Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Putin’s Newly Shattered Norms - With Richard Fontaine

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

Is Putin crossing almost every line the West did not anticipate he would cross? What does this tell us about where he might might ultimately escalate to? Richard Fontaine returns to the podcast to answer these questions and others. Richard is CEO of the Center for New American Security. He was recently appointed to the Defense Policy Board by the Biden Administration’s Pentagon leadership. Prior to working at CNAS, Richard was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked on the Senate Armed Services Committee, at the State Department, at the National Security Council, and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has also been an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. One of the pieces we discuss in this episode: “Why Russia’s Cyber Warriors Haven’t Crippled Ukraine” - https://tinyurl.com/yx86yv46

If you believe, as I do, that Putin wants to come out of this with something that he can show as a win, then if it's a choice between what he would see as defeat and some form of escalation, he's likely to choose escalation. The next two weeks or so of fighting in the eastern part of Ukraine is going to be extremely intense. In some ways, it may be more intense than anything we've seen thus far and may be determinative. Does the West have a playbook for a response to a tactical nuclear strike from Russia in Ukraine? That's one of several unthinkable questions we explore with return guest to this podcast, Richard Fontaine. Richard is the CEO of the Center for New American Security, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Prior to working at CNAS, Richard was a 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. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast my friend Richard Fontaine from the Center for New American Security. Richard, thanks for coming back. Thank you for having me. Fan favorite. We've gotten a lot of demand for Richard Fontaine. So pleased that you're taking the time. I'm in an undisclosed location right now. All I will say is that it is sunny and warm and in a tax-free jurisdiction and likely tax-free shores here and likely the residence state of a future U.S. president. That narrows it down a little bit. Yeah, a little, not entirely, though. Richard, when you were last with us, you laid out a number of scenarios as to where you thought the Russia-Ukraine crisis was heading.

And that was a few weeks ago. So here we are now. This war started late February. Here we are middle towards the late April. So we're a couple months into it. Before we get into the very specific question i want to drive at where do you think things stand right now well the russians have reduced their objectives clearly over the past couple of weeks kiev is no longer part of

their objectives they're not trying to take kiev they're not trying to take the north, they're not trying to take currently anyway, Odessa and areas down in the southwest. And so what they're really focused on is what many people thought they'd be focused on from the beginning, which is the Donbass region in the eastern part of Ukraine, that what they called the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics and land around those together with the land in between Crimea and those regions. And that's where Mariupol sits. And if anybody's watched the news, they've seen the utter destruction of that city. This would create a contiguous territory from Crimea around the Black Sea coast up to the

northeast portion of Ukraine. And that appears to be what the Russians are currently aimed for. But the fighting is quite intense over those territories. And how would you evaluate Western unity, Western resolve at this point? When we last spoke, you Encouraged by the response. So now we're in the you know, the durability phase of that response How would you evaluate the durability? It's still very high and very unified and very active it seems like almost every few days now the United States is Announcing a new arms package to Ukraine. The Europeans are doing the

same thing. They've moved from shipping small arms for the fight around Kiev and in the north to heavy weaponry like howitzers and tanks and helicopters and air defense systems and so forth that are going to be of greater utility in this open field fighting that's just about to really kick off in earnest in the east and of course the coercive measures against the government of russia and the sanctions have only continued to get ratcheted up and you even see the eu talking about an oil ban which was literally unthinkable just a few weeks ago and And now I think it's probably likelier than not. So the Russians continue, of course, to be their own worst enemy and our own greatest diplomat in that respect by galvanizing the world's attention with terrible atrocities

against civilians and unprovoked bombardment of cities and things like that. But the unity is high. So before the invasion, the conventional wisdom by analysts, conventional wisdom in the media, even conventional wisdom among many of our political leaders, was that Putin wouldn't go through with it. He may do something on the eastern edges of Ukraine, but wouldn't go deep into Ukraine and launch a full-scale war.

That was wrong. And then the conventional wisdom was, well, he's launched a war, but he won't unleash mass atrocities. And we look at what's happened in Bucha where you literally have just mass ex execution of of Ukrainian men you know I think mass graves have been discovered and then we were the conventional wisdom was okay so and it's not in perfect sequence but you know he there'll be a limit to what kind of capabilities he will use. And certainly cruise missiles were not on anyone's radar screen. He's used cruise missiles in the east and the north, and as you and I have talked about, you know, some form of rockets in the west.

And so if you just go step by step here, the logical next step in the ladder of escalation would be chemical weapons. And we were told forever, oh, he would never use chemical weapons. That would be far too risky. Are we going to be in several weeks saying, you know, we said he'd never use chemical weapons, like we said he'd never do mass atrocities, like we said he would never go in, like we said he would never go west if he goes in. Will we be having the same conversation in a few weeks about chemical weapons? We might.

It's wrong to say that Russia would never use chemical weapons if for no other reason than they've used them in the past few years to poison people they wish to go away. So Serge Skirpal and Alexei Navalny were poisoned with chemical weapons. So we know they have them. They've used them. They used them. For singular assassinations. Correct.

I'll be on UK territory, which is pretty provocative. But these singular assassinations, they didn't necessarily take credit for. So this is... That's right. So they haven't used them in the way that Basharhar asad used chemical weapons in syria right but there's no particular reason to think that that's completely off the table and uh i think if you believe as i do that putin wants to come out of this with something that he can show as a win then if it's a choice between what he

would see as defeat and some form of escalation he's likely to choose escalation does that escalation include chemical weapons don't know but it could and i think the next two weeks or so of fighting in the eastern part of ukraine is going to be extremely intense in some ways it may be more intense than anything we've seen thus far and may be determinative. So, you know, there are a lot of question marks hanging over this next period. And obviously the next step on the ladder, I think, after chemical is some sort of limited nuclear strike, which I want to get to in a moment. But before I do, I want to talk about cyber. I've been struck by what seems to be the limited or non-existent, at least in terms of what's visible, use of cyber warfare by Russia so far in this war.

And that is to say, before the war, that's what we were all bracing for. One of the things we were all bracing for. That was the one area that was predicted. And yet we see very little. We would have thought that there'd be cyber attacks, certainly once the war started, against the command and control centers and capabilities of the Ukrainian military, but also against critical infrastructure, against communications. And there's nothing we can see. Now, Klon Kitchen, who you know from the dispatch and from AEI, has written this piece for the National Interest, laying out a number of theories as to why Russia has not used cyber capabilities during this war. And one of his theories is that Putin is concerned that once you launch these cyber attacks, they can spiral out of control. And he experienced that

in 2017 with a cyber attack that was supposed to be limited and spiraled all over the place, including it came back, it hit, you know, did tens of billions of dollars of damage and came back and even hit Russia itself. And that there is some concern among the Russian leadership that to launch a cyber attack against Ukraine could easily spread to NATO countries. And then suddenly is that in the middle of a war situation, is that an Article 5 trigger situation? I know that Article 5 trigger conditions

are maybe a little more ambiguous as it relates to cyber. But that's a risk that Putin is not willing to take. That is one theory. Do you agree with that theory? What do you make of what we're seeing on the cyber front? It's hard to say, but I think there's two factors that are at play here. Well, really three. One is probably some restraint because we haven't seen massive cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in the United States, which, of course, was one of the administration's great fears before this began when we started taking quite coercive actions against Russia that they would retaliate in the way that they know best and have some asymmetric advantage, which is in cyber. We haven't seen that.

So, but the question, so there may be some restraint, but I think there are two other factors in Ukraine. One is that, you know, the United States and others have worked with Ukrainians over the past few years to really harden some of their cyber defenses inside the country. And that seems to have been effective in some places. The other is, depending on what kind of infrastructure you're talking about, the Russians still need to use it themselves in Ukraine because they're operating in Ukraine and they don't have their own separate system. So that's especially true in the communication system. So, you know, as has been widely reported now, Russians have been talking to each other over cell phones. Well, if you were to take down the communication system, how would you communicate? Everybody had a radio, turned out they didn't work very well. And so they communicate by cell phone. of poor planning of this and the poor operational rollout of the russian campaign i think might explain why some of the critical infrastructure remains standing when otherwise it could have

been subject to attack in ukraine because the russian troops themselves needed to conduct their operations where are you when we when we last spoke you you didn't put it as a zero probability but you put it as a very low probability that Putin would resort to a limited nuclear strike against somewhere in Ukraine. Where are you on that today? I still think it's not zero. I still think it's quite low. But, you know, the fact that it's not zero puts it higher than anybody should be comfortable with. It's hard to say simply because one would have to, we've tried to assess the possibility and probability of these things by imagining what Putin, we said, well, he probably won't go into Kiev and try to topple the government because what could he gain from that reasonably? Well, that was not a good way to think about that. And our own intelligence community was right when they said, well, we just hear them talking about the plan to do it, which means they're going to do it. Whether or not it's a good

idea. There haven't been any signs that I'm aware of, of a move in that direction beyond the rhetorical sort of symbolic stuff that the Russians have done. But it does get back to this question of if Putin feels like he's on the verge of defeat, however he might define that, and it's a choice between, as he would think, defeat and escalation. Does he escalate and does escalation include a nuclear the nuclear threshold which of course would be a just a tremendous change In the way countries have operated with each other if there's been one taboo since 1945

it's been against the use of nuclear weapons and But it's hard to say and Based on your conversations with senior administration officials, I can't, I can't, U.S. administration officials, I can't imagine that they're not, I mean, as much as they don't want to try to deal with that possibility, I'm sure they're not completely shutting it out from their planning. What is your sense for how U.S. policymakers, decision makers, leaders in operational roles are thinking about how the U.S. would actually respond? Yeah, it's...

And when I say limited strike, I mean a really limited strike. I mean, as catastrophic as it would be, you know, taking out one Ukrainian city, you know, three, four hundred thousand people killed, but actually contained and not spreading in terms of touching other, you know, touching NATO countries or really in any way touching what we call loosely defined as the West. So some could rationalize, well, it is contained, it is very targeted. And say it's, we're not in a full scale nuclear war situation, although it is it is contained it is very targeted and and and say it's it's we're not in a full-scale nuclear war situation although it is a massive escalation right right and so the the biggest question would be does that change uh president biden's admonition that we will essentially do

everything but fight russians directly i think this is just speculation uh but i think it probably wouldn't i don't think that that would make him suddenly want the United States to enter the war directly. But I do think that in terms of any limits or restraints, both on the coercive activities that have been taking place, sanctions and everything else on Russia and a military aid to the Ukrainians, which is a lot, but it's not everything it could be. I think all restraint would be off and all limits would be off. And so you would put, you know, essentially on steroids, the kinds of things that you're seeing now. And, you know, there would be real efforts, you know, to isolate Russia in every possible way, diplomatically and everything else. And I think it would also put a huge amount of pressure on all these countries

that are kind of on the fence about this. I mean, you know, we, including I have talked about, you know, this major Western response, but it does include the countries. It does not include the countries of the Western hemisphere, South of the United States. And it doesn't include countries like India and certainly China. But I think it would put huge pressure on them to get off the fence a little bit and to sort of take some action to punish Russia. You know, when I was working on Capitol Hill in the 90s during the Balkans War, I was struck as a staffer, foreign policy staffer for a junior, for a freshman senator, that early on in the Balkans War, it seemed to be galvanizing and captivating.

And the media and policymakers left and right were focused on it. And then as it dragged on, even as the atrocities got worse and worse, the American public, the American media, and big chunks of Washington, big chunks of the U.S. Congress kind of checked out. Like if you're working for a senator who wasn't on that Senate Armed Services Committee or wasn't on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the Senate Intelligence Committee, you didn't really pay attention. It was like background noise. We, you know, for the first,

it seemed like three to four weeks of this war in Ukraine, it seemed all consuming in the most important ways. The American public seemed to be totally engaged. And now I'm already starting to sense that it's in the news, but it's not necessarily leading the news. And do you worry that we are directionally heading, and by the way, the damage and destruction and loss of life is already comparable

to the peak of the Balkans human catastrophe, the worst of it. We're already there yeah and yet in a much more condensed period of time people are already you know add is kicking in yeah you know we're already you know we spent already way too much time talking about you know will smith at the oscars right and and you know chris rock and like you know so the that was crowding out news coverage of Russia-Ukraine. And is that a sign that we are already at a faster speed in the mode of moving on? We're not moving on yet.

And of course, as I was kind of saying before, the Russians help keep us all focused because every time this looks like it may be going in a direction of less violence, less atrocities, closer to the end and the beginning, they demonstrate that exactly the opposite is the case with some new round of outrages and some stage-managed theater meeting in Moscow or whatever the case may be. But you're right. I mean, it's just not the case that an information environment that's as dense as the one we live in can sustain a kind of one issue focus indefinitely. The question in my mind is less,

is it on every story on the front page every day and on TV all the time, but more, does that affect the policy response that we will have to these things? And it might. And the reason I say it might is actually less the case in the United States than in Europe, because Europe, I mean, again and again and again, did things that only days before the leaders said they would never do, whether it's on sanctions or weapons provisions and things. And part of that is obviously driven by the situation itself. But part of that has been driven by the popular sentiment being so outraged in these countries that they're calling on their political leaders to do more, to spend more on their own defense, to stand up to Russia, to impose sanctions, to aid the Ukrainians. And if that political force becomes diminished over time, then will the Europeans hang together

and hang together with the United States in such a robust way over that period of time? That's a question mark in my mind. So I think it's not the attention itself, but it's about the kind of political will that the attention generates. And that's where I have more questions, I think, around the Europeans than us. There's that famous quote by Lenin, Vladimir Lenin during pre-Bolshevik days,

you know, the worse, the better, that you get construction only after destruction, and that you want things to get worse before you can actually start building. Things have been going badly for Putin. Could you think, could it be like the inverse of what Lenin said, like that things actually have to go better for him before he actually backs off, that maybe we don't want everything to go horribly for him, because then he has no dignified off-ramp, that he's not going to go to the Russian people and say, you know what, I miscalculated. I was wrong. It's pretty bad. I know I have nothing to show

for it, but we've got to wind this war down that that actually i'm not suggesting this is not my i'm not advocating for this but there is certainly among the the realist you know foreign policy community there is this argument that we we actually have to have let putin have like a couple of wins somewhere like in the east and then make clear like that's it call of the day declare. And if one wants to be pop psychologist and get in Putin's head, that's the only way he can actually disengage and tell the Russian people the war is over. Yeah, I think, I mean, there's some logic to that, obviously, in the sense that I think Putin, to stop fighting, has got to claim that he's won

something. And you already see the shift in rhetoric in Russia, where they say this was never about Kiev, we were never fighting in Kiev, this has been about the stopping genocide and the Donbass all along, we were dragged into this by outside forces, we had no choice, this is where the fighting is. And they're sort of they appear to be preparing the public to say, see, we got the Donbass. We stopped the genocide. We win. Whether that's going to fly, you know, as the sanctions and take hold and people are out of jobs and, you know, sons don't come back from the battlefield and all that remains to be seen. But at least on its surface, that's a credible claim of victory that Putin might be able to sell and therefore used to back down. But he's making it harder and harder for the Ukrainians to stop fighting because, you know, who knows what President Zelensky would have been willing to agree to in order to stop the fighting a few weeks ago before the discoveries in Bucha of civilians with their hands tied behind their back shot to death everywhere. Or the Ukrainians say tens of thousands of civilians killed in Mariupol and the complete destruction of that city.

And now Zelensky is saying, well, any peace agreement is going to have to be subject to a referendum in Ukraine. Well, it may be the case that, you know, if Putin doesn't actually win by force, the Ukrainian people will not be in a mood to vote for a referendum that hands them something to which he was never entitled, of course, in the first place place but that sort of gets him out of this jam and so um it it's it's hard to say i don't think though that the i think that to try to imagine um how putin could get out of this uh credibly is one thing i think to give him territorial gains is quite another in order to aid that. I think we can understand that the politics of his position in Russia are such that he will want to get out of this with a win, but I wouldn't be in the business of helping him

by saying, well, just take a couple of places in the Southeast and we'll call it a day or something like that. I think part of the lesson here is that you don't know what Putin is going to do and you don't know what the Russians are going to do longer term. And so we can't assume, I think it's right that they're fighting for Donbass in the south now, but you can't assume that's where they stop. So if they did get those places, would they make a move on Odessa in the future? Maybe. Would they make a renewed fight against Kiev and the West? Who knows? So I don't think that's a risk you would want to run. And so I don't think we should aid Putin in his dilemma with facts on the ground. Final question. I hate rushing to rush to conclusions in what I think is still early innings in this war. That said,

I'm going to violate that resistance, that rule I have against early innings, early inning analysis. What lessons have we learned from this war so far that weren't obvious to us in mid-February of this year? I think there's a few. One is that just because something looks like a bad idea and an unreasonable move doesn't mean that a leader won't make that move. So as we were talking about before, we looked at the map of Ukraine and said, huh, well, if Putin goes and tries to actually pursue regime change in Kiev, even if the government fled, he'd have to occupy the country and he'd have an insurgency on his hands or he'd go home and put on a puppet and then they would rise up against him. And because there's no reasonable way out of that dilemma, he won't do it in the first place.

Wrong. I mean, wrong. It turned out that that analysis was absolutely right. You know, he couldn't do it, but he tried. And it seems to be because he believed his own stuff about Ukrainians greeting the Russians as liberators. So that's one. Two is, you know, how the unthinkable can never be fully, fully unthinkable. If you had to pick, even relatively recently, the kind of stuff that we had seen in the past in international relations that we were very unlikely to see again, you would probably

say state-on-state land war in Europe. That was going to be the one place in the world where this was verboten, unthinkable because of the experience of the 20th century. And here we are with a land war in Europe. And of course, it's a land war in a particular part of Europe, but it involves two big countries and almost every European country involved in some way. So that's, you know, part of this. Another is, you know, also blasts from the past in a way. We've talked as a matter of defense about the importance of insurgency, counterinsurgency, urban warfare, special operations forces, or over in the Pacific,

unmanned systems and high-tech capabilities and things like that and what you're about to see in the donbass is the kind of stuff that looks more like desert storm than anything else with tanks and trenches and howitzers and artillery lines i mean there's a 300 mile front line now and they're trying to encircle the Ukrainian army. So those, you know, it was supposed to be a thing of the past, but it's not a thing of the past. You can sort of go down the line. You know, the other thing I think that we've all learned- Also crushes of people swarming train stations, schools, hospitals, theaters being bombed, all of these images in Europe. And you're thinking, wait a minute.

Five million people who have fled Ukraine, an additional seven and a half million displaced inside Ukraine. Twelve and a half million Ukrainians in Europe who become homeless because of the Russian invasion of their country. I mean, you would think you were reading an account of something that happened in, you know, 1942 or 1945 or something. You know, but then there's the, you know, the other thing, which is the inner strength and resilience of what I would call the anti-aggression coalition, you know, really the West in its broadest definition of that to include Japan and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand and other countries. When you add the countries that have opposed what Russia has done together, their military

strength combined turns out to be extraordinary. Their industrial production, including the production of armaments, turns out to be absolutely extraordinary. Their ability to get those into the hands of the Ukrainians turns out to be absolutely extraordinary their ability to get those into the hands of the ukrainians turns out to turns to be extraordinary and economically they represent well over half of global gdp and are able to not completely control but have huge sway in the global financial markets and uh and the international economy such that russia you know almost overnight has been repositioned so that interest rates are now 17 percent, inflation's in double digits. The mayor of Moscow said that 200,000 people are likely to be unemployed in the next couple of months. Companies from around the world have pulled out of Russia.

You know, the central bank is doing everything it can to defend the ruble. But, you know, it's being disconnected in a lot of ways from the benefits of globalization. And these are all things we knew, right? I mean, we knew these kind of the backs of our head, but they just weren't evident. And there was a lot more focus on, you know, either the high-tech war of the future that was probably going to take place in the Indo-Pacific region, or our own kind of domestic squabbles and fights and divisions and our fractious democracies that can't get their act together at home, forget working together internationally. And it turns out all of that has been not quite as we thought it was. And there's some negative lessons in that, but there are also some positive ones

about how countries can work together. Not to leave on an upbeat note, but just on the category of the unthinkable, the NPT, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which was signed in 1968, made effective in 1970. At the time, there were only five countries in the world, I think, the Security Council countries, that had nuclear weapons. Obviously, that number has changed since

then. The combination of that reality, nuclear weapons proliferation in the world, and now the way we openly discuss the possibility, however low, but not zero, as you said, of Russia launching a limited nuclear strike. I mean, that seems to me the most jarring, bracing, jostling in terms of how we think about global affairs, that we can just have a reasonable, scary, but reasonable conversation, reasonable in that it could happen about a country using nuclear weapons in a world in which more countries have them. Right. And this further underscores a point that has been made time and again over the past couple of decades that

generally speaking, countries that possess nuclear weapons don't get invaded and countries that don't possess nuclear weapons can never be sure. And so, you know, you talked about the Balkans. I mean, if Milosevic had even one nuclear weapon on a missile that could hit somewhere in Western Europe, would NATO have attacked his country? Not sure about that. What if Saddam Hussein had had a fully capable nuclear arsenal? Would the United States have toppled his government? What about Libya? You know, North Korea does, and Northorea gets away with many many things that other countries without nuclear weapons do not uh clearly putin is using the threat of escalation even if it turns out not to be real but the threat of escalation is a way to back off any foreign direct involvement in the war and at least limit that involvement to indirect means and this is having a real effect i

mean if shinzo ukraine And Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. Right, right. So they handed it back. Now, they weren't in control of them. They were Soviet and all that. But nevertheless, they were on Ukrainian soil, and they gave them back to Russia in exchange for what they thought was an agreement that their territorial, their independence and territorial integrity would be respected. And we see how that has turned out. But you look in South Korea, for example, where a majority of people now wish at a minimum to have US nuclear weapons deployed again on the Korean peninsula and perhaps to develop

South Korean independent nuclear strike capability, or Japan, where it is the taboo of taboos, for obvious reasons, given Japan's experience of being the only country on whom nuclear weapons have been used, to develop a nuclear weapons program. And Prime Minister Abe, Shinzo Abe, who is not in office anymore, but he still leads the LDP's chief faction. And he came out after the invasion and said, this can't be a taboo anymore. We need to have this discussion.

And there have been people in the blind quotes and things from the Ministry of Defense in Japan saying, here's the lesson. If you have nukes, you don't get invaded. If you don't, you might. And Prime Minister Kishida knocked that down. We're not going to do this and all this other stuff. But even in Japan, the debate has started about what is required for a country to preserve its fundamental security, independence, and territorial integrity. And the Russians are putting about as fine a point at what countries believe they might need as it is possible to do.

And that is having and will have ripple effects all over the world as everyone learns something from this conflict. Richard, I'm sad to say, and don't take offense to this, but I'm sad to say we're going to have to have you back on. Maybe we can get together on this and talk about some other foreign policy issue where i don't know some trade agreement that's successful or yeah or i don't know some democratic election where a really good person wins of the lsu football

program something that you you're more comfortable talking about it in upbeat terms. Yeah, New Orleans bars or something like that. But in the meantime. In the meantime, lots of grim analysis, but always illuminating. So, Richard, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. To follow Richard's work, you can go to cnas.org. That's c-n-a-s dot org. And on Twitter, he's at R.H. Fontaine.

That's at R.H. F-O-N-T-A-I-N-E. I'll also post in the show notes the article by Klon Kitchen that we mentioned during the early part of the conversation with Richard. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.