Dan Kurtz-Phelan
When Russia botched its invasion of Ukraine and the West quickly came together in support of Kyiv, Vladimir Putin’s grip on power appeared shakier than ever. Last summer, an attempted coup even seemed to threaten his rule. But today, Putin looks confident. From battlefield progress in Ukraine to the coming American election, there’s reason to think things are turning in his favor. The historian Stephen Kotkin joins us to discuss what this means for Russia’s future—and how the United States can be ready for whatever that future holds.
Stephen Kotkin, thank you for joining me again. You were the first guest on this podcast almost two years ago, and thanks as well for the fascinating and extremely compelling essay you wrote for our new issue. The piece is called “The Five Futures of Russia.”
Stephen Kotkin
Dan, thank you so much for having me. It’s really an honor.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
We will, of course, get to the essay, which attempts to look somewhat further into the future than most foreign policy analysis does. But I want to start by getting your sense of some more immediate considerations about Vladimir Putin and the state of his power, about the U.S.-Russian relationship and about the war in Ukraine. If we’d gone back two years ago, to the time we were recording that first podcast, there was lots of speculation about whether Putin could survive his incredible botching of the invasion, the response from the West that was more unified than many predicted, the sanctions regime that was being put into place at the time. A year ago, or a little under a year ago, there was the Prigozhin uprising that many also took as a sign that Putin’s grip on power was starting to fall apart. As you look back at these last couple of years, what did those hopeful prophecies of his demise get wrong? And as you look at Putin’s power now, how stable is it?
Stephen Kotkin
Of course, we’re all geniuses in hindsight, and we have to be careful not to be smarter than we could possibly have been in circumstances a couple of years ago. I’ve been saying for years now, before 2022, that the regime is hollow but strong. There’s an inherent hollowness and brittleness to the regime. Its grand strategy is a dead end. And yet there’s tremendous strength in the regime, repressive power, ability to extract resources and therefore foreign currency and float the regime’s ambitions, but also the absence of a political alternative. The most important thing about authoritarian regimes is that they can fail at everything. They can mismanage a war; they can even lose a war. They’re not losing—but they can, as long as they suppress political alternatives, and if they succeed at suppressing political alternatives, it doesn’t matter how bad they are at all the other things.
And so Putin has devoted himself, heart and soul, to suppressing political alternatives. And unfortunately, he’s been wildly successful. We’re partly complicit in this. We take regime change off the table. We say, “Oh, no. We’re not going to foment the color revolution, we’re not going to support covert operations to undermine the regime. We think it’s excessively escalatory.” There are some other reasons. And the problem with that is that they blame us anyway. So we get charged for the crime which we don’t actually commit. So we don’t put the kind of pressure on these regimes that they understand, which is the survival of their regime. That’s the number one issue for every one of these regimes.
And so if you are not pressuring the regime sufficiently, the regime feels it can get away with murder. Now, having said that, every day is existential for a regime like that. That’s what I mean; that it’s really strong, but hollow, it’s brittle. Anything can happen, triggering a cascade. And so one opposition figure, one opposition party, one big gathering of Falun Gong, one viral post on social media, on Telegram channels or breaking China’s firewall monopoly on the public sphere, and they get thrown into a tizzy. So, what does that tell you? That tells you that’s the space in which we have to play—and we don’t play sufficiently, in my view.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
You have a great line in the piece, and I’m quoting you here, “Putin styles himself as a new tsar. But a real tsar would not have to worry about a looming succession crisis and what it might do to his grip on power in the present. Putin does; that is partly why he must simulate elections.” Last month, of course, Putin had a not exactly fully staged election, but a rigged one, certainly not fair election.
Stephen Kotkin
Choiceless.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
Choiceless election, okay.
Stephen Kotkin
We call it choiceless in the piece. A fake election is kind of when no matter what the results are, you just falsify them. So you could be voted out, but you falsify. That sometimes precipitates, for example, mass demonstrations, because people assume that the results won’t be falsified, and when they are falsified, they can get angry. So they’re capable, certainly, of falsifying, but what he did was just make it choiceless. Those people who either oppose the policies over the regime—for example, the war in Ukraine—or oppose the regime itself were not permitted to stand in the election. That’s how it became choiceless.
Of course, Navalny was killed—or died, if you prefer—in the Arctic circle prison camp in February, about a month before the election was held. That was the one political alternative on the horizon that was genuine that he feared. And now, unfortunately, Navalny is dead, and so that alternative doesn’t exist as a person who could replace Putin.
People often ask me, “Why don’t we just try to assassinate Putin and make the problem go away?” And the answer is that that’s not how democratically elected, rule-of-law regimes ought to behave, necessarily, toward international adversaries. But even taking the moral considerations out and the legal considerations out, you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to get instead. And so for me, it’s Free France rather than Stauffenberg.
If you know the 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, which failed—it came close, was very close, but it failed—it was organized by a group of military men in a conspiracy. It hadn’t been the first time. That model known as sort of shorthand as the Stauffenberg model, the attempt to assassinate the leader is one way that you think you can solve this problem. The Free France model, which refers to [Charles] de Gaulle and the government in exile and rallying the French nation against the collaborationist regime that was in place in France in the Nazi occupation, I think that second model fits more with our political, legal, and moral structures and has generally been more effective in the course of history. It’s very hard; but opposing authoritarian regimes is not easy, standing up to them is not easy. And so you need to have all the tools in the toolkit that you see history provides.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
When it comes to the war in Ukraine. I would imagine that Putin feels about as good about his prospects there as he has since those first days after the invasion. That’s true even with the aid package that President Biden signed after many months of delay. Do you sense that Putin’s objectives have changed at all in Ukraine? Have those shifted over time? What do you think he wants and expects to get out of the war at this point?
Stephen Kotkin
Yeah, I’m different from many other scholars and commentators in that I don’t actually know what Putin thinks. I have his public statements; I have the statements of his spokespeople; I have his actions. But I don’t have lunch with him regularly. I didn’t have dinner with him last night. I don’t have the kind of access to the first echelon that, actually, I used to have, whether it was the prime minister or the defense minister, you could engage those people in conversation, sometimes even one on one. That’s gone now. It’s certainly gone for me, and it’s been gone for a while, since the pandemic, let alone the war.
And so we’re guessing about his objectives. Sure, we have intercepts, electronic eavesdropping. Often, we have electronic eavesdropping of people who are in the second echelon speculating about what they think is happening because they’re not in the first echelon, either. And then of course, Russia puts out disinformation and all the things that you know better than I do, having been on the inside in our government.
So let’s just take what I think would be uncontroversial. Every war of maneuver, when somebody attacks, if they don’t win a victory right away, it gets transformed into a war of attrition. And a war of attrition only has two variables: the will to fight, and the capacity to fight. And if you maintain your will to fight and your capacity to fight, and you erode the other side’s will to fight or capacity to fight, you can win a war of attrition. We don’t bomb Russia’s production facilities, we don’t bomb their capacity to fight. Their missile factories are producing two and a half times—or maybe even more than two and a half times—as many missiles now as they did prewar. We can’t blockade Eurasia, blockade North Korea, China, Kazakhstan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and others that we could name. It’s not possible to blockade Eurasia, and opportunism is really powerful, including in international arms trade or dual use products.
So even if you regain territory, Dan, even if you move forward on the battlefield, even if you destroy X number of tanks, the issue is how many more tanks can they produce? And if you can take out a hundred tanks, but they can replace them, you are not actually winning. And I wouldn’t want to be in a war of attrition against Russia. Putin doesn’t care about the number of casualties. We don’t want to bomb their facilities, because President Biden correctly does not want World War III. I support him in that policy. A direct war between Russia and the United States is not in our interests.
The other big thing to understand is that this war, it’s big business for Russia. The war economy has enriched a huge part of the elite, those who are already rich and new people through self-enrichment. So a Western company leaves Russia, and the business is handed over to a Russian, who gets all of these assets for free because there’s a war. And so who wouldn’t support that level of self-enrichment?
At the lower ends of society, you have people whose job and life prospects are not great. So the state comes along and says, “You fight in Ukraine, and we’ll give you seven or eight or nine times the median wage.” If they die in the war, the family gets $90,000 equivalent in rubles, which goes a really long way in the Russian provinces. So the war is a business at the top end and at the lower end. So they are replacing, they’re recruiting 30,000 cannon fodder soldiers a month. That’s 350,000 soldiers a year without a mobilization, simply because it’s just so much better opportunity for those people in the Russian provinces bereft of other opportunities. Sure, some of them are forced in. Some of them are there reluctantly; many of them want to desert. Don’t get me wrong: I know what’s going on. But it’s amazing the degree to which they’ve succeeded, the Putin regime has succeeded in making this into a successful business and social mobility plan.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
I won’t ask you to assess the Biden administration’s response to every stage of this war since early 2022. But I’m curious, as you look at its strategy, in what ways does it reflect a correct or accurate understanding of Putin and of Russia? In what ways do you think they’ve misunderstood Russian intentions and possible reactions?
Stephen Kotkin
There was debate inside the administration, there were different points of view. Not everyone was on the same page, and my understanding—I’m not part of the Biden administration. I actually have never served in government. I have had a number of conversations with people who are on the inside at their request, and this is what I take away. We’ve won four colossal victories in Ukraine: Ukraine’s defense of its sovereignty, the very beginning of the war. Rallying the West, NATO and all of our partners, including the first island chain partners in East Asia, in ways that people were saying was no longer possible—NATO was brain-dead and everything else. So tremendous revitalization of the West, which is an institutional matrix, not a geographical concept, and includes all of our partners and allies. That’s the second big victory.
Third big victory: humiliating Russia. Not a strategic defeat imposed on Russia, but a humiliation of Russia. Clearly, Russia was corrupt, incompetent. Putin was no strategist. All of that was revealed. And then, of course, Europeans discovering that their dependence on Russia for gas might resemble their dependence on Chinese markets, and trade with China, as well. And China losing its wedge between America and Europe on China policy, Europe coming much closer to America on China policy. And so that was a huge victory. So those four victories were won in the first couple of months.
If you had won those four victories, you’d want to take them off the table. You’d want to say, “Hey, let’s consolidate those victories. Let’s not keep them at risk.” What are they at risk for? Why do we keep them at risk? For the Sea of Azov or for the wrecked and ruined Donbas. Now, remember, Ukraine is doing the fighting and dying, so clearly, if they believe that they want to get all of their territory back and they want to impose war crimes tribunals and reparations on Russia, it’s hard for you as a non-combatant, merely a supporter under international law of someone’s self-defense, it’s hard for you to dictate policy.
But there was a high-water mark in fall 2022, when a deal was available on favorable terms to Ukraine. General [Mark] Milley got this right on the inside. I don’t think he won the policy debate, but he got this right, which was to say, if you can get an armistice: an end to the fighting; an end to Ukrainians being killed and their country being destroyed without recognizing the annexation of Russian territories that are internationally Ukrainian; and without conceding your sovereignty by signing a treaty which says you can’t join this organization or that organization, without letting them impose limits on the size of your military Versailles treaty-style—in other words, an armistice without those Russian conditions, an armistice where you may regain your territory in future, you reserve the right to join any international body that will have you, and you will arm yourself for your self-defense as you see fit, that level of armistice without evicting Russia from those territories—that was on the cards as a potential in fall of 2022.
You guys had a brilliantly researched and reported piece on the negotiations in spring of 2022, and whether or not we came close—the Ukrainians, Russians, and other parties came close or not to some type of agreement then, and why.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
This is the piece by Sergey Radchenko and Sam Charap we published last week.
Stephen Kotkin
It’s terrific, and kudos to Foreign Affairs as well as to the authors for that piece. There’s a second part of that argument, which is the fall 2022, that I believe has yet to be reported with the same depth that they show in their spring 2022 analysis. But I believe that there was the possibility to get to the place where now it would be considered a major victory if we got a deal like that, because the deal that Putin is demanding is Ukrainian legal recognition of Russia’s annexations, including of territory the Russians don’t even control, but an extension of the territory that they currently control, and a treaty not to join NATO or any other potential international organizations and limits on Ukraine’s armed forces.
But the Ukrainian people and many of their supporters abroad, and some of their supporters in the Biden administration, were under the impression that Ukraine could win this thing. But the problem was the definition of victory—because, Dan, if you gain the territory back that Russia occupies, but you don’t destroy Russia’s will to fight or capacity to fight, they come back. Territory is not how you win a war of attrition. That’s not the variable that’s in play. And if the counteroffensive had been successful, that Hail Mary counteroffensive had been successful . . .
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
This is the Ukrainian counteroffensive in summer of 2023.
Stephen Kotkin
. . . They would have turned a 600-mile front into a 1200-mile front, because Russia wouldn’t necessarily concede. And so you have a problem of how do you win the peace. Even if you can win on the battlefield territorially, how do you consolidate that as the peace? Because, Dan, as you know, you can win the war and lose the peace; we just did this in Afghanistan. And you can also lose the war and win the peace; we did that in Vietnam, arguably, in the fullness of time.
So how did we win the peace on behalf of Ukraine in an armistice that stops the destruction of their people and country and yet doesn’t concede their sovereignty and the other things that we’re mentioning? And I think possibly the Biden administration—no doubt, I don’t know—no doubt had a robust internal debate about this. But the Ukrainians were the drivers. They didn’t want to make a deal at that point. And whoever in the Biden administration supported this, the pressure was not applied to Ukraine clearly. And even if it had been, it’s not clear that the Ukrainians would have gone along with a plan like that.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
I have to ask one more question about the war in the coming months before we go deeper into the essay and try to look a little further into the future, and that is about Donald Trump and the prospect of his return. It seems very sensible from Putin’s perspective that you’d wait to see what happens to the election before making any big decisions about the war. We know what Trump has said about how he would end the war and how he would interact with Russia. What do you think he’s in fact likely to do, and how do you think that might affect the trajectory of both the war in Ukraine and also the U.S.-Russian relationship?
Stephen Kotkin
Predict Trump? Dan, with all due respect, I can predict Putin’s next moves much more easily than I can predict anything that Donald Trump might do were he to be reelected to a second term. The challenge is not Trump. Whatever one thinks of him, his presidency, the institution of the Republican Party today, whatever side one’s on in those debates—and those are important debates, don’t get me wrong—there’s a bigger issue here, which is what are the American people committing to? The president needs to explain what the policy is so that Americans can say in a line or two what it is that the policy is. Foreign policy in a democracy has to be understood by the voters. It has to be clear as day what it is that they think we’re doing.
And I don’t think the administration has succeeded in communicating what we’re doing and why we’re doing it sufficiently to the populace, the voting populace. That provides an opportunity for someone else to define it on your behalf, maybe even being susceptible to Russian disinformation campaign and using that as their talking points. So sure, you can look at the useful idiots and lament their existence. You can even cry over those on our side mouthing Russian talking points. We’re a free and open society. That’s our strength. My lament is, where is the clarity on the policy? That’s really necessary. We’re far from that.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
So, in the “Five Futures” essay, the focus, as the title suggests, is five what you consider plausible scenarios for Russia looking forward. But I want to start with the one that, as you note in the piece, you don’t find plausible, and that is the future that Vladimir Putin and those around him would like to see. It’s about a strong Russia that is dominant in its own sphere and also a kind of pole in a multipolar world. How would you describe the strategy as Putin and those around him see it, and why do you think that’s so fanciful?
Stephen Kotkin
Yeah, a really good question. Thank you for that. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that.
Let’s start with the big picture first. So the American-led international order, warts and all, its achievements plus its shortcomings, was vulnerable in three places, territorially. This was not a secret. You didn’t necessarily need a globe. You could see that the three points of vulnerability were Crimea/Ukraine, Israel, South China Sea/Taiwan. You could see that those places were partially protected on the frontier with potentially revanchist, great power or would-be power sitting right next to them. And so Ukraine was not, and it was on the front line, and Russia was sitting right there, and we know what happened.
With Israel, of course, it’s Iran and Iran’s dedication to the eradication of Israel and the eviction of the United States from the Middle East; and Iran’s use of proxies; and then the organic grievances in the region that motivate many of the proxies that don’t come necessarily from Tehran, but that reinforced the ability of Tehran to try to implement this policy of destruction of Israel, eviction of the United States. And then South China Sea/Taiwan.
So that was there. Yes, we were living in the age of globalization. Yes, all of the things that we believed—the end of the Cold War, and the EU expanded, and NATO expanded, and it was a brave new world, and China was reforming, and yes. But what’s interesting about those borders—they’re borders of defeat. Those borders are: Russia used to have that and doesn’t have it anymore.
So people say, “Well, why can’t we do something like we had, the Helsinki 1975 accords and the stability of Europe?” Those were borders of victory, those Cold War borders. It was a lot easier to manage. Same thing on the China side. That piece that they want back, that’s from the Civil War, that’s from 1949. They want that back. That’s not over yet. That is not a border of victory. That’s an unfinished business for them. And of course, the same thing, however you understand, ‘47, ‘48 on the Israeli side, it’s not considered borders of victory on the side of the enemies of Israel.
So you’ve got to manage these borders of defeat and the revanchism of these three powers that are not happy with the United States—which, by the way, exists for, what, 200 plus years when these places exist for, what, a millennium? Five millennia in the case of China? Who decided to put the United States in charge when China is five millennia old? Who decides that the United States tells you you can’t have back territories that you feel you are rightfully-owned patrimony? Okay, so, that’s the problem.
In the Cold War, we had it easier, in fact. Why? Because we had anti-communism. And so when you had illiberal regimes in the liberal international order, you didn’t necessarily have to transform them, democratize them, provided they were anti-communist. They could be nasty as hell, but if they were anti-communist, they were yours. It was quite the device. Now, we have a liberal international order. What’s the place of illiberal regimes? What place do they have in our created and still-dominated international order? Do they come in on our terms, or do they come in on their terms? We don’t have the instrument, the anti-communist instrument.
Sure, the anti-communist instrument had a lot of downsides. We don’t need to discuss our support, for example, for apartheid South Africa, because they were anti-communist. In many ways, having anti-communism and nasty regimes on our side also compromised our values, and some of those regimes maybe we shouldn’t have been supportive of. I’m not saying it was all hunky-dory. History is, as you know, messy. But nonetheless, we don’t have that tool anymore. And so what do you do with Iran? What do you do with Russia? What do you do with China? If they don’t want to be subordinate to your liberal international order, what are the terms of your interaction with them?
I submit we haven’t figured that out, Dan. I submit that that’s still an open question. We don’t know what to allow, how to interact with illiberal regimes in the liberal international order in ways that are effective.
So now we’ve got the Russia problem. And so Russia’s self-understanding, just as you pointed out, is a world unto itself: self-sufficient, a special civilization, Eurasianism, Slavophilism, orthodoxy, traditional values, a pole in the multipolar world, dominant in its region. And here are the problems with that future, and why in the essay in Foreign Affairs we call it “continental cul-de-sac.” Because they’ve tried it, and it’s failed multiple times. Tsarist Russia dissolved, was lost. Yes, the Soviet Union put back, and as a result of World War II put back even more of that continental imperial contraption, but that’s gone too. And now Russia, with the exception of Kaliningrad, that enclave that used to be Königsberg, where Immanuel Kant was born, with that exception, they’re father from Europe than at any time since Peter the Great, and the Baltic Sea is a NATO lake and everything else that you know. At the same time, their neighbors don’t want a part of this Russian world, of this Russian pole.
And so what is it that’s attractive? Russia’s soft power is attractive. Their main export, as we write, is both oil and gas on one side and talented people on the other. What kind of model is that? They’re a commodity export with tech wasteland at home. Their high-tech private sector is in Tel Aviv. Russia no longer even has a machine tool industry. This is astonishing. The Soviet machine tool industry was immense, it was colossal. People say the Soviet Union was an economic midget—they don’t know what they’re talking about. They had a colossal military-industrial complex supported by a huge machine tool industry. Mao had no military-industrial complex to speak of for most of his rule. He was dependent on Russian machine tools, and now look, the other way around. Russia’s entirely dependent on China for machine tools.
And so you have burned every bridge to the West. You have little to no soft power. You’ve lost the whole new economy to emigration or expulsion. You are dependent, ever more so, on the good graces of the Chinese, who look down on you as a failure. What kind of pole in a multipolar world are you? Well, the Russians say, “We speak on behalf of global humanity.” I’ve got news for you: Russia does not speak on behalf of global humanity. You can go ask them. The Russians, sure, they provide lots of covert activities, mafia-like activities for autocratic regimes in the Sahel and elsewhere. They’re great at spoliation. Yes; they’re great at corruption, if you want to be a corrupt regime.
But as a sustainable model going forward where they are a pole in a multipolar world, their world has shrunk, and is shrinking, and is brittle, and they have few friends who are real friends rather than opportunistic friends. It’s certainly Russia’s present under Putin—but it’s a cul-de-sac, in my view, and therefore it’s a delusion. They burned all their bridges to the West and then accused the West of arson, and now, they’re increasing their dependency on the East, and they’re not developing their human capital, their infrastructure, or their governance at home.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
You just pointed out a point that you make in the essay, quoting you here, “Russia has never sustained itself as a great power unless it had close ties to Europe.” And your most optimistic scenario, I would say, is called “Russia as France.” This is also the one that you find probably least plausible of the scenarios you lay out, but what if we look at that as a surprise, that optimistic scenario, what would it take to get to that outcome?
Stephen Kotkin
Well, if you look at France today, it still has the proud monarchical tradition; it still has the statues to the Bourbon dynasty, the palaces, you still can go to Versailles. It still has the absolutist state in some ways. France is really heavily bureaucratic, more so than countries that didn’t have an absolutist state tradition. The revolutionary tradition, of course, is both inspiration and cautionary tale, but France no longer threatens its neighbors. On the contrary, it’s a rule-of-law democratic state, free and open society, dynamic open-market economy. It’s got flaws, and it’s got shortcomings, and we can all say, “Oh, I don’t like this about France.” It’s a great country and a great achievement.
If Russia ever became like France, that would be pretty spectacular: a stable, prosperous, rule-of-law democratic polity that no longer threatened its neighbors but was still proud of its monarchical tradition, still proud of its state, and still in a way proud of the revolutionary tradition despite the fact that it was even more murderous in Russia than in the French case.And so I thought, “Yes, let’s talk about the difference between Russia today or Russia even in the 1990s and France today, and if you think Russia can become democratic, okay, you explain to me how Russia could become France from where it is now.” So that’s why we’ve concretized that question.
Many people are willing to sacrifice their lives to see Russia become a democracy. Many of your readers, your listeners on this podcast, are what we would call dissidents, or opposition figures, or people who’ve been forced into exile, or people who’ve been in prison because of their convictions that Russia could become a democracy. We understand that. We just need to build institutions.
You can’t say, “Oh, de Gaulle came out of retirement in 1958 and imposed the Fifth Republic, imposed the consolidation of French democracy after a lot of back and forth.” De Gaulle came out of retirement in ‘58 after a whole lot of institution building: an impartial professional judiciary, an impartial professional civil service, a genuine legislature, a genuine competitive party system, free and open media. That’s what you got to build, and that has to be built over time, and France took a really long time to get to where it is today.
And I would see that, okay, France and Russia are different places, don’t get me wrong. I know the differences just as you do. But of all the countries in the world, the one that looks closest to Russia in my view is France. And so I regard that as a good jumping-off point to discuss the possible scenario of Russia becoming France. I don’t exclude it at all. Since I can’t predict the future, I can’t say that it couldn’t happen, because that would be predicting the future. But you have to tell me how it could happen, what would be the mechanisms, and then we could talk about the probabilities.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
I have less self-restraint when it comes to that prediction game, and I will say that the one scenario of yours that seemed to me most likely, if I had to bet, was Russia’s North Korea, which, as you describe it, is “domestically repressive, internationally isolated and transgressive, armed with nuclear weapons, and abjectly dependent on China but still able to buck Beijing,” which seems like you can kind of draw the straightest line from where we are now to a scenario like that.
Stephen Kotkin
Yeah. I can’t disagree with that, Dan. It’s kind of ridiculous to compare Russia and North Korea. Russia is 142 times bigger than North Korea, and there’s all sorts of other differences that we could go into. And yet there’s this uncanny phenomenon going on right now where Russia’s claiming to be a pole in the multipolar world, and yet it’s becoming increasingly dependent on China. And China is wary of excessive Russian dependence on China. We think China would love Russia to be 100 percent dependent on them—but then you’re responsible. It’s on your shoulders then. In other words, if it’s a basket case, it’s then your basket case. And so China is very happy under Xi Jinping, who, like Putin, is mortal. Under Xi Jinping, China is very happy to be in a comprehensive strategic partnership, as they call it—which didn’t originate under Xi Jinping, but was deepened under him.
They’re very happy in their joint project of bashing the West, reducing Western power in their mind, and making the world safe for autocratic regimes. Of course, they’re achieving the exact opposite—the perverse and unintended consequences. They’re strengthening the West, rallying the West, making more people wonder if they’d want to join the West. Remember, Russia and China, all power is relative, and if they have problems, shortcomings, they hit a wall, if the West also hits a wall, if the West is decadent, in decline, defeating itself, undermining itself with the assistance of China and Russia, China and Russia can muddle through no matter how deep their problems are.
And so the problem with this scenario in some ways, from a Russian point of view, is they don’t want to become a subject of China. They want to be a pole, as we said, in the fantasy multipolar world that they talk about. And the Chinese don’t necessarily want to be responsible for this vassal, for this basket case. But that’s the direction both are moving in through the opportunism of opposing the West in ways that I believe are galvanizing the Western and undermining their positions, right? If you had to award Olympic medals for Western fortification, gold would go to Xi Jinping, silver would go to Putin, and bronze would be up for grabs.
On the North Korean side, you see that the Kim dynasty is abjectly dependent on China, and yet they can flip China the bird. Kim murders his half-brother, who’s under Chinese protection in Southeast Asia and gets away with it, because China can’t lose the Korean War. You see, if the North Korean regime goes down, the Korean peninsula is unified under South Korea, an American ally with a treaty, a mutual defense treaty with the United States. And [General Douglas] MacArthur not only gets to the Yalu; he stays there, and is not pushed back. And in the fullness of time, Mao, having sacrificed seven figures of Chinese lives, loses the Korean War, and Xi Jinping goes into the history books as the guy who lost the Korean War in the fullness of time. So he can’t do that, he can’t let that happen in North Korea. And so the Kim dynasty knows that. Just like you and I are talking about it here in the studio at Foreign Affairs—well, if we know it, he knows it. And Russia is beginning to show potential signs of this similar behavior.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
I want to come back to some of the U.S. policy questions that you raised early on and that you raised in the piece. You very strikingly note here, as you have in past essays and past talks, that, quoting you, “Over the course of multiple presidential administrations, Washington has learned the hard way that it lacks the levers to transform places such as Russia and, for that matter, China.” Yet at the same time, you’ve made this point about the value of making Putin feel uncomfortable and of suggesting there is another path. You have a really intriguing passage in the essay about being pro-Russian and anti-Putin, about making clear to the Russian people that there are ways back into international society or a U.S. relationship beyond what seems possible now. Talk about the slight tension, I think, between those points and what you think is possible when it comes to encouraging both that sense of insecurity on Putin’s part, but also that sense of possibility among everyday Russians.
Stephen Kotkin
So Russia is European, Dan, but it’s non-Western, because Western is an institutional matrix, right? It’s rule-of-law, it’s real elections, it’s a market economy, it’s a free society. That’s Western. Russia is European culturally, but not Western; it’s non-Western. Japan is not European, but it’s Western, it’s institutionally Western. And so the West is not a cultural or a geographic term. But Russia is non-Western, and so figuring out how to be non-Western and have a relationship with the West has been too difficult of a challenge for too many Russian regimes over a really long period of time.
To be non-Western is not necessarily to be anti-Western. You can, for example, be yourself and still have relations with the West. The idea that you must be an antagonist to the West at all times and at extreme levels is only the case if you’re a brittle authoritarian, if you’re an illiberal regime in a liberal-dominated international order. So Russia’s grand strategy is how to be itself in a world that’s Western dominated; and their mistake, again and again, is that they must be anti-Western to survive rather than figure out a modus vivendi with the West that’s mutually beneficial and prosperous.
Okay, so that’s from the Russia side. What about from our side? So we’re going to have to talk about cold war for a second here. I know we’re all tired of these arguments, meta-arguments about are we in a cold war or not in a cold war. Between great powers, Dan, there are four policy options. You study history, and we could talk for another three hours about every historical case; I’d be happy to go into the details. There are four options. One of them is hot war. I think we can all agree that hot war is not a good option between major powers. 55 million dead in World War II, which was a multiple of World War I; we don’t want to go there. The idea that hot war is okay is insanity. So I don’t like that option.
Another option I have is capitulation, appeasement—that used to be called capitulation—whatever term you prefer. Again, I don’t want to get stuck up on terminology here. I don’t like capitulation, and the reason I don’t like capitulation is the same thing that [Winston] Churchill mentioned in his critique of appeasement: You think you’re getting a peace, but you’re actually just getting self-humiliation plus war in the end, ultimately. So capitulation just gives you the hot war at some point later on, in a worse position than you were before. It’s an illusion.
And then you have Pygmalion, what I call Pygmalion, right? From George Bernard Shaw’s play; it actually has roots in the classical tradition, as you know. Pygmalion is where you think you’re going to change the other side’s personality. So you get a street urchin off the street, and you’re going to transform her into a lady—or, what has been called by one of our best public servants as a responsible stakeholder in the international system, right? That’s Pygmalion. You go in, you transform them, they become more like you, and then you can then have that great-power relationship. And Pygmalion doesn’t work—it generally doesn’t work. Instead, it produces a Putin or a Xi Jinping as the outcome of the Pygmalion attempt. But we can try Pygmalion again. I don’t think there’s a lot of appetite for it right now.
So what does that leave? You don’t like hot war; I agree with you. You don’t like capitulation, because that’s just delay of hot war and worse circumstances when it comes about. And Pygmalion has a poor track record. What’s left, Dan? You know what’s left? Cold war. You know what’s good about cold war? It’s not hot war, it’s not capitulation, it’s not Pygmalion. And you know what? You can call it “managed competition.” You can have a million euphemisms for cold war. And by the way, that’s what we have right now. Everyone is trying to come up with their “managed competition” euphemism, because the term cold war is seen as terrible—because who wants to fight a cold war again?
There is no alternative better than cold war between major powers, whatever terminology you prefer. And if you watch this managed competition, if you watch the actual tools being employed, it’s the toolkit that I recognize really well, and I’m detailing it in Stalin: Volume Three as we speak. And so I’m good with cold war. We know how to do it. We’ve got a really big toolkit. And so one of the tools I have in the toolkit, Dan, is making authoritarian regimes afraid of the survival of their regime, because you know what? It’s happened that authoritarian regimes have fallen, and it’s happened that they’ve fallen in Russia, and it’s happened that we stood up to them and were part of that. They fell from their own internal contradictions and failures; but they also fell in part because we stood up to them, and we had that tool in the toolkit, and we were not afraid to use it.
And sure, sometimes we did stupid things, and sometimes we did self-defeating things, and sometimes we crossed lines that, in prospect, let alone in retrospect, attempts to assassinate [Fidel] Castro and the Bay of Pigs and one could go on about all the things that you’d be cautious about. I think we need to play that game too, and I think that needs to be part of our deterrence-diplomacy combination.
But all of that is not enough, Dan, because you have to have a positive story, you have to be compelling, you have to be something that other people want to join voluntarily. It’s about attraction. It’s about the other side knowing that you are more popular than they are, that others want to join you rather than them, that they need coercion for their sphere of influence; whereas your sphere of influence is voluntary, non-hierarchical, open, and mutually obligatory because of your treaty negotiations and the treaties that you sign. And so you need, as [George] Kennan wrote and as everybody understands, you need to invest in yourself and make yourself something that others want to emulate and join.
Dan Kurtz-Phelan
There is much more in the essay than we have time to get to here. It’s called “The Five Futures of Russia.” Stephen Kotkin, thank you for joining me for a third time on this podcast and for this piece, as well as all the other fantastic essays you’ve done for Foreign Affairs over the years.
Stephen Kotkin
My pleasure.