The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Timothy Snyder on America’s Superpower Suicide

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Timothy Snyder, historian and author of On Tyranny and On Freedom, joins Scott Galloway to discuss what he saw on a recent trip to Ukraine and why he believes America is undermining its own power.  He explains how reduced U.S. support is shaping the war, why Ukraine’s fate matters for Taiwan and nuclear proliferation, and what Canada’s response to Trump reveals about standing up to intimidation. Plus, why he sees the upcoming midterms as a critical test for America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Nice travels. Welcome to the 415th episode of the Proffield Pod. Today's episode we speak with a proffrey favorite, Timothy Snyder, a leading historian of authoritarianism, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe. We discussed with Tim where Russia's war on Ukraine stands, what dwindling U.S. support means on the ground, what we can learn from Mark Carney,

standing up to Trump and what's at stake in the upcoming midterms. I've said this before. Professor Snyder is a role model. I think he's unafraid, incredibly smart, leveraging his domain as a historian to have a really profound impact on the world today and how we view some of the most important issues in our society. Anyways, with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Professor Timothy Snyder. Professor, where does this podcast find you? I'm in Toronto.

I'm just back from a long trip to Ukraine. but now I'm in Toronto. Oh, that's nice. I heard that Toronto has a WNBA expansion team, is that right? Well, I actually just saw one of the last games of the season. Yeah, they got blown out by the New York Liberty. But yeah, it was fun to watch. I was at an event this weekend, and I met a guy who's a legendary basketball player,

and his daughter, her name is Kiki Smith, is on the team. So all of a sudden, I'm following. Oh, she's a fan favorite, I can assure you of that. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Didn't expect to talk to you about it. I'm sure you didn't expect to talk about this. Let's bust right into more your domain.

You were just in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, less than a minute from Russia, by missile anyways. And since you got home, you've been releasing 10 Kharkiv meditation videos. You recorded there at night on cowardice, courage, freedom, and fascism. What? why are you in Ukraine? And can you give us a sense for the atmosphere and the feel on the ground there? Well, I'm there because it's my job.

I mean, I'm a historian of Ukraine. I'm running a big project that involves a couple hundred colleagues, roughly half of whom are Ukrainians. We have big conferences every year in Kiev, which works out very well, better than fine. And in general, if you're going to write about a place or talk about a place, you should go there.

So I was in Haredikiv staying as a guest in a kind of writing retreat, which is the apartment of a Ukraine philologist and doing my own work, and then I was in key of helping to run these big projects. The atmosphere is like, you know, there's one more thing you have to worry about, which is that you'll get killed at the gas station

trying to get gas. There's one more thing you have to worry about, which is that you'll get killed by a missile strike, you know, going to the grocery store to an outdoor market. People live their lives trying to adapt to this, and they do it. very well. They do it in a way which I personally find exemplary. And give us a sense for what it's like, what is the general mood in terms of the war itself?

Is it a feel of we've made some progress, need to hang in there and renewed optimism, or is the fatigue setting in, or is it a bit of both? I mean, it's, I think after going on five years now, or, you know, if you're counting from the first invasion in 2014, you're looking at it. 12-plus years. I don't think fatigue is a really irrelevant concept anymore. I mean, people are living their lives and they're doing what they can. Answer your question. It depends on where you're sitting. If you're at the front, and I was also visiting the front when I was in Harkkeith, but if you're at the front, then things look pretty good. It seems pretty unlikely that the Russians will achieve

any kind of breakthrough with the front, whether they mobilize or not. And the fact that the Russia probably has to mobilize now is a bad sign, I would say, for Russia. However, if you're in the interior of the country, Russia is systematically destroying the Ukrainian economy. It's making people's lives very hard, destroying their livelihoods. And I should add that this is our fault if we're Americans because it's American policy to deny Ukraine the missile defense that it needs. And we've kind of artificially created a situation where Russia can destroy the Ukrainian economy. And people do feel that. So essentially, my understanding is Americans stop funding.

They still sell weapons. They just aren't providing any economic support. Is that accurate? Well, there's zero economic support and there's zero direct weapon support. We do allow Europeans to buy our systems and then pass them on to Ukraine. And we do allow, I mean, we've just allowed other countries to license the construction of patriots, which is the anti-missile system. So indirectly, indirectly, indirectly, at some point in the future, that might be able

to help. But there's been a drastic change since the Biden administration, which probably didn't do enough, but which was doing, but which was actively helping in terms of financial and military aid. My understanding is for all the criticism of the EU, not having its act together and too much regulation, that the EU has stepped up here. Would you agree with that? Yeah. I mean, that's a great point. I'm glad you've noticed that the EU has done more, is done more than any individual state, I would say, and the EU has consistently recognized the threat that Russia poses. It's a good point because, like, when you talk about bureaucracy,

like everybody associates the EU with bureaucracy, and that's a kind of sort of American propaganda point, which we can't get our minds around or through. But when it comes to helping Ukraine, they've been very unbureaucratic, and it's been us, the Americans, who have been either bureaucratic or we've just shown kind of ill will. I feel as if I get two streams of news around the actual situation at the front, who's winning, who's losing, or, you know, this kind of grinding standoff at some, you know, in some periods it feels like. And the traditional media, I think, has a, I don't say a biased for Ukraine, but I feel when I watch traditional media, I think, okay, Ukraine, just asymmetry drones, technically advanced.

Russia is now no longer able to mobilize. It's in deficit in terms of the number of soldiers taken off the field through death or injury and is unable to now raise as many conscripts as they're losing. You see Moscow on fire. And then I go online and I go on TikTok or threads. And I feel I see what doesn't feel more balanced, but some news it's a little bit more. Russia is increasing attacks, having more impact.

and it would be, you could argue, Ukraine has obviously has some tremendous victories, but winning might be a little bit strong. Can you attempt to give us a sense of how over the last 12 months the balance of victory or defeat on the battlefield has shifted? Yeah, I'm going to answer that, and your question leads me on to another point I want to make as well. over the last 12 months we've seen a shift in late last year and then spring of this year where it really did seem like the Ukrainians could win because all the things you said were true so the Ukrainians gain more territory than they lost they're inflicting you know a multiple more

casualties than they're receiving and until you know spring of this year they were also able to defend themselves pretty well the change has been in the shortage in missile defense. Because the shortage in missile defense, which I see is an artificial result of the Iran war and U.S. policy, but that means that the Russians are able to make the kinds of gains you're talking about

when it comes to destroying the Ukrainian economy. That's where they're succeeding now. They're destroying factories, they're destroying mines, they're destroying steelworks. That's the edge that the Russians have now, which they didn't have six months ago. So both things are, so to speak, true.

The Ukrainians are mechanizing the first. It's pretty hard to imagine Russia making gains on the front, but at the same time, Russia is able to hurt the Ukrainian economy and therefore Ukrainian society. The point I want to make, though, is that as we see this ratcheting back and forth of drone and drone defense, the Ukrainians and the Russians are creating the only two modern armed forces in the world. And this is a problem for everybody else, which I don't think everybody else is necessarily recognizing. the Ukrainians innovate, the Russians copy, and pretty much everything Ukrainians do, the Russians can do a few months later, but at scale. And that's a problem for NATO and a problem for the U.S., which is still practicing a pretty archaic form of warfare. And it's not a problem which I think people are recognizing. So by letting this work continue the way it is, we're basically training up the Russian army on Ukrainian methods, which is not a good thing to be doing. Yeah, it's so funny. I mean, Professor Snyder, obviously, you're, I was like to kind of pause the podcast. And when I hear something I haven't heard that I think is really striking and insightful. And I just hadn't contemplated that this war is, you know, we talk about how Ukraine could be this new center of innovation and has this unbelievable army that's teaching the world about the power of the word asymmetry. And it's punching so far. far above its weight class. We've never seen anything like that. But little attention is given to the fact that we're also via this war upskilling Russia, making it a more lethal fighting force, hadn't

thought of that. So Lincoln said you can't win a war without public support and you can't lose a war with one. And it feels from an outsider standpoint that the Ukrainian army has the support and Zelensky has the support of the Ukrainian people. What's less clear is whether Putin and the fighting force there has the support of the Russian people. Can you speak to that? So I think the way the Russians have been trying to run the war is as a consumer war, which is a kind of a concept, I think, which should be pretty familiar to Americans. It's not, we're supposed to win. It's not supposed to touch us. We're supposed to enjoy, like, the daily media coverage of the victories, but it's not supposed to affect our daily lives. And that was largely true for Russia for the first four,

four and a half years. It's much less true now, as you've noticed, because Ukraine is able to hit now with long-range drones, targets which do affect Russians' daily life. That's one thing which has changed. Another thing which has changed is that, and again, you've already mentioned this, Russia probably now has to mobilize as opposed to just using contract soldiers. And that probably, it's hard to predict, but that probably will have some kind of negative social effect for Putin, because the people who are going to the front up until now, they have signed a contract. Like, they're getting paid by Russian standards a lot of money. Whereas once you start drafting people, then you're in a different dynamic, I think a different

political dynamic as well. So I think Russia is keen to end this war by spring, partly for that reason, that I don't think they believe they can count politically on the mobilized soldiers and the families of mobilized soldiers in the same way. So if I were to, I'm going to put forward a thesis, and I'm pretty sure. you'll agree at least with part of it, or maybe not. But if I look at the biggest hotspots of the biggest risks to the world, to world peace, to something, you know, turning into what feels like World War III,

it's, I'll put AI on that list. I don't believe that's true, but according to some very smart people who spent four months at Anthropic, there's a 10% extinction event, which sounds like expected death of 800 million, which I think is worth at least investigating. Two is this war, you know, Europe is being invaded again. And then I would argue probably the biggest risk is that China invades Taiwan and the West literally doesn't know what to do, does something, and it escalates. And that Ukraine or the probability that China decides to take the risk of a hot war goes down or is inversely correlated to success, Ukraine's success on the battlefield. You just got to think that the CCP is looking at this war and thinking if this small,

technically sophisticated army, which the Taiwanese defense forces would be in spades, that maybe we should recalculate the likelihood of victory here and rethink and not attempt an invasion of Taiwan. So my thesis is that any small victory by Ukraine against Russia decreases the likelihood of CCP attempting a hot war and invasion of Taiwan. Your thoughts? Yeah, I agree 100%. And that's an argument I've been trying to make from the beginning of the full-scale invasion

that anybody who's serious, and the Trump people claim to be serious about this, although I don't believe them, anybody who's serious about preventing a war with China would see Ukraine as the, so to speak, the relatively easy way to do so, because funding the Ukrainians, helping Ukrainians to defend themselves,

is a lot easier than actually trying to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. And so you've been basically handed by history, if you're the U.S., you've been handed by history a way to deter such an attack, by showing, as you say, exactly, by showing how difficult it is to actually carry out offensive operations

in the 21st century against a technologically savvy adversary. We've been given that chance, and I'm afraid that what we've been doing is throwing that chance away in the last year and a half under the Trump people and thereby unduly encouraging the Chinese and making the scenario that you're talking about more likely. I would add to your point, and I'll see if you agree, but I would add to your point that in general, helping Ukraine to defend itself against a war of aggression,

also has the positive global scale effect of protecting the legal order and discouraging invasions in general. But I would also make the point about nuclear weapons that Russia is a nuclear state invading a non-nuclear state, and it's using nuclear blackmail pretty much every, you know, few hours, if you allow a nuclear state to win a war against a non-nuclear state and you give in to nuclear blackmail and you keep saying, as the Trump people do say, oh, no, we're afraid of escalation, etc., then you're encouraging that scenario. And encouraging that scenario, you're encouraging middle powers around the world to build nuclear weapons to defend themselves against the Russia's and the Chinas. And if that happens, then you have a much more dangerous world.

And the somewhat old-school threat of a nuclear war then comes back onto your list. Well, you're the historian, but if I remember correctly, Ukraine had nuclear weapons and agreed to give them up, which we all, the entire international community, sees as a good thing. Fewer nuclear nations less likelihood of an errant misinterpretation of something that ends up in nuclear war. they gave up their nuclear weapons in exchange for safety guarantees from Russia. And the reality is right now, they screwed up. And that any, you know, we've created a zeitgeist globally where every nation should have pursued nuclear weapons. I mean, this has, to me, this has just created a series of incentive that are going to make it exceptionally difficult for more control of the spread of nuclear arms. Your thoughts?

No, that's completely right. say, of course, is in line with what the Ukrainians themselves now think. The Budapest memorandum of 1994 obliged the United States and Great Britain, as well as the Russian Federation, to defend Ukraine against external threats. And then Russia invaded twice, and the United States and Great Britain did something, but a minimal amount to support Ukraine in that situation. So it's, it's, and there's a good book about this, by the way, by my colleague, Serhi Poloky. at Harvard. So, yeah, I mean, if Ukraine, it's very hard if you're in Ukraine not to draw the conclusion that if you'd kept nuclear weapons and developed your own delivery systems, which they didn't have.

But if you'd done that, this invasion would not have happened. That's, I mean, I'm afraid that's, that's in a nutshell, the conclusion that other, I mean, my point is other countries looking at the situation also, as you say, are going to draw the same conclusion. And if we want to head that off, we have to do what we can to make sure that the outcome of this doesn't look like a Russian victory. I feel as if I'm fairly politically aware of the situation politically in the U.S. and geopolitics are more aware than your average bear, so to speak. And it still shocks me when you say we're not supporting Ukraine because it was, I think the general populace in the U.S. likely believes we still are. And it seems to me that yet another consequence of the war in Iran,

yet another negative consequence, is that to a certain extent, the American public has taken its eye off the ball and has become indifferent and has given Trump an opening just to stop. Why do you think the Trump administration is so dismissive of Ukraine and the war in Ukraine?

So I want to first give some props to the American public because the public opinion, including among Republicans, is generally pro-Ukrainian. And so I think people can be forgiven for thinking that their own preferences are in some way being translated into American policy, which is, unfortunately, it's not the case. There are some things that we do, we still do, that do help the Ukrainians, for sure. But on balance, cutting off the financial aid,

cutting off the military aid, and putting our diplomacy in the hands of a couple of people who are not professional diplomats and who are not really, I think, acting the interests of any of the states involved, except possibly Russia. And then finally, as you say, starting, this war with Iran, all of those things have drastically hurt the Ukrainians over the last year and a half. I mean, in the Iran War, in the first 10 or 12 days, we spent munitions, I'm sad to say it, but utterly pointlessly, which would have won the war for Ukraine. And that's not something that Americans see or would like to see, but it's something that Ukrainians definitely see. We just, like, we shoot, you know, munitions all over the place, essentially kind of make ourselves

feel good with no measurable strategic outcome, at least not anyone, which is positive. Whereas if we just allowed the Ukrainians to use that stuff, they probably could have won the war. So the Iran has been tremendously negative for Ukraine. And meanwhile, this is also worth noting, you've got like coal miners from the Donbos in Ukraine who've learned to be drone operators who are out there in the world helping to defend Americans and others in the near east from Iranian drones, which is something that no one thinks about or talks about, but which is part of this kind of mismatch of how we think about things, that we, the Americans are this big power, we win wars, we help other people. We've been beaten by a middle power, Iran.

And meanwhile, the Ukrainians are holding back a much bigger power, Russia. And you've got to think those things through to their logical conclusion to see just how wrong our approach has been in the last year and a half. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from BetterHelp. You've heard me say before how useful talk therapy can be when working through a hard problem, and that BetterHelp has been a great option for a lot of people. But at the end of the day, the best way to know if BetterHelp is a good fit for you is to check it out yourself.

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You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. It's time to cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 in your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash Scott. That's LinkedIn.com slash Scott. Terms and conditions apply. It's another interesting insight, professor, that, and it makes sense, the capital society, scarcity is just, is a reality everywhere.

And even America with one and a half trillion dollars in military spend, you're saying at the end of a day, a manager is supposed to allocate resources to its greater return. And the resources expended on Iran, specifically the munitions, you believe, had those assets been diverted to Ukraine, that the war might be over by now? Oh, I mean, that's, the discussion we had the first half of this podcast would be completely different. If just the patriots that we, because we don't know how to use patriots. We use patriots to shoot down anything, which is in the sky. We don't know how to use them. We imagine that we have an infinite supply of stuff. And of course, the president says we do regularly.

But we don't. And so we use it just in an incredibly profligate way as we did in the beginning of Iran. And then we look around and say, oh, wait, we don't have any more of these things. It takes a long time to produce them. But there's a deeper problem here, which is that we are relying on, I mean, it's problem A, we use this stuff in the wrong way, in the wrong time, and we don't give it to the right people for the right reasons, which would have been to give it to Ukraine. But there's a deeper problem here, which is that the U.S. military under Hegsaith and Trump are still relying on products like this, which take months and years to develop. And then when we shoot them out pointlessly into the sand and Iraq, Iran, we then say, oh, we say to our enemies, oh, well, there's nothing we can do because our big weapons companies will take months and years to reproduce these, which is a terrible message to China, going back to your earlier point. But if you're an American confronting that, you should think, well, wait, what are the systems that are cheaper and faster to produce? And this goes back to your question. What are their question? And why aren't we learning from Ukraine? Right. And I think the reason

we're not learning from Ukraine is that Hegset and Trump personally, Vance 2, have a hard time processing that there's a country out there where people are actually showing moral and physical courage. I think they just can't identify with that. And I think the notion of people actually risking and losing their lives for their country is psychologically and morally very troubling for them. And so they want to push it as far away as possible from themselves as they can. So I hear Wyckhoff and Kushner when they're over there trying to act as mediators and bring about peace. It strikes me that anyone who's going to bring about peace is got to have the trust of all the parties, specifically the two warring parties. And everything I hear from them, I feel like they've essentially decided they're a proxy for Russia.

It feels like their talking points were literally drafted by Sergei Lavaev and Putin. and that I can't imagine the Ukrainians have any trust for America and whatever efforts. It sounds to me like we've essentially rendered ourselves neutered in terms of our ability to bring about a piece, even when the atmospherics might be ready for it. Your thoughts? Yeah. I mean, just in fairness to Americans, there are a lot of Americans in civil society who are doing a good deal to help Ukraine. And I think that, you know, in our doing so year after year after year, it's just not the U.S. government. And, I mean, there's a deep problem with sending emissaries

who haven't gone through any sort of civil service and don't, I mean, I'm trying to put this in a neutral way, but don't, as an everyday matter, identify themselves with the interests of the United States. Let's put it that way. That's problematic, because in order to understand the interests of Ukraine, you have to first work from a model, a paradigm, in which you believe that countries have interests,

as opposed to a model in which only individuals have interests and everything is contractual or transactional. So I think it's not that Ukrainians don't trust Americans. They've had a lot of experience good or bad with Americans. It's that it's difficult for them when they're confronted by people who don't visit their country, except for a few hours for the first time, very recently, who haven't experienced the war and who also are unable to articulate Ukraine, interests, right? Because if you're a diplomat, you can say, okay, this is the interest of one side,

this is the interest of another side, maybe we can find a way in between. But the Whitkoff and Kushner, thus far, although they're, you know, they're obviously talented people in their realms. They're totally unable to articulate what the Ukrainian interest might be in preserving Ukrainian life, in preserving Ukrainian livelihood, in preserving Ukrainian freedom, and preserving Ukrainian sovereignty. They just, they can't talk in terms of those concepts. And so there's a, there's a big mismatch between millions of people who are willing to take risks for something and a couple of guys who kind of turn up and as you say talk about how you know Putin has aspirations and these aspirations have to be fulfilled and the Russians have goals and these goals have to be fulfilled

that's it's a tough ask to imagine that they're going to take be able to work with that right and I think the underlying problem here is that for a wickoff or for a Kushner Putin is a real person not because he's a Russian or represents the Russian state but because he's an oligarch, and that's the mentality that they're in, you know, that the world should be run by oligarchs and anybody else who has some other idea, they're kind of hard to understand. Maybe they don't deserve our attention. I want to move on now to the country we share the largest undefended border in, I think, any honest analysis over the last couple centuries would say it's probably, if not the tightest

alliance, almost an alliance we take for granted because we feel so similar and so close, and that's the relationship between the U.S. and Canada, and things have changed dramatically. Your thoughts on what feels like an economic war against Canada, which quite frankly reminds me that Animal House movie where they borrow, the Fraternity Brothers, get access to one of the guy's parents' car, and they trash the car,

and the guy says to the son of his parents, you know, he says, you effed up, you trusted us. It feels like Canada deciding to trust us the way it has, 70% of its exports. Canada's actually our largest customer. It seems just so, it just seems so weird what's happening now between the U.S. and Canada. You now live in Toronto. Give us your thoughts on whether you think this rupture can be repaired at some point, or if this is going to permanently alter the relationship with Canada. I think the underlying common thread here between the discussion of Ukraine and the discussion of Canada

is that the people who make U.S. policy now don't think in terms of the interests of the United States. They think in terms of short-term gains by particular individuals. And I think that's really where one has to start when one considers our policy towards Canada because you're right. Canada has been our ally in a couple of world wars. They've been our economic and cultural friend for a very, very long time, and they would still like to be. But the whole notion of alliance depends upon both sides seeing themselves as states with interests. And I don't think the Trump people see the United States as a state with interest. They see it as a vehicle for the pursuit of the individual gain of a small number of people. And I think what they've done is they, in their policy towards Canada, but also everywhere else, the European Union too, they export that same approach. So we don't really have a foreign policy anymore in the sense of a policy of a country. What we have is the exporting of a certain approach, which is to say, what are the short-term gains we could have,

right? What are the gains we could have if we broke Canada and we could impose our own rules about tech companies. What are the gains we could have if we broke Canada and American companies could do what they want with, you know, with oil sands and Alberta? That's, I think, how we think about Canada now. It's not as a state to a state. It's like a few people thinking in terms of their own interests. And in this light, like living in Canada, the Carney government, but not just the Carney government. I mean, the atmosphere in general, it's strangely normal and conservative in the sense that people assume they're living in a country and that their country has interests and that the government's job is to protect those interests. And I think that's the big mismatch, that like

Carney is really thinking in terms of the interests of Canada and he has to react to this odd thing which is coming out of the United States, which is inconsistent with this alliance and inconsistent with the interests of Canada and the existence of Canada, but also in this weird way, as you say, it's totally also in opposition to the interests of the U.S. It feels as if every crisis birds some unexpected leaders. It strikes me right now that the most respected leader in the G20 is Mark Carney, and that oddly he's kind of become the de facto leader of Europe, of all things.

What can governments and politicians and people running for elected office learn from Carney's kind of meteoric ascent? I mean, I'm sure many people here would be glad to hear that description because up here, I mean, it does feel like, and understandably so, that Canada is embattled and that Canada is doing the basic minimum it has to do to defend itself. And Canadians are very far from, I mean, as a cultural matter, I think this is fair. They're very far from saying, we're the leaders of anything or, you know, our guy is the leader of Europe or some kind of new alliance.

I think your characterization is fair. I'm just pointing out that from here it feels much more like this is a kind of basic defense that we have to play. But I think that what the Carney government is doing is what they have to do, and the imaginative part of it is connecting with the European Union and also connecting with Ukraine because if you are, I mean,

not talking about American politicians now, but if you're a democratic politician in the wider world, you now have to think of not only China and Russia as dangers, but you have to think about the United States, at least under the Trump administration, as a danger. And the only way to handle that

is for these democracies from Canada through the United Kingdom, through Europe, through Ukraine, to trade with one another and to tighten their political relationships. And that seems to be Canadian policy. And I think, I mean, I wish it weren't true, but I think that's the only sound way

of dealing with this kind of triple Chinese-Russian-American problem is to have an entity which is a bigger economy than any of them. You're a historian, I'm curious if you have ever, or if there's any analogy for a superpower such as the U.S. in history that makes this sort of shift in their view of the world in the way they participate with allies and a reshuffling of who is an enemy and who is an ally. If you can point to another point or another superpower in history that has made this type of pretty dramatic, I don't want to call it a U-turn, let's call it a left term, in terms of the way it acquits itself overseas and domestically,

is there an analogy, and if so, what can we learn from it? I've really struggled with this one, Scott. A few months ago, I was asked to come down to the Council on Foreign Relations and have, you know, a talk about the place of the U.S. and the world, and I realized the only, I couldn't sort of do it within the normal constraints and forms. I had to think of some other term, and the term that I came up with was superpower suicide. Yeah, I love it. I used it all the time, by the way. I think that perfectly marks the age. Sorry to interrupt you. No, no, thanks. That's very kind. But because I think that we need a concept, right? Like, we need something that captures the novelty

and the strangeness and the rapidity of all of this, and also the way in which it's not just about the present, but about the future. It's not as though these guys are making a few bad policies. They're also undermining education. They're undermining scientific research. They're undermining the things which would make us a power in the future, right? Like, I, this is not an analogy which I would push too far, but like I tend to think that in the 20s, in the 20s of the last century, Germany had a chance to own the century to come, right? Germany had a chance to own the 20th century. And they blew it in various ways. They They destroyed their democracy.

They sent all their best scientists abroad. And then they carried out these terrible atrocities and started this world war. But before that, there was the crash of democracy and there was the oppression of the best scientists. And that's a little bit of a comparison, right? Like it's the 20s of this next century. And we are crushing our own science. And we are weakening our own democracy for no particular reason. And then another partial analogy, and I think it's one which is actually relevant to Trump.

personally and people around him, is the end of the Soviet Union. Because I think they see that as a positive example. Like, I think they see the end of the Soviet Union as a moment where the oligarchs, like the aspiring oligarchs, people like Trump, who, you know, Trump never actually had any money. He's an aspiring oligarch, right? He needs state power to get rich. But they see that the end of the Soviet Union as a moment where a few guys were able to come crashing in and steal all the resources, which is a reasonable description of what actually happened. But I think they see that as a positive example for what you should do to the United States. And so that I think it's not a completely, it's not a full analogy, and there are no full analogies.

But I think that's a helpful example to understand how they see the world. That when you come to power, the idea is to break up the things that exist and then to kind of steal what you can. We'll be right back. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $26 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. We're back with more from Timothy Snyder. You've written recently about 9-11, the 25th anniversary.

Draw a line and make connections between 9-11 and what's going on today. I was looking at the media coverage of this, you know, before. And I just couldn't handle the general tone of like something bad happened to us. And that's all we're going to say. Yeah, something terrible happened to us, you know. I mean, something I was in New York the day before and I was in New York as soon as I could get back. And it was, you know, people I knew, know were affected. Something terrible happened to us.

But we then blew it afterwards. right? Like we didn't do the right thing. We shouldn't have invaded Iraq. We should have invested in fusion and other high technologies, true high technologies, not the fake high technology of social media that would have gotten us out of the energy crisis, out of dependency on the Mideast, out of global warming. And we didn't do those things. We could have done those things and we didn't, you know, we didn't, we didn't do those things. We did the opposite. We doubled down on all the bad stuff. And that's, that's on us. We made those mistakes. And I think like when you think about a terrorist attack or any historical turning point, it's not the thing that happens. It's how you react to it, like, that shows your freedom and your, and your character. And I just think we have to recognize that we blew it and that the next time that there's a crisis, we have to react better than that. And we have to not make those same mistakes all over again. But more relevantly, I mean, the thing which is on my mind is the way that 9-11 imprinted on us as the, we the way you react to a crisis, a terrorist attack,

is you give the government more latitude to do things, right? And we gave the government latitude to form this, what became the Department of Homeland Security, which I believe was a mistake from the beginning. And we gave the government more latitude to invade a random country, Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11 at all. And that's a lesson which I'm worried that Trump

and the people around him have learned. And so as we gear up for these midterms, I just, you know, without being alarmed, about it. I just want people to think that one possible political move that somebody like Trump, whose party is way behind in the polls, might resort to, is to try to drum up that kind of 9-11 effect again. And another reason why I think about this is that Victor Orban, who, of course, is their political hero, the former prime minister of Hungary, he did exactly that. He tried a fake terrorist attack in order to win elections. It didn't work. Also, people.

Putin, who Trump admires, came to power by way of a fake terrorist attack way back 27 years ago. So I just, the legacy of 9-11 that, like, if we're afraid we should trust the government, that's something which I think we might really have to resist at this particular point in our history. If there is a terrorist attack, fake, real, unclear, whatever, between now and early November, that's on Trump. I mean, that's his problem. That's something he brought about. It's not a reason why we should support him.

Well, let's talk about the midterms. We're five weeks away from the midterm election you've called probably the most consequential election since the 18th century. It feels as of credible people such as yourself, to be honest, say that about every election. Why should we believe that this time it is actually the most consequential election for a while? Yeah. I mean, first of all, just to defend logic, it can be true that each election is the most consequential because, you know, 26 could be more consequential than anything. before it, you know, in 24 could have been more consequentially before that, right? Like if 24 had turned out differently than 26 probably wouldn't be so consequential, but now that we are where we are, I mean, going back to your list of threats, right? And just bracketing, you know, for the moment, which are real and which aren't, but the number one one you mentioned, and I understand you may not agree, but AI, if we have Republican majorities in the House and Senate and Trump is press,

you can kind of toss away any notion that we're going to have an AI policy, it's just going to be unregulated, right? There's there's there's not going to be any attempt on the part of the United States to get control of that. And then the Americans, so the state the statehood of the United States, I mean, that's the thing which I worry about the most as a patriot, but also just as a sensible individual. I'm not sure how much more battering our institutions can take, because at the moment, all of them are being used to protect and further the interests of a small number of people. You can't keep a republic going that long on those principles. Eventually something's going to break.

So for me, that's the main reason the opposition party. It's not that I think the Democrats are supermen and that they're going to fix everything. It's more that in a situation like this, you want the opposition party to win because you want to make sure that the institutions of a republic can still work in a normal way.

And then the third, I mean, going back to like a conservative theme, if you want, is the shrinking power of the United States around the world. We are, like, we've basically, there's still a parachute on our backs, but we have jumped off a cliff. And the question is,

do we continue to enjoy falling precipitously towards the bottom of the cliff in terms of our power in the world, or do we prefer to pull the parachute and slow things down and look around a little bit? You're releasing your University of Toronto course Hitler and Stalin today to the public.

It begins not with Hitler or Stalin, but with the empires that preceded them, a world where Europeans applied one set of rules to themselves and another to everyone else. Why did you begin there? And what are the most important parallels that period has for the world we're living in now? I love that question,

because I think that is really the, the ultimate issue in 21st century politics is can you get past empire into something which is better? And of course, I mean, if you're in the Western civilization tradition, you know, you know that this goes all the way back to the Greeks. Can you do democracy or, you know, the Romans, can you have a republic or ultimately does it have to collapse into oligarchy or? empire. And we Americans imagine that we have a democracy or that we have a republic. It's been flawed all the way down the line. But the question is, for us, can we get over the habits that came from expanding across the continent, often violently? Can we get over those habits into something where we respect one another? We believe that everyone should have rights, that none of us

should be rounded up off the streets, that we shouldn't have concentration camps, that we shouldn't mass incarceration, that we should all have health care. Can we recognize one another as citizens? Everybody should have the right to vote and so on. Or is the habit of having an in-group and an out-group, is that too deeply ingrained in us for us to get over this hump from, you know, being a big imperial power to being a democracy? The Europeans were empires, and they don't think about this part of their history enough. But they have jumped over their own shadow, at least to the extent of forming a European Union, which is a post-imperial entity, right? Which is one of the reasons why both the Russians and the Trump people hate it so much, because the way the Trump people and the Russians look at the

world is it's all power, it's all about individuals, you should just kind of grab what you can. The European Union is beyond that. I'm not saying it's perfect or it's based on ideals or anything like that, but it's beyond that. It's about recognizing states as being equal and cooperating economically and then politically. So that's why I start the class with that. You know, that the 500 years that preceded the 20th century were basically an age of European empire. And the big question for the late empires, which were the U.S. and the Soviet Union, is can you get over that, right? Are you able to move into something better or are you stuck where you are? So I know you have a hard out. So this will be the last

question. Just end on an optimistic note, which is not easy these days when you're covering the news. Something you said earlier in the podcast really struck me, I want to double click on it. And that, as you said, when winter arrives, which is just around the corner, you believe Putin is going to be motivated to end this war. Say more about that? I think the Russians, look, the Russians depend on us to keep the war going. And if our policy changes, even if the Democrats win, and it's just declaratory and we start passing laws, even if Trump vetoes them, that's going to feel harder for Putin. the winter is tough for the Russians because they are going to have to rely on mobilized troops,

and they really aren't making advances. It's going to be hard on the Ukrainians, too. But I think the Russians are desperate to win by spring. That's how I see it. And if that can be held off, I think then we can get to something better in Ukraine. But I mean, I can be more optimistic in general or more hopeful in general. These problems that we have, all the ones we've talked about, they're large, they're not like historically faded problems. These are largely problems that we've chosen to have ourselves, and we've chosen to have them with great intensity in the last year and a half. A lot of the technological stuff, a lot of the things having to do with tech and wealth are a matter of thoughtful redistribution, which could be carried out with a better American government. I mean, we could be in a much, much better America than we're in right now. And I continue to believe in that. Timothy Snyder is a leading historian of authoritarianism, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe. He's the author of various books, including On Freedom, on Tyranny, the Road to Unfreedom and Budlands. Tim is also a professor at the University of Toronto's Muck School of Global Affairs.

Professor, we have a lot of young people who listen to this podcast, and one of my first piece of advice is you have to have role models such that you can think, what would this person do? and you, Anne Appelbaum, and Heather Cox Richardson, in this moment, have been role models for me because you apply your domain expertise in just how not only articulate you are, but just how unafraid you are. I get the sense that you guys don't really care much about what's in the comments. I really think it's a nice moment for historians such as yourself to have such an incredible impact on our country. and I think of you as real patriots and living up to the moment. Just so grateful for you, Professor. I appreciate your time today.

Thank you. That's very kind. I also appreciate the kind words about and Heather and the implication that historians can make a difference. We're trying. Thank you. Thank you. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, Laura Jeneer, and Asher Schwartz. Our video editor is Bianca Rosario Ramirez, Camry Rieck.

is our social producer. Drew Burroughs is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Profi Pod from ProfiMedia.