Stephen Kotkin 西方誤解中國和中共

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/

曆史學家斯蒂芬·科特金解釋西方如何誤解中國和中共（胡佛研究所）

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

2024年8月7日

本視頻展示了對美國傑出的曆史學家、學者和作家之一斯蒂芬·科特金教授的采訪剪輯。科特金自 1989 年以來一直擔任普林斯頓大學的曆史和國際事務教授，也是斯坦福大學胡佛研究所的高級研究員。

采訪題為“五個問題問斯蒂芬·科特金”，由胡佛研究所的彼得·羅賓遜於 2022 年 1 月進行，涉及俄羅斯、普京和烏克蘭等一係列話題。本視頻已將原一小時采訪的部分內容剪輯掉，僅包含與中國有關的部分。

議題包括：中國共產黨和習近平從蘇聯解體中吸取的教訓，西方為何錯誤地認為中國會隨著經濟增長和融入全球經濟而實現政治自由化，共產主義製度及其權力壟斷麵臨的最大威脅，等等。

曆史學家斯蒂芬·科特金

除了胡佛獎學金，斯蒂芬·科特金還是斯坦福大學弗裏曼·斯波利國際問題研究所的高級研究員。他還是普林斯頓大學公共和國際事務學院（前身為伍德羅·威爾遜學院）曆史和國際事務名譽教授，在那裏任教 33 年。他在加州大學伯克利分校獲得博士學位，並在胡佛圖書館和檔案館從事研究工作超過三十年。

科特金的研究涵蓋了曆史上和現在的地緣政治和獨裁政權。他的出版物包括《斯大林：等待希特勒，1929-1941》（企鵝出版社，2017 年）和《斯大林：權力悖論，1878-1928》（企鵝出版社，2014 年），這是計劃中的三卷本俄羅斯在世界權力和斯大林在俄羅斯權力的曆史中的兩部分。他還撰寫了從街頭視角講述斯大林體製崛起的曆史，即《磁山：作為一種文明的斯大林主義》（加州大學，1995 年）；以及分析共產主義滅亡的三部曲，其中目前已出版兩卷：《避免世界末日：蘇聯解體 1970-2000》（牛津，2001 年；修訂版，2008 年）和《不文明社會：1989 年和共產主義建製的崩潰》（現代圖書館，2009 年），Jan T. Gross 參與撰寫。第三卷將討論蘇聯在第三世界和阿富汗的情況。科特金的出版物和公開演講也經常關注共產主義中國。

科特金曾參加過國家情報委員會和其他政府機構的眾多活動，並擔任 Conexus Financial 和瑞穗美洲的地緣政治風險顧問。他曾擔任《紐約時報》周日商業版首席書評人多年，並繼續為《外交事務》、《泰晤士報文學增刊》和《華爾街日報》等媒體撰寫評論和文章。他曾是美國學術團體理事會研究員、國家人文基金會研究員和古根海姆研究員。

2023 年 3 月 20 日 科特金談中國：共產主義的致命弱點、威懾和向蘇聯學習

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

“你不能有一半共產主義，就像你不能有一半懷孕一樣。”

尼古拉斯·韋爾奇和喬丹·施奈德 2023 年 3 月 20 日
斯蒂芬·科特金是他這一代最偉大的曆史學家之一——對於對共產主義有著不健康迷戀的人來說，他是我們能找到的最接近羅伯特·卡羅的人。他最著名的是斯大林傳記的前兩部分。《磁山》、《避免世界末日》和《不文明社會》也是必讀經典。

斯蒂芬對中國有著濃厚的興趣，過去幾年他在 ChinaTalk 時事通訊上的打開率高達 96% 就證明了這一點。

以下是我們對話的第一部分，我們討論了：

習近平從蘇聯解體中學到了什麽；

科特金對共產主義主要威脅的評估——“具有人性麵孔的共產主義”意味著什麽，以及為什麽戈爾巴喬夫的改革最終摧毀了蘇聯的共產主義；

為什麽中共更害怕顏色革命而不是北約擴張——以及習近平為什麽在2020年對香港問題發難；

馬列主義的雙重成分：反資本主義+反帝國主義；

以及對列寧“製高點”的理解，以及當今中國的製高點是什麽。

習近平最可怕的噩夢

?喬丹·施奈德：我想先給你們讀幾句習近平的名言。先從2013年開始：

蘇聯為什麽解體？蘇共為什麽分崩離析？一個重要原因是意識形態領域的競爭太激烈了！全盤否定蘇聯的曆史經驗，否定蘇共的曆史，否定列寧，否定斯大林，就是搞蘇聯意識形態的混亂，搞曆史虛無主義，導致各級黨組織幾乎無法發揮作用，黨失去了對軍隊的領導。最終，蘇共——一個偉大的政黨——像一群受驚的野獸一樣四分五裂！蘇聯——一個偉大的社會主義國家——四分五裂。這是過去的教訓。

斯蒂芬·科特金：他說得對。他一生致力於防止這種事情發生在中國共產黨身上。這是他最關心的事情；也是他不斷向黨的幹部灌輸的東西。讓我們記住誰曾管理過一段時間的黨校[習近平曾於 2007 年至 2013 年擔任中共中央黨校校長]。

黨校有兩個主題在中國的案例中占據絕對主導地位。一個是美國的衰落——關於美國如何頹廢，美國是一個過時的強國。這種觀點是完全錯誤的，越來越多的黨內官員開始認識到這一點——這要歸功於特朗普政府的馬特·波廷格，要歸功於普京在烏克蘭的犯罪侵略，而這些侵略行為對他和習近平都產生了不利影響。但我們必須等待這一切的發生——認識到教授美國權力的終結是一種謬論。

但另一個大課題——事實上對他們來說是一個更大的課題——是避免中國出現蘇聯解體，因此要從各個方麵、各個角度研究蘇聯解體，確保它不會發生在中國。這是習近平的人生項目，也是黨校的大課題——這也是我認為自己的作品被盜版、翻譯成中文、至少對一些人來說是一本值得研究的教材的原因之一。

喬丹·施奈德：我們來談談《不文明社會》。您在書中提出的觀點是：西方認為異見人士和邊緣人士是蘇聯解體的真正原因，但事實並非如此——馬克思主義或列寧主義政權的垮台並不一定需要知識分子或廣大公民社會的推動。事實上，這個製度很快就會自行崩潰，幾乎就像銀行擠兌式的發展一樣。

詳細闡述這一點，然後將其應用於當今中國。您認為 20 世紀 70 年代和 80 年代的蘇聯與 2020 年代的中國有哪些相似之處？

斯蒂芬·科特金：讓我們承認，異見人士的勇氣往往令人驚歎和鼓舞：人們願意遭受可能的驅逐、強製流放、監禁甚至更糟的待遇，因為他們支持自由，反對政權的獨裁和對公眾的壟斷；看到這些人令人印象深刻。

但對共產主義的主要威脅是共產主義。這是這個製度的悖論。
共產黨是一個列寧主義組織。現在，如果你研究中國，你可能在很多年前讀過舒爾曼的書——這本書恰好改編自菲利普·塞爾茲尼克的書《組織武器》；這是我研究所有列寧主義政權的必讀書籍之一，包括中國政權。[喬丹：我讀這本書是因為我記錄了

我正在閱讀這篇采訪，可以確認它很精彩。]

列寧主義政權最引人注目的地方在於，它們既強大又脆弱。黨無處不在。它籠罩著每一個機構、每一個組織——無論是在國家官僚機構、軍隊、教育係統，還是在中國的準私人領域。現在很難知道該怎麽稱呼它——我們正在關注 [Barry] Naughton 的重要幹預，CCP Inc。

但無論如何，黨是控製的偉大武器。但與此同時，你不能一半是共產主義者，就像你不能一半是懷孕一樣。所以黨要麽是壟斷，要麽開始瓦解。沒有政治改革的平衡。

[假設]你開始開放黨，你開始說，“好吧，讓我們在黨內進行辯論，讓我們有一些開放。也許我們甚至可以在黨內進行一些競爭性選舉。”喬丹，結果會怎樣呢？有些人站出來說：“我不想要共產黨。我想要另一個政黨。”黨內官員說：“不，不，不——我們不允許這樣做。我們隻允許黨內辯論。我們保持共產黨的壟斷地位；我們隻是稍微放寬了一點。”

1956 年我們在匈牙利看到了這一點。1968 年在捷克斯洛伐克看到了這一點——所謂的“布拉格之春”。我們在戈爾巴喬夫的改革中也看到了這一點。正如 [列昂尼德] 勃列日涅夫 1968 年所說——當時他是總書記，在布拉格觀察 [亞曆山大] 杜別克，他們報道了體製的瓦解，當時杜別克試圖重振體製，使其自由化，開放共產主義，同時保持壟斷——勃列日涅夫在政治局會議上說，“改革就是反革命”——或者我們稱之為自動清算。我們也經曆過戈爾巴喬夫時期——政治開放從哪裏開始，哪裏結束？因為人們不斷推進，不斷推進，直到他們脫離共產主義壟斷。

所以你有選擇。你可以結束政治改革，你可以鎮壓，你可以說，“我們把這個精靈放回瓶子裏；不再進行政治改革。”或者，你可以讓它展開，你可以想，“它終有一天會起作用——隻是比我們預期的要混亂一點。”因此，戈爾巴喬夫忠於自己的信念：他相信這種具有人性化的共產主義；他相信改革的可能性；他相信自由化的共產黨壟斷——結果，他摧毀了蘇聯的共產主義。

因為黨淩駕於蘇維埃國家的聯邦結構之上（也就是說，蘇維埃國家是聯邦製：有烏克蘭蘇維埃社會主義共和國和白俄羅斯蘇維埃社會主義共和國，它們都是聯邦的平等成員）——但黨是一個具有軍事紀律的金字塔；黨在實踐中淩駕於國家的聯邦製之上。但是，一旦黨因戈爾巴喬夫試圖在政治上開放而解體，你就失去了蘇維埃的中央集權國家，你得到的是自願的聯邦，聯邦部分也決定他們想要退出——就像許多人想擺脫共產黨的壟斷一樣。

因此，習近平現在正在回顧這段曆史，但願不會出現某種“有人情味的共產主義”，共產主義政治自由化即將發生——因為如果任由它一路發展下去，整個體係將土崩瓦解。

因此，這就是塞爾茲尼克借用列寧的術語所說的“組織武器”的悖論。這是列寧主義結構的悖論：全能而脆弱，沒有政治改革的平衡。因此，對我們來說，中國出現戈爾巴喬夫將是救贖，因為戈爾巴喬夫有可能推翻這個政權。而對於習近平來說，這是必須不惜一切代價阻止的。

現在，如果你再深入思考一下：當然，他們可以開放經濟，他們可以進行經濟自由化。順便說一句，蘇聯在 20 世紀 20 年代早期列寧領導下就做到了這一點，他們實際上在 20 世紀 20 年代加強了共產主義壟斷，但他們開放了經濟，允許合法的私人市場和市場行為；這被稱為新經濟政策，簡稱 NEP。從來沒有政治上的新經濟政策——他們沒有開放政治體係；事實上，正如我所說，他們收緊了政治體係，並在一段時間內嚐試了市場經濟。但他們是共產主義者，所以市場本身不是目的：它是一種達到目的的手段。一旦國家不再挨餓（就像他們在 1921 年推出新經濟政策時那樣），一旦經濟穩定下來，斯大林就會再次消除市場和私有財產。因為對於馬克思主義者來說，基礎不能是資本主義的，政治結構或上層建築也不能是共產主義的，因為基礎（社會經濟結構）

資本、生產資料、誰控製它們）對馬克思主義者來說是決定性的。

現在，你有鄧小平和中國共產黨——這是新經濟政策的一個版本。共產黨仍然壟斷——沒有政治上的新經濟政策可言。當然，最終你會有一些鄉村選舉；現在它們已經不複存在了，原因很明顯，它們威脅到了共產黨的壟斷地位。

所以我一直在觀察，說：“在共產黨領導層開始感到威脅到他們的壟斷地位之前，這種情況能持續多久？”因為財富的積累——獨立的、私人的財富——就是權力的積累。因此，事實上，即使你不堅持列寧主義關於基礎和上層建築的意識形態，即使你隻是務實的，擁有大量金錢的人仍然擁有巨大的權力，他們實際上可能會威脅到共產黨的壟斷地位。

所以，我認為，在某個時候，他們需要再次打擊私營部門，因為他們會覺得這威脅到了共產黨對政治體係和公共領域的壟斷。當然，現在他們需要私營部門來促進 GDP 增長和創造就業機會——但私營部門是一種威脅。所以，先是開放，然後是扼殺，開放和扼殺；這是可以預料到的動態——因為再說一遍，你不能半個共產黨。

因此，[中國]政權所能做的事情是有限的，因為它不想自願放棄權力。因此，它可以運作的空間——它能容忍多少私營部門、什麽類型的私營部門，它能否在政治上完全開放，包括放鬆審查製度——這些都受到政權性質、組織武器和體製權力的限製。

如果你把這些放在一起，就會發現，共產黨政權的每一天都是生死攸關的。現在，我們身處民主法治體係中：我們擔心這個政策和那個政策、這個規範和那個規範、這個政治人物和那個政治人物——但我們在最瘋狂、最無能、最腐敗的政治人物麵前幸存了下來；這對我們來說並不重要，因為我們的[體係]是建立在有彈性的機構之上的。

所以，回答你引用的習近平的話：這不僅對他們來說是每天都很重要——如果他們允許太多開放，他們的整個體係就會開始崩潰——不僅如此，他們還認為我們[在美國]可以加速這一進程，我們可以影響這一進程。

習近平和普京對美國最大的恐懼不是北約擴張之類的事情。這是所謂的“顏色革命”。所謂的“民主”、“西方價值觀”、“法治”、“普世人權”滲透到中國公共領域，滲透到人民意識中，並不斷傳播——從而引發了開放政治體係的呼聲。
他們必須每天都麵對這種情況：努力從全球經濟中獲益，引進技術，引進外國直接投資 [FDI]，確保深化貿易聯係以及他們能夠操縱的對中國經濟的一些依賴——但當他們這樣做時，思想、價值觀和實踐有時會與技術和外國直接投資一起發展。所以這是一個非常難以日複一日管理的命題。我們看到他們對此有多麽擔心——你知道嗎？他的擔心是對的。

真正的威懾：威脅共產黨的壟斷
喬丹·施奈德：你之前談到過通過創造政治替代方案的可能性來發揮影響力的想法。你能詳細談談嗎？

斯蒂芬·科特金：這些政權可能無能。他們可能什麽都做不好。他們可以在半夜廢除零新冠。人民可以看到他們有多無能。人民可能會承受後果——無論我們能估計出多少人會在深夜因重啟而死亡——但隻要他們能壓製、否認所有的政治替代方案，他們就能繼續掌權。因此，所有這些政權的遊戲都是在政治領域培育和出現可能的替代方案。

這就是我們介入的地方。你想想對這樣的政權的威懾。當然，你必須擁有他們害怕的軍事能力；當然，你必須有其他工具可以使用，可能具有強製性，但也可能是一種威脅，這樣他們就會受到恐嚇，采取一些可能違反國際法或侵犯另一個國家主權或自治島嶼主權的行動；是的，你肯定要在軍事和經濟上威懾他們。

但威懾最終是一個政治主張。如果你把他們的GDP削減幾個百分點，他們也會接受。他們

不是私募股權大亨。習近平削減了 GDP 中的個人分數。但是，如果突然出現另一種政治製度的可能性——另一種法治、自治、有真正的選舉、黨不再壟斷——那將使他驚恐不已。而這正是我們的力量和權力。
我們在香港也看到了這一點。香港對這個龐大的大陸有多大威脅？香港是英國贈予中國人的驚人資源。如果你看看 1945 年日本占領英國香港的那一刻，日本現在已經輸掉了戰爭——美國人宣布香港應該歸還中國，歸還給蔣介石，而不是英國；而英國人決定，“哦不，中國人不會得到香港。我們要奪回香港。”美國人試圖通過談判挽回麵子或達成妥協——但英國人除了奪回香港之外對其他任何事情都不感興趣；他們做到了。

蔣介石能搶在英國人之前奪回香港嗎？也許能，也許不能——因為他的軍隊駐紮地點很複雜，因為他把重點放在滿洲，因為他依賴美國的空運力量，以及所有你們熟知的變數。

關鍵是，英國人的強硬態度——而不是我們此刻看到的英國人的默許——意味著香港沒有歸蔣介石，意味著香港沒有在 1949 年歸毛澤東，意味著香港發展成為一個英國控製的國際金融中心，在法治下，資本的分配基於市場標準，而不是政治標準、裙帶關係或共產黨的決策。

所以，當你看到鄧小平，看到中國奇跡，看到現代中國的故事時，人們會問我：“戈爾巴喬夫為什麽不效仿鄧小平？”我問他們：“戈爾巴喬夫在香港的時候在哪裏？”從日本和台灣流入中國的外國直接投資和技術轉讓在哪裏，而且是通過香港流入的？所以，這是關鍵變量，這是關鍵工具。

後來發現，這塊土地非常有價值，以至於英國人在租約到期後將其歸還給了中國人。我自己不會這麽做，但再說一次，我當時不在權力中。

因此，我們有一個適合中國的製度。它為北京的共產黨政權帶來了巨大的價值。當然，街頭有抗議，有要求民主的呼聲，有真正的選舉——有些事情在大陸是看不到的。這對中國政權有多大的威脅？從客觀上來說，這很難衡量——但從主觀上來說，這卻是一切。這不僅僅是一個汙點——這是在如今的中國共產黨領土上建立的替代性政治製度。那麽，它能持續多久呢？[直到]習近平決定不再繼續下去。我們看到了這一點。

因此，這個政治替代故事，這種想象一個成功、自由、自豪和具有中國特色的中國的能力——這不是某種外國操縱的東西。事實上，這是中國國內創造的願望。這才是我們真正發揮作用的地方，因為有可能在這裏努力在習近平和我們試圖保護的一些自由和國際秩序國家以及自治島嶼之間建立威懾。

馬克思列寧主義真的消亡了嗎？
喬丹·施奈德：你提到了塞爾茲尼克。您希望當今思考中國問題的人們會認真對待哪些蘇聯或共產主義研究經典著作？

斯蒂芬·科特金：我們的問題是，我們專注於中國的政治製度，認為它是從列寧主義結構演變而來的。所以我們有一百萬本關於中國的好書，它們想象中國已經超越了列寧主義。然後我們發現列寧主義結構從未消失。事實上，正如人們所預料的那樣，他們正試圖強化它，恢複它的活力、力量和能量——不是通過政治開放，而是通過相反的方式，通過強硬的列寧主義結構、斯大林的列寧主義結構、毛澤東的列寧主義結構。

是時候回到這項工作了。現在是時候回到我們認為已經完成的工作了，我們的領域——中國研究、共產主義研究、蘇聯研究——產生了巨大的價值，盡管你們知道發生了這麽多變化，但今天仍然具有巨大的價值。

然而，話雖如此，我們也必須明白，意識形態的故事更加複雜，無論是那些否定它的人，還是那些現在說它又回來了而且非常重要的人。列寧主義結構不一定完全決定政策或意識形態。是的，它限製了行動的範圍，包括

政治改革（除非你想自殺）。但它並不能決定你對 x、y 和 z 采取什麽政策——這些政策取決於利益集團之間的競爭、領導者的偏好以及他們所處的國際環境（是否有利於或損害他們的願望或目標？）。

因此，理解動機和決策的複雜性、意識形態的作用以及意識形態的影響範圍——這是舊文獻有時過於簡單或不屑一顧的，人們說這都是玩世不恭而不是意識形態。

無論是回顧過去還是回顧過去，了解這類事情真正重要的地方是：當你思考馬克思列寧主義——即掌權的馬克思主義——它有兩個基本方麵。

一個是反資本主義：這意味著市場、私有財產、雇傭勞動（或馬克思所說的“雇傭奴隸製”）——這些不僅是剝削性的，而且從根本上疏遠了人性或人道主義。它比不平等更糟糕，比剝削更糟糕。它是人類精神的根本性毀滅和異化。反資本主義是深刻而根本的；因此，超越資本主義（在黑格爾、揚棄和馬克思主義意義上）的方式是消除私人利潤、消除合法市場、在一段時間內消除雇傭勞動——認為你會到達彼岸，因為你要消除所有這些東西。當然，這導致了經濟的完全國有化，以及我們從所謂的“計劃經濟”中了解到的其他激勵問題——正如你所知，計劃經濟不是計劃性的，而是國家化的、集中化的稀缺資源分配，這讓資源變得更加稀缺。

但馬克思列寧主義的另一部分是反帝國主義。在某些方麵，反帝國主義同樣重要。這種觀點認為，西方——西方強國、西方國家，當時主要是歐洲（西方是一個更大的、非地理性的事物，現在大得多）——但當時人們認為西方是邪惡的，因為它是帝國主義的：它占領了其他國家，結束了後來被稱為第三世界的主權，它[采用]直接統治的帝國主義——有時是間接統治的帝國主義，他們強迫你在經濟或外交政策上做事，而不一定直接統治你的領土。當然，這發生在中國，他們稱之為“百年屈辱”。

因此，反資本主義和反帝國主義是兩個組成部分——你可以多或少地擁有其中一個組成部分。你可以削弱反資本主義，但你實際上可以增強馬克思列寧主義中的反帝國主義。有些人認為（我不這麽認為）馬克思列寧主義已經消亡，因為反資本主義一度減弱。但反帝國主義從未消失：你可以說，如果以 1 到 10 的等級來衡量，它一直處於 11 級，甚至可能達到 12 級。因此，反帝國主義意味著馬克思列寧主義實際上從未消失或消亡——即使你允許反資本主義在政權的思想 [或] 教學中有所減弱。所以你可以去黨校，也許他們可以教你致富，並利用資本主義來加強中國政府——但他們從未放棄那個百年屈辱的故事，即反帝國主義的故事。

所以今天我們看到了反資本主義複興的一種版本：不是擺脫市場，而是馴服市場，不是讓市場掌權，而是讓市場完全服從黨的統治。這也適用於黨所決定的最大恐懼，列寧曾經稱之為“製高點”（中國人可能並不在所有情況下都稱之為製高點；但當你在黨校時，你會聽到這些詞匯）。

這意味著，例如，公共領域（教育、青年社會化、科技公司）以及私人教育、輔導，所有與價值觀和對公共領域允許內容的控製有關的事情——這些都將成為製高點。當然，人工智能和生物技術等技術超級大國也將成為製高點；當然，[製高點是]他們可能認為的其他東西——無論是自然資源，還是擁有大量現金流和腐敗和庇護的可能性，黨的壟斷企業總是喜歡這些。

所以你把所有這些放在一起，你就會開始發現，共同繁榮的理念之所以能引起共鳴，是因為它植根於馬克思列寧主義的社會正義公平——“資本主義是邪惡的”、“資本主義造成不平等”、“資本主義造成各種不公正”；它部分植根於此。

所以你會發現[黨]甚至可以複活

馬克思列寧主義的反資本主義方麵——他們可以給它注入活力——不一定是消除市場，而是讓市場為他們服務。
畢竟，新經濟政策（再次是列寧的概念）本身並不是目的：他討厭資本主義；他討厭市場；他討厭私有財產；它隻是達到目的的一種手段——當這種手段不再服務於這一目的時，你可以擺脫它。

所以我們現在看到，即使是意識形態也從未消失，因為它有反帝國主義的部分——正如我們所說，這是一個很大的部分。反資本主義可以複活或重新煥發活力（取決於你如何看待它，你認為它消失了多少）。

所以我們現在就在這裏，即使是意識形態的東西——來自蘇聯學，來自毛澤東時代——也需要重新審視。盡管展望未來，它看起來不會與以前完全相同：已經發生了巨大的變化；中國有龐大的中產階級；有類似金融的體係（很難知道在中國應該如何稱呼事物，因為它們與我們體係中對應的東西不符，所以我們總是很難用我們已有的詞匯來稱呼中國的東西；這就是為什麽“中共公司”比“中國公司”的故事更先進）。

但無論如何，你明白我的意思：有舒爾曼，在這之前有塞爾茲尼克。還有關於毛澤東、意識形態和文化大革命的豐富文獻，以及毛澤東如何不斷顛覆體製以謀取自己的權力：他攻擊自己國家的官僚結構，以使其失去平衡，從而謀取自己的權力。習近平會做這樣的事情嗎？我不是在預測什麽，我隻是說那段曆史值得了解。為什麽會發生這種情況？這僅僅是毛澤東的任性，還是體製內部有什麽東西導致了這種情況？

我最近讀了周雪光的《中國治理邏輯》。我之所以提到這本書，是因為它是用組織理論理解中國的一個絕佳例子。組織理論曾經是斯坦福大學社會學係和其他係的專長；它曾經是這裏的瑰寶：我們有吉姆·馬奇，周雪光師從他。而 [周的] 書吸收了許多被遺忘的文獻見解。它不是菲利普·塞爾茲尼克的“組織武器”、 “列寧主義政黨結構”之類的東西——它是組織理論，在某些方麵實際上是組織理論 101，但也是 201、301 和 501，一直到博士水平甚至更高。

如果你仔細看看，你會發現他向你展示了組織具有一定的內在邏輯和動態，有時你無法完全控製它。他還介紹了村莊競爭性選舉的引入和演變（在他選擇的鄉鎮中，有一定數量的村莊）。這是一個了不起的故事，因為它的結局並不好。選舉結果不是加強了共產黨的壟斷，而是破壞了共產黨的壟斷，使黨的壟斷失去平衡——而且選舉逐漸消失。所以我們沒有那些競爭性的選舉；我們沒有在地方層麵進行試驗。但我們確實有地方試圖應對中央強加的沒有資金的支持的任務，這些任務使地方陷入巨額債務，破壞了他們的財政狀況——但也創造了激勵機製，讓他們真正努力解決財政問題。

所以這是一本關於反常和意想不到的後果、關於組織理論、關於共產黨試驗的局限性的精彩書籍，即使在開放係統的村莊也是如此。其中的教訓是永恒的。

喬丹·施耐德：讓我們談談另一本精彩的書：約瑟夫·托裏吉安最近關於俄羅斯和中國繼承權的作品。您如何看待他的著作——以及其他關於蘇聯和中國轉型時期的學術研究——告訴我們未來幾年中國將麵臨什麽？

斯蒂芬·科特金：喬的著作非常出色，我們應該強調許多方麵。

一是喬讓我們重新比較了蘇聯政權和北京的現政權——也就是說，比較了共產主義政權類型。再一次，它們有區別，而不僅僅是相似之處；即使在列寧主義結構中，也存在著重要的差異，喬也意識到了這些差異。但在我看來，能夠再次將它們結合起來是一個重大成就。

當然，喬有實證維度。他有研究。他有關於蘇聯和中國兩個案例的實際原始資料，包括繼承政治、繼承動態和結果。能夠用一手資料和真實證據來做到這一點非常重要，而不是僅僅依靠推測、有根據的猜測或生成式人工智能風格的即興創作

（不幸的是，這種比較非常流行）。喬再次正確地比較了這兩個政權——不是簡單地比較，而是正確地比較。他有充分的證據基礎。

然後他又指出，這是一種壟斷，壟斷有特定的動態。在很多方麵，它讓我們重新以更深刻的經驗主義理解，即這是關於個人統治的，而這種統治並非偶然地通過黨的壟斷統治而產生。所以你可以從 [Leon] Trotsky 那裏得到這一點。在托洛茨基站在列寧一邊之前，他是反對列寧的。他寫了一段著名的文章，講述了共產主義壟斷將如何產生個人獨裁——事實就是這樣：他預測會出現的個人獨裁殺死了他，而他卻是建立該係統的主要推動者和推動者。所以你在喬身上看到了這種動態。我還可以談到更多真正令人驚歎的方麵。

繼任動態對所有專製政權來說都很難——他們在這個問題上總是很脆弱，因為他們沒有合法的方法來選拔或接任下一任領導人。這是生死攸關的問題。這是不確定的。所有的利益相關者都不知道，當政權更迭、領導人不可避免地去世時（這發生在所有凡人身上），他們的權力和不義之財會發生什麽：斯大林七十年前就死了；毛澤東不到四十七年就死了；他們說“墓地裏都是不可或缺的人”，等等。

但與此同時，這對他們來說很困難，因為繼任問題非常不確定，那些想保護自己權力和不義之財的人可能會想自己進入這種不確定性中，試圖保護自己的不義之財。所以在繼任發生之前，你就會對繼任問題產生陰謀和不穩定。

然後你就會看到繼任政治——我們有時將其歸因於政治差異，有時將其歸因於哲學差異。喬在這些案例中表明政策差異並不存在，這是他取得的一項重大成就。

所以我隻說最後一點：他展示的另一件事是，這些人都很強大，但並沒有集體統治。有集體統治的表象；有集體統治的模仿；有某種集體統治的偽裝。但即使在這種偽裝下，這裏也隻有一個人掌權。而且沒有製度化的繼任，無論是蘇聯還是中國。

所以當我們說習近平“打破規則”、“打破禁忌”時，喬能夠表明的是，其中沒有什麽是不可改變的。沒有什麽是真正打破“列寧主義、毛澤東主義、鄧小平”意義上的。更多的是連續性而不是不連續性。
所以，我們一定要回去讀喬的書，如果我們已經讀過，就再讀一遍。讓我們一遍又一遍地談論它，因為它是了解這個地方如何發展的一個重要出發點。

如果科特金執掌美國的對華外交政策

喬丹·施奈德：[3 月 6 日]，習近平說，

以美國為首的西方國家對我們實施了全方位的遏製、包圍和壓製，給我們國家的發展帶來了前所未有的嚴峻挑戰。

你認為這是習近平現在在公開場合樂於占據的新言論空間嗎？

付費訂閱者可以提前收聽我們談話的後半部分。我們討論：

盡管——或者因為——最近緊張局勢加劇，對中美關係持樂觀態度的理由；

為什麽科特金認為中美冷戰既好又必要；

美國如何在外交上“占得先機”；

理解裏根的外交政策——他既是“運動保守派”，又是“交易保守派”。

2023 年 5 月 12 日“贏得和平”：斯蒂芬·科特金教授談為什麽中國主導的和平協議是烏克蘭戰爭的理想結果

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/?

2023 年 5 月 12 日

以下是 Hub 獨家報道，以私人講座的形式由世界領先的俄羅斯曆史和國際關係學者之一斯蒂芬·科特金教授發表。該講座於 4 月中旬在加拿大多倫多加德納博物館舉行的一場活動中發表，該活動由 Hub 執行董事 Rudyard Griffiths 共同主持。此次講座是一場當代地緣政治大師班，將烏克蘭戰爭與中國崛起及其對美國全球霸權的獨特挑戰聯係起來。

對於任何試圖了解當代國際事件以及如何結束烏克蘭戰爭這一關鍵問題的人來說，這次講座都是必聽的。斯蒂芬·科特金花了三十多年時間教授國際關係

以及普林斯頓大學的俄羅斯曆史。他現在是斯坦福大學胡佛研究所的高級研究員，在那裏他為《紐約時報》、《外交事務》和《華爾街日報》廣泛講授和撰寫有關全球事務的文章。對於俄羅斯曆史的愛好者來說，他關於約瑟夫·斯大林的傳記是必讀之作。《權力悖論 1879-1928》入圍普利策獎決賽，緊隨其後的是大師級的《等待希特勒，1929-1941》。第三卷將於今年晚些時候出版，將講述斯大林從第二次世界大戰到 1953 年去世的故事。

您可以在 Acast、亞馬遜、蘋果、穀歌、Spotify 或 YouTube 上收聽本期 Hub Dialogues。這些劇集得到了 Ira Gluskin 和 Maxine Granovsky Gluskin 慈善基金會以及 Linda Frum & Howard Sokolowski 慈善基金會的慷慨支持。

斯蒂芬·科特金教授：我要和你們談談贏得和平。我們隻討論贏得戰爭。但贏得戰爭遠不如贏得和平重要。你可以贏得戰爭，也可以失去和平。阿富汗就是一個例子。伊拉克就是一個例子。還有許多其他例子。如果你身處戰爭之中，你如何贏得和平？贏得和平是一個跨代問題。

所以，如果你今天占領了某些領土，你並沒有贏得和平。明天、明年或後年，有人可能會回來奪回那塊領土。所以，贏得和平要重要得多，也複雜得多。大約 14 個月以來，我一直在與情報和國防領域的一些最優秀的人才討論他們如何定義勝利，更重要的是，他們計劃如何贏得和平。我隻舉一個例子。然後我將回到過去，稍微偏離主題，最後再給出答案，如果可以的話。如果你能容忍這種漫無目的的討論。

因此，如果烏克蘭收複了所有國際公認的領土，但沒有加入歐盟，也沒有得到安全保障，這算是贏得和平嗎？這算是某種勝利嗎？但如果它沒有收複領土，而是通過加速加入程序加入了歐盟，並獲得了某種安全保障，但其大部分土地仍被占領，這算是勝利嗎？哪種情況是勝利？很明顯，烏克蘭人民兩次冒著生命危險推翻國內暴君，以便加入歐洲。所以，這實際上是贏得和平的唯一有效定義。

所以，如果你想加入歐洲，讓我們假設你有能力——你沒有——但讓我們假設你能夠通過軍事手段奪回克裏米亞。那麽，現在你的境內人口以俄羅斯為主，幾乎全部是俄羅斯人，他們可能會被煽動起來對你的祖國發動永久的叛亂。這對你的歐盟加入進程有什麽影響？這對你的安全保障有什麽影響？當你有數百萬俄羅斯人不想成為你祖國的一部分時，誰會給你安全保障？因此，勝利的定義是感性的，也是可以理解的，它與所犯下的暴行有關——整個戰爭都是暴行，對吧？侵略，隻不過是暴行，我們聽到的暴行令人心碎。與此同時，我們需要贏得和平。

那麽，我們如何贏得和平？好吧，如果我們都認為這是一個有趣的問題，那麽現在我們就退後一步，從一個可能出乎意料的角度來探討這個問題，或者讓我們希望它是出乎意料的。我們來談談中國。我們有很多關於中國的故事，但這些故事都不是真的。鄧小平是一個非常了不起的人，他比我矮——我心裏有一個很大的位置，可以讓他看起來像鄧小平，而不是保羅·沃爾克，他在普林斯頓大學離我家很近，會問我“保羅，那邊天氣怎麽樣？”你知道，就是那種胡說八道。他身高 6 英尺 5 英寸，我以前隻有 5 英尺 6 英寸。

不管怎樣，鄧小平這個小個子，他正透過海麵看著日本。他說：“你知道，這個地方被轟炸了。40 個城市遭到燃燒彈襲擊，傷亡人數比遭到核轟炸的兩個城市還要多。我的意思是，這個地方一片狼藉。現在，他們已經是世界第二大經濟體了。發生了什麽？”就在他家附近。所以他看著這一切，說他們在這裏有一個秘密配方。他們製造東西。然後賣給那些瘋狂的美國人。這個巨大的美國消費市場，這個美國國內市場，實在是太貪得無厭了。如果你能製造美國人想要的東西，如果它足夠好，美國人會買，你就能發財。換句話說，你可以利用美國中產階級創造中國中產階級，通過製造這些瘋狂的美國人想要的東西。

美國人會買。因為日本就是這麽做的。韓國也是這麽做的。台灣也是這麽做的。韓國和台灣都是日本的前殖民地，日本在這兩個地方的後殖民轉型中都發揮了重要作用。

所以，這裏有一個公式，而且是一個非常成功的公式。這個公式適用於的不是很多國家，而是東亞，所以，這就是現在的策略。所以，見鬼去吧，這個瘋狂的蘇聯模式。不管怎樣，毛澤東這個瘋子，摧毀了中國的計劃官僚機構，因為他在文化大革命期間把他們都派到農村去做體力勞動。他破壞了中國政府實施計劃經濟的能力，所以到了 70 年代末，當鄧小平因改革而受到讚譽時，農民自己不想再挨餓，他們在中國南錐體，也就是季風、水稻種植、水稻種植的地區重建了市場關係。大約 3 億農民自行重新加入市場經濟，雖然沒有共產黨的指示，但確實有一些共產黨的指示。“你可以交易洋蔥，但不能交易大米。”他們交易大米，然後說：“好吧，你可以交易大米，但你隻能在周二和周四交易。”他們也在周一、周三和周五交易。

因此，共產黨頒布了許多關於市場經濟的法令，並且勉強做出讓步，允許農民自己進行市場行為。然後農民創辦企業，搬到城市，外國直接投資來自日本和台灣，並通過香港，這是一個有法治的英國金融中心。還記得他們說過“戈爾巴喬夫為什麽不做鄧小平嗎？”沒有香港。沒有香港。你的金融體係獎勵金錢，不是出於共產黨的原因，而是為了資本積累的原因。好吧，你有香港，你有日本的外國直接投資，你有美國國內市場。你擁有別人沒有的要素，你有鄧小平，他足夠聰明，可以做到這一點。你有毛澤東，他創造了公平的競爭環境，使這一切成為可能。然後，你讓共產黨為3億人的創業精神而受到讚譽，他們被放開，再次參與市場行為。

所以，這就是在中國發生的事情。這不是我們的故事。我們的故事是共產黨自上而下地引入改革，這些改革是成功的。所以，中國共產黨因市場革命而受到讚譽。別介意共產黨官員像寄生蟲一樣偷走了農民企業家創立的企業。

但鄧小平的戰略舉措是：“蘇聯模式見鬼去吧。我們要和蘇聯離婚。我們要毒害他們，讓他們死掉。美國將成為我們的經濟夥伴。”鄧小平去了德克薩斯，參加了一場牛仔競技表演，戴上了一頂 10 加侖的牛仔帽，你們看過照片了。這比鄧小平本人的帽子多出 8 加侖，而且很管用。然後，在 90 年代，鄧小平的門生江澤民上台後，江澤民又把蘇聯，也就是現在的俄羅斯，拉回來當情婦。所以鄧小平與蘇聯離婚，與美國聯姻，然後江澤民又把俄羅斯情婦拉回來，因為俄羅斯的軍事工業綜合體正在走向衰亡，江澤民和中國人又把它從死裏複活，開始在俄羅斯軍事綜合體的基礎上建立中國軍隊，俄羅斯軍事綜合體就是舊蘇聯的末日軍事綜合體，對吧？

這就是發生在中國的故事，他們拋棄了蘇聯，然後又把俄羅斯拉回來，但隻是作為他們建設軍隊的合作夥伴。好吧。俄羅斯一團糟。你們當中有些人可能曾經是那裏的投資者，有些人可能去過那裏，有些人可能是來自那個地區的難民。90 年代一片混亂。我們有改革的詞匯。再一次，就像中國共產黨一樣，我們假裝事情被稱為改革，它們是由高層指揮的，而不是他們正在經曆的混亂和崩潰。好吧。在 90 年代，對吧？蘇聯解體在 1991 年之後一直持續，普京來了，他阻止了蘇聯的解體。他們在 1998 年債務危機和金融崩潰中很幸運，因為它使盧布的匯率如此之高，以至於俄羅斯產品在國外便宜得多，進口產品太貴了。

所以，它促進了俄羅斯國內工業的發展。你猜怎麽著？鄧小平發起的中國繁榮現在提高了全球對所有東西的需求。水泥、肥料，對吧？氨。所有的磷酸鹽、金屬，甚至廢金屬，中國人對一切都欲求不滿。因此，蘇聯在 1998 年金融危機之後起死回生，因為

中國對全球所有事物都需求無窮。中國正以如此快的速度增長。中俄直接貿易微乎其微。幾乎為零。但由於全球原材料和工業投入有限，無論是否直接貿易，所有商品的價格都在上漲。那些關注大宗商品市場的人都知道大宗商品市場波動很大，但大宗商品市場曾長期牛市，而這都是基於中國需求無窮。於是，俄羅斯卷土重來，普京這個家夥每年實現 7% 的增長，人們認為這是石油。他第一任期內的平均油價為每桶 35 美元，第二任期內的平均油價為每桶 70 美元，而他每年的增長率為 7%。當油價達到每桶 100 美元以上時，他的增長就結束了，他遇到了瓶頸。

因此，認為石油是俄羅斯增長的源泉這一觀點忽略了中國在全球範圍內的這種需求無窮無盡。蘇聯隻生產了大量低質量的產品，而現在價格卻非常合理。這個故事為當時的中國故事錦上添花。俄羅斯起死回生。中國讓俄羅斯起死回生，就像美國通過日本模式與台灣、日本和香港一起打造中國的繁榮一樣。這就是故事。

我稍微簡化了一下，因為你沒有 15 周的時間和 85 萬美元來聽完整個故事。這就是美國大學的費用。我知道，這有點荒謬。但無論如何，我們稍微簡化了一下。但你在這裏看到了俄中關係的發展，這是沒有計劃的。這是偶然的。這就是我們在科學中所說的新興屬性。如果你了解複雜性和係統理論，你就會知道這不是任何人想要的。這是自然而然發生的事情。

現在，中國已經崛起。現在中國非常成功。是的。大約有 7 億人擺脫了貧困，這是一個令人震驚的故事。如果你自 80 年代以來就經常往返中國，你就會知道這是真的。與此同時，中國有 6 億人完全生活在市場經濟之外。他們沒有受過教育，沒有醫療保健，沒有眼鏡。他們一貧如洗，沒有教育，也沒有人力資本投資。他們被政權拋棄了。6 億人大多來自內陸地區。這個數字非常可觀。但無論如何，有 7 億人擺脫了貧困，其中許多人加入了中產階級，還有億萬富翁階層。

那麽接下來會發生什麽？戈爾巴喬夫認為共產主義是可以改革的，你可以擁有人性化的社會主義，你可以複興它。它不一定是斯大林主義的。它不一定是腐敗和低效的。它會再次煥發活力。所以，他開始自由化政治體係。蘇聯也發生過同樣的事情，1956 年發生在匈牙利，1968 年發生在捷克斯洛伐克。黨決定開放和自由化，在黨內進行辯論。有人站起來說：“你知道，我不想要你的黨。我不喜歡你的共產黨。”他們說：“不，這不是交易。我們正在自由化共產黨的壟斷。我們允許你在黨內辯論。人們說：“好吧，不，不要黨。不要共產黨。換個黨怎麽樣？”

所以，你就有了這個政治自由化沒有平衡的問題。它沒有停止和成功的點。你無法關閉這個過程。一旦你開放，它就會開始瓦解，壟斷就會消失，因為你不能半個共產主義者，就像你不能半個懷孕一樣。你要麽壟斷，要麽不壟斷。所以，你可以自由化經濟。你可以允許市場經濟。但你不能允許政治製度自由化，因為那樣你就會失去壟斷。這在 56 年的匈牙利、68 年的捷克斯洛伐克和 1980 年代的戈爾巴喬夫都發生過。所以你猜怎麽著？中國共產黨開始研究這個問題。他們開始研究蘇聯解體。

信不信由你，我們將贏得烏克蘭的和平。我告訴過你這是不可能的。我告訴過你這會有點倒退和偏離。但我們會到達那裏。事實上，就這一點而言，我們離目標並不遠。所以，中國共產黨開始研究蘇聯解體，他們說，“你知道嗎，我們不能這樣做，我們不能自由化我們的製度。我們不能在政治上開放我們的體製，因為我們最終會像戈爾巴喬夫，或者像杜別克，或者像匈牙利的納吉·伊姆雷。所以我們不會在政治上開放它。”

因此，西方世界通過貿易和投資整合中國，以使中國在政治、法治和其他方麵更像西方。而中國共產黨政權拒絕開放

政治上開放，因為這是自殺。所以，我們在玩經濟一體化的遊戲，這會導致政治和法律轉型。而他們玩的是絕不允許政治轉型和法律轉型的遊戲。你可以談論這個，直到你臉色發青。在過去的 30 年裏——你可以寫關於它的文章，你可以寫一整本書——你無法說服人們，特別是投資階層，相信中國共產黨不會自殺。

有一個人。他和我一樣高。他說話像喬·佩西。他寫了一本被盜版的書，翻譯成了中文，講述了蘇聯解體，講述了沒有改革平衡。你無法在政治上開放並穩定局勢。這簡直就是自殺，他在這本書中證明了這一點。然後他去了中國，結果發現，他的書有盜版的中文譯本，他們在黨校學習。這些人都拿著這本書的破舊副本。黨校的校長是誰？這個名叫習近平的省級人物。他們所學的隻是沒有戈爾巴喬夫，沒有政治開放，從未自殺。我發現了這一點，因為我看著桌子對麵，有這些中國人物——無論如何，非常有趣。

所以，現在他掌權了。他現在是首席執行官，他的故事不是對西方友好的故事，因為西方對他是一個威脅。你們在加拿大有這種模式，我們在一定程度上在更南邊也有，我們在歐洲、澳大利亞和日本也有這種模式，對吧？日本是西方的，但不是歐洲的。西方是一種製度，而不是地理命題。它對中國人構成了直接威脅。台灣的存在，即另一種政治製度，對他們構成了直接威脅。所以，我們現在身處這個世界，包括鄧小平時代，但我們不明白這一點，因為我們認為我們在玩一場不同的遊戲，即“經濟一體化導致政治轉型”，而不是“在我的任期內永遠不會，因為我們不會成為戈爾巴喬夫”。所以，我們玩錯了遊戲，或者我們沒有理解我們所處的遊戲。

這讓我們談到烏克蘭和贏得和平，然後我們會提出問題。這對烏克蘭有什麽作用？所以，事實證明，為了贏得和平，你需要停戰。你需要結束戰鬥。你看，因為烏克蘭需要烏克蘭。俄羅斯不需要烏克蘭。俄羅斯有俄羅斯。所以，如果你有一所房子，假設你的房子有 10 個房間。我進入你的房子，偷了你的兩個房間，我把它們弄壞了，從這兩個房間，我又在破壞其他八個房間。你們阻止我憑借你們在戰場上的勇氣和智慧占領另外八間房間。但我仍占據你們的兩間房間，並破壞其餘房間。你們有一百多萬、一百五十萬的孩子在用波蘭語和德語、烏克蘭語以外的語言上學。一年又一年過去了。他們還是烏克蘭人嗎？你們沒有預算，你們沒有經濟。你們沒有關稅，你們沒有稅收收入。你們正在死去。我們看到的那支勇敢、聰明的烏克蘭軍隊已經死了。他們走了。他們死了或受了重傷。你們在消耗彈藥，你們在消耗沒有人增加生產的東西。我們隻是在提供庫存。

如果你想增加產量，你想開辦兩條新的裝配線來生產軍火，而你是一家私營公司，他們給你一份兩年的合同，你說，“好吧，我將在 2025 年交付軍火。”也許戰爭在 2025 年就結束了，你剛剛建造了兩條新的裝配線。所以，你需要一份十年的合同，而不是兩年的合同，然後你才能開辦兩條新的裝配線。否則，你就會陷入困境。這就是我們在戰爭中的處境。如果有人摧毀你的房子，無論你有多英勇，無論你的抵抗有多驚人，你都不會獲勝。因為俄羅斯人占領了他們自己的房子，它有 1000 個房間。他們不需要你的房子，但你隻有一所房子，烏克蘭。

所以，早點停戰吧。收回盡可能多的領土是可以的，但要有一個非軍事區，一個比西巴爾幹半島正在經曆的更快的歐盟加入進程。一個不會是北約的安全保障。如果你去過德國，你就會明白，北約是建立在共識的基礎上的。烏克蘭不可能加入北約。絕對不可能。公開討論這個問題隻會破壞北約的團結。有可能出現韓國的結果，這將非常令人不滿意。還有朝鮮，這是一個威脅。家庭被拆散。破壞和重建，等等。威脅還在繼續。朝鮮半島沒有和平條約，隻有停戰。冷戰

戰爭結束了，但還沒有結束。然而，他們有安全保障，韓國是世界上最成功的國家之一。

因此，如果烏克蘭像韓國一樣，停戰，有安全保障，那將是烏克蘭的一大勝利。這可能不是與美國的雙邊協議——可能是雙邊協議，波蘭加入，波羅的海國家加入，斯堪的納維亞國家加入，但這不是北約的保證。你越早得到它越好。如果弗拉基米爾·普京簽署了一份文件，那份文件有什麽價值？他會信守諾言，承諾停戰，並信守諾言嗎？當然不會。永遠不會，除非他在北京簽署這份文件。因為如果他在北京簽署這份文件，他就不能對習近平豎中指。他處於危險之中。這是他唯一剩下的橋梁。他已經燒毀了所有其他橋梁。

所以你希望中國人監督和平進程，監督停戰，因為這是讓普京信守諾言的唯一方法。我知道這聽起來很瘋狂，但中國的和平提議是假的。但它不是假的。這是唯一的解決方案。所以，拜登派他的人接受停戰，習近平派他的人接受停戰，他們在北京簽字。否則，這個人可以暫停，明年、後年或五年後去喝茶。你奪回克裏米亞，你就有叛亂問題。十年或五十年後，俄羅斯人會回來。也許明年，他們會回來。鮑裏斯·葉利欽要求克裏米亞歸還俄羅斯。鮑裏斯·葉利欽在 1991 年，當時蘇聯還沒有解體。所以，克裏米亞，俄羅斯人會以某種方式從中走出來，這對贏得和平來說是困難的。

在暴行肆虐的情況下，他們屠殺你們的平民，強奸你們的婦女和女孩，綁架你們的孩子，摧毀你們的文化遺產，以消除任何證明你們確實作為一個獨立國家和文化存在的證據，這是一個很難接受的論點。不能強加賠償和戰爭罪法庭並收複你們的所有領土，就是贏得和平。我們還遠沒有達到這個目標。但我們現在比十四個月前更接近目標了。我們將看看烏克蘭的進攻是否發生——他們現在實際上沒有任何彈藥，因為他們在巴赫穆特消耗了這些彈藥。我們在一月份發送的彈藥是我們戰爭中發送的最多的彈藥，他們將這些彈藥消耗在沒有戰略意義的領土上。現在他們要求更多，他們乞求更多。你奪回一些領土，或者你不奪回。假設你奪回了它。你如何贏得和平？如何讓俄羅斯人停下來，不再試圖奪回它？明年還是後年？你需要贏得和平，而不僅僅是贏得戰爭。

所以，這是非常不令人滿意的。從某種程度上說，這非常令人沮喪。這在政治上非常困難，這是目前擺在桌麵上的最好的結果，除非出現奇跡。奇跡就是俄羅斯在戰場上解體，俄羅斯軍隊就此瓦解。十四個月來，我們一直在聽說這件事，但還沒有證據。這可能會發生，但沒有證據。我們一直聽說普京遇到了麻煩，也許會被推翻。沒有證據。這可能會發生。他必須被推翻，但不是被升級的替代者推翻，而是被投降的替代者推翻。

我們一直希望的奇跡還沒有發生。它們，再一次，可能會發生。戰爭是不可預測的，但如果你冷靜地看待證據，你會看到美國和中國聯合起來，迫使雙方停戰，這樣戰爭就停止了，烏克蘭就可以重建，建立能夠吸收 3500 億美元重建資金的機構，這是戰前 GDP 的兩倍。重建的最低估計是戰前 GDP 的兩倍，這些錢會進來，不會被偷走，也不會隨著他們現在的機構消失？我不這麽認為。所以你必須為加入歐盟的進程建立這些機構，才能妥善吸收重建資金。就是這樣。這不是一個令人振奮的故事。但這就是擺在桌麵上的故事。無論如何，謝謝你的關注。

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.

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.