Artificial statehood and the Soviet collapse
In a June 2014 episode on partitioning Iraq, Bob Zadek grouped the old USSR among countries he described as formed unnaturally: much of Africa, much of the Middle East, and the Soviet Union, put together by European diplomats—British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Americans—who sat around a conference room table with a map of the world and drew lines creating countries. Bob framed the distinction as one between countries created by the natural flow of events, where people with something cultural or linguistic in common end up forming a border, and countries formed unnaturally rather than naturally. He added that Russia was not a case of this. Because such countries were formed unnaturally, Bob said, they are much less stable, and history has shown they fall apart: the USSR fell apart because there wasn’t any commonality amongst all the people, Yugoslavia fell apart before that, the area of Bosnia in Central Europe fell apart, and Africa falls apart. He then asked whether Iraq was the same kind of country United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Guest Ivan Eland agreed and supplied the historical mechanism for the region: after World War I the Ottoman Empire was on the losing side alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary, and both empires collapsed. Despite Woodrow Wilson’s framing of the war as one to spread democracy and self-determination, Eland said, the opposite happened and the Allies grabbed more territory in the Middle East. The British wanted oil in Iraq, so they glued three provinces of the Ottoman Empire together—provinces that, in Eland’s account, had little relationship to each other before, though each had a relationship with the central Ottoman government. Lebanon and Syria were artificial in the same manner under a different colonial power, drawn by the British and the French. Eland’s 2009 book Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq recommended negotiating with Sunnis, Kurds, and Shias for a partitioning in which each group would control an autonomous area under a weak central government. The problem he identified was a strong central government controlled by one group that oppresses the others: Sunni rulers from the British-established monarchy through Saddam Hussein, then a Shia ruler, Maliki, oppressing Sunnis and Kurds. Attempts to beef up central governments in both Afghanistan and Iraq, he argued, produce exactly that outcome.
The USSR thus functions in the episode as a precedent in a general theory of artificially assembled states, alongside Yugoslavia and Africa, rather than as a subject examined on its own terms. The excerpt states the collapse occurred because there wasn’t any commonality amongst all the people; it does not date the collapse or describe its mechanics.
NATO’s purpose and Russia’s inherited perception
A March 2022 episode with Justin Logan turned on the alliance created to counter the USSR. Bob Zadek put the framing directly: from a USSR initially, and now Russia which inherited it, isn’t NATO the enemy—NATO was created to counter, to oppose the USSR and now Russia, and it is both growing in size and growing politically so that it is now on Russia’s doorstep. Bob said Russia is not crazy in feeling a bit insecure, asking whether that was too simplistic Justin Logan on Ukraine (2022).
Logan said the framing was absolutely accurate and not only his view. He cited Bob Gates, the former Secretary of Defense and Director of Central Intelligence, who wrote in a 2014 book that the 2008 effort to get Ukraine and Georgia into NATO was a step too far and an affront any Russian leader, putting aside Vladimir Putin, would view as dangerous to Russia; and Bill Burns, very high up in the American foreign policy establishment, who cabled the same in 2008. Logan described this as a widely circulated belief in the upper echelons of American foreign policy for decades.
On the institutional question, Logan said NATO as an organization had an interest in expanding after the Cold War so that it could tell a story about why it existed, citing the saying that NATO either needs to go out of area or out of business—if it is a military alliance for dealing with the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, then what is NATO about. He characterized NATO as a net transfer payment from US taxpayers to European taxpayers, noting France as an original member that gets to have a lower military budget because of the American contribution to European security. Once the Soviet adversary was gone, he said, the original members looked pretty darn secure, and in the ’90s and 2000s the organization felt it had to come up with a new project. The alliance grew from 12 founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty to 30, a growth Logan said is viewed as a danger in Moscow; the United States, in his account, has been driving the bus on that expansion for decades.
Logan drew a distinction between NATO and the European Union: the most important difference is that the United States is in one and not in the other, and NATO is a security organization while the EU is not. He said NATO’s mission as a military alliance could be met by the EU, and that efforts to develop a European collective security capability—a “third force,” going back to the 1950s and particularly in the 1990s—were stifled by the United States, which wanted to remain the central actor in Europe and to tell countries what to do.
Economic statecraft and the Cold War’s end
A March 2022 episode with Jonathan Bydlak on Russian sanctions included an exchange in which Bob Zadek raised the Cold War as evidence for economic weapons. Bob said that when the Cold War was won, it was won economically: when the USSR packed it in and said it was done, and was then split up to some degree, that was driven by economics—the USSR was bankrupt, like an international Chapter 11, or maybe a Chapter 7, a liquidation. He asked whether the Cold War shows that wars can be won economically, with perhaps short-term detriment to the rest of the world but long-term benefit The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022).
Bydlak said the assessment was accurate and noted that predictions of many academics and experts in Eastern Europe in the mid-’80s did not anticipate anything near a Soviet collapse; many believed the Soviet Union was stronger than the United States at that time. He added a qualification: not all economic measures are the same. The West did not win the Cold War because of its adversarial economic relationship with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, he argued—no more than the Cuban embargo has won in Cuba over the same period. The way the Cold War was won economically was by out-producing and out-innovating the command and control economies of the East: producing too much wealth and too much of what citizens needed, with Boris Yeltsin’s famous visit to American supermarkets as an example, and unleashing the creative potential of an educated workforce that the East could not ultimately compete with.
The same episode’s discussion of sanctions centered on whether the efficacy of SWIFT and the processing of international financial transactions would remain as robust, and on possible factionalization and decentralization of the international financial order; higher energy prices flowing through to other goods and services; and the estimate that around a quarter of Finnish companies do significant business with Russians, given Finland’s border with Russia. Bob closed by calling sanctions an economic weapon and the weapon of choice for the West, said sanctions were Biden being timid but basically getting it right, and ended with “shaken but not broken.”
Across episodes: no development
The three episodes touch the USSR from different angles—Ivan Eland on artificial statehood and the Soviet collapse as precedent United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014), Justin Logan on NATO’s purpose as an alliance built against the USSR and Russia’s inherited perception of it Justin Logan on Ukraine (2022), and Jonathan Bydlak on how the Cold War was won economically The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022)—rather than advancing a single argument treated earlier and later, and the excerpts show no development between the treatments.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the internal structure of the USSR, its founding, its constituent republics, or the sequence by which it dissolved. They give no dates for the Soviet collapse, no account of the Cold War’s major crises beyond Bob Zadek’s reference to Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the UN, and no discussion of Soviet policy beyond its command economy and its role as the adversary NATO was created to oppose. Nothing in the excerpts addresses the pre-1991 period in detail; the USSR appears only as the predecessor Russia inherited from and as a case in arguments about borders, alliances, and economic competition.