Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
This is Honestly, and I'm Peter Sivodnik, in today for Barry Weiss. I'm an editor and writer at Barry's Substack, Common Sense. In a previous life, I reported from the former Soviet Union, for GQ, The Atlantic, Condé Nast Traveler, W, and the New York Times Magazine. And I spent a lot of time, in particular, jumping around Ukraine, from Kiev in the north to Donetsk in the east, to Odessa in the south, to Lviv in the west.
Watching the war unfold on my screen has been heartbreaking and terrifying.
Right now, the U.S. is being asked by the leader of Ukraine to join together with their allies and enforce a no-fly zone over their country to save innocent lives from slaughter and help Ukrainians win a war they seem likely to lose otherwise. I said, if you cannot shut the sky now,
Then give us the timeline. When will you do it? If you now cannot provide the timeline, tell us how many people have to die. The United States has refused to do this. NATO has refused to do this. Basically, a no-fly zone, if people understood what it means, it means World War III. Why?
The conventional wisdom in Washington seems to be that imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine amounts to crossing the Rubicon, moving from a war of words to a war. I think we need to be clear that we are not going to go to war with Russia. That would be the beginning of World War III. It would drag all of Europe into a much broader war. This was what we spent decades trying to avoid, a confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers.
No one wants that, but no one also seems to be able to agree on how best to proceed. In the meantime, millions of Ukrainians are fleeing their homes. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died. Cities are being razed, and the old geopolitical order, what we used to call the post-Cold War era, is coming to a close. I've been trying to figure out how that happened, and more importantly, how we get out of this without destroying the human race.
So today I invited on two great thinkers to help us unpack all of this. Eli Lake is a journalist who's covered national security for several outlets and is currently a contributor to Commentary Magazine and a fellow at the Clements Centers for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. Demir Muresic is a senior fellow at the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council and co-founder of the Wisdom of Crowds with Shadi Hamid. A quick break, then we'll dive in.
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.
Thank you, Eli and Damir, very much for doing this today. This is my first podcast, and I'm excited to be with you. So before we dive into the nitty gritty of the no-fly zone, I want to ask a few things about the war and make sure that we're sort of on the same page and we all have a shared understanding of where things stand right now.
As of today, what's happening right now? What is the status of the battlefield? Demir, let's start with you.
Well, thanks for having us. It's a really difficult question to sort of answer because it's been a difficult war to really get one's handle on. We've seen, I think at this point, it's north of 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine. They are all fleeing to Europe, to Poland, to European countries to escape the war. You are seeing cities being indiscriminately shelled across Ukraine by Russian military forces.
They're targeting civilian areas, bombing residential blocks, murdering people by the scores. But it turns out that much to the surprise of the Russians and also, quite frankly, I think much to the surprise of much of the commentariat, the Ukrainians have been putting up a very fierce fight. There's been a lot of footage of Russian tanks getting blown up.
airplanes getting downed and a lot of evidence of a remarkable resistance. Why I say that it's so difficult to really get a sense of how things are going is that by the nature of the war, by the nature of how cut off basically Russia became within days of the war due to sanctions, due to a very strong Western pushback,
we have actually very little insight into how it's heading from their situation. Despite the fact that it hasn't gone as well as Vladimir Putin had hoped when he launched this war, it doesn't seem to be letting up at all. Eli, is there anything you would add to that?
I largely agree. I do think that we can surmise from a couple of things about the state of the Russian assault. One is that I believe that Vladimir Putin over the weekend said that he was going to be conscripting people who had been arrested in protests for the war and that he is now relying on conscripts after the initial force is now, I think, fully entered into Ukraine.
And that means that you will have even less well-trained Russian soldiers with less of a motivation to fight. And the other point is that there have been some credible reports that senior officers, including generals, have been sent to the front lines for morale purposes to try to buck up Russian forces, which is also a sign that the Russians who are fighting this war on the ground were not told that
that they were going to be invading Ukraine to conquer it, as opposed to a military exercise or establish a sort of zone in and around the Donbass. So these are, I think, hopeful signs from my perspective, because I'd like to see the Ukrainians repel this invasion. But I think it also reveals that the Russian planning has not been good at all.
You were both alluding to the Ukrainian response to the invasion.
We see it a lot in media and social media of these David and Goliath analogies, which I'm a little bit leery of because I think they play into our desires or what we want to believe, which is that ultimately David defeats Goliath and the Ukrainians will defeat the Russian invaders. I wonder what you make of that. I'm wary of sort of becoming overly confident about
Ukraine will prevail. But I also think that you have to notice at this point that the Russian operation has really so far been a failure. Doesn't mean that they still won't prevail, but it's not, they're not doing, this is not going the way that I think anybody thought that Vladimir Putin or the Russian military believed it would go when they launched this war. Yeah, I think that's correct. You know, the
The David and Goliath thing is important because despite how poorly performing the Russian troops seem to have been, it's important not to underestimate how much of a force imbalance seems to be playing out on the ground. It really is a huge challenge.
The other thing to keep in mind is that, and I know this from talking to some Ukrainians, as I understand it, the entire preparation of the Ukrainian military ever since 2014 when Russia occupied and annexed Crimea, which is in the south of Ukraine, and basically occupied two chunks of two eastern provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk.
Most of the planning, as I understood it, from the Ukrainian side since 2014, a lot of the training was on the front line between Donetsk and Luhansk. And they imagined, because of course militaries do this kind of planning, that if the push were to come, it would come from those occupied areas with Russia behind it, that that's the easiest way to roll tanks. They actually hadn't planned on the contingency that Belarus would become a client state of
of Russia, basically becoming a client of Russia's, and that they would be fighting a war on two fronts. So that also underlines the amazingness of the response at this point, both the ability of the Ukrainians to fight this sort of unprepared, and again, the gravity of the underperformance of the Russian forces.
I share Eli's hope that we might see a miracle happen here. But I do think that the Pentagon State Department, everyone's basically planning for the worst at this point, which is that the Ukrainians do get rolled at some point, that the government perhaps collapses, that there are repeated attempts to decapitate the Ukrainian government, as Eli said it. And in fact, they are sending assassins into occupied Kiev to try and find Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.
and kill him, that that may succeed, that in fact, that, you know, would then represent a serious setback and a kind of collapse for Ukraine, and are planning, in fact, to see whether some kind of insurgency can then be sustained in the long term. But not that this would be a, you know, a David and Goliath story where there's the triumph of the little guy.
So let's look then more closely at the question of the no-fly zone. The Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, has been calling for, begging for something called this no-fly zone. In an interview with CBS News last week, he said, quote, How much do you need?
How many legs, arms, heads must be torn off and fly away to finally reach you to make you introduce a no-fly zone? Before we get into whether this is a good or bad thing, and I know you disagree about that, I'd like to just get some clarity about what a no-fly zone is.
Okay, I know Fly Zone is a military mission that would require NATO or the U.S. military to attack Russian anti-aircraft batteries on the ground and Russian fighters in the air in order to clear a swath of airspace where Ukrainian airplanes could operate without being harassed or endangered. It's basically a kind of committing to a limited military outcome mission
to basically prevent or remove any kind of dominance from Russia over certain swaths of airspace in Ukraine. Why is Zelensky so laser-focused on the no-fly zone? What is it about this that is so important for Ukraine in his eyes? Well...
Obviously, as people are getting killed, any relief from that would be helpful. Part of what's puzzling about it, though, and it is worth pointing out, is that, in fact, the Russian Air Force has not been all that dominant. They're flying, but so is the Ukrainian Air Force still is flying.
over the skies, and the skies are contested at this point. So presumably the idea would be to neutralize the Russian Air Force as a factor in that, to, as Eli said, give space to the Ukrainian Air Force to rule the roost, and then perhaps if they had that capacity to in fact...
hit the artillery positions that Russians are currently using to shell the cities and fortified Ukrainian positions. I would add one more benefit of a no-fly zone is that it preserves the option for providing airlift for humanitarian supplies when the Russians will inevitably try to create a full siege of Kiev and other cities. I mean, as we're seeing right now, they're doing in Mariupol. So
The idea would be that if you had a no-fly zone, it was possible to survive a siege in a way that you couldn't if the Russians dominated the skies.
The interesting thing about the humanitarian part that Eli is alluding to is that some of the plans being floated right now for no-fly zones, in fact, point out that the United States would actually not be targeting ground installations, Russian ground installations. Part of the pitch, and this is the sort of call it no-fly zone minus if it was to be strictly humanitarian one, as Eli says, is that the United States would not be targeting Russian ground installations.
would be to fly humanitarian resources and have them escorted by U.S. jets and basically alert the Russians publicly saying, we're doing this. No warning. We're doing this. It's humanitarian. We're not going to hit your forces. And then basically dare them to shoot down our planes in order to deliver this. The gamble being that the Russians wouldn't do that, that it would be, you know, too dangerous and too provocative on them to escalate further with the West.
So that's the other approach, which is this humanitarian approach. The question, though, is how likely are these things to work and what are the upsides and downsides of them? Eli, tell me as succinctly as possible, what is the argument for the no-fly zone? Well, I think there's a few. First is that if you're in for a penny, you should be in for a pound. There is a kind of lazy argument.
argument that we see from members of Congress and even the administration and even NATO officials, which draws this distinction between entering the war in Ukraine as a combatant versus everything that the West is doing right now. And I think this in some ways depends on, we expect that Vladimir Putin understands that unprecedented sanctions, which basically amount to a kind of
financial blockade of his economy would not be considered an act of war. We should say over the weekend that Vladimir Putin did say that those sanctions were an act of war. It assumes that the arming, supplying, and also providing of targeting intelligence to the Ukrainian military would not be seen as a kind of act of war.
or that we are somehow not in the war already. When we hear this sort of, if you want to know Fly Zone, then we're going to get World War III, because it's such an incredible escalation, I would say that everything that the West has done up to now
has been a kind of new escalation. We are in unfamiliar territory in terms of an escalatory ladder with Russia right now. The other factor here that I think is really important is that when this conflict started almost two weeks ago, I largely agreed with the argument that the United States should not commit ground forces to Ukraine and to try to help in every other way.
But the Ukrainians have done so much better than I think anybody had expected that they might have a chance to actually deal a humiliating blow and repel the Russian invasion at this point. That is a possibility. If that is a possibility, I do think that the escalatory risks, and they are there, there's no doubt about it, but the escalatory risks in some ways would be worth it
If Russia was beaten back and it's the final argument I would make is what is the humanitarian price that we in the free world would be willing to accept? And then is there a kind of threshold which would go past that, that we would say we have to do something?
And I don't see a lot of serious conversations about that. So right now, it's hard to say how many civilian casualties there are. And there's probably 1.5 million refugees. But let's say that Putin kills 100,000 Ukrainian civilians. Let's say Putin assassinates Zelensky. At that point, would we say we can't bear it, that that cost is too high? So I want to try to think about in those terms.
we're already kind of in the war. What is our threshold? How much suffering, how much misery, how much massacre and catastrophe are we willing to accept before we want to try to prevent it? And the Ukrainians have a real chance maybe
to win? And are there things that we can do to very much increase their odds at this point that we're not doing? That's where I'm coming at it from. Good. So let me just make sure I understand exactly. I think I've got it. There are three arguments you've mapped out. One, we're already at war and pretending that we're not is pretending. Right.
Two, the Ukrainians actually have a chance, just a chance of winning this thing. And we should help them do that. And then three, what's the humanitarian price that will pay, that the world pays, Ukraine pays for not acting? Demir, what is Eli getting wrong?
I'll pick on the first one first and we can get to the other ones later and sort of talk them out a bit. But I think it is an important thing to be very careful about the question of are we at war yet?
Eli is absolutely right that these sanctions have been unprecedented. It is a remarkable thing that they happened as they did. Quite frankly, everyone in the West was, and I mean even among the leaders who were so galvanized by the brazenness and the shock of the war, that they managed to come together and pull together this sanctions package, a crippling set of sanctions against Russia and the Russian economy.
And Eli is correct that, you know, if one talks about what is an act of war in a, you know, abstract sort of sense, yes, blockades like this traditionally are what we term acts of war. That said, it is important to be careful about the things that the Russians themselves are saying. Over the weekend, Putin said that what the West is doing is tantamount to an act of war, but he hasn't in fact gone so far as to declare war on the broader West.
This is, I think, an important thing to keep in mind because we shouldn't get caught up in this sort of, I think, high-level question of what is the platonic ideal of war and have we crossed this threshold and are we at war or not? The question is, are we at war with Russia? And are we belligerents in a war with Russia? We're not yet.
And it has been actually interesting to watch where Putin has pulled short of actually declaring that, because if he were to declare war, one would then expect that he would, in fact, take steps to actually attack many of our interests elsewhere. Wouldn't even have to be a military attack on, I don't know,
terrorist attack on some military installations anywhere else. You might see submarines trying to cut undersea cables to disrupt communication, any kind of hostile acts outside of theater. Now, one might say it's only two weeks and one might say we'll get there. And we might. We very well might. I do think it's important, though, to note that we're not at war yet. And so that's one, I think, tweak. And that is important. So just to be clear, then that means that
If the United States or NATO were to impose a no-fly zone and then suddenly we take out some Russian fighter jet, as you're framing it, it would be the West that was declaring war, that was crossing the Rubicon, if you will.
Again, you know, I'm not that concerned with the moral question of who really declares war and who started it, you know, in this sort of sense. My bigger concern is what happens when we do try and attempt a no-fly zone and they start shooting down some of our planes.
There's a question whether they will. I mean, a lot of that hinges on whether they would dare. I think a lot of the sort of hawkish arguments for doing this, that they wouldn't because it would be escalatory on their part. But I think it's worth asking the question of what do we do then and what is our response? That's that, you know, Eli alluded to, you know, being worried about the escalatory ladder.
But that's the logic we're getting ourselves into, not a moral logic, but the logic of events that then pushes things forward. And that's the big concern where I would pump the brakes a little bit on what Eli is saying, that we're at war already. We're not at war because we're not shooting each other's assets. Putin is very careful still, for now, to unleash all of his violence on the Ukrainian people and on the Ukrainian fighters.
and their military. That's an important distinction. We're still not there yet. If I could respond to that. Please, please. Well, Putin has said a number of things about what he considers to be acts of war. And he started the conflict warning any countries that aided Ukraine would face terrible consequences. And he twice threatened nuclear response if things got very badly. Now, this was apparently, hopefully, brinksmanship.
But I would just say that the potential for nuclear escalation, we've already entered into it. And I am conceding that a no-fly zone or something like that would be more of an escalation. I don't want to kind of paint you some sort of rosy picture here. But on the other hand, Putin is already talking about, you know, nuclear forces. And, you know, I think that his intention is to sort of
scare the West into a kind of paralysis at a moment when his military is floundering. And I think we have a chance to really reverse some of the momentum in the wrong direction for the last nearly 20 years. So I look at this as a sort of strategic opportunity. And I also think it's also important not only to look at it as the humanitarian cost, but
But what are the strategic costs if Putin manages to kill Zelensky? What are the strategic costs if he manages to kill untold numbers in Ukraine, but ultimately kind of hold it? And then we're stuck in a longer term conflict with Russia where we're isolating their economy and we're hurting ourselves. We're isolating the Russian people, which is not good for our overall interests. And we're kind of committed to a much longer game if there's a chance that
to repel the Russians now, as Zelensky believes there is, then that's why I would say consider it. And if I can just add one more point, it need not be a formal no-fly zone. If the United States used its incredible capacity for electronic warfare to jam the anti-aircraft batteries and jam the Russian fighter jets, that would be, I think, clearly kind of entering the battle space, so to speak,
But at the same time, if we could accomplish that without physically flying U.S. planes, but it would have the same effect, maybe that's a kind of compromise. But if you can keep the Russians from dominating Ukrainian airspace, that would be a huge advantage tactically and potentially strategically for Ukraine.
Demir, what about this point, the second point that Eli made about, look, the Ukrainians might actually be the David that beats Goliath. They might actually pull this off. He's right, isn't he, that we should do everything we could then to help push things just over the finish line.
Aren't we kind of morally obligated then to do that? Look, I want to stress what Eli said there. I mean, the punishment being visited right now, obviously, Ukrainian civilians and Ukrainian people are suffering the worst at the brunt of this war. But Putin has taken unprecedented measures to shut down his own society. The New York Times announced today they're leaving Moscow.
Most Western journalists are soon to follow. There is a 15-year penalty has been announced if you speak ill of the war or misinform the Russian people of what's going on in the war, which is basically a blanket block on free expression. We always talk about authoritarianism. This is certainly in my lifetime outside of North Korea that we're seeing something that approximates authoritarianism.
real totalitarianism coming down over Russia at this point. So I don't want to undersell all of the gravity of the stakes that Eli is laying out there. But I really want to push back strongly on Eli's point. Putin has rattled the nuclear saber twice already, or perhaps even three times, depends how you count it, warning from intervention in this war.
And Eli is absolutely right. The intention is to paralyze us from doing that. The term is nuclear deterrence. It's a term that I think a lot of people, the generation that grew up in the 9-11, you know, in the post 9-11 period, they're not used to it. Eli and I are older. We remember the Cold War even as children and, you know, a lot of the stuff that was
talked about then. We're in a world now where that is a factor. We all assume that these weapons wouldn't be used and that international relations had entered a different phase. We are being deterred in a nuclear way from intervening.
It's fine to say that you don't believe Putin would go there, but I think you have a pretty high bar to bat down that question, that in fact he wouldn't go there. And therefore, what I really want to stress is, again, I'm not minimizing the gravity of the situation we find ourselves in. I'm not saying this is in any way an easy decision. Well, of course we're not going to do a no-fly zone. What are you, crazy? I wouldn't say that at all. It's a very important question.
But this is not something to be all that cavalier about, because even though Russia's conventional armed forces have proven to be second rate, the Russians do have a credible nuclear deterrent on this. So that's my main sort of pushback on what Eli's saying. If I could just respond to that, we should introduce this concept of tactical nuclear weapons, which is a lower yield and less destructive weapon.
nuclear weapon that is meant to be used in a battlefield against a battalion of tanks or a military base, as opposed to destroying a city. And here I would just say that we have to assume that President Zelensky is well aware of the potential for tactical nudes to be used. If they were to be used in this war, they would be used in his country.
So by asking for a no-fly zone, President Zelensky is accepting the risk of a tactical nuclear attack on his own territory. And to me, because the Ukrainians obviously would have the most to lose, if you have the elected leadership of their government saying we still want the no-fly zone because we believe we could win, that does factor into my thinking about it. Of course, under no circumstances would I want any nuclear weapons, tactical or otherwise, used.
But it seems that the Ukrainians are willing to accept that risk. And they're the ones that would pay the highest price if tactical nuclear weapons were used. And they're saying they still want the no-fly zone. So I'm just saying that is just something that I think we have to factor into as we talk about this issue.
You're right. Ukrainians would pay the highest cost. But the argument about tactical nuclear weapons is basically if we commit to a no-fly zone, unless we think that the Russians simply won't engage, that they, you know, they take us so seriously and feel that they would ultimately find themselves losing in a limited conflict.
We're looking at some amount of American casualties. You may say that then we wouldn't escalate and attack ground installations or maybe turn this into a wider regional local war in Ukraine. NATO troops, maybe not ground troops yet, but, you know, air power has its limits. At some point, you know, you need to do more on the ground. And I think we'd hit that limit at some point.
At that point, when we're hitting that limit, you know, we're then getting into a kinetic fight basically against the Russian army, which, as I said, we have good reason to believe would go our way. The question then becomes, what does that loss, that kind of route look like for Putin? Does he then turn his tactical nuclear weapons on, say, NATO ground troops or, you know, battalions or tanks that are on the ground?
As it stands right now, they have an edge in that. Now, again, given low yields, you know, perhaps this is survival and we could just sort of grind it out that way. But given the disparity, it's quite possible we if we weren't then willing to escalate from the tactical to the strategic level, which is what you alluded to, that sort of popular understanding of nuclear deterrence, which is we'll blow up your cities, right?
if Putin is really committed to that kind of scorched earth policy, we may not be able to prevail in conventional or sub-strategic nuclear levels. It's that sort of endgame that I think one ought to really play out and be very careful about as one ponders these options. A short break, then more with Eli and Demir. I'd like to pull back for a moment and think a little bit about the politics surrounding this debate.
Eli, tell me, like, who in Washington supports a no-fly zone? Well, there's a handful of liberal internationalists who just signed an open letter and they're sort of old foreign policy hands calling for a humanitarian corridor, which is a modified version of this. Tom Malinowski, a congressman from New Jersey, who for many years was the Washington office director for Human Rights Watch,
has argued that it's time to start considering possibility of kind of humanitarian no-fly zone. And of course, Adam Kinzinger, I think another congressman is Republican, but in the Never Trump varieties on the January 6th commission, first broached this idea about a week or so ago. But it doesn't have a lot of support, at least at this point, at least among members of Congress. And certainly the Biden administration has ruled it out. And that's where it stands now. As I sort of said earlier, though,
We're going to see far worse images coming out of Ukraine in the next week and months. And would there be some sort of tipping point? And I think that there's two tipping points to watch. One is, could Ukraine really win combining the kind of economic strangulation of Russia with their home field advantage and the failure to prepare for this invasion and the sorry shape of the conventional Russian military?
And I think that you might see more support for such a thing or at least more support for aggressive steps to help the Ukrainians if we keep thinking that they have a chance to win. And the other is, again, is that humanitarian cost. So right now there isn't a lot of support for it. But, you know, if you see Kiev turn to rubble and you start seeing this casualty statistics and they or they assassinate Zelenskyy,
I think that these things can have a kind of emotionally galvanizing effect on Europe and America, and the calculus politically will change.
So the politics here seem very strange. On the one hand, we have people like Marco Rubio, hardly a dove, saying that a no-fly zone would, quote, lead to World War III. On the other hand, I don't know if you saw the video, the artists at the Guggenheim in New York, you know, their paper planes, their protests calling for a no-fly zone. In what parallel context
crazy universe are we in, in which Marco Rubio is against the military action that New York City activists or artists who at an earlier era would have like called for like, you know, give peace a chance are supporting. Like it just seems upside down. You characterize Rubio cautioning against doing this. And then, you know, what you might think is sort of anti-war activists and artists advocating for a stronger stance against
The reality is we're actually doing a fair bit right now. Just right before we went to record, I saw the Polish government announced that they are making their MiGs available. There was one of the plans that was being bandied about was, can we get Russian-made airplanes that are in service in many NATO countries, especially on the eastern flank, former Soviet countries, can we get those to the Ukrainians and have them fight with those planes on their territory?
Looks like just now there was some breakthrough there and the polls were waiting for some inducement from the U.S. are saying, just take the planes. We're good. We'll figure out the details later. That's a huge step. We are getting a lot of arms to the Ukrainians and arming the resistance. It's made a difference, the material support and the training that we are providing. And again, it's interesting. It's interesting that while Putin has said that these are hostile acts,
of arming the Ukrainians, he also hasn't gone so far as to say we are at war with NATO. And that is, I think, another very important discrete point about the localization of this conflict. One thing that listeners might remember is that before the fall of the Soviet Union, we were arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. And there were a lot of protests from the Soviets at that point about us doing that and that it was a hostile act, but they never went to war with us over it. And it was contained on this.
So I would certainly not characterize Marco Rubio or my position as particularly dovish on this. It's just cautionary about crossing this line, perhaps before its time, or perhaps rashly in a fit of, I think, righteous indignation at witnessing what we're witnessing happened before us. But what about this political dynamic that people who are more for the no-fly zone seem to be more in the
sort of dovish or traditionally dovish camp and the people who are against it, it seems as if they are in the harder line or hawkish camp. What am I not understanding? That just seems weird, isn't it? Well, I would say that the hawks in this regard are not just human rights activists. I mean, they're people who kind of focus a lot on Putin.
And so people like Garry Kasparov and Andras Aslan, I mean, you see a bunch of sort of defense intellectual types and have argued for this kind of intervention because they reason that if Putin wins, then he will be emboldened to attack NATO next.
And it begs this question, which is, OK, if Russia then were to sort of turn their military on Lithuania or Estonia, we would be treaty bound to fight them. And all of this escalation that we're worried about right now would would then be for real. So I'm not entirely convinced that it's a certainty that if Putin wins, he will attack NATO. He hasn't attacked a NATO country yet.
Ironically, in my view, if the argument is he wouldn't attack NATO, that's not right, then it's not kind of an argument for, well, why didn't we let Ukraine or Georgia into NATO before? But regardless, if President Biden is willing to say, if you attack a NATO country, you're attacking the entire alliance, Article 5 is real, and he's willing to reiterate that, then to a certain extent, we've already laid out a scenario where we'd be willing to get into a conventional war with Russia.
with all of the nuclear escalation horrors that come with it. And so again, I look at it like this. If the Ukrainians have a chance to win, and this could potentially deal a strategic blow to Putin and his regime, and we can prevent humanitarian catastrophe, and we're already arming and providing targeting and doing this economic blockade, I would argue that at a certain point, we have to consider it. And we should at least sort of come up with
What is our limit when we will enter the fight more directly?
So NATO, as you both know, has repeatedly rejected Zelensky's pleas for a no-fly zone. And he responded to NATO earlier this week in no uncertain terms. Quote, all the people who will die from this day will die because of you as well.
because of your weakness, because of your disunity. Dimir, does the West have blood on its hands? And is the bigger story here that the US, after having led for so long, is now not so sure whether it should lead?
There are many steps in the last 15 or so years that could have been taken to avoid the crisis we find ourselves in right now. Opportunities missed to have deterred Russia, including what Eli mentioned, at some point letting in Ukraine and Georgia into NATO as the ultimate deterrence.
And part of those, to your question, Peter, may have something to do with a lack of vision and forthrightness in the United States in the sort of late post-Cold War period. But I think that most of the real material challenges we face right now in this conflict with Russia, which is not a full peer competitor on an economic level, it's
It's an overall country with an economy slightly smaller than Spain. Nevertheless, the nuclear balance in the local conflict that we're facing right now would still be real. So it's not quite amenable to call it questions of American determination and sense of purpose in the world at this very point.
Well, I do think that there is a problem in the United States in particular in that we have really the leaders of both parties have argued now since Barack Obama that America's post 9-11 wars were immoral and a matter of folly. And there are certainly many fair criticisms of the war in Iraq and the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, but
drone strikes. I'm not arguing that there aren't criticisms that are fair, but I think that in the discourse, we've seen a kind of ascendance on the right and the left of people who believe that American interventions abroad are moral abominations. And that's not true. And we need to regain our
a basic sense that when it comes to the world and American leadership in the world, we are the best alternative to anything else that's available. And that while we are by no means perfect, many times we fight for the right reasons and that you cannot compare Russia's rape of Ukraine to the American invasion of Iraq, even though, as I said before, there are plenty of criticisms there.
And that we need to kind of regain some of that moral clarity. And that does come from bold leadership. So that means a kind of political fight at home against both the amoral transactionalism of Trumpism and
and also the self-flagellation of the progressives. And it needs to be fought by Democrats and Republicans who will say, "No, American leadership makes a difference. Our wars are different. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. And the leader of Russia is evil, and the Ukrainians are in the right, and we should help them prevail."
Because the world will be a safer place when dangerous, evil tyrants are deterred. And it's a lesson that I guess every generation has to relearn. But it's one that I hope we are beginning to sort of understand again in 2022. But the good news, in my view, is that America is a unique country in the sense that we can change almost in an instant.
Before Pearl Harbor, the United States was an isolationist nation. The Roosevelt administration is the third powerful group which has been carrying this country toward war. The prevailing view was never again should we fight a world war or anything like what we saw in World War I.
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, even Charles Lindbergh, the head of the America First Committee, We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. volunteered to join the Air Force. So it's happened before. I believe that in Europe we have seen a combination of Putin's menace and Zelensky's heroism galvanize a continent.
to make decisions that we would have considered to be impossible only two weeks ago, from the increase of the German defense budget to the kind of sanctions that have been imposed to the United Kingdom going after the oligarchs and the laundromat in their own country. So I think it can happen here, but we have to reject the view that America is no better than China or Russia and, you know, our wars are terrible too.
Thank you both for taking the time to talk. My pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Thank you to Eli Lake and Amir Marasic. You'll soon be able to listen to Eli on his new podcast, The Re-Education with Eli Lake on the Nebulas Network. And please look out for his essay, The World Has Changed and We Must Change Along With It, in the April print issue of Commentary Magazine.
You can catch Damir on his podcast and read his recent essay, The Ugly Truth About No-Fly Zones, both on wisdomofcrowds.live. Thanks for listening, as always. If you want to reach out, you can email us at tips at honestlypod.com and make sure to subscribe to Common Sense at barryweiss.substack.com. Also, thanks for letting me jump in for today's conversation. Barry, we'll be back with you next time. See you soon.