Bulwark Takes - Putin Is A Master Manipulator, Trump Is Getting Outplayed | Bulwark on Sunday

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

Former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman joined Bill Kristol live for Bulwark on Sunday to discuss the latest on Ukraine, how Putin is playing Trump and how NATO is preparing. Join us next Sunday on Substack for the next episode.

Hi, I'm Bill Kristol. Welcome to Sunday, Bulwark on Sunday, our second episode. I'm the editor-at-large of the Bulwark. Eric Edelman is the co-host of the excellent Shield of the Republic weekly video and podcast, which everyone should watch to keep up to date on all things national security and foreign policy. Eric, a longtime foreign service official, twice ambassador, top policy job in the Defense Department. So great experience and very thoughtful about these matters. And there's plenty to talk about today, Eric, right? It's a target rich environment, as I might have said in my DOD days, Bill. Yeah, I wish the targets weren't us.

Yeah. I wish other countries were imploding and that's what we need to talk about. So we're talking here, obviously, on Sunday, and the last two, four days have been dominated by, what, the Trump phone call with Putin, the Hegseth speech in Brussels, the Vance speech in Munich at the Munich Security Conference, a conference you and I, I'm sure both, I've been to several times. You've probably been many more times. But I thought we'd begin maybe, you noticed, you pointed out to me yesterday when we were chatting, the announcement of the forthcoming talks, I guess, between the U.S. and Russia, not Ukraine, in Saudi Arabia, I guess, about the U.S. and Russia going to negotiate a peace. And you read Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov's statement, since you actually read Russian, having been educated back in the Cold War days. So tell us, I was struck by what

you said yesterday. So let's just go with that, if that's okay. So, I mean, it's now been translated into English, but I read the original Foreign Ministry readout of the Marco Rubio, Sergei Lavrov phone call. And what struck me about it, and it was a little bit different than the U.S. readout, but what struck me about it was the degree to which the Russian readout made it clear that the Trump administration was sort of throwing its predecessors under the bus by basically saying that among other things that they're going to discuss, not just Ukraine, they're going to discuss the Middle East, they're going to discuss the situation in Palestine, as the foreign ministry said, and removal of the unilateral

obstacles that had been created by the previous administration, the Biden administration, to full U.S.-Russian relations, full normal U.S.-Russian relations, including limits on embassies, sanctions, obviously other things. So this was, in some sense, an effort to completely normalize the U.S.-Russian relationship, you know, prospectively undoing things that go back to, you know, the end of the Obama administration and the Russian interference in 2016 presidential election and the limits on embassies that were imposed at that point in time. And the Russian statement also echoes the Russian readout of the Putin-Trump phone call, saying

that the talks are going to focus on the, quote, root causes of the conflict in Ukraine, which is Russian code for not the fact that we're going to deal with the Russian unprovoked, premeditated aggression against Ukraine. We're going to talk about NATO enlargement and an independent Ukraine, Western-oriented, living next door to Russia. So to me, it all had a very ominous ring to it. It's amazing. I mean, these these sanctions as you say there were some that go back to 2014 and 2016 but the bulk obviously after february 24th 2022 after the all-out invasion right totally bipartisan support it wasn't like a it's probably bad to give away all your negotiating leverage ahead of time b it's probably bad to just walk away from everything

a previous administration has done even if you happen not to agree with it there's sort of a case for a certain continuity in foreign policy but they don't believe that obviously but this these are things that everyone was for uh three years ago almost three years ago and everyone was for incidentally as late as three or four months ago right you didn't hear a lot of a lot of Republican members of Congress screaming and yelling about how we need to be getting, butting up to Putin. We need to give up on sanctions. If anything, the typical Republican critique was Biden had been a little lax. And even people in the Trump administration, we're going to take the sanctions up from a three to six and all this. And then it turns out, no, it turns out it's total. I mean, I guess that's what I was so struck by when you, just now what you said and what you'd said yesterday. I mean, total accommodation to Putin's point of view, I guess. the beginning of the Trump administration. Trump signed that, you know, law, essentially, really kind of under protest, he did not want to sign it. But I believe I mean, I, you'd have to check me on this, but I think it had 98 votes. Which, you know, to your point,

it gives you a sense of how how broad the support was, you know, for for all this. I mean, the other sort of anomaly, I would say, that has cropped up is that once upon a time, Keith Kellogg was named the Ukraine envoy, and it was Keith Kellogg who was talking about dialing up sanctions from three to 10 or from six to 10, depending on which audience he was speaking to. But A, he's not gonna be in Saudi Arabia for the discussions, apparently. He's apparently the envoy for Ukraine to talk to Ukrainians and Europeans, because he's been at Munich

and he's been meeting in Europe. But it's gonna be Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, who initially at least was the Middle East ambassador who was going to focus on the Abraham Accords and did play a role in getting the, along with the Biden administration, getting the ceasefire in Gaza agreed before Trump came into office. There was some speculation he was going to lead the Iran negotiations that Trump has talked about. But he now pitched up in Moscow and was involved in in the release of the teacher, Fogel, who was held for having medical marijuana in his luggage unjustly for several years.

And now is apparently going to be part of the Russian negotiating team. There is reporting that Trump, he's a longtime friend of Trump's, you know, 40 year friend, real estate developer. And Trump believes he's like the best negotiator in the world. And so he's going to be doing the negotiations so I mean you put it all together the Trump phone call with Putin the hexes advanced speeches I mean my sense our sense I think was a very big moment in terms of sadly maybe the fate of Ukraine certainly in terms of the U.S commitment to Ukraine but not just Ukraine right to Europe

that hexeth sentence that I remember you we discussed it the afternoon after he gave that speech about europe's no longer really the focus of our foreign policy or whatever it was i don't say a word about just i want to get to the broader stuff because i know you have strong thoughts about that but short kind of short term how big a pivot is this how big How big of a, of a, so are these three or four days that people, historians will look back on and say, this was the moment where it really became clear that we were in a new era? Well, I think first of all, this is not, some of this is not surprising, of course. I mean, much of this has been telegraphed by Trump during his campaign for the presidency. I think what's becoming clear is there was some,

there clearly was some debate going on inside the Trump administration about, you know, Russia's weakness. I mean, that was, you know, the economic weakness. Trump even talked about that before his phone call with Putin. There was talk about sanctions and maybe levying increased sanctions that Keith Kellogg talked about. But what's transpired over the last several days,

all the things you mentioned, including the Vance speech at Munich, kind of indicates that whether or not there's gonna be a formal withdrawal from NATO, that the US commitment to defend Europe is increasingly going to be called into question by Europeans and potentially by Vladimir Putin and Russia. And therein lies the danger, I think, because it looks like they're hell-bent on a very quick agreement on Ukraine. Keith Kellogg's talked about 100 days.

There's a lot of speculation in the press that they might want to try and get something done by Russian Orthodox Easter, which is in late April, or maybe May 9th, which would be Victory Day. That would obviously be Putin's preference. Tim Snyder, the historian of Ukraine at Yale University, in a piece he wrote yesterday, said it's hard to tell because there's been so much, you know, confusion about exactly what their plan is, you know, for negotiating with Putin, whether they're trying to sell out Ukraine by intent, whether it's by incompetence, or as he put it, whether it's both intent and incompetence. You know, I opt, you know, by and large for the latter interpretation. I think there's both intent and incompetence going on.

You know, it was very striking to me in the Financial Times, there was a story about the questionnaire that the U.S. State Department sent to Europeans saying, okay, how many troops are you ready to provide for some kind of sort of very ambiguous security guarantee for Ukraine? And they were talking to, the Financial Times journalists were talking to some unidentified but former senior Russian officials who've been involved in some of these contacts with the U.S. And one of them said, well, you know, Kellogg's not really a

serious person. We're not really going to deal with Kellogg. And, you know, and this is how Trump likes to do things. He sends a bunch of people out and then he gets to the real serious negotiations. But what he doesn't understand is that Vladimir Putin is a master of understanding human relationships at several levels above Trump. I mean, what they were really saying is this guy is a professional KGB case officer and he knows how to manage Trump. And you saw evidence of that in Trump's own readout, I think, of the phone calls or the phone call with his, he had multiple readouts of the phone call with Putin, both orally and on Truth Social, all of which reflect, you know, the fact, I think that Putin was very successfully manipulating him. I think we're headed towards

a bad deal and that will carry, there'll be a knock on consequences of that, both for obviously for Ukraine in the first instance, but for Europe more broadly, including our Nordic and Baltic allies, the most recent additions to NATO, Finland and Sweden, but also Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poland, who are right up, you know, right the frontline states with Russia they're very concerned and very nervous about this and they ought to be yeah and since you mentioned Trump's own readout I mean one of the things that was striking and we discussed this was the and you mentioned just now alluded to it the Trump said in one of the readouts you know we were allies for 80 years ago and we should be able to recreate that or restore that or something.

And it struck me that that would be a classic thing that Putin would have said in the phone call. Where did Trump get that suddenly from? That's not been sort of central to his thinking, I don't believe, in the past particularly. But the 80, as you say, Victory Day, the celebration of the victory over Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union, I guess is May 9th. Is that right? And that they have a big parade and all that talk about how they should visit each other's countries.

Why do I suspect that Trump will enjoy being Putin's fetid guest at this massive display of military hardware on May 9th in Moscow, right? And he'll have bought peace, as he said he would. And I mean, we're heading to such a uh as you say uh well yeah we're headed we're heading to where putin wants us to be heading i fear yeah i mean you know in the readouts uh both i'm trying to remember now because he had two different uh truth social posts and then you know his comments in the oval office but he mentioned the fact that Putin had reiterated to him that if we only dealt with this with common sense, which was my Trump's campaign slogan during the campaign,

and Putin had previously said, and I suspect he repeated it in the phone call, played back to Trump, Trump's frequent comments that if I'd been president, there never would have been, you know, an invasion in 2022, which of course is belied by the fact that the, you know, fighting in the Donbass continued, you know, throughout Trump's first term. So, you know, it was not as if somehow the war in Ukraine ukraine had been called off uh while while trump was president um so let's talk about the implications of this i mean i let's almost leave aside the direct implications for ukraine which are extremely worrisome to say the least and and obviously uh as you say neighbors of uh russia and neighbors neighbors of Ukraine and the whole question of NATO.

But more broadly, you said, I was very struck, because you're not an alarmist, I would say, by nature, and you've seen an awful lot of challenges over your career. But you said, this is going to make Americans less safe. That's me, we were just chatting yesterday. So explain that a little bit. People think, well, people like you and me, we like the old order where things are changing, get with it. But, you know, it's not really going to affect us. It's just kind of stuff that may affect some unfortunate foreigners, but we're not supposed to care about them anymore since it's all America first. So talk about that. You know, I think everything that's going on actually is going to make Americans less safe at home and abroad. We can get into the home front later if you'd like.

And it's also going to be a major challenge to Americans' prosperity as well. First, while Trump was trumpeting the release of Mark Fogel, the teacher who was unjustly being detained by the Russians, they traded him essentially for a cyber criminal, this fellow Vinnick, who had pled guilty to money laundering and other charges. And all that does of course is incentivize further hostage taking. And lo and behold, there's been another American who's actually been arrested, same exact deal, had a prescription for medical marijuana, had it in his suitcase, stopped at the Vinukova Airport in Moscow, detained. So now we got another

hostage. And this kind of negotiation only incentivizes more foreign government hostage taking of Americans, whether it's Russia or Iran or various others. Secondly, you know, this is going to call into question the American security guarantee to our European allies, which, you know, has, you know, led to a long peace in Europe since 1945. And the absence of that U.S. guarantee could tempt Putin to do more, maybe first in Moldova, where we don't have a U.S. security guarantee, but potentially in the Baltic states. military, despite all the terrible suffering of its forces and the losses that they've suffered, which are immense, is reconstituting very quickly. Moreover, we just had a statement by the head of MI6, the British intelligence service, about Russia's very, very dangerous campaign of sabotage in Europe and potentially against American interests in Europe, but also potentially here at home.

So this is all going to be very bad for European security and endanger American security as a result, which our security has been tied to European security for well over 100 years, and it will continue to be. So that's, you know, point one. Point two, you know, the tariff war on Europe is going to, and the fact that we're cutting them loose, essentially, and saying, you know, sauve qui peut, you know, fend for yourselves, is going to make them much less willing to work with us to contain what the Trump administration has been saying is the big major threat to the United States, which is the People's Republic of China in the Indo-Pacific. You know, so, you know, basically violating the diplomatic law of conservation of enemies, you know, they're creating ructions that, you know, we don't need, including with our close allies and trading partners like

Canada. I mean, I'm a big hockey fan, and you may have been struck, as I was, by, you know, the fact that last night at the U.S.-Canada hockey match in the four nations tournament that's going on right now, Finland, Sweden, the United States and Canada, that number one, the US national anthem was booed. Number two, I've never heard a more robust rendition of Oh Canada. And there were three fights that broke out between the two teams, you know in uh nine first nine seconds of the game um i gotta say i've never not rooted for the us in any international hockey event um and as a dyed in the wool caps fan i you know i hate sydney crosby with a passion but but i was rooting for the Canadians last night.

That's what it's come to. I mean, it is terrible, really. I feel the same way, though. But the U.S. government is much part of the problem for international security, but also for liberal values as it's part of the solution now. That's what's so horrifying, right? It feels to me like, you know. That is precisely the problem that, you know, Europeans are waking up to the fact that we have been the organizing principle around which they have arrayed their various security efforts. And they now have to, you know, contemplate a world in which we might not, we might not, in fact, unlikely to be there to help defend them and they've got to figure out how to deal with that and we've been a huge beneficiary of the uh their trust in us in a sense in terms of

economics and our prosperity as well i think as well as security more you know more precisely since we were dragged into two wars when europe was unstable in the first half of the 20th century but uh but just this is the degree to which the Trump, you know, Trump world, MAGA world, Doge world, don't seem to understand that we've benefited a lot from this international order. Absolutely. Trust and confidence in the U.S. Both economically and in terms of security. And both now, I think, are at risk.

I mean, a lot of people were comparing J.D. Vance, Vice President Vance's speech at the Munich Security Summit, which some wag on Twitter or X, described as actually a long Twitter thread rather than a speech. And having read the text of the speech now, I can attest to the fact that that is a perfectly correct reading of it. But people have been comparing it, you know, to in terms of the shock value that it induced in Munich

to Vladimir Putin's speech in 2007 to the Munich Security Conference. What does that tell you? I mean, it really goes to your point that we're not the solution, we're the problem now. I mean, Vance, when he spoke, started with some appropriate grace notes about the horrible episode in Munich, which occurred the day before the conference began of an Afghan refugee driving into a crowd of people, killing a number and apparently Islamist motivation for it, appropriately conveyed condolences, et cetera, got applause for it. And then he said, I hope that's not the last applause I get in the speech. But it really was because the speech instead of saying

in the conferences about threats to international and particularly European security, instead of dealing with any of the threats to European security or Ukraine, which people anticipated he would talk about, it became a sort of maga red meat you know anti-cancel culture uh diatribe against uh the european union the european order uh and suggesting that the biggest threat to Europe was not Russia or China, but the threat from within, and essentially called for the Europeans politically to make their peace with these sort of populist nationalist parties that have cropped up all across Europe that share a kind of agenda with MAGA, despite the fact that many of them, like the AFD in Germany,

you know, are either Nazi, you know, neo-Nazi or Nazi adjacent, and therefore bring up all sorts of, you know, terrible memories for Europeans who are trying to, you know, keep that kind of politics from reasserting itself in Europe. I mean, it was truly astonishing as a moment. And of course, he met with the AFD leader while he was in Munich. He refused while he was in Germany to meet with the current chancellor, Gustav Scholz, although he did meet with Scholz in his defense in Paris at the AI summit in the days leading up

to the Munich Security Conference, but still kind of, I think, left a terrible taste in European mouths, but also the German host. I mean, Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, social democrat, most popular minister in the government, very pro-Ukraine, went out immediately and gave his own speech, decrying what Vance had done and declaring that that kind of interference in European politics really is unacceptable. But just, you know, a very disheartening performance all the way around. I'm told by people who were there at Munich that

not only could they not find anybody in Europe who would even begin to defend this thing, or at the conference who would begin to defend it, I'm sure there are people like Eric Zemmour in France and others who would defend it, But that, you know, there was literally, Vance kept stopping for applause lines after the initial applause, and there was none forthcoming. I mean, it is just, you know, the idea that the vice president of the United States is going to Munich and defending the AFD

and chastising, really, the Germans for excluding this neo-Nazi or anti-anti-nazi maybe let's say minimally anti-anti-nazi party from government uh um and the europeans generally have been tried to exclude these kinds of parties from governance uh there's no free speech and certainly that's not even a free speech issue there are some differences in the way we handle hate speech on the europeans we're more first amendment oriented're more First Amendment oriented. I guess it's fair enough. I mean, on the other hand, it's kind of a weird thing to raise

as the main centerpiece of your speech at a security conference. And again, I thought these guys were in favor of us running our own country and them running their own countries, but whatever. But the idea that you're actually chastising them for being too anti-Nazi, basically, in Munich, I mean, I just, for a US

vice president, it is astonishing. You know, one thing you mentioned in passing, I just want to pick up here as we approach here, we'll let people go soon on the Sunday, but you mentioned just in passing that, of course, this undercuts the hawkish rhetoric against China. And I think it's worth, people don't quite think about that. I mean do we have a serious uh plan to somewhat isolate china to make sure we're not dependent on china and so forth without the cooperation of the europeans i mean is that it's not right i mean the whole idea of the serious anti-china policy you've written about this our friend aaron friedberg has written about this others would be to have a kind of consortium of the democracies the strong the powerful

industrial democracies, ranging from the European allies to Japan and India and so forth, which kind of leave China on its own and therefore weaken China in some ways. But that's not possible if Europe has been told, fend for yourself. And God knows they'll be, you know, to say nothing of cutting deals with Russia directly, but also with China, right? I remember when I was in Germany a couple of years ago, there's a lot of talk about that. Germany had done a pretty good job of cutting its ties with Russia and people didn't quite expect they would, you know, as much as they did in terms of energy. But China was the tougher one. But there was some

movement there, I'd say, when it was clear that it was a U.S. priority and that that would be sort of part of being part of the alliance would be to have a tougher stance to China. But once you discredit the alliance, what incentives do they have? I mean. Yeah, no. So, you know, one of the whole thrusts of U.S. policy, you know, for the last eight years has been to try and get the Europeans more on board with our concerns about China and European concerns have been growing. I mean, there was a lot of concern about Chinese wolf warrior diplomacy during the pandemic, for instance, in Europe, a lot of exposure of Chinese influence efforts in Europe and in the European Parliament. NATO has, you know, taken on, you know, the fact that China is a strategic challenge for the North Atlantic

Alliance, not just the United States. But everything that we've just been talking about undercuts that. And I was really struck actually by one particular piece of Vance's indictment of the Europeans, which was having to do with the Russian influence operation in Romania over the Romanian election, which basically took place using TikTok, as best we can tell. Now, look, one can have different views about how well the Romanians handled this issue in terms of the impact it had on their presidential election. But where the country, you know, last I looked that led by Republicans outlawed TikTok in the United States. And now he's basically saying you Europeans are so afraid of TikTok in Romaniaia what's wrong with you

why are you you know you're allowing this fight against disinformation to enable cancel culture it's it's it's it's astonishing honestly yeah the attack i don't know that much about romania but i was talking with someone who's from there i mean the supreme court you know can't know the first election because they thought illegitimate r Russian interference just went beyond just advanced sort of to characterize it, paying for some Internet ads, you know. But Romania is a small country right now. Russia, maybe when they interfere here, they can't have quite as much success. They had some in 2016. But in Romania, it's a different story.

But you know what they did? They scheduled another election. Right. I mean, it's not like they've stopped democracy in romania unlike incident and so far as one can tell of their election with both uh different people you know the candidate who has benefited from russia i believe is running again you know it's not as if they they banned him or something it's not like uh so the country that he chooses to criticize is not hungary it's not uh other countries that are tilting in a putinesque direction and it's not not Russia. It's Romania, this small country that's trying to preserve what is a somewhat weak democracy, which fans sort of ridicule as well. If you're scared of them, I guess you just have a very weak democracy. Well, yes, you know what? I'm old enough to remember you were part of this. You were stationed in the Czech Republic. Yeah.

As I recall, I mean, our job was to help strengthen weak democracies, not to mock them. Yes, exactly. And I mean, you know, it's of a piece with what we see them doing here at home with the attack on USAID, on the National Endowment for Democracy, all of those efforts, as you were just saying, that we have embraced to strengthen democracy as countries emerged from under essentially Soviet domination in the Cold War. And this is just a complete reversal of all that and a transvaluation of values, if you would. Well, it's been a big moment.

I hope maybe there'll be a reaction against this moment in the U.S. and in the Congress of the U.S. and maybe among both parties in the Congress of the U.S., but I guess we'll have to see. One would hope. We can discuss that when we next meet. Eric, thank you. It's really terrific to draw on your wisdom and experience here and very illuminating for me and I'm sure for everyone else watching here on The Bulwark on Sunday. Thank you for joining us.