On the Record

Representative McCaul discusses U.S. national security, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the resulting global energy concerns and China’s response, as well as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Manjari Chatterjee Miller, CFR’s senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia, leads a conversation on why nations rise: China, India, and the narratives of great powers.

FASKIANOS: Welcome to today’s sessions of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR.

Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We are delighted to have Manjari Chatterjee Miller with us to talk about why nations rise. Dr. Miller is CFR’s senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia. She’s currently on leave from Boston University where she is a tenured associate professor of international relations at Boston University’s (BU) Frederick Pardee School of Global Studies. Dr. Miller is also a research associate in the Contemporary South Asian Studies Program at Oxford University’s School of Global and Area Studies, and she’s been a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and several other universities. Dr. Miller is the author of several books, including her most recent one, which is what we’ll be focused on today, Why Nations Rise: Narratives and The Path to Great Power. And it’s a fantastic cover.

I love that, Dr. Miller. So thank you for being with us and thank you. Love having you at CFR. I thought we could begin by you talking about some of the strands, the arguments from your book on what constitutes a rising power and why different countries rise and what the narrative is around that.

MILLER: Yeah. Thank you so much, Irina. It is an honor to do this, and since I’m on leave from BU, it’s lovely to be talking to academics and students again.

So let me just—you know, I’m going to answer your question by going back a little in time, which is that, you know, when I wrote my first book, I was really looking at China and India and why they had these very similar responses to how they saw the world and their foreign policy, and so they often saw themselves as victims of colonialism, and they would essentially take the position that they were being victimized by other countries when it came to certain issues. And doing that—when I finished this book, I would give talks on the book and people would say, but they’re rising powers, these countries are rising powers, so why do they talk about being victims when clearly they vanquished colonialism? And that was a really interesting question, right? So that was just a very interesting question. And I thought that’s true. You know, these countries are rising powers; when do countries forget?

So I began looking at Chinese news, and Chinese newspapers were full of these stories about what it meant for China to rise and how it was going to be a great power and what it should do and how should it respond to the United States? And then I looked at Indian newspapers and I didn’t see much of that. I saw a lot of ideas on foreign policy but not really so much on India rising. So I thought, wow, this is really unusual. Is it normal for countries to be also calling themselves rising powers when other countries are, or is it not?

So I went back to India and I did some interviews at really high levels of government and what I found really surprised me because it turned out that Indian officials were very uncomfortable with the idea of India as a rising power, they were not quite sure how to handle it, and they weren’t strategizing in a long-term way about what it meant for India to rise. And I thought, wow, that’s really weird. If we talk about rising powers so much, which we do because international relations is our specialty and we talk about rising powers a lot, as an important category of actors, what does it mean if one country talks about its rise and strategizes and another doesn’t? Is this normal?

And so I started going back in time and I thought, OK, let me look at the one other country which is a rising power and that was the United States, and wow, I found the United States talked about its rise and then I found that Meiji Japan talked about its rise, but then you had other countries that had opportunities to, you know—where they were increasing their military and economic power but didn’t talk about their rise. India was one of them, but so was Cold War Japan, so was the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century, which was a very, very rich country. And so that’s really the crux of the book is that, we talk about rising powers, whether it’s us in the policy community or in the academic community—we talk about rising powers as this one category of actors, right, but that all rising powers are not created the same; there are different kinds of rising powers, and some of them behave exactly as we expect them to do, so they rise to become great powers, but then other rising powers seem stymied.

And so what I argue in the book is that whether a country rises to become a great power or not is definitely dependent on its economic and military power, of course; you need that. But it is also dependent on what I call idea advocacy or, rather, the stories that these countries either tell or do not tell about their rise. And so the book really looks at two kinds of rising powers: one is active rising powers. So they rise to become great powers, they get military and economic power, but they also do what I call globalize their authority. So they basically start behaving as we would expect great powers to behave. And what’s really interesting here is that what—how we would expect great powers to behave is not always the same, so in the nineteenth century, what we expected a great power to do is different from what we expect a great power to do today. So these active rising powers in the beginning of their rise, what they are is they’re very accommodational of these great-power narratives, so that means they say, OK, hey, this is how a great power behaves, this is how we should behave, and so we’re going to try and behave like them. And this is actually counterintuitive to how we normally think about rising powers because we think about them as revisionist, but active rising powers in the beginning are accommodational.

And then you have this other kind of rising powers that are reticent rising powers, and reticent rising powers don’t do that. So they don’t have these narratives. They have military and economic power, they have opportunities, often to take advantage of that military and economic power, but they don’t try and behave like the great power of the day; they don’t try and get recognition of the fact that they’re rising. They also lack narratives about becoming a great power. And so, I think the two big takeaways that I have is that when we talk about rising power, it’s a process, so you become a rising power through this whole process that involves this material power, but then it also involves these narratives about becoming a great power. And the reason this is really important is because coming back to this China-India story, what I argue is that if you look at this idea advocacy that India is lacking and China has, what we find is that this can explain the differences in behavior between them, so they’re not the same as rising powers.

And this difference existed—I mean, of course, today we can say, look, China is just so much, you know, has just so much more in terms of military capability and economic power than India does and that would be correct. But in fact, we can see this even in the 1990s, right, so a period when their material power was comparable, we see that they developed very, very different narratives, so China had these narratives about becoming a great power, even at that time, and India did not. And so what we can really argue is that when we want to manage a rising power, these active rising powers that are the powers that we need to manage, we need to manage them when they’re active, not when they suddenly become revisionist. And on the other hand, reticent rising powers like India often don’t meet expectations, so because they have narratives that are not about becoming like the great power of the day, they have much more limited engagement with the international order and they can end up frustrating their allies and partners.

And so in the book I essentially look at these six cases, right, so I look at three cases of active rising powers and three cases of reticent rising powers, and what I find is that across time and across culture and across regime type, you had these very particular kinds of beliefs about becoming a great power that the United States had, Meiji Japan had, 1990s China had, but then when you look at the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century or you look at Cold War Japan or you look at India in the 1990s, all periods for these countries, when they had some amount of military and economic power and the opportunity to take advantage of them, they didn’t have these narratives; they had very different kinds of narratives. And the way they behaved was significantly different from how these active rising powers behave. And so that’s really the basis of the book, is these six cases and the idea that we need to stop talking about rising powers as this one category of actors.

And I’ll leave you with just one note. So, one of the things that we often talk about as rising powers is BRICS, right, so Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and people rarely realize that BRICS was something that was just made up; it was made up in 2005 by an analyst at Goldman Sachs who clumped these countries together based on the fact that they were emerging-markets economies, but then if you look at what each of these countries have or don’t have, the picture is much more muddied. I mean, Brazil does not have nuclear weapons. Can you be a rising power without nuclear weapons? Can you become a great power without nuclear weapons? Russia—you know, especially with the Ukraine crisis—are we really thinking of Russia as an emerging country or is it a declining country, right? South Africa is a country that in the past has seen its life expectancy drop. Is that a rising power? So we use the term very loosely and we clump countries together and we need to understand that there’s variation in between.

FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. That was a great overview.

And let’s turn to all of you now for your questions and comments. You know how to do this.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

So we already have a couple written questions and I’m going to see—first hand, raised hand is from Ahmya Cheatham.

Q: Yes. First and foremost I would just like to say that thank you so much for introducing this panel. I am an international studies major with an emphasis on foreign language, and I just really wanted to emphasize on the key point that you pointed out between the different kinds of powers and there isn’t much taught historically, at least throughout the Western world or the United States where I’m from, about what you called reticent powers, which are people who—they had the military prowess or they had the opportunity to move in a more imperialist kind of way for power but didn’t necessarily choose so.

So I wanted to ask, why do you think those type of high powers aren’t as recognized or taught about in Western culture?

FASKIANOS: And Ahmya, what university are you with, college or university?

Q: University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you.

MILLER: I have a fondness for Wisconsin. My husband’s from Madison, Wisconsin, so go Badgers. Yeah, so I’m heading—that’s a great question. So your question is, why is it that the Western world has not recognized these categories of rising powers and I think it has as a lot to do with—well, first of all, in international relations theory in general—I mean, this is changing, but in the past, essentially, theorists focused on countries that had enough military or economic power to matter and what mattered was set by the West, right? So that’s, obviously, one way in which you are clearly narrowing down right away which countries matter and which countries don’t and that excluded a lot of Asia and Africa.

But I think there’s another way it matters which is that, if you look at the literature in rising powers, in academic theory—and as somebody in policy, I will say that IR theory is really important because it helps you understand policy better, OK, so do not dismiss it. But in academic theory, in IR theory, there’s an entire body of work that’s called power transition theory, OK, and power transition theory is about essentially—well, it’s kind of set our expectations about why we fear rising powers. So what does power transition theory say? It says that there is a cycle in world politics, there’s a recurring cycle, so you have a great power who’s the status quo power, and then eventually there is always a challenger, and that challenger is a challenger because this country is dissatisfied with how goods are distributed in the international system, right, and because they’re dissatisfied, they eventually challenge the status quo power for control of the international system so they can access those goods.

Now, you see here—so when they challenge the status quo—how a war occurs, and so therefore you have this recurring cycle of conflict. And so that’s why rising powers are considered such an important category in international relations because they have the power to affect war and peace. But then there’s the other part of it, which is—and this is where my work comes in because when you are talking about a challenger’s dissatisfaction with the distribution of goods, you’re not really talking about how goods are actually distributed, right? You’re really talking about their belief about how goods are distributed. And so, narratives, which come very strongly from what a country believes or does not believe about its role, then derives from those beliefs. If you ignore their perception, then you’re ignoring a fundamental characteristic that should be intrinsic to rising powers, but we don’t look at that. But power transition theory kind of has set our bar for how and why we think of rising powers, which is that they’re always challengers, they always have military and economic power that matters, and they’re always going to challenge the status quo. And I think everything else in rising powers has flown from power transition theory.

FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.

Terron Adlam has a raised hand, also wrote the question, but why don’t you just ask it yourself and give your affiliation?

Q: Hi there. My name is Terron Adlam. I’m from Delaware State University.

My question is, knowing how the olden times old powers are based on military and economic, knowing today’s global society, do you think we have a new definition of global powers?

MILLER: OK, so I think you actually have a two-part question here, right, so one part is, is the military and economic power the only thing that matters, and the second part is, do societal factors matter?

So let me take the first one. So military and economic power do always matter, OK? I emphasize the importance of ideas and narratives in my book but I would in no way say that military and economic power does not matter for a country to become a great power. That would be nonsensical, right? What I’m saying is it is necessary but it’s not sufficient, and that’s where this book comes in because it helps you plug the gap and say, well, what else do you need, because clearly military and economic power, by themselves, cannot propel a country towards rising-power status. So that’s the first part of it.

The second part of it is about societal—what matters societally? And I think this is really interesting because this gets to the heart of how we think about great powers, and how we think about great powers is very different depending on the era that we’re in, right? So what matters societally is different depending on the era that we are in. So let’s look at the late nineteenth world. So the late nineteenth century world—what did it mean if you were going to be this great power and this great country? What did it mean if you wanted to become like that? And what it really meant was owning colonies. It meant not just being a great power but being a colonial great power. So in order to be a great power and to be like, let’s say, Great Britain, you actually had to own colonies; you had to have sway over the lives and deaths of millions of citizens who you did not accept as equal citizens of your empire, right? That’s what it meant to be a great power. So when you went out and gained territory, you weren’t just gaining territory, you were gaining territory specifically for the purpose of what economists have called extractive colonialism, where you’re extracting resources from the territory and then sending them back to the mother country.

So when you look at the United States and Meiji Japan rise in this time, they engage in expansionism. That we know, right? But what’s really interesting is that it’s a very particular kind of expansionism. It’s colonial expansionism. So all of the narratives that exist in Meiji Japan and in the United States, they’re different in subtle ways, but in many ways they’re similar, that they recognize that the path to great power is through colonies. So the question the United States has, well, should we acquire colonies, should we become a great power and acquire colonial great power? That’s what they debate because the notion of great power is dependent on colonies. Now, if you fast forward to the 1990s, that’s not what great power is anymore. I mean, nobody would—no country—even Russia does not say that we are out to colonize and this is our colony and it’s perfectly OK to do that. That is not what being a great power means. Being a great power means controlling, directing, and shaping the process of globalization, particularly through international institutions.

So the narratives of great power in the 1990s in India and China are not about becoming colonial great powers. So it’s not about saying we’re going to go out and acquire colonies, we’re going to be like Meiji Japan and show how we’re administering the colonies in really benevolent, beautiful ways, and how we’re extracting resources efficiently. That would not be OK. That would not be socially acceptable. What they say is we’re going to enter international institutions—particularly China says this, is that the path to great power lies through international institutions. And you can kind of, even in the 1990s, see the seeds of BRI in this, because that it is what BRI is; it’s really about using institutions and the rules that were laid down after World War II by the United States and the liberal international order to see how China could actually end up controlling and impacting and eventually shaping those rules. So that’s what great power is. So it is absolutely societal, because how we think of great power changes depending on the era that we’re in.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Pamela Waldron-Moore, who is the chair of the political science department and professor at Xavier University of Louisiana: Is there a perception among states of internal global efficacy versus external global political efficacy, where internal efficacy reflects how India, for example, perceives itself versus how the globe was perceived to view the state’s rise, and in this case example of China?

MILLER: I’m sorry, Irina. I’m not sure I follow that question. Does she define political efficacy?

FASKIANOS: She did not.

But Pamela, do you want to unmute and give your definition?

There we go. Pamela, great. You just have to unmute yourself. There we go.

Q: OK. Yes.

What I was referring to is the fact that internal efficacy is usually how you perceive yourself as a state and your rise, your power, your movement, versus the external efficacy where you understand who you are by the perceptions externally of others. So if the world sees you as a rising state, they will promote you and you start to think of yourself, perhaps in the case of India, as oh, yes, we are rising because we’ve done all these—we’ve established all of these links, these blocs. But if you are simply looking at yourself and saying, well, we’re not, we don’t have military might, we don’t have X, Y, and Z, therefore we cannot see ourselves as efficacious, we can’t call ourselves a rising state. So it’s a question about perception. Is the perception of China, where everybody thinks, OK, you’re moving fast and you’re promoting yourself, different from the perception of India which, in the context of Asia and the Commonwealth and so forth, still see themselves as lesser than a rising state. I hope that is a little clearer.

MILLER: Yes. It is. So that’s actually really interesting because—I mean, there’s certainly a difference, but here’s the thing is that China’s what you call internal efficacy aligns with external efficacy, so in that both China and external perceptions, China’s external perceptions of China are aligned in the 1990s about China as a rising power, right? There’s no dichotomy there. In India there’s a dichotomy. So there’s also external perceptions of India as a rising power, as evidenced by news media or reference or—I look at, like, different kinds of newspapers that refer to these countries. But the internal efficacy doesn’t keep pace with the external efficacy.

Now, actually—and I haven’t heard that term before so thank you for bringing it to my attention; that’s a really interesting way to put it—the question is why. I think the question is why is it that in China it’s different and in India it’s different? And this—and I think that, to be honest, like, there could be a whole volume on this, which is this question of where do narratives come from, and why is it that some countries develop this narrative, this internal perception of themselves that is concurrent with the external perception of themselves, but other countries don’t?

And you know—so when I was looking at—so, I mean, this book—six cases and huge and so I wasn’t going to look at narratives as—and you’re a political science professor so I’m just going to say it as a dependent variable; there was not the dependent variable. It was not what I was examining. I was examining it more as a cause. But if you did—I mean, I talk about this in the conclusion. It was interesting how many people had different ideas about where these narratives come from and why they were different in China and India. I mean, Indians and Chinese had different perceptions of this as well. Some of it was really institutional, about how the institutions were constructed and which institutions mattered when it came to foreign policy, and so therefore, Chinese institutions were set up in a way to be more diffused to these narratives, whereas Indian institutions were not.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to the raised hand, Teresita Schaffer.

Q: Thank you. And thank you for this really interesting introduction to your work.

I am retired Foreign Service and I teach at Georgetown, of course on diplomacy. I spent much of my Foreign Service career working on India so that’s where my examples come from. But you have a situation where India at independence saw itself as, to use the vernacular, punching above its actual weight, and it conducted its diplomacy, to a large extent, on that basis. It built up its military for the needs that it perceived already. And it was the economy which was the most out of step with this impending great-power status, and not until the Indian economy started growing fast did you see people in the so-called chattering classes talking about India as coming close to realizing the greatness of its five-thousand-year-old civilization. Do other countries that you studied display similar disconnects between the different elements of the things that make you more readily seen as a great power, or is the disconnect itself something that matters to this transition?

MILLER: So, first of all, Ambassador, thank you for attending the talk. I’m honored. So let me restate your question. So you’re asking, is it about civilizational greatness, that India had this perception that it needed to punch above its weight after independence and so that’s why it began investing in its military and, eventually, of course, it did economic reforms. And so are you asking whether this notion of civilizational greatness is necessary? Could you clarify?

Q: Not really, because—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—I’m asking whether it matters to your idea of rising powers but whether the different elements of—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—with one another or not.

FASKIANOS: I don’t know if that was just for me that was garbled. For some reason, your audio is now on the fritz, so we did not hear that at all. It was a bit garbled.

Q: I could try again, briefly.

FASKIANOS: There we go. Perfect. Go ahead.

MILLER: And if it gets garbled again, perhaps you could put it in the chat because it sounded like a really interesting question.

Q: There were reasons why India pushed the civilizational narrative. It fit in so beautifully with the way Nehru thought, and he was the foreign policy. But the economic and the military elements that you agreed were necessary elements were out of sync. The military element had to get built up earlier, largely because India’s independent years started with a war. The economic was always viewed as a liability, until the point where India’s economy started growing a whole lot faster in the 1990s. Question: Does the fact that the different elements are out of sync, does that figure in the way you think about the different kinds of rising powers?

MILLER: Yes, it does because—and I’ll tell you why. So—and I’m going to be—I’m going to state this very carefully. So in India’s case—so there are a couple of different elements in what you’re saying. So India has this idea of civilizational greatness even in the 1990s, so it’s not that the idea of civilizational greatness went away, right? I mean, you see that even today in Prime Minister Modi’s speeches or his talk with his harkening back to—I mean, of course, he talks about it as a Hindu civilization, but in the 1990s that wasn’t what the talk was, although it was coming up. It was still about India as just a great civilization with secular nationalism being the predominant idea.

So it wasn’t about civilizational greatness. That never went away. This was about India’s status changing, so it was specifically about being a rising power, which is that a country that is changing its status, not one that has always been a great power and has civilizational greatness to hark back upon, but rather its status was changing vis-a-vis the great power of the day, which is the United States.

So that consciousness existed in China because China also had ideas of civilizational greatness but that wasn’t the only thing that China was talking about in the 1990s. It was really talking about well, how do we take this—we are becoming a rising power and we are rising in the international system, our military and economic power is changing vis-a-vis other countries, particularly the status quo power; how, then, do we respond to that? And that response was lacking in India, although the notion of civilizational greatness did not go away.

And the question I think you’re particularly asking is what happens if you have narratives about being great, and you don’t have the military power and you don’t have the economic power? And that is a really interesting case because there was one case that historians told me about and I nod to it in my conclusion, and I don’t explore it so I definitely do not want to go into it, and state with authority that this is the case. But Weimar Germany—I learned from a lot of historians that Weimar Germany was a country that lacked the military and economic power but had these narratives, that—of changing status, had these narratives that it was going to become great again. And because it did, these narratives actually propelled a lot of military and economic reforms that may not have otherwise resulted, and I’m saying that very carefully because I nod to this in my conclusion, but that is my understanding of the literature that I’ve read. So if that is true, if that is true that you can have narratives of great power but not have the military and economic power to back that up, do the narratives then propel you to aggressively acquire that military and economic power? And I think that’s a really interesting and open question about whether that’s the case.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Natalie Holley, who is an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. How has social media shaped these two categories of rising powers? What have been the advantages and consequences of social media use as countries construct their narratives?

MILLER: Wow. (Laughs.)

FASKIANOS: Good question.

MILLER: That’s a really—yeah, that’s a really hard question to answer. So I will say that in the 1990s—I’m old enough to remember—there was no social media. (Laughs.) It did not exist in the 1990s so it certainly did not affect the narratives then. Would it affect the narratives now? So this is actually a bigger question and it’s interesting because we talk about information and disinformation a lot, but to my knowledge, and this is—I actually have colleagues at Boston University who are working on this. The question is, to what extent does that disinformation then result in behavior. It’s one thing to have disinformation and fake news, and we know that that exists in abundant ways. But then to actually show the link that when you get that disinformation, that in turn leads to a behavioral change among people who consume it, as opposed to just talking about it, that has not—that link has not been clearly shown yet, and people are working on it.

So the colleague whom I was referencing is actually in the computer science department at Boston University and that’s part of his research—does that change behavior? So that’s the question you’re asking is if you have social media and you see these narratives reflected and re-reflected in social media, does that then change behavior? And that’s a—in some ways that’s a chicken and egg situation.

So let’s take the narratives of Hindu nationalism that exist today in India or wolf warrior diplomacy that exists in China. Is that amplified on social media by Indian officials and Chinese officials? Absolutely. Hugely. And then it’s picked up. So does that then intensify and then lead to behavioral change in what the government does? That’s not always so clear, right? Even when it comes to wolf warrior diplomacy, I think it’s Huang at Seton Hall University, I think, has a book that’s going to come out soon which is really interesting because it shows how a lot of this is about, when Chinese officials talk about wolf warrior diplomacy or take these narratives up, it’s not so much about changing China’s behavior as posturing to the Chinese leadership that that is what you’re doing. It’s posturing to the Chinese leadership and saying we are doing what Xi Jinping wants us to do and we’re reflecting all of these narratives. Does that then lead to a behavioral shift? That’s not as clear.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. We have several questions in the chat. Let’s go to Maya Chadda with the raised hand.

You need to unmute yourself, Maya. There we go.

Q: OK, I just want to say it was wonderful introduction, very thought-provoking.

A number of questions that Ambassador Schaffer—asked one of the—the key question I wanted to ask. The only thing I wanted to sort of comment/question on that I’d like to hear from you about is this gap we talked about, the gap between self-perception of the country, China or India, and its material basis, what it has achieved in terms of economic and political stability. There is an intervening factor there and that goes back to their historical experience in terms of the immediate issues, so while India and China were at a similar stage and saw themselves as victims of colonialism, they processed under colonialism very differently. In case of China, the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, the Japanese invasion, everything that the civil war, rise of—it was a very, totally different experience of the country, which I think acts as an intervening factor. It sort of explains just how it sees itself as a great civilization and what it must do. You mentioned—you sort of remarked that China is much more pragmatic, India is much more ideological in building images—pragmatic in the sense what it should do internally in order to get there, to become a great power, while India sort of talks a lot and there is a greater gap between material power and image.

So the question is this: Doesn’t India’s historical experience of independence, the perceptions, the narratives, as you call it, it built—I like to call it stories about themselves—they build. And China—doesn’t that explain to a large extent the way in which they process the world today?

MILLER: OK, so first of all, I did not say that China was pragmatic and India was ideological. I want to be crystal clear about that. I said that China had narratives and India did not. The deduction from that is not that China is pragmatic about it. It has these narratives about becoming a great power, or it did in the 1990s. Is it about—did they have very different experiences of colonialism? Yes and no. So they do have very different experiences of colonialism. India had two hundred years of extractive colonialism under the British Empire, so the Raj, and China had what’s been called piecemeal colonialism. So you had the colonial—the Opium Wars but then you had the colonialism by Japan. And so what was interesting to me in my first book was that both the countries treated colonialism the same way. So they responded to colonialism as historical trauma, and they teach it as historical trauma.

So in China it is taught as one hundred years of national humiliation. And then you have two hundred years of British colonialism, and this is really important to remember. And even though, in China’s case, not only is—does China say that it was colonized for a hundred years, but China accepts the Qing, for example, which is not a Han dynasty, it’s a Manchu dynasty, not as colonizers, as some historians have dubbed them, but as Chinese. So you have those contradictions.

So the point is that they treat it the same way. They perceive colonialism the same way. Now, the reason this is—and this is particularly also evocative because I remember when I was doing the research for my first book, I came across these diplomatic negotiations between Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru, which were the last negotiations in 1960 before the border war of 1962, and there’s this really interesting conversation—these are like verbatim negotiations, transcripts of these negotiations, and what’s really interesting in them is that there’s this squabble between the Indian and Chinese delegates about who has been colonized more. So, Zhou Enlai says, no, no, you don’t understand, we’ve been colonized, and I think it was Morarji Desai says, no, no, not as much as us; we have been colonized more. And so this idea of who’s been colonized more in factual life doesn’t matter so much as how they treat them. So no, I don’t think that the absence or presence of narratives has to do with piecemeal colonialism in China and two hundred years of solidified colonial rule in India.

What I do think it may have to do with is with institutions and I can—I mean, I want to be mindful of time, but I can talk a little bit about this very briefly. So it’s really interesting because in India, what you find is in the foreign policy decision-making establishment, as you see ideas percolate in the establishment, that establishment is very, very—what’s the word I’m trying to use?—it’s very strong bulwark against ideas from outside. So there’s a resistance to ideas from outside.

So think tanks, for example, don’t operate in the same way in India as they did in China in the 1990s and early 2000s. Everything is a little bit different now, now that Xi Jinping has taken over and the censorship and the authoritarianism have increased. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, in China you did not have independent opinions but you had a lot of autonomy among these think tanks. You had a lot of ideas that used to come up, ground up and affect how foreign policy officials thought about issues, and so it was really interesting because you’d see a back and forth in China between government and university think tanks and senior foreign policy officials that simply did not exist in India. And it exists in the U.S. today and it’s somewhat—somewhat; I’m saying this very carefully—somewhat exists in China today because there’s just so much more censorship.

But let’s say you had something like, Xi Jinping coming to the United States and saying, OK, we’re going to talk about a new type of great-power relations. Well, before his visit, think tanks would be asked to convene a conference on new type of great-power relations and they would sit around and talk about what that meant, what it could mean, how could it be framed, and officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would come and they would sit and attend these conferences. They wouldn't say a word, they would just take notes. Now, how those ideas actually made their way up to President Xi and then impacted his speeches or his foreign policy initiatives, I can’t tell you. Nobody can. I mean, if I did, I’d be a billionaire. I wouldn’t—(laughs)—be sitting here. But the fact is that there was that give and take.

That give and take does not exist in India—did not exist in India and does not exist in India even today. So that kind of diffusion of ideas is different. Now, I’m not saying that that’s exactly why those narratives exist in China and that’s why they did not exist in India, but it gives you an idea of how institutions are very different, right, and institutions do matter when it comes to percolating ideas up and institutions do matter when it comes to impacting and institutionalizing and ensuring that narratives continue. So that could be a difference.

So no, I don’t think it’s a difference in colonialism, and yes, I do think it can be an institutional difference.

FASKIANOS: Great.

So Kazi Sazid has written a question but also has a raised hand, so why don’t you just ask it and if you could limit it to one question, that would be great. That way I don’t have to choose when you get to more questions.

Q: OK, so I’ll say my first question is—I’m a student at Hunter College.

So my question is, the Cold War demonstrated the dangers of two military hegemonic powers establishing a duopoly over global politics, which is the U.S. and the Soviet Union. How does the rise of India and China and let’s add Nigeria as rising regional and global powers be seen as a positive thing to help balance the power structure by not allowing a single or two countries to completely control the global political rhetoric? Sorry if that’s a loaded question.

MILLER: That is a loaded question. (Laughs.) That’s a very loaded question. I am not in the business of assigning value judgments to, just a country is a rising power per se. I will tell you that if you take India’s perspective, India sees a multipolar world as better than a bipolar world. And so when it comes, even today, to the United States and Russia and China, what India wants is multipolarity. It does not want this bipolarity like the Cold War where it’s forced to choose between one or the other. And of course it didn’t; it was non-aligned. So are rising powers a positive or negative thing? So that depends really on who you read. If you look at power transition theorists, they would say no because a rising a power is always a challenger; it inevitably leads to war.

Now, what I show in my book is that of course you don’t always have challenging rising powers; you have different kinds of rising powers. So the question is—the question that you’re really asking is that is revisionism a bad thing? It can be, right? I mean, World War II was an indication that revisionism was a bad thing. And so if you talk to China today and the Chinese, even they would say that revisionism is a bad thing and they would say that we’re not trying to revise the international system, we’re playing by the rules. And when the United States talks about a rule-based order, Chinese officials would say, but wait, we were sticking by the rules-based order and you changed the rules on us. That would be their take. So revisionism is a very, very loaded word, and so traditionally, yes, rising powers have been seen as challengers, but as I show, not all rising powers are the same.

FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Brian Chao who’s at the U.S. Naval War College. What are the differences, if any, in narratives and behaviors between rising powers that simply see themselves as returning to their rightful place among the great powers—example, China—a status they perhaps feel they never should have lost, and second, rising powers that may not have histories to draw upon and for whom great-power status is really something unprecedented?

MILLER: I don’t think rising powers see themselves as returning to their rightful place. China does, but that’s not how Meiji Japan thought of itself. It wasn’t about reattaining civilizational greatness. It was really about becoming a great power, and in Meiji Japan it was very much about becoming a great power like the Western great powers. That is what the narratives were. They were about becoming a colonial great power and showing the Western powers that Japan could administer its colonies just as efficiently, just as extractively, and just as well as them, and so Meiji Japan was very careful to abide by the laws and rules of the international order, and the narratives were not at all about civilizational greatness. And so—and again, the example here, again, is of India, which does have narratives about civilizational greatness but didn’t have narratives about becoming—or didn’t have narratives about rising-power status. So the two are not always the same. There’s a subtle difference between them. But just because China also happens to have civilizational greatness narratives alongside its rising-power-status narratives doesn’t mean that the two can be conflated.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next written question from Isis Roopnarine from Howard University. How do you feel the global push toward environmental sustainability will affect current world powers and rising powers? Do you feel this will heavily impact India’s ability to rise, or do you feel world powers like China may be limited heavily by carbon taxes, regulations, and maybe start to decline?

MILLER: I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m just going to totally punt on that because that—that’s about environmental sustainability and whether that has long-term economic effects on countries. I assume it does, but a lot of it will depend on how much the—how countries buy into it. So I’m going to punt on that question.

FASKIANOS: So we’ll have to do a call or a webinar specifically focused on environmental concerns.

MILLER: Which is a really important one, by the way, and we should.

FASKIANOS: Absolutely. Absolutely. I am surprised to see that nobody’s asked—so I’m going to take the moderator prerogative just to ask you to talk a little bit about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and vis-a-vis China and India and their response and how you feel that they are playing and thinking about their narrative, vis-a-vis their response to that conflict?

MILLER: Yeah, so on the surface of it, it seems similar because they’re both trying not to take a position and they’re being careful about it, but it’s also very—it’s also different. So in India’s case, India is really worried about the Ukraine crisis because India worries that it has this historical relationship with Russia and if it is publicly seen to condemn Russia with whom it has historical relationship, with whom it has had a very long defense relationship, with almost 70 percent of its military hardware today being Russian, it will drive Russia into the arms of China, which is India’s number one enemy, so it is very clear about who its number one enemy is and it is China, and so India definitely does not want to publicly take a position that would essentially push Russia closer to China. At the same time, India also wants a multipolar world so it wants Russia and China and—well, particularly Russia—to be a factor in countering the rise of China and in balancing China and the United States. At the same time, India has a very deep strategic partnership with the United States and the relationship with the United States is not the same as it was twenty years ago so India also is very careful that it does not want to push the United States away from it, because this relationship has now broadened to include many, many sectors. So that’s where you see India’s position, where it’s playing a very careful game; it hasn’t come out and condemned Russia, but, at the same time, it has talked about—it’s talked about humanitarian supplies to Ukraine, it has talked about the importance of there being a cease to the violence in Ukraine without actually coming out and taking a strong position on its side.

Now, in China’s case, it’s gone back and forth. It’s very interesting because—particularly I was struck by Ambassador Qin Gang’s op-ed in the Washington Post recently, which kind of laid out China’s clearly approved position on Russia. And so, in the West we think that—we’ve particularly seen these newspaper reports of China perhaps helping Russia, perhaps giving military supplies, will it help Russia evade sanctions, but what was really interesting to me in Ambassador Qin Gang’s op-ed was the dilemma that it posed in those pages, and I’ll tell you what I mean. So China in that op-ed, Ambassador Qin clearly says Ukraine is a sovereign state. Now that statement I have not seen from any Indian official. I have not actually seen any Indian official say Ukraine is a sovereign state. I have not seen that statement. It was there in Ambassador Qin’s statement that Ukraine is a sovereign state. Then he said—and China does not support violation of sovereignty. And then he said, Ukraine is not like Taiwan because Taiwan is an internal affair, which means that Ukraine is not an internal affair, which is what Russia has been saying. So you kind of see this dilemma here that China poses where China has a relationship with Europe; China—(laughs)—a great relationship with Ukraine, right, and so what it sees is Russia jeopardizing all of that, and yet it cannot come out and condemn Russia very strongly either because it has this, the rapprochement that’s been happening with Russia, and of course, the statement that President Putin and Xi Jinping laid out. So you see the countries with dilemmas in both respects, and even though the surface they look the same, the dilemmas are different.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I want to raise Ray Bromley’s question, the University of Albany at SUNY: Would it be fair to say that India’s reticence is based on a strong South Asian and British Commonwealth focus and an obsession with Pakistan? In other words, the Indian news media and educational system don’t give enough attention to the world as a whole and to global issues; it focuses on reporting and discussing relations with Pakistan, so if you could comment on that.

MILLER: Yes, and I have one quote that I’m going to give you that a very senior Indian Foreign Service official once said to me, which I think is exactly emblematic of India’s relationship. This person said Pakistan is just an enemy; China is the adversary. And the reason—this is really important—is because India is not obsessed with Pakistan. India’s obsessed with China, like really obsessed with China. And so India’s focus is all about China. I mean, there’s a huge power imbalance now with Pakistan, even with Pakistan with nukes. So what India’s most worried about is a two-front war. If you have a war with Pakistan on the border and then a war with China on the border, and so what India would like is to do something that would forestall that, and that’s really important. And so for India the focus is very much on China, and if you think that India’s focus is on China, as a rising power that’s going to become a great power, you would think that then the narratives would follow from that about India’s status and how to manage China and India’s own changing status, but they don’t.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the last question from Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome.

Q: Thank you very much.

I’m just wondering about how you rank these two rising powers. So which one has the most capabilities in terms of the military and economic power? And then, the tendency to be reticent and to swagger and be confidently stating that you are a rising power and you are challenging the hegemon—can this be attributed to cultural differences in terms of how one is supposed to move around in the world? OK, so where I come from it’s like if your hand is not on the hilt of the sword, you don’t challenge the people who killed your father. So if you’re not really, really sure that you’re going to win, you shouldn’t start swaggering all over the place. So is that sort of influencing the dynamics of what’s going on?

MILLER: I have not heard that quote before. That’s such an interesting proverb. Thank you for sharing that.

So I would say no—(laughs)—because the narrative’s about rising-power status and not about challenging international order. I think that’s the point that I make very clearly in the book, which is that active rising powers, which are the countries that do have these narratives about rising-power status are countries that are essentially talking about how they will become a great power just like the great power that exists then. So far from being challenging, these are accommodational narratives. Now, that does not mean that these countries will not challenge later, but that’s not what the narratives are, so it’s hard to then argue that they stem from military and economic power. But also what’s interesting is that particularly to forestall this, I looked at India and China in the 1990s, which is a time when their military and economic power are very comparable, which is really not the case today. Now, if I were to say, can you compare them militarily? No, you cannot; you cannot them militarily or economically. But you could in the 1990s. And so if it were true that these narratives derive from the sword, as you put it, then they should have derived in both cases, and they didn’t. You had narratives, the presence of narratives in China but the absence of these narratives in India.

And I should be very clear: It’s not that India doesn’t have foreign policy narratives. There’s plenty of narratives on foreign policy. It was really these ideas about becoming a great power, about being a rising power, about responding to this changing status and these expectations that the globe seemed to have of both countries at the time.

FASKIANOS: We are almost at the end of time and I just wonder, having looked back as you’ve done this research, do you want to project—or you may not want to do this—of where you see China and India’s power spheres developing over the next decade?

MILLER: (Laughs.) Wow. I don’t want to project. I will say—I will say this: I think in China’s case what happens domestically will be really important. I think domestic politics is something—I think there are two things about China that we tend to ignore in the United States. I think one is we tend to ignore the domestic politics of the Chinese Communist Party, which I think is crucially important for how China’s power’s going to play out in the next few decades. The other thing that we tend to ignore is we tend to ignore the fact that even in China, even with censorship, even with Xi Jinping being the most powerful Chinese president since Mao Zedong, you have a plethora of different interests and ideas in China and that doesn’t make its way out of China. We tend to think of China as like this one single actor and it’s not one single actor. There are different interests, there are different competing interests, there are different competing narratives, there are different competing ideas, and how all of those play out I think will be very, very important.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. With that, Manjari Miller, thank you very much for being with us. We really appreciate it. And I apologize for not getting to everybody’s questions and comments but we had a very rich discussion and we’ll have to have you back.

We have put a link to Dr. Miller’s book in the chat. We will be sending out the audio, video, and transcript link after the fact, but I do commend her book to all of you. And our last Academic Webinar of the semester will be on Wednesday, April 13, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Anne Richard, who is a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, will talk about refugees and global migration. Very timely given the flows we are seeing from Ukraine as that war is happening. So I hope you all will join us for that. In the meantime, please follow us at @ CFR_academic. Visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. So thank you all again.

Thank you, Manjari.

MILLER: Thank you so much, Irina. This was really fun. Really great questions, very stimulating discussion.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Have a great day, everybody.

(END)

Lawrence H. Summers discusses the U.S. economy and inflation, recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the global economic consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The C. Peter McColough Series on International Economics brings the world's foremost economic policymakers and scholars to address members on current topics in international economics and U.S. monetary policy. This meeting series is presented by the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies.

The conversation on Geopolitical Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine during the International Studies Association 2022 Annual Convention featured Audrey Kurth Cronin, distinguished professor in the School of International Service and director of the Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology at American University; Charles A. Kupchan, CFR senior fellow and professor of international affairs in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Department of Government at Georgetown University; and Kori Schake, senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. James M. Lindsay, senior vice president, director of studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg chair at CFR, moderated the discussion.

LINDSAY: Good afternoon everyone. I am Jim Lindsay, senior vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations.

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to today’s on-the-record CFR luncheon discussion on the geopolitical implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is also my great pleasure to introduce a stellar set of panelists: Audrey Cronin, Charles Kupchan, and Kori Schake. I am going to keep my introductory remarks short even though I could talk at great length about each of them and the wonderful work they have done.

Immediately to my left—at least geographically; not necessarily politically—(laughter)—is Audrey Cronin. She is distinguished professor in the School of International Service and director of the Center for Security, Innovation and New Technology at American University. She is the author of How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. Her most recent book, Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists was short-listed for the Lionel Gelber Prize and won the 2020 Airey Neave Prize. So congratulations on that, Audrey.

CRONIN: Thanks, Jim.

LINDSAY: In the center of the stage—not necessarily politically—(laughter)—is Charlie Kupchan. Charlie is a senior fellow at the Council, and a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. From 2014 to 2017, Charlie served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs on the staff of the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. Charlie’s most recent book is Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.

Finally, to my far left—again, geographically; not necessarily politically—is Kori Schake. Kori is senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She has held policy positions across government including on the staff of the National Security Council, and at the U.S. State Department where she was deputy head of policy planning. Her most recent book is America vs. the West: Can the Liberal World Order be Preserved?

So Audrey, Charlie, Kori, thank you very much for joining me. We have agreed that we will engage in a conversation for about twenty-five minutes. At that point we’re going to open it up to everyone else in the room.

Given that the title of our session is Geopolitical Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, I’d like to focus our conversation more on what the invasion means or doesn’t mean for global order rather than focus on why Russia invaded or why Putin didn’t get the quick victory that he anticipated.

So where I’m going to start is a question for all of you. Vladimir Lenin once remarked that there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. Now it certainly feels like we are in the latter situation right now, but is this really an inflection point in the global order, and if it is, is the best historical analogy for the current moment 1815? 1857? 1905? 1914? 1939? Pick whatever you want.

Since I introduced you last, Kori, you get the first crack at the question.

SCHAKE: No, I decline. I give Charlie the first crack at the question. (Laughs.)

KUPCHAN: I was—you were going to buy time for me to think, so—(laughter).

The era that most resembles—I’m going to—

LINDSAY: I’m going to ask you the first question. Is this an inflection point?

KUPCHAN: It’s definitely an inflection point, and I guess the decade that most immediately comes to mind would be the 1890s, and that’s because I think it’s in the 1890s that a series of developments took place that enabled us to actually see the changes in the global balance of power that were taking place slowly, but it brought them to the surface. And that’s because during that—it was during that decade the United States came online as a power with geopolitical ambition outside its neighborhood, picked a fight with the Spanish, turned into a colonizer of the Philippines and other places. Germany embarked on its High Seas Fleet in 1898. And so there was a kind of consolidation of a multi-polar setting that I think looked similar to today.

And there was also a lot of domestic change and political fluidity that was the product of industrialization in Germany, in the United States. This was the progressive era dealing with large corporations, trusts, how do we tame them. This resonates with our age, both in terms of what’s happening in other places, but also in here. There’s a lot of economic or socio-economic dislocation that is taking place because of globalization.

So that’s—I think I’d say 1890s.

SCHAKE: So can I now confess that I was actually reading the ISA tribute to the Trail of Tears so I had to punt to Charlie because I actually didn’t know what question you were asking. I wasn’t listening, Jim—(laughter)—and now that I know it’s is this an inflection point—thank you, Charlie for stepping forward when I was unprepared—I don’t actually think it’s an inflection point.

LINDSAY: Why not?

SCHAKE: I think we are still litigating the end of the Cold War, that we assumed that the end was 1991 and 1992 with the unification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the expansion of freedom, but in fact, Russia is more continuous with the Soviet Union than it is different from the Soviet Union under Vladimir Putin. And so, I think what we are seeing is a resurgent effort by the countries of the West to restrict Russian power when it is used for the suppression of the sovereignty and freedom of others.

So I think we are still litigating the end of the Cold War. I hope it will be an inflection point because we succeed and we will end up with a Russia that either lives within the existing rules of the Western order or changes.

LINDSAY: OK, Audrey, so we have a vote for an inflection point. We have a vote for no inflection point. Where do you weigh in?

CRONIN: Well, I think that whenever we talk about historical analogies, I get really nervous because Ernest May’s book had a huge impact on me early in my career—Thinking in Time—and I think personally I’m going to split the difference, and we can choose from different analogies. So I think we do have a lot of what Charlie has talked about; certainly at the end of the nineteenth century you had globalization, you had inequality at tremendous levels. You had a huge monopolization of major companies that were controlling more and more. You had the maturation of fossil-fuel-based economies, which is quite similar to the maturation of digitally based economies, and also the equivalent to oil, I would say, is—many have said—the equivalent to oil and coal is data. The data economy is becoming quite mature.

And so I think the broader context is more the way that Charlie laid it out. But I also agree with you, Kori, because I think that, you know, 1947 is a period where I would look back and say we were—I mean, I did write my first book on the negotiations over Austria, so I see that as being very comparable to what we’re thinking about in some ways with respect to Ukraine—or what the Ukrainians are thinking about. So I can certainly see the continuation with respect to the Soviet Union and Russia there, too. So I think we—you know, we have to pick and choose a little bit.

LINDSAY: OK.

Kori, I want to come back to you, and you can throw this question to Charlie or Audrey if you want—

SCHAKE: (Laughs)—I’m listening now, I promise.

LINDSAY: OK.

You know, you have written a book asking about whether the liberal world order can be preserved, and you have mentioned that we have seen a remarkable show of unity and action in the West. I think the West as a term has sort of gotten a new lease on life. But the fact that there is unity at the start of the crisis doesn’t mean there will be unity at the end of the crisis.

How do you assess the chances for Western cooperation to continue to be sustained? Do you think it’s temporary? Or is there an opportunity here for it to be long lasting?

SCHAKE: That’s a really good question, and the honest answer is I don’t know. But I do see—and things are about to get a lot more painful for the countries of the West economically and possibly even politically to sustain the very hard line we have taken, and not just because it looks like Russia is going to turn off the gas pumps unless Western countries will pay in rubles to get Russia around some of the creative economic sanctions that the West has put forward, but also the inability to export wheat from Ukraine and natural resources from Russia. This is going to be a huge humanitarian crisis. We are going to have a food crisis, most particularly in the developing world. And that, too, will put pressure on Western governments.

The good news is the amazing creativity of the treasury departments of the Western countries to come up new tools to try and impose economic costs on Russia. The bad news is it’s not yet clear what the second-order effects of those tools are going to be, and who they’re going to hurt, and who they’re going to help as they—as they sink their roots.

So we have set sail in very choppy waters. We did it for very good reasons, and I think, though, that two things will help Western countries hold together. The first is Russia is so obviously in the wrong here, and in a way, that’s dangerous—not just to Ukraine; it’s dangerous to this system of rules that have made the West safe and prosperous; namely borders only changed by consent, and sovereignty is inherent in any state—large, small, weak, powerful.

So having the German SPD chancellor almost triple German defense spending this year, to commit to the NATO 2 percent next year as opposed to 2035, which was Germany’s opening position, to start sending arms to Ukraine, and to agree to wean Germany off of Russian oil and gas by the end of this year—I don’t see how you walk that back. He planted his sword, and I think that will hold—since Germany is one of the weakest links in Western unity on the sanctions that have been taken against Russia, it will be very hard for others to walk back if Germany holds the line.

And the second thing is the war in Ukraine is taking on the trappings of a moral crusade, right? There are good guys in this and there are bad guys in this. And it will be very hard for a country of the West to—after all they have already said, look in the face what Russia is doing—you know, kidnapping mayors from towns they have occupied, shelling apartment buildings, and it was easier for us to look away in Afghanistan, in Syria, and in other places. It will be harder for them to look away in a neighboring country as it takes on this overtly moralistic overtone.

LINDSAY: Let me ask you, Audrey, since you have written about Austria, do you see the potential for a negotiated deal that could stick, particularly in light of the point that Kori just made that this is starting—at least in the United States—to turn into a moral crusade, and it’s very difficult to compromise when you are supposedly fighting over good versus evil?

CRONIN: Yes, well, neutrality is not necessarily good versus evil. I mean, it’s a different plane altogether, right? So you’re talking geopolitics. You can have good or evil regimes that are neutral. So I don’t really see the question of whether Ukraine could be neutral in those kind of crusade terms.

I think it’s all up to the Ukrainians and whether or not they can negotiate a deal that serves their interests. And there’s a bunch of key things that I’m really worried about. One of them is they are talking about not joining any kind of foreign alliances. So the details on that are very, very important. So if that’s part of an agreement, who decides what a foreign alliance is, is going to be very important.

The second thing is that security guarantees—they want security guarantees, and they’re saying from the United States, France, and Britain, and that’s essentially an Article 5 commitment. That is quite potentially dangerous to NATO, so it could be quite destabilizing depending upon the details.

What if the security guarantor were China, as well? What if Russia were insisting upon that as the agreement. So the devil is in the details in this agreement and to what degree are the Russians going to insist that there be demilitarization? I think that if the Ukrainians become neutral, it’s going to have to be very important that they maintain robust defenses.

And then the last thing I’m really worried about is what’s it going to look like. What is the territory going to be? Because there is going to be partition, probably. They are going to have to give something up, and it would be the Donbas and Crimea probably—I’m guessing—and this is up to the Ukrainians, not us. But, where is that line going to be? Some people think that it could be along the Dnieper River. Some people think it could only be the Donbas region in Ukraine as I’ve just said. But exactly what it is that they’re neutralizing is crucial. We could have actually a divided Ukraine that begins to look a little bit like the divided Germany after the Second World War.

LINDSAY: Charlie, you have written in the pages of Foreign Affairs just last year, that there is a need for a great power concert. But given what we’ve just talked about and Kori’s notion that we’re really sort of moralizing this conflict, what are the prospects for a concert of great powers, and what would they cooperate on in this current context?

KUPCHAN: Let me tie that question back to Kori’s comment because you all—you clearly want us to disagree to get some friction here.

LINDSAY: I want you to disagree nicely. (Laughter.)

KUPCHAN: I will be very nice, but I—you know, I think there are some differences that should be delineated.

Is this a moment of Western rejuvenation? Yes, on some level. But I also think it is a wake-up moment that will force us to confront the prospect of liberal overreach that we, at the end of the Cold War, thought that the order that we built was going to be universalized, and to some extent I think we are seeing blowback from that assumption, and may need to take a more conservative approach to the expansion of the liberal rules-based system that is more focused on us than it is on bringing others in. And I would point out that there is a big liberal democracy out there called India that has not decided to stand with the liberal democracies of the world in this conflict.

Second point: I’m more worried than you are, Kori, that this kind of resurgence of moralism and Western strength will last, and that’s because all the problems that we were concerned about before February 24 are still there, and in fact, they’re getting worse. Gas prices are going up, egg prices are going up, grain and bread is going up. What—four million or close to four million refugees have arrived in Europe, and not too far off the Europeans are going to wake up and say, holy crap, most of these aren’t going to go home. Where are we going to put them? How are we going to deal with this? And immigration has been really one of the toughest issues for Europe.

So I do worry that as this clock moves forward, as we head into the midterms here in the United States, this kind of burst of bipartisanship will be just a burst, and that the Republicans are going to get their knives out—I’ll defer to you on the Republican Party—but I don’t think the America First crowd is gone; it’s just quiet for now because it doesn’t play well. I expect it to come back vocally as we get closer to the midterms.

Final comment: I think the impulse, Jim, is to say forget a global concert; it’s over. And to some extent I agree with that because Richard and I wrote a global concert depends upon the absence of an aggressor state. We have an aggressor state. It’s called Russia. It has invaded its neighbor. But I would also point out that we cannot afford to go back to a world that looks like the Cold War. We are in the boat together on pandemics, on climate change, on proliferation, on global economic interdependence. So I do think we need to talk about either a post-Putin Russia or even a Putin Russia, and what can be done after the dust settles in Ukraine to figure out how to make sure that the broader global agenda that we face doesn’t go by the wayside.

LINDSAY: Kori, I want to get you to respond to Charlie’s point that India has not joined in the effort to sanction. And I should note it’s not just India; it’s Brazil, it’s South Africa. Indeed most of the countries of the global south have not rallied behind Western sanctions and in fact have criticized them. So what does that mean for the future of the rules-based order that you have spoken about?

SCHAKE: I think it’s a fabulous challenge. So I have a couple of reactions to it. The first is I would be doing exactly what they are doing if I were a developing country, an emergent economy because Germans can have the luxury of paying double gas prices. It’s an incredibly wealthy country. The government can float bonds and pay for things in the future because there is a lot of confidence in the dynamism of the German economy. That’s not the case for most emergent economies, and they have more pressing problems than the problems we are worried about.

And so I think the first thing is we need to not be so judgmental about the fact that they are solving other harder problems than what we are trying to recruit them to help us with. Second, I also think that’s good alliance management because allies very often disagree. They even disagree on really important things, so it’s reasonable that people who are not tied as tightly into the benefits of the liberal international order are questioned more what they’re going to offer for its continuation. So that’s the second thing.

The third thing is I think there’s a difference between not wanting to be counted on something and opposing it. And India is an interesting case in this point—example in this case, sorry—because on the one hand they get a lot of their military equipment from Russia, and they have a budding, burgeoning relationship with the United States, Australia, and Japan; not because of Russia but because of China, and trying to figure out how to synchronize the gas pedal and the clutch on their series of concerns is actually genuinely difficult. And so, again, I don’t think we should be too judgmental about this. But we should work hard to win the argument and explain to them why it is in their interest that countries cannot change borders by force. That’s what Pakistan has attempted to do to India. That’s what China is attempting to do to India. And they have a stake in a system in which all of us work together to prevent that.

LINDSAY: Do you want to jump in here, Audrey?

CRONIN: Yes, I was—so jumping off of that point, actually, Kori, isn’t it interesting that China, the great defender of sovereignty, does not seem to be interested in defending Ukraine’s sovereignty, and is quite interested in supporting the aggressor in this case.

But getting back to India, I think the fact that only within the last two years the Indians have been fighting the Chinese in the Himalayas. You know, they have a lot of other things to worry about.

And the other thing I would say is that, what major power war can you think of where what is essentially the non-aligned movement in the world has ever aligned with those who are currently defending the global order.

And then the last thing that I’ll say—to disagree a little bit since I think that’s what you want—disagree a little bit with Charlie is that I don’t think we could have a concert of Europe right now or a concert of great powers because we have a lot of new actors that are as powerful as great powers are in certain dimensions, including the major tech companies who are having a massive influence geopolitically on this crisis. So, we are not in 1815. We are in a different situation with a lot of new stakeholders and a different economic situation than the one that existed then.

LINDSAY: Audrey, can I draw you out on that point about technology companies and the role they are playing? Can you just sort of spell it out for me—how you see them influencing or being influenced by the conflict?

CRONIN: Yeah, so in some respects the tech companies have been—have sort of been bunged by reality because they have been very poor at dealing with situations of war. So you’ve got Meta that has been—you know, Facebook, and Instagram, and WhatsApp have all been shut down in Russia, and now Meta is being criminalized by the Putin administration—Putin regime—and so, because Meta claimed that they would go to an exception of their moderation rules and allow the Ukrainians to cry for blood against the Russians, this made them seem hypocritical and gave the Russians the excuse to criminalize them within Russia.

So this whole concept of neutrality where—neutrality in terms of communications that they have sort of tied their whole identity to for many decades is proving to be extremely frayed. Meta is now being, you know, as I said, criminalized, and it’s giving the Russians a greater argument for why it is that, you know, they can clamp down within Russia. And so, as a result, the Russian people are getting less information.

For the first time that I can remember, the New York Times has pulled its people from Moscow. All of the major bureaus have either closed down or pulled people. You’ve got a, you know, crackdown that started to occur before this crisis where Google and Apple representatives were being harassed and, you know, very, very severely. There is kind of a hostage-taking approach to making sure that there were people there that the Putin administration could control. So I don’t see Meta as having been very successful.

However, then you’ve also got Elon Musk and Starlink. Look at the role that Starlink has played in Ukraine. I mean, he’s the one who in many respects are keeping the Ukrainians connected, and that’s not unrelated to how this crisis is going. Starlink, with its two thousand individual-sized satellites which are very difficult to shoot down—this has been a huge boon and a support for Ukraine. So I think that major tech companies are an important stakeholder in the international geopolitical realm that we don’t put enough emphasis upon.

LINDSAY: Kori, did you have a two-finger?

SCHAKE: Yeah, I wanted to tag along on Dr. Cronin’s very good—Dr. Cronin’s very good point and say that it’s not just—

CRONIN: Kori, call me Audrey. We’ve known each other for decades. (Laughter.)

SCHAKE: Thank you, my friend.

It’s not just the big tech companies. What we are looking at is a war in which civil society—business, private charities—all these different dimensions are playing extraordinary roles, right? Chef José Andrés is not only buffeting Poland and other countries that are taking in enormous numbers of refugees, he is also running aid convoys to Odessa.

We could be in a point before this war is over where you have private charities breaking sieges of Ukrainian cities and the Russians trying to hold the sieges. You see the hackers group, Anonymous, going after the Russians something fierce, and that’s where the values, the moral crusade part of this matters because civil society in free societies are taking it upon themselves—often beyond the control of the government and without the government’s blessing—to do things that they think will help the people they think are good guys in the war.

LINDSAY: I see you’ve done a two-finger, Charlie. I’ll let you do that, but I’m going to ask one last question of you before we bring the rest of the room in. And it is what do you make of President Xi’s decision to back Russia rather than to stand up for the principle of sovereignty? Are Russia and China now joined at the hip? How should U.S. statecraft respond to that?

But I know you wanted to get a two-finger first.

KUPCHAN: Yes. One quick two-finger to Dr. Professor Cronin.

CRONIN: Oh, please. (Laughter.)

KUPCHAN: And that is that—and this will just be in defense of the concert system, and I just came from a roundtable—I see Chet Crocker and others who were there—on concerts, one of their assets being the flexibility to put at the table Google, and Meta, and International Rescue Committee, and other groups precisely because they are not formal U.N. Security Council bodies. But you seem skeptical—

CRONIN: You are—you are redefining the terms.

KUPCHAN: —so let’s not let you talk. (Laughter.)

To your question, Jim, I think that the Chinese were a little bit uncertain at first, and they said some things that suggested that they were going to back Russia and some things that said they weren’t so comfortable with the disruption that’s being caused. My sense is that they have now coalesced around standing fairly firmly behind Putin. And I think that’s because this is a war that, on balance, is probably good for China. And that’s because it pushes Russia more fully into China’s embrace and turns Russia irretrievably into the junior partner. It distracts the United States and Europe from the Asia-Pacific. We’re going to be focused on the new central front for the foreseeable future, and I think the Chinese like that, just like they like the fact that we were spinning our wheels for twenty years in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The big question mark in my mind is will they go the next step. Will they provide economic assistance and military assistance? Will they bail out a Russian economy that could be collapsing? And I don’t know the answer to that. My guess is they’re going to be careful not to see secondary sanctions get imposed.

But one issue that I do worry about—and then I’ll throw this out for discussion—is, are the Chinese going to look at what’s happening here, and are we going to look at what’s happening here, and say globalization and interdependence has become too dangerous, and as a consequence, we’re moving into what could become an era of deglobalization? That’s scary in a world in which two-thirds of the countries in the world already trade more with China than with us. So deglobalization may be unstoppable, but it’s not necessarily good for the U.S.

LINDSAY: OK, fair enough. On that note, I’m going to bring the rest of the room into our conversation. I want to remind everybody that this meeting is on the record. If you would like to ask a question, raise a hand, and please stand. Wait for the microphone to arrive, then state your name and affiliation before asking your question. And I do ask that you ask a question.

Right here in the front—right here.

CRONIN: (Laughs.) The race is on.

Q: Thank you. Victoria Hui at University of Notre Dame.

These days people talk about today it’s Ukraine, tomorrow it’s Taiwan. So do you think—

LINDSAY: Can you hold it a little closer?

Q: Oh.

LINDSAY: Thank you.

Q: People say today it’s Ukraine; tomorrow it’s Taiwan. So do you think that today it’s Ukraine means— tomorrow it’s Taiwan means that there is a bigger chance that there will be a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or Ukraine—the experiences that we are seeing is actually going to make Taiwan safer? Thank you.

LINDSAY: So have the chances of an invasion of Taiwan gone up or gone down?

SCHAKE: So I honestly don’t know. Let me tell you the two arguments. The first argument would be what the Chinese could learn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is it’s shocking that the Western world actually can pull together when it’s serious. Second, the diabolical creativity of Western financial institutions to develop new tools in market—to affect markets, again, should be scary to them. Third, the only way to tell whether a military is any good at what it’s doing is to fight it, and I—like a whole bunch of other people thought the Russian military was an awful lot better than it is. And China hasn’t fought in a long time, and so whether they would have the grit for this fight or the ability to do the orchestration of logistics and air power, getting across a hundred miles of choppy water in an amphibious operation on Taiwan—that’s a pretty sophisticated military task.

So lots of reasons they should take caution from that. Not at all clear to me that Xi Jinping will take caution from that—that he may very well be arrogant enough to think, well, of course the Russians are terrible at this, but my military is great at this. And of course the Ukrainians feel Western. The Taiwanese are starting to feel Western; we’d better shut this down before it goes much further. Like I could see arguments where he would think the West would never have the stomach to impose on China the kind of economic restrictions they are imposing.

So it’s touch and go I think.

KUPCHAN: Two quick thoughts: the first is that I think on balance it makes a Chinese attack less likely, and that’s simply because the Chinese are watching what’s happening to Russia, and they’re probably going to calculate we don’t want to go down that rabbit hole; that does not look good to us.

My second observation is that I think it probably makes sense for the United States to end strategic ambiguity—not to change the One China policy, but to say we’re going to defend Taiwan because I think part of what happened in Ukraine is we were ambiguous, and the Russians called our bluff. So if we intend to defend Taiwan, let’s say so. If we don’t intend to, let’s say so. But living with this ambiguity, it seems to me, invites trouble. We just learned that in Ukraine.

LINDSAY: Charlie, how do you square that with your observation earlier that you worry that the America First movement is just sort of in abeyance right now and will come back with great force? Because that would seem to be the kind of commitment that they would oppose.

KUPCHAN: You know, it is a huge and interesting question, and if Trump is reelected, I don’t know what the future of NATO and U.S. alliances in Asia will be. I do think, though, that the impetus for the America First movement came out of the forever wars, and that if you look at the Trump administration, they were actually pretty tough on China and supportive of Taiwan.

LINDSAY: The administration was; the president wasn’t necessarily—

KUPCHAN: President not so, but the Republicans are—you know, they’re pretty gung-ho on China, and so I think that this geopolitical realignment that we have been undertaking: out of wars of choice in the Middle East let’s focus on meat-and-potatoes issues in Eurasia is good because I think that’s the sweet spot in American politics.

LINDSAY: Audrey, do you want to jump in here?

CRONIN: Just two things on the Taiwan question and also the relationship between Russia and China—I think firstly that China is going to find that it has developed a kind of a vassal state now and, you know, the Russians are going to be depending upon China for weapons, for buying their oil, for technology, for evading sanctions, and I’m not sure that China, over time, is going to find that this is a good deal for them, so I think that may—in theory—change the desire that they might have had to take aggressive action against Taiwan.

I think you can see it both ways, though. I agree with Kori. I’m not sure that it’s possible to say definitively that way.

But the second thing I would say is that Taiwan has a lot to learn from what Ukraine has done. So, you know, urban warfare; using easily accessible and cheap technologies; engaging in, you know, skirmishes; fighting forward; not depending upon huge legacy systems—instead using the kinds of tactics that we associate with insurgents. I think that Taiwan would be extremely good at that, and they’re going to learn from Ukraine.

LINDSAY: I think it’s a really important point that both sides can learn from the events in Ukraine.

If you want to ask a question in the back of the room, you’re really going to have to stand up and wave because I’m not sure I can see that far back. But we have a question right here.

Q: Hi. Jim Morrow, University of Michigan.

LINDSAY: Go blue!

Q: It’s clear that the Europeans are going to come close to meeting their commitments to increase their military spending. My question is do you also think that they’ll go further to create something like a really unified European military, and also to take the political changes to have a coherent European foreign policy?

And then the other part of the question is should the United States encourage this because it seems to me there’s two sides to this. One is greater burden sharing—the Europeans can carry more, but at the same time, it will decrease U.S. influence on security and defense issues.

SCHAKE: Those are great questions. So I think the result of Russia’s aggression is going to be Europeans clinging more tightly to the United States because when we are scared, we like to hold hands with each other. And even watching how awful the Russian military is at the profession of arms doesn’t appear to be making our European friends and allies any less desirous of having the United States in the mix of it. So I don’t anticipate that the increased spending is going to be external to NATO or to build European capabilities autonomous of the United States.

I do think, however, we should be encouraging closer political and even military cooperation among the Europeans for exactly the reason you said, which is after watching the performance of this Russian military, the Poles could defeat the Russians pretty easily. And once you start mixing all the NATO countries in, our opposition to greater European autonomy has actually encouraged the Europeans to think of themselves as weak, and they are not. And we should want allies that feel their strength and are confident in their strength as a way of better balancing the risks all of us run together.

KUPCHAN: I would just add, Jim, that I think what’s going on in Germany is an inflection point because if there were to be a development on the European side that changed, in a consequential way, Europe’s defense capability, it had to happen in Germany. And Germany was the laggard. I mean, its military has atrophied, deteriorated in a way that’s hard to overstate. And if there is to be a kind of European pillar, it has to start with Germany, and it looks like they are starting.

But I agree with Kori that this is not the beginning of Macron’s strategic autonomy, and that’s because France is alone in having a view of Europe as standing apart from the United States and flexing its muscles on the global stage. Just about every other EU member state wants a stronger Europe that’s tethered to the United States; not that goes off on its own. That’s good for them, and I think it’s good for us.

CRONIN: Yeah, the only thing I would add is let’s look at what the non-NATO members have done to get a sense of how important this shift is. I mean, if you look at the tremendous increase in spending—defense spending in Sweden, increase in defense spending in Finland; the fact that Switzerland, which is not a member of NATO or the EU is now abiding by the sanctions—you know, this is an inflection point if only from that perspective. The Europeans are drawing together in anger and frustration, and it is unprecedented.

LINDSAY: We’ll go over here to the right side of the room.

Q: Hi, deRaismes Combes from American University. Thank you so much for an interesting conversation.

I’m still thinking about this notion of historical analogies that you started with, and I’m wondering if you think Ukraine is teaching us anything about 21st century geopolitics in the digital age that we just haven’t really grasped before in terms of where this is heading, both specifically with Ukraine, but also with Taiwan and with the broader geopolitical system and the liberal world order.

So thank you.

LINDSAY: Do you want to take first crack at that, Audrey?

CRONIN: Yes, I mean, that’s a huge question, and the answer is yes—(laughs)—it’s teaching us a lot about geopolitics in the digital age.

Some of this I’ve already talked about. I think that major digital actors need to be parts of this Concert of Europe that we’re talking about, the concert of the great powers, because I think they play an enormous role in affecting the future and how things are evolving.

You know, I think that we see a lot with respect specifically to Ukraine, which is that the fact that Ukraine had a pretty advanced technology element to their economy; they are very advanced in aeronautics; they had their own drone industry, and their use of drones has come very naturally to Ukrainian citizens—you know, those who are volunteering. You know, this shows you that—again, getting back to the question on Taiwan—countries that are advanced in terms of their digital capabilities, and their populations are able to use digital technologies effectively, are going to be, I think, more successful as we move into the 21st century.

LINDSAY: Kori, you want to jump in here?

SCHAKE: Yeah, two quick, additional points. One is that one of the surprises of this war was that we all expected it was going to start with a cyber Armageddon, right, that power stations were—power systems were going to go down all over Ukraine, that the government wouldn’t be able to communicate. All of these fancy cyber things were supposed to happen, and they didn’t. And it looks like they didn’t happen for three reasons: first, is the Russians gave us so much lead time of what they were potentially doing that NSA and CYBERCOM were able to forward deploy to Ukraine and other places teams to assist in the defense of the architectures. Second, the Russians—for reasons I don’t understand—were evidently more restrained than anybody anticipated. Maybe it’s the nature of cyber tools that once you unleash them your adversaries can use them back against you. Maybe we are seeing an assured destruction leveling. And the third thing is it’s just easier to blow stuff up—(laughter)—and so the Russians blew stuff up. And so one big thing we expected was going to happen actually turns out not to be as significant in modern warfare.

But Audrey’s point about the technological sophistication—I mean, the Ukrainian government dispensing an app so that people can identify Russian troops as they come. That gave them country-wide situational awareness. A couple hundred thousand people are actively using the app, so you get societal resilience and you also get better information. It is really extraordinary.

LINDSAY: Did you want to—

KUPCHAN: Just one quick sentence on the—how important the information space has been. You know, the Biden administration I think deserves credit for stealing the march from the Russians, right? The Russians have spent the last five, ten years cleaning our clocks in the information space. I think that the Biden people reversed it. They got out ahead. They released intel that they probably shouldn’t have released, but they did it anyway, and I really think it has made a difference.

LINDSAY: Going to go all the way to the back of the room.

Q: Thank you. I’m Chandler Rosenberger from Brandeis University.

And I wanted to follow up on this point about resilience because I think we’ve talked a lot about tactics. We’ve talked a lot about specific things that the Ukrainians have done. But I think the most impressive thing about them is how resilient they have been militarily and as a society. And I wonder if that tells us something about the advantages of a kind of, you know, liberal, democratic, civic order in which people feel deeply invested and its ability to survive an assault from an authoritarian states where the soldiers seem not to know what they are fighting for, that there’s—maybe we can have more faith in that kind of democratic social resilience than we might have had otherwise.

LINDSAY: Who wants to take first crack at the question?

CRONIN: I will.

LINDSAY: OK, Audrey, you’re closest, got your finger up first.

CRONIN: All right, well, so yes, I think that we are going to learn a lot about societal resilience, but I think we have to wait. I think we have to wait and find out how this plays out because Kori’s point about it being a lot easier to just blow things up, that is also still true. So if all you want to do is crush a country and, you know, occupy that country by killing a lot of civilians and, you know, targeting corridors of humanitarian fleeing civilians, if all you want to do is kill a lot of people, I think the Russians are capable of doing that. And I don’t think we can yet come to full conclusions about how strong that resilience is going to be to stand up to that.

We’re still pretty early in this fight. I hope from my heart that what you are saying is what we learn from this conflict. But we’re only, what, about a month and a half into it—five weeks into it, so I hope that resilience is what we get out of it.

SCHAKE: So it clearly makes a difference in the willingness of soldiers to run risks in a fight, right? We see the comparative difference in Russia and Ukraine, and I do think that that’s partly about societal resilience. In better militaries than the Russians there’s also the professionalism that gives resilience, right? They’re not fighting for me; they are fighting for the guy standing next to them kind of resilience.

Temperamentally I want so much to believe it’s true, and yet, I think there are a couple of factors that make Ukraine uniquely resilient against a Russian invasion. First, the terrors of Soviet occupation. There are still Ukrainians alive who experienced the Holodomor that Russia—the Soviet Union imposed on Ukraine. They feel like they are fighting for survival. They don’t feel like they are fighting for a particular kind of government—in addition to a particular kind of government.

The second thing is that I think it matters that the World War II generation is still alive in our countries because I think they have a slightly different perspective. But let me add one hopeful note.

When Jim Mattis and I did the surveys of American public attitudes about military issues for our book, Warriors and Citizens several years ago, the weirdest anomaly in the data was that the attitudes of people under twenty-five most closely approximated the attitudes of people who had lived through the Great Depression and World War II: that the world feels fundamentally uncertain and unsafe to them, and that does give a kind of resilience that I think the intervening generations might not have to the same extent.

LINDSAY: Charlie?

KUPCHAN: Yeah, what I’m sort of ruminating on, vis-à-vis this question, is how did Putin get it so wrong, right? Because we will look back at this crisis and say Putin made Ukraine great again. The Ukraine that he envisaged did exist, but it was—it was pre-2014 and probably all the way going back to the Orange Revolution. You know, you used to go to Mariupol, or Donetsk, or Lugansk, and it was full of Russians, and they felt like Russians, and they affiliated with Russia. That’s gone, right? They have come together around a strong Ukrainian national identity, including the president, who grew up speaking Russian, right? How did he get elected? He got elected by, you know, pro-Russian and Russian speakers in eastern and southern Ukraine. That’s gone, right? He’s now a rock star because he’s giving his middle finger to Putin. And so the country has really come together as a consequence of Russian aggression. It’s a kind of blowback that the Russians are going to have to live with forever.

LINDSAY: This gentleman here with the dark jacket.

Q: Fen Hampson from north of the border.

The panel—I’ve forgotten who it was—raised the interesting question about Russia with Putin and Russia without Putin. And I’d like to ask you, if and when this crisis ends, what sort of relationship do we have with Russia if Putin is still around? Do we walk back sanctions? Do we take oligarchs off Magnitsky? Do we stop proceedings in the International Criminal Court? Do we welcome them back to the various organizations they’ve been thrown out of, and that includes the G-20?

And if he leaves—for whatever reason—you know, is Russian going to be easier to deal with or more difficult to deal with? And I would say, you know, be careful what you wish for because he has provided stability—and I’m not defending him—but one can envisage a scenario where the security vacuum extends now to Russia as others see weakness in Moscow.

LINDSAY: Charlie, do you want to take a first crack at that?

KUPCHAN: A lot depends, Fen, on how this ends, and my best guess is that it will not end cleanly, and it will not end well.

Audrey already mentioned some of the provisions that are tentatively on the table. I have a hard time imagining them seeing the light of day. Who is going to guarantee Ukraine’s security? Is Zelenskyy going to get the support of the Rada to change the constitution? Is he going to have the domestic support to recognize Crimea, Mariupol, and Donetsk, and Lugansk as Russian?

So I’m guessing that what will end up here is another frozen conflict in which Russia takes a big bite out of eastern Ukraine, probably doesn’t go into Kyiv because it’s not going very well, and then we sort of have to say, well, the fighting is over. They did more, they took more; now what?

And I guess I’m enough of a realist to say that, you know, we’re going to have to go back to something that looks more like the Cold War which mixes containment and engagement. And that’s because there is simply too much at stake to put Russia in the penalty box and throw the key away. And so I would say that even in a post-war Putin Russia as opposed to a post-Putin Russia, we’re going to have to find ways of getting some difficult hedging cooperation on arms control, on the question of energy issues—I mean, there’s a lot of stuff here that we can’t just throw away.

LINDSAY: I want to get in one last question because we’re nearing the end of our time, so we’ll go to that young lady over there, if we can, and then I’ll have to ask the panelists to be short in the response.

Q: Hi, I hope this won’t be too long. My name is Eve Clark-Benevides. I’m from SUNY Oswego. And I—there was an editorial in the New York Times yesterday that infuriated me, but it has been really coming up during this whole talk.

Bret Stephens argues maybe we’re being a little bit too premature, kind of celebrating that Putin has miscalculated. Maybe actually Putin really only wanted eastern Ukraine all along. He never really thought—and that a lot of the goals that Putin has wanted over time—getting rid of the free press, getting the moderates to move out, and really having full power over the Russian society—is really coming to pass.

So this is kind of a piggyback off the last question that, really, are we going to see sort of these steps to disengage economically and politically with Russia—you know, Britain realizing that maybe having Russian money completely floating their economy—we’re trying to divest. Do you think that maybe in this new Cold War—whatever occurs—that we’re going to continue to really try to get away from oligarch money in the political systems in the West?

LINDSAY: OK, Audrey, you had your hand up first so—

CRONIN: Yes, so when it comes to our analyses of Putin, I think it’s a mistake for us to personalize this as much as we are. You know, put aside this unfortunate comment about potentially regime change in the way that it was interpreted.

I think that the Russians have always, throughout their history, gone back and forth between kind of a Slavophile approach and a Westernizer approach, and Putin is a Slavophile. So what we’re seeing right now is a reawakening of Russian nationalism, a move back exactly along the lines that you just suggested to having greater control over their domestic population, getting rid of some of the threats that Putin personally feels are quite dangerous; you know, domestic movements within Russia.

I hate to see all of this happen, but yes, it does feel quite familiar. I mean, I spend my—some of my teenage years living in Moscow in the American embassy. I remember the Cold War; I’m old enough to remember all of that. And I think we are going to have to move back to that kind of relationship where sometimes we can deal on certain things and at other times we can’t deal on those things, we deal on other things.

But the worst thing that we could do would be to make Russia a complete pariah because, if you understand European history, you also know that anytime you have a complete pariah that is aside from the whole system, you are more likely to end up in a major war.

LINDSAY: Charlie or Kori?

SCHAKE: So Putin—I don’t buy the argument that Putin is a grand strategic genius and invaded Ukraine in order to crackdown domestically for two reasons: first because he is already cracking down. It was just a slow strangulation—CREF, Nemtsov, and Navalny—and so he didn’t need the Ukraine invasion to be more repressive domestically. But the second thing is I think the failure of Russian force and arms in Ukraine is actually making his domestic position much more tenuous in ways that I think are unpredictable from the outside to understand.

My answer to—just quickly, my answer to the what do we—how do we deal with Putin still in power, I think it would be a good thing for us to find ways for a strategically smaller, weaker, and humiliated Russia to have a U.S. counterparty on some things that are important to them and to us. It will make Ukraine’s longer-term future and Russia’s longer-term future easier to handle if we, who have had so little invested in this fight, step forward and help integrate Russia in ways that we can.

KUPCHAN: To the question of was Putin a grand master and he intended this from the beginning, I don’t see it, and that’s because he could have done the eastern bit at any time, and he wouldn’t have needed to put almost two hundred thousand troops all around Ukraine, including in Belarus. He could have just gone into the separatist territories, turned south, gone to Mariupol and connected to Crimea, and called it a day.

I think what’s happening here is he’s changing the goalposts because his original goal of regime change and the occupation of the country, it does not look feasible anymore, although I agree with my colleagues that he might just keep bombing for another few months. Who knows what will happen?

But the key question in my mind is whatever that ultimate disposition is, can he portray it as a victory? Can he sell it—not just to the Russian people, but to the Russia elite system, which is showing more discontent than I think we’ve ever seen in modern Russia. I don’t think Putin is about to go, but I do think that this is a war that is going to loosen his grip on power, and anything could come of that. It could mean he goes and we get a worse outcome. After all, a lot of the people around him share his views. It could also be that we get a more benign outcome. We don’t know, and as a consequence, I think we just have to hedge our bets.

LINDSAY: Well, that brings us to the end of our time here. I want to thank everyone in the room for joining us for this conversation on the geopolitical implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I want to do a shout-out to Irina Faskianos and her team—

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yay, Irina! (Applause.)

LINDSAY: —for arranging today’s thing. And I want to say thank you to our three guests: Kori Schake, Charlie Kupchan, and Audrey Cronin for their expertise. (Applause.)

(END

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