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Hi there, it's PK from the new podcast, Politics Now.

Matt Bevan will be along in a second for If You're Listening, but I just want to tell you about our new politics podcast, Politics Now.

As news breaks, we'll bring you the latest in your feed.

It's called Politics Now, and you can find it on the ABC Listen app.

This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Darug, and Iora people.

I missed something important last year.

It was half an hour into the big presidential debate in June.

This is a pivotal moment between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Like a lot of people, I was sitting there stunned by how badly Joe Biden was going.

Eligible for what I've been able to do with

the COVID.

In the debate that would ultimately end his political career.

Everything we have to do with

look.

I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence.

I don't think he knows what he said either.

But in my silent stunnitude, I missed something weird that Donald Trump said.

It was in part of the debate where he was criticizing Biden's handling of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Our veterans and our soldiers can't stand this guy.

They can't stand him.

They think he's the worst commander-in-chief, if that's what you call him, that we've ever had.

And then he said this about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

We left American citizens behind.

When Putin saw that, he said, you know what?

I think we're going to go in and maybe take my...

This was his dream.

I talked to him about it, his dream.

This was his dream.

I talked to him about his dream.

What an interesting thing to say.

What exactly was this dream?

This is Vladimir Putin's dream.

This is a dream come true for him.

Which was the Putin's dream.

I've got a pretty good idea of what Putin's dream is, and this is the best part of it.

You're not in a good position.

You don't have the cards right now.

A U.S.

president humiliating the leader of Ukraine and blaming him for starting the invasion of his own country.

You should have never started it.

You could have made a deal.

Since he took office, Donald Trump has done a lot of things that Vladimir Vladimir Putin would like.

He has diverted almost all U.S.

foreign policy attention to countries in America's immediate vicinity, targeting them for tariffs and threatening to claim control of Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada.

He has abandoned Ukraine and said if allies don't spend enough on defense, he will encourage Russia to attack them.

No, I would not protect you.

In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.

You gotta pay.

You gotta pay your bills.

These decisions make absolutely no sense if you look at them from the point of view of traditional US foreign policy.

But that's not what this is.

This isn't traditional US foreign policy.

This is Putin's dream.

So, what comes next in the Russian president's fantasy?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is if you're listening.

If you were watching the TV news channel Crimea 24 in early February, and honestly, who wasn't, you'd have seen a report about a new artwork.

It's a painting of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping sitting side by side in armchairs.

It's being displayed in the grounds of the Levadia Palace near the Crimean town of Yalta.

and it's reminiscent of another artwork nearby.

Elsewhere in the palace grounds is a sculpture of three world leaders from the past, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin Roosevelt, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, also seated in chairs side by side.

Those three men attended the Yalta Conference of 1945.

The Trump, Putin, and she in the new artwork are attending a theoretical future future second Yalta conference.

The artwork is called Yalta 2.0.

So let's go back to 1945 for a moment.

The beautiful Crimean seaside town of Yalta was the setting for the latest and greatest conference of the big three.

Yalta 1.0.

Stalin invited Churchill, Roosevelt and their staff to visit the seaside town and they had an extremely strange time.

The summer palace of Tsar Nicholas II is the setting for Russia's welcome.

It wasn't exactly palatial anymore.

The Soviets weren't fans of palaces generally.

They had used it as a tuberculosis hospital.

While the Nazis occupied Crimea, they used it to house army units.

The conference is to seal Hitler's fate and establish lasting peace.

Almost all of the toilets were broken.

Roosevelt got a working one, as did the commander of the U.S.

fleet, though he had to share his with basically the entire delegation.

A rigid toilet schedule had to be implemented so the Americans weren't forced to relieve themselves in the palace gardens or queue for buckets.

In between the long hours of discussion, the three leaders had many lighter moments.

On this occasion, the subject appears to be the Prime Minister's hat.

Most of the lighter moments were accompanied by the Allies getting very drunk together.

On the first night, Stalin joined Roosevelt for dry martinis, Roosevelt's speciality.

The president apparently remarked that there were no lemons and that dry martinis are best with a twist.

At six o'clock the following morning, a member of Roosevelt's delegation was surprised to find a massive lemon tree flown in from across the Black Sea, heaving with fruit in the palace entrance hall.

At the time, Stalin was the bell of the ball.

Into the palace courtyard sweeps the long black car bearing one of the greatest military leaders of all time, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin.

This is a British propaganda movie, by the way.

Representatives of the three powers take their places for the beginning of the Crimean Conference.

There was a reason that they were all gassing up Stalin.

The Soviet Union had done the majority of the actual fighting against the Nazis, losing at least 20 million soldiers and civilians in the process.

But now that Hitler was almost defeated, Roosevelt wanted Stalin to join the war against Japan.

Stalin would only agree to do so if his demands were met.

And Roosevelt was inclined to meet them.

Roosevelt is near death, and is later blamed for making too many territorial concessions to the Soviets.

Stalin wanted control over part of a petitioned and denazified Germany.

Easy peasy.

Czech.

He wanted control over several lightly populated Pacific islands between Japan and Russia that Roosevelt had probably never heard of.

Czech.

He wanted access to some Chinese infrastructure, railroads and ports.

Well, we'll have to ask the Chinese, but I'm sure that'll be fine.

Czech.

And he wanted temporary control of Poland.

Well, just until elections were held there.

Churchill was extremely skeptical that free and fair elections would ever be held in Poland.

He thought that Stalin would just take control of the country.

Despite this, this, they agreed.

Roosevelt really wanted Stalin's help with Japan.

The new borders of the world were drawn there at Yalta.

Roosevelt was optimistic about what they'd done.

I am confident that the Congress and the American people

will accept the results of this conference as the beginnings of a permanent structure of peace.

A year later, Roosevelt was dead.

Winston Churchill was now out of office, and he gave a speech at Westminster College in the American state of Missouri.

Indeed, now that I come to think of it, it was at Westminster that I received a very large part of my education.

As he began to speak, he signalled that the lights in the room were too bright for him to see his notes, and the lights were dimmed.

So it was in a spooky, barely lit auditorium that he described the terrible consequences of what they agreed to at Yalta.

From Stetin

in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe:

Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest,

Belgrade, Bucharest, and Slovakia.

All these famous cities and the population around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.

The Soviet sphere, a quarter of the world's landmass and a tenth of its population, was behind the Iron Curtain and subject to Moscow's rule.

Yalta wasn't meant to start a Cold War.

It was meant to stop the Allies from fighting each other once they ran out of Germans and Japanese to shoot at.

But the Cold War started that day, when the big three drew a line between what was in the American sphere and what was in the Soviet sphere.

Right now in Russia, the word Yalta is everywhere.

There's that artwork at Levadia Palace with Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping sitting next to each other in armchairs, just like the famous images from 1945.

There are documentaries and debate shows on on Russia's main TV channel titled Yalta 2.0.

This concept of a second Yalta, with the world carved into three,

it's not a shocking new idea for Russians.

The president Vladimir Putin has been talking about trying to return to the Yalta system for years.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing 35 years ago, there were some efforts to preserve the boundaries that were set at Yalta.

Soviet officials really didn't want states that were formerly part of their empire to become part of the Western Alliance, bringing Europe closer to Russia's borders.

In an effort to get the Soviet Union to sign a treaty that would allow East and West Germany to reunite, US officials floated a guarantee that the Western-NATO alliance would not expand closer to Russia.

Of course, the Western-NATO alliance did expand, And now almost a dozen former Soviet sphere countries are firm allies of the United States and European Union.

Moscow didn't do much more than grumble very Russianly about this for 25 years, but in 2014, a pro-European revolution in Ukraine was the final straw for Putin.

troops are holding firm in a corner of Ukraine known as Crimea.

A year after invading Crimea,

Vladimir Putin laid out his reasons why at the United Nations.

He said that in 1945, the Yalta system was born in his country

at the cost of tens of millions of lives and two world wars.

He said the system had saved the world from large-scale upheavals.

He said that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western countries gave the former Soviet states a false choice between joining the West or staying under the influence of Moscow.

He said that the revolution that overthrew his puppet president in Ukraine was a Western-backed coup.

He was basically saying, well, I had to invade because you crossed the line.

You got it into your head that once the Cold War was over, America was the only superpower, and so we all had to do it your way.

America created a unipolar world where everything revolves around them.

Putin and his friend, Chinese President Xi Jinping, think this is terrible.

They believe in a multipolar world with separate spheres of influence like the one after Yalta.

Putin wants a Yalta 2.0.

Divide the world again, then just leave us alone to do what we want with our bit of it.

This was never going to happen under George W.

Bush or Barack Obama.

But after Donald Trump became president in 2017, a window opened, as Putin critic and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov explained at the time.

I think Putin had a dream of doing it in Yalta.

And imagine this, how easy it is to sell to Donald Trump.

In Yalta, Putin will be like Stalin, you will be like FDR.

Grand bargain.

Putin's dream.

A grand bargain.

The art of the deal.

Dividing the world.

Who cares about all this?

Estonia, Slatvias, Bulgaria?

We're here, big guys, making big deals.

We decide the future of the world.

Can you sell to Trump?

Something tells me you can.

So, is Kasparov right?

Donald Trump arrived in Helsinki for a summit with no agenda.

It was 2018

and Donald Trump had spent a few days in Belgium antagonizing America's friends.

These days it's hard to tell who he regards as friend or foe.

I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade.

Now you wouldn't think of the European Union, but they're a foe.

Then he flew onwards to meet with America's traditional foe, Vladimir Putin.

The presidential palace in Helsinki, Finland, is in much better condition condition than the one at Yalta in 1945.

Well, at least the toilets work and mixing a dry martini doesn't require airlifting a lemon tree from Georgia.

Not that either Trump or Putin drink.

The two men will have time alone with just interpreters before being joined by senior advisors.

For years afterwards, what they talked about in their two-hour private meeting was a massive mystery.

Remember, in Trump's first term, all this seemed like such a break from foreign policy norms that it really seemed like there might be something more to this relationship.

We were right in the middle of our Mueller investigation era at the time.

Was Putin issuing a reminder of the leverage that he had over Trump?

Were the two men engaging in some kind of nefarious conspiracy?

Well, it seems like neither.

Well, Trump never talked to anyone about what happened during that meeting.

The translator briefed Trump's aides, who then all wrote books about it once he was out of office.

And according to those books, Vladimir Putin started talking and then basically didn't shut up for two hours, speaking for 90% of the time that the two men were together.

He was going on about history and Ukraine and NATO expansion and all the stuff that he loves going on about.

I personally wouldn't have been able to stand it.

A few years ago, Putin wrote an article basically outlining all the reasons that he does what he does, and I forced myself to read all 7,000 words and

it's so long and boring and wrong.

But Trump listened.

Remember a few episodes ago we talked about how Trump groups people into people he respects and people he doesn't respect?

Do you respect Putin?

I do respect him.

Do you?

Why?

Well, I respect a lot of people.

Most of the people Trump respects are either billionaires or nuclear-armed world leaders, especially nuclear-armed authoritarian world leaders.

In 2020, he told journalist Bob Woodward,

Putin and Trump have spoken fairly frequently since that discussion in Helsinki.

Bob Woodward reported that they had potentially had as many as as seven phone calls during Joe Biden's time in the White House.

And it seems like during those conversations, Putin has convinced Trump that a new Yalta is the right move.

So, you know, a big part of the problem was Russia for many, many years, long before Putin said you could never have NATO

involved with Ukraine.

Now, they've said that.

That's been like written in stone.

Putin could not have said it better himself.

For what it's worth, it wasn't written in stone.

It was a deal floated with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists.

And somewhere along the line, Biden said, no, they should be able to join NATO.

Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feeling about that.

He also seems to understand Russia's feeling that it was Ukraine's fault that the war started.

You should have never started it.

You could have made a deal.

I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land.

Everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down.

I'm pretty sure the deal that he's talking about is one where Ukraine is left open to Russian interference in their politics and Russian invasion if that interference doesn't produce outcomes satisfactory to Russia.

Basically, like what they had before their revolution in 2014.

That's fair enough in Trump's eyes because Ukraine will be in Russia's sphere following a nice chat with Putin, possibly at a palace in Yalta, definitely with a working

preferably gold toilet.

Meanwhile, countries near America will be left open to American interference in their politics and crushing American tariffs if that interference doesn't produce outcomes satisfactory to America.

It sounds a bit insane, but also it's exactly what Trump has been talking about ever since he won the election.

He is obsessed with controlling nearby countries.

I think Canada is going to be a very serious contender to be our 51st state.

We need Greenland for

national security and even international security.

We didn't give it to China.

We gave it to Panama and we're taking it back.

In fact, Putin's dream kind of explains most decisions that Trump has made since coming into office.

His decision to directly negotiate with Russia over the war in Ukraine without inviting the Ukrainians.

I'm finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine.

And they don't have the cards.

His decision to ambush and humiliate the Ukrainian president.

Your country is in big trouble.

I know.

You're not winning.

You're not winning this.

You have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of us.

His decision to cut off U.S.

financial aid to developing countries which he claims aren't america's problem in the african nation of le suto which nobody has ever heard of

and his decision to implement tariffs aimed at making the united states self-sufficient even if it makes the united states poorer in this new multipolar world order trump is doubling down on his patch and leaving putin to his and we have marco rubio in charge good luck marco

now

we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to be a strong supporter of a unipolar world.

Now he talks like a multipolar world is inevitable.

But eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.

We face that now with China and to some extent, you know, Russia.

Trump and Putin aren't building an alliance.

Roosevelt and Stalin didn't build an alliance at Yalta.

They're changing the world order of the last 35 years.

The US is giving up its role as the world's only true global superpower.

Trump is focusing on America's neighborhood, and he seems to be handing Putin and Xi Jinping a knife and telling them to cut the rest of the cake however they like.

What does this mean for countries like Ukraine or Taiwan, who staked their democracies on this unipolar world order and the American protection it offered?

And

what about us?

Whose sphere do we fall in in Australia?

And Yalta, the first one, the last time that we had a multipolar world, it led to a nuclear arms race.

What would a shift like this mean for global security?

I'm sure Trump's thought of all this, though, and has a good plan for dealing with it.

Now, I think it's time I poured a glass of vodka and got myself Yolted.

If you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producers are Jess O'Callaghan and Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Cinnamon Nippert.

Thanks to everyone who came to our Adelaide live show.

It was a packed house and everything went off pretty much without a hitch.

It was a lot of fun.

If you are near Newcastle, I'll be doing the live show again there at the Newcastle Writers Festival at 4pm on Sunday the 6th of April at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music.

A link to all the details is in today's show notes.

Donald Trump's sudden shift on Ukraine has come as a massive shock to most countries in America's orbit.

But there is one American ally that has been planning for this potential eventuality for decades.

Right back to the Alta Conference in 1945, France has been skeptical of how much America can be trusted.

Now, they may be the only safe refuge for countries looking for new security guarantees.

How did they see it coming?

And what capacity does Paris have to be the new security guarantor for global democracy?

That story is next on If You're Listening.

Hi, I'm Jan Fran.

And if you're enjoying listening to If You're Listening, I have a feeling you're going to enjoy our podcast too.

It's called Conspiracy, War on the Waterfront, and it'll take you behind one of the biggest industrial showdowns in Australia's history.

We're talking about that day in April 1998 when security guards wearing balaclavas and wielding Alsatians kicked 1400 workers from their jobs on the docks.

What led up to that moment?

Almost has to be heard to be believed.

So make sure you listen to Conspiracy: War on the Waterfront.

To find it, search for Rewind on the ABC Listen app.