Angry Planet - Russia's hybrid war against the West

Episode Date: January 31, 2017

War has changed in the 21st century and combat is not always kinetic. Russia’s battlefields are the internet, financial markets and television airwaves. The goal is not necessarily to take and hold ...territory but to expand Russia’s sphere of influence and achieve political goals. This is hybrid warfare, or gibridnaya voina, the much hyped and discussed way of war. But, as intelligence expert Mark Galeotti tells us on this week’s War College, Moscow’s conception of hybrid war isn’t new - it’s a reaction to and an Eastern adaptation of American military strategy during the Cold War. The goal is simple - expand Russian soft power to make the world more agreeable to the Kremlin’s point of view. Galeotti explains how hybrid war is fought, and how to best combat it in this week’s episode. By Matthew Gault Produced and edited by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. They're trying to not create but destroy. They're not trying to create allies. They're trying to destroy the integrity of the Western system.
Starting point is 00:00:30 Hey, War College listeners. We've asked you to tweet us suggestions for show topics, and today we're covering one. Host Matthew Galt track down Mark Galliotti to discuss hybrid warfare. What it is, how Russia's engaging in it against the West, and how best to fight back. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With us today is one of our favorite guests, Mark Galiati.
Starting point is 00:01:19 Galiati is an expert on Russia and Russian crime, the author of many fine books about the Russian military, and a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. His newest book is Hybrid War, Getting Russia's Nonlinear Military Challenge Right. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure. All right, so I just want to hop into this with what I think is the question on some people's minds, and that is, is the web,
Starting point is 00:01:44 currently at war with Russia? Well, the answer is yes it is. And unfortunately that sounds like a very sort of hawkish proposition. But the reason I say that is because, frankly, everyone I speak to in Russia says so. And when I say everyone, I mean, I'm talking about people within the military, foreign policy, national security, sort of worlds. As far as they're concerned, they're at war with the West, and it's a war that the West started. And whether or not we accept their premise doesn't really matter.
Starting point is 00:02:13 doesn't really matter. It only only takes one person to actually, or one side rather, to think they're at war. Why do they think the West started it? What's their evidence for that? I think it's a fundamental issue here, which is however imperfectly, and God knows it is imperfect, nonetheless, in the West, we do try to stick to some kind of a value-based foreign policy. And that means we do a lot of things which in the Russians eyes, I'm going to say the Russians, I'm obviously talking about the Kremlin and the people around it, are hostile. Every time we support anti-corruption measures, for example, every time we speak up about violations of international law, every time we provide support for investigative journalists, we do so, generally speaking, because we think it's the right thing to do, because it fits with our vision of the world. To the Russians, though, these actually are just simply hypocritical attempts to destabilise the regime.
Starting point is 00:03:10 And let's face it, given that the Russian regime is essentially an autocratic kleptocracy, as a mouthful, then actually anything that highlights its failings does indeed undermine it. So what to us is just an expression of our values to the Russians is a kind of covert attack. And this is the thing. I mean, when one talks about hybrid war to the Russians, we've been there will always say, well, it's the West that invented hybrid war. They look at what happened in Ukraine, they look at the colored revolutions that took place in other post-Soviet states, they look at the Arab Spring. And instead of seeing those as the bubbling up of public anger at existing regimes, they see it as evidence of a nefarious Western.
Starting point is 00:03:57 And when they say Western, they obviously mean American campaign to bring about regime change. And so they think they're just trying to catch up with what the Americans have already developed. All right. So let's define hybrid warfare then, and I would like to define it specifically from the Russian perspective, if we can. Yeah, well, I mean, putting aside the whole question of whether it actually ought to be called hybrid war in the first place. Spoiler alert, it shouldn't, but we're stuck with it as a term of art anyway. When the Russians look at it, you know, this notion of Gibrienaya, the problem is, first of all, they do tend to approach it from the one of the war. How do we think the West is doing it?
Starting point is 00:04:35 So they're trying to copy what they imagine to be our approach. But most importantly, and this is something that I was really quite struck by, as I did more research in country and also sort of talking to people, is that it's clear that there's actually two separate but parallel processes that the Russians have in mind. And one of our big problems is that we in the West don't recognise this, and therefore we tend to actually get it wrong. So forgive me, as I gallop a little bit,
Starting point is 00:05:05 on my hobby horse here. There is what we would think of as hybrid war, which the Russians considered really just as an offshoot of new generation warfare, in other words, how war is in the 21st century. And this is the sort of thing that we saw in Crimea and we've seen in Donbas, in which they use all these non-military means, political destabilization, intelligence penetration, subversion, disinformation and so forth, essentially to prepare the ground for for military operations, to try and demoralize and divide and distract the enemy. So by the time the little green men actually turn up, the war is, if not already one, at least already skewed in the Russians way.
Starting point is 00:05:50 And this is when the soldiers talk about hybrid war. This is what they mean. So essentially it's just a way of helping your regular kinetic forces. Because we've got to bear in mind that the Russians still have a notion of war, which is still essentially fought by massive, deployments of firepower rather than just purely sneaky means. But the trouble is that there's also a parallel process, which doesn't really have a name. I mean, I call it in my book Political War because we need something to call it, which uses the same tactics and techniques, but isn't intended just simply to prepare the ground for war fighting.
Starting point is 00:06:27 And this is what we see, for example, being deployed in Western Europe. It's actually an attempt to bring about the desired effects purely by political purposes. And when it comes down to it, look, war is just a way of forcing another country to do something it doesn't want to do. Whether it's to give up a peninsula, whether it's to free you from oppression, whether it's to bow to your yoke, whatever. All the Russians have just simply decided that, in fact, sometimes you can do that purely with political purposes. So anyway, we have two structures, two different approaches. One that it's the soldiers approach, which is about war fighting, and one which is, as it were, the national security and foreign policy establishment's approach,
Starting point is 00:07:12 which is by how you get what you want, often by threatening military action, but not with that in mind. It really sounds like that back half of the phenomena is just Western-style soft power, the same kind of thing that we had been doing throughout the Cold War. I completely off base there? No, I mean, I think it's actually it's the Russians particular take on soft power. The thing about soft power is that, in theory at least,
Starting point is 00:07:38 it's essentially positive, it's attractive, giving other people, other countries, reasons why they want to be your friend and reasons, therefore, to do things you want them to do. And of course, it's also got a kind of a coercive dimension. But the most effective soft power is precisely, it's that sort that is based on, the positiveness. Now, Russians have a clearer understanding that, you know, whatever they're
Starting point is 00:08:03 bombast may be, they are a weak and in many ways a declining country. I mean, the total economy of Russia is smaller than that of New York City. This is a country which a fair number of sort of would-be strongmen like the model of Putin, but certainly in the West, not many people are actually saying we would like to be a country like Russia. There's bits of it that they might like. Russia hasn't got the economic attractiveness. It hasn't got the systemic attractiveness. So instead, what it has to rely on is the fact that it has will and a certain degree of military power. And it uses that in a form of coercive diplomacy. It also applies things like, you know, subversive destabilization, uses intelligence agencies in a very, very aggressive way. The sort of
Starting point is 00:08:50 ways that, frankly, intelligence agencies tend to be used in war time. Actually, if we look at how the Russians use their agencies, it's the same way the West did during World War II against the Germans. So it's a kind of soft power in the sense of it's not military, but it's essentially it's the sort of the evil twin to conventional soft power. It's much more about creating instability, creating uncertainty and division, and either neutralising an enemy, or, and here we're into the realms of the geopolitics of extortion. It's basically about creating problems, that the country is willing to buy Russia off. I mean, this is in many ways what we see in Syria. A lot of the Russians calculation is, at what point does America get just so fed up with
Starting point is 00:09:38 our spoiling actions that they give us a deal that we actually will be happy to go with? And then, frankly, we'll let Assad go. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the intelligence operations that they've been running, some of these aggressive intelligence operations? Well, I mean, obviously one could point to the DNC hack. And in some ways, that's a bit too easy. So let me leave that until last. I mean, here's a sort of small variety.
Starting point is 00:10:06 A couple of years back, the Russians actually did a cross-border incursion into Estonia, in which they kidnapped a, I mean, a Estonian security officer by the name of Eston Kockfer, brought him back, accused him of being a spy, put him on trial, and eventually he was swapped in a good classic spy swap. In part, this was a political gesture, because just before that, then President Obama had just been in the Baltic states, promising that they will be supported and protected against Russian aggression. But it was also something more than that.
Starting point is 00:10:39 I mean, Eston Cockfeld at the time was investigating cross-border cigarette smuggling. And you might think, well, why does smuggling counterfeit or contraband cigarettes from Russia into Estonia really counts as a security issue. Well, the more I've looked into that, the more to me it seems clear that the smuggling has been carried out just by regular gangsters. But in order to be able to cross the border freely, essentially they were having to kick back a share of their profits to the Russians. And I think what this was doing was creating a black budget of money in the Baltic states
Starting point is 00:11:13 that seemed to have no connections with Moscow, that then they could use some. for political purposes, whether it's bribery, whether it's supporting divisive political movements and such like. So there's this one example where, anyway, it was almost certainly the Federal Security Service, the domestic security agency, was basically facilitating cross-border criminal acts to raise money to be able to fund mischief. One other example that one could point to is actually the fact that we have at the moment, just a disinformation campaign through the usual state media. Everyone's sort of very up in arms
Starting point is 00:11:52 about the impact of RT, the Russian foreign language TV channel, even though actually its impact is much, much less than many suggest. But in many ways what really worries me the most, or worries me rather more, is the actions of what seem to be entirely domestic, little news websites and such like that we find in countries all across Europe and even into an extent in North America, publishing all sorts of weird and ludicrous conspiracy theories, just simply to try and present the idea that in fact, the world is in chaos, that the Americans are evil, that the European Union is ready for collapse, and basically that everyone should just give up and it's better to strike a deal with the Russians than right, than try and challenge
Starting point is 00:12:38 them and so forth. Now, the thing is, these are very, very cheap organisations and structures, But it does seem to be that the Russians are doing several things. One is precisely they're funneling money into some of them. Only some of them, I should stress. Secondly, that in some cases they're funneling choice little bits of information their way to get them more readership. And thirdly, they may well actually be in some cases specifically using local agents to basically set them up. So you actually have a crossover between media disinformation, espionage activities, as well as wider political actions.
Starting point is 00:13:16 And we saw that with the whole issue of the DNC hack. Although clearly there's a lot of information that we still don't know. What we can be pretty bullish about is that this is information that was gathered by an intelligence operation, GRU military intelligence hacking into systems. That almost certainly the Federal Security Service,
Starting point is 00:13:37 the Russian Federal Security Service, then actually leaked it through WikiLeaks, which has now become their mouthpiece of choice, some ways. And then this was obviously then picked up by entirely sort of non-Russian controlled media because they can rely on the fact that once they get juicy information, our own media, obsessed by the 24-hour news cycle and also thinking there might be real stories here, will then run with it. You make it sound less scary than I think a lot of people think it is. You make it sound as if Russia is a decaying
Starting point is 00:14:12 empire that is using propaganda and loud voices and criminal enterprises to distract people from the fact that they're a decaying empire. Do you think that that's true? And to that point, you kind of downplayed RT, and I'm wondering if you can expound on that, because it feels right now, especially as if RT is a big player. Well, I think the point is, two things. One is, it's worth mentioning that one of my concerns is, one of my concerns is, the more we talk up, whether it's Putin's evil machinations or the power of R-T,
Starting point is 00:14:47 actually the more power we give them. But the point is, look, it's not that Russia is entirely irrelevant. Of course it's not, actually. It is indeed a serious challenge. But what sort of a challenge is the question? This is not the Cold War. Russia does not have some kind of overarching ideology that it wants to impose. I mean, sometimes, for example, talk is made of Russia support.
Starting point is 00:15:12 for social conservatives and such like, well that's fine. They're happy to play with that. But if you also look at elsewhere, the Russians will also support and try and play well with extreme populists of the left. In countries like Italy and Greece, they actually sort of have allies both on the left and the right. The fact of the matter is the Russians don't care. The Russians simply want to basically push the West back. They want to be able to run their own affairs, which might sound perfectly fair enough, but they mean their own affairs uninfluenced by international law, uninfluenced by the global international system that has basically been operating since 1945, and also with a sphere of influence, which means places like
Starting point is 00:15:58 Ukraine and Georgia and Belarus, which we can't accept because we believe that every country has its own sovereignty, its own right to exist. So to that end, they're basically trying to push us back. It's a very aggressive form of defensiveness. Now, why this is a problem is not because I said that the Russians are going to be invading tomorrow. This is not that what they're applying is political war, not the soldier's notion of hybrid war. We're not going to see little green men appearing, in my opinion, in the Baltic states or in Poland or whatever. But, first of all, they're trying to not create but destroy. They're not trying to create allies. They're trying to destroy the integrity of the Western system. And at that they are effective. And the reason
Starting point is 00:16:43 they are effective, and this is the second point, is because let's be perfectly honest, the West is currently in a crisis point. I think it's one that the West and the Western system is going to weather and survive and evolve through. But nonetheless, at the moment, it's a difficult point. We have a huge crisis in legitimacy. Whether it's in United States, which obviously has led to the rise of Donald Trump, who presented himself as the anti-establishment, who presented himself as the anti-establishment, candidate and also in Europe. You have people questioning the European Union, Britain already having decided to leave and other potential exits in the wings, the rise of a whole variety of extremist parties, as a set of right and left, because they're
Starting point is 00:17:24 against the current status quo. This gives the Russians huge opportunities with relatively few resources to have a disproportionate impact. A few tens of thousands of dollars or euro can actually make quite a difference when you have politics on a knife edge. I would be surprised if there was any evidence that Russian propaganda could do more than shift opinion by maybe a percentage point or two. But let's be perfectly honest, shifting opinion a percentage point or two, well, that's, for example, the margin of difference of the British vote to leave the European Union. And these crisis points, small impacts can actually be significant. So it's not that the Russians are irrelevant, but the point is all the Russians can do, but what they are doing very effectively, is magnifying our own divisions.
Starting point is 00:18:17 And this is the problem. We are being bitten by our own past failures. The Russians can use their money to buy leverage because we created a financial system where, frankly, money flowed around fairly unconstrained. The Russians are able to use disinformation because we frankly have acquired a political class who lie to us all the time or more to the point just don't answer questions when was the last time you heard a politician asked a tough question and actually answer it
Starting point is 00:18:48 rather than just default to the standard pre-prepared talking points all of these things are coming back to bite us as I say this is not a council of despair I think we will get through this but you might say in such a moment the Russians have a lot of vulnerable points in which to actually put their effort and influence. How do we defend against this short term? It sounds like you've got hope long term for the West, but what can say NATO do right now to defend against this?
Starting point is 00:19:20 In some ways, the problem is you might say that this is not essentially a military challenge first and foremost. I mean, NATO obviously has a role. NATO is crucially important. And certainly the more European countries who start actually making serious efforts to reach that 2% of GDP spending on defence that is regarded as the basic minimum for NATO, the better. Not just because it actually means that they'll have more military security of their own, but also because it'll demonstrate to a sceptical White House that Europeans are serious about protecting their own security and not just freeloading off the Americans because the most terrible thing would be seen to see a break or a weakening of the transatlantic relationship. And thirdly, as just a simple,
Starting point is 00:20:01 to Moscow that they are serious. This is the thing that I find time and again is actually in Russia. It's a sense that the West is not resolute is probably the most dangerous thing because it encourages adventurism. But the point is a lot of these threats are not the kind of kinetic threats that NATO can or should deal with. NATO cannot parachute forensic accountants into a country to try and make sure that dirty Russian money isn't sort of flooding in. to support extremist politicians or whatever. A lot of this is about governance and that's going to be done by individual countries
Starting point is 00:20:39 and also probably by the European Union. At the moment the European Union is talking a lot about its new security role and that's a good thing. Federito Mogherini has done a lot of good work in actually bringing security much more to the fore. But a lot of it is almost in a, again, trying to faintly duplicate NATO activities. It's about soldiers and battle groups.
Starting point is 00:21:00 groups, actually the best defenses against this kind of hybrid warfare, political warfare, is actually to encourage nation-states to be resolute about it. And that means solidarity, because look, with the exception of Germany, no European country on its own can deal with the Russians on anything but a position of weakness. Russia is much, much weaker than the West as a whole, but it's stronger than the West. but it's stronger than a lot of Western countries. And that acts as a deterrent for some. They're less inclined to kick out Russian spies
Starting point is 00:21:36 because they know the Russians are going to retaliate. They're bothered about the impact of sanctions on their own national economies because as far as they're concerned, all the European Union does is just make them keep the sanctions rather than anything else. We need to have a sense of solidarity. If you look at the European Union, this is definitely sort of strangely morphed into a European Union blog podcast, but it has two things it has some really quite vague mutual security guarantees in case of invasion
Starting point is 00:22:07 and has something called the Solidarity Clause which is basically there for massive and devastating terrorist attack saying that you know there will be support and there's even the Solidarity Fund to provide money there's nothing in between those two so it's fine for dealing with major terrorist attacks and it's fine with dealing with military invasion but all these other issues in terms of of cyber attacks, in terms of espionage, in terms of political destabilization and manipulation. There the kind of European Union is more or less, well, there you're on your own, folks. Let's talk about long-term resilience, but nothing about how to deal with it quickly now.
Starting point is 00:22:43 We need the Europeans to basically be willing to have each other's back and to be strong. Because the point is that, as I say, the Russians are encouraged whenever they see weakness. And at the moment they see a lot of weaknesses in the West. The best thing we can do is essentially fix our roof. We can't stop the rain from falling. We can't stop the Russians from trying all sorts of little gambits and spreading disinformation and so forth. But we can fix our roof so that most of it just bounces off.
Starting point is 00:23:12 That's got to be the task, short and medium term. And that means, therefore, giving the solidarity and then telling European countries, you've got to be more bullish. You've got to be more assertive. If you see attempts at destabilizing and manipulation, you don't just summon the ambassador and say that you're very disappointed. You kick people out.
Starting point is 00:23:34 You impose additional personal sanctions. You do anything that actually demonstrates serious will. Do you think some of the problem here is that people in the West don't necessarily believe that they're at war with Russia? Absolutely. I mean, who wants to think that? And particularly, you know, war carries with it a sense of inexorability. And I think even the people who do feel that they're at war with Russia, again, because of this misunderstanding, understanding of the sort of the two different approaches that sort of fall under the same sort of
Starting point is 00:24:03 broad umbrella that the Russians have. In a way, they're fixated on when are the little green men coming and preparing all their plans for that. And the risk is by doing that, they also miss all the kind of more sneaky covert means that the Russians use. But yes, I mean, you know, the fact of the matter is that war is expensive. War involves costs. and no one really wants to accept that. I mean, the same way as 2% of GDP being spent on defence is in terms of recent history of the 1950s or 1960s or whatever, it's minimal.
Starting point is 00:24:42 But most NATO countries are still not willing or able to spend that. We are still, on the one hand, you know, fiercely aware of Russian attempts to destabilise. You have, with key elections coming up in Germany and France, you have had both the French and the German security services saying that they believe there's a serious risk of attempts to influence the elections by Russian manipulation and so forth. And yet at the same time, we trade with them. We allow our financiers to invest money in Russia. You know, we allow all of these kind of things. We are basically trying to pretend that we are not involved in a conflict with Russia.
Starting point is 00:25:26 I mean, I myself, I mean, I don't regard myself as a hawk. I don't regard myself as a dove either. I'm sorry, somewhere in between. I don't know what that would make me a buzzer, maybe. But essentially, it's, in my opinion, just simply accepting the reality that the Russians, you see, are able to take quite a sophisticated perspective. And while they definitely believe that we are at war with them and they are looking to find all kinds of ways of pushing back,
Starting point is 00:25:51 that doesn't mean to say that they want to see us destroyed and burn to the ground or whatever. They just want a certain set of political objectives. Our sense, I think, is almost that it just seems impolite to think we're at war with anyone, especially if we're not actually going to then start shooting at them. We need to have a much more sophisticated concept of what war means. And this is it, I think in some ways, this is the very first, truly 21st century war. We're moving into an age in which actually conflict, let's say conflict rather than war, is, I think, once again, going to be much more likely to be fought through political,
Starting point is 00:26:25 economic, soft power, all kinds of other instruments, sometimes actual shooting as well, but not necessarily. The Russians, by chance, have stumbled on that before us, and it's a problem. And that means that we're not willing not only to really stand up to this threat, but also to accept that all wars have costs. We are very, very unwilling to suffer the costs. We want to be able to face down the Russians, but we'd rather not do it in a way that will make us, require us to have to spend more money on defence, or to take tough economic decisions which are also going to affect us or affect our political basis. All these things are areas in which, unfortunately, at the moment, we are proving Putin right on one specific point. As far as he's concerned, Russia's real strength is its political will, is the fact that as an authoritarianism, one guy or one small group of people, can make decisions and impose them.
Starting point is 00:27:32 Whereas democracies, and obviously I'd much rather live in a democracy than an authoritarianism, but nonetheless, democracies, it involves the myriad political processes, all the difficulties that that involves in trying to sustain. and expensive policy, especially long term. We are sort of thrashing around while they are actually able to act. They're able to act much more quickly than us as well. So again, this is because we are not in a war fighting society. I don't want us to become some kind of authoritarian regime. We don't need to. This is not an existential struggle. This is not World War II.
Starting point is 00:28:12 But nonetheless, we have to find some middle ground between business as usual and World War II. and World War II to take us through the future. Why do you think Russia and I think China too are hip to this and the West is not? What's different there? I think there's a variety of reasons. I mean, one is certainly from the Russian perspective, and I think the Chinese have sort of piggybacked on that. It's actually the liberating power of being the weaker party. They know that they cannot outspend the West.
Starting point is 00:28:44 The Soviets tried that, and we know what happened to the Soviet Union. They know they haven't got the military capacity of the West. We have outspent them militarily at more than tenfold since 1991. And I'd hope that we'll be able to get something as a result of that. So instead, like any guerrilla, they have relied on asymmetric warfare. You do not try and take on the enemy where he is strongest. You try and find his weaknesses in areas where you might have strengths and bring that to the battlefield.
Starting point is 00:29:16 So that's the first thing. They've had to think more carefully rather than just be satisfied with what they've got. Secondly, look, the Russian regime is a mobilisation regime these days. There is a sense in which any aspect of society is subordinated to the state. And that is, if nothing else, a carryover from Soviet times. So that means that you may be an oligarch or running a business or a journalist. But that doesn't mean to say you're not also a soldier in this political warfare. So journalists are expected. Sure, maybe most of the time you're doing proper news stories,
Starting point is 00:29:57 but sometimes you'll be expected to put out a particular line. You're an oligarch. You're busy making money and entertaining your mistresses and your gilded dacha. But perhaps tomorrow the state is and say, well, actually, we want some money to go into this particular cause. And you know for well. That means you've got to. dig deep and put money there. Everyone can be co-opted by the state and that's
Starting point is 00:30:21 because it's an authoritarianism. Now obviously in the West it doesn't work that way. Private property is private property. Governments are much more constrained in what they can do. There is real law, there are real courts in which people can protect themselves and I think that's great and that gives us a huge resilience and a social legitimacy and I also happen to think it's just the right way of organizing things. But on the other hand, It does mean that we have to suffer certain costs compared with authoritarianisms like China or Russia. They have always been about controlling or having, shall I say, a final veto power over every aspect of their society.
Starting point is 00:31:03 And what they now just seem to doing is mobilizing authoritarianism as an instrument and doing so really quite effectively. All right, one more question for you, Mark. We have a new president here in America. Typically, when a new president takes power, there's some sort of foreign policy test that occurs. Do you think Putin will test our new president? And do you have any idea or any sense of what that test may look like? I think, ironically enough, if there's going to be a test, it'll be a test of a temptation. I'm recording this from Prague.
Starting point is 00:31:38 The Europeans are thinking, what on earth will Trump mean for us? are we going to get the Donald Trump who says that NATO is obsolete or the Donald Trump that says NATO is very important? Well, interestingly enough, I think the Russians likewise. I mean, you know, the Russians were not expecting to be facing a President Trump. They were sure they would be facing a President Clinton and their whole political campaign was really designed to weaken that presidency. But now they have Trump. And although Donald Trump is clearly at the moment generally saying very nice things about Putin and Russia, I think they're aware that he can just as easily roll that back and become an implacable opponent.
Starting point is 00:32:20 And an implacable opponent who would operate under a very different set of, shall I say, rules of engagement than President Obama. So to this end, I think they're very cautious. Interestingly enough, they're the ones who've actually played down talk of an early summit between Putin and Trump, I think maybe because they're realizing that the bromance might well not survive actual contact. And I think instead of pushing, they will instead be looking for ways of basically tempting Trump to do things that they would like by offering him things that they think he would like. It was quite interesting that they were, for example, very keen to try and get Washington to send a delegation to the recent talks in Kazakhstan about some kind of political settlement in Syria.
Starting point is 00:33:09 And by doing that, they were basically creating a win-win situation for themselves. If the Americans turned up, it was effectively that the Americans were coming to, after having been invited by the Russians. It makes it look as if the Russians are in charge of the process. As it was, the Americans didn't, and the Russians can say, well, look, we gave you an option and you chose not to, and instead had been able to sort of basically build a process on the back of their relations with their allies, Iran and Turkey. So I think what they're going to be looking for is ways of basically trying to consolidate
Starting point is 00:33:44 the potentially positive elements of the Trump-Putin axis, which is interesting because in the past, there's also has been a habit for American presidents to start their presidency with attempts to reach out to Moscow, offer resets and such like, which are then almost invariably south. we might actually see the spectacle that in their own slightly more cautious way, it'll be the Russians who actually start the overtures. But as I said, I think they'll be waiting until they have a better sense of just what a Trump White House looks like
Starting point is 00:34:19 because they're in exactly the same position as the rest of us, totally uncertain. Mark Galiati, thank you so much for joining us. Always a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick. Matthew Galt hosts the show and Wrangles the guests. And it's produced by me, Bethel Hopday. As you can see, well, here, we take suggestions from you.
Starting point is 00:34:51 So tweet us your ideas for future shows at War underscore College. Shout out to Sali Halanin, forgive me if I'm mispronouncing your name, for sending us this idea. If you like War College and want to support us, please give us a rating and review in iTunes. That helps other people find the show. And I'm not condoning thievery here, but you could borrow a friend's phone and just subscribe to the show for them. And then you can give it back. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.

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