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John Bolton
Fmr. National Security Adviser
John Bolton served as national security adviser to President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019. He was previously the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and is the author of The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Michael Wiser for FRONTLINE on Sept. 29, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Bush’s Assessment of Putin
As the [George W.] Bush administration comes in, Vladimir Putin is a new president of Russia.He’d only been there for a year.What was the assessment, and what did you make of Vladimir Putin?
Well, I think at the very beginning of the Bush ’43 administration, we had high hopes that with the end of the Warsaw Pact, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the progress that we thought Russia had made both in moving toward a more politically democratic society and a more market-oriented society, that there were all kinds of possibilities.And we approached it from the strategic perspective as an opportunity to reorient away from the Cold War and to concentrate on the new threats that we thought were emerging.And we thought Putin would be sympathetic to that, and particularly after 9/11, we thought that there were real possibilities.
So I worked on getting the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, because we didn’t think we had a direct strategic threat from Russia, but we did want to protect the United States with a limited missile defense system against rogue states like Iran, Iraq and North Korea.We thought Russia would share that view.We thought there was an opportunity to negotiate lower levels of nuclear weapons, which we accomplished, and then to work together in the fight against terrorism.So if you look on a broad range of issues, from that perspective, we were optimistic at the beginning.
I mean, of course, he was a former KGB agent.He does have a democratic crackdown early on.And there’s the famous meeting that a lot of people talk about, between President Bush and President Putin, where [President Bush] said he looked into [Putin's] soul.What were you thinking when you saw that interaction between the two presidents?
I wasn’t in the administration yet.I hadn’t been confirmed yet.But I was a little surprised by that.Didn’t bother me that Putin was KGB.I think we saw that many of the officials in Russia were ex-KGB, because they were the most entrepreneurial and creative of all the Soviet bureaucracies.The rest of them were kind of dull and conformist, but in the KGB, you were taught to think for yourself.So actually, that struck us as an opportunity.
I don’t think anybody was looking at this through rose-colored glasses, but we thought at the strategic level, there were real opportunities to work together.And many of us were alumni of the Bush ’41 administration, where Jim Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev had really set the tone after the end of the Cold War, and we thought there was at least a good possibility we could continue that progress.
I mean, you write in your book that, even back then, there’s a meeting between Putin, Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld, where he’s talking about Russia being part of NATO.Were they serious?
Yeah.This was a meeting, the first time I met Putin, within about a month or a month and a half after the 9/11 attacks.And in the Clinton administration, they had created a joint permanent council between NATO and Russia.The Russians were very dissatisfied with it.When Rumsfeld met with Sergei Ivanov, the Russian defense minister, Ivanov said, “It’s rubbish.It’s worse than the U.N. General Assembly.”So I was pretty sympathetic to that point.I thought there were ways that cooperation could be increased, and it turned out that that proved to be wrong.But in those early days, particularly in the wake of 9/11, we were seeking to find out what was possible.
I mean, it’s interesting, you do write in there, too, that one of the things that Putin is saying is, “We were being pushed out of the system of civilized Western defense.”Was there a sense even back then at that point that Russia felt a little bit insecure or felt like they weren’t going to be as big a player or that maybe things were progressing without them?
Well, I think they were concerned.And indeed, the argument we made on the ABM Treaty was that we should both withdraw from it, that we didn’t think either one threatened the other.We weren’t looking for a Reagan-style Star Wars initiative, but we wanted a sufficient missile defense capability to protect against the rogue states or accidental missile launches.We felt Russia would see it was threatened by Islamic terrorism, and it would be something we could cooperate on.
I mean, it’s interesting, looking back with hindsight at Vladimir Putin, because the U.S., it seems, legitimately did not believe that Russia was a major security threat given the other threats out there, but that Putin, at least as he would describe the situation by the end of the Bush administration, sees the U.S. as a threat.Was there an asymmetric sense of threat that Vladimir Putin had?Did he understand how America perceived Russia?
Well, I think we were very open with him, that proposing, as I say, that we jointly withdraw from the ABM Treaty.We were the only two parties to it, so if one of us withdrew, which the U.S. ultimately did, there wasn’t any treaty anymore.But we thought the symbolic value of both of us rejecting the treaty would show we had reached common ground on the nature of the threat from rogue states.
I think something changed in Putin’s mind between 2001 and 2006, ’07, somewhere in there, by the end of the Bush administration.But in those early days, he acquiesced in U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty.He didn’t have Russia withdraw as well, but he didn’t fundamentally object to it.We reached a strategic weapons agreement, the Treaty of Moscow, as we called it, that brought down the limit on deployed strategic weapons pretty substantially.That seemed to be a plus.
And we were working—we thought we were working with the Russians mutually against the Iranian nuclear threat, the North Korean nuclear threat.I think some of the difficulty emerged after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.I think that may have been something that Putin felt had consequences for him.But we didn’t feel it had consequences for him other than positive ones.It was one more rogue regime that had been eliminated.
So let’s talk about that.But before that, you are in Moscow on Sept. 17 of 2001, I think.What was the response from Vladimir Putin about Sept. 11, about how he saw his opportunities, or how he saw his relationship with the United States?
Yeah, that was a trip I had actually been scheduled to begin on Sept. 11.Obviously commercial air flights were shut down, and even by the end of the week of Sept. 11, I flew on a military plane, because there was no way to get there commercially.The first meeting I had, I think, in Moscow was with the deputy national security adviser, and it was about 9:00 in the morning.But we had the U.S. side and the Russian side.They brought out a tray full of glasses of vodka, and they toasted the United States and wished us well in the wake of the attack.So at that point, there was certainly a feeling that they shared the nature of the threat from Islamic terrorism with us and that they were willing to work together on it.
… We talked to somebody who was at the State Department focused on that area and we said, like, “What happened?”And they said, “Well, Afghanistan and Iraq happened, and we were not paying as much attention at a high level to Russia,” which was sort of what Putin was expecting.Do you agree with that assessment?
No, I don’t agree with that assessment.I think we paid plenty of attention to Russia.I can say in my own case, I went to Moscow so often that the people at the desk of the Marriott Hotel on Tverskaya, where we always stayed, would say, “Ah, Mr. Bolton, welcome back.We have your favorite room for you,” which I knew what that meant.But they received a lot of attention from President Bush, Secretary of State [Colin] Powell, Condi Rice.The Afghan decision was one that they supported.
And the first trip after 9/11 that Rumsfeld took, I accompanied him, and we met with Putin.That was the first time I met with him.And he was very strong on wanting to cooperate to deal with this threat of Islamic terrorism, which they saw in the Central Asian Republics, threatening them in Russia.And we had later examples of it at Beslan and other terrorist attacks inside Russia.
So at that point, it did look like we had a convergence of interests.Now, there was a disagreement on Iraq, but—that’s for sure.But we had disagreements with the French and the Germans on Iraq as well.And I think France, Germany and Russia were all wrong in their position.But again, that didn’t seem to signal a strategic shift away from Russia, because there were others in Europe who took essentially the same view.
Nonetheless, I think we can see in hindsight that it was about that point that we began to lose the feeling that Russia really wanted to integrate more closely with the West.And shortly after that, Putin changed his attitude on, for example, the ABM Treaty, which he had acquiesced in in 2001, but by 2007, 2008 was saying it’s aimed against Russia, which he knew not to be true.It was aimed against—the positioning in the Czech Republic and Poland were directed against the threats from Iran and Iraq.Missile defense against Russia we put in Canada and North America.We don’t put it in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Putin’s World View
What is it like to be in a meeting with Vladimir Putin?We’ve heard the story about he’s warm with Bush, but we’ve talked to other people who say, even back then, he could be dismissive, you know, lean back in his chair; he could be argumentative.What did you see when you were in a meeting with Vladimir Putin?
Well, I didn’t, frankly, see much change in behavior from the first time I met him in late 2001 to the last time I met him in 2019.He’s tough, and he’s cold-blooded.But he’s professional.He always seemed confident.And he understood English, which is always an advantage.He didn’t usually speak in English.He allowed his interpreter to do the translation, but he knew what we were saying, and then he could listen again when his interpreter translated it.Occasionally he would correct his interpreter in English when she was translating what he said.But he was always very direct.
In the first meeting with Rumsfeld after 9/11, he talked about Russia’s experience with Taliban and other terrorists in the region.And at one point, he said to Rumsfeld, the Taliban had asked Russia for something, and Putin said, “We told them exactly this,” and he used that gesture.And we were all a little surprised by that.Rumsfeld thought for a second; he said, “Well, we don’t do it quite the same way, but we get the point.”
That’s interesting.I mean, some of the biographers and people who have studied Putin say that one of the things he learned from Yeltsin and Gorbachev and others was strength, that he wanted to project strength.Was that what you saw from him?
Well, I think he felt that Russia was an important player in the world, and he wanted to show confidence.But I didn’t see it as posturing; I saw it as somebody who was sitting on top of 5,000 or 10,000 nuclear warheads and knew he had the strength.I can tell you, in the Bush ’41 administration, my counterpart for part of that was Sergey Lavrov, who’s now the foreign minister of Russia.And the first time I met to meet with Lavrov in Moscow, I got material on what he was like and so on.And one part of it said, “We assess”—this is before the collapse of the Soviet Union—but it said, “We assess that Lavrov is not a Communist,” which is pretty amazing.And then it said, “We assess that he is a czarist.”And I think that is true of Lavrov, true in 1990 and true today.And I think it’s true of Putin, too.
… Do you think that the color revolutions, which is a pattern, these protests in what they call the “near abroad,” and a sense, people tell us, of Putin feeling like these things could come to them, and a link to the United States, in his own mind—do you think that was part of it back then, back in 2003-2004?
I would put it differently.I think Putin and many people around him, and many people in Russia to this day, think that the breakup of the Soviet Union was illegitimate.They think Yeltsin made a catastrophic mistake when he declared Russia independent in effect at the end of 1991, and that Putin and these others believed that these countries, or certainly large chunks of them, had to be brought back into Mother Russia.And Putin himself said that very clearly, although I don’t think we recognized it clearly enough at the time.But he said, in 2005, the breakup of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
I think we all felt it was a pretty good way to end the 20th century.He obviously had a different point of view.The color revolutions were just another manifestation of the basic problem, that these countries shouldn’t be independent to begin with, not because Putin wanted to recreate a communist Soviet Union; he wanted to recreate the Rodina<i>, </i>the Mother Russia that he believed in.And I think that’s what he’s still trying to do today.
And how did America approach this?I mean, he seems to believe he has a sphere of influence, the way America might have a sphere of influence in part of the world.And did the Bush administration follow that?Was there conflict over that question of whether Russia should have an ability to influence the near abroad?
Well, you know, you have to have—you have to take into account what the near abroad thinks of all this.I mean, we’ve got a sphere of influence in Canada, but we don’t tell them what to do.I mean, they tell us what to do more than we tell them what to do, in a sense.And these countries, certainly the former members of the Warsaw Pact, wanted protection from Russia.They’re the ones that joined NATO.
We didn’t extend NATO’s border toward Russia.They were knocking on our door from the minute the Warsaw Pact began to collapse.NATO’s problem was, we didn’t decide what the endpoint would be, and we left a gray zone in many places that Putin is now exploiting.But it wasn’t because we had designs on Russia; it’s because the former Warsaw Pact members and former parts of the Soviet Union, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, wanted protection against Russia.
NATO as a Deterrent to Putin
… You’re, I think, just out by the time he goes to Munich and delivers that speech in 2007.What are you thinking when you’re watching it?And by that point, is it a surprise what he says about America?
No.I think by 2007-2008, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the optimism we had in 2001 was no longer justifiable, and it was going to be a kind of 19th-century power politics controversy in Europe.And it was at that point—I had left the Bush administration by then, but at that point that Bush said correctly, I think, in April of 2008, at the Bucharest NATO summit, that Ukraine and Georgia should be brought on a fast track toward NATO membership.This is the answer to the question, what do you do with the gray-zone countries?In Central Europe, it’s Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine.NATO has accepted as members everybody else up to that frontier, but there’s a gap between NATO’s eastern border and Russia’s western border.And Bush said, “Let’s answer the question.We’re going to bring certainly Ukraine, and Georgia as well, and the Caucasus into NATO, and that will close the border question.”And Germany and France objected.It was a big mistake.
Four months later, four months later, Russia invades Georgia.I mean, you don’t get many laboratory experiments in international affairs.But this showed what happened by not taking the next logical step and bringing those countries into NATO, because neither the Soviet Union nor Russia had ever crossed a NATO border with armed forces, never once.That’s why today Finland and Sweden want to join NATO, because they know that the only real defense is to have a NATO border with Russia.
But by 2008, as Bush is making that decision, and apparently it’s a very lively debate inside the administration, they know, at this point, that that will upset Russia.That Russia will see that as a threat?
Yes. And what would Russia do about that threat?Would they cross a NATO border and risk war with NATO?The answer Finland and Sweden have just given us is they don’t think so.I think you can make a very strong case, there would not have been a Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 or a Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 if we had brought Ukraine into NATO quickly, or it was clear they were coming into NATO quickly.You leave a gray zone in between, as we did, unfortunately, you leave room for trouble.
And who’s responsible for that compromise, for that gray zone?I mean, it may have been better to do nothing than to say an undefined—they can come in at some point.But we’re not going to offer them NATO protection.Where does the responsibility lie for that?
I think the responsibility, going back to 2008, lies very clearly with France and Germany.Just like I think the crisis Europe has today with energy lies with France and Germany.The idea that you could, by increasing trade with Russia and not being threatening, that you’d have a greater chance for peace in Europe, absolutely wrong.
It’s becoming clear after that that the chance of an invasion of Georgia is possible.And Secretary Rice says, you know, “We stand by our friends.”Apparently privately she’s warning Georgia not to provoke Vladimir Putin.But how much of a test is that?What is going on?Is Putin testing the United States’ resolve, NATO’s resolve at that moment?
Well, I think it was a test, and I think we failed.And I think it said to him, “Here is a method by which I can ensure these countries never get into NATO.”He expanded the concept of frozen conflict, which existed in different parts of the former Soviet Union, where there were still what were then Russian troops on the soil of countries like Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Central Asian Republics.The NATO rule for many years, and still is, you don’t admit a new member to NATO that’s already engaged in a conflict, because you’re starting a war; you’re entering a war when you admit somebody.So in Putin’s mind, seemed pretty clear.The more countries he can get Russian troops into, the more he’s got a veto over the expansion of NATO.
I mean, should we have seen what was coming at that point, in 2008, after he intervenes or invades Georgia?Should we have had a sense of where this was headed?
I think that was a real wake-up call that we missed given who was elected president in 2008.If you look at the reaction in August of 2008 of candidate Obama and candidate John McCain, McCain instantly criticized Russia and called for U.S. support for Georgia.Obama’s first response, which is the true test of what he really believes, is to call on both sides to exercise restraint.So, you know, Russia, you exercise restraint, and Georgia, you exercise restraint.Well, who’s kidding whom here?Who’s kidding whom here?
And I think that was the response that Putin and the Russians read.And they said, “Obama is going to be weak.”And I think that was the predecessor moment for what became the invasion of 2014, where the Obama administration response was weak, again, laying the groundwork for 2022.
Putin During the Obama Years
I mean, as you’re watching, you’ve had this progression.You thought that maybe that Vladimir Putin is a guy we can work with, and by the time the Bush administration is ending, this seems like a guy who sees America as an enemy and is bent on some kind of empire building.And then you’re watching the Obama administration come in, and they have a “reset” button, and they say, “We’re going to start it all over again.”What is it like to watch that, having lived through the Bush administration’s experience with Vladimir Putin?
Well, it was to me a proof of Winston Churchill’s comment about the “confirmed unteachability of mankind.”The whole idea, the reset button, that our relations with Russia were bad because of the performance of the Bush administration, misread it entirely.And in fact, at the very ceremony where Hillary Clinton gave Sergey Lavrov the reset button, he humiliated her.He said, “The Russian words you’ve used translate incorrectly,” and she just laughed, and the administration didn’t get it.That’s the Russians saying, “We’ve got your measure.”
And when you hear these comments from Obama, that Russia is a regional power, he says to Mitt Romney, “The 1980s called, and they want their foreign policy back,” what message was that sending, as you were watching that?
Well, I think the Russians were laughing uproariously.I mean, they said, “This guy obviously doesn’t understand what’s going on.”I think they watched his foreign policy generally and concluded that he would not respond effectively if they took strong action to do what they had been talking about really since 2006-2007, which is recreate the Russian Empire.And their foray into Ukraine in 2014 was mixed for them.They got the Crimea back.But they ran into real Ukrainian opposition in the Donbas, and they did not take nearly as much territory the first time as they hoped to.
But what was the Western response?Insignificant sanctions.So that said to the Russians, “We’ve got another opportunity here when the time is right.They didn’t sanction us significantly after the attack in Georgia.They didn’t sanction us significantly after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine.We can keep pushing because it’s an open door.”
And that debate inside the Obama administration, over Javelins and arming Ukraine, how important was that?
I think that said to the Russians, “They can’t make up their mind whether they believe Ukraine is of strategic importance to the United States.In Moscow, we know it’s of strategic importance to us, so that we’ve got the momentum on our side that we can dictate the direction of policy here.”
Do you think there’s another signal sent at this moment, during the 2016 elections, when the intelligence agencies conclude Russia is involved in interference?How do you evaluate the Obama administration’s response and how Vladimir Putin understood that?
Well, I don’t think they took effective measures to respond.I think what the Russians were trying to do was sow discontent and cynicism about American institutions, and I think they did an unfortunately pretty good job about it.And the Obama administration didn’t really respond effectively, because their view of cyberspace was that it was kind of the Garden of Eden, and the last thing they wanted to do was weaponize cyberspace.
So they had developed procedures for decision-making on offensive cyber operations that centralized control in the White House and meant essentially there weren’t any offensive cyber operations, and so the Russians took advantage of that throughout the 2016 election period.
Putin’s Relationship with Trump
And then Donald Trump is elected.And as he’s elected, and Vladimir Putin is watching that, what do you think—or what do you know he’s concluding about how things have changed in the relationship between the U.S. and Russia?
Well, I think Putin, like everybody else in the world, could see that Trump seemed to admire strong authoritarian leaders—Putin, Xi Jinping, [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan.He had a love affair with Kim Jong-un.This probably struck people in the affected capitals as being about as strange as it struck most Americans, and I think it opened to Putin lines of thought about how to take advantage of it.He also saw how Trump treated the NATO alliance and believed that Trump could be a figure that would weaken NATO, which would make anything else Russia wanted to do in the struggle over the former Soviet Union much easier.
Do you think that he respected Donald Trump when the two of them are in a meeting, a private meeting together?How does he evaluate Trump?
I think Putin thought Trump was a fool and easily manipulable if he could get him in the right situation.And I don’t think that’s dissimilar from what many other authoritarian foreign leaders thought.
What about Donald Trump, his attitude towards Putin, which was public, and towards Russia, and what was going on when you were there, at the policy level, and even before you were there?Was there a split of the president’s rhetoric and what American policy was towards Vladimir Putin?
Well, there are a lot of aspects of American policy.The most important thing to understand is that Trump doesn’t do policy, that that’s not how he approached dealing with foreign leaders, particularly adversaries.It was, what was his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin in this case?And he believed that he had a good personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, that the United States and Russia had a good relationship.Now, I’m not discounting the importance of personal relationships, but Vladimir Putin is as clear-eyed and cold-blooded as any foreign leader I have ever seen.He knows exactly what he thinks Russia’s national interest is, and he pursues it unrelentingly.So confronted with Donald Trump, this is like an open field in front of a football player carrying the football.And I think Trump never understood that, never understood what the nature of Putin’s game was.And we should all be thankful that Putin wasn’t more adventurous than he turned out to be.
There were reports, though, that Vladimir Putin did not cease to see the United States as a threat, and in fact that part of his view of the world is that people like you were running American foreign policy in an anti-Russia way and that Trump was sort of a figurehead.Did you get either intelligence on that?Did you get a perception that that was how he saw things?
Well, I think Putin could distinguish between Trump the personality and the United States as a country and what the U.S. strengths were and what obstacles they posed to him.And in the meetings I had with Putin, where we talked about things like arms control, issues like that, that he enjoyed talking about because it showed Russia was still a great power, I thought we had conversations where we didn’t agree very much, but they were very professional and about what you’d expect to have at the Putin level.
Those talks didn’t occur when he met with Trump.They talked about other things.At the Helsinki summit, most of the time, it was in their one-on-one meeting, it was Putin talking about Syria, and issues that would have been discussed with prior presidents didn’t come up.So I think the Russians understood that in the person of Donald Trump, they had a very unusual American president.Didn’t mean that anything else in America had changed.And so therefore, in that sense, their calculations remained the same.But they saw Trump as somebody who was in the wrong job at the wrong time, and they wanted to figure out how to take advantage of him.
Vladimir Putin had seen NATO as a threat, at least going back to 2007.And Donald Trump comes in, and what is his attitude towards NATO?And how do you think Vladimir Putin was perceiving the public comments of candidate Trump and then President Trump, and his general attitude towards NATO?
Well, I don’t think Trump had an idea what NATO was as a collective defense organization or that the United States was leading it.Trump made one very correct, very important point, which was many NATO members were not spending adequately on defense, and he pounded away on that.And it did produce a better result in terms of what many countries were doing.
But it wasn’t because Trump was trying to strengthen NATO.I think he saw it basically as one way to justify getting out of NATO.And I think as Putin followed, and his people followed Western press accounts of what Trump said at NATO meetings, what he’d said in private, what people speculated about his negative feelings on NATO, Putin looked at that, and in the old saying, don’t interfere when your opponent is committing suicide.So he wasn’t going to test exactly how strong NATO was; he was going to let Trump continue to undermine it.And I think he was really waiting to see, in a second Trump term, would he go all the way and actually withdraw from NATO?
As you’re watching that trip right before Helsinki, in Brussels, with [Jens] Stoltenberg, and the president [Trump] is dressing him down and criticizing Germany.And his points may be valid in retrospect, but it’s a very public criticism of … the secretary general of NATO, of a key ally.What are you thinking as you’re watching that display?
It was hard to believe it was happening.But having observed Trump, even in the few months I had been in the administration at that point, I could see that we were on very dangerous ground.And in fact, the next day, Trump said he was ready to withdraw from NATO, and throughout that day, I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t going to announce it right there.
And so were you then in a desperate attempt to convince him of the importance of NATO and of the alliance?
Well, it was all hands on deck, there’s no doubt about that.But what we were trying to do was find some way to persuade him not to raise the subject.One lesson I learned was that it doesn’t make much sense to argue with Trump about the merits of a particular issue.It’s much better to argue the political benefits of him doing the right thing rather than trying to convince him it’s the right thing.
So at that point, I think Mike Pompeo and I concluded the best thing to argue was, don’t get in a fight over NATO when you’ve got a Supreme Court nomination at stake back in the United States.Ultimately that day, Trump did not say he was withdrawing from NATO.He came very close to it, but he didn’t actually say it.I don’t know whether the arguments we made to him were enough to persuade him it was politically unwise, but I think, in Putin’s mind, he didn’t know all the inside details, but he could see from the optics reported in the press that this had been a very serious encounter.And from Putin’s point of view, I think he was content to let that play out and see how much damage might actually occur.
I mean, you concluded, and presumably Vladimir Putin concluded, that this relationship seemed to be so strained that there was a real chance that the U.S., at some point, would pull out of that alliance.
I believe that if Trump had won a second term, freed at that point of really any political constraint—he would never face the voters again—he would have done a lot of things in his second four years that people can only imagine.And I do think that withdrawal from NATO was a very distinct possibility.So if you’re Vladimir Putin, and you see even a possibility that that might happen, or you certainly see NATO being substantially weakened, you’re going to withhold action until you see how much your opponent is going to dismantle their own defense structures.Because once that happens, it’s very hard to put back together again, and Russia’s flexibility is significantly increased.
And when you say withhold action, you mean that’s why he wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine during this period, because why do it if he could let it all fall apart?
Yeah.I think most foreign observers, like most people in the United States, felt that Trump was likely to get a second term.It turned out he didn’t, because of COVID perhaps, because of other reasons.But in forward strategic thinking, if they thought in the Kremlin that Trump was going to get another four years, they weren’t in any hurry to do anything.
So when you then fly to Helsinki, are you concerned about—because you know that there’s a lot of emphasis on what happens in the private meetings between Trump and Putin.What was your concerns at the time, as you go into a moment like that?
Well, I was worried that Putin would want to spend a lot of time with Trump on strategic arms control issues, about which Trump knew very little.So I tried to prepare Trump for that, not terribly successfully, I guess, but it turned out, in the private meeting, the one-on-one meeting just with interpreters, Putin did 90% of the talking, and most of that was about the situation in Syria and the Middle East.So when we heard that, both from what Trump said to us when he came out of the meeting and what my staff found out from our interpreter after the meeting, I breathed a sigh of relief.
What was his demeanor towards Trump?How did he present himself?Because, as I’ve said, we’ve heard different versions of Putin.How did he relate to Donald Trump?Was he warm with him?
I don’t think Putin is a particularly warm person.I think he dealt with him professionally.I don’t think there was any theater, at least in the meetings I was in.I didn’t have any theater from Putin in the meetings that I had with him by myself or without the president.I just didn’t see much theater.I think he was constantly trying to judge Trump’s reactions.That’s what KGB agents do very successfully.And I think he thought he had the upper hand, but he didn’t display it.He wasn’t arrogant about it.I could just sense confidence, that he knew what he was dealing with.
And the American president’s demeanor around Vladimir Putin?
About as unserious as it usually is.I mean, as I say, there are not extensive policy discussions in meetings that Trump had with Putin or that he had with him over the telephone.There were very few trade issues to discuss.Trump loved to discuss trade with the Chinese, but there wasn’t much trade with Russia to discuss.So it really was Putin trying to pursue his agenda more than anything else.
And when you watched that famous moment about who do you believe, and he seems to suggest that, “Why would I not believe Vladimir Putin?,” what was your reaction as you were watching that?
Well, I think I felt frozen to my chair.Like everybody else in the room, we couldn’t believe it.And I describe in my book, we went into sort of damage control.I was worried that Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, might resign at that point.He would have been fully justified to resign if he had wanted to.And actually, the next day Trump came up, when we were back in Washington, and said, “You know, I misspoke, and I left the word ‘not’ out,” which would have changed the meaning of what he said 180 degrees.1Now I’m not sure I believe that, but it was one of the only times I heard Trump say he made a mistake.
Well, how did the accusations of Russian interference affect him in his relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin?
Well, Trump took the accusations of Russian interference through the prism of the arguments about Russia collusion, that he had colluded with the Russians, and he saw admitting any potential of Russian interference as acquiescing in the accusation that he conspired with the Russians to win the election.I and many others tried to explain to him that that was wrong, that he was on very strong ground to say that there had been Russian efforts to interfere in the election.It would not have undercut the legitimacy of his victory and that he would have been better off saying what we felt and what we were doing, I think, throughout the bureaucracy, that we were going to resist not just the efforts of Russia but China or anybody else, any foreign actor who tried to interfere in our election.That was the right policy, and it wouldn’t undercut the legitimacy of the Trump election in 2016 if he said the same thing.But we never persuaded him.
U.S. Policy on Ukraine
… Well, let’s talk about Ukraine.The Obama administration had imposed some sanctions but had not sent Javelins and other types of weapons to Ukraine.What was the Trump administration’s policy towards Ukraine in that regard?
Well, I don’t think Trump had much of a policy toward Ukraine until he began to think of it as a place where Biden and Hillary Clinton had worked in 2016, and were working, looking at the 2020 campaign, to affect him politically.At the Cabinet level, the National Security Council level, I think people were very strongly of the view that we should do a lot more to support Ukraine, to try and work to deter any notion that the Russians might try another invasion, that there were a number of other things unrelated to Ukraine that Russia was doing, that warranted American sanctions and tougher action, and in particular in the cyber warfare area, to get America into a place where we could make decisions about offensive cyber operations and not fear weaponizing the Garden of Eden of cyberspace.Cyberspace is no different from any other human domain.And the best defense is often a good offense to deter the Russians and others, to show you will pay costs if you attack us in cyberspace.
So I think, although there was certainly a lot more we could have done, that much of the actual American policy toward Russia in the Trump administration got stronger and stronger—not strong enough by a long shot, though.
You felt like before 2019, that your approach to Ukraine was stronger against Russia than the Obama administration’s was.
And Trump himself would boast about it, because he could say, “We’re supplying Javelins to Ukraine, and the Obama administration different.”Anytime you could convince Trump he was doing something Obama hadn’t, forget the policy reasons for it, it was a good argument to make.
Vladimir Putin had talked about Ukraine as not a country.He had talked about it as corrupt.How was Donald Trump talking about Ukraine, and did it seem like he was mirroring some of the descriptions of the country that Vladimir Putin had been making?
I don’t think Trump fully understood the history of Ukraine and Russia, or the Soviet Union before that, or much else in history.He once asked John Kelly, White House chief of staff, if Finland were still part of Russia, which would have been news to the Finns if anybody had told them that.So I don’t think any of this complexity and the reasons for the animosity between Ukraine and Russia really crossed his mind.I think what drew his attention to Ukraine was the notion that the famous DNC server was somewhere in Ukraine, that Hunter Biden worked for Burisma, that the Ukrainians had attacked him in the 2016 campaign, and that he wanted to get to the bottom of it.That’s what drew his attention to Ukraine, and that’s what ultimately caused the problem with the shipment of $250 million of security assistance that generated the controversy that led to the first impeachment.
So what happened?How did you learn that things were being held up or things were going to be held up?
Well, as I describe in the book, it emerged only in bits and pieces, because Trump was working outside the regular system.He had Rudy Giuliani and other attorneys who were dealing with Ukrainian representatives on searching for the DNC server and the missing laptop and all the other bowl of spaghetti allegations out there.And he had an irregular group of people, including Gordon Sondland and others, who was the ambassador to the European Union in Brussels, of which Ukraine is not a member, dealing with the Ukrainians.And it was all about the politics of how Ukraine had, in Trump’s mind, affected the 2016 election and could affect the 2020 election.
And somehow or another, in the summer of 2019, Trump learned of the security assistance that had been committed by statute for delivery to Ukraine, and he decided to hold it up, perhaps because OMB.Mick Mulvaney was the acting chief of staff, former OMB Director.That may have been the way that was communicated to him.And it was only in really June, July, August that the pieces of this puzzle began to come together.
I think in Trump’s mind, it was clear all along.He was looking for ways to pressure Ukraine to get the DNC server and expose Biden and Hunter Biden and whatever else he was trying to do politically.And for the rest of us who were just trying to get the $250 million in security assistance delivered before it expired on Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, that’s when we began to see something was going wrong.And I think Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, Mike Pompeo, myself, when we came to see it were completely unified that we wanted that security assistance delivered.
But I mean, just to be really clear, he was holding up the security assistance in order to get these politically motivated investigations?
Yeah, there was no question about it.This was Trump using the powers of the presidency really for his own political advantage, and I think that became clear.It seemed so hard to understand why Rudy Giuliani wanted to talk about Hunter Biden and Burisma and what that had to do with security assistance, and the answer is, it didn’t have anything to do with it in terms of American foreign policy, but it did for the Trump reelection campaign.
And how dangerous was it for Ukraine at that moment, if that had expired, that authorization?
Well, we would have lost the $250 million, because that’s the nature of the end of the fiscal year in federal budget policy.So we were bending every effort, talking to members of Congress, saying, “You need to talk to the president; we’re going to lose this money,” as the end of the fiscal year approached, and trying to persuade Trump that whatever else he was doing with respect to his own political prospects, he needed to let the money go.And eventually that happened, I think actually on Sept. 11 of 2019.
Let me just ask you, because we had spoken to her, when the ambassador, [Marie] Yovanovitch, is removed, what’s your understanding for the reason why?
Well, I think Giuliani and others had told Trump that she was anti-Trump, that she was not cooperating with their efforts to investigate the bowl of spaghetti of allegations about what the Ukrainians were up to and that they wanted her out.
And when this all becomes public, and the call is released, and the hearings happen, what is the effect on how a Vladimir Putin would perceive what was going on?
Well, I think Putin would look at this and it would be further evidence that the only thing Trump cares about is Trump, and therefore that’s an insight about how to deal with Trump in a second term.So it would have been confirmation that Trump didn’t do American foreign policy; he did Trump policy.And I think it would have strengthened Putin’s belief that, if Trump were reelected—which, again, if you look back at that timing, late 2019/early 2020, before COVID, most people thought it was likely, that he would have another four years to take advantage of Trump.
Putin’s View of America
If you look at Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric about America, it’s certainly in the Munich speech but many of his speeches about America, he talks about hypocrisy.Before the invasion of Ukraine, he will talk about the “empire of lies,” and he portrays an America that is hypocritical, that says it believes in democracy and the rule of law and all of these things, but doesn’t.Was there a way that Donald Trump with this phone call, for example, but his presidency in general, seems to be reaffirming the things that Putin had been saying about America all along?
Well, I think Trump said a number of things not just in the Russian context, but said them publicly during the 2016 campaign and during his presidency, where somebody would criticize the performance of another country, and Trump would say, “Well, what about us?You think we’re so great?”In other words, acknowledging the kind of moral equivalence and hypocrisy that Putin and others would point out.
And I think although Trump once took a picture, famously, hugging the American flag for political purposes, holding the Bible up in Lafayette Square, I think he was very cynical about the United States.
And the message that that sent about America, and about whether those principles that all of the other American presidents had expressed about democracy and rule of law and international order, what was the effect on America’s credibility when Donald Trump would say something like that, where, like, “Vladimir Putin is a killer, I think,” and then he [Trump] says, “Well, we have killers, too.”2
2
Washington Post: O'Reilly told Trump that Putin is a killer.
Well, I don’t think it affected America’s credibility except to the extent that foreign leaders thought Trump was representative of American thought further down.And my own view, and since I left the White House I haven’t hesitated to say it, is that Trump is an aberration, and therefore that it shouldn’t have—whatever he did should not have an effect on people’s view about what America’s underlying views are.
You think it shouldn’t, but did it rattle our allies?
I think it gave some of our more cynical allies a chance to take advantage of it.I think I would single out President [Emmanuel] Macron of France, who a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, said NATO was brain-dead, and he was reflecting what he thought Trump’s view was.It was the Biden administration, but it helped assist a view that the U.S. was unreliable and untrustworthy, something that some of our own allies have used to their own advantage.But I don’t think it was because Trump had a theory about it.I think it was just Trump reflecting that all he cared about was Trump.
The Biden Administration’s Approach to Putin
As you watch Biden come in and his approach to Vladimir Putin, he does call him a killer, but he meets with him in June of 2021.How do you evaluate the Biden administration’s approach to Putin before it’s clear that there’s going to be an invasion?
Well, I think the approach obviously failed because we did not deter the invasion.It’s not enough to say we’re helping Ukraine out a lot now as the country gets ground into the dust and tens of thousands of people get killed.America failed when it failed to deter the invasion on Feb. 24, and I think one reason for that is that that meeting in Europe in the summer of 2021 between Biden and Putin was very important; that this was an opportunity for Putin to look at Biden for, I think that meeting was three and a half hours long and judge who the new president was.And I think the conclusion he came away with was a lot of rhetoric and not much strength.
And there’s other things that are going on.There’s Jan. 6.After that meeting, there’s the withdrawal from Afghanistan.Are those things playing into how Putin is assessing the moment?
I think the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophic mistake.It wasn’t just the way it was implemented.The strategic decision was completely wrong.That was Trump’s mistake as well as Biden’s.I think in Moscow and Beijing, when the withdrawal took place, they popped champagne corks.They couldn’t believe they were getting this for free.And that undoubtedly added to the meeting that Putin had had with Biden just a few months before, added to his perception that he was dealing with a weak administration.
And when Biden gets this briefing in the end of 2021, national security briefing, and the intelligence agencies are saying, “This looks real.This looks like it might happen,” what is that challenge that presented to President Biden, and how does he respond?
Well, he didn’t respond effectively.He said, in fact, on several different occasions that the sanctions that he threatened, if the Russians invaded Ukraine, were not intended to deter Russia from undertaking the invasion.They were to signal that there would be punishment after it took place.That’s admitting that you’re not even seriously trying to engage in deterrents.There were many other things we could have done that the White House did not do, and I think the fact that they weren’t being done said to Putin, again, “I’m going to be able to get away with this almost like I did in 2014.”
Because there’s video calls.There’s telephone calls.There’s shuttle diplomacy.There are public statements from the podium.But Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem to take them seriously or respect them.Is that your understanding of that?
Look, I think the run-up to the Russian invasion on the part of the U.S. and Europe was very long on rhetoric and very short on substance.I think Putin read it exactly that way.
And when he finally announces that he’s going to launch what he calls a “special military operation” but is a war, he gives that speech, that “empire of lies” speech, and so much of it is about the United States at the beginning.Does that surprise you when you hear that?
No, because I thought at the time that Putin believed he would win in Ukraine very quickly.I think that was the nature of the preparation that they had made, and they thought Ukrainian forces would collapse very shortly after the first contact.So he was making this into a bigger event, even though he called it a “special military operation.”And I would say only that we know from what our military and intelligence briefed to Congress, House and Senate, in the days after Feb. 24, they thought the Russians were going to win quickly, too.So it wasn’t just a misperception on Putin’s part.
Somebody told us that Putin, —who says he doesn’t believe Ukraine is a real country and who talks about the United States when he goes in, that this is actually a conflict between the United States and Russia in a lot of ways.Do you agree with that assessment, that that’s what’s at stake and that’s at least how Putin perceives it?
Well, I think, from Putin’s point of view—and it’s not just Putin; it’s a large part of the Russian population, that believes the dissolution of the Soviet Union was illegitimate, and many of the new independent states are also illegitimate.I have heard it from all of them, from Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister; Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister; Nikolai Patrushev, their national security adviser.I’ve heard it from Putin himself.They think Ukraine is illegitimate and failed.
So their effort to recreate the Mother Russia really has nothing to do with the United States.However, to the extent they believe that the West as a whole would not respond effectively, that would show a stronger Russia.So I think that was part of it.But I think this is about irredentism from the Russian point of view far more than anything else.
When you were getting those comments were those when you were in the Trump administration or the Bush administration, when you would hear that talk about Ukraine?
That was in the Trump administration.
OK.But did Vladimir Putin misjudge Biden or the West?I mean, the war has obviously not gone the way that he imagined.He certainly misjudged Ukraine, but did he misjudge the resolve of President Biden?
Well, I think he misjudged his own army more than he misjudged anything else.Their performance is, I think, to many pretty close observers of Russia, nothing less than shockingly bad, and that has hurt him internationally far more than anything else.I think the U.S. record post-invasion has been typically a day late and a dollar short.I think the administration has been intimidated by Putin and the risk of escalation.Many of the steps they’ve taken, when they’ve decided to supply weapon systems and intelligence and other information, has come after great pressure from Congress.I think the British, the Poles, the Baltic Republics were all much more forward-leaning than the administration.
But I don’t even think it’s the performance of the United States post-Feb. 24 that’s the issue.The key failure and the thing that influenced not just Russia but China as well was the failure to make a serious effort to deter the invasion from the begin with.It’s not a great solution to say, “We’re going to aid Ukraine and hopefully win the war.”The point is to try and prevent the war from happening, and we did not make a serious effort to do that.
… Vladimir Putin has often seen America as the enemy, and now the president describes Putin as a “war criminal,” a “murderous dictator.”He says at one point, “He’s got to go.”I mean, are we now in a conflict with Russia that is going to be difficult to resolve without an outright one side winning?
Well, I think we’re in a conflict with Russia and China as an entente.And I don’t think you can separate the two.I think you’ve now got a partnership that continues to involve—Ironically, Russia is very much the junior partner in this entente.But I think if we don’t wake up to the nature of the struggle we’ve got, not just in Europe but along the Indo-Pacific, along China’s periphery and in the Middle East, we’re going to be on the strategic defensive for a long time.The Russia war in Ukraine is a piece of it, but it’s a piece of a much bigger picture.
And this particular moment that we’re in right now, with the Russian forces being pushed back, with mobilization and backlash at home, with Vladimir Putin invoking the use of nuclear weapons, how dangerous is this moment?How serious is he?
Well, I think any time you consider nuclear weapons, you have to be sober about it.But I think Putin is bluffing.I think the time at which he would use nuclear weapons would be if Russian forces were in whole-scale retreat, entire command and control system had collapsed, they were heading back into Russia, or the Ukrainian forces were on the verge of crossing into Russia.Then I think he would consider it.But that’s why the United States needs to make the point which we have not done, that if Putin does use nuclear weapons, he has signed a suicide note.
And do you think that we’ve sent the message that we’ll deter that?
I don’t think we have deterred him at this point, but I also don’t think—we’re closer to the point where it may happen, but we’re not on the verge of it, and I think Putin well understands that every time he says nuclear weapons, there are people in Europe and the United States that start to quiver.I think we’ve got to be as clear-eyed about this as Putin is and not overreact and not be in the situation where he’s deterring us rather than us deterring him.
So my last question is, how does this end?
In Ukraine, I think the default position is that it just grinds on and on.I don’t think either side is in a position of sufficient strength, at this moment, that they can really advance the idea of a cease-fire.I think that might have been possible a few months ago for Russia.I don’t see it anymore.And I see one of the consequences of not just the tension in Eastern Europe but tension along China’s periphery, with Taiwan in particular, where we’re at the opening stages of a very, very long conflict, probably for the rest of this century.
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