Russia, Ukraine, and Global Instability, With Michael Kimmage

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Russia, Ukraine, and global instability. 

With me to discuss the origins of Russia's war in Ukraine and the repercussions for world order is Michael Kimmage. Michael is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and a senior associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served in the policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department where he held the Russia-Ukraine portfolio. He's the author of the new book, Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability. Michael, thank you for coming back on The President's Inbox and congratulations on the publication of Collisions.

KIMMAGE:
Thanks so much and really great to be back with you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
I want to get to the question, Michael, of the origin of Russia's war in Ukraine and what it means for global affairs, but I'd like to begin with why you wrote Collisions. You are a historian by training. Historians typically pick up their pens or put their fingers to their laptop keyboards after events have concluded. Why write a history about the origins of a war that is still unfolding?

KIMMAGE:
The first answer, I think, is that we very much need a history of this war, even though it's going to be inadequate inevitably, because there's a lot of evidence that we don't have and we also don't know how the war ends, which is crucial to understanding what this war is going to mean. But we are, as we all know, inundated by social media. This is a war that brings a lot of intense, loud headlines, and it's easy, I think, to get trapped in the news cycle and to see this war as a series of discrete twenty-four hour events, or forty-eight hour events. And I think to gain, first of all, a good analytical understanding of it, we need to go back in time and think historically. But I also feel maybe with even more emphasis, that for good policymaking, there has to be a historical arc of understanding. It's going to be a work in progress. It's going to be a collective effort with lots of different journalists and policymakers and historians weighing in. But that's how I wanted to contribute.

LINDSAY:
Now, you make the point that the war didn't begin in February 2022, but eight years earlier in February 2014, when then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country. Russia seized Crimea and orchestrated a secessionist movement in the Donbas, the eastern region of Ukraine. What prompted that sequence of events?

KIMMAGE:
Well, to a degree, it's prompted by an accident, an accident of destiny, which is that the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who didn't seem that insecure in his power in the early fall of 2013, mismanages a series of protests. He turns them into a revolution, and then he abruptly flees the country. That opens an enormous power vacuum in Ukraine, and Russia moved extremely quickly to exploit that power vacuum. Without that power vacuum, I'm not sure Russia would've done what it did in terms of the annexation of Crimea and incursion into Eastern Ukraine or the Donbas, but the power vacuum was there and Russia certainly jumped on it. But as with all big historical events, you have the immediate cause, and then you have a whole array of proximate causes. And here I would identify two, which are sort of two of the origins of the war as I understand them.

One, is a longstanding Russian desire to control Ukraine. I think we can put it that bluntly. Sometimes it's indirect methods of control through figures like Yanukovych who was a pro-Russian stooge, and sometimes through more overt military means. And that's a constant of Russian history going back hundreds of years and certainly applicable to 2014 into 2022. The other circumstance is, or other origin really is Ukraine's vulnerability, that it has a long border. Ukraine is not the most stable of states after it achieved independence in 1991. And most crucially, Ukraine doesn't fit into any real Western security alliance. As we all know, debates about NATO membership for Ukraine are plenty, but Ukraine is not a part of the alliance. There's no country that has a security commitment to Ukraine, and so that enhanced its vulnerability. So you put those two big causes together, Russian appetite and Ukrainian vulnerability, and you get something combustible, and it's as if Yanukovych's flight from Ukraine and February 2014 was the match that lit the flame.

LINDSAY:
Michael, let me draw you out for a moment on the claim that Ukraine had no security arrangement with any other country. I've often heard from Ukrainians and people who support Ukraine's independence against Russia, that in fact the West, particularly United States, did make a pledge to secure Ukraine's security as part of the deal back in the early 1990s to persuade Ukraine to give up the Soviet arsenal they inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union. How do you respond to those arguments?

KIMMAGE:
Well, it's a very legitimate academic argument because there is something called the Budapest Memorandum, which is something to which the U.S. and ironically Russia agrees guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty. But I think it would be fair to say that for almost everybody in the foreign affairs business diplomacy business, there's a space between a memorandum of understanding and an ironclad Article Five security commitment. And that's why debates about Ukraine's NATO membership, which began in earnest after 2008, after the Bucharest NATO Summit, those were such serious debates. It wasn't understood as if this had been resolved, a case closed. "We've already made the commitment. We just have to make good on it." I don't think that that was the reigning mentality in Ukraine, in Europe, or in the U.S. so it's a sad story on Ukraine's part, heartbreaking story on Ukraine's part, that it did give up certain things, it made concessions in the theoretical name of this kind of commitment, but that commitment, it wasn't material, it wasn't a binding commitment.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about the title you've given your book. You call it Collisions, why?

KIMMAGE:
So we went back and forth with the editors. The original title of the book was Collision. And what I had in mind with that was the collision between the United States and Russia, which is I think what makes this particular war something like a global war, not a world war, but a war with many, many global implications. But it did become sort of apparent, or it is apparent in the argument of the book that there are nested collisions that are at issue here, each with a somewhat different timeline, somewhat different logic. And I suspect each of these collisions will have a different conclusion as well. First and foremost, it's Russia and Ukraine. And that has historical pedigree going back for centuries. Secondly, it's Russia, Europe, that a lot of this conflict is about Ukraine's place in Europe. And Europe has been instrumental in supporting Ukraine after 2022. So in no way is Europe a negligible factor in this conflict.

And the U.S. is equally crucial. It's a war, as Russia says—whether this is true or not, but it's what Russia says—that's sort of about the role of the United States in Europe or the role of the United States vis-a-vis international order. And for the first two years of the war, a little bit less so in recent months, but for the first two years of the war, the U.S. was the most important outside provider of security assistance to Ukraine. So it's an integral part of the story and the course of this war. And so you have these three collisions, and the title should be there on the plural, or the noun should be on the plural to indicate to the readers that it's not one war really, but its multiple wars occurring simultaneously in and around Ukraine.

LINDSAY:
So Michael, walk me through each of these collisions. Let's begin with the collision between Russia and Ukraine. Obviously, President Putin has written his manifesto in which Ukraine is part of the Russian world. I'm not sure to what extent Ukrainians are ever sympathetic to that point of view. Can you just sort of explain it to us and give us some context?

KIMMAGE:
Sure. It's a very intricate set of problems in this regard that in some ways the 2022 war has really clarified. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a great deal of overlap between Russia and Ukraine. These had been parts of the Soviet Union. So there's economic overlap, there's cultural and linguistic overlap, and there are just lots of families that are interconnected. So it's legitimate to say that there was a strong bond between the two countries, and that was an unproblematic for a number of years after 1991. But then you have the Orange Revolution of 2004, and that's a revolution where there had been a rigged election, and that's redone due to popular protests. And the more pro-Western candidate emerges the winner, that's Viktor Yushchenko and policymaker in the Kremlin close to Putin describes that as our 9/11 quote, unquote. So,-

LINDSAY:
Why that description?

KIMMAGE:
It seems to me remarkably hyperbolic, but it's as if it's the event that changes everything where we had been perhaps passive, we need to be active, where we hadn't been sort of full bore involved, now we need to push as hard as we can to prevent Ukraine from moving toward the West, but you have that already as a response in 2004. Actually, the Orange Revolution is resolved by joint action on the part of Europe, Ukraine, Russia, and the United States. So it doesn't lead to some sort of big cataclysm, but it's a turning point. And yet after that, in the six years between 2004 and 2010, Ukrainian politics is pretty volatile. And in 2010, you have Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian candidate, the kind of loser. In 2004, he becomes Ukraine's president. So for three years from 2010 to 2013, Russia really has what it wants in Ukraine, which is influence, capacity to manipulate, it's pulling certain strings.

Yanukovych's Ukraine has officially sort of given up on its NATO aspirations or dialed them down, and it seems as if the problem is solved from Putin's point of view or Moscow's point of view. And Putin overlays this with this propaganda notion of a Russian world, some sort of innate historically grounded civilizational bond between Russians and Ukrainians. And what Putin can pretend between 2010 and 2013 is that this is spontaneously being embraced on the Ukrainian side, which was not the case, but the pretense was available. And all of that is eviscerated by the Maidan Revolution of 2014. 

Ukraine changes course once again, certainly at the time that Russia annexes Crimea becomes the country's enemy. And Russia alienates a lot of pro-Russian, Russian-speaking Ukrainians at that moment. And it's as if the die is cast in Ukraine that the European path is the definitive, the emphatic path on the Ukrainian part, and that triggers a very, very high level of animosity in Moscow. So there's a non-pathological version of friendship between these two countries. It's here and there palpable from 1991 to 2013, and the events of 2013, 2014 really changed that story.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Let's talk about the second collision between Europe and Russia, because my sense in a lot of the coverage here in the United States about the war in Ukraine is that that aspect gets lost. So sort of walk me through what the contest was between the Europeans in Russia, and I asked that question against the backdrop, the sense that Russia itself is, or maybe it isn't a part of Europe.

KIMMAGE:
Yes, that's one of the great questions. The million-dollar question of Russian history, and Putin has answered it in a way almost no modern Russian leader has by saying that Russia is not a part of Europe. And that's one of the things he's telling us with the 2022 war. But it's a rich and important question in its own right. 

So the Europe-Russia dimension to this conflict, the Europe-Russia collision, retraces a lot of the Russia-Europe rather Russia-Ukraine collisions I was describing a moment ago. The reason Yanukovych fails as a politician in 2013, the reason his regime cracks up is because he can't manage the relationship to Europe and the relationship to Russia at the same time. He's offered an association agreement to take sort of first steps to nearing the European Union, not entering as a member, but cooperating with the European Union. He, in the end doesn't sign that due to the pressure that Putin puts on him. That sparks a revolution in Ukraine, and that sets in motion a lot of the military actions of 2014, 2015.

So Europe is integral to that, but that's in no way Europe's designed for Ukraine. What Europe has is a wish that both Ukraine and Russia will integrate maybe at different speeds and in different ways with different objectives into the European world. And there is an incredible optimism in Europe about this. It's strong in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin. It's strong in the first eight years that Putin is president from 2000 to 2008. It's especially strong from 2008 to 2012 when Dmitry Medvedev is president. And in some ways it's not until 2022 that this aspiration on the European side dies. Europe tries to bring everything back to normal in 2014, 2015 diplomatically, sort of keeping Russia on board, trying to honor the European aspirations of Ukraine. A lot gets papered over in those years diplomatically. And then between 2015 and 2022 in a way that historians are going to have to explain in the future, Europe normalizes its relations with Russia. That's often through economic channels, but there's a diplomatic normalization that occurs as well, and Germany is at the forefront of this agenda and initiative. 

So there's almost paradoxical effort on the part of Europe to keep everything as it was. And Russia is overturning various apple carts along the way with a degree of radicalism, certainly in 2014, 2015. And Russia has to know in 2022 when it invades massively that it is going to rupture its relations with Europe. And that's a decision that Putin is able to come to by February of 2022. So a totally mismatched set of visions between Europe and Russia.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you about that, Michael, because as I read your argument the sense I get is that the Europeans in some ways were a-strategic in their approach to incorporating Ukraine into Europe, that it wasn't thinking in sort of traditional geopolitical terms that this might be perceived as a threat in Moscow. And indeed, you write at one point that Europe wanted Ukraine as one more independent democracy in Eastern Europe standing on its side of the political ledger, not necessarily against Russia, but unimpeded by Russia, which seems totally at odds with Putin's view that he or Russia had to control Ukraine's destiny.

KIMMAGE:
Yes, there's a refusal to recognize what Putin's ambitions are, and Putin does quite a bit to cloak those ambitions in different kinds of language and in the end in different kinds of deception. But there's a reluctance to recognize the radicalism of Putin's ambitions and the degree to which he would be willing to go to war for the sake of those ambitions. And there's a naiveté about how much Russia was going to integrate into the European domain. And so you get out of those two things, a failure to recognize who Putin was and a naiveté about efforts at integration that are really aimed at Ukraine that have no security component. And it's very, very difficult to understand once again, in retrospect is as if all of this would happen by magic peacefully. And maybe this is glib to say as a historian of the twentieth century or a historian of the region, but this is a part of Europe where things have very rarely worked out peacefully.

So it's a bit baffling that this naiveté and optimism would be projected on this particular region, but it was, and the ability to recover from that or to recover from these mistakes is also very limited. After 2014, 2015, Europe together with the United States set certain conditions, Russia has to get out of eastern Ukraine. That's the core condition, and that never happens. And at a certain point, it's as if the West kind of loses interest in that. And what I mentioned before with Europe that there's a normalization of relations with Russia. So all of that sets a very permissive environment or creates a very permissive environment for Russia to act, and that's one of the background stories of the 2022 invasion.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about the third collision, Michael, the one between Russia and the United States. My sense is this has gotten the most play in the American political conversation, and it's typically framed in terms of NATO expansion. How do you assess that argument, that collision?

KIMMAGE:
So NATO has to be a part of this story because it's so much a part of Putin's rhetoric and it's a part of the official narrative that comes from the Kremlin. And I think it's fair to say wherever we position NATO in all of this, that Russia has been unhappy historically with NATO enlargement or NATO expansion. And this is not just Putin's preoccupation, but describes the Russian national security elite and perhaps even Russian society as well. That to me seems pretty close to an objective fact, but I do not identify that as an origin of the war. And in a certain way, I'm almost arguing the opposite in this book, that it really wasn't the generation of fear on the part of the United States and NATO that pushes Russia into invading, which is of course Putin's, explication Russians of what he's up to. I think it was a growing sense of contempt on the Russian part and a sense that America is in fact weaker than it thinks it is.

That leads Putin to make the decision to invade. And I think Putin misjudged this. I don't think it's an accurate judgment, but we need to understand the judgment to understand the war. I think it has a lot to do with the way that the U.S. responded to events in 2014, 2015, responding only with sanctions to what was a war, a real military event. I don't know if Syria is crucial to this story, but I think it may play a role. The election meddling in 2016, it's not clear what the U.S. response is to that. And I do think that January 6th and maybe the mood that's associated with the pullout from Afghanistan also contributes. I don't think you need any one of these things to explain Putin's mindset, this contempt that he has for the United States, but I think it's there as a composite picture.

It's not what we like to think of ourselves in the U.S. I think we're more reluctant to look at this part of Russian attitudes because it reflects perhaps poorly on us. But I think it's there, and I think it's much more significant than any of the claims that are made about NATO membership or NATO expansion. After all, Ukraine was anything but on the verge of joining NATO in 2022. So you have that as a problem of logic and many other things that I think push NATO to me into the background.

LINDSAY:
So just to make sure I understand you, your argument essentially is the reverse of the more common argument. You're arguing that it's American weakness or Putin's perception of American weakness, not American power that was a facilitating cause of the war.

KIMMAGE:
Precisely. And I do feel sometimes I sort of wary at the present moment about the validity of this argument as the U.S. could seem to be losing interest in the war in Ukraine and sort of moving on. We might use another word other than weakness in this case. And I think this one that Putin would associate with both of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this is impatience. Putin has to know, he's a canny figure. He has to know that Russia is in almost every respect, militarily outclassed by the United States. There's no way in which on paper these two countries are military equals. Russia is by far the weaker country, and yet there are a series of conflicts in recent memory where the U.S. has dived in and then lost interest and drifted away. And I do think that the Putin sort of took this template and applied it to the war in Ukraine. And I have some worries at the present moment that he may not be entirely off base. I hope he is, but I'm a little bit less certain of this than when I wrote the book.

LINDSAY:
Michael, as we've been talking about the Russia aspect of these collisions, we've been talking about it in personal terms, what it is that Putin wants. That raises an important question I think about, is this really about Putin or is it about Russia or can we not disentangle between the two?

KIMMAGE:
I think there has to be a phased answer to this question. At the beginning, it really was Putin's idiosyncratic choice. Russia by 2022 is a dictatorship. So we just don't know what public opinion truly is in that country, but my guess is, if Russians could have been put to the vote, even nationalistic hardline Russians, 95 percent would have said, we don't want this war. There was no popular pressure on Putin to wage war as he did in Ukraine in 2022. In fact, I think it came as a shock even to names that would be familiar to readers of Foreign Affairs, Dmitri Trenin, Fyodor Lukyanov, and others who were not softies when it comes to Russia, but thought that this war was crazy and that it wouldn't happen.

So there's that at the beginning of the story, but to my surprise, there's been almost no antiwar movement in Russia. I don't think this is a war that Russians enthusiastically embraced. I don't think Putin has succeeded to that degree, but in ways that we can be familiar with from American history, what Putin has instrumentalized and used is anti-antiwar sentiment. And so we're now two and a half years into the war, Russia is able to get young people to kind of sign up and fight often with big cash bonuses. It's able to generate the degree of mobilization that it needs. He's also in a different sense, made Russians complicit in this war, that there's no way for them to divorce their country from it. So what began as Putin's war has, I think very clearly become Russia's war. I say it with a lot of regret because I think it means terrible things for Russia's future, but that's the progression of the last two and a half years.

LINDSAY:
So Michael, we've been talking about the past. I'd like to shift our focus to the future, and particularly to the issue of global instability. What do you think this war, regardless of its origins, means for the future of world order?

KIMMAGE:
I think that there are two empirical effects that we can see so far for the war's effect on international order, and it really will be crucial to see how the war itself ends to say more on this topic because Ukraine's victory would have such an impact as would Ukraine's defeat on what we think of not only as regional order, but international order. So time will tell in that sort of big sense. But I think what we can identify already are a series of global knock-on effects that are quite dramatic. Inflation ticked up quite dramatically in the first year, year and a half of this war in the United States in Latin America, in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, obviously there are pandemic causes to that and other causes to it, supply chain causes, but the war itself generated a wave of inflation that has to have political consequences.

In addition to that, you have food insecurity, which we talked about a little bit more a year ago because Ukraine has actually been very successful about getting its grain to market because of some of its naval victories. But still the war has had a profound effect on food security. And that's a story that's probably not yet over. And I think what will matter, if you could go back to the origins of the Syrian Civil War here in 2011, that's caused by drought and issues related to food among other causes, that we may see the effects, the global instability in this regard two, three years from now, because those effects will be expressed through politics, but the sort of practical instability is there already. So that to me is one category of global instability, the knock-on effects of the war. But there's something a little bit more specific that's probably of greater concern.

And this is that war has driven Russia into the arms of Iran and North Korea. These are the two countries that are openly giving Russia weapons and that's created new kinds of dependency that Russia has on these two countries and in turn in ways that I think are demonstrable, provable, these two countries have become more emboldened in the last year, year and a half. So I would not say that the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel is caused by the war in Ukraine, but there is a chain of causality there that a more emboldened Iran is taking new steps in the region and that's bringing instability of a new kind to the Middle East. I don't think we've seen that yet as a real news story with North Korea, but I think the potential is certainly there. So that's not anybody's design, it's not Putin's design. It's sort of not a strategic aspect of the war, but it's a consequence. And to me it's just astonishing in its scope.

LINDSAY:
So that raises the question, Michael, of where we go from here? And it raises that question in two respects. One, where can we go in terms of the ongoing fighting between Russia and Ukraine? But also where do we go from here in terms of trying to corral or contain this ripple effect that we're seeing from the war, particularly this effect by which North Korea and Iran are becoming more emboldened? Perhaps you could begin with the question immediate of where to go from here on where the war is headed.

KIMMAGE:
I think in some ways the policy answer has an elegance to it, a kind of simplicity. And that's what I'll start with first, which is that the urgency of supporting Ukraine is as great now as it was at the beginning of the war. And that's a kind of support, this is not really news, but deserves emphasis. That's a support that runs through military channels, but it's also economic and it's also very important. This is a European task, maybe before it's an American task to provide a horizon for Ukraine of membership in the European world and in European institutions. That's going to help with Ukrainian morale and the wherewithal that Ukrainians are going to need to endure this terrible war. So this has to be a collective effort, military, economic, and political, of course, transatlantic in nature. This is what I think most of us argue for, but it's of the essence.

LINDSAY:
What do you think will happen, Michael, if that support doesn't materialize? I know that there is this expectation in Washington that eventually Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will bring a bill to the floor. It will pass. Ukraine will get its military and humanitarian aid, but there's also a chance that might not happen. What would the consequences be?

KIMMAGE:
I think the consequences in some ways are being played out before our eyes. Diminished air defenses in Ukraine, which is something over which the U.S. has quite a bit of influence, are already being felt in the war. And if that trend were to continue, I think the war could take a very grave turn. Ukraine has to be able to defend the territory that it has. So I don't know if Ukraine needs to take back every inch to succeed in this war. I think that there are models of success that don't require that, but certainly Ukraine can't every month be losing territory indefinitely or else the war will start to tip in Russia's favor. So that's a matter of course of ammunition and shells and a lot of practical stuff. But there too, the U.S. plays an enormously important role. So it's not about Ukraine precipitously losing the war if the U.S. doesn't get its act together and commit itself to sustain support for Ukraine, but the deterioration in the war that could result from U.S. inaction will have its own momentum. And it just seems at this particular phase to be especially dire. 

I don't want to conclude on a dire note though. I would say that there is a lot of strategic success that Ukraine, Europe, and the United States has already enjoyed in this war. And I feel like this is a storyline that needs a special attention because it's not the storyline of the news and hasn't been for the last couple of months. Russia has since the beginning of the war come into possession of roughly 17, 18 percent of Ukrainian territory. Russia has expended, we don't know, but let's say roughly three hundred thousand deaths, casualties in pursuit of this, unbelievable amounts of materiel and money. And Russia has severed itself from Europe and the United States. Russia was probably in possession of 10, 11 percent of this territory on the 23rd of February, 2022. So that is not a spectacular war so far for Russia.

And in many ways I think Russia has been adequately contained. It needs to be more contained, but there's been something really remarkable about that ability to contain Russia. And so I think psychologically and perhaps also politically, we need to think of ourselves as building on success in this regard. And I feel the need to make that claim because it's not the majority claim that's being made at the moment. And maybe one could tack on one further point about the politics of this taking us back to the United States in debates that we're having here. I think what we need to do, and I think the Biden White House could probably do this a little bit better, but what we need to do is underscore what American national interests are involved.

Now, Europe is big enough as an American national interest for the war to matter organically to American foreign policy. But when we fold in these points about North Korea and Iran, we see that the war really matters to many of America's core national interests. And so the global dimensions of the war I find difficult to articulate, sometimes difficult to conceptualize, but once that work is done, we have to find ways to express them clearly because I think they too make a very strong case for sustained U.S. support for Ukraine. So I think the global and the European dimensions have to be brought together and they have to be made very transparent and clear to American citizens. And if that is done, I feel a fairly high degree of confidence that the U.S. will sort of go down the right path.

LINDSAY:
Michael, I take your point that the war in Ukraine has in many ways been a loss for Russia. I think it may go down as one of history's great strategic miscalculations. Putin thought he could split NATO. Not only didn't he split NATO, he unified it. And we've had two previously neutral countries join the Alliance in Finland, in Sweden, which is greatly complicated Russia's military planning. But I want to just asking you if you have any advice on the North Korea-Iran aspect of the problem. Anything in the U.S. administration can or should be doing, or are we likely to see that axis of the aggrieved become even tighter?

KIMMAGE:
I don't think that we have the capacity to affect the bilateral relations between North Korea and Russia on the one hand and Iran and Russia on the other. We have at this point almost no leverage over Russia when it comes to these things. And that extends of course, to the Russia-China relationship. We can speak about driving wedges in all of these cases, but I don't think that that's a practical option. I think that the best that I can offer is sort of a conceptual answer to your question, Jim, which is that we can't be too segmented in how we understand national security for the United States. It's not that there's an Asia problem set on the one hand, a Middle East problem set on the other, and far away from that, a kind of Europe-Ukraine-Russia problem set. They're very, very interlinked.

And if we can make that linkage, we can see that progress in the war in Ukraine might translate into incremental progress with the problems and the challenges that we face with Iran and North Korea. Certainly this kind of Russian backstop that's there for both of these countries, if we can diminish that, that's absolutely on our national interest. But it's not going to be through persuasion. It's going to be through whatever happens on the battlefields of Ukraine. So in sum, an immense amount for the United States really of global significance runs through the battlefields of Ukraine. The local and the global in this case are deeply intertwined.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Michael Kimmage, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. Michael, thank you very much for joining me.

KIMMAGE:
Jim, thank you so much for having me.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. If you want to contact us, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance and to Justin Schuster for his editing assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.