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Victoria Nuland

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Victoria Nuland

Under Secretary of State

Victoria Nuland has been an American diplomat for 33 years. She most recently served in the Biden administration as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2021 to 2024.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on May 3, 2024, prior to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Biden’s Decision

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Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Let me just start with, when did Joe Biden first come across your radar as a figure in Washington?You've been in Washington a while, but he may have been around Washington even longer.

It's true.

Who was he?

Well, we all grew up with Joe Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.He is obviously older than I am, but our arc of time and service was very much the same.And then when I was George Bush's ambassador to NATO, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was very much involved in NATO business, and I would see him at various events, and he would come out to Brussels, and obviously confirmation hearings and all of those kinds of things.

I would say that, where I first really came to know his views and his brain and his heart was during the Balkans, where he was very much involved in trying to stop Milošević's rampage, and he was extremely supportive in the Senate of peace processes—first Dayton and then during the Kosovo war.But I worked most closely with him in the Obama administration, when he was vice president and he was leading on both Ukraine and Cyprus, and I was assistant secretary for Europe.

One other question about him in the Senate and when you first know him, because there's a trajectory that changes the country over this time.The way people describe the Foreign Relations Committee that Joe Biden came up in was as much more bipartisan than today, sort of unified approach on things like the Soviet Union.Is that true?Did he come up in a different era of politics when he was serving in the Foreign Relations Committee over all those years?

Absolutely.We all came up that way. That “politics ended at the water's edge” was the adage that we were raised with.It was the adage that not just the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but the Senate and House Armed Services Committees also lived by; that you try to present a united front, Democrats and Republicans.And for those of us who were career members of the foreign service or the military, etc., we worked for presidents of both parties, and there was never any question about your loyalty one way or the other.It was just expected that you could represent the interests of the United States for both parties and both presidents.

Do you think that that background shaped him as to who he would become as president?

I think he absolutely believes that the country's at its best and at its strongest when the parties are working together, that particularly when we face adversaries like we do now—Putin and Iran and Xi Jinping, who has big ambitions—that if Democrats and Republicans can’t work together and present a strong united front, not only can those adversaries exploit that, but it's much harder to create that coalition of allies that works together on common challenges vis-à-vis these folks.So that is his tradition.

Obviously he also prides himself, and I think was well recognized during his Senate time, as a consensus builder.He didn't expect always to walk into the room agreeing with the other side, but he expected to stay in that room until they came out unified, particularly on foreign relations issues.

Biden as Vice President

It's also interesting.As he comes into the Obama administration and he's the vice president, it seems like he has a Rolodex or a personal relationship around the world in a way that a lot of vice presidents wouldn't.Is it unusual for a president or a vice president to walk into that position with that experience that he had?

I would argue—maybe President Obama won't like this, but his vice president had met far more foreign leaders and put more time in with them than he had when he first came into office.That was useful for President Obama, particularly because of the way Joe Biden operates, as a U.S. diplomat, if I may.He very much believes in trying to understand the motivation of the foreign leader that you're trying to work with, you're trying to find common cause with, you're trying to ensure you don't have conflict with.So he is always very interested in, what does that other guy need?What motivates him, his psychology, or hers, and how do you create that sense of common purpose with that person?

I think we've read a lot about what Dick Cheney's role was in the Bush administration.What was Biden's role?As you said, he has a lot more experience than the president in some of his foreign policy.How did he operate, as you saw, as a vice president under the president?He's number two, but he has all this experience.

There were certain dockets or issues where the president gave Vice President Biden the lead.Ukraine was one of those.In that second Obama term, Ukraine needed a huge amount of support.It needed American leadership to show up on a regular basis.We needed phone calls on a high-intensity cadence to help support them against the Russian first aggression, but also to support them in reform, etc.And the president deputized or asked Vice President Biden to do that work.So I think Vice President Biden made five trips to Ukraine in that second Obama term.You'd have to ask him.But he very much became a mentor, a big brother, somebody who could give both strong messages of encouragement, but also tough love when it was needed, to the Ukrainians. ...

Biden’s Approach to Foreign Leaders

As you're preparing him for those meetings, or talking to him or briefing him, you said he's really interested in sort of personalities and motivation.How does he approach going into a meeting like that?

Well, first of all, he'll obviously read everything that you give him—the background, the proposed approach to the meeting.But among the things that I have always loved about working with Joe Biden is he doesn't want to just understand the issues and the history and the background.He really wants to understand the psychology, the motivation, the aspirations of the foreign leader on the other side of the table.

So he will start a briefing.You'll be blabbering on about what you think is going to happen, and he'll say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I read all the stuff.But what does he need?What does she need?How do we bridge that gap?What is he worried about?What is she proudof?”—those kinds of things.He really wants to get into the head of the other leader as a way of trying to make common cause.

It's a very—obviously he's got great intellectual gifts but he wants to lead with making that human connection, trying to find a place where their interests can meet.He always knows everybody's family.He never forgets names of grandchildren; he never forgets who's been ill, etc.I remember when we were working the Cyprus issue, and Anastasiades, who was the president of the Greek Cypriots, had a heart problem, and he came to New York for treatment.And Joe Biden, as vice president, took a day off, flew up to New York to visit him and be with him, and that had an impact on the negotiations later, because he had this great sense of empathy and support in the bank with Anastasiades.

Is it calculating, or is it just who he is, that type of connection?

He, I think, really loves people.He's fascinated by people.And when he makes a heart-to-heart connection with somebody, it sticks, and he shows up for them, and that makes a difference as a diplomat.

In those years, did he make an assessment of Vladimir Putin?There's a famous story where he sort of jokes about him not having a soul in response to the Bush comment.Did he have a psychological read on who Putin was back in the Obama years?

I think when he saw Putin exploit Ukraine and send little green men and grab Crimea, for Joe Biden, that just crossed a red line of basic behavior on the international stage.That made Putin a thug.As a leader, you can make choices we disagree with inside your own country; you can be repressive, and you're never going to be trusted by Joe Biden, who bases his judgment of people on democratic principles.But that's a different matter than getting into somebody else's business and biting off a piece of somebody else's country.And I think, from that perspective, if there was anything left in the bank for Putin, in Joe Biden's mind, it goes then.

Which doesn't change the fact that when he becomes president, he has to try to work with him.He came into office wanting a stable and predictable relationship with Putin.The first thing Putin does is a big exercise within the first couple of months of Biden being in office on Ukraine's borders.Turns out it was a dress rehearsal for what came later in the year.But he was testing a new leader.

And then we go to the Geneva Summit, obviously, and I think, at that time, the president had no illusions about the cold, calculated dude he was trying to speak to, but he hoped that it was in Putin's interest to have a stable relationship with us.He was trying to make the case there that Putin and he himself should be spending their time building their own economies, reforming their own countries for the good of their people and that we could do that in a way that didn't cut across each other; that we had certain issues where potentially we could work together on the world stage.And that was what he hoped to establish.And then, of course, four months later or less, we find the war plan, that Putin has a much different agenda for those years.

Biden Oversees the Ukraine Portfolio During the Obama Administration

So we'll get back to that and break that all down, but just to stay in the Obama moment and Ukraine, why does he end up with the lead on that, being the point person?

It was actually sort of interesting.It was a division of labor where Obama was dealing with Putin, and Obama was also dealing with Poroshenko, the Ukrainian leader, but he wasn't able to make three trips in a year and a half.He wasn't able to get on the phone three, four, five times a month with different Ukrainian leaders, the prime minister, the president, to try to ensure that we were completely lashed up on helping them defend themselves against what was going on in the east.

And so it made sense.And I think Biden had a natural affinity for the victim in this case.And he developed, very quickly, as I said, that brother—brother-mentor relationship with those leaders.

Tell me about those trips, about what he was like and how he would operate going to Ukraine.

So as I said, you'd get on the plane.He would go read all the stuff that we had prepared, and then he'd come out, and he'd hang out in the staff cabin, sit on the arm of somebody's chair and start asking a ton of questions and iterating back and forth.And mostly it was about the politics inside the country—how much room different leaders had to maneuver, who was opposing the policy of the Ukrainian president, how the president and the prime minister were getting along; again, as I said, what their fears were, what their paranoias were, what their—so he really wanted to get into the psychology and the politics of the moment, because as a lifetime politician, as a lifetime negotiator within the Senate, he was looking to understand how he could influence decisions in a positive way.

And what's your sense of how those connections — those personal connections — shaped his view, going back into his presidency years later? When the invasion—do you think that having had those relationships and those visits shaped his understanding of the invasion?

Oh, certainly.He was incredibly deep, as vice president, on the specific cities and geography and military vulnerabilities and economic strengths and worries of Ukraine.So when Russia tries to close off that land bridge between eastern Ukraine, Luhansk and Donetsk and Crimea, he understood the strategic importance of that land bridge, not just in military terms but that if Ukraine didn't have access to the Sea of Azov, its economy was crushed.He knows a lot of those leaders, and he has known them for 10 years, not just the top folk but some of the legislators, etc.

And he also is very deep on the history of Ukraine since its independence in '91, and the fact that it has had a pretty up-and-down history in terms of whether it was beating corruption, whether it was pushing back Russian influence, etc.So he knew who he was talking to, and he knew what different cities meant to them when they'd talk about it.He knew what their economy was based on and how the Russians could hurt them.And so that made a difference.It's like talking to a friend versus talking to somebody who you have to tutor in your worries if you are the president of Ukraine.

Did you know where he came out, inside the Obama administration, [on] the debate over defensive weapons and supplying them to Ukraine?Was he a part of that discussion on one side or the other?

Absolutely.He was always, in those years, on the more assertive side, that we should be sending more, we should be sending it faster.He particularly thought we should have been sending defensive weapons, like the Javelin.As we used to say in that little plane, you don't need an anti-tank weapon unless you're facing tanks, so what's the issue here?And he advocated strongly.He didn't always win, as you know, but he advocated strongly.

… Did you know Beau personally?

I did not. I did not.I did not.

But you were working with Vice President Biden during that period of his illness and his death.Could you see how that affected him?

You could see—let's put it this way.In my experience, it never affected him at the negotiating table; it never affected him at the inter-agency decision table.He was able to compartmentalize, but you could feel the strain, the pain.I think it obviously was a question, after Beau died, did he have gas in the tank to run himself in '16?Was that a smart thing or not?And obviously, he made the decision not to run.

You know, he's a fighter.So I think all through the time that Beau was sick, he saw his role as being the champion.But where you really saw it affect him was after Beau's death, and after that, there was that gaping hole in his life and in his heart.

Biden’s Approach to Foreign Policy as President

… As we come into the Biden presidency, and as you're coming in, how do you assess his overall approach or who he wants to be, especially as a leader on foreign policy, as president?

He was obviously horrified by the immense damage that President Trump and the Trump administration did to 70-plus years of U.S. alliances and the institutions that supported the alliance, including NATO.And he was profoundly committed to the fundamental principle that the U.S. can't do everything on the world stage by itself, that it needs allies and friends.And Trump had trashed those relationships.So he was very sincere and intent at the very beginning, in the first half of the first year, in nurturing and rebuilding those relationships with the G7 in the first instance, and that was something that I was working on as well, so the U.K., France, Germany, Japan, Canada, the EU, Italy, ensuring that that core, the biggest democracies, could work together; that they knew that if they worked with us, they could trust us; that we'd have their back, and then, building out from there, concentric circles of other democracies.You see it with India, with the Koreans, with [the] Philippines, with Mexico, etc., trying to build those relationships.

So he understood that a huge amount of damage had been done, that he had to say, “We're back.America's back as your friend,” and he had to demonstrate that we had their back.That later pays dividends when we need to work with all these countries on responding to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, on China issues, in creating more resilience among the democracies, even as you come to Hamas' attack on Israel, on how we're going to respond collectively.

So he's a profound believer in alliances and institutions.He grew up with that structure.He has a memory of the Cold War, among the last generation of leaders to have lived it, and he knows what it means to hang tough with your allies.And so that was the first instinct, I think.

And when you would go out and represent America to other countries in that period, in the wake of the Trump administration, in the wake of Jan. 6, and Biden is saying this, “We're returning to sort of a traditional American foreign policy,” do they believe you?Are they skeptical in those early months?

I think they weren't skeptical of President Biden's intent, of President Biden's approach to the world.They had worked with him as vice president.They had worked with him on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.I think that what they were skeptical of was, which was the aberration in American history?Was it this Trump period, and was that over, and the traditional America was back?Or might Trump come back, and this Biden moment was a brief, fleeting moment, so if they invested with us in working together, were we going to abandon them again in the future?

So one of the things that we were all charged with, at every level, so president's level first, Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, but then as issue manager myself for the G7, was staying in constant communication with these countries.So I would talk to my G7 counterparts at least once a week, sometimes two or three times a week, all the way through the tenure, to share what we were thinking, to try to brainstorm solutions together, to ensure that they felt consulted, to have their inputs and play those in, so that really, we got back to that family atmosphere.And I think they valued that.And as we did it more and more, and we were willing to bring them into our thinking, the trust built.And particularly, when you know, first when everybody has to evacuate from Afghanistan, they couldn't do that airlift without us, and we couldn't do it without them, so that was a searing but important allied cooperation experience.And then, just a few months later, less, we find the war plan that Putin has, and we are really into it, particularly with the Europeans, in protecting Ukraine and protecting the alliance.

So I think if we hadn't put that effort and time, if the president hadn't made clear from his inaugural speech that this mattered to him, we wouldn't have had the undercarriage that we needed for all the work that came later.

The Withdrawal from Afghanistan

You said before we started, that you came into Afghanistan late. ...

When you do get involved, and what that moment is, and was that when we're seeing those images of Kabul falling and the cargo planes, or is that before that?

So as the Taliban are approaching Kabul, and as it becomes clear that the Afghan forces that we have trained are vacating their posts and are not going to stand and fight, and not going to protect the agreement that had been made between the Afghan leadership and the Taliban, that they would share power, it's very clear that we are going to have to evacuate ourselves, our allies, but also as many Afghans as we can who supported and helped us, because the Taliban had broken the agreement, and it was unclear what kind of retribution they might exact on all of those people.

So the planning, we begin talking—and allies and partners are also beginning to panic about their own people on the ground, everybody from the U.K. to the French and the Germans and the Japanese, and they are looking to us for guidance and to help them get their people out.We also had, as you know, some 200,000 Afghans who had worked with us, if not more, worked with the military, worked with the civilians, worked with the intelligence services, worked with our NGOs, worked with our press.And the question was, how many—and many of them were terrified of what a Taliban rule would bring.And so the question was, how many of them could we get out as well?

So I am actually on vacation, because it's August.I'm at the beach.And Wendy Sherman, who was deputy secretary, is handling all these consultations with allies, and when it becomes clear that not only are we going to have to evacuate ourselves and those Afghans that we can, we're also going to have to help our allies and partners evacuate, we put extra people on the ground in Kabul, but we also just needed more hands and more folks to do the coordination.

So the first thing she did was ask me to start calling foreign ministers and consults.So I'm literally sitting in my kitchen, in a wet bathing suit, calling foreign ministers, trying to coordinate how we're going to handle this, and reporting back to Washington.And after two days of that, she says, “I need you to come home.”So I got on a plane and went back to Washington.

The next morning, I was tasked with helping set up what we ultimately called the lily pads, because it was one thing to bring our own citizens home, but in terms of bringing Afghans out, we had to screen them and know who they were.Remember, that we were still in COVID, so we had to ensure that they were immunized.Many of them had never had mumps-measles-rubella [MMR vaccine].So we needed countries that we could fly them to, create places for them to stay and be processed before they came into the United States.

So my team was tasked with putting together legal negotiations with Germany, with Spain, with Italy, places where we already had U.S. bases and NATO agreements.And then we also ended up doing it with Qatar and the UAE, where we could fly people in.And those negotiations, which normally would take six months, took 36-48 hours, including signing legal agreements, because it was such an in extremis circumstance.

And then I had to ensure that these countries who had helped us also got help on the ground from us in getting their own citizens out.So it was really quite a scurry.But again, if we hadn't rebuilt those relationships, if I couldn't speed-dial my own counterparts in these countries and have them pick up the phone, then it wouldn't have been possible.

Those images that look like Vietnam, that—after the cargo plane leaving, I mean, what's the impact of that either on you personally, or as you're talking to other countries, and the image of America?

Well, first, as you said, there were the images of Afghans so desperate to get out that they would hold onto pieces of a plane as it was flying off.That was the first horror.But then, remember, within 10 days or something, you had a terrorist attack outside the gates of the airport that killed innocents who were trying to escape and killed U.S. soldiers.So that just added to the sense of urgency, pressure, how many can we get out, the sense of the volume of the responsibility.And it was all hands on deck for all of us, everybody from the folks figuring out how the planes got in and got refueled to my friend John Bass, who was on the ground, sent back into Kabul and was on the ground, working the manifests, and who gets on and who gets off, to all of us who were up all night, negotiating with other governments to help us, to those crazy days when the planes got stormed in some cases and folks who shouldn't have been on them were getting in, and what did you do with them?Could you send them back?What was a humane way to handle that?So it was really quite an experience.

We've heard that that bombing outside the airport was possibly the worst moment of his presidency, or one of them, and then having to deal with the families.It was a difficult moment for everybody.

Yeah, because we had no way of knowing whether that would be the only such occasion or whether we were now in a situation where there would be repeated terrorist attacks as we were trying to finish this evacuation.And of course we all felt a huge sense of responsibility.

It seems like, for President Biden, who's been a vice president and a senator but not the commander in chief, it seems like a turning-point moment in some ways, to be the one in charge, and families have lost their kids.Do you think it is a moment for him and for the administration where he realizes the immensity of the job?

I don't think that Joe Biden ever underestimated the immensity of the job.And as the dad of a combat veteran, somebody who had worried about his own kid, as somebody who had often made trips to Walter Reed or Landstuhl [Regional Medical Center, near Ramstein Air Base in Germany] or made condolence calls, I don't think he underestimated any of that.But obviously, being commander in chief, the buck stops with you.

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine

I mean, there's Afghanistan, and then we come into Ukraine.These are two pretty monumental crises happening.

In the first year, yeah.

Take me again—you've talked a little bit about it, but to his first approach to Vladimir Putin and that first meeting, and was the sense that he could be deterred at that point?Did you know that he had any designs on invasion?

So Putin had done this massive exercise on Ukraine's borders within the first months of Biden's term, and then he had withdrawn his forces.And the president was quite strong at that point that we would respond.And so what lesson did Putin take from that?Hard to know.But when we went to Geneva, the president, the secretary, the national security adviser, the whole team was quite intent on testing the hypothesis that you could create common cause with Putin in having a stable and predictable relationship; that we would not surprise each other; that we were never going to be besties; we were never going to be allies; we were going to try to get them out of Ukraine; we were going to stand up to their cyberattacks, their disinformation, all of that, but that we didn't need to be in constant conflict, and to test whether Putin was willing to roll up his sleeves with Biden and try to solve some of these problems, whether they were bilateral problems or whether they were global problems, where Russia's help might be useful—Iran, etc.—as it had been in the past. …

By intent, he wanted to have a serious mano-a-mano conversation with Putin about what was possible.Could they have a stable relationship?Could they communicate?Was Putin willing, for example, to get back into the business of implementing the Minsk agreements and get out of Ukraine under the right circumstance, and did he want U.S. help with that?Because remember, the Europeans had been leading the negotiations.

We had a problem then with these Russian attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure.Could we set ground rules that we weren't going to attack each other's critical infrastructure?And that required the president to make both an affirmative offer of how we could cooperate but also be pretty tough about the consequences if Putin was not willing to cut a deal.

And Putin spent a lot of that meeting, both in the small session and when we all gathered around the table, giving his narrative of grievances about American presidents and the promises that they had made to him and then broken, in his view, over the decades.And you remember that he was first president with Bush 43.And he didn't offer anything concretely about what he would do.He heard the president out, obviously, on what we were offering and also that we were prepared to stand up to him if he continued to impact on our interests, particularly in the United States.

And then, very soon after Geneva, we had more cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure, and so at that point, first the U.S. team called the Russian team and said, “This is exactly what we were talking about,” and then we had to implement some sanctions, etc.And then it stopped.So perhaps there was a false sense of security at that point that Putin had heard President Biden in Geneva, understood—you know, tested again, but then understood we were serious and that you could have stable and predictable, if we kept chipping away at it.

So then, in October, so already three months later, I went to Russia to follow up on some of these issues that had been discussed, because with the exception of that issue, there hadn't really been much progress or engagement after that.And obviously we had been in the middle of Afghanistan evacuation and all of that, and the Russians had been chortling about our ineptitude on the global stage, having their own chapter of schadenfreude after their own departure from Afghanistan.

So one of the things I was sent to test was whether, if the U.S. was willing to roll up its sleeves and help, Putin would cut a deal with Ukraine such that he would stop supporting the insurrectionists; he'd pull his own military support out in exchange for a high level of political autonomy out there in the east, which is what the Minsk agreements were about.

And I had maybe six hours of talks with different Russians, and we got, again, lots of narrative of grievance, lots of "This didn't work before," lots of rope-a-dope, but no concrete commitment.And I came back and reported that I just wasn't sure that they really wanted a change of any kind on anything, and that even long-term interlocutors of mine, 20-year folks who I'd worked with on the Russian side, were blank-faced.

And then, two weeks later, the CIA discovered Putin's war plan for Ukraine, which included a plan to invade on three sides with more than 100,000 troops.Now, whether the folks I was talking to were witting of that or whether they just didn't know where their president was going to be and had no mandate to engage, I don't know, but clearly, both in Geneva and when I was there in October, Putin obviously had a far more ambitious and aggressive plan than he let on.

And when the president is being briefed on this, on this potential invasion in Europe, how monumental a moment is that in modern history, and how big is the crisis that the president is facing at that point?

I think this is where you really see President Biden saying to himself, to all of us, “We're not going back to that movie that we had in 2013, '14, '15, '16.We are going to support Ukraine.We are going to strengthen NATO.We're going to plan sanctions.We're going to have one last shot to try to negotiate with Putin,” which we did in negotiations that Wendy Sherman led in January.“But if he executes this strategy, we are going to lead the democratic world in putting the hammer down as hard as we possibly can on him, and we're going to tell him what we're going to do, and we're not going to slow-roll our response.”

And frankly, this time, we had the time, because we found the war plan in late October, and he didn't invade before February.So again, it was all hands on deck in the administration, whether it was us at State, preparing allies, preparing NATO; whether it was the Defense Department, rushing defensive weapons to Ukraine and preparing a pipeline for more, and moving forces to NATO's east; whether it was Treasury working with us to prepare crushing sanctions, including being willing to kick Russian banks out of the SWIFT clearing system, which everybody said the last time around was impossible.The president's instructions were, “We've got to be strong.We've got to be clear.We've got to tell him exactly what we are going to do.If he goes forward with this, we've got to do everything we can to stop it, including offering to negotiate with him directly,” which some people felt was not about Ukraine; it was about cutting a deal with the United States. ...

The other thing that was going on was the Ukrainians thought that this was just a pressure tactic, or a large number of them did.And so we were also working with them intensively to prepare, to prepare their defenses, to have them think about how to work with their population, and whether right up to the moment that they come over the border on Feb. [24], the Ukrainian leadership thought it was just a pressure tactic or a bluff or whether they were actually worried about panicking their population and therefore wanted to be careful not to hype up what might have happened, that was also an intense focus of ours.¹

U.S. News and World Report: Russia Invades Ukraine: A Timeline of the Crisis

So we had the hardened NATO front.We had the get-allies-to-join-us in the political economic sanctions-based pressure that we were getting ready to provide, sending defensive weapons to Ukraine, having the conversation with the Ukrainians, and then also offering—Putin put out a set of demands in November that included banning Ukraine from NATO, withdrawing U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe, various things, and rather than saying, “Forget it,” the president said, “We will sit down and talk to you about what your real security concerns are, because we are not planning to invade you from Ukraine,” which is what Putin was telling his own people and telling the world, “and we can give you certain guarantees to that in that regard.But what we're not going to do is hand you the sovereignty of another country and tell them that they can never do X or Y or Z.”

So he mandated that we have this last negotiation with the Russians, which Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman led.We went with some very strong, concrete proposals that ought to have been perceived as stabilizing and addressed most of Putin's concerns.But we were not willing to say "never" on Ukraine and NATO, and we were not willing to roll back security assurances that were part of our NATO commitments to European allies.The negotiation was inconclusive.We offered a second round.Putin didn't let his negotiators come back to the table.And then he instead invaded.

The decision to issue the warning to put intelligence out there, is that a decision that the president made?

I think this was all in the category of, "We didn't do enough in the Obama administration to warn the world, to prepare protections for Ukraine, to prepare NATO, to prepare countermeasures, to build a coalition with allies that included the sticks, so we're going to do everything we can this time."We had been very chary in the Obama administration.There just was no tradition of it, of sharing the level of intelligence that we had.But that was a decision that the president made.I think the intelligence community also felt burned by not having done that the first time, because they weren't believed.And the fact that they had the goods, and they were able to downgrade it such that we could share it, they offered that as part of the coalition-building strategy.

Now, of course, the problem was our own checkered history with sharing intelligence.So if you're Putin, and you're denying that you have this intent at all, even as your soldiers are practicing for it, and you're starting to move equipment, you're saying, “Well, they told you Saddam had nuclear weapons, too, and that didn't turn out to be the case.”

But what happened was, from the time of those first briefings, you know, “Here is what it's going to look like, 100,000 troops on three sides, with these kinds of weapons,” to through November, December, January of '21 into '22, Putin was actually implementing the plan.He was starting to move his battalions to Ukraine's borders, and it looked even bigger than the practice rehearsal he had done the previous winter.So our intelligence became more credible and more convincing to allies, because we were able to say, “See, we told you this was going to happen, and here it comes.”

What was it like to be there during the invasion?I mean, we now know how it turned out, but at the time, could Kyiv fall?What's going to happen?And there was talk of nuclear war.What was it like on the inside, when you know that this is actually happening?

First of all, I would say it was a minority in the U.S. government, but there were still people inside who also believed that this was a pressure tactic by Putin.He wouldn't go in actually; that he was just trying to bargain with all of his heavy metal out there.So there was some question of whether it would actually happen.And then it was about 10 days later than the initial predictions.So the question was, "Is it going to be today?Is it going to be today? Is it going to be today?"

And those of us who were issue managers on different pieces of this, and under the secretary I was responsible for coordinating the State Department, we all had a set of pajamas, our shower gear, because we expected that we would sleep in our offices when it actually happened.We also were quite concerned that given how much equipment and how many soldiers and the lethality of what Putin was preparing, that Ukraine could be crushed in a matter of days or weeks and that they didn't have the means to defend themselves.

And so there were conversations about government in exile.There were conversations about whether Zelenskyy should evacuate so that there would be the potential for the elected government to still exist even if Kyiv was taken.And again, because we couldn't quite tell how seriously the Ukrainians were preparing or whether they also thought it was a bluff, had they done as much as they could?

So in those first days, I would say, there was this holding of breath to see what would happen.And then, of course, by the second week, where Putin's military, despite the volume and quality of the weapons that he had put in there, they were completely inept.You remember the long, 40-mile column of trucks and tanks and all this kind of thing.That was one thing that gave folks hope, and then the second piece was that of course he had completely miscalculated that the Ukrainians would fight back, and they would fight back in Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, like Kharkiv, etc.

And then, by April, the Ukrainians had rolled back a good 40% of those forces.And we later visited some of those villages that were liberated, that were captured and then liberated in the first month.So it was really just quite an incredible thing to watch, and particularly the bravery and the resilience of the Ukrainians who really had a peashooter against all of this stuff, especially at the beginning.But what they had was heart and patriotism, and they were defending their homeland.

How high does the president see the stakes?The president—who we talked about, starting [at] the Foreign Relations Committee and the Cold War—and who in this period compares it to Charlottesville, how does he see the stakes in Ukraine, and how does that shape the way he responds?

Well, the stakes were massive, because of course if Putin could roll over Ukraine, he could keep going.He could go to NATO's borders, which would in fact make it a Russia-NATO conflict.Nobody knew if Putin would be crazy enough to employ nukes to get his way, and once a nuke had been launched, then all things were changed.

But the implications also, for the rest of the world, were immediately clear.

If we didn't stand up to this kind of aggression on an innocent state minding its own business, then didn't that give license to autocrats and dictators everywhere to take territory that they would like by force, whether it was a long historic grievance or whether it was how Xi Jinping would think about Taiwan, etc.?So the stakes were enormous.The stakes were enormous. ...

A strange thing about this, this rallying of Europe and others around Ukraine, but then at home, as you get into later years, skepticism from the former president, who some people have said has sort of set up a presidency in exile, and members of the Republican Party.And we started by talking about the bipartisan foreign policy consensus.What is the challenge that President Biden faces at rallying support at home?And how unusual—or, in your experience, is it—for him to be finding opposition to funding Ukraine?

… Let's start with the fact that, with the exception of President Trump and a handful of people in his inner circle, there is no love for Putin in either political party.So when Putin invaded Ukraine with the full force of his military, and not only that, when he committed war crimes like Bucha, when he started using chemical weapons on the ground, when he bombed the power plants and water plants that support civilians, which is also a war crime, he didn't make any friends, including in the Republican Party.And I would say that Trump's whole pandering to Putin, “He's not so bad,” gets massively further discredited, and that's how we get the huge bipartisan support in '21-'22 for the funding that we need for Ukraine, how you get it in Europe, etc.

What happens in '23 is something different.You already have the political campaign starting.You already have Trump saying, “We spent too much money on Ukraine.Put this to the border.”And I think if we had been able to have the votes on both the '24 budget and the supplemental in the fall/winter of '23, you wouldn't have had the controversy.The problem was just that everything gets delayed by the massive dysfunction in the House so that there is time for these arguments to build and for the whole vote question to become a Trump v. Biden question rather than a question of what's in U.S. national interest.

But what's most interesting is that even though Trump, in January, February, March, is beating on his base and beating the drum that this money should not go to Ukraine, half of the Republican senators and half of the Republican House members still understand that Putin is a threat to the United States; that if we don't stop it at Ukraine, it's going to come to us; it's going to certainly come to our allies.And they stand up to Trump, and Trump caves.In the end game, Trump conceded.And in the last couple of days before the vote, he gave Mike Johnson permission to have the vote.

And so what that says, to me anyway, is that there still is, at least vis-à-vis Russia, and I would argue vis-à-vis China, that fundamental bipartisan consensus that if the United States doesn't lead the democracies in standing up to autocrats, standing up to those who would shred the U.N. Charter and shred the rules of the road of the global system that have made us rich and prosperous, that nobody else is going to do that.And even those who support Trump don't want him to become president in a world where Putin is running rampage [sic].So—and Trump had to back down — the first time that he's actually backed down and faced strong opposition from his base.So that takes you back to the beginning, 75 years of, "Let's not fight outside the country.Our disputes should end at the water's edge."

Israel and Gaza

… So the third crisis, Oct. 7.Just go to that moment and to the immediate wake of that, and it obviously affected President Biden on an emotional level, but it's also a tremendous political and international crisis.What is that moment like when that happens?

First of all, nobody was ready.There was no intelligence that I remember seeing that we were aware of.I don't know what the Israelis had.And then the absolute crushing brutality of it, the way people were murdered and victimized and taken hostage and the sexual war crimes and all of that, and the awful impact and shock on Israel, the worst crisis that they had had, arguably since their founding, and again, this genocidal inhumanity against their citizens.

So obviously, we knew that they had to respond, that they would respond.So then the question became, what was their intent?How would they respond?And would their response be effective at neutralizing the threat to Israel, and what did that even mean?And obviously they were going to go in and get Hamas, but I think it was not until they actually went into Gaza that we all began to understand, including the Israelis, the magnitude of how Hamas had dug in, the physicality of it, the tunnels 90 feet deep, the fact that the whole place, north and south, was run underground by Hamas, and that this was an enemy that could be hurt and attrited by traditional means, but would be very, very hard to vanquish by traditional means.So that became a very complicated challenge.

And then, of course, whenever you have hostages involved, the only way to get them released is to have a negotiation, so how do you negotiate with an entity, with a movement that has been willing to be this beastly, and where the public, in Israel, is ready to do collective punishment on anybody who's Palestinian, not simply Hamas, and certainly not to see a differentiation between those Palestinian civilians who are also terrorized by Hamas.So very, very complicated.

You said that, when you would brief him, he would say, “Tell me about that leader.Tell me about what they want, who they are.”I mean, was this an example?There's the famous bear hug.Was this an example of Biden trying to read Netanyahu and engage in that kind of psychological-political approach?

Again, I want to be careful here, because I wasn't on that trip; I wasn't in the room the way I was on Ukraine.But what I would say was, that trip that the president made was classic Biden: “I have an ally.I have a brother.I have somebody who is vitally important as a leader to U.S. national interests, who is in crushing pain and has to make extremely difficult decisions.I'm not just going to talk to him on the phone.I'm going to be in the room with him.I'm going to hear him.I'm going to touch him.I'm going to hug him.I'm going to tell him I'm here,” and that, “Let's respond to this together.Let's figure out how to go forward together,” in Biden's view, should give you skin in the game and an ability to influence smart policy going forward.Did it work with Netanyahu?I think it did for a while.Is it working now?I'm not sure.

I can't ask you anything too specific, because the film's not going to air until the fall.

Exactly, exactly.And I want to be careful, because maybe we'll have a great victory and maybe we'll get hostages and two states.

But how monumental—my last question on this is just how monumental the challenge is, because obviously it's a political challenge for him among his supporters; it's an international challenge.I mean, I wonder, how big is the challenge that he faces in this time, even after you've left, of dealing with this crisis or this war?

You know that old adage, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”?I think the challenge for President Biden is he can see very clearly two paths, and Secretary Blinken has articulated them.A path that just continues the war and the destruction and the suffering and doesn't get hostages home and doesn't neutralize Hamas as a force for terror, that's one path. And does Bibi Netanyahu actually prefer that path, because settling this thing would cause him to have to stop and take responsibility for the fact that it happened and everything else?Or the alternative path—and this is the path where an awful, awful, horrible crisis affecting Israel, Israelis, those Palestinians who have also been Hamas' victims—out of that, could you get not only hostages released and a cease-fire, but could you get a more responsible, effective Palestinian Authority?Could you get normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia?And could you get them collectively agreeing on a true path to a Palestinian state so you remove the excuse from groups like Hamas that this has to be done by violence?So that would be the silver lining that could come from this crisis.

And I'm going to guess that everything in Joe Biden wants to get to that better, more stable place for so many humans in so many parts of the Middle East.And he knows that's the right thing obviously for the United States but also for Israel and its democratic future; to be that president who could finally deliver a state for the Palestinians; to create a more stable, normal Middle East, so that all the players there can focus on the real problem, which is the terrorist state of Iran.

I'm sure that he will work every single day of this term, and if he gets another term into that term to get that outcome.But it's hugely difficult, including on the playing field that he excels at, which is, how do you create political, emotional interest in your interlocutor, in taking those tough steps for peace, when he or she—but in this case it's a he—may think that their personal interest stays with remaining at war?

And those goals, those goals in the Middle East, the goals that he has in Ukraine, they're all now tied up in the election that's upcoming.And he's talked about the stakes for that election on the domestic side and on the international side.How do you think he sees the stakes in this election?

He said that this is an election for the soul of America.That's certainly true at home, but it's just as true internationally.I’ve had foreign leaders, foreign counterparts who I've worked with for decades say, “If you vote for Trump once, that could be a mistake; it could be a hope for a different kind of way of governing.But if the United States votes for Trump twice, a guy who doesn't believe in alliances, doesn't believe in NATO, doesn't believe in the foundational institutions like the United Nations, that allow for collective action, we will never trust the United States again, because the first time might have been an accident; this time will be a choice.”And President Biden is intent on preserving this global structure that has led to the greatest time of prosperity and peace for the American people that we've ever seen over 75 years.And if we throw all that away and rip it up and think we can go it alone, or worse—are closer to autocrats and dictators than we are to our friends—I think the president is right in worrying about the planet that we'll live on.

The Choice in the 2024 Election

The last question, which is one we ask everybody, and it overlaps with what you just answered, which is, what is the choice on the ballot in November facing voters, from your perspective this time?

The choice is between a democratic, generous America that is prepared to lead the world, and particularly lead the democracies towards a better future, and a selfish, closed America that behaves, both at home and abroad, more like an autocrat, and more like Putin and Xi Jinping; a president who goes after his enemies and the press and intimidates the political class into supporting things that benefit him but not necessarily the nation.So we will lose our liberty, and we will lose our moral authority if the American people make the wrong choice in this election.

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