 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Keeping the World Company, and we're talking about Vladimir Putin. Putin is undermining Western US hegemony. And for this show, for all our shows on Keeping the World Company, we like to have Jean Rosenfeld, a scholar and historian, who is well acquainted with these issues. Thank you for joining us today, Jean. Thank you. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you, too. I mean, to the extent we can be happy in this new year, we may be more happy today than we are at the end of the year. Let me only say that. In any event, in any event, I guess the first question is, you know, the title suggests that Putin is having an effect on US hegemony. But query, isn't the US having an effect on US hegemony? It seems to me the US has made a lot of mistakes over the past few years. And we are shooting ourselves in the foot anyway. Am I right? Well, I have to take issue with the word hegemony because it's one that Putin loves to apply to the Western world, that he's got his as a target for his long term strategy, his vision of a global world, which is what he calls multi-polar, that really means transferring power to Eurasia and taking it away from the so-called Atlantic states, which have held the balance of power in the world for, well, 75 years since the end of World War II. And now as we approach World War III, Putin would like to reverse that. Wow. Well, yeah. And he's, some say, doing a pretty good job at it, not only by himself, but working with others. And where we thought, you know, at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, we thought that we could stop him with sanctions and the like and gathering collaboration from Western Europe. That may not have worked out in the same way we contemplated. And right now, in many ways, Putin has deflected our efforts to stop him. How is that working? How is that working for him? And how is it working for us? Well, you've got to look at him from the perspective of the old KVG during the Cold War. I mean, he's there to put the best face on everything. And he's there to promote a vision of Russia that conforms to his strategy for gaining power for Russia. And this Eurasianism strategy. So we don't really know what's going on in Russia. We do know that this war has been extremely costly for Russia. They've had to tap other countries for armaments. They've had to turn to Iran. They're actually they're actually building possibilities for Iran to produce more drones and give them to to Russia. And I'm encouraging, I'm sure, China to turn to North Korea. Also, there's there's something about Putin. If you watch him over a period of time, that when he starts talking more positively about his chances and Russia's chances, when he's building up everything as he is on an election year, you kind of feel he's covering over some vulnerabilities. And we don't know what those vulnerabilities are other than that he's lost hundreds of thousands of troops in terms of casualty. I don't know about the death rate, but it has an impact on a society like Russia. So in an election year, I I think you have to be especially careful about what you believe and think you're seeing. So that's number one. Number two, he's been making a lot of speeches, giving a press conference, doing interviews, getting a lot of positive feedback, which recalls the old Soviet Union, that everything is rosy, everything is wonderful. The other thing about Putin is when he starts rattling his rockets and threatening, that is a way of kind of discerning that whatever we're doing is bothering him. And we ought to keep on doing not run away and be threatened by it. So you have to kind of read the God right too. And I'm not I only use open sources, I'm not part of the government or security, but I'm sure they have means and ways of discerning exactly what's going on. I hope so. So, you know, one thing you mentioned is the troops, you know, he's lost, yes, he's lost a lot of troops. And I wondered what it meant that in the middle of some successes in eastern Ukraine, he's taken a few towns or small cities lately, and that's not so good for us. But at the other side of it is he's engaged in the largest prisoner swap of the war with Ukraine. And I wonder if that's related to what you were saying, that he wants his troops back because he's short of troops. Could it be? Well, you know, it's emerging now that Russia's digging into eastern Ukraine, which actually they've been dug in since 2014 and not much is moved, is really to defend Ukraine's desire to recapture Crimea. Ukraine has not been able to break through to capture Crimea. What Russia did in the first place is it flooded a whole area of eastern Ukraine so that their tanks and their troops could not go through. They used environmental means, a warfare, they've weaponized the environment to do that. This is the dam? The dam, the dam that broke. The Ukrainians have been able to establish some kind of a beachhead on the eastern side of the Dnieper River near Zaporizia, where that huge nuclear reactor is. So they sort of have control over the nuclear reactor, and they have a beachhead there. But strategically, they've not been able to gain ground or break through to Crimea, which is what they really want to do. And there's their stalemate, basically. I wouldn't say it's to Russia's advantage, and I wouldn't say definitely it's not Ukraine's advantage, but at least they're not able to establish themselves on the western side of the Dnieper River and threaten to take more land. Well, in terms of the war, we keep hearing that Biden cannot deliver funds or armament that the EU has been blocked by Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Ukraine isn't getting the support it needs. And I'm reminded of Tim Snyder's piece in today's newsletter, where he likens it to a neighbor who does you favors all day, and then one day the neighbor's house is burning and you don't do anything, and his house burns, and then your house burns. I mean, it's a great comparison. But, but query, how does this affect the calculus? Zelensky must be suffering. He's had trouble within his own government, corruption and the like, espionage and the like, and the lack of support by the EU and by the US. It all has the badges of tragedy, doesn't it? Well, it could. On the other hand, Biden didn't think Zelensky would last two weeks at the beginning, and he wasn't treating him very seriously until he got the message that this wasn't going to happen in two weeks. And secondly, we don't know how the people of Ukraine feel about the leadership of Zelensky. Has he been cleaning house? To some extent, yes. He must be getting very, very weary. On the other hand, one of the big things I think that Ukraine has to be very careful about is they don't have that much manpower. Russia has a lot more manpower than Ukraine does. And they've been emptying their prisons to start with. And because social, social resistance to battlefield losses is not something that Putin wants to face. Ukraine, on the other hand, it, I think it's more about manpower than it is about material. I do believe there's material coming in. If they're able to make hits on Russian territory, which they have done recently, and on Russian naval ships, and if they're able to keep the Black Sea open, which they have done, and Tim Snyder makes clear exactly what Ukraine has done not only for itself, but for Europe and the world to keep those, the wheat and the agricultural products going to Africa so people don't starve. I mean, we have to give them their due. And I do believe there are probably conduits of material and ammunition and needs that are going to Ukraine, probably in ways we don't know about. Nevertheless, that's to say that it's very, very dicey. I mean, Russia is capable of taking a great deal of punishment. It showed that in World War II. And it's a very powerful and determined and authoritarian nation. So I think what's more important is what's going to happen in a U.S. election relative to Ukraine. That's the important thing. Well, let's get, let's do the differential on it. What happens if Biden wins? What happens if a Republican such as Trump wins? Well, that is the A number one question of 2024, isn't it? Because whatever happens in that election is going to determine what happens in the world. Totally. Well, but if Biden wins, perhaps he'll be less reluctant to take bold steps to support Ukraine, and for that matter, Israel. And if Trump wins, he'll close it down with his buddy Putin, as he has indicated earlier. He'll close it on day one. He'll give it away. There won't be a war because there won't be a Ukraine, or at least there won't be an Eastern Ukraine. I totally agree. And the result of that, at least as far as the Ukraine invasion is concerned, it'll have implications everywhere. It's global, including us. But let's talk for a moment about the election in Russia. You say that it's an election year for Putin. But is it really an election in the old-fashioned election sense where people vote and there is a prevailing candidate? Or has Putin got that locked up tight after all? He could make Navalny disappear and then reappear, and he can crush any opponent using his police. Is there really an issue about who wins that election in Russia? Some respects it is, because he needs to retain a certain degree of power among various important factions. He needs to have the military on his side. That's the most important thing. He needs not to have people protesting in the streets so that he can continue this narrative that Russia is the country that is going to devolve power among other states if the United States loses power. He's got to maintain whatever fictions contribute to that narrative. So what he's doing now is he's going around to various agencies and groups and audiences and giving them to basically what dictators do. They all sing his praises. He goes on television. All of these different factions representing the mothers, representing the soldiers. They're all giving them the praise and relying on his leadership. And really what option do Russians have? They don't have another option. So he puts a very smiling face on the whole thing. He's feeding them that misinformation every day. They have no other narrative to follow. They're not informed or they're actively misinformed. And there was an article not too long ago about how the Russian people have become comfortable with the war. They have stopped protesting a lot of them and they're with him on it. And that's I think a result of what you say. He's on television every day and he's painting the grass green. They do that in the Russian military. They paint the grass green and the result is that people are buying it. Because if you repeat it often enough, it becomes the truth, even if it's a lie. So I want to go to one other thing and that is early on Trump said that Putin was a smart guy and maybe he is a smart guy. He's managed to neutralize a lot of the effect of the sanctions. He's managed to maintain his oil connection around the world. He's managed to obtain ammunition and weapons from around the world. And he's been creative in filling the ranks even though when you fill the ranks from the prisons you can't rely on the troops. But ultimately what strikes me is that he is building relationships, geopolitical connections in many, many places. He's finding and taking advantage of opportunities everywhere to establish diplomatic loyalties here and there. Doesn't that help him? I mean, first do you agree? But secondly, doesn't that help him in terms of his fight against the West? Well, that definitely is his strategy to win over especially the important non-aligned nations like India, Turkey. Those are pivotal nations for him to win over. He's already got Iran in his camp and Brazil is paying him homage, I would say. However, he can't really believe anything that comes out of a regime like that. As you say, they're going to paint the grass green and they're very, very good at putting up Potemkin villages. Remember the Potemkin villages where everything looks rosy and then 10 feet behind it. It's all devastation. The one thing Putin is doing that is not getting enough attention is he is using the old principle of sowing chaos in order to pressure the United States because he's very angry about sanctions. And I do believe the sanctions have hurt him. He's very angry about that. So what he's attempting to do is get us overstretched. Now we're defending the Red Sea, for example. He has stirred up the hornet's nest in Gaza. He has used his proxies to stirring up the axis of resistance in the Middle East in general. He has stirred up a hornet's nest in Ukraine and before that in Moldova and Georgia. So we see what his strategy is, is to overstretch us, to make us have to put out fires all over the place. When you're busy creating fires like a juvenile delinquent, then you don't have to defend as much against a nation as powerful as the United States. We still have a great deal more economic and military power than Russia does. And China, of course, is staying on one side watching this, seeing who's going to come out on top, how they can avoid a war because they don't want to lose their ability for financial hegemony themselves. And Putin is offering them that by saying the U.N. should become the global currency, not the dollar. So there's a lot of whispering going back and forth between China and Russia, who are basically at heart rivals, and definitely an attempt to sow chaos with the West, to weaken the West, and then to strike. They're creating opportunities. And I see the Middle East as a huge opportunity for him. You know, he opposes Israel. He is working with Iran to create the chaos and so many war fronts around Israel. And I mean, he owes them for their loyalty. He owes Turkey for its loyalty. He owes India to some extent, although I think India is as usual kind of on the fence. And he owes China for being an observer rather than a participant. So is he spending his capital? What I mean is under the hood, Gene, is he spending his capital. So at the end of the day, he owes the whole non-U.S. bloc. He is engaged in a huge propaganda war, appealing to countries like Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, India, probably the Philippines, Indonesia. These are the coming economies of the world. And he's enlisting China in this. Deep down, what he really wants is to spread Russian civilization, to reclaim his views of Russia's past glory. He does not see Russia as a European nation. He is not aligned with France, for example, like his model Peter the Great was. He wants Russian religion, Russian culture, Russian values to be looked up to and admired by the rest of the world. But this is a mortal man. Oh, men are mortal. Putin is mortal. He has only so many years to do this. Yeah, what's the succession? I mean, I'm sure we've all thought about what happens if he's gone. But there's an autocrat of this intensity, this incredible dictator doesn't have a second in command. He doesn't groom a successor. So when you take Putin and his Peter the Great or otherwise model, what happens when he can't serve anymore? Oh, he's got guys waiting in the wings. Kadirov in Chechnya and Medvedev, just second in command. And I'm sure there are many others we don't know anything about. I'm sure the security agencies know who they are. That doesn't mean that there will be an easy succession, because every historian knows that a dictatorship has problems around times of succession. That's when they have to bring in the military. That's why they need to keep the military. If the military defects, then there is national and social change. But times of succession are vulnerable times for dictatorships. We don't know. That was why it was so important that he get rid of Pogosian. Pogosian stayed around. He would have had a real problem. So we have problems, by the way, in this country about succession too, don't we? We're investigating that very closely. But in the what, 10 months left, less than 10, and the clock is ticking, what can the Biden administration do to best deal with Putin? And I guess that's a troubled question in the sense that we have Mike Johnson and the Republicans who aren't there at loggerheads. They're not going to give them any money for Ukraine, any real money or any real support. This effect of support that comes from the EU and NATO, and it's a loggerhead situation. What can Biden do? What should he do in terms of the diplomatic response, if you will, to Putin's efforts? Hold the line. Find the money. Strengthen the coalition of the willing. Get them to contribute. Marginalize those that are playing both sides against the middle, like Turkey and Hungary. Get your narrative out there. Make it the good guys and the bad guys. Put it in terms that people can understand so they feel they have a real choice. And try to grab the mandate. In a democratic society where you have institutional lines of succession, only way to ruin that, which the Trump movement has tried to do is to attack the institutions, which ensure the lines of succession, that there is a charismatic leader is always a threat because a charismatic leader doesn't come up through the usual way of gaining power. They're outside of that. They try to destroy the institutions which confer legitimate power. And Biden has to claim that legitimate power, has to show that, has to put things in almost hyperbolic terms and to demonstrate and prove what the results will be. I've been going back and studying the prelude to World War II and reading things about what happened then. And that's the kind of thing you need to do, is to make those comparisons so people know what's at stake. Yeah, I was going to ask you that anyway. It's a question of the kind of rhetoric you're describing could happen on the autocrat side of the equation too. Autocrats like to get their narrative out there in the strongest possible terms and leave no options. But it seems to me that in a democratic world these days, in a Biden world these days, we need to have him speak to us like FTR's fireside chats. We need to have a personal connection with him. We need to have him strong and give us strong rhetoric and explain the narrative, but also sell the narrative. And to me, I would say that his 10 months, the most important thing he can do is do that, is be strong and sell that narrative and show us because the American public is not really supporting him all that much. And aside from winning or losing an election next November, it seems to me he's got to get the American public on his side to do anything, including aid to Ukraine. Am I right? Well, there is something in America called the bully pulpit. That's what the presidency is. Knowing how to use that bully pulpit is part of the art of governing. If you look at FDR, just prior to our entry into World War II, he personally was far more physically weak than Biden is today. He was a dying man. And he used still that jaunty attitude, that bully pulpit, that those fireside chats to strengthen our resolve at a time when he could not enter World War II. If it had not been for the attack on Pearl Harbor, we may not have been able to enter World War II in Europe. I mean, that was, in a sense, a gift. He was one of our most powerful presidents, but he had such opposition, such isolationism, even an attempt at a coup d'etat. Worse than it is today, but we see the parallels, nevertheless, he was far more frail. And yet the people were more unified. We were more in tune with the threat. And things had proceeded far ahead. We can't see what's ahead of us yet because the strikes have not been that catastrophic for us, but there could be another Pearl Harbor, for example. There could be an attack on another nation that was important to us. We could have to deal with extending ourselves economically to the point where we were weak. We have to study what happened at the end of FDR's life. Look at our institutions, compare them with today and the threat in the world, because we do have a neo-fascist threat. That's what this is all about. Makes me think of the fact that we spend something like $800 billion on the military in this country. And presumably we have a strong, well-trained, well-armed, highly technological military that's capable of going anywhere and doing pretty much anything in any part of the world. But I think that Biden got burned in Afghanistan and he's tentative about using the military. We have it, but we are tentative about using it. And your example of an attack on one of our allies acting as a catalytic force in terms of getting people together, such as Pearl Harbor did, would be a significant historical event in this 10-month period. But it does take some moxie on the part of the administration to actually use that military. Your thoughts? Can't use the military until the people are ready and see what the stakes are. We're not ready for that. There's a strong isolationist trend in this country. There is a sense of doom in terms of the larger picture. So people are looking to their pocket books and what they're seeing despite the financial situation holding steady, what they're seeing as their bills go up. And in that kind of a context, we're not there yet. Unfortunately, by the time we get there, it may be in the hands of somebody very different from Biden, in which case we'll be in a new phase of history. Something which could be awful for the world. It could be a game changer. So the other and the last area I wanted to ask you about, and then we're talking about American public opinion affecting American policy and the actions of the administration in this 10-month period or after, it's important. And what America does can will have a huge effect on the success of Ukraine or the lack of success of Vladimir Putin in dealing with this invasion. I always call it an invasion. I don't call it a war. It's an invasion as far as I'm concerned. And that is the media. The media has been transmuted, in my opinion, during the Trump years. The media is in separate camps. The media has been politicized to a fairly well. And the media has, we have to admit, the media has a huge effect on public opinion in this country. And sometimes they say it's a misinformation media. So we talk about we're not there. We're not ready. The people are really not together on this issue. They don't understand Tim Snyder's article, his allegory about the neighbors and the fire. And so I ask you, am I right? Do you agree about the effect the media has had, the decline of the media in terms of giving the kind of information you need in a democratic country? And finally, what can be done about that? The media is relatively healthy. I know that's not the common perception. We still have flagship news media that are doing their job admirably. More journalists are being threatened and killed than ever before, which is a measure of how much there are stepping up to the plate and how dangerous conditions are. However, the one thing the media has not done is to put Trump on the back pages, not the front pages. This man has gotten where he is in large part because of our open media and our tendency to want to go to the most dramatic rhetoric the most. That's why he plays to it. He's a genius at manipulating us to that. Even the flagship media, they were attacked in the first administration, first of all, because that's what a fascist administration does. It wants to shut off all other voices and create its own narrative. A lot of people in this country also that belong to the Trump movement, they're not listening to New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. They're listening to their local talk show host. They're listening to the conspiracy theorist in their midst, to the Alec Jones, to the Steve Bannons, to the cable shows, to their local pastors who may be converts to different types of militant Christianity or Christian nationalism. We're going to see where the American people are. More important than who is our next president is, how does the boat split? What is going to be the gap between the popular vote and the electoral college? That's a biggie. So what happens in this country between now and November and particularly in November will determine the global world. It will determine the liberal world order. It will determine American hegemony. I'm sorry to use that term. I'm not going to use it. Let's call it what it is. I mean, we can't always do the right thing. As far as getting out of Afghanistan is concerned, it was Trump that did that. He made a very, very bad agreement with the Taliban. And in order to get our people out of a war that was an at war of attrition, Biden had to get our troops out. You know, he's very loyal to the military. He had a son who was in the military. And he's very attentive to the military, as is his wife. He wanted those guys out of there. But there was no easy way to do it. Yeah. Well, as you say, it's very hard to predict what's going to happen. There's so many balls in the air, so many variables, so many possibilities. It's going to be a really interesting time in the Chinese sense. And we are living, may I say I want to go on record with this. We are living in interesting times, but our times would become all the more interesting going forward. Your final thoughts, your final advice, how should we see all these issues? I think on an individual level, we have to return to treating one another kindly, to bridging our differences politically by recognizing we are all, in a sense, Republicans and Democrats. We believe in an open system of government. We are proud of our history. We shouldn't emphasize our weaknesses right now, because we need to build a unified spirit in this country for whatever comes. And we have to better listen to one another and judge the men who want to lead us and the women in terms of their character. Pay attention to character. I mean, I have nothing in common politically with Lynn Cheney. I admire her character. I would read a sigh of relief if she were on the Republican ticket instead of Trump. To recognize what really binds us as the Israelis have had to do under this horrible war that was visited upon them. They have a government that many of them must recoil from, frankly. It's not a popular government, but they themselves are together, unified, strong and resistant. And we have to understand something about each other. We're all in this book together. And just every single day, instead of lashing out at one another, be kind. Caring. From your lips to God's ears, Jean Rosenfeld, an historian and a remarkable individual and reporter on so many things. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay. Aloha.