Unknown Speaker 0:04
Good afternoon, everyone. So
Unknown Speaker 0:07
good afternoon and welcome. My name is Cal racialla. I direct the Buerkle Center for International Relations, and it's a great pleasure to have all of you here today for this year's Bernard Brody lecture. So our mission at the Burkle center is to enrich the understanding of International Affairs here at UCLA and in LA and one of the ways that we do this is by bringing the best thinkers and policy makers to campus to give us a chance to discuss and debate the most pressing issues with them. And the Bernard Brody lecture has been an important part of our portfolio of activities for over three decades.
Unknown Speaker 0:45
So the list of passporty lectures includes presidents, prime ministers, Secretaries of State and Defense, national security advisors, Nobel Prize winners and US senators. And I'm really happy to add Ambassador Mike McFaul to that list, former US ambassador to Russia,
Unknown Speaker 1:04
Mike McFaul is one of our great political scientists in this country, but he's also served our country at the highest levels. He will get a proper introduction in a moment from Congressman Ted Lieu. But I just want to repeat how enthusiastic I am. I think he'll enlighten us about a lot of very important issues, and I'm really looking forward to hearing his talk and having a chance to sit down and chat with him. So So as mentioned, Congressman Ted Lieu will will give him a proper introduction.
Unknown Speaker 1:31
Ambassador McFaul has a talk with slides, which will take about 30 minutes, and then he and I will sit down in those chairs to discuss the talk and a few other issues, and a few other issues, and then we'll open it up to questions from all of you. We do have handheld microphones, so if you have a question when that time comes, please raise your hand, just wait for me to call on you, and wait for the microphone to come to you. And again, keep your questions short and to the point. I know we have only limited time, and I hope we can cover a lot of issues. So with that in mind, let me introduce Congressman Ted Lieu. Ted Lieu was elected to Congress in 2014 representing the 33rd district, and was immediately chosen as president of the freshman class of Democrats prior to his service in Washington, Congressman Lu was a California State Senator, California State Assembly Member and council member for the city of Torrance
Unknown Speaker 2:24
Ted. Lieu was born in Taipei and grew up in Ohio before moving to California for college like Ambassador McFaul. He's a graduate of Stanford University. He also received his law degree from Georgetown and was an active duty jag in the US Air Force. Congressman Liu remains a member of the Air Force Reserve. In fact, he came today in his Air Force uniform, though he's changed out of it just in time. Please join me in welcoming to UCLA Congressman Ted Lieu. Thank
Unknown Speaker 2:56
you for that wonderful introduction, and I'm so honored to be here, particularly at UCLA and particularly with the Berkel center. And thanks to Berkel center for the great work and research you do international relations and foreign policy and the complex issues of global conflict and cooperation. I'm also thrilled to be here because I'm a recovering political science major. I'm always thrilled to be speeches about foreign policy. Lately, we've heard a lot about ISIL. They are spectacularly good at beheading people. But if you were to ask our intelligence agencies, do they pose a threat to us, homeland or an existential threat, the answer would be no, but Russia does. Russia's nuclear arsenal as you know, can wipe America off as a country as we know it, their military, under the right conditions, can defeat our troops on a battlefield. And that's why the work that Ambassador Mike McFaul does, did and continues to do, is so important. In hindsight, it's obvious why he is a Russian expert. He grew up in a place like Russia, a place that's cold and stoic. It's known as Montana.
Unknown Speaker 4:07
Few people in lots of huckleberries. Actually, I, like Montana, was active duty in Air Force. I went to mount to Air Force Base, did some duty there in Seville, state, but Ambassador McFaul now is currently director of their Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford. He is also the Peter Heller being senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of Stanford faculty since 1995
Unknown Speaker 4:31
he currently is also an analyst for NBC News. Prior to this, he served for five years at Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and senior director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House, from 2009 to 2012
Unknown Speaker 4:48
and then he was US Ambassador to the Russian Federation from 2012 to 2014
Unknown Speaker 4:54
he's written numerous books, including, advancing democracy abroad, why we should, how we can.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
On, as well as transitions to democracy, a comparative perspective and Russia's unfinished revolution, political change from Gorbachev to Putin, he received his BA in International Relations and Slavic languages and his MA in Soviet and East European studies from Stanford in 1986 he's also a road scholar, getting a degree in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991 so it's our honor now to welcome Ambassador. Mike McFaul,
Unknown Speaker 5:36
thank you Congressman. Thank you cal. It is a real honor to be here. I saw the list of previous speakers,
Unknown Speaker 5:44
pretty daunting list, but they probably didn't have videos. So if I'm not, you judge the talk by the other ones if you've seen them. But I'll bet you I'm the first one that I bet you there weren't any presidents who brought videos from Russia In Russia. So that'll be a first at least. So
Unknown Speaker 6:02
I want to let me see. So, okay, the videos are the slides are here. So I'm somewhere in between a recovering bureaucrat and an aspiring professor, right? I'm somewhere in between. And what I want to do today is going to be part analytic, part retrospective, part talking as a policymaker, part talking as a political science type. And I want to, I want to try to Cal I forgot my watch. So tell me what. Tell me when we get to like, five minutes, and I'll rush through to the end if I need to, always dangerous for a professor to not bring their watch as ambassador. I could talk as long as I wanted people stayed.
Unknown Speaker 6:45
But here's the question, and let me just start actually, with
Unknown Speaker 6:50
an anecdote from a memory I have when I just got back from Stanford about a year ago, and I went over to my neighbor's house. He just wanted to catch up. I've been away for five years. He wanted to hear about what life was like in Russia and working at the White House. And I started telling some of my stories, of which I'm going to tell you in a minute about my time there. And that kind of got his memory going, and he started to tell his stories. And the more we got into it, His stories were much more upbeat, optimistic,
Unknown Speaker 7:23
than my stories. My neighbor is George Shultz,
Unknown Speaker 7:27
and George was reflecting on his time in government, his time with dealing with the Russians, his time in dealing with Edward Shevardnadze and then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. And that ended in a great way. As we all know, that's the end of the Cold War. Some called at the end of history. Some thought this was going to be a brand new era in US Russian relations. He most certainly did. And as I left that my my Cadillac wasn't waiting for me, but my one speed Schwinn bicycle was. And I thought about all the negative stuff that happened on my watch. You know, the big question is, what happened? Now, the easy thing to say is, I'm not George Shultz. You know, I screwed it all up. He made it all happen well. But we know correlation and causation are not exactly the same thing. But I want to answer that one big question as you, if you maybe we'll have time. I have a second smaller question, what will come later? But I want to just answer this big question, this, why? Question, what happened from
Unknown Speaker 8:33
then to this period of confrontation that we're in now?
Unknown Speaker 8:37
I think it's fair to say this, we could argue about it. And there's lots of experts in this room and lots of Russians in this room. So I'm you know more I gave this speech in Montana, state. I would say this more definitively there, there weren't a bunch of people speaking Russian when I stood up to speak behind me, as there were just now. But I think you got to go pretty deep into the cold war for a member of time that is as confrontational as it is today. I mean, just think about these kinds of things. Russia intervening in the neighborhood, annexing territory, threatening to use nuclear weapons. We're now at 83% in terms of a negative approval rating among Russians. That was just from a couple months ago. And if you listen to Putin talk about the way he thinks about our country. It's not just in some kind of balance of power politics. It's about, you know, a big struggle against this unipolar Imperial country that he calls the United States. And sometimes he talks about us, you know, fighting that the Russians fighting Nazis and evil. They even use the word evil. They're fighting evil. For him, this is a struggle between good and evil,
Unknown Speaker 9:45
and on our side, even with President Obama, who's a much more measured person, I would say, analytically in the way he talks about these things. And yet, you know, some pretty, you know, pretty big stuff is happening in terms of our.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
US Russian relations at the UN last year, he said the three greatest threats to the world are Ebola, ISIS and Russia. Not a great list to be on.
Unknown Speaker 10:11
Most certainly did not go down too well in Moscow, by the way, to be on that list Western sanctions. Do you remember the last time Russian leaders were on a sanctions list.
Unknown Speaker 10:22
You can't because it's never happened before. That's pretty profound. That's a big thing. NATO is now focused on the threat from Russia. Again, I was just in Poland two weeks ago, and you know, the old gangs back together to talk about how to deter Russian aggression. Russia got kicked out of the GA that didn't happen in other crises that we've had, and even other interventions we've had so and Americans now see Russia as an enemy again in our public opinion poll data, right? So that's what I want to I want to understand, how did we get from
Unknown Speaker 10:55
this to this?
Unknown Speaker 11:00
I was at that meeting, by the way, that's in Los Cabos
Unknown Speaker 11:04
on the sidelines of the g20 meeting. And they called it body gate, the journalist, because they didn't say much, but their body said a lot about where we're at. Okay, so here's I want to I want to tease through in the next 20 minutes or so, maybe 15 minutes, looking at Cal 15 minutes,
Unknown Speaker 11:24
three big kind of explanations about how we got here. And what I want to say up front is that, you know, I'm going to simplify, you know, as I go through these explanations is, of course, it's a little bit of each, but I'm going to end with number three, just so you know where I'm going. And if you're in social sciences, the first one is a more of a structural argument, and we're going to work through to a more agent kind of focus, right? So in the structure versus agents, what Explains History? I'm going to lean on the agency side, although you're going to see that there's going to be pieces of these other ones where I'm going, and I just want to walk you through. But my bluff, as we do remember that from your time in the Pentagon, I learned this from a General Petraeus. Actually, my bottom line up front, that's what you that's, that's a term they use in the government in the Pentagon, is that number three is going to be the main punch line. So you know where I'm going, that's going that's going to be my main explanation. But let's start with the first one, nature of international politics. So
Unknown Speaker 12:26
if we could just run this video just for a little bit. This is Europe in 19 1050
Unknown Speaker 12:33
we're reaching 1100
Unknown Speaker 12:36
and what you see here is the rise of powers, the decline of powers and borders changing, right?
Unknown Speaker 12:45
And so one theory to explain what's happening in Russia today is this is just continuity with history going back 1000 2000 some would say several 1000 years, right? And you see, you know, borders change a lot in the place that we now call Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine is not on the map right now. There goes Lithuania. Lithuania has Ukraine. Okay? Now they're going to lose it in a few minutes.
Unknown Speaker 13:11
We're not at 1400
Unknown Speaker 13:14
notice that the Mongols are still in charge. Russian loose has not even come on the map anyway. You get the picture, right? And so if you have a theory of politics that looks at this history and thinks of it as just this is the rise and fall of states and their power, then what we see in Russia is not that different from 1000 years of history. Russia was weak. Now Russia is stronger. They now have new capabilities. And so therefore we should expect these corrections from a time when Russia was weak. And this is kind of argument you can find, not just in Russia, by the way, this is very popular in Russia, as you might think, but it's popular among certain kinds of thinkers about
Unknown Speaker 13:56
international relations,
Unknown Speaker 14:00
General. And I want to be clear that part of this explanation is part of my explanation, which is to say, if Russia had, you know, think of the counter factual. If Russia had no power, if Russia had the same power capabilities as, I don't want to insult anybody, anybody from Moldova,
Unknown Speaker 14:22
nobody. Okay, then I'll insult Moldova. So, you know, if Russia had the same power capabilities as Moldova, we wouldn't be talking about Russia today, right, or or other countries. Now, there's another argument about weak states create other problems. We can talk about that, maybe in questions, but this is a necessary part of it. Without this capacity, Russia would not have annexed Crimea. Would not be in eastern Ukraine, and we would not be having this, this concern about Russia. And I agree with the congressman, this is one of the biggest threats to the United States. I think,
Unknown Speaker 14:53
you know, at least on the top three, and we'll be on that top three for a long time. But I.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
A couple of problems with just stopping at that, just stopping at capabilities, and not talking about other variables. First, I can imagine rising powers that don't invade their neighbors, right? Germany and Japan after World War Two, Poland after the collapse of communism. You know, they didn't go on and invading and try to re correct the borders from a time when they were weak. And we can think about other cases. And you know, to think about IR theory, we can think about the nature of the regime type and whether they're hostile or not to democracies. And you know, democracies don't go to war most often with each other. And so we could, we could talk about why that may be true, but I can think of some counter example. So there has to be more to the story than just power.
Unknown Speaker 15:44
But second, more importantly, even if that Democratic Peace stuff you don't buy. Why now? Then? Why are we having these troubles now? Why didn't we have them before Russia invaded Chechnya twice? They had a lot of capability back then? Why is it all happening now? And what's really confusing to me is that when I was ambassador, and actually when I was in the administration for the five years, but especially when I was ambassador, if you were to have asked me, What's the number one foreign policy objective of put say January 2012 when I showed up, our team at the embassy would have reported to you the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union.
Unknown Speaker 16:28
Now I'm guessing most people have never heard of that because our reporters didn't write about it.
Unknown Speaker 16:33
They weren't focused on it. It's hard to write about trade pacts, by the way, it's hard to write about TPP. It's confusing. But there's no doubt in our mind at the time, this is what he was focused on. And part of the focus of making this thing happen was to get Ukraine, all of Ukraine, not just Crimea, into this Eurasian Economic Union. That was his focus. Part of the reason he needed to do that is he wanted those 40 million or so consumers to be part of this big thing, because Belarus and Kazakhstan weren't adding that many consumers that to make this thing work.
Unknown Speaker 17:09
How many people here have bought something other than a doll or vodka call with the label on the back Made in Russia? What did you buy?
Unknown Speaker 17:21
Okay, what did you buy, actually, yeah, what did you buy Made in Russia?
Unknown Speaker 17:26
Oh, no, yeah. Oh, my iPhone. No. What? What
Unknown Speaker 17:32
made in Russia? Where do you where'd you come from? 40% of your food came were imported. Depends on where you ate. My friend,
Unknown Speaker 17:41
okay, well, okay, Moscow, even Moscow, you're not consuming too many things made in Russia. But how about in America? Anybody? Well, the point is in up in Menlo Park, you can buy baltika beer. I don't know if you know Baltic a SIEM, okay, Baltic, do you have it? Baltic, a SIEM, you can buy that. But there's one country in the world that buys a lot of goods from Russia, and that's Ukraine, and that's why it was important. It was imperative to him to get them all in. Two other data points that are confusing about this story. Right before the Olympics happened,
Unknown Speaker 18:14
Putin let kharkovsky out of jail. Number one enemy of kharkovsky, remember, he was a billionaire, went to jail 10 years earlier.
Unknown Speaker 18:23
It was a surprise to us and the government, I'll tell you honestly. And one day, I was over at the Kremlin talking to Putin's National Security Advisor. Asked him, why'd you do it? He said, this was a signal to you, you Americans, that we got to get things back on track. We got to we got to get things fixed. We're off the race that was just two months before he invaded Ukraine. Moreover, how many people were at the Olympics? By chance? Anybody?
Unknown Speaker 18:50
You're there. What were you doing there?
Unknown Speaker 18:54
Watching hockey. Me too. Where are you from? I watched the game where we defeated you. Um, but,
Unknown Speaker 19:03
but it was a terrible tragedy for both of our countries, let's be honest, because then I had to watch, wasn't it, the Swedes and the Canadians in the final we both had to watch that game.
Unknown Speaker 19:15
I don't know what you thought, but I thought it was a fantastic party. I thought it was a great event.
Unknown Speaker 19:20
You know, despite the arguing about, you know, the yellow water and the doors that didn't work. And actually, I got locked in the stadium one time at a door and but luckily, I had bodyguards that freed me. But it was a big positive event, lots of, lots of people your age, running around in these colorful outfits, right, being very friendly. And the message was, this is not the Soviet Union. This is not the 1980 Olympics. We're different. We want to be a respected member of the world.
Unknown Speaker 19:51
And I don't know, you know, others might have other views, but I remember very vividly the closing ceremony, where they had all these faces of writers who.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
Come across the field, and then we'd flip them up, and then people would apply
Unknown Speaker 20:05
just a footnote, like, how many countries could roll across the stadium, 50 photographs of writers and people in the stadium would know who they are. I'm not so sure we could do that here in America, you know, pretty rich culture. But two jumped out at me. One was Brodsky, and one was Solzhenitsyn.
Unknown Speaker 20:23
And that was to say, we're claiming these folks, this is part of the new Russia. We're not part of the Soviet Union. So two weeks later, actually, just two days later, he invades Crimea. Something more must be going on in the story.
Unknown Speaker 20:37
All right, let me go through these other ones a little faster. So the second explanation, of course, is that it's all our fault, Congressman, it's your fault. America is to blame. This is all our problem. We created all this problem. And this comes in two varieties. I know the the electoral I looked up the how you all vote down here. So one of them is going to be more popular down here than others. But if I was in Idaho, the other one would be more popular. So I want to do both. So the first is that it was all of our aggression towards Russia that created this reaction. Right? We lectured them about democracy markets, then we expanded NATO, then we bombed Serbia, we invaded Iraq, we did the color revolutions, and Putin just had to push back that just, you know, there have to be a reaction to all of this western pressure.
Unknown Speaker 21:27
And just for the sake of being honest, I want to be clear that I was worried about this too.
Unknown Speaker 21:33
This is something I wrote for those of you know Russian and Soviet history. Well, August 19 is an important date, 1991 year before the coup, one year before the coup that led to the collapse. But I was worried that there would be this backlash and that we would not embrace Russia as they were formed. But there's one really big problem with this explanation, is that after all of that negative stuff that I just listed. We had a period that we call the reset, where we were doing things in cooperation with the Russians. We
Unknown Speaker 22:11
got a lot of things done. We signed a new START treaty. We got rid of 30% of the nuclear Well, we will when it's over 30% of the nuclear weapons in the world, we expanded something you probably never heard of, the Northern Distribution Network. This is a supply route for our soldiers through Russia and through other countries in the north.
Unknown Speaker 22:32
When I went into the government, it was 3% of our supply routes. When I left the government, it was over 50% in other words, the Russians were helping us fight that war in Afghanistan. And I just want to remind you, because we were talking about it before we came over here, because of the Sy Hersh piece, this was instrumental for us to be able to do some very, you know, extra territorial things in Pakistan. Think about had we just had 3% through the north the other route is through Pakistan. 95%
Unknown Speaker 23:07
the day that President Obama decided to go in after Osama bin Laden, that would have changed that calculation radically. By the way, the day before the operation against Mr. Bin Laden, we were in calling a leader in that part of the world to enhance MDM, because we knew there would be this reaction from the Pakistanis, and there was, they closed it down. Third, we got in place the most comprehensive set of sanctions against Iran ever,
Unknown Speaker 23:35
ever. We did that in cooperation with the Russians, not in antagonism, in an antagonistic relations with them. And then, you know, there are a lot of dogs that didn't bark the you know, do you do you remember the big revolution from 2010
Unknown Speaker 23:50
I have it up there. So it's, you know, stupid to ask a rhetorical question. It's there the Kyrgyzstani revolution. Dozens of people died. 300,000 people left Kyrgyzstan
Unknown Speaker 24:02
for me, I was working at the National Security Council that during this crisis, without question, it was the scariest event that happened on my watch, because I feared we were on the eve of another genocidal war.
Unknown Speaker 24:18
And across the hall, by the way, my colleague with Samantha Power, who had just written a very famous book about how we never again. And it felt like it was happening. But this revolution didn't lead to this big standoff with the Russians. We actually called them again if we said, we both have an interest in not letting this thing blow up. And we managed it. You know, it's still a ways to go, but it most certainly didn't become this ethnic genocidal war that we were fearing.
Unknown Speaker 24:46
And I could go on, these are, these are Russian and Americans training in 2010
Unknown Speaker 24:50
in Colorado, which is four years ago. Four years ago,
Unknown Speaker 24:55
reset, right? You know, we got some economic things done. This is our former governor with the former.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
A president at Cisco. We got him into the WTO. We got PNC. Are we liberalized? The visa regime trade
Unknown Speaker 25:08
went up. It was still pretty small, but it was going in the right direction through this, this period of cooperation from 2009 to 2012
Unknown Speaker 25:16
and here you can see the popular attitudes. You know, we were. We got up to 60% of Russians had a favorable view of the United States. That was just four years ago, 83% negative now. And you know my point, and by the way, same in our country say almost exactly the same data. So you can't explain all of that cooperation looking at these same variables from the past that are the explanation for why there's conflict. Now, right? There's got to be something else to the story that to bring it in to make the story complete. Now, there's one other explanation. It's all Obama's fault, not because he did too much, because he did too little. He's weak, and that created the permissive conditions he just dared Putin to invade Ukraine because he's so weak.
Unknown Speaker 26:05
And this is a, oh, this your call. Is your colleague, Congressman.
Unknown Speaker 26:09
This is what Speaker Boehner said. You probably can't see that. So let me read it to you. When you look at this chaos, I like to read this one when you look at the chaos that's going on. Does anybody think that Vladimir Putin would have gone into Crimea had George W Bush been President of the United States. No even Putin is smart enough to know that Bush would have punched him in the nose in about 10 seconds.
Unknown Speaker 26:31
Now let's give the speaker a break. This was 10 days before the election. Not you congressman, but I'll bet you know, other politicians have been known to say kind of things they don't really want to say just 10 days before an election. So let's not overstate that, but it's an argument out there, and most certainly you're going to hear this argument as we run into our presidential election. And you know, I'll skip the first part in the interest of time, but I would just remind you that actually, all American presidents, Democrat, Republican, strong, weak over the last 70 years have not been very good at deterring Russian aggression,
Unknown Speaker 27:09
going back to 5668
Unknown Speaker 27:12
crackdown in Poland in 8080 in December 81 even Ronald Reagan, I don't think anybody would accuse of being weak on The Soviets couldn't stop that from happening, and most certainly, with no disrespect to President Bush, but actually,
Unknown Speaker 27:27
Speaker Boehner should know that Russia did invade a country when George Bush was president, and he didn't punch him in the nose. Actually, they did very little.
Unknown Speaker 27:36
The more interesting question maybe for in our Q and A is the response afterwards. And let me say provocatively, I think Barack Obama's response has been more like Ronald Reagan's and less like George W Bush in terms of response afterwards. But hopefully we can get that matter in question. So let me get to the my final explanation. I'll try to do this quickly, Russian domestic politics. Two things here I think, are essential for understanding why we're in the mess we are in today. It has nothing to do with us. It has everything to do with internal politics in Russia, first is the switch from Putin to me Vietnam. This happened in September 2011
Unknown Speaker 28:18
when Prime Minister Putin, that's, that's the guy shouting on the left announced that he was going to run for president, and President Medvedev said, I'm going to be Prime Minister.
Unknown Speaker 28:29
Now. I remember that day I saw the President. A day or two afterwards,
Unknown Speaker 28:34
he asked me, What do I think, you know? What does this mean?
Unknown Speaker 28:38
And I said, Well, Mr. President, you know Medvedev a lot better than you know Putin. So that personal investment that you've made, you know that's now diminished in terms of this utility for us.
Unknown Speaker 28:51
But I said to the president, remember, Putin's always the big dog. He's always been the key decision maker. So why should we expect
Unknown Speaker 29:01
that there would be change, and I was dead wrong about that, because Putin has a very different world view than Prime Minister Medvedev, in terms of these things, seeing the world in zero sum terms, and most importantly, this one, he thinks the United States is a competitor who's willing to use power, covert power and overt power to undermine regimes that we don't like. Medvedev didn't think that
Unknown Speaker 29:31
the second piece related to that is this event that happened between this announcement to run for president and march 2012 which is an in between, there are parliamentary elections stolen just at the kind of levels that they always have been stolen at in Russia, you know, four or 5% at least, that was our assessment this time. However, there are a bunch of young people who documented it with their smartphones and book on tuck day and Facebook and Twitter and that then triggered this.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
Demonstrations in Russia for the first time since 1991 they didn't want their vote just to be stolen. They wanted to demand from their government something better. And that was shocking to Putin first, he was pest. He was really pissed. And and, you know, he said, I made these people rich, you guys. You know, I made you rich. How can you turn against me? Now and then, he got frightened. He got worried about what this might mean, and he decided that he had to make these people the enemy, call them the fifth column, and associate them as being our puppets, related to us, right? And that happened right as I landed in Russia, by the way, right? Right as I flew in.
Unknown Speaker 30:48
Became ambassador. That turn happened, and I therefore became part of this drama, right? So Navalny is somebody you've made now. He's opposition leader. He was portrayed as being my guy, my person that I created with me called Gorbachev, by the way, good company. But this was all part of this turn towards us, part of this driven by the domestic challenges. This is a calendar they put out in 2012 in Russian and English.
Unknown Speaker 31:17
All the other months. Are famous opposition leaders.
Unknown Speaker 31:22
May 6, for the Russians and people that follow Russia. You know, this was a big demonstration.
Unknown Speaker 31:29
May 6, 2012
Unknown Speaker 31:30
here I am portrayed as the ring master, the artistic, artistic director of the circus that is again, come to Moscow.
Unknown Speaker 31:41
And here I am photoshopped in campaigning for Navalny when he ran for mayor
Unknown Speaker 31:48
in Moscow. And here, I know we're running out of time, but give me just a few minutes. Just I want you to get a this is a flavor for what's on Russian TV today, and the way that if we could run this one stress department versus Key stressed. They're saying diplomatic.
Unknown Speaker 32:13
When I
Unknown Speaker 32:19
was named
Unknown Speaker 32:22
ambassador, it was a holiday for the opposition, because they knew I was coming at revolution.
Unknown Speaker 32:30
I'm a specialist. I did not have a plane like that. They're saying I'm a specialist about orange revolutions, color revolutions, and I've come to stimulate
Unknown Speaker 32:41
these friends of mine, including himself. Okay, you get a you get a sense for it. I'll cut we'll play it later. In questions, if you want to see it. It's really kind of jarring.
Unknown Speaker 32:51
There's Mr. Yashin, who, by the way, just released the NEM soft report today.
Unknown Speaker 32:58
This is on Russian television every day. This is just from a month ago, where our president is being compared in ideological terms. He's basically the same guy ideologically as the head of ISIS. That's on channel one television, for those who follow Russian TV, that's Mr. Kisolo Station.
Unknown Speaker 33:17
So
Unknown Speaker 33:19
two last things, and then we'll take questions. The one thing I want to remind you of, in my opinion, this was not inevitable. There was a different way to respond to these demonstrations. And I just would note here, this is President Medvedev meeting in a round table talk with opposition leaders. By at the end, by the way, is Mr. Nemtsov, who was assassinated recently. I the first and only time I met the opposition altogether was this same day as they were coming out of Medvedev house. We were going in to talk about WTO, by the way, and there they were. And so, in my view, there was an alternative path, an alternative response to the demonstrations. This was not inevitable because of these other factors I talked about
Unknown Speaker 34:04
last straw, of course. You know this was brewing. This was this way. Then the fall, the government fell January, I mean, February 21 in Kyiv, we tried to pack the transition. As we would say in academia, we worked with the opposition. We worked with Prime Minister Yanukovych. Poured Vice President Biden called him a dozen times to try to make this transition work, and then it fell apart. February 21 we were shocked. I was still in Sochi. We didn't know why Yanukovych left, but Putin had a theory based on what I described before. This is the CIA. This is us again. And that's when he just said, To hell with it, I'm done with these guys. We're no longer going to, you know, try to cooperate on certain things, even if we disagree. And that's why he went into Crimea and where he went into Ukraine, in my view. So good news and bad news. The good news. I don't believe this is inevitable because of some.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Cultural
Unknown Speaker 35:02
proclivity for dictatorship and anti westernism That we should have conflict with Russia. I don't believe that Putin has a master plan. I think this was emotional, tactical, undermining some other foreign policy objectives he had just a few months, literally just a few weeks earlier. That's the good news. The bad news is, I think Putin's locked in. He's done this is the course he's on. He's fighting Nazis. He's fighting evil. It's hard to negotiate with, with Hitler and the devil, right? That narrative he's now locked into. And I don't see, you know, in the margins, he'll change it, but I don't see a way that he gets off that path. I also remind you, he can stay in power till 2024
Unknown Speaker 35:44
and he works out three hours a day. He's in good health. The real question is, what the West does with all that? And I'll just leave that open for questions. It's clear to me what he's going to do. It's not so clear what our reaction will be over the long haul, but let's do that in questions. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 36:08
Perfect. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 36:12
All right, so a lot of things to cover. That was, I got eight more slides. Man, I keep going. Keep going. No, that was terrific. That was great. So, so let's start first a kind of big question, which you mentioned briefly, but I know for a lot of people, this is a big issue, which is NATO. So NATO expanded a lot after the end of the Cold War. So looking back now, do you think that was mistaken? Did we move too quickly, too far? How would you read what's your analysis of that, because that's a very important issue. Yeah, many people in
Unknown Speaker 36:44
Russia, it is. But I want to get back to my thesis about before we talk about counterfactuals in the past,
Unknown Speaker 36:52
I was in every meeting that President Obama had with Medvedev and Putin. Let
Unknown Speaker 37:01
me think about this. No, no, every meeting except one. Okay, for five years when I worked at the White House, I was on every phone call between President Medvedev, Prime Minister Putin, and Obama. I can't recall once that the issue of NATO expansion came up
Unknown Speaker 37:20
and that that's just, that's a fact. I mean, you can FOIA freedom of information, you can get my write ups of these things and get them that's a fact. And the reason that's important to say is post facto, after the crisis in Ukraine, Putin wants you to believe that what he's doing is in reaction to NATO? Well, NATO expansion. Well, NATO expanded 2002 why didn't he react
Unknown Speaker 37:47
then? Moreover, and we're on the record, I'm assuming, right. Okay, so I'm going to choose my words a little more diplomatically
Unknown Speaker 37:56
here. One of the reasons wasn't that it wasn't an issue is because NATO wasn't expanding.
Unknown Speaker 38:04
Ukraine wasn't asking to be in NATO. Georgia was but the NATO alliance was very clear that that was not on the table. So it wasn't an issue at the time that I was in government and and we talked about I was just reminded of it because our former NATO ambassador was just up at Stanford. Yesterday.
Unknown Speaker 38:25
Medvedev attended the Lisbon NATO Summit in 2010
Unknown Speaker 38:31
so if you're really interested in this, go look at his speech. Not once does he say we're really worried about NATO expanding. Exactly the opposite. He said we have now gotten over the cold war times. We are now seeking to cooperate with the NATO on issues of mutual interest. And by the way, Russia today, the same propaganda channel that in 2012
Unknown Speaker 38:54
was describing Navalny as my puppet in 2010 because Medvedev was in charge of the editorial direction was talking about the historic breakthrough between Russia and NATO in 2010 so I don't think you can go back and say all of this problem is created because of the expansion of NATO, you know, I just don't think just I'm, you know, I'm not. I haven't been a practicing social scientist for a while, but the causal chain doesn't line up for me,
Unknown Speaker 39:23
you know, were there alternatives? Perhaps there were alternatives. You know, people debated them. My own view back in the 90s, when we were debating it was NATO should expand, but should be left open for all countries that meet the criteria of NATO. And for me, that meant including Russia, but that's now kind of, you know, noodle head academic historical debate.
Unknown Speaker 39:47
Okay, so at the end, you talk a little bit about Putin's staying power and the fact that he's locked in. So when you had a profile in New Yorker last August, if none of you read that, I suggest i.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
I urge you to read it. It's a really interesting piece. I don't know what you thought about it. I found it interesting. By David interesting. That's a good diplomatic way. Yes, very interesting, very interesting and very interesting. Points you make, Mr. President, yes. And you told David Remnick you thought in the long run,
Unknown Speaker 40:16
the westernizers would win out. So given what you said in your last slide, how long is long run, and if Putin tomorrow dies of a heart attack, hit by a bus, something happens is there, will that be a significant in other words, is it really about him and the lock in mentality that you talked about, or is there something bigger that's going to stop
Unknown Speaker 40:36
us from seeing another reset?
Unknown Speaker 40:40
So I obviously don't know the answer to that question, and I don't trust anybody who gives you a definitive answer to that question, right?
Unknown Speaker 40:47
We're not good in academia and most certainly the intelligence community that I used to deal with. I have a great deal of respect for them, but we're just not good at predicting these kind of long term things. I was
Unknown Speaker 41:00
at the White House during the Arab Spring, for instance, and I remember our debates about probabilities of change there, and they were all much more conservative than they should have been. In retrospect.
Unknown Speaker 41:12
Let me say a couple of things. One is, I am more pessimistic about that proposition than I have been in 30 years. Just I want to make that clear right up the top that this particular turn has
Unknown Speaker 41:28
the strategy for, you know, consolidation of the regime, because that's my argument, right, has entailed a turn against the West and a kind of
Unknown Speaker 41:40
set of ideologies. I can't think of a better word or arguments that are more damaging to that long term prospect and than anything I remember most certainly. I lived in the Soviet Union in 1983 this is, this is worse, in my opinion, this is more dangerous. This is, this feels more visceral, nationalistic and and it's, it's in two fronts, right? One, it's anti American and Russia and Putin saying, we're going to withstand the Imperial America. But it's also anti liberal, you know? It's, it's, it's, he's, he's going to, he's saying, we're, we're going to withstand the decadent Wests. You know that these all this decadence that's happening there. As a good social conservative, that's what he would say, I am now the pillar of that. And you know that resonates in society, and I don't, I don't want to dismiss that so that. Want to really underscore, I've never been so depressed about that
Unknown Speaker 42:38
prospect than ever before. And at the same time, I still remain optimistic in the long run for a couple of reasons. One is, I don't believe that 80% of the people in Russia support Putin ism in all of its its ways. Yeah, they every country rallies around the flag when they go to war. And you all, if you don't watch as much Russian television as I do, you need to understand, this is a war that they're fighting, and they're fighting it with us, not Ukrainians. They're fighting it with us. So guess what? People rally behind their leader in times of war. We did when we invaded Afghanistan. 90% of the American people supported the president for that war. And by the way, 75% of the American people supported President Bush when he went into Iraq, including some very leading, you know, members of the opposition party, one of whom is going to run for president again, is running for president, right? And I just say that, not flippantly, but just to remind you that that's what happens in societies, even when you have, you know the opportunities to debate. And now remember, this is happening in Russia, where there is no opposition in the Congress, there is no real national media that's in opposition. There is no ability to debate these kinds of issues, right? There's pockets of it, and they're people that criticize the war, and they they say, sometimes publicly, oftentimes privately. With me, this is a giant waste, right? We're just, we're just flushing billions of dollars and 10 years of progress down the toilet. But that's harder to say in that place. And then, just to remind you that the opinion polls that show him at these ratings. I used to do survey work in Russia. Imagine in Putin's Russia, you're out there in Siberia, in a small town, and Ivan Ivanovich calls you from Moscow and says, Do you support Putin
Unknown Speaker 44:34
what is the rational thing to say?
Unknown Speaker 44:37
Of course. I mean, come on. You know,
Unknown Speaker 44:42
given who Ivan Ivanovich might be, and given their capabilities in terms of Mr. Snowden, made you all aware of our capabilities. Well, let me tell you, Russia has incredible capabilities in the same way. So those numbers I think are, will not stay that way.
Unknown Speaker 44:59
What I.
Unknown Speaker 45:00
Don't know. You know, the alternative argument is weaker, the opposition is divided. And to predict it in the short term, I don't see it, but I will say just more anecdotally.
Unknown Speaker 45:12
You know, I just met too many 25 year olds
Unknown Speaker 45:15
that just want to live in a normal country. They don't want to fight Nazis. They don't want to fight evil. They're not interested in, you know, a giant standoff with the United States for the next 30 years. They're quiet now. They're not they're not demonstrating. They're keeping their heads down. But all those folks that I just showed in that photo and below, my proposition to you would be, there's not a single one of them that thinks that Russia is better off today than when they were demonstrating. So maybe they'll be quiet now. But will they be quiet for for 20 years? I just it's hard for me to imagine it. So think of that. That's the way I would put it. What's What takes more imagination to think that the current regime, the way it's constructed, will still be going strong in 20 years. And by the way, that will be without Putin, well, maybe 20 years, 40 years, I got, he's this healthy guy,
Unknown Speaker 46:11
or that, you know, some kind of change will have to happen. I think the second is much more probable. So it's a generational thing in that. I mean, let me just ask, because when we talk about China, for example, we talk about nationalism in China, usually the response is, young people in China are very nationalistic and correctly, quickly, kind of whipped up through the same apparatus you just spoke about. But you're making it sound different, no. And that no, that's, that's exactly what's happening. Now, you're right about that. And I do want to just say in full disclosure, when the Soviet Union collapsed, a lot of people, including myself, were saying, well, the 18 year olds of that time, we just have to wait for them to come to power, and then everything will be fine. That did not work out
Unknown Speaker 46:54
that way. So I don't want to be pretend that I can predict where they're going.
Unknown Speaker 47:02
But you know
Unknown Speaker 47:05
this young guy, Yashin, if he were here with us, he's a young Russian opposition leader, he would say, I'm the nationalist. I want my country to be respected and I want it to be strong and I want it to be prosperous. That's a patriotic claim. He would say that the people in power today are the ones that are undermining those things. So so that that debate is not I want to be clear, that debate is not happening today. It was happening just three years ago, and that it was happening just three years ago makes me think that this is not the result of 1000 years of Russian history, or even, you know, 70 years of Soviet communism, but that there's more variation in what, what what popular attitudes might be.
Unknown Speaker 47:51
And of course, you know another one that if Putin were here, or I don't want to put words in Putin's mouth, is one on the record, if Putin's backers were here, many of whom I know very well, they would say
Unknown Speaker 48:04
you're wrong, Mike, because if we're not in power, the really scary nationalists will come to power, right? The Nazis will come to power. And that's why you have to be patient with us as we guide this, this broken society in this transitional period. Be patient. Be patient with Putin, because ultimately, he's a modernizer. He understands that threat. I don't I disagree with that radically, but it's, you know, it's a hypothesis about political change in Russia that I think is worth considering. I want to ask you about Ukraine, but just quickly, because you mentioned Snowden. So what is there anything interesting about Russia keeping Snowden, or why are they doing this? What tell us something about what's happening with that?
Unknown Speaker 48:48
That guy really ruined my summer.
Unknown Speaker 48:52
He really ruined my summer
Unknown Speaker 48:56
in two ways. 111,
Unknown Speaker 48:59
big way, one little way in the big way. You know, we had planned a big summit with President Putin, and it's not just related to Snowden, but by giving Snowden the asylum, we had to set that aside. That was, you know, nine months of work wasted.
Unknown Speaker 49:16
But one has to wonder, had that meeting happened?
Unknown Speaker 49:20
You know how this other set of dramas might have played out? So, you know, I don't, I don't want to overdo it, but most certainly, we believed in our government, and I and the Kremlin believed that we needed that, that two days we had two days of presidential time for Moscow. We lost that, and that that had negative consequences on the big picture. For me personally, it just meant I had to go be on a secure civets, on a video conference with my colleagues from the CIA and the NSA and the State Department for two hours every night, from 2am to 4am for six weeks. So that was no fun.
Unknown Speaker 49:56
I don't know. I mean, by the way, there's a debate of.
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Snowden in our country, which, if you're interested, we can get into. I want to be clear, I think some of the issues he's raised are very important for our Constitution, for our society. I just don't know. One, what you know the
Unknown Speaker 50:14
stuff he released about foreign relations had anything to do with it? And two, I do think he had an alternative path. I feel very strongly that he could have done a different way. That's a different matter with respect to Russia. I think it's done. I mean,
Unknown Speaker 50:31
you know, he's, he's facing a future like other exiles in Russia, and they don't, they don't end very well. In fact, I think he wants to get out. From what I've I'm not in the government anymore, but from other sources in Russia, I think he's realized that to spend the rest of his life in Russia, I
Unknown Speaker 50:52
think he'd prefer to be somewhere else that way.
Unknown Speaker 50:56
So last question, we'll open it up. So with regard to Ukraine and Russian let's say territorial aggression. Are we doing the right thing? Should we be doing more?
Unknown Speaker 51:08
So generally, I am impressed and supportive of
Unknown Speaker 51:15
what the Obama administration has done
Unknown Speaker 51:18
in close coordination with our allies. Right? So if you think about the five or six pieces of the strategy that I that I would have gone throughout, I had had more time, they're basically doing most of them
Unknown Speaker 51:33
in one way or the other. So
Unknown Speaker 51:35
if Putin escalates, there needs to be punishment for that sanctions. They're doing that more. That's part of their
Unknown Speaker 51:44
policy, strengthening NATO, that's part of their policy they're doing pretty well on that. I was just intolerant, as I said a couple weeks ago, I'm impressed by what we're doing, as opposed to what we're not doing, helping Ukraine succeed. To me, that is actually probably the most important thing, and that's what Putin is most focused on. By the way, Putin is not focused, in my view, on acquiring more territory for the Russian Federation, although maybe that'll come later down the road. He's focused on undermining the Ukrainian economy and undermining the regime there. So it'll fail that that. So then he can say we told you so, and then they'll come crawling back to get credits from him after the IMF program is extinguished, right? That's his focus. There's that I think, in the short term is his focus. So we have to not let that succeed.
Unknown Speaker 52:33
Fourth, I think we should be involved in and you know, information war is not the right word, but but explaining our policy better, both to the people of eastern Ukraine, but also within Russia. I think that is actually a piece that we're losing rather profoundly on. I think we're the Russians are doing a much better job on that.
Unknown Speaker 52:55
So on balance, I think it's pretty good. I worry. I had my worries up there. I worry about two or three things. The most important, most immediate worry, is keeping the EU and the United States
Unknown Speaker 53:11
together, maintaining the sanctions until the conditions have been set that there should be sanctions relief. That's a debate. It's a debate in Europe, it's a debate in Hungary, it's a debate in Greece, it's a debate in some parts of Germany,
Unknown Speaker 53:27
and that's going to be hard to maintain. And
Unknown Speaker 53:32
then the other piece, I guess, if I had one other criticism of the Obama administration, because I don't just want to sound like some Obama hack,
Unknown Speaker 53:41
which I mostly AM.
Unknown Speaker 53:44
The policy looks pretty good, even the words. If you go and you read President Obama's speech in Estonia,
Unknown Speaker 53:54
big lay down of the strategy, right? I think it was a great speech. You look at the words, what sometimes makes me nervous is, and it's actually not usually by the President, it's usually other people in the government, where there's a kind of lack of passion about executing the strategy. There's all this talk about off ramps, and, you know, getting beyond the bump, and we have other problems, right? And we do, by the way, I want to make clear, of course, we need to be talking to Putin about Iran, as Secretary Kerry is doing today, but, but I, if you believe me, I think we're going to be in this, this set of circumstances with Russia, not just for a few months, but for years. And so I think we have to, kind of, you know, embrace it with a little more passion, because our our friends and our allies on the front lines, they need to hear that. And I'm just reporting to you from a country where I just, you know, in in Estonia, and there were lots of Lithuanians and Latvians and and.
Unknown Speaker 55:00
Polls at this meeting government officials, and that's what they would say if they were here with us tonight. You know, we want to make sure that you're with us all the way through. Great. Thank you. Okay, so we have time for questions. As I mentioned, please. A lot of hands going up. So I just want to urge you again, wait for the mic. Keep your questions really short and to the point there's only one lecture here today, and it's Ambassador McFaul. So let's just keep I'll keep my answers short. Yeah, short questions, short answers. So, so let me start the woman in the kind of orange or gold, yes, just hold on one second.
Unknown Speaker 55:36
Thank you. It was a fantastic lecture, and I was always fascinated by the government's manipulation of people's opinions, and I like to look at politics through prism of money. What is the US financial stake in the conflict between Russia, Ukraine, the gas pipe? Thank you. Our financial stake is negative
Unknown Speaker 55:59
zero. It's, it's a money losing proposition, not a money making proposition. So that's my, you know, when I was in the government, are we making a lot of money out of Ukraine? No, we're, as a government, we're actually putting a lot of money in there, right? If you pay taxes, your money,
Unknown Speaker 56:18
the financial, you know, the economic benefit of
Unknown Speaker 56:23
Ukraine to the United States is just small. It's a very small amount of money compared to American economic interest in the world. We would like it to be more, right? We say that, but the reality is very clear. But the third thing I would say, just to remind you of the historical period I was talking about our argument to the Russian government during the drama over whether Ukraine was going to join the EU or not. Right to join Putin's EU, we always made the argument to say, this is not a zero sum game. This need not be, you know, plus two for Russia is minus two for Europe.
Unknown Speaker 57:06
At the time, for instance, the Canadians were in the process of negotiating, you know, they call it something different, but the equivalent of a free trade agreement with Russia. And I would always tell my Russian colleagues, like, are we against that? No? Knock yourselves out. You know. You know, as long as the Canadians abide by their NAFTA commitments to us, we don't see this as a zero sum proposition. We think this could be a win, win, win.
Unknown Speaker 57:37
Putin obviously saw it differently,
Unknown Speaker 57:40
by the way, he convinced Yanukovych of that too. We'll come back to that if you're interested in terms of what I think really happened in those negotiations.
Unknown Speaker 57:49
With respect to Russia, of course, their economic interests are greater in Ukraine, not just with the pipe. Well, you, I think you meant the Ukrainians have economic interests in the pipeline, right?
Unknown Speaker 58:01
Oh, no. We don't make any money off of any of that.
Unknown Speaker 58:07
No, because we're going to be, hopefully we're going to be exporting or our own oil and gas. We don't, you know, we're and it's a world, global market. Gas is different. But I just don't, I think that framing of the issue is exactly what got us in part of what got us into this trouble. Like, like, we have an interest in Russia selling gas to Europe. We do.
Unknown Speaker 58:32
We would like it to be for as lowest price as possible. We would like them not to be dependent on Russia. But we don't have an interest in somehow cutting that off. We want the more energy that's in the world. You know, at least this was our policy when I was still in government. So maybe it's changed since I've left, but we took a very different view on that. We wanted the aggregate amount of energy being shipped around everywhere to be rising, including, you know, all forms of energy, right, not just oil and gas, because we thought that would be better off for our economy and better off for our allies,
Unknown Speaker 59:09
okay? Other questions, let's see, let's go over here in the cloud. Sure, yes, sir, just wait one second.
Unknown Speaker 59:21
Thank you. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Western tide against the Kremlin really managed to shift with the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003
Unknown Speaker 59:32
which seemed to have cost some Western business interests. What exact dog did we have in that fight, specifically between Putin and holder husky, and why are we so elated that he's now out of prison?
Unknown Speaker 59:47
Well, you obviously didn't have shares in UCLA, right, sir, right. You didn't, right? But lots of Americans did. In fact, probably UCLA did
Unknown Speaker 59:56
so just in terms of shareholder rights. The the act.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:00
Was, you know, the appropriation of a multi billion dollar company
Unknown Speaker 1:00:04
of which there were lots of minority shareholders that were Americans, including big institutional investors. That was our dog in that fight back then.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:16
And a bigger question, I mean, so that happened when I was not in government, when I was in government, when we talked about kharkovsky, and we did, by the way, quite often.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:27
We
Unknown Speaker 1:00:29
with President Medvedev, we had this argument about, you know, we want, our argument was, we want more American investment in Russia. We think that is in America's national interest. By the way, we don't talk about it much. I'll probably get in trouble if this is tweeted out with my colleagues in the government, because we pivoted away. But when I was in the government, we also had a very explicit policy of, we want Russian investment in the United States of America. We wanted it. We encouraged it. We brought people over. I hosted people at my house. And by the way, there were some big, multi billion dollar deals done in the last several years of Russian money in Texas and in California and Brooklyn. You know, pro corrupt bought the nets. That's good for the NBA. That's good for America. That's good for Russia. By the way, he made a lot. He's going to make a lot of money when
Unknown Speaker 1:01:27
he sells them. And our theory, just to be explicit about it, our theory was that the more investment that we had, foreign direct investment, in our two countries, and the more trade we had between our two countries, the more likely we were to not do stupid things in the political realm. And we always compared, I used to sit across the hall from the folks that ran our China Policy at the White House. We always aspired to have what they had right. They had conflict, and they had difficult issues and human rights and the Dalai Lama and no territorial stuff. I mean lot. There's lots of complicated pieces in the China America, the US Chinese bilateral relationship, right? But they had this big other thing, multi billion dollar, I can't remember off the top of my head, but big economic interest that created ballast to this security challenges that they were facing. We don't have that with Russia, and that was our goal before this crisis.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:30
And that's how karakovsky used to come up. It was, if you want American investors to come back, you have to, like, protect minority shareholders rights you have. You can't just arrest people
Unknown Speaker 1:02:42
you know for political reasons, which was our interpretation of why Mr. Hartakovsky was arrested.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:49
Okay, let's go and far back,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:53
blue shirt. Yes.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:59
Look. A few years ago, yes, shelvo was was giving a talk here at UCLA,
Unknown Speaker 1:03:05
and I asked her, someone asked her about the internal territorial threats to Russia, and she mentioned that she saw the biggest risk to the integrity as being North Caucasus, which we've heard more or less about
Unknown Speaker 1:03:21
how does that play into the current calculus about the stability of Russia as a country?
Unknown Speaker 1:03:29
So it's a great question, and I don't have a great answer.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:34
I would just say that when I was in the government, we followed events very closely in the caucuses,
Unknown Speaker 1:03:41
because we're on the record, I want to have lots of qualifying language, but I'll send you the data if I can find it. But I remember briefing, actually. I remember it was, it was a congressional delegation that that came in 2012
Unknown Speaker 1:03:55
and we did a briefing on the caucuses. And I remember our caucuses specialist saying, in the year 2011
Unknown Speaker 1:04:03
more Russian soldiers and police, right? So, so MBD, plus, you know, regular soldiers died in the caucuses in 2011 than Americans died in Afghanistan. Just to, you know, order of magnitude kind of thing to get people's attention. This is not just some kind of quiet fight. This is a big fight. Chechnya is the most peaceful part, lots of lots of fighting elsewhere,
Unknown Speaker 1:04:33
and that continues. I don't follow it as closely as I used to, but it continues. And what the long term solution there is is problematic for the the government in in Moscow, you know, Putin's argument to us when we debated the Arab Spring was, you gotta support strongly. You gotta, you can't mess around. And he would, from time to time, invoke.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:00
Him as a model,
Unknown Speaker 1:05:02
you know, Ramzan, Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader there. He was a strong man, and he, yeah, maybe he killed a lot of people, but he brought peace and stability there, right? That was kind of an argument that he had when we were debating about Syria. For instance, we had a very different argument. Obviously,
Unknown Speaker 1:05:21
the problem with that is a little, you know, if you allow people like Kadyrov to kind of become so powerful, as he does
Unknown Speaker 1:05:30
some day, and actually, you see bits of that right now,
Unknown Speaker 1:05:35
you know, he may have some disagreements about what the federal government will do in Chechnya. And as you I can tell you're nodding. So you know the story. I mean, he just recently said, with respect to some federal authorities coming to his
Unknown Speaker 1:05:49
the Republic of Chechnya, that if they came, his folks should shoot them. Right? You know, that's like the governor of Montana saying, if the FBI shows up, we're going to shoot them. That probably happened in the history of my state. I shouldn't joke about that.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:04
We have a strong
Unknown Speaker 1:06:07
well now let's leave Montana
Unknown Speaker 1:06:10
so that, you know, that creates, that's the that's the gamble he made. And lots of speculation about who killed nem soft and is, you know, is that sparking an internal fight between different factions of the soliloquy, I don't know, but I just would say it's a very volatile moment. I don't see that as being solved as an issue for Russia right now.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:34
Okay, let's right over here in the Aqua shirt.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:40
Sorry, hello. What
Unknown Speaker 1:06:43
do you think of the United States sending military supervisors to train the Ukrainian military and the possibility of sending lethal aid to Ukraine?
Unknown Speaker 1:06:54
I support both. Do you
Unknown Speaker 1:06:58
want a longer answer?
Unknown Speaker 1:07:01
I mean, just let me give you a little bit of a longer answer.
Unknown Speaker 1:07:08
First of all, every government in the world recognizes the sovereignty of Kyiv, the Kyiv government, including Russia.
Unknown Speaker 1:07:16
So
Unknown Speaker 1:07:18
all countries, you know, part of sovereignty is the ability to defend your citizens against external and internal threats. You know, these are kind of the classic definitions of sovereignty, and therefore, you know, they should have a right to try to defend themselves. By the way, Russia buys arms from other countries around the world. Like, why are we not having a discussion. You know, if run, if Ukraine doesn't have the right, why does Russia have the right? Like, why are they more sovereign? Right? That's at the kind of theoretical, abstract level. So just on the principle, I support it. Now, the argument you'll get from some of my former colleagues in the government and the Obama administration, it's a very contested issue in the Obama administration, just so
Unknown Speaker 1:08:03
you know, one of the more contentious foreign policy debates that I've observed since leaving the government, those that don't support it, they will make the argument, well, that will lead to an escalatory game, an escalatory tit for tat with Putin, And Putin will win that escalation, right? That's their argument, and I think it's a serious argument, because I think that's right. I agree. I think that's right, that that if Putin wants an excuse to escalate
Unknown Speaker 1:08:34
the sending of weapons, will create the window for him to do that.
Unknown Speaker 1:08:39
What I find somewhat disingenuous about that debate, though, is it's, you know, it's pretty Imperial or paternalistic, or, I don't know what the right word is, like for us to be deciding Ukrainians national interests on their behalf, right? Because it's the Ukrainians. It's President Poroshenko who wants the weapons you think he doesn't know. You know, who is more expert to know about how the Russians might react to that than him?
Unknown Speaker 1:09:07
And therefore, you know my argument in terms of that principle is that
Unknown Speaker 1:09:13
we should respect his judgment about that, because the consequences will be his two other things I would say, though
Unknown Speaker 1:09:20
there is no doubt, and there should be no illusions, that this is not some replay of Vietnam, that some people argue that first weapons, then advisors, then soldiers
Unknown Speaker 1:09:30
under the Obama administration. I know for sure that's not going to happen, and we need to be crystal clear about that, that the consequences of an escalation will be
Unknown Speaker 1:09:39
for Ukrainians, not for Americans.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:42
And the second piece, if we got into the details of that, of what weapons and you know what to do,
Unknown Speaker 1:09:50
Nobody should have any illusions that the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian army for probably a long time to come, probably years to come.
Unknown Speaker 1:10:00
Will ever have the capacity to push the Russians out of eastern Ukraine, their proxies, they're not going to that capability from people that are smarter about this than I just is not in the cards for a long time to happen. Instead, what we're talking about is their ability to prevent further offensive actions against the government of Kyiv. And there's a difference. There's a difference in the kinds of weapons, the kinds of things, where they're positioned. Those are, you know, they're nuanced differences, but they're real. And I think, you know, one should play in that space. But I don't end it. I don't predict it happening anytime soon, unless Putin, unless Putin and his proxies escalate, it will take a fundamental change on the battlefield to change the the in my view, and to change the White House's position on this issue. I think that's actually a good note to end on, and we're running out of time, so please join me in thanking ambassador. Michael Fox,
Unknown Speaker 1:11:01
thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai