So we're talking about, again, communist China, nationalist Russia, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela, theocratic Iran, North Korea, Cuba. These are not countries

that have anything in common. Some of them are run by a single person. Some of them are run by ruling parties. They have a very different vision of the world. They have different aesthetics. The one thing that unites them is their common desire to stay in power and to rule, as I said, without checks and balances. And also what unites them is that they have a common enemy and the enemy is us. And the enemy is the liberal democratic world and the ideas of liberalism of liberal states, which are used both by their own oppositions and by democracies. When did you start thinking about these countries as a kind of a corporation? So a corporation was really a metaphor. I mean, I was, again, as I said, it's not an alliance. They don't have a treaty, nor is it a conspiracy.

They don't meet in a secret room and decide things behind everybody's back. It's, you know, when a lot of times when they cooperate, it's in very obvious ways. You know, they meet one another in public and so on. It's not a conspiracy. It's not even really an when a lot of times when they cooperate, it's in very obvious ways. You know, they meet one another in public and so on. It's not a conspiracy. It's not even really an axis because I don't think they necessarily always have common policies. But what it does function like, it's like a big international corporation in which there are conglomerate, in which there are a bunch of companies and each one has its own business model. And they cooperate at a higher level whenever they need to. And autocracy, Inc., I also like because it encompasses the financial aspect of what they do. In many cases, probably most cases, I think, we're talking about people

who are billionaires and who have enormous amounts of property and wealth, which sometimes they hide in the democratic world. Sometimes they don't own it personally, it's owned by their cousin or their mother or their friends. You know, so even in Iran, which you think of probably as an austere, you know, religious state and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard own enormous amounts of property in Iran and are effectively the capitalists of that system. We see the evidence of Russian oligarchs all around us. But of course, the Chinese leader is also very, very wealthy and so wealthy that he is willing to expel Western journalists who write about his family's wealth because he is eager to keep that concealed. When you have that kind of wealth and when you're trying to conceal it, that gives you

the reason and the need to build an autocratic political system. Because you don't want people to find out where it is or how you got it. You don't want others to know about it. Therefore, you need to put pressure. You can't have independent media. You can't have independent courts. All those things become much more important to you if you have a lot of money that you need to protect. Has it ever been thus, or was there a sort of an inciting moment that caused these regimes to become more self-aware, interconnected? You spend a large part of the book talking about the color revolutions in Central Europe 20 years ago.

So you can certainly look back at other eras when there were lots of dictators who worked together. I mean, this is not like the 1930s. It's not an entirely new phenomenon. You know, the difference, of course, now is that there's this, as I said, this ideological difference and there's a different level of money involved and there's a different level of surveillance technology involved. I think in the current era, there was a turning point that took place at around 2013, 2014. was a turning point that took place at around 2013, 2014. And this was a moment when in the two of the largest countries, there was a shift in policy. And this is the moment of the rise of Xi Jinping, who previously China had the system of rotating leadership, and he got rid of that and instead became a one man leader. And right at about that time, the Chinese Communist Party

issued this notorious document, or I don't know that it issued it. It was a secret document, which has a great name. It's called Document Number Nine. It's the banality of evil right there. And Document Number Nine listed the perils facing the modern Chinese Communist Party. And number one on the list was Western constitutional government. And somewhere also on the list was Western constitutional government. And somewhere also on the list is free press and also civil society, civic engagement. There was clearly a moment when the Chinese Communist Party perceived that it could be challenged by a threat. I mean, maybe this came from their experience with Hong Kong,

the Hong Kong Democrats. Maybe there were other sources. I mean, there was a moment when what had felt actually like, in some ways, you know, that when I was in China a decade ago, you couldn't shout from the rooftops your opinions, but you could certainly discuss them in private. And you could even discuss them, like, say, at a little small event in a bookstore or something. I mean, there was a, you know, there was a kind of small, tolerated liberal conversation that was going on there. And the same was true of Moscow, actually. And there was just a moment when the leaders of those regimes decided that they couldn't tolerate that anymore. And that was the rise of Xi Jinping. And then in Russia, this is, of course, 2014, when Putin watched the unfolding of the Ukrainian revolution of that year. And if you'll remember, that was an anti-corruption revolution. So there were

young Ukrainians carrying signs, calling for the end of corruption and demanding that Ukraine join the European Union, which was a way of saying, we want the rule of law. And they won. And their president got scared and ran out of the country. And Putin saw that and said, right, I don't want that to happen to me. What followed was the invasion of Crimea and so on. So in a way, it was the success of democracy movements and democracy advocacy, probably in both Russia and China, that made those leaders conclude that these things were dangerous to them. And then, of course, there are moments of acceleration. I mean, clearly the war in Ukraine has meant that Russia is far more desperate economically and in terms of needing military supplies. And we've seen very openly that the Iranians have supplied them with drones that are used to kill Ukrainians, and the North Koreans are supplying them with ammunition. And the Chinese have probably enabled, made it possible for the Russians to import components that they need to keep their defense industry going. So we can see in this sense, autocracy working together to keep Russia fighting in Ukraine. I think

otherwise Russia would not be able to continue. So you see the network acting. You could also see the network acting in, you can see it in Venezuela right now, actually. You know, why has Maduro, what gives him the confidence to stay in power, even though he's clearly lost an election and not, wasn't even close? And again, the answer is Russian investment, Chinese state companies and surveillance technology, Cubans are sending extra police reinforcements and so on. So you see how the network comes together to help its members at key moments. So the solidifying of it has become clear in recent years. One of the things that's striking to me comparing your previous book, Twilight of Democracy,

with this book, is that this book actually looks at a narrower cohort of countries. I mean, the previous book talked about Hungary and Brexit Britain and more about Trump's United States than this book does. This seems to be the result of a decision to focus on the most virulent cases, I guess would be one way to put it. Yeah, I mean, in a way, the previous book was about the possibility of democratic decline and the rise of illiberalism inside the democratic world, right? So it was, as you say, Viktor Orban, the Polish Law and Justice Party, you know, Trumpism wrecking the Republican Party and so on. countries who either never were democracies or who made that shift a long time ago, and the way they operate together and the way they seek to affect us. And of course, there is an interaction between the two stories. I mean, even as we're speaking just a few days ago, the FBI revealed the existence of a huge operation that the Russians are spending money

supporting a group of YouTubers and influencers on the American far right based in Tennessee, who sometimes put out messages about how we shouldn't help Ukraine and, you know, the Russians are our friends, but also just put out messages about how America is degenerate and dying and declining and white people are oppressed. And, you know, the woke left is coming to destroy all of our institutions. And some of those are messages that are useful to the autocratic world because they echo their own messaging about the decline of democracy and the rise of dictatorship, and because it would suit them to have the United States in disarray, for the US to be divided and polarized and angry.

I mean, that's how the autocratic world wins. So although there's a kind of interaction between these two stories, I wanted to write something that focused on this particular group of dictatorships as well. Is it a challenge to decide who's in the group that you're talking about and who's not? I mean, I've seen some critiques of your book

that point out that you don't have much to say. There's a weird critique of my book that says, oh, but she doesn't talk about Saudi Arabia. I do. I mean, Saudi Arabia is a vicious gender apartheid state, which is involved in all kinds of ugly projects. The book is not in praise of Saudi Arabia. However, at least at the moment, maybe this will change. I don't think the Saudis are trying to bring down the American political system, you know, or would like NATO to collapse. I mean, maybe it's entirely because the Saudis have a conflict with Iran, you know, which they would like American assistance with. You know, it's true they play both sides. Sometimes they're sort of play with the Russians and the Chinese and sometimes they play with us and they switch back and forth. So I don't see them as good guys. But this is not a book about good guys and bad guys.

You know, this is a book about a specific group of countries that has a specific agenda and acts on it. And I don't think the Saudis at the moment are part of that agenda. There are other kinds of dictatorships. So there's Vietnam. Vietnam is not a democracy. It's run by the Vietnamese Communist Party. Nevertheless, Vietnam is not a power that seeks to upend the status quo. On the contrary, the Vietnamese would like to trade with the United States and seem to not have, again, at least at the moment, a political agenda to change the politics of the United States, whereas the Russians do, the Chinese do, the Iranians do, and so on. But the Autocracy, Inc., as I describe it in the book, is a group of countries who do have an agenda, and they do work together. And they are involved in,

as I say, in bailing one another out and in pushing back against the liberal world. And not all dictatorships do that, at least not all the time, which doesn't mean I'm giving them a pass. But I'm not making a moral judgment about which countries are good or bad. I'm writing a book about which countries are dangerous. Okay. You also guard against or warn against sort of block thinking. One gets the impression there's a reason why this book is not called The New Cold War, because you think that the metaphor has its limits. Yeah, I'm done with Cold War 2.0. I don't like it. Yeah. How come? First of all, it's lazy. It encourages us to imagine that the present is like the past. Second of all, because it also leads to this black and white thinking, you know, that there's two camps and we have to put everybody in one camp or the other. And that leads to bad policy. I mean,

there was actually a little bit of this at one point in the Biden administration, you know, they wanted to rally the democracies. Okay, who's a democracy? What about Singapore? Singapore is a really important American ally, military ally, also, you know, friendly to European and American companies. It's also a country that trades an enormous amount with China. And Singapore doesn't want to have to choose. So you immediately, as soon as you start talking about rallying the democracies, you immediately begin to run into problems. Who do you mean by that? What about the countries that don't fit the mold? You know, so it leads to lazy, lazy decision making.

Last week, I noticed you commenting about this online. Arthur Salzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, wrote in the Washington Post about concerted efforts to undermine the legitimacy of media. And he talked about Modi's India. He talked about some other cases around the world. And he talked about Trump in the United States. Do you buy his argument that this is a key part of Trump's toolkit? So what I liked about his argument was that he understood something fundamental that people often miss. And this is returning to the subject of illiberalism

rather than autocracy, but that the would-be autocratic leaders, the illiberal leaders, the people who are elected leaders of democratic countries, who then seek to make sure they never lose again, who take apart their institutions, don't necessarily use the old tools. So Viktor Orban, when he became prime minister of Hungary, he didn't announce censorship. He didn't ban people. He didn't make, in the olden days in Eastern Europe, there was like a lady who would come around to the newspaper and she would X out the article and say, you can't print that or block out sentences. None of that. That's not how it works now. This is a of old-fashioned Orwellian way of thinking. Now what you do is you, for example, you threaten the advertisers of the

independent newspaper who criticizes you so that people are afraid to advertise there because if they do, they might lose their government contract. This works especially well, I should say, in small countries. Or you use one of your friendly business people whom you have enriched through government contracts or through your national oil industry, and you persuade them to try to buy out existing news organizations or television stations. you know, or television stations. We had a version of that in Poland, for example. So you get them to buy up media so that you can't be criticized. And it's gotten a lot easier because so much media is in financial trouble that actually, if you have somebody who's buying media for political reasons, it's much easier than it used to be. So what Salzberger, I thought, was doing in that piece was sketching out the ways in which government pressure could be applied on the media if somebody wanted to do it. Tax investigations, all kinds of regulatory tools that are part of the toolkit of a government. We assume they're to be used in good faith. I mean,

you're meant to investigate people who are likely to have not paid taxes as opposed to investigating your political enemies. But they could be used. I mean, I can speak from personal experience to this one. So my husband and I were investigated by the last Polish government. Details aren't important. It was on completely spurious grounds. But let me tell you, it was a big waste of time. It was expensive. It involved a lot of lawyers. There was a lot of stress involved. You know, they tried to use it to do bad media. It was more about my husband than about me. My husband, for those who don't know who are listening, my husband's a Polish politician, and now he's the Polish foreign

minister, which is not how I thought that story was going to end. But anyway, that's how it ended. But, you know, if you are the head of government that chooses to use the, in America, for example, the IRS as a political tool, you can, and it's actually been done once or twice before in US history. So what Saldberg was saying is that if Trump became president, and remember, he's, this is Trump has been for the last several days, threatening people, he's been saying, I will lock people up. And people I know in America tend to kind of glaze over that they don't really understand what I mean. But it is true that should Trump put one of his cronies in charge of the IRS and should they decide to use the IRS to persec, like in any country, does have those kinds of powers. And if they are used politically, then they will be. I mean, there are a lot of institutions

in a liberal democracy that are meant to be politically neutral, starting with the courts, of course, including the civil service, including the IRS, all sorts of regulatory agencies. And independence and neutrality is always an ideal, and you can point to lots of examples where it's going to work. But if you had somebody in charge who was deliberately seeking to politicize all these things, you could get a set of very bad outcomes. And again, here I speak from experience. I mean, I saw it happen in Poland. It's exactly what happened in Hungary. It's what happened in Turkey. That's how democracies fail nowadays. And so I thought Sulzberger was well within his rights to point out that possibility.

Is it a bonus for you or a bit of a distraction that you're making this contribution to ways of understanding the really autocratic regimes around the world at the same time as everyone is obsessed with a looming U.S. election? Does that amplify your argument? Yeah, I mean, as you know probably better well than anybody, the timing of when you publish a book depends on many things. And although it was true I wanted it to come out before the election, it could easily have come out a year ago if I hadn't been distracted by the war in Ukraine. So I wouldn't read too much into the exact timing. I'm hoping that the book will alert some people to how dangerous it would be for the U.S. to have a leader who was not interested in leading the democratic world and who was not interested in creating coalitions to fight kleptocracy and who was instead interested in having transactional relationships with other leaders,

including other dictators, in ways that benefit him. I mean, Trump is somebody who's interested in himself. I mean, in that sense, he's not really ideological at all. I mean, he's interested in his own ego and his own money and his own power, and he's obsessed with himself in a way that means he couldn't lead an alliance. And so at this exact moment, maybe it's a good idea to think about, you know, what does an American president do? Well, among other things, an American president has a huge role in the world. And if America wants to play a positive role in the world, then it's very important that we have a leader who wants to play a positive role in the world. And maybe that will convince one or two people. role in the world. And maybe that will convince one or two people.

Your book is dedicated to the optimists, and it closes with some advice to Democrats. Why did you pick the optimists as the dedicatees? And what homework do you leave for the rest of us? So you and I, we live in this very, very lucky world. We still live in some of the few liberal democracies that have ever existed on the planet. And they are relatively prosperous and relatively safe compared to be pessimists. You know, we owe it to everybody else, our children and their children to remain optimistic. And I've been very lucky in my life to know a lot of incredible optimists, including the people we started out talking about, democracy activists in Venezuela and Russia and Iran. And so the book is really dedicated to them and to people in our democracies who continue to see something positive that they want to work for and continue to dedicate themselves to civic engagement and to making things better. And so that's who I wanted to dedicate my book to. You know, the advice I ended up with is somewhat, you know, it's really the beginning of a conversation. Part of it is about reforming

our own politics, beginning the conversation about what kind of social media we want, what kind of online conversations we want, as opposed to the ones we've got now. And then finally, thinking about deterrence. You know, we're living in a more and more dangerous world where more and more countries are prepared to use lawless violence and to deploy it against our allies and maybe eventually against us. And, you know, I would like us to get ready for that world and to begin to plan for it and to begin to deter people who would harm us. That's the beginning of the conversation. Although I have to tell you, I can say this now because I've talked to a number of people over the last few days and weeks about the book.

And I often have encountered there's almost a kind of snide. You don't really think all that could happen or we couldn't really change that. You know, we can't really do anything about those problems. And I almost feel like saying, OK, so we can't do anything about it. So we should give up, you know, we should sacrifice Taiwan to China, and we should assume Russia will run half of Europe, and we're not going to try anymore. I mean, it's a very, when presented with difficult problems, it is amazing how many people say we can't solve that. You know, why not? I mean, let's start the

conversation about how to solve them. Trump getting back into the White House is only one possible outcome in the election in the States. The other is that Vice President Harris becomes president. Do you hope that she would handle America's international role differently from the way President Biden has in the last few years? Do you think that America could be a steadier leader in this fight? I do. Let me preface that. I mean, a lot of what Biden has done has pushed us in the right direction. I don't think there's actually any previous president who would have done more, you know, to send weapons to Ukraine and to organize actually a consortia of 50 countries to aid Ukraine. I don't think previously there was a president who would have done that.

And so I'm really grateful to him. Also, Biden did begin the conversation. For example, he moved the issue of kleptocracy away from just being something the Treasury Department did. He moved it to the National Security Council. In the very first part of his presidency, he talked about the rise of autocracy around the world. I'm not sure that he clearly hasn't wanted to win the war in Ukraine. He didn't want the Ukrainians to beat the world. I'm not sure that he, he clearly hasn't wanted to win the war in Ukraine. He didn't want the Ukrainians to beat the Russians. There have been so many restrictions on what the Ukrainians have been able to do. And those have evolved over time. It's true. But there was clearly an anxiety about that project that has made the war last too long. I mean, it's early to say we're, you know,

we still got six months left, actually. Well, one way or the other, we've got several months left of the Biden presidency. So I don't know what's going to happen between now and January. So maybe this will change. But having somebody in the White House who wanted to win would be different. Whether Harris will be that person, I don't know. Harris has won, from my point of view, and from the point of view of this conversation, one very important thing going for her, which is that she's a lawyer. She was the Attorney General of California. And so she's somebody who's interested and understands the problem of rule of law. Interestingly, we now have the Prime Minister of Great Britain is also the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service in Britain, also a former human rights lawyer. We could wind up with two lawyers practicing prosecutors, actually, at least in

Washington and London. And that would be an interesting combination. I mean, they would have a way of thinking about the world that might be useful at this particular moment. Revitalizing Magnitsky legislation and putting their shoulders to the notion of seizing assets and things like that? Yeah, well, I mean, seizing assets, of seizing assets and things like that? Yeah, well, I mean, seizing assets, beyond seizing assets, I mean, we have too many sanctions on Russia. We aren't able to enforce them. We should pick the ones that are the most vital and we should enforce those. That hasn't really been done. But I also mean in terms of shutting down the world of anonymous companies, anonymous property, the whole kind of the shadow economy that exists alongside the highly regulated and maybe over-regulated

regular economy. She and Starmer could do it if they would know how to do it if they wanted to. They could become sort of latter day trust busters. Yeah, no. I mean, trust busting is actually not a bad historical comparison. I mean, it's not a bad moment to go back and think about. You know, we had a moment in U.S. history when people felt overwhelmed by the power of these trusts, of these huge companies, in effect, the billionaires of their time who seemed to own everything and were stifling small business. And we found a way around it.

We got control of them. You know, we've done it. We've shown in American history that we're able to change the direction of economic development. And we did that once and maybe we can do it again. Anne Applebaum,

the book is called Autocracy, Inc. It's available for sale now. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Oh, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. for taking the time to talk to me. Oh, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. And shortly after I got back from Ukraine, I had this conversation with Timothy Snyder.

He's once again a Yale historian and author of the new book On Freedom. Snyder has worked on and off in Eastern Europe for many years. One result of that investment of real time and energy is that he was the only American who was able to speak to that Ukraine conference in Ukrainian. Here's my chat with Timothy Snyder. Timothy Snyder, thanks so much for joining me. Glad to be talking. anyway. Glad to be talking. You and I were both just in Kiev at the Yalta European Strategy Annual Summit, which is kind of an informal council of war for this horrible invasion in Ukraine. What did you take away from that conference? What did you think was the significance of that moment in this war? Yeah, I mean, I guess what I should say is that the conference was at the end of 10 days in Ukraine for me. So I was in Lviv in the West, and I went to Kharkiv in the East and visited some friends and did some talks and got close to the front. So my impressions are

based a little bit on that. I mean, what strikes me is just the different timescales in which we all live, you know, here in North America. We take our time, we talk to one another, we shoot the breeze, we delay decisions, which we really should have made a long time ago. Whereas there, every day, they're losing people. Every day, terrible things happen. And every day, it matters to them that we're slow and that we're delaying and that we're mainly thinking about ourselves. This was the theme of President Zelensky's comments, which I don't think got a lot of sort of careful attention among attendees at the conference. But what he was saying was, I'm really tired of hearing Americans and other allies whose support is valuable and valued, say, let me get back to you. We're working on it.

Because that's a luxury that they don't have on the ground in Ukraine. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like that spaceship that takes off and approaches light speed and it comes back and it's been 300 years. I mean, for us, it's been two and a half years. For them, imagine what that two and a half years means. How it's the people who are lost, people who are dead, people who are maimed, people who are traumatized, but also even those who have come off relatively unscathed, what that two and a half years of trauma means, like it's like, you know, 25 years or 250 years of human experience packed into this really short period of time. I just think we never caught the positive sense of all this, which was that Ukraine needed to win. I think that's the thing we always missed. Like when

the Americans were right to say Russia was going to invade, but they were wrong to assume that if Russia invaded, it was all going to be over. And we never quite recovered from that. When the Russians failed in 22, we never quite thought, OK, the Russians have failed. It's time for the Ukrainians to succeed. Jake Sullivan, the President Biden's national security advisor, spoke by Zoom from Washington. And that was what was kind of maddening about his remarks to me was that he kept saying, essentially, we absolutely will every time effectively resist any Russian advance. And I'm like, that's not the point, buddy. At some point, Russia's got to be pushed out, or it's got to be persuaded to back out. And resisting advances won't quite do it.

I just, two things here. Number one, I mean, I'm not a military historian. I'm just, I'm a historian. I read a lot of military history. I'm adjacent to military history. I write about war. And I think we've really dropped the ball in letting military history go away because these basic concepts of very basic things like terrain and how rivers matter and what the law of war is, what the experience of war is like, I don't feel like the people making decisions today have been educated in that. I mean, it's not just that they themselves haven't been involved in a war like this. Nobody in North America has been involved in a war like this since the Second War or maybe even the Great War. But it's that we don't have the basic concepts. That's one thing. And then the other thing is, when you're in a war, you have to win. It's not about knocking over their pawn. It's about knocking over their queen, right? It's about getting their king into checkmate. And so you have to think ahead. You have to be seven moves ahead. You have to think,

what is it that's going to make their political system bend? Because that's when a war comes to an end. It's not this or that town. It's not this or that reaction. It's what are the big surprising things we can do that are going to put pressure on the other political systems so that this can actually end. And we have the resources in terms of sanctions, in terms of weapons, in terms of expertise even, but we haven't applied them because we haven't been thinking in the terms that you've just been suggesting. What's always really striking when I hear you speaking about Russia and Ukraine is the deep feeling that you put into the message that you got to get Putin's boot off of Ukraine's neck. And yet the argument of your book is that that's not quite enough, that freedom isn't simply the absence of oppression.

Well, thank you for making that connection, because it really does have a lot to do with Ukraine. The book that's just come out on freedom is something I've been thinking about for the better part of a decade, and I've been writing it for five years. But when I thought I was done, I wanted to put myself through some tests. And one of those tests was going to Ukraine, because it was my Ukrainian friends and colleagues who were not only talking about freedom, but doing so in an interesting way, and then actually taking risks for it. and then actually taking risks for it. And so there are a number of points in the book which were reinforced or brought out or amplified or made more interesting or added by Ukrainian friends and colleagues, including President Zelensky, you mentioned earlier. The point that you're making was really brought home to me

in de-occupied territories. And I'm using that word advisedly. I don't think it's an English word yet, but I think it will be. The Ukrainians tend not to talk about liberation. They tend to talk about deoccupation. And that word is a very important distinction. You can be in a village or a town which has been deoccupied, but that doesn't mean people are free, right? You've removed the torture chambers. You've driven out the people who carry out the torture, but you still have to clear the rubble. You've

got to get the buses running again. The Ukrainians have this thing which might seem quirky from North America, but which I think is really interesting and true. They consider that a town might actually be liberated when the trains run there again, when you can get there by train. And so that extreme example teaches us a general lesson. We, especially Americans, we tend to think freedom is when you've pushed away the bad thing. But the only reason that you really should care about pushing away the bad thing is because you want to be the good thing. It's not enough to push against the barrier. You have to construct something beautiful as well. Freedom from is only the first step towards freedom to.

And the book is really about freedom to. That's a tall order. It adds a burden on the sort of armies of freedom and it redefines the notion of freedom. For the last third of a century, people who present themselves as standard bearers of freedom have mostly been the freedom from crowd. And saying that not just that we've got to get government off our backs, but we've got to get government off our backs, but we've got to get government out in front to help make good things happen, provide education and infrastructure and all that other stuff. As I say, that's a tall order.

I think in a couple of ways it does make life easier, though. One is that if negative freedom is wrong, which it is, and you understand that, that's going to stop you from doing some things which are going to turn out to be mistakes. So, for example, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was premised on the notion that if you get rid of the bad guys, get rid of the bath party, knock over the state, the good things are going to come up automatically. And that's pretty much what we said at the time. the good things are going to come up automatically. And that's pretty much what we said at the time, right? We had a view of how Eastern Europe became free, which was that the wall fell. And of course, I mean, the fact that we talk about the Berlin falling is a sign of how wrong we are about stuff because it didn't actually fall. Insofar as people became free, it's because

people dared to go through that wall and then build things afterwards, et cetera. So if you think about freedom positively, if you realize that it involves creating things, you're not going to start out, like you're not going to make the mistake that the Americans began this century with. So that's one good thing. Another good thing is that it's not about government, first of all, it's about government last of all, and it's about us first of all. So the reason, I mean, the reason why I think we ought to have good roads and trains and healthcare and education and pensions and all of this is freedom. It's not because we need to have a government bureaucracy. It's because in order to be free people, we need to have a more or less predictable world around us. And so freedom for us should be a nice thing. It should be

the quirks, like the beer you like, you know, the wine you like, the stamps you collect, the kites you fly, the friends you choose, the stamps you collect, the kites you fly, the friends you choose, the sports you attend. That's freedom, right? The little things which are unpredictable, which you actually like and which you do with other people. It's not usually this glamorous, dramatic Hollywood type thing. But to get to that, then in turn, you need the government to build the sidewalks and have the schools and subsidize the pharmacies and the bakeries or whatever else might be, but precisely in the name of everyday, normal, happy freedom. So I actually think this notion of freedom is enlivening, whereas if you think freedom is just negative, it's kind of deadening. Because if freedom is just fighting against the barrier, what happens

is you're always angry, like Americans often are, and you look for that barrier. And sometimes you find that barrier in other people, which is a bad thing. And very often what happens is that you don't actually end up ever asking what it would mean for you to be a free person, because the whole thing is directed outwards against the barrier, against the problem. It seems to me that these debates are often at the heart of the politics of Central Europe. I mean, in Poland, for instance, there isn't really a left-right divide in their politics so much as there's a divide between an understandable resentment on one side and a feeling of the responsibility of a country that hasn't always been granted its freedom on the other. So there's, are we going to carry grudges or are we going to try and help? It seems to me that's the axis of division in Polish politics, for instance, which is, it's hard to explain to people who haven't

seen it up close, but it's easy to understand given what that country's been through. Yeah, that's an interesting point about Poland, because Poland is basically the center-right with some centrist and left-wing allies against the right. And like both center-right and right think there should be a welfare state essentially at this point. So it's very hard to classify in conventional terms. Let me just make a different reference to Poland, because on freedom has to do with the fact that I'm an East Europeanist and I've been trying to draw from East European thinkers who I think were unjustly neglected after 1989, including by themselves. And that has to do with this idea of negative freedom. We, that is North Americans, Anglo-Saxons, we tended to come to

Eastern Europe with the idea that so long as that wall fell down, so to speak, so long as you get rid of central planning, so long as you get rid of this system, the good things are going to come automatically. And that's a very appealing idea. It's very elegant. It's very coherent. It's very persuasive. It's seductive. It's just not really true. And the people in Eastern Europe who I admire were the ones in the 70s and 80s who were talking about unpredictability. They were talking about authenticity. They were talking about being your own self, acting as if you were free, people like Havel and Michnik. And those ideas are very applicable to our own society, because of course, it's not true that when you get rid of the walls, you're automatically free.

You have to ask who you want to be, what the values are that you want to affirm, how you want to live in the world. That's what freedom is. And that's where freedom comes from. And so I'm drawing a lot from the right from the post Soviet, the post the Ukrainian, the Polish and the Czech dissidents in this book, because I think we were quite arrogant after 89. And now like that things haven't turned out the way that we thought it's a good time to be a little more humble and to look back at those interesting thinkers. Can I ask about your evolution as a writer? Right up through Bloodlands, you have been more of a classical historian, researched close-up looks at moments, personalities,

regions from history. And in your last few books, you've gotten into the exhortation business. You are writing essays about how we should live. Do you feel like you've gained or lost anything in that transition? Or does it feel like all of a piece? It feels like several pieces which more or less fit together, which is kind of, I think, what life is like, including creative life. Like there's never one thing that's like beautiful and whole. that's like beautiful and whole. But there are pieces and the pieces fit together and you have to be aware about how tight you try to force them

or how loose you, about how far away you let them get. I mean, for me, I have always written exhortation. It's just not, people haven't necessarily always listened. So, you know, so I wrote, I published my first op-ed when I was a teenager. So like the exhorting has been going on for a while. There's probably been no break in the exhortation. It's just that after On Tyranny, more people were exhorted, I think, than before.

But to take a question seriously, I think being a historian involves knowing that there's an element of life which is subjective and or which you can refer to as agency or you might summon with the concept of responsibility. So as a historian, you're doing your best to get the structures right and the trends right. But then there are the moments where you simply have to describe what you think an individual is making of all those things. And if you accept that view of the past or of how life works, then in the present, there's no contradiction in trying to appeal to people's sense of responsibility or trying to live a little bit in that ethical plane, which you can't quite ever pin down the way you can pin down a mountain range or maybe even a social movement or a political institution. That individuality

is the thing which we kind of write towards, but we never quite get there. Even poetry and music don't ever quite get there. They maybe approach it more closely than we do as journalists or historians, but it's real, it's there. And so I don't think there's anything like the very fact that I'm a historian means that I'm aware of that element of human subjectivity and responsibility. And so working in that doesn't feel uncomfortable to me. Although of course I do try to be aware of the difference and where the overlap stops. In the nature of things, don't you feel like Cassandra sometimes? Like we're a month away from a presidential election, which must feel horribly like a potential repeat of 2016 for you.

President Zelensky came to the United States and made his pitch, and I'm not sure the White House has bought his pitch. It must be terribly frustrating at times. Cassandra was wonderful. She did her best. And she was right. It's funny, there's an amazing Ukrainian writer called Lesya Ukrainka, who's also fascinated with Cassandra and the difference between being right and having an effect, which are's now more, I believe that we all need to do the things that we can do. And I'm trying to do the thing that I can do. And I'm trying to encourage other people to do the little things that they can do. So it's more, I have more of a work a day feeling like my describing what I think is going to happen is my bit. And then other people are doing their bits. And then like together, hopefully we're going to get through this. I'm basically feeling like we have the wind in our back in the US now. I think like things can go well in the US now. I think Biden has kind of kept the boat above the water. And

I think now it's possible we might actually start sailing in some sensible direction. So I guess, I mean, I don't want to sound dramatic and say like, oh, I can't allow myself to be frustrated, but it is something like that. And in a way, like this is the spirit in which I wrote this book and the book kind of helps me keep going. And like, I'm glad I have the book out finally, because the book is about how the future can be much, much better, which I believe, right? Like part of our politics, part of the problem in our politics, the deep problem, or one

of the ways the bad guys are winning is that we don't have much future in politics anymore.. There's going to be a future. It's common, but we don't have much political vision of the future. We don't have much imagination of it. And I think that's a problem of freedom. That's a sign that we're not doing so well with respect to freedom. And so I'm trying to bust through that and reopen imagination and suggest that, sure, there are some catastrophically bad things that can happen, but there are some things that are in a range of possibility which are much better than we would expect to. I think if you're just trying to defend all of the time, eventually you lose, which of course goes back to your point about Jake Sullivan. You can't just defend the village. You have to be thinking about the transformation of the entire context. And that's a bit what I'm

trying to do in the book. And I think that's put me in a better mood than just trying to defend the village. It feels like we're coming out of a couple of decades. It's cliche to load everything on the back of social media, but what the heck? We've had a bad extended flirtation with short termism as a society. Nothing comes from anywhere and nothing's going anywhere. And maybe it takes a historian to point forward. I completely agree with you. I mean, I think, I mean, we still have humans in history in 50 years or a hundred years. That moment beginning in 2010, where the internet became social media and, you know, we started to become fleshy robots. Like, I think that moment is going to be seen as a turning point. A lot of things went wrong there. I think to a greater extent than people generally appreciate, we're all on these

terribly short loops. So we're in this kind of eternal present all of the time. And if you're an eternal present, you're going to end up depressed because you can't see what the breakthroughs might be in the future. And you can't draw a line between yourself and that and aim for that because you're constantly just here, here, here, here, here, here, here. And of course, it also, I mean Wheatcroft wrote in his review of your book in the New York Times where he said this. Professor Snyder wants to keep doubling down in Ukraine. Well, we've seen that before. That was the domino theory in Vietnam, and we saw what came of that. That had to cut a little bit as a

comparison, and I wonder what you make of it. So I have to confess that I haven't read the review, so I'm thinking about this for the first time. I'm the bearer of bad news. No worries. Life is full of moments of consideration. And so in a way, I'm not being fair to Professor Woodcroft because I, turn don't know the context of that remark, but it seems to me there are two things which are basically wrong about it. The first is that we're not doing the fighting. In Vietnam, more and more American soldiers were sent under less and less plausible pretexts. And it was the presence of American soldiers which created the dynamic, which is that we have to win because wetexts. And it was the presence of American soldiers was created the dynamic, which is that we have to win because we're there. And we're there because we have to

win. That dynamic doesn't exist in Ukraine at all, because we're not there. That whole psychological trap, that doesn't exist because we're not in Ukraine. So I don't see how that comparison could work. But the second thing is that we're not doubling down in Ukraine. Like, that's just not true. There's no sense in which we're doubling down. We occasionally, I don't know what the card analogy would be, right? But we're like, one side is playing poker, and we're playing gin rummy or something, but we're not doubling down. We haven't even played a hand meaningfully yet. Again, it's kind of unfair to Professor Weikwap, who's an extraordinary military historian. And it would be really good to have this conversation where we could actually air it out with him, and maybe that will even happen. But the way that I feel

a little alienated in this conversation is that I think that the basic, going back to a conversation we were having already, somebody's going to win this war, and that victory is going to have consequences. And we have a fair sense of what the consequences would be if Russia won. The consequences have to do with more nuclear proliferation, encouraging China, destabilization of the world legal order, taking the wind from the sails of people who are willing to resist for democracy, drawing the ethical dimension away from politics. All these things follow if Russia wins. And if Ukraine wins, good things follow. But somebody is going to win.

And I feel like that's the aspect of the thinking which has been missing. Anyway, I don't see how it's like Vietnam. I don't see how we're doubling down. I'd have to be instructed on those things. And just to repeat what we've been talking about, I think the main problem American strategists, if that's the right word, have had is that we haven't thought about what the politics of victory are like. It's so easy to think about what it's like to lose. That's very easy. It's because it's very easy to lose. But the fact that it's harder to win than to lose doesn't mean that it's not worth

trying. But yeah, just to let me just to like to put a little footnote on this, an empirical footnote. So I'm going to wager that I've been to the front in Ukraine more recently than Professor Weacroft. And one of the things which soldiers on the front always want me to tell Americans is, we don't need your troops. They don't want our, we don't need your troops. They don't need American troops. It's not just that we're not there. It's that the Ukrainians don't even want us to be there. They just want our stuff. And the stuff that we've been sending them, I'm not speaking as an American here, but the stuff that we send them is the stuff which we were going to consign to being recycled anyway. The money that we're supposedly giving to the Ukrainians

mostly goes to US arms manufacturers who build new stuff, which goes into our warehouses. And then we give Ukrainians old stuff. All the Ukrainians are saying basically is send us more of your old stuff faster. Like that's pretty much it. That's not Vietnam. That's not doubling down. Maybe there's one more thing, which is worth, it goes back to subjectivity, right? In this story, the Ukrainians are the ones who are showing the subjectivity. And I think Americans have a terrible time with that. And I'm going to extend that to the West generally. I think British people sometimes also have a hard time with that, Canadians, Europeans, that we're not actually at the center of this story.

Canadians, Europeans, that we're not actually at the center of this story. This is not our catastrophe. We can make it our catastrophe by doing the wrong thing. But this is not our catastrophe. It's not our war. It won't even really be our victory, right? We're putting ourselves at the middle of the story. And we have trouble with that.

And so we want it to be our narrative. It must be something that happened to us, like Vietnam. But it's fundamentally be our narrative. It must be something that happened to us, like Vietnam. But it's fundamentally not our narrative. It's fundamentally somebody else's story. And I think if we could recognize that it's somebody else's story, if we recognize that the Ukrainians are not a problem, they're not something which is annoying us, but that they're a solution, that on their own, they're doing a lot of things which help us out. If we could see it that way, if for once we could get off our pedestal and just imagine that other people are the ones who are at the center of the story, then I think we'd be at the right

conceptual starting point because then we would appreciate all the things that they've done and then do our tiny little thing, which we wouldn't even notice if we did it, so that they can win the war. It sounds like what you're calling for is essentially an effort of empathy, that we have to think about other people. That's exactly right. Freedom has everything to do with empathy. We, you know, the English-speaking peoples, we tend to think that we've got freedom figured out. And I think our tradition is fundamentally wrong because of this very point. We tend to start from the idea

of a rational adult who already knows his own interests. And I'm saying he advisedly because the abstract human is basically kind of a, it's a land owning, perhaps slave owning, but certainly land owning 19th century person. And behind that person are all the servants or the slaves and the women and so on, right? And that's our notion of freedom. We abstract away from all of the stuff which allowed that one person to be free or to think of himself as free. And so then you get negative freedom because only the government can take away your property or only the government could free those slaves or enfranchise those women and so forth. And so hence your idea of freedom is keep the government away. But we have to think of freedom in terms of freedom for everybody. And there's even a more profound point. I don't think

that plantation owner is free. I don't think anybody can be free unless they know themselves. And I think you can't know yourself unless you listen to other people. And you can't listen to other people unless you take them seriously as being people like themselves, which is why the last part of the book is called Solidarity and why I spend so much time in the book with philosophers like Edith Stein, who are concerned precisely with empathy. And I appreciate the reference. And it does have an awful lot to do with Ukraine, because insofar as Ukraine is a project of liberation, it has nothing to do with Vietnam. It has nothing to do with Iraq or with other American mistakes or colonial adventures. It has to do with people who are trying to do something because they believe they have to.

And if we could take them seriously and listen to them from where they're coming from, I think it would be much simpler for us to do the right thing. We talk a lot about freedom, but our inability to see things from positions other than our own is in fact creates an intellectual and then a moral and then a political and then a strategic problem for our own decision making, precisely in this case, Ukraine, which is going to make a lot of difference for how free people are in decades to come. Well, you've given us an awful lot to think about. Timothy Snyder, it's been a great pleasure talking to you. Thanks for joining us today.

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