[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Good evening, Vice Chancellor.
Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the 2023 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Oxford, hosted by Linacre College.
The Tanner lectures are now in their 45th year and were established by the American scholar,
industrialist and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner in creating the lecture ships, professor Tanner said.
I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind.
I see them simply as a search for better understanding of behaviour and human values.
Appointment as a Tanner lecturer is a recognition of exceptional, distinguished and important scholarship in the field of human values,
and that description is fully justified in the case of tonight's lecturer, Sir Laurie Bristow.
Celery is president of Hewes Hall, Cambridge.
And as many of you will know, Hughes Hall is the sister college to Lineker at Cambridge University.
Likely, the Hughes Hall is a post-graduate college, home to academics from all disciplines and one of Cambridge's first truly co-ed colleges.
Laurie became the president in 2022.
Prior to that, he had a long and distinguished career as a British diplomat.
He joined the Foreign Office immediately after completing his PhD at Cambridge.
I just learned on Ezra Pound announces and after postings to Romania, the EU, Turkey and a period at the NATO Defence College in Rome,
Lauri became Ambassador to Azerbaijan in 2004, deputy head of mission in Moscow in 2007 and Director of Intelligence and National Security in 2012.
He returned to Moscow in 2016 as British Ambassador.
Most of us would assume that there could be no more challenging diplomatic role than that.
But remember that Hercules was given 12 near impossible feats of bravery and guile.
And in my story so far, celery has only had nine.
In 2020, he was appointed Regional Ambassador for Cop26, with responsibility for China, Eastern Europe, Central Asia,
Middle East and North Africa, and then in June 2020, Lauri took over as ambassador to Afghanistan, two months before couple fell to the Taliban.
The Taliban took over control of the Afghan capital at stunning speed,
leaving the embassy scrambling to pull dozens of its staff and thousands more Afghan allies out of the city.
The Foreign Office reported that Ambassador Laurie Bristow stayed behind to help orchestrate and evacuate the remaining Britons,
including personally processing visa applications at the airport.
I can think of no one better to talk on the subject of human values and foreign policy.
Please join me in welcoming Sir Laurie Bristow. Okay.
Well, thanks very much, Nick, for that introduction. And thank you, everyone for the invitation this evening.
I will talk for probably about an hour if I see eyes starting to glaze over.
I know that I probably outstayed my welcome, but it's quite a complex subject that I want to to cover this evening.
So the title of the lecture is Human Values and Foreign Policy, and I will talk mostly,
I'm afraid, about the conflict taking place in Ukraine today with some excursions around that.
This lecture is about the meeting place between power and values.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a war about both.
Ukrainians are faced with a stark choice between the freedom to choose their own destiny, or to submit to the will of ageing KGB men.
Russians at present, unfortunately, have no such choice. This is, I think, also a war about the future of Russia itself.
Putin's world is one in which the strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.
It's in a world. It's a world in which disputes are resolved by extreme violence.
It's a world in which the crimes carried out by Russia's armed forces reflect the Russian way of war,
but also the nature of the Russian state under a leader who is now indicted by the International Criminal Court.
The purpose of today's lecture is not to catalogue those crimes or to moralise about them.
It's to consider what role, if any, values and ethical considerations play in foreign policy in today's world.
These are, of course, the reflections of a practitioner, not a theorist or an academic.
And so I joined the Foreign Office, as Nick said in 1990.
Diplomacy at its heart is a contact sport. It's about getting things done in the world as it is.
Our lives. The lives of many generation of diplomats are shaped were shaped by greater forces.
The first was the end of the Cold War and the events of 1980 1991.
I left the Foreign Office in 2022, as the unfinished business of 18 1991 was returning with a vengeance.
The second big thing was the space opened up by the end of the Cold War.
For liberal interventionism, that is, promoting democracy and the rule of law and humanitarian intervention to prevent genocides and atrocities.
In 1997, the UK elected a government committed to an ethical foreign policy.
It created the Department for International Development, separate from the more transactional concerns of foreign policy and trade policy.
That same government took the UK into the US led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The third Shaping force was the UK's struggle to arrive at a stable sense of our identity in Europe.
That isn't the focus of this lecture. Nevertheless, I think the freedom to choose one's own destiny is present in the Brexit slogan take back control.
For much of the 1990s, freedom and democracy were over seemed to be on the march.
Across large swathes of the world. Countries transitioned from authoritarianism to accountable governance.
The European Union and NATO expanded. It seemed that a Europe Holland free might one day be within grasp.
Ukraine, of course, became the hardest test of that.
In 2005, after the Orange Revolution, Ukraine declared an ambition to join the European Union and in 2008 sought a membership action plan for NATO.
The 2013 Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity were a response to President Yanukovych,
his dithering over Ukraine's European Union Association agreement.
Under intense pressure from Russia. Russia's response was to seize Crimea, intervene in the Donbas and in 2022 to launch a full out invasion.
In 2003, I worked on the planning for post-conflict Iraq.
I was the last British ambassador to leave Afghanistan in 2021.
The evacuation from Kabul Airport in August 2021 closed a chapter on state building by military intervention.
The cost in lives, in money and political capital was immense.
We failed in Afghanistan. We failed because we lacked a coherent strategy to achieve multiple goals, which were not necessarily mutually reinforcing.
Countering terrorism. Countering insurgency. Countering narcotics.
Promoting human rights. Discouraging migration. Migration.
State building. We also failed because we lacked the stamina to see things through.
Afghans, especially Afghan women and girls, are paying the price.
Russias war on Ukraine is a different sort of conflict. For the first time since 1945, a war of aggression is raging in the heart of Europe.
We are seeing daily challenges to established laws and norms concerning the treatment of civilians and combatants.
We've all but lost the complex network of arms control treaties, confidence building measures,
channels of dialogue, and the mechanisms that help to reduce the risk of great power conflict.
Since the height of the Cold War. Now is surely the time to test some assumptions about the relationship, if any, between geopolitics and values.
We need to dig deeper into the relationship between values and statecraft.
If we are to understand what is happening in Russia and what it means for us.
This is, I think at heart, a Russia crisis.
I think of it as the latest episode in Russia's wars of succession, which followed the demise of the Soviet Union,
and in some respects, I think can be traced a lot further back than that.
But it also has its roots in the Russian leadership's view of the West and of the post-Cold War order shaped in Russia's view,
in the Kremlin's view, by the interests of the West. We need to understand what motivates Putin and the people around him.
To understand, of course, is not to excuse. Putins invasion of Ukraine is based on, I think, a combination of realpolitik values and emotions.
I think its a toxic brew of entitlement, resentment, fear, opportunity and legacy building.
Putin has a certain idea of Russia and of its place in the world,
and of his own role in fulfilling Russia's destiny as a unique civilisation and a top tier great power.
He places himself in a lineage of strong leaders Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great to a still, I think, ambiguous degree.
Stalin.
Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine at first, and still in terms of de-nazification, drawing explicitly on the cult of the Great Patriotic War,
the narrative that Russia inherited the Soviet Union's moral status and geopolitical rights as the country that defeated Nazism.
This now extends to include countering Satanism. Russia as a bastion of socially conservative values, holding the line against Western decadence.
These values are set out explicitly in Russia's most recent foreign policy concept, published in March this year.
Meanwhile, of course, Putin's Russia suppresses civic initiatives relating to Russian citizens imprisoned and killed in the Soviet Gulag Memorial.
The non-governmental organisation, set up during the glasnost era to bring light to the crimes of the Soviet Union
against its own citizens and to document the human rights abuses of today's Russia,
was closed down immediately after the 20 to 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Any moral equivalence between Hitlers and Stalin's murderous totalitarianism is undiscussed all in all with Russia.
This reflects how the Kremlin uses highly selective historical narratives about
the Great Patriotic War to build domestic legitimacy and shape geopolitics.
First a one dimensional presentation of what led to Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Second, a sense of entitlement to a say in all matters of international security, of any consequence,
and to a sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945,
and by the suffering of the Soviet people, and the role of the Red Army in defeating Nazi Germany.
And third, of course, present day Russia's claim to be the successor to those entitlements.
These lies behind the resentments and grievances unleashed by the events of 1989 91 and since.
This is also about great power competition with the United States.
Putins attack on Ukraine has its roots in his determination to push back against
what he sees as U.S. unilateralism and systematic disregard for Russia's interests.
The defining expression of this, of course, remains his Munich Security Conference speech in February 2007.
For those who don't know it, I think it's still the best guide to Russia's foreign policy.
It's a long diatribe against U.S. unilateralism.
So Putin's goals in the war to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign, democratic country, to redraw the security architecture of the Euro Atlantic region,
and to rewrite the rules of great power competition primarily with the United States.
Ukraine has been the site of successive strategic failures for Putin, going back to the Orange Revolution in 2004 to 5.
Why does he keep coming back to this question?
I think it's because what happens in Ukraine is fundamentally about what happens to his vision of Russia.
Putin sees an independent, democratic, pluralist Ukraine as a threat to Russia's security.
It is, but not in the way he thinks. It's not because a democratic Ukraine is a threat to Russia.
It's not because a democratic Ukraine might attack Russia. It clearly won't.
But because Putin's 22 years in power have been about establishing a secure authoritarian regime in Russia itself and
preventing the emergence of systems of government that contradict this model in Russia's former imperial assumptions.
So the Kremlin's rapidly escalating domestic repression and imperialism reflect Russia's
failed transition from its Soviet past to a democratic and law governed future.
In my view, Putinism offers no meaningful answers to the systemic challenges that Russia faces now or in the next decade.
Building a solid 21st century economy, addressing terrible demographics made worse by war,
Covid and the emigration of many of Russia's brightest and best.
Managing differences and possibly building cooperative security arrangements with Russia's neighbours.
Above all, I think now maintaining legitimacy and public consent when the time comes,
as it surely will, for a generational transfer of power in Russia.
Russia struggle to be a great power rests on a remembered world.
When the Soviet Union could compete on equal terms, more or less, with the United States.
Objectively, Russia can no longer do so with the US now or with China in the future.
But Russia's decline does not make it less dangerous. In fact, it's the opposite.
I think these insights should be obvious to any policy analyst and a competent policy analyst, of which Russia has no shortage.
But Russia has rarely in its history been a country where contradicting the leader has been a good idea.
Today's Russia is a country of doublethink, as in the Soviet period, in both domestic and external affairs.
Evasion and lying have become highly developed instruments of statecraft.
Putin's Russia lies on an industrial scale, drawing on Soviet habits and practices.
Authoritarian states lie because they can where there is no accountability.
Departures from the truth have no immediate consequences.
As in the Soviet Union, the systemic dishonesty pervades both strategy and policy formulation and the general political culture.
It contains the seeds of its own destruction. A key reason for the strategic failure of Putins invasion of Ukraine is that
the system he built is chronically incapable of telling the truth to itself.
Bad information, bad intelligence, bad analysis, and weak accountability lead to bad decisions.
I described Putins war as a war of values. I'll turn now to what those values are, where they come from, how they're reflected in policy and strategy.
I'll start with Dmitri Medvedev. I attended his inauguration when he became president.
He was president from 2008 to 2012. In 2008.
He said freedom is better than unfreedom.
I agree, and I've been privileged to know people who have upheld that cost that idea at great cost to themselves, many of them Russian.
That same Dmitry Medvedev has also said more recently that Russia could use nuclear weapons to keep control of the territory.
It's taken from Ukraine. It's easy to moralise about foreign policy, as if the values of Western liberal democracies are somehow universal.
What can we agree on as the values that are fundamental to being human?
How do we codify the values that underpin the conduct of states within their borders and beyond them?
Who, even for these purposes are we make great trouble with that pronoun when trying to write this this lecture?
I'm afraid it goes all over the place. So start with the key document, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This sets out what its authors saw as the fundamental rights of all individuals everywhere in the world.
It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. Moscow and its satellites abstained.
The Soviet Union did agree to the Helsinki, Finland in 1975, including its far reaching human rights provisions,
as the price of agreement to the 1945 borders and to the principle of non-interference in each other's internal affairs.
The Kremlin clearly had no intention and did not fulfil its commitments regarding the self-determination of all participating states,
all respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.
But the Helsinki Final Act did open up space for human rights activists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere to hold their own governments to account.
For a brief period at the end of the Cold War,
it was possible to see a convergence between the West and at least Mikhail Gorbachev's vision of the future of the Soviet Union.
But the Malta Summit in December 1989, a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
Gorbachev challenged President George Bush on his repeated assertion that what was happening in Eastern Europe was a triumph of Western values.
Bush responded, why does that bother you so much?
I see glasnost as a Western value, openness as a Western value, representative government as a Western value, pluralism as a Western value.
Gorbachev replied, we have those values too. Why don't you call them eastern values?
James Baker, Bush's secretary of state, suggested. What about calling them democratic values?
Gorbachev agreed. That's good democratic values. That's it. This is in stroked all that's telling.
By the way. A few months before this exchange, in June 1989, the Chinese leadership violently suppressed Democratic dissent in Tiananmen Square.
Gorbachev had visited Beijing a few weeks previously as the crisis was building.
Gorbachev and the Chinese leadership drew completely different conclusions about how to deal with growing demands for political and economic freedom,
and to the crisis of legitimacy that accompanied those demands.
We are still living through the consequences of those choices. Under Putin, the Russian state has taken a dim view of Gorbachev's choice.
Gorbachev's choices and their consequences, and assiduously shaped domestic opinion in Russia to do likewise,
primarily to support the state narrative that Putin raised Russia from its knees after the chaos and the humiliations endured under his predecessors.
By the time of his death in 2022, Gorbachev's reputation was far higher in the West than in Russia.
Boris Yeltsin's legacy is also troublesome.
The Yeltsin Centre, in your Catherine book captures the unresolved contradictions and the unfinished business of today's Russia.
Visitors pass through seven rooms each,
bringing to life a turning point in Yeltsin's period at the top of the Soviet and then the Russian system in the 1990s.
Unit then into the Hall of Freedom. It's a large room bathed in light and dominated by Eric.
Bülent offers paintings for border freedom. Visitors are invited to record or write down what that word means to them.
The Yeltsin Centre is detested by Russian nationalists and communists.
On New Year's Eve 1999, Yeltsin suddenly and unexpectedly stood down, handing power to a still obscure official called Vladimir Putin.
In his first address as acting president, Putin declared that the state will stand firm to protect freedom of speech,
freedom of conscience, freedom of media, of the mass media. In February 2022, Russia's few remaining free media outlets were immediately closed down.
A final act in the ending of the freedoms that Russians and other Soviet citizens caught sight of in 1989 to 91.
That word freedom keeps turning off. It's bound to do so when discussing the rights and dignity of human beings,
and the values and power structures by which societies organise themselves and regulate relations between themselves.
I'll turn now in a bit more detail to how states articulate their core interests and values.
So governments regularly publish formal documents setting out the risks and the opportunities the nation faces.
The values the government believes the nation espouses and what it intends to do to protect and advance them.
The language used in these documents tells us a lot about the things that governments most value and the things they most fear.
I want to draw attention to two examples close in time and context, but you'll see why I think.
So first of all, President Biden's October 2022 national security strategy published eight months after Putins invasion of Ukraine.
The strategic goal is set out very clearly. We want a free, open, prosperous and secure international order.
We seek an order that is free in that it allows people to enjoy their basic universal rights and freedoms.
It's open in that it provides all nations that sign up to these principles an opportunity to participate in and have a role in shaping the rules.
It's prosperous in that it empowers all nations to continually raise the standard of living for their citizens and secure,
and that it is free from aggression, coercion, and intimidation.
The strategy articulates Biden's vision of defending democracy around the world.
Even as we continue to do the work at home, better to live up to the idea of America enshrined in our founding documents.
The preface sets out a global landscape of strategic competition to shape the future of the international order.
The strategy asserts the right of the US and likeminded countries to shape those rules.
Biden's National Security Strategy was published against the background of Russia's
invasion of Ukraine and of intensifying great power competition with China.
It seeks to move on from the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
It reflects domestic factors the insurrection of January 2021, a looming election in 2024,
a fracturing of consensus about U.S. support for Ukraine and,
of course, wider culture wars and the politics of identity with which all democracies a wrestling.
And it sets out a broader view of national security going beyond great power
competition to include the big emerging challenges of climate change and pandemics,
and the risks and opportunities presented by emerging technologies.
My second example is the joint statement of Putin and XI Jinping in February 2022, during Putin's visit to Beijing, shortly before he invaded Ukraine.
It too describes an increasingly contested global environment.
The conclusions drawn are, of course, very different, with one important exception.
The statement leads off with the centrality of democracy in today's world.
I picked out a few sentences, but it's worth reading the whole thing, I think,
as an expression of the gathering confrontation between democracies and authoritarian states.
So to quote from the joint statement, democracy is a universal human value rather than a privilege of a limited number of states.
Democracy is a means of citizens participation in the government of their country.
It is only up to the people of that code, the country, to decide whether their state is a democratic one.
Democratic principles are implemented at the global level as well as in administration of state.
Certain states attempts to impose their own democratic standards on other countries
to monopolise the right to assess the level of compliance with democratic criteria.
To draw dividing lines based on the grounds of ideology, including by establishing exclusive blocs and alliances of convenience,
proved to be nothing but flouting of democracy and go against the spirit and true values of democracy.
What both the Chinese party state and Putin's authoritarian nationalism mean by this is that the state exercises sovereignty as it sees fit,
free of external influence. Democracy operates at an interstate level among sovereign equals.
Criticism of an opponent's democratic credentials or human rights performance, is a political lever in a constant trial of strings.
Rather than an attempt to ground the behaviour of states in the rights and preferences of the citizens in whose service the state ostensibly works.
According to Russia's most recent foreign policy concept, published in March this year,
Russia's foreign policy is based on the sovereign equality of states.
But Putin's view of Russia rests on a further premise. There's only a small number of truly sovereign great powers the US, China and Russia itself.
By the way, the UK is not one of those great powers, and I've been told that in terms repeatedly in Moscow,
all other states have limited sovereignty, whether they like it or not.
They must learn to live within the penumbra of the dominant great power.
The democracy of sovereign nations is therefore decidedly limited.
A well-known Russian political commentator, I won't name him, but the Russian ists in the room will know of him once said to me,
you, we are talking as if great powers and small countries have equal rights, but we both know that is not true.
How can we use the same words and mean such radically different things?
Authoritarian systems, of course, organise and legitimise power in completely different ways from liberal democracies.
Yet authoritarian leaders often expropriate the emotional resonance and the values embedded in words to legitimise their power.
As George Orwell pointed out. Words mean what the state needs them to mean.
Black is white because it's expedient for the party that black and white, or what the party decides they are, despite the evidence of our eyes.
This is not just a matter of different definitions. The totalitarian state carries out acts of violence on language itself.
Consider the reality that lay behind key words used by the Soviets,
which have been imported into the political lexicon of Putin's Russia and other authoritarian totalitarian states.
Democracy. Elections. Freedom.
Law. Human rights. Terrorists. Imperialism.
Aggression. Fascists. Peace. I'll turn now to how we manage relations between those sovereign nations.
How are we attempt to maximise the benefits when interests align and manage conflicts when they do not?
Western politicians and diplomats often refer to the rules based international system by which they.
We generally mean the interlocking systems of norms, institutions and agreements that help us manage difference and cooperate to achieve common goals.
There is, of course, a huge debate about where the boundaries of that system lie.
I have been told by Sergei Lavrov, in terms that there is no such thing as the rules based international system.
We made it up to serve our own interests.
So Russia's March 2023 foreign policy concept calls the rules based international system the imposition of rules,
standards and norms that have been developed without equitable participation of all interested states.
Behind this line is an increasingly stark parting of the ways about rules, their origins and their purposes.
Western governments and their allies tend to see the rules based international system as a way of getting things done.
They uphold it, but also seek to adapt and develop it to address a rapidly changing world.
That scene from Moscow is precisely the problem.
Our interests are diverging, and the rules based international system is seen in Moscow as an instrument used by the West against Russia's interests,
in particular to interfere in other states internal affairs,
to replace uncongenial regimes through military intervention and so-called colour revolutions,
and to conduct economic warfare through sanctions agreed outside the Security Council and therefore beyond the reach of the Russian and Chinese veto.
One of the most significant developments in the post-Cold War world has been the doctrine of responsibility to protect.
This grew out of the lack of adequate instruments to address genocide, war crimes,
ethnic cleansing, and the crimes against humanity committed during the 1990s.
The Doctrine of Responsibility to Protect was universally agreed by the United Nations General Assembly of the 2005 World Summit.
In the summit photograph, Putin stands between Prime Minister Blair and President Bush in the front row.
What responsibility to protect means in practice is fiercely contested.
Even more fiercely contested is the principle of political leaders legal accountability.
Russia, like the US and China, is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
By definition, responsibility to protect can, in extreme circumstances, limit or override the exercise of sovereignty within a state's borders.
This has become a point of rupture for Putin. Even before the formulation of Responsibility to Protect in 2005.
The NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was seen in Moscow as a violation of international law and the humiliation of Russia.
Putin frequently returns to this and to NATO's interventions.
Intervention in Iraq in 2004 and in Libya in 2011.
He was outraged by the overthrow of the gadhafi regime. In Syria.
In 2015, Russia took a far more assertive approach to keeping Bashar al-Assad in power to protect him from accountability for war crimes,
to challenge directly US led interventionism, and to discredit the US as a security provider of last resort resort in the region.
For Putin, though, the biggest humiliation of all has been Russia's serial failure to pull Ukraine back into its system of values.
Putin is convinced that this is the result of external interference by the US and its allies, not the free choice of Ukrainians.
The Russian leadership concluded that liberal interventionism constituted a threat to the Russian state's sovereign rights,
both at home and in countries where it sees its interests as being engaged.
For the West. Humanitarian intervention. Means preventing genocide.
For Russia, it means regime change. We say Russia flouts the rules based international system.
Russia says the West shaped bend has bent or broken the rules or the system at will, according to our own needs and desires.
So what we then see is Russia mirroring our actions in asserting its interests and seeking to force the West to respect those interests.
We change borders in Kosovo. Russia does so in Crimea. We overthrow regimes in Iraq, Libya, and, as Putin sees it, in the former Soviet Union.
Russia supports its clients in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere.
Russia sees the purpose of the post 1945 system with a Security Council veto at its heart.
I was preserving the ability of great powers to protect their interests by constraining competitors freedom of action.
Seeing the US serially break out of those constraints, Russia has become increasingly impatient of constraints on its own sovereign freedom of action,
to the point where Russia is prepared to risk bringing down important parts of the international system,
even where Russia is a co architect of that system.
A particular example that I had to deal with in Moscow was the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Invasion of Ukraine is a systemic assault on the UN charter and on a full range of international and bilateral treaties to which Russia is a party,
at least one of which Putin personally signed and whose purpose is to keep the peace.
Yet Russia's inherent weakness vis a vis the United States now, and China in the future,
suggests that breaking out of rules and constraints risks being self-defeating in the long run.
It invites overreach with the consequences we are now seeing play out in Putins invasion of Ukraine.
Given Russia's rapidly growing dependence on China,
it's worth briefly summarising how Russia's approach to sovereignty and the rules based international system differs from that of China.
Both China and Russia are seeking to bring about a shift in structural power away from
the US and away from their understanding of the rules based international system,
which they see is largely reflecting and serving United States power and influence.
A key difference between Russia and China is that where Russia increasingly rejects the rules based international system,
China wishes to adapt the multilateral system to its own interests.
Where Russia is about breaking out of constraints, Chinese community of a shared Future for mankind is about adapting the framework of
international relations to suit China's needs and emergence as a global leader.
Faced with the consequences of a disastrous war, rupture with the West, and an inexorable path towards junior partner status with China,
Putin's Russia is repudiating the last vestiges of Gorbachev's 1990 exchanges with George Bush about shared interests and values,
and retreating into an obscurantist and proto fascist Eurasian ism.
Framing geopolitical choices as democracy versus authoritarianism, as several Western governments have done,
I think presents a misleadingly binary view of the values and interests in play.
It disregards frictions and misalignments of interest and values within the West itself,
such as, for example, Turkey's checkered history of democracy. It disregards misalignments of interest between the autocracies,
and it downplays the scope for transactional cooperation between democracies and autocracies based on partial alignment of interests.
Good examples include the World Trade Organisation, the Iran Nuclear Agreement,
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and arms control treaties between adversaries.
Democracy versus authoritarianism also disregards how states understand their own hierarchy of interests.
An example is India's decision to hedge over Russias war against Ukraine.
Putin's 2023 foreign policy concept names India alongside China as a friendly, sovereign, global centres of power and development in Eurasia.
I suspect that India doesn't quite see it that way, but for India,
the strategic challenge from China comes further up its list of priorities than Russia's war on Ukraine, necessitating a careful balancing act.
The number of countries voting with Ukraine in the United Nations General Assembly remained pretty much solid in the first year of the war,
but around 140 votes.
The Global South on the basis of those votes, largely seems to agree that Russia's actions are a gross violation of international law,
but has shown little inclination to take practical measures.
This reflects, in many cases a different hierarchy of interests, and in some cases, dependencies that cannot be hedged.
In particular, food security. We need to recognise, we, um,
that many countries see the United States and its allies as shaping the rules based international
system to pursue their own interests without sufficient regard to the pressing concerns of others.
Not all are autocracies.
Subramanian Shankar, India's external affairs Minister, put the point very clearly whether or not Western politicians agree with it.
Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems.
The is caught in the middle between a rules based international system made in the West's image and interests,
a revisionist China and a revanchist Russia. Keeping your head down and avoiding an unambiguous choice can be the least bad option.
The propaganda of authoritarian states, of course,
feeds on real and perceived injustices committed by its opponents and the grievances that these generate.
Russia depends heavily on what about ism? I've had extensive reason to study this over the years, including when it's been applied to me.
Um, that's the Soviet era propaganda method that applies implies that all states routinely misbehave,
and therefore criticism of a particular state, particularly by its opponents, is groundless or hypocritical.
The purpose, of course, is to obfuscate, not to support clear thinking.
But it can be very, very effective with audiences who are not inclined to take at face value the claims of Western
governments that they operate to higher ethical considerations than Putin's violent dictatorship.
Meanwhile, Russian propaganda has had some success in tapping into narratives of Western neo colonialism.
Again, the 2023 foreign policy concept repeatedly lays claim to Russian and Soviet contributions to decolonisation.
Russia has not yet been seriously held to account for framing what I believe is a neo imperialist war as a defence against Western neo imperialism.
A rules based international system is not, of course, the same thing as a values based international system.
This is particularly important to bear in mind as global systemic risks escalate, in particular around climate and global health.
Power is shifting in the world in complex ways.
Climate change and the energy transition are central to this, particularly with regard to resources and environmental goods.
I think also just coming over the horizon. Intergenerational justice is also entering into the mix,
particularly around the question of who pays the cost of remediation for past emissions and mitigating the impacts of present and future emissions.
We are leaving behind. I think we have actually already left behind a world in which the industrialised democracies
can plausibly present themselves as the custodians of a rules based international system,
which best serves the interests of all. The rules based international system of the future.
If such a thing exists,
we'll need to focus much more clearly on regulating mutual dependencies so that all can benefit from access to resources and to the global commons.
I want now to turn to the west itself. If we learned nothing else from the last year,
it's the strength that we gain from the willing pooling of sovereignty in support of our values and interests.
The war in Ukraine is one in which alliances and staying power are critical to the outcome.
It was not a given that the West would hold together despite the alignments of interests and values.
The resentments of European and particularly German defence and industrial policy, on which Donald Trump fared, have not gone away.
For Europe. In strategic economy, autonomy will remain little more than a slogan unless backed by the political will and the
geopolitical capacity to cope with the dilemmas presented by great power competition,
whether independently from the US or in a genuinely equal partnership with the US.
This is particularly so for the UK. Taking back control implies that the UK can and should behave like a great power and rule maker,
oblivious to the UK's relative weight and to the web of mutual dependencies between the UK and its closest neighbours, trading partners and allies.
More than any comparable power. The UK has since 1945 built its security and prosperity on alliances and networks.
The transatlantic relationship and the relationship with Europe are the two
fundamental poles in the interplay between our values and our geopolitical interests.
They are not alternatives. They cannot be disregarded and they cannot be played off against each other.
In a time of conflict. Mobilising, mobilising and maintaining public support depends on a powerful and unifying understanding of what is at stake.
That is at its starkest in war. What are we fighting to protect?
For Ukrainians, the answer is clear. They're fighting for their lives, their dignity, and for a sense of nationhood.
That Russia's invasion has done more than anything else to crystallise.
In the final days of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, it was starkly clear that neither Afghan leaders nor Afghan,
Afghanistan's international supporters could offer their publics any convincing answers to that question.
This lecture has of necessity focussed on Russias war against Ukraine.
I mentioned at the beginning Putin's goals in Ukraine. It's too early, I think, to predict how the war will end,
but it's not too early to discuss what is at stake and what an acceptable outcome might involve.
Election cycles are already starting to crystallise the choices that need to be made, particularly in the United States.
I offer not much more than some starting points for discussion.
Putin's declared war aims have evolved in response to the failures of Russian strategy.
But his underlying aims will not change, and I think cannot change because they reflect his view of the world and Russia's place in it.
The Western democracies interests are to a large extent the polar opposite of Putin's.
We want Ukraine to survive and to become a democratic, law based society that is part of the European mainstream.
We want aggression to fail.
We want to keep open the prospect of a Russia at peace with itself and its neighbours, and able to see through the long process of Soviet transition.
We want to avoid direct military confrontation with Russia while that happens.
Until Russia itself fundamentally changes and the outcome of the war needs to underwrite a democratic Ukraine security needs.
The West has an enduring interest because this is inescapably linked with Europe's security.
An outcome where Putin's Russia is the dominant military power in Europe is clearly a direct
challenge to the interests and values of all democratic countries in the transatlantic alliance.
To achieve this, we need a stable security system in Europe, including effective guarantees for Ukraine.
This will not depend on agreements with Putin. His word is worthless.
It will involve sustained deterrence of Russian aggression.
That in turn, can and entails a continued United States commitment to Europe's security,
and that entails a serious European commitment to Europe's security.
Since the main focus for any future US administration is likely to be China.
We need to develop our thinking now on how we plan to deal with Russia after the war ends.
Things have happened that cannot be forgiven or forgotten. Russia will be a dark and troubled society for a generation or more.
We need to articulate a clear and positive alternative future for a changed Russia, especially for younger Russians.
We need to involve Ukrainians in that discussion, however difficult that is.
We need to keep channels of communication open, and we need to think in generational terms.
War tests the nation's values to the limits just as it tests individuals.
We no longer live in a world in which the West can take for granted that Russia's violence against Ukraine
and against the United Nations Charter will translate into support for Western policy initiatives,
or for a Western led concept of the rules based international system.
We need to acknowledge and learn from the damage we did to ourselves and our standing in the world from the interventions in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere and how they ended. If we believe that a world with rules, with rules founded in values,
is better than a violent, free for all or system shaped by the Chinese Communist Party,
we need to take seriously the interests and aspirations of those, particularly in the Global South,
who do not believe that the current system is in their interests.
Above all, if a rules based international system is to survive,
it needs to address more clearly our generation's custodianship of global and public goods for future generations.
As for the Western democracies, we need to say what we mean and mean what we say about our capacity and willingness to live up to our values,
as well as to defend our interests. As George Kennan, the US ambassador in Moscow, pointed out in his 1946 Long telegram.
Our ability to counter authoritarian and totalitarian ideas depends on the health and figure of our own society.
We need to build a clear public consensus about what is at stake here.
To set out clearly the values that are capable of guiding us through election cycles and generational transition.
Human rights have a place in foreign policy because they are fundamentally about the relations between the individual and the state.
What happens when the might of the state is in conflict with the freedom and dignity of the individual?
The freedom to speak, to think, to love, to disagree.
The freedom to live in truth. This is what authoritarian states find so challenging in Putin's Russia.
It's so challenging. It's driven the country to war. I want to close with an observation on integrity in public life.
I do not just mean whether politicians are authoritarian or corrupt or lying to us.
I'm also concerned with intellectual honesty, clarity of thinking, and the courage to tell things as they are.
We each take seriously the responsibilities and freedoms of institutions like the one we are in today to educate people,
to think and act with clarity and courage, and to learn to value the freedoms that we enjoy.
Recent events have offered us ample opportunities to reflect on the dangers of telling ourselves the things that we want to hear,
while shutting out evidence that calls them into question. Honesty and integrity are existential issues.
This concerns us all. If we value these things. We need to understand what is at stake and to act accordingly.
Freedom needs to be nurtured and protected. Whether it's ours or someone else's.
We need to exercise freedom with responsibility. Or we risk ending up with neither.
Thank you. Naughty.
Thank you. That was an extraordinary exposition. I particularly enjoyed the way that you developed the idea of, um,
how the world's rules based system must take account of the interests and the
imperatives of global South in order to have the authority to tackle the authoritarian.
So thank you for what is really, really interesting series of ideas.
Uh, colleagues. Uh, sorry. He's very kindly agreed that he will answer, uh, questions.
Um, he did mention to me there may be some questions which he finds it difficult to answer.
Is quite prepared to, uh, to listen to any questions in my life.
So I think there are some things. That again.
Um, do we have somebody from Lineker who could. Oh.
My apologies. Wow.
Might want to be on this side. So it's another speaker.
Okay. That's a difference, right? Uh, please put your hands up if you would like to throw a question.
Sorry about this. My name is Roy.
Good. Thank you for a scintillating lecture because I want to on two things I'd like to ask.
One is, could this not have been avoided if NATO had not been so utterly pusillanimous?
I know Ukraine was not and is not yet a member of NATO, but NATO surely has an interest in preserving the integrity of European countries.
Why did it not step in and say do not will will create a no fly zone?
Don't invade Ukraine. They sat there with a view to avoiding worldwide problems and the result has been absolutely disastrous.
The other thing I just wanted to mention was that I'm.
You know, the wish does not come to this with clean hands.
America has never hesitated to overthrow regimes and prisoners that it didn't like in the past.
And the one thing about communism, I suppose, is that what it does do is to look after its people, provided that they follow the rules.
They get they get food, they get housing, uh, they get, uh, you know, well-paid employment and so on.
And then something perhaps, that we can learn to listen, but we don't always look after our people in the way that we should.
So I very much welcome your comments. Well, how long have we got?
Um, I'll take the last bit first, because I just want to state very,
very clearly I disagree with the idea that, um, the least the Soviet communist people or the system or,
you know, the, uh, some other communist systems that still exist in the world look after their people, maybe, maybe in a certain limited extent.
Um, let me just illustrate the point. Um, I got to know before she died.
Um, Alexia, the, um, the founder of the Moscow Helsinki Committee.
Um, you know, people like Ludmilla, I mean, they they paid with their lives, essentially, um, to, um, to stand up to the Soviet system.
We should never forget that. And I think we should ask ourselves, what would we do in that situation?
I think there's a natural wish to believe that you would do the same.
Um, but I really, seriously contest the idea that somehow Soviet communism was benign in most respects.
You know that that's probably one that we should continue at great length so that the the point about later that I think is a very,
very important, um, uh, one around operational policy.
So my answer to the question comes in two parts. Um, one is, um, how to manage the current conflict.
Um, the, one of the huge achievements and it is actually achievement, I think, of the last year,
um, is that we have avoided direct military conflict between NATO and Russia.
That did not happen by accident. It happened because it is clearly not in either side's interests.
Um, and the reason for that is that once you get on an escalation ladder, uh, amongst nuclear powers, you are in very big trouble very quickly.
I mean, seriously. Um, so, you know, if you can describe it as a proxy war, I don't think even that description really works for me.
But, um, in terms of the, the core, um, security interest to avoid war between Russia and NATO,
this is, I think, um, possibly the most important thing of all.
Um, and deterrence is held in the last year in that respect.
The argument I, the thing I find more troubling about this is this I was in Moscow in 2008, at the time of the Bucharest NATO summit.
Um, and you'll remember that there was, um, a proposal on the table to give, uh, membership Action Plan status to Georgia and Ukraine.
Um, I met I probably shouldn't name him.
I met that evening, um, Russia's top political military analyst at a reception and asked him, what do you think?
You know what? What's what's your take on this? He said, you do know this means more, don't you?
I said, come on, come on. What are you talking about? Now this means war.
And then he explained why. Um, and, you know, he was talking about, um, Georgia, but also Ukraine.
My take on the the progress summit declaration, it was the worst possible outcome to a very difficult question,
because it did neither one thing nor the other. Um, it, it, it poked Russia in the eye in something that we knew was deeply sensitive to them.
But by not proceeding, it said to Russia that we didn't really mean it.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing sort of layman's terms that struck me as a very,
very bad answer to a question that we probably would have done better not to have asked in the first place.
Um, in this line of business, you either do things or you don't.
You don't mess around at the edges. Hi.
Uh, my name is Ulrich. I'm a researcher at the computer science department here.
Um, you spoke a lot about kind of the clash between the values that are embedded in the sort of the big political system,
especially like China, and, you know, the West and, uh, and Russia.
Um, I was wondering if you could say a bit about how you think these conflicts are being affected by, uh, technology,
not in terms of kind of AI going forward and so on, but just in terms of the way a particular system is built in America,
uh, for example, then becomes adopted, uh, in the rest of the world, and then even, you know,
if you try to ban, then people can still access it through particular VPN services and so on.
And how that sort of affects kind of this sort of global battle between values.
It's it's a really great question. Um, and in terms of the technology, I very, very rapidly get out of my chair.
So I should probably invite you up to, to try to answer the question. So, um, so a couple of things to think about there.
Um, first of all, the, uh, the questions that are coming up on us very, very fast now around autonomous weapon systems, um,
where there is limited or no human agency in the um, and, um, decision times, um, decision times can be very, very short and unintuitive.
I've ever worked in policy in a government.
Um, the one thing that you always do is play for time, to give yourself time to think through consequences,
you know, to to generate options that may not otherwise be there. I'm just a an anecdote that belongs in the late Cold War but is now back with us.
So it was the debate around your missiles. So the deployments of SS 20s, um, Pershing and Cruz.
Um, this was a very, very big crisis indeed. Um, because the decision making times, once you have missiles in flight is down to minutes or seconds.
Um, you know, trying to think of, you know, the biggest decision you will ever make.
And you might have 60s to make it in. I mean, that's the size of the problem and the loss of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty,
I think is, um, I was trying to explain to my younger colleagues in Moscow at the time why this mattered.
Um, you know, it's it's, um, it sounds technical. It isn't.
Um, I think the other point I want to make here, it's something I was, um, touching on and hinting at through the, um, uh, the whole of the lecture.
It's what even is the field, um, that we're talking about?
Um, we're talking about rules to manage conflicts of interest, um, and to enable cooperation.
Um. You know, people like me, you tend to think in very militarised paradigms of great power competition and how you deal with that.
One of the things that we discovered in the last decade, including, you know, through the rise of,
you know, the big at the internet giants, you know, the metres, Facebook's and so on.
Um, is um, the, uh, the weight, the agency of private sector actors here who regulates those people who decided that
Elon Musk would buy the world's most important information and communication tool?
No one, I wasn't consulted. Um, you know, none of you were.
There is no regulatory framework around, um, the emerging problems.
The other point, um, again, I think it's important to come back to because it is so fundamental to the, I think, the shape of the rules based system.
Um, for the next few decades is specifically around climate change and mitigation.
What are we going to do against time scales in the next 5 to 10 years?
Um, to head off disaster? Um, you know, we have had a succession of comms, you know,
the companies of state parties where we've successively described the problem in even more scary ways, but we still haven't got the answers to it.
And so I think that there's a whole series of questions in there about intra and inter-state,
private sector, private choices, technological solutions where we honestly don't really have the tools yet.
Thank you very much. Very interesting talk. My name is Egor from the New College.
And a matter of science. So my question is, I think you mentioned one keywords in the lecture, which is a value.
And I think the definition of value is quite a complex.
It's a combination of many things, including culture.
And culture actually can be impacted by the geography difference since in this planet geography lingua so different.
Do you think in one day we might have a shared a value which hopefully one day will reduce a lot of conflict?
Or do you think we are never going to have a shared a video or there one might be something acceptable?
Araba in terms of value that we can share. Thank you.
So this is the point I was trying to get out with, with reference to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It is a, you know, a fundamental document in the entire UN system, which is global, universal, and we all own it.
Um, it's equally clear that you would get utterly different, um, explanations of what that document actually means.
Now, um, you know, it was it was written, published in 1948.
You were in 2023. Um, I'm.
I am not an optimist or I am not an idealist, put it that way. I think.
My provisional answer to your question is that in the real world, for the foreseeable future,
quite a lot of what we're trying to do is to find workable ways forward.
Um, you know, take, for example, you know, the, uh, of course, the thing that, um,
certainly I focus on most, which is the, uh, the emergence of China, the decline of Russia.
You know, this is still unfinished business of the failure of the Soviet Union.
And however you wish to describe what's going on in the United States and Europe.
Um, that is going to generate an enormous amount of friction for the foreseeable future, both between and within those countries.
There is, I think, no universal description or model that will lead us to say, right, this is right.
This is, you know, it's we're not going to agree on that.
I think we do need to do is find ways to manage risk, to manage conflict better than what we've got at the moment.
But also as as I was implying, to widen the field, actually to what we even think, um, you know, is in discussion here.
Thank you very much. Hello.
Thank you. My name is pressed. I'm from Afghanistan and currently I'm an academic Western summer World College.
I'm very interested to know your views on what needs to be done in Afghanistan,
considering the situation and deadlock that we are in and what particularly the international community can do in a way that is not just.
Considering its own self-interest, the self-interest of Afghan government and women that you earlier mentioned,
and to address the gender apartheid and human crisis at this moment.
Thank you. Thank you for that question and for having the courage to stand up and ask it.
Um, I'll start by saying that, um, I am still profoundly shocked by how the, um, the operations in Afghanistan ended.
Um, you know, it's, uh, it didn't need to be that way.
Um, there were, I think, times over the last 20 years where we could and should have exited militarily from Afghanistan.
My own view is that we had long since passed the point where, um,
the application of military force was in any way an answer to the any of the questions there.
The way it was done, I think was, um, beyond negligent, um, in terms of the way that the Doha deal was structured, the way that the, um, uh,
the with the military withdrawal was handled and frankly, the lack of planning for what,
you know, it shouldn't have been too difficult to work out what happened when that took place.
Um, what would I propose instead? Wind the clock back if you're going to do a deal.
If you think that the answer is the exit.
The military exit from Afghanistan depends on a political deal, as I do, the time to do that was much earlier.
Much earlier than Doha. Um, you know, the problem we all have is that the Taliban, um, to some extent represent part of Afghan society.
We also need to be very clear that, you know, it was a part of Afghans, of a movement, um, heavily supported from abroad.
Let's put it no more specifically than that. But saying to an organisation like the Taliban, essentially we're leaving.
Um, we would like you to negotiate with the government that, you know, we consider legitimate.
And if upheld, we're not going to force you to do it. Um, we're going to let a whole load of prisoners out of jail and guess where they're going.
Um, and we're not even going to involve the government of Afghanistan in this discussion.
What do we think is going to happen? So for the future, um.
Uh, I think the immediate priority is to find ways of addressing both the humanitarian catastrophe.
I mean, this is a country now where I forget the figure, but almost the entire population is under food stress.
That's on us because of the way that we exited.
Um, we need to find ways of avoiding losing an entire generation of Afghan girls and actually boys, too.
Um, so that I'm aware of, um, involved in a number of, um, things that might help with that.
Um, but we're not going to get there. Um, you know, until there's something happening that changes the fundamentals in Afghanistan.
Um, and again, I don't see that happening anytime soon because of the nature that the means by which the way in which the Taliban came to power.
So I guess my final point is do not let this fall from the headlines.
Um, I was really struck, um, on the first anniversary, um, last year, you know,
the 15th of August, the anniversary of the, um, the collapse of the government.
Um, just how quickly it spiked in the news and then disappeared.
As if this isn't our problem anymore. It is our problem. We own it, and we need to address it as far as we can.
Thank you so much. My, my name is Doctor Nadia Vania, and I'm fellow clinical fellow.
And, um, I'm also a quarter research fellow at the Department of Education, and I'm Ukrainian.
I fled the what was my child last year?
Uh, first of all, thank you very much for speaking about, uh, this very important talk, uh, topic.
And thank you for speaking about Ukraine. Thank you for bringing this, uh, topic for the, uh, uh, West commute to the West community.
My question is, because I'm a educator myself.
Um, you touched upon a very important topic today, uh, um, just briefly about, uh, educating young people to be critical thinkers.
And, um, my question is, uh, do you see any new approaches, any innovative, um,
techniques, I don't know, innovations, how to educate young people to be really critical,
uh, critical thinking, uh, young people, to be mature citizens of this, of this global world,
not to have this, these awful wars and conflicts anymore, if it's possible.
Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Um.
A couple of things there to think about. Or maybe two poles, or maybe three poles, actually.
Um, one is the experience of living and working in Russia, um, under Vladimir Putin, over, you know, large parts of the last, however many years.
Um. It's very, very easy to react and say, you know, you're wrong.
You've been lied to by your government. You're the victim of disinformation by your government.
I think for us, if if you want to be serious about this, you need to get inside the the traumas,
the resentments, the anger, the emotional factors that have driven a country to that position.
Um, I have a very strong view, by the way, that, um, foreign policy practitioners,
political pressures do not talk and think enough about the role of emotion in policymaking.
It's a very, very powerful driver. Quite often the most powerful driver, far more important than reason or knowledge, I think.
Um. The other point is a rather more self-reflective one.
It's about looking very seriously at what goes on in our own societies.
And I'm I was trying to hint at this without saying it openly.
I think one of the things that we in the universities need to get really,
really serious about now is about how we educate people not only to do critical thinking, however we understand that, but also to have disagreements.
Um, you know, there's I think there's a huge risk in an environment,
particularly an educational environment where all you get reflected back at you is what you already think.
It's a bit like the algorithms of how some social media work.
You know, it pushes you further and further down a rabbit hole.
Um, I don't really want to get into the details of, you know, some of the subject matter, but we all know we all know what it is.
If these institutions are not about, um, critical examination of what is true and what is false, I really don't know what they're about.
Um, for specific example, a country that I think does this well or is certainly hold up that held up well.
This is Finland. Um, so a country where the national security concept has embedded in it, um, information integrity.
Um, and essentially I can't remember the wording, but essentially intellectual integrity.
Um, and of course, the Finns have had to learn this the hard way over many years.
One final point, if I may. Um, I forgot I mentioned this in the speech.
I'll come back to it. Um, it's thinking about, um, probably the most difficult thing of all about post-conflict work is truth and reconciliation.
Um, you know, because of the things that have been done, um, in Ukraine by Russians.
Um, you know, that is going to be appallingly difficult. Um, but again, I think in an environment like this,
we can and should be thinking now about what it would take to get Ukrainians and Russians past that.
That discussion. Thank you.
My name is. I'm, uh. I'm Polish. Um, I do see things from a Polish perspective.
I have to admit,
you gave a wonderful analysis of how people in different countries and and different historical backgrounds and cultures can use the same words,
the same language, and mean something completely different.
Um, again, from my perspective as a as a poll, putinism is only the latest unfolding of something.
You mentioned that the earlier in your in your talk that you can go back quite a long way.
Um, Solzhenitsyn, by the way, so Ukraine should do should not be an independent country doing it.
You know, we admire him greatly. I have been increasingly pessimistic about the situation in Central and Eastern Europe, but also concerning China.
We talk about education and giving, um, educating people to express their views and learn how to disagree and so on.
But as I said, I've become increasingly pessimistic. I wonder if you can give some crumbs of comfort to someone like.
Like me. Uh, because, um, I've lost.
I thought you I mean, your talk was absolutely wonderful, but it confirmed to me and my pessimism.
Thank you. I think this is one pessimist to another. I'm going on here. Um, well, what can I usefully say?
Um, I think it's just to think in the right timescales, amongst other things.
Um, uh, you know, in the career that, you know, that Nick kindly outlined at the beginning, the time that I spent working in government,
um, you know, things came and went in waves, things that sort of looked really, really important at one point may maybe less important.
That's in the nature of how government and politics and, you know, life works.
Really. Um, I think start with the, the stuff that really, really matters.
Um, it's a serious discussion about the damage that intellectual dishonesty does, um, to individual societies and to politics.
That's what these institutions are about. Um, a bit of um, also I think, um.
Uh, resilience. You know, it's going to take a very, very long time to get back to or to get to something that, um.
I hesitate to say we can live with, but something, you know, something we can live with in Russia.
I mean, it's about as far as it's possible to imagine it going. I mean, the the, um, the comparisons aren't exact.
Um, and in some ways, they're unhelpful. But we have been here before with Germany in 1945.
Um, and with other examples. So, you know, I'm not saying under any circumstances, um, that, you know,
we will we the West will be invading Russia or occupying it or doing anything.
It will be Russians themselves making that transition when the time comes, if they ever get there, actually.
Um, so I think my, my point there is, you know, trying to keep a crumb of optimism but also realistic optimism.
It can be done. It has been done. But think about, you know, the fundamentals that need to be in place for that to happen.
Also a bit about institutions. So um, I've worked a lot over the years with institutions like the British Council, the BBC World Service.
Um, there's a lot to say, I'm sure. Um, quite a lot of the recipients of their attention would say an awful lot about them.
Um, that I wouldn't agree with, but just consider this.
Um, so when I was in Moscow as deputy ambassador, then as ambassador, the FSB closed the British Council.
They had to go at it. And in the end, they got it. Why did they do that?
It wasn't because they considered the British Council to be a nest of spies, which is what we said was the reason.
It's because they're afraid of what it stands for.
Um, so I think, again, coming back to what we know works, which is patient dialogue, you know, patient, um,
application of principles, drawing people in listening to the other side in these arguments and thinking into generationally.
And one of the things that really worries me is that we have got a generation now of Russian voters coming,
you know, to actually now entering into adulthood, who were born under Vladimir Putin.
You know, I'm not quite sure what we do with that, but that's the reality.
That's the reality we're going into. They've never known anything else.
And their their understanding of what happened before is filtered through putinism.
Maybe. This is the last question, right?
Um, which, um, I'm sure is going to be an easy one to, to snatch back over the next.
But, uh, and it reflects to some degree self-interest, if you might.
Very simply. The different parts of the Ukraine and Finland, from what must superficially appears,
be relatively similar starting point to point in 2022, where Putin said in a big match the right to whether it wants to join NATO.
Yeah, right. Well, that's a short one to end on. I think everything is about context.
Um, so there are countless historians in the room who can tell everyone a whole lot more than I can about what led to the Winter War.
Um, you know, why are the Soviets behaving the way they did, why they got such a bloody nose from this thing and all the rest of it?
Um, but there's there's a pragmatic as well.
There's a practical answer to these questions. So for, um, almost what, the entirety of the Cold War, um, you know, Finland was,
um, essentially part of the West in all respects apart from military.
Um, that, in my view, as a as a diplomat, as someone having to deal with this, the reality of the situation, that's a good outcome.
And if you're not going to war on the whole, that's better than going to war because of the,
you know, the costs and damage and the unpredictability of that. Um, the situation with Ukraine is now completely incomparable, by the way.
Um, you know, if you look at the reactions from the Kremlin to Finland and Sweden turning around
generations of foreign policy in a matter of weeks and getting to the point where they said,
actually, now is the time to join NATO. The reaction from Moscow was essentially nothing because there's nothing they can do about it.
Um, and you know, the point here is that, um, it's a major strategic loss for Russia,
because essentially, if you look at the military dispositions around the Baltic now,
I mean, how could it not be, um, it's a gain for those countries and a gain for the underlying principles.
Um, I can't see any of that that's comparable with the situation in Ukraine.
Um, you know, there's a lot of debate has been for the last year about whether we should now bring Ukraine into NATO.
I think this is beside the point. I think the task for the foreseeable future, um, is to make it impossible for Russia to win militarily in Ukraine.
And when the war comes to an end, whatever that is, to make it unthinkable for Russia to attack again until Russia changes.
I mean, that is kind of the thing.
But there's another point to this as well, which I'm, I, um, uh, looking at our Ukrainian colleague, it's what Ukraine does with the opportunity.
It's an opportunity that is being bought, that's being bought at enormous cost, enormous cost.
And it's not over yet. Um, so, um, uh, when I was director for the region in London over a decade ago,
the sorts of conversations we were having with our Ukrainian colleagues, I'm not giving away any secrets here.
What kind of, you know, you you're really hard to help.
Your hard to help because you're not great in governance reforms.
You're not gripping corruption. Um, you know, you're putting people in jail who may well belong there, but where's the due process?
Um, you know, Ukraine will get one opportunity and one only to take the dividend of what it's achieved at enormous cost over the last year.
Uh, which is saying, actually, we disagree. Um, you know, we wish to choose our own destiny, and our destiny is that way, not that way.
You have a natural great erudition and scholarship.
I think you will join me in the morning. A wonderful time of writing.
But for those of you who, like me, want to go back and listen to that at a little slower pace so you can absorb more.
Um, it should be available online fairly shortly through the Investees podcast page, uh, and also through the Tanner lectures web page.
Um, for those of you who will now be coming back to Linacre College to join us for dinner.
Uh, dinner starts at 8:00. Um, I might point out to you that there is a demonstration on South Fox Road this evening outside the,
uh, Sciences department, and you may wish to go down,
um, uh, via via mansfield road rather than up, um, uh, Fox Road and alongside Fox Road in order to avoid getting tangled up in the crowd.
Uh, but for those of you who are joining us for dinner, I look forward to seeing you back in Ithaca College very shortly.
Thank you.