>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made when the Trump administration decided to go to war.

Now the Trump campaign in 2024 had a slogan no dumb wars.

Sometimes it was no more wars.

Sometimes it was no more wars in the Middle East.

So when the administration opted for war, it was a surprise to some of their supporters.

Vice President JD Vance said, don't worry, this time we are choosing war.

But we have a smart president, not a dumb one.

Well, the wars we're talking about, Yemen, action in Nigeria, Somalia, Venezuela of course.

Iran.

Yes.

Next, perhaps Cuba.

The New York Times reports that there is internal conflict in the Trump administration regarding what these wars have done to American preparedness for possible new conflicts and possible conflicts, not of our choosing.

CNN reports that the United States has used roughly 50% of its Patriot Air Defense interceptors and 50% of its precision strike missiles.

The war in Iran has seen the U.S.

Use nearly a thousand Tomahawk missiles.

It's a big part of the stockpile.

And according to the center for Strategic and International Studies, the current war inventory is not sufficient to fight a major, protracted conflict against a near-peer competitor like China.

So what if China invades Taiwan?

What if Putin, sensing that the United States is stretched thin around the world, decides to attack a NATO ally?

What then?

There are some very serious questions about whether we are vulnerable to new conflicts and what that could mean.

And we're going to work through some of those angles with our guest this hour.

Dr.

Randy Stone is professor of political science and director of the center for Polish and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester.

Welcome back to the program.

>> Thanks, Evan.

Nice to be with you.

>> CNN says this quote, earlier this year, the Pentagon signed a series of contracts that would help expand missile production.

But the delivery timeline to replace these systems is 3 to 5 years.

Even with the increased capacity in the short term, the U.S.

Likely maintains enough bombs and missiles to continue combat operations against Iran.

In any scenario, should the shaky cease fire fail to hold.

But the number of critical munitions remaining in U.S.

Stockpiles is no longer sufficient to confront an adversary like China, and will likely take years before the inventory of those weapons returns to pre-war levels, end quote.

So if that's the reality, why wouldn't she or Putin see an opening that has come into view here?

Is it possible?

>> Well, so talking about China for a moment, it does look like XI Jinping has his eyes set on Re-acquiring Taiwan.

This has been a long term objective of the Chinese Communist Party since 1949, when the Kuomintang nationalist government, uh, escaped the mainland, uh, after the Civil war and and set up shop in Taiwan.

Um, there have been multiple conflicts between the United States and China throughout the Cold War.

And after over the the sovereignty of Taiwan, the United States doesn't recognize Taiwan officially, but unofficially considers Taiwan to be an ally.

Uh, and the Biden administration for the first time made it very clear that we had a deterrence posture here, that the United States was prepared to go to war to defend Taiwan against China.

Uh, the, you know, XI government found that very threatening.

And, and, uh, and protested and so forth, uh, against that characterization of the situation, the Trump administration has been very fuzzy about what its commitments to Taiwan might be.

There was an increase in arms sales in December.

There's another increase in arms sales that's on the table right now.

Senate leaders on bipartisan group are trying to pressure the Trump administration to authorize that ahead of the meeting next week with XI Jinping, because, of course, XI Jinping is going to pressure Trump to take that off the table as part of whatever kind of deal they, uh, they cobble together.

Um, and there's concern, I think, within the administration and certainly in Congress, uh, that Trump doesn't have a strategy.

He just likes to make deals and anything can happen in that meeting next week.

So, so that's kind of the background.

Uh, is an invasion of Taiwan imminent?

Probably not.

And the main reason is that XI XI Jinping, uh, is very concerned, paranoid about the loyalty of his top military leaders.

And so he's been purging them.

Uh, and he had already purged the previous leadership, replaced them all with his own people.

And now he's become concerned once again about loyalty.

And he is purging everybody again.

So there probably is not the case that China is militarily prepared right now to engage in a major military operation.

So he had stated 2027 was the deadline for what he called a military breakthrough.

And what he meant was a military breakthrough in terms of preparedness, right?

China's ability to wage war, presumably against the United States.

So the the that was the target date by which China would have reached sufficient, uh, preparedness that it could contemplate, uh, a, uh, a reopening of the Taiwan issue.

Um, and that timeline is probably pushed back now by his, uh, his purges, but it's a very threatening situation.

And China is, uh, in a very rapidly growing, very powerful country.

They've been developing militarily at, uh, a, you know, they've been, they've been building ships faster than the United States was building ships at the peak of World War Two.

Uh, and so they, the U.S.

Military is no longer certain that the United States could prevail in a conventional conflict in the Pacific with China.

>> Now, let me take a steel man approach to what the Trump administration is doing around the world.

Is it possible that Hegseth Trump, the administration in general sees that probably China isn't going to be prepared for conflict over Taiwan until at least 2027?

And so, therefore, if they wanted to get going with the business of, as Senator Lindsey Graham says, taking out the bad guys around the world, now would be the time because China wouldn't be prepared to take advantage of us.

So we go into Venezuela, we might go into Cuba next.

We're in Iran.

Is now the time, given the fact that China is not in an advantageous position just yet.

>> They may be thinking about things this way, I really don't.

>> Is that too generous?

>> I really don't think that they have a strategic plan.

I think that they jump from one thing to the next that Donald Trump likes to be in the headlines.

Um, and he, I mean, just just think about the, the way he handles meetings with foreign leaders, uh, like, uh, with Vladimir Putin or with XI Jinping.

Uh, he has these meetings impulsively.

He doesn't have a plan to actually get something at the meeting.

And then there's, you know, there's some sort of a communique or some sort of a deal comes out of it.

He claims some kind of success.

It's never anything more than symbolic because he doesn't really have plans.

>> Sometimes he claims success for a deal that was already in place, that he just announces to the press, um, so but given that tendency and given how sort of obsequious he can be in person, especially with powerful people, what is the concern that Americans should have about what could come out of a Trump XI Jinping summit that's coming up here?

>> Well, everyone is is in in, uh, the Pacific is terribly worried that he's going to give away something crucial.

Uh, and so the, uh, there was an article in today's New York Times about this that the, uh, the, the Japanese are talking to the Australians or the, you know, the, the Indians are talking to the Indonesians.

They're all they're all trying to figure out, well, how do we cobble something together here to, to pick up the pieces after this summit?

Because who knows what he's going to do.

>> The middle powers.

>> Right.

Exactly.

The middle powers.

And there there's concern that he may just sell out Taiwan.

Uh, and if he sells out Taiwan, uh, either, uh, you know, overtly promises that the United States will cease providing weapons or something or symbolically by, um, you know, making, making too many, uh, you know, uh, rhetorical concessions.

There's concern that that will put greater that, that will, um, give China a stronger hand to put more pressure on all of its neighbors.

So the Vietnamese are very worried about what, uh, is said about Taiwan.

It was interesting, you know, the communist government of Vietnam is sort of an informal ally with the, uh, you know, the, the, the successors to the Kuomintang.

Right?

The, um, the democratically elected government of, of Taiwan.

Uh, so these, these middle powers are very concerned that he's going to give up something crucial.

The Chinese or the Japanese prime minister recently got into quite a diplomatic kerfuffle because she, uh, said that Japan might be prepared to intervene militarily if China attacked Taiwan.

And this was this is a, you know, a new kind of, uh, overture in Japanese foreign policy.

It's, uh, something that seemed to be necessary because it looked like the fabric of deterrence was eroding.

>> And so for Trump to give away or sell out Taiwan, could he do it just in a news conference, off the cuff, in the way that he does?

Would it be something more formal?

What would it look like?

>> I think if he made it clear that the United States is not prepared to militarily intervene in a conflict on his watch?

That would be, uh, that would be selling out Taiwan.

So that that would then mean that Taiwan was effectively on its own.

And, uh, whatever the Japanese prime minister says, uh, the likelihood that Japan would intervene in a conflict without the United States support seems very low.

Right?

So Taiwan becomes very isolated, and then it becomes possible for, for China to, uh, to capitalize on that.

>> I take the point that there isn't a reason to look at the current moment and say that China looks like it is going to try to pounce on American weakness militarily.

And I say weakness because we're spread so thin and we've used a lot of munitions in Iran.

And you have all these assessments from very credible agencies that are not Partizan saying it could take several years to build back our stockpiles, that we couldn't really handle.

A near-peer adversary war.

Right now, I take the point that right now China is not looking at that going, okay, it's go time.

But in 2027, who knows how long the Iran conflict goes on?

Who knows what happens in Cuba or elsewhere?

And it's it doesn't appear that the United States could just immediately build back what we have spent militarily.

Are we still in a weaker position in the short term?

And I'd say the short term, the next several years, given Iran, given what this administration has chosen, the wars of choice and what that would portend if a Taiwanese China conflict doesn't happen in 2026, but 2027 or even early 2028, are we in a worse position?

>> Absolutely.

And every time you get involved in a major military operation like this, you make yourself weaker around the world, right?

So the, uh, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made the United States much weaker throughout the first two decades of the 21st century than we would have been had we not been involved in those wars.

They ended up defining foreign policy priorities around the world.

Right.

Our our policy towards other major countries that are more important to our security in the long term than, uh, than, than Iraq.

And Afghanistan ended up being determined by our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The same thing will happen with Iran.

And I think it's fair to say that, uh, the Trump administration has already lost the war in Iran, that.

>> On what grounds?

>> So it's, of course, been very successful in destroying lots of things.

Right.

And, uh, the United States and Israel have tremendous air superiority over Iran and can bomb targets at will and have caused tremendous destruction of the Iranian economy and military and civilian infrastructure and so forth.

Um, but this is a situation of asymmetric warfare where Iran can very easily close the Strait of Hormuz, which is crucial to the world economy.

And it's much more difficult to keep it open than it is to to close it.

The remember, the, the difficulty that the Houthi were able to cause, uh, in, in the Red sea, just with very low tech, uh, operations.

Iran has much more resources.

And, uh, we'll be able to make it economically infeasible to use the Strait of Hormuz if they, if as long as they want to do that.

>> But that hurts Iran too, right?

I mean.

>> It does.

>> And how long can they hold out?

I don't know if we know that, but.

>> I think they can hold out longer than we can.

Uh, the, the, uh, Iranian government is very strongly entrenched.

Uh, they're the Revolutionary Guards seem to be very loyal.

Uh, and they don't have to maintain, uh, you know, a, a strong, military force in order to disrupt, uh, travel through the, through the Strait of Hormuz.

This gives them tremendous leverage.

I think the only way for the Trump administration to achieve its goals in this, in this war, uh, would be a full scale invasion of Iran and occupation of the country, which would be a bigger operation than invading Iraq was and would stick us in a another ten year war where we eventually withdraw with our tail between our legs, because we weren't able to achieve our goals.

>> Yeah.

Netanyahu himself on 60 minutes this past weekend, indicated pretty clearly that the Trump administration has not closed the door on a ground invasion.

And that came from the question, you know, to Netanyahu, well, what is winning the war mean?

And he said removing all of their nuclear material.

And the interviewer said, well, how do you do that?

And he said, well, you have to go in and take it.

And he said, Donald Trump told me he's interested in taking it, going in and taking it.

This is Netanyahu himself indicating that despite the fact that Trump is is leaking to the press and his team is leaking to reporters that he's bored with Iran now, he wanted it to be like Venezuela, and he has said so in the first weeks of the Iran war.

He said, look how well Venezuela went.

And look how Israel and the United States decapitated the Iranian leadership.

That's the model here.

Well, Venezuela did not turn out to be Iran.

And now Netanyahu is saying you got to go in and take it.

You got to go get the nuclear material by force, by hand.

You can't do it with air power.

And he says Trump is still considering that.

So, I mean, I, I don't know if anybody can predict your doctor Stone what's going to happen, because I think the president does want to declare victory and move on.

But I don't think it's a plausible victory to most people.

If you don't go at the very least, and get their nuclear material or install some kind of regime, that's not the theocracy, right?

I mean, those are the two biggest goals here, and they're not achieved.

>> Yes.

And I, I think this is another of these cases where their strategy wasn't thought out, right?

Because and they had they bothered to plan out what the consequences of their strategy are, it would have been clear that, uh, this is the situation you're going to find yourself in.

Um, the, the Iranians have no incentive at this point to compromise on anything.

Uh, they, uh, virtually all of the assets that were hostages, uh, have been destroyed.

Right.

So what do they have left the possibility of perhaps developing a nuclear weapon in order to prevent this from happening again.

Right.

And there, uh, their ability to hold on and fight an asymmetric conflict.

I think they're going to continue to demand war reparations.

And, uh, and tariffs, uh, for, for vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz.

And they're going to continue to disrupt, uh, that, that passage, uh, and the, the United States is stuck here with a couple of very unattractive options.

>> In a moment, we'll talk about how you see how Putin might be viewing all of this.

But just briefly, what else are the implications of the Iran war that you want us to be thinking about?

And I mean, um, how this is possibly impacting other conflicts?

I know the Trump administration will have something to say to XI Jinping when they when they're together.

And, um, you know, opening the Strait of Hormuz and perhaps China's role behind the scenes in all of this, what are the implications right now that you see of this war, even outside of geographical Iran?

>> Mhm.

Well, there are a couple of interesting implications for the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Uh, Iran was one of the major suppliers of drones to the Russian military, and they'd been used extensively in Ukraine.

And those, uh, production facilities have been taken offline, and they're not going to be available for export to Russia for the foreseeable future.

So that's a huge gain to Ukraine.

On the other hand, Ukraine is dependent upon Patriot missiles to defend against Russian ballistic missiles.

And, uh, the world doesn't have enough of these missiles anymore, right?

These interceptors, which have been used so liberally in the in the Gulf.

>> Again, the stats I have, we've used like half of our stockpile just in the Iran war.

>> That's right.

And so, uh, the question is, who's going to give Ukraine additional missiles at a time when they're very scarce around the world?

All the countries in the Gulf are going to be trying to replenish their stockpiles.

The United States is going to be trying to replenish its stockpiles.

Uh, and they won't be available then to export to Ukraine.

Now, Ukraine has, uh, made a lot of progress in, uh, countering drones without using expensive, uh, interceptor missiles and the, uh, you know, the Arab states in the Persian Gulf are still using expensive intercept missiles to counter very inexpensive drones.

Right?

So that is, the Ukrainians actually have been trying to teach them how to shoot them down with machine guns.

So you don't have to use these million dollar missiles to shoot down a $10,000 drone.

Incredible.

Um, but, uh, you know, but, but, but Russia has developed its ballistic missile, uh, production to the point where Ukraine needs these interceptors to defend against ballistic missiles.

And that's a different matter.

>> We're talking to Dr.

Randy Stone, professor of political science and director of the center for Polish and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester.

All right.

Before we dig into Putin here, let me get a couple of emails here.

Uh, and the first comes from Brad.

Get Brad, and Brad says the United States could use the war production rules to ramp up missiles and whatever else it wants.

So this is classic sky is falling stuff from the media.

I don't buy it.

So I think the War Production Act, um, you know, sort of retrofitting existing factories to produce missiles, I think even in the, I really think, Brad, I'm not trying to overstate this for partisan reasons.

I'm trying to read sober analysis from the people who do this stuff for a living.

And what they're telling us is no matter what happens, we are pretty depleted for the short term here because of the Iran war.

I don't know.

Do you see it?

>> You can't just produce these things at a Ford plant.

You know, these these these missiles are very sophisticated technology.

Uh, they have very long supply chains.

You need the chips.

You need the, the, the specialized materials and so on.

The production lines are slow.

Yes.

You could ramp up production of these.

Like we have tried over the last few years to ramp up production of artillery shells and artillery pieces, to supply them to Ukraine.

And that took a long time to produce, to increase the production of a really simple item.

Right.

Uh, part of the problem is that the companies that produce these things want to be guaranteed that they'll have a market in the future.

And will there be a market in 3 or 4 years for all these interceptor missiles, if they ramp up their production capacity?

Right.

Um, we hope there won't be because we hope that there won't be all these crazy wars starting, um, you know.

By, by incompetent presidents.

>> But the bottom line to Brad is that we're not over exaggerating the effect of the Iran war and the conflicts around the world on stockpiles.

>> No, it just it it takes the time that it takes.

And you have to make massive investment before you can ramp up production.

>> Yarrow says.

There's popular poking fun at the fact that Russia is using old, outdated Soviet stockpiles in their current war with Ukraine.

But the current news about how fast U.S.

Munitions are being depleted in just a relatively short term, isolated conflict makes one question about the readiness of the United States for, God forbid, all out conflict.

And Yarrow asks, am I overstating our lack of readiness?

Well, that's what we're talking about here.

And the answer is, I mean, it depends on the scale of the conflict right now.

But, I mean, I don't know if we're going to be a parallel.

He's looking at the way people poke fun at Russia for arming some of its soldiers with outdated, you know, 40 year old guns and and munitions because they're depleted.

And he says, are we about to be in the same boat?

I mean, again, maybe.

So it just depends on the scale of whatever conflict was next.

>> Yeah.

The American military has traditionally prepared for two and a half wars to be fought simultaneously.

And we used to think that we had the capacity to do that.

Um, whether it was wise to develop that kind of capacity, given the unreliability of our leadership, is another question.

Right.

Um, but, uh, what we're seeing now is that we can run through these munitions so quickly that, uh, it's, it's not really feasible to maintain that kind of, uh, that kind of footing.

>> Uh, Dallas says, how does the difficulty in getting oil by China, uh, from its allies affect the idea of Taiwan being invaded by China?

So I think he's looking at energy.

Uh, you know, I.

>> I guess the question is, does the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, uh, put such constraints on China that it wouldn't be feasible for them to invade Taiwan.

>> I suppose?

>> Yeah, yeah.

Um, I don't think so.

Partly because China has one of the largest petroleum reserves in the world.

And in fact, they've been tapping that to sell oil to other countries in the region.

Um, they've been using that also to cushion the price impact of, uh, of the shortage of, of petroleum in China.

China still imports very large share of its petroleum, uh, but China has also diversified away from fossil fuels.

So it's much less vulnerable to a disruption of fossil fuels than it would have been just a few years ago.

Uh, I don't think that that in itself would prevent China from taking this action.

But part of the reason that China has developed this large petroleum reserve is that it's clear that in case of a war, if the United States were involved in a conflict with China, China would not have access to any kind of international shipping.

Right?

So its access to most of its oil supplies would be cut off.

And they had to prepare in advance for that.

>> Here's John in Canandaigua, says Evan, what interest would the United States have in selling out Taiwan?

Taiwan manufacturers via TSMC, advanced semiconductors that the Chinese government so desperately wants in order to create superior weapons systems.

Their military tech is lacking due to them not being able to manufacture these microchips that the U.S.

Has through affiliations with Taiwan.

Deterrence is the best strategy at this point, and defending Taiwan is in the United States best interests.

And with the closing of the Hormuz Strait, it was notable that Chinese ships were allowed to pass.

As China relies on that passageway for a good amount of their oil, the U.S.

Appears not to want to put China under too much stress now to appease them.

For the time being, too much strain on China due to the Iranian conflict could force China to act sooner.

In Taiwan, that is from John in Canandaigua.

So just a question.

He's saying, look, we the world needs Taiwan's microchips.

Um, they're a very important ally to us.

Why would we sell them out?

>> I agree, I think that it makes it makes a lot of sense.

>> There's a rational component to that email.

>> That's right.

>> But you don't always see a rational component to this administration.

>> I, I, I think that the administration is very short sighted.

Um, and the.

>> It's possible that all their waffling about Taiwan is very tactical.

And maybe they're telling China something else in private, but I don't think they have that kind of, uh, signal discipline.

I think that, uh, nobody knows what will come out of the meeting between Trump and XI Jinping, including Donald Trump.

XI Jinping probably has a better idea.

I bet he's planned for this meeting.

Um, but the, uh, the, the administration is, uh, you know, doesn't have a strategic plan.

And so they very, it's very possible to imagine that Donald Trump would think that it was advantageous to get some sort of a deal with China, uh, on some dimension.

And he would think it was relatively harmless to sell Taiwan down the river.

It's quite possible.

>> Yeah.

John.

I mean, I just I look at the population of people who could be U.S.

Presidents.

There's very few people who would just sort of haphazardly sell out Taiwan in these circumstances.

The person who's in the White House has proven himself capable of saying any number of really wild things, you know, and if he decides that deep down he would not go to war over Taiwan, do you trust him not to say it?

I don't know, uh.

>> The the other question is, uh, you know, wars usually start because of misunderstandings or, or miscommunication.

Um, it's also possible that Trump will send some sort of a signal, which is interpreted by China as, uh, washing our hands of, of responsibility for Taiwan.

And then if China moves against Taiwan, Donald Trump might still decide to intervene.

So that's the more dangerous scenario.

That's how we stumbled into the Korean War.

We claimed that it wasn't within our security perimeter.

And then we decided, well, actually it is.

Uh, that's how we kind of stumbled into the first Iraq war because we, uh, American ambassador, uh, let Saddam Hussein think that, uh, the United States wouldn't respond if he took over Kuwait.

Um, and, you know, this kind of miscommunication is really quite dangerous.

That's why it's important to have professional diplomats sending the signals and, you know, keep the amateurs from meeting each other.

>> Roger.

Emails to say the military industrial complex is alive and well in the United States and indeed globally.

I do not worry about the armaments industry's desire or ability to keep the military well stocked.

That's from Roger.

Again, it is big business.

Of course it is.

But that doesn't mean that you can snap your fingers.

And next week be prepared for a war.

And, Roger, I take your point.

I mean, everybody you know, everybody hears you on that.

I just think it would be foolish to assume that you can magically resupply like it's a video game.

>> That's right.

Fair.

Right.

>> Okay.

Uh, connections@wxxi.org is the email address.

If you want to email the program, you can join the chat on YouTube, or you can call the program toll free at 8442958442958255.

On the other side of this only break, we're going to talk a little bit about the Putin side of this.

We've been talking about how XI Jinping and China might be viewing this, this moment of sort of a stretched, thin military.

What about Putin?

We'll talk more about that next.

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>> This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Are you ready for an out of the box email here from.

It's from Patrick.

Patrick says we could always take out Taiwan's capabilities to make microchips that would totally take away China's desire to have Taiwan, and it would end the AI race, and we could be liberated from all of this in the whole entire conversation.

If the microchip capacity was gone, you might think that's harmful to the United States, but perhaps it's more harmful to China.

We could eventually make our own microchips.

So China doesn't really need Taiwan either.

So we're going to take out Taiwan's ability to make microchips.

>> Well, I China wanted Taiwan long before they developed the capacity to build microchips.

So I don't think that that would eliminate China's, uh, desire to take Taiwan.

Taiwan is kind of an existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party, because it's proof that Chinese people can live happily under democracy.

>> Similar to how Russia sees Ukraine in that way.

Right?

I mean.

>> That's right.

>> So that dynamic is a pretty good parallel.

>> It's similar to the way that West Germany was an existential threat to East Germany, right?

Because you could be much wealthier and live under democracy and have human rights and be in West Germany.

Or you could live under communism in East Germany.

Right.

And, um, it suggested that that kind of existence was, was possible.

If, if you just chose to have it.

Um, right.

So, so it's a, it's an ideological commitment.

It's a, it's a, it's a threat to the legitimacy of the regime in China.

And so they would, they would want Taiwan in any case, uh, it's possible that if there were some sort of a conflict, there might be some effort, uh, to, uh, to sabotage the Taiwan Semiconductor Company.

But I don't think that that's really the issue.

The issue is the design, the human capital, the, the know how, right.

Um, if, uh, if those people are all captured by China, then China will inherit that capability.

>> All right.

Dallas thinks that there's some hypocrisy in the show today.

He says when when people like him on the political right were raising the same concerns about munition supplies, American military stockpiles, because we were using those stockpiles to support Ukraine during the Biden administration, he says.

Nobody cared.

Then we on the right raised all those same supply concerns.

When we started supporting Ukraine under Biden, and no one cared.

So why do we care now?

I don't know that it's first of all, I don't there's a lot of things that aren't the same here.

Like in February 2022, right?

That's when it's been for years.

Um, this was an existential threat to Ukraine and there was a moral choice to make.

There was also a strategic choice to make.

And, you know, we didn't have a war in Iran going on in 2022 that was wiping out half of our missile stockpiles in two and a half months.

So, you know, we were in a little bit better, I think, position with munitions.

I don't I didn't intend to ignore that as an issue.

I mean, nobody wants a war in Ukraine to go on forever for a million different reasons, far down the list.

But also a concern is, yeah, yeah, eventually weapons run out if you can't produce them fast enough.

But I don't think people didn't care.

I just don't think it was the same circumstance.

What do you see, Dr.

Stone?

>> Well, I'd be the first to acknowledge that I might be inconsistent.

Um, but, um I, I think that we've a different order of magnitude here.

Right.

That.

Yeah.

Uh, the, the United States kind of cautiously rolled out these abilities in, in, uh, in Ukraine.

The biggest constraint that I recall, uh, in particularly 2022 was the ability to produce artillery shells.

And that was something, there was a concern that we might run down our ability to produce artillery shells to, or our stockpiles too much and so forth.

And how quickly can we replace them?

There was a huge effort made to invest in the production lines of artillery shells.

Uh, and that's still a constraint where the Russia is able to fire 2 or 3 times as many artillery shells as Ukraine is because they have access to more production.

Um, the, the Patriot missiles.

Ukraine always wanted more of them.

Uh, the United States was very, uh, stingy with them.

Uh, I think, uh, and I don't think ever really compromised our security posture by giving too many of them to, to Ukraine.

>> Well, I want to listen to the comments made recently by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius about his concerns about what it means to have active wars happening on multiple fronts.

The biggest, of course, being Iran.

The munition stockpiles and a a military that is stretched.

And what that might mean to someone like Vladimir Putin.

Let's listen.

>> That Putin is in a corner.

Things are not going well for him.

So in that situation, what do you do that breaks out of the situation you're in?

And one possibility he might see is that before this moment of opportunity, when his friend Trump is in the White House, when Europe is still just beginning to really rearm and is still pretty weak, that maybe now is the time to strike and to show that NATO's promises of collective self-defense don't really add up to anything.

And so if he struck one of the Baltic states and Trump did nothing, that would demonstrate to Europe and to the world that American promises to NATO, are not real.

People are already beginning to suspect that.

But this would make make it clear, and I think that would be.

I think that's a danger that people should worry about, that Putin might seize this moment to show NATO alliance that you're so proud of, in the end, is nothing that you might do that.

>> Okay.

That's David Ignatius from the Washington Post.

What do you think?

>> So I've been raising concerns for years about, uh, Donald Trump's, uh, undermining of the NATO alliance and, uh, and sort of rhetorical backtracking in particular from article five, which is the promise that an attack on one is an attack on all, uh, which is the basis of the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The, the three Baltic, uh, former Soviet republics.

But, uh, they've been, uh, democratic states now for, uh, 35 years.

And, uh, these, um, members of the European Union, members of NATO, right.

So they're, they're first on the chopping block.

If Russia were to try to, you know, reestablish the Russian Empire.

Uh, and, uh, you know, not nearly as strong.

These are countries with populations of a few million people, uh, not nearly as strong as Ukraine are able to defend themselves.

Now, there are NATO forces rotating through those, uh, those, uh, republics to act as kind of a tripwire.

So, you know, there are American forces there.

There are German forces there.

Uh, and they would be quickly overrun if Russia were to invade.

Uh, those, uh, those territories.

But that would presumably draw NATO into a crushing response.

Um, so I've, I've been arguing for years that it's very dangerous when Donald Trump, uh, uh, plays with the question of whether the United States is really committed to NATO or not in order to squeeze some more military spending out of NATO allies, which is usually been what his objective was.

He was successful, by the way, in squeezing more military spending out of NATO allies, though what really unlocked their willingness to spend a lot more on on their defense was the Ukraine war, which now has been going on for four years.

And, uh, convinced, you know, uh, the, these, these countries that they, they have to invest much more in, uh, in their military defense.

So then the question is, is this a particular moment when we should be worried about this more than in the past?

Um, so I take the point that Putin is more in a tight spot than he was, say, a year ago.

Uh, the, the early stage of the war, uh, you know, was, was disastrous for Putin.

He, uh, you know, he was supposed to win within 3 or 4 days or maybe a couple of weeks.

And instead he got beaten back.

Uh, his tanks got stuck in the mud.

And then Ukraine launched that dramatic counteroffensive and took back all of the northeastern part of the country and took back a lot of other areas in the South.

And then since then, it's kind of ground to a halt.

Um, but the Russian economy was surprisingly robust, and many have argued, well, that proves that sanctions don't work, right?

Because the Russian economy has grew very dramatically, particularly in 22, 2022 and 2023.

Uh, grew much faster than the US economy.

And, uh, depending upon how you count, uh, Russia's either the ninth largest economy in the world in nominal terms, that is in actual dollars, or it's the fourth largest economy, if you correct, for purchasing power parity, right?

As after several years of dramatic wartime growth, um, now that happened in part because, uh, the, uh, the Russian government used a tremendous war chest that they had built up before the, uh, before the war.

They've drawn that down pretty dramatically.

Uh, they had, uh, national wealth fund of $200 billion.

It's been drawn down to about $120 billion.

They had central bank reserves of about $800 billion.

Now, about 300 billion of those were stranded abroad when the war took place.

I guess Putin didn't think it was necessary to protect his central bank reserves when he started a war.

That was incredible, colossal miscalculation.

Um, they're frozen, most of them in Europe.

But he still left with $330 billion worth of gold.

And, uh, several hundred billion dollars of, of foreign reserves that are located within the, the country.

But he's drawn those down as well, somewhat that huge.

Fiscal, uh, expansion of spending all that money to put the war, the country on a war footing has driven up wages, it's driven up prices, has caused rapid growth, and the growth has been, you know, in real terms, so corrected for inflation.

They've grown, uh, three and a half, 4.5% each of the last couple of years.

That all changed in the last year.

Their their growth slowed down to about 1% by the end of, of 2025.

And they're now moving towards a recession.

And the problem is shortage of labor, right?

They had three quarters of a million people leave the country in order to avoid the draft.

Um, and they, um, they had, uh, dramatic reduction of immigration into Russia, which had been a source of younger labor for the Russian labor market.

And the increase in investment in military industries, the large number of people drawn into the military, the large number of casualties that they've had in the war, um, means that there are tremendous labor shortages.

And that's showing up in the declining economic performance.

So now the mood has suddenly, since about January, the mood has changed.

In Russia, it was there there was a lot of optimism for a while.

Then last year there was optimism because, oh, well, now Donald Trump is in office.

He'll sell out Ukraine and then we'll be able to end the war.

Um, and now it looks like, well, the war still hasn't ended.

Uh, Ukraine is still hanging on.

Russia is making small gains on the battlefield, but not much.

There's no end in sight.

And the population is discouraged.

Right.

So, uh, this latest May 9th celebration was the, you know, least impressive in.

At least.

So sad memory.

>> And they had children driving these, I mean, like participating in the parade.

And everybody looked sad.

Putin looked sad.

But if what if the picture you're painting is, is that okay?

So for several years we thought maybe the sanctions aren't working.

Maybe the Russian economy was more resilient.

Well, now we're seeing that a lot is caving in.

Isn't this a time for a caged animal to lash out?

Couldn't he go ahead and hit a NATO ally and see what happens if he's feeling the economy is struggling.

We're not winning in Ukraine.

We're struggling there.

You know, go ahead.

Let's see what happens.

Plus, he may think that there's two reasons to do that.

The first is that the American military can't really respond.

We can't have a Russian NATO conflict right now because they're stretched around the world.

And number two, he doesn't think Trump wants that anyway.

But you don't think this is the moment for him to do that.

>> So that's that's the case that David Ignatius is making that, uh, this is a time for him to do something desperate to roll the dice to see if he can change, uh, the, uh, the game.

Um, it's conceivable Putin is, uh, never.

>> Put it past him, right?

>> No.

Uh, he he's he's shown that he's willing to take big risks and sometimes make big mistakes.

Um, when he thinks that the timing is advantageous, this is a much better time to do it because the United States is bogged down in Iran.

Right.

That's, uh, that's definitely advantageous.

Uh, I, I think it's probably a bad time to do it in terms of European cohesion.

Um, I would, uh, if I were Putin, I might wait until Macron is no longer president of France.

Um, if that comes about, although it may be that, uh, between them, Trump and Putin have managed to save Macron's fortunes.

He he may actually pull this out.

Uh, if if Macron is replaced by, um, you know, Le Pen, uh, then, uh, it's it's quite conceivable that, uh, you know, France sits out the next, uh, crisis and can the rest of Europe really respond without, you know, the French, uh, nuclear deterrent being in play and so forth?

Um, certainly the war in Iran makes this whole situation more dangerous, makes it less credible that the United States intervenes.

Right?

So it weakens our posture.

And that should have been taken into account when you decide to start a war, right?

That weakens your position.

The reason I don't think that it's particularly likely is that, uh, Putin is bogged down in Ukraine and he's using all the resources at his disposal.

He doesn't have another invasion force to unleash in the Baltic states.

He'd have to do it with a cobbled together, uh, force that was not, you know, was not elite, was not organized, was not prepared for that eventuality.

Right.

And it would strain his resources even more.

And it would invoke, uh, European responses in Ukraine.

And he has a lot of assets now in Ukraine that are really vulnerable.

>> So we're stretched thin.

But of course, Russia is very stretched.

>> Russia is very stretched thin.

And if, if, um, the response to that were that Poland decided to intervene in the Ukraine war, that would be disastrous for Russia.

>> Uh, down to our last 90s or so in the clip there, Ignatius refers to Trump as Putin's friend, and he might be being a little cheeky, but I wonder how you would characterize what you see in that relationship right now.

>> I think that Putin is very disappointed in Donald Trump at the moment, because he didn't get as much as he was expecting.

Um, in the first year of the Trump administration, he was expecting, I think, complete capitulation.

I mean, look, Donald, I've done so much for you.

I got you elected the first time around.

Right.

Um, I, you know, he, he, he would have expected a little bit more gratitude from the Trump administration.

But Donald Trump is hard to predict.

And he hasn't seemed to think it was terribly advantageous to him to, uh, he had.

>> Like, he sided wholeheartedly with Ukraine.

There was that that of course, that incident in the White House with Zelensky and his first visit.

And now, you know, asking Ukraine to buy the weapons instead of giving the weapons.

And, um.

>> And we want your mineral rights and so on.

>> And every time there's a peace deal, it looks like the United States and Witkoff are just signing off on whatever the Kremlin wants.

So, I mean, it hasn't been a total disaster of a relationship from Putin's perspective, has it?

>> No, not total, but, uh, but the United States has not completely pulled the rug out from under Ukraine.

Okay.

He did.

He cut military aid.

Yeah.

But then, uh, the Europeans picked it up, and, uh, he's still willing to sell American weapons to to Ukraine.

And as long as the Europeans pay for them, Ukraine gets them.

>> Um, I want to thank you for contextualizing some very fraught times, and we'll be watching, of course, the upcoming meeting of Trump and XI Jinping.

And and I am sure there will be something to talk about with Dr.

Randy Stone and his colleagues soon.

And they always have their own kinds of programing and guests they bring in from around the world at the center.

Thank you for making the time for the program.

As always, it's nice to talk to you.

>> Good to talk with you, Evan.

>> Dr.

Randy Stone is professor of political science, director of the center for Polish and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester.

More Connections coming up in a moment.

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