The Bulwark Podcast - Mark Hertling: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Gamer

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

The military runs on young soldiers, and sometimes, chatroom braggarts who want to share classified documents get recruited too. Plus, the real world damage in Ukraine from the leaks, and Putin's paranoia. Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is April 13th, 2023. We're almost to the end of the week. There's a lot of things that are going on. I don't know how things could have turned out worse for the Tennessee Republican Party. They really become the poster state for political meltdown. Interesting development in Arizona where there was an election denier who was so extreme that even Republicans in the House decided they could do without her, and she was expelled. This is the story of Liz Harris, an election-denying Republican lawmaker who was expelled on a bipartisan vote. Democrats have their own headaches with Dianne Feinstein.

The speculation is rising that she's not actually going to come back to the Senate, depriving the Democrats of her vote. And there is now a push to get her to resign, which she is not doing so far. Meanwhile, if you ever wondered what witness intimidation in broad daylight looked like, Trump is suing his ex-lawyer, Michael Cohen, at the moment that Cohen appears poised to become a star witness against him in a criminal trial in New York. The fight over abortion pills remains a complete cluster you-know-what. Fox News had another epically crappy day in court. We'll talk about that on tomorrow's podcast. On the Grift Watch. New reports, the special counsel is focusing on Trump's fundraising off false election claims. But let's start with this story, which is just so mind-bending,

the story of the leaked Pentagon documents about Ukraine. And we are joined by retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling. General, welcome back to the podcast. Hey, Charlie. It's great to be with you once again. Some interesting news. Well, there's a lot going on, and I just want to get your sense of this leak, how it happened, how bad it is, what it tells us, where we're at. Let's start with the breaking news out of The Washington Post, whose journalism may be a little bit derivative of what Bellingcat reported a little bit earlier, but they believe they have identified the leaker of these secret documents,

somebody who worked on a military base. Let me just read you the first couple of paragraphs. The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies revealed the grim prospect for Ukraine's war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House, is a young charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic. United by their mutual love of guns, military gear, and God, the group of roughly two dozen, mostly men and boys, you could have guessed that, formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers.

But they paid little attention last year when a man called OG posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar and few people read the long note, one of the members explained, but he revered OG, the elder leader of the tiny tribe who claimed to know secrets the government withheld from ordinary people. So apparently he was, he was depressed that he wasn't getting enough attention. So he figured he was going to share this online with this group of guys. So general, you know, this is not Tinker, Taylor, soldier, spy type stuff. This is not the KGB. This is a bunch of lonely, bored guys on social media. So your thoughts about what we're learning about this.

You're right. It isn't Tinker, Soldier, Sailor, Spy. It's more like Mickey's Playhouse. And what's interesting, Charlie, is I had a short interaction with our mutual friend Tom Nichols about this last night. And Tom wrote a great article in The Atlantic about the quest for fame by young people, the desire not to be part of just the great unwashed, but actually standing out. And when I first read the Washington Post article last night, I just couldn't help but think Tom hit the nail right on the head with his piece a few weeks ago saying, this is it. It is an individual. And you asked me, what does that mean? I don't know. He could be a cleared intelligence analyst. He could be even a young officer. I doubt that. He's probably a specialist or a sergeant in the military or E4, E5 rank who likes to prove his value to his friends by citing that he knows how to get a hold of

secret documents. And as we sometimes say, it's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Well, this guy's about to lose an eye. As the article states, he was passing documents around this small group, proving how important it was. And then somehow those articles or those documents were put on another social media network and sent to the world. And now allegedly the ending of the article claims that this individual is fearing for his freedom and fearing for his life. And he's going to go in hiding because the deep state's going to take control. And it's just every single conspiracy type theory you could think of caught up in a group of young people. And it's just absolutely crazy that these guys would open up the portals to our nation's secrets

and conversations and potentially even sources and methods that others could gain information about because he wanted to prove himself as an important character in this small group of gun aficionados. When I introduced you, I should have mentioned, I reminded people that you were a former commanding general of the U.S. Army, Europe, and the Seventh Army. And I guess the question that is nagging this morning is how does an E4, E5 get their hands on this kind of top secret documentation? What does this say about the security and the way in which these documents are circulated and protected? You know, that's what everyone's question is today. And, you know, these secret documents aren't, you know, typed in, printed out

and delivered by generals and colonels. The members of a staff, the intel analysts, the individuals that really do the deep dives into some things and put the stuff on paper, the so-called PowerPoint rangers, as they're sometimes called, are lower ranking individuals. So it does not surprise me that a sergeant might have a secret or a top secret clearance. You know, in my headquarters in Europe, in my division in Germany and in Iraq, some of my best intel analysts were the younger ones because they would look at things from a different perspective. But the issue is, Charlie, these individuals go through the clearance procedures. They're vetted,

they have the background investigations, especially at the top secret level, that anyone else goes through. And they sign documents that state, hey, I know if I divulge any of the secrets that I'm made privy to, that I can suffer these kinds of consequences, X, Y, and Z, in terms of prison times, fines, demotion in rank, court marshals, whatever you want to say. Now, I'm assuming that the individual that's part of this group, the leader, the so-called OG, as they call him in the article, is probably a military member. I doubt he's a civilian. You don't have civilians that young doing these kinds of things, but the military really runs on young soldiers doing the kinds of things they need to do. And sometimes you have

free-floating electrons like this guy obviously was, who wants to portray himself as more than he appears to be. Before we move on to the substance, I just want to read from the Bellingcat report. This is the investigative collective research outlet that does fantastic work. And they reported, bizarrely, the Discord channels in which the documents stated from March were posted focused on the Minecraft computer game and fandom for a Filipino YouTube celebrity.

You can't make this stuff up. Then they spread to other sites, such as the image board 4chan, before appearing on Telegram, Twitter, and then major media publishers around the world in recent days. So let's talk about the real world damage. How bad is this as a breach? I mean, the documents have been described as highly damaging. They include photos of anticipated weapons deliveries, as well as troop and battalion strengths. I mean,

the Pentagon has confirmed that some of this stuff is legitimate Defense Department documents. Maybe the numbers have been altered, but general, how bad is this? It's interesting, Charlie, because in listening to the commentary and being part of the commentary, I've heard the spectrum of,

oh my God, this is horrible, all the way down to, eh, no big deal. People know we're doing this. And probably it depends on the audience. I personally don't think this will influence any kind of Ukrainian activity in their upcoming offensive. The kinds of things I read in the available documents, the ones that were surprisingly republished with document pictures in places like the New York Times, which surprised the hell out of me. In seeing some of the documents from a military perspective, even though they said top secret, no foreign at the top of the page, some of the information on those documents, yeah, it's important. It's a critical assessment of capabilities. But I think that probably Russia knows most of these things. Ukraine knows that the other side, their enemies probably have a feel for what's going on. There was some assessment of weapons systems and capabilities and the estimated by someone on the joint staff in the Pentagon when

they would run out if they continued to use the weapons the way Ukraine was using them. But truthfully, you know, that's true on both sides. So from the standpoint of operational intelligence leaking, I don't think it's a significant deal. But again, from another audience, from generating trust with our allies and partners, generating trust and ensuring we have trust with our partners on the battlefield, it's not a good look. In another audience, when you're talking about, oh, I don't know, some of the comments that were made about Egypt, Japan, South Korea, you know, they all know that the United States is constantly collecting intelligence, not only on

our foes, but on our friends. And maybe some of the things that were released, and I'm going to specifically point to the Egyptian potential for arranging a deal with Russia, that might be a good thing to send a message. Say, hey, we know what you're doing. Knock it off. We did that to Russia at the beginning of the war. They didn't take our advice to knock it off. They continued with the invasion. I have been in situations, I think I may have shared this once before on this show, where when I was in Iraq, I asked my boss at the time, General Petraeus, if I could share photographs that were classified as top secret with my Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga colleagues, because they were going at it against each other and lying to me about what

they were doing. So when I showed them, hey, I know exactly what you're doing, knock it off, they knocked it off. So, I mean, you know, depending on the audience, depending on who reads this, it can be all the way from a no big deal to an unfortunate loss of trust with the United States to another embarrassment on the world stage to possibly a good thing with some that need to be reminded we know what they're doing. So for the last year, we've had this ongoing conversation. Are we doing enough? Has Ukraine gotten enough of the equipment they need to win the war to be successful? And, you know, among the things that came out in this document, Dampa, this is from a CNN report. Several of the classified documents warn that Ukraine's medium-range air defenses to protect frontline troops will be completely reduced by May 23rd, very specific, suggesting that Russia could soon have aerial superiority and that Ukraine could lose the ability to amass ground forces in a counter-offensive. That seems like a big deal. What should the consequences of that be? You know, not just for what we're letting the Russians perhaps know, but also from the point of view of policymakers.

Yeah, a couple of things I'd point out in that statement, and I read that article too. In fact, I think I'm quoted in that article. There are a lot of woulds, might, could kind of language in that. And it's all based on intelligence and logistics assessments based on what we know. Now, those assessments might be completely accurate, but I was also surprised that they put a specific date of May the 23rd when things were going to run out. And it was like, where did you get May 23rd? What if they have a free fire day where a whole lot more missiles come in? Could it be May 22nd or May the 20th?

But when you're looking at documents, and that's one of the ones that was put in the New York Times that I just mentioned, it's like, okay, this is an intelligence officer and probably a logistical officer based on what they know saying, here is our assessment of where they could be. Now, in the New York Times report, what I saw was nothing but Russian systems that were listed. So is Ukraine running out of their Russian systems? Absolutely, they are. That's common sense. They've been using the hell out of them. But to get to your question, what does this do to policymakers? Well, the potential of how do we resupply very quickly

to counter the potential for running out of equipment. But truthfully, Charlie, Ukraine and the West and NATO have known for a long time that the use of munitions by the Ukrainian force, just like the Russian force, is unsustainable. So when the analysts take it one step further and say, hey, because of running out of ammunition, running out of air defense munitions, that the Russians now will have the capability to conduct an air campaign, that's when commanders step in to the intelligence folks and say, well, gee, that's interesting because they haven't conducted an air campaign yet. Tell me how the Russians are going to do that, because they're scared to death to go beyond the forward line of troops of the Russian forces.

So tell us why you think the running out of an SA-11 ammunition cache is going to create a new approach to warfare on the part of the Russians. It could, but again, this is where you have to have both the assessments and the analysis and the pragmatic approach to trying to figure out what is going on on the battlefield. Does that make sense? It does. I mean, and let's come back to the status on the battlefield. I want to talk about this leak because in that CNN article, they were also comparing this to other major leaks like, you know, Edward Snowden doing a document dump. But you made the point that in some ways this is worse because it is real time. Right. And it is exposing sources and methods, or at least it certainly could. One of the scary things, I think, is the fact that it reveals that we seem to know

a lot about what the Russians are going to do before they're going to do it, which would suggest that our penetration, at least before this leak of Russian intelligence, Russian military, was much more extensive than we might have imagined. The only thing I'd say to that is, yeah, probably. So what is the danger for the human assets or however it is that we're gathering this information? You know, it would be as if you would say, hey, someone's leaking secrets from inside the Pentagon. They must have a mole in there. Well, yeah, there's 25,000 people that work at the Pentagon. Let's find the mole. How do you do that? When you're talking about getting human sources from inside other government, that is truly an art form. And it's one of the reasons why there is such caretaking with these

kinds of documents. When you look at sources and methods, you're never going to name the person. You're never going to say what they are exactly doing. But usually there's a, if you go into a classified document, it will state some kind of fact about a foreign army or a foreign government. And then at the end of the sentence, it will have an italics. Here's where that came from. So as an example, me as an intelligence user, when I'm reading my intelligence book every morning, I can say, oh, okay, that's from an insider. That's probably pretty good information. It's a sole source resource. One person is saying this, and I'll put a certain amount of credence to that. But on the other hand, if the paragraph gives a long litany of things and then says, this is collected from multiple sources inside and outside of the government,

from different resources, satellite imagery, SIGINT, things like that, you say, ooh, this is pretty good stuff. I can rely on that. So I'm kind of going down a rabbit hole a little bit on you, Charlie, and I apologize for that. But, you know, the point of the matter is, yes, we've had insiders in a lot of government. And this is, you know, this is open source. I'm not telling any secrets here that provide us information. It depends on what the document says. And most of the secret documents, whereas they will state the source or the potential method, it won't give you any more of a clue other than to say, oh, man, if I'm Mr. Putin, I've got somebody in, went to Moscow before the war started and said,

we know what you're doing and we know what your intent is. We would highly recommend you not do it. So he has known for a long time that he has intelligence sources inside of his government. So this is an indication that I watched too many movies, but this strikes me that it can cut both ways, that it might expose some of our legitimate assets, but it also might sow a great deal more paranoia in the Russians to think that you don't know who to trust. You don't know who's listening to you. And given someone like Vladimir Putin in the enclosed, hermetically sealed world of the Kremlin, that might be a little bit mind-blowing for him. Well, let me connect a dot for you here.

The jailing of a Wall Street Journal reporter, alongside with the jailing of a lot of other inside reporters from Russia, tells me that Mr. Putin is quite paranoid about, first of all, internal reporting, internal journalists, but now he's increasingly becoming concerned about external journalists. So as I think a couple of news agencies and businesses have already said to their people, you might want to get out of Russia right now, because as much as we want information inside the system, the threats against individuals are too high. But what is that going to do? That's going to shut down some of our open source resources that a lot of journalists risk their lives to do because they're afraid of being thrown in jail. Well, that's interesting. I guess my read on the

arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter was simply that there was Vladimir Putin taking another American hostage. Do you think they're genuinely thinking or genuinely concerned that reporters like that are an intelligence resource or are, in fact, spying? No, I'm not suggesting the Wall Street Journal reporter was an intelligence resource. No, no, I understand that. But whether they thought that they actually think when they arrested him that they were arresting a spy as opposed to, hey, this is a way to screw with another American here. I think it's all of the above. I think it's, you know, screw with an American. We don't want any kind of news reports getting on the front all of the above. I think it's, you know, screw with an American. We don't want any

kind of news reports getting on the front page of the Wall Street Journal because this guy's in Moscow. It's all of the above. You know, in a closed society, in a closed authoritarian society, the leader can shut down the media. And, you know, I personally don't think the Wall Street Journal reporter is a spy. Don't get me wrong. He's just a reporter doing his thing. And, you know, I personally don't think the Wall Street Journal reporter is a spy. Don't get me wrong. He's just a reporter doing his thing. But Mr. Putin doesn't like reporters doing their thing. He does not like freedom of the press. In an authoritarian society, reporting and spying, you know, will look the same thing, right? I mean, you know, if you want to keep secrets.

This is Charlie Sykes, host of The Bulwark Podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I'm sure you're going to find my free Morning Shots newsletter, a great companion for understanding

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That's thebullwork.com slash morningshots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon. So let's talk about the status of the war in Ukraine. You know, the New York Times has this story about how the Ukrainians appear resolved to try to hang on to a neighborhood in Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. A lot of the allies are questioning why they're fighting for this tiny, you know, little corner block by block, which is sustaining huge casualties. And the Ukrainians are saying that they're doing it to wear down the Russian army while it prepares for the counter offensive. So your thoughts about that, whether or not that is worth it, or whether that just become a symbolic, politically important

goal that may actually be undermining the larger strategy? Your thoughts? What I would tell you, it's been a hell of a fight for the last four to six months in that area. The West has been focused on Bakhmut. But as a guy that kind of watches this on a daily basis, I can name Volodar, Marinka, Advivka, Kramina, Lyman, and Kupyansk as challenging battlefields as Bakhmut is. It's just that Bakhmut has seemed to be the magnet for all the reporters that are getting good film out of there.

So that entire front in the Donbass has become critically important because President Zelensky has said, I will not give up more ground and I'm going to fight for it. And it is a strategic political approach that has unfortunately caused the sacrifice of a lot of foolish Russian Wagner group and others that have continued to press the assault. From an operational perspective, Charlie, I'll tell you as a former commander, I would grade the fight as a very tough one. And I'm not sure if I were the general in charge, if I would have withdrawn forces, conducted a retrogade and attempted to attack from a different direction. But that would have given up ground. And I think that violates President Zelensky's dictum that he is wanting to take back sovereign territory. So there is that political inference to an operational commander saying,

stay there and fight and don't give up any more ground and don't give Progoysian the media opportunity to say, see that we won. Progoysian has really taken a hit in the Bakhmut fight, as well as some of the other ones that I mentioned. That's a good thing, because that's caused more turmoil within the Kremlin. And I think that's probably of great strategic value. So let's go back to this question about ammunition. I mean, the Times quotes a commander saying that they have at times run low on ammunition, and they think the Allies have been slow with deliveries. There are real challenges, aren't there? Getting all of the ammunition, whether it's from our stores or whether the Koreans have certain things.

So what are the challenges? What's going on, do you think? Are we getting the ammunition fast enough? What's slowing it down? Might that change? Do they have enough ammunition to wage a counteroffensive, an effective counteroffensive? Well, those are a bunch of questions.

I'll try and answer all of them. The first part is, well, since about July, both the Russians and the Ukrainians have been fighting an artillery battle. That is not the way the West and especially the U.S. fights battles. We don't rely only on artillery. We have combined armed forces of aircraft, helicopters, artillery, missiles, all the things that Ukraine doesn't have. And we can talk about that in just a second too. So the Soviet artillery school used to be in Ukraine. So both the Russians and the Ukrainians have a long history of depending on the king of battle, artillery. When all else fails, fire more ammunition. Now, Ukraine has adapted a little bit as soon as they got the M777s and the Centurions and the HIMARS to say, hey, this precision weapon system is a whole lot better than just firing a bunch of rounds in an area, which is what artillery does to try and disrupt

psychologically and physically an advancing force. It's a whole lot better if you go precision and actually strike the target and you use less stuff. Unfortunately, they don't have enough of that either. They've got a lot of it, but not enough to hit every single target. So it's a combination of just using the old Russian artillery that Ukraine has and firing the amount of stores of artillery rounds that they have while integrating some of the new systems that they've received from the West, which are more precision-based, without having the capability of a combined air-ground fight with very good precision airstrikes on key locations. That's a mouthful that I've just given you. I wish I had a whiteboard that I could draw this out for you. The last few days, this gruesome video showing Russian soldiers beheading a Ukrainian soldier probably over the summer, and the way in which the Russians appear to be more and more openly,

and I'm talking about things on state media as well as, you know, social media, where they're really, you know, embracing this kind of, you know, ISIS-like savagery. I mean, the release of these videos you would not think would be in Russia's interest, but they don't seem to care. So what is the impact of this? I'm trying to remember the last time that we had a, you know, quote-unquote, you know, civilized military engaging in this sort of behavior, but of course we're not dealing with a civilized military anymore, are we? Yeah, no, make no mistake. Russia is not a civilized military. They do not adhere to the laws of land warfare. There have been multiple, I mean, literally hundreds, if not thousands of violations of all the protocols of the Geneva Convention. And this is just another one. You don't torture or mutilate enemy bodies,

dead or alive, and they have done both. I don't know what more information is needed, but the Ukrainians are gathering it day by day in terms of the amount of war crimes that I would say are on the, if you look through historical examples, this has been, especially in an open source environment where there's film and social media and back and forth, this has been just a dynamo of hate violations that people will be tried for. The president of Russia has been accused of being a war criminal for one specific thing, and that's the transfer of children from Ukraine's parents to Russia. But in my read of every single protocol of the Geneva Convention, Russia has violated everything from battlefield to civilian abuse to journalist abuse to, I mean, name that tune. The over 100 articles of the protocols have all been violated. It's just amazing. I mean, Article 51 and 54 of Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention

says indiscriminate attacks on civilian population, destruction of food, water, and other materials needed for survival is a violation of those two articles. Has Russia done that? Yes. Go through any of the other ones and you'll say the same thing. They're all affirmative. And yet this was the week when former President Donald Trump sat down with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. And there was a lot of things that he talked about. But the one that I think has raised the most eyebrows is that once again, he fawns on some of the world's most brutal thugs, including Vladimir Putin, who he again described as this absolutely brilliant individual. And of course, he said the same things about Kim Jong-un and about President Xi of China. So no indication whatsoever that the genocide, the war crimes, any of this changes his opinion of them. And it comes at a time, as you point out,

when, you know, the evidence of the war crimes in Russia, you know, are mounting it, becoming, you know, a fire hose. But it also comes at a time when we are heading toward, you know, a military standoff with China, where they are clearly rattling their sabers. So what does it say to you that the former president continues to be locked into this incredible admiration for some of the world's worst actors, but also some of the more dangerous geopolitical foes that we face. It tells me, first of all, that I don't understand his definition of brilliant, because every one of those three that he named in that interview have failed miserably in terms of either their military, their economy, or just their status on the world stage. But secondly, it tells me that he admires them for some reason. And the admiration is probably centered on they get to do whatever they want and they

can squash all opposition and they are above the law because each one of the three of them are within their own country. They're all dictators. They're authoritarian figures. In the case of Putin, he's also a kleptocrat. So I guess it just tells me what Mr. Trump admires, and that is the ability to do whatever the hell you want as a monarch or as a leader of a country that is not in line with our constitution. And I'd also refer back to the fact that every single elected official who might be supporting those actions or not going against it

are violating their constitutional oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign, domestic, you know, not just Trump, but anyone who refuses to counter him on that is not defending the Constitution domestically. That's my view. That's perhaps a simple approach, but that's kind of the way I see it as a soldier. And we'll talk about how you see this as a soldier, because, you know, Donald Trump is just reminding us who he is because he said this before. But there are real world implications for this because he is running for president. He is the leading Republican candidate for president. The timing is seems important because we are gearing up for some kind of a confrontation with President Xi, the Chinese. We have men and women in uniform, and they're hearing Donald

Trump praise how brilliant this guy is and how incredibly stupid and weak and slimy, whatever word you want to use to describe our American commander in chief. I mean, how does this sound to hear the former president denigrating our military and our leadership at a time when he is praising the Chinese who are rattling their sabers? Well, I learned never to speak for all of the military, Charlie, and it's because anyone that's wearing the uniform of the country is pulled from the society and the divisiveness we have in our society, the divisions that are there without a look at the logic, reason, and passion for ideology and what we believe in, our so-called American values that are stated in numerous documents, have been stated in various

speeches throughout our history, things that we allegedly stand for. It just seems that some haven't really been thoughtful enough to say, do I stand for that or not? And this is a case that there are some in the military who probably think Mr. Trump is the greatest thing going because he's strong and tough, which I personally don't believe he's either of those, that he's thoughtful, which I personally don't believe he's either of those, that he's thoughtful, which I personally don't think, and that he has the best interest of making America great again, which I think is a catchphrase that's not attached to reality. But I would also say there's probably more within the military, and we're seeing polling data on that, that there has been a shift within the military since the Trump ages that says that

there is an increasing lack of support for that kind of dialogue, for that kind of false strength. But I can't say 100% of the military is going to be upset. But from a commander standpoint, what I'll tell you is when I was commanding U.S. Army Europe and people would come up and ask me about different things that were going on in the United States, allies would come up and ask me about that. I had to be a representative. And I can't understand what our current uniform senior leaders went through when Mr. Trump was president and saying we should get out of NATO and withdraw our troops from different locations that are attached to security agreements. What does the rest of the world think about us right now? What do our allies think? How worried are they? Remember when Joe Biden

became president, he said, you know, America is back. But there were people among our allies who said, yes, but for how long? So how does this look on the world stage when people are looking at the divisions in America, the kinds of debates that we're having, the kind of backsliding on issues like democracy? It feels like it's the best of times and the worst of times. We have this extraordinary moment where you have NATO really pulling together, having Finland joining NATO, the Western Alliance feeling stronger than ever. And yet at the same time, they have to be looking over their shoulders and going, what is going on in the United States? Where are you people headed? That is still happening. And I think from my travels, and I've been to a few countries

recently, where there is a little bit more comfort. And I think this shows up in pollings that most nations, especially the ones in Europe, believe that America is back in a leadership role. There's been a huge shift in terms of public polling in places toward supporting and realizing that America is back. But at the senior leader level, there is still concern because they see gun violence. They see the debates on freedoms that are seemingly crazy you know people are concerned about america you know and the thing is charlie you know this because you've traveled significantly i don't know what's going on in spain right now i have a little bit of understanding because i watch iraq because i serve there but i don't know what's going on in most countries. But I guarantee you that a vast number of people in every single country around the world watches the United States because they want to see

what we're going to do next. And their knowledge is often quite granular. You know, you talk to reporters from New Zealand or from Denmark or from Australia, and they know far more about the internal workings of American politics than the average American does right now. They're watching it so closely. They absolutely do. So just one last thing. Looking back to the days when you were in Europe, how amazing is it that Finland has joined NATO, extending the border by hundreds of miles? I grew up hearing the word Finlandization, a country that basically had to subordinate its

foreign policy to its much bigger, much scarier neighbor. And to have little Finland standing up in this particular way is really one of those extraordinary moments in geopolitics, isn't it? It really is. And I'll share a personal anecdote, but the rationale of if Americans don't see this, they should. And that is the fact that every NATO nation, every European nation realizes based on this war, that it would be very difficult to go it alone, that they've got to be part of something bigger. If there's the potential for bullies around the world looking to go back to the 20th century or even the 19th century and invade your country. And they want to be part of a security agreement. And make no mistake, the countries in Europe who were once under Russia's thumb, the ones that were part of

either the former Warsaw Pact or the Soviet satellite system, never want to go back to that. And for Putin to say that anyone was coerced into joining NATO is an easily refutable claim because every single one of those nations that are now part of NATO had to work very hard to meet the requirements of the members access program, the map, to get in. And it's because they don't ever want to go back to what they used to have under Russia. Finland doesn't. The anecdote I was going to tell you is I spent a lot of time in Sweden because we had a training center there as a partner. The chief of their ground forces was a guy by the name of Bernd Grundevik, who became a very good friend of mine, three-star general. And every time I went there, I said, so kiddingly said to him, so when are you guys going to join

NATO? And he said, well, he said, our politicians don't understand yet why we should. Now they understand. So the militaries have understood for a long time, Sweden needs to get in too. But that is kind of an indicator of why a collective security agreement in either Europe or other places in the world is very important. General Mark Hertling is a retired Lieutenant General and CNN military analyst. He is a former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army General. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It is always a pleasure, Charlie. Thanks for all the things you're doing too. Well, I always feel smarter after I talk with you. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.