Episode Notes:

On this episode of the Russia Contingency, Mike is joined by William C. Wohlforth, a faculty member in Dartmouth College’s department of government. Mike and Bill spoke about the challenges of forecasting, American power, Russian revisionism and the future of great power competition.

The Russia Contingency is a bi-weekly podcast featuring in-depth analysis of Russia's military power and the war in Ukraine.

 

Episode Transcript

Michael Kofman: Welcome back to another episode of The Russia Contingency. I'm Michael Kofman, and today I have with me an honored guest. Actually, I'm a guest of his because I'm visiting for a week at Dartmouth University up in New Hampshire, and I've had the opportunity to give some talks here. And I'm spending time with my longtime colleague, Bill Wohlforth. Bill is a professor here and has been long-established in the field of international relations, international security. He has written countless articles, many books, and remains an avid contributor. I've enjoyed conversations with him over the years. And I want to just open up a bit and talk about something that's been on my mind. We're going to have hopefully a broad-ranging discussion today, and we're going to step out the immediacy of what's happening in this war and talk about big picture and history, and how it relates to topics and international security, and US power and interests.

So one of the first questions I have is that, Bill, historically, you professionally grew up at a time of the Cold War and the transition from the Cold War into whatever the post-war period is. And the Soviet Union and then post-Soviet Russia were very much central to that, and had been very much central to discussions in international security. And I'm curious how you reflect on the kind of inflection point we seem to be at this stage with this war, and what does it mean to you when you look at it?

Bill Wohlforth: Well, first let me say, Mike, how happy I am to be able to join you on this podcast. And I want your listeners all to know that I was a huge Kofman fan long before this war occurred. As you know, I assigned lots of your material to my students in my Russian Foreign Policy class. So I just wanted to have that there on the record. Yeah, I got going in the study of international security during the Cold War during what was then called the New Cold War, the intensification of that rivalry that occurred in the mid-80s, early mid-80s, and only began to wane under Gorbachev. And so the signal event of my career was the unexpected end of that struggle, the Cold War that everybody thought was going to keep going, and then the equally unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union.

Then we had a period that some people began to call unipolarity. Lasted a long time, and people forgot about great power competition. And very few people predicted that Russia would become a pugnacious, seemingly resurgent actor in international politics, that Russia's dissatisfaction with its position in the international system would manifest itself in a major conventional war in the heart of Europe. So in a weird sense, the failures of international relations, scholars to foresee what was coming and the centrality of Russia to the global security situation bookend my career, both at the beginning and now, if I may say, towards the end of it.

Michael Kofman: So let me chime in on this. Another colleague of yours in the field, another [inaudible 00:03:17] Paul Poast, he has some really good comments and threads over the years. And one thing he's pointed, I think, is it is true and it's worth discussing is how much of international security, whether it's theory, whether it's conceptual development over the course of this past century, has been so heavily influenced by the study of wars in which Russia features fairly prominently as an antagonist, right? Militarized disputes in the Cold War. And the turns theory and a lot of other things really come out of this time period. So it's heavily premised on the bipolar division of the world and the competition between United States and Western countries and the Communist bloc. And Russia still figures, much less so, but still figures fairly significantly in European security as an antagonist or as a country that becomes a halfway house. Never makes this imperial transition, never abandons the imperial mindset.

And I know you've heard me say before that I see a lot of these wars as principally wars of Soviet succession, that the Soviet Union is still collapsing slowly, and that folks overly interpreted of the Soviet Union as an event more so than a process, which is what it really is. I want to throw this joke at you, and I've made it before times, that a lot of international security sometimes feels like failed Russia area studies. Because it's so centrally focused on cases and things that involve Russia or the Soviet Union. I mean, do you think there's some truth to that and some truth to Paul Poast's commentary on this?

Bill Wohlforth: Of course I think it's true, because when I was a graduate student, I decided I had a choice. I could either study statistics and game theory, or I could study another language and try to gain some area expertise. And of course, I took the latter course, and I studied Russian, went to the Soviet Union, went to Leningrad State University to study Russian, et cetera, et cetera. So I was very gratified when a non-Russia expert, an IR scholar of great renown, Paul Poast, noted statistically how prominent Russia is in all of our data sets on interstate war. Basically whether you look at military's interstate disputes or great power of war, whatever you want to do, Russia is just a highly active, belligerent great power. And people who study, this show is called the Russia Contingency.

So the Russia contingency in some sense is trying to figure out when this Russia's issue, which is a country that has for 400 years punched above its weight in international politics, when that's going to come to the fore in terms of violent conflict. And so someone who is equipped with knowledge about general international relations, scholarship about international security, things like deterrents, things like balancing and alliances, you know this literature, but also knows a ton about Russia, is well-equipped to handle some of the questions that we're going to face, including the two that we've been talking about. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Union, and then the wars of the Soviet succession and the current war that we're seeing.

Michael Kofman: So someone who, I think, grew up professionally much more in the literature of '90s and 2000s, I professionally went this whole period at a time where all the articles were basically saying that Russia's dead. We're not going to have to deal with Russia anymore. Russia's gone as a power. And it seems as we go through cycles of these pieces. Russia typically either exists in a state of being four feet tall or 12 feet tall. And I do fear that after this war, there's been a lot of discrediting of Russian military power and Russian military capability. And the Russian economy is often superficially assessed. As you just said, it tends to punch well above its weight historically, let's say, compared to countries like China, who I feel typically really punch well below their weight if you look at their foundations of power. Just an honest opinion. China analysts and experts are welcome to come at me and fight me on this.

So my sense that is that we may be seeing a genuine transition where after this, at least for some period of time, and this is the valid point, Russia will become less relevant to the conversation. A lot of folks are very much focused on China and in the Pacific. I don't know if that's going to last very long, because Russia has this immense capacity to hang around and if it has one distinct trait as a power, it's the ability to reconstitute itself even after state collapse and then come back as a meaningful actor, maybe a second-tier power typically, but a meaningful actor in international politics long after being written off. Right after being written off. I don't know how you look at it. I think you have a much better historical perspective looking at this timeline.

Bill Wohlforth: Well, you'd start with historical narrative, that you could go all the way back. But look, let's say we just look at the 20th century. It was Russia's perceived weakness, but then at the fear of its gaining strength, so perceived weakness after the Russo-Japanese war, but German fears of its growing strength, that were critical precipitating cause of the First World War. Then you have the sense of Russian weakness in the 1930s after Stalin's purges of the army, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know that whole story. These ebbs and flows of Russian/Soviet power figure in the ebbs and flows of great power rivalry, in some case in wars.

And what we're seeing right now is that even though China is by everyone's acknowledgement a materially stronger state by most measures we can think of except a few military ones, it's been Russia that is truly responsible for bringing great power competition back onto the agenda. Sure, we have all kinds of issues with China, but who's the one that's actually been out over its skis, if I can use a New Hampshire term, in terms of pushing things? Both on cyber, on subversion, on propaganda, and now on the willingness to unleash such a devastating war in Europe.

Michael Kofman: So this is a very fair point, because if you look in terms of base measures of powers' potential, right? China looks so strong. And we can debate how well rated it is, but Russia's far more active, much more engaged as a revisionist. You had a Russian deployment to the Middle East, to basically check policy preferences of us there. You've had far more wars fought by Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A lot of folks don't remember the wars of the 1990s, but there were quite a few that Russia got involved in, intervened in. There were a whole host of conflicts in the 2000s, right? The Russia-Georgia war, the initial invasion, annexation of Crimea, the Russian intervention of Syria, and what have you. And then following even Russian intervention by Wagner mercenaries in Libya. And the list is actually quite extensive.

Most importantly, Russia's a state that has attempted to invade not just its neighbor, but was secondarily the largest country in Europe outside of Russia, Ukraine, and with Maximalist war aims, right? It's really tried to engage in a form of revisionism that China simply hasn't. And so it's a fair argument to be said that, okay, maybe this will be the death knell of Russian military power for some time. But I'm curious from your point of view, you've made some pretty interesting arguments recently with Steve Brooks. And the thrust of the arguments both deal with propensity for revisionism, to what extent can other states challenge the United States, challenge international order, and revise their circumstances? And also how we view the state of the United States and the balance of power.

Some people think United States is in decline, right? Others don't. Some people think that China is a much more powerful adversary than the Soviet Union. Others do not, and have a very good, I think, interesting argument as to why that's the case. And I was wondering maybe take a minute and lay out some of your thoughts. There's a good recent Foreign Affairs article that Bill and Steve wrote together on the subject.

Bill Wohlforth: Well, thanks for raising that. I will just say you did leave one question on the table, and it's good you did. Because it's really a question for you and other guests that you've had like Steve Kotkin and people who spend their lives studying Russia, which is really not just whether Russia will have the material capacity to regenerate itself, but whether its interest in doing so, whether its insistence on its global role, whether its understanding of itself as a great power is going to be revised in any way in response to what happens in Ukraine. I mean, most people I know study Russia think that this understanding of its role in the world of its status is many, many, many centuries old, and it's not going to be dislodged easily. And if that's the case, then there will be the will for Russia to reconstitute itself. The question is whether there'll be a way.

But getting to that article and getting to the distribution of power in the world, yeah, we think that as controversial and crazy as it's probably going to sound to many of your listeners, the world is still closer to unipolarity than it is to bi or multipolarity. And the multipolarity thing is easy, because polarity is counting up great powers that are roughly equal. And if you're going to count great powers that are roughly equal after China, the United States, who do you mention? The others are in a different category.

But thinking about the system in terms of what the way you put it is very, very probative. How hard it is to revise the system. How easy is it to defend the existing status quo? And on those metrics, what Brooks and I try to establish in that relatively short article, at least short for academics, is that if you compare this to previous systems, bipolarity and multipolar systems of the past, the revisionist threats, like the plausible changes that China or Russia can make to the international system, pale in significance compared to the feared kinds of changes, the changes that we feared were possible by revisionist actors in past international systems.

And you asked about the Soviet Union compared to China. I'm sorry, Gen X, the Soviet Union was a really, really capable actor in one way, in many ways, but in one way that really, really mattered a lot. It had a really large, really powerful army, sitting in a place where it was physically close to what was then the world's most important technological and industrial power center. This is what George Kennan was talking about. This is what all the framers of American Cold War strategy were talking about, a credible fear that if the United States didn't do something, its entire international position could be destroyed by Soviet power. Add to that a global ideology that really had appeal around the world, that had appeal. Genuine appeal, not just like, "Oh, I'm pissed off at the liberal world order," but an actual ideology. And you start looking at an actor that in terms of its status as a poll, still had a lot more behind it than I see today in China.

Michael Kofman: I want to add a bit to that. First, I think one of the challenges that it's part of the debate on as to whether the situation between us and China is a cold war, the Cold War. Can't be the Cold War because of a distinct period of history, but it's a cold war, and how does it compare? I think one thing folks forget is that the reason the Soviet Union was such a significant adversary for the United States is first, there was a real vacuum of power created by World War II that essentially destroyed the other powers on the scene. You still had Britain and France, but they were very much in decline. And so they created very different contexts and conditions for the competition, where the Soviet Union had a lot more opportunity, both ideological opportunity and opportunity for revisionism in that environment. You didn't have such fixed structures with alliances, with big status quo states and what have you.

NATO didn't. NATO was created, it was created to do a Soviet Union but didn't exist in that moment. And the second one was that the Soviet Union had an actual coalition of states that it was leading. Meaning not coalition, sure, it coerced the Warsaw Pact, but there was a Communist bloc. There were other communist states like China. And so the United States felt a challenge to the model of socioeconomic development and political development that was advancing. There were real challengers on the scene at that time. And it's not clear that China, that authoritarian largely state-dominated capitalism is really such a great contender. There's always a challenge in debate between liberalism and illiberalism. You can kind of define liberalism, but the antithesis to something is not in of itself a viable political ideology that can be advanced, if that makes sense. It's not a coherent set of tenets or concepts.

But to get to your question on Russia that you asked me, so I think for Russian military power, it will take quite a bit of time. I think it'll take at least a decade. And I do believe that it's not a matter of if, but a question of when. I think it'll take quite a significant amount of time for us to recover from this. That said, a decade is actually a very short amount of time for anyone who does strategy or defense planning. It's often the shortest timeline on which we tend to do defense planning, to believe it. 10 years will come and go very quickly. And I think a lot of countries or folks I talk to in the Baltics, in Poland, amongst Nordic countries, they understand that and appreciate it that however this war ends, to whatever extent Russia military power is destroyed, but they're likely to be left with a state that still has a lot of the same drives and imperatives. Might even have a different leader, but not a fundamentally different system, and that the state will eventually recover some degree of economic and military power.

And that Europe remains a secondary theater in US grand strategy, which is a big change from what Europe has been when you think about it, strategy. So pretty much the inception of the United States, I think that's a fair argument. Right? Would you not agree that up until about a decade ago, the primary geographic focus of US strategy and thinking has been Europe since the inception of this country?

Bill Wohlforth: Yeah, pretty much. I mean there's been periods of an American foreign policy that was absolutely fixated upon and fascinated with East Asia, in particular with China. But in terms of actual commitments, in terms of where the money and where the attention went, Europe's been at the forefront of the American imagination strategically for a very long time.

Michael Kofman: Yeah. I mean, even if we think about the United States becoming great power and US expansionism in the Pacific and the Philippines, that's derivative of the Spanish-American War. So the way by which we become much more of a Pacific power, in many respects, we get there because of the war we have with a dying European power. Even that history, I think, lends itself more to the interactions between US and European powers at the time. But so my sense of Russian power is that we're going to go through another period, there'll be a whole spate of writing in articles of say, "Russia's dead, and it's on its way out again." And at certain point, Russia will recover. It may not recover to what it had been, or parts of the system may change. It may come back as a power with a different balance between fairly anemic and weak economic power relative to its military power.

As I've said in other podcasts, Russia's really spending that Soviet military legacy and inherited that equipment, those capabilities. That what's probably not going to change... This is just my own assumption. I don't like essentialist arguments... But what's probably not going to change is the pursuit of status by Russian leaders, often status beyond Russian actual means. That is foundations of Russian power, and this is the more interesting and contestable argument, the pursuit of a geopolitical space where Russian interests predominate outside of Russian's borders.

And each Russian and Soviet leader, least that I've studied or observed, has had their own definition of what the geopolitical space has been. Right? For Brezhnev, it might have been the entire Warsaw Pact, right? Half of Europe. For Gorbachev, may been not the Warsaw Pact, and he was willing to let go for all sorts of reasons. But it was, let's say, the Soviet Union. And for Putin, it might be Ukraine and Belarus or another state, but not, let's say, the entire former Soviet Union. I know folks don't like that term, but it's contextually relevant here. So in whatever durations that Russia's had so far, if it's different of leadership, pretty much every leader has sought some sort of geopolitical space beyond Russia's borders as a space where Russian interests predominate and Russia has influence. And that, to some extent, leads them to try to impose limited sovereignty on their neighbors. Do you think that's a fair statement?

Bill Wohlforth: Absolutely, it's a fair statement, and it's a way they define their position in the world. I mean, all the years I spent going to Moscow and listening to people talk, it was interesting how quickly the conversation would segue from European security architecture, US-led global order and its inequities, and Ukraine and NATO expansion to Ukraine, or Russian sense that the West was acquiring Ukraine or something, pulling Ukraine away from Russia. So Ukraine was of a symbol. I'm sure there are real pragmatic reasons, obviously, for Russia's interest in Ukraine, but it was a symbol of this overall understanding of their place in the world.

But I will, Mike, notice that in your litany of Russia's sense of its extra-territorial, I don't want to say quasi-sovereign claims, or claims to spheres of influence, that was a shrinking list. If you look at the Russian Empire from 1910 and you look at the Soviet Empire to include the Warsaw Act, and then look at what Gorbachev and frankly Yeltsin thought of as the space that mattered for Russia to where Putin's horizons are, this is shrinking. And the question I guess I have for the real Russia's experts in the world is, can we conceive of it continuing? Could it ever shrink back to the borders of the Russian Federation?

Michael Kofman: I absolutely think it could. And the most optimistic take on the outcome of the war is that Russian elites learn an invaluable lesson that the elites of other nation-states have tried to emerge from imperial collapse had to learn themselves, which is they attempted to use military power to cling onto parts of the empire. And this happened with Britain in the 20th century in France as well. And so Russia, in some respects, is not that unusual in this case. A lot of folks forget that after World War II, neither the British Empire nor other France immediately take on all the ideals of post-Colonialism and the national self-determination, that you sought to advance. Just said, "Yeah, this is great ideas, United States. We don't need our empires anymore. You're totally right." No, they fought to keep what they could. And France, I think was then found clutching to Algeria, that ultimately had to let go in the 1960s.

So in some aspects, it's important to not have either essentialist arguments about their trajectory of Russia, but also to position Russia somehow unique. I always don't like that. I think there are distinct things about Russia, that's true, but very little of it can be positioned as unique. So yeah, I definitely think Russian leaders, certainly not this cohort of leadership that's still fundamentally a Soviet leadership in some ways, given those were their formative professional years. So at some point, we're going to have Russian leadership that actually does learn to define Russia's geopolitical space as Russia's actually agreed-upon political borders, rather than the borders of Russia's neighbors. And I don't know how long that will take.

I worry that, however, the war between Russia and Ukraine as Russia invasion in Ukraine, that how it ends may really constrain that. Meaning if Russia ends up with a host of permanent territorial disputes, it's occupying parts of Georgia, it ends up still occupying Crimea, it's going to be hard. Does that make sense? If you end up with whole parts of neighboring states that you have occupied, and you inherited this legacy, I don't think it'll be that easy of a transition, as we've seen Russia hasn't been able to do it in 30 years.

Bill Wohlforth: Yeah, that's a really, really good point. And that's unfortunately, so it's not so simple even in the optimistic scenario. So as a typical super-expert on Russia, you start out with a spelling out a perhaps slightly optimistic thing about Russia finally coming to terms with its imperial decline, and then end with, "Oh, but actually, they'll be irredentist. There'll be all these problems remaining." But I do want to return to the theme that we touched on briefly previously, and that is... And I'm going to say something and I have to be careful of how I put this so that I don't sound wrong... Look, I support the policy of supporting Ukraine. I think it's the right move, but I do not think the American global position hinges upon this war.

In contrast to those who define US interests in terms of the rules-based international order, I mean, I think I see the actual stakes of this war as very important definitely, but not of a kind with the kinds of revisionist challenges we faced down in the past that we feared in the past, in the sense that its outcome is unlikely to affect the overall trajectory of the US position in the world.

And in fact, I worry a little bit about framing the American interest in this war or the Western interest of the war, the Allied interest in this war, wholly in terms of the principles involved in the liberal international order, rather than a somewhat much more prosaic understanding of any war that results in a secure Ukraine and in a strategic defeat for Russia, it doesn't achieve anything like its original political objective, is a major win for the US and its alliance. And I would be very skeptical, or I would push back against an expansion of war aims in support of Ukraine over that prosaic and modest sort of portrayal of what the stakes of this conflict are.

Michael Kofman: So let me ask you about that. Do you believe that because of where the war is today, or would it fair to say that that would be true of how the war could have gone at the beginning? Let me just play out a counterfactual. Because often we're now almost a year and a half into the war, and we have a sense of it based on the current situation, but this outcome was not over-determined from the very beginning. What if the Russian [inaudible 00:25:32] operation was more successful? What if the initial Russian operation could have decapitated the Ukrainian government. What if, let's say the worst case scenario came to pass and Russia had actually successfully invaded Ukraine, and was stuck trying to occupy it and stabilize it facing a Ukrainian insurgency, but nonetheless, what if the Russian operation was much more successful?

Remember, I know you actually know this better than most folks, because you do a lot of work on predictions and probabilities and forecasting and things of that nature. And I think a lot of times people have a poor sense of the distribution and probability of outcomes, where we often assume that whatever happened had the highest likelihood of happening.

And so the current timeline that we're living in seems like the most probable one because we're in it, but that's not necessarily so. This might have been the 20% probability outcome in reality. So with that in mind, yeah, what if Russia had succeeded in the largest case of territorial revisionism, right, in Europe since World War II? What if it could then leverage that to try to renegotiate the post-war settlement? Do you think that's possible? Do you think that's unlikely? I'm just frankly asking if this had gone differently, would if this been a much more significant event? Versus where we are now where the stakes are existential for Ukraine, but your view is that they're not necessarily as significant for the United States and US position?

Bill Wohlforth: Yeah, never get me wrong. It's totally existential for Ukraine, and nobody could think otherwise. I think that you could play with the counterfactual. Because I believe, I trying to understand these forecasts, there was a strong view prior to the war that Russia would, if not fully succeed, would do a lot better than it did in terms of this mixed intelligence and military operation. But also, the expectation was that there would then be a highly costly Russian occupation. I don't know that many analysts in the US as to my knowledge, of course, you're going to know this much better than I, who really thought this would go so smoothly. There wouldn't be an insurgency, that there wouldn't be cost, there wouldn't be high occupation costs. Whatever weird and imperial views Putin and his coterie had of Ukraine, they all knew they were some highly motivated fighters in Ukraine. They weren't going anywhere.

So even in your scenario that it works, they would've been bogged down. It wouldn't have looked pretty. And I think what you would've likely have seen, again, playing with the counterfactual, is a pretty serious buttressing of NATO similar to what you've seen. Now, there would've been dissension in the West. There would've been those Allies who would've said, "Oh, look, I mean, this is a done deal. Let's deal with Russia. We can't put heavy sanctions on Russia." But I cannot see that outcome that you spelled out occurring without a fairly strong bolstering of the American NATO position and the rest of NATO, which would've ended up being seen as a ultimate strengthening in the overall Western position, as sad as it would've been for Ukraine. Again, I'm just bailing that one out.

Michael Kofman: Right. So from your point of view, even the worst case scenario wouldn't have been that bad. I think to some extent what you're saying is, "Hey, Transatlanticists shouldn't have worried so much." It would not necessarily led to a wholesale relitigation of the post-war settlement in Europe or restructuring European security architecture. NATO might have been bolstered. Finland and Sweden might have still immediately applied to NATO. Right? Nonetheless might have even expanded in that case. And on the one hand, it would've been a serious shock to the system, but Russia would've also gotten bogged down in Ukraine. And although disastrous it would've been for Ukraine, it's very difficult to see how Russia's geopolitical situation, economic situation, military position would've been improved by virtue of that war. Is that your argument, or am I making sense?

Bill Wohlforth: That's the argument, although I'm very sensitive to the bias we have in constructing such counterfactuals, and as you know, I just wrote an article against the idea of multipolarity that suggests a very robust overall US position so long as the United States remains on the defenses. And so I'm likely biased here in my thinking through of this counterfactual. To push it from the other direction, I mean, it could be that there would've been a bandwagoning of countries saying, "Oh my God. Russia's pretty awesome, we need to deal with them." Or it would've conceivably led to more dissension and divide and rule potential for Russia, for a strong-seeming Russia in Europe. Countries in Europe that are even now more inclined to take Russian sensibilities into consideration. May have been even more so, and may have been more willing to cast some legitimacy upon the Russian or learn to live with the Russian operation. But I still see that as unlikely because I just don't think it would've been a neat operation. I don't think it would've been smooth and clean and easy for Europeans to swallow.

Michael Kofman: So going back to predictions ahead of the war, I think nobody I know in the Russian military journalist community thought that was going to be smooth, or that Russia would do well in the occupation phase. I think this is one of the most interesting things how mission legends get built. So I'll make two statements that that might be a bit [inaudible 00:30:55]. First, I don't know anybody, any serious analyst of the subject that wrote ahead of the war that the Russian military would defeat Ukraine or occupy Kiev within three days. And I actually don't believe folks in intelligence wrote that, either. I think that that's a legend that's emerged now, and it's used as this ahistorical foil. And I don't think that when the records on this get unsealed, even though people like General Mark Milley back in January, right, ahead of the invasion said that they could. There was a possibility as one scenario, and that was the Russian plan within a few days to decapitate the Ukrainian government, it could have happened.

Just speaking from my own experience working in adjacent field, the words "will happen" typically do not appear in intelligence documents. In fact, typically, just saying that's not something you usually expect to see. This degree of fortune-telling and prediction, this sort of confidence and certainty. And more importantly, they usually typically deal with a host of scenarios. But that being said, I do think the consensus was in the whole community and probably intelligence circles that Russia would defeat Ukraine in a conventional war, and the differences were simply how long it would take. Someone like me thought maybe a month, maybe two, something like that. Somebody else might have thought two weeks. And I don't seriously think anybody thought three days, but there's a conversation on predictions and counterfactuals. And you've dealt extensively with this. I actually really, really enjoyed some of your writing and work on forecasting. And I'm curious the way you look at this, because I don't think that the best case scenario for Russia was ever seen as that great.

I think most of us believe that the Ukrainian will to fight would really show itself in the occupation phase for a couple reasons. First, just looking at the setup ahead of the war, Ukrainian military conventionally looked really in an inferior position, but more importantly, there wasn't good evidence of significant Ukrainian preparations to defend, particularly to defend against exactly the type of attack that the Russian military was planning to make. A lot of the Ukrainian preparations were focused on defending the Donbas, and they had left parts of the capital largely undefended, and the South opposite Crimea not really prepared to defend as well. And so it was difficult actually as an analyst, to structure their argument the other way. Somebody in policy asked you, "Was a military with 150,000 troops deployed with this kind of potential plan of attack, how's that align with another military that's capable but doesn't seem to be positioned in the right places? Doesn't seem to be mobilizing? A lot of units still seem to be in garrison, not now well set up for the defense."

The reason I'm telling you this whole story is to me, when it comes to predictions, it's often less important whether you get the prediction right. Just a personal view, especially because experts are usually not very good at predictions to begin with. It's one of the paradox of expertise. To me, the biggest question is did you get it right for the right reasons? And you've been doing this all longer than I have. So you live through the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union and folks saying that they predicted it versus not. And you've also seen this recent episode the last year and a half. How do you reflect on this? What does it matter? Does it matter getting the predictions right or does it matter actually getting it right for the right reason?

Bill Wohlforth: Oh, I couldn't agree more. Actually, to be honest, this is an event, and I think this is widely perceived because of the broadcasting and dissemination of intelligence analysis by the United States before the war. This is widely perceived, I think in the general public, the New York Times-reading public as an episode in which the forecasting did pretty well compared to other cases. And I think that's not only true with respect to the actual prediction, I think it's true with respect to how those were expressed. So people tended to express them, I think, in careful ways. In your case, you're somebody who normally is very, very careful about forecasting. And so I know we all debate about credibility and reputation, but you had a reputation, at least I had been following you, of somebody who was quite careful. So when you were as clear as you were, and I know there were others as well in that lead-up to the war, that was a really important signal.

But absolutely what matters is if you are going to predict something happening, it matters the causal mechanism or the process through which you expect this is going to occur. So I remember the old days, everybody was talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union. And people were claiming, "Well, this guy predicted, that guy predicted it." And if you looked at actually some of the causes, I mean, Andrei Amalrik famously wrote a book called Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? His causal mechanism was a war with China. So he was skeptical about the survival of the Soviet Union, but not for the right reasons.

I mean, Trotsky predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union into an uprising of a working class against a new bourgeoisie Stalin had created. I mean, he was a great predictor. He was off by 50 years, and he had the wrong causal mechanism. I mean, you can go on and on and on with this. In this case, though, in this case, I saw a debate about a lot of the things that really did turn out to matter. I saw a debate about Ukrainian resilience, the degree of Russian fifth columns and intelligence operations. How many collaborators would there be? How hard would they fight? Et cetera, et cetera. So people were talking about the things that turns out to have mattered.

Michael Kofman: Yeah, absolutely. I think that some of us probably freighted the Russian intelligence operation, the Russian infiltration more, assumed it was going to pan out better for Russian intelligence services. Others assumed that Ukrainian society and volunteers would have a much stronger role, a much stronger influence. And actually, that ended up being true, at least in the early days relative to the regular military. No, for sure. And the conversation, I think, was actually generally pretty smart. Two extremes where I thought that predictions were poor for the wrong reasons. The first was the assumption that there's nothing that the United States or Europeans could do in terms of material assistance to Ukraine that would make any difference in the run up to the war. And there were some arguments like that, because we saw that US provision of intelligence and material systems did make a significant difference over time.

Although timeline-wise, I don't actually think that the United States could have really played this very differently. Given when we knew about Russian intentions, when we could get alignment with European allies on that subject, the positions that the Ukrainian government and key European states took on it, and when the war actually began. If you play it out, that's a very compressed timeline for the whole cycle of deliveries of heavy conventional weaponry training. That stuff, it takes some time, basically. Especially if you have no infrastructure to do it. Meaning you can't play this out from the spring of 2022, when that infrastructure was coming into place and being put in place by your UCOM, and assume that that infrastructure was in place October/November in the run-up to the war.

But the other extreme argument was, I would say a wish casting argument that we don't need to look at the correlation of forces. We don't need to look at quality, quantity and all this. We should just assume that will to fight is this magical force. This leads me to the esprit de corps and the cult of the offensive depiction and the will to fight assumptions of militaries heading into World War I, that will to fight is really all that matters. And I think the view I take is, yeah, it's significant. I mean, it's absolutely necessary, but it's not sufficient. Militaries with strong will to fight lose all the time. That's just the reality of it. And even if you look at the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine in '14, '15, Ukraine military and Ukraine volunteers had will to fight. Battle of Ilovaisk and Battle of Debaltseve were now victories. That's how we got Minsk elements, too. You can't just freight will to fight with all your hopes and preferences.

Bill Wohlforth: Sure, I think that's right. I think there's also sometimes a failure. I completely endorse that and from my perspective, but I think there's a larger case, and in some case with predictions there with those who did not believe this was going to happen. Despite what I just said about most of the debate, as I read it, was truly about the things that ultimately turned out to matter. But there was another piece of it from people maybe less closely following events, and that was they just could not believe that Russia or any country would really embark upon the conquest of a huge country in the center of Europe. We'd gone through a period in which the idea that big, huge conventional interstate wars are a great thing to try. It'd been a long time. We don't see a lot of wars like this in recent times.

And so it's just that failure to imagine that Russia could really do this thing. And it's a really interesting question when you talk about our interwoven conversation about what this war means for the future, about what will be the lessons taken? I mean, from today's remove, it really does seem like it's a warning sign. Here we have a lesson that doesn't augur well for those who are contemplating territorial conquest as a great solution. Now, I might be wrong. It could be this is opening the Pandora's box to a new set of wars. But it also could well be that when this war ends, it will be seen by later historians as a harbinger of actually an era in which countries are less willing to embark upon such adventures. I hope the latter is true. I don't know which one will be, but it's hard for me to see third parties watching this and saying, "Yeah, conventionally just taking huge swaths of territory against the country, particularly one that the United States and its allies might aid, that's a great idea."

Michael Kofman: Yeah. And that goes to the conversation of, well, China learning from us. I think the challenge is just from my own experience in the field is that military establishments looking at the same war come to different conclusions about what happened and why. About the role of technology, how it was employed, and basically derive different interpretations of the military balance in their scenario and their context from it. And unfortunately, the other fact is that a lot of times, political establishments look at the war and they'll say, "That's not applicable to me." Or they'll say that their contingencies are rather different than that context. Or Chinese might well look at Russia and Russian military performance, say, "That happened to them because of these and these challenges and these assumptions and the way they did it, but the Chinese military is different. The situation over Taiwan is different, and what have you." You hope that observers take these generalizable lessons about the uncertainty and the indeterminacy of using force, right?

How it's leading with risk. And the cost of using force in such a way in international system, the United States and other countries can really punish you. And just keep in mind it can go very wrong. That's the basic value. No matter how much military power you have, it can go really wrong. The United States learned that in Afghanistan and Iraq, right? Russia's learned that once again the hard way. It's a lesson that they've learned before, just most recently in Ukraine. We're just short. Hopefully China won't have to learn it, but we have still won very significant power on the board that we're wondering, are they going to take the smart path and learn from the failures of others, or are they going to wait to learn from from their own failure?

Bill Wohlforth: Yeah, there I'll have to A, hope, and B, rely on our excellent coterie of China experts to help inform that question about what lessons they are learning. I'm thinking of excellent scholars like Jessica Weiss and Taylor Fravel, who study these things. Maybe they can get a beat on how they elite, at least over there, is having this conversation.

Michael Kofman: Getting back to how we started the bit of a conversation on polarity and what this all means for the United States. I know some folks listening to this might not be the crowd that's typically interested in international security or polarity, and those sort of questions are distribution of power. That's fine, but it's always good to get a little bit out of the Battle of Bakhmut, just a little higher-level and think about what it means from a strategy standpoint. Is your sense then that relatively speaking, the United States position is pretty secure? The opportunities for countries like Russia and China to engage in real revisionism that will benefit them, increase their power are pretty limited. That US has huge structural advantage in the international system. It's not actually about measuring GDPs.

I think I'm personally pretty convinced of this argument in China. I think that it could in some cases conceals more than reveals about the advantages the United States has, if you just measure GDP as raw convertible potential. And that the system as it's set now, it's likely set to endure with the United States still being by far the most powerful country. The only question I have there is what about actual US ability to use its power and convert its power in pursuit of its preferences and interest, right? Power is outcomes, the ability to actually get what you want. Because if there has been a visible decline, I think, over the last 20 years in one department for the United States, it's not in actual power. United States is a very dynamic country. It's in ability to dictate events and to get what it wants with the power it has. I don't know how you view that. Maybe you have a different perspective.

Bill Wohlforth: No, I definitely detect the same thing, namely more instances in which the United States has been able to get what it wants. Even among allies, even among countries which it should have leverage. We see lots of evidence of this, but I'd just like to make one little proviso on the first premise, which is the overall US position. The overall US position, what we're saying is way better, and way more secure and way more stable than the positions of similarly situated countries in past international systems, bipolar and multipolar ones. That's why we think multipolarity is a myth. That's why we think it's a bad term to use to describe the current situation. On the other hand, the US position in Asia in particular is far more difficult than it was 15 years ago. Nobody can deny that the task this United States has set itself, but to provide a credible defensive allies in Asia is way more difficult than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Absolutely no question about it.

But we shouldn't exaggerate the challenge by making a false comparison to previous international systems. Now on power as capabilities or resources versus power as influence, no question about it, that matters. But here you have to control for what is the country trying to do. And what happened with the United States, as all of those critics from the camp of grand strategic restraint will note, is when the Cold War ended, the United States did not simply decide to hold onto what it has. The United States actually, and many of its allies actually ramped up their expectations, ramped up their agenda, adopted a far more ambitious view of what they could do in the world.

And guess what? It didn't fully work. It ended in the sands of Iraq, it ended in the mountains of Afghanistan. It ended with pushback from various countries all around the world, including Russia and China, who didn't like all these new norms, didn't like R2P, didn't like the democracy agenda. And we got the sense of, "Wow, you're pushing back." But don't forget what we were doing was not the core interest of defending the fundamental position of the United States. It was expanding it.

So when I say that, so when you're measuring the power as influence of the United States as opposed to the power of capabilities, I still think you have to include not just the ability to convince people to do things, but also the ability to persuade people not to do things. And when you're a status quo power, you're basically trying to persuade people not to take a big run at upsetting the international system. And on that metric, I think the United States still retains massive advantages over the revisionist states. You yourself mentioned in the comparison to the Cold War, this entire ramified networks of alliances has been there for 75 years. It's deeply entrenched. If you're a revisionist, you're up against that. That's not easy, and it's not probably going anywhere. The point of almost being like a structural feature of international politics.

Final point is that that alliance, yes, China has a big GDP. Yes, China is a huge manufacturing power, but that alliance with the United States at its center includes most of the world's richest and most technologically advanced countries. And if they decide to turn the screws on you, even though Russia's surviving better than we thought against these sanctions, if that group of countries decides to cut you off, it's not good for you. So all of those things all summed together suggest a much more robust status quo than the multipolar or even the bipolar rhetoric tends to suggest.

Michael Kofman: I think it's a great argument. Let me win at it first. I think it's a very good point that folks fail to appreciate that today, countries are pretty much status quo powers. There aren't these other countries out there looking to join revisionist, and those trying to pursue imperialist evangelism. How do you know you're in the 2020s instead of 1920s? This is going to be a very silly point. Did you see Hungary and Romania also invade Ukraine at the same time as Russia opportunistically, hoping to take back territory or to expand, to encompass their minorities? The significant Hungarian minority, for example, in Zakarpattia in Ukraine? No, you didn't. Okay. It didn't happen. Never even occurred to them. So you don't see other countries looking to join China. If China wants to seize Taiwan, they don't have anything to gain from it, or they're not revisionist in Asia-Pacific. And much the same in Europe.

The other point I say is, yes, they're good critics of the US overreach and over-extension, which is pretty natural when you're in a system and you have this much power, and you can pursue the kind of policies you want, but they don't have a great case necessarily of how their policies or their strategy would've led to significantly better outcomes than those counterfactuals. They have a good criticism of what happened. They don't necessarily have a great case of how the alternative would've been better. And then the bottom line question is, yes, the United States engaged in overreach. And these are fair criticism, but the pursuit of this kind of international order gives US foreign policy coherency to some extent. And United States political establishment, at least since World War II, just hasn't been one that can simply work off of raw interests and balance of power. And at least, it's a much better selling point to middle powers that are the principle stakeholders in the system.

You're offering a lot more. It's one of the biggest advantages United States over countries like China. Because if the US case is, when it came to Russia or to China, listen, other countries have to join the United States, have to impose sanctions, have to do all these things that are economically difficult for them that involve cost and burdens. Why? Because we don't want to see a decline in US power, or we don't want to see a loss in US hegemony or US presence in that particular region. It's not a great selling argument. That's not a great argument to Japan or some other country. There's a lot more you have to offer and you have to explain, and those countries have to be stakeholder in something more than just your dominance or your presence or the balance of power for you in that region.

Bill Wohlforth: Sure, I buy that. Totally fair point. But that does not mean that this order that we're talking about needs to constantly expand. You can be an order supporter, and you can also be conservative. And I say conservative in the sense of status quo-oriented rather than pugnaciously and aggressively expanding it. And not only when I say expansion, I'm using that in two meanings. Both horizontal expansion. "Let's get more countries in, let's force or strongly incentivize more countries to democratize. Let's punish those who don't." But also vertically, in the sense of assuming more and more elaborate institutions that have more and more intrusive capability, more and more intrusive authorities within states. Those two moves were very controversial.

By the way, there were not just controversial in Russia, China, et cetera. They were controversial in democracies like India and Brazil, and they were controversial in domestic politics here in the United States and within other democracies. So everything you said, there's an order, there's benefits in it for you. We will try to play by the rules, too, and be constrained by it as well, unlike back in the George W. Bush administration. However, that doesn't mean we have to be constantly expanding it.

Michael Kofman: No, it's a perfectly fair point. There's a real balance between being overly activist and trying to build democracy and nation-state building in Iraq, Afghanistan, or try to expand democracy via military intervention, and pursuing policies that to some extent drive extreme change. The states perceive it as undermining their sovereignty of the nation-state system. And then release antibodies to it, right? That's one side, maybe, of the argument. And another side of the argument of, "Yeah, we don't need alliances, we don't need this. We just abandon the current structures we have. And if we just return American power back to US borders, to continental United States, somehow the rest of the international system will look better," or things of that nature. And I don't want to brand that as an isolationist argument, but it's essentially an argument about retrenchment, and significant retrenchment rather than a balanced approach.

Bill Wohlforth: Yeah. And I think it's gaining some popularity, at least the overtones of it appear to be gaining some popularity in some American political circles. We're seeing this in areas of a little bit on the Democratic side, but mostly on the Republican side, with respect to the aid packages that we're sending to Ukraine and some sense of a building potential opposition to that. We have, of course, a big intellectual contingent in Washington DC and elsewhere, wants to argue for a grand surge that they call restraint. It's usually a little more restrained than just abrogating all of the alliances. But there are those who think, "Really, we should get out of this business." I think it'd be a huge mistake.

I think the overwhelming intellectual case is really, really strong that these allies are net assets to the United States, even when they're a pain, even when they don't build the kind of militaries they should, even when they exhibit some of the shortcomings in terms of preparation for contingencies, like what we're seeing in Ukraine. You have been quite eloquent on some of the limitations of our European partners. With all of that said, going into a situation, going into a revisionist challenge, going into a problem that you might have with a posse of really, really rich, really, really capable allies is a lot better than going in alone.

Michael Kofman: That's very well put. All right, Bill, last question. This is going to be very short, and this is a very, very self-interested question from me, you and other colleagues in terms of our own professional job security. Is the field of international security going to survive this current decline in Russian power? Will China be enough, given how central Russia and the Soviet Union, and comparisons of whatever competition or contests we are in to the Soviet Union and to the Cold War and Cold War studies has been in the past? As the case studies of this field has allowed the evidence in this field, since we tend to use history as an empirical basis for a lot of the arguments, are we going to do okay? Is China enough for the field to sustain itself if we see a real decline of Russian power, absence of Russia from the scene, at least for the next decade? This is not a very serious question.

Bill Wohlforth: Well, I got two answers to that. One is history is history. And all the data we use is history. And Russia has done its thing and contributed mightily, often for ill, in terms of the amount of wars that's been involved with to that history. So that's there forever and ever. So you need to know about Russia for that. And then when it comes to whether China's enough, believe me, if you read what is being said in Washington DC about China, in terms of the alarmism, about the challenge that country presents, believe me, it seems to be plenty.

Michael Kofman: All right, let's very fair. On that note, let's continue the conversation another time. Thanks a lot... We've been talking over 50 minutes together... For spending all this time with me today, and I hope those who are listeners of the podcast will tune in for the next episode. Take care, everyone.

Bill Wohlforth: Thanks for your time.