The Dispatch Podcast - Understanding Vladimir Putin's Russia

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

In a lively discussion about who Vladimir Putin is and the danger he poses to the world, Steve is joined by Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker. The two, who are married, offer insights to their book, Kremlin Rising, which they co-authored during their four year stay in Russia. The trio discuss Putin's rise to power, his current rhetoric, as well as how the Republican Party and Trump have grown increasingly close to him.   Show Notes: -Kremlin Rising by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser -Susan's Frontline interview -Polling on Putin's growing popularity in the Republican Party Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, a husband and wife team who have written two books together, including Kremlin Rising, a book about the earlier years of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, where he has covered five presidents. He previously wrote about Donald Trump, Barack Obama for the New York Times and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for the Washington Post. Peter has written several books. He covered the War on Terror from Afghanistan and has been a mainstay, one of the leading journalists in America for the past two plus decades. Susan is a staff writer at The New Yorker where she has a weekly column on life in Washington. She too has a distinguished career

as a journalist covering politics and policy as the top editor of several different Washington publications, including Politico Magazine, which she founded, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy Magazine, and before that spent a decade at the Washington Post. We're happy to have them both join us today for a conversation about Vladimir Putin, his rise in Russia, American politics, American presidents handling Vladimir Putin, and what Vladimir Putin and Russia are up to today. Peter and Susan, welcome. Thanks for joining the Dispatch podcast.

Thanks for having us. I want to go way back, not way, way, way back, but back to your time in Russia. You wrote a book while you were there. This is now 20-plus years ago. The book is called Kremlin Rising, Vladimir Putin's Russia. Folks on the Dispatch podcast have heard me talk about it before. I have encouraged people to buy it. I will encourage people to buy it again.

I think it's highly relevant to what we are seeing unfolding, and it details the rebirth of Russia under Vladimir Putin. Putin grew up in St. Petersburg after World War II. What kind of childhood did Houghton have? Peter, I'll start with you. Yeah, you know, he had a typical Soviet childhood in the sense that he lived in a communal apartment with other people. There are stories of him chasing rats or being chased by rats in the hallways of that apartment. His father fought in World War II. But he also had a lineage that was pretty unique in that his grandfather had been Stalin's cook.

So there had been some connection to the Soviet elites in that time, even though he lived a pretty hard shrabble, you know, not particularly well-off life growing up in what was then called Leningrad. And what was his relationship like with his parents? Well, I think that, you know, his father was a hard dude, you know, one of those guys who was very much a Muzik, which is the Russian word for, you know, a macho man maybe, something like that. and was pretty tough on him and wanted him to be a hard man himself. And Putin, like myself, was not a particularly large guy. And I think as a smallish young boy felt the need to prove himself. He had this sort of abiding insecurity that forced him to find the largest person he could on the playground and go hit him in order to prove that he could knock down, you know, the biggest, toughest guy around. He himself was worthy in that way.

And I think you see a little about psychology even today. I was going to say, we don't have to go too far to impose a storyline on that right now. He wrote an autobiography first person. And from what I gather, I have not read it myself, but from what I gather, it actually did provide some insights, unlike many of the autobiographies we get from politicians in the United States. It's Susan, did he talk about his childhood much there and what was there to learn from his autobiography? Well, thank you so much, Steve. And, you know, it's really interesting how much these echoes of Putin's early Soviet experience really shaped him in a way that's that's hard to fathom now that he's been the leader of Russia for more than 20 years and, you know, actually is the longest serving Russian leader since Stalin. And he actually, you know, is a product of the Stalin era.

And so that memoir that you talked about first person is actually like a series of campaign interviews that he did with a journalist in 2000 when he was first coming to power. And because he later then consolidated power, it is one of the best and only sources of Putin, you know, sort of being subjected to actual interviews and talking somewhat candidly. And so it really is it's unique in that sense. He basically, he has a philosophy that comes through in this book and that he, I think he even says, you know, essentially from that childhood, only the weak get beaten. You know, the strong are the only ones who survive. It's really a kind of law of the jungle type philosophy that he came out of the mean streets of, you know, Stalin-era Leningrad with. This family experienced the trauma firsthand of World War II as well, the siege of Leningrad, you know, something for the history books, but in his family, it's actually present history.

His mother was literally left for dead in heap of dead bodies in Leningrad. She was miraculously found actually by his father who would come back into city was serving in the military to find her. And so an early sibling died. And so then you have Putin as almost a sort of post-war miracle child, but in conditions of extreme privation, I think privation both physically and clearly emotionally as well. It's hard, I think, for anybody who's observed Putin on the world stage for the past couple decades to imagine him really putting himself on the couch, as it were.

And I gather he didn't really do that. But nonetheless, these sort of themes emerge from from his. book. And I wonder how, Peter, you, when you think about what we learned from from the book and what you observed firsthand at the beginning of this time, in your time in Russia. How did those compare? Was it obvious? Was there a clear through line? Like, oh, this is exactly the guy that I read about in the book. And this is what he's doing. Yeah, I actually think that Putin was pretty clear from the beginning. I think Susan agrees. When we were there, we got there. We were there in 2000 for the March election when he was first formally elected and then moved there permanently

at the end of that year and we're there for four years. And it was sort of this formative time. There was this hope in the West, not completely unrealistic, but in the end ultimately, of course, unfounded that he might be a Westernizer, that he might be a modernizer. And he did a few things early on that nodded in that direction. He put on a 13% flat tax that kind of began to bring people into the system. He passed laws that allowed the purchase and sale of land, you know, land codes. It was really important to begin a more of a, you know, to consolidate more of a capitalist economy. And there were, you know, nods of friendship between him and George W. Bush, especially after 9-11, which Putin was the first world leader to call him and congratulate.

But I think even when we were there, we could see that he was not what the West wanted to be. He may not have been a communist in the capital C sense. He didn't adopt an ideology of the old days, but he was a Soviet in the sense that he believed in the greatness of Russia, in the greatness of Russia on the stage. And this sense of grievance that we're now seeing playing out 20 some years later was evident even that. The idea that the West had taken advantage of Russia at a time of weakness and that he needed to consolidate power. It started at home. When we were there, it was about taking over TV stations that were independent. It was about eliminating the elections of governors.

It was about forcing out big businessmen who might challenge his authority. And after we left, you began to see that extend what they call them near abroad, which is the parts of the old Soviet Union that were no longer under Moscow's direct control. And I think, you know, this 20-year evolution that we've seen has its roots in those. years that we were there in Moscow. How are you able to operate at the time that you were there? You mentioned that his tightening restrictions on independent media at the time. How did that affect your ability to do your jobs? And flashing forward, how would that compare to how journalists operate there today? You know, that's a great question. We literally sort of saw doors closing in our face in the period of time, the four years that we were there. And

things that were available to us, even in the Kremlin, which was available to us at the start of our tenure, was not by the end. And so you really saw this remarkable, almost real time, you know, like one of those time-lapse photography things where you see like, you know, the flower coming up and like blooming and then dying. Like, you know, we saw the, you know, the flower being knocked back down to the ground. And, you know, in the 1990s in Russia, that first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a form of small D democracy. It was vibrant. There was real free speech.

It was problematic. It was flawed. There was a form of oligarchic gangster capitalism that arose. There was corruption. There were, you know, all the flaws that you've heard about. But there was a real openness in society that existed that Putin and his regime pretty systematically shut down. And that period when we were there happened to be, you know, the first four years, the foundation of this Russia that we see today, the consolidation of power.

And so we were able to, when we first got there, you know, we had access, you know, the chief of staff, very powerful figure of the Kremlin, holdover from the Yelton era, would meet with journalists, Western journalists. You know, he was a known figure like Ron Kling, you know, like, you know, you would be traveling around the regions and you would. meet with the governors and they were still up for election at that time. And, you know, they were happy to see you. And you would, you know, there was this sort of security state that still existed, right? The FSB, which was the domestic successor to the KGB, and that was what Putin himself had headed before he became president of Russia. They were present if you would travel around sort of an ominous figure. You had the war in Chechnya. So you had, you know, these kind of disturbing counterpoint, but we were able to travel freely. It was a very, you know, bureaucratic

society. But by the time we left, there were people who had openly spoken with us who would not. And there were echoes, by the way, I must tell you, of what we saw in Trump's Washington over the last few years. We saw in the first few years of Putin's Moscow. For example, many people who we thought of as sort of vaguely, you know, internationalists, you know, not necessarily pro-Western, but, you know, certainly modern, you know, post-Soviet figures. They were like political commentators. One of the people we used to meet with a lot, even have lunch with Vyatislav Nikonov, was, had worked with people like Mike McFal and democracy advocates in the early 1990s.

You know, we talked to him all the time. He was, you know, just a very sophisticated. interesting guy, by the way, grandson of Molotov, of the Molotov-Riven-Troth pact. Guess what? Today, he is a rabid nationalist pro-Putin member of Putin's pocket Duma, you know, the sham legislature. And, you know, so that kind of like invasion of the body snatchers experience that you saw with anti-Trump type Republicans becoming Trumpist, we saw a lot of as well. And was that just because it was clear, even in those early days? I mean, again, we're talking about 20 years ago now, even in those early days that that

consolidation of power was likely to stick. Yeah, I mean, it was certainly likely to continue. The question is whether he would be successful at it. He's been more successful, I think, than anybody might have imagined, because who is this guy? He was a nobody, a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. It wasn't even a general. Everybody was a general.

So he was a gray figure, bureaucrat. people thought, well, maybe he'll serve for four years, but clearly some more dynamic figure will come along, and he's just kind of a transitionary figure. And he managed, without any political experience, without any real leadership experience, to make himself into a modern-day czar. And it was really quite striking. He was successful to a degree, I think, that people would have been surprised at that he would still be here today, 23 years after he first became prime minister, longest serving Russian leaders since And I think he has, you know, obviously suffered setbacks along the way, but broadly speaking, accomplished a lot of what he wanted to. How was he regarded by the Russian people when you were there? That's a good question. In part because Putin, like a lot of modern authoritarian's, was pretty systematic about retaking and reconsolidating state power over television and over the media environment.

And so, you know, there was a pretty intensive pro-Putin propaganda that began. Many Russians had never really lost the Soviet habit of watching the Peruvic Canal, the first channel, TV news, you know, essentially state television news. And so when that sort of flipped on to be kind of all Putin all the time, one of the first kind of signature things of Putin's early tenure was the takeover and dismantling of NTV, which was the first. and really only independent national television network in Russia's history. And so, you know, they seize control of the media environment, again, quite systematically. And so it was a little bit artificial. But when we first came there, Putin, what we heard articulated from Russians all over the country of every almost demographic and age was the idea, we want Russia to be a normal,

civilized country, and Putin, a normal sober leader. And when they said sober, by the way, they actually meant like literally sober, as in a joke. The contrast to Yeltsin was profound. That's correct. And so Putin, by the way, was seen as a modern guy. That's the other thing that might not track for an American audience is that when he first came in, Putin was not only very young, still in his 40s, but he spoke a foreign language, German in his case, and the KGB. It wasn't that kind of American Cold War reputation of, you know, evil henchmen of dictatorship. It was this idea that the KGB, you sort of recruited the best and the brightest in Soviet society that they had access to information and education that others did not

in the society. And so Putin had this sort of both tough. guy reputation, but also this idea that he was sort of a modern, educated young man who was fluent in Western society, having lived in Germany as well as in Russia itself. 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 of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else

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to the Trump presidency. And, you know, I think speaking in general, broad terms, what we saw in this sort of dance between Trump and Putin with the public compliments, the almost professed admiration. You had a president of the United States who was saying things about a leader like Vladimir Putin and an open authoritarian, this kind of admiring tone, willing to set aside the things he was hearing from his own intelligence,

intelligence community in favor of what Vladimir Putin was whispering in his ear and in Helsinki and elsewhere. What is a hard question, and I'm asking you to speculate, I know you're both reporters. This is not what you do. But if you're Vladimir Putin and you look at Donald Trump as a president, what are you thinking? Peter, I'll start with you. Well, I mean, you know, You know, the subject of one of your books, Dick Cheney, I thought, put it pretty well way back in 2002 or three when he says when I look at Putin, I see KGB, KGB, KGB, KGB, right? I mean, that is, in fact, foundational to who Putin is. Now, the KGB, by the way, is a more complicated identity in Russia than we think of it as. We think of, of course, is, you know, the bad guys, the movies and all that kind of stuff and all that's true. But in Russia, it was also a of the elite. If you were KGB, it meant that you were like somebody who went to Harvard. You know, you were somebody who was, you know, at the top of the social professional pyramid. But to look at Putin as anything other than that is to fool oneself, I think. I mean, he, you know, Trump's affection

for him was always inexplicable, which is always, of course, why the whole investigation was so important because people couldn't understand it. there must be something more there. It has to be that there is some secret financial relationship. There has to be some sort of story that we don't understand because otherwise, how can an American leader of either party, you know, express such admiration for a strong man like that? And the truth is, of course, we don't know if there's more there. I mean, there's, you know, the investigation didn't find any criminal conspiracy, but Putin occupied a particular space in Trump's head, where at the very least anyway, Trump admired his strength, his macho

kind of character, his take no guff from anybody else style, the idea that he could rule unilaterally without contrary power centers in his society to challenge him. That's something that Trump obviously was, to some extent, envious of. He expressed it about other autocrats to Erdogan, Shee, C, C, C. So it wasn't just Putin, and it may just be a strong man thing, but there wasn't anything particularly special about Putin. And I think that's something that has always been, you know, stoking suspicions here at homey all the way up until yesterday. Yeah. We'll get to the President Trump's comments yesterday. I wonder if you look back, there's sort of a Republican view, and I guess I'm in this sense

using the old school sort of traditional Republican view of Trump's presidency looking back as it relates to Russia, that while he was, you know, he spoke favorably about Putin and the rhetoric was warm, that the policies were tougher underneath and that he had in place people who were willing to, you know, impose tough sanctions on Nord Stream, try to stop that pipeline that would be this crucial source of liquid natural gas. for Europe, for Germany in particular, and that while Trump was friendly sort of on the surface underneath it was tougher. I wonder, Susan, if you buy that analysis. Look, the bottom line, and the record is very clear on this. There was a Trump policy on Russia, and it involved

slavish sort of public displays of affection for Vladimir Putin, private efforts throughout the four years of his presidency to move the United States closer to Russia, including public amplification and private amplification of outright Russian propaganda. Then you had a Trump administration policy that was much more consistent with a policy of a Democrat or a Republican administration. The problem was that the President of the United States didn't support that policy, number one. Number two, this fantastical sort of obsession with Nord Street, too, as if it proves that, well, gee, Donald Trump actually was really, you know, a Russia hawk to those Russia hawks who remained inside the Republican Party. Well, first of all, we've now seen this week pretty clearly now that Germany has finally canceled Nord Stream 2, that it's not stopping Putin's aggression.

So if that's what, you know, the kind of fantasy was, obviously that's pretty quickly been disproven. But the bottom line is that actually three successive American administrations, Democrats and Republicans, the Obama, the Trump, and the Biden administration opposed the Nord Stream to pipeline. None of those presidents of the United States were chancellors of Germany. And it is a German project. And German politics really dug in around this. There were many even around former Chancellor Merkel who wanted to cancel it. What Trump had was actually an anti-Germany policy, much more than a anti-Russia policy. And, you know, we can talk about that.

But I think what's relevant to this present crisis that we find ourselves in is that there's just been this fascinating. And to those of us who've, you know, been paying attention for a long time, kind of shocking, essentially transformation in the politics of American foreign policy. And, you know, everything that all three of us, you know, have absurd for, you know, our decades of watching politics was essentially kind of a Cold War, post-Cold War hangover type politics where you had, generally speaking, not always, you know, Republicans who were pretty, remained suspicious of Russia or hawkish, and, you know, would often try to kind of push Democrats from the right and say, you're not tough enough. And that was often the dynamic, although not always. But certainly it was very familiar. kind of camps for decades, actually, on this issue. And now, basically, I realize we have to blow up that script. And if you're looking for historical analogies, you know, although analogies are also dangerous and not perfect, it's really, I come back to the late 30s or the early 1940s in terms of this kind of neo-isolationist America first kind of politics, having risen

inside the Republican Party, that feels like much more familiar, those debates. You've heard it this week from Republican candidates saying, well, what do we need to do with a European war? That country is far away from us. And, you know, who cares? You've heard it in, you know, the echoes of Lindbergh in Trump's outlandish and even shocking, you know, praise of Vladimir Putin as a quote-unquote genius for essentially taking an army and chopping off parts of the neighboring country because he can. And, you know,

I just, I don't see how that fits anyone's definition of the American national interest. And so it's a really extraordinary moment in our politics. It's just a break with decades of the recent past. Well, at the risk of oversimplifying, I mean, can't you explain some of the rhetoric from Republican candidates in particular by just saying they're looking for approbation from Donald Trump? That's what they're doing. Many of them just want his endorsement. They're willing to say the things that they know will appeal to him. I think we saw this potentially in comments that we got from Mike Pompeo now being played on Russian state TV where Pompeo says, boy, he's shrewd, he's clever. I really respect him. I don't think Mike Pompeo really believes that. I think he's

He's saying that because he wants Donald Trump to hear that. And if Donald Trump doesn't run, Mike Pompeo would love to have that blessing. I'm speculating, but I think there's a pretty clear answer there, at least part of it. What's been striking is that there hasn't been, in my view anyway, this massive shift toward a pro-Putin stance, like the one that we hear articulated by Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican. party. You've seen it from some candidates who want his endorsement, but you really haven't seen. You've seen traditional rhetoric on this, on things going back to Nord Stream, where you've had a pretty hawkish line from Republicans, including Republicans who have become Trumpy, Trump sycophants. Ted Cruz was one of the most outspoken opponents of Nord Stream. You've heard it from, I'd say,

more traditional, thoughtful Republicans like Ben Sass. Peter, how do you, how do you, how do you look at the current discussion of Putin and what he's doing in the context of what we heard from Trump. Am I, am I wishing for the Republican Party I would prefer? And I'm just naive about about how Trumpy it's becoming. I'm open to that possibility. It's been true before of me. Well, I think, look, it's a good question. It's an important question, actually. I think there is still, obviously, within the Republican Party, a Trumpian slash Tucker Carlson, view of this, right? If you look at the poll, I saw the other day, said around 10% of Republican voters or self-identified Republican voters say, you know, something positive about Putin, about 10%. But that

does mean that most are not. And I think that what you saw was a quiet, you know, let's keep our mouse quiet about Russia during the four years Trump was in office, because we don't want to anger him, we don't want to get on his bad side. But they didn't mean that suddenly most Republicans had suddenly become Putinophiles. I don't think they were. I think that what you talked about, about the disparity between the president and his own administration's policy was about how much of an outlier he was even within his own building, you know, that in fact, most Republicans still had a very skeptical view of Mitt Romney view, right, of Russia, that it was our number one geopolitical adversary. And I don't think that changed from most Republicans. And I think that

most Republican office holders today, particularly the Senate, I'm not as, you know, I'm not seeing quite as much about the House, Susan and I were talking about this earlier, particularly Senate are for a tougher stance on Putin. I have a dissenting view from both of you. I have at various points believe that. I don't believe that anymore. I think that, in fact, you've seen an astonishing willingness to jettison what we thought of as previously deeply held ideological beliefs in the Republican Party.

because Donald Trump said we're not for that anymore. And I would include, you know, elements of free trade in that. And Russia actually is a really interesting test case. The numbers show actually pretty clearly, I think, that Republicans did a dramatic about face, the rank and file of the Republican Party. If you go back and look at, say, Pew surveys or, you know, some gold standard survey, you see a radical increase in Vladimir Putin's favorability ratings among Republicans. in the beginning of the Trump years.

And that's just a huge shift. And that then continued up until the present day. And so actually, you know, while outright favorability of Putin is very low right now among both parties in the United States, I saw the economist's head of polling responded to a tweet I had on this subject the other day and point out there's actually a 20-point gap.

If you just look at like, you know, negative and positive views, basically Joe Biden is negative 84 points with Republican voters. Vladimir Putin is negative 64 points. So basically 20 points better than Joe Biden. And, you know, I mean, come on. That should be like zero, right? Like what American should have a favorable view of Vladimir Putin? What's gone wrong in our society? and in our politics that the country that claims that it's in favor of freedom, I mean, God, I've spent two years listening to this crazy, you know, dialogue about how wearing, you know, a mask over your face is some terrible infringement on freedom and liberty.

Russia, folks, is an unfree country. It is an unfree country in which you cannot say what you want in a public space in which, you know, if you want your children to, you know, the state's going to do whatever it wants to do with you, you know, if you are a minority or of any kind, you know, the kind favored by right-wing people in the United States or the kind favored by left-wing people in the United States, you're not at liberty to do what you want. And there's something wrong in our society when the president of the United States gets less support from one political party than the president of Russia. That is this, I'm sorry, but it's just a sign of a sick country. And the reason

and you don't hear anything from that House is because, actually, they're a kind of a leading indicator of Trumpism rather than a lagging one. And so in the Senate, you do still have, you know, this pushback in sort of the Mitch McConnell traditionalist wing of the Republican Party. McConnell is also, you know, there is a connection between their views on democracy abroad and their views on democracy at home. And, you know, this minority of Republicans who's willing to say that, in fact, the January 6th, 2021, you know, at the Capitol was not, in fact, a great demonstration of

patriotism and free speech, but an attack on, you know, the electoral college. And so I think those are the same senators who represent that dwindling minority of what we might call old school Republicans. So I, I dissent from your dissent. I still think they are, I still think they are a majority, but I think the way that you describe the evolution is exactly right. I mean, if, you know, for some of these Republicans, I think, you know, including some, some conservative pundits, some of my former colleagues at Fox News, they start from the question, how can I blame Joe Biden? And that's the first and most immediate. And that, and then they reason backwards from there. And what's been interesting just over the past couple weeks is some of them want to

then praise Vladimir Putin consistent with the view that we hear articulated from Donald Trump. Others want to say, Biden is so weak and in a net. He's just, he's terrible. He's not confrontational enough. And those aren't mutually exclusive views, but they're in some considerable tension, I would say. But the through line is they can use it to beat up Joe Biden. To be clear, by the way, I agree with your dissent from my dissent. So I actually, I totally agree with what you just said. Well, and I would say I was reading last week some of the conservative website, not the dispatch, a different one, where literally one day gone from Biden is weak and the headline the next day is Biden is hysterical. It's promoting hysteria. Why should, you know, that this is going to. And they literally were like, it looked like they were flailing, looking for something. They hadn't quite decided which line of attack to use. Not to say that Biden can't or shouldn't be criticized, by the way. There's plenty of you criticize. And you can have a reasoned thoroughly principled critique of how he's handled this, either direction, maybe. But the point was, I think you're right, Steve, to say that it wasn't on the up and up for a lot of them. It wasn't like, I mean, like, if Lindsey Graham says, I think he should be

tougher, I think it's generally because Lindsey Graham thinks that. And he would have said that regardless. It's not just partisan, although obviously he's a partisan, but I think he genuinely believes that, right? And I think you're right, Steve, some who don't have a particularly strong view of Russia one way or the other are simply just looking for an avenue to say Biden screwed this up somehow. So let's get to that legitimate criticism of Biden on this, because I think there is some. I mean, if you go back and you look at the way that Joe Biden talked about Russia and about Vladimir Putin specifically during the campaign, obviously he was trying to contrast himself with Donald Trump and Trump's, let's say, friendly rhetoric toward Putin.

But he called Putin a KGB thug. He said Putin had no soul. He said Russia was the biggest threat to the United States. I mean, this was Joe Biden, the hawk. I mean, Joe Biden in 2020 he sounded like Mitt Romney in 2012, right? And you look at what he did since he came into office, and I would say that it's almost the inverse of what we saw from Trump. He comes in, and I think you're right. I can't remember, Peter, if you said it or Susan, that his early decisions on Nord Stream reflected a concern about Germany and bilateral relations there, about NATO broadly, but certainly had massive ramifications on Russia. And whether it was intended this way or not,

I'm certain that Putin saw the stepping back from those sanctions, the unwillingness to push for additional sanctions as a retreat. And we saw this, I would say, in several policy decisions that the Biden administration said, which I should point out, were criticized by those hawkish Republicans in real time. So that's not sort of just looking to criticize Joe Biden. They were saying at the time, Vladimir Putin is going to see this as a permission slip to be more aggressive, to be more adventurous. And I think that somebody like a Ben Sass, even a Ted Cruz at this point, can point

back to that and say, hey, look, I'm vindicated. Joe Biden was weak. He said signals of weakness. He had his gaffe a month ago saying, you know, maybe a minor incursion would be okay. Why are those Republicans wrong when they say that? So, look, I think it's very interesting because you're right that Biden campaigned as a hawk, but then essentially wanted to take Russia off the table. So I have a different interpretation, which is not, you know, Republicans, this remaining wing of the party, however large it is,

right, is always about weakness versus strength because that's a very cold war thing. But I would just sort of modify the frame a little bit to say it was more that Biden and his team seem to ignore their own threat assessment when it came to Putin in the beginning and agreed to this early summit with Putin in May. And, you know, the word that we heard from Biden then was he wanted to have a stable and predictable relationship with Russia. Well, obviously, that was a failed assumption. And now we are looking at the prospect of, you know, a horrific war in Europe that reorders the entire, you know, global security order. So that's neither stable nor predictable. So it was a misassessment or a mismatch between the sort of accurate assessment of Putin and who he was.

And I do think Joe Biden, you know, he has a pretty clear-eyed view over a long period of time of who Vladimir Putin is, right? And some real familiarity also with issues of Ukraine and Georgia. You know, that was part of his portfolio as vice president. You have a team who was determined to learn, as we've seen from the failures as they saw them of response to the takeover of Crimea, 14, right? You know, they said, well, we've done a lessons learned. So it was more the misassessment, like, that we need a policy that will just sort of manage Putin, keep him in Russia in a box, you know, give him enough attention. And I think, and then we're going to pivot to Asia. You know, Biden, I mean, almost every president, right, they come into office

out of the campaign trail and they've misread the world in some way or a crisis happens and it becomes totally different, right? That's George W. Bush is the most famous recent example of that, obviously. But it's not clear yet. And where it's an interesting question is, you know, is it toughness or weakness? Is there or is there not a strategic view of the case now? You know, they were wrong in the first year of the Biden presidency in terms of the geopolitics of Russia, right? Are they, in their handling of this, what I would say is that they seem to have been very tactical. I really, I still dissent from you on the Nord Stream two thing, because I think that's become this sort of Washington-focused kind of rallying cry that has a lot to do with

the Trump presidency. And it's not really an accurate statement, in my view, based on 20 years of watching Putin, he's not invading Ukraine because of Nord Stream. I think there is an element of assessing, by the way, the Germans as being kind of weak and disorganized in the same way that he might think the Americans are. One thing that doesn't get a lot of attention is that Angela Merkel has just left after, you know, more than a decade as the Chancellor of Germany, where she was Europe and really the world's main interlocutor with Vladimir Putin. American presidents couldn't stand Putin and, you know, really didn't speak his language. She literally spoke his language.

She was at one point the top Russian student in all of East Germany. And so she was fluent in Russian and fluent in Putin. And so the fact that she just left office and there's this untested new German Chancellor, Olaf Schultz, who comes from a party that has been much more accommodationist toward Russia, whose former leader Gerhard Schroeder is a bought and paid for asset of Moscow. So I think that that is a factor in this here as well. But it's not because of a pipeline existing or not existing that Putin is invading Ukraine right now.

It's unfortunately, it's much bigger and much scarier. And I don't hear either party really addressing in a big kind of strategic way. Vladimir Putin has told us all now in his speech that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the biggest catastrophe of the Soviet of the 20th century and that this is about undoing that and that he doesn't even believe Ukraine is a legitimate independent country. And so, you know, that's just such a profound threat to our sense of where the world is at that I think we have only begun to digest what a, what's it going to be like after this war, whatever this war ends up being. That's the set of questions I'd be much more interested in than the kind of will he or won't

he debate that we've all been having for the last few months. Yeah. And just to be clear, I don't think that Vladimir Putin is doing what he's doing because of Nord Stream. I think that I think that he may have seen as an opening gesture from Joe Biden. I think it was a telling gesture that Putin may or may not have overread. But I think he saw meaning in it that that could have been there and that people warned Biden might be interpreted that way. But I agree with you entirely that this is, I mean, my own view is that this is not months coming, years coming. This is decades coming. I think you've sort of made that point in some interviews I've seen you give. I mean, if you go back and you look at the kinds of things, you know, Susan, you gave an interview

to Frontline three, four, five years ago. And they've posted the entire interview on their YouTube channel, like an hour and a half. I would encourage people to go back and look at it because it's just, I think it allows people to really put in context what we're seeing today. I've already encouraged people to go buy your book. If you don't have time for the book, go watch this interview with Susan. So one of the things that you said then, I found so interesting. I mean, I found it interesting sort of first as a person and as a journalist, but then also as a kind of a broader strategic matter. You said, look, we were there. We were new to the country. We were new to the situation, you know, we're getting our bearings in effect. And when I looked around, I thought

one of the things that we would be wise to do was actually listen to what he said and take it seriously. And your conclusion, 15 years on, was he meant what he said. He said he was going to do these things. And then he did these things. And I would argue that in many respects, that's what we've seen from him in this context. It's exactly what we've seen from him in this context. And the lesson, I think, for people who are still, for downplaying what this could be or where it could go, and this would be a criticism I would have of the Biden White House right now, is he is in effect telling us what he very well could do. And he's not making the argument about Ukraine not having a right to exist because he wants to consolidate power in the Donbass.

He wants something bigger. And it seems to me that our. response collectively, as a country, the Biden administration in particular, is they're responding to something other than what he's saying. So sorry for my mini rant. Let me ask this question, though. One of the things that's been notable about these series of speeches and the meetings that he's had in the past few days is you look at the response from longtime Putin watchers and even they are expressing alarm at what they're hearing. Was it shocking to both of you? I mean, You watched him for a long time. Is this surprising what you're hearing?

Is he going beyond what you would have predicted if I asked you this question a month ago? Well, it's a good question. I think it is of a piece in the sense that, you know, Susan says they wanted a stable and predictable relationship. What they got was an unstable but predictable relationship. And this is predictable because I think that he has had this feeling for a long time that, as Susan said, that the break of the Soviet Union was not just a catastrophe,

but unjust and, and, and, and, and, something that need to be reversed. It doesn't mean that it's not shocking to hear him say it, though. I mean, to say it out loud, but you know he told George W. Bush that Ukraine wasn't a country. So this is a consistent theme going back for years. He wasn't in a position to do something about that back when Bush was president because Russia was still not as strong as he has made it again 15 years later. So it's been a progression. First consolidate power at home, get the economy in a better position so you have more wherewithal. That's a large function of oil prices, but still helped Russia, you know, get back on his feet and get out from under

foreign debt and all that. And then over time, begin to reincorporate and affect parts of the old empire, Georgia, start off in a small place, see what you can do there. Crimea, 2014. And now this in 2022. And so you're right, he does have a big appetite. And you don't give a speech like that if you only want to stop at Luchansk and Danyatsk. And that's what's scary about it. Now, I think that the Biden administration, for whatever flaws it had, certainly, and you can make that argument in the last, you know, number of months have been very clear-eyed about that. They have not tried to pretend that Putin was not about to do what it looks like he's about to do. You know what I mean? And that doesn't mean everything has been right in the last couple months, but I'm just saying that they have been pretty clear-eyed and telling the world this is happening, guys, he is serious about this.

Don't think this is a bluff because we think he's really going to do it. That, I think, has been a big difference between this administration and previous administration. But I do think that you're right that Putin looked at this moment for something he's been looking to do for a long time and said, where is the West, right? Biden's debacle coming out of Afghanistan caps three presidencies, really since 2011 after the Libya intervention when Obama soured on internationalism, at least the internationalism in a muscular military sense. What he's seen as three presidencies in a row say America is pulling back. And that was encapsulated in this, you know, these horrific images coming out of Kabul last summer. Anglo Merkel gone.

Macron has a tough election at home. Boris Johnson in trouble at home. Where is the West? And this is a moment where he might have looked at that and said, well, there's a vacuum in which I can go ahead and try this and see what happens. Yeah. And you worry that she is having some of the same thoughts. Can I ask about a specific moment from the,

the broadcast of the Russia Security Council meeting without putting you on the spot. But they have this meeting that's meant to convey the sense that the Russians are truly deliberating about next steps in Ukraine. And watching it, it has this sort of surreal, very scripted feel to it, something that was basically later confirmed after this open source analysis of the watches of many of the participants suggested, no, no, this was recorded. But there was this odd moment between Putin and Sergei Naryshkin, I may be pronouncing that wrong, who's the head of Russia's foreign intelligence.

Naryshkin was speaking and Putin sort of jumped in to interrupt and grill him. And Putin humiliated him. He mocked his halting speech. He scolded him for mixing his tenses, corrected, sort of angrily corrected him when Naryshkin said that he favored bringing in the two Russian occupied territories into the Russian Federation and Putin sort of shout at him. That's not what we're discussing. What happened there? So I'm glad you brought that up because I think for anyone who wants to understand kind of the nature of Putin and his government right now and how this is happening,

that's a really rich criminology scene there for us, all staged live. So first of all, the incredible isolation, physical isolation of Vladimir Putin, and you have his lackeys who are not just like five or ten feet away from him, but they're like 30 feet away from him and they don't even rate a table. I had a U.S. government official equipped me yesterday that it was like, you know, one of the cut scenes from the death of Stalin, the movie, you know, and which by the way is also, if you want to understand that dynamic, great, great guide sadly to the president. present moment. You know, so Putin, you see this physical isolation. You see the farce now confirmed that, in fact, it wasn't even live. So a lot of people pointing out that the humiliation of

Narushkin was even more significant in the sense that they edited this and they had the chance because it was taped to cut it out. So they chose to show it on national television in Russia. They chose to display this. What's the message, therefore, being sent both to a domestic audience in Russia and then to us? Well, to us internationally, certainly the message is there's one decider and it's Vladimir Putin and these other people are pointless lackeys who are staring at their feed, getting literally their orders, even their scripted thing isn't enough. And Putin has to edit the script, you know, in real time. So we're being told very clearly he's the only one who matters. We're being told he's isolated.

We're also, I think, being told something interesting about who actually is in favor with the Tsar and who isn't. And Narushkin, interestingly, has worked with Vladimir Putin for decades, right? And, you know, what it clearly tells us is Putin has enormous disdain for him. And then the other thing that I think smart Kremlinologists I saw were making of this scene is that it also tells us that Putin... wanted complicity of his lackeys, that he wanted them. And the reason he was mad at Nurushkin actually was because he said,

Gavrit Priyama. That means speak clearly, frankly. What he wanted was a direct endorsement of the annexation, or not the annexation, the recognition of these breakaway territories. He wanted them to be part of his crime. And that's what it is, by the way. It's a crime against international laws. crime against treaties that Russia itself has signed. And he wanted all of them to be

complicit. And so, you know, here we are. Kremlinology in the Zoom era. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. I don't think anybody who's, you know, even been a casual observer of Russia or of Putin would have imagined before this moment some kind of, you know, Kremlin-style team of rivals. But I think your point is an excellent one, particularly the fact that this is something that could have been edited. You anticipated my next question. This was very deliberate. I mean, even if that was a spontaneous moment, who knows,

the fact that it was a spontaneous moment recorded for posterity and presented to the world, this humiliation, you know, if there were to be dissent from Putin's plan in the coming days or weeks, I think that probably evaporated with with that scene. Absolutely. He wants to send that message. There's a reason why he didn't edit it out. Absolutely.

And it's interesting because there's been a lot of speculation about Putin's mindset after these two years of pandemic, right? That he more than most world leaders isolated himself from his own people, his own staff, hit out in Sochi a lot of the time, and that there has talk about whether that sort of intense isolation has, you know, impacted the way he's thinking about things. And certainly the visual image that he presented in that moment that you're talking about, Steve, you know, seems to exemplify that. How far is he apart from his own advisors, literally a gulf between them, which, you know, it's just him versus, not even versus, but him and then the rest of the world. And he himself is the one making decisions.

And you hear, there's a lot of reporting from our very good colleagues in Moscow that even the people around him in these last few weeks and months have not been sure for what he wants to do, that he has not been open with them, that they're guessing too. They're playing criminology. They're trying to read the mind of the czar, if you will, that forgot what his plan is and where he's going with this and how he plans to execute it. And I think that's a rather remarkable moment for us. So can I ask you to do what you just told us they cannot? And we'll end with this question, a simple one. What do you think he's doing? That's definitely a question for Susan.

Vladimir Putin is in a war with history. He is establishing what he sees as his legacy as the great restore of Russia. He came to power more than two decades ago with a campaign theme that might be familiar here in the United States, which was essentially make Russia great again. And in his view, Russia is a great empire. An empire needs territory. It needs breathing space to use a horrifying echo of 20th century European wars. And Vladimir Putin is a restorer.

This is a young former KGB agent who, in St. Petersburg in the 1990s hung a portrait of Peter the Great on his office wall when he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. And he wants to be Vlad the Great. And this is his bid for immortality. Well, thank you both. You've been very generous with your time. Again, I would encourage everyone to go out and buy and read Cremlin Rising. Check out the interview, the frontline interview with with Susan. And thanks both for spending time with us. Hey, thanks for having us. This is great. Oh, thank you so much. It's really, it's great to have the chance to talk about this with such an informed, thoughtful observer. Well, thank you very much.

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