Transcript

What parallels can be drawn between Russia’s democratic decline and challenges facing the US and other Western democracies? 

What are the prospects for genuine peace after Putin's invasion of Ukraine? 

With the US’ shifting priorities, how does Europe’s response to Russian aggression inform Australia’s own security outlook? 

In this episode, Peter Tesch and Mikhail Zygar join Rory Medcalf for a discussion on the evolving role and influence of Russia in the global order, the impending challenges of the war in Ukraine, and the role that the US and Europe will play in this equation. 

(This transcript is partly AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)

National Security Podcast

You’re listening to the National Security Podcast. The show that brings you expert analysis, insights and opinion on the national security challenges facing Australia and the Indo-pacific Produced by the ANU National Security College

Rory Medcalf

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm Rory Medcalf, head of the ANU National Security College. Today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and I paid my respects to their elders past and present.

This week I'm joined by Peter Tesch and Mikhail Zygar for a discussion on the evolving role and influence of Russia in the global order and that's really a polite way of saying that we'll be talking about the profound strategic shocks that the world has been going through, the confronting challenge of the war in Ukraine, the brutal invasion of Ukraine, and of course the questions that we all have in our minds now about what next for Ukraine, Europe and the World as the Trump administration in its extraordinary and very crude way seems to be pursuing peace, but perhaps not.

Let's begin, and I'd love to begin really by introducing our guests. Properly, Peter Tesch, you of course are known to many of our Australian listeners on the podcast and Peter Tesch is now a distinguished advisor with the National Security College at the Australian National University but holds also a number of academic positions, I think with the University of Queensland and also with ANU. Peter draws on really exceptional experience as a leading Australian diplomat and policy official over many years, former ambassador to Moscow, ambassador to Berlin, I think you were ambassador to Kazakhstan as well, back in the early days of Australia establishing that relationship and then before leaving government, Deputy Secretary for Strategic Policy in the Department of Defence. So welcome to you, Peter.

But Mikhail, you'll be new to many of our Australian listeners in particular. of course, I think the fact that you're a, you know, as I would put it, a leading journalist, writer, commentator and expert, especially on Russian affairs and on really the posture of Russia in the world and the posture of Putin's administration, not necessarily a popular individual with that administration and with Putin personally will come to that. But I think as journalist, writer, filmmaker, the founding editor in chief of Russia's only independent news television channel Dojt and now based in New York City, the author of some very key texts, some leading books, All the Kremlin's Men, War and Punishment, Putin's Zelensky and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine and a columnist also for De Spiegel and New York Times and holding academic positions with Princeton University and with Columbia as well. So welcome to you, Mikhail and I know you're visiting Australia in the very near future. Really looking forward to welcoming you here in Canberra and Peter, thank you for your role in facilitating that. But let's hear a little bit from you now and I might just begin with you, Mikhail, because it would be useful for our listeners before we get into the analysis of Russia in the world, what the future holds for the conflict in Ukraine, to understand what has framed your thinking, where did you derive your worldview?

Mikhail Zygar

No, I think it's worth mentioning that I started my career as a journalist from working as a war reporter and for more than 10 years I was covering different wars in different hotspots from Iraq to Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, as well as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as revolutions in Ukraine.

At the same time, I was working for many years as independent journalist in Russia.  I was running Russia's, some people used to call it the only opposition TV channel. So I spent many years trying to make Russia a decent democratic society and I was trying to confront all those authoritarian trends that were obvious during almost 25 years of Putin's regime. But probably the crucial turning point for me as the citizen of Russia, as the journalist and thinker, was the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. I left Russia on the third day of the invasion. Before that, on February 24th, in 2022, I authored the most well-known open petition that was co-signed by 13 of the most well-known Russian intellectuals, authors, journalists. That has become the symbol of the protest for many Russians and as a result of that tragic event, I mean, the invasion, a lot of Russians, as we all know, left the country and now we have that situation of there being actually two Russia's.

There is the inner Russia, the country that lives under Putin's dictatorship, the country that unfortunately has become the fascist regime and I really mean it when I... call it fascist because I think all the literary definition of the of the word fascism really applies to the current Russia. At the same time we have outer Russia, a lot of Russian speaking people, Russians who have to work from abroad. You mentioned the independent Russian TV channel which now has to work from Amsterdam and broadcast for the Russian diaspora, which is something like 30 million living in Europe, in America, even in Australia and for us, the current geopolitical crisis and the current shift in the American administration is even more shocking because we have seen how Russia was becoming authoritarian and fascist for so many years. That's why we are really troubled that we used to think that western values are the democratic values and now sometimes we have discussed, we have to discuss within our circle, but also with our Ukrainian colleagues, Ukrainian journalists, that it seems like... we now have to specify if we're speaking about democratic values. We cannot call them western values because what's the West? Is the United States should shoot or could the United States now be considered the part of the West and which are the values for the new administration?

Rory Medcalf

Yeah, that's a question we will come back to because I think we're recording this in March 2025 and there are lots of questions about who is the leader of the free world now and do they really sit in the White House? But, Mikhail, just to sort of wrap up on this point for a moment about what's framed your worldview because I think it's pretty much that experience of journalism and descent and the way that you've seen, as you say, fascism rise in Russia. It sounds to me that you have found a community, whether it's a community in exile, whether it's an international community of concern for those shared values so it'd be interesting also just to understand how you have found, if you like, common cause in Europe. How that sits with Ukraine, how international is your perspective?

Mikhail Zygar

I think that my perspective is very international and I don't know if it's European or American or just cosmopolitan. From the very beginning of the invasion I was trying to on the one hand explain to my fellow Russians that the war against Ukraine is a terrible crime of Putin's regime and we're going to pay tremendous price for it for many generations to come and actually it's our only goal to see Ukraine winning this war because that's the only possibility for us to have our country back, the country that is currently under the occupation of Putin and his inner circle.

At the same time, I think it's crucial for us that the democratic values prevail globally, not only in Ukraine, but also in Europe. I wish I could say that about America, because I now live here, and I discuss the perspectives of American democracy with my colleagues in both universities where I as well as with my fellow American journalists and sometimes I have to work as some kind of psychotherapist trying to explain to them that yes, it really happens. You can find yourself in this situation when you don't really recognize the society you thought you used to live in and that sometimes you have to speak out and you have to do anything you can to promote those values that used to be irreplaceable.

Rory Medcalf

It's a really interesting insight. A Russian journalist in exile serving as an early warning system to Americans who care about their values. Peter, let's turn to you. And it's quite unusual for an Australian diplomat, official, academic even, to focus so heavily on Russia and Europe. It hasn't always been fashionable, but please give us a sense of your journey and of course, maybe a few clues as to why all of these issues we're discussing matter so much for Australians.

Peter Tesch

Yeah. You put your finger on it there, Rory. I mean, I've always been a little bit of an outlier in my professional life here. I'm trying not to sound too much like the Europe guy, given that most of my 35 year public service career was hallmarked by a very profound and sustained refocusing of Australia upon our immediate region, the Indo-Pacific as we now call it.

I guess the origins of my interest in Europe and in Russia lie in my own German ancestry. The fact that I'd always had an interest in European history, military history and I started with a very clear intent of learning foreign languages at the University of Queensland.  German was an obvious one and Russian, I picked more almost out of perversity, out of curiosity, out of a tendency to swim against the tide, which hasn't been, I guess, the most pronounced hallmark of my career but nonetheless, it's tragic that 40 years later, that area of study, such expertise as I've been able to develop is now desperately needed and even more so in a country like Australia, which has tended wrongly to think that Europe lies somewhere over there and it's only now, and to my great relief, realizing that what is happening in Ukraine with Putin's brutal war of choice has profound consequences for Australia because it is about a unilateral attempt to reshape the global security order. Now being abetted by the White House without any obvious strategic quid pro quo but my experience over the decades studying and working with that part of the world has just reinforced to me how vital Europe is as a construct, as a model, as an appealing set of enduring values based on the rule of law and accountability. These are things that have long since been eviscerated in Putin's Russia and I am very fearful that we are watching the slow disembowelling of those very elements in the United States under Trump 2.0. So, I've come to this field of study out of sheer self-indulgence, but it's increasingly pertinent to our part of the world.

Not least because none of us can assume that democracy is a self-licking ice cream. None of us can assume that democracy stands on its own self-evident merits. We need to work at it. We have to cultivate it. We have to nurture it and we have to protect it because we're seeing on many fronts how easy it is in an incremental way for those things we take for granted to be slowly eroded.

Rory Medcalf

So let's turn to the issues at hand and as I said, we're recording this, think, in Australia, in Canberra on the 12th of March, 2025. Events are moving fast. The latest news that I think Australians have woken to this morning, apart from the Trump administration's decision on not exempting Australia from its steel and aluminium tariffs but the big strategic news, of course, is the announcement that Ukraine will accept a 30-day ceasefire in principle, but of course Russia now needs to come to that table. Mikhail, what's your analysis of prospects for genuine peace in the conflict initiated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine?

Mikhail Zygar

You know, I have been talking to all of my sources back in Moscow during the last month at least, and I was trying to get that information. What they feel is, is peace, any kind of peace deal possible or not and it sounds strange that most of them, would say 99 % of all of the people I was talking to are 100 % convinced that Putin is not going to have any kind of peace and he's not interested in it and probably the most frequent explanation I've heard is that he started loving the war. He sees the war as the only possibility for him to run the country. That's the ideal mechanism for him now. He has restructured Russian economy.

Years to serve for the army, now, there was a Stalinist motto, everything for the army, everything for the front and yes, that's how he's working with the Russian economy. The Russian government since last year doesn't have the vice prime minister in charge of economy, but it has the vice prime minister in charge of the military-industrial complex, as it used to be in the Soviet Union.

So the war economy has become the cornerstone of Russia's everyday life. But what's even more important? The war has become the perfect mechanism for him to get rid of dissent. He made more than 1.5 million people leave the country. The most obvious protesters, that part of Russian society that was most unhappy with him, liberal journalists, IT specialists, mid-level business, middle class actually, but even more, he can be sure that he's got the rest of the country in his control only during the war. Because once the war is over, it's going to be inevitable that those people who are unhappy with the war and with his policies are going to speak out and I'm not only speaking about the liberals, I'm speaking about the far right, going to be, I'm speaking about those people who are, who were happy with the beginning of the war and who want this war to continue.

We have recently heard that one of acclaimed war so-called war heroes the person whose name is Artem Zhoga who is probably the only veteran of this war who was promoted to be the high-ranking official in his administration. He dared to openly criticize Putin's proposal to Donald Trump to participate in the mineral deal and he started saying that actually Russian treasures are not to be shared with American imperialists and they must stay at home.

That's happening even before the end of the war. So once there is any kind of ceasefire, once there is any kind of truce, all the criticism towards Putin and his policy are going to increase a lot and so he doesn't have any other possibility to make people silent and mobilized and working for him taking any decision but to continue this war and that's his clear strategy and at the same time, we saw that he was playing this game very professionally.

He was pretending that he was ready to start any negotiations with Donald Trump and even with Ukraine, but his bet was on the inability of President Zelensky to get involved into that process. He was he was hoping that Zelensky would step out first. So, Putin is not really willing to sit at that table and he knows that he's not going to be invited there because that roundtable is not possible and he's doing everything he can to make Zelensky refuse. So he started with cursing Zelensky and labelling him as illegitimate president and it was rather successful. Donald Trump and his administration started believing in that and repeating that argument of Russian propaganda and I think that's going to be his strategy for the next weeks or months, because his real goal is to pretend that he's ready for the negotiations but never start them.

Rory Medcalf

There's so many questions that this analysis raises. I think it's some really powerful observations, but we might come back to some of these questions. How sustainable is that idea of perpetual war? You know, at what point does, let's hope, I think, a genuine strengthening of Europe play into that? At what point does that become, if you like, a momentum towards the defeat of Russia in that war? and how smart or not is American diplomacy in this regard? So many questions, but I want to turn to you first, Peter, if I may, what's your take on where things go now?

Peter Tesch

Well, I just want to pick up on Mikhail’s last point there because I think it's very important. There is a tendency, I think in our own commentary here in Australia to simply take at face value assertions that Putin wants peace, he's given no evidence whatsoever and if you think back to the very eve of the full scale invasion, the now largely forgotten proposals that the Kremlin had put on the table amounted to nothing less than the dismantlement of NATO and a requirement to return to the pre-1991 status quo ante in terms of European security posture, always intended to be unacceptable, always intended to cast the other side as rejecting. It reminds me of that scene in the Yes Prime Minister where they're debating the channel tunnel, and the French side says you've refused our very reasonable proposal of French sovereignty begin at Dover. I mean this idea that Putin has ever seriously put on the table proposals for peace that would be acceptable in any way to the other parties is just ludicrous and of course we have the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the 1997 bilateral treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, the demarcation of Ukraine-Russia borders that was concluded under President Putin in 2003, which clearly placed Crimea in sovereign Ukraine. The Kremlin's undertakings past and future are shown to be worthless and where we go from here is a very difficult forecast to make. My earnest hope is that there will be a way to at least cease the brutal killing, the cultural and ethnic cleansing and genocide that has already been carried out in the occupied territories to halt the attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, which have been characteristic of Russia's brutal conduct of this war with flagrant disregard for its obligations as a permanent member of the Security Council, and we forget that it is an architect and guarantor of the system of international security and it is absolutely trashing that system for its own national goals. I think Mikhail is quite right to say, Putin is now so invested in this. If we were to see an armistice, a truce, a ceasefire without any assumptions about the future legal determinations relating to illegally occupied territory, what we have is an overheating Russian economy where the military industrial complex has been fed with state money.

I think 40 % of state expenditures going on that sector. Low unemployment, high wages. If the war stopped tomorrow, he can't just spin that economic capacity back to civilian and I think therein lies risks for us in the region because that economic production is going to be seeking outlets. So I would forecast a renewed Russian interest in arms exports into our part of the world and I would forecast a continued series of efforts by the Kremlin to probe, to erode, to corrode Western cohesion and to seek to demonstrate and exploit the apparent indifference of the White House to transatlantic security models in ways that will aggravate the fracturing in European and Western society.

The best we can hope for is an end to the killing of civilians and a chance for Ukraine to regather its strength, to rebuild its economic infrastructure and societal cohesion. But that must come with very serious, in the eyes of the Kremlin, support for Ukraine's ability to defend itself and I do struggle at the moment, in the absence of US backing for this, see what would persuade Putin that there is going to be a serious bulwark of resistance. Renewed efforts, whether it's in 12 months or two years or three years time, and it won't necessarily even be in Ukraine. It'll be probing other weaknesses as he perceives them in the global order.

 

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Rory Medcalf

Let's turn this to the United States because you, as you just said, Peter, so much depends on what the White House is actually trying to do, whether there is a strategy or not and I will come back to Mikhail on that in a moment because I think your, as I said, your role, perhaps inadvertently, is going to the US as an early warning system on what can go wrong when democracy erodes is pretty telling. But let's hear from you first, Peter. What do you think the Trump administration is trying to achieve? Do they have a plan? Do they have a strategy? Do they realize quite what they're doing?

Peter Tesch

I really struggle to answer that question without sounding flippant or glib because nothing we have seen to date in the two months since the inauguration suggests that there is a coherent strategy that is based on anything other than the naked pursuit of self-interest in the most narcissistic transactional way without regard for the inevitable consequences for even the American colossus of abandoning or being perceived to be unreliable in maintaining the commitments that the United States has made over successive administration since the Second World War to the preservation of a regional and global security order through a network of alliances and partnerships. Now, there is no doubt that complacency had set in in Europe and in Australia. When I was reflecting on your earlier question about the formation of my worldview, apart from the shocks of the collapse of communism in 1991 and the Global War on Terror, as it was called, it began with the 9-11 attacks. My professional and adult life was pretty benign and suddenly Australia has been confronted with the reality that our major security partner is just as prepared to make us pay a price for its own narrow perception of self-interest and we are seeing, as I said, this evisceration of the institutions of accountable government in the United States.

I think that from what we've seen and heard to date, Trump is as inclined to believe in the validity of a new age of empires, of great power exceptionalism, and in order to position himself as the key arbiter and the key deal maker, everything is negotiable. So long as at the end he feels that there is a win for the United States, and that is illusory, and it's going to have a lot of consequential damage that will be visited upon countries like Australia and Europe.

Rory Medcalf

Okay. That's your polite assessment of the Trump White House. can't..

Peter Tesch

You can't set aside 35 years of government.

Rory Medcalf

It's my turn to be glib. I'm actually being just that little bit facetious. I mean, I think the, uh, it's very difficult to find any analysis at the moment that is crediting them with a strategy. We had recently on this podcast, uh, Beth Sanner, former intelligence brief to Donald Trump out of the US intelligence community. She is hard pressed to see a strategy. I think you're on the money there. But Mikhail, what do you think? What do you think Trump's White House, Trump's America, MAGA America is actually trying to achieve here?

Mikhail Zygar

Yeah, you know, I agree that it's hard to talk about the strategy but let me start with a different angle because I know what Vladimir Putin thinks they are achieving and what is happening with America and actually with the world right now. According to this point of view, Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago, because of lack of any kind of faith. Soviet people as well as anywhere, anyone in this world stopped believing in communism and that Soviet religion, Soviet ideology became irrelevant and that was the first step, the first movement towards the collapse of Soviet Union because it was irrelevant even for the leaders of that country, and Mikhail Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to embrace the Western ideology of liberal democracy and actually, that reminds me a lot of something we are seeing right now. Liberal democracy is seen by a lot of people in America as completely irrelevant ideology, something that no one still believes in, something that is not working. Trump has become the first American leader openly who openly claims that liberal democracy doesn't work for the future of Americans. And he is, like Mikhail Gorbachev did it once, is embracing the, if I may call it this way, new Russian ideology and new Russian ideology is not communism as it used to be, but that's actually a brutal capitalism with a hint of cynicism.

Putin's Russia is very cynical country. He is running the country as the corporation, which normally is the definition of fascism, actually. But he doesn't try to pretend that he takes care about the people, about human rights, about any kind of values. He prefers not to believe in anything and that's the only thing he believes in. So that's his approach to the new style of governing and according to that, to his point of view, Donald Trump is coming very quickly to that standpoint. As a result, see basically, at least Vladimir Putin expects the United States to collapse just the way Soviet Union wants collapse because United States are not going to promote liberal democracy globally, are not going to practice it at home and that's at least if not as a country. I don't mean that that would mean that United States are on the path to disintegration, but as the… ideological power and as the state…

Rory Medcalf

Yeah, the collapse of their power globally.

Mikhail Zygar

 …As it used to be probably it doesn't play the same role as it used to play for many years and that's exactly Putin's goal. He was speaking a lot about the new world order and the end of the Yalta system actually since 2007. That was the first moment when his Munich speech at Munich Security Conference. He started telling that okay, if Yalta is not relevant, let's invent something different and he's very close to the achievement of that dream because for the months before even the presidential election he was trying to seek to secretly propose a new kind of a pact And as far as I know he's got the very reliable back channel that connects him to Donald Trump via Jared Kushner and Russian Jared Kushner, who is the best friend of Putin's daughter, the person named Kirill Dmitriev, who is now one of the participants and one of the organizers of the negotiations in Riyadh and his idea is actually second Yalta.

He [Putin] wants that unique photo opportunity with him sitting next to Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, as Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill used to do that in 1945 and he definitely sees that as an opportunity and from what I hear in the US, that fits the perception of Donald Trump. He would love to have that picture on the cover of all magazines and on the front pages of all the newspapers. He wants himself to be the greatest American leader of the new era, and he probably is ready to start this era with some kind of new Yalta.

Rory Medcalf

And of course, for any of our listeners who perhaps are a little bit fuzzy with their history of the 1940s and the end of the Second World War, I guess I read the spirit of Yalta as being very much about the victors in that conflict developing their own approach to spheres of influence and Putin's problem with that wasn't the concept of spheres of influence. It was just where the lines on the map were drawn.

Peter Tesch

Absolutely, and if you look at Putin's address to the federal assembly in February, 2023, just one year after he began the full scale war, he expressly lamented that the other side is seeking to destroy the legacy of Yalta and Potsdam and I agree completely with Mikhail. If you go back and reread Putin's Munich security conference transcript in February, 2007. If you read his essay on the historical unity of Ukrainians and Russians of June, 2021, I mean, that is the Mein Kampf of our era that sets out very clearly his worldview and while it's not a step-by-step blueprint, it should be something that is a clarion call and I think the great concern for all of us should be that for some time now, America has chosen not to exercise its unique convening power with full commitment. Trump is accelerating that, and my concern is in a few years time, we'll find that America not only doesn't exercise a convening power, it will not have a convening power and that throws up massive challenges for whence will that authority come in a new world order. We know that our own Indo-Pacific region is not internally cohesive and consistent and therefore, I think it reinforces in my view that Europe must become a much sharper focus for us and for others who seek to stem this tide that is running against the presumed superiority of the liberal, accountable, democratic system of governance. We are much more Huntington than Fukuyama nowadays.

Rory Medcalf

There's three things I'd like to cover before we wrap up this conversation and, Mikhail, when you come to Australia soon, I think there'll be a lot more to cover in this space, but the three things are, do want us to talk about Ukraine and the Ukrainians themselves because too often these conversations treat Ukraine as passive but of course it's been the leadership of Zelensky and the defiance and sacrifice of the Ukrainian people that has us having this conversation in the first place so that we're not talking about the instant conquest of Ukraine that Putin seemed to imagine three years ago. So Ukraine, Europe, the question of whether Europe can genuinely now arm, coordinate, mobilize, prepare, fill some of the vacuum of leadership that America has left, and then finally, Peter, I want to come back to you briefly on the question of Australia in all of this. So Mikhail, if I can perhaps invite you to offer your perspectives on Ukraine, Zelensky, the Ukrainian people and the way they are handling the situation.

Mikhail Zygar

Yeah, absolutely. First, I must say that Donald Trump has done a great job in unifying the Ukrainian population, because obviously Vladimir Zelensky was seen as a superhero back in 2022. And the last years were much harder for Ukrainians. Independent investigations about the corruption in the political elite were very disappointing for a lot of Ukrainians, although his approval ratings were obviously higher than 50% but it's not like all those talks are not relevant any longer. He is now the real leader of Ukrainians and It's very important that for many Ukrainians it's 100 percent clear that even the ceasefire with Russians is very dangerous, because the obvious scenario they see is that, OK, Russia agrees for a temporary ceasefire.

For example, for the period of the presidential elections in Ukraine and then there is the pre-stage provocation, and Russians come and there is a new assault, and they take the empty positions of Ukrainian army and probably take Kiev, because for any Ukrainian, it's clear that Putin loved his Plan A, and Plan A meant taking Kiev within three days and dethroning Zelensky, and he still doesn't have any kind of plan B. He still loves his plan A, and he's not ready to, and he doesn't see himself losing, although there is some kind of popular myth in the Western media that Russia was, that Russian economy was almost destroyed by the sanctions, that the Russian population is suffering, that Putin is so unhappy with the way of this war, it's not the way how it's seen for Moscow. In his point of view, he is winning slowly, but inevitably, and he sees that without American help, Ukraine is becoming weaker and weaker, and Ukrainians know that. Ukrainians know that no temporary ceasefire is possible that he's going to cheat, he's going to deceive them, and I think that's strength of Ukrainians because they know the character of the enemy and they have to rely on the Europeans, that's true, and that's how they see the upcoming months.

Rory Medcalf

Let's turn to Europe and I think I'd be interested in your assessment first, Mikhail, on what we're seeing now out of Europe. I mean, there's obviously the question of the future of NATO, a shadow over the future of NATO, but you've got leaders in a number of European capitals really stepping up and I would include the British in that regard if I can call Britain Europe these days. What's your assessment of how much promise there is now, how much resolve there is now from Europe.

Mikhail Zygar

I think that's the most important question because we haven't really heard the real response from the Europeans to all the initiatives of the Trump administration. We haven't heard from Europeans anything real, anything substantial about his idea to take over Greenland. We haven't heard anything when he's trying, when he's at least pretending that he's trying to occupy Canada, but when it's about Ukraine.

It's obvious that European Union must do that. For example, we saw that last month State Department stopped the operation to restore Ukrainian energy system and it's a crucial one because everything was prepared for quick, fast hems in Poland to go and to restore all the electric power stations that were just destroyed by Russians and it's very important because in Ukraine it’s still winter, it's still freezing cold and restoring electricity is that the matter of the survival of a lot of people and the moment the State Department stopped funding that that operation, that was the signal to Europeans that they must step in. I'm afraid it's going to be very, very slow decision, much slower than it's needed. There is no government in Germany so far, and I think a lot will depend on Chancellor Merz.

He's got a real alternative, like in Matrix. He's got the blue pill and the red pill. Because he used to be compared to Donald Trump a lot during his electoral campaign and we saw that he, in a way, he wants to see himself as the German Donald Trump. We don't know which pill he's going to choose. Is he going to be real? I don't know, Trump 2.0, 3.0, or he's going to choose another path as the person who can try to unify European Union and to stand against Donald Trump and to back Ukraine. We still don't have the answer to this question and I think this question is going to be very important. That's going to be the personal choice of Chancellor Merz.

Rory Medcalf

Okay, so the key is in Berlin. Peter, just as we wrap up, interested to understand your perspective on this, of course, as a former ambassador to Germany, among other things, but then also if you could just segue from that into telling us, as we wrap up, why Australians should care, why all of this matters to Australia.

Peter Tesch

Yeah, well, I agree with Mikhail. I think probably the likely return of a grand coalition in Germany led by Merz is the best hope we have to arrest the haemorrhaging of commitment and cohesion. I think Europe needs to draw a lot more lessons from the likes of Poland, from the Baltics, from the Nordics and so do we in Australia. The concept of total defence, the idea of how do you actually initiate and conduct a dialogue with a population about the fact that this is more than something that the Defence Department can and must contend with.

Rory Medcalf

And I'm going to interrupt you there just to put in a quick plug for the forthcoming National Security College paper on the Finnish model of defence and resilience and why Australia can learn from that.

Peter Tesch

Without having read the paper, I'm absolutely prepared to endorse that because I think we have neglected those important lessons and of course, in many cases, they are smaller populations like the Baltics, but these are some of the important lessons that we need to be observing and dissecting and discussing in our own country and how they apply to our part of the world, where we can no longer assume a convergence and a commonality of strategic goals and interests with our hitherto most significant security partner, and we will remain committed to and heavily invested in the US alliance but we're going to need to diversify. We're seeing strong signs of that over the past decade or so in our deepening relationships with Japan, with Korea, with Indonesia, I would suggest also with Vietnam but there is nothing that binds our region together in the way in which the Western alliance used to be bound through common heritage, common values, common systems of governance, common strategic goals.

But I do think that Europe will have to step up. The problem, of course, with anything that is based on consensus is it only takes one Viktor Orban to block decisions and Putin doesn't need much by way of delay or interruption and we've seen with the flip-flopping, the US turned off intelligence sharing with Ukraine and military aid and now it said it's going to turn it back on. There is this bizarre carrot and stick candy floss and slap approach that the United States is taking towards Ukraine and the only person they're trying to punish is Zelensky. So I think we need to make much more common cause with countries in Europe that still share our systems, our values, our rule of law, our transparency and accountability and we need to become much more firmly resolved to doing what we have to do to protect our own Australia and that involves defining what Australia is, what we want it to be and what we're prepared to pay to protect that.

Rory Medcalf

There's so much more ground we can cover. These issues are moving incredibly quickly, but they point to some very, very deep strategic currents and I think both of you have really uncovered that for our listeners today. I'm going to pause there, but I'm going to first commend you, Mikhail, on your courage and your candour in the work that you do and say how welcome you will be in Australia.

Peter, I too thank you for your role in organizing the forthcoming visit and the workshops and when I say academic, I mean it in the best sense, the intellectual work that will help, I think, Mikhail and others inform Australian policy, and I want to thank both of you for joining us on the National Security Podcast.

Peter Tesch

Thanks, Roy.

Mikhail Zygar

Thank you so much.

National Security Podcast

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