Russia's War

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

And this is Radio Atlantic.

The sound of war, not heard in this European capital since World War II.

This is what Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed on Ukraine.

It's been five days since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

We're here to try to make sense of the crisis and to understand what might happen next.

In this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic, I'm joined by two of our writers, Ann Applebaum and Tom Nichols, who also happen to be two of the world's preeminent experts on Russia, on autocracy, and on nuclear weapons.

We spoke Monday afternoon at a live event.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of the Big Story.

We have a very serious subject to talk about today, Russia's war against Ukraine, and we're going to jump right in.

I just want to introduce very briefly briefly my two guests today.

The first is Ann Applebaum, staff writer of The Atlantic, and of course, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, one of the preeminent scholars and commentators on Russia and Ukraine, all of Eastern Europe and autocracy, as many Atlantic readers know.

And we have with Ann Tom Nichols, contributing writer at The Atlantic, one of the country's preeminent experts on Russia and on nuclear policy, which we're going to be talking about today at some length.

Tom just finished 25 years on the faculty of the U.S.

Naval War College.

Congratulations on your

graduation.

Let's call it graduation.

And Tom, of course, is the author of many great Atlantic pieces and also the Atlantic newsletter Peace Field.

And

those of you who haven't been reading Tom, you ought to subscribe to that newsletter.

It's been very, very valuable, especially in the last couple of weeks.

So let me just jump right in and maybe we could start with Anne

and

just ask you to situate us

five days into the

full-on invasion.

Of course, we all know that the invasion was happening incrementally for quite a while.

But tell me.

where we are

in just a minute, what the situation looks like from your perspective, and give us something that has surprised you so far about the course of events.

So thank you, Jeff.

And it's great to be here, especially with Atlantic readers.

I mean, I think almost everything has been surprising about the last five days, at least if you were listening to the prognoses, particularly from experts in the Russian military.

What most people expected was going to happen was that the assault on Kiev would take a day or two.

Within four to eight hours, the country would be pacified.

We now know that Putin had a very clear plan.

He sent saboteurs into the capital city with the goal of creating a kind of fake coup d'état and taking over the government.

Instead, what's happened is that the Ukrainians, who were almost not part of the conversation in the run-up to the war, you know, we were talking about Russia and America and Biden and Putin and NATO and NATO expansion and so on.

The Ukrainians suddenly appeared as the main actors.

President Zelensky, who

did not have much

fame or reputation abroad,

he spent his career as a comic actor before being elected president, has made a series of incredibly brave and impressive videos telling Ukrainians, I am here, my colleagues are here, the prime minister is here, we all are here, and we're going to fight for Ukraine.

The Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian territorial army, which is civilians,

has blocked the invasion of most of the cities.

They've stopped tanks on country roads.

At the same time, the Russian army has been not what people expected.

We thought we were dealing with the most professional troops.

Instead, it's clear that there are a lot of conscripts.

They don't quite have the right logistics.

The tanks are running out of petrol.

And the invasion is not going the way that Putin expected.

And

as the result of this incredible show of bravery on the part of Ukraine, we've had an amazing, almost, it feels like almost as if history is speeding up

the rapid transformation of German foreign policy as the Germans turned on a dime and having refused to send weapons to Ukraine in the run-up to the war suddenly said, yes, we will.

The European Union, which, I mean, who knew they even had the ability to do this, is sending fighter jets, which as far as I know have already arrived.

They're either on their way or already in Ukraine.

They come from former

eastern states that still have some ex-Soviet planes that can be immediately flown by Ukrainian fighter pilots.

The mood has turned in the international community and in the transatlantic community in particular, very fast, so fast that we have the harshest sanctions on Russia that I could have imagined there are some people, and maybe we'll get into this, who think they're not enough, but we have blocked the Russian Central Bank

from accessing foreign reserves.

Russian markets are crashing.

All kinds of companies are bailing out of Russia, including British BP, British Petroleum, and Shell.

And so we have this accelerating different kinds of sanctions from different and different reactions from companies all over the world.

And very rapidly, Russia is being made into a pariah state.

And that was not the expectation a week ago.

Tom, I want to turn as quickly as we can to this subject of

nuclear threats,

because

Putin has not been shy about

invoking

the existence

of Russia's nuclear arsenal.

But before I do that, just if you could add on to something

to what Anne has been talking about,

things have not gone the way Putin would have wanted them to go.

Do you anticipate that they will continue to go in Ukraine's favor?

Or are we actually

motivated in our reasoning to think that Ukraine is doing better than

we expected, but not doing that, not doing all that well, considering?

I mean, where do you think we're heading in terms of Ukraine's ability to keep withstanding Russian military force?

Yeah, you know, I want to believe that,

but it is so, from a military standpoint, it's so counterintuitive to believe that the Ukrainians can keep holding out if the Russians decide to come in heavy.

They haven't come in heavy yet, in your mind?

No.

They have not gone the full Grozny or Aleppo

yet.

And I think that was part of their part of Putin's miscalculation is that he thought, I mean, I think, first of all, I think Putin made

the will be greeted as liberators miscalculation and that, you know, our opponents are corrupt and weak and decadent, and they will simply flee the Capitol

to avoid this make-believe coup that Anne was talking about.

I mean, there was a lot of script writing.

I was talking with a colleague the other day saying that this is almost a case study in making every possible strategic mistake you can make.

script writing your opponent's reactions, believing that your opponent will only do things that are congenial to your planning,

believing that your opponent is not as motivated as you are.

I mean, it's just a whole laundry list of really bad strategic errors.

But with all that said, at some point, if the Russians

wanted to

do the full World War II and

roll through Ukrainian streets, they can.

But Putin's now in a trap because the one thing he didn't want, he didn't expect, is to have all of this footage of Russian atrocities and crying fellow Slavs.

I mean, this is a really important thing.

These aren't Georgians.

These aren't Syrians.

These aren't Chechens.

These are brothers and sisters.

And

that's what's making this different.

And so this initial miscalculation has led to a situation where, from a military point of view, we can say, yes, if the Russians really want to do this and kind of flatten everything in their path, they still have that ability to do that.

The question is, what would they at this point?

Because they didn't count on having to do it.

So it leads me to, you know, the other counterintuitive thing to say, which is that if you'd asked me three days ago, I wouldn't think we'd be sitting here on day five saying, wow, they're still alive and Kiev's holding and Zelensky's still

putting out statements.

So

this can go on for a while if the Russians

are loath to just level whatever's in their path.

Now, this actually links back to the problem of nuclear threats, because I'm wondering now

if Putin, I mean, Putin makes nuclear threats.

I don't want to minimize it and say, oh, you know, it's just what he does.

Anytime a Russian leader, anytime somebody with thousands of weapons points at the United States makes

that kind of bearing of his teeth, you have to pay attention.

But I wonder, too, if that's a shield that he's trying to put in front of himself in anticipation of doing things in Ukraine that are really going to horrify us.

Let me jump back to Anne for a second.

We'll come back to the nuclear question.

But Anne, do you agree with Tom that the Russians have not actually done all that is within their power to suppress and subdue Kiev in particular?

And could you frame this a little bit historically in terms of Grozny and Aleppo, two recent examples, maybe explain a little bit about Russian tactics in those places

and try to answer the question,

what has kept them from going all out if you think that they haven't gone all out already?

So they haven't gone all out in the sense that they have not carpet-bombed Kiev and burned it to the ground, which is what they did in Grozny, and it is what they did in Syria.

Grozny is the capital of Chechnya.

Yeah, sorry, Grozny is the capital of Chechnya, and that was how they ended the Chechen War.

They killed hundreds of thousands of people.

They burned everything to the ground.

It was a charred ruin.

I mean, it was like a World War II photograph.

And my guess is the same as Tom's, that, you know, Putin is actually going on Russian television and saying, you know, this is Russia.

You know, he's not just saying they're fellow Slavs.

He's saying, this is a Russian city.

These are Russian people.

And I'm retaking it for Mother Russia.

And to

burn this historic city with the ancient churches and

murder tens or hundreds of thousands of people would, you know, I mean, it would undermine many of his claims about the purpose of this war in the first place.

And so that is my guess as to what they,

you know, as to why they haven't done it.

Obviously, they can do it.

And actually, yesterday and today, they have been using these very imprecise

multiple bomb, these kind of flying

cluster munitions on Kharkiv.

And

someone just told me they may be doing it in Kiev now, but they were doing it in Kharkiv already.

And they're beginning to kill civilians.

I'm also told, by the way, and this is something we're not seeing because there are no reporters there, that there has been some street fighting in Mariupol, which is the town just on the border

in the east.

But I also have to say that if the Ukrainians are going to do street-by-street fighting,

then this will be very long and very bloody and is very hard to say how it will come out.

But so anyway, to sum up, I agree they haven't done this extremely brutal form of fighting.

Thank God.

And what does worry me now is that they are running out of other ideas.

I mean, it's very strange.

It's already day five.

The plan, there were a couple, it was clear there were a couple of different plans.

There was a plan to land paratroopers.

There was a plan to have a coup d'état.

None of that has worked.

And what worries me is that they're left with only these very extreme options.

Tom, let's go to the most extreme option.

And let's talk about this very carefully, obviously, because it's too serious to talk about

in a non-measured way.

But

you're an expert on the Cold War.

You're an expert on Soviet nuclear policy, Russian nuclear policy, and American nuclear policy.

It's notable that Putin has twice, once with an allusion to his strategic arsenal, and once

that was rather direct

by moving his nuclear alert status to a higher degree.

What is the threat to Ukraine?

And what is the threat to the West, to the United States and Western Europe?

Can you foresee any situation in which Vladimir Putin decides that the nuclear option is a plausible option?

I don't in Ukraine.

Because of what Anne was talking about, this is in his mind, Russia,

as a city of Slavs and churches.

And I, you know, I, I mean, there are, Putin is not

Stalin.

And, you know, there will, there are, I don't know where the internal limits on his behavior are, but I assume there are internal limits on what people around him will actually

allow or do.

Probably those lines are pretty far away, but

I think,

you know, as you said, we need to think about this responsibly.

I think there's like

most

leaders and most military leaders, and we know this from the Soviet experience, they talked a good game about nuclear weapons, but after the Cold War, when we talked with them, they often made it clear, talking to these former Soviet generals and marshals, that they were no more willing to go near that

than we were.

What I worry about is

a combination of things.

One is that if this goes so badly that Putin decides that the only thing he can do to recover some sense of national unity

and to save himself

is to scapegoat the West somehow.

and to say, you know, these Germans, you know, this remarkable turn in German foreign policy.

These Germans are, you know, neo-Nazis that are providing dangerous weapons that are, you know, they're collaborating with nuclear.

I mean, he's, he's really been talking about, he's really been using this Soviet era, you know, banderists and Nazis and neo-Nazis.

I mean, really weird stuff coming out of him in the past five or six days.

And to set up some kind of confrontation with, because this is the Soviet playbook, set up a confrontation with the United States somewhere else to get people's minds off of what he's doing in this current war.

How he would do that without a central front.

You know, we always worried about Berlin and the central front.

I don't know how those pieces move together, but I worry that that temptation on his part will be linked to some kind of black swan event that we can't foresee, to some kind of accident, misidentification, random pot shot across a border,

some kind of triggering event that we can't see.

And I think that

the recent nuclear alert,

I'm surprised that he went for it so fast, but Jeff, as you know, I wrote a piece before the last thing I wrote saying this is one of the things he will do,

likely to do, and he did it.

I just didn't count on him doing it three days, two days into the war.

But

I worry that he then decides that somehow this is the only way out of this

as to create, not because he's looking for a nuclear conflict, but to just throw the dice and to move this to a, you know, chest-thumping confrontation with Washington

that then somehow gets out of control.

When you increase the alert status of your nuclear weapons, now I don't know what he's actually done on the ground, and the Pentagon's been looking for this because he can say it.

He can say, go to a special combat regime.

And, you know, the guy, the two guys he was talking, the chief of the general staff and the defense minister both went, okay.

As far as we know, nothing's happened on the ground yet to indicate they've gone to that.

Does that mean that they're treating him?

The possibility that they're treating him the way the national security apparatus often treated Trump, which is a yes, great idea, we'll go for it as soon as we can, and then hoping that Trump

forgot that he asked for something outlandish.

I mean, is there any possibility that there's that people inside the national security apparatus in Russia know that Putin is a little bit

unstable and extreme at this point.

I don't think so, but I don't think it's impossible that they might be slowrolling him just a bit.

You know, the defense minister is a really interesting guy.

He's the only guy that's been in the Kremlin in every administration since 1991.

He is kind of the ultimate Kremlin survivor,

this Sergei Shoigu.

And he's, you know, he's a pretty wily character to have survived in Kremlin politics for 30 years.

So, but I don't think it's, I mean, with Trump, it was a different matter where, you know, people literally take things off his desk and say he'll forget about it.

But it may, and it could just be that Trump is, excuse me, that Putin is consciously just engaging and signaling and saying to these guys, I'm going to declare this thing, but I understand we're not going to, you know, move a lot of stuff around.

But once you say it, you know, again, there are, you put things in motion that are inherently risky.

And, you know, we can't pretend that he didn't say it, but I don't think we should be like, you know, clutched with panic or fear right now.

He's done that before, and the Biden administration did exactly the right thing by basically ignoring it.

Let me ask you a very specific, short question, and then a very big, general question for both of you.

The short question is:

do you have any sense of how influential his advisors are over him?

Or is this really a one-man show?

I mean, the defense minister could be a wily character, but he could be ignored by this leader.

Yeah, I mean, I think Anne's better tuned into that than I am.

I'll say on the security side,

when you humiliate the head of your own foreign intelligence service on national television, it tells me that these are not, you know, you're not getting a lot of good information from

your inner circle.

And the staging of these meetings, you know, are just

maybe I'm kind of lapsing too much into the old Kremlinology of looking at staging and who's sitting where and all that stuff.

But the staging of these meetings has been weird.

I mean, there is a, it's almost visually noticeable how isolated he is.

And if you ask me right now, who's the guy whispering in his ear who really can, you know, that he who does he call at 11 o'clock at night and say, you know, Boria or Serge or, you know, whoever, and I don't know who that is, I can't say with certainty that I know who that is.

And do you have any insight in that?

So the only insight I have is that even a few years years ago it was possible to kind of know people who knew people who talked to putin in moscow and you could kind of get some information or some sense about it and in the last two years during the pandemic that has stopped

he has been living in almost total isolation he has required anyone who's coming to see him to be in quarantine for two weeks before they meet in person um he you know you're now seeing him sitting at the end of these very long tables um That is

presumably related to COVID as well, although I've had a momentary question in my head as to whether he's not afraid of assassination or something else as well.

He is much more isolated than he's ever been.

I mean, I think one of the reasons why he seems to have so completely misunderstood Ukraine is that he's not reading anything about Ukraine or no one's telling him about Ukraine.

And so that

means that we're in a very peculiar situation.

So I think we don't know who's talking to him in the middle of the night, and I'm not sure anybody knows.

Very Howard Hughes.

It's very Howard Hughes.

And this is different from what he was before, just to be clear.

I mean, he did have, he was part of conversations.

People did go and see him.

There was interaction between him and lots of different members of the Russian elite and different parts of it.

And that seems to have stopped.

You know, as a friend of mine said, this may be the one political impact of COVID that nobody predicted was the isolation of Putin.

That's very interesting.

Let me ask you this.

The very large question is, you're both experts on Soviet leadership and Russian leadership after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Which leaders from history

does Putin resemble right now?

The related question is, you've already alluded to it, and is he decomposing in some way?

Is there some level of disintegration or cognitive decline or moving into some sort of fantasy realm?

And do you have insight into how the Soviet system dealt with that in the past?

And let's just, for shorthand, let's just call it the Soviet system, even though you might want to talk about leaders who came after the Soviet Union.

Tom, do you want to go first?

Yeah, well, in the Soviet system, the way they compensated for it was with decentralized leadership.

That even with things like nuclear release, there were

their procedures for nuclear release were actually more complicated than ours.

In our system, the president says it, the SEC dev says that really was the president speaking, and Stratcom does it.

Their system, there was a kind of army-kgb party leadership interlock among those three parts of the three leaders on the Politburo, and it was actually a little bit more cumbersome for them to do this stuff.

If you're asking me who he resembles in

Soviet history,

you know, he it's somewhere between it's like Andropov in the last days of dialysis.

I don't want to say Stalin.

I mean, he's not a world history, Putin's just not that big a person.

But the most dangerous period in the Cold War, in my view, and I keep having this kind of gut feeling about it, was 1983.

and early 1984 when Andropov was just sick and he was cut off from everybody and he had given up on relations with the West, particularly after the downing of the Korean airliner.

The outpouring of anger about that, and this is kind of tracks with what we're seeing in Ukraine, the outpouring of anger after the Soviet downing of that aircraft really shocked Andropov.

And he said, oh my God, the world really doesn't, you know, we are surrounded by enemies.

The world really hates us.

And he, at that point, he gave up, according to all the memoir literature and archival say, he just gave up and said, okay, you know, conflict with the West now is just inevitable and we're headed down that road.

So, you know, if I had to pick someone as an analogy, I'd say that.

But I want to add one other thing.

People keep talking about Putin's rationality.

You know, you don't have to be insane or, you know, gibbering to be irrational.

The thing I worry about most is that, like

people become irrational, he's capable of functioning and he can prioritize decisions, but he's not processing information in any way that's attached to real.

to real life.

I mean, and this is what you see when leaders become, like when Saddam Hussein said, you know, the allies are crossing the line of departure.

And Saddam goes, no, they're not.

It's just not happening.

I think he's reaching that point of just not being able to process.

And I don't know how long he's been there.

You know, Lizanne is saying, maybe this has been going on for, you know, at least two years, but I think he has reached the point of he literally is not capable of processing information in a way that's tethered to events and reality.

And that's really worrying me.

Ann, you're an expert on Stalin, among other figures.

Does Putin rise to Stalin levels?

No, I mean, I agree with Tom.

He's also not

yet been a mass murderer.

He hasn't established a concentration camp system with millions of people in it or anything like that.

Funny enough, I was going to pick Andropov too, but for different reasons.

Andropov is actually Putin's idol.

He's built a couple of statues to him.

He dedicated a kind of painting and a sort of icon to him in the FSB building in Moscow very, very early on.

I think it wasn't even when he was president.

It was before that.

It was when he was either FSB chief or prime minister.

And there are lots of rumors in Moscow about his connections to Andropov.

They might be made up, but he clearly has a special relationship to Andropov, at least in memory.

And what's interesting about it is that Andropov's obsession, I mean, obsession, was with the power and importance of democracy movements, street movements, dissidents,

you know, the language of dissent.

Andropov was the Russian ambassador to Budapest in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian Revolution.

This was one of the great

revolutions against the Stalinist system.

And Andropov witnessed that as the Soviet ambassador.

Eventually, the Soviets sent tanks in to clean it up.

But the Hungarian Revolution started with a very small thing.

It was these kind of academic discussion groups.

And then they bought academic discussion groups into the street, and then like the workers joined them, and then the police joined them, and then the military joined them, and then you had a revolution.

And so Andropov had this obsession about it.

And actually, the 1980s were one of the times of the greatest crackdown on dissent in Soviet history.

So there was the Stalin period, obviously, as a special case, but then there was a thaw.

The 60s and 70s were a little bit lighter.

You know, people could have private conversations without feeling so much fear.

There was a little bit of distant literature, it was kind of publicly available.

Andropov ended that.

He did this major crackdown.

He eliminated dissent

because he had this theory that even little tiny things that you think don't matter, little independent newspapers or magazines can blossom into something big.

And it seems to me that Putin is following that same line.

I mean, he has now, aside from what he's doing in Ukraine, he has now completely shut down almost every civic organization in Russia, almost every independent organization, including apolitical ones,

organizations for mothers of soldiers, Memorial, which is a historical society

that worked on the past.

He's shut down almost all independent media.

So there's almost no you know, there's no, it's not just that there's no opposition,

there's no even language of, you know, anything different from what you see on state television.

As a result of which I should say something like

one Russian that I know estimated that only about 20% of Russians even know there's a war in Ukraine.

So

it's not being discussed on Russian television.

This is also relevant to what we were saying before.

It's such a taboo war that it's not even there.

So I think he's that.

And then the question is whether he veers into something even crueler and more terrible.

But right now, he thinks of himself as the person who's stopping Lycan Dropoff, stopping everything before it starts, before it turns into the street revolution that he's the most afraid of, that he saw in Ukraine in 2014, that he almost he feared in Moscow in 2011.

Right.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be back with Ann and Tom in a moment.

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You know, you make an interesting point about what people know.

We have to be very careful not to assume that the Russian population is understanding or getting information the way we're getting information.

And that's a very important

definitely not.

Put aside Russian leadership.

Here's something I never thought I would say, but I have a feeling I'm about to assign a Andropov profile, which is not something that anybody would imagine in 2022, but he seems to be the sort of the man of the moment.

Can I add one thing about Andropov that's also interesting?

Andropov had great faith.

He believed so much in the power of these movements that one of the strategic errors he made in the early 1980s was that he really thought that public dissent in the West was going to help the Soviets squash a lot of, you know, Reaganism and,

you know, rearming Europe and

all of that stuff.

That he, he really, like, he gives, they're now declassified speeches where, you know, he says, okay, comrades, well, we really thought we were going to keep these nuclear weapons out of Europe through, you know, the peace movement and people power.

And as one Russian historian later told me, said there were, he was one of the people and people surrounding him who were genuinely shocked when Reagan wins a landslide because they had in 84, because they had just

kind of internalized the notion that what they see as public dissent was just going to be fatal to the regime.

So they not only worried about it for themselves, but they actually thought it was very powerful,

you know, overseas.

And I think, you know, Putin's got to be flipping out seeing if he's seeing, and this is another question, is he seeing the number of people that are congregating in London and Barcelona and Toronto and, you know, wherever?

But I just don't know.

Yeah.

Two short questions, and I'm going to go to, we have more than 100 questions from our audience.

We're not doing 100.

Many of them are on the same theme, so I'm going to try to bunch a couple.

But before I do that, Anne, could you answer this question?

You've written

very interestingly about the formation of Ukrainian national identity.

There are many surprising things here.

We have a piece in the last couple of days by Del Beckerman about one of the surprising twists of history is that

Ukraine has a Jewish president who is leading the Ukrainian nationalist revolution against Russian imperialism.

Go back to this question I asked at the very beginning about things that are surprising you.

Talk about the Ukrainian response and Ukrainian-ness and how it's actually being cemented right now a little bit that you know this question of is Ukraine an independent country?

Well, I think we have an answer.

It's not just a little bit, it's a lot.

I mean, I think Ukraine is changing not only its image abroad, I think Ukrainians are going to feel differently about their state and about one another when this is over, however, it ends, you know, whether it ends with a in a good scenario or a bad scenario.

Just one thing about Zelensky being Jewish, which a really smart

Ukrainian historian said to me a couple days ago,

you know, no one has ever said to the Ukrainians that there are different definitions of nationalism.

You know, there's ethnic nationalism and there's civic nationalism.

Ethnic being, you know, you're attached to your tribe, you know, and civic nationalism being something more like patriotism where you're attached to the laws of your country and so on.

And, you know, political scientists make this distinction between them.

No one ever said to them that that's, you know, that there are these two different things.

But without anyone saying it to them, what they have chosen is a kind of civic nationalism.

And so, you know, if you're Jewish, if you're Afghan, as one of the leaders of the 2014 maidan was his afghan he was afghan origin um if you are um you know whether you speak ukrainian or whether you speak russian and this of course might have something to do with it um you can be part of the ukrainian nation you know as long as you are willing to defend your country and as long as you believe in our national mission which is to create a sovereign nation and integrate with the west and become a democracy and and that is and and somehow the ukrainian national identity has become wrapped up in those ideas so it's not a it's not just about, you know, blood and soil.

You had to be born here and your great-great-great-grandfather had to speak Ukrainian.

It's more complicated than that.

Right.

Let me ask you, several, several people have asked versions of this question about the negotiations that are happening.

Is Putin open to negotiations, really?

I don't think so.

I'll just keep it brief.

It's I don't think so.

I don't think so either.

It may be some kind of play for time.

You know, there may be, you know,

I was a little worried that it was some game to get people to the border and then shoot them or poison them, which he's, which there's a long Soviet and Russian history of doing that.

But it looks to me like part of an information war game.

Here's a question that I think you'll both like and you both address this in different ways.

I'm hearing from friends that this war is the fault of the US because we let countries like Ukraine near Russia join or start moving to join NATO and Putin felt threatened.

This is what the questioner says.

I think this is a baloney, but I'd like a more thoughtful response.

What do you all think of that concept, that notion?

I won't use a stronger word than baloney.

Okay, we're not a G-rated magazine, but malarkey, okay, you're moving.

And

you've just escalated to malarkey.

All right.

But, you know, and Anne's written about this, what Putin feels threatened by is the proximity, not of NATO, but of democracy.

And I think also Putin, it's really important to understand that Putin is, there's this expression in Russian, a Savok, a Soviet guy.

He's just, it doesn't, it's hard to trace.

He's like just a product of the Soviet system.

He hates NATO because it's practically encoded in his DNA to hate NATO.

And so I don't think this, you know, I was a go-slow on NATO expansion guy in the 90s.

I was, you know, more conservative, a kind of post-Reaganite Republican saying, you know,

do this slowly, do this with measure.

But again, Putin has made the best argument for NATO expansion that anyone's ever made.

He certainly talked me into it.

And so I just don't buy that.

Oh, you know, they got too close to us and we got scared because these are all countries that Putin has no, Russians have no problem traveling to, sending their children to their schools, doing business with, but yet somehow Putin says, but, you know, but this line is too far.

I think this is about democracy.

I think it's about a mafia regime trying to stay in power.

And I think that these arguments that, you know, if but but for NATO expansion, this wouldn't have happened, I think is just utter nonsense.

Yeah, I'll go farther than that, which is that I think that the expansion of NATO was

the most successful, if not the only truly successful piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years.

It created a zone of safety and security for 60 million people in a part of the world that had been the source of two world wars.

It was begun because the nations of the region, Poland, the Baltic states, and others, were afraid of the language of Russian revanchism, which began already in the early 90s.

There's a speech that the then president of Estonia gave in 1994, in which he talks about precisely that.

The fact that we expanded NATO, you know, pushed this, you know, pushed the possibility of this kind of conflict back for at least a decade, if not more.

You know, we would be having this fight in East Germany right now if we hadn't done it.

You know, the reason why

Ukraine was not in favor of joining NATO a decade ago, the reason why Ukraine wants to join NATO now is because they're afraid of Russia.

You know, Russia has created this sense of fear in all its neighbors by its aggressive actions.

If that weren't the case, there would be no NATO.

There would be no need for it.

So Russia has created this need for NATO and has made Ukraine envious of the relative safety and security, well, not just the relative, the genuine safety and security next door.

Right.

Let me, we're going to run out of time quickly.

Let me ask you, I'm going to take about a dozen questions and kind of smush them into one.

They're all along the same theme.

The theme is what can NATO do?

What can the United States do?

The way I would frame it, borrowing some language from one of the questions, is like, what are the outer limits here?

Let's just say that the American people, the American government is fully engaged in supporting Ukraine.

NATO is fully engaged in supporting Ukraine.

Tom, this is in part a nuclear question, but it's more than just a nuclear question.

How far do you think America and NATO can go to support the Ukrainians before it triggers some kind of new catastrophe?

Well, you can't,

the president's made clear we're not putting boots on the ground.

That's the right thing to do.

I think that the people,

you know, I

actually ran into Congressman Kensinger the other day who was talking about no fly zones.

I think that's a bad idea.

I think

we're at the limit militarily of what we can do other than providing weapons and defending our own,

defending NATO territory.

I mean, I think had Putin blitzed his way through this and everything had collapsed in four days and actually started talking about, and now it's time to bring home the Baltics and to bring back, you know, Bessarabia and whatever,

then

I might have a different answer about

counter signaling to that to say enough's enough.

But I think, you know, NATO's doing what NATO ought to be doing, which is making clear, you know, yeah, we can't defend this.

We can't defend this country.

We understand you have a home court advantage.

There's a lot of terrible things you can do.

And we're going to do everything we can to make sure that this fails, including helping our Ukrainian friends.

But don't even think about going.

you know, anywhere else here, because

that's a whole different volume.

Thanks, Tom.

And let me just add on one final.

I'll give you the last word here, but let me add one more question to it.

What would you, if you were advising President Biden on what to say tomorrow night to the nation and the world, what would you like to see him, what points would you like to see him hit, including in this area of what can America do?

I would like him to explain to Americans, who I think, despite the heavy news coverage, may not understand it,

why this matters to us, why it's about more than just Ukraine, brave as the Ukrainians are and extraordinary as they are, why it's about

the preservation of peace in Europe,

why it's about respect for borders and for a certain idea of political order and stability, why the shattering of that order would damage us materially, economically, politically,

spiritually, and in every other way.

You know, actually, I slightly disagree that this is a good moment for foreign policy.

I wonder whether a lot of people are following this and understanding it.

And I would like him to hit really high notes in framing this and explaining it to people.

Well,

we'll see tomorrow night what he does.

I'm sorry that we're run out of time, but we all have writing to do, including that big Andropov dual byline.

10,000 word profile, which I'm looking forward to by tomorrow morning.

Thank you both for agreeing to do it in advance.

Let me thank Tom and Ann and the thousands of people, thousands of Atlantic subscribers and Atlantic readers who've joined us today.

I really do appreciate it.

And

I just want to let you know that if you want to support our journalism,

which I hope you want to do, and you're not already a subscriber, you can go to theatlantic.com for more information on how to do that.

And again, I just want to thank you all for joining us today.

And we'll do this again

as soon as necessary which could be in a couple of days for all we know anyway on behalf of the atlantic and on behalf of tom and ann thank you very much for joining us

thank you to atlantic staff writer ann applebaum and contributing writer tom nichols Our producers are Kevin Townsend and Rebecca Rashid, and our executive producer is Claudine Nee Bade.

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