Putin and the Presidents: John Bolton (interview) | FRONTLINE

as the Bush Administration comes in Vladimir Putin is a new president of Russia he'd only been there for a year what was the assessment what did you make of Vladimir Putin well I think at the very beginning of the Bush 43 Administration we had high hopes that uh with the end of the Warsaw Pact the dissolution of the Soviet Union uh the progress that we thought Russia had made both in moving toward a more politically Democratic Society and a more market-oriented society that there were all kinds of possibilities and we approached it from the Strategic perspective uh as a an opportunity to reorient away from the cold war and to concentrate on the new threats that we thought were emerging and we thought Putin would be sympathetic to that and particularly after 9 11 we thought that there were real possibilities so I worked on getting the United States out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty because we didn't think we had a direct strategic threat from Russia but we did want to protect the United States with a limited missile defense system against Rogue States like Iran Iraq and nor North Korea we thought Russia would share that view we thought there was an opportunity to negotiate lower levels of nuclear weapons which we accomplished and then to work together in the fight against terrorism so if you look on a broad range of issues from from that perspective we were optimistic at the beginning I mean of course he was a former KGB agent he does have a democratic Crackdown early on and there's the same meeting that a lot of people talk about between President Bush and President Putin where he said he looked into his soul what were you thinking when you saw that interaction between the two presidents why wasn't in the administration yet I hadn't been confirmed yet but I was a little surprised by that didn't bother me that Putin was KGB I think we saw that many of the officials in Russia were xkgb because they were the most entrepreneurial and creative of all the Soviet bureaucracies the rest of them were kind of dull and conformist but in the KGB you were thought to think for yourself so actually that struck us as an opportunity I don't think anybody was looking at this through rose-colored glasses but we thought at the Strategic level there were real opportunities to work together and many of us were alumni of the Bush 41 Administration where Jim Baker and Edward Shepherd Nazi George W bush and Mikhail Gorbachev had really set the tone after the end of the Cold War and we thought there was at least a good possibility we could continue that progress I mean you read in your book that even back then there's a meeting between Putin secretary Rumsfeld where he's talking about Russia being part of NATO were they serious yeah this was amazing the first time I met Putin within about a month or a month and a half after the the 9 11 attacks and uh in the Clinton Administration they had created a joint permanent Council between NATO and Russia the Russians were very dissatisfied with it when Rumsfeld met with Sergey ivanovs the Russian defense minister even I've said it's rubbish it's it's worse than the U.N General Assembly so I was pretty sympathetic to that point I thought I thought there were ways that cooperation could be increased and it turned out that that proved to be wrong but in those early days particularly in the wake of 9 11 we were seeking to find out what was possible I mean it's interesting you do write in there too that one of the things that Putin is saying is we were being pushed out of the system of civilized Western defense I mean was there a sense even back then at that point that Russia felt a little bit insecure or felt like they weren't going to be as big a player or or that maybe things were progressing without them well I think they were concerned and indeed the argument we made on the ABM Treaty was that we should both withdraw from it that we didn't think either one threatened the other we weren't looking for a Reagan style uh Star Wars initiative but we wanted a sufficient missile defense capability to protect against the Rogue States or accidental missile launches we felt Russia would see it was threatened by Islamic terrorism and and it would be something we could cooperate on I mean it's interesting looking back with hindsight at Vladimir Putin because the U.S it seems legitimately did not believe that Russia was a major security threat given the other threats out there but that Putin at least as he would describe the situation by the end of the Bush Administration see the U.S is a threat was there a asymmetric depth of threat that Vladimir Putin had did he understand how America perceived Russia well I think we were very open with him that the proposing as I say that we jointly withdraw from the ABM Treaty we were the only two parties to it so if one of us withdrew which the U.S ultimately did there wasn't any treaty anymore but we thought the symbolic value of both of us rejecting the treaty would show we had breached common ground on the nature of the threat from Rogue States I I think something changed in Putin's mind between 2001 2006 seven somewhere in there by the end of the Bush Administration but in those early days he acquiesced in U.S withdrawal from the ABM Treaty he didn't have Russia withdraw as well but he didn't fundamentally object to it we reached a strategic weapons agreement the Treaty of Moscow as we called it that brought down the limit on deployed strategic weapons pretty substantially that seemed to be a plus and we were working we thought we were working with the Russians uh mutually against the Iranian nuclear threat the North Korean nuclear threat I think some of the some of the difficulty emerged after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein I think that that may have been something that the that Putin felt had consequences for him but we didn't feel it had consequences for him other than positive ones it was one more Rogue regime that had been eliminated so let's talk about that but before that you are in Moscow on September 17th of 2001 I think what was the response from Vladimir Putin about September 11th about how he saw his opportunities or how he saw his relationship with the United States uh yeah that was a trip I had actually been scheduled to begin on September the 11th obviously uh commercial air flights were shut down and even even by the end of the week of September the 11th I flew on a military plane because there was no way to get there commercially the first meeting I had I think in Moscow was with the deputy National Security advisor and it was about nine o'clock in the morning but we had the U.S side and the Russian side they brought out a tray full of uh of glasses of vodka and they they toasted the United States and wished us well in the wake of the attack so at that point there was certainly a feeling that they shared the nature of the threat from Islamic terrorism with us and that they were willing to work together on it we talked to somebody who was at the state department focused on that area and we said like what happened and they said well Afghanistan and Iraq happen and we were not paying as much attention at a high level to Russia which was sort of what Putin was expecting do you agree with that assessment uh no I don't agree with that assessment I think we played plenty of attention uh to Russia I can say in my own case uh I went to Moscow so often that the people at the desk of the Marriott Hotel on varskaya where we always stayed would say ah Mr Bolton welcome back we have your favorite room for you uh which I knew what that meant but but they they received a lot of attention uh from President Bush uh Secretary of State Powell Condi rice the Afghan decision was one that they supported and uh the the first the first trip after uh 9 11 that Rumsfeld took I accompanied him and and we met was Putin it was the first time I met with him and he was very strong on wanting to cooperate to deal with this threat of Islamic terrorism which they saw in the Central Asian republics threatening them in Russia and we we had later examples of it at the salon and other terrorist attacks inside Russia so at that point it did look like we had a convergence of Interest now there was a disagreement on Iraq but that's for sure but we had disagreements with the French and the Germans on Iraq as well and I think France Germany and Russia were all wrong in their position but again that didn't seem to Signal a strategic shift away from Russia because the brothers in Europe who took essentially the same view nonetheless I think we can see in hindsight that it was about that point that we we began to lose uh the the feeling that Russia really wanted to integrate more closely with the west and shortly after that Putin changed his attitude on for example the ABM Treaty which he had acquiesced in in 2001 but by 2007 2008 was saying it's aimed against Russia which he knew not to be true it was aimed against the the position and the Czech Republic in Poland were directed against the threats from Iran and Iraq missile defense against Russia we put in Canada and North America we don't put it in Poland in Czechoslovakia what is it like to be in a meeting with Vladimir Putin we've heard the story about his warm with bush but we've talked to other people who say even back then he could be dismissive you know lean back in his chair he could be argumentative what did you see when you were in a meeting with Vladimir Putin well I didn't I didn't frankly see much change in behavior from the first time I met him in in late 2001 to the last time I met him in 2019 he's tough and he's cold-blooded but he's uh professional he always seemed confident and he understood English which is always an advantage he didn't usually speak in English He allowed his interpreter to do the translation but he he knew what we were saying and then he could listen again when his interpreter translated it occasionally he would correct his interpreter in English when she was translating what he said but he was always very direct in the first meeting with Rumsfeld after 9 11 he talked about about Russia's experience with Taliban and and other terrorists in the region and at one point he said to Rumsfeld the Taliban had asked Russia for something and Putin said we told them exactly this and he he used that gesture we were all a little surprised by that Rumsfeld thought for a second he said well we don't do it quite the same way but we get the point that's interesting I mean some of the biographers and people who studied Putin say that one of the things he learned from Yeltsin and Gorbachev and others was strength that he wanted to project strength was that what you saw from him well I think he felt that Russia was an important player in the world and they wanted wanted to show confidence but I didn't see it as posturing I saw it as somebody who was sitting on top of five or ten thousand nuclear warheads and and knew he had the strength I can tell you in the Bush 41 Administration my counterpart for a part of that was uh Sergey lavrov who's now the foreign minister of Russia and the first time I met to meet with lavrov in Moscow I got material on what he was like and so on and one part of it said we assessed that this is before the collapse of the Soviet Union but it said we assess that lavrov is not a communist just pretty amazing and then it said we assess that he is a czarist and I think that is true of lavrov true in 1990 and true today and I think it's true of Putin too do you think that the color revolutions which is a pattern these protests and what they call the near abroad and a sense people tell us the Putin feeling like these things could come to them and a link to the United States in his own mind do you think that was part of it back then back in 2003 2004 I I would put it differently I think Putin and many people around him and many people in Russia to this day think that the breakup of the Soviet Union was illegitimate they think Yeltsin made a cat he made a catastrophic mistake when he declared Russia independent in effect at the end of 1991 and that Putin and these others believe that these countries are certainly large chunks of them had to be brought back into Mother Russia and Putin himself said that very clearly although I don't think we recognized it clearly enough at the time but he said in 2005 the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century I think we all felt it was a pretty good way to end the 20th century he obviously had a different point of view the color revolutions were just another manifestation of the basic problem that the that these countries shouldn't be independent to begin with not because Putin wanted to recreate a communist Soviet Union he wanted to recreate the rodina the Mother Russia that he believed in and I think that's what he's still trying to do today how did America approach this I mean he seems to believe he has a sphere of influence the way America might have a sphere of influence and part of the world and and did the Bush Administration follow that with their conflict over that question of whether Russia should have a ability to influence the near abroad well you know you have to have you have to take into account what the near abroad thinks of all this I mean we've got a sphere of influence in Canada but we don't tell them what to do I mean they tell us what to do more than we tell them what to do in a sense and these countries the certainly the former members of the Warsaw Pact wanted protection from Russia they're the ones that join NATO we didn't extend NATO's border toward Russia that they were knocking on our door from the minute the Warsaw Pact began to collapse NATO's problem was we didn't decide what the end point would be and we left a gray Zone in many places that Putin is now exploiting but it wasn't because we had designs on Rush it's because the former Warsaw Pact members and former parts of the Soviet Union like Estonia Latvian Lithuania wanted protection against Russia you're I think just out by the time he goes to Munich and delivers test speech in 2007. what are you thinking when you're watching it by that point is it a surprise what he says about America no I think by 2000 2007-2008 it's becoming increasingly clear that the optimism we had in 2001 was no longer justifiable and it was going to be a kind of 19th century power politics controversy in Europe and it was at that point I had left the Bush Administration by then but at that point that that bush said correctly I think in April of 2008 at the Bucharest NATO Summit that Ukraine and Georgia should be brought on a fast track toward NATO membership this this is the answer to the question what do you do with the gray Zone countries in Central Europe it's Belarus Moldova and Ukraine NATO has has accepted as members everybody else up to that front Frontier but there's a gap between NATO's eastern border and Russia's western border and Bush said let's answer the question we're going to bring certainly Ukraine and and Georgia as well and the caucus is into NATO and that will close the border question and Germany and France objected it was a big mistake four months later four months later Russia invades Georgia I mean you don't get many laboratory experiments and international Affairs but this showed what happened by by not taking the next logical step and bringing those countries into NATO because neither the Soviet Union or Russia have ever crossed the NATO border with Armed Forces never once that's why today Finland and Sweden want to join NATO because they know that the only real defense is to have a NATO border with Russia but by 2008 as Bush is making that decision apparently it's a very Lively debate inside the administration they know at this point that that will upset Russia that Russia will see that as a threat yeah and and what would Russia do about that threat would they cross the NATO border and risk war with NATO the answer uh Finland and Sweden have just given us is they don't think so I think you can make a very strong case there would not have been a Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 or a Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 if we had brought Ukraine into NATO quickly or it was clear they were coming into NATO quickly you leave a gray Zone in between as we did unfortunately you leave room for trouble and who's responsible for that for that compromise or that Gray Zone I mean it may have been better to do nothing than to say an undefined they can come in at some point but we're not going to offer them NATO protection where does the responsibility lie for that I I think the responsibility going back to 2008 lies very clearly with France and Germany just like I think the crisis Europe has today with energy lies with France and Germany the the idea that you could you could by increasing trade with Russia and not being threatening that you'd have a greater chance for peace in Europe absolutely wrong it's becoming clear after that that the chance of an invasion of Georgia is possible and secretary rice says you know we stand by our friends apparently privately she's warning Georgia not to provoke Vladimir Putin but how much of a test is that what is going on is Putin testing the United States as resolve NATO's resolve at that moment well I think it was a test and I think we failed uh and I think it said to him here is a method by which I can ensure these countries never get into NATO he he expanded the concept of Frozen conflicts which existed in different parts of the former Soviet Union where there were still what were then Russian troops on the soil of countries like Moldova Armenia Azerbaijan Central Asian republics the NATO ruled for many years and still is you don't admit a new member to Nato this had already engaged in a conflict because you're starting a war you're entering a war when you admit somebody so in Putin's mind seemed pretty clear the more countries he can get Russian troops into the more he's got a veto over the expansion of NATO I mean should we have seen what was coming at that point in 2008 after he intervenes or invades Georgia should we have had a sense of where this was headed I I think that was a real wake-up call that uh that we missed given who was elected president in 2008 if you look at the reaction in August of 2008 of candidate Obama and candidate John McCain McCain instantly criticized Russia and called for U.S support uh for Georgia Obama's first response which is the true test of what he really believes is to call on both sides to exercise restraint so you know Russia you exercise restraint Georgia you exercise restraint who's kidding whom here who's kidding whom here uh and and I think that was the response that Putin and the Russians read and they said Obama is going to be weak and I think that was the predecessor Moment For What became the invasion of 2014 where the Obama Administration response was weak again laying the groundwork for 2022. I mean as you're watching you've had this progression you thought that maybe the Vladimir Putin is the guy we can work with and by the time the Bush Administration is ending this seems like a guy who sees America as an enemy and is bent on some kind of Empire building and then you're watching the Obama Administration come in and they have a reset button and they say we're going to start it all over again what is it like to watch that having lived through the bush administration's experience with Vladimir Putin well it was to me a proof of Winston Churchill's comment about the confirmed unteachability of mankind the whole idea the reset button that that our relations with Russia were bad because of the performance of the Bush Administration misread it entirely and in fact at the very ceremony where Hillary Clinton gave Sergey lavrov the reset button he humiliated her he said the Russian words you've used translate incorrectly and she just laughed and and the administration didn't get it that's the Russian saying we've got your measure and when you hear these comments from Obama that Russia has a regional power he says to Mitt Romney the 1980s called and I want their foreign policy back what message was that sending as you were watching that well I I think the Russians were laughing uproariously I mean they they said this this guy obviously doesn't understand what's going on uh I think they watched his foreign policy generally and concluded that he would not respond effectively if they took strong action to do what they had been talking about really since 2006 2007 which is recreate the Russian Empire and their foray into Ukraine in 2014 was mixed for them they got the Crimea back but they ran into real Ukrainian opposition uh in the donbass and they did not take nearly as much territory the first time as they as they hoped to but what was the Western response insignificant sanctions so that said to the Russians we've got another opportunity here when the time is right they didn't sanction us significantly after the attack in Georgia they didn't sanction as significantly after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine we can keep pushing because it's an Open Door get inside the Obama Administration over javelins and arming Ukraine how important was that I think that said to the Russians they they can't make up their mind whether they believe Ukraine is of strategic importance to the United States in Moscow we know it's of strategic importance to us so that we've got the momentum on our side that we we can dictate the direction of policy here do you think there's another signal set at this moment during the 2016 elections when the intelligence agencies conclude Russia is involved in interference how do you evaluate the Obama administration's response and how Vladimir Putin understood that well I don't think they took uh effective measures to respond I think what the Russians were trying to do was so discontent and cynicism about American institutions and I think they did a unfortunately pretty good job about it and the Obama Administration didn't really respond effectively because their view of cyberspace was that it was kind of the Garden of Eden and the last thing they wanted to do was weaponize cyberspace so they had developed procedures for decision making on offensive cyber operations that centralized control in the White House and meant essentially there weren't any offensive cyber operations and so the Russians took advantage of that throughout the the 2016 election period and then Donald Trump is elected and as he's elected and Vladimir Putin is watching that what do you think or what you know he's concluding about how things have changed in the relationship between the US and Russia well I think uh Putin like everybody else in the world could see the Trump seem to admire uh uh strong authoritarian leaders uh Putin Xi Jinping erdogan he had a love affair with Kim Jong-un this probably struck people in the affected capitals as being about as strange as it struck most Americans and I think it opened to Putin lines of thought about how to take advantage of it he also saw how Trump treated the NATO alliance and believed that Trump could be a figure that would weaken NATO which would make anything else Russia wanted to do uh in in the in the struggle over the former Soviet Union much easier do you think that he respected Donald Trump when the two of them are in a meeting a private meeting together how does he evaluate Trump I think Putin thought Trump was a fool and easily manipulable if he could get him uh in in the right situation um and and I I don't think that's dissimilar from what many other authoritarian foreign leaders thought what about Donald Trump his attitude towards Putin which which was public and towards Russia and what was going on when you were there at the policy level and even before you were there was there a split of the president's rhetoric and what American policy was towards Vladimir Putin well there there are a lot of aspects of American policy uh the most important thing to understand is that Trump doesn't do policy that that's not uh how he approached dealing with foreign leaders particularly adversaries it was what was his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin in this case and he believed if he had a good personal relationship with Vladimir Putin that the United States and Russia had a good relationship now I'm not discounting the importance of personal relationships but Vladimir Putin is his clear-eyed and cold-blooded as any foreign leader I have ever seen he knows exactly what he thinks Russia's national interest is and he pursues it unrelentingly so confronted with Donald Trump this is like an open field in front of a football player carrying the football and I think Trump never understood that had never understood what the nature of Putin's game was and we should all be thankful that Putin wasn't more adventurous than he turned out to be there were reports that Vladimir Putin did not cease to see the United States as a threat and in fact that part of his view of the world is that people like you were running American foreign policy in an anti-russian way and that Trump was sort of a figurehead did you get either intelligence of that did you get a perception that that was how he saw things well I think Putin could distinguish between Trump the personality and the United States as a country and what the U.S strengths were and what obstacles they posed to him and in the meetings I had with Putin where we talked about things like Arms Control issues like that that he enjoyed talking about because showed Russia was still a great power I thought we had conversations where we didn't agree very much but they were very professional and about what you'd expect to to have at uh at the Putin level those talks didn't occur when he met with Trump they talked about other things at the Helsinki Summit most of the time in their one-on-one meeting it was Putin talking about Syria and and issues that would have been discussed with uh with prior presidents didn't come up so I think I think the Russians understood that in the person of Donald Trump they had a very unusual American president didn't mean that anything else in America had changed and so therefore in that sense their calculations remained the same but they saw Trump as somebody who uh was in the wrong job at the wrong time and they wanted to figure out how to take advantage of it Vladimir Putin had seen NATO as a threat at least going back to 2007 and Donald Trump comes in and what is his attitude towards NATO and how do you think Vladimir Putin was perceiving the public comments of candidate Trump and then president Trump and his General attitude towards NATO well I don't think Trump had a idea what NATO was as a collective defense organization or the the United States was leading it Trump made one very correct very important point which was many NATO members were not spending adequately on defense and he pounded away on that and uh and it did produce a better results in terms of what many countries were doing but it wasn't because Trump was trying to strengthen NATO I think he saw it basically as one way to justify getting out of NATO and I think as Putin followed and his people followed Western press accounts of what Trump said at NATO meetings what he said in private what people speculated about his negative feelings on NATO Putin looked at at that and and uh in the old saying don't interfere when your opponent is committing suicide so he wasn't going to test exactly how strong NATO was he was going to let Trump continue to undermine it and I think he was really waiting to see in a second Trump term would he go all the way and actually withdraw from NATO as you're watching that trip right before Helsinki in Brussels with stoltenberg and the president is dressing him down and criticizing Germany and his points may be valid you know in retrospect but it's a very public criticism of the Secretary General of NATO of of a key Ally what are you thinking as you're watching that display uh it was hard to believe it was happening but having observed Trump even in the few months I had been in the administration at that point uh I I could see that we were on very dangerous ground and in fact the next day uh Trump said he was ready to withdraw from NATO and throughout that day I wasn't sure that he wasn't going to announce it right there and so we do that in a desperate attempt to convince him of the importance of NATO and of the alliance well it was it was all hands on deck there's no doubt about that but what we were what we were trying to do was find some way to persuade him uh not to raise the subject one lesson I learned was that it doesn't make much sense to argue with Trump about the merits of a particular issue it's much better to argue the political benefits of him doing the right thing rather than trying to convince him it's the right thing so at that point I think Mike Pompeo and I concluded the best thing to argue was don't get in a fight over NATO when you've got a supreme court nomination at stake back in the United States ultimately that day Trump did not say he was withdrawing from NATO he came very close to it but he didn't actually say it I don't know whether the arguments we made to him were enough to persuade him it was politically unwise but I think in Putin's mind he didn't know all the the inside details but he could see from the Optics reported in the press that that this had been a very serious encounter and from Putin's point of view I think he was content to let that play out and see how much damage might actually occur I mean you concluded and presumably Vladimir concluded that this relationship seemed to be so strange that there was a real chance that the U.S at some point would pull out of that Alliance I believe that if Trump had won a second term Freed at that point of really any political constraint he would never face the voters again he would have done a lot of things in his second four years that people can only imagine and I do think that withdrawal from NATO was a very distinct possibility so if you're Vladimir Putin and you see even a possibility that that might happen or you certainly see NATO being substantially weakened you're going to withhold action until you see how much your opponent is going to dismantle their own defense structures because once that happens they're very hard to put back together again and Russia's flexibility is significantly increased when you say withhold actually you mean that's why he wouldn't have invaded Ukraine during this period because why do it if he could let it all fall apart yeah I think most uh foreign observers like most people in the United States felt that Trump was likely to get a second term uh it turned out he didn't uh because of covid perhaps because of other reasons but in forward strategic thinking if if uh if they thought in the Kremlin that Trump was going to get another four years they weren't in any hurry to do anything so when you then fly to Helsinki are you concerned about because there's a lot you know that there's a lot of emphasis on what happens in the private meetings between Trump and Putin what was your concerns at the time as you go into a moment like that well I was worried that uh that Putin would want to spend a lot of time with Trump on strategic Arms Control issues about which Trump knew very little so I uh I I tried to prepare uh Trump for that not terribly successfully I guess but it turned out in the in the private meeting the one-on-one meeting just with interpreters Putin did 90 of the talking and most of that was about the situation in Syria and the Middle East so when we heard that both from what Trump said to us when he came out of the meeting and what my staff found out from our interpreter uh uh after after the meeting I breathed the sigh of relief what was his demeanor towards Trump how did he present himself because as I said we've heard different versions of Putin How did he relate to Donald Trump was he warm with him I don't think Putin is a particularly warm person I think he dealt with him professionally I don't think there was any theater at least in the meetings I was in I didn't have any theater from Putin in the meetings that I had with him uh by myself or without the president I just didn't see much theater I I think he was constantly trying to judge Trump's reactions that's what KGB agents do very successfully and I think he thought he had the upper hand but he didn't display it he wasn't arrogant about it I could just sense confidence that he knew what he was dealing with and the American president's demeanor around Vladimir Putin about as unserious as it usually is I mean as I say they're not not extensive policy discussions in meetings that the Trump had with Putin or they had with him over the over the telephone there were very very few trade issues to discuss Trump loved to discuss trade with the Chinese but wasn't much trade with Russia to discuss so it really was Putin trying to pursue his agenda more than anything else and when you watch that famous moment about who do you believe and he seems to suggest that why would I not believe Vladimir Putin what was your reaction as you were watching that well I think I felt Frozen to my chair uh like everybody else in the room we couldn't believe it and I describe in my book we went into sort of damage control I was worried that Dan coats the Director of National Intelligence might resign at that point he would have been fully Justified to resign if if he had wanted to and actually the next day Trump came up when we were back in Washington and said you know I misspoke and I left the word not out uh which would have changed the meaning of what he said 180 degrees now I'm not sure I believe that but it was one of the only times I heard Trump say he made a mistake how did the accusations of Russian interference affect him and his relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin well he Trump took the accusations of Russian interference through the prism of the argument arguments about Russia collusion that he had colluded with the Russians and he saw admitting any potential of Russian interference as acquiescing in the accusation that he conspired with the Russians to win the election I and many others tried to explain to him that that was wrong that that he was on very strong ground to say that there had been Russian efforts to interfere in the election it would not have undercut the legitimacy of his victory and that he would have been better off saying what we felt and what we were doing I think throughout the bureaucracy that we were going to resist not just the efforts of Russia but China or anybody else any foreign actor who tried to interfere in our election that was the right right policy and it wouldn't undercut the legitimacy of the Trump election in 2016 if he said the same thing but we never persuaded him well let's talk about Ukraine the Obama administration had imposed some sanctions but had not sent javelins and and other types of weapons to Ukraine what was the Trump administration's policy towards Ukraine in that regard well I don't think Trump had much of a policy toward Ukraine until he began to think of it as a place where Biden and and Hillary Clinton had worked in 2016 and were working in looking at the 2020 campaign to affect him politically at the cabinet level National Security Council level I think people were very strongly of the view that we should do a lot more to support Ukraine to try and work to uh to deter any notion that the Russians might try another Invasion that there were a number of other things unrelated to Ukraine that Russia was doing that warranted American sanctions and tougher action and in particular in the uh in the cyber warfare area to get America into a place where we could make decisions about offensive cyber operations and not fear weaponizing the Garden of Eden of cyberspace cyberspace is no different from any other human domain and the best defense is often a good offense to deter the Russians and others to show you will pay cost if you attack Us in cyberspace so I think although there were certainly a lot more we could have done that much of the actual American policy toward Russia in the Trump Administration got stronger and stronger not strong enough by a long shot though you felt like before 2019 that your approach to Ukraine was stronger against Russia than the Obama administrations and and Trump himself would boast about it because he could say we're supplying javelins to Ukraine and the Obama Administration different any time you could convince Trump he was doing something Obama hadn't forget the policy reasons for it it was a good argument to make Vladimir Putin had talked about Ukraine as not a country he had talked about it as corrupt how was Donald Trump talking about Ukraine and did it seem like he was mirroring some of the descriptions of the country that Vladimir Putin had been making well I don't think Trump fully understood the history of Ukraine and Russia or the Soviet Union before that or much else in history he once asked John Kelly white house chief of staff at Finland were still part of Russia which would have been news to the Finns if if anybody had told them that so I don't I don't think any of this complexity and and the reasons for the animosity uh between Ukraine and Russia really crossed his mind I think what drew his attention to Ukraine was the notion that the famous DNC server was somewhere in Ukraine that Hunter Biden worked for barisma that the ukrainians had attacked him in the 2016 camp pain and that he wanted to get to the bottom of it that that's what drew his attention to Ukraine and that's what ultimately caused the problem with the shipment of a 250 million dollars of security assistance that generated the controversy that led to the first impeachment so what happened how did you learn that things were being held up or things were going to be held up well as I describe in the book The it it emerged only in in bits and pieces because Trump was working outside the regular system he had Rudy Giuliani and other attorneys who were dealing with Ukrainian Representatives on searching for the DNC server and the missing laptop and all the other bowl of spaghetti allegations out there and he had an irregular group of people uh including Gordon Sandlin and others who was the ambassador to the European Union in Brussels of which Ukraine is not a member dealing with the ukrainians and it was all about the politics of how Ukraine had in Trump's mind affected the 2016 election and could affect the 2020 election and somehow or another in the summer of 2019 Trump learned of the security assistance that had been committed by Statute for delivery to Ukraine and he he decided to hold it up perhaps because OMB Mick Mulvaney was the acting Chief of Staff former OMB director that that may have been the way that was communicated to him and it was only in really in June July August that the pieces of this puzzle began began to come together I think in Trump's mind it was clear all along he was looking for ways to pressure Ukraine to get the DNC server and and expose Biden and Hunter Biden and whatever else he was trying to do politically and for the rest of us who were just trying to get the 250 million in security assistance delivered before it expired on September 30 the end of the fiscal year that that's when we began to see something was was going wrong and I think Mark esper the Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo myself when we came to see it were completely unified that we wanted that security assistance delivered but I mean just to be really clear he was holding up the security assistance in order to get these politically motivated investigations yeah there is no question about it this this was uh Trump using uh the powers of the presidency really for his own political advantage and I think that became clear it didn't it didn't it seems so hard to understand why Rudy Giuliani wanted to talk about Hunter Biden and brisma and what that had to do with security assistance and the answer is it didn't have anything to do with it in terms of American foreign policy but it did for the Trump re-election campaign and how dangerous was it for Ukraine at that moment if that had expired that authorization well we would have lost the 250 million because that's that's the nature of the end of the fiscal year and federal budget policy uh so we were bending every effort uh talking to members of Congress saying you need to talk to the president uh we're going to lose this money as the end of the fiscal year approached and uh trying to persuade Trump that whatever else he was doing with respect to his own political prospects he needed to let the money go and eventually that happened I think actually on September the 11th of 2019. let me just ask you because we had spoken to her when the Ambassador yovanovic is removed what's your understanding for the reason why well I think Giuliani and others had told Trump that she was anti-trump that she was not cooperating with their efforts to investigate the bowl of spaghetti of allegations about what the ukrainians were up to and that they wanted her out when this all becomes public and the call is released and the hearings happen what is the effect on how a Vladimir Putin would perceive what was going on well I think Putin would look at this and would be further evidence that the only thing Trump cares about is Trump and and therefore that's an insight about how to deal with Trump in a second term so it would have been confirmation that Trump didn't do American foreign policy he did Trump policy and I think would have strengthened Putin's belief that if Trump were re-elected which again if you look back at that timing late 2019 early 2020 before coven most people thought was likely that he would have another four years to take advantage of trump if you look at Vladimir Putin's rhetoric about America certainly in the Munich speech but many of his speeches about America he talks about hypocrisy before the invasion of Ukraine you'll talk about the Empire of lies and he portrays an America that is hypocritical that says it believes in democracy and the rule of law and all of these things but doesn't was there a way that Donald Trump with this phone call for example but his presidency in general seemed to be reaffirming the things that Putin had been saying about America all along well I think Trump said a number of things not just in the Russian context but said them publicly during the 2016 campaign and during his presidency where somebody would criticize the performance of another country and Trump would say well what about us you think we're so great in other words acknowledging the kind of moral equivalence and hypocrisy that Putin and others would would point out and I I think it's uh although although Trump once took a picture famously hugging the American flag for political purposes holding the Bible up in Lafayette Square I think he was very cynical about the United States and the message that that's sent about America and about whether those principles that all of the other American Presidents had expressed about democracy and rule of law and international order what was the effect on America's credibility When Donald Trump would say something like that right like Vladimir Putin's a killer I think and then he says well we have Killers too well I I don't think it affected America's credibility except to the extent that foreign leaders thought Trump was representative of uh American thought uh further down and I my own View and uh since I I left the White House I haven't hesitated to say it is that Trump is an aberration uh and therefore that it shouldn't have whatever he did should not have an effect on people's view about what America's underlying uh views are you think it shouldn't but did it rattle our allies I think it gave some of our more cynical allies a chance to take advantage of it I would single out president macron of France who a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine in February said NATO was brain dead and he was reflecting what he thought Trump's view was it was the Biden Administration but it it helped assist a view that the U.S was unreliable and untrustworthy something that uh that some of our own allies have used to their own Advantage but I don't think it was because Trump had a theory about it I think it was just Trump reflecting that all he cared about was Trump as you watch Biden come in and his approach to Vladimir Putin he does call him a killer but he meets with him in June of 2021 how do you evaluate the Biden administration's approach to Putin before it's clear that there's going to be an invasion well I think the the approach obviously failed because we did not deter The Invasion it's not not enough to say we're helping Ukraine out a lot now as the country gets ground into the dust and tens of thousands of people get killed America failed when it failed to deter The Invasion on February the 24th and I think one reason for that is that that meeting in Europe in the in the summer of 2021 between Biden and Putin was very important that this was an opportunity for Putin to look at Biden for I think that meeting was three and a half hours long and judge who the new president was and I think the conclusion he came away with was a lot of rhetoric and not much strength and there's other things that are going on there's January 6 after that meeting there's the withdrawal from Afghanistan are those things playing into how Putin is assessing the moment uh I I think the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophic mistake it wasn't just the way it was implemented the Strategic decision was completely wrong that was Trump's mistake as well as bidens I think in Moscow and Beijing when the withdrawal took place they popped champagne corks they couldn't believe they were getting this for free and that undoubtedly added to the meeting that Putin had had with Biden just a few months before added to his perception that he was dealing with a weak Administration and when Biden gets this briefing in the end of 2021 in the national security briefing and the intelligence agencies are saying this looks real this looks like it might happen what is that challenge that's presented to President Biden and how does he respond well he didn't respond effectively he said in fact on several different occasions that the sanctions that he threatened if the Russians invaded Ukraine were not intended to deter Russia from undertaking the invasion they were to signal that there would be punishment after it took place that that's admitting that you're not even seriously trying to engage in deterrence there were many other things we could have done that the White House did not do and I think the fact that they weren't being done said to Putin again I'm I'm going to be able to get away with this almost like I did in 2014. because there's video calls there's telephone calls there's shuttle diplomacy there is public statements from the podium but Vladimir Putin doesn't seem to take them seriously or respect them is that your understanding of that look I I think the run-up to the Russian invasion on the part of the U.S and Europe was very long on rhetoric and very short on substance I think Putin read it exactly that way and when he finally announces that he's going to launch what he calls a special military operation but is a war he gives that speech that Empire of live speech and so much of it is about the United States at the beginning does that surprise you when you hear that no because I thought uh at the time that Putin believed he would win in Ukraine very quickly uh I think that's that was the the nature of the preparation that they had made and that they thought the Ukrainian forces would collapse uh uh very shortly after the first Contact so he was making this uh into a bigger event even though he called it a special military operation and I would say only that we know from what our military and intelligence briefed to Congress House and Senate in the days after February 24th they thought the Russians were going to win quickly too so it wasn't just a misperception on Putin's part somebody told us that couldn't who says he doesn't believe Ukraine is a real country and who talks about the United States when he goes in that this is actually a conflict between the United States and Russia in a lot of ways do you agree with that assessment that that's what's at stake and that's how at least how Putin perceives it well I think I think from Putin's point of view and it's not just Putin it's a large part of the Russian population that believes the dissolution of the Soviet Union was illegitimate and many of the new independent states are also illegitimate I've heard it from all of them from Sergey shoigu the defense minister Sergey lavrov the foreign minister Nikolai Patra Chev their National Security advisor I've heard it from Putin himself they think Ukraine is illegitimate and failed so their effort to recreate the Mother Russia really has nothing to do with the United States however to the extent they believe that the West as a whole would not respond effectively that would show a stronger Russia so I think that was part of it but I think this is about iridentism from the Russian point of view far more than anything else when you were getting those comments were those when you were in the Trump Administration or the Bush Administration when you would hear that talk about Ukraine that was in the Trump Administration okay but did Vladimir Putin misjudge Biden or the West I mean the war has obviously not gone the way that he imagined he certainly misjudged Ukraine did he misjudge the resolve of President Biden well I think he misjudged his own Army more than he misjudged anything else uh their their performance is I think to many pretty close observers of Russia nothing less than shockingly bad and that has hurt him internationally far more than anything else I think the U.S record post Invasion uh has been typically a day late in the dollar short I think the Administration has been intimidated by Putin and the risk of escalation many of the steps they've taken when they've decided to supply weapon systems and and intelligence and other information has come after great pressure from Congress I think the British the polls the Baltic republics were all much more forward-leaning than the administration but I don't even think it's the performance of the United States Post February 24th it's the issue the key failure and the thing that influenced not just Russia but China as well was the failure to make a serious effort to deter The Invasion from the begin with it's not a great solution to say we're going to Aid Ukraine and hopefully win the war the point is to try and prevent the war from happening and we did not make a serious effort to do that vitamin Putin's office in America as the enemy and now the president describes Putin is a war criminal a murderous dictator he says at one point he's got to go I mean are we now in a conflict with Russia that is going to be difficult to resolve without an outright one side winning well I think we're in a conflict with Russia and China as an on time and I don't I don't think you can separate the two I think you've now got a partnership that continues to involve ironically Russia is very much the junior partner in this on time but I think if we don't wake up to the to the nature of the struggle we've got not just in Europe but along the indo-pacific along China's periphery and in the Middle East we're going to be on the Strategic defensive for a long time the the Russia war in Ukraine is a piece of it but but it's a piece of a much bigger picture in this particular moment that we're in right now with the Russian forces being pushed back with mobilization and backlash at home home with Vladimir Putin invoking the use of nuclear weapons how dangerous is this moment how serious is he well I think any time you consider nuclear weapons you have to be sober about it but I think Putin is bluffing I think the time at which he would use nuclear weapons would be if Russian forces were in whole scale Retreat the entire command and control system had collapsed they were heading back into Russia or the Ukrainian forces were on the verge of Crossing into Russia then I think he would consider it but but that's why the United States needs to make the point which we have not done that if Putin does use nuclear weapons he is signed a suicide note and do you think that we sent the message that will deter that I don't think we've deterred him at this point but I also don't think we're closer to the point where it may happen but we're not on the verge of it and I think Putin well understands that every time he says nuclear weapons there are people in Europe in the united states that start to quiver I think we've got to be as clear-eyed about this as Putin is and not overreact and not be in the situation where he's deterring us rather than us deterring him so my last question is how to defend uh in Ukraine I think the default position is that it just grinds on and on I don't think either side is in a position of of sufficient strength that they can at this moment that they can really uh Advance the idea of a ceasefire I think that might have been possible a few months ago for Russia I don't see it anymore and I see one of the consequences of not just the tension in in Eastern Europe but tension along China's periphery with Taiwan in particular uh where we're at the opening stages of of a very very long conflict probably for the rest of the century

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 773,963

Keywords:

Id: KT7n1VOgNq0

Length: 58min 21sec (3501 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023