Putin and the Presidents: Timothy Snyder (interview) | FRONTLINE

I just want to start at the moment right before the invasion of Ukraine the end of 2021 Joe Biden's being briefed his intelligence is saying that Vladimir Putin is intending to go into Ukraine that this is serious can you help us understand what the stakes are at that moment what's on the line for Joe Biden for Putin for democracy for the world well in late 2021 Dubai Administration was faced with this challenge I didn't expect namely one a major Powers going to invade its neighbor not just any major power the Russian Federation and not just any neighbor Ukraine which is on the border of NATO and the European Union what was at stake is the idea that countries shouldn't destroy other countries for no reason in a war what was at stake is the international legal framework which you've been trying to keep going since the second world war and what was the stake more broadly from the byte administration's point of view is whether they can be a coherent for American foreign policy which makes any difference and I think they've had a pretty good run at that first by trying to persuade other people that the Russians were going to invade which which the Americans are right about secondly by being part of a coalition which has helped the ukrainians with arms and in other ways and third by talking about what the war is all about which is that if you let a country invade another country with the goal of extermining his pop population that's not just a horror in of itself it's a it's a remaking of the world which is going to continue in directions that you don't want indefinitely so this is really a profound moment for the Biden Administration one that's going to Define who they are and really Define his presidency I think in a hundred years historians will be writing about the war in Ukraine I'm not sure there's going to be any other event in the body Administration about which that is true a lot of the things that seem very important to us right now like gas prices one summer or whether we're wearing masks or not that's going to disappear into the midst of time whether Ukraine wins or loses which is very much up to the United States very much up to the body Administration is something that historians are going to be writing about in 100 years there's this tremendous effort to try to dissuade Vladimir Putin there's a video call there's statements that Biden makes there's diplomatic missions going to Moscow trying to convince them there are warnings there are threats why does it not dissuade Vladimir Putin from invading I believe that Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine on the basis of a systematically false understanding of what Russia is and what Ukraine is Putin helps us understand him by publishing a 7 000 word essay about his own views about history and then the essay he makes it clear that he doesn't really believe that Ukraine has any kind of independent existence there isn't really Ukrainian State there isn't really Ukrainian Nation if you're planning your war on that basis you think it's going to be all over before anybody else's response really matters the Russians were planning for a three-day War they were planning for a political war they were thinking that there aren't really that many ukrainians in the sense of people who'd be willing to risk their lives for their country and in this they were entirely wrong I think what Putin was imagining is that this is all going to be over so quickly that anybody else's reactions be they sanctions be anything else are going to look silly and aren't really going to matter when he announces what he calls special military operation but which is the war in Ukraine if you go back and you look at that speech one of the things that's interesting about it you know the line that comes out of is the Empire of lies and a lot of the speech is about the United States it's about Ukraine but a lot of it is about the United States in particular what do you make when you see him deliver that speech well Putin is and he isn't talking about America I mean this is not a man who really spends a lot of time in the rest of the world unlike above the foreign Leaders with which he deals he doesn't know foreign languages he doesn't know a thing about Ukraine which is interesting he thinks he knows everything he doesn't know anything and his understanding of Ukraine is based on the notion that isn't really a place and if it seems to be a place this is because of foreign conspiracies and then in historical reasoning those conspiracies have been in the past the austrians the Germans the polls the Jews today it's the European Union and the Americans so Putin's worldview which I think he really believes is that Moscow and Kiev are somehow organically together and always should be and it's only because of The Outsiders that this isn't true and so what he's talking about is not America as it is he's talking about a fantasy of America a fantasy of America that wants to to do these Insidious things like take Ukraine away from Russia Russia but that just shows in my view anyway a misunderstanding not only of America and Ukraine but also of his own country before Ukraine many Americans didn't see themselves in a cold war with Russia didn't see Russia necessarily as a major enemy but here he's describing America as a major enemy how important is it to understand the different world views of Americans and of Russians about what's happening and how different they are well the the one thing that one has to understand is that the Russians are systematically wrong about how much attention Americans pay to Russia the Russians think about America all the time Americans only think about Russia when they have to and that is not a reality which Russian leaders can afford to recognize or talk about because their power or their ideology power rests on the idea that there are great powers in the world Russia America China Russia is one of these great powers and so the basic reality that Americans actually don't really like to think about Russia they don't think about Russia that much it would be something which is absolutely unacceptable but that's a fundamental difference in worldview Russian leaders are thinking about nothing about domestic politics thinking about foreign policy all the time and foreign policy is a kind of duel of great Powers American Presidents American public opinion the American columnists they're not thinking that way we only react to Russian we absolutely have to I mean we reacted very very late and very very weak to the Russian intervention in the American election in 2016. when Mitt Romney said when he was campaigning against Barack Obama that Russia was a serious threat everyone laughed at him except the Russians who would kind of like to think that they were a serious threat when Obama says that Russia doesn't matter because it's only a regional economy and so on um he's saying something which to the Russians is absolutely incomprehensible they think of themselves as a great power and they want to prove that they're a great power so the biggest difference is that Russians really like to think about America because American enmity the idea that America is trying to hurt Russia gives Russia a sense of meaning whereas Americans absolutely do not need Russia for their sense of themselves that's the that's the basic difference the last question on the end of the Cold War is these statements that you would hear George H.W bush says it's a victory for the moral force of our values that there's a feeling at the end of the Cold War that it wasn't just a collapse of the Soviet Union that it represented something bigger that democracy had triumphed when you look back at that and and the contrasting views between Biden and between Americans I mean was that a dangerous view that Americans adopted that it was that of the sense of inevitability about what had happened I think it's better to say that democracy is a better system than it is to say that it's inevitable because once you say that it's inevitable you're forgetting all the things that you have to do or struggle for in order for democracy to come into being and that applies not just to us I mean our own democracy I think arguably is in a worse situation than it was in the late 1980s it applies to everybody the Russians nobody in Eastern Europe was going to get democracy inevitably and nobody was going to get it just because there was capitalism which I think was our big tremendous stupid mistake at the time relied on these larger structural forces not not paying attention to culture not paying attention to ethics and imagining that the economic transformation in the form of privatization was automatically going to bring about political changes that's what we were thinking and we were wrong about that and Russians were also wrong about that the Russians who were in charge it was convenient for them to think that because the people around Yeltsin were making huge amounts of money at the time but that was a big mistake which we should recognize that you know that democracy is going to be inevitable because there are no Alternatives as people said it's going to be inevitable because Capital isn't going to bring it these were all mistakes and we can learn from these mistakes Russia I think is one consequence of believing in those mistakes if you seriously believe that just privatizing things is going to lead to a good political system then Russia should be a good political system because they did privatize things but in fact this is a lesson for everybody if too few people own too much of the stuff and if too few people dominate the main media you're not going to end up as a democracy whether you're America whether you're Russia whether anybody else and I imagine that the former KGB agent who you described the cynical Vladimir Putin you know could see in American hubris about democracy some way that he can operate that we may not pay attention to until it's almost too late yeah I mean the idea that we have that capitalism is eventually going to bring everybody around to some kind of reasonable form of Politics the idea that there's no alternative opens a huge window of opportunity for people who do represent Alternatives especially in capitalist countries which Russia and China by the way are we were very slow to pick up on the particular nature of the putiness threat largely for this reason because we thought well because its capitalist it'll be okay or we just measure its economic growth and we say it's not very important but meanwhile Putin can represent an alternative you can come up with an ideology which draws people not only in Russia but in America he can come up with a counter story about globalization he can claim that he's the one who embodies values because we're not talking about values we're just talking about health stuff is inevitable which is not very attractive he can make all those claims and we're very s very slow to pick up on it because we're in the story about how history is on our side what do you make of that famous meeting with George W bush where he says he looks into Putin's eyes and he seek his soul I mean back then did it matter did we not understand who Vladimir Putin was or was it not clear at that point who Vladimir Putin was I think the Vladimir Putin at that time is not the same person we're dealing with now but there is a constant thread which is in a way representative of Russia the eyes seen this whole thing I don't understand at all I've never had that experience but Putin did consistently say Ukraine is not a real country and that that has been consistently his View and that's a typical Russian view the Ukraine is not really a country and the idea that Ukraine is not really a country only becomes threatening when Ukraine in some way starts to be a better country than Russia uh according to measures with some Russians at least some of the time themselves accept like ukrainians Can Vote or ukrainians have had a peaceful change of president with an actual election where the votes counted which Russians have never had um where ukrainians are closer to Europe Ukraine is going to be able to travel in Europe those kinds of things suddenly turn Ukraine from being not a real place a joke which is Putin's first idea to being not a real place therefore some kind of concocted threat by the west but the common the common idea which is not just Putin's that this is not a real country that was that was actually there to hear way back then and what's going on in that time Putin it seems like it's trying to win over Bush and but by the time you get to the famous speech in Munich he's describing America as a threat what is it that turns them is it the rhetoric of the freedom agenda of bush is it a rock is it what's going on in the near abroad what's the progression of those seven years can you give me give me the chronology again so Putin comes in in 2000 and by the time you get to 2007 he gives a speech at the Munich security conference where he says you know the West is a threat and we've talked to people who are there and they said it was striking to see Putin describe you know in rhetoric that's very similar to what he was saying in 2022 about the West what's his progression of coming to see that America as a threat I guess it's very important for us as Americans to recognize that the most important things that are happening in Russia are actually happening in Russia and that the things that Putin says about us are very rarely and if so only distantly connected to actual things that we do and say in our own country that the way to understand Putin I think is to follow the failure of his domestic policy Putin comes to power with the basic idea that Russia can be rigged up into some kind of rule of law state dictatorship of the law is the phrase that he uses he quickly realizes that that's not the case or at least that he's not the person to do it and shifts gears to a different program of rule which involves not getting rid of oligarchy but being the top oligarch which is a very fundamental difference it might look the same because you're rounding up people putting them in jail but becoming the top oligarch becoming the boss of bosses turning the state into the most important Mafia Clan is very different than cleaning out the Stables once Putin makes that turn that's the important turn because it means that there's never going to be effective domestic policy Russians are not going to get the things you're going to get out of the rule of law like social Mobility Freedom they're not going to get that what they're going to have to get instead is a foreign policy of spectacle so we the West are the enemy of choice for Putin and the reason why we're the enemy of choice is that defining the West as the enemy feeds into a very long tradition in Russia A and B it's also very safe because we're not actually going to do anything aggressive with respect to Russia so the way to understand Putin's turn against the United States is not to feel guilty about American policy it's not to imagine that we're responsible for everything because we're not it's not to deny him or Russian's agency because they have agency it's to understand the failure of Putin's domestic policy and his recognition that what he needs is a kind of permanent spectacle which comes out of foreign policy into the Europeans the Americans are always going to provide that now when I say that I'm not saying that American foreign policy has been good the Iraq War was an absolute disaster and I said so at the time and the Iraq War has played a later indirect role in the Ukraine war which maybe we can talk about but what I am trying to say is that it's very important as Americans not to think that everything that Putin does is because of some little thing that we did the most likely explanation is that what Putin is doing in foreign policy has to do with his needs in domestic policy When Vladimir Putin says look at the Americans you know look at Hillary Clinton talking about democracy in Russia or Victoria Milan or Michael mcfaul or whoever it is that they are interfering what is he doing there is that something he believes is that for show what is Vladimir Putin see when he sees Americans coming to Russia talking about democracy talking to activists I think he sees a threat I mean the the Putin system is based upon turning democracy into a ritual using what Russians call the administrative resource because there's no alternative ideology to democracy Putin only survives with a repeated legitimation that Democratic theater acts Democratic performances provide him so every so often every six years we're gonna have an election and Putin's gonna win that election and he has to win it by a lot not because people actually believe in the results they don't but because the election proves that he's the one who's in charge because he's the one who's writing the election right that's how it works the idea that elections could be real whether it's Pompeo Hussein it or Clinton who's saying it the idea that elections could be real is a threat Putin needs Russians to believe that elections are always a circus a farce and a fake because if Russians believe that British elections and German elections and American elections are also fake they're not going to mind that their own elections are fake so when Americans come to Russia and talk about votes being counted I think he authentically regards that as a threat and the way he expresses that sense of threat is to say our democracy is real their democracy is fake um we care about ourselves they only care about meddling in our politics and so on and so forth but I think the concern is that people in Russia might actually believe that there are places in the world where votes are counted Joe Biden goes there in March of 2011 and speaks to students and talks about democracy do you think that Biden or any of the Americans who go understand that you know it's so common in America to talk about democracy and talk about values do you think they understand how it's seen by Putin or that it's going to lead to that reaction from him I think that American policies I understand it was based upon the Assumption which I think is sound that we would be living in a more secure world not just a Freer worlds if there were more democracies in it Putin's reaction is not to the Americans talking about democracy Putin's reaction is to the idea that there might be democracy in Russia an idea which by the way is much more threatening when it comes from nearer neighbors like Ukraine where Russians could actually see aha the system is actually working I think in general Americans are aware that that Putin isn't going to like them talking about democracy I don't think there's any kind of surprise there what I would caution against is the idea that Putin is reacting to the Americans he's not reacting to the Americans he's reacting to the threat of the idea that there might actually be Democratic elections in Russia it's very convenient for him to frame this as great power Politics the Americans are not talking about democracy they're talking about their own geopolitics and they're pretending to talk about democracy that's what he's going to say that's very comfortable that works very well but he would be saying that regardless of what we were talking about I think by the time you get into the Obama Administration we talked a little bit about that like how seriously do you take Russia and there's that famous moment of course um that you mentioned with between Romney and Barack Obama do you think that Barack Obama and the administration took Vladimir Putin and Russia seriously enough I think they didn't understand the Russian state in the correct way the Russian state is not about a creative project if the Russian state were about a creative project then in some sense President Obama would have been right when he said no no it's just a regional power because it's correct Russia doesn't have a big economy it doesn't really set an example for anyone else so in that narrow sense where you think economics and ideas that are familiar to us are all that matter and then maybe Russia doesn't matter so much but that's imposing our own criteria on the Putin regime the Putin regime was never about creating things the Putin regime is about removing Alternatives it's about making the normality that is Russia the corruption the inequality the spectacle the constant line seem normal and the way you make it seem normal is by making it be normal not just in your own country but in other places so what the Russians became very effective at doing by way of their International propaganda and then later by interfering in elections is messing things up taking the worst of other societies and bringing the worst Tendencies to the fore finding by digital means and otherwise our weaknesses and making those weaknesses greater and greater so the Obama Administration was totally blindsided when the Russians decided to try to alter our electoral outcomes but it was totally consistent with the way Russia sees the rest of the world Russia is not trying to make America like Russia Russia is just trying to make it turn America into a total mess that's what that's what they're going for and that's a kind of power and it's consistent by the way with a lot of Soviet history that it's not so much about necessarily making everybody believe your ideas it's more a matter of making sure that nobody else can mount a serious challenge to you undermining everything else making everything else a shambles and then you may be shambolic but provided that you're no more shambolic than anybody else you're going to be okay Biden actually gives the speech about the reset and Hillary Clinton gives them the button I mean with that ever going to work or was Vladimir Putin always needed the U.S as a enemy as somebody who's interfering as somebody who's causing trouble with it by that point was the reset ever going to work were things ever going to be put back as they were hoping early in the administration I think that we generally just don't take Russian domestic politics seriously enough and therefore we don't take Putin's we don't take Putin's position seriously enough of course the reset wasn't going to work because there's nothing that America did which was actually that important inside Russia I mean I'm sorry if I'm like undermining the whole premise of your program but there's literally nothing that we do which is that important inside Russia American foreign policy does not matter that much in Russia what matters in Russia is what happens in Russia they have chosen to have us as their foreign policy enemy because that is convenient for them and it works very well in domestic politics there is nothing we can do to change that we could all wear the Russian flag as t-shirts every day we could get up in the morning and we could all sing the Russian national anthem it wouldn't change that there's nothing the reset nothing else that could have changed us because it's a need which comes out of domestic politics to have a convenient enemy of choice so no I don't think the reset ever could have worked and I think it's it's kind of one more expression of American vanity because the idea is that well we did something wrong and if we as long as we have some kind of course correction they have some kind of course correction it's all going to be okay but the problem was just much deeper than that yeah I mean you're not undermining the premise of what we're trying to figure out because the question is did we understand on the American side and then I'll ask you more about on the Russian side too it's like did we understand who we were dealing with and what their actual worldview was or were we projecting in that case of the reset I guess that's the question it was did the Obama Administration really understand Vladimir Putin really understand Russia as they were trying to deal with them I think the answer to that is fundamentally no the Obama Administration I think misunderstood Russia and also misunderstood what it would take to reorient American foreign policy the Obama Administration thought that we can repair relations with China and Russia will just somehow follow along one way or or the other I I don't think you can treat it that way I think Russia is an independent issue and you have to take Russia seriously along with the Europeans which is where the Obama Administration also went wrong we needed to be with the Europeans vis-a-vis Russia rather than imagining that we could go off and solve something with China which we pretty much completely failed to do what we didn't fundamentally didn't understand is that for the Russians it's not that there's a foreign policy problem and they want to solve it they don't want to solve the foreign policy problem they want to have the foreign policy problem in a form that they can handle so for the Russians the real foreign policy threat is not us where they're not really afraid of us they're really afraid of China but that fear is so deep and that geopolitical problem is so real that they prefer not to talk about it at all what they would rather do is have the Americans as the you know as the cartoon enemy basically because that works in domestic politics and it's not really risky because we're not ever really going to do anything is the basic is a basic idea so we can be more friendly or less friendly we can turn the dial this way or that way but it's not going to change that basic reality I mean in this period too is the Arab Spring is Obama who comes in a little bit skeptical of the freedom agenda of the Bush Administration and you know spreading democracy by the time you get to the Arab Spring the rhetoric at least is democracy is coming it looks like maybe Russia is part of it maybe other countries as well I mean from the Obama Administration was there a hubris about what was happening about whether they had to do anything or they could just support it rhetorically how do you see the Obama Administration at that point in the rhetoric of democracy especially in regards to Russia but in that era after the Arab Spring I don't I think the Obama Administration was right to talk about democracy I can't imagine a coherent American foreign policy honestly which doesn't talk about democracy I think if we think our system is better we should be advocating our system as being better the criticism I would have is that the hubris um is is more a matter of thinking the history is on your side and history is never on your side and as soon as you think that history is on your side you've got to reevaluate your assumptions because there's no such thing as history which can be on your side and I think the whole Arc of History bending towards Justice it's a nice it's a nice thing you know it's one would likes to one likes to believe things like that are true but there's no Arc of History it's not bending any particular direction um you can make democracies happen but to make democracies happen you have to first set a really good example yourself and second understand the countries that you're dealing with and in the case of the Obama Administration I think we dismissed Russia as weak rather than realizing that the people who run the Russian state are very intelligent that they have no desire to have democracy at all that they're not just going to wait and let it happen to them but instead they're going to go on the offensive and try to undermine it in other places this isn't to say though that everything is our fault when Putin looked at the Arab Spring or when Putin looks at Gaddafi it's absolutely right that he thinks their dictators I'm a dictator their tyrants I'm a Tyrant they end up in a cage I could end up in a cage he certainly thinks that because that is the logic of being a tyrant you know as we know from Plato to Shakespeare the logic of being a tyrant is that you're going to be afraid of ending that way In fairness to the Obama Administration and everyone else there is nothing that we could have done to stop that when you when you are the the the boss of bosses when you were the Tyrant you're going to be afraid of ending up in a cage what you're going to want is to die peacefully in your bed and that is a logic which is which is true and irresistible regardless of what American foreign policy is going to be so he was going to look at the Arab Spring the way he looked at it regardless of how we talked about it or what we did by the end of the administration the maidon seizing Crimea eventually they'll be the war in the East what was the message that Putin was sending in that or what was the message we should have been receiving at that moment well the message Putin had been sending since 2008 in Georgia was that he was willing to intervene militarily in his neighbors if he could get away with it and the if he could get away with it is really important because what America thought or Americans thought or our administration at that time thought is that we are winning the war of ideas we are winning the war of words history culture all that stuff is on our side but that was wrong what Russia was able to prove was that no as a matter of fact we can we can invade a country and we can make you think that didn't actually happen Russia invaded Ukraine and basically persuaded us that it didn't actually happen while Russia was invading Ukraine the most important thing that was happening in the minds of the West not just Americans were discussions about whether there'd been a coup in Ukraine or whether the ukrainians are all Nazis or maybe they're all gay or maybe they're all Jews depending on what social media you were following right the the Russians totally had our minds in a trap at that time and we were totally unprepared for that not just the Obama Administration but American public life in general they outsmarted us they ran circles around us and they did it by appealing to what they already knew about us because they were paying attention to us at least in the negative sense of knowing what our vulnerabilities were on social media so when they invaded Ukraine which they did in 2014 we were unable to talk about it that way we couldn't say War we couldn't say Invasion this basic realities of life we couldn't talk about because we got ourselves all tied up in these discussions which the Russians invented for us so what we were not prepared for was the possibility that actually the ideas and the culture and the digital technology were not working for us they were actually working for somebody else we were totally unprepared for that um and I think to this day we haven't quite figured out how we got that wrong and if anything it's the ukrainians in 2022 with their own social media and the own the way they're approaching it which are kind of teaching us how you might deal with the situation like that I mean we might have been unprepared before but Vladimir Putin straight out lies to Barack Obama says no I don't know anything about the little green men in Crimea I mean what lesson at that point if we weren't prepared for what was happening in the moment as the dust cleared and it became very clear what had happened and then by then what's going on in the East I mean what lesson did we take what lesson should we have taken back then yeah I think I I just really wouldn't want to underestimate how important the Russian propaganda was at that time because it's hard to take a lesson from something when you haven't really understood that that something is happening and in the American mind if you go back and read the Press from those weeks and months this is very clear it just wasn't clear that an invasion of Ukraine was happening I mean if there had been a single column story in the New York Times one day which it just said Russia invades Ukraine that would have been so much more useful than the endless discussions we had about a whole bunch of things which either were relevant or weren't happening but we couldn't get ourselves the moment where we just have a single column story saying Russia invades Ukraine we can't learn a lesson if we don't know the thing is actually happening the lesson that we should have learned in domestic politics is that the Russians have found techniques using social media to structure and frame what's going on they did that in 2014 when they invaded Ukraine and then they did it in 2016 to great effect when they intervened in our presidential elections using the same people the same institutions and the same techniques so once we had been had in Ukraine in 2014 we should have been better prepared for being had in 2016. I made that connection at the time and I tried to persuade other people that this was what was happening but so I remember this very vividly nobody was going along with that nobody thought there was anything we needed to learn from 2014 because we hadn't realized how much we've been fooled in 2014. which is by the time you're getting to the debate inside the administration which is about like do you send javelins do you send weapons to Ukraine I mean by that point it is clear who is involved and what has happened and was there a lesson you know by that point that wasn't learned I mean it sounds like a lot of people inside the administration were advocating for it and the president was really the one making the decision in that case what do you think of that decision and whether they were really understanding what was going on well I I think we were caught up in a world where fundamentally was going to be ideas and economics and they were fundingly on our side so therefore we make some public relations announcements and we have some sanctions and our job is done which was basically our policy I don't think we were in a world where we were thinking the ukrainians are real people and they might want to defend themselves I think that's fundamentally the problem that you know Russia is not an important country and the countries next are even less important and you know what do we what are we really going to do here what what what's you know you're asking me to kind of decode what the what the president himself thought and I don't know I could only talk about the kind of the factors which were around it but I think the thing that we basically didn't understand is that Ukraine could have defended itself if we had done in 2014 more like what we've done in 2022 we never would have gotten the 2022. I think all the dancing around about whether we send javelins or not was just bizarre and kind of a weird example of American vanity because you're not a party to a war because you give weapons if that were true then every country in the world would be a party to every war which is going on because we're constantly giving weapons and selling weapons we went on for years with this debate about whether we should arm ukrainians is obvious that we should have armed ukrainians if we'd armed ukrainians earlier and better I think we'd be in a better world now does Putin take a lesson from that Putin takes a lesson from Syria when we say there's a red line and there's not a red line and Putin takes a lesson from Ukraine when he's able to invade a country which is and sees territory which is a fundamental violation of everything that we say is the is the basis of our legal order the whole thing the idea that one country does not invade another country and Annex territory is the entire foundation of the United Nations and its Security Council of which Russian America are members and our reaction is minimal right and so of course he takes a lesson from that the lesson he takes from that is that this kind of thing can work if we gin it up properly and that's not the message that we really wanted to be sending at the time but I think the other lesson he took from that totally understandably is that if you can just get the Americans to talk about themselves you can get away with a lot of stuff right I mean we just we can't we we can't separate out the propaganda from the war itself because the Russians won a propaganda war in a way which a propaganda War has rarely been won in this Century in the past Century in any other Century it is very rare that a country country a invades country B and Country C talks about other subjects entirely um so one of the lessons he learned is that you can mess with the American political mind which he applies in 2016. if anything in 2022 he thinks we're too much of a pushover and he doesn't he doesn't work hard enough on the propaganda side because he just thinks we're just complete idiots um but you know which we turn out fortunately not to be is the conflict in Ukraine about democracy and about authoritarianism at that point we talked about how we had this rhetoric about democracy and about the Arab Spring and was that on the line then did the president realize that did we recognize it in those terms we we didn't take the maidon in Ukraine seriously enough so Russia invades Ukraine because it looks like Ukraine could become a functioning rule of law state which would join the European Union it doesn't have a whole lot to do with America what it has to do with is the possibility that a post-soviet country next to Russia where lots of people speak Russian which is in some ways not so different from Russia that that country could actually become a rule of law state a democracy and join the European Union that is what Russia needed to prevent in 2013 and that's what Russia needed the Britain 2014 when it invaded that's what was really going on it was really about democracy it wasn't about American Presidents talking about democracy different subject it was about actual democracy in Russia's actual neighborhood which is an actual threat to Putin the European Union is also an actual threat to Putin although they don't like to see themselves that way because the European Union shows that you can take flawed post-communist States and with a little bit of encouragement a little bit of Aid and some Norms you can make them into prosperous countries that would be very bad for Putin if his people actually believe that so from from Russia's point of view it was all about showing that Ukraine is actually a joke it's never going to join Europe I don't think we got any of that because we were taking neither the Russians nor the ukrainians seriously enough but that that that was a story about how ukrainians had understood that for their country to have a rule of law and defeat the protesters on the maidan the million people who came out of the maidan when they were pulled the thing they said was most important to them was the rule of law you know not language or other all the other things that we were obsessing about in the U.S what they wanted was the rule of law they wanted their country to be a normal country which could join Europe and that's what Russia needed to stop that's what it was all about and we the Obama Administration said very little and what it said it said very late about the maidan it's not something that we took very seriously unfortunately as we get to the election interference does Vladimir Putin we talked about this idea that we thought democracy had triumphed in the post-cold war and that it was going to go forward on its own does Vladimir Putin understand something about the weakness of America of American democracy that Americans don't or didn't understand at that time they always have the advantage of believing in the worst parts of human nature and we are not better than anybody else we may have better or worse institutions but we're not better than anyone else and the the KGB instinct the Soviet Instinct that every psychology has a weakness and the way that you perform your work and indeed perform your life is to find that weakness and expand it and exploit it that can work on us that can work on American democracy so I'm not I'm not sure that they understand us the normal sense that would understand I think they have a protocol that they follow and they use it in interrogations and that protocol they follow in interrogations where they seek out weaknesses also works on social media because remember the way they try to throw the election doesn't have to do with people in touch with people not really it has to do with the mechanical collection of data which reveals weaknesses so do Russians understand American racism no but do they understand that people reveal their racism on Facebook yes and so then they can appeal to racists on Facebook um do they understand what it's like to be an African-American in the U.S obviously not do they understand that African Americans might be sensitive to claims that Hillary Clinton is a racist yes they get that and so what they're doing is they're they're following a protocol which says look for the psychological weakness expand it exploit it hit it make everything about that and they're taking the data which social media provides to generate a coherent approach to trying to affect an American election I don't think they understand us I don't think they have to in order to follow this protocol any more than a KGB interrogator really had to understand a dissident in order to try to hurt that person exploit that person or turn that person when suddenly you have a president who's very different than all of the other presidents we've talked about who talk about democracy and freedom and going back to H.W bush and even to Reagan somebody from a completely different tradition what is the view if not personally from Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin from Russia as they're watching this new president come in so I hesitate to answer the question of what Putin is thinking about Trump just because I think they're thinking all kinds of things that we don't know I mean I think they have their views about how this person is going to destabilize America which are probably informed by data that we just don't have um the things that because they've obviously been paying attention to this man for a long time so just how they see him I think is is something we can't quite get to the end of it it's clear that Putin wanted Trump to win he said as much it's clear that he applauded Trump's idea that the European Union isn't really a thing and that NATO should perhaps be weakened um that's all clear because Putin has said so that's all absolutely clear in general what Trump does for Putin is he normalizes the Russian way of doing politics so Putin's view that democracy is a joke you can lie all the time politics is fundamentally about some rich guy becoming richer corruption is normal right Trump normalizes that for the whole world so it's a huge gift for Putin because the United States although it doesn't matter as much as it thinks it does it does matter a lot and so what what Trump did was he took Putin and he made Putin normal he put Putin at the middle Putin was now no longer something exceptional Putin was now normal thanks to Donald Trump and that had a tremendously negative effect on politics around the world I think was there something they were hoping to get from Trump I mean you talk about is it destabilizing America is it destabilizing the Western Alliance what are their hopes for that Trump presidency look it was a bonanza for them the way it actually turned out so we before we talk about what they were hoping the Trump Administration was just a feast for the Kremlin every day because what the Trump Administration delivered every day in its outrageous rhetoric in its disrespect for American institutions um and in the countless scandals was what Russian propaganda Outlets dreamed of they dream of the of of this kind of raw material which proves that democracy is a joke Trump is there to tell you that democracy is a joke that's that's what he's there to tell you he's there to tell you that the rules don't apply to everyone equally they don't apply to him he's there to tell you that might makes right he's there to tell you that you can lie every day not just in Russia but In America which you know that's what he did he lied every day all the time just like Putin so they had other hopes but Trump gave them the basic thing that they wanted which was an American Administration which was an embarrassment for everyone who cared about democracy and American Administration which showed that Russia was more normal right which that's what they crave they crave the rest of the world the Democratic world to say actually Russia's normal the way things happen in Russia is the way things happen everywhere else because if that's what people believe then there's no threat to Putin in his regime so Trump did Putin a huge favor just by his existence and his everyday Behavior I think they wanted an America which would pull out of NATO which they'll likely get in a second Trump Administration if there there is one or at least an attempt in that direction I think they they want it in America which would separate from the European Union which they got to a considerable extent in which the body Administration has had to work very hard to repair and again if there's another Trump Administration I think we can probably say goodbye uh for for quite a while to American European cooperation and one thing which they wanted which they got which they celebrated was a coup attempt they loved January 6th nobody loved January 6 more than the Russians did January 6th showed that all this stuff about peaceful transitions of power and consensus and the American Constitution they just loved it they lapped it up they reproduce it all the time they talk about it all the time that was that that was I mean Trump gave them four years which was one big gift but January 6 was like the rapping the beautiful rapping you know the package um which is which they'll just never forget I mean if he's elected again if he becomes president again I should say I'm I'm sure it'll come up with new things but January 6 was an extraordinary gift to Russia for Vladimir Putin however experienced at the time now talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union and what he saw in Germany as being such a staring time to see something like that happening on the steps of the capital after watching you know the West celebrating the fall of the Berlin wall and here are the images that are sort of reminiscent in America how much does he have taken that well I think he understands all of this in terms of vulnerability so he doesn't know why the Soviet Union fell apart Putin has no idea where the Soviet Union fell apart his whole story of why the Soviet Union fell apart is utter nonsense the story that they tell is that the Americans wanted to happen and therefore it happened which a were not that powerful and B and I was there at the time our policy in 1991 was to keep the Soviet Union together it wasn't to make it fall apart so but with the way he sees the world it's all just about power it couldn't have mattered that people in Lithuania or Ukraine had ideas about the Soviet Union it couldn't have mattered that there were legitimate disagreements inside Moscow you know none of that matters it's just about power the Americans showed their power and so now he was showing his power now it looks like the Russians are powerful look what we can do we can make a mess inside American politics which ends with Bloodshed on the steps of the capital and since we've shown that we're powerful what are we going to do next we're going to invade Ukraine because obviously this crew of people who can who can just barely get Biden into office this crew of people is not going to do anything about that so January 6th apart from anything else leads directly to the war in Ukraine because it it if it looks like America is not just morally discredited it looks like America is weak let's just pick up one thing about Ukraine which is we were talking about Ukraine as well you were talking about Ukraine as an example of this important conflict here between democracy and authoritarianism and being an actual conflict and not just rhetorical and Trump's approach to Ukraine which we know he described as sort of a corrupt country there's obviously the famous phone call what is Trump's approach to Ukraine tell us what does it tell us about democracy and authoritarianism and what would happen well and Trump's world is like Putin's world they're you know they're big guys they're little guys it's all about Force you respect you know you respect the person who can humble you therefore he you know therefore he respects Putin but he doesn't respect other people he respects Putin because he knows Putin helped him get to power he thinks that Russia is a great power and in this sense as in so many others his view of the world and Putin's view of the world overlap it's very it's very comfortable Russia has a great power the countries around Russia are not real places and of course Trump doesn't care at all about democracy he doesn't care about American democracy he doesn't care about anybody's democracy he's a gift not just a Putin but to all all dictators around the world especially the ones who came out of a quasi-democratic background because he seems to show you can start from democracy and end up in in tyranny right that's what Trump seems to show that's why he's so beloved among a certain class of dictator so what Trump does with Russia and Ukraine is he personalizes all of it it's all about Putin you know Putin I mean a lot of Americans have this problem we just talk about Putin Putin Putin Putin but Trump really personalizes it it's all about Putin Putin's one who really has power the ukrainians in zolenski who are those people they don't they don't really matter they're just secondary so might makes right naturally the Russians are going to do what they're going to do and when it comes to you know the the interaction between President Trump and President zielinski we see that the only thing which matters to Trump is staying in power personally because of course he needs to avoid prosecution and he needs to avoid challenges to his wealth so he needs to stay in power in order to stay in power he's willing to try to Blackmail Ukraine and its newly elected president by saying we're going to take weapons away from you unless you pursue this basically insane investigation which by the way all the Ukrainian investigative journalists know is bogus this insane investigation of the son of my of my arrival so he's he's not he's not taking Ukraine or zelinski seriously as a country they're just there to help him in his re-election campaign that's it in those statements the Ukraine's just a corrupt country I mean obviously there is corruption in Ukraine that it's just the corrupt country how did that play into that perception that conflict between democracy and authoritarian it's really important so all you know all countries have problems right so America has a problem with racism are we just a racist country it's pretty fundamental but we're not just a racist country other things are going on um all democracies have these issues is France a post-imperial country yes it is but there are other things going on in France that make France you know not a completely lost lost Republic um does Poland have a problem with Judiciary certainly it does and so on and so forth Ukraine has a problem with corruption absolutely Rick has a problem with Russian but that became a sort of Trope where thanks in part to Russian propaganda it was pushed to a degree where people would say well it's not really a state you know it's a failed state which is something the Russians said over and over again so what happens is that people use various things that are in some way or another kind of true about Ukraine in order to turn in order to turn Ukraine into a place that doesn't really exist so the language's question is another issue people in Ukraine speak two languages what's wrong with that I think it's kind of nice I wish more my students spoke two languages but somehow speaking two languages becomes bad it means you don't really know who you are it means they're not really a people and so on so these things which are kind of true in one way or another like the corruption or like the languages become an argument for saying Ukraine is not really a place and we are not really paying attention we're not really experts the Russians are taking these themes and they're driving them home as seriously as they can which leads us to this almost impossibly implausible situation of Donald Trump who is like the walking embodiment of corruption talking about how other people in other countries might be corrupt what was Joe Biden's approach was it different from other presidents well I mean I'm going to judge the Biden Administration from how it reacted to a crisis and the way they reacted to a crisis was to recognize that the crisis was real and that I think that does them credit they were right that Russia was going to invade Ukraine they were right to try to persuade other people that Russia was going to invade Ukraine and where I think they stand out boat from not just other Democratic but all the previous administration since 1989 is they were right to to believe that they couldn't handle the problem on their own you know that it wasn't they weren't going to be able to just say there's a red line or that they weren't able to just conjure up a coalition because they said so that they were actually going to have to do the hard work of getting a coalition together so I think that the bite Administration recognized that they're recognized that something terrible was going to happen and they they scratched their way towards coming to to some kind of coherent response to it I think that's that's all in their favor and I think they I mean I think the body Administration reacted they reacted quickly also in terms of the concepts that they were using you know it was no longer about how Russia was a failed Democratic project or Putin was someone we could do business with it was more about just actually taking the data as it was on the ground and trying to respond to it I think they did that pretty well I mean when you look at it from a western perspective I was from everybody except for Russia or at least Vladimir Putin's perspective it seems so illogical a war it seems so hard to understand why they would isolate why the threats against them wouldn't work why he would risk so much maybe even his life on this Invasion and had Putin changed did we just never understand him and it had always been there how do you explain that I think it's all the above I mean first of all Ukraine changed Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 saw generational change in leadership where a lot of talented and interesting people actually came to power Ukraine changed in the sense that 2014 the maidan the first war opened up a period of cooperation in civil society and human networks which weren't approved be very important in the 2022 War I think that we and the Russians were alike in the sense that we didn't really understand how much Ukraine had changed and how much Ukraine would be an agent in this story of a war how much this was not going to be a story of Russia humiliating America by invading Ukraine how this was going to be a story of Russia humility itself because ukrainians were going to fight back and win number two I think we always misunderstood Putin I think we always misunderstood him in the sense that we misunderstood Russia as a kind of failed transition to democracy Russia wasn't that Russia was an alternative to democracy which pretended to be a democracy and which functioned in its foreign policy by trying to destroy the democracies which are more real than it was but that said Putin also changed over time the cynicism gave way also to a certain mysticism a certain idea about Russia's Mission and his personal mission and how he would be remembered after he died that did change and if one follows his rhetoric in the last 10 years it's clear that he's reaching a point where he actually believes that Russia and Ukraine are one country and that this means that Ukraine will collapse when he invades but it also means that this is his opportunity to somehow make history right again which is the kind of thinking which it's understandable that democratically elected leaders are not going to really understand does Vladimir Putin understand Joe Biden does he understands what the American response will be does he also have an inability to understand what will happen if he invades Ukraine I think there's a there's a fundamental misunderstanding on the Russian side on Putin's side of people who are used to living in democracies because in some ways he's right we are slow we're complicated the various forces inside our countries end up canceling each other out but that doesn't mean that there aren't points where a fundamental sense of decency is involved and I think in Dante is an American public opinion but in European public opinion invading Ukraine across that line across that line for a lot of people and and here you can take President Biden as just as a person like other Americans or like others who just thought it totally invading a country with the aim of just of wiping it out of existence is it crosses a line which is not a political line but with some kind of line of human decency and I think it is a misunderstanding that Putin has about us that we don't that we are just as cynical as he I think that is a misunderstanding I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding when he says he's a murderous dictator he's a war criminal he should be gone I mean if it's a real breaking point or a real turning point in I mean certainly in these presidents we've seen from George W bush even before up till now how profound is that a break when Biden says that I think it's kind of refreshing for us honestly to be using this language which is more straightforward I think it's important for Americans to be used in a language which is more General and which is not of our own making because in our language there was 89 and 91 and democracy and it was inevitable and then maybe some people were going astray but to flat out say that what's happened in Ukraine is genocide which it is is to get out of our story of what's been happening the last 30 years and to bring in some more fundamental concepts which I think Biden has been doing and I think there's that's that what that involves fundamentally is recognizing our own mistakes that maybe more dramatic things have been happening that we have been not quite been able to look at and when we use the more dramatic language like war criminal for example we're recognizing our own mistakes it doesn't really matter for Russia the way that people think about us for Russia because there the Putin regime is always saying that we say things like this I mean so it was when we actually do it actually they don't actually cover it so we assume that when for example when Biden said that Putin had to go that that would have huge ripples in the Russian media and I'm here to tell you that it didn't I was following the Russian media after that if anything they tried to just kind of tuck it away on the side because it was a bit embarrassing it's much better for them to be in control of the story than it is for an American president to actually come out and say these things how dangerous is this moment how dangerous is it for Putin how dangerous is he well I think I think he's I think he's trapped in the conventional war that he's fighting so I think the chief danger of this war we should remember is for the ukrainians who are under Russian occupation the civilian deaths of Ukraine I think are are the worst thing about this war and will likely Remain the worst thing about this War I think he's in a conventional War which he's going to lose and I think the conventional Worthy is going to lose will likely have political ripples already is having has had for some time political ripples inside the Russian Federation and it may lead to his losing power I think it's pretty important for us not to get too emotionally involved as we have in the past with individual Russian leaders you know we want to go to Gorbachev to say we wanted Yeltsin to stay you know we don't like Putin but even so we're discomforted by the idea that Putin won't be in power they always fall from Power dictators always fall from power that it always happens and when it happens it's not something we should feel guilty or ashamed about we should just be ready for it and uh and be preparing our policy for for the next person so obviously the situation is very dangerous for Putin and poetically you know he's created the situation which could bring him down which didn't have to happen by mobilizing a million Russian soldiers to go fight a war which was utterly pointless in which many of them are going to die he's created the situation where he could fall he's gone back to a place like 1917 you know where where a Russian government is fighting a war it probably shouldn't have been fighting he's going back to like the 1560s and Yvonne the terrible like fighting a war he shouldn't have fought in creating domestic consequences which he may not be able to to deal with that's that's all on him and I think it's very important for the United States to recognize that these things have their own logic and we should really do our very best to try to deter nuclear weapon use we should do our very best to try to make this war in Ukraine end as quickly as possible which means to be clear the ukrainians winning it as quickly as possible because that's the only way it can end and how things turn out in Russia we shouldn't be talking about who we want to rule Russia that's not our business we shouldn't be talking about whether Russia should fall apart that's not our business if the Russians start a war and they lose a war let them figure out what what happens next don't talk too much about it just make sure that the right country wins the war and then you know the rest is up to the Russians themselves

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 1,992,658

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Id: um-SEQDQidM

Length: 57min 37sec (3457 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2023