- In the last two years from the steps of the US Capitol to the streets of Kiev, the fight for democracy has been joined.

Today's guest reviews the struggle and the links between events overseas and the health of American democracy.

He's Max Boot, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright instrumental music) (bright instrumental music continues) (bright instrumental music softens) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- This week we're joined by Max Boot, a historian, bestselling author, and foreign policy analyst whose regular column in "The Washington Post" is a must-read.

He joins us today from New York.

Welcome, Max.

- Thanks for having me.

- Now, there's so much we want to talk to you about, but I think probably first of mind is the war in Ukraine.

I guess two questions.

The first is where, as we tape this on March 1st, does the war stand?

And secondly, what's at stake?

- Well, the second question is easier to answer than the first because I think the stakes are monumental, and that's been clear from day one, which is that this is a battle not only about the future of Ukraine, but really a battle over the future of the international order.

And I think what happens in Ukraine will very much define the international system for the 21st century.

And the central question, of course, is are we going to be governed by the rule of law or are we going to be governed by the law of the jungle?

And this is really a test case of that because Russia is doing something that we have not seen in Europe since 1945.

It is trying to change borders by force.

It is trying to annex, at gunpoint, its neighboring state.

And if it gets away with it, that will destroy one of the foundational principles of the post-1945 world order and will be a green light to China and Iran and North Korea and other predatory states in the world that have designs on their neighbors.

Conversely, if Russia is defeated, I think it'll be a very powerful symbol of Western unity.

It'll be a victory for democracy and the rule of law and the principle of self-determination, the notion that countries can pick their own systems of government, their own leaders.

And clearly Ukrainians have made abundantly clear, more than 90% of them, that they have no desire to be ruled by Russia, that they want to be an independent, real Western state, and that is what they are fighting for.

They're laying down their lives, and so far they're having quite a bit of success in defending their country.

In terms of where the war stands at the beginning of March, 2023, essentially Russia continues to occupy about 17% of Ukraine's territory.

That's down from where they were at the beginning of the war a year ago, but it's still a substantial amount of territory, particularly in the South where they have, Russia has managed to conquer a land bridge between Crimea and Russia proper.

And so I think the issue now for the Ukrainians in 2024 is, can they break that land bridge?

Can they take back a substantial amount of territory?

Because I think this is kind of their window of opportunity this year as they assimilate Western weaponry.

This is their chance to drive the Russians back.

I fear if they're not able to do that this year, that we may see a frozen conflict with the lines becoming entrenched and this chunk of Ukrainian territory lost for the foreseeable future with Russia preparing to launch yet another offensive once they can regenerate their forces.

So I think at the moment, the war is in a quasi-stalemate, but I don't necessarily expect that stalemate to last throughout the year.

- Were you surprised by Russia's inability to win the war quickly in the spring of 2022 when the war started?

There were a lot of analysts at that time talking about, you know, the size of Russia's military and the professionalism of it would make for quick work against the Ukrainians.

That proved not to be the case.

Were you surprised?

- Yeah, truthfully, I was surprised by the incompetence of the Russian military because they had created this illusion that they are much stronger than they actually are.

And they'd had some successes over the past couple of decades in Chechnya and Syria and Georgia, and they had given the impression that they had revamped their military to be much more effective than it actually was.

And I think what we're seeing is that to a large extent, it was a Potemkin village, that it was not nearly as strong as Putin thought.

And I think he was shocked himself that they were not able to take Kiev in three days as they had planned to.

You know, I was not surprised that they're having trouble conquering the whole country.

I never expected they would be able to to do that because, you know, this is a country with a pre-war population of about 40 million, and the Russians only sent, you know, fewer than 150,000 troops into Ukraine so the troop to task ratios did not add up for me.

I just didn't see how they could control that country.

But truthfully, what I expected was that they probably would, you know, devastate the Ukrainian military, probably would take Kiev, and then they would face a kind of guerrilla resistance that would wear them down, and that obviously is not what happened.

The Ukrainians proved much more adept, much more motivated, much more successful than I expected.

And the Russians, conversely, proved to be much more incompetent and clueless than I expected.

And so the result of that has been really so far, you know, a tremendous Ukrainian victory, which has really generated enthusiasm and support for Ukraine and the West.

Because remember, at the beginning of the war, a lot of countries were reluctant to support Ukraine because they were operating under the assumption it was all gonna collapse in a few days.

And then initially they were sending very light weapons like Javelins and Stingers, but gradually, as the Ukrainians have shown that they're able to more than hold their own against the Russians, you have also seen a massive increase in ramp up in Western aid to Ukraine, which is really a vote of confidence in Ukraine's fighting ability.

- Is the West, including the US doing enough to support Ukraine?

And if not, what else should be done?

- Well, we are doing a lot.

I mean, we have, the US in particular has provided over $20 billion of aid since February 24 of 2022 when the invasion began.

A lot of our allies have also provided a lot of aid on a proportion basis.

The states of Eastern Europe, Poland, and the Baltics are providing a huge percentage of their GDP and defense spending.

So we have certainly done a lot, and we've provided a lot of very effective weapons, whether it's the handheld weapons like the Stingers and Javelins to the HIMARS, which is really a game-changer when the US provided the HIMARS, which is the rocket artillery systems.

In the summer of 2022, that enabled the Ukrainians to blunt the Russian offensive and to target their supply lines and headquarters and really begin to roll back the Russian advance.

But is it enough?

No, I would not say it is enough.

I've been dismayed that it took so long to start providing armored forces to the Ukrainians.

It was only in January that the US and Germany and other states finally agreed to provide main battle tanks, and I don't know why we didn't provide that earlier.

And it's gonna take a while to actually pony up the tanks that have been promised and to get the Ukrainians trained.

We're still not providing aircraft.

Again, I'm not sure why.

We could have.

If we had provided F-16s at the beginning of the war, Ukrainian pilots would be flying them right now and could be defending their airspace as well as enabling offensive operations.

And then I think the...

But I think the big missing link right now is what's known as the ATACMS, which is the long-range mobile rockets that the US Army has in its stores.

The HIMARS that we've provided is an incredibly effective weapon, but it only has a range of about 50 miles, and right now the Ukrainians are more than 50 miles outside of Crimea, which has become the key base supporting Russian operations.

So I think it's imperative to provide the ATACMS which works on the same platform as the HIMARS but has a range of up to about 180 miles.

Now, if the Ukrainians could get the ATACMS, I think they could much more effectively target Russian bases and supply lines in Crimea, and they could effectively sever Russian forces in Southern Ukraine from their logistics tail, and I think that would be a huge step up for the Ukrainians.

And you know, I'm sorry that we've kind of imposed these limitations on ourselves because we're so afraid of the Russian reaction, but honestly, I don't think that...

There's no indication that Putin is about to use nuclear weapons.

There's no indication that he's going to attack Poland or do anything crazy like that because he knows that would lead to his own destruction.

And so I don't, you know, we've kind of drawn these red lines, which I don't think make a lot of sense.

And then we've crossed those red lines and nothing has happened.

Like, we didn't wanna provide main battle tanks.

Now we're providing them.

I still don't understand why we're not providing fighter aircraft or longer range rockets.

I think those are all things that we can do without running the risk of igniting World War III.

- Do you have a theory as to why we are not, we meaning the US and the West, are not providing fighter aircraft and those missiles?

And you said you don't know, but you also said that, you know, every supposed line has been crossed and Russia has not really done much of anything regarding that.

Why?

Why fighter jets?

And why not fighter jets and these long-range missiles?

Any theory at all?

- Well, it's not a theory.

I mean, I've talked to administration officials about this, and I've heard their viewpoint.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but their viewpoint is basically, I mean, part of it makes sense, part of it doesn't.

I mean, President Biden really wants to manage the risk here.

He does not want to risk a confrontation between the US and Russia, which makes sense.

Nobody wants to risk a nuclear war, obviously.

But I think they've operated with an abundance of caution.

And I've heard, you know, administration officials have told me things like, "Well, if we give 'em F-16s, what's to stop them from bombing Moscow?

Well, I don't think that's a reasonable concern because the Ukrainians have shown that they're actually very responsible.

And we've told them not to use the weapon systems that we supply to attack targets inside Russia, and they have 100% abided by those restrictions.

So I don't think they're going to try to bomb Moscow, which by the way, they could do already.

They have big fighters that could reach Moscow.

It's not that far away.

That's not something that they're planning to do.

But I think there is just a concern that somehow we will, providing longer range weaponry, we will escalate the war and lead to, you know, this US-Russian showdown.

And I think, yeah, I mean, we should be concerned about that, but we should not be paralyzed by that.

And I think we're being excessively cautious because I think the real risk we run is that the war continues indefinitely, continues for years, and it becomes, you know, this horrible conflict in the middle of Europe that will destabilize the continent for years to come.

And I think the only way to avoid that is by helping the Ukrainians right now when they have this window of opportunity to try to take back more of their territory and to establish the conditions for a more durable piece.

- Hey Max, there are Republican critics in the US Congress who contend that of all of the generosity and largesse of American military assistance to Ukraine, Ukraine remains at heart a fundamentally corrupt political system.

You've written about this recently, and what are your thoughts on those Republican criticisms and sort of where Ukraine really stands on the corruption front?

- Well, there's no question that Ukraine has been battling corruption, as have all the other former Soviet republics.

I mean, that's a legacy of the communist system.

But I don't think that should be an excuse to stop US aid.

I mean, if we stop US aid, it's going to be an enabler for the Russians who have a much more corrupt system than the Ukrainians to take over the country.

That doesn't make a lot of sense.

And the reality is that inspectors general from both the US and Europe have looked very carefully at where foreign aid spending is going, and they have found zero evidence that any of it has been siphoned off or stolen.

And in recent months, you've seen President Zelensky launching an offensive against corruption in Ukraine.

A number of senior officials, including his own deputy chief of staff have been fired and arrested.

He's really showing that he is serious, I think, about taking on corruption.

And obviously he's not gonna eradicate it all.

It's a deep-seated problem, but hey, guess what?

We have corruption in this country too.

It's not like Ukraine is uniquely corrupt.

Corruption is a problem in every country in the world, but so far I've seen no evidence that it's undermining the Ukrainian war effort.

And I think there's less tolerance for corruption now in Ukraine because the whole country is pulling together in a moment of existential crisis, and tens of thousands of Ukrainians have given their lives to defend their homeland so I think there's a lot less willingness to tolerate officials who have their hand in the cookie jar today than there would have been a few years ago.

- So let's switch to another part of the world.

How do you assess the status currently of US-China relations and is this a new Cold War?

- I think it is a new Cold War, and I'm very concerned about the status of US-China relations because, you know, we are running the real risk of a nuclear war with China, most likely over Taiwan, with Xi Jinping threatening to take over Taiwan by force.

And you have US generals predicting war with China could break out within a few years.

I think, you know, this is, for a historian like me, this really reminds me of the early days of the Cold War where yes, we avoided World War III, but you know, partly that was by luck and happenstance, and we might not have been so lucky.

So I think we need to be very careful about the path we're going down.

And I think there's, you know, a lot of reason to be genuinely concerned about the Chinese threat, primarily military, but also economic and their horrible human rights abuses.

But I think we also need to be careful about not getting carried away with anti-China hysteria and alarmism of the kind we saw, for example, when this Chinese spy balloon made its way across the United States.

You know, you would have thought that we were being attacked by China the way a lot of politicians in Washington reacted.

They made it seem like, you know, China, you know, this was clearly a violation of US airspace, but it wasn't a real threat.

It was just, you know, it was a spy balloon that apparently got off course.

They didn't mean to send it across the US but they probably didn't learn anything from that spy balloon that they couldn't learn from their spy satellites.

So I think we need to keep a sense of proportion and not get carried away by hysteria and alarmism.

And we need to remember that while China, yes, they are a threat to us, and we are, you know, in a new Cold War with them, but we also have a massive economic relationship with China.

They're still one of our largest trade partners.

We still benefit from those economic links, and we need to be able to work with China on issues of mutual concern, whether it's global warming or dealing with the Russian War in Ukraine.

And I would add, by the way that, you know, Xi Jinping and Beijing have not been committed allies of Russia when it comes to Ukraine.

They've actually been very ambivalent in their posture.

And you know, they're still trading with Russia.

They're happy to get cheap oil from Russia.

They're selling microchips to Russia, which is helping Russia to evade Western sanctions.

But so far, at least, they have not been sending weapons to Russia, and if they do that, that could be really a game-changer in Ukraine because Russia desperately needs the weapons that China could supply, but so far China is not supplying those.

And I think, you know, it's very important that we work with China to prevent them from doing more to aid the Russian war in Ukraine.

- You know, Max, at least some of the public concern about the war in Ukraine is through the lens of the Taiwan Straits and whether or not that open aggression against Ukraine might manifest itself in an open aggression from Mainland China to the Republic of China and Taiwan.

You spent some time recently in Taiwan, and I'm wondering.

what did you learn or what do you know about Taiwan that maybe most Americans don't but should know about that island?

- Yeah, I was in Taiwan in early January for a few days and met with a range of current and former government officials and military officers.

And basically what I came away with was an impression that on the one hand, Taiwan has been alarmed by what has happened in Ukraine.

It's kind of been an event that concentrates the mind because they understand that what happened to Ukraine could happen to them and so it's led to a greater interest in increasing Taiwanese defense capacity.

Just recently, they extended conscription to a year, and in the pipeline they have, you know, massive buys of US weaponry that they want to defend themselves.

But at the same time, what I also learned is that Taiwan is struggling to transform its military because it's been a very traditional kind of military force focused on ships and tanks and fighter aircraft.

And I think the general consensus in the US military and in the Taiwan military is that they need to transform themselves into a more asymmetric force to better counter the threat from China, really focusing on missiles, targeting Chinese aircraft, targeting Chinese ships.

They need to go much more heavily into drones.

They're not producing their own military drones at the moment, and China's the largest producer of drones in the world so they need to, they are making more of an investment in their military.

They understand that they need to do more, but it's not just a question of buying weaponry.

It's also, there's also a need to transform the strategy, doctrine, and training of the Taiwanese military for a different way of fighting that utilizes these high-tech weapons systems that can neutralize some of China's conventional military advantages.

And they're just at the beginning of a multi-year process with that so it's something where they need to do much more to have a much more capable military.

But we also need to remember that the People's Liberation Army is also upgrading their capabilities so we're really in a race against time to create in Taiwan what some referred to as a porcupine state that will be hard for China to swallow.

- How do you think President Biden has been navigating the challenges presented by China and Taiwan as you've just been discussing?

- I think he's doing a pretty good job overall.

I mean, I would probably give him something like an A minus.

I think he deserves a lot of credit for keeping the Western coalition together in the face of Russian aggression.

That's not something that was inevitable.

I think this is the most impressive international coalition we've seen since the Gulf War in 1991.

And I think it's really President Biden with help from Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and others, they're the ones who have really brought this coalition into being and kept it together in a way that I think a lot of people a year ago would not have expected that the Western support for Ukraine would be as robust or united as it is today.

And again, I give a lot of credit to President Biden.

And I think he's also doing a pretty good job of assembling the coalition to contain China in East Asia.

For example, the US-Australia submarine deal, I think, was a very important milestone in that regard.

He's really tried to reinvigorate the Quad, this coalition involving the US, India, Australia, and Japan.

You're seeing Japan now upgrade their defense spending.

I think that's hugely important.

I think overall President Biden is doing a pretty good job.

His, you know, the major failings are, we discussed the failing or the drawback in Ukraine, which I think he's a little too cautious in terms of the military aid that he's providing to Ukraine.

I think with China, the major failing is that he's largely abandoned a free trade agenda because remember, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was negotiated in the Obama-Biden administration, and then President Trump exited it.

But President Biden has shown no interest in getting back into this trade deal, which would actually be one of the most effective ways to counter Chinese influence by creating this new trade zone among China's neighbors, and that's, you know, we need to have a more positive trade agenda rather than simply relying on sanctions and tariffs.

I think there's a place for that, but we also need to have a more positive trade agenda.

And that's something that I think is entirely lacking with the Biden administration.

But again, so I wouldn't give 'em an a plus, but I would certainly give him at least an A minus for, you know, foreign policy overall.

I think he's doing a pretty good job.

- Hey Max, we've got a few minutes left here, and I wonder if we could turn our attention now to sort of the divisiveness in American politics.

You know, this is maybe nothing new, but just in the last couple years we've had everything from the insurrection on January 6th to the US intelligence community warning quite clearly now about the threat from domestic terrorism to a member of Congress just in the last couple of weeks talking about the need for a national divorce.

What's your assessment about the health of the American republic today?

- Well, the health of the American Republic is certainly something we should be concerned about.

If there were a doctor we could call to make us all better, we should certainly do that.

It is, I think, in many ways the greatest threat that we face, greater than a threat of Russia or China, Iran, North Korea.

We can deal with external threats, but if we are divided at home, if our democracy is imperiled at home, if our unity is missing, then it's hard to do anything on the international stage, and I think that's what we're grappling with.

And again, I think President Biden has done as good a job as he can of trying to bring the nation together.

He's actually passed a lot of bipartisan legislation, which is something that even a lot of Democrats didn't think that he could do, but he did it.

But clearly he is not ending the divisiveness of American politics.

Clearly he's being excoriated every night on the Fox News Channel, and I think, you know, the two most likely Republican nominees in 2024, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, if either one of them wins, I think that could be a threat to American democracy.

Trump much more than DeSantis, but even DeSantis, I think, has gone in for a lot of very alarming culture war rhetoric and actions, and he's also adopting a more isolationist mindset when it comes to Ukraine and other challenges that I think, you know, threaten America's global leadership role in the world.

I think we really need to turn down the temperature in American politics, and it would be great to see the Republican Party returning to the kind of Republican Party I grew up with going back to the 1980s.

And I was, you know, fortunate enough to work as a foreign policy advisor to Mitt Romney and John McCain in their presidential campaigns.

And I think, you know, both Romney and McCain would not recognize the Republican Party today.

And until, I think, the Republican Party returns to a more sane and centrist path, I think that's going to continue to be a danger to American democracy.

- Max, we've got about, literally about 30 seconds here.

I know that your next book is about, it's a biography of Ronald Reagan.

And I'm curious where you think Reagan would've come down on that, and that's a bigger question, I think, than we've probably really got time for.

But very briefly, where do you think that Reagan would have come down in this long continuum of American conservative politics in 2023?

- That's a big question that I'm grappling with in the book.

And I think it's fair to say that basically the trajectory of the Republican Party since the mid '60s has been ever further to the right.

And what that means is that, you know, when Reagan was president in the '80s, the Republican Party was further to the right than it was in the 1970s.

But then after Reagan left office, it moved further to the right of him in the 1990s under Newt Gingrich and more recently under Donald Trump.

So I don't think he would necessarily recognize the Republican Party because remember, Reagan was somebody who loved America's alliances, very pro-NATO.

He was pro-immigration, he was pro free trade, and he was certainly somebody who, you know, called for standing up to Russian aggression.

So he couldn't imagine so many Republicans today saying that we should cut off aid to Ukraine in the face of a Russian invasion.

I think that would be, he would being incredulous to see that.

But you know, in the long sweep of time, he was part of this progression to the right, which has now led the Republican Party much farther to the right than it was in his day.

- Well, we will look forward to that book.

Max Boot, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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