What’s Happening on the Battlefield?

Welcome to Shield of the Republic. A podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Littman during World War two, that a strong and balanced foreign policy is the necessary shield of our Democratic Republic. I’m Eric Edelman Counseler at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments, a Bulwark contributor and a non resident fellow at the Miller Center. And I’m welcoming back my partner in this enterprise from is sojourn in Scotland Elliot Elliott Cohen, who is the Robert e Ozgood professor of strategy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And the Arleigh Burke Chair and Strategy at the Center for Strategic International Studies.

Elliott, welcome back from Scotland.

Well, thank you. I will, will spare you in the audience, some of my large stock of memorized poems by Robert Burns. Complete with phony accent, but I will say it if you have peep for people who have not been to, Edinburgh, which is where I’ve spent the last week and a half. It is a glorious city. It is just a beautiful city.

There are a lot of interesting things to do. It’s very literary sitting. You know, the biggest monument there, and it is a whacking big monument is to sir Walter Scott. And and in fact, one of the things that was fun there are many things that are fun about this trip, and I’ll get to the serious purpose in a moment. But it was to use it as an occasion to revisit Walter Scott.

By reading some of the Scottish novels, and they are wonderful. They’re truly wonderful. They’re a, you know, Walter Scott, who who was extraordinarily popular in the nineteenth century became sort of known as brighter of historical romances and, you know, one of the classics that you never read.

Ivan Ho and

Ivan Ho. But but, actually, it’s the Scottish novels that are in many ways the best, which are about the period in roughly the century, running up to his period, which is the early nineteenth century. And it includes the forty five and things before that, but also things later than that. And he is really the man who invented this historical novel. And and you really appreciate his characterization as brilliant, but he, you know, he knows the people and the places, and it really comes through.

And then we We visited his, home, Abbott’s fur, which is also magnificent. And I did come back with some excellent Scotch whiskey, which I hope to share with you, Eric. Having said all that, let’s talk about substance for a change.

Well, I know that you were doing more than, reading Walter Scott and and Sipping Scotch while you were in Edinburgh. Do you wanna share any of of what you were what your actual reason for an appointment

was. Yeah. Well, I’m I I also have to say, by the way, the weather’s a hell of a lot cooler than it is in Washington. So this the reason for going there was a workshop, which is one in a series, which I’m running with my friend and colleague, Phillips O’Brien, who we should also get on the podcast, by the way. Who’s a wonderful military historian at Saint Andrews.

On military analysis of, Russia and Ukraine, in the run up to the war and to some extent thereafter and what went wrong because the, you know, the fact is that the estimates of Russian military power and of ukrainian military power and performance. We’re way way off. And that’s, of course, we’re just looking at open sources, but I think it’s pretty clear as true in the intelligence community as well. You know, this will all become public. I I can’t talk about people who were there.

It was a fantastic mixture of academics, retired military officers some intelligence community people. But so the one item, which I wanted to highlight, and perhaps you and I can talk a bit about I think one of the points that, came through repeatedly is that one of the big mistakes that people made, and they make in a number of contexts is failing to see the way in which armies really reflect their societies. And can’t help but reflect their societies. And this could be a source of strength as is in the case with Ukraine. A, you know, flawed but democratic society where people can take initiative and, and so forth.

Or they can militaries can be really hampered by the nature of their society, and particularly the Russian military, which like the society that it’s coming out of, and the political order is corrupt hierarchical, brutal, and that affects military performance. And, you know, this is a core insight of military sociology, I think, but one which people often forget you know, I, it just seems to me too often. People get caught up in the order of battle. The you know, numbers of tanks, numbers of submarines, performance characteristics of missiles, all of which are very important. Don’t get me wrong.

But but they miss something that’s really quite fundamental.

Yeah. I mean, this is, of course, something that the late sir Michael Howard used to talk about a lot in terms of the social dimension of war, which you you’re right. We I think we typically, tend to to slight. Well, on that note, What do you make of what is going on right now on the battlefield? I mean, you’re you’re beginning to detect, I think, or one is beginning to detect in a lot of the commentary, you know, a rising chorus of you know, we’re headed towards a stalemate.

I’ve heard a lot of people on, in the finance world on Wall Street or oh, we’re we’re gonna head to a stalemate and in October, the Biden administration will, you know, impose a a settlement on Ukraine and Russia. Somehow, as if the Biden administration, you know, can wave a magic wand and impose a settlement on people. But, you know, I will confess to the fact that it is a little nervous making that the gains and there are gains from the six weeks of the counter offensive have been pretty limited. No big breakthroughs, of course. My own sense is that it was never in the cards that this was gonna be, you know, like Karky for like Harrison.

Russians have had a long time to dig in. Moreover, the Ukrainians have received less than fifty percent of the equipment that you know, people talk about and have, you know, been, had been promised to them. And so there’s plenty of reason for them, you know, to be taking their time, but I confess to being a bit nervous. What’s what’s your take?

Well, of the of course, nobody really knows or the ones who know aren’t talking. I I guess my basic feeling about is the Ukrainian did try initially to see how what conventional attacks would look like. They quickly realized that they were gonna have to take a longer approach to finding weak spots in their Russian lines, a, and b, the Russian it’s not just that the Russians are dug in. The Russians are also attacking. And I think this is being done to throw the Ukrainians off balance to, you know, pull in reserves and and so on.

So it’s and they’re not it’s not stupid on their part.

Are they attacking in the east and and I think hoping to draw some of the forces in the south up to the north and to the east in order to disrupt the counter offensive.

So here here’s what seemed to me to be the observe I think I in a situation like this, it’s very important to just stick with the observable facts. So what are the observable facts? Well, one is it’s very clear that the Ukrainians are actually having are are going very aggressively after Russian logistics, after Russian command and control, in other words, command posts, after you know, fuel and, targets of that nature. And ammunition dumps And so I and I think what they’re doing is they’re they’re adapting their means, to what the tools are that they have at hand. They don’t have the kind of massive superiority and the kinds of things you would need to breach deep defenses.

They don’t have air superiority. I’m not sure anybody will ever have air superiority in the old sense. So what they’re gonna do is first, I think, really chew their way through a lot of the Russian infrastructure and then they’ll begin attacking.

They’re also short short range air defenses. Yep. And mind clearing equipment, both of which are essential for this kind of operation.

Right. So I I think what they’re doing is they’re gonna take their time. And, you know, I’d I’d remind our listeners that if you look at the breakthrough battles towards the end of world war two, you know, everybody thinks about the Majino line and the Germans taking France in a week and a half or the Israelis of the six day war. That’s not the situation that we’re looking at. We’re looking at something that is you know, much more comparable to the allied breakthrough at Allemagne, which it took two weeks to get through German defenses at Allemagne.

And that was with the Germans having much less resources than the Russians did, you know, because their supply lines have been, chewed up by the royal air force, and the and the Royal Navy. But, similarly, you know, attacks along the Sigfried line and other deeply fortified situated.

The hedgerows in Normandy.

Right. So it’s not it’s not they won’t they won’t necessarily get there. It just it’s It’s there. And the, you know, the Russians are mining vast areas on the scale that we’ve never seen before. Another observable fact is that the Ukrainians have not committed their best trained units yet or at least have only committed a very small fraction of them.

So they are and I think this it shows real generalship on the Ukrainian part to you know, where I’m sure people on the front lines are crying for help to say, no. We’re gonna hold our our reserves. And I, you know, I don’t know how what your reaction is my reaction to a lot of the reporting when, you know, and I give credit, obviously, to reporters who go into the front lines, which are really very dangerous.

Yep.

They’re even more dangerous in some respects than Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, if you talk to the guys who are in the front lines of a very called fight. None of them are gonna be saying, this is great. Things are wonderful here. Things are going very well.

You you would have probably been appalled if you listened to what, you know, American GI were saying in early December in the Ardennes forest. Yeah. But but the, you know, the question is the larger reporting on the larger position. And and I guess you know, my feeling remains that, at some point, it’s entirely con it’s not certain by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s entirely conceivable that the Russians will crack. And there this is a vast front that they’re trying to defend.

And they’re stretched thin in terms of personnel.

They are stretched thin. It’s not clear that those, you know, they’re second and third, and for all I know, the fourth and fifth lines are actually manned. I mean, no, they’ve got they don’t have enough troops for that. So and and it’s also, by the way, this will lead to other things we’ll talk about. You know, how will Russian decision making be affected by disturbed internal politics.

So I remain I mean, like you, I’m I’m anxious, but I understanding the limits of what I know and just seeing what I can observe, I tend to think, you know, too early to tell, and I still think that they tend to have a a pretty good chance of at least breaking the land bridge.

Yeah. Just a couple of observations on on what you’ve said, Elliot. One is You’re beginning to see in some telegram channels Russian soldiers talking about the impact of the US cluster munitions, which are now arriving. Those have arrived pretty quickly because a lot of them were, as you know, pre positioned in in Europe, so it wouldn’t have to, you know, ship them over from from Conis, but that seems to be having, you know, an impact. I mean, it’s in part just because In these artillery duels, the Ukrainians now seem to have a bit of an advantage in the pure artillery fight, even as they suffer from other disadvantages we’ve talked about, but that is very is becoming palpable to the Russians on the ground apparently as they get hit with these cluster munitions.

You know, I’ve always thought that the idea that the Ukrainians were gonna do, you know, combined arms, mobile operations, based on four months of training given the way we train our guys to do it was sort of fanciful. So it’s not surprising that rather than very large scaled operations, this is now more, you know, kind of platoon and company sized units doing the very hard work of clearing out, you know, these fortified, you know, clearing the minds in these, lines of fortifications and obstacles. So that, you know, that none of that really is surprising. And so like you, I think, you know, we have to give this some time I’m still puzzled by the administration’s refusal, to provide, attack ons, to the Ukrainians. So the Brits have, supplied storm shadow and the French have supplied their version of the same missile, the scalp E, which has a range roughly of a hundred and fifty miles.

The attacker would give another fifty to forty to fifty miles of range and would actually bring all of Crimea into range for the Ukrainians. And, you know, I’d I keep hearing this persistent argument, you know, from the Pentagon that don’t have very many of these, so we can’t give them to the Ukrainians, even as we’re preparing to sell forty of them to Morocco. And and my question is, maybe you can answer this, but Some of these surely were set, you know, set aside for US war plans, to deal with Russia in, in Europe. So why not let the Ukrainians use them to deal with Russia now and, you know, use future defense preparations to restock and buy more in the future.

So I look. I think that you put your finger on it. I mean, my guess is that there are two sources of opposition. One is just The administration well, maybe three hospitals. One is, you know, the Russians may escalate.

I think that everybody realizes that’s a pretty threat bear argument at this point. I think someone is just stubbornness, you know, some or or peak at the Ukrainians for saying we need more stuff. It just Well, we said no. We’re gonna show you that when we say no, we really mean no. Unlike the previous time when we said no to High Mars and no to tanks and no to other things.

But there I I would never underestimate the role of petulance, in in the way people make decisions. And by the way, it’s not as that we’ve followed through on a lot of our commitments. One of the dirty secrets out there. We’ve said we’re gonna send tanks. Thanks.

I don’t believe have actually Still

not there. Yeah.

They’re still not there. We’ve we said we’re sending patriots. I believe we’ve sent one battery. Yeah.

There are patriots there, but not ones we’ve sent.

Right. So they’re, you know, we we I think sometimes the administration likes to think that if you announce something, you’ve you’ve done it. But but I I I bet there is opposition coming from the military, and it is exactly what you said. Well, we need x hundred for a real war with Russia. And, you know, the problem is you just made a strategic argument.

And meaning no disrespect to a lot of people engage in this, I think there’s a lot of obtuseness there. And that that kind of reasoning is saying, hey, look, you know, we’re destroying the Russian army. Now why why not that’s what these way what these weapons are for. And I it’s I think it’s just one manifestation of the kind of bureaucratic inertia that that we suffer from. I mean, why haven’t we really ramped up production of a lot of our long range precision missiles.

Right.

Yep. You know, I mean, it’s crystal clear. You’re gonna need vast numbers. If you get into a war, you’re gonna need vast numbers of harpoons and

long range anti ship anti ship missile. Yeah.

In long range, air to surface missile. I mean, all kinds of all kinds of things. That’s a clear lesson of the war. It’s clear lesson of the war. You consume a heck of a lot more of these things than you ever anticipate in peace time.

So why aren’t we putting together the infrastructure for all that? And and and, you know, the big long term buys. And it’s It just it’s it’s a lack of, a kind of a wartime sense of urgency. You know, I I think I’ve used the quote on the podcast before, it’s, you know, the, as the French say, Alaguer or Kumar. If you’re at war act like you’re at war, but But I don’t think there’s that sense of visceral sense of war like

— Right. —

engagement now.

Because the Ukrainians are at war, and we’re not, you know, we’re not suffering the missile strikes on grain facilities or although we may start to feel the price effects of of some of this if the Russians have their way.

Don’t you think that we patronize the Ukrainians a lot? I mean, say, well, they don’t really need them. We we know what they really need.

Yes.

Or, I mean, the worst thing that was actually not American some German saying, well, I we don’t really think the Ukraine answered that good at operational art. I mean, the German army, which is

—

Right.

—

at this point, pretty

worthless. Joke. Right. Yeah. I know I agree with all of that.

I I detect that, from what I hear inside, the Pentagon as well on the question of, like, you know, lessons learned. You know, there is, you know, on the one hand, people say, oh, yes, we’re studying this war very carefully. On the other hand, I think there is this very patronizing attitude about acranians and the kinds of adaptations that they’ve made. And and you do get this sense of like, we know what they need more than they do, you know. Which, I I think is, you know, is wrong.

I mean, the outgoing under, you know, Secret Podcast Cole was quoted in the, papers as saying, you know, the what they need is, you know, the fight right in front of them, not the long distance fight. Well, the reality is they need both.

Right. And I would call the call now.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I this

is the this is the thing I find, essentially, at at the moment, there’s only one group of people in this world who are genuinely expert on the subject of fighting a conventional war with Russia, and they all speak Ukrainian.

Right. I do take solace in the fact that, although there was reporting, in the Washington Post this week that you know, there’s opposition in DOD, to attack them. And people were quoted as saying we’re no closer to resolving that, you know, decision or reaching a a decision to do that, then we have been earlier It it’s also clear as Jake Sullivan has confirmed that the, you know, president, has said he’s thinking about this and he’s had conversations with Zelensky about this. And since in this administration power is so, you know, concentrated in the White House, I’m holding out hope that eventually this will be like a lot of the other decisions you would have been talking about over the last year and a half, one which will be, you know, a day late, a dollar short, but at least it’ll arrive. Some point.

Yeah. I mean, put put somewhat, more nastily. I mean, the good news is they don’t have the courage of bad convictions. And so they and they do move, and I give them credit the truth is I give them credit for it. I think I think, by the way, what one change that’s coming up which you and I have talked a little bit about offline is there’s gonna be a new undersecretary of defense for policy.

Derek Shalay, who we both know and who I think probably, you know, you you and I, we both suspect is probably closer to our view of the world than, colin Carl, who we also both know. But, of course, you were the under secretary of defense for policy. So could you maybe could explain to everybody what the USDA does and why it’s, and don’t be modest why it’s as important a job as it really is.

The job, essentially, is the third ranking policy job, in the Department of Defense That doesn’t mean you’re third in line by precedence, you know, to succeed the Secret Podcast some god awful catastrophe was to befall senior leadership of the Pentagon. But it does mean that you are the senior manager of the inter agency process on all matters of policy for the Department of Defense. That you oversee all the bilateral US defense relationships with, with other countries. You’re responsible for both the articulation and implementation of the national defense strategy, by by statute. You also have special responsibilities for counter terrorism and defense export controls.

You oversee the two field agencies, the defense technology security administration, which is meant to preserve America’s qualitative military edge by controlling defense technologies and, the defense security cooperation agency, which oversees the foreign military sales program, and you advise the Secret Podcast defense, again, by statute on all the contingency plans that is to say the war plans, that the Department of Defense, combatant commanders are responsible for developing with the approval of the of the secretary. So it it’s a it also, by the way, you sit on the nuclear weapons council and are responsible for, you know, arms control, etcetera. So it’s a a a job with and and I’ve only scratched the surface. I mean, the, DOD directive that sets out the responsibilities is kind eye watering when you read it. It’s actually very scary.

Or it was scary to me when I read it before I was sworn in. Because it really is, know, you’re responsible for a lot. So it’s an important job. And I agree with you. I think Derek, who I’ve known for many years, is a good nominee.

I don’t agree with him about a lot of things as he knows from my, rather critical review of a book he wrote at the that was published just at the turn of the administration back in, the winter of twenty sixteen and seventeen. But he has a lot of experience. He’s a former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Its former counselor of the Department of State.

The linchpin of the entire US government.

What if your distinguished successor is in that job? He, he’s been a senior director at the White House. So he he has all the requisite you know, range of experience, for the job. He’s got a terrific temperament too. You know, as much as I, disagree with him, you know, he is he’s a partisan Democrat, but, without being partisan, if that makes sense.

I mean, he he understands that the problems that administrations face, you know, transcend partisan lines and and that people of goodwill are always trying to solve these problems, you know, in every administration.

Yeah. And and of course on top of that, and, you know, I I saw you fulfill this role. You you are the top diplomat for the defense department. And and, since it’s the defense department that has all the toys and the airplanes and stuff like that. You actually have a quite a strong role in make of American foreign policy.

So I, you know, I think it is an important thing. And I think as a voice, I suspect he will be I everything that I saw about things that Colin Carl said, and Colin has his strengths was he was one of these people who’s very fearful of Russian escalation and, you know, Ron DeSantis say, well, it’s gonna take eighteen months to train the Ukrainians to fly a sixteens, which turns out to be wrong by about a factor of three, or or even more. So I think you I think it will be it’ll be better on that. But as you say, that’s a very centralized administration. And, ultimately, Joe Biden will be making we’ll be making the calls on this.

But one thing we should note though, which is it may be a while before Derek gets confirmed. And that is not something that is, you know, s simply a issue for Derek. That is an ongoing problem because of the of the, hold that Senator Tuberville of Alabama has placed essentially on all DOD nominations.

So could could you explain that to our our listeners? Because I think actually a surprising number of people don’t know that one senator a senator who in this case, by the way, has not spent a day in uniform. It’s not an expert on national security. That’s for sure. Can, all of a sudden, completely gum up the work so you can’t promote any generals, including the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

How does that happen?

Well, because by tradition, any one member of the Senate can put a hold on nominations and, frequently these holds are used, by members of the senate to extract other promises, from the administration or other object that senators may have. We’ve got something similar, by the way, with, Ambassador nominations, because state department denominations have been held up by combination of senators, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz. It’s bipartisan, by the way. I mean, right now, the main bad actors here are Republicans, but Democrats have done this too. I have scars myself, from having been held for a number of months by the late Carl Levin when he was the ranking and then, chairman of the, Senate Armed Services Committee.

Had nothing to do with me. I mean, he told me that you know, he liked me, but he wanted some document. He said, I, you know, I like you. I didn’t like your predecessor, but I want some documents from his office. I read all the documents and I said, you know, Senator, I’d love to give you these documents.

If I could give them to you, I would hand them over right now. There’s nothing in them that I’m concerned that you would see or or a problem. But, you know, because they were from other agencies of the government, they weren’t controlled by DOD and because the White House said invoked executive privilege. You know, I was I wasn’t even in a position to give him these documents. You know, at the end of the day, I only got confirmed, and it’s a very uncomfortable feeling, by the way.

I was, given a recess appointment by president Bush in the summer of two thousand five. And then was in that position for about six or seven months, and it’s it’s horribly awkward position because, first of all, you’ve got a clock ticking. Right? You’re like the coach in Cinderella. Right?

When the clock strikes midnight and the Congress adjourns, that Congress adjourns, when you got the recess appointment, you turn back into a pumpkin, and you have to be either renominated or you’re terminated. So you’ve got the clock ticking. Every day, you’re, you know, making hundreds of little minor decisions about things. You’re acting on all sorts of issues, taking positions, and you know that you’re ticking people off. You know, there’s someone with every decision you make.

Someone is, you know, a winner and someone is a loser, and the losers are gonna get angry at you. You know, it’s very, very uncomfortable. In my case, in the end of the day, Senator Bill Fris, who is then, senate majority leader, his chiefs had been were Mark Esper and then later Steve Vegan. And, you know, they basically ultimately dropped a cloture petition to invoke cloture, which kinda breaks the hold. Right?

So if if because then the senator who’s holding has gotta come up with forty votes to hold you. It can’t just be a one, you know, a personal thing. And, I got confirmed by unanimous consent because there was no opposition to my nomination. But that’s how our very broken system, unfortunately, functions right now.

Yeah. I if I heard you correctly, you said this is tradition. It’s not that

Nothing in law or in the constitution.

Right. I mean, that That’s the thing that’s mind boggling. It it was such an abuse.

It’s a norm.

Yeah. It well, it’s an abusive power is is what it is. And I just hope he he sees reason because they you know, with I mean, it there really are limits to what, acting people can do.

Oh, absolutely.

It’s profoundly demoralizing to people who have big jobs ahead. They know they’ve got these big jobs ahead. They need to act on them. You’re holding people who’ve have long records of service to this country. It’s just it’s contemptible.

It’s my basic view.

It’s a, real challenge for civil military relations now. I mean, with right now, we we could. If this continues past September thirtieth, we could be without a chairman of the joint chiefs staff. The president has just nominated a new chief of naval operations. She might not get confirmed.

The, Marine Corps has got an acting commandant, since your former student Dave Burger has left, as commandant, and there’s no, con confirmed replacement. We’ll be talking about civil military relations in a few weeks, I think, with our friend, Peter fever, friend, friend of the show, and multiple time, guest, and he’ll be back for as his new book is coming out. We’ll be discussing that with him, but this is one of these cases where You just, you know, have to shake your head about what people are thinking when it comes to political policy dispute as opposed to the larger national security.

Will Saletan, just hope that listeners to the podcast who are constituents of Senator, Truberville will, let his office know that They think he’s doing terrible damage Jonathan Last security and he should not get off or face the consequences at the, at the ballot box. Was wondering maybe could we move on? There have been some very interesting writings about internal politics in Russia. And, of course, you served there. You followed very closely.

I will just open up with one thought, which is as I think I mentioned to you, that the progression putsch or attempted putsch happened as I was coming back from Ukraine with a couple of very senior Polish, with one official, one very senior non official. And what struck me was their consensus that, a, this is not, progression acting on his own, that there are in their words, men in the shadows who are either supporting him or maybe even directing him, and that be, Putin comes out of this much. No no matter how it ended, they thought he comes out much weaker. So and I have to say that, you know, now there were several weeks after the that those seems to me like pretty good diagnoses, but I wonder, do you share that those views and just in general, what’s your take?

We had our friend Steve Sistanovich, John, of course, talking with us about this in the immediate aftermath. And Steve was making the case of that this could paradoxically strengthen, you know, Putin’s position. And I, you know, I can see the argument for that in the sense that progosions, his complaint, his reason for launching the mutiny, was as as far as we could tell, trying to get Putin on side in his own dispute with, Shoigu, the defense minister who is currently in North Korea celebrating the seventy fifth anniversary of the armistice, I guess, or the seventieth anniversary of the armistice. And, Shoygu, I’m sorry, Shoygu, and Garasimov, the chief of defense. And and in that sense, those two have been sort of confirmed in their position.

Their critics are being weeded out, etcetera. So at least in the short term. It certainly seems as if, you know, Putin is maybe consolidating some of his position. However, it’s certainly the case that the revolt has shown, I think, how frail the system is, and how vulnerable it is, if not to, you know, a coup by progression, perhaps a more successful one by someone else in the future. But it’s also now become part of something that is broader, which is a purge of the mill seri, of leaders who Putin, I think, has and Shuego and Grasimov have reason to believe were in sympathy or harmony with precautions, complaints, if not with the actual coup itself.

So general Surravican, for instance, who is the author of the Sortvegan Line, the fortifications we were talking about earlier in the show, hasn’t been seen in a month. Lots of reports he’s being not only detained, and held, but being tortured. Don’t know, obviously, if that’s true

or not,

but he was by far the most competent commander, you know, involved in this war so far, and he’s now kind of off the table, you know, as a commander. Other commanders, have been removed, as well. In general, Toplinski, the commander of the airborne, which is one of the more capable elements of the, Russian military whose fighters are actually putting up some of the best fight, I think, right now, in the face of the Ukrainian counter offensive by all accounts. Is at risk. Yeah.

It hasn’t been, you know, cashier’d or arrested yet, but there are ongoing rumors that he might be. So this kind of leadership churn, and you were adverting to that in your earlier comments, Elliot, have real battlefield effects as you know. And and one of the things that’s happening here is that loyalty to the incompetent leadership of Shoygu and Garasimov’s being rewarded and competence and criticism which could lead to perhaps more successful adaptation on the battlefield is being punished, which is not exactly a a sort of recipe for great success in wartime. And, you know, both of us, I think, have read this article by, Simon Montfury, who has written court of the red czar about Stalin and written about the Romanoffs and very knowledgeable historian of Russia article in foreign policy in which he talks about what Putin’s going through with the generals is sort of re really not unique to Putin. This has got deep kind of roots in Russian history where the czar has to be not only, you know, the all knowing, all powerful AWz, but also has to be, you know, commander in chief and who has to be seen as a successful commander, but also has to be fearful that the military is going to, you know, supplant him and overthrow him.

And and he has plenty of examples going back to the founding of the Romanov dynasty to make this point. I wonder what you make of of that argument.

I think it makes sense. I’ve for me, the thing that’s stunning in all this is, the progression is still alive and walking the surface of the earth, that, you know, Putin did not feel he could simply have him arrested. It it is, you know, that it’s clear that there have been purges of the military, which again would suggest And there are other stories that have come out, all of which suggests that, yeah, there really was some pretty high level, support for progression. There was another report that Putin was just bewildered about what to do for a day or two at the beginning. And

That report, by the way, which was in the Washington Post, was in part reported by Catherine Belton, the former Financial Times correspondent in Moscow. Who’s terrific in her book, Putin’s people is one of the most deeply reported, analysis of Putin’s system of of government, that I’ve read, and you know, she ended up being sued in courts in in in the UK by, among others, Roman, Roman Abramovich, one of the oligarchs in attempt to shut the, you know, the book down. So it’s a that’s an important story, I think.

Yeah. I I guess it mean, what does it add up to me? To me, it all adds up to Putin being weak. Or at least having been weakened by all this. What I find myself wondering is, what when does the shoe the other shoe drop?

I in other words, I I thought Steve laid out a very as persuasive a case as is possible that this is strengthening, but I just I find myself not able to believe it. The the question that I have in my mind is at what point did these people begin killing each other? And, I won’t be at all surprised if that were to happen.

Well, some of that’s already happened. Right? There have been any number of people who’ve met, you know, unfortunate accidents typically near windows from high rise buildings. So Yeah.

So I think that I think that happens and You know, and I and I guess I tend to believe that, as people high up both in the military and the civilian side get more and more paranoid and, you know, you can never be sure who your friends are, who your enemies are, or I wouldn’t say friends. Who’s aligned with you and who are your enemies? I think those are the the kind of two the only two categories that that really exist, that that begins to affect decision make of the battlefield and in ultimately in pernicious ways. You’re also seeing, Russia continue to expand if you will alternative enemies, and particularly the RussVardia, the National Guard, and, you know, give them heavy weapons and stuff like that. So it means you don’t fully trust the military to stand by the regime.

So I I think they’re in trouble. The, you know, the the conversation I’d like to report to you in all this is I had a conversation with a very senior, very senior person from a an important Asian country. Let’s put it that way. And they were, you know, they were very somebody who’s extremely well informed and extremely smart. And he was basically echoing Henry Kissinger’s line that, you know, we don’t want a Russia in turmoil.

So we have to find a way through this and so on and so forth. And and I, you know, I found myself reacting to him saying, you know, on the one hand, People say to the United States, you know, you fools, you thought you could remake Afghanistan, you thought you could shape Iraqi politics. Don’t you understand that that it was never gonna work. And so we’re idiots for that. But then we’re being irresponsible if we don’t exert complete control over Russian internal politics.

The country much bigger, much more, you know, much harder to influence particularly since we’re not occupying it. And I I I I think a lot of this thinking about the prospects of internal chaos in Russia don’t take adequate account of the fact that we just don’t have a whole lot to say about it. You know, we can plan to adapt to it. We can plan to take advantage of it. We can plan to minimize the risks to ourselves if it does happen.

But, you know, we we’re kidding ourselves if we think we get to control any of this because I I don’t believe that we do.

Right. No. I agree. This goes to the whole issue of, you know, we can’t push too hard and, you know, in, in behalf of a Ukrainian victory because it could destabilize Russia. I mean, you know, we we Will Saletan know, you know, what might be the detonator that will set off, you know, a chain of events in Russia.

That, could land in a number of different directions. In part, because, you know, this, regime is so opaque. Very difficult to know what’s going on. It’s all controlled by, you know, a, one person and a very small group of retainers. And by the way, Russia is not the only, you know, country that, that we have to deal with like this.

I mean, we just had the Chinese foreign minister disappear for about a month and now he’s been replaced by his predecessor. And what do you make of that?

I I think it’s very much to your point that a sophisticated authoritarian regime is frequently very opaque to the outside, you know, from the outside. But but there’s an additional point which, maybe we should, I know we’re coming to an end here, which which is that it’s the nature of these regimes that they look kind of strong and their leaders look like they’re in complete control when at some point they’re not and things kind of fall apart. And at the same time, there are also regimes where they can never be entirely sure who their friends are. You know, and where people really stand. And of course, they’ve always had to alienate somebody to get to where they are.

They may have had to have even have them killed. So, you know, there’s a a constant, threat of paranoia that, runs runs through this. And it it just seems to me that, you know, whenever people begin to believe that these regimes are, you know, stable, solid, and able to be farsighted because their leaders don’t have any domestic worries. That that’s wrong. They do have domestic worries.

I guess what worries me about your description with, with which I completely agree. Is that our tendency in the US when we think we are dealing with paranoid leaders is to say, oh, you know, we have to be careful not to trigger their paranoia. And so we begin to kinda negotiate with ourselves about what we will and won’t do, out of fear that we’re gonna trigger the, you know, the paranoia or create a cell filling prophecy. I mean, there was a little bit of this, during the Progyzian Rebellion when the administration Was apparently at great pains to tell the Russians we had nothing to do with this, which I can’t really tell whether they were, you know, trolling the Russians or whether they really were trying to convey that to the rest. I can’t think of anything more calculated to make Putin worry that we were actually somehow involved in this by rushing to tell him that we weren’t.

Yeah. Well, it’s also I think it’s, to repeat an old tagline. It’s confusing foreign policy with psychotherapy. And that’s always a mistake, but it it also there’s also an element of hubris in it. It’s that we actually know how to reassure these people.

And the answer is, I don’t think we do. I mean, because, you know, even the people I don’t I disagree with most deeply on foreign policy issues. They’re not Vladimir Putin. They, you know, they don’t have the experience that he’s had. Of revving people out and, you know, establishing a really manipulative dictatorship.

That that’s not who they are. I mean, even Donald Trump. Donald Trump, I think thinks he understands Vladimir Putin. And I I don’t think he does any better a job of it? In fact, I’m pretty sure he does a worse job of it than, you remain.

I’m pretty sure of that. You know, look, I think one of the mistakes we make and I think we’ve discussed this on previous shows is that we treat Russia like a normal nation state when, in fact, it’s a criminal enterprise with a variety of of clans that, and and by the way, that’s one of the explanations for why progression is being treated differently you know, than the generals who may have supported him because for all of his, you know, flaws, you know, a, the system needs the capabilities he created in Wagner, to intervene in in Syria, sub Saharan Africa, Libya, you know, etcetera. Not to mention the media empire he controls. Which included the internet research agency, which was involved in the twenty sixteen election interference in the United States. A bunch of those people were indicted by Robert Mueller.

So there’s sort of still spoils that have to be, you know, taken away from progression or parts of his empire that have to be taken away parts he’s gonna keep. But also, you know, not that I think Putin isn’t the least bit sentimental, but you know, this is someone he’s been tied to since the nineteen nineties, and he does have recur to all these people from his past in Saint Petersburg in terms of those he surrounds himself with. So you have to understand it in in terms of, like, you know, you know, criminal gang mentality. I mean, our mutual teacher, Al Bernstein, you know, would be counseling people, who wanna understand you know, Putin’s Russia to read the godfather rather than, you know, any academic study by, you know, someone, on Russia. So I I think that’s right.

You know, we started the podcast today with Walter Scott. We ended up with the godfather.

Before we before we finish, though, I wanted to just, ask you one thing because as someone who’s, you know, a strong supporter of Israel, I have been really troubled by, you know, what I see going on there right now in terms of the judicial reform and, the protests on both sides, not that Israel couldn’t use some judicial reform. I mean, it it’s obviously a country without a written constitution the judiciary has arrogated to itself a lot of power over the last few years, but this is a judicial reform that is being rammed through without any kind of social consensus and which seems at least somewhat, inflected by, the prime minister’s personal legal troubles. And I wonder if you’re as distraught about this as I am.

Oh, I am. And in some ways, even more so, you know, my wife and I, we we have a lot of friendly friends. She has a few relatives. And so we’ve been communicating with them. And people, including people who have had very senior political intelligence and military positions, are well beyond distraught.

And I think the the reason is that, you know, the the immediate judicial reform is basically to take a a whack at the so called reasonableness standards. So the this was a a legal theory that was invented by, the chief of their Supreme court around barack in the eighties. And, you know, it has allowed the court to exercise a check on, the Connecticut, which is a unicameral legislature, elected on the basis of proportional representation. But the the issue which is triggering everybody, it’s not just that this was done without any attempt whatsoever really to create a, internal consensus on a weighty thing. That there’s a whole slew of further pieces of legislation in the pipeline, which will do all kinds of things.

So they, you know, they’ve already created a situation where one of the, you know, some of the worst ministers in this government, one of them is actually wasn’t named Ben Vier, gets to run his own militia. There are, it’s clear that this will, you know, that the part of the agenda is speeding the annexation of the West Bank. Part of this also is, obscene payoffs to the ultra orthodox community, which basically just takes from the state and doesn’t, give. I mean, they don’t serve in the military or you don’t pay taxes. And and what I think you’re seeing is the Israel that that I knew and that I was very fond of, which is a combination of secular and sort of religious but quite modern, people, with essentially Western liberal democratic values of a kind that I think would be familiar to most Americans, up against a, very dangerous coalition of both secular and religious national ethno nationalists of a kind of a very ugly sort of Victor Orban kind of, Stripe.

And the Ultra Orthodox who are, you know, basically just exploiting the state for their own purposes and have reject modernity, and reject you know, the kind of lives that we live, in a in a thorough way and, you know, have views that I considered pretty benighted on women and gays and and lots of other things. You know, and then you have an Arab minority, which is watching this and is kind of terrified by what this all means. And it’s being rammed through on a very narrow, majoritarian basis. The polls indicate that this does not have majority support among the Israeli population now. If there’s an and now the results would be different.

And and it’s not ending here. You know, the, there are real prospects, I think, for serious violence. There’s already been violence on the streets, for a lot more, for the flight of the people who’ve made Israel to start nation and so on. So it’s a really serious business. And it’s I would good news and wait for the podcast, I suppose, then we’ll have a, we’ll be having a very interesting, writer.

It’s just written a book about Israel to explore this further, but is Isabel Kushner, but I’ll I’ll just say that, no, at the moment, I’m I’m quite worried about it.

I am too. It’s a sort of a grim down note to end the podcast on, but I no. I’m I’m in agreement with you. I I find this very, very distressing. I’m looking forward to discussing it with, Isabel Kushner, the New York Times correspondent, in Jerusalem, who is a, has written a very interesting and nuanced book about this we’ll have her in a couple of weeks.

We’ll have, Christopher Miller of the Financial Times, whose book, war came to us about the Warren Ukraine, another terrific book on, in an upcoming episode as well. But, for today, that’s, all we have for shield of the Republic.

It’s good to be with Eric.