What’s Next for Russia and Ukraine?

April 04, 2022

This article appeared in 19FortyFive on April 4th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

Six weeks into Russia’s second invasion of modern Ukraine, Moscow’s stunning military failures dominate the West’s attention. Unsurprisingly, therefore, basic misperceptions are becoming conventional wisdom, thereby potentially distorting future U.S. policy, making it even less effective than at present. The following corrective effort is only illustrative, not exhaustive.

This is not Putin’s war, it’s Russia’s war. Western leaders are deluding themselves to think that Putin alone is responsible for the invasion. As Russia’s president, he obviously makes the final decisions, but he is far from alone in believing passionately that Ukraine (not to mention Belarus and other once-Soviet republics) should be returned to the rodina, Mother Russia. This is certainly true for the siloviki, the “men of power” forming the core of Putin’s advisors, from several of whom I once heard personally their message that Ukraine is a failed, illegitimate state.

Kremlin leaders have a thirty-year obsession with reabsorbing their lost empire. News reports on today’s war often read eerily and confusingly like 2014 news accounts of the Crimea annexation and Donbas invasion, reflecting the West’s historical ignorance and short attention span. The siloviki have many egregious, bloody faults, but short attention is not one of them.

No wonder America’s media and the Biden Administration are surprised by independent polls showing increasing Russian public support for Putin, even in the face of Western sanctions and Moscow’s flagging war effort. Not all Russians feel Putin’s irredentism as deeply as he. A sufficient number do, however, so that whatever else endangers Putin’s regime, public opinion is not only not a threat, it is for now a pillar of regime strength.

Putin does not have a screw loose, nor does he suffer from insufficient, inaccurate information. Not all of Putin’s advisors grovel and snivel, fearing from telling him the truth. Contrary analysis by unnamed Biden administration sources may be elements of our information war against Russia, but they do not describe Kremlin reality. Even in autocratic regimes, there are always advisors more than happy to point out their rivals’ failures, and to provide fulsome evidence to put them in a bad light. Like America, Russia has multiple intelligence agencies that vie bureaucratically for influence and attention. Besides, Soviet embassies don’t need the SVR to communicate back to Moscow what Western media are reporting. There is no upside for every fawning Putin advisor to cover for those who can easily be blamed for evident failures.

The Pentagon offered the most absurd lyrics for the “Putin is uninformed and a little nuts” mantra, speculating that his lack of information could impede ongoing Ukrainian-Russian peace negotiations. For Moscow, these negotiations are merely a propaganda exercise, something affording a patina of reasonableness to its belligerent position. Ironically, it was President Biden who brushed this chatter aside, saying “I don’t want to put too much stock in that at this time because we don’t have that much hard evidence.”

Westerners may not understand how much Putin and company value Ukraine, but that is our problem, not his. We heard this same psychoanalysis in 2014. Angela Merkel among others reportedly believed Putin was “out of touch with reality.” Andrei Illarionov, a former close Putin advisor now in the U.S., corrected her: “People in the West think Putin is irrational or crazy. In fact, he’s very rationale according to his own logic, and very well-prepared. It is not Putin who is out of touch with reality — it is the West.” This rings true. More than once, Putin has said to me, “you have your logic, we have ours; we will see which prevails.”

Part of the problem may be Putin himself. Not his advisors. He may have dismissed hard facts contrary to his preconceptions, a common human failing. It would be an equally grievous mistake, however, for America to think Putin has not by now recovered. Moreover, Russia’s battlefield failures may result from still-endemic corruption and incompetence throughout its military. “Ghost soldiers” whose salaries, weapons, rations and supplies found their way into black markets, as lower-ranking officers submitted false reports on unit strength and readiness up the chain, have now been laid bare. Despite twenty years trying to reform and modernize Russia’s military, the Ukraine conflict demonstrates that these efforts were far from successful.

Russia’s strategic mistakes have cost it dearly, but it has not yet lost the war. Russia did not launch this invasion with only one goal. The Kremlin was likely considering several options, depending on how the war unfolded. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, the top-line strategic objective seems to have been capturing Kyiv, overthrowing Zelensky’s government, and replacing it with a Quisling regime under Moscow’s control. This strategic blunder cost Russia numerous opportunities elsewhere in Ukraine that might already have been achieved, in turn enabling Moscow to pursue additional priority objectives. By trying too much at once, however, Moscow’s reach substantially exceeded its grasp, and it failed broadly.

Broadly, but not fatally.

The cliché tells us generals always fight the last war. In 2014, Russia seized the Crimea almost without firing a shot. Indeed, significant portions of Ukraine’s navy defected to Russia’s side. Fighting in the Donbas region was not so successful for Russia, but neither were the military costs high nor subsequent Western sanctions effective. One can easily imagine Moscow’s leaders envisaging a similar scenario in 2022. They were obviously wrong.

Even more importantly, on and after February 24, Russia violated the fundamental military doctrine of force concentration. Instead of aiming at a small number of key targets with overwhelming forces, Moscow attacked broadly with inadequate manpower, firepower and logistics. Ukraine’s heroic resistance was totally unanticipated. The result was failure to win most key objectives: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa and more. Russian arms have had relatively greater success in southern and eastern Ukraine, but even these advances are far from overwhelming.

Now, Russia is belatedly trying to get its act together, withdrawing from areas around Kyiv and other northern cities Ukraine, perhaps back into Belarus and Russia, to regroup, reinforce and resupply. Moscow will either try again in the north, or redeploy these forces to the

east and south, where reinforcements are arriving from existing deployments in Georgia, the Middle East and elsewhere. The media report Syrian soldiers returning Russia’s earlier favors to Assad’s regime by coming to Ukraine, likely without crash courses on the Geneva Conventions.

The Kremlin’s goal now will likely be maximizing its military and political control throughout southern and eastern Ukraine. Russia’s overarching goal of fully conquering Ukraine is almost certainly out of reach for now, but there are many alternative, subsidiary objectives. If Putin could accomplish significant elements of these lesser goals, he would be well-placed to persuade Russia’s public that the war was worthwhile, and to induce all-too-many Westerners to turn the page, and return to “normal” economic and political relations.

Almost certainly the critical second-tier objective is control over Ukraine’s substantially Russophile areas, effectively splitting the country in two. The Kremlin’s targets are southern Ukraine, particularly control over the Black Sea’s strategically important northern coast, and eastern Ukraine, east of the Dnieper River to the city of Dnipropetrovsk and then north to the Russian border. Broadly speaking, eight Ukrainian oblasts (in addition to Crimea) are involved: Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odessa.

These oblasts are predominantly or substantially Russian-speaking and Russian Orthodox, as compared to areas more Ukrainian-speaking, Ukrainian Orthodox or Catholic. This, of course, is the Kremlin’s view, not an exercise in Wilsonian self-determination. Because Ukraine’s demographic distribution looks like a bad case of measles, and citizens are often ambivalent or conflicted in their religious loyalties, these characterizations are not bright lines. Russia may well fail to conquer all this territory, but the more it seizes, the stronger its bargaining position when negotiations actually turn serious.

For now, Russia’s military position in eastern Ukraine is relatively strong, and “victory” entirely possible. Along the Black Sea, however, Moscow had been blocked, and Odessa seems beyond its grasp at the moment. Nonetheless, if Moscow reconstitutes its forces, coordinates its land, sea and air efforts, and Western support for Ukraine’s military insufficient, taking Odessa is still feasible. With the east and much of the south secure, Russia could make territorial “concessions” by withdrawing from areas it still holds in the north, but which are no longer tenable long-term. Putin is counting on flagging Western interest and unity. This would make it difficult and costly if not impossible to push Russia from what it holds near its current borders and Crimea. Uti possidetis remains a powerful form of diplomatic inertia.

Washington needs to step up its leadership, and NATO its performance. Let’s be clear: NATO is not fully united. The West must do better in tightening the economic noose around Russia and increasing and speeding its military assistance to Ukraine. Performance to date is mixed. Despite incessant hosannas about Alliance unity, the West is already fraying. The United Kingdom and the United States have led in supplying hardware and intelligence, but others, like France and Germany, have lagged, starting with Berlin’s pre-war offer of 5,000 military helmets, and continuing later by supplying former East German Strela missiles, over thirty years old, that did not work. Time and again, President Biden has responded to pressure from Congress and the Allies rather than leading himself, acting either belatedly or not at all, as in his refusal to authorize transferring the Polish MiGs.

Remember, every day the war grinds on is further evidence of NATO’s fundamental, unalterable shame: failing to deter Russia in the first place because of shredded credibility (see Georgia, 2008, Ukraine, 2014, and the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal); grossly inadequate threats

of future punishment through selective, inadequate sanctions; and Biden’s early December unforced error, rejecting even the possibility of U.S. force, in exchange for exactly nothing.

This pattern must be reversed, and quickly. Given Russia’s mistakes so far, it would be a fool’s errand to bet it can successfully reculer pour mieux saute, but it is at least possible. We are likely therefore in a slow-motion race to see whether Moscow can get off its back before Ukraine’s military breaks under the strains (incompletely reported by Western media) it has felt. Time is on Moscow’s side, so slow or inadequate Western resupply efforts could be ruinous. The Western is not unified on sanctions.

Europe’s purchases of Russian oil and gas continue, and China, India and others are providing financial lifelines keeping Russia’s economy afloat. Looking ahead, the real efficacy of sanctions turns on rigorous enforcement and enhancement to close loopholes as Russia creates them. The best day for any sanctions’ regime is the day it is announced, dropping rapidly if the sanctioning powers are not as least as creative as their target. Historically, U.S. sanctions enforcement and enhancement has been decidedly mixed, and the Europeans are, to be polite, far from diligent. Modern history’s most effective and comprehensive sanctions were imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Enforced by the U.S. and allied militaries, even these were not enough to oust Saddam’s invading forces.

The Alliance’s biggest test will be maintaining diplomatic unity at the inevitable moment when Moscow decides on serious negotiations. The siloviki see the West’s weakness for money not for the ideological reasons of their Communist predecessors, but with at last equal clarity. Already, France and Germany are searching for ways to end military hostilities before one side or the other scores a decisive victory, thus freezing the conflict without materially resolving it. This would certainly be the typical European approach. If, however, Russia emerges from its current military debacle with anything even remotely smacking of victory, the reverberations in Europe and worldwide, especially in Beijing, will be enormous. Nattering on about NATO unity may warm hearts in elite Washington circles, but all that talk is worth what you pay for it. American leadership and NATO performance to date have been inadequate. Face up to it.

The clear lesson is that Americans should not bliss out prematurely. This is a European conflict. Think Thirty Years War or Hundred Years War. Putin is

Reaganism Podcast: John Bolton on the Crisis in Kyiv

April 01, 2022

On this episode of Reaganism, recorded at our Reagan Institute Strategy meeting on February 24, John Bolton, former National Security Advisor and Ambassador to the United Nations discusses Russia’s military assault on Ukraine, the impact of Trump’s presidency on national security, and what America must do to strengthen our defense.

Biden gives Putin a win with his indefensible decision to deny Ukraine fighter jets

March 14, 2022

This article appeared in The New York Post on March 14th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the war with Russia was at a “strategic turning point.” Unfortunately, America and NATO may have missed it. President Joe Biden’s decision to reject transferring Polish MiG fighter jets to Ukraine is inexplicable and indefensible.

Kyiv’s heroic resistance to unprovoked aggression has exceeded pre-war expectations, both NATO’s and Russia’s. Innumerable Russian mistakes and failures, from strategy down to basic logistics, have been equally startling. The Kremlin has not achieved key objectives, its advances have been slowed or halted, and its casualties are reportedly rising alarmingly.

But there is no guarantee that Ukraine can maintain the present standoff, let alone repel the invasion and restore the status quo ante bellum. It is not enough to say that Zelensky is losing slowly, especially if and when the moment for negotiations comes. Nor is it politically helpful for his purported allies to publicly refuse requests for help, like the MiGs or a no-fly zone over Ukraine, even a partial no-fly zone to stem the surging humanitarian tragedy of millions forced to flee their homes.

Biden’s White House has offered numerous rationales for rejecting the MiG transfer, so many that it suggests a desperate effort to hide the real reason: Biden is intimidated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Whereas Biden’s effort to deter Russia’s invasion failed, Putin’s efforts to deter the United States from responding adequately have unfortunately been all too successful.

Washington in fact actively considered the Polish MiG transfer and sent signals it was all but approved. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said so expressly. CBS anchor Margaret Brennan asked him March 6, “If, for instance, the Polish government . . . wants to send fighter jets, does that get a green light from the US, or are you afraid that that will escalate tension?” Blinken replied, “No, that gets a green light. In fact, we’re talking with our Polish friends right now about what we might be able to do to backfill their needs if, in fact, they choose to provide these fighter jets to the Ukrainians.”

The administration and its media stenographers worked overtime to shift blame away from Biden, thereby revealing the weakness of the case against the MiG transfer. They said Poland could have made the transfer on its own. Of course, as a dependable ally, Poland wanted assurance that NATO’s leader — that would be the United States — supported the idea. Otherwise, Biden’s team would have complained Poland had gone rogue.

Next were arguments that Ukraine didn’t need the planes. The Pentagon said it was “simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it.” But Biden has long made it clear there would be no US combat role in the war. Why undermine the judgment of those actually engaged in combat, with the very survival of their country at stake, especially at no effective cost to Washington?

Finally, the real argument: Biden feared he would cross a Putin red line, thereby risking all-out war in Europe. We risk that war already, however, by supplying anti-aircraft and anti-tank systems, intelligence and cyberwarfare capabilities. All this aid has to cross NATO borders to get to Ukraine, just like the MiGs. Anything other than Ukraine’s unconditional surrender risks displeasing the Kremlin. There is no legal, moral or military rationale that supports disapproving the MiGs but allows other advanced-weapons assistance, only fear and sophistry.

Indeed, the administration is also leaking assiduously that it is considering alternative forms of aid. Undoubtedly, steady increases in rhetorical bombardments, permanent deployment of Vice President Kamala Harris to Europe to boost our allies’ confidence, ramped up White House and Pentagon press briefings and longer telephone calls from Biden to Zelensky are all under active consideration.

We cannot precisely measure the intangible effects on morale, both in Kyiv and Moscow, of Biden’s rejection of the MiG transfer. It would be stunning, however, if Zelensky’s advisers and Ukraine’s military were not dismayed and Putin’s elated. Whatever the precise operational value of the Polish MiGs, such a tangible sign of American and NATO support could have been inspiring. With both the MiGs and no-fly zones off the table, Ukraine’s options are narrowing.

Pentagon officials rightly remember Clausewitz’s insight: “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Biden took a simple idea, made it difficult and then rejected it. Congratulations.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019 and US ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.

The Reckoning of Western Foreign Policy Elites

March 08, 2022

As yet, it is barely perceptible, but with each day it is becoming more apparent that only a week into a globe-shaping crisis, we are seeing the first signs of a new phase.

It is clear that the United States is not whole-heartedly engaged and is lagging far behind its European allies in showing resolve. For example, while the EU has sanctioned 490 entities as of March 3, and Switzerland 371, the United States has only sanctioned 118. Moreover, leaks from the administration show signs of faltering rather than steeling will. Articles are appearing in elite Western papers, such as the New York Times, which only a week ago led the charge into confrontation, already laying out intellectual paths to backing off and yielding to Putin. In conversations in the last 24 hours with people in the bordering lands north of Russia, from what I gather the populations of the Baltic states are beginning to assess that they are next in Putin’s plans, but that they will not be saved by NATO despite all the talk and commitments. As a result, in the last 24 hours, there has been a drop in the hitherto lava-hot housing market in all those lands, and we are even seeing the first signs of an exodus from them. Population movements are among the best indicators of what people really think since they are voting with their feet at the cost of great disruption. In this case, they are voting on their appreciation as to whether the US – as the only genuine leader that can pilot the Western world — will go the distance on this and draw the hard border on Putin to stop the slide at and within Ukraine and no further, or whether the United States will back off after the initial hoopla, which will then set everyone up for Putin’s next thrust of which those closest to Russia will pay first and hardest.

Israel, the UAE and the Saudis are on the other end of this rising Eurasian power and face off against one of its most important allies, Iran. While the West demands fealty on Ukraine, all are deeply fearful that if they go blazing in, they will be picking a fight with a colossus and be left alone holding the bag. Arab nations and Israel just do not have faith yet that the US is genuinely changed, is now serious and has effectively begun mobilizing for the long haul. The emerging Iran deal, in fact, tells them the opposite.

There also appears as yet to be no appreciation in the West as to how great and disruptive sanctions will have to become to genuinely sever Russia and isolate its economy – which is one of the first steps as the globe enters another Cold War. There is no way to do this but to also sever the West from China, since Beijing will cut out banks that commit to the sanctions, and others that won’t. For example, Chinese banks can just hide and transfer monies internally between the two, therein positioning China as a money-laundering superpower on a scale never before seen. At this point, our elites are hesitant on truly isolating Russia, and thus are hardly in a position to really draw the line on China too.

In fact, we are not even willing to disrupt our dependence on Russian oil and gas. The White House, via its spokesperson, Jen Psaki, has made that clear a dozen times over the week since the invasion of Ukraine. As a whole Germany is more serious, as are several other European nations. For this they are to be commended. And yet, in the end, even Germany is willing to suspend NordStream2, which was not going to truly come on line until next winter. In other words, it took a stand for which payment is expected to come due only after Ukraine falls or wins. In contrast, Germany allows NordStream to continue to flow. Again, Germany and some of its European allies are still to be given credit for what it has done, but we should be sober. The sanctions all Western nations have imposed on Russia via SWIFT structures are riddled with holes because of this continued trade.

If we are really not willing to wean ourselves off Russian gas and oil, then it is unlikely that we will be willing to do so on everything else. Once Ukraine settles into a festering mess (it will never be truly subjugated by Russia, even if the Ukrainian army dissolves as a coherent conventional fighting force, which is itself not even certain), we will begin to feel the full effects of severed economic ties to Russia — the consequences of which (devastated supply chains, for example) we really have not thought through, and certainly not felt, yet.

In general, at this moment, when suddenly things really matter and everything becomes deadly serious, there seems to be a verdict on the reckoning of the US foreign policy establishment and of its uninspiring record of missteps, delusions, inconsistencies and lapses since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, despite the unveiling by Putin of a chilling manifesto last summer, US diplomats, indeed our Under Secretary of State for Policy, Victoria Nuland, this last October traveled to Moscow and left the impression that we were distancing ourselves from Ukraine, and even reprimanding it for its resolute interpretation of the 2014 Minsk Agreement. For a leader like Putin, who outlined last summer a dangerous imperial vision, that was like throwing steak to a tiger. He understood this as weakness and an invitation to invasion. A seasoned official like Nuland should have understood, given the troubling evolution of Putin’s thinking as unveiled over the last half decade, that whatever diplomatic nicety or polite deference she expressed, and any light she showed between the United States and Ukraine, would be met by man who brags about physically subjugating tigers and bears as weakness, not refinement.

Thus, as Ukraine fights for its freedom, its identity and its survival, nations around the world and their peoples will settle into a hedging pattern until they are convinced the US has it in it to go the distance here linearly and decisively, rather than in a partial, waivering and hesitant process, the consequences of which are that many closest to the fire will pay a horrific price until the US finally comes around clearly and determinedly.

Sadly, the problem is not just the shortcomings of the Biden team. If it was, then we could just fix it by changing leaders. The problem is far deeper. It is, in fact, a civilizational reckoning. People are beginning to take note of the speeches and writings of Putin and his clique of intellectuals – teaching us once again that we are ill served us when we ignore the earnest nature of what others with ambition say. And yet, while people are beginning to realize the expanse of the challenge he poses, there is little discussion of the magnitude. The geographic parameters of Putin’s ambitions are coming into focus, but still ignored is his civilization critique of the West and his grandiose solution, which in the end is a far more dangerous assault than any real estate. He believes the rise of Western freedom has corrupted Christianity, and that his Eurasian fantasy is the salvation of European civilization. Along the way, he has no need for the small and weak, all of whom should be retuned to the strong and bog as minions.

In as far as Putin judges the flaws of Western civilization (as distinct from his grandiose answer), it is important the West appreciates that there may be part of this critique which demands serious introspection on our part. Indeed, there is a common thread uniting Hitler, Japan, the Soviet Union, Khomeini, and bin-Ladin with Putin: they all believed that the West was a soul-less, corrupted civilization that confronted with strong will can be swept aside as easily as breezes scatter dust on a floor. While Hitler and Japan were buried decisively and immediately when a relentless America obliterated both their armies and their ideas, continental European powers and elites had until that point failed and were in fact swept aside.

It bears consideration as to why that was so. European elites, led by failing aristocracies, had become a pessimistic lot that had traded the souls of their national identity for an increasingly performative but ultimately hollow rising set of international ideas and institutions. In the end, those elites never really internalized that they were part of their nations or accepted the passing of the baton of defining “legitimate” culture to their whole populations. They thus increasingly distanced themselves from their own people, whom they believed had rejected their inherently superior status. The elites, led by a dying aristocratic class, felt jilted. Hitler gauged that Europe’s elites simply could no longer tap into and leverage their nation’s cultures for power, and thus with utter disdain he played upon the elites’ resulting impotence, internally and externally. His appreciation of the continent was correct, and despite Germany’s initial weakness and his personally tenuous grip on power, it fell to him within half of a decade. He then leveraged this as a parade of Western retreats not only to destroy, but to humiliate along the way, his internal doubters.

And yet, America was different, and its elites at that time were still products of the culture and its informing ideas that all Americans shared. Thus, when either Hitler or the Japanese imperial leadership slammed against America, it slammed against an insurmountable tide of power. It took a still confident America a bit longer to lead the world to devastate the Soviet Union, but win it did in the end. Still, there were some warning signs along the way as elites in the 1970s increasingly began to resemble the elites of their trans-Atlantic allies who lacked civilizational confidence and instead of confidently tapping the sinews of power of their own cultures, increasingly invested in international structures, institutions and norms to codify inertia – or which they hoped would at least — and hide their fading self-confidence.

Reading Putin and his intellectuals for years, it is this question which most animates him. The imperial expansion of geography is the aim, but his imagination that he can realize his ambitions emerge from his appreciation of the rot and corruption of the West, which he fingers as emanating from freedom itself rather than from the Western elites’ abandonment (rather than embrace) of their cultural identity and soul. For Putin, the West is a desert of nobody people, but the new Russia is a land of faith and a soul. His substance will vanquish our emptiness. In this civilizational challenge, Putin follows in the footsteps of the Hitlers, Ishiwara Kanjis, Mussolinis, Stalins, Nassers, Che Guevaras, Maos, Xis, Khomeiinis and bin-Ladins.

So where is America today as we enter the next great challenge? Do people outside America measure us as a rising confident civilization with a strong sense of who we are? Or do our urban and foreign policy elites — which after all is what is most visible to the outside, not the patriot with a pickup truck sitting in a diner in Fargo with a gun rack on the back window — either act with deep pessimism as if either we assume our own decline or behave as if we are a nobody people (no soul, no faith, no history, no identity)?

Putin, and for that matter Xi, ISIS, al Qaida, Iran too, measured us up as deficient. The real question, the answer to which will determine how far and fast the world will mobilize around the new order — which is not yet clearly either a cold war or a world war, but which is rapidly approaching somewhere on that level of seriousness — is whether people eventually see Putin’s, Xi’s, bin-Ladin’s and Khomeini’s assessment as the better bet or not.

Ukraine is an opportunity, not only a bellwether, in this regard. Putin views core elements of the West’s foundations with disdain. Our response to the Ukraine crisis ultimately must be a reassertion of our confidence as a civilization and the values (that unique combination of Greek, Roman, Judeo-Christian, Renaissance and early Enlightenment foundations) upon which it is grounded, not a specific policy or action.

The first signs are the American people are beginning to appreciate the true civilizational nature of this challenge. But our political elites face a reckoning. For many decades so far, they have failed us. Will our foreign policy be based on the platform of our culture and values, or on a ratatouille of academic theories, reactive scrambling and shifting values based on diplomatic expediency?

Meanwhile, in the Middle East: The Biden administration’s strategy is causing real problems

March 08, 2022

This article appeared in New York Daily News on March 8th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

Ukraine’s ongoing tragedy is now having dangerous ramifications in the Middle East, fueled by significant Biden administration policy failures. The United Arab Emirates, normally a staunch American ally, abstained recently on a UN Security Council resolution condemning Russia’s invasion. The reason: President Biden declined to relist Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who had repeatedly attacked civilian targets in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as a foreign terrorist organization. Biden had earlier removed the Houthis, Iran’s surrogates in Yemen’s civil war, from the list, purportedly to mitigate Yemen’s sustained humanitarian crisis.

The UAE pressed to reverse Biden’s delisting after early February Houthi attacks on civilian targets in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but the White House failed to act.

When Biden pressured the UAE, now a non-permanent Security Council member, to support his anti-Russia resolution, the UAE abstained instead. Embarrassing Biden reversals also include initially waiving, and now supporting, sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline, which may have encouraged Moscow’s aggression.

Bumbling the Houthi threat reflects Biden’s profound misperceptions about what constitutes a serious menace to Middle East and global peace and security. Houthi strikes against civilian targets and threats to international shipping in the critical Bab-el-Mandeb Strait are, unfortunately, nothing new. Using missiles and drones, Houthi attacks increased markedly since mid-2019, along with increased Shia militia attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq. These dangers would not exist without Iranian weapons shipments, training, targeting and logistics.

Because of the Yemen civil war’s complex politics, deeply-rooted underlying causes and resistance to solution, outsiders often focus on the hardships the conflict has caused. While severe and enduring, these hardships hardly explain the conflict’s causes or who is culpable. Instead, pre-existing hostility toward Saudi Arabia and the UAE, unrelated to Yemen, have colored outside judgments. The Houthis played the “victim card,” and sympathetic Westerners were duped.

Biden announced he was ending American support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen in hopes of ending the conflict, although that military support ad already been considerably reduced. Nonetheless, the Houthis continued their military efforts without evincing any real interest in resolving the conflict.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Iran has largely escaped condemnation for meddling in Yemen, and for using the war to establish strategic positions literally in the backyards of its Arab enemies. Eliminating Tehran’s support to the Houthis would help end Yemen’s fratricide, and, equally importantly, end threats to commercial airports, oil infrastructure and other targets where innocent civilians live and work. Major airports are not far from urban population centers, and the reckless use of highly destructive weapons could easily cause mass-casualty events.
The Iran-Houthi alliance is almost entirely terrorist in its aims and methods. From its birth, Iran’s regime was a state sponsor of terrorism, so designated by Ronald Reagan in 1984. The Trump administration named the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran’s external military arm, to the foreign terrorists’ list in 2019. Iran’s ayatollahs have consistently pursued terrorism, from seizing U.S. hostages in 1979 to aiding Hamas, Hezbollah and Iraqi militias, and threatening Americans worldwide.

Even so, the Biden administration is still begging Iran to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, an agreement fatally flawed from the outset, and getting worse with age.

The Houthis and their top leaders are also terrorists, as their behavior both inside Yemen and regionally amply demonstrates. As with the IRGC, the only legitimate complaint is that the U.S. government didn’t designate them as a foreign terrorist organization earlier. The designation expressly provided ways to ensure it did not impede delivery of humanitarian assistance to Yemeni civilians, UN protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Accordingly, while Yemen’s conflict remains complex and difficult, and not easily solvable, Iran’s presence is totally self-interested. It is not about Yemen, but about Iran’s efforts to achieve regional and religious hegemony through its own terrorism, assistance to terrorist groups and its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Unless and until Americans understand this reality, grave humanitarian challenges in Yemen will persist, and gullible Westerners will still believe they can make a viable agreement with Iran to limit its determined quest for nuclear weapons. But even if Houthis are returned to the foreign terrorist organization list, it is unclear the Biden administration understands these larger points.

Bolton is a former U.S. ambassador to the UN and former national security adviser.

Broken Biden sank the West’s efforts to stop Putin invading Ukraine

February 28, 2022

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on February 28th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

President Joe Biden has explained why he failed to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He admitted that he had no idea what he was doing.

For months, Nato members and other governments thought they were working to deter Vladimir Putin from unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. The entire debate centred on choosing the most effective measures to convince Putin of the enormous consequences he and Russia would face if they resorted to military force.

Western leaders asked themselves what combination of preventative actions, threats of economic sanctions and even – in the minds of some, myself included – military force would be the most effective deterrent against a Russian invasion. What measures would persuade Moscow that the costs of any military action would be prohibitive, and more serious for Russia than any possible benefits?

Today, it is tragically obvious this collective effort failed. Last Thursday, at a White House press conference, we may have learnt why. Biden admitted that he never believed his threats to impose economic sanctions against Russia, and other steps the West might take if the Kremlin “further invaded” Ukraine, would deter Putin. The transcript is admittedly confused, as are so many of Biden’s unscripted remarks, but the meaning is clear.

A reporter asked: “Sir, sanctions clearly have not been enough to deter Vladimir Putin to this point. What is going to stop him?” Biden answered: “No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening.” That was news to Washington and beyond, where people believed their deliberations and preparations were intended to do precisely that.

Another reporter asked: “If sanctions cannot stop President Putin, what penalty can?” Biden said: “I didn’t say sanctions couldn’t stop him.” Perhaps stunned at Biden contradicting his own words, uttered just moments before, the reporter tried again: “But you’ve been talking about the threat of these sanctions for several weeks now.” Biden interrupted: “Yes, but the threat of the sanctions and imposing the sanctions and seeing the effect of the sanctions are two different things… He’s going to begin to see the effect of the sanctions.” If that wasn’t bad enough, Biden said repeatedly that “this is going to take time”, as though every day in Ukraine isn’t agonising.

Translating Biden’s answers into sensible English leads to disturbing conclusions. Possibly, he simply doesn’t understand what deterrence is, and that it almost always includes credible threats of future punishment to affect an adversary’s current actions. It hardly inspires confidence in US leadership when its President fails to grasp the vital concept that kept the West safe during the Cold War’s nuclear standoff. Yesterday, Putin showed what he thought of Biden’s leadership by placing Russia’s nuclear deterrent on high alert – a provocative move, to say the least.

It may be that Biden was never confident Putin could be deterred, certainly not by threats alone. In that case, unless Biden was prepared to accept the inevitable devastation that an invasion of Ukraine would cause, he should have spared no effort to develop additional steps to prevent it. He did not, despite widespread, urgent advice that the sanctions he threatened were insufficient, and that real-time costs had to be imposed on Putin before he initiated military action.

The rubble in Biden’s mind is what it is. We should not await improvement. Instead, we immediately need new ideas that can change the direction of events and impact Putin and Russia.

The Ukrainian people are certainly doing their part. They are fighting hard and courageously, and their spirit is high. The contemptuous riposte of a small outpost in the Black Sea (“Russian warship, go f— yourself”) reminds us all of General McAuliffe’s equally defiant response to German demands he surrender during the Battle of the Bulge: “Nuts!”

One new idea is for Nato and EU countries simply to bar entry to any Russian citizens. Such a visa ban is clear, sweeping, immediate and readily enforceable. This would be far more shocking to Russians than sanctions against a small number of high-ranking targets. (Now under both Russian and Chinese sanctions myself, I can say confidently they don’t affect me at all. I only regret I didn’t have any assets Russia and China could have seized!) We could go further and expel Russians already in Western countries.

Some will say this is too harsh and disruptive. Really? Ask Ukraine what harsh and disruptive mean. The West has failed to deter Russia’s attack, and its post-invasion sanctions have so far been pinpricks, hardly even touching Russia’s critical energy sector. If there are better ideas than a visa ban, let’s get them out in public. Otherwise, we will just be sitting back watching the casualty lists get longer.

John Bolton is a former US national security adviser

Gradual Sanctions Against Russia are a Loser

February 27, 2022

This article appeared in The New York Post on February 27th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

The Biden Administration has been explicit that it is pursuing a strategy of “graduated escalation” in imposing sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine. This approach is virtually certain to be less effective in imposing economic hardship on Russia than a more robust effort, thereby prolonging Ukraine’s agony and postponing Russia’s isolation. Gradual escalation in economic warfare carries precisely the same risks as in kinetic warfare; the enemy has a say in both cases. Biden could be introducing us to to the Vietnam of economic sanctions.

Indeed, to all outwards appearances, Biden’s graduated-escalation policy is motivated largely by domestic American political considerations, especially regarding Russia’s energy sector. With U.S. inflation high and rising, economic pain at home is the last thing the White House wants, especially soaring oil and gas prices. Consumers feel the squeeze not only when they fill their gas tanks, but in their other purchases that require transporting good to stores or front porches, especially food.

A little history on sanctions and recent U.S. foreign policy. It says something about today’s Democratic Party that Woodrow Wilson’s views are too hard-line to contemplate. Wilson, amidst his prolonged reveries about the League of Nations, strongly advocated using economic sanctions in lieu of military force to resolve international disputes. He called sanctions “a peaceful, silent deadly remedy,” and “a hand upon the throat of the offending nation.” Too much for the Biden Administration.

America’s experience with sanctions has been mixed, and suggests several conditions for effectiveness. First, sanctions should be imposed swiftly and by surprise if possible, to prevent targets from taking precautionary or protective steps to mitigate the sanctions’ impact. That obviously did not happen with Russia, international sanctions having been threatened for months, and even if not known in precise detail, easily imaginable. If Russia is not prepared for the measures already imposed so far, the Kremlin is guilty of governance malpractice.

Second, sanctions should be as sweeping and comprehensive as possible, since no sanctions will be completely effective. Lesser measures produce lesser results. Phrases like “targeted sanctions” sound good in diplomatic communiques, but broad-gauge sanctions are far more likely to cause sustained pain. Even history’s most-extensive sanctions, the UN Security Council measures against Iraq after invading Kuwait, did not ultimately succeed in forcing Saddam Hussein out. Concern for second-order impacts of sanctions on America’s economy is warranted, but sanctions should maximize harm to the target, with other measures separately protecting the domestic economy. Dialing down sanctions to protect the sanction-imposer does far more to shield the target than Biden realizes.

Finally, sanctions should go for the jugular. With Russia, its very existence as a major threat relies on the revenues from its oil and gas production and exports. As some wags have said, it’s more a big gas station than a real national economy. Russian earnings from hydrocarbon sales internationally totaled 60% of its export revenues in 2019, and forty percent of its national-government budget. Russia’s dependence on oil and gas revenues has grown steadily over the last eight years.

The Biden Administration argues that blocking Russian hydrocarbon sales would not immediately damage Russia because of currency reserves accumulated in anticipation of just such sanctions. Of course, many more non-hydrocarbon sanctions are also required than currently announced, also hastening expending the reserves. The aggregate effect of more robust and comprehensive sanctions, including particularly oil-and-gas sanctions, would strangle Russia’s government and broader economy.

The Administration’s misguided graduated-escalation strategy and failure to strike Russia’s energy sector unfortunately reinforce one another, providing Putin a lifeline. Postponing any sanctions now, especially against energy, only sustains Moscow’s war machine. If Biden wants to keep U.S. hydrocarbon prices down for political reasons, he should consider the supply side: U.S. production increases, quickly available through already-existing horizontal-drilling and fracking infrastructure, could substantially mitigate price rises on American consumers.

Europeans may have a harder time, entirely through their own fault, and contrary to U.S. warnings dating to Ronald Reagan against depending on Russian energy sources. And what better opportunity or higher motive for Germany and other governments to force their economies toward green energy than supporting the courageous Ukrainian people. No one is asking for unnecessary sacrifice, but no anti-aggression policy in Ukraine is cost free. That is the reality of a globalized economy. Otherwise, the West’s policy is simply, “we support Ukraine, but not when it is inconvenient.”

It’s time to squeeze the Kremlin hard, not engage in semiotic warfare, gradual escalation, and pearl clutching. Drive a stake through Russia’s energy sector. Now.

The battle for the soul of the Republican Party has just begun 

February 11, 2022

This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on February 11th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

‘President Trump is wrong.” With these words last Friday, former vice president Mike Pence drew an unambiguous red line in the fight for the Republican Party’s future. Although the battle began well before January 6 last year, when Pence rejected Trump’s direction to subvert the Constitution when counting the Electoral College’s vote, Pence’s steadfastness and clarity come at a critical moment.

As the conservative-libertarian Federalist Society was applauding Pence, the Republican National Committee tragically voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in a House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 riots. This self-inflicted wound evokes the remark attributed to the Marquis de Talleyrand: “It’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.”

Pence’s words mean inevitably that Republicans must choose sides between supporting Trump’s dangerous effort, in his own recent words, to “overturn the election,” or Pence’s adherence to the clear Constitutional text. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s sharp criticism of the Cheney-Kinzinger censure on Tuesday underlines the importance of Pence’s stance. This issue will now play out in two ways: constitutionally, as people align with either Trump’s view or Pence’s, between which there is no compromise; and politically, in the race for 2024’s Republican presidential nomination.6 sec

On the substance of the Constitutional issue, the merits are entirely with Pence. Neither the original Constitution nor the Twelfth Amendment give Congress or the vice president anything other than a clerical role. Pence said it eloquently on Friday: “I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American President.”

No “constitutional conservative” can seriously argue the Framers intended Congress to do more than tabulate the respective States’ electoral certificates. The Framers wanted a system of separated powers, with President and Congress elected by different methods and constituencies, thus establishing the independence of government’s two elected branches. The Electoral College’s sole purpose is electing the President and Vice President; it was created precisely to exclude Congress from that function. And in America’s federal system, each State determines who its valid electors are, not Congress. Trump’s assertion that Congress has a larger role subverts the most fundamental premise of America’s national government. It is not a parliamentary system.

Politically, therefore, aligning with Pence or Trump is a flat, either-or choice. Pence, in the early maneuvering for what will blossom into a fully-fledged presidential campaign, has tried hard not to alienate Trump or his supporters. To maintain his own unquestioned integrity, however, he cannot bend on the correctness of his January 6 conduct. Party leaders and members were always going to have to choose sides, and that moment has arrived.

Moreover, other prospective Republican candidates, currently numbering between 15 and 20, must also now declare themselves one way or the other. In the campaign’s current “testing-the-waters” stage, most candidates are seeking the best of both worlds: separating themselves from Trump’s worst excesses without incurring Trump’s wrath. Good luck with that minuet.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who does very well in public opinion polls even with Trump included as an alternative nominee, has consistently refused to state publicly that he will not seek the nomination if Trump runs. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has already said he is in whatever Trump does. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who may run, will have no trouble aligning clearly with Pence.

By contrast, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has clung to Trump like a limpet, now faces his worst nightmare. Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Rick Scott, and more now have the same dilemma. To exemplify the dangers in Trump-world, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has said she won’t run if Trump does, but he nonetheless castigates her mercilessly for her inconsistencies (which will likely doom her campaign in any case).

Some commentators say the issue is philosophical, with more-conservative Republicans supporting Trump, while moderates oppose him. This is false. Donald Trump has no philosophy or policy other than Donald Trump’s greater glory. That is why the debate Pence has created is so important for the party’s future. It can either be a conservative party or a Trump party. It cannot be both. My bet is that philosophy, which ultimately brings electoral victory, will prevail.

Putin’s playing chess in Ukraine and Biden steps in as pawn

January 25, 2022

This article appeared in The New York Post on January 23th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

President Biden’s first press conference in 10 months, on the eve of his inauguration’s anniversary, made news. But not the kind he wanted. Asked about Russia’s possible invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s lack of unity and the likely failure of economic sanctions to deter Vladimir Putin, Biden answered that “the idea that NATO is not going to be united, I don’t buy . . . It depends on what [Russia] does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera.”

In a stroke, Biden demonstrated he didn’t understand his own Ukraine policy, undercut Kiev’s government and people, and handed Moscow an engraved invitation to make a “minor incursion” into Ukraine.

That was bad enough, but further answers made his position even more unintelligible. He said, “and so, I got to make sure everybody is on the same page as we move along . . . But it depends on what [Putin] does, as to the exact — to what extent we’re going to be able to get total unity on the Rus — on the NATO front.”

Biden was correct that Putin “was calculating what the immediate . . . and the long-term consequences of [sic] Russia will be.” Right now, Putin has the initiative and a broad range of options. America and the West are reactive and disunited, as Biden all but admitted. Putin is following a strategic playbook encompassing the entire former Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact “allies,” grounded on his 2005 precept that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” The United States and NATO are answering this strategic threat only tactically. The West focuses on avoiding imminent hostilities, whereas Putin is seeking enduring hegemony over former Soviet territories. The White House still fails to comprehend that Putin need not conduct all-out invasion of Ukraine to win significant new advantages. Seizing “pro-Russian” areas, leaving a rump independent Ukraine or installing a Moscow-friendly government might be Putin’s real goal. Or he may make political or military moves elsewhere, in Belarus, Georgia or Kazakhstan for example, for which the alliance seems completely unprepared.

Even worse, Moscow is now suckering Washington into negotiations over “security guarantees” that weaken and divide NATO itself. Biden said, “NATO is not going to take in Ukraine anytime in the next few decades,” an astonishing unforced error. George W. Bush was ready in April 2008 to fast-track Ukraine and Georgia as NATO members, but Germany and France objected. Four months later, Russia invaded Georgia and in 2014 invaded Ukraine, annexing Crimea and seizing control over the Donbas. NATO has never admitted a country with unwanted foreign troops on its soil because that would effectively put NATO in a state of war with the occupying country. Of course, Russia is the aggressor in every case, with its “minor incursions” not just in Georgia and Ukraine but many others.

Russia creates an artificial crisis, then graciously accedes to resolve it by “accepting” precisely the objective it sought in the first place. Biden’s response is totally backwards, signaling willingness to discuss restrictions on Ukraine’s NATO candidacy and limitations on missile and troop dispositions near Russia’s borders, all key Kremlin demands. This is a major error, which will only prompt further demands. Russia, a consistent violator of international commitments, is the aggressor, not NATO, which has always been a purely defensive alliance. Geographic restrictions on NATO deployments endanger its members and benefit Russia, as Poland, the Baltics and other central Europeans fully grasp, even if Germany and France don’t. Russia has always feared violating a NATO member’s border, but weakening NATO resolve undermines even its historically successful defensive purpose, as Moscow clearly understands.

Playing small ball with Putin, as Biden is doing, will not durably protect Ukraine or other endangered states. Biden’s inadequate and now incoherent policy is not deterring Russian military action, and timidity simply incentivizes Putin to increase his demands. We risk a downward spiral of NATO concessions to avoid military conflict today, but which will only increase its likelihood soon thereafter.

Indeed, the situation may be so far gone Putin inevitably emerges the winner. The last hope is that Biden immediately reverses course and seizes the initiative and insist the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline never operate until Russian troops leave any country that does not want them. Urgently required are more weapons and more NATO troops, not to fight but to train and exercise with Ukrainians, thereby increasing Moscow’s uncertainty and risk. So doing, of course, requires strength from the Europeans, especially France and Germany, that they may well lack.

This is Putin’s calculus, which Biden’s statements and last week’s negotiations did not change.

Time is on Putin’s side.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019 and US ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.

John Bolton’s Guide for Containing Russia and China

December 20, 2021

Drop the virtue signaling on democracy and put some boots on the ground in Ukraine. A Q&A with Trump’s former national security adviser.
By Tobin Harshaw

This article appeared in Bloomberg on December 18, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

Last month, I was in Honduras for its watershed presidential election. (OK, I was actually there to scuba dive, but it was during the watershed presidential election.) The result wasn’t a shock: The wife of a leftist former president with antidemocratic leanings beat the candidate of the right-wing ruling party with antidemocratic leanings. What was remarkable was how smoothly things went. The New York Times called it a “largely peaceful, orderly election” and reported that “the chief of the Organization of American States’s electoral observation mission, former President Luis Guillermo Solís of Costa Rica, called the vote ‘a beautiful example of citizen participation,’ noting the high turnout.”

Two weeks later, U.S. President Joe Biden held his Summit for Democracy, pledging “to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.” Guess who wasn’t invited: Honduras. And guess who was: Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq, all of which are rated “not free” in Freedom House’s annual democracy scorecard.

Political liberty, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. To make sense of the contradictions, I talked with somebody who has beheld many of them: John Bolton. Before his tempestuous tenure as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser — details of which can be found in his memoir, “The Room Where It Happened” — Bolton spent four decades in public service, including as U.S. representative to the United Nations under President George W. Bush. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion:

Tobin Harshaw: Let’s start with Biden’s democracy summit, which I assume you don’t think was a smash success. What about the administration’s stated effort to put democracy promotion back at the center of foreign policy?

John Bolton: I would start from a different conceptual perspective. What we should be fostering in the world is not the abstraction of democracy, we should be fostering freedom, and those two things are not the same. Democracy has come to mean all things bright and beautiful, and that just obscures the meaning of what we’re after. What we want are constitutional representative governments, and, by definition, all constitutional governments are limited governments, which means they’re not fully democratic. People can live in freedom with different kinds of governments.

TH: It’s hard to understand why some countries were invited — Congo and Pakistan — and others weren’t, like Hungary and Bangladesh.

JB: When you get to summits like this, you inevitably end up making distinctions that are somewhat arbitrary. What we really ought to focus on is the threats to free government in the world, and invite people who may not meet a standard of perfection.

One reason not to hold this particular summit was the fact that it was virtual. Anybody who has ever been to major international meetings — the general debate at the United Nations every September, G-20 summits — will tell you that what’s important is not the plenary meeting, the speeches that all the leaders read and that nobody listens to, but the bilaterals, the pull-asides, the informal meetings. That’s where you can get into real substance. So the whole thing strikes me as an exercise in symbolism. I don’t believe in virtue-signaling.

TH: I like your distinction between democracy and freedom. Isn’t it true that many if not most nations exist in some sort of gray area between being free and being unfree?

JB: Trying to make this into a contest between democracies and non-democracies misses the point. The biggest threats we face are authoritarian governments, and you’re going to have governments that can be important allies but don’t live up to the standards that we live by. That may be unpleasant, but it’s the reality we live in.

TH: That was certainly a reality that we lived in during the Cold War.

JB: As Winston Churchill put it: If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. That’s not to say we don’t hope that these friendly nations will become better representative governments, and in some respects that has happened. We had Spain as a member of NATO while Franco was still the authoritarian leader, and yet now we have a functioning representative government in Spain and in Portugal. I think that shows progress.

TH: If we are in a new Cold War with China, what are the countries we should be looking for as allies, even if they don’t measure up to our highest ideals?

JB: I don’t think it’s a Cold War with China. Because it’s not ideological like it was during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It’s two different systems for sure, but the authoritarian party that runs China now is not communist, except in name. It’s classic authoritarian, domestically and internationally.

The point we tried to make during the Trump administration was that we wanted a free and open Indo-Pacific, and we’re happy to band together with anybody who opposes countries that try to make it less than free and open. Vietnam is hardly a free democratic society, but it’s on the border with China and has longstanding historical concerns about Chinese hegemonic ambitions. I have no hesitation whatever to work with the government of Vietnam; one day they may decide to adopt a more representative government, and that would be great.

TH: There are people who feel that Chinese authoritarianism is an ideology — and that Beijing is trying to promote similar authoritarian states in its image through the Belt and Road Initiative and other things.

JB: I think the Chinese are less concerned about transforming foreign regimes than about dominating their own people. It’s a powerful argument against their system when you have social credit scores, where they judge the performance of their own citizens. That’s something a free society should reject. But I hardly put it in the category of communism or fascism or the more identifiable 20th-century ideologies.

TH: Weaker countries are finding themselves more and more dependent on Chinese investment and economic help through Belt and Road and other things. Do you think that they are in danger of becoming a string of vassal states, or do you think they will react against efforts by China to bring them into the net?

JB: In many cases they are already reacting against the circumstances they find themselves in. Because their previous governments did not scrutinize the terms of Belt and Road projects, they didn’t see the debt trap that they were walking into. That’s one thing that we ought to try to work with like-minded countries globally to help prevent. The West believes in free and open economic transactions, and the Chinese have a completely different model that they have worked with enormous success, in part by subverting and undercutting things like the World Trade Organization.

TH: Many people feel that one of those opportunities was tTrans-Pacific Partnership, yet the Trump administration pulled out before it was finalized, and the Biden administration doesn’t seem any warmer to it. Do you think that’s a mistake?

JB: The trouble with TPP was not its concept — to use an economic organization to help combat Chinese hegemonic aspirations. The problem with TPP was it didn’t do very much; it just wasn’t a very impressive deal. Now we should re-look at how you take a notion that’s correct conceptually and make it more effective. The whole Indo-Pacific today is more receptive to doing something than it was before.

TH: How can you have another project with these friends and allies who feel that the U.S. snubbed them in the end?

JB: They are very concerned about an American retreat from the region as a whole, and would welcome other initiatives. I think this is true really on a global basis. Part of the problem, starting with Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and now Biden doing the same thing, is that every other region thinks we’re lessening our attention to them. We’re a global power, and the idea that pulling out of Afghanistan or the Middle East is somehow necessary to better deal with China is a completely fallacious argument. As we pull out of these regions, the Chinese move in.

TH: The question of the moment: Is Vladimir Putin about to start the largest land war in Europe since World War II, by invading Ukraine?

JB: I think Putin is doing cost-benefit analysis in real time, 24/7, and his objective is to get more and more hegemony in the space of the former Soviet Union — which may or may not include more annexation, a la Crimea — and to do it at a minimal cost.

Our threatened sanctions aren’t enough to deter him, and I think the U.S. and Europe have both suffered from a lack of strategic thinking. It’s not just a Ukraine question, it’s a question of what you do with the gray-zone countries: Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova in one clump, and then Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the other. NATO expanded east but it didn’t think through the logical end point: How much more are we going to expand and who are we consciously going to leave in a gray zone? So now Putin is forcing us to answer that question.

TH: The cliche is that he plays a weak hand well.

JB: I say that all the time.

TH: Like most cliches, it’s true. So how does the West play its stronger hand more effectively? Should NATO expansion be seriously on the table?

JB: Sure. President George W. Bush put it seriously on the table in April 2008, with respect to Georgia and Ukraine, and the Germans and the French said no. And four months later, the Russians invaded Georgia. You don’t get many laboratory experiments in foreign affairs, but there’s one of them right there, and I’m afraid we’re seeing another one here.

I would put more American and other NATO forces into Ukraine, exercising and training with the Ukrainians. Not because I expect them to fight, but because I want every Russian commander looking at that border to think, good grief, if I’m ordered to go across, there are going to be Americans a few miles away. I would send Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Kyiv right now to talk about greater cooperation. I would airlift more weapons into Ukraine, and into NATO countries that border on it, to say to Putin: Your cost-benefit analysis is changing right in front of you.

TH: Finally, let’s talk nonproliferation. You had an op-ed column the other day that did a good job of highlighting all the flaws in the 2015 Iran Nuclear Pact, but I don’t see much progress from arguing about the past. Biden and Trump both promised that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. Is that even possible?

JB: Sure it is, but the problem is for 25 years we’ve had politicians of both parties who say it’s unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons, it’s unacceptable for North Korea to have nuclear weapons. I always took it to mean that if something is unacceptable, we wouldn’t accept it. And that means you have to take steps to stop it, including military force.

On Iran, I’m not sure the U.S. is going to have to do that, because Israel is prepared to act. North Korea remains a problem that successive American governments have failed on, and there’s nobody else in the world to blame for the success of the proliferators. We were the only ones who could stop them.

TH: What does success look like?

JB: You’ve got options for regime change in both North Korea and Iran. The idea that if we just negotiate a little bit harder, we’ll find a way to solve the problem, has been wrong for 20 years. It’s not just the threat that they might use the weapons, it’s that they would sell them or give them to others: to terrorist groups in the case of Iran, to anybody with hard currency in the case of North Korea.

TH: China, which long had a small and not particularly fearsome nuclear arsenal, has been expanding it like crazy. It’s building underground silos, it’s tested out this wacky space missile, and so forth: What happens if China really achieves nuclear parity with the U.S.?

JB: Then we’ve got a three-way nuclear standoff. During the Cold War, we were really in a bipolar nuclear environment with the Soviets, even if the U.K. and France and later China and other countries had some weapons. I think we’re past that bipolar point already, whatever China’s capability, because there’s no doubt they could scale up to the levels that Russia and the U.S. have under the New Start treaty. One of the things I said in the Trump administration was that any negotiation over New Start extension or replacement must include China.

TH: But there were good reasons that the USSR came to the table with President Ronald Reagan, and later Russia as well: The U.S. held all sorts of advantages. What reason would the Chinese have to come to the three-way table today?

JB: They feel they don’t have to, because the U.S. government through successive presidencies has failed to recognize the nature of the threat. We have far too long believed that the consequence of Deng Xiaoping moving toward more market-oriented domestic policies would mean a more democratic China internally, and a more responsible China externally. Those hypotheses have been proven completely wrong. I don’t think the Chinese fear us, and I don’t think they believe there will be any consequences for them becoming the third major nuclear power.

TH: So what is the strategy to bring them into talks?

JB: People have to wake up to the issue of how you want to deal with China overall. I think we’ve got to start imposing some economic costs. I’m not suggesting any military action, but because China’s approach is a whole of government, whole of society approach, we’ve got to respond in part the same way. It’s going to be economic retaliation with things we should have done already anyway — for example, penalize China for the theft of our intellectual property for the last three or four decades.

TH: Finally, you had a second op-ed piece this week on some of China’s other bad behavior — decrying its influence on international organizations such as the UN Human Rights Council. You were the American representative to the UN: Is there any chance of making it a useful tool in spreading the freedom you described earlier?

JB: No, I don’t think so. But it’s a place where you have to conduct the battle, to make the case. What happened with respect to the World Health Organization and coronavirus, what China has done to keep Taiwan outside the international system, what it has done to pervert the whole concept of human rights in the Human Rights Council, shows how it pretends to participate constructively in the international system. You have to expose that kind of behavior. It is part of the persuasion war that we are losing all around the world today.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

News

Drop the virtue signaling on democracy and put some boots on the ground in Ukraine. A Q&A with Trump’s former national security adviser. By Tobin Harshaw

Drop the virtue signaling on democracy and put some boots on the ground in Ukraine. A Q&A with Trump’s former national security adviser.
By Tobin Harshaw