Ukraine at the Crossroads: From Donetsk to the Garrison State

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.6 • 643 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After nearly 11 years of war, Putin’s maximalist demands have shrunk to a sliver of land in Donetsk, a pyrrhic victory after countless lives lost and millions displaced. But while the Kremlin clings to a symbolic scrap of territory, we explore whether Ukraine’s true future lies not in NATO membership but in becoming what political economist Harold Laswell once called a “garrison state.” What does that mean? Think of countries like Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, or even Finland in 1940: highly militarised, heavily armed by allies, but able to survive and rebuild under constant threat. Could this be Ukraine’s path, a nation of 40 million people with a vast agricultural base and heavy industry, rebuilt under an American security umbrella and billions in European aid? We pull apart the history: from the Treaty of Moscow (1940) that fixed Finland’s borders for decades, to Eisenhower’s warning of the military–industrial complex, to the Peloponnesian War’s clash of Sparta and Athens. Can democracy thrive in a garrison state? Is Europe ready to bankroll Ukraine’s reconstruction? And will turning Ukraine into a military bulwark finally secure peace, or only prepare the ground for the next war?

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Transcript

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1:10.0	How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast.
1:17.2	Hope everything is, well, you're not feeling a little bit too angsty. People going back to work. Summer's kind of over. Back to school. It's early September. John always hated this time of the year. He was depressed. I, as swatty pants, was always like, ooh, here we go. Back to school. Great fun. Let's learn lots. And I'm going, nah.
1:28.5	Let's learn lots. Exactly. Anyway, my head is empty. It needs to be filled out. I hope you are well, and I hope the summer has been kind to you. And it hasn't been a bad one weather-wise. So fingers crossed, we won't get completely lashed out of it in the coming months now.
1:25.8	Also in the coming weeks,
1:26.7	because John and I are going to electric picnic next Friday. Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to that. It's very funny when you do, when you do things like this at electric picnic in the tent, right? You have a kind of ambiguous relationship with the weather because the one hand you don't want to be too hot because then nobody will go into the tent because everyone's sitting outside. Yeah, okay, yeah. Makes sense.
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