so former president barack obama made
these comments yesterday about the war
in ukraine and vladimir putin's ability
to harness resentment both in russia and
overseas in his bid to undermine the
west
it is
a bracing reminder for
democracies
that
have gotten
that had gotten flabby
and
uh
confused
and
feckless
around the stakes of things that
we
tended to take for granted
yes rule of law
uh
freedom
of press and conscience
we
have gotten complacent
and i think that that
i cannot guarantee that as a consequence
of what's happened uh we are shaking off
that complacency
so let's bring in the man who conducted
the interview editor-in-chief of the
atlantic magazine jeffrey goldberg the
atlantic in the university of chicago's
the institute of politics has convened a
three-day conference on disinformation
and the erosion of democracy what was
your takeaway from your speech from your
interview with the former president
yesterday
uh you know a couple of things uh one is
that he is
genuinely i think
grappling with consequences of his own
decision-making in ukraine on
2013-2014 has very good answers for why
the obama ministry why his
administration didn't do more and yet
you know it still feels somewhat
unsatisfying to people
the situation was different but uh
you know i think like uh
a lot of people um he's
a bit surprised that putin went as far
as he did now um second uh
i think he believes that uh in a way
that i think a lot of us on this panel
do that america is
surprisingly
uh vulnerable to the same sorts of
disinformation patterns that
non-democracies are uh
you know
the idea that and he brought this up
very specifically the idea that 30 40
percent of americans don't believe that
possibly the most effective vaccine in
history it doesn't work um shows that
it's not just a russian problem with
disinformation i started by asking him
is he if he's you know an essentially
surprised that so many russians believe
that hey uh ukraine is an aggressor
nation and b that the russian army is
winning and he said you know he kind of
brought it back to america and said look
we have millions and millions of people
here who believe
uh that the current president is
illegitimate and that vaccines don't
work so
i think he's i don't want to say
surprised but he's he's a bit taken
aback by
how powerful a force in human nature and
in technology disinformation is
well there's an important conference
disinformation on the erosion of
democracy especially at this time i'm
curious so jeffrey for you personally
have you seen a bit of a readjustment we
were just talking about how vladimir
putin had been held as a master of
disinformation and he is his dis
information machine is just getting
chopped to little bits getting
annihilated by ukraine getting
annihilated by u.s intel services and
you also see putin now has gone from
being somewhat popular with among rank
and fire republicans so being one of the
most reviled uh
figures in in the world i'm i'm
wondering if uh if you're seeing this as
a clarifying moment and that americans
and uh our society are making some
adjustments
yeah you know i was a little bit
surprised by president obama's criticism
of what he referred to as as the sort of
flabbiness and recklessness of
let's say mature democracy
that we've lost a happy democracy and
that we're not
skilled or paying or have been paying
enough attention to
uh some of the challenges that
technology uh and nefarious actors would
bring to this um on the other hand you
know i don't want to overstate it yet uh
i i mean vladimir putin
is a blunt force instrument and has
become much blunter obviously but um
meanwhile they're still tearing up
ukraine and uh they're tearing it up
with a certain level of impunity uh i i
think
propaganda like this this information
like this works um best when it's done
deliberately
and and a little bit more subtly than
than than
the russian campaign over the last
couple months in the west but let's deal
with the the the the ultimate reality is
that most russians right now seem to
believe him yep i mean that's the
consumer that matters the most right now
i mean if the russian people
decided um or had enough information or
were open to to to factual information
um that this invasion is a disaster then
we'd be in a different place entirely
but if he's got 80 of the population
he's got 80 percent of the population
that's what matters the most
you also asked former president obama
about the power of social media to
spread disinformation
if you look at for example facebook's
response or twitter's response or
youtube's response post january 6th
they made a point of saying well we
responded in by doing a whole series of
things
some of which then were reversed after
the heat was often
which tells me that
they at least appear to have some
insight into
what's more likely to prompt
insurrectionists white supremacists
uh
you know uh
misogynist
uh
behavior on the internet bullying
behavior on there they they seem to know
what it is
jeffrey you mentioned earlier that the
former president
talked i guess about some misgivings he
had about his own administration's
response
to ukraine in 2013 2014 i'm wondering
did he mention specifically the night
that he took a pass on russia crossing
the red line which had already crossed
by using chemical weapons in syria and
the united states rather than acting on
it
did he talk about that at length at all
no i've talked to him at length in the
past about the red line issue um we we
only spent a few minutes on ukraine and
we didn't get there um but obviously
this is a
strong critique of of of obama's
performance in syria which of course has
that had downstream consequences for
russia and for countries that are sort
of were engaging and always gauge
american presidential responses to
provocation um we didn't get i don't
think that he has i don't want to
overstate it i don't think that
necessarily has misgivings about um
ukraine um i think he's he's thinking
through
um what has changed about vladimir putin
i asked him you know explain uh explain
putin you know him better than most
people most americans certainly um and
he he posited a couple of ideas he said
you know it it could be age it could be
the isolation that brought about by
kovid but even back then he said he was
still
putin was captured by kind of these
ethno-nationalist myths
that
really motivated his thinking about
ukraine uh in particular as an
illegitimate state i think that's where
he was going with that but no you know i
i don't think he's um i would like to
push him more uh actually on that syria
question and i asked him when his next
book is coming out the next volume of
his autobiography because that's going
to be the the syria chapters and i'm
very keen to see how he interprets that
uh eight or two years later
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