Anne Applebaum

It's a

you know, a kind of elementary school vision of how you project power.

You just bomb stuff and then you win.

That is not how the United States became the world's most influential country.

And it's not how we achieve good outcomes in the past.

So I really dislike predicting the future.

It's because you're smart, Anne.

There's Twitter to remind me.

And there's also, you know, there are events that you don't predict or foresee or, you know, Putin dies or Zelensky dies or something, you know, that I feel are not in my control.

You know, the only thing I think I would say about Russia and Ukraine, Ukraine will not disappear as a country.

It will be more integrated with Europe.

It's possible that we would have, I won't say a different regime in Russia.

We could have a different leader.

If things keep going the way they go, that's one alternative.

It's also possible that we could have, between now and then, a broader European war.

So it's possible that, as you were asking, will Putin lash out?

Will he try to somehow want to use this moment to prove what he believes, which is that NATO isn't real?

So he may...

something in the, I would think, in the region just to test whether the United States would come to anybody's aid.

This would be not just a test of NATO, but also, of course, a test of the United States and its alliances, as we were discussing.