The Bulwark Podcast - Susan Glasser: A Superpower in Crisis

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

The U.S. is knee-deep in the war in Ukraine, and now another potentially enormous war in the Mideast may draw us in. At the same time, military and ambassadorial appointments have been blocked, and we don’t have a speaker of the House. Our own political crisis is undermining America's role in the world. Susan Glasser joins Charlie Sykes. show notes: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/16/trial-by-combat 

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This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Whether you're navigating workplace stresses, complex relationships, or family dynamics,

therapy's a great tool for facing your fears and finding a way to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.com. podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is October 11, 2023, and the horrors out of Israel continue yesterday. IDF forces uncovered the bodies of 40 babies, many of whom had been beheaded. The horrors continue to stack up. The hundreds of young people who were raped and murdered at a peace concert. The kibbutzes were, dozens of people were just gunned down and

massacred. The continuing abduction of Israeli citizens. Yesterday, though, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, issued a very, very forceful condemnation. If there was any concern that he was going to soft-pedal any of this, I think it was just abuse. This was one of the strongest statements of support from any U.S. president. Let's listen. Bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas, a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews. This is an act of sheer evil. An act of sheer evil. We're joined by Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington and has been writing about international affairs for

some time, a former editor-in-chief of foreign policy, where she covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also the co-author most recently of The Divider, A History of Donald Trump and the White House with her husband of The New York Times, Peter Baker. Welcome back to the podcast, Susan. Thank you so much for having me, Charlie. I want to talk about your big piece in The New Yorker about Jake Sullivan and the incredibly detailed reporting and revelations in that piece. But let's just take a moment to assess where we are at here. Joe Biden, I think, very accurately described what's happening in Israel as sheer evil.

And I guess one of the things that shocks me is how many folks, and let's be honest about it, on the pro-Hamas left, are having a hard time recognizing this as pure evil. We're getting a lot of whataboutism, a lot of rationalizations, a lot of, you know, what about the historic context, all of this stuff. But I don't know how you look at these images coming out of Israel and just are not shocked that this is not just a moment of moral clarity that, you know, evil is evil. This is objectively evil. Yeah, I think there's no nuance to it. It's not complicated. There are a lot of things in this world that present difficult moral choices, and condemning the murder of civilians and babies and old people is not a complicated moral choice, Charlie.

You know, let's be very clear on that. You know, look, it's a hard thing to know. This is a very loud, very online faction of the American public. It's not necessarily a very large faction of the American public unless you happen to be on a college campus. It's been painful to watch the inevitable polarized debates, reflexive thinking across the political spectrum in the U.S. You know, a crisis like this reveals, unfortunately, a lot about the weaknesses of the system that's trying to absorb the impact of this crisis. And so we see the fault lines in Israeli society, we see the broader fault lines in the Middle East, and of course, we see here in the United States, our own fault lines. I just want to like,

take a step back and recognize that a terrible tragedy has taken place. And it's very important to me to, you know, sort of keep centered in that a thing happens here that was a terrible thing, and then to go from there into our analysis of what it could be. I would like to think that crises like this bring out the best in us. That used to be kind of the template. But now, as you point out, it brings out the degree of our divisions. And, you know, Tim Scott, among other Republicans yesterday, comes out and says Joe Biden has blood on his hands. I mean, this kind of extreme, you know, demagoguery, the cynicism behind this. And then you have, look, I understand that there are people who are critical of Israel. I understand that

there are, you know, legitimate differences and the people are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. But when I see these pieces of literature being distributed on university campuses where they feature the hang gliders that the Hamas terrorists use to attack the young people at the concert, when I see this kind of imagery or the rhetoric from some of these student groups that says that Israel alone is responsible for this. Or watch the scenes from the Democratic Socialists of America rally in New York City where they're applauding and laughing about the atrocities. And this is an ugly, ugly moment in our political history. There is ugliness, you know, in so much of politics right now. And it's hard to watch. It's hard to watch the coverage from the ground. And as we find out what's happened, and by the way, we have not yet fully seen, I think, the full scale of the

devastation. We're already over 1,200 confirmed dead, according to the Israeli government. Proportionally speaking, that's well over 45,000 people equivalent in the United States. If you think about what a small country Israel is, it's the scale of the loss is enormous. Like you, I was also struck by some of the absolutely wild and overheated comments by, you know, rightwing public officials in this country. Tim Scott, whose alleged brand is a certain, oh, I'm the kinder, gentler token guy in the Republican field. And then to just go ranting, ranting and claiming without, I mean, just in such a wild-eyed way that Joe Biden has blood on his hands. Joe Biden is responsible for this. Like, imagine how a Republican senator would have felt to have a Democrat go off like that on George W.

Bush on September 12th, 2001. It made me feel a little bit of a, you know, not in the pit of my stomach because it suggests, you know, the opportunities for demagoguery here are so irresistible. And of course, we live in this moment when demagoguery is seen as the recipe for getting ahead in our politics, as well as in Israeli politics. At any rate, that's a long prelude to saying we don't really know what's going to happen. On this issue, by the way, as on so many issues right now, we can talk about the war in Ukraine, because these are not unrelated subjects. There is a broad swath of the American people that stands with Israel, that stands with Ukraine, that understands we are at a moment of international challenge to American leadership,

in part because of our own internal weakness and divisions. This is a mirror of the debate happening inside Israeli society today, by the way, where there is going to be a profound reckoning and self-examination, and that is already occurring inside Israel about the extent to which that country's own internal divisions and fights over Prime Minister Netanyahu's efforts to reform the judiciary might have caused a very security-focused society to take its eyes off of security. I think this is such an interesting question, you know, this whole question of do we project weakness? What does the rest of the world think of us? What do they think of the divisions in Israel? Again, there'll be time for a reckoning, but all of this rhetoric about how, you know,

we look weak, which is why China is on the march, why Iran might have participated in all of this, this ought to shine a brighter light on other things that are going on, including the fact that we are seriously contemplating shutting down the federal government right now. Tommy Tuberville continues to put a hold on military promotions. We do not have an ambassador right now to Egypt or to Kuwait or Oman or to Israel because of members of the House, Republicans in Congress, who've launched an impeachment inquiry against the commander-in-chief. I mean, all of these things, you know, have to project an image of, you know, dysfunction to much of the rest of the world, which will invite some of this. So it is interesting watching Republicans and people like

Rand Paul, who opposed, who tried to block Israel's Iron Dome, to watch folks like this talk about American weakness and the projection of American weakness, I think is another reminder that irony is dead, Susan. Well, that might be one thing we can all agree upon, Charlie, you know, across the political spectrum. You know, there was a tweet from the self-styled America Firster, Josh Hawley, yesterday that to me summed up the stupidity of the moment. He said, well, because Israel faces an existential threat, we should stop all aid to Ukraine and send it to Israel. And if there's not an existential threat of having, you know, a few hundred thousand Russians invading your country, talk about murdering babies and other atrocities, right? I mean, these are not serious people has

become sort of the, you know, the Logan Roy inspired anthem of our times, I'm afraid. Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about where we are at with Israel. You were up, you talked about this on a Sunday on CNN. What kind of response can we expect? Usually what happens after an attack is Israel responds with a barrage of rockets and missiles. It's not going to play out that way this time, is it? What happens next? No, that's right.

And so, you know, it's very clear the scale of the mobilization that has been ordered up in Israel. Over 300,000 have been ordered to report to the IDF. This is a mass mobilization. There's so many people required. El Al has had to add flights around the world to bring people back into the country. That suggests a country preparing for full scale war, not for another series of exchange of missile fire. Gaza is almost inevitable already. It appears that electricity has been cut off. There is something like a blockade occurring. And because Egypt also will not let the people of Gaza out on the long border that it shares with Gaza, there's a feeling that civilians, they may be warned, but there's nowhere for them to go. There's no place for them to go.

So what does all-out war look like? What does a ground war in Gaza look like? I mean, there are millions of people that live there. They are, in effect, trapped. So Hamas is not an army in the conventional sense. So what will this fighting be like? Urban, you know, street to street, house to house with terrorists in tunnels. How awful is it going to be? That's the thing, right? The awfulness is limited only by our imagination and our ability to think about how awful it will be. I don't know, is the short answer. The somewhat longer answer is the question of to what end? And I do think that right now, that is an extremely important question because Israel has occupied and ruled over Gaza before

and essentially threw up its hands and said, this is a nightmare and we're not going to do it. And 20 years ago, we left Gaza and there was an election back in 2005. That was the last time there was an election in Gaza. This is when Hamas took formal control over the strip. And, you know, it's been a sort of a nightmare that the world has largely preferred to avert its gaze from for the last very long time. And so Israel can militarily take over Gaza. I don't think there's anybody who doubts that, although the cost could

be extraordinarily high. The question is, what on earth would Israel do once it has taken over Gaza? And if you've decided that Hamas control over the territory is no longer sustainable because of the risk to Israel's security, then the question is, well, who is going to rule over Gaza? And there's been no answers. There's been no articulation of that. Just before we got on this conversation this morning, it was announced after a couple of days of wrangling that Israel would form a new war cabinet, bringing in opposition to the government for the purposes of this war. leader, former defensive leader of Israel, along with Netanyahu. So they have not articulated what the war policy or the war aims of Israel are at this point. So it's very hard to talk about what is the American policy going to be, because right now, I think we're still in the initial shock phase of just standing shoulder to shoulder, showing solidarity, as President Biden did, with great passion, I think, as President Biden did with great

passion, I think, and personal commitment yesterday. So let's talk about some of the more immediate fallout. What are the prospects of this becoming a wider regional conflict, of Hezbollah getting in, other countries, missiles coming from Syria? That's right. There is the immediate fear of that happening. And I think that's where you'll see a lot of the goal of mediation and backstage diplomacy is trying to head that off, trying to de-escalate or at least to make sure that this is contained in terms of the conflict. You've already seen exchange of rocket fire in the northern borders of Israel in the last few days.

There is the Iranian proxy based in Lebanon, Hezbollah, firing rockets. There is the possibility of rockets coming from Syria on Israel's northern border. That is a huge problem if you're fighting both Hamas and Hezbollah at the same time. Then there's the question of the West Bank. This has a completely different Palestinian dynamic there because you have the Palestinian Authority, which have been the great rivals of Hamas so far. Abu Mazen, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, has refused to condemn the attacks. And you haven't seen the violence spreading there yet. Of course, if that were to happen and you had another full scale intifada at the same time, you know, you would be talking about

a very, very serious and scary escalating situation. So that's the immediate goal, I think, of everybody is to try to dial it down and to make sure there's not a multi-front war for Israel. Beyond that, though, of course, there is the question of Iran and the Gulf states and what role everybody is going to play going forward. What is your assessment of the role that Iran played in this? Because immediately after the attack, there was that report in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that Iran was intimately involved in the planning. There's been a lot of pushback on this.

Iran has been a longtime supporter of Hamas. I mean, you can't really separate out Iran from what happened over the weekend, but what's your assessment of their role? How intimately involved were they in this attack? Well, look, that is the question. I am a believer that the truth will come out and we will have an enormous amount of detail that we do not yet have that will explain both this massive intelligence failure inside Israel and how they could have been surprised by an attack like this. I have no doubt Israel has had a long tradition of inquiries after military disasters like this. So hopefully there will be an accounting. And I suspect we will

find that there were lots of data points that were existing inside the Israeli system in this very surveilled part of the world. And that, you know, perhaps there was an inability to put the pieces together in ways that we will come to understand. And that will include the question of Iran's role. But you made the most essential point, Charlie. Iran has been the backer and partner of Hamas, which, by the way, has had other partners in the region. And I should point out that both Qatar and Turkey, countries that the United States has close ties with, have also maintained strong connections to Hamas over the years. But Iran has been the patron and the financial supporter. And in my experience, in your experience, you don't make a major change in your organizational model without consulting

your ownership structure and your big investors. And Iran has been a big investor in Hamas. So I suspect there will be more evidence that comes out. So what does this do to those ongoing peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia? Does it scuttle them completely, put them on hold? What happens there? Well, you know, many people have wondered about that as one of the reasons and proximate timing for this attack. Certainly one of the consequences of the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab states in the region, such as the UAE, and now Saudi Arabia would be the big prize if you were to add them to this normalization deal, has been this notion that

essentially the rest of the Arab world has moved on from the Palestinian cause, that they're willing to make a separate peace with Israel. And this does seem in some way to be an enormous and bloody challenge to that line of thinking, the idea that you can just sort of make your peace with Israel and forget about the suffering of these millions of Palestinians. And yet, you know, it strikes me that the leaders of Saudi Arabia, in particular its Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is an extremely cynical character. And that he doesn't seem to have the emotional attachment to the Palestinian cause that his grandfather and the earlier leaders of Saudi Arabia had. So, you know, maybe he's willing

to put it on ice and then resume talks in, you know, a certain amount of time. I wouldn't think that he cares a lot about that. And one thing that hasn't gotten a lot of attention in recent days, but that I think is very important, is that, you know, the United States and the Biden administration have been very focused on this big sweeping vision at a new age of geopolitical competition between Russia and China and the United States. The words China and Russia have hardly surfaced in a lot of the media coverage since this Hamas attack in the last few days, but they're not going away. And that context is a very important one for understanding the machinations in the Middle East. tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts

of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Whether you're navigating workplace stresses, complex relationships, or family dynamics, therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding a way to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's

BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Okay, so let's switch gears here because I do think this context is important. You have this very, very lengthy story in The New Yorker about Joe Biden's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and the Washington front of the Ukraine war. Why a profile of Jake Sullivan, Susan? Thank you, Charlie, for asking. I mean, you know, it's interesting now that we have another enormous war that's going to draw in the United States and be very consuming for the Biden administration. You know, I set out to write about the war that the U.S. has already committed so much to, the war in Ukraine. And, you know, when I was talking to people, this is an issue that I have followed, obviously, for more than two decades since I served as a correspondent in Moscow for the Washington Post

at the very beginning of Vladimir Putin's tenure. And of course, you know, this kind of almost final bloody crescendo of Putinism in this kind of war of aggression on his neighbor has been an abiding interest of mine. What I heard from people in Washington was that, you know, Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, really had become the war's indispensable man in Washington, that this is a very White House-centric foreign policy team, and that Biden likes to keep a close hold on these decisions. And so too does his national security advisor. And that when it came to the decision-making, if I wanted to understand why we were giving certain weapon systems, why we weren't doing

other things, who was formulating our approach to the war, that I would need to write about Jake Sullivan, someone who I've actually known for a very long time. You point out he's the youngest national security advisor since McGeorge Bundy during Vietnam. And there's been a lot of feuds and infighting in the administration over Ukraine, but the administration's policy has not always been that clear, has it? I mean, vowing to stick with Ukraine for as long as it takes is not a strategy. This is from the House and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. So give me your sense of this. Do they have a strategy or are they making it up as they go along? Well, you know, I think some of the most

biting criticism, and by the way, this has come from Democrats as well as Republicans. I think that's an important one. Many of the strong supporters of Ukraine are concerned about this too, is the fear that the administration has been sort of incrementally boiling the frog, if you will. It didn't expect, of course, this war in Ukraine to explode the way that it did. And it didn't expect Ukraine to survive the initial onslaught. And so it's sort of like we all did. We backed into this long war. First of all, it's important to say it was the biggest military commitment. We have shipped more weapons there really since to any other place since the end of World War II. And I'm not sure people really understand that. However, you know,

if I asked you, Charlie, you know, and pushed you to the wall, could you really describe what the administration's strategy is, what its goal is? And I think a lot of it has to do, my conclusion was, first of all, a lot of it is blamed on Jake Sullivan, which is interesting, but he's ultimately Joe Biden's guy. And this is a Biden policy. He is not going to let Ukraine into NATO. He is trying to signal in every possible way to Putin, listen, it's not our war. You started this thing, buddy. It's not us. We're just trying to give them the tools not to be overwhelmed. But I think the caution comes from Biden himself, but it also comes from our politics, Charlie. So this is where I would link up our

Israel conversation and our Ukraine conversation. We don't have a real theory of the case of America's role in the world anymore because we are a superpower in crisis. And we are not really able to project confidence in the rest of the world. It's painful almost to me when I hear Joe Biden in Warsaw giving this bold speech saying, you know, it's the great challenge between democracies and autocracies. I'm not sure he could give that speech here in Washington. You talk about how Jake Sullivan joined the administration in 2021. And one of the biggest events, obviously, of that year was the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that led to a lot of people saying he ought to be fired. And he told you that that was his trial by fire,

and he had taken it very, very personally. So talk to me a little bit about that, because that was really one of the turning points for the Biden administration. And in terms of our discussion about projection of weakness, you know, I could argue a failed policy. So what was Jake Sullivan's role in the abandonment of Afghanistan in the fall of Kabul? Well, look, you know, Jake Sullivan, you know, I think as national security advisor understood that he would be blamed and was accountable for the handling of the withdrawal. I think you can say that the policy decision was Joe Biden's and it's very clear from the very beginning. Joe Biden felt that the United States had spent 20 years and had not succeeded in its mission in Afghanistan. and he didn't want any other

American soldiers to die in the pursuit of a mission he had concluded long ago, I think, could not be achieved. They felt constrained by a number of things, including Donald Trump's deal with the Taliban, which really, you know, sort of restricted them in their view and tied their hands in terms of their options for how they would do that withdrawal. Where the blame, I think, has more properly fallen on Sullivan and on the rest of the Biden administration is how they chose to execute and to carry out the withdrawal. You can have an argument over the policy, but I think the critiques that have landed the most fairly and squarely on them are the critiques of how they undertook that withdrawal. You know,

for Sullivan, you described him, right? He's the youngest guy since McGeorge Bundy. He's a brilliant Rhodes Scholar. He's had a dazzling career, right? And so he isn't used to screwing up like this. And, you know, I think that it's that experience of failure with real lives in consequence was a terrible blow for all of them at the beginning of this administration when they're just, you know, figuring out how to do their jobs and to work as a team. Another blow, of course, that Sullivan had, you know, unlike others with that kind of dazzling resume, remember, he was Hillary Clinton's closest advisor for many years on policy matters. And he experienced the 2016 defeat in a very visceral, personal way. So I think that shaped his approach to the job. I think Afghanistan did. And then the third thing

that I think has not gotten enough attention is Obama's kind of screwed up reaction to the 2014 Russian takeover of Crimea and launching of a proxy war in eastern Afghanistan. Jake Sullivan was then Joe Biden's vice presidential national security advisor. Tony Blinken, now the secretary of state, was the deputy national security advisor at that time for Obama. They were, and Biden himself, were very internally critical of Obama's response. They didn't think it was strong enough. They were all advocates of sending military security assistance to Ukraine to be able to fight back against the Russians. Obama rejected them. And so I think that shaped them too. They didn't want a repeat of what the Obama administration had done, which, in their view, was insufficient to counter Putin. And I think history shows that it was insufficient. new wheel. Wherever you go, you can get a pro at Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid

MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions.

Whether you're navigating workplace stresses, complex relationships, or family dynamics, therapy's a great tool for facing your fears and finding a way to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.com. So let's get into what I think is the meat of your piece in your analysis, which is

the way in which the Biden administration has been supplying Ukraine and the support of its nail entry. You know that Jake Sullivan avoids any daylight between himself and Joe Biden. Biden tends to hold on to decisions to wait, test the angles, and Sullivan, you describe as kind of hyper-analytical in his style, fits Biden. But you talk with our good friend Eric Edelman, who told you there's a real tendency to paralysis by analysis. Jake likes to look at every facet of a problem and wants to understand everything. So how does that play into all of this no, no, no, yes approach to the weaponry, you know, these red line concerns over, you know, those, the long range missiles, the attackums,

you have detailed reporting about NATO issue, sort of what happened, talk about the way they have handled this question of admitting Ukraine into NATO. Zelensky, obviously, President Zelensky, very much wants to be part of NATO. And you recount in rather eye-opening fashion the role that the Biden administration played in some of these European talks. Yeah, well, a couple of observations there. First of all, that is one of my favorite quotes

in the piece, especially the ending of it from Eric Edelman. He says, that's the great tragedy for any national security advisor. You have to make decisions behind a veil of irreducible ignorance. You don't know how your decisions are going to play out in the real world. It's a hell of a tough job. Certainly not a job I would want. I spoke with one source who's quite close to Jake Sullivan, someone I've known for a long time. He said, you know, being this close to a national security advisor and talking with him,

the one thing I've really learned is that it's a job I would never, ever, ever want to have. And then I don't think I could possibly do it better than Jake. So I do try to be humble and empathetic, you know, in recognizing the great difficulty of these decisions that the Biden administration has to make right now. But I personally found it hard to understand. That's one of the reasons I did the piece. I didn't understand why is it that we seem to keep having the same fights over and over again and no, we're not going to give the long range missiles. And then a few months later, we're going to give them and no, we're not going to do the F-16s. And then, okay, well,

we're going to let our allies do the F-16s. And then, okay, well, I guess we'll train the pilots. You know, I even spoke with a senior administration official, Charlie, who told me, I just don't know what to believe anymore. I keep hearing the same movie over and over again. You know, they tell me on the inside, no, we're not going to do the ATACOMs, but I don't know what to believe. And this was, you know, a few months ago, I had this conversation. And of course, by the end of it, they had also approved those. And so if your own administration officials can't really articulate what is the principle behind your decision-making. And yet I found it fascinating when I asked Jake Sullivan in an interview about this no, no, no, yes policy. He got very mad at me, really, in his mild mannered way. And, you know, said basically like, no, that's not right.

You know, and to him living inside the forest, right, each tree is highly individual. And, you know, this tree is all about maintaining unity with Germany. And so he says, that's the reason why we gave the Abrams tanks after saying no. And this tree over here, well, this tree is all because the State Department didn't want us to send cluster munitions because many of our allies banned those by treaty. And it's, you know, will cause so many future problems. Okay. And this and it's, you know, will cause so many future problems. Okay. And this tree over here, you know, is something entirely different.

It's the Pentagon and the ATACOMs and not wanting to send missiles that they think they might need for some other conflict. So what I concluded from that is that it's very, very hard when you're living in the land of wanting to get each individual decision right to step out and also construct a viable theory of the case and doing that in real time as facts are changing. So I don't think they have one. And I think that's a problem. Yeah, that is a problem. But the bigger problem is the politics. It's the politics. Well, you write in here that a lot of people had been

blaming Jake Sullivan for all the delays over the weapon system, but you make it very, very clear that it's Biden pulling back from the trees to the forest. It's Joe Biden who's been doing the on-off switches. You report that like the F-16s, Sullivan was supportive of sending the F-16s, but Biden outright refused. Then several months later, he changed his mind. So how does the politics play in this, or is Joe Biden kind of indecisive when it comes to these details? Well, you know, it's interesting. Historically, that has been the rap on Joe Biden, that he will, if he's not indecisive, he will hold out on a decision as long as he possibly can. You know, Biden is a survivor in politics. And one of the ways that he has survived is by, you know, trying always to end up in sort of an approximation of

not necessarily the political center, but the center, at least of his own party, the center of the decision space. The other thing that I found, you alluded to this on NATO, is that Biden has really prioritized his relationship with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that this is a very low key because they're two relatively low key politicians. You know, they're not the flamboyant international types in the way that Donald Trump was, or even Barack Obama in some ways, is not flashy, but that that nexus between Washington and Berlin, a senior European official told me the two have such a warm, almost brothers in arms relationship. And so Biden has consistently

been willing to prioritize unity with Germany, even at the expense of problems elsewhere in the political coalition. And that came out in NATO. Is that a good choice, particularly the way it's played out with NATO? That's right. Schultz is even more cautious than Joe Biden, right? I know. And a very good example of that is the sort of frantic maneuvering in the lead up to the Vilnius summit of NATO this summer, in which, you know, Zelensky was hoping for more progress toward Ukraine's membership aspirations. Many European countries, not just in the Baltic states, were on Ukraine's side. Even Emmanuel Macron, by the way, in France. Now, he might have been opportunistic, maybe just seizing to score a point against Biden and Schultz because he knew, you know, their opposition was immovable. But even

France, you know, took a different position. And so there was a real concern, essentially, of US and Germany being isolated in the NATO alliance. That is such a different dynamic. I've been watching this closely for many years. And the bottom line is that usually it's the U.S. trying to push the Europeans in NATO to do more. But in this situation, it was the opposite. That was a little bit shocking, I think, to find out that it was Joe Biden working behind the scenes with Germany to block NATO membership for Ukraine. That seemed like a very strange dynamic. Well, again, you know, what they would say is, you know, that they communicated very clearly

to Zelensky for months that while the war was ongoing, the U.S. was just not prepared to support NATO membership for Ukraine. And frankly, many European countries were not. Because that would trigger Article 5, right? Right. I mean, that would, yeah. In my reporting, you know, even in their private meetings when Biden flew and then took the train into Kiev in February, remember that dramatic visit that even at that meeting, they were very clear with Zelensky that, you know, the NATO summit in Vilnius was not going to include a big membership rally for Ukraine. The question on the table before the summit was, could you give more in the way of progress to Ukraine in order to demonstrate to the Russians as well as the Ukrainians that this really was going to happen at some point in the future? And that's where Germany's opposition, you know, was the big dynamic. You know, a lot of times international diplomacy, it comes down to haggling over, you know, a single word or a single sentence in language. And they had a huge fight, a huge fight. For days, they couldn't resolve this. compromise that Jake Sullivan signed off on. It was an American authored sentence that said, well, we will give Ukraine an invitation

someday, but we couldn't say when or under what conditions and how they would even meet those conditions. So let's talk about what happens next. You talk about the endgame for the war in Ukraine. And obviously, Jake Sullivan is very deeply involved in monitoring back channel negotiations with russia and you write there's little doubt that the biden administration has actively considered ways to get russia to the negotiating table last fall mark milley then the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff publicly expressed his view the war would likely not be ended on the battlefield. So there's going

to be a little bit of tension, a little bit of back and forth. So what are you hearing about all of this? I mean, as you point out, you know, talks, if they occur, are likely to raise tensions between the U.S. and Ukraine. What do you see happening? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, I think there's a lot of, I don't know if I call it wishful thinking, but a certain naivete and thinking that, you know, the Russians and the Ukrainians or even the Americans and the Russians are going to sit down and, you know, have a big treaty signing ceremony and, you know, come to terms and give Putin a certain amount of territory and return for peace. Like, that seems wildly unrealistic to me.

And there are a lot of different reasons for that. First of all, Vladimir Putin has every incentive to keep fighting, at least through next year's American presidential election, when Donald Trump might come back to power, who has consistently not been a supporter of the Ukrainian cause, has been against the large amounts of American military assistance to Ukraine. And so, you know, the war is very, very likely to continue for some period of time. There is a view inside the White House that Sullivan is looking for eventually

some kind of negotiations that would end the fighting, right? Who doesn't want that? And the problem is it's almost an impossible circle to square right now because Ukraine has suffered so much. It's hard to see Zelensky being able to stay in power, frankly, and make almost any kind of a deal. The big fault line to keep your eye on is Crimea. And Ukraine continues to consider that a core part of its territory. There have been, as we've noticed, these recent drone attacks and missile attacks on the bridge, the Crimean bridge, on the Russian fleet that's anchored there. The American assessment, according to my reporting in this piece, is that a full-out effort to take back Crimea might be the scenario where a Russian nuclear response is the most likely of all of the scenarios. And of course, that's a huge concern.

You know, will Ukraine press on toward Crimea and what would happen if it did? When you wrap up your piece, you quote a former official who told you that the administration's hesitancy over giving weapons to Ukraine hasn't been about how Russia respond. It's that they believe the war isn't going anywhere. And you read that quote to Jake Sullivan, who said, that's kind of the rap on us. I don't think it's a fair one. We're not fighting for a draw here. And then he says that the administration has an obligation to the American people to consider worst case scenarios. that's our job. So how do you reconcile that? They're not going for a draw, but they're also preparing for the worst case scenario, which would include nuclear weapons over Crimea. You know, I remember when, you know, Dick Cheney

talked after 9-11 about essentially the government's responsibility to contemplate the dark side. And in some ways, that led the United States into a lot of excesses and a lot of dark places of its own. You know, Jake Sullivan is a very different character, obviously, than Dick Cheney, but the responsibility in a position like this, you live in the world of the worst case scenario. Sadly, with Israel right now, we're watching a pretty worst case scenario play itself out, the worst loss of life for the Jewish state, arguably since the Holocaust, right? That's a worst case scenario. And there are many, many worst case scenarios that we can still contemplate with this war going on as an open wound in Europe that threatens the security not only of Europe,

but really the entire geopolitical order. So there's a lot of bad, bad, scary things to have our national security advisor dwell on these days. And they seem to be getting worse. You can read Susan's article in the most recent edition of The New Yorker, a very detailed deep dive into Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden's national security advisor. She's also the co-author of The Divider, The History of Donald Trump, which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker. Susan is a staff writer at The New Yorker. And one of my must-reads every week is her column on life in Washington. Susan, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast today. Charlie, fantastic to be with you. Thank you so much.

And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will 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. Bro, we're Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. Treadexperts.ca

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