3 Takeaways - General David Petraeus Continues His Brilliant Analysis of the Ukraine War — Plus China, Cyber and Other Threats (#129)

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Former CIA Director and General David Petraeus (Ret.) continues his brilliant, in-depth analysis of the Ukraine war, including whether or not Putin will use nuclear weapons and the risks of a wider war. Also hear his expert views on China, the battlefield of cyberspace, threats posed by Iran, N. Korea and Islamic terrorists, plus the stunning new importance of NATO. Don’t miss this remarkable talk with a remarkable man.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another

Three Takeaways episode. Today, I'm excited to continue my fascinating discussion with former Director of the CIA and retired four-star General David Petraeus. We complete this two-part series today with a discussion on whether or not Putin will resort to the use of nuclear weapons, whether the war between Ukraine and Russia will lead to World War III, and we'll also give you General Petraeus' thoughts on China and cyber. Welcome, Dave, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Great to be with you, Lana. Thank you. There's a long-term issue of Europe being unable or unwilling to defend itself. The European Union's economy is

about 10 times the size of Russia's, but the EU is reliant on the US to defend itself against an expansionist Russia. Only, I think, about three European countries spend 2% of their gross domestic product. Oh, no, it's many more. It's way more than that now. That has gone up very dramatically in recent years and especially since 24 February. Now, Germany, of course, is the big development. And there's this great German word for, you know, sort of a thunderclap or whatever hinge in history kind few months that the previous chancellor over the course of a decade and a half or more never, and that is jump immediately, not just a 1.5% of GDP on defense, but to 2% with an additional $110 billion equivalent for improving readiness, which was not what it should have been. And then the decision to provide lethal equipment to another country for the first time in their post-war history as well. So that has dramatically changed.

But the reality is that still we will spend more than two point, again, three or four times as much as all of our NATO allies put together. And that shouldn't be. They should do more. The presidents of both parties in the U.S. for many, many decades have bewailed that fact and have encouraged our European allies. I remember when I was still in uniform, and I think it was a commander, a central commander in Afghanistan at the time, it was after Iraq, Secretary Gates at the final North Atlantic Council meeting that he attended, so the NATO headquarters, and everybody thought this would be a great hug and appreciation, and he went after them on not spending 2% of GDP on

defense. But again, there have been significant changes since then. It's more encouraging than it was. Again, no one has done more to make NATO great again than Putin. Ironically, he was setting out to make Russia great again, but he's actually pushed two very geostrategically important countries under the arms of NATO, Finland and Sweden, and has pushed everyone. I mean, he's given NATO a reason to live again. And that was not really present in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR and Warsaw. What do you think about Sweden and Finland potentially joining NATO? I think they're very, very important. By the way, I've had their forces under me in combat operations. They were both in Afghanistan. Some of them were in some of the other

endeavors we were engaged in, in the Balkans, by the way, as well, Bosnia and Kosovo. And I knew some of them from there when I was in Bosnia as a one-star for a year. And they are very capable military forces. They have superb equipment. They have superb human capital that's very well-trained. Of course, they're motivated because they share a border, especially Finland, obviously, with Russia. So that in itself is important. This is not, again, a country that's going to be a net consumer. These are net contributors right from the beginning. Beyond that, of course, they control the part of the Black Sea that we didn't control without them, and it makes a NATO-controlled lake. And then,

finally, when you look to areas of future competition and you think of the ARC, they're both ARC Council members, and they add that dimension, which is very important as well. So this is a very significant substantive, not just symbolic development. Russia should rue the day that they push these two countries into asking for membership in NATO, which of course, NATO rapidly granted the two countries still need to finally agree, Hungary and Turkey, but I think they will. There will be additional tough negotiations and concessions, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that will happen. What do you think Putin's options are in Ukraine? And under what circumstances do you think he would use nuclear weapons? I don't think he will use nuclear weapons,

although clearly the possibility is greater than it otherwise would have been. And he certainly has not hesitated to rattle the nuclear saber from time to time, as has his minister of disincentive human, as have others. That said, I think it's almost a sign of desperation that they are doing so. They're just trying to grasp any straw that could intimidate Ukraine and scare the West from continuing to do what Ukraine and the West have been doing. It would not change this strategic reality that I described earlier, which is very dire for Putin. And that is that Ukraine has mobilized its country vastly better than has Russia. And it continues to out-generate Russia when it comes to recruiting, training, equipping, and organizing additional forces and capabilities supported massively by the U.S. and our allies and other Western partners.

So the use of tactical nuclear weapons has a tactical effect. It doesn't change the war. It could kill or destroy a lot of people and a lot of infrastructure, but that doesn't change this dynamic. If anything, it probably inflames the Ukrainians further and the U.S. and West, and it makes Russia even more of a pariah than it already is without really achieving anything that would be truly noteworthy. So I think he will shrink from doing that. I guess there's some scenarios where, I don't know, Russian survival might be at stake, however he defines that, and that's an open question. But I think, again, right now, that it is unlikely. By the way, depending on how he uses or would use nuclear weapons, his own forces could be in jeopardy. They don't have protective equipment. They are trained on this. They're very poorly trained on just basic skills as soldiers, as infantrymen, much less on

acting on a nuclear battlefield. And depending on which way the wind blows, it could actually, again, do more damage to Russia than it could to Ukraine, at least outside of the immediate area of the explosion and the effects of that explosion. Do you think there's a risk of it becoming a wider war between Russia on the one side and the U.S. and or NATO on the other? It's a possibility that absolutely has to be considered and thought through. But I think the last thing Russia needs is a wider war. They're not winning this one. They don't need to add additional parties to the war. They don't want to bring in NATO countries, I don't think. And frankly, obviously, NATO countries don't want to

be engaged in a war directly with Russia either. President Biden repeatedly has stated publicly he doesn't want to start World War III. And it's one of the reasons for the caution, the reservations about providing certain additional capabilities and then engaging in certain initiatives that some people put forward in the beginning, which I thought were wrong as well, wrongheaded and foolish, such as a, quote, humanitarian no-fly zone or something like this. Look, if you get our aircraft in the same airspace with Russian aircraft and Russian air defenses, we are going to shoot down their aircraft and we're going to destroy their air defenses. Maybe some of us, but in general, we're going to take them down.

And now you are into a wider war. So that notion never made sense to me, frankly, and why individuals with reasonable expertise were putting that forward, I think was quite questionable. What do you think the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war is on China? I hope that it is cautionary. I hope that it leads the leaders in Beijing and throughout China to recognize that when you roll the iron dice, as Bismarck termed the decision to go to war, you know, it doesn't always turn out the way you envision, that if you haven't actually done combat operations for a very long time, it's a little

bit harder than it otherwise might be. And that if a country really resists you and has outside support and has supporters that will sanction the economy, that can have pretty dismal effects as well. Now, you could also say, well, but they'll say, we're not Russia. We don't have the corruption. We don't have the lack of professionalism. We have better training, better discipline. The rest of the world can't do to us what they did to Russia. We're too important. It was the second economy in the

world, the largest market in the world, if you will, in terms of just your people and middle class, albeit not as big as the U.S. in terms of overall GDP. So you can come at this from different perspectives, but I think, and I'd like to think as well, that it is a cautionary tale rather than an encouraging one. And of course, a lot of this depends, of course, as well on what the U.S. does to shore up the two elements of deterrence, which are, of course, a potential adversary's perception of your capabilities on the one hand and your willingness to employ them on the other. We have to ensure there's no doubt about those. That means we have to transform our military forces and bases and all headquarters and all the rest of that to a world in which you're no longer going to have huge platforms, heavily manned, incredibly capable, but also incredibly vulnerable.

You're going to go increasingly to smaller, increasingly unmanned, even algorithmically driven. So not just necessarily remotely piloted. And ultimately, where the human in the loop is the person who makes the algorithm, makes the decision to tell the machine, okay, you can now execute that algorithm without any further interference from me, but also hardening of our bases, our infrastructure, our headquarters, improving the resilience of it, improving the defenses of it, and all the rest of that. Ukraine is not the war of the future at all. It's really much more of what would have been the Cold War turning

hot. It's largely that era of armored vehicles, artillery, even aircraft. Yes, there are drones, but they're very short range and relatively much, much less capable than the high-end ones. The ranges of the most precise systems right now for Ukraine. It's about 80 kilometers. Put this in a bigger construct where you can see everything. The drones have colossal distance and capability, and they're command and control with bouncing off satellites. But the networks are connecting everything. There's unbelievable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, many of them unmanned, and again, algorithmically driven. And you then think about the old Cold War adage,

what can be seen can be hit, what can be hit can be killed. If you put this in the really modern, the real future of war, everything can be seen, everything can be hit, and therefore, everything can be killed unless you have really good defenses, great resilience, stealth, and a variety of other qualities and capabilities. So we see some glimpses of this in Ukraine and we see some old truths that leadership matters and will matter and all the rest of this training matters, readiness matters, commitment of an entire nation matters. But again, the technology, other than one other aspect of this battlefield, which is truly unique and unprecedented, and that is the advent of smartphones and social media, which give a degree of transparency to

what's going on and the availability of so-called open source intelligence that is, again, just completely unparalleled in the past. How do you see the risks of tech and cyber to the U.S. in general? As very, very substantial as they have been, as they continue to evolve, but also risks that we can pose to others in those realms as well. Cyberspace is a new battlefield domain, the equivalent of land, sea, air, outer space, and cyberspace, requiring new organizations, cyber command, new structures, new capabilities, new defensive organizations, cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, et cetera, et cetera, new doctrine, new ways of working together, sharing threat intelligence, risk mitigation, threat mitigation measures, and all the rest of that.

So these threats are very profound. We don't truly know 100% that we can shut down each other's electrical grid or this or that infrastructure. We've seen little pieces of that from time to time. I mean, we should recognize that Russia brought it on Ukraine at the start of the invasion and didn't have the effects that they thought they would achieve because there as well since 2014, it wasn't just in the forces in the military, it was in their actually their cybersecurity arena where they got much, much better with the help of NSA and a variety of other agencies like that from around the world that lays out what Russia tried to do at the start of the invasion and which was thwarted by a combination, again, of improved Ukrainian capabilities, improved Western capabilities, and not just, again, in government capabilities,

but also in civilian areas, including very prominently Microsoft, given the ubiquitous nature of its products that it has, but also cloud computing and a variety of other capabilities than it provides literally to the entire world, the Western world in particular. How do you see China? I see China as the most important relationship for the U.S. and the West in the world. If you think about the U.S., which I think right now faces the most numerous and complex array of challenges and threats ever, certainly in post-Cold War, if not post-World War II era, and think of us as the guy in the circus who gets a plate spinning and then another

one comes back. And of course, we have folks that help us with that called allies and partners. If you think of that as a metaphorical image of what it is we have to do, the relationship with China together with our allies and partners, so it should be whole of governments, comprehensive, integrated, coherent, whole of governments approach, that plate is bigger than all the other plates in the tent. But there are other plates in the tent. There is Russia. We are in an era of renewed great power rivalries. It is North Korea still. Iran has several different aspects of the threats that it poses from nuclear missiles to their more accurate and longer range, to drones, to support for Shia militants in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria as well, and elsewhere. And then there are these cyber threats, not just from criminals, but from extremists and also from state actors.

There are threats actually posed by various aspects of climate change. I mean, very extreme weather, which is a huge issue, of course, for all of our countries, whether it's more frequent, more extreme hurricanes, fires in the West and the United States, water resources, you name it. And there are other issues as well. There's even threats to the democratically elected autocrats, essentially. And so these kinds of issues, domestic populism and so forth. So for us, the U.S. has to lead all of this. We're the most important one keeping all these plates spinning, but we do, again, have allies and partners who really do matter. And we've got to continue to lead the way, but to do it in a way

that is absolutely thoughtful and objective and rational, comprehensive, integrated approach to China, and generally have done that, I think, impressively in reinvigorating various of these alliance and partner relationships over the last couple of years, while noting that there's a glaring absence and that is the trade component. The administration knows they just can't seem to get through the domestic politics of that. And of course, the previous administration grappled with that as well. Dave, what are three things which would surprise people? Well, it's hard. And by the way, it just reminds me, I should add one other issue, one other set of plates, and that is there are still Islamist extremists out there. That might

be one of those, that we are still engaged on, quote, war on terror, however you want to define that. But we're still engaged with Islamist extremists. One of the lessons of the surge, drove violence down by 85% over the 18 months. Actually, in 19 and a half months, I was privileged to command that effort. And then it continued. Violence continued to go down for the subsequent three and a half months. And then literally within 24 hours of our final combat forces withdrawing, the prime minister undoes what we'd done with Hailem's sectarian actions, takes his eye off of the Islamic State, is able to reconstitute itself,

develop a caliphate, and we have to go back in and help them defeat, destroy the caliphate, defeat the Islamic State as an army, at least. And then since then, I've tried to help them to deal with the remnants, which essentially now should be thought of as insurgents and terrorists in both Iraq and in northeastern Syria. And by the way, we can't withdraw from if we do. I think those situations could come unhinged. The same is true in Somalia, West Africa, and a variety of other places around the world. So I guess that would be one of them. The other, again, is certainly, I think, just the sheer nature of cyber threats and how

they continue to change and how dangerous they can be as well. Also, again, allies and partners matter, and we can't overlook that. And I know that there's always an inclination in aversion to however you want to describe nation building or being active abroad when we should be doing nation building at home. And indeed, there's a lot of requirement for that, despite the big infrastructure bill that both parties brought to legislation. This is really necessary. The question is, how can you do it most efficiently, most effectively in achieving your objectives abroad? Final question, Dave, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? Well, let me give four. Two will be sort of geopolitical, and then I think two might be personal. The first is that geopolitics are bad.

We have gone from an era of benign globalization in which economics drove geopolitics, say, 10 years or so ago, about the time I joined KKR and established the KKR Global Institute, to an era of renewed great power rivalries in which geopolitics at least creates the context in which economics, trade, investment, and so forth take place. That's really quite a big transformation. And so that's point number one. Number two is, again, allies and partners really do matter. I was fond of quoting what I was demanding, what we believe was the largest fighting coalition in history, which was the one in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force. That old quote from Winston Churchill, that the only thing worse than fighting

with allies is fighting without them. And it's very true. It's very concerning. It's frustrating. It's sometimes maddening. The partners don't always do what you'd hope that they might do, as we discussed, for example, with investment and defense in Europe. But nonetheless, you want them, they matter, they really help. And Churchill was right on that particular adage. Beyond that, then I think just sort of personally, two big takeaways. One is that life is a competitive endeavor. You know, you don't get a t-shirt in the real world or a trophy just for showing up the way you do in a little kid's soccer. You get it for achieving excellence and not just individually, but as the best team player as well. And I've often shared this, people in particular at West Point or universities, what should we, what would you suggest? And you got to compete. You got to

compete. You don't, again, nobody's impressed in the real world by the gentleman's bee or the person who's too cool for school. They want someone who is absolutely engaged, doing everything that he or she can do to be all that they can be. And then finally, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. And this is a quote from an old Roman philosopher. And people said about me, about my own career, I, Petraeus, got lucky, you know, you happen to be here. And then that led to this. And all of a sudden, the world's desperate, the president's desperate, and he ends up commanding the surge. And then that led to this. And all of a sudden, the world's desperate, the president's desperate, and he ends up commanding the surge and timing's just right.

And then he has to do this. And then they call him for Afghanistan. Look, I'd like to think that I'd spent a lifetime, decades preparing for those moments, whether they came along or not, was something that you, which you can't be certain. But if they do come along, you do want to have truly done everything you can to prepare in terms of sort of academic study, in terms of your own self-study, in terms of your own experience and leadership and actually doing it yourself and then watching others do it as well. And you've got to have, when that moment arrives, the skills, the knowledge, the expertise, the attributes, et cetera, that enable you to perform your duties as successfully as that is possible.

Again, it may never have come about, but what it does, it's timing does matter. Clearly, there's that element of luck. But what really matters is the preparation that you've done to be ready to meet that moment. Dave, thank you. This has been wonderful. And thank you for your service in government. That was the greatest of privileges. Thank you. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to listen to part one of this conversation with General Petraeus. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes

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