Stephen Kotkin 西方误解中国和中共

MAR 20, 2023 Kotkin on China: Communism's Achilles' Heel, Deterrence, and Learning from the USSR

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/kotkin-on-china-communisms-achilles

12 MAY 2023 'Winning the peace' : Professor Stephen Kotkin on why a Chinese-led peace deal is the ideal outcome to the war in Ukraine

https://thehub.ca/podcasts/winning-the-peace-professor-stephen-kotkin-on-why-a-chinese-led-peace-deal-is-the-ideal-outcome-to-the-war-in-ukraine/

历史学家斯蒂芬·科特金解释西方如何误解中国和中共（胡佛研究所）

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaxfx_Dt8E
2024年8月7日

本视频展示了对美国杰出的历史学家、学者和作家之一斯蒂芬·科特金教授的采访剪辑。科特金自 1989 年以来一直担任普林斯顿大学的历史和国际事务教授，也是斯坦福大学胡佛研究所的高级研究员。

采访题为“五个问题问斯蒂芬·科特金”，由胡佛研究所的彼得·罗宾逊于 2022 年 1 月进行，涉及俄罗斯、普京和乌克兰等一系列话题。本视频已将原一小时采访的部分内容剪辑掉，仅包含与中国有关的部分。

议题包括：中国共产党和习近平从苏联解体中吸取的教训，西方为何错误地认为中国会随着经济增长和融入全球经济而实现政治自由化，共产主义制度及其权力垄断面临的最大威胁，等等。

Historian Stephen Kotkin explains how the West got China and the CCP wrong (Hoover Institution)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRaxfx_Dt8E

2024年8月7日
This video presents edited clips from an interview with Professor Stephen Kotkin, one of America’s preeminent historians, academic and author.  Kotkin has been a professor of history and International Affairs at Princeton since 1989, and is a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

The interview— entitled “Five Questions for Stephen Kotkin” — was conducted in January, 2022 by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, and touched on a range of topics, including Russia, Putin and Ukraine. This video has edited out the parts of the original one hour interview to include only the segments pertaining to China.

Topics include: the lessons the CCP and Xi Jinping learned from the collapse of the USSR, how the West got it wrong in assuming China would liberalize politically with economic growth and integration into global economy, the biggest threat to communist systems and their monopoly on power, and more.

历史学家斯蒂芬·科特金

除了胡佛奖学金，斯蒂芬·科特金还是斯坦福大学弗里曼·斯波利国际问题研究所的高级研究员。他还是普林斯顿大学公共和国际事务学院（前身为伍德罗·威尔逊学院）历史和国际事务名誉教授，在那里任教 33 年。他在加州大学伯克利分校获得博士学位，并在胡佛图书馆和档案馆从事研究工作超过三十年。

科特金的研究涵盖了历史上和现在的地缘政治和独裁政权。他的出版物包括《斯大林：等待希特勒，1929-1941》（企鹅出版社，2017 年）和《斯大林：权力悖论，1878-1928》（企鹅出版社，2014 年），这是计划中的三卷本俄罗斯在世界权力和斯大林在俄罗斯权力的历史中的两部分。他还撰写了从街头视角讲述斯大林体制崛起的历史，即《磁山：作为一种文明的斯大林主义》（加州大学，1995 年）；以及分析共产主义灭亡的三部曲，其中目前已出版两卷：《避免世界末日：苏联解体 1970-2000》（牛津，2001 年；修订版，2008 年）和《不文明社会：1989 年和共产主义建制的崩溃》（现代图书馆，2009 年），Jan T. Gross 参与撰写。第三卷将讨论苏联在第三世界和阿富汗的情况。科特金的出版物和公开演讲也经常关注共产主义中国。

科特金曾参加过国家情报委员会和其他政府机构的众多活动，并担任 Conexus Financial 和瑞穗美洲的地缘政治风险顾问。他曾担任《纽约时报》周日商业版首席书评人多年，并继续为《外交事务》、《泰晤士报文学增刊》和《华尔街日报》等媒体撰写评论和文章。他曾是美国学术团体理事会研究员、国家人文基金会研究员和古根海姆研究员。

Historian Stephen Kotkin

In addition to his Hoover fellowship, Stephen Kotkin is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School), where he taught for 33 years. He earned his PhD at the University of California–Berkeley and has been conducting research in the Hoover Library & Archives for more than three decades.

Kotkin’s research encompasses geopolitics and authoritarian regimes in history and in the present. His publications include Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (Penguin, 2017) and Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (Penguin, 2014), two parts of a planned three-volume history of Russian power in the world and of Stalin’s power in Russia. He has also written a history of the Stalin system’s rise from a street-level perspective, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California 1995); and a trilogy analyzing Communism’s demise, of which two volumes have appeared thus far: Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2001; rev. ed. 2008) and Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross (Modern Library, 2009). The third volume will be on the Soviet Union in the third world and Afghanistan. Kotkin’s publications and public lectures also often focus on Communist China.

Kotkin has participated in numerous events of the National Intelligence Council, among other government bodies, and is a consultant in geopolitical risk to Conexus Financial and Mizuho Americas. He served as the lead book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business Section for a number of years and continues to write reviews and essays for Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Wall Street Journal, among other venues. He has been an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

MAR 20, 2023 Kotkin on China: Communism's Achilles' Heel, Deterrence, and Learning from the USSR

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/kotkin-on-china-communisms-achilles?

"You can't be half Communist, just like you can't be half pregnant.”

NICHOLAS WELCH AND JORDAN SCHNEIDER  MAR 20, 2023

Stephen Kotkin is one of the greatest historians of his generation — the closest thing we have to a Robert Caro for people with an unhealthy fascination with Communism. He’s most famous for the first two parts of his Stalin biography. Magnetic Mountain, Armageddon Averted, and Uncivil Society are also must-read classics. 

Stephen has a deep interest in China, as shown by his 96% open rate on the ChinaTalk newsletter over the past few years.

Below is part one of our conversation, in which we discuss:

• What Xi learned from the USSR’s fall;

• Kotkin’s assessment of the main threat to Communism — what “Communism with a human face” means, and why Gorbachev’s reforms ultimately destroyed Communism in the USSR;

• Why the CCP fears color revolutions more than, say, NATO expansion — and why Xi snapped on Hong Kong in 2020;

• The twin components of Marxism-Leninism: anti-capitalism + anti-imperialism;

• And an understanding of Lenin’s “commanding heights,” and what China’s commanding heights are today.

  Xi's Worst Nightmare

Jordan Schneider: I want to start by reading you some Xi quotes. Let’s start with 2013:

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU — as great a Party as it was — scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union — as great a socialist state as it was — shattered into pieces. This is a lesson from the past.

Stephen Kotkin: He’s right. His entire life is dedicated to preventing this from happening to the Chinese Communist Party. This is what is uppermost in his mind; it’s what he inculcates in the Party cadres incessantly. Let’s remember who ran the Party School for a while [Ed. Xi was the president of the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party from 2007 to 2013].

There are two subjects at Party School that are absolutely dominant in the Chinese case. One is the supposed decline of the United States — about how the United States is decadent, the United States is a power of the past. This [viewpoint] is completely wrong, and more and more Party officials are coming to understand this — thanks to Matt Pottinger in the Trump administration, thanks to Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine which has backfired on both him and Xi Jinping. But we’ll have to wait for that to play out — the realization that teaching about the end of American power is a fallacy.

But the other big subject — in fact it’s an even bigger subject for them — is not having a Soviet collapse in China, and therefore studying the Soviet collapse all the way, every way, every angle, and making sure it doesn’t happen [in China]. That is Xi’s life project, [and] the big subject at the Party School — and it’s one of the reasons why I think my own work was pirated, translated into Chinese and, at least for some people, was a text to study.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about Uncivil Society. The idea that you put forward in that book: the Western vision that dissidents and folks around the margins were the real cause of the fall of the Soviet Union is in fact not the case — that a collapse of a Marxist or Leninist regime doesn’t necessarily need an intelligentsia or a broad civil society to push you there. In fact, the system can just collapse on itself very quickly, in almost a bank-run-style development. 

Elaborate on that, and then apply it to China today. What do you see and not see as parallels between the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s and China in the 2020s?

Stephen Kotkin: Let’s acknowledge that the courage of the dissidents is often just astonishing and inspiring: people willing to suffer potential expulsion, forced exile, imprisonment, or worse because they stand for freedom, against the regime’s dictatorship and monopoly over the public; it’s very impressive to see these people.

But the main threat to Communism is Communism. This is the paradox of the system.

The Communist Party is a Leninist organization. Now, if you were in China studies, you probably read the book by [Franz] Schurmann many years ago — which happens to be an adaptation of Philip Selznick’s book, The Organizational Weapon; it’s one of my go-to books on all Leninist regimes, including the Chinese one. [Jordan: I read this book after recording this interview and can confirm it is fantastic.]

And the most remarkable thing about Leninist regimes is that they’re all-powerful and brittle simultaneously. The Party is ubiquitous. It shadows every single institution, every organization — whether that’s in the state bureaucracy, in the military, in the education system, and, in China’s case, in the quasi-private sphere. It’s hard to know what to call it now — we’re following [Barry] Naughton’s important intervention, CCP Inc.

But in any case, the Party is this great weapon for control. At the same time, however, you can’t be half Communist, just like you can’t be half pregnant. So the Party is either a monopoly, or it begins to unravel. There’s no political-reform equilibrium.

[Let’s say] you begin to open up the party, you begin to say, “Okay, let’s have debate inside the Party, let’s have some opening. Let’s maybe even have some competitive elections inside the party.” And what happens, Jordan? What happens is some people come forward and they say, “I don’t want the Communist Party. I want another party.” And the Party officials say, “No, no, no — that’s not what we’re allowing. We’re only allowing debate inside the Party. We’re keeping the Communist Party monopoly; we’re just liberalizing it a little.”

We saw this in Hungary in 1956. We saw this in Czechoslovakia — the so-called “Prague Spring” in 1968. We saw this in [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s reforms. As [Leonid] Brezhnev said in 1968 — he was the general secretary watching [Alexander] Dub?ek in Prague, and they were reporting on the unraveling of the system as Dub?ek was trying to re-energize it, liberalize it, open up Communism while keeping the monopoly — and Brezhnev said at a Politburo meeting, “Reform is counterrevolution” — or what we would call auto-liquidation. And we lived through the Gorbachev period as well — where you start the opening politically, and where does it stop? Because people keep pushing and pushing and pushing until they’re outside the Communist monopoly.

And so you have a choice. You can end the political reform, and you can crack down, and you can say, “We’re putting this genie back in the bottle; no more political reform.” Or, you can let it unfold, and you can think, “It’s going to work at some point — it’s just a little bit more chaotic than we anticipated.” So Gorbachev was true to his beliefs: he believed in this Communism with a human face; he believed in the possibility of reform; he believed in a liberalized Communist Party monopoly — and as a result, he destroyed Communism in the Soviet Union.

And because the Party overrode the federal structure of the Soviet state (that is to say, the Soviet state was a federalism: there was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, and they were all equal members of the federation) — but the Party was a pyramid with military discipline; the Party overrode the state’s federalism in practice. But once the Party disintegrates as a result of Gorbachev trying to open it up politically, you lose the Soviet’s centralized state, you get the voluntary federation, and the federal pieces decide they want out as well — just like many people wanted out of the Communist Party monopoly.

And so Xi Jinping is now looking back at this history, and God forbid some “Communism with a human face,” Communist political liberalization is going to take place — because it would be the unraveling of the system if it were allowed to go all the way.

So, this is the paradox of what Selznick called the “organizational weapon,” borrowing Lenin’s terminology. This is the paradox of a Leninist structure: all-powerful and brittle at the same time, with no political-reform equilibrium. Therefore, for us a Gorbachev in China would be salvation, because a Gorbachev could potentially bring down that regime. And for Xi Jinping, that is to be prevented at all costs.

Now, if you think about this a little bit more deeply: sure, they can open up the economy, they can do economic liberalization. The Soviets did this, by the way, under Lenin in the early 1920s, where they actually strengthened the Communist monopoly in the 1920s, and yet they opened up the economy to allow legal private markets and market behavior; this was called the New Economic Policy, or the NEP. There was never a political NEP — they didn’t open up the political system; in fact, as I said, they tightened the political system, and they experimented with the market economy for a time. But they were Communists, so the market was not an end in itself: it was a means to an end. Once the country wasn’t starving anymore (as it was when they launched the New Economic Policy in 1921), once things had stabilized economically, you had Stalin eliminate markets and private property once again. Because for Marxists, the base can’t be capitalist, and the political structure or the superstructure can’t be Communist and survive — because the base (the socioeconomic relations, the means of production, who controls them) is determinative for Marxists.

Now, you have Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Communists as well — it’s a version of the New Economic Policy. There still is a Communist monopoly — no political NEP to speak of. Sure, eventually you get some village elections; they’re gone now, for the obvious reason that they threatened the Communist monopoly.

And so all the time I’ve been watching, saying, “How far can this go before the Communist Party leadership begins to feel that it threatens their monopoly?” Because accumulation of wealth — independent, private wealth — is the accumulation of power. And so ipso facto, even if you don’t adhere to the Leninist ideology about the base and the superstructure, even if you are just pragmatically driven, nonetheless, people with a lot of money have a lot of power, and they could ipso facto threaten the Communist monopoly.

So at some point, I’m thinking, they’re going to need to crack down on the private sector again, because they’re going to feel that it’s threatening their Communist Party monopoly over the political system and the public sphere. Now of course, they need the private sector for GDP growth and job creation — but the private sector is a threat. So you have the opening and then the strangulation, and the opening and the strangulation; this is the dynamic you would expect — because once again, you can’t be half Communist.

So [the Chinese] regime is limited in what it can do, because it doesn’t want to give up its power voluntarily. And so the space in which it can operate — how much private sector it can tolerate and what kind, whether it can open up at all politically, including relaxing censorship — these are limited by the nature of the regime, by the organizational weapon, by the power of the system.

If you put this together, it turns out that every day is existential for the Communist regime. Now, we here in democratic, rule-of-law systems: we worry about this policy and that policy, this norm-busting and that norm-busting, this political figure and that political figure — but we survive the craziest political figures, the most inept political figures, the most corrupt political figures; it’s not existential for us, because our [system] is based on resilient institutions.

And so to answer the quote from Xi Jinping that you presented: not only is every day existential for them — in the sense that if they allow too much opening, their entire system can begin to unravel — not only that, but they think that we [in the US] can accelerate that process, that we can influence that process.

The great fear of Xi Jinping and Putin when it comes to the US is not something like NATO expansion. It’s so-called “color revolution.” It’s so-called “democracy,” “Western values,” “rule of law,” “universal human rights” penetrating the Chinese public sphere, penetrating the consciousness of the people, and spreading — and therefore giving rise to calls for opening up the political system.

And they must live with this every day: try to reap the benefits of the global economy, and import the technology, and import the foreign direct investment [FDI], and make sure they deepen the trade ties and some of those dependencies on the Chinese economy that they’re able to manipulate — but when they do that, the ideas and the values and the practices sometimes ride along with the technology and the FDI. And so that’s a very difficult proposition to manage on a day-by-day basis. And we see how worried they are about this — and you know what? He’s right to be worried.

True Deterrence: Threatening the Communist Monopoly

Jordan Schneider: You’ve spoken before about the idea of leverage by creating the possibility of political alternatives. Can you expand on that?

Stephen Kotkin: These regimes can be inept. They can fail at everything. They can repeal zero covid in the middle of the night. The people can see how inept they are. The people can suffer the consequences — whatever the number that we can guesstimate of deaths of people who are vulnerable to the reopening in the dead of night — and yet they can stay in power provided they can suppress, deny all political alternatives. So the game with all of these regimes is the cultivation, the appearance of possible alternatives in the political realm.

And so that’s where we come in. You think about deterrence for a regime like this. Sure, you have to have military capabilities that they’re afraid of; sure, you have to have other instruments in the toolkit that you can use, potentially coercively, but also just as a threat, so that they’re intimidated to take some actions that might transgress international law or the sovereignty of another country, or the sovereignty of a self-governing island; yes, you must deter them militarily and economically for sure.

But deterrence is ultimately a political proposition. If you shave a couple of points off of their GDP, they’re okay with that. They’re not private equity moguls. Xi Jinping shaves his own points off his GDP. But if, all of a sudden, there’s the possibility of an alternative political system — of an alternative rule-of-law, self-government, where there are genuine elections, where the party doesn’t have a monopoly anymore — that scares the Jesus out of him. And that’s our strength and power.

And so we saw this with Hong Kong. How much did Hong Kong threaten this gigantic mainland? Hong Kong was this amazing resource gifted to the Chinese by the British. If you look at the 1945 moment when the Japanese are in occupation of British Hong Kong, and the Japanese have now lost the war — and the Americans declare that Hong Kong is supposed to go back to China, to Chiang Kai-shek, not to Britain; and the British decide, “Oh no, the Chinese are not getting Hong Kong. We’re taking Hong Kong back for ourselves.” And the Americans try to negotiate a face-save or a compromise — but the British are not interested in anything other than reseizure of Hong Kong; and they carry it out.

Could Chiang Kai-shek have taken Hong Kong back before the British? Maybe, maybe not — because of the complexity of where his troops were located, because of his focus on Manchuria, because of his reliance on America for airlift power, and all the variables that you know well.

The point is that the assertiveness of the British — rather than the acquiescence which we could have seen from the British in this moment — meant that Hong Kong did not go to Chiang Kai-shek, which meant it did not go to Mao in 1949, which meant that Hong Kong developed as a British-controlled international financial center under the rule of law where capital was allocated on the basis of market criteria rather than political criteria, cronyism, or Communist Party decision-making.

And so you look at Deng Xiaoping, and you look at the Chinese miracle, and you look at the story of modern China — and people say to me, “Why didn’t Gorbachev do a Deng Xiaoping?” And I say to them, “Where was Gorbachev during Hong Kong?” Where was not just the FDI and tech transfer that came in from Japan and Taiwan into China — but was funneled in through Hong Kong? And so that’s the key variable, that’s the key instrument.

And then it turns out that this is so valuable [that] the British handed it back to the Chinese when the lease expires. I myself would not have done that, but once again, I wasn’t in power.

And so here we have, then, a system that works for China. It delivers enormous value for the Communist regime in Beijing. Sure, there are protests in the streets, there are calls for democracy, there are real elections — there are things which you don’t get on the mainland. How threatening was it to the regime in China? On an objective basis, it’s hard to measure — but on a subjective basis, it was everything. It was not just a blackeye — it was an alternative political system on what was now Chinese Communist territory. And so how long was it going to last? [Until] Xi Jinping decided it was not going to last anymore. And we saw that.

And so, this political alternative story, this ability to imagine a China which is successful and free and proud and Chinese — it’s not some foreign-manipulated thing. It is, in fact, a domestically created Chinese aspiration. That’s really where we come in as, potentially, working to put deterrence here in between Xi Jinping and some of the freedom and international-order countries and self-governing islands that we’re trying to protect.

Did Marxism-Leninism Ever Really Die?

Jordan Schneider: You mentioned Selznick. What’s another book people should be reading in 2023 from the canon of Soviet or Communism studies that you’d hope folks thinking about China today would take seriously?

Stephen Kotkin: The problem we have is that we focused on the Chinese political system and thought it evolved out of the Leninist structure. So we have a million really good books on China that imagine that China has transcended the Leninism. And then when we discover that the Leninist structure never went away. And in fact, they’re trying, as one would expect, to reinforce it, to bring back its dynamism, strength, and energy — not with political opening, but with the opposite, with the hardline version of the Leninist structure, with the Stalin version of the Leninist structure, with the Mao version of the Leninist structure.

It’s time to return to that work. It’s time to return to the work that we thought was done, that our field — China studies, Communist studies, Soviet studies — produced and is of tremendous value still today, despite all the changes that you know about.

However, having said that, it’s also necessary to understand that the ideology story is more complex, both from those who dismiss it and those who now say that it’s back and really important. The Leninist structure doesn’t necessarily determine policies or ideologies completely. Yes, it limits the scope of action in terms of political reform (unless you want to commit suicide). But it doesn’t determine what policy you might have on x, y, and z — those are determined in the competition among interest groups, in the leader’s preferences, in the international environment in which they find themselves (is it conducive or corrosive to their aspirations or aims?).

And so the complexity of understanding motivation and decision-making, the role of ideology and how far ideology goes — this is something that the old literature sometimes was simplistic about or dismissive about on the other side, where people said it was all cynicism and not ideology.

Here’s what’s really important to understand about these kinds of things, in going as well as looking back: when you think about Marxism-Leninism — which is Marxism in power — it had two fundamental aspects.

One was anti-capitalism: meaning that markets, private property, wage labor (or “wage slavery,” as Marx called it) — these were not just exploitative but fundamentally alienating in a humanity or humane sense. It was worse than inequality. It was worse than exploitation. It was the fundamental destruction, alienation of the human spirit. The anti-capitalism was deep and fundamental; and so the way you transcended capitalism (in the Hegelian, Aufhebung, Marxist sense) was to eliminate private profits, eliminate legal markets, eliminate wage labor for a time — thinking that you were going to get to the other side because you were going to remove all of these things. And of course, this led to complete statization of the economy and the kind of incentive problems in other things that we know from the so-called “planned economy” — which, as you know, was not planned but was a statized, centralized allocation of scarce resources that made resources even scarcer.

But the other piece of Marxism-Leninism was anti-imperialism. And anti-imperialism was just as big, in some ways. This was the idea that the West — Western power, Western countries, predominantly Europe at the time (the West is something larger and non-geographical, much bigger now) — but at the time, the idea was that the West was evil because it was imperialist: it took over other countries, it ended the sovereignty of what came to be called the Third World, it [employed] direct-rule imperialism — and sometimes indirect-rule imperialism, where they coerced you to do things in your economy or in your foreign policy without necessarily directly ruling your territory. And of course, this happened to China during what they call the “Century of Humiliation.”

So the anti-capitalism and the anti-imperialism are the two component parts — and you can have more or less of one of those components. You can diminish the anti-capitalism, but you can actually enhance the anti-imperialism in the Marxism-Leninism. Some people thought (I didn’t) that Marxism-Leninism had died because of the diminishment of the anti-capitalism for a time. But the anti-imperialism never went away: you could argue that it was, on a scale of one to ten, an eleven the whole time, and maybe even went to a twelve. So the anti-imperialism means that Marxism-Leninism never actually did vanish or die — even if you allow for the anti-capitalism to have been diminished somewhat in the thinking [or] teaching of the regime. So you could go to Party School, and maybe they could teach you to get rich and use capitalism to reinforce the Chinese state — but they never relinquished that story of the Century of Humiliation, of anti-imperialism.

So now today we see a version of a revival of the anti-capitalism: not getting rid of the markets but taming the markets, not having the markets be in charge but having the markets solely subservient to Party rule. And that goes for the biggest fears that the Party determines, what Lenin used to call the “commanding heights” (and what the Chinese might not call the commanding heights in all cases; but when you’re at Party School, that’s the vocabulary you’re going to hear).

And so that means, for example, the public sphere (education, socialization of youth, tech companies) and then private education, tutoring, all of the things that are about values and control over what’s permissible in the public sphere — that’s going to be commanding heights. And then of course, the tech superpower stuff, in the sense of AI and biotech, is also going to be commanding heights; and then of course [the commanding heights are] the other things they might deem — whether it’s natural resources, where you have massive cash flow and possibilities for corruption and patronage, which Party monopolies always love.

So you put all of this together, and you begin to see that the common prosperity idea has resonance because it’s rooted in the Marxism-Leninism social justice fairness — “capitalism is evil,” “capitalism creates inequality,” “capitalism creates all sorts of injustice”; it’s rooted partially in that.

And so you see that [the Party] can resurrect even the anti-capitalist side of the Marxism-Leninism — they can breathe life into it — without necessarily eliminating the markets, but getting the markets to work for them.

And after all, the New Economic Policy (once again in Lenin’s conception) was not an end in itself: he hated capitalism; he hated markets; he hated private property; it was just a means to an end — and when that means was no longer serving that end, you could get rid of it.

And so we see now that even the ideology never went away because of the anti-imperialism piece of it — which is a big chunk, as we said. And the anti-capitalism can be resurrected or re-energized (depending on how you look at it, how much you think it went away).

And so here we are, where even the ideological stuff — from the Sovietology, from the Mao era — needs a revisit. Although going forward, it’s not going to look identical to what it looked like before: there have been tremendous changes; there’s a huge middle class; there’s a quasi-sort-of-almost financial system (it’s hard to know what to call things in China, because they don’t correspond to the kind of stuff that’s equivalent in our system, and so we always have trouble calling the Chinese stuff with the same vocabulary that we have; that’s why the CCP Inc. was an improvement on the China Inc. story).

But anyway, you get the point: there’s Schurmann, and before that there’s Selznick. And then there’s rich literature about Mao and ideology and the Cultural Revolution, and how Mao was constantly upending the system for his own power: he was attacking the bureaucratic structures of his own state to keep them off balance for his own power. Will Xi Jinping do something like that? I’m not predicting anything, but I’m just saying that that history is worth understanding. Why did that happen? Was it solely the caprice of Mao, or was there something inside the system that went that way?

I recently read Xueguang Zhou’s Logic of Governance in China. I mention it because it’s a fantastic example of using org theory to understand China. Organizational theory was once in the sociology department and other departments here at Stanford; it was once the jewel in the crown here: we had Jim March, with whom Xueguang studied. And [Zhou’s] book incorporates so many of the insights of that literature that’s been forgotten. It’s not the Philip Selznick “organizational weapon,” “Leninist Party structure” stuff — it’s org theory, really org theory 101 in some ways, but also 201 and 301 and 501 and all the way up to and beyond the PhD level.

And if you look at it, he shows you that organizations have a certain inherent logic and a dynamic, and that sometimes you don’t fully control this. And he goes through the introduction and evolution of competitive elections in villages (in a township that he’s chosen, which has a certain number of villages). And it’s a remarkable story because it doesn’t end well. The elections turn out not to enhance Communist Party monopoly, but to destabilize Communist Party monopoly, to unbalance the Party’s monopoly — and they peter out. And so we don’t have those competitive elections; we don’t have the experimentation at the local level. But what we do have is the localities trying to cope with centrally imposed mandates that are unfunded and that put the localities into massive debt and ruin their fiscal situation — but also create the incentive structures for them to actually work in the fiscal situation in an attempt to fix it.

And so it’s a brilliant book about perverse and unintended consequences, about org theory, about the limits of Communist Party experimentation, even in villages with opening the system up. And the lessons are eternal there.

Jordan Schneider: So let’s talk about another fantastic book: Joseph Torigian’s recent work about succession in Russia and China. What’s your take on the lessons that his work — and other scholarship around transition moments, both in the USSR and in China — tell us about what we are going to face at some point in the coming years in China?

Stephen Kotkin: So Joe’s work is absolutely outstanding, and there are many aspects that we should emphasize here.

One is Joe has returned us to comparisons of the Soviet regime and the current regime in Beijing — that is to say, comparisons of Communist regime types. Once again, there are differences, not just similarities; even within the Leninist structure, there are important differences, and Joe is alive to these differences. But the idea that they can be put together once again is a major achievement in my view.

Then of course, Joe has the empirical dimension down. He’s got the research. He’s got the actual primary materials on both cases, the Soviet case and the Chinese case, in terms of succession politics, succession dynamics, and outcomes. It’s very important to be able to do this with primary-source material, with real evidence, rather than just speculation or educated guesses or generative AI–style riffing (which is very popular, unfortunately). Joe’s got the fact that he’s comparing properly the regimes once again — not simplistically, but properly. He’s got the fact that there’s a massive evidentiary base.

And then he has got the fact that this is a monopoly, and there are specific dynamics to the monopoly. In so many ways, it’s returning us to an understanding with much deeper empirics that this is about the rule of an individual, which comes about not accidentally through the monopolistic rule of the party. So you get this from [Leon] Trotsky. Before Trotsky was on Lenin’s side, he was against Lenin. And he wrote this famous passage about how Communist monopoly would produce individual dictatorship — and there it was: that individual dictatorship that he predicted would come about killed him, after he, was a major facilitator and an enabler of the creation of that system. And so you have that dynamic in Joe. And I could hit many more aspects to it that are really amazing.

The succession dynamics are really hard for all authoritarian regimes — they’re always vulnerable on this question, because they don’t have a legal way for people to be chosen or to assume the next leadership. It’s existential. It’s uncertain. All the stakeholders don’t know what happens to their power and ill-gotten wealth when there’s regime change, when the leader inevitably dies (which happens to all mortal human beings): it happened to Stalin seventy years ago; it happened to Mao not quite forty-seven years ago; they say that “graveyards are full of indispensable men,” et cetera.

But in the meantime, it’s hard for them, because the succession piece is so uncertain that people who want to protect their power and ill-gotten gains may want to move inside the uncertainty themselves to try to protect their ill-gotten gains. And so you have intrigue and destabilization over succession before succession even happens.

And then you get the succession politics — which we sometimes attribute to political differences, sometimes we attribute it to philosophical differences. Joe shows in these cases that the policy differences were not there, and that’s a really big achievement on his part.

So let me just say the final piece: the other thing he shows is that these people were all powerful, and there was no collective rule. There’s the appearance of collective rule; there’s the simulation of collective rule; there’s the pretense that there’s some type of collective rule. But one person is in charge here, even under that pretense. And there’s no institutionalization of succession, neither in the Soviet case nor the Chinese case.

So when we say that Xi Jinping “broke the rules,” “broke the taboo,” what Joe was able to show was that nothing in that was hard and fast. Nothing was really broken in a “Leninist, Maoist, Deng Xiaoping” sense. There’s more of a continuity than a discontinuity.

And so let’s all make sure we go back and read Joe’s book, or reread it if we’ve read it already. And let’s talk about it again and again, because it is a massive point of departure for understanding how this place is going.

If Kotkin Ran America's China Foreign Policy

 

Jordan Schneider: [On March 6], Xi said,

Western countries — led by the US — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.

Any thoughts on that as the new rhetorical space that Xi is now comfortable occupying in public?

Paid subscribers get advanced access to the second half of our conversation. We discuss:

• The case for optimism about US-China relations, despite — or because of — the recent ratcheting up of tensions;

• Why Kotkin believes a US-China Cold War is both good and necessary;

• How the US can get on the diplomatic “front foot”;

• Making sense of Reagan’s foreign policy — how he was both a “movement conservative” and a “dealmaking conservative.”

 12 MAY 2023 'Winning the peace' : Professor Stephen Kotkin on why a Chinese-led peace deal is the ideal outcome to the war in Ukraine

https://thehub.ca/podcasts/winning-the-peace-professor-stephen-kotkin-on-why-a-chinese-led-peace-deal-is-the-ideal-outcome-to-the-war-in-ukraine/?

12 MAY 2023

The following is a Hub exclusive in the form of a private lecture given by Professor Stephen Kotkin, one of the world’s leading scholars of Russian history and international relations. It was delivered in mid-April at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada at an event co-hosted by The Hub’s executive director, Rudyard Griffiths. The talk provides a master class in contemporary geopolitics linking the war in Ukraine with the rise of China and its unique challenge to American global supremacy.

The lecture is a must-listen for anyone trying to understand contemporary international events and the critical issue of how the War in Ukraine is likely to be brought to an end. Stephen Kotkin spent over three decades teaching international relations and Russian history at Princeton University. He is now a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University where he lectures and writes widely on global affairs for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal. For fans of Russian history, his biographies of Joseph Stalin are essential reading. “The Paradoxes of Power 1879-1928 ” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was followed by the masterful “Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941”. A third volume, to be published later this year, will take the story of Stalin through the Second World War to his death in 1953.

You can listen to this episode of Hub Dialogues on Acast, Amazon, Apple, Google, Spotify, or YouTube. The episodes are generously supported by The Ira Gluskin And Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation and The Linda Frum & Howard Sokolowski Charitable Foundation.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN KOTKIN: So I’m going to talk to you a little bit about winning the peace. We only talk about winning the war. But winning the war is not nearly as important as winning the peace. You can win the war, and you can lose the peace. Let’s call that Afghanistan. Let’s call that Iraq. Let’s call that many other examples. So, if you’re in a war, how do you win the peace? And winning the peace is a multi-generational question.

So, if you gained some territory today, you didn’t win the peace. Somebody can come back for that territory, tomorrow or next year or the year after. So, winning the peace is much more important and much more complex. So for about 14 months now, I’ve been discussing with some of our best minds in intelligence and defence, how they define victory, and more importantly, how they plan to win the peace. I’ll just give you one example. And then I’m going to go backwards in time and a little bit sideways, and then come back out at the end with an answer, if that’s okay. If you’ll tolerate that kind of meandering. 

So if Ukraine recovers all the territory that’s internationally recognized territory of Ukraine, but doesn’t get into the European Union, and doesn’t get a security guarantee, would that be winning the peace? Would that be victory of any sort? But if it didn’t regain its territory, but got into the European Union through an accelerated accession process, and got some type of security guarantee, but a lot of its land was still occupied, would that be a victory? Which one of those scenarios would be a victory? It’s pretty obvious that the Ukrainian people twice risked their lives to overthrow domestic tyrants in order to get into Europe. And so, that’s really the only definition of winning the peace that works.

So, if you want to get into Europe, let’s imagine you’re able—you’re not—but let’s imagine you’re able to retake Crimea militarily. So, then you have a predominantly, almost exclusively, Russian population now inside your borders, that can be instigated in a permanent insurgency against your country. What’s that going to do for your EU accession process? What’s that gonna do for your security guarantee? Who’s going to give you a security guarantee when you have a multimillion Russian population that doesn’t want any part of your country? And so, there are sentimental and understandable definitions of victory which relate to the atrocities that are committed—the whole war is an atrocity, right? The aggression, it’s nothing but an atrocity, and we hear about the atrocities it’s just heartbreaking. At the same time, we need to win the peace.

So, how are we gonna win the peace? Okay, so, if we agree that that might be an interesting question, now we’re going to step backwards and approach it from an angle that’s maybe unexpected, or let’s hope it’s unexpected. Let’s talk a little bit about China. We have a lot of stories about China, and they’re not true. Deng Xiaoping, who was a pretty remarkable fellow and was shorter than I am—I’ve got a big place in my heart for somebody that I can look like this to, rather than Paul Volcker, who was down the hall from me at Princeton, “Eh Paul, how’s the weather up there?” You know, that kind of nonsense. He was 6’5. I used to be 5’6.

Anyway, so Deng Xiaoping, this little guy, he’s looking over the water at Japan. And he’s saying, “You know, this place was bombed. 40 cities were firebombed with higher casualties than the two cities that were nuclear bombed. I mean, this place was a wreck. And now, they’re the second biggest economy in the world. What happened?” Right in his neighbourhood. And so he’s looking at that, and he’s saying they got a secret formula here. They manufacture stuff. And they sell it to those crazy Americans. This gigantic American consumer market, this domestic market in America, is just so insatiable. If you can make stuff that the Americans want, if it’s good enough that the Americans will buy it, you can grow rich. In other words, you can use the American middle class to create a Chinese middle class by manufacturing things that these crazy Americans will buy. Because that’s what Japan had done. And because that’s what South Korea did. And that’s what Taiwan did. Both South Korea and Taiwan are former Japanese colonies, and Japan was very involved in the post-colonial transformations in both of those places. 

So, there’s a formula here, and it was a very successful formula. And it’s not very many countries, and it’s East Asia, and so, that’s the strategy now. So, to hell with this crazy Soviet model. And anyway, Mao Zedong, the lunatic that he was, destroyed the planning bureaucracy in China because he sent them all down to the village to do manual labour during his cultural revolution. He undermined the ability of the Chinese state to do the planned economy, so that by the late 70s, when Deng Xiaoping gets credit for reform, the peasants themselves, not wanting to starve again, have recreated market relations in the Southern Cone of China, the monsoon, rice cultivating, wet rice part of China. And 300 million or so peasants rejoined the market economy on their own without any communist directives necessarily, though with some communist directives. “You can trade onions, but you can’t trade rice.” They trade the rice and they say, “Okay, you can trade the rice but you can only trade it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.” They trade it on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays too. 

So, there were lots of communist decrees about the market economy, and there were grudging concessions to allow market behaviour that were behind the peasants’ own activity. And then the peasants built businesses and so moved to the city and the FDI came from Japan and Taiwan, and it went through Hong Kong, which was a British financial centre with the rule of law. Remember how they say, “How come Gorbachev didn’t do a Deng Xiaoping?” No Hong Kong. No Hong Kong. You have a financial system that awards money, not for Communist Party reasons, but for capital accumulation reasons. Okay, so you got Hong Kong, you got Japan with the FDI, and you got the American domestic market. You have ingredients here that no one else has, and you have Deng Xiaoping, smart enough to do this. And you have Mao who levelled the playing field and made this possible. And then you have the Communist Party taking credit for the entrepreneurialism of the 300 million people who are let loose to engage in market behaviour again.

So, that’s what happened in China. It’s not the story we have. The story we have is the Communist Party from the top-down introduced reforms, and those reforms were successful. So, the Communist Party in China gets the credit for the Market Revolution. Never mind that the Communist Party officials stole the businesses that the peasant entrepreneurs created like parasites. 

But the strategic move from Deng is to go for this: “To hell with the Soviet model. We’re going to divorce the Soviets. We’re going to poison them, and let them die. And America is going to be our economic partner.” And Deng goes to Texas, he goes to a rodeo, he puts on a 10-gallon cowboy hat, you’ve seen the photograph. That was about eight gallons more than Deng himself was, and it works. And then, in the 90s, when Jiang Zemin, who was Deng’s protege came in, Jiang brings back the Soviet Union, which is now Russia, as a mistress. So Deng has divorced the Soviet Union, married the United States, and then Jiang brings the Russian mistress back into the picture, because the Russians have a military-industrial complex which is dying, and Jiang and the Chinese bring it back from the dead and begin to build a Chinese army on the basis of the Russian military complex, which is the old Soviet doomsday military complex, right?

This is the story of what happens in China, meaning that they ditched the Soviets and then they brought the Russians back, but only as a partner in building their military up. Okay. And Russia is a mess. Some of you might have been investors there, some of you might have visited there, some of you might be refugees from that part of the world. The 90s is a mess. We have this vocabulary of reform. Once again, like with the Chinese Communists, we pretend that things are called reform, that they’re directed from the top rather than the chaos and the breakdown in the collapse that they’re experiencing. Okay. In the 90s, right? The Soviet collapse kept going way after 1991, and Putin comes along and he arrests the Soviet collapse. They get lucky with the 1998 debt crisis and financial collapse because it makes the exchange rate of the ruble now such that Russian products are much cheaper abroad and imports are too expensive. 

So, it gives a boost to Russian domestic industry. And guess what? The Chinese boom that Deng has launched has now raised the global demand for everything. Cement, fertilizer, right? Ammonia. All the phosphates, metals, even junk metals, the Chinese can’t get enough of everything. So, the Soviet Union comes back from the dead after 1998, after the financial crisis, because of the insatiable Chinese global demand for everything. China is growing at such a clip. The China-Russia direct trade is minimal. It’s almost nothing. But because there’s a finite amount of raw materials and industrial inputs globally, it doesn’t matter if it’s direct or not, the price of everything is rising. And those of you who rode the commodity markets understand commodity markets are volatile, but there was a long bull run in commodity markets based upon Chinese insatiable demand. And so, lo and behold, Russia comes back and this guy Putin is having seven percent growth per year, which people think is oil. The average price of oil in his first term is $35 a barrel, and the average price of oil in his second term is $70 a barrel, and he’s growing at seven percent a year. And when he gets to $100-plus a barrel, his growth ends and he hits a wall. 

So, the idea that the oil is where the Russian growth came from ignores this insatiable Chinese demand, globally. The Soviet Union produced just a massive amount of low-quality stuff, and now the prices were really good. This story adds to then the Chinese story. So, Russia comes back from the dead. China brings Russia back from the dead, just as America is building China’s boom, through this Japan model, with Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong. That’s the story. 

I’m simplifying a little bit because you don’t have 15 weeks and 85 grand to hear the whole thing. That’s what college costs in America. I know, it’s kind of absurd. But anyway, so we’re simplifying a little bit. But so, you have the development of a Russian-Chinese relationship here that wasn’t planned. It’s circumstantial. It’s what we call in the sciences as an emergent property. If you know complexity and systems theory, it’s not something that anybody intended. It’s something that came together and happened.

Now, China has risen. And now China is very successful. Yes. About 700 million people lifted out of poverty, which is a breathtaking story. And if you’ve been back and forth to China since the 80s, which I have, you know it’s real. At the same time, 600 million people in China live completely outside the market economy. They’re not educated, they don’t have health care, they don’t have eyeglasses. They’re destitute, no education to speak of, no human capital investment. They have just been left out by the regime. Mostly from the interior part of the country, 600 million people. It’s very substantial. But anyway, you have the 700 million people lifted out of poverty, many of whom join this middle class, there’s a class of billionaires. 

So then what happens? Gorbachev gets the idea that communism is reformable, that you can have socialism with a human face, you can revive this thing. It doesn’t have to be Stalinist. It doesn’t have to be corrupt and inefficient. It’ll get a second wind. So, he begins to liberalize the political system. And the same thing happens in the Soviet Union that happened in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The party decides is going to open up and liberalize, have debate inside the party. And someone stands up and says, “You know, I don’t want your party. I don’t like your Communist Party.” And they say, “No, that’s not the deal. We’re liberalizing the Communist Party monopoly. We’re allowing you to debate inside the party. And people say, “Well, no, no party. No Communist Party. What about a different party?”

And so, then you have this problem where political liberalization has no equilibrium. It has no point where it stops and is successful. You can’t turn off the process. Once you open up, it begins to just unravel and the monopoly disappears because you can’t be half-communist, just like you can’t be half-pregnant. You either have the monopoly or you don’t. And so, you can liberalize the economy. You can allow market behaviour in the economy. But you can’t allow liberalization of the political system because then you lose your monopoly. And it happened in Hungary in 56, and Czechoslovakia in 68, and Gorbachev in the 1980s. And so guess what? The Chinese Communists begin to study this question. They begin to study the Soviet collapse. 

Believe it or not, we’re gonna get to winning the peace in Ukraine. I told you it was improbable. I told you was gonna be a little backwards and sideways. But we’re gonna get there. We’re not that far away, in fact, at this point. And so, they start to study the Soviet collapse, the communists in China, and they say, “You know what, we can’t do this, we can’t liberalize our system. We can’t open our system politically, because we’ll end up like Gorbachev, or we’ll end up like Dub?ek, or we’ll end up like Imre Nagy in Hungary. And so we’re not going to open it up politically.”

So, you have the Western world integrating China through trade and investment in order to bring China along to look more like the West politically, with rule of law and everything else. And you have the Communist Party regime in China refusing ever to open up politically because it’s suicide. So, we’re playing the game of economic integration, leading to political and legal transformation. And they’re playing the game of never allowing political transformation and legal transformation. You can talk about this until you’re blue in the face. Throughout the last 30 years—and you can write essays about it, you can write whole books about it—you couldn’t persuade people, especially the investment class, that the Chinese Communists were not going to commit suicide. 

There’s a guy. He’s exactly my height. He talks like Joe Pesci. And he wrote this book that was pirated, translated into Chinese, on the Soviet collapse, of how there’s no reform equilibrium. You can’t politically open up and stabilize the situation. It’s just suicide, and he proves this in this book. And then he goes to China, and it turns out, there’s this pirated Chinese translation of his book, which they study at the party school. There’s all these guys with these dog-eared copies of the book. And who is the head of the party school? This provincial character named Xi Jinping. All they’re studying is no Gorbachev, no political opening, never committing suicide. And I discovered this, because I’m looking across the table, and there are these Chinese characters—anyway, very interesting. 

And so, now he’s in charge. He’s CEO now, and his story is not a story of friendliness towards the West, because the West is a threat to him. The model that you have in Canada, and we have, to a certain extent, farther south, and that we have in Europe and in Australia and Japan right? Japan is Western but not European. Western is an institutional, not a geographic proposition. It’s a direct threat to the Chinese. The existence of Taiwan, which is an alternative political system, is a direct threat to them. So here we are now in this world that we’ve been in for the whole time, including under Deng Xiaoping, but we didn’t understand this because we thought we were playing a different game of “economic integration leads to political transformation,” rather than “never on my watch, because we’re not going to be Gorbachev.” So, we were in the wrong game, or we didn’t understand the game that we were in.

This brings us to Ukraine and winning the peace, and then we’ll go for questions. How does this work for Ukraine? So, it turns out that in order to win the peace, you need an armistice. You need an end to the fighting. You see, because Ukraine, they need Ukraine. Russia doesn’t need Ukraine. Russia has Russia. So, if you have a house, let’s say your house has 10 rooms. And I come into your house and I steal two of your rooms, and I wreck them, and from those two rooms, I’m wrecking the other eight rooms. You prevent me from taking the other eight rooms with your courage and ingenuity on the battlefield. But I’m still occupying two of your rooms and wrecking the rest of them. And you have more than a million, a million and a half of your children going to school in a language other than Ukrainian, in Polish and German. Another year passes, and another year passes. Are they still Ukrainian? You don’t have a budget, you don’t have an economy. You don’t have customs duty, you don’t have tax revenues. You’re dying. That whole courageous, ingenious Ukrainian army that we saw, is dead. They’re gone. They’re dead or severely wounded. You’re burning through your ammunition and you’re burning through stuff that nobody’s increasing production. We’re just giving stocks. 

You want to increase production, you want to open up two new assembly lines to produce munitions when you’re a private company and they give you a two-year contract and you say, “Okay, I’ll deliver in 2025, the munitions.” Well maybe the war’s over in 2025, and you’ve just built two new assembly lines. So, you need a ten-year contract, not a two-year contract before you’re going to open up two new assembly lines. Otherwise, you get stranded assets. That’s where we are in the war. You’re not winning if someone is destroying your house, no matter how valorous, no matter how amazing your resistance has been. Because the Russians take up their own house and it has 1000 rooms. They don’t need your house but you only have one house, Ukraine. 

So, armistice sooner rather than later. Regaining as much territory okay, but a DMZ, an EU accession process that’s more accelerated than the ones that the Western Balkans are going through. A security guarantee which is not going to be NATO. If you’ve been to Germany, you understand, NATO works on consensus. There’s no possibility of Ukraine in NATO. None. And discussion of that publicly can only undermine NATO unity. There’s the possibility of a South Korea outcome which would be very dissatisfying. There’s North Korea, it’s a menace. The families were separated. The destruction and the rebuilding, and everything else. And the threat continues. There’s been no peace treaty, only an armistice on the Korean peninsula. The Cold War is over except it’s not over. Yet they have a security guarantee and South Korea is one of the most successful countries in the world. 

So that would be a big victory for Ukraine, if it came out looking like South Korea, with an armistice, a security guarantee. It might not be bilateral with the U.S.—it might be bilateral plus, where Poland joined and the Baltics joined and Scandinavians join, but it’s not going to be a NATO guarantee. The sooner you get to get to that the better. If Vladimir Putin signs a piece of paper, what’s that piece of paper worth? He’s gonna keep his word, commit to an armistice, and keep his word? Of course not. Never, except if he signs the paper in Beijing. Because if he signs the paper in Beijing, he can’t flip the bird to Xi Jinping. He’s on the hook. That’s his only bridge left. He’s burned every single other bridge.

 So you want the Chinese to oversee the peace process, to oversee the armistice, because that’s the only way you can get Putin to keep his word. I know it sounds crazy, but the Chinese peace proposal is fake. Except it’s not fake. It’s the only solution. And so, Biden delivers his guy to accept the armistice and Xi Jinping delivers his guy to accept the armistice, and they sign in Beijing. Otherwise, this guy can pause and go for tea next year, or the year after, or five years. You take Crimea back, you’ve got this insurgency problem. And in ten years or in fifty years, Russians will come back for it. Maybe next year, they’ll come back for it. Boris Yeltsin demanded the return of Crimea to Russia. Boris Yeltsin in 1991, before the Soviet Union had even dissolved. So, the idea that Crimea, Russians are going to walk from this somehow, it’s tough for winning the peace. 

In a situation of atrocities, where they’re murdering your civilians, they’re raping your women and girls, they’re kidnapping your children, they are destroying your cultural artifacts to eliminate any evidence that you actually do exist as a separate nation and a culture, this is a very hard argument to accept. That not being able to impose reparations and war crimes tribunals and regain all your territory is a winning of the peace. We’re nowhere near that yet. But we’re closer to it now than we were fourteen months ago. We’ll see if the Ukrainian offensive, if it happens—they actually don’t have any munitions right now because they spent them in Bakhmut. The ones we sent in January, the most munitions we’ve sent in the war, and they spent them over a territory that has no strategic significance. Now they’re demanding more, they’re begging for more. You take back some territory, or you don’t. Let’s say you take it back. How do you win the peace? How do you get the Russians to stop and not try to take it back again? Next year or the year after? You need to win the peace, not just win the war. 

So, it’s very unsatisfactory. It’s very, in some ways, demoralizing. It’s very difficult politically, and it’s the best outcome that’s on the table right now, short of a miracle. A miracle would be Russian disintegration in the field, the Russian army just disintegrates. We’ve been hearing about that for fourteen months and there’s no evidence of it yet. It might happen, but there’s no evidence. We’ve been hearing about Putin having trouble and maybe being overthrown. There’s no evidence to that. It could happen. He would have to be overthrown, but not by an escalatory replacement, but by a capitulatory one. 

The miracles we’ve been hoping for have not happened yet. They, once again, could happen. War is unpredictable, but if you’re looking soberly at the evidence, you’re looking at U.S. and China getting together to impose an armistice on each side, so that the fighting stops and Ukraine can get rebuilt, get the kinds of institutions that could assimilate $350 billion, at the lowest estimates, in reconstruction funds, which is twice pre-war GDP. Reconstruction at the lowest estimate is twice pre-war GDP, and that money is going to come in and not be stolen and disappear with the institutions they have now? I don’t think so. So you have got to build those institutions for that EU accession process in order just to assimilate the reconstruction funds properly. So that’s it. It’s not an uplifting story. But it is the story that’s on the table. And anyway, thank you for your attention.