SPICE has the honor of working closely with the Yanai Tadashi Foundation. The Yanai Tadashi Foundation’s mission is twofold. The first focuses on leader development by developing “leaders who can solve issues from a global perspective and drive the growth of Japan and the world.” The Foundation works towards this goal through its International Scholarship Program and the Ryugaku Fellowship, a study abroad support program. The recipients of the International Scholarship Program have the honor of carrying the title of Yanai Scholar. Since 2015, the Yanai Tadashi Foundation has funded very generous scholarships to Japanese students who enter top colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The second mission focuses on the promotion of mutual understanding. The Foundation “strives to create a society where people with diverse backgrounds develop mutual understanding and live in harmony.” The Foundation works towards this goal through Stanford e-Japan, a distance-learning course administered through SPICE with generous support from the Yanai Tadashi Foundation. First offered in Spring 2015, Stanford e-Japan enrolls exceptional high school students in Japan to engage in an intensive study of U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations. The Spring 2025 course marks the tenth year of Stanford e-Japan. The instructors of Stanford e-Japan are Waka Takahashi Brown, Manager and spring session instructor, and Meiko Kotani, fall session instructor. One of the goals of the course is to encourage Japanese students to consider applying to colleges and universities in the United States. Though many Japanese students have considered doing so, one major concern has been the cost.

Image

Meiko Kotani and I recently met four freshman Yanai Scholars at Stanford, and they offered to share their experiences at Stanford—as well as their gratitude to Mr. Tadashi Yanai and the Yanai Tadashi Foundation—in this article. Photo above: Gary Mukai, Mr. Tadashi Yanai, and Waka Takahashi Brown, courtesy the Yanai Tadashi Foundation.

Koichi Kimoto

I am a first-year student planning to study Aerospace Engineering/Electrical Engineering. As a Yanai Tadashi Foundation Scholar at Stanford, I feel very honored and grateful to be able to attend a university abundant of opportunities in terms of activities and network at virtually no cost. I know for a fact that my family would not have been able to support my college education costs in a university in the United States (especially a private school), so being a recipient of the Yanai Tadashi Foundation scholarship was the enabling part in realizing my goals of studying Aerospace Engineering at a school in the United States, where the field is most predominant.

Receiving the scholarship acceptance before college admissions was also a huge benefit both psychologically and admissions-wise, since it alleviated my worries about financial burden and kept me solely focused on just getting into a university. Moreover, not only does the YTF scholarship help me attend Stanford right now, but being a part of such a wonderful community of such diverse, talented people has made me a part of an amazing network full of potential collaborators in various fields ranging from engineering, computer science, and music, and I have accomplished so much with my fellow Yanai Scholars, and I hope to keep and learning and growing through this opportunity of a lifetime.

Chisa Ogaki

I am beyond grateful and honored to be able to study at Stanford as a Yanai Tadashi Foundation Scholar. Thanks to Mr. Yanai and the Foundation, I am able to immerse myself fully in my college experience and pursue a degree in Mechanical Engineering without any financial burden on my family. Beyond the generous financial support, what truly differentiates the Yanai Tadashi Foundation from other scholarship foundations in Japan is the community. It has been invigorating to connect with and learn from fellow Yanai Scholars who are all incredibly skilled in their respective fields. Our alumni are always willing to offer mentorship and many of us stay connected well after graduating college.

The Foundation also actively helps us build this sense of community by hosting annual retreats and events that bring us scholars together. One of the highlights of my Stanford experience so far is the weekly dinner I have with three other first-year Yanai Scholars at Stanford. After a long and eventful week, it is always refreshing to come together on the weekend to recap and share stories. Listening to each of their experiences refuels my motivation to work harder in the following week. The connections I have made with fellow Yanai Scholars have enriched my college experience and will continue to inspire me to make the most of my education at Stanford.

Issa Sadamoto

I am a freshman studying Computer Science, with an interest in other fields such as Classics, History, and International Relations. Being able to attend Stanford through the financial assistance granted by the Yanai Tadashi Foundation, I am most grateful for the chance to attend a university that allows me to explore my breadth of interest to the fullest extent, not constrained by a narrow four-year structure. Taking classes and being able to enjoy undergraduate life having the privilege not to worry about my financial situation, the Yanai Tadashi Foundation and Stanford enable me to dive into my interests and find my future passions.

The Foundation’s support extends beyond mere financial assistance. The community it has formed has helped to push and motivate me. The environment of highly motivated peers within the community motivates me daily to excel academically and engage meaningfully with campus opportunities. The diverse perspectives I have encountered have challenged my preconceptions and enriched my worldview in ways I never anticipated. Each conversation with fellow scholars introduces new ideas that complement my technical studies with humanistic insights. This integration of knowledge domains is precisely what I hoped to achieve in my education. I hope to keep leveraging this amazing chance to further grow and develop my interests, and to keep learning from the wonderful environment offered by Stanford!

Shodai Tanaka

Firstly, I love the violin. My dream was to study the physics of musical instruments at Stanford. The dream has come true with the support of the Yanai Tadashi Foundation scholarship and the great community of Yanai Scholars. Since coming here, I have been recognizing the history of the Japanese people anew, including the history of myself. As an international student who has spent almost the entirety of my life inside Hokkaido, Japan, it is not an easy workload to study abroad and be exposed to a different culture. However, in Stanford’s environment, with freedom and therefore requiring agency, I am gaining diverse thinking perspectives from intriguing teachers and friends.

Image

During a recent meeting at the Yanai Tadashi Foundation in Tokyo, I had the pleasure of meeting with Chikano Shiroma, SPICE’s former main liaison at the Yanai Tadashi Foundation; photo to the left courtesy the Yanai Tadashi Foundation. She has met with many Yanai Scholars at Stanford and other colleges and universities. Waka Takahashi Brown, Meiko Kotani, and I would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to her for her unwavering support of Stanford e-Japan and the chance to work with Yanai Scholars, several of whom are alumni of Stanford e-Japan. Two of Chikano Shiroma’s colleagues—Kano Sasaki, Masami Ueda—kindly joined the meeting as well, and we are looking forward to working closely with them as well as Ayako Tamura and Takatoshi Tanaka this year. 

To stay informed of SPICE news, join our email list and follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram.

People are fed up with political parties, and that's a big problem for democracy, says political scientist Didi Kuo. She joins host Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast to discuss why we need well-functioning parties, how we got the party system we have today, and what can be done to course correct and build better parties for the future.

Watch the video version of their conversation above, or listen to the audio below, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other major podcast platforms. A full transcript of the episode is also available.

Kuo's latest book is The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't, published by Oxford University Press.

TRANSCRIPT:

McFaul: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Michael McFaul, the Director of FSI. Today, I'm talking with Didi Kuo, a Center Fellow here at th Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law. 

She's an expert on comparative politics, democratization, political reform, and she's the new author of this fantastic book called The Great Retreat, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't.  You should all buy it now. 

Didi, thanks for coming on to World Class with us.

Kuo: Thank you Mike

McFaul: What's the origin story here? Why did you decide to write this book?

Kuo: It's interesting that we're both here at CDDRL because this is very much a product of our intellectual programming. So when I first got to Stanford ten years ago, we started a program on American democracy in comparative perspective.

We at CDDRL have primarily been concerned with how to build strong democracies in places where democracy is emerging and how to have that partner with effective development.

And we started this program on U.S. democracy because we noticed there were these new challenges in the U.S.. I mean, they have historical roots, of course. But we wanted to look abroad and see, are these challenges just in the United States or are they in a lot of other places? And also, what kind of lessons can we draw from them?

And as a result, I got a lot of cool opportunities with the reform community around the United States. And one thing that really struck me is there's deep and widespread anti-party sentiment among a lot of people who care deeply about American democracy. And as a political scientist and a comparativist in particular, it runs counter to everything we know about the relationship of parties and democracy. And really the long-running empirical finding, in anyone who studies democratic consolidation and stability, is that you need strong and robust parties in order to ensure good democratic outcomes.

So, this book was born of a sort of understanding of this big disconnect. We have a public that increasingly dislikes and distrust parties. We also have a lot of historical evidence that we need strong parties to get better democratic outcomes. And in particular, to mediate this relationship of democracy and capitalism that has long been considered stable, but has been fraught, especially at the start in the 19th century.

This book is to try to help us understand what parties historically have been good for, why it is that they're weak today, and why we should think in a kind of pro-party or a party-building framework when we also think about democratic renewal.

McFaul: Well, that's a great segue. Those are three great questions. You just asked three big ‘why’ questions. Let's talk about them in detail.

So, why parties in the first place, right? It's not intuitive, I think, to a lot of people that parties are necessary for democracy. Tell us that story.

And then the next ‘why’ question is, why are they in retreat?

Kuo: There's a long history. We could go all the way back to the beginning of modern democracy when democracy was very limited, right?

So you had these little proto democracies, including the United States, that had legislatures but were not popularly elected in many cases and suffrage was not universal. And in those places you had what Duverger referred to as kind of elite cadre parties. So loose factions in the legislature.

McFaul: Talk about who Duverger is. That just rolls off of your lips, but not necessarily everybody else's.

Kuo: He's a French political scientist who did very early studies of political parties and he's someone who's most well known for an adage that if you have single member districts and first-past-the-post elections, you're likely to get two political parties. And if you have proportional representation, you get multiple parties.

When he was sort of thinking of the history of parties, he noted that they were initially just these elite factions in the legislature. But as democracy expanded and suffrage itself was extended to people who didn't have to own property to vote, there was this kind of dilemma: How do you actually mobilize people into a democratic system and how do you make it actually representative?

And the answer was party organizations.

So parties had to build local chapters. A lot of campaigning and electioneering was very labor intensive. So you had to deploy election agents and volunteers to go literally register people to vote. Parties purveyed the initial journalism, literature, party pamphlets. And elections themselves were often big spectacles. There were public rallies, people voted viva voce, by voice, before the secret ballot. So parties distributed ballots once we got to that era of voting. So a lot of the actual coordination of democratic elections was through parties.

But at the same time, parties performed this linkage function of trying to understand—what are the segments in society? How can we create distinct parties around them that will represent specific constituencies and segments?

And so we have this famous idea from political science that political parties freeze the divisions in society in various ways.

That's kind of a static conception of the party, but over time parties, of course, adapt to the modern era. Once we have full suffrage, for example, parties already have an infrastructure that allows them to integrate new voters. And as we move into the post-war era, in the 19th century, there was a lot of skepticism about whether or not you can have market capitalism and democracy. People like Karl Marx said that these institutions are just going to get captured, right?

McFaul: Right. Right.

Kuo: The post-war consensus about democratic capitalism was because political parties could serve a function of mobilizing interests distinct to capital. You got labor parties and social democratic parties that had strong ties to trade unions. You had the mainstream parties of the center-left and the center-right that alternated in power, competed in fairly predictable ways along a set of economic interests and issues, and developed policy programs that hewed to their different kind of ideological conceptions of the relationship of states and markets.

That's a long way of answering the question of why we have parties. They serve an electoral function and they also serve a representative intermediary linkage function.

Now the retreat. The retreat is after the 1970s, which is an era that, you know . . .

McFaul: It was way back then! Oh! Not just in the last four or five years. That's interesting. Go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

Kuo: No, it's okay! So you get a bunch of different things happening beginning in the 70s, but really accelerating in the 90s.

First, parties adapt to changing communications technology. They become more professionalized and more nationalized. So you start to see an atrophying of local party organizations arise in the use of, first it was direct mail and then of course, if we accelerate way into the nineties, it starts to be a little bit digital. And now, television advertising, et cetera, allows parties to reach voters directly.

So they rely more on professional polling strategists, consultants, to do a lot of the campaign messaging that used to be done in-house or even through a more bottom-up process. And those have had the effects of potentially eroding the intermediary and linkage function of parties, despite the fact that parties continue to be very good at winning elections.

The book focuses at length, I would say, on the 90s, the end of the Cold War, when there's a real consensus about market and political liberalization around the world. And the way that that takes root in Western democracies is through cross-partisan agreement that economic growth should be the foremost goal of government, and that the way to achieve growth is through policies we would associate with neoliberal orthodoxy.

So, deregulation, free trade, globalization, cutting corporate taxes. And that basically creates a consensus in favor of a pro-market, anti-state relationship of democratic capitalism.

McFaul: Just so I'm clear, that happened in both Europe and the United States? Left parties both moved that way, right? I know the American story pretty well. That's like Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council and the Third Way. It was not just in our countries, it was in Europe as well?

Kuo: Right! And there's a really interesting history of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, new leaders who led these insurgent factions within parties of the left to say we have an electability crisis. In order to become a majority party once again, we're going to need to adopt some of the policies of the right and we can do it with social democratic characteristics. We can still care about alleviating poverty through market means. We don't have to rely on the state.

And so you have people like Bill Clinton saying the era of big government is over. But you also have Western European leaders within the social democratic parties getting together at different Third Way conferences and conventions talking about a new era of global social democracy.

And in Europe, the way that that really took hold was the project of the European Union, which provides a really interesting comparison to the United States because once the EU is up and running as a common currency union and it is responsible for a lot of macroeconomic policy, and the free movement of goods, people, and capital across borders, it constrains what national governments can offer. And political parties across Europe, especially of the left, become more constrained in the kinds of economic policies that they adopt in elections. And that kind of convergence of parties nationally provides ample opportunity for extremist parties to fill that void in representation.

It is not dissimilar from what happened in Latin America after structural adjustment policies implemented and mandated by the West take hold in the 80s and 90s, where you have parties along the political spectrum of the left and the right implementing very similar austerity policies, scaling back the scope of their bureaucracies, and in doing, also muddled party distinctions in a way that created more voter antipathy and distrust and ultimately paved the way for more extremist leaders there as well.

McFaul: So, to fast-forward, let's do America and if we have time, we'll come back to Europe . . . tell us a little more about the more recent, and let's focus on Trump first, right?

So Trump seems to be a highly disruptive person within the Republican Party, both in terms of his worldviews and his ideas, but also in terms of his methods, right? Tell us how Trump took over the Republican Party.

Kuo: So there are two things I would point to here.

One is that some of the trends that we've already talked about, including professionalization and nationalization have been true everywhere, right? You need less of a party infrastructure these days. It's something that Allen Hicken and Rachel Riedl have called party deinstitutionalization around the world. Nowadays, a lot of leaders can just use social media to connect directly to audiences.

McFaul: Right. As Trump most certainly did, right? I mean, the first time he ran, he just went, he was on Twitter. He didn't have to go through the party and he didn't have to go on TV.

Kuo: Well, he was already a celebrity.

McFaul: He was already a celebrity, right.

Kuo: As a result, you can obviate a party infrastructure entirely as a candidate. And that's led to trends of personalization. And there's a great new book about how we're entering an era of personalistic parties where they still compete in democratic elections, but they are vulnerable to takeover by specific individuals.

Of course, the way that parties succeed in supporting democracy is when they can transcend the needs of any one individual, right? And they become these brands that last over time and people need to kind of put aside their self-interest to work in the interest of a party. It has a disciplining effect.

Under a personalistic party, of course, there is no such thing and it starts to resemble more of the worlds that you're familiar with: one in which loyalty to an individual is paramount and institutions are only important in so far as they serve the desires of that individual.

I was just reading this morning—and I know we're going a little wide—that Republican members of Congress are now asking for specific exceptions to the DOGE cuts. Which is, of course, what happens in a patrimonial regime and in an era, that I've written about, when patronage and clientelism were far more pervasive than they are today. So building a clean state takes a very long time. Dismantling it can be very fast.

So, on the one hand, there are some trends in political parties and the way they organize that make it more likely that an individual can come to power very quickly. But on the other hand, the other trend that I think is global rather than—or at least in the West—is that of far right extremism.

You and I have written about global populism years ago and we now see through any number of different kinds of overlapping reasons, but one of them is that people are upset at, sort of, this bargain of democratic capitalism, right? It hasn't worked for a lot of people, especially the workers who are left behind by the promise of globalization.

And if we think of the 21st century, the global financial crisis didn't translate into some kind of change in the political alignment or the left and the right, at least that change hasn't been fast by any means. And after the COVID pandemic, that's kind of a juncture of even more distrust. It accelerated that. As a result, you have a lot more general grievance, discontent in the electorate that, again, is ripe for extremist messaging. People don't feel loyal to democratic institutions or processes.

Now, it's not a given that just because there's a combination of democratic and economic unrest that you're necessarily going to get strongman leaders, but it certainly makes it more likely. It can facilitate that kind of politics.

Those are both what I see as long running factors that produced President Trump.

And then I'll just point to a very quick thing is that in the book, I spent some time in the conclusion arguing that when there's a imbalance between who democracy serves—you know, say we go in a much more sort of pro-market private sector direction—it makes it much harder for the government to articulate its raison d'être and the way that the government has effectively protected people or implemented programs that people care about.

These anti-state attitudes have been building in the United States for a really long time and that has made it more likely that people think the private sector should solve problems and it has also has really accelerated the thing that none of us really foresaw which is things like the private sector now, Elon Musk, being asked to make decisions about how the federal government should operate.

For the world's richest man, who's not democratically elected, to take a chainsaw to government and to seemingly do it without being held to account, because the litigation process is going to be slow and is likely to have differential outcomes depending on which circuit court you go to, that is an outcome that I didn't really anticipate: that we would literally just give capitalists the keys to the kingdom.

McFaul: Well, you and me both. I mean, just one more question on that and then let's talk about some solutions or party systems that work.

So this paradox in the United States: I'll just make it personal, but it's an anecdote about a bigger story that's in your book.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Montana. Both my parents were members of unions. And my grandfather was a union leader in Wisconsin at a factory, right?

They voted for decades for Democrats, no question about it. There was never any debate. It was just, “we’re part of the Democratic Party.” And now, seeing the data from the last several election cycles, you have this flip where people that self-identify as working class or less well-off in terms of income, vote for, as you say, a billionaire who's a president who's got as his lieutenant or co-president the richest man in the world. That's such a paradox to me. How did that happen?

Kuo: This his realignment of around class and education has been somewhat long in the running, I suppose.

Since the 90s, people have noted that there's new middle-class coalitions that support, for example, the DLC and the project of the Third Way. Whereas the Republican Party, which used to be very reliably the party of capital, has very recently been breaking its long-standing alliance with business.

When Kevin McCarthy was speaker, he argued that corporations are becoming “too woke.” That chambers of commerce are not reliably Republican enough. And we've started to see these tensions, within and among capitalists themselves, they say we need to move towards stakeholder capitalism rather than shareholder capitalism and embrace environmental, social, and governance goals and implement DEI projects.

All of that has been under attack by certain Republican leaders and Republican governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis. And today, I think we have a very uneasy relationship between capitol and the Republican Party. We've seen a lot of owners of corporations capitulate very quickly to Trump. But again, I don't think that this is like a long-term winning strategy.

But the realignment is also around education. So part of it is that there's not really a reliable party of the working class. And the left is in crisis across the advanced democracies. The social democrats have had very bad electoral showings. In Germany, the worst post-war electoral showing ever was a few weeks ago.

And when that happens, the parties of the left now are more likely to represent people who are better educated. So professionals with higher levels of education, more reliably vote for parties of the left.  Whereas the working class is either up for grabs or increasingly is targeted by parties of the right, not necessarily through economic appeals, but instead through kind of grievance and nationalism, xenophobia, those kinds of cultural issues.

There are some scholars who have been able to empirically document that contestation over economic policy has either declined or stayed the same over the past 30 or 40 years, while there's been an uptick in contestation over cultural issues or ones that are person-based, that are less divisible, that there's less issues, areas for compromise. And that's how you're simultaneously able to see polarization between parties, even though there's also kind of an underlying—or was for a while, at least—economic consensus.

Which is all just to say that the issue of “who do the working class vote for?” is increasingly unsettled.  And both parties claim to represent the working class, although they do so in very different ways.

McFaul: Two last questions. I know we're running out of time. First, what's a good example of a well-functioning party system in the world?

Kuo: A party system that functions well is one that kind of preserves democracy and party competition.

And there are many places in Western Europe, where we still see similar trends of  less rates of party membership. People are less likely to want to join parties. They may switch their votes more, but those parties are still able to preserve democratic procedures and fairness.

I would point to places where parties have actually succeeded in blocking anti-democratic candidates.

In France, there have been multiple times that Marine Le Pen's National Rally made it to the final round of the French presidential election and the parties worked together to stop that. And that was also true when it looked as if that party, the National Rally, was going to make inroads in French legislative elections. All parties worked together to preclude that from happening by sort of bargaining over where they would run candidates.

You know that Poland's Law And Justice party finally suffered electoral defeat and was precluded from a majority by, again, a lot of civil society actors coming together with political parties across the spectrum to block PiS. 

And in Brazil and South Korea, leaders who have overreached have been held to account. 

That's less about parties in general and more about parties in moments of democratic crisis when there's a real possibility of an anti-democratic leader being elected. But I think that in the United States, we now face this question that is prior to building strong parties, we need to establish pro-democracy coalitions across people who disagree, you know, whose issues are not the same, who care about different things. But you have people in the center-right, who now don't have a party. You have people across the political spectrum who should care more about principles and American values than they do about whether or not they should continue to capitulate to this administration in this moment.

McFaul: Right. Well, you may have just answered my last question, but if you were going to write a decade from now, a new book called The Great Renewal, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Do, what would have to change in that decade for you to be able to write that book?

Kuo: There's one theory of democratic transition called “pacting” about when, you know, elites come together and create just an agreement that they're going to put down their arms and agree on these rules of the game. 

The most basic thing that needs to happen is a recommitment to American values and holding people accountable who have violated those values. And I would say those values have to do with accountability, rule of law.

But that's a conversation for another time  But the first thing would be to get the democratic house in order to allow fair play and reestablishing the rules of the game.

The other things that I would really like to see are for parties to reestablish themselves as linkage organizations. And you could do this in any number of ways. One is that parties have been delegating a lot of the work of elections to outside groups. So get out the vote efforts, messaging, issue areas. They can bring that back in-house.

And Giovanni Sartori, a political scientist, once described parties as a transmission belt between society and leaders. If they want to do that again, they will need to bring all of that knowledge and work back within the parties and allow for a bottom-up process of listening to what it is people on the ground want. I don't want to just say voters, because they are more than that. Citizens, people who are living in this country and making their living here and trying to make it a better place also need some way of having their voices heard within the party and for parties to serve that sort of deliberative, factional, mediating function again.

I'd also like to see changes to campaign finance where we learn from most other democracies that have reigned in how private money can affect elections. We have really a diffuse campaign finance system now where many—especially billionaires—can influence politics or at least get their preferred outcome by acting through any number of channels outside the party. But given the current Supreme Court interpretation of speech and equating it to money, it's unlikely that we'll see that anytime soon, but I think it would be good for our political system.

And finally, I would like people who have an issue they care about, or who think the parties are failing, to work within parties rather than outside of them. You can build power outside of a party, but eventually you will need to work within the channels of party organizations to accomplish long-lasting change.

And I think that if people could sort of imagine a world in which they are partisans, but not in a fake way or a way that's highly attenuated from everyday action, but partisans who realize that compromise is part of this, and negotiation, and doing the hard work of everyday politics, seeing that as a goal rather than an enemy, I think would be very helpful.

McFaul: Well those are all very practical things to think about and for people to do.

So Didi, congratulations! Thanks for being on World Class.

The book is called The Great Retreat, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't.

Please buy this book. If you don't buy books like this, they won't get written in the future. And we need this kind of research for the health of our democracy. This book is not just about parties; it's really about the future of democracy here in the United States and Europe.

So congratulations, Didi! Great to have you on World Class.

Kuo: Thanks Mike, thanks everyone for listening.

McFaul: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what's happening in the world and why.

The "Meet Our Researchers" series showcases the incredible scholars at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Through engaging interviews conducted by our undergraduate research assistants, we explore the journeys, passions, and insights of CDDRL’s faculty and researchers.

How has infrastructure development been used to gain influence in diplomacy? How has our understanding of that tool changed since BRI, and how successful has it been for China?

Infrastructure development has always been a problematic tool for amassing geopolitical influence; it builds friendships when loans are going out, then creates enemies once they’re issued. A recent example is the 1997 Asian financial crisis when Western countries had invested in power plants throughout the continent, only for many countries to default and expropriate. This has happened repeatedly throughout history.

While China’s done quite well at protecting its economic interests in infrastructure projects, it's a mixed bag due to the prevalence of moral hazard, public backlash, and the tarnishing of diplomatic ties. With the state being so heavily involved in BRI, China intervenes when countries want to default or expropriate, protecting its interests and those of state-owned enterprises effectively. However, this can lead to a moral hazard problem because these enterprises feel too protected by China and act without the appropriate caution while building risky projects.

Today, many countries that have received BRI lending have serious relational problems with China, if not at the government level, then among the public. People tend to push back and feel taken advantage of when a foreign country comes in and builds projects, especially with rumor mills churning out narratives about China’s 'debt-trap diplomacy.' These diplomatic challenges were true long before the BRI and persist today.

Why do countries, through BRI or other means, decide to take on infrastructure projects they obviously can’t afford?

Countries often don’t behave rationally — politics, corrupt officials, and conflicting interests all affect policymaking. Also, everyone builds infrastructure projects that may bankrupt them, partly due to an ingrained optimism bias in the infrastructure sector.

We’re in the worst developing country debt crisis in modern history, and countries are having a difficult time navigating a changing infrastructure lending landscape. China is now the largest bilateral lender, and its absence from international organizations like the Paris Club prevents the unified action needed to allow countries to emerge from debt crises. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is struggling to help them, as it is cautious about issuing aid to countries with murky BRI loans to pay back.

Funding for infrastructure development can be used as an incentive for democratization through conditionality on loans. However, many countries are turning away from traditional Western lending institutions in favor of alternative lenders with fewer conditions. How can we balance the importance of conditionality and incentivizing democratization while preventing the decreased reliance on Western institutions?

Conditionality can be positive in promoting democratization, but there have to be limits to it, especially because it becomes less effective when alternative lenders like China exist. Conditionality began as limited to policies that promote democratization, development, and liberalization but has metastasized to the point where lenders are pushing a wide range of policies on borrower countries. Many of these conditions, such as environmental or social protections, are good policies but can be viewed as a manifestation of Western imperialism within these countries. These programs also become futile when countries become simply incentivized to seek Chinese loans instead, which have virtually no conditionality.

Is the turn away from Western lending institutions an inevitable shift, or can policy changes encourage its prodominance again, if that’s something that we want?

Western institutions are better for infrastructure development, as organizations like the World Bank are the best at protecting human rights and preventing environmental disasters. There are also strategic and security reasons for promoting Western institutions — for example, we don’t want Chinese technology companies building telecommunications grids in other countries.

The bigger question is, what would a return to a Western-dominated model of investment look like? Pre-BRI, there was an open, liberal system of direct investment from private companies. BRI represented a pivot to more state-driven investment. Should the US shift to a similar model, or return to private direct investment fueling infrastructure development? The Biden administration’s alternative to BRI for state-driven investment was the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). Despite mutual investment in telecommunications and renewable energy, PGII focuses on developing very different sectors than BRI, building social impact projects like healthcare infrastructure.

What is the most exciting or impactful finding from your research, and why do you think it matters for democracy, development, or the rule of law?

I’m focusing on how liberal democracies can get building again, so I researched flaws in domestic infrastructure projects within the US. It revealed how the judicial system was an engine fueling how infrastructure projects are conducted; I realized the extent to which permitting regulation and environmental litigation had been driving my own incentives when I was a bureaucrat. Decisions are often made in response to case law and to ‘litigation-proof’ projects, which can incentivize inefficient and expensive project management. I believe democracies are perfectly capable of building infrastructure projects well, but problems in current building initiatives, from the California High-Speed Rail to our housing crisis, are rooted in the outsized effects of the threat of lawsuits.
 

How do you see your research influencing policy or contributing to real-world change?

I do research on practical public-private partnership policy in the United States, working with the Build America Center and the Department of Transportation to directly supply the government with research when needed.

There are policy changes that must occur to promote effective infrastructure development. The US will have to reform institutions that predated BRI to adapt to today’s post-BRI world. The three key institutions are the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). I hope that my ideas can influence their restructuring. For domestic development, I’m continuing my work with the Build America Center on how governments can more efficiently procure infrastructure projects and help public officials adopt best practices.

Lastly, what book would you recommend for students interested in a research career in your field?

The first book, which is extraordinarily boring but crucial to infrastructure development, is The Strategic Management of Large Engineering Projects: Shaping Institutions, Risks, and Governance. Written by Miller, Lessard, Michaud, and Floricel, it includes the perspectives of MIT engineers on infrastructure project case studies to understand why so many have failed. For some great history, the economist Raymond Vernon’s book Sovereignty at Bay develops the idea that relationships sour over international investment and that it’s not an effective diplomatic tool.

The following is a guest article written by Dr. Hideto Fukudome. He is a Professor of Higher Education and Chair of the Department of Integrated Educational Sciences, Graduate School of Education, and also Special Assistant to the President, the University of Tokyo.

In October 2024, the Graduate School of Education of the University of Tokyo celebrated a memorable and highly significant day. It was the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for mutual academic exchange between SPICE of Stanford University and the Graduate School of Education of the University of Tokyo. The ceremony was held on a beautiful autumn day at the Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo. We invited two guests from Stanford: Dr. Gary Mukai, Director of SPICE, and Professor Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, a lecturer at Stanford and former professor at the University of Tokyo. Eight faculty members of the School of Education and several related staff members attended the ceremony. As participants looked on, Professor Masaaki Katsuno, Dean of the Graduate School of Education, and Dr. Mukai signed the document.

The MOU document between the two organizations has an official appearance. Nevertheless, contained in its formal content is an essential friendship. Furthermore, it is not only the members who attended the ceremony that day who are in the circle of friendship. After the ceremony, faculty and students who had participated in previous SPICE collaborations gathered to renew old friendships around Dr. Mukai and Dr. Murphy-Shigematsu, and new exchanges were born there. In the evening, Professor Miho Takahashi of the Graduate School of Education hosted a research seminar and reception with Dr. Murphy-Shigematsu. Everyone had a pleasant time.

Moreover, the exchange between the two organizations is supported by many SPICE friends. The exchange between the two organizations, which began in 2019, was affected by the impact of COVID-19 along the way, but we continued to interact with each other across distances using online resources. We have continued to organize a regular Lecture Series, in which many SPICE members have participated and supported. In the process, we have learned a lot from each other about international and cross-cultural education. SPICE members offered their breadth and depth of knowledge and experience. SPICE’s willingness to engage in exchanges with Japan and Asia has deepened our friendship. Above all, all of us share a passion for education!

Here are our exchanges so far. I invited Dr. Mukai to Japan for the first time in 2019. Professor Takeo Hoshi helped me. He is currently a professor of economics and vice president of UTokyo, and he was formerly a professor at the Stanford FSI, to which SPICE belongs. In the fall of 2022, I invited Dr. Mukai to UTokyo as a foreign researcher invited by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). During his two-month stay, various exchanges were born between faculty members, students, and UTokyo’s affiliated middle school, and memories were made. Among them, I will never forget the graduate class Dr. Mukai and I offered. Enthusiastic students gathered to attend. With the help of Dr. Mukai, we also held various events, and many people participated, creating many new encounters and friendships.

Image

Since 2023, I have been taking graduate students from UTokyo to Stanford University every year to give intensive lectures. The photo above was taken after a presentation by SPICE’s Meiko Kotani (front row far left), Sabrina Ishimatsu (front row third from left), and Irene Bryant (front row fourth from left); photo courtesy Graduate School of Education of the University of Tokyo. Each time, 15 to 20 students join the program. I ask SPICE members and Stanford University faculty and staff to give lectures and workshops. Through these, students deepen their understanding of cross-cultural education and diversity and learn a lot about American higher education, education, and cultural history. When visiting Stanford University, we also visit nearby higher education institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University, which are friendly universities. We also visit related facilities, such as the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, the Immigration Museum on Angel Island, the Consulate-General of Japan in San Francisco, and IT companies in Silicon Valley in order to broaden the students’ experiences. Appreciating art and watching sports are important parts of learning about American culture.

The highlight of our visits is the meeting with SPICE members, which is always the most enjoyable time. We are grateful to all the lecturers and staff who welcome and warmly host our visits. This special opportunity provided by SPICE has significantly contributed to the internationalization and quality of teaching and research in the School of Education.

Many Japanese and Japanese Americans are active in Silicon Valley, centered around Stanford University, and they are putting into practice cross-cultural exchange. Every time I visit the area, I am greatly stimulated and learn a lot from them and people interested in Japan and Asia. My perspective has broadened dramatically, and I can gain new ways of thinking. I am also interacting with UTokyo’s alumni group Akamon-kai, which has two local groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. I hope to further strengthen the relationship through more visits in the future.

Our MOU will be an opportunity for more people to participate in our exchanges and have scholarly exchanges as well as a fun time, and our mutual friendship will deepen and broaden. The MOU itself may be a formal document, but what is important is the friendly exchange rooted in mutual friendship and common interests, which now will have even more opportunities to blossom thanks to the MOU.

TRANSCRIPT:

McFaul: You’re listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. We bring you in-depth expertise on international affairs from Stanford's campus straight to you. I'm your host, Michael McFaul, the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Today I'm joined by Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center Fellow here at FSI, an active member of the United States Air Force Reserve, in fact, a recently promoted officer of the Air Force Reserve, and Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy at the Pentagon. Oriana combines all that expertise in her latest book called Upstart, How China Became a Great Power.

I strongly advise you to buy this book. I don't care if you read it, but I want you to buy it now. In all seriousness, I've read lots of books on China in recent years. This is one of the best. It's one-stop shopping for all you need to know about China. It examines China's climb to great power status through a careful mix of strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship on the international stage.

So Oriana, let's get right to it. Let's talk about Upstart. So, Upstart sounds like a Silicon Valley topic. Tell us about the title and tell us why you decided to write this book.

Mastro: Maybe I'll start with why I decided to write the book because it leads into the title. In my academic work and in my policy work, looking at how China was building power, the conventional wisdom was the same. Academics called it something a little fancier, but it was basically mirror imaging. There were a lot of arguments being made.

McFaul: What was the academic words? I'm curious.

Mastro: Oh, Kenneth Waltz, like, “emulation,” diffusion” . . .

McFaul: Got it, got it, got it, okay.

Mastro: Kenneth Waltz argued that success breeds the same type of competitive tendencies. Meaning, if you want to be a great power, if you're China in the 1990s, the way to do it is to act like the United States.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: You go into the policy world and you see the same exact things. Constant arguments about, Is China going to build overseas bases? Is China going to, you know, have a military the same as ours? that were all basically predicated on the understanding that they wanted to mirror image the United States.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: As a China specialist, I'm a political scientist, I'm also doing this policy work, but I'm also a China specialist. And I speak Chinese, I spend a lot of time in China. And on the surface, it just didn't really make any sense. Like, why would China do exactly what we do? How would that make them competitive?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And it really was an introduction in my life to literature on competition from business and management. Partially being in Silicon Valley inspired that, and partially it's because the rise and fall of great powers is very rare, but the introduction and destruction of companies is actually very frequent.

McFaul: Good point.

Mastro: So I discovered this whole other literature on, how are you competitive in trade and in commerce? And a lot of the arguments about competitive advantage, about being entrepreneurial, innovative, trying to find a different way of doing things, really resonated with how I saw China. And so that's what sparked the original idea. It takes writing a whole book to try to convince people that there is very strong evidence and a logical argument for why we have to look at this situation differently than past historic cases of rising powers.

McFaul: Dig into it a little bit. Give us some examples, especially about military power, which is your strong suit. And then if we have time, we'll talk about economic power. So, give us some examples of the “upstart strategy.”

Mastro: So the upstart strategy has three components: emulation, entrepreneurship, and exploitation. Now the first one is based on the conventional wisdom, right?

China does emulate some aspects of U.S. power, but the book tries to evaluate the conditions under which they do so. When are we most likely to see them take the old strategies, whatever the United States is doing, and apply it in the exact same area? That's my definition of emulation.

McFaul: Okay.

Mastro: And they tend to do this when it's reassuring to the United States. So think of examples like engaging in free trade, joining international institutions. In the military realm, they started to participate in humanitarian aid and disaster relief campaigns. They started to participate in peacekeeping operations, right? They're the number one contributor to PKOs on the Security Council of the United Nations.

And so they did decide to do certain things that they thought, Listen, this will help us build power — mediation diplomacy is a great example, helping to mediate between different countries when they're engaged in conflicts —it helps us build power and it makes us look good and it makes the United States calmer about our rise. Because one of the main reasons why you don't want to act exactly like the United States, is that actually could seem very threatening, right?

If you're trying to build the exact power the United States has, it would be very easy for people in the United States to say, Hey, wait a minute, what's going on here?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Right? And the example I give, if China built overseas bases, like our network of 120 bases, we would have seen that a lot differently than what they ended up doing, which was the Belt and Road Initiative, like economic policies. So those are in the emulation category.

For military power, most of them are about reassurance. And then there's a few times where they have such a competitive advantage and this area of power is so important that even though there's a downside in terms of how the U.S. will perceive it, they go for it anyway.

So, an example in the military realm is building what we call C4ISR network, or Command Control Computers Communication Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance, which in the most simple way...

McFaul: That's what — ISR, you just spelled out the acronym, right?

Mastro: Yeah, right.

McFaul: Thank you.

Mastro: So in the most simple sense, it's building a space architecture.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Having their own navigation systems, having their own precision timing, you know. So, they realized that was really important for the nature of warfare. They needed it. The United States might not like it, but it was just so necessary. And because their engineers are cheaper, because they're actually really advanced in certain missile technologies, they knew they would have an advantage there.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So that's emulation. Exploitation is when they use the U.S. strategy, but in an area where the United States isn't competing. There's disincentives to do it directly. And this largely could be because of competitive advantages. So one area is like arms sales, Chinese arms sales around the world. China really only sells arms to countries that cannot buy them from the United States. Either because they're under some sort of human rights arms embargo, they’re poor countries that are not strategically relevant enough to be gifted arms by the United States, so the Bangladeshes of the world get a lot of their military equipment from China.

McFaul: Because they're too poor? I did not know that.

Mastro: Yeah, well, Chinese stuff is a lot cheaper. Now, there's some countries who are poor that still have U.S. stuff, but that's because we've decided, like . . .

McFaul: They're important.

Mastro: They're important for strategic reasons, so we have gifts and loans and things. And then there's certain technologies that because of treaty obligations, the United States wasn't exporting. And this is how China got sort of a stronghold in the market on unmanned systems, for example. On the diplomatic side, elite visits, right? A Chinese leader like Xi Jinping makes as many overseas visits as a U.S. president, but they go to fundamentally different places, right?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: The U.S. president is mainly going to the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia. Chinese president is visiting Africa.

McFaul: A lot.

Mastro: A lot! So Xi Jinping has visited three times more countries than President Obama did, and President Obama visited more African countries than any previous U.S. president. He also goes to the poorest countries in the world, the 70% of the poorest African countries Xi Jinping has been to, that no U.S. president has ever been to. So it's kind of filling in those gaps.

And then the military realm, for those of you out there with military background, the example that's just perfect for this is something we refer to as A2/AD, or the Anti-Access/Area Denial strategy.

What is that? Very simply put, China deliberately evaluated the types of things the United States needs to project power, and then they developed specific capabilities to target those. So things like the aircraft carrier. So China developed a missile designed to hit and sink an aircraft carrier, right? Or a need to refuel because our bases are far away, you know, or blinding satellites because we need satellites more because we don't have the home-court advantage.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So in the military realm, this exploitation strategy is very strong.

And the last category, entrepreneurship, is when they do something completely different. And this, I would say, is the most controversial aspect of the book. I briefed it to a lot of military audiences. Just on Friday I got a note that a four-star wanted my address to send me a letter about the book. And I'm like, Is this– I don't know if it's going to be like I loved your book or it's gonna be like I hate everything you say about the following chapters, because it is a Navy admiral.

So I imagine that they're sensitive about, one, my argument that China is not seeking an overseas basing network despite all the concerns over the past 20 years that they're, you know, they're on the cusp and they're going to build when they're going to build one. One of the reasons China sometimes does things differently from the United States is that they think U.S. strategy is stupid. So, one of the parts of the argument is trying to look at how China might change in the future. And it's important, the rationale.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So the book looks at thousands of Chinese . . .

McFaul: Startups are not always startups, right? They get old, and…

Mastro: . . . They evolve. This book relies on thousands of Chinese sources to also evaluate the rationale of why they chose certain strategies. So you could imagine if they chose a strategy because they were weaker or didn't have an advantage, as they get more powerful, they might start emulating.

But this is an aspect when they're like, you know, the war in Afghanistan cost the equivalent of ten Belt and Road Initiatives. Why would we be engaged in sort of foreign military intervention, which tends to go hand in hand with these overseas basing networks, when we can achieve our goals better with economic and political means of power? And that's outside of Asia. China does clearly want to dominate Asia militarily, but they don't need bases for that because they have China.

So, that's one of those arguments that says this is not for lack of ambition. Of course, they will have certain military roles in some places. We'll probably see some more intelligence gathering, you know, sensors being put places, but not offensive combat operations.

And the second very controversial one is about China's nuclear forces. And I had a follow-up piece in The Economist last month by invitation to talk about China's nuclear arsenal. China has, basically, since 1964, every aspect of their approach to nuclear weapons has been different than the United States: posture, doctrine, readiness, delivery systems, number of nuclear weapons, structure of the organization for nuclear weapons.

I mean, besides the initial decision to build them for the sake of nuclear deterrence, nothing has been the same. And part of that, again, is about inefficiency arguments, that China never understood why the United States needs thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And from a competitive point of view, up until the mid 2000s, the United States spent more on its nuclear weapons than China spent on its whole military.

McFaul: Wow.

Mastro: So, one of the reasons they've been able to get this conventional power that people like me write very openly about being concerned of, right? I'm not as concerned about their nuclear weapons. But, I'm absolutely concerned about the tipping of conventional power in China's favor. They've been able to do that by not overspending on nuclear weapons.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So there's a lot of debate right now because they're increasing their numbers. They used to just have like 200 and 320. There's a debate right now about whether or not they're going to push up to 1,000 or 1,500 in the next 10 years. But even so, I sort of argue that there's other reasons for that, dealing with advancements in technology and changes in U.S. doctrine that has made them concerned that their deterrent has weakened.

McFaul: Their nuclear deterrent has weakened.

Mastro: Their nuclear deterrent has weakened. And so they still have the same sort of minimal deterrent posture that they've had before. So that hasn't changed. But those are kind of the two most controversial entrepreneurial areas that I discuss in the book on the military side.

McFaul: So, if you had the chance to . . . in fact, I learned this term from military folks when I worked in the government: the BLUF, right? “Bottom line up front”. Really great phrase for all people having to do briefings.

But if you got, say, 45 seconds with President Trump, and he asked you, Lieutenant Colonel - can I call you that now?

Mastro: Yeah, sure. Yeah.

McFaul: Lieutenant Colonel Mastro. He probably wouldn't call you Dr. Mastro, but Lieutenant Colonel Mastro.

Mastro: He'd probably be like, “Hey lady!”  But, yeah. Yeah.

McFaul: Congratulations on being Lieutenant Colonel, by the way. That's a fantastic achievement. But if he just asked, What's the balance of military power between the United States and China today? How could you answer that in 45 to 60 seconds?

Mastro: I would say that we're outgunned in Asia. We have the advantage everywhere else. We're deterring China from a large-scale protracted war.

But the problem is in conflicts close to China, in particular over Taiwan, the United States is outgunned. And we need to put more bombers, submarines, and land-based missiles closer into China, which means we have to be nicer to countries in the region because they have to agree to let us put that stuff there. And we have to reform the defense industrial complex so that we can innovate in those areas, in particular land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles, and be able to produce them in mass in a cost-effective way.

McFaul: Fantastic answer. You know how to do this. I can tell.

Mastro: You usually get more than 45 seconds, but sometimes they get right to it.

McFaul: You hit it, I saw it. Now we have a little more time to dig into that. Because that was a very profound thing you just said. Take us through the pieces that you think are inadequate. And then let's talk about whether the Trump administration will begin to realize those solutions. But first, just articulate the threat posture that — you had three big buckets there — maybe more, but I heard three. Tell us a little more in detail about what is alarming about that balance of power in Asia to you?

Mastro: So, if you can humor me, right before I do that, I just want to really hammer home a point that I said in that answer, that I feel is clouding some of the debates among policy experts and academics, okay?

McFaul: Please.

Mastro: Which is, we are adequately deterring China from engaging in a large-scale war with the United States. So people are always like, China doesn't want to fight a war with the United States and all of our allies and partners. And, the economic costs will be huge. And it's like, yes, but that is not what people in the defense department are worried about. We're not worried that tomorrow China attacks the United States and we're fighting World War III.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: What we're worried about is that there are certain aspects of contingencies like Taiwan that they can move and gain, in this case, control over Taiwan before the U.S. military can come in mass. Okay? And the coming in mass is just a more diplomatic way of saying, Before we can really start blowing things up. So, let me just start with that because what people say . . .

McFaul: That's very important. I'm glad you did that. Yeah.

Mastro: It's very important because it's not the case that I think, like, China's like, gunning for whatever. Or, I do a lot of media interviews when I'm walking my kids to and from school and once my four year old was like, “Does the United States lose all the wars that we fight?” after they hear me on the phone, I'm like, “Mom did not say that!”

What I'm saying is that there's this particular scenario, and if China initiates conflict, they're going to initiate it when it's most favorable to them.

So the problem is, the United States, we have forces close to Taiwan, right? In Japan, for example. But there are so few of them that if we actually mobilized them after the immediate attack on Taiwan, for example, they're not survivable. Which, again, is the military diplomatic speech of saying everyone is going to die.

And if that were credible, if China thought we were going to do that, then they're in the major war with the United States, right? They’ve just killed thousands of Americans. So, that doesn't become appealing. But the logic is, most U.S. presidents are not going to send in those forces — in this case, it's mainly air power — when they're all going to die. And then we also lose in this sort of exchange about 70% of our most advanced aircraft? Which means then, now we're transitioning to that major war with China. It's like, we're not in a great position.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So we have stuff there, but we don't have enough. The question is like, what does enough mean? Very simply, you gotta keep the ships that are carrying the people across the strait from landing on Taiwan. And so, I'm kind of a broken record on this with the military when people are always like, “Well I'm contributing to deterrence. You know, I'm doing this dance, I'm doing this messaging.” Or even certain weapon systems like, well, you know, “I got this tank . . .”

I'm like, if it does not sink ships, I do not care. Right? Because then you're in this realm of cost in which people say they're trying to deny China the objective of Taiwan, but really it's like, well, I could sink a ship or two. And I'm like, well, when you got thousands of them, you know, one or two is not going to do it.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So the thing I laid out, basically, are designed to sink a lot of ships quickly. Submarines, the United States has the advantage undersea still. There's an apocryphal story that I talk about in my book that when they devised that strategy to target the key platforms of the United States in the 1990s, the Navy, for some odd reason, was changing their patrolling schedule. So the submarines just weren't patrolling them.

And so when China was like, we got to get the aircraft carriers, we got to get the satellites. We got to hit the fixed bases where the aircraft are taking off. They just didn't think of the submarines, you know? So that's the story. I don't know how true it is, but that's the apocryphal story.

So we have, full reign with submarines. The problem is we just don't have a lot of them.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And then the munitions they carry, they can only sink a few ships. And then we have no capability to replenish them in the region. So they have to go all the way back to Guam or Hawaii. So I talk about tenders, submarine tenders, a lot of military personnel being like, I need that stuff and I need it in the Philippines and Japan. Like, that's where we need it.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And then the bombers are very controversial because those are an offensive capability that are designed to penetrate into China and bomb mainland targets. Mike, we're just throwing it out there. That's what they do.

McFaul: That’s what they do.

Mastro: That's important because the biggest threat are all the missiles that China is going to be shooting at us.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Missile defense on the back end is hard, like missiles coming towards you. It's a lot easier if you just took out the launcher where it's coming from.

And so that's really what that is about. Like, okay, if we're going to stop all these missiles from being shot at Taiwan, from being shot at our carriers, from being shot at our bases that we need to operate, we're going to have to get in there, we're going to have to take care of it, and that's where the strategic bombers come from.

And then the last component was the land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Missiles are a lot cheaper than everything else. Because they're land-based, they tend to be more powerful, more precise. There is a deterrent against China, just a little bit more, because they have to attack the country where the missiles are based.

McFaul: Right. Good point.

Mastro: That's an additional thing that imposes caution on them. So yeah, those are the things that I would want more than anything else. And I really believe that if we put those things in place and so China couldn't do this quickly, the two-and-a-half to three weeks that they might consider, that they'll never do it.

And then this problem will just persist forever, but at least we won't fight a hot war over it. So that's why I really focus on some of those issues and focus on just understanding that China sees a lot of things differently than we do. So, that's what really the book… the heart of the book is about convincing people to keep an open mind about how they're understanding and interpreting Chinese actions so that we can be more entrepreneurial ourselves about how to deal with great power competition.

McFaul: That's a great point. Your recommendations are crystal clear. Who is listening in the Trump administration? And I mean that as our last question.

Don't talk about the specifics, but at the end of the Trump administration, as you know better than I, they focused pretty heavily on diagnosing the China threat. And they put out all sorts of speeches. And Secretary Pompeo did this big long paper about the threat.

It's a little curious to me, and it's only a few weeks, of course, so let's give them time, but it's a little curious to me how we're focused on a lot of other things besides what you just described so far.

Is that unfair or is it too early? And what do you expect in the coming weeks and months in terms of the Trump administration doing some of the things that you just outlined?

Mastro: Well, I think the fact that it's been quiet, I'm very hopeful.

McFaul: Mmm. Explain that, that's good!

Mastro: Because generally speaking, you want the experts to have the space to do the things they need to do. And I see a lot of those policies being driven by some of the domestic political stuff. Like we know tariffs is not going to help anyone get their jobs back, but the people who voted for President Trump believe that.

And so when you say, Who is listening? I mean, this is one of the main reasons that 15 years ago I enlisted in the military, when I was doing my PhD at Princeton, is because people explained to me the pathways that academics could be influential.

And I thought, Okay, so I could write an op-ed and hope someone read it and hope they did this. Or I could go into government, which is a great pathway, but as a woman who, I knew I wanted to have children, the in and out of government thing could be disruptive to the move, and I didn't want to wait 10 to 15 years before I got to do anything interesting.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So, for me, there are people listening. I feel like I do have the ear of some pretty important people. And then, as someone who works in the system, I make changes directly.

So I get to see, here's the national defense strategy. It's done. Here's our war plan. It's done. Here's our force posture, our force modernization. I get to physically just go in there and change it and then hope no one notices and changes it back.

But that's how I tend to focus on my influence. And as long as the Trump administration, the more they stay out of that space, the easier it will be, I think, for us to devise good effective strategies.

So if you have that top level of support, and respect for the expertise of the people in the building, which I think we've seen some signs that maybe that's going to be a problem, you know, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. They respect their military advisors and that expertise. Then we can really make some advancements.

My biggest concern is that we're going to upset a lot of other countries in the region. And Biden made a lot of improvements in our force posture by getting countries to agree to certain things, in particular, Japan and the Philippines and Australia and some second island, you know, Pacific Islands, that if that's reversed, it's going to make it harder for us to deter China.

So I just hope that . . . the way I articulate it to people who have some of those more isolationist views, or unilateralist views, is like, this isn't about your love for this other country or even about multilateralism or legitimacy. If you want the United States to be powerful and that you want to do whatever you want, you need to have these countries willing to host you.

Hopefully they won't disrupt those relationships too much. But on the other hand, they're not as worried about provoking China, which a lot of my recommendations, like with the bombers or something, previous administrations might be like, Oh, I don't know, that might be a little touchy.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: But maybe with the Trump administration, they're like, yeah, get in there, what you need to get in there. So there could be some pros and there could be some cons, but I think it takes this type of academic research is important because then we can really stand from a position of knowledge and authority and confidence, when you're making arguments that are controversial that people might push back on, that, at least I believe they better inform policy.

So, I stick to them even when people try to push back in more emotional ways about stuff. I think that is really the role of the academic practitioner, and I hope this book serves that purpose.

McFaul: Well, that's one of the most optimistic things I've heard in the first weeks of the Trump administration. As long as they're not talking about the issue, that's a good sign, not a bad sign.

And we can't see what you write for the Pentagon and inside the Pentagon and who you brief, but we can read your book, and everybody should. It's called Upstart: How China Became a Great Power. Thanks for talking with us about some of the ideas here. And I encourage everybody to go out and get this book.

Mastro: Thank you, Mike.

McFaul: Thanks for being here.

You’ve been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review. And be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, to stay up to date on what’s happening in the world and why.

TRANSCRIPT:

McFaul: You’re listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. We bring you in-depth expertise on international affairs from Stanford's campus straight to you.

February 24th marks the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It's a horrific, tragic day. There's a lot of uncertainty right now in Ukraine and among its friends and allies about what the future is going to bring.

There's a lot of pressure right now on President Zelenskyy to negotiate. There’ a lot of concern in Europe over what might happen over the negotiations between the United States and Russia, something that has not happened in three years, and a lot of unanswered questions more generally about America's future leadership in the world and especially in Europe.

And so we could not be luckier than to have Steve Pifer, an affiliate with the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Europe Center here at FSI to be with us today.

Steve not only is a former ambassador to Ukraine, but has spent three decades of his career in diplomacy working on European issues. And is one of the most prolific commentators. I have to say, Steve, it's hard to keep up with you and all your writing. Most people after they retire from the Foreign Service slow down. It seems like you are speeding up. But maybe that has to do with the events that are happening in Europe that require that.

So thanks for coming on our program today, Steve.

Pifer: Thanks for having me, Mike.

McFaul: So originally we were going to have a conversation to start with takeaways from the Munich Security Conference. But so much has happened since that event, which is literally only six days ago, by the way. The negotiations in Saudi Arabia, the trolling between President Trump and response to President Zelenskyy.

Steve, just start at some kind of basic assessment: where do we stand right now in terms of the alleged peace negotiations that have been started? And I'll let you characterize it in any way you want to. Take stock of where we are at right now.

Pifer: Well, Mike, let me just actually step back first and make a couple of observations.

One is: on February 24, 2022, I would not predict we would be having any kind of conversation like this.

McFaul: Great point.

Pifer: Nobody, virtually, expected the Ukrainians to last militarily. Had you asked me, I thought that the Russians would win the force-on-force fight. And then in 2025, what we would be seeing would be a very bloody insurgency by Ukrainians against Russian occupying forces.

McFaul: Right, right.

Pifer: So I think it's a real testament to the Ukrainian military, Ukrainian resilience, that the Ukrainian military is still very active in the field. Even last year in 2024, I have to say the Russians had the momentum. But in that period, over the entire year, they captured maybe 1,500 square miles of Ukrainian territory. That's less than 1% of Ukraine's land.

And they did that at enormous cost. At some points, they were losing 2,000 troops a day, dead and wounded. The British Ministry of Defense now estimates that more than 800,000 casualties on the Russian side. And I'm not saying that Ukraine is winning, but the idea that Russia is on the verge of a great victory, I think, is overblown.

McFaul: Great point to start with. I'm glad we started with that. And I share your assessment. I remember three years ago, I remember talking to you three years ago and the assessments we all had and here we are three years later and it hasn't happened.

Pifer: Yeah. And again, that's a credit to the Ukrainians.

You know, a lot's happened in the last two weeks. I have to say I am thoroughly disappointed in the efforts by the Trump administration to try to broker a solution and this unseemly rush to try to re-engage Vladimir Putin, which I think is a mistake.

I mean, if you look back, there have been, think, three or four wins for Putin in the last 10 days. One is you had Secretary Hegseth in Europe and then the president saying, “Well, Ukraine can't expect to hold onto its territory and Ukraine get into NATO.”

Now, whether or not that's realistic, why are senior officials and the American president saying that when we're going to try to broker a solution? We've already at the beginning made a big lean towards the Russian position.

Then you have President Trump calls Putin and announces he's going to have not one, but several meetings with Putin, breaking with a policy with the Western leaders for the last three years that you do not engage Putin.

The next day he says, let's bring Russia back into the G7 to make it the G8 again.

McFaul: Oh my goodness, I even forgot about that one!

Pifer: If you had a vote right now, I think Trump would lose six to one on that.

McFaul: But he did offer it, yes.

Pifer: And then Secretary Rubio goes to meet with Lavrov. So that looks like that's four pretty big wins for Russia. And I can't see a single thing that the United States has received in return.

And then I would just add, I mean, this unseemly haste to engage Putin, I think Putin looks at this and says, I'm dealing with somebody — Trump — who is very weak. I'm just going to sit back and wait for more concessions. I think they've gotten off to a very bad start that's going to make it much harder to achieve their goal if their goal is to try to broker a just and durable settlement between Russia and Ukraine.

McFaul: Steve, why do you think this is happening the way it is? Let's talk about Trump and then we'll talk about Putin and Zelenskyy separately, but how do you explain it?

Pifer: Trump going back for 10 years has this inexplicable affinity for Putin. You're very hard pressed in the last 10 years to find examples where Trump has criticized Putin or Putin's actions. That's hard to understand because Putin's committed a lot of actions in the last 10 years which deserve to be criticized.

Someone suggested maybe there's a grand chess strategy here. And the idea is perhaps to throw Ukraine under the bus and back away from Europe to peel or to basically cultivate Putin so you could somehow peel Russia away from China, given the administration's focus on China.

But I think that grossly misunderstands the depth of the relationship between Xi and Putin and how dependent Russia is on China now.

McFaul: Yeah.

Pifer: So if that's the objective, I think it's going to fail. But otherwise, if it's not by design, then it simply is incompetence or, as one Republican senator said — he's a bit more diplomatic saying — “rookie mistakes.”

McFaul: Let's just pull on this thread a little bit because first of all, he's not a rookie. He was president for four years. And second, it seems more by design, right?

It seems like he just wants to make a go at a peace treaty. He doesn't really care about the contours of it. Most certainly doesn't care about Ukraine. And then just walk away or is there a bigger deal that he's trying to get?

So one, as you pointed out, might be this China play. And I completely agree with your assessment; that is going to be a loser. If you're Vladimir Putin, you're going to break up the most important relationship you have in the world to take a gamble on President Trump, who then might not be in power in four years time?

Pifer: Exactly.

McFaul: So that makes no sense to me at all. But what about like, maybe there's some kind of economic deal that somehow Trump thinks getting closer to Putin might be good for the United States?

Pifer: Well, reportedly that when Secretary Rubio was in Saudi on the Russian delegation was this Russian oligarch who talked about, I think he said hundreds of billions of dollars that American businesses had lost by not being in Russia over the past three years.

McFaul: Yeah. By the way, his name is Kirill Dmitriev. I used to know him. Has a degree from Stanford and Harvard, by the way. Very savvy guy who runs their investment fund.

But that's a good point. He did say that, and the fact that he was on the delegation is kind of strange too, isn't it?

Pifer: It's very strange. But his numbers . . . I think he said $380 billion. He's talking about American companies lost the equivalent of 5% of Russia's gross domestic product over the last three years? That's a wildly inflated number. And I think he was also talking about oil and gas concessions.

Well, before the Trump administration gets too excited about oil and gas concessions in Russia, they ought to go back and talk to President George W. Bush and his energy people, because there was all this excitement back in 2002 and 2003 about energy cooperation and huge advantages for American companies, which never panned out.

If it's an economic deal we're talking about, I think we're pursuing some pretty false hopes.

First of all, American industry they don't find the business environment there very attractive and it's not been one of their goals over the last 25 years.

McFaul: So let's pivot to President Zelenskyy next and help us think through his options and his situation right now and what he has done and what he might do moving forward.

Pifer: Yeah, well, think, Zelenskyy, first of all, I mean, he's epitomized that resistance and that resilience of Ukrainians in ways that . . . in fact, I think we had a conversation back in January of 2022 with some other Stanford scholars. And the question was, well, if the Russians invade, what kind of a wartime president would Zelenskyy be?

McFaul: Right.

Pifer: And I think we were uncertain. Well, I think Zelenskyy's proven that he was exactly what Ukraine needed at that very difficult time.

But I think you have seen growing war weariness within Ukraine. Polls now suggest that a majority of Ukrainians want negotiations, although we still have a sizable segment of the population that oppose any territorial concessions.

Zelenskyy seemed to show, I think, a bit of flexibility at the end of 2024, where he said, look, we could be prepared in a negotiation to agree that we would not use military means to recover lost territory. We would pursue diplomatic routes.

Now, he tied it to NATO membership for Ukraine. And I think what he's basically saying, If I'm going to give up, temporarily or perhaps longer, Ukrainian land, I need to have a firm security guarantee for the rest of Ukraine.

What he doesn't want to do is broker a deal with Vladimir Putin now, give Putin three or four years to regenerate his military, and then have another invasion to deal with. He's looking for solid security guarantees to prevent that.

And that, to my mind, is as the Trump administration tries to broker the settlement, any settlement is going to be judged on those two factors. One, how much territory remains under Russian control, even if just temporarily. And then two, what kind of security guarantees does Ukraine receive and how solid are they?

McFaul: Those are tough decisions, right? Because he's not getting much of a signal from the American side, at least so far, of anything substantive on the security guarantees. At least not that I've been able to see.

Pifer: No, And when Secretary Hegseth was in Europe 10 days ago, what he talked about was Europe providing either a peacekeeping force or a security force that would be on the ground in Ukraine. But he said there would be no American contribution to that.

And then he went a step further and he said that force would not deploy as a NATO force; it would be outside of NATO and it would not have the coverage of Article 5.

I worry about that because that seems to be a usually tempting opportunity for Vladimir Putin. So say you have 25 or 30,000 Europeans there not as NATO, but there to basically provide that security guarantee. That'd be an opportunity or tempting opportunity for Putin: Well, what if I hit that force? What if I had a pretext? They got too close to the Russian border or they were cooperating too much with the Ukrainians. They're no longer a neutral force.

It wouldn't have to be a big strike. But you kill a few members of this force and there's no then American response. That's going to be a pretty shattering blow to NATO. And I think Putin would be tempted on that.

So, I worry about what they're thinking in terms of how they do involve the Europeans. And I worry that they haven't thought through just how risky that could be ultimately for the underlying NATO relationship, which I still believe is very much in the American security interest.

McFaul: I'm going to get to NATO in a second, but one more question on Zelensky's position and just say parenthetically, that's a very profound thought. I haven't heard anybody talk about the scary scenario that you just laid out.

But let me come back to that in a minute. One more question about Zelenskyy and their government. As you know, and our listeners probably know, there was a floated document that the United States, the Trump administration, gave to President Zelenskyy, first in Kyiv, and then later it was presented and discussed at some detail at the Munich Security Conference when Vice President Vance and President Zelenskyy met.

And to the best of my understanding — maybe you have seen the document by now, I haven't — but I've talked to officials about it. It's a 50% sharing of the profits of all future critical minerals to be mined in Ukraine. Pretty amazing, outlandish, colonial document. And what's mysterious to me is what the Ukrainians get in return.

Having said all that, it's very clear that President Trump thinks this is an important document to be signed. What should President Zelenskyy do?

Pifer: Well, I think he was correct in not signing the document he was given, which as I understand it, it was basically giving America access to perhaps $500 billion worth of rare earth minerals and other minerals in Ukraine as a payment for what the United States had done for Ukraine in the past.

McFaul: So it was for the past, right? See, this is a very important point. Not future?

Pifer: And Trump has this incredibly inflated idea. He thinks that the United States in the past three years has provided Ukraine $350 billion. It's more like $120 billion, which is, not saying that's not a lot of money. But the bulk of that money was actually spent in the United States buying weapons for either the Ukrainian military or buying modern weapons for the U.S. military to replace things — older weapons — they had pulled out of their stocks to send to Ukraine.

And I would argue that that's not a gift to Ukraine; that's also in the American national security interest.

McFaul: Very important point.

Pifer: But I think Zelenskyy had expressed a readiness to allow the United States to help develop these minerals, but he wants something in return. And that agreement gave Ukraine, as far as I can tell, nothing in return.

Now, there was a spokesperson for the National Security Council said, “Well, that would be a secure, you know, that kind of economic relationship would be in effect a security guarantee.”

You know, if I'm in Ukraine, I'm not prepared to take that to the bank. And I think what Zelenskyy wants is he's prepared to allow the U.S. access, but he wants some firmer commitment on the part of the United States to Ukraine's security.

And thus far, that's not been on offer. So I think Zelensky was entirely correct in saying no.

McFaul: Just having some security guards, private security guards at these American mining companies is not going to be enough.

Pifer: That's probably not going to . . . the fact that the United States has companies developing those minerals, that's not going to deter Vladimir Putin from another attack on Ukraine.

McFaul: And the paradox of course, is that, you know, having talked to some of these companies around the world in my career: they're not going to do any of this mining unless they feel like their property rights are secured. So they need a security guarantee from the United States, too. It's not just the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people. So they've got to figure that out for sure.

Pifer: Exactly. And this is why I think that the administration really hasn't thought through a lot of the ideas that they're putting on the table in this rush to try to get some kind of agreement.

McFaul: Why do you think Trump is in such a hurry?

Pifer: Again, I think it gets back to solving a problem so that he can cultivate Vladimir Putin.

McFaul: That's the end game, right?

Pifer: If I look at this and say it's not incompetence, it's by design, the design is to get back to some kind of relationship with Putin. Trump admires Putin. Trump likes Putin. In some ways Trump would like to be like Putin.

And again, Ukraine is kind of an irritant that he would like to resolve. And that makes me nervous that in our effort to broker a solution, we're not going to give attention to the just positions of the Ukrainian side.

And at the end of the day, he can broker a settlement. But if it's heavily pro-Russian, the Ukrainians at the end of the day can always say, we're sorry, we cannot accept that. We will not accept that.

I think Ukrainians would like the war to end, but they're not prepared to accept a bad peace negotiated largely between the Americans and the Russians.

Zelenskyy has been very clear. He's not prepared to accept a fait accompli that's negotiated bilaterally between Washington and Moscow.

McFaul: And to add to your point: having just spent some time with Ukrainians, including Ukrainian soldiers in Munich, they don't all speak and think the same way.

Even if Zelenskyy wanted to accept a deal that Putin and Trump negotiated, then, you know, sent him an email saying to sign . .  there are other voices there as you know better than anybody, Steve. It's a democratic pluralistic society.

And there's a lot of warriors who have lost a lot of loved ones and a lot of comrades who are not just going to lay down their arms just because of a deal negotiated on the outside, blessed by the president.

I think President Zelenskyy probably understands that, but I'm not sure we in the West understand that. That's, I think, a pretty dangerous situation for Ukraine.

Pifer: And that's why in the sequencing of how you begin to prepare for this brokering, the first visit should have been to Kyiv.

McFaul: Yes.

Pifer: Because you're exactly right, Unlike Putin, Zelenskyy has a domestic constituency. And that may limit his maneuverability and what kind of concessions he can make. We need to have that understanding before we get too far down the road talking to the Russians.

They got the sequencing, I think, completely backwards. It should have been talking to the Ukrainians first, then the Europeans who, again, the American administration hopes will provide a significant force on the ground in Ukraine afterwards.

Then even before talking to Putin, we should have taken steps to build leverage. By virtue of the assistance we've provided to Ukraine over the last three years, we have huge leverage in Kyiv.

If you want to work this brokering right, you need leverage with Moscow. And there things you could have done. You could have tightened sanctions on Russia. As we know from our work in the international sanctions working group, there's a lot that can be done in that area.

Second, we could have gone to the G7 and said, let's take that $300 billion in frozen Russian central bank assets, seize them, and put them in a fund for Ukraine.

He could have even gone and asked the Congress, you know, let's prepare more military assistance for Ukraine. Things that would have confronted Vladimir Putin with the fact that if he does not negotiate . . . and thus far when Putin talks about negotiating, it's always on just his terms, which amount to Ukraine's capitulation.

We've got to move him off of that. I think the way to do that is by confronting Putin with the fact that this war continues, the military, the economic, the political costs for him are only going to increase.

And that they did none of that. They just jumped right into the conversation with the Russians. I think that was a mistake and it decreases the likelihood that this effort to broker a settlement will succeed.

McFaul: Just because you've teased it up, one last question about the American side and then we'll end with the Europeans.

I remember, you know, as we were waiting to see who would be on the new Trump team, I think there were a lot of people that I know — including in Ukraine, by the way — who are pretty excited about the fact that Senator Rubio was chosen to be Secretary of State Rubio. Same with our new National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz.

But I have friends who thought, my goodness, we are so lucky in these two jobs, we have very strong pro-Ukrainian people that understand the autocratic threat, the imperial threat from Putin.

And yet so far, we're not seeing that their voices represented. What's your take on that, Steve? Is it just too early to tell?

Most certainly, you know, they did not do well in their first round to underscore what you already said. When I saw them sitting across the table from Lavrov and Ushakov, people who have been in those jobs for two decades, and they had only been in their jobs for three weeks.

Maybe you could understand they're just getting their feet . . . they're trying to learn how to do this diplomacy. But so I'm struck by the fact that their positions before they joined the administration and now seem different.

Is that going to be the case forevermore or is it too early to tell?

Pifer: No, I've been struck by the same thing and I hope this will not be the continuing position.

I know neither Secretary Rubio nor the National Security Advisor Waltz, but I had the same view that you did. For a Republican president, these are guys who have experience in foreign policy. They've been on the right committees. They know these things. They could be the, quote, “the adults in the room.”

McFaul: Yes.

Pifer: I haven't seen them though, showing that they've been adults or that they've had any impact. And I think Secretary Rubio said a couple of things today that suggested that maybe they're looking back at what's happened over the past 10 days and maybe there's some recognition that this has not been the best way to handle things.

That's why I hope . . . I mean, in this debate of is the Trump administration's approach incompetence or design . . . I hope it's incompetence. Because you can fix incompetence. You can rethink things.

And I hope that they are reassessing and understand that they have mishandled these things. And if they want to succeed . . .

McFaul: And we want them to succeed.

Pifer: I would like to see President Trump broker a just, fair, durable settlement that ends this horrible war, that stops the killing, that brings peace back to that. And he can win his long coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

But everything that they've done, I think, in the last two weeks makes that possibility less and less and less . .

McFaul: Likely. And by the way, footnote to that: there are very few issues where Americans are united. We're a very polarized, split country right now. But a poll that came out this week, the Quinnipiac poll, for those that want to look it up, when Americans were asked, do you trust Putin? 81% said, No. Only 9% said, Yes.

And so President Trump is way ahead of the skis on this one. He is out of touch with the American society. So I think that that's an interesting data point. They have to produce results; they just cannot say, we just want a good relationship with Putin.

But Steve, go ahead and then we're going to get to the Europeans.

Pifer: I just wanted to mention there was one other quick poll that just came out when President Trump just bizarrely said that Russia attacked Ukraine, bizarrely said that Zelenskyy is a dictator, there was a poll I saw that I think was conducted on the 18th or 19th of February. It said 41% of Americans viewed Trump as a dictator, only 22 % of Americans viewed Zelenskyy as a dictator.

McFaul: Wow, I didn't see that one!

Pifer: I think there's a lot to suggest that where Trump is going thus far is very much divorced from where American public opinion is, both on Zelenskyy and on Russia.

McFaul: And Zelenskyy's approval rating actually is significantly higher than President Trump.

Pifer: 57%. And all this nonsense about postponing the elections: Last year in 2024, when they postponed the election, it was widely supported by Ukrainians. Most pro-democracy NGOs supported it. Most of the leaders of the parties in the Ukrainian parliament, with the exception of one, and this included people who would call themselves opponents of Zelenskyy, like Petro Poroshenko, the former president . . . they all agreed the election should be postponed.

And in a poll just conducted in the last couple of weeks, 63% of Ukrainians agree that there should be no elections until after the war is over.

McFaul: Interesting. Thanks for sharing that.

Finally, and I suspect we'll come back to this topic in the coming months, but give me your base reaction to the fissures in the NATO alliance. The vice president gave a pretty provocative speech in Munich.

How worried are you, Steve, that this is the beginning of the end of the alliance? Or is that too premature to think in those terms?

Pifer: You know, there were periodic suggestions during the first term that President Trump wanted to take the United States out of NATO. He actually doesn't have to formally take us out of NATO, but he can do things like reduce the American troop presence in Europe.

He can do things like . . . well, again, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, saying that basically, if you send a European security force into Ukraine, you're on your own. Those will weaken the American commitment to Europe. And they will weaken the confidence that the Europeans have that the United States will be there.

I think NATO has been a big asset for the United States over the past 70 years. I agree with President Trump that Europe has to do more in terms of its own defense spending. But what's interesting now is that in 2014, there was an agreement that by 2044, NATO members would spend 2% of gross domestic product on defense.

And so we went from three countries meeting that standard in 2014 to 23 meeting it last year. The talk now in Europe is they have to do more and they're looking at three to three and a half percent. The Europeans understand that their security situation is very different from what it was 10 years ago, that they have to do more. But that means that they can be stronger partners, stronger allies.

And I fear that if we were to throw NATO under the bus, it's going to mean that America first is going to be America alone. And if we do turn against the Europeans or we end this 76 year long security attache that we've had, do we really think the Europeans would be helpful to us when we're trying to deal with China?

McFaul: Absolutely not.

Pifer: I think at that point, that Europe would be morally preoccupied with Europe and the idea of helping the Americans out against China after we'd abandoned them in Europe . . . I wouldn't expect a lot of European assistance in that regard.

McFaul: That's a great point. Oh, by the way, our NATO allies did go to war with us when we were attacked. The only time Article 5 was invoked. Their soldiers died with us in Afghanistan. And some of our NATO allies went with us into Iraq.

And they never asked us to pay for that. They never asked us to compensate them like we're now doing to other Ukrainians.

And I hope the sounder, more rational people around the president will remind him of those kinds of facts. But Steve, I'm in trouble. I just looked at the clock. We talked much longer than I was supposed to, but that's because there's so much going on in the world.

I think we'll have a lot of news in the coming months, and let's just do this again.

Pifer: Happy to do it. I just hope the news will not be like the news we've seen in the last 10 days.

McFaul: Yeah, me too.

You’ve been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review. And be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, to stay up to date on what’s happening in the world and why.