Ep 180: Stephen Kotkin on Endgames in Ukraine

Stephen Kotkin, Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

Aaron MacLean:

We have covered the war in Ukraine from time to time here on School of War, and we're going to do it again today with the great Stephen Kotkin. Amidst all the hot rhetoric and high emotion of the last few weeks, is the United States actually adopting a wholly new direction in its approach to the war, to Russia and to grand strategy more generally? Or is there a lot of sound and fury right now obscuring the fact that things are going to return to more familiar trajectories soon? And if that's an open question, how and when will we know the answer? Kotkin's going to help us figure out what it all means. Let's get into it.

Aaron MacLean:

For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter @aaronbmaclean. Hi, I'm Aaron Maclean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today, Stephen Kotkin, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's the author of many books on Russia and the Soviet Union. He's Stalin's biographer, author most recently there of Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1940. Stephen, you came on the show last year to talk about Ukraine. It was one of our most, I think it's actually, it is the number one most popular episode in the history of the show. And I thought, "Who better to have back to help us untangle and better understand the events of recent days?"

And I'm going to note for the record before we really get into it here, and I turn it over to you, that we're recording this on the evening of Friday February 21st, which I feel like you have to say because these things changed so quickly by the time this airs, who knows what reversals we have witnessed. But when you came on the show, Stephen, you laid out, I'm just going to put it very briefly and crudely, a plan to get to a good outcome in a negotiated settlement by applying political pressure that is to say by applying pressure and putting at risk things that Putin cares about within Russia. And that that line of action would work in concert with some sort of diplomatic strategy and that was your thought on how to get to a result. Well, here we are, February 2025, diplomacy is underway. Please help us understand what's going on. How do you compare what's happened this week to the sketch of a plan that you laid out?

Stephen Kotkin:

Aaron, thanks for having me back. Ukraine is a hard one. It's not going to be easy to get to a place where the fighting stops and hopefully doesn't resume. That's always been true, but I've been advocating for some type of negotiated process for a long time now, and so you're not going to get me to oppose a negotiation process. I welcome it. The issue are, or the issues are, what are the terms of the negotiation, right. There's peace and then there's peace on one's knees, which is not really peace. So it's good to see a negotiation process, I have to wait to see how it unfolds, if it unfolds. But I want to talk a little bit about the terms. Let's first understand what happened here. So Russia invaded its neighbor Ukraine. It's a war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine. Russia has done this beginning in 2014, not beginning in 2022, taken Crimea and southeastern Ukraine, part of the so-called Donbas, and then expanding its conquests after February 2022.

If for example, we said Aaron, that a woman was raped and somebody came and said, "Oh, her skirt was short. She had a lot of makeup on, she wanted to join NATO," it would still be a rape. That's the only way to describe this. That's what's happened. We might think about other places around the world, Tibet, for example. Are we happy about Tibet's incorporation into communist China? I don't think we are. Could we have done something about it back in that period, 1949, 50? Potentially. Now, no. So we're at a moment where there are some big choices to be made. We don't have all the leverage we would like, but it's pretty clear to me who started the war and who's responsible for the war. Imagine if for example, we said that, "Geez, Israel started the war on October 7th, 2023." Your audience would be outraged. They might cancel their subscriptions and never listen to your fantastic show again if you said that.

Now, having said all of that, we don't want the war to go on forever and the US commitment cannot be forever. And so President Trump, despite some of his statements which are at variance with reality, is correct to try to catalyze the negotiation process. So what might that look like? How might that work? It's very interesting that Ukraine has lost the war. Now, I've been saying this for three years. The reason they've lost the war is because it started in 2014, as I said, when Russia took Ukrainian territory and was largely unpunished and Obama got a slap on the wrist. Russia has taken very little new territory since fall of 2022, up till today, Russia's further conquests of Ukraine amount to nothing. It's just under 20% of Ukrainian territory. And since fall 2022, Russia has suffered more than 700,000 casualties and 200,000 deaths at a minimum. Having taken no additional territory since fall 2022.

So Ukraine won a victory in defending its sovereignty, making sure its capital was not conquered by Russia. It's a tremendous victory in that period, February, March, April 2022. But overall, it's lost the war because Russia is an occupation of Ukrainian territory and Ukraine can't get it back militarily. But as I've just suggested, Russia has also lost the war, astonishingly. They took that territory mostly early and they haven't been able to increase it at phenomenal cost. So we have a situation where both sides are dug in and both sides are dying in numbers and neither side has much to gain, and their ability to gain a full victory from their point of view on the battlefield is over, it's non-existent. So that would be the time for negotiation, wouldn't it? When you can't get your maximal objectives, you're stuck in a prolonged stalemate and you're dying at prodigious rates.

Russian casualties are much greater than Ukrainian casualties. So Ukraine won its sovereignty, but otherwise has lost the war and can't evict Russia from Ukrainian territory militarily. But Russia cannot conquer all of Ukraine. It can't swallow up Ukraine. Let's remember that this is not about NATO expansion. Russia is attempting to destroy Ukraine as an independent nation and country, as a sovereign state. If the threat was from NATO, a collection of pacifist countries that don't spend anything on their military, quite the threat. If the threat was from NATO, why is Russia annihilating Ukrainian cultural institutions? Why are they destroying or stealing, looting cultural artifacts that demonstrate Ukraine's existence as an independent nation? Why are they kidnapping Ukrainian children for which President Putin himself was indicted as you know, and taking them back to Russia in numbers because they're trying to wipe out the existence, the memory, the culture of Ukraine as an independent nation and state.

That's what this is about. I don't think we want to see that. But given that both sides are stalemated and dying at prodigious rates, Trump in his usual way, chaotically, let's say with less than accurate information, has catalyzed an important moment for everyone to take advantage of. So that's where I am. Now I want to know what the terms of the negotiation might be. I want to see Trump applying pressure onto Putin. He's applying all the pressure onto Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian side. Some pressure was definitely required there, but where's the pressure on Putin and Russia in order to get the deal that Trump would like to see happen? Let's get some more pressure on the Russian side. Now, again, we're early. A lot can still happen. We don't really know the full substance of the meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A little bit is leaked, but there's more to come, we hope. So I welcome this negotiation and I'm concerned about the terms and where the pressure is on the Russian side.

Aaron MacLean:

So let's play out some of the ways in which this could move even in the next few weeks. And there seems to me to be one major junction or fork in the road approaching rapidly, and that is whether or not we snap back to where I think everyone sort of thought we were, which was a more traditional negotiating posture where as you point out, you would expect a fair amount of pressure on the Russians, some on the Ukrainians, but a fair amount on the Russians, and it would be a long road and a difficult road because we don't have all the leverage we would want to bring about acceptable terms. But you could imagine a world in which Trump's comments and everything that's happened in the recent days is a function of annoyance with Zelenskyy declining to sign the agreement over mineral rights, Zelenskyy making comments that invoked the phrase disinformation environment, which is a third rail.

That kind of language has become a third rail in conservative circles in the United States. You could see it in other and with some justice, and you could see it as a collection of relatively short-term problems that could be solved probably by Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy's probably the key player there. If say for example, Zelenskyy did ascend ultimately to some kind of economic arrangement with the United States to put Trump back in a place where he seemed to be relatively recently.

And then we go to the hard work, and it's potentially a very long time horizon as your colleague Neil Ferguson has pointed out, the timelines for these sorts of negotiations can be lengthy and measured in years, not in weeks and months, but that's scenario one. Scenario two is we actually keep going down what appears to be the new direction of the last few days, and that is really certainly for an American President, certainly for a Republican president, much less well-charted territory, a world in which we seem to be moving closer to Russia and away from allies and partners like the NATO states, a world in which we do apply a lot of pressure to Ukraine.

To end the war, you could also say to compel a kind of surrender, which doesn't necessarily need to be physically tanks rolling down the streets of Kiev. It could be elections that produce a candidate favorable to the Russians. So those are two broad and crude categories. They seem to me like, we either turn back onto the more traditional path that I think a lot of us had signed up for, or we continue down this new path that seems to be emerging out of the mist.

Stephen Kotkin:

If only Joe Biden had negotiated for Donald Trump to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, I think we'd be in a better place, honestly. So what do we have here? You don't win unless the defeated side capitulates, they can continue to fight, even if it's a guerrilla war. Whatever territory they hold they can fight on or whatever territory you conquer, they can try to foment an insurgency there. So not even Donald Trump can impose a settlement on the Ukrainians that they don't accept. Then you have to add in the fact that some Europeans, not all, but some Europeans will continue to support Ukraine substantially. Whether that's the case across Europe is doubtful. But nonetheless, there's a big part of Europe that really would support Ukraine. And so the second scenario that you outlined is one that has to take into account the Ukrainian side's willingness to capitulate and the Northern Europeans, let's call them Northeastern Europeans willingness to abandon Ukraine.

I don't see either one of those things happening. So Trump is not wrong on a lot of stuff. Let's give him his deal. Some relationship with Russia to manage relations with Russia is required. We have to share the planet with Russia. It's not going away. It's not going away as Ukraine's neighbor, no matter what the settlement or lack of settlement here, and it's not going away as the second or first largest nuclear power in the world. So managing that relationship rather than ignoring Russia, trying to completely isolate Russia, trying to make believe Russia doesn't exist, that's actually a fantasy trying to make believe it doesn't exist. So Trump is right to manage it. Again, what are the terms? Let's look at this. When Biden who played nice with Europe like Obama, when Biden asked the Europeans if they were in on Taiwan, if the US had a conflict in the Indo-Pacific with China, were the Europeans in, what'd they say?

They said, "Oh, maybe not. Maybe, but maybe not." But when there's a conflict in Europe, the US has to be all in for the Europeans. So there was a clear lack of reciprocity in the way that the Europeans pledged or failed to pledge their support for US interests in the Indo-Pacific versus the demands that they were making on US power in the European theater. So if I had been Biden, I would've blown that up. I would've been really angry. I would've said, "Hey, we're supposed to have your back in Europe, even though you have a colossal economy, 10 times the size of the Russian economy, and you don't have our back in Asia, how does that work?" So that's not the motivation for Trump's behavior vis-a-vis, the Europeans, you know very well his motivation, you outlined part of it, the animus against Zelenskyy, and we could go on, but nonetheless, the Europeans are a little hypocritical in their explosion at the Americans over what's happening in the European theater now. Where were they not that long ago? Okay, so again, Trump is not wrong. It's just that his modus operandi is sometimes self-defeating.

Aaron MacLean:

Let's play out the scenario you just outlined where there is an attempt to bring about a more rapid conclusion of the war by applying the balance of the pressure to Ukraine and the Europeans. But the Europeans and or the Ukrainians balk. They won't do it. The Ukrainians actually won't surrender. The Europeans won't stop supplying them, and I'll stop talking and turn it over to you, and then we... We cut off aid and we break up NATO. How do these things iterate out, do you think?

Stephen Kotkin:

Not a lot of options here for Trump, if he wants an outcome that's favorable for his popularity, his ratings, and his place in history. Let's remember Afghanistan, when Biden withdrew from Afghanistan in the middle of the night, it didn't go over well. His presidential popularity cratered and never recovered. Now, there were multiple causes to Biden's loss of popularity, but Afghanistan was a major contributing factor. Americans hate war, but they hate losing war even more than they hate war. Now remember, Trump started that process. It was Trump that started negotiating with the Taliban cutting out the Afghan government. It just so happened that Trump ran out of time. Biden picked it up, did not reverse the Trump policy, but embraced it and finished the job, and it turned out really badly for Biden. So Trump has the Afghanistan option in Ukraine. That is Biden left him a mess just like Trump left Biden in negotiation or failed negotiation, you could argue with the Taliban, Trump has picked this up and now he pulls out of Ukraine in the middle of the night abandoning it to the Russians.

And how does that look for Trump's presidency, his approval ratings and his place in history? Maybe he doesn't care, but I can tell you a whole lot of Republicans will care. Even those who are not favorably disposed towards Ukraine, they don't want a debacle. They don't want Republicans getting smashed in the next several elections because it looks like we lost the war that we didn't have to lose. The other side of the equation is Nixon in Vietnam. Remember, he campaigned to end the war in Vietnam, which every American with few exceptions thought, "Hey, that would be great." The war was extremely divisive. It looked like it wasn't winnable. It was tearing the country apart. And Nixon said, "We're going to end this." He won the election, in fact, he won in a landslide. And it turned out that the North Vietnamese, they didn't want to come to the table.

So what did Nixon have to do? He had a bomb the smithereens out of the North Koreans to bring them to the table, the so-called escalate to deescalate. So your two alternatives here, which is cut and run arguments for which we're hearing from the Vice President among others, the cut and run, or the escalate to deescalate, which by the way didn't work very well. Kissinger did get the Nobel Prize, but he tried to give it back and the Nobel Committee wouldn't take it back. The North Vietnamese negotiator refused the Nobel, never accepted it in the first place. But anyway, whether it's cut and run or escalate to deescalate, those are not choices that any President would like to see as his main choices. So Trump's got to look for another choice here, right. Where he doesn't absorb the blow, and yet he extricates the parties from this mutual disaster.

So that's where I was talking on your show last time about the pressure points for Putin. His domestic economic situation is dire. Yes, the military industrial complex is booming. Those factories are getting all the money, all the credits, but none of those credits are going to be paid back. They're making loans to factories to build munitions and weapons that are already bad loans. And so the Russian financial system is ruined. His payment system is under massive pressure. He's got dirhams and he's got rupees that he can't use for anything. He's accumulating huge stocks of UAE currency and India currency as well as Chinese currency, which he can only use really to trade with China, although there are a couple of other third parties he can use it for. So his payment system is and his financial system are in really big trouble. He's hemorrhaging his human capital abroad.

His 21st century economy lives in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. He is undergoing massive labor shortages domestically since 700,000 people killed or seriously wounded, at least, and he had bad demographics before he did that, and I could go on. He can't develop his energy. He's lost his European market to a very great extent. The gas market was extremely lucrative for him, thanks to mistakes by Germany. He hasn't been able to recuperate that level of volume with sales. The oil is still selling, but it's complex to sell it. They have these ghost ships that are in really bad shape, and I could go on that he's forced to use because of sanctions. He can't develop his Arctic energy because ExxonMobil and other companies with the tech were forced to leave. He can't develop Sakhalin, really big energy resources. So even on the things he previously bet on, the commodity export energy superpower stuff, he's behind the eight-ball.

The one area where he's not feeling sufficient pressure is in the political sphere. Authoritarian regimes can fail at everything across the board as long as they succeed at one thing, which is the suppression of political alternatives. But as soon as political alternatives, real ones begin to appear, the regime can potentially get destabilized. Now, we're not talking about the democratic opposition here, which is full of many courageous people, but also fractious to the point of dysfunction and infiltrated in part by this KGB in its current incarnation. We're talking about the Russian nationalists, the Patriots, the authoritarians in Russia who don't share our values, but believe that the war in Ukraine is hurting Russia. They don't care about Ukraine, they care about Russia and the damage this war is doing to Russia's long-term trajectory. That's a big constituency for us to operate within, and that's where the political pressure on the Putin regime could come.

So I would expect a good negotiator, not just to be telling the Ukrainians that it's time to make some concessions because it's pastime, Trump is right, but also telling the Russians, he says, "We're going to continue to squeeze you until you cut this nonsense out, and come to the table and stop talking about redoing the world order, stop talking about rolling US power out of Europe," you know, what Stalin was fantasizing about with Roosevelt in '45. "Stop talking about energy deals where Russia gets everything it wants without paying a price. Stop talking about all the Russia wish list fantasy list and say, 'Okay, well make some concessions. Maybe we'll make sanctions, relief concessions on the energy sector in exchange for your cutting a deal that stops the war that gives us the armistice without ending Ukrainian sovereignty.'" If there are elections in Ukraine, no pro-Russian candidate is going to win.

Zelenskyy might lose if they're free and fair elections, as they should be, and as they were when he got elected. But if they're free and fair elections and he loses, it'll be another pro-Ukrainian candidate who wins, not a pro-Russian. The only way for Russia to get a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine after the atrocities that they committed, the whole war is an atrocity, would be to conquer Kiev, would be for them to walk into the capital either by invitation or by conquest and try to impose install a puppet regime. That's something that the Ukrainians will resist with every fiber of their body, even if Trump decides he needs to cut and run because he's got other priorities here in the US, and as you know, we have a lot of priorities. So the room that Trump has here without creating additional leverage, without even using the leverage he already has, which is massive given Putin's vulnerabilities, I don't know how he gets a good outcome for himself, let alone for Ukraine.

So this is what Rubio's talking about. He's a seasoned national security professional at this point, given his role the last 15 years in the Senate and his record of statements about Russia and this evil regime, Mike Waltz understands this really well, Witkoff understands this well, and we could go on. So it's there for Trump to pull off potentially, but he's got to pressure the Russians at least as much if not more, as he's pressuring the Ukrainians. The Europeans are already in a tizzy. Trump has had his defense secretary, if you can call him that, announce that Ukraine's not getting into NATO. Well, I'll tell you, Joe Biden announced that himself. So it's not like that's news. Trump announced that we're not sending any American troops into Ukraine. Well, geez, that was Joe Biden's policy. No American boots on the ground. No forever war Trump has announced as well.

Well, if Biden didn't announce that he should have and some large-scale rearmament of Ukraine to be able to defend himself, which would benefit American industry, a tremendous amount of the so-called aid to Ukraine has been for them to purchase American weapons or to get American weapons on lend-lease for which Ukraine is still on the hook. So there's a big deal to be had here, which involves Ukrainian rearmament and a lot of the stuff that was taken off the table, Biden had already taken off the table, and Europe's failure to figure out a position that involves security guarantees for Ukraine from the European side is not something you can blame Trump for. But let me make one final point here on where this is going. Big opportunity for Trump if he can pull this off like I'm saying, but this is about Northeastern Europe, A lot of people talking about NATO and the survival of NATO and what's going to happen to NATO, and is this the end of the transatlantic alliance?

The transatlantic alliance has been on the precipice of collapse since 1949 when they founded NATO. The differences between Europe and the US over the years, I mean, they've been phenomenal and the fights that we've had and the accusations that we had in public, let alone behind closed doors. And you can just remember Reagan, let alone all the other stuff going back to Truman, Eisenhower and Suez in '56, and I mean, Aaron, come on, it's all this history that you know well. If there's a conflict in the Indo-Pacific, US assets in Europe are going to be evacuated. We just don't have enough stuff. God forbid there's a major war in the Indo-Pacific. Everything that we got sitting in Europe in warehouses on military bases, it's all going to have to move to the Indo-Pacific. And so NATO or no NATO, the Europeans are going to have to defend themselves conventionally within the US nuclear umbrella, which by the way, Trump has reaffirmed.

And so we're going to see Poland, Finland, Sweden, the Baltic States, potentially France. We'd have to see what kind of government France would have at that point, step up to fill the vacuum to defend Northeastern Europe against Russia. Sweden has an army. Actually, they have an air force in a navy, a real one. Real navy and real air force and real intel. Finland has a real land army. Poland has a real military. Sweden and Finland have real militaries because they were outside of NATO and had no choice. Poland has had one because they're on the front lines here and they have a history with Russia that's not enviable. So all that's going to be true in spades. God forbid there's this conflict in the Indo-Pacific. So Trump is accelerating processes that Trump didn't cause and that were likely to happen or potentially could happen anyway, and so the Europeans are getting a, you might say impolite strike upside the head.

I thought Vance's speech in Munich was excessively provocative, gleefully provocative, saying some things that maybe had to be said, but doing it in a way that undermined the message. He's a very smart guy, very capable person. He knew what he was doing, but he could have done it in a way that redounded to our favor. But the message conveyed to Europe is overdue. They got the message. Let's see what they can do about it. Let's see if they make some offers over the China thing. But Trump and his team, that's the main message. They have their work cut out. We want an armistice and we want an armistice that looks more like South Korea, one of the most successful countries in the world as an outcome for Ukraine rather than South Vietnam or rather than Afghanistan as we were alluding to earlier.

Aaron MacLean:

I take your point that there are real risks. There are risks in every direction, but there are especially risks in the new direction we've been talking about, the direction that attacks closer to Russia focuses on pressure on Ukraine. Those risks are on the ground, there're risks to order, and they intersect with political risks that again, are sort of recently unexplored terrain for Republican presidents. Though I suppose for Biden, as you point out, the fall of Kabul did nothing good for Biden. Fall of Saigon, here's a Republican. The fall of Saigon did nothing good for Gerald Ford. The hostages at the embassy in Tehran did nothing good for Jimmy Carter.

American voters don't like this kind of stuff, and public opinion turns on a dime. If you polled Americans, as I'm sure we could go look up the polls right now prior to the fall of Kabul and asked them, "Should we stay in Afghanistan?" I'm sure a majority said, "No. This doesn't make any sense. No one's explained it to me in 10 years. Why are we there?" You pull them after the fall of Kabul and ask, "How do you feel now?" They're against it. You ask Americans in the spring of 1950, should we fight to defend South Korea, they'd look at you like you were a crazy person. You ask them in July-

Stephen Kotkin:

You're right, Aaron. And that's just the political side. There's also the fact that having friends when stuff hits the fan is better than not having friends. So we have nearly 80 treaty agreements of mutual obligation, voluntary agreements with countries. Nearly 80 countries are in some type of treaty with the US, most of which ratified by the Senate. Again, voluntary imposing mutual obligations. That's a pretty amazing place to be. That's a superpower for a superpower. And so when you're trying to bring your friends and partners along towards realities that they might be in denial about or towards interests that you have elsewhere that they might not share to the same degree, you're doing the right thing. It's just the way that you're doing it, how you're doing it. There's no doubt whatsoever that America is a hard power military superpower. There's no doubt it's an economic power.

There's no doubt. It's a science and tech innovation power. There's no doubt it's a soft power. No matter how much we damage America's reputation, they still line up at the embassies for visas or they try to run across the border without a visa. There's no doubt that we have power in every dimension, superior to every other power in recorded history. But the biggest thing we have on top of all of that, what knits it together is the relationship power, the alliance power, the friends and partners power. And so I'd be cautious about overthrowing that. I'm fully in favor of rebalancing. I'm fully in favor of delivering tough messages and America's friends, not just with Europe. We got huge interests in East Asia. We got huge interests in the Middle East, and we could go on and sometimes those interests conflict. What we need to do in the Middle East conflicts with what the Europeans think about the Middle East.

US support for Israel, which is ironclad across the aisle, across administrations, is not shared in Europe to the same degree. And so there's conflict with Europe over US interests in the Middle East. That's normal. I got no problems with that kind of conflict, that's just something to be managed. And that's just something that the Europeans sometimes don't understand that the US is a global power, not just the power in the European theater, but let's manage that well. Yes, let's get everybody to pull their weight, but, Aaron, sometimes when you get and you alienated all your friends and you get sick or you need help or you have a financial issue or whatever it might be, and you got nobody to call, you were on the top of your game your whole life. You were the big guy on the block, the king of the mountain, the superpower, and then you hit the skids, some hard times, somebody attacked you.

Remember 9/11, even governments that were not favorably disposed towards the US aligned with us after we got hit. That's pretty spectacular. And that's something that's of transcendent value, and I got to be cautious. When I'm rebalancing, my methods of rebalancing have to keep in mind that I got to be playing for the long game.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let's play out the alternative then, because the alternative that seems to me to be on the minds of some around the administration, and I take your point that different people here have apparently different views based on their backgrounds and idiosyncrasies. Trump being by far the most important. We had Phillips O'Brien on the show recently, not to talk about Ukraine, but to talk about his book on World War II, the core thesis of which is you can have all the white papers and bureaucratic processes that you want, but at the end of the day, it's the idiosyncrasies of the principle that drive grand strategy. And he makes his case on Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill and the rest of them.

Stephen Kotkin:

[inaudible 00:37:10] and not on Japan, and not on many other actors in World War II.

Aaron MacLean:

We're going to go down a rabbit hole there. Actually, I would be delighted to go down in that rabbit hole with you sometime, but let me get to my question here, which is, isn't the alternative to everything you just outlined, we'll get some new friends and they'll be really big dogs themselves? We will enter some kind of condominium or describe it how you want with Russia, China's more complicated because their conservatism is in question, given that they're communists and all, but you could make a case that they're more conservative than our progressives in certain respects, and so maybe we have a reason to like them more.

I'm channeling something here, obviously, and you raised Vice President Vance's speech in Munich. Vice President Vance says quite bluntly at the outset of the speech, extraordinary speech, that in the Cold War there was a side of the Cold War that shut down churches and banned free speech and was basically a tyranny and I'm glad that side lost, the Soviet Union. And now basically that's you. That's you guys. That's the Europeans... Well, what about the world where we have new friends, Stephen? What about that grand strategy? A grand strategy that I don't think it's the first time someone has suggested such a thing in American history. We just haven't really been in the mood for it since the 1940s. What do you think about it?

Stephen Kotkin:

JD Vance or part of Putin's system. They don't have a vice president there in Russia, but if he was part of their system in some way, he'd be falling out of a window like many other members of that system, Aaron. I'm all for realism vis-a-vis the Europeans, I understand that letting in immigrants without being able to assimilate them at their scale was a self-defeating policy by Europe. I understand that their energy policies have not reduced their carbon footprint while increasing costs vastly and making them geopolitically vulnerable. I get all those aspects of Vance's critique. He's right about those things. Let's be honest. Those are facts, right. However, the fact that Europe has made some really big mistakes and in some cases is continuing to make them policy-wise, doesn't mean that Russia or China are countries we want to be friends with. The diagnosis can be correct, but the cure can be worse than the original disease.

Let's remember that Stalin went into the underground and spent his entire adult life till the age of late thirties because of Czarist injustice. The Czarist regime was vastly unjust. Stalin's diagnosis was correct, and he sacrificed everything. He had no job, no career, no money, no place to live. He was in and out of Siberia and exile and prison and chased by the police. He sacrificed everything to fight czarist injustice. And then what happens? His system is more unjust when he gets to power than anything the czars did than anything any other country's ever done. So let's be careful with our view about what Russia really is, what China really is. Again, we have to share the planet with them. They're not going away. So we have to negotiate with them. We have to cut deals with them. Trump's instincts are absolutely correct, but Aaron, what are the terms of the deal, right.

Are the terms of the deal Tibet, Xinjiang, what happened to Hong Kong, what might happen to Taiwan, are those are the terms of the deal? 'Cause I don't want to deal like that. That's not stable. The appetite grows in the eating, the terms of the deal cut and run from Ukraine, give Putin an energy deal to reward his aggression, because he doesn't close churches and he wears a cross, which may be quite cynical on his part. I don't know. I don't know if those are the terms of the deal I like. Again, just because the Europeans may have done things that JD Vance detests doesn't mean that you jump into the arms of something else that if you were in their system would push you out a window.

The Republican critique of US foreign policy has a tremendous amount of substance. I'm in agreement with a lot of the critique. The idea that the liberal internationalists brought peace and prosperity to the world. The story that they tell has empirical problems, let's be honest. And so there is rationale, significant justification for the critique. And maybe I'm not as articulate as Vance, I could make a version of the critique too. But what I need is a workable alternative for peace and prosperity for America. And that's where I think the conversation needs to go and Vance needs to explain, and I would love it if he's capable of doing this, and maybe he is, what their plan is, what their strategy is. Think about the Middle East that Israel knows really well, they're trying to kill you, Aaron. They're trying to kill you.

Aaron MacLean:

They've tried many times.

Stephen Kotkin:

They're trying to kill you.

Aaron MacLean:

Actually.

Stephen Kotkin:

And that's the story with the Russians too. They're thugs. It's a criminal regime, and you got to be really careful. Now, again, diplomacy is critical. Diplomacy is what you do between adversaries, right. With friends, you don't need as much diplomacy, you do need some. Diplomacy becomes critical when you have massive differences in state interest and ultimately even more fundamentally of values. But in order to do diplomacy well, you got to have leverage, right. What does Reagan do? Reagan has a massive amount of leverage and he just goes and increases it. He vastly increases his leverage and he's in the diplomatic conversation so that he can pocket the concessions that his leverage has produced. That's what peace through strength means. It means, "Hey, I have leverage. I'm going to increase my leverage. Why am I going to push my chips across the table before the negotiation starts?"

Like, I'm imitating John Kerry. Why am I going to do that? Instead, I'm going to increase my leverage, but I'm going to be talking... I'm going to have, instead of, the hawks are great. They want to increase us leverage, but they detest diplomacy. So how are you going to pocket the concessions? What's the leverage for? And the doves, fabulous. They love to negotiate, but they got nothing to negotiate with because they push all the chips across the table before the talks begin. How about real peace through strength? How about increasing leverage and negotiating deals that are favorable to America? And how about doing that in a sustained fashion and not just with Russia, but of course we need to come to grips with Iran in the Middle East in some fashion. What's the leverage in the deal that's favorable to us there? We need some modus vivendi with the Chinese and the Indo-Pacific. A hot war is not good for the United States interests, but neither is capitulation.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, I think, and I want to be clear, I don't have any evidence that this is what Vice President Vance thinks, but I know there are commentators on the right, some of them are close to this administration, who would say that the big deal, the grand strategic deal, looks something like, who cares what happens in Europe, one. Two, in the Pacific, you're totally right, Stephen, we got to avoid a war. And what's going to start a war is that we're in places like Japan and the Philippines with military forces that maybe don't have a good reason to be there, so we can solve that problem. And three, we get everyone to leave us, the Western Hemisphere and the Chinese can work things out for the Pacific, and the Russians can work things out for Europe and the Middle East. They've been fighting each other for thousands of year anyway. It's a mess.

We produce our own energy now anyway, and on balance, given the perfidy of liberal powers, 'cause progressives at home have been pretty perfidious too, we kind of would prefer to just deal like men with the Putins and the Xis of the world. And that's the new deal. That's the new order. And I had not really contemplated significant moves in this direction until this week. And again, I don't have any evidence that it's actually Vice President Vance's view. I don't think it's President Trump's view. I think my personal opinion is President Trump was a successful foreign policy president in his first term and had better outcomes than the presidents who preceded and followed him, that's my personal opinion. And he certainly didn't govern like that.

And his recent comment, we haven't talked about it at all, but his comments on Gaza in the last few weeks certainly do not suggest an America that's on its way out of the Middle East if we're developing real estate in the Gaza Strip. So it's obviously complicated at the presidential level. I don't know at the vice presidential level, but I do think that what I outlined is say what you will, and I'm going to invite you to say what you will. It has a kind of superficial coherence.

Stephen Kotkin:

Trump is a much more complicated figure than either his fans or his enemies understand him to be. Trump has this animal instinct, this political animal instinct that's really remarkable. He understands vulnerability. He understands opportunity at a visceral level before many other people in the room or in the administration get it. The challenge with Trump, of course, is attention span, follow through, competence, cohesion, long-term versus news cycle. He's a bundle of contradictions, and that opens up possibilities that people either didn't consider before, like you're suggesting that seemed easily dismissible, but turn out to involve potential upsides, right. So that disruptive quality that Trump brings, that just because we've done it one way doesn't mean we'd continue to do it that way forever. That disruptive quality, which is canny as well as chaotic, that is potentially leading to opportunities, choices that might be favorable to American interests long term.

We need to actually articulate what that is rather than shoot from the hip and conduct foreign policy with our thumbs, we need an implementation process in addition to an articulated strategy. Why do you need a strategy or at least a sense of strategy? Because you're trying to get your people to implement. There's only so many conversations President Trump can personally have. He's got to send people like he did to Riyadh. He's got to have people do things, build things, conduct talks, whatever it might be. And so they need to know where it's going, what they're part of, what they're doing it for. Our problem in America is a confidence problem. We've lost our confidence to a certain extent. We've lost the narrative. We've lost the e pluribus unum, and so I want to see us get our confidence back. I want to see us get us our national story back, our national sense of purpose back.

I don't want to see us... Well, the far left conducted a revolution and it was antithetical to American interests, so let's go right into an immediate counter revolution that's going to be even bigger than the revolution. I get the emotionalism of that, I get where that comes from. But we're a 50, 50 country. Trump won by the skin of his teeth. 1.5% in the popular vote may seem like a lot, given that he lost the popular vote last time, but that's quite a marginal victory, and you're not even including the huge number of people who didn't vote, right. So you got 30 to 40% of the country behind you. You got 30 to 40% of the country against you, and you got 30% or 40% of the country that's neither yes nor no. So you got to build that coalition of America that trust, that social solidarity, that America can do things, America is competent. America is a model. It's an example.

America has a national story. America is something to work for, sacrifice for America has a future even better than its past, I want to see that Aaron, I get what they're doing with the DEI and the bureaucracy, and I get all that stuff. I understand the excesses of the left as well as anybody. I'm a lifetime student of the excesses of the left. I don't need a lesson from contemporary politics anymore than I've already had. But I need more than just that lesson, be reminded of that. I need more than just excesses of the right to correct the real excesses of the left, which have been properly diagnosed. I need something better. Trump is 78-years-old. He'll be kind of Biden-esque by the time his presidency, right, 82 by the time his presidency winds down.

What's the future here, Aaron? Where are we going with this? Are we going with this in a way where, hey, we're going to be retreat to the western Hemisphere and Russia and China, can do what they want, wherever they want? That's not worked too well before. The history on that is not encouraging, and we've been down that road. That's not something that we're unfamiliar with. So yeah, the liberal international order got us into a lot of stuff that they promised would be good and turned out not to be good for middle America. Yeah, I get that.

Okay, where's the alternative that's better, that's the American story, the one that you and I grew up with in our civics classes? I need that. Maybe Vance is going to be that. Maybe others are going to be that, but where is that? I got to see that. I got to see not just denunciation and criticism, however justified. I got to see the positive vision that rallies peace and prosperity long term. We did that once and it worked. And the idea that that epoch is now over may be true, but I need an alternative. Not just a diagnosis, a critique, a denunciation, and I need an alternative that's going to work. And I need people that are collectively going to do... Reagan got 59% of the vote with no conservative media. Think about that. Where is that America? That's the America. I need

Aaron MacLean:

Stephen Kotkin, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. I don't know where we're going, but the one thing I am sure of is I'm hopeful that you will come back from time to time to help us understand the moment. Thank you so much. That was really fascinating.

Stephen Kotkin:

God bless. Aaron, it's a great show.

Aaron MacLean:

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