The FRONTLINE Interviews

Daniel Baer

U.S. ambassador, OSCE, 2013-17

Daniel Baer served as U.S. Ambassador for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), based in Vienna, from 2013 to 2017.

This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 19, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Putin’s Road to War

The Putin Files

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The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister

… When the Arab Spring comes along—and let's start with Egypt, and we’ll end up with Libya—we don’t have to go into tremendous detail, but what's the play?What's the view of the Obama administration and America and France and Germany?What are we thinking about that part of the world and what's going on there?Let's really be specific to Obama to the extent that you can be.

… I think to some extent, we were learning in the moment the same lesson that Putin was learning, which is that dictatorships are only stable until they aren't.These autocracies that in some sense we had felt bound to because of various policy concerns for decades were crumbling far faster than anybody had predicted.Figuring out how to maintain and secure important policy interests, whether those were the interests in terms of protecting U.S. troops that were deployed in the region or the interests of protecting Israel and some hope of a path forward for a peaceful Middle East, we were trying, as ground was shifting very quickly, to think through the best way to do that.

I was working in the human rights bureau at the time, so obviously, on the one hand, there was something incredibly inspiring about people claiming rights that they had been denied for many years.On the other hand, even a human rights focus, even when you're focused on human rights, you know that massive instability, massive political instability and uprising is likely to be accompanied by violence and have dire consequences for innocent people.

I have to say I know there's a lot of criticism of various pieces of how we responded to the Arab Spring.From the inside, one of the things that I saw was I never had a doubt that my colleagues, even the colleagues with whom I disagreed, were all struggling to figure out how to in a good-faith way respond to something that was changing very quickly.That’s always a challenge in policymaking circles.When change happens quickly, you have to accelerate decision making.And obviously, the consequences of your decision making are also accelerated.I don't think everything was perfect, but I think there was near-perfect intent.

Putin criticized the United States and President Obama pretty extensively during this time period for the stance we took.He’s always looking to make some mileage out of what appears to be hypocrisy or whatever it is.Can you understand and relate to us what it was he as so critical about?

We always have to take a step back when we try to think about what Putin was thinking.We generally give too much foreign policy lens to things that would be foreign policy for us but are actually domestic policy for him.I see this much more in the context of the grand bargain that has always been the bargain at the center of Putinism, which is Putin came into power under murky circumstances at the end of the 1990s.The 1990s had been a tumultuous decade for Russians.The bargain that he offered was basically—and this wasn't a one-time bargain; it’s been a progressively tightening one—but was basically you give up a lot of your freedoms or at least your freedom to question how I make my billions and how my cronies make their money, etc.,and I will give you order.

To the extent that the Arab Spring saw the crumbling of a set of bargains about imposing order versus asking questions, that was a huge threat to him domestically, because to the extent that he had a political, ideological premise to his rule, it was, "I will deliver order through the control that I take."I think that explains at least some significant chunk of his negative reaction to the Arab Spring. …

Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown

Let’s talk a little bit about those protests in 2011 as he’s announced that he’s going to go back to being president and [Dmitry] Medvedev gives up and says, “He's going to be the president; I'm happy to go back to being prime minister.”… One Facebook post, and 30,000 people hit the streets.Talk to me a little bit about that.

Well, Bolotnaya Square, I think that was also part of the experience of the early 2010s for Putin that was a significant chapter.Obviously, Secretary [Hillary] Clinton’s calling out the fraud in Russian elections was a significant moment for him because it made him feel weak and exposed.But I think the Bolotnaya Square protests were significant partly because they were so organic in the sense that the fact that [it was] spontaneous protest, which he probably thought that in some sense the expansion of the Russian police state had made much less likely.The fact that that happened was probably a wakeup call.I think we saw another wave of protests this year in 2017 that must have rattled him quite a lot, too, and this time because they happened in so many cities across Russia.

As strong as Putin is in terms of controlling police and public spaces in St. Petersburg or Moscow, Russia is a big country, and the reach of the Russian state into some of the more remote areas is less iron-fisted.The fact that there were protests going in regional capitals, etc., must have been quite unsettling as well and in a way, I think, echoed the unsettlingness [sic] of Bolotnaya Square.

Tell me about the Hillary Clinton statement about the elections, its genesis, what she said and Putin’s reaction.

She made a statement. It was actually at the OSCE Ministerial [Council] in 2011. She made a factual statement.The OSCE had observed the elections; they had found fraud, and I think it was in about a third of the election polling places that they had observed that didn't meet standards.Secretary Clinton likes, devours facts.When we worked for her, she was one of those rare principals who read everything, seemed to read everything that was given to her in terms of briefing books and things like that.

My take on it is that Secretary Clinton was in a meeting that was focused on commitments to democratic processes and including elections.There had been an election in the preceding days that did not meet international standards, and she called it like it was.I don't think there was an intent to needle. I think it was an honest call on how we saw the elections.One of the things that I didn't fully appreciate before going into government is how much the United States as the United States you know, the OSCE would observe elections places, and our statement recognizing that we [the United States], too, saw the findings the way the OSCE saw it was a reinforcing, a legitimating statement.

I think for that reason, Putin found it incredibly offensive that Hillary Clinton would give further legitimacy to what the world already knew and what had been observed on the ground, which is that Russian elections are not free and fair, and they have not been free and fair.In addition to goosing the numbers in terms of fraud and ballot stuffing, there's abuse of administrative resources; there's obviously huge restrictions on opposition candidates in terms of their access to media and the rest.But I think the theater of legitimacy is something that's very important to Putin, and so anything that challenges that is a threat.

… I'm certain it’s not the only reason, or maybe even the main reason, why he got involved in our election in 2016.But it certainly is apparently a strong motivation and something that he didn't get over.

… Hillary Clinton also over the course of her time as secretary of state and over the course of her career has established a brand that is consistent with—that is not unique to her, but that is consistent with a long tradition of American foreign policy which does put a focus on the importance of democratic values and on the importance of the expansion of the reach of democracy in the world and the value that that has to the United States.

… That episode confirmed for Putin that if she were elected president, Hillary Clinton would be in line with the tradition of American foreign policy that puts a focus on values.A focus on values is a threat to him because in some sense, what he would like is either to rewrite the rules that have values written into them, whether that's the U.N. Charter or the Helsinki Final Act—he’d like to rewrite them, or at least have a kind of neo-Westphalian [idea that] what happens in any one country is only the business of that one country, which sounds good in theory, but we know from centuries of experience [that] what happens in one country actually has quite a lot of implications for other countries.

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term

…Help me understand what's happening to him between 2012 and 2014 at the beginning of the Sochi Olympics.What is happening to the outer—what do they call it, the near abroad, or whatever it is?

The near abroad.… A lot of people talk about Putin’s desire for respect, and, of course, most people want to be respected.That’s not a uniquely Russian trait; it’s not a uniquely Putin trait.People want to be respected.

But the kind of respect that we're talking about, I think, there are some differences, and I'm not convinced that even that isn't just a reflection of a domestic political formula.Part of another piece of the political bargain [was] I'll give you stability and lack of chaos; I will also give you national pride, even where I don’t deliver economic benefits, even though I don’t deliver a constantly rising standard of living, certainly not for the vast majority.

So to some extent, the respect for him he sees as something that he can project out to the people and say, “Look, Russia is powerful, and I have delivered that for you.”In some sense, even the desire for respect as a second-order desire that flows from this domestic political maintenance and maintaining his grip on power, I think Russia would be far more respected in the world right now if Putin’s policies were different.One could easily make that argument.It’s not like I think he’s particularly effective at getting respect.He gets playground-bully respect, but that's not actually the kind of respect most people want.

But in a society where he owns the television and 90 percent of the people see the news from his perspective, do they even know that it’s a kind of bully respect, or do they think it might be more legitimate and long-lasting than that?

That's a good point. It's probably a mix.… My sense is there are plenty of world leaders, even those who he considers to be ones more in his orbit, if you will, who recognize that they have to deal with him but that don’t necessarily want to.One of the measures of respect is when people seek you out rather than see you as a necessary component of getting by.

… I think it is accurate and often repeated that Putin’s great fear is that there will be a so-called color revolution in Russia.Particularly one of the things that became clear after Maidan in Ukraine, when it really did feel that partly because of the disappointment of the Orange Revolution, [was] that people were ready, once and for all, to try to turn the page, and this desire for an association with Europe was not strictly speaking only a desire for the political accoutrement of a formal arrangement.It was a desire for what people in Ukraine would describe as a European way of life, which is to say institutions that don’t rob you and police that you can trust and doctors and teachers that don’t extract bribes and so on and so on.

The possibility of success in Ukraine, the possibility of a free democratic European Ukraine, is one of the greatest fears that Putin has, because the progress of Ukraine exposes one of the great lies on which Putin’s regime rests, which is that Slavs or Russians are incapable of living in a Western-style democracy.It's a racist fear; it’s not true.Exposing that lie is a great threat because if the people in Kiev can have leaders that they choose and institutions that they trust, then it’s much harder to maintain the lie that people in Moscow can't, and that the only alternative is mass chaos, which is part of his selling points for his maintenance of power.

You talk about a behind-the-scenes preparation for an invasion or something just as Sochi and everything else is happening.We all know that December gets kind of nutty in Ukraine. Tell me the story.

… One of the things that I think was a turning point was these students had gone out to protest Yanukovych’s last minute volte-face where they thought he was going to sign the association agreement and Putin came in persuasively in whatever way he persuaded at the end and persuaded Yanukovych not to.Students went out and protested and when they were beaten late at night in the square, it was really the beating, the bloodying of these young people peacefully protesting a bad decision by their president.It was the beating that really catalyzed the tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands and eventually more than a million people protesting the [Ukrainian President Viktor]Yanukovych regime.

My sense is that Putin thought that Yanukovych was being incompetent by not controlling these protests.We know that the Russians worked very closely with Ukrainian secret services during the Yanukovych era and were probably trying to help or direct the Ukrainians on how to shut this down.Then Sochi happened in the latter half of Maidan.I think for Putin, Sochi was a very important way to display Russia for the world, as the Olympics is for many countries.He didn’t want to ruin that show, so to speak, especially after so many tens of billions of dollars of cost overruns.He had to get his money’s worth in order to keep taxpayers, Russian taxpayers, who had funded the graft and the rest of it from being too unhappy.

Then Yanukovych’s flight from the country in the latter part of February [2014]—he basically signed an agreement, and then the next day disappeared and flew to Russia.I think that created a moment of chaos.Putin doesn’t want any lack of control or unpredictability at home.He's quite willing to exploit it beyond his borders, and I think that the flight of Yanukovych did create a moment in which he saw an opportunity to try to maintain a tail by which to wag the dog in the form of Crimea.

I think what he did in Crimea is unlawful, unacceptable.Crimea has been turned into a dark, dark place that is essentially a black hole for human rights.It’s terrible.I think it was a tactically impressive move that he was able to basically invade a huge chunk of a neighboring country and do it in a way that made it difficult to figure out exactly what was going on until it was too late.

And I think once he saw the continued—the fact that Ukraine was not going to fall apart, that Ukraine was going to hold democratic elections, etc.,that made grabbing another chunk, having a little more to hold onto and to attempt to impose a violent veto on any kind of political direction that he didn't like another impulse.So he went into the Donbas and sent in very highly trained folks to take over town halls and police stations, to work with local thugs and pay them off.Here we are now, almost three years later, and we still have, in my view, a de facto Russian occupation of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine and an actual Russian occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula, of Crimea.

Thanks.The Toria Nuland phone call, what was the importance of that?

… It was Russian tradecraft to try to embarrass Toria, to embarrass the Ukrainians.At that moment, we were trying to make sure that the new leaders of Ukraine were able to—the coffers were literally almost empty, like can't-buy-milk empty, so there was a huge financial challenge in terms of making sure that Ukraine stayed solvent.

And then there was this political challenge of what do you do when the president disappears and the parliament has duly noted that the president has abandoned ship?How do you get to elections quickly that can be free and fair and provide a fresh start for the country?

When we talk about things like that, a giant political change, we usually think in grand terms of, oh, you know, there was this set of peaceful protests, and then there was a new government that came in.The mechanics of trying to get in three months from a guy abandoning ship to getting a new set of elections is really difficult.There's a lot of practical things.

Toria Nuland was my boss for four years. I've never worked with anybody who’s more operational. I mean, she's an incredibly practical person.Toria saw the risk that in a vacuum that the thing that people had been out in the streets protesting for could elude them, that things could break down and that there needed to be somebody to take charge and say, “OK, I'm going to help manage this during the interim,” and [then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arsenjy] Yatsenyuk obviously did that.There needed to be a set of candidates who wanted to be president to run in these elections.

No character is perfect.I have a great respect for the way that particularly during those three months, from the end of February until the presidential elections in the end of May, Arseniy Yatsenyuk held together a government and delivered free and fair elections, made it possible to get from A to B to the free elections of President [Petro] Poroshenko.

If you watch the Oliver Stone interview with Putin, … Putin just takes off after her [Nuland]. She got under his skin in some significant way.

He seems to be threatened by powerful women, and I won't presume to understand—he’s not the only insecure man to be threatened by powerful women.

Why would she threaten him, though?

Because Toria’s smart, and she knows exactly the game that he’s up to.She served in Moscow; she's no stranger to KGB tactics and tricks, and she knows that he’s not as strong as he pretends to be. He knows that she knows, and that's a threat.

It’s also fascinating that—and by the way, I think we have footage.She's passing sandwiches out after under strictly scary circumstance.When you say “operational,” do you mean beyond pragmatic, we’ll do this, we’ll do that?

No, I meant that in the sense of Toria’s one of those people who every time you finish a meeting, she says, “OK, you're going to reach out here and see if that—” I mean, she is an incredibly operational policymaker.She doesn't just sit around and talk; she tries to figure out a way forward.

The famed handing out cookies on the Maidan, which the Russians love to talk about— “Oh, she was giving cookies to the protesters.”What people forget is she was giving cookies to the police as well.She went out—you try a lot of different things in public democracy, and in retrospect, the way the Russians have manipulated that,… it wasn't the message she was trying to convey.

But I think there was this moment where people forget, we were very interested in making sure that Maidan itself remained peaceful, and that it remained a peaceful protest.One of the ways that we could show our support for both the protesters having the right to be out there peaceful[ly] protesting and the police being nonviolent in their monitoring of those protests was to go out and shake hands with both.And if shaking hands turns into handing out cookies, it wasn’t meant to show support for either side, but rather for the act of a peaceful protest being something that requires often police presence as well as the protesters’.

People have made fun of that.In retrospect, I don’t see anything wrong with the decision to do that.And many people thought— I mean, I went to Maidan in early December in the early days and walked around Maidan with Geoff Pyatt, who was our ambassador there at the time, and just talked to people: “Why are you here? Where’d you come from?”I can remember meeting a young guy.He was a medical student, not from Kiev, had driven through the night to be there and had just arrived a couple hours before.At the end of our conversation [we] said, “Where are you going to sleep tonight?,” and he said, “I didn't come here to sleep.”I think in the early days in particular, Maidan had a really magical feeling.People were fed up, but they were hopeful and optimistic, and you could feel that energy on the square.There were a lot of people who went to experience it and to show their support for the institution of peaceful protest, which is part of our history as well.

There's a moment where shots are fired, snipers killing protesters.It’s a bloodbath, some people have told us; 100 people die there. What does that tell you?

I think that was also another turning point.It was, in part because of the beauty—and it really is hard to overstate how impressive the organization of Maidan was just in a couple of weeks after it began.There was no alcohol allowed, and there were checkpoints as you went into the square where people would—and there was no drinking going on, because they realized early on that drinking could be the cause of fighting, etc.It was a way of—and people would be cooking pots of soup and sharing with friends over a wood fire, etc.

The desecration of what was a celebration as well as a protest with violence was incredibly traumatic, obviously because of the lives lost, and the lives lost were mothers and fathers and sons and sisters.I think that probably catalyzed for a lot of people that there was no going back, that this was a moment of transition.People still, when you talk to civil society activists or journalists who were there, it’s understandably still a very traumatic set of memories for them.

And if you walk the streets of Maidan and you can see where the people were walking up past the [Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna] Rada or up to Bankova [Street], and you can see the high ground and the buildings from which snipers were shooting on the rooftops, it is haunting.You can relive it. It's a haunting scene.

Does Putin cast a shadow over that? Are his fingerprints on it?Did he cause it? Did he order it?

His fingerprints are on the Yanukovych regime because the Yanukovych regime was effectively functioning as a client of the Putin regime.The corruption of the Yanukovych clique was linked to the corruption around the Putin clique.The Russian security services were working with the Ukrainian security services.So in the sense that training and an approach to crackdowns was something that is learned, sure his fingerprints are on it.I don't know at what point the exchange of orders, or the lack of exchange of orders, that precipitated the snipers shooting protesters, I don't know the exact chain of events that led to that, but certainly it was a product of a regime that had been under the Russian thumb for some time.

… But it’s also something that's just fascinating, if you're us, to watch him operationalize all of these elements so that Russia looks like the Soviet Union in some ways, right?

… There's some parallel between [Putin and] “I'm the great Oz.”It's to make us forget the fact that Russia’s economy is undiversified and stagnant; that it is now around the 15th largest in the world, smaller than Italy’s, about the size of Spain’s; that the GDP per capita is less of than that of Uruguay.When I hear people say, “Do you think Russia will be back in the G-8?,” no, not until they get out of Ukraine, including Crimea.But also in some sense it was, except for a couple of years maybe, where oil prices were super high, it was always a charity that we allowed them to be in the G-8.They're not one of the eight largest economies in the world.By a significant distance they're not.

… And one of the things that I often remark on is that this was particularly true a few years ago, still true today, when you talk to Russian diplomats, you can't talk for more than three minutes without them talking about a multipolar world.“We live in a multipolar world,” which of course is the code for saying it’s no longer a U.S.-dominated world; there's going to be multiple poles.

I always want to say, even though I don't think that’s true in a lot of ways, and I think even with the rise of China, the U.S. remains, even with the damage that Trump has done to our reputation, the U.S. remains de facto the world leader.But even let’s grant the Russian diplomats’ claim that we live in a multipolar world.A pole is, by definition, something that draws people.There's nothing attractive about the model of Putinism for other countries.There's nothing that draws them to that.

And there are other countries that have, I think, much more promise for the 21st century of being poles in a supposed multipolar world.Maybe we will have a multipolar world in some sense that there are different—that China and India are rising and having a dynamic diversification of their economies, huge political challenges internally, but much more interesting in some ways and much more promising in some ways than what we see in Russia.So I think part of what the Putin strategy is is creating the Potemkin superpower.

That's fabulous.Nonetheless, chaos and disruption can be fairly annoying.

Yes.Like I said, we have to take it seriously, especially because they have huge human consequences.I believe that the Russian establishment is concerned about NATO.I don't believe that they have reason to be concerned, and I think that in large part, the constant Russian complaints about NATO is just creating an opposition.Russia, the borders where there are NATO countries either near or adjoining, are the most secure ones that Russia has.This is one of the great tragedies of Russia’s behavior in the last few years in particular.

You know, Russia invades a neighboring country and seizes its territory.OK, it used to be, in fact, the foundation of the Helsinki agreement was that it was the Soviets who were really concerned about us in the West redrawing borders by force.They were concerned that we were going to try to take back their satellites.They wanted to have agreements about respecting borders, which makes sense.… If I gave you a map of the world and took all of the country names off and said, “Which country in this map should care most about respecting the lines?,” it would be Russia.They’ve got borders with a bunch of less than fully stable, autocratic regimes.They’ve got tens of thousands of kilometers.And they're the ones violating the rules that uphold the sanctity of borders and that borders shouldn’t be changed by force.

It’s not strategic; it’s not smart in the long run.In some sense, the hardest thing for a Russian strategist to admit would be that Russia actually benefits from NATO.NATO is good for Russia.NATO maintains stability on Russia’s west and that allows Russia to focus its attention on other places.As much as they complain about NATO, there's no threat that Poland is going to invade Russia, and they know that.I mean, they may not admit that, but deep down they know that.

Intervention in the U.S. Election

Help me understand why by the spring of 2016, the CIA, in some ways the FBI, are fully aware that there has been a Russian incursion into our election process.They maybe don't know absolutely it’s Russia, but they figure there's been Russian espionage in ’08.For espionage purposes, they're gathering information, and maybe they're activating it; we’ll wait and see by the summer what they're going to do with this information.Why is that happening? What's motivating Putin then?

I think that at a macro level, there's much more connection between the efforts to sabotage the U.S. elections in 2016 and to help the candidate that he thought does the most damage to America and to hurt the one that he thought would be most likely to support a traditional U.S. foreign policy in terms of supporting universal values around the world.I think that has much more to do with—for Putin, especially by 2016 and maybe not so much in 2002 because he hadn’t gotten so far down this path, but for Putin increasingly, it’s not clear that the world in which a European Union, which is founded on universal values and includes democratic institutions and is on the face of it open to anyone who signs up to those universal values, that an America that is also founded on the same values, that this, what we call the liberal world order that had held the peace for more than 70 years since World War II, that that is compatible with the kind of authoritarian cronyism that he has developed at home.

Any undermining of Europe, of European integration, of European stability, has value to him, because it becomes another centerpiece to show people the unattractiveness of the presumed alternative model and makes good copy for Russian state TV to say: “Look, there are countries being overrun by refugees. There are protests and racist violence. We don't have that here at home.”Ferguson, [Mo., and the riots that followed the fatal shooting of an African American man by a white police officer] was a touch point.The Russians loved to focus attention on Ferguson, because any time that we show something that they can portray as a fundamental weakness in our society is something that allows for good sales back at home.And I think—

House of Cards.

… It’s amazing to me how [the Netflix series] House of Cards has become less melodrama and more verisimilitude.But it’s amazing how much House of Cards resonates in former Soviet states.I saw Kevin Spacey speak at a conference in Ukraine last year, and people are bigger fans of House of Cards in Kiev than in Washington even.

Why?

I think the intrigue resonates.For us—at least for me, and maybe I'm just an idealistic, earnest American—I've been accused of worse—but it seemed over-the-top when it came out.And to them, it resonates as realism.People were—I can remember a young parliamentarian asking a question of Kevin Spacey: “Is it the good or the evil that wins out in the end?,” and the fact that that's what that show raises for them—by the way, Newt Gingrich was also at that meeting and asked Kevin Spacey how he played so compelling[ly] somebody who comes to Washington and loses their way, which was a memorable moment.… The question about the election.I think [they] see that as largely an opportunity for Putin to, first of all, do the playground bully, “See what I can do,” the gangster threat of "Look what I can do in your backyard," which is an exercise of destructive power, but one that you have to take seriously.And there may be some personal animus toward Hillary Clinton, the hope that by embarrassing her, undermining her, elevating a guy who I don't think he ever really liked but saw as challenging American norms and democratic principles, that he could spin some chaos.

Now, my personal view is that the Russians probably see their intervention in our election as the most successful Russian intelligence operation since the end of the Cold War.I think they maybe surprised themselves at how successful it was.I think they didn't need to get Trump elected to succeed, in their view; they just needed to sow doubt and confusion.And obviously, one of the challenges is that I believe very strongly that we need to get to the bottom of exactly how and the various ways in which the Russians intervened in our election and to understand that so we can protect our elections in the future and to understand what happened.

Obviously, there's also a criminal question about whether Americans colluded with them, and we must pursue those investigations.At the same time, I understand the point that, when I've testified for Congress or in other contexts that people have made, that the internal disagreements that we're having as these investigations go forward is exactly what Putin wanted.He wanted to sow discord in our democracy.We can acknowledge that.I don't think that's a reason not to pursue the investigations.But I think in some sense, it’s not just on Election Day that there was a success.There's a success in the sense that our political establishment is still stricken by the consequences of both the Russian intervention in our election itself, as well as the lack of clarity about who and what may have helped and exactly how it worked.

This is all a very strong argument for, in addition to a special prosecutor to explore the criminal question, there needs to be a fact-finding—an impartial, bipartisan, nonpartisan fact-finding commission to lay out so that citizens can be informed about what exactly happened.And [in] an election that turned on only 70,000 votes across four states, we have to acknowledge the fact that any one of a number of factors could have produced a different outcome.

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term

There's a couple of things I've missed as we marched through the narrative.With some hesitancy, I'm going to ask us to go back to Ukraine for just a moment, and then we’ll come back up to where we are.… Where are you on that continuum of people who advocated or didn't advocate the United States taking a more robust role in the defense of the Ukrainians in military terms?

In terms of the question of so-called lethal defensive weapons, anti-tank weapons, etc.,I was part of the group, the set of people inside who was advocating for transferring weapons that would allow them to defend themselves against Russian tanks, because we saw Russian tanks in the Ukraine.I would never have acknowledged this while I was in government, but now I will say I was part of the group that advocated for that.

I will say also that I think this is a perfectly good example of a policy question that has no right answer.The burden—I mean, the people—and I think if I could show the American people the discussions that we had, I think people would be proud and say that's exactly how a democracy is supposed to work, that you have a real discussion about a tough issue, and people on both sides present their opinions.I think the burden for those of us who were advocating for more equipment, more kit, is to be able to argue compellingly that that would not itself simply produce more equipment and more kit from the Russians coming in on the other side.

The burden for the people arguing against it is to be able to convince compellingly that the mere giving of kit is a provocation when it didn't take any provocation of that sort for the Russians to invade in the first place.I can argue both sides.I came down on one side, but I can argue both sides, and I think this is what you hope that you have good policymakers sitting around—not sitting around, but sitting around a table and trying to hash through and make the best decision possible.I don’t see this as a slam dunk.There are other ones where I do see as a slam dunk, but I see this as people of good faith and good wisdom can disagree on this.

… I have sympathy for the oft-repeated [line] that Putin pushes the knife until he hits bone.I think that that's true. He is somebody who tests boundaries.… I think the moral case—you have to be careful, because you can justify a lot of things morally that end up having unintended consequences.But I think the moral case is a strong one, that when there is a people who are under attack and invasion through no fault of their own, through only because they wanted to build a more democratic, rights-respecting society, and they are willing to defend themselves but unable to, I think it’s very defensible to say we should do what we can to help them defend themselves.

We don’t necessarily have an obligation to risk our own troops, but certainly if we can, [we should] help them.It wasn't that they said, “Come save us.” They said, “We're happy to push back against this invasion ourselves, and we need your help.”

One of the things that I worry about the debate over lethal weapons—one of the things I worry about is what gets lost in that is we did do quite a lot.We did a lot of other things, including particularly around communications, because one of the problems was the Russian forces were using UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] as targeting devices and were able to—I mean, the Ukrainian forces were, in the early days, using cell phones to communicate between [them], and those were getting picked up by the Russians.

So secure communications, anti-battery radar, those are important things that we did deliver and that did help make the Ukrainian forces more effective on the front lines.People don’t realize that Ilovaisk, in the summer of 2014, was the largest land battle in Europe since World War II.

The U.S. Response to Russian Measures

So now let's go back—thank you for that diversion and hitting reverse.Another place where inaction is a kind of policy choice, again for the Obama administration, is knowing that it’s the Russians just before Wiki[Leaks], let’s say July of 2016.Nonetheless, the president and the White House really don’t seem to have a taste for, early on, identifying the Russians and saying to the American people, “This is happening in this election.”As you looked at it from afar, afar I guess, or as afar you ever get, why do you think the president and even the intelligence services in some ways didn't more aggressively let the rest of us in on the secret?

I think that knowing what we know now, it’s very hard to put ourselves back in time to what seems sensible then.I think that probably nobody thought then that the Russians were going to be successful at throwing an American election.That wasn't a real fear that people had.In some sense, there may have been a sense that to focus attention on it gives it more power than it actually has, and certainly gives it the power to be manipulated in our domestic context and have people accusing the president of politicizing intelligence and using it to boost his favorite candidate or things like that.

Obviously in retrospect, there's a great number of people who have said, “I wish we had known more sooner.”But I assume the answer that the president would give is that it didn't seem like the pluses outweighed the very significant potential minuses in terms of protecting the democratic process.I think a president’s responsibility in that case is to protect the democratic process and to make sure that she or he is being careful not to disrupt that process, especially in the campaign that was as unconventional—where so many of the norms that normally protect our process had already been damaged by an unconventional candidate who had stretched the boundaries of decency and rhetoric, etc.

It wasn’t like everything was proceeding apace and this was the one thing that was out of the ordinary.I assume that the answer that he would give would be he thought about it and he was worried that it would get used to further undermine the democratic process rather than to protect it at that point.

Putin and Trump

… What does Putin see in Trump after the victory?What did Trump do during the unfolding of it?“Hey, Russia, go get Hillary’s emails,” whatever it was.What does Putin see in that character?

I don't know what he sees, and I imagine he probably has a developing view just like many people do.I think that the attractiveness of Trump was the way that even before he became president, it was obvious that he was attacking democratic norms.I hope one of the silver linings of this last, for me, incredibly painful 12 months of watching the attack on these norms coming from now the president of the United States is that it reminds us how much those norms actually are crucial to the ongoing function of our democracy.Unfortunately, they're much harder to build than they are to destroy.But I think there are a greater number of people who appreciate the preciousness and fragility of those, and I hope that that will be a foundation at some point going forward.

I think Putin, by contrast, probably greatly appreciates that.… I mean, I saw Putin trolling Trump on Twitter by the Russians announcing they would offer political asylum to James Comey.He doesn't like Trump.He hated Hillary, whether for specific political episodes of their past interaction or for what she represented, which is not something that she has exclusive claim to.There could have been a Republican candidate who represented that, too.I assume that he wouldn’t have been terribly happy with a Mitt Romney presidency, either.

But unfortunately for us, at least in recent memory, the degree to which a foreign power could count on one or the other of American candidates being less American on the world stage was never a real differential.If [Sen.John] McCain had won in 2008, McCain would have likely taken a policy that was consistent with Democratic and Republican administrations since the end of World War II in terms of building out the liberal world order.And if Hillary had won in 2016, I think that would have also been true.Unfortunately in this case, we have a president who has called [that] into question, and I think that is something that Putin finds useful.

Did you by listening and watching have a sense of what Trump thinks of Putin?

… I think probably one of the things that led Trump to say so many, in the American context, odd things about this Russian autocrat who seems to only cause trouble and never be helpful in the world, to say these oddly admiring things, is that probably Trump thought he could do deals with him.

That's perhaps the most dangerous impulse that Trump has in the foreign policy context, because the huge portion of the investment that we have made from Truman and Eisenhower to Reagan and Clinton and Bush and Obama has been in investing in a world in which foreign policy is not mere deal making and in which you can make frameworks for interaction and cooperation that last more than a single episode and are durable over time and that can create trust.Because we've found that even as the most powerful country in the world, it’s far less efficient to have to force people to do what you want, or to have to extract a deal from them at every turn, than it is to create frameworks for cooperation where you get out of zero-sum thinking and can actually have win-win arrangements that work over time, and where you trust that even if [in] one interaction things are slightly less good for us, we know there will be a second interaction that follows, and a third, where things are better.

Destroying that and reducing foreign policy to deal making will be incredibly damaging for U.S. foreign policy interests, not only in terms of international stability and building the kind of world that can be peaceful and take on the challenges of the 21st century but also for our economic well-being, because a great benefit in the post-World War II era of our working to create these cooperative arrangements with other countries has been that American products and companies are able to function around the world.

Some of the building out of the rules-based order is less sexy than people think.It's not human rights treaties; it’s agreements that allow businesses to do business overseas and to have their contracts enforced.So I think this is a real threat.I think the impulse that Trump has that potentially inspires his affections for Putin is the same impulse that could lead him to maybe even inadvertently undermine a great deal of the global infrastructure that American blood, sweat, tears and dollars has built over the last almost eight decades.

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