John Sullivan
Subject: What Is Putin Thinking?
Bio: US Ambassador to Russia during the Trump and Biden Administrations and previously Deputy Secretary of State
Reading: Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia’s War Against The West is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and international relations.
The topic today is Putin is a Thug.
Our speaker is John Sullivan who was formerly the US Ambassador to Russia during the Trump and Biden Administrations and previously Deputy Secretary of State. John just published a new book entitled Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia’s War.
I plan to ask John about why Putin decided to invade Ukraine. Did Putin’s fears of NATO encirclement and his impressions of our Afghanistan withdrawal debacle affect Putin’s thinking?
I want to hear if the Russians are close to making their way to the negotiation table and whether the Kursk offensive will give them a push.
Buckle up.
John, please begin with your opening remarks.
John Sullivan:
I wrote this book, Midnight in Moscow, after I retired from public service. My motivation was to write about what I saw as the US Ambassador how the Russians and Putin launched this aggressive war. My audience was Americans who don't seem to understand the threat that the United States faces from the Russian Federation.
I wrote a memoir, explaining how I got to Moscow, what I saw in my first two years before the war started. A very difficult time in US-Russia relations, and how that relationship plummeted after the Russians’ invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. I believe it's in the vital security interests of the United States to oppose Russian aggression in Ukraine. And to my fellow Republicans who say they don't care about Ukraine. I disagree with them, but if you vote for those defense and intel budgets, then why would you not oppose Russian aggression in Ukraine where it can be done more effectively and more cheaply?
Larry Bernstein:
This is the third memoir I've read by a US ambassador to Russia. I read Jack Matlock's book about his time with Reagan and Gorbachev. I also did a book club with Michael McFaul who was the Russian Ambassador for Obama. McFaul was very upset about his treatment as ambassador by the local Russian KGB. They made his life miserable.
John Sullivan:
Ambassador McFaul is a friend of mine, and he was kind enough to write a blurb for my book. I met with him at Stanford when I was still Deputy Secretary before I went to Moscow. I had no illusions about how the Russian government was going to treat me. I never felt physically unsafe. I didn't think that the Russians wanted anything physically to happen to me. It would look bad on them if something happened to the US ambassador in Moscow. It was their relentless effort to embarrass me in every way they possibly could, whether it was monitoring all of my phone calls. I went into this endeavor not expecting any privacy, expecting to be spied on 24/7. My expectations, particularly after Ambassador McFaul’s experience, were low. He also had his family with younger children with him. I was there without my family. So, there wasn't an opportunity for the FSB to harass my family, but we did have US diplomats with families whose young children were harassed by the FSB which is outrageous.
It was difficult to convince Washington that that was important for the US mission to continue to function in Russia because people find it hard to believe that the Russian police would stop a school bus and search school children on the pretext of a safety inspection.
Larry Bernstein:
You told two stories in the book on this. One was when you went to the Apple store to buy a new iPad and everyone else got their iPad but you. The Apple salesperson asked you to come back tomorrow for your iPad after they had the chance to install special software.
And the second story was when you took a train outside of Russia to Germany with a colleague from the US embassy and a couple of Russian henchmen stole your bags hoping to find some confidential information inside.
John Sullivan:
Typical but not out of the ordinary. My colleague and I were traveling to Stuttgart, Germany visiting with the leadership of US, European and Africa command. We were taking a short train ride to Frankfurt. Two Russian speakers unbeknownst to us stole my colleagues' backpack from above the rack where he was sitting on the train. And fortunately, we wouldn't have had any classified information, but he lost his personal passport. But that's what the Russians do.
Larry Bernstein:
In this new technological age, should the United States close its embassy in Russia? Is there a good reason to have a US ambassador on the ground in Moscow?
John Sullivan:
Yes, but it does not reach the point where we need to risk life and limb to have an embassy open in Moscow. At what point do we say the physical danger that we're putting U.S. diplomats, and their families is not worth it to tolerate this behavior by the Russians? And my view was we call their bluff because Putin wants his embassy in Washington. But he thinks we're wimps, and we will cave as we always do. It's important for us to have an embassy in Moscow but not at any cost. If Putin said, unless you stop sending long range strike weapons to Ukraine, you've got to close your embassy. I assume the Biden administration would say, forget it.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about Putin. In the book you describe him as a typical KGB strongman, what did you learn about him?
John Sullivan:
He describes himself as a KGB man. And he's famously said, there's no such thing as a former KGB man kind of sounds like organized crime. What's important to understand about him is he has metastasized into this nationalist empire rebuilder. His foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that when asked who Putin’s principal advisors are Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great. He does have an imperialist nationalist ambition for Russia that grows out of his view of Russia's place in the world as a career KGB man.
Larry Bernstein:
I assume that this war in Ukraine will go on for as long as Putin wants it to.
John Sullivan:
I don't disagree with your proposition, Larry. I would add to that the Ukrainians aren't going to surrender either, so it's both sides.
I knew as ambassador that Putin was going to invade. What we in the United States government did not anticipate was the resistance by the Ukrainians. What I've learned from all my Ukrainian friends is that even if Putin reaches the point where he feels he's gotten as much as he can get out of this endeavor without losing something on the table that would cause unrest among his so-called Putin voters, Ukrainians and Russians are going to be killing each other over this for a long time. Even if there is a ceasefire or a frozen conflict.
But what it's going to take for Putin to come to the negotiating table to compromise is a lot more stress than Russia has undergone right now. The Kursk offensive that's a sideshow. He's tried to give the back of the hand to what the Ukrainians did, seizing 500 square miles of territory in this Kursk incursion.
It's going to take the perseverance of the West to continue to provide weapons and support to Ukraine so that they can strike Russian air bases from which they attack sites in Eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainians need to be able to defend themselves. They've not been given the weapons that would allow them to do that. We've put restrictions on the weapons that we've given them that would allow them to do that to their maximum advantage.
He's just not going to surrender. He doesn't want to be the first Russian leader since Stalin to have lost Russian territory. Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941: it's the last time that Russians lost territory. Putin now has that stigma. He's going to ultimately want to remove that from his record, and he's going to want to keep what he can in the Donbas. And right now, the cost that's being imposed on him, it's not sufficient to drive him to the negotiating table. And he's trying to cower Washington by threatening the use of nuclear weapons. He's got energy and the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.
Larry Bernstein:
President Biden mentioned the possibility of a regime change. In your book, you said that that decision should be solely in the hands of the Russians.
John Sullivan:
The Russians I've gotten to befriend both those who are pro-war and those who are not, both sides have said to me, regime change isn't the answer. And be careful what you wish for because Putin's successor from the West’s perspective may be even worse. There are many, including those who are opposed to Putin who say that as bad as he is, he does exercise a check on those within his government and civil society who are urging more drastic measures, including the use of weapons of mass destruction, whether it's tactical nukes, chemical or biological weapons. And Putin has been given credit by those Kremlin voices for protecting, as best he can, the Russian economy from the sanctions and exports controls that have been imposed by the West.
The United States is not good at influencing regime change. Our track record is horrible and the blowback to the United States is always much worse than the potential gain. Churchill said in 1920, “if Russia is to be saved, I pray that she will be saved by Russians only.”
We in the West are not going to be able to impose a West-leaning democracy. Those who criticize the United States with respect to Russia from starting in the Gorbachev era through the present day is that we in the West thought that history ended in the 1990s and we didn't do as much as we could to support democrats. Russian nationalism lurked from the moment that the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russian criticism is we took our eye off the ball. We thought that change was inevitable in Russia, and it wasn't.
But the United States is not in a good position to influence that to our advantage, which is not to say we can't adopt policies that would potentially support those who are opposed to the authoritarian regime that's been foisted on the Russian people by Putin. But this has got to come from within Russia itself not from without.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think Putin was justified in his fears of NATO encirclement?
John Sullivan:
NATO Encirclement is a canard. Baker and Gorbachev have both denied emphatically that there was never some offer by the United States to never expand NATO to the East, and that the Russians relied on that to their detriment.
Starting in the early nineties with the demise of the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Republics and the former members of the Warsaw Pact in particular, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, that those populations could not decide for themselves whether they would become members of NATO protection against the behemoth to their East that had oppressed them for decades.
It wasn't some relentless expansion of NATO east. Those peoples of Eastern Europe who had been oppressed for decades under Soviet rule from Moscow decided that they needed protection for their fledgling democracies from NATO.
The United States should have done more in the 90s to work with the nascent Russian Yeltsin government. I acknowledge that the United States could have done more to focus on Russia's security concerns. But crediting Putin's argument means that over a hundred million people in Eastern Europe, in countries independent of the Russian Federation are controlled by Moscow. And that's inconsistent with what my friends in the Biden administration call the rules-based international order, the UN charter and basic international law.
Larry Bernstein:
In your opening remarks, you mentioned that the Republicans should be spending more on Ukrainian defense. Do you agree with Trump made that the Europeans should pay a greater share?
John Sullivan:
That is a legitimate point. If you look at the broader picture, Trump's complaint that NATO allies weren't meeting their 2% of GDP defense budget commitments that they made after the first round of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Canada is woefully short. The Germans have been for a long time. I have objections to how then President Trump went about articulating it to our allies. But that's a legitimate criticism. The United States should not be spending more per capita. This is a NATO problem. This is a problem of the West.
Larry Bernstein:
In the 2012 Presidential Debate, Mitt Romney said that the biggest geopolitical threat was Russia. And Obama thought it was Al Qaeda. Obama said that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Who do you think is America’s most dangerous threat?
John Sullivan:
This is bipartisan. Russia has been since 2022 been willing to engage in aggressive military actions against the West. The PRC has been aggressive in the South China Sea, particularly with respect to the Philippines, but right now, the most immediate threat to the West is by Russia in Ukraine.
We must do what the Roosevelt administration did. After Hitler declares war on the United States days after Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt doesn't say Germany's the bigger threat, so we'll just put this war against Japan on hold. We've got to be able to face down Russian aggression in Europe and PRC aggression in Asia. And that requires alliances. Getting our allies and partners to do more in Europe and in Asia, as we've seen with Australia, the Japanese and the South Koreans to be better aligned on national security issues, something we struggled with in the Trump administration.
Larry Bernstein:
You suggested that the Biden administration hasn't allowed the Ukrainians to fight to win the war.
John Sullivan:
We've been too cowed by Russian threats. We were cautious about what military support would be provided to Ukraine including the presence of U.S. military in Ukraine.
President Biden gave his team two instructions to do everything we could to support Ukraine and to not get in a shooting war with the Russian Federation.
It is not a new tension. It is something that the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in during the Cold War. There were many Americans who were shot down by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. North Vietnam didn't have the domestic industrial capacity to produce surface to air missiles that could shoot down B52 bombers flying at 50,000 feet. Those were provided by the Soviet Union, many of them operated by Soviets. There were more than 3000 Soviet military advisors in North Vietnam killing Americans, including flying air sorties against US aircraft. They did a similar thing in the Korean War.
We supported the Mujahideen resisting the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. So, this is not new. What is new is how close this is getting to the Russian homeland because of the country Putin decided to invade.
But to get back to the Biden administration, we don't know how the Ukrainians are going to use the equipment we've given. Let's give it time and we'll see how we develop this working relationship with the Ukrainians and how they use what we're giving them. I think the Ukrainians have proven over the last two and a half years that they're entitled to not only the weapons that we've given them, but lifting the geographic restrictions that preclude use in the Russian Federation because the Russians are striking Ukraine from Russian territory. And if the Ukrainians are going to be able to resist, they need to be able to strike those Russian bases in the Russian Federation. The Ukrainian military has built a track record to show that they will use effectively what we give them and won't do something that's so egregious that Putin is going to start a war against the United States or NATO.
The administration feared a strike on NATO territory. If we're providing weapons to Ukraine, that the Russians will target those areas in Poland and Germany. Those hubs where the weapons are being transferred to Ukrainians and from their transported into Ukraine. A strike on NATO territory, the Poles would invoke Article 5. NATO is now in a war with Russia.
The second concern was the use of WMDs, tactical nukes or chemical weapons. I didn't think that the Russians would use a nuclear weapon. But when the Russians in the late Spring of 2022, when they are approaching the city of Mariupol, the Ukrainian forces gathered like at the Alamo the final show down at an enormous urban steelwork.
The photographic and satellite evidence I saw, Mariupol looked like Stalingrad in January of 43, just rubble. Ukrainians were dug in, and not just Ukrainian military but families. And the prediction was it was going to cost the Russians a great deal of men and material to capture that. I wondered whether they might use a chemical weapon the way Assad has used chemical weapons in Syria to kill those Ukrainian defenders and their families that were dug in into that steel factory and spare Russian lives. And I was mistaken in how little regard Putin has for Russian lives, let alone Ukrainian lives.
Larry Bernstein:
Some critics complained that when Biden cut and ran from Afghanistan that this decision encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine.
John Sullivan:
Biden meets with Putin in June 2021. Putin invades Ukraine in February of 2022. Looking back, I now believe that by June 2021, Putin had a good idea of what he was going to do. And Putin wasn't going to be deterred from invading Ukraine.
It was a slim chance that was eliminated when we had the debacle in Afghanistan. And I cite a statement by one of Putin's closest advisors, Nikolai Patrushev, who was the Secretary of the Security Council, he's quoted in August 2021. He says, “why would you want to be a member of NATO? Look what they're doing in Kabul. After 20 plus years, the investments that they've made in Afghanistan. And they let that happen to their Afghan partners. What do you think they're going to do to you?”
That was his message to the Ukrainian people, because the Russians thought that the Ukrainians wouldn't resist. They wouldn't expect support from NATO after being invaded by Russia. Putin doesn't wake up on August 26th and say, what a debacle for the United States, I think I'll invade Ukraine today. But if you look at it over time, that's the nail in the whatever chance the United States had to stop what he was going to do at that point; it was done.
Larry Bernstein:
In the debates, Trump questioned why Harris hadn't bothered to pick up the phone to call Putin to help resolve a war that has killed a million people.
John Sullivan:
Putin wouldn't speak to the Vice President of the United States. They would've only spoken to Biden. Now, it's appropriate to tag Harris with what the Biden administration was doing. Take this for what it's worth, I never spoke to Vice President Harris as the U.S. ambassador. I spoke with Biden, and she was on secure video teleconferences with the President. But to my recollection, I don't recall her ever speaking at one of those meetings, which in the larger scheme of things, the president is the commander in chief, and on an issue like this, the president is going to be doing the talking. So, I think it is not fair to say, why didn't Harris pick up the phone? A fairer point to make is whatever criticisms one has of the Biden administration; she was Vice President, and she gets tarred with it.
Larry Bernstein:
In the book, you mentioned that Trump is an unusual executive, that he believes in the deep state, and is not a big fan of the State Department. Other presidents have gone around the State Department. Henry Kissinger went with Nixon to China without informing the Secretary of State. FDR sent Bullett to the Soviet Union to negotiate outside of the chain of command. How do you feel about presidents not following State Department protocols?
John Sullivan:
I've got to know Henry Kissinger. We were talking about the relationship between the White House, the NSC and the State Department. And he said, with no trace of irony and without trying to be funny, he said, I think it worked best when I was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. And I said, yeah, I bet you thought it did.
There are those who have concerns about that consolidation of power. So National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, very common area of conflict.
Where it's a little different in the Biden administration and that's the role of Bill Burns. Bill has got a very unusual background for a Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a former career ambassador, highest rank in the U.S. Foreign Service, former Deputy Secretary of State, former Ambassador to Russia, now DCIA. He had been dealing with Biden personally when Biden was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bill has gotten tasks from the President that another Secretary of State might've had concerns about it. But the relationship that Biden, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken have with Bill as the Director of CIA doing things that only a US diplomat or a special envoy would've done. I went with Bill when he traveled to Moscow in November of 2021 to deliver a message to Putin about Ukraine. That's an unusual role for the Director of the CIA. And it's because of Bill's background as he was of his generation, the most prominent senior member of the US Foreign Service. So that's an unusual feature of the Biden administration.
Larry Bernstein:
I assume if Harris wins, she's going to run State and in a very similar manner. But Trump behaved quite differently. Tell us how you expect Trump to run the State Department if he wins a second term.
John Sullivan:
Well, I can just tell you how things were in the first term, and we can extrapolate then to the second term. It was difficult to get senior political appointments confirmed that are important for managing the department. This is because career officers in the federal government have difficulty getting cleared by the White House, and outsiders have trouble getting confirmed by the Senate. I fear that that level of mistrust is going to lead to empty positions. And I can testify firsthand for my three years as Deputy Secretary of State that it is just no way to run a department.
There are institutional forces at work within the US government that are going to impede the president's ability to do get State Department appointments including the Senate. Now, if the Senate flips, there are Republican senators, I'm not sure President Trump could count on their vote to get somebody controversial confirmed. And if the Senate doesn't flip and if Trump is elected, then it's real gridlock.
Larry Bernstein:
Did the Russians influence the 2016 or the 2020 US Presidential Elections?
John Sullivan:
President Trump could never acknowledge that the Russians tried to interfere with the election but didn't get Trump elected as president. The Russians did it. And it's not the first time in 2016. This goes back to Soviet days.
And no doubt in my mind that they are trying in 2024 to influence the U.S. election. But I'm just as convinced about the activities of other countries that are equally trying to influence the U.S. election. And with a thumb on the scale for Harris and that's Iran and the PRC. They do have a capable cyber operation.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to U.S. - Russian relations?
John Sullivan:
I propose in the book a form of containment strategy like what George Kennan proposed in the late forties for containment of the Soviet Union. What he was writing about got modified by the Truman Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon administrations. But the type of containment strategy that I'm proposing like that Kennan proposed is a long-term view.
Churchill gave a bunch of speeches before the war, before September 1st, 1939, warning about what was coming from Berlin. And they're bound together in a book that was titled While England Slept. And then JFK writes his senior thesis at Harvard before the war, and the title is Why England Slept. And the most popular history of the attack on Pearl Harbor is At Dawn We Slept. I think we're asleep now. Our political leaders in both parties underestimate how dangerous the state of world affairs is with Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang.
My fear is politicians think they can score political points and not get serious about the threats we face. And that eventually, there will come a time where if we are not treating seriously what the Russians and the PRC say about war and peace, that we will be forced to confront this later, and it'll be more expensive and more catastrophic. That wasn't optimistic. I'm sorry.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to John for joining us today.
If you missed our previous podcast, check it out. The topic was Torturing the Wrong Man.
Our speaker was Maurice Samuels who is a Professor of French at Yale and the director of their Program for the Study of Antisemitism. Maurice is the author of a new book entitled Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair.
Maurice and I discussed the 1894 trial of Alfred Dreyfus a Jewish French artillery officer who was falsely convicted of treason for selling military secrets to the Germans. For his crimes, he was imprisoned and tortured on Devil’s Island in French Guinea.
The story took a bizarre turn when the French military learned that the real spy was still at-large, and that Dreyfus was innocent. But the French military establishment was too embarrassed to publicly acknowledge its failure and refused to release the guiltless Dreyfus. This caused a major public showdown that split the country of France in two.
Antisemitism is central to the Dreyfus Affair, and it is symptomatic of French society’s ambivalence with their fellow Jews during the 20th century.
I would now like to make a plug for our next week’s podcast with Martin Eichenbaum who is a Professor of Economics at Northwestern. Martin wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal this week where he argued that the focus on American manufacturing jobs is misplaced, and that our economy has moved on. Manufacturing jobs were good jobs in the 1950s but no longer.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, good-bye.
Check out our previous episode, Torturing The Wrong Man, here.
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