- The possibility of a military confrontation between two nuclear armed adversaries, is larger now than it's probably been since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

[soft music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and this week we are talking about Russia and NATO, and whether they'll ever be able to talk to each other again.

The war in Ukraine sped up the breakdown of an already fraught relationship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Western world.

Both sides are digging in for the long haul.

Finland has officially joined NATO.

Russia just walked away from its last nuclear arms agreement with Washington.

Putin's diplomatic efforts, or lack thereof with the West, and vice versa, have been pointing all in one direction, escalation.

So how does it end?

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War?

It's probably worse than that, no?

And where does that put countries like Brazil and India, who have economic and diplomatic ties with everybody?

I'm talking with Ivo Daalder.

He's president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and former U.S.

Ambassador to NATO.

And later we'll look back at NATO's founding, and the history of the Warsaw Pact.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

♪ And don't get me started about Iran ♪ ♪ Who knows how many will hang on?

♪ - But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Narrator] Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor, First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Prologis, and by.

- A year ago, Vladimir Putin was a lonely man.

The Russian President took extreme measures to isolate himself during the pandemic.

He wasn't seen in public for months.

This is what it looked like when he met with his security advisors, and who could forget that shiny, white, ridiculously long table?

But even a former KGB agent can't stay in total isolation forever.

Autocratic leaders need friends too, especially ones in the middle of a long, expensive war.

So who is standing by Russia?

Who are Putin's friends right now?

Well, first, there are the Loyalists.

They're the ones who voted against the UN resolution condemning Russia's special military operation since the beginning, Belarus, Syria, North Korea, and Eritrea.

Now that's what I call a party.

Mali and Nicaragua joined the gang, they heard it was fun, on a similar resolution for the one-year anniversary, and that's it.

Next, there's China, the friend Russia really, really wants the world to know is on its side.

Xi Jinping's first trip abroad in the pandemic was to Moscow, and the Kremlin rolled out the red carpet.

Putin even personally walked Xi to his car at the end of the summit.

How's that for hospitality?

Xi and Putin say they have a friendship without limits, but China has resisted giving Russia direct support, like troops or weapons, for its war in Ukraine.

Putin also has some friends close to home.

His first foreign trip after launching the invasion was in June to Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

In fact, in the second half of 2022, Putin traveled to all five former Soviet countries in Central Asia, to shore up Russia's major sphere of influence.

There are the friends a little farther away, like Iran.

Putin met with Supreme Leader, Ali Khomeini, in Iran last July, and a few weeks later, Russia received its first batch of Iranian made drones.

And then there are countries on the fence, like India, Brazil, and South Africa, with strong economic ties to both the Kremlin and NATO.

And they're trying to walk a tightrope between the two sides, calling for peace, but not openly criticizing Russia.

So far, they've all refused to participate in Western sanctions.

And while they technically haven't supported Russia's invasion, their money sure does.

Then again, so do the Europeans when they buy Russian oil, food and diamonds.

So despite the West's best efforts to isolate Russia, Moscow still has plenty of international partners, allies, and friends to lean on when times get tough.

And as sanctions keep fuel prices high and global inflation too, who knows how many more it will have a year from now?

And what does all this mean for Russia's enemies, namely the G7 and NATO?

To find out, I'm talking with president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and former US Ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder.

Ambassador Ivo Daalder joins us.

- Good to see you.

Hey, great to be here, Ian.

- So much to talk about.

NATO, to start, since you've got a little bit of experience there.

How significant, not just symbolically, but in real operational terms, is it that Finland is now a member, over 800 new miles of border of NATO directly with Russia?

- It's extraordinarily significant.

It's probably the most significant new member of NATO, at least since Poland joined, but possibly even since the end of the Cold War, when you really think about it.

If you're a Russian military planner, you all of a sudden have to think about a border that you didn't really worry about, 830 miles long, twice as long as any other part of the border that Russia has with current NATO members.

It now needs to defend that border.

It needs to think about, "How do we make sure that NATO doesn't come anywhere near?"

Some of the most important strategic assets that Russia has in the Kola Peninsula way up north, it is a submarine base, it has nuclear weapons' capabilities there, and they're now within striking distance of NATO ground forces in Finland.

So that's one big thing.

A second big thing is that Finland is an incredibly capable military.

These are people who have been armed in their neutrality.

They've never skimped on the ability to defend their territory, and they've been part of NATO military operations in Afghanistan, in Kosovo, in Libya, around the world in many ways, for the past 30 years.

They're pretty integrated.

Their capabilities are real.

They have a ground force that is not only very capable today, but they can massively bring in reserves over time, so you're adding real military capability to the alliance.

And then finally, one of the most exposed elements of NATO are the Baltic countries, who are close to Russia.

Small, not very large, when it comes to their own military capability.

Well, right across the Baltic Sea now has Finland, and so the Baltic Sea is becoming a NATO lake, with St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad the only Russian entry points, but the rest of it is now all NATO, particularly once Sweden, of course, joins.

- Now when I think about the relationship between NATO and Russia today, we can't quite just call it a Cold War.

I mean the economics, of course, have been cut off, the gas is no longer flowing, the oligarchs have been sanctioned, the sovereign assets of the Russian Central Bank have been frozen.

What do we call that?

I mean what is the state of relations between NATO and Russia today?

- It's adversarial, to the point that Russia now sees NATO as its enemy, and frankly NATO sees Russia as an enemy.

Not just a threat, but an enemy.

A country that is determined to find a way to exert influence through use of military force, possibly including against NATO territory.

That's something that we haven't thought about, in the NATO parlance, since the end of the Cold War.

And frankly, even during the Cold War, the likelihood of a Russian military attack, certainly towards the end of the Cold War, was discounted, but here we see it in real life every day.

Russian military forces crossing a border in order to enlarge their own territory, imperialism and aggression in realtime.

So the relationship is not one of partnership.

When I was NATO Ambassador in 2010, we talked about the potential of a strategic partnership with Russia.

No one in NATO today talks about the potential of a strategic partnership with Russia.

It is the most important military threat, and that's very different.

- What we're saying is that the military confrontation today of the global order, leaving aside any other threats, is absolutely not just as bad as when the Cold War was in place, but in some ways it's worse?

- [Ivo] In some ways it's more dangerous.

- Yeah.

- Because during the Cold War, since the late and sort of mid to late 1960s, there was an attempt by both the United States and the Soviet Union to find ways to coexist, to talk to each other.

There was arms control, there was the hotline, there were a whole series of agreements that said, "Let's manage our military competition in a way that we know that the only reason we will ever have a war is if somebody decides that that's what they wanna do."

No accidents, no escalation, none of that.

We even had arms control agreements.

We had a European conference on security and cooperation that led in 1975 to the Helsinki Final Act that defined the relationships of all countries in Europe and North America.

All that's gone.

Russia has just walked away from the last arms control agreement that existed, the Start Agreement that limits the nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia are allowed to deploy.

Russia has just said that they will no longer tell the United States when it tests ballistic missiles.

We've been doing that for 50 years, we're telling each other because you wanna know if they're testing a ballistic missile, that it's not an attack.

That's all gone, so it's a very, very dangerous military situation, and with deep distrust of each other.

The possibility of a military confrontation between two nuclear armed adversaries, is larger now than it's probably been since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

- Russia just announced that they're going to put tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

That hadn't existed since the days of the Cold War.

In the context of all of these fail-safes that are being taken away, this does feel like an intentionally endangering move.

- Yeah, clearly Putin is becoming used to rattling his nuclear saber in ways that frankly we haven't seen for a very long time, maybe since Khrushchev was banging his shoe at the UN, and, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The way that Putin talks and the people around Putin talk about nuclear weapons, Medvedev, his deputy national security chief, talks about nuclear weapons as if they're the same as conventional weapons with just a bigger bang for the buck.

It's really worrisome.

The actual movement of nuclear weapons potentially to Belarus, as long as they remain under firm Russian control, I actually have less concern about.

I don't think that it's leading to the first step to nuclear war.

I worry about whether the Belarusians are gonna be trained to use those weapons, but even so, we have NATO countries that train to use nuclear weapons, even though they don't have them.

So I'm not particularly concerned about the technical and tactical details.

I'm worried about the strategic impact.

What are you trying to do here, Mr. Putin?

Are you trying to send a warning that we, the Russians, are willing to defend our gains in Ukraine by threatening and possibly using nuclear weapons?

That I'm worried about.

I think it's real.

I think he's trying to do it to deter the West, and he's been very successful in doing so, so far.

The West has provided arms, intelligence, training, but not troops.

- And, of course, from the Russian perspective, they see themselves as at war with NATO, which is part of why I'm framing this so much in terms of the broader Russia relationship with the West 'cause that's truly a step.

- It clearly is that the situation today between NATO and Russia is completely different, certainly when I was there 10, 12 years ago, but even different than it was before February of 2022, when at least you thought you could talk to them in some way.

Remember, Putin and Biden had a summit meeting in Geneva, in the middle of 2021.

There was this idea that you could establish guardrails around the relationship.

All that's gone.

- The fact that the International Criminal Court, okay, not recognized by the United States as legitimate, but by most other countries they are, directly referring to Putin, finding Putin a war criminal.

There's no way to come back from that, in terms of Western institutions, is there?

- The relationship between the United States, and the West and Russia, is gonna be forever painted by this reality that Vladimir Putin is now wanted as a person who committed heinous crimes, incredible crimes.

Taking children away from their parents, and putting them in other foster families, or whatever you can talk about.

It's extraordinary.

That doesn't happen normally.

He now is accused of that crime, and the ability for the West to have a normal relationship with him at the G20 or anywhere else, is going to be virtually impossible.

It's gonna be very interesting to watch, if he comes, which is a big if, and if he does come, what the West will do.

- Now, there is, of course, an enormous difference between the way the collective West feels about Putin, and everyone else feels about the West, everyone else feels about Russia, feels about the war.

I mean India is a strong member of the Quad, a partner in many ways with the West, but their relationship with Russia is virtually identical to China's relationship with Russia.

South Africa's perspective is very, and Brazil, Mexico, so I mean as soon as you get out of the collective West, suddenly it's not talk about war crimes, it's not talk about Ukraine has to be redressed no matter what.

It's, "These sanctions are hurting us.

We need to keep doing business with the largest country geographically in the world, with all their resources and you guys are hurting us."

What do we do about that?

- It's a real problem, and I think people in the White House, and in the Chancelleries and the Elysee and other places, are spending a lot of time thinking about how do we change not only the narrative, because the narrative is important, and clearly the Russians were very good at saying everything that you're suffering is a consequence of this war, higher fuel prices, less food, and, therefore, higher food prices, and everything else that came from it, is because of the sanctions that the West has inflicted.

As opposed to, well, wait a minute.

Why did these sanctions get inflicted and imposed in the first place?

Because you invaded another country.

And I think the West sort of believing that because they had a pretty darn good vote in the UN General Assembly, 140 plus countries.

- [Ian] In condemning the invasion.

- [Ivo] Condemning the invasion.

- [Ian] But not in supporting the sanctions.

- [Ivan] No.

- [Ian] Very different.

- But in condemning the invasion, they thought, well, everybody, of course, understands this is a terrible thing and we have to do something.

We're not going to war directly, so therefore we are imposing sanctions.

And by the way, we will allow, of course, food and other agricultural products to be exported.

We didn't think that people would see the sanctions as the problem, as opposed to the invasion, and, in fact, that is the reality.

The reality is when you're the man or a woman on the street in Brasilia, or in Johannesburg, or frankly in Delhi, and your fuel and food prices have gone up, you're gonna say, wait a minute, where's the problem here?

It must be the West, it's not Russia.

And so trying to figure out a way to start talking about this in a different way is one part of it, but the second part of it is it puts pressure on finding a solution to this conflict.

It's not a surprise that at the G20 meeting in Indonesia, the intervention by the Ukrainian president was to lay out a 10-point peace plan.

And there is the question at what point does military confrontation start to compete more effectively with diplomatic engagement?

And in terms of how to talk about this war.

We're not quite there yet.

There's a pending Ukrainian offensive.

- But it feels closer, doesn't it?

- It does feel closer.

I think people know that the war is starting to hurt the image, but more importantly, that there isn't a lot of juice left in the war, in the sense that there's enough material and enough manpower to continue with the high intensity that we currently have.

Lower intensity, probably for months, if not years, possibly even decades.

After all this war, at a low intensity point, started in 2014.

It's been going on for almost nine years, but at that point you start thinking about, well, is there a way that we can start talking about it today?

No, we can't say that.

- Final question for you.

It is at least possible, maybe even reasonably likely, that Erdogan loses in May his election.

He has been without question the most recalcitrant, the most problematic NATO ally.

I've had Richard Haas on this show saying they should be taken out of NATO, they shouldn't be an ally.

How much will it matter?

What will the impact be if Turkey is post-Erdogan?

- It'll matter a lot, because not only- - For NATO.

- Yeah, but it will certainly matter for Turkey.

- I know that, yeah.

- But it'll matter for NATO, in part because the opposition is today campaigning very much on a platform to lean more to the West and so it has an interest, once it does come to power, and once you have a new parliament and a new president, to demonstrate to its allies, to the United States, but also its allies in Europe, that it is and will be a good ally.

The first thing it will do, presumably, is allow Sweden to come in to NATO, but more importantly, it will start talking in a way that Turks used to talk.

Yes, still an interest in the Middle East, still as a country that can be a translator of Arab and Muslim sentiment to the West, and vice versa, of Western sentiment into the Middle East.

It'll always be there, it's a strategic country in that region, but we won't doubt anymore where its bonafides lie, and it won't start using the power it has of saying no, which is the real power that countries have in NATO, of mucking up the works, which is what Erdogan has done so effectively.

- Ivo Daalder, thanks for joining.

- Always a pleasure, Ian.

[bright soft music] - Russia and NATO have been sworn enemies for about 75 years, but could there be a time in the distant future when Russia is a friend, even a partner?

That's not happening any time soon, certainly not while Putin is in charge, but if history is any indication, it's not such a crazy idea.

NATO has a precedent of absorbing its enemies.

I'm talking, of course, about the Warsaw Pact, the 1955 military alliance between the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries.

Don't remember the Warsaw Pact?

Well, we're going back to the beginning of the Cold War.

World War II had just ended, Perry Como was at the top of the charts.

I don't know who that is.

And the Iron Curtain went up almost immediately.

♪ Duck and cover ♪ ♪ Deedle-dum dum, deedle-dum dum ♪ - The Soviet Union was flexing its muscles in Eastern Europe, so U.S. leaders created the Marshall Plan in 1947, which gave aid to friendly countries to help rebuild after the war.

In 1948, the Soviet Union helped topple the democratic government of Czechoslovakia, and cut supply routes to West Berlin.

The West needed something stronger than the Marshall Plan to counter Soviet expansion, so in 1949, a dozen countries from Western Europe and North America formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In 1955, when NATO let West Germany in and allowed it to rearm, things got tense.

Less than two weeks after West Germany joined, the Eastern Bloc nations signed the Warsaw Pact, which like NATO, bound countries to come to each other's defense if attacked by an outside power.

There was also a convenient internal security component that allowed the Soviets to use the pact to squash popular uprisings in Hungary and Poland, and in Czechoslovakia, but when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, so did the Warsaw Pact, and soon former enemies became allies.

By 2009, the Pact's entire Western flank was part of the NATO alliance.

So, yes, NATO formed in opposition to the Soviets, and continues to fight Russian expansion in Eastern Europe to this day.

And, yes, one of Putin's main reasons for the war in Ukraine is he thinks NATO presence on the Russian border is an existential threat, or at least so he says, but allegiances between nations are constantly changing, and the enemies of today could be the allies of tomorrow.

Maybe there's a future where NATO's secretary general and the Russian president are clinking glasses of chilled vodka.

Nazdarovya.

[soft bright music] And now to Puppet Regime, where Putin takes a hard look at his new friends and himself.

Who knew Vlad was so talented?

♪ One year after invasion I've heard observation ♪ ♪ That maybe I'm not in such a bad state of isolation ♪ ♪ After all ♪ ♪ Look they say it's not so bad ♪ ♪ See all the friends Putin still has ♪ ♪ War caused a great divide ♪ ♪ But half of world is still on his side ♪ ♪ But take a closer look and you will see ♪ ♪ These friends I've got now ♪ ♪ Aren't all they're cracked up to be ♪ ♪ China's help is nice, okay ♪ ♪ But what's the real price I will pay ♪ ♪ Russia is great civilization ♪ ♪ Not somebody's cheap gas station no ♪ ♪ And don't get me started about Iran ♪ ♪ Who knows how many will hang on ♪ ♪ Yes he sends me drones I guess ♪ ♪ But it's not same as nice yachting West ♪ ♪ And look Ashrenka please that bumbling idiot man ♪ ♪ He's the Fredo of the former Soviet Union's strongman clan ♪ ♪ Can I get some real respect or am I just a foil ♪ ♪ Would they really care at all if I didn't have any oil ♪ ♪ With friends like these ♪ ♪ Who really needs enemies please ♪ ♪ Well they're all clowns or bastards ♪ ♪ Or new would-be masters of me ♪ ♪ I guess you might say India is a pretty decent prize ♪ ♪ The world's biggest democracy kind of sort of on my side ♪ ♪ And let me just point out that for much of Global South ♪ ♪ Some white on white European war ♪ ♪ Is not something they care about ♪ ♪ As time goes on you will see ♪ ♪ More countries start to be sympathetic to me ♪ ♪ But do they respect me really or am I just a foil ♪ ♪ Would they really care at all if I didn't have this oil ♪ ♪ Real talk ♪ ♪ With friends like these ♪ ♪ Who really needs enemies please ♪ ♪ When they're all clowns and bastards ♪ ♪ Or new would-be masters of me ♪ ♪ Well I can hold my own hand and buy myself own flowers ♪ ♪ And sit alone ♪ ♪ And tell myself I'm still a great world power ♪ ♪ What I ask are these so-called friends compared to me ♪ ♪ With such friends enemies not needed ♪ ♪ With friends like these who really needs ♪ ♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week, come back next week.

And if you like what you see, or even if you don't but think, hey, I wanna be part of alliance.

How come no one wants collective security with me?

We've got you.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[upbeat music] - [Narrator] Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor, First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Prologis, and by.

[soft music] [bright music]