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This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: Putin’s nuclear threat and China ‘friendship’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. In this week’s edition, we’re looking at the war in Ukraine and the risk of nuclear escalation. My guest is Professor Graham Allison of Harvard University. He wrote the classic study of the Cuban missile crisis, Essence of Decision. More recently, he’s gained a lot of attention in Beijing and Washington with his book on US-China relations, which has the stark title Destined for War. As you’ll hear, he believes that Russia could indeed use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But how high is the risk? In the past week, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has claimed that the Nato alliance is now fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. He also said that there’s a very serious risk that the conflict could turn nuclear.

News clip
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov with a chilling warning. The risk of nuclear war is a real one. Speaking to state run media, Lavrov said, quote, The danger is serious. It is real. It cannot be underestimated.

Gideon Rachman
The Russians have a clear interest in trying to deter the West from supplying heavy weaponry to Ukraine. But in fact, America and its allies intend to step up weapons supplies. As the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin made clear after a visit to Ukraine this week.

Lloyd Austin
They need long-range fires. You’ve heard them express a need for tanks and we are doing everything that we can to get them the types of support, the types of artillery and munitions that will be effective in this stage of the fight.

Gideon Rachman
Many in the US and Europe are inclined to dismiss Russia’s talk of the use of nuclear weapons as a bluff. But Graham Allison believes the risk of nuclear escalation is real. I began our conversation by asking him why he believes that.

Graham Allison
I think if you tried to put it in a single sentence, it is that if Putin is forced to choose between losing on the one hand in Ukraine and escalating the level of destruction, there’s every reason to believe he’ll escalate the level of destruction. We know about him and his history. He had no compunction, whatever killing massively in his own city Grozny, levelling the entire city in order to quote, win, and Aleppo in Syria. The commander that’s now commanding the Donbas operation had no trouble, whatever just killing people massively. Secondly, he has the physical capability to do this. Those Iskander missiles with tactical nuclear warheads can hit any target 300 miles inside of Ukraine. So he can pick a city and hit it. And there it is. And if he were to do that, the world will say, this man seems like a madman and like a murderer, the mass murderer, maybe genocidal. I think we’ve already used all those words. So, you know what else can you call him, than what he is and what he’s shown himself to be? So I think the painful fact about Ukraine is that we have to hope to get to some resolution or some ceasefire or some place where it stops before we give him that option. Because I think, unfortunately, in that option, there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t conduct a nuclear strike. And if that were to happen, we will all be back into the world of thinking about the unthinkable and which is not very good choices.

Gideon Rachman
If he were to conduct a nuclear strike, what is your best guess as to how the West would respond?

Graham Allison
Most Americans, and I think most Europeans, consigned nuclear weapons to the dustbin of history with the Soviet Union when it disappeared. And certainly for Western militaries, nuclear weapons are essentially no longer weapons of war. So we’re accustomed to the taboo in which just don’t use nuclear weapons and can’t even imagine it, except in retaliation for a nuclear strike. So the idea that it would have happened all of a sudden just to be, you know, skins can fall off people’s eyes and they’ll be terrified. And then you say, well, what are US options? I’ve tried to help our team work through these. There are no good options. So maybe we should conduct a nuclear strike against what? Against some Russian city? Well, now we’ve got the war in the Russia. And what would be the response to that? Maybe we really, really, really tighten the sanctions. I think that’s what we’ve been trying to do, though. There’s more to do. Would Europeans be so shocked that they would cut off gas? I don’t think so. The scenario I envisage is by nightmares, he conducts a nuclear strike on a small city, maybe 20,000 people. And now he says, Zelensky, would you like to see what a Ukrainian Nagasaki looks like? Remembering that it was actually the Americans who dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killed more than 100,000 people. And then another bomb on Nagasaki before the emperor said, OK, I give up. That’s enough. Again, in response to this, could you imagine we sort of settle on some stalemate with a monster and then try to live with the monster? Well, I can, but this man’s gonna be a monster as long as he’s the leader of Russia anyhow, whether it be double Bond Street. But then what am I gonna do about it? So we really this is the land of the ugly and uglier.

Gideon Rachman
And I mean, you said that you’ve been trying to help the American team think through some of this. So is it your impression that the Biden administration. Is it your impression that they are genuinely concerned by the threat of nuclear escalation? How central is that to their thinking?

Graham Allison
I think that Joe Biden, whom I’ve known for 50 years, so I know for a long time, I like him. He knows what nuclear war means. He’s actually thought through this even has been through not recently, to the best of my knowledge, but in the past, a simulation in which he basically played one of the parts in the Cuban missile crisis where people were debating choices that Kennedy thought had a one in three chance of having a real nuclear war with 100 million people being killed. So the existential experience of that in terms of what it means emotionally and psychologically trying to do that vicariously, he’s done that and so have a number of other people in the administration really has gone through something like that. Jake Sullivan.

Gideon Rachman
The Middle East, the head of the Joint Chiefs, and Jake is the head of the National Security Council.

Graham Allison
So they actually have tried vicariously to think about whether, wait a minute, if we do this, this could happen. You do this. So why Biden has been so clear from the get go that we’re not going to fight world war three over Ukraine, is that you start a conventional world war three, you are fighting Russians in Ukraine and it escalates to a nuclear war. And at the end of the nuclear war, it’s not just Ukrainians who’ve been killed and Russians there, but maybe all Europeans and all Americans and all Russians and say No, that’s not possible. Well, unfortunately, it is possible. So if the total American arsenal were used to attack Russia, we can kill every last Russian and we can also, in retaliation, see the US disappear from the map and literally disappear from the map. No people left. So you think, oh my God, that’s crazy. It’s dangerous. It was called, if you can, you’re old enough to remember, MAD, mutually assured destruction. And it was meant to be a double entendres. Hey, man, this is bad. This is madness. This is crazy. You know, we people would end up destroying all of each other, maybe even life on earth, which answers. Yup.

Gideon Rachman
I mean, it’s extraordinary. It’s mad enough that we built the capacity to do this.

Graham Allison
Yes. And then the so the whole idea that you’re trying to live in a world in which that’s conceivable is hard to take real and then once has been 70 years without any use of nuclear weapons now. OK, I know that was a fantasy. Probably wasn’t real anyhow. Any case so I don’t have to think about it. But then all of a sudden this guy can give us a shocking wake-up call. And I think, unfortunately, the impulse this would have for incentivising other people to get their own nuclear arsenals for their own protection. However, this comes out, I think will be a big blow to the non-proliferation regime, and we’ll have to do a lot to try to shore that back up.

Gideon Rachman
But, I mean, so you say and I completely take your word for it that Biden, Sullivan and so on take nuclear escalation as a real threat factored central into their thinking. And yet Biden’s rhetoric. You’re correct. Obviously, he said we’re not gonna fight world war three. But he’s also accused Putin of genocide, of war crimes. He’s essentially called for regime change, which is cutting off all the options of compromise. Doesn’t that in itself increase this threat of nuclear escalation?

Graham Allison
Maybe a bit. Joe Biden is an emotional person, and if one is not genuinely outraged at the outrageous atrocities Putin is perpetrating, you know, you really must have a heart of stone. So now maybe it’s not convenient for the president to have an emotional outburst, but that’s what he said. I mean, is it true that this fellow is absolutely beyond the pale? Absolutely. And is he genocidal? I believe he is. And is he a mass murderer? I believe he is. Now, do I believe that in the end we’re going to end up having to do some version of a dirty deal with him? Most likely, and it’s gonna be extremely uncomfortable, will be made less comfortable by saying that he’s genocidal yeah but in the world war two Churchill and Roosevelt didn’t have any trouble dealing with Stalin and Stalin did kill 30, 40 million people. Here we are, the 50th anniversary of the opening to China. Kissinger and Nixon didn’t have any trouble dealing with Mao. He had probably killed 50 million people. So I don’t think Putin will ever be rehabilitatable. He is a pariah and he’s gonna be a pariah for the rest of his period, I believe. But I think that in spite of whatever we’ve said about him, I think in the end, unless he loses his position, which would be great, but I don’t think that’s likely. I think that they’ll end up being some degree of a settlement in which he will remain a pariah the way Kim Jong Un is. But we’re gonna have to live with him.

Gideon Rachman
And again, looking at the analogies you’ve drawn with the Cuban missile crisis, you said that one of the things that Kennedy decided was that you mustn’t humiliate this guy or you mustn’t leave him with no options. And yet it does sound a bit like America, at least in public, isn’t prepared to countenance the idea of giving him a face saving device.

Graham Allison
I mean, Kennedy, you’re absolutely right in your reading and memory of the missile crisis. So the missile crisis Kennedy kind of stumbled into and that’s a long story. But then he goes through this experience, the most traumatic experience of his life. And it really had a searing impact on him personally and psychologically, even made him and his brother more reflective than they had ever been. They’re both Catholics who mean to be good Catholics. So they thought that they were gonna go to the day of judgment in which they had to get an account of their lives. And Bobby said to him, you know, if we had killed a hundred million people . . . 

Gideon Rachman
I mean, a tough interview.

Graham Allison
Probably. There’s no forgiveness for that. So he then gave his most supportive foreign policy speech just five months before he was assassinated. The American University speech is a wonderful speech, brilliant. But he says, here’s the lesson from the missile crisis. Nuclear powers must avert confrontations that force an adversary to choose between humiliating retreat and nuclear war. And that was actually part of the crazy cocktail that he concocted for Khrushchev to give him a way out. So I think the administration is certainly thinking about that. And yes, some of the rhetoric will make it difficult, but I would say the Donbas operation. My bet is it’ll go considerably better than the first innings for Russia. And let’s imagine the Russian troops succeed in taking Mariupol, which they have, and they didn’t got a land bridge all the way to Crimea. So they push a little further in Donbas. They got more of Lugansk and more of Donetsk that they had before. And now you’ve got Ukraine where Zelensky’s perfectly happy to say they’re not joining NATO. And NATO members are prepared to say they’re not joining night time for 15 years or something. That the Putin spin. That is some version of a victory, you know, in Russia. Well, he’s pretty good at spinning pretty strange tales. And so he may be able to say that’s enough. And I think from our point of view, Biden has had four objectives that he’d been very clear about him. The first objective is that Ukraine survives. Putin wanted Ukraine exterminated, Biden wanted them to survive, they would survive. Secondly, no world war three, no nuclear war. Third, Putin will have had a strategic defeat, a major strategic defeat. Everything that was Putin’s objectives, he will have failed on. So, his objective was to extinguish Ukraine. Sorry, Ukraine is there. His objective was to splinter, collapse Nato. Nato, they look healthier. This was to divide the West. The West, as you wrote recently, is kind of revived. I’ve never seen so much life and vigour in the West in terms of response. He’s worried about a Nato on his border that’s threatening. You’re gonna see a stronger Nato on his border, you know, than he ever saw before. So he should be dealt and is being dealt a major strategic defeat. So that anybody looks at the net of it will say, boy, this was crazy. You know, you won 10 and you lost a thousand.

Gideon Rachman
So that’s a deal that Putin can spin as a victory at home.

Graham Allison
And we could say, I know Ukrainians don’t like this argument, but I’ve argued that Ukraine was not a successful country before Putin got there. Ukraine has been a mess. Now, part of the mess is because Russians have been fooling around in and whatever. But there’s now more Ukrainian identity than there’s ever been. There’s more Ukrainian pride than there’s ever been. There’s more recognition of Ukraine in the world than there’s ever been. So anybody that hadn’t been moved by the Ukrainians and Zelensky, hadn’t been watching. So the West is gonna be as supportive as we can to the rebuilding of a successful Ukraine. They can build a successful country. And then in the same way that you ended world war two, we didn’t go fight the Soviets in order to liberate East Germany. We settled and the West became a great success story and the East became a hell hole. And people looked at the difference and over time, you know, they drew their own conclusions. North and South Korea. I mean, there again, again with an armistice. South Korea now one of the wonders of the world in the last half century. North Korea is still a mess. So Ukraine could become . . . 

Gideon Rachman
Even if they don’t have all the territory like South . . .

Graham Allison
Exactly.

Gideon Rachman
Korea, that they could become the model country.

Graham Allison
And then for the guy sitting on the other side, they’re gonna be looking saying, my God, how did we get stuck on the wrong side of this? But also Russians looking and seeing a successful market democracy on their border that were people whom they said were Russians. But they seem to be succeeding and we’re not. I’m a little hopeful.

Gideon Rachman
And last question on this aspect of it. Another thing, looking at the Cuban missile crisis and your writings and what happened is that there was a secret undertaking by Kennedy to the Russians where he said, I’m not gonna say this publicly, but we will take the missiles out of Turkey. Is there any scope for that kind of secret undertaking? Can you imagine?

Graham Allison
I certainly have written so and think so. And then obviously there would have to be a secret. And now that government is even more complicated than it was then, it would be difficult to do. But in the same way that I think it would not have got the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, if you had only left it to the formal negotiations. So you had a backchannel that consisted interestingly . . .

Gideon Rachman
Of Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns.

Graham Allison
And Bill Burns. So that’s the director of CIA and the national security adviser, both of whom are extremely competent people. And both of them know how to keep a secret. And Burns had been the ambassador to Moscow. So he knows Putin and he knows full well he’s actually gone in a couple of acknowledged missions to Russia just before this. So I don’t know exactly what the terms would be. And if I had any really thoughts about him, I would obviously try to be quiet about them. But I could imagine something. And Putin is so much about Putin that you could do something for him or his family or somebody that he really cares about. I mean, this is like dealing with a mafioso. If you go back and look at The Godfather, Godfather, you know, looks after his own children. And it’s . . .

Gideon Rachman
Amazing how often The Godfather comes up in international relations.

Graham Allison
It is. It is. It is. I mean, it’s a spectacular book and it’s I’m sure there’s things wrong with it. But I often ask myself, what clues can we get from the Don or from a subset of interactions?

Gideon Rachman
And so that’s the two key players at the moment, the Russia, the US. But obviously China’s crucial and you know, you made a big splash a few years back now with your book about the Thucydides Trap, which basically argued that rising powers and established powers more often than not went to war and that therefore there must be a risk with China and America. How do you think China is seeing this conflict? After all, Putin met Xi on February the fourth and the invasion happens on February the 24th. So sitting in Beijing, what are they thinking?

Graham Allison
So US-China relations are the worst that they’ve been in 50 years. And actually, what I wrote in this book, Destined for War, was expect things to get worse before they get worse. For one fundamental reason, that when the tectonics of power shift rapidly and dramatically in such a way that a rising power is rising and the see-saw is shifting, and the ruling power is finding where it used to be in control of things, its feet lifting off the ground. This discombobulates the hell out of everything. So the rising power becomes to feel “I’m bigger, I’m stronger, I deserve more say and sway” and the ruling power thinks “How could I not be appreciative for the fact that we provide an environment in which they were ever able to grow?” And the structural reality is just happening. And as long as China’s continuing to rise, the impact on the see-saw is gonna be what it is. And that, I think, is the driver. I’d say that 75% of story then is 25% more. That I mean, if you didn’t have Xi Jinping, if this was another version of who would win, it would be a different story. Xi Jinping, different person altogether with different set of aspirations. Second point, Washington I think has done a great job in the intelligence community and a great job of getting inside of Russia and being able to announce what Putin was gonna do the week before and keeping him wrong footed and so forth. The intelligence community and Biden concluded early on that Russia was going to invade. And even though very prominent Russians who should have been involved hadn’t figured out the picture. And twice, Biden called European leaders and told them it’s next Wednesday. So I was talking to people in the government and I said that’s not gonna happen. Not going to happen before February 24th. So I offered 4 to 1 bets to everybody. I collect a lot of money.

Gideon Rachman
Why were you so confident it wouldn’t be on February 24th?

Graham Allison
Because the closing ceremony of the Olympics is not on February 24th. And the idea that Putin was gonna rain on Xi’s parade, no way. Secondly, the question, what position is China gonna take? Xi has built with Russia the most operationally significant alliance in the world today, way more operationally significant than most of American treaty allies. So if you said the value to China and especially to Russia of their relationship versus US in India. It’s not even comparison if you do it operationally. Even though India’s a member of the Quad, we call them a non-NATO ally or whatever. So what’s going on there? And I think that partly it’s what Zbig Brzezinski’s, in his idea the last year of his life in 2017 and then I wrote about it in 2018. He called it the “alliance of the aggrieved”. So the US is isolating both of them. The US is seen by both of them as trying to overthrow the regime. Doesn’t regard their regimes as legitimate. So the enemy of my enemy is a friend.

Gideon Rachman
But then, of course, comes the war. And my assumption has been that China would have been fine, would have liked a quick Russian victory, but now it’s a terrible mess. So what do they think in Beijing? And I should add that I suspect you’ve got a better idea than most, because I remember when the two of us met at a conference in Beijing in 2018, I think your book had just come out and the Chinese were very intrigued by it. So you know what they think or how they think.

Graham Allison
I know someone, so Wang Qishan who’s the vice-president and the closest buddy of Xi’s, said to me that they said, you know, Graham, you’re the best publicity agent an author ever had. He said, most people had never heard of Thucydides you know, when you wrote your book about Thucydides Trap. And the idea that there’s some guy that was roughly a contemporary of Confucius and that he had a wise insight about pattern in history, which they like. He said, fantastic. He said his book, Peloponnesian War in Mandarin, has sold more copies since my book than it had in the previous 2500 years. I think they haven’t sold any before that. But any case, so I would say that this first question, which is what was the conversation like on February 4th at the summit, the first day of the Olympics, between Putin and Xi? I brought you a copy of something I produced for folks in the government, and then I published a version of it. I said, let me imagine the briefing chart that’s gonna be given to Xi before this meeting. And the first briefing in chart’s gonna say “advantages for China if Russia invades”. And the second chart, “disadvantages for China”.

Gideon Rachman
And as far as you know, that is exactly how they brief him.

Graham Allison
I think they did that. It’s fun. It’s an exercise, you know, intellectually, I mean, all governments do things like that. But doing it for Xi was fun. So here it is. So advantages for China if Russia invades. So it’s a hundred advantages . . . 

Gideon Rachman
Don’t give me 100 . . . 

Graham Allison
First 10, no first 10. This is the bottom line upfront. The US will not be focused on us. As the chairman has repeatedly reminded us, what we need most from the US is just one thing: inattention. Fortunately, the US system is unable to focus on more than one major threat at a time. The longer the Russian threat to Ukraine in Europe consumes US attention, the longer breathing space we have to realise our China dream. Now, if I were betting, would he have said, “this is not the most convenient time for me because we’re doing stability through the coronation in November”.

Gideon Rachman
This is when Xi’s term is extended. So he doesn’t need a headache.

Graham Allison
That’s right. He’d just like to have things calm until then. But I think he said, “we understand you’re a great power and you all have to do what you have to do”. I don’t think he imagined that the Russian military forces would have performed as poorly as they have. And I don’t think he imagined that the Ukrainian forces would have performed as well as they have. I don’t think he imagined that the West would have a reason and come down on him. So I think by now he must be thinking either this guy’s a screw up and I’m sure he has doubts about him from time to time, but I think he’ll still stick with him in the same way that monarchs have always been reluctant about the beheading of other monarchs. You know, the whole idea that this is one of my guys and if he can be overturned, you know, what about me? But I have to be thinking, what about the military capability of them? Though I would suspect he thinks that the first round didn’t work out very well and that he’s looking for better performance in Donbas.

Gideon Rachman
Do you think it’ll make them think a bit harder about the possibility of attacking Taiwan?

Graham Allison
I hope. I hope. I mean, we always imagine what they should be seeing or what they should be saying. And I would prefer to be listening to see what I could hear. But you can’t not watch this and say, well, certainly the Russian military has underperformed. So it may be that a complex military operation is complicated, and if you haven’t been practising it lately, you can’t be confident how it’s gonna go. And I believe that’s true. So since Chinese military, like almost all militaries, is conservative, they have a good reason to practice war. So for me, delay is success. So then secondly, we got a bunch of Russian weapons. These weapons don’t seem to be performing as well as we think. Chinese are great students of ongoing wars. So I’m sure they’re looking at this and thinking “if the problem is they didn’t maintain this stuff. Or maybe there’s some fundamental problems with the equipment”. But any case, there’s a lot of it’s our equipment. We got to reconsider this. So, again, that’s a good reason for delay. And then I think the Western response. The huge amount of the Chinese governing class are global people. So they go to Davos or they go to London, they see the park or they go shopping in New York or Paris, and they’ll send their kids to England, or in the US

Gideon Rachman
Indeed Harvard, didn’t Xi’s daughter . . . 

Graham Allison
Some even to Harvard. And so the idea that you might basically be blackballed or become a pariah has got to be shocking them. And I’ve had probably ten discussions with people even now with Zoom, you know, which you could listen to what they’re saying, but you could hear between the lines, the thought that this could happen to Chinese, to good or to Chinese that are part of the ruling class. Cause now, for Putinistas, you know, the oligarchs or the other, you know, people that you and I were friends with.

Gideon Rachman
We’ll never see them again. (laughter) That’s right. So very last question. We talked about how the Chinese will be seeing this. The US before all this war broke out. I mean, the one consistent thread, it seemed to me, between Trump and Biden and even Obama, was attempt to refocus American foreign policy on China to say, look, Russia’s yesterday’s problem. Do you think that can survive this conflict?

Graham Allison
Ah it’s a great question. And my former student and colleague, Kurt Campbell, is the, you know, tsar trying to do this.

Gideon Rachman
He’s missed the pivot to Asia in the White House.

Graham Allison
Exactly. And I go there almost every week and I’ve been trying to help them a bit. I think they’re appropriately terrified that if you look, the Chinese strategy for the administration, which actually has been really, I don’t know, three times for the last more than half a year, every time you get ready to give a speech about it or say what it is and you say hold hold you have to (inaudible) out of this. So if you’re giving a speech about China today, the president, or the secretary of state, it’s kind of start with Ukraine and then with Ukraine and Russia and then Ukraine and Russia and China. And I think it’s also the case that in most outcomes of Ukraine, Russia will still look like a militarily threatening force to many Europeans. And the Europeans are finally, many of them, waking up about, you know, maybe we can even be serious about our own defense. And so, again, from the American point of view, most Americans are more European in this than they are Asians. It was has a huge install base of Europeanists and very few people that know very much about Asia. That’s one of the weaknesses in trying to rebalance just in terms of the competence in the State Department or the Defense Department or our intelligence community. And the Army has a much clearer role in Europe than it does in Asia. So I think that the right thing to say is the US is a global power, and we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can even multitask. We can’t not be interested in what happens in the Middle East. So the most urgent problem today is Russia and Europe, but the most significant problem over the next generation is China. And we have to find a way to do more than one thing at the same time.

Gideon Rachman
That was Professor Graham Allison ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.

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