[reflexive music]

This is the problem of despotism.

This is why despotism is, or even just authoritarianism

is all powerful and brittle at the same time.

It's because it creates the circumstances

of its own undermining,

the information gets worse,

the sick of fans get greater in number,

the corrective mechanisms become fewer

and the mistakes become much wider

and much more consequential. 13

We've been hearing from voices, 14

both from the past and the present, 15

telling us that the reason for what has happened 16

is, as George Kennan said,

the great blunder of eastward expansion of NATO,

a modern, realistic story like John Mearsheimer tells us

that a great deal of the blame

for what we're witnessing now

must go to the United States,

that he calls it the great strategic blunder

of the postwar era.

I thought we'd begin by your analysis of that argument.

What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise,

it's not some kind of deviation

from a historical pattern.

Way before NATO existed in the 19th century,

Russia looked like this.

It had an autocrat, it had repression, it had militarism,

it had suspicion of foreigners in the west.

This is a Russia we know

and it's not a Russia that arrived yesterday

or arrived in the 1990s.

It's not a response to actions of the west.

There are internal processes in Russia

that account for where we are today.

George Kennan was unbelievably important scholar,

practitioner person in our country and culture.

The greatest Russia expert who ever lived.

But I just don't think blaming the west

is the right analysis for where we are today.

When you talk about the internal dynamics of Russia,

historically, it reminds me of a piece that you wrote

and it was published in Foreign Affairs six years ago,

and it began like this,

"For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy

has been characterized by soaring ambitions

that have exceeded the country's capabilities,

beginning with the reign of Yvonne the terrible

in the 16th century,

Russia managed to expand

at an average rate of 50 square miles per day

for hundreds of years,

eventually covering one sixth of the Earth's land mass.

And then say these high water marks aside,

Russia has almost always been

a relatively weak, great power."

So if you could expand on that

and talk about how the internal dynamics of Russia

have gone on to describe it,

both historically and in the present day on Putin,

that would be, I think, very helpful.

One of the arguments I made in my Stalin book

was that being the dictator,

being in charge of Russian power in the world

in those circumstances in that time period,

made Stalin who he was and not the other way around.

And so with Russia what you've got

is a remarkable civilization.

You know it, you know it in the arts,

in music, in literature, in dance, in film,

in every sphere in science,

it's just a deep, profound, remarkable place,

a whole civilization, more than just a country.

At the same time it feels

that it has a special place in the world,

it's a country with a special mission in the world.

It's Eastern, Orthodox, not Western,

and it wants to stand out as a great power.

Its problem has always been not that sense of self,

not that sense of identity,

but the fact that its capabilities

never match those aspirations.

And so it's in a struggle to live up

to this aspiration that it has for itself, which it can't

because the west has always been more powerful.

Russia is a great power, but not the great power,

except for those few moments in history

that you just enumerated.

And so in trying to match the west,

or at least manage the differential

between Russia and the west, they resort to coercion,

they use a very heavy state-centric approach

to try to beat the country forward and upwards

in order militarily and economically,

as I said to either match the west or compete with the west.

So Putin is what he is,

and no one has to tell you who Putin is,

you've been on this for a very long time.

At the same time, he's ruling in Russia,

and he's got these circumstances, almost a syndrome,

where geopolitics is trying to make up

for a power differential that it can't make up for.

Well, let's describe Putin and Putinism.

What kind of regime is it?

It's not exactly the same as Stalinism,

it's not certainly not the same as Xi Jinping

or the regime in Iran.

What are its special characteristics

and why would those special characteristics

lead it to want to invade?

Or why would Putin want to invade Ukraine?

Which seems at least from this distance singularly stupid.

So of course this isn't the same regime of Stalin,

it's not the same regime as the czars either.

Of course there's been tremendous change,

urbanization, higher are levels of education,

the world outside has been transformed.

So that's the shock, actually,

the shock is that so much has changed,

and yet we're seeing this pattern

that they can't really escape from,

where you have an autocrat

or even now a despot, who's in power,

making decisions completely by himself.

Does he get input from others?

Perhaps we don't know what the inside looks like.

Does he pay attention?

We don't know.

Do they bring him information he doesn't want to hear?

That seems unlikely.

Does he think he knows better than a everybody else?

That seems highly likely.

Does he believe his own propaganda

or his own conspiratorial view of the world?

That also seems likely.

These are surmises.

So he believed, it seems,

that Ukraine was not a real country.

He believed that the Ukrainian people

were not a real people,

that they were one people with the Russians.

He believed that the Ukrainian government was a pushover.

He believed what he was likely told

or wanted to believe about his own military,

that it had been modernized

to the point where it could organize

not a military invasion, but a lightning coup.

to take Kiev in 1, 2, 4, 5 days,

and either install a puppet government or force,

because he captured the current government and president

to sign some paperwork.

The courage of the Ukrainian people

and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government

and its president Zelensky,

galvanized the west to remember who it was.

What is the west? How to define what the west is?

The west is a series of institutions and values.

The west is not a geographical place.

Russia is European, but not Western.

Japan is Western, but not European.

Western means rule of law, democracy, private property,

open markets, respect for the individual, diversity,

pluralism of opinion,

and all the other freedoms that we enjoy,

which we sometimes take for granted,

we sometimes forget where they came from,

but that's what the west is.

And that west, which we expanded in the nineties,

and in my view properly, through the expansion of the EU

and the expansion of NATO,

that west is revived now,

and that west has stood up to Vladimir Putin

in a way that neither he, nor Xi Jinping expected.

And so if you assume that the west was just gonna fold,

because it was in decline and it ran from Afghanistan,

if you assume that the Ukrainian people

were not for real, were not a nation,

if you assume that Zelensky was just a TV actor, a comedian,

you know, a Russian speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraine.

If you assumed all of that, maybe you could take Kiev

in two days or four days or five days,

but those assumptions were wrong.

Let's discuss the nature of the regime,

'cause it seems to me that the Putin regime

changed somewhat, that Putin came in

and there were these figures called the oligarchs

from Yeltsin era, there were 7, 8, 9 of them.

And they were read the riot act, stay outta politics.

You can keep your riches, but stay outta politics.

And those who kept their nose in politics

like Mikhail Khodorkovsky were sent to prison

and others left the country,

with as much of their fortune as possible.

But we still talk about oligarchs.

What actually is the nature of the regime

and the people who are loyal to it,

and the people who are important in it?

So you have a military police dictatorship in charge,

with a finance ministry macroeconomic team

running your fiscal military state.

And so those people are jocking who gets the upper hand,

because for the macroeconomic stability,

for the economic growth,

you sort of need decent relations with the west.

But for the military security part of the regime

which is the dominant part,

the west is your enemy, the west is trying to undermine you,

it's trying to overthrow your regime

in some type of so-called color revolution.

And so what happens, the balance of those groups

shifted more in favor of the military security,

let's call it the thuggish part of the regime,

and of course that's where Putin himself comes from.

The oligarchs were never really in power under Putin.

What he did was he clipped their wings,

they worked for him, and if they didn't work for him,

they could lose their money.

And so he rearranged the deck chairs, he gave the money,

he allowed expropriation by his own oligarchs,

by people who grew up with him,

played judo with him,

summered with him.

And those people who were in the KGB in St. Petersburg,

known as Leningrad back in the day,

or were in post Soviet St. Petersburg.

Those people began to become oligarchs

to expropriate the property

to live the high life.

And some of the early Yeltsin era people

were either expropriated, fled or were forced out.

And so he built the regime in which private property

once again was dependent on the ruler.

And everybody knew this,

and if they didn't know,

they learned the lesson the hard way.

And sadly, sadly, what that did was

it encouraged people all up and down the regime

to the lowest levels

to start stealing other people's businesses and property.

It became a kind of free for all.

If it was good enough for Putin and his cronies,

it's good enough for me.

But such people, in such a regime,

it seems to me would care above all about wealth,

about the high life, about power.

Why would they care about Ukraine?

It's not clear that they do.

We're talking about one person here.