John B. Hurford Memorial Lecture With Timothy Snyder

Historian Timothy Snyder explores the concept of freedom, what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s worth fighting for both in the United States and abroad.

Copies of Timothy Snyder’s new book On Freedom are available for purchase.

The John B. Hurford Memorial Lecture was inaugurated in 2002 in memory of CFR member John B. Hurford, and features individuals who represent critical new thinking in international affairs and foreign policy. This meeting is also part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Meeting Series on Democracy.

FROMAN: Well, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. This is a busy time here at the Council this week and next so I’m sure we’ll see you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over the next over the next several days.  

My name is Mike Froman. I’m president of the Council and I’m delighted to be here to open up the John B. Hurford Memorial Lecture. We’re pleased to have about a hundred people in this room but actually close to 300 people online as well.  

This lecture started back in 2002 in memory of a CFR member, John B. Hurford, and since then it’s highlighted individuals who brought new critical thinking to international affairs and foreign policy, and I’d like to recognize Helga Hurford and Jennifer Hurford and their friends of the Hurford family who are here with us today, as well as Jayne Kurzman from the Hurford Foundation for joining us here in person. Thank you for that.  

Today’s lecture features—it’s our great pleasure to feature Tim Snyder who joined the Council just yesterday as a senior fellow for democracy and this is so his first event. He’s already hit the ground running.  

He joins us, of course, from Yale University where he’s the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs, the author of twenty books including On Freedom, which many of you have seen out in the lobby, as well as On Tyranny, which is a number-one New York Times bestseller. 

Tim is going to play a critical role here at the Council as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel project on the future of democracy. That project aims to analyze the state of democracy around the world including our own and provide steps for policymakers, business leaders, civil society, and citizens in the United States and other countries to prevent the erosion of democracy at home and abroad.  

And given Tim’s background as a highly acclaimed historian and public intellectual we have no doubt that he will contribute and add immense value to this project.  

I would like to thank Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel for all of her support at the Council and for having the foresight several years ago of coming to the Council and initiating this program on democracy here. 

The program today will have Professor Snyder making some brief remarks and then a conversation between him and Gillian Tett. Gillian Tett is the provost, which means she runs King’s College Cambridge, and in her spare time spends time here in the United States and as—on the editorial board of the Financial Times as well, and a new member of the Council on Foreign Relations. So we’re delighted to have Gillian Tett back here as well.  

Needless to say, this has been a year very focused on democracy with so much of the world’s population going to the polls, so many concerns about threats to democracy, challenges to democracy including with artificial intelligence and misinformation here in the United States and, of course, we’re very focused on the upcoming election and we’re not the only ones focused on our election.  

All over the world people are following it closely and following the integrity of our election and the importance of our democracy showing that we can go through elections safely and securely with integrity and accept the results of those elections being an example for the rest of the world.  

So it’s an important year on this issue. This is an important initiative. We’re delighted. Let me—with that, let me turn it over to Professor Timothy Snyder who will give remarks and then have a conversation with Gillian.  

Why don’t you two guys come up? (Applause.) 

SNYDER: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us at a time which no doubt would be better spent walking in Central Park, although I guess for you New Yorkers that’s probably not as romantic and appealing as it is for us poor souls from Connecticut who are just here for a day as tourists. 

This event, as you can tell from Mike’s introduction, was very carefully sequenced. So I first became the democracy fellow and then we had this event, thereby fulfilling all of my obligations as a democracy fellow. I appreciate that. To the Spielvogels in the room, that was a joke. (Laughter.)  

All right. I wanted to just take three or four minutes before speaking with the great Gillian Tett about freedom and my book just to make a couple of remarks about how speaking to the Council and the new position on the future of democracy might bear on the book.  

So this is the Council on Foreign Relations, which raises the question of what’s foreign and what’s us? Who are we? What does it mean to be a democratic country?  

An easy way to answer that question is, well, we’re us and they’re them and there’s an awful lot of that in our domestic politics and in other people’s domestic politics as well. That kind of reasoning leads to the dead end of fascism, as one can see around the world.  

Another way of answering the question of who are we and what are foreign relations is to talk about interests, but American interests pretty much tends to mean the commitments of whoever happens to be speaking at the moment. It’s very hard to say exactly what an interest is—I think impossible without saying what the common commitments are and those common commitments, I think, ultimately have to involve moral commitments, and democracy, I believe, is ultimately a moral commitment.  

So the way that my book On Freedom, I think, connects to the project for democracy and connects in some way to the work of the Council is that, that if you believe in democracy you have to believe in a people.  

Democracy means rule by the people so you have to actually believe that there is a people, and the people that can rule itself has to be a certain kind of people. It has to be a free people, and that’s not as self-evident as it might seem. How you actually get to having a free people? Because freedom, of course, is an ideal and that means that democracy is not just a thing out there in the world like other things.  

It must have a metaphysical component. You must want it. You must believe that it’s good, and I would insist on the metaphysical part of it because the other side, the anti-democrats, certainly have a metaphysical commitment too. When they say there’s nothing good in the world, there are no values, there’s no truth, everything’s just a transaction, that is a big metaphysical claim. It’s a claim about what’s real and what’s not.  

The claim is nothing’s real. Nothing’s true. It’s really not worth valuing anything. Whereas the argument that I try to make in the book is that the reason why we want to be free is that freedom is the value of values—that there are good things in the world, that each of us has different kinds of commitments and freedom is the state in which we can pursue and realize our various combinations of values.  

And if one sees freedom that way positively I think it clears up some of the conundrums that we Americans are a bit addicted to like, for example, the conundrum of security versus freedom. There is no security versus freedom. Almost all the time if you’re more free you’re more secure and if you’re more secure you’re more free. There are exceptions but they’re really quite minimal.  

Likewise, our American mistake of believing that freedom and government somehow have to be balanced against each other. On the contrary, there are certain things government must do in order for us to be free, and if you accept the claim that freedom is the highest value then that becomes a legitimation for the existence of government because we have to cooperate socially and generationally to be able to do those things.  

So that is just my very brief introduction to the book and my connection of some of the book’s themes to the larger themes of the work of democracy and, I hope, of the Council, and now I’m looking forward to speaking with Gillian Tett. (Applause.) 

TETT: Well, thank you very much indeed, Professor Snyder, for those rousing words and I think what we should do, first of all, is set in context where your ideas about freedom have come from because until a few years ago you were a highly respected academic historian who was laboring in—(laughter)— 

SNYDER: That would have been the comic place to pause there. (Laughter.) 

TETT: No, who was very highly respected but not exactly an intellectual rock star in the public sense in that your books about history—you’ve written endless books, numerous books about history of Ukraine, of the region. Highly respected.  

And then the Russians’ brutal invasion of Ukraine happened and you became almost overnight an academic rock star in that you produced a series of lectures about Ukrainian history, which were filmed, went onto YouTube and had no less than 10 million downloads around the world, and in essentially popularizing Ukrainian history, standing up for the idea that actually this brutal invasion had not come from nowhere—it had actually come out of a series of big civilizational clashes—you’ve had enormous influence on the Ukrainian government and their discussions about how to tell their own story and how the West sees Ukraine.  

And in fact your book On Freedom, which I read a few days ago and thoroughly recommend, the preface is actually written, it says at the end of it, on the Kyiv to Donetsk train, wagon ten, compartment nine, 6:10 in the morning after an overnight journey back from Kyiv.  

And I should say that we actually were all just in Ukraine last weekend, along with Mike Froman, and we all took the same train back from Kyiv for Donetsk. I can tell you that at 6:00 in the morning after an overnight train I was not about to pen the preface of a book. (Laughter.) 

So the fact you wrote this book on the train—and it’s a fourteen-hour train journey—is pretty, pretty tough. It’s very striking.  

But let me start with a key question, which is this. How do your concepts of freedom relate to the extraordinary work that you’ve done in trying to tell Ukraine’s story to the wider Western world and why do you think it matters so much now?  

SNYDER: OK. Thanks.  

TETT: There you are. You can check what you wrote if you want. (Laughter.) 

SNYDER: Right. So the first thing I would say is that freedom involves listening to other people. We have an idea about freedom, which is that you’re all by yourself. Nobody is bothering you. You follow your own impulses. You click as you will and you’re a free person.  

I’ve come to think that that’s basically wrong because to be free, to be free of other people’s manipulations, to be free of—to be free of various kinds of behavioral patterns you have to know yourself and the trick of knowing yourself is that you’re the one person in the world who can’t do it, which means you have to have some pattern to listen to someone else. 

The one person who nodded when I say that—said that is the one person in the room who knows himself. Congratulations, sir. (Laughter.) 

So it follows from that that in order to be free you have to have some kind of habit of listening to other people and taking in what they say, if only about yourself so you know what your own weaknesses are, and I just say that by way of answering the question, Gillian, because insofar—so people started paying more attention to me when I wrote a little pamphlet called On Tyranny, and insofar as On Tyranny made any sense it was because I was noticing things in the U.S. that had already happened in Russia.  

I was noticing things in the U.S. that already happened in Eastern Europe and, more broadly, that had happened in the twentieth century as a historian. So I was trying to listen, and a lot of the advice I gave in that book was advice that I had received from East Europeans or other people who had been resisting tyranny.  

And then in a broader sense, like, as a historian I’m really struck that—the reason I became a historian of Ukraine was because many of the big issues that historians try to grapple with like the nature of Stalinism or the nature of national socialism or why the Second World War, the answers of all of those questions turn out to have something to do with Ukraine.  

So, in my view, if you want to understand the twentieth century you have to get serious about Ukraine, which was what I was doing when all this happened.  

And then the final answer and maybe the most pertinent one is what you can learn from the Ukrainians themselves. So if you think that freedom is just an impulse, like, whatever you feel like doing then somebody else is probably making you feel like doing that thing.  

My view is that since freedom is about values you choose values over time and the values that you choose over time accumulate and create this thing called character. Free will and character, I think, are actually different names for the same thing.  

And the choice of Zelensky and other people to stay at the beginning of the war I think is an expression of freedom. Everybody thought they would run away, which I think is a problem with everybody, and in fact they stayed and I think that helps to see freedom as a kind of accumulative moral commitment.  

And another thing that one can get from Ukraine and to the experience of Ukraine is the notion of freedom as positive. We tend to think that freedom is negative. You just pull the bad thing away. You pull the government away—whatever you think the bad thing is—and then we’re fine. Then we’re free.  

But if you’re in de-occupied zones you realize that, well, yes, pulling the bad thing away is important. That the Russians no longer torture, they no longer deport children, that’s important. It’s necessary but it’s not sufficient.  

You also have to rebuild the houses and restore the bus lines and give people access to other basic things that they need to be free people. So that’s another lesson that one can draw from Ukraine. 

TETT: Right. I’m going to come in a few moments to the question of where you think Ukraine’s going. But I did my own Ph.D. in the former Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union—I’m that old—and back in 1995 Ukraine and Russia didn’t seem to be so radically different.  

And, yet, starting at the beginning of the twenty-first century the two countries began to really separate in terms of how civil society was or was not operating in a way that was absolutely remarkable to anyone who was soaked in the culture of the area, and in my view the defining element was not just the question of freedom but agency and that Russians became increasingly fatalistic and passive and really lost the belief they could actually influence anything, be that the government, the country, politics, or even their own lives, and Ukrainians discovered this very American concept of agency—that we can actually act together in this distributed way as communities and actually take control and reimagine the future.  

So I guess one of the questions I have is, why did that happen? Because things like the Maidan Revolution didn’t come out of nowhere. You know, the fact that Ukrainians have fought back didn’t come out from nowhere. Why did that happen? Why do some countries and societies get the freedom bug and get the belief they actually do have the ability to have agency over their lives in a way that’s so fundamental to the American vision of what makes America special? 

SNYDER: That’s a really wonderful question and I’m going to try to go from kind of the cool analytic explanation towards the more warmer human stuff.  

There’s some very basic analytical things like in Russia, because of hydrocarbons but also just because of some accidents, it was easier for there to be one oligarch, whereas in Ukraine in the ’90s there were multiple oligarchs, and that’s not a great situation.  

I’d just mention that. OK. It’s not a great situation but it’s better than one oligarch because you can have a thing called oligarchical pluralism, which is better than no pluralism at all. 

The second thing which happens is that at a certain point civil society gets a taste of success, and civil society is very important here because, to paraphrase some of the things Gillian was saying, it involves groups that might be a little bit accidental who, in a certain historical moment, are pursuing something together and believe they can do something together that they can’t do as individuals.  

And it’s a bit about interests but it’s not only about interests. It’s also about a sense of togetherness, a sense that you can change things. And unlike in Russia, in Ukraine civil society kept winning and they kept winning ever bigger, and if they win this war, incidentally, that will be the biggest win of all because this war is not Russian government. It’s Ukrainian government. It’s Russian government against Ukrainian government plus civil society, which is a very different thing.  

And then the warmest thing I wanted to say has to do with some of the ideas of freedom in the book. You can’t really be free, I think, without solidarity and this is a very East European idea, which was present in Eastern Europe but also in the Soviet Union among the dissidents, that in order to be free you have to be able to do something together and to be a free person is to be unpredictable. But to be an effective free person is to do unpredictable things together and Maidan is an example of that. 

TETT: Right. I mean, one of the points you make in the book is that many people, particularly on the American right, have defined freedom as the freedom to do whatever you want without government interference or control or social norms. That’s the extreme libertarian view. 

We’ve had people pushing back from that over the last year like Joe Stiglitz with his book The Road to Freedom, which argues that one person’s freedom is another person’s coercion because they’re controlled and if it’s only the rich who have freedom to do what they want then other people suffer.  

One of the themes in your book is that freedom entails having respect for the norms of government rather than trying to chuck it out the window, and trying to have respect and awareness of each other.  

Do you think that’s something which needs to be remembered again in America right now? 

SNYDER: Absolutely. I mean, the premise—it’s a very American book. I’m writing it as an American—it literally starts with a child during the Bicentennial ringing a bell—and I’m writing it for Americans but on the basis that we Americans use the word freedom all the time and we don’t really know what we mean by it or we don’t mean anything by it or sometimes we mean less than nothing by it, or it’s—or the word free gets—this is the thing I find most disturbing—it gets disassociated from people.  

So I think freedom in the way that I try to— 

TETT: So, like, free markets and free enterprise, you know. 

SNYDER: Yeah. Exactly. Right. There is no such thing. There’s not even a free country. There isn’t free speech either.  

Freedom in the sense that we’re talking—I’m trying to talk about it only can apply to people and as soon as you let that slip you’re letting—you’re giving away the entire game. So with negative freedom free market is a good example. There’s no such thing as a free market. If there were a truly free market then we would all be selling each other’s kidneys before this lunch were over.  

There is no—it doesn’t work that way. But, I mean, that’s just the most basic point. Once you say that the market is free what in fact you’re saying is that people have duties to the economy like I have a duty not to, quote/unquote, “intervene,” right?  

But once you say the market is free suddenly the humans have duties to the abstraction rather than the other way around, and more broadly still if we think of freedom as negative then we never have to ask the question of who we are and what we’re for.  

If freedom is just about a small government or no government then we dodge the entire question of what are we positively, what are we committed to, what is our life all about, and without those questions freedom actually doesn’t mean anything and then the political outcome, as you’ve already suggested, is that you kind of—you can’t really change the status quo.  

If the government’s small and nobody has any ideas about what to do with government then the accidental oligarchy that you’re born into, because we’re all born—we’re born accidentally into a certain range of wealth and power—then there’s no reason to change that. It will just stay and the oligarchs themselves will control the use of the word freedom and they’ll say things like free markets and the word itself will end up getting quite warped.  

TETT: It becomes almost Orwellian, yes.  

SNYDER: Yeah, I think so. 

TETT: So are you concerned? I mean, is the reason you wrote this book that you fear that America is losing its freedom and sliding towards political tyranny? 

SNYDER: I mean, I wrote this book because I love my country and because I think freedom is the right concept and I think it’s the only concept. I think it’s literally the only way to go forward both philosophically and politically. And so, yes, I am worried but worry is not the animating concept of the book. 

Like, I wrote this little thing called On Tyranny and I wrote these dark books about East European history called Black Earth and Bloodlands, and when people read those books and spoke to me they asked questions like, Professor Snyder, well, this is very awful—what would a better world look like?  

And I’ve been trying—so this is me trying to take that question seriously. So I am worried and that worry appears here but actually I’m quite hopeful because I think these problems about freedom, if we solve the conceptual philosophical problems we also end up beginning to solve some of the political problems which seem insoluble right now.  

So it’s actually—it’s quite a happy book, at least if you get to the end. (Laughter.) 

TETT: Right. And do you see anything on the political landscape right now, given that we are sliding towards an election which seems to be anything but happy, do you see anything that gives you, you know, reason for cheer that these messages are being adopted at the moment? 

SNYDER: Well, the word freedom is certainly back, I think, in— 

TETT: Back in fashion, big time. Yes. 

SNYDER: —in an interesting way, right, because it used to—so I think of freedom as being—and there’s a bit about this in the book. There’s a long riff about this in the book. As being conservative and liberal and socialist or social democratic if you prefer, because it’s conservative because it’s an old value and the case for freedom I’m making is fundamentally about values or virtues, which is the word actually used in the book.  

You have to believe that there are things that really are good, I think, to believe in freedom because if you don’t think anything is really good then the freedom to pursue things that are really good doesn’t make any sense. You’ve already given away the game by saying nothing is really good. So that’s a very conservative position.  

At the same time, if you want to create people who are capable of believing in values and juggling them you have to give them the right institutions. There has to be daycare and vacation and parental leave and health care and all these things if you want to create people like that. So that’s socialist or social democratic. But the commitment to freedom itself is liberal, right? That’s what liberal means.  

And so freedom manages to gather in—I think has to gather in all these positions. And by the way, I don’t think those positions work on their own. I think, you know, wealthy conservatives are all beneficiaries of miniature welfare states known as their families and, you know, it’s—so these values only work when they work together, in my view.  

So but what’s happened is that we’ve seen people—the right traditionally tried to hog the word freedom but is now dropping it as a general rule. If you look at the language of this election you don’t find the Republican presidential candidate speaking about freedom very much.  

Meanwhile, the center or the center left or however you want to describe the Harris campaign has picked up on it in a pretty big way and it’s interesting because they start with this traditional negative view. They start talking about—they start as freedom as freedom from but then they start to slip towards freedom as freedom to.  

And not to answer your question, that actually—that gives me some hope because freedom is freedom, too. Freedom from is important but freedom from is only important because we’re creatures of freedom, too. We’re creatures and have aspirations and desires and values and make them come true. 

TETT: Right. Well, that, again, is a point that entirely coincidentally Joe Stiglitz has made a lot recently, and then saying the way these—the way that freedom is being redefined and reembraced on the political stage is truly fascinating.  

I’d like to turn back to Ukraine because, as I say, we were in Ukraine together over the weekend. The first thing I would like to ask is, you know, you have often argued that one of the reasons why the West should care about Ukraine—and, of course, there are many voices on the political scene right now who are saying that we shouldn’t care, but one of the reasons why we should care is because it crystallizes so clearly the choices that face the West at the moment and both the dangers and in some ways the sources of inspiration.  

Can you explain why anyone in the room should care about Ukraine right now? 

SNYDER: That’s a really lovely question because I tend to think, and I’ll try to justify this, that— 

TETT: I feel that if you were marking my questions right now I’d get an A- so I feel quite good. (Laughter.) 

SNYDER: Yes. In Cambridge A- is lovely. You might not have known that—(laughter)—but that’s officially what they write, lovely.  

Thank you. Let the transcript record that a gentleman laughed at my joke. (Laughter.) 

So the—it’s a really important question because I think in American politics right now the people who say that you can’t do anything about Ukraine are also the people who say you can’t do anything about anything.  

So I think it’s like if someone says we can’t do anything about Ukraine that is usually a bit of a giveaway for actually we have no power in the world. Actually, government is sort of helpless and actually I’m kind of a doomer.  

That’s generally the way it goes. Or in foreign relations it’s we can’t do anything about Ukraine, we can’t do anything about Russia, and then they’ll say it tomorrow if they haven’t said it already, we can’t do anything about China, right?  

It’s the same school of thought, and there’s a reason for that, which is that the folks who say we can’t do anything about Ukraine recognize the point that Gillian is gesturing towards, namely, that Ukraine is actually central to all the things that we can do, right?  

So metaphysically the Ukrainians are showing that you can—that people can take risks for freedom, that people really can believe that it’s better to live in an imperfect, pluralistic democracy than to live under an occupation where your children will be deported and your leaders will be tortured and executed.  

That may seem like an easy choice but, frankly, a lot of people beyond Ukraine don’t seem to understand it as an easy choice, including a lot of people in the United States. So that there is a difference between having a basically free life and a basically unfree life.  

They’re reminding us of that and they’re showing us that people take risks for it, which in fact they are doing. People, you know, like me, people like you, people who had fairly normal lives until two and a half years ago now make up the entirety of the Ukrainian armed forces at this point. 

The second thing is that—so that’s the metaphysical part, the freedom part. The second thing is the whole legal order. So we are all children of a legal order which is created out of the post-imperial moment of the end of the Second World War in which we take for granted that there are states, those states have borders, those borders are inviolable.  

Now, that legal order is challenged by a Russian idea which says Russia has no borders, a dictator’s view of history matters more than international law, and if you take that view of international order there is no international order left, right? We would all have to abandon—I mean, this may not be a bad thing. We’d have to abandon this nice dining hall for the Iroquois or something, right?  

If you said that whoever has a claim to the past can change borders it’d be total anarchy. So international order is point two. 

Point three, which I alluded to earlier, is China. If we can’t win in Ukraine there’s no way we can win in China. And Americans can choose not to pay attention to Ukraine but the Chinese, God damn it, certainly are, intensively every day, and what they’re watching is to see whether we can win an easy one because if we can’t win an easy one there’s no way we’re going to win a hard one.  

And so what we do or don’t do is going to influence what the Chinese do or don’t do, and whether the Chinese are more aggressive in the Pacific is going to have, now going back to what people in Washington have been caring about for thirty years, that’s going to have a very profound influence on whether Americans have to go to war and whether there will be a major world conflict. 

And finally, nuclear war. So the Ukrainians are holding off a lot of things for us. You know, the greatest human capacity is to take things for granted, right, and so what we’re doing with Ukraine it’s not that we’re war fatigued. That’s absurd. What would we be fatigued about? We can’t be tired when you’re not doing anything, right?  

We’re not fatigued. What we are is bored or distracted or, I think, fundamentally taking things for granted. They’re holding off a lot of things for us and one of the things they’re holding off is nuclear proliferation because if a nuclear-powered state is allowed by way of nuclear bluffing to defeat a nonnuclear-powered state that means that a lot more countries will go nuclear both in order to have the power to bluff, as Russia is doing, and in order to have the power to resist bluffing.  

And this is not just a hypothesis. This planning is now underway in a number of medium powers in Europe and in Asia. So those are the kinds of reasons—even if you didn’t happen to care about Ukraine itself, which I hope you would, those are the kinds of reasons, to answer your question the way you put it, that I think anybody should care about this war. 

TETT: Right. I’ll also may add one other thing, which is when I was in Ukraine and when we were in Ukraine a few days ago I interviewed a number of the soldiers who’d just come back from the front lines and literally coming back from the trenches, and the soldiers in the army right now tend to either be older men—Dad’s army, a lot of older men—or young kids.  

And the kids who are the same age as my kids, one of them I spoke to who’d previously been working as a barista in Kyiv and a graphic design scholar had gone off to fight and then lost his legs, and the thing that comes through is that they are part of a generation that knows all about the importance of sacrificing for what you care about and fighting for the values you care about and want to uphold.  

And the thing that strikes me is that, you know, here in America the concept of sacrifice has gone dramatically out of fashion and the idea of fighting for and sacrificing for values is not something which is very common. 

In many ways your book is trying to put that back on the agenda and say there are things which are actually worth sacrificing for at the age of fifty or the age of twenty-five. 

SNYDER: And I completely agree with that, every word, and it reminds me of something I wanted to say earlier when you asked about Ukraine, which is—Ukrainian freedom, which is that it’s about the future.  

Another sign that folks are not really caring about freedom is that they’re politicians of nostalgia one way or the other. Putin is the master at this. At the moment, he has this weird nostalgia for a baptism.  

You may have heard about this. He has this weird nostalgia for a baptism that took place. It was a Viking. His name was Vladimir. He got baptized maybe a thousand years ago and, therefore, Ukraine and Belarus and Russia are all one nation today. You may have heard the story.  

Anyway— 

TETT: You may have actually seen it if you watched the Tucker Carlson interview, which was basically two-thirds about what happened a thousand years ago. 

SNYDER: Yeah. And it’s—I mean, if you’re a historian it’s actually physically painful to, like—(laughter)—engage with this. It is. It’s like, no, if you’re a historian, like, the main risk that you face in your career is at cocktail parties when people corner you with their views on Napoleon or whatever it might be, and Putin is like that, like, with the nuclear weapons and the horrible intentions. His historical ideas are just dreadful.  

But the point is that the authoritarians pretty much always have a cyclical view of history, which says that there was a time when we were great and we were innocent and then others came and took our innocence and our greatness away from us, and now it’s time to return to that point in the cycle where we are great and innocent, which we will do at the expense of those others.  

That’s one view. But then the people who care about freedom tend to talk about the future, and I think it’s one of the great signs of the crises that we’re all in that we are having so much trouble thinking of the politics in the future. 

The future, which was so lively in this country, I think, just a couple of decades ago is very hard to talk about now. And so Ukrainians, when they talk about freedom they’re always talking—almost always they’re talking about a future that the Russians got in the way of. 

And then I would paraphrase your point about sacrifice, which I take and agree with, but just rephrase it in a slightly less demanding way, which is risk. Like, at the very least being a free person involves the risk of feeling uncomfortable. It involves at least some risk, right?  

So the Ukrainian case is an extreme one but I would say that there’s a spectrum and at the other end of the spectrum free people in countries where there are fewer risks nevertheless are taking some risk of saying something somebody else isn’t going to like, for example, or of voting a different way than your parents or whatever it might be. But must be some component of risk or else there isn’t freedom.  

TETT: Well, thank you. Well, we’re now going to turn to ask the CFR members to join the conversation with their questions. We’re going to start off with a question in here and then we’ll go to some online as well.  

We have a question straightaway over here. I’m sure lots of you want to ask about not just the freedom and current politics in America but also the future of Ukraine and what’s actually happening. But—and as ever it would be courteous but not compulsory to identify yourself. Please keep your questions brief because I can see a lot of hands waving already, and also do remember the meeting is on the record.  

Q: Yes. Thank you. Robin Hessman, a documentary filmmaker, former producer of the Russian Sesame Street Ulitsa Sezam. 

 I have a question that if we go back to late February 2022 and let’s imagine all the world leaders came to you, Professor Snyder, and asked for your guidance that they would follow what would you have instructed them to do then, and given where we are now what would you say now to do in reaction to the invasion of Ukraine?  

SNYDER: Well, I can answer that not—I mean, I can answer that kind of non-counterfactually.  

So in February 2022 there was a broad consensus in this country—in fact, the consensus inside the Beltway was, sad to say, essentially the same as the consensus inside the Kremlin walls, which is that Ukraine will not last more than three days, and I was hearing that same story from both my Washington contacts and the Russians who at that point were still talking to me.  

That was it. That was what everybody thought, and there was a moment. It was the Monday before the full-scale invasion where I was in a classroom with multiple members of the last two presidential administrations who were having just this conversation and all of them, all six of them said Zelensky is going to flee. The Ukrainian army is going to collapse so, therefore, there really isn’t anything that we can do.  

And what I said at the time was Zelensky is not going to flee, the Ukraine army’s not going to collapse, and we should be thinking in terms of not just of some kind of partisan thing. We should be thinking in terms of a long-scale war and what that means.  

And so I think—and then about a month after that I started talking about victory, which I still think, that, like, if you’re in a war the way you have to think about it is victory and even if what you want to do is end it you have to think in the categories of victory and defeat and who’s going to win and who’s going to lose and try to generate a win for somebody and a loss for somebody.  

And that’s been a very hard argument but that is what in fact—that’s—to answer the second part of your question, that is, in fact, what I’ve been doing. In terms of right this moment, I mean, I think we have to be less predictable. We have to not let the other side invent new rules for war and then follow them.  

That’s complete—I mean, I’d be happy to be corrected but I just can’t think of any other historical instances where that one power allows another power to generate new rules of how war is fought, especially given that the other power is the aggressor and the committer of war crimes—that you would allow new wars—new rules to be created like that the war can only take place on the territory of the country that’s invaded.  

That’s complete innovation and somehow we’ve all taken it for granted and accept it as natural, which is a Russian psychological warfare victory.  

So we have to be faster, we have to be less predictable, and if we want the war to end by negotiations or anything else we have to be thinking in terms of how the Ukrainians can appear to be winning. 

TETT: Which the only thing that Putin is going to back down from is a show of strength and speed.  

Fred Hochberg? 

Q: Fred Hochberg.  

What does this say about China? You mentioned early on about a taste for civil society. There was discussion of agency. So does that make our view of China look more optimistic or even more bleak? 

SNYDER: So I am a confessed area expert and there are languages I know and languages I don’t know, and I don’t know Mandarin. I don’t claim to be following China. I think, in general, less bleak. But they’re—a big asterisk on that would be social media or the internet, which is something that we didn’t talk about, although we’re edging towards it.  

One of the things which is wrong with us in the third decade of the twenty-first century is that social media in our societies makes us more predictable, easier to classify, and when you’re easy to classify and easy to predict then you’re easy to rule.  

In China it’s all much more direct, right. People are followed and scored and tracked, not just nudged but forced, essentially, by the ratings in the various spaces. So that would be the big qualifier. But I think maybe a little bit—a little tiny bit less bleak. 

I wanted to mention something else, though—sorry, it’s not the last question—the three days thing. I want to connect it just to what I was saying about freedom. I think when I say that freedom is a real thing in the world or that values are real in the world it’s very easy to say, like, oh yes, he’s an idealist. Look, here’s what’s real. Like, a table is real.  

But values are, in fact, real. What people care about is as real as the tables from which they eat their lunches, and a basic reason for our misanalysis in February 2022 was that we had forgotten. 

We talk about freedom all the time but it just did not occur to very many Americans that somebody would in fact fight for freedom and that is a sign it’s not just, like, Ukrainians good. It’s wait a minute, like, what has gone wrong with us that in all—that in the scenarios that most people were talking about for this war nobody was saying, oh, actually, people might prefer to live in an imperfect, free country to living under Russian occupation.  

They might actually fight for that. And so in order to be a realist you actually have to take these ideal factors into account. In that way we weren’t being realists.  

TETT: Yeah. I’d say most people in a city like New York can’t imagine a world where a barista would pick up a gun and be willing to lose their legs to fight for the values they care about. I’m not sure how many baristas here in New York would actually do that.  

We’ve got a question right at the back—the woman back there.  

Q: Thank you very much, Professor Snyder. Barbara Demick. I’m an author and journalist. 

I was wondering how you explain and how you would address the pro-Russia sentiments among the right wing, both in the U.S. in the Republican Party and—I’ve been working recently in Germany among the members of the AfD, some of whom are saying we just don’t care about Ukraine—and I think I saw that quote in a recent New Yorker piece. Thank you. 

SNYDER: I think there are several connections. I’m going to address the most banal first so it doesn’t remain an elephant in the room. A lot of people are simply being paid. A lot of people are simply being paid. And I have the slight impression that European counterintelligence agencies and European investigative reporters might be doing a better job on this story than North American ones, but I’m just going to leave it at that. But we know from the European side that a lot of politicians and parties, including the one that you just named, are literally receiving direct payments from the Russian state. And that’s something not to be dismissed because it turns out that not only can people be bought, but the price from the point of view of the Russian state is astoundingly low. That’s one. 

Number two is I think there’s legitimate ideological overlap, or at least what people think is ideological overlap. Russia appears—although in fact Russia is a place with, you know, world-leading abortion, divorce, and pretty much anything else you want to name, right, people still manage to see it as a bastion of family values and so on and so forth, right? Much like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia is very good at projecting an image of itself which is 180 degrees opposite from reality. But nevertheless, I think there are people who sincerely believe that Russia is a Christian country, for example, which is just ludicrous. Nobody goes to church there, and the official church is basically an arm of the state, right? 

And then another part of it, though—it’s the third part—another part of it is—has to do with wealth and oligarchy, like, the people who say—like the Vance position. The people who say the state can’t do anything are the same people, like, we should just give up, right? They are the same people who also think we should just let the oligarchs do stuff, and Russia is the—Russia is where that goes, right? You have one oligarch. He’s in charge of the state. And so Russians tend to favor people who want a world like that where everybody else’s state is weak, and the oligarchs who want the state to be weak—and there are some in this country as well, right? 

You might have noticed that the oligarchs who call themselves libertarians and say they want a weak state. Weirdly, they also like Russian dictatorship which—whatever it is, it’s not a weak state, right? And so there’s also, I think, the oligarchical element to it. 

TETT: Right. We’ve got one more question there, and then there, and then let’s go there, and then the lady in red, and then gentleman there, and then let’s go online. (Laughter.) 

Q: Thanks so much for this, Professor Snyder. Tom Nagorski with the Cypher Brief. 

And we know that President Zelensky is bringing—or he has said he is bringing a peace plan to Washington and to others soon. And I wonder if your travels or conversations have given you any greater sense that there is a willingness in Ukraine or among Ukrainians of any stripes for negotiations for settlement greater than they had an appetite for that, I don’t know, months or a year ago, or at the start of the war. 

TETT: So are the Ukrainians ready to settle? 

SNYDER: I just—I think there’s a basic—I’m going to explain their logic as it has been explained to me. And by the way, one of things that I think has gone wrong in this war for us, going back to freedom being about being able to listen. I think you listen much better when you are physically in the same place. And it’s a very—and oddity of this war that there are so few Americans there, and therefore, there aren’t enough friendships—to use an old-fashioned work. We need to compare it to the U.S.-U.K. relationship during the second war or even the U.S.-French relationship in the first war. There are just a lot—there are far fewer personal connections, which means that there are—basic misunderstandings spring up all the time, which hinder cooperation. 

So in terms of negotiations, the answer is that they are very much in favor of negotiations, but not in the sense that war bad, negotiations good. They understand something which I guess I wish more of our nattering classes understood, which is that there is no way that Russia will negotiate in good faith unless Russia perceives itself to be losing. So they will negotiate, as they did in 2014, 2015, but it won’t be in good faith; they’ll just immediately breach the agreements that they reach—that’s what they’ve done with Ukraine. And it’s—I mean, it's not only what they’ve done; it’s consistent with everything they are saying. They say Ukraine is not a real state, Zelensky has no right to rule, Ukraine has no right to exist; like, they say this every day. 

And so there is really no—they will not negotiate in good faith or anything like good faith unless they have to. And so, therefore, the Ukrainians are in favor of peace, but the psychological element of their peace plan is we have to do things together so that the Russians will seriously want to negotiate. 

I think a problem in the U.S. is that we’re—and no one will say this quite out loud, you know, so I will—it’s a lot easier for us to push the Ukrainians around than it is for us to push the Russians around—or at least that’s what we think. I think that might not be true, but it’s what we think. And so when we’re lazy and not thinking things through to the end, we think, well, Ukrainians should just negotiate. Oh, well, since they should just negotiate, well, maybe we should start pushing them towards negotiation. But that means basically we lose and they lose, and Russia wins, and China knows Russia wins, and that’s not a good outcome; not just for the Ukrainians, but also for us. 

So yes, they are coming with a peace plan, but the psychology of the peace plan is Americans, you have to help us get Russia into a position where it will negotiate, and that’s a very important piece which can’t just be papered over with, you know, the word peace or the word negotiation. 

TETT: Yes, the one thing that always astonishes me is that there is so little awareness of what’s being said on Russian television, which I watch far too excessively. 

SNYDER: Yes. 

TETT: And they’re constantly saying on Russian mainstream television—imagine this as Morning Joe, you know—after we’ve taken Ukraine, we’ll then take Poland, and we’ll then take Finland, and we’ll then take Alaska. And they say that repeatedly, and they have graphics of nukes going straight to London, you know, every other night on Russian television. So the idea of negotiations being from a position of Russia accepting the need to negotiate right now is, you know, extraordinary.  

But perhaps we should go to the online questions—got one, OK—and then we’ll come back to the lady in red back there. 

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Lila Green. 

Q: Hello, thank you so much, Professor Snyder. This is such an incredibly inspiring conversation. 

I am an IAF fellow to Canada for ’24-’25, and I want to circle back to what you were talking about with the general consensus in Washington and amongst your students just prior and just following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

I’m just going to say it point blank: Why do you think everyone was so wrong, and what can we do about it going forward? Thank you. 

TETT: And why didn’t they listen to you more? 

Q: Yeah, absolutely. We’re certainly listening to you right now. (Laughs.) 

SNYDER: Well, I—since that time I’ve worked a lot on the jokes at the beginning to soften up the crowd. (Laughter.) See, see. 

So there are a lot of things there, but I’m going to—since you’ve asked it very bluntly I’m going to answer it very bluntly, and it goes to what I was saying to—(in turn ?) before. Number one, we just didn’t take freedom seriously ourselves. We thought the only thing that mattered was power. You can chart out power by counting the number of Russian tanks, the number of Ukrainian tanks. That’s just the world works, might makes right, they’re going to—the biggest guy always wins. That’s it. 

And that’s of course—I mean, historically it ain’t true. The bigger country usually loses wars, the bigger—as every American should know. (Laughter.) The bigger country usually loses wars. Since 1945, the post—the imperial power—not always—but usually loses against the post-imperial power. 

TETT: I think since 1776. (Laughter.) 

SNYDER: Well, that’s kind of you to say. (Laughter.) 

TETT: I can say that in my British accent. (Laughs.) 

SNYDER: That’s kind of you to mention. 

And so, in fact, if you actually look at reality reality as opposed to—capital R—Realism Reality—if you look at reality reality, you would expect Ukraine to win, in fact. You wouldn’t expect the imperial power to win necessarily. So that was part of it; that it just didn’t occur to us that people might act for reasons of their own. And that’s not only an arrogant American attitude, it’s a troubling one, because if we don’t think that people act on the basis of freedom, who is going to? And what is that going to do for our foreign policy if our foreign policy is to assume that might makes right and the strongest is always going to win? And that’s what I was trying to say at the beginning. Then you can’t have any kind of foreign policy really because you are just kind of preemptively conceding everything all of the time. 

And then the second thing which is related and almost equally important—it has to do with imperialism actually—is who are real countries and who are not real countries. So as of February 2022, most folks in this bigger discussion thought Russia was a real—I’m sorry, but it was a blunt question, so, you know, and I just signed this contract so they can’t get rid of me right away. (Laughter.) Russia—who knows? I don’t know what it said; I didn’t read it. (Laughter.)  

But most folks in this American policy conversation thought Russia is a real country; Ukraine is not a real country. And they wouldn’t have said it in those terms, but it would have been more like Russia has a great literary culture, or Russia is the real inheritor of the Soviet Union, and it goes back to very primal things like in college did you read Russian literature, and many people did. Did you have some taste of Russian history, which is always taught from a Russian imperial view, which is actually not so different from Putin’s. 

So it goes back to—I think it goes back to a basic sense of countries being real countries and not real countries, which again is something that one has to be really careful about, I think. So I think that’s the other basic way that we went wrong. 

And then there are—and then, third, but probably less important, all the specialists on the Russian military were specialists on the Russian military and not specialists on Ukrainian military, and they were kind of inside Russian military doctrine, and nobody thought—and this probably summarizes points one, two and three—nobody thought the Ukrainians were prepared, which they were. They did have a plan for a Russian attack which they executed, and of course, part of their plan—as it has to be—was not to tell us what their plan was because we leak everything immediately. 

TETT: Absolutely. 

Right. We’re almost out of time, but let’s take two questions. We’ve got the lady in red, and the question for the forward gentleman. 

Q: Thank you. I’m Alexandra Starr with International Crisis Group. 

To piggyback off of the question about negotiations, it seems like there’s a lot of pressure on Ukraine to cede territory that’s currently under Russian control, or a kind of peace process, or cease-fire. I’ve heard a dissenting view to that, that that’s shortsighted and that territory isn’t truly what Putin is after, and putting pressure on Ukraine to cut that kind of deal is counterproductive. So I was interested in getting your perspective. 

SNYDER: Yeah, I mean, I think—first, coming, I guess—when you are in Ukraine—and maybe Gillian will add to this—but when you are in Ukraine, you both have a much deeper sense of how people are suffering in this war, but also a deeper sense of their knowledge of why they are doing it. And this time I was close to the front line near Kharkiv, and, you know, the soldiers who were fighting, they were from what had started as an all-volunteer battalion, and they were all people from civilian life. So they were like—their job descriptions were not so terribly different from your job descriptions, two-and-a-half years ago, but they’ve all been infantrymen since that time, and like their view is very realistic about us, it’s very realistic about the war. But the thing that they understand is that there is something much—there is something worse than fighting a war with Russia, and that’s losing a war to Russia—not reputationally, but because the territory that Russia controls, people will be treated worse in that than they will be treated when they are in a free country fighting, right? And that’s the thing—it goes back to freedom, right, that they really think it’s better to risk—to take risk and to lose life so that people might actually live a life which has dignity. They really think that. So many of them, over and over again, say something like that—probably not in such elevated language, right, but they really think that.  

I think that it’s—I think there’s a kind—I mean, I worry that there is a sort of American imperial proclivity to start saying let’s push on the weaker side, you know? I really worry about that, and I think it’s inherently counterproductive. I think any—if you actually want negotiations that will end this war, you have to side with the smaller country and not the bigger one. And I think it’s self-delusion to say that pressuring Ukraine is not siding with Russia because it is. And if you side with Russia, then you are making normal—you are normalizing this kind of war. And if the war ends now, you know, with America—you know, which could happen—with America pressuring Ukraine into peace, then the war won’t end. This war will continue—that’s my basic theme—more wars are likely. 

Or to put it in a positive way, I mean, I think the Ukrainians have given us a chance to reaffirm a system. That’s how I honestly see it. I mean, I think we tend to start—whether we’re journalists or policymakers—from the proposition that the Ukrainians are causing this trouble because they’re making us have these debates in Congress, or they’re making us learn about a country we didn’t really know much about, right, that somehow the Ukrainians are the problem. 

But they’re not; like, they’re the solution; like they’re doing work for us that we can’t do; like they’re deterring China in a way that we can’t deter China because any way we deter China can be read as a provocation. The Ukrainians defending their own country deters China, but it’s not a provocation. 

The same goes with nuclear weapons. They are doing work that we can’t do directly but is really in our interest. And so I think that a lot this about like let’s somehow bring this to an end comes from the daily irritation that Americans feel, that this is a problem, and we just should kind of solve the problem as it goes to it’s a tough world out there. A lot of this work somebody else would be doing if the Ukrainians weren’t doing it for us. 

TETT: I can see lots of other hands being raised, but I’m really sorry. We are up against time unfortunately. 

I’m sure that Professor Snyder will be staying around and can chat to you a bit more—if you can. Are you signing books? 

SNYDER: There are books. (Laughter.) 

TETT: There are books. (Laughs.) OK. There are books, and he will be with the books, but you can grab him then. 

But I just want to say, for me, I take away sort of three key points from this conversation. Firstly, that freedom is a word that we all love to toss around, but very few of us actually think about what it actually means. And this year—partly because of the election—is a moment for us to really reflect on what we mean by the word freedom and how we fight for it. 

Secondly, as you’ve heard, one of many reasons why Ukraine is important is because it really does crystalize some of the values that America was founded on around agency, and freedom, and a belief in community and liberty. And that, in many ways, should make us all reflect on what we’re fighting for or not fighting for, and complacent about in America. 

And thirdly, as a former anthropologist who believed quite strongly that often the best way to understand ourselves is look at other cultures and then look back at ourselves. I do think that Professor Snyder’s perspective, by being soaked in Ukrainian history at this pivotal moment in time is a very good way for us also to frame where America is going, along with the future of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine. 

So thank you very much indeed. He will be out there signing books. Do go and buy a book. 

And very best of luck in getting this message out, and I look forward to your next ten million YouTube hits about freedom. Thank you. (Applause.) 

(END) 

This is an uncorrected transcript.