The Dispatch Podcast - 'Nuclear War? Yawn!'

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

The Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia is underway, but what would it take to bring these two nations to the negotiating table? Scholar, professor, and columnist Walter Russell Mead joins The Dispatch Executive Editor Adam O’Neal to share insights from his recent trip to Ukraine and: -The normalcy of life while in war -What a “successful” counteroffensive looks like -Opportunities for US -The end of the Russian empire and a new nation -(Unrealistic) Theories of victory -Engaging with nuclear adversaries -How to get to the negotiating table Show Notes: -Walter Russell Mead's page at Hudson Institute -The Arc of a Covenant available online -Walter Russell Mead's page at Wall Street Journal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And ask your family eye care professional for SLOR Stellist lenses at your child's next visit. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Adam O'Neill, executive editor of the dispatch. Today we've got a really insightful interview with Walter Russell Mead. Walter is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, a professor at Bard College, and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He also recently returned from a visit to Ukraine and gleaned a lot of information about what's happening on the ground while he was on his trip. One quick programming note. We recorded this interview just a few hours before the short-lived mutiny or rebellion.

inside of Russia over the weekend, so we don't touch on those events in the interview. But Walter still provides a lot of context and understanding about the war that should be useful, and we hope you enjoy it. Walter, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Thanks for taking the time to chat today. It's great to be here. Thank you. What we'd really like to start out is just talk to us about what it was like being on the ground in Ukraine not too long ago, just right around before the counter-evensive got rolling, if I'm not mistaken. That's right. Well, it was a very strange experience. For one thing, when we got there, the Dow Jones Wall Street Journal Security made me put on a flack jacket, a very heavy flack jacket, and a helmet, which we didn't use, fortunately, and didn't need to use. there was an air raid while I was, air raid siren while I was there, I demonstrated I'm totally

unfit as a war correspondent because I slept right through it. Had I actually woken up, I would have gone down to the bomb shelter in the hotel. And I'm happy to report there is progress in the world today because the bomb shelter has Wi-Fi. And so unlike, yeah, exactly, unlike people in the London Blitz or whatever. If you have to, you know, cower in your bomb shelter all night, you can at least catch up with your email. That was, you know, the couple of trips I'd taken Ukraine pre-2020, the thing that struck me the most, even when you were out east like Mariupil, when that city still existed, was how normal life was. I went bowling. You know, we went in the morning, we went to the front line, checked out some bunkers, and then in the

afternoon we went bowling before our next meeting. Can you talk a little bit about that, not that specifically, but that experience. It's a strange thing about war. Remember, I was actually in Moscow when Yeltsin attacked Parliament, you know, and there were actually, there was fighting in Moscow. I had been visiting a friend and we get the news and suddenly, you know, what I'm looking at is, oh my gosh, is this war going to mess up my subway ride home? You know, is it going to affect the lines I'm going to be on?

You sort of realize one of the things about conflict is that everybody in a conflict zone or anywhere near a conflict zone still has daily life to do. It's like, oh, no, civil war, how am I going to get to the dry cleaners? And this effort of ordinary people to keep going with their lives is one of the things. I think it's hardest to understand if you haven't been in a war zone, but it's kind of a dominant reality if you're there. Now, that's true, certainly in Kiev, the western parts of Ukraine, but there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men and some women on the front lines, you know, dying by the hundreds, perhaps every day. At the time we're speaking, the counteroffensive is underway. What does success look like to you? And based on your conversation, to you as a strategist, a historian,

a thinker, but also as someone who's been talking to Ukrainians, veterans, regular people what are they hoping out of this uh summer offensive well the everybody i met uh thought that territorial compromise with russia was impossible i mean that you know i i don't know if they'll be able to achieve this but um they said look you know uh we had we had a treaty with russia in 1991 they recognized our boundaries when they saw an opportunity they invaded in 2014 They occupied a lot of the country. We tried to get security guarantees. We tried to get negotiations.

They attacked again when they thought they had a great opportunity. They had beautiful things like the Budapest memorandum and all of these, you know, solemn promises, Russia attacks, Russia attacks again. So one guy I met said to me, look, he said, my grandfather fought the Russian. I think my grandkids will be fighting the Russian. And so a lot of people in Ukraine are kind of entering the war with this psychology. And when it comes down to the counteroffensive, obviously they want to get as much back as they can. They want to defeat Russia. You'll hear a number of people in Ukraine talk about things like wanting to dismember Russia after the war,

that this empire with its long history of expansion and sort of grandiosity and so on is just a dangerous. danger. And until as long as Russia exists, Ukraine can't be safe. And the way that that's certainly how they think of it, but in America and much of the West, a lot of the framing is you look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a problem. And it certainly is. You would prefer that countries not invade other countries and nuclear sabler ratling. And we can get into that in a minute. But why do you see it also as an opportunity for the United States? I know you've written about this. in the journal before you know different countries look at the situation differently because in fact

we have different interests and priorities and i think the american interest is not actually for the russian federation to be dismantled i think you know a large chaotic situation from you know vladivostok to the ukrainian frontier with loose nukes running around and goodness knows what kinds of warlords or different conflicts emerging with China gaining a tremendous amount of interest and influence in that part of the world. From the United States point of view, it would be a disaster. So the Ukrainians may say the existence of Russia is a threat to Ukraine's independence and sovereignty.

Americans might say the disappearance of Russia is a threat to our interests. So we see the thing differently. And I don't think it means their moral or we're immoral or vice. versa, you just look at the world from where you sit. Now, when it comes to, you know, what should we be going for? Why is there an opportunity here? It's this. I think it's in our interest to see Russia realize that the door on expansion to the West is closed. That the Russian empire, as it was known by Peter the Great, as it was known by Catherine the Great, is just not happening anymore, just as the British have had to realize the British Empire is dead.

The French have had to realize that, you know, France is no longer a world power, just as the Spanish. They have to realize that. They may not accept it totally yet, but they should realize that, right? I think we can expect that there'll be a politics of gesture. Look, I think ever since the Battle of Waterloo, the French, smart French people have understood that they are not the world's dominant power. But every ruler of France has understood that in order to maintain your political power at home, you need to make France look as great as possible on the world stage. So you strut, you posture, you convene international meetings in Paris, you do everything

you can. And I think we can expect that any future Russian leader will have politics of imperial nostalgia, the way that they do in Britain and so on and so forth. Fine. You know, the rest of the world can live with that. But for Russia to accept the idea that they have to build a new idea of Russia, that, you know, when Putin writes about Russia, when he thinks about Russian history, the great Russian empire and so on, and that for him, Russia is an empire or it's nothing. Actually, Russia is a nation, not an empire, and there needs to be a realistic concept of what Russia is, what its place in the world is, what its interests are, what its rights are,

and that can't include creeping expansionism as far west as possible. So that I think it's what we want to try to achieve here. But didn't the West itself provoke Russia by expanding its empire through NATO up to Russia's borders and making Putin feel so insecure, so close to Moscow, NATO troops. I hear the voice of the devil's advocate here, Adam. I don't hear a lot of sincerity in your voice as you pose this question. I'm just concerned about humiliating Mr. Putin, that's all. You are, you know, there's a song by Noel Coward.

I recommend that you go listen to, don't let's be beastly to the Germans. that he wrote during the Blitz in World War II. Though they've been a little naughty to the polls and checks and Dutch, I don't suppose those people really minded very much. So, look, the Russian, we did in a sense provoke Russia because when you put no fishing signs up on one side of a lake, you are sort of saying that, you know, and you put nothing up on the other side of the lake,

you're actually broadcasting a message that fishing is permitted. So when we've partially expanded NATO, in a sense, we aggravated and annoyed the Russians, but when we didn't include, when we didn't think seriously about the security of any territory between Russia and NATO, we actually did create a situation of strategic instability, and we're living with the consequences of that today. So the problem isn't NATO expansion per se. It's not expanding fast enough if you're thinking about expanding. Right. Well, let's just say not having a coherent security concept for the former Soviet space. Because expansion of NATO makes a lot of sense in terms of the countries that are in it,

consolidating Europe, but leaving a wide, a large strategically important, important area between Russia and NATO without a clear demarcation's lines and so on. That was a mistake. Now, there's that argument, which as you can tell, I don't think is totally convincing, but I think it's worth bringing up because vast hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people actually believe that to be true if you think about the global South in their view of the conflict. But probably one of the more persuasive arguments is that Ukraine is nice. It's good to bloody. the Russians and teach them a lesson and we can send them some weapons. But really, this should be a European problem. The wave of the future is East Asia. We need to be preparing Taiwan to be able to

defend itself or ideally deter an invasion from China. And there are only so many artillery shells. There are only so many anti-ship weapons, so many stingers. And Ukraine, while it matters, it doesn't have TSM, such an important role in global semiconductors, that sort of thing. What do you make of the argument that we just need to shift to East Asia and leave Europe in the past? It's a dying continent anyway. Well, I think there's actually a significant amount of truth in it, and that Europe is the most important, longest running trend in international affairs is the declining importance globally of Europe. I mean, if you think about 1910, Europe basically rule the entire world.

And today, the European Union altogether probably has less influence in the world than any one of three or four European great powers did in 1910. And while the Europeans have tried to build the EU as a way to change that dynamic, I think it's even in Europe, there's this uneasy sense that they haven't succeeded. But, you know, to say that something is declining in importance is not the same thing as saying that it has no importance. And in fact, today we see Russia and China are largely aligned. And they are both revisionist powers who want to upset, overturn, destroy the sort of maritime liberal commercial order that the United States has been working on building. and we need to oppose it. I don't actually think that there is a big conflict between the things that Ukraine needs and the things that Taiwan needs. There are a few issues, but in the great scheme of things, they're not decisive in either theater.

And certainly, Tanks, Bradley, tanks are not what Taiwan needs. Any conflict involving Taiwan is primarily a naval conflict, while anything involving Ukraine is clearly primarily a land conflict. Those are quite different things. And you've done a little bit of traveling in your time. When you go to Japan, when you go to Taiwan, which I think you've been to both since the Ukraine invasion began, if I'm not mistaken. Certainly Japan, I know. What are they telling you about how they perceive the conflict in America's role for better or worse?

Are they worried that we're being distracted by this? we, the Americans, or are they worried that we're not going to show the fortitude that they would hope to other adversaries? Well, I think both the Japanese and the Taiwanese have the governments have officially said that they support what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The Japanese have been really proactive. They've sent a mission to Ukraine. They've really, they're trying to get a NATO office opened in Tokyo. For the Japanese who have Russia and China come coming closer into alignment, they are close to both Russia and China. So Ukraine does not actually seem like it's a distant, irrelevant problem to Japan.

And from Taiwan's point of view, Japan is so important to Taiwan that, and the United States is so concerned with Ukraine that anything that's important to both Japan and the United States is by definition important to Taiwan. So they don't actually see the same kind of rigid separation between the European theater and the Asian theater as maybe some U.S.-based critics do. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer

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without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. one one interesting comparison and i want to talk a little bit about historical analogies in a second but first you know we can go to world war one uh the winter war afghanistan for the soviets or

for us but one interesting comparison you've made with ukraine is that ukraine is actually quite like israel could you elaborate on sort of the ukrainian spirit that you saw while you were there recently and how you view Israeli society and the differences and similarities between these two embattled nations? Well, my comparison was actually kind of narrow and focused in that Israel is a cut Israel is not in NATO. Israel doesn't have U.S. troops on its frontier and Israel has to have, be very vigilant about constant security threats. And it seems to me that that's where Ukraine is likely to end up for at least a period of time, it's not going to get into NATO right away. As you know, NATO requires unanimous consent to bring in new members. And we are very,

very far from having anything like unanimous consent for Ukrainian membership in NATO today. And I wouldn't be surprised if a country like Turkey might not permanently veto Ukrainian membership. And I also think there might be absolutely nothing we could do about that as the United States. So we can't control the process of Ukraine's NATO accession. So Ukraine may well be a country that has to be very vigilant about its own security, have to think not that, oh, war is this terrible thing that used to happen in the world, but now at the end of history, we live in a wonderful world of enlightenment and peace. But actually, we live in a world of constant threat. My grandfather fought the Russians.

My grandkids may fight the Russians. And so, and again, from the American point of view, having a state like that in the space between Russia and the rest of Europe, that's a strategic asset. And the Baltic states, Poland, Sweden, and Finland, and even Norway are, because of their own concerns about Russia are likely to be quite sympathetic to this Ukrainian point of view. So that, again, from the American point of view, it looks like we're about to have a bunch of focused, committed allies in the northern part of Europe who agree with our view that Russia and power in Europe needs to be restricted and limited and who are prepared to be a lot more helpful about that than some of our older NATO allies who don't feel the threat in the same

way. When the war started, I was living in Warsaw at the time and talk about a country of people who are steeped in their own history and are always thinking about it. And one thing we were with various people I were talking to was just going through the different examples. What is this war? Is this is this World War I where there's a spat between two, countries that's going to bring all the great powers in and be horrific. Is this Hitler invading Poland? Is it going to turn into the extended Soviet occupation of Afghanistan? The attempted to subdue Finland during World War II? Now we're 15, 16 months into this conflict, almost exactly 16 months. As it's taking shape, what wars do you look to and think about historically that are

similar. No two are the same, but where do you see anything striking? Actually, interesting, the point that I find myself looking at is that in almost all of these wars that you've mentioned, the conventional wisdom about that particular war was almost always wrong. And it constantly flipped. You know, when war comes, everybody wants to predict what's going to happen more obviously engages our attention it's a it we want to know what's going to happen we want to but you know what people are almost always wrong about these things and i think that's that's already we've already seen that in the ukraine war at the beginning it's like oh russia will never invade they're just bluffing that was the conventional wisdom

then they invade and like kiev will fall in three days that was the conventional wisdom almost immediately after that, Russia has totally failed and confronted with the might of Western sanctions. Putin will be lucky if he can hold on to power. The war is over. Ukraine is going to win really fast. And it keeps flipping. It just keeps flipping. And all of the serious graybeards stroke their chins and utter wise words, war by definition is an unpredictable. thing. And if everybody knew what was going to happen, the two sides would settle because it would be clear what kind of conflict we're in and where it's going to go. So I have to say, we just don't know. The other thing about this war that's common to many wars is each side entered the war

with a theory of victory. That is, for the Russians, it was going to be a quick march into Kiev. They felt the Ukrainian state really didn't have any cohesion. And then basically, Russia could pretty much do what it wanted. That was their theory of the war. And that's how they tried to execute in the beginning. And the Western slash Ukrainian theory of the war was that the Russian economy is so incredibly small and vulnerable that once Russia realizes what kind of a conflict it stumbled into, it just cannot hold on. And in almost every war I can think of, both sides come in with a theory of victory and both sides fairly rapidly realized their theory of victory was wrong.

And now they're in a conflict that neither side really understands because your baseline assumptions didn't work. And so you're sort of in a death match. and each is kind of struggling to get its hands on something, a dagger, a stick, some way to beat the other side. And this groping process, the struggling process, that's when, since you get into the real war. So I don't know where this thing is going, and I really don't think anybody else does. It's sort of terrifying in a way to not know that, given that Vladimir Putin, controls the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. And I don't think he needs all 6,000-odd nukes

to subdue Ukraine or if it would actually do him any good. But how do you think of, given all the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, how do you think about nuclear risk? Because I can remember, I don't know, seven, eight years ago people saying we shouldn't send the Ukrainians javelins because it could lead to nuclear escalation. And here we are. training them to fly F-16s and clearly that that calculation of risk has shifted. Do you think it's shifted in a dangerous way or how do you engage with adversaries when they have the ability to destroy the world if they're unhappy? We have to remember I actually am old enough to remember a lot of the Cold War when we were doing that pretty much every day. Proxy wars were

kind of you know a feature of life and even when you weren't actually fighting you had armed trusses like on the Korean peninsula that at any moment could erupt. So actually, for 40 years, two nuclear adversaries faced off in a variety of places all over the world and nobody used nukes. So to some degree, maybe I underestimate simply because, you know, I mean, I had my big panic about nuclear war when I was 10 years old during the Cuba missile crisis and all the adults around me really believe that we might all die that week in a nuclear conflict. So, you know, oh, nuclear war, yawn this again. You know, there's a certain thing that one

gets from that. And I think in a younger generation, which doesn't have those memories, this now suddenly realize, oh, wait a minute, humanity stands on the brink of nuclear annihilation, and we have these hostile great powers with nuclear weapons. Uh-oh, why anything could happen. Yes, that's true, and some of us have been living with that truth for seven decades or more. However, when we, I don't actually, when I think of Putin's escalatory capability, I don't actually go immediately to nuclear weapons. Back in the day before the war, the reason that a lot of people used to argue that we shouldn't do anything about Ukraine is that Putin would have quote, escalatory dominance, unquote. That is to say, since he cared more about Ukraine fundamentally

than we did, at any given point, Putin would be willing to go after his objectives more ruthlessly at a higher level of violence. So anything we do, we could dribble in javelins, we could dribble in F-16s and so on. But at every step of the way that we go, Putin would be willing to go a step further. And it's possible that that's correct, in which case, you know, it's the future looks rather cloudy. But again, I think Putin is less likely to move to nuclear weapons than to do something else to make trouble for us. For example, he could start delivering sophisticated air defense systems to Iran that would put Israel in the position of, you know what, if we wait another six weeks, the Iranians will have achieved the kinds of air defenses

that mean that we could no longer be reliably sure that our planes could get to nuclear sites in Iran. And so either, you know, we either have to attack Iran now or we have to, you know, we have to accept an Iranian nuclear bomb. And so provoking a war or stirring up conflict in the Middle East for Putin, that would be a, you know, might be a very nice idea, double the price of oil, cause all kinds of economic problems everywhere, force the U.S. instead of having to think about, oh, do we send weapons to Ukraine or Taiwan, think, well, Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, where do we send their weapons. So it's a, you know, Putin's strategic ability is to do things that we don't

expect in places that make problems for us that we just didn't think would happen. And I would be more worried. I am more worried about that than I am about a tactical nuke or something of that kind. Last question. I'm not going to ask you to predict exactly where the armistice line will be drawn or how the war will end. Because I would refuse to predict. But I do have to ask in terms of just a framing or a way to think about it,

Ukrainians want the restoration of their post-Soviet Union borders as an independent country. Crimea, everything. The Russians have said, well, you know, we have this really deep connection to the Donbass, but also Zaporizia and Kurson, we have our mystical connection,

which is I didn't know about until they annexed those oblasts, but they've basically said huge chunks of Ukraine are actually part of Russia now. And that's a pretty irreconcilable difference. How or under what conditions or what needs to happen for them to get down to the negotiating table? And not a joke like when the African leaders visited Moscow and Kiev and put out their points or when various people will suggest a formula like the Chinese had or other other actors, you know, the Brazilians, whoever. But what actually gets them to sit down and talk about it?

Or is this possible that it'll be decades before that something like that could happen? Look, you know, there's sort of two ways countries can agree to end a war. One is that when one side thinks it's lost the war or losing the war and it just needs to make the best deal, can under bad circumstances. That's one way you get a piece, a winner and a loser. And another way you get a piece is when both sides think they have nothing more to gain or they have more to lose from a continuation of hostilities than they have to gain. And so at that point, you can get some kind of a compromise piece. The sort of general tendency in modern times is for these things to turn into frozen conflicts where neither side gives up its sort of abstract claims

of sovereignty or whatever, but both on a pragmatic basis just decide to stop fighting. And these are, you know, that we call these coal pieces, whatever, like on the Korean Peninsula during World War, you know, we've seen a number of these coal pieces in, in, you know, in, in the world and it's partly i think um you know ukraine is not going to want to sign a treaty that seeds territory legally to russia and russia is not going to want to give up its claims so so because of that we're probably more likely to see a cold peace than anything else assuming neither side wins or loses. That is not a great thing from the U.S. point of view, because I don't know how, if there's a

coal piece, what do we do about restoring normal trade relations with Russia or economic relations with Russia? What about all of the sort of declarations by various world courts and legal authorities? this is a genocide, this is a war crime, whatever, a coal piece is not going to address any of those sort of legal issues. So are we going to be left in a situation where Russia is run by people that we are saying are war criminals? One consequence of that would certainly be to drive Russia much closer to China for the long term. We're also likely to see countries like Germany with an economic interest in opening relations with Russia,

really looking to erode any kind of Western united front on those issues. So a coal piece is bad, but a coal piece may be the only thing that's possible. Walter Russell Mead, thank you for your time. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be.