What Everyone Needs to Know about Russia Under Putin - FPRI's 2018 Champagne Brunch for Partners

before i introduce today's speaker i should say that one of our fastest growing programs at fpri is our eurasia program managed initially by adrian basara and john haynes who have now passed the reins on to the next generation which uh include chris miller who's not with us today and maya otarashvili the deputy director of the program we also have mitch orenstein from penn who's part of our program as well here today uh the eurasia program is uh involved in several initiatives a baltic initiative looking at the baltic region the three baltic states the black sea region we have a special series of papers on russian foreign policy and a special series on russian on the russian economy as well as a daily briefing that you can subscribe to for free that one of our trustees says he reads religiously every day so uh and one of our and we have five fellows each year in the eurasia program and our twenty one of our 2018 fellows happens to be stephen cotkin um stevens uh most recent book is stalin uh waiting for hitler 1929 to 1941. now you're not going to believe this but this 1100 page book is actually the second volume in a trilogy about the life and times of joseph stalin it has 106 pages of footnotes which are in extremely small type so it has received both volumes so far have received widespread uh critical acclaim and uh in fact if you read today's uh sunday new york times book review there is a there's a review of the new book by john lewis gaddis on grand strategy gaddis is has been running the grand strategy program at yale university for many years and he is known as the dean of cold war historians two weeks ago in the new york times book review they have a column called by the book where they interview a prominent author and they interviewed john gattis and the question was which books by contemporary historians do you most admire and gather said stephen cotkins two volumes on stalin i've read every line and have had to repeatedly reconsider what i thought i knew now that is quite uh a statement from john lewis gaddis and i uh therefore i think we're really in for a really magnificent talk uh from steve who is i neglected to say a professor of history at princeton university and also a senior fellow at the hoover institution we've asked steve today today not to talk about stalin but to talk about what every american needs to know about russia under putin so please welcome stephen cotkin a russia thing is good business uh the world gets worse and worse and i get more and more invitations to speak at brunches if i were to tell you about how this is a criminal regime and the leader is a gangster you would know all this already this is a very well-informed audience you wouldn't really learn anything if i told you that kind of stuff it is a criminal regime there's no question about it use of very obviously state only controlled chemicals to kill people abroad who are considered traitors to the state is an indication that the regime will do just about anything it wants regardless of international law and the beauty of this is they'll say oh we had nothing to do with it but if anybody thinks about betraying our nation again think twice right this is what we call implausible deniability right implausible deniability i could go on and on about that for you but as i said i don't think you'd learn that much so i'm going to take a little bit of a deeper dive through some history and come back the other side and do three separate parts to the presentation the first part will be what i'm going to call the geopolitical conundrum of russian power in the world the second part will be about the paradoxes of russian power and the third part will be about a u.s response or what i would call a possible u.s response u.s foreign policy so i'll run through those three pieces during the course of the next 30 minutes or so and then we'll take questions if there's anything i failed to cover during the presentation obviously we have plenty of time i hope in the question and answer to cover other things okay so the first thing to say about russia is that if you look over the long haul there's a pattern everything looks personal and the personalities matter but the paradox is that we keep getting a similar type of person in charge of russia so maybe it's more than just personality in other words i'm not discounting personality i'm just saying that if you look through russian history there's a lot of i would say repetition or similarity not the same exactly but a pattern and i would describe the pattern this way the first and most important piece is that russia has always wanted to be a special country in the world what they call a providential power or a power under god this means that they have a special mission they're not just a regular country you can argue where this comes from does it come from the byzantine legacy just does it comes from just being a big country there are many different theories about where it comes from but what's not in dispute is that it's been there a long time and it's still there today but point number two is that although this aspiration of being a providential power has been clear for a long time russia has never been the greatest power in the world there have been moments in time when russia has had a significant position the defeat for example by peter the great of charles xii of sweden which is how russia got onto the baltic sea uh in the early 18th century the defeat of napoleon by alexander and alexander got to paris for example and of course the defeat of hitler by stalin in world war ii other than these three peaks russia has not quite been as powerful as it aspires to be so the result has been a gap actually a gulf between the aspirations and the wherewithal the capacities of the russian state so this has led russia time and time again while holding these aspirations and while not fully having the capacities to live up with them to live to the the aspirations it's led russia time and time again to have recourse to the state the state as an instrument to push the society to push it in terms of some type of economic modernization that's coercive a kind of state-led right drive to make up the difference or at least to manage the gap with the most powerful countries it's taken different forms there was a czarist version there was a bloody very coercive soviet version and there is a version today under president putin that we would recognize once again not identical throughout time but enough similarity to recognize a pattern this recourse to the state right the state has an instrument the state is a lever to push and kind of bully the society forward towards some type of modernizing project has produced time and again a spur a kind of economic spurt and then a period of stagnation the spurt is always followed by stagnation so you get this recourse to the state which looks like it's going to work and for a time does produce some results at high cost nonetheless then gets into a kind of bogged down quagmire situation the fourth and final piece of this historical excursion is that the recourse to the state the attempt to build a strong state produces again and again personal rule it doesn't produce a strong state it produces a personalistic state right one of the things you probably don't know is that vladimir putin goes on russian television and complains endlessly that only about 20 percent of his orders are implemented the rest are circumvented ignored right buried in bureaucratic red tape because personalistic rule is not as strong as we think it is state actors are not as easily controlled in authoritarian regimes and the more you build up the state in an authoritarian setting the less control you have over the state officials ironically enough so you have aspirations to be a providential power serious capacities but not always the first rank in states a recourse to the state is an instrument to force the country to try to close this gap with the most powerful countries and then personalistic rule and the personalistic rule the problem with that is a conflation between the national interests and the survival of the personal regime so to criticize the personal regime is to criticize russia right there's this conflation between national interest and personalistic rule survival that's the period we're in yet again so in some ways putin is as much a symptom as he is a a driver of the current state of russia the implications of this should be clear right our bad relations with russia are not accidental they don't derive for example from a quote misunderstanding you know if we respected them more if we understood more what they were about relations would be good the answer to that is no relations when was the last time there was a sustained period of good relations between the united states and russia over more than a generation into a second generation when was the last time that happened that's correct before the united states became a great power there was a sustained period of good relations of course professor mcdougall got it right how surprised are we at that since the u.s has been the leading economy in the world which dates to about 1890s maybe even before relations have not been good they've been poor there's a fundamental clash of interests between the united states and russia u.s grand strategy looks very complicated but it's not that complicated it could be boiled down as follows do not allow another country to dominate its region what that means is that no country not germany not anybody else should be able to dominate europe no country not japan and now not china should be able to dominate east asia and no country not russia should be able to dominate eurasia well what's russian grand strategy russian grand strategy is dominate eurasia so there's a fundamental clash of interests between u.s grant strategy and russian grant strategy there's also even below that a fundamental clash of values right the highest value in russia is respect for the state the highest value in the united states is freedom often understood as freedom from the state so not only is there a clash of interests but there's a clash of values even deeper than the interest so we would expect relations to be difficult that doesn't mean they have to be warlike that doesn't mean that tension has to be as high as it is now because differences even differences of values can be managed right that's called for example marriage everybody in this room is familiar with the problem of managing a clash of interests and a clash of values even before your kids are teenager age right and so we can manage better but the idea that we can get to a friendly place with russia has been a constant illusion not because russia russians are bad people right they're an incredible civilization their civilizational achievements are stunning but there's a fundamental clash of interests and a clash of values right which leads to difficult relations time and time again we saw president trump discover this before president trump president obama went through this cycle and problem president bush before him went through this and on it goes okay so that's my first the general point right so it's not only putin and it's not even primarily putin there's something deeper going on there but once again that doesn't mean that they're an enemy forever or that we're always right it just means that we need to manage the tensions and we could be doing a better job all right area number two of my talk as i said i'm gonna do three now i'm gonna do the paradoxes of russian power right now and then do a final third area much briefer on u.s policy visa russia that's okay all right okay um yeah so you hear a lot that russia is weak that russia is very weak but of course this is the natural state of russia it is one of the great powers it's just never the greatest power right you can recall the soviet union and we thought oh the soviet union collapsed we're done with the russia problem well it turns out we're not done with the russia problem even though the soviet union collapsed right because they are weak or weaker but they are still a major power if you look at for example gdp russia's gdp which is a maybe 1.3 trillion 1.4 trillion at current exchange rates if you look at russia's gdp it's only a little bit more than 1 15 the size of the u.s gdp one-fifteenth the soviet union's gdp at peak was one-third the size of the american economy still not gigantic but can you imagine going from one third to about one fifteenth that tells you that russia is not really on the same level of the united states at the same time you can look at under other indicators they obviously they have a military-industrial complex yes it's been inherited from the soviet union so a lot of it is not credited to the current regime but nonetheless it has been revived under the current regime and they're able to produce world-class weaponry of all different types and they're able to do that even when they have budgetary austerity so there's something effective and successful about the russian state we think of the russian state as a pure kleptocracy it's a bunch of crooks and gangsters and thieves and they steal everything in sight that describes a large part of russian reality but not all many people predicted for example that the sanctions would crash the russian economy that the oil price when it dropped would crash the russian economy and there they are still there today still investing in their military industrial modernization the military-industrial complex and the reason is because they have also not just kleptocrats but many competent people in the state their central bank is competently run their finance ministry has a tremendous number of competent people their macroeconomic policy over the last 20 years has been excellent since the 1998 default it's been just excellent and so we have to take account of these paradoxes on the one hand a tiny economy compared to the u.s economy on the other hand the ability to produce weapons in fact to sell them globally right and to use them that are high class on the one hand thieves and crooks a kleptocratic state on the other hand of highly competent central bank and a highly competent finance ministry they also have something we don't have they have a state department their foreign ministry is excellent it's full of people who know foreign languages have experience of other countries and go into meetings fully briefed and fully on their brief right so there's quite a lot of competence inside the kleptocratic chaos of the russian state so these are some of the paradoxes we don't fully understand right russia is smaller than ever farther from europe than ever since peter the greats time and yet it's still in this geography of eurasia which means it touches on europe it touches on the middle east it touches on east asia and so russia's geography is a great platform for influence projection they have a unique geography russia doesn't have any allies per se and so it looks weak in that regard a lonely power but it's got one of the vetoes in the security council at the u.n which is why time and again russia tries to push things into or through the u.n where they have significant voice of course they earn that veto in the victory over the nazi land army in world war ii so we can't seem to be able to manage this the paradoxical nature of russia we paint it one way or the other way rather than both ways at the same time and i could give you many statistics all the averages about this and that and this and that you know averages are very valuable right if you if your head is in the oven and your feet are in the fridge on average you're comfortable now you guys know that from your statistics class way back when i could do that with all the averages about russia but just the deeper point is that it is weak and yet it's a major power or another way to put it it's a major power and yet it's weak right this is the story of russia it has some unique attributes one of the unique attributes is daring not recklessness but daring russia does stuff constantly surprising us right daring it's no use being a superpower if you behave like a wussy or an idiot and it's quite useful if you're a weak major power but you have a certain amount of daring and calculated risks right okay so uh a third point a u.s uh foreign policy vis-a-vis russia or u.s foreign policy generally a third area of discussion i haven't really talked about the current administration i think we'll leave that for the q a there may be some people interested in that question including for example relationships between the current president and people in russia i want to talk a little bit given this audience fpri i want to talk a little bit then about the foreign policy implications of some of what i'm saying so to me there's a deep paradox on the american side which is to say we're very proud of our tradition of limited government at home if if you if they still taught civics they don't teach civics anymore but if they had they were still teaching civics they would teach a story about the tradition of limited government where it came from the founding fathers and the the arguments at the constitutional convention and the formation of the united states and separation of powers and checks and balances and everything else right things that i was taught just before they abolish civics for the next generations right anyway but paradoxically while we cherish the tradition of limited government at home we sometimes forget about this when we talk about foreign policy so if our idea is that too much power of any one institution or group leads to tyranny how could it be that we want the united states to do everything alone and to dominate the whole globe isn't that a violation of our own principles of our own traditions of limited government wouldn't it be smarter if we had a limited government theory in foreign policy terms so that like at home we would be afraid of our own excess power in the international system in other words maybe it would be to our advantage abroad just like it is at home if our power were more limited i know that sounds ridiculous but if you think about american values there is a certain logic there what would that look it like in practice what it would look like in practice is what should be familiar to this audience traditional a balance of power notion about the world you'd want a lot of friends and you'd want to consult those friends so you wouldn't want to engage in a trade war with somebody who's cheating a trade not because that person is innocent or that country is innocent no the chinese are cheating a trade but a trade war between the u.s and china has very adverse effects on all of those countries that also trade and are us allies and i don't have to mention them but you know south korea japan germany right they're all u.s allies and so they are potential victims of a trade war that we would inflict on the chinese even though the chinese deserve that so you would instead want to preserve your alliance and your deep relationships and you'd want to address the problem of chinese cheating in economic terms without victimizing one of your strengths which is your alliance system you have more than 60 allies and the chinese have north korea as their principal ally or formal ally right anyway so just to continue this further then with the russian story so it's it's very convenient and by the way as i said it's true that it's a gangster regime on the other hand it's still there it's not going away the soviet union went away and we're still confronting as i said similar problems so what we need with russia is some type of negotiation we need some type of relationship we need some type of managing of the tensions and we have forgotten how one does this that's not to say we ignore violations of human rights murders of journalists all of that remains part of our understanding and part of our policy but nonetheless you can't go through have a stable u.s foreign policy that's sustainable over generations whereby you don't have any relationship whatsoever with russia so paradoxically again president trump's instincts are actually pretty good on this he believes and he's actually correct that we need to get to a better place with russia the problem is how how we would do that here's where the rubber meets the road so one of the things you'll hear is well we have to get tough on russia we got to be strong we got to show strength and that's correct those people who argue for deterrence for strength for standing up to russia they're correct of course you have to recognize the limitations in a policy like that for example russia has an army ukraine doesn't really have an army so are you going to defend the sovereignty of ukraine are you going to make a statement publicly that you're going to defend the sovereignty of ukraine because if you make that statement you're going to have to send a quarter million american boys and girls to ukraine for a long period of time to defend that sovereignty so if you're gonna make aggressive statements of deterrence or strength against russia your means better line up right with your policy announcements it's one thing to not recognize russian incorporation of crimea right russian annexation of crimea not recognize that we didn't recognize soviet annexation of the baltic republics either as you know so the our ambassador in moscow couldn't go to estonia latvia in lithuania because the americans didn't recognize their incorporation into the soviet union right it's one thing not to recognize it's another thing to talk about roll back or to talk about military confrontation that's fine if you're ready to send a quarter million american boys and girls there to defend that sovereignty because russia as i said has a real army and you say well we can arm we can arm the ukrainians to fight themselves you can do that right you can do that let's try that somehow of course we can't arm them to the degree that the russians are armed and moreover we can arm the ukrainians to defend themselves and then the train station in kiev blows up and whole bunches of people die one day and the russians say oh we had nothing to do with that we don't know how that happened and the ukrainians in their capital are afraid to take mass transit because somebody set bombs in their mass transit in response to arming of eastern ukraine to defend itself against russia right so that's the kind of escalation one could get into i'm not saying we shouldn't do it or we should do it i'm just talking about we have to be aware of the implications of our public statements and about our proposed policies so getting tough with russia standing up to russia has implications are we ready for those implications once again i'm in favor of the deterrence of being strong and of getting tough with them but i understand that maybe differently from the cable tv discussion version of it where everything is cost free and russia never responds and has no ability to escalate okay let's turn to the other piece then you have some people saying you know russia should be our friend we should be more friendly with them we should negotiate with them and just like those who say we should get tough with russia i agree with that statement too i agree completely that we should have a relationship with russia of mutual respect and derive as much mutual benefit as we can for our own benefit not because we want to be altruistic but once again the issue is how and in what form obviously we need to combine the strength and the negotiation just to get strong and tough with somebody and then what you're tough with them you impose some punishment on them and then what happens next right what happens next is you need a diplomatic negotiation so that if you're strong and they make concessions you're ready to pocket the concessions our problem is we're neither getting tough with them in a smart way nor are we in negotiations getting tough without negotiations is a dead end and just negotiating without having any leverage is also a dead end think about the obama administration first it wanted to get nice with russia because it thought there was this misunderstanding that made the relations bad this turned out to blow up in their face the reset didn't work then they wanted to ignore russia and then russia can't really be ignored because they have significant capabilities and so they reminded the united states that they were out there they interfered in our election process hello we're still out here you're trying to ignore us you're trying to isolate us we're just reminding you that we're still out here one of the other pieces of the obama administration policy that's not well understood is the negotiation right we had with russia so for example we wanted russia to help in syria so we announced that we wanted russia to help in syria now this put all the leverage on russia's side of the table we announced that we wanted to do a deal on the iranian nuclear program and we needed russia for that deal once again we pushed all our chips all our leverage onto the russia side so while there were some negotiations in the obama case they were negotiations not from strength but from weakness and we gave what leverage we had over to the russian side before the negotiations opened up and of course we got nothing out of those negotiations so the idea is and this goes back to reagan by the way it was during reagan's presidency that i was the ta of professor mcdougall out there at berkeley this goes back to reagan and schultz and it's it's not rocket science but it is uh shows him strength and negotiate at the same time and then linkage of the strength and the negotiation but not linkage of all the issues so that if russia for example murders a journalist you break off negotiations no you make a statement about how this violates core principles of the international community and you increase the pressure but you keep the negotiations going because increasing the pressure gives you more leverage in the negotiation process so this ability to kind of walk and chew gum to apply our strengths but also to have dialogue right to have diplomacy or to have diplomacy that's backed up with the kind of advantages that a superpower would have this is not this is banal once again not rocket science but i just don't see that happening all right so in conclusion then in conclusion washington right now is is just not really capable of a russia policy we're sort of paralyzed for all the reasons that you understand but if we were to get a russia policy if there were to be a russia policy it would involve understanding that the differences are not superficial but fundamental yet they can be managed it would involve understanding that russia is weak but also a major power and it would involve an understanding that we need to show our strengths in intelligent fashion not over committing while also using diplomacy negotiation right to get those concessions and to pocket those concessions anyway thank you for your attention this morning thank you very much steve we'll have a few minutes for questions we have a couple of people coming around with microphones so please raise your hand and then we'll get the microphone to you we have a question right here uh wait for the microphone sir thank you very much it's a great lecture one of the best i've heard and uh and i i agree with you fully on practically everything but i have two questions okay all right so one you said that the russians do develop i have developed advanced weapon systems yes that event can you name one that has been battle tested and shown that they it does operate i know they claim a lot of weapon systems that advanced but uh so that the khrushchev said that they're putting out missiles like rockets like a sausages but it turned out to be that they were all out of papier-mache so now lately i think president trump called you know called them bluff and they did not show that their weapon systems are working and the second question is so you mentioned crimea but i think you didn't mention that we were one of the guarantors we guaranteed that ukrainian borders were not going to be violated and when they were violated we practically didn't do anything thank you sir yes i think the second point you raised which is make fewer commitments but uphold all the commitments you make if you're not going to uphold the commitment you got to keep quiet we had a problem in 1956 in hungary there were ways in which we encouraged the uprising against communism behind the iron curtain in hungary and then when the hungarians rose up we all said oh you know who's responsible for helping the hungarians uh did i say anything i didn't say anything right so you're right if you make a commitment as we did to ukraine's territorial sovereignty we were a signatory to that when they give up the nuclear weapons we need to uphold that commitment or we shouldn't have made that commitment in the first place that goes for all the commitments currently on record and any new ones that we might make on your point about russia weapon systems yes so they have seven thousand seven hundred nuclear weapons seven thousand seven hundred we're not sure how many north korea might have but it's not seven thousand seven hundred moreover russia has intercontinental ballistic missiles that can exit earth's atmosphere and re-enter without burning up we don't think north korea has such a capability and if they do they can't have very many of them but russia has those missiles and russia could hit this ballroom could hit this brunch if they so decided accurately right the missile wouldn't fishtail into the sea of japan next to japan if they say if they send it up right so we can say that yes the f-16 is a superior plane and then you could go down all the whole arsenal which is superior this is superior would you trade american weaponry for russian weaponry the answer would be no of course you wouldn't trade it you wouldn't trade it for chinese stuff either right that's not the issue the issue is uh just because your fighter jet isn't necessarily superior to the latest american fighter jet doesn't mean you don't have a good fighter jet and that's what they do have so if you look across the capabilities air sea and land right there are gaps between u.s and russian capabilities but those gaps are less than the gaps between russian capabilities and other european partners let alone eastern europe central asia right russia has a formidable arsenal they don't have what we have but they have enough and so we need to take into account that this is part of the power that they exercise in the world even as we understand your deeper point is that our stuff is better ed stitzer on this side of the room wait for the my kid professor what would be your policy towards russia today if you were president of the united states thank you for that scary thought ed the idea of becoming president of the united states is uh is daunting but you know so we need to get to a better place with them so how what would that look like as a concrete example so let's take crimea crimea it was stolen illegally and is under russian occupation in international law terms was annexed by russia in an annexation that has not been widely recognized you can argue that crimea is going back to ukraine the day after texas is going back to mexico i would say that that there's a possibility that it might go back after texas goes back to mexico so the the possibility of ukraine getting back crimea is not so high so you say to yourself okay that's not something that we can get back very easily can we make something of that problem that russia has caused that violation of international law and the answer could be that you will grant russian recognition of annexation of crimea over a 30-year period and during those 30 years they would have to perform certain tasks for example they would have to give up eastern uk they would have to pull out of eastern ukraine the donbas and lugansk they would have to pull out of abkhazia and south of session georgia they would have to pull out of transnistria in moldova and then they would have to do the following with assad and syria you could list a whole bunch of things that you would want to see them do and moreover you could make it a 30-year or 20-year process so that during the course of that time if they went back and cheated and did something that they promised but then took it away you could say well i'm sorry you're in violation moreover you could make them pay monetary compensation for the annexation of crimea in addition to getting a stabilization on a whole lot of other issues and so you say to yourself but that would be wrong that would be handing them legalizing something that they stole and it would be but here's the thing about life right here's the thing about life the versailles treaty in 1919 ed everybody says well the versailles treaty was a big mistake it was a punitive treaty and it was so punitive it destabilized germany and it brought hitler to power and it was a mistake and others say oh no the versailles treaty was fine it's just the british shrank from enforcing it if the british had had more resolve it would have been okay my answer to them is wrong on both accounts because the versailles treaty was an anomalous period it was the only time since 1870 that germany and russia were both flat on their back and this was not going to last either germany or russia was going to be a great power again and the versailles treaty was done against germany without russia and so it was an impossible treaty that was possible only in that one moment of 1919. think about that in 1991 the 1991 settlement was imposed when russia was flat on its back and could do nothing about it and we think it's inviolable we think you know the the world inherited with the collapse of the soviet union with the borders that were there and all the agreements that that's forever well guess what in the 1990s russia couldn't do anything about it now they can and they are and they will do more so we can if we want try to hold 1991 in place even as it's unraveling and has unraveled in many places or we can recognize that it was an anomalous situation in 1991 when russia was flat on its back that anomaly has passed we must deal with the fact that they are able to revise the 1991 treaty and are doing that and it would be in our interests to take the lead and stabilize that process by extracting advantages rather than let russia continue to revise 1991 while we're holding to an impossible situation so you could argue that that's immoral that that doesn't um uphold international law and i would argue that well what's morality is morality committing to uh for example overturning tyranny in iraq making a mess of it and then wanting to leave right i mean where does morality come in in terms of your commitments and your ability to deliver on the commitments our gentleman mentioned that we didn't deliver on our commitment to ukraine we're in violation of that uh there's no doubt that we are and so the answer to that is either live up to that commitment at a cost that american society is not willing to bear right now or revise those commitments to make them in line with our capabilities and the costs that we want to pay and try to extract some benefits in a negotiation with that so i don't know if it's a satisfactory answer ed but thankfully they're never going to make me president we have time for one more question john medvekus yeah so um about the baltics russia and the baltics yes russia's intentions so uh let's imagine john that i want to steal your wallet i'm a typical academic all right and your wallet is in your pocket and your pocket is zipped up that's going to be tough for me to get that wallet out of your pocket with the zipper up right let's call that nato article 5. but let's imagine that you put your wallet on a table and you just leave it there in the middle of the table and you turn around you don't pay attention to anybody and i want to steal your wallet well am i going to take the approach of the wallet that's in the pocket all locked up or am i going to take the approach of the wallet that's sitting on the table like a stick of butter that's russia with the baltics to the extent that we offer it up like a stick of butter in the middle of the table it might do something to the extent that we lock it up pull that zipper they're going to do something elsewhere where it's a lot easier than they are going to do it where it's a lot harder so it's it depends in part on us right russia's forward policy as we might call it in these places forward policy meaning right offense is the best defense they understand their security as being on the offensive destabilizing the outside world right russia is not going to become part of the west so let's make the west more like russia right that's that's the strategy in a nutshell that only works right that only works if you let them you can't get away with that if for example the baltics are well defended if for example russia there are measures to counteract russian behavior so i don't think it's that i'm not that worried about the baltics as i am for example about many other places but here's one thing i want to do i have time to conclude okay i want to conclude on this note right we haven't really mentioned it yet so i just want to make sure that we're clear on this so at the very beginning of this problem you know russia interference russia trump all of this kind of stuff people are asking me what's going on what what is this stuff about how could this be happening and it's it's very clear what happened right think about this for a second you have a very sophisticated military intelligence and civilian intelligence operation you want to discredit american candidates you want to discredit american democracy so what are you going to do you're going to need the services of the buster keaton trump campaign in order to pull this penetration off right you're gonna need to collude with the trump campaign because you're russia you're not good enough to pull this off on your own you can't find a wikileaks as a cut out to release all this information so that you have deniability you need the trump people to do all of this so obviously the idea of collusion is absurd on the surface the russians have never had any need for any collusion from the beginning moreover the idea that the russians knew or thought trump was going to win is also absurd on the friday before the tuesday election the trump campaign polling operation sent out an email bragging that is a few days before the election the trump campaign sent out an email bragging that they would get as many as 250 electoral votes they were bragging at how close their loss was going to be that was the trump internal polling argument that was the trump campaign that's what they thought was going to happen right so the idea that the russians knew what they were doing on the one hand and and therefore bet on trump right but didn't know what they were doing on the other hand and therefore they needed to collude with trump right there's been an absurd discussion in the u.s public sphere about this what the russians did was they compromised the trump campaign and the trump people they entangled them in criminal activities and they penetrated them with surveillance to find out what was going on on the inside it was a russian intelligence operation the intelligence operation was also there on the clinton side the clinton people were less willing right they were more unwilling victims of this and the trump campaign was unfortunately a willing victim of russia's compromising entangling them in criminality right but the point was to penetrate and compromise so the idea of collusion is ridiculous it just think first of all it's not on the american statute books in any case there is no crime called collusion on the statute books but so what we have is a russian a sophisticated russian operation that the idiotic people in the trump campaign willingly cooperated with and entangled themselves in compromising situations subjecting them the campaign themselves and maybe even the president of blackmail so that's why this all started as a counterintelligence investigation which then morphed into a criminal investigation but the origins are a counterintelligence problem that's what the russians did it was an intelligence operation of penetration and compromise one final point if i could make on this right the other piece i i noted at the very beginning of this the absurdity of of collusion is one piece the other piece was that overpriced real estate overpriced real estate is ipso facto money laundering that's the business you're in if you're selling overpriced real estate if you're selling a a quote luxury condominium with one one thousandth of a millimeter thick walls a hundred million dollars or right or how much per square foot you can do the calculation there's only certain kind of people who can buy that property who would be interested in that property people who have stolen big amounts of money and buy overpriced real estate parking their ill-gotten gains so if any investigation of the trump operation move towards the business they would discover the business was a criminal enterprise because once again many people in the real estate business will not cross lines they will do due diligence they will look where the money comes from they will decline some buyers because of the suspect nature of the money that's after all what the law requires but in this case that organization did not do its due diligence and in many cases did the opposite and so it was very vulnerable on the investigation if it went into the business area which president trump himself announced at the beginning that it was a red line to look into his business operations you'll recall that right so here we are now confused as hell about collusion which was a russian entanglement in criminality on purpose that foolish people got involved in on our side and moreover now we're investigating the business operation where you have the money laundering and the pincer movement is moving in so you get the um the campaign manager and then you move to the lawyer and then you go go for the son-in-law and then the son and the daughter until finally people break i mean this is right this is a standard operating practice people break and so we're in a potential trouble here not necessarily because president trump quote colluded with the russians if you understand what i mean the idea the president i don't even think that that's a crime necessarily for example a back channel to the russians communicating with them i don't think that's a crime in the united states opening a back channel to another government that you want to talk to i actually think that that's maybe even a good idea let alone a crime right so we're in a kind of crazy situation now where what's happening behind the scenes an investigation of the business criminality which has little to do with the campaign necessarily and we've lost the russian intelligence operation that opened this investigation in the first place by the fbi a really really really long time ago anyway thank you very much for your attention again thank you i would like i'd like to thank stephen cotkin it was a talk it was a model fpri talk giving insight into contemporary affairs through the lens of history geography and culture before you go i would like to thank susan goldberg the chairman of our special events committee rachel hemler our event planner and eli gilman coordinator of all things at fpri thank you for the great jobs each of you have done to make today's event such a great event finally one more thing since steve mentioned professor mcdougall i should mention that on may 15th mcdougall will give the first annual ginsburg satellite lecture at the under fbi auspices in co-sponsorship with the museum of the american revolution on this is the first annual lecture on american identity and character this particular lecture will look at where did the founders get their ideas so join us on may 15th at the museum of the american revolution you

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

Views: 228,556

Rating: 4.2589946 out of 5

Keywords: Russia, Putin, History, Lecture, Eurasia

Id: RnWp_kr4tfc

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/markvp]

This was posted here just two weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/comments/8it6bl/what_everyone_needs_to_know_about_russia_under/

[u/whenihittheground]

This was pretty bad. The best part was actually what he said about US grand strategy.

Peter Zeihan is FAR more informative about Russia.

On Russia Part 1

On Russia Part 2

[u/MisoSoup]

Yeah - brought to you by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, that noble bastion of neocon zionist propaganda.

Just no.