>> From WXXI News.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour is made with the future of NATO and with a question should Ukraine become part of NATO?

In recent negotiations, it's clear that the Trump administration believes that Ukraine is going to have to give something up to stop the Russian attack on their soil.

Perhaps they have to give up their eastern territory.

Perhaps they have to give up their dream of joining NATO.

The director of grand strategy for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft says that Ukraine should indeed give up on NATO membership.

Make that a promise on connections.

Last month, George Beeby called for Ukraine to give up on NATO while being given membership in the EU.

Instead, he argues that Russia has a legitimate security concern, with NATO moving closer to its doorstep.

He compared Ukrainian NATO membership to Cuba holding nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Bibi said that the United States justifiably could not tolerate nuclear weapons so close to its airspace, just as Russia justifiably cannot tolerate NATO in its backyard.

Is that fair, or does it fundamentally misunderstand NATO?

The Trump administration has repeatedly criticized NATO and its members, and now some NATO states are preparing for a future without American involvement or leadership.

Last week, we welcomed a panel of Ukrainian women who were visiting Rochester for the week, and that was a powerful conversation.

And today we welcome back the man who helped organize that visit, that delegation, doctor Randy Stone is director of the center for Polish and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester.

Welcome back.

Thank you for being with us.

>> Nice to be with you, Evan.

>> I want to start with the spectacle of seeing President Trump roll out a literal red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska, followed by a news conference in which Putin seemed to take the lead on everything that was going on.

And then all of a sudden, everything ends abruptly.

There's no deal.

What did you make of that day?

>> Well, it's a terrible faux pas, to undermine the enormous effort that U.S.

foreign policy had made over a course of many years to isolate Russia and to isolate Vladimir Putin.

As you mentioned, literally rolling out the red carpet, making it clear that Putin is now a Rist, a respected conversation partner perhaps a peer.

this is exactly what Putin desperately wanted.

one of his motivations for invading Ukraine was to try to get shake things up and get his seat back at the table and become a more important architect of of the new of the New World order.

So Russia has been arguing for decades that the the U.S.

dominance of the world order which prevailed after the end of the Cold War.

And it was described by political scientists briefly as a unipolar moment, a period when there was really only one leading world power, that that was intolerable and that it would represent progress to get back to a period of multipolarity and multipolarity or the existence of numerous great powers that compete amongst themselves for power and prestige and get into frequent wars and so forth, has usually been thought of as a destabilizing factor in international relations.

But from from Putin's point of view, that's kind of liberating.

And so getting some leverage shaking things up becoming elevated on the world stage was exactly what he was hoping for.

And he got the visual that he could show to his people that his strategy in Ukraine was working.

>> And then they he gets together with Modi and Xi Jinping.

and the images of Putin and Modi literally hand in hand.

the images of Xi Jinping and Putin talking about a future of mutual respect and security he has certainly elevated or attempted to elevate himself and his leadership into that multi-polar framework that you talk about.

Is it inevitable right now that the United States has to reframe how it views itself?

It's not a unipolar world, I don't think.

I mean, certainly.

And so in terms of who has leverage, who has power, does that influence how the United States has to view itself when it's either negotiating with Russia regarding Ukraine, with China, with India?

Do we have to reframe those things?

>> There's a there's a danger of overextension.

and U.S.

foreign policy got too cocky in the 1990s.

and that that is a concern.

Russia is not the partner, right?

That has or the or the the security threat.

Right.

That is really foremost.

And the the the concern really is what's the implication of U.S.

relations with Russia?

for U.S.

relations with China, right?

China is a very rapidly rising economy and a very rapidly rising military power.

Right.

China is building more ships than the United States was building at the height of World War II.

Right.

And so the everything that happens in U.S.

Russian relations has to be viewed through that lens, because that's where conflict might break out.

That's a that that's the the real area of concern.

>> And I'm very curious to see in the weeks to come, if the Trump administration can negotiate any kind of agreement with China on economic issues.

So yesterday we talked about tariffs and we talked about how China is the buyer of a quarter of American soybeans.

So if you're in the soybean industry, it's a crisis right now in North Dakota, in Kentucky, certainly soybeans are grown in New York State.

They're growing across the country.

it is billions of dollars, and a quarter of the industry sells to China.

And right now, zero is going to China contractually this year because China has pulled out because of tariffs and it's retaliatory tariffs.

So the United States, the Trump administration puts tariffs out.

China responds with a 34% tariff.

Now your soybeans are a third more.

And China is buying from Brazil.

So you have in North Dakota.

In Kentucky, soybean farmers who probably never thought they'd be criticizing this administration, calling it a five alarm fire and saying they never want to hear the word tariffs again.

And the Trump administration is saying we can negotiate with China like, we'll figure this out, even though at the same time, they're also saying tariffs are good and we should have them forever.

So when it comes to the leverage that you're talking about and the way powers see each other, how are you curious to see what happens here in vis a vis even just this tariff episode, to see how the Trump administration handles it?

>> Yeah.

So the interesting thing is that Trump administration doesn't really have a strategy with respect to to trade.

They have a bunch of slogans and a lot of incoherent policies that have been rolled out.

And then with retracted and then rolled out again and so forth.

in contrast, the Biden administration had a strategy vis a vis China, which was that they needed to prevent China from acquiring certain technologies that were of crucial military importance.

And that primarily was was was chips.

the computer chips that were produced by Nvidia and a few other companies.

That strategy was carried out very consistently under Biden and was pretty successful.

there were some reverses.

There were some cases where China was able to make substantial gains in A.I.

technology and in chip manufacture, in spite of the export controls.

But the export controls were gradually tightened up, and it looked like it was having an effect and actually affecting the the competition between the two countries.

Trump came into office, promising to change the fact that China has a substantial trade surplus with the United States.

He thought he was going to do that by imposing tariffs, which doesn't work.

We you can shift around which countries you have trade surpluses and deficits with by imposing tariffs, but you can't actually make a long term effect on your on your trade deficit by imposing tariffs, because the tariffs cause your your currency to appreciate which offsets the effect of the tariff.

So the effect of these tariffs is to reduce bilateral trade between China and the United States.

>> Which is exactly what.

>> We're seeing.

>> That's what we're seeing.

but but does not affect the, the overall balance of American trade.

but then he turned around and made a deal with Nvidia, which allows them to export chips, computer chips to China that had been forbidden under the Biden administration.

You have undermining the strategic aspect of the interaction, which was to try to prevent China from becoming a military threat to the United States while engaging in this kind of incoherent on again, off again policy of imposing tariffs and then backing them down and then then renegotiating and so on.

>> So it sounds like you don't see a whole lot of consistency or coherence.

and if I were a soybean farmer, I don't know if I'd be counting on a solution.

>> That's, that's that's right.

Well, there's also incoherence vis a vis India.

You mentioned India earlier, and Modi meeting with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in, in China.

So this was a case where we were expecting that one of the dividends from Trump being president was would be improved relations with India, because Modi and Trump had good personal relations.

And in Trump's first administration they both have a kind of right wing xenophobic sort of gestalt to their to their leadership styles.

They got along pretty well.

and for a while that seemed to be going fine.

And rush and Trump was undermining Ukraine and and withdrawing support from Ukraine.

But then he got frustrated with Putin.

So he decided that he was going to put pressure on India to stop buying Russian oil.

That was the origin of his 50% tariffs on India.

he didn't.

If he'd really wanted to do this in a strategic way, he probably would have talked with Modi about this negotiated in the background and avoided actually imposing the tariffs in order to get Modi to change his behavior.

But instead he slapped tariffs on India very publicly, forcing Modi then to dig in his heels and show that he's not going to be pushed around by the United States.

So it backfired.

And a week later, Modi goes to China to to meet Vladimir Putin.

>> You know, we're going to get back to Ukraine and NATO in a second.

One other question on this subject relates to some of the conversation.

Yesterday.

We had an economist on yesterday, and I asked if there's anything regarding tariffs that had surprised him in his profession because I said, regardless of where you are in the political spectrum, most economists, the vast majority were warning against tariffs, are not a fan of tariffs, have seen historically what tariffs do.

And I said has anything surprised you.

And he said there's one thing he said people are having a better understanding of what tariffs actually are now and who pays them.

So you could put a tariff on China.

But China's not paying the tariff.

Their goods come in here and we are paying the tariff.

But what he said is so far the Home Depots of the world, some of the other companies are doing their best to eat the tariffs for a little while, not to anger the administration, not to raise prices.

And he said that's not sustainable forever.

So the shock of the tariffs has had an effect like we're seeing in soybeans and some industries.

But if it is sustained, we will eventually see even more price increases and more of the passed on to the consumer.

And that's what surprised him.

Now, your work is different than my guest yesterday, but I'm curious to know if anything has surprised you.

From what you've seen in Trump 2.0, with the tariffs.

>> I'm I've been surprised that the stock market has so far recovered so well from the tariff shock that it faced earlier in the year.

Given that the uncertainty has not abated and tariff levels are still very, very high.

And so it that that is a surprise to me.

I seems to me that it's not sustainable.

I it's absolutely correct that you know, in this in the the simple model of perfectly competitive markets, you can tell who's paying the tariffs and so on.

And tariffs are a tax on American importers.

they reduce the welfare of American import consumers and they reduce the welfare of foreign producers, both,, and there's a deadweight loss, right?

Inefficiency due to, due to tariffs, which, which doesn't go to anybody.

But with imperfectly competitive markets, firms have market power and they can choose how much of the tariff to pass through and when to do it and so forth.

So part of what happens is it cuts down the the profits of of some of the middlemen.

but that, as your guest pointed out, is, is unsustainable in the long run.

And we're going to see those price pressures eventually get passed through to the consumer.

>> So let's get back to let's get back to Ukraine and NATO.

And I want to listen to part of the conversation that I had last month with George Beeby from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Now, he served as an advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney on matters regarding Russia.

And now he's part of an organization that is certainly heterodox in the marketplace of international ideas.

and I want to listen to what he said about how he sees Russia's decision to invade Ukraine.

Some of the dynamics that underlie that, how Russia sees NATO and possible Ukraine, NATO membership and more.

Let's listen.

>> If you go back and read media coverage of Russia's invasion, starting from the very, you know, early days in February of 2022, up through most of the last three years, you always saw an adjective that was preceding that word invasion in the coverage of this.

And that was unprovoked.

This was an unprovoked invasion.

and this, I think, is a critical conceptual difference between those that believe the only way you solve this problem, the only way you end this war, is through brute military force.

The Russians are going to continue this war and continue their aggression against the West more broadly until they are stopped by force.

Now there's another conception for understanding what happened here, one that I tend to subscribe to, which doesn't look at this war like some sort of replay of Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in World War II, but more like the way World War I began, where you had an entanglement of alliances, countries that thought that they were enhancing their own security through building this network of alliances, through building up their military capabilities, all of which were meant to deter potential adversaries, but in fact ended up provoking alarming other countries.

On the other side of these alliances and military forces.

And you wind up in a spiral, an escalatory cycle of action and reaction that led to a war that nobody actually wanted in World War I. Nobody actually expected it to be as bad or as extensive as it was.

It wasn't like some leader in 1914 said, you know, I really want to go conquer other territory.

This was a case of mutual insecurity.

And I think that is, to me, a better description of what we've been seeing in Ukraine.

The Russians, for many, many years, beginning in the early days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, worried that the United States and its NATO allies were going to monopolize European security, that the overarching European security entity would end up becoming NATO and NATO would have a military presence on Russia's border in very sensitive areas that the Russians found quite threatening.

And they early on said, wait, this is not the direction that we want to see things take.

We believe we need to have a voice in European security matters and a principle that has been forgotten in Europe is the principle of indivisibility, of security.

That's the notion that one state or groups of states should not enhance its own security at the expense of another state security.

And they urged that we discuss how to apply that principle in Europe.

And we essentially said, no, you don't get a say in what countries can ally with others.

That's a sovereign right that all states have.

So this, I think, is at the root of the conflict that we're seeing in Ukraine.

>> What do you make of some of that doctor Stone?

>> Well, that's a familiar perspective.

I mean, there, there's a long standing debate in international relations between proponents of the deterrence model.

that and the proponents of the spiral model.

What really explains international conflict is the problem that your opponent is unsure whether you really have the resolve to fight.

And so you have to demonstrate your resolve in order to keep your opponent from making a mistake.

Right.

that's the deterrence model.

And that that has led us down various mistakes, like fighting the Vietnam War, right?

Because we thought that if we backed down in Vietnam, that would lead to the Soviet Union starting a war in Europe.

And in fact, there's it doesn't seem to be the case that the Soviet Union never had serious plans to invade Western Europe.

>> the, the the alternative is the the spiral model, which, as was described, is often used as an explanation for World War I. It's not uncontroversial.

Right.

There are alternative theses about what happened during during World War I. but the argument is that the, opponent is unsure about whether you have aggressive intentions.

And so in order to prevent war, you have to reassure the opponent that you don't have aggressive intentions.

The difficulty is that it's difficult to demonstrate resolve and and demonstrate a lack of aggressive intentions with the same action.

Right.

And so depending on what you think the uncertainty is that you're trying to resolve, you lead to completely opposite prescriptions.

Now, I was very sympathetic to this view, and I spent years meeting with Russian counterparts, talking with them.

in a group called The Program on New Approaches to Russian Security in the 1990s.

and then as part of a Valdai discussion group, I that was organized by, you know, the the Russians, president's office to have a bilateral discussion with Americans.

And they also organize them with many other countries.

so I, I met as part of this Valdai group from 2009 to 2019, twice a year, once in Moscow and once in the United States.

And we would talk about contemporary issues in bilateral relations and try to figure out mutually agreeable solutions and ways in which we could reassure one another that we didn't have aggressive intentions.

And in early 2009, that seemed very hopeful.

we would meet we had very similar objectives.

We had we had similar perspectives on the world.

we agreed on most of the facts that we were discussing.

and then as time went on, those discussions became more and more like the crazy uncle that you have to invite to Thanksgiving who listens to different media than you do lives in a different world than you do.

didn't agree with you about any of the basic facts of the world.

and so we saw our perspectives and our beliefs diverge so that that was I just give that as background that I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that Russia, American policy, particularly in the 1990s, unnecessarily provoked Russia that the Clinton administration was a bit ham fisted.

>> Doing what, by the way?

>> well, the way in which NATO expansion was, was carried out it was primarily a political decision made by the United States, made by, by Bill Clinton.

in, in the, in the, in the mid 1990s, and without very much effort to negotiate and, and and cajole the Yeltsin administration.

I think the Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin then was president of Russia was seen by America as an important priority trying to safeguard democracy in Russia.

That was seen as one of the great victories at the end of the Cold War was that Russia became a democratic country and was cooperating with the United States in many fields.

and yet, as Russia became weaker and weaker in the course of the 1990s, it became less and less of a priority to to think about the long term of what was happening to Russian public opinion.

I mean, I think those are all valid, valid concerns.

And I've heard for years from Russian counterparts that if Ukraine ever joined NATO, that would be war, right?

That would be a casus belli for Russia.

>> Did you hear that in the 1990s?

>> I didn't hear that in stated quite that way in the 1990s, but I heard that in our very first meeting of the Valdai Group in 2009, right at the height of the reset, right when we were looking for improved relations between in the.

>> Putin era.

>> That was in the Putin era.

Yeah, but I think that's misplacing where the uncertainty is.

I don't it's true that Russians were very concerned about NATO expansion.

They were they were fearful about it.

They were afraid, among other things, that it would squeeze them out of their natural economic sphere of influence, that if Ukraine wasn't dependent upon them militarily, it wouldn't be dependent upon them economically.

And that would be bad for the Russian economy.

Right.

They I think that they had valid concerns, but they weren't fundamentally concerned that the United States actually wanted to invade Russia.

I don't think that was ever really the fear.

on the other hand, I think there really was uncertainty about what Russian ambitions and goals were towards the former Soviet Union, Russia, even under Boris Yeltsin, tried to maintain a semi hegemonic sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union.

It created a set of institutions called the Commonwealth of Independent States which built, very close relations with some of the former Soviet countries and less close with others.

and they tried very hard to pull Ukraine back into that sphere of influence.

There was a push and pull in Ukrainian politics between a pro-Russian and anti-Russian factions, and the series of Russian administrations tried to support the pro-Russian ones and undermine the anti-Russian ones.

and, it was it was unclear whether ultimately, I think, to the, the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, whether Russia really intended to let those countries be sovereign or whether that was just a short term accommodation to Russian weakness in the early 1990s, Vladimir Putin has shown his true colors.

And in 2022, he told us why he was invading Ukraine.

It wasn't because he was afraid that, Ukraine was a security threat, or that the United States was intending to overthrow his regime.

He was invading Ukraine because Kyiv was the historical center of this mythical Kievan Rus.

Right?

That that owning Ukraine was seen as an important part of Russian national identity that there was that there was a religious dimension to this, that you know, Vladimir Putin is named after Saint Vladimir, who was the Kievan prince who ushered in Orthodox Christianity a thousand years ago.

incidentally, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is also named after the same saint, right?

and Vladimir Putin built a statue to this saint in one of the major intersections right near the Red square.

it's ironically referred to in in Moscow as the statue of Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Right.

Because, Vladimir is also Putin's father's name.

And so his patronymic is Vladimirovich.

And so it's kind of a statue to himself of this saint from a thousand years ago.

so there is a an exactly how Putin identifies with various right wing strains of nationalism that have become elaborated during the Putin administration over the last 25 years is a little unclear, but he is beholden to a lot of these ideas.

He echoes them in his speeches, and it seems like he was just desperate to retake Ukraine for its own sake.

So our problem here was not reassuring Russia.

Our problem here was deterring Russia all along.

We just didn't know it.

>> Yeah.

>> Look, I, I don't have the credentials to challenge you or George Beeby.

You're both Russian.

Russian speaking.

international minds well beyond mine.

But what I said to Bibi after he claimed what he claimed in the clip that you heard, was that this didn't look to me like Moscow's deeply concerned about NATO membership, about encroachment of NATO on on its doorstep.

If you just read and and listen, even in the Tucker Carlson interview that Vladimir Putin did he doesn't view Ukraine as sovereign.

He doesn't view it as legitimate.

He views it as Russian.

And that's a fundamentally different thing.

And and Bibi said two things.

He said, number one, he thinks that's a misreading.

He said a lot of people, quote Vladimir Putin when he said that anyone who doesn't weep at the dissolution of the Soviet Union has no heart.

And he says that people often leave out the next thing he said, which is, and anyone who wants to reconfigure it has no head.

So he said, you know, doesn't that prove that he actually doesn't just want to hegemonic grab Ukraine and Estonia and Latvia, which I think is.

Facile, if I can say it.

But I but then he said that he views this more as Bay of pigs, the Russian, the Cuban missile crisis, the concern that how did the Americans feel when nuclear weapons were going to be right outside our door in Cuba?

Would we have gone to war over that?

Well, that's what Russia feels in Ukraine.

And you got to give them some understanding there.

I just think that that ignores everything that I read.

Putin himself say, and I don't know how to bridge that.

I mean, if the Russian leadership doesn't view Ukraine as legitimate, that's not the same as well.

We don't we don't trust Europe, Europe security plan.

And we think that they may invade us.

I don't think he rationally can make a case that anyone wants to invade him.

So I don't know how.

I was kind of at a loss as to where to go with people who feel that way, but there's plenty of people who do feel that way.

So what do you do with that?

Randy?

>> Yeah, I mean, ironically Ukraine being a member of NATO wouldn't be on the table if Putin hadn't put it there.

Right?

If he had not invaded Ukraine in 2022, we wouldn't be having this kind of discussion about whether Ukraine should be a member of NATO.

Ukraine being a member of NATO was always seen by most of the members of NATO as intolerably risky, right.

For exactly that reason that it's, in the midst of the Russian sphere of influence.

it puts NATO forces very close to Moscow.

it Ukraine has long standing territorial disputes with Russia.

since 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and Donetsk and Lugansk occupied the, the southern and the eastern portion of the country.

Ukraine has had an ongoing territorial dispute with Russia, and NATO has generally seen that as disqualifying for NATO membership.

It's just too risky to to take on a member who has major outstanding territorial disputes with its neighbors.

so that that wouldn't have happened.

there was an effort briefly in the George W. Bush administration to encourage NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia as as new members.

I think that was at the time a mistake.

It it exacerbated already worsening relations with Russia, helped to contribute to the Russian-georgian war of 2008. and it was immediately rebuffed by West European countries because they saw that as, as too, too risky.

That would be that would be overextension.

but now we're in a situation where there's an ongoing war with Russia, which can't be resolved without some kind of security guarantee for Ukraine.

Ukraine has no incentive to make any kind of deal with Russia.

because that would cause the current coalition of supporters to dissolve.

Right.

it would then have to exert tremendous efforts to, to reconstitute it.

And it might not succeed.

And it would leave Russia in a much stronger position to invade once again or to make demands short of invasion for various kinds of concessions.

Right.

So Ukraine sees that it would be in an untenable strategic position if it agreed to peace on any terms, whatever they might be short of getting some kind of a military guarantee, the best quality of military guarantee, the gold standard is NATO membership.

so far, Russia has never been willing to invade any country that had NATO membership.

they've they've been tempted, I think at various times, but they haven't done it.

but and, and so far, article five of NATO, which commits every member of NATO to absolutely defend any other member of NATO that has attacked has seemed to be as effective, credible deterrent now that currency is somewhat debased in the Putin in the Trump administration, it's not quite clear what Donald Trump would do under any given set of circumstances.

And he has made numerous comments that have tended to undermine faith in the U.S., commitment to article five.

The rest of NATO has made it very clear that they're very committed to it.

so it's still a pretty good coin of of deterrence.

Anything short of NATO membership is less effective.

But perhaps an agreement could be reached under which Ukraine received a guarantee.

from NATO that was short of membership.

perhaps that would seem more credible if at the same time, Ukraine became a member of the European Union, that would pull the European Union in another way into support of, of of Ukraine, those kinds of things would have to be negotiated at some point.

if serious.

peace negotiations were to begin.

but it's hard to imagine Ukraine agreeing at this point to any kind of cessation of hostilities without a serious guarantee.

Keep in mind that they already had a guarantee.

It was a bilateral guarantee from Russia and the United States that both would respect and would guarantee Ukraine's independence and sovereignty inside its post 1991 borders.

and that that was the the Budapest Memorandum, which was signed when, when Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons.

Vladimir Putin violated that agreement in 2014 when he invaded Ukraine, and the United States did not stand by its guarantee either.

So it's going to take something pretty significant to reassure the Ukrainians.

>> And the other side of this, only break, I'm going to get a response to some listeners.

Got a text from Justin who says how come what Russia did in Poland with the drones didn't trigger article five?

We'll talk a little bit about that.

and we'll talk a little bit more about the future of NATO as as a security organization, especially if this current administration continues to go in this direction.

We're talking to doctor Randy Stone, who's director of the center for Polish and Central and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester.

Coming up in our second hour, Congressman Joe Morelli joins us.

He will be flanked by some folks who work in childcare in various ways, thinking about the future of our children.

Now, the Trump administration has promised that tariffs would pay for universal childcare and better situations for every American family.

Congressman Morelli says, put your money where your mouth is.

He says.

There's a lot that is falling short for American children.

We're going to talk about it next hour.

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>> This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

So Justin texted the program to ask what happened in how come?

What happened in Poland with Russian drones?

encroaching in polar space was not triggering article five.

Randy.

>> That's right.

Well, the other country that's affected has to formally request that article five be invoked.

and that hasn't been done in this case.

>> They requested article four.

I think they requested article four, didn't they?

I could I could look it up.

>> Yeah.

>> But article five being what.?

>> So article five is the guarantee that an attack against any country of NATO is regarded as an attack against all.

And it's been invoked once, which was by the United States after 9/11.

and that was the basis on which the NATO participated in the war in Afghanistan.

so there are incursions on rather frequent basis, not quite a daily basis, but a rather frequent basis into the airspace of NATO countries.

There were some over the weekend in the Baltic Sea.

There have been numerous flyovers in the Baltics by by Russian aircraft and I think this is just the latest in a series of those things where Putin is trying to exert pressure, trying to see how much he can get away with alarm the West and try to demonstrate that that NATO is a paper tiger.

And so the question is, how far do you let that go before you start shooting down his planes?

And escalate into conflict?

And NATO has been pretty careful not to escalate into conflict.

China does the same thing, by the way, over the South China Sea.

China claims the South China Sea, and it buzzes over American ships when they sail through the South China Sea.

occasionally they come very close to having mid-air collisions between Chinese and American fighter planes.

It's the same tactic of trying to increase pressure.

>> so you do view this as an intentional probing by Putin to see just how much resolve NATO has.

>> Yes.

And an effort to try to scare NATO countries to deter them from supporting Ukraine.

>> But at the same time, I guess I feel like it is wise that we we NATO hasn't shot down a Russian aircraft yet.

I mean, I don't know that that would be helpful.

>> Well, it would, it would lead to further escalation.

Right.

Presumably Putin probably has a plan.

For what to do when that happens, and it probably will happen at some point.

and what exactly that plan looks like?

I'm not sure.

I think NATO is in a position to exert escalation, dominance if it wants to.

this is a matter of who escalates the most and what who is, is then compelled to back down.

NATO has much stronger air forces than than Putin does.

There is a little bit of an asymmetry in that.

Russia has invested so much in developing drones, and NATO is behind in terms of drones, technology and countermeasures.

NATO would be shooting down drones that cost you know, tens of thousands of dollars to produce with missiles that cost $1 million to produce.

And so that's not a sustainable long term strategy for dealing with the drones.

But that just calls for some further adaptation.

>> You feel like Pete Hegseth has it under control.

>> I don't think Pete Hegseth has any idea what he's doing.

He's completely incompetent.

And and was was you know, didn't have qualifications to the position that he's in.

I think there are a lot of very professional military people in the Pentagon who have a handle on this.

>> Greg in San Diego is on the phone.

Hey, Greg, go ahead.

>> Good morning.

I think that Putin must really get nauseous every time he has heard the phrase.

The U.S.

won the Cold War.

and in, in the 1990s, it appeared to be so.

The Berlin Wall came down Germany.

There was no more.

And East Berlin or East Germany it was united and became a member of NATO, as did Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and so forth.

So basically all of those countries that had been part of the Warsaw Pact and which had been allied with the Soviet Union, were now basically essentially a part of the West.

And Putin, I think that just grated on him.

And when it came to the Baltic states, integral parts of the Soviet Union, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, I think that really was a bridge too far for him and that he could not in no way allow Ukraine to follow that, because it was too wealthy in terms of minerals.

It's the breadbasket of Europe.

So I think he has every reason in the world to want to conquer Ukraine and have a path to intimidate, if not more.

The NATO states in the future.

>> Greg, thank you for the phone call.

Randy, what do you think?

>> Well, Greg, I hope the the weather's okay in San Diego.

Nice to hear from you.

so the situation changed immeasurably.

in 1989 and then again in 1991, in ways that no one was anticipating at the time.

you know, I, I was in Europe in the I was actually in Saint Petersburg.

They called it Leningrad.

Then in the summer of 1989 and I had no idea that the Berlin Wall was going to collapse or that the Soviet Union might cease to exist.

that didn't seem like it was on the horizon at all.

And at the time, if you'd asked me whether it was acceptable, to to, to Russian public opinion that Germany would be reunited, I would have said, well, absolutely not.

They'll never allow that.

so things have changed.

we live in a different world than we did then.

and part of what changed was that the Soviet Union collapsed.

what had, you know, it was in the 1980s, estimated to be the second largest economy in the world after the United States.

Right.

it was a superpower.

it was able to compete militarily and economically.

and had global reach.

It collapsed.

And by the mid 1990s Russia had an economy that was smaller than Portugal.

So the the shift of of power was was tremendous.

and it was naturally very disturbing to Russians.

And they cast about to try to understand how they could explain this.

And of course, they blamed their leaders particularly Mikhail Gorbachev who introduced the idea of, of openness and openness to the West and democratization and so forth, and economic reform in the, in the 1980s they gradually came to blame.

Boris Yeltsin, who succeeded Gorbachev as he also was unable to cope with the economic collapse that was ongoing.

They then came to blame the United States because we gave them all this advice.

And IMF programs and so forth.

And it didn't seem to work.

And they they assumed that liberalization and democratization must have just been an American trick to turn them into a third world country.

>> now, of course, the history of that time period suggests that if they'd followed IMF objectives and if they'd followed the reform proposals that they that they received, their economy would have collapsed, much less rapidly, and it would have been a would have been a much more rapid recovery that they could have had much less inflation and much less inequality and so forth than they ended up with.

Right?

They ended up with the worst of both worlds.

They went through periodic austerity programs, followed by hyperinflation, followed by austerity, followed by hyperinflation over and over again, doing all the damage on the way down and all the damage on the way up, right to the economy.

Ukraine's macroeconomic policies, incidentally, in the 1990s, were even worse than Russia's.

And so the economic damage was even worse.

And by the end of the 1990s, Ukraine was, was was much poorer right than than Russia was so does that mean that Putin is justified in trying to conquer Ukraine?

No, I mean, Ukraine has been a sovereign, independent country since the beginning of well, since it it declared that it was in August of 1991 and it was internationally recognized, including by Russia in 1992, Russia had a series of solemn international agreements with Ukraine guaranteeing Ukraine's sovereignty and independence and and its borders and Putin has has trampled all over those and a country that has been independent for decades is is not the, the property of its neighbors.

>> So in the last couple of minutes here, you mentioned in 1989 you were in Leningrad and you just couldn't foresee the events that were about to happen.

>> Exactly.

>> It's a good reminder that a lot can change quickly and a lot can change very unpredictably in history.

So we could be sitting here a year from now and be very different world.

or this could intractable situation could remain that way for, for years.

But do you think there is anything that signals to you that a real peace and not even an end to the hostility is even plausible?

>> I don't think that it's plausible in the near future.

I, I one possible route to an end to hostilities would be if Putin lost power.

His position and looked to be pretty weak.

about a year ago.

It looks a lot stronger now., one possibility would be that the Ukrainian military just crumbles and gives up.

it's doing less well than it did.

a year ago.

Russia has been making some progress, particularly in Donetsk.

there are a couple of strategically important cities that may fall this fall.

We'll see.

But it's been very slow progress, and Russia's been paying a terrible price in order to make that little bit of progress.

so I'd have to say that the Ukrainian military has won the war so far.

They their their effort was not to lose too much territory too fast.

and they have managed to grind the Russian advance down to a really painful, really slow crawl.

so that's that looks like a a success from their point of view as a, as a holding action.

One possibility is the Ukrainian population could just give up out of war weariness, but there's no indication whatsoever that that's going to happen.

>> As we heard last week on this program.

Again, six Ukrainians with us on this program last week.

That's not a perfect sample of the population.

I understand that, but the resolve was very strong and very immediate not to cede territory and not to give up NATO membership and not to just sign the deal right now.

>> The bottom line is that someone needs to come up with the political will to offer Ukraine a guarantee, and then the conflict can be resolved.

>> Thanks for being here.

>> Nice to be with you, Evan.

>> Appreciate your time and your expertise.

As always.

Dr.

Randy Stone, director of the center for Polish and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester.

Congressman Joe Morelle joins us next.

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