2023-06-30
31 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
This, I think, really is one place where Putin and Xi connect quite closely.
They both feel shut out and marginalized.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades.
Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today.
And so understanding what drives these two men, how they view the world,
what they want, is as important as any question in foreign policy and international affairs.
To that end,
I talked to two of the absolute best scholars who study these countries and their histories,
the great Russia scholar, Stephen Kotkin, and the great China scholar, Orville Schell.
This is part one of our conversation.
Before we begin, I wanted to offer some context for the conversation you're about to hear.
I'd had a series of exchanges with Kotkin and Schell separately about China and Russia,
their strategic partnership, and the similarities and differences between their leaders.
Each has written a slew of powerful foreign affairs essays on these topics.
But I wanted to bring them together for a wide-ranging conversation about Kooten and she,
and the history that shapes them, and by extension shapes the world.
The conversation was so fascinating and so rich that I blew through our usual time limit and kept going for another hour.
We're going to bring it to you in two parts.
We hope you enjoy it.