Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - 5 Scenarios for Russia-Ukraine -- with Richard Fontaine

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

How could Russia-Ukraine escalate? How could it deescalate? Does Zelensky survive? Does Putin survive? Does China try to bail out Russia? On this episode, we explore five scenarios with Richard Fontaine, who returns to the podcast. Richard Richard Fontaine is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a bi-partisan foriegn policy think tank in Washington, DC. Prior to joining CNAS, Richard was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department, the National Security Council, and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Richard Fontaine's essay in The Wall Street Journal: "The World That Putin Made" https://tinyurl.com/5n8fyaze

When I reduce this down to the possibility of a nuclear change, I don't think Putin is suicidal. I don't think the United States or Russia wants to get into a nuclear exchange. Putin has put his nuclear forces on alert. They've got these DEFCON levels kind of like us, and he moved them up one. Nothing has moved. They haven't seen anything move on the ground in terms of weapons movements or anything like that, or mobilization. So I think that this is basically his way of telling the rest of the world, stay out. I've got nuclear weapons. And if you're smart, you'll let me tend to Ukraine without getting involved directly. But, you know, it's a dangerous situation. What are concrete scenarios for where the Russia-Ukraine war could head? How does it escalate? How does it de-escalate? Does Zelensky survive? Does Putin survive?

Does China try to bail out Russia? And should we be thinking about the unthinkable? Well, in today's episode, we explore five scenarios with Richard Fontaine, who returns to the podcast. Richard is the CEO of the Center for New American Security, which is a bipartisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. A number of the top officials in the Biden administration today previously worked with Richard at CNAS. Prior to joining CNAS, the Center

for New American Security, Richard was a foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain, and he worked at the State Department, the National Security Council, and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Let's get into these concrete scenarios with Richard Fontaine. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast, Richard Fontaine from the Center for New American Security. Richard, thanks for joining. Thanks for having me back. You are a, you too are a fan favorite. We've recently had some fan favorites on you. You just followed Matt Pottinger, who was also a return. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. on you just you just followed matt pottinger who was also a return yeah yeah um so richard there's a lot we want to cover with you uh first and we last time we had you on was before putin invaded ukraine and a lot of your forecasting was uh what turned out to be accurate so uh so obviously there'll be a lot of interest in what you're us today, what pearls of wisdom you have for us. I want to start with, before we get into different scenarios for where this all may be going, your reaction to President Zelensky's speech before the U.S., address before the U.S. Congress this week. Well, it was extraordinary both that it happened, I mean, just given technology, from the middle of a war zone in a besieged city, a foreign leader can address the U.S. Congress, which is new. So that was a new experience,

I think, for everyone. And then it was also extraordinary just in his inspirational tone. I mean, who would have thought that a former comedian actor who didn't even have a very high approval rating before the war began sort of comes into his element as this brave and heroic leader? Yeah, Churchill in a t-shirt, as David Sanger has called him. Right. And I think it's made a huge difference. I mean, if he had taken some of the early advice and withdrawn the government from Kiev to Lviv or gone into exile and formed a government in exile, I think it would have to fight and the world's willingness to support the Ukrainians in such extraordinary fashion would be significantly less. So you actually think there is something very symbolically important about him actually being in Kiev and the message that sends to the world? Yeah. He's not wavering, so the world shouldn't waver.

Exactly, Yeah. And the fact that he is able to, I mean, he's now serially talking to world leaders. He spoke to the Canadian parliament. He spoke to the British parliament. He spoke to the US Congress. He spoke to the Bundestag in Germany. I mean, he's communicating this message, asking for assistance and showing that with that assistance, he and his government and the Ukrainian people are willing to stay in there and defend their country. And yeah, I think that's a very big difference than if he had been, you know, in London or Warsaw or take your pick of safer places. And I think it's also been inspiring clearly to his own people. This is not what the Russians bargained for, obviously, when they did this invasion in the first place and thought they'd get a quick win out of this.

So there's no telling what it would have looked like had he gone into exile. I think Ukrainians very likely would have fought anyway. But certainly his resolve has been contagious. You recently penned a long and important piece for the Wall Street Journal. It was called The World That Putin Made. And I want to quote here, you wrote, Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has resulted in geopolitical shifts astonishing in their scale and rapidity. The outlines of a new global order are already perceptible. And in many ways, they are precisely the opposite of those the Russian

president seeks. So what are these new outlines of a new global order that you are already beginning to visualize? Well, you can start by looking at what Putin wanted and what he actually got. He wanted a smaller NATO or at least a NATO that would agree never to expand any further. He wanted a weaker NATO, one that was divided internally, one that didn't have its troops or materiel in Central or Eastern Europe, the redeployment of all that stuff previous to 1997. He wanted a Ukraine that was somehow one with the Russian people in some sort of a bond politically or de facto or otherwise. And you could sort of go down the list of things he wanted. And of course, he wanted a return to Russian greatness in partnership with China.

There was a kind of major revisionist manifesto that Xi Jinping and Putin issued in February, just a few weeks before the invasion, talking about the world that they wanted to see. And you look at what he's gotten. He's gotten a NATO that's more united than any time in at least a generation, if not more. In terms of a smaller NATO or a NATO that that won't expand that's not going to happen and now for the first time ever sweden and finland are talking nato membership and majorities in both those countries favor joining uh he wanted ukraine out of transatlantic institutions and somehow bonded with russia just the significance on finland i, it's a country that not only had not been part of NATO,

but shares in like an 800-mile border with Russia. Right. And the word Finlandization was the term given during the Cold War to the fact that Finland was able to maintain its domestic autonomy and its territorial integrity and sovereignty, but the Soviet Union had an effective veto over its foreign policy, so it could not align with the West. And, of course, Sweden has been neutral.

And those things are quickly going right out the window. This cannot be what Putin had in mind. He wanted to show that Russia is great again as a major military power, must be contended with and respected. Its military is bogged down in Ukraine and showing itself to be weaker than anybody thought before it was tested in this fashion. How many casualties do we think, based on latest estimates, that the Russian military forces have suffered? The estimates from the Russians are very low. The estimates for the Ukrain military forces have suffered? The estimates from the Russians are very low. The estimates for the Ukrainians are high, but what the U.S. officials are saying is about 7,000 Russians killed, not just casualties killed, and perhaps another 12,000 or 15,000

injured. Those are astonishingly high numbers. I mean, if you think about that number 7,000, that's more than the United States has lost in all of its wars since Vietnam combined. And they did it. I mean, look at Iraq. In 16 years of Iraq, we're something approximating 4,400 US casualties in 16 years. Which is a searing wound in the American psyche. And obviously for all of the- We live with that every day. And these casualties you're talking about for Putin are, for Russia, in a matter of weeks. Right.

Three weeks. Three weeks. And, you know, potentially many more to come. And he's tried to hide the reality of the war. I mean, Russian pronouncements and Russian media inside Russia are not allowed to call it a war. It's now against the law to say that it's a war rather than a, quote, special military operation. They continue to say that this is fighting taking place only in the Donbass and Ukraine's east rather than across the entire country. And at some point, you know, these families who have now seen their sons and mostly their sons, but maybe some daughters too,

be killed are going to have to wrestle with this terrible reality. And we don't know what the political effect of that will be. But, you know, as one other point of comparison if you look at the horrible experience that the soviet union had in afghanistan they lost about 15 000 troops over uh a decade over a decade and that was that was a lot and of course they pulled out uh at the end without success but it took them about it took them about a decade though right i mean exactly exactly so it took them about a decade to get to that number. In 1979, the Soviets go into Afghanistan, and even though they suffered considerable casualties,

it still took a decade for them to decide grinding it out wasn't worth it. Exactly. And so here you're at maybe half that number in three weeks. Right. And so among the lessons here is that it was clear to, I think, every observer that Putin is not bothered by mass casualties among what he would see as the enemy. You can look at Grozny and Chechnya in the war in 1999, where he leveled the city and huge amounts of civilian and other casualties. The way they aided and abetted Assad and his horrific attacks in Syria, that clearly doesn't bother him. What is also true now is apparently Russian casualties don't bother him either. His own

fighting men don't bother him when they die or injured in the course of this fairly quixotic attempt at remaking the political dispensation in Ukraine. So I want to get to the scenarios in terms of where this this could be going or where it could land before i do just understand how you where you come out of this where are you on the spectrum of putin as madman versus putin as rational actor because when I talk to analysts and policy makers, they tend to lean heavily in one direction or the other. Oh, he's a madman.

He's unpredictable. You can't try to get inside his head because there's nothing rational about him in terms of his thought process. He's lost his mind. And then the other end of the spectrum is he's a shrewd, rational, geopolitical strategist who, while he takes gambles, they are informed gambles. They're

not reckless gambles. And therefore, it is easier to kind of think about different scenarios. I tend to lean towards the latter. Where are you on that spectrum? I lean towards the latter as well with a but. I think there's a sort of concept of bounded rationality, rational within the confines of assumptions and beliefs that one holds. And if you look at the beliefs that Putin held, or at least seemed to hold before he invaded Ukraine, there were three big assumptions from which his decision appeared to flow. One was that the Ukrainian people and the Russian people were one sort of mystical, historical, civilizational, even religious group of people. And therefore, you know, the Ukrainians would greet Russians

as liberators when they came to their country. The second was that the Russian military had made huge advances since the war in 2008 in Georgia. It was modernized, it was disciplined, it was effective. And so if the commanders say, hey, we can do a lightning strike and send the government fleeing in 24 or 48 hours, then that's the kind of thing that's within their capabilities. And if not that, they can do other things besides. And the third is that the international community, the West, was divided and feckless, weak, and couldn't really mount anything like a serious response. And so he had stockpiled foreign reserves, tried to sanction proof his economy. And had he faced the kind of sanctions that he got after Crimea or poisonings of various people or what he did in Ukraine's east.

He could have weathered those and he'd be fine. All three of those were completely wrong. So Ukrainians, of course, did not greet Russians as liberators, but exactly the opposite. They're fighting back to a person against them. The Russian military has shown itself to be poorly motivated, poorly planned, bad logistics, unable to accomplish what it set out to do on at least a reasonably fast timeline. And then this astonishing response of the international community, not just the West, so to speak, but Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, formerly neutral countries like Switzerland, all putting draconian sanctions on Russia. But hold on. In fairness, on that last one, one could argue that the outcome is not what he expected,

but he was not delusional. That's what I'm getting to. Exactly. So that's what I'm getting to. He was not delusional. That's what I'm getting to. Exactly. So that's what I'm getting to. He was not delusional in anticipating or expecting that outcome. Right. So based on information that he had or beliefs that he held, one could argue that he was making rational calculations on the base of those erroneous beliefs.

They were erroneous, you know, beliefs. They were erroneous. Now, is he rational in the sense that he can discern a pattern in information? Probably. Is he suicidal? Probably not. But hold on, just on that previous point, I mean, if you look at every time he has leaned in some sort of aggressive posture, 2008 in Georgia, 2014 in Crimea. Every step of the way, and we can go back before that, and then obviously the U.S. policy, 2015 Syria, this past summer in Afghanistan, he could calculate that every time he has taken an aggressive stance, his appetite for risk has gone up because he hasn't been turned into a pariah state. And in fact, Russia hasn't been turned into a pariah state, but U.S. actions in these other theaters, like I said, Syria or Afghanistan, conveyed a general disengagement from the world or desire for disengagement from the world or desire for disengagement from the world. And so,

I mean, after 2014, I remember, you know, President Obama saying that Russia would become all but a prior state. And the reality is they weren't. They weren't a prior state. The world was dealing with Russia. They were fully integrated into the world. No one was really, there were some sanctions, but no one was really isolating Russia. So why wouldn't he calculate that this would just be another step in that direction? No, I think he would, and he did. I mean, and of course, the meddling in the 2016 presidential election was a direct assault against the democratic process in this country. He did the same thing in the French presidential election. He tried to meddle in the 2020 elections to some degree in the United States. He poisoned Serge Skirpal and Litvinenko in England. He poisoned Alexei Navalny. I mean, you know, the list of transgressions, you know, cyber attacks, the list of transgressions

is extraordinarily high. And there have been responses, but there haven't been responses so draconian as to change the way of life for the Russian leadership. And so, you know, there is this sort of pattern of thought of, well, I, you know, you go after South Ossetia-Bnakazia in 2008, you go after Crimea in 2014, you go after the Donbass or China goes after Hong Kong, take your pick of these kinds of things.

And the world reacts, there's some sanctions, there's outrage. But you fast forward a few years. Cooler heads have prevailed. People want to, you know, work things out. Maybe some of the sanctions come off. Maybe some of the sanctions aren't as harsh as they looked originally. And guess who still has Crimea, Russia? Guess who still has South Ossetia, Akazia, and the Donbas? Guess who still has south of secha akazia and the dumbass you know yes he still has hong kong and and that's been the pattern here and this um was the straw that broke the camel's back and is not the pattern any longer the one but that i would say in this in this discussion of though of you know is putin rational in all of this is i you know it is disturbing when he rants about Nazi drug addicts being in charge in Ukraine or that the forces gathering in Ukraine were preparing biological weapons and were going to attack Russia. And therefore, this was an intolerable situation that demanded a military response. You know, these kinds of outlandish things, if he believes those things,

those are not rational. I mean, that is not a rational assessment of what's going on. I mean, it's just not true. And whether he believes that or not, I don't know. But that's the but to my... Meaning if you take him at his word, then it is someone who's unstable. Okay, now let's talk about the different scenarios for where this could be heading in the weeks and months ahead.

I want to start with the possibility of a no-fly zone. So I guess my first question is, where do you come out on this? Do you think a no-fly zone is unlikely to impossible to be implemented, declared and implemented in the weeks and early months ahead? Or do you think, as some policymakers have commented, it's kind of inevitable? I mean, we never say these things. We never say we're going to take these steps and escalate in this way. But if you look at the history of American foreign policy, as these conflicts drag on,

our posture winds up changing with time and things that we thought were impossible become normalized. And that will be the same with the no-fly zone where are you on that debate i don't think a no-fly zone will happen because it would involve americans and russians shooting each other directly and for all of the daggers drawn between the soviet union and the united states during the cold war uh we never we tried to avoid stabbing each other directly. Plenty of proxy wars, plenty of political warfare, economic warfare, information warfare. But the potential for escalation between the two biggest military powers with the two biggest military arsenals was so profound, and I think remains so profound, that we've got a strong interest in doing

everything but turning this into a direct US-Russia war, which is what a no-fly zone would be. So can you explain why just, because I think people throw terms around like no-fly zones as though they're like passive acts, like you just declare it and then it happens. And why, you know, it's uh someone said it's like when we declare gun-free zones around school you just declare it and then there's no guns in school neighborhoods which is not exactly true there may be guns in those neighborhoods but if they're not it's because there are cops walking the streets you know frisking people to make sure there aren't guns

and you don't just declare a no-fly zone you have to implement implement it. And can you just describe mechanically what implementing it means? Yeah, I mean, the classic way the United States has implemented no-fly zones is to put U.S. warplanes and bombers up over whatever the area is and to attack first the air defenses so that you bomb all of the surface-to-air missiles, the radar installations, things like that, so that you have the ability to fly yourself around that area. And then if there are... And a lot of those in this case are in Russia. So you'd be bombing anti-aircraft assets in Russia. And in Belarus, and in Ukraine. So they've brought a lot of that into Ukraine as well.

So it's in those those places then um and then you know to the degree to which their enemy planes flying um violating your no-fly zone you shoot them down and you know there's another concept in which you wouldn't suppress air defenses but theoretically you could just you know shoot missiles from somewhere outside uh ukrainian territory at russian planes but you can't enforce a no-fly zone if the enemy air force wants to fly without shooting down the enemy air force i mean that's how a no-fly zone works and um that's what we would be in the business of doing so So there's this sort of potentially seductive hope that we would just declare no-fly zone and Putin would say, okay, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going

to risk it. But you can't plan like that. You can't assume that he wouldn't risk it. The other thing, of course, is that I know fly zone would help, of course. It would reduce the bombing of Ukrainian cities. But a lot of what we've seen over the past few days has been artillery and rocket fire. And a no-fly zone stops airplanes. It doesn't stop incoming mortar shells or incoming missiles or things like that. So I think what I would suggest is that we give the Ukrainians everything that they can handle in order to defend themselves, including air defense systems to take down Russian planes that are flying over,

missile defense systems so that they can shoot down as they can, incoming rocket fire. And even, you know, there's now this debate over whether they should get these MiGs from Poland to fly. And if they can do that, I think they should. So why is this issue of the MiGs so controversial? Can you just explain why this debate has gotten sort of mired down in non-action? Yeah, there's a couple reasons. Well, one, our friends in Poland came up with this idea that they would give their MiGs to the Ukrainians,

but they didn't want to give them to them directly. So they said, okay, well, we'll fly our MiGs to a U.S. Air Force base in Germany, and then America can take them, and then America can figure out how to get them to the Ukrainians. And then the Americans will reimburse us with F-16s, which is a more capable aircraft. But they hadn't actually asked or told anybody on the American side. So there was they just sort of put a statement on their website.

And, you know, so there was a bit of trying to figure out how this would actually work aspect to this. Beyond that, there's the question of where are these planes going to operate from? Until a few days ago, it looked like Western Ukraine was relatively permissive until the Russians launched this major attack on the base out in Western Ukraine, dozens of rockets. And so there's been some thought that if you give additional war planes to the Ukrainians, then they could or maybe they should operate those planes from outside Ukrainian territory. They should take off and fly from Germany or they should take off and fly from Poland. And that is a potential expansion of the war to NATO territory if the Russians chose to try to fight those planes outside of Ukrainian territory.

So there's a few things kind of bound up in this. And what about also the training of Ukrainian pilots? Because I saw one study about the avionics in these MiGs have been updated to some degree several times that the Ukrainian pilots wouldn't be able to fly these versions of MiGs without sufficient training. Yeah, that I don't know. I don't know what it would take for them to fly these MiGs versus the ones they've already been trained to fly. I mean, that would certainly be an issue if we wanted to give Ukrainian pilots our own planes or something.

But, you know, so I think this, though, may be one of those things that, you know, we discuss and we discuss and we discuss and that at some point it just kind of happens in some way, shape or form, especially if the Ukrainians prepare to operate those from inside Ukrainian territory. And if they are, then it doesn't seem to me that there's any particular reason why we shouldn't. I mean, I think we should be in the business of trying to give them everything they can to defend themselves. So going to another scenario, which is not inconsistent with the scenario we're discussing, is if this just drags on. This conflict drags on and on and on. And, you know, instead of a few thousand casualties, Ukrainian casualties, we're talking about tens of thousands of casualties. And, you know, Putin is just, you know, bombarding these Ukrainian cities and towns. And we in the West, as we tend to do, just kind of get distracted, you know, we just move on and we stop paying attention and the press coverage is not as comprehensive

and consistent and all-consuming. And we, you know, it sort of starts to feel a little bit like the Balkans in the mid-90s, which some of us who were very focused on it for a variety of reasons were paying attention to the minute-to-minute, but actually most people weren't really paying attention and people lost interest. And there were periods where there was

some, you know, major catastrophe that captured the world's attention, but that lasted for a couple of news cycles and then people would go about their business. Can you imagine a world and this drags on for, you know, we talked about Russiaussia the soviet invasion of afghanistan being a decade yeah it's very hard to say but um i think that we're at the early stages of this how early i don't know but there's clearly huge hopes bound up in the diplomacy that's going back and forth between the russians and the ukrainians now everyone would like to see some sort of negotiated and the russians from the very first day of this have sort of teased various solutions some of them sounding half reasonable uh that they would be willing to live with to stop um each of these seems to get thrown right out the window with the next statement by Putin. And if you think about the nature of wars,

they often go on much longer than anyone anticipated at the outset, especially if the political objective and the military objective that was spelled out at the outset were not met in the way that they were intended to meet at the beginning. And that's exactly the case here, right? So political objective was we're going to change

the regime. Military objective is we're going to force the government out of Kiev. We're going to take Kiev. We're going to do that very fast. Neither of those things happen. So, you know, if you transpose this, not in any way on moral grounds, but just on sort of military timeline grounds to the u.s invasion of iraq we would have what just gotten to baghdad at this point dan right right right and you know so uh and and you know at the time remember that was mission accomplished so it that was supposed to be the end and of course as we know that just the beginning. So it's really hard to tell. But I think the chances that this goes on for a long time are depressingly high.

The other thing that this means extraordinarily tragically is that, you know, the Russians, again, tried this kind of blitzkrieg. We'll go in grab the cities the government will flee you know okay it's all over that doesn't work and so now they're going to their more tried and true tactic which we saw in grozny in 99 which you saw in aleppo and syria which is you just bombard the cities until life uh becomes so intolerable uh that you, you try to force the capitulation of whoever's in those cities. And, you know, either through a combination of siege or just outright attacks on civilian and military targets. And, you know, we see the casualties piling up. And of course, this is before we've seen urban warfare in Kiev, which, you know, if bombardment looks bad and, you know, the casualties on both sides from street to street fighting in a city of a couple of million people in Kiev is going to be

pretty terrible. So I have as much hope, I guess, bound up in the diplomacy here as anybody else, but I'm not very optimistic about it. So let's talk a little bit about the diplomacy, because there have been, as you said, some frameworks and like an outline of a possible ceasefire deal. Obviously, none of it has gotten real traction, but yet these ideas keep being thrown around. And obviously, there was the 2014 op-ed by henry kissinger in the washington post uh that is that many analysts keep referring to so let's go through what a what a possible um deal could look like or that that keeps leaking out or surfacing one is ukraine gives up any claim

to crimea so it's been invaded and annexed by Russia, and that's the end of it. Donetsk and Luhansk, the two eastern self-declared republics of Ukraine, remain independent. So between that and Crimea, you're ceding something like a third of the country, either to Russia or to Russian influence. And Ukraine publicly declares neutrality. It gives up its hope of joining NATO and does so and declares it. Does that, am I getting everything? Are those the big ticket items that are being kicked around as a possible basis for a negotiation? By the Russians, yeah. But this gets tricky because it depends on what Russians you're talking about. So as recently as yesterday, Dmitry Peskov, who's Putin's spokesman, came out and said, oh, you know, we would be open to a solution that has Ukraine look like Austrian or Swedish neutrality. Well, okay. Austria and Sweden are not members of NATO. Both of them, well, especially Sweden, work with NATO, but they're not members.

They're both members of the European Union, which Ukraine is not, although it's now closer to being a member of the EU when all of this started. Ukraine could remove from its constitution its ambition to be a member of NATO. It wasn't a member of NATO before and was not about to be a member of NATO. It wasn't a member of NATO before and was not about to be a member of NATO when this started. But they would have to amend their

constitution. I mean, in the Ukrainian constitution, it states that Ukraine will pursue a path to NATO membership. Correct. Right. So they'd have to change that. But NATO membership is not now and has never been imminent for Ukraine anyway. So, I mean, part of the tragedy of this is the degree to which Putin was animated by a desire to keep Ukraine out of NATO. It was out of NATO already and it wasn't about to come in. And everybody acknowledged that. So to fight a war, to try to acknowledge, to make something happen that's already in effect is... Well, it would formalize it.

Yeah. It would formalize it. It would formalize that Ukraine can't pursue it. But if you look at that, if the model is Austrian or Swedish neutrality, that is an unbelievable climb down on the Russian side from the ambitions they had for this war even a couple of weeks ago um i guess the nazis can stay in power in kiev as long as you know it looks like austria or sweden i mean it's just you know i mean there's a there's a very serious cognitive dissonance

meaning he's escalated the rhetoric so much in demonizing the the ukrainian government that it just this looks like he's reaching an accommodate well he will have he will have he will have more territory than he had when he went into it well maybe i mean so uh so so the the but here is well you know they haven't spelled out at least publicly what the specifics are on something like that but um But one could imagine an outcome like that where Ukraine didn't have control over Crimea before and it doesn't have control of Crimea after. Ukraine didn't have control over Luhansk and Donetsk in the east before. It doesn't have it after. Ukraine wasn't in NATO before. It wasn't in NATO after. Ukraine wasn't in the EU before,

but it's free to join the EU in the future. That would be a tremendous Russian failure, I think. But the Ukrainians have already rejected that framework. is it's unclear whether this is trolling essentially by uh russian speakers and uh in in moscow and diplomats or whether this actually has any standing because on the same day that dmitry peskov sort of floated that option then uh you know then then putin comes out and basically says you know we've got to denazify Ukraine. We have to demilitarize Ukraine. We have to stop the genocide that's going on against Russians in Ukraine. And the plan is, everything's kind of going according to plan. So what's really on the table?

It's hard to say. I think there's a strong possibility that there's really nothing on the table and that the diplomacy is once again a smoke screen for russia to try to buy some time seem vaguely rational and realistic and reasonable to the rest of the world while they continue to bombard the cities and regroup militarily in terms of their ground defenses is there a world in which they keep bombarding the cities to the cities and regroup militarily in terms of their ground offenses is there a world in which they keep bombarding the cities to the point and so weaken Ukrainian forces and so isolate city centers that they effectively occupy Ukraine and can do so for some extended period of time

not unless they go into the cities themselves with ground forces and that's the part that certainly in kiev they have not been able to do and has always been sort of uh the thing that no one can quite figure out here including me including me so what's the concept yeah so so let's say you bombard these cities and you say, OK, we've done enough. We've we've killed enough civilians and the population is so desperate that, you know, they'll they'll give up. And which I think is is probably the concept. And they'll, you know, they'll negotiate the entrance of Russian troops. Well, maybe maybe you get that. But let's say you don't.

Okay. So then at some point you move into these cities and then you're talking about urban warfare, which advantages the defender. The Ukrainians clearly have the appetite for a fight with the Russian invaders. And either way, let's say either there's a negotiated entrance into the cities or you fight your way into the cities, then what? I mean, Dan, you and I and others have some inkling of what it's like to occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied by a foreign army. I've told friends of mine, I've made this point that among the many horrors that I most visibly recall from our early months and years in Iraq was literally trying to get a country running again where no government employees show up to the ministries to do basic jobs, providing basic services to a country you are trying to make function. I mean, it is, in the case of Iraq, we had like 27 or 28 ministries. No one showed up to work. None of the technocrats, like good luck getting a country, good luck trying to get a country back on its feet. And even if you have influence over it, or in the case of Russiaussia literally trying to run it when you have no real allies doing the job day to day in that country ukraine is not quite twice the population of iraq but you know not that far from it uh the united states invaded iraq with

more troops that were more capable. We had friendly ground forces like the Kurds and things like that. And we still had a raging insurgency on our hands when anyone who could pick up a gun or plant an IED wanted to kill American troops for a long time. The Russians have a much less capable military, a highly motivated population to try to keep them out. By the way, a history of this. I mean, the Nazis took Kiev and they took the city and they moved the people who were going to govern the city in. And once they settled in the offices, the bombs started to go off. The Ukrainians had booby trap places and the whole thing. So the Russians would have to either put some puppet on the throne here and then leave,

in which case you're going to get a popular uprising against that puppet in about five minutes after that, and you're right back where you started. Or they can try to occupy this country indefinitely with fewer troops than the U.S. had, less capable troops, no ground forces to assist them. And the biggest country in Europe. Biggest country in Europe. Bigger than Germany, bigger than France. And with half the world pouring weapons into the resistance. And so, you know, what's the concept? Which is why I think at the end of the day, they will pursue some sort of negotiated outcome. But I just don't know what those terms will be and what ultimately they will accept, because clearly I think the Ukrainians are not going to accept what the Russians would like.

OK, two other scenarios. And one is much darker than the other but i it's the elephant in the room people weren't talking about it now they talk about it the it's a very difficult topic to speculate about but the potential for some kind of nuclear exchange uh which you know the war in ukraine heightens risks of some kind of nuclear conflict, at least to a level we haven't seen, you and I, in our lifetimes. I don't think, you know, the U.S. has seen since, in terms of the heightened risk since the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think the chances of a nuclear exchange are extraordinarily low, but that still puts them higher than they used to be a few weeks ago.

And, you know, this is a classic very low probability extremely high consequence uh possibility so i think it i don't think it will happen um but i don't like the direction that the the numbers are going in terms of probability here even though that's very low and uh it's not impossible to imagine an escalatory chain of some sort i mean i think meaning triple wires you know crossed by inadvertently like misreading signals not even inadvertently but i you know the country that has the most tactical nuclear weapons these sort of battlefield nukes in the world is r. Would they use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine? I don't know. Probably not, but they might. I don't think the United States would

respond in a nuclear way to that or maybe not respond at all. But then you've broken the nuclear threshold for the first time since the bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That doesn't produce a nuclear exchange, but it's one more chipping away at this taboo that so many countries have tried to put into place so that we don't, you know, risk the existence of the planet. And, you know, even before you get to a nuclear attack, I wonder whether all of this talk of, you know, biological weapons labs in Ukraine, you know, fomented by the U.S., which is untrue and don't exist, is a pretext for the Russians to use some sort of chemical or biological agent in Ukraine. I mean, when they, you know, when they do their poisonings, they use chemical weapons.

So, you know, they could use arsenic or something if they wanted,, they use chemical weapons. So they could use arsenic or something if they wanted, but they use chemical weapons. And so everybody knows, one, that they've got those chemical weapons, and two, who did this, even as they deny who did this. And so, yeah, when I reduce this down to the possibility of a nuclear change, I don't think Putin is suicidal. I don't think the United States or Russia wants to get into a nuclear change. I don't think Putin is suicidal. I don't think the United States or Russia wants to get into a nuclear exchange. Putin has, he put his nuclear forces on alert. They've got these DEFCON levels kind of like us, and he moved them up one. There's nothing has moved. They haven't seen anything move on the ground in terms of weapons movements or anything

like that or mobilization. So I think that this is basically his way of telling the rest of the world, stay out, I've got nuclear weapons, and if you're smart, you'll let me tend to Ukraine without getting involved directly. But, you know, it's a dangerous situation. Two final scenarios before we let you go. One, the possibility that Putin gets overthrown

either in some kind of palace coup kind of situation where elites around him, whether in the security apparatus or elsewhere in the government or among the oligarchs, organize some kind of overthrow or some sort of popular mass protest that results in some kind of overthrow? You know, these regimes tend to be like hollow trees sometimes. They look sturdy from the outside, and they are until somebody hits them with a blow, and it turns out that they were empty inside. And so if there is some sort of overthrow overthrow then we probably won't know about it

until it's already happened i think if it does happen it'll be a combination of the two things that you said it'll be some sort of popular agitation and then there will but that won't do it on its own i mean this won't be uh uh you know a storming the Bastille kind of thing. This would then prompt some of the elites. That kind of event is basically unheard of, actually, if you look at Russian history. It's just, you know, other than the Russian Revolution. Well, right. But so are successful internal coups. I mean, if you look from 1917, when Lenin took over until today,

the only successful coup was the second one that got Khrushchev out of power when Brezhnev took over. The first one failed. Stalin died in office. You know, Khrushchev, again, he got out in the second one. But Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, they all died in office. Gorbachev, there was an unsuccessful coup, and that didn't work. And, you know, Yelts all died in office Gorbachev, there was an unsuccessful coup, and that didn't work. And, you know, Yeltsin died in office, Putin as an officer. So it's not to say it won't happen. But this is not like being, you know, the Prime Minister of Italy, where, you know, if you if you just wait a few more months, and there's going to be a new one. I mean, that's that's just not Russian history. So, you know, people going into the streets have a strong signaling effect in an autocratic regime like this because they're taking such risk.

I mean, they know they're going to jail if they go into the streets. And so that sends a strong signal to the elite that there's discontent in the population. And it just takes a few members of security services to get weak-kneed in shooting on protesters once. I mean, it just has to have that where they kind of blink, where, you know, that's where things can get very dicey. Right. So I think that, you know, if there's a mechanism by which something happens, it's the popular discontent then signals to the elite that they're in an intolerable situation and to

be worse off by Putin remaining than him going and trying to work something else out. I mean, I think there's this other thing to the degree to which over time, the oligarchs are really getting hammered hard by these sanctions. You know, there's this sort of theoretical possibility that, you know, the Russians and Ukrainians come to terms and there's some relaxation of the sanctions. But honestly, the combination of the government sanctions by countries around the world and then the self-sanctioning by multinationals and Western companies that are all pulling out of Russia, that's not going to change as long as Putin's

in power. So even if this ends tomorrow, as long as Putin's there, it's, it's like, it's going to be like Assad. I mean, you know, Assad might wrap up this war, but, you know, no one's going back in. He's, he's persona non grata. So, you know, again, I think the chances of all of that resulting in a Russian regime change are relatively low, but, you know, they're not zero and they're higher than they were, which is yet one more irony in this little piece I did with the Wall Street Journal that you mentioned at the beginning. I mean, part of this war is a piece of Putin's efforts to restore Russian greatness and make Russia respected around the world and deal with its, you know, what it would say is its legitimate security concerns, show that it's a great power.

It's having exactly the opposite effect. Okay, last one, which is China bailing out Russia in some way. And this was, this, I think many of us were speculating about, you talked about the Putin visit to Beijing during the Olympics a week before the invasion. And just the other day, Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, former ambassador to Russia, I probably should add parenthetically, testified that their intelligence is showing that Beijing, that Xi, that the Chinese Communist Party leadership is rattled by the response to Putin. And I think he used the word shaken to describe China's reaction to what is happening.

What is your reaction to that, to what Burns reported out and or testified to and uh two do you do you think that this whole china bailing out russia is just we we may have all thought it was it had more teeth before the invasion but now it just looks less so well on the first question i think that there's China would be Chinese leadership would be forgiven to not have a pretty strong dose of buyer's remorse. Um, having, you know, announced this quote without limits, uh, quasi alliance with Russia in February, even if they have no moral qualms with this war of aggression, this barbarous attack on Ukraine. What is going to result is a Russia that is weaker, that is far more isolated internationally, that is poorer. I mean, the Russian GDP may contract by a third this year. They're about to default on their sovereign debt,

whose military has been shown to be far less capable than everyone, including they assumed. Those are the opposites of what you want in your number one ally, right? You want strong, unified, effective, competent allies, right? And so, you know, this is what they've signed up for, and this is what they're getting. Now, that said, you know, there's some talk about, well, China's kind of on the fence and all that. Well, not really. I mean, they've they've thrown in with the Russians. I mean, they've thrown in with the aggressor here and they support what the Russians are doing. They're not criticizing it. They've adopted a lot of the Russian language about Russia's legitimate security interests need to be met, kind of

tried to blame some of this in the United States. Their companies are going to be in a jam when it comes to the sanctions because their companies want to do business in the U.S. market, not just the Russian market. And so even if there's some desire to bail out the Russians in economic terms, buy more of their oil and gas, I'm sure the Chinese will buy as much as they can get, especially if they get a 20% discount like seems to be on offer these days from the Russians. But their companies may well just have to decide. And I could easily see them deciding to abide by the sanctions, not because they like them, but because they feel like that's in their economic interest to do so. The bigger question is about whether the Chinese come to the military aid of Russia.

According to the latest reports, the Russians have asked the Chinese for everything ranging from MREs to surface-to-air missiles, which is an amazing commentary on the second biggest military in the world that after three weeks of fighting already has to ask the Chinese to send supplies. This could not have been how they thought this was going to go, but this is where they are. If the Chinese do this, I don't know that the Chinese leadership fully recognizes the consequences of this. I mean, there haven't been coherent, really coherent blocks, geopolitical blocks, like during the Cold War. China in one side and, you know, the United States or the Democratic or the free world in another side.

And it's because of all the free world and another side. And it's because of all the business that's being done. And the Chinese have seen Europe in particular as a power center distinct from the United States, one that they could kind of peel off and do business with, even if they're in this competitive and maybe confrontational relationship with the United States over time. What they don't want to face is a unified front of the United States, Europe, Japan, and a few other countries, because then you're talking about half the world's GDP. You're talking about the richest and most powerful countries in the world. If in Europe's time in peril, China aids the aggressor that has started and prosecutes this war on the EU's borders,

I think that they've lost Europe. I think that Europe will see China as of a piece with Russian aggression, which is not how they saw them before. Right. Many of them rationalize still having their economies fully integrated with China's, and that could change. And you are seeing the profound changes that Europe is making in such a short period of time with respect to its own prosecute this war, I think the chances that it will lose Europe, so to speak, are significantly high. How come? Lastly, you are in close contact with senior administration, Biden administration officials, some of whom worked with you at the Center for New American Security. Generally, if you were to summarize, what is their mood? Are

they feeling overwhelmed when you talked about the situation? Or do they also, while it is overwhelming, dealing with an international crisis of this scale, do they see this as a big opportunity for President Biden, that this is Biden's moment? Again, I don't think he's handled it the way it's his moment, but I can imagine some of them. spoke to one who who said we should we should throw our lot in with this fight this should be this should this should define the presidency now for the next year the reality is there's not much we can do about inflation there's not much we can do with build back better there's not much our congressional efforts are sort of going nowhere obviously they'll get it they'll probably get a supreme

court nominee confirmed but that's basically it there's not a ton they can do on the domestic agenda that they can directly influence. Seizing this moment in global affairs. I mean, my gosh, if Putin were to fall or the regime, the Russian government were perceived to have a major setback, it would be a serious geopolitical moment for the United States. And President Biden could own it. And he anyways, that's what one one one advisor, how one described it to me. And I'm curious what you're sensing in your conversations with them. Do they do they get the how consequential this moment is and what what an opportunity is for the U.S.?

I think they do, but maybe in a different way. I haven't really talked to, I talked to them a lot, but not much on the domestic politics of this. Is this going to make Biden's numbers go up or down? Or can he sort of seize the moment of bipartisan unity on this to do things otherwise? Or what does this mean for the midterms or something? I've never had those conversations. And frankly, I'm probably talking to the wrong people if I wanted to have those conversations because those tend to be other people in the White House. But I would say, you know, there was, I discerned, not fatigue, but a certain level of maybe even depression when Russia did what seemed so obviously costly and wrong by invading. I mean, the administration picked up the intelligence

that this was in the offing back in October. They took, I think, extraordinary steps to tell everyone to engage in diplomacy with the Russians, to get the Ukrainians and Europeans on board, to threaten sanctions, to get the Chinese to help out, all of these sort of to spell out the costs, and Putin just went ahead and did it anyway. And I think that they thought that was going to happen. But the reality of this is tragic. And these are people who are working on these issues. And I think the human side of this for everybody does resonate. On the other hand, I think the opportunity to act together as the West or as the free world, or I say the West meaning not just, you know, the United States and Europe, but Japan and Australia and South Korea and even, you know, Singapore joined in the sanctions and other countries. You know, it turns out that

we're learning something in this process because, you know, there's been all this talk about, you know, the resurgence of great power competition, the rise of China, which will have the world's biggest economy and its military modernization, the aggressiveness and capabilities of Russia. The jungle is back, as Bob Pagan. Now, all of that's true, right? All that's true. And if you add Russia and China together, which has been kind of the nightmare scenario, you get a more formidable, you know, potential adversary still. But it turns out that the bulk of the wealth and the power and the military strength and the economic power still resides in all the other countries. You know, the G7 countries that sanction Russia are, you know, with a few others are roughly half of world GDP.

So Russia and China are a lot, but they're not anything compared to that, right? What it turns out is, you know, the countries that tend to be, tend to have these kind of Western institutions, tend to be democracies, although not exclusively, are strong. They've just been fragmented and not working together and focused at home on what they're doing. But this spurred them into action. It shows what they can do. Does that translate into what could be done with China or Iran or North Korea? Maybe, maybe not, but it's not a bad sign. I mean, countries are, you know, in this horrible tragedy, countries are getting together to exercise some geopolitical muscles they haven't exercised in a very long time. And they're finding the inner strength that they had all along.

Let's hope you're right and let's hope that inner strength endures. Thank you. We've kept you longer than I offered when we negotiated this interview. So I appreciate you staying. I hope this doesn't mean that you won't return. We're going to get you back because, sadly, this story is not disappearing. But until then, Richard, thank you for your insight and your pearls of wisdom. And just hope your voice continues to be out there. Thanks for having me. Good talking to you. All right.

Take care. That's our show for today. To follow Richard Fontaine's work, you can go to cnas.org. That's c-n-a-s dot org. And you can follow him on Twitter at RH Fontaine. That's R-H-F-O-N-T-A-I-N-E. We'll post the Wall Street Journal op-ed we talked about in our show notes. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.