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Foreign.
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Welcome back, everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute, and the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. President Trump, who so far promoted a hands off approach to artificial intelligence and has largely given Silicon Valley free reign to roll out the technology, is now considering the introduction of government oversight over new AI models. The administration is discussing an executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures. Among the potential plans is a formal government review process for new AI models before they are released. As public concerns mount about the threat that the technology poses to jobs, energy prices, education, privacy, and mental health, Democrats and Republicans have found common ground on the topic, while Trump has increasingly found himself isolated on the issue. According to the New York Times. Walter, is this news or faux News?
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I think what it is is Trump executing a necessary retreat. I think if you believe, and I think probably he and most of the people around him still do believe, that what the US Needs is the fastest possible rollout of AI. I think you don't have to be a super genius to see that the public sense that nobody is paying attention to what's safe and what isn't is ultimately going to generate a firestorm. And you get sort of Elizabeth Warren writing the legislation, you know, that you have to ask mother, may I? Before every prompt that you give or whatever. And so this strikes me as a way to try to get some less aggressive regulation in there. And meanwhile, while you have the process going, you know, oh, well, we have a process. Every time anybody asks a question, well, we have a process. So I think it's a pretty smart move. We'll have to see whether it leads to anything substantive or not.
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I know we're at the very earliest stage of this whole revolution, but when you think about the various shocks of the industrial revolution and other, you know, big technological advancements, how do you think we're dealing with this one so far? I mean, you know, on the one hand you've got people protesting outside data centers and threatening Sam Altman's life and, you know, of various other things. And on the other hand, you know, ChatGPT has been rolled out. It's billions of people have access to it and use it. It's seems like people have learned something about this technology and how to use it pretty quickly.
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Yeah, I would say faster is the Main difference between this and other forms of industrial progress or change. But, you know, when I think about disruptive technologies, the one that strikes me as the one that we spend the least time thinking about, but which is absolutely overwhelming in its impact is the car. You know, when you think about, I mean, we still have, I don't know, 30,000 people a year killed in car accidents. And it's been much higher than that in the past. I mean, we've lost more people in car deaths than in war in the history of this country. The enormous expense, the pollution connected with cars, the sort of social transformation. As, you know, families are. Family dynamics are changed, sexual mores changed, shapes of our cities has changed all of this. And, you know, there's been a sort of constant effort to deal with the car through this all. And, you know, everything from speed limits to driver's licenses to drunk driving tests to, you know, all kinds of things happening. And yet we still, you know, we like the car enough that we put up with. What if you'd asked a past generation the abstract, would you trade all of this for the mobility? They might well say no. But then they'd never, like, been on a road trip and they had no idea how much fun they are. So I think the fact that a lot of people are getting into AI now and are using it now will probably have a protective impact, but we'll have to see.
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All right, our second story. Narendra Modi's party has won a resounding election victory in West Bengal, a state which had been a rare opposition stronghold, expanding his unrivaled consolidation of power across the country. It is the first time that the Indian Prime Minister's BJP has won assembly elections in West Bengal, a large and politically significant state in eastern India. Over the past 15 years, the state had been ruled by Trinamul Congress, a key opposition party under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister. Banerjee had been one of the most outspoken critics of Modi and his Hindutva agenda over his 12 years in power. But in a result that will have significant implications for India's political landscape and deal another demoralizing blow to the already weakened opposition, the BJP looks set to win more than 205 out of 294 seats in Bengal State Assembly, a landmark majority. Walter, is this news or faux news?
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Well, it's news. It. It does change the balance of power in India. I'd say it's not quite historical news. For one thing, south India remains by and large not, you know, it's not a buyer of the BJP at this point. I mean, there are occasional victories here and there, but on the whole, in the current elections in the southern states, the BJP did not get a lot of success. The BJP remains a North Indian phenomenon. We should also look at north and central. We should also look at the way that before the election, a voting commission struck something like 10% of the names of eligible voters off the electoral rolls. And, you know, on the grounds that they couldn't prove that they were Indian citizens, they might be migrants from Bangladesh or what have you. And at least from what you've been reading in the press, probably more anti BJP names were struck off the rolls than pro bjp. Now, how much that has to do with anything, I can't say that I've done a forensic analysis of the Bengal legislative elections to be able to tell you, but I think we ought to bear stuff like this in mind. But the thing that could make this really big is that under the Marxists who ruled it for quite a while, and then under the past chief minister, Calcutta has been, or Calcutta, as we now say, has been a great story of loss, missed opportunity in Indian history. This was one of the great metropolises of India in the British era. And there's really no reason from geographical situations on that it couldn't be again and couldn't be kind of a center for the trade of that very rich area, potentially rich area that includes Bangladesh and Myanmar. But it just hasn't taken off. If the new BJP government can bring about the kind of local reforms that would promote a flourishing of growth and an alliance with the national government, get some better infrastructure and so on, and Kolkata actually begins to fulfill its potential. That would be a real step forward for West Bengal and for India.
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All right, final story of the week. According to a report from a European intelligence agency, the Kremlin is imposing draconian security measures amid fear of a plot or coup attempt against Vladimir Putin by senior members of the Slovaki, or the Russian security elite. According to the same intelligence report, Sergei Shoigu, Russia's minister of defense until 2024 and a man who retains significant influence within the Russian military elite, is seen as a potentially destabilizing actor and is associated with the risk of a coup attempt. The report is full of details about the atmosphere of Stalinist paranoia in Moscow, including widespread Internet blackouts ordered not by the FSB, as many had assumed, but but by the fso, the de facto praetorian Guard responsible for protecting Putin. Other security measures have included banning staffers who work near Putin from carrying devices that connect to the Internet and installing surveillance systems in the homes of cooks, photographers and bodyguards. In particular, Putin is said to fear, quote, the use of drones for an assassination attempt by members of the Russian political elite. Walter, is this news or photos?
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Well, I think it's news from Mr. Shroyger's perspective. My advice to him is to stay away from open windows. This is not a good time for him to go up to 12th story hotel rooms and stand near the window. I do think that we are. You keep hearing that phrase late capitalism, which is always uttered, been uttered since I was a kid and so far it doesn't seem to have materialized. But we are probably in late Putinism that he is aging and a lot of the sort of ideas that he wrote into town on are coming toward a sell by date. Some of the political associations behind him are less, less effective, less innovative and forward looking than they used to be. And in a state like contemporary Russia where people are basically bound together by ambition, there's always the problem of growth. How do you distribute? All right, you've already paid off the older guys. Well, what about the young, hungry ones that are coming up? What about, are you giving them. And then are you giving it to them at the expense of the current barons? And, you know, if you pay somebody off, will they be using those resources to plot and scheme against you or will they be loyally supporting you in return for your beneficence? These are the kinds of governing questions that in a state like Putin's Russia, you have to be thinking about all the time. I'm maybe not surprised that the story also mentioned that President Putin is spending more time in underground bunkers. That's probably also a good idea from his point of view, but it does. There's a kind of a darkness taking hold in Moscow now, and we'll have to see how far it goes.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. But let's talk more about Putin in the big conversation. You wrote this week, Walter, about Putin, and it was interesting to kind of take his quarter century in power as a whole. Can you take us through that first decade and a half or so of Putin's rule up through about 2014, when it did seem like he was, you know, maybe the greatest or the only real strategist in Europe and much of Eurasia, just so much smarter and more deaf than any American president or European head of state. And then what he's done to Russian power and Russia's position in the world in the second half of his tenure.
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I actually think we have to start with what a lot of foreigners don't pay enough attention to, which is Putin's rise within Russia. You know, he, he came into power at a time when the sort of in the late Yeltsin era, when Russia, the Soviet Union had fallen apart at the start of the 1990s. It was looking by the end of the 1990s as if the Russian Federation could fall apart. Weak government corruption, you know, dysfunctional institutions that just enormous crushing losses that so many people in Russia sustained in the transition from the communist to the post communist era. And Putin appears on the scene and begins to rebuild Russia almost from the ruins. He gets the economy going again. He manages to sort of, he sides with some oligarchs against the other oligarchs and then, then he turns on the oligarchs who had supported him and ultimately kind of rebuilds a very traditional form of Russian state. An all powerful czar at the center of things who sort of like the powerful Byzantine emperor or Russian czar, rules through this kind of quasi feudal approach, but holds the reins so firmly in his hands that, that he's able to get things done. And he did get things done then, having kind of rejuvenated Russia. And obviously this is at the cost of a lot of loss of political freedom and so on, because that was never on his agenda. And certainly corruption and favors for the ones you like and then extralegal, in some cases, punishments for those who don't. He took that greater force and began to reinsert Russia into European politics and ultimately world politics in a new way. And we often forget that the Russian power elite from Soviet and post Soviet times doesn't actually have a very flattering view of, of the morality and the wisdom of their counterparts in the West. They did not interpret the end of the Cold War as oh gosh, Reagan was just so darn virtuous. And the Americans who supported him are just so great at what they do that we must not only try to capitulate, we must also seek to imitate them because they know the path forward. They there wasn't a single Fukuyamen in the top echelons of Russia. They were all Huntingtonians. But what this enabled them to do is to look without sentimentality at Western moral posturing and so on. And so they looked and they saw that after 1990, all the political leaders in the west want to vaunt themselves as these tremendous moral crusaders. We would have never done what Neville Chamberlain did. We are just, you know, we're smart, we're honest, you know, we're principled. In fact, they were kind of wishy washy, untested, and in many ways a deeply insecure group of people who thought that life was all about formulas and that if you, if you did, you know, studied your homework and stuff, then life was an exam and you were sure to get an A on the exam. And so Putin was able to disrupt them. At first he was very cautious. He went into Georgia in 2008 when President Bush was at sort of very low in popularity after the financial crisis had really hit. You know, when the United States just didn't want to deal with Georgia. You know, we didn't really want to make a strong response. I still think if we had established bases in Ukraine back around then as a response to what Putin was doing in Georgia, a lot of things that happened later wouldn't have happened. But that's not where we were and certainly not where the Europeans were. And in 2014, again, he could see the gap between our self image and the self reality. So when Obama says, I'm not going to allow chemical weapons in Syria, Putin says, maybe, and actually ends up, you know, Obama's red line kind of vanishes in a puff of smoke. And Putin emerged as the preeminent foreign power along with Iran, his buddy Iran in Syria, he's able to get into Libya following the Gaddafi fiasco. Even during the war, he's been able to get into North Africa. So he understands that Western leaders had an inflated sense of their own power and importance and virtue and was able to exploit the gap between a kind of puffed up Western self interest, self vision and the actual political consensus in the West. And until the, you know, in a way, like Hitler in the. Again, I'm not trying to say that Putin is another Hitler, you know, please, let's not go there, but just in this way, like Hitler in the 30s who understood that while the west was much more powerful than he was, it was much less resolute and focused so that he could remilitarize the Rhineland, he could annex Austria, he could take the Sudetenland, and the west would not stand. He could rearm all of these things, and it worked brilliantly for Hitler until it didn't. And he went to war in Poland and the war came. And in some ways, 2022 may have been Putin's 1939. That is the time when maybe inflated by hubris and his past successes, he went for something that was bigger than, you know, that he just couldn't get. We'll see. I mean, he still, I'm sure, has hopes, but he has not been able to conquer Ukraine. He misunderstood the nature of, of what he was facing in Ukraine.
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One final question. I lived in Russia in 2009-10, which was a much more optimistic time. And I made a lot of great friends who I stayed in touch with for a long time. And just since then, and especially since 2022, it's just extremely depressing how many of them have either left the country permanently or who were conscripted into the army or who, through information blackouts and various types of domestic propaganda, I think, you know, kind of went a little crazy in terms of their understanding of reality or information. And it made it just very hard for us to stay in touch. And, you know, I know that's anecdotal, but I wonder what you think are kind of the long term consequences for Russia's, like, human capital of, of, of, of, you know, the 25 years of Putin's rule.
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Well, they won't be as bad as the 25 years of Stalin's rule. You know, really, when we look at countries like Russia and Ukraine, we have to understand that they have already suffered worse things than we could imagine. We Americans really are like the Princess and the pea, you know, that I can't sleep if there's a pea on a mattress, seven mattresses below us. It's like, oh my God, you know, it's like my house in the suburbs is going to be farther from the center city than my parents. All life is hopeless. I am ruined. Somebody misgendered me. The assault to my deepest, deepest self image is how can a person live? Okay, something like 25% of the population of Ukraine was killed in World War II, and that's after Stalin had killed millions of in the collectivization process. What the Russians have been through World War I, Civil War, collectivization, World War II. So we're just not in a very good position to understand how in America, fortunately, we don't really understand what happens in societies that go through these kinds of experiences. The loss of social trust, what happens to family bonds, to bonds of friendship, to self images, understandings of authority. But I think what we can say is that Putin has delayed Russia's reckoning with and recovering from its history in the 20th century.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Listener Devin writes in to ask, simply quote South Carolina or North Carolina,
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that in my family is One of the most difficult questions you can ask, probably only tougher one would be Chapel Hill, you know, North Carolina or Duke. But you know, if it comes to barbecue sauce, I'm going with North Carolina. I like that vinegar based sauce that really works better. I remember my. I had an aunt and an uncle, both born in South Carolina, one who stayed there, the other had moved to North Carolina. And at one point at some family event, Uncle Billy says to Aunt Laura, you know, he says, North Carolina is just much more sophisticated than South Carolina. This really set her off. And she was driving down from North Carolina, down to South Carolina the next day. Every time she would see like this is the old days when both states were pretty poor, she'd see like an outhouse, unpainted outhouse, behind an unpainted shack and going down the highway. Look at that. We don't have anything that sophisticated in South Carolina. That outhouse, that is so much better. Look at those chickens on the front porch. We have nothing like that in South Carolina. We just can't aspire to compete. So the North Carolina sort of folk saying is that North Carolina is a valley of humiliation between two mountains of pride. As said Virginia and South Carolina. And they're very different states, very close together. But South Carolina was the most enthusiastic seceder in 1860. And North Carolina really kind of only went in after it was entirely surrounded by the Confederacy and didn't have a lot of options. And North Carolina's historically, I think, had a stronger progressive tradition than South Carolina. But they're both great states. And while it is true that my birthplace, Columbia, South Carolina, it was burned toward the end of the Civil War as Sherman occupied it. It mysteriously burned. And they say that was the one piece of news in the whole Civil War that both north and south rejoiced to hear that by then, you know, everybody was so sick of the war and secession that to hear that South Carolina was finally getting what it deserved. This really brought a lot of joy and a lot of hearts. But you know what? I still do love it.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller. Thanks to Alex Vatanov at Hudson and my co host Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.