Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
In this edition of One Decision In Brief, hosts Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain's MI6, sit down to break down Germany's latest decision to support Ukraine with a €5 billion military aid package. They also explore the political and social ramifications of President Donald Trump's decision to block foreign visa applications from prospective Harvard students and the threat it poses on academic freedom. Plus, Sir Richard and Christina share stories on what it's like visiting Cuba during and after the Cuban embargo.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Raffini: Germany tells Ukraine to go long. Has Harvard lost its foreign meal tickets? And how times have changed for anyone trying to get cigars out of Cuba? I'm Christina Raffini for One Decision In Brief. With me, of course, is my cohost, Sir Richard Dearlove. Sir Richard, how are you today?
Dearlove: Christina, I'm extremely well, and I hope you are too.
GERMANY AND UKRAINE
Raffini: I do wanna talk to you about some of the key decisions we saw around the world this week. One of the main ones that stands out to me, and I don't know how you feel about it, is Germany kind of stepping up and getting more involved in Ukraine, saying Ukraine, you know, it's gonna help Ukraine develop its own long range missiles and some other really at least seemingly significant shows of military support there. What does that say to you?
Dearlove: It's a huge deal, and I think it's really important, particularly in terms of European security, because the background is key. Scholz had originally promised a significant increase in the German defense budget, but never really followed through. You now have a commitment from Merz, bearing in mind he's actually kept the same defense minister who was in Scholz's government. He's called Pistorius, who's a Social Democrat. But I was in Germany a couple of weeks ago in Hamburg, and whilst I was there, Pistorius actually said that it was Germany's intention to spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2030. Now that is massive. It's not just huge, it's massive. And it would, given the size of the German economy, mean vast conventional forces. Of course, this is a fundamental psychological change for Germany because the postwar settlement was that Germany shouldn't rearm. The other hugely significant thing that Merz has done is change the debt regulations that confine the expenditure of the German government in order to allow them to spend these vast sums of money on defense. So that's the background. It's a massive change, both psychologically in German politics and strategically in terms of European defense. But if you recall at the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, well, after February 2022, the Germans were pilloried for supplying 5,000 new helmets to the Ukrainian military and not much else. They have gone full circle.
Raffini: The reason they're doing this is because so many nations gave weapons but with so many restrictions on them, including that they didn't want them to fire into Russian territory. So this seems like a fundamental shift that I'm wondering. I mean, I don't expect The United States to follow suit, but I wonder if we'll see some of those restrictions lifted, you know, more from The UK and from France and other players in the sphere.
Dearlove: Well, the Germans have lifted this range restriction on the weapons that can be used into Russia. And I think it's pretty clear that the French and the English, British supplies are going to go the same way. So that's also a strategic change. And, I mean, basically, you have Germany stepping up to the plate to eventually replace what the Americans have been doing in terms of supplying the Ukrainian military. And, you know, this is gonna take months. The question is what happens in the intervening months. So there is a problem there.
Raffini: The episode you and I just recorded, which will be dropping soon, and I'm sure all our listeners will tune in, with General Stanley McChrystal, we were talking about Afghanistan, and I was thinking about the comparisons between the American public's will to stay in Afghanistan and how that's impacted its will and commitment and, frankly, attention span these days for foreign wars. And I wonder if even if you had a president like Biden who, for all his other faults, was very pro Ukraine and was pretty good at getting European allies on side and getting everybody singing the same song, I am not sure there was enough road there even with support from top levels of government. It seems to me Europe, who obviously is much closer and has a bigger stake in the game, if they were to be strategic, this is what they should have been doing from the beginning, is taking a more front leading stance on this because ultimately they're the ones who are gonna feel these impacts first.
Dearlove: Absolutely. I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. And in fact, I mean, The UK really has been the European leader, but it should be an alliance of The UK, Germany, France, and to an extent, Poland, of course. And I think that's the direction we're moving in. So it's a big strategic shift. It hasn't yet been given the full attention that it should, but it's going to change the way that the war is conducted in Ukraine, I think, over a period of time.
HARVARD AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Raffini: I also wanna ask you about what's going on here in The US with Harvard University. Obviously, the Trump administration has taken aim at quite a few universities, including Columbia and some others under the impetus of these protests that you saw, these pro Palestinian protests that you saw kind of chaotic last year and through the summer. It started nominally as an effort to combat antisemitism, and it has turned into something much more far reaching. And a lot of schools have complied, allowing the administration essentially to audit clubs, activities, and giving kind of the government unprecedented access. Harvard has gone the other way, and Harvard has pushed back pretty hard. And Harvard is now paying the consequences for that, including the administration has tried to cancel all foreign student visas to Harvard. Now one of the things about Harvard is a lot of the students are foreign students because it is the preeminent educational facility in The United States, and they do so many international studies. They really like a diverse student body population. Is there something bad happening here beyond rich, important kids not getting to go to a cool school?
Dearlove: Yeah. I mean, I think it raises all sorts of questions about academic freedom, and I think all of us feel uncomfortable at government interference to that extent. I mean, I was intrigued by following this issue because there was correspondence that I read from some Harvard alumni saying in a way that Harvard had overplayed its hand as well, and that it wasn't purer than the driven snow. Given that it does receive a huge amount of government funding, you can have a situation, which is certainly happening in British universities, where the foreign element in the universities is disproportionate to the domestic element.
Raffini: Even the school I went to, I went to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, had a huge foreign student population. One of the reasons for our listeners not in The US is because foreign students don't qualify for financial aid. So the international students, for the most part, are paying full tuition. So they've become a very profitable student body contingent for a lot of these universities, and they're very heavily recruited at a lot of schools around the country, not just these super elite Ivy Leagues, but even places like I went to in Fort Worth, Texas. We had huge Muslim student population because we had a whole bunch of Saudi kids because they paid full tuition and TCU was happy to have them.
Dearlove: It's exactly the same in The UK where some universities have made their financial model dependent on the higher fees paid by foreign students. Given the arguments in The UK over immigration now, it's undermining their financial model, so a lot of universities are in financial difficulties. And of course, another aspect to this is that bright British kids can't necessarily get in to the universities that they would like to go to because a number of the places have been reserved for high fee paying foreign students. I think that problem also has arisen to an extent in Harvard. It's not a black and white situation.
Raffini: And especially when you look at programs like I went to for my master's, you know, if you're studying foreign affairs, that program is better when you have kids from all over the world because they all have different perspectives, and it's really important part of your education. But, yeah, it's not a black and white issue. But I'm not sure we want the government telling these schools who they can and cannot take based on seemingly a personal vendetta.
Dearlove: Yeah. And I think that, you know, if I was now in Cambridge and the government was ringing us up saying, you know, refuse these students, we would be having huge difficulties with accepting that sort of intervention in our governance.
Raffini: It's interesting because I'm a giant history nerd, and I was listening to a deep dive on Castro and how he came to power. And one of the things he did after taking over the typist union for journalism, he didn't tell journalists what they could report, but he did allow the typist who actually typeset the papers to put a rebuttal underneath any article that they thought was not pro revolutionary, i.e. was critical of Castro. So you'd read the news, and then you'd read the party's policy underneath. And adjacent to that, while that was going on, he went to the universities and made faculty and staff start signing loyalty oaths or swearing loyalty oaths. It's a little evocative of what's happening. And in 1959, 87 percent of Cuban university professors, staff ended up resigning or being told to resign because they were deemed to not be pro revolution enough.
Dearlove: Yeah. Whether you're beginning to skate on very thin ice in terms of the principles behind university education if you do what's being done to Harvard.
CUBAN CIGARS
Raffini: I mean, any of this sounding a little too familiar? You know, I've heard you have a good Castro story.
Dearlove: Yeah. If you'll remember, The UK continued diplomatic relations with Cuba throughout the period when The US didn't have them. I used to occasionally have exchanges with General Delgado, who was the head of Cuban intelligence. And General Delgado used to send me at Christmas time a very large box of very expensive Cuban cigars. I do not smoke, and very few people I know smoke cigars. Those cigars ended up on the other side of the Atlantic being smoked perhaps in the White House?
Raffini: No. Was that Bush?
Dearlove: I'm not gonna — you'll have to work the timing out for yourself.
Raffini: I'm going with Bush. I'm going with Bush. That's a great story. I went to Cuba just after the Obama administration kind of restarted relations. And it was so interesting because obviously with the embargo, there's so much technology they don't have, and you weren't allowed to bring any kind of Wi-Fi transmitting device. This was a few years ago before everybody's phone could be a hotspot. So we flew in with this thing that's called the LiveU that's basically, you know, seven cell phones in a pack, and it can put your camera up. We weren't supposed to have them. And the customs guys, I went with the cameraman. He had, like, 18 cases. And at the last minute, we said, there's so much gear here. They're not gonna know what this is. They've not seen it before. Like, let's just let them search through all the gear and get confused. And at the last minute, somebody said, you know what, Christina? Why don't you hide it in your stuff? So I took this little device, and they searched. When I tell you we were there for two and a half hours, they searched every piece of equipment in my giant, muscly bald cameraman's bags. And then they came over to me and said, hello. I hope you have a nice time in Havana. And I said, thank you, and just pushed my cart right out the door. And that's what we got on TV for the next week. But it's not quite as good as your Cuban story. But you were allowed to bring back Cubans at that point.
Dearlove: Well, you couldn't import Cuban cigars into The United States, but, of course, no one was gonna look in my bag when I brought them in.
Raffini: Yeah. I think your bags are safer than my bags, Sir Richard, because yours come with, you know, armed guards and the power of the British government, so I can't quite beat that.
Dearlove: Particularly given where they were going.
Raffini: Alright. I think we'll leave it there for this week. Sir Richard, thank you so much. And everybody, please listen to our full episode this Thursday with retired General Stanley McChrystal. As always, for more exclusive content and key discussions with global leaders, be sure to check out our website, 1decision.com, and of course, our YouTube. I'm Christina Raffini. We'll catch you next time.
