Pod Save the World - Mr. Putin goes to Washington?

Episode Date: April 5, 2018

Tommy talks with New Yorker writer Robin Wright about Putin’s possible visit to Washington, his relationship with Trump, and what we know about Trump the negotiator vs what’s required for success. Then they discuss Robin's visit to North Korea, the situation in Gaza, Syria and John Bolton.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. I learned a hard lesson last week that you guys don't like being called Worldose. There's a lot of angry tweets, a lot of true hostility towards me for even floating that name. So point taken, won't do it again. My guest this week is Robin Wright. She is an incredible reporter for the New Yorker. And we basically did a tour of the hotspots around the globe. We talked about the U.S. relationship with Russia and what Putin wants and why we were letting. all these Russian spies in our country to begin with before we expelled them. We also talked about Trump as a negotiator, how he acts versus what a successful negotiation looks like and what that might mean for North Korea. We talked about the situation in Gaza, which is looking increasingly fraught. We talked about Syria. And we also talked a bit about John Bolton, the new national security advisor. You will not want to miss this one.

I learned a lot in a short period of time. So here is the interview. Robin Wright is a writer for the New Yorker, the author of Ruff. Rock the Casbah and seven other books on the Middle East and a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Robin, thank you so much for doing the show today. Great to be with you, Tommy. I want to start with some recent news about Mr. Putin, potentially going to Washington. You've been writing a lot about U.S. Russia relations lately. And this week, we learned that during a recent call with Vladimir Putin, Trump didn't just congratulate him on his

election victory. He also invited Vladimir Putin to the White House. This would be Putin. Putin's first White House visits in 2005, and it comes on the heels of interfering in our elections, voting irregularities and ballot box stuffing that is all captured on video and brazen and the attempted murder of a former Russian double agent in London with nerve gas. So it seems like odd timing for a meeting to me. But is there any explanation from the White House about why now or what they want to accomplish in the areas Trump mentioned, which were arms control, North Korea, Syria, and Ukraine? President Trump has long wanted better relations. He campaigned on that platform and he has said it many times since his inauguration. There's no question that he wants outreach. And that was reflected in his call immediately after Putin's re-election, suggesting that they have a meeting. The challenge for President Trump is that most of the allies disagree with him profoundly on his approach to the Russians. There is deep skepticism, growing skepticism,

in Europe about President Putin's intentions. He's been increasingly aggressive during his third term in office, whether it's in Ukraine, seizing Crimea, intervening in Syria's civil war. There are now investigations in Spain about whether Russia tried to influence the vote in Catalon about independence. And, of course, the Brits are looking at the question of Russian intervention in the Brexit vote. So there is a lot of concern about Russia's tentacles deepening inside the West as far away as a remote cathedral town in Britain called Salisbury. Yeah. And it's also, like you just said, this comes on the heels of the U.S. literally just booting out 60 Russian spies from the country as part of a coordinated international response to that aforementioned assassination attempts.

I bet some people listening are wondering, okay, if we knew. there were 60 Russian spies in the U.S., why would we let them in here in the first place? Why do we let them work in Washington or at a consulate in Seattle and give them easy access to Boeing, Microsoft, or a U.S. naval base? Can you sort of explain how these spy agency relations work and how it could be the case that there could be 60 spies in the U.S. to kick out? The interesting thing is that the Trump administration acknowledged that there are over 100 Russian spies operating in the United States and that they're only kicking out. 60 of them and they're still 40 here. That in some ways was the most striking fact and a little

reported. I mean, as you know as well as anyone, there are even among our allies, there are intelligence agents operating inside embassies. They collect intelligence both overtly and covertly. We often know who they are. There is close scrutiny of their activities by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies. But this was a moment that because of what Russia is doing there had to be a kind of strong response from the West that I think the Trump administration went along with it, but you also sense the reluctance within the administration to have done it. President Trump said it was likely that Russia was involved in the poisoning of a former double agent in Salisbury, as if he wasn't totally convinced. And again, whether

it's in a press conference or some of his public statements, there's a sense, well, He thinks he can get along very well with Vladimir Putin, but maybe it won't happen. And so there's this sense of being torn that he still wants to try, but that it's difficult right now in the international environment to do what he would prefer to do. Last week, you wrote this fantastic piece for the New Yorker titled, For Trump Diplomacy is a four-letter word. And I wanted to raise this piece for a couple of reasons. The first is there is a hilarious story about Trump that I think explains his diplomatic style in a way that I haven't heard. done succinctly before. Second, I also think it speaks to the kind of work in preparation that's actually required for any president to be successful diplomatically, including with, you know, say, North Korea. So could we start with a story? Why did Donald Trump call over to George H.W. Bush's White House and lobby for a job negotiating a nuclear agreement? Well, in 1980s, now President Trump, then real estate magnate, Donald Trump, was a bestselling author of The Art of the Deal. It had been on the

New York Times bestseller list for 48 weeks. And he wanted to prove it was not just real estate he could do a deal, that he could also do a deal on virtually anything. So we lobbied beginning in the mid-80s and then very hard with the George H.W. Bush administration to be the nuclear negotiator for what became the start talks. And the administration then appointed Richard Burt, ambassador to West Germany, long history of political and military. military affairs, been at the State Department, and Donald Trump and Richard Burt happened to meet each other at a society wedding in New York. And Trump walked up to him, according to Bert, and said, so you're the guy, meaning you were the one who got the appointment. And Richard

knew the story of Trump's lobbying. And he said, yes, I am. And Trump said to him, well, let me tell you what I would have done if I'd been appointed the envoy to the Soviets, I would have gotten them into the conference room. I would have made sure they were comfortable, very comfortable, and then I would have stood up and shouted, fuck you, and walked out of the room. Sounds about right. What is so striking about this is that Richard Burt then undertook very complex negotiations with the Soviet Union that played out over two years, but had a long history of dating back decades in terms of creating principles. What are the ideas that might lead to both superpowers reducing their nuclear arsenals? And so there was enormous amount

that went into this sophisticated background, sense of real knowledge of nuclear arms. And Donald Trump thought that he could do a deal. with everyone simply by charming them. Yeah. Or bullying them. And this is why the piece is so great. It's not just that anecdote. I mean, you look back all the way to 1961 when President Kennedy went into a summit with

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. And Kennedy thought, like Trump, he could charm Khrushchev. He didn't really prepare adequately. And he failed. And you contrasted that with Nixon and Mao's successful normalization of relations between the U.S. and China and Reagan, successful negotiation of the start armed control treaty. why do you think those succeeded where the first failed? And what do you think the lesson is out of those successful experiences for policymakers trying again? Well, there are two really important encounters,

one between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, when Nikito Khrushchev really wagged his finger at Kennedy and over two days of very stressful talks, had him wrapped around his little finger. I mean, this was something that Kennedy failed abysmally in charming Khrushchev. And then again, Ronald Reagan, meeting with Gorbachev in Iceland in Reckhevik in 1986, and he came poorly prepared. But he thought that he could do a deal, that he and Gorbachev saw the world in a similar way. But he stuck to the idea of Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and Gorbachev wouldn't go along.

So in both instances, they failed. Now, the one time we have done an about face, we have changed foreign policy, dramatically was when Nixon met with Mao Zedong in the 1970s. And this was particularly interesting because you had, again, a long period of diplomacy in which Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing. And there was a lot of legwork. The thing that when you look at the challenges the President Trump faces with North Korea is that there has been so little time to prepare the legwork. And we're dealing with a regime that has anywhere from 20 to 60 nuclear bombs, has an intercontinental ballistic missile system capable of hitting any city in the United States.

This is far more complicated than the Iran nuclear deal. Iran had no nuclear weapons and no intercontinental ballistic missiles. And so the magnitude that we face right now and the lessons of our failure when we thought that an American president could kind of bluff their way through, charm their way through, talk their way through. There are really important lessons about when we failed in the past. Yeah. And one of the biggest potential negotiations that may or may not happen would be with President Trump and Kim Jong-un to North Korea. You actually visited North Korea with Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 2000, I believe. Can you talk about that trip and what it taught you about the prospects of achieving some sort of nuclear deal with the North?

Well, North Korea is really a fascinating place, especially as an American going to a place where a country with which we fought a war and which is in many ways still locked in the mentality of a war in the 1950s. It's a very impressive place in terms of its high rises, but you understand the reality of the difficulties of living there because the light bulbs are so dim. I had to go down to the front desk and ask for something brighter because my computer was the thing that really. lit the room. The lights were so dim. And the receptionist said, oh, but we've put in our best light bulbs for the secretary's visit, walking down the street and seeing carts that were dropping little kernels of rice. And this was, you know, in the aftermath of a terrible drought. And people were going on to the streets, the dirty streets, and picking up these little kernels of rice. That there is, no one would look at me when I walked into the street, through the streets of

Pyongyang. There, you know, I was a. foreigner and who knew what the dangers were of acknowledging a foreigner in this country. But I do think that the North Koreans did want a deal. I think there is almost a desperation to engage with the United States. We've seen this with all three members of the Kim dynasty, Mao in power for 70 years. They wanted that recognition. And one of the reasons I think they've developed a nuclear weapon because they've always feared that the war still officially not over. The endgame is still to be fought out. Did Albright and her people regret making that trip, or do you think it was a worthwhile effort? Well, I've talked to several of the people who were on

that trip in the last few weeks, and this was at the end of the Clinton administration. It was a time when there was a doubt about who would won the election. The administration was trying to decide what would be its last grand gesture? Was it going to be a deal on North Korea's missiles, or was it going to be an Arab-Israeli peace plan? And they could only do one of them. And the administration opted to hold a summit at Camp David between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, hoping that they could finally finish the deal that had been started in the 70s between Egypt and Israel. And of course, that failed and the Clinton administration ended up with neither. One thing that's important to understand about North Korea is that all of the attempts by both Democratic and Republican administrations were based on a broad set of principles that it's quite easy to determine, look, we want to end the war, we want to see North Korea denuclearized, we want some kind of peaceful coexistence, trade to increase between the two Koreas, a dialogue to be fostered,

and whether it was the six-party talks during the Bush administration or the framework agreement during the Clinton administration, the trick was taking these broad principles in both cases. And when you sat down at the table getting to the specifics of, well, exactly what does denuclearization actually mean? Does it mean getting rid of all your weapons or freezing your program? That there are really different interpretations. And that's where negotiations have always broken down. Switching gears a little bit. You wrote a fascinating piece I thought about deepening ties between Russia and Iran and what that could mean for the broader Middle East. Putin recently visited Tehran to meet with President Rouhani and the Supreme Leader. Iranian media reported that the Supreme Leader specifically said their cooperation would, quote, isolate America. Some analysts say that the U.S. pulls out of the Iran deal. That could be a tipping point of improving relations between the Russians and Iran and other parties in the Middle East. Can you talk about that piece for a bit in what you think the possible ramifications are? Well, Russia and Iran are longstanding rivals.

Remember, the origin of the Cold War was when Stalin refused to remove his troops from northern Iran after World War II. And Harry Truman issued an ultimatum to Stalin to leave. And he refused. And so it went to the new Security Council. And that really was seated the Cold War. The Soviet intervention in Iran has alienated a lot of Iranians, and Iranians are deeply suspect of what the Russians want. And of course, during the Soviet era, Iran is an Islamic Republic and Soviet Union as an atheist, officially atheist state. Again, different interpretations of what man's law or what law should be in force, different understandings of what the obligation to the citizen was,

that they differed in many, many different ways. But the interesting thing that's happened in the last couple of years is that a relationship that had evolved into something that was cold and kind of calculating diplomatically or practical economically or when it came to strategy in the region, kind of tactical, has evolved into something far more meaningful. And this has been pushed a little bit by the Trump administration's targeting. of Iran trying to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal. And now this is increasingly becoming a strategic partnership. And you see this playing out particularly since 2015 in Syria. But it plays out, I think, across the region. And so when Putin went to Iran in November and went straight to see the Supreme Leader, that was a signal of how the longstanding animosity is over. And there is this moment when, whether it's intentional or unintentional, the Iranians and the Russians have common cause

on a lot of things. Unnerving. Watching that closely are our folks in Israel. While we patiently wait for Jared Kushner to solve the Middle East peace process, the situation in Gaza is looking really dicey. Israeli troops fired live ammunition last week at Palestinian protesters who were gathered by the Gaza-Israel border and apparently killed more than a dozen people. Do you know, is this Hamas trying to ferment violence? Do we think the Israeli forces overreacted? And how combustible is this situation in Gaza right now? Well, I'm not in Gaza, so I can't tell you what the intentions of Hamas or the Israelis might be.

But I can tell you it is very combustible. And there's a sense that the momentum that was initiated after the Trump administration took office on the peace process has dissipated enormously. and the hope among both the Palestinians and the Israelis that this actually might happen has frayed. And after the president's decision to acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of a Jewish state and to move the U.S. embassy there in May, that led the Palestinians to walk away. And there hasn't been a meeting between senior officials who used to be quite close between the administration. administration and the PLO office in Washington. And there's a sense that things could get far worse. There's a great fear of a third intifada that each one has become more militant, harder to control,

lasted longer. And there's a danger that if there isn't some kind of progress, some plan put on the table, something to discuss, something to get the two sides together, that events on the ground will overtake diplomacy, which unfortunately is the rule of thumb in the Middle East. Yeah, I mean, the Intifada for this thing is essentially an uprising, right, against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I believe the first one was in the late 80s. But each time, Hezbollah has stockpiled more rockets and advanced weaponry on the border and it's become more lethal. And as a consequence, the Israeli response has become longer and more militarized. And the bloodshed was enormous. You're right. And in many ways, the other border, Israel's other border to the north with Lebanon is even more. volatile. You have, I went to see Hezbollah. I lived in Lebanon for five years.

I've talked to Hassan Nisrallah, who's the chief of Hezbollah and I went to see the number two Hezbollah Naim Qasem last November. And there's a cockiness among the Hisbolahis now about the amount of weaponry they have. Somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 missiles pointed at Israel, and they feel that that has given them a deterrent capability. One of the big questions, of course, is do we see, you know, another war between Israel and Hezbollah? We see a little bit of that playing out over Syria. Now, Israel has carried out something like 200 air strikes against Hezbollah targets inside Syria, their arms convoys, their military deployments.

And that's another combustible situation that barring some kind of movement on the peace process could get far worse. Yeah. I mean, I think American diplomats and politicians have limited capacity to restrain the two parties in the situation in any instance. But, I mean, do you think we have enough credibility today to pull the Israelis and the Palestinians back from the brink? Or have we lost that ability? Well, the Palestinians are not talking to us. The problem with the Palestinians for the last decade, 12 years, in fact, has been. that there are two different sets of Palestinians. You have Hamas ruling in the West Bank and the PLO, the Fata branch of the PLO ruling in the West Bank, and they have been rivals. They have split officially. There was a reconciliation effort last year, but everything kind of crumbled under the weight of the decision on Jerusalem. And, you know, the problem with the Jerusalem issue is no one ever doubted that Jerusalem would be accepted, embraced as the capital of Israel. But it was always an issue of when.

Was this a reward at the end of the peace process? And was the Palestinian authority going to get a small sliver of Jerusalem as its nominal capital? Or as the Trump administration decided, do you do it up front with nothing in exchange? And so it's not the issue of whether Jerusalem is going to be the capital of Israel. The Palestinians understand that. It was the issue of at what point do you do it? And it's one of the pieces of leverage the United States. states had over Israel. We'll give this to you once you engage in a peace process and the world recognizes the borders of both states. You mentioned Syria. The other day, Trump offhandedly mentioned that the U.S. would be getting out of Syria very soon. Those were his words. I believe this was news to his national security team, the Pentagon, the press corps, basically everybody. Today, he floated that the Saudis should pay us if we stay in Syria. I think the one thing we've learned about Trump is that when he gets these ideas stuck in his head and he tweets them and he says over and over again, we should believe him or we should believe that he sincerely wants to

act on these suggestions. So do you have a sense of what our footprint is in Syria at this time and what might happen if we pulled out? Well, the United States has had hundreds of U.S. special forces in Syria who are acting as trainers and advisors to the Syrian Democratic forces, which dominated by Kurdish fighters but include some Arabs as well. And this was a combination that was critical, pivotal in beating back ISIS, taking back Raqa, the nominal capital of the Islamic Caliphate. And so the American presence there has been tremendously important. I was at a conference today with General Votel, who's commander of Sentcom, and Brett McGurk, who runs the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.

And both of them pointed out that there's still a lot to do, both in Iraq, where ISIS has a nominal presence along the border, but one that could grow, and it still has a big corner of Syria down in the eastern Euphrates Valley. And the United States really needs to stay there to complete the mission militarily, but also then to help stabilize. One of the challenges for the United States is we're great at winning things militarily. Our forces have been phenomenal, whether it was beating the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq, beating back ISIS or helping the Iraqis beat back ISIS. The Syrian Democratic forces beat back ISIS in Syria. The problem is we're not very good at creating alternatives, stabilizing environments. That's why we're still in Afghanistan 17 years later and why we had to go back into Iraq after leaving after eight years. So the question now is what is the priority? What do we need to do to make sure that we don't have to go back to Iraq again? or deeper into Syria so that we kind of finish the job and finish it efficiently, effectively. And I think this is where the big split is between President Trump and many of his national security advisors.

Now, that may change once you get a new Secretary of State, CIA Director of Mike Papeo or a new national security advisor in John Bolton. Both men have been much more similar in their worldview, particularly of the Middle East, than the previous men in their place. Yeah. I mean, you wrote a fantastic piece about Bolton and how hawkish he is, really just how out of the mainstream, even of Republican or Neo-Con conservative thought he is. I mean, in fact, by 2008, you had George Bush essentially denouncing his views. Everyone should read that piece, but I wanted to quickly highlight one piece of it that fascinated me. You mentioned that Bolton has long backed a cult-like opposition group called the M-E-K. They were on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations until about 2012. Now they pay politicians and national security officials of all parties, thousands of dollars to speak at their events. They've sort of been normalized in the D.C. swamp world. I bet most people have never heard of the M.E.K.

Can you explain what they are? And is this association troubling to you? The Majahedino Kalk or MECA was one of the groups involved in the revolution. They were on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations because they were responsible for the death of American military officials and diplomats in Iran. And this is a group that is both Islamic and a kind of cult. It's a very strange combination. For many, many years until the end of his rule, they were supported by Saddam Hussein. They had a big camp on the Iraqi border.

they received arms, funding, political support, strategic advice in countering the Iranian government. Now, this is not a group that is popular, even among those in Iran, who don't like the regime. It's been marginalized. In the early days, it was a player, but that quickly faded after it split with the revolutionaries, won its own way, and then became an active opposition group. This is one of the most interesting groups in terms of lobbyists in the United States. It has, as you mentioned, managed, often with a lot of money, to win over people like Louis Free, who was the director of the FBI, Tom Ridge, Homeland Security, Patrick Kennedy in Congress.

A lot of really big names, Bill Richardson, who was the UN ambassador and Secretary of Energy. There are a lot of people who have flown to Paris where it's now headquartered and spoken at their annual conferences. They have tried to buy out others, including Dave Petraeus, the former commander in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, with success in that case, but that it's been very active in lobbying. And Bolton has appeared at their annual conferences as he bragged last summer eight times. And so, yes, I'm concerned in terms of what Bolton might suggest, not just in terms of the op-eds he's written, which he said to get rid of Iran's bomb, you have to bomb Iran. Whether it's talking about regime change in North Korea or Iran, which are vastly different than arms negotiations. You're talking about major military operations, you know, expenditure of huge amounts of money with well-armed populations.

North Korea with nuclear weapons. This is kind of a losery in terms of what's actually doable. And the big question is, does Bolton want to go one step further than just walking away from the nuclear deal and encourage President Trump to support the M.E.K. as an alternative to the clerics who rule in Tehran. And I don't know the answer to that question, but it's certainly one that I think a lot of people in Washington are watching. Yeah, I mean, if you took Bolton literally, his writings, you would assume that he wants to use the military to achieve essentially every objective and every hotspot around the world, regime change in North Korea, regime change in Iran.

How literally do you think people who know him well take those words? Or do we think that the realities of the National Security Advisor position will moderate him at all? I don't know. I talked to Bolton when he was at the United Nations. Remember, at the time, he was so controversial he couldn't get confirmation from the Senate. So he was a recess appointment. And he was at the UN in 2005 and 2006. And in talking with other Republicans who were served with him in the Bush administration, you know, they talk about him being a very good functionary, that he runs a good meeting, that he as a Yale law graduate, that he understands legalisms.

But the question is, how do you marry a very efficient operator when it comes to the government bureaucracy with someone who has very aggressive or ambitious ideas about how to deal with adversaries. And, you know, it's hard to tell. I think there are some who think that he may moderate. But remember, he, the tenor of the administration has changed enormously after 15 months in office. That you had General McMaster, who was a thoughtful voice on foreign policy, who often urged, you know, whether it's compromise or understanding the position of our allies or

understanding the limits of U.S. military power and what would be involved in any military operation. And now you have him being replaced by Bolton. Rex Tillerson, who supported the Iran nuclear deal, being replaced by Mike Pompeo, who in Congress called for regime change. And so this is where the dynamics, the agenda, the willingness to step out much further than ever before, I think will be quite visible. Yeah, not a great trajectory. Robin Wright, I hope that Trump's new national security team has a percentage as good an understanding of these hotspots around the world as you do. Thank you so much for doing the show today and for being with me and for helping us understand a very complicated region. Thanks, Tommy. Great to be with you.

Thanks again, non-worldos for listening to POTSave the World. If you enjoy the show, please tell your friends about it and rate and review us in the iTunes store. It actually makes a difference and helps people discover all this good stuff. Have a great week. Talk to you soon.