Episode Info
- Season6
- Episode4
Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guests
Shane Harris
Shane Harris is a reporter for The Washington Post.
Hassan Hassan
Hassan Hassan writes for New Lines.
Episode Summary
It’s been two years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but the virus has quickly been replaced by two increasingly concerning crises that are redrawing the political and diplomatic map. The Washington Post’s Shane Harris and New Lines’ Hassan Hassan join Sir Richard Dearlove to consider how Putin’s gamble in Ukraine, coinciding with a global energy crisis that is battering households worldwide, is putting pressure on governments.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Lockwood: Hello, and welcome to One Decision, the show that brings you to the heart of the key decisions and their consequences that affect us all. Today, we bring you a special episode. More than a month has passed since the invasion of Ukraine, and we're seeing global shifts, realignments, and looming threats on the horizon. And so we have enlisted some help with analyzing what the near future may bring. I am delighted to be joined today by a formidable panel. We have, of course, my regular co-host, Sir Richard Dearlove. Richard, how are you?
Dearlove: I'm very well.
Lockwood: We also today have the Washington Post's Shane Harris, who covers intelligence and national security, and he's recently written a book on the rise of the surveillance state in America called The Watchers. Hey, Shane.
Harris: Hi, Julia. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Lockwood: Thanks for joining us. And we also have Hassan Hassan, who is the founder and editor in chief of New Lines Magazine and program director at the Center for Global Policy. Also, co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror with Michael Weiss. Hassan, great to have you on.
Hassan: Oh, thank you, Julia.
Lockwood: Right, so let's jump straight into this, because we have a ton to get through. Now, we began last year with a world reeling from the pandemic, which was strangely unifying. Most countries around the world were experiencing some sort of lockdown. There were closed borders, health services straining under the pressure, with a few exceptions such as the worsening Tigray crisis in Ethiopia and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict reigniting. It was quite a quiet year in terms of conflict. This year, however, the crisis in Ukraine has overtaken COVID as the number one global security concern. First, I wanna ask you, Shane. The Biden administration spent weeks warning the world that Russia was preparing an invasion. Why did nobody believe it until it was too late?
WARNINGS AND INTELLIGENCE ON THE INVASION
Harris: It's such a good question. And the warnings were also so unusual in that, you know, as you all know, they consisted in part of declassified intelligence that the administration was putting out about what it knew and what it believed about Russia's plans and their intentions. It was met with some degree of skepticism. I think to some degree perhaps it was natural insofar as people don't wanna believe the worst. Obviously, there had been Russian troops massing at the border earlier in the year, and they effectively backed down. So that may have been a factor at play in the skepticism. Certainly in Ukraine, I know from talking to sources there that there was a real concern on the part of the president, President Zelenskyy, about igniting a panic among the people. We can maybe get into questions about why he maybe didn't take the warnings more seriously, since they were shared with him directly by US intelligence officials, but at least outwardly, was trying to project a kind of an air of calm and of resolve, and I think to some degree, some skepticism about Russia's plans for invasion. And I often wonder too whether there's not a little bit in the background, some thinking in some quarters that, you know, we've heard warnings, dire warnings from US intelligence officials before that didn't exactly pan out as they described. There may still be a little residual hangover from 2003, warnings about weapons of mass destruction. But, ultimately, I think that it was maybe just a tough thing for people to imagine that Vladimir Putin would actually end up doing what he did, which is to launch a full scale invasion of the country with the aim of decapitating the government and taking it over. And that was just a, I don't wanna say an unimaginable scenario, but I think one that particularly in some European capitals, they just found a little bit maybe hyperbolic, and we're not seeing the intelligence with the same degree of dread as the British and the Americans.
Lockwood: Right. I mean, there was that really interesting exchange with, now, was either an Associated Press reporter or Reuters reporter who was pressing the Pentagon about this evidence, and this was before Russia launched the invasion. And I remember there being quite widespread doubt, skepticism. Was this the US administration actually talking about intelligence they had seen that showed plans for an imminent attack? Or was it the Americans really trying to warn Putin not to launch an invasion. I mean, what kind of sense did you get from your sources in the world of intelligence about what was actually going on in those early days earlier this year?
Harris: Yeah. And you raised a good point too, just that, you know, there's the intelligence that's seen and that they disclose and then things that they didn't disclose. And when we talk about intelligence, we should specify too. I mean, the mainstream, so far as I can tell, involved satellite imagery, intercepted communications, and then probably some historical analysis of what Putin had done in the past. I don't get a sense that there was, at least on The US side, any great human sources from inside the Kremlin telling them what was about to happen. So some of that intelligence they could put out publicly, and they did. We published satellite photos that had been declassified. And you could kind of compare those with publicly available satellite imagery, and you could physically see the troops and the material massing there. But then you point to that exchange with the Associated Press diplomatic reporter, where, I think that was, well, there was at least that one, in the State Department as well, where they were pressing and saying, look. Well, where are these other reports? Where are you getting this from? Where are you getting talk among the generals? How do we know this? And, of course, the administration had to say, look. We're not gonna tell you everything about where this intelligence is coming from, but we can tell you that this is our conclusion. And there was, I think, a sense that because there were clearly authorized disclosures coming from the US government, some things that you could physically see with your own eyes, some things you sort of had to take your word for it. There was a question of whether the administration was trying to also play a bit of an information operation with Putin and sort of get him to back down and warn him. And the administration actually kind of acknowledged that. On one hand, there was an exchange. I can't remember off the top of my head when it was, but I believe it might have been with the State Department where they said effectively, look. If we're wrong about this and Putin is not actually going to invade, we would rather be wrong and have warned people about something that didn't happen than be accused on the back end of not taking it seriously enough and telling people what we knew. So they clearly came down on the side of trying to disclose more. And the confidence ratings, I have to say, among my sources were always very high. They told me that the Americans and the British had basically judged with about 70 to 75% confidence Putin would go in. And I think at the end, as he got closer, that was largely based on intelligence agencies seeing the physical formation of the artillery, of the tanks, of the troops, and realized that they were moving into an attack formation and that they wouldn't go to all of that trouble unless they invade.
Lockwood: And that's sort of 70% certainty. I mean, given that Western intelligence had just totally failed to predict how easily Afghanistan was overtaken by the Taliban. Do you think that played any kind of role in evaluation of that intelligence?
Harris: I think that American officials certainly were still smarting from that. I do know from talking to some sources that that event left a number of people in the administration rather traumatized because there was so much that they did incorrectly gauge, including frankly, I think, that they were not predicating their analysis on the Afghan administration simply fleeing the capital. And there was a real question, I think, among US officials I spoke to before the invasion of Ukraine, whether or not Zelensky would hold out, whether he would try to leave, whether the Ukrainians simply would not be able to fight. There was a real doubt about the readiness of the Ukrainian troops as well. But I think that the Afghanistan experience does factor into it because there was so much that went wrong in the fall of Kabul, even though intelligence agencies had been saying, look, this government could fall apart very quickly after US forces leave. And I think that they wanted to make very, I don't wanna say emphatic pronouncements about Ukraine, but they didn't wanna be accused later of overlooking or underestimating anything.
RUSSIA AS A FAILING POWER
Lockwood: Right. So Richard, in some of our conversations earlier this year, you characterized Russia as a failing power and its increasingly aggressive behavior prior to the Ukraine invasion as indicative of a failing power lashing out. So is the war in Ukraine Putin's last roll of the dice as it were? Does he have the Russian leadership with him on this, or is this very much Putin's sole attempt at doing something that will burnish his legacy?
Dearlove: Well, I think there's strong evidence, you know, of severe miscalculation, let's put it like that, and what the knock on consequences are for Putin and his administration, it's hard to predict. But there's no question, in my view, that we have all the signs here of imperial decline, of severe angst, of a wish to assert their power and influence in those regions which they thought they could practically do so, and historically Russia has always tried to dominate its periphery, and in a way there's no more important part of greater Russia than Ukraine if you characterize that historically, so it's to an extent understandable. I mean I thought that Putin would ultimately take a rational decision and the rational decision would not have been to go ahead with a full scale invasion, it would have been coercive diplomacy, bite off more of Donbas, and then as it were sit tight and you know we probably wouldn't have been, there wouldn't have been the action taken to dislodge you. So I think that it's very interesting about the intelligence predictions. I mean I disagree slightly with one thing that Shane had said. I do not think that there would have been those releases of intelligence if there hadn't been significant human. You never release human, you only release human if you can corroborate it with other issues, which they clearly could do with satellite and all the other stuff. And I mean what I thought was striking were the predictions that the invasion was going to go ahead, and to me that was, you know, almost counter cultural because it's such a crazy decision to take. We've now seen the consequences of that decision for Russia and how this will play out, I'm not going to try to predict. So I mean I think that my conclusions are that this is very much an imperial power struggling with the issue of its decline, and of course there's no worse indication of the decline than how it suffered militarily inside Ukraine. And the predictions that Putin must have received from their, I'm sure, very significant intelligence coverage inside Ukraine, it's not difficult when you've got a population which is partly rational, ethnically rational, to recruit sources, yet they could get their estimates so thoroughly wrong. And it's extraordinarily surprising how determined the Ukrainian resistance has been, but I mean I think what is even more extraordinary is the strength of the Ukrainian identity as a separate identity from Russia, which historically would be hard to argue in some respects which is what Putin argues, but over the last fifty years or however long you like to calculate it, clearly Ukraine has seen its destiny as separate from Moscow's, and we're sitting now on a series of such seminal events in terms of the future security of the European continent. I mean for me the most important change, the biggest change, the most significant change is the change in Germany's attitude towards European defense, and this is massive, and we'll have to see what consequences it has over the next three, four, five years. It's not going to happen immediately. And of course then the whole issue of energy security and how energy security now ties in to the security of every independent European nation in relation to how its energy is supplied.
Lockwood: Right, I just want to go back, given what you said about so much of Putin's decision to go into Ukraine has to do with this post imperial anxiety. I mean, a lot has been made of Russia's disappointing military strategy on the field in Ukraine, and we had quite an extraordinary almost turnaround from the Russians signaling that they were shifting their military strategy in Ukraine to really solidifying their grip on the Donbas region, which was a region that was already occupied by Russia before the February 24 invasion was launched. And then you had President Biden making that sort of hashed comment about inadvertently calling for regime change. Do you think Biden's words, and anyone who's interested in this can answer, have Biden's words changed the calculus for Putin? He is a man that is very sensitive to criticism. What is the danger there of The United States explicitly calling for regime change, even if the White House and the government have tried to walk back some of those comments?
Dearlove: Biden's dilemma, and it's a dilemma for every democratic leader, is do you make public statements as a diplomat or statements as a politician? And it's absolutely clear, this wasn't a gaffe in my opinion, he was making a public statement as a politician, and what western politician would disagree with him in the cold light of day if they had to sit down and have a one to one. He's being criticized for not having made a diplomatic statement, and I mean I was listening to Kim Darroch, our recent ambassador to The United States, as it were criticizing Biden, and in a way justifiably, but is Biden's role in the future to be a diplomat and try to secure a peace agreement, or is he, as it were, behaving as the leader of the Western world and making a political statement? I mean let's go back and sort of envisage the Second World War. Would Churchill have made diplomatic statements about Hitler, or would he have made political statements about Hitler? I'm pretty sure that Churchill's statements about Hitler were absolutely basically political in terms of the values. I mean, the question is how do we judge this crisis, and how do we see this crisis? So I'm a bit surprised by the way in which there has been this, let's say, politically correct reaction to Biden and criticizing him for not behaving as a diplomat.
Lockwood: Has, but then why walk back those comments the way the White House did? No, no, he's not calling for regime change. It's not about Putin.
Dearlove: I'm aware, in a way I would have preferred to see the democratic administration blink and rally behind the president and say, well look, let's face the reality. This is catastrophic crime. I mean a quarter of the Ukrainian population has been displaced. This is four or five million refugees. I'm lost for words in a way because of the extremity of what's happened. The question is about maybe peace negotiation, but I mean in a way the negotiation isn't going to come out of accommodating Russia, it's going to come out of the fact that the Russian military are failing to win this war, and maybe are forced to back off. And you know, if you ask me personally, as quite an elderly gent now who's been following geopolitics for a long time, I would love to see Putin deposed by a palace coup, and okay we're still going to have to deal with some intransigent Russian leadership, but possibly a leadership that understands the weakness of Russia's position in relation to what's happening at the moment.
LESSONS FROM SYRIA
Lockwood: I wanted to ask Hassan, given that the Russian army was most recently tried and tested in Syria, fighting a totally different war to the current situation inside Ukraine, how do you think Russia's military strategy was maybe falsely informed by the fighting they did in Syria, thinking that they would be fighting the same kind of war in Ukraine?
Hassan: So in many ways they did learn from Syria and they're replicating some of the lessons they learned from Syria in the sense that in terms of disinformation, in terms of the tactics they used, even use of foreign troops, non-Russians on the ground, militias and so on and so forth. It's been uncanny in that sense. So people who followed Syria from before kind of recognize a lot of what's happening in Ukraine today. But generally, as everyone has said, I think Putin has overestimated, you know, maybe not his power, but probably also underestimated the EU, US and Western reaction to it. A lot of people, and we've been doing stories from the ground in Ukraine and one of the earliest dispatches that we did was, I remember at the time I thought it was grandstanding from Ukrainians to say we're going to fight and we're going to defeat the Russians, right? But then, because nobody, as Shane said, even The US was expecting the president to flee. They offered him a ride. He refused. So the fact that the Ukrainians kind of fought back is quite interesting and surprising to many people, I imagine, including to Putin. And in many ways also, if you had followed Syria before, you would also recognize that Russia has used some of the relentless air campaigns in places like Damascus or the outskirts of Damascus and in Aleppo. And those campaigns actually took many, many months, even though Syrian rebels in this case were facing similar campaigns for several years before that. So after all this time they still resisted and were able to sort of face these campaigns by the Russians. So in some ways it's not surprising. In many ways, probably it is surprising that people thought the Ukrainians will cave, Putin will, you know, prevail soon enough.
Lockwood: I mean, the majority of Russian forces fighting in Syria was largely its air force carrying out bombing campaigns. We have a lot of similarities between how Ukraine is being attacked to how Syria was attacked, civilian infrastructure being targeted. In Syria, we saw a lot of those horrific bunker busting bombs targeting people hiding in basements. I think we've yet to see that being used in Ukraine. But I mean, what have you made of a lot of the footage of young Russian conscripts, tanks, ground forces being stymied, clearly being unprepared for what they were being sent into? Were you surprised by seeing that side of the Russian military?
Hassan: I think also, you know, that some of that happened in Syria. I remember vaguely that some of the most embarrassing footage of Russians not able to fire rockets and things like that from in Syria happened early on. That's why some people are saying the Russians were actually testing weapons inside Syria early on. The tactics and social media obviously helped kind of show some of these failings on the part of the Russian military. So in a way, Russia is not that impressive when it comes to sort of street to street fighting and so on and so forth. That was expected. The only thing that worked for the Russians, and by the way, even ISIS recognized this early on, is basically the sheer bombardments and the fact that they were bombing anything, using dumb bombs and so on and so forth. I remember even ISIS were saying the Americans are actually easier to evade because Americans are more precise when they strike ISIS. So they strike a building, sometimes half a building where ISIS resides or ISIS fighters, whereas the Russians would just drop things on the ground. Right? Less concerned with hitting civilians, it would be. Yeah. So that's really what's working for the Russians, not smart weapons. And that's really what everyone's fearing. That's why people are concerned about chemical weapons and those types of tactics.
Lockwood: Right. There's one thing that I find really, really interesting that I would love to get your thoughts on. And that's that the Syrian government owes its survival to the Putin regime. And we've seen reports recently of recruiting centers in Syria, that fighters may be sent from the Syrian Republic to fight in Ukraine. There's been some pictures circulating on social media in recent days of Syrians protesting with the letter zed, showing solidarity apparently with Russia. I should be clear that those pictures appear to show pro-Assad factions in Syria. There have also been a lot of anti-Putin protests by opposition Syrians. Russia famously bombarded Aleppo and other previously rebel held areas, hitting schools and hospitals and other civilian targets as we've discussed. Hassan, what do you make of these reports of Syrians getting involved in this war? Have we actually seen any in Ukraine? We've certainly had that announcement of these recruiting centers opening in Syria, but have these fighters been on the ground yet as far as you know?
Hassan: So much of this is really about how the Syrians feel compelled, Syrians in the case of the pro-regime Syrians feel compelled to show solidarity to Russia and Putin rather than really feeling, obviously, that Putin needs them on the ground. So you have to sort of consider that element that when Shia forces in Iraq or Syrian pro-regime fighters say we wanna go and fight on the side of Putin, it's really a statement in a lot of ways. It's a political statement saying basically we stand against America, the West, on the side of Putin. And it's quite fascinating. I mean, you zoom out a little bit and see how this whole war is viewed in places like the Middle East and South Asia and how it feels close. You know, there have been a lot of recent fights, whether you're talking about Kazakhstan or in Armenia and in different places, these wars did not feel as close to people from the Middle East. And I think part of it is because they felt that Putin is standing up to the western powers, but a lot of sympathy actually for the Ukrainians because of what Putin did in Syria and places like that, in Libya as well, standing with a warlord against a democratic, internationally recognized government. And it's, in a way, the same. I think probably a big part of this is how the image of Putin has been altered in many parts of the world. And I would say the same effect is happening now for Russia as it happened to The US after Afghanistan. Meaning, I think Putin's image as a savvy leader and a reliable partner in places like The Middle East has been shattered in many ways. People, Putin has built a reputation or had built a reputation before as almost the air of this, like, he is going to be the next superpower force that you can rely on, at least in places where The US is leaving. Afghanistan was the latest example, and now they see that Putin cannot even defend himself. He can't protect his own neighborhood. So in that sense, I think Putin has lost much of the goodwill and political capital that he built over the years in places like The Middle East and South Asia.
Lockwood: Shane, I see you nodding quite a lot.
Harris: Yeah. I think it's so interesting to think about how even the image of Putin has changed in The United States since the war began, which is not to say that people in The United States had warm feelings towards Putin. But I think that The US intelligence community and the national security establishment was turning its attention towards China. And it's not to say that they were disregarding Russia. You know, the CIA is led by the former ambassador to Russia, who was dispatched to go meet with Putin before this invasion began. But there was a sense that the strategic focus of The US was shifting and it was kind of realigning. And now Putin has kind of reappeared with Russia and asserted himself in this way. And you see, you hear people kind of talking more in the rhetoric of the Cold War again. And it's almost like it's happened overnight and reminded people that Putin is a force to be reckoned with. And in the Trump administration, I think people were almost used to him as being kind of this figure that the president had this weird affection for, and he wanted to interfere in our elections, but he was a declining power and that he wasn't gonna be able to assert himself in Europe certainly. And so that's just been a remarkable shift to watch. Even just going back to what Richard was saying about Biden's statement as being a political statement and not a diplomatic one, absolutely. And I don't think that it was necessarily a slip of the tongue. I think the president genuinely feels that Putin is not someone who The United States and Europe can tolerate as having in power. At the same time, I think one of the reasons why the White House moved so quickly to clean that statement up, and even the president the next day tried to sort of say, I don't mean regime change, is there is this palpable feeling, and they say it, but you can really feel it in talking to officials too in the administration, feeling of not putting Putin into a corner and not escalating this conflict. And even the concept of escalation has been a little bit distorted here in this war. But this feeling of, you know, we really would like Putin to go, but we really, really don't wanna be in direct conflict with Russia. And so they find themselves in this kind of very awkward place where they don't wanna antagonize him. They certainly don't wanna corner him, but they have to make political pronouncements about him. And it's just challenging, and you see them improvising a little bit here.
Lockwood: Right. I mean, the number of times I've seen in the press, the story repeated of Putin saying he found this rat in an apartment, when it was cornered jumped up and tried to bite him. I mean, clearly, that is a metaphor for how the world is scared of putting Putin in a corner lest he lash out. He's already been talking about moving the nuclear weapons around. I think it's really interesting what you say about how the world, particularly the West had been sort of focusing on countering a rising China and how the war in Ukraine might have affected, or maybe it hasn't affected China's ambition. What impact do we think that the war in Ukraine is going to have on this sort of anti-Western alliance that appears to be dividing the world? I mean, we've seen most countries in the United Nations voted a few weeks ago to condemn Russia's behavior, but notably the vast majority of international states have not opted to sanction Russia, outside of Europe, The US, Canada, and I think staunch US allies, Japan, South Korea, and then Singapore, the only countries in Asia to implement sanctions. There were no countries on the African continent or the Middle East, no countries in Latin America taking part in those sanctions either. I'm gonna throw this out to all of our speakers. What is our take on this?
CHINA, RUSSIA, AND THE GLOBAL REALIGNMENT
Harris: Well, I'll just offer up some first thoughts, which is I think that there is that sense, right, that China and Russia are kind of entering into this, I don't know we wanna think about it as the anti-democratic alliance because it doesn't break out so neatly because there are democratic countries that have not taken as hard a line against Russia. I can say from talking to administration officials in the past couple of weeks, I think they see a real opportunity in the invasion of Ukraine to strengthen our resolve against China, which is to say that the Biden administration seems to feel very confident that China is watching NATO's resolve in responding to Russia and the implementation of these sanctions and taking a lesson and thinking twice about whether they would try and take Taiwan. So they seem to think in the Biden administration that this is an opportunity for The US and its allies and NATO to flex its muscles against China. And that China, being pragmatic as it is, is not necessarily ready to openly just embrace Moscow and make it the junior partner in some new anti-democratic alliance. I mean, I think the Biden administration was very encouraged that when Putin went to China essentially begging for weapons and money and food, even for his troops, they felt that the Chinese were willing to provide some support but would not cross the line of providing weapons. And I think the Biden administration was very encouraged by that. But there's no doubt that Russia is becoming the junior partner maybe in some sort of new alliance. China's maybe its really only powerful friend. And that too is gonna change the strategic view, I think, certainly, of the intelligence agencies that I cover, saying, are these two powers coming more into alignment now against the West? And that's the fascinating game that's going to play out for months and years to come. But at least in the short term, it doesn't seem to me that the White House is too worried about Xi and Putin forming some huge new military alliance. I think that they think they're sending a very clear message to Beijing reflecting kind of off what's happening in Ukraine.
Lockwood: Right. And I think something that is really interesting is India and the stance that India has taken. And it wasn't too long ago, Richard, you were talking with Julie Bishop, who was a former foreign minister of Australia, and she was talking about India as a member of the Quad and how it was sort of joining the club of countries that were trying to counter China. And we've recently seen the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs praising India as a supporter of Russia. Richard, is India still a partner of the West?
Dearlove: Yes definitely, I mean don't be deceived, Modi's just being cautious and you have to remember in the case of India, the sort of ghost of the non-aligned movement and the role that India played in the non-aligned movement, and it was very keen to stand between East and West, and I think one has seen that in terms of the way that Modi has reacted. I mean why should he compromise India's position at this moment by taking a definite stand? But I think in the medium term, what's important to India isn't what's happening in Russia, it's what's happening in China and what's happening in The Pacific, and I think that you will see there's a consistency in India's attitude on these issues, and I think that India will continue to be supportive of an initiative like AUKUS and looking to build its alliances worrying about China in the future. I think the question we need to ask ourselves is: is Ukraine a cautionary tale for China, or is it an encouraging tale for China? I think that my interpretation at the moment in the way that Xi has reacted in a sort of reserved fashion, it's a cautionary tale for China and it's going to make China much much more careful about the way that it plays its cards internationally in terms of its relationship ultimately with The United States. I mean let's be realistic about the future of global security. Pax Americana is going to become Pax Americana et Pax Serica or whatever the exact Latin term is, and that's what is in Xi Jinping's mind. And obviously people are drawing parallels with Taiwan, but I mean the lesson for China at the moment in relation to Taiwan is very very cautionary. I mean an amphibious invasion of an island which is mountainous, which has all the sophistication and training of modern weaponry, and we've seen what's happened in Ukraine, there's no way that China is going to, as it were, feel a loyalty to Putin's Russia and build some close alliance which ultimately is going to militate against China's influence, China's soft power, China's opportunity to play a constructive role on the world stage. Now, okay, China's an uncomfortable partner, we all know that, and there's been a huge shift in US policy which I think is very sensible and of which we're very supportive, but I think this will have put the brakes on a lot of China's ambitions, and specifically in relation to India I don't think you're going to see a shift, and ultimately a strategic shift, in India's attitude towards the West. I mean, India, remember, is the world's largest democracy and a relatively successful democracy at that. Modi's government may have some autocratic characteristics, but it isn't an autocratic government ultimately, it's a democratic government.
Lockwood: Right, I mean you say that India is trying to not get involved, but certainly the way the Russians are speaking, they count India as one of their supporters in the prism of this.
Dearlove: I think they're frankly kidding themselves. I mean, there's no way if the chips were down and Modi had to make a choice, he's not going to choose Russia in these circumstances. I mean let's, well, I'll reiterate, remind ourselves about what Russia is. This is a declining imperial power with a relatively tiny GDP that certainly doesn't have the power to sustain the trouble making unless it starts a nuclear conflict, okay, but I don't think we're going to go down that track personally. This is going to cause a huge destabilization, and ultimately the country that is going to suffer most is Russia itself.
Lockwood: We've talked a lot about sort of Russia being in decline and will be declining further through this very, very costly invasion. The reaction of the world, I think, has taken a lot of people by surprise. We got that united response on SWIFT. We got unlikely allies in Switzerland and Hungary, in joining sanctions against Russia, even the Kazakhstan government, which was propped up by the Russians not too long ago amid protests earlier this year. Is Russia really alone? I mean, given when we look at the map of countries that have sanctioned Russia, most of those countries are exclusively countries in the West, Europe, and countries such as South Korea and Japan that are utterly reliant upon The United States for their defense. Is Russia really alone in this fight, or is the huge absence of international states joining in those sanctions indicative that actually maybe there are more people who are not willing to join The US in this than not?
Dearlove: Well I would invert the question and say does Russia have any reliable allies? And I think if you look at it in that light, you would be hard pressed to say who would line up with Russia militarily and economically in the medium to longer term. I mean obviously when you have such a seminally divisive event globally, there are going to be a lot of countries that will sit on the fence for as long as they can without defining their position, but if they're forced to define their position then you should, as it were, try to identify which side they will fall. And I think if you say who are Russia's reliable allies, then it's very hard to start enumerating a list beyond Belarus. I mean, maybe Kazakhstan to an extent, and maybe for issues of convenience there will be other small nations that will line up with them. But I can't see even the China, I mean the key issue is China and how China behaves towards Russia through this crisis. And I think that China is going to be extremely careful and cautious without necessarily offending Putin to make sure that it retains its independence of decision making.
ENERGY, IRAN, AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Lockwood: I want to turn the discussion slightly because one sphere in which we are seeing this conflict impact so many of us is it is exacerbating an energy crisis that is being felt all over the world. And one thing that I think is really interesting, may or may not be a wild card in this, is the fact that we have the Iran deal, which is being negotiated. We've seen talks resume, while not officially related, there was also this huge symbolic step forward recently when British hostages in Iran were released back home after a long standing debt owed by the British government was finally paid to Iran. Iran is desperate to sell the West its oil. Is the current boycott of Russian energy going to make a deal more likely? Hassan, do you have any thoughts on that?
Hassan: So I think this process is going to take some time anyway. Now, this goes back to American allies and how they dealt and reacted to this crisis. You know, from India, it had India supporting Russia in a way, but also India's rival, Pakistan supporting Russia and The Gulf States and the oil rich countries in the region. Also not really standing with The US and kind of following what The US is trying to achieve by kind of lowering the prices of oil and such. I think this all has to do with two things. One is basically that so much hope has been pinned on Russia by these allies, and they're not going to just give up on Russia. And this actually goes back to some of the closest American allies, to Turkey. You know, they made quite deep, whether you're talking about energy, politics and military, alliance with Russia since 2016. And yet they still try to sort of stand with Ukraine in this crisis, but they still really didn't go all the way against Russia. And that's one element of it, that there's so much has been built between these countries and Russia, but also so much has been destroyed between The US and these countries over the past few years in terms of trust. You know, do we trust, like if the Americans need us now? Do we switch side and just go with The US? And what happens the day after? A lot of people from India to Pakistan to The Gulf States are thinking about the day after, and I don't think the Iran deal would save the day because I think it's going to take a while anyway. It's not gonna happen in one day, even if a deal happens tomorrow.
Lockwood: I think it's really interesting that you bring up Turkey because I think something that I find quite peculiar is that Turkey was criticized, was it not, recently for buying that missile system from Russia, which is now, I think either being sent to Ukraine or there's been talk of the Turks sending those missile systems to Ukraine to use against Russia. I mean, the complicated diplomatic dance that so many of these countries are having to do is mind bending.
Hassan: Yeah. Back in the day in the Cold War, one had to just pick a side. Now they can't pick a side. They have to strike a balance.
Harris: And for Iran too, you know, Julia, you talk about the negotiations. I mean, Iran in watching the way that the West has been so cautious with Russia because it has a nuclear arsenal, is the x-factor underlying all of this. Iran's just been given a case study for why it's important for them to have a nuclear weapon. Because once you have that, you have just this profound leverage clearly and understandably so. I'm not saying that the Biden administration is calculating that way. But every step that The United States is taking, they keep that in mind. And here, not only does Iran have a reason to want a weapon, but lots of countries do. I worry whether this has been one of the greatest incentives to create mass proliferation and acquisition of nuclear weapons that we've seen in some time.
Lockwood: If no one is going to be a winner of this conflict, certainly arms manufacturers may end up reaping their rewards. Hassan, I think what you mentioned about Gulf allies not standing entirely with The US, I think is really interesting. And in particular, I wanted to ask about The UAE because The UAE has been increasingly working with Russia. And most recently, symbolically, I think really importantly, to reintegrate Bashar al-Assad back into the Arab fold after years of him being isolated during the Syrian civil war. Isn't The UAE supposed to be a close ally of the West? What is going on there?
Hassan: So on one hand, The UAE doesn't feel it's under so much pressure to listen to The US. You know, it's not the Trump administration, it's the Biden administration. That's one thing. The second thing is a lot of it has to do with economics as well. The UAE has been moving away from its previously aggressive policies in the region into making friends and making amends with the former foes like Turkey, Qatar, other places, even Iran has been visiting Iran a lot. And there's also the Houthi pressure, the strikes that are coming from, or the bombings coming from Yemen. All that has to do with needing more from The US and not needing to listen to The US. And the economics of it is basically they don't want to just lower the prices of oil or do something. There's basically The UAE first policy, and that's common at the time when The UAE feels they need more from The US in terms of compromises. The Saudis are the same story. They also want, it just happened at the same time where there's so much pressure from the Houthis in Yemen, and they want something from The US in exchange for any sort of deal with US.
Dearlove: Yeah, I agree. I mean, MBZ, Mohammed bin Salman, has always sort of played both ends against the middle. He's quite skillful at doing that, and he will be trying to squeeze every inch of advantage for his regime out of the current situation, and there's quite a lot for him to squeeze out, but a fundamental break with The US, no way.
KEY CONSEQUENCES AND FINAL THOUGHTS
Lockwood: We have just a few minutes left, so I wanna ask a question to each of our panel here. Whether it is the German reverse ferret on its defense policy or whether it is the revelation that Putin is not a four-d chess master after all. What is the key consequence, key revelation, key development of this crisis, and which is the most important one that we should be aware of in the coming months to come? I'm gonna start with Shane.
Harris: Well, at the risk of repeating myself, I'll say that I think the most important strategic revelation, at least the one that's impressed me the most, is what a powerful incentive this creates for other countries to have nuclear weapons as leverage. But I'll pick another one actually that I think has been really on the minds of my sources, the intelligence communities. And it's much more of an immediate tactical question. But yes, the intelligence community made great predictions about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. But it seems that they wildly overestimated the capabilities of the Russian military. And that is something that a lot of my sources are scratching their heads and saying, wait a minute. How did we, why did we think this military was a hundred feet tall when it can't even get trucks onto trains and take this country that we all thought would fall in seventy two hours? General Berrier, who runs the Defense Intelligence Agency, was asked about this question in an open hearing and said something that was remarkable to me, which was, ultimately, we based our assumptions of the Russian military performance on Putin's assumptions of the Russian military performance, which turned out to be very, very flawed. And it says, this is an occasion where probably a lot of governments, particularly The United States, are gonna be reassessing, to a degree, how strong is this military and possibly what it would take for Putin to spend some years regrouping and possibly trying this again if he ultimately has to sort of take a pass on his first invasion of Ukraine and reach the settlement.
Lockwood: I can't imagine Putin licking his wounds for long, I have to say. Hassan, same question to you.
Hassan: So I think the most interesting one, also repetition, which is I think the war in Ukraine has the same effect on Putin and Putin's image, and that actually has practical consequences for Putin in the future. Like I said, the same effect as The US withdrawal from Afghanistan and that shattering of the image that, you know, twenty years of war, you leave basically without doing anything. The same forces are back into the country. And the practical consequences for these should not be underestimated. The US is now being treated by even small countries like UAE and Qatar and others like it's a small player. Obviously there's a special dynamic here that The US, they know The US is power. Nobody understates The US power, but they probably know the American will and ability to do something in terms of damage to them if they say no to it. And I think that damage to Putin's image in the world is real. It's not something that we saw before, that he is not that smart. He's not that powerful. Now that said, I don't think, to Shane's point earlier, I don't think that changes the fact that Putin is dangerous and Russia will remain a threat. That's not mutually exclusive in that sense. We were looking at this from a Western perspective. We think that because Putin is licking his wounds and wounded by this war, that that's not a victory for him. But actually, three months from now, four months from now, if the outcome is destroyed Ukraine, a devastated economy and other neighboring countries are looking behind their shoulders, that is a victory for Putin if he stays in power, obviously.
Lockwood: Very, very good point. Richard, I would guess that the answer to that question to you is going to be Germany's change in policy.
Dearlove: Well, Germany's change in policy, but I would actually generalize it further than that and say that energy security has become the primary issue of national security, which is a huge shift, and I don't think that we should ignore the impact on business and the business of business. ESG loses its E. And the reluctance of the world's investors to invest in energy companies is blown away overnight because suddenly it becomes respectable as an issue of national security as opposed to zero carbon to invest in energy companies. So this is going to have a huge commercial impact as well, and of course one shouldn't also ignore the knock on effects of the rise of commodity prices, I'm thinking about the grain market and the impact in the higher cost of food we'll have in The Middle East and in Africa. So I agree with the points made by Shane and Hassan, but I think just to add a different perspective, I would put the energy security issue to the forefront, and of course, that is absolutely crucial for Germany of all countries.
Lockwood: That's it for this week's episode of One Decision. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. From me and the team, thanks for tuning in, and see you next week.
