The Dispatch Podcast - Zelensky Makes His Plea to Congress for Ukraine

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

On today’s episode, Steve speaks with Eric Edelman, a member of the U.S. foreign service for 28 years who served as a U.S. ambassador, a national security adviser to the vice president, and an under secretary of defense. They discuss Vladimir Putin and his strategy going into the invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to Congress, and finish with the latest on the Iran deal.   Show Notes: -Edelman’s page at The Dispatch -Edelman’s podcast Shield of the Republic -TMD: “Iran Deal on the Ropes?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. Joining us today, we have Eric Edelman, a frequent dispatch contributor and someone with long experience, both the Defense Department and the State Department as well as embassies throughout the world. Eric served as a senior DOD policy official under Secretary of Defense for Policy during the second George W. Bush. term. Before that, he served in senior state department roles, served as ambassador to Finland under Bill Clinton, served as ambassador to Turkey, early parts of the Bush administration, served on Vice President Cheney's staff, principal deputy assistant for national security affairs. He has a long and very distinguished history working on national security and diplomacy issues for the United

States. And he also hosts a podcast. The Shield of the Republic. I listened to the most recent episode with Corey Shockey from the American Enterprise Institute and found it fascinating. And Eric and his co-host, Elliot Cohen, have Andrew Roberts, the British historian coming up on their next episode in what surely be a fascinating discussion about parallels with this moment and the life in times of Winston Churchill. In our conversation today, Today, we spent time on Vladimir Putin and his mindset and strategy going into the invasion of Ukraine. We also talk about President Voldemir Zelensky's speech to Congress, Joe Biden's reaction to it, and a little bit on the Iran deal and domestic politics too.

Eric, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for, thanks for spending a little time with us. Thanks for having me, Steve. It's great to be with you. Russia launched this invasion of Ukraine three weeks ago. Where are we today? Well, you think have to break it down into different pieces. On the military front, the Russians have not done very well. I mean, this has been a, really astonishingly poor performance, which seems to reflect a variety of different factors, very poor planning and very poor planning assumptions. It appears the assumption was this was going to be a very quick and easy drive down Ukrainian highways into Kiev, where the Russians would

be welcomed with flowers and sweets as liberators. That's not obviously what's happened. logistical shortfalls of a very serious sort, some of it, which appears to be the result of the endemic corruption in Russia, which has kind of rotted out the Russian military from the inside, inside out. And as a result, a turn towards just brute force as the preferred mode of military operations. Now, to begin with, this was an unpremeditated, unprovoked, scripted war of aggression. And in that sense, it began, it was conceived in essence as a war crime. And I think that's important to bear in mind. But it's run into very, very serious difficulties. There does appear to be a diplomatic process ongoing. There's a lot of discussion

by Foreign Minister Lavrov and various Ukrainian representatives who've been in touch with their Russian counterparts suggesting that at least the outlines of an agreement might be emerging, which would entail some kind of version of, depending on who you read or what you listen to, some version of something that looks or sounds like the Austrian State Treaty on neutrality that would neutralize Ukraine. You know, we'll have to see how that plays out. I don't think we know the answer to that yet. obviously, I don't think we should interfere with Ukrainians stopping the carnage.

I mean, they obviously have a strong desire to stop this massive bombardment of urban areas like Mady Opel, Kharkiv, Kiev, that is killing lots of innocent people. By the same token, one would hate to see, you know, this, you know, premeditated aggression rewarded with, you know, positive political outcomes for Putin. Then on the economic front, you know, Russia is teetering on the brink of default because of the impact of the sanctions, which I think have been much broader, much deeper, and much better both coordinated and thought out than Putin anticipated. So Putin had obviously amassed a $600 billion-plus war chest of foreign exchange, which he hoped to utilize.

He can't really, including gold, and he can't make that liquid right now for the most part. So Russia is facing some very, and many of the steps he's taking are going to, you know, dig him into a deeper hole, is nationalization of property of companies that have stopped their operations in Russia, for instance, is a long-term disaster for Russia because who in their right mind will ever invest in Russia again, knowing that your property can just be seized like that. So it's not a great picture from his point of view. However, he still has, you know, the potential of using mass, which Russia has used historically, militarily, to its advantage to just grind, you know, Ukraine down.

And that's a very real possibility. Let me dive a bit deeper on the diplomatic question. Sergei Lavrov is meeting with Ukrainians having ceasefire talks. He's also the same person who said Russia didn't invade Ukraine. Right. You've been in the room with people like this. how do you take them serious in a diplomatic context when they're I mean those are just you know they're not trying right those are those absurd lies what what happens what's the dynamic in the

room when you sit across from them and why why would we believe why would the Ukrainians believe anything that comes out of his mouth yeah no it's a very good question I mean levroff is a very accomplished liar this is not the first time you know in 2008 during the Russian invasion of Georgia when then French president Sarko Z was the French president and on behalf of the EU trying to

mediate the Russia-Georgia conflict you know some of his aides have told me he got so furiously angry and he's a short guy who you know wears you know lifts in his shoes he grabbed this is Sarko Z

not Lavrov. No, there's a, what, six, four or something. Lovroff is taller, but he grabbed Lovroff by the lapels and practically lifted him up off his feet, screaming at him about what a liar he was. So that may be somewhat exaggerated,

but nonetheless, it gives you some sense of, you know, how much of a difficult interlocutor, Lavrov can be. The question of why the Ukrainians should trust anything, you know, is, you know, very, very relevant here. And it's one of the reasons why, you know, this may end up being the, you know,

diplomacy of desperation that leads, you know, to an outcome like this. But, you know, people will say, well, this is a legally binding treaty and it's got four power guarantees like the Austrian state treaty. Well, first of all, let's get, see if that can get through the United States Senate, that we will come to defend Ukraine if it's attacked again by Russia. I'm not sure that could get through the Senate. But, you know, this is a legally binding treaty. Russia has a legally binding bilateral treaty with Ukraine that it's signed back in the 90s, that it's violating.

It's got a set of undertakings it gave that are not a legally binding treaty, but still pretty solemn guarantees that it made in connection with the Budapest memorandum of 1994, which oversaw the relinquishing of Ukraine's claims to the nuclear weapons left on its territory. after the Soviet Union collapsed in exchange for some material considerations and assurances that Russia, the United States and Great Britain would, and France did it somewhat separately, would assure Ukraine that its borders would be respected and its territorial integrity would remain intact. You know, those have gone up in smoke. the UN Charter, you know, the OSCE Final Act, any number of things that the Charter of Paris, I mean, any number of documents, the Russians have signed saying they wouldn't do what they've done, and now, you know, they're going to say, oh, well, this time we really, really mean it,

so you should, you know, agree to this. It's really, you know, hard to see how that would be acceptable under anything other than the kinds of terms that were sort of dictated to the Czechs in Munich in 1938. And I know that, you know, the Munich analogy gets overused, but, you know, in this instance, I think it would be the rough equivalent. If you're the Ukrainians, if you're advising President Zelensky, you know, the inclination is to say, well, don't even bother. What's the point? I mean, they're, they're not telling the truth in these broad sweeping statements that they make publicly, why would you think they're going to tell the truth or you could take their word or you can try to bind them in a diplomatic

context? But that's not really an option either, is it? Look, Zelensky faces a, you know, really a very difficult kind of set of circumstances and decisions he may be asked. to make. And on the one hand, I think as a responsible leader, he wants to stop this killing. I mean, his speech to the Congress this morning was, I thought, you know, a masterful, you know, effort to engage both the, you know, intellects and the emotions of the members of Congress about what's going on in Ukraine and the importance of stopping the carnage. by the same token, he's made comments that make it clear that he doesn't want to reward Putin for the aggression too much. I mean, he understands he may have to give up some things.

I think the best hope for diplomatic outcome here is that Ukraine can do some things that might allow Putin to claim some kind of victory. And I think he has a lot more kind of, he has more degrees of freedom on that score than a lot of people realize, I think, because of his total dominance of the media environment in Russia. So he can spin almost any outcome as a success. So I can imagine something where the Ukrainians say, you know, we're going to amend our Constitution so it no longer requires us to seek NATO membership. we're not going to we're going to leave ambiguous the question of whether we can in the future maybe apply for for NATO membership will create some kind of ambiguous outcomes about Crimea and the Donbos and Russia withdraws its troops from like everywhere else you know I could see Putin spinning that as a great you know success

will it be worth the you know 10,000 or so who've been killed on the Russia inside and maybe higher and the, you know, $100 billion plus in economic damage that he's done to Ukraine and all the civilian deaths? No, of course not. But, you know, unfortunately, as John Kennedy said, life is unfair. I mean, it seems that would get us to sort of status quo ante as of January, right? I mean, it would be basically where things were. But that seems not. With the, with the I'm sorry, Steve, just with one exception, which is one of the things that seems to have been eating at Putin was the fact that it was in the Ukrainian constitution that they had to apply for NATO membership. That's not a, you know, that's not a small thing for him to walk away

with, whether it's worth all this is a completely different question, but he could at least claim that he got something. Yeah, I mean, I guess I view that as ancillary and the reasons that he's doing what he's doing, having far more to do with, you know, his sort of expansionist worldview. But fair point, that, even that, though, if feels like an unsatisfactory result, I mean, it would be conceding certain things to Putin and, in a sense, rewarding this kind of aggression. No, of course. I mean, and, you know, if there is a diplomatic settlement, I can promise you it will be

unsatisfying because whatever it is will involve something that propitiates him and you know and frankly you know he doesn't deserve to be propitiated at all he deserves to be removed from power by his own people and which you know still may happen it may take a while i mean you know we should remember that it took 10 years or so between the um Soviet invasion of afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those two events were connected, you know, to one another. And I think he's set, he has definitely set in motion a dynamic that is going to be in the long run, extremely bad for Russia and extremely bad for him. Yeah, and this seems to be top of mind for Vladimir Putin right now. He gave remarks, we're recording this early afternoon on Wednesday. He gave remarks

this morning in which he talked about cleansing the nation of dissidents and folks who, who are not sort of on board with what he's doing, no doubt at least in part, being mindful of those possibilities. Yeah, I mean, he really has got himself into a kind of trap, which is, and a lot of what was gnawing at him about Ukraine, I think, was the fact that for all of its difficulties, the corruption and its economic difficulties, Ukraine was a kind of functioning democracy. imperfect to be sure, but an actual democracy in which the people got to, you know, make a choice and choose their presidents. I mean, he clearly had problems with that in 2004 during the

orange, so-called orange revolution. He had problems with that, you know, when people rose up in the Maidon rebellion. And I think although he kind of hoped that maybe he'd be able to take it advantage of Zelensky. I mean, after all, who was this guy? He was just a comedian who was on TV and got elected president. You know, how tough an opponent is he going to be for me? You know, I think he, you know, came to understand that the dynamic in Ukraine was carrying Ukraine further and further away from Russia towards the West and that it was a living, ongoing invitation for Russians to look across the border and see that you don't necessarily have to have the kind of personalistic authoritarian system that Putin has created.

And that, I think, was the biggest threat to him, not NATO and bio labs, all this other nonsense that has been generated about this. But I think he's going to, you know, he may walk away satisfied that I've done so much damage to Ukraine that they can never become, you know, there'll be a failed or failing or a fragile, broken state for a long time. and therefore I don't have to worry about, you know, the, you know, the example it might set, but he's still going to be terrified of his own people. And, you know, that's why he's going to double down on, you know, they've already arrested 14,000 people.

And he's, you know, never going to rest, you know, rest easy. This is why he has meetings with his defense minister and his chief of defense sitting at a table that's a football field away. It's crazy. I want to move to President Zelensky's remarks to Congress and the Biden administration's response and where we see this going. But I think it's worth dwelling for a moment on Putin and on his mindset, especially with you, given your sort of knowledge and experience, the Defense Department at a State Department as ambassador to Finland, as ambassador to Turkey. You have a unique perspective on some of this. When we go back and think about Putin's dramatic rise to power in 1999, 2000, turn of the century, Yeltsin sort of handpicks him, Putin becomes incredibly powerful over this very short period of time, eight months. And is pretty clear in his public rhetoric that, you know, whether or

he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Empire, the Russian Empire, however we want to frame it, that he has big ambitions. And I think you could go back and look at Georgia. You can look at 2014 and first the Maidan in Ukraine and look at his hand in trying to influence what was happening domestically in Ukraine. Then you can look at the Crimean Peninsula. It seems to me that he was telling us all of. long and other people have pointed out his speech at the 2007 munich security conference he was in effect telling the west hey i'm going to do this did we take it didn't did we are we had fought for not

taking him seriously enough and as a diplomat as somebody who is you know who's working on on these issues or you know trying to to understand what his public rhetoric actually meant what do you what do you do when somebody says something like that it's easy to say now i think there were a lot of people who were saying these kinds of things earlier, including you. But how do you hear that as you're charged with making policy on these matters? You know, when I was a graduate student in history, one of the scholars, I was a graduate student at Yale. And Peter Gay, European historian there, once I remember giving a lecture, He believed in the higher naivete, which was if people tell you something, you know, over and over and over again,

unless you have some really strong reason to disbelieve them, you probably should take them, you know, at their word. I mean, you could say the same thing about, you know, Europeans and the rise of Hitler. I know the argument at Hitlerum is always the, you know, refuge of scoundrels. But, you know, Hitler wrote, you know, a book that told people what he wanted to do, and then he got elected and he went out and did it, you know, big shock. Right from the beginning, Putin was saying things that should have been setting off, you know, alarm bells, you know, for people. I remember as Ambassador to Finland reading his campaign biography, which was published

for the 2000 election because he was appointed at the end of 99 and had to run for election as president after Yeltsin resigned in March as I recall of 2000 and he published what was in effect the campaign biography which is really a long

interview which if I recall correctly don't hold me to this I think it was commercant and it was published online in Russian and there was an English language version called first person but when I read it one of the things that struck me was, among other things, real hostility to the Baltic states, particularly Estonia,

and there seemed to be like a personal, you know, personal connection there. His father fought against Estonian partisans after World War II because both the Baltics and Ukraine had sort of active insurgent activity after World War II that took the Soviets a couple of years to put down. But also, you know, they asked him about the Stalin years, you know, and I served in Moscow in the late 1980s in the embassy during, you know, the period of Glasnost, I like to call the period of high perestroika, which was Gorbachev's reform era, where all the truth was coming out about the Stalin years in Russia. And, you know, I remember my wife and I talking about

this constantly when you would talk to Russians and you asked them, it was almost inevitable that somebody would say they had a, you know, a parent, an uncle, a cousin, a sibling, a child who was in the gulag at some point because of the repression. There was almost nobody that we knew who was untouched by the repression. And you could say that's, you know, self-selection because people who talk to American diplomats are probably more intellectual class and, et cetera. But it was still quite striking.

And yet when they asked him about the Stalin era, he says, well, you know, I don't think it was so terrible. My family did fine because his, I guess it was his grandfather, I think, was, you know, in the Kremlin apparatus, I think in the food service part of it. that was a very, you know, kind of strikingly different kind of view than, for instance, Boris Yeltsin had.

You know, I remember Boris Yeltsin came to the Pentagon and met with Dick Cheney when I was the assistant deputy undersecretary for Russia and Cheney was Secretary of Defense. And Yeltsin said, you know, it's clear to me that the Soviet experiment was, you know, 75-year, you know, failed human experimentation on people. That was a very different view, obviously, than Yeltsin had. Moreover, in his election manifesto, I remember talking with a lot of Finnish, Russian experts, Finns pay a lot of attention to Russia, as you can well imagine. As they have to, yes. Given their complicated history with Russia and the 800-kilometer border, and they were all kind of taken aback when Putin talked about, you know, the dictatorship of law

that needed to be established. Not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the dictatorship of law. Now, on the one hand, a lot of people said, well, let's just, you know, there's been so much, you know, the oligarchs have ripped so much off, you know, in terms of property in Russia.

He just wants to return, you know, the rule of law. You know, that's maybe a good thing, et cetera. There was a lot of, you know, you know, people trying to explain this away, But clearly it was, I think, you know, revelatory of a particular cast of mind that we've seen, you know, first go to work on Russia domestically as he consolidated his power. And then, as you point out, it started to manifest itself in Russia's external relations once he felt strong enough in 2007 with the Munich speech and then the invasion of Georgia and Ukraine, you know, et cetera. etc. I also think, you know, in retrospect now, and we have, you know, much better understanding

of this from the late Karen Dowish's book on Putin's kleptocracy, but also Catherine Belton's book on Putin's people, both of which deeply researched, I think make it clear that there were, you know, people inside the KGB who were, you know, bound and determined to try and, you know, retake power and rebuild Russian power, both domestically and on the world scene. And Putin was a part of that. Yeah. I guess I'm struck as I watch the news and read as much as I can about this. I'm just struck by the inadequacy of our responses to each of those.

And not only the inadequacy of our formal responses, but the rhetoric that we used in response, and never followed through on. I mean, you know, you go back and you look at the language that the Biden administration was using after the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, and it was, you know, Russia would be a pariah state. They would be isolated internationally. In effect, nobody would be doing anything. And some of those sanctions had some bite, not as strong as I would have preferred, of course. But Russia was never a pariah state. Russia was still involved in Iran deal negotiations.

Obama held a bilateral meeting with Putin. I mean, this was not, they were not frozen out at all. So it's easy for me to understand why Putin, as he contemplated, you know, this most aggressive step, would say, they've been warning me forever and they just haven't done it. Yeah, and this is a point that I think, you know, Gary Kasparov and Andrei Kozarev, the former Russian foreign minister on Yeltsin have both made, and I think they're quite right. Look, I completely got wrong what Putin was going to do in this instance. I mean, a lot of people were saying he was, you know, getting ready to do this big, massive military operation in Ukraine. I, you know,

believed he was going to do something more limited, like, you know, grab off the whole Donbos or something like that, which would have been much more consistent with kind of what he did in Georgia, you know, and what he did in 2014 in Crimea and in 2015 in Donbos. Now, I was wrong. And I think the reason I was wrong, and this is the point that Kasparov and Kosovov make, is his appetite for risk has grown. And the reason his appetite for risk has grown is every time he took a risk in the past, he was met with an underwhelming response.

And as a result of that, you know, he has seen that, He can, you know, cow the West by threats of, you know, using nuclear weapons, using chemical weapons. Again, some of this goes back to the Syria episode in 2013, the so-called Obama red line about chemical weapons. Seeing the U.S. not follow through on some of this, I think, you know, has encouraged his appetite to take, you know, more and more risk. And, you know, as I wrote in the dispatch, some of the things that the Biden administration did in the first six months probably encouraged that propensity to risk. I'm not saying that these things directly led to his invasion of Ukraine, but the fact that they, in their first act with Russia, rolled over the new START treaty unconditionally for five years without even, I mean, they have reasons. They had reasons to do it. I mean, the treaty was coming up for renewal on February 5th.

They only had about two weeks to deal with it. And so they rolled it over unconditionally for five years. They could have at least taken a run at the Russians saying, what about a one-year roll over, two-year roll over, and then we'll negotiate all your new exotic weapons and the large number of, you know, non-strategic nuclear weapons that you possess, etc. They didn't even try. You know, they gave Putin a summit.

on the, you know, on the grounds that it would, you know, give him the respect that he craves. And they're without demanding that he actually pull all of his troops back from Ukraine's borders. And let's not forget he was doing all these exercises and massing troops around Ukraine back last, last spring. Spring, yes. You know, and they gave it to. And I would say Nord Stream 2. Nord Stream 2, waived the Nord Stream 2, you know, sanctions. That's the pipeline that would have helped circumvent Russian oil going.

Right. Now the, not having passed through Ukraine. Correct. And there was reasons for that too, right? I mean, they would say, we needed to rebuild our relations with Germany. Correct. This was important to Germany. Germany had been neglected, even disregarded during the Trump administration. There are all reasons, but I think you can understand why Putin, on the receiving end of these messages, heard them in a particular.

Precisely. Precisely. Same with, you know, same with the cyber threats, right? we were getting these attacks on U.S. infrastructure, colonial pipeline, the meatpacking plants, etc. And President Biden, you know, look, to his credit, he tried to take Putin on, but I worried at the time that, you know, going to Putin and saying, there are 16 different, you know, critical infrastructures in the United States.

If you attack any of those, we're going to give you, you know, a strong. response. If you're Putin and you're hearing that, the message you're getting is everything else is fair game. It's on the table. And so, I mean, you know, on the one hand, it was, you know, a good thing, I think, that Biden was trying to take on the cyber issue. But I think it would have been better if it had been a more ambiguous warning saying, knock this crap off or, you know, you know, there can be pipelines shutting down in Russia, too. 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

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it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. may vary. Let's turn to the speech that Ukrainian President Zelensky gave to Congress this morning. Relatively short speech, maybe 10, 15 minutes. He played a two-minute video. Afterwards, I think, a very powerful two-minute video showing the devastation of his country. Having communicated now with several members of Congress who were in the room as the video played, as he spoke, the descriptions I've gotten this, you know, overwhelming, unbelievably powerful, surreal to be talking to him or hearing from him in that context. And I think it's fair to summarize his speech effectively

in two words, do more. He had specific asks. He wants the cry from the ground in Ukraine is close to the skies. He wants a no-fly zone or some version of a no-fly zone. He's asked for fighter jets from Poland, and the president spoke in response. President Biden spoke in response early this afternoon, I thought gave appropriate admiration, showed appropriate admiration for everything that President Zelensky is doing, recounted what the United States has already done, which is not insignificant. But more or less, I think the message back from Biden was, while we admire what you're doing, we're happy to help in targeted ways, we are not going to do the things you're asking us to do. I wonder if you had any reaction to Zelensky's speech

and to that response. Yeah. So I think the speech was extremely powerful. And watching Zelensky do this, he has been extremely artful. You know, so when he spoke to the House of Commons, He, you know, rhetorically said, we're going to fight in the forests, you know, we're going to fight in the streets, you know, very reminiscent of Churchillian rhetoric in the May of 1940 about, you know, fighting on the beaches, et cetera. You know, when he spoke today to the Congress, he echoed Martin Luther King, you know, I have a dream. And I think he very powerfully engaged both the intellects and the emotions of, you know, members of Congress. I'm not surprised to hear you report that he was very successful. You know, and I think in a way this speaks to his unique preparation for the role history is assigned him, which is that he is an actor. and the Russian sort of sneered at that when he, you know, a comic actor at that,

just as many people sneered at Ronald Reagan when he became president. Reagan had the enormous advantage of having been governor of the largest state in the union for eight years before he became president, which was not in considerable political experience. Zelensky had much less and had some difficulties when he became president, even though he got 72 or 3% of the vote in the election that brought him into office in 2019, he's had a rough couple of three years as president until this moment, which brought out, you know, this ability that he has shown to, you know, tap into these emotions, but also the intellect.

And I don't mean to suggest that there's anything false or artificial in what he's doing. But it's just that part of leadership is performance art. And his background, just as Reagan's background, prepared him to execute this role at this point in time. You know, I thought it was very interesting the way he expressed it. He said, close, you know, the airspace over Ukraine. He did talk about no-fly zone, but he said, look, if you're not going to do that, than give us other things, give us planes or give us anti-air equipment. And, you know, look, as former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy,

there are enormous difficulties with the idea of a no-fly zone. And I don't mean the escalation dynamics. That's an issue as well. But, you know, just the practical, technical. Practical, technical, mechanical issues of getting sufficient air defense assets an aircraft forward. We can't really get to eastern Ukraine because of the geography. This is not like Syria, where we had certain advantages of already having lots of air power in the theater or Libya where we could do it from offshore because, you know, the only populated, seriously

populated parts of Libya were along the coastline. So it's a challenging, you know, no issue. There are also issues with the mig 29s. You know, for instance, those aircraft have avionics that have been upgraded several times and not clear Ukrainian pilots could, you know, actually, you know, fly them easily without training. There's probably, I'm pretty sure there's got to be NATO crypto gear in there that you'd have to pull out. Strip out. These are the, These are the aircraft that we're talking about having Poland provide, and we would sort of come in behind Poland with some of our own. So there are legitimate issues here about, you know, whether you provide this equipment or not. What I don't understand is why the administration has cast all of this in terms of the escalation dynamics.

Because it would be perfectly fine to say, okay, we don't want to give them this, but we're going to give them something else. Because what they really need is, you know, better and more sophisticated anti-air, shorter and longer-range anti-air assets, you know, more drones that are, you know, have lethal capabilities. And so, you know, there is a way to talk about this. But instead, the administration has continued to say, well, we don't want to do this because it's escalatory. or if we do this, it's going to lead to World War III, which I think is the wrong way to talk about it, because it allows, it puts Putin in kind of the driver's seat in terms of, you know, worrying about the escalation dynamics. And there's taking things off the table. Yeah, we're constantly taking, we're not going to do this, we're not going to do that. Yes.

And the problem is they're busy worrying about what will provoke Putin. And that's, you know, it's part of their job. But the bigger part of their job is to make Putin worry about the things that might provoke us. And so they've, you know, they're over-fulfilling the plan on the first part and underperforming on the second part. And that's allowing him to kind of call the tune. Again, this is something that, you know, Gary Kasparov and Andrei Kozarev, you know, who know, I think Putin's psychology pretty well, understand. instinctively. And I wish there was a little bit more attention to it in the Biden administration. Well, I think it sounds to me, if I were describing what we heard from the president today,

it sounds to me like he is taking something of a hybrid approach, where he did say, look, we're going to do some new things. Here are the alternative things. We're going to provide anti-aircraft systems. We're going to provide additional small arms, 20 million rounds of ammo, anti-armor systems, additional drones. But again, you know, invoking this idea that we would be provoking World War III by taking a bigger step. The other thing that I think surprised me about this debate that's been taking place about these migs specifically, you know, setting aside for a second the kind of rhetorical fumbling that we saw from the administration saying, in effect, yeah, we think we're going to do this and then kind of

going back on that and saying they green light they weren't really yeah yeah which is which is which is inartful and i think problematic for its own reasons but i think what i'm and you you hear talking to administration officials administration defenders they raise some of the the very practical technical uh issues that that you mentioned and those are real issues it's not a snap i think sometimes people get this idea that we can snap our fingers and and have a no flies of it can't can't happen anywhere ever that way. It particularly can't happen here for the reasons that you suggest. But, you know, President Biden in his comments today, which were basically a response to President Zelensky said, you know, this could be a very, very long battle. If it is going to be a long

battle, the kinds of practical, technical issues that you're talking about that they're talking about can be overcome. And it seems to me that that's the failure of imagination here from the Biden administration is if it's going to be a long battle, we shouldn't be talking about what we can do for them this week. We should be talking about what we can do for them this week a month from now, six months from now potentially. And that, it seems to me, would have to include migs and things like that. I agree. Look, under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria New who, you know, has served in Moscow, knows Russia well, testified in front of Congress, I think it was last week or maybe it was the week before I'm, you know, it's all beginning to become

a little bit of a blur. But she said that, you know, the objective of the administration is that Putin be, you know, unsuccessful to, you know, make him fail in this endeavor. And I think that's the right objective. I would go even further. I think it's like an imperative. Because if You know, if we don't, you know, we can sit here and talk about the risks of escalation in Ukraine, which are real and they should, you know, there should be a debate about it. We shouldn't say anything we're going to do is going to cause World War III because, A, it's not true. And it's just an excuse for shutting down, you know, debate and discussion. I mean, so let's talk about the, you know, escalation risks. And let's go back and look at, you know, what, you know,

what in the past, you know, the escalation dynamic has been. Because as we've been discussing, Steve, I think under responding, you know, is got its own escalation risks because it encourages more appetite for risk. But moreover, if you look at this in the long view, if Putin were successful, if you were able to get, you know, Ukraine to knuckle under and become reabsorbed into, you know, some new, you know, Russian Soviet kind of empire, along with what I've called the slow motion Anschluss that he's executed in Belarus. Then you've got, you know, Russia cheek by jowl with NATO. I mean, Belarus just, Belarus just amended its constitution in a, in a referendum that was clearly rigged by Lukashenko to remove the,

part of its constitution said we won't host nuclear weapons on our territory. Like Ukraine, nuclear weapons that were on Belarusian territory left and went back to Russia after 1992. Now the Russians might be deploying, you know, nuclear capable missiles into Belarus. For instance, the SS26 of Scanders, which they have in Kalinandrad, which are dual capable. And so those could be ranging part of Europe. They could move in the missile they developed that violated the INF Treaty and range a lot of Europe, which would bring us back to where we were in the 70s with the SS20 crisis that we had that was resolved ultimately by the INF Treaty, which we no longer are abiding by

because we were the only country in the world being covered by this treaty since the Russians were violating it. Everybody else is developing missiles in this 5 to 5,500 kilometer range that was covered by the treaty except for the United States. So the nuclear escalation dynamics

with U.S. treaty allies who have an Article 5 guarantee that we have to defend them are even more severe and more dangerous than the escalation risks we're talking about here. If he succeeds. If he succeeds. Right. Which is why it's imperative that he fail.

Right. So one of the areas that you've been very positive about in your commentary on the Biden administration is their decision to make public intelligence reporting that we were getting near real time in the weeks and months before the invasion took place. You know, I don't have a fraction of the understanding of these things, intelligence, but from a layperson from a newspaper reader's perspective, I also thought it was very clever and seemed to be effective, not so much as a deterrent, but at least as establishing accountability. We know you're going to do this. When you do it, we're going to be able to tell people that you did it and that we knew you were going to do it. I think it was very effective. One question that I have as I listen to the president today and listen to him to talk through the additional things we're going to be providing is if we knew that Putin was going to do this or some version of this, why were we not scrambling during that period to provide the things that we're now scrambling to provide in the middle of a hot war?

It's a great question and I agree with you completely. And I, you know, I had that same concern at the time. I mean, look, the strategy they pursued, which I've in the pages of the dispatch called deterrence by disclosure, you know, had pluses and minuses, right? I mean, the plus was it brought you some time. So you could line up the allies and get these sanctions in place. develop better sanctions than Putin anticipated you could put into place, et cetera. Second, it forced the Russians, Putin and Lovroff and all the rest of them, to deny it,

which was very helpful in the sense that, as you were saying, in accountability terms, because it's created a presumption of disbelief now in anything the Russians say about this, right? Why would anyone believe anything they say when they've been, lying about, you know, about this. It should have bought time as well for sending in additional weapons and trainers. Now, we know that there were debates inside the administration about doing both of those. And at various times, those were either halted or delayed again because people were concerned about provoking Putin.

And there is something kind of contradictory about saying, well, we know he's going to do this, but we don't want to provoke him. It's kind of the same disjunction that you see when you see the administration saying, well, we want to be careful about these migs because we don't want to provoke him. As I've said, there are reasons why you might not want to send the migs. But provoking him isn't one of them because you're killing people with javelin anti-tank missiles. You're killing people with Stinger, you know, shoulder, man, portable, you know, air defense systems. And if you kill them with a MiG, they're still dead. And so it's, you know, you could make

the argument that, well, that's escalatory as General Berryer did in a hearing the other day, because Migs could fly technically missions against Russia itself, except that's not Ukraine is doing. So, you know, I find, I just find it totally unpersuasive that, you know, this is an escalation, you know, risk. And we shouldn't be talking about it for that reason. But to be talking about it in the same breath that you're saying, we want to put out the intelligence that we are afraid he might be ready to use chemical weapons or a bio weapon or create a radiological incident at, you know, Chernobyl or one of these other nuclear reactors that they've been shelling. Oh, by the way, that's a war crime under the Geneva

conventions. You know, that, that to me is kind of weird that you're worried about provoking me. How much more provoke can he be? Okay, the nuclear card. We get that. But if, again, if you allow him to cow you with that over everything, then you may as well just, you know, fold up your tent and go home. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's my concern and sort of the broader worry that I have is, you know, there are different ways to look at this. And let's be clear. I mean, you have actually been in the room. These are not easy decisions. Nobody's pretending these are easy decisions. You know, you worry when you criticize or you offer sort of encouragement to take another course that it's better to have Vladimir Putin look back at the United States and see

everybody saying the same things. I had a conversation with Ben Sass about this. How do you you offer these criticisms? How do you make a public critique when you worry about that? On the other hand, if you think that the steps that we're taking are likelyer to create more problems or not result in the kind of outcome that we want, it's a sort of obligation to do that. Can I just ask you just, again, on a personal level, when you're making these arguments, when you're thinking about it, people pay attention to what you say. And you know, a lot of these players, right? I mean, you know that, you know a lot of the people who are making these decisions. Do you think about personal relationships and, you know, you don't want to hear

so-and-so listen to you critiquing because you might not get the whole context of a, what you mean is a helpful critique? How do you think about that? Look, I mean, I, first of all, a lot of these people are people I know or have known for years and I consider friends. And you're right. I mean, all of these decisions are incredibly difficult. And it's very easy to sit out here, you know, now that I have no responsibilities whatsoever

and say, you should do this, you should do that, you know. And I'm sure there are things that, you know, I don't even know about that make it even more complicated. So, you know, my view is we have one president at a time. I want, you know, I want Joe Biden to be the very best president he can be in this circumstance for the United States. And I try and, you know, call the balls and strikes as I see them. You know, I think they've done, as I said earlier, you know, with you, Steve, that they've done a very good job of alliance management, very good job of managing the sanctions. I give Secretary Blinken

an enormous credit. He's been parapetetic and he's handled alliance management in the way that my former boss, the late George Schultz, you know, described in his memoirs. It's like gardening. It's got to be there constantly tending to the alliance. So I give him enormous credit for that. I mean, there was the cofluffle about saying that he'd given a green light to, you know, Poland on the migs. I'm not sure what the backstory is to that. But, I mean, I'm sure if you had, you know, Tony, sodium pentothal in front of us, he'd say, yeah, that probably wasn't our finest moment. So, I mean, I think you just have to, if you make the arguments in good faith, you know, and say, look, I think you should do this. Don't worry so much about that. And by the way,

nothing I'm saying to you is anything that, you know, hasn't either been said directly to them or, you know, through intermediaries to them. So it's not like I'm saying one thing, you know, and saying something else, you know, behind the scenes. you know, I do think actually that they have a bit of a problem in the sense that for a variety of reasons, not completely their fault, this is a more insular administration than I would have hoped. I mean, this is something I've written about, you know, in the dispatch over, you know, since the election and even before the transition was complete. You know, the president has surrounded himself with a lot of people who are longtime staffers of his,

but it's not a team of rivals or, you know, cabinet of peers. And, you know, it's not to say that that's what he should have done. I mean, every president gets to design the national security apparatus the way they like under the National Security Act in 1947. It's a flexible instrument that's meant to do that. But there is a danger of becoming too insular, and in particular because the confirmation process has been so slow, and a lot of positions have remained unfilled, it's really put a lot of, you know, centralized a lot of power in the White House and in the NSC, you know, staff.

We saw that in the Obama administration as well, and, you know, it's, in some sense, it's not, And it's not just, you know, the Obama and Biden administrations. It's been a long-term trend over years. But, you know, you need to have a balance, you know, honestly, between the departments and between, you know, the White House. And you need to have some, you know, you need to have some alternate voices coming in and talking to you about these things, in part because when you're in government,

it is very easy to get kind of cocooned in a bubble of intelligence and government information and the things you can't talk about and the result is everybody in the situation room ends up drinking their own bathwater and that's a real danger and you have to be alive to it to their credit I think they've done some outreach

they should have done it earlier in my view and I think they should be doing it more consistently but they have reached out to groups of people and listen to criticism including for me. And I know that they want to do more of it. And, you know, as long as they solicit criticism, I'll be happy to supply it. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at MX.ca. We are, I don't want to take up too much more of your time. There are two things I want to, I want to get too quickly before we let you go. I'd like to turn to Iran.

In the context of Russia, we saw in late January headlines in the New York Times and elsewhere that the U.S. was on a verge of this Iran deal number two. And it wasn't quite a fade accompli, but it felt close. It felt like it was going to happen. We're in a different place right now. I think there have been all sorts of reasons to believe that they're not, some of them having to do with Russia. But then just a couple days ago, we saw the head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, give an interview to French television. And he said this, I think we're on the verge of a deal with Iran.

the problems created by the new sanctions on Russia prompted a pause. So I'm very, a pause in the talks. So I'm very glad foreign minister Labrov says he got U.S. assurances. I hope we reach a deal soon. First of all, why is Russia part of these talks? How can we claim, again, going back to what we were talking about earlier, that Russia is a pariah state that they should not be a part of the community of civilized nations, that we should exclude them from all these things and then have them at the table on issues like climate

change and on this Iran deal, where effectively they've been, I think, making the Iranian argument for the Iranians. Number one and number two, what do you imagine these assurances could be? Well, first, full disclosure requires me to say that, you know, I testified against the original JCPOA back in 2015 in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And my critique of that agreement, I think, has been borne out by events. I think it was an inadequate agreement to begin with that basically just kicked the can down the road. President Obama pretty much admitted that. I mean, he said that at the end of the various sunset clauses of 1510 and 8 years,

for various elements of that agreement. At the end of it, the Iranians would be, as he put it, in an interview with NPR, days away from having enough Fissal material to have a nuclear weapon. So the only thing it did was really kick the can down the road. And that was assuming good behavior and Iran abiding by it. Iran, I think by and large, abided by it in part because the deal was so advantage. that there was no need not to. They weren't in a hurry. And they got their money. I mean, they got their money. They didn't get as much money as they hoped and wanted, in part because

the U.S. sanctions were so, had been so successful that people were, you know, foreign banks and businesses were very, very chary about going back into Iran after the deal was signed for fear that sanctions might snap back at some point. And of course, the Trump administration, you know, left the deal. And one can argue about, you know, how they did that and whether the timing was great, whether they'd laid all the predicates that needed to be laid for that, but put that to one side. The Biden administration and the Democratic platform promised a deal that would be longer dealing with the sunset clauses that I mentioned earlier and stronger, that would, you know, have fixed some of the issues having to do with verification of the

agreement since the Iranians had never come completely clean. And because the Israelis managed to exfiltrate out of Iran, an archive of the late, unlamented Mosin Fakhrizida, who was the head of the Iranian nuclear program, that detailed a lot of the work that they had been doing on weaponization of nuclear weapons, which, in secret, which have never been, which got swept under the rug by the JCPOA, which was one of my criticisms. So they were going to do a deal that was longer and stronger. I don't really want to comment, Steve, on a text that I haven't seen. I mean, we're told it's a 20-page text with three or four annexes. It certainly looks to me like this is not going to be longer and stronger, you know, this is actually going to be kind of weaker

than where we were. There are going to clearly have been some concessions to the Iranians to get them back into the JCPOA. And I don't know exactly what, you know, Foreign Minister Lov means when he says he's gotten written assurances. I suspect that has something to do, although I don't know this with elements of the agreement that would have, well, let me back up for a second, one of the things that happened after the Trump administration pulled out of the deal was that the Iranians also began to not abide after one year with all of the elements of the JCPI. They were limited to what level of enrichment they could have. In other words, they could enrich uranium, which was a mistake, by the way, to allow them to do that. But they could enrich up to,

I think, 3.75%, but not above. And they started going up to 20% and up to 60%. So the question, you know, when this deal comes back into force is what happens to that low-enriched uranium, which is well on its way to becoming weapons grade? And I believe that part of the deal is going to be it gets shipped to Russia and the Russians get paid for it. I'm not sure exactly how and by whom and with what mechanism, but presumably the assurances that Lavrov is talking about are somehow encapsulated in the text that they've got now of this agreement that will enable them to be paid for this. I mean, I think, again, I want to say, you know, we haven't seen the text, so I don't know for sure. But in any of it.

event, what should happen and what I'm afraid won't happen is that this all needs to be submitted to the United States Congress under existing law, which is the Iran Nuclear Accords Review Act in ARRA. And I think I'm fearful that the administration is going to refuse to do this. You'll recall that the JCPOA in conformity with law was submitted to the House where it was voted, there was a negative vote in the House. There never was a vote in the Senate, and there was never a vote in the Senate because of the filibuster rule. Republicans controlled the Senate at the time. Had there been a vote, it would have been voted down.

There would have been some Democrats voting it down, including at least, at least, three who declared themselves against it in 2015, the current Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, the current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Robert Menendez, and the ranking Democrat after Menendez on the committee, Senator Ben Cardin, all of whom came out against the deal. On March 1st, Senator Menendez made an extremely long speech on the floor of the Senate. attacking the negotiating position that the Biden administration had taken in terms of getting to, arguing many of the things that I've been arguing here. They promised longer and stronger.

It looks like we're getting weaker and shorter. And so it's going to be a key moment here at how this is handled. It should be submitted to the Congress for a vote. the administration may argue, we already submitted JCPOA, and so there's no obligation to resubmit this because it's just going back to the old deal, except we know that there's a 20-page text with three annexes, which is not exactly the same deal. It's changed, materially. So I think the legal argument for not resubmitting it is going to be very, very weak. Just this morning, Punchbowl was reporting that there apparently were some very upset moderate Democrats who raised issues with the administration about the deal and about, you know, why they haven't been briefed.

And my sense is that there are two groups, you know, there's one group of moderate Democrats who are likely to support this deal, but want the administration to brief. them, want them to be given better talking points for why this is a good idea. I think there others like Elaine Luria and some others who are just going to flat out oppose this deal because, you know, like Menendez, I think they think it's a bad deal. She had some tough language in a letter that she submitted just a public letter that she wrote, who wrote with some other skeptics last week. Right, correct. I think they're about... Vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee. And I think there were about 12 of them, 12 or 13 Democrats. So, in a, you know, in a, in a house where they only have, like, what, 11, 12 vote, you know, majority,

that could become a real problem. I mean, the last time around it was the, you know, Republicans who controlled the House who voted unanimously pretty much against this deal. Most Republicans, with possible exception of Rand Paul, are going to vote, you know, against this deal again. 49 of them signed a letter in the Senate. So the administration, I think, is going to find itself in a position of you have to justify all of this stuff and whatever deal they cooked up with the Russians. And again, we don't know what it is. But whatever

they cooked up, they're going to have to defend that, I think, in front of the Congress. And if they don't, you know, they're going to run the risk of, you know, putting themselves kind of in a very bad light, you know, because they love to, you know, contrast themselves with the previous administration, which had a very fast and loose relationship with the law most of the time. But they're going to be doing the very same thing if they don't submit this to the Congress under Ennara. And it ought to be, you know, it ought to be ventilated in front of the people's representatives. Yeah, I think the concern I have among many, I agree with you on the things that you've said.

they seem to be continuing the Obama administration's approach of decoupling these talks from Iran's malign behavior more broadly. Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State was on Brett Baer, on Fox News Sunday with Brett Beir this past weekend and said, well, you know, look, we've got to get them to address the nuclear issues so that we can finally address the malign behavior, which just strikes me as exactly backwards. Right. Particularly in light of the fact that they sent missiles on Saturday night. To her bill, yeah. Well, and it's not just that, right? So the administration, again, in the spring came in, and one of the first things it did was remove the designation of the Houthis under the FTO,

under the Foreign Terrorist Organization list. And this was, you know, I think in hopes of trying to promote. a negotiated settlement of the Yemen civil war and to diminish our support for the Saudis and the UAE. UAE actually has not actually been in Yemen for a year or two, but the result of this was a bunch of Houthi, you know, attacks, missile and drone attacks on Abu Dhabi and Dubai. I think there have been five attacks. And the UAE has asked, you know, for you know, for, you know, redesignation of the Houthis in response to which there's been silence from the administration. No action, no answer. Is it any surprise that in that context

when the Biden administration called up MBS in Saudi Arabia and MbZ and UAE and said, we really would like you guys to pump more oil, you know, so that we keep the price down so that the Russians don't get a windfall to help them finance this war in Ukraine, that, you know, they, you know, weren't there to take the call. They weren't going to take the call from the U.S. Well, why do you think that was? Maybe they were just busy. Yeah, I mean, it's obviously a response to, you know, and you can say that's not a great response by allies, and I agree at some level that, you know, maybe they should have at least listened, but you can also understand the peak that, that they feel about, you know, the administration not listening to their concerns. And, you know, this is,

this is an area where I think they're going to have to do a little bit of work. But I agree with you that in the run-up to the JCPOA, it was very clear that particularly in Syria, where the Iranians were being extremely active, that the United States chose not to contest it and not to do anything about it because they didn't want. want to get in the way of the negotiations over the JCPOA. And the response was that a month after the JCPOA, the late unlamented Gassim Soleimani, went to Moscow and essentially proposed the division of labor that led in September of 2015 to the Russian intervention in Syria using Russian air power and the sort of Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Shia militias that the Iranians

put together of, you know, Afghan, Iraqi, Iranian, and other, you know, itinerant Shia to be the cannon fodder, the ground force, to help deal with the, you know, shortfalls in military manpower that the Assad regime was running into. And, you know, that, you know, continues essentially up to this day, notwithstanding the Trump administration's strike killing Soleimani in January to two years ago, I guess. Well, there are about a dozen or so issues that we're not going to get to just because I can't keep you here for five hours, much as I would like to. let's let's end with a very brief discussion on on domestic policy what we're seeing

particularly with respect to Russia and domestic politics one of the things that we've talked about here on the dispatch podcast both with our roundtable discussion and then also with several successive guests is the extent to which those in the Republican Party who have been I would say pro Putin there's no real way to dress it up Vladimir Putin has had fans in Donald Trump, in some Republican backbenchers, Madison Cawthorne, certainly in the conservative entertainment media, Tucker Carlson literally said, I am on Russia's side. That's a paraphrase, not a direct quote, but that is what he said. Fascinating as this unfolds to see how isolated they are.

The polling, you mentioned earlier before we started recording the polling on this is clear. What do you make of the fact that they're so isolated? And what do you think that portends for our domestic politics? Well, it's a very interesting development. I mean, for a never-trumper like me, who signed all four of the never-Trump letters in 2016, one of the things, you know, I found disconcerting was even though by, and large, you know, the Republican Party in the Congress remained pretty tough on Putin. I mean, it's why they passed Katsa and with a veto-proof majority that Trump had to sign it and all of that.

In the electorate, you started to see kind of the opinion about Putin sort of renorming around the president's, you know, much more benign view of Putin that, you know, he expressed repeatedly and including. from the podium, you know, at Helsinki, which as a former ambassador to Finland, you know, that was in July, I think, and I was there in December giving a lecture and the city was still vibrating from that, you know, that press conference. It was an amazing moment. So, you know, I watched this with some trepidation and concern. It went from roughly around 20% saying, you know, Putin was a positive force, I mean, like 40% at its peak. And that seems to have completely gone now. I mean, there seems to be very little variance among Democrats,

independents, and Republicans about, you know, good and evil in this instance, you know, that Zelensky is the good guy and Putin is the bad guy. The degree to which you can see that, by the way, I think can be measured by Trump, who very frequently is not leading public opinion, but following where he thinks public opinion is going. And he gave an interview to David Drucker of the Washington Examiner and in which he said, well, you know, Putin's changed terribly overnight. I don't know what's happened to that guy.

And it's, you know, he's really bad. What's going on is terrible. That's after, you know, three weeks ago saying what a brilliant genius he was for launching this investigation, this invasion. So it's too early to tell what that means politically. I hope what it means is that more and more

Republicans will disenthrall themselves from the, you know, personality cult around Trump that I think has, you know, damaged the party enormously and damaged our politics nationally, you know, for the last four or five years. It is, it is ironic to me that what Trump is now saying about Putin, he's not going to get away with that. I mean, there's no way that somebody who was as pro-Putin as Donald Trump was is going to be able to recast this. I just don't believe it's possible. But it's interesting to me that he's saying about Vladimir Putin, that he's changed, that this isn't the person I knew

that we had, you know, sort of we had to, who could have had any idea? Is the same thing that, that the many top defenders of Donald Trump for years said after January 6th, well, this is so out of character. We couldn't have imagined he would have tried to steal an election and remain in power. there is a there is that sort of an ironic echo on that well uh eric thank you so much for for taking the time to join us we uh we are eager to have you back as i say there are a lot of things that we didn't get to um so we're eager to have you back and if you can arrange bringing tony blinkin with sodium pentothal um we will do that any time you want and break into our normally scheduled program. Thanks for your time. Thank you, Steve. It's great to be with you.

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