Stephen Kotkin: A bilateral US-China
won't work to our advantage. The President of the United States,
President Biden. President Biden is sitting down
for a high-stakes meeting with Chinese President, Xi Jinping. Chinese Leader, Xi Jinping. This will be their first in person talks
in more than a year. What are we expecting from a summit? — I agree that we have to share
the planet with China. The point is what are the terms
of sharing the planet? I’m Stephen Kotkin, a Kleinheinz Senior Fellow
at the Hoover Institution, Bill Whalen: He’s also a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Peter Robinson: Princeton History Professor,
Stephen Kotkin, Walter McDougall: Kotkin is the author, contributor,
and/or the editor of about a dozen books. Niall Ferguson: I think he's the Jordan Peterson
of the historical profession, what can I say. — History never tells you
what the future is going to be. But what history can tell you
is that the present is not going to last. — You can not only win a war
and lose the peace, you can lose a war and win the peace. So kind of how do you win the peace in Ukraine? — You have to be ready to be lucky. Gita Wirjawan: So you believe in luck? Hi friends and fellows. Welcome to this special series
of conversations involving personalities coming from
a number of campuses, including Stanford University. The purpose of the series is really
to unleash thought-provoking ideas that I think would be of tremendous value
to you. I wanna thank you of your support so far,
and welcome to this special series. Hi, I'm honored to have Stephen Kotkin
who is one of the most famous historians. He's also a senior fellow at the Hoover institution
and FSI at Stanford University. - Stephen, thank you so much.
- Thank you for the time. It's an honor. I want to ask you one or two questions
about how you grew up. What made you get interested in history? Yeah, I wish I knew. When you're young,
you think you know a lot but of course you know nothing, and it's only with time that you realize
how little you knew, but you're very confident as a young person. The thing I had going for me
was my mom was a big reader, and she would take out books
from the library in bulk, several at a time, and one of the areas that she liked a lot
was historical fiction. And so she would bring them home,
and they'd be sitting around the house, and occasionally I would pick one up
because she was done with it and I had to go back to the library. So there was that. But on the whole,
besides my mom's influence, which was not forced on me,
not imposed on me, but just indirect through the books
that she took out and read, I was really a science and technology kid
when I was growing up, not a reader. And so I loved math, I loved physics
and biology and chemistry, and that's what I did mostly
in high school and what I thought I was going to do
at University. So I went to University for STEM and spent the whole first year
doing almost all STEM courses. I was in a program that after two years
admitted you to medical school, instead of the usual four years. And I did very well in organic chemistry,
which was the hardest course. If you passed through organic chemistry, there was a chance you could get on
to the path from medical school, but organic chemistry mostly crushed people
and ended their aspirations. I did well. I moved on. I got into this molecular biology class,
which was a seminar for 12 people; very exclusive, and part of it was
in the hospital. I had to go to an operation, and back then they had
a carotid artery operation where they cut open your neck
to scrape the plaque that had built up in the carotid arteries
that threatened heart attack. Now we have Lipitor and other
generic versions of Lipitor Statins which remove this plaque
and reduce the risk of heart attack. Heart attack risk is way down as a result,
but back then they didn't have them yet. So when I saw the operation
in the hospital, I got a little queasy from the blood,
and I passed out. - And it ended my medical career.
- Quest. Quest. You're right. Exactly. And I foolishly gave up the science in addition to the aspiration
to go into medicine. I didn't have to; I could have just stayed
as a scientist doing research in a lab in any of the various fields
I was interested in, but I just gave it up, so disappointed, gave the whole thing up,
and I went into British poetry, wrote my senior thesis on John Milton,
did a lot of Shakespeare. But crazily, the
concentration in English at the had a requirement that you did
eight courses in your concentration and then four courses in an allied field. And so I said to my advisor,
"Well, I didn't know that." And he said, "Well, you need
four courses in an allied field now to finish major the concentration." And I said, "Well, I have four semesters of math and the math that I did is like poetry; there are no numbers in it." It's topology and all this fabulous math
because I was a math kid. And he said, "No. That's not considered
an allied field for English Literature. You have to take some history courses. So I took almost all history courses
immediately the next semester and they were fabulous. And then I did it again, and then I did it
one more time so I had a history major in addition to the English major
before finishing only because I was told I needed
an allied field for English. And then I went on for a PhD in history. So if you had looked at me at any point
in the trajectory I was on, you would not have predicted, despite the fact that my mother read
historical novels, historical fiction, you would not have predicted that
I would have ended up on that path. - So therefore accident, contingency,
- Yeah, and recalibration. Yes. are really important
for the way that I write history since that's how I came
into the history field myself. Amazing. But you started studying
the history of France before you switched on to that
of the Soviet Union. I had a lot of great influences on me,
fortunately. University of Rochester where I did
my undergraduate work as a STEM kid and then switched,
had a nice roster of fantastic historians. They had Christopher Lasch
in American history, Eugene Genovese in American history, and one of my favorites, William McGrath,
who did Western Europe and Central Europe. So they were my primary influences;
America and Europe. And I ended up going to Berkeley
for a PhD in European history, and I started in France history
because everyone every American had this sort of goatee,
cafe society, leftist politics. And so France history was by far
the most popular at the time, especially at Berkeley.
This was 1981. And so 18 students were in the first-year
France history seminar that I was in, but I wasn't on the left,
didn't have goatee, and I've never had a cup of coffee
in my life. So France history didn't really work with me. My first major assignment was
a paper on the Paris Commune, which was Left to seize a power
during the Franco-Prussian War in Paris that was not supported by the Parisian countryside and was overthrown by force. And I did a critical analysis where
I didn't support the Paris Commune seize of power, and everyone was a little bit shocked. "Really?" They said. So French history wasn't really for me, and then I moved into the Central Europe
Hofburg history stuff, and that was really exciting
but there was no major mentor. And I started learning the Russian language
in my third year of the PHD program, which is the time you're supposed to
take your exam, and instead I started learning
Russian alphabet that year, and then I took intensive Russian
for quite some time and four years later I was assistant professor
of Russian history at Princeton University. Why Russia? So it's hard to say exactly, but when I was in Hofburg history,
I studied Czech language, one of the major nations and languages
in Hofburg Empire. German, Hungarian, Czech,
even though it was a dual empire the Czech part was very substantial. And so it was my first Slavic language,
Czech, and I got to Prague in the summer of '83
maybe for the first time, and I was behind the Iron Curtain,
saw a communist regime, and it was incredible how interesting it was, it was nothing like the stereotypes that
we had grown up in the US about the system; everything was gray on the outside but on the inside was this fabulous
entrepreneurialism and resistance to communist way of life, and trying to create your own way of life inside the limitations of
being stuck with the censorship and the lack of travel, permission,
and everything else. But the people were very inventive and the system was alive
as a black market, second society, secondary economy inside the formal structures
that were hard to see but when you live there you understood
how exciting and interesting and inventive the whole thing was. So it was very oppressive, of course, but it was also had this
entrepreneurial inventive side. And so I thought that's interesting. And then I had a teacher, I was very fortunate many Europeans
came to Berkeley in the 80s, so I met for example (Jürgen) Habermas,
Jacques Derrida, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault. And so I was a student of Foucault. This is me and Michel Foucault
in my house in Berkeley. You look a little bit younger. I was 40 plus years younger. But anyway he said to me at lunch one day, "Wouldn't it be great if someone used
my analysis of power to study the stalinist system?" Because he had applied this theory
of micro-power to the Western system, Western Europe especially France. But how does it work for
a totalitarian system? So I thought, "Yeah, that's really exciting." I was young, impressionable,
20 something years old, I didn't share his view that
Western Society was kind of like a prison or imprisoning in many ways that
the enlightenment was a negative thing entirely, the 18th century European Enlightenment. But I love the way that he was able
to connect individual identities and behaviors
in a micro setting with the larger structures of a system. So this little tactics of the habitat, actually a phrase I got
from Michel de Certeau who was another French intellectual
came through Berkeley, was very exciting. So on the one hand, Foucault's prompt
to use micropower techniques to study Stalinism, and on the other hand, my trip to Prague
which had introduced me firsthand to what the Iron Curtain,
what such a system was like in practice. And so I was very enthused,
I didn't have a home, the Hofburg history wasn't working because
I didn't have a thesis adviser at Berkeley, and so why not? There were these fabulous
Russian history professors Martin Malia, who was the main influence on me,
and Reginald Zelnick, both of whom were my thesis advisers, were very prominent professors
in Russian history. So that was the piece that was missing
in the other areas that I was studying, and then these influences, and so I started learning
the Russian language and lo and behold I had an amazing
teacher of Russian who was an emigrate
who came out in the East. He came out through Siberia
in the revolution, his family. He was 80 something years old
by the time he was at Berkeley teaching very accelerated Russian to a handful of kids who needed to
learn Russian from scratch like me. Serge Kassatkin; and he had been
a translator of Mongolian, he wrote a Mongolian-Mongolia dictionary, he worked for British intelligence
in the Far East and new Japanese. So he had this amazing East Asian piece
that was unusual for Russians, and so he had stories
like you couldn't believe; World War II and Intel
and just Asia in general. This is a huge influence on me.
I was there to learn Russian. So grammar and vocabulary
and sentence structure. So I took accelerated Russian with him
a whole semester but one year. So two hours a day, five days a week, considered a year's worth of
college Russian in a semester. The second semester was
the second year's worth of college Russian. And then the third year of college Russian
I took it in the summer in Leningrad in 1984. So I had three years of college Russian
in a single calendar year, mostly thanks to Serge Kassatkin and then thanks to this
summer language program in Leningrad where first time to the Soviet Union
Konstantin Chernenko was the General Secretary. the place was clearly stagnant
and everything else, and I experienced that firsthand, but I had enough Russian
so that after just one calendar year I was able to start reading
with a dictionary coming back from the Soviet Union
in that fall of 1984, and embarked soon enough
on dissertation research, finished my dissertation a few years later, and then started at Princeton University,
my first job where... - In the '90, right?
- Yes. September 1989. - 33 years you were there.
- Yes. And the wall fell in November
in my first semester. The Berlin Wall fell. So I just caught this wave, this wind, from that molecular biology class
where I fainted in my own vomit on the floor of the OR, from that through Shakespeare
and Milton... To the fall of the wall. All in just a really short period of time. The French intellectuals at Berkeley,
and Berkeley was just fabulous in the 80s. And so I was really lucky, really privileged,
things just kept falling my way. Gorbachev happened, I chose to study the Soviet stuff
before Gorbachov. So I'm there Konstantin Chernenko
learning Russian in Leningrad, and then the Gorbachev thing happens. So it was one thing after another
that I got very lucky, extremely lucky, but it was not foreseeable. Looking back, it makes sense. I can tell a story that seems
to make sense, but looking forward prospectively
it was like, "What was I doing?
Where was I going?" And so life is like that;
you have to be ready to be lucky, you have to perceive these moments
of good fortune and seize them and take advantage of them. So you believe in luck. I'm a living embodiment of luck, for sure. Hard work; no substitute for hard work, but a lot of people work hard,
not everybody has good luck, some people have the other kind of luck. You had quite a number of lucky events
earlier on, but you're one of the few that
have written so much about not just Stalin but Russia, the Soviet Union. What has changed? And I want to put this
in the context of how I'm seeing so many people don't understand
each other. You've written so much, but what is it that the Americans
need to have a better understanding with respect to Russia? This is a problem of big countries. Big countries are so big, they can get
self-absorbed in their own story, and their own story is substantial,
it's really large. American history is consonant
with global history at this point. That's not how American history
is written for the most part; it's not studied and written
as global history, it's studied and written in a nationalist
sort of naval gazing internal view, even though America's effect
on the world is colossal. This is true of the way China works, it's true to a certain extent
the way Russia works, although Russia is somewhat different because it had this giant Eurasian continent
folded in to its story. America had an assimilation approach so that lots of newcomers
became American, wanted to become American
as soon as possible. My generation;
I'm fourth generation American. So in other words, my ancestors came
a long time ago before WWI. My father's side from from Belarus,
my mother's side from Poland, but by the time it got to me
nobody was speaking foreign languages. Already the second generation
was extremely eager to assimilate, become as American as possible. And so by the time it got to me,
there was almost nothing left of the origin story. And so Russia's a little bit different
because folding in the Tatar Khanate, and folding in all sorts of other people; Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states,
the Caucasus. Russia had a lot larger world
than just Russia, inside Russia, for a really long time. It was much more of an Empire
in its mentality and makeup than the US or China were in terms of
their Chinafication in the Chinese case and Americanization in the American case. That's not to say that
they're completely Chinafied or completely Americanized. There's an ability to retain one's culture,
one's language, one's identity inside a larger story, but that's much more prominent
in the Russian case. But nonetheless it's typical
of places like America to think that America is the world. And so the American version of English,
American institutions, American food, American way of life, that either the whole world is like that
or it has a desire to become like that. And so that's just wrong. The whole world is not like that, and it doesn't have a desire to assimilate
into some larger global americanism. So it's something you got to
push against. You got to get out there in the world,
you got to live in foreign countries, you got to learn foreign languages, you got to live and learn to think like
the people who are not Americans, and this goes for any culture,
any part of the world, it's very valuable, and we don't do enough of
that because America is too big, too self-contained, too self-satisfied on occasion, we don't encourage it enough. We encouraged it after we got scared with the Soviet Union sending up
the first artificial satellite in 1957, the Sputnik, couple years before I was born. And so America had a panic
and invested massively in trying to understand the rest of the world. That was really beneficial
for several generations, but now we need that again,
we need that boost again, where we all want to send
our young people out there so that in the formative years
they begin to understand just how big the wide world is and how it's necessary to have empathy
with how other people live and work and think and their viewpoints. We lack empathy. Empathy is the hardest thing to achieve. - Yeah, you've been talking about that.
- But it's the most powerful. Is that doable, though? The ability to send a bunch of
one country citizens to the rest of the world and vice versa? Sure, it's possible. It just doesn't happen. You're right, it doesn't happen naturally. It doesn't just happen
automatically or organically, you have to be proactive,
you have to encourage it. So both of my kids are in college now, and I try to let them find their own way, not to use them as guinea pigs
for disappointments in my life to make them do some of the things
that I didn't do or not to make them do
exactly what I did. So, encourage, facilitate,
but don't impose on them. But it turns out that one of my kids
who's a chemistry and economics double major, decided he wanted to go to France. He learned French in college
and he went to France for study abroad. Now he speaks French,
he loves French culture, and he understands America
much better as a result, and our daughter who's two years younger
than him, who does visual arts, anime,
poetry, creative writing, so very different profile,
but she's also very enthusiastic about Japanese culture,
and wants to do her study abroad in Japan. Now, mind you, my wife is
a South Korean passport holder. My wife is Korean. So the kids grew up with Korean school
and Korean culture on the weekends, they went to Korean school
and they got introduced to K-pop and other influences besides the language. - And K-dramas.
- Yes. And my wife was Chief curator
of the Korean art section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and so she did a number of
really gigantic Korean related exhibitions, and we had Psy from Gangnam Style come, and the kids met Psy
and took videos with him. So they had some international influence, but nonetheless they took
the initiative themselves like my son to do the French stuff
and my daughter to do the Japanese stuff, and we think that makes them
much better Americans and much deeper understanding of America. We travel with them as much as we can. Tourist travel. Usually, I'll be invited to give a lecture
or attend a conference, and my wife will come along
to do Museum work, and the kids will tag along
just to see what that culture is like. So we've done some family travel that way, opening up vistas for them
but not telling them that they should do this
or they should do that, but showing them what's possible. And so we think that that can be done.
Of course, we have resources now. When I was growing up, we weren't rich
and I was a working class kid, and first time I traveled abroad was
a subsidized trip for language study to Vienna when I was in graduate school at Berkeley where they paid my way to go study
at the Goethe-Institut in Austria to study German. But now that I've worked really hard
and got lucky and been rewarded, we have some resources to be able to travel, and my kids started traveling much earlier
than I did traveling abroad, but now as part of their studies. So it's really exciting
and we can do more of that. it's important to bring it here and have it available
inside American culture, and we do have a gigantic population of immigrants, green card holders, foreign students,
and it's indispensable for our economy, and I would argue,
indispensable for our way of life. But we also need to get
the Americans out there, and especially the ones who are
going to be in decision-making capacity, officials, positions of authority. It's not just that they got to have passports, and plop down at some five-star hotel in luxury and spent a couple of days there
talking to some brilliant people who got a PhD at Harvard or MIT or LSC. Not that kind of travel abroad. Let them go to the villages,
the trenches, and all that. Yes. See how the transport system works, see what the school system is like, see how ordinary people live
with families around the world, and how they think
and what their aspirations are. You alluded to a song by Sam Cooke
"Don't Know Much About History", I get the sense that the kids nowadays,
they tend to over social media communicate among themselves,
to themselves, as opposed to their predecessors,
the 107 billion people that have died. We call that history. Isn't it a concern that the kids nowadays
don't study history the way you did or most of your peers did? We have a lot of complaints that
our young people don't know history. And so I say,
"Well, whose fault is that? Is that their fault or is that
our fault as history teachers?" We have to do better. We have to teach a history; we have to write history and teach history
in ways that attract their attention. It's on us, not on them. You complain till you're blue in the face,
walk around the Stanford campus, or they don't know any history. Well, do something about it; teach them some history
but in a way that sparks their curiosity, sparks their desire to learn more
when you're not there anymore. So I'm not a complainer about
people not knowing history, I try to be a doer about that. But that's true not just of our young people, that's true of people in positions of authority. What I've discovered in my travels
and in my advisory capacity with private sector or public sector officials is that the demand for history is really high. It's not a demand problem,
it's really a supply problem. when I go to Washington
or other government institutions, our allies Five Eyes,
they're all dying to know history from me. That's all they ask me about;
historical, how did it happen the last time
or what are the lessons, what can we learn from previous episodes. So demand for history
in the government sectors is huge, same thing I discovered
in the private sector. Okay, sometimes the history is
financial history, economic history, the tech people want to know
how innovation works, they want to know history of technology
and history of science, and so demand is off the charts, it's just we're not supplying
the big picture history, the tour of horizon, the connect the dots, the history that is exciting and gives you
insight into how the world works now and where it might be going, what the drivers of change are. History never tells you
what the future is going to be, nobody can do that. But what history can tell you is that
the present is not going to last, that things are going to change because that's happened
many many times over. Who living in China in the 1960s or 70s
was going to think that China was going to be
the second largest economy in the world, per capita GDP was $200 a year
under Mao (Zedong). And so if you projected that forward,
you would have looked like a fool because the China that unfolded
was nothing like that time period that people were living. So you got to do that
with your own time period, with your own set of institutions,
with the reality that seems permanent, because it's the reality that you live in and you got to say,
"It's very likely it's going to change. I don't know how it's going to change,
but it's going to change, and therefore let's be ready
for the changes, let's may even try to shape
the changes somewhat. And so what are the levers of power,
the levers of agency onto large systems? How do you affect change? Not giving a lecture, giving a speech
that something should happen, but how could it happen? What role does agency play? And you only can do that
if you understand systems, systems theory, complexity theory, and if you understand the drivers of change. So history is really empowering
for agency. Yes, there's perverse
and unintended consequences often, you think you're trying to invent
one type of world and you get the opposite result because you don't understand
how nonlinear causality works and you get these perverse
and unintended consequences, sure. but nonetheless history is
enormously empowering if you take it seriously
and study it well for you to understand the could
and therefore how to intervene, and not to assume and project forward. So you take the models for climate
or the models for economic growth, all those models have built in assumptions
that are then projected forward 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, and we know that those projections are bunk because if you look at the previous projections,
they were generally off. The ambassador of the UK
in Germany in the 20s. So the Germany's a great power, the UK is the biggest power in the world
in the 1920s, and this Ambassador is not
a dumb guy and he writes this report that
Adolf Hitler is finished as a politician. He's done. He's toast. And a few years later,
he's Chancellor of Germany, not because the Ambassador was a moron, but the Ambassador was projecting forward from the circumstances in which he was living, not understanding larger dynamics at work
that became visible retrospectively, and so how do you see some of that
prospectively, right? Once again there's contingency,
there's accident, there's a lot of things that
you didn't think were going to happen and then wow they happen, right? I like how you've always
compared yourself with the economist, who would always use
the assumption everything else being equal. Economics is a very powerful profession. I like economics a lot.
I studied economics. I have a lot of friends who are economists, their models are very impressive but they always have that line in them
just like you said, Gita. All other factors held constant comma and then you're off to the races
with this economic model. In geopolitics, nothing is held constant. And so we have this policy advice
that goes like this: the economists are dominant. Economists have the ears of officials,
economists have the ears of policy makers, and then one day bad stuff happens, and everyone discovers that
people are not maximizing utility, they're murdering each other. And so then the geopolitics
gets let back in, right? And all of a sudden it's geopolitics 24/7, geopolitical risk and all sorts of
great power rivalry, this and that, and the economists for a time get eclipsed
because we're not maximizing utility, we're having war or there's a pandemic
or whatever it might be. But that's wrong also;
that's another extreme. So economics is really important;
prosperity, trade, opportunity. So it's peace and prosperity,
it's geopolitics and economics, and we can't let one occlude the other
just because it seems to be a happy time or just because it seems to be
an unhappy time. So I try to keep a balanced perspective knowing that it's never as good
as people say, it's never as bad as people say, economics is just as important as geopolitics even when it doesn't seem to be the case
and vice versa. I want to take you to the present. And we kind of talked about this
a few months ago. This is on the topic of Ukraine. You've asserted a few times
the importance of winning the peace as opposed to winning the war.
Talk about that. All wars are about winning the peace. Wars are generally a miscalculation; they generally don't turn out
the way people hope or expect, they rarely deliver the advantages
that the people who start them think. But it's not the war per say,
it's the peace that you should focus on. So for example, the United States
in Afghanistan won the war, but then we lost the peace. I think it's pretty clear
we ousted the Taliban really quickly, we helped another alternative
Afghanistan political system form, but in the fullness of time,
Taliban came back and we lost the peace. Iraq is a little bit more ambiguous;
we certainly won the war, looks like we lost the peace,
although the fullness of time we'll see. In Vietnam, the United States lost the war
and it won the peace. Vietnam is a remarkably
pro-American country as you know despite the atrocities that
the Americans committed there. Vietnam has this amazing
museum of American atrocities. It's really moving to see that museum
made a very big impression on me. And at the same time, the
people were incredibly warm towards me as an American, same towards South Koreans, and the South Koreans as you know
were on the American side in that horrific war in Vietnam. And so that's really interesting. You can not only win a war
and lose the peace, you can lose a war and win the peace. So, kind of how do you win
the peace in Ukraine? That was my question early on. I understand that we need to talk
about the war, and I have talked about the war,
but what about after the war? Is there an after the war,
and what should it look like, and therefore how should we
define victory in the war if our goal is to win the peace? So, Ukraine defined a victory as recovery of
all their internationally recognized territory, which is under Russian occupation now; a war crimes tribunals for those who
launched the aggression against Ukraine; and reparations for all the damage
that was caused in Ukraine. So, those are fully understandable
at an emotional level. At a justice level, this is a criminal
aggression under international law, what Russia has done. But in order to achieve those war aims, to achieve a victory defined that way, you have to take Moscow
in order to impose that kind of peace. So Ukraine is not taking Moscow, and therefore that version of victory
is just not reachable. As much as it is understandable
at an emotional level, you can't achieve that in reality. So, what's a better defition of victory? A better definition of victory,
at least for me, now remember we're sitting here
in an office at Stanford University, Palo Alto California. We're not under bombardment, we haven't had our sons
or our husbands or our brothers or our sisters, aunts and uncles killed. We're not victims of rape
and atrocities here. So it's a lot easier for us
to talk about the war in Ukraine than it is for the Ukrainians
living it day-to-day, as we sit here and speak. But I think we can talk about
the peace or a victory as Ukraine getting into the European Union and Ukraine getting some sort of security guarantee. Now, why does Ukraine need
to get into the European Union? Well because it needs that
mechanism of European Union accession to transform its domestic institutions; to go from a poorly institutionalized,
weakly institutionalized, extremely corrupt state to more like a European state with rule of law, open society, free and open media,
and prosperity, because Ukraine is remarkably poor
by European standards. And then a security guarantee
so that Ukraine if they rebuild, it then isn't destroyed again. What might that accession process look like? What might the security guarantee look like? I think those are worthy of debate
and need to be debated and they are being debated,
so that's very positive. But to get to that road,
you need an armistice. You need the fighting to stop. Meaning, you don't need to get
all of your territory back in order to start the process
of European Union accession, transformation of institutions, rebuilding the country in new economy
and with some security arrangements. It would be better if you got
your territory, but it would be much better
if you started the process with an armistice of gaining a Ukraine
that the Ukrainians need. Ukraine needs Ukraine. Russia doesn't need Ukraine,
they have Russia already. And so, getting however much of Ukraine
you can control and transforming it into a European country, joining the West is how we would put it. Ukraine wants to join Europe, that's why they opposed domestic tyrants
in 2004-2005, that Orange Revolution; that's why they overthrew
that domestic dictator in 2013/2014, Yanukovich who fled to Russia. They risk their lives to join Europe
before Russia took Crimea and then the fullscale invasion of February 2022. So, that I think is means
how do you get an armistice, how do you get to that point
where you can start that process, that's a better definition of victory
and that's how you win the peace. So if you look at the Korean Peninsula, of course is a very unsatisfactory outcome; it's only an armistice,
it's not a peace treaty. They're technically still at war, but there's not large scale fighting. Yes, the families were separated,
some never saw each each other again because the border was closed. And yes, North Korea does a lot of things that the South Koreans regard
as provocations, and so it's unsatisfactory. But still, on the other side
of that demilitarized zone, with the American Security umbrella,
in the absence of a peace treaty, they got an American Security umbrella. They built or rebuilt one of the most
successful societies on the planet, as you know, South Korea. It's unbelievably impressive what they did. Again, it's not perfect,
it's not satisfactory, it would have been much better
to get a peace treaty. But hey, look what they've achieved. And so an outcome like that for Ukraine
would be a miracle and would be a gift and would not necessarily involve Ukraine
acknowledging loss of territory South Korea doesn't acknowledge that
the Korean Peninsula is divided forever quite the contrary,
but in the meantime they rebuild. You've mentioned the EU
but you've not mentioned NATO, and you've talked about bilateral plus
in the context of Ukraine. Yes. So right now what's on the table
for a security guarantee of Ukraine is not a treaty where someone else will come
to Ukraine's aid if they're attacked but instead a promise to arm Ukraine
and enable it to defend itself. What's happening now during the war
on an ad hoc basis could be institutionalized. That's the guarantee they're talking about. Next level up would be some type of treaty, probably not with NATO
because NATO works by consensus, and there isn't a consensus to extend
the Article 5 security guarantee to Ukraine while it's still at war
or even if the war stopped. We're not sure that
there would be such a consensus, so we have to live in the world
that we live in. Sure, Ukraine would love to be in NATO, and sure, many officials in NATO
have promised Ukraine, but is it feasible? And if it's not
feasible what do we do then? And so some type of security
guarantee with the United States would have to be sold to the American people the same way that the one
with South Korea, the one with Japan, the one with Australia, is supported by the American people
would have to be sold by them. That hasn't happened yet but that could also be joined
if it were to happen by others. This is why I call it bilateral plus. For example Poland might wish to join, for example the Baltic states,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, maybe one or two of them would like to join, maybe the Scandinavians like. So it's a kind of proto version
of the fuller NATO, more than just what South Korea has
which is a lot, but less than the full NATO. So that would be a big step forward,
we're not there yet, we would have to prepare the US public and the US Congress, the Senate especially,
to ratify a treaty like that. We're far away from that now,
but at least let's discuss these terms publicly so that people understand
how Ukraine could win the peace. You think about Crimea. Crimea internationally recognized
Ukrainian territory because in 1991 when
the Soviet Union broke up it was part of Ukraine,
had been since 1954. Well, does it make sense for winning the peace
for Crimea to go back into Ukraine? First of all, how would they get it back? You'd have to take it because Russia has it. People say that this is like Munich
in 1938 if you give Crimea to Russia, and I say, "Well, Hitler was given
the Sudetenland Munich in 1938." He didn't have it yet;
it was handed to him for no compensation. Putin has taken Crimea;
nobody's handing it to him. He's got it now,
and if you can't take it back, it's your potential bargaining chip
to get a larger deal. Moreover, if you do try to take it back
and you're successful, what does that give you? It gives you a bad choice of the necessity,
maybe of ethnic cleansing. You have 2.5 million ethnic Russians
in Crimea now, are you going to remove them all
in an ethnic cleansing? Otherwise, you have 2.5 million Russians
inside your state who might not want to live inside Ukraine and might be available for insurgency or sabotage manipulated by Moscow by the Kremlin, and so incorporating Crimea back
into Ukraine might be detrimental for your EU accession process,
for your security guarantee, for your overall stability, plus it incentivizes regime in Moscow, whether the Putin one or the one after that
or the one after that or the one after that, it incentivizes Russian rulers
to come back and do this again and get it back because
Crimea was part of the Russian Empire since Catherine the Great since 1783, and for Russia it's mother's milk, and it's hard to to see how
they would accept the loss of Crimea. So it has all sorts of potential
negative consequences for Ukraine. The final argument Crimea does
is that well if they don't get Crimea back, Russia can use it to attack Ukraine,
and that's true, that's what they're doing now. But Russia can use Russian territory
that borders Ukraine to attack Ukraine even without Crimea, and it's also possible to demilitarize Crimea even if it was not regained
in some type of bargain. And so, you have to win the peace and you have to think about all of the ways
that you don't incentivize this to happen again or you don't have an insurgency inside
your country that's more or less permanent, or you don't get yourself involved
in ethnic cleansing because ethnic cleansing is not
a ticket into the European Union, minority rights are, but minority rights can be manipulated
by Russia the other way. So, this is complex; it's fraud. You have a lot of emotion
understandably involved in this, and I'm not trying to underplay
all of those dimensions, I'm just trying to say how do we win the peace so that we don't get an endless war,
a permanent war, a renewal of the war, but instead we get a stable Ukraine that can aspired to become something
like South Korea's success. I want to switch to China,
but before then I want tomake reference to your earlier statement about
the fact that a transatlantic alliance could be deemed as a pivot to Asia?
- Yes. Explain that to some of us in Southeast Asia
to better understand it. So, many people in the United States
were talking about a pivot to Asia, which is an absurd concept because the United States has been
an Asian power for a really long time, has huge financial investments
throughout Asia including Southeast Asia where it's just a colossal investor, technology transfer, people-to-people exchange
like we were talking about earlier. America is in Asia deeply already, but the pivot to Asia was meant as
a transfer of some of the resources from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. So, that was the intention, and that also implied maybe Europe
should take care of itself and the US shouldn't expand
the scale of resources, especially military, with NATO. Why can't Europe defend itself
their rich countries? And so the notion of pivot to Asia
became tied into a kind of Zero Sum, take it from here, put it over there,
because we have limited resources, the world is changing,
we have deficits, we have demands at home, we can't be everywhere
on the same scale anymore. So, it's understandable, but it turned out that the war in Ukraine
galvanized the America and its allies, galvanized/resuscitated NATO and the EU, and also brought Europe and the US
much closer on China policy because China, as you know,
initially rhetorically and now more than rhetorically has supported Russia's war effort. And so, the Europeans had been
attempting to distance themselves from the United States to a degree
on China policy. China and the US were going to be
antagonistic two great powers; one the status quo power,
one the rising power, it was inevitable that
there would be friction, but hey we're Europe,
we don't like conflict, we love trade, so let's distance ourselves from the US and have a more friendly face towards China and have mutual enrichment,
the trade with China. And then they discovered that
well geez the dependency on Russian energy, blew up in their face, maybe it's not so good to be that
intertwined with an authoritarian regime that mistreats its people at home and might therefore behave abroad
in similar ways to the way it behaves at home; throw its weight around, bully, coercion,
cheat, undermine the rules based order. So the Europeans came much closer
to the Americans on China policy as a result of the revival of transatlanticism sparked by Russia's aggression against Ukraine and Ukraine's ingenious and
courageous resistance to Russia. So Ukraine gave Europe a gift,
it gave the United States a gift, which was a revival of the institutional West which turns out to be really important
for American-China policy. So the pivot to Asia was
the Revival of transatlanticism because Germany and France and the UK
and all the rest are crucial for any China policy. Now we have to remember that
the West is not a geographic term; it is an institutional term. Russia is a European country culturally, but it is not Western institutionally, whereas Japan is not European culturally,
but is Western institutionally. Japan looks like a western country institutionally. That goes for Japan's former colonies,
South Korea and Taiwan; it goes for Australia; and one could argue,
it's appropriate for Indonesia. It's a little more complicated there,
but you know better than I do. But there's a larger non-geographic West
that's institutional, that's a club of likeminded rule of law, open economies, open societies,
democracies in the sense that they feel
they share a lot in common whether they're culturally European or not, and many of them are not. And so that's really valuable to have. Whereas Russia, China, Iran,
they're not institutionally West nor in value terms do they identify
with the West. They're Eurasian ancient civilizations,
land Empires with a millennium, or in the Chinese case claiming
five Millennia of history before today. And so there's a big difference in that
non-geographical institutional West where if you're going to confront China
it's nice to have friends and allies, and it's nice to have
the most successful countries and countries that share your values
and institutions, be your friends and allies. I agree that we have to share
the planet with China. China has been here a long time, they're going to be here a long time
going forward, they're just a remarkable civilization. Their achievements are breathtaking. My wife for 15 years worked
in the Asian art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I used to take the kids
to pick up Mom after work, I used to go meet my wife on my own
at the Metropolitan Museum, and she's in the Asian art department, and I have to tell you
it's just breathtaking every day to see it again and again, there's more
and more and more to discover even if you've seen it every day
for 15 years. So China just takes the breath away. We have to share the planet with China,
that's not the point, right? The ocean is wet. We have to share the planet with China. The point is what are the terms
of sharing the planet, and how do we negotiate those terms so that
we preserve the free and open societies, the rule of law, the institutional West
that accounts for our peace and prosperity. Yes, we make a lot of mistakes. Yes, there are a lot of policies and actions
that one could criticize from that Vietnam War
to many others that you could name. There's a lot of agony that comes from mistakes, and more than mistakes
on the western side. It's very imperfect but we live in a world
of reality where what's the better alternative. Is it better to make the West
live up to its promises, or is it better to undermine
the Western order and get something else
that maybe would be more coercive, more hierarchical, less free and open. And so I'm all in favor
of sharing the planet, I just want to negotiate the terms, and I want to have leverage
to negotiate those terms so that we can defend our values and institutions
while we're sharing the planet. We can recognize China's greatness,
we can recognize China's achievements, but we don't want to live under Xinjiang, we don't want to live
what happened to Hong Kong, we don't want that to happen
to places outside of China because China has huge influence and power
as a result of its commercial success. We want to push back,
not against the commercial success, we want to share in that commercial success
because that's win-win in many cases. We want to push back on use
of that commercial leverage by China to enforce a different world order
that's suitable for an authoritarian regime that is safe or more secure
for an authoritarian regime, but not for the kind of values
and institutions that we cherish. You've expressed this view
that would have been slightly different with respect to Kissinger's outreach
to China in the early 70s. With the benefit of hindsight,
how do you think the US could have done it differently to make the two largest countries or
economies in the world share the planet a little bit better? I mean, you've given description
of some of the things that should have been instilled
in the process. Hindsight is a lot easier than foresight, and being a critic from an office
at Stanford is a lot easier than being Secretary of State
or National Security Advisor where you have imperfect information,
a flood of unpredicted events, lots of pressures from interest groups
and negotiation is hard. So we have to be careful not to be
the kind of armchair think tank critics where we know better, we're smarter,
fullness of time, things have happened. I would just say it this way: we're a lot stronger than we think,
the United States. We're just a lot more powerful
than we think, and in addition we have a lot of friends,
and our friends are amazing, they're so capable,
they have such incredible achievements, and they're voluntarily our friends;
we don't coerce them to be our friends. So that's how we have to approach China. we have to approach China with
a sense of self-confidence and our strengths, not arrogance, not hubris, but a sense of our own leverage
and self-confidence why we are successful, what makes for our success
and encourage that, but also with our friends and allies in step. A bilateral US-China won't work
to our advantage because we need to have
the strength of our friends and partners taken into consideration in those negotiations and in that deal-making
and in that sharing of the planet. The whole point of the American World Order is that it provides opportunity for others,
not just for Americans. That's what we got to reinforce,
that's the message, and therefore our friends and partners
have to be in that room, and our actions that may be unilateral; we have to understand what the effects are
for our friends and partners as well as those who are not yet
our friends and partners but might want to be one day
our friends and partners. So, self-confidence plus humility, a larger room rather than just
a bilateral room, and making sure that we don't undermine
the interests of our friends and partners in the deals that we might make
as superpowers bilateral. And so that's much harder; it requires more work,
more patience, more knowledge, more talking not just with the Chinese
but with everybody, to understand what the effects might be, whether it's in Indonesia or Japan
or Germany or Brazil or South Africa or any other place
you could name, UAE, we could add in many many other places. We have to understand
the secondary and tertiary effects, we have to understand the aspirations
of those places, and sometimes we have to compromise. Stephen, I know you got to go,
but I've got two questions. The first one is with respect to
the unfortunate event that took place in West Asia recently. You've talked about how the Middle East
could be the battleground between China and the US, right. And the second question is
with respect to this perception of this increasing hegemony
of China with respect to Southeast Asia, which is kind of inevitable. I'm just curious as to what your thoughts are
with respect to these two situations. Again, we have to be careful to
understand places on their own terms; what their challenges are,
what their aspirations are, we can't refract everything through
America-China. So in other words, let's have
a conversation with Saudi Arabia because it's important for China policy. No, let's have a conversation
with Saudi Arabia or let's have a conversation with Indonesia
or let's have a conversation with ASEAN because it's important in and of itself, not solely and not even predominantly
because of its China-US implications. I think that's a mindset
that we sometimes fail at that we have to overcome. The other piece I would say
in answer to your question is we can't be naive about China's aspirations. They want a world that works for China, which means works for
an authoritarian regime that doesn't threaten or undermine a regime
which lacks a mandate with its own people which doesn't submit to regular elections, which imposes censorship. For them, the world is dangerous right now because America and its friends
have a different system which is appealing not just to our populations
but appealing to Chinese people. And of course Taiwan has
an alternative model of governance under Chinese language. They don't think of themselves
as ethnic Chinese, as mainlanders, they think of themselves
as Taiwanese predominantly, but nonetheless it's an important
alternative model of how a Chinese speaking entity
could govern itself. And so we need to remember that
the more leverage the Chinese get from commercial relations, the more interdependent we get
with them; the more leverage they can have
over our systems, over our sovereignty, over our institutions,
over our interest groups. We're free and open societies,
and they can take advantage of that. And so we just have to be careful
to protect oursovereignty, to protect our institutions,
our way of life, our well-being, while benefiting from the commercial relations. So, again, lack of understanding that
the Chinese are building leverage over us through commercial relations
that they may choose to use and in some cases already are choosing. So, I'm all in favor,
just to conclude of sharing the planet, I'm all in favor of win-win commercial ties. But what are the terms? Are the terms reciprocity?
Are the terms free and open? Are the terms actual win-win? Or are the terms more coercive, more influence buying,
more subversion, more turning the world in a direction
that's safer for an authoritarian regime and corrosive for democratic rule of law regimes? Anyway, thank you so much
for your time. - Really a pleasure talking to you.
- Thank you so much, Stephen. I got tons of more questions,
but next time maybe. We'll revisit for sure. It's a great pleasure that
we have you here at Stanford, Gita, and that we raise the interest
and the understanding of Southeast Asia here in America.
- Thank you. That was Stephen Kotkin from Stanford University. Thank you.
