The FRONTLINE Interviews
Stephen Hadley
National Security Adviser, 2005-09
Stephen Hadley served as the National Security Adviser under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009. From 2001 to 2005, Hadley served as Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser under Condoleezza Rice.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on July 27, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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Let’s start with a little bit of the Putin biography.Before President Bush sees him and looks in his soul, or whatever he said he saw, you all must have been preparing in some way for who is this new president.Where does he stand?Where does he come from, and what is he going to be?What's the biographical sketch that you could deliver of Vladimir Putin in 2000?
The bio sketch of Putin was not very clear.Yes, he had been a KGB agent in Germany, and that had a lot of ramifications about who that person might have been—not a particularly successful or high-ranking KGB agent, present for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of empire.On the other hand, he was associated with the now St. Petersburg, then Leningrad group.Actually it was St. Petersburg, because it was all post-the collapse, which was a reformist group.[Anatoly] Sobchak was the mayor of St. Petersburg, and he was part of that clique.
There was a view at the time that one of the things about the KGB was that, in some sense, they were the part of Russia, of the Soviet Union, and then later Russia, but particularly in the Soviet period, which were most knowledgeable about the West.And that raised a question that, while their job was to defend the regime, were they also likely to be aware of the problems in the regime?
Oddly enough, then someone like Putin becomes associated with Sobchak and the reformers out of St. Petersburg.So it wasn’t quite clear who this guy was, how he saw the future of Russia.I think we came to those early meetings with more questions than answers as to just who this guy was, because he was really plucked out of relative obscurity to become the president of Russia.
Did you know what he wanted, what his hopes and dreams were vis-à-vis a relationship with the United States of America and the new president?
No. He was relatively new to the job.And one of the things that President Bush detected about him was a certain nervousness and apprehensiveness, because we didn’t know a whole lot about him, but he didn’t know a whole lot about President Bush.He didn’t know how aggressive President Bush was going to be, whether President Bush was going to try to embarrass him, bully him.So I think President Bush’s view was that there was a lot of uncertainty on Putin’s part.1I think what he probably wanted was simply to have a successful meeting, to get in the meeting, be viewed as a peer of the new president and to begin to establish a working relationship with the new president.
1
That’s about all we were seeking in those early meetings.That’s probably about all those people around President Putin were seeking in those early meetings.
We've talked to so many people who were there that day in Slovenia, where they first go inside.… The president [Bush] says, “I looked in his eyes, and I saw his soul”; they all—they watched Condi stiffen.Everybody was like, “Oh, no, this is going to follow us forever.”How, when you heard about it, what did you make of what the president was actually trying to say?
I was deputy national security adviser at the time, and I stayed home when the president and Condi Rice, then the national security adviser, would travel.I didn’t know quite what to make of it.Years later, when I was interviewing President Bush after we’d all left office, I asked him what was he thinking about when he made that comment, and he said, “Hadley, I was just reading the talking points that you had given me,” which of course was not at all true.
The explanation he gave was: “Look, I'm standing next to this guy. We’re at the beginning of a relationship.I'm trying to win his confidence a little bit, because we've got real issues to deal with this man, whether it’s the relationship generally, whether it’s getting out of the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty, which clearly we wanted to do, raise an issue for the Russians.It was the possibility of further arms control negotiations. There's a lot of business to be done with this man, and a press person says, ‘Do you trust him?’”The president said, “What am I supposed to do, say no?I wanted to do something that would put him a little bit at ease and send a message that I wanted to have a positive relationship.”President Bush said Putin had just told him a famous story that Putin has told many people, finding in the rubble, and asking people to search in the rubble of a burned apartment building, for a token that had been given to him by his mother that had religious significance for him.President Bush thought that told him something about President Putin that he did not know.And so he would have had it in his mind.
When he was asked that question, it just popped into his mind: “I looked into his eyes, and I saw his soul.”What he was thinking about was the fact that Putin had shown himself to be somebody who was a religious person.Of course George W. Bush is also a religious person, and that told him something positive about Putin.And it’s that that was running through his mind when he said, “I looked into his eyes, and I saw his soul.”It was an effort to answer a difficult question in a way that would show an openness to try to have a positive relationship with this man.
It’s so interesting, because we’ve talked to people in Russia about that as well, who tell a story this way.Putin is a former KGB officer who would have really done a lot of research about Bush, known that he was religious, known that he was evangelical, and it’s a true story that Putin loves to tell about finding—it was a crucifix, a wooden crucifix, that somehow miraculously had survived the fire, and that he brought the story to the conversation with Bush in a way to accomplish exactly what it accomplished.
Well, that’s the theory.And you know, we love to make the Russians and the Soviets 10 feet tall and view them as these master chess players. That’s one explanation.Another explanation is that they're simply having a conversation and looking for some common ground.Who knows?It is what it is.
A lot of people over there [in Russia] told us that they think what Putin wanted from the relationship with the Americans was respect; that he felt rather strongly that, in the Clinton administration, they had used and abused Boris Yeltsin and the Russians and that they were embarrassed by what had happened in the collapse of the Soviet Union and embarrassed by their own inadequacies in the world of democracy, and that he thought it was his job to restore a certain amount of respect for Russia and himself from an American president.
It has clearly been a thematic of Putin’s tenure, wanting personal respect, wanting respect for Russia.He felt, as he said publicly many times, he felt very keenly the effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union, called it one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.Interestingly, in my presence, when he made that comment to President Bush, he was talking about the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union left so many Russian nationals and Russian speakers in independent countries that were now no longer connected with Mother Russia.That, of course, is an ongoing piece of the narrative, complaining about how Russians are treated in the Baltic states and elsewhere.
Second, he had a clear sense of Russia’s weakness.At one point in an early speech, he talked about—his phrase something like this: that if Russians work hard, we will have an economy the size of Portugal’s.There was a real sense of loss of empire, a little loss of identity, a loss of power, a loss of status, a loss of respect.That is the kind of thing that is felt very keenly, certainly by Putin personally, we know, but also by the Russian people who went through the 1990s and the humiliation of pensioners having to sell belongings in the bazaars in order to make ends meet.
This humiliation narrative, this fall from power, this lack of respect, it’s in Putin’s perceptions, but it’s also in the perceptions of the Russian people.And when people many times overstate how much Russian foreign policy is Putin’s policy, and how much is he reflecting actually the impulses, the anxieties, the frustrations, the sense of loss of respect, of humiliation of the Russian people, I think you have to see Putin as someone who is, yes, shaping public opinion in Russia, but also reflecting public opinion in Russia.And to simply say the problem with U.S.-Russian relations is just about Putin is a very inadequate explanation.
… The way they tell it, his argument that we should have not gone to Iraq, and the decision to go to Iraq [anyway], tears for him; it breaks or gets to him in some fundamental way.True, from what you can tell?
I think that the question about what happens to Putin and to Russian policy over the period of the Bush administration is an interesting one.It actually starts out pretty well. We have a working relationship.We have difficult issues to raise. One of them, of course, was the ABM Treaty.President Bush felt we needed to get out of the ABM Treaty in order to be able to develop the defenses, to defend ourselves against Iran and North Korea.I think we see in retrospect how wise that decision was, because of the threats that both Iran and North Korea—potentially in the case of Iran and actually in terms of North Korea—present to the United States, pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, to deliver them to the territory of the United States.
The president felt we needed to get out of the ABM Treaty.The question was how to do that without rupturing the Russian relationship.And basically, President Bush gave President Putin a variety of options: “We can do it together. We can do it with the United States simply withdrawing, and you can comment as you will. The United States can withdraw, and you can be silent. Tell me, tell me, Vladimir, how you want me to do this.”It was viewed by many people at that time, the nuclear priesthood if you will, that once you got out of the ABM Treaty and eliminated restrictions on ballistic missile defenses, it would be impossible to have negotiations with the Russians to reduce the number of offensive ballistic missiles that would be countered by those defensive systems.
In fact, the relationship with Russia was such that we both managed to exit the ABM Treaty with fairly modest Russian reaction, and about six months later, we were able to conclude the Moscow Treaty, which made a very substantial reduction in the levels of offensive nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, submarine launch, land launch and bombers—a substantial reduction in the number of those offensive systems.
I would say the relationship really got off on a pretty good start.Iraq was a setback.But of course it was really Russia joining with Germany and France at the time to oppose the invasion in Iraq.And one of the problems, of course, is up to the point of February 2003, we were all together.The U.N. Security Council passed a 17th resolution condemning Iraq for its pursuing weapons of mass destruction, supporting terror, oppressing its people, invading its neighbors, all the national security concerns and threats that Iraq represented.The United Nations adopted a resolution condemning those, calling on Saddam to cease or suffer the consequences.It was unanimous, France, Russia, the United States joining.
What happened after that was that basically, Russia, Germany and France announced publicly that under no circumstances would they support a use of force against Iraq, at which point all the leverage that we had built up diplomatically, to try to get Saddam Hussein to account for his weapons of mass destruction and comply with the U.S. resolutions, without the use of force, all that diplomatic buildup went for naught, and the air was out of the balloon.At that point, the United States and the international community had to either back down in the face of Saddam Hussein’s intransigence or carry through on this threat of use of force.So that was a beginning point.
But I do not think that's what really was the problem in terms of U.S.-Russian relations.I think the problem really came with the color revolutions.We were in a dialog with Russia, a strategic dialog that was set up by the two presidents, that I actually ran at the working level as deputy national security adviser with the Russian counterpart, and we had developed a set of rules of the road of how United States and Russia were going to cooperate together in the near abroad; that is to say, those now independent states that used to be part of the Soviet Union.
The premise was that the United States and Russia could cooperate to try to stabilize and enhance the security and prosperity of the near abroad, these new neighbors of Russia, in ways that would make them positive neighbors of Russia, a source of trade and investment and economic cooperation rather than being a drag on Russia, as they had been in many respects during the period of the Soviet Union.That progress all fell apart, really, under the pressure of the color revolutions, the revolutions in Georgia and Tajikistan and Ukraine and elsewhere.
Putin concluded that these were efforts by the United States and intelligence services working through local politicians and NGOs, nongovernmental organizations, to install in these neighboring countries regimes that would be anti-Russian and that this technique could potentially threaten his control in Russia itself.I think it was that that actually resulted in a dramatic change in the attitude of Russia and the United States.And of course it comes to the most extreme expression in the summer of 2008, when Russia goes into Georgia. …
What that adds to is this list of grievances you’ve started to talk about when he began, that sometime in the future is going to take about 45 minutes for him to articulate to any visitor who comes into his office.We hear stories about John Kerry coming in for a meeting and getting the first 45 minutes of Vladimir Putin giving him a list of grievances about America.
I got it, too. It was a stack of file cards.He would read the file card, talk about it, put it down, and he’d bring up the next file card. It went on for 45 minutes, grievance after grievance.
OK. So he’s building these grievances.
Yep.
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
The implications of the Munich speech, what was it a declaration of, from what you could tell?
The Munich speech, I think, comes at a time when three things have happened.One, there is a pattern now of the West taking action, and Russia going along with those actions, and feeling that in the end, Russia got nothing for it and was taken advantage of.This is sort of that Russia was not being treated with respect, and its interests were not being taken into account.It was not a level playing field; it was a bad deal for the Russians.This list of grievances had built up—the United States getting out of the ABM Treaty, NATO enlargement—a long, long list.So one was a list of grievances.
Two was the real concern presented by the color revolutions and whether this was a plot by the Americans to destabilize not only Russia’s neighbors but also potentially Russia itself.And three, Russia is no longer the weak Russia of 1999 and 2000.Its oil exports are booming. The price of oil is high.Russia made some very good decisions to stabilize its macroeconomic situation, economic growth returns.Russia is at the early stages, then, of restoring its military capability.
Putin now has some options, or at least feels he has some options, and I think that all comes to a head in his speech in Munich, which, interestingly enough, is preceded by a speech that was given early on, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the period of Bush 41, when the then-foreign minister of Russia, under President Yeltsin, comes into the NATO forum and gives a speech that sounds very much like the speech Putin gives in Munich in 2007.
All of us are aghast, and we come up to the foreign minister afterward, and we say, “What was that about, a very hostile speech against the West, against the United States, against NATO?”And this gentleman, whose name was [Andrei] Kozyrev, [said], “If you do not treat Russia properly, at some point, a Russian prime minister or president will give that speech.”In some sense, the speech that Putin gives in Munich in 2007 is prefigured by Kozyrev some 12 to 13 years earlier.
Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia
One month after the speech, the Estonia cyberattack happens.What do you take from that attack?What was its result to you? Or what was its cause, and what was its result?
The attack on Estonia does a number of things.2One, it’s a wakeup call about the vulnerability of all of our societies as we become increasingly dependent on cyber-vulnerable electronics and other information devices.Secondly, it is a beginning of the kind of bullying and intimidation that increasingly Russia begins to show toward the near abroad, its new neighbors, if you will, and former satellites from the Soviet period, or actually part of the Soviet Union during the Soviet period.
2
It’s a prefiguring of things to come.Of course, again, it comes to a head in the invasion in Georgia.3And interestingly enough, at that time, in the invasion of Georgia, within the U.S. government, many people were saying the following: If we do not manage to convince Russia that going into Georgia in the summer of 2008 gives them no tactical advantage, and in fact is a strategic defeat, if we cannot convince Russia that that was the case, we are likely to see this reproduced in Ukraine and potentially the Baltics.
3
Of course, what we have now seen is an invasion into Ukraine and threatening of the Baltics that has really caused NATO to decide to put on a rotational basis, have what constitutes effectively a permanent presence of NATO troops in the Baltic states.
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
I've read a quote that you allegedly might have offered, delivered, about having thrown Russia in the toilet.What was the point?
We thought it was very important to work closely with our allies, to throw U.S.-Russianrelations and Western-Russian relations into the toilet.Why? To make the point to Russia that there was no strategic advantage for doing this.In fact, it would pay a high strategic price.We had deprived them, really, of most of the tactical advantage.At one point in the famous story, of course, then-Russian Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov tells Condi Rice that their conditions—for the three conditions they had had for ending the Georgia incursion, there was a fourth one, which was that the elected government in Tbilisi had to leave, and Prime Minister, or then-President [Mikheil] Saakashvili, had to be booted out of office.Condi exposed that.It galvanized the international community, and Russia’s incursion was stopped short of overthrowing the regime in Tbilisi.In fact, tactically, Russia is much in the same position geographically as it was at the beginning of the war.So tactically, we were able to deny their tactical objectives.
What we needed to exact was a strategic price so Putin would decide that, on a cost-benefit analysis, this kind of activity was not worth repeating, which is why we adopted a number of measures that we did.Those measures adopted, short of economic sanctions—we’ve been criticized for that.But of course at the time, the world was moving into the most serious economic and financial crisis that we had had since the Depression, and people were concerned that international trade was going to come to a stop.At that point, you come into an interagency meeting, and you say, “I have a good idea: Let’s impose sanctions on Russia,” and make the economic situation even worse.
There were some limits on what we could do, but we felt it was very important to make a statement, which is one of the reasons why a number of us criticized the reset, which was begun early in the Obama administration, to try to revitalize and rekindle, if you will, U.S.-Russian relations, because we felt that not enough time had passed to try to impress on the Russian people and President Putin that the going into Georgia was a mistake.4It suggested that, in fact, if Russia were to take some action and were willing to be punished for six months after that time, the international community would come its way, and U.S.-Russiarelations would proceed as if nothing had happened.That’s a bad signal for Russia.
4
Did it work?What was Putin’s reaction to at least what was done?
He was not happy.I mean, the relationship was frozen as of the end of the Bush administration.That, I think, was the right thing to do.It’s one of the lessons that have been learned with respect to Ukraine.While there's been some discussion about it, the sanctions regimes adopted by the United Nations and then operationalized by the United States and the EU have really held now for a number of years, because there is a recognition that, one, Russia has not stopped what it’s doing in terms of fomenting violence in Ukraine, but secondly, the time to draw the line in the sand that this is unacceptable behavior is now.Many people say Ukraine is not a member of NATO—that is true—so we have no obligation, treaty obligation, to defend it.
The problem, of course, is if Russia feels that it can do what it did in Georgia and now in Ukraine with impunity, and tries to do it in the Baltic states, who are a member of NATO and protected by the Article 5 guarantee that an attack on one is an attack on all, then Russian meddling and destabilization activities in the Baltic states could potentially involve a war between Russia and NATO, Russia and the United States.So the goal was to try to draw the line in Georgia, certainly to try to draw the line in Ukraine, so we don’t have to risk the possibility of a war between NATO and Russia over the Baltic states.
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
Of course in 2014-2015, Crimea and Ukraine, … a lot of people we've talked to in the American government, in the Obama administration, [are] still very angry and think it was a significant or a serious mistake by the president [Obama] not to have stepped up and bloodied the nose of the bully.Even Mr. [John] Brennan, [then director of the CIA], believes strongly that we should have bloodied the nose of the bully at that moment, especially looking back after the summer of 2016.5What think you?
5
The Obama administration rhetorically denounces what Russia is doing in Ukraine.Basically, at the end of the Cold War in around 1990-1991, all the countries of Europe, including Russia, sign the Charter of Paris, which establishes the post-Cold War regime in Europe.6It talks about democracy and freedom and rule of law, all the rest, but it also talks about respect for sovereignty, respect for existing borders, no change of borders by use of force or by intimidation.The movement into Georgia, and then again in Ukraine, basically tears up that document.
6
Now, President Obama was an international lawyer and makes the point that this is in violation of international law.But it’s a rhetorical point that is not backed up enough by a strategy to even impose a cost on Russia, much less return it to the status quo ante and vindicate those principles.What could have been done?A number of things could have been done, of course.Nonlethal assistance was provided to Ukraine; lethal assistance was never provided to Ukraine.The training we provided to Ukrainian forces was quite limited.There [was] very little by way of U.S. signaling that our military forces might get more actively involved, something we did signal in Georgia by delivering in the Georgia crisis of 2008, when we delivered assistance through military aircraft, where we sailed U.S.Navy ships into the Black Sea, and where we returned the unit of the best-trained unit in the Georgian army very quickly from Iraq to Georgia so it could help in the defense of the capital.
A lot of people would say that the response was rhetorical; it was not backed up by any set of forceful measures that would have convinced President Putin this was a mistake.President Putin has given to Russian policy a very entrepreneurial and opportunistic cast.He moves very quickly, sees an opportunity, seizes it, and will take a move.But his initial move, many times, is limited.He waits, and he sees whether his initial operation militarily is successful and then whether there is resistance to it.And if his initial operation is successful, and the resistance is inadequate, he is liable, then, to expand his objectives.That’s what you saw as the Georgia crisis unfolded. I think you saw it as the Ukrainian crisis unfolded.
And that’s what leads people to say, if the United States had a much more prompt and stiffer response, perhaps Russia would have backed off in this process early on.
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
Now, one of the things that we've also been tracking in this film is the creation of his hybrid war toolkit from hard power that he learns from Georgia, one.“I've got to beef this up. It's from Estonia. Cyber could work.”[Gen. Valery] Gerasimov and others are getting the mix right.7Seize it all, almost road-test what happens in America in Ukraine and Crimea, as that all happens.Do you see it that way?
7
I think that’s exactly what he’s done.He’s developing a new set of tactics that are full-spectrum tactics, that have a strong propaganda element, a strong cyber element, a strong subversion element, as well as selective use of military force.So he’s testing out the tactics. He’s also testing out the new hardware.You see it in Syria, launching long-range cruise missile strikes into Syria, just to show the world that he can do it, but also to operationally test his equipment, so that it’s clear that he can do it.
It’s a pretty ambitious program.It has a geopolitical element of pushing back on what he sees as the encroachment by the West in ways that threaten Russia’s geopolitical position.It involves the full range of toolkit, but it is also a testing ground and a proving ground for the improvements in his military hard power that he is making.
When you look at an incident like MH-17 [Malaysia Airlines Flight 17], from your vantage point, what does it reveal about him, about that war, about his policies, about all the things you’ve just talked about?
Well, the question of MH-17 is, did President Putin order that civilian aircraft be shot down?And [from] what I have read, and I'm not talking from any intelligence sources, that doesn’t seem to be right.I think it’s a situation where the folks on the ground made an operational mistake, which the Russians then, in typical fashion, tried to both cover up on the one hand and construct a fictitious counternarrative [on the other hand] that blames that on everybody else, other than Russian-associated forces.
I think it shows both the risks of the kind of operations that President Putin is engaged in, but also the fact is that, at the end of the day, he’s paid very little price for it.His strategy for both burying the truth and constructing a counternarrative allowed him to escape that incident without consequence.
It’s like the birth of fake news in some way.There's an opacity to it all. There is, “What is truth anyway?”The lying about the “little green men” certainly is an example of that, and all the information warfare surrounding, if that’s the right word for it, surrounding truth about MH-17, again another road-test component almost for what awaits America in the summer of 2016.8
8
Well, it’s also a little different in this sense. I mean, it is the old “big lie” technique.If you can get out a counternarrative and push it over and over again, and it has the most rudimentary plausibility, you can convince people that maybe it’s true.That takes the air out of any kind of outrage that might fuel an active response to the matter.But the truth is, one of the changes in Russian attitude from, I would say, the first decade of the 21st century into the second decade of the 21st century is that, in the first decade, particularly in that strategic dialog that we had with Russia during the first term of the Bush administration, people around Putin would say that President Putin understands that his historic opportunity is to bring Russia permanently into the West.And they would talk about democracy and freedom and rule of law and even human rights in favorable terms.At least they would use the words if it was not reflected in the policies.
But that’s not the Russia of the second decade of the 21st century.Their view is that—and I think it is not just Putin’s view; I think it’s shared by the Russian people, is part of the propaganda he uses to the Russian people; he is playing to a receptive audience—that Russia is unique; that Russia has its own way; that authoritarian systems actually are more stable, are better able to provide for the security, if not the prosperity of their people.Yes, some market elements in the economy are permitted.They enable a degree of personal freedom, particularly personal economic freedom for the Russians, but with enough state control so it isn't going to get out of control, and that that is a superior model to the West.
This is a case that President Putin makes, and the Russian propaganda agencies actually make, not only at home, to discredit democracy and freedom in the eyes of their own people, but it’s a campaign internationally to discredit Western values, Western institutions, and all that the United States stands for in the global community.We are in a new ideological struggle.We thought, at the end of the Cold War, that our model of democracy, freedom, rule of law, human rights had defeated all comers.Fascism in World War II, communism in the Cold War—our model was, you know, this was the end of history, because our model was the only option, and it looked that way into the 1990s, into the first part of this century.
And we went to sleep a little bit.Well, Russia on one hand and China on the other have come forward with a very different model, explicitly rejecting our model and trying to convince the world that theirs is superior.And they're not doing a bad job of it, quite frankly, sadly enough, particularly China, which is emerging now as an economic powerhouse and has brought a lot of prosperity to its people, precisely because we have admitted it to that international system that the United States helped create and maintain since the end of World War II.At the same time, while the Chinese model looks pretty good, and the Russia model looks good, at least to its own people, the American model doesn’t look so good these days.Our economy still is not robust as it should be; our politics look to be fractious and chaotic; and we are not solving, because of our political gridlock, the social and economic problems we face.Our brand is a damaged brand at this point.And at that moment, we are being faced with really an ideological challenge to the principles which we’ve stood for throughout our history.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
Into that battlefield enters Vladimir Putin, Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear, Guccifer 2, DCLeaks, WikiLeaks, all of it last summer.9When it happens, when it starts to hit the press, June, let’s say, what do you think is happening?What do you think? Do you think it’s Russia? Do you agree that it’s Russia?Do you know that it’s Russia pretty soon, pretty early in the process?
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There are a lot of suspicions.We have public statements now by our intelligence communities as to what their assessment is.Robert Mueller, the independent counsel appointed by the deputy attorney general, is going to need to get to the bottom of all this.So what do we know? We know that historically, in other administrations before 2016, foreign governments sometimes do have favorites among the candidates.They tend to favor the incumbents.Better the devil you know from the devil that may be to come.
In the diplomacy that has occurred between Russia and the United States or the United States and China, for example, in the periods of arms control agreements, Americans would make it very clear, for example, that if we could operationalize the Vladivostok arms control agreement that Gerald Ford was negotiating with the Soviet Union at that time, it would help Gerald Ford politically in his presidential race in 1976, because it would show that he could do business with the Soviet Union and produce an agreement which was perceived as reducing the risk of violence.
So in a funny way, in traditional diplomatic terms, foreigners have always tried to play, within certain, very confined and appropriate boundaries, some role in our electoral process.What's different this time is the extent and the level of intrusion that it looks like the Russians have used in 2016.Part of it is shame on them for having tried it.Part of it is shame on us for not having realized that our electoral infrastructure is critical infrastructure, and therefore needs to be hardened against cyberattack and other kinds of disruptions, something that we have still not stepped up to and have not addressed with the kind of urgency that the problem warrants.
It will have to run its course.I think the proper course is, one, we’ve got to get to the bottom as to what happened.Two, we have to have an appropriate response with respect to the Russians, to try to deter them or any other power from trying to do this again, and exert a cost.And three, we need to harden our electoral infrastructure and our processes so no country is able to do it again.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
When it was happening, July, August, September, there was a great deal of struggle inside the Obama administration for the president to do something.… What were you thinking the president of the United States could or should do during those, especially those months of August and September?
You know, there's two different paradigms, and they were visibly displayed in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.One is a law enforcement paradigm, which is, when something bad happens to you, you patiently, meticulously determine the facts through a process.You then have some consideration, and then you make a judgment.You get the facts; you put the guy on trial; you pronounce sentence; and they go to jail.That’s the kind of law enforcement model.
What we decided, and what President Bush decided after 9/11, is he was willing to sacrifice the ability to prosecute and put somebody in jail if he could take action now to prevent them from committing the crime or the terrorist act in the first place.I think that President Obama in part, and his staff, were too much prisoner of the law enforcement model—let’s be careful; let’s get the facts; and then we’ll go through a process and decide the punishment—whereas what the situation required was urgent action to try to prevent and avoid a situation where the Russians could have had an impact on the outcome of our election.10I think that’s what people are criticizing President Obama for.Why did he act way after the election, in December?Why didn’t he try to act early on in the summer, when he became aware of this, try to deter Putin from doing more and to try to prevent him from having an impact?It is said that on two occasions, President Obama did talk to Putin and told him to cut it out.But again, you know, rhetoric that is not backed by action is not going to be particularly credible to someone like Vladimir Putin.
10
I think that's the debate.There is a counterargument by the Obama administration.The chief of staff put out an op-ed here in the middle of July making their case that they did all they could.I think a lot of people still find it inadequate.We should have been doing more to deter Putin and Russia from this kind of activity and protecting our systems so that he could not disrupt the election.
Putin and Trump
So you’ve watched this man for 18 years.Maybe you can answer the question.Why did he do it?
Because he could. Because he could.And a lot of people say, “Well, why did he try to throw the election for Trump?”I think it didn’t start out that way.Again, this is somebody who takes a step; it’s limited. He sees whether it’s succeeding; he sees whether he’s resisted.Then his aspirations may grow.I think it started out as an effort to disrupt our political system as part of this ideological narrative, that America is not only not a superior political system, it is at least no better than the Russian system, and maybe a little bit less.It was basically to sow disruption and chaos and discredit our democratic system.11
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Now, at some point, there is this suggestion in what's been talked about publicly about the intelligence, that he went a step further and was interested in trying to punish Hillary Clinton and see if he could advantage President Trump.Secretary of State Clinton—let me put it this way: President Putin had longstanding grievances against Secretary of State Clinton, and President Trump, then-candidate Trump, was saying some very encouraging things about a future direction of U.S.-Russia12relations.So maybe President Putin and his team got carried away, having moved from simply discrediting our election to trying to influence its outcome.
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Did he win?Did Putin win something by doing this?
It depends. The story isn't over.It depends on what the independent counsel Robert Mueller finds.It depends on what the Congress of the United States decides, based on that evidence, what the impact it has on the American people, and what our country decides to do about it.
Thank you.Let’s see what we missed.
The only thing I would ask is, what does Putin see in Trump?From his perspective—you know him very well from over the years—how do you think he viewed Trump through the campaign?
President Putin’s view of Trump, I suspect, was in some sense, he saw him a bit of a kindred spirit, somebody who saw themselves as a strong leader, seemed to have less concern about democratic process, someone who has not talked about particularly human rights or even political rights, has backed off talking about freedom and the spread of freedom and democracy in terms of saying, instead, people should respect the decisions and that we won't meddle in the internal matters of other countries.So a penchant for authoritarianism, a strong leader, backing off of human rights, backing off of what looks to Putin like promoting democracy and freedom, and talking about wanting to have a more positive relationship with Russia, cooperating with Russia in places like Syria and the like.What's not to like if you're Vladimir Putin?It sort of sounds like he’s one of us.
If I were doing a net assessment with Mr. Putin, maybe as you said, he got some tactical success.But isn't there another side of it, that there's been a really sharp backlash in the United States?Look at the votes on sanctions in both houses—overwhelming.What's successful about something that results in this?
The results are not in, but I would say that at this point, Putin has paid a very modest price in this respect.Yes, there are sanctions, and they were passed overwhelmingly by the two houses of Congress here in the middle of July.But, you know, they’ve depressed Russian economic growth a point or two at this point.The economy is recovering, and later statistics I've seen it’s going to grow positively this year.
And sanctions, you know, are easy. They come with a low political cost.They also come with a pretty low impact, because these are not the kind of comprehensive sanctions that could cause real economic harm.It is true that it gives more impetus to the positioning of NATO troops in the Baltic states, in Poland and in Romania, for example, to show that the United States and NATO countries stand with our allies.But these are battalion-sized units, and the size of the units on the Russian side of the border are massive by comparison.
Yes, we are doing more exercises in NATO in these areas.The size of those and scale of those exercises pale in comparison to what Russia is doing.So if you look at economic costs, if you look at diplomatic costs, Putin is still going to the G-20 and all the international meetings.If you look at shifts in the geopolitical correlation of forces, as the Soviets used to say, not much.So I think, at this point, he hasn’t paid much of a price, quite frankly.
I think there's only in one respect, there's a bit of an opportunity cost.I think that Putin expected very positive engagement by President Trump and maybe by this time, concrete cooperation on issues that [Putin cared] about. That has not happened.That’s the one price he has paid, but the question is whether that never happens or simply gets pushed out six months or a year. And Putin is a patient man.
Well, he can afford to be right now.
Sure can.
Thank you.
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