Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course Nukes, Russia and our new Cold War. The world has never been a settled place, but it has been enveloped by sweeping existential challenges in
recent years. The COVID nineteen lockdowns offered a public health crisis reminiscent of epidemics that once seemed pass a and that Russian US Cold War from the nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies that also seemed consigned to the history books. Well that's back with us too. In other words, everything old is new again, including frosty global military conflicts and the looming threat of nuclear confrontations. There's even a hit movie out about the dawn of the nuclear era Oppenheimer.
Ever since Vladimir Putin sent Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine in early twenty twenty two, assumptions about the possibility of war in the twenty first century have been turned on their heads. A long absence of conflict in Europe gave way to a bloody and sustained ground war. Russia has even warned it might unleash nuclear missiles, China, rattling its own saber in Asia, looms large in the background, just
as it did in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The primary lesson of the Ukraine War, hal Brands has written is that nuclear coercion will be essential to prevailing in the rivalries that define our age. The nukes are now the new normal. Hal's a foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, co author of Danger Zone, The Coming Conflict with China, a member of the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and a Bloomberg opinion columnist, and he joins Crash Course today.
Welcome Hell, Thanks for having me.
Great to spend time with you. You know, my big overarching question, if somebody like you who studies and watches these things, is would you have thought ten years ago, or say even a year and a half ago, that this is where Europe and the US would be right now with Russia.
No, probably not ten years ago. We were still before the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, although we had seen the Russian attack on Georgia in two thousand and eight, but I think there was still a significantly greater degree of hope then in Washington, but especially in a number of European capitals, that Russia might still make its peace with the international system that the United States and its European allies had done so much to construct and maintain
over the years. That obviously turned out not to be the case, But even I guess a little bit more than a year and a half ago, if you go back to the run up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there was a significant amount out of disbelief in Washington, but also even more so in European capitals, that Russia was actually going to do this, that it was actually going to try to wipe a sovereign state off the map, annex much, if not all, of its territory, and extinguish
its existence as an independent political entity. That just didn't seem like something that happened in the modern world. It seemed like something that was ripped from the nineteen thirties. And so I think it actually took the shock of the invasion to convince a lot of skeptics that we had entered either a fundamentally new world or we were
threatened with a return to an older, darker world. And that has really produced a lot of the intensified transatlantic cooperation we've seen over the past year and a half. And some of what we've seen is actually quite remarkable. And so you've seen Germany, which spent more than a generation cultivating its addiction to Russian energy, kick that habit fairly quickly. You've seen Poland take steps to turn itself
into a major military power. You've seen Ukraine pulled closer to NATO and the European Union and the West writ large than anyone would have anticipated. And you've seen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization be revitalized and expanded to bring in Finland and Sweden in a way that many people certainly would not have predicted two years ago.
And why was that? This is one of the curious things to be given all of the informational and observational firepower that exists in the digital era, and the amount of communication and analysis that's available to both policymakers and diplomats certainly, and to others as well military strategists. Was it simply that no one thought that Vladimir Putin would
be willing to send tanks over a border. Was it that simple that there was an appraisal of him as a person and a decision maker that didn't encompass launching a very ill considered and possibly self defeating ground war.
I think there were a couple of things going on, and first, as a caveat, I should say that I think the US intelligence community should get a huge amount of credit for snipping out what was coming, and the Biden administration for warning everyone what was coming. If you wonder, you know why the United States has this massive intelligence
establishment that costs tons of money. This is why, right, because it gave us advanced warning of this major geopolitical shock, and notwithstanding what I said about people not being willing to believe it was coming, actually positioned the US and other countries better than they would have been to respond.
But I think, and just to stay on that for a sec before you go on to your next point, is it was very interesting to watch how the Biden administration handled that intel and made it public, because remember they were sort of leaking bits about a massing of Russian forces on Ukraine's eastern border, and people were like, you know, is this wagging the dog? You know, are
they just trying to manipulate public opinion, etc. Etc. And what they were saying to people was you should believe what we're seeing and hearing.
And they were taking away some of the options Putin otherwise would have had for manipulating the situation to make it look as though Ukraine had somehow provoked a conflict. And so a lot of what the US intelligent community was doing was saying, the Russians are going to stage this sort of false flag operation, don't believe it when
it happens. So that, notwithstanding, I think there were really two big things that stood in the way of more people heeding those warnings and understanding what was coming at them. The first was that I think a lot of us failed to understand how much Putin's decision making had atrophied over his twenty plus years in power, and in particular during his two plus years, i guess, almost two years
of COVID induced isolation and so well. The reason a lot of people didn't think Putin was going to stage a full on invasion is because what he was doing didn't seem to make sense. It made a lot more sense to think that Putin was just going to try to nibble away in a little bit more Ukrainian territory, And the reason we didn't get that is we didn't realize I think how much decision making had atrophied with Putin, but also within a regime that had become increasingly dysfunctional
as the level of sycophancy around Putin increased. The second thing, though, is that I think it was just shocking to people to think that this sort of thing could happen in the modern age, right, you know, it looked like nineteenth century conquest, and so I think it took the thing actually happening, right and seeing these images of Russian tanks streaming across the border, learning what the Russians had done in Bucha and countless other places in Ukraine to realize
that this sort of behavior is still real. Right, it doesn't go away. The question is just whether we can suppress it and keep it at bay.
And not to be forgotten. He rolled into Crimea in twenty fourteen, so eight years earlier he had already sort of done an opening act to a land grab. Yes, from his side of the ledger. Do you think the US pull out from Afghanistan and Ukraine moving more warmly toward NATO membership also encouraged him to act or one of those, both of those, none of those. What do you think about those things?
I think Putin definitely got stuck in a trap of his own making, in the sense that his aggression in twenty fourteen, which you mentioned and after, really left Ukraine with no choice but to move closer to the West in a way that I think would have been quite
controversial in Ukrainian politics. Prior to the taking of Crimea in twenty fourteen, Ukraine was actually quite divided on the question of, you know, whether it wanted a Western identity, whether it wanted to move closer to NATO in the European Union, or whether it wanted a close affiliation with Russia prior to that, but you know, by burying his teeth in the way that he did, Putin basically left Ukraine's only option for maintaining its territorial integrity such as
it was, and perhaps even survival as moving closer to the West. And then as that happens, Putin says, oh, Ukraine is moving closer to the West. I really don't want that. I'd better do something to prevent that from being consolidated. And so, even though Ukraine was not on the verge of being admitted to NATO or anything like that. In early twenty twenty two, I think Putin was genuinely
worried by the westward drift of Ukrainian policy. He didn't realize, or at least chose not to acknowledge, that that drift was largely a result of his own actions on the first issue he raised, which is the pullout from Afghanistan.
It's really difficult to say for certain. In general, I think it's bad for US policy when the US fails in a major undertaking of some twenty years, when there's achaotic rush to the exits and so on and so forth, and so I wouldn't be shocked if, at the margin, right it was some small percentage of Putin's calculus was influenced by this view that the United States was weak, that it was in decline, that it was losing resolved to pursue its interests in an assertive way in the
international system. And he might have gotten some of that impression from Afghanistan. But I think if it mattered, it mattered mostly at the margin. I think the invasion was mostly about his perception of the strategic situation in and around Ukraine, and.
So regardless of causation, here we are. And what do you think are some of the most significant things that have changed. You talked a little bit earlier about the militarization of Poland, the expansion of NATO, include Finland and Sweden, things that would have been unheard of. But what do you think are some of the other sort of big tent pole changes that this is catalyzed.
I think there are three. The first is the revival and reconsolidation of what we would have called the free world back in the Cold War. And so the Ukraine War has obviously led to greater cohesion and greater effort within NATO, but it's also had that effect on the other side of Eurasia, in East Asia and in the Western Pacific, where the war has given momentum to the
defense reforms that Japan and Taiwan are making. It has led to fears that aggression in Europe might be a prelude to aggression in Asia, and so it has facilitated US coalition building efforts visa VI China. And so what the Ukraine War has done is it's strengthened kind of the free world, the Democratic alliance blocks on both sides of Eurasia and also led them to do more together.
And so it's really interesting that South Korea has quietly been one of the most indispensable members of the coalition, supporting Ukraine by supplying artillery, ammunition and things like that. Japan and Taiwan and Australia have joined in the sanctions and helped in other ways as well, because there's an increasing recognition that what happens on one side of the Asian land mask can still matter for countries on the other side. So thing one would be kind of consolidation
of this free world community. Thing two, unfortunately, is a greater integration of what you might think of as the axis of Eurasian autocracies. And so the war has pushed Russia closer to China, because as Russia is cut off from the West as a result of its own actions, it has few strategic alternatives other than too deep in its relationship with China. It's gotten a much deeper military relationship with Iran as well, So it's not just Russia
selling Iran gear anymore. It's Iran providing Russia with drones and artillery and maybe some missiles that it's used on the battlefield. And so you're seeing overlapping closer relationships between Eurasian autocracies that have in common they're shared antipathy to a US led international order. So that would be thing two.
And then thing three is you get what you might think of as non alignment to point ozh, but you get a whole bunch of countries around the world that basically say, we prefer to avoid choosing a side in this right. And it could be Brazil, which gets tons of fertilizer and other things from Russia and under Lula in particular, is not particularly desirous of following the United States into a geopolitical and ideological showdown with the Eurasian autogracies.
You've got India, which is aligning ever more closely with the United States on China issues but not doing anything of the sort with respect to Russia. You've got countries throughout Southeast Asia and Africa and a variety of other places that have basically said, either we don't have a dog in this fight, or a pox on both your houses.
Because yes, the war is bad in terms of food security and international economic security, but so are the sanctions, and so in some ways the international system we have now is coming to look a little bit more like the Cold War, where you've got these two opposing blocks that are consolidating, and then a large group of countries that are trying to sort of navigate the territory in between.
You know, I love how that you respond in bullet points and lists and numbered things as a It makes it a life, you know, very apprehensible and easy, and that you call it thing one and thing two like Doctor Seuss. You like the Doctor Seuss. So foreign policies, Oh, I'm glad we've arrived there. You know. One of the other extraordinary things to me about the consequences of this
war is that Germany and Japan are rearming. And that's another one of those who would have thought, especially anyone who's interested in our student of World War two, that you know, we'd be eighty ish years on where everyone is advocating rearming Germany to deal with a more aggressive Russia and rearming Japan to deal with more aggressive China. That also just seems extraordinary to me.
Yeah, And I think it's probably important to note that Germany's rearmament is a bit more aspirational, whereas Japan's is happening in real time, and so the Germans have made a variety of commitments to get to two percent of GDP for their level of military spending, which is the standard within NATO, at least it's supposed to be the standard within NATO, but as is often the case, there have subsequently been delays and modifications such that you know,
the moment when we get a Germany that wields meaningful
military powers still some years in the future. Japan's rearmament is remarkable by historical standards, and so at the end of twenty twenty two, the Japanese government pushed through a series of reforms that would see defense spending increase by about seventy or eighty percent over a five year period, that would see Japan acquire more offensive military capabilities like Tomahawk missiles and things of that nature, and would basically help Japan make this transformation from what it was in
say the nineteen fifties, when it was basically a strategic protectorate of the United States, to a real regional military power and maybe America's most important single ally in the world because of geography, because of the capabilities it has and things of that nature.
Do you think it's an overstatement given all of these big global chess pieces that are moving around, and these realignments of oversea powers in new combinations and in very clear ways. Now it's not foggy. There are very purposeful alliances being formed for largely military and strategic reasons. That the risk of global war hasn't seen so pronounced since the early nineteen sixties. Or is that an overstatement.
No. I think the basic statement that the risk of not just war but great power war, so war between the most powerful actors in the international system. I think that risk is higher, certainly than any time since the end of the Cold War, and maybe even since the hottest part of the Cold War, So the period of crisis in the late fifties and nineteen sixties which you
referred to. Tend to think that the alliance building we're seeing, in the coalition building we're seeing, is more the symptom than the cause, right, And so you see countries in Europe and the Transatlantic Community, countries in the Indo Pacific doing more together because they're observing either what Russia has done or what they fear China might do in the Western Pacific and deciding they have to get together to
strengthen their collective capabilities. And you know, it's maybe worth mentioning here that China is engaged in what US officials have said is the most significant peacetime military build up we've seen since the run up to World War Two. The military balance in the region has changed dramatically. China has become much more willing to court friction with its
neighbors and the United States. We've got a preview last August and the crisis that followed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan of some of the ways in which the People's Liberation Army might use those capabilities to blockade, or bombard or even invade Taiwan. And so there's just a much greater degree of anxiety among democratic states, in particular in Europe and East Asia, which leads to a greater willingness to try to band together for security.
Hal I want to take a quick break here from one of our sponsors, and then we'll come back and pick this conversation up. We're back and we're joined by Hal Brands, a foreign policy savant and a very elegant thinker, and we're talking about war hell. Before we took a break, we spent some time discussing Japan in the context of
the great global Cold War that's taken shape. Let's recall that Japan is the only country who've been attacked with nuclear weapons by the US during World War Two, So let's talk some more about nukes, and specifically, as a departure point, I wanted to talk about the movie Oppenheimer, which I thought was a provocative, entertaining, and troubling examination of what it means to have unleashed this incredible force
of energy, power and destruction into the world. What lessons did you draw from Oppenheimer?
I think the major message that the movie tries to convey and the major insight or take away that I got from it was just the intense moral dilemmas that are created by nuclear weapons. And so nuclear weapons were created in a context where it seemed plausible that some of the worst regimes ever seen on Earth might conquer much of the Earth, and it was entirely plausible that
they might develop nuclear weapons of their own. We know in retrospect the German program wasn't as advanced as we feared it was, but it was hard to know that at the time, and so I think that the moral case for building nuclear weapons in the first place was very, very strong. The challenge, though, is that nuclear weapons are kind of the most indiscriminate weapon that humanity has ever
come up with. When they were used against Japan, against cities in Japan, they killed a lot of non combatants. And as you got into not just the nuclear but the thermonuclear age, so the development of the hydrogen bomb and a lot of the follow on weapons in the nineteen fifties and after, you were talking about weapons that
could be civilization shattering in their effects. And so if there was a full on nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, it's not clear you know, how much of humanity would have been left after that. And so these weapons served important strategic purposes in winning World War Two and hopefully deterring World War three visa VI the Soviet Union, But they were weapons whose use was so destructive that it was hard to understand what
moral or political purpose that could actually serve. And I think that tormented the real Oppenheimer as well as the Oppenheimer in the film. And I think that dilemma consumed a lot of American policymakers during the Cold War as well.
There's this one moment during the film where all of the scientists involved in researching fission and fusion and the use of a nuclear weapon are uncertain whether or not even the tests might actually ignite the entire atmosphere. And there's this just sort of troubling, you know, moment where well, we just have to go for it, and yes, the atmosphere may actually get torched by our test, but there's no other way to test it. And fortunately, you know,
they didn't torch the entire atmosphere. But you know, I feel some of this now in the present in a different way, in that Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and he certainly won't torch the atmosphere, but he could ignite a broader war, and it's going to present this complex response if we were to go there.
And you recently wrote in a really long, wonderfully all encompassing Bloomberg opinion column that the true impact of nuclear stockpiles in the world we're in right now is largely psychological. And I always enjoy quoting you, but I'm just going to quote you here because it's very descriptive, and you say, nuclear weapons may be good insurance against invasion, but they aren't a full proof guarantee that a country fighting for survival won't hit back with attacks on a nuclear armed
aggressor soil. And so you sort of have these two forces in play. One is that the nukes themselves discourage overly aggressive confrontations or maybe confrontations at all, and then once they occur, because as you've already mentioned, they're so indiscriminate in their destructive force that they don't really deter
conventional warfare in certain theaters. Can you just expound on this a little bit and then sort of offer our listeners a take on whether or not this is a good rule of the road to think about going forward, because I'm not sure.
Yeah. So, I think there are two ways of thinking about the role that nuclear weapons have played in Ukraine, and the first way essentially holds that they haven't had much effect at all. And so since day one of the war, literally Putin has been brandishing nuclear weapons against Ukraine, against the West, threatening to use them if certain things happen.
Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal, and yet Putin hasn't used nuclear weapons, and the fact that he possesses so many nuclear weapons, it hasn't allowed him to win the war. It hasn't deterred Ukraine from fighting back and even bringing the war onto Russian soil. It hasn't deterred the United States and other countries from supporting Ukrainian forces as they killed tens of thousands of Russian personnel and target Russia's generals and do a lot of things that
are hugely embarrassing to Putin's regime. And so one way of looking at this is, you can have all the nuclear weapons, but it's not necessarily a guarantee that you're going to prevail in a contest against a weaker, non nuclear country, and you may run into the problem that actually using nuclear weapons deploying them in battle provokes so much global blowback that it's not worth it, and that this appears to be the lesson that Putin drew in late twenty twenty two when he was making all sorts
of nuclear threats, and the Chinese and the Indians and a bunch of other countries basically said, it would be a really bad idea for you to do this, comrade. But the second way of looking at this is that even if nuclear weapons aren't used in battle, they still profoundly shape the way that this war and other wars play out. And so Russia's nuclear weapons have had a
deterrent effect on the United States. They have deterred the United States from getting directly involved in the fighting, which I think might well have happened already if we were talking about a nuclear United States and NATO confronting of Russia that did not have nuclear weapons. They have deterred the United States from providing certain capabilities to Ukraine. So the United States has been very cautious about providing Ukraine with capabilities that can allow Ukraine to reach into Russia
for fear of sparking escalation. And so Russian nuclear coercion is working to an important degree, even if it hasn't achieved as much as Putin likes. But US nuclear coercion is also working, right, And so if the United States didn't have an alliance like NATO that was backed by the US nuclear arsenal, I think it's entirely likely that Putin would be doing much more to try to coerce
or bloody the countries that are supporting Ukraine. Right, it's not like Putin doesn't know where the weapons that are coming into Ukraine are coming from, there being a symbol that logistical hubs and staging points and pull in other countries not that far across the border. Right, The Russians could go when attack these things with their power or
ground based missiles if they wanted to. They've chosen not to because they know that that would lead to a war with NATO, which is backed by the nuclear arsenal of the United States. And so both sides are actually coercing each other to a degree, and so the contours of the war have been powerfully shaped by nuclear weapons even though they haven't actually been fired off in anger.
But as I think this through hell and it's interesting because mutually assured destruction and coequal coercion and the reality of nuclear weapons has created this kind of proxy war at this point, with Russia's being supported by other countries as well, Ukraine's being supported by the US and other countries as well. And this horrible military confrontation is also this dance that has gotten everyone into a bit of a corner.
Now.
I don't know if it's a stalemate just yet, but certainly it's gotten to the point where it's not clear if Ukraine pushes Russia out of eastern Ukraine that they'll stop at the border. It's not clear that Russia would stop the wharf that happened. And then what brings this kind of a war to conclusion unless there's some sort
of an escalation. In the absence of a diplomatic resolution, nothing will end it unless there's an escalation, And US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has said that America has warned Putin of undisclosed catastrophic consequences if Russia went nuclear. But even if Russia doesn't go nuclear, the US is alsibly going to have to raise the stakes to force a conclusion here. So how do you think about those things?
I think you're exactly right if the US wants to not just help Ukraine liberate its territory. But and this maybe the even harder part, convince Putin to accept that, or convince Putin to accept any settlement that leaves Ukraine mostly intact territorially viable, economically defensible, militarily, and things of that nature. It's going to have to exert more coercion than it has exerted to date, and We've already seen
this dynamic at work in US policy. So the US has been more willing, not so much to kind of sprint across, but to stick a toe across Putin's red lines in this conflict. It's more willing to do that now than it was a year ago. And so the United States initially said it wasn't going to provide F sixteens because that might be escalatory. Well, now we're providing
F sixteens. The United States initially said we're not going to provide a Tackums missiles, basically the longer range version of the Himars rockets that the Ukrainians have used to good effect. Well, now there's some reporting that the US might be sending a tackems to Ukraine after all. And I think what this reflects is a realization that the US is going to have to do more to help Ukraine win this conflict, even if it requires testing some
of these Russian red lines. And the US has more confidence in doing this because Putin has talked a lot about using nuclear weapons, or he's hinted at it, at least some of his subordinates have talked about it more explicitly, and Russia hasn't actually done anything so far, so that makes US officials feel that the Russian red lines may
not be so read after all. But there is a bigger question out there, which is that is it going to be possible for the US to help Ukraine accomplish its objectives without the US intervening more directly in the war. And that would be a big escalatory move on the
part of the United States. It might be warranted morally and otherwise, but it would require a much more deliberate decision to test Russian red lines directly and to test the proposition of whether two nuclear arm great powers can fight a conventional war, which is what this would entail without nuclear escalation occurring.
And we've been focusing a lot on Russia, but of course China itself strategizes around its own nuclear capability, having a nuclear neighbor like Russia, and jousting with the US for military dominance. Biden has said at different points he wouldn't fight Russia directly in Ukraine, and I wonder if draws a happy lesson from that as they watch how the US maneuvers in Ukraine and thinks, well, if the
US isn't really going to confront Russia. Here, nothing's preventing us from, say, dipping our toe into Taiwan.
I think this is a real challenge. You know. One of the big guessing games in DC these days is what lessons is shizhin Ping learning from the war in Ukraine. And you can tell a good news story where Shixhinping is learning that conquest is hard, He's learning that US intelligence is really good. He's learning that outrageous aggression tends to provoke a lot of blowback that you might not
have expected, and a variety of other bad consequences. And if that's the case, that might make him more hesitant to use force against Taiwan. He may also be drawing the lesson, however, that the United States simply won't go to war conventionally against a nuclear arm great power. Because this is exactly what Joe Biden has said in the
context of the war in Ukraine. If you go back to the beginning of the war, he issued a tweet and made a variety of other statements essentially saying what I've just said verbatim that there's no way the United States can fight Russia and conflict because that would lead to World War three. And we obviously all want to
avoid World War three. The challenge, of course, is that China is also a nuclear armed great power, and so if China attacks Taiwan, the United States has to choose between fighting a nuclear armed great power and letting Taiwan
be conquered. And China has been developing its own nuclear arsenal very rapidly, not just strategic nuclear capabilities, so things that can reach all the way to the United States, but so called theater nuclear capabilities, things that are perhaps a little bit more useful in terms of actually fighting a regional war against the United States. And it's entirely plausible that if China did move against Taiwan, it would couple that with warnings to the United States saying this
is a fight over China's territorial integrity. If you get involved, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons. And that threat would be very difficult for the United States to deal with. And so one of the challenges the Biden administration, i think has faced over the past couple of years is trying to disabuse Hijinping of this notion that the United States would only support Taiwan in the same way that it has supported Ukraine by sending weapons and other
things without actually getting directly involved. But if Xijinping thought that America's actions in Ukraine spoke louder than its words about Taiwan, he might be wrong, but he wouldn't be insane to draw that conclusion. So I worry a little bit that the declaratory statements we've made about nuclear weapons in the Ukraine context may actually be somewhat unhelpful in the Taiwan context.
So many scary things to worry about, interesting things to think about. Let's take one more break and then we'll come back to the show. I'm back with how Brands, who's educated me about how the world works. How we've been talking about the chill wins of our current cold wars in twenty twenty four as an election year. So talk to me about how you assess the Biden team's foreign policy conduct thus far, taking into accounts some of the things we've already discussed.
I think, on the whole, the Biden team has done a pretty good job on foreign policy. I think there were definitely some hiccups or stumbles early on. The Afghanistan war ended in a way that nobody can think particularly good things about there were a variety of other challenges. There are a variety of challenges that are still out there.
I'm not sure that the administration has much of a viable Middle East strategy at this point, for instance, But on the two biggest issues, which are the Ukraine War and the competition with China, I would certainly give the administration passing marks, and I think they've done pretty well. So I think the administration has done pretty well in imposing a huge cost on Ukraine and using that war as an opportunity, tragic as it is, to rally the
larger free world community. There are times I wish the administration had done a little bit more, a little bit faster to support Ukraine, but most of my critiques would be kind of quibbles at the margin. With respect to China, I think the United States as a country needs to go faster to develop the sort of capabilities and coalitions
that would ensure stability in the Western Pacific. But the Biden administration, to give it some credit, has done remarkable things in terms of strengthening and expanding US coalitions and that part of the world. Again, there are things I would critique this administration, like the last one is a bit of a disaster when it comes to the economic elements of US policy in the Indo Pacific, namely the
absence of a meaningful trade policy. But as I mentioned, that's a bypartisan failing, and so it's hard to get particularly mad at the Biden administration as opposed to the sort of broader US political class for that particular shortcoming. And so I think foreign policy is an area where the administration hasn't done everything right, but they have a decent record DURAN in twenty twenty four.
It's also about a long time since any administration of any political stripe has had to really think in a real time way about multi theater engagement with very robust opponents.
Yeah, that's right, and this is an area where I think it is probably fair to give the administration a little bit of criticism in the first year. One of the things the administration argued in the first year was that it basically just needed to park the confrontations with
Russia in Iran so it could focus on China. I think that rhetoric was probably a little bit unhelpful in the impact that it had on Vladimir Putin, because it may have helped convince him that if he pushed hard in Ukraine, the US would be distracted and unwilling to respond as strongly as it actually did. But I think the administration has started to get a better handle on
that strategically the last couple of years. It does raise a larger question, though, which is that the US has been moving toward a military strategy over the past ten years or so that's essentially premised on the idea that the United States would not need to fight more than one significant war at once. That shift was necessary in a way to help the Pentagon focus on the demands of competition and potentially conflict with China as opposed to
getting pulled in a lot of different directions. But if you just look at the way the world is going today, it's unfortunately not that hard to imagine scenarios in which the US might face violent instability in Eastern Europe and East Asia, or East Asia and the Persian Gulf at the same time.
If polls are to be believed, Donald Trump is highly likely to be the Republican nominee for president if he winds up in the White House again. How do you think about the second Trump administration's foreign policy as it enters this very perilous world we're living in right now.
I think it would be really dangerous and really bad. Just to be perfectly honest with you, I think that Donald Trump brings a unique combination of incompetence, illiberalism, and unilateralism to US domestic policy and US foreign policy, and that would be a pretty destabilizing element on the international stage right now. Yes, Trump would do some things that you know, a card carrying China hawk like me would appreciate.
He would be economically fairly tough with the Chinese, but you know, Trump has shown very little understanding of why, for instance, Taiwan matters strategically. He would also.
Where it is on a map, perhaps.
Like where it is on a map the role of plays in the First Island chain. I think he would probably pursue a policy of omnidirectional antagonism, so he would annoy the Chinese while also picking fights with US allies in the Asia Pacific. And certainly it would be bad news from Ukraine's perspective, because Trump, you know, as was the case during his first term, continues to kind of, you know, read the lines that the Russians might have written for him on the Ukraine War and how the
United States needs to extricate itself from that fight. Whether he would actually do that or not is a different question, but certainly the prospect that Trump might become president is one of the things that Putin is looking to as a means of salvation in the Ukraine War. He can hold out hope that Trump will be elected and the US will drop out of the Ukraine Coalition. I think it'd be more complicated than that. But what I think
is an important What Putin thinks is important. So I think the reality is that countries around the world, in Europe, in Asia, and the Middle East are already trying to figure out what a second Trump presidency would mean for them. They're trying to hedge their bets now so that they are not caught out if Trump is reelected. And if Trump is reelected, it would make it far harder to make the argument that the Biden administration has tried to
make that. Yes, there was this period when Trump was president. It was very disruptive, but that's not the real American foreign policy. The real American foreign policy is what we're seeing now. If Trump gets a second term, I think it's much harder to make that argument, and so you just inject a much higher degree of uncertainty about the long term future of US foreign policy as.
Well, and every other global player has to consider an unpredictable but powerful US with unclear strategic goals and a very itchy but unstable trigger finger in the Oval Office. You know, if you could wave your magic diplomatic wand across the globe looking at you know, essentially at what's going on in Eastern Europe right now, and what's going on in East Asia in terms of militarization and this lurking cold war, how would you like to see it resolve?
Well, ideally you would see Russia and China become, you know, willing constructive members of the US led international order. And I don't say that simply because I'm an American and I like a US led international order for that reason, although I'm sure that's true to a degree, but because the international order that the US and its friends have built since nineteen forty five has helped deliver the most peaceful, prosperous,
humane world we've ever lived in. If you had to pick a seventy five year period in history in which to live. You'd pick this one for that reason, and I think it would serve a lot of people's interests around the world of this international system where to continue
and it were to thrive. And moreover, the fact is that the world is healthier if it has a China and Russia playing constructive role in the international system, because these countries make up a huge chunk of humanity to make up a huge chunk of the Earth's surface, and it's kind of hard to imagine a stable international system if Russia and China are permanently excluded from it. So
that would be my wish. The reality, unfortunately, is that I just don't see any prospect of this happening anytime soon. It's certainly not going to happen on Putin's watch in Moscow, and I worry that it's not going to happen on
Che's watch or perhaps even after that in China. And so I think realistically the objective of the United States has to be to strengthen the international order around Russia and China, to limit their ability to do it harm, whether through violent aggression or economic predation, and try to build as strong as possible a community of like minded states that are committed to the international order because they
recognize the benefits that it holds for them. Unfortunately, that's also a recipe for a fairly long, protracted, difficult, dangerous standoff with Moscow, Beijing and some of their confederates around the world. But I think that's the best we're likely to get in the coming years.
I always like to ask folks at the end of the show what they've learned as you look at the events of the last year and a half in a tight time frame, What do you know now that you didn't know then?
That's a great question. I think that the period since February twenty twenty two has underscored a bunch of things for me. I think one thing would be the events in the last eighteen nineteen months are a reminder of how fragile international order is. We take for granted that we live in this world where global trade is possible, where great power war is rare, where democracy is widespread, But that order is really just the product of the
efforts of the states that are sustaining it. And what the Ukraine War indicates is that there are actors out there with dramatically different preferences for how the world should work. Right, Vladimir Putin does not want to live in a liberal international order. He does not want to live in a world where territorial sovereignty is considered sacer sancti, does not want to live in a world where human rights are widely respected in democracy is the dominant form of government.
And so the war reveals the way in which the world would change if these sorts of actors got the upper hand. And so that's perhaps the first lesson. The second lesson, though, I think, is how much gas there still is in the tank when it comes to American leadership. And we had heard a lot of talk after the Trump era or after the global financial crisis before this about how we're moving out of an era of American power, moving into a multipolar world, how the world has changed fundamentally.
But when Russia attacks Ukraine, the fundamental rally point in Europe was NATO, which the US led alliance. You see off the chart demand for more American engagement in that region and elsewhere you see how countries are clustering around
the United States. And so one of the fundamental enablers of American influencing the international system is the fact that the United States supports a concept of international order that is attractive or at least acceptable to lots of other powerful states in the world, particularly advanced democracies, and so when a crisis like this happens, they try to do more with the United States rather than less, and that has the effect of further shoring up this order that's
under threat. And so you can look at this in a couple of different ways. The war underscored for me the fragility of international order, but also in some way the resilience of it.
You know, Al, I could talk to you for the rest of the day, but we have run out of time in our little visit, so I'm going to have to call it quits. But thank you so much for spending time with me today.
Thank you, Tim, I really enjoyed the conversation.
Hal Brands is a foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, and he's a Bloomberg opinion columnist. Here at Crash Course, we believe that collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that no matter how much a might be wishing for a peaceful revolution to all of the compla and dangerous conflicts that are brewing in the world right now. The need to end them might involve something other than just diplomacy.
What did you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now, and please leave us a review. It helps other people find the show. This episode was produced by
the indispensable Anamasarakus, moses On Dam and Me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Henrickson, and we had editing help from Sage Bauman, Katie Boyce, Jeff Grocott, Mike Nize and Christine Benden. Bilart Blake Maples does our sound engineering, and our original theme song was composed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another Crash Course