The FRONTLINE Interviews
Thomas Graham
National Security Council, 2002-07
Thomas Graham served on the National Security Council from 2002 to 2007, first as Director for Russian Affairs and then as Senior Director for Russia. Graham was a Foreign Service officer with the State Department from 1984 to 1998, including two tours of duty at the United States embassy in Moscow.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 19, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term
… Take me to what the state of play is, as the new administration, the new Bush administration comes in.What does the world believe it knows about Vladimir Putin?And more importantly, what does the president think he knows about Vladimir Putin?
… The short answer to that is, we didn’t know much about Vladimir Putin at that point.He had just arrived as the Russian president a year ago.We knew very little about him and his career before then, something of a mysterious individual when he arrived in Moscow in the late 1990s, a tremendous surprise that he was named prime minister and then became president of the Russian Federation.
He had spent his first year in office, to my mind, trying to demonstrate that Russia had some influence in the world.He had traveled around to a lot of different countries in the Third World, areas where there had been conflicts, trying to create the impression that Russia had some influence with these individuals, can act as a channel of some sort between the country in question, the United States, or the West in general.
One country in particular that he had some ties to was North Korea at that point, through one of his representatives out on the Russian Far East.He made a point of that in one of his initial meetings with President Clinton: Russia has some avenues to the leader of North Korea.We have some understanding of the way he thinks.We understand there's a tremendous issue with North Korea over nuclear weapons, [and] perhaps we can be of some help or assistance to the United States in formulating a diplomatic strategy that will lead to the cessation of the nuclear weapons program.
What was he trying to do?What is something like that about?
This is about putting Russia back on the map.The 1990s was a period of tremendous crisis in Russia, national humiliation.This was a superpower.This was the other great country in the world up until 1991, and then it basically disappeared off the map, for many leaders in the West and even in the United States.The Clinton administration had reached out to Russia, but it was clearly as the mentor to a country that was supposed to be making a transition to democracy, free markets, was supposed to be unwinding from an imperial period.We were clearly the superior power.We didn’t pay much attention to what Russia’s interests were.We had an active role in Russian domestic affairs at that point, both on the political side and on the economic side.
Then we took actions that were clearly contrary to Russian interest, the expansion of NATO for example, in the late 1990s, and Russia had no way of pushing back.It simply didn’t have the resources.One of Putin’s clear goals, when he became president of Russia, was to restore Russia’s status as a great power.One of the ways of doing that was demonstrating that Russia actually had ties around the world, that it could play on a global stage, that it could be an important actor, and [that] it did have something to bring to the table in discussions with the United States that the United States should find of importance.
In those days is it a Potemkin foreign policy?
In many ways it is, in part, because Russia is just coming off of this tremendous socioeconomic decline.The economy collapses by 40 percent in the 1990s.We’re talking about 1999, the oil prices are still quite low.There's still a lot of disorder in Russia, so it’s just the initial period of Putin trying to restore both order in Russia and Russia’s status as a major power in global affairs.
Did we know he was a potential strongman, that he had an interest in locking down the society, maybe returning it more to the days of the autocrat?
I don’t think that that's really where we were at this point.It was clear that he thought about the state, about the relationship between state and society, different from the way we did, and different from the way that people did during the Yeltsin period, those so-called young reformers and Yeltsin himself.1He had published a document just before he assumed the presidency at the end of 1999 that was called “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,” that laid out a vision of what Russia was, where it was headed over the next several years.2[It was] a document that was really programmatic, that in retrospect people didn’t pay enough attention to at the time.
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He laid out a very, I would argue, traditional view of what the Russian state was, what that relationship was with society.He made a clear point that Russians do not find a strong state to be a problem, that a strong state has been a constant in Russian history, and a very important element of organizing society, an important element of Russian national identity.
In fact, he laid out what he called a Russian idea that included patriotism, being a great power, a strong state, something of a collectivist society.If you go back now and look at it, you can see all the threads, the seeds of a more autocratic position in that writing.That wasn’t clear in the late 1990s, the early 2000s, in part because of the tremendous disorder in Russia at that time.
… When you guys are thinking about him and reading about him and trying to understand him, to what extent do you factor in KGB experience as relevant at that time period?
It is relevant, but not in the way that most people talk of it in the West or the United States today.The KGB is a schooling in Russian patriotism.It is a schooling in the way a big state operates on the global stage.That is—to my mind, there's nothing necessarily nefarious in that way of thinking.Again, it’s very consistent mainstream Russian thinking.
But it was a change from the people that we had had, that we had been dealing with during the 1990s, these liberal, more progressive young reformers, [as] we called them, people who were intent on breaking down the traditional Russian state, reforming it in some way to make it more like a liberal Western society.Putin comes out of an institution that is dedicated to a traditional view of Russian statehood, Russia’s role in the world.That’s what we should have taken away from it.That is something that is not simply an element of KGB training.That is a viewpoint that is shared widely across the leads, whether it be the military, other people in state organizations.The exception were the people wanted to move in a more Western direction.
So when President Bush meets him, looks at him, what was that about?When he says, you know, “I've seen his soul,” or whatever he said about him, what do you make of that?3
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I think people have made too much of this moment.President Bush had been meeting with Putin for—I forget how long, but a long negotiation, where they had talked across a wide range of issues.President Bush saw this as an effort to get to know Putin in some way.He did believe in personal diplomacy, something his father had done extremely well when he was president.He wanted to create some rapport with Putin that he could use as a foundation for dealing with what were some very difficult issues on the agenda in U.S.-Russian relations.
Remember, President Bush, at that point, was committed to withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile [ABM] Treaty, something that the Russians considered a foundation of strategic stability.There was some talk about further expansion of NATO, again, something that the Russians would be opposed to.So he wanted to create some rapport with Putin in order to move on some of these difficult issues.
What President Bush himself has said is: “Well, what did you want me to say? I got asked this question in public. Am I supposed to say I hate this man? I don’t trust this man? I said something that was very diplomatic.”That, I think, is point one.Point two is that people tend to look at the statement, “I looked into his eyes; I got a sense of his soul.”But what comes after that is also important, and that is that he came to the conclusion that Putin was a Russian patriot, and he was going to look after the best interest of the Russian state.That was, in fact, accurate.
What was wrong in the assessment at that point is our understanding of what Putin thought the interest of the Russian state would have been.He’s turned out, I think in the eyes of most Russians, to be a very strong patriot.But it turns out that it’s a vision of Russia, of Russian domestic politics, of Russia’s role in the world, that is quite different from what we had hoped for at the end of the Cold War, and certainly when Bush was assuming the presidency in 2001.
Just to button up the first meeting, a lot of people say Putin, the former KGB agent, had researched the president, knew of his religious proclivities and told the story of the cross and from the fire that had been saved as a way of hooking the evangelical president.
Perhaps.But that said, for Putin as well, Russian Orthodoxy is a central element of Russian national identity.It’s something that he has worked on certainly during his presidency.[He] has given the church a much more prominent role in Russian politics, Russian domestic affairs.So yes, there may be an element of hooking the evangelical, but I think it’s also reflective of Putin’s own thinking about how Russia should be run, what Russia is, what the foundations of Russian greatness are.
The further point on this would be that, even if he had hooked the evangelical, if you look at the way the policy unfolded over the next eight years, it’s hard to make an argument that President Bush conceded a lot to President Putin at that point.President Bush had an agenda.He drove it forward.He realized that he needed to placate the Russians in some way in order to get that done.If you look at this from the standpoint of U.S. national interest, in some ways, he was quite effective in managing the Russia part of the relationship, at least until 2007-2008.
… Sept. 11 happens.Putin makes the phone call [to the U.S.] within an hour, hour and a half.I think [he] talks to [then-National Security Adviser] Condi Rice.[He] makes an offer [of assistance] that says, “Whatever you need,” whatever the offer was.A lot of people we talked to say this is evidence of Putin’s willingness to cooperate with the United States and [desire to] be respected by the United States, but that he is somehow rebuffed in the aftermath of that.Help me with that.
You have to put yourself in Putin’s mindset at this point.Putin is someone who understands power, believes in power.You're right about respect.He wants Russia to be respected as a great power.But you simply can't declare yourself to be a great power.Other countries have to recognize that, and you recognize Russia as a great power by willing to work with Russia and take Russia’s interests into account on the big issues of global affairs.
If you look at the world from the Kremlin standpoint in 2001-2002, the biggest power in the world is the United States.We’re at the peak of our influence after the end of the Cold War.We had gone through a decade of economic expansion.Our military powers are unrivaled.Being recognized by the United States as a partner, to some extent, was exactly what Putin was looking for.I'm dealing with the biggest guy on the block, and he’s taking my interest into account.So if I can form a partnership with the United States, I have made a tremendous step forward in returning Russia as a significant power in global affairs.9/11 offers that opportunity to reach out at a time of maximum distress in the United States and offer to work with the United States on dealing with this issue of terrorists.
Again, remember terrorism is something that the Russians had experienced in the 1990s [in] Chechnya.It was on the wave of a battle against terrorism that Putin had risen as prime minister and then assumed the presidency in Russia.And then you add to that, it’s Afghanistan.The Russians know something about Afghanistan.They spent the good part of a decade engaged in Afghanistan.They still had ties into some of the key warlords in that area.They understood the terrain and [how] to be of help to the United States.So it was an offer, but an offer that came with some substance.
Putin, shortly after he had made this offer, made a public statement along the lines—And he didn’t ask for a quid pro quo.His reasoning for that was, well, if we’re doing something that’s in our interest, we don’t ask for someone to give us something in exchange.Fighting terrorism with the United States is important for Russia.We made the offer based on an assessment of our own national interests, and we should proceed on that basis.
But I think it was clear at that time that there were things that he wanted.In particular, he wanted the United States to recognize that Russia had what he might have called back then a privileged position in the former Soviet space—that this was our area; this was our geopolitical space.It had been historically, and while the United States is involved in Afghanistan and managing the rest of the world, we will manage the former Soviet space for you, so you don’t have to worry about it.
I think he also expected not that the United States would reverse the decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but that the United States would be prepared to provide some sort of compensation to the Russians in a strategic arms control agreement, for example, that would ease some of Russia’s concerns about the missile defense system.He was also clearly looking, at that time, because he was focused on reviving the economy, [for] some way of using the United States to ease entry into the World Trade Organization.
It became clear in the months after that phone call that Putin did, in fact, want something from the United States.It’s the failure, in Putin’s mind, of the United States to deliver on those points that ultimately leads to the rapid deterioration in relations between the two countries.
We do pull out of the ABM Treaty.4We then invade Iraq, which a lot of people we talked to say Putin, as an autocrat himself, worried about: … “I see what's happening. Certainly the Middle East is sort of in my sphere of influence. Wait a minute. What's going on here? Am I a target eventually?”
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I think people are reading too much of the present back into the past.Iraq was a problem for Putin, for the Russians.But remember, it was also a problem for the French and the Germans and a bunch of other people.I don’t think the question in Putin’s mind was about the United States invading a country and overthrowing a dictator; [it was] a concern about what that meant for Putin’s Russia at that point.2003, there has been evidence of this authoritarian tendency in Russia, but certainly people aren’t seeing Putin as an autocrat at that point, determined to crack down on civil society, determined to crack down on any opposition to them.In fact, if you look at the first two or three years of Putin’s presidency, it was more restoring order, something that you needed to do in state.You can't have the regional authorities defying the center.You can't have people making up their own rules across the country.A centralization of authority, a centralization of government, was, in the minds of many, a step forward.[It was] read that way inside Russia, I think also in much of the outside world.
So Putin wasn’t in that same position, didn’t see himself as comparable to Saddam at that point, and certainly didn’t believe that what the United States was doing was a direct threat to him personally or the regime inside Russia.That comes somewhat later.
What the concern was, more than anything else, was a military operation on Russia’s borders that the Russians believed would not go well over the long run.It would increase instability, and instability is an environment in which terrorists thrive.Russia did face a terrorist threat at that point, at least in their own mind.They were fighting in Chechnya at that point.They're concerned about stability in Central Asia because of the penetration of radical Islamist elements into Central Asia as well.I think that is the major reason for the opposition.
Again, remember, [French President Jacques] Chirac and [German Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder shared that view.Putin formed something of an alignment with the Germans and the French in opposition to what the United States and the United Kingdom wanted to do at that point.That’s the reason that we don’t get the second resolution in the U.N. Security Council authorizing the military operation against Saddam.
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
Let’s talk a little bit about the first go-around of the color revolutions that were happening.5As we’re watching that and Putin, does it matter at all to us what's actually happening there to him, or does it just feel like the natural course of adjustments that would happen in a changing world order?
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We didn’t pay exaggerated attention to what Putin was thinking at that point.Now, the first [color revolution] in the former Soviet space is Georgia, the Rose Revolution.Russia’s attitude toward this is somewhat different from its attitude toward what happened in Ukraine a year later.The leader of Georgia at that point is Eduard Shevardnadze.This is the man that broke up the Soviet Union.He wasn’t a man that was in good order in Moscow at that time.Moscow had made several attempts to eliminate Shevardnadze, so the fact that a group of young Georgian reformers led by [Mikheil] Saakashvili was throwing out Shevardnadze wasn’t necessarily an overwhelming negative from the Russian standpoint.
… So I don’t think the [Rose] Revolution in Georgia is a turning point in their relationship.
I have always thought that the turning point in Russian attitudes and Putin’s attitudes toward the United States comes in the fall of 2004, and it’s bookmarked by two events.The first event occurs late August and September, and it’s the Beslan terrorist attack.A group of terrorists take over a school on the opening of school, Sept. 1, in 2004.There's a standoff, an eventual assault to the school.Over 300 to 400 people died in this attack, many of them children. …And then the second is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.This is a time where Putin had clearly shown his support for one of the candidates in the presidential election, [Viktor] Yanukovych.The United States, in his mind, works to intervene to produce a different result and get a pro-Western individual elected president.
The reason Beslan is important is that the whole foundation of the partnership, from 9/11 forward, was counterterrorism.We’re going to form this antiterrorist coalition because the United States and Russia have a common interest and share a common threat.That’s Al Qaeda for the United States; it’s the Chechens for the Russians.
President Putin had been concerned from the moment we began this antiterrorist cooperation that the United States was not supporting Russia sufficiently in dealing with Chechen terrorists.And indeed, there's a foundation for that.The United States, as a matter of policy, did not agree that all the people in Chechnya fighting against Moscow were terrorists.To the Moscow view, what was happening [was that] we tried to divide the world between moderate Chechen rebels and terrorists—people who had legitimate grievances against Moscow and were bearing arms against Moscow for legitimate reasons, and those terrorists who were allied with the nasty guys that we were fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world.
You could see how that would have gone down in Russia.One of the arguments you heard from Putin and other senior Russian officials was, if we had Al Qaeda figures walking around Moscow, you would protest, and you would think this is an act of hostility, but you have Chechens, a government in exile, that are living openly in the United States.… There are Chechen websites in the United States that are supporting the rebellion in Chechnya.You can't shut them down because it’s a free-speech issue in the United States.Financing is coming out of the United States and out of Europe, and yet you can't shut this down because it’s too complicated, or private rights and other things get in the way.
What type of antiterrorist coalition is this?He gave a very important set of remarks shortly after Beslan, talking not so much about the terrorist attack but about how historically, countries that are weak get beaten, how there are countries that are still concerned about Russia because we have nuclear weapons.They want to bite off juicy pieces of Russia.Well, the only country that he could have had in mind, although he didn’t say it directly, was the United States at that point, evident to us in Washington, that that was at least in the back of his mind.
Then you come to Ukraine and the Orange Revolution.Again, we are supportive of what we call democracies, democracy promotion in Ukraine.That’s all we’re doing.The fact that a pro-Western candidate wins the election after there are protests, and charges of fraud, and you have to rerun the election, it’s simply a working out of a democratic process in Ukraine.
Putin’s reaction is, it’s nonsense.Again, it’s the United States operating in an area that is critical to Russian security and using democracy promotion, again, as a smokescreen for the United States’ geopolitical advance, with the clear goal of constraining and weakening Russia.That is unacceptable.
It’s after these two events that you begin to see, in the early months of 2005, Russia formulating a different foreign policy, questioning the United States, a bit more tension in the relationship with the United States.Fall of 2004 is the real turning point in U.S.-Russian relations during the Bush administration.
… The next point for us, following and agreeing with you about the importance of Beslan and the first Orange Revolution, is the Munich speech, where it feels like he declares something critical.Take me there.Tell me whether you agree with that and what the impact of the Munich speech was on the NSC and the Bush administration at that moment.
I left the administration 48 hours before the Munich speech, but it was a wakeup call for the Bush administration.6You can see a lot of activity trying to reconnect with Russia after that.
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But let me build on something that you said, because I think you are right.2005 [for Russia] is: “We need to rethink our strategy. We need to have the capabilities to operate effectively in a modern world. We still want to try to have a good relationship with the United States, because in 2005—“The “we” you were saying is Russia.Russia, so in Putin’s mind, Russia—we still need to have a working relationship with the United States, because the United States is still the most powerful country in the world.What it’s doing in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates, from the Russian standpoint, the havoc that the United States is capable of wreaking in areas that are along Russia’s borders.
But [in Putin’s mind]: “We do this in a number of ways. We need to clamp down domestically because we need to deny the United States those tools that it has used in Ukraine and elsewhere to undermine legitimate governments.”That’s the beginning of the squeezing of nongovernmental organizations, the focus of squeezing out foreign funding of these organizations.We [Russia] begin to think about a military modernization program, to give ourselves the capabilities that we’re going to need, the hard-power capabilities, to be effective at least along our own periphery.
We [Russia] also—and this comes to fruition somewhat later—we begin to develop this idea of hybrid warfare.Now, it’s not our idea, the Russians would say; it’s your idea. It’s the Americans’ idea.[Russia believes,] “We’re learning from you the way that you have affected regime change, going back to Yugoslavia. Now we’ll look at the Rose Revolution again and the Orange Revolution, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan.”
These things today that we see as core elements of Russian strategy, as a threat to the United States and the West, in the Russians’ mind, are things that they developed, copying what the United States had been doing quite effectively to erode Russian power and influence along their border.
The Munich speech—and there's a back story to the Munich speech which I think hasn’t received enough attention in the West and in the United States.There was still a hope in Moscow that they would be able to come to some sort of constructive relationship with the United States, because of American power.But from the summer of 2006 to the Munich speech in February of 2007, the United States basically had nothing serious to do with Russia.You've got to take [yourself] back to that period.The Bush administration was focused on the situation in Iraq.The insurgency had spread well beyond what we had anticipated in 2003-2004.It looked like we were heading for defeat.
Internal focus was thinking through what the United States needed to do to save its position in Iraq.The discussions eventually led to the surge, but that debate sucked all the oxygen out of the air.There wasn’t room for thinking clearly about a Russia problem, responding to what the Russians wanted, and there was no follow-through.Putin had asked for a meeting with the president when he stopped over in Moscow on his way to Hanoi, if I remember correctly, for at that point, it would have been a WTO meeting, if I remember correctly.
What year are we in?
We’re in 2006.It’s October-November of 2006.
OK.
The Bush administration initially had given Putin the brush-off.When they did go to Moscow, there was a meeting, and they agreed that the Russians would send a senior delegation to Washington in December to talk about some nonproliferation issues, some strategic stability issues.When that delegation came to Washington, the White House basically would have no time for them.The meeting at the White House got squeezed in just before they had to catch their plane to go back to Moscow.The Russians clearly saw this as a brush-off.
Putin’s Munich speech is a reaction to “We’re being disrespected. People aren't taking us seriously, and I need to lay down a marker. Here is the marker.”Then he goes through the litany of Russian grievances for certainly the entire time this presidency; some of it goes back even further.But [he] makes the point that Russia is intent and has the capabilities to defend its own national interest.We are going to do that, and some people in the West are not going to be happy about the way we go about doing this.
Now, that caught the Bush administration’s attention, because the last thing they needed as they were trying to deal with the Iraq situation was a total break in the relationship with Russia.There was a concerted effort to reconnect to try to find out what Putin’s concerns were and to answer those in some ways.There was some discussion about how we might modify the architecture of the ABM or our missile defense system in Eastern Europe to ease Russian concerns.7
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There was more talk about how we can move forward on antiterrorism cooperation and so forth.They managed to patch things up for a time, but clearly, as we see in 2008 and the Georgian events, they didn’t succeed.
Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia
Well, and even before that.Two months after the Munich speech, they cyber-invade Estonia and literally lock the banks down first.8The president wakes up and can't get into his bank account or whatever it is.… How did you see Estonia?
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It was a confusing situation at that point.Again, we’re beginning to see all the elements of now, of the problem of dealing in cyberspace now.Attribution is a big problem.Much of what was done in Estonia, at least initially, didn’t look like it was directed by the Russian state.You had the cutouts. You had the patriotic hackers.All these things slowed down the understanding of what had really happened and the way that Russia might use these things in the future.
It also led, as you know, to the significant debate within NATO, [which] is, how do you treat these things?To what extent does a cyberattack like this fall within the definition of Article 5?What are the obligations of other NATO members to an ally that is subjected to an attack like this, particularly, when in the initial phases, [it] is very difficult to find a direct link between what you're seeing happening in a country like Estonia and the Russian state as well?
Now, in the interim, I think we have gotten much better attribution and understand much better how these things are done.So the big gap between the incident and being able to identify, with a high level of confidence, the perpetrator is now quite significant.That certainly wasn’t the case in 2007.While the Estonians were quite confident that they were under attack by the Russians, that wasn’t a view that was shared throughout the West, and certainly wasn’t a view that was shared across the U.S. government.There were major debates as to who was behind this.How do we understand this? To what extent can we identify a clear Russian state role in the events that have unfolded in Estonia?
… As the Bush presidency ends, where are we with Putin?
We’re nowhere with Putin.Putin is no longer president; he’s the prime minister.But clearly, he is the most significant figure in Russian politics.We’ve come through the Georgian war, which leads to a breakdown in relations between the two countries.We cut off the channels of communication as the NATO-Russia Council is put on ice for a while.There's not enough time to even think about how you would restore this, because a new president is coming in.
But there's another change that is also significant. It’s a change in Russian attitudes.We talked about 2000-2001, when Putin clearly saw the United States as the dominant world power and Russia’s ability to be accepted as a great power depended very much on the attitudes of the United States.
… By the end of the Bush administration, Putin is focused on the problems of the United States’ economic collapse, obviously, which started in the United States, which had a devastating impact on the fiscal financial situation here, in Europe and around the globe, eventually hits Russia itself; a foreign policy that, from the Russian standpoint, is hard to mark down as success.You know, the United States is mired in Iraq. There's no way out.It hasn’t solved the problem in Afghanistan.
Putin comes to the conclusion that even if the United States is the major power in the world, it’s in decline, and Russia is coming back.Because we’re rebuilding our capabilities, we’re developing some asymmetrical capabilities, we’re able to act a bit more boldly on the world stage than before.We also have a potential ally, because the Chinese had made tremendous progress over the past 10 years and are rapidly approaching the United States in terms of economic power, the size of the economy, but also making advances on the technological side as well.
The world, the geopolitical situation, looks radically different in 2008, the end of the Bush administration, than it did at the beginning of the Bush administration.Even if Russia is hit by the global financial crisis harder than any other country in the G-20, in many ways, the geopolitical environment is much more favorable to Russia now than it was when Putin first assumed the presidency in Russia.
Let’s ask these guys, before we go to the modern era, anything in here?
I would just like a little bit more on Georgia.
… I just want the inside story from the Bush part of the just so we understand.
There's a back story to this.We had spent a lot of effort trying to manage the relationship between Georgia and Russia.It begins in the early years of the Bush administration.The Russians had come to us and complained about Chechens using Georgia as a base for their operations in Chechnya, and is there something we could do about this?
What we told the Russians is: “You don’t need to intervene. We’ll work this out with the Georgians.”So we had to try and equip.That was ostensibly intended to give the Georgians the capabilities they needed, in a sense, to pacify areas where Chechens might be operating in Georgia, to cut off their lines into Chechnya and basically ease whatever concerns Russia might have about the Chechens using Georgia as a base for their operations.
The Russians couldn’t stop it, but clearly they felt uneasy about this, because again, Georgia was in their backyard.Georgia should have been in their sphere of influence.And there was a great deal of unease about the United States trying to insert itself into Georgia by undermining Russia’s own presence.
Nevertheless, we did work at this, I think, very, very actively.We tried to mediate between Tbilisi and Moscow, to ease concerns.We did this quite effectively until 2008, when we had taken our eyes off of Russia, in many, many ways.We had been much more supportive of Saakashvili.Georgia is the beacon of democracy in this part of the world, poster child of President Bush’s Freedom Agenda.
… You also have the decision at the NATO summit in Bucharest not to give Ukraine and Georgia Membership Action Plans, but a statement that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO.Again, NATO [is] expanding into a region that Russia believes is critical to security, where Russia needs to maintain its pre-eminence if it’s going to remain and sustain itself as a great power.
That’s when the tension and the provocation, on both sides, by both the Georgian independents and the Russians, accelerates.… That, I think, is the background to the events of late August—again, a very confused sequence of events, provocations on both sides.But the conclusion by international investigators who have looked at this is that the Georgians take the first action in South Ossetia that leads to the deaths of a certain number of Russian peacekeepers, an assault on the capital city of South Ossetia.Russia has used that as the event justifying their invasion of South Ossetia, again, to defend their peacekeepers … They were more than happy to engage in this type of military operation to put the Georgians down, to put them in their place, but also to send the message to the United States that U.S. has repeatedly, that Russia doesn’t have a veto over NATO decisions.9But [Russia] just wanted to demonstrate, in a practical way, that Russia does have a veto.It’s called the use of force.
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… How did the understanding of who Vladimir Putin was change by the end of Bush’s administration?
It’s hard to pinpoint the change in President Bush’s attitude, but he had become increasingly frustrated with President Putin over the years.He had made a particular effort in the early years not to criticize Putin for what he was doing domestically.As he said, he didn’t want to hector Putin.He didn’t see any advantage to this.But there was growing pressure in 2003-2004 to say something about this.… President Bush begins to change his mind.He had a particularly difficult and disturbing one-on-one conversation with Putin at the Bratislava Summit in 2005, where the conversation was about domestic politics in Russia.Bush raised concerns about the crackdown on the press, the crackdown on the opposition.Putin comes back and says, “Well, you fired that journalist,” and Bush says, “You're talking about Dan Rather?”And he said, "You raise that in public, you're just going to demonstrate to everybody you have no idea about how our system operates.”
But Putin continued to push that in public.There was clearly, in the post-summit press conference, joint press conference, a question planted by a Russian journalist that raised that question and allowed Putin to respond.I remember sometime after that, in a conversation with Bush and others, the president saying, “We’ve lost him.You know, I don’t know how, but we’ve lost him,” basically meaning that on the drive or the transition to democracy, Putin was going in a different direction, and there was little that the administration, in President Bush’s mind, could do to put Putin back on that course.
How did he feel?How did that feel with Bush? Was it “I'm sorry we've lost him”?That’s a fact.
It’s a fact. It’s disappointment.We had hoped for something better.In Bush’s mind, we had worked hard at this. Didn’t happen.Now we’re going to have to deal with Russia in a different way.That said, you could still see that there was something of a personal relationship between the two men.They talked to one another more freely than President Bush might have to the other leaders who were somewhat more distant.
Why, do you think?
In part because there was some personal rapport that had grown out of that first meeting in Ljubljana.There had been some things that they had done together on the terrorism side that the president at least had found useful.Again, if you go back and look at the initial phases of the administration, there was constant contact between these two men, dozens of phone calls.Every time President Bush was in the same city as Putin there was a meeting of some sort.
So in 2002-2003, you may have had 15 to 20 discrete episodes of contact between the two men, talking in many ways, about substance.Remember, President Bush had had Putin down at his farm in Crawford, [Texas].President Bush went to President Putin’s dacha in Moscow.There's some contact between the two first ladies at that point.There was a personal relationship that had developed.
When President Bush says, “We’ve lost Putin,” I think it’s a great deal of disappointment that it hadn’t turned out otherwise.
And when [former National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley says, “We’re in the toilet”?
I think that’s just a statement of fact and observation.This is where we are in this relationship.We had, in many ways, argued for the closer relationship with Russia on the assumption that it was moving.It was indeed in a transition toward democracy.We were willing to understand that this would not proceed rapidly without zigzags.After all, Russia is a difficult country.It’s had a complicated history, but we thought a direction was clear.
When it becomes evident that Putin is not moving in that direction, that all these hopes have been, in a sense, had been false, then it’s very difficult for us in public to justify why we are still cooperating with the Russians on any number of issues.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
… Let’s fly over the reset, Obama, Medvedev, 2011, the Arab Spring, … and everything that happens in Ukraine.A lot of people say we should have used lethal action.… Has he become a madman, or is he just a super-cunning, street-smart, whatever he is?… Suddenly it becomes apparent that somebody, probably the Russians, have made a cyber incursion into the United States.… What are you thinking as to who Putin is then and what his motivations are?
I would argue that Putin is not a madman.He’s not a grand strategist, but he is an acute calculator of power and power relations.He also takes calculated risks in order to advance what he sees as Russian national interest.He also operates in a way that is not radically different, to my mind, from the way any Russian leader in his position would, given the circumstances that you see unfolding around the world.There is no way that a Russian wouldn’t have responded to the Maidan, the overthrow of [President Viktor] Yanukovych in Ukraine, to do something to prevent what they saw as a too-rapid drift westward by Ukraine out of a Russian orbit forever.10… The intrusions in the United States, one, everybody who has the capability engages in this type of espionage.And it’s considered—you may not like it, but it’s normal.We’re not going to push back too hard.It’s when you gather that information and begin to use it directly in the United States, the revelation of that information, that you’ve crossed the line.From Putin’s standpoint, the goal here is really to discredit the United States as a model of democracy. The system’s corrupt.You work your politics backrooms the same way we do it in Russia, so you're not in the position to judge us in our democratic practices inside Russia.
10
… It’s also payback. The United States, in the Kremlin’s mind, had blatantly interfered with Russian politics for 20 to 25 years.We’re giving the United States a taste of its own medicine, using the tools that we have in order to affect that.There's a little bit of that as well.
What I think you see in 2016, in all Putin’s actions, are a defense of what he sees as Russian national interest, a pushback against the United States, and all of this still with the idea that, at some point, we need to re-engage with the United States.But we need to re-engage at a time when the United States understands that it needs to respect Russian power; it needs to respect Russian interests; it needs to understand that Russia is capable of defending those interests in a practical way, certainly all along Russia’s periphery, but probably even farther afield.
Should the president of the United States, at that time, when it became apparent what was happening, have counterattacked in some way?
I imagine they're debating this in Washington now.What's the counterattack? What's the response?How do you push back against this in an effective way?There have been various ideas that have been put forward.Release information that demonstrates that Putin’s corrupt.
One, Russia does a very good job of controlling the information space inside Russia.It’s hard for me to imagine what you could release that would cause Russian people to think radically different about their leader.Remember the Panama Papers, where some people thought that this revealed an underlayer of corruption in Putin’s inner circle.What was the reaction to that inside Russia, or even elsewhere in the world?Minimum. …
But the other thing that you have to be concerned about in things like this is the Russian response.Is the worst thing that the Russians can do interfere in your domestic politics, or do they have other types of cyber tools that they can use in other ways?Do they have the capability of taking down the power grid in the United States?Would they do that if we responded in some way?If we excluded them from the Swiss system, does Russia have the capability to take down a financial center in the United States?
I think the president found himself in a very complicated and delicate situation, and that’s beyond the impact that it would have had domestically in the United States, whether this would have been seen clearly as interference in the campaign, in favor of a specific candidate or not, and what the domestic political consequences of that would have been.We’re still there. We’re still doing the investigation.My guess is that the government, on the executive side, is still thinking about what the appropriate response is, what capabilities we have, in order to push back against the Russians, and whether there is an active countermeasure to do that does damage to the Russians domestically, that sends the appropriate message, but sends that message in a way that reduces the risk of an escalation and a response in the United States, that would have devastating consequences, both here and perhaps for some of our European partners.
If I said it feels a lot like Putin’s revenge, does it feel like revenge to you?
There's an element of revenge in this.But remember, from the Putin standpoint, I'm defending Russian national interest.He said this publicly on more than one occasion.You have pursued a policy—and he would say over the past 300 years—trying to contain Russia, of trying to weaken Russia.At some point, you have to expect us to push back, because this is a question of our existence.
I don’t think you can exaggerate the extent to which, in the Russian mind, being a great power is a central element of Russian national identity.For the Russians and for Putin now, they're engaged in an existential struggle with the United States, because the United States refuses to acknowledge that Russian is that great power, that Russia does have a sphere of influence in the former Soviet space, that Russia is sovereign and will conduct its internal affairs as it sees fit.
When you're in an existential conflict, pushing back, using the resources that you have in order to beat back that attack, one, it’s justifiable; and two, it’s something that you and the population are prepared to do, understanding that you may experience a deprivation because of this.At the end of the day, this is about defending who you are as a people, who you are as a country.
… So is it a war?
From the Russian standpoint, it is.It’s not your everyday kinetic war, but it is a competition, a confrontation.This is, to the Russians’ mind, to Putin’s mind, about defending the survival not simply of Putin, but of the Russian state and the Russian people.So it is serious for them. I don’t think you can exaggerate how serious it is to the Russians.It’s not something that the United States is prepared to accept at this point, in part because we see the world in a somewhat different way.
Just one question on Ukraine is that some people will say that Putin will push until somebody pushes back.Inside the administration there was this debate over, do you respond?Do you provide use of lethal defensive weapons?Do you think, when you look back at that in particular, that the Obama administration should have done more?
That’s a good question.The short answer in my mind is no.… I think the Obama administration handled the conflict more or less properly once the conflict erupted.If you have fault with the Obama administration, it’s a sequence of events that led up to the conflict and not understanding that the Russians would respond, not being prepared for that response.If they had thought through more clearly what the possible scenarios are, my guess is that they may have managed the whole Maidan situation somewhat differently than they did, in part to lessen or diminish the risk that you would have gotten this violent response that we have from the Russians after the overthrow of Yanukovych.
Thank you.
The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister
Just have one question about the evolution.You said the whole evolution of relationship in the Bush administration, very high hopes to.Can you comment just on, when the Obama folks come on, the whole idea of reset, how you viewed that?Was it naïve, or was it the reality of necessity?And then, the second part of it is, the Trump administration, as they come in, their whole sort of way of dealing—
We’re going to go global here, and start with Adam and Eve.
I can start with the post-Cold War.Each American administration—and we’ll leave Trump to the side for a moment—has come to office thinking that it had to, and it could, build a constructive relationship with the Russians.The Clinton administration certainly did that.They talked about a strategic alliance with Russia formed.The Bush administration did that. They talked about a strategic partnership with Russia.The Obama administration comes in and does that with the reset.
All of these administrations recognize that for a range of U.S. national security issues, you need to deal with Russia.We can start with the obvious one, strategic stability.They’ve got a formal nuclear arsenal.We need to be engaged with them to make sure that these things aren't used in anger or even accidentally at this point.There are things that the Russians can help us with, in nonproliferation, and they have over the years, Iran being a case in point.
There are things that you need to do with the Russians or engage with the Russians if you're going to manage the security situation in Europe and elsewhere along Russia’s periphery.They have energy resources.You're going to do climate change, you’ve got to deal with the Russians.There are very good reasons why the United States needs to have a working relationship with the Russians, with the standpoint of its own national interests, and when the relationship breaks down totally, it complicates American policy.The Bush administration recognizes that when it comes into office, as does the Obama administration.
There's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing wrong, I think, with the Obama approaching the reset.I supported that policy. I thought it was the right way.The problem that we’ve had all along is that we’ve always linked cooperation with Russia with this rhetoric, at least public rhetoric, about Russia making some sort of transition toward democracy.Clearly, that is a central element in the Clinton administration’s policy, an important part of the Bush administration policy, particularly when it begins to talk about the Freedom Agenda in terms of the war on terrorism.I think the Obama administration, to a lesser extent, but even then they realized that they needed to have, as part of this dialog, a discussion of Russia’s domestic politics.
… That’s a short way of saying the three administrations up to Trump have, in a sense, based working relationships with Russia on the assumption that Russia is slowly if fitfully integrating itself into the Western world in some way.That is broken down now.We still need to engage with the Russians, but we need to engage the Russians without this overlay of a transition to democracy.They're not moving in that direction.They don’t want to integrate into the Western world.The challenge for this administration—and I would say for any administration that comes into office, in the next period—is to be able to develop a working relationship with the Russians that understands that, as far as values are concerned, they're in a different place, that they're not becoming like us.Yet we have to deal with them, because it’s critical to the advance of our own national interests.
Can we move the type of relationship that we've had with China to a relationship with Russia?It’s been easier with China because we’ve always assumed that China, it’s a different type of civilization.They have a different cultural tradition.Russia has suffered in this regard because it’s seen as part of the European family in some way, [and] the expectations are different.But we won't be able to build an effective policy dealing with Russia until, in a sense, we put them not in the same category as China, but realize that they operate on a value system that is going to be different from ours for any period that is significant for policymaking.
Thank you. Really good.
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