#13 Seva Gunitsky: Putin Got His Multipolar World. Now He'll Regret It

invasion is a catastrophic strategic mistake. Probably the single biggest strategic blender of the century so far. We have a million casualties on the Russian side, now over a million killed and wounded and captured. That's a huge number for a country that has serious demographic problems. Finland and Sweden are in NATO now. NATO is directly on Russian borders. European defense spending has increased. So every single thing Putin said he was trying to prevent, he caused by this invasion. Hey, it's Marcel Delsis and this is the next best. This is a conversation with Sever Gunitsky. Sever is a professor at the University of Toronto and the author of a book named Aftershocks. We discuss Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the structure of Putin's dictatorship and the changing nature of the global order, which might not be so grateful Moscow. Let's go. Hi, Sever, thank you so much for joining. I'm Marcel, thanks for having me. So I have a million questions, but first of all, let's start with a difficult one, maybe. Do you think Putin made a strategic mistake by invading Ukraine? That's not a difficult question at all, actually. I think it's pretty clear at this point and it was clear from the start, I think, that the invasion is a catastrophic strategic mistake. And I say that because you can measure the negative effects pretty much across every dimension, but that matters. I mean, we have a million casualties on the Russian side, now over a million killed and wounded and captured. And that's a huge number for a country that has serious demographic problems. Every year Putin gets on TV and talks about he's going to solve the demographic problem. Over 20 years, he's been saying that. And Russia lost over a million people under COVID in excess mortality. So it's already facing a huge population crisis. And now essentially you've got a generation of men that have been sacrificed to this war. So there's that dimension that the long term consequences for Russian society are going to be huge economically and socially and psychologically really. Those are going to be enormous and we're just now starting to see that. And then geopolitically of course, what was Putin's explanation for the invasion? Well, he's worried about NATO supposedly. But what's happened since that? Well Finland and Sweden are in NATO now. NATO's directly on Russian borders. He got basically the exact opposite results. It's almost like comically self-defeating honestly. And I think that's why a lot of people did not expect the invasion or skeptical about the invasion myself included because it was clear from the start. This is a really bad idea. I mean, economic, I even talked about the economic impact. It's been, Russia's been cut off from Western financial systems. It's lost access to really critical technology imports. It's trying to make up for it through China. In massive brain drain, like hundreds of thousands of educated Russians, educated young Russians have left the country, including some people I know, including some family members. I still had family in Russia and the remainder has left over the past three years. And you know, people have been predicting Russian economic collapse for a while. The economy was doing well for a while because it basically was wartime spending. But now that's slowing down and it's not sustainable. They're burning through their reserves. They're budget is militarized. They're almost completely dependent on China now as an economic partner. That's not really a position of strength. The military, we can talk about that. The Russian military, everybody thought, you know, it was going to be a force to reckon with, you know, the second biggest army in the world, all of that talk. But, and then the Russians believe this too. But we see what a fiasco it's been. Put in themselves, expect that the army to take over in a few days. I mean, they sent like, they sent like dress uniforms with some of the initial soldiers so that they have, would have clothes for their victory parade and Kyiv, you know, the week after or whatever. That's not happening. So they've lost enormous quantities of equipment. They basically burned through their professional military. They're relying more and more on convicts and mercenaries. And you know, now they're shutting off telegram basically so that they can have a mobilization without people protesting. That's what Putin is worried about. So that's the end result after four years of war. We're talking on the four year anniversary of the war today. So even if Russia holds some territory in eastern Ukraine at the end of this, whatever the end looks like, its military has been degraded, its economy has isolated. And look, the entire Putin's entire thing, his entire social contract was, you know, look, at least I saved you from the Nazis. I saved you from the chaos of that awful period when everything was in turmoil. And so I'll give you stability, that's the bargain, right? You know, don't challenge me too much. Don't make too much noise. You can have your car and you can have your consumer goods, no demonstrating, right? That was the implicit bargain. That was the stability compact. And that bargain goes out to window as soon as Putin invades. And again, like, here's the thing. We'll talk about personal regimes and the dumb things they do. But I think what's really important is like, none of this was really that surprising. In fact, a lot of it was pretty predictable. And a lot of people made these predictions, you know, that when you have a, when you're invading this large mobilized country with a national consciousness and also one that has backing from external powers, you're going to have problems, right? We don't have to look far for that. We have the Soviets in Afghanistan, we have the US in Iraq. These are the most reliable ways to bleed a regional power dry is a bad invasion. And of course, a lot of people were saying this. It's not just a miscalculation, that's the idea. You know, we talk about all these negative consequences. And that's easy than to move from that to all Putin was crazy or Putin was irrational. I think that's also wrong because it wasn't just him being overoptimistic or whatever. It was an informational failure, right? The result of making rational decisions that's based on bad information. And that systemic failure is kind of baked into the regime. Let me ask you about that because obviously that information failure is directly related to the structure of this regime. That's a part of the explanation for why dictators keep making these incredibly consequential mistakes. So who actually advises Putin? How does he get his information? Who are the people that he actually listens to? Yeah, so as he's gone on in power, as we as we come in trench in power, his inner circle is basically kind of shrunk and he's become more isolated. There's all these security service people that are basically in his inner circle like Patruschov and the, you know, the Siloviky, the security services people and their loyal and they're basically yes, man, right? And this is what happens over time with these personal regimes is the inner circle starts to shrink and it starts to become more homogenous. And of course, COVID didn't help here, Putin basically isolated himself even more. Very few people got to see him. I think he just just a couple of weeks ago, he lifted the restriction where everybody had to wait to meet with him in quarantine for several days. He did that way longer than any other leader. He just stopped doing that recently. So he was basically placed into self isolation, talking to people who will not challenge him, who will not challenge his assumptions. And that's a very dangerous feedback loop because that inner circle that I'm talking about those security people, they see the West as an existential threat, which of course pushes them and puts them to be more belligerent towards the West, which validates the hawks, right? And this around, around it goes. So I think that's essentially what happened that he's become increasingly isolated and talking to people who are supremely paranoid and he feeds off of that paranoia. And I think that drives a lot of decision making, especially over the past few years. People always debate this point about the rationality of Putin, right? And I agree that he is rational, but within the system in which he operates. So by our standards, he looks irrational, but that's because we're in a very different situation than he is. And the information that we get is also very different. And he look at his conduct now as it pertains to the one Ukraine. What do you think motivates him? Like is this primarily about regime survival? Is it about advancing Russia's national interest? Is it about his place in the history books? What does he want? Hey, quick interruption. As you can probably tell, I'm having a lot of fun doing this podcast. If you want to support me, do me a favor and hit that subscribe button. That way you don't miss next week's episode and you're really helping me out. Thank you very much. Well, I think a lot of it is he sees his legacy as helping Russia recover from the Soviet collapse, right, which he has said is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century. And so when you have a regime that's essentially an extension of a leader's psyche, which is what we have in the personal regime, his personal grievances, his historical grievances essentially become national policy, right? There's no daylight between what he believes, what grievances he personally has versus what Russia does. And this is very different from ordinary autocracy. You can have a brutal autocracy that still has deliberation among the elites of some kind. You think about Brezhnev, USSR and the Brezhnev? That's obviously a sclerotic, autocratic institution, but it's a collective decision-making one, right? Or China after Mao explicitly designed to prevent one man rule. Or even military junta's in Latin America where they rotate power or require some kind of agreement between branches. Personalists get rid of all of that, right? So you get these informational bubbles. You get rulers surrounding themselves with yes, man. And they make these decisions based on personal fixations and not coherent national interests. So I think for Putin, it was a combination of factors. One is desire to secure his legacy. And I think his sincere belief that Ukraine is part of Russia and that most Ukrainians would welcome Russian presence. There was a new piece by Sean Walker. I don't know if you had a chance to see on the decision-making before the invasion began. They thought that maybe a small percentage of Ukrainians would fight back. They did not anticipate this widespread resistance. And again, if you believe that only a small fraction will fight back, maybe it's rational to invade. So it's not about Putin being rational. Irrational, what is the information he's getting from the system he's built? And how limited is that information? And how sort of cherry picked is that information? And it's very much so. And that's why I think it not just put in what you claimed, but historically speaking, dictators keep making these kinds of mistakes that seem absolutely dumb to us from the outside, but kind of makes sense when you look at it from their prism, the way they get these facts fed to them. So, actively, I think that explains a lot of the initial optimism that Putin had going into the world. Why he thought this was going to be, I think he sincerely thought this was going to be his greatest achievement. Now, when it comes to now, I think it's just sort of acquired in the inertia of its own where he sees the victory in Ukraine as a sort of a really important goal, probably the most important goal. And he's willing to risk all those things we talked about, the million casualties, the economic isolation. He's willing to risk all of that if that means getting what he wants in Ukraine. And so I don't see for that reason any short-term prospects for peaceful resolution. Putin, by the way, is still getting fed bad information. We see the press conferences where the generals are talking about towns that they've conquered that have not been conquered. So we know he's still getting this filtered information, which impacts how he sees the war going. And so he probably still thinks that they're doing well, that he can win this thing. And that's another reason why he doesn't really have a big incentive to stop anytime soon. Yeah, it's kind of ironic, right? Because you build this system all around yourself. You eliminate all of these other institutions in order to expand your power. But then gradually, you almost become so successful that you need to cap yourself because you no longer get accurate information. And it makes it much more likely that you make these catastrophic mistakes. But let me ask you one more thing about that regime survival angle. Do you think Putin could actually afford peace? Could he remain in power and make peace? Yeah, so that's something we don't usually talk about. What are the constraints on Putin himself? I think it's an interesting question, because we generally tend to think, well, if you wanted peace, you could have peace next week. And yeah, in some ways, yes, the media in Russia is pliable enough where they could portray the ending of the war, at least some kind of ceasefire as a victory for Russia. That's fine. But there's like a bigger economic and social inertia here, where the economy is now so wrapped up around the war that it's hard to wind that down easily. This military canesiness, essentially, right? The entire economy is geared around the war. Society has really become geared around the war. And that takes on an inertia that is hard to stop. So if Putin suddenly changed his mind and realized, oh, man, this is a bad idea. This is a bad mistake, which is not going to happen. But let's say he did. Even then, there are huge risks and huge sort of inertia pushing the thing along. And I think he's worried about now is not necessarily like protests from the peace people. He's not that worried about protests on the street from people who want to stop the war. That's been clamped down. And by the way, people forget there was a lot of protests when the war first started and thousands of people were immediately arrested. I think he's more worried about people who think he's not prosecuting the war hard enough, like the right-wing nationalists who are criticizing him for even attempting to talk to the West, right? For them, that's a non-starter. They think it would be a betrayal to even do any sort of a peace process. And those are the people that I think he's worried about more. The people who might do a coup if they feel he's not being sufficiently aggressive. Not the people on the street who want him to stop. Those have been taken care of. So there's a bunch of reasons why he has all kinds of incentives to keep going. Both based on his personal belief, which I think is really important. But even outside of that, some of these structural factors that have arisen over the last four years as a result of the war. Yeah, I agree. Let me move away from Russia a little bit and zoom out a little bit to the changing nature of the global order. So you've written that the global order is changing in a way that it is becoming more personalist. That we're entering a personalist global order. What do you mean by that? Yeah, so, you know, personalism has been around for a while. The personalist leaders have always been around. But I think what's actually different this time is that for the first time in many decades, probably for the first time since the 1930s, really, that some of the most powerful countries in the world are governed by personalist leaders all at the same time. And I think that's a fairly new situation. And it changes sort of the logic of the global system. The entire global system. I mean, a lot of people are arguing, you know, what is happening with the global order? What is it going to look like? And I think a lot of the frameworks people use to understand what's happening now is incomplete, let's say, or wrong because they don't account for this personalist angle. Let me give you an example. So you hear a lot of, like, talk about the return of great power competition. And this is almost like a default mentality that we're going back to Cold War 2.0 or whatever. But great power competition assumes that states are pursuing coherent national interests, right, that they're trying to do something to make their countries better off or more secure or whatever. That's not really what's happening. They don't really, they're not that interested in the national interest. People like Trump, people like Putin, even people like Xi, to lesser extent, he still seems like relatively more irrational above who knows. But the bottom line is it's not, it's not great power rivalry because these leaders are fixated on things that they want personally. For Trump, that means, you know, oil or flattery or dominance over the Western hemisphere. I mean, the kidnapping of Maduro and Venezuela, does that serve the national interest? Absolutely not. It serves zero national interest. In fact, it's probably bad for the national interest because there was so much blowback from allies and Latin America is now going to hedge now that they're worried about US. But it served sort of Trump's psychological personal goals. And in that sense, that's the US will do that, right? Same with Putin and Ukraine. Putin wants Ukraine, I think because of a personal, I would say obsession with the revisionist Russian history. I mean, he lectures leaders all the time about Moscow's ownership of Ukrainian territory. He lectured, including Trump. He's given him all these historical lectures about Yudy Degaruki and all these. Just crazy right? Just crazy right? So I mean, like, what a move. Like imagine you meet Trump. This is like a really, really important meeting for you. And what do you do? You lecture about history, which like you just know anything about. He doesn't care. It's like, yeah, I mean, it's nuts. That's a classic example of a leader being sort of in his own bubble. I mean, this happened in the summit in Alaska last year where Trump came in. He thought he was going to get his Nobel Prize, you know, with Kof and all his flunkies. They said, yeah, Russia is ready to talk peace. So Trump flies in. He's ready to hear peace and Putin gives him a history lecture. We know this from insider accounts, by the way, he gives him a history lecture and Trump is dumbfounded, by the way. He's like, what the hell is this? He almost leaves. He cancels the plan lunch meeting they had. So, you know, talk about two ships passing in the night. They had two totally different perspectives coming into this meeting and it was a disaster. And it's sort of a classic example of why personalist regimes don't build good global orders because they're siloed in the information bubbles because they're self-centered in the way that self-centered has helped them. That's what's helped them get to the top and state the top. But it doesn't work when you're talking to other leaders who are also personalists, self-centered leaders. That creates for, let's say, an unstable global system. So with this changing global order, what you would expect then is more wars, more instability, less predictability, all around, not very pleasant, right? Yeah. I mean, the literature on personalist regimes suggests that for all these reasons we talked about, they're not very good at conducting foreign policy because they don't have access to good information. They're more belligerent. They're more likely to start wars, all of those things. And you know, people sometimes say, well, maybe that means we'll get some good deals out of it. If it's just one-on-one, we don't have to go through this bureaucracy. We can just have these personal meetings. But you know, that has not worked. You know, think about this goes back to Trump's first term even. Like, when he wanted to reach out to North Korea and have this splashy meeting with Kim Jong Un and lots of proclamations of how many things they got done and pledges to do nuclearized and all of that. Once the cameras leave, all of that disappeared. But North Korea went right back to building and testing weapons. So it's hard to conclude bargains in this kind of world. So even if, let's say, Trump concludes some kind of a bargain with Xi over Taiwan or something with big announcements and photo apps, there's no institutional scaffolding to hold that together. There isn't. They eliminate those kind of scaffolding. They don't like it. And that's why alliances in a personalist global order are really unstable, right? Because Trump with NATO, in his view, NATO is a drain on US sovereignty or US funds or whatever. The fact that NATO has been an instrument of US power doesn't really matter to him, right? That's not what he's interested in. So alliances in that kind of world are really based on private preferences and personal relationships, which means allies can't trust commitments. So they have to hedge. I mean, we see that already with Canada. We see that more with Europe, right? And hedging and trying to spend more on their own defense and looking to reduce their dependence on Washington. And then, of course, the same logic applies to Russia and China because those leaders cannot make credible long-term commitments, the system is unstable. And also, I should say, when you have personalist leaders running the show, the system becomes a lot less democratic because one thing that all three of these people agree on Putin and Trump and Xi's democracy is kind of an old-fashioned way to run a country. Washington has completely abandoned democracy promotion. You can argue about whether that was good or whether that was bad and whether democracy promotion was ever effective, but now he's doing the opposite. He's basically making links with these autocratic leaders, like bailing out Millay and Argentina, things like that. So all of that is kind of private transaction that's dressed up as state craft. That's all very bad. And of course, final thing I'll say on this is you get escalation risks, ton more escalation risks, because there's no checks on these leaders, right? If there's nobody stopping them from acting at impulse. And so if you have two personal leaders clashing, there's no leader, there's no advisor pulling these leaders back and saying, hey, let's take it easy. So there's this incentive to keep escalating more than normal leaders. And the incentive to escalate is backed up by these sycophantic advisors who say, oh yeah, sure, you'll win. You're the greatest. And they don't really have an incentive to back down because then they look weak. And the entire system is built on projecting strength. And now this is happening in context where all three of these countries have huge nuclear arsenals. There's little guardrails for proliferation. That's all collapsing now. So it's the combination of having these isolated leaders and then having to interact with other isolated leaders that creates a very bad combination for the global order, I think. And so I was never, you know, I've criticized the liberal order myself many times that in many places it wasn't liberal or orderly, but I'm not excited about what's replacing it. And that is this weird, multipolar personal system where the most powerful people basically have nobody telling them no. Historically speaking, that's a bad combination. You don't want that in your most powerful countries. So the other aspect that you just mentioned is that the world is becoming more multipolar. American dominance had a lot of downsides for a lot of people. But now what we see is that power is more evenly distributed. And initially, this seems like something that might be quite attractive to somebody like Vladimir Putin. So there's a funny irony here. So Putin has been wanting this multipolar world for over 20 years, at least since his Munich speech in 2007. He's been saying that the liberal international order is unjust and that he wants a multipolar world where basically if you're a great power, you should do what you want in your so-called backyard. No sanctions, no interference, no sanctimonious lecturing from other great powers. And he's demanded that for a long time and he's getting it. He's now getting it thanks to Trump. Trump's abandonment of Europe, accommodation of Russia and China, the revival of the Monroe doctrine. Yeah, so Putin is finally getting what he's wished for so long, which is sort of this anarchic multipolar spheres of influence type of world. But I think the great irony is that the liberal order in some ways benefited Russia. Because yes, the rules of the liberal order constrained Putin's ambitions, imperial ambitions, but they also constrained from everybody else, namely they kept China hemmed in. It prevented regional powers from challenging Russia in its near abroad. It basically gave Russia a degree of predictability. If you're in a liberal order and you have a nuclear umbrella and you have a security council seat that's permanent, you can punch above your weight, right? You can use that order for your benefit, which is what Putin did. He could play kind of the victim of Russian hypocrisy. Russia could invoke international law when it was convenient and ignore it when it was not convenient. So it was able to take some advantages from the liberal order, which I think Putin would not really admit to, but I think they were real advantages. So now that order is fading or let's say it's gone. So what does Russia have? Well, all the problems we already discussed become magnified in this world, right? It has a slowing economy. It's GDP growth has collapsed this year under 1% compared to the previous couple of years. The military is bleeding out essentially in Ukraine. They're having huge labor shortages. They've started talking to the Taliban recently about importing workers. That's, you know, they're desperate for labor. Always a great sign. Yeah, not a great sign to be importing, to be discussing with the Taliban about importing your labor. And, you know, they have this partnership with China that's deeply asymmetrical. Asymmetrical is a euphemism here, right? It's completely one-sided. Russia sells oil and gas to China at big discounts. China sells Russia the stuff it needs to keep the war going, the things it can't get from the West anymore. So it's really become a junior partner to China over the last two or three years. If you're in this anarchic, multipolar world, where might makes right, you have to have more might than that, right? You can't be this faltering, middling, regional power and still want this multipolar world with no protections, right? And we see this in concrete ways already. Like even within Russia's own sphere of influence, Trump, a broker to peace deal, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, less summer, right? Completely sideline Moscow, which is, you know, from a conflict where it had been a major sort of voice, major participant for decades. And now there's a transit corridor that's named after Trump that bypasses Russia. So that's what this new world looks like for Putin, the world he's always wanted. It's not just American stepping back, but it's everybody rushing into film vacuums that Russia assumed were its own. And the US still acting like a global superpower with no regard for these so-called spheres of influence. I think Putin is going to find some ways that he'll miss that, that he'll miss the liberal order in some ways. I don't take you whatever admitted, but the spheres of influence world, that's only stable when great powers mutually recognize each other's claims, each other's spheres. Where does that recognition come from right now? Not from any institutions, certainly. It's from Trump's personal temperament. What if, you know, he believes Russia is a great power, that's true. And so it should have some allowances in its region, that's true. But that's a very thick of, there's no institutions upholding that. So if Trump changes his mind on Putin, or if Trump is replaced by a president who's not so instinctively enchanted by Putin, which hopefully will happen, then we're back in the world where Russia and the US are in the great power rivalry. Except now they don't have that institutional scaffolding of the liberal order to protect it. I think that's a worst position for Putin than where he started. So he's betting that eliminating the liberal order will kind of liberate him to do what he wants, to free him to pursue his foreign policy agenda. But look, it's a petro state with a shrinking population, a broken army, an isolated economy. When you enter the multipolar world in that condition, you should be very careful. So I think for Putin, the lesson is, again, be careful getting what you wish for. You might just get it. And I think he has. Yeah, I don't think we think about those constraints enough in general. I mean, even I think the Americans are now finding that their options with Iran are kind of limited. Like there's a limit to where you can achieve with military power, even if you're the United States. And the United States is the United States, right? So like, yeah, I mean, I totally see the argument. I don't think this is going to be that fun for Putin. I mean, that's one. Yeah, it's one of the things that often brings down great powers is this belief that they can do anything that limits don't apply to them. This goes back to like, the Cidities, right? Where Athens basically says, you know, the stronger what they can, the weaker suffer what they must, right? That's what brings down great powers is the belief that the rules don't apply to them, the belief that we know how to do it better than everybody else. I'm sure Putin believed that. And I think he's going to find out that it's not entirely true. That they're limits on what Russia can do. As you said, they're limits on what the US can do. And the US is in a much better position, materially speaking than Russia. So they're real limits on what Russia can do. And that will become more clear now with the constraints of the liberal order kind of fading away. So people always ask me how Putin is going to lose power. So let me ask you, what do you think? How is Putin going to lose power? The most likely, a lot of Soviet leaders died in office. Surprisingly, Stalin and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernyanko. So I think that's the most likely scenario right now. He will die in office and there will be a battle for succession. One of the things I didn't mention is this is a huge problem for personalist regimes is who replaces the leader when they die. This always causes a crisis because there's no institutional mechanism for replacement. Even in a monarchy, there's a set line of succession. And in democracies, you obviously have institutional turnover, etc. When Putin dies, there's going to be sort of jacking for position among whoever's left. And that will, I think, create a level of crisis. Now, I don't know for sure. Obviously, that's what will happen. He could be thrown out of office, maybe through protests. That is the least likely, I think, scenario that protests bring him down. He has consolidated the regime. You know, it's funny. In some ways, the Putin's regime is stronger than it was when the war started. Like, the country is a whole is weaker. But the regime itself is consolidated power. He's brought everybody in line. Even a pregozion's thing where he had that run on Moscow that he stopped. Even after that, it's helped to consolidate Putin's control. So I don't think he's worried about bottom-up protests over throwing him. The third possibility is that he's removed in a palace coup. And I would place that as the second, most likely after him dying, but in a far second place, that there is a group of maybe hard rights, conservative advisors who get together to overthrow him. It's not likely because he does have such a tight grip over the regime. And it's a collective action problem. Like, who wants to be the first to say, let's do this? And nobody wants to put their neck on the line. So at least for now, those are the three possibilities. And the death of coup and being overthrown by protest. But with the latter two being far down on the list. What's your view on this, by the way? You love this question. I know that. Yeah, no, no, I think you're right. I think protests are extremely unlikely. Like you said, obviously they have been protests again and again, but I think they're just extremely good at crushing them. They're very good at you know controlling the media environment and the costs of mobilization are just so high now that I think it's very unlikely that people are going to turn out in mass, you know, in the streets. I think there was a moment probably where he was quite vulnerable when the war was going really, really badly and I could have imagined something like a palace crew against him or some sort of pregoation type scenario, but obviously now you know we're much closer to a stalemate and it doesn't look like Russia is actually losing so I think that heavily reduces pressure on him. So I don't know, I mean I think as depressing as it is the likely scenario loser power is probably just death or some sort of severe illness that then kind of changes the calculus of the people around it. So you know if they think that he's only got you know 10 months to live then they might reconsider their support and start support somebody else because you know the people around Putin I guess are not really interested in Putin individually but interested in the system because it's the system that gives them money and the system that gives them power. So I think that will be another vulnerability, but you know I don't see him falling anytime soon, but also I think it's impossible to make these kind of predictions with any certainty because it's about so few people right because unlike in a democracy the entire system hinges on you know a tiny number of people and we can't look inside their heads and also they can change their mind at any moment. So I don't think we'll ever really be able to predict how things are going to go right. Yeah, I mean the thing is like he doesn't have an escape hatch that's the thing he can't just be like I'm going to step down this person is going to take over you talk about this in your book right you talk about the dictators treadmill right the basic idea is that yeah they can never once you're on that treadmill as a dictator you can't just safely step off right you have to keep running and that's that's a big problem because there's no there's no golden parachute there's no exit available that means you got it you have to keep doing what you're doing until you're dead and put in things he's going to live for a long time he's convinced so he he's not going anywhere voluntarily. Yeah, I thought a lot about that when the discussion came up about sort of the risk of nuclear escalation because on the one hand I thought well okay this is probably a serious risk because here's a guy you know if he feels like his back is towards the wall because he thinks that the Russians could actually be losing the war he might be tempted to escalate but also here's a guy who definitely does not want to die so you know so I was sort of like torn on that when that happened what's your view on that yeah well I think one thing that's been helpful is whenever the Russian officials start talking about nuclear war which they do constantly by the way on some low level they're always threatening the nukes which is one of their few things that they can do I think China has made it very clear to Putin and she has made it clear to Putin that the use of nuclear weapons would now be acceptable now obviously that's not China's choice but I think Putin also understands that he would have all sorts of consequences even Putin even in his isolation isolated information bubble I think he he realizes that the consequences of using even tactical nuclear weapons would be really bad for Russia both in terms of its sort of rhetorical appeal and it's in terms of its material isolation you would I think create problems even with countries like China I think they're very willing to use nuclear threats I am less certain that they would actually carry out those threats I mean the threat of nuclear use has become more viable I suppose more likely let's say then it was five years ago but but that percentage is still fairly low what I'm afraid of is that you have all a combination of all these personalist rulers including Modi and India and others so it's not just one isolated person with nukes it's all of these leaders that are personalists and they have nuclear weapons and they don't have the best information we had some really close calls in the Cold War as you know with nuclear crises that almost turn to war but you know we step back from the brink because we got enough information or because somebody wanted to take a moment to pause with a personalist regime you're less likely to get that so my concern is that when we get more crises in a personalist global order like that that they may be more likely to escalate into nuclear war and to be sort of completely pessimistic the chances of nuclear war or even the chances of nuclear use in our lifetimes yours and mine I think has gone up in the last five years to the point where seeing the use of nuclear weapons maybe between India and Pakistan or something or who knows who in the future has become still a very small probability but I think a bigger probability than it would have been even a few years ago let me ask you a question about recent history do you think it was always inevitable that Putin's Russia was going to be a dictatorship or could this have gone differently? That question because there's a temptation to say this was inevitable right the way Russia was sort of it felt humiliated in the 90s the economic collapse it of course this was going to happen the problem with history is everything looks inevitable in retrospect by historians have this term retrospective determinism basically that well of course in hindsight all of this was going to happen I think that misses how contingent everything is in the moment and you know it's possible with everything had gone right that Russia could have been integrated into the West war and turned towards you know market reforms not necessarily liberal democracy but some kind of stable hybrid regime where you know don't protest too much but as long as you are you can complain to your friends just don't don't get a get a poster and go out and read square right if you do that then we'll go after you and I think there were a lot of Russian scholars you know including in the first decade of Putin's rule that said you know this is Russia is a normal country in fact there was a book I think by it was it under each life or wrote a book I'm not remembering the author but basically saying a normal country right Russia is a typical sort of hybrid middle power but there is this giant weight of history where for some reason every time they tried to reform it always goes back to something else and you know it's hard to talk about this without going into like almost genetic predispositions I don't want to do any of that right I'm not saying that I don't want to be like those crazy people let's say Russia is genetically predisposed to autocracy or whatever but there are strong structural factors that push the country towards autocracy the fact that it felt excluded from Western institutions the fact that it has it's reliant on natural resources doesn't really have a modern diversified economy right all of that means that if you're going to be Putin and you're going to be the leader what do you build your legitimacy on well for the first 10 years Putin built his legitimacy on the the compact I mentioned right I will give you economic growth and stability right I will save you from the 90s in exchange don't protest too much but that's a very that's a very fickle way to build your legitimacy because as soon as that economic growth is not there anymore you have to turn somewhere else and for Putin that's been nationalism right that's been pro-Russian nationalism all the all our neighbors are Nazis and we need to liberate the Russians in those in those former Soviet republics so and you have a KGB former KGB agent in charge right so I think there wasn't attempt however brief to go the other way for Russia in the early 2000s but by 2008 or so that attempt had been I think abandoned and it became much more likely that Russia would try to sort of recompose its lost empire I mean that's the other cyclical thing here why this might have been I don't again I don't want to say inevitable but why this may have been likely is if you look at the pattern of Russian history this happens over and over again they they build up they they're successful then there's some kind of crisis whether it's the 1917 revolution or World War II or whatever and then they they experience a collapse and then they build back up so in 1917 the empire collapsed a bunch of countries peel away the red army actually by force puts the empire back together right in 1945 they're invaded they win they by force annex all these territories and control these to Europe 1991 same thing well a lot of the republics peel away all of the republics peel away and so it's just Russia left in the middle and now once again they're regathering the lands as Ivan the terrible would put it right they're regathering the lands that they they feel were unjustly lost in 1991 this is the same thing that they did in 1917 except it's playing out in slow motion not in five years but in in 30 years so in that sense that kind of cycle of imperial breathing right where you inhale and exhale where you lose and then regather that's been around for a long time and I think Ukraine is just the latest iteration of that imperial breathing cycle and that's why I think there are structural forces that work here that go beyond even Putin's personality that made this outcome I would say more likely before I let you go is there a question you wish I'd asked and if so what's your answer to it? we've covered a lot I guess I'm curious like if you don't mind I want to ask about like how to get rid of get rid I use that in quotes get get rid of dictators thinking about your book like so you know that outside influence is usually limited when it comes to overthrowing dictators but you know but the outside environment has changed a lot right the US is the band in democracy promotion the great powers are all personalists you know might makes right is the ideology does that change sort of how tyrants fall for you like are we entering a period you think where they have to stay on the treadmill longer because there's no like there's no external pressure anymore right and yes external pressure was never that important but now it's almost nonexistent so do you think that means that we're going to have more entrenched leaders that are going to be hard to topple whether from the outside or from within really either way that's a good question I'm not entirely sure I think that might happen there's probably also I would probably even say it's likely that that will happen but I can also see it play out the other way right because those guardrails are no longer really there and because you know anybody can really do anything that they can do I guess I can also see see a scenario where life will be. becomes a lot more uncomfortable for some dictators at least. Right. So I think Maduro is a good example for this. I don't think Trump sent in special forces to topple Maduro because he's invested in democracy. He did it because he can. And he thought it would make for good television. And he thinks it's in his sort of personal political interest. So I don't know. I mean, I think dictators might get toppled as they have been, or perhaps dictators will get toppled even more. But it's going to be for different reasons. Right. So it might not be that dictators get toppled because people want to spread democracy, but simply because they annoy the wrong type of leader. And that leader simply is not constrained to the same extent that they may have been before. So to just do it. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, that would be another side effect of like the post liberal order where you might get removed if the great power or the regional power whoever doesn't like what you're doing. And that was sometimes the case in the Cold War, but it was generally deprecated. And we might get more of that, which again, I'm not optimistic about the kind of stability that we would have with the system like that. So we'll see. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for joining. That was fascinating. And if you want to hear more from Sever, he writes a really interesting newsletter on Substack called Hegemont. So if you're free to subscribe, and again, Sever, thank you very much. Well, it was my pleasure, Marcel. Thanks so much for having me. That's it for this episode. Thank you so much for watching. Click here to subscribe so you don't miss my next video. And if you want to see more right now, there you go. Either way, I'll see you soon.