The czar is even at their worst and they were terrible at their worst had more legitimacy than Putin has now. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his long series the Red Wheel that's about half a dozen books each of them doorstoppers essentially one of his points is that the real tragedy of the Russian revolution with the downfall of the czar was nevertheless the only point, the concision point of order in the system. If the czar went then there was anarchy or very weak governance from which the Bolsheviks could stage a coup and go on to kill tens of millions of people.
The great dilemmas of geopolitics are not battles of good against evil, where the choices are clear. They are contests of good against good, where the choices are often painful, incompatible and fraught with consequence. That’s the argument that political scientist Robert Kaplan who's joined here in conversation by political philosopher John Gray. Together they discuss how the insights of the Greek tragedians – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – as well as Shakespeare and modern philosophers and classic authors can help us understand the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power. And they explored how viewing events through a tragic lens could guide the West’s strategy for dealing with Russia and China today.
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