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Daniel Fried

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Daniel Fried

National Security Council, 2001-05

Daniel Fried is an American diplomat who as a special assistant to the president at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2005. From 2005 to 2009, Fried served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.

This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 21, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Putin and the Presidents

Putin’s Road to War

The Putin Files

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Putin's Political Rise

… The people we talk to, they all have a kind of—because they would now—have an early memory of the first time they heard about Putin, or the story they heard about Putin, or when they perceived that this little gray guy was a comer in the Yeltsin world.How about you?

The first time anybody mentioned Putin to me was a casual remark by one of our diplomats in St. Petersburg consulate who mentioned that he had a good relationship with the deputy mayor who seemed to be a good fixer.And that was Putin.I didn’t think much of it.I mean, you know, glad you have a good contact; that’s great.In those days, St. Petersburg had a progressive reputation in a Russian context.That’s the first I ever heard of him.

Later, when he started his rise in Moscow, of course his name came up.I remember I was in Poland when Yeltsin resigned and basically named Putin as his successor.The story going around was that Putin and Yeltsin had made a deal.Yeltsin would name Putin, and Putin would protect Yeltsin’s family from action on the corruption charges or the corruption allegations that had been made.That’s what I knew.Early, Putin seemed to present himself as a tough-minded, businesslike, cut-to-the-chase guy who could make the system work.That’s an impression.I'm not giving you a deep analysis, but that’s the impression people had.

Let me back up for just a minute.Russia under Yeltsin, the end of the Soviet Union, America’s perception,Clinton’s perception of Yeltsin, and how it was at the end with Yeltsin.

Oh, sure. We made a miscalculation about Yeltsin, but it was one that was made honestly; that is, we saw Yeltsin on the tank, facing down the coup plotters, pushing back against neo-Soviet forces in the summer of 1991.That was a heroic moment, and he seemed to have captured the support of the Russian people.And it seemed to a lot of us that Russia really might go the way of Poland; that is, it might regard itself as liberated from the outside, the alien yoke of communism, which was an argument [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn used to make all the time, and find its way back to its prerevolutionary identity as a rapidly converging European power.

Now, right now, that sounds wildly optimistic, but think about it.Russia really was a convergence power, converging with Europe in the last decades before the revolution.It was a leader, a leader in Europe and Western art, music, philosophy, science, drawing near with the West on engineering, its economy rapidly growing.It’s easy to see that if World War I and the Russian Revolution hadn’t intervened, Russia would be a very different place.So the argument went, if the Russians can overthrow communism, can they find their way back to the path they had been going on?

So when in that process does it become obvious that Yeltsin’s not going to be the guy that carries that?

Well, it depends on whom you talk to.

I'm talking to you.

The first time I heard a serious analyst start shaking her head and saying that “Yeltsin’s not the guy we think he is” was when he fired on the White House.If you remember—I mean the Russian government building during the political standoff.And this analyst said: “Look, I know that most of Washington ... is backing him because he’s facing down a bunch of neo-Soviet reactionaries, but still, this is unconstitutional, and Russia will regret it.It shows us that what we think we’re dealing with is not what we’re really dealing with.”

Now, that was early.I think that was ’93, and I just pocketed it away.I remember it.It’s 24 years later.I remember that analyst saying: “Watch out.Don’t fool yourself.”After that, though, we kept trying to work with Yeltsin, and the Clinton administration, to its credit, got a lot done.It helped stabilize the Russian economy.We did help the Russians.We did invite Russia to become kind of an ally of the alliance, as [former NATO Deputy Secretary General] Sandy Vershbow used to call it.The NATO-Russia relationship would be the alliance with the alliance.So we were building a strategic framework to bring Russia into the family of nations through the ’90s.

But after the ’96 elections, with the devil’s bargain of getting election money from the oligarchs in return for their ownership of state assets, and then later with Yeltsin’s health deteriorating, inflation, financial crisis, it became clear that the Russia we thought we were dealing with was not the Russia we actually had.

Enter Putin.So Putin comes in, and his argument, and the argument of people around him speaking to us, serious people, was: “Look, after the degradation of the Russian state and difficulties of the ’90s, you need a strong ruler who is going to reassemble the Russian state and modernize it, and on this basis be able to deal with you, not from the position of supplicant, which is unsustainable politically.”Now, those are my words, but that’s a basic summary of the argument we were hearing on behalf of Putin.

Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term

Did he pretty much need to make the case that he should be president to the United States?

Well—

I'm not thinking publicly, but—

Strobe Talbott had a very skeptical view of Putin, and Putin was doing things in 2000, the end of the Clinton administration, which I believe caused Strobe and others to start questioning where they were headed.¹

And it was a harbinger.It was a foretaste of things to come.

Do you know what those were?

Pulling out of arms control arrangements.I believe something to do with Iran.This is a long time ago.But at the time, when Bush comes in, he and Condi Rice are willing to deal with Putin at face value, with one big caveat.They never, ever sacrificed other countries on the altar of good relations with Russia.It was about a bit of a hedging of their bets, so if they got it wrong, they wouldn’t be wrong at somebody else’s expense, which means it was basically an honorable policy.And I was part of it.I'm not trying to distance myself from it.There was a sense—and this was solidified during the famous Bush-Putin meeting in Slovenia in June 2001—that you could do business with Putin; that Putin was going to be a kind of strong-ruler modernizer in the Russian tradition, but not anti-Western, not someone who would trash the rule of law, not someone who would act in opposition to the West, but someone who would try to get Russia ready to work with the West.Now in retrospect, it’s easy to say, “Boy, you guys really got it wrong.”But at the time, we were dealing with what we had.

Sure.And I think the question is, when you went to school, when you read the book on who was Putin, what was it that Condi, you and others saw that led you to those conclusions?What was it about him that you thought you knew or had heard about or had seen?

Well, in the Soviet period, some of the more insightful KGB people actually understood the depths to which the Soviet Union had fallen.[Yuri] Andropov, no liberal, also understood that things couldn’t go on the way they were.And it was possible that Putin was aware of the need for reform of the system, that he was not a committed liberal or human rights guy, hardly, being KGB, but it was possible that he understood the need for a strong state, meaning strong rule of law.

Because he was—

Now, that’s not how it turned out, you understand.

Sure.But because he was a KGB guy, it was a plus.

Well, no, it wasn’t a plus.

But it was not necessarily disqualifying.Now people look back and say: “Well, organizational affiliation is destiny.Once KGB, always KGB.”OK, right, I get that.But at the time, you could argue that the insight the KGB had into the system—that is, dealing with real information—gave them the basis to understand that the system had to be reformed in order to be saved.

Now again, these assumptions turned out to be wrong, but it was worth a try.And the reason I'm defending the early Bush policy is because Bush never, ever stopped working with Central Europe, and he never tried to buy Russian friendship by sacrificing other countries.That was Bush’s version of what Clinton was doing, which was pretty much the same thing; that is, support EU enlargement, enlarge NATO to the countries that are ready, and at the same time work with Russia.Oh, and no real military or no military buildup at all in Central Europe in the new NATO countries, but keep that military level low in the hopes that the Russians would understand that this was not a foretaste of some arms race.

So it was actually a complicated policy, a mixed one.And it was wrong.But, you know, if Bush hadn’t done it, and if Clinton hadn’t done it, you would ask me the legitimate question, “Well, why didn’t you even try?,” to which I would have no answer.So I'm glad we tried.The failure is principally a failure of Russia to take advantage of the opportunities Clinton and Bush opened up to it.

Let’s talk a little bit about the personalities—the Bush personality; the Putin personality; the way they both, from what I can tell, as a former KGB man, he would have studied Bush dramatically and known the cross story and all of that, and Bush would have had a book from you guys and others about who was Putin and what is the KGB and where did he come from.So those two people meet, and, as I hear the story, they go privately into a room for about 45 minutes.

I think they walked around.I remember them walking around outside also.

OK.

It was Slovenia.It’s Brdo Castle, great location.I'm standing next to Condi.Putin comes in, and his body language was all positive and sunny and, you know, kind of open.And I think I whispered to her, “This is going to be really good,” and she nods.You could just tell.And they seemed to hit it off right away.Putin was all business, but not in a bad way.He was: “Look, we’re the guys.Let’s make deals.Let’s sort out our relations.We want to work with you.”Bush is a shrewd judge of people.He wants to know who you are, where you as a person are coming from.He sort of liked what he saw, or what he thought he saw.And fair enough, right, Putin was leaning forward in his best way, and Bush was—remember, Bush had just been to Warsaw, and he had given a speech, which if you read it, sounds like he’s telling people, “We’re going to keep enlarging NATO, and we’re going to expand freedom.”It’s the Bush freedom agenda without the Iraq war and before 9/11.

So he’s done this.He’s staked out a position.And then he meets Putin, and Putin is glad to see him.So Bush has not given away anything.He’s taken the policy high ground and then is in a position to really welcome Putin as a potential partner.I thought that was pretty clever of Bush.This was Bush and Rice figuring this out.I was in the NSC at the time.So I think this was a good beginning.

Now, you're going to say, “Yeah, but it all failed.”

No, I'm not.

Well, look, it did end up badly.

Well, I'm going to walk you through ways that it might have failed.

It was worth the try.And it’s always important with the Russians never to give up on trying to establish a positive agenda, for two reasons.One, you might succeed; and two, even if you don’t succeed, you don’t want to be open to the charge that you never tried.But an important rule of Russian policy, a policy toward Russia: Don’t sacrifice somebody else’s country and think it’s a gesture of goodwill which will be reciprocated.It will be seen as a gesture of weakness, and you’ll lose.

So the moment comes where they're talking to the press, and the question gets asked of the president, “What do you think?,” or whatever the question was.You're sitting there next to Condi.

In back of her.

In back of her.Take me there.Tell me what you were hoping he would say, and tell me how you reacted when he—

Well, I'm sitting there, and, as I remember, I'm sitting next to John Beyrle, who is later our ambassador, and the best Russian speaker in the entire U.S. Foreign Service.And Bush gives that line, right, that “I looked into his eyes and got a sense of his soul,” and John and I sort of look at each other and go, “Uh-oh.”And Condi does her version of not comfortable.She just reacts.Her back stiffens just for a second.If you didn’t know her, if you weren’t watching, you would have missed it.I think she felt she should have prepared Bush for that question.But you know, even though it’s a famous line that people kid him about, it’s not a bad sentiment to have.Yeah, you look back at Putin, and you're wrong.You know, that was wrong.But in the context that is reaching out to Putin, it didn’t actually give away anything.It set the groundwork for a “I’ll trust you until you prove otherwise.”And then Putin proved otherwise, and President Bush responded accordingly.But I'm not going to criticize that line, even though it’s been much criticized.Again, that’s in the category of worth a try, even if you're wrong, as long as you don’t sacrifice your values or your interests.

Putin picks up the phone on 9/11 and reaches Condi and talks to her about it.Do you know why he did that and what he was hoping it would yield?

I don’t know.I’ll never say I know what Putin was thinking.I wasn’t on Air Force One, so I don’t know the details of that.But I know that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Putin was leaning forward, offering to be helpful.He made it clear that he would not oppose the U.S. establishing temporary military bases to support the operation in Afghanistan.And we really thought, in the Bush administration, that counterterrorism would be the rock-solid foundation on which we and Russia would build a new relationship, that we would use arms control to settle the last remnants of the Cold War; counterterrorism in a post-9/11 era would make us rock-solid allies, and that the notion—we would increase, we would thicken, so to speak, the NATO-Russia relationship, which Bush did in the spring of ’02, the Pratica di Mare NATO Summit in Italy.So we would strengthen the relationship between Russia and NATO.We would build antiterrorist cooperation, and at the same time, we would continue the policy of NATO enlargement and support EU enlargement.That’s how we entered the post-9/11 period, trying to do more with the Russians without sacrificing our other objectives.

The people we talked to say what Putin desperately needed, wanted, would have done anything for, was respect from the United States on a world stage that he really felt the nation, his audience, his base felt diminished, broken, and they looked to him not only for security but for status in the world, in the worldview, and that what he really wanted from America was to be shown in some important ways that respect, and that the thing that tears it for them first, for them, was Iraq.

Well, we were aware that Putin wanted this, and Bush was giving it to him—I mean, brought Russia into the G8, expanded the NATO-Russia relationship.Don’t forget, in November ’01, after 9/11, Bush brings Putin down to the Crawford Ranch.I was there for that, and it was wonderful.The atmosphere was terrific.

What were they like together?

They seemed to get along.²

Putin, let us say because of his training, is good at being kind of buddies with somebody if he wants to be.He can be quite charming.The whole reception with the Tex-Mex—the Texas music and some dancing, and a whole easy, relaxed atmosphere, was terrific.I remember a deputy, a Russian deputy foreign minister, turned to me, watching the president and Putin chatting in a kind of animated way, said, “You're just getting to know him, and we’re just getting to know him, too.”And I said, “Well, here’s to both of us.”

I'm giving you this as a sense of the atmosphere.I don’t think that Russian deputy foreign minister was being arch.I think he was sincere, and we saw some real possibilities.Like I said, it didn’t turn out that way.But I'm not a believer in inevitability.I don’t think it was doomed.I think there were other possibilities.

Now, the Iraq War, OK.You had this huge split, very emotional, between the U.S. and Britain on one side, also Spain and Poland on one side, and Germany, France and then Russia on the other.This was painful and damaging.Now, whatever you think of the Iraq War, pro or con, I think both [Jacques] Chirac and [Gerhard] Schroeder used that debate to promote their own domestic political standing by taking anti-American postures.Now, a critic of the Iraq War would say: “Yeah, well, we deserved it.They were right, and we were wrong.”And maybe so.But I'm talking about at the time.This isn't a discussion of Iraq, but of Russia relations.

We saw Putin suddenly look and evaluate the split within the Western alliance.You had Chirac and Schroeder appealing to him to come on their side, to box in Bush and Blair, and you could feel Putin tempted by this.And then he got a taste for it.He liked it.Now, this is without prejudice to the merits of the Iraq War, but this is the fallout.I don’t think this split over the Iraq War was dispositive, but I think it was too bad.Now, it did not destroy the U.S.-Russia relationship, and in particular, it didn’t destroy Bush’s and Condi Rice’s efforts to keep working with the Russians.

I remember she took this rather philosophically, as if to say, “Look, the Russians are still going to play around; we shouldn’t let this throw us or exact revenge.”It was a very measured, collected response to what Putin was doing.

Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term

Do you guys know by then—it’s ’04, ’05.He’s had a little beginnings of the color revolutions, … and he’s taking the television stations.

I was going to raise that.

Right.So he’s created—he’s starting to act an awful lot like the guy we might fear.

Oh, like Putin.The Putin we know.Well, we notice this.I was going to say, when Putin moves against NTV and pushes out [Vladimir Aleksandrovich] Gusinsky, we were alarmed by this, and we tried to find ways to dissuade Putin from this course.We were trying to think creatively of ways to support independent Russian broadcasting without interfering.You know, you can't give U.S. government money to it, and we weren’t tempted by that.

But Putin started taking down the independent mass media, and that was a bad sign.³

And earlier than a lot of people realize, Bush himself, I think, began to re-evaluate his initial assessment of Putin.I remember a conversation between Bush and Blair in—I think it was October ’03, after the Iraq War.It’s in London.Bush is going to London.There were big anti-American or anti-Bush demonstrations.And I remember, it was over a lunch—I think it was a lunch—that Bush and Blair, off-script, started talking about Putin, and the two of them had the same view.They had reached—they were groping toward—I can't say had reached, but they were thinking through Putin the same way.It was striking.And they were saying to each other: “You know, I'm not sure he’s the guy we thought he was.I'm worried about this throttling of the independent media.This is not good.This is not the guy we were signing up to help and bring into our inner circle of world leadership.”

They didn’t draw any conclusions, but it was a striking conversation.And it was not in the talking points.This isn't staff-generated.This was two leaders thinking about the guy.Remember I said earlier, Bush had a good feel for people and a good sense of where they were coming from.And it was both leaders saying to each other, “We don’t like this.”And this was early.This was before Condi Rice or Powell or Blair’s people were there.And I just struck it.It struck me at the time, and I thought, wow, this is interesting.

Take me to—there's the Beslan [school siege] moment, which seems like total carnage, of course.But it also feels like a hint that if you're Bush and you're trying to evaluate somebody, and you're worried about his autocratic tendencies, and suddenly you see the press being taken down, or the TV being taken down, and then there's this moment.You’ve been talking about how he handled counterterrorism anyway.And here this guy goes full-chested, you know, boom, right in there.Is there an effect of all of that on you guys?

We were horrified, I mean, genuinely, on a human level, by the terrorist attacks in Russia, Beslan and the theater in Moscow.This was bad stuff.And there was a lot of human sympathy for the Russians.But this was a period of growing concern about what Putin was really doing and who he really was at the same time that we were trying to keep the relationship together and organized.And all through this time, we’re still working on ways to stabilize the relationship, ways to find a common positive agenda.

But it’s getting harder.We didn’t know what was going to happen.We were still plugging away.But there was a kind of steady, growing concern as this authoritarianism rises.And then, of course, we get the color revolutions.And that was a turning point, much more than the Iraq War.We did not appreciate, at the time, that Putin actually thought we were behind it, because we knew we weren’t.I mean, I remember, we were dumbfounded.You know, I remember hearing about the Rose Revolution in Georgia.I'm getting on a plane in Paris, and my deputy was saying: “Look, there's real trouble at the parliament.This guy [Mikheil] Saakashvili is pushing things pretty hard.”I get on the plane, I land, and I phone him.And he says, “Well, it’s over.”I said, “What do you mean?”He said, “Well, [Eduard] Shevardnadze’s fled.Saakashvili is in.”Like, what did I miss?We didn’t know.

We didn’t understand what was going to happen with the Orange Revolution.Like, no idea.Putin thought we did.He thought we were the puppet masters.Like man, we are not that good.I even told Russian television once, when they were accusing me personally of being the “gray cardinal” of the color revolutions, I said: “I wish.How come you see America with a massive budget being unable to do anything much, to stop the political deterioration and security deterioration in Iraq, and you think, on no budget at all, we can overthrow Moscow-supported governments in Kiev and Tbilisi?Are you kidding me?”But they really thought we were doing it.

Well, he’s increasingly paranoid, right, about the idea.He is not somebody, as people tell us, he’s not somebody who can comprehend grassroots rising up.

Well, here’s the story.Here’s a Soviet story.It’s World War II, and Anna Akhmatova, the great poet of the pre-revolutionary period, the Silver Age, is going around to Russian cities with all these refugees from western Russia and living in miserable, hungry conditions, and work to the bone, and fearful for their country, and she’s reading poetry.The message to these Russians is: “We’re still alive, and our culture is still here.We’re still here, despite it all.”And she’s getting rapturous ovations in World War II.And news of this goes to Stalin, and he says, “And who organized [this] spontaneous applause?,” right.

Putin, in one of the recent call-in shows, is asked—some Russian asks him, “What about official corruption?,” and Putin says, “Who told you to ask that question?”⁴

He’s channeling Stalin.He’s channeling Stalin.Think about it.Stalin couldn’t believe that the Russian people would embrace one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century in World War II.He had no comprehension of why.And this is still a characteristic of Russian rulers.There is no such thing as society.It’s all manipulation.It’s rather chilling, if you think about it.

What do you make of the 2007 Munich speech?Were you there?

I wasn’t.My deputy, Kurt Volker, phoned me.I remember, he was chuckling, saying, “This is not going to surprise you, but it seems to have surprised everybody else.”He said that [Secretary of Defense] Bob Gates was taking it philosophically.Other Americans were pissed, you know, frantic, angry.But he laid it out for me, and we could see this building.I mean, it’s a good moment to mark a change.It’s Putin’s organized expression of his anti-Western agenda, one he has held for the last 10 years, and it’s coming out of all of his frustrations and the color revolution and the sense that Russia was never going to get from the West what it wanted, which was a sphere of domination, because no one was going to give Russia a sphere of domination over its neighbors.⁵

Like, been there, done that.

Now, if we weren’t—if Harry Truman wasn’t going to give it to Stalin, and if even Roosevelt at the end of his life regretted what he had done at Yalta, what makes you think that now we’re going to give away the same countries?And I think Putin had had enough trying to be with Russia trying to be a normal nation.Russia wants to be a nation that makes its own rules and is surrounded by satellites, and they measure all countries by their own measure.And I think therefore they do not understand the West; they don’t understand NATO; they don’t understand the EU, because they think that it has to be dominated, either by the U.S. or Germany, and that all the arrangements to support the powers and prerogatives of smaller countries are mere scaffolding for power, because that’s the way they see things.They really don’t understand the American system, the free world.And Putin clearly in this speech was drawing a line and saying: “We’re not going to try anymore.We’re just giving up on you.And we’re going to make our own world in which we are the master.”

Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia

And two months later, they hit Estonia.Denial of service, all the stuff, all—the first real, effective cyberattack.

Well, at this point, I was becoming known as a Russia hawk, OK.Look, I had been totally behind the outreach to Russia; I was there.And I was comfortable with reaching out to Russia in this middle period where we had growing doubts, but there's a good argument to be made for a positive agenda.By late ’06, I've got my doubts, and now I'm hawkish.So that reputation I have is fair as of about 2007.We’re watching this stuff, and we’re watching the tension build.And we were thinking Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltics, they are now in the crosshairs and Putin’s appetite has only grown in the 10 years since.It’s quite ugly and dangerous.

Putin has started two wars, Georgia and Ukraine.And he has gone after the United States; he’s gone after France.He continues to spread money around throughout Europe.It’s bad.But in 2007, you could see that this was coming.And it was the Bush administration, to its enormous credit, [that] continued this dual-track policy of doing the best we could with Russia, but not sacrificing other countries.We can debate whether we chose the right tactic by fighting in NATO over a Membership Action Plan [MAP] for Georgia and Ukraine in 2008, but as a strategic concept, what we were trying to do was still basically the right thing.

[National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley famously says, “I think we threw Russia”—maybe he said, “The French and us” or “The British and us” or "Somebody and us threw Russia in the toilet.”This is the end of the Bush administration.What did he mean by that?

Well, Steve Hadley is one of these policymakers who is always looking for a way forward.⁶

I mean, it’s his greatest gift.Give him an impossible situation, and he’s going to try to find some way to fix it.And it’s wonderful.And he’s very good at it.

I wouldn’t put it that way.I think, though, that we made some pretty tough decisions that the Russians didn’t like.Kosovo was one of them; that is, Kosovo independence, in February 2008.The Russians hated that.Serious people have said to me that that might have been a precipitating factor in the Russian decision to invade Georgia.

But here is my counter to that.Russia had sentimental attachment to Serbia and therefore was opposed to Kosovo’s independence.Sentiment, hell.We had troops on the ground, and we had troops who had arrived to liberate Kosovo from Serb atrocities and were stuck with the U.N. basically management of Kosovo, which was failing, becoming more unpopular.And you think I'm going to sit around as a policymaker and let us slide from being liberators to occupiers with the ground burning at our feet?Hell no.

Background 2004, some of us had decided that we had to make decisions about Kosovo’s future, and that turned out to be independence.And we did so with almost all, though not all, of the European Union countries.Now, should we have stopped short of independence and kept the U.N. mandate there, so as not to hurt Russia’s feelings?Hey, their feelings, our troops.Oh, yes, not to mention the actual Kosovars themselves.Do they get a vote in their own future, or are they to be sacrificed to avoid hurting Russia’s feelings?

Now, I'm putting it in rather arch terms, but I'm trying to clarify for you the policy choices we actually faced.So you come in and tell me that Russia won't like it, and I'm telling you that you won't like the results unless we act.Choose.And I remember there was an NSC meeting, not just a Principals Committee meeting; it was President George W. Bush in the chair making the final decision about Kosovo independence.And he made sure.You know, he asked me and others to present the downsides, and I said, “Look, here are all the downside risks.”Everybody knew.Gates, Rice, they all knew.But it turned out OK.I mean, Kosovo’s independence turned out to be a lot more viable than South Sudan’s—you know, not bad, and a lot better off than it would be if we hadn’t.

I went into detail so you would understand that when somebody comes to you and says, “Well, we really stepped on the Russians’ feet because of Kosovo,” you have an idea that there were actual equities that have nothing to do with Moscow and its hurt feelings.

Did President Bush know it was going to piss off the Russians?Did you tell him?

That came up, sure.

And what did he say?

I mean, we all understood this.The Russians aren’t going to like it.And it was kind of, “Well, what happens if we don’t?”“OK, well, sir, this is how it likely unravels.”We had just stabilized Iraq because of the surge, so I'm telling the president: “You're going to have an indigenous population that is really mad at American soldiers, because we've betrayed them, and now we’re occupiers.How does that sound to you, sir?Does it sound like a good idea?”

OK.

Now, I didn’t have to—you know, there was no need to tell President Bush.Condi Rice laid it out, that wonderful, analytic mind she has, where she will walk you through a problem with clarity.There wasn’t anything she didn’t know.And similarly, on the decision for a Membership Action Plan for Georgia, the president made this call himself.He knew that it was risky.He knew the alliance was divided.He knew Putin wouldn’t like it.And he knew that there were tough—this was not an easy one.There were real equities at stake.

In retrospect, if I had known that Angela Merkel would have been unmovable, maybe I would have come at it a different way, maybe.But it was only a Membership Action Plan.It wasn’t membership.Nobody was asking about membership.These were some of the tough issues we had to decide.And Steve Hadley is always, throughout this period, trying to do the right thing about Russia.He was one of these people who was trying to find ways to cooperate with Russia on missile defense.And his ideas were good.I mean, these were win-win solutions that Hadley would think through and try to get through the system, and they were the right ideas.

The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister

Tell me about the notion of the reset.Obama and Clinton.Putin is now the prime minister of Russia.Medvedev is the president of Russia.Do we know that this is a joke?

Ah, the tandem, the tandem.Well, there were some—There were some who believed that the tandem was real, possibly because they wanted to believe it.It was a little like the Clinton people believing Yeltsin could really pull something off.You want to believe it.It clearly—you said the tandem was a sham, and of course it was.Of course it was.But there was this hope that Medvedev represented the 21st century.And this policy failed, and it was based on a mistake and assumption.But this Obama policy is like the Clinton policy and like the Bush policy.You're failing, but you're doing so honorably, and you're trying for a good reason.

I'm not going to sit back here and bust them and say, “Oh, they were foolish,” because the Obama administration, even though it put too much faith in the tandem, didn’t sacrifice other countries.The equities we played with were our own, and it was worth a try.I was with Secretary Clinton when she gave that reset button to [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov.I didn’t object.I didn’t object at the time, and I'm not going to go back and object.

Take me in there.What was that? How did that go? Whose idea was it?

It was Vice President Biden who first used the word “reset.”And I’ll say something for Joe Biden’s framing of Russia relations in his Munich Security Conference speech.⁷

He used “reset,” and in the same speech, he also said, “No Russian veto over NATO enlargement, and no recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two Georgian provinces Russia had grabbed.”So Biden was limiting the reset.I thought, wow, this guy is good.Now, I was there.I was on this trip.But this was all Biden.It was [then-U.S. Ambassador to Russia] Mike McFaul, [then-Deputy Secretary of State] Tony Blinken and myself were on the plane, but it was Biden who’s working this out.⁸

And he just nailed it. He just nailed it.Reset, but not with somebody else’s country.

So an honorable policy.So when Clinton’s going to give the reset button to Lavrov, look, I get it.It’s an attempt to take some of the rancor out of the relationship so we can work together in areas where we agree.

What is the reset button?What do you mean, the reset button?

Don’t you remember this?There was a big button, misspelled, in Russian, which said, “Reset,” only it was misspelled, because it was “Peregruzka” in Russian, which we thought meant “reset,” which means “overload.”“Perezagruzka” means “reset.”Now, my Russian is a little rusty, and I trusted somebody else; I won't say who.I trusted somebody else, because, Polish was my best language at the time.And so misspelled, that might have been a prophetic, but it was still—

It’s what?

Yeah, it’s this plastic button that says, “Reset,” and it was just—it was kind of a gag gift, but it was also symbolic of what Hillary Clinton was trying to do.And in retrospect, it was very similar to what Bush did, and very similar to what Clinton is doing.That is, American presidents were trying to make things right with Russia.And even though they failed, these are honorable efforts.

But what does Lavrov do when he looks at that?

He laughs.He laughs.And he points out that it’s misspelled, but he takes it in good spirit.

Right.

And it’s a perfectly good meeting.I think it’s in Geneva.I was still in my old job as assistant secretary.And Hillary Clinton’s approach to the Russians at this time, I think she said it to me in the corridor once: “It’s Goldilocks—not too hot, not too cold.Let’s hit it right down the middle.”Well, fair enough.

Every administration ought to take a look at ways we can improve things in Russia.I think the Trump administration is entitled to do the same, as long as it doesn’t give away somebody else’s country or give Putin unilateral presence.

During that time period we’re in, ’08 to ’11, the thing that seems significant is, of course, the Arab Spring to Libya.It just feels like that lights up for Putin himself.He’s seeing popular uprising, seeing despots go out the window, seeing that the United States is encouraging, throwing [Hosni] Mubarak under the bus, or whatever he sees.I understand.But this is his eyes, and he’s seeing it.

No, I know, I know, I know.But I have to object when somebody says, “It would be more realistic to put our support behind an 80-plus-year-old guy.”Really?But the Obama administration is grappling with the Arab Spring, and it’s wrestling with these different objectives: stability versus democracy; short-term versus long-term; the problem of election, electoral democracy when you don’t have other institutions of a modern state in place; all of these problems.And they're grappling, honestly, with a set of hard problems.

But Putin doesn’t see this.He sees this as the United States trampling around, overthrowing his kind of guys, which are dictators, in the name of some ephemeral thing that he doesn’t believe in called democracy.So he hates it.He just hates it—still does.If I had to give a sentence to describe Russian foreign policy, it’s this.Putin wants to make the world safe for Russian autocracy, which means compromising every democratic center of power he can find, and crushing democracy closer to home, like Ukraine.It’s a pretty cynical appraisal, and it’s not new.

Go back to the early 19th century, where Russia was crushing liberal revolutions in Budapest and Warsaw, because the Russians were afraid that success in these countries would infect Russia.Sound familiar?Yeah.That’s a lot of what's going on.And that kind of approach to the world is a function of the failure of Russian reform at home.So instead of reform at home, you do expansion abroad, the better to keep away the alien ideas and show your people who’s master of the universe.And when that fails, and only when that fails in Russian history, has Russia turned to internal reform.But when it does, it often gets—it often succeeds.And that gets me back to the Russia the two generations before the Russian Revolution.

Liberal czars, reactionary czars, weak czars, Nicholas II.Nevertheless, Russia was developing in a European direction.So I'm not one of these people who believes that Russia is civilizationally apart or different.Condi Rice’s book Democracy talks about this.And she’s right. She’s right.Don’t write off the Russians as if they're alien.You know, that’s the Sam Huntington approach, [put forth in the political scientist’s article “The Clash of Civilizations?”], civilizational differences, culture is destiny, you know.Come on, really?That’s retrospective inevitability.Things are the way they are because they could be no other way.You think?

When you're a policymaker, you see a multiple of opportunities.And if things are inevitable, how come inevitability never works projecting it forward?Only backward.So for Russia, that means that it’s in one of these periods of internal backwardness and lack of reform and therefore hostility to the world, which produces a downward spiral of lack of reform and corruption at home, and hostility to the world, that forces Russia to, it thinks, increase the repression.That cycle is broken or can be broken when Russia fails.

Now, changing Russia’s policy internally is not our business.It’s not our responsibility, and I'm not saying that it should be a policy objective.It’s beyond what we can do.But as a student of history, that’s sort of a reality you’ve got to keep in mind.I'm really amused sometimes when the Russians say: “There is an infinite capacity in the Russian soul for suffering.Nothing you can do can affect us.”Well, the Russian capacity for suffering was proven in World War II.That’s true.And in 1812, we look through that war through the eyes of Tolstoy, a similar kind of thing, a national resistance to an outside invader.

But what about all those wars Russia lost?Crimean War, Russo-Japanese War, World War I.Germany beat Russia in World War I.And Russia was saved ultimately by the United States.That saved Russia.And that suggests to me that Russia’s capacity for suffering is enormous when Russia is truly menaced by an outside aggressor—not when the government says they are, but when the people know they are.And there's a difference.

Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown

Let’s talk for a minute, Daniel, about the 2011 street protests and how Putin reads that.He’s made the announcement he’s going to run again, and the people hit the streets.It’s the moment where Hillary says whatever she says, and he remembers it forever and ever and ever, as the United States interfering.

Oh, for God’s sake.You know, it’s all Stalin: “And who organized this spontaneous applause for Anna Akhmatova?”The Russians have an inability to recognize that not everything is manipulation, not everything is spin, not everything is fakery, not everything is a Potemkin village.There is reality out there.And Russian society has its own views.They're not going to be swayed by America.They're not going to be swayed by the Kremlin ultimately.They're going to look around like people do everywhere.Nothing special about that.But I do believe Putin was somehow convinced that Hillary Clinton was behind this, and convinced that Toria Nuland was behind the Maidan, [Kiev’s main square and the site of anti-government protests], my colleague and successor’s assistant secretary of state.Oh, it’s nonsense.Hillary Clinton as the muse that inspires the Russian demonstrations?Give me a break.We don’t have that power as Americans.

All we have as Americans is the power of an ideal that we hold up and occasionally represent.But if people are taking to the street, they're doing so because they want to, not because we tell them to.

The phone call that is wiretapped or whatever that is then released, talk to me about that.Why was that even anything anybody is still talking about?

If you're familiar with Toria’s style, well, she has her own, and she’s famous for it.⁹

That's the way she talks.But it was, to me, when I heard that, I just laughed.You think that European diplomats on the cell phone don’t say similar things about the Americans and how difficult we can be?Of course they do. Of course they do.It means they're just letting off some steam and frustration.Big deal. Nobody cares.

So why did the Russians release it?

Because they wanted to embarrass her.

Why?

Well, I have a theory for which I have no evidence but simply observations.I've noticed that the Russians really have problems with strong, capable women.Think about it: Hillary Clinton; Toria Nuland; Angela Merkel; maybe Condi Rice, too.It just seems to set them on edge that these women in positions of power who are deeply knowledgeable and intensely competent are able and have, in the Russian eyes, the effrontery to stand up to them and just hold their ground.I've noticed that.Just sort of a pattern.

And ask, you know, I think a lot of the women who have dealt with the Russians, Russian officialdom over the years, and there are a lot of senior American diplomats and others, like Madeleine Albright, who know the Russians well, and are not going to be fooled.So I think that they may have just wanted to slap her down.

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term

We’ll generally skip the ins and outs of the Ukraine-Crimea moment.But there is, in fact, an argument about arming the Ukrainians.

Sure.

A pretty intense argument, [then] President Obama finally makes his announcement.Where are you on that argument?What do you believe we should have done?

What was my own position?

Yeah.

Well, I wasn’t part of the decision-making apparatus.At the time, I was just the sanctions guy.As the sanctions guy, I would prefer that sanctions not be the only pillar on which our policy rests.I'm glad to be at the center of policymaking, but come on, give me some company here.Don’t put it all on sanctions.So I was for it.I think Strobe Talbott and others outside government had the stronger case.But it’s not a 100-to-zero case.

There were arguments on the other side: You're going to escalate.You don’t have escalatory dominance.The Russians can arm more.Then you're going to be held responsible.The Europeans don’t want to do this.So there are arguments on the other side.I still think the argument for giving the Ukrainians the means to defend themselves, particularly against Russian armor, against tanks, is compelling.I think we should have done it.

But OK, look.The Obama administration, I think, in the end, should get a lot of credit for the way it responded to Russia’s aggression generally.Look what it did: heavy sanctions against Russia; the diplomacy to sustain it; NATO decision to put brigade-strength forces into the Baltics and Poland, reversing 25 years of American drawdown.That’s a pretty big decision.That’s Obama.That’s more than Bush did after the [2008 Russo-]Georgian War.So give the Obama people some credit.

You know, [Obama’s White House Chief of Staff] Denis McDonough, [National Security Adviser Susan] Rice, the president himself, had to sign off on all these things, and they did.As a known hawk on Russia, you know, I might have pushed for more, but I'm not going to knock people who have ultimate responsibility for the decisions.And I think the Obama Russia policy, like Bush’s, stands up pretty well.

Putin and Trump

... After Trump wins, in that month, in that two months, mid-November into December, all kinds of back channels are trying to be created.All kinds of conversations are going back and forth.We hear about them.The Mike Flynn phone calls with [Russian Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak, back and forth.In your experience, in the State Department, over all these administrations, has anything like this happened at this level in the transition period between presidencies?

There's nothing wrong with a transition team talking to ambassadors.They do it all the time.Campaigns do it. This is done.What's odd is not owning up to it.That was a little weird.They're trying to do it in a secretive way.I don’t understand that.There's nothing wrong with meeting with Ambassador Kislyak.It’s a little odd that you would forget it.He is an interesting personality, strong person, smart.You don’t forget that you’ve met with him.You remember it.

I don’t know anything more than has been in the newspapers.But given the atmosphere at the time, the emerging story of the Russian hacking into the DNC, the odd rhetorical deference the Trump campaign gave to Putin on all things, one would think that a transition team would be more careful.

Now, I only know what I know, and I don’t know anything [more] than is out in the public press.But at the time, in the Obama administration, we were preparing these cybersanctions in retaliation for the cyberhacking.These came out on Dec. 29.¹⁰

I think they should have been stronger.I think we needed more time to study the implications of what the Russians had done and come up with a more serious countermeasure.But it was the right thing to do, nevertheless.

But why couldn’t it have been done—was it being discussed in August or September?

Well, that’s a fair question.I know that some of us in the State Department were discussing it, but there wasn’t an organized interagency process until very late in the game.

Why?

I don’t know.Maybe people didn’t want to be seen as acting before the election because it would be seen as politicizing things.I don’t know.I'm not the person to ask.I do know that we were puzzled and frustrated.I was able to do only a few things on my own authority, not take action on my own authority, but start preparing for possible cybersanctions, which I did.And some of these were implemented.But it would have been far more effective had the U.S. government decided to prepare stronger sanctions and look at some of the larger issues the Russian cyberhacking raised.We’re finding out now that the Russian cyberhacking was more extensive than originally known.We had a suspicion it might be like that, and we’re finding out that it really was like that.

So this has to be laid at the feet of the Obama administration.I think they were cautious, perhaps overly so.In the end, they decided to do the right thing.I think we should have done more of it.But now the Trump administration has a problem, because not only is Russia not doing anything at all to merit a lifting of sanctions imposed because of Ukraine, but the extent of Russia’s aggression through cyber is growing.Moreover, that’s aggression not just directed against us; it seems to have been directed against the French elections as well.

Now, I'm not in government, but if I were, I would have probably by now have been over to Brussels a couple of times, and Berlin, and Paris, to discuss what we might do together, because this is something the Transatlantic Alliance, the great democracies of the world, should consult on, not act unilaterally.

Do you think that’s happening?

I don’t know.Well, there's no replacement for me so far.That is, there is no new coordinator for sanctions.There is no assistant secretary of state for Europe.The policy people at the European Bureau are really good.These are professional people, knowledgeable, skilled, competent.First-rate team at NSC.But I've not heard of it.I hope I'm wrong.I hope that we’re in these kinds of discussions now.

Putin and Hybrid Warfare

Can you just describe the summer of 2016 as it becomes apparent that the Russians were involved in the election?What's the feeling at the State Department around you as you're watching the leaks happening during the DNC?What's sort of the atmosphere and the reaction?

When this story started to break in the summer, as citizens, we were horrified and angry.As professionals, we wanted to start thinking about countermeasures.And this is also taking place when the Trump campaign was consistent and inexplicably soft on Putin.We couldn’t figure this out.It didn’t make a lot of sense.But professionally, we started thinking about, very early, about what we could do and should do.

You know this guy.

Which guy?

Putin.

Oh, I've met him a handful of times.I would not presume.

All right, but you know about him, and you know what his motives are, and you know what his actions have been.Why is he doing this?

If I had to characterize it, I would say that Putin wants to make the world safe for Russian autocracy.Now, what that means is, close to home he has to make sure that Ukraine’s democratic and European vocation fails.Farther away from home, Putin wants to weaken the Transatlantic Alliance, and he wants to weaken the idea of democracy.He wants to compromise it, the better to protect his brand of autocracy.

In the Soviet period, Russians, Soviets knew that the West was wealthier and freer than they were.They believed that there was a democratic system out there.Putin wants to tell them: “No, there isn't.They're just like us.”He wants to bury their hopes in an avalanche of cynicism.So by compromising our elections, or attempting to, it’s not so much the result he wants; it’s the sense that our elections and our democracy is, in fact, compromised, which is what he’s after, the better for him to be able to say to his people: “See?We’re all alike.Better stick with me, because it’s just one boss or another, and I'm the boss you know.”

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