 Good afternoon, everyone. It's a real pleasure to see all of you here in the room at the Michigan League here on the University of Michigan campus. Welcome to the many of you. I'm told many hundreds of you who are watching online. Welcome as well to those of you who are watching through Detroit Public Television. It's really a delight for me to be able to be here today. I'm Michael Barr. I'm the John and Sanford Wilde Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy here at the University of Michigan. It's a great pleasure to welcome you today to this policy talks at the Ford School Special Series, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian, journalism, and commentator, Ann Applebaum. Today's event is part of an ongoing series hosted by the Ford School in partnership with Wallace House, the home for journalists here on campus, as well as the University of Michigan's Democracy and Debate Initiative. The series is entitled Democracy in Crisis, Views from the Press. The series, which has been going on this spring, will also continue into the fall, features award-winning journalists and their insights into the forces threatening our country's democratic systems. It also explores the role of the press in upholding democratic institutions at a time of demagogic attacks on the media and dramatic shifts in media ownership and independence. In addition to our partners at Wallace House and Democracy and Debate, I also want to thank our partners at the Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, as well as the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and our media partners at Detroit Public Television for their support of this event and the overall series. Today, as I said, I'm delighted to welcome journalists Ann Applebaum, an expert on geopolitics, an award-winning historian, informed by her expertise in Europe and her years of international reporting. Ann's work examines the challenges and opportunities of global political and economic change through the lens of world history and the contemporary political landscape. Particularly fitting to the Democracy in Crisis Series, Ann's most recent book, Twilight of Democracy, the Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, raises an alarm about anti-democratic trends in the West. A theme we'll be exploring in just a moment. Ann was recently named one of the top 50 thinkers of the COVID-19 age by Prospect Management Magazine. A senior fellow of International Affairs and a Nagora fellow in residence of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., she is also a staff writer at The Atlantic. I first met Ann nearly 35 years ago in graduate school, and I can tell you she was already then a great writer and a steely-eyed observer of the human condition. I've been impressed ever since by her fearlessness and truth telling, and I'm so grateful she's with us today. Before we get started, a quick word on format. Ann and I will be having a conversation for the first part of the event, and afterwards we have some time for the Ann for questions from the audience. I encourage our attendees here in the room to write your questions on the provided note cards and pass them towards the center aisle of the room. They'll be collected and then curated by two Ford School students, Radhika Arora and Renee Rosas, board members from our International Policy Students Association. Our virtual viewers can also participate by submitting questions in the YouTube chat box or tweeting your questions to hashtag policy talks. With that, I ask you to please join me in giving a warm welcome to Ann Applebaum. Ann, it's a delight to have you here in Ann Arbor. Thank you so much for joining us. I know it is amazing. On this beautiful day. Yes. You now have such beautiful spring weather here in your city. Thank you. Typically Ann Arbor weather for April. We call it second March. Right. More like a second January, but okay. Yes. Fair enough. Fair enough. The topics we're going to talk about today are often feel wintry and cold and dark and gray, so it's fitting. I want to start by having you talk a little bit about the opening scene from Twilight and Democracy. You're describing a part of you through on New Year's Eve back in 1999. I wonder if you could talk with our audience a little bit about why that event was significant in terms of your own thinking about authoritarianism and democracy. So yes, thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation to be here very much. It's not the first time I've been at the University of Michigan, and I'm always happy to come back. So my book Twilight of Democracy does begin with a party, and actually the party itself had no significance at all. So the only significance it began to have for me was when I began to think about it 20 years later and realized that I was not speaking to half the people who were there. And I should explain the party was given in, it was the New Year's Eve party in 1999 to celebrate the end of the millennium, and it was a moment of great optimism. The party was in Poland, my husband is Polish, and we own a house in the countryside that we had renovated, it had been destroyed, and we renovated it, and at that time it wasn't even furnished, but it was therefore better to have a party in because there was no furniture in the sitting room. But the mood of the party, they were our friends who were journalists, and some were in politics already at that time, and we also had friends from London and friends from the United States, and the mood was very optimistic. This was a moment when Poland was just beginning to emerge from the shock of the end of communism, was beginning to become a serious player in geopolitics, was beginning to, was making progress towards entering the EU and NATO, was becoming integrated with the world economy. I would say the people who were there in the room all agreed that this was a good thing, and this was a good moment, and it felt very much like a moment when my American friends, and my British friends, and my Polish friends all more or less saw the world the same way and seemed to agree. 20 years later, when I thought about who was at that party, I actually had a lunch with my husband where we sat down and we tried to remember, there is a last no existing guest list, so I might have forgotten some people, but I realized that some of the people were no longer friends of ours, and it wasn't personal quarrels, it was because there had been such a powerful and profound political divide in Poland that was, you know, it was that we had a very polarizing, you know, very polarizing five-year period in which people began to choose sides in a, you know, in politics in a very, in ways that made it almost impossible to speak anymore, because the choices were so existential. That became, I mean that may have been just a personal story, it became more interesting to me when I thought about my friends in the United States and my friends in Britain, and when I did some reporting in places like France and Spain, and I found that this kind of political divide had happened everywhere, that where people who had been more or less in the same camp found themselves on very opposite sides. In particular, I mean there's a, there would be a different story from people who came from the left, but I, my husband and I were part of what you could roughly call the center right, I mean that we were anti-communists, we were happy when the Berlin Wall fell, we believed in rebuilding a Poland that was integrated into the West and had, you know, a market economy or a social market economy like Germany's, and we wanted it to be part of, as I said, the European and transatlantic institutions. In the ensuing couple of decades though, a part of the right in particular had come to different conclusions and had decided that the system that was built after 1989 was not, didn't reflect their views or for a variety of reasons they were disappointed with modern Poland or they were, as in America, a part of the Republican party became disappointed with modern America, a part of the Tory party became disappointed with Britain, that the country was not what it had been or not what they imagined it should be. In some cases it was ideological, in some cases it was personal, you know, they had not personally got what they wanted to get and so they attached themselves to new radical political movements that seemed to offer a different path into politics and you had the emergence of, I mean it's very hard to know what to name this phenomenon, sometimes you call them, sometimes it's called populism although I have a lot of reasons maybe to, it's too technical for this audience, but a lot of reasons I don't think that's a good word because it echoes other things and other times and places. Sometimes it's called populism, sometimes it's called, you know, the rise of the far right, sometimes it's called, you know, there's a, you know, national conservatism is a word that people use, that also I don't think is very good, but there was the emergence of a movement on the right that was, that believed that there were, that the political system, liberal system, liberal democratic system as they existed needed to be destroyed, undermined, rebuilt, that a different kind of politics based on, you know, ideology and partisanship was necessary in order to do that and each country has its different version of this. In Poland, there was a, there was a terrible plane crash involving one of the former presidents and a huge set of conspiracy theories were built around the plane crash and the effect of the conspiracy theories was to undermine public trust in institutions, very similar to what happened in the United States if you think of the conspiracy theories around Barack Obama's birthplace. You know, it was that, that was, so birtherism was a thing that many people didn't take seriously, I didn't take it seriously enough, but if you think about what it suggested, the idea that the American president was illegitimate, that he was born outside the country, that he wasn't really American, that he shouldn't be president and that there's a giant cover-up designed to hide this fact from Americans, that's a really profound charge and of course if that's true then all kinds of people are responsible, you know, Congress and the White House and the press and I don't know, the FBI, all these institutions are colluding to hide the illegitimacy of the presidency from ordinary Americans and that, that conspiracy theory had, depending on how you counted at which time, something like 25 percent or 30 percent of Americans believed it and we had a similar phenomenon in Poland so the use of conspiracy theory to undermine public trust and in specifically to undermine trust in democratic institutions was something I started to see happening all across, you know, western democracies really starting in about, well, starting in, you know, 2013, 2014 and so that's essentially what the book is about and the party was really a way of starting it to say where did we start and where are we now? So Anne, you're talking about a very complicated relationship between an intellectual movement and the rise of authoritarian power and how do you see those connections? What's the link that lets that kind of intellectual moment be seized or be driven by those who then end up assuming a much more authoritarian role in society? Why doesn't it, you know, fizzle out or become shunted to the side? What allows it to become this powerful force that you describe? So I think there was a set of conditions that prevailed in Europe and America, you know, starting as I say in the kind of from about 2010 maybe even earlier, I mean you could probably date it to the financial crisis. There was a set of combinations that were partly economic and partly cultural. You had really rapid political change and demographic change and sociological change so, you know, accompanied by these very rapid economic changes and shifts and whenever you have major changes like that, things are left behind and so people who now say the America now isn't the America that I knew growing up, you know, it's different in all these ways, they're not wrong. I mean they're right, you know, there have been these, you know, rapid changes, you know, places that were prosperous are no longer prosperous and you certainly know that in this part of the country but we're really everywhere in the country. Things that were once considered unacceptable or now acceptable whether that's gay marriage or interracial marriage, you know, that's changed a lot. You know, ways of life that we once were familiar with, you know, a lot of this is idealized, you know, a lot of what we remember about the 1950s is based on television programs about the 1950s rather than what people actually experienced in the 1950s but, you know, a kind of idealized vision of what America was is no longer there and therefore the development of very powerful nostalgia for that past. And you can see this, again, it's repeated in so many countries that it can't be, this is not just an American phenomenon. You know, and so you have a, you know, accompanied by that you have demographic change that it works a little bit differently in Europe and America but you have, for example, in Poland where I live part of the time, you had in the 2000s you had a big exodus of younger people in particular moving to, you know, Western Europe to get better jobs. And here in America we also have the phenomenon of people leaving rural areas and moving to other parts of the country. And so that leaves in rural communities and in provincial communities the sense that, you know, of loss, you know, we're losing people. And telling people that, don't worry, you know, new immigrants are coming who will replace the workforce doesn't, you know, assuage that sense of loss. And you had this very much in Poland where, as I said, you had this, the sense of the provinces that they were somehow left behind by the nature of political change. And that I think was offered this opportunity for more radical politics to, so it's partly economic but it's more cultural. That the appeal of, you know, when you feel that your society is declining or changing in ways that you don't like, then the arguments of somebody who says, right, well, what we need now is to smash up everything and start again. You know, the system doesn't work. It's terrible. It can't be renovated. It can't be fixed. It can't be renewed. What we need is something completely different, you know, and what we need is something autocratic is very, can be very appealing. And so I think that's a part of the story. I also think a part of the story is about power. I mean, the four people in politics to get the idea that, you know, if we just change the nature of the playing field and make it uneven, and if we rewrite the rules so that we always win, and we change the way the media operates, and this is, for example, what happened in Hungary, so that there is no independent media and that it's very hard to find alternate voices, then we can hold power indefinitely. And of course, there is, that is very appealing. And in fact, the founders of the United States, the people who wrote our constitution, knew this very well. I mean, that's what they were talking about when they were writing it. They were worried about demagogues by which, and they were all reading, you know, what they read was probably kind of bastardized versions of histories of Greece and Rome, but they were reading about, they all knew the story of Julius Caesar and the end of the Roman Republic. And what they were afraid of was that. And they say so in some of the, you know, in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. And so they wrote the constitution with those very, very weird rules that now have strange, you know, stranger consequences. But one of the reasons it was written the way it was was precisely to fend off that possibility, because, you know, so this is really nothing new. What feels new to us is really, you know, all of us I think in this room have this experience of having lived through this extraordinary successful period of American democracy, starting really with the Second World War. This experience of, you know, democracy plus prosperity plus international leadership kind of probably culminating in 1989, but really continuing through the 1990s. And this experience of continued success, I think conditioned many of us to feel that this was inevitable, you know, that we would, you know, we would always be a democracy and there would be no challenges to it. But, you know, this inevitability had a certain danger about it. Because if it's inevitable, then there's nothing that you really need to do to make sure that it continues. Because, you know, it's like tap water. I mean, the water comes out of the tap. You don't have to think about where the water comes from. You know, it just comes from some reservoir somewhere and goes through some pipes and you turn on the water and it's there and we, for a long time, treated our politics like that. Well, politics was just this thing that happened and, you know, there are some professional politicians and they're over there and they do their job and the rest of us go on with, I don't know, painting paintings or, you know, making money and we don't have to think about it because it turns over. Maybe we go out and vote every four years. But the idea that democracy required some kind of participation or some kind of involvement beyond that for most people just didn't feel that necessary because, you know, as I say, what was wrong was just the tap water. So I think what we're experiencing now is the end of that sense of inevitability and the realization that it might not last forever, that there are ways in which you can gerrymander and alter the U.S. voting system so that, you know, a minority of the country can win permanently, which is what has just happened in Hungary and that it could happen here. I think the awareness of that is finally beginning to dawn on people. And let's dig a little deeper into that, the authoritarian playbook that you were talking about and maybe we'll take Hungary as an example because of the elections this weekend. If you could just, you know, nutshell and encapsulate the story of what has happened to Hungary over the last decade and a half, so people get a sense of how that plays out. Hungary's a country I know pretty well because I wrote a book called Iron Curtain, which was about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. Then one of the countries I focused on was Hungary. I had a lot of friends and contacts there and I spent a lot of time there, like in about between 2006 and 2014 or so. I was in the country a lot. And so I was there during the early days of Orban being Prime Minister and so on. And it's very important to understand what he did because he is a democratically elected politician, absolutely democratically elected. He won in a landslide election against a very unpopular previous government. But what did he, when he, he had also been in power once before, had then lost and then he came back. And the second time he came back, he was really determined never to lose again. And he therefore began to alter the rules of the system and he did it over a long period of time and in some fairly subtle ways and so it wasn't always obvious to outsiders. But small things like altering the advertising market so that it, because members of Hungary are very small countries. So this is a big difference for the United States. But in a very small country, you can effectively tell companies that need to do business with the government and most companies need to do some business with the government. You can effectively tell them we don't want you to advertise in opposition newspapers. So don't advertise in the press only in pro-government newspapers. And if you do that, then opposition newspapers begin to have financial trouble and they eventually go bankrupt. And then once they go bankrupt, you can have businessmen who are friendly to you buy them. So some of this was, some of this was just about, they have in state media, which is very important, as it is in a lot of European countries and that could of course be made totally partisan. But then the private press was also made totally partisan. And this happened over a number of years. And the point is that there are now no, there is no television news in Hungary that is not pro-government. And there is no, you know, there are hardly, the printed press hardly matters more any at all. There are some little websites that are in the opposition. And there's a radio station that is only available on the internet. It's not a, you know, can't get it on your radio. So there are a few little things, but it's mostly a few couple radio stations, but they're, but mostly dominated by the, by the government. You know, the takeover of the judiciary was done in the same way. The manipulation of the constitutions, the constitution was rewritten constantly in order to make sure that the voting system gave an advantage to the ruling party. And so over time, the ruling party became, is unbeatable because it essentially controls the business community. It's got a kind of symbiotic relationship with the business community. It controls, you know, the media. It's, you know, it, you know, you can't really do business in Hungary unless you are, have a good relationship with them. And through other means and bribery and so on, it controls a lot of local politics. And so people also vote for the ruling party because, you know, the ruling party is the source of everything, you know, local, local funding, you know, if you want, if you're a local mayor and you want them to build your street or, you know, build a bridge, you need their support. And so it becomes very hard to step outside of the system. And so it's not a violent takeover. It's not a, and it's not as ugly as it is in, say, Venezuela, which actually had a very remarkably similar form of, of government takeover, but, but it's, you know, but it's nevertheless, it's not a democracy anymore. And it's very hard to know how it will be unpicked. But, but in fact, if you look back at the history of the last couple of decades, most democratic failures nowadays, I mean, we have this image in our minds of, I don't know, that democracy ending with a coup d'etat and there's this tank on the street and, you know, the, some colonel goes into the presidential palace and, you know, shoots up the windows or something. And that's how the end of democracy looks like. But actually, most of the time, that's not how it looks like. It ends with the slow erosion of institutions and the takeover by a strong man or by a political party. If you look at Venezuela, that's exactly what happened. And so it's, and I, and I especially, Venezuela underlines the fact that this is not a right or left wing issue. I mean, you can do it from either side of the political spectrum. And you can do it the way both Chavez actually in Orban did it by declaring themselves to be the only legitimate power. You know, my opponents are traders and foreigners and enemies. Only I have the right to rule. You know, only I have, you know, have legitimacy. And once you do that, then that gives you the sort of the right to, you know, undermine all these institutions. Because if, if only one party has legitimacy, then why should the other party be able to speak freely in public? And why should they have the same right to contest for power? And so, you know, democracy is based on this very delicate, you know, assumption that everybody's playing by the rules. You know, you have to, there has to be a kind of, everybody has to play by the rules. There has to be a kind of public sphere in which debate can be had and in which, you know, people obey some rules about, you know, I mean, even just rules about courtesy and rules about mutual respect. I mean, that's what, if you think about it, that's what parliaments are in congresses. You know, there are these elaborate rules about who speaks and how and when. You know, that's all about giving people, everybody's right to voice their, their views. But and once that breaks down, it can be very hard to recover because, because who can come back in and set the rules again? So let me bring the conversation for a bit here to the United States. You've been describing this process in, in Hungary, you've talked about in Poland, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, many other places in the world. But you've also talked about the erosion of democratic values here in the United States. So how do you see that playing out here? And what are the parallels and dissimilarities between what you're seeing here and what you're seeing elsewhere in the world? So unfortunately, there are parallels and similarities and they're emphasized by the fact that, you know, a part of the sort of new conservative establishment is very enamored of Hungary. They, you know, Tucker Carlson has broadcast his program from there. A part of the, the CPAC, the, which is, you know, the sort of conservative kind of political conference has, you know, met in Budapest. You know, there's a, and they, and they see that as a, you know, they're very open about seeing that as something they would, something that they admire. Both because Orban, I should, I should have added this that Orban also uses as his method of doing politics, you know, culture wars, you know. So he's always fighting against, you know, the, you know, he's fighting against, you know, changes in attitudes to, to gay rights. He's fighting against feminism. He's fighting against, you know, my immigration, which actually there isn't, I mean, Hungary is an interesting case where there isn't any immigration. I mean, not really, because now there's a lot of Ukrainians, but there was no significant immigration to Hungary ever, and yet he made the threat of immigration or the threat of foreigners into a major centerpiece of politics. And you can see, you know, there, there, there are different problems on the left, which we can talk about if you want, but I mean, you can see on the, on the right, you can see the admiration for these same kinds of tactics and the use of them. I mean, the, the focus on culture wars over real issues, because these can animate and divide people, the, the creation of enemies, the, you know, demonization, but also the interest in, you know, in, in, in changing the rules. I mean, can you, can you, you know, change the rules of voting so that, you know, some people are discouraged from voting and only the people who you want to have vote vote. I know there's some voting rights people in the room because they came up and talked to me before, before, before we started. You know, and that, you can see that this rash of voting legislation across the country, which is, which is very strange. I mean, it's funny because not all of the legislation is, is, is that bad or is that, you know, but the point is that the only reason it's happening, the reason why voting laws are being passed right now is as a response to, to the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen in 2020. So again, the use of conspiracy theory, the undermining of respect for democratic institutions, the way in which that flows into, you know, well, we need to deal with this, so we need to pass all these laws. You know, the laws are unnecessary because they're dealing with a non-existent problem. You know, there was no rigged election in this country, unlike, you know, in Hungary, but, and so the, you know, the, the Republican party, part of the Republican party, I shouldn't say all of it because it's very much not all of it, but a part of it, you know, kind of reconstructing itself as a, you know, as a party designed to overthrow the American voting system and is designed to under undermine trust of the American voting system. This is very familiar from other, other times and places. I mean, you know, in a way, the January 6th events were an extension, you know, I talked already about birtherism. You know, the idea that, you know, the, you know, the Trump's kind of post-presidential campaign is an extension of that. You know, the, there is a conspiracy to take away the votes of ordinary Americans and instead to put in fake candidates for president. And first, Obama was fake and now Biden is fake. And that's, that's a way of under, again, as I said, undermining confidence institutions and giving people the sense that they need to do extra legal or extra judicial, you know, actions, including violent actions in order to, you know, take power. We are having in a couple of days Liz Cheney, speaking of Republicans who are not in favor of January 6th. And Liz Cheney was just censured by the Republican party. They ousted her from her committee positions because she said very openly that what President Trump did in January 6th was wrong and is now participating in the investigation of this commission. So we're going to have a conversation with her on Wednesday with Debbie Dingell here. You do see some of these fissures in the Republican Party, but, but overall there's a very strong trend towards supporting this set of changes in the Republican Party as well. So either supporting them or, or, or not remain silent. Yeah. So how fragile given that how fragile is the system that we have, how fragile is our democracy right now? How worried should we be? American democracy is very hard. I find, and I'd love to know what other people here think it's very hard to make broad judgments about because it can be very robust locally or in in states or in cities. I mean, you can see how it very often works differently in a local level and a national level. You know, nationally though, it's clear that we have big problems. I mean, people, you know, national politics have become a form of entertainment. You know, people don't seem to take seriously the issues. I saw recently a poll about the infrastructure bill that Biden passed. And the question on the poll, I'm sorry, I'm not going to remember the exact numbers, but essentially it was, you know, are you pleased with the infrastructure bill and some very high number of percentage of people thought it hadn't passed at all. Because, you know, the way in which people get information is so convoluted, they thought, well, there was no infrastructure, but well actually there was and there are going to be bridges built and, you know, and so on. And maybe that's the fault of the Biden administration for not selling it and not, you know, nowadays you have to really repeat yourself over and over and over and are going to be heard. But the, but national politics is a sort of circus and it's not taken seriously and people don't, people don't focus on it or when they do, they consider it some, as I said, a form of kind of extended reality television show. And that makes it very hard to create any change. I mean, when, you know, what's often successful at the national level is, again, the use of culture war, the use of divisiveness, you know, you get attention by being loud and insulting rather than by being, you know, decent and productive. It makes it very hard to see how a well run democracy will survive at least, you know, at least at that level. That's interesting. We had Jeb Bush here last week and Governor Bush made exactly the same point you did. Right. Which is, our politics have become corroded because even when you have a substantive view that, you know, is not linked tightly to this idea of divisiveness or polarization, you get all your attention and your votes and your activity from being polarizing rather than working on the substantive thing that you, you actually might get done together with people who disagree with you on other issues. Right, right, right. And much harder to make progress. Right. Well, you have Jeb Bush endless chaining. That's very good. Yeah. So we, it's got two of them. Yeah, exactly. You know, here in Michigan, we had a plot to kidnap our governor. There's a trial going on right now of the gentlemen who were accused of that. And there was a lot of disaffection in our community against Governor Whitmer about the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Right. There's obviously enormous dissatisfaction in our society on lots of things. How did, why does that, when does that translate, the disaffection translate into things like January 6th and things like kidnapping the governor as opposed to kind of normal politics where you work it out in the context of the existing political system? I mean, it's interesting, there's a lot of political science about this. Like when do politics become violent? And there, you know, there've been a couple of recent good books on this subject actually. When, you know, when does the Civil War start? You know, when does, when does violence start? And what are the triggers? And actually, according to the political scientists, the US has a lot of the triggers. You know, it's when you have, it's mostly about distrust in institutions. So if people don't believe that the voting system is fair, if they don't believe that, you know, the police and the FBI are politically neutral, if they begin to see them as the enemy. And it's also when people begin to view their political opponents not just as, you know, legitimate members of the opposition, but enemies of the state or existential threats. This is, this is when you begin to get actual violence. I mean, in other societies. I mean, in the United States, as I said, we're a very strange country because we're so big. And because politics are different in different places. I mean, you know, you hear these sort of American Civil War comments. But of course, there's no scenario in which I can envision, you know, you know, this is the 1860s, and you have an army lined up on one side of the Potomac and another army on the other side, you know, I can't see that. But I can see, you know, pieces of political violence breaking out in different places. I mean, we've actually, that happens already. And we had January the 6th, you know, there was violence around the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. I mean, those are that was that was a little bit different. But I mean, there is, you know, at some of the edges that we have it already. So we have a lot of our own problems internally without any external sources of disinformation. But you've also written about the way in which Russia has attempted to introduce disinformation in our society. How important is that in the mix of things we should be worried about? So, you know, it's very hard to gauge the relative weight of these things. But, you know, it's it's it's, you know, the Russians had for a decade, actually, I mean, starting starting 10 years ago, have been thinking about how to, you know, that one of their main foreign policy goals, their well, their central foreign policy goal is to undermine, you know, undermine Western democracy to dismantle the European Union, to dismantle NATO and to get the Americans to leave Europe. And that that's been their, you know, openly stated, I should say, goal for a decade. You know, all those things make sense from their point of view, you know, the European Union, you know, when when Russia is negotiating one on one really with any European country, even Germany, they are either the same size or much bigger. When they're negotiating with the EU, they're much smaller and less powerful, you know, when and the same goes for their use of military. I mean, they although we all think differently about the military this week in Russia than we did a month ago. But the same is true, you know, that them them one on one with Lithuania is very different from being one on one with NATO. But now I wonder if Lithuania might not do better than we thought it was going to do. But but but so that's been their goal for a long time. And also from the Russian point of view, and this is important to the war in Ukraine, from the Russian point of view, the language of democracy and even the the sort of ideology of democracy is is itself a problem, aside from our foreign policy or so on and our institutions from and this is not from the point of view of Russia, I should say, but the point of view of Putin and the Putin regime, you know, so so so Putin is a strange figure because he's simultaneously very powerful and also in some ways very weak. And so he's very powerful inside his society because he controls things in a way that we can't even imagine. I mean, imagine American president controlling Congress, the White House, the judiciary, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the CIA, you know, Exxon, Facebook, Google, General Motors, and the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Fox, CNN, and I don't know, whatever else, you know, NBC. And Putin has that kind of control. So he controls the media, the business community and at the same time he is constantly conscious of the fact that he doesn't have anything like popular legitimacy. He has not been elected democratically, maybe the first time sort of, but after that never. So he's never, you know, he's never he's never won in a legitimate way. And he's very unusually paranoid about democratic activism in Russia when it wouldn't there was a big wave of it in 2011. Again, Alexei Navalny's movement was beginning to gather speed more recently. And he's extremely paranoid about that and sees all of it as a kind of part of a western plot to, you know, fade to him. He's somebody who's incapable of seeing anything. Nothing is grassroots. Nothing is authentic. Nothing is real. Everything is manipulated. If he sees demonstrators in Moscow, his first reaction is, oh, that was organized by Hillary Clinton, you know, or the CIA, literally. You know, Hillary Clinton herself remembers that, I happen to know. But that was one of the things he said in 2011. And so, you know, he sees himself as being, you know, the victim of these plots using democratic language to unseed him. And he saw Ukraine as the, you know, as this, he thinks it's a fake country that had been manipulated in order to become part of the same plot. So what he hates about Ukraine is the fact that it wants to be a democracy and that it wants to be part of the West, or the Western institutions. And that's what he, you know, and that is a thing he can't tolerate. And so he's launched this existential war. Inside our country, you know, the Russian tactics have been there, they were there for a long time, and then they started to gain currency as they began to learn how to use Facebook in particular. But other forms of social media as well to spread. So what, it's very important to understand that what they learned to do was not, they don't promote Russia, you know, they don't care what we think of Russia, you know, so what. What they seek to do and what they sought to do was create division. So whether it was supporting far right anti-immigration groups in Idaho, or whether it was supporting, you know, Black Lives Matter groups and messaging to them that, you know, Hillary Clinton is a racist. You know, there were different messages for different communities, but they were all designed to undermine, you know, unity and increase division and increase dissatisfaction. And that was their social media campaign in 2016. You know, and this is not subject to any controversy at all, this is that both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Mueller Report, you know, have described very precisely what was done. And it was also this, you know, elements of this campaign were seen by hundreds of thousands of people, you know, you know, millions, I should say not hundreds of thousands, I should say millions of people. And so these are these are campaigns that were very far-reaching, they had a biggest impact. So these things are impossible to measure. But of course one of the things they also did was they, you know, I think that actually a part of the Republican Party learned from them how to do some of the same things. And so you saw during 2016, you actually saw Trump using Russian messaging. There was a whole weird moment when he was talking about Hillary Clinton starting World War III and Barack Obama having been the founder of ISIS. These were originally Russian disinformation campaigns that he picked up and used in 2016. I don't exactly know where they came from, but he did do that. And so understanding how this, you know, so this is what they do here. In other countries, they've been much more explicit. So in France, in Germany, and in Italy, they've actually funded far-right parties, you know, sort of pro-Russian and anti-European and anti-democratic political parties. And they do it sometimes through direct funding and sometimes through offering business deals to people who are close to the party leadership. And so they, you know, and the point of doing that was also once again to create these fissures. I mean, even if those parties couldn't win, like, I don't think the far-right in Germany will ever win an election. But they're disruptive all right, you know, and they have their 11% or whatever it is in the Bundestag and that's enough to make it difficult to form a coalition and so on. So, you know, so they do have an impact on politics almost everywhere, at least in Europe and America. Let's bring the conversation back to Europe and in particular to Ukraine. Obviously, people are watching now on a daily basis what's going on on the ground in Ukraine. The situation is quite different from what people expected just a month ago, as you said. Horrifying images of the civilians killed that were released just a couple days ago. But I wonder whether you could take us up a step from the kind of daily grind of the war and set it in historical context about the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the Soviet relationship with Ukraine, Stalin's tactics and policy in Ukraine. So people have a longer historical perspective about the relationship. So, I mean, I think the best way to understand the relation between Ukraine and Russia is to understand that Ukraine was essentially, I mean it's a little more complicated than that, but it was essentially a colony of Russia. Think a little bit about the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain, a little bit like that, up until the end of the 19th century, in that it was a territory that had been, you know, conquered long ago. It was kind of, had been, there was a cultural mix, there was back and forth, you know, there were Ukrainians who went to Moscow and made careers, and so it's a, you know, it was a very long relationship. And the Russians had this attitude to Ukraine, again, a little bit like the British towards the Irish until Irish independence. A little bit had this attitude of, you know, it's a peasant culture, they don't have a real language, they don't have any, you know, they can't possibly rule themselves, you know, they're an integral part of our country. I mean, it was a kind of paternalistic colonial attitude to Ukraine. And that's been there for, you know, 200 years, I mean, that's nothing new. More recently what Putin has added to that was the thing I spoke about before. Namely was this sense that Ukraine had become, you know, it had acquired the trappings of statehood, that it wasn't really a real country, and that it was being used by the Western powers, it was a Western puppet state that was being used to undermine Russia. And that Ukrainian democracy was illegitimate and that it's really all fake, and it's a way of inspiring Russians to be, you know, to be anti-Putin. And so that has, and then, you know, then something happened during Putin was in virtual isolation for a lot of the COVID pandemic. He was very afraid of getting sick and he made anybody who went to see him had to be in quarantine for two weeks before getting to be in his presence. And for that reason, you know, he was very isolated and he seems to have really fixated on this idea that Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia and it needs to be eliminated. And there is no question that the original purpose of the war was that. The battle plans, which actually we know because the US intelligence had them and had them as early as last November, and that's why there were these warnings about it, described an assault on Kiev that would last for three days and then a march, a slow march across the country that would take about six weeks, you know, all the way to the Polish border. And the Russian assumption was that that was going to be possible and part of the reason they made that assumption was because they believed they were in propaganda, you know, Ukraine is not a real country, therefore it doesn't have a real army, therefore it's not going to fight back. And the, you know, that was a gross miscalculation. The other part of their assumption also because they read their own propaganda was that the United States is now so divided and so chaotic and its politics are so bad that Americans will not do anything. The NATO has been so also so divided by the Trump years, you know, because Trump was a was a source of constant attack on NATO, that NATO will also not be divided. And, you know, Putin must have assumed that his investments into business people and political parties in Germany and France and, you know, Britain and elsewhere would pay fruit and he assumed that, you know, that that would all be true. And, of course, his, you know, those are the assumptions were wrong and there was still possible to rally NATO. The assumption about Ukraine were wrong. It's also very, there's some funny aspects to this. I mean, the Russians were paying Ukrainians. So they had a, there was sort of these pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine and locally as well as nationally. And they were, I think they spent a lot of money on creating a sort of fifth column that was then meant to organize this coup d'état. And the amusing thing is, of course, you know, if you pay people to be on your side, they might just decide, well, I'm just going to take the money and not do anything. And that seems to be what happened. And when push came to shove that, you know, nobody wanted to collaborate. And all these collaborators turned out to be, you know, unreliable. But, you know, but the, but the essential assumption was that this would be an easy war to win. The Ukrainian, so I was in Kiev in December. And at that time, this is before the war, I was told that the Ukrainian army was already then planning to fight almost as a guerrilla force, even though it's a real army. You know, they were going to divide up into small groups so that they wouldn't, it wouldn't be possible to just drop a bomb on, you know, they don't have a lot of large and expensive pieces of equipment. But instead, what they were going to use were these, you know, javelins and stingers, you know, in order to stop it. And this, there was a lot of skepticism about that plan, but it looks like it, I mean, it has not succeeded yet, but it has, it certainly stopped the assault on Kiev. And the northern Ukraine is now the Russians are gone and Kiev is for the moment relatively safe. Anyways, you know, the war is still going on and it will, you know, the, you know, much depends on, and the military outcome is still very important. So the degree to which the Ukrainians can push back the Russians and prevent them from taking more territory will affect the final settlement. So I don't think anybody has really stopped fighting it. Thanks. I'm going to turn over to our students now who are going to ask some questions they've collected from the audience, those who are here in person as well as those who have submitted questions online. It looks like you're still maybe gathering the questions. So do you have one to start, Radhika? Yeah, we do. As you had mentioned, we have spent some time collecting questions in advance of this event as well as in real time as anything comes up. And so thank you both for facilitating this really interesting conversation, covering both the range of domestic as well as international topics. I did want to kick this off with a question we received focusing on domestic issues. And do you see or think that there's any, you know, significant common ground between the two sides of the current political divide? And do you see a path to refocus the public on common interests, values and goals? I think at least initially there was some rare perhaps bipartisanship on the Ukraine issue. And is that maybe emblematic of a turning point or a shift? Or is this kind of a one-off event when it comes to that bipartisanship? So the bipartisanship around Ukraine is really interesting and maybe we can learn something from it. I mean, you know, one of the things that's happened in Ukraine is, you know, our kind of culture war for the past decade has been based on this idea that, you know, the sort of just to be incredibly crude about it, the sort of liberals who believe in an open society, blah, blah, blah, on the one hand, and then kind of muscular nationalism on the other hand. And one of the things the Ukrainians are doing is they're showing us that there can be a kind of muscular patriotic defense of an open society and liberal values. And I think one of the reasons why Zelensky has been so captivating to Western audiences and not just in this country, but in Europe as well and around the world is his ability to bring together these different ways of talking about the state. But you can also see, you know, almost this relief that people have of being able to talk in a unified way about a foreign policy issue again. I mean, so there are, I even wonder retrospectively whether, you know, we always said that NATO and, you know, the U.S. involvement in Europe after the war, you know, this was something we did for Europe, right? It was a kind of, it had an effect on European democracy and it sort of, but I wonder in retrospect, if we haven't underestimated the way in which the transatlantic alliance wasn't also good for democracy in the United States in that it made democracy a central part of our national definition. This is who we are. This is what we do at home. This is what we do abroad. It gave us the feeling that we were part of this community, which we were. I mean, it wasn't just a feeling, you know, with the British and the French and the Germans, the post-war Germans. And it gave us a sense of national purpose. I mean, that's not to say that everything we did during the Cold War was good or that we were always on the right side of every issue. But having that be the, having that be part of the national self-definition, I think, was quite important. And so, you know, maybe there, maybe there are other things that we could do that would revive that sense. You know, the war in Ukraine is clearly one thing. Maybe there are other foreign policy issues that could unite us. I mean, funny enough, I always thought, you know, if you look at countries that have had a bad history of civil war and conflict, and I once wrote something in which I looked at partly at Northern Ireland, not that we have anything in common with Northern Ireland, but as an example, you know, what was peace building like in Northern Ireland, you know, which has been not entirely successful, but somewhat successful, because they don't kill each other that much anymore. What is peace building like? Well, a lot of it was about infrastructure. I mean, a lot of it was about what are the community projects that we can do together? Build trust. You don't even have to build trust. You just have to be able to argue about it in a way that doesn't make you want to murder one another. So we can talk about building a bridge across the river, and we can disagree about where the bridge should be or how much money we should spend on it, you know. But having that, we can be in a single conversation, but it's not an existential crisis. It's not about, you know, who we are and do we still exist? You know, it's about should we build the bridge here or there, and then nobody wants to murder one another because of that, at least not most of the time. And so the more, you know, and this by the way is what I thought Biden did very well during the election campaign. The more that politics can be refocused on real things that we can all understand and talk about and participate in, and not mythical culture war, you know, issues about, you know, what kind of a nation we are, the better politics will be. And the more we can pull in, we can have bipartisan conversations. So if there's a, you know, the more concrete it can be, the more it's about the economy, the more it's about real things that people can feel. And unfortunately, that's easier at the state level, and even at the city level than it is at the national level. Because as I said, you know, Biden can pass an infrastructure bill and half the country won't know he passed it. So, but the more, you know, the more concrete, the more pragmatic and the more practical the issues are, the more we can change the subject away from, I don't know, you know, ideology, and the more we can focus it on practical things, you know, the better chance we have of finding some common language. Thank you for your response. The next question is, you mentioned your concern with using the word populism. Do you have any qualms or discomfort using the term fascism? Describe what's going on in America these days, given some debate about the usage of this word outside of the specific European context. I can't quite understand. Do you mind taking off your mask? Just for a second. Sorry about that. The next question is, you mentioned your concern with the use of the word populism. Do you have any qualms or discomfort using the term fascism? To describe what's going on in America these days, given some debate about the usage of this word outside of the specific European context? So, the word populism, to be clear, I don't like it because, particularly in English, because we had a populist movement in the United States in the 19th century that was completely different from what we're talking about now. And so, it creates confusion about what the word means and what exactly we mean. I mean, really what we're talking about here is a movement towards, you know, maybe towards autocracy or towards a much more major, you know, anti, you know, the use of minorities to control the majority. So, we're talking about something different from 19th century populism. Fascism is a, I have a long running argument with a couple of friends about this, including there's a Yale academic who is sometimes on Twitter who's written a book about fascism and why what we're seeing now in the US and elsewhere is exactly that. And the problem I have with the word fascism is not that it's totally inaccurate but that it immediately makes people think of the Holocaust and the Second World War. And therefore, it's a distracting word. And so, I understand that the some of the tactics used by the far right now are similar to tactic used, say, in Italy, you know, in the 1930s or Germany in that earlier period as well. And some of the, you know, this idea about creating political division as a way of doing politics, you know, the use of, you know, the creation of, you know, the impression of, you know, creating fear, using fear and violence as a way of doing politics. Well, that some of that you can see parallels to the 1930s. But I don't think the word is useful because it's, as I said, you know, where it's a, you know, it brings us back to a historical period in which different things happen and there was a different outcome. And so I don't like to use it, but I don't think it's a, I don't think it's an incorrect, just, you know, it's not, I don't know what the, it's not, it's not that they're historically wrong and it's not that there aren't parallels. It's that it creates the wrong echoes today, I think. Right. And you, of course, are a story journalist writing for the Atlantic as well as other publications and really zeroing in on that role of journalists and the complicated relationship at times they have with the U.S. public. What would you say is the number one thing that journalists need to do so that when they report facts, they are believed and they are trusted? And what can audiences do to be more mindful of the content that they are consuming? I mean, those are, those are difficult questions because the question of who you trust, you know, can depend on who you are and what kind of politics you have. You know, I was involved in a really interesting and sort of wacky research project a few years ago that, that we did with an Italian newspaper called Corriere de Lacerra. And the point of the project was to look at how Italians responded to articles about the migration crisis, which was then happening in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. And one of the things we discovered was that, you know, and we sort of measured responses to different articles, you know, people would write an article and, you know, there were different styles, you know, some people write, you know, narratives, some people wrote feature pieces and what, and one of the things we discovered surprisingly, a lot of these sort of emotional, you know, I'm following a new, an immigrant from North Africa through his day and I'm, you know, the sort of personal pieces did not build trust. And a lot of the very basic informational pieces did. So here's what happened yesterday. And also what's often very important is articles that offer some kind of constructive solution. So not, there's this terrible problem and we're in a huge crisis. But here is what the government in Rome is doing about this problem. And here is how they're trying to fix the problem. You know, so, and there's a whole school of journalism actually called constructive journalism that looks at, you know, that tries to emphasize not just an analysis of what's going wrong, but also how we fix it and even, you know, Denmark, which is very into this idea and has spent a lot of time thinking where a lot of people thought about it. For example, television programs that bring together different stakeholders in a problem, I'll use the bridge again, you know, we have a bridge we need to build and people disagree about where the bridge should go. They'll bring people who live on both sides of the river and they'll bring the mayor and they'll bring the taxi drivers and they'll put them on a television program and have them discuss the bridge. And that's a form of constructive journalism where the point is to create consensus and to find an outcome. The problem with it is, and this is the problem with human nature, is that it's sometimes boring. You know, do you want to watch the television program about the bridge? Wouldn't you rather take a sign and shout over my dead body, I will have no bridge here. And so that is a, and the conflict between those things, you know, in journalism is very real. You know, the other thing that you have to deal with in journalism is the fact, and this is somewhat changing a little bit, but was that at least until very recently, the way people were making, after the sort of collapse of the old business models when, when the, you know, journalism made its money out of advertising, one of the ways in which people could make, get more money and more, you know, more online attention and traction was by, was by being extreme and by being very emotional. So if you're more extreme, you're more emotional and you have an angrier headline, I mean, you can see this on Twitter still, you know, then you get more attention and more people like you and, you know, argue about what you say. And so the incentive for journalism, and this was an incentive that came by the way from the readers, you know, as much as from anybody else, the incentive was towards, you know, was towards louder, more angry, more emotional writing and that was coming from the readers and also came from the nature of social media, which, you know, Facebook, as everybody forgets, is an advertising company. It makes its money off of advertising. It's not a, it does not make its money off of creating consensus or promoting better speech, you know, or better conversations. And so, and because journalism was connected to Facebook, because Facebook, you know, articles get promoted on Facebook or on other social media and then spread faster, there was a, that had a really negative impact on journalism. And so the incentive to do this kind of constructive, constructive projects was, was reduced. It's changing a little bit, at least in larger newspapers because so many more of them now rely on subscription rather than, rather than advertising. And if you rely on subscription, then what you're doing is you have a community of people who support you and you become a trusted voice in that community. In the downside of that is then you're only speaking to your community. But that was, of course, always the case with newspapers. Thank you so much for your response. The next question is focusing on Ukraine. What off-ramps can the West offer Putin to end the war in Ukraine? And what do you see reconstruction efforts looking like for the rebuilding Ukraine and realigning or strengthening European security after all of this? So we cannot offer any off-ramps. There will be no process by which we, you know, suggest something and the war ends. The war will end when Putin is no longer feels that it's his interest to fight it. And at that point there can be, I believe there can be some kind of negotiation. There are negotiations now, by the way, as you know, in Turkey and elsewhere. But the war will end when Putin feels it is he can't prosecute it anymore and when, you know, when he decides that what he'd rather do rather than fight this existential war to get rid of this state that he hates on his borders, when he decides that instead he can sell to the Russian people an argument, well, at least we got the Ukrainians to recognize Donbass or we achieved X or Y, whatever that is. It's also very important to understand that people will, and I, you hear this all the time, you know, that Ukraine should make territorial concessions in order to end the war. That's all very well, but it's very important that outsiders remember what territorial concessions in this context mean. I mean, we just saw with this in Butcher yesterday that the Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory is going to mean the arrest and maybe murder, you know, kidnapping of local mayors and local leaders. It's going to mean random terror and violence decorated, you know, and aimed at civilians. It could mean, you know, the mass destruction or looting of property. You know, so any territory that is consigned to Russia by some, you know, international line drawing or whatever it's going to be, it means, you know, horrible crisis and disaster for the people who live in it. And therefore it is not something either that the Ukrainian president can do morally or politically with any ease. You know, there is no appetite in Ukraine for giving away anything. Not because like they're so stubborn and they want their territory, but because, you know, the significance of giving away territory is they consign their compatriots to life in an authoritarian, occupied state. And so it's very important for everybody to remember that. That's why, you know, the idea that if they just make concessions, it will be over isn't sufficient. I mean, it's also the case that Ukraine needs some reassurance that this isn't going to happen again in three years. You know, this war is really the continuation of war that started in 2014. So it's already, you know, in 2014 Putin tried to go farther. He failed. He pulled back. He regrouped. He did, you know, eight years of propaganda in Russia about the, you know, the danger from Ukraine, you know, and then he started it again. And they will need some sense that this won't, you know, that this isn't some kind of recurring, this is some kind of recurring problem. And so I think, but you know, I do think that because Putin controls the narrative in his own country, you know, that he had still hasn't told the Russians that this is a war. He calls it a special military operation, which has prompted some people to say, well, in that case, you know, you don't have to, you know, these aren't sanctions. It's just a special financial operation. So we're not going to bother lifting them. But the, but the, but it's a special military operation. And so he's still in the position, I think, of being able to say special military operation has ended. We got international recognition of X or Y. And therefore it's over. So I can imagine that happening, but, but we're not there yet, because first the Ukrainians have to win. I mean, they have to, they have to expel Russian troops from their country. And that is not easy. Following up on, you know, this conversation on Putin and, and I think even just a sphere of, sphere of influence, we touched on Hungary a little bit. And a question came in too around, if you expect the invasion of Ukraine to meaningfully alter the trajectory towards a liberal democracy that's been underway in Poland over the last decade and Poland. Exactly. Honestly, it's genuinely too early to say, because, you know, my experience of the COVID pandemic was that everything you thought was true about it at the beginning was not true six months later. And I think this may be the same. I mean, right now you have in Poland, just this upsurge of pro American pro European sympathy. And remember, this is a government in Poland that was very close to believing in January six conspiracy theories. You know, they, they didn't announce that Biden had won on their national on state television, which is very, very partisan. They didn't announce that Biden was the president for several weeks and so on. I mean, now they're, you know, we love Biden and, you know, he just got this very warm reaction in Warsaw. And there's also some divisions emerging even inside this kind of far right group that runs the government, where some now are very pro American and want to head back towards the mainstream and some don't. So there's a, there's a there's a disagreement. I mean, but there are a lot of things that aren't, you know, we don't know. And so right now there's this, you know, upsurge of sympathy for the refugees. There are two million refugees in Poland. And remember, this has happened in three weeks, you know, so very rapid. And almost all of them are staying in people's houses. So there's a, it is almost entirely grassroots, you know, NGO and charities have organized this placement of Ukrainian in people's private homes. And right now that's, that's fine. And we, we had some in our Polish house as well. And right now that's, that's fine. What it will look like in six months, if the war doesn't end, and if it's not possible to return home, I think most of them right now want to return home. I don't know. And it's very hard for me to predict, you know, whether people will get tired on whether there will be an anti-refugee and anti-Ukrainian surge of feeling. There will certainly be, you know, Russian and other, you know, groups trying to create such a feeling. I mean, that's, you know, you would expect that that's what happened in Europe after the, after the Syrian emigration arrived. And I expect something like that will happen too. And so it's very hard for me to say what, what this will look like, you know, in, in, in six months. I mean, one thing to understand about the refugees that part of the, they're almost entirely women and children and old people. And that means that the reception of them has a different flavor. You know, it's understood that these are people who are not economic refugees. They are genuinely fleeing a crisis. And so that creates this kind of sympathy that we haven't had for other refugee groups. But again, what that will look like when the school system collapses three months from now or when the health care system can't cope with two million extra people, we'll see. And we're almost at time. And this has obviously been a set of very difficult topics to go through. But I wonder whether I might ask you to give our audience both here and online some sense of what they might do as citizens of a democracy and citizens of the world to affect this course of action about democracy globally and here at home. So one of the, you know, the fact that democracy is not inevitable makes people nervous. You know, the idea that it might not be forever is creates anxiety. But it should also be the thing that creates optimism and possibility because if that's, you know, democracy is not inevitable, but, you know, dictatorship is not inevitable. Nothing is inevitable. You know, what happens tomorrow depends on what we do today. And so the, you know, the actions of everybody, the participation of everybody, whether it's in elections, whether it's working, you know, in a polling booth, whether it's working in a local institution or NGO organization or joining a political party or standing for office or supporting somebody else who's standing for office, whatever you do in your community matters and makes a difference. And that will affect what happens next. And so really that's the idea, you know, the fact is that we all have agency and we can all affect the course of events. And it's that that we have that people who live in dictatorships don't have. You know, we have this possibility of creating change. You know, we don't always know how to use it and we don't always use it well and we don't always have time and so on, but it's open there for us if we want it. And we're, you know, we are so lucky to have that. You know, and we're so lucky that we don't have to defend it with, you know, with weapons and a territorial army right now. I mean, what are the Ukrainians fighting for? They're fighting for that right. You know, just the right to have the ability to decide for themselves how their society will be run and what its rules are. And we, you know, we take that for granted because we've had it for 250 years with a few glitches in the middle. And, you know, it's there for incumbent on all of us to take pride in the fact that we have it and to use that possibility. And I know there are, you know, none of you would be here tonight if you didn't, if some of you didn't believe that. So thank you very much for coming. Please join me in thanking Ann Wappelbaum for this great conversation. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this.