Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Zawahiri, Putin & Pelosi - with Richard Fontaine

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Why did Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei get such outsized attention? She’s not the first US Speaker to travel to Taiwan. Why did the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri get so little attention? After all, he was one of the three most important figures in al-Qaeda's leadership for decades. And why the dwindling focus on the Russia-Ukraine war? Where does the war stand right now? Richard Fontaine returns to the conversation. He is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a bi-partisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, DC. Prior to CNAS, he 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. He currently serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

Why did Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei get such outsized attention? She's not the first Speaker of the House of Representatives, which is the number three in line for President of the United States, to travel to Taiwan. And yet it seems like the stakes are so much higher now than the last time a speaker traveled to Taiwan. And why did the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri get such undersized attention? He was one of the three most important figures in al-Qaeda's leadership for decades. And yet the reaction to it seemed muted. And why the dwindling focus on the Russia-Ukraine war, which seems to be far from over? These are the issues we explore with Richard Fontaine, who we wanted to check back in with. Richard, as you know from previous episodes,

is the CEO of the Center for New American Security, which is a bipartisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Prior to 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. He's on the Defense Policy Board, which is a board of outside advisors appointed by the Biden administration to advise the Pentagon on policy issues and receive regular intelligence briefings. Lots to unpack with Richard Fontaine. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast my longtime friend Richard Fontaine. Richard, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me back. More trouble in the world to discuss.

I know. Well, the good thing about you, one of the reasons you're a fan favorite with the Call Me Back listeners is because you calmly explain things. You don't do crazy. There's a lot of crazy in the geopolitical, analytical world

and you calmly... So you analyze crazy things, but you do it calmly. So you yourself... I'm saving the histrionics for Joe Rogan. Okay, good, good, good. All right, so let's jump into it. I initially wanted... I primarily wanted to talk about Speaker Pelosi's trip to Taiwan,

which we'll talk about in a moment. But before we do, the killing of Zawahiri in Afghanistan, I just want to spend a few minutes on that. Why was this so important? And by the way, two questions. Sorry, I hate asking two questions at once, but I will. A, why is it so important? And B, why has the public reaction to it much more muted than I would have expected and much more muted than I believe it deserves to be? To take them in reverse order, it's a sign of how far we are from 9-11 and how the terrorist threat and the feeling of the acute foreign terrorist threat in the United States has subsided over the years. I mean, had this happened in 2003 or four or five or six, it would have been nonstop wall-to-wall coverage. Or 2011 when Bin Laden was killed. Yeah, 2011. So really, there were three people who were on the most wanted list that were at large. One was Mullah Omar, who died of natural causes, apparently. He was the emir of Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Natural causes, okay. The other, yeah, who knows. The other is, of course, Osama bin Laden, and we know what happened to him. And third is Ayman al-Zawahiri. He was bin Laden's number two during the September 11th attacks, involved in that, was calling for violent jihad against the West as recently as earlier this year. Had been at large for all of this time, but had been a founding member of al-Qaeda. He was the most wanted terrorist in the world. And now he's left us mortar coil. So that in itself is a big deal. The other big deal is where he was found, downtown Kabul, in a safe house that at least reportedly belonged to AIDS to Sirajuddin Haqqani, who happens to be the Taliban interior minister.

So the fact that the Taliban is sheltering al-Qaeda and violent jihadi groups that have global aspirations is about as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. But here we are. And now this is the situation we're faced with. So the good news is he's gone. The bad news is we don't know who else is in Afghanistan. Well, the good news is he's gone and i was talking about this with a friend in the administration who i i made a point similar to the one that you made which is like this is not a great sign that people like zahra zahra here are recongregating in uh kabul after we withdraw on the one hand on the but

their reaction was yes but people like you me and, and I guess you, Richard, were very critical of the Biden administration's view that they could do over the horizon surveillance, intelligence gathering, and then execute real operations to take out our enemies. And we were right, they say. We were able to take them out when you all were saying that it was going to be harder and harder to do from farther and farther away. Yeah, there is something to that, the over the horizon effort on this counterterrorism operation worked. We should be glad for that. They were able to acquire the intelligence necessary to do this. And they were able to conduct the strike. I think I was critical. For our listeners, when we see it, throw around the term over the horizon, what we mean by that is that many of us believe that if

we didn't have any presence in Afghanistan, we would not be able to do surveillance and catch enemies and kill enemies of the United States. The administration said they would be able to do it from afar. I just want to provide the context. And this, they argue, is a data point, a case study in their ability to do it from afar. Right. So the United States previously conducted counterterrorism activities in Afghanistan from Afghanistan. And since the withdrawal, it wishes to conduct counterterrorism in Afghanistan from outside Afghanistan. My worry has not been that it would be completely impossible, but rather that it would be less effective than had it, it would be, uh, if we were in Afghanistan and there wouldn't be the cost savings and other things that were supposed to be the return on the

withdrawal. So we, you know, we still have to use assets to be able to do these things in Afghanistan. So you sort of wonder exactly what the dividend was for the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But nevertheless, we are where we are. And this is a good sign that over-the-horizon activities work in this case. It doesn't automatically prove they will work in every case. And, you know, I think hopefully they will, but it's hard to know what you don't know. And, you know, it's also worth noting that Zawahiri's been, you know, again, the most wanted terrorist in the world on the intelligence community's radar screen for well more than 20 years. There are other jihadi groups in other parts of Afghanistan that may be more under the radar screen.

So that's just the situation that we're going to have to deal with. And some, I talked about a friend of mine in the administration, and friends of mine on the, let's call it the neo-isolationist right, argued, okay, so you take this guy out and there'll be another one. You know, like someone will fill Zawahiri's place. And my reaction to that is, Zawah Hiri was an outsized force, an outside figure, and those kinds of figures and their influence don't get incubated overnight. He was in the game for literally decades. I mean, he was involved with the assassination of Anwar Sadat.

He's been a player, you know, he went to jail, he grew up in Cairo, he went to jail he grew up in cairo he went to jurors i think outside of cairo he went to prison uh in egypt came out of egypt got involved with al-qaeda got involved bin laden was involved with the 98 terrorist attacks against the embassies in kenya and tanzania was involved with the u.s the attack on the uss cold in 2000 and obviously 9-11 this is guys has a multi-level career in terrorizing the West. It's not like you knock him out, and then boom, there's a new Zawahiri. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And if you look at the pattern of disruption to these kinds of groups when their leader, even one that doesn't have all the charisma of bin Laden, which Zawahiri doesn't, but he kept al-Qaeda together for a decade after bin Laden was killed. If you look at when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq, or Baghdadi

was killed during the ISIS campaign, or bin Laden himself, or for that matter, actually, Soleimani, the Quds Force commander, these are very disruptive events yes it is true that a group can replace the guy who's left with a new guy the question is is the new guy going to be as effective as the old guy and when the cause is uh violence against the west uh that we hope the answer is no and the pattern is the answer is no so and part of the reason the old guy was so effective is he's been doing it for a long time it's not like someone just replaces him and boom they they have and he was a an intellectual and leader of the movement as you're saying going all the way back to you know his days in egypt and the belief that the secular regime in egypt was illegitimate and had to be overthrown

and that had to be followed by the overthrow of other regimes in the Middle East. And therefore you had to take the fight to the West because they were the supporters of those regimes. I mean, he's been a threat of continuity going back decades and now he's gone. So yes, there can be a new guy that maybe no one's ever heard of and who knows how long he will last, but's not a one-for-one yeah replacement but by the way the for our listeners if you want to uh read an interesting uh background on the life story of the biography of zara here you should read lawrence wright's book the looming tower fantastic fantastic i didn't like the tv series by the way i didn't like the did you see the hbo series no no no it was the movie's never as good as i know i I know, I know, I know. But the book is excellent, and particularly that history from those early years of Zawahiri's life in Egypt. Okay, so while this is happening, we have Speaker Pelosi's trip to Taiwan, to Taipei.

This also, I mean, whereas the Zawahiri killing didn't get as much attention as i think it deserved and and that i would have thought this this visit got like incredible attention the last time a speaker of the united states as representatives traveled to taiwan was newt gingrich i think in 98 uh which was a big deal uh the world didn't come apart because Gingrich went to Taiwan. And yet the Pelosi trip, which I was surprised it leaked out in advance, but we can spin him in on that as well. The Pelosi trip, it was framed in this context that the stakes were so much higher. And depending on how you looked at it,

it was interpreted as either a bold move by a courageous political leader in the U.S. who's been active on Chinese human rights issues and a big critic of China for her entire career, or a reckless move that wasn't terribly well thought out or coordinated with the administration. I guess my first question is, why did this event get so much attention and where do you land on that, either of those interpretations? Well, to connect it to what we were talking about before, it is very striking to any of us who, you know, cut some of our foreign policy teeth in the wake of 9-11 and everything that had you at any point around then said Simultaneously a member of Congress will go to Taiwan and the world's most wanted terrorists will be killed in a drone strike by the CIA Which do you think will be the bigger story? Which will people talk about more which will be the headline and it's the it's the Pelosi visit. It's not those are coming I'm sorry, not the

Zara here killing and and again, I think that's a sign of the times. What are people focused on now? Much less the threat from foreign jihadi groups and more this long competition or even threat from China. The other part of why it's become such a big deal is because the Chinese have made such a big deal about it. She was supposed to go in the spring and got COVID and didn't go. That news came out as well. The Chinese denounced it as you would expect them to do, but they didn't make as big a deal of it as they are now.

Now, why are they making a big deal of it now? I think a lot of that has to do with domestic Chinese politics. They're headed into the party Congress this fall. Xi Jinping will get an unprecedented, at least since Mao's third term for five years. He wants to have what he would call a stable domestic and international environment, which helps explain why they're doing the COVID lockdowns and things like that. And he wants to look tough on Taiwan. I mean, this is a major legacy issue, and it's the most sensitive foreign policy issue for any Chinese

leader. And so to let this trip happen without comment, so to speak, I think was a non-starter. And then it became a question of what are they going to do in order to look like they're imposing costs or standing up for themselves in the face of this. And so that you put all that together, I think that's why we are where we are. And, you know, now that it's happened, I think, you know, the Chinese reaction is pretty symbolic, but also fairly dramatic in the sense that they are conducting live fire exercises around the island. They sent warplanes across the median line of the Taiwan Straits. They conducted a cyber attack and some of the missiles they fired have fallen in Japanese EEZ waters and and all of this. And so I think what this is going to do is, you know, they often refer to wolf warrior diplomacy, where the Chinese kind of overreact to something

rhetorically and threaten and cajole and all of this. And they hope that that's going to intimidate the other country and often has the effect of just making them more anxious about Chinese intentions over the long run. I think this is a variant of that maybe wolf warrior military exercises here, where they overplay their hand a little bit. What do you think of Pelosi's decision to take the trip? I was on the fence about it, honestly. I think that if I were, you know, it was bound to be provocative to the Chinese coming at the time that it did. It, of course, she has the right to do it and all of that. But the question is,

is it a good idea on balance? I mean, personally, if we were going to, as a country, take a step that was going to provoke a Chinese response, I'd rather do something that would give Taiwan additional capability to defend itself rather than what is essentially a symbolic political act. But, you know, you could argue it the other way, too, and reasonable people have. What do you make of it leaking and how the administration reacted to the news and what the administration projected? You know, when Biden talked about his military, the military people, as he put it, I think, or the military officials were cautioning against it. What did you make of that? Yeah, that was not an adroit handling of the situation, shall we say.

You know, since then, I think the administration's handled it reasonably well. You know, they got the G7 together for a statement to call for peace in the Taiwan Straits and a sort of united front, which, you know, is a signal, but a good one. They've kind of called for calm. They describe this as normal activity because, of course, we should remember that there's nothing in U.S. law nor any agreement between the United States and Beijing that would preclude a Speaker of the House from visiting Taiwan. So it's not like we're this is violating anything. But at the beginning, you know, having this come out in public and saying, well, you know, the military doesn't think this is a good idea and so she shouldn't do it. That's the kind of stuff that would have been much better handled behind closed doors. And of course, once it did become public and once the Chinese publicly said, thou shall not come, then it became a test of wills. Well,

are we going to back down and say you can dictate who goes to Taiwan and who doesn't? Are you going to, you know, sort of tell us and tell the Taiwanese what kind of trips can and can't happen? Are we going to reward bad behavior? And then the calculation became different. It became much harder to say something like, oh, yeah, well, maybe we'll postpone and do this later on or something like that. So having it out in public was not a great move. Do you, in terms of what we are doing vis-a-vis Taiwan, in light of all that we've learned about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, if we live in a world in which we think that China could do a version, albeit not identical because Taiwan's an island,

Ukraine is on the border of Russia, but if China were to engage in some kind of real operation against Taiwan with the same brazenness that russia invaded ukraine uh i mean i'm just i'm using pelosi's visit because because taiwan is in the news but just taking a step away from pelosi's visit do you think we have been doing enough to bolster taiwan to help protect taiwan inoculate it from from some of the biggest threats from, the way we might have been doing or should have been doing with regard to Ukraine before Russia invaded? No, I think that both the United States can do more and the Taiwanese themselves can do more. And it's not just doing more, it's doing things differently. So, you know, over the past

few decades, the Taiwanese have been very interested in buying what one might call prestige weapons systems, lots of F-16s, you know, subs, diesel subs and things like that, that would be very hard actually to use effectively in the face of a Chinese onslaught. Over the past few years, they started to change their defense concept along with American assistance. You know, this idea that Taiwan would become, you know, a porcupine, that it would have,

it would be hard to sort of swallow. And so it would look more at investments in things like sea mines and mobile strike capability and asymmetric kinds of capabilities that may even be able to be used in an insurgency if the Chinese actually got onto the island and things like that. That is a highly incomplete transition of the Taiwanese defense concept and their purchases. But that plus the stockpiling of munitions and things like that has to be done because, you know, as hard as it is...

And is that not happening, the storing of munitions? Well, it is. I've heard others, members of Congress, express that concern. It is, but there's a, I mean, frankly, there's a munition shortage almost everywhere right now. And if you're thinking about this over the long run, then you've got to have a lot and they've got to be readily accessible. So in Ukraine, we're able to, and other countries are able to pass munitions and other things to the land borders. Well, there's no land border with Taiwan. And if the Chinese look like they are going to try to do something to Taiwan, like they are doing right now, which is encircle the island in a quasi blockade,

it becomes very difficult to resupply the island. So what they have, at least for a while, is what they have. And so that then pulls the premium forward toward getting the stocks as high as possible for the most useful things possible as soon as possible. And I think both the Americans and the Taiwanese plus the Chinese are all learning things from the Ukraine experience. But I think that's the next step here. And what about this issue of Taiwan being in the front of the military, foreign military sale list, or at least near the front? They're not now? Like, how does that work? Yeah, I mean, every Taiwan arms package is carefully negotiated and notified and things like that. And so, you know, I think

there's going to need to be just greater urgency across the board. I mean, there's, I think, very little, if any, remaining lingering concern, as there used to be about, well, if we sell this particular size package of weapons to Taiwan, or these kinds of things, this will provoke China in a way that will be bad for everyone, including Taiwan. Well, the Chinese seem to be getting provoked well enough without those weapon sales. And, you know, so on balance, it's better for Taiwan to have those things. So in the Congress, and I think in the executive branch as well, I think there's a lot of openness to just moving forward. Before we wrap, I want to come back to what we normally talk about, which is Russia-Ukraine.

Where – talk about something receding from our – from the news, from our public consciousness. It's depressing. Where are we as it relates to this war? Where do you think we are in it right now? The Russians are taking what they describe as an operational pause. It's only a pause as a relative matter because there's still bombardment that's happening every day. They're still killing Ukrainians and destroying their buildings and probing lines and trying to make advances where they can. They've taken the Luhansk region in the east. They're trying to take the Donetsk region in the Donbass further south. The Ukrainians are talking about

a counteroffensive down around Kherson, also in the south. One of the things that has made a significant difference, at least since the last time you and I talked about this, is the provision of these HIMARS. These are basically, it's basically a truck with a rocket on it, and it can fire up to, you know, 70 miles or so, and then move. So it's both effective, high precision and hard to find. And these are the equivalent of 500 pound bomb kind of things. And the Ukrainians, there was a big question before those were provided about whether the Ukrainians were going to be able to use those effectively. And so far, it appears that they've used them very effectively to hit Russian ammunition depots and things like that, and had the effect of backing

the Russians off of the line that they previously controlled because they don't want to be hit by these things. And so, you know, it's in a way for all of the talk at the beginning of the war about, you know, stingers and javelins that were going to kind of be the game changer weapon unclear whether heimars are a game changer yet uh but they certainly seem to be uh giving ukrainians possibilities of holding the line and maybe even potentially making advances that otherwise wouldn't have been possible and these things are starting to arrive more and more they started out with four then eight and twelve what was the hold up on them i i i someone in the military told me there was this concern about how well trained the ukrainian army was to use them and that was the reticence to uh expediting these well at the beginning there was nobody trained on them so they had to be taken out of ukraine to be trained up on

them which took about three weeks and then they were sent in um then there's not an infinite supply of these things including the munitions that they fire and so you know i think there was a concern that if these were used more or less like a mortar shell and just sort of fired indiscriminately well that's you know you're going to run through your stock pretty fast and so it was almost a a proof of concept kind of thing now the ukrainians didn't want to have to deal with any kind of proof of concept they were like give us as much as you've got as fast as you can, for very understandable reasons. I think the Department of Defense said, let's see how they use these things.

If they use them effectively, then we'll give them more. And they have used them effectively, and they are giving them more. The unity of Europe has been extremely important to this effort, and Europe staying strong. We've all said that gets harder and harder as we get closer and closer to the winter months. I think many analysts expected Russia to be on its way out or on its way to slowing down. I mean, I guess there is this sort of pause, quote unquote, by this time. But you get dangerously close to winter months, which aren't that far away, puts more and more pressure on European countries given their growing energy needs during the winter months.

Is that a concern? It's a concern, but in a somewhat different way than I think the way that you put it, which is what one often hears is that as it gets harder, you'll have defections away from the solidarity on oil sanctions or gas sanctions for example i actually worry a little bit about the opposite i mean the eu has adopted these oil sanctions which is going to reduce their imports of russian oil into law and so it's going to be hard politically and legally to undo that just because you know the, the winter gets cold and, you know, people are using more oil of all kinds and things like that.

And so you really have this perverse outcome right now where, as everyone listening to this knows, the price of gasoline has gone way up and Russian oil revenue has gone up, which was not the idea. The idea is to reduce Russian revenue, not increase it. So we were looking for things that would reduce the benefit to the Russians and not increase the cost to us. But actually, we seem to have landed precisely on the opposite. That's not a sustainable position. And so, of course, the administration is talking about a price cap mechanism that would basically force, it's a buyer's cartel, basically, that would force Russia to sell at a deep discount

so that the overall supply of oil in the global market would go up and reduce the price and people would be buying at a discount anyway. And then the Russians would get some revenue, but they get less revenue than they're getting now. I hope that works. I don't know. We will see. But if it doesn't, then we really may have very, very high energy prices that there's not a lot of great answers to. And so that's the scenario that I think we might find ourselves in in a few months. In a way, kind of the opposite of, you know, have lots of defections because the price is high, and then it comes down and the Russians just pump whatever they want.

Got it. All right, we will leave it there. Thank you for this quick update and analysis. Like we said, the world's not getting less crazy. So we will need you back. But we've broadened the range of topics we've talked and i was going to say you know the north koreans are on the verge of testing uh they're having conducting their seventh nuclear test so uh you know you want to do north korea you're pitching a north korea episode i like it we're i mean i don't like the test but uh but i do we will have you back to talk about that well and of course the other thing it's, you know, the Middle East peace process has run into a sticking point. You can always at any time say the North Koreans are just on the verge of testing and then just fill in the blank with, you know, rockets, sub-launched missiles, nuclear weapons. You know, what's the diplomacy going to be?

What are the sanctions response and things like that? But, you know, this will be a this will be a wake up call because they have been in abeyance on their nuclear tests since the Trump days. And we've just been so consumed with other events around the world. Exactly. Right. All right. Thanks for doing this, Richard. Good talking to you. That's our show for today.

To follow Richard's work, you can go to cnas.org. That's c-n-a-s.org. You can also follow him on Twitter, at R.H. Fontaine, F-O-N-T-A-I-N-E. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.