YouSaid · the spoken record

Lawrence Freedman

lines on the record: 41
first: 2026-03-15
most recent: 2026-03-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“There's a vital interest at stake. You've got to be clear, there's a vital interest at stake that you've got things to do about it, that they're credible and so on. So I think we try to generalize deterrence too much. And then you get into the situation that the Israelis get into where they talk about restoring deterrence. Well, if deterrence needs restoring, then it's clearly not work very well. I think it's one of those terms a bit like strategy, I suppose, as well. Familiarity and comfort mean that it gets a bit overused and applied in ways for which it's not really suitable And that was really what I was trying to get away with. There are areas, the top end where deterrence is important and should be taken seriously elsewhere, a bit less so.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to think a little harder about this level of activity below war. It hasn't quite reached the threshold of war, but can be violent and certainly can be disruptive. And the danger of a soviet deterrence mindset is you're not thinking about that in a rather dynamic sense, which is not to say you abandon high-level deterrence where it I think, as I've suggested, it works. The thing that's been problematic about deterrence is the tendency after the Cold War, because it had been so successful. We got to 1990 without World War III, believing the deterrence was the way he had to deal with all future conflicts. And it doesn't work that way. You've got to be very clear.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the point I think I was trying to make there was that Sort of a basic posture, deterrence is always sounds great. I mean, it's robust. You're defending your interests, but you're not going to be provocative. You're not going to go on the attack. And so it is a bit passive, and it's working when nothing happens. But things are happening. Now, they're not things you would expect to deter very easily. I mean, we never tried to deter except by vague threats of economic sanctions, the full-scale invasion. We haven't tried to deter the attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, but we haven't also really tried to deter drones hovering around European airports or cyber attacks or acts of sabotage or assassination attempts on people within our countries and so on. And that's really what I was referring to.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than before, and it's in some ways astonishing that we've gone as long as we have without one of these weapons being used in anger again over 80 years now. While they're around, it doesn't take very much to change that. They're not hard to use if you've got them. And so it's just one of the features of the modern age that will stay with us because there's no, despite... all the campaigns there's no obvious way of getting out of the nuclear age”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How to manage a nuclear relationship when the wider relationship is pretty poor. And there are all sorts of stresses and strains, and so for we've managed, which is not a prediction about the future, but it tells you how far we've got. And it gives you some sort of guidance for the future in terms, I think, of the importance of keeping commute lines of communication open, but also just keeping in mind what our big step this would be. The longer that we haven't used nuclear weapons, nobody's used nuclear weapons. I think it's going to be harder for the first mover. If a war in the mid-50s, it would have been taken for granted that nuclear weapons would have been used early on. We've gone for so long development, what people call the nuclear taboo, that I think it's a real thing. It would be genuinely hard to break it, which doesn't mean to say again, it won't be, but it's just going to be that much harder. So it's paradoxical. It's more dangerous.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every time something is muted, which they don't like, how Sweden and Finland joining NATO, long-range systems being provided to Ukraine, attacks on Russian territory being allowed, whatever, all sorts of deep threats have come, and not much has happened. And that's led from the Russian point of view to a degradation of deterren Putin has always been pretty consistent, that deterrence in this context is about persuading NATO not to get directly involved on Ukraine's behalf. He's never actually directly threatened Ukraine with nuclear use and there was talk that it could happen, but I don't think that was ever a serious consideration that he's had could change, but that is nothing that's where he's always been. In that sense, I think you've had a pretty interesting case study.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She mentioned a lot of saber rattling. Of Russia in connection with Ukraine. What I found. With that is two things. First, actually. Worked out almost as the theory would have predicted. Russia has not attacked NATO countries despite it could claim provocation. Equally, the United States And other NATO countries have not got involved directly fighting side by side with Ukraine, which almost certainly they would have done, I think, if there'd been that sort of aggression against a neighboring country, a nuclear weapons weren't anywhere around. So in that sense, the theory has worked and deterrence has worked as you would expected. Yet we've also seen an attempt by Russia to extract a lot of political benefit from its nuclear arsenal, which hasn't really worked.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First strike, second strike, damage limitation, escalation, all of these concepts come from that period. They shape our thinking still. As you move forward to the present day, yes, I mean, there are more nuclear power, not as many as people thought they were good at thee, but more. certainly more than they were during the period in which I started writing. There have been conflicts between nuclear powers with endurant”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't know anything about the topic when I started to research it. It was just, you know, I started in 1945 and ploughed on. And you saw all these debates emerged. I think that's quite a good way sometimes to research things. If you know it all beforehand, it gets a bit boring. But when it's still a bit of discovery, then you can maintain your interest. Anyway, you see a lot of debates developing and you have this the first edition covered this period of absolute intellectual ferment in the 1950s as people first really began to grapple with weapons of mass destruction and what they can do and the nature of deterrence and how did it work It still strikes me how much of current thinking is influenced by the 1950s and 1960s, what Colin Gray, I think, made it called the Golden Age of Strategic Thinking.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so nuclear weapons have been a theme of my career, as it were. That's where I started most of my work in the 70s and into the 80s was about nuclears. And when I began work on evolution of nuclear strategy, which was in 1975, actually it was only 30 years in to the nuclear age. So it was easier to do the book than when I later came to revise it with a colleague a few years ago. There was much more to it. And it was also, you know, there was a book of discovery for me because”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've seen things before I've never experienced an administration like this. And it just makes it very difficult to follow.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, as they're fighting with deportees and the Justice Department is in their home security is working without pay at the moment. So it's an extraordinarily inept. Operation as well. And it's scary, I think, for people who have to deal with it because you never know where it's going to lead. Are we going to have a war with Iran? And if so, about what? Is it about regime change? It might give a cheer. Is it about proliferation? But you told us you'd sorted the proliferation situation last year. And what was that all about? Now, you know, would it be better if he was more competent? I don't know. It made him more dangerous then. But I've never, you know, I've been following professionally these things since the mid-70s. That's how long I've been doing it. And when I was doing my research in Washington, Watergate was on.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Channel just did it better than he did. So he doesn't press on regardless, Trump, and he does change his mind and forgets what he said. And he makes points to annoy people because they've annoyed him. And this makes him extraordinarily difficult to deal with. And in the first administration, you had people around him who sort of knew he was annoying and unguided, but managed to soften the blows a bit, but you just don't have that with this administration at the moment. It's a very thin administration. There's not that many people doing the daily jobs. The two topwood negotiators are neither paid employees, both Trump's personal envoys, Whitcoff and Kushner. Kushner... Actually, people who talk to him normally find him quite able, but Whitkoff is a complete amateur. And they plough into things. And then a lot of the bureaucracy has been...”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Individuals like Starma who state a lot on trying to make this worth along with Macron and so on. They had to speak out. You really can't have Greenland. It's not yours to take. If there is a problem there, let's work it out. But this isn't acquiring it for the US isn't it. And I think you find with Trump is that he actually picks his fight some fight he clearly doesn't want to want to have mainly because you've got an innate sense of what he'll lose, which going back to the tariff point. And I don't think what I wrote in April 25, I would rewrite. I mean, I think it remains okay, is these which China pushed back.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's extremely difficult, and I think you've seen over the past month policymakers who thought that they had him under control, or put it slightly differently. Policy makers who thought they knew how to handle them suddenly realizing that their methods weren't adequate. But I think the Greenland issue, possibly more than the Canada issue, crystallized that. And so up to that point, you could get quite a long way with flattery and sort of going along with what he was saying, not interrupting, not contradicting. I managed zooming in on the things that really mattered and then turning them around and saying, look, great achievement, Mr. President. That worked up to a point. It got us through last year largely. But then all of a sudden it just didn't seem adequate.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he repeats their falsehood. So that tells you something about how he stays informed. He's not a man who browses the internet and why he continues, I still think is a policy that's doomed to failure.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“America first has a long tradition in American history. What's quirky about it, eccentric, is back to implementation, is the erratic way it's implemented in the lack of curiosity. About the claims he's making on behalf of his policy. So, you know. The question I was always taught to ask, what would it take for this proposition to be wrong as a pretty good? Check on whether you were right. You don't get the sense he's ever he ever asked this question or is curious about evidence to be just for his own comfort. about whether he's doing the right thing. So this makes his rationality, I think, much more conditional. But Putin... speaks more coherently maybe, nonetheless is clearly not curious enough at times to question what is generals are telling him.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saving not the eastern and southern part, that it's a wholly artificial state as a result. This government is illegitimate, and therefore that led him to believe it would fall quite quickly, which of course it didn't. So you can understand where he's coming from, but in the process, the more you try to look at it, the better you should be able to see the flaws. Now, when you get to your own president, I think these questions become harder because you're not quite sure exactly what's driving his interests and concerns of the moment other than his own egotistical needs. So it's actually much harder with Trump. But nonetheless, nonetheless, you can still see themes in his thinking which go back a long way. For example, his dislike of free trade. It's not a new thing. It's always been there, his distrust of alliances. So there's something real to...”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially at the moment, it doesn't mean reasonable. It doesn't mean you reason. I mean, for the classic social science view of rationality is there is a consistency to it. that is coherent, that it fits. But if you're starting assumptions are completely wrong, you can be perfectly rational but end up with a pretty poor answer. So getting into somebody else's view of rationality, the way their thought processes work, doesn't mean to say that by saying that they're rational, saying that what they do necessarily makes sense, it makes sense to them. That's essentially what it's about. And so with Putin. Makes sense to him what he's doing. He believes. On the basis of pretty tendentious historical research that Ukraine should never have been separated from Russia.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of the kill zone, you're likely to be spotted in movement. And if you're spotted, you're likely to be killed. So this is an extraordinary change that has taken place. And the speed of innovation has been quite staggering. I mean, you can see this, obviously, in previous wars. Any war that lasts a long time sees innovation in tactics and technology, short wars don't. But given where Ukraine started, it explains why they're in a far better position than anybody would have dared assume they would be, certainly at the start of 2024, never mind, in February 22.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most people who view the war, the amount of innovation that has taken place, oddly without it having that much effect on the movement on the front lines over the last two years, is extraordinary. We forget how recent the drone warfare that the Ukrainians sort of mastered first and the Russians have certainly more than caught up with became a feature of this battlefield when the current Russian offensive, which I say would say started in late 2023 began. The assumption was that you moved forward with armoured columns still, maybe not quite as grand as the wonder of which they started, but still tanks were the way of moving forward. Now you move forward with the infiltration of companies and maybe just two or three. People on bikes or on foot”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Assume that wars would be fought between pretty equivalent armies, which meant the if one did culminate, then the other could take over, whereas, of course, in this case Russia has got much more resource than Ukraine. So maybe it doesn't mean the same thing. So what I'm trying to point out is there's an interesting concept here, which can give you questions to ask, but you shouldn't be bound by it because you have to this isn't a term of pure science. Like all of this, it requires judgment, but it's helpful. So I think that's been important. I think like...”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of things that can go wrong. These are why this may not work. I mean, at the moment, I'm trying to write a piece on whether the Russian offensive has culminated, which is a good Klausovitsian concept. And so I've been reading back in Klausvitz what he actually said about calmination, which is not quite the same as how it's always understood now. I might say, well, you know, so the idea of culmination is that every offensive reaches a point at which it's sort of exhausted or the enemy is able to resist. And if you push your luck beyond that, then that can produce disaster. If you recognize the point, then you can recover and so on. And then you have to remember that Klauswitz was writing at a time when he is...”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be absolutely sure about what's going on and therefore you've got to be a bit cautious if you're trying to forecast where it's going. On the other hand, there's no point doing the commentary game as it were unless, again, you're prepared to take some risks. I think the other thing that struck me is it's quite useful to have a background in military history. There's certain situations you recognize and this gives you a starting point to think about them, the people who are just coming to it fresh as the conflict of the day might miss. So I think that's helpful. The military history, it's not that you get simple analogies, but it just gives you questions to ask. These are the”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After that, I became much more cautious and I've been cautious since and remain cautious. I've realized, especially when you're writing from a distance, it's very hard to be absolutely sure. However much you read, however many videos you watch.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The dangers of extrapolation, I suppose, just because one thing's happened in one way doesn't mean to say the next thing will happen in the same way. I think like many people, I got optimistic on Ukraine's behalf during the course of 2022. Correctly so that they performed amazingly well, but didn't allow for quite how much Putin was prepared to double down on the war. I still think a lot of the key decisions were those taken in September 22, as much as those taken in February 22 when he partially mobilization put in the economy more on a war footing annexing for oblasts in addition to Crimea and so on.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question It's something that's dominated my thinking as so many other people since before the full-scale invasion, but when these debates were going on about whether it would happen or not, which I got wrong. I thought it was a stupid thing to do, which I think it was a stupid thing to do. But I should have been more aware that that didn't mean to say it wouldn't happen. And by the time it happened, I think I was. I'd be more persuaded that it was as likely as not. But I stuck to the view that it was stupid and I felt sort of reasonably vindicated on that quite quickly. So, what's it changed since in my thinking? First,”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes they're right, and it's important to be, there's nothing worse in management than the person who says he's consulting when they've clearly made up their mind.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, one of the things that came out of Iraq was when you have somebody who's been pretty successful, whose judgment has been shown to be pretty good, who tends to be trusted, they can believe it a bit themselves and become less good at taking advice. That's a problem with authoritarian system. So again, what I'm talking about Putin, that's a problem with Putin. He becomes utterly convinced of the rightness of the cause and that his own judgment is correct. And all those voices that might have said, are you sure this is a good idea? What about this? Is that how the Ukrainians really think just weren't? To him, and to the extent anybody did raise concerns, he dismissed them out of hand. So I think it's not only sometimes frustrating to have to deal with your own organization and objections within it.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“or move forward with nation building they weren't committed to the policy in the first place so i think if you're going to build up commitment you've got to work it is necessary to work on people and if they're not going to be on side either you've got to find a workaround or accept that as a limitation on on what you can do and maybe it's because it's not a very good policy”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People have got a strong enough will to push them through. But you can then find that, again, later on, the lack of buy-in from others holds you back just to give an example, because I use it in one of the essays on Iraq. Tony Blair was able to push through a policy on supporting the US invasion of Iraq, despite many misgivings in government departments as well as in the country, but he was committed to the policy and he pushed it through. When things got difficult after the invasion, and in particular when it got around to trying to run Iraq, there was very little support from the bureaucracy. People didn't rush forward with bright ideas about how to help run wayward provinces or deal with insurgencies.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“go into government is soon really struck by how much time is spent wallowing in the bureaucracy, how writing papers, persuading people whose own particular professional interests, bureaucratic interests, don't really served by some radical new shift, even if you think the country demands it, that the best policy demands it, which is what comes back to tactics again, that if you haven't fought these things through, however great your ideas, you're likely to get frustrated. Now, in some cases...”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think So one of the other points that is obvious when you talk about it, but that it's often forgotten because it somehow often seems to be inappropriate is if you're developing a strategy for dealing with an adversary, you're also all the time having to deal with your own bureaucracy. If you're a military officer, those in other services, your subordinates, your superordinates, whatever. Strategy has always got an inner sense that you've got to look inwards at how you get people on side, anticipating problems, what's going to motivate people, as well as your outward look, what is it that will gain the objectives for the organization or the country that you're seeking to gain. And there's often a real tension between those. And of course, anybody, once they move, certainly from academia into...”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“those in government or in the military that they can see how sometimes too much big thinking leave thinking out of the box always considered to be a good thing to do but if you don't know how to work the box itself then being outside of it's not going to be much help i think i think in terms of the development of my thinking of strategy it's coming to appreciate more recently the importance of implementation a lot of strategy fails because though formulating it don't talk to those who have to do it”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually, if you go back into the 19th century, most of the literature was about tactics. I mean, strategy was something that you learned by studying the great battles of the past and had timeless principles, but the real innovation was in tactics. And there's something in that. So I think because we've elevated strategy so high, say back to this sort of magic ingredient quality. And as I know, you have plenty of vice presidents for strategy. I was one myself for a while, but you don't have a vice president for tactics Actually, getting it right, implementation is critical. That's how you move forward. And if you don't get your tactics right, then you're in trouble. So I think that's, and I found actually talking with people that resonates, especially”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, it is in that sense more like a soap opera than a three act play. So that, I think, has been the big shift. And I find it works for me. It worked for other people, but it works for me. One of the essays in the collection that I... I'm pleased with and I'm allowed to be is the one on tactics because that articulates something I've been thinking for a while but it has represented a shift in my thinking but a recognition like everybody else I've tended to play down tactics as being lower order secondary activity.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that if only you had a good one then you would know exactly how to act and also the people tended to start by saying what's your objective and then working backwards as to how you achieve that objective whereas in my experience and just looking at the people i'd studied they started with a problem the here and now what is it that i'm trying i what does i need to do and what am i available resources and they may have an ultimate objective in mind they should have one in mind but they may never get there so i think my view on strategy shifted from being working backward from where you wanted to be to working forward from where you are a moving i put a moving to the next stage and then appreciating the strategy never ends because when you've reach one stage there's another stage to follow and the stage after that”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think my view has evolved inevitably. To start with, it was more I talked about it without thinking very hard about what it actually was. As I started to work up the big book, I started to move beyond the idea it was just about the relationship between ends and means, which is still the simplest way and quite a perfectly useful way of thinking about what strategy is about How do you achieve your objectives? What do you do if you can't get your objectives? realizing that a lot of the time when people were talking about strategy they talked about it as a sort of magic ingredient”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“US government, British government, elsewhere. And then all my career, for some reason, I got involved in administration and management as well as scholarship. And their strategy comes up all the time. So I was sort of a doer as well as a theorist, if you like. And I think that practical experience, both in my early political career, which didn't last very long, but in my lengthier administrative career. Reinforced some ideas that I had developing out of the reading and the study and research of high-level policymaking.”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“sort of radical aspirations that were not unique to me or my generation and the practicalities of getting change. So that's what animated me to start with. I got frustrated by people just saying this will be achieved when it was clear they had very little idea about how it would be achieved. So that got me going. Then I think two things added to this in later years. First, my chosen field of work, which ended up being largely about war but started off, as you've noted, about being about nuclear strategy and nuclear arms control led me to look hard at policy making decision makers. And I found that kept on interesting me. How did these big decisions on war and peace made in the”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started getting interested in strategy in a way I think a number of people of my generation did baby boomers in the late 60s as part of the sort of student radical movement belief that we had some great ideas that would improve everybody's lives but was struck very much about how everybody didn't seem to be as interested in these great ideas as I thought they should be so I got interested in this sort of gap between”
2026-03-15 · Intelligence Squared · Is the Russia–Ukraine War a Failure of Strategy? With Lawrence Freedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT