 Thanks everyone for joining us. We've got Chris Fedweiss here from Tulane University to offer us a conversation on the US interest and the war in Ukraine. And without any further ado, Chris, please go ahead. Well, thank you everybody for having me here. Professor Stigler asked me to confine my remarks to three and a half hours. I know I can do it because I have a lot of fascinating things to say, but I promise there'll be time for you to say at the end, tell me why I'm an idiot, why I've gone wrong. And we're going to be talking today, obviously, about Ukraine and about US interests. I'm going to basically be addressing three questions. Of course, this talk. How did we get here? Why this war happened? Where is it going? Where is it going to end? And then what are the implications for the future of the international system? And if that's not enough, I'm all the way talking about US interests and how it relates to what we're doing. But I'd like to start off with this. My favorite Ukraine maps. Washington Post asked people to put a dot in Ukraine. Some of these disturb me. I don't know. This is sort of an average cross-section of people. Some got it right. And I like to think this audience knows more or less where Ukraine is here. But it was also a correlation they found. I'll give you a second to read this. More likely you were to know where Ukraine was. The inverse relationship, the less likely you thought it was important, or at least important enough for a US troop to be deployed. I don't know. There's a lot of things that this could, if you think about it too much, it'll depress you. But there's a corresponding type of maps like North Korea, Iran, people don't know where the heck anything is. But if you don't know where the heck stuff is, you tend to be more popular. What we're talking about today is some of the framing that's going to be going on in this talk. And we'll be talking about our tangible interests. And at the same time, what we might call intangible, but also imaginary interests. Interests where we have to think about, we thought about it enough to come up with an interest. Or if we thought about it enough, we could start worrying about it. If we think, for instance, that the Chinese are going to be learning a lot from what's happening in Ukraine, they're going to detect that it's going to shape what we think we should do in Ukraine. If the Iranians are watching what we do, but this is also part of our imagination. We have to think, imagine what Putin is thinking, will Putin stop at Ukraine? Will Putin go into Moldova next? By the way, I don't know how many of you have been to Moldova. It's not going to be a big shift in bounce power because Moldova. But we'll talk about this as we go on. This is going to be in the background. Now, as I'm going to say, what we call in my business a realist, if we focused on our tangible interests, what we actually, our actual security and prosperity and our freedom and our prosperity and democracy, we're going to do a lot of different things. And if we get stuck up in the realm of imagination and what we think of, what are the kind of interests we can devise if we sit around and think about it enough. And sometimes I think back, I don't know if you guys still do. We used to do a thing when I was here. We talk about like, what interests are you, what are you willing to, when we talk about interesting class, what are you willing to die for? What are you going to stand for? We had this, I had an international officer from Norway who looked like Dolph Lundgren. And I have to explain to these students, Dolph Lundgren, it's obviously, I have to explain a depressing amount of information to today's students. They don't remember a crime. They've never seen Seinfeld or the Godfather, so all my references are lost on them. But after I explained who Dolph Lundgren is, I say he laid out 15, 20 things he's willing to die for. Now ask the class, what are you willing to sacrifice your kids for? He said nothing. Maybe as national security professionals, we ought to think a little bit that we have the responsibility. I don't know too late, but people who are making decisions have a responsibility to think about what we're sacrificing our kids for. I suggest to you over the course of this talk, that that should be the tangible interest, not the ones we think of. We think it when our imagination goes great. But first, how do we get here? Why did this war happen? I know you guys have all been thinking about this for a long time. And there's people in my business who blame us. There are people who say about the mirror from the realist perspective and the liberal anti-American perspective or anti-U.S. government, that it's our fault that the United States brought this back. That it's essentially expanding NATO, making Putin no choice. That it's all our fault. And you get other people on the other side of the coin basically say it's our fault, but for different reasons. That we didn't send a message when he moved into Crimea in 2014 or Georgia, or when we pulled out of Afghanistan, we put an idea in Putin's head that he never would have had. Either way, it's our fault. To me, I think this is all basically nonsense. That it's not our fault. It's something that political scientists that just passed away, Robert Jervis would call centrality, that we think we're more important in their decision making than we actually are. We're the center of our world. So it's kind of natural to think we're the center of their world too. And I don't think, to this whole argument that it's our fault, to me strikes me as ridiculous, strikes me as forgetting the important difference between necessary and sufficient conditions, which I don't have to brief you folks on, but yeah, expansion of NATO in my mind was a necessary condition for this war. It wouldn't have happened without that. We'll talk about it in a second more, but it doesn't explain why it happened. 911 essentially made this country crates for six months, nine months, but it was still George Bush's decision to go to war. It was a net without 911. Iraq war doesn't happen, but it was still Bush's decision. Without the expansion of NATO, this war doesn't happen, but it's still Putin's barbarous decision to invade his neighbor. He didn't have to do it. He has what we call agency. It's not our fault that he made these choices, but without the choices we made, it probably wouldn't have happened. We could have listened to this guy. And Christy when I were talking to you earlier about how a lot of our senior foreign policy people are supposedly, everyone says how well respected they are, but they generally become ignored. George, George Kennan, granddaddy in a lot of ways of containment and in a lot of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, said this while the first big debate was going on of my graduate school career, whether we should expand NATO in mid to late 90s. Kennan, and I'll give you a second, is the word he's slide we're going to have. So I apologize, but Kennan said it's going to screw things up. If we expand NATO is going to screw up our relationship with the Russians and being the realist. And our relationship with the Russians is more important than our relationship with the Czechs or the Hungarians, but we ought to be thinking about great powers. And Kennan now suggests he was right. Expanding NATO, I'll get back to those guys, expanding NATO affected this guy and his generation of thinking in ways that we can look back now upon and say we could have avoided it was a unforced error. Putin all the time talks about three things that screwed up the relationship. That's about NATO expansion, us leaving the ABM treaty in 2001. And the coup in his mind, the coup that we engineered and Putin's mind, the CIA is behind everything. To a lot of people around the world, the CIA is like the witchcraft. I might have stolen this from somebody here, I stole it from somebody. The witches in the during the Middle Ages are assumed to be behind everything. The crop fails, it's witches, something's happening with my relationship as witches to burn some witches. The CIA is behind everything and a lot of people's minds today is certainly behind that poo and or whatever happened in Ukraine 2004. The CIA codes mine. And he said right before the invasion, and I lied when I said it was less wordy slide as we have a couple of wordy, but this is plus word. Right before the invade, NATO was on his mind. It was a necessary condition for this war. It wouldn't have happened. If this guy wasn't obsessed with the West, essentially sticking it in his face for the loss of his mind of cold war. I mean, this is stolen from another talk I give sometimes you need to understand a little bit about Russian strategic culture to understand why they would have thought this way. And strategic culture is the stuff going on underneath that they don't talk about. This is the stuff that really drives foreign policy decision making underneath the water. This is where the realm of strategic calls what makes them different from us, or what's unique about any country's strategic thinking. And the Russian way of war we've seen it in practice. Mass massing artillery massing troops, passing the peasants essentially in the frontline to get destroyed. Other indifference to casualties but also because they have a different history, and we do constant history of invasions. One after the other. There are history some of which got to Moscow some of which didn't, but all of which came from the outside. Some of which came without warning, especially the big one coming without warning even though two and a half million troops are lined up on the border style and thought Okay, but there was a surprise to many people in Russia, which has led to national levels of paranoia that we can't really understand here without understanding that they come from a different place. And the big effect we've had on that is pushing that paranoia to higher levels by expanding this alliance to the East. And in the grass while people were talking about this all the time. And it was pretty much unity among these sort of come the common commentary at the people in the foreign policy community said this would be a bad idea. But we just went ahead and did it today. And a generation of Russians was this guy in the forefront, who had just come out of the Cold War. It's hard to really grasp what losing does the site. And what losing a gigantic generations long conflict does to people, and it looked to him and his generation, not only did they lose the Cold War, but they lost a piece that occurred at it, because they couldn't stop NATO from expanding. They were kicked while they were down, which helps explains a lot of the stupid weird sounding decisions that seeming decisions that this guy and his encodery have made. And that lead up to a war in Ukraine. It's not our fault that this war happened. It's this fault. But it probably wouldn't have happened if we made different decisions. This is not only important now because there's going to be a lot of talk pretty soon about letting Ukraine into NATO. There's going to be a lot of talk going on in the abstracts, but once if this war reaches a lull at some point, there's going to be a lot of people saying the only way we can get it to not start up again is by letting Ukraine into NATO. That's going to cause a lot more problems than it's worth. It's not just an academic question what we should have done 30 to 25 years ago, because it's going to come up again, and expanding NATO would be as big a mistake or bigger than it was in the, in the 1990s. But that's the first thing you can tell me a full crap about in a few minutes, but the second thing. It's clear how this is going to end business. I wrote a piece two months into this war, chopped it around and I get the same reaction to shop anything around who were you and why you're bothering. But it's clear what's going to happen, how this is going to end. It's going to end with Ukraine giving up some chunks of this territory. It's not fair. It's not right, but international relations aren't fair. They're not right. It's not justice doesn't come into it. Ukraine is not going to get back quite no matter what happens this offensive that started a couple of days ago. They're not going to get all this back or if they do they're not going to get it back for long, because the Russians aren't going to give up. Political scientists have a great way of taking an interesting concept and making it horribly boring. There's a interesting concept that they call audience costs, which essentially just domestic pressure. Putin would have too much domestic pressure to let go to stop to let this go back into the Ukraine's hands. Right now, nobody's there yet. Neither side is there yet to the point where we're going to have to seed some territory. Soliski couldn't make the decision to seed territory without being overgrown immediately. Putin's not going to give up the idea of getting rid of the Nazis in whatever he thinks and can. Neither of them are there yet and probably tens of thousands of people are going to have to die before both sides get there. In my view, we're actually doing pretty well. The Biden administration is doing pretty well, looking at our tangible interests here, which are not much. It doesn't matter to us who runs Donetsk. It doesn't. Or who runs the Crimea. It just doesn't make much difference. We can imagine how it's the beginning of a European conquest. We can imagine we're back here, but I'll talk about where we can imagine in a second. Okay, tangible interest here, quite little. And the Biden administration's job is to manage this from getting and prevent it from getting bigger and let both sides come to the conclusion that eventually it's going to be some kind of armistice line. Some chunks of these territories are going to go over Russia. It's not right. As I said, it's not fair, but it's going to happen. Eventually, they'll get to that place. The messenger says said something very similar. He's just turned 100, sort of morphing into a turtle. But if you've seen it, but he's still sharp and still when he said this at a Munich Munich conference a little while ago, he was followed by the Ukrainian president who said this constantly. What you hear is references to Munich and appeasement, especially as a Linsky's mouth who knows his audience. But the comparisons in 1938 and encouraging Hitler is ubiquitous. This conference has informed more of the thinking about Ukraine than anything else. And I would suggest I've been writing and thinking about this like it's terribly misapplied in almost every situation, but certainly here. There are several analogies that can give you hundreds of them. There's plenty of times when countries go to war and one country gets a big chunk of another country. The Romans took big chunks of Dacia in 1871, the Prussians took the big chunk of France didn't keep going. We took big chunks of Mexico. We sort of skip over this in history classities then it's sort of surprising to my students to find out that we took half of Mexico, including some of the more productive bits of Mexico. We didn't keep going and take away those there are times in international politics. This happens that there is that one of the reasons that makes Putin's land grab different. This hasn't happened much. It hasn't happened much in the last couple of decades, which borders don't shift much anymore. They're going to shift now. And our job ought to be getting both sides to realize that Russians are not going to take over. So it's going to be the president. It's going to be an independent Ukraine. It's not going to work. You fail. And Ukraine, you're going to have to give up some of your territory. Maybe you can make some kind of arrangement where you both share bits. You're not going to get cry me a back because if you and here's I like this map of Russian expansion over time. A little reminder that Russia is an empire. Everybody complained about overseas empires. Oh, it's how terrible you colonialism with the Russian French did it. Russians are doing the same time and they just held on to it. But a better preview of what's going to happen here can be found with the same actors Chechnya. For a year and a half or so, the Russians mismanaged award did terribly got beat by Chechen rebels and thrown out of a tiny province inside their empire inside their country, but they came back. I took over. He to see engineered some terrorist attacks right near the Chechen border and they attacked again and surrounded Grosny, the Chechen capital, which is the Russian word for terrible by the way to tell you what they think of the Chechens. They surrounded with artillery blasted into oblivion kill, maybe 30,000 people massing the artillery not caring about casualties, but they didn't give up. And they're not going to give up a new brain. They're going to be back, even if they get thrown out. They're going to be back, which is why when they if they do get thrown out somehow if this offensive succeeds, there's going to be a lot of calls in this country expand NATO now. The only way to deter from getting back in would be to expand NATO. I don't know how that's in our interest. I don't know how you can make a case for my kids or the Norwegian officers kids. That it makes a difference to who's in charge and don't ask for a tangible interest. And so it's going to be an issue to be aware of, and a boy. It's also surprising to some people that the Russian they're going to be back this is a popular war. All wars are popular. When war breaks out people rally around the flag. I'm not sure what this is all about, but when there were people saying early on, all this isn't going to be a popular war with the Russians. Once they find out about it, they're going to throw up. No, no, they're not. They're going to rally around the government. This effect doesn't last forever. And if it goes, it continues on maybe they've been erosion of Russian public opinion. This is also the polly data from one of the few independent pollsters has taken seriously in Russia. There's a lot that aren't big, you know, in support in the 90s, but the Russian people are behind. We don't know what numbers, but enough of them to say that they're not going to give up. He's not going to give up. The war is going to have to end with territorial concessions by Ukraine. And what that means to us, very, very little. When you talk about our tangible interest, what can we care where the border is? We'd only care. We think, well, what message does that send to Beijing? If Beijing never thought about attacking Taiwan before this war happened, and now they're going to see how things play out. I mean, it seems a bit crazy that Beijing would think, anyone in Beijing would think, well, international pariah status looks pretty good to me. Let's give it a try. Let's cut off all of our trade with, if essentially the Russian economy is now teetering on the edge of oblivion, not in there yet, but if it continues up, these sections continue on, they're going to be there. The Russians are not going to quit. So how this ends, maybe next year, maybe five years, who knows? But we know how this is going to end. Getting the two sides there is not going to be easy to do. Last idea for you, the implications of all this. What does it mean? What does this war mean for US foreign policy, for the system moving forward? My sense is not as much. People always think we're right on the edge of a new revolution. 9-11 was going to be system altering. It altered defense budgets. I had a lot of lectures in here about how the littoral ship, what is it, the littoral combat ship would be good to fight terrorists. But it didn't affect the overall evolution of international politics in the long run, and it didn't affect system polarity. There's a lot of talk now, how the US reign at the top is over. I don't see any sign of that at all. It strikes me that it's weird to think that the Russians have underperformed, done terribly, and a little bit of Western training has helped Ukrainians fight them off. This means that the US position as the number one country in the world has been diminished. I write a lot about unipolarity. This is a shameless plug. If anybody was interested in, this is the Spanish unipolar moment, but I don't see the big factors that led to US dominance changing anytime soon. We're talking about how much we're spending, because of Poops Orc, we've increased the defense budget by much more than the Russian defense budget entirely. And we spend plenty, yeah, the Chinese might be able to challenge us in a region happens to be right next to them. For a little end in this talk now, could the Chinese take over Taiwan, flip it around. Could we take over Taiwan? Yeah, pretty fast. There's a big dynamic in China becoming a regional military power, but there's one international military power. There's one international economic power. The coalition of economic sanctions that the United States put together ought to show that we have a lot of power when we want to wield it. We have, what, 38, 39 treaty allies? I like to tell my students, give me the list of the Russian allies outside of the former Soviet Union, and we give you the list. Syria? That's it. That's the list. That's it. What Chinese allies did they have? We have a lot. And as a result, we can go from around here. They're a force multiplier, but it's sort of intangible things too. Science, technology, still the leading country in the world in the intangibles. Everything from this stupid little thing you might think of, but it become important internationally like Nobel prizes, the highest grossing films, cultural factors. This is still a unipolar force compared to anything that has come before. Yeah, this is challenges. We're not number one in everything, but compared to any other system before, we dominate the world like the Romans never dominated the old world. We don't have an empire in that same way. Well, this is still a US focused world, and it doesn't seem to me to be changing anytime soon. There was a foreign affairs article just came out a few weeks ago, making this argument in more details. I want some stats of how things were doing. I kind of like the foosball analogy here. Kind of like foosball. But it does open the foreign affairs article if you're interested in more, I agree with these two completely. This is not the end of the US era. In fact, it's shown the weakness of the rest of the world. Why would we think that Chinese would do better taking over Taiwan than the Russians were doing in Ukraine? The Chinese have no, I think the last time they attacked anybody outside their country, here's a good trivia question. When was the last time you tried to attack anybody outside your country? Yeah, 1979. This is a, this, this audience gets that right away. My students, and might as well be talking about their things. But they also did poorly, got out in a couple of months. Why would we think they would be better? Yeah, they spend a lot more money, but that's a regional concern, not an international concern. So I don't think it's going to matter much to US foreign policy. And this is something Rick brought up before. It's also not going to matter much to what there's the most important phenomenon that's happening quietly and observantly. And that's a word in international relations, the decline of warfare. Doesn't mean war is impossible, obviously. Doesn't mean war that doesn't, it doesn't happen. But we are living in the most peaceful era of human history. And granted, I couldn't get something on the internet right clickable to point it out here. This is essentially war in Syria, a little bit right there. But overall numbers of wars, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, international wars are at all time lows. And I tell people this all the time, and they usually come at me with a couple of different things. Number one, you just wait, we'll come up with new reasons to kill each other. Okay. Somebody will say, well, what about climate change? Okay, well, yeah, there's problems. But there's not, there's, and one person said one time, you know, I heard that the traffic fatality rate in the Congo is way up. Well, okay, it might be partially because the war in the Congo is mostly over and people are driving again. But fine, yeah, there's problems. Or they just say, look, you don't know what you're talking about. You're an idiot. Okay, you're staying war, baby, but I understand that. And battle casualties are way to think about the entire Western Hemisphere. It's at peace for the first time that I could find. And you might think, well, how are you defining peace? There's narco traffic, narco killing in Mexico. Yeah, but there's no conflict, there's no wars. The last war in the Western Hemisphere, let's see if I can get you on this one. Ended in 2016. Where was it? Civil war. Columbia. Columbia's national hobby has been more essentially since its exception. And that could end tomorrow. There's been rumblings, there's been killings in Columbia. It's unstable by its credit than it was. And all, all pronouncements about warfare are relative. This is, yeah, there's a lot of problems in the world. There's war. There's something going on in Ethiopia, which we don't know the scale of it because they keep the reporters out. But there's always been conflict in Africa. Dave Burbach and I, about five, six years ago, had a paper analyzing warfare in Africa. It sets the lowest levels in recorded history, even without factoring in population growth. Because this is all happening. And there's not 8 billion people in the world. And 183 members, 193 members of the United Nations. There's a lot less warfare. I don't think this war is going to change much. I don't think there's too many people around the world going and thinking, Hey, let's give it the brush. It seems to be going swimmingly for them. Let's give it up. Let's give it a go on our side. I think it's quite like that we will look back on this conflict and see it and it was 2000 see it not so much as the first shot in the new Cold War. But historians will probably look upon it as the last event of the last. The last event of this generation, seeing that they lost the Cold War, then they lost the peace when we kept shoving NATO in their faces and not cooperate pulling out of every treaty unilaterally. For what reason I don't know why we had to get out of the AVM treaty, and I know why these weapons of mass destruction courses I said, I have to tell people it's fun if you don't like people as a fun course to teach undergraduates. And so I know why we did it, but it screwed up this relationship and made and intensified this guy's already high propensity for paranoia. So we're going to have some choices to make coming up in the next few years. As this thing unfolds as the Russian as the Ukrainian advance it is spunners or keeps going. Well, what to do to stop the Russians from doing it again, stop it from happening again. And I think the best way to do it is a settlement which gets people back home off his back. Maybe Zalinsky's people back home off his back and keeps this thing moderate at least and stops it from spreading, not expanding our commitments. We expanded commitments to the Baltics. I love to tell people this as of last fall. The three Baltic countries combined had zero combat and three tanks. Olds. The only way to stop Putin if he wanted to get into Tallinn or Riga, where we have security, but US troops, maybe bigger weapons was mushroom clouds in the way. When you start talking about the thing about national tangible interests, what the heck are we doing? How does that affect our freedom, our security, our prosperity? The things that a realist would tell you we should focus on. And it's not the case that we're letting Putin get away with this, that this is some kind of appeasement because the Russians are suffering right now. I don't know if you've seen what we have put on a substantial package of sanctions that is bringing that country and it's going to continue to bring it to its knees. Nobody's going to want to repeat that. If I'm a betting man and I'm happy to be a betting man, if anyone would like to take me up on it, this is going to continue. We're not going to say we have entered into a kind of a relatively peaceful system that's going to be difficult to change. Here's today's final trivia question for you. You give you a sense of how different the world is than the Romans inhabited or the Mongols or anybody else throughout history. How many UN members have disappeared against their will, not just imploded or divided, but been conquered by their neighbors? Zero. Zero is the answer. The closest we had was South Vietnam. They weren't a member of the UN. And so I'm saying try to take over UN member, absorb Kuwait. They got thrown out. Putin tried it again and has failed. So we've had since 1945, zero conquest. Zero successful conquest. That's weird, everybody. We're living a weird time. This is not normal that borders rarely shift, which is what makes this war so anomalous and so strange and so horrifying. Putin's trying to shift borders and he's going to get away with it. Short term or long term, it's going to happen. It would be better if we accepted it now. We're living in weird times. We're living in weird times when the Germans, my people, are the most peaceful people on Earth. That's weird. That's the French or the Poles or the Romans. The Germans are bad neighbors. Now they are the most people. These are different times. And I don't think this war is going to change that in a long term. I think historians, as I said, are going to look back. This is the last act of the Cold War. The last gasp of this generation of Soviets who couldn't handle losing. Losing hurts. And it hurts in ways you can't really grasp if you're on the other side. It's not only that they lose the war, but they lost the peace. Well, they conclude here that we focus on these interests and we're doing, I think, pretty well at it. I think the Biden administration has been keeping us restrained to some degree, but making Russia, making it clear we disagree, making Russia pay. But our main change of interest is this thing doesn't get bigger. And anything else, the things we worry about are in this. We can imagine things. Other people are learning the lessons that we might have to, that might be bad in the future. But that's up here. The Chinese, I've been quite closely monitoring what the Chinese are saying. They're not saying, hey, you know, we're learning a lot from this war about what we might do in Taiwan. But we can imagine they're learning it. Okay, focus on this, everybody, and we'll be better off in the long run. That's what I came to bother you about. I really appreciate you having me and appreciate your time around lunch to listen to me. And now you can tell me where I'm screwed up. Thanks, Chris. Very engaging presentation reminding us of America's core national security interests, and how they may or may not be at stake in this. You know, that was excellent. Thank you very much. My question is about my shoes though. Okay. Well, you did a good job of nullifying that. Let me offer a couple of just to start things off and then I'd like to open it up. A couple of rebuttals or other considerations are accurate. You use the language necessary and sufficient and I could be sold and in fact I may be sold that NATO expansion was a necessary condition for this conflict that we're seeing right now. That is it was unlikely to have occurred without NATO expansion. My question is though and I noted that later on in the presentation you did say war is Putin's fault. Yes. Could I ask what what you had in mind with that because I might argue, NATO expansion might have been necessary might have been a mistake might have been a cause of this conflict, but is not necessarily the root cause that a lot of it has to do with Putin is to meaner as the leader, the state he has created over more than 20 years now, and that has played a tremendous role in generating this conflict and one of the reasons it has occurred. I agree with everything you said, except that if you remove NATO from that, I don't think the paranoia those other factors are sufficient to explain what happened. Okay, and then I go back to the analogy, you take 911 of the equation, the war in Iraq doesn't happen. But it's still, in my view, Bush's fault that was a blunder that can be explained by the people in the White House. And it's the same with this war. It's Putin has the agency is his fault. But you take away what we did affect that calculation by maximizing his paranoia by doing things to make it clear that we were going to be his mind the enemy and his mind you know the CIA is behind everything pulling stuff that matters. My administration was not in a position to reverse NATO expansion, of course, right, you know it was a commitment made decades before. In fact, um, so if one argued that, given the situation, we had in 2022 2021, you know, that even if one recognized that NATO expansion might have been somewhat misguided, given the facts on the ground, a response to help NATO, something that might be in terms of tangible interest, Ukraine is the largest country that is entirely within Europe, in terms of landmass. I would argue that has some geo strategic significance, and therefore minimizing Putin's ability to control even a portion of it is a goal that it might be worth pursuing, and in fact embracing some risk to go after. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily concern myself too much with Ukraine in the big in the sense that it is it worth fighting for. Is it worth spending for is it worth. Yeah, I think the Biden administration handle it well. I think it making it clear where our lines are we're not going to have us forces shooting Russians. And we're not going to be doing things to provoke further action, but making it clear that Russia has to pay costs. They were not happy about it, that Ukraine should stay independent. And it's our interest, primary interest, but it's it we'd like to see him stay independent. And we've supported them well. There's a lot of us money and weaponry going in there, and making like Putin's life miserable, and making this is unsuccessful so I think, overall, done pretty well. I also would say if I were Biden. Okay, look, just for the future having nothing to do with this war. The NATO is going to stay where it is for a while. We're going to keep that baby where it is we're not going to be expanding Georgia, Ukraine. Maybe someday in the future. There's only one president who didn't expand NATO, and do a lot of Brock Obama a lot of my people's mind has a lot more in common with George HW Bush the realist, and George Bush George W Bush expanded it as much as he could. And that's what got us here at least Biden could say this far and no further build like a hate ever Hadrian, one of my favorites, everybody's got a favorite right that's not music I'm a nerd right okay. He built walls not so much to keep the barbarians out because they were thin, but to keep the Romans in and make it clear this is the empire, we're going to go here and no further. I'm going to do the same kind of message. No Ukraine no Georgia. To make it clear to set Ukrainian expectations and deal with the Russian paradigm. Just on that one just. What's your position on Finland and Sweden. Is this part of the wall like that was essentially inevitable. Once once Putin's tanks rolled. I didn't have a great passion against that is number one they bring actual capabilities, but the number two what do we need those. You don't need much capability apparently to beat today's Russia, but that was going to happen. It was pointless to try to stop it. Once Russia did this and that's also part of the cost that was going to pack a diplomatic cost that NATO is going to take on two new members. That's not going to make him as crazy as talking about Ukraine or Georgia. But not like Ukraine, and at least it's my perspective was like that's going to happen once this war started there's no point in trying to avoid it. But you can avoid Ukraine online so we have the O Melanopoulos online he was a student of Bob Jervis. There's two political scientists that I could never be nearly as good well as many political science I can't be nearly as good as but the top two that I can in my view if you're looking for stuff to read. Bob Jervis and John Mueller, they write well as well as as much as they think well. Go up to check maybe. Allow him to speak. So you feel after all this it's got to be a great question. Okay, you can type it in. Yeah, feel if you want to throw it in the chat. I'll read it on your behalf. Anyone else. Anyone else have any fun. Yeah, please. opinionate on what you think it would cost to return the, the, the boards to 2014 for 2008 is there a red line. I mean, like what we should, what would cost to Ukraine, the Ukrainians or costs us because the West, because they don't know Ukraine can't do it without the West. So many Ukrainian sons and daughters they're willing to sacrifice to get it. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's going to happen. It could be that the Russians hold in front of this offensive and of course a couple weeks. It could be that they had enough time to dig in that they're not going to. So either what it's possible. And we could line I guess is there. No, it's, I don't know it. I don't know if it's worth it to do it because the Russians will be back. I don't think Putin can lose Crimea and then say there's people. Well, we gave a good shot everybody. Let's talk about the Olympics or no it is is he's going to pay a cost at home. And what people that way maybe gets overthrown. I don't know how most of you folks have been following if Putin falls what follows him like worse. There's segment Russian security community which is worse. So the Russians are going to give up. We can't make the Ukrainians not fight for their terror. But over time they're going to probably figure out and make an assessment they're going to get exhausted. Both sides get exhausted. It's okay enough. If it ends with Ukrainians kicking the Russians out of all their territory. The Russians will be back to be a Chechnya situation. So I don't even think I mean, is it worth it for us that remark perspective cares who runs Crimea. It's not. There's no tangible interest there. So offer a counterfactual if you will that is it really not necessarily NATO expansion per se. It was really about Ukraine joining me and that if that expansion had ended there and it was clear that Ukraine was not going to potentially become a NATO member. Russia has still acted as he did in the lead up to the war. A lot of people are saying just make a pledge Joe, President Joe that Ukraine will never get. And I think back channel we might have made quite made it clear, but Putin didn't believe it. And he speeches a couple days before launching the war. We know that Ukraine's going to be a NATO that he never believed that we would keep them out. You're probably right that if Ukraine is the absolute line for him. But do the people would he believe even if he thinks now I can trust Joe what happens. What happens with the next guy becomes the last guy. Is he going to live who knows who's gonna be president next. You can't trust what the United States going to do. I don't think at that point it made any difference. The harm had been done. Yeah, Tom and then we've got to your question go ahead. Yeah, Chris. Excellent. I agree with you fundamentally about everything that you said, but again, another look at the other side expansion NATO. Every time we expanded. I sat there I did NATO. Right. I didn't like NATO expanding. I offered all the realist arguments. Now I look back and I say, how many allies to Russia have right Syria, how many allies to the United States have a whole big bunch. Yeah, when we expanded the American public opinion was supportive. More importantly, the Czech public opinion was supportive checks and Hungarians and all these people are looking at America as a country that kind of seems to care about their domestic politics. It might have nothing to do with realism, but the fact that NATO expanded for domestic reasons I would say more than realist reasons. Maybe it was a success Russia sitting there by itself and we're sitting there with an army of allies. Good job NATO expansion. I guess so we have an army of allies that include the Albanians and the Estonians and the Latvians. Okay, and the Czechs love us. Yeah, that's just good. It's better than have the Czechs hate us. They're good hockey players in particular, but what else do we get from this? Are we safer? Are we safer than the Hungarians are NATO? If we get attacked by the Mexicans, you know, they means we'll be at our side. Okay, but too much conversation in this in our country good NATO because become an end, not a means alliances as you guys I'm sure still talk about ends and means grand strategy. Alliances are means to the end of security some kind of goal you put an alliance together to get to that goal. It has become NATO is our goal. We'd have to fight for NATO if Estonia gets attacked. Well, because if we don't want NATO to go with NATO and come the end. What are we talking about? Well, why would we've lost our minds if the alliance becomes more important? The alliance itself becomes the end the goal and the important thing that our interest interest has presumably served by NATO, not NATO itself. So if once fighting once NATO becomes the interest we're in trouble. And I all those things you left right look absolutely true. We have more allies now. But I'm not sure that we're safer or secure any better tangible interest. Yeah, the Bulgarians love us. Great. You know, I prefer that than hate us, but it doesn't help. They don't know I'm never being scared. A question from a few milanopoulos. He says I wanted to follow up on any question about NATO expansion as a necessary condition to provoke Putin to conduct this invasion. This implies that the absence of NATO expansion would not have promulgated this invasion. Do you believe this is true? And let me offer a different counterfactual similar to Terry's question. If in 2008 the United States had admitted Ukraine immediately into NATO, instead of promising entry into some future date, would Putin have been deterred? That's a great question. And it seems to me that if you're and NATO is expanding and it's going to take a few months for NATO expand, you might act before you might act preemptively to stop it from happening. And let's say that he does this knowing that. Are we going to sacrifice New York for Karkov, for Keith, during the Cold War all the time? Would we really sacrifice New York for Hamburg? Well, would we sacrifice today, New York for Riga? Or would we go to war? Would he essentially, as I'm saying, follow our bluff? Or would we have to choose to fight in Ukraine for what I don't know? But because we made a security commitment. And I have to answer the first part of the question. If we hadn't expanded it, I don't think this war would have happened. I don't think Putin would have felt quite the same level of paranoia. And let's say it did happen. Let's say he did attack. There's no reason we couldn't have acted exactly the same way we did. It's not the case that NATO was a precondition for our aiding the Ukrainians. We could still pump dollars and weapons into Ukraine just as easily without the NATO commitments all around the country. I used to love when I was here and I still use this scenario. And we did U-Com in the days of U-Com, but they would have a, I showed at the little city of Narva. Narva is the third biggest city in Estonia to like 90,000 people. It shows you a small country. But also, it's something like 80% Russian. What if the Russians decide we're taking over Narva? And we have the common nationality. We're going to take over Narva. We have to decide whether we're going to fight for Narva. And if you're Putin, might you calculate, they're not going to do that. And this will destroy NATO. This will destroy the NATO commitment if we don't, we have to determine, decide whether we're going to try to stop the Russians from getting into Narva, which no Americans could find on a map, even the people from Narva. And so it's, it's, we have the hell of a choice to make. And we've gotten to this position because of our choices. We didn't have to make a commitment to Narva. We could have stopped it. And it'll be right now, we should say, okay, no more. Let's put Hadrian's wall around NATO now and move on with our lives and pretend it didn't happen. Bringing, talking about bringing in your friends in a big endorse. You just got a follow-up and then we can come around. Additional questions since in the time it took me to type. I was appointed to the Obama administration as the outlier on NATO expansion, but the officials from the Obama administration are now in the Biden administration, and have said their inaction following aggression in Crimea, force them to learn hard lessons they didn't want. They don't want to repeat now. What do we make of the learning they've done from their own experience on this front? It's true. And they, one of the big NATO expanders, a guy went to, I was in graduate school at Maryland, there was a guy, Evo Dolder, who was teaching there. And we, it was during these big debates and he would make the case that, oh, this is not about security. It's about essential European stability. It's about trade. It's different. It's not your father's NATO. And he became the ambassador to NATO under the Obama administration. So there are people, there's a lot of liberals and a lot of NATO expansion makes a lot of strange bedfills. And a lot of liberals think we had to do this in order to expand the circle of democracies and things that make us feel good. But I disagree with all those people in the Biden administration who have, hopefully they learn different lessons. And I worry a lot because I think those people are going to be at the vanguard of saying the way to stop the Russians from coming back is to put Ukraine and NATO in deterrence. Without thinking what happens if deterrence fails? Do we really want to go to war? Seems to me the answer is no. Of course not. What are you crazy? But we're really going to stick our feet in it if we expand. And so I worry about what Theo was asking about that people learned, oh, look, we should have expanded NATO more rapidly. What? What universe are these people living? And what are we going to have to continue to do it and continue to say our sons and daughters are going to be risking themselves for Tallinn, for Kiev, for inter-Slav conflicts. Slavic people are like the Germans. They're very excitable. They get into disputes. Why do we have to get in the middle of it? And I would say if we do focus on our tangible interests, we won't. Brian, you had your hand up and then we'll come around. So I'm a 20 year practitioner, you know, aspiring scholar and say, forgive me if I'm not on point. But, you know, we look at a lot of, you know, interest-based, you know, wars, right? And as someone that spent 20 years as a practitioner being deployed, you know, to fight for our core national interests. I've had a struggle and reconcile, you know, the difference here between these tangible and imaginary interests. One thing that I don't like about the way that we teach, you know, that the kill for, die for, pay for, and I agree with you, we need to think about, hey, would you risk your sons and daughters? But I think it's dangerous to bifurcate, you know, strictly between, hey, tangible and imaginary. And I would be curious, you know, with a nation that was built upon a value-based interest, right, much more than a security-based physical, tangible interest. Where would you put, you know, our national strategy is kind of third core value national interest, which is the realization, you know, motion of democratic values and that freedom. And that in terms of tangible versus imaginary interests, because that is right at the forefront of what we're talking about. That's a great question. And I think, really, let's get a bad name, because everyone thinks, oh, you don't care about democracy, you don't care about human rights. I think we responded pretty well to make it clear we do care about democracy. We just aren't willing necessarily to die for it. We're going to be bringing the Russian economy to a halt over the next few years, essentially. And they're going to make their lives miserable. They're going to have to pay a price for having done this. I think this is totally appropriate. And then we have a lot of tools in that case, and we don't have to leave with the military. And when somebody violates our values, we can leave our significant economic power and significant diplomatic power. We haven't been able to get the Indians and other people on board the anti-boot train, but we have been a lot of countries. We're making Putin and Russian life miserable, or at least somewhat more miserable. There are a lot of miserable beforehand, but more miserable. We didn't say it's okay with us. And we've done quite the opposite, leading at the UN, leading economically. But thanks, our main interest is not see this thing get worse because if it gets worse than human right, then the US gets involved. How many more people are going to die? And not just our people, but it's going to get... Iron law of international relations, things can always get worse. And our job ought to be managing this thing to make sure it doesn't get worse. And making it clear to the Russians this is not okay. And I think we're doing that. But I don't know any realists who think, I don't care about democracy. We're all fans of democracy. We all want people to be treated right. Generally, anti-torture sentiments pop up in realist camps too. But what are we willing to do about it? It should be the case. How much? Did you come up with that? What do we die for? I would say, A, I don't think U.S. foreign policy is driven by national interest exclusively. I sort of start there. B, we kind of came up with that notion to apply some restraint. I would say I trace it at least to my reading of Weinberg's doctrine. And then, I mean, to help, he doesn't need any help. But then you really have to sort of ask, do outcomes matter? Do results matter? And if the answer is yes, what is the track record? You know, the track record is pretty poor. And so at least I would say like my motivation with sort of that hierarchy is to try to add an emotional dimension when presidents decide to use military force. Right? The track record of using the military or any interventionist foreign policy, it's pretty bad. Right? So, you know, like my answer to you, right, for your 20 years of sacrifice is, I'm sorry, right? We should have done better. We could have done better with our decision making. The reality is we, right, the administrations didn't, and that's across lines. Now, where I'll disagree with Chris a little bit, or maybe I don't, Chris, is, I mean, you're really calling, right, with this and other work to have a stricter reading of national interests. Yes. And I think we would probably agree the US does not actually use force based on national interests. Not enough. Not enough, right? Yeah. And so that's kind of like how we teach, right, is sort of how the US government makes foreign policy decisions with FDA is all of these other factors. Because I think Chris even would argue, right, Putin was going to do this anyway, for cognitive reasons. If it wasn't NATO, right, it's the, right, Keelan-Ruse or, right, we went to graduate school and it was about Milosevic and Greater Serbia. Right. I mean, that's really where we are. And so it's those internal cognitive factors. And then the external is, Putin has an external enemy with the US and NATO, he would have found external enemies anyway. It didn't have to be this NATO question. So maybe that's where we would sort of split. But I think ultimately, you know, this is, right, it's a call to do more, right, stricter reading. If we focused on, I mean, we don't always focus on tangible interests, like Derek said, but if we did, we'd bite a lot less. And if everybody, these were realists are, I skipped over this, I just found this on the internet somewhere, I don't know who to help these people are, but the notion of good and evil, where Putin's an evil guy, don't get me wrong, but realists are really uncomfortable with the notion, talking about good and evil, because you can't compromise with people. You can't, you can't lead, you can't make decisions thinking good and evil. Because once you do, you can't, you know, if you want somebody to Hitler or Satan, you can't make, you can't compromise. And it's the, so if we made our decisions based on our tangible interest, if we remove the notion that we're the good guys, they're the bad, yeah, they're evil. We know that, but we can't make decisions on that way. So when, when, when, when President Reagan said, you know, called the Soviet Union, the Axis or the evil empire, you know, okay, what part of that do you disagree with? Sure, at a level, yeah, but you can't think of it that way. You have to deal with them as a country. Putin's an evil guy, but we can't think that way when we, because otherwise it's going to shape what we decide. And if we did focus more on tangible interests, we'd do a lot less stupid stuff. But people like me, Ken and roundly ignored. Oh, no, I like to put myself with Ken and we're both ignored. We have, we get together. Yeah, Paul, you had your hand. Yes. First, very interesting, very provocative. Several issues, one in your book, which unfortunately I haven't read yet. Yeah, just weird. I think you said that the Unipolar moment is still with us. Yes. So does that mean American primacy is still with us? Yeah, well, it depends on how you think about, we can't, we're not the Romans where we can determine everybody's choices, but we're still the strongest country in the world by every meaningful and most unmeaningful. Yeah, it works by that logic, which should maintain our alliance obligations that part of the alliance structure is essential. This is an essential element of the primacy grand strategy. If you think it's important to maintain the point of Unipolar moment, British lost the Unipolar moment, they're fine. I had a student last term from Bulgaria, and he changed the way I think about a lot of it. He said, basically, we'll talk in here. This is not about comments and post comments and this is about Russian materialism. Right. And the Russians will never stop. So Ukraine is simply one stop on a larger project. Right. So you either stop them there, or you allow them to keep going and becomes a bigger problem. No, I think a lot of Russians would like to do that. Maybe they're not going to be able to do that. And then we're sort of imagining what they're going to do. It's 1938. We have to stop Hitler. We're all it's always 1938. It's always we're always at Munich. And of course, your Eastern Europeans are going to say that, because they won't don't want us to leave. They want to make sure NATO stays and you didn't think it's obvious why the polls wanted into NATO. Yeah, yeah, you would too if you were Poland, but we have to make decisions for us. Yeah, it seems to me if the book gets some ideas, let's go into Bulgaria. And like I said about message about Mount Moldova, if you've been to Bulgaria, but they got, but the Bulgarians don't think that way. And they would, but we can impose costs. I'm not sure what our application is right now. There's another sort of four letter argument happening within your argument with the European Union. Many states that have joined NATO are also simultaneously members of the EU or happens to become EU members. And so the European project we support, because of its democratization, et cetera, it's something that is a sort of net benefit of expansion NATO. So you would agree with that. I didn't have the EU without NATO. The EU doesn't have a security arm. And do you need that? I don't think this is the 19th century where you need the Marines to be able to make sure that the Germans and the French are going to find. They're not going to find it. It's a big question is what if Ukraine joins the EU, will that make Putin as crazy as NATO? The answer is no, because we wouldn't be pledging to die for NATO, but for Ukraine if the EU expands. And it could make the economic threats going to be different granted this is symbolic part of EU becoming put as you said the European project. Yeah, that could make him more paranoid. Not anything like putting the US security commitment there. It's your question for about how what we should be prepared to do to stop Russians from expanding. Well, there's a lot of different things we can do, but once we expand NATO, we have said we're going to fight for it. And it closes too many people and think that say we shouldn't bluff. I kind of like bluffing sometimes. But once we expand that commitment, we're going to follow through on it. And it might be the case that Putin calls that bluff. And it ended up fighting for it. What are we doing? And part of it is, you know, yeah, sure, the Russians are paranoid. They'd like to put together their empire in their ear, but they can't do it. They can't take over the Eastern part of Ukraine. Maybe in 10 years they can revamp the security effort probably not though. But of course the Bulgarians are going to say that. They don't want to, they can't say, well, we're probably going to be fine. And have a stay. Do we want to stay? Can I ask one first and then we'll come around. That's right. That's time for a couple more questions. You talked about the domestic environment in Russia and said that Putin is in a position where if he were to retreat from the Donbass and a few the other Eastern oblasts, he would be in a domestic pickle. But doesn't he control the domestic discourse? That's part of how I interpret the polling numbers that you rightly cited where he's, this is one of the liabilities of the Western position, which is, Putin has displayed that he's to a certain extent immunized from legitimate criticism of how he's conducted the war. But that means that if he did choose an end game that is less satisfactory than some that have been suggested, doesn't he have the latitude to sell it to his population in a, since he's in a controlling political position. Absolutely right. Doesn't that open up a broader spectrum of outcomes that might be acceptable and might be worth embracing some risk to pursue as possible, culminating resolutions. Hey, you're exactly right. He doesn't have to worry about his public. The Russian people aren't the Russian people. They're correctness people like this. This is this Chechen leader. This is the son of the original premise Chechen Chechen leader who emerged from the second Chechen war is there. He got assassinated. This guy took over. This guy's going to get rid of him, not himself, but the inner circle of uber hawks is who Putin would have to worry about. The Russian people are going to rise up and get rid of him. But the hawks around him, and this is not sort of my assessment of the people saying, look, if Putin steps down, maybe things go well. Who knows? Or he is removed or assassinated or there's always rumors about him being ill. He's been ill since 1999 or so. But if he does get removed from the scene, somebody like this might come. They're not this guy. He's Chechen. But somebody like him might replace. And somebody like him, a group of them might get rid of him. Because they are also, they're the ones who he has to worry about what we call the audience costs. Not the Russian people. I used to think Lebedev would be a moderate type of, maybe if somebody, not Lebedev, what's the name of the guy who was briefly the president? Medvedev. Medvedev. Yeah, Medvedev. Yeah, some Russian. I thought maybe he would be a voice of reason. Of course he's the insane, more insane than the rest of them. They're tweeting while drunk all the time, apparently. But there's not a lot of voices of moderation. They're saying, boy, maybe we should have rethought this plan. That's what he has to worry about. And not the people. Yeah, Jim. My question was on kind of determination. You said kind of how does this happen. It ends with Ukraine giving up a chunk of this territory. Well, what would prevent Russia from looking at swillings, buying time, and then coming right back at it? I mean, the NATO, that's the whole port of the NATO. Yep. It's a deterrent. So how would you, how would you kind of minimize the risk of. You're exactly right. The Russians have to come to the realization that they're not going to be able to take it. The West is not going to let that happen without enormous payable costs. That's where they have to get to. They're not there yet. And the Ukrainians have to get to the point where they say, well, maybe we should give up some land for our children. Children's future. Because the Ukrainian economy. So you're right. It's not a one-way thing that the Ukrainians have to get there. The Russians have to get to the point too, which I think we're doing pretty well. Let's show that there are tremendous costs to be paid if you keep going, Vlad, and how much to the Chinese, how much the Chinese going to stay on board with your aerial ambitions here. And also, you know, just NATO weaponry doing really well. These people say, oh, look at the weakness of the United States. What are you talking about? Have you been paying attention to the war's going? So the Russians have to get there and they're not there. The Ukrainians have to get there and not there. It might take 10 years, but it's going to look a lot like that matter. And I might be totally wrong, but I'll be gone a long time. You guys won't be able to track me down. I'll change my email. But that's how it's going to end. Tens of thousands are going to die before we get there. That's how it's going to end. That's going to be a big push for an encore. Keep on going. I know. Now you didn't pay for that much. Chris, thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. I think we're constantly reassessing things that we believed and what's the right way for the future is very important. Thanks very much. Thanks to people who joined us online. Thanks for attending.