Stephen Kotkin: What Putin Got Wrong About Ukraine, Russia, and the West | Foreign Affairs Interview

I'm Dan Kurtz Phalen and this is the Foreign Affairs

interview

. I thought maybe Putin would get his way again, not because the West was

what

he thought, but because the West wouldn't respond to show teeth and show power. to show unity to show the values ​​that gave him this power there is perhaps no one who brings a deeper historical perspective to understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine than Stephen Copkin. For 33 years he has been a professor of history at Princeton. He is also a Stanford Hoover Fellow and is the author of several books, including a fascinating three-volume biography of Stalin, but Stephen is not just a great historian: he combines his knowledge of Russian history and its past leaders and present with a unique insight into how they shaped the world today I couldn't imagine a better guest for this first episode of the Foreign Affairs

interview

Stephen, welcome, thank you very much for joining us.

He has written a number of fantastic essays on

foreign

affairs

in recent years, including those published long before the arrival of Russia. The invasion of Ukraine I think really continued to shed a lot of light on the terrible events of the last few months. His most recent article is in our Meijin issue. It's called the Cold War, it never ended, but I wanted to start by reading a couple of lines from a previous essay that you wrote in 2016, called The Perpetual Geopolitics of Russia, wrote a quote for half a millennium. Russian

foreign

policy has been characterized by sky-high ambitions that have exceeded the country's capabilities.

Recurring episodes of Russian aggression reflect the same geopolitical trap that Russian rulers have set. for themselves over and over again, so if you extend this pattern to the present, how does it explain Putin's aggression in Ukraine and why it has gone so badly for him, at least so far? Dan, thank you for the honor of the invitation. It's wonderful to be here and to be able to discuss these issues with your audience, so this enigma arose as to why Russia was continually an autocracy, not just an autocracy, a personalistic autocracy with very repressive state coercive attempts at modernization that failed again and again, so how can we explain that and some people explain it through the notion of a deep cultural propensity toward imperialism.

You know that Russia is simply innate imperialist and wants to swallow its neighbors. They are very, very aggressive and therefore you can never trust them. You need to be careful. and they are going to do it again and another way to look at it is to know that the West is hegemonic or at least striving to be hegemonic, constantly pushing Russia, constantly challenging Russia and therefore Russia is simply defending its own interests of security against Russia. -a-vis Western imperialism, so we have this kind of perpetual Russian imperialism, which is an innate cultural commercial explanation, and we have this response to the West,

what

could they really do?

The West's actions are themselves imperialist and Russia is actually defending itself with NATO expansion. the most recent iteration of this being exactly Dan, so I'm thinking that doesn't work for me, how is that the pattern that we see again today with Vladimir Putin's regime? How come that pattern predates NATO expansion? We see it with Stalin, we see it. that with the tsar long before NATO existed and, furthermore, something is a cultural trait rather than a strategic choice, nothing can be done about it, it is essentialist, it never changes and that is not true either, so I started to decipher What were the factors?

The elements that came together gave this type of behavior and the first and foremost in my mind was this feeling of being a providential power with a special mission in the world. This is not unique to Russia, but the Russian mission is deep and enduring. centuries under different incarnations, of course, and then you have this providential power with a special mission in the world, a kind of civilization itself, neither Western nor Eastern, but something specific, maybe it is Eurasian, maybe the word Russia is enough and that providential power with a special mission in the world has a problem its capabilities do not match these ambitions it wants to be in first place but it has not been in first place there are a handful of episodes in history in which exceptional episodes in Russia was briefly in first rank when Peter the Great defeated Charles the top of the world and it seemed like his power coincided with his ambitions, but those episodes were fleeting, so there is a gap between power and ambitions, ambitions exceed power and time and time again we see that okay, let's try to build a strong state to compensate for this gap or to manage the gap or to overcome the gap and this strong state will take the country to that first rank of power with some coercive modernization of the state, you get a boost, an economic boost, but then you usually watertight and, furthermore, the State is even worse.

Building the pursuit of the strong state. becomes a personalist government that is anti-institutional and is actually anti-strong state, the state is undermined by the capricious nature of personalist government and here we have perhaps the best current example of this pattern: we have Vladimir Putin complaining about the West and trying to match the power of the West without the capabilities that use a strong state that becomes a personalist government and now makes its situation much worse than it was before February 2022, that's why I call it the perpetual geopolitics of Russia and It is important to emphasize that it is a choice, not an innate cultural trait.

Russia could say: you know we cannot match the West, the West is too strong for us. Instead, let's not try to compete with the West and perhaps surpass it. Let's try to live together with the West and focus on our own internal development. Instead, that is an option, it is the strategic option that those of us who are not Rucifos but Russophiles would like Russia to take, but we don't see that option yet. It would be great if after this Ukrainian tragedy we saw a different strategic choice in the Kremlin where they finally give up they can be Russia they can be non-Western a European with hidden power in a cultural sense but not Western institutionally they can be true to their identity and values but they don't have to be.

Try to do something they can't do. You know, I would love to play in Premier League football and I practice and practice and I can't do it and I can't do it because my abilities don't match my abilities. Ambitions: That analogy sounds very trivial, but this is what we have with Russia, so one aspect of that narrative that I think goes against the way most people have talked about the events in Ukraine in recent times months is that he doesn't focus as much. about Putin and what he's thinking and the kind of information he's getting, it sort of fits the type and the structure is much more important.

Do we focus too much on Putin and who he is and what he thinks? And most of the analyzes do that. We have to recognize that personalities matter a lot when people were criticizing Khrushchev for not living up to Stalin and Khrushchev gave that call to the personality speech and they told Khrushchev that yes there was a cult but there was also a personality that meant Stalin . he was a forceful figure, so Putin's personality does matter, but the fact that he is in the Kremlin and in charge of the problem of Russian power in the world is also really important.

In many ways, systems select leaders who can be brought to power randomly through some accident like you get appointed or there is a death or you mention cases where there is some sort of accidental rise to power of a figure. but you can't stay in power for more than 20 years accidentally, you actually have to stay in power and that's much harder. It's more complex and therefore the random characters that might appear aren't there 20 years later, but then they transform when they are in that position. Stalin's argument in volumes one and two so far is that he did not have a fully formed personality before.

He reached the position of being the despot of the Kremlin, it was being in that position that made him the figure we know and then something happened to Putin too, it does not mean that he did not have a certain vision of the world Tendencies grievances resentments, experiences of life, he had all that, but now he is in charge of this very difficult problem with this ambition, so the weakness in Grandeur also combined in his case to produce this paradoxical person who becomes more anti-Western than he was because the West is so powerful and Russia is so weak this aggression derives from weakness a sense of greatness that is not satisfied and weakness in terms of the capabilities they have finally I must say about this question of personality and structures that it is not just that the system selects the people, it's not just that the system has an effect and transforms personalities or highlights certain traits more strongly than others, it's that others around this person are negatively selected for their loyalty rather than their competence rather than their level of competence. ability, so you get a regime where the person in charge fantasizes that they are there because they are better than everyone else and the reason that seems true is that they have designated these non-entities around them so that they don't stage some kind of palace coup against him and then you have an autocrat who is trying to manage Russia. power in the world surrounded by non-entities and many of them know that they are not as skilled or capable as the person at the top and so they hesitate to act against the person even when the person exacerbates the geopolitical dilemmas that person was in. supposed to fix it, so it's a very deep hole that they have dug themselves and this is not the first time, which is why we in the American foreign policy world spent months before February 24 arguing about the expansion of the NATO and the degree to which this was a cause of Russia and security, which you included very forcefully and persuasively in your recent article for us, countered and I think quite effectively dismantled the idea that NATO expansion is responsible for Putin or what Putin is doing now, but when we look back at this period from 89 to 5 or six years ago, do you see things that the United States and its allies could have done differently to reach a different result? ?

He says in a recent article that we made a mistake in seeing 1989 as a really fundamental historical turning point when we look back. A couple of decades after that, you could go back and repeat American policy: there would be more assertiveness, more friendliness. Anything that could have changed the course of Russian politics and geopolitics during this period we tend to exaggerate the influence our policies have on Russian behavior. Iranian behavior. Chinese behavior, their ancient civilizations that pre-existed the United States by many centuries and there were internal dynamics there, of course, that are very deep, does not mean that there were not important political mistakes, true, of course, there were political mistakes and, retrospectively, one.

You can criticize a lot of things the West did or didn't do, you just can't get that to be the explanation or the main driver of our relationship with Russia. Today, you write in the new essay that Putin's biggest miscalculation was underestimating. The United States and the West generally thought that he was a country that was decadent and indecisive and divided by internal tensions and unlikely to respond in any meaningful way to their invasion of Ukraine, and I think we have all been surprised by the extent of the economic and military problems. response and the unity that we've seen at least between the United States and Europe so far you see this idea of ​​the West and the advantage that it confers as one of the real strengths that the United States and its allies bring to this.

The advantage that comes from being unashamedly and unashamedly Western are advantages that the United States should take for granted. I think this has become a little more complicated in recent months, as you see other powers that are a little less comfortable with this idea that we presented. an article by shiv Shankar Menon, the former Indian splitter of Nash's crew, who takes issue with what he called the free world fantasy, so he explains how putting this idea of ​​the West or the free world in your mind leads to better strategy how we respond not just to Ukraine but to the Russian challenge more broadly.

Yes, I didn't use the term free world in the essay, but a lot of people do and it certainly was a powerful concept in previous decades and did a lot of conceptual work. To unite the alliance and guide the policy there are two directions to go and answer your question: one is that Putin got away with it, he was literally murdering journalists, he was murdering people abroad, even with chemical weapons, and he signed . Russia signed a treaty. Not Putinpersonally, but Russia, signed the treaty that prohibits the use of chemical weapons and is using novichoke and other things to kill people.

It got its way with George in 2008. It got its way with Crimea in 2014. Germany voluntarily increased its energy dependence on Russia. France continuously. fantasize about being a diplomatic superpower and go to Russia and ask someone in the Kremlin what do you need to be respected what concessions do we have to make to make you feel respected again the UK has this colossal money laundering and reputation industry , all of which were available to Russia and of course not just Russia, so if you get away with that kind of murder, literally and figuratively, you might miscalculate that the West really is finished, not just with decadent but also self-corrupting and self-flagellating people in the West, even in our major universities, including our most illustrious opinion pages, including that morass known as cable television, talk about how the West is in decline, America is in decline, the rise of China is inevitable, the West is genocide, the West is imperialism and In other words, we are talking about this, much of the establishment, not just the far left, in university departments dedicated to attacking the West, much of the establishment is repeating the right-wing talking points from the Moscow Kremlin and Beijing, and you live in that world and you get away with that literal and figurative murder and you can start to think that the world goes your way, you can start to think that you know that the West is right in itself, flogging, it's over, it's over and it won.

He doesn't stand up to me because he hasn't stood up to me and he's afraid and he's divided and he's dependent on energy and he doesn't really want to fight wars anymore, he wants to trade and he's worried about the standard of and the prices and the quality of life and the luxury goods and that is the West that Stalin misperceived and that is the West that Putin must perceive but, furthermore, it is the West that we ourselves misperceive, so he got his way and felt he could do it again, but the Other way The answer to your question is this: then I knew that the West was more powerful than we said, and much less than what Russia and China said.

I knew that there is no multipolar world. You knew the West wasn't in decline, right? you are part of the military-industrial complex in Russia or China, you depend on the West for these components and software if you trade with the rest of the world and not trade with a Western country you are still using Western currencies and Western financial institutions, if you go as a Chinese representative to a meeting somewhere in Asia, your neighborhood with other countries, you speak English with them because they don't speak Chinese all over the world, they speak English all over the world, even with the countries. aligned with China in China's own neighborhood, so if you are in Beijing in Moscow you live in a world dominated by the West, not only the military, not only the financial system, not only the technology, the highest technology, the technology really cutting edge, but even in the cultural sphere and terms of values, so that's the problem for them and I honestly understood beforehand that the West was really powerful.

Several years ago I gave lectures in Vienna about the West as a voluntary sphere of influence and how the West had this power, but I made a mistake in what did you see that others missed? I study history well, so people talk about a multipolar world and I say: "Okay, name me the important international institutions where someone from South Africa, India or Nigeria is the dominant decision maker, tell me what institutions you are talking about." . Would that be the IMF? Would that be the World Bank? Would that be the EU in NATO? Would that be the five eyes?

Would that be the Federal Reserve, which is not even a multinational institution, but a national institution, but it is the most powerful multinational institution? in the world, even for Europeans, so if you look at it seriously, empirically, historically, you couldn't fall for this Chinese and Russian propaganda that we ourselves were spreading, but I made a big mistake. You know it is very necessary for Dan to be humble and humble. He is the most difficult and most important trait of anyone you know, he pretends to have some experience in some area and I made a really big mistake.

I didn't understand how the West was able to recover so quickly and rediscover this power it had. I thought maybe Putin would get his way again, not because the West was what he thought, but because the West wouldn't respond to show its teeth, to show its power, to show its unity, to show the values ​​that gave it this power. , and that is why I underestimated the West's ability in a short period of time to rediscover and reassert itself and I am very happy to be

wrong

on that, so if we had had this conversation on February 22 before the invasion, they would have shared the opinion of what would happen that Putin had supposedly done at that time.

He was afraid that we would not respond adequately to Russia's challenge in Ukraine. I understood that the Ukrainians would resist and that is because we all saw five in real time in 2004 and in 2014 we saw them. overthrow the national tyrants and we saw them risk their lives and we saw some of them lose their lives in what was originally called the Orange Revolution and then the maidan of 2013-14 when Yanukovych was expelled from the country and then Putin took over Crimea shortly after. We all saw that and then we understood that the pathologies of the Ukrainian political system apart from the fact that the society was really very strong and that there was courage and ingenuity, we didn't necessarily know the depth of NATO training of the rebuilt Ukrainian army, I think. that's something that only people who know it from the inside fully understood, and I certainly didn't fully understand it, but I understood that the willingness to resist, to take risks, put their lives at risk and I feared that the West would not respond adequately to that.

Let's remember the Biden administration that had the disastrous exit from Afghanistan. We can argue whether it was a good or bad idea to leave Afghanistan, but I don't think you can argue that the exit, as executed, was well done, you know, Trump started it. The departure from Afghanistan, the original date was May, the administration changed it to September 11, thinking it was going to reap all this political capital, instead it reaped the whirlwind, as we know, it was the same plan for Ukraine, it was a cut and run and It wasn't just the US, but all the embassies fled Kiev.

I mean, what was that about? And then the US offered Zielinski the opportunity to flee the country, you know, Ghani fled Afghanistan alone, but we were offering him the logistics to get out and he turned down what we could have had if Zelenski had committed the mistake of accepting the Biden administration's offer to leave, we could have had something similar in Ukraine to what we had in Afghanistan, only maybe even worse, but we didn't. kind of courage to risk your own life, as well as all the ingenuity that we've been seeing to stay there and say we're going to stay here and we're going to fight, and the Biden Administration was good enough and smart enough to hold on to that and increase little by little our support for the Ukrainian resistance.

The Europeans were ahead of us at the beginning of that process when Zelensky made them change and the Biden administration has been too slow and too gradual, but it has still done the right thing, which is We say to support Ukraine's self-defense with everything we can and bring together in a leadership role the NATO alliance to get deeply involved in that and the EU has also stepped up, so I didn't understand how all that could happen so quickly. it was a gift from the Ukrainians it was a gift their courage their ingenuity was a gift maybe we didn't deserve it but it was given to us at a very high cost extremely high cost that still continues as we speak and fortunately we accepted that gift and we responded and the West reacted and now the point is to sustain that self-rediscovery of the West thanks to the Ukrainians that gift we received we will return after a short break Foreign Affairs Magazine we are celebrating a century by providing our readers with expert commentary on the debates that shape our world for a limited time, only you can get the best pieces we've published over the past 100 years delivered straight to your inbox from W.E.B Du Bois's Worlds of Color published in 1925 to How to Take on the Kremlin by President Joe Biden in 2018.

Our centennial edition of readings summer will provide you with a thought-provoking context for the last century of global events. Sign up for Foreign Affairs Summer Reads or any of our select newsletters for free in the Foreign Affairs.com newsletter Let's pause in China for a moment before returning to Ukraine itself. If we've had this conversation in early March, I think there was a consensus that the Chinese were really unnerved and seemed to be in a pretty weak position as a result of their interactions with Russia before the invasion, their reaction to the invasion Beijing seems to have recalibrated a little bit and I think you're trying to figure out how to turn this into an opportunity or an advantage, what's your sense of how China is likely to get out of this and what are you learning from the Russian experience in Ukraine so far, big problems, they made some deep and fundamental errors that they did not understand and when I say them I mean that we have despotism.

The problem is that we have a single person with too much power who is not accountable not only to the population in general, which is an autocratic or authoritarian regime , but it is also not accountable to the internal regime, not even to the elites at the top, and that type of system that is characteristic because what we said about Russia is characteristic of China is characteristic in a different way of Iran, which It is a much more complex political structure and such a profound mistake, which is why the Chinese had a brilliant grand strategy, their grand strategy just to simplify was the following: the United States is going to be hostile because from the Chinese point of view the United States is hegemonic, it cannot rest until it controls the entire world, it is in this quest for global control, so it must stop the rise of China which it could never tolerate except the rise of China, so the We are going to be hostile towards we don't want to decouple in Beijing because we still need the transfer of cutting-edge technology, those components and software while we build our own high-tech, the famous or now infamous.

China made in China 2030 5, where China was supposed to become self-sufficient at some point in crucial high-tech components and software and perhaps even beat the West in this area, but that could only be achieved if it continued to import Western high technology. end technology and know-how, steal it or buy it or some combination of both and it seemed like a brilliant strategy because they had an ace up their sleeve, the ace up their sleeve was the conflict in Europe, diverse trade first did not want to be in the pocket of the US on China policy and being this colossal trading partner of China, so no matter how bad things got with the US, even if there was a decoupling in technology that didn't was on the horizon at the time, but even if that happened, they still had Europe and then Xi Jinping sides with Vladimir Putin over the unprovoked criminal invasion of Ukraine that is based on all the lies that we know it is based on and is on their side and the Europeans are saying wait a minute, could this be happening and not just Russia invading a sovereign country on the territory of Europe, but the Chinese came in and what happened was Xi Jinping destroyed his own rift between Europe and the United States and, in turn, Europe and the United States have embraced not only the policy towards Russia but also the policy towards China now and trade first with Europe. vandel duoj Handel Angela Merkel changed through trade and has blown up in everyone's face and now how can you recover that you know Dan?

It's not just about quoting Putin about Ukraine, but now Europeans understand that Tibet is Ukraine and Xinjiang is Ukraine and Hong Kong is Ukraine and Ukraine is Ukraine and we haven't even gotten to Taiwan yet and this deep understanding that such Perhaps European policy towards China should not have been what it was and instead should align with the US to a large extent, not one hundred percent, but Europe has largely lost, we will see if it is a permanent loss, but how will Europe recover? Also, they have no trading relationship with Russia, so to speak, the only thing they get from Russia is very cheap oil and gas. that is available in other parts of the world and that they get from other places because they also have adequately diversified sources from a strategic point of view in Beijing for their hydrocarbons they have their own veto they don't need Russia's veto so what is it? that in reality they are positively putting the commercial relationship with Europe and cutting-edge technology at risk.

Let's close this answer with one last point:what is done in China 2035. The problem with that is that you can potentially get there and mobilize resources. and you can get there, but you know that the West does not stand still and that is why there are massive investments in R&D and innovation in the European countries in Japan, Australia, South Korea, North America, the USA and Canada, for example. so maybe you can close some of the Gap, especially if there is no decoupling, but the gap doesn't close completely because the West doesn't stop. Innovation does not stop, so its dependence on the West never ends, knowing what it knows now after three months of war about the vigor of war.

Western response and knowing what they presumably knew before about Putin and the rest of us have seen in these last few months what you expect to happen in the coming months in Ukraine, can you imagine Putin agreeing to any plausible deal? Or do you imagine this will continue at great cost more or less indefinitely, exploding at various points and becoming the sort of central concern of American foreign policy for months or years? You are in charge of Foreign Affairs to the extent that when you tell people to do something, they do it and when they don't do it, you are not actually in charge, you are nominally in charge, if they decide not to implement your directives, already Whether silently or not, you don't have the kind of power that you actually have on paper, so a despotism is only as good as implementing the chain of command and, therefore, right now, if the orders of Putin are not deployed anywhere in the chain of command, even quietly, whether it's on the staff or whether it's on the battlefield or at the platoon level, so he doesn't have as much power as we think, so there are a couple of really important variables to take into account here, one is the capacity of the Ukrainian army. mount a large-scale counteroffensive, not counterattacks, not defense of its territory, but combined arms operations of the type that Russia failed to successfully carry out in Ukraine, can the Ukrainian military on the battlefield do that to dislodge Russian troops from Ukrainian soil?

We are arming them with the heavy weapons necessary to attempt that counteroffensive, that combined arms operation at scale and we will see it in the coming months, either in late June, July and August, depending on the battlefield situation and the number of weapons to actually get to the front the dynamic right now is Russia bombs a school Russia bombs a hospital more heavy weapons coming into Ukraine from the West, right, all Putin has to do is use a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukrainian territory and then you will not only have heavy weapons, but you have NATO forces fighting against your troops, so that is the dynamic we have, which is very positive for the Ukrainian army, but heavy weapons, I would say, are a necessary condition but not enough.

We hope they can carry out that combined arms operation against Russia. forces that the Russians failed to do, it could be that the Ukrainians can't, in which case we have a stalemate, it could be that the Ukrainians can't handle it, but the Russians think they can and begin to disintegrate on the battlefield, so a Russian disintegration occurs. like a kind of bank run where at first everything seems fine and then suddenly there is a really rapid acceleration and everything falls apart they don't want to fight they leave the battlefield they join the Ukrainian forces we cannot exclude a Russian disintegration after the contact, we don't know how much of that is happening now, so Ukraine's ability to mount an offensive remember that offensives are much more difficult than defense, they require great superiority on the battlefield in terms of numbers of soldiers, they require tremendous skill and coordination. his planes his tanks his infantry can do it we hope we find out if the Russian military will disintegrate if he does that is the end of Putin's despotism so those are the two main dynamics we need to pay attention to on the other side However, we have to do it.

I understand that we have to be sober about this in many ways. It seems that Russia lost the war. They couldn't take kyiv. They have not been able to take the entire Dawn bus, neither in phase one nor in phase two, neither in plan A nor in plan B. they have failed, but they have actually penetrated more Ukrainian territory now than before the war started , so they must be evicted and, if they are not evicted, they will be there, in addition, they have destroyed the Ukrainian economy and, finally, there is the question of Western unity. and I don't have to tell your listeners about Hungary's position regarding the EU oil embargo on Russia or Turkey's position regarding Sweden and Finland joining NATO and that's just today.

Project things three months from now. six months from now nine months from now, so if you're Putin in the Kremlin, can you put up with this by digging in instead of going on more offensives if you're just digging in to try to hold the territory you have against Ukraine? Offensive and partisans in your rear and they are digging in if Ukraine can't make it, if the West starts to lose some of its resolve and unity or gets distracted, you can muddle through if you are Russia, one last point on this Dan. Let's remember the problem with economics textbooks, the models are brilliant and explain a lot, but there is always this line that says that all other factors are held constant like bang bang bang you get the result of the model, but as you know, you have been within the government and editing Foreign Affairs and having all these incredible numbers covering things that happen in the world, things happen, including things that are not anticipated, so all the other things are not constant in Health and therefore, what happens as Iran starts to get closer and closer to bombing this summer, does any Israeli government, whatever Israeli governments are in power, tolerate that or do they decide to act and potentially bomb Iran and, furthermore, what do they have in the Israeli arsenal?

Remember the Obama administration wouldn't give Israel those mountain breaker bombs, but we had the Trump administration got those bombs from Israel, even if they didn't get them, they have tremendous capabilities and could act, so how does that alter the chess board and calculations and eight billion dollars a month for Ukraine and everything else? happens in North Korea, what if he decides it's his time now, like his grandfather decided in 1950, as we discussed in the recent foreign

affairs

article you posted, and then there's all these other things I don't know about no idea and I'm not watching closely and I'm not an expert on and it's probably going to be one of those things rather than the things that we're observing and that's a variable that always turns the chess board upside down and if you're Putin, we're resisting not only because of those weaknesses that you perceive or that you hope are in Ukraine's offensive military capabilities in Western pockets in Western resolve, something else could have happened in the world that could come to your rescue, so I don't predict anything, I don't have idea. what is going to happen I know nothing about the future, in fact I am even less than nothing about the future, but there are these factors to take into account, is the way I would put it, it is a good note of intellectual humility to end with Stephen Cotkin. recent essay on foreign affairs and our May June issue is called The Cold War Never Ended Stephen, thank you so much for doing this today oh, thank you Dan for the opportunity, thank you, thank you for listening, you can find the articles we discussed on the show from today. on Foreign Affairs.com, the Foreign Affairs interview is produced by Kate Brannon, Julia Fleming's dresser, Rafaela Siewer and Marcus Zacharia.

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