00:00:04
Speaker 1: Welcome to Newsworld podcast on the Higheart podcast network. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held one of the most consequential confirmation hearings I've watched in years, and it didn't get nearly the attention it deserved outside Washington. Todd Blanche, nominated to be the permanent Attorney General after Pam Bondi's departure, sat for hours of questioning on Wednesday. Ranking Member Dirick Durbin pressed him hard on the Justice Department's handling of the Epstein files, on the administration's proposed one point eight billion dollar anti weaponization fund, and on the IRS settlement tied to leaked tax filings. The committee heard directly from Danny Benski, an Epstein's survivor, and from Elizabeth Oyer, the former DOJ partner attorney Blanche himself fired. Durbin demanded Blanche commit on the record to meeting with ten of Epstein's victims within thirty days. That's not a routine confirmation hearing. That's a Justice Department being asked in public to prove it still has credibility on one of the most sensitive files in the entire building. Here's the detail to stop me though, and it's one I can't get past. Because of Lindsey Graham's death, Judiciary Committee Republicans now have exactly one vote to lose in this nomination. One. A seat that in front of mine held for years, a seat that mattered enormously to how that committee has functioned for over a decade, is now an empty chair, changing the math on one of the most contested confirmations of the year. I said last week that losing Lindsay wasn't just personal, it was consequential, and here it is playing out in real time in a committee room on a rural call vote. On top of that, J Clayton's confirmation hearing for Director of National Intelligence, which happened under his own cloud, New Mexico's Attorney General publicly complaining the night before that the Southern District of New York still won't cooperate with his state's own Epstein related investigation, a probe he opened back in February. Whatever you think of that specific dispute, the pattern across both hearings this week is the same. Senators on both sides of the isle are no longer one to treat Epstein related transparency as a settled matter. That question is going to keep surfacing at every Department of Justice and Intelligence hearing until somebody actually answers it in full. My bottom line is this institutions are entrust by being boring and consistent, not by being defensive. A Justice Department that, once Todd Blanche confirmed with room despair, should wunt maximum transparency here, not less. Stonewalling and State Attorney General or dodging a direct question from Durbin doesn't protect the department. It just guarantees the question comes back louder next time. I've said this about every administration I've watched since Watergate. The cover up costs you more than the original problem ever does. That's what things stand. Heading into a Senate that's going to be even more closely divided on these committee votes than it was two weeks ago. Coming up, George bb, director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute and former director of the CIA's Russian Analysis, joins me to break down whether the Ukraine War really stands, how drones are reshaping the battlefield, what it would take to Ilvadimir Putin and the fighting, and how close this conflict has come to pulling NATO and the United States in directly. That's next. I am really pleased to welcome my guest, George Beebing. George is a director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Stakecraft. He spent more than two decades in government as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including as director of the CIA's Russia Analysis, director of the CIA's Open Source Center, and staff advisor on Russian matters to Vice President Cheney. He is the author of The Russia Trap, How our Shadow War with Russia could Spiral and a Nuclear Catastrophe, which warned how the US and Russia could stumble into a dangerous military confrontation. He's joining me to discuss three things. What Ukraine's drone campaign, including its deep strikes on Russian oil refineries, is actually doing to the battlefield picture, what in sentis of any might get Vladimir Putin to agree to end the war, And how real the danger is that this conflict escalates into a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO and the United States. George, welcome once again. Thank you for joining me again on this world.
00:05:15
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for having me on the.
00:05:17
Speaker 1: New York Times. Just got inside a secret Helsing drone factory in Germany. Germany's Europe's most valuable AI defense startup. They're mass producing loitering munition drones for as little as seventeen five hundred euro roughly a seventy percent mission success rate. In Ukraine, they keep functioning even when Russia and jamming knocks out their GPS and communications. Compare that to over one hundred million dollars for a single AP thirty five. From your standpoint, having studied all this, what is that kind of cost a symmetry? Actually, due to how this war and the next one gets fought.
00:05:59
Speaker 2: Well, there's no cue question that drones are the future. I think this war has not only demonstrated their utility on the battlefield, but it is revolutionized procurement. And that, ironically enough, is one of the controversies that just erupted in Ukraine over the past couple of days, with this dispute between the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Sirski and the now former Defense Minister Fyodorov. Fyodorf will saying, hey, look, drones are the way to go. Drones, AI high tech, that's how we're going to fight this war, and Sirski said, well, I sort of beg to differ that by itself won't do it. But this, I think is an issue that's going to have an enormous impact on how conflict is fought and how militaries prepare for conflict, and it's going to have an enormous impact on how we deter and that is something that we need to think very hard about because deterrence is the foundation of American national security. It's also the foundation of Russian national security and the advent of drugs beings. We can't do the terrence the way we used to, and this is a very very significant issue and one that we are going to have to devote a lot of attention to.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: You mentioned apparently vastly ahead of the US right now, but Ukraine actually runs whole battalions of ground robots. I mean, I've seen some of the video and I've seen, for example, a totally unmanned ambulance. It goes into the part of the battlefield to pick up a wounded person. They're not risking an ambulance driver to try to save somebody else. But you also mentioned a story that there was a village where apparently the robot itself held the village for about forty five days. Why have the Russians been able to countermatch that I.
00:08:02
Speaker 2: Would take issue with that. I think the Russians are countering this. The pattern in this war has been for one side to achieve a tactical breakthrough of one kind or another, often a technology breakthrough, and then the other side is set on its back foot for a while, but then it adjusts, it adjusts its tactics, it comes up with new technologies to counter the developments on the other side, and you see a back and forth pattern. And this has been going on since the very early days of this full scale Russian invasion, and I think we're in a phase over the past few months, since April, if you want to pick a starting time, where the Ukrainians have had a technological advantage through the use of these new drones with AI targeting capabilities that are not susceptible to the jamming and other counter drone approaches that the Russians have been employing, and the Russians have had to react to all this, but I think they're starting to do that, and so I don't think that what we've seen here is a situation where the Ukrainians have found an ace that will win this war for them. I think they have a tactical advantage that will have a shelf life that is not going to be measured in years. It's probably going to be measured in months. And then the Russians will have some advantages that the Ukrainians will react to those. So there's a back and forth dynamic here that is important to understand.
00:09:36
Speaker 1: The Ukrainian ability to do strategic targeting. It seems to me that per weapon fired, the damage they're doing, for example, to the Russian oil and gas infrastructure is extraordinary compared to the sort of blind volume that the Russians are throwing out Ukrainian cities. I mean, I'm missing something here.
00:09:59
Speaker 2: I would agree partially with that. Certainly, the Ukrainian attacks on the Russian oil refinery infrastructure have been impressive. They've increased in scale, for one thing, and that matters a lot, because if you don't do it as sufficient scale, all you're doing is creating an annoyance on the Russian side, but you're not really affecting their oil industry in a significant and lasting way. And that had been the pattern up to last year. The Ukrainians were attacking Russian energy infrastructure, they weren't doing so at a scale that was sufficient to cause serious disruptions, and the targets within these refineries were not so precise that they would knock these refineries out for more than a few weeks. The Russians could repair the damage that was being done. Now, in order to put really lasting damage on these refineries, you either have to have much bigger weapons payloads, or you're going to have to have a much more percent de svice target and to know exactly what parts of the refinery you have to hit that can't be repaired very quickly, and that's one of the things that the Ukraines have done. They're doing this in greater volumes, but they're also targeting parts of the refinery that the Russians can't fix very quickly, so they're putting these refineries out for a longer period of time and that is having an impact, no question about it. There are gas shortages in Russia, particularly in rural areas, and the Russians are having to make some hard choices about what to do with their oil resources. And they can certainly still export crude, which they're doing and they're doing it in greater numbers, and as the price of oil internationally goes up, which it is now starting to do with the renewal of fighting against Iran, they can still make money and fund this war effort. But they do have domestic shortages of primarily gasoline, things that are refined, and so they are having to make some hard choices about that, and consumers are being effected, There's no question about it. There's less gas, there's higher prices. People are unhappy about this. Now. What the Russians have done is they've made sure that the shortages are not in the major cities. They're not in Saint Petersburg, they're not in Moscow. The residents have enough gasoline and diesel that they can make sure there aren't shortages there. That matters a lot, because if there's really going to be political unrest in Russia, the major cities count for a whole lot more than the rural areas in Russia. So I think Putin has been very careful to make sure there's not problems in those critical cities, and so far they really haven't been.
00:12:45
Speaker 1: On the one hand, I find myself kind of drawn to the northeast from Kiev. I'm looking at Saint Petersburg and Moscow and the various oil infrastructure. But on the other hand, they've simultaneously launched an offensive in Crimea, which I gather is designed to potentially cut Crimea off logistically and make it impossible to sustain. I thought their ability to dominate the Black Sea using DRAMs was pretty remarkable, And if you've looked at the relative correlation of forces when the war began, you would never have thought that the Russian Black Sea fleet could be driven to the Sea of Azof what's your take on that whole campaign.
00:13:32
Speaker 2: Well, when you're talking about what we'll call these medium range strikes, not deep strikes into Russia, but attacks on Russia's logistical supply chain, the rear areas that support the people on the front lines, that support drone operations, that support infantry, that support supplies from Russia proper onto the Crimean Peninsula are having an effect, no question about it. I'm not sure that this is a war winning strategy. It's a tactical phase of the war that we went through once before. It recall a few years ago when we first provided the Ukrainians with the hi Mars system, what Ukrainians used that high Mars system to do was to take those weapons and target exactly these same rear logistical supply areas, and that forced the Russians to adjust. And what they did was they dispersed these chains, they moved them further back from the front lines so that they're out of range of these high Mars. So it had a temporary effect, but not anything that really changed the course of the war. The argument now is that, well, the range of these hornet drones, these AI program drones is much greater than that of the high mars, So simply moving back isn't going to help the Russians and there's nothing that they can really do to defend against them. So this is some sort of permanent advantage that will change the course of warfare. And I do think the Russians can't simply make a tactical military adjustment to handle this new threat. We're going to have to make a technological adjustment. And then the question is what does that look like. Can they interfere with the operations of this new generation of drones, And I think the jury is out on that. The pattern has been that Russia has found technological adjustments at every point in this war. I expect that they will here too, but so far we've only begun to see the Russians starting to make adjustments to this. The other question that I have about all of this, though, is how does this affect an end game strategy for Ukraine. If the Ukrainians think that these kinds of tactics will cause Putin to say, you know what, I can't win the war. This whole thing was a mistake. I'm simply going to sue for peace. I think they're wrong. I don't think that Putin is simply going to raise the white flag here. And the other problem is that drones can cause problems on the Russian side. Drones can't occupy and hold territory. When this gets back to an old debate within the US military or whether you can win wars through strategic air campaigns or not. And as I'm sure you know, there's been a raging debate in the United States over this issue for many, many decades, with you know, Air Force and other people arguing, yeah, you know, strategic air campaigns can win wars. You know, the ground pounders as they like to refer to themselves, saying yeah, no, you can do a lot, but there are a lot of things you can't do, and you do need ground forces. And I think I come down on the side at least in this war that you can cause problems for the Russians, but you can't take an occupy territory that the Russians now hold inside Ukraine unless you have an occupation force. And the problem the Ukrainians have is they don't have that. They don't have enough manpower to do that. So you can cause problems for the Russians in Crimea, Can you occupy Crimean govern it? No, not with drones and not with the size military that the Ukrainians have and the severe demographic strains that the Ukrainians are under right now. So they need something more than just taking the battle to Russia and causing Russian distress. They've got to couple that with something else in order to have a viable endgame approach to this.
00:17:49
Speaker 1: When we come back, we'll get into what it would actually take. Do you get Vladimir Putin to in this war? And why George says sanctions relief alone won't do it. I wonder sometimes since we now got in a longer war than the First World war is a point of exhaustion. The Ukrainians have no choice except to fight, because if they fail to fight, they'll disappear. The Russians don't seem to be interested in having a choice because it violates what Putin is trying to achieve. Do you see this potentially going on forever?
00:18:28
Speaker 2: Well, it's certainly one possibility. But I do think the Ukrainians have a choice. The Russians have put a choice on the table, and I think the Americans have as well, and that is to cut a deal that would leave Ukraine independent and politically and economically integrate the European Union, but not militarily aligned with NATO. The Russians have essentially said, that's the deal. We take the rest of the dun Boss, which Ukraine occupies about a little hundred twenty percent of, You abandon that, you acknowledge that this is Russian territory, and will then agree to settle the war, providing that there's no NATO forces on Ukrainian territory and Ukraine is not a part of the NATO alliance. The Russians can't take all of Ukraine, and they have not indicated that they want to take all of Ukraine, and it's beyond their capability. Speaking your occupation forces, they invaded Ukraine with less than two hundred thousand ground troops. Ukraine is the largest geographic country inside Europe. It's huge. If you can't occupy a country that large with two hundred thousand troops. If you're really going to erase Ukraine from the map and take it over and conquer it, you're going to need an invasion force of at least a million and a half people, and probably a lot more than that. It's not like Ukraine can't come out of this with a compromise deal that preserves its independence even if it loses some territory in the bargain. And I think that's the real question for Ukraine. Are they willing to settle for a compromise that preserves their independence, gives them a chance of being reconstructed economically, but loses some territory in the process, and affirms military neutrality. So far, I think the verict is out on that. My understanding of popular opinion in Ukraine is that more and more Ukrainians are saying, yeah, how we should do that, But Zelenski and company have not yet come to that point. The question is will then.
00:20:39
Speaker 1: I mean, there's also a concern that the Putin requirements would basically disarm Ukraine and make it set up five or ten or fifteen years from now for Russia to finish the job.
00:20:54
Speaker 2: I don't think so. That remains to be seen. But one of the things that jumped out to me from the Anchorage summit was Puttin agreed to a compromise where the Russians would stop fighting in two of the regions that they have annex but don't control. They would basically establish a ceasefire along that line of contact, which would mean they would give up the ambition to control all of those annexed territories in return for full pool of Lugans and Dannette's the don Bos region, so to speak. And at the press conference and acreage, Pruden explicitly said, we understand that Ukraine has to have a means of defending itself. They have security interests, they have to be respected. We get that. Now, does that by itself tell you that the Russians are willing to agree to a Ukrainian military that has some teeth to it or not? No, not by itself, But if you believe the press reports about provisions for the Ukrainian military that are out there that supposedly the Russians have not balked out. They're talking about a military with eight hundred thousand people as a cap on it. That's a pretty substantial military. It's not being disarmed, and I think the Russians have also indicated that they understand that Ukraine needs air defense capabilities. What they have objected to primarily are long range missile capabilities, things on Ukrainian territory that would pose strategic threats to Russian security. But that's a far cry from being disarmed. I think what Russians are zooming in on is are Ukraine that can defend itself but can't go on offense against Russian territory. I think that's unsurprising that that's where they would be on them.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: What about the concern that particularly some military people have that at some point you're going to see, either in the Baltic States or with Poland or somewhere an additional probe to expand the Russian influence beyond the current Ukrainian fight.
00:23:18
Speaker 2: I'm very skeptical that that's likely. I'm not skeptical that we could wind up in an escalatory spiral over Poland or the Baltic States that gets out of hand. But I'm skeptical that the Russians would mount an invasion of some kind or deliberately provoke one of these countries through a military action that might invoke Article five. On Native's part. Why number one, Ukraine is different than the Baltic States. Even throughout the Cold War, when the Russians had incorporated the Baltic States into the Soviet Union, the Russians never thought of the Baltic States as theirs as part of Russia. They were always considered foreign territory. So it's not as if they're deep cultural and historical and territorial claims on this area. From Russia's point of view, they really don't regard this as vital to Russia Number one. Number two. The alternative approach to this that people offer is, well, the Russians want to provoke a split in NATO. They want to do something that would be so divisive inside NATO it would tie the Alliance into knots and potentially expose the hollowness of American support for our allies, expose Article five is not being rock solid, and that in turn would have potentially a fatal effect on the alliance as a whole. That would be the argument. My reaction to that is, I can accept that the Russians don't like NATO and want to see it cohesiveness undermined. But the best way for them to do that, and by far the least risky way for them to do that, is to let the developments inside NATO take the course that they're on right now. The Russians don't have to do much to undermine the NATO Alliance. The NATO Alliance is doing a pretty good job of achieving that on its own right now. So I don't see the urgency on Russia's part to introduce elements of divisiveness into an alliance that is already in a situation where there's a lot of sources of internal conflict.
00:25:33
Speaker 1: Do you discount the European increase in spending and their sort of effort to rearm.
00:25:41
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't dismiss it at all. I think that's a very very significant thing. It's significant inside the alliance in terms of burden shifting, and it's something that has to happen. The old Cold War and post Cold War model of the United States essentially being the europe and security subcontractor and providing that umbrella for the Europeans is over. We can't afford to do it fiscally, and we can't afford to do it geopolitically. We have other much more urgent requirements in the world that demand our attention. The Europeans are going to have to stand on their own feet to a great degree on this, so that part of that's going to involve rearmament and building capabilities that they right now don't have. And also this is something that the Russians take very seriously, because not only are they seeing this rearmament, they're seeing it in Germany, and the Russians have great concerns about that for obvious reasons. Ironically enough, one of the arguments that we made with the Russians back at the close of the Cold War in the beginning of that post Cold War period was don't you want the United States to play the role of adult in Europe making sure that extreme nationalist tendencies don't get unleashed. That would pose real problems for you. So let's keep the United States in NATO and take these states inside NATO, where the United States can have a restraining effect on them, so you don't get German nationalism coupled with German rearm event. And the Russians accepted that argument to a great degree. They understood, you know, we want to keep the United States in in part to keep Germany down. But that process is now changing and the Russians have real concerns here. If this burden shifting results in both German rearm event and far less American ability to restrain and influence some of these states that are becoming quite virulently anti Russian, the Russians have themselves a heck of a problem to deal with, and part of it is their own making. Quite honestly, I think you know a lot of the reasons why Europe has turned so anti Russian as Russi his own behavior.
00:28:01
Speaker 1: The Russians have themselves to thank for put If you were advising Trump, what if anything, do you think can be done to get Putin to agree to sit down and discuss a serious piece plan with Ukraine.
00:28:18
Speaker 2: Well, I would say several things. Number One, this war is not just between Russian and Ukraine. Part of it is a biviral conflict over things like territory, over things like language, rights treatment of minorities inside Ukraine. But a good portion of this war is much bigger than that. It's between Russia and the West over what the foundations of European security are going to be and over Russia's role in European security. And you're not going to settle that question unless the United States is at the table. So we can't be just a mediator in this bilateral conflict between Russia and Ukraine. We are an interested directly involved in this bigger conflict between Russia and the West writ large over the foundations of European security. And if I were to make one recommendation to President Trump, it would be something that Dwight Eisenhower used to say. Eisenhower said, if you run into a problem that's not soluble, and large it and that is what the key to success is. Right now, we have focused very narrowly on this territorial impasse over who controls disputed parts of Donetsk, and that is a real issue. We have to find a real compromise there. But we've not focused the degree that we need to on this bigger question of the foundations of European security, and that is what the Russians really want to talk to us about because the way the European security landscape is shifting is profoundly threatening to Russia and they can't solve it by beating Ukraine on the battlefield. They need us in order to deal with that bigger problem. And you know it's funny because last week the Kremlin press spokesman gave an interview to a Swiss media organization and he said, quite explicitly, we're not going to find an end of the war in Ukraine unless we tackle the problem of European security ri at large. So the Russians are asking us to talk about this bigger issue, and I think getting into that saying to the Russians, we recognize this as an issue we have to talk about. We've got to find solutions to this bigger problem that could unlock I think more flexibility for Russia on these smaller issues like territory and other bilateral issues between Russia and Ukraine. Now, you're not going to solve that bigger issue in a few weeks or a few months of negotiations. That's going to be years of talks, but beginning them and showing the Russians that we recognize this is an issue we have to tackle and indicating to them that we want to address this, we want to find a solution that's acceptable to all parties here. I think that would go a long way in bringing the Russians around through a more flexible approach on some of the bilateral issues that they have With Ukraine.
00:31:37
Speaker 1: Coming up, we'll get into the scenario that keeps George up at night, how this work could pull NATO and the United States indirectly, and why he says we're closer to a nuclear threshold than most people realize. In your judgement, how much danger, if any, is there that we and the Russians could stumble into each other in a way which would lead to a really significant war.
00:32:12
Speaker 2: Well, I think the chances of that are uncomfortably high. Now. I wouldn't say they're greater than fifty percent to put an imprecise number on it, but they're significant enough given the dangers that that kind of escalation would entail, that we really need to be careful about how we handle this.
00:32:32
Speaker 1: Though.
00:32:32
Speaker 2: Right now, the approach that the West is taking, and particularly the approach that the Europeans are advocating, is you've got to squeeze the Russians as hard as possible economically, diplomatically, militarily, make this war so painful that Putin says, uncle and comes to you with a very generous offer for settling the war. Now, the problem with that approach is that's what we began this war doing. That's the Biden approach, and we're going to turn the ruble into rubble. We're going to turn Russian diplomats and so called oligarchs into international pariahs. We're going to send a lot of Russians home in body bags. And then Putin will say, you know what, this just isn't worth it. The benefits of this war are far outweighed by the costs. So tell me what I need to do to end the war. I'll do it. And it hasn't worked. In fact, what this has done is we've been in an escalatory spiral that is slowly unfolding, but we have pushed further and further in stepping up the battlefield pressure on Russia to the point where Russia's strategic nuclear triad was actually attacked, you know, in the last year of Biden's presidency, and the Russians that actually violated their declaratory policy when they would use nuclear weapons. So we have pushed pretty far beyond Russia's redlines. The reaction in the West has been, well, you know, Russians are a paper tiger. These red lines don't really exist. They are not actually willing to retaliate directly against NATO because that would simply be too threatening for Russia to tolerate. So we can push pudin almost to the very max and not have to fear retaliation against the NATO state. Where we are right now though in Russia, is that the Russians have certainly noticed this, and they're making the argument. These are a lot of advisors, not just hardliners, who are saying to putin Hey, look, if we're in a situation where the West thinks that there are no limits to what it can do in inflicting damage inside Russia on us, then the foundation of Russia's deterrence strategy is undermined. Our national security depends on creating the impression in the West store any other enemies that if they attack inside Russia, we will retaliate against them. And we've lost that to terrence. We have to restore it, and they're arguing that restoring it has to involve direct attacks on NATO, which is building these drones. As you pointed out earlier, inside Germany, these drones are being targeted with the help of American targeting, information, intelligence, and programming. Russians know all this very well, and yet they're not at this point willing to retaliate directly against the West.
00:35:35
Speaker 1: It strikes me that the Russians are engaged in a coalition war. There are all sorts of ways in which this Western coalition has rallied around Ukraine, leaving Russia faced with multiple opponents, not just Ukraine.
00:35:52
Speaker 2: That's right, it doesn't have many allies at its side. It's gotten some help from North Korea, has gotten some help from Iran, It's gotten some sort of lukewarm help from the Chinese. But the Chinese are actually aiding the Ukrainians too. It's ironic some of the dollars that are being sent from the West to Ukraine end up in Chinese pockets as parts that go into these drones, and the Russians know that too. They're happy about it. And this gets back to this question of what incentives does Prutin have to come to the battlefield. Not only does he have a security threat, in Europe that he can't address just by winning the war in Ukraine. But he's geopolitically isolated. He's increased Russia's dependence on China. China has disappointed Russia. It has not provided the kind of support either directly for this war or through investments in the Russian economy, through helping Russia be competitive in high technology, which is really the name of the game of twenty first century geopolitics. And Russia is being left further and further behind in this high technology race for influence in the twenty first century. And so he's got a big geopolitical incentive to open a relationship with the West that gives him room for maneuver with the Chinese. You know, the Chinese are exploiting Russia's dependence on them right now. The Russians don't like this. So at any rate, I think we're in a situation right now where Russia's got a lot of incentives to compromise. If the United States plays its cards right on all of this, there is a path forward. But again, I don't think this path is going to be there forever. You know, we probably have through the midterms, and if the Republicans do poorly. Then I think we're in a situation where Trump will simply lack the political cloud that he will need to push a compromise through the opposition to it that exists here in Washington, but also in Europe. And then we're into that long term conflict that you alluded to earlier, and that's a long term conflict that will go poorly for Ukraine. It will get worn down over time, doesn't have the manpower the air defense to sustain itself for years and years, and it will be a conflict that will be prone to escalatory spirals that could get quite dangerous. On all of this to me, when I look at these options, by far, the best one is let's push through a compromise, and let's do it quickly before the window of opportunity closes.
00:38:33
Speaker 1: I've always wondered if we had genuinely brought them in and said, all this alliance structure was built at a different time for a different purpose, and it's our goal to have you inside, not have you as an adversary. What the world might have looked like, or whether the remnists of a KGB organized crime and Yelton's propensity to stay drunk made it impossible to find a path to a very substantially different period.
00:39:14
Speaker 2: Well, it's an excellent question. I've thought about that a lot myself, and as always with these alternative histories, there's a great deal of speculation and there was a lot of complexity to it, so it's very hard to forecast exactly what would have happened. But you might recall back in the early to mid nineties there was a debate in Washington over NATO enlargement, and there were those that said, you know, NATO needs to be the foundation for European security, and we need to enlarge it in the Russians and have a relationship with NATO, but they can't be on the inside. They can affect native decisions. They are going to be on the other side of that NATO enlargement line. The other alternative was coming out of the Pentagon under then Secretary of Defense Bill Perry Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison, the Harvard historian, who were arguing for a program called Partnership for Peace, which was designed to help the in between states, the former Warsaw Pact states that were now no longer under Moscow's thumb and had to reform their defense sectors and put the civilians in control of the military. It would help them do all that, but it would not extend an Article five defense commitment to them, and partnership for peace would have been open to the Russians too. Now, what would have happened if we had gone down that path? I am inclined to think that we would have a much healthier relationship with everybody involved had we done that. Lots of ways this could have gone wrong too. It's certainly not a foregone conclusion that that would have worked. I think it's a topic that we should be thinking hard about as really the path we went down as it worked out very well, and a lot of tools that we expected did not come to fruition.
00:41:07
Speaker 1: You've been very tenous with your time. Thank you for joining me. I think people are a great deal by listening to you on this, and they can follow your work by looking at the Quincy Institute for Responsible state Craft at quincyionst dot org. And I want to thank you again for being really engaging and helpful.
00:41:30
Speaker 2: My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you to my.
00:41:34
Speaker 1: Guest, George bb. New to World is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers Guarncie Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Special thanks to the team at Ginglishree sixty. If you've been enjoying New World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on substat at Gingers Street sixty. Dought nat, I'm new languish. This is newt World
00:42:10
Speaker 2: MHM.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Newsworld podcast on the Higheart podcast network. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held one of the most consequential confirmation hearings I've watched in years, and it didn't get nearly the attention it deserved outside Washington. Todd Blanche, nominated to be the permanent Attorney General after Pam Bondi's departure, sat for hours of questioning on Wednesday. Ranking Member Dirick Durbin pressed him hard on the Justice Department's handling of the Epstein files, on the administration's proposed one point eight billion dollar anti weaponization fund, and on the IRS settlement tied to leaked tax filings. The committee heard directly from Danny Benski, an Epstein's survivor, and from Elizabeth Oyer, the former DOJ partner attorney Blanche himself fired. Durbin demanded Blanche commit on the record to meeting with ten of Epstein's victims within thirty days. That's not a routine confirmation hearing. That's a Justice Department being asked in public to prove it still has credibility on one of the most sensitive files in the entire building. Here's the detail to stop me though, and it's one I can't get past. Because of Lindsey Graham's death, Judiciary Committee Republicans now have exactly one vote to lose in this nomination. One. A seat that in front of mine held for years, a seat that mattered enormously to how that committee has functioned for over a decade, is now an empty chair, changing the math on one of the most contested confirmations of the year. I said last week that losing Lindsay wasn't just personal, it was consequential, and here it is playing out in real time in a committee room on a rural call vote. On top of that, J Clayton's confirmation hearing for Director of National Intelligence, which happened under his own cloud, New Mexico's Attorney General publicly complaining the night before that the Southern District of New York still won't cooperate with his state's own Epstein related investigation, a probe he opened back in February. Whatever you think of that specific dispute, the pattern across both hearings this week is the same. Senators on both sides of the isle are no longer one to treat Epstein related transparency as a settled matter. That question is going to keep surfacing at every Department of Justice and Intelligence hearing until somebody actually answers it in full. My bottom line is this institutions are entrust by being boring and consistent, not by being defensive. A Justice Department that, once Todd Blanche confirmed with room despair, should wunt maximum transparency here, not less. Stonewalling and State Attorney General or dodging a direct question from Durbin doesn't protect the department. It just guarantees the question comes back louder next time. I've said this about every administration I've watched since Watergate. The cover up costs you more than the original problem ever does. That's what things stand. Heading into a Senate that's going to be even more closely divided on these committee votes than it was two weeks ago. Coming up, George bb, director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute and former director of the CIA's Russian Analysis, joins me to break down whether the Ukraine War really stands, how drones are reshaping the battlefield, what it would take to Ilvadimir Putin and the fighting, and how close this conflict has come to pulling NATO and the United States in directly. That's next. I am really pleased to welcome my guest, George Beebing. George is a director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Stakecraft. He spent more than two decades in government as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including as director of the CIA's Russia Analysis, director of the CIA's Open Source Center, and staff advisor on Russian matters to Vice President Cheney. He is the author of The Russia Trap, How our Shadow War with Russia could Spiral and a Nuclear Catastrophe, which warned how the US and Russia could stumble into a dangerous military confrontation. He's joining me to discuss three things. What Ukraine's drone campaign, including its deep strikes on Russian oil refineries, is actually doing to the battlefield picture, what in sentis of any might get Vladimir Putin to agree to end the war, And how real the danger is that this conflict escalates into a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO and the United States. George, welcome once again. Thank you for joining me again on this world.
00:05:15
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for having me on the.
00:05:17
Speaker 1: New York Times. Just got inside a secret Helsing drone factory in Germany. Germany's Europe's most valuable AI defense startup. They're mass producing loitering munition drones for as little as seventeen five hundred euro roughly a seventy percent mission success rate. In Ukraine, they keep functioning even when Russia and jamming knocks out their GPS and communications. Compare that to over one hundred million dollars for a single AP thirty five. From your standpoint, having studied all this, what is that kind of cost a symmetry? Actually, due to how this war and the next one gets fought.
00:05:59
Speaker 2: Well, there's no cue question that drones are the future. I think this war has not only demonstrated their utility on the battlefield, but it is revolutionized procurement. And that, ironically enough, is one of the controversies that just erupted in Ukraine over the past couple of days, with this dispute between the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Sirski and the now former Defense Minister Fyodorov. Fyodorf will saying, hey, look, drones are the way to go. Drones, AI high tech, that's how we're going to fight this war, and Sirski said, well, I sort of beg to differ that by itself won't do it. But this, I think is an issue that's going to have an enormous impact on how conflict is fought and how militaries prepare for conflict, and it's going to have an enormous impact on how we deter and that is something that we need to think very hard about because deterrence is the foundation of American national security. It's also the foundation of Russian national security and the advent of drugs beings. We can't do the terrence the way we used to, and this is a very very significant issue and one that we are going to have to devote a lot of attention to.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: You mentioned apparently vastly ahead of the US right now, but Ukraine actually runs whole battalions of ground robots. I mean, I've seen some of the video and I've seen, for example, a totally unmanned ambulance. It goes into the part of the battlefield to pick up a wounded person. They're not risking an ambulance driver to try to save somebody else. But you also mentioned a story that there was a village where apparently the robot itself held the village for about forty five days. Why have the Russians been able to countermatch that I.
00:08:02
Speaker 2: Would take issue with that. I think the Russians are countering this. The pattern in this war has been for one side to achieve a tactical breakthrough of one kind or another, often a technology breakthrough, and then the other side is set on its back foot for a while, but then it adjusts, it adjusts its tactics, it comes up with new technologies to counter the developments on the other side, and you see a back and forth pattern. And this has been going on since the very early days of this full scale Russian invasion, and I think we're in a phase over the past few months, since April, if you want to pick a starting time, where the Ukrainians have had a technological advantage through the use of these new drones with AI targeting capabilities that are not susceptible to the jamming and other counter drone approaches that the Russians have been employing, and the Russians have had to react to all this, but I think they're starting to do that, and so I don't think that what we've seen here is a situation where the Ukrainians have found an ace that will win this war for them. I think they have a tactical advantage that will have a shelf life that is not going to be measured in years. It's probably going to be measured in months. And then the Russians will have some advantages that the Ukrainians will react to those. So there's a back and forth dynamic here that is important to understand.
00:09:36
Speaker 1: The Ukrainian ability to do strategic targeting. It seems to me that per weapon fired, the damage they're doing, for example, to the Russian oil and gas infrastructure is extraordinary compared to the sort of blind volume that the Russians are throwing out Ukrainian cities. I mean, I'm missing something here.
00:09:59
Speaker 2: I would agree partially with that. Certainly, the Ukrainian attacks on the Russian oil refinery infrastructure have been impressive. They've increased in scale, for one thing, and that matters a lot, because if you don't do it as sufficient scale, all you're doing is creating an annoyance on the Russian side, but you're not really affecting their oil industry in a significant and lasting way. And that had been the pattern up to last year. The Ukrainians were attacking Russian energy infrastructure, they weren't doing so at a scale that was sufficient to cause serious disruptions, and the targets within these refineries were not so precise that they would knock these refineries out for more than a few weeks. The Russians could repair the damage that was being done. Now, in order to put really lasting damage on these refineries, you either have to have much bigger weapons payloads, or you're going to have to have a much more percent de svice target and to know exactly what parts of the refinery you have to hit that can't be repaired very quickly, and that's one of the things that the Ukraines have done. They're doing this in greater volumes, but they're also targeting parts of the refinery that the Russians can't fix very quickly, so they're putting these refineries out for a longer period of time and that is having an impact, no question about it. There are gas shortages in Russia, particularly in rural areas, and the Russians are having to make some hard choices about what to do with their oil resources. And they can certainly still export crude, which they're doing and they're doing it in greater numbers, and as the price of oil internationally goes up, which it is now starting to do with the renewal of fighting against Iran, they can still make money and fund this war effort. But they do have domestic shortages of primarily gasoline, things that are refined, and so they are having to make some hard choices about that, and consumers are being effected, There's no question about it. There's less gas, there's higher prices. People are unhappy about this. Now. What the Russians have done is they've made sure that the shortages are not in the major cities. They're not in Saint Petersburg, they're not in Moscow. The residents have enough gasoline and diesel that they can make sure there aren't shortages there. That matters a lot, because if there's really going to be political unrest in Russia, the major cities count for a whole lot more than the rural areas in Russia. So I think Putin has been very careful to make sure there's not problems in those critical cities, and so far they really haven't been.
00:12:45
Speaker 1: On the one hand, I find myself kind of drawn to the northeast from Kiev. I'm looking at Saint Petersburg and Moscow and the various oil infrastructure. But on the other hand, they've simultaneously launched an offensive in Crimea, which I gather is designed to potentially cut Crimea off logistically and make it impossible to sustain. I thought their ability to dominate the Black Sea using DRAMs was pretty remarkable, And if you've looked at the relative correlation of forces when the war began, you would never have thought that the Russian Black Sea fleet could be driven to the Sea of Azof what's your take on that whole campaign.
00:13:32
Speaker 2: Well, when you're talking about what we'll call these medium range strikes, not deep strikes into Russia, but attacks on Russia's logistical supply chain, the rear areas that support the people on the front lines, that support drone operations, that support infantry, that support supplies from Russia proper onto the Crimean Peninsula are having an effect, no question about it. I'm not sure that this is a war winning strategy. It's a tactical phase of the war that we went through once before. It recall a few years ago when we first provided the Ukrainians with the hi Mars system, what Ukrainians used that high Mars system to do was to take those weapons and target exactly these same rear logistical supply areas, and that forced the Russians to adjust. And what they did was they dispersed these chains, they moved them further back from the front lines so that they're out of range of these high Mars. So it had a temporary effect, but not anything that really changed the course of the war. The argument now is that, well, the range of these hornet drones, these AI program drones is much greater than that of the high mars, So simply moving back isn't going to help the Russians and there's nothing that they can really do to defend against them. So this is some sort of permanent advantage that will change the course of warfare. And I do think the Russians can't simply make a tactical military adjustment to handle this new threat. We're going to have to make a technological adjustment. And then the question is what does that look like. Can they interfere with the operations of this new generation of drones, And I think the jury is out on that. The pattern has been that Russia has found technological adjustments at every point in this war. I expect that they will here too, but so far we've only begun to see the Russians starting to make adjustments to this. The other question that I have about all of this, though, is how does this affect an end game strategy for Ukraine. If the Ukrainians think that these kinds of tactics will cause Putin to say, you know what, I can't win the war. This whole thing was a mistake. I'm simply going to sue for peace. I think they're wrong. I don't think that Putin is simply going to raise the white flag here. And the other problem is that drones can cause problems on the Russian side. Drones can't occupy and hold territory. When this gets back to an old debate within the US military or whether you can win wars through strategic air campaigns or not. And as I'm sure you know, there's been a raging debate in the United States over this issue for many, many decades, with you know, Air Force and other people arguing, yeah, you know, strategic air campaigns can win wars. You know, the ground pounders as they like to refer to themselves, saying yeah, no, you can do a lot, but there are a lot of things you can't do, and you do need ground forces. And I think I come down on the side at least in this war that you can cause problems for the Russians, but you can't take an occupy territory that the Russians now hold inside Ukraine unless you have an occupation force. And the problem the Ukrainians have is they don't have that. They don't have enough manpower to do that. So you can cause problems for the Russians in Crimea, Can you occupy Crimean govern it? No, not with drones and not with the size military that the Ukrainians have and the severe demographic strains that the Ukrainians are under right now. So they need something more than just taking the battle to Russia and causing Russian distress. They've got to couple that with something else in order to have a viable endgame approach to this.
00:17:49
Speaker 1: When we come back, we'll get into what it would actually take. Do you get Vladimir Putin to in this war? And why George says sanctions relief alone won't do it. I wonder sometimes since we now got in a longer war than the First World war is a point of exhaustion. The Ukrainians have no choice except to fight, because if they fail to fight, they'll disappear. The Russians don't seem to be interested in having a choice because it violates what Putin is trying to achieve. Do you see this potentially going on forever?
00:18:28
Speaker 2: Well, it's certainly one possibility. But I do think the Ukrainians have a choice. The Russians have put a choice on the table, and I think the Americans have as well, and that is to cut a deal that would leave Ukraine independent and politically and economically integrate the European Union, but not militarily aligned with NATO. The Russians have essentially said, that's the deal. We take the rest of the dun Boss, which Ukraine occupies about a little hundred twenty percent of, You abandon that, you acknowledge that this is Russian territory, and will then agree to settle the war, providing that there's no NATO forces on Ukrainian territory and Ukraine is not a part of the NATO alliance. The Russians can't take all of Ukraine, and they have not indicated that they want to take all of Ukraine, and it's beyond their capability. Speaking your occupation forces, they invaded Ukraine with less than two hundred thousand ground troops. Ukraine is the largest geographic country inside Europe. It's huge. If you can't occupy a country that large with two hundred thousand troops. If you're really going to erase Ukraine from the map and take it over and conquer it, you're going to need an invasion force of at least a million and a half people, and probably a lot more than that. It's not like Ukraine can't come out of this with a compromise deal that preserves its independence even if it loses some territory in the bargain. And I think that's the real question for Ukraine. Are they willing to settle for a compromise that preserves their independence, gives them a chance of being reconstructed economically, but loses some territory in the process, and affirms military neutrality. So far, I think the verict is out on that. My understanding of popular opinion in Ukraine is that more and more Ukrainians are saying, yeah, how we should do that, But Zelenski and company have not yet come to that point. The question is will then.
00:20:39
Speaker 1: I mean, there's also a concern that the Putin requirements would basically disarm Ukraine and make it set up five or ten or fifteen years from now for Russia to finish the job.
00:20:54
Speaker 2: I don't think so. That remains to be seen. But one of the things that jumped out to me from the Anchorage summit was Puttin agreed to a compromise where the Russians would stop fighting in two of the regions that they have annex but don't control. They would basically establish a ceasefire along that line of contact, which would mean they would give up the ambition to control all of those annexed territories in return for full pool of Lugans and Dannette's the don Bos region, so to speak. And at the press conference and acreage, Pruden explicitly said, we understand that Ukraine has to have a means of defending itself. They have security interests, they have to be respected. We get that. Now, does that by itself tell you that the Russians are willing to agree to a Ukrainian military that has some teeth to it or not? No, not by itself, But if you believe the press reports about provisions for the Ukrainian military that are out there that supposedly the Russians have not balked out. They're talking about a military with eight hundred thousand people as a cap on it. That's a pretty substantial military. It's not being disarmed, and I think the Russians have also indicated that they understand that Ukraine needs air defense capabilities. What they have objected to primarily are long range missile capabilities, things on Ukrainian territory that would pose strategic threats to Russian security. But that's a far cry from being disarmed. I think what Russians are zooming in on is are Ukraine that can defend itself but can't go on offense against Russian territory. I think that's unsurprising that that's where they would be on them.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: What about the concern that particularly some military people have that at some point you're going to see, either in the Baltic States or with Poland or somewhere an additional probe to expand the Russian influence beyond the current Ukrainian fight.
00:23:18
Speaker 2: I'm very skeptical that that's likely. I'm not skeptical that we could wind up in an escalatory spiral over Poland or the Baltic States that gets out of hand. But I'm skeptical that the Russians would mount an invasion of some kind or deliberately provoke one of these countries through a military action that might invoke Article five. On Native's part. Why number one, Ukraine is different than the Baltic States. Even throughout the Cold War, when the Russians had incorporated the Baltic States into the Soviet Union, the Russians never thought of the Baltic States as theirs as part of Russia. They were always considered foreign territory. So it's not as if they're deep cultural and historical and territorial claims on this area. From Russia's point of view, they really don't regard this as vital to Russia Number one. Number two. The alternative approach to this that people offer is, well, the Russians want to provoke a split in NATO. They want to do something that would be so divisive inside NATO it would tie the Alliance into knots and potentially expose the hollowness of American support for our allies, expose Article five is not being rock solid, and that in turn would have potentially a fatal effect on the alliance as a whole. That would be the argument. My reaction to that is, I can accept that the Russians don't like NATO and want to see it cohesiveness undermined. But the best way for them to do that, and by far the least risky way for them to do that, is to let the developments inside NATO take the course that they're on right now. The Russians don't have to do much to undermine the NATO Alliance. The NATO Alliance is doing a pretty good job of achieving that on its own right now. So I don't see the urgency on Russia's part to introduce elements of divisiveness into an alliance that is already in a situation where there's a lot of sources of internal conflict.
00:25:33
Speaker 1: Do you discount the European increase in spending and their sort of effort to rearm.
00:25:41
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't dismiss it at all. I think that's a very very significant thing. It's significant inside the alliance in terms of burden shifting, and it's something that has to happen. The old Cold War and post Cold War model of the United States essentially being the europe and security subcontractor and providing that umbrella for the Europeans is over. We can't afford to do it fiscally, and we can't afford to do it geopolitically. We have other much more urgent requirements in the world that demand our attention. The Europeans are going to have to stand on their own feet to a great degree on this, so that part of that's going to involve rearmament and building capabilities that they right now don't have. And also this is something that the Russians take very seriously, because not only are they seeing this rearmament, they're seeing it in Germany, and the Russians have great concerns about that for obvious reasons. Ironically enough, one of the arguments that we made with the Russians back at the close of the Cold War in the beginning of that post Cold War period was don't you want the United States to play the role of adult in Europe making sure that extreme nationalist tendencies don't get unleashed. That would pose real problems for you. So let's keep the United States in NATO and take these states inside NATO, where the United States can have a restraining effect on them, so you don't get German nationalism coupled with German rearm event. And the Russians accepted that argument to a great degree. They understood, you know, we want to keep the United States in in part to keep Germany down. But that process is now changing and the Russians have real concerns here. If this burden shifting results in both German rearm event and far less American ability to restrain and influence some of these states that are becoming quite virulently anti Russian, the Russians have themselves a heck of a problem to deal with, and part of it is their own making. Quite honestly, I think you know a lot of the reasons why Europe has turned so anti Russian as Russi his own behavior.
00:28:01
Speaker 1: The Russians have themselves to thank for put If you were advising Trump, what if anything, do you think can be done to get Putin to agree to sit down and discuss a serious piece plan with Ukraine.
00:28:18
Speaker 2: Well, I would say several things. Number One, this war is not just between Russian and Ukraine. Part of it is a biviral conflict over things like territory, over things like language, rights treatment of minorities inside Ukraine. But a good portion of this war is much bigger than that. It's between Russia and the West over what the foundations of European security are going to be and over Russia's role in European security. And you're not going to settle that question unless the United States is at the table. So we can't be just a mediator in this bilateral conflict between Russia and Ukraine. We are an interested directly involved in this bigger conflict between Russia and the West writ large over the foundations of European security. And if I were to make one recommendation to President Trump, it would be something that Dwight Eisenhower used to say. Eisenhower said, if you run into a problem that's not soluble, and large it and that is what the key to success is. Right now, we have focused very narrowly on this territorial impasse over who controls disputed parts of Donetsk, and that is a real issue. We have to find a real compromise there. But we've not focused the degree that we need to on this bigger question of the foundations of European security, and that is what the Russians really want to talk to us about because the way the European security landscape is shifting is profoundly threatening to Russia and they can't solve it by beating Ukraine on the battlefield. They need us in order to deal with that bigger problem. And you know it's funny because last week the Kremlin press spokesman gave an interview to a Swiss media organization and he said, quite explicitly, we're not going to find an end of the war in Ukraine unless we tackle the problem of European security ri at large. So the Russians are asking us to talk about this bigger issue, and I think getting into that saying to the Russians, we recognize this as an issue we have to talk about. We've got to find solutions to this bigger problem that could unlock I think more flexibility for Russia on these smaller issues like territory and other bilateral issues between Russia and Ukraine. Now, you're not going to solve that bigger issue in a few weeks or a few months of negotiations. That's going to be years of talks, but beginning them and showing the Russians that we recognize this is an issue we have to tackle and indicating to them that we want to address this, we want to find a solution that's acceptable to all parties here. I think that would go a long way in bringing the Russians around through a more flexible approach on some of the bilateral issues that they have With Ukraine.
00:31:37
Speaker 1: Coming up, we'll get into the scenario that keeps George up at night, how this work could pull NATO and the United States indirectly, and why he says we're closer to a nuclear threshold than most people realize. In your judgement, how much danger, if any, is there that we and the Russians could stumble into each other in a way which would lead to a really significant war.
00:32:12
Speaker 2: Well, I think the chances of that are uncomfortably high. Now. I wouldn't say they're greater than fifty percent to put an imprecise number on it, but they're significant enough given the dangers that that kind of escalation would entail, that we really need to be careful about how we handle this.
00:32:32
Speaker 1: Though.
00:32:32
Speaker 2: Right now, the approach that the West is taking, and particularly the approach that the Europeans are advocating, is you've got to squeeze the Russians as hard as possible economically, diplomatically, militarily, make this war so painful that Putin says, uncle and comes to you with a very generous offer for settling the war. Now, the problem with that approach is that's what we began this war doing. That's the Biden approach, and we're going to turn the ruble into rubble. We're going to turn Russian diplomats and so called oligarchs into international pariahs. We're going to send a lot of Russians home in body bags. And then Putin will say, you know what, this just isn't worth it. The benefits of this war are far outweighed by the costs. So tell me what I need to do to end the war. I'll do it. And it hasn't worked. In fact, what this has done is we've been in an escalatory spiral that is slowly unfolding, but we have pushed further and further in stepping up the battlefield pressure on Russia to the point where Russia's strategic nuclear triad was actually attacked, you know, in the last year of Biden's presidency, and the Russians that actually violated their declaratory policy when they would use nuclear weapons. So we have pushed pretty far beyond Russia's redlines. The reaction in the West has been, well, you know, Russians are a paper tiger. These red lines don't really exist. They are not actually willing to retaliate directly against NATO because that would simply be too threatening for Russia to tolerate. So we can push pudin almost to the very max and not have to fear retaliation against the NATO state. Where we are right now though in Russia, is that the Russians have certainly noticed this, and they're making the argument. These are a lot of advisors, not just hardliners, who are saying to putin Hey, look, if we're in a situation where the West thinks that there are no limits to what it can do in inflicting damage inside Russia on us, then the foundation of Russia's deterrence strategy is undermined. Our national security depends on creating the impression in the West store any other enemies that if they attack inside Russia, we will retaliate against them. And we've lost that to terrence. We have to restore it, and they're arguing that restoring it has to involve direct attacks on NATO, which is building these drones. As you pointed out earlier, inside Germany, these drones are being targeted with the help of American targeting, information, intelligence, and programming. Russians know all this very well, and yet they're not at this point willing to retaliate directly against the West.
00:35:35
Speaker 1: It strikes me that the Russians are engaged in a coalition war. There are all sorts of ways in which this Western coalition has rallied around Ukraine, leaving Russia faced with multiple opponents, not just Ukraine.
00:35:52
Speaker 2: That's right, it doesn't have many allies at its side. It's gotten some help from North Korea, has gotten some help from Iran, It's gotten some sort of lukewarm help from the Chinese. But the Chinese are actually aiding the Ukrainians too. It's ironic some of the dollars that are being sent from the West to Ukraine end up in Chinese pockets as parts that go into these drones, and the Russians know that too. They're happy about it. And this gets back to this question of what incentives does Prutin have to come to the battlefield. Not only does he have a security threat, in Europe that he can't address just by winning the war in Ukraine. But he's geopolitically isolated. He's increased Russia's dependence on China. China has disappointed Russia. It has not provided the kind of support either directly for this war or through investments in the Russian economy, through helping Russia be competitive in high technology, which is really the name of the game of twenty first century geopolitics. And Russia is being left further and further behind in this high technology race for influence in the twenty first century. And so he's got a big geopolitical incentive to open a relationship with the West that gives him room for maneuver with the Chinese. You know, the Chinese are exploiting Russia's dependence on them right now. The Russians don't like this. So at any rate, I think we're in a situation right now where Russia's got a lot of incentives to compromise. If the United States plays its cards right on all of this, there is a path forward. But again, I don't think this path is going to be there forever. You know, we probably have through the midterms, and if the Republicans do poorly. Then I think we're in a situation where Trump will simply lack the political cloud that he will need to push a compromise through the opposition to it that exists here in Washington, but also in Europe. And then we're into that long term conflict that you alluded to earlier, and that's a long term conflict that will go poorly for Ukraine. It will get worn down over time, doesn't have the manpower the air defense to sustain itself for years and years, and it will be a conflict that will be prone to escalatory spirals that could get quite dangerous. On all of this to me, when I look at these options, by far, the best one is let's push through a compromise, and let's do it quickly before the window of opportunity closes.
00:38:33
Speaker 1: I've always wondered if we had genuinely brought them in and said, all this alliance structure was built at a different time for a different purpose, and it's our goal to have you inside, not have you as an adversary. What the world might have looked like, or whether the remnists of a KGB organized crime and Yelton's propensity to stay drunk made it impossible to find a path to a very substantially different period.
00:39:14
Speaker 2: Well, it's an excellent question. I've thought about that a lot myself, and as always with these alternative histories, there's a great deal of speculation and there was a lot of complexity to it, so it's very hard to forecast exactly what would have happened. But you might recall back in the early to mid nineties there was a debate in Washington over NATO enlargement, and there were those that said, you know, NATO needs to be the foundation for European security, and we need to enlarge it in the Russians and have a relationship with NATO, but they can't be on the inside. They can affect native decisions. They are going to be on the other side of that NATO enlargement line. The other alternative was coming out of the Pentagon under then Secretary of Defense Bill Perry Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison, the Harvard historian, who were arguing for a program called Partnership for Peace, which was designed to help the in between states, the former Warsaw Pact states that were now no longer under Moscow's thumb and had to reform their defense sectors and put the civilians in control of the military. It would help them do all that, but it would not extend an Article five defense commitment to them, and partnership for peace would have been open to the Russians too. Now, what would have happened if we had gone down that path? I am inclined to think that we would have a much healthier relationship with everybody involved had we done that. Lots of ways this could have gone wrong too. It's certainly not a foregone conclusion that that would have worked. I think it's a topic that we should be thinking hard about as really the path we went down as it worked out very well, and a lot of tools that we expected did not come to fruition.
00:41:07
Speaker 1: You've been very tenous with your time. Thank you for joining me. I think people are a great deal by listening to you on this, and they can follow your work by looking at the Quincy Institute for Responsible state Craft at quincyionst dot org. And I want to thank you again for being really engaging and helpful.
00:41:30
Speaker 2: My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you to my.
00:41:34
Speaker 1: Guest, George bb. New to World is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers Guarncie Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Special thanks to the team at Ginglishree sixty. If you've been enjoying New World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on substat at Gingers Street sixty. Dought nat, I'm new languish. This is newt World
00:42:10
Speaker 2: MHM.
