 Good afternoon. I'm Nathan Ryan, Chair of the LBJ Future Forum Board. On behalf of the Future Forum, thank you all for joining us for this discussion focused on Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine. I think we've all experienced a range of emotions over the last two weeks. Shock at Russia's brazen attack and the loss of civilian life. Pride and the heroism shown by everyday Ukrainians. And curiosity to better understand what's happening geopolitically and the ripple effects that this that that are and will continue to cause around the world. This is why the Future Forum exists. The Future Forum brings together individuals with different backgrounds, experiences and points of view to discuss local statewide national and international topics that affect us today. Our goal is to create civil informed and bipartisan discussions. Today we're honored to be joined by two eloquent historians, Dr. Marcy Shore of Yale University and Dr. Jeremy Surrey of the University of Texas at Austin. Marcy Shore teaches modern European intellectual history at Yale University. She received her MA from the University of Toronto and her PhD from Stanford University. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of 20th and 20th of the 20th and 21st century, central and Eastern Europe. Jeremy Surrey holds the Mac Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership and Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He's professor in the in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Dr. Surrey is the author and editor of nine books on contemporary politics and foreign policy. He teaches courses on strategy and decision making leadership globalization, international relations and modern history Marcy and Jeremy thank you so much for being with us today. It's a great opportunity to answer your questions at the end of the conversation. There's a little Q&A box in your zoom window there. Feel free to type questions into that box throughout the conversation and we'll address as many as we can at the end. And now I'll turn it over to our moderator Dr. Mark Lawrence, director of the LBJ Presidential Library to lead our discussion. Take it away Mark. Well, thank you so much, Nate. It's a pleasure to see so many people responding so quickly to an event that was organized fairly quickly, obviously in response to one of the most remarkable things that has happened. I think it's fair to say in international life in in recent times Jeremy Surrey and Marcy Shore thanks so much for making time to be with us. There are so many angles on this crisis. It's sort of difficult to know where to start. Let me begin with what I think is most impressive to me at least about what I've been seeing on television and reading about over the last 24, 48 hours and that is the ever growing humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the Ukraine. Marcy, I know you have friends and colleagues in the Ukraine. What are you hearing from them? It is a, it is a catastrophe that even a place and people who are used to expecting absolute that absolutely anything can happen. And this is a part of the world where people know very well that anything is possible. I think the invasion was completely a surprise, but it is such an extreme dire, throwing us back in 1939 type of situation that I think it is a shock. The mass attacks on on civilians, you know, on hospitals, you know, on a bread factory on children, you know, everybody is fleeing with their children. Well, I should say first of all, you know, people who have children, the women who have children or they have to flee to protect the children. Nobody else that I've talked to wants to, you know, they, you know, they feel a very strong sense that they need to stay in fight. And then the question is, you know, dudes, does the mother leave with the children, you know, or does she stay with a husband. I was just, you know, pleading with a friend of mine, who got out with a five month old baby to Vienna and feels incredibly guilty, because she should be there also resisting and fighting with her husband. And I said the thing is, you know, her, her husband was a friend of ours. He was too important, a job to play, he's one of the smartest and best, you know, and most ethical and most well prepared people in the country. He's playing a very important role right now. He won't be able to think, knowing that, you know, his, his wife and their five month old child could get killed at any moment therefore you have to stay where you are. You have to do that for him. But it's grotesque and there are almost 2 million refugees that have come into Poland. The polls have shown absolutely their best side, you know, and that's less the Polish government and more civil society, all of our friends in Poland, you know, are out there they are making sandwiches they're taking kids from the border I have Polish friends here who are getting on planes now, you know, who have special skills to go go help you know refugee children with cancer and transport them to hospitals. It's a catastrophe on that Europe internally hasn't really seen I think since the second world war. I think a lot of people throughout the West and certainly in the United States feel a certain sense of frustration that they can't do more to be helpful I wonder let me stay with you for a moment Marcy. If you have thoughts about how ordinary Americans can somehow make a difference in the Ukraine crisis. Well, there are definitely there are many, many civil society organizations that have stepped up, you know, on both in Europe in the United States in Ukraine itself. There are places you can donate to many places you can donate to and I can forward list of them and I know many of these people personally. One of the things I've been spending a lot of time doing is just connecting people with other people, you know, making sure that Ukrainian journalists who are out there in the field, you know, are getting heard across the border, making sure there are people who can do translation and interpretation. A number of people who have nothing to do with Ukraine who have gotten in touch with me and say that you know I know these are your friends and I'm watching on the news and is there anything I can do, you know, has been incredibly moving. Like there are all these good people in the world I've never actually seen such good press coverage in America of something that is happening in a country about which most Americans know nothing. Perhaps there's a silver lining we should talk about in a few minutes. Jeremy, though, let me go to you first with the same question. What do you advise people here in the Austin community about how they might make a difference? Well, I think one of the most important things is for people to remain concerned to stay involved to watch and pay attention and make their voices heard. Vladimir Putin was counting on a mild, if any, reaction from people. He was counting on certain party in the United States to actually come out and defend him. And so the more that citizens of all kind, particularly students, particularly young people and ordinary citizens, whatever falls under that category, the extent to which they're involved and make their voices heard and show unity. I think that's one of the most important things for Vladimir Putin and for the other evil doers to see, which is that the West is united, that there's a strong reservoir of commitment to the sanctions commitment, even to some of the sacrifices that we are going to have to burden, which of course are much lighter than the sacrifices that the Ukrainians and others are going through. And to show the evil doers that there is a strong, united coalition against them within the United States and within the West, broadly defined. And so I was very heartened the other day, Mark, when we had, I think, 300-400 students come to an event that we organized at the last minute. It showed me that they care. And I hope that message is something we continue to back up in the coming days and weeks. Since this crisis began, it seems to me the single biggest question that has loomed over it is Vladimir Putin's intentions. What is he trying to achieve in launching this war? Jeremy, let me go to you first. What's your answer to that question and have your answers to that question perhaps evolved, given what we've seen in the period since the war began? So we have a long track record for Vladimir Putin now. He's been president for two decades, which is a long time, and we have seen patterns of his behavior. And I think what we do as historians well is that we assess behavior over time and we look at the intersection between what people say and what they actually do. I think there are three consistent patterns that we can see that are behind much of what we're witnessing today. First, Vladimir Putin wants to create and make Russia a greater power than it really deserves to be based upon its gross national product, based upon its population, based upon its geostrategic position. Russia is in the classic case of a declining great power or a declined great power that is trying to punch above its weight. And this is why he has said repeatedly and acted on his belief that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. I don't think he's defending the Communist Party. What he's defending is Soviet great power status. Second, I think Vladimir Putin is deathly afraid of democratic movements of all kinds, and he's not alone in this. There are plenty of people, including some in the United States who are afraid of democratic progressive grassroots movements. But he sees that going back to the color revolutions, going back to what we've seen just recently in Kazakhstan. He sees democratic movements as inherently averse to his power and to the vision of Russia that he has. And then third, I think he has come over time to believe his own rhetoric about the United States and our allies being somehow out to get Russia. And he's carrying a set of grievances with him that I think are effective at mobilizing Russian xenophobia and nationalism at home. But again, that's not unique to Russia. Others do this. Why he has taken on trying to swallow all of Ukraine, which he is ill-prepared for. We knew that already and it's been proven in the last few days. I think that's a little bit of his reading his own propaganda, overestimating himself and underestimating his enemies. And as you know, Mark, you've written about this too. This is an occupational hazard of isolated dictators that they don't get good information. Stalin fell into this trap and I think Putin has as well. Marcy Putin's motives with anything you'd care to add. Oh, well, I should first say that, you know, I have no privileged access to what's going on inside Putin's head. I'll say something from the point of view of an observer. So eight years ago when I was working on a book about the Maidan, watching the Maidan, I paid close attention to what Putin was saying. You know, and I'm not, I'm not a historian who works on great power politics. I work on intellectual history. I was interested in language. And I listened carefully to his Crimea speech, his grandiose, you know, Russia are, you know, our Crimea has been returned to us, which he had set up in a very, you know, majestic style. And he was a very shrewd grand strategist. You know, he took exactly the moment when a popular revolution had overthrown a brutal gangster president but had not had a chance to put another government in place. You know, he took the most vulnerable part of the country. You know, he sent people in before anyone had a chance to figure out what was going on. And he took Crimea really without violence. And people were happy and the Russians were happy and they kind of got something for nothing. You know, and it was very carefully orchestrated, you know, and the language and you know he was saying all sorts of things that were false but it was false and a kind of controlled master performer grand chess master kind of way. And when I listened two and a half weeks ago now on the Monday, two days before the invasion to that hour long speech that Putin gave my, my intuition, and you could take this with a grain of salt because I'm not a native Russian speaker, but my intuition was that he was no longer the same person. He was not so sharp he was not so shrewd his Russian was no longer so sharp. He sounded much more diluted, much more deranged much more removed from reality, you know, making less sense the various false stories he was spinning made less sense than the ones he was spinning eight years ago. And my, my literary sensibility about it, you know, and again I don't work on geopolitics was that we are no longer in the metaphor, of the chess match between grand masters. Now we are in the Shakespearean drama, you know, and we have an aging man facing his own mortality who quite possibly has decided to destroy the world. That was my intuition. So we've crossed out of the realm of rational behavior into perhaps the realm of irrational Jeremy your thoughts about the use of that word irrational is that a fair way to think about this. We have to be very careful. I think all rational actors can behave irrationally. We know this from our own lives. And the what appears to be irrational can also have very rational motivations and there's been a lot of work many of us have done on why sometimes it's rational to appear to be a madman. I mean, Vincent himself talked about this. Right. And one could argue that's what Putin was trying to do with his threats to raise a nuclear alert that he didn't actually raise from what we can tell. So, so I'm hesitant to call him irrational and I don't think that's what Marcy was saying either. I am though taken and I had similar impressions to what Marcy said in that I think he is operating in a space that's very self referential now. One of his strengths earlier on was that he is trained as a KGB officer he's good at getting information and good at using information and he's used that against us including in our own elections at times right. So, so his manipulation of information is one of his strengths. And it appears he's less deft at that. And I think his decline and deafness in that is maybe not that he's intellectually losing his grip, but that he's less in touch. And this happens with all leaders market happened with Lyndon Johnson right that over time, your avenues of information and insight they become less useful as the world moves on and you're relying on those same avenues of insight. I think that's part of what we've seen it's a very different world today, then it was five to 10 years ago, and Putin is a dictator of yesterday, not of today. And I think that's what we're dealing with. Please add a little PS to what you said. I mean, I think what what exacerbates that still more is these two years of COVID. Yes, you know he's now had two years of COVID isolation hanging out in the bunker staying 50 feet away from people, you know with extremely limited contact, you know that's clearly exacerbated you know what Jeremy was explaining is already an occupational hazard. Those long tables Marcy right I mean those are so revealing to me. They are I mean when you said when you made the Shakespearean metaphor that's exactly what I thought about King Lear up on his, you know up on his throne. Let me pause just for a moment to say I'm delighted to see a couple of questions appear in the Q&A and please members of our audience please keep putting questions there will come to the Q&A part of our program in a few minutes. Jeremy and Marcy. It seems to me by all accounts, the war has not gone according to plan for the Russians who seem to have expected relatively quick subjugation of the Ukraine. Why have things not gone as well and I think we've already touched on at least a couple of reasons, having to do with with Putin's mindset perhaps and the kind of unrealistic expectations. What else would you call our attention to to explain why this war has bogged down into the grueling horrible conflict that it seems to have become Marcy why don't we go to you first. Okay, well I'm not, I'm not going to make any kind of military analysis because I would be completely outside of my realm of expertise and I don't even know the names of the kinds of equipment. What I can say is that first of all, the there has never been this kind of unity that you know in in post Soviet Ukraine that I've seen. There was the Maidan was an unprecedented amount of unity and even so there were a lot of cracks in the east, which Putin was able to exploit with a lot of disinformation, you know, and with certain kinds of hybrid warfare in 2014. Eastern Ukraine was in particular but not only was very divided. That is not the case now, there's a kind of unprecedented amount of solidarity. And I think now like now I keep thinking as a historian to Poland in September 1939. You are showing up and in the like a brutal invasion of a country offering nothing. You know, I mean there's, there's no, there's no incentive. There's no reason, you know that people are going to be happy to see you when you are showing up with these tanks, you know and bombing hospitals and massacring people. You know, and so there's an incredible amount of resistance. You know, there, there's, there's been a kind of solidarity that my friends are saying is indescribable, you know, and unprecedented. So there's a very strong determination to fight. I think, eight years ago and you know these are, these are all accounts from my Ukrainian colleagues again because I have no, you know ability to analyze military things. But when the war began when Putin instigated a war in the Donbas, right after Yanukovych had, you know, fled across the border into Russia and they were trying to form a new government. You know, it turned out that Ukraine really had no functioning army and it was being crowdfunded on the internet, and it was all volunteer work, you know, and it was all civil society and I was in Dnieper of Petrovs. You know, then it was still Dnieper of Petrovs talking to people from civil society organizations who were they were negotiating prisoner exchanges 2014 2015, you know, because there wasn't a state structure robust enough to be doing that and it was all volunteers. And it turns out now there is. It turns out that you know in the intervening eight years there really is a state infrastructure, you know, and it really is functioning. So you've got high motivation, you know people don't want to be bombed to death. And you also have, you know, he's, he's telling you know his Russian soldiers that you know we are coming to liberate our Russian speaking Ukrainian brothers from this Nazi dictatorship in Kiev. Everybody in Ukraine knows that's not true. Everybody knows that the president is a Jew, who is a native Russian speaker, whose Russian is better than his Ukrainian, you know, who won genuinely free elections with 73% of the vote. It has no traction. The story has zero traction among Ukrainians at this moment. And I think there are moments of encounters with Russian soldiers when it loses traction, especially with 1819 year old conscripts, who when they're confronting other people face to face as opposed to in the air. I think some of them do start to figure out that they're not. People aren't happy to see them here. They're not, you know, sent for the reasons why they thought they were. And I think here the language really does matter in a somewhat opposite way to the way you know Putin said Ukraine is a bilingual country. And as a generalization as you move east Russian is stronger as you move west Ukrainian is stronger. But it's basically a bilingual country and everyone and everyone has facilities, you know, in both languages people before the war started in the Donbass, you know and people started using Ukrainian more as a sign of resistance, people would easily switch back and forth dozens of times in the course of a conversation to accommodate people to make people comfortable. And so when those Russian soldiers are confronting people face to face, they're confronting other native speakers of their language with whom they can communicate extremely well. You know, so once there's a conversation you can have real communication. Thank you, Marcy. Jeremy I'll throw the same questions to you and perhaps you could take us into the diplomatic and military realms. Sure. And I think to start with the points Marcy is making I think is where one would have to start, right, the courageous resistance of the Ukrainians, which we would not necessarily have predicted. And the role of relatively new institutions, nascent institutions, many of which have been supported by external actors, including the United States, but most of the hard work again has been done by the Ukrainians. So before I say anything else, the explanation has to begin with the hard work, the sacrifices of the Ukrainians. And I think Marcy really covered that very well. Adding to that, starting from there, I would say that we should be conscious of the fact that Putin might have come closer to succeeding than we thought he had. And I think what he fell into was what Carl von Klauswitz would have predicted, right, which is the fog and friction of war. He had a plan that was to strike a knockout punch at the leadership of the Ukrainian regime, sending Chechen assassins and others. I mean, this is right out of the 19th century, right, to assassinate Zelensky and to put a puppet in place. And then to tell an information story, to tell a propaganda story about how this was a rise up against the Nazis who somehow were in control and come back from the dead and had put a Jewish person in charge of this country. And he might have gotten away with it. Actually, he might have come closer than we thought, if not for a variety of things that happened. The first is that his machine was not as well-oiled as he thought it would be. And this is the first thing that Klauswitz reminds us of. These kinds of operations can go either way, and a few small things, one way or another. The fact that the FSB, the Federal Security Bureau, was not on board and actually apparently shared some of the information about where the assassins were might have been part of the story there. The fact that Zelensky actually, strangely enough, performs very well in this space as a performer by his own background, right? There are all these contingencies that I think have determined which way this turns out early on. Putin's plan for a quick victory did not have a secondary plan if that didn't work. And so the precipice of victory is also the precipice of defeat. And that's where we are here. The Russian army has proven at almost every level to be ill-prepared for the operations. Part of it is the morale issue that, of course, is at the center of Klauswitz that Marcy talked about. The Russian soldiers don't know why they're there. They were told they were there on exercises. They were being talked to by citizens. It reminds me, and again, Marcy knows this better than I do, the world of 1988-89 when citizens in that part of the world were talking to the Soviet soldiers who were supposed to be in positions of occupation. So there's that. But there's also the basic blocking and tackling. This is a large military that has bought a lot of fancy equipment but is not invested in training, not invested in doing a lot of the things that any well-run organization does. Why hasn't it? Well, one of the reasons is no one wants to tell the king that he has no clothes, that the things he wants to do with his new toys are actually harder to do. And that's apparent. We sometimes fall into that as well in the United States. Let's not simply put that on Russia there. And then the last point I'd make in addition to all these is I think we have to give some credit, in this case, to the U.S. intelligence agencies. They did a remarkable job since November of getting detailed, credible information on what Putin was trying to do and circulating that information to help build unity, especially among our NATO allies. It did not bring the Chinese on board. They rejected that information. We know that. But our NATO allies did. And most important, it prevented Putin from framing the story. And I think that matters on the ground because that seeps in to the day-to-day. And just back to where I started then, one of the key points in most military theory and analysis is people have to have a sense of the purpose and a morale built around that. There has to be a discourse. There has to be a sense of what this war is about. And the Ukrainians, with some help from outside, have made this a war of resistance and prevented the Russians from making it a war of liberation, which is what they were trying to call it. So a lot of people around the world, I think it's fair to say, have been inspired, of course, by Ukrainian resistance, but also by signs of anti-Putin activism within Russia. Let's talk about the Russian political context for a moment. Is there any reason to believe that that anti-war activism and sentiment could amount to something that could seriously imperil Putin's ability to carry on the war, but also even his own position at the top of the Russian state? Jeremy, shall we stay with you first? Sure, sure. I think so. I'm not here to predict that it will happen tomorrow. I'm not here even to predict that it will happen. But we have every reason to believe, as historians of societies like this and then as historians of Russia, we have every reason to believe that Putin does depend, as every dictator does, on some consent. Everything is not done by force. And the consent comes, I think primarily for him, from the oligarchs and from the military. And so what I've been watching and trying to get more and more information on is how members of the military are acting, leaders in the military and others who already showed reluctance on television when he berated them. And of course, the oligarchs whose money we're attacking right now. And I think what happens in the streets matters, particularly for the soldiers, because they see that. Those are their relatives as well. Those are people they know in some cases. And I think that affects the ways in which they view what is happening. Russian history is filled with rulers being overthrown one way or another through military revolts. But those military revolts don't happen in isolation from the climate of public opinion such as it is. So it's a complex dynamic. The protesters in Red Square are not going to overthrow Putin, but they are contributing to his declining legitimacy from those who he needs at least some basic consent from. Marcy, please, what's your assessment of the internal situation Russia. I mean, I agree with all the points that Jeremy made. I mean, you're asking a question that has been the million dollar question that I think I feel like I've literally been talking about with friends and colleagues like 24 hours a day. And I can say among everyone I know people are divided into like the optimist, you know, and the pessimists because really we don't know. And like in all situations are, you know, my personal sample sizes is biased. I mean, just like I don't. There are many Trump supporters in America, but I don't have close contacts with them. There are many Putin supporters in Russia, but all the Russians I know are kind of it's a disproportionate demographic of people who are dissidents and oppositionist that. So I mean I have been desperately following that, you know that the human human rights activist who started up a petition than yet voinia petition against the war within a couple days had over a million signatories, which is a lot for Russia when you're taking a real look on. They've arrested some 13,000 people coming out for demonstrations, you know, which is that 13,000 people is a lot of people, you know, in prison, you know, it's still too small a scale. And so I think the question now is the question that sociologist and political scientists ask when do you hit this tipping point, because yes, there's something that's resting on consent, if even in a dictatorship, if only in a very indirect way. There's got to be a point where like the people around him kind of calculate cost and benefits but how you get that tipping point. Like I keep thinking obsessively about Chichesco in December 1989. Right in the moment where you know they're at the rally. I mean that had been not the heart that had been like that the harshest regime, all the way up to 1989, nothing like the dissident movement that you got in Poland or Czechoslovakia got going in Romania, because it was just too draconian and too brutal, you know, and he seemed so all powerful, you know, and, and so, you know, megalomaniac and so violent, you know, and then there was a huge rally, there was a Chichesco support, there was everybody shouting and then somebody starts to shout boo, and then somebody else joins him, you know, and, and some there was a moment of enough people catch on cross to the other side of fear, and literally within a few minutes, it was all over. After all those years, it was all over it turned but, but you have to get that tipping point right like if the guy standing next to him hadn't started saying boo and the guy standing next to him. And that's a kind of mystical variable like when do you get the masses of people to cross over to the other side of fear. Thank you, Marcy. How does all this end? And I'm here not asking you to predict the future another impossible question, for sure. And I'm not asking you as I say to predict the future something that historians are perhaps not particularly well equipped to do in any case but give us a sense of what you might consider to be let's say the, the most likely two or three scenarios I think that might be a healthy way to think these days about what lies ahead. And Marcy, shall we switch it up and go to you first. Oh, yeah, I say I'm very bad at prediction. I always tell journalists when they ask me that you know historians in the best case we can tell you what has already happened. We have good sources that we've done a good job. And what we know as historians about what will happen is we know what's possible. You know, we don't know what will happen but we have a sense of what's possible people kept asking me, you know, as I'm sure they're asking Jeremy and many other people is Putin going to invade is Putin going to invade. And I kept saying, I don't know, you know, it's possible. And a friend of ours, Slava of our cartoon was actually Ukrainian rock star who had spent a semester Yale years ago, after the Maidan at the Yale World Fellows Program. And he called on the Saturday before the invasion from Kiev. And I, you know, I said Slava how you know how does it feel there. What is the atmosphere like and of course you keep in mind that this is a country that from the point of view of many Ukrainians, you know, and from my point of view as a historian, they've been at war with Russia for the past The war in the Donbass has been going on, you know, since spring of 2014, it's been simmering it's in a fairly confined part or had been in a fairly confined part of the country, the part of the country that foreigners know least well. And that is, that is furthest away from the rest of Europe, but nevertheless, you know, some 14,000 people had been killed there are a million and a half internally displaced people in Ukraine from that conflict people are still you know getting shot they're still shootings, they still have these breakaway republics. So, from the point of view of many people there with this is a continuation of something that we've already been dealing with on a daily basis. You know, and so with that in mind you I said Slava how does it feel now in Kia. And he says well, I would say, imagine the synthesis of safe Florida in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Central Europe in the summer of 1939 between the Munich Conference and the invasion of Poland. It feels something like that. Jeremy thoughts about what lies ahead and scenarios that could bring some sort of resolution at least to the fighting. Yeah, I'm not even sure we know what the possible is actually I think we're we're in a space where we're sometimes the past gives us a sense of some of the possibilities. Not all of the possibilities right. I think one scenario is the scenario I think Vladimir Putin is aiming for today, which is to take control of Ukraine slowly but surely grind his way through and build a pro Soviet regime there, and just outlast everyone in a war of attrition he's gone from lightning warfare from Blitzkrieg, which we talked about a little bit ago now to a war of attrition. And he's hoping that he will slowly grind down the Ukrainian resistance grind down the Allied support and take I think the fact that he's not launching more cyber attacks on the United States that he is, is a sign that actually he's trying to play an end game where he can stabilize Ukraine and stabilize his relationship with other countries so I think he's actually that's what he's seeking to do. I don't think that's a likely outcome. And I think even if he is able to take formal control of the urban areas of Ukraine, he's unlikely to have actual ruling control over the society anytime soon but but I still think that's one scenario he's pursuing. Another scenario is the opposite which is that he gets progressively more desperate and seeks to widen the war, which would actually be again in the irrational rational space. One of the advantages of widening the war is that's another way of rallying people right and now making a case to his own people that look the West has attacked us in Ukraine look at all the javelin anti tank missiles they're giving look at all these things they're doing look at how they've attacked us with sanctions. So now we have to go out of them rally to Russia. I think that's a very possible scenario that's what NATO is preparing for right now. The third scenario is that he remains bogged down you see growing discontent, and you see him then begin to look for some way out. And this is the problem right what is that way out. Is it going back scaling back and just focusing on the East. I think he might have been able to get away with that earlier on what does he try to go back to that. Does he try to find some excuse to claim victory and leave you know the the the old George Aiken strategy that Lyndon Johnson didn't take in Vietnam. And then there is a scenario of his regime crumbling and I think that's again not the scenario I put my money on right now, but I think it's a realistic scenario now in a way it wasn't 10 days ago. Oh Jeremy that makes me feel that so much better because this is the hope that I am clinging to the most hopeful thing that anybody had told me. I think in the past week was I was doing a live stream pen club discussion. I was a writer who kind of came on with with a colleague in Ukraine and a writer from international pen came on and talked about his experiences from Southeast Asia he's from Southeast Asia over decades of covering wars, revolutions dictatorships. And he said Marcy what I've learned is that sometimes a dictatorship looks strongest and most unbreakable five minutes before it falls. Yep, yep. It's the Thomas Mann approach right the star burns straightest burns brightest just before it's gone out. I am delighted with the number of questions that are piling up in the Q&A and I want to turn to those in just a moment. But before I turn to those questions one final question for both of you. Talk a little bit about Western policy not only in the present moment but perhaps over the last decade or even 20 years. I don't think there's a lot of patience right now for arguments that you know NATO expansion was to blame for Putin's aggressiveness or that you know the lack of an assertive response in Syria in Crimea, etc. You know, amounted to a kind of Munich moment that encouraged Putin's aggression and yet this is an argument it seems to me that has to be taken seriously. What about Western behavior, not just in the present moment, but over the past decade. How would you evaluate both the West's performance historically over the last period of time and also since the crisis began. Jeremy, why don't we start with you. So my view would not be really that the question surrounding the NATO expansion which are serious and worthy of debate in their arguments on both sides whether that was wise to expand NATO or not that those are really not at the root of this topic today. I would say that we have had recurring across parties in the United States and in Europe, wishful thinking about Vladimir Putin. Wishful thinking has two different varieties right one is we are so attractive we will convince this thug to become a good guy that over time right he will want to join the good side right. We let's call that the sort of liberal hope right on the other side right is the sense well he's a really bad guy but we know how to work with bad guys. The most extreme version of that was Donald Trump but it was not unique to Donald Trump as well and we've batted between those two. I think what we haven't grappled with which is actually what I do think historians have been saying is that Vladimir Putin was a figure who carried certain grievances and a certain power and politics that was incompatible with either of those worlds he was never going to become one of us. He was never going to really be part of the g8 even though we tried to make him part of the g8, and he was never going to be someone we could make deals with in this sort of realist imagination. And I think we have been singularly uncreative in thinking about the ways in which we could provide, provide methods to limit the damage he could do and encourage positive forces in his society. I am not saying we should have been involved in regime change in Russia. I'm not saying that our track record of democratization is very good, but I'm saying that we have been singularly uncreative in dealing with a figure who was not seeking to take over the world, but was incompatible with the vision that we had for a peaceful democratic capitalist Europe as we would define it. And so I think that's the issue. I think we've almost been too personalist and put too much emphasis on our ability to personally change him when the structural issues are the ones we should have focused more on. Marcy, your assessment of the behavior of the West. I would make two points. The first that both the United States, you know, and Europe were, were too slow to abandon the cheerfully optimistic liberal teleology of progress, Francis Fukuyama end of history narrative. It took us too long to abandon our conscious or subliminal notion that the wicked witch is dead. Okay, there are going to be some bumps in the road, but basically we're all moving on this liberal teleology of progress towards western liberal democracy. And that was a problem in terms of our insufficiently disentangling liberalism from free market neoliberalism from democracy, you know, and it's now like this is the end of the end of history. I mean this is now like really the coffin like you know the last nail in the coffin of the end of history. I'm much too slow about that, not only the United States but I think I mean I think lots of Eastern Europe as well. The other thing I would say is is more cheerful so when the Maidan happened eight years ago, it was an extraordinary privilege and a gift to bear witness to that, even from a distance. You know it was the most extraordinary thing I had seen in all the years I had been hanging out in Eastern Europe, which was my whole adult life. You know, it was the return of metaphysics it was an existential transformation it was the best of people came out in a way that happens rarely. It was a reminder of the human capacity to be better. It was a reminder that we are capable of something better even if that happens rarely. You know and one of the reasons I became so preoccupied with writing about it is that I felt like it was ignored it wasn't understood that the German language wasn't that great I was in Vienna at the time I felt like that English language coverage like it wasn't people didn't care about Ukraine it's not that they were hostile it's just that the attention was elsewhere and you know Putin was putting out and Russian trolls were putting out a lot of disinformation. This was back when we had no experience with post truth. You know we were kind of slow to pick up on that. This is also one way in which we were unprepared when Trump came on the scene. You know when Trump came on the scene I had journal American journalists coming and saying can you put me in touch with Russian and Ukrainian journalists who have experience with this post truth thing. You know, American journalists were used to people fact checking individual pieces of information they weren't used to total unhinging. You know from empirical reality and the technical possibilities of troll factories, which previously hadn't been imagined. Now, I feel like the media has done a really good job. I mean I haven't done a systematic analysis but I feel like there's a lot of understanding that the media in combination with with what you mentioned earlier which is the American intelligence agencies. So not only were they, you know, why don't they were they gathering information, but by making the decision to make that information public, you cut off the possibility of Putin setting up this kind of provocation. And the politics of provocation are so deeply embedded in this part of the world, this kind of false flag thing or some kind of elaborate theatrical deception whereas you get somebody else to like attack your own guys so that you then have a pretext. And Putin was a master, you know at that at saying different things to different people and spinning so many stories that nobody could keep track. And, and what the Biden administration did or whoever the people who are on it did essentially made that impossible. Like I don't feel like I'm eight years ago I felt like there was this whole phenomenon of the so called Putin for stare which is what they called it in German like you know that you have to be understanding towards Putin. I don't feel like I'm having those conversations anymore. You know I feel like like, like Americans understand well what's going on for Americans which is extraordinary because for Americans to really pay that much attention to another part of the world is already kind of like a leap. The coverage is good the disinformation is not taking off. You know, I think we're much better at that. I like to think that that will that will get us somewhere. And I'm just desperately helpful it won't be the end of the world. Thanks, Marcy. Let me now go to some of the wonderful questions. And the first one I will pose to you makes reference Jeremy to your earlier. Quick mention of nuclear weapons and Putin's nuclear alert the question asks, do you think that this threat of nuclear weaponry will become more imminent in the coming months and beyond. I think there'll be more nuclear talk, whether there'll be more nuclear threats, which is the deployment or symbolism of deployment to try to coerce someone to behave in a different way. I'm not sure because the problem Putin faces is the problem American decision makers have faced since at least the 1950s. It's very hard to tie these weapons to any political goal. It's very hard to show what you can do with these weapons. The most likely scenario, if these weapons were to be used would be for them to be used tactically by Putin in Ukraine in a way that one would think he would use chemical weapons to create mass casualties and shock. It seems to me it's still unlikely he would do that. And it might be that if he were to actually try to order the use of these weapons that could be the precipitating end of his regime, because every member of his military establishment knows that that not only would trigger an incredibly strong US response, but now we're in the clear war criminal space. And it's very hard to deny that. And there would be action by the world to go and capture anyone who actually followed through on that. So I don't think we're going to see nuclear weapons entering the equation, but I think there'll be more talk about them. Marcy would you like to touch on that or shall I move on. I'm an erotic catastrophist. So I'm terrified he would easily use them if he could. But again, I don't think we're an irrational actor model and I think lunatics play major historical roles all the time. So anything is possible. I think he's we're already so far into war crimes. Obviously a huge problem of the world is that we have no way of actually preventing countries from committing war crimes. People are people are out there in the Hague and they're documenting, but how do you actually stop them from happening. That last question, by the way, came from Matthew. Here's one from Sam. And the question is essentially, is there any reason to believe that the attack on Ukraine is the first of a series of similar moves against other territories is Putin only after Ukraine is this all about Ukraine, or does it signal some larger pattern of assertiveness. Marcy, why don't we start with you. Okay, I'm again, I'm going to be the neurotic catastrophist and I think anything is possible. My intuition which again I'm not inside his head is that yes, I'll take Ukraine and keep going. Why not. I feel like we're in a September 1939 kind of moment. But again, I, you know, I don't know I mean he's clearly someone for whom other people's lives have no meaning. I mean, okay, like you know you kill 50 kids you've got corpses of 70 like it like where then do you suddenly like feel like oh I'm having moral qualms maybe I'll step back now we know he has no moral qualms about anything. Yeah, I have a slightly different view not but Marcy could be right but I have a slightly different view which is that I mean even if you take the 1939 example, you know, leaders of this kind and Putin has shown this pattern. They wait to see how people react, not because they have moral qualms, but because they they they're tacticians right and that's what we're talking about the and so I think he his hope was to take Ukraine quickly and then wait and see, and I don't think he had decided what he would do. I would like to think that what's happened so far has had a sobering effect on him, and at least made it clear to him that going elsewhere would not be easy and it is certainly strengthened NATO's resolve and NATO's on the ground capabilities in many of the places he might go. There's always the sense that he could lash out for reasons that actually would would help rally people to him if he thinks so I don't think he's suicidal and I don't think he's a fanatic, but that doesn't mean that he is and still operating under a point of view that can have lunatic consequences. There are a few questions here about possibilities that are open to the United States and other Western countries by way of a response I'm looking at one from Marion, who says given that Ukraine has been offered NATO and EU membership one day, in quotes, but that both of these options are in practice a long way off. What assistance and protection can the West offer to Ukraine to defend its sovereignty and the security of the Ukrainian people. Jeremy why don't we flip the order and go to you. So I think we're doing a lot of that I want to start by saying, you know, just as I think our intelligence agencies in this case, not in other cases has done a great job I think, in this case we have done remarkable work just in the last 10 days. But certainly in the lead up to those 10 days to to provide the Ukrainians with weapons to provide them with intelligence to provide them with all kinds of aid that allow them to fight a resistance with more capabilities. So the Russians have not been able to establish air superiority. It's not because there's a no fly zone we haven't created no fly zone it's because the Ukrainians have access to anti aircraft weaponry that most insurgents don't have they have much more than the insurgents in Iraq he's had much much much much more. And so I think we need to continue doing that. I think the sanctions and being more and more smart about targeting what we see as the pillars of the Russian regime, really going after those. And I think continuing to rally the world to be prepared. I don't think a direct confrontation with Russia is a good idea not only because I think that can escalate. But I think that then gives Putin a credible way of redefining the war as Russia versus the US right right now he's fighting as David against Goliath, and David is not looking as strong as he was before. That's the framing I think we want to actually Goliath is not looking as strong as he was before right that's the framing we want to stick with. I don't think we wanted to become a US Russian conflict, he would like that that might help him to rally people and so the indirect approach I think is much better and I think we've been doing well with that. The American side is clearly outside my realm of expertise but if I could maybe just mention this that the resources that we're sending, you know, and I don't know, I don't have technical details about them but what I do know is that in the past eight years since the Maidan, there's a new generation that's come of age. You know, and I know this also because I work with some of these students and there are there, they've been students of my colleagues in Ukraine and I've been in touch with large numbers of them. You know, and a decade in the life of somebody who was 18 or 22, you know, eight years ago is significant. And so people who had experience of revolution, who have been living in this country, you know, like that in which there's been a war simmering, you know, who have a sense of what it's going to mean that you need to get a stronger state together are really a real place now to use these resources that we're giving them, like the young people I know who have stepped up, like, they have language skills they have it skills, they have networks of people, they are savvy, you know, they've been in some logically preparing for it. And they are there have grown come of age in a world of disinformation. And the, the human capital there, you know that is working on the intelligence logistical side is really remarkable, like from my point of view. And so I feel like whatever resources we are giving, like can be used very well. Thank you. Henry's question encourages encourages us to think really globally about the Ukraine crisis. And I think at the heart of it is the question of what lessons and implications might other authoritarian governments China above all might be drawing from the Ukraine crisis. Jeremy, I know this is something you've been thinking about. Let me go to you first. I think I don't know for a fact, but I think that the Chinese in particular as they look at Taiwan, I have to be sobered by this sobered a by the unity of response, and be by the reminder of clouds bits of how difficult these things are to do. And so that those are those are probably silver silver linings for us here. And I just want to say, Mark, there's something you and I've talked about a lot before. I think one of the lessons that this is reminding I hope all dictators is that aggressive, undeniable acts of conquest really are hard. That doesn't mean you can't try to do other things that are aggressive. But this is this is really hard it doesn't work. Marcy, if you'd care to answer that or I can, I can also move along. I'm sorry, I think I forgot the question I was wrapped up in Jeremy's answer. The sort of global implications, including the lessons that the Chinese government might be drawing from the crisis. The Chinese government I should just pass on because I have no particular information. No worries at all. Here's one, in fact, Marcy that I know is right in your wheelhouse. What are your opinions and this comes from Alexandra. What are your opinions about the shift in attitude and criticism of from Poland. So the question really gets at the place of Poland in this crisis and some of the perhaps surprising behavior that we've seen there. Could you talk a little bit about what's going on in Poland and what strikes you. I mean, Poland is obviously disproportionately paying the cost of the crisis, because they are the ones taking in most refugees. And it is somebody who'd like knows Poland who has spent a lot of time in Poland who feels close to Poland. It is a moment when the polls are showing the best side of themselves. It is a moment when civil society is showing the best side of ourselves. There are many many friends in Poland and everybody is out there, you know, at people everyone is taking in refugees they are making sandwiches they're transporting people. I think also, you know, it's brought out the best side of the polls, the generous side and also the polls understand the polls remember September 1939. And there's a profound sense of a kind of solidarity of the shaken, they know what the stakes are, they know what is possible, you know, and they, they still have a living memory, you know, of what it means to be in that situation, and it's been incredibly moving to see that as the country I love it does not always show its best side, you know, even the quite nasty, you know, national populist government that's been in power piece, even they even do that. And it kind of has stepped up and is saying you know it's saying the right things, and I think it's a moment of a kind of shaking, you know, of moral conscience, in which you see things with a kind of clarity and a reminder, like, as during the my done that people are capable of something better. You know, we are capable of caring about one another we are capable of creating a better world, like and you have to cling to that reminder precisely at such moments. Charles that really gets at the cultural and even religious backdrop of the crisis. And Marcy, I think this is best directed to you, your thoughts on the relationship between Putin and Sozenitsyns 1990 essay rebuilding Russia, where Ukraine was not really a separate entity, and also the more recent split between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches how much of this kind of these kinds of calculations are driving Putin. What's going on in Putin's mind is difficult to say as a historian I can say that, you know, it, there are the borders existed in different places over hundreds of years. You know the borders of empire shifted the borders of dominant language area shifted, you can any any given starting point as normative in the past is arbitrary. You can say oh here you know 1572 the borders were there and you know here at 1863, you know they were, they were here and I think that's basically completely irrelevant. I think, even if everyone in Kiev, where Putin's personal first cousin. That doesn't mean you like go in and attack Kiev and start massacring people there. And it's completely, it's completely illogical I think there are many people in Ukraine, who have family and Russia and vice versa. There are many people in Ukraine who for whom Russian is their, their stronger language that doesn't mean that you've given them any incentive to welcome, you know, a violent occupation by a tyrannical dictator. It's just, it's a misunderstanding of like, Oh, these are our brothers, we feel close to them culturally. We've had a shared history in different ways. Therefore, I think I'm going to like show up and raise their cities to the ground. Thanks. And finally, let me let me ask you just just one more and this comes from this comes from Ashley and is perhaps a fitting way to wrap up. Do you think there are any actions that Western countries could take that would not have that escalatory quality and therefore, you know run grave dangers of expanding the war Jeremy. Can I go to you first? Sure. I mean, I think there are still are some things that we have on the table. I think we can be much more vigorous and going after Putin's wealth and the wealth of the oligarchs right. We know where a lot of it is. We might need legal changes in some places but I think this is the time to do that. The wealth that they have amassed and we're talking 10s if not hundreds of billions of dollars and Putin's case alone is ill begotten wealth. And we should go right after it. That's that's definitely one thing I think that symbolically important. I think it also hits the oligarchs where it really counts. I think we should be finding other ways to get assistance to Ukraine. There are many things we're doing that are not public and we need to be exploring all of those. And I don't just mean weapons assistance, all kinds of assistance. And I think we should probably be doing more than than we're doing or at least that I that I know we're doing about trying to get real information into Russia. I think we should be trying to penetrate Putin's efforts to create a propaganda bubble. And I hope we're doing that and I think we should be doing more that and those are all areas where people even who are not in the US government who have ideas and skills should be lending their skills to this effort. Marcy. I would definitely echo that. I mean, there are many people saying this is naive at this point, but I think we've got to try to reach the Russians. Ultimately, they're the ones who are going to bring Putin down. He's not going to see reason on its own. You know, I don't think it's a country of 144 million people who've just for sadistic reasons would like to massacre Ukrainians. You know, I think, you know, of the ones who are afraid to go on the street or who have bought into the story. There are people who many, many Russians who think like, Oh, but where they're there as part of a kind of, you know, very limited special operation to dismantle this Nazi dictatorship, you know, so that we protect our poor Russian speaking Ukrainian brothers there has got to be away. You know, and we need a lot of people on that there's got to be away. I also think, and this is my kind of my more sentimental or emotional side, like, you know, I have a lot of friends and colleagues there. So this is like, this has not been an academic matter. I mean, I've been constantly checking on them, you know, and every time like somebody doesn't read a message for an hour you're terrified that they've gotten killed. And I, you know, I'm terrified they're not all going to be here when it's over and I feel like we need to like, they need to know that we're with them. They need to know we're thinking about them they need to know we haven't forgotten about them, like the journalists need support they are on the frontline or these absolutely heroic people who are out there every day they need the right kind of equipment they need to be able to get their stories out to the Western media. I think we should be doing all of that. I mean I kept having this feeling like, you know, I don't, I don't want this person to die alone. Like, you know, I don't want him like I'm getting messages from people in bomb shelters, you know, and for people who are, I'm getting letters that sound like well this might be goodbye. But first of all, no we're not going to like, they're not going to give up and we're not going to give up and we're, we're not going to let them feel alone I can't let them feel we have like, I have to feel like we're doing everything we can. Well, Professor Marcy shore of Yale University and Professor Jeremy Surrey of the University of Texas. Thank you. Thank you dearly for what I think has been an incredibly enlightening hour. Thanks for taking time to be with us and shedding some light on this truly tragic experience but I think we're all a little bit better off for your words of wisdom. I'm going to turn it back over to Nathan Ryan who will bring our event to a close. Thank you Mark. When we host one of these events, I learned so much today was no exception. I'd like to thank Dr shore and Dr story for being with us today. Thank you to Mark Lawrence for moderating as well as Sarah McCracken and rust hole at the lbj foundation for helping plan and produce today's conversation. Events at the lbj future forum are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors including the downtown Austin Alliance. If you're not yet a member of the future forum and you learn something from today's discussion I'd encourage you to sign up on our website lbjfutureforum.org. Lastly, I want to say thank you to everybody who joined us again today, including based on what I'm seeing in the Q&A box, what looks like a group of seventh and eighth grade students. I know this is a historic heavy important topic, and I appreciate everybody spending their lunchtime with us. And my name is Nathan Ryan. I'm chair of the lbj future forum and we hope to see you again soon.