Ukraine and America’s Credibility Crisis — with Anne Applebaum

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Episode 375. 375 is the country coach of Belarus.
In 1975, Jaws premiered.

I like to watch Jaws backwards as it becomes a heartwarming story of a shark that helps disabled people put their lives back together.

Go, go, go!

Welcome to the 375th episode of the Prop G-Pod. So I'm very self-conscious about my dirty jokes now we had a guest

who is a wonderful guest a very high-profile guest uh who does really well on the podcast basically say he can't come on again because he was so like rattled offended i don't know what the word was he didn't speak to me spoke to the team about some of my profanity at the beginning of the episode which is fair because it doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong but

He doesn't need to be on a program where he feels like he's being strafed by a certain, I don't know, approach that he's not up for. So I totally respect that.

And it got me thinking about profanity and vulgarity and the role it plays in our programming. And I've been,

what have I been doing? I've been mostly recovering, recovering, dealing with

the critique of my book. Notes on Being a Man, available on Amazon.

So came out at number one in the New York Times bestseller list.

I've never gotten above number five, which is mostly a fact, mostly a function of the fact that one, the conversation is getting a lot of attention right now around the role of men,

you know, the masculinity crisis, et cetera. And also, I have been just a total media whore.

I've been going on TV and different podcasts for the better part of 10 years.

You know, I'm generally a likable guy. I try to help other people out.
So when I had this book come out and people heard about it, everybody invited me on everywhere.

And my publicists are not worried about me, or the publicists for the book are not worried about me being overexposed.

And I've actually canceled a bunch of stuff this week because I feel like it's enough Scott already.

I feel like I'm AOL in the 90s, where if you stick your hand in a cereal box, you're going to pull out some Scott.

And there's been some really interesting feedback. The most valid feedback, as it hurts, so I know it's right, is that I'm too focused on reverse engineering my success to advice.

that is unilaterally beneficial for all young men, recognizing that it may not work for them. Specifically,

economic security solved a lot of my problems, a lot of my anxiety. So, a lot of my counseling to young men is how to become more economically viable.

And two, that they need to get a relationship, that if you have money and a relationship, that you will be okay.

And that that's not true for everybody, and some men aren't going to have access to either of those things. I think that's a fair criticism.

But some of these, some of these immediate, just this gag reflex of

oh, you know, men were not interested in helping you and it's always part of the patriarchy and it's women's fault. No, it's not women's fault.
And that's not what we're saying.

But that's not the point of this. The point of this is that I wasted my fucking weekend thinking about all this bullshit online.
And

it has kept me glued to my phone, went extremely online.

You'd think in my age and knowing as much as I do about the algorithms of big tech and how it is their job just to keep me online so they can sell me more zip recruiter ads or get me to, I don't know, target me with the right ads at the right time, that you think I'd be somewhat smarter and wouldn't just go down these rabbit holes and get all bummed out.

And I'm still not. I think we're up against just this godlike technology with

medieval institutions regulating them and Paleolithic instincts driving us. And what's the message here? The message is that you really do need to take stock of your own screen time.

We have these apps that keep our 15-year-old, who I think does suffer from a certain level of screen addiction, which supposedly affects one in four kids,

to keep or to limit his use.

And I feel as if I need to start limiting my own use, because I end up going down these rabbit holes and getting upset and seeing all this shit that I think misrepresents my work and getting very disappointed or angry.

The thing I think we all need to do, especially young men, but all of us,

is say, okay,

Recognize a couple of things. One,

the world online is a pretty small world. And that is, I used to get upset or excited about what was being said about me and about topics I cared about on Twitter.

And then when I logged off of Twitter, when it kind of turned into a Nazi porn bar,

I found that it just didn't matter. It didn't impact me professionally, financially, and it impacted me positively emotionally and psychologically.

And you realize how just fucking small the world of Twitter is. It's like 1%.

of Twitter users are driving 90% of the content. And then I would say probably a third to two-thirds of the content is being driven by bots that just have are just part of troll farms.
So one,

this is not the real world.

This is a part of the world, but what your friends think of you, what strangers think of you, what the majority of people think of you who are not on TikTok or threads or Instagram all day long, it's just not, it's meaningful, but it's not profound.

And the thing that is most disappointing to me about myself is that I oftentimes let the bullshit or the views of strangers impact my time and my presence and my well-being around other people.

I don't know how I got here. I don't know how I got here.

Anyways,

what's going on in today's episode, you might be asking? Well, I'll tell you. In today's episode, we speak with Ann Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and staff writer at The Atlantic.
I

love

Ann Applebaum. And I not only love how incredibly smart and measured and thoughtful she is.
Jesus Christ, make her secretary of fucking state.

Anyway, one of the things I love about social media is it brings attention to people who are just so outstanding that their content resonates for the moment. And this is how I found Ann Applebaum.

I think this is going to be her second or third time on the show.

Anyways, I'm just an enormous fan of Ann's. So, with that, here's our conversation with Ann Applebaum.

And you are one of our favorite guests. I think this might be the third time.
Where does this podcast find you?

I'm in the offices of the Atlantic Monthly magazine in Washington, D.C., which is a rare occasion, actually.

The Atlantic Monthly in Washington, D.C. Wow.
All right, let's bust right into it.

We're recording this in the middle of what the New York Times called a week of hasty diplomacy around the war in Ukraine, leaked peace plans, private negotiations, and a swirl of of business dealings.

Putin is set to meet with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
And as we speak, no peace agreement has been accepted or signed. And give us the current state of play.

What's actually happening on the ground and in these negotiations?

So the negotiations are

a somewhat strange product of a series of conversations that Steve Witkoff and maybe others have been having with a guy called Kirill Dmitriev, who's the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund over the last several weeks and months, actually.

And

remembering that neither Steve Witkoff nor Kirill Dmitriev has as their main goal

the conclusion of the war and the preservation of the sovereignty of Ukraine and the defense of Europe and a secure future for Europe and for Ukraine, they seem to have as their main goal the creation of a possible new set of American and Russian business deals.

And we know this both because of reporting, really quite amazing reporting in the Wall Street Journal, as well as a few months ago in the Financial Times.

We know this because the original version of a peace deal that they presented had a whole long list of plans, American-Russian plans, including

looking for minerals in the Arctic and

oil and gas infrastructure and

maybe the use of some frozen Russian assets that are in European banks by Americans to develop Russia. So that seems to be their primary interest.

And they came up with this 28-point peace plan that was completely unacceptable either to the Ukrainians or to the Europeans. It was somehow then modified.

Secretary Rubio got involved, modified change. There's another version of it, which we haven't seen yet, that Steve Witkoff is supposedly taking to Moscow.

I mean, really, as we're speaking, as we're having this conversation, he's there. What's disturbing about this episode is that it shows something very ugly about this administration, namely,

and it raises a question, in whose name are they conducting American foreign policy? Is this for

the security and prosperity of America and our allies?

Or is this something that's happening on behalf of companies, maybe even some involving the family of Trump or of Witkoff, who are hoping to make money out of this negotiation?

That's where we are right now.

And I think it's, I've talked to a lot of people.

I can't find an exact precedent in American history before where something this high stakes and at this high level and involving the security of so many millions of people and so many other countries was being conducted by essentially business people whose main interest was business deals.

Aaron Trevor Barrett Ross Powell, isn't this a continuing pattern? We've monetized access to the White House. We've monetized the pardon system.

I mean, isn't this a continuation of the Core Brand Association thus far, and that is

one of grift?

Yes. I mean, I suppose

the shock for the outside world, and as you know, I live part of the time in Europe.

I have a Polish husband who's involved in all this stuff as well.

He's a Polish diploma. Well, no,

he's the Polish foreign minister. And I'm continually hearing from not just Poles, but from British friends, from German friends.

I'm continually hearing this kind of shock and surprise that even this, I mean, I guess everybody got used to the idea that American politics are corrupt or there are elements of corruption in our system, but that even at this level, that it would be that corrupt

remains surprising to other people. Maybe it's not really surprising to us anymore, but yeah, I think you're, you know, it is an extension of other decisions.

I mean, we're talking in a week when at the same time, speaking of foreign policy, Trump is also

working himself up, or maybe members of his administration are working themselves up to have some kind of conflict with Venezuela on the grounds that it's a narco-terrorist state.

And at the meantime, exactly in the same week, they've pardoned a former president of Honduras who was in jail on cocaine charges, apparently because maybe he has business dealings with some people who are around Trump or close to Trump.

So

it looks more and more like the main motivations for everything, you're right, not just foreign policy, are to do with the business interests of people in the entourage.

Well, just along those lines, I'm curious, you validate or nullify this thesis.

I think with somewhere between, if my son had committed a crime and was in prison, I think with somewhere between $3 and $10 million with my connections, I could figure out a way to get to the White House, communicate.

I'm going to make a seven or eight figure donation to the East Wing renovation and get my son out of prison. I legitimately think I could accomplish that right now.
Your thoughts?

I would be amazed if you couldn't do it. I don't even know if you need special connections.

I mean, you know, you need to make a donation to the East Wing or you need to buy into the president's cryptocurrency fund. I mean, there are lots of ways to do it.

And you can buy into the cryptocurrency fund anonymously. You can do it, you know, as an anonymous shell company.
And so, actually, nobody would have to know except the people who run that fund.

And which, by the way, includes Zach Witkoff, who's Steve Witkoff's son. I'm not even sure you have to be an insider.
I don't know if you have to be a MAGA Republican.

I don't think anything ideological is required. I think it's really just money.

Before we talk about

the piece you wrote for The Atlantic around the peace plan,

I'm curious,

let's assume, all right, we get to some sense of normalcy.

In your view,

give us a historical context for whether, if you do believe that, in fact,

real egregious crimes have been committed here, up and down the stack, from the Secretary of War, maybe a war crime, to outright grift and

corruption that makes us less safe overseas, that will take decades to repair.

Historically, when a democracy like ours faces this type of corruption, or if you believe that this in fact has been wrongdoing, how does a democracy best move past it?

Is it to forgive it and move on, or is it to have something resembling some sort of tribunal?

I am not sure because I don't know of an exact historical parallel to what we are living living through.

Very often when you have this kind of corruption takeover system, it results in some kind of collapse or disaster or war.

And it's usually after the collapse or disaster or war that you have the moment of reckoning when people say

that was too much. We need to change our system.
We need to change our constitution.

You know, we need bigger, deeper changes to prevent this from happening again. And of course, I don't wish something like that to happen.

And so I'm not, you know,

but in the absence of it happening, I don't know how you reach enough people, how you shake the foundation of politics.

I've just been, I've just started to read Jill Lapore's new book, which is,

it's about the American Constitution. And one of the points she makes is that often our Constitution has been amended, at least in the most serious ways, after a war.
So firstly,

after the Revolution and then after the Civil War, that's when we got the amendments that allowed black people to vote and change the nature of American citizenship.

Then after World War I, there were a number of important amendments,

women's suffrage being one of them. And it's almost as if you need some big moment of change to convince people that

the foundations of the system

are

rotten.

And I don't right now see how we get to that. And the scenarios that would lead us to that aren't aren't good and so I don't wish for them.
I mean one would really have to have a

the only other alternative I can think of is that there needs to be just a lot more awareness among ordinary people of how

you know how bad it's gotten. You know, I know that a lot of for a lot of Americans this doesn't feel like something new.

A lot of Americans partly because of the way they've been reading and thinking and learning about politics in the last several years, think that Washington is corrupt anyway and everything has always been corrupt.

And this is exactly, you know, it's just an extension of past corruption.

And explaining to them that this is something qualitatively different, that this is a different kind of behavior, that American foreign policy has never been for sale at this level with these kinds of stakes before.

I think, you know, the best I can do is write about it and talk about it.

And I know you're doing that too, in order to convince enough people, you

to take this moment seriously and have it change their behavior, make them vote, make them get involved in politics,

make them participate. Because it's really without that,

it's really hard to see how you would change. I mean, an interesting comparison, I haven't written this yet, although I hope to do it in the next few days.

I talked this morning to a senior figure who's involved in a corruption investigation inside Ukraine.

Maybe you've heard that

there's a Ukrainian state is investigating itself, which is actually at this point in history hard to imagine in the United States.

There's an anti-corruption bureau inside the government, and they are investigating people, some of whom are very close to the president, for a kind of kickback scheme to do with the energy industry.

The details aren't that important. What matters is that it's the Ukrainian state that's doing it.
It's as if our FBI was investigating our president, which right now is hard to imagine.

You can't imagine that happening. And I asked the investigator, how is it that you have the legitimacy to do this? How do you have the support to do it? And he said, look, it comes from Ukrainians.

You know, there was a moment last summer when some people in the presidential administration tried to shut down this investigation, and there were popular protests.

You know, Ukrainians understand that this is an important part of their democracy. They want corruption ended.
They think it's important,

not just for moral reasons, but because corruption corruption weakens them and makes them more susceptible to Russian bribery and blackmail and so on.

So

this is a state body that's acting with the support of Ukrainians. And I don't know that we have the equivalent movement here.

Could you imagine big national protests if well, I mean, you can't imagine it because it's already happened.

I mean, if the president were to replace the heads of the FBI and the Department of Justice with flunkies flunkies who would never investigate him, what would happen?

I mean, we know what would happen, nothing would happen because

that's what took place early this year. And I just think Americans have lost

the ability to be shocked or the ability to absorb the ways in which this is different. And so, as I say, all I can think of to do right now is to explain it to people as much as possible.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

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You wrote for the Atlantic about this peace plan, which many are actually calling a capitulation document.

Can you break down the quote-unquote peace plan for us and what you think is the likelihood that

something resembling this ends up getting more traction than it has today?

There are a couple central pieces of it. I mean, I think the most controversial piece is that the U.S.
is promising to recognize all or most of them.

There are now several versions of this kicking around, so I'm going to be a little vague. But

all are some of Russia's, of the occupied territories of Ukraine. So that's Crimea, that's eastern Ukraine, Donbass, Luhansk, and maybe some of the other territories too.
But more than that,

it asks the Ukrainians to give up territory that has not been conquered. So this is a part of Donetsk.
Donetsk is a province of Ukraine. The Russians have conquered part of it.

In fact, they conquered a lot of it in 2014 2014 as a part of a surprise attack right after they occupied Crimea.

And they've really been trying to conquer this whole province since then, so 11 years. And they haven't been able to do it.

And they're now losing, again, I spoke to someone last night who reminded me of these numbers. They're now losing 15 to 20,000 people a month trying to conquer Donetsk.

And that's, I guess that's killed and wounded. But that's still 15 to 20,000 soldiers being knocked out every month in order to conquer this piece of territory that they can't conquer.

And what they want is they want the Trump administration to intervene and give them this territory for free.

And this is not only controversial because it rewards the Russians for

nothing,

but also it's probably politically impossible. I don't think President Zelensky could stay in office.
He can't stay in office and just turn over this piece of land.

It's right now very heavily fortified land.

It's not especially

populated anymore. Most people have left that part of Ukraine, but it's very heavily fortified.
And so the Ukrainians would be giving up this fortified territory.

And that would allow the Russians then to set up. presumably to make another attempt to conquer central Ukraine later on.
And that's what it looks like to the Ukrainians.

You know, so the Russians haven't been able to win the war militarily. Now they're trying to win it through bribing the Americans, promising things to the Americans, and then

getting the Americans to pressure the Ukrainians to give up this territory supposedly in the name of peace. So that's probably the most controversial piece of

the deal. And that seems to be something that Putin himself thought up.
And it's been kicking around for a while.

And in fact, when I first saw this document, I didn't think, I didn't make that much of it because it's been, some of the points have been around for a long time.

And it was only when, you'll remember a couple weeks ago, the president said, the Ukrainians have to sign this by Thanksgiving, that suddenly this became salient and relevant in new ways.

And then Trent, you know, then he dropped that idea. Anyway, so

that was a piece of it.

Recognition, not just de facto, but de jure, meaning formally recognizing that the Russians now control this Ukrainian territory, which also would be very unpopular in Ukraine.

There was a line in it about

organizing Ukrainian elections, which, if you think about it, is a strange thing to put into a peace plan. I mean, the Ukrainians organizing elections is something they can do

on their own.

And what about the Russians organizing elections? The Russians haven't had free elections for 20 years.

So, you know, it had that element in it that the Russians were somehow wanted to change the Ukrainian leadership and maybe hoped to shape the elections. That was the second

piece of the story. There was also

Ukraine has to promise never, ever, ever to join NATO and has to put that in its constitution. Again, pretty controversial.
Don't know whether that could be done.

And that Western powers, European powers, would promise never to put troops on Ukrainian soil.

And all this also creates another problem, which is if this war were to end even right now, you know, if there were to be a ceasefire on current lines, which is something the Ukrainians have accepted, in order for the peace to be real, in order for it to last longer than six months or a year or two years, there has to be some reason for Ukrainians to believe that the war isn't going to just start up again next week.

So there has to be a guarantee, there have to be troops, there has to be NATO or something like NATO.

There has to be something that will prevent Ukrainians from fleeing the country once the borders are opened.

There has to be something that gives people the belief that they can invest in Ukraine, that they can rebuild Ukraine. There has to be something that makes it a viable country.

A lot of people often compare Ukraine to South Korea, which is another country that was divided and part of it was occupied. And nevertheless, South Korea...

remained a viable state and it went on to become a very rich country, very successful country, kind of culturally successful in lots of ways. And people have said maybe that's a model for Ukraine.

And that's, it's true.

You could imagine that kind of future, except that South Korea has American troops. You know, South Korea has defense agreements.
You know, South Korea is defensible.

And Americans have been willing to defend it for many decades, or at least

that's been the assumption of the North Koreans. And you need something like that in Ukraine to make it viable.

And it just doesn't seem like Witkoff or Jared Kushner or whoever is doing this negotiation now has come up with a version, something

that would give the Ukrainians that sense of stability. So, this is why people are talking about it as a kind of surrender drug.
So, we give away land and in exchange for what?

For

certainty that the Russians are going to invade again.

The problem with this document then, as I've already said, there are all these weird clauses about U.S.-Russian deals that are going to be done and money that the U.S.

is supposedly going to spend in Russia. And it looks from the outside like it's a U.S.-Russia deal that just isn't worried about the future of Ukraine or the future of Europe because

a fall in Ukraine or

a dysfunctional Ukraine has huge impact on security in Poland and Germany, all across the European continent. And it just feels like the Trump administration doesn't care.

So you spend a lot of time in Europe. Your husband is a senior official in the Polish government.

What is the vibe, for lack of a better term, in Europe and especially in in the nations bordering Ukraine around the war right now? Is it stay the course?

This is an unacceptable cost for Russia and Russians, and eventually they will retreat, or is it we're facing an inevitable end which isn't a good one?

I like what Lincoln said. You can't win a war without public support.
You can't lose one with it.

What is the state of public support across Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and Europe more broadly as it relates to this war? So So the Ukrainians are genuinely prepared to keep fighting.

Their losses are far lower than the Russian losses. They know that they need outside support.

And most of the nations of Europe, certainly those closest to Ukraine, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Germany as well, have, you know, are continually stepping up, offering not just weapons, but money.

Remember, the Ukraine has its own defense industry. It makes its own drones now, including these long-range drones that

can hit Russian targets and Russian refineries and so on.

And I was there in September, and at that moment, there was still a lot of confidence.

They were pretty sure they were going to make it through the winter. They didn't expect the Russians to stop fighting anytime soon.
I mean, there's been a little bit of

the huge pressure from Russian airstrikes in the last month or two, I think, has been,

and this is on Ukrainian cities. This is nothing to do with the front line.
This is the people, you know, bombs hitting Kiev, missiles hitting residential apartment buildings and so on.

I think that's been that's been pretty debilitating. But they don't, you know, you have to remember that if you're Ukrainian, you don't really see an option.

You know, your option is you keep fighting the war or you let the Russian win and then they destroy you and your family and they wreck your country anyway.

You know, so it's not like they have this great choice, you know, and it's not like if the war ends, then everything will be fine and i think that for the most part i mean there are variations inside each country i think most of the countries around ukraine feel the same way you know for poland you know or for the baltic states you know for romania if ukraine were to lose that wouldn't mean oh okay the war is over now and we can get on and do other things no that would mean it would be more expensive and they'd have to spend more money on defense and there would be more panic about where the russians would would go next, and there would be more chaos from Ukrainian refugees and more economic disruption.

So the prospect of a Russian victory doesn't make anybody feel like that would be an improvement. And so they too have this feeling that there's no choice, you know, so that

they will keep fighting

until some better solution is reached.

And I should say, there's another weird thing about this whole U.S.-Russia negotiation, which is that it seems to, they seem to be acting as if the Ukrainians and the Europeans have no agency.

I mean, actually, the Europeans are now paying for the war. You know, there is almost no U.S.
supplies going in.

They're paying for the war. They are supporting Ukraine economically.

You know, so actually, even if the U.S. did bow out, they could keep going.

I mean, and acting like this negotiation is some kind of U.S.-Russian agreement that doesn't involve the people who are actually doing the fighting and who are paying for the fighting is also very very weird.

I mean, it's just not how you do diplomacy. It's not going to get you to an ⁇ you know, it's not going to get you to an agreement

that makes sense.

And that's, again, why I question the motives of the people who are involved. Aaron Ross Powell, isn't that sort of the silver lining here? And that is the U.S.

has somewhat abdicated, withdrawn, gone AWOL, whatever you want to call it. And my understanding is that we are still supplying weapons, but we're forcing the Europeans to pay for them.

Not in huge numbers.

And the weapons that we're supplying, the thing that we have that other people don't have is air defense. And so it's mostly that.

But most of the other weapons are coming from Europe or they're being made in Ukraine.

But isn't back to the notion of silver line, isn't, to be fair, and I feel like Europe is always

every headline on a broad basis about Europe as a whole is a pretty negative one about a lack of growth. It's becoming a museum.
There's a lack of leadership.

Hasn't Europe really stepped up here and filled this void and is, in fact, pushing back?

Yeah. I mean, not only are they pushing back, and not only have they stepped up often in ways that aren't attracting attention.

You know, there's a lot of Danish help for the Ukraine, and the Norwegians have been really important. There's a lot of smaller countries have played an important role.

But you've also had, I think, especially since the U.S. election last year, I think there's been a real transformation in European understanding.
You know, so the,

you know, of course, everybody's natural instinct is to say,

you know, the war is far away, it doesn't touch us.

You know, and everybody prefers the status, safe status quo to involvement in some kind of unknown project.

And I think you are finally beginning to see, especially in Germany, which is important because it's the largest European country, biggest economy, you're seeing a real transformation.

Like, okay, we get it. The post-1989 era is over.

And the automatic assumption that the U.S.

will see the world the same way we do and shares our values is also over. And maybe we'll work with the Americans again in some way.

I mean, nobody's writing them off altogether, but we're in a different era.

And you can see that beginning to affect European politics in a lot of ways, especially in Germany, but also in other places.

And you see investments going into the defense industry, new thinking about strategy, new kinds of relationships. I mean, a lot of things are changing.

It's not ideal, mostly because Europe is not a federation.

I mean, it's funny for all the kind of Euroskeptics about, you know, overbearing Europe and how it's supposedly, you know, they're creating a single state.

It's on actually, it's not a single state, and that's the problem. You know, so it's very hard, it's still hard for Europe to act as one.

And that's why you have this formula, the coalition of the willing. You know, you have this group of countries who are working together,

and the ones who care the most are involved the most. And that coalition of the willing is the group that's supporting Ukraine.

But no, no, there's been a big change in Europe and European strategic thinking and in European understanding of the world. And

I think the

big realization that Europe has made a huge mistake in allowing the U.S. to dominate the new technology, defense technology, but also the internet, AI.
I think that

it's sunk in. I mean, everybody gets it, that that was a disastrous European failure.

Whether there's time to catch up, I don't know. But you certainly have now the formation of new companies and new thinking.
I mean, I know you're interested in that.

That's begun. And it's interesting to see the connection between this geopolitical shift, which is happening kind of in the ether, and people saying, right, right, okay,

we need our own stuff. And that's happening now.
Aaron Ross Powell,

if you have an absence of U.S. funding,

limited cache of weapons from the U.S.

going to Ukraine, and it's Ukrainians fighting on the ground doing the fighting and combat, and you have Europe is responsible for the majority of the funding or the intelligence,

when what feels like a peace plan architected by Russia and the U.S.,

I mean,

quite frankly,

can't Ukraine and Europe, and maybe you've done this, kind of say, hold my beer? And to a certain extent,

hasn't the U.S.

I mean, okay, we've walked away from our responsibilities, but haven't we walked away from all leverage here? And quite frankly, it doesn't really matter what we think.

To some extent, that's true. I mean, I think that the I think people are still hoping the U.S.
will have some influence. There's a lot of, you know, maybe,

you know, maybe false hope.

I think there's, you know, there's a fear that a U.S.-Russia condominium, you know, kind of U.S.-Russia deal would be bad for everybody, and we'd like to avoid it.

So I don't think people want some kind of huge break with the United States.

But yeah, I mean, the United States is not going to be able to dictate what happens in Ukraine, and they certainly won't be able to dictate a bad solution.

And by bad solution, remember, it's what a bad solution means that Ukraine is so badly weakened that Russia can invade again. That's like, that's the bad solution.

And I don't think the U.S. is going to be able to dictate that, even if that's what they're, you know, even if that's what they want.
So, no, the U.S.

doesn't, it has fewer and fewer cards and is going to have less and less influence as time goes on. I think that's true.

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We're back with more from Ann Applebaum.

You have, I love this, a kleptocracy tracker on your sub stack. What's the most worrying shift you're seeing right now? What is this metric unearthed?

Right. So the kleptocracy tracker is something I started in, this is regarding our previous conversation.
I started it a few months ago

just as because I felt like there were all these news stories that flashed by, you know, people being pardoned after making donations to the President's cryptocurrency fund or or regulation being lifted or regulation not being enforced.

And I just felt like someone should keep track of it somewhere. And so I started doing it.
And and it actually appears on a Johns Hopkins website as well. The Agora Institute also publishes,

they even created a little graphic so you can track it and click on it.

I mean I don't know how many people look at it or use it but I'm hoping like at least historians of the future will be able to say that somebody was paying attention.

And I, you know, there are really two or three important shifts.

I mean, one of them is this one that doesn't get attention I just mentioned, which is it's not just that the Trump administration is making money for itself or its, you know, Trump companies are benefiting from deals with the Saudis or investments in Vietnam.

It's also that this administration is either refusing to enforce laws made in the past or is actively preventing new laws from being made.

So laws designed to prevent

the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, for example, or laws designed to regulate the cryptocurrency industry so that ordinary people wouldn't be ripped off.

You know, all kinds of regulation that's designed, mostly designed to benefit ordinary Americans and make sure that our system isn't corrupt and that people aren't ripped off by U.S.

or foreign companies. A lot of that is just being taken away.
You know, they're just not enforcing it. They don't care anymore.
And of course, the bad actors know that.

And so when they see the legal system being taken apart and they know it's a free-for-all,

they can just remove money from people's cryptocurrency wallets, which happens more often than you think.

Or they can violate the law or

they can do as they please because they know that nobody's watching them.

And I think that's, and that doesn't get a lot of attention because it's not, you know, it's not very exciting news to say that the Trump administration has decided it won't enforce X or Y law, but that's going to create the long-term problems.

You know, if we create this atmosphere of lawlessness where, you know, you can buy a pardon from the president if you've broken the law, you can assume that nobody will enforce regulation if you decide to break it.

You can rip people off and you won't pay any price. You can do all these things with impunity.
I mean, that begins to create a kind of business culture that is ultimately bad for everyone.

I mean, I guess, you know, bad guys will benefit from it. But if you've ever lived or worked in a really corrupt country, and I have,

you know, I spent a lot of time in Russia in the 1990s.

I spent a lot of time in Ukraine, actually, in the era before it began to reform itself.

And, you know, I remember that it's a even for, I mean, maybe particularly for ordinary people, you know, daily life is different in a really, really corrupt country. You know, you

don't make

business investments in a normal way. You can't make judgments about how to work or where to work unless you know who's really in charge or who's the person behind each one of these companies.

It distorts ordinary life and ordinary decision-making.

In Russia, universities became very corrupt.

The state services became very corrupt. I mean, if you wanted a driver's license or any kind of license, you could pay for it, and people knew that.

And then that has a corresponding effect on safety and so on. So

you can get into this very ugly downward drift if you don't stop it soon. And as I said, I mean, the main problem in the United States is just the lack of awareness.

I mean, we're so used to our system running on autopilot, you know, assuming that people, more or less, most people obey the law and more or less, you know, things work.

And once that, once the kind of critical mass is reached and that's no longer true, then it's going to be very hard to fix.

Aaron Ross Powell, what impact do you think the war in Ukraine, let's assume that in,

say, nine, ten months, it's loosely in the same place it is now, right?

I wouldn't describe it at a standstill. I would describe the war rages on.

What impact do you think it's going to have on the midterm elections?

I mean, that's an interesting point. It depends what

what it looks like. You know, if it looks like

exactly like it does now, you know, maybe there wouldn't be an impact. But if there has been a

series of failed Trump peace efforts that were transparently grifting, that they weren't really about peace,

or if there has been some kind of Trump-Russia, Trump-Putin agreement to start doing business over the heads of the Ukrainians and the Europeans, I don't think Americans will find that attractive.

And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people won't care.
You know, foreign policy is far away.

Ukraine is pretty remote to a lot of people.

But I still think, and this is something I know because I've seen surveys about this, Americans still like to think about their country being a good country.

You know, we like to think of ourselves being a positive force in the world. I mean, reasonable people can disagree about what that means, you know, and

maybe not everyone's definition of good is the same, but they don't like the idea that the main,

you know, in the big issues and in the big arenas, that the main motivation of the United States of America is the wealth of a few people who are close to the president.

I just don't think Americans are going to like that.

And I don't know that it would be the main issue in the midterms, but I think it would be something that would certainly affect people's perception of Trump and maybe of the Republican Party.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, it's strange.

It feels as if, and I don't know if this is Trump or more specifically the cloud cover for this being the idolatry or the increasing idolatry of the dollar in the United States, but it feels as if diplomacy itself is being replaced by private capital networks, sovereign funds, energy deals, rare earth investments, data centers, and that the reporting shows that billionaires operating outside of the traditional lines of diplomacy, whether it's Witkoff or Kushner on the U.S.

side,

Kirill Dmitriev on the Russian side, hammering out drafts in Miami and shuttling between Mar-a-Lago and Moscow. A, what do you think of this? And I think I know the answer to this.

What do you think of this business-first diplomacy? And are there any analogues for when other nations basically diplomacy gets co-opted by what I'll call these private capital billionaire networks?

That is literally the Russian. That is exactly the Russian system.

I mean, the Russian system is that you have companies like Gazprom, which are nominally private, but which are really owned by people who also run the country.

And they use,

you know, their Russian foreign policy has been kind of commercial and diplomatic and political, all mixed up for a long time.

And the purpose of a Gazprom investment in a foreign country would be partly to make money for the people who run Gazprom, and partly it would be to achieve some goal, you know, for the Russian state.

And

particularly in oil and gas, but not only, Russian companies have been inseparable from the state for a long time.

And it's created this ugly system where all of government and all of foreign policy is really just designed to benefit this kind of ownership class.

And we are really very much at risk of that in America.

That government isn't for everybody. It's not for to make all of us rich and prosperous.

It's not to project a set of American values into the world, which has been true at least some of the time of American foreign policy, certainly since the Second World War, but you could argue further back than that.

And instead of being this, you know, the kind of outward representation of us and our values and our, you know, our desire for prosperity and a good life, it's actually just designed for those people.

And that's really how the, you know, I mean, Russia is maybe the most prominent example of this, but you can look at other autocratic states and say the same thing about them.

And this is the argument of my recent book, was Autocracy Inc., is that it's a mistake to look at the world's autocrats, even when they have different ideologies.

You know, Russia and China and Iran and North Korea and Venezuela and Azerbaijan. You know, they have very different ideologies, but they all often work in some of the same ways.

And one of the ways that, one of the things they have in common is this kleptocratic model, you know, that the rulers of the country are also the owners of the biggest businesses.

And they use their business relations with one another to make money for themselves.

And they hide money in the same ways. They hide money in the Caribbean or in

or indeed in Delaware. And

they move money around the world anonymously. And they share ways of doing that.
And that's part of what keeps them all in power.

And it looks in, you know, the Trump administration is still not free to behave in that way. You know, we still live in a democracy and we still have,

you know, we still, I hope, will have congressional investigations and we have courts and so on. But they seem to be pushing the country in that direction.

And clearly there are very wealthy people in the tech world and in the crypto world and in other industries who want the U.S. to develop very much in that direction, a kind of

a state where political power and economic power are the same thing. And

the politicians own the companies and they act in their interests, not our interests.

So I love books about war and movies. And one of the things I think I've sussed out from them is that wars don't change history.
They sort of accelerate it.

And that is they take existing trends and massively

pull the future forward, if you will. And countries on the ascent come out big winners.

And countries, you know, arguably Britain's finest moment was World War II, but it essentially accelerated the decline of the empire, right? They could no longer hold on to their empire, if you will.

Within Europe, who do you see as a, if there's a reshuffling here and a dramatic increase or decrease in power, and I'll put forward a thesis, my sense is this is a really big moment for Poland.

But A, do you agree with that? And B, who do you see as the biggest winners and losers across Europe?

Yeah, I think Poland sees itself very much as being a country that will play a role in deciding what happens next in Ukraine and will play an increasingly influential role in helping other European countries shape their security decisions.

I mean, there's some interesting,

there's a very close Polish-Swedish relationship. The Poles just bought some submarines from Sweden.
You see

this kind of countries around the Baltic becoming

working together in lots of ways, and actually often including the UK.

So you kind of UK-Scandinavia, Baltic-Poland alliance, which is emerging as a really important alliance of countries just because they share values and they have a similar view of the world and they work together in new ways and you're seeing that emerging.

I mean there's also a Polish-German relationship that's really important.

Actually the Polish government

I'm not sure they're still there today, but as we're speaking,

they were there yesterday. Several senior senior polish ministers including the prime minister were all in germany you know there was a kind of big

you know multi-leveled multi-layered um conference was held in which they they they you know there's there's still endless historical issues to work out but in which they're looking at ways of working together economically and in security i mean you you can see those kinds of links developing and becoming more important you know it's almost as if in the past a lot of stuff went kind of through nato like through america You know, there was a Polish-America-German link, and now everybody's looking around and saying, wait, you know,

is going through America or through NATO, is that safe? You know,

we need to have much stronger country-to-country links that don't depend on, you know, some assumption of

permanent American presence in Europe. So yeah, I think

Poland is also a country that is doing well economically and looked at over the span of 30 years has been doing well the whole time. I mean it's it's it's caught up to Western Europe.

You know, it's not exactly, it's not, it's still not as rich as Germany, but if I recall this, you'd have to I'd have to check.

I think it's richer than Greece per capita and I think it's richer than Portugal per capita.

And so if you're looking at Western European countries, so it's it's caught up to Western Europe faster than it has ever before at any time in history and and

and continues to develop and grow in a way that um you would not have guessed or imagined a couple of decades ago so yeah i think i think poland up germany changing um i mean the uk is the country that worries me the most just because i think the damage done by brexit is still working its way through the system doesn't mean there aren't brilliant people there and great companies and and all that um

but i it's it's you know it's it's it's it lost so many markets and so many opportunities through that one stupid decision that I worry it's falling further behind.

And I don't want that because I lived in London for a long time.

I'm a fan of British culture and many other things. But that's what it is.

It's interesting. There's often a lot of, in the UK now, there's almost a kind of, they keep writing articles in the British press about how great Poland is and what if Poland catches up to Britain.

I mean, it's almost there's a kind of cultural snobbery there. Like it can't possibly be the case that Poles are as rich as we are.

But there is something happening whereby they are coming. Certainly they're a lot closer in terms of

GDP per capita anyway than they were ever before.

Do you have a sense for

having spent time in Russia and I imagine still having contacts there? How do Russians feel about the state of the war and the relationship with the U.S. and China?

What's the vibe, again, I hate to use that word, in Russia right now with respect to the war? It's really hard to say.

So, first of all, I had a lot of Russian friends at one point, and they are all gone. They have all left Russia.
They're elsewhere in Europe, some are in the U.S.

And so,

I don't have friends inside Russia anymore, at least none that I would be able to talk to. It's also...

genuinely impossible to measure something called public opinion in Russia because this is a country in which to be against the war is illegal.

And people are arrested for saying things that are against the war.

And so that means that if, you know, if you're conducting an opinion poll and you call someone up and you say, how do you feel about the war, what are they going to tell you?

They're going to say, I'm all for it. You know, it's a, it's not a,

it's not something that you can measure. And there isn't also a kind of public sphere in which these things are discussed.

It's not like there's a place where people talk about the war and debate whether it's good or bad in any real way.

So what are people's opinions is, it almost doesn't matter because they won't tell you what their opinions are because they keep them to themselves. I mean, I do have,

there's a part of the Russian opposition that measures kind of sentiment on the internet. They use those kinds of metrics.

And they say that exhaustion with the war and disappointment with the war are pretty widespread. And another metric you could look at is the number of

Russian elite, people in the Russian elite who have fallen out of windows or have succumbed to mysterious accidents in the last couple of years.

And almost all of those are probably people who, in some way, were seen as insufficiently enthusiastic about the war or about Putin.

So it's pretty clear there's, you know, if Putin were to say tomorrow, the war is over and now we can move on, I think people would be happy.

They would probably be very happy to end this terrible number of deaths. I mean, imagine the United States, imagine 20,000 people a month dying

or being mortally injured and how that would affect us and how we would be

unthinkable.

Isn't that, quite frankly, Russia's core confidence? Is it willing to endure more suffering far more than Europe or the U.S.? There's no way we would do this.

No way we would let a million Americans be injured or killed.

We would have found a reason to

get a helicopter on the embassy and get the hell out

a year and a half ago. And I think we consistently underestimate the Russians' willingness to subject their citizenry to pain.
Yeah, I think we do. I don't think the Ukrainians underestimate them.

I mean, my last month, a lot of recent conversations I've had in Ukraine have been with people who say, right, we get it. The Russians don't care how many people we kill.

I mean, we're going to go on killing them because that's how we keep our country sovereign.

But they shifted strategy some months ago and they began really focusing on hitting Russian oil export and oil refining facilities.

And they do that because they say, okay, they don't care about people, but they care about money and they care about wealth.

And so we're going to try to hit them in the places where they're making the most money. And actually, just in the last couple of days, they've started hitting tankers.

So far, it's empty tankers, just in case you're worried about oil spills.

They hit a couple of tankers that were going into a a port oil tankers. I think they were under a Gambian flag, but we all understand that this is called the Shadow Fleet.

We understand that they're Russian or

they're going to be carrying Russian oil.

And they also have had this campaign to hit Russian refineries. And they've hit some several dozen of them and they do it repeatedly and they do it almost every night.

I was in a Ukrainian long-range drone factory in September and they showed me these drones. They were like little airplanes.
They're large. These aren't little drones.
These are huge drones.

And I said, how many do you make? And they now make 100 a day. These are very sophisticated little planes.
And how many do you launch every day? And they say, we launch 100 a day.

They have this permanent now campaign of hitting Russian oil and gas infrastructure all the time. And this is, when they describe it to me, they say, this is the real sanctions.

The sanctions that the U.S. and Europe do are now full of holes.
The U.S. isn't really enforcing them anymore.
It's too easy for everybody else to buy oil and gas from Russia.

And so we're going to make it more difficult.

And that's now a really important and very underreported for reasons that I don't really understand, but a very underreported part of how Ukraine is fighting as well.

So they understand that

killing people won't win the war, but maybe doing enough damage to infrastructure could. And their theory of victory now involves that.
We do enough damage that they at least have to stop fighting.

And that's, you know, but you're right. I mean, killing a million people, so what?

So in our remaining three minutes here, and you've been jennis for your time, I want to move to something much lighter. You said that you had lived in Russia.
I know you've lived in the U.S.

What other nations have you lived in, Anne?

I lived in London.

I lived in Poland. I live in Poland, actually.
I spend about half my time in Poland.

I live in Warsaw, and then we have a house in northwest Poland as well in the country. We renovated, old house.

I haven't really lived anywhere else, but I've spent a lot of time flying around and staying in other places. Spent a lot of time in Ukraine.

So stack rank, you're 25, you're thinking you have some skills, a lot of geographic mobility. Stack rank the best, the upside and the downside of living in all those nations for a young professional.

Well, Russia's out. You don't want to be kidnapped.

Honestly, if I had the right kind of skills, and I don't, but maybe a young person would, I would be trying to work in the Ukrainian drone industry.

That's where it really feels like that could be the fuel that rebuilds that economy. It will.

I mean, once the fighting stops, they're now so far ahead of everybody else, everybody's going there to learn how they're doing it,

including Americans and including the British and including the Poles, obviously. I would do that.

You know, so actually the country where I see the most innovation and where things are really exciting is there. I mean,

obviously,

you have to be pretty tolerant of

loud noises at night and so on.

But I would do that. And then,

yeah, I mean, Poland.

Poland, once you overcome whatever cultural differences there are, and there are some,

it's still a country where there are all kinds of wide open spaces. You You know, there are kind of things that haven't been done and companies that haven't been created.

And I would think that that would be a great place to live. And I don't know.
I mean, for me, London is still the greatest city in the world. And

I'd be happy to be transplanted there again anytime.

That's a nice note to end on, that wouldn't it be nice if when this war is over, that Ukraine becomes a magnet for human capital and potential and optimism and economic growth.

I like the thought of of that. Ann Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and staff writer at The Atlantic.
She's also a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins.

Her books include Gulag, a History, Red Famine, Stalin's War in Ukraine, and Her Latest Autocracy. And she joins us from the Atlantic office

in Washington, D.C. Ann, we absolutely love having you on.
We have

our listeners are generally

kind of younger and more male and i i i just love that we introduce them to historians and really thoughtful people that they may not come in contact with across their other channels.

So, very much appreciate your time and how in demand you must be right now. Thanks very much, Anne.

Thanks. It's always a real pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Janaire.
Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop GPod from Prop G Media.

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