Morning Wire - Art of the Deal Meets Art of War

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

After Ukraine stuns Russia with a strategic drone strike, defense expert Ben Jensen breaks down what it means for peace talks. Will President Trump be able to negotiate an end to Europe’s deadliest war? Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Evening Wire will be back Monday June 9th! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump has vowed to end the deadliest war in Europe since World War II, but talks between Ukraine and Russia have so far failed to offer much hope of a peace deal. The recent escalation by both countries has further complicated the negotiations, with Russia targeting more civilian areas while Ukraine launched a surprise drone attack that crippled Russia's strategic bomber fleet. In this episode, we sit down with defense and security expert Ben Jensen to discuss how the events of the last few days have changed the equation and what steps Trump can take to end the grueling three-year war.

I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, June 8th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now to discuss the state of the Ukraine War and the peace talks as Ben Jensen, director of the CSIS Futures Lab and Senior Fellow at its Defense and Security Department. Ben, thanks so much for coming on. Oh, no problem. I'm glad we could connect. So let's start with the news of the week. Ukraine's drone strikes.

many are calling this Russia's Pearl Harbor, that of course highlights how affected this strike was reportedly wiping out as much as a third of Russia's strategic bomber fleet, which is really remarkable of true. That also, though, has the connotation that this could spark an even more aggressive response from Russia, even nuclear maybe. How significant was this strike? So you're tapping into something. And beyond the rhetoric of Pearl Harbor, the significance is that Russia has been firing on average 100 to 200 cruise missiles a month, at Ukrainian cities. Shockingly, it's not normally military targets. So even just at the tactical and operational level, Ukraine in a single special operations raid was able to take out 30% roughly

of Russia's strategic air assets that deliver those munitions. When you put that in actual terms, that means anywhere from 33 to 50 cruise missiles that don't hit Ukrainian critical infrastructure or citizens at any one given time. Now, the cost of that amazing battlefield success, as you highlight are these escalation tensions. I honestly, I will, you know, be a betting man on your show. I don't think Russia is going to use nuclear weapons. They prefer to do saber rattling. We know in the past that actually Xi Jinping, we've heard reports, has restrained Putin early in the war. So I do think Russia will continue to attack Ukrainian cities, but it will continue to be with drones and ballistic missiles. It will not be tactical use of nuclear weapons or any significant change

to the way Russia is fighting this war. So win for Ukraine. that I think was worth the risk. Now, there's been a lot made of how many resources Russia really does have militarily. Some people see it as almost infinite. That's obviously not true. How much does this really hurt them? Are they eventually going to wear out here? Or is that way too long-term a prospect to actually consider?

You know, you're really tapping into something important. Most predictions about this conflict haven't panned out the way anyone thought it would. The Russian economy seems to be more resilient than we thought. Russia seems to keep finding excess equipment to burn through. But I'll tell you two things that matter on this point. One, one of the reason the Russian economy continues to generate the material resources that they put in the hands of young Russian men they send to frankly die like being slaughtered. You've seen these meat assaults. It's horrific.

It's not the way you fight a thinking man's war. It's wave assaults. So what they've done essentially is benefit from China and Iran. So one of the things we don't talk enough about it, this is why sanctions really do matter. And frankly, the Biden administration was way too slow out the gate on these. You need to actually hit Russia hard enough where other authoritarian states can't keep Russia in the fight by supplying them resources. And Iran, separate from those strategic bombers, supplies the components for Shaheeds, the designs. And we've seen a 10 times increase in the number of domestically manufactured long-way attack drones that Russia is bombarding.

Ukrainian cities with. So if you have 100 to 200 cruise missiles a month, you just the other day had 472 attack drones in one 24-hour period. So that's why Russia stays in the fight. It's authoritarian friends. And the fact that they've destroyed the Russian middle class because of the BS of planned economics and turned their country into basically North Korea in Europe. So they're able to sustain this fight. And the sad part is knocking out their strategic bombers won't disreact. that Shahid equation or the ballistic missiles. So Ukraine has used surprise to generate psychological shock in the best tradition of maneuver warfare and special operations theory. But sadly, I think once the dust settles here, it does nothing to stop Russia's fundamental war plan, grind down Ukraine on the front,

and then hold their citizens hostage through daily. I mean, literally daily strikes with drones and ballistic missiles on Ukrainian cities that keep millions of people in basements across that country. So all this ties in obviously to the peace talks in general, but specifically we have some major conditions released this week from Putin. Would you unpack that for us? We've seen this develop over the course of the week. Was there any progress, no progress? How is Ukraine responding to the conditions Putin laid down? So I think one thing we always have to be mindful of is negotiations are always a two-level game, right? So there's the public-facing side of any negotiation, and then there's the private side. And this is where I think people are maybe a little too quick to judge.

our president, President Trump, and some of his negotiation tactics. I think you can actually get a lot further with private phone calls between leaders than you can with big public displays where people are shaking hands. So I honestly think it's too soon to say really what's happening in the negotiation front. If we believe just the surface image, the negotiations aren't going anywhere. There's low-level delegations. They're dealing with, like, easy, low-level issues, which are really important for the people who they affect.

Prisoner swaps, if you're the poor Ukrainian that's in a Russian prison, you want to get out, right? So it's a big deal at that lower level, but it's not really looking like it's making any progress at a higher level. But I would just still caution people, don't discount how shuttle diplomacy, whether that's Wittkoff or Rubio, flying to these different locations, using third parties like the kingdom of Saudi Arabia or even Erdogan himself. And then our president picking up the phone call and talking, I think there's maybe more going on behind the scenes. than we realize, but history will tell us that. I'm glad you highlighted that, that we have this public posturing that's part of the plan with the Trump administration.

This is part of how Trump operates. Again, like you said, public negotiations, but behind the scenes, that's what's important. Russia hasn't backed off on its demands for Ukraine. What do you think it will actually take for them to agree to peace? Yeah. I mean, I think this is the real, the art of the deal as it meets geopolitics. And actually, we've been doing really interesting work on my life. lab on this. So we've actually surveyed about 40 different experts on the war to see where do they think

each side would budge. What does the U.S. want? What does Russia want? What is Ukraine want? What are the Europeans want? And what we did this novel is not only did we statistically analyze their responses. So you can look at the tradeoffs. We actually used an AI. So number one, this is really fundamentally an issue about territory. And I think that it's going to be almost impossible barring a collapse the Russian military or Putin's regime for Ukraine to leave this war without conceding some territory. And on the flip side of that, the challenge of that becomes that's political poison for President Zelensky. And frankly, for a lot of the Ukrainian people. So every inch of territory that he makes as a concession to end the war is almost his political fate in the future elections.

And not just the future elections, the next one, because once martial law is lifted, Ukraine will have elections, it'll be political ramifications for years to come. So one of the major findings is the complexity of negotiations over territory. The other is that there's actually going to be a lot of technical devil in the details about what a post-war security force looks like. If I'm Ukraine, I don't buy that China's going to send peacekeepers and protect my territory. And if I'm the U.S., and I have these mineral concession deals, I certainly don't trust Chinese peacekeepers on top of titanium exports that I might be wanting to develop into larger joint businesses with the Ukrainian. So the composition of the force, the size of it, that's the

technical details that behind the scene stuff really push and the public facing is really difficult to make sense of. What about Trump's role in all of this? What, if anything, can Trump do to at least speed up this process? You talked about more punitive sanctions. Is this the secondary sanction concept that's going to be the most effective? Yes. I think you hit the on the head. There's really two things that actually, I think, would really do this. But I think what has to happen beyond kind of the strategic communication aspect of gaining leverage in the negotiation is you have to hit the Russians where it hurt. They've already done that by lifting a lot of the long-range strike conditions and probably helping our European partners come to the

same conclusion. So now a lot of those European munitions, not just U.S. munitions, can be used to hit behind the front lines. And number two, the secondary sanctions. You need to hit Russia where it's hurts. Russia is an exploitive, authoritarian state that steals from its own people. So you need to make it hard for those elites to steal from their own people. And that means stealing resources like oil and other natural resources and selling up the world. So you need secondary sanctions that actually stop Russia's ability. And frankly, that means you need to even further push energy independence and drill baby drill at home. Because everything the U.S. does to make money in hydrocarbons actually lowers the ability of Russia to make money in hydrocarbons. And this fits with that.

old story of the Cold War, that one of the reasons America won wasn't just like the leaning, you know, leaning into it the way President Reagan did, both military buildup and diplomatically, it was the fact that oil prices collapsed in the 80s and made it impossible for the communists to use oil to prop up a broken ideology. That's a great point. One more question specifically about Ukraine, and then I wanted to broaden out and talk about China a little bit. We hear a lot about NATO and the U.S. providing aid to Ukraine, but what about militarily?

What kind of direct military help are any other countries providing, specifically the U.S. Do we have, you know, U.S. Special Forces, for example, playing a role in any of the military actions from Ukraine? Great questions. I think what we have done is essentially build a infrastructure for what's called security force assistance. So help our partners man, train, and equip. And you've seen that actually happening really since 2014.

So this was really, even post-2014 and really accelerated under President Trump's first term in office is when you had a lot of special forces teams that would go train Ukrainian counterparts. You'd have elements of the National Guard and the U.S. trained conventional counterparts. So it was a big security, the partnership for peace, I think it was California training a lot of Ukrainian units. So the U.S. military is actually very good at building this infrastructure, where we help other countries stand up their own formations, and then we help them determine what type of equipment, how do they want to fight. And I think that's actually more of what's going on behind the scenes. You've seen in the news things like the Security Assistance Group

Ukraine, which I believe is now the NATO training and assistance mission for Ukraine. So the U.S., along with NATO partners, are helping supply Ukraine. They're helping train its leaders, and they're helping generate new combat formations. But I would be shocked if there were any U.S. or even NATO military personnel. I think this was a completely indigenous Ukrainian, special intelligence and special forces mission. Now, China is obviously closely watching how the U.S. handles the Ukraine situation. They're also taking notes on the military action of both Russia and Ukraine. In fact, some are pointing out that the Ukraine drone strike actually might give China some

ideas about some ways that they could approach some situations in their region. Do you think China is more or less likely now to take military action against Taiwan or other neighboring countries? So this is where there's a really healthy strategic debate. One camp is that China is going in all-in by 2027, right? There's the Davidson window. So anything that makes the U.S. weaker or demonstrates the U.S. is less likely to defend Taiwan or U.S. partners, key partners like Japan, are willing to defend Taiwan, increases

the probability that they execute that invasion. I lay that argument out because I don't subscribe to it. I think this actually does the opposite. I think if you look at the leadership circle around Xi Jinping, they're largely technocratic communists who grew up following rules and finding ways, frankly, also a lot of corruption, right? So they know how to give a bribe, they know how to take a bribe, and they know how to plan a ghost city. And when you think about technocrats like that, they don't necessarily aren't known for risk appetite. And so if you try to do a thought experiment and imagine them sitting around Xi Jinping, number one, are they even going to tell them the truth?

Maybe, maybe not. Number two, the dialogue probably goes something like this. hey, we took Hong Kong without firing a single shot. Yeah, we beat up some protesters. We silenced democracy, but that's 101 for a communist. But we had a very high-gain, low-cost strategic enterprise. Classic, unconventional warfare, classic what we used to call in the Cold War political warfare. And then you compare that to Ukraine. Hey, we've watched the military that we used to think was more effective than ours, grind itself down, lose 30% of part of their triad, their strategic bombers, lose all of their modern military equipment, and basically throw itself into the economic status

of North Korea to gain marginal territorial, and frankly, the territory Russia's gained, is going to require hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild because it's strewn with explosive ordinance. So if you compare those two, I still think rational decision-making matters. If I'm in that room, I'm telling Xi Jinping, hey, let's go for a Hong Kong and avoid Ukraine like the plague. Yeah, makes sense. Now, final question, really large, you can go wherever you want with this. Trump has repeatedly presented himself as the president of peace. He clearly is actively trying to de-escalate various situations. We have Ukraine, we have Gaza, we have China trying to head that off. We have Iran trying to hamper their nuclear growth. Do you think he's going to be successful

from what you've seen from the administration so far, is he going to do more winning than losing? What do you think? I think the president is headed to the poker table with not a great hand. So do I think he truly actually, I mean, I'm going to believe him at his words. I think he actually really does want to solve these conflicts.

And I don't think it's for the reasons you get in some media outlets where it's vanity. He wants a Nobel Peace Prize. I actually going to believe the man at his words that he actually genuinely doesn't like the idea. And you hear this in the language. His language isn't crafted. for spin in some cases, it's more crafted about he feels deeply when people are dying for no good

reason. And so I think he genuinely wants to end these conflicts. I think there are structural conditions that are set up that make that very difficult. I'm not doubting he could do it, but I think it's going to take a lot of things. So whether you think about Gaza and you've seen the difficulty ending that conflict, you've seen him really try to reach out to the Iranians, I don't trust them. And frankly, Russia is trying to wait for the opportune moment to continue its summer offensive. So I think he wants to, but I think the deck is stacked against him. And if I was sitting next to him and Secretary Rubio and others, I would say we need a plan B. And we're going to continue negotiating, but how do we start to mobilize resources that don't

drain the U.S. economy and be prepared for a much darker strategic horizon in the next 18 months? Well, as you've laid out a very, very complicated set of challenges for these peace goals and things don't appear to be getting any easier anytime soon. Ben, thank you so much for talking about us. Thanks for having me. That was Ben Jensen, director of CSIS Futures Lab, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning.