Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Russia: In decline or on the march? with Richard Fontaine

Episode Date: December 11, 2021

Russia poses a threat to Ukraine, again. But what about Russian President Putin’s threat to the unity of Europe, and what do recent developments tell us about global perceptions of America's geopolitical strength? Is Russia a declining power or is Russia on the march? Could it be both? Our guest, Richard Fontaine, is CEO of the Center for American Security. He was formerly the top foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain, deputy staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and an official of the US State Department and National Security Council.

If you look at the history of declining powers, what sometimes happens is they find themselves with less and less of an interest in maintaining the status quo order in their region or in the world because they just have less of a stake in it. Every year, they've got less to lose than they had the year before. And so they become more and more risk tolerant, more willing to shake things up, more willing to take on risk than a status quo power like the United States. And so for as much as we say, oh, my God, China's a rising power and therefore is more dangerous, that's true. But it may also be true that Russia is increasingly dangerous and acts more risky precisely because it's a declining

power. Russia poses a threat to Ukraine again. But what about Russia's threat to the unity of Europe? What does all this say about the global perception of America's strength? Is Russia declining power? Or is Russia on the march? Could it be both? We asked smart and savvy foreign policy insider Richard Fontaine to help us think things through. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome my friend Richard Fontaine to the Call Me Back podcast. Hey,

Richard. How you doing? I'm all right. Just for our listeners, before Richard joined the Center for New American Security, he had a long experience in the U.S. government in a range of national security positions. He worked in the State Department on the National Security Council of the Bush administration. He worked on Capitol Hill as the deputy staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is one of the most important committees on Capitol Hill in terms of congressional, national security, national defense, foreign policymaking. And he traveled all over the world with Senator McCain, which if we have time, we'll spend a minute on that. But Richard, before we get into

Russia and Ukraine, just so our listeners kind of understand where you come at this from a big picture, where you come to your kind of national security worldview, can you just tell us briefly what the Center for New American Security is? Why was it founded and how is it – where does it fit in the spectrum of think tanks in Washington, D.C., working on foreign policy and national security? Sure. CNES was founded – we'll celebrate our 15th anniversary next year, so 14 or so years ago, by Kirk Campbell, who's now in government running the Indo-Pacific account at the White House, and Michelle Flournoy, who went on to serve as the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. And it was founded as a think tank that would be a little bit different than the other national security think tanks around town. Some of the comparative advantages of our outfit are, one, we have a bipartisan staff, not just Republicans and Democrats and independents working in physical proximity, but doing completely separate things and arguing, but actually collaborating with each other on national security solutions to some of the big problems. Two really close connections with the policymaking

process, irrespective of party and the White House and in the government and on Capitol Hill, and a strong focus on the next generation of national security leaders. We pull in a lot of younger people with some innovative ideas and then launch them off and into government service. And so it's a great place to be able to think about and connect with some of the great national security challenges of the day and try to formulate some policy responses to them. So speaking of one of the great national security challenges of the day and trying to formulate some policy responses to them. So speaking of one of the great national security challenges of the day, Russia and Ukraine. So last we, last the world, it seems, or at least many in the U.S. had paid close attention to what

was happening on the Russia-Ukraine border was 2014. So just to refresh the memory of our listeners, what happened in 2014? Because I'm just trying to compare what's happening now to what happened in 2014. And what's interesting is, A, what happened in 2014? And how was it resolved if it was? In 2014, the president of Ukraine was Viktor Yanukovych, who tried after originally for a little while trying to align more with the West, tried to align economically with Russia. And based on an agreement with Putin and things like this, protests broke out in response in the streets of Kiev and other cities. Ultimately, there was a real push for Yanukovych to go. He was not only trying to align Ukraine with Russia, but was deeply corrupt himself and had a number of other governance problems.

He fled to Russia. There was some political instability in the country. Russia used this as a pretext to move Spetsnaz special operations forces with no insignia into Crimea, the peninsula down in the south of Ukraine, ultimately seized Crimea by force and then changed the borders in Europe by force for the first time since the Second World War, annexed Crimea. And that in the Russian mind now, although it hasn't been recognized by anybody around the world as part of Russia now, They have a senator in the Duma, things like that. The other thing that happened is in the Donbass region of Ukraine, which is in the east bordering Russia, the Russians started to support separatists in that region, Russian

speaking separatists. So let's just spend a minute on that. So in eastern Ukraine, so basically the part of Ukraine that's closest to Russia's border, you have a large population that in many ways identifies with the Russian, the motherland, if you will, more than it does with Kiev and western Ukraine, right? They're Russian-speaking, even though they live in Ukraine. They culturally feel more connected to Russia, even though they live in Ukraine. Generally speaking, yes, although there's also an urban-rural divide in eastern Ukraine where folks in the rural areas sometimes feel more connected to Russian and the urban areas feel more connected to Ukraine as

a country. So there's some complexity there, but generally speaking, yes. I mean, the further west you go, the more of a Ukrainian speaking and Ukrainian identity you get. The further east you go in Ukraine, the more of a Russian you get. And this has always been a tool in Putin's toolkit, is that he knows inside Ukraine there is a population that he can tap into and gain sympathies from as he tries to challenge the political and security order in Ukraine. Yeah, exactly. And so in Ukraine, what Putin seems ultimately to want is a Ukraine that is aligned firmly with Russia. If he cannot have that, then the second best outcome is a Ukraine that is so off balance politically, so unstable that it will not actually align with the West.

It won't become a member of NATO. It won't be a host of Western troops and military equipment and so forth that he believes would threaten Russia. And so what you see in basically a low-grade war that has continued since 2015 in the eastern part of Ukraine is the Russian attempt to kind of constantly keep Ukraine off balance that way. So there was very acute fighting. They killed well over 10,000 people in eastern Ukraine after the Russians stirred up the war with these partisans out there.

And then there was this agreement, the Minsk Protocol. There was a version one and a version two that stopped the fighting. But it was pretty much a victor's peace because the Russians had inflicted and their allies had inflicted such losses on the Ukrainians. And so there was a number of things that were agreed to in the Minsk Protocol that were never implemented. And to this day, one of Putin's major demands is the full implementation of the Minsk Protocol. And so what, now fast forward to now, and not specifically to how this current crisis was sparked, but just how does Putin view Ukraine? I mean, as we get closer to the next presidential elections in Russia, there is this sense that Putin feels like he still has unfinished business in Ukraine. So what is that unfinished business? How does he think about

Ukraine? Why is this so important to him as it relates to his own legacy and his own positioning inside Russia? Yeah, just to take one step even further back, I think it's worth looking just for a second at how Putin seems to view Russia's place in the world, which bears directly on what's going on today. And there are many things that are true about the Russian leadership in terms of, you know, them being a kleptocracy and brutal and all these other kinds of things. But there are two things that I think are fairly defining. One is that there is this historical Russian instinct that fears the presence of an opposing force close to their borders because of, you know, Napoleon and the Mongols and Hitler all invaded them through

countries on their borders, they feel exposed. And so while we sort of think to ourselves, okay, well, it's crazy for Vladimir Putin to think that because NATO is in the Baltics or that because we have a relationship with Ukraine, this is somehow a threat to his rule in Moscow. But he genuinely seems to think that and is willing to take measures to try to create buffers between the West, as he would think about it, and Russia's borders. The second is there's a real sense among the Russian leadership, and I think especially among Putin, that Russia doesn't receive the kind of status from the world that it deserves by virtue of its history and power and might and things like that. And in fact, actually, Russia doesn't have the kind of power and sort of geopolitical throwaway and certainly economic throwaway that it once did when it was the Soviet Union. It is not the other superpower in the world. But in the Russian leadership's

mind, Russia has been disrespected and taken advantage of when it has been weak and has to constantly remind the West, and particularly the United States, of its standing in the world so that it is treated accordingly. And that's a major problem because the gap between, I think, where the Russian leadership believes it should be in the world order and where it actually is in the world order is not going to be closed anytime soon. There really is a gap. Then with Ukraine, Putin releases fairly remarkable long, I guess you'd call it an op-ed, in July. It went on and on and on about how he sees Ukraine. And looking back on it, there's some fairly ominous things in there.

He says that Russians and Ukrainians historically are one people, that parts of Ukraine were part of Russia and that Russia was robbed from those parts of Ukraine, that they are historically and spiritually, because of their religious links, part of one people. It goes all the way back to the Kiev Rus and all this. And that the only reason why there's a division between the Russians and the Ukrainians is because others have put up an artificial wall between the two people. And, you know, if you start to put two

and two and two together here... Others are the West. Yeah. So it's a certain kind of meddling in his backyard. Exactly. That wants to use Ukraine in an ahistorical way to divide the Ukrainians from the Russians and therefore weaken Russia and undermine these historical and spiritual ties. If that's your worldview, then it would appear that you have a strong interest in getting rid of that wall. And I think that is in fact what is animating some of the behavior we see now with Russia poised with 100,000 troops massed on the Ukrainian border and doing other things that look like preparations from war, like redeploying units from Siberia, calling up reservists, launching information and influence operations and cyber operations inside Ukraine to sort of prepare the battlefield

and things like that. So that is all consistent with what Putin has said fairly clearly is the way that he sees Ukraine. And in terms of how, I mean, Putin does risk assessment in anticipating how the world will respond to, as you said, putting 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian, Russia-Ukraine border. He's got to imagine that there will be some, the U.S. was weak or strong, and Europe was united or divided over what to do about Russia and Ukraine. So fast forward, you know, 2014, 2015, fast forward to today, to 2021, do you think Putin looks at the U.S. as the same level of strength as it did the last time he was at it? And where does he see Europe's unity or lack thereof? Well, I think he is a pragmatist in

the sense that he's going to tally up the costs and benefits before he takes an action. And that actually then provides the United States and Europe with the opportunity to change the cost-benefit calculation and try to avoid a terrible situation. United States and Europe might come together and threaten is difficult, given some of the divisions that you just kind of alluded to that have unfolded over recent years. And then on the diplomatic carrot side, there is not agreement, really, between the United States and some countries in Europe about what to offer, if anything, to Putin as a way to get out of the current situation without rewarding bad behavior. You know, as a kind of a macro point, I don't think anyone in the world has looked at the United States over the past, you know, year or so and saw a model of efficient, unified democratic practice and, you know,

a marshalling of strength. So how that fits in, who knows? But we haven't done ourselves very many favors over the past year. So let's talk about that. Should we read into any geopolitical events? Maybe the withdrawal from Afghanistan is one over the summer that could have influenced Putin's thinking on timing. You point out that he gave this speech in July, which was before our withdrawal from Afghanistan, or before the

thick of the chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Is there anything that Putin sort of looked like? Why now? I guess that's my question. Why now? Yeah, I doubt that it's because of Afghanistan. I also doubted that the move on Crimea was, as some people said, was a reaction to President Obama not enforcing a Syria red line and showing American lack of resolve and weakness, and therefore he sort of marches in. It was much more opportunistic. So just to rewind on that, so what Richard's referring to is when President Obama said that Syria, Assad using chemical weapons would be a red line, and if he crossed that red line, the U.S. would get involved in Syria militarily, and then Assad used chemical weapons against civilians, and we did nothing.

The criticism back in 2014 and 2015 was that Putin saw the U.S. failure to enforce the red line as a sign of weakness and therefore an invitation for Putin to act because, you know, the U.S. was a paper tiger. And you're saying you disagree with that critique, that you don't think that's what prompted Putin to act then. Yeah. I mean, the critique has a lot of surface logic. There's just no actual evidence for it. And there's other explanations, including the ones articulated by the Russians themselves and by others as well, that I think explain those facts better than saying this is a response that emboldened Russia after Syria. And similarly, if you do the thought experiment of if the United States had not had a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, would we be in the same situation between Russia and Ukraine? I think the answer is yes. Because basically, if you look at Russian behavior with respect to its intervention in Crimea and eastern Ukraine back in 2014-2015, in Syria when Russia came to the aid of Assad

and helped quite brutally beat back rebels, are now in Ukraine. Russia has a pattern of trying to achieve through first through diplomatic means, whatever its objective is. In this case, the objective is to see, I think, implementation of the Minsk Protocol and avoid a Western orientation for Ukraine. When that doesn't work, it'll often use economic means, either economic coercion or inducements or things like that. If that doesn't work, it'll often use covert means. And when none of that works, then it finally decides, well, maybe we should use the military means. And I think that's basically where we are now. I think Putin, you know, complained diplomatically there was no implementation of Minsk and that, you know, Ukraine was becoming more Western's orientation. The U.S. and Ukraine

signed a strategic agreement this year. NATO and Ukrainian forces have done joint exercises this year. There have been U.S. trainers of the Ukrainian military and things. So he doesn't like any of that and fears it. Wasn't able to get that done through, wasn't able to reverse it through diplomatic means, wasn't able to reverse it through economic inducements or threats, wasn't able to get that done through cyber means or covert means. And so I think that he is now considering military means to try to achieve that outcome. And do you buy into the theory that if he's going to make a move, he wants to do it while Joe Biden is still president? Which, if you assume that Biden is going to only serve one term,

doesn't mean he has a ton of time. Anything to that? I don't know. That's a hard question to say. I mean, I don't know how much Putin or anybody else is calculating time to do something or not do something based on who's going to be president i do think though how um the the issue in that that actually plays into is so you know what putin now says he wants which he's not going to get but what putin says he wants is a legally binding guarantee that ukraine will never be in nato um and uh you know i don NATO and a treaty or something like that. And increasingly around the world, you're seeing countries that want stuff from the United States, even things we're not going to give them, but want stuff, say you've got to do some sort of guarantee that's going to outlast whoever the next president is because they've seen, for example, the Iran

deal where we sanctioned Iran, we didn't have a a deal we were in the deal stop sanctioning Iran then we got out of the deal started sanctioning Iran now we're trying to get back in the deal and are willing to unsanction Iran that the next president comes in and we do get in the deal then we get out of the deal again and unsanctioned and you know so but you know welcome to American democracy you can't tie the hands of a president too much uh when that person hasn't even been elected yet. So that – I think it plays into it in that respect. But I don't know how much doing something now is related to our political timeline or who's in office as opposed to lack of satisfaction he believes he's had on the things that he's worried about. While we're at it, and I want to get to the here and now,

or where we go from here in a minute, but before we do, there's conventional wisdom that Putin regarded, conventional wisdom among many in the press and many in the foreign policy community, that Putin had Trump, president trump and the trump administration eating out of his hand that's one that's one narrative and yet if you look at the facts the u.s had a pretty hard-headed approach to putin and russia during the trump years if you look at increased sanctions if you look at military action against like Russian security contractors in Syria, if you obviously look what we did on the on the energy production and export side, which Putin couldn't have been happy about. The if there was a if you believe there was a cozy relationship between Putin and Trump personally, it didn't reflect itself in terms of U.S. policy towards Russia.

Where do you come down on that? Yeah, I think you're totally right. It was, you know, that, look, the Trump administration was not exactly a model of consistency in messaging or anything else. And so you had this very strange dynamic where people who watched Trump thought this must be the warmest administration toward Vladimir Putin that we've seen in forever. You know, there was always sort of smiles and handshakes, and I believe him, not the CIA, or, you know, all this other kind of stuff. But if you look to the underlying policy, the Trump administration did things that no administration has done up to that time. I mean,

they closed consulates, they expelled Chinese, Chinese, they expelled Russian spies that were inside the United States acting under diplomatic cover. You mentioned the attack on Russian mercenaries in Syria. They provided lethal anti-tank weapons to the government of Ukraine when the Obama administration had declined to do so. They sanctioned the oligarchs, which had never happened before. You can go around and around. And they dramatically expanded the defense budget. So that alone sent a more muscular posture globally. So they did all of those things, which made the Trump administration's policy toward Russia, I think by far the toughest of any since the end of the Cold War. At the same time, as you had that American president who was

overseeing all those policies speak in tones that were warmer toward any, uh, toward Vladimir Putin since he had, uh, taken office. And so, you know, when people wanted to look for an America that was cozy with Russia, they would listen to what Trump said. When they wanted to look at an America that was tough toward Russia, they would look at the underlying policies. And both were true at the same time. One of those peculiar things about the Trump era. Worthy of its own podcast. So in terms of where we are now and where we go from here, do you believe there's going to be real military conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the next 12 to 18 months? It's definitely a possibility. I think that we're probably at the

50-50% mark or something like that, but the uncertainty associated with this is not fixed. I think that whether that happens will in part depend on what the United States does or doesn't do. And in that respect, I think that, you know, the combination of deterrence, specific threats of consequences for Russia actually does take such a dramatic move as to move across the border and engage in a bloody war and try to seize territory by force. But also a diplomatic process in which the Russian leadership in particular can get some feeling of presence at the table. It may or may not be enough to avert a war, but I think it's worth trying. If Russia continues to escalate, the Biden administration has laid out the possibility of some pretty

aggressive sanctions against Russia. So short of obviously us sending U.S. forces or NATO forces over to defend Ukraine, but sanctions that have never been implemented before. And let me just rattle off a few that have been speculated about either explicitly by the Biden administration or sort of quietly leaking out. Canceling Nord Stream 2, sanctioning Russian sovereigns on the secondary market, sanctioning state-owned banks, Russian state-owned banks, restricting imports of Russian commodities, barring Russia from the SWIFT system. I mean, these could be crippling to Russia's economy. By the way, they could also have a negative economic impact on the U.S.,

but I'll get to that in a second. But first of all, how serious do you think these kinds of steps would be taken by the Russians? Well, SWIFT in particular would be taking extraordinarily seriously. And it's like nothing that's ever been done before. Right. I mean, we've done this to Iran. And explain what the implications, what it would mean to kick them off SWIFT?

Well, SWIFT is basically the payments clearinghouse for dollar-denominated payments. And Russia sells, like everyone else, its oil abroad in the transactions or take place – the dollar-denominated transactions take place through SWIFT. So it would make it extraordinarily difficult for them to export the one commodity they have, which is oil, and it would have a potentially really crippling effect on their economy. When the Iranians have done this, they worked around this by working out barter deals. They would trade oil to country X and they'd get some, you know, credits in some other currency and something else. I mean, it just makes life very difficult for their economy. And in fact, the Russians themselves have said explicitly that they would consider this an act of economic war. So SWIFT, I think,

is probably the most serious of the threatened sanctions, although I don't know whether the administration has specifically threatened that as a sanction or is just, you know, this is sort of in the ether. You know, but there are other very serious things too. I mean, you know, canceling Nord Stream 2, which probably should be canceled anyway. Why? Well, because the whole point of reducing Russia's leverage over Europe. Well, let me step back. So the Nord Stream 2 is a pipeline

that would carry gas from Russia to Europe, and it would go into Germany, and would basically provide Europe with some badly needed natural gas, particularly when global supplies are relatively tight and so forth. The downside, of course, of it is that it increases the dependence of Europe on Russia, which in the past has used its gas and oil supplies as a means of leverage over other countries. That's a situation that we don't want to see.

We don't want to see a Europe that is increasingly vulnerable to Russian manipulation. And Nord Stream 2 would actually expand the scope of that potential manipulation. The United States has been opposed to Nord Stream 2. The Biden administration had the requirement to either sanction the pipeline or not and wave it under US law, they decided to waive the sanctions that would have been applied to Germany because their conclusion was the train has left the station, the pipeline's almost built, and the Germans would move forward anyway, and all we would do is seriously irritate the U.S.-German relationship by sanctioning them without actually having achieved the outcome of killing the pipeline.

Ukraine, going into Ukraine with the new German government, I think there's a strong chance the U.S. and Germany would decide to cancel the pipeline, even with the costs associated with that, just because moving into Ukraine would be seen as such a serious transgression that even an expensive response to it, I think, would be seen in order by a lot of people, including in the U.S. and Germany. So I think that is very much on the table. And then there's other economic sanctions, some of the ones that you mentioned, expanding sectoral sanctions and things like that.

The question, of course, is ultimately when you're threatening things, whether they're economic sanctions or there's something militarily like moving more troops and equipment to NATO's east closer to the Russian borders, what the Russians don't want and saying that'll be a direct consequence of going into Ukraine. Is that enough to get Putin to say okay well it's not worth it if he feels so acutely vulnerable in Ukraine if you buy the fact that he in fact does which I think he does um and that is really in the head of one guy and he's not saying um so we just don't know that's what the administration is trying now is to put a combination of carrots and sticks both on the table at the same time as a way to dissuade him from taking the step. So I want to – a friend of mine from Europe said to me the other day in terms of Europe's ability to take a hard line on some of these to back the u.s with a hard line on

some of these sanctions if we go to this route he said don't underestimate uh how weak the german government the german government will be to act in winter meaning germans there's nothing worse in german politics than freezing cold germans uh not being able to get heat and what he was referring to is you know if we cut cut Russia off from SWIFT, Europeans need the payment system to purchase Russian gas. Washington can't meaningfully punish Gazprom because of Europe's dependence on the firm. You know, it literally would threaten gas supply in Germany and parts of Europe in the winter. And then it got me thinking about these other sort of cascading effects

or knock-on effects that we may not be thinking about in the U.S., right? So there could be inflationary impact. If we sanction commodity exporters, it would be costly to Russia, but also to many other countries. It certainly would, it could at least exacerbate inflation in the U.S. And anyways, I can go on and on. I mean, the even derivative effects of all this is gas prices go up here in the U.S. as we head into midterm elections.

So I guess, you know, it's easy to say to avoid military conflict let's escalate all these economic sanctions and we can get really creative all day long uh with some of these sanctions but there would be real impact over here here meaning the west u.s and europe and i don't i don't think anyone's really explaining to the public in europe or the public in the U.S., if we go down this path, it's going to impose some pain on us as well, but it's worth it. I think you're exactly right. So the missing piece in foreign policymaking in government, or a missing piece, given that sanctions are the instrument of choice because we want to often do something bigger than issue a strongly worded statement but less than going to war in order to avoid

some bad outcome or to punish some bad behavior, is what is the cost and who bears it? And that is, I think, insufficiently part of the discussion when it comes to these things. And yet, if you look at, you know, the kind of economic measures we're taking with response to China or that are threatened with response to Russia, just very rarely, what is the cost and who bears it? And that's not to say that the cost is not worth bearing or that the people who bear the cost would think that it's not worth bearing. There are things worth bearing costs for, you know, changing borders by force in Europe and, you know, undermining European security in a dramatic way, probably the most dramatic way since the Second World War. I think that that's

worth bearing the cost associated with economic sanctions. But it would be helpful to know what cost that is and where it's likely to fall. And therefore, if our political leadership needs to prepare people to bear the cost because they need to understand that it is worth it for other reasons that may not be apparent to them, like the sanctity of borders in Europe. And if we rewind the tape, you know, enough decades ago when borders were routinely violated in Europe, it elicited twice the United States having to go across the ocean and stop it. So I think you're right. I think that this is, you know, right now we're at the point of the debate where those sanctions have not been imposed. They're merely threatened.

And the hope is that by threatening them, you avoid having to impose them in the first place. But we very much may get to the point where we do need to impose some serious economic measures that will have costs not only on Russia, but on us and our allies. And what do you think about our willingness to head in this direction if there's escalation by Russia but the threshold like lower escalation than obvious kind of them just you know plowing through borders and look like looking like there's war over there you know does Russia you know Russia has assets and tools at its disposal where it could wreak havoc in eastern ukraine send a message to the region

that they're not going to let ukraine go fully into the be absorbed by the by the you know western sphere of influence but short of action of like real kinetic action that you know would create a world in which secretary lloyd austin walks into the oval office and says mr president we gotta we gotta we gotta take real action we gotta do something real here like is there a way that that putin can turn the dial but not like trip uh you know you know hit a trip wire that provokes a super intense u.s response yeah so So I don't think there's really any circumstance where the United States is going to fight Russia in Ukraine, that we're going to put troops into the... So in that respect, I think if that's what he ultimately is trying to avoid, then I think he actually has a lot of running room. But there's still gradations. And so if you look at the Georgia-Russia playbook

from 2008, when Mikhail Saakashvili was running Georgia, it was becoming very Western aligned. The tail end of the Bush administration, right? Summer of 2008 in the middle of the presidential election. Exactly. The Obama-McCain election. Yeah, I was working on that campaign at the time and I remember this happening. And Russia invaded Georgia and got actually within, I don't know, 40 or 50 miles of Tbilisi, the capital, before it withdrew. It withdrew to these two breakaway enclaves of Khazia and South Ossetia, which had already tried to break away from Georgia,

and then recognized them as independent countries. No other country, I don't believe, has recognized them, but Russia does, and then left Russian troops there, quote, at their request. And those Russian troops remain there that day. And so what they essentially did was invade Georgia, destroy a lot of its military capability, and then withdraw to these enclaves that now form what the Russians claim is an independent buffer, two buffer states between Russia and Georgia, so that if one day Georgia does become more Western-aligned again in a meaningful way, it will not be adjacent to the Russian border. And you could imagine a similar kind of thing happening in Ukraine. So we're looking at this crisis in isolation.

The reality is there are three, potentially four, hot spots that could light up at any time now or over the next couple of years. One is Iran moving to full, you know, as you and I talked about earlier, 90% enriched uranium, kind of real military nuclear capability. China making a move in Taiwan. So you could have, you know, a crisis in the Taiwan Strait, a crisis in the Persian Gulf, a crisis that, you know, in the Black Sea, you know, sort of Russia-Ukraine focus crisis. You mentioned to me when we were talking earlier, North Korea could light up.

What, do you worry at all that, like we tend to like look at these problems as bite-sized problems. Like right now we're dealing with Russia-Ukraine. That's our problem du jour. But like, that's not the way the world and certainly people making plays around the world think about these problems.

And any of them, we could have a situation where they're all happening at the same time well if you call up some of our friends at the State Department you say what are you spending um at least over the past before the last couple of weeks when Ukraine Russia has really flared up what are you spending most of your time on some of them would have said Ethiopia uh you've got the Tigrayan rebels that are at the gates of Addis Ababa. You've got this government there that is aligned with Eritrea. You know, if things go bad there, the evacuation of noncombatants from Afghanistan could look relatively mild compared to the evacuation of people from Addis Ababa given full-scale civil war in that country. And, you know, Bob Gates has this line that for the past 40 years, we have a perfect track record of predicting the next U.S. war. We've always been wrong. So every time we think we know,

you know, the big issues that are sort of headed down the pike, then something else flares up. So part of this is the price of being a superpower with global interests and in multiple regions and having to deal with multiple things at the same time. But the kinds of things that we've just rattled off, I mean, Iran and North Korea and China and Russia, I mean, these are not small scale sorts of things. These are major potential crises. And the ability of the U.S. to respond adequately and appropriately to all of them simultaneously or closely adjacent to each other is going to be very daunting. So that is a reality. Just a couple questions before we wrap up. One, how should we think about Moscow's relations with

Beijing and whether there's like a real alliance there between Russia and China that we should worry about? There's not an alliance, but there's an increasing alignment. I was one of these folks that for years said, oh, there's so much more that divides these two countries and unites them. They can be the party of no against the United States and international organizations and things like that, but there's not too much that's real. I don't think you can deny anymore the increasing alignment between Russia and China. You can look at it from the economic perspective, Russian arms sales and oil and gas sales to China or Chinese economic ties to Russia. You can look at technology exchange, which has increased. You can look on the military side, not only weapon sales, but also joint

Russian-Chinese exercises in the South China Sea, certainly diplomatic convergence against a common adversary in the United States. None of that adds up to an alliance. If China went to war, I don't think Russia would fight for it. If Russia went to war, I don't think China would fight for it. So we're well short of that. There's a long way to go. But I think that the outlines of greater alignment are pretty palpable. And in terms of Russia over the next decade, you know, just how we think about Russian power in the world over the next decade, you know, just how we think about Russian power in the world over the next decade. It's got an aging and shrinking population. It doesn't have the most dynamic economy when it comes to tech innovation on the one hand.

On the other hand, I'm looking at some data here. Russia has about $620 billion in foreign currency reserves. It's just south of 20 percent of debt to gdp it looks like they're going to have budget surpluses for the next couple years i mean they can withstand some economic pressure some macroeconomic pressure so you know if if they're not as vulnerable to and there's also pressure back here at home in terms of the cascading effects if we try to isolate them economically. You know, how do you think about Russia's position in the region, in the world over, you know, the decade?

The decade is that we're focused on this podcast on the 2020s. But just so it's a crude kind of period of time, meaning it could be the next five years, next 10 years. But generally, Russia growing power or Russia shrinking power? Overall, I think it's a shrinking power. But Putin, since 2008, has really modernized the Russian military in ways that make it today much more capable than it was 12 or 13 years ago. There's some other ways in which Russia, just because of its sort of discipline and its activities, for example, going into Syria now plays a role in the Middle East that it didn't play before it went into Syria. As a big macro question, I think it's a declining power for some of the regions you alluded to,

the demographics, the reliance on essentially one or two commodities and things like that. However, we can't comfort ourselves and say, well, that means we don't have to worry about them because they're a declining power. If you look at the history of declining powers, what sometimes happens is they find themselves with less and less of an interest in maintaining the status quo order in their region or in the world because they just have less of a stake in it every year. They've got less to lose than they had the year before. And so they become more and more risk tolerant, more willing to shake things up, more willing to take on risk than a status quo power like the United States. And so for as much as we say, oh, my God, China's a rising power and therefore is more dangerous, that's true. But it may also be true that Russia

is increasingly dangerous and acts more risky precisely because it's a declining power. So I'm afraid there's not much solace in the idea that Russia is just going to – in the Obama administration, they often like to dismiss Russia. It's just a regional power. My former boss, John McCain, had a line which I didn't quite think resonated well, but it was pretty funny. He said, Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country. And that's funny, that's, you know, that's funny. But I,

unfortunately, I don't think that captures the entirety of what's the dynamic. So before we let you go, you mentioned John McCain, and I mentioned this at the beginning of the conversation. I love your war stories, not literally war stories, but traveling war stories about your time with John McCain. Just some color here. First of all, how many countries did you travel to with Senator McCain? Oh, probably 40 or so. But over what period of time? About five years. But some of them were serious repeats. Like we went to Iraq 10 times. It kind of became a favorite holiday spot for Senator McCain and ultimately for me and Afghanistan. There's no one quite like him anymore in the Senate.

I mean, I've been thinking about this recently as we look at the passing of Don Rumsfeld, the passing of Colin Powell, obviously the passing of George H.W. Bush, and the passing of John McCain. This whole generation, regardless of what one may think of any one of these figures and their sort of ideological disposition one direction or the other on national security issues, sadly this generation is passing away. And you worked obviously with some of them. I worked with some of them. Because while you do have in Congress today Republican policy legislators and Democratic legislators who care about foreign policy, not the way McCain did. So can you just give us a snapshot of what made John McCain's approach to America's role in the world as a legislator, not as an executive?

He wasn't a cabinet secretary. He wasn't a president of the United States. This is like unique to America's system in the world that an actual legislator can become a major force on national security independent of what the administration does or who the administration is. How did McCain use his Senate seat in that regard? Because you had a front row seat to it. Yeah, he really was exceptional in that regard for a couple of reasons. One, this was the area that interested him most, and he spent an enormous amount of time and effort. Another was he had this very deep belief in American exceptionalism and American leadership and America as a force for good in the world and thought that an inactive America was going to make the world a worse place for everyone, including Americans. And then he also had, you know, this track record of having worked on these things for so long that if you got McCain behind something, you would get, you know, probably 10 or 12 senators almost with a snap of a fingers who would also support what he was supporting. And then you could sort

of build out from there. And today you've got, you know, some very thoughtful people in the Senate and stuff that are more or less solo operators. They may have something, but it's not automatic by any stretch of the imagination. They'll have support for their positions. So I'll give you two examples of where this kind of came to the fore. I mean, one, back in 2005, Senator McCain fought the Bush administration over, and again in 2006, over the use of torture by the CIA against detainees, terrorists that were captured and treated with fairly serious physical and psychological brutality. I mean, the treatment of detainees at wartime has always been seen as kind of a core presidential power. And here is a senator who wished to take that power away from a president of his own party in the middle of a war just a few years after 9-11.

And, you know, people listening to this may remember some of the fear and the politics around this. And this was the same Tom McCain that wanted to run for president of the United States in 2007 and 2008 and wanted the support of the very Republicans that he might be alienating in the process of doing what was, to say the least, a fairly unpopular position. And yet he did it anyway. And he succeeded and got legislation passed, which took that power away from the president and changed the course of detainee interrogation operations. And that's one. The other one is the surge? Well, okay, so then maybe there's three then.

But the surge, I guess I can say, is the other one. As early as August of 2003, the United States invaded Iraq in March of 2003. In August of 2003, Senator McCain was saying that we had an insufficient number of American troops on the ground. He didn't quite put it in these terms, but he started talking about a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy would be necessary to deal with the problems that Iraq had at the time. You know, the situation in Iraq, Dan, you know this better than anybody else from a security perspective, deteriorated, deteriorated, got worse, worse, worse, worse, worse until suddenly it became essentially a civil war where we were one side of that civil war. And there was a split debate. A lot of people said, okay, we didn't find those weapons of mass destruction. That was the reason to go in here in the first place. You know, we're losing Americans right and left. None of this is worth fighting for.

And it's a lost cause. Let's get out of there sooner rather than later and declare ourselves in defeat. And then there was Senatorain and a few others who said well here's the thing we never have tried which is the only thing we think would actually work which is a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy and um and and he really pushed all the way up to the president of the united states uh for the adoption such thing together with people in the executive branch who were um but what was amazing about to your earlier point is the peak of his effort in this was while he was right before. And while he was running in a Republican primary for president with when even

Republican politicians and Republican senators are saying, please, no, don't make us send more troops to Iraq. And he was running for president arguing for sending more troops to Iraq. It was extraordinary. So in 2000 and the end of 2006 and through 2007, there were all of these pieces of legislation that would require the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

And there was a little meeting of Republican senators, plus Joe Lieberman, who supported keeping troops in Iraq and allowing what ultimately became the surge to have a shot at actually righting the situation. Every week there were fewer and fewer senators who attended these meetings because fewer and fewer wanted to sign on to extending an extremely unpopular war in the name of giving you know a

last shot that we could actually salvage something decent from it. By the end, I think it was pretty much Senator McCain, Senator Lieberman, Senator Graham, maybe Senator Kyle and a couple of others. But yes, McCain was running for president at the time and he did help fend off this withdrawal legislation. The surge did take effect. And between January of 2007 and September of 2007, violence in Iraq fell by 90%. That is success. One of the great, honestly, one of the great kind of reorientations of a strategy in the middle of a military conflict that worked.

And then what was your third? Just before you go, you had the debate over torture. You had Iraq. And then I threw in Iraq. You had one other. Now I'm trying to remember. Oh, my other one is just an anecdote. It's just an anecdote.

So I guess this was probably in 2006, I believe. And we went to Georgia, the country of, not the state of. And McCain had met President Saakashvili when Saakashvili was a student, a grad student or a law student in the United States or something like that, and had always been sort of a champion of, you know, these little countries that are in faraway places about which we know nothing, that he thought were exactly the kind of places where history is made and exactly the kind of places where freedom is important and exactly the kind of people that the United States should be standing up for. So he had this sort of long relationship with Georgia. I remember telling him at one point he had met literally every Belarusian dissident in the world because they would, you know, when they would come to Washington

or he'd go see them in Lithuania and things like that. But in Georgia, we land and the military plane lands and I look out the window and there's the stairs and then there's a red carpet that's about 100 or 200 feet long there. There's cameras everywhere. And it turned out that Georgian TV covered the arrival of Senator John McCain and Tbilisi live on national television as he walked down off the plane, shook the president's hand, who was there to greet him. And I don't know if there's another parliamentarian in the world who is greeted by a 200-foot red carpet, the president of the country, and live coverage on national television of his arriving at the airport.

Well, I often tell Republican legislators that I try to encourage them to get more involved in national security and foreign policy debates and be more entrepreneurial in taking on these issues. And now I can add to the mix that part of the reward will be is someday you can be greeted in Tbilisi as you walk off the plane as like a head of state. So, you know, there's a payoff. Richard, thanks for doing this. We're going to have you back.

We will hold you to account on your predictions. Hopefully they're kind of wrong. But either way, there's probably a lot still to chew on. So we hope to have you back to the podcast. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me. I look forward to it. That's our show for today.

To follow Richard Fontaine, you can go to the Center for New American Security website, which is cnas.org. That is cnas.org. That is c-n-a-s.org. You can also follow him on Twitter, at RH Fontaine. If you have comments or questions for future episodes, email me at dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.frankmerry. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar.

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