230. Russia, Ukraine, and the West ｜ Frederick Kagan
Summary
The whole world has been watching the invasion of Ukraine. To help us understand the biggest attack since the end of World War II, Dr. Frederick Kagan, an expert in Russian military history, an author, and the Director of the Critical Threats Project at AEI joins me on the podcast to talk about the current landscape, WW II, hybrid warfare, Putin's interest in Ukraine, the protests in Moscow and the personal history of Putin, and by extension, Russia and the West. We really hope you and your loved ones are safe and that you are able to take something useful away from this conversation. These are uncertain times, and we need to be prepared to do what we can to prepare for them. Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to get immediate access to all new episodes of the show. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first month with discount code Power10 at checkout. Subscribe today! To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/Dailywireplus and enter the offer ends on November 1st, 2019. To learn more about our sponsor discount offer, click here. Thanks to our sponsor, Cash Apparel. We are working with them to make sure our products are beautifully handpicked and priced to match your needs, including shipping, packaging, shipping, and shipping and handling throughout the world. We are committed to providing the best quality and support throughout the process. Thank you, wherever you get your orders arrive, we will be able to serve you the best service, the best possible care and support possible. We appreciate you, the most efficient and the most affordable and affordable service in the best experience possible. Thank you. You can t ask us the best of your experience, we truly appreciate your feedback and support you get the most effective service possible. This is the best chance to help us achieve the most amazing results possible, your feedback is the most authentic experience possible in the world, your greatest day to your day to day life, your biggest day, your day gets the most of your day, and you can be the most profound experience possible, and most of all of your chance to support us all wins the most meaningful day possible, most of it, your most authentic day, you get it, you most of the most beautiful day, we get it in the most important day, most importantly, you are truly a day to be the best, most beautiful, most fulfilled, most uplifting, most authentic, most profound, most meaningful, most helpful, most rewarding, most powerful, most fulfilling, most impactful, most influential, most inspiring, most peaceful, most prosperous, most moving, most inspirational, most important, most human, most memorable, most supportive, most humble, most understanding, most effective, most resilient, most succulous, most grateful, most genuine, most loving, most lovely, most successful, most etc., etc.
Transcript
00:00:00.940
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Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:50.980
Welcome to episode 230 of the JBP podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson.
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The whole world has been watching the invasion of Ukraine.
00:01:04.120
To help us understand the biggest attacks since the end of World War II,
00:01:08.340
Dad had Dr. Frederick Kagan, an expert in Russian military history, an author, and the director of the Critical Threats Project at AEI on the podcast.
00:01:18.080
They talked about the current landscape, World War II, hybrid warfare, Putin's interest in Ukraine, the protests in Moscow,
00:01:26.780
and the personal history of Putin, and by extension Russia, and the West.
00:01:31.740
We really hope you and your loved ones are safe and that you're able to take something useful away from this conversation.
00:01:39.280
If you want to learn more about anything discussed, check out the links in the description.
00:02:06.340
I'm pleased to have with me today Dr. Frederick W. Kagan.
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I reached out to some of my contacts who have some intellectual credibility and some political expertise to find out who could be contacted to provide an update for everyone,
00:02:22.280
me included, on the unfolding situation in Russia and Ukraine.
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And Dr. Frederick Kagan, his name popped up instantly.
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So I'll give you a bit of a bio and then we'll get right to the issue, what's happening in the Ukraine.
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Dr. Frederick W. Kagan is author of the 2007 report, Choosing Victory, A Plan for Success in Iraq.
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He's one of the intellectual architects of the surge strategy in Iraq.
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He's the director of the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
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His books range from Lessons for a Long War, American Enterprise Institute Press, 2010, co-authored with Thomas Donnelly to The End of the Old Order, Napoleon in Europe, 1801 to 1805, De Capo Press, 2006.
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He worked as an assistant professor of military history at West Point from 1995 to 2001 and as an associate professor of military history from 2001 to 2005.
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Dr. Kagan holds a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale.
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So welcome. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today.
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I very much appreciate it. I'm looking forward to this insofar as you can look forward to a discussion about such topics.
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And so we'll get right to the heart of the matter, I guess, in the most pointed manner possible.
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Maybe you could give us some sense of what's happening right now, and then we'll move to why and what we should do about it.
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But as far as you're concerned, how should we be understanding the events that are unfolding in Ukraine?
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So several days ago, I confess I've lost all track of time.
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But several days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked and unjustified and illegal attack on Ukraine for the purpose of conquering it.
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He has conducted air and missile strikes against multiple targets across the entire country.
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And he has launched a ground invasion along multiple axes.
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His objective is very clearly to take control of the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, but also take control of a lot of other territory in Ukraine.
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He obviously aims at a minimum to replace the pro-Western government headed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's current president.
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And install some kind of governance structure that will bring Ukraine as he sees it back into the Russian fold.
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It's not at all obvious to me or anyone, really, what kind of governance structure Putin has in mind at this point.
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But it is very clear that he intends to do this at the point at the muzzle of the tank and that he is willing to kill quite a lot of people
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and do quite a lot of damage in Ukraine in order to regain control of the country.
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In short, it's part of a larger effort that Putin is engaged in to reconstitute the Soviet Union in some way or possibly the Tsarist Empire in some way.
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The geographies of the Soviet Union and the Tsarist Empire had interesting overlaps and underlaps.
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And it's important to keep in mind that Putin refers to both when he's talking about what his aims are.
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And then just, you know, the last larger thing to zoom out from all of that, he's been very explicit about his intention to destroy the NATO alliance,
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to break the ties between the United States and Europe, to change the world order fundamentally,
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and to return the United States to what he regards as its proper sphere, which is a Western hemispheric power.
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So let me ask you some questions about the way you answered that.
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So you started out by saying unprovoked, unwarranted, and illegal.
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And then you switched to, so I'd like to delve into that, why all of those.
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And then one might conclude that there's territorial ambitions here in some sense,
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and he is moving troops into a large geographical area of some value merely because it's a geographical area.
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But you also highlighted the importance of a shift in governance in Ukraine away from a pro-Western governance structure.
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And so how much of this should we assume is territorial in some sense?
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And how much of it is his desire to create a subordinate state?
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Is it a state subordinate to him, or is it more important to him, do you think, that it's not pro-Western?
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His objective is very explicitly to change the political order in Ukraine.
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It's about ending Ukraine's ambitions to join, to be part of the West to begin with.
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But he has written lengthy articles, and he has given lengthy speeches,
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explaining that he thinks that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent state,
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that it has no nationhood, that it is simply a natural part of Russia that was reffed from Russia
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by the stupid Soviets, and then by what he has called the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century,
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And so it's apparent from everything that he says that his ultimate objective is to regain
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The exact way in which he would govern a reconquered Ukraine is not yet clear,
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but that he is insisting that it be in Russia's sphere of influence,
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So let's talk, let's ask about this idea of the Russian sphere of influence,
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because one of the things that puzzles me in some sense is,
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why isn't Russia, why doesn't Russia conceptualize itself as part of the West?
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Like, why is Russia, why does Russia insist upon
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viewing itself as an entity independent of the West,
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especially given the fact that it isn't exactly obvious that Putin is an admirer
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of what happened under Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union?
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And so I don't understand why we have to have this notion that it's Russia against the West.
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It's why he doesn't trust the West, we don't trust him.
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I know they're trying to find a fourth way or something like that philosophically in Russia.
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Why are we in this situation where Russia doesn't conceptualize itself as part of the West?
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I love this question. This is great because you let me get in,
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To begin with, Russia has never considered itself fully part of the West.
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You know, when Peter the Great broke a window into Europe in the magical phrase of Pushkin
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Peter attempted, who is one of Putin's two great heroes in Russian and Soviet history,
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And ever since then, there has been a debate within Russia about whether Russia really is Western
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or part of the West or whether it is something else.
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In the 19th century, this manifested itself particularly in the distinction,
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in the divide in Russian intelligentsia between Westerners and Slavophiles.
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And you had people like Leo Tolstoy arguing for the inherent, you know, Russian soul as being distinctive and unique.
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From the end of the Napoleonic Wars on, Russia politically has regarded itself as something more than European.
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And the acquisition of Russian as Asian territories, among other things, in the 19th century,
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has led Russians to see themselves as European and also.
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Throughout the 19th century, obviously, the West was Europe.
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You know, the United States was not a big player in being the West.
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In the 20th century, it's hard to know exactly where Russia would have gone, except that Bolshevism,
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which triumphed in 1917, was an explicit rejection of the Western political economic model
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So there was a narrative of Russian uniqueness.
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And there is an inherent sort of Russian messianism.
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And the messianism actually goes all the way back to Yvonne the Terrible.
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And I'm happy to talk about that if you'd love to delve into ancient history.
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But there are these strands in Russian thought going back centuries that Russia is a unique kind of place
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And then, of course, as the Soviet Union was one of two global superpowers with the United States,
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when Putin is talking about the geostrategic calamity of the fall of the Soviet Union,
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what he really means is the loss of Russia's privileged position as one of the two rulers of the world.
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And what he is aspiring to is reestablishing that.
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Oh, I've tried to understand this Russian exceptionalism.
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I mean, I'm an admirer of Russian literature and Solzhenitsyn certainly did feel that it would be appropriate for Russia
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if it could throw off the shackles of its Soviet totalitarianism to return to the Russian Orthodox tradition
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that undergirded the Tsarist regimes, let's say.
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And he felt that a return to that would produce the foundation that would allow proper movement forward.
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But that still, to me, doesn't exactly seem to justify claims that, in some sense, this is a non-Western enterprise.
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I mean, insofar as it's grounded in Orthodox Christianity, it's still grounded in Christianity,
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Because the messianism that was established under the Yvonne rulers was the notion of Moscow as the third Rome.
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And the argument was that first there was Rome and Christianity was founded there.
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And then when Constantinople fell in 1453, the Russian Orthodox Church began to make the argument
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that the center of Christendom had moved to Moscow, which was the inheritor of the true faith.
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And so in that sense, it is a line of Christianity that does not...
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That rejects sort of Rome as the center anymore, runs through Constantinople to Moscow,
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And so even in that sense, defining Christianity as a Western thing in this sense
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is problematic within the ideological framework that Putin and others operate in.
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So they see that as more embedded in the remnants of the Byzantine Empire
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and in the separation from Constantinople and Rome a very long time ago.
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And do you know anything about the relationship between the Orthodox Christian authority hierarchy
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in Russia and the hierarchies of authority in Rome?
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Does the Orthodox hierarchy itself regard itself as something separate entirely and in opposition to the...
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The Orthodox hierarchy in Russia does not regard itself as under the edicts.
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No, but are the relationships friendly and is there communication or...
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Well, there is communication and successive popes have reached out to patriarchs to talk with them.
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But one of the things that it's important to understand is that Putin has carried on the tradition of the Tsars
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of subordinating the Moscow Patriarchate to himself.
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And so the Moscow Patriarchate at this point is fundamentally an arm of the Russian government.
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It is not an independent of religious authority in reality, even though it is ostensibly.
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And so its relations with the Vatican are whatever Putin decides he's willing to have them be at any given moment.
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I don't understand there to be a particularly contentious relationship except...
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Most recently, if you want to get really nerdly on this, there was a big fight a couple of years ago
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because the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had been a component or subordinated to the Moscow Patriarchate.
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Um, the formal, uh, leader of all of the Orthodox, uh, communities is in, um, Constantinople, is in, kind of, I want to say Constantinople, is in Istanbul.
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And a few years ago, I've forgotten exactly when, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church petitioned the, uh, Patriarch in Istanbul
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to grant it autocephaly, to make it independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, and that was granted.
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And so the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has become an independent, uh, entity directly under the Constantinople, uh, the Istanbul Patriarch.
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And the, Putin bitterly resented that, hated it, attacked it, uh, and it was, it is one of his grievances that, in fact, that that occurred.
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That was not done by the Pope, that was done by the, uh, Patriarch in Istanbul.
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Well, people might be wondering why we've taken a detour into a religious direction, but the answer is we're trying to sort out the issue of
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the degree to which Russia rightly regards itself as an autonomous community independent of the West.
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And in order to answer that question properly, you have to delve down to the bottom of the cultural separation,
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and near the bottom is, well, the relative autonomy of the Orthodox Church.
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And I have talked to people in Washington who are associated with the Orthodox Church in Russia,
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and they do claim that Putin goes to confession, and that there is some validity to his claims to have adopted
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That obviously leaves open the issue of what the relationship is between the political power and the church power.
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And one of the things that also is a mystery to me in relationship to that is that
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you can trace a fairly clear line of development of democratic thought in the West proper
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to Protestantism in particular, which is grounded in Christianity.
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And there's a fair bit of emphasis on individual sovereignty and Orthodox Christianity,
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but there wasn't a development into a democratic polity in the same way there was, especially in Northern Europe.
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And I can't, I can't really understand why that is.
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It doesn't seem to be a doctrinal issue exactly that stems from the faith itself, but I don't have any more.
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I am, I'm going, I'm about to reach the limit of expertise that I'm comfortable talking about,
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but I will, I will make the observation that one of the central characteristics of Protestantism
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is that apart from England, after Henry VIII, Protestantism was independent of state control.
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And even Catholicism was independent of state control for most of the history of the West after the fall of Rome.
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And so that, I think it's very, that independence from state control has been an important element in allow,
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in the fact that Western religion, that Christianity in the West, it's created space, as it were,
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right, by creating this separation, this gap between church and state, in which-
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At the level of detail, at the level of legislation and actual interactions between the church and the state.
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And just the, I mean, this is what, you know, of course, why Henry, one of the reasons Henry VIII took control of the,
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you know, went to the Protestant Anglicanism and took control of his own church,
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because he was aggravated to having the Pope, you know, being, have a say in anything.
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But in most other countries in Europe, the Pope continued to have a say in things for a long time,
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We never had an independent patriarch who could create that space from the Tsars,
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into which there, you know, something else could happen, because it was always fundamentally,
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at least in the, from the Muscovite period on, it was, the Orthodox Church was always fundamentally
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under the control of the Tsar, and so it was a state religion, and it was not, it just did not
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And then there's a bunch of other sociocultural reasons that, you know, as a historian, I'd love to
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nerd out about why the Russians didn't develop Western traditions of personal liberty and
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But this religious aspect has to do with state capture, state control of the church, I think,
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So too much integration at the top, which is, that's how Mussolini defined fascism in some
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sense, although he was thinking more about it in terms of collusion between the corporate
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But, so you need autonomous organizations as close to the top as you can get.
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At least that's worked, that's how it's worked in the West.
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Okay, so we've talked about why Russia might regard itself as somehow importantly separate.
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I mean, you could also say that about any number of countries within the West.
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It's not like Germany and England are the same place, or France and England, or France
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We've been able to develop an integrated West to some degree that also allows for autonomy,
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so I still can't exactly see why the Russians can't be brought under that umbrella.
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Well, certainly the idea that they've lost their empire and they've lost their central
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place, that there's a, I don't know if there's a resentment that goes along with that or confusion
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Yeah, before you even get there, I mean, look, you can't understate the importance of the
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Bolshevik revolution in this regard, because the Romanov dynasty, especially in the 19th century,
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regarded itself as a part of Europe, as well as something more.
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It regarded itself as European plus, and it regarded itself as a sort of a European superpower,
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but it regarded itself as part of the Concert of Europe and a pillar of the Concert of Europe.
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So the change comes when you have a revolutionary cabal take power that is dedicated to the destruction
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of all of the fundamental principles of the West, and that was the Bolshevik revolution.
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And it took control, and it imposed its ideology by unbelievably brutal force on a population that
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And that ideology involved not only that every aspect of the sociopolitical economic structure
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of the West was evil, but that it was seeking to destroy Russia, and that it was seeking to
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destroy this virtuous Bolshevik revolution. So we can talk about the, you know, the historical Russian
00:22:01.600
theories of encirclement and various other things, which frankly, can be easily overstated when you go
00:22:08.040
back into Russian history. But the Bolsheviks absolutely saw themselves as the kernel of a world
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revolution, and assumed naturally, that the entire capitalist world was seeking to destroy them.
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And to be fair to them, of course, the initial reaction of the Western powers was in fact to try to
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crush the Bolshevik revolution. And we did have American troops land in Russia in during the Civil War,
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to try to help the white forces defeat the Bolsheviks. So there was an initial Western and the British and
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the French did too. So there was an initial sort of Western intervention against the Bolshevik
00:22:50.120
revolution, which gave just a little bit of color to this. But the anti-Westernism and the notion of an
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encirclement and being at permanent war with the entire capitalist world is inherent to Marxism and Leninism.
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And then what did the Bolsheviks do? They systematically cut the Soviet society off from
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the world and took all control of communications, prevented people from leaving the Soviet Union.
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It's one of the ways that you can tell a legitimate state from a prison with a government is, does it
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allow its people freely to leave? And the Soviet Union did not. The Soviet Union, you know, the laws
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prevented people from leaving without special permissions and so on. And so it was a prison
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with a government. So that's the certain, the certain hallmark of a totalitarian society is
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that you cannot, it's a prison, essentially. Right, exactly right. So that was- So the Russians,
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so you think there's inertia in some sense, even though Russia is no longer a Bolshevik state,
00:23:52.600
you think there's inertia in the distrust of the West that probably developed even before the
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Bolshevik revolution. Not, I don't think that there was a huge amount of inertia along those lines
00:24:03.560
among Russians themselves. But now we need to talk about Vladimir Vladimir Putin, who was a KGB,
00:24:13.540
a mid-ranked KGB thug, who claims never really to have believed in the communist claptrap that he was
00:24:21.400
putting out, which is, which wouldn't make him unique among the Soviet apparatchiki. But who
00:24:28.140
nevertheless, obviously imbibed a sense of Soviet patriotism, and some kind of belief in aspects of
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that ideology, and has certainly accepted the Soviet theory that the West, that the world is out to get
00:24:43.580
Russia, and accepted that paranoiac doctrine. Because, I mean, as you, as you know, Jordan,
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the ideologies are large, sprawling, and complex. People can believe in parts of them while rejecting
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other parts of them. I'm willing to believe that Putin was never a committed communist, per se.
00:25:02.620
But it is apparent that Putin accepted the special destiny of the Soviet Union or Russia
00:25:09.720
in the world to be a superpower and to have influence beyond the norm, and accepted that the world was
00:25:17.800
hostile, and was seeking to prevent the Soviet Union or Russia from having that role.
00:25:25.500
Okay, so then, is it the case then that, and this is part of the expression of political,
00:25:32.280
what, variability in opinion that you hear expressed in the United States right now,
00:25:36.580
it's, it was definitely the case, and correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding is that after the
00:25:41.200
Soviet wall fell, that the West did take steps quite rapidly to try to consolidate some of the border
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territories between the former Soviet Union and the West, and to invite the Baltic states and so forth
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into a much closer partnership with the West, and a lot of that happened quite quickly, and then
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Ukraine was sort of left in, in an in-between state for a long time. So, it didn't get moved West as fast
00:26:06.180
as some of the other states did. Yeah, I mean, I'd like to clean up the history here, because I think
00:26:10.680
that, okay, I think the details matter. So, the Soviet Union formally ends at the end of 1991.
00:26:22.220
There is, there is discussion about exactly what's going to happen to Germany, and about whether East
00:26:26.920
Germany is going to become a part of NATO, and the Russians have a certain idea of what we, of what
00:26:31.740
they were told, and we have a different idea of what they were told. There were no formal commitments
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one way or another, but it ended with Germany being reunited, and then all of Germany remaining
00:26:41.220
in NATO. There was no further expansion of NATO until 1997. Okay, so that's very important. It is
00:26:49.980
not like in, in 1990, it's not like the year after the Soviet Union fell, NATO expanded, nor is it the
00:26:56.980
case that the messages that were going from the West to Russia were, we're going to take all of the
00:27:03.040
non-Russia parts of the former Soviet Union into NATO, but you Russians need to stay out. You're the
00:27:09.240
adversary. On the contrary, NATO reached out to Russia also, and NATO established the Partnership for Peace
00:27:15.820
Program, and Russia was a member of the Partnership for Peace Program, along with all of the other
00:27:20.060
former Soviet states. And NATO did offer various forms of technical assistance. The US offered various
00:27:27.360
forms of technical assistance to Russia in the 1990s, most of which the Russians rejected, some of which
00:27:35.340
they accepted, which were, which were very important. And there was a lot of cooperation, because it's
00:27:39.280
important to note that when Boris Yeltsin was president, he did not identify the West as the enemy.
00:27:46.040
He sought to integrate into the West, he sought to westernize Russia, and he thought, and he did to a
00:27:50.880
considerable extent. And he sought to democratize Russia, and he did. And he had to fight off multiple
00:27:56.820
efforts by the Communist Party of the former Soviet Union to regain power, and re-establish communist
00:28:03.920
rule. And he fought against that, and we tried, we did try to help him with that. But the first NATO
00:28:11.480
expansion doesn't happen until 1997, and it did not include the Baltic states. The Baltic states were
00:28:16.880
admitted in, I think, 2003, 2004, I've forgotten the exact date in there. But they were not admitted in
00:28:24.400
that first tranche. So the notion that we somehow just immediately started snapping up, you know,
00:28:32.080
former Warsaw Pact states, and then Baltic states into the alliance is false. Nor is it the case that
00:28:38.700
that was initially done in a way, in our, in the way that we expressed it to the Russians, as being aimed
00:28:45.760
at threatening Russia. These states sought admission into the alliance. And look, we've got to recognize
00:28:53.480
that the alliance was formed on a principle of an open door policy that always, that is inherent,
00:29:02.560
that is innate in the North Atlantic Charter that founded the alliance, that any state can request
00:29:09.160
admission to the alliance. This is one of the things that Putin is demanding that NATO change.
00:29:13.920
But that provision was not added or created after the end of the Cold War, it was created when the
00:29:19.640
alliance was created. Now, obviously, the alliance doesn't have to choose to admit any particular
00:29:24.760
member. But we can now ask another question, which is why, what did we, the West think that NATO was
00:29:32.460
doing in the 90s? And why were we admitting these former Warsaw Pact and then the Baltic states to the
00:29:39.660
alliance? Yes, we wanted to make sure that we had a buffer against the kind of threat the Soviets had
00:29:48.320
brought into Central Europe, because it's important to keep in mind that the Cold War was shaped by the
00:29:55.480
fact that whereas we, the United States and Britain, and then a restored France, as we liberated territories,
00:30:03.860
we made them free. And we, they, we offered them the opportunity to join NATO, they did join NATO,
00:30:10.900
and which became a very rambunctious alliance, which periodically told the United States to pound sand,
00:30:15.960
and which we did not run as an empire, Soviet rhetoric notwithstanding. And it was an alliance of
00:30:22.300
free states. And it was a, it is a purely defensive alliance, there's absolutely no offensive provision
00:30:27.420
in the NATO charter anywhere. So that's what we did. What did the Soviets do? Well, with the Red Army
00:30:34.160
rolled into Eastern Europe, it did not liberate anybody. It drove off the German forces. And then
00:30:42.780
it took control of those countries, installed puppet states, which were ruled from Moscow. How do we know
00:30:49.260
that? Because there were periodic revolutions in the Eastern European states, which the United States
00:30:54.300
and NATO did not foment and did not support, and which the Soviets crushed brutally with tanks
00:30:59.880
repeatedly. So they established an empire in Eastern Europe, and they brought millions of forces
00:31:07.260
into the heart of Europe and threatened to overrun all of Western Europe. And that was the threat
00:31:12.600
against which NATO was formed. I tell you all of that to say that people talk about the buffer that the
00:31:18.540
Russians feel that they need against the West. The NATO expansion was about giving the West a buffer
00:31:25.760
from the threat that it had just managed to drive off of vast Soviet mechanized armies in the heart of
00:31:34.940
Europe poised to overrun all of the West. So there was absolutely a security thing. NATO is a security
00:31:42.880
alliance. And the big part of this was gaining a buffer for the West, so that Europe could actually have peace
00:31:49.600
and develop peacefully and without fear, which the threat of Soviet invasion throughout the Cold War had
00:31:56.960
denied it. But in addition to that, the NATO accession was also meant to help bring those Warsaw Pact states and then the
00:32:07.840
Baltic states into compliance with NATO standards, which is not just about military stuff. It's also about
00:32:14.160
legal, moral ethical frameworks, that about how we fight wars, about how we treat our soldiers, about how the
00:32:23.640
military interacts with the civilian population. It was meant to be part of an effort that was successful
00:32:29.600
to help those countries develop healthy democracies and healthy free market economies. And we invested-
00:32:36.560
And the capacity for some autonomous function at the national level, or for full autonomous function
00:32:42.880
Right. Complete, complete, because we don't control them. Right.
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So you're laying out an argument essentially that claims that to view this as a
00:34:31.520
dual, a duopoly, let's say, it's the US and its satellites against Russia and its satellites.
00:34:36.560
That's a profound misapprehension of the historical reality because it wasn't Russia and its satellites,
00:34:41.360
it was the Soviet Union, which was a bloc, and it's America with its allies. So America sits as
00:34:48.880
first among equals, let's say, something like that in a voluntary organization that's predicated on the
00:34:54.080
preservation of freedom at the political level and at the economic level. And if we want evidence for
00:34:59.120
that, we look at the response of, well, the wall in Berlin, for example, to take not the least of the
00:35:06.560
examples, but the crushing of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and almost Poland when the Soviet
00:35:12.320
Union did fall and look at the response to any manifestation of genuine autonomy on the part
00:35:17.760
of the Soviets. So, okay, well, we still have a question that's lurking constantly in the background.
00:35:24.000
It's like, why in the world would the Russians, the Russians are prone to reject an invitation to
00:35:31.360
become part of the sovereign voluntary association of Western states. For some reason, they distrust
00:35:38.480
the West. We've talked about that. They regard themselves as having an autonomous destiny, but
00:35:43.280
but, hypothetically, that could have still happened. So let's take a slightly different tack.
00:35:50.400
What did, let's imagine we're trying to figure out, what did we do wrong in negotiating with the
00:35:54.880
Russians in the last 20 years? And what did the Russians do wrong in conceptualizing themselves and
00:35:59.600
then negotiating with us? So let's start with us, maybe. Like, we're in this situation.
00:36:04.800
Well, hang on, hang on. Before, I mean, before we do that, there's a, there's a sea change that happens
00:36:10.000
in Russia when Putin takes power. Because Yeltsin had been one thing, and then Putin is something else
00:36:19.680
entirely. And Putin was, had become an anti-communist in the 1990s, and he helped Yeltsin fight off the
00:36:28.320
attempts of the communists to regain power. And initially, I think, by the way, Putin identified
00:36:33.600
himself as a Democrat and someone who was in favor of democracy, which worked for him as long as he
00:36:39.840
was actually winning elections, you know, handily and didn't have to rig them. And he didn't have to
00:36:44.160
rig the first few elections very much, and he could allow them to be relatively free because he was
00:36:49.280
popular. So, but it's, it's Putin who brought a new approach to this. And it's Putin who brought
00:36:59.040
a real sense of grievance and anger. And the grievance was about the fall from greatness of
00:37:05.760
the Soviet Union. Now, the one thing that it is necessary to have in people's minds here,
00:37:10.960
the 1990s was a horrific time for Russians. Okay, I want to set aside the question of our
00:37:20.400
responsibility or what we did or couldn't have done, because the truth, the truth is, I will,
00:37:23.920
I will assert, and I would be happy to argue with anybody about that. If this wasn't our fault,
00:37:28.960
and there wasn't much we could have done about it, frankly, anyway. Are you talking about the 90s?
00:37:33.360
About the 90s, yeah. Yes, yes. Well, yeah, the 90s were a catastrophe. My son-in-law,
00:37:38.320
former son-in-law, was Russian. And he said often when he went to school, him and his close relatives
00:37:44.880
who were also attending school weren't necessarily sure they were going to come home alive through
00:37:48.960
much of the early 90s. It was crazy. I was there in 1995 doing, doing research in the Russian archives,
00:37:54.880
and the ruble dropped from 3,000 to the dollar to 5,000 to the dollar in the five weeks that I was
00:38:00.480
there doing research one time. It was, it was absolute, I was, I went to the first,
00:38:05.680
I went to the first McDonald's on Trotskaya Square as it, as it opened. And it was, it was an amazing,
00:38:13.280
it was an amazing thing. So I saw a little bit, I mean, I was standing around, there were guards
00:38:18.320
with AK-47s guarding vegetable markets as I would walk by them. You know, why was that going on? Because
00:38:25.600
everybody was getting cuts and their rival gangs were controlling every aspect of it. And it was
00:38:30.400
completely insane. It was an unbelievable, it was a horrible period for Russians to live through.
00:38:36.800
And it was an unbelievable humiliation for someone like Putin, who believes in Russia,
00:38:42.960
that Russia should be one of the world's two superpowers to have gone through that experience.
00:38:48.720
So Yeltsin tried to lead his country through that with its democracy intact, and he succeeded until
00:38:54.960
Putin destroyed it. Yeltsin was never able to fix the economy, really. So Putin comes in with a deep
00:39:03.840
sense of grievance, and burning in with humiliation at what had happened to the Russians in the 90s.
00:39:09.680
And he needed an explanation that came readily to hand for why that had happened. And on the one hand,
00:39:16.400
he blamed Gorbachev for surrendering, instead of fighting. And he bitterly resents the fact that
00:39:23.520
Gorbachev didn't kill as many millions of people as he needed to just to stay in power. But he also
00:39:29.120
blamed the West, in many respects, quite some, mostly unfairly, honestly, for Russia's humiliation.
00:39:38.160
And then we had a narrative rapidly emerge in the early Putin years, that not only had the West
00:39:44.880
contributed to Russia's humiliation in this way and mistreated Russia in various ways in the 90s,
00:39:48.960
but now the West was trying to prevent Russia, as he kept saying, from rising from its knees.
00:39:54.800
And that the West was trying to keep Russia down. And he began to elaborate a series of narratives,
00:40:01.680
which attributed all kinds of malevolence, and frankly, much more thinking and coherence in
00:40:08.800
Western policies than has ever existed in that, to us, and also made the mistake that most humans
00:40:15.760
make of solipsism, of imagining that he was at the center of everybody's thought, and that everything
00:40:21.200
that we were doing in the world was aimed at Russia in some way. And so he created this narrative,
00:40:27.920
which he has been pumping into the Russian population ever since.
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Well, when things are going chaotically wrong, one of the simplest things to do always is to
00:41:46.960
make a unitary assumption of cause and to make it external.
00:41:53.840
It's convenient in 50 ways. First of all, it gives you an enemy to unite against,
00:41:58.560
it gives you an enemy to talk about politically, it solves your conscience. It's also very simple
00:42:04.320
because the reason that the former Soviet Union was so catastrophically chaotic in the 1990s, the
00:42:11.600
reasons for that are unbelievably complicated and detailed. And they go all the way from the
00:42:16.720
highest levels of government to the nature of arrangements within families, right? The whole
00:42:21.840
society was authoritarian for, what, 70 years, murderously authoritarian. And to unravel that and
00:42:28.800
to take responsibility for it and to figure out how to fix it is way harder than to blame almost
00:42:35.760
Especially when you're also motivated, as you said, by this sense of thwarted destiny, which we could
00:42:41.200
identify. I mean, in the West, we do regard a certain degree of patriotism as noble and
00:42:46.320
and justifiable. And you can see how that, under some conditions, noble and justifiable motivation would
00:42:52.720
get hijacked if there was also reason to externalize blame for conditions for resentment generated by
00:43:00.160
genuine chaos. Right. Right. I mean, look, just, I mean, in addition to all the other factors you
00:43:05.920
listed, we need to keep in mind how, Mac, how enormous was the task of trying to convert the Russian
00:43:11.360
economy, the Soviet economy to a free market. Basically, you know, industrialization in Russia
00:43:18.080
fundamentally happened under the Soviets. And it was done to a planned centralized economy.
00:43:25.200
So Russia is still littered today with what are called monotowns. They're towns of half a million
00:43:31.600
people that exist around a single huge factory in which 75 or 100,000 people work. That was the Soviet
00:43:39.840
model. The task of taking an economy built like that and turning it into a free market economy would
00:43:46.160
have been unbelievably daunting with the best of the will in the world. And unfortunately, Yeltsin
00:43:55.600
was preoccupied with the fight against the communists and keeping Russia democratic.
00:44:02.640
I don't know whether he ever would have been able to undertake that mission successfully anyway of
00:44:07.040
marketizing the Russian economy, but he wasn't even able to concentrate on it.
00:44:11.520
Well, that's and as you point out that that's not merely a conceptual issue is no part of the reason
00:44:16.960
that free market frameworks work in the West is because the actual industries and micro industries and
00:44:23.280
small shops are all autonomous and distributed. And so the legal structure matches the actual
00:44:28.720
infrastructure. Whereas in the Soviet Union, as you said, because it was centralized, there's these
00:44:34.080
massive entities that are not distributed or autonomous in any sense at all. And just changing
00:44:41.120
the legal framework doesn't change that in the least. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So it was it was a huge
00:44:45.920
task. And all of this leads to the externalization of grievance and the narrow and the feeding of a
00:44:53.840
grievance narrative that blames the West and then and then articulates this theory that the West is
00:45:01.040
focused on preventing Russia from attaining great its natural position of greatness in the world and so on.
00:45:06.800
And then Putin, who is it was a spy master. He wasn't a terribly good one with the KGB,
00:45:13.520
but he was a spy master. Begins and launches on a new form of conflict, which we now call hybrid war.
00:45:24.560
Sorry, the phrase is hybrid, hybrid, hybrid war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A phrase that's very complicated to talk
00:45:33.200
about and understand, but that includes information operations and information warfare that can best be
00:45:41.680
characterized by by the term gaslighting. And this is the stock and trade of the Russian hybrid warfare
00:45:50.240
effort. There's a Soviet concept. And there was a terrific paper at the Institute for the Study of War
00:45:56.240
that my wife Kim founded and runs and that I where I work with the Russia team there. But there was a
00:46:02.320
terrific paper that they published a few years ago by a woman named Maria Sniagovaya on Russian reflexive
00:46:08.640
control, a Soviet reflexive control doctrine, because the Soviet, it was Soviet theorists who articulated this
00:46:14.480
framework in the 50s or 60s. I don't remember that Putin and his goons have taken and perfected.
00:46:21.440
Reflexive control is the art of creating a world of picture of the world in your adversary's mind
00:46:31.200
of such a fashion that your adversary voluntarily chooses the course of action that you desire him to
00:46:37.280
choose, thinking that it is in his in his best interest. That's a very complicated way of saying
00:46:44.560
gaslighting, right? You create a false universe for the adversary to live in. And in that universe,
00:46:50.720
the adversary will naturally do what you want him to do. This is what the Russians have been trying to do.
00:46:55.840
Okay, and what? Okay, so I have two questions about that. The first is, as soon as anything like
00:47:01.280
that is put forth, it instantly sounds like a conspiracy theory. And I'm not saying that you're
00:47:06.000
engaging in conspiracy theories, but that's the reflexive response. So what's the evidence in your
00:47:12.080
estimate? Great question, yeah. And then what's the narrative they're trying to create? How effective
00:47:17.120
has that been? And, well, we already understand to some degree why. If the West is being conceptualized
00:47:23.920
as an enemy responsible for Russian chaos, for keeping the Russians down, and for encircling them,
00:47:30.960
depriving them of their just destiny, then we know the motive. There's others, but that's not a bad
00:47:36.320
core motive. What's the warfare aimed at and what's the evidence that this is occurring and how and where
00:47:41.520
and how are we subject to it, all of that? So, right, as soon as you're operating in the information
00:47:47.120
space and as soon as you're dealing with this kind of psychological warfare and stuff,
00:47:50.480
I will tell you there's a mountain of evidence that this is going on and it's deliberate,
00:47:57.360
and lots of people can argue with that. And certainly we can argue about the specifics.
00:48:03.680
But the evidence is, first of all, this is a published Soviet doctrine, which we can read,
00:48:10.160
you can read this, where this is articulated. And then there is Russian doctrine on warfare and on hybrid
00:48:18.080
warfare that also explicitly lays out this framework. So, the barrier to entry here is
00:48:26.880
reading Russian. If you can read Russian, then you can read official Russian doctrine and documents
00:48:33.200
laying out the theory of hybrid warfare and how to conduct it. Now, there's one trick in the way that
00:48:40.960
they tend to articulate this most clearly. And we've written about this. This is a terrific paper. I would
00:48:45.600
commend to your attention by Mason Clark, the Russian team lead at the Institute for the Study of War
00:48:53.040
on Russian hybrid warfare and particularly lessons from Syria, where they used this approach
00:49:01.360
and then wrote about it. And so we have writings from actually the guys who are commanding the war
00:49:10.480
against Ukraine right now. The commander of the Southern Military District, General Dvornikov,
00:49:17.120
was a commander in Syria and wrote articulately about what he did there. The commander of the Western
00:49:22.320
Military District, Zhuravla, is another Syria alum and wrote about his experiences there. So they're quite
00:49:29.840
overt about this stuff. The only trick is a lot of the time they describe hybrid warfare as they claim we
00:49:37.760
do it to them. And they describe their activities as defensive against our own hybrid warfare. And that
00:49:48.640
we initiated this hybrid war and they are defending against it. And then in that way, they describe
00:49:55.360
exactly what they have been doing. And so you can see them talking about what they think it is. And then
00:50:00.160
you can see specific actions they take. You can see Russian bot farms that we know work to manipulate
00:50:07.760
our social media. And that has been revealed. Talk about that in some detail. So what bot farm,
00:50:13.120
what is that exactly? How widespread is it? What is it doing and where? So this is where you take,
00:50:19.520
you program, you take, you know, computer programs that masquerade as Twitter accounts, for example,
00:50:26.480
and they do lots of different things. Sometimes they will just either tweet out or otherwise message
00:50:36.560
out sort of spam and such a volume as to drown out other voices. But a lot of the time, what they do
00:50:43.840
is they will repeat Russian messages from lots of different accounts that appear to be independent
00:50:53.360
accounts. So they seem to be corroboration of the Russian narrative, but they're actually all
00:50:58.640
computer programs that are not, they're not even humans and they're all, they're controlled by
00:51:04.480
Russia. It's a mimicking of a bottom-up process. Right. I'm not the expert on this. Lots of people
00:51:10.560
on both sides of the political aisle have written about this. There's a lot of technical detail
00:51:15.200
about this and you can find a lot of, this is not questionable. This is, that this is going on
00:51:20.400
is not in question. Any idea how extensive it is? If you're on Twitter, do you have any sense of what
00:51:26.720
proportion of responses that you might be subject to would be? I don't know. One of the things that's
00:51:31.680
happened is we got wise to this after the, especially after the 2016 election, when we,
00:51:36.000
the US became, and I don't want to get into that whole election controversy. There are,
00:51:42.080
there are aspects of what was going on that are not in question, including that there were Russian
00:51:46.720
bot farms sending messages and that they were exposed and the, the cyber details are clear of
00:51:52.720
what they were and so on. As we became aware of that activity, we, the US, the social media companies
00:52:01.360
like Twitter and others started to get very aggressive about developing algorithms to detect
00:52:06.640
when something was a bot and shut them down. So I believe that we're probably subjected to a
00:52:12.480
lot less of this than we were a few years ago. Because, and again, I don't want to get any issues
00:52:18.320
of social media blocking individual humans, because that's not what we're talking about here. We're
00:52:22.960
talking about these are machines and it is possible to detect that something is a machine and not a
00:52:28.080
human and then to shut it down. And that's one of the things that's been going on. So the, so the
00:52:34.080
social media companies have been doing good work in trying to reduce the number of these things and
00:52:39.520
fight them. So I think you're probably subjected to less of it now than you were in a few years ago,
00:52:46.080
but there's, it's still, it's still out there. It's still going on. Okay. So let's tie the hybrid
00:52:50.720
warfare back in. So what's the goal of the hybrid warfare as far as you're concerned?
00:52:54.560
So the goal of the hybrid warfare has been to try to achieve Putin's objectives without having to do
00:53:02.160
what he's doing in Ukraine right now. Because hybrid warfare is in part a poor man's game. So
00:53:08.720
the, we talked about the economic devastation that Russia faced in the nineties. Putin inherited that.
00:53:16.800
Putin has never fixed the Russian economy. The Russian economy is still deeply and fundamentally
00:53:21.040
dysfunctional. Um, oscillations and energy prices have helped him various other things that he's
00:53:26.880
done have helped him gain enough money to be able to rebuild his military to some extent,
00:53:33.520
but his military until very recently was simply not capable of posing a serious conventional threat to
00:53:41.440
NATO or hoping plausibly to defend against NATO. If it, if the Russians began a war and NATO seriously
00:53:48.480
leaned into it. So the hybrid warfare approach was designed to help him achieve victories in
00:53:56.720
reconstituting Soviet power one way or another without having to fight wars. And it worked pretty
00:54:05.120
well in some important ways, but it reached limits. Um, so how did it, when, what ways did it work? Do you think?
00:54:13.040
So what the classic example of hybrid warfare, if you like, was the little, remember the little
00:54:19.920
green men who turned up in Crimea in 19, in 2014. Um, and the claims that the Russian, uh, the Russians were
00:54:29.680
not, they were not Russian soldiers. They were, they were, you know, local Crimeans who were fed up with
00:54:34.880
Ukrainian alleged Ukrainian oppression and so forth. Um, it became rapidly apparent that they were in fact, Russian
00:54:42.000
special forces troops, um, and that the Russians did in fact have troops in Ukraine. But even the, that
00:54:49.680
thinnest veneer of implausible deniability led to the following consequence. It led to the establishment
00:54:58.240
by Germany and France with Russia and Ukraine of the Minsk Accords that, that established the air quotes, uh,
00:55:07.920
ceasefire in Ukraine that held, uh, ostensibly from 2015 until Putin just broke it by invading.
00:55:15.520
And here's the fascinating thing about the Minsk Accords. Russia is a party to the Minsk Accords
00:55:21.040
as a mediator. What? Russia is a party to, or is a party to the Minsk Accords as a mediator.
00:55:29.040
Nowhere in the Minsk Accords, is there a recognition of the fact that it's Russian forces
00:55:35.680
in Ukraine, that the proxy republics that Putin just recognized their independence
00:55:42.000
are Russian controlled, that the chain of command of the forces of those proxies ran
00:55:47.600
to the eighth combined arms army, which is Russia's headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. Nowhere in the Minsk
00:55:55.200
Accords is that recognized. And so you think that was made plausible, rendered plausible or possible
00:56:00.640
even by a successful disinformation or propaganda campaign. Yep. Because the, because the Russian
00:56:06.000
approach again, and all of this just changed. So, I mean, there's a whole other inflection that we need
00:56:11.280
to talk about, about the change that's just occurred, but the Russian approach before this invasion had
00:56:17.520
been to use disinformation, misinformation, and sometimes telling the truth in weird ways
00:56:22.960
to generate the following effect, who really knows? That's been the standard that has been sufficient
00:56:32.400
for Putin a high percentage of the time. And unfortunately, the rising skepticism and mistrust
00:56:38.480
within our own society has been, made that pushing a rock downhill. We so mistrust each other at this point
00:56:46.400
that we're inclined to say, well, who really knows? And so when the Russians are creating
00:56:50.960
these opportunities to say, well, who really knows? The point of that is so that we'll say,
00:56:57.040
well, who really knows? So why should we get involved in this? So that instead of reacting to
00:57:02.400
the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which is what actually happened, the Russian military invaded
00:57:08.640
Ukraine in 2014. It seized and then annexed Ukrainian territory in 2014. And then it continued a war in Ukraine
00:57:17.360
from 2014 to the present. The Russian military was doing all of that. Instead of that, we've been talking about
00:57:22.720
ceasefire. I have a sour joke for you, Jordan. I've used this joke right up until the invasion. What do you call it
00:57:28.880
when the armored, mechanized artillery, missile, aircraft, naval, and special forces troops of two countries fight each other?
00:57:38.000
In Ukraine, we call it a ceasefire. Because that's what had been going on.
00:57:42.640
So by sowing chaos and confusion at the level of information, you sap the moral unity of the people
00:57:48.880
that you're attacking. So they can't unite to justify to themselves even a singular and effective response.
00:57:56.240
What you do is you isolate the victim, which is what the Russians have done or had done. They isolated Ukraine
00:58:04.880
so that instead of seeing Ukraine simply as the victim of a Russian invasion in 2014, which is what
00:58:11.520
happened in the West, we've had a lot of conversations about, well, are the Ukrainians living up to their
00:58:16.640
obligations under Minsk? Well, are the Ukrainians doing enough here? And you get in rapidly into this,
00:58:22.800
you know, well, faults on both sides kind of thing, which paralyzes Western response. There
00:58:29.200
aren't faults on both sides. Faults on one side here. There are faults on the side of the of the
00:58:34.160
Russians who invaded in 2014 and have invaded again. That's the consequence of an injudicious
00:58:41.280
even-handedness. Right, exactly. That's a tough one because there's the strong moral impulse to
00:58:47.360
even-handedness and also to self-correction, right? To examine yourself for your own faults,
00:58:51.680
which we seem to be more than good enough in some sense in the West. Yeah. But that can be
00:58:56.320
capitalized on. And it's an interesting moral conundrum, isn't it? Because there's a time for
00:59:01.440
decisive action that requires a certain level of moral certainty. And that means you're not even
00:59:06.080
you're not even handed under those conditions. So, hmm. So, okay. So, so now let me ask you another
00:59:13.680
question that's associated perhaps on with the disinformation front. There are many people around the
00:59:19.520
world in the West as well, claiming that in some real sense, Ukraine isn't an independent state.
00:59:25.040
It's part of Russia. It has been historically. It's not Germany. It's not a country with a clear,
00:59:31.840
like historical existence. It's a... And so, so, so what, what, what do you, so you're obviously not
00:59:39.920
very happy with that argument, but that is being made continually. And so- I know, I know. I'm laughing
00:59:44.480
because you, you mentioned Germany and the, the natural, you know, of that, of course, Germany is
00:59:49.920
naturally a country. Really? That, right, right. That wasn't a, that wasn't a, a natural thought
00:59:55.760
until 1871. Right, right, right. Well, we forget about all, how difficult it was for those countries
01:00:02.080
we think were all, were forever around to unify themselves. Exactly. Yeah. So, and look, so, and,
01:00:08.000
and, you know, there was historically a lot of argument about exactly what Germany was.
01:00:11.760
And then, of course, Hitler had a view. You mean like World War II. Right. And then,
01:00:16.000
of course, Hitler had a view of what Germany included, and it included things like Austria
01:00:19.840
and Czechoslovakia. And, you know, we, we persuaded the Germans that that was not the case after some
01:00:27.840
considerable effort. The analogy is apt because you can look at Austrians and say, well, they're Germans.
01:00:37.040
Mm-hmm. Well, they speak German. They're Catholics. The dominant religion in Germany
01:00:44.560
is Protestantism. Austrians are largely Catholic. You can tell when you get into Austria and Southern
01:00:50.960
Germany, by the way, when the, when the greeting changes from Guten Tag to Gruß Gott.
01:00:56.560
Right. There's also no shortage of dialectical variation across the hypothetically unified German
01:01:01.360
language. Exactly. Like extreme dialectical variation. Exactly. Right. So we, we've got to
01:01:07.040
not just imagine that the blocks that we're used to in Europe are, were always that way,
01:01:12.000
or have been for centuries, because that's not true either. So then, how do we reliably identify
01:01:17.440
when there is a country? Well, okay. Let me come back to that because there's a straightforward answer to
01:01:22.320
that. But the, it was the Kenyan, um, president or prime minister, um, whom I can't believe I'm
01:01:31.120
quoting approvingly because I rarely approve of anything that he has to say. Um, but who put this
01:01:35.920
very well, uh, recently in a very, very strong statement, um, that look, if we want to get into
01:01:43.280
the business of talking about how, uh, it should be the case that all peoples who identify ethnically
01:01:52.000
with other people should be unified in country in single states, then you are signing the world up
01:01:58.720
for global war on a, on a Hobbesian scale of a sort that we have never seen because look at,
01:02:06.080
look at Africa, look at Asia. Look at Canada. Look, well, I'll leave that to you, Jordan.
01:02:13.440
But how many countries in the world actually are drawn that way? Virtually. Right. So, okay. So the
01:02:20.400
fundamental point here is, is that mere linguistic, uh, historical similarity is not a sufficient
01:02:27.040
condition for presuming a superordinate autonomy. Exactly. And so we have other mechanisms to decide
01:02:33.600
what a country is. And they're very straightforward mechanisms. We live in a world where there's a,
01:02:38.160
there is a United Nations and there is a body of states and the community of states recognizes
01:02:45.600
a new member by recognizing it. And we say, we recognize you as an independent state and we
01:02:52.320
establish diplomatic relations with them and we give them a seat in the United Nations. And then
01:02:56.640
they are a state with all of the rights that any other state has. We did that with all of the states
01:03:04.400
of the former Soviet Union and Russia signed up to all of that. When, when did that happen?
01:03:11.600
In 1991. In relation to Ukraine. In 1991, 1992, all of the states, all of the former Soviet states,
01:03:17.680
including Russia, were recognized as independent states, established diplomatic relations with the
01:03:24.240
world. That's the only standard there is. Okay. So that goes back to your initial claim
01:03:29.120
that what Putin is doing was, you said, unprovoked, unwarranted and illegal. So now we've established
01:03:35.360
the illegality element of that. It's like he had signed agreements or Russia had signed agreements
01:03:40.320
stating that as far as they were concerned, Ukraine was a country among other countries.
01:03:45.760
And more than that, they did something even more. Because when the Soviet Union fell,
01:03:52.240
parts of its nuclear arsenal were still in three other countries, in Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
01:03:59.680
And we worked very hard to persuade those countries, we, the United States and Great Britain,
01:04:06.640
worked very hard to persuade those countries to give their nuclear arsenals back to Russia.
01:04:12.160
Because we were very concerned about the threat of nuclear proliferation. So we pressed that.
01:04:17.840
And they did. And they did. Right, right. In return for that, in 1994, we, Britain and Russia,
01:04:23.920
signed an agreement with Ukraine, committing to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine as it
01:04:30.480
was recognized at the time, in return for Ukraine handing back those nuclear weapons.
01:04:37.280
The Russians signed that treaty. The Russians have just violated a treaty that they specifically
01:04:44.720
signed with Ukraine, recognizing it in its territorial integrity as it was in 1994.
01:04:53.600
That was Yeltsin. Okay, so Putin hypothetically doesn't feel that he's bound by that agreement,
01:04:58.320
but within the framework of international law, he is.
01:05:00.720
He is. I mean, he can regard himself however he wants to, but he is.
01:05:04.640
So not only did Russia recognize Ukraine as a country, but it specifically recognized Ukraine
01:05:16.560
Okay. So, all right. So let's go to unprovoked. Now, here's a mystery. This could have happened at
01:05:26.000
any time over the last 20 years or any time into the future over the next 20 years, but it happened
01:05:33.600
now. And there are accusations of all sorts flying around on the political front in the West about
01:05:38.000
why now? As far as you're concerned, why now? And is there a lesson in the fact that it's now for us?
01:05:48.480
So let me, I'll go into this a little deeper. I read a couple of papers by Victor Davis Hanson
01:05:53.280
yesterday, and he made a claim that was approximately the following, which is that
01:05:57.760
the Democrats, for example, under Obama, talked about Russia in a negative way, but really didn't
01:06:06.800
do anything about Russia, whereas Trump gave Putin flattery in some sense, but actually did something
01:06:14.160
about the potential danger they posed. And I'm not claiming that that's a valid argument or an invalid
01:06:19.760
argument. It's just something that I read when I was trying to prepare for this. Why now? Because it is
01:06:25.520
being politicized like mad in the West. We think, well, Putin is taking advantage of our perceived weakness, and
01:06:31.760
there's partisan reasons for that, and maybe there's deeper philosophical reasons for that. Those need to be
01:06:37.280
separated. As far as you're concerned, why now? And then we do need to get to also maybe how we stepped
01:06:45.440
into this. Even if it was only 20% our fault or 2%, I don't care. What did we do wrong that made this
01:06:51.520
happen and happen now? So look, the answer to the question why now is very hard, I think. And this is
01:07:01.360
something that I'm also wrestling with, because what we need to explain is the invasion. Putin has
01:07:08.000
been carrying forward operations to regain control of Ukraine since 2014. He has been pursuing hybrid
01:07:17.280
warfare approaches, pursuing informational operation approaches in Ukraine. He's put various forms of
01:07:23.280
military pressure on Ukraine from his occupied territories. So it's not exactly now. This is actually
01:07:29.440
an extension of a process that's been occurring for a long time. It's an inflection in that process.
01:07:33.840
Now, so what we need to explain this particular inflection, which is a huge inflection,
01:07:38.720
but that's actually rather hard, to be honest with you. And there's no simple partisan or straightforward
01:07:48.000
explanation to why Putin decided that he needed to invade now, which is the question that is that
01:07:54.480
preoccupies me as someone who's focused on Putin's calculus. Well, the best explanation I've
01:07:59.120
heard so far, and it goes along with this gradualist idea in some sense, is that part of what Putin did
01:08:04.240
while he was attempting to wrest back control of Ukraine, let's say, is build a military presence
01:08:09.920
on the border. And then the fact that you've done that actually changes the situation substantially.
01:08:16.640
You're much more likely to shoot someone with a gun if you happen to be holding it and
01:08:20.640
pointing it at them as a precursor. And so you could see how a gradualist approach and his initial idea
01:08:27.360
might have just been, well, we'll build up the military to put even more pressure on the West
01:08:31.440
and to continue this gradualist approach. But once it's there, the situation changes. And then it could
01:08:37.120
be, in some sense, relatively small and relatively random events that precipitate it at any given moment.
01:08:43.440
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01:09:14.560
So I think it's quite possible that something like that occurred.
01:09:23.120
There's a lot of technical details about, so I want to say on the air to you what I've been saying
01:09:28.480
to other people that I talked to. I got this wrong. Okay. We made a forecast. I and the ISW Russia
01:09:35.520
team made a forecast beginning in November and then carrying forward until very recently that
01:09:41.120
Putin would not launch this huge invasion. And we were wrong. Obviously, he did.
01:09:48.240
And as a matter of analytical integrity, I feel it necessary to say to people explicitly, yes,
01:09:53.840
we were wrong in our forecast. And we've spent a lot of time trying to understand and think about
01:09:59.200
why we were wrong and what lessons we can learn from that. Here's one of the reasons why we were wrong.
01:10:05.600
And let me say, this is one of the reasons why we forecast that he would not do this.
01:10:08.960
Because when you look actually at the technical details of the way that he arrayed his forces
01:10:14.240
around Ukraine, we were watching that and saying, this is going to stink this military operation
01:10:20.480
that he's conducting. He's not well set up to do this. Surely his professional military officers are
01:10:26.320
going to tell him that this is a bad idea. And it turns out that we were wrong that he would be
01:10:33.680
persuaded by that reality. But we were right that it was a bad idea. Because the problems that he's
01:10:40.400
now encountering, we actually did predict that he would have the problems that he's now encountering
01:10:46.480
Okay, okay. So it isn't obvious what precipitated this. And there isn't an obvious moral to derive
01:10:51.920
from the story there. But yeah, there are errors in it. And okay, go ahead.
01:10:56.160
We'll get to errors. But I, you know, before we get to our own errors, because you know,
01:10:59.360
I've got to tell you, Jordan, it's one of my one of the things that I'm very focused on is you need
01:11:02.880
to start by blaming the enemy for things the enemy does. I'm happy to talk about what our
01:11:07.440
responsibilities are here. But this was all Putin's decision.
01:11:11.600
Well, I and I'm actually more interested in in some sense now what our responsibilities are
01:11:17.280
going forward. Okay, right. So so because that's the crucial issue. But and I'd like to hear I,
01:11:23.360
when I commented about mistakes, then I was thinking you said his troops were badly positioned,
01:11:27.760
his military machine is badly positioned. And so that might mean he was setting it up for other
01:11:32.480
reasons, but defaulted to this. Why did that? What is the situation he's in now? Because
01:11:39.280
he's not finding allies at that rapid rate. Let's say no, no, he's not finding really allies at all.
01:11:46.400
Look, the first thing I want to say is, I think it's quite possible that he decided to launch this
01:11:50.640
invasion, because the intent of the mobilization, I think it is possible. The intent of the mobilization
01:11:56.640
was to intimidate both the Ukrainians and the West into surrendering
01:12:01.840
without having to invade, and that he therefore, you know, allowed his military guys
01:12:07.920
to set up a deployment that didn't make sense for an invasion, but was great for threatening.
01:12:12.880
One of the things that happened at the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit for
01:12:17.120
at least one thing that it's done actually for a few things that it's done deserves some criticism
01:12:20.880
for other things. But for the first time in history that I'm aware of, the Biden administration
01:12:28.480
fought a counter hybrid warfare campaign back against the Russians. And as they became,
01:12:35.920
as the Biden administration became aware of Russian preparations to conduct a coup d'etat in Kyiv,
01:12:42.080
they told the Ukrainians about it, and they told the world about it. As they became aware of multiple
01:12:47.840
Russian preparations to conduct false flag attacks or stage Ukrainian provocations or various other
01:12:53.120
things that would have given Putin informational cover and created a who really knows effect
01:12:59.440
in the minds of people in the West, they blew, the Biden administration blew every one of those
01:13:04.560
operations. Okay, so why is that a hybrid warfare response on on Biden's part and not just,
01:13:10.560
not just, I don't mean just, but not just the utility of straightforwardness and honesty
01:13:16.000
as a response to disinformation and propaganda? It's both.
01:13:19.280
It's both. It's both. Because we can wage war with the truth because we're not trying to lie.
01:13:26.000
Putin is trying to create a false universe. Putin is trying to create a fictitious universe,
01:13:30.560
and the Biden administration punctured that. I'm calling it hybrid warfare because they reacted to,
01:13:36.480
first of all, Putin engaged in violence, which makes it politically motivated violence, which makes
01:13:41.600
it warfare. And his guys were conducting deliberate information campaigns to support specific
01:13:48.560
preparations for military activities. And the Biden administration engaged game for game
01:13:54.960
with them on a very tactical level. So it wasn't just sort of blanket telling the truth. It was
01:14:01.120
finding strategic, yeah, well, strategic and tactical blowing all and informed.
01:14:06.320
Yeah. And you can, by the way, see, I have a little bit of the artifact that suggests that this was
01:14:11.360
true because Putin whole held one of his weirdly publicly staged, you know, National Security Council
01:14:18.080
meetings on Monday. And one of the things that happened was he absolutely humiliated
01:14:25.120
the guy who is the head of his foreign intelligence agency that would have been responsible for a lot
01:14:29.440
of these operations. I mean, he humiliated the guy in public in a way that we've never seen him do
01:14:33.600
before. And I think he probably was genuinely angry that the guy had allowed the Biden administration
01:14:39.040
to get inside all of these operations. And I am hypothesizing that Putin decided,
01:14:46.080
in the face of having all of this cover blown, decided that he was just going to go for it,
01:14:52.480
instead of waiting for this guy, Nadezhkin or somebody else to get something. Putin just said,
01:14:58.080
okay, screw it. We've got the forces. I'm tired of this. We're just going to do this. And I don't
01:15:02.480
care that we don't have the informational cover. So frustration and anger in response,
01:15:08.560
possibly to the success of the Biden administration sort of defeating all the informational stuff.
01:15:14.960
Okay. Okay. Well, that's an, that's an interesting explanation for a tipping point and certainly not
01:15:20.960
an expected one. So, so you've covered unprovoked, unwarranted and illegal, I would say, and we've
01:15:28.400
covered territorial ambitions or political ambitions, and we've talked a lot about reconstituting the
01:15:33.200
Soviet empire, let's say, or something approximating that. Do you think it's, we're so, so let's switch
01:15:40.960
to something else. Is what he's, how do you assess the success of what he's doing from a military and
01:15:50.080
a political perspective? Has he miscalculated what, what's the situation on the ground in the Ukraine? How
01:15:56.640
are the Ukrainians resisting? Uh, how are, how are other countries responding? Like, what's the
01:16:03.120
situation in your estimation? So I'm going to lead by saying, uh, the Russia, you know, the Russian
01:16:11.040
military is so much stronger than the, than the Ukrainian military writ large that the odds remain
01:16:18.400
high that the Russian military will be able ultimately to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenses and
01:16:24.400
take control of Kyiv and so forth. I don't want to offer an optimistic take here because we're still
01:16:29.760
early days in this war and the power imbalance is just so great. But that having been said,
01:16:37.280
I would never have expected to be sitting here four days into the Russian military operation
01:16:42.320
with Russian troops just messing around on the outskirts of Kyiv,
01:16:45.920
just finally getting into Kharkiv and struggling all up and down. I would never have expected that to
01:16:51.600
happen except that we, we did expect it to be a mess when they tried to do an invasion with the force
01:16:59.520
packages that they had put together, especially those that are attacking Kyiv and, uh, and Kharkiv. So
01:17:06.960
a few things have gone on. One is this was a stupid way of, of, of preparing for an invasion. If you were serious
01:17:12.720
about an invasion, I give you all. In what way? Yeah. Yeah. Give some details. I think that'd be
01:17:16.880
interesting. So here's the thing. Um, mechanized maneuver warfare is very complicated undertaking.
01:17:24.320
Logistically. Well, yes, logistically, but even more than that, in terms of command and control,
01:17:30.880
when you are a commander and you've got multiple battalions, mechanized battalions, moving down
01:17:37.440
multiple axes of advance, sort of driving down different roads to different targets rapidly,
01:17:44.320
keeping track of all of that is very hard. Understanding what they're doing is very hard.
01:17:48.880
Figuring out how to support them is very hard. They need artillery support. They need air support.
01:17:53.840
They do need logistics support. You need to tell them what to do as they get the particular, or as
01:17:57.920
they run into problems. It's a lot of burden on a commander to keep track of a lot of subordinates.
01:18:04.080
So the solution for as long as there's been mechanized warfare is that you build forces where
01:18:10.320
you never have more than two or three or maximum four direct subordinate units like that. So
01:18:16.880
battalions get grouped into regiments or brigades, which are at the same echelon, uh, in an organizational
01:18:23.840
structure. And there will be not more than, than four, uh, maneuvering battalions or mechanized
01:18:29.360
battalions within a mechanized regiment or a mechanized brigade. And then brigades and regiments
01:18:34.720
get grouped into divisions. So there's not going to be more than three or four brigades or regiments
01:18:40.000
in a division. And then the divisions are grouped into larger, uh, organizations. And this is the way
01:18:45.680
the US military is organized and it's the way the Russian military is organized formally. But the weird
01:18:50.880
thing is that when they put these masses of forces into Belarus and into Western Russia that are now
01:18:57.360
attacking Kyiv and when they built up forces opposite Kharkiv, they didn't move entire regiments
01:19:04.080
or brigades, let alone entire divisions. They pulled individual battalion, what they call battalion
01:19:10.080
tactical groups, BTGs. They pulled individual BTGs from all across Russia. The guys in Belarus actually
01:19:19.120
came from out of 10 or 15 different regiments and brigades in the Russian Far East.
01:19:24.800
And did they do that to not weaken those divisions and brigades where they were already located?
01:19:30.720
No, no, because they're most of this, all the stuff in Belarus is coming in a place where the Russians
01:19:35.280
don't need to worry about their Chinese are not invading the Russian Far East. So the Russians could
01:19:39.040
have taken whole regiments or brigades from the Far East if they'd wanted to. And they didn't,
01:19:43.440
I can offer various technical explanations for why they might not have. But the point is that they
01:19:49.360
put together what we're calling just sort of collection of cats and dogs of battalions
01:19:55.360
wung together from a whole bunch of other parent units, not organized coherently, even on the spot,
01:20:03.120
as far as we can tell, into clear regiment brigade structures and all like that. And then they just sort
01:20:08.960
told them go down, you know, drive down the road and go take Kiev. Okay, that gets you the kind of
01:20:15.040
mess that they have now, where they try to, you know, individual battalion tactics groups drive down
01:20:21.040
and then they get stopped, but then there's not a good coordination so that there's not an immediate
01:20:25.040
other battalion that can take over and flank and keep the attack moving. There are all kinds of ways
01:20:29.840
of dealing with the defenses the Ukrainians are putting up and the Russians are not using them.
01:20:33.280
And I think that that has a lot to do with the organization of the Russian forces that is just,
01:20:40.080
it was just crazy as an organization for a mechanized operation like this.
01:20:45.200
And then Putin assumed that just brute force numbers in some sense would overcome that.
01:20:54.080
Possibly, but I think another answer goes to your second question.
01:21:07.360
It's unbelievable the determination with which I thought they would fight.
01:21:12.320
I mean, I know Ukrainians and I thought that they would fight.
01:21:23.440
Okay, so he's having a lot more trouble locally than he might have expected for a multitude of reasons.
01:21:30.640
Poor organization to begin with, which seems in keeping with the notion that the troops were put
01:21:36.000
there as intimidation rather than as a reliable military force for an invasion.
01:21:43.200
And also, the Ukrainians are entrenching and fighting back with a ferocity that was unexpected.
01:21:48.960
Well, they have more to lose in some sense than the Russians have to gain.
01:21:54.960
That's a dangerous inequality in morality in warfare.
01:22:01.920
And so what's happening on the international front in response to the cohesiveness of the response to the invasion?
01:22:09.840
This has been very heartening, and it goes to one of the other reasons why I thought Putin wouldn't do this.
01:22:17.360
Because the international community is rallying, and we can have frustrations with the way individual states are responding to specific requests and so forth.
01:22:29.120
And I have been frustrated by that, as everybody else has been.
01:22:33.120
But the truth is, if you get out of the time-dilated world we're in, in which if something doesn't happen five seconds from now, then it's taking a long time.
01:22:41.760
We're talking about within three to four days, we've got the Russians being partially kicked out of SWIFT.
01:22:47.920
We've got sanctions on the Russian Central Bank.
01:22:50.480
We've got the Germans for the first time since the Second World War directly sending lethal aid to the Ukrainians.
01:22:56.720
We've got virtual unanimity in condemning the Russian attack.
01:23:08.640
Bashar al-Assad continues to demonstrate what an evil slime ball he actually is and how much he owes the Russians,
01:23:15.840
because he immediately recognized the Russian recognition of Donbass, of Donetsk and Luhansk.
01:23:23.520
The dictator of Syria, who has been conducting his own little genocide there with Russian active assistance.
01:23:30.240
Right, so he's just the kind of ally you'd hope the Russians would have.
01:23:37.760
Again, when Maduro's on your side, you ought to be thinking hard about your life choices.
01:23:44.240
And the Iranian, what they call the axis of resistance, I think, was very prompt in recognizing the
01:23:54.160
And the Iranians are generally focused on blaming NATO for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
01:24:00.240
But other than that, even Xi Jinping could not bring himself to veto the UN Security Council
01:24:15.840
It tells you that what Putin has done is even Xi is going, you know, Vova, I'm not sure that I can
01:24:21.200
actually support you on this, the way you've done this.
01:24:31.840
Even the Hungarians supported kicking him out of SWIFT.
01:24:34.720
And so let's go into the SWIFT issue to some degree, because people won't know what that is
01:24:41.200
It's very complicated, and it is in some respects overblown.
01:24:46.320
SWIFT is a European consortium that is the means by which banks communicate with one another to do
01:24:56.800
And if you are kicked out of SWIFT, then you have to find other ways of communicating with banks
01:25:16.880
It introduces all kinds of friction into bank-to-bank transactions, which is important
01:25:24.320
because the Russians rely on dollar reserves for their reserves.
01:25:29.760
And when they have challenges interacting with the dollar market globally, it's a big problem for
01:25:37.200
And getting them interfering with their ability to use SWIFT makes that much harder for them.
01:25:46.560
It makes it harder for them to move money around, including to regain, you know,
01:25:50.160
reclaim money that is abroad or to move money to buy things or various other things that states
01:25:55.120
do and that individuals try to do using banks and so on.
01:25:58.400
It just throws a huge amount of sand in the gears of all of that.
01:26:02.400
Do the Russians use SWIFT to move money between the banks in Russia, or is that all international?
01:26:10.480
I'm sure they can work that out internally, but getting abroad is a whole other story.
01:26:18.640
But important to SWIFT is, actually, the sanctions on the Russian Central Bank are even more important.
01:26:25.360
Because SWIFT is just a means of communication, and it is important.
01:26:28.720
And I'm glad that we've gotten people around on that for the most part.
01:26:32.800
But we've got the EU imposing sanctions on the Central Bank.
01:26:42.480
It can make it hard to impossible for the Russian Central Bank actually to play on the dollar market
01:26:49.440
and to engage in the dollar economy, which is a problem because the global economy remains
01:26:57.440
And as the ruble is predictably collapsing, as this is going on, in fact, there's a joke going
01:27:05.680
Russians from the Soviet days and even before have a very dark sense of humor, and they excel at that,
01:27:14.960
But one joke going around as soon as the invasion began was, could you kindly tell us that before
01:27:22.160
you invade somebody else the next time so we can buy dollars?
01:27:28.880
And sanctioning the Central Bank makes it hard to impossible for the Russian government to deal
01:27:38.160
And how long will it take the consequences of that to unfold in some way that actually bites,
01:27:48.640
Well, I mean, so okay, the problem is, I don't know that it will bite on the military front.
01:27:54.400
Because we need to keep something in mind that a lesson that we learned from the Soviet Union,
01:27:59.760
a dictatorship can generally do any one thing that it decides to do.
01:28:05.280
When you're running a country, the resources that are available to you, sanctions notwithstanding,
01:28:09.520
you can usually choose any one thing and actually make that happen.
01:28:13.520
So the Soviet military threat, for example, reached its height at the same time as the Soviet economy
01:28:20.480
began to go into terminal decline in the 1980s.
01:28:24.000
Those two facts were probably related to one another and with some causality, by the way.
01:28:30.560
I think he probably can keep his military going.
01:28:32.880
But what's going to happen is the Russian economy will collapse.
01:28:38.320
I don't know exactly what that means, but will be badly harmed at some point.
01:28:43.520
Okay, now do you think, now do you think that, so okay,
01:28:49.520
One would be that support for Putin within the country vanishes and
01:28:53.360
the demonstrations that we've already seen start to increase in scope.
01:28:57.120
And I suppose the other possibility is, you know, bombing people into submission, so to speak,
01:29:02.720
often produces much more resistance than anyone attempts or intends or assumes.
01:29:07.440
And so is there any possibility that these sanctions might backfire and increase support for Putin?
01:29:14.240
Or do you think the disintegration into chaos possibilities is more probable?
01:29:18.880
The sanctions, so the last thing that I want to flag for you, which is part of our own self
01:29:25.760
reflection on why we got it wrong is, we assumed that Putin would prepare his people for a big war.
01:29:33.280
We assumed that before he attacked, he would have spent days, if not weeks, telling his people,
01:29:40.640
basically, that he was going to have to fight a big war.
01:29:43.040
And here's why, and that they were going to suffer, but it was going to be necessary and good for them.
01:29:49.680
As he was getting ready to invade, the Russian officials were lampooning the West,
01:29:56.560
They were talking to the Russian people and laughing at us and saying, look at these stupid Westerners
01:30:04.480
He did nothing to prepare his people for this war.
01:30:07.680
And the protests that you're seeing, and the word that is coming out, even from the sectors
01:30:12.960
near Kharkiv, from near the border near Kharkiv, where the Russians concentrated all of these forces.
01:30:18.080
I've seen Western interviews talking to Russians near the border who are saying,
01:30:22.720
we had no idea, we were shocked when this thing kicked off.
01:30:24.960
So he's done nothing to prepare his people for the war, which is why-
01:30:29.040
Have you ever seen anything like these demonstrations?
01:30:32.080
Okay, so let's, we could talk about that a little bit, because it's not like we're
01:30:40.480
And so, so, so how do you, you account for that, at least in part by the fact that this is
01:30:46.960
a terrible shock to people and that they can see that it's going to cost them.
01:30:51.680
But also, it's no trivial thing to demonstrate in a place like Russia.
01:30:57.360
You put yourself at some risk here, but not very much by doing that.
01:31:01.840
He's reportedly already arrested 1600 people for demonstrating.
01:31:05.120
And those people are certainly having a very hard time in prison.
01:31:09.440
And will probably never emerge again, I would predict.
01:31:12.000
And he's, I think he's going to have to get in the business of killing a lot of Russians.
01:31:16.400
If this protracts, they're not going to blame us.
01:31:20.160
We are not going to be the target of the anger for the sanctions and the economic suffering
01:31:28.240
This, and this is the other part of why I thought he'd have to prepare his people.
01:31:32.400
Lots of polls show that Russians see America as an enemy and a threat and all of that kind
01:31:37.760
He spent 20 years getting Russians to believe that.
01:31:40.800
And of course, there's the Soviet hangover of a lot of comfort in Russia, you know, believing that.
01:31:50.880
And all of the language that he's been using about these are our fraternal Slavic brothers,
01:31:55.440
and they, we need to bring them back to the fold and all of that kind of stuff.
01:32:01.440
And he's been talking about, you know, we need to remove this illegal junta that's in Kyiv.
01:32:06.400
He's got a whole narrative about how this really isn't a war against the Ukrainian people.
01:32:19.600
And they are, they are understanding that this is a war against Ukraine.
01:32:24.240
And a lot of Russians, I think, are just like, why are we fighting Ukraine?
01:32:31.600
So insofar, insofar as they are their Slavic brothers, this is now tantamount to a civil war.
01:32:42.240
So it's, he's just, he's totally failed to prepare anybody informationally for this.
01:32:47.520
And that is one of the things that is generating this, this outrage in Russia
01:32:53.040
over this unprovoked war of aggression against a, a, a brother Slavic state that did not attack
01:33:00.320
Russia and wasn't threatening Russia and where there are no Americans.
01:33:03.760
Because again, you can even, you could tell the Russian people that the Americans are the
01:33:18.400
So let's, we're, we're, let's move to future actions.
01:33:23.600
So the, the West is united while the world is united, except for the exceptions that you
01:33:28.080
already described, and Putin is having a lot of trouble on the ground.
01:33:31.360
And as far as you're concerned, he wasn't well prepared either on the propaganda or the
01:33:35.360
military front, and he's going to suffer substantial economic costs.
01:33:39.760
And so this, at the moment, this does not look like it's going well for him.
01:33:43.840
So we could be happy about that, except that there are also nuclear weapons.
01:33:47.840
And that's always something to think about what, what, how do we not, what's the right
01:33:56.320
What, what do you think is an intelligent pathway forward as far as you're concerned?
01:34:00.320
And are you, do you feel comfortable in even detailing out such a thing?
01:34:06.560
I, there's, you know, we don't, we don't do secrets very well.
01:34:09.440
And that's, um, you know, this is, this is straightforward.
01:34:12.560
Um, so I guess I'm confident in your knowledge about making such a, such an,
01:34:19.200
As you can see, I'm comfortable making forecasts and recommendations with the possibility that
01:34:24.400
they'll be wrong and I'll accept the consequence if they are, that's, it's my job to do that.
01:34:28.720
Um, so right now we're doing the most important thing that we should be doing, which is rushing
01:34:35.600
the most important kinds of defensive weapons to Ukraine, uh, as much as we can.
01:34:40.240
Um, we need to try to help the Ukrainians save their country if there's any way for them to do that.
01:34:44.880
Um, and we need to believe the Russian military badly.
01:34:48.400
Um, if we can't, I am very confident that there will be a Ukrainian insurgency if Putin overcomes
01:34:55.840
the, uh, Ukrainian conventional forces and this can turn into Ukraine, uh, Putin's Afghanistan war.
01:35:01.200
Um, and, uh, we should absolutely help the Ukrainians win that as quickly as possible.
01:35:14.400
We're sending, so we're sending primarily what they need are anti-tank, uh, weapons,
01:35:19.680
which are mainly javelin anti-tank, uh, man, portable, you could fire them from your shoulder,
01:35:23.920
um, missiles, um, and stinger, um, anti-aircraft missiles.
01:35:28.080
Again, you know, we, we sent stingers to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
01:35:32.640
Um, and it did fear for harm to the, to the Soviets.
01:35:35.280
And we're sending stingers here too, and the Ukrainians are using them to good effect against
01:35:41.120
Um, those are the most important things we need to do.
01:35:43.920
I'm sure that there's also sort of basic ammunition and stuff that we, uh, need to send
01:35:53.840
I don't have a list right now, but their organizations getting together to send
01:36:01.440
Um, as long as there is an independent Ukraine, it's going to need a lot of help because the
01:36:05.520
Russians are doing fearful damage to it and we'll do more.
01:36:07.600
So that's what people, people can do that at a local level.
01:36:11.200
And maybe we could put some links in the description of this video.
01:36:14.320
I'd like links from you for recommended papers.
01:36:18.080
So that people could familiarize themselves, but also anything you could provide us that
01:36:21.680
would, would help in that practical sense would be useful as well.
01:36:27.840
Start with our websites, understanding war.org and critical threats.org.
01:36:31.040
Um, and we, we have daily and, and sometimes several times a day updates of exactly what's
01:36:39.600
Um, so, um, and, and I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll try to find you some links for organizations that
01:36:48.080
I'll name one spirit of America, uh, has, has historically done really great work and
01:36:55.040
Um, so we're doing all of that stuff and that's great.
01:36:58.000
Um, we're going to bring a lot of economic pain on Putin and that's great.
01:37:02.000
Um, look, a wounded bear is a very dangerous animal and we must not be complacent about this.
01:37:11.040
I want to bound what I'm worried about here for, for your listeners.
01:37:16.880
We're not going to get into a global thermonuclear exchange that ends the world.
01:37:22.400
Because as crazy as Putin might or might not be, he's not that crazy.
01:37:29.200
Because the, because we are not going to do anything that is going to put the survival of
01:37:36.880
Russia at stake in such a clear and fundamental way.
01:37:40.400
Part of the issue of a measured response is that.
01:37:43.120
So the measured response is to, to insist upon the territorial integrity of the, of Ukraine.
01:37:49.600
I mean, we're not going to, we're not going to attack Russia.
01:37:52.160
We're not going to, we never were going to attack Russia.
01:37:58.160
I mean, you know, we know anything from history.
01:38:00.160
Do you, do you want to invade, drive from Warsaw to Moscow again?
01:38:08.720
We're not going to put the survival of the Russian, of Russia at stake.
01:38:12.000
Putin is not going to end the world because we're never going to back him into a corner
01:38:20.320
Now I am worried about a conventional expansion of this conflict.
01:38:25.520
Well, cause I was wondering when you were saying we start to fun funnel in defensive weapons.
01:38:29.680
Well, at what point, well, now we should be the global community, not the United States
01:38:37.440
And then, but it's still at what point does the funneling of defensive weapons become
01:38:44.320
I mean, is that means the movement of troops, I would presume from other countries that maybe
01:38:49.280
Well, no, I mean, no one is sending, no other countries are sending troops into Ukraine.
01:38:54.800
And you, and you think that's an, that's appropriate certainly at the time and perhaps into the future.
01:38:59.280
I'm going to tell you the, the, I'm going to tell you what I'm worried about before I say that,
01:39:13.440
We know in Syria that Russian, Russia was using precision guided munitions to attack bread lines
01:39:22.000
We know that he was supporting what were called siege and starve campaigns to compel communities
01:39:32.080
to surrender by literally cutting them off from food and water and watching them die until they
01:39:39.280
These are things that Russia did in Syria, and it's very well documented.
01:39:43.280
In fact, I mean, like the Doctors Without Borders and other organizations had to stop announcing
01:39:49.440
the locations of their medical facilities in Syria because the Russians were using those lists,
01:39:53.680
which are supposed to be do not strike lists as target lists.
01:40:03.360
And I'm very worried about the fact that the Russians are bringing weapons toward Kharkiv
01:40:09.600
of the sort that one uses to exterminate city blocks in short order.
01:40:16.080
I'm hoping that that's not what they're going to do with those weapons.
01:40:18.400
If they do anything with them, the West is going to have to ask itself, if the Russians
01:40:23.440
go that route in Ukraine, are we actually just going to stand by and watch?
01:40:29.520
I don't have, I'm not going to offer you an answer.
01:40:31.200
I'm just telling you, that's a decision to take down the road.
01:40:38.880
But as long as they don't go there, we're not going to see Western troops going into Ukraine,
01:40:43.840
and I'm not going to advocate for that. And I'm not, I'm not getting into, you know,
01:40:47.120
I'm not suggesting that we should do that now. We should do everything we can to help the Ukrainians
01:40:51.920
defend themselves. Putin has said that it is an act of aggression to help the Ukrainians defend
01:40:56.400
themselves, which is not true. But he has asserted that, and he has threatened to attack
01:41:02.880
Might he attack Poland? Yes, he might. He might attack Poland. I can absolutely see Russian missile
01:41:08.480
strikes, or airstrikes into Poland, or into Hungary, or into Romania, or into any of the
01:41:15.680
states that are, which would be an attack on NATO territory, which would activate Article 5 of the
01:41:19.680
NATO Treaty. Which would mean what would have to happen? Well, it would mean that that we and all of
01:41:26.400
the other NATO member states would need to vote to activate Article 5, which I would hope that we would do.
01:41:31.200
And then what we would do, what I would like to see us do, is what we are now doing, which is,
01:41:37.760
or an acceleration of what we are now doing, which is sending American military power,
01:41:42.160
and also British and French and other countries' military power, to the NATO borders, to the Eastern
01:41:48.480
NATO borders, in a defensive posture to defend. There's no, no one is talking about attacking.
01:41:56.480
But we have to be prepared to defend against these sorts of things. The complexity will come,
01:42:01.360
if the Russians actually begin rocketing or firing missiles into Poland, the defense against that
01:42:07.360
is counter battery fire. And at a certain point, you do start to have to shoot back, shoot back at
01:42:13.920
The defense, the line between defense and offense is quite blurry.
01:42:17.440
Well, it's not in a legal sense. This is, you know, legally, that would not be an offensive action.
01:42:22.400
The Russians would have engaged in an act of war against Poland, and Poland and NATO would,
01:42:27.760
Poland would then have a right under international law to defend itself, and NATO would have a right
01:42:32.400
under Article 5 and collective security agreements to come to Poland's defense in that regard.
01:42:36.640
No one is going to talk about a ground invasion of Belarus or Russia or Kaliningrad or anything.
01:42:44.160
I am confident that NATO will act, if it acts militarily at all, in an entirely defensive fashion,
01:42:50.320
and simply for the purpose of eliminating known imminent threats of attack to member states.
01:42:58.080
But no one is going to talk about an invasion, and we're not going to do that. But we are going to have to
01:43:03.760
change our force posture very fundamentally, which is going to have all kinds of ripple effects.
01:43:09.680
Because this, this is not a short term crisis. This, the threat that Putin is manifesting is a threat
01:43:16.080
that's going to be here as long as Putin is here. So we're going to have to be prepared to defend
01:43:22.480
Poland and Romania and the Baltic states from Russian, the Russian conventional threat. For the first time
01:43:30.400
since the end of the Cold War, we're going to have to be prepared to defend against the risk of a Russian
01:43:36.480
mechanized attack on NATO member states. The US defense budget is not built to do that. The US
01:43:43.280
force posture is not structured to do that. Our national security documents are not built to do
01:43:48.000
that. We're going to have to change all of that. And we're going to have to rebuild some defense
01:43:52.800
capability. And we're going to have to spend more on defense because China hasn't gone away. We've spent
01:43:57.360
more than 90 minutes here talking about Russia. We haven't talked about China, which is great because
01:44:00.560
I'm not a China expert. But this doesn't reduce the threat that China poses to Taiwan or the
01:44:07.200
requirements to beef up our capabilities in the Pacific. By the way, we've got problems in the
01:44:12.240
Middle East still going on. We haven't talked about that either. And we've got an ongoing series of wars
01:44:18.400
in the Middle East that can engage us at any moment. We've got to get serious about our defenses.
01:44:23.280
And I can tell you right now that the defense budget that we're operating under is insufficient
01:44:30.560
by a lot. And no one wants to hear this. No one wants to spend more on defense.
01:44:39.120
So let's let's sum up a bit and then let's see if there's anything else we need to cover.
01:44:43.920
It's been a pretty comprehensive discussion. And and we've we've talked about an unprovoked,
01:44:50.080
unwarranted and illegal attack by Russia on Ukraine, which is by all indications,
01:44:54.880
a sovereign state by legally and otherwise. We've talked about why the Russians might have
01:45:00.160
been motivated to do that historically and also proximally. We've talked about the situation on
01:45:06.320
the ground and internationally, the Russians are having more trouble than they might have
01:45:10.240
predicted on both fronts. And I suppose that's good news in some sense for the rest of the world
01:45:15.360
and for Ukraine. We've talked about the pitfalls associated with that.
01:45:19.360
We've talked about how this might move forward and should move forward, partly in terms of supporting
01:45:25.360
Ukraine's and the Ukrainians attempts to defend themselves. And then what might occur after that?
01:45:30.880
You've talked about your belief that the world response, because I won't call it the Western
01:45:36.080
response, the world response is likely to be measured and careful and that as far as you're concerned
01:45:42.240
at the moment, you don't see radical danger in this tit for tatting up to some ultimate exchange.
01:45:48.800
And so. Well, I'm wondering if there's anything else you think it would be useful to bring to the
01:45:56.000
attention of people at this particular point, we can always have a conversation like this again as
01:46:00.000
things unfold. Anything else you think that that is necessary for people to understand right now?
01:46:05.600
I think that I just want to end by saluting the heroic Ukrainians who are defending themselves
01:46:16.160
valiantly against this attack. Salute all of those who helped them.
01:46:22.640
And I will sign off as I will going forward while this war is going on and while there's a free Ukraine.
01:46:34.400
Well, thanks very much for talking to me today. And we'll get this up as soon as we possibly can.
01:46:38.880
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure.
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but it will always be thinking of you with smart controls and zero upfront costs.
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Visit EnbridgeSustainSmartFlow.com to learn more. Thrive knows that quitting smoking is hard.
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You get advice like try hypnosis or quick cold turkey. Instead, start small with Thrive,
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which can lead to something big. Start stopping with Thrive.