Welcome to The Week from ProfG Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, June 12th. Today, we get into what the Iran war is revealing about American power. Then, nearly a trillion dollars in new stock is about to hit the market. And finally, why optimizing your life might be the best way to miss it. Let's get into it.
This week, Scott sat down with two of the sharpest foreign policy minds alive: Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and staff writer at The Atlantic, and Fiona Hill, former National Security Council official and one of the world's leading experts on Russia and geopolitics. And after more than 100 days of war with Iran, neither sounded particularly optimistic about where things are headed.
The IRGC is a car dealership. Trump is a car purchaser browsing for cars, and Trump is trying to negotiate and has accidentally, or has let the car dealership know that he needs a car to get home, or that he's playing poker and his cards are turned upside down and he has a weak hand. Fiona, your thoughts?
I think that's absolutely true, and I think, you know, the other part of your analogy here is that Trump also thinks that he's the seller, not just the buyer, and that is the problem because he's always telling the Iranians what he would do, and in real time he's laying out everything, everything that he's thinking. So, of course, there is no incentive whatsoever for them to make a deal on any kind of basis right now because they have no certainty, no assurances of what the outcome is going to be. So, Trump every single day confounds his own ability to make any progress.
On the war in Ukraine, the story that deserved far more attention than it got this week, Anne had just returned from Kyiv and told us her report. Something has fundamentally shifted.
The real interesting part of this story is not so much that Ukraine has gone from defense to offense, is that Ukraine has changed completely the way this war is being fought. And so what you have to understand about the Ukrainian front line is that it's a kind of 20-mile-wide zone. It's not a line that people are fighting against. It's a 20-mile-wide zone which is now completely transparent, and Ukrainians can see everything in it because of their extraordinary, literally millions of drones that they've built in the last couple of years. They have reconnaissance drones, they have short-range drones, long-range drones. They can see the whole front line, and every time any Russian truck or car or person comes into the zone, they see that person and they can hit them. And these huge numbers of people dying, a thousand a day or 30,000 a month, or being wounded, are coming from the fact that despite the existence of this zone, the Russians have until now continued sending people in it. And even at the beginning of this year and late last year, by doing that they were able to move it forward a little bit. So many resources were being thrown into it that they were still moving. That is now stopped completely. They cannot move forward.
Ukraine has gone from aid recipient to security provider. Gulf states and European companies are now seeking partnerships with Ukrainian drone firms. Scott called it the third Silicon Valley, and they did it after the US cut off supplies, hoping it would force a surrender. On the Russian side, Fiona laid out how Putin may well be running out of road.
And in Russia, Putin is now starting to get very nervous about Russian society and perhaps the elites. I mean, we hear stories about this. I wouldn't, you know, overplay it because Putin has all kinds of repressive capacities, but it's certainly the case that now his choices are shrinking. And, you know, as Anne has described on the front line, he's not as close as he would like to be to be able to be taking the whole of the Donbas, which is certainly one of the intermediate goals, and he's going to have to make some tough decisions as to whether he keeps on escalating these bombardments against Kyiv. And it's just a question of whether the constraints around him in terms of the number of people will continue to volunteer, as Anne described about all of the casualties here. In the last months we've seen the numbers of dead, not just injured, increasing, and in fact it's kind of flipping now the ratio of dead to injured in a way that is very detrimental to Putin. The other thing is that oil, everyone's expecting that Russia will have benefited enormously from the increase in oil prices, but in fact the sanctions that were imposed by the Europeans and others on Russian oil have actually constrained some of those revenues. So it's not a tipping point at this particular point, but we can see that the picture has become darker from Putin's perspective.
And the conversation ended on a reflection on what these autocracies, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, really have in common. Hint: it's not ideology.
You know what binds all of them is rather their dislike of and fear of the language of the liberal world. In other words, the language of rights, the language of rule of law, the language of separation of powers. You know, all of these are states that are seeking to create a kind of total environment where the regime or the leader or the ruling party controls all media, all conversation.
Autocracies aren't winning because they're stronger. They're winning because democracies are increasingly divided, distracted, and uncertain about what they're willing to defend. And it wasn't just academics making that argument. Last week at the final stop of the Prof G Markets tour in New York, Scott posed many of the same questions to someone who spent years making these decisions from inside the Situation Room: Hillary Clinton.
