Susan Glasser: A Superpower in Crisis

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Speaker 1 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 6 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 5 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 8 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 12 Good morning. Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast.
I'm Charlie Sykes. It is October 11, 2023, and the horrors out of Israel continue.

Speaker 12 Yesterday, IDF forces uncovered the bodies of 40 babies, many of whom had been beheaded. The horrors continue to stack up.
The hundreds of young people who were raped and murdered at a peace concert.

Speaker 12 The kibbutzes where dozens of people were just gunned down and massacred. The continuing abduction of Israeli citizens.

Speaker 12 Yesterday, though, the President of the United States Joe Biden issued a very, very forceful condemnation.

Speaker 12 If there was any concern that he was going to softpeddle any of this, I think it was just abused. This was one of the strongest statements of support from any U.S.
president. Let's listen.

Speaker 13 Bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas,

Speaker 13 a group whose stated purpose for being

Speaker 13 is to kill Jews.

Speaker 13 This is an act of sheer evil.

Speaker 12 An act of sheer evil.

Speaker 12 We're joined by Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington and has been writing about international affairs for some time, a former editor-in-chief of foreign policy, where she covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also the co-author most recently of The Divider, a history of Donald Trump in the White House with her husband, The New York Times, Peter Baker.

Speaker 12 Welcome back to the podcast, Susan.

Speaker 11 Thank you so much for having me, Charlie.

Speaker 12 I want to talk about your big piece in The New Yorker about Jake Sullivan and the incredibly detailed reporting and the revelations in that piece.

Speaker 12 But let's just take a moment to assess where we are at here. Joe Biden, I think, very accurately described what's happening in Israel as sheer evil.

Speaker 12 And I guess one of the things that shocks me is how many folks, and let's be honest about it,

Speaker 12 on the pro-Hamas left are having a hard time recognizing this as pure evil.

Speaker 12 We're getting a lot of whataboutism, a lot of rationalizations, a lot of, you know, what about the historic context, all of this stuff.

Speaker 12 But I don't know how you look at these images coming out of Israel and just are not shocked that this is not just a moment of moral clarity, that, you know, evil is evil. This is objectively evil.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I think there's no nuance to it. It's not complicated.
There are a lot of things in this world that present difficult moral choices.

Speaker 11 And condemning the murder of civilians and babies and old people is not a complicated moral choice, Charlie. You know, let's be very clear on that.
You know, look, it's a hard thing to know.

Speaker 11 This is a very loud, very online faction of the American public. It's not necessarily a very large faction of the American public unless you happen to be on a college campus.

Speaker 11 It's been painful to watch the inevitable polarized debates reflexive thinking across the political spectrum in the U.S.

Speaker 11 You know, a crisis like this reveals, unfortunately, a lot about the weaknesses of the system that's trying to absorb the impact of this crisis. And so we see the fault lines in Israeli society.

Speaker 11 We see the broader fault lines in the Middle East. And of course, we see here in the United States our own fault lines.

Speaker 11 I just want to take a step back and recognize that a terrible tragedy has taken place.

Speaker 11 And it's very important to me to, you know, sort of keep centered in that a thing happened here that was a terrible thing and then to go from there into our analysis of what it could be.

Speaker 12 I would like to think that crises like this bring out the best in us. That used to be kind of the template.
But now, as you point out, it brings out the degree of our divisions.

Speaker 12 And Tim Scott, among other Republicans yesterday, comes out and says, Joe Biden has blood on his hands. I mean, this kind of extreme

Speaker 12 demagoguery, the cynicism behind this. And then you have, look, I understand that there are people who are critical of Israel.

Speaker 12 I understand that there are legitimate differences and the people are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

Speaker 12 But when I see these pieces of literature being distributed on university campuses where they feature the hang gliders that the Hamas terrorists use to attack the young people at the concert,

Speaker 12 when I see this kind of imagery or the rhetoric from some of these student groups that says that Israel alone is responsible for this, or watch the scenes from the Democratic Socialists of America rally in New York City where they're applauding and laughing about the atrocities.

Speaker 12 I mean, this is an ugly, ugly moment in our political history.

Speaker 11 There is ugliness, you know, in so much of politics right now. And it's hard to watch.
It's hard to watch the coverage from the ground.

Speaker 11 And as we find out what's happened, and by the way, we have not yet fully seen, I think, the full scale of the devastation.

Speaker 11 We're already over 1,200 confirmed dead, according to the Israeli government. Proportionally speaking, that's well over 45,000 people equivalent in the United States.

Speaker 11 If you think about what a small country Israel is, it's the scale of the loss is enormous. Like you, I was also struck by some of the absolutely wild and overheated comments by

Speaker 11 right-wing public officials in this country. Tim Scott, whose alleged brand is asserted, like, oh, I'm the kindler, gentler, you know, token guy in the, in the Republican field.

Speaker 11 And then to just go ranting, ranting and claiming without, I mean, just in such a wild-eyed way that Joe Biden has blood on his hands. Joe Biden is responsible for this.
Like imagine

Speaker 11 how a Republican senator would have felt to have a Democrat go off like that on George W. Bush on September 12th, 2001.

Speaker 11 It made me feel a little bit of a, you know, not in the pit of of my stomach because it suggests, you know, the opportunities for demagoguery here are so irresistible.

Speaker 11 And of course, we live in this moment when demagoguery, you know, is seen as the recipe for getting ahead in our politics as well as in Israeli politics. At any rate, that's a long...

Speaker 11 prelude to saying we don't really know what's going to happen. On this issue, by the way, as on so many issues right now, we can talk about the war in Ukraine because these are not unrelated subjects.

Speaker 11 There is a broad swath of the American people that stands with Israel, that stands with Ukraine, that understands we are at a moment of international challenge to American leadership, in part because of our own internal weakness and divisions.

Speaker 11 This is a mirror of the debate happening inside Israeli society today, by the way, where there is going to be profound reckoning and self-examination and that is already occurring inside Israel about the extent to which that country's own internal divisions and fights over Prime Minister Netanyahu's efforts to reform the judiciary might have caused a very security-focused society to take its eyes off of security.

Speaker 12 I think this is such an interesting question. You know, this whole question of do we project weakness?

Speaker 12 What does the rest of the world think of us? What do they think of the divisions in Israel?

Speaker 12 Again, there'll be time for a reckoning, but all of this rhetoric about how we look weak, which is why China is on the march, why Iran might have participated in all of this.

Speaker 12 This ought to shine a brighter light on other things that are going on, including the fact that we are seriously contemplating shutting down the federal government right now.

Speaker 12 Tommy Tubberville continues to put a hold on military promotions.

Speaker 12 We do not have an ambassador right now to Egypt or to Kuwait or Oman or to Israel because of members of the House, Republicans in Congress, who've launched an impeachment inquiry against the commander-in-chief.

Speaker 12 I mean, all of these things

Speaker 12 have to project an image of

Speaker 12 dysfunction to much of the rest of the world, which will invite some of this.

Speaker 12 So it is interesting watching Republicans and people like Rand Paul, who oppose, who tried to block Israel's iron dome, to watch folks like this talk about American weakness and the projection of American weakness, I think is another reminder that irony is dead, Susan.

Speaker 11 Well, that might be one thing we can all agree upon, Charlie, you know,

Speaker 11 across the political spectrum. You know, there was a tweet from the self-styled America firster Josh Hawley yesterday that to me summed up the stupidity of the moment.

Speaker 11 He said, well, because Israel faces an existential threat, we should stop all aid to Ukraine intended to Israel. And if there's

Speaker 11 an existential threat of having, you know, a few hundred thousand Russians invading your country,

Speaker 11 talk about murdering babies and other atrocities, right? I mean, these are not serious people has become sort of the, you know, the Logan Roy-inspired anthem of our times, I'm afraid.

Speaker 12 Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about where we are at with Israel.
You were up, you talked about this on Sunday on CNN.

Speaker 12 What kind of a response can we expect? Usually what happens after an attack is Israel responds with a barrage of rockets and missiles. It's not going to play out that way this time, is it?

Speaker 12 What happens next?

Speaker 11 No, that's right. And so, you know, it's very clear the scale of the mobilization that has been ordered up in Israel.
Over 300,000 have been ordered to report to the IDF. This is a mass mobilization.

Speaker 11 There's so many people required. Elal has had to add flights around the world to bring people back into the country.

Speaker 11 That's just a country preparing for full-scale war, not for another series of exchange of missile fire. And the indications are that some kind of ground action in Gaza is almost inevitable already.

Speaker 11 It appears that electricity has been cut off. There is something like a blockade occurring.

Speaker 11 And because Egypt also will not let the people of Gaza out on the long border that it shares with Gaza, you know, there's a feeling that civilians, they may be warned, but there's nowhere for them to go.

Speaker 12 There's no place for them to go. So what does all-out war look like? What does a ground war in Gaza look like? I mean, there are millions of people that live there.
They are, in effect, trapped.

Speaker 12 So Hamas is not an army in the conventional sense. So what will this fighting be like? Urban, you know, street to street, house to house with terrorists and tunnels.
How awful is it going to be?

Speaker 11 That's the thing, right? The awfulness is limited only by our imagination and our ability to think about how awful it will be. I don't know is the short answer.

Speaker 11 The somewhat longer answer is the question of to what end.

Speaker 11 And I do think that right now, that is an extremely important question because Israel has occupied and ruled over Gaza before and essentially threw up its hands and said, this is a nightmare and we're not going to do it in 20 years of how

Speaker 11 Gaza. And there was an election back in 2005.
That was the last time there was an election in Gaza. This is when Hamas took formal control over the strip.

Speaker 11 And, you know, it's been a sort of a nightmare that the world has largely preferred to avert its gaze from for the last very long time. And so Israel can militarily take over Gaza.

Speaker 11 I don't think there's anybody who doubts that, although the cost could be extraordinarily high. The question is, what on earth would Israel do once it has taken over Gaza?

Speaker 11 And if you've decided that Hamas control over the territory is no longer sustainable because of the risk to Israel's security, then the question is, well, who is going to rule over Gaza?

Speaker 11 And there's been no answers there's been no articulation of that just to just before we got on this conversation this morning it was announced after a couple days of wrangling that israel would form a new war cabinet uh bringing in opposition to the government for the purposes of this war so you'll have benny gantz the opposition leader former defensive leader of israel along with netanyahu so

Speaker 11 They have not articulated what the war policy or the war aims of Israel are at this point.

Speaker 11 So it's very hard to talk about what is the American policy going to be because right now, I think we're still in the initial shock phase of just standing shoulder to shoulder, showing solidarity, as President Biden did with great passion, I think, and personal commitment yesterday.

Speaker 12 So let's talk about some of the more immediate fallout. What are the prospects of this becoming a wider regional conflict? of Hezbollah getting in other countries, missiles coming from Syria.

Speaker 11 That's right. There is the immediate fear of that happening.

Speaker 11 And I think that's where you'll see a lot of the goal of mediation and backstage diplomacy is trying to head that off, trying to de-escalate or to at least to make sure that this is contained in terms of the conflict.

Speaker 11 You've already seen exchange of rocket fire in the northern borders of Israel in the last few days. There is the Iranian proxy based in Lebanon, Hezbollah, firing rockets.

Speaker 11 There is the possibility of rockets coming from Syria on Israel's northern border. That is a huge problem if you're fighting both Hamas and Hezbollah at the same time.

Speaker 11 Then there's the question of the West Bank.

Speaker 11 This is, you know, has a completely different Palestinian dynamic there because you have the Palestinian Authority, which have been the great rivals of Hamas so far.

Speaker 11 Abu Mazin, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, has refused to condemn the attacks. And you haven't seen the violence spreading there yet.

Speaker 11 Of course, if that were to happen and you had another full-scale intifada at the same time, you know, you would be talking about a very, very serious and scary escalating situation.

Speaker 11 So that's the immediate goal, I think, of everybody is to try to dial it down and to make sure there's not a multi-front war for Israel.

Speaker 11 Beyond that, though, of course, there is the question of Iran and the Gulf states and what role everybody is going to play going forward.

Speaker 12 What is your assessment of the role that Iran played in this?

Speaker 12 Because there was a immediately after the attack, there was that report in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that Iran was intimately involved in the planning. There's been a lot of pushback on this.

Speaker 12 Iran has been a longtime supporter of Hamas. I mean, you can't really separate out Iran from what happened over the weekend, but what's your assessment of their role?

Speaker 12 How intimately involved were they in this attack?

Speaker 11 Well, look, that is the question.

Speaker 11 I am a believer that the truth will come out and we will have an enormous amount of detail that we do not yet have that will explain both this massive intelligence failure inside Israel and how they could have been surprised by an attack like this.

Speaker 11 I have no doubt Israel has a long tradition of inquiries after military disasters like this.

Speaker 11 So hopefully there will be an accounting and I suspect we will find that there were lots of data points that were existing inside the Israeli system in this very surveilled part of the world and that you know perhaps there was an inability to put the pieces together in ways that that we will come to understand and that will include the question of iran's role but you made the most essential point charlie iran has been the backer and partner of hamas which by the way has had other partners in the region and i i should point out that both qatar and turkey countries that the united states has close ties with have also maintained uh strong connections to hamas over the years but iran has been the patron and the financial supporter and in my experience and your experience you don't make a major change in your organizational model without consulting your ownership structure and your big investors.

Speaker 11 And Iran has been a big investor in Hamas. So I suspect there will be more evidence that comes out.

Speaker 12 So, what does this do to those ongoing peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia? Does it scuttle them completely, put them on hold? What happens there?

Speaker 11 Well, you know, many people have wondered about that as one of the reasons and approximate timing for this attack.

Speaker 11 Certainly, one of the consequences of the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab states in the region, such as the UAE, and now Saudi Arabia would be the big prize if you were to add them to this normalization deal,

Speaker 11 has been this notion that essentially the rest of the Arab world has moved on from the Palestinian cause, that they're willing to make a separate peace with Israel.

Speaker 11 And this does seem in some way to be an enormous and bloody challenge to that line of thinking, the idea that you can just sort of make your peace with Israel and forget about the suffering of these millions of Palestinians.

Speaker 11 And yet, you know, it strikes me that the leaders of Saudi Arabia, in particular, its Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is an extremely cynical character.

Speaker 11 And then he doesn't seem to have the emotional attachment to the Palestinian cause that his grandfather and the earlier leaders of Saudi Arabia had.

Speaker 11 So, you know, maybe he's willing to put it on ice and then resume talks in, you know, a certain amount of time. I wouldn't think that he cares a lot about that.

Speaker 11 And one thing that hasn't gotten a lot of attention in recent days, but that I think is very important is that the United States and the Biden administration have been very focused on this big sweeping vision of a new kind of security order in the Middle East, in part to guarantee Israel security, but in part because we are looking at a new age of geopolitical competition between Russia and China and the United States.

Speaker 11 The words China and Russia have hardly surfaced in a lot of the media coverage since this Hamas attack in the last few days, but they're not going away.

Speaker 11 And that context is very important one for understanding the machinations in the Middle East.

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Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 5 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 7 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 2 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes. Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 6 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 5 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 8 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 12 Okay, so let's switch gears here because I do think this context is important.

Speaker 12 You have this very, very lengthy story in The New Yorker about Joe Biden's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and the Washington Front of the Ukraine War. Why a profile of Jake Sullivan, Susan?

Speaker 11 Thank you, Charlie, for asking. I mean, you know, it's interesting now that we have another enormous war that's going to draw in the United States and be very consuming for the Biden administration.

Speaker 11 You know, I set out to write about the war that the U.S. has already committed so much to, the war in Ukraine.
And, you know, when I was...

Speaker 11 talking to people, this is an issue that I have followed, obviously, for more than two decades since I served as a correspondent in Moscow for the Washington Post at the very beginning of Vladimir Putin's tenure.

Speaker 11 And of course, you know, this kind of almost final bloody crescendo of Putinism in this kind of war of aggression on his neighbor has been an abiding interest of mine.

Speaker 11 What I heard from people in Washington was that, you know, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, really had become the war's indispensable man in Washington, that this is a very White House-centric foreign policy team, and that Biden likes to keep a close hold on these decisions.

Speaker 11 And so, too, does his National Security Advisor.

Speaker 11 And that when it came to the decision-making, if I wanted to understand why we were giving certain weapon systems, why we weren't doing other things, who was formulating our approach to the war, that I would need to write about Jake Sullivan, someone who I've actually known for a very long time.

Speaker 12 You point out he was the youngest national security advisor since McGeorge Bundy during Vietnam. And there'sn't been a lot of feuds and infighting in the administration over Ukraine.

Speaker 12 But the administration's policy has not always been that clear, has it? I mean, vowing to stick with Ukraine for as long as it takes is not a strategy.

Speaker 12 This is from the House and Center Foreign Affairs Committee. So give me your sense of this.
Do they have a strategy or are they making it up as they go along?

Speaker 11 Well, you know, I think some of the most biting criticism, and by the way, this has come from Democrats as well as Republicans. I think that's an important one.

Speaker 11 Many of the strong supporters of Ukraine are concerned about this too, is the fear that the administration has been sort of incrementally boiling the frog, if you will.

Speaker 11 It didn't expect, of course, this war in Ukraine to explode the way that it did. And it didn't expect Ukraine to survive the initial onslaught.
And so it's sort of like we all did.

Speaker 11 We backed into this long war.

Speaker 11 First of all, it's important to say it was the biggest military commitment. We have shipped more weapons there really since to any other place since since the end of World War II.

Speaker 11 And I'm not sure people really understand that.

Speaker 11 However, you know, if I asked you, Charlie, you know, and pushed you to the wall, could you really describe what the administration's strategy is, what its goal is?

Speaker 11 And I think a lot of it has to do, and my conclusion was, first of all, A lot of it is blamed on Jake Sullivan, which is interesting, but he's ultimately Joe Biden's guy. And this is a Biden policy.

Speaker 11 He is not going to let Ukraine into NATO. He is trying to signal in every possible way to Putin, listen, you know, it's not our war.
You started this thing, buddy. It's not us.

Speaker 11 We're just trying to give them the tools not to be overwhelmed. But I think the caution comes from Biden himself, but it also comes from our politics, Charlie.

Speaker 11 So this is where I would link up our Israel conversation. and our Ukraine conversation.

Speaker 11 We don't have a real theory of the case of America's role in the world anymore because we are a superpower in crisis and we are not really able to project confidence in the rest of the world.

Speaker 11 It's painful almost to me when I hear Joe Biden in Warsaw giving this bold speech saying, you know, it's the great challenge between democracies and autocracies when I'm not sure he could give that speech here in Washington.

Speaker 12 You talk about how Jake Sullivan joined the administration in 2021.

Speaker 12 And one of the biggest events, obviously, of that year was the Bosch withdrawal from Afghanistan that led to a lot of people saying he ought to be fired.

Speaker 12 And he told you that that was his trial by fire, and he had taken it very, very personally.

Speaker 12 So, talk to me a little bit about that because that was really one of the turning points for the Biden administration.

Speaker 12 And in terms of our discussion about projection of weakness, of you know, I, you know, you could argue a failed policy.

Speaker 12 So, what was Jake Sullivan's role in the abandonment of Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul?

Speaker 11 Well, look, you know, Jake Sullivan, you know, I think as national security advisor, understood that he would be blamed and was accountable for the handling of the withdrawal.

Speaker 11 I think you can say that the policy decision. was Joe Biden's, and it was very clear from the very beginning.

Speaker 11 Joe Biden felt that the United States had spent 20 years and had not succeeded in its mission in Afghanistan, and he didn't want any other American soldiers to die in the pursuit of a mission he had concluded long ago, I think, could not be achieved.

Speaker 11 They felt constrained by a number of things, including Donald Trump's deal with the Taliban, which really, you know, sort of restricted them in their view and tied their hands in terms of their options for how they would do that withdrawal.

Speaker 11 Where the blame, I think, has more properly fallen on Sullivan and on the rest of the Biden administration is how they chose to execute and to carry out the withdrawal.

Speaker 11 You can have an argument over the policy, but I think the critiques that have landed the most fairly and squarely on them are the critiques of how they undertook that withdrawal.

Speaker 11 You know, for Sullivan, you described him, right? He's the youngest guy since McGeorge Bundy. He's brilliant Rhodes Scholar.
He's had a dazzling career, right? And so he isn't used to screwing up.

Speaker 11 like this.

Speaker 11 And, you know, I think that it's that experience of failure with real lives in consequence was a terrible blow for all of them at the beginning of this administration when they're just, you know, figuring out how to do their jobs and to work as a team.

Speaker 11 Another blow, of course, that Sullivan had, you know, unlike others with that kind of dazzling resume, remember he was Hillary Clinton's closest advisor for many years on policy matters.

Speaker 11 And he experienced the 2016 defeat in a very visceral, personal way. So I think that shaped his approach to the job.
I think Afghanistan did.

Speaker 11 And then the third thing that I think has not gotten enough attention is

Speaker 11 Obama's kind of screwed-up reaction to the 2014 Russian takeover of Crimea and launching of a proxy war in eastern Afghanistan.

Speaker 11 Jake Sullivan was then Joe Biden's vice presidential national security advisor. Tony Blinken, now the Secretary of State, was the deputy national security advisor at that time for Obama.

Speaker 11 They were, and Biden himself, were very internally critical of Obama's response. They didn't think it was strong enough.

Speaker 11 They were all advocates of sending military security assistance to Ukraine ukraine to be able to fight back against the russians obama rejected them and so i think that shaped them too they didn't want a repeat of uh what the obama administration had done which in their view was insufficient to counter putin and i think history shows that it that it was insufficient

Speaker 14 ah Greetings from my bath, festive friends.

Speaker 15 The holidays are overwhelming, but I'm tackling this season with PayPal and making the most of my money, getting 5% cash back when I pay in four.

Speaker 14 No fees, no interest.

Speaker 16 I used it to get this portable spa with jets.

Speaker 17 Now the bubbles can cling to my sculpted but pruny body. Make the most of your money this holiday with PayPal.

Speaker 18 Save the offer in the app. N1231, see paypal.com slash promo terms.
Points give your renee for cash and more paying for subject to terms and approval.

Speaker 19 PayPal Inc. at MLS 910457.

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 5 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 7 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 2 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes. Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 6 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 5 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 8 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 12 So, let's get into what I think is the meat of your piece and your analysis, which is the way in which the Biden administration has been supplying Ukraine and the support of NATO entry.

Speaker 12 You note that Jake Sullivan avoids any daylight between himself and Joe Biden. Biden tends to hold on to decisions to wait, test the angles.

Speaker 12 And Sullivan, you describe as kind of hyper-analytical in his style, fits Biden. But you talked with our good friend Eric Edelman, who told you there's a real tendency to paralysis by analysis.

Speaker 12 Jake likes to look at every facet of a problem and wants to understand everything.

Speaker 12 So, how does that play into all of this no, no, no, yes approach to the weaponry? You know, these red line concerns over, you know, those long-range missiles, the attackums.

Speaker 12 You have detailed reporting about NATO issue, some of what happened. Talk about the way they have handled this question of admitting Ukraine into NATO.

Speaker 12 Zelensky, obviously, President Zelensky, very much wants to be part of NATO.

Speaker 12 And you recount in rather eye-opening fashion the role that the Biden administration played in some of these European talks.

Speaker 11 Yeah, well, a couple observations there. First of all, that is one of my favorite quotes in the piece, especially the ending of it from Eric Edelman.

Speaker 11 He says, that's the great tragedy for any national security advisor. You have to make decisions behind a veil of irreducible ignorance.

Speaker 11 You don't know how your decisions are going to play out in the real world. It's a hell of a tough job.
Certainly not a job I would want.

Speaker 11 I spoke with one source who's quite close to Jake Sullivan, someone I've known for a long time.

Speaker 11 He said, you know, being this close to a national security advisor and talking with him, the one thing I've really learned is that it's a job I would never, ever, ever want to have.

Speaker 11 And then I don't think I could possibly do it. better than Jake.

Speaker 11 So I do try to be humble and empathetic, you know, in recognizing the great difficulty of these decisions decisions that the Biden administration has to make right now.

Speaker 11 But I personally found it hard to understand. That's one of the reasons I did the piece.
I didn't understand why it is that we seem to keep having the same fights over and over again.

Speaker 11 And no, we're not going to give the long-range missiles. And then a few months later, we're going to give them.
And no, we're not going to do the F-16s.

Speaker 11 And then, okay, well, we're going to let our allies do the F-16s. And then, okay, well, I guess we'll train the pilots.

Speaker 11 You know, I even spoke with a senior administration official, Charlie, who told me, I just don't know what to believe anymore. I keep hearing the same movie over and over again.

Speaker 11 You know, they tell me on the inside, no, we're not going to do the ATACOMs, but I don't know what to believe. And this was, you know, a few months ago, I had this conversation.

Speaker 11 And of course, you know, by the end of it, they had also approved those.

Speaker 11 And so if your own administration officials can't really articulate what is the principle behind your decision-making, and yet I found it fascinating when I asked Jake Sullivan in an interview about this no, no, no, yes policy, he got very mad at me, really, in his mild mannered way.

Speaker 11 And, you know, said basically like, no, that's not right. You know, and to him, living inside the forest, right, each tree is highly individual.

Speaker 11 And, you know, this tree is all about maintaining unity with Germany. And so he says that's the reason why we gave the Abrams tanks after saying no.

Speaker 11 And this tree over here, well, this tree is all because the State Department didn't want us to send cluster munitions because many of our allies banned those by treaty and it would cause so many future problems.

Speaker 11 Okay. And this tree over here

Speaker 11 is something entirely different. It's the Pentagon and the Atacoms and not wanting to send missiles that they think they might need for some other conflict.

Speaker 11 What I concluded from that is that it's very, very hard when you're living in the land of wanting to get each individual decision right to step out and also construct a viable theory of the case and doing that in real time as facts are changing.

Speaker 11 So I don't think they have one. And I think that's a problem.
Yeah, that is a problem. But the bigger problem is the politics.

Speaker 11 It's the politics.

Speaker 12 Well, you write in here, you know, that a lot of people have been blaming Jake Sullivan for all the delays over the weapon system, but you make it very, very clear that it's Biden, so I mean pulling back from the trees to the forest.

Speaker 12 It's Joe Biden who's been doing the on-off switches. You report that, like, the F-16s, Sullivan was supportive of sending the F-16s, but Biden outright refused.

Speaker 12 Then, several months later, he changed his mind.

Speaker 12 So, how does the politics play in this? Or is

Speaker 12 Joe Biden kind of indecisive when it comes to these details?

Speaker 11 Well, you know, it's interesting. Historically, that has been the rap on Joe Biden, that he will, if he's not indecisive, he will hold out on a decision as long as he possibly can.

Speaker 11 You know, Biden is a survivor in politics, and one of the ways that he has survived is by, you know, trying always to end up in sort of an approximation of not necessarily the political center, but the center at least of his own party, the center of the decision space.

Speaker 11 The other thing that I found, you alluded to this on NATO, is that Biden has really prioritized his relationship with German Chancellor Olaf Schultz, that this is very low-key because they're two relatively low-key politicians.

Speaker 11 You know, they're not the flamboyant international types in the way that Donald Trump was or even Barack Obama in some ways.

Speaker 11 It's not flashy, but that nexus between Washington and Berlin, a senior European official told me the two have such a warm, almost brothers-in-arms relationship.

Speaker 11 And so Biden has consistently been willing to prioritize unity with Germany, even at the expense of problems elsewhere in the political coalition. And that came out in NATO.

Speaker 12 Is that a good choice, particularly the way it's played out with NATO?

Speaker 11 That's right. Schultz is even more cautious than Joe Biden, right?

Speaker 11 And a very good example of that is the sort of frantic maneuvering in the lead up to the Vilnius summit of NATO this summer, in which Zelensky was hoping for more progress toward Ukraine's membership aspirations.

Speaker 11 Many European countries, not just in the Baltic states, were on Ukraine's side.

Speaker 11 Even Emmanuel Macron, by the way, in France, now he might have been opportunistic, maybe just seizing to score a point against Biden and Schultz because he knew their opposition was immovable.

Speaker 11 But even France took a different position. And so there was a real concern, essentially, of U.S.
and Germany being isolated. in the NATO alliance.
That is such a different dynamic.

Speaker 11 I've been watching this closely for many years. And the bottom line is that usually it's the U.S.
trying to push the Europeans in NATO to do more. But in this situation, it was the opposite.

Speaker 12 That was a little bit shocking, I think, to find out that it was Joe Biden working behind the scenes with Germany to block NATO membership for Ukraine. That seemed like a very strange dynamic.

Speaker 11 Well, again, you know, what they would say is, you know, that they communicated very clearly to Zelensky for months that while the war was ongoing, the U.S.

Speaker 11 was just not prepared to support NATO membership for Ukraine. And frankly, many European countries were not.

Speaker 12 Because that would trigger Article V, right? I mean, that would.

Speaker 11 In my reporting,

Speaker 11 even in their private meetings when Biden flew and then took the train into Kyiv in February, remember that dramatic visit, that even at that meeting, they were very clear with Zelensky that the NATO summit in Vilnius was not going to include a big membership rally for Ukraine.

Speaker 11 The question on the table before the summit was, could you give more in the way of progress to Ukraine in order to demonstrate to the Russians as well as the Ukrainians that this really was going to happen at some point in the future?

Speaker 11 And that's where Germany's opposition

Speaker 11 was the big dynamic.

Speaker 11 A lot of times international diplomacy, it comes down to haggling over a single word or a single sentence in language. And they had a huge fight, a huge fight.
For days, they couldn't resolve this.

Speaker 11 They even went to the summit with it unresolved. Finally, they came out with this awkward compromise that Jake Sullivan signed off on.

Speaker 11 It was an American-authored sentence that said, well, we will give Ukraine an invitation someday, but we couldn't say when or under what conditions and how they would even meet those conditions.

Speaker 12 So let's talk about what happens next. You talk about the end game for the war war in Ukraine, and obviously Jake Sullivan is very deeply involved in monitoring back-channel negotiations with Russia.

Speaker 12 And you write, there's little doubt that the Biden administration has actively considered ways to get Russia to the negotiating table.

Speaker 12 Last fall, Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly expressed his view the war would likely not be ended on the battlefield.

Speaker 12 So there's going to be a little bit of tension, a little bit of back and forth. So what are you hearing about all of this?

Speaker 12 I mean, as you point out, you know, talks, if they occur, are likely to raise tensions between the U.S. and Ukraine.
What do you see happening?

Speaker 11 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 11 I mean, first of all, I think there's a lot of, I don't know if I call it wishful thinking, but a certain naivete in thinking that, you know, the Russians and the Ukrainians or even the Americans and the Russians are going to sit down and, you know, have a big treaty signing ceremony and, you know, come to terms and give Putin a certain amount of territory and return for peace.

Speaker 11 Like, that seems wildly unrealistic to me. And there are a lot of different reasons for that.

Speaker 11 First of all, Vladimir Putin has every incentive to keep fighting at least through next year's American presidential election when Donald Trump might come back to power, who has consistently not been a supporter of the Ukrainian cause, has been against the large amounts of American military assistance to Ukraine.

Speaker 11 And so, you know, the war is very, very likely to continue for some period of time.

Speaker 11 There is a view inside the White House that Sullivan is looking for eventually some kind of negotiations that would end the fighting, right? Who doesn't want that?

Speaker 11 And the problem is it's almost an impossible circle to square right now because Ukraine has suffered so much.

Speaker 11 It's hard to see Zelensky being able to stay in power, frankly, and make almost any kind of a deal. The big fault line to keep your eye on is Crimea.

Speaker 11 And, you know, Ukraine continues to consider that a core part of its territory.

Speaker 11 There have been, as we've noticed, you know, these recent drone attacks and missile attacks on the bridge, the Crimean bridge, on the Russian fleet that's anchored there.

Speaker 11 The American assessment, according to my reporting in this piece, is that a full-out effort to take back Crimea might be the scenario where a Russian nuclear response is the most likely of all of the scenarios.

Speaker 11 And of course, that's a huge concern. You know, will Ukraine press on toward Crimea and what would happen if it did?

Speaker 12 When you wrap up your piece, you quote a former official who told you that the administration's hesitancy over giving weapons to Ukraine hasn't been about how Russia responds.

Speaker 12 It's that they believe the war isn't going anywhere. And you read that quote to Jake Sullivan, who said, that's kind of the wrap on us.
I don't think it's a fair one.

Speaker 12 We're not fighting for a draw here. And then he says that the administration has an obligation to the American people to consider worst-case scenarios.
That's our job. So how do you reconcile that?

Speaker 12 They're not going for a draw, but they're also preparing for the worst case scenario, which would include nuclear weapons over Crimea.

Speaker 11 You know, I remember when, you know, Dick Cheney talked after 9-11 about essentially the government's responsibility to contemplate the dark side.

Speaker 11 And in some ways, that led the United States into a lot of excesses and a lot of dark places of its own.

Speaker 11 You know, Jake Sullivan is a very different character, obviously, than Dick Cheney, but the responsibility in a position like this, you live in the world of the worst-case scenario.

Speaker 11 Sadly, with Israel right now, we're watching a pretty worst-case scenario play itself out, the worst loss of life for the Jewish state, arguably since the Holocaust, right?

Speaker 11 That's a worst-case scenario.

Speaker 11 And there are many, many worst-case scenarios that we can still contemplate with this war going on as an open wound in Europe that threatens the security not only of Europe, but really the entire geopolitical order.

Speaker 11 So there's a lot of bad, bad, scary things to have our national security advisor dwell on these days.

Speaker 12 And they seem to be getting worse. You can read Susan's article in the most recent edition of The New Yorker, a very detailed deep dive into Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden's national security advisor.

Speaker 12 She's also the co-author of The Divider, The History of Donald Trump, which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.

Speaker 12 Susan is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and one of my must-reads every week is her column on life in Washington. Susan, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast today.

Speaker 11 Charlie, fantastic to be with you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 12 And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
We will be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.

Speaker 12 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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