Travis Khachatoorian:
You are listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College, where we talk with faculty and alumni who are making a difference on campus and beyond. I'm Travis Khachatoorian.

Marilyn Thomsen:
And I'm Marilyn Thomsen. This season we are having thought-provoking conversations with faculty and alumni who are tackling the difficult. Mietek Boduszyński, Associate Professor of politics, spent about a decade as a diplomat with the US State Department.

Travis Khachatoorian:
He's also been a policy advisor to a congressman, and recently completed a year working at the Pentagon. We talked with him at the KSPC studio. Here's that conversation.
Welcome to the show, Mietek.

Mietek Boduszyński:
Thank you.

Travis Khachatoorian:
It sounds like you've been working at the Pentagon the past year. What can you tell us about that?

Mietek Boduszyński:
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Great to be here again, but this time in person. At the Pentagon, I was working on a whole bunch of stuff, but I guess most perhaps of greatest interest to your listeners was my work on the Ukraine War, unprovoked full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US response. And in particular, I was involved in a government-wide effort to see how we, meaning the United States, can promote various forms of accountability for Russia's aggression and atrocities in Ukraine.

Travis Khachatoorian:
And now you're back on campus. I want to touch on that a little bit. What are you teaching this year and what are you bringing back from that experience to your students?

Mietek Boduszyński:
So I'm teaching US foreign policy, which I've taught every semester since I've been at Pomona. And also a class on Eastern Europe. So I suppose that my experience in the Pentagon feeds into both of those courses.

Marilyn Thomsen:
What was eyeopening to you in your work in the Pentagon? The subject matter is one of great concern and interest. What caught your attention?

Mietek Boduszyński:
The Pentagon is a big place. 29,000 people work in the building. But of course the Department of Defense has something like 2 million employees worldwide, spread across multiple facilities. I think there's something like 800 facilities around the world from small lily pads to giant bases. And that's overwhelming and intimidating at first, but it was also remarkable how that gets whittled down to much smaller group of people once you start working on a particular issue, not just within the Department of Defense Bureaucracy, but spread across the government. So that was a surprise.
It was eyeopening to see the incredible unprecedented balancing act that the US, that the Biden administration is performing in its support for Ukraine. And what I mean by that is, that we want to assure Ukraine's sovereignty, we want to help the Ukrainians take back what was taken from them by the Russian invasion, but we also want to prevent a direct conflict between the United States and Russia. And that's an incredibly difficult balancing act. And I didn't realize how tricky that balancing act is until I had this experience. I didn't appreciate how hard that is. It's an art, not a science for sure.

Travis Khachatoorian:
I'd like to go more into that statement because I would imagine that would lead to some tense moments if it's not a science, people have to have differing opinions.

Mietek Boduszyński:
Sure. And I think that the Biden administration particular approaches every major decision with intense deliberation, often informed by these worries. The first and foremost, the worry is could and would Russia deploy some kind of tactical nuclear weapon? Which would be game changing of course. As already has happened, could a stray missile or other kind of projectile land in a NATO country? And that actually has happened, thankfully. I don't think any civilians have been killed so far, but there have been, I think, the remains of drones and the missiles that have landed in places like Romania and Poland.
So the danger of escalation is ever present on the minds of policymakers in Washington. And yet they're also keeping their eye on this goal, this valve that President Biden has made to Ukraine that will support them for as long as they need our support. And of course, the other part of balancing there is bringing in allies and partners, which I think President Biden has done a great job of doing. But then those allies and partners, we have other interests and other issues that we need them for. China, for instance. And the competition with China's of course, number one on the priority list right now. So it's a complex chessboard to think about all these things at the same time.

Marilyn Thomsen:
What happens to the work product that a team like you are part of produces?

Mietek Boduszyński:
So there's different kinds of products. One of my main tasks was to prepare my superiors for these high level interagency meetings where policy gets discussed, where policy options are prepared for the president and other higher ups in the government. So it's almost like writing a script, these memos, where you're providing a context and a scenario. This is where we are with this decision. And then you're giving your principal, your superior language to use in that meeting that reflects the way we see the issue. What should they say? And then also there's contingencies built in. If this comes up, this is what you can say or what you should say. So part of it is preparing those kinds of memos so that your superiors are well-prepared and well-informed when they sit down at these tables where policy decisions are made and where maybe on one day they may be talking about 10 different things about Ukraine, and my issue may be just one of them. And these are people who deal not necessarily only with the Ukraine war, but maybe with a whole host of issues across the globe.
But there's other kinds of products. There's also you write memos where you're giving your superiors, including the Secretary of Defense, some options on policy. You can do this, but it comes with these risks and opportunities, or you could do this and it comes with these risks and opportunities. And often you find yourself working on issues with highly imperfect solutions.

Travis Khachatoorian:
So you're working under the fear of nuclear escalation. Is that something that kept you up at night?

Mietek Boduszyński:
That would be a gross exaggeration to say that kept me up at night. I guess I was channeling more what most senior policy makers in the US government have to think about. I wasn't one of those, but certainly it's in the back of your mind. So much of what we're doing in Ukraine is also based on thinking about what is Russia going to do in response. And again, that's a game of prediction that depends on so many factors from historical precedent to of course is informed by intelligence gathering and a lot of many imperfect instruments.

Marilyn Thomsen:
Let's talk about the history of the area a little bit. Americans are not always wonderful at remembering history. What do Americans not understand about history and politics in Europe and in Russia that would help them better understand the war in Ukraine and its importance?

Mietek Boduszyński:
I think one way to sum that up is nationalism and the power of nationalism. You've heard that term used around here too. Some people would say that President Trump was a nationalist president because of his America-first approach to the world, and maybe his rallying of certain kinds of domestic sentiment, his talk of White nationalism and so on. But it's a different phenomenon in Europe, the idea of belonging by blood to a particular piece of land and of equal importance, the way that that has been used to mobilize people to legitimize politics and so on. At the core, what we're seeing in Ukraine is a competition of nationalisms that are oriented in different directions. But there's a lot more, and you're right Marilyn, that Americans have short memories and I think that goes for policymakers sometimes too.
And are relations with Russia after the Cold War are complex. And there's certainly a long list of grievances that Russian leaders and diplomats have pointed to for a long time. Now, I'm not saying anything about the credibility legitimacy of any of those grievances, but there's grievances and there's perceptions of the way the United States has behaved since the fall of the Soviet Union that they're often cited by Russian officials. And so again, I think it's important to at least be aware of the way Russian leaders and maybe ordinary Russians perceive their place in the world and perceive the role of the United States in the world. You don't have to agree with it, and it may be totally misguided, it may be ethically, morally wrong, but you need to understand your adversary as well.

Travis Khachatoorian:
What do they think? What is in the mind of an average Russian citizen in terms of how you do your job?

Mietek Boduszyński:
So I am not sure if I had to, in the particular work that I did, I had to think a lot about what ordinary Russians think. But as somebody who teaches, thinks, writes about us foreign policy, I think the perception of foreign publics are a very important category of analysis. So as a diplomat, I worked primarily in public diplomacy. In the same world that you both work in, media relations, thinking about public opinion, thinking about influencing public opinion. And you find that while American historical memories may be sometimes not particularly deep, foreign public opinion tends to remember things, even the younger generation tends to remember things much longer and further back in some ways part of their education and so on.
But to get to your question more directly, I think that probably a lot of Russians would perceive some hypocrisy in, for instance, US efforts to promote democracy around the world, given some of our own internal challenges, they would point to the US invasion of Iraq, for instance, as an example of US aggression.
So just to be clear, I don't think that those are fair comparisons or those are false equivalencies I think in many ways. And yet, perceptions matter a great deal, especially in an era of disinformation, of polarization. And so all of that comes into play. And I think that to the extent Putin has been able to maintain some degree, maybe a large degree of support among the Russians that are still in Russia, of course a lot of, some of the most educated and talented Russians have left. I think it's based on a calculation that he can count on some of the ways that Russians see the United States and its role in the world.

Travis Khachatoorian:
I would imagine Russian disinformation campaigns are very complex and far-reaching, as a lot of countries send out disinformation campaigns. But how have you seen Russians efforts spread through the region and what makes it so attractive to other countries to latch onto?

Mietek Boduszyński:
So they aren't complex. I just showed my students in my East European politics class a video, I'm not sure who recorded, it was a covertly, secretly recorded video with sound. Perhaps it was made by the intelligence services, perhaps it was made by the TV station that released it. But it takes place in Slovakia, and it's one of these ones that looks like a Cold War era espionage scene where there's two guys walking out of a forest, two middle-aged guys. One is kind of smoking a cigarette, they're dressed casually. And on the screen, because this was produced by a TV station, there's some graphics that say that one guy is the deputy Russian military attaché in Bratislava the capital of Slovakia, and the other guy is the publisher or editor of a right wing newspaper in Slovakia that has often expressed sympathy or pro-Russian sentiment.
And basically the Russian deputy military attaché saying to a Slovak friend, "We're going to pay you this much to publish our disinformation in your newspaper." So it's a pretty straightforward thing. And the guy negotiating with him about how much he's going to get. And so a lot of times it goes down like this. It goes to the Russian government paying African politicians to pass laws criminalizing homosexuality, for instance. I mean, so this playbook of influence, it's not just disinformation, but in other ways that seek to undo liberalism, that seek to challenge the United States in different ways. It often comes down to just paying people money to spread information. And in Slovakia, this has been particularly potent, but of course there's deeper historical risk to all of this. So yes, the Russian disinformation matters, but there's other things having to do with Slovakia's history.
And I am raising Slovakia because Marilyn, I know you saw this in some of the things that you read in preparation for this. It's a small country in Eastern Europe, frontline country shares a border with Ukraine. And surrounded by countries that have been among the most hawkish and sort of, we need to support Ukraine, we need to counter Russian aggression. And yet in this country, Slovakia, some astonishing percentage of people, maybe 40% expressed in a recent public opinion poll that they want Russia to prevail in the conflict and not Ukraine. And Slovaks were also victims of Soviet aggression after World War II. So it's a really complex phenomenon, but there's no doubt... I mean the way that Russia does is not complex, but the psychological processes that lead people to adopt these positions, these pro-Russian positions maybe are a little more complex.

Marilyn Thomsen:
Tell us a little bit more about that.

Mietek Boduszyński:
Well, let me tell you another anecdote. So in 2014, so shortly after the uprising in Ukraine, the so-called Maidan Uprising where people rose up and they kicked out this pro-Russian president who was also corrupt. And they said, we want the EU, we want the west. I went to teach a course in a summer course in Kazakhstan, so former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. And it was at a English-speaking university. I was teaching just one summer course, and I had students from all throughout Central Asia, they were from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and so on. They were all English speakers because they were all young in their early 20s. In Kazakhstan, there were no limits on access to global media. So they could access social media. They could access everything from Facebook to Twitter to any media they wanted. So there was no controls on that.
And yet when the class arrived at a discussion of what had happened in Ukraine, nearly all of my students expressed that the Ukrainian revolution was a CIA-backed fascist affair. And for me it was a real eyeopening moment because I realized just how potent Russian disinformation was, even among young people, right in the Russian-speaking world, which includes Central Asia because many Central Asians speak Russian even though they're ethnically not Russian, speak Russian as their first language. And so that like, whoa, I can't believe that this particular group of young people who propaganda is not being forced upon them. But there's some sort of fallback, there's some sort of comfort with the worldview that Russia represents. I think it reinforces some preexisting anti-Americanism and suspicions of the United States. I think it often plays on some certain insecurities. I think it appeals to people who are frightened by globalization, liberalism and progressive social values. Certainly Russian propaganda plays up those sort of divisions as they did in the US election in 2016.

Marilyn Thomsen:
So is Western support for Ukraine likely to be short-lived? And what does history teach us about that? Can Putin just wait it out?

Mietek Boduszyński:
I think that's what he planned to do with the invasion. I think he thought that he would divide NATO from the very beginning. I think that he thought that countries like Germany for instance, or the Netherlands that had economic interest, trade ties with Russia and who historically haven't been very enthusiastic about sending military support to other countries, strengthening our defense budgets. I think he assumed that that's what would happen. And I think he was deadly wrong about that because we've seen an incredible amount of unity and resilience in that alliance. Having said that, there are many countries around the world that are experiencing economic pain as a result of this war, especially in the global south, but Western Europe as well. United States also, some of the inflation we've seen and other economic issues are related to it. I think that it's a natural phenomenon that over time people's, first of all, attention will be diverted, there'll be fatigue. There'll be a sense that we can't give a blank check forever to a war where we have an unclear stake, where we have unclear interests.
We can't give the Ukrainians a blank check forever. At some point they have to sit down at the negotiating table. So I think if I was to make one prediction today, it would be that inevitably the support for national governments that are helping Ukrainian various ways, that the public support is going to dissipate. It already has. And so part of the challenge that leaders like President Biden and our allies and partners around the world face is explaining to their publics why this is important, why this matters beyond Ukraine. But even then it's an uphill battle.

Marilyn Thomsen:
What are they saying?

Mietek Boduszyński:
How are they explaining it?

Marilyn Thomsen:
Mm-hmm.

Mietek Boduszyński:
Yeah, so I am not sure how it's being explained in other countries, but in the United States, I think President Biden has been consistent in saying that this is about much more than Ukraine, it's about a rules-based world order, it's about deterring any country in the future, strong country, from invading its weaker neighbor. I mean, it's against every principle of the UN charter, against every norm that we've considered sacred since the end of World War II. And beneath that, of course, for President Biden, and I think this is what diplomatically we're saying to other countries is what about China and Taiwan? What about Iran and some of its neighbors? If we don't impose costs on Russia, will this be carte blanche for another adversary would be aggressor to do the same thing, which could be catastrophic for the world order as we know it.

Travis Khachatoorian:
So looking at your history, you've seen the world through a number of lenses. Just looking at this alone, it says you grew up in Poland, you were a child immigrant, diplomat, a congressional foreign policy advisor, and then recently working in the Pentagon. How has that all shaped your worldview?

Mietek Boduszyński:
That's a big question. I feel like Pomona should pay me more to answer it. It's always been remarkable to me, especially in my experience as a practitioner, as a diplomat or working in Congress or now at the Pentagon, how much individuals and personalities matter in international relations. It's one of the things that I discuss with my students a lot. In fact, today they were just given an assignment where they're going to profile some of the top foreign policy makers in the Biden administration. So people like Samantha Power or Linda Thomas-Greenfield or Tony Blinken, because all of those people have a lot of power over foreign policy and being from the world's still strongest premier global power by extension, they're shaping what happens in the world, but they're not robots or machines, they're individuals that come to the job with certain worldview. You asked me by my worldview, they have a worldview of certain backgrounds, certain sometimes prejudices and blind spots and personalities that they bring to the table. And so understanding them and their approach, the way they see things is really, really important. But often international relations or political science classes don't teach that enough or don't think about that enough.
For instance, I think it's a fascinating question why the Biden administration has continued many of the most hawkish, hardline policies towards China of its predecessor, the Trump administration, maybe with different rhetoric, but some pretty tough policies. And in many cases, pretty contentious policies.
And you look at these people like Tony Blinken who's a consummate diplomat or some of the other people who Biden has appointed the top positions. I mean, these are pros. They're not warmongers, they don't want to conflict with China.
So you asked, how did this come about? And I think part of the answer is that all of these people were part of the Obama administration also in pretty senior positions. And their view is that they've already tried the more conciliatory line towards China. They've tried to engage China, they've tried and it didn't work. And in many cases, China just used that against us. So there's that kind of like we've been there, we've tried that it hasn't worked, which you can consider sort of a set of blinders. But nevertheless, you have to understand that about them and about their background to understand where they fall on these issues.

Travis Khachatoorian:
Well, it's interesting because when I think of a behemoth organization like the Pentagon, it's massive, incomprehensible, but you've been inside of it. You pulled back the layers of the onion, and you're saying it gets smaller and smaller, the amount of people who make what is considered foreign policy.

Mietek Boduszyński:
Absolutely. Especially when you're considering particular issues. It's a very small community of people. So a large part of the Pentagon is operational, of course it's uniform folks, and then all the operations we have around the world, and there's contingency planning and so on. But the people who actually make policy on a particular issue, it's a very surprisingly small community of people. And getting to know them as individuals and understanding what makes them tick is incredibly important if you want to move the needle on something. So that was one of my big takeaways, like, wow, this peeled back, it was like The Wizard of Oz, what's behind here? And it's a bunch of people, some of whom have been there for very long working on the same issues. The lawyers in the building are, for instance, extremely powerful, and they often have an influence on policy, and it's the same people who've been there doing the same thing for a very long time.
So I hope my students also get that because even, and I wasn't particularly senior, but even at a more junior level, you have this ability to move the needle on something. Of course, not working by yourself, but understanding who are the people that you need to build an alliance into and to make a difference.

Marilyn Thomsen:
So take out your crystal ball and look in the future, a year, two, five years in the future, what's your best assessment of what the map of the world's going to look like?

Mietek Boduszyński:
Another one that I think I should get paid more for, but I would say much more fragmented with weakened international institutions, with more of a hardening of positions of a little bit of a Cold War esque situation where you find countries around the world aligning themselves either the United States or with China and remains to be seen where Russia falls into that. And of course all the transnational risks, climate change. It's almost every day that we see some other place in the world where climate change is having this direct effect on politics and economics and geopolitics. Libya a place where I've spent time being the latest one, these devastating floods, and it's essentially a desert.
So I think an extremely challenging world in which the US is gradually losing power, which highlights the importance of building alliances and partnerships with countries around the world so that we can preserve what the Biden administration continually refers to as a rules-based world order, which sounds like an abstract except when it's no longer an abstract when we saw even during the pandemic, when there's supply chains are disrupted and so on.
But yeah, it really requires a lot of, I think, imagination to think about all the possible scenarios and threats.

Marilyn Thomsen:
Our is board likely to be different.

Mietek Boduszyński:
If we take Ukraine, which we open our conversation with, I think there's some likelihood that there's going to be some sort of frozen conflict or messy temporary arrangement. These parts of Ukraine, these frozen conflicts that we've seen in other parts of the former Soviet Union, whether that's Nagorno-Karabakh or Ossetia or Transnistria Moldava where we might see... Or now Serbia-Kosovo, that's still not resolved, that's not the former Soviet Union, but Eastern Europe. Where this lack of resolution may be the status quo, may be the new norm. On the China Taiwan question, that's too difficult. I just don't have enough expertise. But certainly that 2027 or whatever it is here that you hear talked about a lot is something that policymakers are thinking a lot about.

Travis Khachatoorian:
So looking at your personal history, you tend to take sabbaticals to do interesting things. A, aside from teaching every year or two, do you have any idea what's on the horizon for you?

Mietek Boduszyński:
So I'm here back at Pomona, excited about, of course my teaching, excited about some programs that I'm developing, including short-term faculty-led program that will hopefully take off next year that we haven't had here at Pomona. I think that I'll lead that will focus on diplomacy actually. So thinking of ways to translate some of this experience I've been fortunate to have to the classroom and beyond the classroom at Pomona.
I'm also putting in my committee time. I'm serving on the executive committee this year, which is great, learning more about how the college works and is governed. So staying put for now, but certainly looking for opportunities in my teaching and research, but perhaps also outside of the classroom if I can continue to contribute to policy discussions in Washington in other ways, whether that's through public facing writing or being involved in discussions through think tanks and so on, that always, I think, refreshes and invigorates me and refreshes and invigorates my work here.

Marilyn Thomsen:
Do you find a strong interest in international relations among Pomona students now?

Mietek Boduszyński:
Absolutely. I think the geographic focus has shifted. When I first started here, there was a lot of interest in the Middle East. And I was in fact teaching on the Middle East at that time. I think that's now moved Indo-Pacific, especially to some extent Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia. I've also found an interesting, and I haven't studied this in any rigorous scientific way, but I feel that there's a lot more students interested in government service, especially in the national security space. And one of the coolest things I got to do in Washington was to reunite with students from my decade here who are now working in that space. I met students who are in the Intel community. They came over and visited me at the Pentagon, and we met in one of these secure facilities so we could... Last time I'd seen them, we were meeting in my office, talk about a thesis. Now, we were talking about secret stuff. Which was fun.
I had a student who was doing an internship at the State Department, and I got to go to a meeting with her. She's now in my class, but we actually got to go to a real business meeting together. Students who are working in Congress and working on foreign policy issues, students who are working in the outside in NGO sector advocacy sector on foreign policy issues.
10 years ago when I started here, I detected a little bit of a resistance among quite a few students to government service for various reasons. But now I think that there's a newfound interest even in parts of the government, I wouldn't expect. There's also some phenomenal Pomona alumni working at the Pentagon in positions of amazing responsibility. So I think there's a renewed interest in national security and in serving in public service and national security.

Travis Khachatoorian:
Well, Mietek, it's very exciting to have you back on campus this year, and very exciting to have you on the show. So thank you so much for taking time and coming to talk with us.

Mietek Boduszyński:
Thanks Travis, and thanks Marilyn. This was great.

Travis Khachatoorian:
Lots to think about and certainly fitting Sagecast's season's theme of tackling the difficult. Our thanks to Associate Professor of Politics, Mietek Boduszyński for joining us.

Marilyn Thomsen:
Thanks to our audio engineer, Erica Tyron and KSPC for hosting our conversations. Until next time.