Filmed October 15, 2025
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I am Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined today by Tim Snyder, a professor of history at Toronto, author of great history books, Bloodlands, maybe best known in 2010 I believe, but also great—I don’t know what to call them—more popular, but nonetheless, based-on-scholarship type books, addressing the current moment On Tyranny back in, what was that, 2017 or something like that? And then more recently On Freedom, both of which I highly recommend. And Tim is now, as I say, a professor of history at Toronto. And we had a conversation about a year and a half ago, which actually stands up well, almost entirely on Ukraine, which stands up very well. You were less pessimistic, I think maybe is one way to say it, than the conventional wisdom at the time. And let’s get to Ukraine a little bit later and begin with the US, if that’s okay. And—
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah, of course.
BILL KRISTOL:
How do you think things stand? I wrote a newsletter this morning, we’re talking about—what is it? October 15th—that it’s getting worse. And maybe I want you to tell me that, I don’t want you to tell me anything. I’d be happy if you told me it’s not, but if you tell me it is, that’s facts are facts, truth is truth.
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah. So maybe why don’t we start with, why don’t start with the ways in which it’s bad and then maybe we can move on to things that are not so bad. I spend a lot of time personally trying to conceptualize how things are bad because if you can conceptualize it and put labels on it, then sometimes it’s not only seeking truth as you say, but it’s also comforting to know that we do have concepts for all of this. It’s not all entirely new, and then we have concepts. It’s also easier to get to action. So I’ve been thinking about the mechanization of lying. So if you think about Pam Bondi giving testimony or Kash Patel, the way that they don’t prepare for the actual substance of the conversation at all anymore. And also—and this is going to sound very old-fashioned and conservative of me—but also the way that they completely disrespect human ideas of social contract or even ideas about speaking truth, because maybe you’re under oath or you have some obligation to do so. That all of those human or even beyond human ideas are gone and they’re speaking to the machine.
All they’re trying to do is produce clips for the internet, that’s it. So the humans don’t matter, it’s all clips for the internet. And the second thing, which is related to or consistent with that is the giant fantasies, like the fantasy of Antifa, the Stephen Miller terror memo about how there’s this giant Antifa conspiracy, and therefore we have to have effectively a state of emergency. And the whole government has to be turned against the liberals and the Democrats and everybody who tries to organize themselves in the United States. That’s another thing which is happening is that we’re in—I mean, you can see resonances of this with Stalinism if you want, or with fascism if you want—but certainly a kind of authoritarian or totalitarian politics where you imagine this enemy, you imagine this enemy that has no face and is invisible, and therefore because they’re invisible, you are allowed to go after them with whatever means necessary and so to speak, produce the facts about them, not just by making them up, but by the violence itself.
So you send ICE or you send troops into cities, and naturally things happen. And then when things happen, you say, “Oh, this proves that there was a conspiracy in the first place.” Or as Miller is clearly fantasizing about in his memo, you get a lot of people under interrogation and then you generate, so to speak, the facts that prove that it was all true to start out with. Those are a couple of things that I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks, which are new and troubling.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s really interesting. The Bondi testimony didn’t get quite enough attention. Just the willingness to just stonewall. I mean, it literally is the Oversight Committee of the Senate, the judiciary. So there’s some, it’s not even like, “Well, she was talking about justifying about something else. The Democrats were asking her trick questions.” It’s literally what this committee is supposed to do. So unless you don’t believe in congressional oversight, which I will stipulate they don’t, I mean, it was a pretty stunning moment. Yeah, I guess the one human they care about speaking to is Donald Trump.
So in addition to the feeding their own media beast, it’s sort of making sure that Trump understands they’re 100% loyal. The cult, I don’t know, I’ve sort of slightly downplayed in my own mind, the cult of personality side of it, because I think it can sometimes distract people from the authoritarian infrastructure underneath, which is very dangerous. We’ll get to that in a minute. But you’ve studied this so much in other countries, and how big a part of it is that though? I mean, I guess I think might’ve a little underestimated it. They certainly think it’s important.
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah, it’s interesting, because charisma, you either feel it or you don’t feel it. There’s a deeply human aspect of it. You’re either drawn to it or you’re not drawn to it. And if you’re not drawn to it, you can’t intellectually understand somebody who is. And so you have to make this leap of empathy or something. Personally, I mean, I feel like I objectively appreciate Trump’s talents. I see him as a talented entertainer. I think I have a sense of what his skill set is like, and I try not to underestimate him, but the subjective part of the charisma, I just don’t get, I find some people charismatic, but I don’t find him charismatic. But clearly you can’t get by without some notion of that as the charismatic leader who therefore is allowed to break the rules. Like going back to Max Weber and Weber says, you start from the charismatic leader, and then the trick is to get to the rule bound institution.
But you can also go in reverse. You can have the rule about institution, and then the charismatic leader shows up and he’s the guy who breaks all the rules, which is Trump’s image. And so the whole notion of charisma is that the rules don’t really apply to me, and you get to decide who the rules really apply to. So it’s like we’re rolling back down the mountain of modernity, we’re going the other direction with this guy. And another thing which I find interesting is who, the national-international divide here. Because I mean, as a first approximation, nobody outside the United States finds Trump charismatic. Nobody. I mean, there are right-wingers who admire him and so on, but as soon as you cross an international boundary, it’s like the magic just goes poof. Which is a little bit different from other authoritarians or fascists in the ’20s and ’30s who tended to have authentic admirers beyond their own country.
But I find it really striking with Trump is that the magic works inside the country, but it really doesn’t work outside the country at all, especially with the notion of strength. And this is where I have a really hard time communicating with people who admire him because I can’t help but thinking of the United States in the world and from the point of view of the world, Trump is making the United States much weaker. I mean, sure, he can pull things off here and there, because he’s inherited all the state power, but from the point of view of Beijing or Moscow or Pyongyang or wherever you’re looking at the United States from, or Berlin or Paris, he’s making the United States much weaker and catastrophically so, very rapidly so. But inside the cult, you don’t feel that at all. Inside the cult, you just feel this warm sense that there’s strength all around you somehow. For those of us who think that there’s a world system, that itself seems frightening and perilous.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, I guess the older term, more or less similar term for charisma, which I think Weber came up with charisma in the 20th century, was demagogue, which the founders use a lot and which of course goes back to Greece, and it’s a little different, but I think very related. And he is a very effective—I totally agree—a lot of our friends, my friends, yours too, I would think underestimated him because they underestimated what an effective demagogue he is. And I think that gets to your other point though. He is an effective American demagogue. I mean, he’s a distinctively American demagogue, which is why that may not quite have the same effect elsewhere. The con man stuff, the business side of it, that’s a sort of American-ish. We’ve had con men and salesmen and those types for all of American history, everyone’s written about it from God knows all the way back in the early 19th century on.
And so maybe that’s a little different from some of the European or other types of demagogues who’ve done well. He has an effect around the world, but I agree it’s not quite the same as fascism, the genuine admiration that you read about for Mussolini in the ’20s or something elsewhere in Europe. But you said, I think very well, that we are sort of going backwards from the law, more or less institutionalized sort of law-abiding politics, you might say, to Trump breaking the rules. But what strikes me the most and what worries me the most, and I really love your thoughts on this is, but now that they control the federal government and have for almost nine months, and they really control it in a way they didn’t in the first term, no internal guardrails left.
It is being, they’ve now weaponized the law on behalf of the project. They’re not running against the, as they were half somewhat in the first term, against the institutions of the federal government that Trump had taken over. They’re now got them pretty well, I mean pretty well, I’ve got to say much— even more than I expected, weaponized and chugging along. And of course, people are retiring and they’re losing people and all this, but they’re indicting people, they’re prosecuting people, they’re putting out the executive orders and the national security memoranda. The FBI seems to be doing, for all that Patel’s presumably gotten rid of a lot of people, and it’s not as effective maybe as it once was, seems to be doing what they want. And even justice, DHS, God knows with ICE. I don’t know. How struck are you by that? What do you make of that?
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah, I want to briefly agree with your point about demagogy because this is exactly what the Greeks were afraid of. This is why Aristotle said that democracy isn’t going to work or it’s going to be very hard. You’re going to get somebody backed by wealth who uses language in a clever way. And there you have it. Aristotle, he didn’t use the term social media, but that combination of media concentration and wealth, and one guy with talent, that is exactly the scenario that they saw themselves and worried about and the founders after them worried about it. So that’s completely correct. On the institutions, I’ll tell you what strikes me. It strikes me that they’re going really quickly, and the thing that they’re trying to establish, at least in the categories familiar to me, is something like a party state. So, it’s not that the state is going away, it’s that the state is becoming secondary to something else, to some other project, which is what of course the fascists and the communists had in common.
They didn’t do away with the state, but the state was secondary to a movement as they called it, or to a party. So, the party, the state functioned, but the party was on top of it. The party was beside it. The party ran through it. And I guess the tricky part here is trying to define what kind of party or movement we’re talking about, because it’s certainly right-wing, and there are radical right-wing people who are very influential within it, like Stephen Miller, but it’s also oligarchical. It’s like it’s people with a certain set of Americans who are extremely wealthy getting inside of and on top of the American state, getting rid of it where they don’t want it, and then focusing it where they do want it. The worrying thing for me, and this is a little bit different from the prior cases, because they actually went more slowly.
I mean, the Germans, when Hitler creates a party state, and I’m using this analogy in the precise parameters that I’m using it in, when Hitler creates a party state, he doesn’t actually dismantle the previous institutions. He penetrates them, he gets rid of their independence, he puts his own people on top. He merges police institutions together, but he doesn’t actually just drop whole pieces of the state into the lake. And these guys, they just drop whole pieces of the state into the lake. And then sometimes they jump into the lake and they try to pull them out from the bottom of the lake when they realize they make a mistake. But they have a kind of randomness and acceleration that is unfamiliar to me, and which I think is risky in a very specific way.
Because if you’re in their world, and if you’re like Peter Thiel and you think the real threat to the world is anything which taxes billionaires because that could lead to the Antichrist. Or if you’re like Russ Vought, and you think the real problem with the world is that bureaucrats are preventing Christ from coming back, if you’re in these catastrophic mindsets where it’s the government, which is somehow the problem always, or if you’re Elon Musk and you just want to have the government out of your way completely, then you have these destructive reflexes. And that thing, like that libertarian or right-wing anarchist’s destructive reflex with respect to the state seems to me to be novel, but also dangerous because I don’t think these guys really understand that disease prevention and things like this are core functions of a modern state without which there will be unpredictable consequences. That if you just drop disease prevention and you have measles and polio outbreaks and so on, it’s not just that that’s bad and people will die. They don’t care about that, of course, but that then the stability that they’re taking for granted will also break down.
I feel like there’s a sense in which they’re naive in a certain way, because they think you can just keep dropping pieces of the state in the lake and fundamentally will still be in charge. America will keep running, but if you drop enough pieces of the state into the lake, there won’t be anything to run anymore. At a certain point, their naivete will come home to them and there won’t be in America anymore. There will be some kind of crisis. And what I worry about for the next six or nine months, this is more what I worry about. Also, the FBI. If you pick the entire FBI, okay, I don’t want to exaggerate, 50% of the FBI and you put it in border control, that’s 50% of the FBI that is not actually looking for criminals. If you take the Department of Defense and you say that its main mission now is going to be the homeland, which is a frightening thing in itself, then that means that we’re not worried about foreign threats.
If you drop, as they have dropped, all of our defenses against foreign cyber operations, then maybe a foreign cyber operation is going to succeed against a major US company or against many American citizens. I worry in the next six to nine months that something like that is going to happen. Some catastrophes, which they have invited by breaking pieces of the state as they pursue this new model where, as you say, the state is tamed by them, and that’s good from their point of view, but the state that they’ve tamed is a dysfunctional version of what we had just a few years ago.
BILL KRISTOL:
But I suppose it’s a question of whether that catastrophe, it weakens them in some ways, which people don’t like their governance. I think it helped the fascists and Hitler, the economy was pretty good, sort of at least under them for a while. And the trains ran on time famously from Mussolini. I assume there was some germ of truth in that famous cliche and so forth. And so yeah, they don’t have that. They might not have that to fall back. On the other hand, it could also be an excuse to obviously tighten the repression further. I mean, I guess they try to square the circle, don’t they? They drop massive parts of our biomedical research and do huge, unbelievable damage, I think, just to the point of view of the country’s wellbeing. But they don’t fire anyone much from DHS except the people that don’t go along with them.
They increased the size of ICE four or five-fold. Defense is more complicated, but they try to penetrate it with their people, and they try to redefine it with the homeland at all, but they’re not cutting it. They’re not going against it, so to speak. And even same with, they’re not prosecuting fewer people. They’re prosecuting them for different things. So, I guess, what do political scientists call them? The “security agencies,” the “security ministries,” they have “power ministries?” There, the libertarian anti-government stuff kind of goes away and they want strong power ministries. They don’t want much else maybe in the government. Maybe that’s a little bit of a tough circle to square though. I don’t know.
TIM SNYDER:
I don’t know. I take an old-fashioned view of this, which is that there really are threats in the world, and they want the power ministries to be strong in their sense of strength, which is like chest puffing, obedience. Lots of, as you said before, lots of adulation of the leader. The Pete Hegseth speech version of strength. But that version of strength isn’t very functional against the actual threats in the world. And so I worry a lot that an FBI that is with a completely incompetent director, completely unqualified director and deputy director, where 50% of the agents are directed towards border control, is not an FBI which stops a terrorist attack.
And so it may be performatively strong in the sense of Kash Patel going out and jogging with the guys at the academy or the women in the academy, but performatively strong, but not functionally strong. And so I think that’s, as you said before, I think that’s a real test. When something cracks, which is pretty obviously because of what they have done to the American federal government, does anyone blame them then for that? Or do they say as of course, they will of course say like, “Oh no, that was the left. That was Antifa.” Whatever it is, they’re going to say it was the left. It was Antifa. I think that these things are going to be important where causally, it’s their fault and then subjectively, how does the American population experience it?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s very interesting and important. It does put a big burden on independent media and independent actors in civil society to not let Trump and those who have succumbed to him in the private sector and civil society control the narrative. Are you surprised? You, I think coined the phrase anticipatory obedience, is that the phrase? Are you surprised by how much of it there’s been among elites, I would say almost across the board, honestly? I mean, different kinds of obedience from more conservative elites than even centrist or even liberal elites. But the lack of resistance to me has been a little bit startling. Or maybe not, maybe that’s what history suggested.
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah, I mean, so just to be clear, it wasn’t vorauseilender Gehorsam, “obedience that runs out ahead,” or “flies out ahead,” is a German term, which colleagues who are historians of national socialism that brought into English. But yeah, ‘don’t obey in advance’ is lesson one of On Tyranny. But that’s because somewhere in the back of my mind, I was thinking about that term, that German term— anticipating what they want and then meeting them halfway. Some of it I think was a kind of rhythm. That there was Trump one, and people weren’t ready for Trump two. That people think, okay, there was Trump one, and that was going to be… Either they just completely forgot about it, or they thought, “Well, the second time around is not going to be as bad somehow.” And then the Democrats threw all their energy behind Harris and she lost and also, and that she lost was divisive.
And then there was Palestine in the background, which is divided a lot of people. And so when you hit January 2025, it’s like we’re just in the wrong moment of some kind of political cycle. There’s that, those kinds of unglamorous factors. But yeah, I of course agree with you. I guess it’s like, the naivete that bothers me a little bit. The people who have law firms, people who think of themselves as being tough in the world, and how naive people who run law firms or universities or big companies can be. I mean, hypocrisy I don’t like, but I can at least understand it. But being just not really knowing what you’re doing, like Columbia giving away the whole game at the beginning, just not really knowing what you’re doing. Columbia writing letters to the federal government saying, “Well, tell us what the next steps are.”
Or law firms, law firms who give in when they could have won a lawsuit that they filed themselves. That kind of thing is really troubling. And then of course, there’s the stuff which is more collaboration where people just believe that this is the right way to go. And so why not direct a whole television network that way? So there’s that too, which is troubling in a different way. But yeah, it’s simple. But I am just struck too by the time factor that people, like talking about… so on Saturday, I hope you’re airing this soon.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, we’re hearing it within the day.
TIM SNYDER:
Okay, good. Because on Saturday, there’s the second big No Kings protest.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, let’s talk about that, because I’ve been very interested in that.
TIM SNYDER:
And it’s going to be very big. I mean, it’s going to be millions and millions of people in several thousand different places, and I’ll be at one of them. But I still, like when I’m moving in elite-ish environments like where I am now in Boston area, or where I was a couple days ago in the New Haven area, I still talk to people who are like, “Yeah, this is all terrible, but oh, I didn’t realize it was a protest on Saturday.” And it seems to me that’s the beginning. There are other things we can do, but if we’re not protesting, then we’re not doing Politics 101. That’s Politics 101 at this point. You do that, and then maybe you do other things too, but you got to do that and to not know what’s happening, I mean… Well, I just want to tell you something I’ve been thinking about.
Okay, so I got baseball in my mind at the moment because the time of year we’re in, and I just took one of my kids to see a playoff game, first playoff game I’ve ever seen live in my life, I realize. And it’s like a lot of people in our, forgive me, class, broadly understood, the way that they think about politics is that it’s like a baseball game and there’s an umpire. So there are two teams, and they each have their tactics and their uniforms and their personalities, but at the end of the day, there’s an umpire. There are rules and there’s an umpire. And the thing is that’s not actually the way politics works. The way in moments like this… you’re the umpire. You can’t just sit in the stands and say, “Oh, the umpire is not calling balls and strikes. This is weird.” You’re the umpire. You actually have to get out on the field and be the umpire. And I think we’re stuck at that moment where we’re eating the popcorn and we’re like, “Oh, where’s the umpire? I want to watch the game. Where’s the umpire?”
And there isn’t going to be a game unless we get out there and say, “Okay, we believe in the rules.” Because the rules only come into being because you assert that you care about them. Anyway, that’s just maybe a silly analogy, but that’s what’s on my mind lately.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, it’s a good … I’m also following the baseball playoffs, despite my greatest disappointment in the Mets totally blowing their season there in the last month.
TIM SNYDER:
It let the Reds into the playoffs though, which was glorious for about five seconds.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s true. No, but the umpire, many people I speak to, I’d say are slightly … to use your analogy, it’s sort of like umpire has been getting some things wrong. I’m a little worried that they’re not quite being aggressive enough and disciplining the players here or calling balls and strikes. It seems like it’s a little tilted. But maybe they’ll kind of come around or there’ll be a reversion to normalcy, so to speak. They haven’t internalized, in my view, what’s really happening. Wishful thinking turns out to be a pretty strong part of life, I guess.
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah. It is, but then this is something that I get from real life, but also from my East European friends of an older generation or the dissidents that I learned from. What is knowledge of politics? And knowledge of politics has to involve, I think, a certain amount of personal exposure or risk that this is Havel and this is that when Havel said “Live in truth,” he didn’t mean you just sit in your laboratory, in your library or whatever, and you figure out the facts. What he meant is you have to get yourself out there and expose yourself for the things you think are true. And that’s truth. The affirmation of truth with your body. Actually doing things.
It’s very simple but I think that’s incredibly profound because by no means am I a first-rate organizer or anything, but I do organize stuff and I do go out with people. And when I do that, I hear ideas and voices and things that I wouldn’t have otherwise heard and some of the things I think are true, turn out very quickly not to be true and vice versa. But there’s also just, I think, the fundamental fact that you don’t really know what’s going on in politics unless you’re feeling some resistance. Even just a little bit. Just a tiny bit. Or you’re feeling a little bit uncomfortable. If you’re not feeling a little bit uncomfortable, then probably you don’t really know what’s going on.
And that is an argument actually for protest. I think in a moment like this, especially, you just don’t know what’s going on if you’re not somehow in it. This is a narrow problem. It’s not a big American problem, but I think it is a problem a bit for our milieu. And my use of the word milieu signifies what I’m talking about. That we can say incredibly clever things and we can get caught up in incredibly clever arguments amongst ourselves, but we don’t really know anything unless we’re doing something. It’s the engagement. That word which gets misused and by the French and the existentialists, but engagement in the sense of being physically present, organizing something, creating something that wasn’t there before. It’s not only good in itself, but I think it’s actually indispensable to knowing what’s going on.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s so interesting. I hadn’t really thought about it until you put it that way. I have some academic background and edit a magazine and all that. I’ve also been pretty involved with a lot of the activists more than I used to be, honestly, and certainly more on the liberal side in the last few years. And I agree with that. They’re less articulate about it sometimes. They don’t theorize about it the way the college professors do, or some essayists and so forth, but they really get a grip on it in a way that I think a lot of other people don’t. Orwell, I think saw this, right? This is an implicit and explicit theme of a fair amount of his writing, I would say. And he went to Spain, and he did all kinds of things like that, which is interesting.
Maybe this is a good transition to Ukraine, which you’re a great historian of Ukraine itself and of that region, but you’ve been there several times since the war began, and I think you were just there last month, weren’t you? And so I really would love an update and the sense of what’s happening there and I feel like it’s fallen beneath the radar screen a little bit here. It’s okay. People can’t spend every day studying the maps of what’s exactly going on in different battlefronts and or what’s going on in Zelenskyy’s government. And because Trump’s been not quite as bad as some of us feared, but unclear what he’s doing, again, I feel like our viewers here, could really use an update on what your judgment is of what’s going on there.
TIM SNYDER:
Okay. Yeah, I’ll stay closer to Ukraine because I don’t feel like I have any privileged access to why Trump does the things that he does. But yeah, Ukraine. I was there for a couple weeks in September, and it’s the sixth time I’ve been there since the full-scale invasion. And like several of the other times that I’ve been there, I was visiting brigades, visiting units at the front among other things and going to command centers and talking to my buddies and getting to know new people.
So major impressions. Number one, these are people who are doing what they have to do. So, it kind goes beyond the categories that we tend to apply. We want things to be over quickly because we don’t have an attention span, but they would like things to be over quickly too, but they’re doing what they have to do. And it goes beyond, I’ve noticed, the category of morale. People ask how are they doing? How’s their morale? I don’t feel like morale is even really the right category anymore. Everybody’s morale is, in some sense, horrible, but also, they’re living their lives. That’s like the soldiers who are on the front. If they have a little bit of leave, they want to go somewhere else and do something nice. Or the people who are in cities that can get shelled or attacked by rockets, they want to go out at night. They might get hit by a rocket and die, but they want to go out at night. And that sense that life is there to be lived.
And then another impression is, and it’s a very useful one, going back to what we’re talking about about protest; is all the horizontal cooperation, which has been there from the beginning and continues where the state is doing a really good job, but the brigades need certain things that the state can’t really provide. And civil society organizes, fundraises. It does things to help the brigades. And individual groups, NGOs will adopt a brigade or adopt a unit. And that horizontal thing just keeps going. It just keeps going.
Another impression I have—and this accords with your question—is that we are just not there. I’ve been traveling around Ukraine during this war for three and a half years now, and there’s so few American accents out there. The British are present in a way that we’re not, and they have been from the beginning, but American accents, as you’re out in the south and the east, you just do not run into that many Americans.
It’s such an odd moment of provincialism, I feel like. There’s this war on a scale of a world war, and we’re just physically not really present. We’ve got a big embassy and great people in that embassy, but they have all these restrictions on them and it’s hard for them to move around.
As far as the military situation, the Ukrainians are doing their best to hold the line and they’re trying to do it as mechanically as possible, i.e. with drones. And the Russians are trying to take territory, but they’re losing people at a rate which is eventually unsustainable. The front has not moved that much. A big Russian gain is a village. On the scale of Ukraine, the Russian advance in the last six months is pretty minimal, and Ukrainians have actually taken some territory back in the last couple of weeks.
So the trend I think in the news coverage is something like “Russians moving ahead,” and they are, but I mean, I’m looking out at the Charles River and the amount of territory they’ve gained, it’s not even me to the Charles River. It’s just not very much. And because we’re not physically there and we’ve lost our ability to think in three dimensions, any advance seems like, oh, the war might be about to end, but it’s not. The war is not going to end until the politics of Russia change as I’ve been saying from the beginning, and the only way to make the politics of Russia change is to make it clear that they can’t win this war.
And here’s a place where I agree with people I don’t usually agree about with it, which is American tech oligarchs. Ukrainians are being incredibly innovative. They’re being incredibly innovative. They have a lot of smart people, and the war creates a natural meritocracy, which I noticed. There are lots of young men and women who are captains and majors who are doing interesting things with tech. And so they’re solving problems and figuring things out, which then smarter Americans are trying to learn from. Not necessarily Americans that I would admire on other grounds, but the innovation of it. So yeah, the Ukrainians are doing okay, if we hold up, they’re going to hold up. And I think Russia will eventually break. War is always about politics, in the end. Somebody breaks or somebody else breaks. I would still rather be Zelensky than Putin in this war.
BILL KRISTOL:
Wow. Well, that’s both very interesting and pretty encouraging. It is amazing how long it’s gone. The beginning, of course, the Russians thought, I guess, it might be a few days or a week. And then even the coverage in America was sort of, well, either they’ll get exhausted or the Ukrainian. It’s got to end. I think about this as you spoke three and a half years, I hadn’t really focused on that. I mean, I guess it is really three and a half years now, right? October, yeah, September… February 24th, ’22. We fought in Europe and World War II for three and a half years.
TIM SNYDER:
Exactly.
BILL KRISTOL:
So the idea that this is just this smaller swore, which is a little bit of a thing, this is the way Trump clearly thinks of it, is one of many things. He could either bring peace or not bring peace. And the way America First people think of it is just this kind of distraction. They don’t care who wins. It’s not only the largest war in Europe since ‘45, but as long a war in Europe, almost, not quite as…Yeah. So it’s really remarkably… Do you agree that it is still decisive for the future in the sense, obviously Ukraine, but of Russia, but of Europe and of the world? In the sense that if they get away with this, if Putin succeeds it’s a whole different world than if he fails.
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah. I want to just pause on what you said about the scale of it, because you have to imagine a Second World War in which if you want to compare it to the US and the Second World War, you have to imagine that the whole eastern seaboard is occupied. And you have to imagine casualties proportionate to population on an order of magnitude greater. This is comparable to the Second World War, I think, but it’s far greater than our Second World War.
And when you think of how important that experience and the legacy of it was to the creation of our country, and you start to get an inkling of a sense of what this means locally. But I agree with you about the global part too. This is about whether there is something like the rule of law. The rule of law is under assault from various directions, including from the Trump administration. But if you can invade a country and take territory, then all bets are off. That’s the fundamental thing.
Another area which I think people overlook because there are a few dots to be connected, is nuclear proliferation. That the Ukrainians are holding off a nuclear enemy in a conventional war. If they fail to do that, then everybody else has to build nuclear weapons. And just to be fair, Trump has been better about this than Biden, but if you give into nuclear blackmail, then everybody has to build nuclear weapons.
But the Ukrainians holding off the Russians means that for now, there are a lot of mid-sized countries who they have plans on the table, but they haven’t actually started building nuclear weapons. And so the Ukrainians, by resisting the Russians, are making nuclear proliferation and therefore nuclear war a lot less likely.
And then in a broader sense, this is about empire, whether we’re going to be in a world of empire or not. The Russians think we are, they think everything else is a joke and they’re trying to prove it. Whereas the Ukrainians believe in national sovereignty and integrating their country with European neighbors, which is a radically different model. And it’s not just two countries, it’s two models that are at war. And they have very different implications for the rest of us.
BILL KRISTOL:
I got to say, what you’ve said about Americans being noticeable by their absence just hit home for me. Whatever one thinks of mistakes and other features of American foreign policy for the last, well, I was going to say for the last 30 years, but I suppose for the last 80 years, that was not the case… When I was in government, I traveled places obviously with the vice president when I was the chief of staff. We were present everywhere. Maybe too much so in some cases. And I mean handedly so and whatever.
And not just on the military side, not just the embassy itself, but through all the, obviously USAID to take something that’s been in the news, but non-governmental organizations, quasi-governmental organizations, election monitors. Now the Europeans did a lot of that to be fair, especially after the Cold War, but we did it with them usually. And I don’t know how much that contributed to global stability and also how much it was in America’s interest. I would say it would be. And how much it contributed at times to helping forces who are in favor of liberal democracy around the world.
I hope it can do fine without us, honestly. I mean, it’s very important that it do fine with us being less present, but that’s not an experiment we’ve run for quite a while, right?
TIM SNYDER:
It kind of goes back to if you read the history of the early Cold War and how incredibly incompetent we were. We didn’t have an apparatus until the Cold War, which was capable of learning things about the world. I think there’s a legitimate debate on the left, primarily, but no, it’s also on the right. There’s a very legitimate debate about how engaged the U.S. should be. And I was against the Iraq war at the time. I would in general have said we should have been less engaged in certain places than we were. However, I think what we’re talking about is actually prior to that debate, because you can’t have a debate without knowledge.
And what I worry about with the absence of Americans in Ukraine is the way that digital memes and emotional certainty replaces the just simple fact-gathering or human understanding that you can’t get without physical presence.
And this is why I admire diplomats. Sometimes they’re put to bad uses or good uses, but at least they’re in the country. Or why my heroes are war correspondents or journalists who are doing … Because at least they’re there. They put their bodies where their bodies have to be in order to learn things. And so where everyone comes down on this issue of how engaged we should be or where we should be engaged, not knowing anything about the world is not the answer. That can’t be the answer. That’s not going to make things peaceful.
I think if you really believe in America first, you have to know… If you’re in a race and you have a blindfold on, you don’t know if you’re first, right? You could have driven into the ditch. Maybe you just did. It’s the knowledge I think which has to come first. That’s the thing which concerns me so much, and which I find so weird. It is historically weird, like you say, but it’s also just weird in terms of policy because then policy ends up getting driven by these impressions.
It also ends up being driven by foreign leaders because what happens, if we don’t go to another country, first of all, they try to drive our social media and then secondly, they go to the White House and they try to influence people at the top. And if we have no institutions coming from the bottom, if that’s all weakened, or if we don’t have the people present, then our president— let’s just abstract away from what his intentions are, whether they’re good or bad—but our president ends up getting constantly rolled by foreign leaders because we don’t know anything about the world. We can’t really compete.
BILL KRISTOL:
Or if our president and his top people are interested in making deals that will benefit them with foreign leaders, they do that.
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah, that’s happening.
BILL KRISTOL:
There aren’t people who know enough. I’m very struck by that. I’ve always been struck traveling around the US and giving lectures like you do and stuff, you run into people and I served in government, and they sometimes defer to you a bit about what do you think about what’s happening where … Then it turns out they know more about what’s happening in some place. Much more than I do. And they’ve been to those places and they served in the military, they served in the diplomatic corps, but also they were in businesses. And we have many huge multinational corporations, they have their pluses and minuses. But you know what? They have a lot of contact with people around the world.
And a lot of Americans have worked in different NGOs and other efforts around the world. It’s such a cliche and it’s some truth to it, obviously, that we’re inward-looking and some percentage of Americans don’t have passports, and we have such a tradition of putting the two oceans between us in the world. And that was very important, obviously, geopolitically in much of our history.
But I think post-World War II … And I think my personal view is it was good for us. America became a more cosmopolitan and globalist country, to use the term that’s now used as a term of derision. But I don’t know. Wasn’t that good for America? Good economically, good in terms of civil rights, good in terms of understanding things better, as you say. I guess I think we need a full-throated defense of globalism personally, but that’s my own prejudice.
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah. Well, civil rights is an interesting case because there were a lot of international influences on civil rights, but one of them was that the Soviets kept—
BILL KRISTOL:
Very much.
TIM SNYDER:
…using our racism against us. Not that that was the decisive point, but it was a way that our engagement ended up affecting domestic politics. As I see it though, the question is whether you can go from… And this is, in a way, a domestic as well as an international question. I’m going to put it really broadly. Whether you can go from being Europe-focused to thinking about the whole world or whether you just drop Europe and thereby drop the rest of the world. So with Obama, what I didn’t like about the… I thought the Obama people were very hasty about saying, “Okay, we can pivot.” You can’t pivot. There’s no such thing as pivoting. You can try to add.
We didn’t want to leave the Europeans behind. They were our friends, and they really wanted to be friends with Obama. We had an opportunity in Europe to get closer, but instead we were thinking about this pivot. And the thing is, can you add engagement with China? Can you add engagement with other places to having friends who are allies who are in Europe? Can you do that? That I think was the real challenge and I think nobody has met that challenge.
And instead, what we have with Trump is let’s drop the Europeans because they’re democratic and they’re liberal and they’re annoying. So maybe we’ll keep the alliance, maybe we won’t, but it’s not an area which is meaningful for us anymore. And that corresponds to Trump and his personality. But it also, of course, corresponds to demographic changes in the U.S. The question is, as America becomes a more Cosmopolitan country, does that mean we make the turn from being Euro-centric to being multifocal, or does it mean we just say, “Ah, to hell with all of it?” And right now, I think we’re in “to hell with all of it.”
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. That’s why I’ve always thought there’s more of a connection between the liberal world order and liberalism, broadly understood liberalism, at home. I think I used to debate a lot within the conservative world, a lot of libertarian types who I think sincerely and not unintelligently had the argument that the national security state, very dangerous with civil liberties. God knows there were instances where the national security state was not as friendly to civil liberties, could be.
But I think the argument on the whole, cut the other way though. It’s not an accident. I guess the way I would put it is that the more involved we’ve got in the world, civil rights, it was harder to sustain a American exceptionalist, if you want to use the term in a different context, on race. It just became indefensible. And I think other thing, and this is true in general, the liberalization on immigration policy and stuff, came at the height of the Cold War.
And I’m not defending everything that happened in the Cold War saying we should have Cold Wars for the sake of more liberal policies at home. I don’t think it’s an accident, let me put it this way, that the authoritarianism at home coincides with America first attitude abroad.
And here’s one thing. I’ll come back to U.S. maybe here at the end. I know we only a few minutes. I feel like there’s somehow more than an accidental connection between the focus on immigration and mass deportation on the one hand, and the authoritarianism on the other. That is, in theory, it needn’t be, I suppose, right? You could have authoritarianism that just left the people who are living in the U.S. alone or that could want immigrants for all I know, to work in businesses in a fairly authoritarian context maybe.
You could have anti-immigration policies, I guess, that didn’t imply the kinds of things we’re doing on mass deportation or the other stuff on threats to free speech and free political activity. But I don’t know. I can’t really articulate this or explain this, but I have the sense that… A friend of mine put it this way, the mass deportation regime is kind of somehow an important part of the authoritarian project, even though maybe not necessarily, so I’m curious what… you’ve thought about this a lot. Are there historical analogies for this or is this a distinctively American thing or…?
TIM SNYDER:
Yeah, I mean both. I think the historical analogy that I can’t get away from as a student of the history of Nazi Germany is the deportation action in fall 1938. It was the first really large-scale violent action of the SS, and it was a deportation of undocumented people, mostly Jews whose families were from Poland and very often had been in Germany for quite a long time, including before the German Republic had been established in 1918.
And what was a huge action by the scale of the time, a few tens of thousands of them were gathered up basically overnight, very quickly, and dumped on the Polish side of the border. That’s the first big thing the SS did. There was a range of concentration camps already at that point, which had not very large, but there was a network of concentration camps run by the SS, but that action was the first big action of the SS.
That’s not broadly remembered, I don’t think, but that’s something I can’t help but think about, and just as a matter of fact, that was a big step in their training for what they eventually became. And then as far as how it’s working here, I think there are three things. One is the intimacy of it, that you can intellectually separate undocumented people from citizens, but in fact, we live in the same buildings and we’re in the same cities and we see the force being applied and we have to react to it some way or another.
And that reaction is the government’s responsibility, whatever it turns out to be, like they’ve chosen to do this, but we can’t help but be involved in it. And maybe we get used to it. If we get used to it, then we’ll get used to people in camouflage and masks doing other stuff as well.
And it’ll be hard to tell when they start doing other stuff. They already are doing some… I mean, they’re committing crimes as I see it anyway, against citizens routinely at this point. So there’s the intimacy of it and then there’s the normalization of the use of force. But I think the fundamental thing, the way this works is the politics of us and them, that it’s, the undocumented person, or as they say, the criminal immigrant is an enemy within.
And so you’re starting with one enemy within and you’re getting people used to the idea that the enemy is within, and they’re not camouflaging this at all. So then the problem is the homeland and the defense of the homeland, but not from external enemies, of which we have no coherent account whatsoever, so long as they pay us off, we’re okay basically, whoever they are, not from external enemies but from internal enemies.
And so I think deeply what this is about is that, that the enemy is within, and oh, look, we have tens of billions of dollars to deal with the enemy within. And today it’s the undocumented people, but it could be some other enemy within tomorrow. That’s, I think the main way that it’s essential to American authoritarianism, and I think that is a little bit unusual actually. And I think it’s also a bit of a weakness, by the way, because we haven’t really talked about resistance much. We mentioned the No Kings protests on Saturday, but I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I think that they are necessarily winning.
They’re doing terrible things, but they think, if you read some of their more radical people, they think they’re running out of time. They think that there’s a lot of resistance. They think that they’re not moving fast enough. So it’s not like from their point of view, everything’s going great.
And this internal enemy thing, I think it’s terrible, but it’s also a weakness because most Americans don’t really like it. A lot’s going to have to happen before Americans get used to this. And usually if you’re a fascist, what you do is you fight a war abroad and then at the same time you gin up the idea of the enemy within, right? Like the Germans and the Jews, sure, there were anti-Semitic laws and practices before the Second War, but once they were in the war, then it became a Jewish war. And so then it was much easier to do things inside German society.
And then people, because there was an enemy without, the people were much more likely to believe in the enemy within. Whereas our guys are trying to do it without the foreign war.
And I mean, I don’t want them to go fight, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want them to go fight a foreign war, like that wouldn’t make me feel better. But what they’re essentially trying to do is say there’s an enemy within which is part of a vast, invisible left-wing Antifa conspiracy, but they’re trying to do it without all the propaganda advantages that fighting a true war would bring to them. And I think that’s unusual. And I think it’s hard. I think it’s difficult, and I think it actually opens some hope that this can be resisted.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s very, very interesting. And it’s worth a whole other conversation we should have sometime. I guess blowing up the boats in the Caribbean is a minor version of what you’re talking about, but maybe not enough. But they do try to link domestic terror and the foreign terrorist organizations.
TIM SNYDER:
Absolutely. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
There’s a kind of sense that they want to play that card, but they also… Just a couple minutes, I’d love you to say a word about this very admirable fundraising effort you’ve launched or you’re central to at least, I read about it on your Substack.
TIM SNYDER:
Oh, thanks, Bill. That’s very kind. So, as we were talking about, I go to Ukraine and I go to the front, and I know lots of folks in various brigades and thanks to them, I have a sense sometimes of what’s actually needed. And as we said before, the Ukrainian state does a pretty good job at delivering things, but there are some things that it’s hard to deliver on time.
So, my friends in the second corps of the Ukrainian National Guard, which is called Khartiia, are running a fund drive right now. It’s ongoing right now to raise, it probably is going to turn out to be about a million dollars to buy vehicles, trucks and cars which have drone jammers. So it’s very simple, like when you’re trying to retrieve the wounded, the Russians will try to kill the wounded and they’ll try to kill you in your car as you’re trying to retrieve them with drones.
And if you have drone jammers on your cars, that makes it harder for them to do that. So the campaign is to raise money for a very specific need, which is reliable vehicles that are easy to maintain, that can jam drones. So this will save lives. All of the intermediaries I know, they’re reliable. I personally know the commanders and I’ve got a lot of buddies in these units. And so my name is attached to it and I’m helping to raise the money. If you just Google Snyder Freedom, Freedom is Action. It’ll pop up. That’s what it’s called. “Freedom is Action.”
BILL KRISTOL:
Great. Well good luck with that, and I hope people do help out. It seems like a very worthwhile cause. But Tim, I know you’re on the road here, and so I’ll let you go. You’ve got to catch a plane. But this has really been terrific and thanks so much for taking the time to join all of us today.
TIM SNYDER:
Bill, thanks for reaching out. It’s always a real pleasure, and I’ll look forward to the next time.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, me too. And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
