Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell: What Drives Putin and Xi | Best Of: Foreign Affairs Interview

0:00 This week, we're pleased to bring you some of the best conversations from our archives. In 2023, I spoke with the historians Steven Cotkin and Orville Shell about what drives Xiinping and Vladimir Putin and how they are and are not like Maen Stalin. You can look forward to a new episode of the Foreign Affairs interview later this month. I'm Dan Curts Failen and this is the Foreign Affairs interview. This I think really is one place where Putin and she connect quite closely. They both feel shut out and marginalized. If Xi Jinping cash his his closest friend, what does he get for that from the US? The entire US fullcourt press remains in place.

0:46 There's no reciprocation for any potential abandonment of Putin. Xiinping and Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way she and Putin do today. And so understanding what drives these two men, how they view the world, what they want is as important as any question in foreign policy and international affairs. To that end, I talked to two of the absolute best scholars who study these countries and their histories. the great Russia scholar Steven Cotkin and the great China scholar Orville Shell. [Music]

1:32 So we're we're recording this the day after Xiinping turned 70, but since Vladimir Putin has already wished his dear friend health and happiness, we can move past that occasion and get right right to the substance of of the topic today. You know, Steve is the ultimate biographer of of Stalin. You're completing your third volume of a magnificent and transfixing biography of the man and Orville as the author of more books than I can rattle off here on China, past and present. But you're also both among the most trenchant and eloquent observers of these two contemporary figures and their effect on the world. So, we really could have no better pair to make sense of Xiinping and Vladimir Putin and their commonalities and differences and their relationship and what it all means. But I I want to start by tracing the arc of American and western understanding of

2:17 the two figures. When you go back and look at profiles and speeches and memos from officials on both of them from their early years in power, see this kind of powerful impulse among Americans especially to view both she and Putin as moderate, as modernizers, as you know, western oriented, certainly as leaders we could basically get along with and who would by and large move their societies in a direction that seemed you know roughly aligned with our interests and our values. So Orville, let's start with you. What was the early impression of Xiinping? What did it miss and how did it start to change as you reflect over the last 10 years or so of uh our interactions with him? >> When Xiinping came to power, he was he was not somebody with whom we were tremendously familiar. We knew more

3:03 about his father and we rather blightly and I think quite naively assumed that because his father had undergone a lot of persecution and sort of political travailes that this might have rubbed off on his son in a way that would have made him somewhat jaundice about the old one party Leninist state and the whole revolution. And um I remember writing a book concluding just as he was coming to office and cautiously wondering if he might not turn into a reformer. Well, he did not. So, now we're left to try to figure out who exactly is he? And this is why I really welcome chatting with you, Steve, here because I think, you know, any leader, there's history, there's ideology, and then there's the man. And all of those ingredients have

3:49 to be factored into any kind of a sort of understanding of what drives them. And I can't think of a leader in Chinese history who is a is more opaque in this regard than Xiinping is particularly the latter part. The psychological syndrome out of which he operates I think is really important but very very difficult to divine. >> Just to linger on Xiinping's father for a second say a bit more about who he was and how we thought that might have shaped Xiinping and how he thought about China. Well, Xiinping's father, Xi Jong Shin, was somebody who during the cultural revolution had a very bitter experience and like so many other people was accused of being a counterrevolutionary anti-party element.

4:36 And it was in that climate of sort of the Mauist the most intense period of Ma's revolution, the cultural revolution that Xiinping came of age. And there is a a scholar at the American University, Joseph Tigan, who's been writing about his father and actually discovering some very interesting stuff. But we still are left to sort of divine, you know, how did that impact his son? And I think the only thing that that that we can say is that when you're a teenager and your father is pillaried and of course you yearn to love and respect your parents, that casts a tremendous shadow on your life. And he got sent away to the countryside to the family sort of Shani province, which is where the father came

5:22 from. And then finally one point he came back to Beijing tried to escape his exile and his mother berated him and send him back again. So we have here at least in so far as we understand it a tremendously complicated parental web of relations in which he grew up having to in a certain sense despise his own father because he was considered a counterrevolutionary element at the same time yearning to be part of what was going on the cultural revolution to be a red guard to get into the little red pioneers. One telling fact is that he applied eight times to become a Little Red Pioneer, which is a sort of the preceding party membership later on when

6:08 you're older. And of course, he was assued and turned down because of his black category of family background. Finally, a friend of the family presided over the decision and he did get in. But you have to kind of wonder how did that influence him? this idea that you have to be a sort of 200enter more read than anyone else in order to be accepted and then you're still not quite accepted and to survive. Before we we focus on this idea of you know psychological syndrome as you put it Orville Steve let me turn to you to go back over this course of western understanding of Putin. This is obviously slightly longer history. He's been in power longer. But as you look at what we thought we knew of Putin and what we got wrong and why, how do you

6:55 understand that history of our own interpretation? >> Orville mentioning the person who presided over Xi Jinping's admission to the pathway towards eventual Communist Party membership reminds us Dan of contingency. We always have very substantial, deep, long-term structural understandings of how things work. And yet in our own lives, there's been so much contingency, so much accident, randomness, intercession of people. And so we have to be careful to recuperate that contingency in our analyses. You know, having said that, let's linger for a minute on the structural factors that the contingency eventually trips.

7:41 So, with Xi Jinping, he doesn't claw his way to power. This is not something where he has been fighting internally battles and and cleverness and just Machavelianism and finally made his way to the top. He got tapped on the back of the shoulder. You know the way people get tapped on the back of the shoulder at Yale to run the United States. We need to understand this. And there's a parallel Dan with Gorbachoff which is why I bring this up. So Gorbachov is also this figure who is tapped by the KGB faction by the powers that be who are worried both about the corrosive corruption that's become completely pervasive in the Soviet system and they're worried about the loss of dynamism in the Soviet economy

8:28 and the cold war competition. And so they settle on a guy that they don't know that well but they do know that he's not corrupt. They do know that he's a sort of true believer in the system and and his mandate is to tackle the corruption and re-energize the system. Same mandate as Xi Jinping and a similar selection process although hardly identical and there's a sort of different interest groups and power relations and different time periods. So we want to be careful with the analogy but the analogy works to a certain extent. And so the big difference is that Gorbachoff has happened. So that when Xi Jinping is tapped, the Gorbachoff attempt to re-energize the system to get back to dynamism ends in

9:16 liquidation, self liquidation, in implosion. And so if Xi Jinping is going to do anything, he's not going to do Gorbachov. That's 100% clear. Clear as day. whatever lessons he learned from his dad and whatever lessons he learned from his own experience in the cultural revolution and whatever happened behind the scenes and we may never know that but the key point here is that he comes in Xi Jinping comes in unlike Gorbachoff where Gorbachoff's already happened and the lesson is profound and clear and so the party is dedicated to a nonre repeat of Gorbachov so the whole story is what is their analysis of the Soviet collapse. Not what is our analysis

10:03 necessarily, not what do we think happened or didn't happen, but what does Xi Jinping think happened or didn't happen. Let's remember that Xi Jinping was also running the party school before he got the big job. And so the two biggest topics at the party school were Soviet collapse and never to repeat in China and then Western decadence and etc. you know, the US is in decline and all of that mythology that they are marinated in at the party school. But the point, the number one topic, Dan, is no Gorbachoff, no political opening, no political reform, no suicide of communist party rule. And so if you knew this, if you were aware of this, you saw

10:51 that there were limits to the possibility of political opening and reform under Xi Jinping. I wrote a book on the Soviet collapse, a short book in which I made the argument about how there's no political reform equilibrium in communism. And once you begin a reform, you open up the party for liberalization. People want other parties. They don't want the Communist Party. So the Communist Party is left with this problem that it can't open up. It can't politically liberalize and maintain its monopoly. It either has to crack down on political opening or it has to go all the way in Gorbachev fashion and the thing unravels. And so for me, the history of the party and Xi Jinping's

11:38 understanding of the history of the party were absolutely central to what we needed to be thinking about. And Steve, you know, um, China did have its sort of near garbageoff moment, didn't it, in 1989 when reforms started unraveling the Leninist structure. And you will remember that one of the most embarrassing moments for the the Chinese Communist Party in 1989 was that Gorbachoff was supposed to come to Beijing and they were going to bury the hatchet and Gorbachov did actually come to Beijing and he couldn't go to Teneamman Square to be received with proper pomp and circumstance. They had to meet him at the airport and all the way into the city there were people holding such signs as where is China's

12:25 garbage off. So for a good Chinese Leninist, this was a wakeup moment, you know. And I think it's very interesting. I've never seen anybody say anything about where Xiinping was during 1989, what his disposition was towards those demonstrations. But whatever he did, I think the message he ultimately took home was we're not going there. You know, there's that famous line, Orwell, that you know that Dung supposedly told one of his children that he thinks Gorbachoff is an idiot. >> Well, I think if you're a good Leninist, that's not an illogical conclusion, is it? >> Yeah. The irony of course is that Gorbachoff was himself a Leninist and thought that there was a better Lenin, a more pluralistic non-Stalinist or pre-

13:11 Stalinist Lenin which was a fiction which was an illusion but it was his north star and he followed it as a result of which communism died more or less peacefully in the Soviet case. And then there was the the non-fantasy version of Leninism that Dong Xiao Ping had. And of course, Dong did purge the party of the fantasy Leninists, the ones who thought reform and opening was possible in a political sense, not an economic or a foreign policy sense. I mean I I do think you know we we don't want to forget that during the house decade of the 1980s when we thought there was a fair wind blowing towards reform and and and opening and China might slowly integrate into the world

13:56 system and become more soluble etc etc and it was a very exhilarating exciting time when many of us actually thought there was a prospect that this communist party might make a some kind of a peaceful transition to something else. But we should remember that in 1981, just as the reforms were hitting the high tide in China, Deng Xiaoping came out with something that he called the four basic principles. And everybody's just thought, "Oh, well, this is sort of communist rhetoric." But what were they all about? They were all about the party. And he wanted to remind people that whatever the hell was going on, we're not getting rid of this one party Leninist system. But one thing I want to ask you about Steve is this. I mean one

14:41 element of well both Maong and Xiinping and I'm wondering about Putin is this idea of a restoration of greatness you know rejuvenation and in the China's case the China dream but I think Putin also has such a dream maybe a bit more in Kuwait and less spelled out but it seems to me this is one thing they do share in common. >> Let me just add to that question Steve. You know, you trace this history of Shei, but that does seem like there are some commonalities with Putin. He was also kind of tapped, not exactly out of nowhere, but he was not the the obvious era parent. He at least in the the mythology that most of us get, he was very much foreign by the experience of watching the Soviet Union fall, just as Xiinping presumably was. So, in addition to that sense of lost greatness, how did

15:28 that sense of humiliation and shame of that period shape him? >> Yeah, it's a very good question. There are similarities besides age between the two, Xi Jinping and Putin. They're both 70. They had sort of hard scrabble youths. Their growing up was not luxurious to to put it mildly. And yet they rose somehow to positions of authority thanks to these circumstances and others who facilitated their career. And Putin was appointed more or less because he vowed to protect the Boris Yeltson family as it was called the family in the kind of mafia sense of the state that if Yeltson stepped down he wouldn't go to prison and at the same time Putin would fix the chaos the

16:15 anarchy of the Russian state because the Soviet collapse in Russia didn't end in 1991 as I argued in my book. It continued all throughout the '90s. And so Putin's mandate as it were was to protect the Yeltson family but also to arrest the continued decline implosion that Russia had inherited from the Soviet case. And so that life experience of the collapse is also very very imminent for him just as for Xi Jinping right Xi Jinping has a different experience in the Chinese countryside and Orville's already alluded to this. Putin is in the the second capital, St. Petersburg, but he's in a communal apartment, a rough and tumble courtyard.

17:01 There's the experience of World War II and the Nazi siege of Lenningrad where nearly a million people starve to death or die of disease resulting from their starvation. And so all of that is the crucible as it were in which Putin rises and then he he gets into the KGB as we know the same way that Xi Jinping got into the party track which was to knock on the door. They tapped him but but ultimately he was looking for it and looking for it and that must have gotten around. He doesn't have a distinguished career in the KGB just like Xi Jinping doesn't have an incredibly distinguished career as a provincial leader. And then Putin is in Germany right there on the front line of the cold war when the wall

17:46 implodes and Moscow is absent as he said not giving instructions over the phone. And so he experiences that calamity, the end of the Soviet forward position in Eastern Europe firsthand. And that's extremely formative for him. And so resurrection of the state, resurrection of the system in some fashion, not the communist system because that's gone. and and not recuperable but resurrection of a Russian state and a great power status because the Soviet Union was not just a single party monopoly communist state was also a great power but here we need to expand the purview a little bit you know we have the Leninist picture Leninism is very specific form of organization and we need to spend a

18:31 little bit more time on what that is but we've got that picture partially introduced but the other picture is the Eurasian land empire or multiple millennia of history. And so what you've got here is an upstart version of power that's very modern and that's the world we live in which is the British Empire, a big navy, trade, especially trade with other advanced countries that have high techch and high valuated products and a kind of open market economy based on trade and based on a navy with limited government in some form, right? limits on executive power. And this model is unbelievably powerful and it's a kind of upstart. You can see it in with the Dutch who have a

19:17 version of it, but it's really the British. And the British defeat the French in a more or less hundred-year war that culminates in the defeat of Napoleon. And then the British from 1815, they refashion the world in their image as a world where lural states have an advantage and land-based empires are at a disadvantage. They're autocratic. They have land armies and they don't trade with other advanced countries. They're often commodity exporters where they don't develop their own high-tech and they don't acquire the high-tech the same way. They're losing a game that for a long time they won, right? For a very long time, the land-based empires had the riches, had the system until this British upstart and then of course the

20:04 Americans inherit that British power and the Americans transform it. And so we have these two forms of power, one an upstart and one at least a millennium long. And the upstart one's got the upper hand. And so we see these autocratic ancient civilization land empires of Eurasia fighting back and they fight back on the ground at their strongest, which is to say history, which is to say civilization. Right? Huntington didn't get it right when he said there would be a clash of civilizations that would arise naturally. What he did get right was the Clash of Civilizations handbook would be available for these countries to try to realize a Huntington vision to pitch

20:51 themselves as as civilizations, not just countries, and to try to talk about that golden age and how that golden age is being stolen from them by Western imperialism. first the British or the Dutch and now the Americans and how no one has the right to rule them and they're sovereign and they're much greater and they're much older and who put the Americans in charge of the world when in fact the Americans barely exist when it compares to Russian history or Chinese history. We could say the same for Persian history. We see a version of this in Turkey. We see a version of this in India. And so it's very interesting to see this clash and for them to object to the world as it's configured, you

21:37 know, the last two centuries, but especially since 1945, and to try to reclaim their selfassigned place, their sense of being more ancient, more legitimate, more impressive. And so for us, we need to think about how the Chinese Communist Party does not own Chinese civilization. And so being able to separate the civilization from the regime rather than to allow the conflation, that's true in the Russia case. It's true in the Iranian case. The Mullers don't represent Persian civilization through the centuries. Vladimir Putin does not equal Russian civilization and its achievements and Xi Jinping and the

22:23 Communist Party don't as well. But once you put this Eurasian landmass autocracy, land-based empire and extortion or expropriation or repression together as a package, you see that they're fighting a losing game, which is one of the reasons we see them teaming up. Orville, does the does Xiinping's view of history align with that? How when you when you talk about that sense of reclaim greatness and how it relates to humiliation in his own life experience and his countries, how how does he trace that narrative >> here? I think there is something that Xiinping and Putin actually share and that is we forget that I mean Leninism is all about how to build a strong

23:08 wellorganized one party structure and state. But there was another aspect of Lenin and that was his his theories on imperialism that you know the developed world in order the higher stage of capitalism is to you finally you have to export all your your excesses abroad and colonize and exploit lesser peoples to keep the whole capitalist edifice going and of course out of this came out of Lenin is anti-imperialism anti-colonialism anti- all of these these kinds of things from the 19th and early 20th century came the whole culture of victimization. This is something that of course China has taken to a very high stage. But I

23:54 think it it was also very deeply implicit in the way Russia looks at the world that you're disrespected, you're occupied, you're disesteemed, you know, you have your victories, but still and this I think really is one place where Putin and she I think connect quite closely. They both feel shut out and marginalized. There's an expression in Chinese, you know, it it makes me laugh every time I hear it and the foreign ministry uses it a lot. It's Shanghai. It means you've hurt the feelings of the Chinese people as if the Chinese people were some throbbing mass of of weakness that you're constantly offending. But so

24:41 I think that comes from Lenon because he's the guy who set up the us and them, the colonializers, the imperializers, and then the victims, the people who were prayed upon and oppressed and exploited and marginalized, mistreated. And so this is a very deep thing that ties them together. And they want to be respected and yet they don't act respectably. So they're in a terrible loop. And yet they're constantly offended. And I think this drives them in in a very powerful way together. And it it just simply in infuriates them because we cannot and will not and are able to say, "Oh, well, you know, fine. You're a little autocracy. You've done a lot. You've pulled a lot of people out of misery. It's all good. Let's just not

25:26 criticize you." Well, that's not going to happen. But so there's that deeprooted victim culture that came out I think of the Leninist narrative which both have deeply embied >> and Dan here we have the ultimate irony because Marxism Leninism it's western it's a western import so here everything is anti-western everything is about keeping out the pollution of the west the decadence of the west the amoralism of the west and all the other things that they accuse the west of But in the name of Western ideology, right? I mean, Marx was not Chinese, although certainly uh you could think that if you spent some time in a party school there. So, on this point about the

26:12 anti-imperialism, imperialism happened. The Chinese were abused. The British were narot traffickers. They did the opium war, forcing opium into China. All of that happened. We know that history and we write about that history. We're not in denial of that history. The part that China is in denial of are the depradations that Communist Party rule caused domestically. What the British did in China is inexcusable. But what the British did in China doesn't begin to scratch the surface of what Ma did in China. Ma put numbers up on the board that Hitler never put up on the board, let alone the British. Right? So, we're talking about a very selective view of history and and the further point that

26:58 they're right that Western imperialism was very nefarious for China. And yet, okay, we'll talk about that, but let's also talk about what your own communist system has done to your country. And if you want to talk about that, you know, open up your archives. We may never see the Communist Party archives of China the way we have in the Soviet case. I've been very privileged to take advantage. China scholars don't have the that same privilege, that same fortune where the regime has imploded and the archives became widely available. But I guarantee you, Dan, the secret of the Chinese Communist Party archives, if it's ever revealed one day, is that they they're communists. That's the secret of the Soviet archives. You know, I I remember

27:46 vividly walking down the avenue of eternal peace during I guess it was National Day or whatever, and they'd have pictures of Markx, Engles, Lenin, and Stalin, giant painted portraits up, and you think, "Oh my lord, where's the anti-forignism here?" And and I might also say that you know having spent decades uh living within this sort of victim culture of China that was elaborated out of Leninism you you go to Vietnam or Holland or even Burma or Cambodia or India. I mean here's some places that were really colonized. China was only partially colonized and I don't make any excuses for that. But the fact that they have managed to retain this

28:31 idea of of a century of humiliation even when they are so demonstrabably succeeding is very striking. And you have to ask yourself what is it that appeals to them about this idea of in insisting even when they are one of the great success stories of the of global history on being victims. >> We'll be back after a short break. And now back to my conversation with Steven Cotkin and Orville Shell. Orville, I want to talk more about the cultural revolution and the great tragedies of Mao's era. The question of why Xiinping treats that history the way he does still seems like kind of a puzzle to me given his own personal

29:17 experience. In power, he's tried to scrub that history and really gone out of his way to prevent criticism of Mao in that era. How does he see that history and why does he feel the need to treat it the way he does? >> Well, it's interesting, isn't it, that despite the fact that he comes from a family that was really laid low by the Mauist revolution and humiliated that he still lionizes Mao. And I think here this gets back to this idea of the sort of yearning for a restoration of greatness. You know, the first thing Xiinping did when he came to power in 2012 was he took the entire pilot bureau across Tenman Square to an exhibit in the National Museum that was called

30:04 China's rejuvenation as if to say this is what I'm going to do for you. This is what we need. This is what we want. We need to be a great power and this is my agenda. And actually what he borrowed from Mau was the deep and abiding need for enemies. And that's the way he fuels this idea I think of rejuvenation. What I think he learned was you you've got to keep be on your toes. You have to learn how to be brutal. You have to learn how to compete and struggle and win. And if someone happened to remind him of the human costs of some of those the results of those policies, is that the cost of progress or rejuvenation? How how do you think he processes that? >> I think he views the Chinese Communist

30:51 Party as China's only saving grace. And if you lose the party, you know, as Steve said, you turn yourself into a Gorbachoff show over. And so he staked his fortunes on the party even though the party turned on his own family and in a certain sense you know wre havoc on his family and on China. >> Remember Dan the alternative to one party dictatorship in their minds is not a liberal democracy. The alternative to a one party dictatorship at home is chaos, anarchy, implosion warlordism. Right? credits collapse. And so for them, even though that instrument has

31:36 been used in ways that maybe had negative effects from their point of view, it's still the instrument not just for Xi Jinping's own personal power, but also for preventing the alternative in their minds. And that alternative is not what we would see potentially or what some Chinese dissident would see. It's an alternative that they fear. And to a certain extent, the rest of the population in both Russia and China share this view that as as bad as one party rule or dictatorship in Putin's case, autocracy can be at times that the alternative may be even worse rather than better. We probably need to

32:23 understand that in their minds that's the alternative that they need to hold at bay. Steve, it's also a pathway to the restoration of greatness which I think both Putin and she deeply yearn for. >> Yeah. The state is their one instrument. They don't have the same type of dynamism in the open society and innovation society and they don't have the friendships, the alliances across the globe that are voluntary. They don't have the instruments that we take for granted sometimes and that we even sometimes try to undermine crazily. Their instrument is the state. The state is a coercive apparatus. Obedience or quasi military style discipline in

33:09 the political sphere. Suppression of political alternatives. censorship which means not just suppressing some views but also promoting other views very widely so that people accept a certain set of information and ways of looking at the world. So they have this coercive state as their instrument. They lack some of the other instruments that we have. I should also add that you know geography does play a role here. If you look at China it has become a trading nation. It has followed in the footprint of the Americanstyle modern power. It followed that because it has Japan across the water. Dong Xiao Ping is looking at the Japanese ashes as a result of World War II literally. And

33:56 then within a generation, generation and a half, second largest economy in the world. And how'd that happen? Well, it happened because they had access to the American domestic market and they manufactured things that American middle class wanted to buy. So Dung is looking at this right across the water and he goes to Japan by the way before he comes to the United States as Orville knows. But the limitations on this are severe. First of all, they have no California. Now some people here paying taxes in California might rejoice at a statement like that. You know, no California. But for China, that means that they don't have that gigantic western ocean opening up into a a region that they can trade

34:42 with across that body of water. Instead, for them, the West is desert. It's ethnic minorities that are under severe repression. And so, they're trying to build an air California through Pakistan and Burma. That's their way to get to the sea. But Pakistan and Burma, they don't own those places. Those places are volatile and that's ultimately no substitute for the actual California. And then even if you look at the one coast China does have, their eastern coast, it's not exactly open to the ocean the same way that the US eastern coast is with the Atlantic. As you know, Dan, it's closed in by what we call the First Island chain, which is dotted with American military bases and

35:28 which has a lot of choke points that the Chinese are concerned about that could be closed down by the American Navy potentially or coalition alliance navies. And so for them, even their one coast is not fully open the same way that a maritime power like Japan or Britain or of course the US would have. And so for them, they're trying to play this game partially with autocratic rule rather than limited government, with closed political system and closed society rather than a fully open one, with repression and censorship rather than with the chaos and the berserk quality of an open society that we have here in America. So they're doing the trade part. They're finally

36:15 building the navy, by the way. Right? They built the navy out. They did all this without a navy. They used our navy to become a trading nation. But there are limitations in China's ability because of its system and its geography which are interlocked for them to play this game of modern power as successfully as we do. And and so if you look the US flipped Germany and Japan into the American voluntary sphere of influence and flipping Germany and Japan were decisive in that. And then following Germany and Japan, Eastern Europe came in in '89 as you know, which has been transformative. The transatlantic piece has only grown and the East Asian piece has also grown

37:01 because of the successes of South Korea and Taiwan, not just economically as we know, but also the transformation into rule of law, prolistic, open society democracies. That's been astonishing. And so all of that happened in a recent time period and China was great for millennia before that. But now they face the fact that US power exists. So when they talk about the 18th century or the the Tong dynasty or whichever one of their great historical periods they want to talk about, there was no US power then. And so it's just a different game for them to play. So rolling back American power, right? Exp that nine dash line in the South China Sea. That's

37:49 no accident, right? They're hemmed in and they're trying to push out trying to loosen the American alliance system and the American military bases along the first island chain. This is a intentional clear as day geopolitical strategy that they're unfolding. And we were naive about this, but it's rooted in the history and the geography. and they know that history and their geography and we have to know it better. And so let's not allow them to flip Eastern Europe. Let's not allow them to flip Germany with economic ties. Let's not allow them to neutralize Japan. People speak about a multipolar world and it just drives me insane and they say, "How could you be against a multipolar world, right? It's

38:34 democratic. It's fair. And and and we all have to share the planet together." But then the polls are not the same. The US poll is open, non-coercive, and voluntary for the most part. And people are asking to join like Ukraine. The Chinese poll is coercive, vaselage, nonvoluntary, and it's about subordination to China. You can ask Putin about this himself. And so when we speak about a multipolar world in a positive sense, we are doing China propaganda here because the polls are not equivalent. >> Oral if you put that narrative to to Xiinping or you know Wangi or someone around him what would their uh what would their rejoiner be? What would

39:20 their analysis be? >> So Dan, the question I would like to put to Wangi and Xiinping is this. I mean Steve has just sort of laid it out for us. You know why are you doing this? Why when it's so demonstrabably not in the interest of China, I should say also in Russia to invade Ukraine, why does China when it had a really good thing going and had everybody eating out of their hands? Why does it go and and alienate Korea over THAAD? Who alienates Sweden or or Norway or India, one of the first non-aligned nations to recognize China or even Australia? I mean, what's going on here is the question I would like to ask she. Why are you doing this? You had a really good thing going. You can have

40:07 your your your little one party state and nobody was beating up on you. Just keep a little reform going and we'll all share and care and the global economy will go and you'll get rich and you know when Maadong met with um Kissinger and Nixon, he said, "Oh, Taiwan, you know, settle it in a hundred years, no problem." And and Steve, you mentioned Dang Xiaoping stopping in Japan on his way to restore diplomatic relations with Jimmy Carter. He said in Japan, he said, "Oh," he said, "Taiwan, let's leave it for smarter generations to come to solve." Now, why is not that a good formula? >> You're absolutely right. China had its cake and it was eating it too. >> Yeah. So, that's the question I want an answer to. >> I think it's fear. I think they

40:54 understand at a fundamental level that our existence and our power and our open societies and our values and our alliances even when we fail to live up to our promises fully that it is an existential threat to their existence. And so it's not American policy. The issue is just our existence is existential for them. It's it's a bizarre situation where on the one hand they're the principal beneficiaries and on the other hand there couldn't be a bigger threat than the international order that that we created for them. And so maybe as Marxist Leninists they're not being fools, you know, when they take those cricket bats across the border with India and smash the heads of

41:40 India and push India into the American camp as you alluded to. It looks crazy. It looks idiotic. It It looks worse than idiotic. And yet maybe it's rooted in a a cynical but profound understanding of the way they fit into the world going forward. >> Well, this is exactly the understanding that I think we need to understand better and it has two elements. One is China's sort of deep historical sense of grievance and the other is of course what what are the animating principles that that that Vladimir Putin and Xiinping are guided by. In other words, what sets them off? Because in an autocracy, individual personalities of leaders get to write themselves very

42:26 large. And I think there's some very mysterious questions that are very hard to answer. People always say to me, oh, you know, don't talk about ideology. I think you're absolutely right that when you have two such antithetical political systems, they cannot help but feel competition, even threat from each other. And I think that is sort of the radioactive core that helps, you know, make everything else so difficult to deal with now that she is really been he's committed now to what he calls the they have some words in Chinese that aren't quite the Chinese model, but there's no doubt about it. He thinks that the people's democratic dictatorship of the proletariat is a

43:12 better form of democracy than what we have. And that is a source of immense contention and controversy between us. >> We can say to our blue in the face. We're not pro- regime change. We're not trying to contain China. But he's sure that the whole American establishment that this is all we think about when we wake up in the morning. Well, you remember that this all began with John Foster Dulles when John Foster Dulles said, "We may not be able to win China over militarily, but we will get them by peaceful evolution, by soft power and one thing or another." And so, so this word peaceful evolution, which sounds pretty good to us, is a total antichrist in China because it's the color

43:58 revolution. It's the underhanded way that they feel they're going to be undermined by the ideological differences and the preferences that people feel for one system over another. >> Steve, that ideological dimension in Putin's case seems a little bit harder to decipher. He invokes kind of cultural conservatism and he obviously obsesses over color revolutions in the in the way that that or referred to, but it's a little less clear that he has some ideological commitment or a commitment to a kind of system that he thinks has broader broader relevance in the way that the Chinese Communist Party does. >> Yeah. You know, it's different for Russia, Dan, because Russia is culturally European. China is not culturally European and doesn't care. It doesn't care about ancient Rome or ancient Greece. Doesn't

44:43 care about the Renaissance and the Reformation. It's China. It's got its own story which in their minds is grander than Western civilization story. Russia is different because it's clearly culturally European, right? It's not Western institutionally because the West is not a geographic but an institutional matrix. Japan is not European culturally, but it's institutionally western. Russia is not western, but it's European. So for Russia, you have a kind of ceiling on the anti-westernism. And so you can do anti-westernism in Russia. It's mother's milk, and it's the way these regimes maintain their grip on society, their hold on power, and in Putin's case, the personal regime. But

45:31 being completely cut off from Europe forever is a difficult proposition to sell in the case of Russia. And so we see now some grumblings, rumblings about potential vasselage to China here. And of course Russia doesn't decide to become a vassel of China. That's China's decision. If China makes Russia a vassel, it becomes partially responsible for Russia. So, I'm not sure we're there yet on the China side. But on the Russia's side, you see the disqu about being in some type of partnership, however we want to call it, with China indefinitely and losing the ties to

46:16 Europe. And so for Putin, he has the same ambivalence. I wouldn't say it's 50/50 ambivalence, but it has vacasillated over time where it's been uh more pro-western integration, less anti-westernism earlier, and far more anti-western and less pro-western integration now. to a certain extent the 1990 attempt to integrate Russia into the west which was swed by illusions on both sides it blew up uh the the attempt to integrate China into the west also blew up but in very different ways because China was never going to become culturally part of the

47:02 west. It was always going to be right its own civilization in a deep and profound way. Russia was going to be its own civilization but partially European western to a degree that they were willing to explore. So, so for Putin and the rest reaching for an ideology, the anti-westernism is what's on the shelf. But is it anti-Westernism or is it anti-Americanism? And this is true for China to a certain extent as well because you can be anti-American but you can have very good relations with Europe. You can divide the West. You can cleave off, put a wedge in between Europe and the United States. The Ukraine war blows all this up. The biggest geopolitical consequence

47:50 so far of the Ukraine war was the destruction of China's wedge in the Western Alliance between the US and Europe on China policy and the US and Japan on China policy. We could throw in Australia here. We could throw in the Western Pacific. And so China has strategically inflicted so much damage by its support for Putin's aggression in Ukraine. And it's not clear he can recuperate this. It's not clear that even if there is some type of solution in Ukraine and it's a solution where people stop dying, that's what I mean by a solution. Even if that happens, how will China be trusted again given what it did with

48:37 Putin over the Ukraine war? And so that strategic blunder or self-inflicted damage is to me potentially enduring. And so for Russia, it's already been a strategic defeat across the board. Sadly, Russia's strategic defeat is not a Ukrainian victory. But for China, it's also been a strategic defeat. And so, how does he recuperate that? How does he get the wedge back in between America and Europe, between America and Japan? I'm not sure he does. And so, you know, Putin is a hedge for him. If it wasn't for Russian fistle material, the stuff you make nuclear bombs with, and China's program to build out a

49:23 massive nuclear arsenal, which we think could potentially rival the Russian one and the American one in the fullness of time. There's a dependence on Russia for a lot of that, especially the fistal material and expertise. If it weren't for that, the cost of the hedge would so far outweigh the benefits of the hedge and you would see a lot more vulnerability to Xi Jinping domestically over his choices. You could see more grumbling going forward about this bromance, the strategic bromance, the strategic partnership. But if it keeps costing China as much as it does and the Russian thing gets worse and worse and

50:11 China is partially responsible for that Russian basket case and has lost Europe and Japan permanently, I'm not sure. They already have so many domestic issues that we didn't talk about. One man rule is susceptible to mistakes in a much bigger way than competitive rule. even competitive authoritarianism is. So it has been very interesting to watch Putin's miscalculation and she as it were doubling down with his own miscalculation on top of that paying a different kind of price. Right? The Ukrainians are paying the ultimate price here. Putin is paying a price. Russia is paying a price and China is paying a price. >> We'll be back after a short break.

51:02 And now back to my conversation with Steven Cotkin and Orville Shell. Orville, as we've watched Xiinping's relationship with Putin over the course of the last 18 months, his reaction to the war in Ukraine, he certainly seemed a little bit on his back feet right after the war started, just a couple weeks before that they'd stood together in Beijing and talked about a, you know, partnership without limits between Russia and China. he does seem to have been a little bit more proactive in trying to navigate some of the dynamics that Steve laid out. What is your sense of how he sees this this picture at this point? Do you think he sees a chance for advantage or is that kind of grim strategic outcome that Steve described more or less inevitable? >> I think he does feel a little bit betrayed and trapped, but he's not going to make any demonstrations of of

51:48 anti-Russian sentiment. I think the thing that really astounds me about both Xiinping and and Putin is the lack of sense of agency that they have that they seem to not understand that they are creating the very situation they most fear and that the world is responding to them not to nothing. They just think the world is this hostile place out here that likes to get together and have a cold war 2.0. Oh, but you know in actuality both of these countries have a lot more power than I think she or Putin recognize and it wouldn't be very difficult particularly in she's case to kind of you know use that power in a

52:35 different way and recognize that you do X Y is going to happen and if it's against your interest then do something else and it's very hard for them to give a little to get a little because they don't really have a very highly evolved notion of the essentially reciprocal nature of foreign policy and great power relations. >> But Orville, if you're sitting and these are smart people sitting in in Beijing when they're as they observe the the Russian experience and what Vladimir Putin has done to his own country strategic prospects. Do they they must see warnings in that? They must see certain courses that they would want to avoid. I mean I think many do have a very highly evolved recognition of this and I think she himself may even

53:21 recognize it but I think he's he's bereft of the ability to you know to make that kind of critical we thought of sort of flexible authoritarianism and in a certain sense that was true for a long time it still remains to be true whether Putin can advince that kind of flexibility and if it gets too brittle of course then it gets dangerous. Now, he did turn around on COVID, but I don't see a lot of flexibility in his playbook because I think he is so jinned up on his own big leader culture and his own fear of looking weak or surrendering and he's so besotten with this notion of hostile foreign forces that it's very

54:08 hard to to make nice. >> You know, Dan, everyone says we got to share the world with China, we got to share the world with Russia, right? They're not going away. They were here before we were. They're going to be here in the future. We got to share the world. And I say, you're right. And you want to know something else? The ocean is wet. I know that firsthand. So, the issue is not we got to share the world, Dan. The issue is what are the terms that we're going to share the world with? Are the terms going to be the 14 demands they tried to impose on Australia or the what they did to LE World and and South Korea o over the missile defense system or what they're doing with the cricket bats on the other side of the line that's in dispute with India or we could go on

54:53 right what they're doing in Shing Jang what they did in Hong Kong are those the terms that we're going to share the world with them because if those are the terms I want to push back but at the same time I recognize like Orville does that we're in this together. It's a planet and it's the only one we've got and all the other cliche. But so the Soviets shot down K, the Korean civilian airliner. They shot it down and we had evidence that they shot it down in real time and we exposed that evidence publicly. And George Schulz went to Moscow. He didn't cancel the trip. Forget about some stupid spy balloon. They shot down a civilian airliner, denied it. We proved they lied and

55:40 Schultz got on the plane anyway. And Schultz got off the plane and demanded an answer for what they did. So, China sends a spy balloon over the US and Blink and cancels. He should have taken that balloon, what was left of it, put it on his plane, went to Beijing, and said, "Here, you can have it back now, but this is what you did." You got to define the terms of engagement. You got to create leverage. You have to make them be ashamed of things they do, not we're ashamed that we shot the balloon down and we can't release the report about what was in it. What would George Schultz have done with that balloon? He would have done just what I said. He

56:27 would have put it on his plane. He would have never cancelled the trip and he would demanded an answer and and then he would have continued with the diplomacy. He wouldn't have broken off talks. The whole point of diplomacy is not that you talk. It's that you create leverage and then you use that leverage in conversation to try to make deals. deals which support your interest. You have to make concessions. You don't get everything you want. Even with Gorbachoff, Reagan didn't get every single thing he want. And yet, that's diplomacy. That's not getting on a plane and begging for a uh meeting or whatever else it might be or cancelling a trip when they do something that they should answer for rather than we have to answer

57:13 for it. When you look at the diplomacy around the war in Ukraine, China has, I think, responding to some of the dynamics that Steve laid out around its relations with Europe, especially made a big show of sending peace envoys, supporting peace talks. Can you imagine Xiinping making a serious effort to end the war in Ukraine? Do you see any substance to this? Any anything he will do to constrain Putin at any point? You know, I'm not sure I see evidence that Xiinping has this ability to date. And yet, as you, I think, are suggesting, it would be a stunning achievement for him. And if he really did want to reassure the world of China's constructive role, he could do something. And in fact,

57:59 there are many areas where he could do something. But I'm not sure and this is this is why I think we were having this discussion is what is preventing him from playing a more constructive role in the world and a less destructive role in the world. I mean why the belligerance? Why the wolf warrior diplomacy? No one believes that he's earnest in question of of bringing peace to the Ukraine but he could be >> he's got a problem. Vladimmer Putin. >> Yeah. >> Right. We we see this Orville with North Korea. >> Yeah. China can't give up North Korea. If it gives up North Korea, it ends up with unification of the Korean Peninsula with the South, the same thing that happened in the German case as the the

58:44 winner of the Korean War. And then a US military base even closer to China's border than it is now. And so the North Koreans drive the Chinese up the wall as you know, but they bite the bullet. We could end up with a giant North Korea here with Vladimir Putin. Let's remember he goes to Beijing, the Olympics, big ceremony, bromance, partnership with no limits, and then he unleashes this crazy war almost the day he sets down back in Moscow, which upends China's strategic wedge with the Europeans. Then Xi Jinping makes a play and says, "You know what? They're not going to use nuclear weapons." Remember that? Remember how

59:29 China intervened to prevent the first use of nukes over this war and how that was supposedly a big diplomatic accomplishment for she and how many days later does Putin announce that he's moving tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus you know so much for my friend and strategic partner I've just semi humiliated him in public by making this announcement over Belerus. So, I don't know what these guys are talking about oneon-one, but I'm getting a sense, Orville, that the problem is less Xi Jinping here exerting his leverage than it is Putin. Let's remember that the Chinese didn't have much leverage when the war first broke out, largely because

1:00:15 they haven't been supplying weapons to the Russians, which has been really important. At the same time, they've got leverage now that they didn't have before because some very large percentage, perhaps as high as 70% of Russian chips, semiconductor chips are coming from China now. They're not coming directly, you know, they're going through Dubai and then through the Dubai port, overland through Iran and other ways across the Caspian, etc. our our friends in Virginia understand this a lot better than I do. Although I was in the Emirates recently to to discuss these questions. In any case, they have some leverage now. And so those semiconductors, whatever level they're supplying, it's a very important level

1:01:00 for Putin. And the Chinese, of course, could tilt the battlefield in Russian's favor because they have munitions, drones, they could supply Russia at scale. and and they they not only have stocks, they have production facilities at scale in China. And so they could increase their leverage. But what does he get if he gives up Putin? Is the US going to repeal the chipsack dam? If Xi Jinping cashes his his closest friend, what does he get for that from the US? The entire US fullcourt press remains in place. there's no reciprocation for any potential abandonment of Putin. And so what Orville is referring to is correct,

1:01:46 of course, that he's got the opportunity to bring peace to Europe and recuperate that relationship and reinsert the wedge between Europe and America. If he brings peace to Europe, the great peacemaker of Europe. But to do that, he's got to put the screws on Vladimir Putin and bring Putin to heal. I don't know if he's tried yet. when he went to Moscow if they discussed this you know what what would be acceptable to you Vladimir mayor as a as an outcome if we interceded here but this is what I do know if Putin signs a piece of paper it's worth nothing his promises are worth nothing unless he signs the piece of paper in Beijing and then all of a sudden that piece of paper becomes

1:02:31 meaningful. So, China being involved in the negotiations like Orville just alluded to that it is a possibility for Xi Jinping to seize this. Ironically, we're self-interested in that which is one of the reasons why President Zilinski of Ukraine has been a lot less dismissive of China's involvement here than we have been. Although, I think we've turned the corner a little bit and become less dismissive of potential Chinese involvement. At least that's my impression from some conversations on the inside and some public statements. How do you then go forward? What does the relationship then look like? What are the terms of sharing the planet? The engagement thing could never work

1:03:16 because both sides had illusions and a policy based on illusions is destined to fail. We had the illusion that they were going to liberalize politically and they had the illusion that we were going down whether it was the Iraq war, the global financial crisis or COVID or or whatever. Right? So, we've both sold illusions and our illusions have to a very great extent been shaken. Right? You can't be disillusioned, Dan, unless you had illusions. So, that's a much better basis for a relationship. enough when you have a more realistic picture of who the other side is and what their goals are and what their bottom line is and what their strengths as well as their weaknesses might be. But I just

1:04:02 want to say that the puncturing of the illusions is a positive for me. Engagement blowing up and Xi Jinping rediscovering through this Ukraine war that the West is for real. Those are really positive steps now that need to be consolidated with effective diplomacy and with creating leverage and using that leverage and all the other things alliance system that we've been talking about. So, ironically, I'm actually more positive about USChina relations now than I was during the heyday of engagement. Orville, as you look at both the potential for the USChina relationship, but also the interest that we United States have of preventing a a full, you know, SinoRussian alliance,

1:04:48 full SinoRussian convergence, what as you look at a a forward-looking options would you be uh pointing policy makers towards in the next several years? Well, you know, I think both Putin and she recognize that if the world is decoupling, and I think it it is, maybe not completely, but that's the trend line. They really only have each other. I mean, Iran, you know, a few other bits and pieces doesn't quite do it for for an alliance. Uh, and China still does have some real cards to play, but they need some other big substantial power if we're going to be off in a new kind of a version of whatever you want to call it, a cold war. So, I don't think that they're

1:05:34 going to be able to to push each other hard enough to actually lead. Um, I interesting your optimistic, Steve, but you know, your optimism, I think, is born out of a world of of logic and reason. You can see that it would be in the interests of nations to do things. But I'm very interested in the psychology of these guys because I think that's running them as much as a realistic assessment of interest. And this is what really frightens me because I think they have very thin skin. I think they're very allergic to humiliation, very allergic to being shut out, disesteemed, all the things we've talked about. And I don't know what the remedy is for that.

1:06:19 Yeah, leadership variable. You're right, Orville. You can lay out the structural landscape and then you need the leadership to kick in and that's where the personalities, they impinge all up and down the whole story. Uh, you know, he's got some very clever people in his regime. You know, Wang Yi is he's shrewd. >> And we should say this is Xiinping's top foreign policy hand at this point. >> He's he's no he's no fool. But I don't think he has permission to actually think really innovatively and creatively. >> Yeah. The the issue here is what you said or it's reciprocity, right? So we felt that the Chinese didn't reciprocate to us. That's one of the reasons we're angry. We gave them WTO admission and

1:07:07 they failed to reciprocate. You know, they failed to do some of the reforms that they should have done in order to qualify to get into WTO in the first place. So now if Xi Jinping makes some concessions, if he says, you know, we got to walk this back, there's no sense of reciprocation on the American side, we now have a bipartisan commitment to standing up to China. And so if Xi Jinping gets the advice from Wangi or others that there needs to be some level of rapro and for that the Chinese have to take some steps here. Whatever those steps might be, we could argue and discuss, but there needs to be some level of movement in the in the western

1:07:53 especially US direction. Does the US reciprocate or does it, you know, sort of smack the hand that reaches out? We understand that the Biden administration is trying. We see Jake Sullivan, we see Janet Yellen, now we see Anthony Blinken. We see all their main actors and the various pieces of our fragmented US power. We see them reaching out to try to reestablish. The most prominent one is the Pentagon, of course, because they want to deconlict with hotlines and regular communication and all the things we had eventually with the Soviets. But is that really reciprocation, that kind of dialogue? Because yes, you want to talk, but what do you want to talk

1:08:39 about? You want to talk about things that we don't want to talk about with you. You want to contain us. You want to hold us back. You want to put these guardrails. Well, within those guardrails, you're going to full court press us. So why should we allow you to have guardrails? That's just conceding the terms of your policy, of your posture, of your cold war or whatever we want to call it. So there's a fundamental problem of the absence of potential reciprocation on the US side even if the Chinese logically figure out what it is that we're talking about here that could alleviate the pressure on them that Orville has rightly said they've brought about on themselves to a

1:09:25 very great extent. But I wonder if some catalyst moves, some series of events, some random actions, something that we're not predicting, moves us to a point where we can then take advantage of the catalyst, of the unforeseen events, of the contingencies that pop up. Are we ready to do that on each side? Because right now we're stuck in this doom loop that Orville has elucidated which has this deep psychological dimension.

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