AUDIO ONLY The premise of this show is simple: Peter Robinson poses five questions to Dr. Kotkin: what Xi Jinping, the president of China believes; what Vladimir Putin believes; whether nuclear weapons are a deterrent in the 21st century; the chances of another American renewal; and Kotkin’s rational basis for loving the United States. It’s a fascinating conversation that delves deep into one of the country’s brightest minds.
Stephen Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his planned three-volume history of Russian power and Joseph Stalin, Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 and Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941. The premise of this show is simple: Peter Robinson poses five questions to Dr. Kotkin: what Xi Jinping, the president of China believes; what Vladimir Putin believes; whether nuclear weapons are a deterrent in the 21st century; the chances of another American renewal; and Kotkin’s rational basis for loving the United States. It’s a fascinating conversation that delves deep into one of the country’s brightest minds.
Recorded on January 14, 2022
Stephen Kotkin
Books
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Articles
The world breathed a sigh of relief when, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—November 11, 1918—the guns fell silent. The Great War, as World War One was then known, was over in Europe.
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Articles
This Monday marks thirty-six years since the beginning of the end of the Cold War. In the excerpt below from Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, I recall watching the Iron Curtain part while serving in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment, a unit charged with border surveillance and control along the East-West German border and the West Germany-Czechoslovakia border.
November 10, 2026