Eliot Cohen on Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas conflict, Trump — and Shakespeare

In this episode, Michael Fullilove speaks with leading strategist and historian Eliot Cohen. They discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine, the intelligence failures that led to the 7 October attacks on Israel, the prospect of Trump returning to the White House, and why people who care about international politics should read Shakespeare.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Director's Chair, a Lowy Institute podcast. My
name is Michael Fullilove, and I'm the executive director of
the Lowy Institute. On the director's chair, I sit down
with political leaders, policy makers and commentators in order to
understand what's happening in the world. And there is certainly
a lot to talk about in the world today. We
are nearly two years into Russia's brutal and illegal invasion

(00:24):
of Ukraine, and we're also nearly two years into Ukraine's
magnificent resistance. Under President Biden's leadership, the United States has
returned to the international community. But the orange spectre of
Donald Trump's return to the white House is playing on
all our minds. And, of course, on the 7th of October,
the terrorist organisation Hamas attacked Israel, leading to the deaths

(00:46):
of more than 1200 Israelis. Israel responded by declaring it
would destroy Hamas, and the conflict that has followed has
completely roiled the global strategic situation. To talk about these
important issues and a life spent dealing with them, I'm
joined today on the director's chair by the leading American
strategic thinker, Professor Elliot Cohen.

S2 (01:08):
Well, I think it's an intelligence failure, particularly on the
part of the Israelis. The answer is we won't fully
know probably until the Israelis do what they usually do,
establish a blue ribbon state commission, which will investigate it very,
very thoroughly. Heads will roll, beginning probably with the Prime Minister.

S1 (01:26):
Elliott is a very well known scholar, a former dean
of science at Johns Hopkins, but he's also been a policymaker,
serving in a number of roles, including as counsellor in
the second term of the presidency of George W Bush.
He's currently the Robert E Osgoode Professor at Size, as
well as the Ali Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIs

(01:46):
in Washington, DC. Elliot writes widely on military affairs, American
foreign policy, and leadership. He's a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
His latest book, The Hollow Crown Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise,
rule and Fall, was published in October, and Elliott is
in Australia as the Lowy Institute's 2023 Distinguished Fellow for

(02:09):
International Security. Elliot Cohen, welcome to the director's chair.

S2 (02:13):
Michael, it's great to be with you.

S1 (02:15):
All right, Elliott, let's start at the beginning of your life.
You're born in the suburbs of Massachusetts. Tell us a
bit about your folks, about your family and your upbringing,
your influences as you grow up.

S2 (02:26):
So I was born in Newton, Massachusetts, which is a
it's a suburb of Boston. My family was, I would say,
had originally been a fairly secular Jewish family. My grandparents
were all immigrants from Eastern Europe. My father was a
psychiatrist who began to get interested in religion first, I
think to study it and then really connecting with his

(02:46):
own religious roots. So he kind of led the family into,
I would say, a more religiously observant world. I went
to a remarkable private school, the Maimonides School, which was
founded by one of the great Modern Orthodox rabbis, Rabbi
Joseph Soloveitchik, which stressed a top notch secular curriculum as

(03:08):
well as a top notch Judaic curriculum. And I give
my vanity school a lot of credit. My mother was
quite a remarkable person. She was one of only nine
women who matriculated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
four in her class who graduated. She was an architect,
but then she ended up committing most of her life
to raising four rather unruly sons. And, you know, from

(03:29):
there on I went. I went to Harvard. I became
fascinated by military history, by national security, by American foreign policy,
had a wonderful advisor, Samuel Huntington, probably the greatest political
scientist of his generation, and then went on to the
Naval War College and occasionally serving in the United States government.

S1 (03:51):
Well, let me come back to that interesting phenomenon in
US politics, where scholars and business figures and others can
bounce between government service and their and their other lives.
As you mentioned, you've served in government a number of times.
I guess at the most senior level, when you were
counselor to Condoleezza Rice, when she was secretary of state

(04:11):
in the second term of the George W Bush administration.
Tell us what that was like, and tell us what
you think are the pros and cons of this system
that sometimes brings quite brilliant but inexperienced people in a way,
into very senior positions in government. Is it a net
positive or a net negative?

S2 (04:30):
Well, it's certainly quite different from how other governments operate.
I think one thing to remember about it is that
it's very rare that people come in at senior levels,
have no government experience whatsoever. So when I became counselor
of the State Department, for example, I had already worked
in the Defense Department on the Defense Department policy planning staff.
I had run a major study for the Air Force
of the first Gulf War. I'd been on advisory panels

(04:52):
in the intelligence community and in the Department of Defense.
So at the very top, usually what you're getting, say,
with people like Kurt. Who's the deputy national security adviser,
who devised Aukus, among other things. So he's a he's
well-known figure here, somebody who'd been in and out repeatedly.
And I think what that means is that you have
people who have serious experience, but not full time experience.

(05:15):
The good news in all this is you get a
lot of fresh thinking, and you get people who are
generally aligned with whatever the current administration wants. So it's
unlike other systems where the the civil service is can
have its own views. Yeah. The so-called deep state, on
the other hand, we do have literally thousands of officials

(05:38):
who change out when whenever there's a new administration. So
you can have some chaos, particularly initially. And some of
the people you get are not particularly competent or effective.
I will say I came in at the end of
the Bush administration is counselor for the last few years.
And I have to say, I thought at that point
the system worked wonderfully well because the both the career

(05:59):
people and people like myself who had come in, had
a similar orientation to public service, worked extremely well together.
You didn't really see fundamental disagreements among us. And I
think there was a certain freshness that on the whole
was beneficial. But it's it's a very unusual system. I
don't know any other country in the world that has the.

S1 (06:18):
Most important foreign policy decision that George W Bush made
as president was to take the United States and its allies,
including Australia, into Iraq, in the aftermath of nine over 11.
Let me ask you about that decision, because I know
you were in favor of that decision. You worked a
lot on Iraq and Afghanistan when you served in the administration.
To put my cards on the table. I opposed the

(06:40):
invasion of Iraq at the time because I thought it
was too risky and likely to lead to negative, unintended consequences.
When I look back on it 20 years ago, it
feels to me like that decision remains a stick in
the spokes of the West, in not only in the
sense of the long term implications of that particular intervention,
but also because it is constantly thrown back in our

(07:01):
faces whenever the West tries to intervene. Now, regardless of
how pure our intentions are, we get the charges of
what about ism? So when I argue that Australia should
support Ukraine's resistance against Russia's illegal invasion, many people say
to me, well, Australia supported America's illegal invasion of Iraq.
It does seem to me it's undermined some of the
West's claims. How do you feel about that decision two

(07:24):
decades later? Was it a mistake or was it not
a mistake?

S2 (07:29):
I was very much in favor of it, as were
a lot of other people. And I'll just mention two.
One was The Economist, which, you know, is not an
organ of the United States government. And I actually knew
John Howard a bit. I don't think John Howard was
dragged into that war. I think there were a lot
of people who thought it made sense, and that it
made sense for several reasons. One was legitimate fear, which

(07:52):
we know was misplaced about a revival of the Iraqi
nuclear program. But I think the other thing which people
tend to forget now is that after the conclusion of
the first Gulf War, there was an inspections regime to
contain the Iraqi nuclear program, and there was a sanctions
regime to prevent Iraq under Saddam Hussein from coming back.
The inspection regime had collapsed and the sanctions regime was collapsing.

(08:16):
And we forget now the price the West paid for that.
For example, if you go back and look at some
of some of bin Laden's declarations, including his infamous declaration
of jihad against the West and specifically against Jews as well,
there's a lot of reference to the suffering of the
Iraqi people. Plus, we forget all the issues associated with
a large military presence in Saudi Arabia and so forth. Now,

(08:38):
in retrospect, the premises were false. I also think that
we made things much worse for ourselves by incompetent execution,
which is actually what I was saying at the time,
which was one of the reasons I was surprised to
be asked by Condi to to be her, her counselor.
And I don't think it had turned out quite the
way that it did. On the other hand, is the

(08:58):
world better off without Saddam Hussein? I think unquestionably. So.
Is the Iraq that you have today a more reasonable
state in the Middle East because of what happened? I
tend to think that it is, although I think it
was a mistake in retrospect, wouldn't have supported it, certainly
not the way I did. I think it was an
understandable mistake, and I don't think we should be wringing

(09:21):
our hands about it. There's a terrible thing, I think,
in the West now that we we like to cringe.
What about us? What Australia did with the Aboriginal peoples?
What about allying with Stalin? You know, we need to
have the courage to make the argument about the right
policy at the moment. And I think it's a terrible
mistake to go weak in the knees, because in retrospect,

(09:42):
some decisions probably were not the right ones, because, you know,
that's the nature of foreign policy and and decision making.
Every country, including ours, including yours, has made some terrible decisions.
That doesn't mean that we should be paralyzed now, and
it doesn't mean that we should go around to apologize.
I think.

S1 (10:00):
Well, we could do a whole podcast on Iraq. A
few of your arguments there that I wouldn't mind responding to,
but I want to keep going, and I want to
come now to Ukraine. Since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly two
years ago, your commentary on the war has been very
widely read. Let me just ask you what you think
the state of play on the battlefield is now, and

(10:21):
what happens next?

S2 (10:23):
Well, I think it's pretty clear that I don't know
whether stalemate is right word, but the front lines are
pretty clearly settled in. Russia is mobilizing, probably not quite
as effectively as sometimes painted, and Ukrainians are feeling the pressure.
I think, you know, I have very mixed feelings about
my own government's performance and all this. I think they

(10:44):
did a very good job alerting everybody to the impending invasion, which,
by the way, I think actually undid a lot of
the damage of Iraq. You know, one of the consequences
of Iraq was damaging the reputation of American intelligence in
the sense of governmental information. And I think the way
they handled that was good. You know, I give President

(11:06):
Biden credit for the right instincts. I think the big
mistake we've made is to let ourselves be deterred by
Russian threats from delivering the things that the Ukrainians really
needed in quantity and fast. I mean, at the moment,
what we have is we're giving the Ukrainians the right
kinds of things, but we're giving too little and we're
giving it too late. Where does it go from here? Well,

(11:29):
you know, they'll probably be another Russian offensive. What's going
to happen in the next phase of the war? The
Ukrainians are committed to fight this out. I've been to
Ukraine several times, and they're an inspiring group of people.
They will fight also because they know that this is
about their very existence. I mean, this is that fundamental,
a kind of war. The Russians are waiting to see
what happens with the American presidential election. I think they're

(11:51):
also waiting to see what kind of aid Ukraine gets.
I think the competition will now shift more to a
technology intensive kind of competition. You know, generals illusionary, the
Ukrainian chief of defence staff, wrote a very interesting paper
about the war, which is very candid. There was a
short version of it in The Economist, but you can

(12:11):
get the full version. And I think the point of
it is that the shift now is to one in
which technology will be critical, and that includes things like
high performance aircraft, but also things like long range missiles,
cruise missiles and things of that nature. So the war
is not over like most wars. You can't tell how
it's going to end when you're in the middle of it.

(12:33):
But what I would say is the stakes are very,
very high, obviously for the Ukrainians, but they are high
for the entire liberal democratic world. And I advisedly don't
say the West, because I think it includes the Asian
liberal democracies. If Russia succeeds, we're going to be in
a much darker world then I think we can even
imagine right now.

S1 (12:54):
Eliot, as you mentioned, you've been to wartime Kyiv a
couple of times. You've met with President Zelensky once. What
has the war revealed about Zelensky, about his qualities, about,
if you like, the role of the individual in great
historical moments. And what has the war revealed about President Putin,

(13:15):
about his frailties?

S2 (13:17):
I was at the Munich Security Conference two days before
the Russian invasion in February of 2022, and I was
speaking to a very knowledgeable person who, fluent in Russian,
knows Russia very well, who assured me that President Zelensky,
who actually appeared at Munich, would just continue from there
to London and ride this thing out. And I always

(13:38):
remember that because this was a bona fide expert and boy,
was he dead wrong. Zelensky turns out to be an
inspirational leader. I think his gifts as an actor, actually,
coupled with just a kind of strength of character, have
made him an extraordinarily effective leader, both within Ukraine but

(14:00):
also in representing Ukraine to the rest of the world.
It's it's astonishing to me how well he knows how
to speak to different audiences Americans, Germans, dare I say it,
Australians as well. And I know he's he's spoken here
at at Lowy. I think with President Putin the signs
were there if you cared to pay attention to them,
and particularly if it's very important, I think, to read

(14:20):
things leaders publish and to take seriously the things they
say in public, by the way, that has applications for
XI Jinping on Taiwan as well. But with the case
of Putin, he wrote this essay, which is filled with
a lot of bogus history on the historical unity of
Ukrainians and Russians, it's very clear that he does not
think that Ukraine deserves to exist as a state, that

(14:42):
he thinks of it as an inferior branch of Russia,
and that he is determined to restore the Russian state
by which he means an imperial state. What is striking
to me is how much difficulty expert opinion, including people
who are Russian historians, had. And taking that seriously. You'll
see lots of other interpretations of Putin's behaviour before the

(15:05):
war and in its early stages, which suggest that he
had limited aims. He does not. He wants to destroy
Ukraine and really recreate a Russian imperial state, which is
in many ways, I think, legitimately called fascist.

S1 (15:20):
Alright, last question on Ukraine. Ukrainians have been enormously courageous, professional, innovative,
entrepreneurial in the way that they use the aid and
the the weapon systems that the world has given them.
But but obviously they need our help if they're going
to win. There are a lot of claims of war
weariness in the West you will have seen a few

(15:43):
weeks ago, for example, I think the Italian prime minister
was pranked by someone and said that there's a lot
of fatigue in Europe. Do you think Americans are war weary?
Do you think democratic countries are war weary?

S2 (15:55):
So I have to tell you, I have a visceral
reaction when people use that phrase. You know, my wife
and I know what it is to send a sent
off to war. We had a son who had did
two combat tours and a light infantry brigade in Iraq.
My feeling was he was entitled to be war weary,
but he wasn't. My wife certainly was, but I don't
think she was. And I'm entitled to be, but I wasn't.

(16:16):
If all you're sending is dollars and things, it's kind
of contemptible to say that your war weary, you're just cheap,
that's all. Or you have a kind of policy, attention
deficit disorder. So, you know, I think it also bespeaks
a kind of seriousness about what the stakes are. So again,
I would push back on it quite hard.

S1 (16:37):
All right. Let's move to the theater. And the conflict
that in many ways has has taken the world's attention
away from Ukraine. On the 7th of October, the deadliest
single day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, nearly
50 years to the day since the outbreak of the
Yom Kippur War, we saw another catastrophic failure of Israeli

(16:59):
and Western intelligence on that day. How did the intelligence services,
the famous intelligence services of Israel, and the rest of us,
how do we get it so wrong? How do we
miss what was happening, what Hamas was planning?

S2 (17:11):
Well, I think it's an intelligence failure, particularly on the
part of the Israelis. I mean, you know, the way
intelligence communities work, something like the CIA can't be equally
strong everywhere. So what they do is they form liaison
relationships with other intelligence services, as we have with Australia,
and we tend to listen to them. And here, of course,
the Israelis do have very effective intelligence services. The answer

(17:34):
is we won't fully know probably until the Israelis do
what they usually do, as they did after 1973 war
and after they did after the 2006 Lebanon War, which
is they have established a blue ribbon state commission which
will investigate it very, very thoroughly. Heads will roll beginning
probably with the Prime Minister. But there seem to be
a number of things. First, as is usually the case,

(17:56):
there were signals in the system that got missed. Some
of the reporting in the Israeli press suggests it's because
you had female soldiers who were, you know, in charge
with doing surveillance by with electro optical and other sensors
who were sending up kind of alarming messages, and they
were dismissed. So, you know, there may be some male
chauvinism at work there. I think it's also quite possible

(18:19):
that the Israelis felt that they had a sort of
a solution with Hamas, that is to say, you know,
occasional strikes and stuff when when there were rocket attacks,
but also actually encouraging the Guterres to fund Hamas, which
the Israelis did, and allowing nearly 20,000 Palestinian workers with

(18:40):
the prospect of more to cross the border from Gaza
into Israel. And I think they felt that that was
kind of the solution. And I think they radically underestimated,
particularly the leadership. The main leader of Hamas, Sinwar, who, remember,
had spent a number of years in Israeli prison. That
was very interesting interview in the Financial Times with one
of his interrogators who said, you know, this guy spoke

(19:02):
perfect Hebrew. We thought we understood him well. We didn't
fully understand as he was really going to school on us.
And he was he was reading biographies of Israeli leaders.
He was reading a lot about Israeli history. The fact is,
you're dealing with a guy who's evil. I mean, the
kind of person who authorizes what they did on October
7th is evil, but is also very smart and very,

(19:25):
very capable. So I think there's a larger misreading as well.
But all this is preliminary. We'll find out much more.
When a thorough investigation is done. It will certainly go
down in history as one of the great intelligence failures
of all time, though.

S1 (19:38):
In response to the attack, Israel declared it would destroy Hamas.
Is that war aim achievable? And how far has the
IDF gone in the period since then towards achieving it?

S2 (19:51):
You know, in a way, this goes back to your
earlier question about Iraq. Part of my reaction to the
Iraq war is I'm never certain. About anything. And so
when people tell me, well, the Israelis can't possibly do that, well,
maybe not, probably not. But am I willing to be conclusive? No. Because,
you know, wars are uncertain things. I think it really

(20:13):
hinges on an element that people haven't talked about, because
it's very hard to know anything about it. And that's
opinion in Gaza. I mean, there's no question the population
of Gaza hates the Israelis. I'm sure they hate them.
If it was possible they hate them more now than
they did. I think it's quite likely. And there is
evidence that it's a fact that they also really hate Hamas,
which brought this upon them. And I think they know

(20:35):
that we know that Hamas grip on the Gaza Strip
is not far from perfect, because otherwise you wouldn't have
movements like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others, which are not
entirely under Hamas's control. So I think we don't know.
I find it hard to see how they could do that,
particularly since after the operations in the northern half of

(20:55):
the Gaza Strip. I find it hard to imagine that
they'll be able to do the same kind of thing
in the South. In other words, displacing this case would
be almost 2 million people and then going after Hamas.
But what I what I would say is, I think
there are two really important things to bear in mind.
The first is that the Israelis, I believe, now have
a kind of an existential mindset that is to say,

(21:16):
for the first time in about 50 years, actually, they
think that in a certain way the existence of their
state is in question, not so much because what Hamas
can do directly, but because of what will happen if
Israel's ability to deter attacks, including from Hezbollah, including from Iran,
is called to question by a failure here. The second

(21:38):
thing is, however, it is waged. This war is going
to go on for a long time. You're not going
to go back to the pre October 7th dispensation, where
the Israelis would just kind of observe Hamas, but not
necessarily go after it. I think from now on, whenever
Hamas leader leaves a building, whenever there's a training exercise,
if there's ever a popular demonstration or parade or something

(22:02):
like that, the Israelis are going to hit it and
they will be doing things overseas as well. So I
think the rules now are just very, very different. I'm
not sure everybody's internalized that.

S1 (22:13):
You mentioned Hezbollah and Iran. When I was in Washington
about a month ago, there was a lot of concern
about the potential for escalation into a region wide conflict.
Is that something that concerns you?

S2 (22:25):
Of course. And it should. I mean, the what's been underreported? First,
the amount of attacks by Hezbollah on Israel along the
northern border and the fact that most Israeli settlements and
villages along the northern border have been evacuated. I mean,
the Israelis now have a displaced persons population of about 125,000. Now,
that's all done in accordance with the set of understandings

(22:48):
that Israel and Hezbollah have, which is you attack military targets,
you don't attack civilian targets, you don't attack things that
are too deep. It's okay for the Israelis to hit
big targets in Syria. And so there's this kind of
tit for tat is it possible that it could escalate? Absolutely.
I do again, give the Biden administration credit. I think
deploying two aircraft carriers off the coast of Lebanon sent

(23:10):
a serious message.

S1 (23:11):
A lot of heavy metal, a.

S2 (23:12):
Lot of heavy metal there. But I also am not
sure that Hezbollah really wanted to get involved. It was
very interesting when Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech that the
head of Hezbollah gave a speech about this, he was
at pains to say this was 100% Palestinian activity. We
didn't know about it. You know, you have to ask,
why is he going to make such a big point
of that? And I think it's because he doesn't want

(23:33):
a war. Remember, also after the 2006 war, he said
that in retrospect, if he had known how the Israelis
would react, he wouldn't have ordered the kidnapping of the
two Israeli soldiers that led to that war. So I
think he's he's a bit more cautious. And I think
that's restraining them for now. But the potential for something

(23:53):
much larger is there to to include just one last thing.
I would add indirect Iranian attacks via Yemen. I mean,
the Houthis have been going after shipping off the coast
of Yemen. They've fired missiles at Israel. This is not
the Houthis in this case or cat's paw for Iran.
I don't think they manufacture their own missiles. And, you know,

(24:14):
it's it's absolutely possible that this thing will escalate in
a variety of ways.

S1 (24:19):
Let me finish on Israeli politics. Many in Israel blame
Prime Minister Netanyahu for failing to detect and prevent the
attacks on October the 7th, but also for including far
right figures, for example, in his government, who say things
that are completely unacceptable. Is Bibi finished, do you think?

S2 (24:37):
Yes, and I think rightly so. First, obviously the presiding
over this catastrophe. But I think it's also the case
that his kind of reckless and irresponsible policies to include
bringing these really marginal far right figures into his government
and the ensuing reaction by a large chunk of the
Israeli public, including. Over judicial reform and things like that.

(25:01):
Convinced Hamas and possibly others that Israel was internally divided
and weak. Now, in a way, that's a misreading, because
the very same organizations that were bringing out hundreds of
thousands of people to protest the government then turned around
and began supporting what was really a very large scale
mobilization at the front. A lot of those very same

(25:23):
people are actually at war right now. But but absolutely,
Bibi will go. I think there's, you know, all the
polls indicate that, like 90% of the Israeli public wants
him gone and he should go.

S1 (25:34):
Let me come to your own country, the United States.
You've described yourself to me as a politically homeless person.
You served in a Republican administration, but you are never Trumper.
I think you left the Republican Party in 2016, and
certainly the Republican Party of today is a mile away
from the Republican Party. I have read about, as an historian,

(25:54):
a party of strong defense, strong commitment to alliances, fiscal rectitude,
and so on. Let me ask you about President Trump.
What are the chances of Mr. Trump being elected president
next year? If he were elected president, how would his
next term as president differ from his first term?

S2 (26:15):
Well, you know, again, I've been on the record from
the very beginning. I was actually, I think, one of
the original Never Trumpers. I thought then and in fact,
as early as 2015, that he was utterly unfit to
be president and said so. And I think if anything,
he's more unfit than ever in the light of everything
that he said and done, since I think if he
got in, there would be two things he would. Undoubtedly,

(26:39):
he has had as much try to use the government
to go after his enemies as he understands them, and
he doesn't understand the word opponents. He understands the word enemies.
And there's decent democratic governance requires that you think of
the other side as opponents, not enemies. And unfortunately, you know,
he now knows more about how the government works, and
he has more people around him who know that. So

(27:00):
that part would be very dangerous. But I also think
that he would be crazier and even less disciplined and coherent.
I think if you just look at his speech, if
you look at the things he he writes, if you
look at public meetings, I mean, he is he's visibly aging.
People talk. And rightly I think about President Biden, in essence,

(27:22):
being too old to continue on as President Donald Trump
is only something like about four years or so behind him,
maybe six. But he's old, too. He's in his late 70s,
and I think it shows, and I think that would
make him even more erratic now. I mean, the polls
are quite worrisome if you believe all that. I tend
to think at the end of the day, his chances

(27:45):
are not as good as people think. First, you know,
he could very well be in jail by the time
the election happens. He's got four different court cases against
him with, I think, a grand total of 91 indictments.
And so I think that will come more to the fore.
Americans don't make their their minds about politics until a
couple of months before the election anyway. They're probably not

(28:05):
entirely paying attention. And I also think that, you know,
in the crunch, Biden will be a somewhat more effective
candidate than people tend to think. So although I'm obviously
concerned about it. And it's not that I'm hugely enthusiastic
about President Biden, but he's unquestionably better than the alternative.
I tend to think that the chances of Trump coming

(28:26):
in are not as high as people think.

S1 (28:29):
All right, Eliot, today we've spoken about a lot of
big individuals Zelensky, Putin, Xinhua, Trump, Biden, the most acute
observer of individuals, of course, was William Shakespeare, which is
lucky because, of course, you've just published this wonderful book,
The Hollow Crown, on what Shakespeare thinks about leaders. This

(28:54):
is obviously a departure from from some of your other
more scholarly books. Why should people who listen to this podcast,
who care about history and international politics, why should they
read Shakespeare?

S2 (29:04):
So let me begin with the opening line of the book,
which is, it's all very well to see Richard the second,
Goneril and Iago on the stage. I've had to work
with some of those people. And the truth is that,
you know, as the course of a career in which
I've spent a lot of time in the corridors of power,
and I've met with presidents and prime ministers and generals

(29:25):
and diplomats and spies. The more I think about it,
the more I see Shakespeare as just a wonderful guy
to that which Shakespeare has to teach us about his character.
You know, he he's not interested in economics. He's not
interested in mass movements. He's interested in character. And I'll
give you just one example of all that I mentioned.
I'd been at the Munich Security Conference a couple of

(29:46):
days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And I remember,
I would say, the vast majority of the European experts
there thought, well, this is largely a bluff. Or if
Putin does attack Ukraine. Just a small piece of it.
Then it'll offer negotiations. They expected something quite subtle, and
I had my doubts. And the reason why I had

(30:06):
nothing to do with my knowledge of either Putin or Russia.
It had everything to do with having reread Richard the
Third for the eighth or ninth time. Now, Richard the third,
of course, is about this incredibly evil and cunning king.
And what struck me on that most recent rereading was
that in the first three acts, Richard the third is
committing murder left and right. He has his own brother
drowned in a cask of wine. But he is subtle.

(30:29):
He is indirect. He covers his tracks. In the fourth act,
he orders the murder of his two nephews in the tower.
And the way Shakespeare portrays that is, he says to
his lieutenant Buckingham, I want the bastards dead and wish
it done suddenly. Do you understand me? Buckingham is a
little bit shocked, and next thing you know, Buckingham is

(30:50):
off to the block. So what does that tell you?
What it tells you. What Shakespeare sees in the character
of dictators is a kind of deterioration, and that they
can go from being subtle and indirect and cunning to
being more and more brutal and open in a way,
part of the natural trajectory of their characters. It's accompanied

(31:11):
by language to include, by the way, the language of rape,
which Richard uses, as did Vladimir Putin. You know, Putin
before the invasion, said, kind of addressing the Ukrainians, like
it or not, my beauty, you'll have to put up
with it. Well, that that is clearly a threat in
effect of rape. And, you know, that was just one

(31:32):
of those moments of recognition, of which there are many.
I've always loved Shakespeare, but I will say that over time,
what I came to believe is that he was the
best guide there is to understanding the role of character
and leadership and the role of theatre in politics, which
is another theme of the book.

S1 (31:51):
Well, Eliot Cohen, parting is such sweet sorrow. It's been
a pleasure to speak with you, but you have other
duties to carry out. As the Lowy Institute's Distinguished Fellow
for International Security. So we'll let you go. Thank you
for joining me today on the director's chair to talk
about Ukraine, the Middle East, Zelensky, Putin and Richard the Third.
Eliot Cohen, thank you very much. Thank you. Michael. The

(32:13):
director's chair is a podcast from the Lowy Institute. The
producer for this episode was D'Arcy Milne with research by
David Vallance. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave a
review in your podcast app. You can find all our
past episodes at our website. Lowy Institute. Org slash director's
chair I'm Michael Fullilove. Thank you for listening.