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This is Honestly. Over the past week, in a move that has shocked and alarmed much of the free world, Russia invaded and attacked its neighbor, the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
We're recording this conversation on the afternoon of March 2nd, 2022, and as of right now, air raid sirens are ringing out over the capital of Kiev. Nearly a week into the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, Russia steps up its offensive on larger cities, seemingly firing indiscriminately at civilian targets.
Russia has intensified its air and missile assaults as Russian forces lay siege to Ukraine's second city Kharkiv, what could be a trial run for the capital. And in the south, Russian troops have surrounded the city of Kherson, and the mayor there says that they'll need a miracle.
but I will hold the city and its functioning as long as I can. The mayor goes on to say, if the Russian soldiers and their leadership hear me, I ask, leave our city. Stop shelling the civilians. You have already taken everything you wanted, including human lives.
Today, I am joined by three of the people that I respect most when it comes to thinking about foreign policy, history, and American power. They are Neil Ferguson, Walter Russell Meade, and Frank Fukuyama.
Neil Ferguson is a historian. He's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and his most recent book is called " The Politics of Catastrophe." Walter Russell Mead teaches at Bard College. He writes the Foreign Affairs column at The Wall Street Journal. And his next book, coming out in June, is called "The Ark of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People." Last, Frank Fukuyama is a political scientist who teaches at Stanford.
His latest book, coming out in May, is called Liberalism and Its Discontents. Thank you all so much for being here today. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. So given the subject at hand, I thought we might take a page from the tradition of the Russian novel.
I want us to introduce the main characters in this high-stakes drama and explain what their motivations are before we get to the war that's currently unfolding. So, Neil, let's start with the main character here, Vladimir Putin. Who is Putin? How does he see himself? And how does he see the role of his country on the world stage? Vladimir Putin has long aspired to
not to resurrect the Soviet Union, but to resurrect the Tsarist Empire. His fantasies are more 18th and 19th century than 20th century. His idol is Peter the Great, and he is in some ways reenacting in his own imagination the Battle of Poltava in 1709, which was the moment that Russia really arrived on the European state emphatically as one of the great powers.
Putin published an essay on the historic unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people, a strange pseudo-historical essay essentially saying the independence of Ukraine is an historical anomaly. And when I read that essay when I was in Kyiv back in September, I realized that Ukraine was screwed because he was going to break its independence.
either to annex it outright or more probably simply to reduce it to the status of a puppet state similar to Belarus or Kazakhstan, clearly within the Russian sphere of influence, and not in danger, in his eyes, of becoming a successful democracy orientated towards the West and a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That's what he is fighting this war to prevent.
Who is Volodymyr Zelensky? He is one of the strangest people to come onto the world stage in a while. My name is "Fuck you!" He started off as a comedian in Ukraine. But why on the other hand? I'm telling you, you've been living here for a year. "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "F
and actually filmed a television series about a comedian who becomes president of his country. His election was actually a sign in some ways of the alienation of many people in Ukraine from the existing Ukrainian political establishment. Ukraine in a lot of ways has a real split.
between the kind of the civil society movement for democracy and to move westward is a very important part of Ukrainian society. But at the same time, a lot of the political parties, a lot of the economic institutions, a lot of the government bureaucracy remains wedded in various ways to structures that date back to Soviet times.
And Ukraine is a country of oligarchs, powerful oligarchs, who often work through the political process. I think what we've seen is that under this national crisis, we're seeing a kind of new Ukraine struggling to be born. And I think it's going to transform the role of the president and maybe catapulted him into a place he didn't think he was going to be.
If they try to take away our country, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. Speaking of the president, Frank, who is Joe Biden and what is his perspective and his motivation in this drama?
Well, Biden was elected as a center-left candidate. He won out over Bernie Sanders precisely because he was more centrist after the South Carolina primary and Jim Clyburn endorsing him.
Since he has been president, he actually moved not to the center of the American political spectrum, but to the center of the Democratic Party and perhaps even a little bit further towards its progressive wing, certainly in terms of the three big spending bills that he hoped to pass through Congress. And, you know, in terms of the cultural divisions within the party, he
has taken a stand against defund the police and some of the other slogans of the progressive wing of the party, but he's not done that with a whole lot of emphasis. However, in foreign policy, I think that he returns the United States to
its traditional position that it's held, you know, on and off, really, since Woodrow Wilson, of being an internationalist, a supporter of democratic allies.
And I frankly think he's done a magnificent job in rallying the whole NATO alliance to oppose Putin. And, you know, some very smart things in terms of, you know, for example, diverting LNG supplies to Europe so that they could endure a Soviet cutoff of gas to them if there were to be a war. I think he's probably...
the single person most responsible for this amazing change in German foreign policy. I mean, the Germans have abandoned 40 years of Ostpolitik, you know, the reaching out to Russia that was their hallmark all the way through Angela Merkel and has
You know, Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, has declared a doubling of the German defense budget and willingness to sell weapons to or ship weapons to Ukraine. And that, I think, is the result of a lot of diplomacy that was occurring in this long lead up to the war.
You know, Biden has not been a successful foreign policy president altogether. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a real debacle. But I do think that in many ways he's redeemed himself quite substantially in the way that he's handled this Ukraine crisis. May I disagree completely? Yes. And then I want to get to the war itself. In Russian literature, there is, of course, a great novel, Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Biden is the idiot.
The reason this happened is because the Biden administration slowed down deliveries of armaments to Ukraine, lifted the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was supposed to bypass Ukraine, signaled to Russia that they would not support Ukraine militarily, and therefore made it clear to Putin that he had an opportunity to take military action with only sanctions to fear.
The Biden administration's strategy, which was completely misconceived, was to threaten sanctions, such sanctions as you have never experienced, the worst sanctions, as if that was going to deter Putin. It was never going to deter him. And then they tried something even crazier, which was to say, you're going to invade and we know the date, as if that was somehow going to stop him invading. And the worst and craziest thing they tried was to get the Chinese involved.
to dissuade him from invading when the Chinese had given him the green light on condition that he didn't go until after the Beijing Olympics. This has been a debacle, Frank, that has allowed a massive war to break out that could have been prevented if there had not been such clear signs of weakness last year from Biden. Well, Neil, look, I just think that's a silly position to
no president was going to actually threaten war if that meant putting actual US forces on the ground or in the air. I'm not arguing that, Frank. What I'm saying is that we could have continued to arm the Ukrainians so that they had a chance in this scenario. We slowed that down. We have been arming them. We have been giving them javelins and stingers and trainers on the ground in Ukraine now for the last two years.
Part of the reason they're doing is well down the arms deliveries last year. Guys, I want to get to all of this. But first, let's just establish the action. OK, so, Walter, why did Russia invade Ukraine at this moment? I think Putin really did see Putin fundamentally misread the situation, but he saw this as a great opportunity.
He saw what he considered to be an American administration that had been hit hard in Afghanistan, lost a lot of credibility, had been signaling, in his view, not a huge interest in opposing him in Ukraine. Maybe more importantly than anything in the U.S., he saw a new government in Germany with a chancellor who was both untested and
and who comes from the SPD, which is the more left wing of the major German parties, one that has a kind of historic sense of wanting good German-Russian relations, and one which in the recent past has been led by Gerhard Schroeder, a former German chancellor who's now essentially a bagman and a hireling of Putin.
So, I think he felt that he had, you know, he was in a good spot. China was strong. China was feeling more opposed to America, more threatened by America than in the recent past. And so, he could expect maybe more support. He'd also, in the last year, had a real run of wins.
Belarus, the Democrats are like, oh, yeah, you know, the Democrats in Belarus, human rights, hooray. And all of Europe goes, yes, yes, democracy in Belarus. Putin helps Lukashenko crush them.
and essentially establishes himself in power in Belarus. Lukashenko had always been trying to kind of steer between Russia and the West, much as some Ukrainian leaders have done. And then we had the mysterious situation in Kazakhstan, where again, Putin was called in by the leader of Kazakhstan, whose power was threatened in an internal power struggle. So Putin's experience of 2021 was win-win-win.
And he was able to settle matters in both Belarus and Kazakhstan very easily. I think Putin felt he was on a roll and it was time for the big one.
And there's no doubt that in his mind of Russia's neighbors, Ukraine has always been the one that he considers both the greatest threat and the most intolerable. Ukrainian independence is intolerable to him. And Frank, why is it intolerable to him?
You know, Neil referred to a speech and an article that Putin wrote last year in a speech that he gave on the eve of the war. And he lays out his intentions very clearly.
He wants to reunify Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. He doesn't believe that they should be separate sovereignties. There was an article published on a Russian website accidentally that was actually supposed to be the victory
the celebration of Putin's quick victory over Ukraine that just laid this out. They talked about the tragedy of 1991. For over 40 years, the United States led the West in the struggle against communism. When the Soviet Union fell apart, this struggle shaped the lives of all Americans. It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction.
That confrontation is now over. That night, the red flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time. And that this historical mistake would now be corrected by what he was doing. And then, you know, beyond that, I think that if you look at their demands in the negotiations leading up to the invasion of NATO, they also want to roll back NATO, not just from extending into Ukraine, but they want to roll it back all the way to the 1990s.
So I think that that was his intention. The stuff about
neo-Nazis is just ridiculous. There are extreme right-wing parties, particularly in Western Ukraine, like Svoboda or the right sector, but they have like one seat in parliament. They represent a very small part and there's actually more genuine fascists in Russia than there are in Ukraine. And so it was so transparent an excuse as to be really laughable.
So, if you don't mind, I'm in another area where I will disagree with Neil is I think actually
giving out all of this intelligence and predicting the invasion was actually a brilliant strategy. It was pre-bunking because we knew that the Russians would be pumping out all of these false narratives about what they were up to in Ukraine. And I think the administration, you know, declassified a lot of their intelligence to get everybody ready so that they wouldn't believe some of the stuff coming out of
Russia, and it worked brilliantly. Nobody believes this stuff. You know, part of the reason there's such a massive protest against what happened is that none of these Russian narratives really make sense to anybody, you know, because we seem to have gotten the intelligence right ahead of time and, by the way, you know, in part redeemed the failure of the Iraq War when we released intelligence that turned out to be completely wrong.
The problem is that we created the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO and joining the European Union. But our actual attitude was like that New Yorker cartoon of the guy on the phone who says, no, I can't do Thursday. How about never? Could you do never?
And so we never really seriously meant for them to join NATO or the EU. One saw that last year when these issues were raised as they were raised repeatedly by the current Ukrainian foreign minister. We weren't even serious about their bids to join the EU or NATO. We didn't supply nearly enough armaments for them to deter Russia from attacking.
And as a consequence, we have a massive geopolitical crisis that could have been avoided. Telling people, I saw it coming, is not an act of strategic genius. It's an act of strategic feebleness. Now, the consequences of this are very far-reaching indeed. First of all, in their anxiety to avoid even higher inflation than the inflation they already started.
they're desperately trying to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal, get Iranian oil back onto the world market, and in the process making all kinds of concessions to the Iranians that I think will come back to haunt them. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping is watching this fiasco and saying to himself, well, if the most I have to fear is the threat of sanctions, if I decide to take control of Taiwan and assert my claim to that island,
I'm in good shape because, first of all, the US will never dare impose these sanctions on China. The costs to the US would be too high. And secondly, there's no way the Taiwanese are going to fight like the Ukrainians if we can get a significant force onto the island. So the credibility, if that word is still allowed to be used, of US foreign policy, which suffered its first major dent over Afghanistan, is suffering another huge dent.
And there's one other thing I'd like to add, which is really important. When we look like we might do something meaningful, by we I mean NATO, Putin took out his little nuclear saber and rattled it. And we were immediately deterred.
The Europeans were so terrified, they immediately canceled the plan to make fighter jets available to the Ukrainians, which they had offered in the early days after the invasion. We've been deterred.
successfully by a really quite implausible nuclear threat. Neil, what would you have done that the Biden administration has not done that you think would have made such a big difference in this Russian calculation given the stakes that Putin sees in this? There are two choices here and we chose neither. Either you say, look, this NATO thing isn't happening, guys. You're going to be neutral.
And we should just accept that that's the way it's going to be, because if we don't establish your neutral status, the Russians are going to invade and we're not fighting. So you'd better be ready to accept neutrality. This is what Henry Kissinger proposed back in 2014 when we first confronted this problem at the time of the annexation of Crimea. So you either said to the Ukrainians, it's NATO things not happening.
But we will guarantee you neutrality to avoid the Russian invasion. If you're not going to do that, then you have to arm the Ukrainians sufficiently that they can deter the Russians. We did neither. We did arm the Ukrainians sufficiently. Part of the reason that they have bogged down the Russians is that we have vastly upped the weapons going into that country. We've given them training. We've given them intelligence cooperation. Short of...
you know, flying into Ukrainian airspace or putting boots on the ground. There is nothing that you have suggested that is realistic that we could have done that we've not done. But first of all, the Russians are not really bogged down. I mean, they're going to win this war quite swiftly. Well, but Neil, that would happen, you
you know, regardless, except if NATO directly intervenes against Russia. And unless you're willing to say that that is what we should have done. No, no, no, that's absolutely not on the table. But what you have to realize is that we went into this knowing that Ukraine could not survive an invasion, which was telegraphed for months. The Russians had 100,000 troops before Putin gave his speech. The worst case scenario is the one that we now confront.
It is not the worst possible outcome. Well, come on, what are the other scenarios are there? It could lead to the downfall of Vladimir Putin. It's not a popular war in Ukraine. He thought it was going to be over quickly. He didn't believe the Ukrainians would fight. And there's no way that he can control a country of over 40 million people, certainly not with anything like the forces they've got. So he's going to be in a huge amount of trouble with his own military, with his own population.
The kinds of sanctions we oppose are completely unprecedented. We basically sequestered two-thirds of his central bank reserves. These are very powerful measures. And if you think that anyone in Russia or the Chinese looking at this think, wow, that's a real big success. If Putin can get away with that, you know, we can get away with anything. You're crazy.
I'd like to bring Walter in here and dig a little deeper into this question of what we could have done to prevent this. Neil mentions Kissinger, who warned in 2014 that to Russia, Ukraine, he said, can never be just a foreign country and that we need a policy in the West aimed at reconciliation. He also said that Ukraine should not join NATO.
But other foreign policy realists said the same thing. I'm not a great fan of his, but six years ago, John Mearsheimer warned that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. You had Noam Chomsky, 2015. Ukraine's desire to join NATO is, quote, "...not protecting Ukraine and is threatening Ukraine with major war."
I differ politically in major ways from all three of the people that we've just mentioned. But the fact is, is that all of them have sort of been warning about this for a while. And, Walter, my question to you is how much of this current war is sort of on America and the West's heads?
I think that Neil is right, and I don't think Frank would disagree, that the origins of this crisis do go back some ways. I have to say, back in the 1990s, I was not a big fan of expanding NATO.
My fear was that unless you expanded it all the way up to the Russian frontier right away, you would be putting no fishing signs up on one side of the lake and not putting up no fishing signs on the other side of the lake. And the implication to a lot of people would be fishing permitted on the side of the lake that doesn't have signs. I thought it would have been a better idea to try to put together some sort of security arrangement, including Sweden-
Finland and some other countries, so it's not a second-class thing that would have a guarantee from NATO, perhaps also from Russia, but would not be the same. Whether that would have worked, one can't say. The Finns were actually interested at the time, at least some of them. But we are where we are, and I would argue that maybe the big problem started in 2008 in Georgia, where
when the Russians invaded Georgia, still occupy chunks of Georgia that they seized then. And we really did not come up with a very effective response. A major issue is Russia's contention that the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia may not be a part of Georgia's future.
These regions are a part of Georgia. It was sort of sanctions and mean words, but not a real response. And the United States fully recognizes this reality.
We will continue to stand behind Georgia's democracy. We'll continue to insist that Georgia's sovereignty and independence and territorial integrity be respected. George W. Bush was in a tough situation. It was at the height of the financial crisis. The presidential campaign to replace him was going on. His popularity was low. The Iraq war was very, very divisive. And Putin, I think, chose his moment very astutely.
Then again in 2014. In recent months, as the citizens of Ukraine have made their voices heard, we have been guided by a fundamental principle: The future of Ukraine must be decided by the people of Ukraine. That means Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.
and international law must be upheld. Our response telegraphed that we're going to accept sanctions that don't push Putin out of Crimea, but that make us feel good, and then we'll issue lots of speeches about our unity and our dedication to democracy. And so Russia's decision to send troops into Crimea has rightly drawn global condemnation.
From the start, the United States has mobilized the international community in support of Ukraine to isolate Russia for its actions and to reassure our allies and partners. We saw this international unity again over the weekend when Russia stood alone in the U.N. Security Council defending its actions in Crimea. And as I told President Putin yesterday, the referendum in Crimea was a clear violation of Ukrainian constitutions and
international law and it will not be recognized by the international community. We've taught Putin over a period of years that the way we counter geopolitical assault is through tough words and essentially
sanctions that are of marginal impact. Today I'm announcing a series of measures that will continue to increase the costs on Russia and on those responsible for what is happening in Ukraine. And so he very much expected the same thing to happen this time, perhaps 2014 on a larger scale. He gets more territory, we give more sanctions.
So I think it's, you know, the Biden administration, I think some things it's done have been better than others. But this it did not create this situation. We'll be right back. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.
How much of this is a problem about energy and Europe's dependence on Russian energy? For all of Trump's sort of fawning over Putin, Trump in 2018 defied diplomatic protocol and called out Germany publicly for its dependence on Moscow.
It's sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia where you're supposed to be guarding against Russia and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia.
He said, Germany, as far as I'm concerned, is captive to Russia because it's getting so much of its energy from Russia. German officials deny that the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline will allow Russia to exert undue influence over their country. True? Not true? Fair? Unfair? I think when the history books finally come through all this, the American president who will be seen to have been the least effective in dealing with Putin will be Barack Obama.
the combination of Crimea and Syria. Now, Trump in some ways was, you know, Trump certainly had, I think, policies that in many ways, Trump's policies were more anti-Putin than anything Obama did.
But his rhetoric was not. And then because of his sort of whole crazy defensiveness over Russiagate and these other things, he got himself in various tangles and as, you know, just kind of an ugly mess. And again, Trump was not a strategist, you know, in foreign policy, not somebody who carefully builds a lot of things and moves them through along some plans, very impulsive.
And I think Putin did read from Trump a certain kind of Western weakness that the European alliance was getting weaker, that America was hopelessly polarized, was electing unpredictable leaders. Trump read the whole phenomenon, the whole Trump phenomenon in terms of growing American weakness. And he's not—I think that was—that's been true around the world.
Is Biden a continuation of sort of an extension of this weakness or at least the projection of weakness that you're attributing to Obama? I mean, last night we heard Biden at the State of the Union opening on this subject, saying that the U.S. stands with the Ukrainian people. Putin's latest attack on Ukraine was premeditated.
and totally unprovoked. That freedom will always triumph over tyranny, all these soaring words. The free world is holding him accountable. But the actual policies that are happening. Along with 27 members of the European Union, including France, Germany, Italy, as well as countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and many others, even Switzerland, are inflicting pain on Russia and supporting the people of Ukraine. Putin is now isolated from the world.
more than he has ever been. Do they have any teeth? Will they actually project American strength? Maybe Frank or Neil on this one? Barry, on the question of energy that you began with just then, it was hugely consequent that the German government and other European governments knowingly became reliant on Russian oil and gas. And oil is actually in some ways economically more important. The German government of Angela Merkel turned away from nuclear power
and regarded an increasing import of Russian energy as a strategically smart move. Now, this is an old strategy in some ways. It goes all the way back more than 50 years to the late '60s and the birth of Ostpolitik, the idea of getting the Russians to export energy to Europe as a long pedigree.
But if anything, the strategy was doubled down on under Angela Merkel. And it has created the opportunity for Putin in two respects. First of all,
That is the principal source of revenue that the Russian state has used to build up its military capability, to restore its army's technological edge and scale. And secondly, of course, it created a situation in which the European political and business elite became dangerously entangled with Russia to the extent that the former German chancellor ends up on the board of Gazprom and Rosneft.
Gerhard Schroeder, who's going to go down in infamy in the history books. Explain this to me, though. How is it that Angela Merkel is praised by all right-thinking people as the most serious leader, not just in Europe? I'm not. I've never praised her, and I am right-thinking.
Shia was a disaster. I mean, proper thinking, not conservative thinking. I mean, how is it that she could be praised as serious while failing to establish energy independence from an authoritarian power? I don't get it. Well, I remember vividly when Putin gave his famously menacing speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.
I was sitting beside John McCain. Putin simultaneously called the end of the unipolar moment of American dominance and threatened the Europeans by implication. And John McCain was fit to be tied, wanted to do an immediate press conference and had to be restrained. But I later heard that Angela Merkel, who sat impassively during the speech, backstage said to one of her ministers, cool speech.
And I think one day we'll fully understand the ambivalence that Angela Merkel felt all along towards Russia as someone who'd grown up in East Germany, who entered politics only after the fall of the Soviet Union. Her ambivalence about Russia and I think about the United States is crucial here because it took uspolitik and it took it to a further stage in which by the final year of her chancellorship,
Germany was non-aligned. In polling two years ago, Germans said that they wanted to be closer to China than to the United States. The Kerber Foundation published that poll. Now,
All of this has changed with astonishing speed with her departure and Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Ostpolitik out the window. The new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, despite being a social democrat, has just committed to more or less double Germany's defense budget. There's an extraordinary paradigm shift happening in Germany right now.
that is as important as anything in the cast of characters we began with, because it would appear that Germany is now committed to playing a proportionate role in the defense of Europe. And that could imply German troops and assets, military hardware being deployed into Poland and the Baltic states, who are after all, next on the menu if Putin is successful in Ukraine. So this is a
an extraordinary turn of events. But the second question you asked about was American weakness. And I do think that that's a big part of the story. I agree with Walter. Obama's policy towards Russia was a disaster. Remember the 1980s are calling and they want their foreign policy back? And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War has been over for 20 years.
And then Putin goes into Crimea, annexes it, takes partial control of eastern Ukraine. And Obama responds, as Walter says, with weak sanctions. And even worse, Obama then says, oh, we're going to have a red line on chemical weapons in Syria. Haley fails to enforce that, then hands the Russians responsibility for the chemical weapons. Next thing you know, Putin's intervened in the Syrian civil war and decided its outcome and established Russia as a power broker in the Middle East for the first time since the early 1970s.
This was a disastrous record of failure. And I think it set many of these trains in motion that are reaching their terrible terminus right now. Frank, it seems like Walter and Neil have some agreement here on seeing Obama's weakness as sort of the root of a lot of what we're seeing now. Agree, disagree? So I think that many presidents, American presidents, have a role in bringing us to where we were. I think that
We should really begin with the Bucharest summit in 2008 when Ukraine was first promised NATO membership at the time I thought that was a big mistake because we couldn't actually fulfill that promise and that was George W Bush that did this I would agree with the criticisms of Obama I think his refusal to sell weapons to Ukraine and
The red line, not observing the red line in Syria were bad moves. I think that you guys have let Donald Trump off the hook big time. It's not just that he was upset about, you know, Russiagate. He has been issuing statements supporting Vladimir Putin from well before he was elected president, even after the invasion.
You know, he talks about Putin being a genius and very savvy. He gives a speech, you know, just a few days ago at CPAC where he attacks as a global tyrant who... A line has been crossed. You're either with the peaceful truckers or you are with the left-wing fascists. And that's what's been happening. Justin Trudeau. You know, I was...
with putin a lot i spent a lot of time with him i got along with him i got along with president chi i got along with kim jong-un kim jong-un has massive nuclear power
It's a good thing to get along with people, not a bad thing. You can be very tough and get along. And so there is a real affinity for him and for his followers on the right for strongman leadership. That's really what is at stake. And when you go to Helsinki and you say, I believe Vladimir Putin more than my own intelligence community, that's giving aid and comfort. You know, I mean, that's that's close to being treasonous in my view.
So, you know, there's a good reason for Putin to think that America is weak under Joe Biden, partly because Trump hasn't gone away. After January 6th, you got a significant part of the Republican Party that believes this lie that the election was stolen. The country is very seriously divided because of the failure of the Republicans to concede the peaceful transfer of power. And so if you're Putin, you're saying, well, OK,
We got a new president that's internationalist and saying that he's going to do these things to me if I act, but the country is so divided there I can rely on my Republican friends to, you know, soften any blow. You know, and then finally, if we get to Biden, yes, I think that he did not do certain things. I was very disappointed when he pulled back on trying to cancel Nord Stream. I thought at the time
last summer when he did this, that this was a big mistake. So I think there's really four presidents involved here that have contributed to this image of American weakness, that have made mistakes in policy. But where we are right now, I think, is pretty good, given all that legacy. I wonder if I can ask a very basic question, but one that I think is kind of deep.
Is the sovereignty of Ukraine a vital interest for the United States?
Well, if I can answer, I think it is not in that it directly affects American interests, but it is the down payment on a larger agenda. And Neil has described this very well, that Putin basically wants to reverse the entire legacy of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. He wants to roll back the extension of liberal democracy into his part of the world. And so...
Ukraine may not be of terribly great direct interest to the United States, but it is the opening shot in a much longer war that's going to involve the Baltics, Poland, you know, the Czech Republic. I mean, all of the countries that democratized Ukraine.
you know, to I think everybody's great delight in the early 1990s. And he would represent a continuing security threat. And that's why if you don't stop him now, I mean, we've been saying that he wasn't stopped back in 2008 or in 2014. If we don't stop him after this blatant aggression in 2022, when are we going to stop him? Right. I guess that's that's the way I would answer this.
But we're saying we're not willing to go to war. Putin clearly is. So doesn't he just want his endgame more than we want ours? Which brings me to the question, what even is the endgame here for the United States and the free world, if I can still call it that? Walter, maybe you. Barry, look, I think we're—
You know, right now, today, March 2nd, it's just impossible to tell where this thing is going.
And that's one of the reasons it's such a compelling world event and people are so engaged with it. You know, on the one hand, there could be a palace revolution in Russia tomorrow and people there decide this Putin guy has really gone too far, wrecked everything. They liquidate the invasion of Ukraine. They try to, you know, realign a bit with the West move, you know, so that there's that trajectory.
There's another trajectory where the violence just gets worse. When we look at Ukrainian history, it's important to remember just how terrible Ukraine's history was in the 20th century.
OK, some of the worst fighting in World War One was there. We tend to think only of the Western Front in World War One, but the Eastern Front was very brutal. Immediately after you have the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the White Guard and the fighting in Ukraine at that time, a few years later, you get Stalin's repression with millions of people killed, sent to the gulags.
Then you have Hitler's invasion, again, a systematic attack on the intelligentsia, as well as ethnic minorities like the Jews, but also Ukraine. Stalin's reimposition of rule was also extremely brutal, mass transfers of population, a guerrilla conflict in western Ukraine that goes on into the 1950s.
So what you have is a society that's been repeatedly brutalized on a scale that few other societies have had this even once. Now, how will Ukraine, you know, and Putin's whole training, his worldview is brutality works.
All of this crap about, oh, democratic elections and freedom, blah, blah, blah. That just leads to a lot of gay pride parades. And who cares about that, says Vlad, bare chested Vlad, right? You know, and so he says, no, no, no. It's real power that matters like Stalin. Real power. All right. What happens if Putin is able to bring that kind of power to bear on Ukraine?
You know, if he's able to hold on in the Kremlin, if they're able to continue to grind out these ugly advances on the ground, we don't know. So for us to sit here now and say, you know, what does this all mean? It is very, very hard to say. I do know that.
The resistance of the Ukrainian people is our and the Ukrainian army is our best hope of avoiding some really ugly things and possibly and I don't think Frank is wrong about this. The possibility of Putin's overthrow or an internal change in Russia does increase with effective Ukrainian resistance. But we don't know. We can't know.
Walter, I don't know about you, but I've been watching all of these videos and pictures streaming out of social media, but also in the mainstream press. We are in a queue where people are waiting to get their weapons to fight the Russian invaders.
showing regular people. I wouldn't really want to participate in anything like this, but I don't really have any choice because this is my home. Including women my age. When I heard the explosions, I decided that I'm ready. Lining up to get weapons to defend their town or their city. Do you know how to use the gun? No. A little bit.
We started to teach two days ago. It's awful. How does Ukraine understand itself in this conflict? And what have you made of the response of everyday Ukrainian people? Well, the Ukrainian response has just been stunning. Putin may go down in history as the man who made Ukraine a nation. Because following the Soviet Union, while people really did want to become independent from Russia,
There was a real divide between the eastern Ukraine, which is largely Russian-speaking, and western Ukraine, which is extremely different in culture and history. It wasn't at all clear just how deep this sense of Ukrainian identity went. Would the east and the west ultimately split apart?
Putin first in his, remember that Ukraine has been at war really for eight years since 2014 when Putin invaded Crimea and then the Donbass, and that the fighting in eastern Ukraine has never stopped. So it's been low level, but it goes on. People die. People that you know are on the front at any given moment.
People have lost their homes in Crimea, can't go back, what have you. So Ukraine has been in this war atmosphere and Putin has been clearly the cause. He's the bad guy.
And now Putin is coming in with tanks, with missiles, with planes, and the radio and the television are full of the most amazing lies. Everyone in Ukraine knows that it's not being run by Nazis. Everyone in Ukraine knows that there's no interest in genocide against the Russians, etc., etc., etc. So when you hear a brute and a thief saying,
and an oppressor come at you spouting the kind of lies that Stalin or that Goebbels spouted in the past, you have a sense that, okay, this is the time to try to do something. This is not a man you can deal with. It's not a man you can compromise with. Every now and then, you just have to take a stand. So I think Putin continues to make Ukraine a country. Neil, do you think that the West has an endgame?
Or what it should be doing is, as I've said, trying, if it's at all possible, to keep Ukrainian resistance from crumbling, though I think it's almost certainly too late. And if it can prevent a Russian victory, then seeking to broker a ceasefire. This was the 1973 playbook that Kissinger used when Israel...
also not a NATO member, was attacked by Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations. The Kissinger playbook was supply the Israelis with enough arms that they can avoid defeat, but also not so much that they completely overwhelm the Arabs and then broker the ceasefire and make sure that the United States calls the shots and the Russians are essentially marginalized. So what I think we're doing at the moment is almost the exact opposite of that.
We're offering those powerful weapons of applause, editorials and speeches rather than the kind of hardware that the Ukrainians need. By the way, if they had just a little bit more in the way of Turkish TB2 drones, they might actually be able to take those convoys out that are on the way to Kiev. But they clearly don't have enough.
So we're not really helping them win. We're certainly not going to give them victory with fine words. And then we're leaving the Chinese to offer to intermediate, which is just fatal. Because what I think will happen-- I know what Putin's end game is. Putin's end game is smash the Ukrainians on the ground, Gerad Zelensky one way or another, put somebody else in that position, do a deal with the oligarchs, who obviously don't want to be expropriated.
And done. And then say to the Chinese, yeah, I think we should definitely have some talks with the new Ukrainian government. How about Minsk? How does Minsk sound? It's almost as if all the lessons of diplomatic history have been forgotten. There was a time when Russia got itself involved in a war with Japan that went pretty wrong. And the United States brokered the peace then. That was forgotten.
Theodore Roosevelt, who played that role. But we are again and again allowing others to set the diplomatic pace. Even the Europeans, I think, have run ahead of the United States in the last week.
in ways that I don't think necessarily will endure. I wonder how long this paradigm shift in German politics will really last. But no, there's no end game. I think cluelessness has been the order of the day. And that is why, just to go back to my point that I was making earlier, this is a very bad scenario. Yeah, maybe there are worse scenarios. Nuclear war is a worse scenario. But
It's a pretty bad state of affairs if Russia is going to win by brutal means a conventional war using the tactics of Grozny or Aleppo on Kharkiv, killing a lot of people because this is just getting going. And then they sit there controlling Ukraine, perhaps fighting a nasty insurgency, but controlling Ukraine and menacing the Baltic states and Poland.
I think the thing that really troubles me the most, Barry, is the cascade effect where one disaster leads to another. There is unquestionably going to be at some point a crisis over Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power. And there is going to be a crisis over Taiwan.
And I think we are moving towards these other crises in a position of significant weakness. I wrote a piece for The Economist last year, which you may remember, Frank, because you also contributed to the series, in which I said the position of the United States increasingly resembles that of interwar Britain.
indebted, overextended and unable to cope with multiple strategic challenges in more than one theater. That is why this is a very, very bad outcome indeed. And I cannot really look back and say the Biden administration did anything other than screw it up.
Neil, look, you are being way too defeatist about the situation in Ukraine. It's not nearly as bad as you are portraying it. The idea that with 190,000 men you can control a country of over 40 million is ridiculous. The idea that you can even control a city like Kiev with that many troops is really not in the cards.
even if they manage to take Kyiv and get rid of the Zelensky regime, they're going to face a prolonged insurgency because the Ukrainians are united as never before. They're mad as hornets. And, you know, they're going to keep killing Russians until something happens.
snaps on the other side. The thing that is blocking the armament of the Ukrainians right now are logistical ones because everybody, beginning with the United States, is tripping over themselves to get anti-tank weapons, stingers, you know, helmets.
medical supplies into Kiev, and they're currently overwhelming the logistical ability to get in there and, in fact, sort of tripping over themselves because there's so much stuff coming in. So we are doing a lot. And I just think that the idea that somehow we know that Putin is ultimately going to win is defeatist. Just coming back to the United States for a minute and the way the conversation is playing out here—and it's played out in ways that have really surprised me—
I think that it comes down to how you answer two questions. One, post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan, post-foreign policy of the past two decades, do you believe that American power can still be a force for good? And the second question is, do you trust the people in charge?
Do you trust a political class that has lied to us about any number of things to actually, A, be telling the truth about what's going on in Ukraine right now, and B, be able to actually follow through on threats? And from the left and from the right,
I am shocked by how many people—maybe not so shocked, but the number of people I know who basically say, "Can't trust American power, can't trust American elites." Frank, I wanted your take on both of those questions.
Well, look, this goes back to the whole, my whole posture during the Cold War. Of course, the United States can be a force for good. I think our role in the Cold War, despite bad decisions like Vietnam, was, you know, was good. And it was rewarded in the end, really, by the spread of democracy to places that had been held under a communist regime.
dictatorship. I think that most of the really bad mistakes that have occurred have been in the Middle East. And there, I would actually say that we're probably better, in general, staying out or trying to minimize our presence because we really don't know what we're doing. The politics of that region is complicated in a way that I think the moral clarity that we're seeing in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine is much greater than the moral clarity of
you know, Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan, where we've been so heavily involved. And yes, I do think you can trust it. Well, look, first of all, if you believe that America in power is a force for good, then it's completely corrosive to have this generalized distrust of America, that somehow the elites in America always lie to you, that they can't be trusted, that they won't live up to their promises.
they have to i mean we have to believe that that's possible and quite frankly as i said at the beginning of this discussion i think the biden administration has pretty much lived up to its promises with regard to what it's going to do vis-a-vis ukraine it actually predicted what was going to happen very openly and they were right in those predictions and so
So as I was saying, we created a lot of distrust for ourselves the way that George Tenet testified about the intelligence on Iraq before that war. But we've been pretty good about this one. And so I think we've got to hope for the best in terms of rebuilding trust for the U.S. government because we are still very important to a lot of allies, a lot of democratic allies all over the world who are counting on us to help them.
Having good intelligence is not sufficient. The problem is not having the intelligence but formulating a coherent strategy on the basis of that intelligence. If you know Russia is going to invade Ukraine and you even think you know the day it's going to happen, that's not the end of the story. You then have to try and come up with a coherent strategy.
If you can't deter Russia, if you can't find a diplomatic alternative to the conflict, then you have to have something more than I think we've got from the Biden administration thus far. The Europeans have been more, I think, impressive in their response and have pushed forward the sanctions agenda. But sanctions aren't, I think, going to determine the outcome of this war. They rarely do. You need the kind of sanctions that cause conflict.
the vehicles to run out of fuel and the soldiers to run out of food and the guns to run out of ammunition. And we're not in a position, I think, to say that that's happening. So my sense is that we are in a situation in which the United States has lost control of events. Walter, do you see things that way? And I know that
We're not supposed to be looking forward as you guys look backward mostly and make sense of what's happening in the now. But it feels at least to me like we're emerging out of maybe the end of an era that stretches back decades, maybe even centuries. And I'm wondering if you feel that way and what you think is sort of around the bend for America and for the world. Again, the post-Cold War era is over.
in that not just Russia, but China, Iran and other countries are not just disliking the post-1990 world order, but they're taking action of various kinds intentionally to contest it. And so,
This is a different kind of world. Great power competition is here. The world is not about passing resolutions at the United Nations or creating multilateral forums in which we do this or that. Hard power is back and all of these things are back on the table. And that's, you know, I think that's frankly terrifying.
to a generation that thought that all of that stuff was way back. We don't have to worry about nuclear war anymore. We don't have to worry about hostile great powers. We have plenty of time to worry about climate change, etc. And those things are worrying enough. No, it turns out it's additive. You've got them all on one plate.
I think wiser policy might have been able to keep us from getting here, but we have no ability to go back and do anything about that now. And one thing I think one does discover when you try to study history and think about it is you find that the one thing that history really seems to teach most strongly is that people don't learn much from history.
That is, generations continue to make similar mistakes. In some ways, the experience the world went on through World War II and the Cold War was an unusually deep lesson. But in many ways, even that lesson has begun to wear off. And so this may kind of contribute to your sense of our being in a different place at the start of something that is rather challenging.
We're in Cold War II, folks. Just as World War I was followed after an interwar period by World War II, which was different but fundamentally deserved to be called World War. So, we're in a second Cold War and we had an interwar period, which was kind of fun.
But now here we are. And in this Cold War, just as in World War II, things were a bit different. In Cold War II, things are a bit different. In Cold War II, the Chinese are the dominant partner. The Russians are playing second fiddle.
There'll be a non-aligned movement, but it'll be different countries that will be non-aligned. I think much of the action will be trans-Pacific rather than trans-Atlantic. That's why watch this space Taiwan coming soon. But here we are. It's the same old kind of conflict in the same old place. Ukraine has, as Walter rightly earlier said, had the most disastrous history of almost any country in the world over the last century.
And here we are again. It is agonizing to watch this country, which seemed to be climbing out of the pit into which it had been flung so many times, flung back in, to see bombs dropping on railway stations, refugees flooding across borders, to an historian is, it's a kind of nightmarish deja vu. But it's just the end of the interwar period, like the second interwar period. And this is Cold War II, which, by the way,
will not be entirely cold. Cold War I got started early with a hot war in Korea. Looks like Cold War II got started early with a hot war in Ukraine. Do you have any sense that Americans are ready
Well, I think if one looks at the polling, Americans are coming out of one of their periodic phases of introspection. Oh, man, we're so divided. This really sucks. And wakening up to the fact that there is evil. There are bad people out there. And if you don't do something about them at some point.
they attack you. So I think there's a shift occurring that's detectable in polling on this topic, on Ukraine. Majority of people think the Biden administration has been too weak in its response. Frank is in a minority amongst Americans and thinking it's done well.
And a rising proportion of Americans think that we should be ready to support Taiwan if it's invaded by China. So I think what's happening here is that as often, ordinary Americans are kind of moving ahead of the elites who are still clinging to diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory. And ordinary Americans are aware of the fact that all of this is, in fact, happening.
a distraction from the return of great power politics and organized lethal violence. As always, if you'd like to drop us a line, email tips at honestlypod.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.