Samuel Charap

speaker

472 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 24 Mar

Samuel Charap’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #240 – Samuel Charap on how a Ukraine ceasefire could accidentally set Europe up for a bigger war · 24 Mar 2026 podcast

So I think what we say in the piece is that the risks won't dramatically decrease with the ceasefire, that they won't disappear.

Not that they're necessarily going to be greater after a ceasefire than they will before.

I think you hear a lot of that rhetoric that essentially

If there's a ceasefire in Ukraine, then Russia is going to be coming for us, NATO next.

That I don't buy.

But and I also would say that there are lots of risks attendant with this war that we've sort of become accustomed to.

But every once in a while, you know, we see an incident and we're reminded that at any moment this could spiral out of control.

So Russia is at war, full scale conventional war involving, you know, a whole range of high end weapon systems that including, you know, long range strike.

um that uh in a country that borders for nato allies and you know meanwhile like ukraine is fighting with weapons that have been supplied by the alliance um russia is engaged in all this you know activities to subvert that supply chain so the potential for escalation in this war i think is quite high and for that reason alone uh if it you know not even taking into account the you know the ukraine piece of this which i think you know

It's in their interest, too, to see this end, as they themselves have now articulated.

But I think it's certainly in the alliance's interest to have an end to this conflict sooner rather than later.

I mean, the escalation risks are one factor, and another, of course, are the resources.

It's going to be an ongoing struggle for Europe to arm itself while it is emptying its resources

caches of weapons to provide to Ukraine.

And the fiscal challenges aren't going to get easier as time goes on when this war and Ukraine becomes more reliant on the UK and the EU for financial lifelines and so on.

So there is a resource argument here too.

But I think first and foremost, the escalation risk and the sort of broader security environment being so volatile

And trying to get that under control, I think, would be certainly a stronger case than saying, well, Russia's bogged down here, and so therefore they're not going to engage in this, you know, active opportunistic aggression against NATO.

So I don't think I ever argued exclusively that it was one set of issues that drove this decision in the way that some like John Mearsheimer have argued.

I don't think that that is the case.

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