Manifold

Pascal Lottaz is Associate Professor at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Law & Hakubi

Center. His research area is Neutrality Studies - the study of neutrality as a concept in international relations, sociology, international law, diplomacy, political science, security, and history.

Follow Pascal on X @Plottaz
Pascal's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@neutralitystudies

(00:00) - Professor Pascal Lattaz's background, early life, and experiences in Japan
(14:17) - Neutrality in international relations
(20:07) - Ukraine's struggle for neutrality
(28:44) - Debating the Ukraine conflict
(37:50) - Physics, social sciences, and observer-independent reality
(46:13) - The importance of dissent in open societies
(47:01) - Russian resilience, NATO, escalation strategies, and potential outcomes
(51:43) - European realism and U.S. influence
(56:16) - Incentive structures and NATO dynamics
(01:04:11) - Japan's strategic position and U.S. alliance
(01:13:49) - Potential conflicts and proxy wars in East Asia
(01:30:35) - Philippines' strategic dilemma
(01:36:26) - Concluding thoughts

Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.

Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

Creators & Guests

Host

Stephen Hsu

Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University.

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Join him for wide-ranging conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Pascal Lottaz: Open societies usually encourage dissent, whereas closed societies try to sell to everybody that if you're a good person, you agree with the top down narrative. And in this sense of analyzing war, it is a responsibility of us to try also to dissent with current narratives and try to offer different interpretations and hope that nobody calls us fake news, but they do that anyhow.

Steve Hsu: Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is Professor Pascal Lattaz. He's a professor in the field of international relations at Kyoto University. I discovered Pascal's channel because in the past on this podcast, I've had guests like John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Ted Postel, Ray McGovern, people who have a kind of alternative view of current events, and geopolitics and because I watched their content,uh, the algorithms led me eventually to Pascal's channel, which I recommend on YouTube called Neutrality Studies, which is his field of academic research. Pascal, welcome to the podcast.

Pascal Lottaz: Steve, thank you very much for having me.

Steve Hsu: So as we were discussing before we started recording, I'm fascinated by your background because as I understand it, you're originally from Switzerland, but you did your graduate studies, master's and PhD in Japan, and you're now a professor at really what is one of the most esteemed and oldest universities in Japan, Kyoto University.

So, I would love to spend a little bit of time, if you don't mind, talking about your biography. What did you want to do as a child? How did you end up in Japan? How did you end up studying what you study?

Pascal Lottaz: Happy to tell you about that. And you know, actually this year I have a double anniversary with Japan. It is now 10 years since I'm living here permanently and 20 years since I've been here for the first time. The story is that as a junior high school kid, I got the idea that I wanted to go out of Switzerland for an exchange year.

You know, I grew up in, in rural Switzerland, although, you know, I, I didn't grow up in the mountains. I grew up in one of, in between two cities between Bern and Fribourg. And, it was a lovely little place, a village of 3000 people, you know, not, not super tiny, not, not super big, not too far away from the cities, but, you know, relatively rural.

And that, I always had this feeling that I wanted to see a place that's a bit bigger, even as a kid, and in junior high school, I got the idea. I really want to go on an exchange here. And I was thinking about where I would like to go. And the 1 place that fascinated me the most was. Japan, basically because other European countries and the US from what I saw on TV looked like what I knew from home,Africa and East Asia or South America looks too different and, and Japan somehow looked very, very modern and a place that I could probably try to explore while still being considerably But So I was fighting with my parents for two years until they finally said, okay, go.

And then I signed up for a high school exchange program with one of these organizations, this one was called YFU, youth for understanding, and that then brought me at the age of 17, 18 to Japan in 2004, where I was living for one year at the age of 18. with a Japanese host family in Wakayama, right below Osaka, so not in Tokyo, close to Kyoto, actually.

and my host family, they were, they are farmers, they're, rice farmers. They have their own plantations. And I was going to a high school and that was a fantastic experience. I had, I was under no pressure to have good grades because I had to repeat that year anyhow. So I just had time for one year, not to understand what was happening.

And for six months, I didn't get what was happening. And then slowly I started understanding a bit of the language and I had a fantastic time with the people there, which then led me when I went back to decide that I wanted to go to Japan again. So at university, I was looking for opportunities.

Unfortunately, my university, where I then started studying philosophy and history, didn't have any exchange agreements. So I had to find something else. I found a way to do an internship for three months in Tokyo. And during that time, I discovered that there was this interesting university called the National University of Tokyo.

A graduate institute for policy studies, a tiny little institute, not very famous worldwide, but, but well known inside Japan. And they offered a one year master's program in public policy, which was strange. And they didn't even, they didn't even require any kind of background in public policy.

You just needed a bachelor's degree. And with my bachelor's degree in philosophy, I thought I could sign up. And I did, and I went there. in 2011, not really knowing what I was signing up for, but it looked interesting. And then when I went, when I arrived there, I started studying together with people, public officials from Southeast Asia, from Africa,from China and a couple of other countries.

And I started slowly realizing that a master in public policy is the equivalent to an MBA for public officials, you know, people who do economics and work in the big, in the industry and, and the big organizations, private organizations, they do an MBA. Public officials do an MPP.

So I ended up doing an MPP with them. And that was, that was, that was pretty cool.

Steve Hsu: Where in Japan is this place located?

Pascal Lottaz: In Tokyo, in one of the hearts, in one of the centers in Roppongi and Roppongi is famous for its nightlife, not for its universities. This is a really special little Institute. Well, it has its own very interesting history, but the point then was that I did that for one year, I went back for two years to Switzerland, but then regretted going back because I started working, but it wasn't, I was still fascinated with this.

So I signed up for another, for a PhD. They accepted me again, from the same Institute, and I could do my PhD for four years, starting in 2014, in international relations, actually, and that's when I started working on this topic. That I'm now specializing in neutral actors in international relations.

I wrote my thesis then aboutSpain, Sweden, and Switzerland, their diplomacy toward Japan in the second world war, because that just hadn't been worked on. And that became my thesis, and then I found a first job at Waseda University, and now a second gig at Kyoto University.

Steve Hsu: wanted to ask you about language acquisition. So presumably when you were there in high school, you learned to speak Japanese pretty well. At what point could you read kanji well enough to do something like read scholarly literature?

Pascal Lottaz: I still can't.

Steve Hsu: Oh, I

Pascal Lottaz: still Yeah, I So,

The thing about the Japanese language is you can pick up Japanese, spoken language, and go out and drink with people. You cannot pick up kanjis while drinking with them. So, um,language acquisition, Japanese language acquisition to me has always been something that I did with people while talking, which is why conversations with me are fine.

And every day kind of a conversation like this would be more or less fine. except for, let's say I, the problem then is always, if you can't read, you can't really get the words, the expert lingo of certain fields. this one I'm still struggling with and the Kanji themselves I'm struggling with.so it's a little by little process.

I can read enough to decipher emails, mostly, although these days it's also getting much easier with technology, with translation. Software.But in order to read a newspaper, you need around 3, 000 or so kanji, and I only have around 1,500, 2,000 max. Although that's only a third missing, that third is quite crucial because if you don't, if you cannot read a third of the letters in any kind of newspaper, then you just don't get very far.

Steve Hsu: I empathize with you because I'm Chinese American and I appreciate it. My parents tried to teach my brother and myself Chinese when we were young, we went to Chinese school. But we never really mastered the written language, and so I'm always fascinated by someone who can come as an adult and do that.

So mastering kanji is sort of almost equivalent to mastering Chinese characters, at least in terms of difficulty. And so, yeah, I was just curious, and I can empathize with you. It's extremely challenging. I mean, I think this is actually when we later get into this question of geopolitics and things.

I think one of the big problems for America is that there's so few experts here in the national security or intelligence community that can actually just even follow what's being said in ordinary Chinese media or government documents because so few people have the language skills actually to do it.

So I think it's challenging for everyone.

Pascal Lottaz: Yeah. And language skills are crucial. This is that I still, even after 20 years, can properly read the language is a problem. It's, it's more, it's something that I never managed to get around, but the people who do read it, they, they can get a much deeper understanding, especially also of the newspapers, right?

Where, which are quite important in order to understand where the public discussion, the display of the public discussion is, I recommended,to everybody to try to do what I couldn't and get into that, depth of the language if possible, but it always comes at a trade off because especially Kanjis, you just need to learn them one by one. It

hurts.

Steve Hsu: Anyway, you're in a race with A. I. And actually, my children who also grew up here in the United States had the benefit of my wife, who is Taiwanese and obviously is fully literate in Chinese. Now, we tried to keep them bilingual as well. But the thing is, A. I. Is getting better so fast that Uh, to stay ahead of what the A.

I. Can do for you is actually not easy. And so you might lose some motivation if you know the eyes better in the same way that if you're in Germany and everybody you talk to speaks English better than you speak German, it sort of retards your progress and learning German. Right? And here, I think, translation is set to get enormously better in the next few years.

So,

Pascal Lottaz: We do. My guess is we are less than five years away from these things, gaining the ability to do basically live translation, probably less than five.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. Well, they're

Pascal Lottaz: have

Steve Hsu: it on our next iPhones has the basic capacity to even get live translation.

Yeah, you can already buy products that are effective, I mean, they're not perfect, but you can buy universal translators, which just work in your earbuds. So,it'll be a standard feature in your phone pretty soon. So,

Pascal Lottaz: learning a language, a non,European language, has one additional benefit, which is you get a lot of new concepts because some of these concepts you can translate them a little bit, but they, if you understand them for themselves, you gain new neural connections and that itself then helps with thinking.

That's something that we will never be able to replace. So it still makes sense to dive at least into maybe one other language that works differently.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, having been in my case, I first spoke. Mainly Chinese with my parents, Mandarin. And actually they were worried that my brother and I didn't speak English. So they actually switched at some point and started talking to us mostly in English, which would now in hindsight might've been a mistake, but yeah, so my brain somehow was organized mainly for Chinese for a while and then switched to being organized mainly for English.

So, uh, some of those dual concepts are still in there, I think. Yes.

Pascal Lottaz: I mean, the dual concepts, it's more in the way that then you are able to see that other people might do things differently. And I, my, my favorite example is that, you know, in Japanese, you also conjugate verbs, but you don't conjugate them according to, like first, second, third person, you, you conjugate them according to, hierarchy and politeness, which is a, which is a different way.

And you don't, you have,uh, auxiliary verbs. Everything we do, in European language with auxiliary verbs, in Japanese, you do with verb endings. And that's an interesting way of approaching the same problem or how a language solves the same problem. And once you get that, you get a couple of more ways to express stuff.

And you suddenly start seeing why Japanese, when they speak English, do phrase certain things in a slightly quirky way. But yeah, it's, it's interesting. So these kinds of things, it's always valuable to have one more approach.

Steve Hsu: When you, when you lecture, are you lecturing in English or Japanese?

Pascal Lottaz: all of my lectures so far have been in English. I only occasionally give a little talk or something in Japanese, but it usually hurts me and hurts my audience. So, so far, I try to keep it in English.

Steve Hsu: I get it. Yeah, I'm actually, I'm going to be giving some physics lectures in Shanghai and Beijing later this fall. And I always have to say in some kind of apologetic way with the little Chinese that I know, I say, I apologize for giving the lecture in English. And then I give the lecture in English. So, I, I feel for you.

Yes,

Pascal Lottaz: guest lecture to basically apologize in Japanese, then talk in English, but add a lot of Japanese, left and right, wherever I think it helps to explain a concept or, you know, have the slides in Japanese actually. That also helps. So we get to express ourselves freely and the audience has a good chance of understanding most of what we want to bring across.

Steve Hsu: got it.

So, maybe we can switch gears a little bit now and talk about it. I'd like to return to Japan later. If we have time to talk about the geopolitical forces at work, in the competition between the US and China, where did Japan and perhaps South Korea go, where will they find themselves in the coming decade?

But before we get to that, maybe we can talk about it. The concept of. A neutral country, which I feel in the, in the current, discourse about Ukraine, and maybe this is one of your main points has been sort of forgotten that, you know, if you're a smaller country next to a great power, sometimes the best thing to do is just try to stay out of maybe if you can avoid being dominated, great, try to be neutral.

So you can't be used by a distant great power as a proxy against your neighbor. That whole concept of neutrality is, am I right in thinking that that is the, that is among the concepts that you study in your academic work?

Pascal Lottaz: That's my main subject. That's the name of my channel. And that's the name of what I do because, I do think we have international relations. There is no, there's no, a structured approach towards studying those. Powers that are not involved in war while others are the neutrals always fall by the wayside because you know, When you study war who the hell would be interested in those who didn't fight but and that's my claim thereby we disregard a very important component of what I call the conflict constellation So we have to we have a main conflict and that one is of course between the powers that then Is end up fighting.

But if you look at the war between Russia and Ukraine, and you only analyze Russia and Ukraine, you're missing the point. There's an entire thing going on around it. And actually the conflict has different layers. And then there's different actors involved in that. And this in and of itself is no secret and of course, historians and IR specialists also look at others, but then there's an entire separate component and that's the third parties that try to stay out.

So at the moment in the hot shooting war between Russia and Ukraine, we have two main belligerents, but then we have others that support their respective sides to various degrees. You know, the Europeans and North Americans, Ukraine with love. Everything except boots on the ground. And the Belarusians and the UK and Iranians and even China to certain degrees, but in very, very different ways.

But those are powers that play a role. And then we have countries that. Try to completely somehow take themselves out like India, like, Southeast Asia, South America, all of the African States, but they're then still being accused of basically by not sending weapons and supporting the other side.

And that kind of dynamic is a very classical thing to happen all the time and everywhere. And if we take these ones out of the picture, we don't get the conflict, right? So that's the same for the first world war, the second world war, but also for the smaller wars. And there's no structured framework.

And I try to create such because current IR often frames these non involved powers as auxiliary, and then it developed new concepts in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, like balancing and hedging and bandwagoning in order In fancy terms, describe something which a lot of these countries and these actors never use for themselves.

I've never heard any foreign minister saying that, you know, we are going to balance, are we going to hedge? Never heard that, but a lot of them sometimes say, look, we're going to stay out, some say we're going to stay neutral. And the concept of neutrality itself has, even in international law, a history of at least around.

and so there is a very traditional thing and I claim it's not just traditional, it's baked into the way the conflict works. And if we study that more, more systematically, then maybe we can deconstruct the mechanics of conflicts and understand them better. And hopefully find ways to influence them and tame these beasts.

I keep looking at war as a defect, something like cancer, and I'm not the first one to do that. There's a whole school of thought that thinks of war as a, as a sickness. It's a cancer that if it goes very bad, will consume us all, right? It will kill its host. But it's a cancer because it's a strange thing.

It's a dumb thing to do for a species to kill its own members. It's a dumb thing to do. And for some reason we cannot get rid of it, but we cannot get rid of it because we cannot properly deconstruct conflict. And, neutrality is one part of a conflict. So I'm, though. I keep saying, like, imagine neutrality as a triangle with the belligerents on two sides and the neutral is the third part of the triangle and the point is the neutral has a normal relationship with both belligerents while the belligerents are at war with each other and that triangular situation is the point.

basis for all the troubles. So naturally both belligerents will put pressure on the neutral to do something in their favor and not for the other one. And that then creates a push and pull. And it's of course not just three, it's like multi dimensional and that creates a network, so that's what I'm working on.

Steve Hsu: Great. Now, I, you know, the people that I mentioned, that I have had on my podcast in the past and through whom I found you, I would say, and lumping you in with them, they endorse a kind of view that there is a plausible counterfactual.

Where Ukraine just kind of stayed neutral vis a vis Russia and the United States, and this whole war could have been avoided.

And I think the dominant narrative in Europe and the United States is that that's just a fantasy. Putin is such an evil person, there was no avoiding this war. Could you talk a little bit about that point of view, which I think is your point of view? And also whether in the academic community that you're in, is that an accepted point of view?

Because certainly the, in the, in the sort of mainstream media narrative in the U. S. it's not an accepted point of view. So maybe you could talk about that.

Pascal Lottaz: I would say it's not an accepted point of view, but I think the evidence speaks for itself, which is that Ukraine ever since its independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved itself, right? it was basically the three, right? It was Russia, on the Yeltsin Ukraine and Belarus coming together, deciding to dissolve the Soviet Union.

And ever since then, Ukraine was basically going through political phases in which, you had political forces in power that were more pro neutralist. and powers that were more pro,West leaning.

Steve Hsu: Mm

Pascal Lottaz: a German colleague, David Nowak wrote a very nice essay for one of my first edited volumes back in 2018,about where Ukraine was standing in 2018, after several of several such cycles, where he showed very beautifully, you know, how since 1995, when Ukraine got its, it's more or less.

First concrete constitution. I mean, they had constitutions before, but they kept changing in 1995. They made one that stuck. And in that one, there was a neutrality clause that, and the neutrality clause was framed in an interesting way, which is that, Ukraine will strive to be neutral, not that Ukraine is neutral, but strive to be neutral and that clause basically expressed something very important, right?

Which is that the people. In the nineties understood that, you know, Ukraine, while not being part of any kind of, CIS, like the Russia's, like the post Soviet kind of military structure, which is a very, very loose structure, though they didn't join that, but at the same time, of course, you couldn't join, the, any kind of NATO expansion that was already being planned.

Being talked about at that time. So you stay, you remain your own thing. you are a buffer zone and you try to have good connections with everybody. And you had these ups and downs,again, more Western leaning, more neutralist forces, but then over time, The narrative in the West changed to the point that they started demonizing any kind of neutralist forces.

And of course, in 2014, I mean 20 to 10 to 14, when, Mr. Kovich was in power, Mr. Kovich was a neutralist, he said, we will try to have the best relationship with both sides and,that was something then that especially certain, neoconservative circles in the U. S. also rallied against and, and actively tried to say like, no, you should come into onto our side that they supported forces.

And we know that this is not a secret. And whatever you think about the Maidan protests in 2000, 1314,whether they were instigated or naturally occurring, or, you know, you follow what Jeffrey Sox is saying, whether or not the U S had a hand in it, that there were circles in the U S and Europe who tried to woo Ukraine over.

I think that one is undisputed. and that you had people who wanted that. And. The thing is that the Russians, they were fine. So between 1995 and 2014, Crimea was part of Ukraine. Russia had a military base in Crimea, which leads to the question, how can Ukraine be neutral if it has a military basis, but the point is neutrality is a very fuzzy concept and if it works as in keeping a state stable.

And it was fine. Integrated and stable. And it was fine with the connections it had, right? Because you always start from where you left off previously in history. And then this whole arrangement started collapsing. If you look at the timeline, the collapse starts with the Maidan protests and then the elected government is ousted, replaced by a government support that, that was very much in favor of the neoconservative vision, also of like getting closer to NATO, and that was the first time that Russia had to fear that it might lose its port.

In Sevastopol port, right? And then Russia did something that nobody expected at the time. It didn't, it basically took Crimea by having like, by now we know it was probably Wagner groups who entered and without firing a single shot, they managed to get military control over Crimea, then had a referendum,

Steve Hsu: Quick question about that event. Was that really surprising to people? Because I, I guess, I mean, I, I obviously didn't follow any of this as carefully as someone like you, but I was following it and I wasn't that surprised that they went into Crimea everyone who's played military board games in Europe realized they don't want to give up that access to this Black Sea and that they would have to do something, right?

So, I guess, was it surprising to everybody else that,uh, they went into Crimea at that point?

Pascal Lottaz: Let me put it like this. It was surprising to me. I hadn't heard of anyone talking about that possibility and the fact that it happened the way it happened with personnel that were unmarked, right? No, no Russian flags, but military people. And that there was no, no Ukrainian defense, nor any kind of, there was no narrative defense either.

You know how in 2022, before the full scaling, Russia's full scale invasion or counter offensive or offensive, whatever you want to call it, special military operation, whatever it is,Before that you had narrative narratives from, especially from the U S saying like, Oh, an invasion is imminent and invasion is imminent.

Don't do it. Don't do it. And Western leaders even went to Moscow saying, don't do it. And then it happened anyway. You had nothing, nothing of that sort in 2014. So I think that step was something that was probably not foreseen, at least not in that way or in that speed. And it was highly successful.

Right. And the point then is politically that after that happened, the Ukrainian Rada. Change that neutrality clause in the constitution to say that it replaced it, right? Ukraine strives to be neutral while Ukraine strives to be a NATO member.

Steve Hsu: Yes,

Pascal Lottaz: from there, the escalation spiral kept turning. You then have this approach at the Minsk agreements one and two.

the Donbass, the, the separatism in the Donbass, which was supported by Russia, right? With, with troops and weapons and so on, that never ceased. And this, Minsk agreements never, were never completed and then for a long time, and we don't have a complete one. We're never successful.

And then in 2022, the whole thing blew up, even. even bigger,after shelling of the Donbass and then an attack. and it only got worse from there in 2022 in April, we almost had an agreement. And we now know that agreement would have cemented Ukraine's neutrality. And that again, Was sunk. And it took me a whole year to understand why neutrality failed.

Because at the time I was of this sure conviction that this would be, this is the way to solve the problem. Right? So the Europeans and the Americans and the Ukrainians and the Russians, they all have a common interest in making this work. Was my naive idea when I was still thinking that international relations was inherently, you just need to find the right constellation and everything will work out.

No, it isn't. This was actively sabotaged by Western powers because they're the forces in power, these neoconservative circles, they want to solve the conflict militarily, and they want to beat the Russians into submission, and that was the strategy, and the strategy didn't work, and so neutrality only works,There are several instances how neutrality can work, but in a situation like this, just like with Laos and Cambodia and the Vietnam War, it only works when fragile state, for fragile states, when the others actually want it to work.

If fragile states cannot defend their own neutrality or don't want to, then it ain't going to work. And that's the tragedy we have now. So that's the view I've come to, by 2024.

Steve Hsu: Right.

Now, I guess I, my interpretation of events and sort of the theoretical framework around them is, I think, similar to yours. In conversations I have, I'm often talking to someone, it might be on Twitter, in which case it's, you know, totally, potentially totally unserious. It could be talking to some, you know, highly educated,um, You know, professor or tech entrepreneur or billionaire, whatever investor people who are very quote high information, but probably embedded in this kind of Western,know, standard narrative. I can only with limited success move them. With specific facts about what happened, what Naftali Bennett said, you know, about his negotiations, you know, I can only move them a little bit. I'm curious, though, in your circles where you're talking to professionals, I would like to say, professionals who think about IR and diplomacy and history. How does that dialogue work? Because I think the facts are all on your side. So are you able, like, will they give you an hour to present your facts? And then can they be moved? Or is there something that stops them from coming over to your perspective on these things?

Pascal Lottaz: No, there's still, we all have our mental barriers for everybody. And the funny thing is that everybody thinks the facts are on their side. So we're not alone with that unites us, you know, with the other group.

Steve Hsu: But sometimes, just to give you an example, because a friend of mine who was in the, who worked at number 10 Downing Street when Boris was there, in fact, when Boris went to scuttle the negotiations, he didn't realize, how close a deal was, to being done. He subsequently, I think because I pointed it to Uh, looked at the conversation. I think it was in Hebrew, right? So Naftali Bennett left office and so enough for the audience. Naftali Bennett was the prime minister of Israel, and he was actually involved in brokering, I guess this would have been March, April 2022, potentially something that could have possibly settled this whole war before half a million or a million people got killed.

and after he left office, he gave a series of long interviews, about those negotiations, and I think they're in Hebrew. But I think my friend actually, who's in the UK, got them translated, put subtitles on the video and then released the video because he wanted other people in the British government to understand the reality.

Right? So, there could be cases where they're just facts that are unavailable, like fat evidence that might move people's priors to posteriors, which they don't have access to, but you can make them. Like, I think you're aware of everything. So, you could make them aware of facts that they weren't previously aware of.

And then the question is, are they rational enough for their views to change? And are the academics you're surrounded by any better than the people that I have to deal with on a day to day basis?

Pascal Lottaz: I would say like, in my circles with people who study this seriously, you can have a serious debate and you can, you listen to each other, but you still end up at a, in, it's hard to describe because it has nothing to do with intelligence, nothing. It's more a form of world view, the way you understand how things are happening. If your basic understanding is, and it's a problem of analysis. It's the analysis. If your analysis is that this war ultimately happened because Vladimir Putin is an imperialist Hitlerite who wants to rebuild the Soviet Union and you then have your facts, right?

And your facts are not wrong. Your facts are, we have these 20 speeches that they can show me where he said, you know, we need to have our sphere of influence. We need to dominate. We need to, we, it, the greatest strategy is that the, of the 20th century is the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he actually said, but I mean, I could put the asterisk and so on and not, but if that is the analysis of the framework under which you operate, then Putin is like Hitler is a sentence that is.

Like the sky is blue. If I didn't come along and say like, look, but the sky is actually green. Then he will repeat to me and say like, no, look up, the sky is blue. And then I will say no, no, it's green. And then he will, he will come to the conclusion that I'm either colorblind or dumb or misleading. Then people start doing the following, which is they rationalize my utterances, my analysis in the, within their framework and usually, and whether it's in a dumb way in Twitter or in the intelligent way in academia is to say like, okay, either this person is paid by the Kremlin to say what he says. So he's bought. Or he's dumb. Or he's naive. One of these three. That's then, that then works within their worldview, within their analysis of how things work, and then they can wrap it up and put it aside and they don't need to worry about this anymore.

And we do the same with. With the other side, right? We then explain their misanalysis, their misinterpretation within our frameworks. And I'm a relativist. I don't think there's an objective reality outside and, conscious of outside the interpretations of a conscious or conscious observer.

I cannot tell. Whether I'm on the right side or not, I just have to hope that my analysis is closer to how, you know, how, to a productive version of reality. And productive to me is one in which we manage conflict at a below war threshold. And I think the other side is definitely one then.

Under that analytical framework, that leads you to the conclusion that, well, we got to fight this war. You know, we need more weapons. Stoltenberg is right. Weapons are the way to peace. Therefore, let's fight the war. And I'm saying this is the pro war narrative, which is based on a pro war analysis.

And I have, I have another analysis, which I hope It's more conductive, but then the other side keeps telling it keeps calling us appeasers. We are aggressively using a peace approach, which is pretty nasty, but that's where we are stuck as a society. And then there's circles that fuel this.

Of course, for political gain and purposes, and thereby we keep the tragedies alive.

Steve Hsu: You know, I, I thought your analysis of the psychology of the other side and how they would react to the sort of new information or arguments that you might give them was good. Was pretty spot on because usually the response I get, to that particular fact about the Naftali Bennett negotiations and what he said about it is usually just, Oh, Steve, you're so naive, even if they had signed that agreement, Putin is so evil, he wasn't going to live up to that agreement.

And so, therefore, why are you wasting my time with this particular set of anecdotes? Because it doesn't matter. Right? So, so you're, I think your characterization of the other is is spot on

Pascal Lottaz: The best thing we can do is then pierce their narrative a little bit. And usually with like these questions, for instance, when, if somebody comes along and says, you know, Putin and Xi, they hate democracies. They just want autocracies everywhere because they're easy to control. And then you say like, okay, yeah, sure, sure.

I see. I see your point. It's funny though. Mongolia, isn't that a funny case, you know, sandwiched between Russia and China. And, they are by any definition and standard, a blooming democracy, multi party system, peaceful transition of power, ever more democracy, independent judiciary, really a model case of democratic development right next to these autocracies.

And both of them don't worry about it, right? They don't care and they have a good relationship. Isn't it funny? Then you, they will start explaining that, ah, yeah, you know, this one is different because then they actually have to flip to our side and say like, it's different because they are not a problem to either side.

So they leave them alone. They, the Mongolians are,uh, a satellite anyhow. Okay. So it's not just. The urge to transform everybody into autocracies. There are other factors too. Fine. And then you can start piercing them and you can actually use these neutral places quite a lot. It's like, okay.

So when the narrative is like the whole world condemned the invasion, the whole world is on the side of Ukraine. It's like. So what about these 50 odd African states? What about Southeast Asia? And what about South America? I know they don't count. They don't count.

Steve Hsu: 85 percent of the world's population probably, right? So,

Pascal Lottaz: So you need to pierce the narrative a little bit.

But the best way to do that is by strategically questioning the tenants of the other side. And I, in this sense, I do believe that our analysis is not invincible, but it is easier to use the explanatory variables from within our analysis. to defend it than it is for the other side. On the other hand, if you poke it a bit, it deflates pretty quickly.

And then the only thing these people have left or the other side has left is then to shift the reference frame and go to another, to go to another thing and another thing and leave that one behind.

Steve Hsu: so, you know, in the idealized picture of academia, well, okay, I come from physics, for example, there's some hope that eventually the evidence, the weight of evidence from physics experiments becomes so predominant that even the recalcitrant other side, switches to the new theory or something. and maybe one could hope in your academic discipline that can happen.

In the broader world, it seems like there's kind of no hope. One example I always give is, you know, we fought this Iraq war and this Afghanistan war, the U. S. forever wars. For the U. S. Which I think clearly is disastrous for us? But in the broader sphere, not the academic sphere in the broader sphere, one can just forget about it.

We don't even talk about America. We were obsessed with this stupid, stupid antics in America for 20 years, and now we don't talk about it at all. And it seems plausible to me that if Ukraine goes away, maybe there's some settlement where the Russians actually end up recovering a lot of territory in Ukraine.

We'll just stop talking about it. Does that seem plausible to you?

Pascal Lottaz: Yeah. Yeah. At some point. one of the strategies of. One of the various strategies is to memory hole people about certain occurrences. And we see how it, especially the U. S. public, is currently being memory holed about Joseph Biden. It's difficult to remember that he is still the president.

It's like he's being like that completely, and the same will happen with Ukraine. The same happens with other wars. The same happened with Laos and Cambodia. Nobody remembers why the hell. They went to hell and because like, you just keep ignoring their expressiveness, they're being like. Excluded from, from the main narrative about the Vietnam war.

But let me put this one aside because one of the things that's really interesting and physics is a wonderful example is that it all boils down to this singular question, whether there is an observer independent reality, yes or no. And physics is so interesting because physics is so fundamental and all the natural sciences have this.

have this thing where they can strive toward discovering how the universe works. Apart from us, right? And, and social sciences, and by the way, I kind of ran about social sciences. Social sciences are a scam. They're not science, hard sciences, natural sciences. They are sciences where you try to discover how things work and you can do experiments and so on.

Social sciences should be really called social studies. That would be the right way because these ones depend even more upon the analytical framework that you apply to them in what they render. And, but then social science sciences, they have this envy of the natural sciences and they try to reproduce them, but thereby they just make the scan worse because you're pretending that you're an observer independent,science.

But even the physicists, that's why they are so interesting, had to come to the point. To a point where they said like, well, we actually don't know Schrodinger's cat Schrodinger made This thought experiment of the, of the cat that was simultaneously alive and dead in order to ridicule the other side to say like, look, if your guys is interpretation, if the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, then I can construct a thought experiment in which a cat is at the same time alive and dead.

And that's obviously impossible, but that. That turned out to be so fundamental to this understanding that this might actually be possible, although it should be logically impossible, that it became baked into quantum physics, right? And people Is this dispute settled or not,

Steve Hsu: So I, I work in this area and we could spend the whole podcast talking about it, but let me put it this way. The philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics are still somewhat unsettled among physicists. They're different. Mm hmm. sort of camps that disagree. However, the empirical fact, the experiment, the things that experimental physicists are able to do in the lab, that's the final arbiter.

And so over time, as our technology gets better and better, we are able to create more and more complex Schrodinger cat-like states. So we now can put a living virus or some small object, like a little bug or something. into a Schrodinger cat state where the thing is clearly in a superposition state, uh, not necessarily alive or dead, but maybe at position x and position x prime.

And can, we can then cause them to reinterfere. So, we know that we actually made them into this weird Schrodinger cat state, and then we reinterfered them. and the big mental block, it's similar to the mental block that you and I were just previously discussing, like, trying to understand what really happened in Ukraine.

Was this a U. S. designed proxy war to weaken Russia, or was it a Russian invasion of Ukraine? Right, so that, mental block of trying to understand what really happened, physicists are Still, most of the bulk of physicists are still reluctant to admit because we can do this to bugs or viruses in the laboratory or systems of millions of atoms, there's every possibility that you and I are in a superposition state now, there's, there's no reason of principle preventing that.

So the idea that, in fact, quantum mechanics is a description of a universe that's constantly splitting into different branches of the wave function seems to be supported. By the best that we can do in the laboratory. Now, it could be at some even more macroscopic scale. We find no, you can't make superposition states of things bigger than, know, this bug.

But as far as we can tell, we just keep pushing and we can make bigger and bigger and more complicated superposition states and control them. So there's no reason why you and I couldn't be in superposition states right now and that, but the field hasn't accepted this yet. The typical working physicist has not accepted this yet.

So, so it's a kind of

Pascal Lottaz: Isn't it interesting? I mean, if we are not able as a species to, to come to common interpretations of something as fundamental as particle physics, how the hell are we supposed to make up our minds about the much, much more macroscopic kind of social environment we're living in and what people think and so on.

This just shows to me that the, that we are interacting, even as scientists, not even like, especially as, as scientists and historians and, political analysts in a, a field that is dominated by interpretations of the world. Analysis. So we need to always ask people. So what's your analysis of the situation in order to understand what we can work with and whether the analysis are, go together, like.

You and I, we can have a different kind of conversation than if we had to go against each other and explain to each other how we think, but, this, I don't think, I mean, this is what Socrates struggled with, with Plato and Aristotle were doing. This is what we are doing. This is what people in 2000 years will still be doing.

unless we can, We actually have definite proof that there is an observer independent reality and then we just figure out that reality and everything else becomes mute. But I don't think we'll go there. We live in a contingent world, which then, so funnily enough, means that even particle physics becomes a discursive discipline.

Steve Hsu: I think that, at least in the fields that you characterize as social studies or history, it's too much to ask that you can force the whole field to converge on a particular interpretation. History or events. I think the best you can do is try to make your own rigorous arguments and there will be some people you agree with.

And, you know, in your own subset, you can try to advance a deeper, deeper understanding, but you can never eradicate this other group that just violently disagrees with you. What can you do? Right? So, uh, they all have tenure too. Right? So, yeah.

Pascal Lottaz: They do. And we need that. We need that because there's always the possibility that we are wrong. And if we are wrong, we would really like to have somebody there who can prove us wrong. That's baked in. The problem is once one of these sites starts saying, Oh no, actually these people shouldn't exist.

They should have their tenor cut. They should have their channels switched off. They should be silent because they are part of the problem. Once that happens, you get into a very toxic environment. And we've seen that. We've seen that, right? We've seen that with the way that religion, organized religion used to work.

We've seen how fascist regimes tend to work.

So open societies usually encourage dissent, whereas closed societies try to sell to everybody that if you're a good person, you agree with them, with the top down narrative. And in this sense of analyzing war, it is a responsibility of us to try also to dissent with current narratives and try to offer different interpretations and hope that nobody calls us fake news, but they do that anyhow. Then again, it's what we are operating in.

Steve Hsu: So, maybe, moving to a slightly easier question epistemologically, so, forgetting about the origins of the conflict, do you have a sense of how it's going? Like, is there a relatively high conviction prediction you would make about where things will be in six months or a year?

Yeah,

Pascal Lottaz: No, the thing is that wars tend to move in unpredictable ways because at any point in time, something that nobody has foreseen can change the cards. One thing that we have seen over the last two and a half years is that a lot depends. Almost everything depends on the strength of the West, right, to, to support Ukraine.

On the other hand, the initial idea was that the, the reason why, the 2022 kind of peace, talks were sabotaged was because there were enough people who believed that they could break Russia and Russia didn't break Russia actually proved that its economy is resilient, that it's, that it has manufacturing capacity, that it can produce all of these weapons, that it can outproduce not just Ukraine, but the entire world.

Western camp, right? the entire NATO camp that has been sending weapons in a way, you know, Russia has not only demilitarized Ukraine and has demilitarized militarily, NATO to a very large extent,but there is. NATO is not a dead cat. NATO could actually send troops. NATO boots on the ground would be the way to change the war.

And at, in my view, and I tend to agree here with Alexander Mercury's, of Duran, who I watch a lot and, and a couple of other analysts,on YouTube, which are one of my sources of information, that, if. At the moment, the strategy of Ukraine might be to escalate, right? That's the only chance they have of drawing NATO completely in, which would be doing something so crazy inside Russia that Russia would have to do something crazy back, which would then lead NATO to intervene.

That is still a possibility. If Ukraine managed to send a missile straight into the Kremlin, kill Sakharova and a couple of others, then, well, what Russia would have to strike back and basically maybe use a tactical nuke or destroy the Kremlin? A large part of Kiev or whatever it is, and then the West would pretend to be super shocked and probably use their own.

So escalation is still on the cards. On the other hand, when we look at the battlefield situation at the moment, it looks as though, well, Kursk isn't going anywhere. On the other hand, the Donbass seems to be. Like the Russians now seem to be in a really forward offensive, right? And if they managed to get to the Dnieper then, and get the Ukrainians out of Kursk, which it looks like it was likely if things remain the same.

All things equal. and then we will get to the point where we get nearer to a, you know, Korean scenario where Ukraine will be permanently divided, or like from the Russian perspective, you know, incorporated, although the West and the rest of Ukraine will probably never accept that. And then the question is, will the, will we have a real stalemate with the end of,exchange of fire or will the East, the West Ukrainian part go into a pinprick, a kind of a strategy of still firing as much as they can in order to create continuous hurt.

And we know that there are neoconservative circles in the U. S. who Hillary Clinton, who said, you know, Afghanistan is the model. Let's make Ukraine, let's turn it into an Afghanistan for the Russians, a poison pill that they are, that they have to swallow. These people are horrible, right? They are horrible, but that's how they think and that's an option. The other option is of course that it dies down and then you just have a hard demarcation line, but overall we have no more dying that's happening on both sides it's a very unhappy situation, but as one of my Colleagues heinz gertner once said for ukraine It's either going to be permanent neutrality or permanent division One of the two and it looks like it's going to be it's definitely going to be the second one Not the first one that train has Departed the station like two years ago.

It's an unfortunate situation. We just have to hope it doesn't get worse. It still has the potential. So if we are in the, you know, in a multiverse, it might go towards de escalation and hard stalemate. It might go into more escalation and could still drag in other countries and kill millions of more people.

Steve Hsu: I think I, I have more or less the same interpretation as you, and I also agree that, Zelensky clearly wants, I mean, his, his only way forward is to escalate this and drag, NATO into the conflict the same way with Bibi, to try to create a wider conflict between the United States, involving the United States and Iran, otherwise they're just in losing positions.

It is a very dangerous time for the world right now.

Pascal Lottaz: It is, unfortunately, I, I do hope that the reason comes back, but one of the things that we, especially realists at the moment, have a hard time explaining is why Europe is so willing, to go down this path, which is so self-destructive. because usually realism is based on the idea that every state looks after its own affairs and tries to get the best out of itself.

Like it's a very, ruthless world. But what we are seeing right now is that there are several states. Almost all European states that are willing to give up their own security for the greater, U S NATO project of U S dominance actually. Right. And this is, you can explain it.

There are ways to make sense out of it, but it is a crisis of realism, at least for the Europeans.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I, this is a topic I discuss a lot with certain people, I was just in Frankfurt at a meeting with, actually a bunch of, I, I like to call them oligarchs, basically like super wealthy elites and some political leaders and such, and I actually advocated the idea that a lot of the top European politicians are probably in some sense under the control of United States security services because if you go back to Snowden and to Wikileaks We know that, for example, the Americans were monitoring Angela Merkel's cell phone for something like a decade.

And they also did the same to some, several presidents of France. And, normally people think, oh, this kind of spying is so that I can learn the plans of the German leadership by listening. But actually that's not the best use of it. The best use of it is if you can monitor the phone of a particular European political leader, you probably know who they're having an affair with.

You probably know who they took a bribe from. You probably know, you probably have a recording of them using some racist language that they shouldn't have used or something. So all you have to do is just have someone from the State Department, i. e. CIA, just visit with them and say, Hey, you know what?

We intercepted these Russian and Chinese hackers. They were monitoring your phone and this is what we intercepted. It would be terrible if this information were to get out. And by the way, can you make sure that,uh, you know, we keep sending, you guys keep sending weapons or leopard tanks to Ukraine, right?

So, now, some people will say to me, Steve, this is insane. This is not actually happening. You're too imaginative. And then other people will say, yeah, of course that kind of thing is happening. All the time, and I obviously, it's very tough to know to what extent these kinds of things are going on.

But I think the reality is the observable reality, which I agree with you on this is that it doesn't seem like the European leadership is acting in the interest of their own countries and are acting in the interest of the U. S. Empire, mostly. So why? Why is that?

Pascal Lottaz: This is the point where certain people ascribe to our camp and similar camps, this, the term of conspiracy theorists, right? These people, they believe that they're nefarious powers, that there's a nefarious power center, Klaus Schwab, who secretly controls everything.

And, no, it's just, There are, there are different actors in the entire game, and this is an eight billion people game, right? The entire planet. We are a self organizing planet, and we are bad at self organizing, and the political tactics that you use are everything you need. And all and everything you can in order to get what your vision of the future is, right?

And we know that in the United States is a very complex, political beast that is composed of like, you know, several branches, but it also comprises about 20 or so security agencies that are not under parliamentary control because they can just refuse to answer any kind of questions.

We know that there are, we know that there are elite Circles that, that interact with each other and sometimes fly on Epstein Island in order to do things and that they are probably an Epstein list, but it would never comes out because people start mysteriously dying in their cells and so on and so forth, you know, all of these things that are murky and the background that we know that they spy on others on, on adversaries and allies, and these things, they do go together, but we cannot know about them at the same time.

We also understand that there are. Very real incentive structures and that there are sensible narratives. If the narrative is that, If Ukraine loses, then tomorrow the Russians will be in Berlin again. If that's, if you believe that narrative, then the logical thing to do is to send weapons to Ukraine, right?

Because defending Ukraine is defending yourself.

So it makes sense, in terms of self preservation, how do you get there to that stupid narrative not just by control over the actors, but you also create an incentive structure. And we are seeing that at the moment, right? You have a. You have an incentive structure in which the highest positions are.

In the ones that get your name, not just on a little plate of honor or like on a portrait somewhere in the, the,in any kind of parliamentary hall, the highest offices are not The ones of national office anymore. We have created a supra national office and you want to be the commission leader, right in the EU.

You want to be, what's better to be prime minister of Estonia or to be the foreign policy chief of the EU? Well, she immediately decided. Kayak colors to take the second one and ditch the first one. and NATO, you know, NATO and NATO leadership and NATO top positions are gangled in front of a European audience for grabs.

Right. And we can see how these elites are very eager to do what it takes in order to get to these higher positions. And they're all somehow linked to the United States, which is not a conspiracy theory. That's just how it works. And then the incentive structure becomes one in which then leaders are willing to turn a blind eye to something like Nord Stream, and that's a very classical traditional way in which alliances work, you know, military alliances always have the purpose of like, they're always directed toward the outside, but just as much.

Toward the inside in order to, you know, tame your own, Alliance members. And that's nothing new. The war so packed with the exception of Afghanistan was, Oh, it was only used against its own members. Hungary in 56 against Czechoslovakia in 68. And against Poland without actual intervention, but in the eighties, it was used to threaten Poland.

You either fall in line or else. And, Afghanistan is the one example where it was used, externally, but we know that Ismay Hastings, the first general secretary of NATO once said, the purpose of NATO is to keep the Americans in the Russians out of the Germans. It's not a secret.

It's just how these structures work. And it's a social phenomenon.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I would say that quite a few of the European elites just buy the whole standard narrative. As you said, if we don't fight them in Ukraine, Putin will be in Berlin soon, right? So they really believe that, as incredible as it seems to you and me. yeah, I think most of the elites actually just accept that narrative.

Pascal Lottaz: I, that's, that's my question because intelligent people, I wonder whether they actually believe that or whether they understand that it is a convenient narrative, certain people probably do, but other people, I, I serious. And this is, this is a very important question because there's a huge difference between a leader who believes.

His own lies and the leader who knows that they're lies or knows that they're fabrications or that they're highly unlikely. If they believe in it, they will do way more crazy things than if they actually know that this is, we made it up for political purposes. So they at least have a more realistic analysis of the situation.

If it's the first case, then we have a huge problem, which is why I keep saying we need to analyze what these People, how these people probably reason, because that's the only thing that matters. What they say. What reality is doesn't matter that much. What they believe, what reality is matters for the decision taking.

Steve Hsu: I think both types exist. So in the conversations I've had, there are some that sort of doubt the U. S. line and they say, well, of course, the U. S. blew up Nord Stream and things like this. And there are others who will seemingly with great sincerity and, you know, in a kind of informal conversation with some, you know, guy like me who is just an academic over drinks will say, you know, no, no, the rush, didn't the Russians blow that up, right?

So,so, uh, I think both cases exist. People who really buy the standard narrative and then people who realize it's false, but they're playing along maybe because of incentives or maybe because they're compelled to play along. Uh, I think all of these types exist.

Pascal Lottaz: they probably do. They probably do. It's just a question of what the leaders, the decision makers, what they believe, you know, this question of who's running the United States. If Joe Biden is running the United States, you really want to know what he believes.if Jake Sullivan and the State Department basically run foreign policy, then you want to know what they believe.

And, and this is, this is a serious issue for international relations, right? Uh, recently we've seen something quite interesting, which is Jake Sullivan going to China and meeting with Xi Jinping. And, you know, Jake Sullivan is the national security advisor. He's not even a cabinet member. And Xi Jinping has a habit of only meeting equals.

By virtue of him meeting Sullivan, that tells me that probably China kind of recognizes that Sullivan is the kingpin when it comes to foreign policy making. and then you want to know what this person's worldview is, right? And how this person then creates strategy and whether that is a lunatic world or whether it is a realist world dressed up as lunacy,it's quite a crazy world, you know,

Steve Hsu: I think in the, regarding Jake Sullivan,I, I think Xi Jinping, although they met in a hallway. Formally, they didn't meet, right? He met with one year or something else, right? He just came and addressed the group or something and took a photo in the hallway with Jake. But,yeah, but yes, this is the main thing.

It's like, I hope our leaders. are realistic. I hope they're not, they don't believe, they don't actually drink the Kool Aid, but I actually suspect a lot of them actually do drink the Kool Aid, so, pretty scary.

Pascal Lottaz: Self, self deception. And then that becomes dangerous as well. And that, that, then that is something that the other side needs to factor in. And one thing that is interesting, you know, about,I think Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin is that when you listen to the way they talk, they always think in processes.

That's something that I hear much less from, uh, European leaders who are concerned with, who often talk in ways of we need to do X to get to Y. Whereas, at least Vladimir Putin, whose speeches I tried to study. He usually also in his interview with Tucker Carlson and so on, he talks about processes.

We do something that then will lead the political process in a certain way. So. but that one then will also be influenced, of course, by, by the way the other side reacts, but I do hope that this is a useful way of doing international politics, and I would hope that the other, I actually believe the other side sees it that way too.

The idea of the Ukraine war. The proxy war was not so much to the, was of course not to defend Ukraine. The idea was to have a process that leads to the collapse of Russia. and then you have these processes that fight with each other over what's going to, what's going to happen.

And which then means that what we need is not a hard agreement of how to structure security in Europe or worldwide. What we need is two processes that stop going against each other, but that start converging. An example of that is the conference for security and cooperation in Europe, which created OSCE and, you know, which to me was the beginning of the end of the cold war, where you started to have a convergence.

Where detente really started working and then over, over a decade, two decades, basically led to a very prosperous moment, at least for the West and for Russia to a less prosperous one, a non prosperous one, but at least to a deescalated one. and getting there would be the goal, but at the moment, these processes still are, yeah, hard against each other.

And that's the basis of war logic and war mentality, which we're still not out of.

Steve Hsu: So now that we've broadened our scope a little bit outside of Ukraine, I wanted to turn to this other topic that I'm super interested in, which is, from your vantage point in Japan, maybe you can say a little bit about how China U. S. competition might play out, uh, vis a vis the position of Japan and the position of South Korea, in that competition.

Pascal Lottaz: So I've been in Japan now continuously for 10 years and I've done my studies and my PhD in, at a, this institute, which actually is one of the closest things to a think tank in Japan, as you can get, and you know, where we get a lot of these policy talks, and whatnot. and one thing that I realized is that Japan, It's still very much that the decision making process is on the one hand a black box on the other hand to a good point, predictable, in a sense that the Japanese do try to look out for their own country.

So that's something that distinguishes them from the way that politics, the process of politics works at the moment in Europe, where a lot of the Europeans were really sold on, You know, we have to give up our national interest for the interest of the United States and NATO, or the greater interest is more important than a particular one, while Japan still uses the same, narrative and actually the policy circles are, are using the rhetoric that looks like the European rhetoric, they don't act like it.

Then you have an outcome that's different and it usually presents itself by, you know, just the different symptoms. So while on the whole, all the Europeans signed up to the rhetoric and started sending weapons to Ukraine, Japan signed up to the rhetoric, signed up to the sanctions, but didn't send weapons.

So in a sense, the Japanese approach is very similar to the Swiss one. Say yes to the rhetoric, but don't,don't send lethal aid, that horrible, uh,

Steve Hsu: think Japan, didn't Japan also get a carve out so they could continue getting,

Pascal Lottaz: They got, they did get a carve out. Yeah,

Japan is very, very.

Steve Hsu: Yes.

Pascal Lottaz: on carbohydrates, always has been. and they got a carve out for that one on the sanctions and Japan tries to protect its national interests a bit more. And at the end of the day, my claim is that, even when it comes to a war between the U S and China, the slogan dying for Taipei is not something that, you know, more than a couple of lunatics in Japan will sign up for.

The rest will say like, ah, you know, let's not. The problem that Japan has is, of course, that it is an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States. This is, you know, this is where history has this is this history is quite funny, and it has this tendency of producing ironies over ironies. One of the big ironies is that after the second world war, the U S came in, occupied Japan, and then forced Japan to accept, a, a new constitution.

Although, you know, the constitution was negotiated. It was not just the Americans who wrote it. There were like Japanese also added to the constitution, of course, but one of the very important clauses to which also the Japanese added, but which MacArthur signed off and said, this is a good thing. Was That Japan renounces war as a method of international relations and will not maintain a standing army, will not have a, will never use its potential again to make war.

the way they got around the first one is by now, they don't have an army. They have self defense forces.

Steve Hsu: Yes.

Pascal Lottaz: Self defense forces are by, for any purpose and intent, of course, regular forces, but Japan for the last 70 years hasn't used them outside of Japan except for some very specific kind of humanitarian purposes.

very, very, very constrained. So Japan has a relatively well equipped military. That it keeps on a very, very short leash and that itself doesn't want to go abroad. The U. S., the U. S. Self Defense Forces are not warmongers. They are very much, okay, we are here to defend the country. And they don't have a history of it.

Now, this is something the U. S. regrets. And the U. S. now puts a lot of pressure on Japan saying, you should really help us and you should really, go out and fight with us. And the Japanese are like, we would love to, but we can't because of the constitution. And that's something that the Japanese do a lot.

They say, oh, we want to. Really to help you guys, but you know, we can, and it's so bad. They did the same with the economy saying like, ah, we would love to contribute more here and there, but our economy is so bad. You know, we're suffering and have been very successful at selling everybody the idea that since the 1990s, they're going through the worst economic times that Japan has seen, you know, 30 years of stagnation, stagflation, whatever term you want to attribute, come to Japan.

This is a wonderful society, they work like a charm, the trains are beautiful, the toilets are pristine, the general income level of people is, I mean, a lot of people are doing very fine, the social welfare system is working for a large group of people, of course, there are people who fall through the cracks, but in terms of a good society, Japan is really up there, I would say, with, with a couple of Nordic countries and so on, So Japan is very, very good at pretending that it is suffering, but it's doing relatively well, which is, which also serves internal purposes of telling the people, look, certain things we can and we cannot do.

And one more thing to keep in mind is that Japan has a very, very strong three nuclear, no, policy, no production, no possession, no transiting. and This one is baked into Japanese society because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. so there are certain things that Japan militarily is not willing or politically cannot do, but they have U.

S. bases in Tokyo, all over the, all over the country. And the most dangerous one is of course Okinawa, which is huge and it's quite right next to Taiwan. So in case of hypothetical war between China and the U. S. over Taiwan, this would be the place from which the U. S. would launch all its direct support.

Or, In the worst case, even start shooting at China, in which case China has no other option, but to shoot back and take out these military positions, in which case they hit the bases, but they will also automatically hit the U. S. Like, Japanese territory, right? And that is the moment when the self defense forces will get triggered.

So in a sense. Japan has very little chance of escaping the war if it happens, because no country on earth can just accept that its territory is hit by missiles without doing anything against it, even if that territory is actually leased to the United States, unconditionally. So in a way, Japan is structurally baked into this problem, which is why.

War in and about Taiwan is a worst case scenario for Tokyo and Tokyo keeps saying, we don't want this to happen. We don't want this. We don't want this to happen. We don't, we have no interest because again, Japan doesn't want to be a second Ukraine, although they don't say it out loud.

And although I do think that politicians don't think about it in this way, the nationalist tendencies of Japan leads them to try to deescalate. And you can see how Tokyo and Beijing actually have a better, bilateral relationship than Beijing with Washington. And they do have high level talks and there are telephone lines between the ministries of two of defense in order to deescalate.

In case something happens. and although they have disputes and Japan is continuously signing up to the rhetoric of the West. They also simultaneously still try to engage with, with China, which is a. Positive thing and whether it will work to deescalate, I don't know. At the end of the day, if something crazy happens in Taiwan, There's probably nothing that Tokyo can do.if the president of Taiwan steps in front of the cameras and announces, we hereby declare the Republic of Taiwan and simultaneously says, you know, we're not doing anything special. We just changed our name a little bit. China doesn't freak out. And then China will of course freak out because that's the Chinese red line.

No independence. They will. You know, this, this can, this can start. On the other hand, luckily the Taiwanese government at the moment, although they might be in favor of independence, they are not willing to do that because they know the consequences. But if something like this happened, then there's very little Tokyo could do to de escalate, only in theTokyo can only help when there are, reasons for war that are unintentional, like to kind of try to be a, mediary to, to some point, but at this, at the same time now Japan is still, into,augmenting its integration with the U S forces.

So this might lead in a negative way, but I must also say that one of the reasons why Japan is increasing its military budget. In the U. S. media, you read they are increasing the military budget because the U. S. asked them to, and now they're going to become a stronger ally. One of the reasons, and I know that for sure, from military strategists over here, is that they're not that sure anymore about whether or not the U.

S. will really defend Japan if push comes to shove. So they want to have their own abilities and capabilities. And, well, you know, that then gives them the option to say, like, if the U. S. pressures us, To start shooting it against China, and we know this might lead to our destruction. We will now have the ability to say no to that.

On the other hand, it might lead into the way where, where they jointly start threatening China even more and escalate rather than deescalate. But at least for now in 2024, I see Japan still as a rather deescalatory piece in the puzzle.South Korea, I'm not that sure. because their rhetoric toward North Korea is extremely belligerent.

The North Korean towards the South as well.but at least Japan I see as rather de-escalating, even though not, inherently, pacifist. Of course not.

Steve Hsu: Is there any scenario where something is happening in Taiwan and the Japanese government tells the Americans not to fly missions out of Okinawa? Like could that ever be in the cards that they would just say, Hey, don't use our bases. In your operations in the Western Pacific, or is that just

off?

Pascal Lottaz: I mean, at least for the new nuclear realm, that is a given. I mean, officially the U. S. is not allowed to have, to transit even nuclear weapons through, Japanese territory.

Steve Hsu: I meant conventional weapons.

Pascal Lottaz: And conventional weapons, that's the question. I mean, legally speaking, I don't know how far these agreements go. I would have to look that up, whether there's a clause in there that says that Japan has a say in what the US transits and whatnot.

Because I know that for the new agreements between Finland and Sweden, there's a clause that says, the US can transit anything. Anything they want and the other government doesn't even have the right to say like tell us what it is But the Japanese agreement was of course made in in 53 in 1960 so I would have to look that one up, but The likelihood is quite high that if something happens and a Ukraine like situation happens in for Taiwan That the Japanese government would at least unofficially try to put limits on what they can do The U.

S. can do so in order to decrease the risk of Japanese islands becoming a target. Target for China. That would be a rational thing to do while at the same time, they would probably pledge almost unconditional support. but I would expect them to phrase it in a way to signal to Chinathat unconditional support has certain conditions.

So I would think about the likelihood. It's high that they will try to do that, whether they will be successful or not is another question. And of course, at the end of the day, the. The U. S. is at the stronger end of this lever because it has possession of these positions, of these territories and might just choose to ignore Japanese wishes, which then draws Japan further in, which might be in the interest of the U.

S. at that point, because yeah,we know the U. S. is now an expert at fighting proxy wars and fighting proxy wars in several different ways. in several, not dimensions, but, but layers, right? And the pinnacle is Ukraine where you have an entire nation willing and happy. To fight a proxy war. The next best thing then is an unwilling ally to force an unwilling ally to do what it actually doesn't really want to do, but then, you know, go along anyhow.

and so these layers of proxy war fightability are definitely there in, in East Asia and Japan is part of that. Although again, I do hope that Japan's baked in nationalism will. Will work against that force.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I'm curious how explicitly, the the considerations that, uh, you just discussed are kind of, you know, clearly the important ones. Are they discussed explicitly? Like when you attend a talk by some national security analysts in Japan, will they openly discuss like, well, what, what are we going to do if.

Things flare

Pascal Lottaz: They do. They do. I remember that when Japan decided to, now build missiles themselves that could be used, offensively, although offensive, they have very strict doctrines and offensive in the Japanese sense now means that if North Korea launches a missile against Japan, the Japanese now reserve the right to shoot down not only those rockets.

But shoot down the launching pads inside North Korea. So that's the big change that came last year. And that they want to build these things themselves. And, that they increased the military budget to 2 percent GDP. When that happened, there were a lot of debates and discussions also in policy circles, what that meant.

And one of the interesting ones that I attended was by two of my former professors who sat there and they kind of represent two different schools. One who said, we do this in order to be a stronger US ally. We know, we are not just a shield. We are now going to be the spear tip if needed. And it's like, why would you do that?

Why would you be happy about that? But fine. He's there and he's. An important person in that discussion and somebody who thinks very much in terms of deterrence, you know, we have to be threatening in order to be left alone. And then there's this other person, from a professor of mine who, who said, I agree with what you're saying.

On the other hand, there's also this component that, yeah, if we cannot count on the Americans, we can now do it on our own. And we are learning this. Japan has to have needs. Cannot depend that much more on, much longer on the United States, you know, and these two schools of thought, they are not geared against each other.

They're complimentary and they develop that in tandem. And Japan often works through this means of consensus, right? Also in the decision making circles where you, in the end, have a decision made once everybody in the, in the meeting. Can sign off on it for different reasons, but they all sign off on it And if that's the thinking if you have people who want to do deterrence You have thinking people who just want to have indigenous capabilities of self defense then, you know, japan keeps its way open In the future keeps all options open.

And I think that's where they're at the moment. And that's, I think though, a different situation than where the Europeans are in, where the integration with NATO is a matter of fact. Although I must say that the U S Japan Alliance is the backbone of all the security thinking that's happening over here.

the way that NATO is the backbone of security thinking for the Europeans. for Japan, a war. With China between China and the U S is just as scary as the thought of the U of A's second Trump term and Trump basically saying we're going to dissolve the U. S. Japan alliance. We are hereby, you know, contract null and void.

We are leaving by having your basis. We're out of that. Would just as much be a national security crisis for Japan, as would be a war between these two superpowers. The Japanese would very much like to keep things as they are. The status quo has been working for them for 70 years. Very well. So they would like to keep this, but the status quo is fragile and will change as a historian.

That's the only thing I can tell you with certainty, nothing lasts forever. So, and these prep, but the preparations for the future are one that can go on. Both directions. Japan keeps all its options open at the moment.

Steve Hsu: Is there much of a Doomer or U. S. Empire U. S. Imperial decline narrative in Japan where they say, well, we have to prepare for the day when the Americans pull out because they're getting weaker and weaker. Is that narrative, does that narrative have any purchase in Japan?

Pascal Lottaz: Yes, I would say. Not in the sense of a doomer of this, the end, not the end is nigh kind of, talk, but more the, America is an unreliable ally. It's like, you know, Donald Trump really scared the heck out of us because he kept saying, like, he kept pressuring us, for more money and everything.

And, you know, Japan at the time played it very, very smart. Mr. Abe was the first person to fly to the U S within the first week after Donald Trump was elected, always made president and played golf with him. because Abe intuitively understood that. Donald Trump is that kind of animal, a political animal, and kept a relatively okay relationship with him.

But at the same time, the pressure on Japan was mounting and the threat was always, if you don't follow through, then you're on your own. And again, the Japanese are afraid of that because their security doctrine is built around the alliance with the United States, including the nuclear doctrine, right?

That they don't have nuclear weapons themselves, but basically because they can. They have the written guarantee that the US nuclear umbrella extends to Japan. So, but they are aware that this might not always be given for always, which is one of the reasons why Japan has such an advanced, civilian nuclear program.

And no politician will ever say that in front of a camera, but it is implicitly understood by the entire security establishment over here. That, if push comes to shove, Japan has the ability to have nuclear warheads within six months, because the division between military use of, nuclear, nuclear power and nuclear capabilities and the civilian use is purely fictional, it's a policy line.

And that line, the Japanese have everything, including the, The enough uranium or plutonium, stored enriched, Inside the country and the technological know how, plus they know how to miniaturize it in order to mount it on missiles and so on. Everything is there, so it's a question of policy, not a question of ability.

and that one is parked as an option, and that option is not there in the parking space. Because the Japanese think it's unlikely to happen or because the Japanese think it's likely to happen, it's an insurance policy and that the existence of that insurance policy tells me that there's at least enough people in these circles who understand that maybe at some point things will change.

Now, I hope they don't do that because I hate nuclear weapons. On the other hand, if the grand scenario changes, then you have to react to that. So, yeah, Japan at the moment is still. The big problem, of course, is that if Japan does that, Japan is still perceived very negatively in China, in the North, even in South Korea.

And the problem that Japan has is that even in the security circles, a lot of people don't understand how negatively they're perceived and how much afraid these other states are of them. When I hear colleagues from China talk aboutJapan 's threat, I'm like, you know, Japan that the Japan I know doesn't want anything from you.

But of course, the historical memory and the fact that Japan never apologized and so on and so forth, and, creates this threat perception. And the Japanese are historically bad at understanding how others look at them. And then if Japan builds its own indigenous capacities, that then only scares the others.

and even that, you know, this brilliant guy, and I had him on my channel, Narushige Michishita. I respect him very much. He's a realist who understands a lot about military capabilities. Even he says that if Japan increases its military potential, then, you know, China and Korea, they're going to understand it's just for Japan's self defense.

Although this man teaches the security dilemma, when it comes to Japan, he thinks that everybody else is on the same page with Japan, but that's the whole problem. They are not. So this could create downstream war potential. Unintended by current day Japan. But then again, current day Japan is not Japan in 20 years.

And then different generations have this tendency of using what they're given historically differently than it was intended to. So there is a danger of a remilitarized, militaristic Japan, out of design or out of bad luck at the moment. It's not at the moment. Japan has no militaristic desires for the Asian continent.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. I think realistically, that's true. I think, uh, the problem is that on the Chinese side, they keep alive very strongly the memory of the Japanese occupation. And so, that 6 month window that you mentioned, yes, they're very advanced in nuclear science, and they could be. produce a nuclear weapons program very quickly, but very quickly, in those six months,you could easily imagine some kind of precision strike from China trying to basically retard their ability to actually take that step.

And uh, I wouldn't completely rule it out or even the North Koreans. So

Pascal Lottaz: But that would be war. That would be war.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, yeah.

Pascal Lottaz: And, yeah, so this, there is a lot of, there is a lot of, escalation potential, right? In, in, in the region. At the same time, I do believe that we have better chances in East Asia. to de escalate that than in, Eastern Europe,

Steve Hsu: You know,

it's,

Pascal Lottaz: are historically bad.

They're historically bad at de-escalating. They always go into stupidity, uh, when it comes to, you know, interacting with the other, because the Europeans, they do that. They just have war after war, after war, after war. There's no decade in European history where European borders don't change.

The only question is, do they change peacefully or not? And it's more often than not the Europeans choose war because they think that's the, that's a given at the moment, whereas in, in Eastern, in East Asia and South Asia, at least since the decolonial, since decolonization, since the 1950s, borders have changed relatively little. And although there are disputes and they are, there's warfare, and skirmishes, they are being kept on a lower level. And you can see clearly how East and South Asia are better at managing conflict because while India and China are at loggerheads over their border area, they have high level discussions on how to manage them.

They're both part of the BRICS. They still cooperate. So they separate these levels. Which is something the Europeans and Americans, they don't do it's like either with us or against us, ally or foe, choose your side, which is why this neutrality concept has actually more chances here and in the African continent and South America than it has in Europe and the US, which has this with us or against us mentality.

And that's why I think also, if you look at Taiwan, it's such a wonderful example, Taiwan andChina, or let me put it this way, the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China, they are still officially in a state of war. They are even, rhetorically and so on, each other's greatest threats while at the same time, the People's Republic of China is the greatest, the biggest trading partner for the Republic of China, and they have.

People- to-people relations are fine and they have a working arrangement and that is quite a miracle. That's an, it's a situation, a de facto situation that works in a de jure situation that shouldn't. And, we should have a plot that what we need is a replacement for that. Of that implicit arrangement, because the current implicit arrangement is running out of time.

we don't need a solution. We just need something that gets us another one or two generations further ahead, when the conflict will change again, its nature, and then maybe allow for a solution then. and overall. As long as there is not too much foreign interference, I believe that this can remain stable, or that's at least my hope.

Steve Hsu: I think the biggest worry is the same neocons who created this proxy war in Ukraine would create a problem for China and Taiwan as, you know, maybe the last, their last chance to stop the rise of, PRC and that, that,

that's,

yeah. I think the big question is gonna be, again, like, in terms of history, you look at people's expectations of what's gonna happen, and then you look at what actually happened, one more thing that you see is not just the irony, it's one more thing is that you see that Expectations tend to be fulfilled, but in a slightly different way from how they were anticipated.

Pascal Lottaz: there's several examples, but one of them is of course, Pearl Harbor. If you look at the documents of 1940, September, October, November, it is pretty clear that the Americans, they understood that by November, these peace talks, Japanese had two ambassadors in the US, two, a regular one and an extraordinary one that was there just to try to mend ties and to prevent a war.

And by mid end of November, it was clear that this had failed, had failed. And the Japanese started withdrawing. and cutting, cutting like communication channels. And it was clear that something was in preparation. The U S strategists expected an attack, a direct attack on the Philippines. And they started telling their military commanders in the Philippines to get ready. They didn't expect it to happen in Pearl Harbor. So the surprise was the location, not that it happened. So in a sense, if I, then I. Take this and say, like, if we do the same at the moment and everybody expects a war between the US and China to happen through a proxy, and we all look at Taiwan, we might say, like, maybe it's not Taiwan.

Maybe it's going to be this time, the Philippines, you know, where, which is this other place where we have a big problem. Potential for a proxy war with a good part of the population that hates the Chinese enough in order to sign up for a maritime battle with them.

or in some other strategic location, Japan, I think it's unlikely, but both Taiwan and the Philippines could happen.

And maybe it's actually gone, maybe the Philippines is actually more dangerous than. Taiwan, because they seem to me by now to be more closely integrated, operationally and ideologically than the Taiwanese, because the Taiwanese, luckily, they also still have a healthy dose of nationalism, and actually, you know, ties to mainland China That nobody can, dissolve, right, because they're family ties.

The Philippines is developing into a place that starts worrying me even more because the potential of ideological capture is even higher.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I don't really understand what's happening in the Philippines. I mean, Marcos, I think when he was campaigning, he seemed like he was going to have a good relationship with China. But then when he entered office, it seemed like he reversed course pretty strongly. Again, like this might be conspiracy theory, but it does, it does seem like the U.

S. put some leverage on him once he came into office. And, now he's, he's, much more antagonistic toward China than he was before.

Pascal Lottaz: Well, 1 of the things, although I haven't checked on that, and I, I'm sorry, I just need to correct that before I said 1940, but I meant 1941 just just for the record. Sorry about that. When it comes to Marcos, there is talk about him trying to have someone have sex with him. Family assets unfrozen in the United States.

I don't know if that's true, but that is, that's some of the talk and that's possible because his dad is the former dictator of the Philippines, right?and there are, there's certainly a little bit of such leverage on the other hand, you must also sympathize with the Philippines because it's not a lie that China is putting extreme military pressure in the Philippines and occupies,archipelagos and, and features in the Philippines.

South China Sea that is officially recognized by basically everybody else as, as, uh, Belonging to the Philippines. and the case of the Philippines is very, very strong, including in an arbitration tribunal that decided so in 2016. And then during the previous administration of Mr.

Duterte, Duterte tried to play softball with the Chinese and tried to, you know, he was as sweet to China as a Filipino leader could be. And like as sweet and as nice and as accommodating as it could be in the hope to, get reciprocity from China and get China to say like, okay, let's find a way that we both can be happy.

And what I don't understand is why China didn't take that, but why China decided to use that and say like, and add even more claims to even more features. And this, then the next administration, of course, didn't say like, fine, if this doesn't work, then let's flip the table and let's go to the restaurant to the Americans.

Because the Chinese obviously don't want to play ball. And if you ask Chinese experts, they say like, yeah, but Pascal, you know, these are Chinese features. I mean, how could we accept that the Filipinos occupy our features? It's like, yeah, but can you see that from the Filipino perspective? And they go like, yeah, but you know, China has these historical rights and so on.

We need to defend ourselves. So both of these. China, Chinese and Filipinos think out of this box of, we are defending ourselves and our territory here.

Steve Hsu: So the Chinese and the Filipinos, they both act out of this idea and rationale that they are in a defensive position, that they are being bullied by the other. Even the Chinese claim that they're being bullied by it, by the Filipinos. And the United States is. at exploiting such, such crises, internal and bilateral crises.

Pascal Lottaz: and that's, but that's where we cannot discard the, the respective claims also of the Filipinos. They have legitimate grievances. And if these Filipino fishermen that have been fishing for like 200 years in certain fishing grounds. And now. They are being chased out of these fishing grounds because the Chinese say like, these are not yours.

These are ours, even though they're like, 50, 60 miles outside of, of your shores. Then. It's highly understandable why they get pissed and start understanding China as a threat. so the question would be how to deescalate that and not how to abuse it in order to get another proxy war that you yourself are preparing.

And the sad thing is that the only thing that the Republicans and the Democrats are agreeing upon is the inevitability. Of a war with evil china.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I haven't, I don't follow the Philippine situation that carefully. It does seem like the Chinese are behaving differently. You know, in an impractical way, like, do they really gain very much by, you know, causing these escalating frictions? It doesn't seem like a smart policy, but maybe I don't understand it properly.

Pascal Lottaz: Yeah. Yeah, I just you know, it would be China is is is great at a lot of things but soft power They are not they're not good at trying to convince others to follow them like voluntarily And like convincing the philippines To actually be more on their side would have been in my view, a very important strategy, but that wasn't chosen.

And now, the Philippines is on the other side, but then again, that might not be the best course of action for the Philippines and it's just the Philippines. They really, even more than Taiwan, are between a rock and a hard place.

Steve Hsu: Yeah,

Pascal Lottaz: I would say, Because in Taiwan, you at least theoretically have a way of coming together again, right?

Coming out for a, in a joint, you know, joint venture or some, some form of. Common agreement, for the Philippines and China, as long as China doesn't try to woo the Philippines over and still wants to like demands that the Philippines stand down, we do not get into a, I cannot see a cooperative framework emerge.

and that's something that can be exploited by outside forces.

Steve Hsu: Well, we've been going for some time. I want to be respectful of your time. And I think your coffee is ready now. So,

Pascal Lottaz: it switched itself off. It's like, ah, stupid thing.

Steve Hsu: but, uh, maybe, maybe this is a good place to, end our conversation and, would love to maybe Have another one that maybe, uh, you know, in six months or a year, if events, something interesting happens in Ukraine or elsewhere, we can, maybe continue this conversation.

Pascal Lottaz: Anytime, Steve, please reach out again. And thank you very much for having me today.

Steve Hsu: All right, thank you very much.

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