104. Timothy Snyder: How will the US election result impact Ukraine?

24:18Just talk us through how the Soviet Union morphed into the Russia that we have today and which form of dictatorship you think history will be kinder to. That's a really interesting question because it is the case that in many ways, I think the Russian regime on a lot of measures that folks would agree to now is more repressive, certainly than like Gorbachev and probably even than Brezhnev. So it's an interesting thought, especially when you start thinking about durability, because the whole Soviet Union only lasted for 69 years, whereas Putin has been in power now in one way or another for what we've got of the 21st century.

24:58So I don't think he will, but if he gets through one more presidential term, he's been in power for half as long as the Soviet Union even existed. I think they'll be remembered as very different systems. And that's the tricky part. And again, kind of the dialectical part, because there are ways in which the Soviet Union enabled Russia of today. Like if you concentrate, if you have central planning, it's relatively easy for the few valuable enterprises to end up in the hands of a few people. And so in an odd way, state planning gets you to a monopoly. And there's a funny way in which the Marxist project pointing towards the future actually led to the Putin project of pointing towards the past, which is that when you say everything's in the future and you fail, you're setting yourself up for nostalgia.

25:40And so Brezhnev was already nostalgia for the Second World War and Putin just takes that a step further and now it's nostalgia for the Second World War plus the 18th century plus the 10th century. So there are ways that one led to the other, but they are very different kinds of systems. The Soviet Union at least always pretended that it was about an idea and it always pretended that there was truth and that it was telling the truth. Whereas Russia succeeds insofar as it succeeds by denying that there's a reason to anything, denying that there's any sort of truth, which is a very comfortable reality for the present Russian system, which is a kind of fascist oligarchy.

26:17And it's why Russia and Russian methods are so tempting and attractive for folks beyond Russia who are aiming for similar things. Tim, one of the mysteries is, on the one hand, obviously, the Russian population is, by global standards, highly educated, highly informed, and will be conscious of many of the problems of Putin's regime. And yet at the same time, many, many Russians will buy into a very nationalist view. And Putin's popularity is sort of surprisingly high, given the nature of the regime. And we can discuss how popular or how unpopular, but it's still surprisingly high. So, you know, he's more popular than the Iranian regime is with its people, etc.

26:58So what's going on here that these highly educated, thoughtful Russians, or some of them at least, can have a sort of implicit sympathy for Putin, a skepticism about Ukraine's claims? So I'm going to give the easy answer and the hard answer. The easy answer is that there has been a sifting. Many of the most critical Russians are, of course, now in Riga or Vilnius. They're scattered. They're not necessarily in Russia. But the hard answer, because I don't want that dodged it has to go something like this. We were talking earlier about what went wrong in the 90s, which could be characterized as a politics of no alternatives.

27:34That the thing that we have is the only real thing. That's Putin. It's just a darker version. What Putin says is that what Russia has is what everybody has. England is no different. America is no different. If you believe that it's any different, that's because you're a gullible fool. And that, of course, is an attractive line of argument because you don't want to think you're living in a worse country. You'd rather think, well, the English pretend, but they're just hypocrites. And of course, England and America, and you could use any example for this, we generate enough stuff for their media that it's easy for them to portray us as basically corrupt and our democracies as basically a joke and so on, which is what their media does.

28:11And this goes again back to the question about the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union, that in the Soviet Union, the idea was propagandas about how the state is good. And in Russia, propagandas about how everybody else's state is bad. they don't have domestic news coverage at all. It's all about how things are terrible in London, things are terrible in Nevada. That's it. Things are terrible in Paris. Today, they're terrible in Italy. That's it. And just to finish the thought, I mean, the way that this works psychologically is that it does speak to a certain kind of nationalism. Because if everything is terrible, if it's terrible everywhere, what's good about the Russians is that at least we're honest about it.

28:49The rest of you are a bunch of hypocrites. And there's a sort of history, isn't there? Because there was, during the Soviet Union period, a very strong move by the left to point to real crimes, the British Empire or the oppression of African Americans in the United States, as one kind of big symbolic ways of saying these capitalist democracies are hypocritical. And that, of course, really appealed to many people on the left within our own countries. But there's been added to this something that I'm increasingly picking up on in Europe, which is a sort of argument of Russian spiritual superiority, that we're all a bunch of decadent materialists and that they represent the last hope of profound, serious, spiritual Western civilization.

29:32I think that argument kind of runs two different totalitarian ways. And you can find them both in Russia, you can find them coexisting, and you can find them overlapping. We have a big soul version. So, we have a big soul and you have smaller souls. And the big soul version, you can't possibly understand our depths from the narrow perspectives of your tiny Western souls. The big soul version also kind of works with communism. Because Marxism says there is actually a single human nature. And the problem is that it's been corrupted. And this is where it is kind of a religious line of thinking. It's been corrupted by something which happens to be private property.

30:05And so if you can remove this earthly corruption, we'll all get back to having our big soul, or as Marx and Engels said, our species essence. The big soul thing can actually work with communism. It can also work with flat-out religion or right-wing views. It can work with fascism. So there are Russian fascists like Ivan Ilyin, who Putin has cited many, many, many times and continues to cite, who say that it's no longer a Marxist view, it's a fascist view. The world is fragmented, it's beaten up. Everybody in the West picks up the pieces. We're concerned with these things we call facts, but facts don't matter.

30:35The only thing which matters is wholeness. And Russia is the only hope for wholeness. And on this line of reasoning, Russia may not have a big soul now, but it might in the future. And Russia is the only hope. And since Russia is the only hope, anything that Russia does now doesn't matter. Russia can't do wrong because the wrong that it's doing is just in this superficial factual world or the superficial world of values like human rights. And none of that stuff matters. All that matters is the fundamental wholeness. So, the big soul argument can work both from a fascist position and a communist position.

31:06But then there's also the no soul argument. The no soul argument goes like this. We know that we're all complete nihilists and you guys are complete nihilists too, but we're superior to you because we're honest about the fact that we are complete nihilists. And so, it's one soul or no soul. And you can see Putin doing both of those. Like Tuesdays and Thursdays, it's big soul. And Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays, it's no Seoul and the weekends he has off. Tim, what does Russia winning this war look like? What does Ukraine winning this war look like? And why is it so important to the world that it's the latter that prevails?

31:41I mean, I was speaking in a slightly jovial fashion just then, but it's actually quite a serious point, the point about morality. The idea that you can do everything because you're Russian is extraordinarily evident in the way that they treat Ukrainian people and Ukrainian children and Ukrainian elites, Ukrainian cities. And that I think is at stake. like the idea that there are in fact values besides your sense that you're special. Because if it's all about your sense that you're special, it's really hard to hold up anything like constitutionalism, let alone an international legal order. So that notion that everything is permitted either because God is dead or because I am God, you know, like one or the other.

32:19But that notion is kind of what's at stake because democracy, it's a word we toss around and we kind of empty it of value by using it so much and so loosely. But democracy really does depend on the idea that there are people and the people should rule, you know, and that there's something good about people which will allow them to rule. And this war is directly against a democracy, but it's also against democracy in that moral sense. And if we let the Ukrainians lose, it's pretty hard to imagine what better case we're going to have for supporting a democracy and, you know, what better allies we're going to have, we're willing to take risks for it.

32:48So there is that deep, hard to define moral stake, I think. And then geopolitically, there is the basic post-war order. The countries aren't supposed to invade other countries and claim they don't exist and take their territory. That was the basic post-colonial way we were supposed to be thinking about legal order. Russia is challenging that. Third, there's China, which for most everyone thought was the real issue. And if Russia is allowed to prevail in Ukraine, then it's hard to see what's going to prevent the Chinese from being more adventurous. My own view is that the Ukrainians are now deterring the Chinese in a way that we can't, because anything we do to deter China can be read as provocative, but Ukraine defeating Russia is not a provocation to China.

33:29It just shows that offensive operations are difficult. So that's kind of a special opportunity that we have. And then beyond that, there's nuclear proliferation, which I worry about a lot because it's pretty unique. And this goes back to the nihilism point to try to win a war by brandishing your nuclear weapons, which is what Russia has done. And if you can win a war by brandishing nuclear weapons, that means that everybody has to build them either to brandish or to defend against the brandishing. So there are multiple European and Asian countries, which will go nuclear in the next decade if Russia wins this war, in my view.

34:01And that makes nuclear war more likely. And just the first part of my question, what does Russia winning look like? And what does Ukraine winning look like? How does the war end either way? Somebody wins. Somebody wins and somebody loses, which doesn't mean they'll acknowledge it. But I think somebody wins when the other side of the political order breaks. In Russia, there are three ways this can happen. Putin loses power, Putin dies, or Putin changes the subject, which he's very capable of doing. I mean, Ukraine matters to them hugely right now, but the moment that there's another coup attempt or something else happens, then they'll all be thinking about Russia, just like they did in summer of 2023.

34:33It's very possible for them to change the subject. We just have to make the subject change. So I can't tell you what it looks like operationally, but what I can tell you is that in Russia, it feels like someone has to change the subject because Russian troops are more necessary somewhere else than in Ukraine right now. And in Ukraine, it looks like NATO membership, EU membership, the sense that the future has been restored and that we can claim, if not literally, we're claiming politically, morally with all of our territory. Let's take a quick break. Back in a second.

35:10Tim, I'm not going to get into territory that's going to get us all in trouble and make sound like I'm obsessed, but it does make me think about the Middle East and what the similarities and differences are here. Because I guess a critic of what's happening in the Middle East might say that there are some similar dynamics at play, that there is a sense that one nation has a very, very unique right. And that either through some sort of great soul argument or some sense of its own legitimacy, ideas of proportionality and neighbors are pushed aside. And I also think that there's a, you know, maybe if I move away from the Middle East, because it's maybe too sensitive to drag you into, but I mean, maybe if you looked at Myanmar and elsewhere, that the question is not just a question of what democracy means in terms of the protection of minority rights, but the connection to this idea of a global order and borders, that it is partly about a sense that Russia-Ukraine sometimes seems to be a symptom of a broader problem of us giving up on ideas of international law, giving up on ideas of humanitarian intervention, giving up on ideas of a US-led order, that it does feel like we're entering a culture of impunity in which increasingly nations are simply asserting they have the right to do almost anything, provided they feel it's in their national interest to do it.

36:24Yes. First of all, I think it's perfectly okay to talk about the Middle East, and I don't want I don't want to be shy about it. I'm not an expert on it, but I think we are watching an entirely unnecessary tragedy unfold before our eyes in the Middle East. It's clearly the case that an American conservative Christian conception of Israel as a place which is unlike other places, inhabited by people whose fate is somehow connected to the world becoming whole in some way. It's clearly the case that that view of Israel has something to do with the kind of place that Israel is now and the kinds of things that Israel is doing now and the difficulty that the United States has in restraining it.

37:01Or that view has something to do with the difficulty that even well-meaning Americans have in seeing Israel as a country like other countries and analyzing Israel with the same tools we would use to analyze other countries. But the general point, I just think you're absolutely right. And it's very brilliantly put. The Ukrainians who in general are very hesitant about, to say the least, about studying Russian literature, the way that many of them characterize Russian culture is crime without punishment. So impunity precisely. And once you have crime without punishment, crime starts to seem like the point in itself.

37:34You're in a different moral world. There's a different moral geometry where you show off by your ability to commit crimes, which of course in political terms blends back into fascism with Carl Schmitt and his definition of the sovereign as the person you can make an exception. So Putin is saying, I'm going to make an exception over and over and over again until everyone realizes that your rules don't really mean anything. And of course, it's not only Putin, as you say, but the war in Ukraine to me is a bit special because it is a place where there's an unusual amount of moral clarity and where I think we do have the ability to make a difference.

38:08And those two things don't always hold. Tim, crime without punishment, the image that popped into my head was Donald Trump. And I just wondered both in relation to Ukraine, but also in relation to the Middle East and in relation to the issues that you've written about on tyranny and also your latest book on freedom. How big a danger is it if Trump gets back? And is he, if he does get back, is that not the ultimate crime without punishment? I can't disagree with the beautiful formulation of that question. I was thinking about, I wrote a little column in my substack the other day about Georgia, which has gotten to this very weird position where the normal voter suppressors may have to stifle the Trumpist voter suppressors because the Trumpist voter suppressors are so radical that it discredits the normal kind of voter suppression.

38:56So I was thinking about Georgia, which is like a key American state in this election, obviously. And then I realized, gosh, Trump called up Georgia and asked them to find 12 ,000 votes. He literally made a phone call. It's like Hollywood. It's like the kind of crime that you almost have to be wearing a black hat to commit, right and have a camera in front of you you call somebody up and literally say find 12 000 votes so i can win the election and i was reading this thing by god the man has still not been prosecuted for this like he has still not been prosecuted for this and it really calls into question what kind of country i live in and i think the kind of country i live in is between these two things and this is kind of like in some deep sense what's at stake with trump because we're obviously not a rule of law state in the way that we would like to be because there are countries, and they're not perfect countries, but there are countries like Italy and France and so on, where at least people do get prosecuted having been head of government or head of state.

39:51It does happen, but we're not them. We're also not quite Russia. We do have, or we're not Hungary. We do have prosecutors at work. It's just somehow in four years, we haven't actually been able to bring a criminal case. It's like we're hovering in between. As with the war in Ukraine, so with the election of Trump, if Trump can come to power, I'm going to use that term, because there are scenarios in which he comes to power where I don't think he actually wins. But if Trump can come to power, that's going to be really rough on the rule of law, not only because he is, as you say, someone who has obviously committed lots of crimes, which other people would already have been committed, but also because it's not just the past, it's the future that he's promising.

40:30He's promising to use the law to punish his political opponents. And he's also promising to fire the 40 ,000 or so top civil servants whose job has been to execute the law and to replace them with cronies who will presumably just kind of do what he says. So, I mean, that's just one dimension of how bad it will be is that it is really about the rule of law. And Ukraine, if Trump wins? I think Ukrainians keep fighting. I'm hopeful that some smart person gets the ball rolling on Ukrainian membership in NATO before Trump wins, because I think the Europeans need a framework and a way to depoliticize assistance for Ukraine.

41:05But the Ukrainians will have to keep fighting, You know, because even in like Trump scenario where he gets the Russians and Ukrainians, he cuts off American aid to Ukraine to force Zelensky to the table with Putin. Let's say that even happens and there's a ceasefire. The Russians just then invade again six weeks or six months later. So the Ukrainians don't have any choice. They're going to be fighting one way or another. And so the question is whether like the Canadians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Europeans can get themselves together to help in some way. I don't think he's going to win, you know, but he could.

41:34And I think Europeans, the British, have to have some kind of plan B, even if it's not a great plan B for this, rather than saying, like, oh, well, if Trump wins, we're just going to throw up our hands. That's what the Russians are counting on, by the way. Can I come in with an old chestnut? Tell us what people miss, commentators and international observers, about why people vote for Trump. And you'll be aware of the sort of cliches that we might have in the United Kingdom for why people vote for Trump. What do you think we might be getting wrong in Britain in our perception of that? And what might even the New York Times not quite get about why people vote for Trump?

42:05The stuff that people miss isn't necessarily the interesting stuff. Like part of the problem is like we want these problems to be interesting. They're not always interesting. So one of the things in the US is that we have a two party system. And of the two parties, the Republicans are the ones that's more like a club or a clan. And the Democrats are more like a circus or a sporting event or something. And there are good things to both sides, honestly. When Republicans say they're loyal to their party, I think, okay, I get it. Loyalty is a good thing. It's just like sometimes you have to take other things into account.

42:34And so much of the reason why people are going to vote for Donald Trump is just that there's an R next to his name on the ballot. And that's an incredibly boring explanation, but I'm afraid it's true. There are just a lot of folks in America who can't really believe that if a candidate is a Republican, he could be a bad guy who could destroy the system. And that's too banal to report about, but I think that's a big part of it. And then there are the historical things which are harder to explain, I think, for journalists, which many journalists understand very well, but they can't quite get it into a column like the legacy of slavery.

43:01That's a hard column to write. But because slavery, therefore voter suppression, because voter suppression mentality that black votes maybe don't count, because of that mentality, when Trump says he won in 2020, he's triggering a lot of Americans who, while they wouldn't say it out loud, really do think that those black people in Baltimore or Detroit or Philadelphia or Atlanta cheat or somehow shouldn't get a whole vote. So like historical racism. And then something that reporters do get, but which I think is really important is just lack of mobility, that people not being able to move in the country and socially and change social class the way that they could before is a big part of it because that opens up the way for the Trumpian nostalgia.

43:44And then another thing that people I think hesitate to admit is that the guy is really talented. Like Mussolini was talented too. It's not our taste necessarily. But objectively, he is a talented entertainer. He's good at what he does. It may not speak to us, but he is good at a thing, right? And I think that's also part of it. He goes to his rallies. He makes no sense. He contradicts himself. He lies all the time, blah, blah, blah. But he does still pack a punch. Not the one he did maybe eight years ago, but he is still good at what he does. And he's still working pretty hard to do it. And that's part of it too.

44:17You're very big, both in your work and in your sense of the world and what's wrong with the world on the concept of truth and fact and the role of journalism. And you also, I love that quote you had in one of your, I can't remember which book it was, but you talked about collective memory as a tool of resistance. How important to Trump is the whole post-truth concept being the fact that he seems to be able to lie and not just get away with it, but have many, many, many people, including media people, believe the lies. Yeah. Or if not exactly believe them as truth, believe that storytelling is the reality.

44:55Because there are a lot of other mechanisms that go into this. People, when they realize he's lied, they think, well, it's okay that he lied because that's what a clever politician does. And then they tell themselves, but actually, I knew he was lying all along. It's like a sort of American version of what you said earlier about Russians saying that we're hypocrites. It is. They all lie. So what's wrong with him lying? That is it. And that's the way that Trump is a Putinist character. And I think that's the right way to put it because Putin got there first. But Trump is a Putinist character in that way.

45:21He knows that he doesn't have to respect the convention of telling the truth. And that's the difference because you could have liars who respect the convention. If you catch them in a lie, they say, okay, well, my speech writer did it or whatever, but you're respecting the convention. He doesn't respect the convention. And I think liberals, I mean, this like small L enlightenment oriented people think, well, we're all kind of rational, we're all seeking the truth. And therefore, this Trump is some kind of deviation. Whereas in fact, the politics in which we're all kind of rational, all kind of seeking the truth takes a hell of a lot of generational work over and over and over again.

45:52And the thing that he's doing, it isn't just some kind of deviation or a failure. It's just a different kind of politics based on a different metaphysic. And it works, whether you call it fascism or not, this idea that there isn't really truth, there's just will, there's just emotion. You define truth by defining the enemy, then you go from there. That works as politics. We know that works as politics. And how alarmed were you, Tim, in the debate that Trump did with Kamala Harris? How alarmed were you his refusal to answer twice the question about whether he actually wanted Ukraine to win the current war with Russia?

46:25Well, personally, it didn't make any impression on me because I've long been convinced that he wants Russia to win. Sorry, I don't mean to be snide about the question. It is just unfortunately the case that Trump believes that dictators should rule the world and that real power is in the hands of people who make their states and societies weaker at the expense of themselves. And that's Putin, right? Like Russia is much weaker as a state and society that it could be because of Putin and his oligarchy and his wars. And Trump thinks that's the way things should be. And therefore, because that's how things should be, Putin should beat Zelensky.

46:57The dictatorship should beat the democracy. Democracies are weak. He doesn't like them. So unfortunately, it's very alarming, but personally, it wasn't at all surprising to me. I'm listening to something else though. Trump over and over again says, Ukraine is finished. Ukraine is done. It's been obliterated. And I just want to point out that when he does that, again, I think one has to assume that he's intelligent and he usually knows what he's doing. What he's doing is he's setting a marker for later on because he's saying today Ukraine is obliterated. That's not true, of course. Where the Russians occupy, there have been horrible war crimes.

47:30But the country itself, the economy is doing pretty well. They've restored trade in the Black Sea. People are going to work. It's like it hasn't been destroyed as a country. But when he says Ukraine's been obliterated, what he's doing is setting us up for what happens after his so-called deal with Putin. That's what he thinks is going to happen. He thinks, I'm going to give away the store to Putin. then Ukraine is going to be obliterated. But I'm just going to congratulate myself on my great deal. Ukraine was already obliterated. Therefore, nothing bad can happen to Ukraine. Tim, last one from me.

47:58You've been very patient. But just to return back to the story of the young Tim Snyder in the 90s, one of the big differences between then and now is that we've lost faith in the idea that there is a clear vision of how to create more prosperous, democratic, peaceful societies. We're talking at the moment where there's talk about regime change in Iran, for example. And maybe in the 90s, we would have had an idea that, okay, you get rid of the ayatollahs and a liberal democracy emerges. Now we've seen Egypt and Myanmar and Syria and Iraq. And we can think of 30 scenarios which are pretty nasty about what happens when the regime collapses in Iran.

48:34And Iranians too maybe sense that. And maybe the Afghans sense this when looking at the Taliban, that there's no longer something available to people when they look at unpleasant regimes, which gives them confidence that there is a clear, well-performing, delivering democratic future, which they can easily reach for. Yeah. So three things about that. One thing which is worth noticing is that even though democracy is right now being challenged and overall in decline, there are places which are actually working incredibly well. And those places are not very good at telling their stories, right? Like where's the powerful story about Norway or where's the powerful story.

49:10I mean, even places like Poland, which has lots of problems, but there's still an incredible story about a place like Poland, which used to have good roads and now has good roads, which now people in Poland now live longer on average, or it's close depending on what you're looking at, but they live as long or longer than Americans. Who would have thought that was going to happen? So, there are these good stories and we're just very poor at telling them. That's the first thing. The second thing is, and this is a point that I try to make in my book, that our problem a little bit was, and it is like the Marxist problem, that when we were pointing to the future, we were just pointing to one future.

49:40And that one future had too much to do with determinism. So the invasion of Iraq is, and this is, by the way, I'm not somebody who's changed his mind on this. I was against it at the time for this reason, among others. But the invasion of Iraq was premised on this, that if you just knock over something bad, then deterministically, things are going to rise up and create something good. And that just isn't true. And the problem is when you only have one idea of how things work, then as you say, you get disillusioned. You go from one to zero. And this is the third point. I think to have an idea of the future, this is how I would kind of characterize the problem, that we don't have an idea of the future.

50:13And without an idea of the future, you can't really have a democratic present because a democratic present depends on negotiating futures. It's all about negotiating futures. The moment it's about negotiating past, you can tell things have gone wrong. We have to know the past so we can get to the future. But when it's all about negotiating the good guys and the bad guys in the past, you know you've taken a wrong turn. And so we have to have a future to look into, but it has to be a future which is open to multiple things. And of course, some of those things are bad, global warming disaster, right?

50:41But there are also good things that can happen. This is what I'm trying to hit in the book, that there are actually a whole bunch of futures and they're not all bad. Some of them are quite good, but we're not going to get there just by thinking that there's only one or that it's going to be brought to us automatically. But we have to actually start thinking about different combinations of futures and trying to get there. And I think that's doable. We're in a cycle, which you've described, of thinking, well, history's on our side, or the economy's on our side, or our righteousness is on our side.

51:08And now we're coming, we're out of that cycle. So Trump and Putin, but it's an alternative, which is nothing's actually good. And Putin actually says very sharply, he weaponizes the sentiment that you're talking about. He says, look, it might be bad here, but whatever you try to improve it, it's going to be worse. If you go in the streets in Ukraine, I'm going to invade your country. I'm going to make it worse. There are no alternatives, right? This is the dark version of no alternatives. And so we have to be in a position to say, actually, there are lots of good alternatives, and we can see what some of those good alternatives are.

51:34It's not automatic, but we could actually get there. Now, Tim, my final question, and thank you so much for being so generous with your time. And I know that Rory's going to roll his eyes madly when I ask this question and say, you're obsessed, man. I want to ask you, what were the historical trends of which Brexit was a part? And what is history going to think of Brexit? I mean, I think stupidity is an underused historical category. I mean, I think we underestimate both how brilliant we can be and how stupid we can be and how conjunctures can arise in which we do things that are very foolish.

52:07Personally, for that debate, I was in Britain a few times. I came in and out. I wasn't living there at that time. I was looking at Brexit from a certain position, which was a person who was writing a book called Road to Unfreedom, which was about Russia invading Ukraine. It was about the 2010s and what was going wrong in the 2010s. And from that perspective, I see two things about Brexit, which may not seem essential to the British, but which I think were essential at the time. One is social media. I think Brexit is very much kind of in that general trough with Trump, where things that wouldn't have been possible a decade before were suddenly possible because social media had changed politics into much more of an us and them, I'm right, you're wrong sort of discussion.

52:53And that at a more superficial level, social media enabled bad actors to change the conversation in ways that we were not really aware of at the time. But a huge amount of the social media traffic on Brexit, something like 10 % on Twitter, came literally from just one other country, which happens to be Russia. And I deeply believe that that changed the tone of the conversation. I think without social media, and perhaps even without just Russia in social media, that vote might have gone another way. So my deep sentiment about Brexit is that the European Union, it's an interesting and promising form of post-imperial politics.

53:30So for me, the big question of the 21st century, or one of them, is what do you do after empire? Because empire, regardless of which side of empire you were on, there's a danger in the past. There's a danger if you're in a post-colonial position of just being stuck and being opposed to the empires. And if you're in an imperial position, there's a danger in being nostalgic for empire. But where European countries have succeeded is in doing something different, which was European Union. European Union is a place to go after empire. By the way, if you look at the debates in Britain in the 60s, people were well aware of this 60 years ago.

54:04The EU is there as a place to go after empire. That's what it's for. And that's what it succeeds in. So my deep reaction to it was that the people voting for Brexit are misunderstanding post-imperial global politics, that they've been offered this thing to do after empire. That is a good thing to do after empire. Whereas being on your own or trying to be a nation state is a weaker alternative in every way than being with other European countries after empire. And that the European Union is a much more radical, interesting new sort of thing to do. Whereas in Britain, ever since I've been a political adult, it's been portrayed as like boring, repressive, yada, yada, yada.

54:42Whereas in fact, it's kind of an interesting thing to do. Just going off and trying to be a nation state is pretty boring. Like everybody does that, you know, whereas the European Union is actually sort of interesting. So there you have my answer. Thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks to both of you.

54:59So, Tim Snyder, who as I say was my neighbor at Yale, right across the corridor from me and who I'm a real fan of. What did you think of it? Well, I mean, I have long been a huge admirer of his. I think he's incredibly clever, very articulate. I do think it came through the interview that I hadn't really noticed before. He's got a very sort of wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. Yeah, I loved it when he kept saying, you're trying to make Tim Snyder interesting. That kept coming back again and again. I think one of the reasons why people like our interviews, this was never planned, but we've developed this way of trying to get everybody to talk about their childhood.

55:35But it is very, very interesting. So he's trying to say he had a very ordinary childhood and a very uninteresting childhood, but he didn't. So, no, I think he's so smart. And he does, like, we pose as these great linguists. I mean, he puts us absolutely into Division 5. I mean, he fluently speaks 5, reads 10. I mean, that's something else. It's unbelievable. He's also somebody who is unusual because he, very, very serious academic, as you say, with incredible linguistic ability, huge amount of time in the archives, formidable early research, who's now managed to move on to become a much broader public intellectual engaging with questions like Trump, fascism, Ukraine.

56:18I get the sense he's actually quite close to Zelensky as well, and is certainly very, very admired in Ukraine for the work he's done on trying to publicize their experience. Yeah. And he's done this big fundraising project to help Ukraine. He's also, he's somebody who, he has this ability to kind of take big historical trends and sort of make them feel very, very simple. I loved his answer about Brexit as well, I've got to say, you know, I know that as you say, that will sort of make us sound like we're sort of, but it's true. It's one of the most stupid things that a country's ever done to itself.

56:52It's also in a world where people are often very kind of denigrating of the United States. I think that people like Tim Snyder are such a reminder of how the best American intellectuals and academics are second to none in the world. I mean, they have a kind of clarity, a confidence, a kind of erudition, which is astonishing. And that sense of a kind of global vision is quite unlike anyone else. He's also a very, very good writer. I've only read two of his books, but he's clearly a real believer in structure. He structures his books really, really well. I've never seen him lecture in person, but I bet he's somebody who just has a few notes because what he needs is the structure.

57:32He gets the structure right and then he builds his arguments around that. And that's how his books come across to me. And that's a very kind of ordered brain, which can take in a lot, assimilate it and then put it back out. And a phenomenally popular lecturer. Colleagues in Yale are very jealous of the hundreds of people that competes to get into the lecture halls when he speaks. And it's a real advert for the Jackson School at Yale that they have someone of that stature with them. Good. Well, I hope people enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoy talking to him. Thank you, Alistair. Bye-bye.

58:01See you soon. Bye.