Opinion Round Table: ‘A Weak Putin Could Turn Into a Nuclear-Deploying Putin’

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the refugee crisis in Eastern Europe are intensifying as the war enters its fourth week. On Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appealed to Congress to do more, pleading for a no-fly zone, more weapons and more sanctions on Russia. President Biden is set to meet with NATO allies and E.U. leaders next week, while the West navigates the reality of war at its doorstep.

Times columnists Michelle Goldberg, Bret Stephens and David Brooks discuss what’s to come with Times Opinion podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

Opinion Round Table: ‘A Weak Putin Could Turn Into a Nuclear-Deploying Putin’

Times columnists Michelle Goldberg, Bret Stephens and David Brooks discuss what’s to come with Times Opinion podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Michelle, Putin is clearly willing to inflict untold costs on Ukraine in this war. We’ve seen this over and over again. What’s happening in Mariupol is horrific: the bombing of a captive civilian population who are cut off from any help.

You were just in Europe looking at the fallout from the war. When Europeans look eastward, toward Ukraine and Russia, they clearly see a threat to the E.U. and the continent. How is that changing their calculations?

Michelle Goldberg: Well, it obviously works differently in different countries. I was in Berlin, and then I was in Hungary, where the politics are very, very different. In Germany, there was, first of all, a sense of real shock when the invasion happened. I think that many Americans heard the Biden administration declassifying the intelligence, saying that this was going to happen, and assumed that there was a good chance that it would indeed happen, whereas everyone I talked to in Germany was convinced that either the administration was exaggerating, the intelligence was bad, Putin was bluffing. So people were stunned when it actually happened.

There was this feeling of real fear. I was talking to one woman who runs a cultural institute. And she was saying that when she’s making plans now for various programs over the next few months, people say things like, OK, yes, let’s do it in June, if we’re not in a nuclear war. So the war feels very, very close.

The central train station is kind of a makeshift refugee processing center. In Hungary, where there’s going to be an election next month — it’s the first election in 12 years where people seem to feel like the opposition has a real shot at ousting Viktor Orban, their sort of authoritarian, kleptocratic leader who’s been quite aligned with Putin. There’s the sense of this war having reshuffled that race in a couple of different directions.

The opposition hopes that this has made Orban’s Putin connection a liability for them. And when I interviewed Peter Marki-Zay, who’s the opposition candidate, he says this contest is about whether we’re going to be part of Europe and part of the West or whether we’re going to be in the orbit of Russia and China and sort of this authoritarian world. At the same time, people worry that there’s a bit of a rally-around-the-flag effect. Orban is saying that Peter Marki-Zay is going to drag Hungary into war with Ukraine. And his propaganda machine, which is extremely comprehensive, is out there really parroting Kremlin propaganda. So I went to a big Fidesz rally, which is Orban’s party, and the first person I spoke to without me bringing him up called Zelensky scum and blamed George Soros for the whole crisis.

There’s been some speculation that as Putin becomes an international pariah, these kind of right-wing populists who he nurtured are going to lose power. I think there’s some signs of that happening. But I think whether or not it’s going to start taking down these illiberal populists, it still remains to be seen.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Michelle, you bring up a really important point, which is: Europe isn’t united, hasn’t really been united. There are countries that obviously follow a democratic tradition, like Germany, and then there are countries in Eastern Europe, which you visited, which have drifted away from democracy in some sense.

I want to put this to you, Bret. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave a scathing address to the German Bundestag, echoing language referring to the Holocaust: “I appeal to you on behalf of everyone who has heard politicians say ‘never again’ and who saw that these words are worthless because, again, in Europe they are destroying the whole nation.” We’ve heard a lot about a resurgent NATO, a unified E.U. What does that mean, though, in terms of how far they are willing to go together to defend Ukraine and themselves?

Bret Stephens: That’s a great question. I don’t think we have an answer. In the case of Germany, Germany did have — both under [Chancellor Angela] Merkel and particularly under her predecessor, Chancellor [Gerhard] Schröder — a very, I guess the word would be soft-on-Russia orientation.

And Germany has long had a kind of a pacifist orientation, a profound sense of guilt in terms of its relationship with Russia, and a sense that the only right way for Germany is to avoid and eschew any kind of military confrontation that changed a little bit after 9/11, but that was deep.

But on the other hand, what’s really striking is that under the new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, there’s been a sea change, a transformation in German policy. A hundred billion euros for defense for a country that had allowed its military forces to atrophy, the decision to finally cancel the Nord Stream 2 project, which will at least lessen Germany’s dependence on Russian gas. So Germany’s transformation, I think, is in tune with the change I’m seeing in much of the rest of Europe.

Europe’s ties to NATO, to the United States, had been eroding for years. They had eroded very sharply under Donald Trump. I mean, if there’s a silver lining in this crisis, this seems to be it. A new sense throughout Europe that there is such a thing as a free world and that the trans-Atlantic alliance is one that they still very much need.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: David, I’m going to bring you into this. Michelle just said that there’s speculation that as Putin becomes an international pariah, his right-wing populist reflections could lose power. We just heard Bret saying that there is a silver lining here, bringing Europe together, making NATO stronger. You’ve written that the war has indeed in some way re-energized, reinvigorated the fight for democracy.

David Brooks: Yeah, it’s reawakened our faith in ourselves. We have more faith, frankly, in our leaders who have done pretty well, faith in our system and maybe faith in some that we can actually unify. Of course, there are some people on the right who are a little pro-Putin, but mostly we’re a pretty unified country, an experience we’ve not experienced much.

I think it’s also — and Michelle mentioned the argument within Hungary — should we go authoritarian or should we go democratic? And five weeks ago, that was a live debate. More countries are going authoritarian than were going democratic. You could, say, look at China. They can be authoritarian. They centralized power. They know how to run things, and they can have fast economic growth.

But the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen the real failures of authoritarianism. First, it’s terrible at information. Wisdom does not flow to the top dog. People are afraid of him. So he often has no clue what’s going on in the world. Second, people want to live big, full, independent lives. And if you treat them like serfs, they’re going to want to leave your country. So people are leaving Russia just as they’re leaving Hong Kong, because they want to live big, dignified lives.

Third, parties turn into gangsters. When men rise to power and have that kind of autocratic power, they become autocrats and they become mobsters, and they become even more thuggish than they were when they rose to power because they become more paranoid.

And finally, nationalism has a tendency to self-inebriate. It goes crazy. In democracies, you’re nationalistic. People are patriotic, but they also believe in a higher order of liberalism, which is a set of universal values. In post-Communist authoritarian countries, there’s no universal values. It’s just us the people, us the nation, and that has a tendency to turn into this fanatical Russian greatness or Chinese greatness, and it leads countries to attempt to bite off more than they can chew, more than their capacities.

So we’ve seen the weaknesses of authoritarian countries in the last three or four weeks. That doesn’t mean they’re passive, as Bret wrote recently. Weak Putin could turn into a nuclear-deploying Putin. And so it’s not to minimize what could happen over the next few weeks or months, but it’s to have some faith that our system fundamentally is better. And that if we can last this out, the contradictions of their own systems will begin to show.

Bret Stephens: Can I disagree a little bit with David? I agreed with everything he said, with one exception, which is, we’re just entering the fourth week of this thing. There has been a rally-around-the-flag effect. So far, the Biden administration has done a lot of things right after getting a lot of things wrong last year, but we’ll see.

The problem with conflicts like this is that at the end of the day, people follow a winner. So Putin’s final cards are very far from played. I’ve seen a certain amount of triumphalism in a lot of the commentary that Putin can’t possibly win, that he is probably looking for an off-ramp, he’s stepped into a quagmire from which he’s never going to emerge.

People said that about Putin’s intercession in Syria seven years ago, and it actually ended up working out well for him. So we should take some solace in the fact that, as David puts it, democracy tends to hide its strengths until it needs them, and dictatorships tend to advertise their strengths until they’re exposed as actual weaknesses. But we’ll see. It’s too soon to tell.

Michelle Goldberg: There’s something about this triumphalism, which on the one hand, I understand and feel to a great extent this idea of the West being united and inspired by a leader who speaks the language of liberal universalism and democracy and human rights. And there is a feeling that these values, which had been sort of flaccid, are now vindicated. But I almost feel like there’s an element of kind of stolen valor in us now, feeling a new sense of confidence and purpose, while the Ukrainians are just being crushed under this machine. In many ways, they’re getting weapons, but they are very aware that they are ultimately alone in this fight where it counts.

I’ve been struggling with this, because I’m interested in seeing not just Putin but Putinism be weakened and destroyed. And if that happens, this conflict, I think it would be a net good. But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact of just the sheer horror of what’s being inflicted on these people that the rest of the world is feeling good about their solidarity with them. But that solidarity only goes so far.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I would like to say this with the idea of stolen valor and some of the skepticism of democracy triumphant, which is: Europe and NATO, not to mention the U.S., mostly sat by and watched the annexation of Crimea, the incursions into Georgia, what happened in Syria. And they basically did nothing, making the calculation that they would be insulated and protected from Russian aggression.

And I’m just wondering how resilient democracy really is when you see the flood of refugees over time, the higher fuel prices, the higher costs, the tension. Putin has used these tactics before, betting that democracies are less resilient to wars and their costs, and that they end up destabilizing democratically elected governments.

Michelle Goldberg: You can already see in the United States — for all the people’s talk about us coming together, high gas prices are already becoming a millstone for Joe Biden. My guess is that the refugees — it’s not going to be as destabilizing as the refugee crisis in 2015, and part of this is just because of race, part of it is because it is much easier to assimilate into a neighboring country. Even in Hungary, where you see, like I said, a lot of pro-Putin sentiment, there’s virtually no anti-refugee sentiment, which I think is interesting.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Bret, I’m going to turn to the United States now, because Zelensky also spoke to the U.S. Congress this week, and the Biden administration is now giving some $800 million more in military aid. You wrote that the West has basically appeased Putin and that the Biden administration is operating on a series of catastrophic illusions, that sanctions will work, that these strengthening alliances between Europe and the U.S. will be a deterrence. Biden is going to Brussels next week for NATO and E.U. meetings. You want him to do what exactly?

Bret Stephens: I want him to help Ukraine win.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: How?

Bret Stephens: Well, there’s a great deal more that we could do. The most obvious case is President Biden’s decision not to permit MiG-29s, which are planes which Ukrainian pilots are familiar with — these are surplus planes that, I think, the Poles have — to be transferred to the Ukrainian Air Force.

There are S-300 antiaircraft missile systems, which are also in NATO military stocks, that could be transferred over to Ukraine. There’s a possibility, instead of having a formal no-fly zone, which I understand is politically probably untenable, to at least create humanitarian air corridors — not NATO-backed, but perhaps U.N.-backed to make sure that cities like Kyiv aren’t starved to death, which is almost certainly what Putin intends to do.

The president can have, if he hasn’t done so already, a covert finding to establish C.I.A. bases in places like Romania and Poland to aid a long-term insurgency. So we have provided Ukraine with enough aid for it to fight. But my concern, Lulu, is that we’re not in this just to prolong Ukraine’s agony, to hold out a hope that turns out to be a vain one. I think we want to make sure that what Russia is attempting to do fails on its own terms. And ideally — although this is not the endgame — that the results are so catastrophic that it causes Putin to fall in Moscow itself, his regime to fall and be replaced, because otherwise he will simply attempt this experiment again five, six, however many years down the road.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: David, listening to Bret, I have to say I can’t stop thinking about what a dangerous time this is. The U.S. and Russia, between them, possess 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. So should the U.S. offer more weapons to Ukraine as Bret suggests, or humanitarian air corridors?

David Brooks: More or less, my approach is the status quo plus more. And I think we are imposing real costs on Russia. I think we’re destabilizing Russia. I think we’re doing a lot to strengthen the Ukrainians in their brave fight, and we should do more of that, but we shouldn’t fundamentally transform the nature of this conflict, which I think a no-fly zone has the risk of doing.

So, doing what we’re doing, and more of it, and allowing time, as I realize that Ukrainians suffer every day. But to me, that’s the right strategy and the right way to hold off what is truly a series of horrific possibilities if nuclear weapons get involved in this.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Michelle, the Biden administration is also reaching out to other countries outside Europe. They went to Venezuela looking for oil, possibly to lower gas prices, but also to move that country potentially out of Russia’s sphere. It feels like many countries are going to have to make choices about where they will sit in this new realignment.

Michelle Goldberg: Well, yes, absolutely. And that’s why there’s some debate about, does this ultimately benefit China by sort of creating this new dependence on China, or does it weaken China by weakening authoritarianism more broadly?

One of the most basic and obvious lessons here is the national security implications of our reliance on fossil fuels and our reliance on various autocracies to provide them. I understand that you can’t cut these things off overnight, but something that I think is really disappointing is that there doesn’t seem to be much political unity or political momentum to say: This is why we need a much quicker energy transition in this country.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I’m going to bring this back to this moment.

David, there’s been so much discussion as all these different pieces are moving around the chessboard. Russia said on Thursday that it had the “might” to put the U.S. and other enemies in its place. Obviously, that is a huge question looming over this: What might Russia do in retaliation to the West for how they are involving themselves in Ukraine? What do you see in terms of Russia’s next move?

David Brooks: That I can’t predict. I think one of the postures we have to figure out is, what’s our attitude in the face of a thug? So he’s going to threaten us with nuclear weapons. And so our posture is, how seriously do we take that? Do we take it so seriously we’re cautious and back down, we don’t want to prompt him?

Or do we say, nah, he’s probably not going to do it. Or do we say, which I think is probably the correct one: If we show weakness and back down, he’s probably more likely to do it. My posture would be 60 percent lean into it and be aggressive rather than be weak, that the way to pacify him is to show strength and not to show weakness, and that strength would be shown by doing what we’re doing, as I said before, only more so. And that’s the way to hold him off from doing something really stupid.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I want to end by asking Michelle and Bret this: There are reports that a peace deal could be struck where Ukraine could be neutral, give up its ambitions to join NATO for security guarantees. President Zelensky has said that there has been some movement in those talks with the Russians. We are seeing Russian forces not really advancing.

We are only going into week four, as you have all pointed out. But do you think there is a negotiated settlement to be had?

Bret Stephens: Well, I hope so. I can see a negotiated settlement, but it’s only a negotiated settlement in which it is clear that Ukraine has inflicted a devastating setback to the Russian Army and that doesn’t vindicate Putin’s strategy of aggression, conquest, ambiguous warfare and so on — because if you allow that to happen, he’s simply going to pocket his gain and do it again.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Just to understand: Are you advocating for Russian regime change?

Bret Stephens: Well, regime change — I hope Putin falls. It’s a little bit different from regime change in the Iraq-style sense of sending the Third Infantry up to Moscow. Obviously, that’s not what I have in mind. But what I have in mind is that we have to engage in a long-term strategy of containment of the Putin regime at every point that we can so that the ultimate conclusion of this struggle is that we are awakened to the fact that he is a major, clear and present danger to world security and that we should unite with our allies to make it very difficult for him to try to do something like this ever again, and to undermine the pillars of his regime’s support. So in that sense, sure, I want Putin to go, and I hope everyone else does, too.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Michelle, I’ve heard there are obviously no good options, but a Russia without a strong leader is a Russia that might actually cause even more problems. Where do you see this going if, indeed, this does lead to some sort of negotiated settlement?

Michelle Goldberg: Look, I think this is something you will rarely hear me say, but I agree with Bret that obviously the world would be better off without Vladimir Putin. In terms of a negotiated settlement, look, I think that if the Ukrainians manage to hold off Russia long enough to find a settlement that they can live with — I think that that is close to a best-case scenario at this point, even if it’s a compromise that is unsatisfactory and that does seem to, in some ways, reward Russia for its aggression by getting Ukraine to say that it’s not going to join NATO, by kind of consolidating Russian control over these areas that it seized. At the same time, what that really would do is basically ratify the status quo. Ukraine wasn’t close to joining NATO.

And I don’t think that if you could get a settlement that is something close to the prewar status quo — Russia still emerges from that, I think, far, far weaker. I also hope that if they do make a compromise that Ukrainians can live with, even if it’s not the kind of vindication of liberal democracy that people in the West want to see, that people stay as engaged with Ukraine’s future as they are with its very dramatic present. Ukraine is going to need in the best-case scenario just an unbelievable amount of help rebuilding. And so the world that now is kind of thrilling to their example will really owe it to them to help them create the kind of society that they’re espousing if and when this war is brought to an end.

David Brooks: I just find it hard to believe the Ukrainians are going to want a settlement that doesn’t include E.U. membership. And I find it hard to believe that Vladimir Putin is going to accept a Ukraine with E.U. membership. It goes against his entire sense of what the Russian nation is. And to me, insisting they get E.U. membership is the touchstone of all settlements.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a Times Opinion podcast host. Michelle Goldberg, Bret Stephens and David Brooks are Times columnists.

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Times Opinion audio produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Alison Bruzek. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Alex Ellerbeck. Original music and mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Lauren Kelley, Kaari Pitkin, Patrick Healy and Kristina Samulewski.