The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 104. Timothy Snyder: How will the US election result impact Ukraine?

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

What can European history teach us about the potential outcome of conflicts around the world? What effect will the results of the US election have on Ukraine? Will America always be a democracy? Rory and Alastair are joined by esteemed historian and author Timothy Snyder to discuss all this and much more. You can purchase Timothy's new book On Freedom here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/460254/on-freedom-by-snyder-timothy/9781847928054 TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Podcast Editor: Nathan Copelin Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to The Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics. Leading with me, Aleister Campbell.

And I'm not with Rory right now because he's in Australia. However, he was with me shortly before he left when we sat down for a fascinating interview with Professor Timothy Snyder. Now, some of you will know Tim Snyder because he's regularly on British. media. He's a regular appearer on media around the world, frankly. He's one of those guys is a historian, but he's somebody who is very, very relevant to the modern age. He makes his history very relevant to the modern age. And as you'll hear, particularly, I think that is so important in the context of what's happening in the United States right now, literally

in a few days' time with the election. Fair to say he is not a fan of Donald Trump, but also his views on Ukraine. This is a guy who speaks five languages fluent. including Ukrainian, he can read and understand 10 languages, which means that as a historian, he relies on sitting down in archives and libraries and just absolutely going to the nub of the issues that he goes into. And this is somebody that I've lent on in the past because he was right at the heart of the debate as it developed about the influence that populism and polarization and post-truth were having on our politics and on our world. Really, interesting guy, comes from an interesting background. As you'll hear, he likes to pretend he's

not very interesting, but believe me, he is. So Rory and I really enjoyed talking to Tim Snyder, and I hope that you do too. Here we go. So can I start by asking you just a little bit about where you come from, childhood? I was fascinated to read that you have what you describe as parents who were left-wing and not just American left-wing. So what do you mean by that? Well, America is a beautiful and interesting country, and it's easy inside the country and outside the country to say, oh, look, they're the nice liberal coasts, and then there's the terrible backward red hinterland, the flyover country. But the truth is that it's a very interesting patchwork in layers, and people come to their right-wing or left-wing or other politics from

all kinds of interesting directions. My family on both sides has been in Ohio for well over 200 years at this point, and on most sides of my family come from religious dissenters. And I think for that reason, have always had a bit of an edge as far as having perspective. on the rest of the country, perhaps, and taking part in movements, which are now seen as radical or progressive. But yeah, it's right that I was raised in a household that in 1970s, which was left-wing and not just by American standards. Even as a child, I was well aware of the difference.

Where would they see Bernie Sanders on the spectrum? I think both then and, I mean, we have to sort of remember that my parents are now 50 years older than they were when the story begins. But both then and now Bernie Sanders would be a sort of perfectly normal fellow. Tim, then we move on to the next stage of life. You moved from Ohio. You then went, I think, to Brown, and then you ended up studying in English. You went to Oxford. And I guess you were turning up, and it was quite an interesting moment. We're in this sort of transition moment. Fall of the Soviet Union launch of this new Francis Fukuyama age of America as a superpower. History's ended. Tell us a little bit about both what it felt like coming from the US to Britain and also what, in retrospect, that. decade meant for you. Well, first, I want to thank you both for the heroic effort to make my early life interesting. I will try to play along with this as best I can. There is something interesting about that moment, though, which does tie into my life. So, I mean, as an American, I had a very

fortunate life. Not everything went well, but most things did. And I was able to go off to Brown, which had no particularly well-organized curriculum, and then went off to Oxford, which pretended to have an organized curriculum, but which, in fact, was sort of push you towards the library, very anarchy essentially. And that suited me incredibly well. My personality type was very much that if there weren't rules, then I worked harder. And that, of course, at the time was consistent with a worldview that, gosh, when that Berlin Wall fell when communism came to an end, then all the barriers that were gone and everything would just kind of sort itself out, right? Like that kind of intuition, that Anglo-Saxon intuition, which worked well with Thatcherite or Reaganite politics.

and which was, of course, I think, completely mistaken. But in that sense, like, I was very happy. I was incredibly lucky to be in Oxford. I could study with Tim Gartonash. I could study with other people at St. Anthony's and elsewhere. And because Oxford had no curriculum to speak of, I could just go and go to archives and learn languages and make friends. So I spent the first half of the 1990s, largely in Eastern Europe doing those things.

And so I did have the deep experience of folks saying that, gosh, if we just get the economics, right, everything else will fall to place. and being there at the time and thinking, that doesn't seem quite right. The privatization isn't really working. People are being scammed. Or in Russia, a small group people are taking all the natural resources. This isn't going to lead necessarily to democracy. Not that I had thought it all through at the time.

But you're right that there was a sense in which, like, you could think things are just now going to work out. And I think that kind of laziness and political thought in the 90s has a lot to do with where we are now. Spoiler, what Professor Snyder had an all. office right opposite me at Yale, although nine of us are there enough to see much of each other, but anyway, we had a good cup of coffee a few weeks ago. And I was just reading a book by one of our colleagues called the Deluge, Adam Too's, where he tries to suggest that there's a similar moment before the Second World War, where after the First World War, a kind of idea of a possible

liberal global order emerges, which can be made to sound a little bit like your story of the 1990s, where there's global free trade, where there's the rise of liberal democracies, where there's the sort of U.S. domination, and where people like Trotsky and Hitler feel under quite a lot of threat and feel that the world may be going in a certain direction. Do you see those echoes, or do you sort of differ? I mean, I'm just sort of interest in this possibility that history has these moments, maybe before the First World War II, moments of sort of great sort of parent complacency and peace that then give way to great conflict. Yeah, I think it's very hard for us to avoid the sense that somehow everything is coming together and that conflicts can be avoided.

And, you know, one of the things that I try to make the case for in the book, in On Freedom, is that the conflicts are real because that's just the kind of creatures we are. Even if we only talk about the good things, the good things are in conflict with one another. So there just can't be a point, whether it's capitalist or communist, where all the conflicts somehow work themselves out. And if we believe that we're in such a point, then we need to check ourselves because that's got to be wrong. So what, like the moment of dialectical trickery of the 1990s was that folks went from thinking, well, one version of economic determinism is correct, thinking another version

of economic determinism is correct, whereas what we need to throw out was the economic determinism. So Adam chooses a wonderful story, and I think he's certainly onto something. For me, I'm more comfortable with a moment before the First World War for this comparison, where you really did have something that looked like a globalization. The surface of the earth with the canals and such was literally being made smaller. The telegraph was like the social media of today. The press media was probably better than the media of today in many ways. And that moment where it just seemed like things could only get better, at least from a European perspective, right? And war was something to the past, which means it was only fought in the colonies, to be fair. But that moment feels more like the 1990s

to me. But whatever moment one chooses, I think you're right to put your finger on this phenomenon, which is that that moment when you think that history is on your side is when you really have to watch out. Tim, what was it that made you choose kind of Eastern Europe as the place that you found most interesting, most fascinating, and where you became kind of expert? So I grew up in the Cold War, and for me, the Cold War meant Russia, a Soviet Union. And I first started studying nuclear arms and conventional arms and thought it was going to be an arms control negotiator. and I switched from there to something that people knew less about, which was Eastern Europe rather than the Soviet Union. And I switched a bit from arms control by way of economics, which I studied for a while, to history and the history of politics, not the history of ideas.

Because I thought that there was something more interesting going on. You know, it was like it was a very naive, but not wrong impulse, that the end of one thing wasn't just going to be more of the same of our thing, but that those checks and those Poles and those Bulgarians and those Ukrainians. might have something from which we could learn, and that the history of Jewish life, which is so important, could only really be understood in those places where Jews lived before the Holocaust. That was kind of a second level of this insight. And so, like, that was the first thing. And then the second thing which drew me in was what we already talked about was this rapid, unpredictable change, which we wanted to kind of gather in under various headings like transition

or market, but which in fact was humanly, unbelievably interesting. and like whether people were 20 in 1989 or 30 or 10 makes such a huge difference. And like watching people's relationships and their families and when they have children in a Y. All of that stuff was just wonderfully interesting. And then the thing which was addictive, and now I'm going to geek out on you incredibly, what were the archives, that you could go into these archives if you knew the languages and you could read documents which either nobody had ever seen or which people like you hadn't been allowed to see. And you could come to entirely new conclusions about familiar.

subjects, you could find subjects that hadn't been covered before. And then I came by the time I started writing books like Bloodlands or Black Earth, I was coming to the conclusion that the things we thought we understood about the world, like the Second War, like the Holocaust, we didn't really understand because we hadn't got the East European part, right? What is it that we had not understood about the Second World War and the Holocaust? Give us the sense of what you discovered in the course of that book. They're very elementary things. The Second World War was primarily about Eastern Europe, which is not something that Americans or British people or the French generally would accept. It's not the way we think about it.

The Cold War, the Iron Curtain cut us off from where the most significant battles of the Second World War took place. It cut us off from the territories that Hitler was most interested in, precisely above all, Ukraine. And the Americans are very significant because economically and especially in the Pacific, militarily, the British are very significant because of the British don't stay in the war, then it's a very different war and somebody else wins. But the terrains where civilians are killed are in Eastern Europe, the huge majority. And the Holocaust is largely a crime committed against people who live in Eastern Europe. So the Polish Jews, Soviet Jews are overwhelmingly the majority if you take them together

and then the next big group of the Hungarian Jews. And of course, it affects Italian and Czech and French Jews as well, but in smaller numbers, The essence of the Holocaust are killing facilities and death pits, which are not very far away from where the Jews actually lived most of the time. So what we miss about the war is that Hitler's main objective was Ukraine. What we miss about the Holocaust is that it took place where the Jews lived and that it was much more intimate and much closer, and that the mysteries about it are not the mysteries we think. It's not the mystery of mechanization or abstraction or distance or how did people not know.

Those are fake questions. The real questions are how do people kill people? close to, what are the motivations for that? How do you move from very brutal face-to-face kinds of killings to slightly more mechanized swamps of killings? Those are the real questions. So we were kind of going down the wrong road. The real questions about the Holocaust have to do with Germans and then people alongside Germans killing people at very close quarters in very large numbers. I think like the way we talked about, even Auschwitz, I had along with the late grade, Bob Silver is the editor of the New York Review of books. I wanted to title an article.

saying Auschwitz was a euphemism and he stopped me from doing that and I think he was right to stop me. But the point that I was trying to make was that the image of Auschwitz that we have like that there was only one place Auschwitz and that somehow it was like above the earth or below the earth but not quite of the earth and not very many collaborators were there and that it was somehow a factory. We use these metaphors. Somehow a factory or a machine that all of that was clouding us from a much darker reality which you get to when you read the sources from Belarus or from Poland or from Ukraine. On this question, but you inside the archives, I mean, Rory and I fancy ourselves as linguists because I speak three languages and Rory speaks several. Really badly. Really, really badly. So when you're in these archives, are you reading in all these languages and understanding? Did that not take you years to learn them? First of all, I want to just say that speaking languages badly is a mark of a courageous person. If you're willing to speak languages as badly, you'll get to places and make friends you won't otherwise make. Like, it's, especially if you're,

like, if you speak an imperial language, like we do, right? Like, the ability to speak languages badly, is not something that all the British and all the Americans have been able to do. But you speak five fluently? I speak some badly, too, though. Like, I speak some quite well, and I speak some quite badly. And, like, sometimes, like, my Ukrainian is not great, but I've been speaking a lot of Ukrainian lately because there's been a reason to do it. But you could read these archives in all these different languages. Yeah, but it was so, I mean, my languages, I have, I mean, I have a little bit of Hebrew, but except for that, my languages are all the romance, Germanic or Slavic. So three language families.

And I was free in the early 90s. I didn't know how hard Polish would be, but I threw myself into it. And I had patient friends and the internet wasn't there. So I could choose not to be touched by English. I learned Polish and French really well for the dissertation. I learned German pretty well because I had to be in Austria to do work as well. And then on that basis, I learned the other ones. But I had a lot of time.

I refused to speak English with other people. which really helps. I mean, I just declined to speak English for about five years. And I read a lot, and that was part of it. And it was also just very exciting. And did you ever think of going into diplomacy? You mentioned possibly being an arms control negotiator. Have you ever thought about going into diplomacy or politics rather than academia and history? Yes, but those are probably not wise thoughts. When I went off to Oxford, I very much had the kind of all-purpose intellectual in mind. Like, I could be a scholar, I could be a journalist, I could be an activist, I could travel, I could write about it. Like, as a kid in the 80s, I read Tim Gart Nash in the New York Review. You know,

I also read other people in the UK, but that was kind of my model. Like, you could write a, could write a big, thick book in the background, right? But you could also go places and know people and write about things, catch history as it was happening. That was my model. And I did actually take the force, but I did think about being a diplomat, like because I had, there are people I admired, like George Kennan or Thomas W. Simon's Jr., who was a fantastic historian, who was also an American diplomat. So I kind of, I had this notion, you've, kind of put all these things together and probably better people than me could. And I did actually take the American Foreign Service exam when I was in college. But I think I'm really better as a

historian or just better as someone who says what he thinks than trying to be a diplomat. Going back to Oxford, this was a conversation which Tim Gardnash and I actually had where he said, Tim, I believe you have a uniquely scholarly talent, which it took a moment for the penny to drop there as to what he actually meant. Okay, we're having the end. I'd like to move on. I mean, you made an observation about killing at close quarters and I've just been reading Chris Browning's book about Reserve Police Battalion 101 and this sort of granular accounts of these individual men and that. What did you conclude about killing at close quarters? And how did that help you understand some of what's happening around us today? Well, one thing, this seems very

simple, but it reminds us that war is about conquering territory and that the Germans who were going through Poland were on their way to Ukraine and the Caucasus and Western Russia because they were after particular resources and particular territory and that they wouldn't have been there to kill those Jews if they hadn't conquered that territory. And I think the way that we think about war very often today is incredibly abstract. And I'm struck often even two and a half years into the war in Ukraine where the people who are supposedly the experts on the question don't know where the rivers are and don't know what the step is and don't know what the ports of the Black Sea were and don't know about the 2,500 years of history of war for that territory.

The face-to-face killing reminds you that this war happened in a place. And to put that more positively, second thing, it reminds you that Jews have a history, if you're thinking about the Holocaust, like a deep, complicated, interesting history of long settlement of large numbers of people in precisely these lands. I mean, if you think about Jewish history is just a diaspora, then you can kind of bracket that whole bit. But that whole bit is like that's most of what we know about most of the Jews who have ever lived. is that. And so when you look at the history of killing face-to-face, because this is what happens, like, with a factory metaphor, is that if it's a factory, then they're not really people. Whereas if you have the records of people that they left behind right up to the moment of their death, then you see something about how they lived and what their connections were and what their children's names were and things like this. And so the face-to-face killing reminds you that it was a person. And then as far as perpetration, it helps us to see how easy it is to slip into various things, like events like the German soldiers who are murdering, or the German SS men or policemen who are killing tens of thousands of people, come in Spodilski or Babiar or whatever.

I mean, they knew what they were doing was extraordinary, but they didn't know they were taking part in something that would later be called the genocide or later be called the Holocaust. Just like people who do terrible things now don't necessarily see the whole picture, right? The things that matter, sure, ideological motivation matters, but also conformism and like the terrible human inability not to do the thing that the guy next to you is doing, these incredibly banal things. And Chris Browning is very good on this. Once you know that Germans were not actually punished if they chose not to shoot. I mean, there's an incredible

moment in the Chris Browning book where one of the police officers who doesn't participate, two things are going on. First, see, you get his colleagues talking, like contempt of him saying, well, you know, all very well for him. You know, he got to get on his moral high horse and, you know, we had to go and do the business. And then him saying slightly apologetically, well, yes, it's true. I didn't kill people on that occasion, but then I was a little bit older and I had Jewish friends and I had a business to go back to in Hamburg. So as you say, the conformism was so deep. We have this incredible human double capacity to shift to an incredibly new sort of behavior and then to make it normal. And I think we have to be aware of that. So Browning took a special case.

It involved a lot of middle age folks. And I think he deliberately picked a union. unit, which was less ideologically prepared than other units were so that he'd have kind of a cleaner case for his argument. But the point is that people can shift to a very different reality and make something else normal. And while it's normal, then those normal human sentiments like kick in. Like, I shouldn't step down from killing these Jews because then the other guys have to do more of it, which would be applicable to them like if you were chopping down trees or mopping the floor or something, but somehow you're able to take that normal human sentiment and apply it to is what would seem like an incredibly abnormal situation.

We have to remember that we're able to do that because if we don't remember able to do that, we can't say like, oh, this thing that seems normal to me right now, maybe it's actually radically abnormal. And three years ago, I would have seen it that way. And three years from now, I'm going to see it that way. We obviously want to come back to Russia and Ukraine, but just given that you've mentioned the Holocaust, are you worried that we're losing sight of the significance of the Holocaust? And is that partly explaining the difficulties that lots of people are having in debate

what was happening in the Middle East now. I mean, I have things to say about the Holocaust and the present, but I guess I would want to draw you out on the specific connection you want to make about the Middle East. Well, if I was an Israeli, I would think that one of the reasons that there appears to be, they would say less sympathy for what they're doing at the moment, is because current younger generations have no real sense

of just how awful the Holocaust was and what it means to Jewish people. Yeah, I mean, there are some Israelis who would argue it that way, and there are some Israelis would argue with a different way. You know, it would argue that if you deeply understood the Holocaust, that means that you wouldn't think of destroying all the universities in Gaza. I want to agree with the underlying sentiment, though, which is that I do think that there is right now the year 2024. We are in a moment of worsening global anti-Semitism that one feels from various sides,

not at all just in the Middle East, also in the United States and in Europe, and that it's not like people on the right will say, well, it's just on the left, and people on the left will say it's just on the right. I think it kind of escapes those categories. And even in discussions about Ukraine, the way that Trump talks about Zelensky is anti-Semitic, 100% as a Semitic. He talks about Zelensky as a war profiteer, whereas Zelensky is in fact a physically courageous person. But because he's a Jew, he can't be a physically courageous person. He has to be a war profiteer. It can't really be a war. It has to be a scam. In the book that I wrote about the Holocaust, which is called Black Earth,

I made a revisionist argument, not in the sense of Holocaust revision, but I made a different kind of causal argument. And I think in addition to the global anti-Semitism, which is what I called it, like Hitler had a very specific view of Jews, there were two other factors which mattered a lot. One was the destruction of states and the other was a sense of ecological catastrophe. And those two factors, I think, were causally necessary for the Holocaust. The Germans could only do what they did in the political social spaces created when they destroyed states. And this goes back to Eastern Europe and territory. They didn't occupy Poland and the Soviet Union the way that they occupied France, for example. They deliberately destroyed institutions.

They took citizenship away. They created in that way a completely new set of social dynamics, which enabled the Holocaust. And then the sense of ecological catastrophe that we're running out of everything, everyone's going to go hungry. And therefore, it's morally right for one race to take from. other races, which hooks back to an anti-Semitism because Hitler says that the Jews try to teach us things like they teach us Christianity, they teach us socialism, they teach us the rule of law, they teach us constitutionalism, they teach us Marxism. All the stuff that Jews teach us is

basically the same. It's basically about trying to tell us that there's something besides a struggle of race against race. And that's why we have to remove the Jews because we have to have a race against race. And so what ecological catastrophe or the sense of it does to politics is also a lesson, I believe the forgotten lesson of the Holocaust and one which is quite relevant to the 2020s. That's absolutely right what you said. I mean, I think we feel it all the time that anti-Semitism is on the rise. And of course, we also feel, or at least I feel in Britain, that anti-Muslim sentiments on the rise, that there's a lot of people who are now settling into very unpleasant tropes and generalizations about Muslims and seem to be willing to describe Muslims in a very

dismissive, odd, generalizing way. I mean, and maybe that's taking you out of your Arabic expertise. But I mean, is that a new phenomenon or is that something that in your study of the 20th century, you can see also the origins of this kind of anti-Muslim sentiment? That's not something that I've studied or I feel particularly expert in, but I certainly agree with the premise. And I think it's very important to recognize it just because somebody's an anti-Semite doesn't mean they're not anti-Muslim, which is Trump's case. You can very easily be both. And the fact that someone's against Muslims doesn't mean they're a friend to the Jews or vice versa, for that matter. Just talk us through how the Soviet

Union morphed into the Russia that we have today and which form of dictatorship you think history will be kinder to? That's a really interesting question because it is the case that in many ways, I think the Russian regime on a lot of measures that folks would agree to now is more repressive. Certainly think Lake Gorbachev and probably even than Brezhnev. So it's an interesting thought, especially when you start thinking about durability, because the whole Soviet Union only lasts in the first 69 years. Whereas Putin has been in power now in one way or another for what we've got of the 21st century.

So I don't think he will. But if he gets through one more presidential term, he's been in power for half as long as the Soviet Union even existed. I think they'll be remembered as very different systems. And that's the tricky part. And again, kind of the dialectical part because there are ways in which the Soviet Union enabled Russia of today. Like if you concentrate, if you have central planning, it's relatively easy for the few valuable enterprises to end up in the hands of a few people. And so in an odd way, state planning gets you to monopoly. And there's a funny way in which the Marxist project pointing towards the future actually

led to the Putin project that pointing towards the past, which is that when you say everything's in the future and you fail, you're setting yourself up for nostalgia. And so Brezhnev was already nostalgia for the Second World War. And Putin just takes out a step further and now it's nostalgia for the Second World War plus the 18th century, plus the 10th century. So there are ways that one led to the other, but they are very different kinds of systems. The Soviet Union at least always pretended that it was about an idea. And it always pretended that there was truth and that it was telling the truth.

Whereas Russia succeeds insofar as it succeeds by denying that there's a reason to anything, denying that there's any sort of truth, which is a very comfortable reality for the present Russian system, which is a kind of fascist oligarchy. And it's why Russia and Russian methods are so tempting and attractive for folks beyond Russia who are aiming for similar things. Tim, one of the mysteries is, on the one hand, obviously the Russian population is, by global standards, highly educated, highly informed, and will be conscious of many of the problems of Putin's regime. And yet at the same time, many, many Russians will buy into a very nationalist view. And Putin's popularity is sort of surprisingly high, given the nature of the regime. And we can discuss how popular or how unpopular, but it's still surprisingly high.

So, you know, he's more popular in the Iranian regime as with its people, etc. So what's going on here that these highly educated, thoughtful Russians, or some of them at least, can have a sort of implicit sympathy for Putin, a skepticism about Ukraine's claims. So I'm going to give the easy answer and the hard answer. The easy answer is that there has been a sifting many of the most critical Russians are of course now in Riga or Vilnius. They're scattered. They're not necessarily in Russia.

But the hard answer, because I don't want to dodge it, has go something like this. We were talking earlier about what went wrong in the 90s, which could be characterized as a politics of no alternatives, that the thing that we have is the only real thing. That's Putin. it's just a darker version. What Putin says is that what Russia has is what everybody has. England is no different. America is no different. If you believe that it's any different, that's because you're a gullible fool. And that, of course, is an attractive line of argument because you don't want to think you're living in a worst country. You'd rather think, well, the English pretend, but they're just hypocrites. And of course, England and America, and you could use any example for this, we generate enough stuff for their media that it's easy for them to portray us as basically corrupt and our democracy's. is basically a joke and so on, which is what their media does. And this goes, again, back to the question about the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union, that in the Soviet Union,

the idea was propaganda is about how the state is good. And in Russia, propagandes about how everybody else's state is bad. They don't have domestic news coverage at all. It's all about how things are terrible in London, things are terrible in Nevada. That's it. Things are terrible in Paris. Today, they're terrible in Italy. That's it. And just to finish the thought, I mean, the way that this works psychologically is that it does. speak to a certain kind of nationalism, because if everything is terrible, if it's terrible everywhere, what's good about the Russians is that at least we're honest about it. The rest of you are a bunch of hypocrites. And there's a sort of history, isn't there? Because there was during the Soviet Union

period a very strong move by the left to point to real crimes, the British Empire or the oppression of African Americans in the United States, as there's any kind of big symbolic ways of saying these capitalist democracies are hypocritical. And that, of course, really, you know, appealed to many people on the left within our own countries. But there's been added to this something that I'm increasingly picking up on Europe, which is a sort of argument of Russian spiritual superiority, that we're all a bunch of decadent materialists and that they represent the last hope of profound, serious, spiritual Western civilization. I think that argument kind of runs two different totalitarian ways and you can find them both in Russia, you can find them coexisting, and you can

find them overlapping. We have a big soul version. So we have a big soul and you have smaller souls. And the big soul version, you can't possibly understand our depths from the narrow perspectives of your tiny Western souls. The big soul version also kind of works with communism because Marxism says there is actually a single human nature and the problem is that it's been corrupted and this is where it is kind of a religious line of thinking. It's been corrupted by something, which happens to be private property. And so if you can remove this earthly corruption, we'll all get back to having our big soul, or as Marx and Engel said, our species essence.

The big soul thing can actually work with communism. It can also work with flat-out religion or right-wing views. It can work with fascism. So there are Russian fascists like Yvani Lin, who Putin has cited many, many, many times and continues to cite, who say that it's no longer a Marxist view, it's a fascist view, the world is fragmented, it's beaten up. Everybody in the West picks up the pieces. We're concerned with these things we call fast.

acts, but facts don't matter. The only thing which matters is wholeness, and Russia is the only hope for wholeness. And on this line of reasoning, Russia may not have a big soul now, but it might in the future, and Russia is the only hope. And since Russia is the only hope, anything that Russia does now doesn't matter. Russia can't do wrong because the wrong that it's doing is just in this superficial factual world or the superficial world of values like human rights. And none of that stuff matters. All that matters is the fundamental wholeness. So the big soul argument can work both from a fascist position and a communist position. But then there's also the no-soul argument. The no-soul argument goes like this. We know that we're all complete nihilists.

And you guys are complete nihilists too, but we're superior to you because we're honest about the fact that we are complete nihilists. And so it's one soul or no-soul. And you can see Putin doing both of those. Like Tuesdays and Thursdays, it's big soul. And Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays, it's no soul. And the weekends he has off. Tim, what does Russia winning this war look like? What does Ukraine winning this war look like? And why is it so important to the world that it's the latter that prevails? I mean, I was speaking in a slightly jovial fashion just then, but it's actually quite a serious point, the point about morality. The idea that you can do everything because you're Russian is extraordinarily evident in the way that they treat Ukrainian people and Ukrainian children and Ukrainian elites, Ukrainian cities.

And that, I think, is at stake. like the idea that there are in fact values besides your sense that you're special. Because if it's all about your sense that you're special, it's really hard to hold up anything like constitutionalism, let alone an international legal order. So that notion that everything is permitted, either because God is dead or because I am God, you know, like one of the other. But that notion is kind of what's at stake because democracy, it's a word we toss around and we kind of empty it of value by using it so much and so loosely.

But democracy really does depend on the idea that there are, are people and the people should rule, you know, and that there's something good about people, which will allow them to rule. And this war is directly against a democracy, but it's also against democracy in that moral sense. And if we let the Ukrainians lose, it's pretty hard to imagine what better case we're going to have for supporting a democracy and, you know, what better allies we're going to have, we're willing to take risks for it. So there's that deep, hard-to-define moral stake, I think. And then geopolitically, there is the basic post-war order. The countries aren't supposed to invade other countries and claim they don't exist and take their territory. That was the

basic post-colonial way we were supposed to be thinking about legal order. Russia is challenging that. Third, there's China, which most everyone thought was the real issue. And if Russia is allowed to prevail in Ukraine, then it's hard to see what's going to prevent the Chinese from being more adventurous. My own view is that the Ukrainians are now deterring the Chinese in a way that we can't, because anything we do to deter China can be read as provocative, that Ukraine defeat. feeding Russia is not a provocation to China. It just shows that offensive operations are difficult. So that's kind of a special opportunity that we have. And then beyond that, there's nuclear proliferation, which I worry about a lot because it's pretty unique. And this goes back to the nihilism point,

to try to win a war by brandishing your nuclear weapons, which is what Russia has done. And if you can win a war by brandishing nuclear weapons, that means that everybody has to build them either to brandish or to defend against the brandishing. So there are multiple European nation countries, which will go nuclear in the next decade, if Russia wins this war, and by view. And that makes nuclear war more likely. And just the first part of my question, what does Russia winning look like and what does Ukraine winning look like? How does the war end either way? Somebody wins. Somebody wins and somebody loses, which doesn't mean they'll acknowledge it. But I think somebody wins when the other side

political order breaks. In Russia, there are three ways this can happen. Putin loses power, Putin dies, or Putin changes the subject, which he's very capable of doing. I mean, Ukraine is matters to them hugely right now, but the moment that there's another coup attempt or something else happens, then they'll all be thinking about Russia, just like they did in summer of 2023. It's very possible for them to change the subject. We just have to make the subject change. So I can't tell you what it looks like operationally. But what I can tell you is that in Russia, it feels like someone has to change the subject because Russian troops are more necessary somewhere else than in Ukraine right now. And in Ukraine, it looks like NATO membership, EU membership,

a sense that the future has been restored and that we can claim, if not literally, we're claiming politically morally with all of our territory. Let's take a quick break back in a second. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vacs, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer.

It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying faulty cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them,

visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Samark here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alastair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment

when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few. few issues with the trade unions and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between

that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we're looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then

record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Tim, I'm not going to get into territory that's going to get us all in trouble and make it sound like I'm obsessed, but it does make me think about the Middle East and what the similarities and differences are here, because I guess a critic of what's happening in the Middle East might say that there are some similar dynamics at play, that there is a sense that one nation has a very, very unique right, and that either through some sort of great soul argument or some sense of its own legitimacy,

ideas of proportionality and neighbours are pushed aside. And I also think that there's a, you know, maybe if I move away from the Middle East, because it's maybe too sensitive to drag you into, but I mean, maybe if you looked at Myanmar and elsewhere, the question is not just a question of what democracy means in terms of the protection of minority rights, but the connection to this idea of a global order and borders, that it is partly about a sense that Russia-Ukraine sometimes seems to be symptom of a broader problem of us giving up on ideas of international law, giving up on ideas of humanitarian intervention, giving up on ideas of a US-led order, that it does feel like we're entering a culture of impunity,

in which increasingly nations are simply asserting they have the right to do almost anything provided they feel it's in their national interest to do it. Yes. First of all, I think it's perfectly okay to talk about the Middle East and I don't want to be shy about it. I'm not expert on it, but I think we are watching an entirely unnecessary tragedy unfold before our eyes in the Middle East. It's clearly the case that an American conservative Christian conception of Israel as a place which is unlike other places inhabited by people whose fate is somehow connected to the world becoming

whole in some way. It's clearly the case that that view of Israel has something to do with the kind of place that Israel is now and the kinds of things that Israel is doing now and the difficulty that the United States has been restraining it or that view has something to do with the difficulty that even well-meaning Americans have. And seeing Israel as a country like other countries and analyzing Israel with the same tools we would use to analyze other countries. But the general point, I just think you're absolutely right. And it's very brilliantly put the Ukrainians who in general are very hesitant to say the least about citing Russian literature, the way that many of them characterize Russian culture is crime without punishment. So impunity precisely. And once you have

crime without punishment, crime starts to seem like the point in itself. You're in a different moral world. There's a different moral to you're in. There's a different moral to where you show off by your ability to commit crimes, which, of course, in political terms, blends back into fascism with Carl Schmidt and his definition of the sovereign as the person you can make an exception. So Putin is saying, I'm going to make an exception over and over and over again until everyone realizes that your rules don't really mean anything. And of course, it's not only Putin, as you say, but the war in Ukraine to me is a bit special because it is a place where there's an unusual amount of moral clarity and where I think we do have the ability to make a

difference and those two things don't always hold. Tim, crime without punishment, the image that popped into my head was Donald Trump. And I just wondered both in relation to Ukraine, but also in relation to the Middle East, and in relation to the issues that you were written about on tyranny and also your latest book on freedom, how big a danger is it if Trump gets back? And is he, if he does get back, is that not the ultimate crime without punishment? I just can't disagree with the beautiful formulation of that question. I was, I wrote a little column in my substack the other day about Georgia, which has gotten to this very weird position where, like, the normal voter suppressors may have to stifle the Trumpist voter suppressors because the Trumpist voter suppressors are so radical that it discredits the normal kind of voter suppression. So I was thinking about Georgia, which is like a key American state in this election, obviously.

And then I realized, you know, gosh, like Trump called up Georgia and asked them to find 12,000 votes. like he literally made a phone call. Like, it's like Hollywood. It's like the kind of crime that you almost have to be wearing a black hat to commit, right? And have a camera in front of you. You call somebody up and literally say, find 12,000 votes so I can win the election. And I was writing this, I think, my God, the man has still not been prosecuted for this. Like, he has still not been prosecuted for this.

And it really calls into question what kind of country I live in. And I think the kind of country I live in is between these two things. And this is kind of like in some deep sense what's at stake with Trump because we're obviously not a rule of law state in the way that we would like to be because there are countries, you know, and they're not perfect countries, but there are countries like Italy and France and so on where at least people do get prosecuted having been head of government or head of state. Like it does happen. But we're not them. But we're also not quite Russia. Like we do have, or we're not Hungary, we do have prosecutors at work. It's just somehow in four years, in four years we haven't actually been able to bring a criminal case. So it's like we're hovering. in between. And as with the war in Ukraine, so with the election of Trump, if Trump can come to power, I'm going to use that term, because there are scenarios in which he comes to power, right? I don't think he actually wins. But if Trump can come to power, that's going to be really rough on the rule of law, not only because he is, as you say, someone who has obviously committed lots of crimes, which other people would already have been committed, but also because it's not

just the past, it's the future that he's promising. He's promising to use the law to punish his political opponents. And he's also promising to fire the 40,000 or so top civil servants, whose job has been to execute the law and to replace them with cronies who will presumably just kind of do what he says. So, I mean, that's just one dimension of how bad it will be, is that it is really about the rule of law. And Ukraine, if Trump wins? I think Ukrainians keep fighting. I'm hopeful that some smart person gets the ball rolling on Ukrainian membership in NATO before Trump wins, because I think the Europeans need a framework and a way to depop. litigize assistance for Ukraine. But the Ukrainians will have to keep fighting. You know, because even in

Trump's scenario where he gets the Russians and the Ukrainians, he cuts off American aid to Ukraine to force Zelensky to the table with Putin. Let's say that even happens and there's a ceasefire. The Russians just then invade again six weeks or six months later. So the Ukrainians don't have any choice. They're going to be fighting one way or another. And so the question is whether like the Canadians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Europeans can get themselves together to help in some way. I don't think he's going to win, you know, but he could. And I think Europeans, the British, have to have some kind of plan B, even if it's not a great plan B for this, rather than saying, like, oh, well, if Trump wins, we're just going to throw up our hands. That's what the Russians

are counting on, by the way. Can I come in with an old chestnut? Tell us what people miss, commentators and international observers about why people vote for Trump. I mean, you'll be aware of the sort of cliches that we might have in the United Kingdom for why people vote for Trump. What do you think we might be getting wrong in Britain in our perception of that? And what might even the New York Times not quite get about why people vote for Trump? The stuff that people miss isn't necessarily the interesting stuff. Part of the problem is that we want these problems to be interesting. They're not always interesting. So one of the things in the U.S. is that we have a two-party system. And of the two parties, the Republicans are the ones that's more like a club or a clan. And the Democrats

are more like a circus or a sporting event or something. And they're good things to both sides, honestly. When Republicans say they're loyal to their party, I think, okay, like, I get it. Loyalty's a good thing. It's just like sometimes you have to take other things to account. And so much the reason why people are going to vote for Donald Trump is just that there's an R next to his name on the ballot. And that's an incredibly boring explanation, but I'm afraid it's true. There are just a lot of folks in America who can't really believe that the candidate's a Republican, he could be a bad guy who could destroy the system. And that's too banal to report about, but I think that's a big part of it. And then there's historical things

which are harder to explain, I think, for journalists, which many journalists understand very well, but they can't quite get it into a column like the legacy of slavery. That's a hard column to write. But because slavery, therefore, voter suppression, because voter suppression mentality that black votes maybe don't count, because of that mentality, when Trump says he won in 2020, he's triggering a lot of Americans, who, well, they wouldn't say it out loud, really do think that those black people in Baltimore or Detroit or Philadelphia or cheat or somehow shouldn't get a whole vote. So like historical racism and then something the reporters do get, but which I think is

really important is just lack of mobility, that people not being able to move in the country and socially and change social class the way that they could before is a big part of it because that opens up the way for the Trumpian nostalgia. And then another thing that people, I think, hesitate to admit is that the guy is really talented. Like Mussolini was talented too. It's not our taste necessarily, but like objective. he is a talented entertainer. He is good at what he does. It may not speak to us, but he is good at a thing, right? And I think that's also part of it. Like, he goes to his rallies. He makes no sense.

He contradicts himself. He lies all the time, blah, blah, blah. But he does still pack a punch, not the one he did maybe eight years ago, but he is still good at what he does. And he's still working pretty hard to do it. And that's part of it, too. You're very big, both in your work and in your sense of the world and what's wrong with the world on the concept of truth and fact and the role of journalism. And you also, I love that quote you had in one of you, I can't remember which book it was, but you talked about collective memory as a tool of resistance. How important to Trump is the whole post-truth concept being? The fact that he seems to be able to lie and not just get away with it, but have many, many, many people, including media people,

believe the lies. Yeah, or if not exactly believe them as truth, believe that storytelling is the reality. Because there are a lot of other mechanisms that go into this. Like, people, when they realize he's lied, they think, well, it's okay that he lied because that's what a clever politician does. And then they tell themselves. But actually, I knew he was lying all along. It's like a sort of American version of what you said earlier about Russians saying that we're hypocrites. It is. They all lie. So what's the wrong with him lying? That is it. And that's the way that Trump is a Putinist character. And I think that's the right way to put it because Putin got there first. But Trump is a Putin's character in that way. He knows that he doesn't have to respect the convention of telling the truth.

And that's the difference because you could have liars who respect the convention. If you catch them in a lie, they say, okay, well, da-da-da-da-da, my speechwriter did it or whatever. But you're respecting the convention. He doesn't respect the convention. And I think liberals, I mean this like small L enlightenment-oriented people think, well, we're all kind of rational. We're all seeking the truth. And therefore, this Trump is some kind of deviation. Whereas in fact, the politics in which we're all kind of rational, all kind of seeking the truth, takes a hell of a lot of generational work over and over and over again. And the thing that he's doing, it isn't just some kind of deviation or a failure. It's just a different kind of politics

based on a different metaphysics. And it works, whether you call it or fascism or not, this idea that there isn't really truth, there's just will, there's just emotion. You define truth by defining the enemy that you go from there. That works as politics. We know that works as politics. And how alarmed were you, Tim, in the debate that Trump did with Kamala Harris, how alarmed with you at his refusal to answer twice the question about whether he actually wanted Ukraine to win the current war with Russia? Well, personally, it didn't make any impression on me because I've long been convinced that he wants Russia to win. Sorry, I don't mean to be snide about the question. It is just unfortunately the case that Trump believes that dictators should rule the world and that

real power is in the hands of people who make their states and societies weaker at the expense themselves, and that's Putin, right? Like, Russia is much weaker as a state in a society that it could be because of Putin and his oligarchy and his wars. And Trump thinks that's the way things should be. And therefore, because that's how things should be, Putin should beat Zelensky. The dictatorship should beat the democracy. Democracies are weak. He doesn't like them. So unfortunately, it's very alarming, but personally, it wasn't at all surprising to me. I've been listening to something else, though. Trump over and over again says, Ukraine is finished. Ukraine is. done, it's been obliterated. And I just want to point out that when he does that, again,

I think it has to assume that he's intelligent and he usually knows what he's doing. What he's doing is he's setting a marker for later on because he's saying today Ukraine is obliterated. That's not true, of course, where the Russians occupy, there have been horrible war crimes. But the country itself, the economy is doing pretty well. They've restored trade in the Black Sea. People are going to work. It's like it hasn't been destroyed as a country. But when he says Ukraine's been obliterated, what he's doing is setting us up. for what happens after his so-called deal with Putin. That's what he thinks is going to happen. He thinks, I'm going to give away the story to Putin. Then Ukraine's going to be obliterated,

but I'm just going to congratulate myself on my great deal. Ukraine was already obliterated, therefore nothing bad can happen to Ukraine. Tim, last one from me, you've been very patient. But just to return back to the story of the young Tim Snyder in the 90s. One of the big differences between then and now is that we've lost faith in the idea that there is a clear vision of how to create more prosperous, democratic peaceful societies. We're talking at the moment where there's talk about regime change in Iran, for example. And maybe in the 90s we would have had an idea that, okay, you get rid of the Ayatollahs and a liberal democracy emerges. Now we've seen Egypt and Myanmar and Syria and Iraq.

And we can think of 30 scenarios, which are pretty nasty about what happens when the regime collapses in Iran. And Iranians too maybe sense that. And maybe the Afghans sense this when looking at the Taliban, that there's no longer something available to people when they look at unpleasant regimes, which gives them confidence that there is a clear, well-performing, delivering democratic future, which they can easily reach for. Yeah. So three things about that. One thing which is worth noticing is that even though democracy is right now being challenged

and overall in decline, there are places which are actually working incredibly well, and those places are not very good at telling their stories, right? Like, where's the powerful story about Norway or where's the powerful story? I mean, even places like Poland, which has lots of problems, but there's still an incredible story about a place like Poland, which used to have good roads and now has good roads, which now people in Poland now live longer on average, or it's close, depending on what you're looking at. But they live as long or longer than Americans. Like, who would have thought that was going to happen? So there are these good stories and we're just very poor at telling them. That's the first thing. The second thing is, and this is a point that I try to make in my book, that our problem a little bit was, and it is like the Marxist problem, that when we were pointing to the future, we were just pointing to one future. And that one future had too much to do with determinism. So the invasion of Iraq is, and this is, by the way, I'm not somebody who's changed his mind on this. I was against it at the time for this reason, among others.

But the invasion of Iraq was premised on this, that if you just knock over something bad, then deterministically, things are going to rise up and create something good. And that just isn't true. And the problem is when you only have one idea of how things work, then as you say, you get disillusioned. You go from one to zero. And this is the third point. I think to have an idea of the future, this is how I would kind of characterize the problem,

that we don't have an idea of the future. And without an idea of the future, you can't really have a democratic present because a democratic present depends about on negotiating futures. It's all about negotiating futures. The moment it's about negotiating past, you can tell things have gone wrong. We have to know the past so we can get to the future. But when it's all about negotiating the good guys and the bad guys in the past, you know you've taken a wrong turn. And so we have to have a future to look into, but it has to be a future which is open to multiple things. And of course, some of those things are bad, global warming disaster, right? But there are also good things that can happen. This is what I'm trying to hit in the book,

that there are actually a whole bunch of futures, and they're not all bad. Some of them are quite good, but we're not going to get there just by thinking that there's only one or that it's going to be brought to us automatically, but we have to actually start thinking about different combinations of futures and trying to get there. And I think that's doable. We're in a cycle which you've described of thinking, well, history's on our side or the economy's on our side or our righteousness is on our side. And now we're coming, we're out of that cycle. So Trump and Putin for that it's an alternative, which is nothing's actually good. And Putin actually says very sharply, he weaponizes the sentiment that you're talking about. He says, look, it might be bad here,

but whatever you try to improve it, it's going to be worse. If you go in the streets in Ukraine, I'm going to invade your country. I'm going to make it worse. There are no alternatives, right? This is the dark version of no alternatives. And so we have to be in a position to say, actually, there are lots of good alternatives. And we can see what some of those good alternatives are. It's not automatic, but we could actually get there. Now, Tim, my final question, and thank you so much for being so generous with your time. And I know that Roy's going to roll his eyes madly when I ask this question and say, you're obsessed, man. I want to ask you, what were the historical trends of which Brexit was a part?

And what is history going to think of Brexit? I mean, I think stupidity isn't underused historical category. I mean, I think we under us somebody like both how brilliant we can be and how stupid we can be and how conjunctures can arise in which we do things that are very foolish. Personally, for that debate, I was in Britain a few times. Like, I came in and out. I wasn't living there at that time. I was looking at Brexit from a certain position, which was a person who was writing a book

called Road to Unfreedom, which was about Russia invading Ukraine. It was about the 2010s and what was going wrong in the 2010s. And from that perspective, I see two things about Brexit, which may not seem essential to the British, but which I think were essential at the time. What is social media? I think Brexit is very much kind of in that general trough with Trump, where things that wouldn't have been possible a decade before were suddenly possible because social media had changed politics into much more of an us and them. I'm right, you're wrong sort of discussion. And that at a more superficial level, social media enabled bad actors to change the

conversation in ways that we were not really aware of at the time. But a huge amount of the social media traffic on Brexit, something like 10% on Twitter came literally from just one other country, which happens to be Russia. And I deeply believe that that changed the tone of the conversation. I think without social media and perhaps even without just Russia in social media, that vote might have gone another way. So my deep sentiment about Brexit is that the European Union, it's an interesting and promising form of post-imperial politics. So for me, the big question of the 21st century, or one of them is, what do you do after empire? Because empire, regardless of which side of empire you were on, there's a danger in the past. There's a danger if you're in a post-colonial position

of just being stuck and being opposed to the empires. And if you're an imperial position, there's a danger in being nostalgic for empire. But where European countries have succeeded is in doing something different, which was European Union. European Union is a place to go after empire. By the way, if you look at the debates in Britain in the 60s, people were well aware of this 60 years ago. The EU is there as a place to go after empire. That's what it's for. And that's what it succeeds in. So my deep reaction to it was that the people voting for Brexit are misunderstanding post-imperial global politics, that they've been offered this thing to do after empire. That is a good thing to do after empire. Whereas being on your own or trying to be a nation state

is a weaker alternative in every way than being with other European countries after empire. and that the European Union is a much more radical, interesting, new sort of thing to do. Whereas in Britain, ever since I've been a political adult, it's been portrayed as like boring, repressive, yada, yada, yada, whereas in fact it's kind of an interesting thing to do. Just going off and trying to be a nation state is pretty boring, like everybody does that, you know, whereas the European Union is actually sort of interesting. So there you have my answer. Thank you for your time.

Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks to both of you. So, honest, Tim Snyder, who I'd say was my neighbor at Yale right across the corridor from me and who I'm a real fan of. What did you think of it? Well, I mean, I have long been a huge admirer of his. I think he's incredibly clever, very articulate. I'll tell you the thing he came through the interview that I hadn't really noticed before. He's got a very sort of wry, self-deprecating sense of humour.

Yeah, I love that when he kept saying, you're trying to make Tim Snyder interesting. That kept coming back again again. I think one of the reasons why people like our interviews, this was never planned, but we sort of, we've developed this way of trying to get everything. to talk about their childhood. But it is very, very interesting. So he's trying to say he had a very ordinary childhood, very uninterested childhood, but he didn't. So, no, I think he's so smart. And he doesn't mean, like, we pose as these great linguists. I mean, he puts his absolutely into division five. I mean, he is fluently speaks five, reads 10. I mean, that's something else. It's unbelievable.

He's also somebody who is unusual because he, very, very serious academic, as you say, with incredible linguistic ability, huge amount of time in the archives, formidable early research, who's now managed to move on to become a much broader public intellectual engaging with questions like Trump, fascism, Ukraine. I get since he's actually quite close to Zelensky as well, and it's certainly very, very admired in Ukraine for the work he's done on trying to publicise their experience. Yeah, and he's done this big fundraising project to help Ukraine. He's also, he's somebody who he has this ability to kind of take big historical trends and sort of make them feel very, very simple. I loved his answer about Brexit as well, Rory. I've got to say, you know,

I know that as you say, that will sort of make us sound like we're sort of, but it's true. It's one of the most stupid things that a country's ever done to itself. It's also in a world where people are often very kind of denigrating of the United States, I think that people like Tim Snyder such a reminder of how the best American intellectuals and academics are second to none in the world. I mean, they have a kind of clarity, a confidence, a kind of erudition, which is astonishing, and their sense of a kind of global vision is quite unlike anyone else. He's also a very, very good writer. I've only read two of his books, but he's clearly a real believer in structure.

He structures his books really, really well. I've never seen him lecture in person, but I bet he's somebody who just has a few notes, Because what he needs is the structure. He gets the structure right. And then he builds his arguments around that. And that's how his books come across to me. And that's a very kind of ordered brain, which can take in a lot, assimilate it and then put it back out. And a phenomenally popular lecturer.

Colleagues in Yale are very jealous of the hundreds of people that competes to get into the lecture halls when he speaks. And it's a real advert for the Jackson School at Yale that they have someone of that stature with them. Good. Well, I hope people enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoy talking to him. Thank you, Alison. Bye-bye. See you soon. Bye.