The New Yorker Radio Hour - How Should President Biden Respond to Putin’s War on Ukraine?

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Since last summer, Russian troops have been amassing on the Ukrainian border, and, in recent weeks, President Vladimir Putin warned that he intended a military takeover of Ukraine. This week, Russia began the war, with widespread attacks, including in the capital, Kyiv, aimed at crippling the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called on civilians to enlist in the military to fight the invaders. The U.S. and nato are levying heavy sanctions against the Russians, but there are disagreements within the U.S. and among western allies about exactly how to proceed. Susan B. Glasser, a New Yorker staff writer, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the war, and the choices faced by the Biden administration and nato. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's too late, my dear colleagues, to speak about the escalation. Too late, the Russian president declared a war on the record. Should I play the video of your president? Ambassador, shall I do that right now? Or you can't confirm it. Do not interrupt me, please. Thank you.

Then don't ask me questions when you are speaking. proceed with your state. Anyway, you declare the war. It is the responsibility of this body to stop the war. That was the Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations, Sergei Kislytzia,

at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. The meeting was meant to be a final effort to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but as the ambassadors assembled in New York, Vladimir Putin announced what he called a special military operation there. The invasion of U.S. invasion of U.S.

Ukraine could turn out to be the largest war since the Second World War, and many eyes are now looking to how the United States and its allies will respond. Putin's aggression against Ukraine will end up costing Russia dearly, economically and strategically. We will make sure of that. Putin will be a pariah on the international stage. Any nation, the counten as Russia's naked aggression against Ukraine, will be stained by association. The New Yorker's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenen, spoke with Washington correspondent and former Moscow correspondent, Susan Glasser, on our Politics and More podcast the day the invasion began, shortly after President Biden addressed the nation. Hi, Susan. Thank you so much for joining me on this terrible day.

Well, thank you, Dorothy. It really is a tragic day, indeed. Yeah. We're speaking, actually, just a few hours after the president's speech. What did you think about what Biden had to say? You know, it's, I mean, I start my column out saying essentially Joe Biden said all the right things, but what are all the right things today on such a terrible day as today, right? And you can call Vladimir Putin a bully, a liar, a tyrant denounce his sinister vision. But You know, in some ways, I feel like our rhetoric really outstrips our ability to follow through on it. And that's not just true. Biden, of course, that's just true in a broad sense when it's come to Putin. And of course, my attitude about this is certainly informed by, unfortunately, more than two decades of watching Vladimir Putin. I went to Russia as a young foreign correspondent to cover the beginning of Putin's what turned out to be his epically long rule. And I've watched. George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump. And now Joe Biden struggle and not really succeed at figuring out how to handle an extreme kind of threat to the world order that's existed since the end of the Cold War. And on that point, given your long history with Putin, he has never regarded the former Soviet republics as independent countries. and throughout the long prelude to this invasion, this most recent invasion, we should say, he's made his intentions very clear.

But I also wonder the economic and political perils to Russia are so obvious. What are his calculations here? Well, I think that's an important thing that you just pointed out, Dorothy, which is a lot of people who think about Russia got stuck on that. it seemed to be folly, you know, the potential costs are so high that, you know, the risks, the sanctions that will now devastate his economy, that, you know, waging war on fellow Slavic brothers, it's essentially a civil war, really, that he's unleashed. All these terrible potential consequences, many of which are likely, seemed like that alone would be enough to deter Vladimir Putin. And yet,

what I would say, and, you know, I think what the Biden administration saw pretty clearly these last few months, They got a lot of, you know, guff from it from both the right and the left, frankly. But what they saw clearly was that for Putin, this is existential. It's emotional. It's about the restoration of empire. It's about writing the wrong that he sees of the breakup of the Soviet Union. And you really can't negotiate with that. And, you know, it's not about NATO.

Because, by the way, he's felt this way since before there was even a glimmer of an idea of Ukraine joining NATO. In 2005, Vladimir Putin said the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. And, you know, he's really been on an almost two-decade-long project of doing what he can to revise that outcome. But given that, he's been totally transparent about that from the start. So, and there was the NATO expansion. I mean, have we failed?

to see it enough from his perspective, however distorted it may be? Honestly, I find that to be a kind of extremely frustrating argument. What about the perspective of the Ukrainians whose country is being destroyed right now? You know, like, what does that mean to say we should look at it more from his perspective? Ukraine became independent in 1991, not because of the magnificence of the United States of America. it had nothing to do with NATO. It became independent and has since been a sovereign independent country guaranteed by Russia in law and in treaties ever since then.

And that is what Putin is attempting to revise right now because he does not like the direction that Ukrainian democracy has taken, which is a different direction than the return to authoritarianism and dictatorship that Putin himself has taken. fled next door in Russia. He has considered that almost a direct threat to his rule. Ever since the 2004, Orange Revolution in Ukraine threw out a pro-Russian corrupt leader. This has been a consistent theme of Putin's leadership. So again, when we talk about, well, what is it that somehow we did? Putin has proven remarkably immune, actually, to having outcomes shaped by decisions that we make here in Washington. And so tell us what we learned from Biden today about what the sanctions will entail.

You know, he talked a tough game, but what are we talking about here exactly? You know, it's interesting, that's right. There does feel this mismatch in a way between, you know, this sort of sweeping rhetoric, both of solidarity with Ukraine and, you know, determination to stop Putin and to make sure this aggression not only doesn't go unpunished, but that it doesn't go any further. And yet, you know, you already see some fissures with the Europeans. For example, the Biden administration had talked about cutting off Russia from the swift international banking protocol, which would basically shut down most international transactions. But it turns out today that the

Europeans have refused to go along with that. And so that's not a part of the package. Biden himself mentioned at his news conference that he has considered personally sanctioning Vladimir Putin and his money, but has not yet decided to do that. On the other hand, there are an extremely strong set of sanctions that are notably much tougher than those that were imposed by the United States and Europe after the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. So you have sectoral sanctions. You have against many of the biggest banks in Russia. They'll be cut off from transactions. You have export controls. You're cutting off their access to capital markets. I spoke with someone I've known for a long time who was the director of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assess Control, the department that's

in charge of sanctions. And he told me that these are, in fact, the most powerful sanctions that we've seen in the modern era, given the size of Russia's economy, and that there's also more to come. So, you know, I don't want to downplay the nature of these sanctions, but I think Putin has also shown his willingness to take that as the price for Ukraine, you know, that he has baked that into his calculation and his decision to go ahead with the invasion. So I'm sure you saw former Secretary of State Medal in Albright's uphead in the New York Times this week calling Russia's plans to invade Ukraine a historic mistake. And she argued that sanctions will decimate the Russian economy and that with NATO backing,

Ukrainian fighters can tie up the Russians in what she described as an unwinnable war and likened it even to the Soviet Union's occupying. of Afghanistan in the 1980s? Well, that is definitely a possible outcome here. No question about it. The overreach wars start out one way and they often end up another. Obviously, the United States has its own very recent example of that after 20 years of not succeeding in Afghanistan.

But there are alternate points of view here and equally compelling arguments. There was a very interesting argument made in The Economist that takes. the counterpoint on sanctions, which says that as much pain as they may inflict on Russia and that they will in some worrisome way, it could end up consolidating and resolidifying the power of Putin and his inner circle in the regime, you know, by hurting other players in the economy. And I do think we should expect an additional domestic crackdown by Putin inside what he's already turned into a police state. And this is, you know, domestic repression and external aggression, I think, go hand in hand for Putin. The Russian people, it's so important to say that they are not the ones launching this war.

It is a top-down war of a dictator. It's a war of his choice. I have seen, I'm sure you have as well, you know, images of spontaneous protests breaking out in Russian cities at enormous personal cost to those people who are being dragged away into jail simply for holding up signs to say things like Stidner, Rassi, shame on Russia, Pazur. So civil society is not totally dead. And, you know, I do think that there is the potential to backfire because Russia and Ukraine are so closely connected. And so many families in both Russia and Ukraine have intermarriage. They have families on both sides of the border. I don't think the Russian people are clamoring to kill thousands and thousands of Ukrainians and of their own sons. But it is interesting that throughout the escalation of tensions before the invasion, Putin's approval rating just kept climbing.

So it does seem as though, yes, there are these spontaneous protests, but the public appears to be pretty much rallying behind his very effective propaganda campaign. Well, look, I mean, public polls in a police state are what they are. You know, you have massive propaganda machine over two decades. It makes it very hard to gauge what, you know, a real, you know, sense of Russian people is given, you know, the exposure to independent news and information they have, which is very restricted. You know, Putin is an insecure leader. All dictators are insecure leaders. And that's why they do things like lock up their opponents and jail the country's richest man and assassinate rivals overseas and poison them with all things that Vladimir Putin has done. Those are not the acts of a secure leader. You know, dictators tend to be paranoid. And in Putin's case, U.S. intelligence now, you know, pointing out what we're seeing that's almost obvious, which is that, you know, the dictator is speaking to a smaller and smaller circle of officials and perhaps telling him more and more what he wants to hear. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Let's switch for a second to the Biden administration

and the strategy there. It's been interesting to watch how he and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have been sharing declassified intelligence. And our colleagues, Josh Yoff and Adam Entous reported this weekend that it's pretty unprecedented. Could you talk a little bit maybe about what this administration learned from the mistakes of the Obama administration when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014? Yeah, I think that, you know, when it comes to the, you know, being transparent almost in real time and putting this intelligence out there, in some ways the model they might have, you know, had in mind to reverse was not just 2014, but even more recently, the Afghanistan withdrawal kind of debaversed. And I think, you know, they, that was the first kind of huge foreign policy crisis for this Biden administration and didn't go well, obviously. And part of it was a question of, well, what were their decisions based on, right? And what, you know, did they, how disconnected were they from the reality of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan? And so they did seem determined, you know, not to make that same mistake twice. Also, the United States, as we've seen to an astonishing degree, I mean, You know, they were accurate. They were absolutely extraordinarily accurate with what they ended up putting out. And, you know, you had really, again, people both on the left and the right Europeans, Zelensky himself at time, many of the Moscow correspondence, you know, they didn't believe it. They didn't think it was going to happen. They didn't believe the United States government. And I was struck by the extent to which, you know, they had uncannily accurate, not just clearly open source information, right? You know, the open source

trackers able to show us these incredible satellite photographs of this invasion army building up, but the U.S. intelligence that was declassified and publicized was much more specific than that. It was warning at each step along the way about Putin's playbook and what he might do next and the false flag operations that could be anticipated or the kinds of attacks. Even now, when we look at what's happening on the ground on this awful day in Ukraine, you have the Pentagon briefing and pretty accurately assessing, you know, what the strategy of Putin's military is here, you know, the decapitation strike and the cutting off of the capital of Kiev that they seem to be pursuing, even as you and I are talking.

Former President Trump, of course, had his own remarks about the crisis. He said at a fundraiser at Mara Lago on Wednesday night, that Putin, he said, is taking over a country for about $2 worth of sanctions. I'd say that's pretty smart. And then this is what I want to get you on about his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who said in a series of interviews that he, too, has enormous respect for Putin, who, as he put it, knows how to use power. We should respect that.

So you wrote about Pompeo for the New Yorker in 2019. He's now considering his own presidential ron. in 2024. What's his political calculation here? Well, I, you know, look, the most memorable quote from that piece I wrote about Mike Pompeo was that he was a heat-seeking missile for Trump's posterior, and it seems that that is still the case, obviously, because one thing I can say, working on right now a history of the Trump administration, is that Mike Pompeo was, in fact, not on board with Donald Trump and his sucking up to Putin, his desire to withdraw from NATO, his desire to withdraw from sanctions imposed on Russia after 2014.

You know, so Pompeo is both being outrageous and completely hypocritical and untruthful in ways that kind of suggest just this sort of shocking evolution in a large swath of the Republican Party. Like I remember, you know, when Republicans were, you know, against Russia and, you know, wanted a tough defense and, you know, free trade. And, you know, these are not your father's Republicans. But it's the brazenness, I think, Dorothy, that really stands out, especially because Pompeo today, by the way, has flip-flopped along with lots of the other Republicans and rediscovered their hawkish Russia tendencies in a way that is just sort of pretty hard to stomach. because remember, all of them, went along with Donald Trump's blackmailing of Ukraine and President Zelensky, using as he has blackmail $400 million in congressionally appropriated aid to fight these very Russians.

All of these Republicans, every single one of them who's demanding that Joe Biden do more, every single one of them, with the exception of Mitt Romney, every single one of them, voted. to acquit Donald Trump. So that brings me to my next question, which is these prominent Republicans who have rediscovered their hawkishness are now attacking Biden for weakness, and some are using the loaded term appeasement when they talk about his handling of Putin. Is that just, as you say, political posturing, or is there some real ideological difference here between Republicans and Democrats? The Republican Party is very divided, Dorothy, on this particular

issue and on many issues. But when it comes to Russia, there is a, you know, a rump, a residual, vestigial, you might call it Republican group of, you know, traditionalists, this sort of Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell. They are no longer ascendant and in the mainstream. And one of the reasons you saw people like Mike Pompeo sort of being hypocrites, on the Russian thing this week is because, you know, there's a perception that the center of gravity in the party has switched toward not just Donald Trump, but the many kind of Trumplets that he's inspired. It's not a clear voice that you're hearing from Republicans. So they have the instincts, of course, to want to bash Joe Biden for basically anything. And so I've seen

some statements from Republicans that have literally done both things in the same breath, right? You know, on the one hand, suggesting the United States should have nothing to do. with this conflict in Ukraine, and yet at the same time bashing Biden for being weak. So it's a very muddled message because it's a muddled and unclear Republican Party right now. And maybe you could talk for a moment about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech yesterday, where she compared Russia's decision to declare Donetsk and Lohansk independent republics to Nazi Germany's 1938 annexation of the Sudaten land, the U.S. and its allies, intervene then, and the following year, Hitler invaded Poland, which, of course, incited the Second World

War. Yeah, that's right. It was an incredible analogy, I thought, for Nancy Pelosi to use, and very chilling. And certainly, you know, these echoes of sort of America firstism, you know, it's not our war in Europe, you know, kind of resonate in this political moment here in Washington. But it also underscored for me that there is still a mismatch between this very kind of alarming warnings you're hearing from Pelosi, from Biden, the language, you know, about Putin as an unchecked aggressor who's doing violence, you know, on a grand scale and possibly far beyond Ukraine. And yet, what are we really proposing to do about it? What is our real strategy for dealing with? And what, even if there was a kind of sweeping vision for how to counter him, is that within the

political ability of Joe Biden and other Western leaders to pull off in this divided, angry time. You know, this is, we're here at the end of two years of a pandemic where the United States is so divided against itself. You know, we've been in an inward-looking weekend moment, almost certainly part of the reason why Putin has felt emboldened in the first place. So, you know, it's, it's It's hard to come up with a big, bold, sweeping strategy for countering aggression in Eastern Europe when, you know, you have struggled so much to come up with a strategy to counter, you know, deadly problems here at home. And Biden has to be considering as well his dismal approval ratings.

And he was clear in his press conference after the speech that he considers the steps the U.S. and the Allies have taken to confront Russia to be long-term actions. He doesn't expect sanctions to affect Russia's strategy right away. But in the coming days and weeks, what can we expect to see? Well, that's a good question. And I think it does depend, actually, on, you know, the vast moving contour of what actually happens on the ground in Ukraine. You know, we are looking at potentially very, very horrific.

scenes in the next few days. And I think that that might really call forth additional action from the White House, from the Europeans. You know, Putin has shown no hesitancy in my experience to use brutal, brutal force, especially if drawn into urban warfare. I just don't, it's not clear to me that Western publics in the United States and elsewhere are really ready for the kinds of images and the kinds of death and suffering that could possibly yet occur. So we haven't seen the full contrast of the war, and I think that really will shape the outcomes. But I do think people should brace for, you know, if this could get much, much worse before. And here in the U.S., there's absolutely, especially given the pullout from that 20-year war in Afghanistan,

You know, there's no appetite here for American intervention in Ukraine. But Biden did indicate that he would send troops to Germany, not into Ukraine, but to Germany, to help NATO. Well, yes. And in addition to that, sending U.S. troops who are already in Europe closer to the east and to the Baltic states and Poland and other frontline NATO countries. There will be a summit, NATO summit tomorrow to discuss further actions. And that is actually an important, if less visible, part of the response to what Putin is doing, because NATO needs to act in quite quickly to reinforce the idea and to make it very clear to Putin what the costs would be and that he really would trigger an Article 5 response, i.e., you know, collective defense.

and that includes the United States if he steps into Lithuania or Estonia or Latvia or Poland. And, you know, that's exactly the reason, by the way, why those countries chose to join NATO and were so eager to do so because they recognize the potential threat from their neighbor in Russia. And, you know, Putin may well have actually inspired other countries, including Sweden and Finland, which have long resisted joining NATO, they're now going to be attending the NATO summit. They may consider joining NATO depending on how far this goes. So exactly what Vladimir Putin claimed in his sort of manufactured grievance about, you know, NATO being on Russia's borders. Well, if he gobbles up Ukraine, he's going to be on NATO's borders. And he will have certainly,

it appears, inspired a lot more unity and determination to confront him on the part of NATO. But he must have expected that. So to a certain extent, wouldn't that prove the point that he's trying to make? No. I think it's the exact opposite. What it proves is that it wasn't about NATO. What it proves is that it's about Ukraine. Thank you so much, Susan. Thanks, Dorothy. That's the New Yorker's executive editor and host of the Politics and More podcast, Dorothy Wigenden. You can subscribe to that and other New Yorker podcasts by Surve. searching for The New Yorker in your podcast app. And you can find all of the New Yorkers reporting and analysis about the conflict in Ukraine at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker

Radio Hour. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.