Stephen Kotkin -Stalin’s Propaganda and Putin’s Information Wars

good evening and welcome to the cato institute i'm david bowes i am the very longtime executive vice president of the cato institute um it's my pleasure to welcome you to the fourth presentation in the joseph k mclaughlin lecture series this series recognizes dr mclaughlin's support for cato his scientific accomplishments and the broad range of his intellectual interests and the diverse speakers in this series have reflected his broad interests in science technology economics and more we appreciate the support and the presence of joe's wife gene rosenthal and his daughter allison and her husband and what better place for a broad range of important topics than the hayek auditorium which is named for a scholar who wrote books on economics political theory law psychology and the methodology of the social sciences and of course hayek wrote a great deal about socialism and the effort to eliminate markets and private property which today's mclaughlin lecturer has devoted his career to studying the 101 years ago this week lenin led the bolshevik revolution that ushered in the era of communism in russia and much of the world as it happens today is all saints day and tomorrow morning it will be all souls day when christians commemorate the souls of those who departed which is an unfortunately appropriate time to reflect on the record of communism no one knows that record better than our speaker today stephen cotkin is the john p birkeland 52 professor in history and international affairs at princeton university for 13 years he directed princeton's program in russian and eurasian studies he's the author of numerous books including two on the collapse of communism he is best known for his current project a three volume biography of joseph stalin two volumes have appeared so far the first on stalin's rise to power the second focused on his collectivization terrorization and geopolitics just before the outbreak of world war ii the book is a pulitzer prize finalist and just today the council on foreign relations announced that stalin waiting for hitler had been awarded its annual prize for the best book informing our understanding of the world and international affairs the new york times called the books masterly and monumental and said they will surely stand for years to come as a seminal account the historian john lewis gaddis calls them the contemporary history books he most admires and says that they made him repeatedly reconsider not whether joseph stalin was a monster but just what kind of monster he was the wall street journal reviews all the literature on stalin well i should probably say much of the literature on stalin and says only mr cotkins book approaches the highest standard of scholarly rigor and general interest readability at cato we defend liberalism against illiberal systems from across the political spectrum in the 1930s liberalism faltered as communists communists battled fascists for supremacy today as we see a resurgence of authoritarian factions and illiberal movements on both right and left it's our job to ensure that liberalism this time is more resilient please welcome our joseph k mclaughlin lecturer an incisive analyst of totalitarianism stephen [Applause] thank you for the honor of the invitation and for that wonderful introduction i'm sorry you didn't keep going it was so good i would really like to be able to live up to that introduction um so uh it's very nice to be this my first time in this building it's very nice to be in a group that understands and values and defends liberty as you know there are many enemies of liberty and even worse there are people willing to give it away so it's nice to keep remembering the fight that produced it and that is necessary to keep it so that's going to be one of the principal themes of my lecture so [Music] i took this picture myself uh that's uh president vladimir putin riding the american eagle which is pretty much our understanding of russia today here in the united states this is another important picture you'll you'll recognize the great sportsman leonard brezhnev who was the uh leader of the soviet union for 18 years uh during the sort of late soviet period and so these are our images of russia or this passes for a debate about russia today in the u.s this image which is the predominant one about russia now and this image which is sort of our understanding of that soviet phenomenon about how it decayed it degraded it got flabby it wasn't really a big threat anymore and so somehow now it's a really big threat but towards the end the soviet union wasn't a big threat well as you know leon and brezhnev had um one-third the size of the u.s economy at peak and this guy has about 1 13th depending how you measure it's not easy to measure do you use uh purchasing power parity do you use absolute gdp how do you measure soviet economy they didn't have real prices these are approximations but nonetheless about 1 13th and about one-third american economy double the population that this guy has 40 000 nuclear weapons a 40 000 uh tons of chemical weapons and of course the biological weapons program that the cia didn't really know about fully until after the soviet union collapsed so the soviet union was a massive massively armed state 5.3 million men under arm six hundred thousand troops in eastern europe four hundred thousand troops in east germany alone and so we wouldn't want to mistake the size of the threat that each of these posed in their day this is the rest of the policy debate that we have currently in the us first that there's this russian president riding the american eagle then there was this flabby degrading declining soviet union certainly nothing compared to the current russian offensive and then there's this bizarre admiration that's going on that we're so we seem to need an investigation of to get to the bottom of when it's right there in front of our face so sadly this is what i understand to be the current policy debate in the u.s about russia i get many invitations to talk about policy and those three slides with the assumptions built into them are account for the majority of the questions that i usually get from the audiences and these are people who pay a close attention to foreign affairs okay so i don't think that this is correct okay now we're now at the point in the lecture where i'm supposed to pivot and i'm supposed to tell you that there's this really deep problem threat to freedom soviet union russia and connect stalin to putin because that's the only way you can talk about a stalin book to an educated audience is to connect it to the current affairs and also you're looking to get that booking on msnbc and they're not going to book you on msnbc otherwise known as red army tv unless of course you can connect the history to the present somehow so as i say this would be the point in the lecture where i would pivot am i supposed to stand up here i'm sorry i left the cage did i frighten anybody it's one of those things that'll be on the news later that the the animal escaped from the zoo and they needed the tranquilizer gun i'm not very good at giving lectures i never really figured this out so i pace this guy also paced as you know he paced because his bones hurt his joints hurt he had all sorts of uh arthritic and and other ailments i pace because i'm trying to figure out what to say okay so so this is where i supposed to pivot now and connect stalin to putin the soviet union to russia in a more serious way based upon history the problem is is that stalin and lenin together killed 18 to 20 million people most of it was stalin and so the idea that there's something close between these two regimes you have to be very careful because the scale of the horrors is just off the charts under communism as david referred to in his introduction and as bad as the current regime is and let's be honest the current regime in russia is a gangster regime as bad as it is it's just not comparable to this kind of stuff stalin was the master of the smear but he controlled the public sphere fully and so uh you couldn't defend yourself against the smear putin's regime is good at the smear but is not really on the same level so what are we going to do instead right you can see the slyness in both of the pictures let's also talk a little bit now as a preface about uh the information wars and russia's interference in our democracy just as by way of background so in the 1990s there was a very big russian money laundering scandal and a lot of money which was stolen inside russia was laundered outside and we got all worked up about this russian money laundering scandal well was it a russian money laundering scandal it was actually the bank of new york that laundered the money now the bank of new york denied that they were involved in these operations they've never admitted guilt to the extent that they were brought to court they paid only court fees rather than a significant settlement but my proposition to you is that the russian money laundering was the western financial system laundering russian money and so imagine that vladimir putin was sitting around working in the fsb and he had a great idea he decided to find a kid at harvard in a dorm room make the kid not finish harvard but instead start a business have this business grow and connect the whole world together and then use this person use this instrument use this business which later would become world famous as facebook in order to overturn democracies in the world and it was a brilliant idea that he had to take this kid at harvard and to build up this system and it worked my point is simply that the russian information wars are again an american problem just like the bank of new york uh accusations charges of money laundering of russian money the russians stole the money and today and the bank of new york was accused of laundering it but without the western financial system the russians really couldn't have done anything so without the ecosystem that we have created and we are the issue it's our technology so the putin information wars are not really putin information wars they're american information wars and we have to solve this problem his nasty behavior has further indicated to us that we have a problem so all right have you been to the russian high-tech industry i've been there it's in tel aviv and the reason it's in tel aviv is because the russians don't have a civilian high-tech industry they do nothing but hemorrhage intellectual capital their intellectual capital is everywhere but russia it's sitting right here in this room and their high-tech industry is in israel so once again is it putin's information wars he doesn't have a civilian high-tech industry he's got some military high tech but nothing compared to what the united states has and that he's using so in understanding the russian phenomenon and the challenges that it presents a lot of it has to do with our institutions our technology our behavior our governance our lack of governance etc so okay now if you want to talk about the specifics of what's going on in russia it's very depressing all right here they are taking over the world on cable television by the way have you noticed that the the democrats have their cold war which is with russia but the republicans have their own cold war which is with china and that each side prefers its own cold war so the democrats prefer to talk about the russia threat and now the republicans prefer to talk about the chinese threat back in the actual cold war they shared there was one cold war was the soviet union and they each had a piece of it now they've got their own so the russian threat which seems to loom very large is not as big on the republican side as now the chinese threat is becoming okay so if you think about what's going on in russia the the degradation of the human capital the continued lack of diversity of the economy the demographic situation all the things that you and other experts know about right there's no long-term pattern of modernization of investing in social capital and people of building infrastructure of gaining the kinds of necessary structural attributes that sustain power over the long term there's tremendous spoilation and there's asymmetric taking advantage of those things that we do wrong or don't or should do better but there is no aggrandizement of russian power over the long term russia's grand strategy is hang on cause trouble and when the west collapses will be okay in other words relative to the west russia is terrible so if the west collapses russia is okay china at this point will also have to collapse for them which is something they didn't plan on 15 or 20 years ago so we need to be clearer about the nature of the russian threat because as you know the bigger threats get the bigger certain things around threats also get so as to repeat it's a gangster regime but it is not an existential threat and it can be dealt with in a way that doesn't require 24 7 attention or massive investments in the kinds of things that we did during the cold war okay so this is uh if you've been to the white house recently that's the white house now and you can see it's been rebranded at the top says trump now so we focus quite a bit obviously on the circus act that we have uh here in town and there's something to that obviously it's the business model for the media now on both sides uh to have the trump it's also as anders ocelon and i were talking before and it's our business model because the more chaos or seeming chaos or apparent chaos the more we get invited to give lectures about the chaos but this is another thing the lecture is not going to be about right now let me just see if if we're done yet so i'm getting to the lecture itself i know you've been waiting patiently i know this hasn't been very good but the lecture is now coming so this is a roundabout way of saying that we need to reorient our thinking a little bit because we're kind of caught up in a certain um day-to-day entertainment infotainment complex uh etc okay so what what do i see as the main things that we should understand where should what should this lecture be about that's where we are now i know i'm not allowed off the stage and i don't have to go off the stage now because usually i go off the stage in order to check on the sales of the j crew sweatpants and the facebook updating the updating of the profiles on facebook and the other things that happened during my lectures but i see no laptops open right now during this lecture so there's actually no reason for me to leave the stage you think i'm kidding you think anything i've said has been ingest it's all been serious so this is the thing we have a new version of authoritarianism and that's the thing to understand and it goes something like this there are four attributes to modern authoritarianism the definition of modern authoritarianism is the rule of the few in the name of the many in the old days we had the rule of the few in the name of the few that was aristocratic rule or various other versions now we have the rule of the few in the name of the many that's modern authoritarianism and the key thing about modern authoritarianism is the absence of serious limits on executive power so there are four attributes to this one is you have to have a big repressive apparatus you got to be able to repress physically repress information repress a big repressive apparatus you can't have too efficient a repressive apparatus because then you could get in trouble because they could repress you so you need a big repressive apparatus for your domestic population but it has to be subdivided into many different competing rival organizations and it has to be ipso facto inefficient if it's too efficient right you end up being on the receiving end of the efficiency of the repressive apparatus as the ruling group or the ruler so we see you need this this is a precondition repressive you give me a repressive apparatus i can get a lot of things done the problem is is that it's not enough you need a second piece i'm going to give you four and the second piece is this the second piece is cash flow cash flow is really critical for an authoritarian regime why we have this silly understanding now it's true it's only in academia that authoritarian regimes go into a bargain a social bargain with their population they promise to grow the economy and the population relinquishes its liberties or its freedoms for the time being as the economy grows right there's no such bargain because if the regime fails to grow the economy the regime doesn't say i'm sorry we didn't keep our hair for the bargain and therefore uh we're gonna leave power now we stopped growing the economy and we had this deal where you gave up your civil liberties and we were in power while we were growing it but we failed to grow it so we're sorry we're leaving now no they just repress they don't leave power however they don't need to grow the economy what they need is cash flow they need liquidity the easiest way to get cash flow is when you just pick it up from under the ground right you extract hydrocarbons you extract diamonds or silver or all sorts of other things or you hack it you go into somebody's central bank and you transfer money from their account to your account or you counterfeit a hundred dollar bills on moss or whatever it might be cash flow is absolutely critical to an authoritarian regime it's also the most significant point of vulnerability what human rights was in the 70s 80s in battling authoritarianism anti-corruption and going for the jugular on cash flow should where should be where policy is today it's fine to fight for human rights and think campaign for human rights it's not as effective as it once was however anti-corruption choking the cash flow off kicking them out of the international banking system closing down the offshoring all of those things get them at the jugular they cannot function putin's regime does not bank in north korea they bank in frankfurt they bank in vienna they bank in liechtenstein they bank in london they bank in new york those are the places where these regimes are vulnerable as we saw with the north korean case and the iranian case very good sanctions that came out of the treasury department so they need that cash flow that's the second attribute the third attribute is control over life chances control over life chances sounds uh easy but for example if you can open a business by yourself well then you don't have to pay obeisance to the regime if there's a big private sector if you're not dependent on the state for employment or for your kids to go to school or for yourself to get housing or for yourself to go on holiday or whatever it might be if you're not dependent on the state if they don't control your life chances you have a lot more space in a regime like that so the more there's state control over the economy state control over education state control over housing right the more empowered these regimes are this textbook so their ability to control life chances often takes place in denial of access right kick you out of school kick you out of your job and so when you see numbers for state employment fifty percent of the economy is state employment eighty percent of the economy you know and when you see that there aren't as many private universities or private elementary schools right control over life chances this is critical to authoritarian regimes those regimes that don't control life chances are at risk all the time you see with the communist party in china right now it's doing this difficult dance with the private sector right it encouraged the private sector because it needed the wealth but now it's afraid of the private sector because what is the private sector it's freedom it's people's ability to establish businesses school their children go on holiday to live with nobody controlling their life chances right and so you think the communist party is now going to do a major liberalization in china and open up or reduce its control over life chances obviously it's going in the other direction right because there's a major threat to the regime from the power that people accumulate in a private sector okay and the fourth piece is what i call the well or the ideological piece that's where you have to invent stories you have to invent powerful narratives that speak to people and speak to their fears and speak to them your their dependence on you so the control over life chances gives you a lot the cash flow is fundamental the repressive apparatus you can't do without it but when push comes to shove it's the narratives right the ability to talk about internal enemies and external enemies oh you know you got a big package here they could be the ethnicity that's a minority they could be romo or gypsies they could be jews they could be serbs versus croats they could be immigrants they could be anything right so this well right you put the bucket down the well and you bring up the stories about the great past that you once had that they're trying to take away from you they're trying to prevent you from reclaiming this great past who well you you're external and but they're internal enemies like a fifth column and who are they and you go through and this ability to tell stories persuasive stories is very impressive some of these authoritarian regimes are amazing they're absolutely stunning in their ability to manufacture these stories which are about fear insecurity reclaiming a great past the prevention of the unequal treaties humiliation by the outside powers right it's one after another they're about grievance and they're about hopes and dreams that are blocked but some leader or some group is going to realize these things so if you put these four pieces together that's modern authoritarianism there's a lot of overlap with totalitarianism yes they did all of these things too but the scale is very different you see you can be violence is very costly so you don't have to have a lot of violence it's kind of like an accordion stalin like this putin more like this more selective in the application of the violence you're violent but you're not the gigantic violence that you had back then right and so this modern authoritarianism doesn't have to be as xenophobic like an accordion you can open or close the xenophobia you need more xenophobia you open up the sluices a little bit you get by without it because it's potentially destabilizing violence and xenophobia are potentially difficult to manage so if you can get by without heavy violence and without xenophobia it's a lot easier to rule the last piece i said there were four attributes the last piece is the international system and whether it's conducive or corrosive of authoritarianism this is not something that the authoritarians themselves control when it's the repressive apparatus and the cash flow and the control over life chances and the stories that they're able to manufacture they have a lot of control over that but the international system they have less control over right meaning right um where do they bank or is there somebody promoting democracy intelligently and vigorously that's threatening them right is the international system conducive or corrosive of these authoritarian regimes well right now you see that that factor it ceased to work against them and now they're turning it more and more to their advantage so that was the big surprise and that's the thing where the modern authoritarianism that we had is on the offensive and we're surprised by it but once again to refer to the earlier part of the conversation it's our instruments that are at their disposal that enable them to make the international order less corrosive and maybe even conducive to their rule so we need to focus not only or even predominantly on the art on their nastiness but on our failings our vulnerabilities our institutions the things that we can have under our control to make the international factor less conducive to them and maybe even to undermine some of these attributes that they have that make their regimes sustainable at least in the short run authoritarian regimes are inherently unstable i see i'm not that bad with time authoritarians are inherently unstable for all sorts of reasons as i pointed out there they're um inefficient by design because if they get too good at what they do they have an internal coup so they make themselves inefficient they make themselves less good at what they do on purpose another inherent instability in authoritarian regimes is the succession mechanism right meaning they don't have legal succession mechanisms they tend to have uh uncertainty built in is the ruler going to get sick is the ruler maybe going to die who's going to take over if the ruler gets sick or dies are is our property going to be protected is our liberty going to be protected if there's a change you get ambitious people who worry mubarak is 80 years old and has cancer and his son gamal is not taking seriously by the rest of the elite so their property and maybe even their lives are at stake so the elite is not going to stay with mubarak all the way there's an inherent instability in all authoritarian regimes and when courageous people come out in the streets maybe the internal elite will say you know what this is our opportunity to protect ourselves in the uncertainty of the absence of secure succession mechanisms okay so they're inherently unstable but however when they collapse they can often collapse into themselves again another version of the regime comes back from the instability so we look at the putin regime and we see for example protests in the streets we see courageous people and these people are definitely courageous they're risking their lives certainly risking their livelihoods potentially their relatives and their children's livelihoods often by taking these actions right so we have to understand that courage at the same time the dynamic of instability the threat from the putin regime comes from within it comes from other elites looking around and seeing either opportunity that they can rise up or grievance that they've been pushed aside or the uncertainty of the succession mechanism which puts everything they do at risk so this doesn't mean that the putin regime is collapsing but it does mean that there's not only degradation in russia but inherent instability in that regime right now as we speak in this room we're unable to take advantage of that instability because we don't really have a russia policy as we discussed at the beginning of the lecture it would be better to have a russia policy so if it's okay let me conclude with that the idea of a russia policy right um if you've accepted what i've said already you you don't like the facile analogy between the totalitarian stalin and the current putin however you also understand that putin is a very significantly nasty regime and is not our friend and not out for our interests and we have to do something about it you also understand that that regime has certain capabilities but a lot of those capabilities are ours remember i said the problem was there are a lot of people who are trying to overthrow liberty their enemies of liberty and then there are other people who want to give it away which is even worse that's the bigger problem the much bigger problem okay so what about policy where do you go from this right so i'm not making the argument that what i study tells you everything you need to know about the putin regime right i'm not one of these idiot savants who knows something about fascism and therefore says that you know trump is fascism look look what's happening look at the rhetoric because i know something about fascism yeah trump is fascism you can see for example the glei has already taken place the court system has been taken over by the nazi party they've eliminated all other political parties uh there is no more freedom of the press because they closed down all the media institutions there are several million uh paramilitaries who march in uniform throughout the streets yeah trump is fascism i get that argument right so we don't want to make that argument about putin either that putin is communism right that putin is stalinism that putin is stalin we have to avoid that kind of simplicity and that doesn't mean we're going to let this regime off the hook okay so how about policy so where do you start with russia policy you don't want to end up where russia is the center of attention and you're spending all your time talking about it and inviting people uh to cato to talk about russia when you could have had a good lecture about something important right you want to have a russia policy where russia is not the center of your attention meaning whatever you're doing with russia it can't be some gigantic mobilization 24 7. on the other hand you can't have no russia policy at all which is what we currently have so where's the needle to be thread here on russia policy so let me start with a couple of premises and then i'll offer a a few concrete things and then we'll pull the plug and see if there are any questions objections uh relief whatever it might be the six o'clock evening slot is not the easiest slot i'm sure you've had better but i got to tell you i i do better in the morning slot the launch time slot right the six o'clock evening slot is really something all right and i'm not even allowed to get off the stage it's the caged animal problem right the muskrat who escaped from the zoo so versailles treaty 1919 remember the versailles treaty there's a critique of the versailles treaty and it goes like this the peace was punitive they accused germany alone of being responsible for the war they made germany pay these giant reparations it was very unfair this punitive peace contributed to instability and the rise of hitler the versailles treaty was wrong there's another critique which is less prominent but also there which has to do with oh no the treaty was fine the germans were really the problem but the british didn't have the willpower to enforce the treaty they failed to do their job and be the the great power to enforce the versailles treaty the basis simple but these are the basic arguments in the literature on the versailles treaty no one's going to rehabilitate the versailles treaty it's kind of like trying to rehabilitate chamberlain for example invite me back again which won't happen but if you did i'll do that lecture the rehabilitation of chamberlain lecture that's the hardest that's like the most difficult dive at the olympics that's like the triple jackknife dive the chamberlain lecture okay so both arguments are wrong about the versailles treaty why because the versailles treaty is a complete anomaly it's the only time 1919 it's the only time since bismarck's unification of germany when both german power and russian power were simultaneously flat on their back that hasn't happened that didn't happen before and it hasn't happened again and so you could confidently predict that either one or both of these powers would come back at some point remember the versailles treaty was against germany without russia russia was not invited to participate and the treaty was imposed on germany but you couldn't have a treaty without germ against germany without russia that would last because it's an anomaly in fact in a single generation both german power and russian power came back they were great powers again within a single generation not one but both and so lo and behold the british spent the entire inner war period trying to revise the versailles treaty that's right before hitler came to power in 1933 the british were convening international conferences to get germany into the post-world war remember genoa in 1922. in fact they toyed with the idea of even bringing the communist soviet russia into the international order to stabilize the situation it didn't work we all know and there was world war ii so fast forward to 1991. here we have german power in some ways a better because you get unification of germany right but we have russian power flat on its back and then there's a settlement that's imposed the settlement because it doesn't stop in 1991 it moves after 1991 and the russians are absolutely powerless to do anything about this imposition of the settlement in 1991 but they don't like it boris yeltsin is telling the ukrainians and everybody else who listen that crimea is russian territory this is 1991 as the soviet union collapse is becoming more real he's telling the ukrainians how did you get crimea crimea is ours but he couldn't do anything about it he could do nothing about it has anybody read the just declassified telephone conversations between president clinton clinton and president yeltsin they're fantastic they're amazing they show you the incomprehension and arrogance on the american side and the pathetic unbelievably pathetic pathetic quality on the russian side begging begging don't do this don't do that but unable to get their way and enforce their will so lo and behold the russians now they still don't like the 1991 settlement but they can do something about it which is something they couldn't do in 1991. this is versailles treaty 1919 this is a version of it you can argue you can argue that the treaty was punitive that russia was cheated that russia should have got a better deal in 91 that we screwed the russians over whatever you however you want to make that argument or you can argue that you know what the treaty was fine they lost the cold war they were a menace and we earned our victory we stood up to that menace they collapsed collapsed from within based in part upon our pressure and therefore we need to enforce that 1991 settlement just like the british should have enforced 1919 well we signed a treaty where we were going to protect ukraine's sovereignty uh if they gave up their nuclear weapons were signatories to that treaty and they gave up the nuclear weapons and russia took the crimea and what did we do it kind of looks like we're the british here it kind of looks like we're shrinking from the responsibility of enforcing that settlement so you can either exhort us to send a quarter million troops your people in this room or your children or grandchildren to be stationed to evict the russians from crimea and eastern ukraine and to stay there so the russians don't come back or we can recognize that we were bluffing that we did that when russia was not a great power anymore and they are a power again they're not a power on the level they were before but they keep collapsing and collapsing and collapsing and yet they're still there so we need a relationship with them where we don't have to appease them we don't have to give in to them we don't have to surrender to them but we can't pretend that we're going to do things we're not going to do like send a quarter million troops to ukraine to evict the russians from ukraine and to stay there permanently if we're going to do that fine but i just don't see the appetite in the united states for that kind of sustained confrontation maybe there are other ways to deter russia short of that but ultimately and there are in my view but ultimately we need a relationship with russia that recognizes that they exist that they're still there this doesn't mean rewarding good behavior but it does mean excuse me for this word being realistic about our ability to overturn or uh what russia did and or defend that settlement from 1991 which was an anomalous situation when russia was flat on its back and is no longer in that situation so my view is we need to deter russia but we need to deter them in those areas where we're really strong it doesn't make sense to fight against russia in those areas where they have an advantage so in eastern ukraine the russians have a greater advantage than we have they're right next door they're going to stay there for a really long time on the other side of the border i mean even if we evict them and ukraine itself is a difficult proposition in terms of its stability to necessarily stake the western order on now people say that ukraine was cheated and i agree with that however is it ukraine that we should take the stand against russia where they have strengths and we have weaknesses why can't we take the stand against russia where we have the strengths and they have the weaknesses and begin to deter some of this behavior but if you do the deterrence if you show the strength you need a negotiation process you need bargaining you need diplomacy otherwise the strength of deterrence is wasted you can't do sanctions for 300 years you could do them for a certain amount of time and they're necessary and i applaud them what's the next step where do we want to get in the relationship how can we get to a place where they're not incentivized to do spoilation but they're incentivized to do either less spoilation or even to cooperate and so we need a deal which revises the 1991 settlement and you're going to say to me that's crazy that's unfair that's immoral that's just i mean look what the russians did and i agree what they did but the crimea is going back to ukraine the day after texas goes back to mexico if you think that it's likely that texas is going back to mexico then it's likely that crimea is going back to ukraine if you don't think texas is going back to mexico then you need an alternative strategy for defending ukrainian sovereignty and for deterring russian aggression and that has to be where we're strong which is obviously in that jugular that i was talking about the finances the anti-corruption we have sanctions in place they're just not very serious they could be much more serious we could ratchet up and put tremendous pressure this would require as many of you know that we deal with some of these things like our own offshoring like our own fonseca law firm like many of those vulnerabilities on our side that they're exploiting and so we have to come to grips with the fact that the problem is here rather than there in order to deal with the problem that's over there thank you for your attention thank you very much we will open the floor to questions we will bring microphones around so i wait for them to get the mic well no you point out somebody and then somebody will bring a mic to that yes sir i see here and then i see a woman over there go ahead it's okay i do a madeleine albright and i stand on the elevated usually she did it behind the podium thank you for the great lecture it was really good a real quick one how's the third book coming uh thank you for asking and do you work for penguin publishers uh yeah the third book is a massacre it is very difficult it's world war ii and a cold war and in fact it doesn't end in 1953. because stalin after he's dead is still the biggest personage in that country so it is it's it's occupying it's taken over my life and it's still years away and i hope the interest is still there when the thing actually eventually comes out but thank you and um um it's a long way from new york from penguin offices to come down here to ask that question but i appreciate it yes we had a woman over there you mentioned ratcheting up sanctions to cut off the cash flow how would you get europe on board with increasing sanctions and is there a fear that overusing sanctions will make the tool ineffective so you've got to make the case that what you're doing is necessary and justified if you just announce things if you just do things because you're america and you don't have the kind of consultative process and you don't bring forward the evidence in the public sphere where it can be verified debated right then of course you can't bring anybody on side remember there are a lot of financial interests and business interests at stake but look what the germans did the germans were willing to sacrifice significant business and financial interests to recalibrate that relationship with russia right and that was a big step for them and they were willing to do it and they had an internal discussion and a public debate and why it was necessary and the business community didn't resist fully and many of them joined voluntarily so let's take something as simple as the russian planes that buzz our airplanes or that buzz our ships right i believe that we should shoot those planes down yeah honestly i believe that how would you go about doing that well you would videotape the incident and then you would make that videotape of the incident available of the of the buzzing available to all the media globally in fact you would allow the media on board to videotape if they want and then you would say this behavior is inappropriate and it shouldn't happen and then of course they would do it again and you would videotape it again if you didn't have the evidence you couldn't do anything but if you videotaped it again and it showed their aggressive action and it was a second time then you could issue a warning and then you can say uh if you do this again there will be consequences and then they think you're bluffing and they buzz you again and if you have the third buzz video taped just like the first two then you can shoot it down because you videotaped the first two and you've issued the warning and the evidence is there and the europeans are not going to say that the americans are making this up and then you shoot the plane down and what happens russia declares war on the united states because their 1.5 trillion dollar economy is going to take on the american economy right they're small special forces that seized crimea where they already had a military base and where the ukrainians decided they wouldn't fight they're going to overrun u.s assets abroad i don't think so they're going to show that they're bluffing by buzzing our planes but then after you've shown the evidence and you've taken the deterrent action then you need the secretary of state secretary of defense mattis to say this is a terrible incident we didn't want this to happen we issued a warning now how do we have a dialogue so that this doesn't happen again and we get to a better place because if it happens again we're going to have to shoot them down again but we don't want to do that right this is how you do deterrence i mean where did we lose this skill so that's the same thing you do in the financial system first you reveal the evidence you begin to close down some of your own vulnerabilities and then you begin to issue warnings and you say you know if you keep doing what you're doing we're going to have to remove remove you from the international banking system we don't want to do that it would be terrible if we had to do that we don't want to collapse your economy that would be not good for you and maybe we would have to pay a price for that too but if we're forced to do that we'll do it and we'll do it with our partners and we'll do it with the evidence and so this is how you this is how you're a superpower not by declaring unilateral acts but by gradations right of deterrence with evidence revealed to the public so it can be assimilated verified and debated and then a negotiation process reagan didn't show strength because he wanted to beat his chest he wanted to get a bargain where they we bargained from strength so we don't want to talk about your re-education archipelago in wigan really we don't want to do that but you know if you keep stealing our technology we're going to have to form a weaker government in exile i'm so sorry we have to do that i'm so sorry we're going to have to defend taiwan with more significant weapon systems and we don't want to do that we don't want a war but if you're going to force us to do this we're going to create governments in exile we're going to go on a massive anti-corruption campaign because where's the chinese money we're going to cut you off from this and cut you off from that we're going to evict your students from the universities we don't want to do this that's terrible we're an open society we want international exchange so here's what you have to do for that not to happen and here's the dialogue we're going to have so that we get to that better place right this is foreign policy 101 deterrence from strength calibrated so as not to escalate beyond your control combined with diplomacy negotiation skills and a sense of where you're going to get the relationship to go you can't get everything in a negotiation so with putin there are some things we're going to have to concede and crimea is one of those things but you got to extract the price what's the price well you give them 25 years process of recognition of crimea and it depends on their behavior elsewhere and if the end of the 25-year process or whatever you can get the 15-year process if their behavior has been acceptable to you then you can formally internationally recognize but they have to pay compensation for it they can't just have it for free and moreover they have to evacuate from eastern ukraine from abkhazia and essecia from that other trash afghanistan transnistria they got to get out and then if they go back in then we during that long period of time then we don't have the formal process of it's got to be gradation so that their behavior is incentivized in a certain direction so we need a bargain over the 91 settlement and we need to use those instruments which are at our command but we need to have a sense that the relationship is going to go somewhere where we're going to make some concessions as well as extract major concessions from them you know we have to do diplomacy again for example we'll need a state department again right yes okay i think this gentleman over there and then this one in the front our our leadership is going to pull the plug on this when uh we'll put stick a fork in it when it's done thank you yeah so basically russian patriots so-called patriots proposing russians say that the west would like to see russia collapsed but it will never do this because russia is so strong and powerful and and proud and so on and so on the opponents of putin say that actually the west can very easily bring russia on its knee there are tools like for example i can go on and on about what it can do yeah but the question is they say that united states the west the united states specifically would not like to see russia to collapse because it would be too heavy price for the west itself what do you think about it yeah so we could potentially try to collapse russia and then we could have china on the border with hungary you like that idea i don't like that idea you know i'm not bismarck i don't have that kind of skill right but uh there's balance of power there's a world out there and russia is part of our world in addition we could collapse russia and we could get russia back this is the thing about uh we if you've ever seen the westerns those hollywood movies where they were white hats and black hats the white hats are the reformers the black cats are the people we call the anti-reform the reactionaries and so we have white hats in iran we have white hats in russia we have white hats everywhere where we're looking sometimes we don't see that the white hat and the black cat is actually a stripe down the middle and it goes around and it's white and it's black and it's white anyway so we got these we got this idea that we could do better we could get a gorbachev type guy back we could get a yeltsin back maybe we could get a reformer back it's possible tell me right now what the historical popularity is of all those pro-western russian reformers are historical figures as opposed to the historical popularity of the anti-western uh leaders of that country the numbers don't look very good do they yeltsin and gorbachev single digits in gorbachev's case under one percent stalin good numbers really big numbers he puts up on the board still today so the white hat black hat thing it's not a stable proposition necessarily you got to take the world as it is collapsing russia okay maybe we could try and if we succeeded we would get russia again and if we succeeded too much we would get china expanded in greater eurasia potentially right watch right now you see the china russia contest for iran we think everything's about us china and russia are going toe-to-toe over iran why does russia support iran and syria why does russia support the iranian militias elsewhere because if russia turns on iran iran becomes a satellite of china potentially they lose iran fully to china and china just keeps eating russia's lunch across eurasia so this is how we have to think about we have to live up to our values at home we have to have restraints on executive power at home we have to have an impartial professional judiciary we got to have a parliament whether we like the way it functions or not if you do away with the congress it's a lot worse than if you see the congress in its current state right so we got things where we got to live up to our values and support our institutions at home and then we got to live with the world in a way that advances american values without the kind of over extension backfiring that we have so samuel huntington what did he say is huntington okay in this building sam huntington said we've done it exactly wrong we've done crazy diversity at home and universalism abroad one worldism abroad one american system imposed on everybody and at home we've hyphenated like crazy and huntington says no it's universalism at home it's civic americanism civic citizenship civic nation at home and it's recognition of diversity abroad to deal with the world as it is so that lesson that hunting it's an eternal lesson right that's that's kind of where we got to get to while also still living up to our values it's not easy what i'm saying right we're a democracy every foreign policy has to be rooted in the majority in the people right you can't have a foreign policy that works at cato or that works at heritage or that works at brookings it's got to work in america it's got to work in electoral politics it's got to work in a democratic setting so you can get up here and make a brilliant speech about restraint i've made those speeches not brilliant about restraint but how do you do restraint rooted in the american populous the american populace gets over extension they bought into that the american populace gets abdication that's where we are now between overextension and abdication the smart policy is restrained it's universalism at home recognition of difference abroad but how do you root that in a democratic majority how do you tell stories about that so that's successful how do you get that to work in an electoral democracy we're very far from having that kind of foreign policy hi so i'm wondering um do you think that competitive authoritarian regimes can form values-based alliances or these regimes based too much in self-interest to have meaningful lasting partnerships and as a little sub-clause on that question can you define illiberalism [Music] so illiberalism is anti-liberal in the 19th century constitutional order sense not democracy necessarily but the the old liberal which has been confused with the modern liberal so illiberal is anti-system we have people today who are anti-system in the american public sphere they are illiberal in their thoughts and what they say should happen in their critique of the judiciary the press the congress whatever it might be right however we have liberal institutions that constrain them the problem is when you don't have the institutions that constrain the illiberal behavior or you undermine you undercut you do away with the liberal institutions right the rhetoric is problematic it matters but it's the de-institutionalization of a liberal order that's the real problem and authoritarianism right is fundamentally illiberal it's not anti-democratic always we're now learning that there is a democratic dimension potentially to illiberalism just as we democratize liberalism over a long struggle over a long period of time expanded the category of citizenship can authoritarian regimes illiberal regimes have a kind of common value alliance across the world can democracies do that we think democracies can do that i'm not sure that our understanding of common values and alliances is fully in line with historical uh experience uh it's possible to a limited extent on the democratic side it's possible to an even less even more limited extent on the authoritarian side right there's no honor among thieves one of the things about alliances is that they're based on common interests and they're based on trust these regimes have no trust within themselves right they don't like each other they fear each other domestically they're full of mistrust and then in dealing with so-called partners they don't necessarily have a lot of trust stalin didn't trust hitler that's ridiculous right and they didn't have an alliance anyway they had a non-aggression pact but so there's a limited ability based on common values because they're defending against the liberal order and so there's the commonality but if they defeat the liberal order they go after each other and even before they've defeated the liberal order they're going after each other so the common interests are shallow they're there but they're shallow so i don't think we have to worry about that let's put it this way if we're america we don't have much to worry about at all our institutions are phenomenal our economy is incredible our innovative culture our university system it doesn't look like in reality what it looks like on cable tv it's got neuroscience it's got a.i and it's got a couple of professors talking about marxism or whatever or postmodernism right and the students aren't taking those classes are they they're not in those classes they're not in those majors right so we've got attributes and advantages that are breathtaking there's never been a power like this and it's difficult to ruin this thing we've seen how difficult it is to ruin it because there's a lot of people trying like the dickens to bring us down we're the only thing that can bring us down thankfully that's not an easy proposition and thankfully we have institutions like cato to remind us that we have to defend this instead of trying to bring it down thank you for your attention thank you

Channel: Nathan Watson

Views: 124,471

Keywords: Russia, Soviet Union, USSR, USA, Cold War, Cold War 2, 2016, US Presidential Election, Donald Trump

Id: dqiqUtdFi2I

Length: 67min 15sec (4035 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2019