Ezra Klein Interviews Fareed Zakaria
Transcript: March 4, 2022
Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China
The case for thinking strategically, not ideologically, about great power conflict.
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
It is eerie knowing that you have lived through the end of an era and that you’re now witnessing the birth of another. For most of my life, foreign policy has not been dominated by great power conflict. And that is a defining characteristic of that period. There have been crises. There have been wars. There have been horrors. But America was too strong and other countries too weak to really worry about world wars or even cold wars, to see the world as this great power chessboard.
That’s changed. I don’t know where you’d mark it exactly, but it’s like the old line about how bankruptcy happens. First, the era ended slowly, and then it ended all at once. It ended slowly as China rose in power, in wealth. And then it ended all at once with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the sharp revitalization of the NATO alliance, to some degree of a Western identity in response.
So we are again in an era of great power something — great power competition, great power conflict. But what? What kind of conflict? What kind of competition? What are the lines?
Should Russia and China be understood, as many in the West are arguing, as a neoauthoritarian bloc? Should we see the lines as these open democratic societies against the closed authoritarian regimes? Should Russia be understood as great power at all? Or is it something closer to a rogue state or even a vassal state increasingly of China?
I mean, their G.D.P., it’s roughly that of Italy. They’re not an economic peer of the US. They’re not an economic peer of China. What has the European become, now that Russia has roused its fury, its collective identity, and maybe most importantly, its defense spending? And I think this is actually the most important question of all. What is China in all this? Is a cold war, not just a hot war, between China and the US inevitable? Or is that a choice and one we can choose not to make? Can Russia and China be split from each other, if we make the right decisions?
The most dangerous moment in a foreign policy paradigm is its birth, is its beginning. Because at the beginning, the rules remain unknown. The alliances remain untested, and there is not predictability. That’s where we are right now.
And so I wanted to have a conversation about not just what this era is shaping up to be, but the many things it still could be. I wanted to have a conversation where we tried to imagine it, but didn’t impose a shape it has not yet attained. If we are re-entering a period of great powers, and I think we are, how do we avoid letting old mindsets and metaphors drag us back into the disasters of the past? How do we not believe the future is more set than it actually is?
And so I invited Fareed Zakaria to join me on the show. Zakaria is, of course, the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” He’s a columnist for The Washington Post. He’s a best selling author many, many, many times over. And he’s been thinking, in his various books, about the problems of illiberal democracies and the rise of new powers for decades. And so I hoped he could offer some perspective on the moment, and he didn’t disappoint at all. As always, my email— ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Fareed Zakaria, welcome to the show.
Fareed Zakaria
Pleasure to be on, Ezra.
Ezra Klein
So on your show this past Sunday, you said, quote, “Russia’s utterly unprovoked, unjustifiable, immoral invasion of Ukraine would seem to mark the end of an era, one that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.” How would you describe the era that feels to so many like it’s ending?
Fareed Zakaria
One simple way would be to describe it as a Pax Americana. Because in the most simple realpolitik sense, great power politics, you went from a world that was dominated by two great powers, two superpowers, to one in which there was just one. The period after 1945, Hans Morgenthau, the great international relations theorist, said the reason he called it a bipolar era was that the two poles, the United States and the Soviet Union, just towered over everybody else. And that remained true until 1991 roughly, when the Soviet Union essentially collapses.
And after that, we entered an age where there was no contest to the United States’ supremacy, hegemony, politically, militarily, economically, but even in terms of the realm of ideas. I grew up in India. In India, there was an active contest between, what were the best ideas about which way to order your society — capitalist, democratic, socialist, communist? All that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So it’s a unique moment in World history, where all these forces seem to favor the American model and American power. And I think that is the world we’ve lived in. You can say that it begins to atrophy with the global financial crisis, the Iraq War going sour. But this certainly seems to mark the first frontal, great power challenge to American hegemony. That’s why I say, in a sense, it’s the end of an era.
Ezra Klein
I think that question of where you market is really interesting. I want to hold on the emotional, the felt experience of this world for a couple of minutes here. Because, look, I was born in 1984. So the Soviet Union really collapses, ‘91, let’s call it. And the next 20 years or so — so most of my maturing and political life — they’re really unusually free of great power conflict.
And I would mark it 2010-ish, China is becoming strong enough. And as you note, the financial crisis and the Iraq War are making America look weak enough, that people are beginning to expect a different world is coming. Russia really begins becoming more assertive. They meddle in our elections, obviously, in 2015 and 2016. Now they’re invading Ukraine. And so what do people who maybe have come of age in this aberrant period of American unipolarity not understand, not gutturally sense about what it means to not live in an age of American unipolarity?
Fareed Zakaria
More than anything else, a sense of constraints, a sense of the limitations on your power. Throughout human history, power has always been checked by power. I mean, there’s a period of the Roman Empire. But for the most part, modern history has been marked by a world of many powers.
And that meant there was severe limits on what you could do. We now think of the United States nostalgically. We talk about the period after World War II as being a period of extraordinary American dominance. That’s what Trump wants to return America to.
But in fact, while domestically, it was a period of — yeah, it was a great period of economic boom times, in international terms, the United States was very constrained. The Soviet Union was this very powerful rival. Approximately half the world, in some way or the other, either aligned itself with the Soviet Union or was non-aligned, which was a way of distancing itself largely from the United States. So when America wanted to get its way on international issues in any international fora, like the U.N., it could not. When it was trying to rally countries to its side for some international cause or the other, most of the time, it wasn’t able to do that.
That sense of real constraints on American power has not existed for the last 30-odd years. You know, we’ve had trouble getting a complete coalition for one thing or the other, but never the sense that this was the defining characteristic of the world we lived in, that there was superpower competition, that it was a zero-sum game, that our loss was their gain. That world we haven’t really experienced. And by the way, the global economy was built on that lack of great power competition. That’s why the global economy was so broad, so wide, so ubiquitous, involving everybody, Russia and China included.
Ezra Klein
You just mentioned zero-sum competition. And I just noted the felt experience of Millennials — let’s say, Zoomers, true — of being in this aberrant period without great power competition. But before that, people who are older, what they remember mostly is the Cold War competition, which did have this profound zero-sum dynamic to it. And is that the only kind of great power competition that can exist? Because I worry that the mental model that is operating for a lot of analysts right now and a lot of politicians right now is that, if it’s not the ‘90s, it’s the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s.
Fareed Zakaria
The best way to answer your question is along two dimensions. First, in terms of power politics, in terms of realpolitik, no, you can have different ways of organizing power or disorganizing power that is not unipolar, that is not bipolar. Generally speaking, we refer to the third option as multi-polar. And that’s what most of modern history has been characterized by.
And multi-polarity is actually even more unstable than bipolarity. Because a bipolar world, while very dangerous, because you have these two big powers glowering at each other, and every loss is the other’s gain — so that’s why we cared during the Cold War. Which way is Angola going to go? Which way is Nicaragua going to go? Which way is Cuba going to go?
You think, at some level, these were kind of crazy, foolish, irrelevant questions. Who cares which way Nicaragua went? But you wouldn’t remember this, because it happened around the time of your birth, but there was a huge, heated debate in the United States during the Reagan administration as to which side Nicaragua was going to be on. Because everything became about the great power competition.
A multi-polar world is different. It is ceaseless competition among lots of countries, but they’re constantly shifting power, weight, policy, which means there’s lots of room for error, misperception, miscalculation. Multi-polarity is what characterized 19th century Europe.
And you will notice that that is a period of lots of little wars. Germans go to war with the French. British go to war with the French during the Napoleonic period. Napoleon goes to war with the Russians. And there’s just constant movement of trying to figure out who’s on top, who’s not and constant ceding of land. So that’s the power politics.
But then there’s a second piece to this, that I think it’s worth talking about, which is this is not just about a world of power politics. There is also the question of, how much have the liberal ideas, practices and institutions that have been built up over the last century, how much have they changed the world so that it’s not zero-sum? To what extent have we created a world of interdependence, commerce, capitalism, travel, contact, values, that mean that we shouldn’t just be applying this power political set of ideas to the world?
Ezra Klein
I think that’s very important, and we’re going to come back to it. But I want to pick up on the idea of stability that you mentioned and a cousin of it, which is predictability. There’s an idea you’ll hear from foreign policy scholars, which is that the most dangerous moment of a given foreign policy paradigm is it’s beginning, the beginning before clear red lines are established, before the different parties really understand each other’s motives and intentions and capabilities. Does it feel to you like that’s where we are now?
Fareed Zakaria
I think so. Because it’s an interesting — I hadn’t thought about it quite in the way you describe it. But what you are describing is, in some ways, for example, the only Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union both had acquired this terrible new weaponry, nuclear technology, and weaponized it. But they barely talked to one another. There was a great deal of ambiguity about what their posture was, just how many weapons they had.
And there was very little contact. There was no constant arms control summits. The arms control itself didn’t exist. And after the Cuban Missile Crisis, you start a process of regularized contact, communication, confidence, building measures, and things like that.
So in some ways, I wonder whether we are in a similar moment, where there is a waning of American unipolarity, hegemony. There is the rise of some kind of new structure. We are not completely sure what it is. I myself think, in the long run, it will tend toward bipolarity.
But the truth is we don’t know. And that period of uncertainty is very unstable. And it’s the one we’re living in now.
Ezra Klein
So how do you map out what you see emerging right now? Robert Gates, the former defense secretary, was on your show over the weekend. And he said that the United States and our allies face a situation we have not faced since World War II. And that is we have two superpower adversaries, one in Europe, one in Asia. Our so-called holiday from history is over.
Do you see it like that, that we should understand it as there being two adversaries here, Russia and China. And if so, should we understand them as linked, as allied, as in a relationship of convenience? If you were to sketch out what looks like it is emerging, what is the structure?
Fareed Zakaria
To me, it seems much less clear than Gates was making it out to be, that you have two superpower adversaries. To put Russia in the position of a superpower seems, to me, we’re fundamentally missing something, particularly in the 21st century. It is fundamentally a petro state. It has some natural resources beyond that, but not very much.
It has all kinds of bad omens in terms of its power profiles. It has bad demographics. It has incredible overreliance on one or two dimensions of power. It has triggered a very powerful countervailing response in Europe, which is its principal line of contact with the outside world.
So it doesn’t feel right to me to call Russia a superpower. China clearly is. The structure of the world that looks clearer to me is one that is emerging bipolarity. You have two powers that are head and shoulders above all the others.
So that was, again, Morgenthau’s definition in the ‘40s. And I think it works here, which is that number one and two are very far away from the others. So the U.S. is number one, for sure, economically. China is number two. But get this — the Chinese economy is larger than the third, fourth, and fifth economy in the world put together.
Similarly, the U.S. has the largest defense spending in the world. China is number two. And again, China’s defense spending is larger than the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth put together. So you see the U.S. and China are in the league of their own.
What makes Russia complicated is it is a spoiler state. It’s willing to use what power it has and really in a kind of very disruptive way. So for me, it complicates life. It’s a kind of menace. It has to be dealt with, but it doesn’t have the capacity to shape the international system in quite the way that China does.
I think we should be trying to drive a wedge between Russia and China. I think we could do it. The Chinese and the Russians have been suspicious and hostile of each other from Nixon’s opening to China until yesterday. This is not a particularly comfortable alliance that Xi and Putin have. And if the United States were to work at it, I think it would be possible to exploit areas of difference, areas of disagreement, in a much more effective way than we have done so far.
Ezra Klein
So what working at it would look like, changes, depending on what you think the nature of the cleavages here and the alliances here are? And I want to lay my cards in this conversation on the table a bit, which is I am really allergic to the new cold war mentality that dominates in Washington around China. I have a really just bad reaction to it.
But I want to try to give that a hearing. It’s part of why I wanted to have you on the show. Because I thought you could help me do it. And so I’ve been thinking about an essay Thomas Wright, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe, at Brookings, wrote in 2018, about the inevitable return of great power conflict. And I want to read a chunk of it, because I thought he laid out the logic of this case very clearly.
So he writes, quote, “Russian and Chinese leaders concluded, that if the liberal order succeeded globally, it would pose an existential threat to the regimes. Moscow and Beijing saw the spread of color revolutions, helped along by the press and non-governmental organizations. They came to understand that Western governments will always face pressure to back democracy activists overseas at precisely the moment that authoritarians are most vulnerable, regardless of what assurances or cooperative relations existed beforehand.
They saw how media organizations publish material that destabilize the regimes, such as the 2012 New York Times investigation into corruption in China. They worried about Google and social media companies aiding dissenters in their own societies,” and so on here. And so there’s a bunch there.
But the underlying idea that he’s laying out is that our system, our values, are more expansionary and confrontational than we give them credit for. And the systems we then criticize, threaten, even seek to undermine, see us as a threat, and they try to weaken and undermine us, in turn. And that that’s pretty fundamental to the differences between an open, small-d democratic world, and a more closed neoauthoritarian world. And there’s not an obvious way around that. That’s a pretty I think popular analysis right now. Do you think it’s right?
Fareed Zakaria
Look, the world we’re living in is a world of grays. And so when you present something like this, there are elements of it that are true. There’s no doubt that there’s a difference between dictatorship and democracy and that democracies, in some sense, pose a fundamental, ideological threat to dictatorships. But I think that what you read in that Thomas Wright essay, which I remember, is a fundamentally ideological conception of international relations.
Whereas, I have a fundamentally strategic conception of international relations. So when I look at that same reality, what I’m struck by is, China and Russia are very different in this way. Russia benefits from international instability. It’s an oil state. Oil prices go up. It seeks to undermine international institutions and cooperation.
China, as a general principle, does not do that. It benefits enormously from international stability, from international order, even from international institutions. What it wants is to become powerful within them, so powerful, that you cannot violate its sovereignty.
China’s number one principle for the last 20 years, and what it criticizes the U.S. for, is state sovereignty, the inviolability of state sovereignty. Which is why this whole business with Russia invading Ukraine has been so awkward for Beijing. So what they want is to grow powerful within the world as it exists.
You can see this in the fact that they want to become powerful in the U.N. They want to become powerful in the I.M.F. They want to become powerful in the World Bank. They don’t want to overturn these institutions.
A good example that gives color to this is, during the Obama administration, they came to the United States and said, we want to set up an Asian infrastructure bank. Because we don’t think the World Bank has enough capacity to fund all the needs that we have in Asia. The Obama administration said, no, you won’t, and we will actively oppose this.
So the Chinese go out and set up their own, that’s totally not tied to the existing international system, but still fairly rule-based and such. Everybody joins it. When Britain joined it, an Obama administration official said to me, I guess the game is over.
So that’s a good example of how we were, in my view, unnecessarily an overly suspicious of what the Chinese were going to do. And the Russians would never do something like that. So there’s that reality.
And the second, of course, is China and Russia share a huge land border, have had decades of hostility. China is a rising, avaricious power. Russia is a declining power. If you look at their border and the empty wastelands of Siberia are being increasingly bought up by Chinese businessmen and entrepreneurs, it is not a happy situation.
So why would you lump them together? Why would you do the opposite of what Strategy 101 tells you, which is divide your adversaries? Instead, by applying this kind of ideological frame, we are uniting our adversaries. And I think most importantly, we’re fundamentally misreading these two very different countries.
Ezra Klein
One thing I thought was so interesting in that Wright essay, because Wright is very much part of the American foreign policy establishment, is somebody who believes, as I do, in American values and in democracy and in liberalism. But he really does present America as expansionary, liberal democracy as expansionary, in a way that I don’t think we always admit it is.
And something you said there, Fareed, I think really gets at this, that if you look at America from the outside, how we look to Russians, how we look to the Chinese — and I sure as hell don’t want to take the Russian side at the moment. But I just want to offer the narrative. As Russia weakened, we expanded NATO to their doorstep. The Bush administration, George W. Bush’s administration, really pushed this. As China rose, our top foreign policy officials have talked openly, publicly, explicitly, about keeping them in, to quote former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “their proper place,” and we’ve organized a lot of foreign policy around that.
We’ve expanded military presence in East Asia, arms sales to Taiwan. Bush embraced a nuclear India. You can keep going on down the list. Do we not have a clear sense of our role in practically driving them closer together? Do we not see clearly how our foreign policy looks to those whom it’s often targeted at?
Fareed Zakaria
We do not at all. I mean, you raise a very important point. And it’s an even larger point than you think. I don’t think we understand how we appear to the rest of the world. So it’s one of the things I often point out with regard to the so-called liberal international order or the rules-based order.
We think we’re the great upholders of it, without we don’t seem to understand we have violated those rules probably more often than almost any other great power in the world. I mean, think of the Iraq War. Think about the multiple efforts at regime change. Things about the times we violate international trade rules every time it suits our purposes. Think about the number of times we weaponize finance.
So this is all an undermining of the international rules-based system, right? We always think we do it in a good cause, so it’s different, right? Like trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein is different from Russia invading Ukraine. But both are violations of state sovereignty outside of any kind of UN system.
Now, there is a broader issue, which I think you’re also raising, which is democracy is inherently expansionist in the sense that we want the world to become democratic. And that’s been part of the American DNA forever. We have a theology. We assume that this is going to be the way that the world ends up. And that’s ideologically very expansionist. It’s very threatening to dictatorships around the world.
And again, I think it’s different from, say, the Chinese conception of their national interests. I’ve sometimes wondered whether this is rooted in the kind of high Protestant tradition that Britain and America came out of, two great superpowers that rule the world or dominated the world, that really had this conception of universalism, that what was good and true for Britain and for the United States was good and true for everybody.
So Britain goes into India and tries to make India, in some sense, in its image. America goes into Iraq and says, we’re going to make this a democracy. It’s going to be just like Kansas or whatever.
The Chinese have no such conception. They have an ethno-nationalist conception of their global role, which is to make China great. There’s no way Iraq could become like China, because it’s not full of Chinese people. You know what I mean? There’s a Han Chinese conception of their national interest.
That is a real ideological clash that is hard to mitigate. But you could mitigate the great by this other piece of it, which is we could be more conscious of the way in which our actions are seen as not just expansionist, but also hypocritical in ways that we often don’t realize. So there’s that exchange in Anchorage, where the Secretary of State Tony Blinken tells the Chinese all the things they’ve done wrong.
And for the first time, the Chinese foreign minister stands up and says, well, what about Iraq? What about Afghanistan? What about those civilian casualties? What about the way you treat Blacks at home?
And that exchange, by the way, the Chinese side of it went viral in China. There are t-shirts in China with the things that he said. That’s what we sometimes don’t understand, how we come across to the rest of the world in our acts as a global superpower.
Ezra Klein
And so I want to draw out something that you’re saying, but I want to make it very explicit here. Because I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’re in another age where there’s going to be a lot of great power competition, hopefully cooperation, and clearly now, conflict. But it does matter how we conceptualize what that is. And I think — and I’ve got all these quotes here on my paper in front of me on it — that the dominant view is that people want to fit this back into the West versus the Soviet Union, that there’s liberal, democratic West, and then this neoauthoritarian bloc rising.
And that might become true. And there’s elements of truth to it, perhaps. But something you’re saying is that another way of thinking about it is that there’s a very, very powerful United States. There’s a rising power in China. And one thing we don’t want to have happen is have a neoauthoritarian bloc cohere around China.
And if you think about it that way, then instead of trying to hold down everybody in that area, you’re really trying to drive wedges between, say, China and Russia. So what does it mean to drive that wedge? How do you begin to split them apart in their interests?
Fareed Zakaria
Probably the greatest 19th century statesman was Bismarck. And Bismarck’s rule was, I want to have better relations with all of my potential rivals than they have with one another. And in a sense, it is that Bismarckian logic that drove Nixon and Kissinger to China in 1972.
Remember, this was a China that was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. So this was not a reforming China at the time. This was a deeply, deeply reactionary, rogue communist China, that was funding insurgencies all over the world, from Angola to Latin America. But the Nixon-Kissinger strategy was, we are going to drive a wedge between the two great communist countries, so that we’ve divided our adversaries.
I think we could have a much better working relationship with China. Look, the Chinese expected this when Biden came in. They thought there was going to be a reversal of the Trump policy, reversal of Trump tariffs, reversal of the badgering China about everything. Instead, we kept all of that. We even doubled down on it.
I’ll give you one example that would be politically controversial. But I think it’s worth pointing out. We weaponized and politicized the idea of genocide and accused the Chinese of genocide. In the case of Xinjiang — and I can say this as a Muslim — what they are doing to the Muslims there is horrible. It’s probably crimes against humanity.
But it is a forcible process of re-education; indoctrination; to some degree, incarceration. It is not mass slaughter. And to use the word genocide to describe that, not, frankly, what is going on in some other places in the world, does feel like it’s a very selective and politicized use of the word to attack China. And that is certainly how it is perceived in China.
I mean, I had the prime minister of Pakistan on the other day on my show, and he said, look, 100,000 Indian Muslims have died in Kashmir in largely extrajudicial killings, vigilante killings, over the last several decades. Is that worse than what’s going on in Xinjiang? I mean, his view is that there is no question. It’s not worse. Of course, he’s got a politicized view there.
But my point is, we could have a working relationship with China. Because the fundamental threat that China poses to us is an economic one. And it is one of competitiveness. And what we need to do fundamentally, to deal with it, 90 percent of it is invest at home, invest in education, invest in technology, maybe have the government do more to encourage some of the technologies that we think we may be falling behind in. I’m in favor of all that. But very little of it requires that we enter into a Cold War with China.
Ezra Klein
There’s a very, very central question in how you understand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that is somewhat unanswered in a lot of the media analysis, which is, do you understand Putin as being driven by a coherent view of Russia’s interests or being driven by quirks or pathologies of his own psychology?
Fareed Zakaria
I think it’s probably a combination of them. Putin began his tenure in office. And remember, he has been in power now since the end of 1999. He began, I don’t want to say pro-Western, but recognizing the power of the West.
Look, Russia was deeply indebted. 1998 was when the Russian default happened. Oil prices were low. Russia was the second tier, even a third tier power at that point.
That’s the point at which, by the way, Bush looks in his eyes and sees his soul. It might have been more that he was seeing low oil prices than Putin’s soul. But Putin was amenable.
As Russian power has grown, Putin has revived a sense of Russian nationalism, a sense of Russian imperialism. And Ukraine, in particular, I think, is he’s neuralgic about. So where he’s calculating and cautious about the others, notice when he goes into Georgia, it’s a limited military intervention. He takes the two pockets of Georgia that are Russian-speaking, declares them independent republics.
Ukraine feels emotional, romantic, nationalist neuralgia, call it what you will. But the key here is, all that nationalism and romanticism and imperialism feeds into a worldview that says, I don’t care if this breaks the international system. I don’t care if this imposes great costs on me.
That, to my mind, is the part that is deeply troubling and why I’m in favor of the most robust response to counter this invasion. Because Putin is trying to break the international system. And if he succeeds, there is a good chance you will have broken it.
I don’t want to say irreparably. And things can be fixed. But that’s why this is such a big deal. Because Putin may have his own romantic notions of unifying the Russian-speaking people. But in doing so, the roadkill along the way is the rules-based international order. And that we cannot allow to happen. We cannot let him win at that.
Ezra Klein
What does succeeds or success here even mean? I guess, for Putin, maybe for the international order, I found this a little bit more opaque a question than I think people realize. Because there’s also a way of looking at this where Putin ends up engaging in what’s going to become a much more — is becoming, as we speak, a much more brutal invasion.
And then he’s trying to continuously pacify a huge country that doesn’t want him in there. That looks like a graveyard for imperial ambitions to me. So what is success here for him, such that it would break the international order?
Fareed Zakaria
Success is very simple. He turns Ukraine into Belarus. He turns Ukraine into a subordinate satellite state. He forces it to be demilitarized, to be neutral, to renounce any aspiration for NATO membership. He decapitates the regime and puts in place a pliant pro-Russian government.
As you say, it’s going to be very hard. There’s going to be a lot of pushback. You’re talking about a country of 44 million people who do not want it. I think we have seen vividly and powerfully and in a deeply moving way how nationalistic the Ukrainians are, how proud they are of their country.
But it’s a 10 to 1 mismatch in defense spending. It’s the David and Goliath story. Russia has the capacity and is willing to be brutal to at least, formally gain control of the place. And if they do that, they will have violated the sovereignty of Ukraine, engaged in a completely unprovoked war, forced a surrender in terms upon — that are really, again, reminiscent of the 19th century.
And all of this breaks the international system because — and this is where the liberal international order is worth talking about. The liberal international order has had a surprisingly powerful effect on international behavior. So there’s this wonderful book by two Yale scholars, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, which points out that the forcible alteration of borders and the annexation of territory, which was a routine feature of international life from, say, 1845 to 1945, became virtually non-existent after 1945.
There are very few cases where countries have actually just marched in and grabbed territory. The Russian example with Ukraine is a rare exception. And it’s very important that it not succeed, that there be very, very high costs for Russia in doing this.
Ezra Klein
What does it mean for that order to be upheld? Because the West’s current stance is that they’ll fight Russia economically, but they/we will not directly intervene militarily to save Ukraine. I mean, there are arms shipments going forward, but we’re not bombing the Russian convoys or anything like that.
I think what everybody fears right now, what’s arguably happening as we speak, is that Russia is retooling for a much more brutal invasion, where they simply flatten cities and shell civilians. So on some level, is Putin right to say that the commitment to that international order is weak, that he has already shown, on some level, its limitations?
Fareed Zakaria
I think it’s fair to say that the West had, in this case, greater aspirations and ambitions than the means it was willing to deploy. Ukraine is a hard case, is another way to put it. It’s not in NATO. It neighbors Russia. Many Russians think of Ukraine as inextricably linked with it. I’ve been struck by that. When you go to Russia, whether it’s an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the kind of right-wing cultural critic of the Russian regime, whether it’s Mikhail Gorbachev, the kind of left-wing critic of the regime, they all believe Ukraine is inextricably tied up with Russia.
So it’s a hard case. What do you do to a country that you don’t have a formal security guarantee and that has the second largest, or the largest, nuclear arsenal in the world, depending on how you count it? I do think we should be careful not to go down a path that could lead to an escalation that even gets close to a nuclear conflict.
But I believe we could be much tougher. I think we could arm the Ukrainians far more effectively, far more extensively, than we’re arming them. I think we could provide much more aid in various forms. And I think the central issue that we have to deal with is, are we really willing to impose costs on Russia? Is this as significant as I think it is?
And if it is, you can’t fight every war at the same time. The only way you can make this work is you squeeze Russia on energy. And in order to squeeze Russia on energy, you have to be willing to give up some of your other goals for energy.
So for example, if we were to relax sanctions on Venezuela, if we were to get into the Iran deal and relax sanctions on Iran, if we were to use American liquefied natural gas and send it over to Europe, all those things would have a very, very significant effect. There are a couple of very good papers out there that show Russia is not providing so much in the way of energy to Europe, that it could not be replaced.
But you can’t do everything. You have to make priorities. And my priority is Russia must feel that it is facing unacceptable costs. And if you drive that home, and if you’re willing to make no exceptions — tell the Italians, sorry, for two years, you can’t sell Prada handbags in Russia — whatever it takes, you will be able to drive up the costs.
Russia is not such a big economy, and it is totally connected to the world in the sense that the Russian elite, in particular, well-being has been their ability to buy large amounts of consumer goods from the West, using their petro dollars. And if you can break that nexus, I think you can make them face real pain. But it will cost us as well. I mean, that’s the thing. It isn’t cost-free.
Ezra Klein
You see in that an asymmetry here, in the structure of the liberal democracies and the structure of, at the very least, Russia, where certainly, going into this, the fear of a Germany, of an Italy, to some degree of a United States — and I think you continue to see it with the energy carve-outs and the sanctions — is they don’t want their populations to feel too much pain. Because that upends their own domestic politics. Joe Biden does not want energy prices spiking even more in 2022 than they did in 2021 if, for no other reason, than there’s a midterm in 2022.
Putin, meanwhile, whether this is true or not, is ruling as if he does not need to worry about how the Russian public feels about the punishing economic misery that is about to be, or is being, unleashed upon them. He’s even ruling like he doesn’t have to worry about what the Russian elite, the oligarchs, the other power centers in his own regime and country, he doesn’t have to worry about what they think about the way their lives have been upended.
And I can’t tell, actually, who’s right or if either side is actually right about the calculations they’re making. Clearly, the West is quickly coming to believe that there’s enough passion in their own publics to go further on sanctions than they thought a week ago. But I’m curious how you see those bets on both sides.
Fareed Zakaria
I think democracies have more staying power and more willingness to take pain than people realize. We always hear this about democracies, that they’re shallow. They can’t take the pain. They can’t stay the course. I don’t think it’s true.
We’ve seen extraordinary sacrifices that people have made. And by the way, a lot of what I’m describing, in terms of opening up supply from Venezuela, from Iran, from the United States — remember, the United States is now the largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons in the world. All this would just relieve the price pressure. High prices help Putin. So the more we can lower prices, they help the American consumer.
Also, by the way, one of the reasons that China and India are allying themselves with Russia on this issue is they need cheap oil. They need cheap gas. I mean, I was talking to an Indian businessman who said, at $120 a barrel, no Indian government can survive.
So there’s a reality to what you’re describing. But for the American consumer, there may actually be a way to make this not as painful. But we need to have patience, and we need to stay the course. We just need to understand the stakes here. And they’re pretty high.
Ezra Klein
How about the other side of that? To what extent can Putin rule alone? And to what extent does he actually have to worry about the feelings, the sentiments, the opinions, of this more complex network of oligarchs, party officials, industrialists? I mean, no ruler truly is singular. And certainly, the strategy of the West is to try to create cracks in that elite structure around him.
Fareed Zakaria
The truth is, anyone who tells you they know is bullshitting. It’s the strangest system in the world right now, at some level. I mean, think about it. Even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there were structures. There was institutions. There were processes.
Let’s take China. If Xi Jinping dies tomorrow, we know what will happen. The standing committee of the Politburo will get together. They will elect somebody else. The guy will become the president of China.
If the king of Saudi Arabia dies, we know what happens. The crown prince becomes king. If Putin dies, what happens? This is the most extraordinary, one-man rule in the world. It’s what he described once as a vertical of power.
I don’t know the answer to your question, how much does he depend on these oligarchs? What we do know is that he depends on some degree of tacit consent among the Russian people. And that consent has been earned by the fact, that when Putin came to power, Russia was on its knees.
Russia’s G.D.P. contracted during the ‘90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, by 50 percent. And then Putin comes in and rising oil prices. And he does restore stability.
And so for the average Russian, life has improved quite a bit under Putin. And there has been order restored. And he ended the kind of Wild West aspect of these oligarchs, and all that. He’s living off that.
I don’t know whether how much it’s frayed, how much it’s atrophied. You get the sense that it has, because you do see some dissent. And remember, the dissent is often punishable by death in Russia. So this is surely a sign of much more underneath it all.
But I’m always struck by how the regime is willing to be very repressive. It can last a lot longer than you think. I mean, look at Syria under Assad. And look at Venezuela today; obviously, North Korea.
I think that if a dictator is willing to be truly brutal and use all the mechanisms at his means, they can last. Any strategy that is based on the idea that you’re going to get regime change in Moscow strikes me as a very wishful thinking. I would much rather put in a place a strategy that exacts very, very high costs for Russia. And then we see where it goes.
Ezra Klein
A few minutes ago, you described Putin as having two levels of goals here. One is invading and capturing Ukraine. And the other is breaking the international order.
And one argument I’m hearing often now — one argument I think you’ve made, too — is that on that level, you can see Putin’s ambitions somewhat backfiring, that he thought he could take advantage of fractures and exhaustion within the NATO alliance. And instead, he’s reinvigorated the NATO alliance in a way we’ve really not seen in decades. He’s moved Europe into an entirely new military posture. How do you see the Western response and the way the West is changing in response?
Fareed Zakaria
Putin made two miscalculations. The first was he miscalculated the Ukrainian response. I think he really does not understand that Ukraine is an independent country and that its people want to be independent.
And so he thought the Ukrainians would crumble. And he thought the regime would collapse. He kept calling on the Ukrainian military to dislodge the regime, then on Ukrainian people to do it.
And the second is the one you mentioned, which is he misjudged the West. So I think if, again, well-led, if we get lucky in terms of the ability to be patient and to keep this all together, what we may see is the emergence of a powerful, strategically-minded, national security-minded Europe that is willing to defend the liberal order, which is a huge shift in international politics. Because so far in the geopolitical landscape, you’ve had one passive actor, which is Europe, 25 percent of global G.D.P.
I don’t remember the number, but Europe spends a huge amount of money on armaments. But they are not strategically designed to defend. A lot of it is make-work stuff. A lot of it as national defense, which makes no sense. Who’s about to invade Belgium?
But if this were all forward deployed toward the East, if it were projected power, if Germany does, in fact, start spending more than 2 percent of G.D.P. on the military in association with America, which it would all be done, then you have a very formidable new player in the international system. And it allows for a much more robust defense of Europe and of NATO. It also, by the way, allows the United States a little bit more freedom to pivot and deal with Asia and the challenges that come out of a rising China.
So you may not just end up with a more united West in a kind of atmospheric and symbolic sense. But it might have some real practical payoffs. And it would be deeply ironic, if the result of what Vladimir Putin has done, has been to arouse the sleeping giant of Europe.
Ezra Klein
Is there a way here that Donald Trump was right in one of his critiques of NATO, that NATO — frankly, much of Europe — has largely free-loaded on the US for defense, and they bear some real blame in all this for spending too little on defense and too much on Russian gas?
Fareed Zakaria
It deeply grieves me that you would say Donald Trump was right about this. American presidents have been saying forever that Europe needs to do more. Jimmy Carter said this. Obama talked about this. Trump, in his weird, chaotic manner, piled onto it, because in general, he thinks everybody is ripping off the United States.
But let’s also remember the origins of it. So part of the way in which the United States brought stability to Europe was to say, we have seen the madness of nationalist policies and competing nationalisms and defense policies in Europe over the last 100 years before 1945. We are going to defend you. We will be the umbrella.
That succeeded brilliantly. I mean, who would have thought that France and Germany, that went to war three times between 1850 and 1950, would never go to war again, and the war would be unthinkable on the entire continent, which was the most blood-soaked continent in history? So because of that, that success, you have had peace in Europe. We have the European Union of this extraordinary experiment in cooperation.
And yes, the result of it was that after a while, we began to realize that, hey, wait a minute. They’re now rich. They’re on their feet. We need to get them to start paying more for their defense, to think more strategically.
But I don’t have to tell you, Ezra, in 1955, somebody had said, the real thing we need is for Germany to spend more money on the military and to think about projecting power. That would not be a message that would have gone down very well in Europe or frankly, anywhere in the world. So it’s the product of our success.
We have to move to a new place. We are moving to a new place. And it took the jolt of Putin, rather than the encouragement and cajoling of a lot of presidents, to do it.
Ezra Klein
To what degree do you think that Putin’s decision to actually invade, to make good on this imperialistic nostalgia he has for Ukraine, reflects trends of the Trump years — so growing cracks that Trump broke open in the NATO alliance, a distinctive pro-Russian turn in not just the Republican Party, but its associated media outlets? I mean, you watch Tucker Carlson on Fox News. And what’s happening there has become very, very bizarre, if you remember the right that most of us grew up with — a sense that the West is internally divided, politically divided, much too exhausted, to project force. How much do you think that Putin looked at all this, saw the ease with which he was manipulating us, saw our own divisions, and thought, OK, now is the time?
Fareed Zakaria
I think he had his own timeline, which has to do with the fact that he worried that Ukraine was becoming a de facto member of NATO, that he was now dealing with two presidents. After Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president, who ran away in 2014, you had Poroshenko. And now you have Zelensky, both of whom seem tough Ukrainian nationalists, unwilling to concede anything. He saw Ukraine becoming its own nation, becoming more pro-Western, NATO cooperating with it — so in a sense, becoming a de facto NATO member, whether or not it was going to happen.
He saw the price of oil go up. He saw the price of gas go up. He saw Germany’s dependence. He saw Nord Stream coming through. I think those were the main things going on in his head.
But I do think probably, like a lot of dictators, he thought about the divisions in the West. He follows what is going on in the West very, very closely. So it’s not at all unlikely that he looked at these divisions, and he said, these guys are not going to get their act together. But I think more than anything else, it’s this kind of hatred of seeing an independent Ukraine that is at the heart of it.
Ezra Klein
We’ve talked a bit about what happens if Putin wins here. But there’s an increasingly dangerous path to where he loses, where he has simply miscalculated the economic sanctions are too much, at the same time, the resistance is too much, and he needs a pathway out that he doesn’t have, or he just feels himself backed into a corner. And I’m not making here — I want to be very clear — any predictions about how the military campaign is going to go.
But something my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote in a column today is haunting me a bit, where she said — this was otherwise, an optimistic column. But she wrote, quote, “even if a democratic Ukraine wasn’t an existential threat to Putin before, it is now, since its survival would mean his humiliation.” What does losing or de-escalating or an off-ramp here look like for Putin?
Fareed Zakaria
It’s a great question. And this is why I’ve always felt that we have to find some compromise. And by that compromise, I mean an off-ramp. We have to find some way that Putin can claim that the situation is now more stable than it was. And if that involves a NATO-Russia permanent dialogue, if that involves some arms control measures — there are some of those old arms control treaties negotiated, when Russia was at its weakest, that are actually humiliating. I mean, the conventional forces agreement did not allow Russia to move troops within its own borders.
We’ve got to find a package of things that we can do that do not compromise our values, that at the same time, reassure the Russians. Look at what Kissinger did with Taiwan, where they came up with this compromise called the Shanghai Communique, which basically says, both sides agree to disagree on Taiwan. I’m summarizing.
We need something like that, some kind of creative footwork. Because otherwise, Michelle is right. You have to find some way for him to be able to walk away from this. You cannot hope that what is going to happen here is you can trigger a democratic revolution; Putin is going to be overturned; the guy who comes in is going to be a liberal democrat, with very minimalist security aspirations; and will say, yeah, that’s totally fine. I can live with a completely free and independent Ukraine. Right? We have to have some plausible scenario in which he can declare maybe not victory, but he can declare a cease fire with some honor.
Ezra Klein
Do you buy the view that you hear from both some realists and some folks on the left right now, that if we had not opened NATO to Ukraine, none of this would have happened?
Fareed Zakaria
I think it’s fair to say that there’s two or three historical models of how you create peace in the world. One is, if you go back to Rome, a Carthaginian peace. When Rome destroyed Carthage, it basically sowed the grounds with salt so they could never grow anything again and be an agricultural power. That works if you’re willing to do it, to be that brutal.
The second is the peace of Versailles, where you leave the defeated power enraged and wounded. And the third is the peace of the Congress of Vienna, or the Peace of 1945, where you incorporate the defeated power. You give the defeated power some degree of honor and stability.
And so the real question is, what did we do after 1989? Did we humiliate Russia in the way that Germany was humiliated after Versailles? Or did we try to rehabilitate it? And there’s a huge debate about this.
My own sense is we did a little bit of both. We created the G7. We gave Russia some aid. But then we also did a lot of things that kicked it when it was down. And I think those could have been done better.
There’s no question, in the ‘90s, we could have had a better formula. I think if you flash forward to the last 10 years, I don’t think there’s much we could have done to deter Putin by assuaging him. I think by then, he had decided that the West was out to kick Russia when it was down, was out to expand, was out to get him personally. Because these color revolutions were a threat to him.
The real question is, could we have ended up with Russia ruled by somebody different and looking very different than Putin? Once you get a Putin, an imperial Putin, I don’t think you could have done very much differently at that point. When I listen to the people who say, oh, if we had no NATO expansion, everything would have been great, remember, all these countries desperately wanted to be part of NATO. They felt deeply insecure being left unmoored.
Remember the European Union couldn’t offer them membership until they had gone through lots of criteria? And there was a long process to E.U. membership. And I think one of the things that we don’t recognize is, these countries in Eastern Central Europe, their experience was even worse than— not even worse, but different from just having lost a war to the Soviet Union. They had been permanently subjugated by the Soviet Union for four decades, every part of their politics, their economics, their social life, and their foreign policy.
They had been invaded several times — ‘56, Hungary; ‘68, Czechoslovakia. Right? So they were desperate to get out of that Soviet embrace, that Russian embrace, and to have the ability to know that they could live — they could build independent lives, as nations without. Sometimes, in the talk about NATO expansion, you forget there are real people here.
And think about it with Ukraine, right? OK, I think you’re — probably making Ukraine a member of NATO is a step too far. But remember, you’re talking about this 44 million people who are desperately seeking independence, dignity, survival. And to them, they need some kind of assurance. And they have agency, too. So it’s an unsatisfying answer to your question, because I don’t think there’s an easy binary answer to it.
Ezra Klein
One of the genuinely terrifying dimensions of the conflict as it’s played out so far has been the return of the nuclear threat. So the return of Putin’s nuclear threat — and I think most people consider that to be saber rattling. But it is still a lot of nuclear weapons under the control of somebody who does not strike, at least, everyone as perfectly rational and tempered.
But also, at the Munich Security forum, President Zelensky stated that Ukraine had made a mistake in abandoning the nuclear weapons that it inherited from the Soviet Union. So you could also see an outcome of this being that more countries within Russian, Chinese, or just any orbits, more countries that feel a little unmoored, will begin pursuing nuclear weapons, because it looks like a path to safety. How has the last months, a couple of years, changed your estimation of the nuclear risks the world faces, going forward?
Fareed Zakaria
Look, nuclear proliferation is another one of the great successes of the liberal international order of the rules-based system, which is contrary to realist predictions, contrary to the predictions of many actual realists, like John Mearsheimer. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. Germany has not sought nuclear weapons. Japan has not sought nuclear weapons. South Korea has not sought nuclear weapons, which defies realist logic. Because you would think, to them, that once you’re rich enough, you would say to yourself, well, I’d like to take care of my own security. Thank you very much, the United States. I respect the fact that you say you’re my friend. But I’m not sure you’ll be there when the chips are down. And we the South Koreans want to take care of our own security. And by the way, we’ve got a country to the north that is threatening us with nuclear weapons.
So the fact that that hasn’t happened is an extraordinary triumph of this more rules, norms, value, trust-based system. And could it erode? Absolutely. One of the great social science experiments in the world is going to be played out over the next 10, 20, 30 years, which is, is the liberal international order entirely simply a product of American power? And as that power wanes, as that relative power wanes, are you going to see the return of great power politics, the erosion of those norms, the breakdown of the global economy, because it was based on a kind of universalism? It’s possible.
I tend to, as always, be a bit optimistic. But that is the challenge. And it’s going to be hard work. And it’s, in some ways, harder work when you have less power.
Ezra Klein
You could not find, I think, an American leader who believes more in the liberal international order and America’s role in it, at this point, than Joe Biden. How do you rate how he’s performed across this crisis so far?
Fareed Zakaria
On this crisis, I think he’s performed admirably. He’s rallied the West. He’s rallied Asian allies. He’s surprised Russia with the severeness of the sanctions.
He combined deterrence and raising costs for the Russians, while always keeping a diplomatic off-ramp, while always saying, we’re willing to talk. We’re willing to negotiate. We’re not willing to sacrifice Ukraine with a gun to our head. But short of that, we’re willing to have a negotiation.
I think this plays to his strengths. He’s a lifelong believer in this order. But it now gets much more difficult. Are you willing to make choices?
One of the features of American hegemony in this unipolar world has been we’ve never had to make choices. So we can say, we want to contain Iran and Iraq and Venezuela and Russia. And by the way, we want to have a new containment policy toward China, and we want North Korea to disarm, and we’re going to try and intervene in Syria in some limited fashion.
We’ve never made strategic choices. We’re never had to say to ourselves, these are the core issues. These are peripheral. We’re willing to give on these kind of things.
And that’s what I’d like to see more in Washington. There is still this imperial mindset that says, America can have it all. But you know what? We’re not in Kansas anymore. America cannot have it all.
Ezra Klein
I think that is the place to end. So always our final question, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Fareed Zakaria
I think the book that I remember best, when I got my Ph.D. in international relations, is a book by Kenneth Waltz, called “Man, the State and War.” And it’s the most elegant exposition of the kind of realpolitik point of view, about why living in a world without a world government makes countries have to fend for themselves.
The most articulate expression of the liberal international order is “A World Safe for Democracy” — by John Ikenberry — “Liberal Internationalism and the Crisis of Global Order.” And the book that taught me a lot about Russia, George Kennan, probably the greatest diplomat of the 20th century for America, greatest just in being a literary scholar, an amazingly profound, insightful guy — spoke Russian fluently, among many other languages — he wrote memoirs that won the Pulitzer Prize.
So think about a diplomat whose memoirs won the Pulitzer Prize. And the first volume of those memoirs is basically, 1925 to about 1945. And it’s a fascinating story about what diplomacy was like in those times, what Russia was like, what it meant for the United States to be trying to shape events, when it was not the dominant superpower in the world. And it’s beautifully written. So that’s the third.
Ezra Klein
Fareed Zakaria, thank you very much.
Fareed Zakaria
Always a pleasure, Ezra.