The Paul Wells Show - Toomas Ilves on living in Russia’s shadow

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

As the former president of Estonia, Toomas Henrik Ilves has a unique perspective on Russian aggression. Though he grew up in the United States, he moved back to Estonia and got into politics, helping to lead a technological revolution that has given them a unique advantage for a country of only 1.3 million inhabitants. He talks to Paul about building up his country’s tech sector, pushing to get Estonia into NATO, and what it’s like watching from a small, Baltic country as Russia grows more aggressive.

How did a tiny country join the modern world? As fast as it possibly could. We've got to go digital. Why don't we do a strategy to teach kids how to use computers? Which was wildly unpopular when I proposed this. Today, former Estonian President Tomas Hendrik Ilves on life in a dangerous neighborhood and how to handle a bully. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. Tomas Ilves, whose friends call him Tom, was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago on his way to the Halifax International Security Forum.

Seems he's always on his way to some global gathering of people who worry about war. I saw him at the Warsaw Security Forum in October. He's easy to spot in a crowd, dapper, in a tweedy suit and a bow tie. He comes by his interest in war and peace honestly. From 2006 to 2016, he was the third of the five presidents Estonia has had since it regained its independence in 1991. Before that, in the 90s, he was Estonia's foreign minister, which means that during all the time when the world was celebrating the end of the Cold War, he was trying desperately to deliver a single message. Not so fast. He's a fascinating figure from a fascinating corner of Europe. He grew up in New Jersey and on the west coast of the United States. He speaks Estonian with a bit of an American

accent. That may help explain why, after independence, he became a leading advocate for the fastest possible economic transformation of a tiny country that had been constitutionally part of the Soviet Union for a generation, and that had suffered enormously for it. The path he chose, not just for catching up to Europe, but for getting ahead of it, was a digital revolution that became known as the Tiger Leap. When I visited Estonia for the first time in 2004, it was leading Europe in internet access, e-commerce, and open government. That's part of Thomas Ylvis's story. The other part is the constant certainty that Russia wasn't done being a threat. Even today in retirement, he's a leading thinker about the dangerous politics

of Central and Eastern Europe. I spoke to Thomas Hendrik Ilves at the Munk School in Toronto. Everyone's got one teacher that really changes their life, if they're lucky. Yours was a computer science teacher. No, there was no such thing as computer science. But basically, she actually changed Estonia's life, not mine. Okay. But I had a math teacher who was doing her PhD in math education at Teachers College in Columbia. And she had this crazy idea in 1971 that, can we teach kids how to program? And so she rented a big teletype machine with a perfo tape and a big telephone modem and it was hooked up to a mainframe uh here i guess i would say 50 kilometers away 30 miles uh and um and we learned how to program

in basic the language itself at that time was only a year and a half old because it was baby for a little surprise that it was basic yeah well i mean 1971 and basic was it came out in 70 i guess anyway and we learned how to program and it wasn't any big deal it was just like oh okay I mean and it was just part of the math curriculum and then later on when I was in college I said there was a little 3x5 card saying looking for a programmer and and it was the first commercially available lab computer was It was a PDP-8, called so because it had 8K of memory, which is less than an empty email.

But then it turned out that because it was such a small computer, I had to program it in assembler language, which is the base 16 hexadecimal language. A lot more complex than basic. Well, actually, the thing you find out that the programming is identical. It's just that your commands are not like, you know, self-evident. The point is, I ended up, I mean, computers just never really fazed me at all. It came back 25 years later. This is the next question is, how on earth did that change Estonia's life? And the reason I've gone down this path is because the answer is kind of interesting.

Well, I'll tell you from my perspective. I mean, I became ambassador to the United States, and Estonia's in terrible shape. To get a perspective on it, and also the psyche of Estonians, if you look at the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Volume 2, you'll see a chart there which shows GDP per capita of European countries. Estonia has a slightly higher GDP per capita than Finland, which is our big role model otherwise. And then that was 1938, the last full year before World War II. 1992, the first full year of Estonian re-independence. The GDP of Finland per capita was 24,000 US dollars nominal. The GDP per capita of Estonia was $2,800. So it was more than an

eightfold difference. What that means is if Finland with 24k per capita had a measly 1.5% growth rate in a year, and Estonia had like a nearly impossible 10% growth rate. Finland would still grow more than we would. And so the question is, how do you catch up? And you had the additional problem of basically horrible infrastructure. I mean, communication infrastructure was pre-war, largely. The roads were absolute garbage. And then because I'd been a geek, kind of geeky, a friend of mine who was at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1993,

knew I was geeky, said, here's this thing. You might want to check it out. And it was the first commercially available web browser, which was invented by, what's his name? Mark Andreessen. Mark Andreessen. He was a graduate student at the time. And so I said, oh, OK, well, I'll go. Went to Radio Shack, $29.95.

I got this package. And it's got seven floppy disks, I think, and I uploaded them, and then there it was, the World Wide Web. And I said, wow, this is it. This is where we are, if not, we're almost on a level playing field and probably on a level playing field. And I said, we've got to go digital. This is the one thing we can do.

Why don't we do a strategy to teach kids how to use computers, which was wildly unpopular when I proposed this. And for about a year, the Teachers Union Weekly devoted at least one nasty article about how I was going to destroy Estonian culture. And fortunately, there were enough young people who were sort of into the idea that it gathered sort of civil society support. Later digitization became popular enough that I mean all the really smart people took over and pushed it and created the system we have now and have had since the year 2000. This is the beginnings of what became known as the Tiger Leap. Yeah, well, the Tiger Leap was the educational program.

So we started in 96, and by 97, 98, all Estonian schools had computers, computer labs, and they were all connected. And that was the initial program which I proposed. And then the Minister of Education, who was a PhD in astrophysics he said oh that's a great idea the president didn't really know computers but I said this is going to be good for your re-election campaign so he's like okay all this time in foreign policy circles you were the first the ambassador and then the foreign minister uh you and your colleagues from the other

Baltic countries and from Poland were trying to warn people in the west that then the foreign minister uh you and your colleagues from the other uh baltic countries and from poland were trying to warn people in the west that russia wasn't done being dangerous that's essentially a theme of your life yeah i should talk a little bit one other thing i mean before that which is that i mean all these countries were obsessed with joining NATO for fairly self-evident reasons. But I've been in the United States as ambassador, and it became very clear to me there that, okay, even if the United States, which was not really sort of, I was on the fence on whether the Baltic countries should join NATO, it was clear that Germany, France, UK, Italy would not allow us in because, oh my God, how we could take someone from the former Soviet Union?

And while I was there, I became convinced that the only way we would be able to get into NATO was if were we to join the European Union because then they would not be able to veto us. Germany can't veto another EU member state's application to NATO because that would be suicidal. So you wanted to get into the EU to get into NATO rather than for its own sake, as it were. Well, I mean, I like the EU,

but it was a question of strategy. If you want to get into NATO, you don't jump up and down saying NATO, NATO, NATO. You actually have to get in via the back door, frankly. I mean, that was the strategic issue. And our Baltic neighbors to the south adopted. I mean, they thought I was crazy, as did the foreign ministry when I became minister. They said, what are you talking about?

EU's stupid socialism and all this other stuff. Bureaucracy. I mean, the same lines you hear today. And, I mean, it hasn't changed. But I said, well, too bad. I'm the minister. We're going to do this. And we focused all our efforts on getting into the EU. So in 1997, Estonia, but not Latvia and Lithuania, who had not taken it seriously at that point, Estonia was invited to begin accession negotiations. Ultimately, we all ended up joining at the same time because the

commissioner of the EU in charge of enlargement said, oh, I can't deal with this. Let's just take them all. And then we were postponed by two years. So Estonia, Poland, Czechs, Hungary were postponed by two years so that you just take everybody and just be done with it. So that was them. so that you just take everybody and just be done with it. So that was them. But, I mean, that does tie into the Russia issue that, why was Germany, France, Italy, so adamant about not letting the Baltic countries into NATO? It was because they had a very different view of Russia from what we had.

And that problem has persisted since even before independence. I mean, if you actually, last year, if anyone reads Der Spiegel, last April they published Coles' memos, Helmut Coles' memos, the chancellor. He was against independence of the Baltic countries. I mean, the country the Germans had made the Malta Ribbentrop Pact and divide up between them, and they were against our independence. And you can see these policies really continuing until February 24th, 2022.

Two years ago, the president of Germany, Frank Steinmeier, said, we owe the Russians Nord Stream 2, the big pipeline, because of all the horrible things we did to Russia. Kind of leaving out the fact that many more Poles, many more Belarusians, and many more Ukrainians were slaughtered by the Nazis than Russians. I mean, there's just numbers are horrible in the amount of territory. They occupied those three countries, but only a small part of Russia. This historical sort of amnesia. So this led to a policy that was pursued by those countries for, I mean, since basically 1989 of, what I say, Ruslan Uberalas alles. I mean it was just Russia overall And there was the other part of this is the behavior of Russia toward us the sort of the central and East Europeans

was very different from the kind of Smarmy behavior towards countries of Western Europe and the United States so They were brutal nasty with us, but they were not that way. They were always very friendly when they were talking to the Germans. And it really took, unfortunately, the invasion of Ukraine, the continued invasion of Ukraine, to realize that,

because the invasion of Georgia did not change policy. It's continued. I mean, the completely illegal, contrary to international law, invasion and annexation of Crimea did not change anything. In fact, the year afterwards, Nord Stream 2 contract was signed. Obama refused to send or allow the Ukrainians any weapons after 2014. It took the horrors of the current invasion to actually move Western European and Western in general policy towards Russia. Let's go back and look at some of that. In 2008 Putin invades Georgia. You with the other heads of state from the other Balkan countries and from

Poland, and from Poland, go to Tbilisi, stand on a platform and show your solidarity. I've always wondered, was your policy at that time that Georgia should then have been part of NATO? No, I mean, that was, well, just to back up, it was not even close, but we had had in the Bucharest Summit in 2008 in which Germany blocked the membership action plan for Ukraine and for Georgia. Now, that's like saying, you know,

you can't even, like, do baby steps. This was not that they would get in. mean the membership action plan is open then it can take forever to join NATO by simply following the member but that was vetoed by Germany so which I was taken I think quite definitely by Putin as a signal that the West was going to abandon or at least let these countries sort of, basically let them be on their own or at the mercy of Russia. He tested it out three months later, I mean, after the Bucharest summit, they invaded Georgia. But there was no hope.

No one thought they would get into, I mean, it was not in the cards. But simply the little step of getting a membership action plan whereby you begin doing things, you know, changing your laws, I mean, all kinds of stuff. I've heard it argued that whatever the effect of expanding NATO to Georgia and Ukraine would have been on Russia and on a Russian reaction, that it would be unwise from the position of sort of NATO internal maintenance,

that these countries are not defensible, not as defensible as, say, Estonia would be. We're not, we were not, the argument against us is we're not defensible, to which I said, oh, you mean like West Berlin? I mean, it's not a credible argument. I mean, if West Berlin was defended by NATO, then you can't say, oh, you're not defensible. I mean, we're much more defensible than West Berlin, and that was, they were under the nuclear, NATO's nuclear umbrella. Yes and no in terms of them being defensible.

Yes and no in terms of them being defensible. I mean, the only country that has credible experience fighting Russia is Ukraine. I mean, and number two is Georgia. I mean, it's just that, you know, that was a while back and they didn't do so much of it. So NATO needs to learn a lot from Ukraine. It needs to learn a lot from Ukraine. And a lot of the policy advice given to, or military advice given to Ukraine has turned out to be completely wrong, because when they follow the advice that is given to them by Western generals, they get slaughtered.

And then they say, no, we'll do it our way, and they do much better. So, in fact, Ukraine would be a huge boost to the security of the West as a member. I mean, the issue of the West as a member. I mean, the issue of EU membership is a little more complicated because of something like the common agricultural policy. I mean, it's unsustainable. It would be unsustainable with Ukraine in the European Union. It means a complete overhaul of subsidies, which I think is ultimately necessary, but is politically incredibly difficult.

On the other hand, taking Ukraine in, it is not Ukraine that will be indefensible. It would just mean NATO on the soft underbelly of Russia, which would mean that Russia, in fact, then would be much more difficult to defend. Russia, in fact, then would be much more difficult to defend. After the break, I'll talk to Thomas Ilves about how he worries that the world is running out of patience with the vital war against Russia in Ukraine. In Canada, everyone is supposed to get equal access to health care. The new podcast, The Health Care Divide, looks at how the treatment you receive depends on who you are and what you look like. One

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produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. The first episodes are available now. So the full invasion of Ukraine happens in February of 2022. The reaction of the West is essentially astonishment. Then a second wave of astonishment that the Zelensky government is encrusted immediately. And then a fairly rapid ramping up of economic and military assistance. To a point. Well, that's where I want to go. When President Biden says that he will help Ukraine defend itself for as long as it takes, I suspect that doesn't sound quite as good to you as it might to a lot of folks.

Well, first of all, it's not clear that will happen, given that the House of Representatives just the other day basically cut out aid to Ukraine. How are they going to continue? I mean, military assistance. So, I mean, as long as it takes. I mean, I think the other common phrase is that, you know, Ukraine must win, but never Russia must lose. And unless Russia loses, it will continue on this path one way or another.

I mean, it may not be an invasion always, but this idea that we can get away with it is, I think, the lesson of the past 23 years under Putin, and certainly it's the lesson since 2008. As you go back to 2008, I mean at that time Nicolas Sarkozy was the president of France and France held the presidency of the EU and he went there and he said I have a deal and we will cease all cooperation and cancel the

partnership and cooperation agreement until the Russian troops leave. Six weeks later, there was a council meeting with the European Union with all the heads of state and government, and he pushed through that we'll restore the PCA with no, I mean, the troops are still there. And what if you're Putin?

You go, oh, okay, see, I invaded. They made a little noise. After that, you're Putin, you go, Oh, okay, see, I invaded. It made a little noise. After that, it's we're back to we're back in business. And on top of that, like six months after that, almost to the day, you had the reset by the US, basically, water under the bridge. Bygones be bygones sort of thing. What would you like to have seen different in the Western response to the Ukraine invasion? Weapons, I mean basically attackums not and not the short long-term missiles or long-range missiles well medium, but I mean not the attackums that finally came a year too late, which are one half of the range and none of the Firepower, I mean sort of the heavy load of 220 kilos of TNT.

With that, I mean, they could shoot into Crimea. They could get rid of the bridge in fairly short order. The U.S. has like several thousand F-16s. They give some of them to like a Moroccoco but you know ukraine no uh i mean actually what it comes down to is if what the ukrainians had asked for in august of 2022 had been delivered it would be a completely different battlefield but what not having that the russians throughout the winter six months built the sorovikin line. I mean, basically three lines of industrially built trenches, kilometers and kilometers depth of landmines.

They would not have been able to do that had the Ukrainians had the firepower that even now they're being given. So, I mean, that just gave the Russians six months to really get stronger. And this kind of dithering, I mean, it was not just the U.S. I mean, everyone was like dithering. We gave 1% of our GDP to Ukraine. And the country, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, if you actually, when you have a chart that says how much anything is given, you always see the US is number one and Germany is number two. If you actually do it on a per capita basis, it's

the East Europeans that have given the aid and the other ones are kind of a much smaller percentage. Now even in Eastern Europe, there seems to be fatigue with this battle. Slovaks just elected a complacent government that doesn't want to take the fight to the Russians. Even in Poland, fatigue was an issue in the recent elections. Well, I mean, they're very pro-Ukrainian, but there were

a lot of economic interests in there which i think there were mistakes made on both on the part of both because uh basically it had to do with grain polish grain being undercut price grain prices undercut by ukrainians had they not done that they wouldn't have had that problem with the other element to this i mean there are huge numbers of Ukrainians in mainly Central and Eastern Europe. Estonia's population is 7% larger than it was since February of last year. I mean, that's how many we just have. I mean, so many Ukrainians. I mean, we're happy to have them, but I mean, some places, you know, and locally in certain places, you end up with problems. So you have a huge refugee population, much larger than anything that we saw with the so-called migration crisis of 2015.

Many, many more people absorbed with very few problems, actually. absorbed with very few problems actually but uh but still i mean it imposed a cost on the social welfare systems of every one of these countries that have taken in large numbers so i mean it's the sustainability of the war also must take into account the ability of the the donor countries recipient countries to actually handle all the various effects of both giving money giving weapons and also hosting a lot of refugees Estonia Latvia also have substantial Russian populations rest of phone populations were Russian origin is that causing trouble too no I mean the population I mean I am won't speak for Latvia. In the case of Estonia, it's a very, very diverse population of people who are dissidents who have fled Russia

and violently anti-Putin to people who are very pro-Putin. But I mean, basically, I know, sort of, I'd say the middle is that, you know, they realize that living in a EU member state that's doing rather well economically, where the Russian babushka in Estonia gets a larger pension than the average wage in Russia. I mean, working. It's like, okay, I mean, we can grumble over language policy and so forth, but it's not

a serious issue and has not been for a long time. You're heading off to the Halifax Security Forum. A year ago, I was struck by the sense of almost hope is a strange word to use in the context of a shooting war in Europe. But Churchill talked about the solitary effect of being shot at without effect. I mean, having Russia throw everything it could at Ukraine and be fought to a standstill was better than most people could have hoped.

And so the mood in Halifax was quite optimistic last year. I suspect that won't be the case this year. Yeah, I don't think so. Well, I mean, Halifax, I mean, it was right after the Kharkiv offensive, which, you know, just caught the Russians completely by surprise, massive advance. But, I mean, that was the illusion of this year was that, oh, it'll be just like Kharkiv. And turns out that Kherson was really hard to take, even harder to go into Zaporizhia. Then you had Bakhmut where basically, I mean, it was a slaughterhouse for the Russians,

but I mean they don't care. They're just pumping in. The problem with the approach is that you have a war of attrition, and that is what they're fighting. There are four times as many Russians as there are Ukrainians, so you can attrit, I guess, is this new awful word,

but you can attrit a quarter of your population, but on the Ukrainian side side they're all gone so i mean something has to be done to give the ukrainians much more firepower to actually effectively do fight the russians does the american presidential election calendar also make you nervous yes extremely so and if you read well i mean not only for ukraine if if the candidate donald trump keeps to his word that's the end of democracy in the united states i mean i mean the retribution camps i mean all the stuff that he's been saying the last two weeks i mean if you read his his statements you i mean this is vermin

the opposition or vermin i mean we've heard that before uh it was kind of 90 years ago but i mean i mean and that's and that's a word that's a term that is explicitly used as a dog whistle i mean it is you know basically racist anti-Semitic, I mean, used against the whole opposition. We're in a different place now with U.S. politics, and the guy stands a decent chance of winning, first and foremost because of an 18th century electoral system, which gives far too much small states and overrides the popular vote. Now you must often have felt even as the president of a small country a little helpless and a little sort of buffeted by events like that. What can a small country do to maximize its advantage

in this kind of world? Be good at something. I mean, that's what we've been doing. I mean, now, 33 years after independence, we have 11 unicorns, billion-dollar companies, for a population of 1.3 million, which is basically one for every 120,000 people. I mean, a billion-dollar company. I mean, next in the world is Israel, with about one for every 700,000, 800,000 people. I mean, a billion-dollar company. I mean, next in the world is Israel with about like one for every 700,000, 800,000 people.

I mean, we are an IT powerhouse, and lots of things that people use were invented in Estonia. And so it's someplace where we are taken seriously. And being the number one country in by far and in the European Union for digitization of public services and governance I won't bring in Canada the United States here but but anyway is I mean we actually what we say in one area has clout and that's actually pretty

good because normally a country the size of a small well the very small city i mean i don't know 1.3 million is i mean that's a that's really pushing kind of the size of ottawa yeah ottawa okay i mean well i don't i mean don't take a capital because they have do have oversized power but anyways it basically just means that you're a very small place that actually uh rates or something Everything else, we have all the weight of a 1.3 million town. Thomas Ilves, thank you for sharing your insight and your experience with everybody. It's great to be here. Thank you. Good night. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. This episode was recorded live at the University of Toronto's Monk School. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's

Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.