JIM GILMORE - You're with the vice president
at that point, in the very beginning. … So the idea of the reset, how do they
go into it? What's the expectation? What are the hopes as far as Putin and Russia? JON WOLFSTHAL - A big part of the reset, I
think, was to try, strangely enough, to depersonalize the relationship between the United States
and Russia. There's a lot of criticism that President
Bush had made the relationship about his personal relationship with Putin, and there was a sense
that we had to broaden the relationship; we had to professionalize it. So the idea of the reset was really to break
with that personal connection between Putin and Bush and to basically have the whole of
government engage the whole of the Russian government. I think it’s also important to keep in mind,
however, it wasn’t just out of some sense that we should get along with Russia. We had some very specific goals in mind for
what the reset should accomplish. I would put those into three categories. The first and foremost was Iran. It was a recognition that we were not going
to be able to put the type of pressure and sanctions on Iran to convince them to negotiate
over their nuclear program if Russia wasn’t on our side. The reset was largely about bringing Russia
into our camp on that. The second was the president’s commitment
to end the war in Afghanistan required us to be able to get lethal assistance through
former Soviet states into Afghanistan. That was the only efficient way to make sure
that the war ended. It was essential to the “mini-surge.” Then [that] also allowed us to evacuate effectively. So the second goal was making sure we could
get Russian cooperation on Afghanistan. The third was the expiration of the START
arms control agreement with Russia, which took place in December of 2009, would be a
break with decades of arms control and verification. We needed to get that agreement back in place
quickly. Getting Russia’s cooperation to make sure
arms control and verification and nuclear stability could be a basis for the relationship
was a third building block. JIM GILMORE - But was there also a belief
that dealing with [President Dmitry] Medvedev would be easier than dealing with Putin? Some people have the theory that we knew that
he didn’t have all the power, but maybe if we treated him like he did, maybe he’d
be able to establish himself? JON WOLFSTHAL - I don’t think we were playing
sides with Medvedev versus Putin. We always understood who was in control and
who had the power. We also understood that there were limits
to how far Medvedev could go. But there was also recognition that he was
the guy in charge; as long as Putin didn’t block it, we could get business done. The president wasn’t going to wait around
and say: “Well, maybe we won't get what we want out of Medvedev. Let’s not bet on the come. Let’s just cut deals now.” We were able to get what we needed, especially
in the first few years of the relationship, from Medvedev, without Putin blocking it,
and we decided to go for it. JIM GILMORE - So when did it start going wrong? And when did you guys [begin] to talk on the
NSC [National Security Council] about “Uh-oh, it’s going south here. We’ve got a problem”? JON WOLFSTHAL - We knew really very early
on that this wasn’t going to be an early relationship. I worked for the vice president when he traveled
to Georgia while the Russians were attacking Georgian sovereign territory. We knew that this was not going to be some
lovefest and a meeting between liberal democracies. There was always the sense that we should
agree where we could agree, that we should get business done where we could. Where we disagreed, we would point at that. But we didn’t want to add fuel to the clear
paranoia and the sense of aggrievement, and also the way that Putin was using the sense
of America as an enemy, as a domestic political tool. We didn’t want to add to that sense. So even where we had disagreements, if we
didn’t see eye-to-eye on things related to Europe and NATO enlargement, if we didn’t
see things eye-to-eye on Syria, we recognized that we could isolate those disagreements
and still cooperate in other areas. JIM GILMORE - … Some people come in here
and talk about the fact that there really [was] no foreign policy; it was all domestic
policy with Putin in a lot of ways, the use of the United States as the enemy that was
needed. JON WOLFSTHAL - Vladimir Putin has made no
secret of the fact that he views the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy
of the 20th century. He viewed the Soviet Union not as a dictatorship
and a totalitarian state that oppressed its people but as a center of strength to protect
Russian-speaking peoples and that protected Russia through the creation of the Soviet
empire and its satellite states. He then saw, from his perspective, the West
take advantage of Russian weakness, NATO encroachment onto or near Russian territory, and through
what he calls the color revolutions, undermining of Soviet and Russian satellite governments,
including Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere. For Putin, the sense of America as an enemy
or an adversary was not only the way he views the world, but he uses it as a very potent
tool at home, where he can say: “I'm the only person willing to stand up to the United
States. We’re the only peer competitor. We’re the only superpower. It’s incumbent on us to make sure that America
can't just dictate to the rest of the world.” That’s a very powerful message for Russians,
who are very proud, and rightfully sense themselves as having an important role to play in global
affairs, but their economics and their declining standard of living, lifestyle and life expectancy
has prevented them from exercising that. JIM GILMORE - In the beginning in the Clinton
administration, the beginning of the Bush administration, there was this attitude that
what the goals that we were working toward was bringing Russia into the European community,
into the world community. Had that completely dissipated by the time
that the Obama administration started out, or [were] there still glimmers of hope? JON WOLFSTHAL - I would say that the administration,
by and large, was very skeptical of the idea that Russia was going to be a natural partner
or member of the European family. We recognized that Russia was an important
power on the European continent, could make our policies very difficult; they could make
our lives very difficult. They could challenge NATO. But, at the same time, we had some common
interests. One thing was, we wanted prosperity; we wanted
trade; we wanted globalization; we wanted free energy flows. These were things that also benefited, we
felt, the Russian state. Anticorruption [sic] was something that was
really robbing Russia of tremendous economic potential. We thought that that was something that we
might be able to cooperate on, again as long as we kept Vladimir Putin’s inner circle
exempt from that effort. But in the end, despite the clear advantages
for economic growth and development in Russia, and I would argue also from their security
point of view, they made choices not in their own interests, but in the interest of challenging
the United States, because that was good politics. JIM GILMORE - Let’s jump up to 2011. So 2011, you've got Arab Spring; then you’ve
got Libya. These things seemed to scare the bejeebers
out of Putin. Explain what we were seeing about his reaction
to this, what we understood about that, and what we understood about his reaction to our
involvement in Libya. JON WOLFSTHAL - … When the United States
was willing to side with the Arab street, was willing to let somebody like [Egypt’s
Hosni] Mubarak go, our longest ally in the region, and when he saw how quickly [Muammar
al-]Qaddafi was deposed, it added to this sense, in Moscow, that Putin was vulnerable. Every time we’ve seen, whether it’s in
Iran in the Green Revolution, whether it’s Qaddafi, whether it’s in Ukraine, every
time an established dictator or leader falls, Putin takes it personally, because he recognizes
it could be him. When we saw the follow-on protests in Moscow
after the election, that also added to his real sense of vulnerability. We saw commensurate crackdown on other alternative
political parties. We saw Putin really tighten control and build
up the sense that America was coming to get him. In large part, that’s why I think we had
to balance our security objectives with not unnecessarily antagonizing that sense of paranoia
in Moscow. JIM GILMORE - But did we find that there was
almost nothing we could do not to add to that paranoia? Because he tied us into almost everything,
and his view toward [Hillary] Clinton, when she said the statement that she said about
the need for fair elections and all. JON WOLFSTHAL - It’s one of these situations,
there's still a lot of mirror-imaging. We did this during the Cold War a lot, and
it turned out to be wrong. We do it now, even though it’s probably
wrong. We always think of the Russians as being 50
feet tall and ourselves as being unable to do what we want, and the Russians think exactly
the same. They think we are in everything and that they
themselves are highly vulnerable. The reality is really in the middle somewhere. We are not organizing a global set of revolutions
to make Western democracies in our image all over the world. We’d be very happy if countries were to
adopt liberal democratic reforms, because we think that is the most prosperous pathway. It’s the way that people can be the most
free and live out their rights for self-determination, freedom and economic development. But we’re not out to get Putin. We’re not out to get countries in the former
Soviet sphere. But when Putin sees them go, and then sees
the fact that we do have funded programs from the United States for democratic reform, for
information and transparency, for accountability, he views that as a direct line for American
imperialism. In his mind, it’s not that different to
what the CIA used to do back in the 1940s and ’50s, even though we have no intention
or desire to overthrow Vladimir Putin nor any other leader. JIM GILMORE - Were there any attempts during
the Obama administration to send the vice president or send [Ambassador Michael] McFaul
or the secretary of state over to have a conversation with him, to help define the fact that he’s
misunderstanding our intentions? JON WOLFSTHAL - I think there were constant
communications. The telephone conversations and the personal
meetings between President Obama and President Putin and President Medvedev during the early
years were actually quite cordial, very informal, even though we were willing to point out where
we had disagreements. We tried to achieve our objectives, whether
it was on Afghanistan, Iran. There was a lot of good coordination, particularly
early on, on Iran, when we stood united at the G-8 and disclosed the presence of illegal
nuclear facilities in Iran. Russia stood with us. But over time, even when we said, “Look,
our programs are not out to get you; we’re not funding political parties in Russia; we’re
not trying to stoke a revolution,” we didn’t expect Vladimir Putin to believe us. He has his own view of the world, and it’s
still not clear to me now how much he believed and how much was just convenient for him to
talk about. It’s easier to talk about the United States
coming to get him and use that as an excuse for controlling the media in Moscow, for suppressing
political parties, for closing down human rights groups and groups that promote accountability
and transparency, because he can call them foreign agents and American actors. JIM GILMORE - So when he comes back into the
presidency in 2012, how do you guys in the White House view him? How does Obama view him? Is he a different man than the man he had
been when he was president beforehand? And how does it change everything at that
point? JON WOLFSTHAL - I wouldn’t say that there
was an immediate switch, where we went from, “Oh, great, we have Medvedev,” to, “Oh
no, we have Vladimir Putin.” We wanted to see whether or not the agreements
we had struck and the efforts we were making were going to hold. It quickly became clear that Vladimir Putin
was going to take a much harder line; that he was going to define his success by his
ability to create failures for us. Very quickly, they began to pull back on a
whole host of things that we had thought were pretty easy agreements. We had wanted to pursue new negotiated arms
control reductions to bring the level of nuclear weapons down on both sides. The president made a speech in Berlin in 2013. Russia refused to negotiate and to this day
has still never agreed to come back into a negotiated agreement with us, even though
we have several. We had information at that point that Russia
was violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [INF], a bedrock treaty of ending
the Cold War. We tried to engage Russia on that. Vladimir Putin denied it and to this day continues
to deny it. We saw pretty quickly that there was going
to be really slow-going when it came to adopting new agreements. We even began to see an erosion of some of
the cooperation we had had in the past. JIM GILMORE - You’ve got also the statements
that he’s making about Clinton at that point. You’ve got [him] eventually coming down
harsher on the media as well as the demonstrators and stuff. What's the view of that when you're listening
to some of the stuff that he’s saying? Is the reset basically considered dead at
this point? JON WOLFSTHAL - I don’t remember us using
the term “reset” very much after 2010-2011 anyway. I think that was a convenient way of showing
that we wanted to try and have a different type of relationship. But it wasn’t the defining feature of how
we talked with Russia. It wasn’t that we had to redo or reset everything. I would say that our defining characteristic
for the U.S.-Russia relation was pragmatism. There were areas where we could do better
and be more secure and more prosperous if Russia worked with us. If they didn’t, so be it. There were areas where we were going to have
clear disagreements, and we weren’t going to pull any punches just because we wanted
cooperation with Russia in other areas. Whether it was on Syria, where we were beginning
to have a dramatic divergence in views and the view from the United States that President
[Bashir al-]Assad had to go, that he had lost his legitimacy, and the willingness of Russia
to back him politically, and then much later, obviously, to back him very strongly militarily,
was a sign that we were going to diverge on a number of issues. That all, I think, led up to what we saw in
Ukraine, which then became a dramatic rupture in the ability to cooperate. JIM GILMORE - But in 2012, is there a feeling
that we’re screwed here? JON WOLFSTHAL - We never just threw up our
hands, because the president was running for re-election and would win re-election in 2012. He wasn’t going to stop trying to deal with
Russia and achieve what were very important objectives with Russia. For example, Russia participated in the Nuclear
Security Summit that we had in 2012. They didn’t participate in the 2016 version. They felt that it was somehow an American-led
organized effort that really didn’t benefit Russia at all. But they still participated in both 2012 and
2014. There were still areas where we could cooperate. Quietly behind the scenes, we were still doing
a tremendous amount of work on cleaning up the chemical weapons in Russia, cooperating
on other forums, Global Health Security Initiative [GHSI], where we’re trying to prevent epidemics,
trying to promote greater globalization and economic development. But there were clear areas after 2012 where
we just couldn’t go. I would also say that during 2012, it wasn’t
as if we stood up and said, “Oh, you know, President Putin has to allow full democratic
reforms to flourish in his country.” We knew what was going on in Russia. We knew that Putin wasn’t going to change
his view and decide to let pluralism flourish. We also recognized that we didn’t have the
ability to influence the course of democracy in Russia. We had failed at that in the past. They had chosen their own path. We were clearly going to stand up for what
we felt were important democratic principles, the willingness, the ability of people to
protest, to organize, to run in contested elections, and for there to be a free and
open media in Russia. But we also recognized that there were limits
to how far we could push that agenda inside Russia. JIM GILMORE - The philosophy behind the president
referring to Russia as basically the JV team. JON WOLFSTHAL - Actually, I think he referred
to them as a regional power. He called ISIS the JV team. JIM GILMORE - OK. But it was similar in attitude and certainly
the way Putin would have accepted it. Was that a philosophy that there was more
behind it, that this actually is a good way to either irk him or get him to move in some
way? What was that all about? JON WOLFSTHAL - I never had a conversation
with the president about why he used that term. I don’t think that it was a signpost of
a strategy. I think there was a belief, and I think it’s
true, that while Russia can influence affairs on the global stage, they are not a global
superpower aside from their nuclear capabilities. They can project power into the Atlantic,
into the Pacific. They can influence things in the Middle East
and in Europe. But they are not a global power. If you're not a global power, but you are
a power, that basically makes you a regional power. I think the president was referring to them
the way he saw them, that they largely were not an actor in South America; they weren’t
an actor in Africa; they weren’t an actor in the Mediterranean. They were really a country that was able to
influence the development in former Soviet states, in Eastern Europe, and to a somewhat
lesser extent in East Asia. I think that’s still an accurate characterization
of what Russia is today. JIM GILMORE - Accurate, probably, but also
the realization that here is this former judo-expert guy with a chip on his shoulder as big as
Ohio, who feels that his government and his country has been humiliated by the United
States. Do we understand the effect on what he’s
thinking and how that affects his decisions toward us? JON WOLFSTHAL - I think we do. I think the president understood that. By 2012, it was clear there were limits to
what our cooperation with Russia was going to bring. We still felt that they would act out of self-interest
to do the right thing in places like Syria. We never really expected them to, for example,
cover for Assad’s use of chemical weapons. It’s such an abhorrent act that we imagine
a responsible global power like Russia would in fact condemn those sort of behaviors. That was clearly miscalculation. JIM GILMORE - 2014, and I know you're not
an expert on Ukraine and stuff. But what's the overall view on Ukraine? What's the United States doing in Ukraine,
and how is Putin and Russia looking at it? JON WOLFSTHAL - I’ll be a little careful
here, because I was out of the government from 2012 until December 2014. But what I can tell you is, we viewed the
presence of foreign fighters and the annexation of Crimea for what it was, which was Russian
deliberate strategy to seize Ukrainian territory and to destabilize the Ukrainian government
so that it would not become a member of NATO. It would not become a member of the EU. Putin would be able to continue to have it
as a buffer state. He preferred chaos to cooperation with the
West and Ukraine. He would have preferred for there to be a
compliant regime in Ukraine, but he couldn’t have that because the Ukrainian people wouldn’t
stand for that corruption and influence anymore. At the same time, we recognized that the Ukrainian
territory was not NATO territory. This was not an attack on NATO. This was a very different kind of conflict
that we were dealing with. There was recognition that we had a limited
capability and a limited willingness, quite frankly, to confront Russia in Ukraine. We could punish them for their actions. We could tell them that we would never accept
them. We could try to bolster the Ukrainian state
so that they could resist themselves what was going on. But we also recognized that we needed to keep
our powder dry, because the last thing we wanted was a full-on war between NATO and
Russia. There was a concern that this could escalate
quite quickly and that Russia might try to deal with any confrontation in Ukraine by
expanding the playing field to the Baltics, to Poland, to other parts of the European
landmass. JIM GILMORE - And the attitude toward critics
that would say that we didn’t do anything in Georgia, and then [Putin] moved on and
had no problem with going into Crimea; if we don’t do anything in Crimea or enough
in Crimea that the other areas are going to be in danger. What was the view? JON WOLFSTHAL - … I would have a lot more
patience for those arguments if we had just said: “You know what? There's probably nothing we could do, so let’s
not even talk about it.” We spent countless hours in meetings, with
the president, with the Cabinet, in the Pentagon, with the State Department, with the Europeans,
thinking through, all right, if we arm the Ukrainians with offensive capabilities, and
they end up using those to kill Russian soldiers, what will Russia do next? Will they say, “Oh, gee, this is too dangerous;
we’d better back off,” or will they double down, and will they put actual Russian troops
onto Ukrainian territory? Will they attack not only Ukrainian forces
but American or NATO trainers, which would be needed to help the Ukrainians understand
and use the weapon systems people were calling for? That’s a very quick way to escalate. So you could argue, yes, we should have confronted
Russia in Georgia. But if Americans had died, there would have
been a call for us to respond very forcefully. That could have led to conflict in Georgia. The same thing could have happened in Ukraine. While I support the rights of Ukraine and
Georgia to determine their own governments, we have legal treaty commitments to NATO states. We don’t have those commitments to Ukraine
and Georgia. It’s still not clear to me, to this day,
while I don’t want Russia to have that influence, and I don’t want Vladimir Putin to be able
to behave the way he behaves, why the invasion of Georgia or the invasion of Ukraine is a
strategic interest of the United States, with the exception of, does it embolden Putin to
take action in the Baltics or in NATO territory? To date, Vladimir Putin hasn’t taken action
in those states. We’ve been able to bolster our deterrent. We’ve been able to deploy additional forces
in Eastern Europe. There is evidence that suggests he is deterred
from crossing those lines because he knows that’s where our commitment lies. JIM GILMORE - But of course he came after
us. JON WOLFSTHAL - … Vladimir Putin thinks
we’ve already been coming for him. His willingness to interfere in our election,
to try and pick sides, to try and discredit American democracy, some people view that
as an attack. He probably views that as a response. That in itself is interesting. But then it raises the next question, which
is, if Vladimir Putin’s already behaving in a way that is a response to a perceived
attack, maybe we should be trying to influence what's going on in Russia more. I think that’s a debate that’s completely
missing from the American discourse right now, which is, if Vladimir Putin is willing
to come after us, and he already thinks that we have come after him, is there a cost for
us actually doing so? Maybe there is some deterrent value in showing
Vladimir Putin what could happen if we wanted to influence the direction of Russian politics. I don’t know the answer to that question,
but I think that’s something that we have to be thinking about if we want to prevent
Russia from trying to interfere in the next election in 2018 and 2020, because I think
there's good evidence that that’s coming. JIM GILMORE - Which led, I guess, to the part
of the debate that we've heard about, is that there were people in the administration saying:
“We’ve got to use cyber against them. We have the capabilities. If we don’t show him that there is a response,
that even if it does up the ante, if we don’t do it now, when do we do it?” I mean, how healthy a debate was there around
that issue? JON WOLFSTHAL - I wouldn’t just put it in
a cyber category. I think we have lots of ability to influence
what goes on in Russia. There was a long debate about the extent to
which we should be exercising those early. There was concern, and this has been written
about publicly, the president was very mindful not to respond too strongly to what was seen
as favoritism toward Trump, because it would be perceived as partisan politics on his part
to protect Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But at the same time, we did send very clear
messages—that’s also been reported—to President Putin directly, that we know what's
going on, and we are not going to tolerate the Russian government interfering in our
electoral systems. We took real valuable steps to insulate the
actual process of voting. But I think it was still not clear, even in
the fall of 2016, exactly how this influence through social media, through Facebook, through
Twitter, was really going to affect the discourse. There were many people who really thought
this was going to be, OK, push a button, and there are 2 million more votes for Donald
Trump than Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t a recognition that the goal was
just to discredit the whole election, to throw chaos into the system as opposed to picking
one district where Trump should do better. JIM GILMORE - Alright. Let’s go back to Ukraine, and then we’re
going to go back up to the election. But what was the debate like? How vigorous a debate was taking place about
the potential of arming the Ukrainians? JON WOLFSTHAL - Vigorous. It went on a long time. People felt very, very strongly about it. There were strong camps inside the administration
on both sides. It was very similar, I would argue, to what
was happening in Syria, where there was a lot of debate about, OK, we could do this. What would be the likely Russian response? They might back down. They might double down. They might move in a different direction. Every time we followed that pathway to what
was a reasonable conclusion, we believed we ended up worse off, that put aside the normative
value, the moral obligation, it was simply a security calculation that if we were going
to arm the Ukrainians with offensive weapons, we weren’t going to be able to control those. There were going to be Russian troops that
were going to end up dying as a result. It is possible, even probable, that Russia
would want to expand the conflict to come after Americans or American assets in Europe. That was a risk that, over Ukraine, the president
himself was unwilling to take. JIM GILMORE - It seemed like he was pretty
lonely in that decision. It was the president. Who else was with him on that? JON WOLFSTHAL - I don’t want to get into
who said what. It was clear that the Pentagon, key parts
of the Pentagon, believed there was both a capability to go after and disrupt Russia,
and that there was going to be a deterrent value for going with offensive weapons in
Ukraine. There were also European advisers who felt
very strongly that this was important for NATO’s credibility, for the credibility
of Partnership for Peace and the NATO affiliation program. But there were also people in Intelligence
Community and elsewhere who understood that confronting Russia here had risks, that it
could go sideways very quickly, and that it was also going to make it harder for us to
protect our allies where our foremost obligation lies. In the end, all decisions are lonely. The president is the only one who gets a vote. [National Security Adviser] Tom Donilon used
to like to say in the middle of the vigorous debate, he would go to a Cabinet officer and
say: “How many electoral votes did you get, because they only vote for the president of
the United States. He’s the one who has to decide these things,
whether it’s how many troops in Afghanistan, whether we’re going to war in Syria, whether
we’re pulling out of Iraq, or whether we’re going to confront Russia in Ukraine.” JIM GILMORE - In February 2014, [Ukraine’s
President Viktor] Yanukovych is pulling back from the EU with the agreement. There's demonstrations going on. What's the view from the United States about
what's taking place and where we think it’s going? JON WOLFSTHAL - I mean, it’s chaotic. This is really a level of protest led by the
Ukrainian people in Maidan Square, and nobody was really sure which direction this was going
to go. We were, I think, as surprised as anyone when
Yanukovych ended up fleeing for Moscow. There was a recognition that, whatever was
going to happen in Ukraine, the United States had to be very careful because of recognition;
that if it was seen as being American-led toppling of the Ukrainian government that
Russia could respond very strongly to that. It was also quite clear that we’re not going
to take credit for something that we didn’t do ourselves. We obviously had been promoting democratic
reform, transparency, anti-corruption effort in Ukraine for a long time, but that’s different
than advocating or pushing for regime change. Vladimir Putin clearly saw it as an American-led
coup, and [that] led to a very strong reaction from the Kremlin. JIM GILMORE - The attitude that Putin had
toward Victoria Nuland and the secretary of state, when we saw that happening, and then
the hacking of Nuland’s telephone call? JON WOLFSTHAL - We had seen Russian behavior
like this, and even more disturbing than that, for quite some time. I don’t think anybody was surprised. We knew that Ukraine was an extremely important
satellite country for Putin. When the government fell, we weren't surprised
that he acted very strongly. We also viewed his reaction that this was
an American-led toppling as predictable. It was convenient for his narrative. It was consistent with the way he viewed the
world. It also allowed him, quite frankly, to get
away with some of the things we then saw happen, in terms of patriotic Russians coming to the
defense of Ukrainians and so forth. JIM GILMORE - The Nuland conversation being
released, this was something new, the idea of using a wiretap material. JON WOLFSTHAL - There are also cases where
Russia has released things or WikiLeaks has released things that turned out not to be
true at all. They were going to use statements by American
officials as evidence of a conspiracy. To be quite honest, I didn’t talk to Toria
about how she felt about it personally, but most people in the United States government
have a pretty thick skin. We understand that Putin is playing for keeps. It’s not something that we welcome. We condemned it for what it was, but we also
were trying to deal with a very chaotic security situation in Ukraine, and keep our eye on
the prize. JIM GILMORE - How potent was his allegation
that we were trying to name the new leaders for Ukraine? JON WOLFSTHAL - Yeah, potent in terms of credible
or potent in terms of—? JIM GILMORE - Well, when we’re looking at
it and we’re seeing that they're putting this information out. JON WOLFSTHAL - … My sense is that Putin
was going to do what Putin was going to do. We were going to focus in on how do we help
stabilize the situation in Ukraine? How do we make sure that it remains a peaceful
situation? It was clearly the risk that the protests
in Kiev could get very ugly very quickly. There was already violence, and that could
expand. Actually, I'm still to this day amazed that
it didn’t become much bloodier than it was. Yanukovych could have actually tried to mow
down the protesters in the way we've seen in China and elsewhere. But I can't get to the specifics of how the
Nuland call and the allegations by Putin played inside the government. … JIM GILMORE - So Yanukovych leaves. Soon after, “little green men” appear. Soon after, the country is basically taken
over. What are we seeing? ... JON WOLFSTHAL - It was pretty apparent inside
the United States government what was going on. Nobody that I spoke with believed that these
were patriotic Russians on vacation going to protect Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. These were active military that were under
orders, and we were able to pick up on all that, in terms of their movements, who was
in command, where they were getting their supplies, what was going in. We obviously were concerned about it, but
we also saw that they were moving, to the extent that you can call it conservatively—they
weren't shipping in massive amounts of arms. They weren't flying fighter jets. They were moving basically small combat vehicles. It wasn’t a whole scale invasion, which
obviously complicated our ability to respond. Had it been 500,000 troops rolling over the
border, then Europe, the EU, NATO would have had some obligation to respond forcefully,
not in the way we would protect NATO states, but we obviously would have had a very different
response. Putin was using hybrid warfare in a way we
hadn’t seen, and we did not have an organized response for it. We also recognized that he was attacking at
a weak point. Ukraine wasn’t a functioning state. It was a vassal state and a corrupt one. There wasn’t much of Ukrainian army to work
with when we decided to cooperate and to push back. Most of what was shipped to the Ukrainian
army over the years had been looted, sold off. The officers were corrupt. The troops weren't trained. You didn’t have a cadre of people who could
organize and push back against the hybrid attacks we were seeing. JIM GILMORE - Are you surprised at how successful,
to some extent, the Ukrainians have been? JON WOLFSTHAL - … As Vladimir Putin said,
if he wanted to take Kiev, he could have taken Kiev. The United States is not committed, and nor
is NATO, to protect Ukrainian territory. I think Vladimir Putin wants a frozen conflict
more than he wants to own and control Ukraine, because quite honestly, he can still get what
he wants out of Ukraine without having to own all the problems, all the chaos that would
come with it. He’s destabilized the region. He’s been able to seize the strategic ports
on the Black Sea that he’s always valued. He’s been able to make sure that the region’s
going to be trouble for years to come. JIM GILMORE - … We’re going to be tracking
the hybrid war. We’re going to go from Estonia in 2007 and
what happened in Georgia. Now you've got this hybrid war that’s taking
place in Ukraine. What did we see? What did the White House understand about
this? And was there an evolution in how the White
House was viewing what this threat was? JON WOLFSTHAL - Undoubtedly. For 60 years, we have been preparing for massive
armored combat on the European landmass. That’s what we have been designing our entire
Army, Air Force, Navy and military around. We did not anticipate, even after Georgia,
the extent to which Putin was willing to use these tools he had developed in Ukraine to
destabilize the state and to achieve the annexation of Crimea, the theft of Crimea. All of the plans that we had for protecting
NATO territory against invasion, destabilization, weren't really viable in Ukraine, in part
because they weren't NATO states. We hadn’t been training with them and participating
with them. But also, this wasn’t the scenario we had
been planning against. … Looking back, there's no question that
Putin was able to take advantage of his weakness per se and our planning against what we had
expected to see during the 1990s or before, and to destabilize the region in a way that
achieved his goals, with a minimum of risk. Now, that also tells us something about Vladimir
Putin and how much he cared about Ukraine, which is he clearly wanted to make sure that
America didn’t establish a strong ally and a NATO partner in Ukraine. But he also wasn’t willing to cut off his
leg to achieve it. He was willing to throw a couple thousand
nameless Russians into the battle. He was willing to commit some anti-aircraft
batteries and some armored personnel carriers and drones and so forth, but he wasn’t committing
the whole Russian army to this endeavor. The question is, had we pushed back, would
he have folded, or would he have doubled down? That’s something we will never know the
answer to. My belief is that Russia was committed to
seizing Crimea, and had we gone with offensive weapons to support the Ukrainian people that
this conflict would have expanded very quickly. … JIM GILMORE - When you hear about the Russian
involvement and the hacking of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and [Clinton campaign
chair John] Podesta and all … what do you think? JON WOLFSTHAL - This isn't the first time
we've seen Russia—well, let me rephrase that. It’s not the first time we’ve seen hackers
meddling with American political systems. The White House is constantly under cyberattack,
from denial of access to foreign governments trying to penetrate our systems. We joke at home, my wife and I, [that] the
Chinese know more about my wife and I than the American government does, because of the
OMB hack. It’s a constant problem in Washington and
in people who work in national security. We recognize we’re vulnerable. However, what we were seeing and what we were
hearing about the Russian attacks were really different, because it wasn’t just accumulating
information for use later, for potentially targeting or cyber. It really was designed to be actionable. It was really designed to use, to release
and to damage both individuals, parties, campaigns, but also to throw doubt over the whole democratic
system. That was something new, not working on it
day by day, it was something that even now I'm not privy to all of the different aspects
of. But it was clear that, from at least my point
of view, that what we were seeing was Vladimir Putin responding to what he saw as American
threats to his hold on power, and that he was going to choose sides in an American election
between someone who has been very strong on human rights and democratic rights and the
rights of people for self-determination and the eventual man who won president of the
United States. JIM GILMORE - … When did you guys start
understanding the complexity of the attack, the different levels of the bots and everything
else? JON WOLFSTHAL - I think we’re still learning
to this day. But I think, at least not as somebody who
was primarily engaged in this issue and protecting the American political system, early on we
thought this was more small-scale Russian hacking, that they were just trying to target
and get information and then provide it to WikiLeaks. I don’t think we had a sense, or at least
I didn’t have a sense early on, that this was part of a coordinated, systemic campaign
to go after the American political system. I think even up until the election, it wasn’t
exactly clear publicly what we were actually facing. JIM GILMORE - What did we think? What did the White House start thinking about
what did Putin want from this? … JON WOLFSTHAL - There were different opinions. The major concern was that Vladimir Putin
was putting himself in a position to where he could influence the outcome directly. Our real concern was on ensuring that you
could not get cyber intrusions into the electoral systems in 50 different states, and we coordinated—not
my office but the White House and the people working on cyber issues, coordinated through
FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and other offices, how to ensure that the
states had the resources that they needed, or if they requested them, if they didn’t
have them, to get what they needed, to protect their voting systems. We’ve gone to electronic voting in this
country, but it’s run by the states. The federal government doesn’t get involved. But just as we help after a tornado, we wanted
to get in position to help protect these systems. If there were compromises, [we wanted] to
be able to notify people, to alert the electorate, to deal with that in a systemic way. The primary concern was that he was going
to influence the outcome of the election directly. I think it wasn’t until later after the
election we recognized that that wasn’t the goal. We still are now learning information about
how the people who produced the voting machines actually may have been compromised and the
voting rolls may have been compromised, but largely that this was a disinformation campaign
designed to throw up a lot of fake news and complicate the way people saw the election,
the debates of the election and to influence it that way. JIM GILMORE - How big of a debate was this
within the White House, I mean during the campaign and sort of seeing this stuff happen? JON WOLFSTHAL - I’d want to be careful,
because I wasn’t involved in any of the political discussions and specifically in
terms of how the Russian behavior was influencing the election. I viewed it from the outside, looking at how
are we going to be able to achieve other objectives we were still trying to work with the Russians
on? It was clear why we weren't able to get the
attention that we felt these issues deserved, in part because there were other priorities,
like how do we protect the American democratic system from a Russian attack? JIM GILMORE - Was it from both sides that
you were seeing dead ends? JON WOLFSTHAL - No. [It was] largely from the Russians. Every time we went up the chain to get either
[National Security Adviser] Susan Rice’s support or the president’s support, in terms
of how do we engage Russia constructively, how to try to advance our goals with Russia,
North Korea—I'm sorry, with Iran, North Korea, on arms control, we always got it,
because there was a recognition that, if we could make progress, even with a President
Putin that was interfering in our election, the job of the American president is still
to protect the American people. But I think, from at least June on, it was
clear the Russians felt either they were going to get Donald Trump, and they were going to
get a better outcome, or they were going to get Hillary Clinton, and anything that we
might negotiate in the Obama years wasn’t going to be relevant. JIM GILMORE - Because? JON WOLFSTHAL - Because they felt that they
were going to get a much tougher deal from Hillary Clinton, which, in my opinion, is
why they chose sides in the election. They felt that Hillary was going to be much
stronger in confronting Russia across the board. I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. I think Secretary Clinton would have proved
to be just as pragmatic as President Obama when it came to specific issues and cooperation
with Russia. But the Russian perspective was clearly one
where they weren't going to be able to do business with Hillary Clinton. JIM GILMORE - We started talking about this
already, but let’s finish it up. The debate in the summer of 2016 about why
the White House did not react more forcefully: There were Clinton people that were furious
with the White House. There were other advisers who thought we needed
to do more. There were intelligence folks that were also
on that side. Take me one more time to the debate that was
ongoing about that, and how serious it got. JON WOLFSTHAL - There was clearly a debate
about how we could respond to this and how we could deter Russia from continuing to take
these actions. It wasn’t clear that there was any magic
solution. We had already told Vladimir Putin that there
was clearly an unacceptable set of actions, including interfering with the voting itself,
that we wouldn’t tolerate. In fact, he didn’t go in that direction. He may have had the capability to, but we
don’t have any evidence that he affected the actual votes. JIM GILMORE - This is the red phone conversation? JON WOLFSTHAL - The red phone conversation? JIM GILMORE - Yeah. JON WOLFSTHAL - Yeah, yeah, we did send an
action alert through the Nuclear Risk Reduction [Center (NRRC)] communication system, which
is the first time it’s been used in years, to basically make clear that they understood
the seriousness of how we viewed interference with the American voting process. JIM GILMORE - And how was it defined? JON WOLFSTHAL - Well, I’ll be careful, because
I'm not at liberty to talk word by word. What we focused on was that we would not tolerate
any effort to change the votes of American citizens and the way they were tabulated for
election of the president. JIM GILMORE - And what has been reported is
that a cyberattack would be considered to be equal, basically, to an armed attack. JON WOLFSTHAL - I can't confirm the report. What I will say is that nobody could mistake
what we were saying. Both the means through which we communicated
it and the content made clear that we were not going to view interfering and vote tabulation
as just another cyber intrusion. That being said, it’s not clear to me, even
now, had the president of the United States gone out and given a press conference—and
he did talk publicly about Russian interference—if he had called together the heads of Facebook
and Twitter, if he had gotten together with the heads of 55 or 155 major newspapers, what
in fact the United States government could have done to actually prevent Russia from
influencing the debate. You had bots; you had individuals who were,
even unbeknownst to them, were creating content which was casting credibility on Hillary Clinton,
on the nature of the election, on the mainstream media. Real stories were seen as fake; fake stories
were seen as real. That’s really, in my mind, what the danger
is here. It’s not that Russia already interfered
in our election the way they have with others, but they can do it again. We haven't begun to really appreciate exactly
how that process worked on individuals, on blocs of voters, and how we’re going to
try and prevent it from happening again. JIM GILMORE - Of course the other argument
that was being had—and certainly the Clinton folks believed strongly in this, and certainly
people in Congress were calling for it—is they wanted more information released to the
public, to the United States public, so that they understood the ramifications of what
was going on. JON WOLFSTHAL - I'm not in a position, nor
was I in a position to make those calls. I'm very skeptical that, even if we had released
information about the individuals perpetrating and organizing these attacks, had we released
clear intelligence in terms of what was happening and how, that the American public was going
to digest that in a way that was going to change the way they viewed the candidates. This was a situation where, even today, you
have huge percentages of the American population who supported Donald Trump who think that
the idea that Russia interfered in the election is false, because Donald Trump tells them
it’s false and that it’s designed to be a way for Democrats to explain why they lost
an election even he says they should have won. And you have all the Democrats getting together
and [saying], “Yeah, Donald Trump is a Russian puppet,” even though there's no direct evidence
that he’s a Russian puppet. So it’s not clear to me how—and I would
argue that it wasn’t clear to the president and the vice president and the Cabinet—how
releasing this information, disclosing sources and methods, providing all of this intelligence
over to Congress was going to change what was happening. What we quite frankly need is an informed
and engaged electorate that knows how to understand and digest credible news sources, and that’s
not something you turn on with the flip of a switch. JIM GILMORE - And the point of view of the
president for not coming out more forcefully to explain we were being hacked by the Russians
early on? JON WOLFSTHAL - I think the president did
come out very clearly and said that we are being influenced by the Russians, that they
are interfering in our systems. But he himself has said that he was wary about
[being] seen as being overtly partisan. Even though he clearly supported Hillary Clinton
and campaigned for her, there was concern that he would be seen as using the American
intelligence apparatus to support one presidential candidate in a way that many people would
have felt was inappropriate. JIM GILMORE - The [Director of National Intelligence
James] Clapper report that comes out in January, that was the unclassified version. A lot of people point to that as saying if
we know that in January, we knew a lot of those elements a lot earlier. Some of that would have been very useful to
the electorate. JON WOLFSTHAL - Again, it’s not clear to
me that it would be useful to the electorate. I'm not in a position—it’s not my job
to make that call. But I respect the president’s right to make
it, and I understood the reasons why. That’s why we elect our leaders, is so that
we rely on their judgment. I'm sure just as the vice president second-guesses
himself that the president second-guesses himself on this. But in the end, those are the decisions that
were made. JIM GILMORE - President Trump, or candidate
Trump beforehand, his statements of support for Putin, his negative attitude toward NATO
and toward the EU, preference for Brexit, this is now your NSC hat. When you're in the White House, listening
to this, you guys that are dealing with our allies constantly, the message being sent,
how are you hearing it? What are the worries about what you're hearing? JON WOLFSTHAL - It’s actually still the
messages that I get today. I'm still being contacted by foreign governments
who want to understand what's going on in the American government, because there aren't
a lot of American officials put in place who can answer their questions. But what we told them is that we have treaty
commitments that are sacrosanct; that even the elected president of the United States
is not going to go back on NATO. He’s not going to go back on our extended
deterrent commitments to Japan and South Korea. There are a whole bunch of reasons that we
don’t work more closely with Russia, in large part because Russia has decided that
they don’t want to move in that direction. But we did field a tremendous number of calls
of concern from allies. They're rightly uncertain about what American
policy is going to be. I can't tell you today in the way I could
six months ago that the United States will always be there for Europe, that we will protect
Poland or Estonia or Latvia from the type of hybrid attack that we saw in Ukraine from
Russia. I’d like to believe that we would. I know under President Obama we would have,
but I'm not as certain as I should be. JIM GILMORE - And the ramifications? JON WOLFSTHAL - The ramifications are multiple. You're going to see a lot of countries beginning
to think for themselves about what their security situation should be and be less beholden to
the United States. You’ve seen Angela Merkel, the chancellor
of Germany, say, “We need to be responsible for our own security.” There are even some in Germany who have said
they need to think about their own independent nuclear options. The interest in nuclear weapons in South Korea
has spiked, even with the election of a left-leaning government. The fact that President Putin said, “Maybe
they’ll have to pay the United States for the missile defense that we’re installing
there to protect our own troops, and that they should pay more for American bases there,”
has really caused South Koreans to question the level of commitment to the United States. Ironically, the country that’s doing the
best is Japan, because Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe was smart and came to the United States
very early, sidled up next to President [Trump] very cozily, made sure that he was getting
the economic cooperation and flattery that he wanted, and seems to have worked out a
close personal relationship. That’s not the way that it’s supposed
to be. The United States is supposed to stand for
the rule of law. I’d like to believe that people around President
Trump, like Secretary [of Defense James] Mattis, like Secretary [of State Rex] Tillerson, like
[National Security Adviser] Gen. [H.R.] McMaster, understand that our security is
based on the ironclad nature of our commitments to our allies. If that falters, American power is diminished
dramatically. JIM GILMORE - … What was your experience
as far as, when the Trump administration came in—normally, when an administration comes
in, the last folks hand off the information, and they give advice, and they tell the latest,
where we are schedule-wise with treaties and everything else. What was your experience at NSC? JON WOLFSTHAL - We spent a tremendous amount
of time on transition. Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice
made it very clear that this is going to be the best transition in the history of this
country, regardless of who won. We didn’t write our transition papers for
President Clinton or for President Trump. We wrote them for the next president of the
United States. We generated a tremendous amount of bureaucratic
paperwork, but we also generated a tremendous amount of insightful information about what
was going on in the world, the advantages and disadvantages that the United States had
in different parts of the world, what was working and what wasn’t and why. … I held personally three very long meetings
with my successor, who took over as the senior director for weapons of mass destruction in
the Trump administration. Unfortunately, there were only two people
that were taking meetings from the NSC at the time, one of whom was my successor and
another person who was going to end up at Treasury. But they were taking meetings from the senior
director for Europe, Russia, defense, economic affairs, East Asia. It was just, they were inundated, because
the transition team for the National Security Council was tiny. It basically was Gen. [Michael] Flynn, [then-Deputy
National Security Adviser] K.T. McFarland and a couple of staffers, and that
was it, only one of whom remains at the National Security Council. Unfortunately, a lot of that effort was lost. Now, the saving grace of our system is that
about one-third of the people at the National Security Council are political appointees,
like myself, who were experts in their field, but are affiliated directly with the presidential
administration. The other two-thirds are professional civil
servants who come from the different agencies, Defense Department, State Department, Treasury,
Commerce, the Intelligence Community. So my staff that I hired on was still there. They're the ones that are the loyal officers
protecting the United States government and staffing the president, even to this day. I met with my successor recently, and he’s
been thrilled with the level of support he gets from them, because they're true professionals. MIKE WISER - We’ve heard reports inside
the administration that there was an assumption that Hillary Clinton was going to win. Was there a moment on election night? Did it change your understanding of what the
Russians might have been up to, the effectiveness or the weakness? JON WOLFSTHAL - I can tell you that there
was a moment when I became aware, on election night, that Hillary Clinton was not going
to win. I think the vast majority of people in the
media, government, intelligentsia class were pretty convinced Hillary Clinton was going
to win. The numbers suggested she was going to win. I don’t think, to this day, we understand
exactly how she lost, when it comes to the Russian effect. … Is that because of Russia? Is it because of Donald Trump and his populist
message? Was it his willingness to offend pretty much
everybody? Was it Hillary Clinton’s inability to connect
with voters? Or was it the fact that Russia was really
good at spreading fake news on Facebook? … The fact is, in this country, we don’t
want anybody to interfere in our election. It’s up to us to decide who our elected
officials are going to be, but we’re in an interconnected world. The fact is that other countries and other
actors have been influencing us in different ways for a long time. What we have to do is be aware of it and be
able to process it. That’s something we haven't digested yet. MIKE WISER - Did you feel like the American
government was surprised by this type of attack? Some people have compared it to 9/11, that
it was a failure of imagination. JON WOLFSTHAL - If it’s a failure of imagination,
I'm as guilty of it as anyone in the sense that it’s still not clear to me that there's
a direct line between Russian behavior and Donald Trump getting elected. Had Russia backed Jeb Bush, would Jeb Bush
have been elected? I can't draw that direct line. … To me, it’s not a question of whether
we lack the imagination. It’s possible that Russia dictated the outcome
of the election, and it’s possible they had very little influence. What's clear is that they tried to influence
our election. They tried to discredit the system. And we’re not in a position to try and prevent
that from happening again. MIKE WISER - That’s my next question. Putin says these are patriotic hackers who
might have been involved, and this might have been an organic thing that happened. Is there any debate inside the government? At what point is it clear that this is not
organic, these are state actors? JON WOLFSTHAL - I don’t think there is any
debate inside the government. There clearly wasn’t inside the Obama administration
that this was a directly organized and directed Russian attack from Vladimir Putin and the
highest levels of the Russian government. There may be a debate about what we do about
it, if anything, although if you listen to every Trump administration official who’s
asked, “Have you talked to the president about the Russian interference in the election? What has the president said?,” even Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions acknowledges
he hasn’t even received a briefing on the Russian interference in the election. It’s remarkable, the lack of curiosity. The idea that somehow the Trump administration
is going to be our best protector against prolonged Russian influence in the election,
to my mind, is just nonsensical. To the extent that we are going to deter Russia
from interfering with our electoral process again, it’s going to take very strong deterrent
statements and a willingness to order direct responses, whether that is political, economic
or cyber, into Russian systems. It’s not clear to me that Donald Trump is
ever going to authorize those sort of actions against Russia. DAVID HOFFMAN - … Once the hotline, the
risk reduction line is used and the message is sent, how did Russia respond with it all? And secondly, the President himself told Putin,
“Knock it off.” What was the response? Essentially about both cases, what kind of
response did Russia give to these two things? JON WOLFSTHAL - The response we got from Russians
on these two events was largely what we always get from the Russians, which is, “we’re
not doing anything. It’s not us. You know, I don’t know what you're talking
about. We would never interfere in your system the
way you interfere with our system.” You know, non-denial denials. Or actually, not even non-denial denials,
just straight out denials. “We’re not involved. It’s not us. We would never do such a thing.” … JIM GILMORE - Let me ask one other thing. Since you were there throughout the administration,
was the Vladimir Putin that you guys saw in 2009, how different or similar was he at the
end? How did he evolve? JON WOLFSTHAL - That’s a great question. Our perception of Putin may never have really
reflected what he was actually like. We always knew that Putin was calculating. We always knew that he was going to serve
his own interests before being altruistic. He never did anything for the good of others. He was trying to ensure that he was in control
of Russia and that Russia was in control of its destiny. In that sense, he didn’t really evolve very
much at all. What's remarkable is that he became even more
paranoid, more concerned about his control. The tighter that he controlled all aspects
of Russian power, the less confident he was. He didn’t need to do the things he was doing. Taking over Crimea was a tremendous risk. He was much more secure in power in 2017 and
2016 than he was in 2009 or 2010. Yet he still took those chances, which suggests
to me that he really was never confident in his ability to control his surrounding and
his circumstances. At the same time, it’s no surprise to me
that we ended up at an impasse with Putin. President Obama has very thick skin. He doesn’t need to be loved by foreign leaders. It’s always better if you get along with
a foreign leader. If there's real business to be done that protects
America, and that’s also a win for Russia or China, the president has shown, time and
time again, that he was willing to take those decisions. What I think stumped us was that there were
clear wins on the table for Putin that he wouldn’t take just because America was offering
it. Russia could still be seen as a leader in
international nonproliferation affairs. They could still be engaged in broader economic
development. They could still be participating in the G-8;
[they could still be] much stronger actors in global economic affairs. … It was really zero-sum. If the United States is willing to suggest
it there must be something wrong with it; therefore we don’t want it. They’d rather have an argument with the
United States than agree with us. That's something that I think defines Vladimir
Putin very well, that even if it seems like a good deal, if it’s coming from the United
States, it’s something he’s not quite sure he wants to be a part of, because he
has defined his power, his influence and his leadership of Russia as countering American
influence. A number of us who grew up at the end of the
Cold War are now asking ourselves, is this a new Cold War? Is this really where we’re headed? This isn't a global competition to take home
all the marbles. This is much more of an arm-wrestling match
and back-and-forth that I think we’re going to be engaged in for as long as Vladimir Putin
is president. Nobody’s really sure how far it’s going
to go. What I can tell you is, his paranoia became
so extreme that we really worried about the ability of a conflict in Ukraine or Estonia
or anywhere else to get out of control and to escalate very rapidly to the nuclear level. … We’re still very concerned that the
people around Vladimir Putin are not confident in their position and that things could get
out of control very quickly. Whether that’s through escalation or through
deliberate use, it’s something that I think we still have to be very, very worried about. JIM GILMORE - Great. Thank you. JON WOLFSTHAL - Sure.
