Will Vladimir Putin be president by the end of the year? Ex-MI6 head makes his predictions for 2023.

Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove

Guest

Episode Summary

2022 was a crazy year. And our Sir Richard Dearlove says 2023 won't be any less eventful. The former head of MI6 sits down with host Julia Macfarlane to discuss what the future might hold for the war in Ukraine, the burgeoning protest movement in China, and the United States presidential race.

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Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Mcfarlane: You're listening to One Decision, the podcast that examines the big choices shaping our world today. Who makes them? Who is affected by them? I'm your host, Julia McFarlane. We recently reviewed 2022's biggest decisions with friends of our podcast from The Economist, Bloomberg and Semafor. You can find that on our recent shows wherever you found us here. But today, my cohost and partner in pod, Sir Richard Dearlove, the former chief of MI6, he and I are looking at 2023, where the chess pieces have moved, and what Sir Richard is going to be looking for in the months ahead. Richard, happy New Year. Happy New Year, Julia, to you as well, and I hope it might be a better one. Yes. Yes. 2022, I remember going in thinking, oh, we're coming out two years out of the pandemic. Here's hoping we have a bit more of a quieter, less dramatic year. And then we found ourselves in the middle of a war in Europe, things got madder still.

Mcfarlane: I guess most of us didn't see specifically the war coming. I remember the two of us were in concert about that. We both felt quite strongly that no way Putin would be stupid enough to actually launch a ground invasion of Ukraine. And one of us, certainly, it was probably me, said that if Putin does actually go ahead with this, I'll eat my hat. So that just goes to show that you never know what can happen in this crazy world of ours. But, certainly, a lot of curveballs happened last year, and now we find ourselves looking ahead to 2023. And we are looking at a world that was shaped by the pandemic, of course, the two years before that. And so we're beginning 2023 in a world that is likely gonna be shaped by Putin's war in Ukraine. So I just wanted to get started with this conversation, looking at some of the key moving pieces, which are likely to be in play for 2023 and potentially beyond. And I first of all want to start with, of course, the war in Ukraine and how that is likely to shape up in the months to come, and what kind of impact it will continue to have on the world's political alliances, and, of course, the global economy. And we saw President Zelensky making this incredibly important trip out last year, his first foreign trip since the war began in February 2022. It was a really historic trip, his trip to Washington, to The United States, and it was planned and organized in total secret. And it was only announced publicly a few hours before he went to address the US Congress. There was that incredibly powerful image of Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi unfurling the Ukrainian flag that was signed by Ukrainian soldiers. They did that in the Capitol as Zelensky made his address. He tried to make it very bipartisan. He frequently addressed both parties in his speech. Dear Americans, in all states. That was obviously so important for Zelensky and for Ukraine because The US has been his most important ally in the war. I believe the Americans have committed some $50,000,000,000 of financial humanitarian and security assistance so far, which is way more than any other country. And then there was of course the donation of a Patriot system of advanced defense missiles to Ukraine, which Zelensky welcomed, but he candidly asked for more, which is quite funny because you saw Biden laughing as Zelensky said, sorry, but we're in a war. Can we have some more Patriot missiles? You know, last year, we spoke to quite a few experts on Ukraine and Russia about how the war was going. And particularly, we're at a really important crossroads on the battlefield. We've got Ukraine's very difficult and harsh winter conditions. And then, of course, there's the will of European nations to bear pain in order to support Ukraine and potentially prolong the war, and perhaps most crucially, the American appetite to fund it militarily. So what do you think we're likely to see in the months ahead? And how did you find Zelensky's trip to The US, particularly given the questions over that bipartisan support?

THE WAR IN UKRAINE

Dearlove: Zelensky's trip, of course, is fundamentally important to Ukraine because Ukraine, for its survival but for any chance of military victory, totally, I think, dependent on the support it gets from The United States. So you can see that trip as being completely seminal. And a colleague of mine talking about it drew an interesting parallel between Churchill's address to the United States Congress, which I think was in 1941, and Zelensky's at this point in time. Okay. That's making a very dramatic comparison. But I think it underlines the fact that Ukraine absolutely needs that alliance with The United States to survive. And I think we're at a difficult point in the war, really, because Putin is clearly now playing for time. The longer the war goes on, the longer that he can, as it were, push the date of continuation out, the better the chances are for Russia in that the West's alliance could be fractured and could break apart over time because there will be different views about fighting the war and fighting directly in support of Ukraine or giving Ukraine the military support to sustain it over time. So there's no question that I think Putin now is playing for the long term because his other options militarily on the ground look really poor. One's almost heading for a frozen conflict, a line which doesn't seem to be moving a great deal. Their losses are reported to be huge, and of course Ukrainians on their side haven't really had a breakthrough. But we'll have to see what happens over the coming weeks. I feel neither optimistic or pessimistic at this point in time. And the Ukrainians are certainly holding their own, but Putin's objective of playing for the long term seems at the moment to be relatively successful.

Mcfarlane: We spend a lot of time, not just you and I on this podcast, but media and Russia, Ukraine watchers in general, analyzing what was happening a lot on the battlefield in Ukraine. And I wonder if this year, '23, we're going to start to perhaps see more movement within Russia. And we've seen the Ukrainians recently making good use of the HIMARS system that they've gotten from the Americans. And there was this huge loss of life on the Russian side with this HIMARS attack on a military compound, and we don't know how many Russian soldiers died. Kyiv says as many as 500 Russian soldiers have died. The Russians admitted that they certainly lost a 100 soldiers, their biggest single casualty since the war began. But what I thought was interesting was there is now a lot of finger pointing and blame happening within Russia. You have these very influential war bloggers, these very influential military commentators within Russia who are really laying it on thick with Putin when it comes to his strategy. There's been open sort of criticism of how Putin has conducted this war. Recently, we've had those kinds of voices criticizing those soldiers involved in that Ukrainian strike for possibly giving away their location on social media. But there was this wife of a Russian soldier who said that the local population were very hostile to those Russians in this town of Makiivka, which is on occupied territory. And she said that she thinks the Ukrainian locals were the ones who gave away their position to Kyiv. And, of course, this is the local Ukrainian population that we're always hearing from Vladimir Putin is very pro Russian apparently.

Dearlove: Well, it just shows the Russians are still militarily very incompetent and that the conduct of this war at the operational level is going really, really badly. They must be vulnerable to intelligence leakage from the local Ukrainian population, even if the majority are pro Russian, are individuals who are not. And I think the Ukrainians have already shown us that they have the ability to strike behind Russian lines and even to strike inside Russia. So I don't think we should be surprised because I think that the Ukrainians are becoming really much better equipped and much better directed to make these real tactical successes, which aggregated over time will turn into a strategic success. So I mean, it's really going badly for Putin. I think the other thing I was going to say, in some respects, I think one has in Moscow now the preconditions, and I stress they are preconditions for some sort of political change over time. I mean, there's no question that Putin now is in a disastrous situation. It's difficult to predict how long this will go on for. But I think he's in a very fragile position with not much room for maneuver. And the only way out of it is military success, and that doesn't look likely in the current time frame.

PUTIN'S HEALTH AND THE QUESTION OF SUCCESSION

Mcfarlane: I totally agree with you on, you know, the idea that Putin is fragile. He's also physically fragile increasingly. I mean, he sparked even more health rumors following that bizarre, furious, rambling New Year's Eve message on television. A lot of media outlets picked up that he looked really tired as he made that address. He spoke to Russians in each of the country's 11 time zones before midnight, and he coughed quite a few times in his speech, which a lot of people noticed. Curiously, a few days before that, Peskov, who's the Kremlin spokesman, he said that President Putin would no longer be communicating with journalists as he did before the pandemic. And he blamed actually COVID and all the bugs going around for that. He said that Putin's health was a matter of state security and officials wouldn't risk his infection, which I think is very curious. And then of course, you know, he also took the unusual step of canceling his annual large press conference, which is something that he's done every single year since 2012.

Dearlove: Well, I think the evidence strongly suggests that he is not in good health. In fact, it would suggest to me that there's something seriously wrong with him. And, you know, if he's being kept away from the public, that also would suggest some sort of compromising his immune system, so that he'd be very vulnerable to any bugs that he did catch. And of course, that would be a classic case of treatment for some sort of other disease which compromises immune system. Look, I'm not a medic and I really don't understand these things in detail, but I think if you look at him, look at his behavior, look at his comportment, look at the way that he speaks, there's something fundamentally wrong unquestionably. And the people I know who are in a position, you know, to comment more closely on these things agree with that view.

Mcfarlane: I wonder who you could possibly mean behind that curious infirmity. Tell us who your friends are, Richard.

Dearlove: Well, I was thinking of one or two people I'm still in touch with who I talked to who are well connected with people in Russia, and they're absolutely convinced that there's something fundamentally wrong with him. And that it's possibly an illness which has impaired his judgment as well. And I think that there's a, and given the decisions he takes, his behavior is so strange, that I think that that's quite a likely explanation of his situation.

Mcfarlane: Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because those, you know, those really, really long tables, him keeping such an arm's distance away from others, you know, I suppose they could point towards either him being worried about an infection or indeed him worrying about anyone getting too close to him. And, you know, we're always sort of gleaning any kind of rumors of a possible palace coup. Let me ask you to make a prediction. Will Vladimir Putin be president of the Russian Federation still by the end of 2023? And if you think he's not, who do you think is likely to be a successor? I mean, he's not appointed a successor. There is, of course, that circle around him, the Siloviki, who possibly be one of those, likely to be someone from a similar KGB background. The obvious name that springs to mind is Nikolai Patrushev. What would you say? Will he still be president? And if not, who do you think is the clear front runner if there is one?

Dearlove: Well, I think it's pretty unlikely that he'll survive the year. And I, you know, I had said that he could be shuffled off in a sanatorium about now, and I still think that we could wake up one morning and find rather strangely that he's not around. But there hasn't been a coup, there has just been someone stepping in and taking his place without much explanation as to what's going on. But if that were to happen it would definitely be one of the Siloviki, and my choice would be Nikolai Patrushev who's been around for a very long time. He was head of the FSB when I was visiting Moscow. He's a hardliner. And Patrushev was an impressive individual, but he's very, very hard knit, he's very nationalistic. And I think could be a dangerous successor from the West's point of view. On the other hand, I think someone like Patrushev, however extremist nationalism is, is also rational, and it might well be that a more rational leader, even a strongly nationalistic one, would be easier to deal with in searching for a way out of the conflict in Ukraine. I don't know. But clearly, at the moment, neither side is inclined to indicate a willingness to negotiate.

Mcfarlane: What wouldn't I give to be a fly on the wall for a meeting between the head of MI6 and the head of the FSB. I'm pretty sure I've seen that scene in Spooks and Homeland several times. How did you find Patrushev? What was he like as a person?

Dearlove: Well, you know, you're sitting across the table talking, very hard nosed, rather cold. Well, quite difficult to deal with. But this was way back, this was post 9/11, when for a period of time we had a different relationship with Putin's regime before things went awry, which they did over a number of issues, but I won't go into detail now. I think that's as much as I can say at this point in time.

CHINA AND XI JINPING

Mcfarlane: I think another thing that we're potentially going to see in 2023, which I don't think is going to come as quite a shock, is that China is perhaps going to be in for quite a bumpy ride. Now that twentieth party congress for Xi Jinping didn't quite go as planned. And yet it was an event that had been sort of years in the planning and the making. And there were quite a few things that threw spanners in the works. There were those protests that were going on throughout the year, those protests on the Sitong Bridge in Beijing hung up saying that the people of China, they want freedom. They don't want dictatorship. We don't want Xi Jinping and really bold things that we haven't seen in China quite a while. And then there was the protest that really exploded late last year after that building fire in Xinjiang where people died because they weren't allowed out of that building to flee the fire because it was under lockdown. I mean, Xi has, he's now essentially rode back and started to unwind his COVID policy and loosening some of the lockdowns. He scrapped the virus tracking app. He's opening China up for travel, but we are seeing quite a worrying rise in cases. But given we saw how vulnerable the Chinese economy was to COVID and everything that followed, do you think that we are going to see an economically and therefore politically very, very difficult year for Xi Jinping?

Dearlove: Well, I think I would rather express it by saying that Xi Jinping faces some huge challenges. Obviously the primary one is the whole issue of COVID and the failure of his lockdown policy and the impracticability of trying to suppress the virus, which clearly was hiding to nowhere. And I think what's extraordinary is that it was in fact a series of street protests which spread, as you correctly explained, from that original fire, which I think caused the Chinese Communist Party leadership to reassess the COVID policy and rather quietly announce various changes that indicated that it was being abandoned. But even in abandoning the policy they put themselves into a very difficult situation, because on the one hand you had the lockdown, on the other hand you've got a largely unvaccinated population, or you've got vaccines which have not been particularly effective in creating immunity. So as they let the brake off, they are also faced with the risk of very heavy mortality, particularly amongst the elder generation. So I think Xi's, as it were, confirmation in power as General Secretary of the party, and it looks like almost for life, has started rather badly. The way I think I would see Xi's position is, okay, he is in a very dominant overall position of rulership. No one's challenging him. He's eliminated all of his rivals. But if things start going wrong politically, civically, socially in China, which must be a considerable risk at the moment, his room for maneuver is very narrow. The distance between him and, as it were, the political cliff edge is pretty short. And the Chinese system famously is very brittle, very inflexible, very poor at coping with crises. I think the surprising thing in terms of recent events is the speed at which the COVID policy was dumped. And you could argue rather extraordinarily that this is the first time the Chinese leadership, as it were, reacted to pressure from the street, which in a way is pretty unprecedented given their reaction to that sort of pressure usually is lockdown control, repression, imprisonment, and so on and so forth.

US POLITICS

Mcfarlane: I'm gonna change gears slightly and ask you about The US because I think it's gonna be a pretty interesting year in American politics. It's already got off to a very interesting start. Kevin McCarthy seems to have gotten himself into a bit of a pickle, and the Republicans can't seem to decide who they want to be their speaker. US politics is never boring for long, but this year, we're not in an election year this year, but we will likely start to see a bit of a ratcheting up of the electoral process. We don't have any primaries until 2024. But I wanted to ask, who do you think is perhaps likely going to be the main contender for the Republicans to challenge Joe Biden? I mean, the question of who will run for the Democrats next year, I think, is still an open question.

Dearlove: Well, I think Trump will continue to be the great disruptor, but it looks to me as though Trump politically has peaked. The performance of his favored candidates in the midterms was generally disastrous, and many of them lost their opportunity to be elected and were significantly defeated. But on the other hand, you know, we're well aware that Trump continues to have a following on the extreme right of the Republican Party. But for my book, I think that the likely candidate will be DeSantis because you're never gonna win an election without appealing to the floating voter. And I think the floating voter or the voter that sits between the Republicans and the Democrats is not going to be inclined to support Trump any longer. I mean that's a pretty outlandish guess, but I think one sees the preconditions for, I wouldn't say a sea change in US politics, but a shift away from the situation as it's been so heavily dominated by the Trump factor. But the other problem, of course, is that Biden has done surprisingly well politically during the midterms and in the aftermath. He's conducted himself well on Ukraine, but given his overall age and condition, it's very hard to see him being again the Democratic candidate. So what's going to happen on Democratic side of the equation? It's difficult to predict and I'm not well enough informed of the detail of US politics to know if there's anybody who's likely to emerge as a replacement for Biden.

Mcfarlane: Yeah. I mean, I do think those midterm elections last year were so interesting because we saw Biden polling so badly ahead of those elections, and yet we saw him doing so much better than we all expected. But a lot of people say that's because the elections were actually not a referendum on the incumbent administration as they tend to be, but rather a referendum on the previous one. And I think it's because so much of what we saw on the campaign trail were throwbacks to 2020 and a bunch of Trump favored candidates who were still waffling on about the 2020 election without offering a view for America in the future, which interestingly was exactly what Ron DeSantis did. And he seemed to reap the benefits from that. So I do think it's interesting that we have question over who is going to be the future of both the Republican and the Democrat parties, even if it's widely expected that Joe Biden is going to run. But do you feel like The US is going to continue to be the global leader in terms of international leadership? Or do you think a lot of this political infighting and what we're seeing in Congress at the moment is going to make it harder for them domestically from being the global grown up that we have all for decades been used to?

Dearlove: I don't see that being, well, I don't see US position as the global superpower really being seriously prejudiced. I think there was a brief crisis of confidence after the withdrawal from Afghanistan which did make the Americans look dreadfully incompetent. But I think one can understand why the American administration wanted out, and it was a disastrous move, and it looked awful internationally. It was bad for America's reputation. But I think I argued at the time that it delivered a significant dent. It didn't deliver significant structural damage and I don't think it did. And I think the indications are that America's, to an extent thanks to what's happened in Ukraine, refound its confidence and refound its role as, let's say, the protector of Western values and Western interests. And it's quite extraordinary the way that America has rallied to Ukraine's support and has done so very successfully and looks as though it will continue to do so. I think these rumors about Republican concerns about the extent of the finance going to Ukraine, the lack of audit, those sorts of issues are actually marginal and at the moment not important. I don't think they really represent what the majority of the Republican Party think, because the Republicans are generally speaking hawks in foreign policy. I don't see them, as it were, further compromising themselves in terms of the view of the American voter by being equivocal now in relation to supporting Zelensky. I think Zelensky is in a pretty strong position as far as US support goes. What I would like to see, you know, is a more consistent approach from Europe. I think The UK has stood up to the block and so countries like Poland and the Baltic Republics have been fantastic. And really the former countries of the Soviet empire have all behaved creditably. The two that have been equivocal and remain equivocal, of course, are Germany and France.

Mcfarlane: What are your predictions for 2023? What are the biggest priorities for your country? What are the biggest concerns facing you wherever you are listening to us from? Please get in touch. You can tweet us at One Decision Pod. We're also on Instagram at One Decision Podcast. From me and Sir Richard Dearlove, it's been so wonderful to have a growing listenership around the world. I really hope you've been enjoying these conversations as much as we have enjoyed recording them. Thank you so much for listening, and see you next time.