Clip: The geopolitical implications of the prisoner swap that freed Evan Gershkovich

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, first of all, congratulations America, you survived July. You remember July, right? Joe Biden announced he wouldn't run again. A woman of color became the nominee of a major party. Someone tried and failed to kill Donald Trump. Trump picked J.D. Vance to be his running mate. And meanwhile, Joe Biden, who was written off as a political force, somehow managed one of the most complicated prisoner swaps in history, the result of which is that our Wall Street Journal colleague, Evan Gershkovich, is now free.

Joining me tonight to discuss all of this and more, Anne Applebaum is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic, she's also the author of the new bestseller, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Elisabeth Bumiller is the Washington Bureau chief for The New York Times, Steve Inskeep is a co host of NPR's Morning Edition and the author of Differ We Must, and Vivian Salama is a national political reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Welcome all.

Vivian, let me start with you. It's a great week at The Wall Street Journal. Tell us how it feels.

VIVIAN SALAMA, National Political Reporter, The Wall Street Journal: I mean, every emotion that you can imagine all at once. Obviously, we are beaming. I saw his parents yesterday. I saw his sister and brother-in-law. And to see after a year-and-a-half of such a weight that was on them, lifted, they were smiling from ear to ear. We all were, I mean, cheers, celebrations. Evan is finally free. He never should have been behind bars in Russia in the first place. And that comes with a little bit of frustration for us that just never should have happened.

But at this point, we're looking forward. We want him to be well. We're happy that he's free and we wish him the best.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He's a kind of stone cold reporter. He asked Putin in an official document for an interview, as he was being taken out of Russia, correct?

VIVIAN SALAMA: Part of the sham protocol as he was leaving was to request clemency directly to Vladimir Putin. And so in that request, he did ask for an interview. And today, the spokesman for the Kremlin responded and said that it is under consideration.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Okay.

VIVIAN SALAMA: So there you go. Mind you, I don't think they would even entertain the idea publicly if they thought he was guilty for a second but --

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes. They got to get their story straight. Either he's a spy or a journalist.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Obviously. And so -- but Evan is free and that's what matters.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes. Anne, could you talk a little bit about the geopolitical implications of this? I mean, obviously, we're -- you know, all Americans are excited about the release of Evan, the other two Americans, plus a group of Russian dissidents. But, you know, this is a -- Putin got a reward for essentially kidnapping, among others, an American journalist. I mean, there's a dark cloud here.

ANNE APPLEBAUM, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: There's a dark cloud. I mean, in a way, there were two things going on. There was the moral imperative to release Evan, to release the Russian dissidents, you know, and on the other hand, there's this moral hazard. You know, we let go a contract killer, a bunch of cyber criminals and several other spies. And in exchange, we really got hostages. I mean, you know, Gershkovitz obviously was not a spy, you know, and so there's a fundamental unfairness.

And, of course, the risk is now that Putin thinks, well, I can capture anybody at any time whenever I need to get somebody back. And that's the big risk here.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right. I mean, I have to -- I mean, everybody here has been a foreign correspondent and traveled extensively for their jobs. Elisabeth, I have to ask you, as someone who runs a large operation, sending reporters to Russia in the future?

ELISABETH BUMILLER, Washington Bureau Chief, The New York Times: No, we don't do that. Our Moscow bureau chief is in Berlin.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: So, no, it's a real problem. And, I mean, the one -- another positive thing that came out of this is that, and Biden -- it was interesting Biden said it, which was that allies matter. And I think he said that obviously with a nod towards former President Trump at the point at that he worked very closely with the German chancellor, with the Slovenians, right, you know, as he was about to drop out of the race.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are you suggesting that Biden was trolling Trump?

ELISABETH BUMILLER: I'm suggesting he, you know, he had a very good day at the end of a really bad month.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes. Steve, let me ask you about that. I mean, it's interesting. Biden obviously had been involved in trying to figure out this very complicated formula for the release of Evan and the others. He seems to still have it in some way, yes?

STEVE INSKEEP, Host, NPR's Morning Edition: Well, the good thing to remember, anybody who's president, if they're doing their job properly, we don't know 90 percent of what they're doing, and it turns out we did not know the details of this until it came out. It's also interesting who he brought along for the ceremony of arrival and for other occasions in the last several days. The vice president is with him again and again.

She made her own statement, which Republicans criticized as word salad. It was a little wordy, but the statement is very clear, actually. It's clear what she meant. She said, this shows the importance of having a president who understands diplomacy and the value of alliances. And so, in a way, that was almost a campaign stop for Vice President Harris to be at the center of the action.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: You don't often see them at 11:30 at night walking together across a tarmac and dark steamy night in Maryland. And I think that was a very striking tableau of the two of them.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: By the way, you, I mean, this is one of the criticism, you very seldom saw Joe Biden night, period, but he seemed, you know, very energized by -- I mean, it's what's done is done, but you know, he seemed to be very involved in the guts of this negotiation.

I have one question for Anne, who's a professional criminologist. I don't know if that's fair, but I'll just say it anyway.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Close enough.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, but a little criminology here about the response. There was a feeling that Putin was going to reward Donald Trump when he becomes president. Putin was assuming perhaps that Donald Trump would win, that Trump would be rewarded with this release. And I know there's a lot of speculation and among people who study Russia and the Byzantine ways of Russian foreign policy, there was this assumption. Does the timing surprise you at all?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, the only -- my only guess is that it may even be that Putin is now worried that Trump won't win. And I think he really wanted his contract killer, this guy, Krasikov, who was in Germany, he wanted him back.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Tell us what he did.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: He murdered -- it was a Chechen dissident, you know, in cold blood in the middle of the day, in the middle of Berlin, and was caught immediately.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: And Putin really wants him back because he's one of the, you know, top secret police agents.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He had sort of an honor guard at his arrival.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: That's right. No, he really wanted him back there. It's thought that he has some older connection with him, that he knew him from his, you know, KGB days. And he really wanted him back. And it may be that -- and the only way, by the way, he got him back was because Biden convinced Scholz to release him. So, the German chancellor had to make the decision to release him. And, originally, the Germans didn't want to do it because, you know, the guy was a murderer. He murdered someone in the middle of the German capital and they didn't want to let him go.

And so I think it was maybe the fear that if Trump would won that Scholz wouldn't release him. So, I think a lot of this was about him and, you know, this one particular person who he wanted back. And the rest of it is just sort of making other people happy and making the Germans -- there were a bunch of Germans who were released too.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right. It's fascinating because, come back to this point about allies, I think when Vice President Harris said that, I think that was top of mind, that the idea that what Joe Biden did was work the phones intensely with other foreign leaders in a way that those of us who've covered the first Trump administration would find unlikely.

STEVE INSKEEP: Well, he did call Ukraine, remember, just keep in mind.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That was a perfect phone call, the so-called perfect phone call.

Let's move to the behavior of another autocracy. I'm going to stay on the theme because of Anne's book. Iran is threatening very openly to seek vengeance on Israel. There's this expectation that some large scale action is going to happen sometime soon. The Defense Department just announced that America is moving more assets to the region, defensive shields over Israel, et cetera. I'm curious to know if you all think that this is the moment when things spin even more out of control in the Middle East.

I mean, Steve, you've been to Iran many times.

STEVE INSKEEP: A number of times. At a minimum, things get closer to spinning out of control. I have a memory of being actually at an earlier version of this table months ago, and we discussed this. We discussed how it was not in Iran's interest, as Iran saw it, to go into a wider war, and it seemed they would avoid it as long as they could.

Nevertheless, they have been struck in this way. Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, who we should remember was the political leader of Hamas, widely regarded as a terrorist group, but they killed him in Tehran at a particularly embarrassing moment.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: To make a point.

STEVE INSKEEP: To make a point, perhaps, but in any case, to kill him, and leaving Iran with no choice, really, but to respond in some way.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, there's no choice.

STEVE INSKEEP: Well, from the Iranian point of view.

And so the question is, if Iran still sees it in their interest not to engage in a much wider war with Israel, can they find some way to respond, as they have in some other recent incidents, that fall just a little bit short of an utter conflict?

ELISABETH BUMILLER: That's the expectation right now of, you know, national security officials in the United States. But, nonetheless, the Pentagon has moved -- is moving combat aircraft and warships into the region in preparation to perhaps do what happened, but maybe more so than happened in April.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, there was a -- this is round two of the missile --

ELISABETH BUMILLER: Yes, this is round two when there were all these drones and the U.S. and the allied -- Britain and other allies shot them down.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: U.S., Britain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, all were involved.

VIVIAN SALAMA: But it's important to also remember that this comes at a moment where the U.S. has been trying to broker a ceasefire agreement. Haniyeh was, in a large way, involved in those talks, as is Netanyahu and just Hamas, in general.

And to have this happen at this moment brings us further away potentially from achieving that goal, which Biden would love to see, which is to achieve that goal entirely --

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to come back to Anne in a second, but, Vivian, stay on that point, because it's interesting. You know, there's a lot of criticism in Israel or in national security circles in Israel that there's no love lost here. There's no sympathy for Ismail Haniyeh, who's responsible for murders of a lot of Israelis. But there is a belief among Netanyahu's many critics that he is trying to, for personal and political reasons, extend the war, and he's not paying attention to the hostages. There's more than 100 Israelis still being held hostage in Hamas.

Do you have any insight into the salience of this kind of idea that Netanyahu did this very much on purpose, in order to slow this down and get the confrontation with Iran that may be coming?

VIVIAN SALAMA: I certainly can't read Netanyahu's mind, but I can tell you that numerous U.S. officials who I've spoken to have speculated that that is his intention. Obviously, he has a lot of political battles at home that prolonging any kind of conflict might put off kind of him ultimately having to face the music.

But at the same time, you have this tit-for-tat that continues with Iran and Lebanon and Israel and whether or not it escalates into a full blown war. A lot of these parties don't necessarily want it to, but, ultimately, what it does do is delay a ceasefire.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: Biden himself said at Joint Base Andrews last night when the hostages were coming back, he was asked by the pool of reporters, does this -- how does this affect the negotiations, this assassination? So, it doesn't help, you know. And it was like -- it was a quick sentence full of meaning he's been through it a lot.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: But if I can add one other little piece of the story that's fairly new, is there is beginning to be evidence that the Russians are beginning to help the Iranians with new kinds of weapons. You know, these Iranian drones that are going to Russia are being to use in the war in Ukraine are being remade and remodeled and possibly sent back to Iran. So, it could be that if the Iranians are bolder than they used to be, it could be because they have more allies.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What a convenient way for me to introduce the main topic of this book, Autocracy Inc. The theory of which is that you are looking at a tacit alliance of China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, for starters. Talk about the risk here that if the U.S., let's say, in the coming hours, days, has to come in the defense of Israel, and maybe Jordan as well, if Iran is firing rockets and does something kinetic, as they say, against Iran, does that bring the U.S. closer into an open confrontation, even with Russia or other elements of this autocratic alliance?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: It's a network. It's not an alliance.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Network, not an alliance. Explain the difference.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: They don't have anything in common ideologically. So, this is theocratic Iran and communist China and nationalist Russia, and they don't have a special room where they meet and make decisions. They just cooperate when it's in their interests at particular moments.

And right now, Russia is very interested in confronting the U.S. and challenging the U.S. wherever it can because of the war in Ukraine.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, you say it's not an alliance, but it sounds like Russia would benefit from having Iran act as a proxy.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Yes, of course.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Okay. But you're saying that the coordination is looser than we think?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: They didn't sign a treaty somewhere where it says, you know, like the NATO treaty, I will help you in case of X. But are they interested in the U.S. being dragged into a war in the Middle East? Yes, they are.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, anything to drag America into any bad situation.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Anything that will keep them away from helping Ukraine.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Anne, one more question for you before we turn to domestic politics. On this question of the next hours, Lloyd Austin very publicly is moving American assets closer to where a fight could take place. Is Iran deterrable? I mean, is this the sort of action that would cause a rational or semi-rational autocratic regime to say, you know what, Biden seems upset, maybe I'm not going to go do the thing I'm going to do?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: I mean, I can't read their minds either, but I mean, yes, they --

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I wish you all could read minds.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Yes, I can read Netanyahu's mind.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, make it more an exciting show, right.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: No. I mean -- but, yes, I mean, the idea in all these cases is to raise the cost, you know, raise the cost for them, make them think about it harder. That's what we didn't do, by the way, in 2022, in the run-up to the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians weren't sufficiently armed. And, I mean, I think that was a lesson, that in each of these --

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That was also a problem of the Ukrainians not believing American warnings that Russia was going to --

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Also.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, but, right, the pathway was open, I guess.