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Speaker 1: Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
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Speaker 2: We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around the world, and.
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Speaker 3: Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
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Speaker 2: Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you may not have heard.
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Speaker 3: Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
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Speaker 2: We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. Michael Carpenters want of Washington's most experienced Russia and Europeans. He's a former career Foreign Service officer and now a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He also served as US Ambassador to the Ossee, Senior Director for Europe at the NSC, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defenser Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia and our Control. So this is a conversation not just about Russian Ukraine, but about how the Kremlin's model of power is sadly bleeding into our politics here.
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Speaker 4: So Michael, welcome, It's great to be with you both.
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Speaker 2: So let's start with the issue of conspiracies and conspiracy theories. I can think of no regime that engages in conspiratorial policy, spreads conspiratorial theories, and believes conspiracy theories. What is it about Russian history and political culture that lends itself to this mindset? You know?
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Speaker 4: I think it's the long history of secret service under the Tsarist regime that then obviously continued into the Soviet period and is well ensconced in the post Soviet period as well. I think it's that desire to foment political warfare, use the secret services to undermine one's enemies, and to also get compromand on one's friends just in case. So it's a long history of relying on informers and leverage to be able to control political situation. And let's face it, it served the Kremlin really well over the years.
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Speaker 3: Does the Russian leadership to what extent do they believe in conspiracy theories their own and or do they just understand it is sort of propaganda tool, a weapon against the West. And I'd just like to get a shout out to my one of my favorite conspiracy theories, Russian conspiracies is the dullest plan. Right. That was the one where that back in Soviet times they were convinced that the CIA that we were going to get the Soviet youth to become gay and alcoholics. Right, I think we were half and half. So to what extent did they buy into this? It isn't their fault, it's you know, CIA with some cunning plan.
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Speaker 4: Yes, I don't know how much they buy into it. And you look at like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a Russian conspiracy theory that they planted with a very clear purpose. And you look at subsequent ones, whether it's accusing the United States of fabricating the HIV virus or any number of other ones like the one you just mentioned. I think for most of these they actually they don't believe them, and it's just they're throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. But they do have a pretty good understanding of human nature, and I think especially in moments when times are uncertain, when you know things are changing rapidly, human beings have a tendency to sort of reach for simple explanations. You know, sometimes conspiracies actually prove to be correct. Some people rely on them more than others. But I think the Russian leadership understands that this is a tool for getting inside people's minds. It's a form of cognitive warfare, and they're really good at that, so why not use it.
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Speaker 2: Russia developed differently than the West did, essentially, so they never had a Reformation and a Renaissance and a lot of those things. They never developed that civic culture with lawyers and merchants and things because they couldn't grow things there. So therefore they didn't have extra that they could then sell and create this sort of commercial merchant class and the things that they did often in the West, And so I think they developed a sort of a sense of statism. Right. So, but when the Bolsheviks took over and the Soviet Union, it was all about regime security. It was keeping the leadership in power at all costs. So everything is to protect the leadership, keep it in power, and support the state. So the things that we believe in individual rights, telling the truth to them, it doesn't register. It's not about telling the truth. It's about saying what you need to say. To stay in power and keep your people in power. Just I think it's a different mindset absolutely.
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Speaker 4: I mean, they've been a long history of thinking in collectivistic terms now as we do in terms of individuals, individual rights, freedom, all these sorts of Western concepts that we subscribe to that frankly don't resonate with a large segment of the Russian population because they have grown up in an autocratic system. Their culture has to developed just value the collective over the individual. And therefore, you know, what's to say that we can't sacrifice the truth or that we can't sacrifice individual rights if we're trying to achieve the larger collective goal.
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Speaker 3: My thinking goes back to the big lie. So, I mean lots of big lies in Soviet history, you know. For me, one of the biggest ones is that the Hitler Stalin picked where Stalin and Hitler joined up as allies, and that later was presented as no, no, you know, Stalin was playing five dimensional chess, right, And it sort of makes me sense, gives me the sense of one political party today saying no, we didn't really lose the election. It's all based on this one big lie, and it's our leaders playing five dimensional chess. To what extent do you get the sense increasingly that political leads in the US are taking a cue from how the Russians do it?
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Speaker 4: Authoritarian? Yeah, I think they are to a certain degree, But I think there's a there's a bigger sociological phenomenon that is underlying what we're seeing in the US, but also frankly countries around the world. There's a Polish sociologist named zig Baumann who I think has nailed this phenomenon with a very simple phrase. He calls it liquid modernity. Basically what it is. You know, we're living in times where things are changing so rapidly, where the job market, for example, with AI is changing so rapidly, where social structures are morphing more quickly than previous generations have had to adapt to. Technology is transforming the way we live. So many things are changing so rapidly. A lot of people have this just they may not even be aware of it. Sense of insecurity, and when you feel this way, conspiracies offer a sort of an easy way to understand reality and what it is that you're confronting, whether it's this particular group of people secretly control the world or you know, more sort of tactical conspiracies. The Big Lie is a very carefully constructed conspiracy that tests loyalty. But it's to me, it's more reminiscent a sort of I mean, I want to say, like cult groups, right, it's like this, you have to It's this pledge of allegiance that you make to the group, to the movement, and you may even know it's false, but if you say it, it's this sort of blood bond that you create with the other members of the cult. And I think the big lie about the twenty twenty election sort of falls into that kind of category.
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Speaker 2: I want to stuff from the premise that I suspect we both share that Russia is actually weaker than it looks, but the West keeps rescuing it from the consequences of its own weakness. Why do American administrations, in this case, it's Republican and democratic, keep reaching for the reset button when Moscow would never do the same for US.
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Speaker 4: No, that's a great question. I completely subscribe to the thesis that Russia right now is a lot weaker than a lot of people realize, militarily, economically, socially, across all dimensions. But you're right, there's this fear in the American foreign policy establishment of Russian collapse, the sort of the fear of catastrophic success if you like, that if the leadership in the Kremlin falls, then the country is going to disintegrate, or a new leadership will come in and it might be worse. There might be I don't know, nuclear materials that somehow fall out of the hands of the central government and then get married up with terrorist groups. There's all sorts of different ways that you can spin this out, but fundamentally, it's just this sort of somewhat irrational fear that if the regime changes in Moscow, that we're going to be worse off. And you're right. From their perspective, they are pushing regime change every which way they can, into every goddamn nook and granny they can find, right, so they're not scared of this. But we are on our end, and it makes us so self censor and not do certain types of activities visa of either Russians that we would do with regards to other countries or regimes, and that certainly other countries and regimes would do to each other and to us.
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Speaker 3: And this is all based on another big lie that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine, right, that Russia is not the aggressor that Ukraine has it coming. So you know, one country attacks another country tries to take it over. It is blatant aggression. And yet within the West people are bending over backwards to try to accommodate conspiracies as to why you know, biolabs per Tulsa Gabbert or it's the color revolutions, that this was a CIA plot. The fact that Ukraine exists at all as a separate entity.
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Speaker 4: It just it drives me fucking nuts. A number of times I have heard the war described as a defensive war from Russia's perspective, and I'm thinking myself to and how they invaded their neighbor with zero pretexts, just like that from one day to the next, and have been torturing its population and bombing its cities and dispensing with the Geneva Conventions all their forms of international law. I don't I honestly, I don't get it. There is described as the Putin first ayer phenomenon, trying to get inside the minds of the Kremlin, trying to see things from their perspective. You know, NATO encirclement, all this nonsense. NATO's a defensive alliance. I think most Russian leaders actually recognize that NATO would never invade Russia unless it was attacked. I don't get it, but there is this desire to sort of always pin the blame on us, that we were the ones who we didn't have enough dialogue with the Russians prior to the war, and that's why when I was ambassadort the OSSE I had to concoct all these crazy Kokamamy schemes to engage the Russians in dialogue because I knew that our West European friends were later going to accuse us, oh, you didn't take the olive branch of diplomacy when you could, so we wanted to prove damn it. We were going to try everything, you know, turn over every rock to try and get the Russians to agree to a diplomatic solution. Of course they didn't, but it goes to this mindset of trying to placate this mindset.
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Speaker 3: Yeah. The other great lie, of course, is that there's no Ukrainian identity, that there is no Ukraine. There are just Russians who speak funny.
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Speaker 2: Well, identity longer than a Russian identity, Yeah, exactly.
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Speaker 4: But that's a peculiar Russian perversion that they I think a lot of Russians actually truly believe that the Ukrainian identity is I don't know, Texas identity in the United States, that it's a variant of the larger great Russian chauvinistic identity. And why wouldn't they want to be Russians were such a great power, were so awesome, right, like, and they just don't get it. And you know, now, one point four million casualties later, I think a lot of them still don't get it, but some are waking up to the fact that Ukraine is an independentation and that they don't want the Russians.
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Speaker 2: There's a line I use a lot like that Russia's borders and when someone punches them in the face, and like, is the central lesson of the last thirty years, that Moscow just expands more than thirty years, That Moscow expands until it meets hard resistance while the West keeps mistaking hope and half measures for a strategy like we back down out of fear of escalation like you mentioned, or and then allowing Russia to pocket concessions and treating each new demand as a fresh crisis rather than part of the same pattern. Is the problem Russian strength is at our own self sabotage.
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Speaker 4: It's a bit of both. But I'll tell you from the Russian perspective, they've been spectacularly successful at colonizing other nation states, if you will, or other ethnic groups, and then assimilating them into the Russian nations. So even totally different, religiously different, ethnically different populations like in the North Caucauses, they have incorporated in the Russian Empire. Ermolo of the famous nineteenth century general sort of conquered these territories and just through root force, sort of assimilated them into the Russian Empire. And look at what they did to the Finns up the Karelians up in the north. It was just an absolutely brutal campaign to torture them into submission, if you like. And they thought they could get away with the same thing with Ukraine. And if your perspective is two hundred years of history, okay, there's a slightly logical character to that assumption. But obviously they ran into the Ukrainians punching them in the face, like you said, and that is where the Russian Empire stops today. And maybe this overreach in Ukraine, this is prognosticating into the future. I'm not entirely sure that this is correct, but this could be the gradual unwinding of the multi ethnic Russian Empire in the future, depending of course, on how this war turns out.
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Speaker 3: There's a tendency not just amongst Russians, but people in general and inability to say I was wrong. And I did know one experienced Russian diplomat I was dealing with, and when I first met him, there was a seemingly hell the Soviet Union right in the late eighties, and he would taught me about capitalists and they are there for humanity, Communism is the way of the future. And then Russia collapsed. This was in Germany, and by the time we parted ways, he was a committed Russian nationalist, completely hit changed. And what I was most surprised about was he started out with the solidarity of mankind in the beginning, and three years later he was talking about the Jews, and that he was talking about the Blacks, but that he met the Tartars and the Chechens and the Kalmark. And yet he never despite all these mental gymnastics, he never said, oh, maybe we got it wrong, or this is what I really feel. And I wondered, was he lying to himself or it is a communal thing, or just lying to me because I'm a foreigner.
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Speaker 4: My sense is a great Russian chauvinism was a part of the Soviet elite's mentality for decades and decades prior to the fall Unions. So this was always just right below the surface, and sometimes even above the surface. But they got so proficient at just mouthing the official party line, the propaganda talking points, that they could easily pivot in the course of, you know, a single conversation with the same person, in fact, from talking about Marxist ideals to fuck it, We're the greatest nation on earth and we're going to subdue all these other people that frankly deserve our civilizing influence. So that doesn't surprise me at all. They've been this nationalism has been there for a long time.
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Speaker 2: So Putin, I think he came up through the KGB and you talked about this cognitive warfare, political warfare, use of the security services and It seems to me that Putin uses the caarative corruption with the stick of compromot to try to born his interlocutors. And we can talk about that how it works with negotiations, but in terms of actually compromising Western political figures, how compromised do you think some of these people are.
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Speaker 4: The Russians are really exceptionally good at this. They played a long game, so they try to cultivate people for decades and decades. It starts with offering them whatever it may be, some small prize, a ticket to some the Valdai conference in Russia, and then typically it's these relationships have been lubricated oil and gas industries, so people are hired on as consultants, they're given special perks, and over time they've used this exceptionally well to influence very senior people in Western societies. You look at Gerhart Schroeder, right, a guy was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Like, why on God's green Earth would someone like that need to avail themselves of Russian benefits. It doesn't make any sense. So he could be on the he could be on the board of fifteen major German corporations and do quite well for himself.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, the talking points, and then I'm going to US politics in conservative circles in the beginning support Ukraine, Russia, the excess of evil, and now US talking points in negotiations between Russian and Ukraine. We seem to have changed sides, and a lot of US senators have changed sides without ever admitting to it. So a lot of ways, we're no different than that Soviet I was talking about that Soviet Russians.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, well for Ukraine, and we take a little bit of issue with what you just said, Jerry, because I think I'll be I agree with what you're saying about face on a lot of this. But I think a lot of members of Congress, you know, they recognize Putin's a bad guy, but they're going to pull every They're not going to you know, they won't. They just simply won't talk about it right now because they don't want to. Cassette, I agree that Steve Whitkoff beautiful peace process that we have before us, But I think they're dissembling essentially. So I think deep down they think Russia is a great power adversary. They'd like to see Russia defeated, but they're not going to say that because that's not politically expedient right now. But I find it just astonishing that such a large percentage of the MAGA base right now would have a different view of Russia from maybe where they were ten years ago. That to me is frightening that attitudes can change so quickly on a dime, based on whatever the great leader is saying at one particular moment in time.
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Speaker 2: You mentioned Witkoffs. Let's talk a little bit about these negotiations supposed, you know, with Ukraine and Russia. They're obviously focused on Iran right now, but I think the Russians see negotiation as part of conflict, right They use negotiations to benefit themselves, and I worry that this administration is you uniquely situated to fall for this and be manipulated by Moscow.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you're right. The Russians are extremely good negotiators, and they see it as a way to legitimize their position, because if they're in talks with the Americans, you know, the other great power on the planet, then maybe that means that the Europeans should back off. Right. They use it to their advantage, and certainly in the global South you know, we're talking to the Americans, so don't you poke your head into these affairs. It's being handled at a much higher level. They sort of use that sort of language to get themselves a position that is favorable for them. But I don't know actually what the thinking inside the White House is these days. It seems like they're realizing that there isn't a set of overlapping interests that would lead to an agreement, which anyone could have told you on January twentieth of twenty twenty five. But it's okay, eighteen months later. I think that realization is dawning on some people. Now, what I will say is I think that the suites that have been dangled by Kirol Dimitriev and other Russian negotiators are that they're so they look so wonderful to certain people's eyes. They've been promised riches in the Arctic North, oil and gas concessions, all these sorts of things, critical minerals in Siberia that people, I guess some of them just salivate thinking about Cowma can earn.
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Speaker 3: So arguably one of the other great lives inside of the United States is since nineteen forty five, one of the geniuses of American diplomacy has been our system of alliances right in Asia and in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Strong genuine alliances and like anry family, there's going to be squabbles, right, but we had it was based on values, it was based on economic interests and make America great again America first. We're pulling away from our alliances. And the story is the I think the conspiracy theory is we don't need alliances. And Russia and China, authoritarian countries have never really had alliances. They have proxies who they control to authoritarian James. But Russia has no real friends, right, unlike we used to have Germany, France, England, the US, Australia and so forth. So are we losing our alliance? Is is this gone for good? Or people's acceptance of the fact that we're going to go this alone. You know, we can attack our allies in Denmark to take Greenland. So what is your what's your feeling on that?
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Speaker 4: Yeah, I think we're at a critical inflection point where we the alliances are obviously fraid far worse than they have been in a generation, both in East Asia and in Europe and what's interesting is this Bridge Colby has this Twitter thread just a couple of days ago where he talks about we're going to shift our alliances from being values based to being interests based. So he's basically saying we're going to move towards the sort of allies that Russia and China have, which is purely transactional, purely interest based, transient, not founded in liberal democracy or shared values surrounding human rights or any of that. No, it's going to be purely interest based. I don't know, you even know if he really believes this, but if we did move in that direction, be a catastrophe for the US because interests change, and you know, we squabble, like you said, on trade issues and this and that. It's the values. It's the fact that we believe in democracy and we want other countries to be with us in this liberal democratic camp to fight the authoritarians. That's what cements these alliances for generations. You undo that and you're gone. And that's why, to my mind, the Greenland crisis of January this year was so devastating because Greenland Denmark or Democratic States or Denmark is a democratic state. Greenland is autonomous region. Within it, and we're threatening them with military invasions. That is crazy for it surreal for many of our European allies, and that is how you kill an alliance.
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Speaker 2: We were just talking about Whitcoff leading these negotiations in Iran and Israel and Russia and Ukraine. Now it's how bizarre is this that he's not a government worker, he's not a diplomat. He's a real estate guy with his own business interests. But you know, you did a career in the Foreign service, in the State Department. How is this affecting the State parment? What's happening at the State Department? What's your sense on not just morale, but you know, the state of our diplomatic service.
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Speaker 4: Obviously, the career diplomats have all been sidelined in favor of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, people who have close proximity the president, who are precisely capable of doing these kind of transactional deals that we were just talking about, where they also enriched themselves or their business benefits from whatever deal that it is that they're cooking up. And so that obviously has a very poor effect on morale. And you've had masses of people leave the State Department in the last year, senior people, many career people, junior people who decided that this is not the career that they wanted. They've been completely sidelined. And they'll tell you themselves if you ask them over a cup of coffee what's the policy on X, Y or Z, They're like, I don't know better than me. We're going to read the paper tomorrow morning and find out what.
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Speaker 3: Do are Ukrainian friends think of all this. They're fighting for their lives, they're fighting for their democracy, for their identity, and three years ago Biden provided lukewarm, mediocre support, right, not just enough to lose, And now we're openly siding with the Russians in the UN. We're not providing any assistance to them.
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Speaker 4: They're now understanding what the Trump administration is all about when it comes to their country. Like you said, they you know, we had a sort of an interesting complex relationship with the Ukrainian leadership in the Biden administration and did provide them with seventy billion dollars of military assistance, which they appreciated. But as you said, we were also very slow at certain key junctures to give them the advance capabilities that would have not even equalized the Russians on the battlefield, because the Russians always had an advantage, but just marginally got them closer, whether it's fifth generation aircraft or whatever. You know, we were so slow with the attack of missile, for example, but so many other capabilities as well. We were always a little bit slow, and we argued with ourselves that this wouldn't really make that much of a difference, and blah blah blah. So the Ukrainians were frustrated with US. At the end, many of them welcomed a change of administration. They looked forward to the Trump administration because they thought this is a blank slaight, Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Now they understand, they understand truly what this is about. You know, my former colleagues and at the OSCEE, you know, when the United States voted against a Ukrainian resolution that was sponsored by the EU and sided with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and Sudan like okay, like the lights went off. Okay, yeah, we switched sites. And so now that the Ukrainians understand, they still rely on our intelligence, which is very important. They no longer rely on our military equipment. Increasingly they're much less reliant on and so they're not going to consult with us, and they're just going to chart their own way forward and they're just going to set us off to the side. And I think the US is losing more and more influence with each passing week as Ukraine becomes self sufficient.
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Speaker 2: And we're losing influence, but we're also losing some experience because warfare is becoming more and more drone warfare, and they're getting to be the best in the world at it, and we're not really there to take advantage. But yeah, you were talking about during the Biden administration some frustrations. Yeah, I think this is a bipartisan thing here. I can remember during the Biden administration it was leaked that there was this view from intelligence. I don't know what that means, oh, that the Russians there was a fifty percent chance they were going to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. And I thought it was nonsense at the time. But I think Putin seemed if he's good at something, it's bullying and blustering and threatening because he knows it works on us, and we keep backing down. Is the West's fear of escalation actually creating escalation by teaching Moscow that these threats work. Like, I don't think it makes any sense for them to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and even if they did, the Ukrainians wouldn't give up.
00:27:13
Speaker 4: So the conventional escalation fear, to this day, I just it is so unfathomable that we would have boxed ourselves in and that we would have not given, say, Ukraine, a missile with a three hundred kilometer range, because that was somehow going to be escalatory for the Russian side. When the Russians were launching cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea with a range of two thousand kilometers. The fear of conventional escalation was frankly, just to my mind bullshit, But it was prominent among senior people in the last administration. Now that I think is distinct from the fear of nuclear escalation, and the Russians were very savvy nuclear's saber rattling in order to try to preclude us from doing things that we would have otherwise been more enthusiastic about doing. You know, there's that famous moment in the fall of twenty twenty two, you know, the publicly available account, which is in Bob Woodward's book, is that you know, the IC concluded that had the Ukraine's broken through Russian lines and been on the verge of taking Crimea. I don't think they got that specific, but something along those lines, then there was a fifty to fifty coin toss chance of deploying a non strategic of clear weapon. Yeah. First of all, I think that's made up, Like, I don't know where the IC got that figure, but it was also predicated on this notion that, yeah, that the Ukraine has had completely broken through they pushed the Russians back hundreds of kilometers and they were taking over Crimea. We were light years, light years in the fall twenty twenty two from that scenario. So it's all abstract, right, like we weren't even remotely close to that, and yet that kind of deterred us from doing things that we should have done at the time. And yeah, the Russian sense weakness and then they move forward. So in a sense, it's more escalatory to be deterred in this way than it is not to be.
00:29:06
Speaker 3: So we had take Iran and they closed the four moves, Like who would have thunk that everybody would have thunk that right, So you know, you know, I wasn't a Middle East expert in the agency, but even I knew that I was wondering, so, what's the plan? And the plans seemed to be out of Washington. It was they pushed aside all the experts like yourself and John and the others, and they came forward with basically their own sort of myth that they could deal with a deal with the RINOs from strength, that they could a bully them and be that there were Iranian moderates, that they could kill their way into that to that group and deal with them. And this is something that's gone back to the Reagan administration. This I wouldn't call it a conspiracy theory, but this self perpetuating myth that they are like us that in negotiating, and the myth is that we can just make this happen without negotiations, without experts, without planning, just by gut feel.
00:30:03
Speaker 4: I think it's very much a factor of the lack of expertise, the complete misunderstanding of the historical military context in which this war was being fought. The US history is littered with examples of regime wars, where we tried to change the pieces on the geopolitical chess board and we failed spectacularly, whether it be through the use of military force, as is the case in Iran, or sometimes through political warfare methods like ba pigs. It's always tempting to think, well, you know, Iran is historically weak, so we have an opportunity. And obviously our Israeli friends were making this case to the president and people on the inside were probably making this case to him as well, that this was once in a lifetime opportunity, and not knowing the context and not having people in the inner circle who were willing to truly push back and say, hey, look, this is likely to go wrong. They're likely to blockade the straight of horror moves, this is going to cause tremendous damage to the global economy. Without those voices warning him that this was a very likely probability, you know, he went for and obviously he was kind of riding high. I think off the seizure of Maduro in Venezuela, totally different contexts, totally different circumstances, but thought, wow, you know, our military forces are amazing, and they are, and what they did in Caracus was just tactically brilliant. But that couldn't be replicated in Iran, despite the fact that they killed the Supreme Leader, which if he had maybe stopped at that, he would have gotten around of applause from many politicians around the US. But you know, kept going with this idea that regime change could happen. They right now, we've heard fifteen different rationales for this war, but I truly believe that the key one was a desire for regime change and it has to happen despite the killing of so many people. It's become, if anything, more heartline than it was before.
00:32:05
Speaker 2: I've always said it. Dictators sometimes fear peace almost as much as pressure or war, because peace exposes their failure. So is the day after the war in Ukraine ends potentially the most dangerous day for Putin? How does he sell this at home? Is it almost better for him just to keep this going because he has at least he knows his status.
00:32:25
Speaker 4: Now, Yeah, that's a great question, and I think there is a lot of danger for Putin. The day after obviously depends on what that looks like. But in the most likely scenario of a sort of an armistice without any formal ceasefire agreement. I think there's a lot of pressure that begins to mount on Putin. You just look at the economy, and civilian economy has been completely cannibalized in order to goose the military industrial complex, and once the war ends, it's not gonna And there's this huge labor shortage now that's been thrown into the war effort, with all these people being this meat grinder tactic on the front lines, just bringing bodies in and throwing them at the problem. Once the war ends, all those people are going to come back into Russian society. All these psychopaths with their PTSD that have been torturing Ukrainians in the occupied territories, they're going to be coming back into Russian society. That's going to be a ticking time bomb sociologically, and they're going to be radicalized in hardcore nationalists. And then the economy, as I said, which the civilian economy has just been going through a period of unprecedented retrenchment, and the Russian statistics lie by the way, so they claim they're doing much better than they are. So all this is going to come home to roost. And yeah, Putent's going to face a lot of pressure. I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of people that are going to be questioning his leadership during the course of this war once the war's over, maybe even before the war's over.
00:33:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, Mike pulling your crystal ball out. Is there any reason for optimism that we could see in Russia? Maybe a smaller Russia that will take on some traits of Western democracy, or will be less less aggressive, less violent, less conspiratorial minded. Is there any reason to be optimistic at all? They have a highly educated population, at least in the cities.
00:34:12
Speaker 4: Look, I am very pessimistic when it comes to Russia, and I have really good friends like Vladimir Kara Mores, a Russian opposition politician, who truly believe in their souls that democracy is possible in Russia, in fact, that it's not that far away, it's maybe only a decade away. But I just don't see it that way. I look at the what the Russians call systema, just the system of forces and institutions that creates the conditions that we find in contemporary Russia, and it's just it's stacked towards businessmen who expropriate other businessmen through violence, political leaders who repress citizens, spy services that transgress the law in order to maintain their control over society. There are not the elements of a liberal, democratic, open society in Russia large. You know, maybe if we were just talking about a country that was confined to Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but given that Russia is much larger than that, I just don't see how a liberal democracy can flourish anytime soon. There's this pervasive culture of violence. I mean, you see some videos from like Russian schools of how teachers behave towards their students, and you see it in terms of how soldiers certainly treat more junior soldiers in the military. It's this pervasive sense that you need to physically control and subdue your opponents. That's the opposite of a civil society, which is where you settle your differences through institutions and dialogue. And so that has to change, and it's going to take a while.
00:35:53
Speaker 2: I mean, I lived in Russia in the nineteen nineties and there was this view in the West, Oh yeah, don the Solovietian fell They want to be Western, they want to come around. But there's one thing that has stayed consistent over decades, maybe even the centuries. Is this these brutal security service whose job is to keep the leadership in power at all costs. And that's one thing for my time in CIA that I saw handling Russian spies and defectors. There's one thing that's unusual about Russian sources and spies, unlike from other places, is almost to a person, they say the same thing when they come out is that the system is rotten and as long as the security services are there, Russia will never be a normal country. In other words, that security services. It's an intelligent state that security services run the state, and they did through the nineties, which is one reason why they didn't become more Western. Because the security services still had the Communist Party money. They stay stayed in power even when the rest of the society was falling apart. And as long as that's there, Russia is never really going to change. I think they've actually been probably strengthened because of this war, not weakened.
00:36:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's exactly right, John. I think that the fatal flaw in Russian democracy as it emerged from the Soviet Union was the fact that the state was captured by the security services. Every official had a minder, every institution had a minder or a curator, as is sometimes called in the Russian system. The institutions of the state just ever broke free of that overarching control from the KGB legacy agencies, and so that here we are with the KGB elite still ruling the country so many years later, and until that's broken apart, it's just likely to remain the same no matter who's in power in the Kremlin.
00:37:39
Speaker 3: And inevitably, whenever there is a popular democratic, populist uprising, the Maidan in Ukraine or in East Germany, some of the color revolutions in Georgia, they're inevitably seen or perceived in Russia as conspiracies. It's the CIA. It's famously Hillary Clinton was behind all this, right, Madelin Albright was behind this is almost that they're simply unable to conceive that a genuine popular uprising wanting better things in life and wanting democratic input is even possible without a conspiracy behind it.
00:38:17
Speaker 4: Tried and true method of security service control over the Russian population to blame their own sort of democratic instincts as being instigated by foreign or external powers, and so the moment that Putin feared the most in the fall and winter of twenty eleven to twenty twelve, when his grip on power was the weakest during his entire reign. He blamed it on Hillary Clinton precisely as you said, and on the United States. There were the protests then, where the bullet Naya protest was huge. I was actually in Moscow on that day. The security services had tried to prevent it from from being so widespread. They had locked down every little piece of public space. Gardens, lawns, sidewalks were barricaded, and yet the Russian people came out in this spot a uprising, and Putin basically decided, I think then and there never again, and he's been true to his word moving again.
00:39:17
Speaker 2: While moving forward, NATO Russia uses the NATO excuse. But my view of NATO, as you know, NATO threatens Russia like a gun threatens a thief. Where would we be today if Poland and the Baltic States were not in NATO? Doesn't the current war prove that NATO enlargement was not the problem, but maybe one of the few things we got right. And therefore, should we really start thinking about getting Ukraine into NATO is probably one of the best fighting forces in present day NATO, rather than you know, letting this drag on for a long time.
00:39:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, one hundred percent. And I had this conversation with President Biden when he was in office. One of the things that drew me to him initially when I first started working for him was that he was such a champion of NATO enlargement in the nineteen nineties and took on skeptical voices in his own party like Daniel Patrick Mornihan, you know, a great democratic leader, but who is very skeptical about NATO and LAS but precisely on the grounds that it might provoke Moscow. And Biden took him on in a Florida bate and said, no, this is the right thing to do for these tens of millions of East Europeans who were living under the Soviet yoke for so long. And he was absolutely right then, and that's still the right decision today, is to enlarge NATO, to create this space where people can live freely without fear of Russian domination, and as the Ukrainians currently fear, and as they're experiencing in the occupied territories in the South and East. NATO is a defensive alliance. It's never threatened Moscow. Some people will say they see it differently in Moscow. I don't care what they say. It's defensive alliance. It's never threatened Moscow. It never will. But it was the surest way to bring the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgary, all these other countries into this space where they could prosper and create liberal democracy. And it's actually retrospectively, it is crazy how successful these countries were in becoming democratic in such a short span of time. I know we sometimes criticized, like the current leader of Slovakia who's got some pro Russian instincts, or you know, in Bulgaria this or that, you know, corruption scandal, But by and large, these countries have been kind of dramatically changed for the better. And it's just truly astounding. And you go there today if you're a tourist, and you just see how freely people live and how much they've prospered under liberal democracy. It's amazing.
00:41:38
Speaker 3: And these countries came in voluntarily, they wanted to come in. It's not as though they were.
00:41:42
Speaker 4: Pressure them to come in. They weren't taking.
00:41:46
Speaker 3: I wonder if you've heard the Mandelin Albright plan that goes with the dollars plan. Putin has referred to it several times. But there was a guy in the Russian security services named Boris Rottnikov, great name, and Rottnikoff led a team of clear voyant sort of far seers, And you have to imagine this. They're sitting around a table looking at a photograph of mad and Albright, which allowed them to enter into her psyche and into her mind, and what they found was deep Russian hatred. And they actually got quotes from her mind that said that it was unfair for Russia to have so much natural so many natural resources, and so much wealth, and that Siberia should be shared with mankind, and that the conspiracy is that this continues today, that the US wants to take Russian wealth and Siberia away from them to share it out more equally.
00:42:46
Speaker 2: I think these might want that, but I've read about it.
00:42:51
Speaker 3: I'm like, no, even Putin is like commenting on these Mandlin all like quotes.
00:42:55
Speaker 4: I had not heard that one. I know they had put other words into Madeline Albright's mouth that were untrue, and claimed that she said certain things, including about NATO enlargement, that she never said. You know, that's the aim. It's to say at the West is bent on breaking Russia a part, and all of us are russophobes, you know, as my friend Karen Morzo, where I cited earlier, likes to say, you know, we're actually supporting Russian patriots because we want a better, democratic Russia. The only thing that we're phobic against is the autocratic nature of the regime there, which is autocratic and repressive at home, and it's imperialistic and aggressive abroad. And yeah, none of us like that, but that doesn't make us rusophobic in the sense, right, you know.
00:43:37
Speaker 3: And if your proof that we are is a bunch of clairvoyant staring at a photograph and getting into your mind, that's impressive.
00:43:43
Speaker 2: That's a crazy story. Sounds believable. Sure, Nicle, Thank you so much for your time. I would recommend our listeners to read your articles on Russia and on national security issues. Your foreign affairs piece I think was outstanding recently. Is there anything that we can that you're working on, or books or anything that we can tell people to look for.
00:44:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I'm working on a book. It won't come out for a while, but it's on regime wars, and I'm looking at the different tools from mill Tory force to political warfare and trying to compare how the balance is shifted, especially in the last couple decades where the sort of information technology has goosed the ability of great powers to use political warfare to regime change effect.
00:44:24
Speaker 2: Well, we will read it when it comes and maybe have you back on to talk about it.
00:44:31
Speaker 1: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
00:00:23
Speaker 2: We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around the world, and.
00:00:30
Speaker 3: Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
00:00:34
Speaker 2: Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you may not have heard.
00:00:41
Speaker 3: Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
00:00:43
Speaker 2: We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. Michael Carpenters want of Washington's most experienced Russia and Europeans. He's a former career Foreign Service officer and now a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He also served as US Ambassador to the Ossee, Senior Director for Europe at the NSC, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defenser Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia and our Control. So this is a conversation not just about Russian Ukraine, but about how the Kremlin's model of power is sadly bleeding into our politics here.
00:01:19
Speaker 4: So Michael, welcome, It's great to be with you both.
00:01:22
Speaker 2: So let's start with the issue of conspiracies and conspiracy theories. I can think of no regime that engages in conspiratorial policy, spreads conspiratorial theories, and believes conspiracy theories. What is it about Russian history and political culture that lends itself to this mindset? You know?
00:01:38
Speaker 4: I think it's the long history of secret service under the Tsarist regime that then obviously continued into the Soviet period and is well ensconced in the post Soviet period as well. I think it's that desire to foment political warfare, use the secret services to undermine one's enemies, and to also get compromand on one's friends just in case. So it's a long history of relying on informers and leverage to be able to control political situation. And let's face it, it served the Kremlin really well over the years.
00:02:15
Speaker 3: Does the Russian leadership to what extent do they believe in conspiracy theories their own and or do they just understand it is sort of propaganda tool, a weapon against the West. And I'd just like to get a shout out to my one of my favorite conspiracy theories, Russian conspiracies is the dullest plan. Right. That was the one where that back in Soviet times they were convinced that the CIA that we were going to get the Soviet youth to become gay and alcoholics. Right, I think we were half and half. So to what extent did they buy into this? It isn't their fault, it's you know, CIA with some cunning plan.
00:02:58
Speaker 4: Yes, I don't know how much they buy into it. And you look at like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a Russian conspiracy theory that they planted with a very clear purpose. And you look at subsequent ones, whether it's accusing the United States of fabricating the HIV virus or any number of other ones like the one you just mentioned. I think for most of these they actually they don't believe them, and it's just they're throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. But they do have a pretty good understanding of human nature, and I think especially in moments when times are uncertain, when you know things are changing rapidly, human beings have a tendency to sort of reach for simple explanations. You know, sometimes conspiracies actually prove to be correct. Some people rely on them more than others. But I think the Russian leadership understands that this is a tool for getting inside people's minds. It's a form of cognitive warfare, and they're really good at that, so why not use it.
00:03:59
Speaker 2: Russia developed differently than the West did, essentially, so they never had a Reformation and a Renaissance and a lot of those things. They never developed that civic culture with lawyers and merchants and things because they couldn't grow things there. So therefore they didn't have extra that they could then sell and create this sort of commercial merchant class and the things that they did often in the West, And so I think they developed a sort of a sense of statism. Right. So, but when the Bolsheviks took over and the Soviet Union, it was all about regime security. It was keeping the leadership in power at all costs. So everything is to protect the leadership, keep it in power, and support the state. So the things that we believe in individual rights, telling the truth to them, it doesn't register. It's not about telling the truth. It's about saying what you need to say. To stay in power and keep your people in power. Just I think it's a different mindset absolutely.
00:04:49
Speaker 4: I mean, they've been a long history of thinking in collectivistic terms now as we do in terms of individuals, individual rights, freedom, all these sorts of Western concepts that we subscribe to that frankly don't resonate with a large segment of the Russian population because they have grown up in an autocratic system. Their culture has to developed just value the collective over the individual. And therefore, you know, what's to say that we can't sacrifice the truth or that we can't sacrifice individual rights if we're trying to achieve the larger collective goal.
00:05:23
Speaker 3: My thinking goes back to the big lie. So, I mean lots of big lies in Soviet history, you know. For me, one of the biggest ones is that the Hitler Stalin picked where Stalin and Hitler joined up as allies, and that later was presented as no, no, you know, Stalin was playing five dimensional chess, right, And it sort of makes me sense, gives me the sense of one political party today saying no, we didn't really lose the election. It's all based on this one big lie, and it's our leaders playing five dimensional chess. To what extent do you get the sense increasingly that political leads in the US are taking a cue from how the Russians do it?
00:06:02
Speaker 4: Authoritarian? Yeah, I think they are to a certain degree, But I think there's a there's a bigger sociological phenomenon that is underlying what we're seeing in the US, but also frankly countries around the world. There's a Polish sociologist named zig Baumann who I think has nailed this phenomenon with a very simple phrase. He calls it liquid modernity. Basically what it is. You know, we're living in times where things are changing so rapidly, where the job market, for example, with AI is changing so rapidly, where social structures are morphing more quickly than previous generations have had to adapt to. Technology is transforming the way we live. So many things are changing so rapidly. A lot of people have this just they may not even be aware of it. Sense of insecurity, and when you feel this way, conspiracies offer a sort of an easy way to understand reality and what it is that you're confronting, whether it's this particular group of people secretly control the world or you know, more sort of tactical conspiracies. The Big Lie is a very carefully constructed conspiracy that tests loyalty. But it's to me, it's more reminiscent a sort of I mean, I want to say, like cult groups, right, it's like this, you have to It's this pledge of allegiance that you make to the group, to the movement, and you may even know it's false, but if you say it, it's this sort of blood bond that you create with the other members of the cult. And I think the big lie about the twenty twenty election sort of falls into that kind of category.
00:07:41
Speaker 2: I want to stuff from the premise that I suspect we both share that Russia is actually weaker than it looks, but the West keeps rescuing it from the consequences of its own weakness. Why do American administrations, in this case, it's Republican and democratic, keep reaching for the reset button when Moscow would never do the same for US.
00:07:59
Speaker 4: No, that's a great question. I completely subscribe to the thesis that Russia right now is a lot weaker than a lot of people realize, militarily, economically, socially, across all dimensions. But you're right, there's this fear in the American foreign policy establishment of Russian collapse, the sort of the fear of catastrophic success if you like, that if the leadership in the Kremlin falls, then the country is going to disintegrate, or a new leadership will come in and it might be worse. There might be I don't know, nuclear materials that somehow fall out of the hands of the central government and then get married up with terrorist groups. There's all sorts of different ways that you can spin this out, but fundamentally, it's just this sort of somewhat irrational fear that if the regime changes in Moscow, that we're going to be worse off. And you're right. From their perspective, they are pushing regime change every which way they can, into every goddamn nook and granny they can find, right, so they're not scared of this. But we are on our end, and it makes us so self censor and not do certain types of activities visa of either Russians that we would do with regards to other countries or regimes, and that certainly other countries and regimes would do to each other and to us.
00:09:23
Speaker 3: And this is all based on another big lie that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine, right, that Russia is not the aggressor that Ukraine has it coming. So you know, one country attacks another country tries to take it over. It is blatant aggression. And yet within the West people are bending over backwards to try to accommodate conspiracies as to why you know, biolabs per Tulsa Gabbert or it's the color revolutions, that this was a CIA plot. The fact that Ukraine exists at all as a separate entity.
00:09:59
Speaker 4: It just it drives me fucking nuts. A number of times I have heard the war described as a defensive war from Russia's perspective, and I'm thinking myself to and how they invaded their neighbor with zero pretexts, just like that from one day to the next, and have been torturing its population and bombing its cities and dispensing with the Geneva Conventions all their forms of international law. I don't I honestly, I don't get it. There is described as the Putin first ayer phenomenon, trying to get inside the minds of the Kremlin, trying to see things from their perspective. You know, NATO encirclement, all this nonsense. NATO's a defensive alliance. I think most Russian leaders actually recognize that NATO would never invade Russia unless it was attacked. I don't get it, but there is this desire to sort of always pin the blame on us, that we were the ones who we didn't have enough dialogue with the Russians prior to the war, and that's why when I was ambassadort the OSSE I had to concoct all these crazy Kokamamy schemes to engage the Russians in dialogue because I knew that our West European friends were later going to accuse us, oh, you didn't take the olive branch of diplomacy when you could, so we wanted to prove damn it. We were going to try everything, you know, turn over every rock to try and get the Russians to agree to a diplomatic solution. Of course they didn't, but it goes to this mindset of trying to placate this mindset.
00:11:22
Speaker 3: Yeah. The other great lie, of course, is that there's no Ukrainian identity, that there is no Ukraine. There are just Russians who speak funny.
00:11:29
Speaker 2: Well, identity longer than a Russian identity, Yeah, exactly.
00:11:33
Speaker 4: But that's a peculiar Russian perversion that they I think a lot of Russians actually truly believe that the Ukrainian identity is I don't know, Texas identity in the United States, that it's a variant of the larger great Russian chauvinistic identity. And why wouldn't they want to be Russians were such a great power, were so awesome, right, like, and they just don't get it. And you know, now, one point four million casualties later, I think a lot of them still don't get it, but some are waking up to the fact that Ukraine is an independentation and that they don't want the Russians.
00:12:09
Speaker 2: There's a line I use a lot like that Russia's borders and when someone punches them in the face, and like, is the central lesson of the last thirty years, that Moscow just expands more than thirty years, That Moscow expands until it meets hard resistance while the West keeps mistaking hope and half measures for a strategy like we back down out of fear of escalation like you mentioned, or and then allowing Russia to pocket concessions and treating each new demand as a fresh crisis rather than part of the same pattern. Is the problem Russian strength is at our own self sabotage.
00:12:41
Speaker 4: It's a bit of both. But I'll tell you from the Russian perspective, they've been spectacularly successful at colonizing other nation states, if you will, or other ethnic groups, and then assimilating them into the Russian nations. So even totally different, religiously different, ethnically different populations like in the North Caucauses, they have incorporated in the Russian Empire. Ermolo of the famous nineteenth century general sort of conquered these territories and just through root force, sort of assimilated them into the Russian Empire. And look at what they did to the Finns up the Karelians up in the north. It was just an absolutely brutal campaign to torture them into submission, if you like. And they thought they could get away with the same thing with Ukraine. And if your perspective is two hundred years of history, okay, there's a slightly logical character to that assumption. But obviously they ran into the Ukrainians punching them in the face, like you said, and that is where the Russian Empire stops today. And maybe this overreach in Ukraine, this is prognosticating into the future. I'm not entirely sure that this is correct, but this could be the gradual unwinding of the multi ethnic Russian Empire in the future, depending of course, on how this war turns out.
00:13:56
Speaker 3: There's a tendency not just amongst Russians, but people in general and inability to say I was wrong. And I did know one experienced Russian diplomat I was dealing with, and when I first met him, there was a seemingly hell the Soviet Union right in the late eighties, and he would taught me about capitalists and they are there for humanity, Communism is the way of the future. And then Russia collapsed. This was in Germany, and by the time we parted ways, he was a committed Russian nationalist, completely hit changed. And what I was most surprised about was he started out with the solidarity of mankind in the beginning, and three years later he was talking about the Jews, and that he was talking about the Blacks, but that he met the Tartars and the Chechens and the Kalmark. And yet he never despite all these mental gymnastics, he never said, oh, maybe we got it wrong, or this is what I really feel. And I wondered, was he lying to himself or it is a communal thing, or just lying to me because I'm a foreigner.
00:15:01
Speaker 4: My sense is a great Russian chauvinism was a part of the Soviet elite's mentality for decades and decades prior to the fall Unions. So this was always just right below the surface, and sometimes even above the surface. But they got so proficient at just mouthing the official party line, the propaganda talking points, that they could easily pivot in the course of, you know, a single conversation with the same person, in fact, from talking about Marxist ideals to fuck it, We're the greatest nation on earth and we're going to subdue all these other people that frankly deserve our civilizing influence. So that doesn't surprise me at all. They've been this nationalism has been there for a long time.
00:15:56
Speaker 2: So Putin, I think he came up through the KGB and you talked about this cognitive warfare, political warfare, use of the security services and It seems to me that Putin uses the caarative corruption with the stick of compromot to try to born his interlocutors. And we can talk about that how it works with negotiations, but in terms of actually compromising Western political figures, how compromised do you think some of these people are.
00:16:19
Speaker 4: The Russians are really exceptionally good at this. They played a long game, so they try to cultivate people for decades and decades. It starts with offering them whatever it may be, some small prize, a ticket to some the Valdai conference in Russia, and then typically it's these relationships have been lubricated oil and gas industries, so people are hired on as consultants, they're given special perks, and over time they've used this exceptionally well to influence very senior people in Western societies. You look at Gerhart Schroeder, right, a guy was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Like, why on God's green Earth would someone like that need to avail themselves of Russian benefits. It doesn't make any sense. So he could be on the he could be on the board of fifteen major German corporations and do quite well for himself.
00:17:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, the talking points, and then I'm going to US politics in conservative circles in the beginning support Ukraine, Russia, the excess of evil, and now US talking points in negotiations between Russian and Ukraine. We seem to have changed sides, and a lot of US senators have changed sides without ever admitting to it. So a lot of ways, we're no different than that Soviet I was talking about that Soviet Russians.
00:17:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, well for Ukraine, and we take a little bit of issue with what you just said, Jerry, because I think I'll be I agree with what you're saying about face on a lot of this. But I think a lot of members of Congress, you know, they recognize Putin's a bad guy, but they're going to pull every They're not going to you know, they won't. They just simply won't talk about it right now because they don't want to. Cassette, I agree that Steve Whitkoff beautiful peace process that we have before us, But I think they're dissembling essentially. So I think deep down they think Russia is a great power adversary. They'd like to see Russia defeated, but they're not going to say that because that's not politically expedient right now. But I find it just astonishing that such a large percentage of the MAGA base right now would have a different view of Russia from maybe where they were ten years ago. That to me is frightening that attitudes can change so quickly on a dime, based on whatever the great leader is saying at one particular moment in time.
00:18:48
Speaker 2: You mentioned Witkoffs. Let's talk a little bit about these negotiations supposed, you know, with Ukraine and Russia. They're obviously focused on Iran right now, but I think the Russians see negotiation as part of conflict, right They use negotiations to benefit themselves, and I worry that this administration is you uniquely situated to fall for this and be manipulated by Moscow.
00:19:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you're right. The Russians are extremely good negotiators, and they see it as a way to legitimize their position, because if they're in talks with the Americans, you know, the other great power on the planet, then maybe that means that the Europeans should back off. Right. They use it to their advantage, and certainly in the global South you know, we're talking to the Americans, so don't you poke your head into these affairs. It's being handled at a much higher level. They sort of use that sort of language to get themselves a position that is favorable for them. But I don't know actually what the thinking inside the White House is these days. It seems like they're realizing that there isn't a set of overlapping interests that would lead to an agreement, which anyone could have told you on January twentieth of twenty twenty five. But it's okay, eighteen months later. I think that realization is dawning on some people. Now, what I will say is I think that the suites that have been dangled by Kirol Dimitriev and other Russian negotiators are that they're so they look so wonderful to certain people's eyes. They've been promised riches in the Arctic North, oil and gas concessions, all these sorts of things, critical minerals in Siberia that people, I guess some of them just salivate thinking about Cowma can earn.
00:20:29
Speaker 3: So arguably one of the other great lives inside of the United States is since nineteen forty five, one of the geniuses of American diplomacy has been our system of alliances right in Asia and in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Strong genuine alliances and like anry family, there's going to be squabbles, right, but we had it was based on values, it was based on economic interests and make America great again America first. We're pulling away from our alliances. And the story is the I think the conspiracy theory is we don't need alliances. And Russia and China, authoritarian countries have never really had alliances. They have proxies who they control to authoritarian James. But Russia has no real friends, right, unlike we used to have Germany, France, England, the US, Australia and so forth. So are we losing our alliance? Is is this gone for good? Or people's acceptance of the fact that we're going to go this alone. You know, we can attack our allies in Denmark to take Greenland. So what is your what's your feeling on that?
00:21:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think we're at a critical inflection point where we the alliances are obviously fraid far worse than they have been in a generation, both in East Asia and in Europe and what's interesting is this Bridge Colby has this Twitter thread just a couple of days ago where he talks about we're going to shift our alliances from being values based to being interests based. So he's basically saying we're going to move towards the sort of allies that Russia and China have, which is purely transactional, purely interest based, transient, not founded in liberal democracy or shared values surrounding human rights or any of that. No, it's going to be purely interest based. I don't know, you even know if he really believes this, but if we did move in that direction, be a catastrophe for the US because interests change, and you know, we squabble, like you said, on trade issues and this and that. It's the values. It's the fact that we believe in democracy and we want other countries to be with us in this liberal democratic camp to fight the authoritarians. That's what cements these alliances for generations. You undo that and you're gone. And that's why, to my mind, the Greenland crisis of January this year was so devastating because Greenland Denmark or Democratic States or Denmark is a democratic state. Greenland is autonomous region. Within it, and we're threatening them with military invasions. That is crazy for it surreal for many of our European allies, and that is how you kill an alliance.
00:22:59
Speaker 2: We were just talking about Whitcoff leading these negotiations in Iran and Israel and Russia and Ukraine. Now it's how bizarre is this that he's not a government worker, he's not a diplomat. He's a real estate guy with his own business interests. But you know, you did a career in the Foreign service, in the State Department. How is this affecting the State parment? What's happening at the State Department? What's your sense on not just morale, but you know, the state of our diplomatic service.
00:23:27
Speaker 4: Obviously, the career diplomats have all been sidelined in favor of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, people who have close proximity the president, who are precisely capable of doing these kind of transactional deals that we were just talking about, where they also enriched themselves or their business benefits from whatever deal that it is that they're cooking up. And so that obviously has a very poor effect on morale. And you've had masses of people leave the State Department in the last year, senior people, many career people, junior people who decided that this is not the career that they wanted. They've been completely sidelined. And they'll tell you themselves if you ask them over a cup of coffee what's the policy on X, Y or Z, They're like, I don't know better than me. We're going to read the paper tomorrow morning and find out what.
00:24:15
Speaker 3: Do are Ukrainian friends think of all this. They're fighting for their lives, they're fighting for their democracy, for their identity, and three years ago Biden provided lukewarm, mediocre support, right, not just enough to lose, And now we're openly siding with the Russians in the UN. We're not providing any assistance to them.
00:24:36
Speaker 4: They're now understanding what the Trump administration is all about when it comes to their country. Like you said, they you know, we had a sort of an interesting complex relationship with the Ukrainian leadership in the Biden administration and did provide them with seventy billion dollars of military assistance, which they appreciated. But as you said, we were also very slow at certain key junctures to give them the advance capabilities that would have not even equalized the Russians on the battlefield, because the Russians always had an advantage, but just marginally got them closer, whether it's fifth generation aircraft or whatever. You know, we were so slow with the attack of missile, for example, but so many other capabilities as well. We were always a little bit slow, and we argued with ourselves that this wouldn't really make that much of a difference, and blah blah blah. So the Ukrainians were frustrated with US. At the end, many of them welcomed a change of administration. They looked forward to the Trump administration because they thought this is a blank slaight, Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Now they understand, they understand truly what this is about. You know, my former colleagues and at the OSCEE, you know, when the United States voted against a Ukrainian resolution that was sponsored by the EU and sided with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and Sudan like okay, like the lights went off. Okay, yeah, we switched sites. And so now that the Ukrainians understand, they still rely on our intelligence, which is very important. They no longer rely on our military equipment. Increasingly they're much less reliant on and so they're not going to consult with us, and they're just going to chart their own way forward and they're just going to set us off to the side. And I think the US is losing more and more influence with each passing week as Ukraine becomes self sufficient.
00:26:23
Speaker 2: And we're losing influence, but we're also losing some experience because warfare is becoming more and more drone warfare, and they're getting to be the best in the world at it, and we're not really there to take advantage. But yeah, you were talking about during the Biden administration some frustrations. Yeah, I think this is a bipartisan thing here. I can remember during the Biden administration it was leaked that there was this view from intelligence. I don't know what that means, oh, that the Russians there was a fifty percent chance they were going to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. And I thought it was nonsense at the time. But I think Putin seemed if he's good at something, it's bullying and blustering and threatening because he knows it works on us, and we keep backing down. Is the West's fear of escalation actually creating escalation by teaching Moscow that these threats work. Like, I don't think it makes any sense for them to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and even if they did, the Ukrainians wouldn't give up.
00:27:13
Speaker 4: So the conventional escalation fear, to this day, I just it is so unfathomable that we would have boxed ourselves in and that we would have not given, say, Ukraine, a missile with a three hundred kilometer range, because that was somehow going to be escalatory for the Russian side. When the Russians were launching cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea with a range of two thousand kilometers. The fear of conventional escalation was frankly, just to my mind bullshit, But it was prominent among senior people in the last administration. Now that I think is distinct from the fear of nuclear escalation, and the Russians were very savvy nuclear's saber rattling in order to try to preclude us from doing things that we would have otherwise been more enthusiastic about doing. You know, there's that famous moment in the fall of twenty twenty two, you know, the publicly available account, which is in Bob Woodward's book, is that you know, the IC concluded that had the Ukraine's broken through Russian lines and been on the verge of taking Crimea. I don't think they got that specific, but something along those lines, then there was a fifty to fifty coin toss chance of deploying a non strategic of clear weapon. Yeah. First of all, I think that's made up, Like, I don't know where the IC got that figure, but it was also predicated on this notion that, yeah, that the Ukraine has had completely broken through they pushed the Russians back hundreds of kilometers and they were taking over Crimea. We were light years, light years in the fall twenty twenty two from that scenario. So it's all abstract, right, like we weren't even remotely close to that, and yet that kind of deterred us from doing things that we should have done at the time. And yeah, the Russian sense weakness and then they move forward. So in a sense, it's more escalatory to be deterred in this way than it is not to be.
00:29:06
Speaker 3: So we had take Iran and they closed the four moves, Like who would have thunk that everybody would have thunk that right, So you know, you know, I wasn't a Middle East expert in the agency, but even I knew that I was wondering, so, what's the plan? And the plans seemed to be out of Washington. It was they pushed aside all the experts like yourself and John and the others, and they came forward with basically their own sort of myth that they could deal with a deal with the RINOs from strength, that they could a bully them and be that there were Iranian moderates, that they could kill their way into that to that group and deal with them. And this is something that's gone back to the Reagan administration. This I wouldn't call it a conspiracy theory, but this self perpetuating myth that they are like us that in negotiating, and the myth is that we can just make this happen without negotiations, without experts, without planning, just by gut feel.
00:30:03
Speaker 4: I think it's very much a factor of the lack of expertise, the complete misunderstanding of the historical military context in which this war was being fought. The US history is littered with examples of regime wars, where we tried to change the pieces on the geopolitical chess board and we failed spectacularly, whether it be through the use of military force, as is the case in Iran, or sometimes through political warfare methods like ba pigs. It's always tempting to think, well, you know, Iran is historically weak, so we have an opportunity. And obviously our Israeli friends were making this case to the president and people on the inside were probably making this case to him as well, that this was once in a lifetime opportunity, and not knowing the context and not having people in the inner circle who were willing to truly push back and say, hey, look, this is likely to go wrong. They're likely to blockade the straight of horror moves, this is going to cause tremendous damage to the global economy. Without those voices warning him that this was a very likely probability, you know, he went for and obviously he was kind of riding high. I think off the seizure of Maduro in Venezuela, totally different contexts, totally different circumstances, but thought, wow, you know, our military forces are amazing, and they are, and what they did in Caracus was just tactically brilliant. But that couldn't be replicated in Iran, despite the fact that they killed the Supreme Leader, which if he had maybe stopped at that, he would have gotten around of applause from many politicians around the US. But you know, kept going with this idea that regime change could happen. They right now, we've heard fifteen different rationales for this war, but I truly believe that the key one was a desire for regime change and it has to happen despite the killing of so many people. It's become, if anything, more heartline than it was before.
00:32:05
Speaker 2: I've always said it. Dictators sometimes fear peace almost as much as pressure or war, because peace exposes their failure. So is the day after the war in Ukraine ends potentially the most dangerous day for Putin? How does he sell this at home? Is it almost better for him just to keep this going because he has at least he knows his status.
00:32:25
Speaker 4: Now, Yeah, that's a great question, and I think there is a lot of danger for Putin. The day after obviously depends on what that looks like. But in the most likely scenario of a sort of an armistice without any formal ceasefire agreement. I think there's a lot of pressure that begins to mount on Putin. You just look at the economy, and civilian economy has been completely cannibalized in order to goose the military industrial complex, and once the war ends, it's not gonna And there's this huge labor shortage now that's been thrown into the war effort, with all these people being this meat grinder tactic on the front lines, just bringing bodies in and throwing them at the problem. Once the war ends, all those people are going to come back into Russian society. All these psychopaths with their PTSD that have been torturing Ukrainians in the occupied territories, they're going to be coming back into Russian society. That's going to be a ticking time bomb sociologically, and they're going to be radicalized in hardcore nationalists. And then the economy, as I said, which the civilian economy has just been going through a period of unprecedented retrenchment, and the Russian statistics lie by the way, so they claim they're doing much better than they are. So all this is going to come home to roost. And yeah, Putent's going to face a lot of pressure. I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of people that are going to be questioning his leadership during the course of this war once the war's over, maybe even before the war's over.
00:33:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, Mike pulling your crystal ball out. Is there any reason for optimism that we could see in Russia? Maybe a smaller Russia that will take on some traits of Western democracy, or will be less less aggressive, less violent, less conspiratorial minded. Is there any reason to be optimistic at all? They have a highly educated population, at least in the cities.
00:34:12
Speaker 4: Look, I am very pessimistic when it comes to Russia, and I have really good friends like Vladimir Kara Mores, a Russian opposition politician, who truly believe in their souls that democracy is possible in Russia, in fact, that it's not that far away, it's maybe only a decade away. But I just don't see it that way. I look at the what the Russians call systema, just the system of forces and institutions that creates the conditions that we find in contemporary Russia, and it's just it's stacked towards businessmen who expropriate other businessmen through violence, political leaders who repress citizens, spy services that transgress the law in order to maintain their control over society. There are not the elements of a liberal, democratic, open society in Russia large. You know, maybe if we were just talking about a country that was confined to Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but given that Russia is much larger than that, I just don't see how a liberal democracy can flourish anytime soon. There's this pervasive culture of violence. I mean, you see some videos from like Russian schools of how teachers behave towards their students, and you see it in terms of how soldiers certainly treat more junior soldiers in the military. It's this pervasive sense that you need to physically control and subdue your opponents. That's the opposite of a civil society, which is where you settle your differences through institutions and dialogue. And so that has to change, and it's going to take a while.
00:35:53
Speaker 2: I mean, I lived in Russia in the nineteen nineties and there was this view in the West, Oh yeah, don the Solovietian fell They want to be Western, they want to come around. But there's one thing that has stayed consistent over decades, maybe even the centuries. Is this these brutal security service whose job is to keep the leadership in power at all costs. And that's one thing for my time in CIA that I saw handling Russian spies and defectors. There's one thing that's unusual about Russian sources and spies, unlike from other places, is almost to a person, they say the same thing when they come out is that the system is rotten and as long as the security services are there, Russia will never be a normal country. In other words, that security services. It's an intelligent state that security services run the state, and they did through the nineties, which is one reason why they didn't become more Western. Because the security services still had the Communist Party money. They stay stayed in power even when the rest of the society was falling apart. And as long as that's there, Russia is never really going to change. I think they've actually been probably strengthened because of this war, not weakened.
00:36:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's exactly right, John. I think that the fatal flaw in Russian democracy as it emerged from the Soviet Union was the fact that the state was captured by the security services. Every official had a minder, every institution had a minder or a curator, as is sometimes called in the Russian system. The institutions of the state just ever broke free of that overarching control from the KGB legacy agencies, and so that here we are with the KGB elite still ruling the country so many years later, and until that's broken apart, it's just likely to remain the same no matter who's in power in the Kremlin.
00:37:39
Speaker 3: And inevitably, whenever there is a popular democratic, populist uprising, the Maidan in Ukraine or in East Germany, some of the color revolutions in Georgia, they're inevitably seen or perceived in Russia as conspiracies. It's the CIA. It's famously Hillary Clinton was behind all this, right, Madelin Albright was behind this is almost that they're simply unable to conceive that a genuine popular uprising wanting better things in life and wanting democratic input is even possible without a conspiracy behind it.
00:38:17
Speaker 4: Tried and true method of security service control over the Russian population to blame their own sort of democratic instincts as being instigated by foreign or external powers, and so the moment that Putin feared the most in the fall and winter of twenty eleven to twenty twelve, when his grip on power was the weakest during his entire reign. He blamed it on Hillary Clinton precisely as you said, and on the United States. There were the protests then, where the bullet Naya protest was huge. I was actually in Moscow on that day. The security services had tried to prevent it from from being so widespread. They had locked down every little piece of public space. Gardens, lawns, sidewalks were barricaded, and yet the Russian people came out in this spot a uprising, and Putin basically decided, I think then and there never again, and he's been true to his word moving again.
00:39:17
Speaker 2: While moving forward, NATO Russia uses the NATO excuse. But my view of NATO, as you know, NATO threatens Russia like a gun threatens a thief. Where would we be today if Poland and the Baltic States were not in NATO? Doesn't the current war prove that NATO enlargement was not the problem, but maybe one of the few things we got right. And therefore, should we really start thinking about getting Ukraine into NATO is probably one of the best fighting forces in present day NATO, rather than you know, letting this drag on for a long time.
00:39:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, one hundred percent. And I had this conversation with President Biden when he was in office. One of the things that drew me to him initially when I first started working for him was that he was such a champion of NATO enlargement in the nineteen nineties and took on skeptical voices in his own party like Daniel Patrick Mornihan, you know, a great democratic leader, but who is very skeptical about NATO and LAS but precisely on the grounds that it might provoke Moscow. And Biden took him on in a Florida bate and said, no, this is the right thing to do for these tens of millions of East Europeans who were living under the Soviet yoke for so long. And he was absolutely right then, and that's still the right decision today, is to enlarge NATO, to create this space where people can live freely without fear of Russian domination, and as the Ukrainians currently fear, and as they're experiencing in the occupied territories in the South and East. NATO is a defensive alliance. It's never threatened Moscow. Some people will say they see it differently in Moscow. I don't care what they say. It's defensive alliance. It's never threatened Moscow. It never will. But it was the surest way to bring the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgary, all these other countries into this space where they could prosper and create liberal democracy. And it's actually retrospectively, it is crazy how successful these countries were in becoming democratic in such a short span of time. I know we sometimes criticized, like the current leader of Slovakia who's got some pro Russian instincts, or you know, in Bulgaria this or that, you know, corruption scandal, But by and large, these countries have been kind of dramatically changed for the better. And it's just truly astounding. And you go there today if you're a tourist, and you just see how freely people live and how much they've prospered under liberal democracy. It's amazing.
00:41:38
Speaker 3: And these countries came in voluntarily, they wanted to come in. It's not as though they were.
00:41:42
Speaker 4: Pressure them to come in. They weren't taking.
00:41:46
Speaker 3: I wonder if you've heard the Mandelin Albright plan that goes with the dollars plan. Putin has referred to it several times. But there was a guy in the Russian security services named Boris Rottnikov, great name, and Rottnikoff led a team of clear voyant sort of far seers, And you have to imagine this. They're sitting around a table looking at a photograph of mad and Albright, which allowed them to enter into her psyche and into her mind, and what they found was deep Russian hatred. And they actually got quotes from her mind that said that it was unfair for Russia to have so much natural so many natural resources, and so much wealth, and that Siberia should be shared with mankind, and that the conspiracy is that this continues today, that the US wants to take Russian wealth and Siberia away from them to share it out more equally.
00:42:46
Speaker 2: I think these might want that, but I've read about it.
00:42:51
Speaker 3: I'm like, no, even Putin is like commenting on these Mandlin all like quotes.
00:42:55
Speaker 4: I had not heard that one. I know they had put other words into Madeline Albright's mouth that were untrue, and claimed that she said certain things, including about NATO enlargement, that she never said. You know, that's the aim. It's to say at the West is bent on breaking Russia a part, and all of us are russophobes, you know, as my friend Karen Morzo, where I cited earlier, likes to say, you know, we're actually supporting Russian patriots because we want a better, democratic Russia. The only thing that we're phobic against is the autocratic nature of the regime there, which is autocratic and repressive at home, and it's imperialistic and aggressive abroad. And yeah, none of us like that, but that doesn't make us rusophobic in the sense, right, you know.
00:43:37
Speaker 3: And if your proof that we are is a bunch of clairvoyant staring at a photograph and getting into your mind, that's impressive.
00:43:43
Speaker 2: That's a crazy story. Sounds believable. Sure, Nicle, Thank you so much for your time. I would recommend our listeners to read your articles on Russia and on national security issues. Your foreign affairs piece I think was outstanding recently. Is there anything that we can that you're working on, or books or anything that we can tell people to look for.
00:44:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I'm working on a book. It won't come out for a while, but it's on regime wars, and I'm looking at the different tools from mill Tory force to political warfare and trying to compare how the balance is shifted, especially in the last couple decades where the sort of information technology has goosed the ability of great powers to use political warfare to regime change effect.
00:44:24
Speaker 2: Well, we will read it when it comes and maybe have you back on to talk about it.
00:44:31
Speaker 1: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
