History’s Not Just About Great Men: Peter Frankopan on Iran and Ukraine

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1:40The United States is seen as a predator. China, it's a big gorilla that people are scared of. Russia too. History is not just about great men, although it might look like that at the moment. It's about raw logistics. It's about understanding geography and geology and working out how you can find a way around that. Peter Frankopan, the historian making sense of a shifting world order. Do you think that Putin and Trump have something in common in that these wars with Ukraine and Iran respectively are with much less powerful countries, but have they both underestimated the kind of power that those countries can nevertheless wield?

2:18No question. Powerful men often miscalculate and think that their muscles and brainpower are stronger, better than anybody else's. And the challenge in a system where you have a single powerful leader who expects everyone to bow down in front of them is they're very hard to get to listen to advice. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:43We're at a moment right now when the US-Iran war is again resurgent with ripple effects across the Middle East. and for global shipping and trade. That war has already cost tens of billions of dollars. And at precisely the same moment, there is another longer running war, one that is much less in the international headlines, but which also has implications beyond the countries actually doing the fighting, Russia and Ukraine. I've been thinking a lot about the combined effect of these two conflicts. And as far as the Ukraine war is concerned, there is something very notable that has happened in the last few months.

3:26The way Ukraine has been striking Russia is really having an impact economically, as well as on the battlefield, where there are many thousands of Russian casualties every month. There are also links between these two situations that are worth exploring. The tactics being deployed, the relationship of Iran and Russia, the comparison to past moments. And that is what led us to Peter Frankopan for this episode. He is a historian, but one who has charted the rise and fall of middle as well as great powers, who's plugged into China and Central Asia, and also Russia, Ukraine and the Middle East. He's always looking for undercurrents that tell a wider story.

4:12So transport connections, trading routes, pipelines that reveal where new markets are being found. Peter is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and the author of a book called Silk Roads, which he updated on its 10th anniversary last year. He's also written The Earth Transformed, all about climate and battles over time for natural resources and land. He is especially worth listening to if you're interested in drawing out common threads and working out what we need to brace for next. I hope you agree. Hi, Michelle. Hello, Peter. How are you? I've had a very busy year, but you caught me in the absolute sweet spot where I've got lots of things I want to do and I'd rather be talking to you than doing them.

5:00I feel guilty, though. We're taking you away from thinking big thoughts and probably your next book? No, I've got a manuscript I've got to hand in in a month. So I do need to slightly get myself under the cosh. But I mean, I don't work without a deadline. Yeah. So I'm almost there. OK, well, I look forward to seeing that come out. Why don't I just start by telling you what made us reach out to you? It's essentially because your work has so often been about the links between places and people, links that surprise other people. You know, you find these connections. And right now we have an ongoing war in Russia and Ukraine, which feels like it's in a new phase.

5:39And then we have a resurgence in the war between the US and Iran. And I just wondered, when you see those two conflicts and situations, what jumps out to you? What are your observations at those two? I mean, the first one is that if you decide to fight a war of choice, it's very hard to win. If you are fighting a war of existence, then your capacity is limitless. And in that sense, slightly unlikely bedfellows, you see Ukraine doing something similar to what Iran are doing, which is you can absorb enormous amounts of military superiority, enormous amounts of pressure, political, military, all the rest of it.

6:16And you can keep on going, maybe not indefinitely, but it's quite hard to deliver a knockout blow. And, you know, Iran has been fighting since 1979, three Cold Wars simultaneously, one with the great Satan, as Iranians like to call it, the United States, one with the little Satan, Israel, and with Saudi Arabia. And it's done so for 47 years with about 3 % of the US defence budget. And, you know, I'm not here to tell you whether that's a good or a bad thing. But, you know, if your job is to stay in business and to preserve regime stability, then it's amazing how far you can go. So that's the kind of major takeaway that the United States has not been able to deliver a knockout blow to a middling size, in fact, small to middling size country like Iran.

6:58And the fact that the capability to keep on going was mispriced by Washington as it was mispriced by Moscow. And what is your assessment then of the state of play between Russia and Ukraine? because that has been the war much less in the headlines in the last few months. And yet it feels that something distinct has happened in that Ukraine has been doing better than many people imagined. Well, there's no question that it's an investment, particularly in drone technology, but also in the hierarchy of the targets it's trying to hit from Wildberry's logistical centres through to the oil refineries.

7:32And that has brought the price of the war into daily Russian life. One of the reasons it hasn't been in daily Russian life is if you have state control of the media, you can choose what it is that your citizens hear. When you have massive plumes of smoke over Moscow or St. Petersburg, it suddenly becomes more real. That capacity to invest in drone technology has taken several years and has a lot of outside support and investment in innovation. We're saying that at a time when last year, Russia took less than 1 % of Ukrainian territory, probably for the cost of something like 200 ,000 servicemen's lives, as well as many injured.

8:06The question, I think, is what it is that that gets Russia to come to the negotiating table. And that's been open to them at any point. But there's no question that the paper cuts that Ukraine are delivering to Russia are being very painful for the Russian economy, as well as for citizens and therefore credibility in the regime. And is part of that because of a link to the other war in that Iran was a major supplier of drones and other military hardware to Russia, and then it ends up fighting a war for its own survival? Well, we've seen all sorts of smoke and mirrors. I mean, lots of noise in Russia.

8:41In fact, in the last month in particular, people like Nikolai Patrushev, who's one of the grey cardinals around Putin, very experienced, say that Europe wants Russia to become a resource colony and this should never happen. if you look towards China, you know, from Beijing's point of view, that's exactly what Russia has become, a resource colony where China gets metals, oil and gas at discounted prices, and in return, gives support both multilateral agencies like the UN, institutional support, but also lots of support that is meaningful for the Russian war effort. So I think you can see these echoes everywhere.

9:13But I think there's no question that Russia's challenge is to define what it is that it wants. And so far, the problem is, is that Putin, it's not a particular river or city that he wants to get to. He doesn't believe that Ukraine should exist as a sovereign state, despite his famous essay on the historical unity of Russia and Ukrainians, where at the very end, he says, it's up to Ukrainians to choose their own future, we would never use force against Ukraine, and so on. And that, I think, is an existential question that if you're a Russian historian, it's not new to Putin, and it's not new to the last 30, 40 years, it has a long history and legacy in Russia.

9:48We're going to dig into a lot of what you've said, Peter, further as we go on in this conversation. But I'd love you to take us back in time to how your own interest in Russia in particular, but in Iran and the Middle East as well began. You were born, I think, 1971. We're almost the same age. I'm much older, Michelle. Not really. But we're talking about the 1980s and, you know, teenage years, how did the interest in Russia begin? It began even earlier. I used to watch John Craven's Newsrand. Well brought up, child. Yeah, as a child, it was a TV programme that I was of a generation, which I'm sure you're the same, where our parents actively discouraged us from watching TV because they thought it would corrupt us.

10:29But we were allowed to watch John Craven who did a sort of 10 minute news bulletin at about five o 'clock every day. And I was struck even as an eight or nine year old boy that all the news I saw at that time was the tail end of the Vietnam War, genocide in Cambodia, SS-20 missiles being parked in Eastern Europe pointing at us here in the United Kingdom. And to see that there were all these parts of the world, like the Middle East, that we never heard anything about in our classrooms. So the interest in Russia or the Soviet Union, as it was then, was to try to understand why it was that nuclear Holocaust was expected in our lifetime, Michelle.

11:04And again, these last 30, 40 years, we've come to think that the world is all about free trade or possibly even fair trade, but to find ways in which we can cooperate together. And I think our generation was disquieted by the fact that there was a likely moment that the Cold War would turn hot. So I wanted to understand that. And so I started reading lots of Russian literature and eventually Soviet literature too. I was very lucky to go to a school where we had a Russian teacher and even luckier that my Russian teacher in our A-level year had gone to, I think, Kuwait for 12 months and learned Arabic and came back and taught a small group of us Arabic, but also about Middle Eastern cultures, including Iranian culture, including the complexities of the Middle East.

11:48So by the time I went to university, I was already looking east. And I'm fascinated in the history of Western Europe, but I didn't think I could add much. Whereas if I looked eastwards, there was a whole world waiting to be explored and it felt to me not only interesting but important and so I made a bet on that when I when I started my PhD on looking at those worlds that that by and large people thought I was mad because if you wanted to have an academic job it was much better to do the Tudors or Hitler because that's what students want and the worlds I work on are slightly still slightly obscure you know for investment bankers they'll call all of these places the rest of the world I mean China now has its own category.

12:26But our engagement with peoples who live to our east is pretty minimal. And even now, despite Gaza being in the news, despite the war in Iran, despite the importance of critical minerals, despite last year in April, there being a war between India and Pakistan, despite this huge change across Southeast Asia in the last 20 or 30 years, apart from organisations like yours at Bloomberg, we still understand these parts of the world, not just imperfectly, we pay them very little attention. And it turns out that they are super important to our own futures. I'm going to share two things, one that is different in the way we were brought up and one that we have in common.

13:03Because I grew up in the Middle East, we didn't have television. So I had no news, no TV news or children's programming of any kind, although I do remember my parents talking about Cambodia and exactly the period you mentioned. But I also learned Russian at school. And that was also due to the geopolitical time, because at that time, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, my family in Pakistan wondered if one day they would come across the border and they thought it would be a good idea if someone in the family knew how to speak Russian. So I do recognise the time you're talking about. And of course, then there was that period after the end of the Cold War and before 9-11, where it felt like you could travel anywhere, you could do anything.

13:45And then the world started to look a lot darker. Yeah, I mean, the old saying is if you're an optimist, learn English, if you're a pessimist, learn Chinese. And if you're a realist, learn how to assemble a Kalashnikov. I mean, that Afghan war and its conclusion, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 80s, and then 91, when Soviet Union collapsed, it did presage a huge set of changes. And those changes, sometimes we think of as being in the Soviet world. But they had a massive impact on the global economy too. But look at Russia, which changed fundamentally in economic terms, but there's a mindset that remained.

14:22And I'm thinking particularly about Putin, former KGB man, one form of control that he knew was essentially replaced by another form of control. Well, it's small groups of men who make all the decisions. And in fact, that world of the 80s that you missed out, Michelle, because you weren't allowed to watch TV. But, you know, we used to have Soviet leaders who they'd be dead for a few days, for a few weeks, like Chyonenko before it was announced to the world. They all looked like they lived in a deep freeze. And the group around Putin are all in their 70s now. They've all grown up together. There's no sign of a new generation coming forward to replace them.

14:55And I think that in some ways, the decision making in Moscow has been as narrowly dictated under Putin as it was under the Soviet Union. So there's a lot of continuity there. I mean, you could argue that parking vast amounts of assets into the hands of about 30 families changes things. But I can promise you, under Marxist-Leninist states, there are still forms of control that families are very adept at keeping within their own structure. So I think one of the challenges is we thought that Russia was changing. We thought that Russia was going to become more like us. Now, with a bit more gas in the tank of thinking about where did this all come from, Russia has had the same foreign minister for 20 years.

15:33Putin's essentially been in charge for more than a quarter of a century, the group around him likewise. So I think like in any relationship, either Russia's changed or in fact Russia never changed. It's just we misunderstood it and got it wrong. So I think that that would be my more persuasive line of trying to argue, which is that the end of the Soviet Union was seen as a moment to regroup and to re-harness what Russia would look like as a great power. And Russia, despite its military weakness, the fact the fact it's a smaller economy than Italy, has a small population that's declining life expectancies, all those metrics.

16:05It still has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and it has the hydrocarbons and the metals that mean that it shapes global markets. So Russia gets a seat at the high table, whether it deserves it or not. And Russia tries to leverage that weakness into a stronger position than it might otherwise have. So, Peter, can I then take you into the future and ask you about how various situations in different parts of the world, problems or conflicts are likely to play out in your view? The first being Ukraine and Russia. The backdrop we've already discussed. Do you see a landing zone for an agreement at any point?

16:44Or are we looking at almost endless, perhaps low-lying conflict? Well, I should probably, with the modesty of a historian, say I'm much better looking backwards than forwards because I've got facts and data in front of me and shaking the bones to guess what happens. There's a slight hiding to nothing. I'd have thought that the logic would be that there would be a frozen conflict in Ukraine, that eventually one or both sides reach the stage of exhaustion where there's a sort of fudge. And those fudges can last essentially indefinitely, as they have done between North and South Korea, as they've done in Cyprus since 1974.

17:22Kashmir, you could say. Kashmir too. And you can establish a modus vivendi. There are ways in which faces can be saved. It doesn't look to me that those are the noises that are coming from Moscow of a willingness to say, let's cut our losses. Trump last summer offered Putin, I think, a deal that he thought was impossible to turn down of bringing Russia back into the G8 family of nations, back into the global economy, US investment into metals in particular and gas and oil fields in the north of Russia, as well as elsewhere. The technical expertise that's needed because sanctions, you can beat them, but they're expensive to beat.

17:59And he couldn't understand, I think, why Putin said no. no and Putin did say no because he started to give a long lecture about this is Russian history that goes back a thousand years of confrontation from the West. So I can't, although the logic would be a settlement of some kind, that requires one or both sides to reach a stage of exhaustion and I can't see that yet. So I fear that things will keep going until Putin or Moscow decides that it's time to cut losses and there has been some noise about that properly for the last month or two, that might escalate over the summer. Yeah, well, that's what I wanted to dig into, because you wrote about this in your foreign policy piece recently, that average monthly casualties are running at more than 30 ,000.

18:44This is on the Russian side. And that Russian fighters, once they're sent out onto the battlefield, survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes. I mean, this is almost incomprehensible to me, those kinds of odds. Well, those battlefield numbers They're drawn from a small number of Russian military bloggers. But interestingly, this week, the head of the CIA has said that this is confirmed by US military intelligence, too. I think the point is that the casualty levels are unsustainable. Russia is losing more on the battlefield than they are able to recruit. And so far, the men who've been called into service have been from distant regions, from the big cities, and from minorities disproportionately hurt.

19:25There are lots of minority populations in Russia. The problem now is for Russia to keep sustaining itself and to sustain its army, it needs to be starting to look at how it conscripts from cities. And that brings, again, the war closer to home. And again, you'll remember from the Afghan war, Michelle, that one of the reasons why it became difficult with the Soviet Union was mothers of fallen servicemen started to take to the streets to protest that their boys would never come home again, except in body bags. And that is something that is always difficult in any authoritarian state, whether you control the media or not, is that groups of people start to say we are willing to take our protests because we've got nothing left to lose.

20:03But that is something I think that can happen both in Russia and also in Iran. And I'd probably have both of those on my bingo card for coming up later this year. Then the question is, like in all periods of history, with the persecution of Christians through to how this worked in Islamic societies, is you either have to become more tolerant and you need to let some pressure into the system, or you have to repress and you have to crack down. And cracking down tends to be an attractive short-term solution, but it can make things much, much worse. Thank you. Opening up a world of opportunity.

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23:14I'm still wondering, at its heart, what does the Ukraine project, the Ukraine war, represent to Putin? Or is it a combination of all of these? Is it an imperial project? Is it recovery of lost prestige? Is it emotional? Or is it a question of his own survival? Because if he has to make a deal or end the war in Ukraine, what does that mean for his standing domestically? Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's lots of things. I think there's no question that many of us think that Putin having an existential threat or something that's badged as an existential threat is important because it justifies the means.

23:51It's a really important tool of control. I think beyond that, what does Putin want, I think, is to be able to frame this in a context that this is not just about Zelensky or Kiev. It's about a persistent, long running way in which Europe in particular is trying to undermine Russia and to colonise it. And we might find that impossible to understand because the way we see it, we're trying to help Ukraine protect its sovereign territory. but that is something that has gone through the system in Russia and is absolutely believed, that this was all to do with a plan that the West always had to destabilise Russia, that Russia as a persona non grata never will be and no matter what Russia does.

24:30And so the war is a way of saying this is our way of showing how we are bloody Europe's noses. It's a complicated one in Russia now, but it's something that is deeply believed in Russia, that Europe and particularly the British are behind all of these things. And again, very similar conclusions are drawn in Tehran too. Do you think that Putin and Trump have something in common in that these wars with Ukraine and Iran respectively are with much less powerful countries? But have they both underestimated the kind of power that those countries can nevertheless wield? No question. And I think that powerful men often miscalculate and think that their muscles and brainpower are stronger, better than anybody else's.