Harry Litman [00:00:07] Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. I'm Harry Litman. The Biden administration turned its attention outward this week to a world that suddenly appears more dangerous to U.S. interests than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines cited multiple challenges in our annual threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee. These included China's emergence as a near peer competitor, Russia's continuing cyber espionage, Iran's effort to destabilize the Middle East, North Korea's military buildup and global and domestic terrorism. The president seems to be matching his ambition in domestic policy with an early assertiveness in foreign affairs, designed in part to undo the consequences of President Trump's lax approach to foreign mischief. In the first 60 days of his presidency, Biden has had dustups with China, which has emerged as the US's most formidable long term adversary, and with Russia, which compensates for a relatively weak economic hand through sophisticated cyber espionage and the bullying of its regional neighbors, especially Ukraine.
At the end of the week, Biden dropped the thunderous announcement that he was withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan and thereby ending the United States' longest war. Biden and his advisers concluded that no amount of United States force could sustain a durable Afghan government, essentially conceding the strong possibility that the Taliban, massed in neighboring Pakistan, would overrun the country once the U.S. leaves. The decision was recognized and by some experts endorsed as a concession that the United States faces serious problems on too many simultaneous fronts to continue to commit outsize resources to an endless stalemate. For a country beginning to show signs of finally emerging from the pandemic, the week's events were a sobering reminder of the old and new dangers it faces around the globe and the fragility of its own position as the world's dominant power. To discuss these seismic events and assess the Biden administration's early performance in foreign affairs, we have three of the most knowledgeable and experienced experts on foreign policy and national security in the country. They are:.
David Frum. David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He has written 10 books, most recently Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy. He served in government as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002, during which the United States went to war in Afghanistan. David also served as chair of the Board of Trustees of the UK Center Right Think Tank Policy Exchange from 2014 to 2017. We're really proud that he has joined us on numerous occasions and still keeps coming back. David, thanks as always for being here.
David Frum [00:03:28] Thank you.
Harry Litman [00:03:29] And we're delighted to welcome two first time guests, first: Evan McMullin. Evan McMullin's the executive director of Stand Up Republic, a nonpartisan watchdog organization defending truth and democracy. He was an independent candidate for president during the 2016 election, and previously he served as a chief policy director for the House Republican Conference, an operations officer of the CIA from 2001 to 2010, and a senior adviser on national security for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2015. Evan McMullin, thank you very much for joining us on Talking Feds.
Evan McMullin [00:04:12] Great to be with you.
Harry Litman [00:04:13] And Fiona Hill, the Robert Bosch senior fellow in the center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. Fiona Hill recently served as deputy assistant to President Trump and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. She also served from 2006 to 2009 as the National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. She's the coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, we are really thrilled to welcome you to Talking Feds. Thank you so much for joining us, Fiona.
Fiona Hill [00:04:55] Thanks for having me, Harry.
Harry Litman [00:04:56] I think we could spend several hours on any of a few international stories from the week and their repercussions for the United States. But let's start with the announced end of the longest war in United States history, the 'forever war' with Afghanistan, as Biden called it in his short and fairly stoic speech. It seems to me there is an arguable, if tepid consensus emerging that his decision was the least bad of the bad options. Does that seem fair? Would you endorse that view?
Evan McMullin [00:05:30] I don't think we know yet. There's another piece of this that has yet to come, I think, which is OK, what do we do now? We're withdrawing troops, I think the country is ready for that. The American public are tired of being there. Obviously, our nation building efforts there, although they have yielded some success, they haven't been what we hoped they would be, they've cost a lot of money. And so the question, though, is what will we do to ensure that Afghanistan does not become a safe haven for terrorists once again, from which they will plot and launch attacks against the West and against our homeland? And I think that remains a challenge, and I think this situation may create opportunities for us to think anew and develop new capacities to deny Afghanistan to terrorists as a safe haven. But it's unclear about how we're going to do that at this point. I think there are some opportunities, but we'll have to do that even as we perhaps make the best of a bunch of bad decisions, or we take the best option among many less than ideal options in Afghanistan.
David Frum [00:06:43] I think the days of worrying about terrorist safe haven became obsolete with the advent of social media. Terrorists don't need safe havens the way they used to in a more hierarchical world. In 1995, if you wanted to become an Islamic terrorist, you had to get on a plane and go to Sudan or Yemen or Afghanistan and enter a program and report to a superior, and they would provide the training, and the weapons and the mission. Since 2005, terrorism of all kinds, Islamic, white nationalist has been much more self-motivated. The terrorists find online the ideology, the justification, they choose their own targets, they choose their own weapons, they choose their own procedures. And, of course, that they are much more likely to be European-born or American-born than people who fly in from another place. The interest in Afghanistan is about America preserving its word, and not allowing friends and allies, people plighted their faith to the United States 20 years ago to be hacked to pieces and the women and girls who relied on us to be rechattelized, if that's a word — turned back into chattels.
So I understand the logic of drawing down your footprint, the United States has been doing that for a while. I understand the logic of not overcommitting to Afghanistan. I would say to make one partizan point, Afghanistan became a way for Democrats who wanted to criticize the Bush administration's over commitment to Iraq, as they saw it, to have an overcommitment of their own that they built up too much. So we probably did overinvest in Afghanistan, but I don't think it's ever a good idea to say we're withdrawing from Country X. You want to take the troops down from 3000 to 1200 and see how that works, that's fine. But Biden is now going to have an ongoing problem, which is every time he authorizes a drone strike, every time there is some covert operation, his critics will say, 'wait a moment, you said you withdrew from Afghanistan,' when what he really means is 'I am reducing our regular army infantry footprint.' And so I would have advised him, I know why it was difficult, and I know he's had a long standing commitment to ending this operation, just to not say much, just take the troops out, be quiet and maintain the drone and special forces presence and try to then honor our commitments and to protect the people who gave faith to the United States.
Evan McMullin [00:08:56] If I could just respond to that, and I'll be brief and give Fiona a chance to jump in on this. But I agree with a lot of what David said, and I think terrorism has changed dramatically over the last 20 years, certainly since 9/11. But the issue of safe havens is still an important one. The sort of changes in terrorism that David talked about changed by necessity as a result of our denying terrorist organizations a safe haven in which they could organize further and plot larger scale attacks and plan and prepare for them, develop capacities for them. When we denied them, that's when they shifted to a different recruiting approach. Yes, using social media, leveraging and inspiring lone wolf attacks that tend to have a lesser impact in terms of lives lost and terror created. But they switched or they made that transition because they were denied safe haven.
So it was inspired by that necessity, I think if you allow them to establish a new safe haven or reestablish a safe haven they had in the past, I would expect them to go back to using it to their strategic advantage, as I think they'll be able to. Now, that said, I'm not saying that we need to maintain a troop presence, at least conventional forces in Afghanistan. I think it's time for a change in approach, and I do agree that one way to maintain an ability there is through drones and, yes, special forces or if not special forces, an intelligence capacity that can exist on a smaller scale without a U.S. troop presence. But safe havens, I just have to say, I think it continues to be important that we not simply allow anywhere on Earth to become an open zone for plotting, planning and training of terrorists.
Fiona Hill [00:10:52] Yeah, I'll jump in here. I've been listening very carefully to this, and obviously, I think this is an incredibly difficult dilemma. And to be honest, I personally feel quite conflicted about everything. And I think that, you know, what David is saying about what we say about this is very important, the overall messaging, because it's both David and Evan, you know, pointing out the nature of terrorism has changed, but the idea of a safe haven still remains. And the biggest problem that we have still is regional insecurity, because Afghanistan remains pretty much a failed state that is being propped up through various means, and a region that is already an acute source of tension, not just regionally, but also globally, more broadly on the borders with Pakistan, Pakistan, India remain in a perpetual standoff. We've seen clashes recently between China and India over the disputed Himalayas, Afghanistan's in China's neighborhood as well.
And obviously, Iran and the Biden administration are now grappling, just as previous administrations have, with what to do with Iran, and Iran has always been a major factor in Afghanistan. We've got difficult relationships with Turkey, which has traditionally played a role in Afghanistan as well, not just in a NATO context, but historically. And we've now added ourselves to the long list of countries back in the imperial era and then more recently, who have found that Afghanistan has been an incredibly difficult issue to tackle from every imaginable angle. So just like the Russians, we're now withdrawing, although in this case, after 20 years rather than after a decade, the Soviet Union attempted the same thing that the United States did, shifting from an intervention that was meant to solve a problem of imminent political collapse, quickly finding themselves in the middle of a basically an insurgency war. But, of course, we were contributing to the Mujahideen, and then feeling overstretched and basically seeing enormous domestic repercussions and then having to withdraw, you know, really around the whole time that the Soviet Union falls apart.
And some of the messaging from that is really quite negative for the United States as well. Now, like everyone else, the Brits before, with the devastation of the withdrawal from Kabul with tens of thousands of people dying and really showing the inadequacies of the British Empire, showing that we ourselves have found the kind of limits to what we've been able to do there. Not the limits on counter-terrorism, but the limits of what else we were setting ourselves out to do. That messaging of saying that we were in the process of nation building. I say, why have we pulled back? Because of problems at home as well, because we've got to get our own house in order. And I think that this is what David is really sort of getting at here. It's that difficulty of messaging around this, because we have to be very careful, you know, what we're saying about what we're doing. And also what are we sending is a signal about where the United States is to everybody else who's watching?
David Frum [00:13:44] If I can just say something on behalf of Fiona's native Britain, though, about their presence in Afghanistan, because the British experience is often used as the second proof point in the Afghanistan graveyard of empires myth. The British did have a military presence in Kabul in the 1840s and it ended in disaster. They retreated and there was a tragic ambush of the retreating infantry column of the civilian population, including women and children, and they were cut to pieces. But the British then reasserted a form of indirect rule over Afghanistan that operated extremely successfully from about the middle of the 1840's until the end of the Raj in the 1940s. And the moral of the British experience in Afghanistan is don't try to run the place, but you can, working with local friends, and applying power point to point money. And the British ultimately did use air power in Afghanistan. Make sure that Afghanistan doesn't become a danger to anything you care about, and you can keep faith with your friends.
Fiona Hill [00:14:39] That's like a really important point. And that's what I mean about the messaging and about what David was saying about being very careful about what you're saying about pulling down the troops or what you're trying to achieve. There might be other ways of tackling this. That's why I was putting the emphasis on the regional aspect of this, too. It may be that we start thinking about Iran or what we're doing with Pakistan and India. How are we going to posture ourselves with China and in fact, down the line in a very difficult relationship with Russia? It may be that we might find some other way of dealing with this, and so we have to be very careful about messaging now, where it looks like more like a defeat.
Harry Litman [00:15:14] I think that's right. And the way that the administration tried to message it, it seems to me, was by aiming to persuade that our main goals were achieved, which Biden described as crippling al-Qaida and showing nations we won't tolerate the sheltering of terrorists. But, of course, you could have stopped at the Mission Accomplished speech in 2003, if that's the goal, as you were really trying to show here. And I just want to go back to this safe haven point because I understand the importance of it. And you're putting it in a slightly different spin on it, David, with trying to do it in an indirect way. But I take the general assessment that this is the least bad of the bad options that we are very possibly throwing in the towel here, that we're expecting the Taliban to return from Pakistan and quickly take over Afghanistan, causing terrorist problems in in Pakistan itself. And that it's really a kind of concession that we just have bigger problems abroad, not simply at home. Let me serve up as a kind of final question here, do you really think we can hold out hope that we won't have a replay of Vietnam and that in a year from now we're just back with Taliban and whatever that means in terms of harboring of terrorists back in sway as they were 20 years ago?
Evan McMullin [00:16:41] Well, what I would expect to see is that within a year or two, the Taliban will have retaken most of the south of Afghanistan as well as the east, and expanded their areas of control elsewhere in the country. I expect the cities, which are now under Afghan government control, supported by Western and other allies, they will be challenged as well, control for major Afghan cities. It's a real problem, but I don't think that we're leaving Afghanistan entirely. Yes, there's a troop drawdown, it does mean that we'll have less capacity in Afghanistan. But I think the administration understands that simply abandoning Afghanistan entirely is simply not an option. We've learned that lesson too recently. I just think we're going to find different ways, hopefully, to look after our interests there. And I do think it will be a combination of technology, drones, maybe some special forces staging from outside of Afghanistan, certainly intelligence operations, working with some of our regional non-governmental allies over time. But I think that's what this becomes, I think it becomes a question of managing a very, very difficult problem rather than solving it. We've been trying to solve it, we're not going to solve it. We're going to manage it, and we'll have some wins and losses on that front, too. But it'll be a lot less costly.
Fiona Hill [00:18:13] Yeah, I think that's spot on, managing the problem. That's exactly the task you've moved into.
David Frum [00:18:18] I seriously doubt that the Taliban gets back into the terrorism sponsoring business and for two reasons. The first is during the 20 year struggle between the United States and the Taliban, the Taliban financed itself by trafficking in heroin. And whenever that happens in an insurgency group, eventually the group begins as a terrorist group with a sideline in drug trafficking. But the drug traffickers have the money and the guns, and eventually become a drug trafficking group with the sideline in terrorism. And the terrorism is very bad for the drug smuggling business, and the drug smuggling people are going to say, 'you know, we we might do a little regional terrorism, but to get into a big fight with the United States, are you crazy? 'You know, I've got a I've got a business to run.' The second thing is to remember the Taliban aren't a threat to Pakistan, they are in operation of Pakistan.
They can again do small local things the Pakistanis don't know about and don't like, but most of their big things are things the Pakistanis, maybe they know about them, maybe they don't, but they certainly do like. One of the things we're going to have to rethink about the thickening US relationship with India, and we're going have a different set of challenges, but again, we've had a lot of terrorism over the last 20 years with no Taliban in Afghanistan. And we'll continue to have terrorism and and it will flourish and lots, lots of places. And Afghanistan is in fact, when you think about it — terrible airline connections, bad Wi-Fi, it's a terrible place to locate a terrorist headquarters. There are a lot of better places to do it, and I'm sure that the terrorists will figure that out as well as I do.
Harry Litman [00:19:42] And maybe you're right that it's just a different business now, terrorism, you don't locate it in the same way. Everyone's always talked about the war on terror being endless, but maybe when we write the history of this 15, 20 years from now, we'll just see this as sort of a sea change from a conventional boots on the ground warfare with a different kind of enemy to very unconventional warfare.
Fiona Hill [00:20:06] One final thought that actually gives us a segue to this, is that terrorism is a tool. And I mean frankly, states use terror as well in similar ways, and often engage in some of the same kinds of actions. And of course, we've had that whole discussion about bounties that were purportedly put on American servicemen's heads, perhaps by some Russian unit in and around Afghanistan. We don't know the full details. And in fact, in recent reports, the government has had very low to moderate confidence, which suggests that they don't really know whether this is a thing or not. But that kind of makes the point that to engage in terror have all kinds of other means, as David is suggesting. And really you just mentioned yourself as well Harry, that movement into different forms of warfare. So a state can also adopt terrorist tactics, but there are many other ways of making that point felt. And the way that we have moved now in the region is into countries that are not just thinking in conventional or even unconventional military terms about how they can make their presence felt, the kind of points made by the United States.
But you know how they can sort of attack us or get at us in ways that don't necessarily provoke a kinetic military response. So cyber actions as David suggested, Afghanistan wouldn't be a great place to launch a massive cyber attack from. You're not going to be able to really connect yourself in a way from there as you would be in other places. And so maybe the threat dimensions are shifting, we still have the conventional military threat, we still have the nuclear threat, but we're really now getting into a realm of different domains in which we're really worrying. Information war, hybrid war, the sphere of cyber war and conflicts in space. And so we're moving into completely different categories there. And a lot of state actors are in that space, and cyber criminals and maybe terrorist groups that have cyber capacity are going to be enormous challenges in trying to bring down grids, and hacking into our main foreign systems and to private sector companies. The world is shifting around us in different directions that we'll have to factor in.
Harry Litman [00:22:07] It's a great point and a great segue, so let's turn to Russia and let's start with the sanctions. So first, in a sense, he draws another, does Biden, sharp line with the past. Trump was notoriously, if not perversely soft on Russia and ignored his own intelligence agencies conclusion. Here, Biden expressly relies on them, I'm thinking of the solar winds hack in particular, and the election meddling and aims to impose serious, though I think proportionate, as they put it, sanctions. So let's start there with the degree of sanctions. Putin, among other accomplishments, it seems to me, has insulated Russia more than other countries from the pain of sanctions from afar. They have a very low government and private debt, they have a high government surplus. How much do these sanctions really hurt Russia?
Fiona Hill [00:23:10] All kinds of ways, I mean, it is actually the fact that sanctions have really impinged on the ability to grow the Russian economy. There are many people who have looked into this and documented this in quite some detail. At the same time as you're suggesting Harry, Russia has been able to, in a way, a substitute for sanctions. I mean, literally, if they've had various imports cut off, then they've basically tried to stimulate the domestic economy to replace that, to literally substitute for this. But where things have really been difficult for them have been on the personal sanctions. They don't like that. And the question has really been in all of the different sanctions about how much we're going to single out various individuals, and in fact, I was just looking at my phone just as we started this taping because it looks like the Russian government have retaliated with some sanctions against some US individuals, which is like the tit for tat aspect of this, you usually suggest. Because they really don't like that they find it insulting, but it also does create some difficulties here.
So it looks like, I've got the Russian government website up here, this is a proportional aspect and often they are disproportionate. The Russians will decide that they're going to curb the number of diplomats that we can have at our embassies when we kick out the intelligence operatives, because they really value having their intel guys who can run around as hit squads on the cyber front, or literally as assassination teams. They don't like the diplomacy in the same way that we did, they put more value on the intel operations and less value on diplomacy. And that really hurts us when they cut down the numbers of people we can have at our embassies. We cut down consulates, they cut down consulates. But as we've announced a number of sanctions against people that we've seen being involved in operations, now they've sanctioned Merrick Garland, according to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alejandro Mayorkas, Susan Rice, which I thought was a little odd because although she used to, of course, deal with Russia in a previous position, she's more on the domestic front right now, Chris Wray, Avril Haines and John Bolton, which is strange, and Jim Woolsey.
Harry Litman [00:25:22] OK, very good. Well, let me just ask you, because we expel 10 Russian diplomats and we impose sanctions on particular entities, what are they doing to Merrick Garland and John Bolton and Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of Homeland Security?
Fiona Hill [00:25:38] Well, they're basically saying that they're going to mirror the same sanctions and obviously ban them from coming to Russia. I mean, notably, they haven't done this to Bill Burns, which suggests that they're leaving doors open here. They're just trying to sort of signal a way proportionality, but with the extra icing on the cake of Bolton and Woolsey, which I thought was slightly odd. But anyway, and Susan Rice obviously making some comments about the fact that President Biden said this was unfinished business. But at the same time, as I said, it looks like they're leaving some doors open because if they had done something against Bill Burns, for example, who at this juncture is not just the head of the CIA, but perhaps the biggest Russian heavyweight in terms of his previous positions and previous work on Russia, that would suggest that they didn't want to leave the door open for trying to stabilize the relationship and find a way past this. And that's really the art of what we've been trying to do. We want to send a strong message, but, you know, we can debate whether we've done that or not, but we want to leave the door open to try to stabilize this relationship.
Harry Litman [00:26:36] Yes. So we've done things publicly, but Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, says the sanctions alone won't deter them and there are going to be seen and unseen actions. What is he referring to there?
David Frum [00:26:53] There's an inherent asymmetry between the Western countries and Russia, because Russians stored their wealth outside Russia and Westerners do not store their wealth inside Russia. And just to give you an idea of the many, many pain points that that creates, one of the things that you remember that President Trump and President Trump's favorite podcaster Tucker Carlson got very excited about was the entry of Montenegro into NATO. And they kept warning that if we let Montenegro into NATO, that's it. We're in danger of triggering World War III. You think, wait a minute. Montenegro is 2000 kilometers from the Russian border. First, why do the Russians care? In what way is this a threat to any Russian interest? And the answer is, well, Montenegro was the one place on the Adriatic where a Russian could park a yacht without worry about EU sanctions. And when Montenegro joined the EU and join NATO, that suddenly made that yacht park a much more transparent place for international law enforcement. And there, I mean, it's like kind of like the Miami Beach of a certain kind of rich Russian.
There are lots of condos, there's a bank, and what they're terrified of is ordinary police work. They're just terrified of somebody who's maybe not even part of the state, but has committed some other kind of financial crime, which so many other important people connected to the Russian state have done, and they just find that their banker in Montenegro suddenly reveals, you know, spending details to the EU police, or that their yacht can be seized if they don't pay their debts. So the pain points are asymmetric. I think there's also the thing that the Russians are dealing with, they have a kind of imperial nostalgia where someone like Vladimir Putin can remember that there was a time when Russia or the Soviet Union was the strategic, not equal of the United States, but at least was playing on the same field. And so they've got some very bad habits, poor risk calculation. And the 2016 election was really an example of that, I mean, as it happened, their bet paid off, at least in the short run. But generally, if you take the rent money and go to the casino and bet it on roulette, it's still not a smart idea, even should you happen to win, because once you win, you're going to make a habit of it and you're certain to lose.
And the idea that they would have interfered in an American election that was bound to catch up with them and now it's going to catch up with them. The Treasury just confirmed what everyone has known, that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort gave very important, proprietary campaign polling information to a business associate who had dealings with Russian intelligence. And while there's some question marks over the story like this, it's uncertain whether a candidate Trump knew in real time about this, whether Manafort was acting to further some corrupt scheme of his own, of which he had plenty. But certainly Trump didn't object, and certainly Manafort got the benefit of a presidential pardon. I think, so a lot of these things in the end, I mean, Russia remains a country with the GDP of approximately Italy. It's got nuclear weapons, true. So does China, so does Israel. That does not in itself make you the equal of the United States, the thing that being a superpower means is you have a spectrum. Yes, you know, maybe Russia can threaten us with nuclear weapons, but they can't threaten American yacht people with having their yacht seized for debt, because no American's parking a yacht in Russia, whereas lots of Russians are parking yachts where U.S. and EU law enforcement can catch up with them.
Fiona Hill [00:30:09] Davis made some great points here, and he's obviously right. There's a lot of yacht parks actually, I mean, it's not just, as you're saying, off Montenegro, but that was kind of, as you said, the last safe haven. But, you know, we've provided plenty — you've talked about Miami. Delaware, actually, strangely enough, is one of the places the yachts are registered, but not necessarily parked. We've got a lot of problems in our own system here that if we actually closed up loopholes and basically implemented our own regulations, we'd also make it very difficult for Russians to park their money, not just their yachts in different places. You know, be there apartment buildings in New York or condos in Miami or elsewhere, too. And that's what Russians are really worried about, because just as we're not investing money in property in Moscow, at least large numbers of us are not, Russians don't want to have all their money parked at home either. That's the problem of the system. And an awful lot of the Russian oligarchs, Putin and the people around him included, like to have property elsewhere in Europe.
They'd like to be able to take advantage of all of the pleasures and the leisure that Europe affords them at the same time in the United States as well, at the same time that they want to impose upon us in different ways. And that's the dilemma that we're trying to respond to. The Russians see and want to see the United States as a security threat, and Putin looks at our capabilities and capacities and wants to roll those back. And this comes in lots of different forms, it's not just in terms of the conventional and nuclear forces, but it's also just in the way that we conduct ourselves. And as David says, when there's that massive asymmetry in many different forms and Russia is so much weaker than the United States in so many ways that you know, the Russians have to take all kinds of subversive action to be able to push back. But the point in other ways in which Russia feels vulnerable, it's that sort of bright spotlight that we used to cast in the past on the kleptocracy and the corruption, but also on the way that they were running the country internally.
And so what Putin really liked during the Trump period was the fact that President Trump didn't put any spotlight on that at all, and, in fact, that we had so much chaos at home that we looked like we couldn't get our act together, and Russia actually looked good in comparison. There was an awful lot of Putin crowing at home about now look at the United States, the much vaunted United States can't even run an election. Because, you know, the Russians got a multiple wins from the 2016 election from interfering. As David said, they couldn't possibly have thought that there wouldn't be any blowback from that, but it was a win win because the fact that we were basically saying that, look, it looks like they might have even tipped this election. I mean, my God, that was a kind of a clap on the back and loads of medals for members of the intelligence services saying, look at that, we're so powerful, we're so clever and we've launched such a fantastic operation that we might have switched candidates or even had an impact on the outcome of the US election.
On the other hand, it also reduced all of our confidence in the election by the fact that they were there, and they were messing about, although I have to say very clearly that they didn't have an influence on the actual election votes and on the vote count. But the fact that they were messing about, though, had everybody so freaked out that suddenly our confidence in ourselves disappeared. And that's what the Russians want to show, they want to show that we are not the superpower, we're not in charge anymore. And they want to divert us away from doing the very things that David is suggesting, which is trying to roll them back. And Putin is just of that mindset that the United States remains a threat, and he wants us to remain a threat because otherwise they're left exposed with China, as David saying, they're not the powerful player that they used to be. They're not up there and near the top economies in a way that actually might have been at some points in the 2000s. And they've got lots of their own vulnerabilities, including for Putin wanting to stay in the presidency until his 80s out there till 2036, as he's recently decided, and lots of opposition internally. Any sign of weakness becomes a problem at home, not just abroad.
David Frum [00:34:08] And one of the things that's going to enhance the asymmetry, and maybe the most important thing that Biden is doing in all of his foreign policy is this breathtaking vaccination rollout. You try to think over the past dozen years of a large project undertaken by the United States government that wasn't in some degree or another a failure or a fiasco, from Iraq to the attempt to put the economy back on its feet after the collapse of 2008-2009, I mean, so many things went wrong. And then suddenly we're doing this thing and it is like the America you knew. I mean, and if you had the experience of going to one of these giant depots and seeing the National Guard there and bang, bang, bang, vaccinations in arms, I mean, I, I keep thinking, to quote an eminent Russian, I don't know if I can say this on on your podcast, which is a little blue, but Alexander Ovechkin, in the year that the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup, Ovechkin gave a speech. He doesn't speak good English, he picked up the Stanley Cup, held it over his head and said, 'This year, we no fucking suck.' And and I think that's the American slogan for 2021. And that display of the ability to roll out a big thing and do it right and not only do it right, but do it better than any other major — I mean, with all due respect to Bahrain and Bhutan and Israel, any other continent sized society, no one's done anything like this. It's amazing.
Harry Litman [00:35:29] And it's propelling his general popularity, and I just want to say a quick tip of the hat to Ron Klain, whose teeth in the Ebola context and really as chief of staff is running it. All right, I don't want to leave Russia without talking briefly about Ukraine. So 40,000 troops seem to be massed on the eastern border of Ukraine. Biden pledges unwavering support and president Zelensky, whom we remember from a couple of years ago, said, look, we need more than words here. What is Russia's play here? Would they really try, if they could, to annex Ukraine or is it just a saber rattling operation?
Fiona Hill [00:36:11] It's not just a saber rattling operation. If they feel they need to, they'll poke that saber into someone, you know. So basically, we have to be careful about that. But exactly why they're doing this, in many respects, this is a rerun of things that they've done before. I mean, yes, they annexed Crimea, which was pretty significant in 2014, and then they sparked off this war in Donbass soon thereafter to keep Ukraine very much on its toes. And they clearly had aspirations to go further if they could, perhaps even to annex territory in Donbas and further afield that might join up with Crimea. They pull back from that in large part because of the response that they got from the United States and others with sanctions which were unified early on with Europe. Since then, they've obviously been trying to send a signal to Ukraine that they will not let Ukraine succeed in becoming a sovereign, independent state that's getting its act together. And they certainly won't let Ukraine join forces with the European Union and NATO.
That's exactly what this was all been about. And recently, Zelensky has been making noises about NATO joint exercises. You might remember back in 2008 with Georgia when the Russians rolled on in. That was partly the result of Saakashvili making a bit of an ill-advised military move in South Ossetia, which had been pulled away from him by the Russians as much as anything else, but also because Georgia and Ukraine at that time were trying to push for a membership action plan with NATO. They were rejected in 2008, but Georgia really forged ahead and the Ukrainians pulled back. The Georgians got clobbered. And this is happening again now, Ukrainians talk about NATO again. They talk about maybe having some exercises. Biden says we're really going to support Ukraine, and the Russians are basically saying, 'oh, yeah? And you and whose army?' Which is basically what they said to Saakashvili in 2008.
Putin literally told Saakashvili, 'your western allies promised you a lot. They promised you membership action plan at NATO, you know, Bucharest in 2008, you got nothing. I threatened you, I delivered.' And basically, Zelensky has been put on notice that we could beat the crap out of you if you wanted to be more of a, you know, take a Ovechkin out to you basically. I mean, you're going to get clobbered if you make any further moves. And also because we were seeing in Ukraine that they were trying to move ahead on economic reform. Zelensky is trying to get his act together, and every time they make a step forward, the Russians go after them. There's also a problem is that the war in the Donbass is pretty much insoluble, really, because Ukraine doesn't want it back, because it's going to be a ruined area that will just drag them down and it'll be a perpetual sore in Ukraine.
Harry Litman [00:38:53] This is the area that Russia annexed a few years ago, yes?
Fiona Hill [00:38:56] Yeah, and that's where a lot of the troops are now poised, and of course, they've also done a pincer movement with Crimea because they're trying to force the Ukrainians to open up all kinds of water resources and infrastructure into Crimea that Ukraine's been very reluctant to. The Russians don't really want Donbass either, for the same reasons they want to keep Donbass as a kind of a nasty screw that they keep turning against the Ukrainians. We just don't really know honestly how we're going to be able to solve that one. And the Russians also know that we're not going to fight for Ukraine. We're not going to send in the boys, because then the Russians will make it clear that they are prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian and are we? And so this becomes a really difficult situation for us to solve. It's one of those conundrums that it might get back to what Evan and David was saying about Afghanistan. We might have to manage this, temper our expectations about what we're going to be able to pull off here.
Evan McMullin [00:39:46] And I think that's exactly right. I think this is another one of those problems that, you know, we don't solve any time soon, and probably not as long as Putin is in power. It really is a question of management, and that's one reason why I'm actually encouraged by what we're seeing now from a US policy perspective vis-a-vis Russia, and that we seem to be a little less naive now about Russia. I mean, both parties administrations have engaged, I think, in some naivety or hopeful wishful thinking with regard to Putin over the years. And then certainly Trump took a wholly different, perhaps perverted, Harry, to use your word, I think, approach to Putin, but now it's not that I think there's a greater recognition that Putin has long standing grievances in his mind about the end of the Soviet Union and the victory of the West, and that shapes his approach to the West and to the United States, and I think forever will. And of course, I would defer to Fiona's expertize on him. She literally wrote the book, but I think now we've got to make clear where our lines are. We've got to draw clear lines, meaning we've got to articulate clear consequences for malign activities and aggression that I think Russia has increasingly used , and at the same time, look for opportunities to work together. And I think those opportunities do exist, but we shouldn't wait around anymore or hope for some kind of transformational change in the way Putin approaches the West. I think it's just not going to happen. We've got to draw a clear line, stick to them. And at the same time, as I said, look for opportunities to cooperate where they exist.
Harry Litman [00:41:33] It really is noteworthy that whenever we talk about Russia, it's Putin, Putin, Putin and if you endorse the sort of great man in the sense of big man theory of history. Robert Gates said nothing's going to really work as long as Putin is there, and more than we think of the pivotal power of any given leader in a given situation, it seems to always come back to him. All right, I want to call quick audible here. And instead of doing the five words or fewer than we do at the end, serve up this question to all three of you, which is, is it too early to assess or characterize a Biden foreign policy? It's been 60 days. We've had dustups with both China and Russia, China. We haven't even mentioned China in this episode, are we able to describe and assess what a Biden foreign policy is?
David Frum [00:42:29] Way too early. He's not had the first big crisis of his administration, he certainly hasn't had anything that is not leftover business from the previous administration. There's nothing where he has had to revisit or rethink, there's nothing his team has had to work together as a team. And that's been good, and let's all be grateful for the peace and quiet while we can enjoy it and hope that the crisis when it comes, comes as late and as little as possible.
Evan McMullin [00:42:55] I would agree with that, but I would also say that I think that there's a flavor of of pragmatism, I think in the Biden foreign policy so far, you know, it is early. So let's see what happens. But you look at the approach to Iran now, the attempt to restart negotiations there, the withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan, and hopefully another way of preventing Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist safe haven, which I still think is relevant and important. I think there's reason to believe, perhaps, that we've learned some of our lessons from naivety and misadventures over the last few decades especially, and that maybe our approach now is just more pragmatic. And I hope that continues to be the case.
Fiona Hill [00:43:45] Yeah, I agree. I mean, I just think it's far too early to really say, I mean, he's almost come in as the cleanup operation. And, you know, we were not quite there yet. Sort of like the spillage in aisle 4 is, you know, still not quite contained here. But I'm with Evan and David that some of the signs are somewhat promising. I think his biggest challenge is really how you tie the foreign policy to the domestic front. This whole discussion about what does a foreign policy for the middle class look like? I mean, that's pretty difficult to articulate, actually. And how does that then start to shape some of your discussions with allies as well as adversaries, and the way that you starting to shape that? And I think that will be interesting because maybe this is going to be the key as to whether he can really fully articulate what that means. And that will be his stamp on it.
Harry Litman [00:44:34] Yeah, he has certainly advanced that as his overall goal.
Thank you very much to Fiona, David and Evan, and thank you very much, listeners, for tuning in to Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts, and please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. You can follow us on Twitter, @TalkingFedsPod , to find out about future episodes and other Feds-related content. You can check us out on the web, talkingfeds.com , where we have full episode transcripts, and you can look to see our latest offerings on Patreon, where we post discussions about special topics exclusively for supporters, like the one we just had with Steve Vladeck about the Supreme Court's use of its shadow docket to change the law of free exercise. Submit your questions to questions@talkingfeds.com , whether it's for Five Words or Fewer or general questions about the inner-workings of the legal system for our Sidebar segments. Thanks for tuning in, and don't worry: as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking.
Talking Feds is produced by Jennifer Bassett and Rebecca Lowe Patton. Our editor is Justin Wright. David Lieberman and Rosie Dawn Griffin are our contributing writers. Production assistants by Matt McArdle. Research assistants by Abby Meyer. Our consulting producer is Andrea Carla Michaels. Our gratitude, as always, to the amazing Philip Glass, who graciously lets us use his music. Talking Feds as a production of Dalito, LLC. I'm Harry Litman, see you next time.
