Dealing with the Deadly | Ambassador Robert O'Brien | EP 398

Now Xi Jinping has said many times that this Century humiliation will be overcome by the Chinese people and that they'll take every square inch of property back that they believe was theirs, that they believe was historically Chinese. You know this idea that they're gonna— that China is going to assemble all this land that it lost to Western powers or it lost when it was humiliated because it was weak. Do you think they're not coming for the Russian lands?

Hello everyone watching and listening today. I have the pleasure of speaking with Ambassador Robert O'Brien. We discussed the inner workings of international hostage negotiations, the ongoing success and legacy of the Abraham Accords negotiated under President Trump, the Russia-Ukraine war and its complexities, and the current perception of diminished American strength—a situation which leaves much room for improvement.

So Ambassador O'Brien, you were the fourth US security adviser under Donald Trump. So why were you the fourth, and what was it like taking on the job knowing you were the fourth? And what was it like working with him? He's a mystery to many people; maybe he's a mystery to himself, who knows. But you stepped into a role that had obviously been contentious, and so there must have been some apprehension in that regard. Why did you do it, and what was that like?

Well, thanks, Jordan, great to be with you. You know, I was the fourth. We had General Flynn was there for a brief period of time, and then General McMaster and John Bolton. It's not a job I expected to receive, but I was serving as the president's hostage envoy at the time, trying to bring Americans home from detention or wrongful detention or being held hostage by terrorist organizations.

I didn't really know the president. I’d been with another candidate in 2016, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. But I supported the president in the general election, of course. He asked me to be the hostage envoy, and I got to know him through that job.

I think one of the things President Trump appreciated about the work I did is we got a lot of Americans home, and President Trump gets the credit for that. Some people give me credit for it, and that's flattering, but you know, when things go well for a president, the president should get the credit, and he deserved the credit for bringing so many Americans home.

We developed a relationship. I was actually in Israel, working on a hostage case, trying to help some of the Israelis bring the remains of a fallen soldier home, and John Bolton had resigned or was fired, depending on whose story you believe. I got the call to come in for an interview, and it went well, and he asked me to do the job, so I was humbled and honored to have that position.

I didn't know, you know, I was keenly aware that I was the fourth person, but I also felt that I had a good relationship with the president. I felt my job every day, and the prayer I said as I left my apartment every morning was that we'd keep America safe that day. The president appreciated my commitment to keeping the country safe, and I appreciated his commitment to doing the same. We had a good relationship, and it worked out well; we had a lot of accomplishments that took place that last year and a half in office.

Let's talk about the hostage cases to begin with. So how did you get involved in doing that, and do you want to walk us through some of the stories and what it is exactly that you were doing before you became US security adviser and how that set you up for the job?

Sure. So I received a call in late 2017 from the White House asking if I’d be willing to fill this role of being the US hostage envoy. The title is SPHA, which sounds like a Dr. Seuss character, but it’s an acronym for Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. I just started a law firm with a partner, Steven Larson, a former federal judge in Los Angeles. We left a big national firm and so I wasn't planning on going into government.

I always wondered over my career, I'd spent time traveling abroad all over the world in international arbitration cases and law cases. I always kind of wondered if our plan was hijacked; if we were taken hostage, would someone come look for us? When the job was offered, I went and talked to my wife, and we prayed about it. We looked at some of the cases of people who were held abroad, and I thought, you know, I’m going to give this a shot. It’s a sacrifice for the family and a sacrifice for my law partners, but I’m going to go see if I can get some people home.

We did the job, and we got a lot of people home. We were very successful at it. Again, credit for that goes to the president for his tough stand on bringing Americans home. I think he felt that Americans being held abroad just because they were Americans, just because they have a blue passport, was kind of the essence of poking your finger in the eye of the United States.

His “America First” view of the world was: if you do that, I don’t care who the person is or why they were taken; if they were a missionary, if they were a tourist, if they were a business person, a diplomat, or a soldier, if you’ve taken somebody to leverage them, leverage their life to try and get the US to change our policy or try and get a concession from us or money from us, we’re not going to stand for it, and we’re going to get that person home. That was a job I undertook.

I didn’t expect it to lead to becoming the National Security adviser, but again, we had some success, and I can talk to you about some of the cases. At the end of the day, the president gets the credit for making it a high priority. You’re up against a bureaucracy; other people in government have different priorities than getting a single American home. But for me, my job in that position was solely focused on bringing those Americans home.

So what had set you up in your previous career to be able to conduct those negotiations, and why do you think that you were apart from Trump’s support— which we can go into— why do you think it was that made you successful at doing this? What was it like to actually negotiate? Who were you negotiating with, and what was that like? How did you do it?

Yeah, so great questions. You know, I think my past experience as a diplomat helped. I’d been a diplomat in the Bush administration and had even carried over and worked on the Afghanistan program for the Condoleezza Rice setup but went into the Obama-Clinton years when Secretary Clinton was Secretary of State. That certainly helped. I’d been an Army officer earlier in my career and had worked at the UN, so I had kind of the diplomatic experience.

But I think the day-to-day experience of being a lawyer in Los Angeles—I was a litigator, and we’ve got the toughest lawyers in the country, I think, in LA. I spent a lot of time in mediations, hundreds of mediations over my career both serving as counsel for parties and later serving as an arbitrator, mediator, and neutral. I think that was the experience that gave me the best background for the job as hostage envoy.

To your question about who we negotiate with, you know it’s tough because we couldn’t negotiate directly with some of these countries—for example, the Iranians. I had to work through the Swiss. So our envoys were the Swiss diplomats, who are great diplomats, and we worked with them. We worked with other third-party governments to get to governments that we could negotiate with.

We negotiated with the Russians directly, and we negotiated with the Taliban directly. You’ve got bad guys on the other side; you’ve got thugs on the other side to some extent, and you’ve got to be tough. That has to be backed up by American hard power. The diplomacy is important; the negotiating skills are important. But at the end of the day, they’re looking at you to see what America’s going to do if we don’t comply. What tools does this guy have in his toolkit? What kind of support is he going to get from the bureaucracy?

That goes back to the classic Ronald Reagan formulation of “peace through strength.” So working for a president who believed in peace through strength, who wasn’t trying to appease or not provoke our adversaries, but who believed in a strong America, was good for peace in the world. That helped me in my negotiations.

So that was, given that in the thumbnail. The other thing I did, Jordan, which I think created a stir at the time, when I became the hostage envoy, there was a memo about the office that had been prepared in the prior administration, in the Obama administration, that described what we did as the office of the SPHA and it said, “Our first resort is diplomacy, and the very last resort we’ll take to rescue Americans is military force.”

I looked at that and I said, “This is exactly wrong,” and I changed the memo. I said, “Our first resort will be to use our military, our special operators.” The modern special operations community was really formed after the failed attempt to rescue American diplomats held in Iran in 1980. That's how we ended up with Delta Force and Seal Team 6 and this very top-tier group of operators that were originally set up to be hostage-rescue guys based on a large part on the SAS and the UK’s SAS regiment.

I said, “Look, our first resort, if we can affect rescue, is we’re going to use these highly trained National Assets, these great men and women of US Special Forces to go get our hostages back or our wrongful detainees back, and then we’ll look at diplomatic options.” I wanted to send a message to our adversaries that, you know, we’re going to— this is a different approach, and we’re going to use American hard power.

If you’ve got a chance to negotiate with us or negotiate with a third-party country that’s coming to you on our behalf, take it because you know the other option we’ve got— and our primary option— is to go rescue our people. We had a number of rescues either using foreign partner forces that engaged special operators of foreign governments or our own special operators that were really exquisite where we brought Americans home.

I think that sent a message to folks and backed up our diplomacy. So that was one thing that we did to change the policy and at least send a message to our foreign adversaries and the terrorist organizations or rogue governments that if you take an American, there’s a penalty to pay, and we’re going to get them back.

Okay, so to get—so if I get this straight—so the people that were taking hostages came to know that they might have an opportunity to negotiate through the intermediation of third parties, but that the military option was likely to be brought forward very rapidly. Is that the right sequence of events?

Correct, and look, if we had a military operation that could be launched immediately, it becomes more difficult to launch these operations if a hostage is aged or if they’ve been taken and held for a while because they’re moved. Some of the terrorist organizations have pretty good operational security. It’s always tougher when a government is holding your hostage because they’re held in a downtown jail somewhere in Caracas or Tehran or Moscow.

Those circumstances make the military option more difficult. If we could find a hostage organization— we did this at the end of the administration in late October in 2020. A group had kidnapped an American named Walton in Nigeria. We launched an operation within 48 hours, rescued him, dealt with a terrorist, rescued him, and brought him home safely. The whole thing happened in a very short period of time. I think that from start to finish, it was a 72-hour operation from us finding and fixing where he was, where the terrorists had him, the kidnappers, and bringing him back to Washington, DC.

So sometimes, you know, negotiations weren’t always an option for the bad guys, but if they had secured the hostage somewhere, a government had them in a jail, that was certainly one course for them to take.

Right, right. So were there any downsides to moving the military option up the list of priorities? Did that add risk in any situations, or do you think overall it decreased risk?

Well, I think overall it decreased risk, right? Because you let people know that if you take an American hostage, the US military is coming for you. We’ve got long reach; we can go from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to wherever you are in a very short period of time. But we think it was a deterrent and prevented further hostage taking. Anytime you put the men and women of our Armed Forces into an operation, there’s risk to them.

There’s obviously a risk to the hostage in a rescue situation where bullets are flying. There’s also a risk of escalation; a hostage rescue turns into more of a conflict. But our feeling was that the deterrent effect of letting folks know we’re going to rescue our people and the high degree of skills and capabilities our special operators had to rescue a hostage if they were taken outweighed the risk of either escalation or death to one of our service members or the hostage. But it’s a tough call to make. Well, there are going to be risks no matter what approach you take.

Has the approach that you put in place stayed intact as a consequence of the transition to the Biden Administration? What’s happened now?

Well, we have a really terrific hostage envoy. The guy who took over from me is a guy named Roger Carson—Ambassador—and he was a former military special operations guy. I’ve got a lot of confidence in him. But again, he’s working in an environment that I call a “do not provoke appeasement” mentality of the Obama folks who came in and have now staffed the Biden Administration. I think there’s a lot less emphasis on hard power and a lot more emphasis on just pure diplomacy and soft power.

And, you know, look, that can work in some cases. You know, you have different tools in your toolkit. But I think there’s a perception of American weakness now, and I think that makes the job of the hostage envoy tougher. I think Roger’s done a great job, and to his credit, I think the current national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, who took my position, has been good on these hostage issues.

But again, you’re only so good as the environment that’s around you, and if your adversaries know that military force is off the table and the likelihood of appeasement or ransom or concessions is on the table, they’re going to look for those results instead of just turning over the hostage and hoping they don’t get punished for having engaged in that activity.

And do you think that’s reflected in the broader geopolitical landscape, especially in relation to say what’s happened in Ukraine with the Russians?

Look, sadly, that’s the case, Jordan. We saw a direct line from this catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way that it was handled to Vladimir Putin sensing that America was weak. American weakness is provocative; American strength keeps peace in the world. But when our adversaries believe us to be weak, they take chances, and they look for opportunities to exploit that weakness.

I don’t think America is fundamentally weaker than we were four years ago. We’re a very strong country. We’ve got geography on our side. We’ve got demography on our side. We’ve got innovation. We’ve got a tremendous military. But the perception that our adversaries develop over time—watching things like Afghanistan, watching the failure to deter Putin in Ukraine—I mean, you recall, Jordan, all the talk with the pundits and the administration folks before Putin’s invasion was, “We don’t want to provoke them; we don’t want to give the Ukrainians extra weapons; we don’t want to do things that would dissuade the Russians because that could provoke Putin into an invasion.”

Dictators look at the world very differently than we do. It’s maybe rational from their perspective, but it’s not what we believe is rational. I mean, I remember commentators saying it would be crazy for Putin to invade Ukraine. Well, Putin didn’t do that way. Putin saw us withdraw from Afghanistan; he sensed weakness. He thought he had an opportunity to gain geography, to gain territory. He’s got a demographic problem in Russia; he could gain 40 million more Russians—he could get access to agricultural land and increase Russia’s ability to trade. Ukraine has some natural resources, some oil and gas, so he looked at that as an opportunity to take the whole thing.

Whereas we would think that’s irrational for a big country just to invade its neighbor because might makes right, but for Putin, it was perfectly rational. So when he sensed our weakness, he moved, and we didn’t do a good job to deter him, and that was a failure of policy. Now, we’ve done a pretty good job supplying the Ukrainians since then, since the invasion, but we lost a real opportunity to prevent the whole war from happening, and that was a shame for the Ukrainian people and frankly for the Russian people.

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Jordan, well, it was very interesting to me. I mean, Trump’s a very complicated character in a complicated world. It was very interesting to me, though, especially having contemplated Trump’s legacy in the intervening years—that when he first emerged on the scene, some of the fears associated with him were that, in his sort of bullying and provocative manner, that he’d be a real bull in the china shop on the foreign policy side of things.

But he seemed capable of simultaneously charming people like Putin and the leader of North Korea while simultaneously keeping them on their heels, I would say. Maybe as a consequence of his perceived unpredictability but also his clear willingness perhaps to use force. And there's two consequences of that that I find quite fascinating. It’s sort of reminiscent to me of what happened with Reagan when he bombed Gaddafi. You know, I was pretty young when that occurred, and when Reagan bombed Gaddafi, I thought, “Oh my God, all hell’s going to break loose; there’s going to be terrorism everywhere.”

Because, I mean, I think Reagan, if I remember correctly, killed a couple of members of Gaddafi’s immediate family in that bombing raid, and I thought all hell was going to break loose. But what happened instead was that Gaddafi was actually chastened, and the degree of terrorist activity emanating from Libya declined to pretty much zero. And then when Trump took power, I think one of his remarkable achievements—and I really think that he has got far less credit for this than he deserved—was that there was a period of four years without wars; like no wars. And that’s pretty damn rare.

I mean, Afghanistan was continuing, but Trump didn’t start that. And also, he initiated the Abraham Accords, even though the Obama Administration had had an opportunity to do so. It was Trump who moved on it; it took a while, but he did it successfully, and that could have obviously been expanded. The Abraham Accords, they could have been expanded under Biden. The Saudis, as far as I can tell, would have signed those Accords if Biden would have taken the opportunity that was right bloody well in front of them to take.

And so we have this strange spectacle of someone who is pretty blustery and noisy and who might easily be regarded as provocative actually setting up a circumstance where, by your testimony, the negotiation for hostages was much more likely to be successful, but also where there were no incursions of the sort say that Russia undertook in Ukraine during that four-year period that would precipitate a war. And we also saw the initiation of a really large scale and major peace process because that’s certainly what the Abraham Accords represent.

So what do you make of all that?

Well, so Jordan, you’re perceptive. You had a very perceptive comment at the outset of that question, and that was, how could President Trump be cordial with some of these bad guys and yet still obtain the results that we wanted as America to advance our national interests and to deter these thugs and dictators and tyrants from engaging in malign activity?

There’s an old saying that diplomacy is saying the nastiest possible things in the nicest possible way, and President Trump was really a genius at that. He was always very cordial in his conversations with allies but also with Putin or Kim Jong-un or Xi Jinping. I was on many of those phone calls. He was very cordial, got along well with them, but at the same time, we put more sanctions on the Russians than anybody since Ronald Reagan. We put the Russians in a box, and yet the president was very cordial with them.

So they understood here’s a guy who’s being cordial, wanting to reduce the risk of a nuclear war in the case with Russia, wanting to make sure that we got our message across. But at the same time, this is a tough guy who’s not going to take any nonsense from us, and there was a level of unpredictability. The president talked about this—that the odds of us sending troops to Ukraine were small if Russia invaded, but there was a risk there, and Putin had to take that risk into account. It complicated the lives of his planners, his military planners, to say, “What if Trump does engage? Then we lose, and that could be a disaster.” So we better factor that into the risk and not invade Ukraine.

The same thing happened with North Korea. The president had very cordial relations with Kim Jong-un, but it didn’t start out that way, and I was a hostage envoy at the time. When we were talking about “Little Rocket Man” and “fire and fury” and “my button’s bigger than your button,” it wasn’t just the rhetoric—and this is what American politics often times misses. It’s backing up the rhetoric with hard power.

The president moved two aircraft carriers into the Yellow Sea near North Korea and said, “Look, you want to keep playing this game? I’ve got 80 aircraft per carrier and a good chunk of the US Navy sitting off your coast. How do you want to do this? Would you rather have a summit and try and work things out and denuclearize?”

Now, we obviously didn’t get there, but we went down that path, and Kim Jong-un committed to denuclearization. We didn’t get there, but at least he committed to it. Or do you want to keep testing your nuclear weapons and see how it works out for you? So it was that combination of cordiality and frankness and good cheer with our adversaries, with our partners as well, but backing it up with American hard power and letting them know that if you cross a line, and we’re not going to be like Obama, we’re not going to set red lines that we don’t intend to enforce. But if we set a red line, no— it’s going to be enforced. So you understand what you’re getting into—that’s your call; that’s not on us.

That raises a very important point that you made. President Trump was the first president since Jimmy Carter—probably technically you could argue Reagan as well—that didn’t start a new war. We didn’t send—you know, we eliminated some of the great terrorist threats to the country; we got Baghdadi. We took other measures to protect the country, but we didn’t start a new war.

The reason we didn’t start a new war is the same reason Ronald Reagan didn’t start a new war, is because our adversaries understood if we crossed American red lines, if we damaged American national interests, there’s going to be a heavy price to pay, and we better factor that into our planning, our consideration. They didn’t engage in the activity that would have led to us having to engage militarily. The last president that really truly did that was Ronald Reagan.

He had the invasion of Grenada, but I’d argue that was more of a big hostage rescue of the medical students in Grenada that turned into a taking over the country. Other than Reagan, in recent presidencies—Republican and Democrat—no one has been able to stop our adversaries without engaging in military action on a large scale until President Trump, and I think that’s one of the great accomplishments of his administration.

I wonder if that proclivity that Trump has to strike terror and disarray into the hearts of his political opponents within the US, who seem to regard him as the next best thing to Satan himself in terms of the danger he presents to the integrity of the state, I wonder if that is the same unpredictability and menace, cordial menace, that intimidates his potential opponents or the potential opponents of the US on the foreign policy side.

Do you think that’s the same manifestation?

You know, I’m not sure if it’s intimidation. Whether it was our allies—we had pretty competent and confident leaders like Macron in France or Boris Johnson in the UK. Angela Merkel had a very different personality but was a very strong character. Then our adversaries—Putin’s a tough guy, and Xi Jinping is a tough guy, and Kim Jong-un is unpredictable himself.

I’m not sure if it was intimidation of the leaders, but I think what it was is it was the resolve that he showed. They understood this guy represents America, and sometimes we look at our adversaries and think they’re 10 feet tall. Sometimes our adversaries get ahead of us, and we’ve got to catch up with them. China’s gotten ahead of us in a couple of things, and we’ve got to catch up with them.

But the reality is America is a fundamentally very strong country, and if you’ve got a president that’s willing to use all the tools of American national power—economic, diplomatic, military—and is resolved to protect our national interest, the other guys know that they can do an assessment of the balance of forces and decide, “Are they going to win or lose if they press the issue?” With President Trump, they understood at the end of the day this guy had a lot of backbone and wasn’t going to fold, so they better not cross the red line.

I’m not sure if it’s intimidation, or more a confidence that the president shows when he enters a room. That works with adversaries, but it also works with our partners. One of the great accomplishments of the Trump Administration that’s an inherent benefit to Ukraine today and Europe today is back in 2019.

I had been National Security adviser very long—maybe a couple of months—and we had a real problem with NATO. The president was very unhappy that our NATO partners weren’t paying 2% of their GDP, with the exception of—I think at the time it was four or five countries. The UK was one of them, Greece, the Baltics, Turkey. But the rest of the countries were getting a free ride on American defense, and we’re spending 3.5 to 4% of our economy—of our GDP—to defend not only America but the free world.

The president said, “Hey, that’s not right; everyone committed to at least 2%. That’s still half of what we’re paying, but you’ve got to pay the 2%.” The Europeans kind of chuckled and said, “Well, every president—I went back and looked at this. I actually wrote an article about it. Every president running for president since 1972, the theme of that campaign plank has been on both the Republican and Democrat side: Europe will pay its fair share; you know, Europe will step up for its own.”

No one got it—even my, you know, my hero Ronald Reagan couldn’t get the Europeans to pay their fair share. The Europeans were getting a cheap ride on American defense, and we had to make that clear. I thought, “How is this going to play out?” It gave me the opportunity to go as the negotiator with Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, who’s a terrific statesman.

Yen and I were able to go to our allied partners and say, “Look, the days of Germany getting cheap minerals from Russia, selling expensive finished goods to China, and letting America pay for its defense while it runs up a budget surplus— that’s got to end. It’s not fair to the American taxpayer; it’s not fair to your other partner nations.”

It wasn’t just Germany; it was Canada and all the countries. So the fact that President Trump was being tough and talking about Article 5 applying, you know, if you’re not paying your dues, quote unquote—I mean, they weren’t dues, but you know that’s the way the president phrased it—that kind of struck some fear into the hearts of our allies. So we walked away from that summit with going from four or five countries paying 2% to 11 countries paying 2% of their GDP committing to it.

But we also had an overall increase. We didn’t get Germany as high as we wanted, but we got a small increase from Germany because the German economy was so big it was a lot of money. We got $400 billion in commitments for new NATO spending outside of the US over the course of ten years at that December summit.

Of course, the hand wringers, the diplomatic correspondents and the folks that cover the State Department and cover NATO, they rang their hands and said, “This is terrible; it’s awful diplomacy; the standing of America has gone down in the world.” Well, I’m sure our European allies weren’t happy. In some cases, they had to spend the money, but guess what? They’re happy now. I was at a conference in Prague recently, a defense conference, and I had Germans coming up to me saying, “You guys were right; thank you for making us spend more money.”

That additional spending, even in the initial three years from 2019 to 2022, allowed some of those European countries to get new platforms and new weapon systems so that when Russia invaded Ukraine, a lot of those countries were able to send their old Soviet equipment—especially in Eastern Europe— their old equipment that was no longer modernized, and they sent that equipment to Ukraine. A lot of the initial equipment that Ukraine got was a direct result of the additional increase in defense funding that came out of that 2019 summit that President Trump was pilloried for being arrogant and rude and putting America first.

In fact, what we did is we put our allies in a position where they could defend themselves and help Ukraine. Again, it’s counterintuitive. Someone taking that sort of an approach— and it’s not something that may be great in people, and diplomats might not like it, but when you look at the results, they were incredibly successful.

What do you think it is in Trump's character that makes it possible for him to do those things? Because that is quite a track record really of success. You’ve laid out four different instances. You said he was very effective in relationship to hostage negotiation. He was good at keeping potential enemies at bay and establishing peace for four years.

But he also was instrumental and successful in getting the NATO allies to pay their fair share, which was something I was watching from the outside. From the Canadian perspective, I know full well that we haven’t pulled our weight at all and continue to not do so. But it was quite striking to me that he was able to manage that. The justice of the cause seemed self-evident. I mean, it’s completely absurd that America has to shoulder this burden by itself and also take all the moral slings and arrows that go along with being the prime defender of the West.

It’s just too much to be asked to pay the financial price and then to bear the moral appropriation at the same time. There’s no excuse for that. But Trump was very effective at negotiating for that to be rectified, and so what do you think it is about his character and the way he conducts himself that makes him capable of doing those things?

You talked about, you know, his willingness to rely on military force, say, in relationship to potential foreign enemies, but of course, that’s not going to be an issue when he’s talking to NATO allies. So what’s he doing right?

Well, look, I think I didn’t know President Trump before becoming his hostage envoy, and I got to know him a little bit during that period of time and then, you know, came to know him fairly well as his national security adviser. But I think it’s your background. We all bring whatever our background is to the new job, right? You know, you’ve got a background as a clinical psychologist. Now, you’re doing political analysis, which is par excellence.

I think Trump brought his background as a real estate developer, where you’re in New York, you know, in the thick of it. Whether he had a track record, some people liked his track record; some people didn’t like his track record. But he built big things; he built big buildings; he built a hotel empire. In those real estate negotiations, I used to see this as a lawyer with clients: you’ve got to keep two things in mind at the same time, and it’s hard for a lot of people to understand that you’re trying to do a deal with someone, and you’re trying to beat the heck out of them and get the best price you can, and at the same time, they’re a partner because you want them to consummate the deal, right?

So if you’re buying land from somebody or buying a building, you want to get the very best price, but at the same time, you want to keep them at the table and have them not go to another guy and sell the building to someone else because you want that asset. Or if you’re selling the same thing just on the other side of the table, I think President Trump learned that through years of negotiations in real estate—50-year career.

Even younger than that, watching his dad, Fred Trump, do deals. You’ve got to be tough, and you’ve got to get the best deal you can, but at the same time, you’ve got to prevent your partner from walking away from the deal and walking away from the table. Striking that balance, I think, is pretty tough.

Look, a lot of people don’t have experience with it. A lot of people come into government from think tanks or from academia or from the military, where folks are used to following orders or even as lawyers, but maybe without the litigation or the deal experience. So they come to government, and people expect them to be great negotiators, but they’ve never really had that experience.

Whereas President Trump came to office probably with more experience negotiating—certainly anyone in his cabinet, anyone in his immediate circle, but also any other politician in the world that he was dealing with. For good or for better or for worse, there are all kinds of different ways to prepare to be president. I’m not saying being a real estate developer is the best way to prepare to be president, but for President Trump, it worked when it came to these negotiations that we’ve been talking about.

And trying to come to a deal where you get both parties to say yes, but you get a good deal for America—so I think that’s probably the best preparation he had for some of the things we’ve been talking about.

Jordan, well, you’ve worked as a diplomat and a litigator, a national security adviser, and all of that’s involved negotiation. One of the things I’ve noted in my private life watching people and in my clinical practice, and suppose my role as a professor as well, is that generally speaking, people are very bad at negotiating.

They don’t say what they want; they don’t admit what they want; they don’t listen to the other side; they don’t understand how to strike that playful balance between competition and keeping their partner in the game. They’re not trained to negotiate. We do a very bad job of that in our society. People can’t negotiate with themselves; they can’t negotiate with their spouses; they’re not good at negotiating with their kids; they can’t strike a deal with their business partners.

It’s a big problem, right? Because negotiation—there’s no difference between bringing a successful negotiation to a conclusion and establishing peace. Those are the same things. Now, you’ve done a lot of negotiating as a diplomat, which is more diplomatic obviously; as a litigator, which is more on the offense side, let’s say; and then under stressful conditions when you’re negotiating for hostage release. What is it that you’ve seen that makes a successful negotiator? What skills do you have to master, and what pitfalls do you have to avoid, and how have you mastered that? Or do you feel that you’ve mastered it?

Well, I certainly haven’t mastered it, but I have had a fair amount of experience, and sometimes successfully negotiated deals or releases or diplomatic accords, and sometimes unsuccessfully. So it certainly hasn’t been a 100% track record. It’s a big question, and there’s a lot that goes into that mix. You talk about all the different scenarios in which we’re involved in negotiation, whether it’s in our home life, our business life, or professional life—putting it totally aside politics and international affairs—we’re all negotiating all the time.

I think there are a couple of things that have been lodestars for me in negotiating. One is understanding that the other party has to get something out of the negotiation. That doesn’t mean money necessarily; it doesn’t mean— usually it means respect. So I think being respectful and being cordial with your adversary, even if they’re a, you know, I’ve sat across the table from some pretty unsavory characters, but if you’re respectful and you’re cordial, that’s one thing that you can give that costs you nothing other than some goodwill and humility. So that’s number one.

Number two, you have to listen to the other side and try to figure out what it is they really want because they may be saying they want one thing, but they really want something else. Figuring out what their bottom line is, what’s the least amount they’d take to give you what you want requires you to listen to them.

Number three, I think you have to be honest. I mean, I’ve never done a negotiation in my private life or as a lawyer, as a litigator, as a diplomat, where I’ve lied to people. I just don’t think—I may not disclose every last piece of information I’ve got or that I know, but I don’t lie to people because once you get caught out in a negotiation telling something is false or lying, you’ve lost your credibility, and your ability to get a deal done goes away.

The last, I’d respond to that question and again probably a hundred if we sat and thought about it and talked longer: you’ve got to be willing to say no. There has to be a point at which you’ll walk away from the table because if there’s not some level that you’ll say no and walk away, your opponent will understand that, and they’ll push and push until they’ve taken everything from you.

You’ve got to have a red line. Sometimes it’s hard because you know saying no is going to mean somebody staying in prison longer or somebody, you know, being in a dungeon longer or not getting the deal you really wanted for, you know, your client if you’re a litigator—not getting the peace deal that would, you know, make the headlines and help solve a war. But if you’re not willing to say no and your adversary understands you’re not willing to say no, there’s no limit to what they’ll take from you.

You have to have your own—and that doesn’t mean you have to disclose those red lines and tell them what you’re going to say no. That’s kind of the interplay with the honesty issue, but you’ve got to be able to say, you know, oftentimes you’re ambiguous about it where you tell the other side there’s a point that I’m not going to go beyond, and you’re getting close to it. If you get to that point, I’m going to get up from the table; I’m going to walk away, and then you’re going to lose. Negotiation as well, because the point is that they’re there because they want something from you as well.

It’s not you coming as a supplicant. Usually, they’re there not supplicating to you; you’re not supplicating to them, but there’s a deal to be had. You know how that deal works out; you have to see. But if they know that you’re not willing to get up and leave, you’re never going to get a negotiation done.

I had this happen, and I’m not going to mention the country, but we were involved in pretty high-stakes negotiations when I was National Security adviser, and we thought we had a deal with the leader of the country. We came back to finalize it, and the foreign minister and some of the other leaders kind of tried to put new conditions on, tried to renegotiate the deal. I did something at the time; I was a little tired; I’d had long nights and a couple of days straight.

I just packed my briefcase, and I had a whole team of State Department folks with me, and I don’t think they’d ever seen that before. I packed up my briefcase and said, “Okay, thank you. We tried. We gave it our best shot, but we’re done,” and got up and started to walk away. I think the other side was shocked by it; certainly the guys from the career officials of the State Department were looking at me like I was a nut.

I said, “Come on, guys, let’s go. We’re out of here,” and the other side said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait,” you know, and then we got back to the deal we had the night before with the leader. But our State Department guys had never seen someone pack up a briefcase and leave. I’d seen people pack up their briefcases and leave a hundred times as a lawyer in Los Angeles.

If a good plaintiff's lawyer didn’t pack up his bags and leave three or four times during the day during a negotiation, then you weren’t doing a good job. So you’ve got to be willing to walk away from the table if the other side is not serious. That doesn’t mean you don’t come back; you laid out three principles there that I think are worth delving into because this is very important, I think, for people’s practical lives as well.

So, well, I learned something very profound from Carl Rogers. A lot of Rogers’ work has been instrumental in establishing mediation processes over the last few decades. Rogers delineated out what’s come to be known as active listening, which is kind of a cliched version of what he was attempting to put forward. And I've used this a lot in my private life and also in my clinical practice because it actually works. It’s one of the few psychological techniques, so to speak, that’s not manipulative, that actually is credible and not just cliched.

Rogers suggested to the clinicians he was training that when they listen to a client, they listened without interruption and then provided back to the client a summary of what they had just said and asked the client whether or not that summary accurately represented the intent of the communication. That was useful in three ways.

The first element of utility is that it indicated that at least the listener was interested in and attentive enough to fully and brave enough to fully understand what was being communicated. So that’s very useful because that’s a sign of respect—attentive respect. The next part of it that was useful was to indicate to the person that what had been said was actually understood, right? Because if you’re going to put the gist forward, you have to have understood it, and that also often helped the person who was communicating clarify what it is they were actually trying to communicate, because it’s not always the case that the person you’re talking to knows exactly what they want.

And so you’re offering them a gift if you can summarize it, and then you also have some insight into the potential conditions of satisfaction that the other person is attempting to establish. Like if I’m talking to my wife about something where there’s some contention, we’ve negotiated this as a meta-negotiation strategy that it’s incumbent upon both of us to define the conditions under which peace could theoretically prevail.

You know, because you can ask someone, “Well, what would I have to give you hypothetically so that this went away and you were happy?” Now, it isn’t necessarily the case that I can or will deliver that, but at least I’d like to know.

So that’s active listening and then you said also—and condition of satisfaction. You also said, this is something I always told my clients too, is that if you can’t say no, you can’t negotiate. And then no means—this is what no means—no means if you continue doing what you’re doing, something you do not like will happen to you with 100% certainty.

Now, that might just be that I’ll leave and that the negotiation ends, but you know it could be other things as well. But if you don’t have that in your back pocket, you’re weak. And if you do have it in your back pocket, you’re much more effective negotiators. They knew what they wanted— they knew where their line was, and that stiffened their spine in the and.

You have to have all that straight in your head before you go into the negotiation.

No, that’s a great point. What I used to tell people—and still do tell colleagues who are thinking about leaving their job or aren’t happy or think there’s a better opportunity—I always tell them: keep one arm on the monkey bar when you’re swinging for the other one, but don’t drop it in the air and hope you’re going to catch the other monkey bar. Make sure you’ve got a plan B; you’ve got another job. Or you can keep your current job, but don’t drop the monkey bar and hope you have enough momentum to get the next rung.

It may work, but you could also end up in the sandpit down on your butt, right?

Well, it helps as well. It helps very much as well to walk into a negotiation having plotted out what you’ll do if it goes as badly as it could, right? Because there are going to be fears that beset you. What if this is a catastrophe? The answer to that can’t be, “Oh, it won’t be a catastrophe.” The answer has to be, “If this is a catastrophe, here’s the steps that I will take to ensure victory on a different front.”

That also stops you from being pushed around.

Yeah, 100%. How do I mitigate the downside? And look, it helps to have a counselor. I’m not just talking about a national security adviser; it helps to have someone like you—or a lawyer or a psychologist or a friend or your wife—that you can sit down before the negotiation and talk these things through. Because sometimes it’s hard to do it on your own.

If you’ve got people you can rely on, whether it’s colleagues or professionals, that you can bring in to help in the negotiation, you walk through these things. You can become more focused and figure out, you know, here’s my real red line. If I have to walk away with that red line, here’s the downsides to me. How do I mitigate them? And here’s how I can give the other side down, you know. Here’s how I can prepare downsides for the opponent so that they’ve got to keep that in mind when they’re negotiating.

Yeah, well, it’s also very helpful to pre-negotiate with people who are quite pushy so that they can push your limits and test you out. That’s part of the purpose of critical thinking, right? Is you could have all the weaknesses in your position analyzed by someone else without any real threat, except maybe to your self-esteem and your ego; you know, and it’s your inability to formulate your arguments clearly.

But it’s a hell of a lot better to have them pretested than to have them fail on the actual battlefield.

100%. So you characterized earlier, and this will be a lead-in to some questions about Russia, you characterized the withdrawal from Afghanistan as catastrophic. And so, that’s all faded away in principle. Although we may be suffering from the aftermath of that in the form of this, you know, never-ending conflict, or a conflict that looks like it’s going to never be ending in Russia and Ukraine.

Why would you characterize the withdrawal in Afghanistan as catastrophic? I mean, the US did extract itself; it was a messy long-term conflict. So in that way, it’s come to an end. You could imagine that there might be some benefits from that. But that obviously isn’t the way that you look at it overall.

So what is it about the withdrawal that you object to, and why did you characterize it as catastrophic?

Let me walk you through that, but let me first make a point. When you said it faded away, and you’re right because we’ve got a short attention span in the West. It's not just America; it’s Western Europe, Japan, Australia. Well, what I kind of call not the geographical West but the ideological West—hopefully India is becoming part of that group and other countries.

But we’ve got a short attention span; we go quarter to quarter with our stocks; we go election to election—two-year cycles for the House of Representatives here, four years for president. We’ve got a short-term view, and I think that’s true with Afghanistan. So people have already forgotten that this just happened and two years ago.

But guess who doesn’t have a short-term view? The Chinese Communist Party. When I was in Taiwan in March of this year, I led a delegation for GTI, the Global Taiwan Institute, to work on how do we improve US-Taiwan relations and strengthen Taiwan and make it more resilient to deter China.

One of the things that they had—the videos that they showed on TikTok and Instagram—was to undermine the confidence of the people in Taiwan in the relationship with the US, but also in their own ability to defend themselves. They showed a picture of that C-17 that was running along the Afghan, the runway at Hamid Karzai Airport in downtown Kabul, and had the Afghans running alongside it and people climbing on the wing and people trying to get in the wheel well.

They said, “This is what America will do to you. This is how America leaves. You better cut a good deal with us now because this is your future.” That Afghanistan withdrawal that we might want to forget, and we want all that to go away; our adversaries aren’t forgetting it.

So it was seen—those videos emboldened Putin to go into Ukraine. But it’s also the Chinese are very skillfully using it to undermine the confidence of our allies in Asia about our ability to stand with them in the event of a Chinese invasion. So in other words, cut the good deal with us now because America won’t be there.

Going to your broader question, why was it a catastrophe? We wanted to get out of Afghanistan—that was a forever war. Secretary Pompeo and Ambassador Khalilzad had spent a lot of time for President Trump negotiating a deal with the Taliban, which we signed in February of 2020.

And that deal was to stop killing Americans because the president had gotten sick of going to do—and was sick from going to do. I was with them on three occasions; I represented him on another three occasions for the dignified transfer of the remains of our fallen heroes. You’d have to go and comfort those families and watch these young men come home in a flag-draped casket, and it was a beautiful, dignified transfer.

But that’s not the way their parents or their loved ones or their wives wanted them to come home—that’s not the way America wanted them to come home. Those are heart-wrenching experiences. We decided, “Look, we’ve got to end this Afghanistan war.” It’s taking, number one, too many of our lives of our young men and women who volunteer to go serve our country and defend ourselves, defend America.

But it wasn’t just America, it was Canada that was there and France and many of other partner nations. But it was also costing us billions of dollars every month. While we were plunging billions of dollars into Afghanistan with very little return—Afghanistan was not on—they mentioned Sweden earlier. Afghanistan was not on the way to becoming the new Sweden.

The Chinese were taking those same billions of dollars and launching a new frigate or new destroyer every month, so they were engaged in great power competition, building the biggest navy in the world, which they now have, bigger than the US Navy. We were pumping this money into Afghanistan, much of which was getting put on pallets and cash and being shipped to Dubai because of the corruption there.

And it had to come to an end, but it had to come to an end in a way that met American national interests. What President Trump ultimately decided—and that took a lot of time to get there— is that we’d leave 2,500 troops there as a counter-terrorist force to deal with ISIS-K and deal with Al-Qaeda.

We had 5,000 NATO troops, so for the first time when we left office in January of 2021, we had 5,000 NATO troops and only 2,500 American troops. For the first time since 2001, the NATO was bearing the burden— the only time in history we had NATO bearing the burden.

We kept Bagram Airbase because Bagram had big fields of fire. It couldn’t be overrun by the Taliban; it would have been the perfect place if we ever had to engage in a somewhat expedited withdrawal. Bagram was a place to do it. We put everything in place. Then we insisted to the Taliban, “You have to negotiate with the Afghan government. This can’t be—we’re not turning the government; we’re not turning Afghanistan over to the Taliban. You’ve got to negotiate with your friends, your fellow Afghans, and you’ve got to have a government of national unity.”

We’re staying here until that happens, and even after that happens, we’re likely going to stay because you’re going to need our help. The Taliban is now even admitting with ISIS-K—I mean, ISIS-K is the Al-Qaeda offshoot, which is just a brutal terrorist organization that’s alive and well in Afghanistan. You know it’s bad when the Taliban are calling them “extremists.”

You know, it’s— you know, it’s pretty bad when the Taliban are saying, “Hey, those guys are Islamic extremists.” You know, it’s just got to be pretty bad. They’re now taking hold in Afghanistan. So had we gone with our plan, kept a counter-terrorism force there, had the Afghan government and Taliban come together as a government of national unity, used American prestige but hard power to make sure that happened, that would have been a very different result than what we saw of Afghans falling out of wheel wells and leaving behind thousands of Afghan collaborators who worked with us— interpreters or Afghan Special Forces— Afghan pilots.

Leaving behind hundreds of Americans—I mean, there are still Americans trapped in Afghanistan— and that gives the Taliban leverage over the administration, you know, in every negotiation they have to free up funds or that sort of thing because they’ve got these Americans there and they’ve got our allies who are still there that they could do harm to.

It was a very different scenario than what we had in mind than what played out, and what played out led to what we talked about at the top of the show—a perception of American weakness, that we were so weak that we were running out with our tail between our legs, with the Chinook helicopters going to the top of the embassy and extracting our diplomats and racing them to safety while our Afghan allies suffered the results of a Taliban takeover.

And again, maybe the Biden Administration didn’t expect it to happen; maybe they didn’t expect the government of Afghanistan to fall as quickly as it did. But you could see in hindsight— you know, which is always perfect— you can see how just one step after another, withdrawing our troops down to 600 troops, giving up Bagram Airbase in the middle of the night without telling our allies.

Appeasing the Taliban— you know, begging them not to take this city until a certain number of days. You know, that’s the sort of thing that led to this catastrophe. And as Churchill talked about with the Munich Accords, this is something that was going to carry on with us long down the road. It was a defeat without a battle, and we’re seeing that now with Xi Jinping and Taiwan. We’re seeing it with the Ayatollah in the Middle East, and we’re certainly— the most concrete example is we’re watching Vladimir Putin, you know, invade Ukraine, and with limited success, but also with it causing great and terrible humanitarian damage in Ukraine and basically to his own people as well. His own soldiers— thousands of young Russians’ lives have been lost in that meat grinder.

So, you know, all these things you can tie back to what happened in Afghanistan, and in hindsight, it was a poor decision by the Biden Administration to handle the evacuation and the withdrawal the way they did. Ending the war— good idea; doing it in that fashion— bad idea.

Well, given that that plan was in place to keep 2,500 troops there and that there were 5,000 NATO personnel there as well and that would have been a credible peacekeeping and deterrent force, why do you think the Biden Administration acted contrary to that plan and so precipitously?

Yeah, I think there were just bad analysis. I think they thought the Afghan government could stay in power longer than it did, that they could get out quicker. I think they didn’t quite understand the structure that we’d left behind, although we briefed them on it many, many times.

You heard things like, “Well, this is Trump’s fault,” and “Trump signed the deal.” Trump did have a plan. Look, I think part of it goes back to what we talked about earlier— was Trump’s resolve. I mean, the Taliban knew not to push Donald Trump very far. They knew the results of what— you know, they saw the Baghdadi right; they saw how tough we could be around the world.

I think they took a very different measure of Joe Biden. So I think all these things played into it, and look, I think another part is Biden always wanted to get out of Afghanistan. I mean, as did we. He wanted to get out of Afghanistan back in the Obama Administration.

Down Victory?

Yeah, well, and wanted, I think, they also wanted to see a, like, a quick accomplishment on the foreign policy side, and that beckoned.

Let me talk to you now about the situation in Russia. We talked a little bit about what led up to it, although there’s a lot more to unpack with regard to that. I mean, I see our relationship— I guess we could talk about that a bit— I see our relationship with Russia since the 1990s as an unbroken string of missed opportunities; virtually unbroken string of missed opportunities by the West.

And I also don’t understand what we’re looking for—what our conditions of satisfaction would be in relation to the current war. So this is how it appears to me. In the '90s, after the wall collapsed, there were all sorts of attempts to modernize the Russian economy, often conducted by economists who were out of their depth because modernizing an entire nation’s economy or bringing it into the capitalist realm is complicated beyond anyone’s understanding.

You need a bedrock of trust between people before that can even happen, and it’s not easy at all to understand how to instantiate that trust. I mean, in the West, we assume that the default economic transaction will be honest, and that’s an absolute miracle. I have no idea how we ever accomplished that because it’s so unlikely that people on eBay, for example, can conduct transactions without attempting to rip each other off.

The fact that that’s the case is an absolute bloody miracle. In any case, it looked to me like we had an opportunity to bring the Russians fully into the Western fold, and I think that by applying a Cold War mentality to that situation, either by commission or by omission, consistently for 30 years, we squandered that opportunity.

Now, I know that people view Putin as having expansionist proclivities, and that may well be the case if you look at what happened in Crimea and the Donbass. But I also think that Russians regarded Ukraine as an extension of Russia and were very concerned about NATO incursions into Ukraine.

It isn’t obvious to me— and I’m perfectly willing to be corrected— it isn’t obvious to me why we didn’t try to bring NATO into or to bring Russia into NATO too, especially given that the fundamental concern that we’re going to be dealing with in the long run is clearly China. And now Russia and China are much closer than they might have been, and that’s further complicated by the fact that we’re settling down into a very long war here.

We’re going to spend the sort of money that we spent in Afghanistan that could have been put towards strengthening the Navy, for example. We’re going to spend the billions of dollars in Ukraine that we were spending in Afghanistan there; and I don’t see what we have as a plan for either peace or victory. So that’s a lot of things to throw at you, but it’s quite a mess, so is there a lot of things to say that would bring some clarity to that, would be more than welcome.

Well, there’s a lot of time packed there and a lot of good thoughts. I think starting at the beginning, how we dealt with Russia after the fall of the wall, and we missed opportunities. But I think the Russians missed a lot of opportunities, too. I think a lot of times in the West, we’re very critical of ourselves— if we would have only done this, then they would have responded reasonably.

I mean, Russia was a very corrupt society; it had just come off a— the revolution was in '18, so, you know, basically 80 years of tyranny— of Soviet tyranny of the most brutal kind: purges and famines and millions— I mean, tens of millions of people being killed. So there’s no surprise that the fabric of the society across the former Soviet Union was frayed and there wasn’t the trust that you talked about.

And by the way, I agree with you— it’s still a miracle that you can do a deal on eBay, and most of the time it works out; it’s shocking.

Yeah, it’s like 99% of the time.

It’s and it’s a testament to our system; it works, and when we have faith in our system, it will work for the benefit and prosperity of all. But Russia didn’t have that. I think the other issue is, you know, Russia was an empire.

Britain acquired an empire then gave it up; Russia has always been an empire. There was the Russian Empire; there was no differentiation between Russia itself and its colonies, its constituent republics. They were assembled in the Soviet Union, but it was basically the Russian Empire.

I think the Russians really struggled with the idea that, you know what? Ukraine is just not that into you. I mean, if you go to Ukraine, yeah, it was subjugated by Russia, and there were Russian-speaking people in Ukraine, but most Ukrainians were Western. They had been at one point part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Polish Empire, or the Polish Kingdom.

They were Roman Catholics, to a large extent, not Orthodox. They didn’t want to be part of Russia. I think that was very hard for the Russians to understand. Just like a guy who is pining after a girl—she’s just not that into you. The Ukrainians just aren’t into the Russians; the Baltics, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Estonians—not that into Russia.

They didn’t want to be part of the empire. They’d been subjugated. I think that was a failure on the Russians’ part. So, you know, we may have— there’s a lot of talk about NATO expansion. We tried to bring Russia into NATO; we had a partnership with Russia; the Russians had military officers in NATO headquarters, which you think now is quite shocking in 2023.

But you know, in 2000, that seemed like a great idea, and unfortunately, the Russians didn’t take advantage of that. I think the Russians are being very shortsighted. This is something I pointed out to Putin when I negotiated with him in Geneva.

A big part of Russia and Russia’s wealth is in the East, which is underpopulated— in Siberia and in eastern Russia. It’s where their diamond mines are, their platinum mines, their oil, their gas, their timber, wildlife.

I mean, their massive lands— a lot of that territory was taken or agreed to be transferred to Russia in 1860 under something called the Convention of Peking or the Treaty of Peking, about the time of our civil war here in America. China gave up thousands of thousands of miles of AC.

Millions of acres of land to the Russians, including the city of Vladivostok. All along Siberia, resource-rich lands that the Russians forced the Chinese to recognize as all Russian land. Now Xi Jinping has said many times that the century humiliation will be overcome by the Chinese people and that they’ll take every square inch of property back that they believe was theirs, that they believe was historically Chinese.

That’s why you had Mao and Hong Kong and the Uyghurs in western China. It’s why you see them fighting the Indians today, engaged in bloody battles along the Line of Actual Control in the Himalayas. You see it with Tibet; why you see it with the threats against Taiwan.

Of course, this idea that they’re going— that China is going to assemble all this land that it lost to Western powers or that it lost when it was humiliated because it was weak—do you think they’re not coming for the Russian lands? Do you think they’re not coming for Siberia with its treasure trove of resources?

The Chinese are desperate for it because the Chinese, as big a country as China is, are bereft of natural resources the way that Russia or America has these great stores of natural resources and wealth. They’re coming for that. I told that to the Russians.

Tom Clancy wrote a book about it, you know, years ago called The Bear and the Dragon or The Dragon Coming Over the Mountain or something along those lines. The Chinese are coming for that land, and they’re doing it very cleverly.

Right now, there are I think 9 million people in Eastern Russia; 3 million of them are illegal Chinese immigrants. The Chinese are flooding into Russia. They throw a bottle of vodka at the border guard and, you know, get let in. They’re going to take that land back, and that goes to this national interest.

Russia’s national interest is not with China. China looks at Russia as being weak, as being a country that can be colonized or can be reabsorbed into China in large part. The Russians are a proud people, and they’re no longer communists. They’re authoritarian. They’re imperialists, but they’re not communist.

They’ve got no ideological affiliation with Beijing. You know, Vladimir Putin or whoever comes after him— you know the one thing we know about Russians throughout history, that whether it’s Tsar or the General Secretary of the Communist Party, they don’t like to get a back seat to anybody as a Russian. They’re very proud people.

I don’t think they’re going to want to be a colony of China, and unfortunately, what’s happened is we— I don’t want to say we've pushed the Russians to China; the Russians would tell you the West has pushed the Russians to China. We needed to come up with a way— and we still need to come up with a way to deal with Russia that doesn’t allow them to invade their neighbors, doesn’t allow them to invade Poland or Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, or Ukraine.

But that pulls them back away from this unholy alliance that they’ve got with Beijing.

And how do you see that happening, as given that this war is devolving into— well, it’s very difficult to get accurate representation of the situation, but my understanding is that it’s turned into something like a grinding stalemate, with the advantage possibly shifting to the superior Russian forces now.

Like I said, I’m not confident in the information that I have, but what do you see happening currently, and how would you outline something approximating a productive pathway forward?

Well, look, I think you’re right in describing the situation. The Ukrainians are very tough, and they were savvy at the outset of the invasion. They really dealt the Russians a bloody nose. One of the reasons they did that was that because we got them in the Trump Administration— we got them 600 Javelin missiles, anti-tank missiles that were highly effective at blunting those three armored axes that came into Ukraine.

Up until that time— look, when I was National Security adviser, we were having a heck of a time getting the Pentagon to even deliver those Javelins to Ukraine because there were people in the Secretary of Defense’s office that didn’t want to provoke Putin. It goes back to this whole theory that if we gave the Ukrainians help, we’d provoke Putin.

So after Russia invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014 and took Crimea and took parts of the Donbass, remember the Obama Administration said, “We’re going to aid Ukraine,” and we sent them Gatorade and MREs and blankets and, you know, a few night vision goggles. What they needed— it’s like Zelenskyy said this time: when they offered to send him a helicopter, he said, “I don’t need a helicopter; I need ammunition.”

We got him the ammunition to blunt the initial invasion. They got more from the Biden Administration. I credit the Biden Administration for doing that when it came time. But the Russians suffered.

But what I’ve told people is the Russians aren’t stupid; these are very smart people. These are technical people. They’ve got engineers and scientists and doctors and, you know, musicians. This is a culture that they got Sputnik to space before we did, so don’t count the Russians out because they’re not dumb.

If you look at Russia’s wars, whether it was against Sweden, or France with Napoleon, or Germany with Hitler, the Russians always do poorly at the outset, and because they’re willing to throw men and material into the meat grinder in a way that we can’t do in the West because the political constraints aren’t on them— they can go through 100,000 dead young men without losing the presidency.

That wouldn’t work here in the West; it wouldn’t work in Canada or America. It works in Russia, and they use it to their advantage. Stalin did it, and Putin’s doing it now. Between their smarts and their cruelty to their own people, they’re going to turn things around, and I think they’ve started to do that.

It’s a very difficult situation for the Ukrainians. Now, the big question—and I look, I don’t have the answer on this, Jordan, but we need to figure it out—is how do we resolve this situation so the Ukrainians have a safe and secure country, they get most of their territory back, if not all of it, in the war, and we give them security guarantees?

The Ukrainians are going to be skeptical of those guarantees because they had the security guarantee from the US, from Britain, from Russia, from France, and from the Budapest Accords, and you know that didn’t help them out. That was the situation for them giving up their nuclear weapons.

Right, right.

Which, by the way, now is this whole thing; this is another argument for any country that’s thinking about getting a nuke—get a nuke! Because, you know, that’s the only real way you can defend yourself against a great power. So it makes non-proliferation tougher, and counter-proliferation tougher.

So the question is how do we get the Ukrainians what they need and the security they need, and how do we get the Russians to back off and pull them away from the Chinese and integrate them more with the EU and the West and try and make them a responsible stakeholder and player?

Well, especially because we need much of what they have to offer. I mean, the world can’t do, as far as I can tell, without Russia and Ukraine’s natural resources, particularly with regard to fossil fuels, but also with regard to— well, the ammonia that those fossil fuels produce. That’s a crucial issue.

But also the amount of edible grain that both of those states produce. Of course, that’s not their only contribution to the world’s economy. I mean, it’s hard to defeat a trading partner upon whose resources you’re actually dependent. And I mean, it’s terribly complex, as you said.

I mean, Ukraine has to be supported because they did give up their nuclear weapons, and that’s obviously a bad thing if they give up their weapons and strip themselves naked, and now they have no defense that’s not a good precedent for operating in the rest of the world.

I mean, it doesn’t look—I’m speaking out of turn here, but I’m going to anyways because you have to start somewhere. I can’t imagine the Russians ever giving up Crimea. I think they’d go back to the wall to keep Crimea. With regard to the newer territories they took over, their argument, of course, is that those territories were primarily occupied by Russian speakers who have a primary allegiance to Russia.

And it seems to me that that could be, in principle, settled by something approximating a referendum in those districts if that was something that could be established under international supervision, and then to provide the Ukrainians with territorial integrity guarantees and to invite the Russians back into the Western game.

It looks to me like something like that looks like a pathway forward, and maybe I’ve been accused in my attitudes of being a Russia appeaser, and I’m certainly not trying to do that. I think I’m fairly cognizant of the dangers of the Russian enterprise overall.

I think that makes me more appreciative in some ways of Putin than other people might be because my sense is that, by historical standards, Putin is by no means the worst and most reprehensible leader that the Russians have ever managed to produce. And so, you know, it might be lovely to consider what the country would be like in his absence, but—

Yeah, it’s a low bar for him. That’s for sure. It’s as low a bar as has ever been established anywhere, with the possible exception of the Chinese.

So in any case, I mean, those are thoughts about what a potential move towards solution might approximate. I mean, what do you think of those thoughts, and what do you think there is as an alternative?

I mean, the Ukrainians, I think, are going to become increasingly desperate, and that also brings up the terrible danger of having the West dragged into this, you know, which is the most likely outcome—dragged in by their sleeve into this terrible monstrous machine.

Well, look, I think a lot of good points, and let me start with the first thing you mentioned about the trading partner. Look, if Russia could get integrated like it was on its way to into the West, selling oil and gas and agricultural goods— and the agricultural goods may not be that expensive, may not be considered cash crops or the same as diamonds or platinum or oil and gas— but that agricultural output of Ukraine and southern Russia, that’s a breadbasket for Africa, for Southeast Asia, for Asia.

Without that, we’re going to face famine, and it’s critical that we get this grain out of Ukraine and allow the Russians to keep trading their grain because there are so many people that will just literally die in places like, you know, the Congo and Egypt and other Lebanon that will have real trouble if they can’t get access to it.

The other issue— Canada has something in common with Ukraine and Russia here, is potash, which you need for fertilizer and to grow crops on an industrial scale. Canada, Russia, and Ukraine are the only folks that make potash to commercially viable levels; they can allow for modern agriculture which