The Bulwark Podcast - Eric Edelman: A Struggle Between Democracy and Tyranny

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Zelensky didn't hit a wrong note, and he embodied the Ukrainian people's will to freedom on the floor of the US Congress. Plus, from a realpolitik perspective, the degradation of Russian military power via US aid to Ukraine is a bargain. Amb. Eric Edelman joins guest host Bill Kristol today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Biden and President Biden. Very pleased to have Eric Edelman, the host of Shield of the Republic. Very qualified to discuss the meaning of the Zelensky visit, but also the broader question of where we stand in the war in Ukraine and the broader implications of it. Eric obviously served at very senior positions in the U.S. government and the State Department and Defense Department and White House. Knows a lot about how these presidential visits go and also knows a lot about Russia and Ukraine. So perfect guest. So Eric, thank you for joining me. Bill, it's great to be with you this morning. So let's get right to the chase. We have a lot to discuss. It was a pretty amazing day yesterday,

didn't you think? What'd you think about the speech, the visit? You've seen many of these in your career. Not like this one. This really was, I think, an incredibly historic and important visit. Zelensky was clearly coming here to shore up support in the capital of his most important international patron in the middle of the most consequential war in Europe since the end of the Second World War. And in that sense, it really does bear, I think, comparison to two other historic milestones, one of which many people have observed, which is the speech that Winston Churchill made to the United States Congress in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor during his two-week visit to Washington in December and January of 1941 and 42. But I would also, in its moral sense, compare it to the speech that Vaclav Havel gave to a joint session of Congress in February of 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist bloc in Eastern Europe and the triumph of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in November of 1989. And I think Zelensky's speech compares favorably, I would say, to both speeches

historically. I mean, I went back and checked the record and Churchill was interrupted seven times by applause by the joint session of Congress, drew a particularly big roar when he said of the Japanese, what do these people think we're made of? But Zelensky was interrupted by standing ovation 23 times in a 26-minute speech, which gives you a sense of the strength of the, as he put it, bipartisan, bicameral support that he got. And I think he did not hit a wrong note, by the way, Churchill did. I mean, I think both you and I yield to very few people in our admiration for Winston Churchill, but Churchill in his speech actually tried to go back and talk about the interwar period and American isolationism. And there were a lot of folks on both sides of the

aisle who had been part of that isolationist tradition between the wars who kind of sat on their hands during the speech and didn't applaud Churchill as raucously as Zelensky got, you know, greeted. So it really was an incredibly historic moment. Yeah, I didn't think I'd be here hosting a podcast and criticizing Winston Churchill. But I suppose that wasn't maybe as politic as he could have been. Maybe he wanted to really bring home to people that was kind of a mistake. Kind of a good lesson for the next 80 years, actually. It's not that he was wrong. He was right.

Right. No, of course. That's the problem, right, in politics. It's usually the things you say that are right that are most worrisome. Well, people can't forgive you for pointing out that they were wrong. Well, that's true. Yeah, we've learned that the last few years, right? Yeah. The Havel speech, I hadn't thought of at all. And I guess I was in the White House then, and I don't really remember it. I mean, that's so interesting that you thought of that, though. The thing that struck me about Zelensky's speech last night was it didn't have

the kind of rhetorical flourishes, obviously, that Churchill would bring to the table. And by the way, you know, FDR had to go deliver a State of the Union a week or two after Churchill, and there was a lot of concern in the White House that Churchill had upstaged him, although Roosevelt did quite well in that speech, and actually Zelensky made a reference to that speech. But, you know, Havel's speech was not just about kind of the war as Churchill's speech was. Havel's speech was sort of an elegy to the end of the Cold War and talked about the importance of truth versus lies and the importance of the moral as opposed to the material. And actually, your mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the late great historian of Victorian Britain, wrote a really terrific essay about Marx and

Hegel and Havel's speech. I mean, she was drawing not only on Havel's speech, obviously, but our friend Frank Fukuyama's essay that had appeared that fall on the end of history, what she said seems to me to be very apropos. She finished the last words of her essay very apropos for what happened last night. And it says, the real movement of history, it turns out, is fueled not by matter, but by spirit, by the will to freedom. And I think what Zelensky incarnated last night, you know, on the floor of the U.S. Congress was the will of the Ukrainian people to freedom. Now, that's terrific. I should tell our listeners that you and I didn't coordinate this ahead of time. And I don't actually remember that essay. Now I have to go back. This podcast,

there's so much work to do this afternoon. I have to go back and read Havel's speech and read my mom's essay. And it does sound apt. So what about the visit as a whole? I mean, you've been, as I said, you've seen many of these very close up. And then, of course, also as an ambassador, looking back at the U.S., maybe when the president of one of your countries would visit and so forth. So what struck you about President Biden and the Oval Office meeting, the press conference? Well, before we completely leave the speech, I mean, this is both, I think, a function of the speech, but also the photo ops and the joint press conference that President Zelensky and

President Biden held, as well as what I believe were the messages that Zelensky delivered in his private consultations with leaders in Congress, particularly Kevin McCarthy. And I think that the messages were the following. First, thanks, an expression of gratitude for all the support, almost $22 billion with the addition of the $1.9 billion that President Biden announced yesterday of military assistance to Ukraine plus the financial assistance. So expressing the gratitude, not just of Zelensky personally, but of the Ukrainian people to the United States, very, very important. Second was a statement that despite the disproportion in material resources between Russia and Ukraine and all the doom and gloom that accompanied the initial invasion February 24th, when people thought the Ukrainians would fold up in no time against this Russian

assault. He delivered the message, as he said in the speech, Ukraine is still alive and kicking and has every prospect, if it continues to get support, of victory. Very important message, I think. He framed it very well, as did Biden in the press conference, as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism and tyranny and for a liberal rules-based international order where national sovereignty is respected and territorial aggression is resisted. Nonetheless, I think he also made an argument that despite all the support and the largesse that Ukraine has benefited from, it still needs more. And finally, I think in a very important argument, as he framed it in the speech, this is not charity for the Americans. This is an investment in international security and democracy. And even at $100 billion,

the destruction of Russian military power that that has accomplished is a bargain, I think, by anyone's estimation. So that's just such an important point, even from a realpolitik point of view, if you assume Russia's not a friend, which seems like a good assumption, and that a weaker Russia's better for the world and better for us. as a pure kind of cost-benefit trade-off. It's, yeah, it's a good point to make. People don't make that point enough. Absolutely. And I think he framed it very well. And he also, look, I mean, part of rhetoric is an appeal not just to reason, but to the emotions. And so I think he very effectively, you know, tied, you know, the battles in Ukraine to historical battles in American memory. I mean, he talked about the Battle of the Bulge when American soldiers repulsed

the Nazis, which was a way of getting in the point that the real Nazis here are the Russian forces that are entering Ukraine and creating territorial aggression against Ukraine, as opposed to the alleged Nazis in Ukraine that Putin and his propagandists keep talking about. It was, I thought, a nice way to connect with Americans. And then he talked about the Battle of Saratoga, which was, of course, a crucial battle in our own revolution, the importance of which probably was lost on most of his listeners, frankly. But the point there was that after the Battle of Saratoga, when the Americans defeated General Burgoyne's effort to divide the colonies, France came in as an ally of the United States and provided from that point on about 95% of the shot and powder that were used in the revolution, absolutely crucial to American victory there. So an important, I think, connection to an American audience. And he also made two

other points in the speech, I think, that are worth touching on for a second. One is the emerging Iranian-Russian alliance, knowing full well that there are very few countries in the world who score as negatively with the American audience as Iran, but also making the point, which could have gotten lost in all of this, that the Russian public, as he put it, is being poisoned by the Kremlin, making the case that, you know, this is not a war against Russians, it's a war against Putin's regime, really. And that, I think, was an important point to make as well. No, that's good. I mean, you really bring home, I think, how much he said in a very short speech,

you know, 26 minutes with all the applause interruptions, probably, what, 20 minutes of reading or something like that. But he made those points and did so sort of tersely, but also effectively. And yeah, so in that respect, the speech when you first watched, I found was, I mean, his English isn't perfect, and the pronunciation isn't always quite as easy to understand. And so it was, of course, moving, and no question about that. But one sort of didn't quite appreciate the artistry in it, maybe, until you go back and look at it a second time. And a lot of themes that can be developed by friends of Ukraine here, and of course, by, he'll continue

to emphasize over there. No, I agree. I mean, it wasn't as fluid as Churchill or Havel, but, you know, the authenticity of Zelensky as a person, I think, came across very well. Now, look, it's helped by the fact that, you know, he has training as an actor. I mean, that doesn't hurt. I mean, it didn't hurt Ronald Reagan either. And so he knows how to rise to these moments. On the other hand, I think he was genuinely moved by the massive standing ovations that he received so many times during the course of the speech. And you could see that, I think, in his face as he was speaking. It was a very moving moment. So let's talk about the rest of the visit. There was a private meeting, which we've gotten a little bit of readout from, and then the press conference. Yeah, well, let me start by stipulating that, thank God, Joe Biden was elected president

in November of 2020, because, you know, without that fact, you know, this would be a very different conversation that you and I would be having. And the Biden administration deserves, in my view, a lot of credit for the way it handled the run-up to the war in terms of its release of intelligence, as well as its efforts at both alliance management and now coalition maintenance since February 24th. And I think they deserve a lot of credit. I give a lot of credit, particularly to Secretary of State Tony Blinken for that. But having said all that, there were some things that came out in the press conference that I found a bit troubling. I mean, on the one hand, Biden used the press conference to sketch out for the first time, in a comprehensive way, some of the themes that Zelensky hit on.

This is an important war for Americans, that the outcome matters, that it's a struggle between democracy and autocracy, that the rules-based order is at risk if the Russians succeed. All of that is something I wish he had done in an Oval Office address maybe a couple of months ago, but I suppose better late than never. But I think he also managed to step on the message a bit in the very last Q&A when he was asked about one of the systems that the Ukrainians have asked for but haven't gotten, the Atakom missiles, which have a 300 kilometer range, which would allow the Ukrainians to hit deeper and potentially into Russian territory, which the administration has denied the Ukrainians because of its fears of escalation risk. And Biden's answer after stressing in his opening remarks that the alliance is united as it's never been, that the EU is as united as it's ever been. He then said, but if we give them a tack, then the whole alliance will get blown up. And then he said, I think I've talked too much. And he kind of backed away from the whole

discussion. I think that unfortunately sort of marred the visit. And I think it highlights what the administration still has ahead of it to do. I mean, you know, part of this visit, as I said at the outset, was to shore up support in the United States, because in the aftermath of the midterm elections with the Republicans taking the House with a very narrow majority, there have been a lot of voices and you, you know, some of them have already been raised on the MAGA right last night and today about this visit. You certainly saw, you know, Matt Gaetz and Ted Cruz and Lauren Boebert on screen not standing up as part of the standing ovations that Zelensky got. Zelensky obviously is sensitive to all that and wants to reinforce the very strong bipartisan support you see in polling, although

there is some distressing erosion among Republicans. My view is if the administration wants to maintain public support for this effort in Ukraine, and again, I give them a lot of credit for the $40 billion package. The package that's moving through on the omnibus is even larger. It's $47 billion. By the way, the Congress plussed that up from what the administration initially asked for. So I think Senator McConnell really deserves an enormous amount of credit here because he's been pushing very hard, gave a terrific floor speech yesterday about this. You know, all of that is to the good. But what I think the administration really needs to do now is, first of all, provide Ukraine everything it possibly can to win this war as quickly as

possible. I mean, Putin's clearly trying to play for time, hoping that the support here will evaporate, that the divisions between the United States and its allies will emerge. And so we have to, I think, operate in a much more speedy way. And that means the attack comes, it means both manned and unmanned aircraft, more air defenses, one Patriot battery is great, but that's nearly not enough. You need a layered defense against the variety of threats that the Russians are raining down from the air on Ukraine's cities. Tanks probably would be necessary for the Ukrainians to take back territory. You know, there's a lot of discussion about the M1 tank being too difficult for the Ukrainians to master, that it takes time to train and they're expensive to

maintain, all of which is true. On the other hand, these were the tanks we planned to defend Europe with against the Soviet Union. So I kind of find it a little hard to understand the reluctance to provide them. I think the administration also needs to push allies more to step up on the economic side. I mean, I think Americans are willing to be the arsenal of democracy. How long they're willing to provide a subvention to Ukraine's budget. I'm not sure of. On sanctions, I think there's much more to be done. There's been a lot of sanctions activity, but more recent assessments suggest that the Russian economy is only going to shrink by 3.5% this year, as opposed to the 30 or 15% that people were talking about when this conflict started, which suggests that there's scope for much more on sanctions. Former Ambassador Mike McFaul is part of a working group out at Stanford that's issued 10 reports that indicate there's way more that can be done to cut off all Russian banks from the international banking structures and more that can be done in other sectors of the economy

to sanction Russia. And then finally, I think the administration ought to adopt as a formal aim, making Russia pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine. And that I think can be done, you know, by the 300 billion in frozen and seized assets that Russia has outside the country. That was really excellent, Eric. And it really shows that one could be extremely grateful that Joe Biden and not Donald Trump is president and praise the Biden administration appropriately, but also give him a lot of constructive suggestions and a little bit of criticism. There's a lot to be done by us. What's your sense of the war? You've been following it very closely in the languages, or at least to Russian. Ukrainian is pretty close to Russian, right? Can you make your way

through Ukrainian a little bit or not so much? That's pretty hard for me. And my Russian is a little rusty, although it's been getting a pretty good workout on Telegram. Who expected 30 years maybe after the end of the Cold War that there you, you know, people like you studied Russian in grad school to be more effective diplomats and officials during the Cold War. It's had quite a workout here in 30 years, three decades later. What's your sense of on the ground? I mean, how does it stand? What do you expect over the next month, two months, three months, the winter? Well, there are a couple of different things going on. Of course, there's a lot of focus on Bakhmut, which is where Zelensky was the day before he got on a plane and flew to Washington, which is a city in the Donbass where the Russians have just been

throwing bodies into the meat grinder in a kind of World War I-like trench warfare. I mean, if you see the pictures that have come out of that area, the fighting, I mean, it really does look like Flanders Fields, you know, in photos from World War I. Not clear exactly why the Russians have put so much effort into Bakhmut. I mean, it's not particularly strategic. I mean, it would be a big city that they could say that they've gained, but it's a little bit hard to explain why they're doing it. Some of it seems to be tied to Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, who is also sometimes referred to as Putin's chef because he's done a lot of catering for the Kremlin and is looking for a bigger role and perhaps more contracts as part of the Russian military effort. And so his

forces seem to be playing a big role there, trying to show that they're more effective than the regular military. The losses have been horrific on both sides. I mean, Ukrainians are taking some losses there as well. They continue to make kind of incremental, very, very incremental progress on the Svatove Kremina line in Donbass, that is the Ukrainians are. But I think the terrain is not yet frozen. So it's making it a little harder for them to move in. And the Russians are throwing a lot of bodies into this from those so-called mobics,

the people who they've mobilized. In the south, there's, again, very incremental gains, you know, on the eastern side of the river opposite Kherson, which was liberated a few weeks ago by the Ukrainians. So I think the Ukrainians want to continue. They don't intend to take a winter pause. I mean, the Russians seemingly would like to take some kind of pause. On the other hand, they also seem to be suggesting that they might, and the Ukrainians have suggested that the Russians may be gearing up for yet another offensive, maybe coming from the north. This is why Putin's recent trip to Belarus to meet with Lukashenko may be important. He's trying to get the Belarusians into the war.

The Russians have been sending a lot of equipment to Belarus. They've been doing some training with the Belarusians. Lukashenko doesn't seem to be that enthusiastic about doing it. Certainly his military is not very enthusiastic about being a part of this. And it's also not clear that the Russians can really generate much combat power with the mobilized forces that they're trying to put in the field. These people have not had very much training. They don't have very good equipment. Putin just had a meeting with the military leadership in which he said, you've got to get them good equipment and you've got to completely train them and do all this other

stuff. It's not clear that they can actually do that given the way the military institutions have been hollowed out by corruption. Again, I mean, at the risk of repeating myself, I think the imperative here is to allow the Ukrainians to build on the momentum that they've established and not let their counteroffensives culminate before they've been able to take back more territory. And in particular, I hope they're able to take back the territory along the southern coast from Mariupol down to the isthmus of Crimea opposite Kherson and Mykolaiv, because that is really essential for Ukraine to have to maintain its independence and sovereignty. Yeah, that's very helpful and very thorough. So it sounds like you don't expect a huge amount

to change. I mean, one never knows in war, God knows, but in the next month or two, maybe more incremental progress. So I guess one just never knows if there are breakthroughs and so forth. I also wonder about Europe. You've served there. I think were you DCM in Prague, if I recall correctly? And then I passed you to Helsinki, to Finland. I mean, my sense is just that the European situation, both in terms of their political will and actually the energy situation,

is better than we might have expected a few months ago? Not a huge amount of pressure from Europe to capitulate or too much foolish pressure on Zelensky, is that right? Yes. I mean, I think that's basically right. The Europeans are much more united, and certainly the Russian aggression and the war crimes have been a huge wake-up call for many in Europe who had illusions that Russia could be dealt with like a normal nation. But I think underneath that, there are a lot of differences. So frontline states, that is to say countries that border Russia, like Finland, like Poland, like the Baltic states, I think have been in the forefront of warning against the idea of negotiations anytime soon,

providing maximum aid to Ukraine. I mean, the Baltic states stick out in a per capita basis. They haven't supplied, obviously, nearly as much as the United States has. But on a per capita basis, they've supplied quite a bit of military assistance to Ukraine. You've got at least two countries in Europe that are terribly ambivalent, Hungary and Turkey. And it's no accident, comrade, that they are essentially run by authoritarian dictators, you know, Viktor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They have much more complicated relations with Putin. And as a result, you know, the Turks have made it clear that they're not going to abide by the sanctions that the United States and Europe imposed. The Turks

have nonetheless, because under the Montreux Convention, they control access to the Black Sea, because they have worked out this grain agreement, because they maintain a line, open line of communication with the Russians, that they have facilitated some prisoner exchanges. They continue to get some forbearance from Washington about their role, also because they continue to threaten to veto the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, which is actually one of the more important and underappreciated strategic shifts that this war has created. They're getting a lot of forbearance. And because both the EU and NATO operate on the basis of consensus, you know, Hungary as well, you know, has been able to slow certain things down, like the oil price cap and things like that.

Britain has been very steadfast. In France and Germany, both have done better than one might have expected. But in both countries, I think you still see a lingering desire to get some kind of negotiation going so we could just return to the status quo ante and not have to deal with all of this messy stuff. You see that both, I think, in Scholz and Macron, that both of them have, I think, this kind of ambivalence about them. I mean, they continue to support Ukraine, which is good, but they also clearly would like to find some way out of this as quickly as possible. And when you talk to people in Europe, my sense is I've just talked to a few think tank types or whatever, just ask them, well, what's your what's life like? I mean, how bad are your energy bills? And they're not great, but it feels like it's less dire than we thought it would be. Is that your sense? Yes. Just good luck or good policies on our part or on their part? It's a

combination of things. Some of it's luck, some of it's, you know, export of U.S. and Algerian and other gas to Europe to fill the void created by cutting back on Russian supplies. I mean, since we started this podcast, Bill, talking about Hegel, you know, he was famous for describing the cunning of history. And the cunning of history here is going to be that Vladimir Putin will go down in history as the father of Ukrainian nationalism and the father of Europe's turn away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. And turn away from Russian fossil fuels in particular. Russian fossil fuels, yeah, in particular, yeah. Which is good. So it's good both from a climate point of view and from a European independence liberation from Russia, presumably point of view.

He'll be the father of the green transition. Isn't that something? I mean, that is a cunning of history thing. That's assuming, of course, that we stay the course and Ukraine is able to prevail, more or less, depending on what prevail means, but certainly deny Putin a victory. That would be seems absolutely crucial. People can't count on that until it happens, right?

But what about the effect here? I've read a couple of articles on Zelensky reminded us who we are. And I sort of do believe that. I think stepping back from the speech over the 10 months or so, I guess it's 10 months now, it's amazing. Since the war began, almost exactly 10 months, February 24th. I feel like it's had a big effect here and a big effect elsewhere in the world. I was talking with an Iranian dissident the other day, an Iranian who lives here but had been a dissident.

And that person said that he thought that Ukraine had a pretty big effect there too, you know, that, I mean, somehow the whole notion of liberal democracy being valuable and worth fighting for has sort of had a bit of a revival here in 2022, I think, maybe, hopefully. And I think Ukraine deserves an awful lot of credit for that. Absolutely. And Elliot Cohen and I discussed this in our year-end wrap-up on Shield of the Republic, that this has been a bad year for autocrats. And you see this both in the popular uprising in Iran that you were just mentioning, but also in the protests against the COVID lockdowns in China, where people were calling for down with the dictator with regard to Xi Jinping.

So it was just COVID lockdowns, but it was the fact that one man could actually just decree this that I think seemed to have resonated with the Chinese public. And of course, I think that's one of the things that Chinese leadership is most fearful of, its own people, which is why it spends almost as much or maybe more on internal security than it does on its defense budget. So, yes, I mean, you know, Frank Fukuyama has written about this. David Frum has just written about it. There's been a lot of discussion about the so-called democratic recession over the last decade or so as populist regimes and authoritarian regimes of one sort or another have risen up, you know, in a variety of places in Asia, in Europe, in other parts of the world.

You know, that seems to now be a potential inflection point where the forces supporting liberal democracy are maybe now going to be more ascendant. And it's one of the reasons why it's so important for Putin to be defeated. It's really important for people to not see that tendency as ascendant and rather remember why liberal democracy is really important. And I think Putin's war has done that. You know, I do feel just talking to you and I, we're in government in the 80s. I came to Washington to be in the government. You served a little before that and were in the Foreign Service and quite senior position

by the end of the 80s. And I feel a little bit the way I felt then, that, you know, we really could be living through a historic moment, an important moment. And it's so important for us to try to get things as right as we can. Not that we got everything right even then. But I don't know, I just feel like it's a moment sort of different, not to minimize anything that's happened in between. And we've all, I think, tried to do our best and contributed, maybe made some mistakes in various ways, but and all kinds of other important fights. But this, I just feel that this is a moment different from

most of those over the last three decades. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think this is a hugely historic moment. That's why I think Zelensky came. I think he recognizes it. I think President Biden recognizes it. Even if I have my criticisms, I do think he understands the importance of this fight and why it's so important that Russia not succeed and that Ukraine emerge victorious. I mean, when I say that Ukrainian nationalism, Putin will be seen as fathering it, I think there is a potential if the war ends in the right way, that Ukraine will, because it will have to be rebuilt because there's been so much damage, it will be in some sense like Germany and Japan after World War II. It will be rebuilt on a completely different basis, completely oriented towards the West,

with a lot of emphasis on high tech. David Ignatius has had two very interesting columns in the Washington Post about the potential military technical revolution that is being demonstrated on the battlefield in Ukraine with the use of drones and sensors and artificial intelligence, et cetera. And Ukraine clearly wants to be in the forefront of all this. And, you know, nothing could be, I think, healthier in the long run for Russia than to have a Western-oriented, successful, economically vibrant, technologically proficient Ukraine next door. That's a hopeful note to end on, an appropriately, realistically hopeful note to end on in the middle of Hanukkah and with Christmas coming right up.

So, Eric, thanks so much for joining me, for joining all of us on this very enlightening, forward podcast today.