Historical Conversations: Russia vs. Ukraine

welcome everyone uh my name is manny i'm the executive director here at the hoover history working group and i'd like to welcome you to hopefully the first of many historical conversations this is a new type of event that we're hosting where we will try to apply and bring history to bear on current events in a way that is a little bit less formal than our usual seminars but before i get started i wanted to remind you uh on march 16th i will be hosting roger lowenstein on ways and means his new book about lincoln his cabinet and the financing of the american civil war on april 1st which is april fool's day alan guelzo uh will be joining us and then on april 14th uh will be uh gazan mwazing uh talking about chinese banking and so without further delay since we only have about an hour i will now hand it over to neil ferguson who's the milbank family senior fellow here at the hoover institution thank you manny and uh welcome to everybody it's friday afternoon uh but there's a war uh raging in eastern europe and uh that is the kind of thing that anybody who wants to apply history uh must be keenly interested in we're very fortunate to have persuaded two of the world's leading experts on the relevant history to join us uh mary serrota is the kravis distinguished professor at johns hopkins author of numerous books collapsed the accidental opening of the berlin wall 1989 the struggle to create post-cold war europe and most recently not one inch america russia and the making of post-cold war still mate if anybody uh timed a book well uh lately has to be mary's uh decision to publish on native enlargement just before a war broke out on the subject of nato enlargement so uh kudos to you you probably weren't quite planning that at least i hope you weren't uh chris miller is assistant professor of international history at the fletcher school at tufts uh and the author of a number of uh very important uh books on modern uh russian history the struggle to save the soviet economy putanomics power and money in resurgent russia both of our guests today are in a great deal of demand and they are probably as zoomed out as any two human beings in the country uh if not the world right now i want to thank them for uh accepting one more zoom invitation uh to talk to the hoover history working group uh i can uh i can only offer you i i hope somewhat more sophisticated questions than the tv networks uh tend to go in for uh i'm gonna kick this off with a few uh questions from uh as it were the chair and then uh open it up if you want to intervene the simplest way to get my attention is to raise your hand using the reactions button like i just did and that you can also use the chat function if you prefer to put your thought in writing uh let me start mary with you there is a view that uh is associated with let's say the realist school uh john mearsheimer and others that this war is at some level all our fault because uh we went uh too far with nato enlargement and that we perhaps inadvertently crossed a red line by raising the prospect of ukraine and indeed georgia becoming nato members and the more that we stuck to this idea even though it seems we didn't really mean it the higher the probability of a war like this became you're really now the authority of nato enlargement from this new vantage point very different one from the vantage point when you wrote the book how do you think about this thesis that the war is a consequence of a fundamental overreach by the united states and its european allies yeah uh thank you for inviting me here great to be here great to see friends like norman neymark who was such a help in in writing the book to talk about these important issues yeah the um the meerscheimer thesis i've probably said this before in this forum but the one phenomenon i've never observed as a historian is mono causality important events happen for multiple reasons and even i as someone who has studied nato expansion now for many years i do not see it as the prime cause of what is happening i see the prime causes what is happening is the mind of vladimir putin now that being said his grievances about nato expansion obviously factor into his decision-making so the book in particular as you know is not an anti-nato expansion book it i actually think that nato enlargement was neither unprecedented nor unreasonable i think the problem was how it happened and that it happened in a way that contributed to maximum aggravation with moscow but it's important to understand that it happened in cumulative interaction with other events and tragic self-harming russian choices and particularly relevant here indeed frighteningly relevant was yeltsin's decision to invade chechnya at a time when there were debates about the structure of post-cold war europe and where there might be a birth in it for russia or ukraine yeltsin decided to launch a brutal invasion of chechnya as everyone here knows ultimately turning in the second chechen war grozny into what has been declared the most destroyed city on earth and it is it is i can only use the word terrifying how much my military contacts are using the example of grozny as what might be about to happen to various cities in ukraine given that putin was largely the moving spirit behind the most brutal phase of that conflict and is obviously the moving phase now so when yeltsin decided to invade chechnya which even his own foreign minister kozirov called a bad mistake that really helped tip the balance toward drawing a new article 5 line across europe and we're seeing the consequences of that now president clinton had initially and i think wisely of tried to avoid doing that because he realized and he even said this at the time which i found amazing that peace in europe depended on ukraine as he put it ukraine was the linchpin of security in europe i'm paraphrasing a bit but the exact quotations are in my book not one inch and he uh as the central eastern europeans poland and hungary and so forth pressed him saying you know let us in.nato give us article five which is the guarantee that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all uh he said you know if we do that we're gonna draw a new line and this this is president clinton clinton speaking why should we draw a new line across europe when we just got rid of the cold war line if we draw a new article five line we will leave all those post-soviet states out in the cold especially ukraine and we can't do that and then even behind closed doors you would say to the polls you of all people should appreciate what it feels like to be left on the wrong side of a line we can't do that we have to have options for ukraine so we need to blur that line we need to bring countries into nato gradually and if we have this partnership for peace which post-soviet states can join we can blur that line by gradually letting the states in and it gives us options to manage contingency right it gives us options to give people you know partial nato memberships we can be vague about how much we're going to defend them that vagueness is going to be useful wouldn't it be great to have those options again now but because of yeltsin's decision to invade chechnya the central and east europeans start pushing clinton to draw that article five line uh he also looks at the results from the midterm congressional election of the republicans in 1994 who supported article 5 extension as soon as possible clinton realizes he needs those people who's going to be re-elected also ukrainians start to denuclearize ukraine had of course been born nuclear and it becomes uh it denuclearizes for the budapest memorandum and so for all these reasons we in the west and clinton in the west we decide to draw that article 5 line there i think things do become difficult because now it's you know you really don't have options to manage contingency and then the tragic problem is this then feeds into the twisted mindset of vladimir putin and into his grievances and helps him to instrumentalize this history and to use it as a justification for for the horrific things that he's doing now thanks mary that gives me a chance to turn to chris and talk some more about vladimir putin's mentality uh there is now a quite common talking point in the u.s that he's lost his marbles and we're dealing here with someone unhinged chris you studied putin and uh i would love to get your take on how how crazy this all is or are we still dealing here with a rational if ruthless actor well i think to answer that question neil like we need to differentiate a bit the conduct of the war over the past uh week and a half versus the war aims because i think the conduct of the war is really hard to describe as closely tethered to political realities in ukraine and russia's ultimate political goals if if you knew that there was going to be substantial ukrainian resistance you would have structured your military operation differently and the only reason that the russians didn't do that is because they were confused by their own propaganda about ukrainian weakness and division and as a result made errors in in judgment about about how to structure the military operation but the the goals i think behind uh the war we're seeing right now are are not at all unhinged or crazy they're they're deeply built into uh russian foreign policy thinking um and there's a i think nothing that surprising in some ways as mary said that uh ukraine is is the flash point where all this is coming together because putin he's certainly accelerated his discussion of ukraine over the past uh 12 months or so following on his article in last from last june on the historical unity of the washington ukrainian people but of course russia has been at war in ukraine for almost a decade now um and it's influenced operations in ukraine in terms of trying to swing elections or trying to manage different groups of oligarchs to achieve its political goals have been present for a very long time and are widely accepted and popular among russia's foreign policy elite so i think we'd be wrong to say this is all about putin or all about one person becoming unhinged because you can draw pretty clear lines not only to the early years of putin's time in power but even back to the 1990s when there were lots of russian politicians on the far right of the political spectrum who were espousing broadly similar aims now we're historians and we're supposed to stick to the past according to the uh the traditional job description but i'm gonna uh push you both to do something that i frequently do to the great disgust of uh of many more conventional historians and think about what comes next uh as chris says this is not gone according to putin's plan and we are now in a highly complex situation in which five or six different things are happening uh uh and it's hard to to really tell which will happen fastest that there's the war itself and i think it's unclear how quickly if at all uh russia can declare victory and how pyrrhic any victory would be there are the sanctions uh and their impact on the russian economy and how quickly that will bring russia to its knees and whether quickly enough to influence the outcome of the war then there's the domestic situation in russia how secure is putin has he uh got to the the khrushchev zone where he's now behaved in such a reckless way that he's likely to fall victim to some kind of uh palace uh coup uh there's uh there's the wider question of uh diplomatic uh intervention the chinese have indicated some interest in playing the role of uh of ceasefire if not peace brokers and maybe we should also bear in mind the great uh but uh ephemeral force of western public opinion uh which seems to have uh a relatively short half-life if our outrage at the fall of afghanistan as anything to go by so merry thinking about all these different things that are going on as you say in a non-monocausal historical process give us your i don't know one two three scenarios as we try to think about how this uh plays out and uh i guess we should also include in the mix the fact that putin's shown himself ready to threaten to go nuclear which has to be uh a big part of this story right obviously i don't have any monopoly on the future so i actually would be interested in your take on this uh neil and and some of the other people in the room as well i just have some speculation to offer which of course you know ranges from more hopeful to more grim uh on the more hopeful side this may be too optimistic my hope is that the strong men around putin decide that they don't want to live in north korea for the rest of their lives because putin is increasingly turning russia into north korea and so i think a good outcome frankly would be if they decide to move him aside now to be clear i'm not talking about regime change i don't think suddenly russia would be a democracy again and it would all be you know wine and roses but i do think that just as in some ways the the the anti-semitic genocidal aspect of world war ii was really tied to hitler personally uh i think that a lot of what is happening is tied to putin's personal grievances and if he personally could be moved aside that some of the worst brutality that i fear is to come could be avoided also on the hopeful scenario would obviously be some kind of russian popular uprising i was heartened a tiny bit by the pictures out of actually berlin last weekend where a hundred thousand people protest basically marched in to support of ukraine and if you saw the pictures most of them had the brandenburg gate in the background which is where as you know on november 9 1989 the power of the people overcame tyrants and dictators and i thought you know you should be very wary of what you've started mr putin because this might be what finally causes that in your home country so those are more optimistic scenarios or those though although those would obviously be complicated and you know not happy scenarios what is currently going on now i've been thinking of as banks versus tanks so we are basically trying to see how quickly we can bankrupt the country basically russia and we're hoping that zalenski can hold out against the tanks while we do that the hope is that this will cause again people inside the country to you know the strongman to somehow stop what they're doing i doubt very much putin will stop but perhaps if they see the degree to which we're going to bankrupt russia they will be able to uh find the resolve they need to find and so zielinski basically needs to keep the country alive while that process is going on since he's obviously not going to defeat russia militarily going down the scenario more hopeful to more grim uh obviously in a war between russia and ukraine russia wins that war but it's not clear to me that russia wins the insurgency that follows right russia has something like a little south of 200 000 troops that's enough to wreck a country that is not enough to rule a country i was heartened to hear the military analyst michael kaufman who if you're not following him on twitter you should be saying today that he actually thinks this whole operation is shot not in military terms but because there's just no way they're going to be able to hold ukraine with anything like the forces that they have given the way ukraine has rallied against it so i think there's certainly an ugly insurgency coming getting to the more grim scenarios some of the military folks i'm in touch with looking at the equipment that's moving into place they are seeing the assembling of a force package that could create grozny level destruction so in other words you circle a city if you're in a good mood you give the civilians a window to get out and then you reduce the city to rubble so that is now within the realm of the possible and then obviously now we're getting to the worst case scenarios i was deeply worried about the uh the fact that the russians were not careful enough to avoid live fire near a uh nuclear plant i underst i obviously realize it wasn't hit but that's that's a lot of risk that's also a war crime and um the fact that putin is talking about nuclear saber rattling is obviously very concerning now for me i think the big question and this again i'd be appreciative of just discussing with the group here i i think we obviously need to be cognizant of the risks and i just published a new york times op-ed uh and chris had a new york times op-ed we've both been hounded by op-ed editors for the past couple of weeks i just published an op-ed on the potential risks of inadvertent escalation which was the topic the new york times wanted but on the other hand i don't think that can deter us this is a real breaking point in modern history and we need to find a way to make this violence stop so the question is what can we do that doesn't lead to nuclear war and here i really do think applying history works because there haven't been many examples of this but we did have the cuban missile crisis and as you know from graham allison's work what eventually did it was a combination of three things which graham referred to as the magic cocktail the first was a public deal which is uh the public deal is if you take the missiles out we won't invade then there was a private sweetener which is don't talk about this in public no quid pro quo but we will take the jupiter missiles out of turkey but there was also private ultimatum which is you need to get those out in 48 hours and we're going to do something about it in other words you know we call khrushchev's bluff and so the question is at what point do we say something similar to putin and say you know you need to stop for 48 hours or we are going to send an e-10 warthogs and destroy that column of tanks so we are going to establish a no-fly zone in other words how do we take this to the brink without going over and i think that is an immense challenge one of the biggest we faced and i think that his actually historians are uniquely positioned to help answer that i mean i would say that but i genuinely believe that so i'd be interested in the thoughts of this group on those questions i agree with you mary i i i could tell you the number of uh quite eminent people who've asked me about a no-fly zone in the last uh eight or nine days has surprised me because that would so obviously be an act of war in the eyes of putin and that is indeed why i think he he rattled the nuclear saber to make sure that was quickly taken off the table but it concerns me that we did in fact back down very quickly when he started to use that language uh feels as if uh we're forgetting some of the rules of the cold war uh the secretary of defense lloyd austin announced he was canceling a minuteman test because he didn't want to i like why are we canceling it let's blow some things up absolutely this is like to me as a student of the cold war really shocking we are showing considerable weakness and encouraging putin to think that he can use this threat to compensate for his uh relative relatively poor performance on on the ground and and it is deterring us i think from from giving the ukrainians the kind of assistance that might be meaningful i was against the no-fly zone because i thought that was too escalatory but i was in favor of uh making uh making uh fighter jets uh and for that matter drones available to the ukrainians chris uh let let me turn to you now and i'm gonna start encouraging other participants to to start raising their hands and getting involved norman i'm looking at you i'll certainly want to call on you after some of your excellent comments in public on this subject but let me give chris one more uh a crack at this if you were not just writing op-eds but advising uh president biden what would you say jake sullivan i hear has just been fired and chris miller has been appointed national security adviser after correctly forecasting the invasion and correctly calling just about every turn of events uh this year so you're suddenly in that situation room and the president turns to you uh and and you and you are put on the spot what should we do well the more i think about how the invasion is likely to keep playing out the more it does seem really important which territory falls in the next couple of weeks because it's clear the russian advance is moving very slowly um it's clear that uh as time passes ukraine will begin to find its capabilities in the conventional sense degraded but it will also show more and more to the russians how capable it is of imposing costs uh as weeks past russian losses are going to increase dramatically and in the federation council today one russian senator publicly began speaking about the losses that um already are being faced now they're described as being in the interest of the special operation of the donbass but nevertheless this is real their loss is not just among contract soldiers but also among draftees and economic losses at home were also escalating there's all these pressure points on the russians that make a long war very unappetizing and perhaps even impossible uh to wage which makes the next couple of weeks i think pretty decisive and right now it's very unclear does adetha get attacked in a serious manner or not does kiev fall um does harkev fall because if these cities don't fall in the next uh couple of weeks or maybe two months it seems pretty plausible that uh russia at that point will be looking for some sort of ceasefire or deal uh with stelensky and and so i would be pushing to give ukrainians all the time that they they have because yes they're going to lose the war in a conventional military sense but how they lose and with what map they lose is still very much uh open to question and i think it's quite possible that we end up in a couple of months with ukraine maybe even still holding on to kiev certainly holding on to odessa is very possible and half of ukrainian territory if not more could well be in ukraine's hands it won't be pretty it's going to be a brutal couple of weeks but i don't think russia can sustain this at this level um over a sustained period of time it's one of the data point already russia has lost three percent of its tanks in nine days of war so map that out over a couple weeks uh ukrainian friend of mine said to me on the eve of the russian invasion will be like the mujahideen alluding to the soviet invasion of afghanistan and he looks like being vindicated but by comparison with the military assistance that we gave the afghan mujahideen the assistance we're giving ukraine is still really rather modest i did the math and it's a lot lot less i must confess if i were in that uh hot seat advising the president i would be urging him to uh maximize the assistance particularly with respect to air defenses that that we can give zelensky to keep to keep the ukrainian resistance going because i i agree with your view that the more protracted this is uh the better the prospects that that putin is forced into some kind of uh of diplomatic compromise norman uh it's great to see you i was reading uh an interview you did uh earlier uh today and agreeing with uh your uh remarks you're someone who knows uh this region well and knows that it has an almost unique track record for uh lethal organized violence uh over the last century i i remember when i was writing war of the world reading some of your stuff and thinking one of the great puzzles is why ukraine always ukraine why so many disastrous uh events have played out there uh give give me your sense of of how long the ukrainians can hold out uh what has been your reaction to the rather extraordinary spectacle of a former sitcom actor becoming a wartime uh a heroic wartime president how long do you think ukraine can hold out and is it reasonable to draw parallels with afghanistan in the 1980s um uh first of all let me just say uh i i think you asked the right questions neil and i think our our panelists gave uh you know our thanks for inviting uh chris and and mary they i thought they gave excellent uh answers um you know and one that i think one of the things i'd add before i turn to your questions one of the things i really wanted to add you know is implicit in your question about uh you know how long they can hold out and also about zelinski you you didn't mention also that he's jewish which is a sort of interest a jewish comedian right who's who's uh now president of ukraine and you and and you get these wonderful uh you know these wonderful little pieces of humor as he speaks to us you know even with his beard and his t-shirt you know he still has this uh marvelous sense of humor um [Music] i like the one especially where he said don't give me a ride give me guns you know i thought that was really fantastic that's one for the history books yeah um so a couple of things that i would say first of all um uh you know we all uh are in admiration of ukraine and the ukrainians and what they've done um in this war and and chris is absolutely right you know the war started in 2014 i mean it didn't start uh just in this with this invasion i mean they've um they've behaved extremely well and the other thing that's happened i mean it's important again as historians you know we note this that nations are made they're not you know they're not there they're not you know some kind of thing that exists in the abstract they're constantly being made and the ukrainians you know especially over the last eight years you know have created you know an extraordinary nation one dedicated to you know principles of freedom and democracy of uh sovereignty uh versus the russians you know from maidan this revolution of dignity which is an important event really not just in the history of eastern europe but in the history you know of the west of the world you could say because this is you know like solidarity like other moments like this um you know it's an extremely important part of how we think about the development of democracy and liberty uh in the world so the ukrainians have have turned themselves interestingly uh you know into a fighting nation in which there seems to be almost no dissent whatsoever about how they about this standing up to the russians and how one stands up to the russians and even those russians who live in ukraine with the exception of some and donetsk and a few others i'm sure around although we don't hear much reporting about them but they're not going to be that many are now ukrainians you know and are are are are calling themselves ukrainians even if they speak russian much better than they do ukrainian um and they're you know there are a lot of people like that um and it's so it's it's an incredible development that's all uh you know i i i would say about that you know zelinski also you know who was a contested figure uh in the ukrainian elections one in some cases you know i mean in some analyses uh you know against all odds um and there were you know plethora of candidates in the plethora of um of uh political parties but he he he won in part because of his notoriety and his television kind of past um you know has has become this extraordinary leader much as the ukrainians themselves have become an extraordinary nation in some ways so you know this is all very impressive and it means i think you know and again here you know we join all our colleagues trying to predict what's going to happen it means i think that this will be protracted this is going to take a long time i mean i think chris has that just right as well that um uh you know this is not going to be easy and even if somehow you know and given the preponderance of power um you know this may be inevitable i don't know um you know the russians win the the battle as it were for ukraine in terms of um in terms of the military battle and even being able to establish some kind of occupation regime i've spent some time studying occupations too and every what everybody says is correct it takes more than what they have now uh you know to successfully occupy uh uh you know a country of over 40 million people you know um it was one thing as as mary knows very well you know to occupy eastern germany 17 million people with whether you know 170 000 soviet uh uh troops you know they don't have that money to occupy this to occupy ukraine it's 380 000. 380 000. so 280 000. depends it came and came and went um so you know it's going to be it's going to be extremely difficult for them uh you know to occupy the country but let's assume they do ukraine has changed forever they will not um you know buckle under uh an imperial um uh master in the way that uh you know putin hoped or hopes uh they will they're just not going to do it and the result is as you mentioned neil um i think i think there's going to be a lot of fighting before this is over i mean even once the occupation has begun um as i mentioned in that piece uh that i sent you the the um you know ukrainians fought well into the fifties you know against the re um sovietization of ukraine especially in western ukraine um you know and a lot of those that same tradition is there and there's another tradition by the way that's sort of interesting um that the the ministries the ministry of defense and the uh and um and zielinski's office is mentioning which is the cossack tradition you know and the cossacks also didn't uh exactly fall over and uh uh were easily occupied you know by the russian empire i mean they made a deal with the russian empire at one point uh in the 17th century but you know they they also fought uh uh very hard and uh continuously and i mean on and off really uh against imperial domination and that's part of the ukrainian kind of national ethos too so there's a lot of reason to think that this will go on for a while i mean it's people have talked about a potential frozen conflict future but that frozenness is going you know is is certainly going to be melted a lot of places by resistance i think and and you know bloodshed which is uh too bad so let me leave it at that i had a rather heated uh discussion with our colleague frank fukuyama the other day uh in which he accused me of defeatism because i was somewhat bleak in my assessment of the ukrainians prospects i'm beginning to wonder if he might be right though because uh the more i think about this the combination of pretty poor performance in the field and far far more severe sanctions than putin foresaw makes me wonder if we might be surprised by how quickly he starts to seek some diplomatic off-ramp before his situation becomes absolutely powerless i i'm beginning to question my own pessimism the more i hear about the military situation on the ground but i want to i want to step back and take a global uh view now i can't uh resist uh welcoming uh the great male leftler uh to this group uh as one of the uh preeminent historians of the cold war uh i can't think of anyone better to give us a global perspective on this uh if you don't mind me cold calling you mel my my sense is that we can't view this too narrowly that we must recognize that this is part of a global strategic problem that the united states confronts and china's role is extraordinarily important here my sense is that this would never have gone ahead without xi jinping's blessing that it was time to happen after the beijing olympics for a reason and that china's really putin's only hope at this point uh to keep uh the economy from complete implosion uh and of course uh from an uh asian vantage point the question is is taiwan next so i don't know if you buy my now well-established argument that we're in cold war too we just don't want to face it now i suspect you probably don't uh but but tell me how you think about this at least uh in a global framework i think that would help us all well i i appreciate your you're talking to me and i need to um preface my remarks by saying that uh i'm in toronto taking care of my five-year-old granddaughter so um uh i'm not likely to be to be on this very much very much longer and but i much appreciate uh the discussion that's gone on i really think that it's it's been excellent um yeah i i would just comment um by very much supporting the notion that that for the united states at least it's really imperative to think of this in global terms and i think that the most compelling factor to ensure that putin does not succeed um except that very very very great cost is that i do think that the chinese are watching this carefully with regard to uh taiwan and um i think that that should be a major preoccupation and and focal point um so it so i think in in that perspective um is very important um in both situations i think um what i would learn from the cold war is a question uh and that is um i think it's imperative for policymakers both with regard to ukraine and with regard to taiwan to to think deeply about what constitutes vital interest um justifying the prospect uh of of wage of waging war and um i think uh that um uh the answer to that to that question is is a very complicated one in which reasonable people uh will disagree but before people start arguing as um [Music] occasionally i hear and implying that the united states should in fact take stronger actions in ukraine for example one does need to think about to what extent is ukraine really a vital interest to the united states um justifying the risk of an escalatory cycle leading to a global war in in that context i would say that i think that president biden has handled this situation pretty adroitly so far i'm not sure if in retrospect if i would have said in a declaratory sense um that we would never enter ukraine or never engage in military action in ukraine i think that's the right policy um but i don't necessarily think that it should have been a declaratory policy in advance and certainly undermined what might might have been some marginal deterrent uh impact um but i do i do think um that the the thrust of what american policy should be right now um if you would ask me would you ask chris and chris i think gave a very good answer about if he were uh jake sullivan what he would what he would be arguing i would be saying that the united states um should be doing everything it can to prepare to support a long insurrection uh in conjunction uh with its allies what i would learn from the cold war is how imperative it is um to keep a cohesive alliance together um to preserve allied cohesion to make certain your allies are with you um in supporting uh this venture and i think that uh given the complexities of european politics that biden has done a pretty good job i think he needs to sustain it i'm amazed actually by some of the support that numerous european countries are providing i am of the opinion neil different from what you said a few minutes ago that um that we are offering far more aid to ukraine than we offered to the mujahideen um i don't know how you measure that um but uh in terms of the amount of economic and military supplies i would say that it far exceeded i think what you need to provide ukraine requires um a commitment of aid uh and support far in excess than than what we provided the mujahideen but i think that has been forthcoming and i think we have probably uh encouraged our allies and um and an an amazing amount of support from countries that i would not have thought would make commitments like sweden and switzerland um so um you know i think thinking globally and preserving allied cohesion and and readying to support a a long insurrection are critical i would also say one other thing from the from the cold war and that is how imperative it is even while pursuing a tough tough containment policy it's also extraordinarily important to engage and to be ready to engage in diplomacy and to pick up on overtures and maybe even to make appropriate over overtures to try to um uh ratchet ratchet down the incredible strife that's that's going on so i've spoken long enough thanks thanks for asking me thanks so much mel and i have fun with the grand uh child i uh i think this uh this puts me in mind of uh 1973 when the us simultaneously armed israelis and then initiated the the ceasefire and peace negotiations i worry a little bit that we might be letting the chinese take the initiative when it comes to uh brokering peace and i want to take advantage of the fact that we have aaron and brett carter on as people who think a lot about uh china aaron um i'm trying to get a sense of just how xi jinping and indeed the chinese uh people think about all this uh my my sense is that he gave a green light uh the the chinese foreign ministry is trying to kind of have it both ways and uh blows hot and cold depending on who's the audience but tell us a bit about how this is uh is being thought of in in china and whether i'm right that there's a sort of possibility here for the chinese to be the the ceasefire brokers thank you um yeah this has been an absolutely fascinating discussion um thank you all for these really illuminating thoughts um so i think i think one way to look at this issue is to draw a contrast i think we're really seeing a point in which the chinese foreign policy has really changed um so in in hank paulson's memoirs which are wonderful it's absolutely engaging if you haven't had a chance to read them um there's this wonderful anecdote about how uh right after the collapse of lehman brothers uh moscow called beijing and proposed to both work together to sell u.s treasury bonds and in so doing deep in the american recession um and what paul simmer counts is that at the time uh beijing you know declined the offer um said no thanks and called washington and said um this you know i just want you to know moscow made us this offer we declined um and i think that was a really interesting story about how beijing at the time was very much invested um in um sort of you know some aspects of the global liberal order at least you know the economic benefits it was receiving from it um i think a really interesting contrast is a story that appeared in the new york times earlier this week by ed wong that was absolute bombshell which documented how um the united states had spent months pressuring china to go represent russia and try to pressure russia to not invade ukraine um beijing obviously punted on that um and evidence shows actually shared the intelligence the u.s was giving to china with rush to say like we know we know about this true bilbao um so i think that that's a really interesting signal about how china's stance towards trying to maintain um the the sort of global liberal orders really pivoted to supporting russia's um efforts to um really dismantle something into a more traditionally um sort of um adversarial system now i think that there are two other aspects that they're mentioning one is that uh what china i think you put it exactly right with foreign ministry trying to have both ways in many ways um but i think that when you can see with china doing domestically and its messaging about the conflict is very revelatory so in particular on social media um there's been a huge amount of astroturfing where the ccp is using its 50 cent army um to boost what russia is doing sort of praise the russian uh military operations to not call an invasion um and to really place as much blame as possible on the united states um so i think that that effort to frame this military operation is legitimate to the chinese people um is something that's really noteworthy and second i think that there is a big connection with something else that's going on at hoover today there's the launch of the digital currency report about china's efforts to build a digital currency there are a lot of meetings about the earlier this morning um and i think that there's been a lot of discussion in the press over the last two or three days about how you know china perhaps should be praised for um sort of you know signing on complying with sanctions against russia um i think we have to be really careful in interpreting that as a signal of the ccp's commitment um to being sort of a responsible stakeholder in the international system uh because you know in recent years the ccp has had a very interesting strategy of um allowing specific banks to engage in trade and financing of north korea um but when that was sort of found out by the international community the ccp just said we didn't know anything about that um so i think that there there are ways that the ccb could easily find to support russia's activities while sort of having the image of complying and sort of being a positive positive role in this conflict internationally um so that would be my interpretation thank thanks aaron that's that's really helpful nobody's been raising your hand so i've just been uh moderating my way through this by means of a cold call but i'm glad to see that brett uh has has just broken the ranks and raised his hand i'm gonna go to you and then if uh if we have time and remember we're down to eight minutes now i'd like to get tyler goodspeed to give us some insight into the economic consequences of the war uh which i think will have a huge bearing on just how long it lasts but but brett yeah of course um and thanks uh so much um to you neil and to our other colleagues for organizing um what's been a really fascinating session and of course to marion to chris for joining us so i'd like to take um neil's invitation uh seriously so my question um was um to mary serrani i there was something that she said earlier um that i thought was was very fascinating but also which the but also that struck me as um uh puzzling in a way so so mary sorry mentioned that um in thinking about the prospects for some kind of uh domestic change engineered by um putin's kind of inner circle she suggested that you know it was probably the case that most um kind of regime insiders didn't want to live in north korea but you know i it seems to me that maybe the better analogy is living in xi jinping's china or perhaps even um huge intel's china so i was curious um why she [Music] went for the north korean analogy rather than the china analogy and if indeed the china analogy is more appropriate to what extent she thought that putin's kind of ruling elite would actually be quite happy to live um in perhaps maybe not she's you know china but certainly hughes china and then kind of you know what what that kind of pretends for prospects um for some kind of uh domestic uh change of government yeah the uh obviously that's uh i mean obviously it's an exaggeration for effect but uh you know the world hasn't cut off china's central bank so i think we're headed i mean that is a nuclear option right i mean you know central banks are supposed to be sacrosanct like like embassies uh and we're i think rapidly heading to a point where we're not going to let russia earn money from its natural resources we're not anywhere near that with china i do think we're heading i don't know if we'll get there but i think i mean the sanctions have moved through rapidly various phases right the sanctions first were meant to deter which they didn't do and then they were meant to punish which they did to some extent but now they're meant to bankrupt right we are trying to destroy russia's economy i don't see us destroying china's economy although i'd be interested to talk to neil about that i actually would actually be interested to hear from you what you think will happen if uh china tries to evade taiwan this is obviously a situation i know much less well in the european situation so i do think that the the peril is more north korea than china and that and also that you know you you you can fly to china right i mean we've and everywhere that counts is now closed airspace uh you know they're going to cut off trains they're going to cut off border crossings i mean people are fleeing moscow now right it's now gotten to the phase in moscow you know my moscow friends are texting each other saying are you still here right every time putin announces a speech they think it's going to be the speech that declares martial law so i i think that the end state is more north korea than china and then the question is you know do you want to live somewhere that is so cut and now you can't access facebook now i mean what's i saw this list today on twitter i didn't even know it was accurate but even it was only partially accurate the list of companies that are no longer doing business in china is is they're not going to supply aircraft carts right i mean are you going to want to even get on a plane right in china and get on a plane so i i mentioned neil what your thoughts are yeah i mean i of course the north korean analogy is a little misleading just because ideologically this is not some rehashed soviet union uh people sometimes forget if they haven't gone to russia that russia is radically different from the soviet union today the ideology is different it's a nationalist conservative orthodox uh regime with uh you know a curious oligarchical uh kleptocratic uh elite with putin at its center but i think you're right in saying that the economics uh take russia back many decades very fast and uh russia which uh in the period uh after the 90s became highly integrated in the world economy is suddenly being cut out of it as quickly as as germany was cut off from uh overseas trade in 1914 and i do actually think that that we haven't seen sanctions of of this nature uh since the time of of the world wars we're almost out of time but let me uh cheat by passing the buck to tyler goodspeed uh to get a quick read from one of the world's most gifted economic historians on the economic consequences of the war and if you can squeeze that into two minutes we can get a last word from our our panelist chris miller and then i'm afraid we're going to be out of time tyler sure i'll i'll try to be brief i guess uh first i i struggle to see how russia avoids complete usher key simply because of the the nature of the sanctions if if i'm a if i'm a russian importer how the heck am i going to be getting getting my hands on dollars and euros with which uh to to pay uh foreign exporters and yeah and i don't see them being able to get around via bitcoin or whatever else and then in terms of the the domestic u.s implications look we're not as reliant upon well first of all i mean the united states doesn't import much oil directly from russia uh generally speaking we're not nearly as dependent on on imported oil as western europe but nonetheless even though this isn't the same regime as in the 1970s we do still have an elasticity of u.s output with respect to the global price of oil of about negative 0.2 0.02 which means a persistent exogenous shock to the global price of oil of ten percent is going to shave uh two tenths of a percent off u.s output uh and if we're looking at a a bigger and more persistent shock than ten percent then you know scale that up accordingly and then finally i mean just if i'm a private economic actor and i'm looking at the rapidity with which uh severance of an economy from the global economy can proceed i'm wondering about a real acceleration of trends already underway even before coven in terms of reshoring or near shoring from china so in a january 2020 survey by bank of america of 3 000 multinational firms with 67 trillion dollars in market capitalization that survey found that 80 affirmed in 12 sectors with global supply chains expected to shift at least a portion of their supply chains from current locations uh and a ubs survey two months later said the survey respondents said that they were chiefs chief financial officers of multinational enterprises from the u.s north asia and china suggested that 20 to 30 percent of their production capacity would be relocated from china most of it going to the u.s canada japan or mexico uh we're the leading candidates among relocation so i mean does this accelerate some of the deglobalization trends that were already underway not only before russia but before before covenant well one thing's for sure tyler if if any part of the world can do autarky it's the vast eurasian landmass that extends uh from western russia to china uh uh we are alas at a time but i want to give uh chris the last word uh uh as uh as we began with uh mary and chris and chris hasn't had a chance to wrap this up uh uh chris uh let me uh uh hand the the last word to you it strikes me that uh the hardest thing about applying history uh is that the unexpected uh can come along uh and uh do what the fall of the berlin wall did in 1989 mary has written of course about that and i'm sitting here wondering if if some comparable event uh is going to surprise us because it will turn out that in fact putin's military and political power weren't were less than we thought uh if if one thing would surprisingly unsurprise me it would be that he folds faster than just about everyone in this call expects can you give me a probability on that scenario x ante well i i will say neil that i've been personally struck by all of my contacts in moscow who two weeks ago i would have put in the pro-government camp now posting on facebook in the final minutes before it's finally banned from russia their opposition to the war which i think puts the russian government in a complicated position because one of the challenges of protests and coups is that it's dangerous to move first but if you already know that all of your facebook friends and their final facebook posts were uh getting the opposition to the war that makes protests and coups both a lot easier uh so i i think you're right that there's a lot more domestic pressure than uh than his repressive apparatus might suggest lots of non-linearity in in history and uh and i'm not gonna call call it a black swan my sense is precisely that we as historians should be ready for the abrupt discontinuity that most people didn't see coming remember most people didn't think this invasion would happen and and uh eucharist were one of the people who predicted with high confidence that it it would well uh thank you so much to everybody for joining uh this call i think it's always worth our while as historians uh sitting down and comparing notes uh between bouts of zooming with the media or for that matter with uh folks in government uh who uh who who who want to pick our brains uh it was mentioned to me the other day by an eminent nonagenarian that uh there was a kind of strange lack of historical perspective in much of the discussion uh going on in in government about this crisis uh my strong conviction is and has been for many years that uh the people in government need to think much more uh historically than they do and turning around when the crisis has begun and asking for a quick briefing on the history of ukraine is not really the way to do this thank you to mary sarotti uh thank you to chris miller uh thank you to everybody who joined and uh didn't mind being cold cold uh i hope this thing is over soon uh it wouldn't certainly be in keeping with ukraine's tradition if it it was to end soon with minimal casualties i think that would be a breakthrough in ukraine's history but who knows perhaps this time finally will be different from for that poor uh that poor country uh anybody who is able to watch this who is ukrainian or is close to ukraine i hope it's been of some value uh to provide some context for this latest disaster in ukraine's history with that i'll wrap things up and look forward to seeing you at our next applied history meeting of the hoover history working group thanks everybody

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 117,627

Keywords: Russia vs. Ukraine, Cold War, NATO expansion, Putin

Id: zUvXrCm90Bk

Length: 60min 49sec (3649 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2022