AI transcript
0:00:08 Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Before we get to our episode, I’d like to invite you
0:00:14 to come see Freakonomics Radio Live. I will be in San Francisco on January 3rd and in
0:00:20 Los Angeles on February 13th. For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com/LiveShows. They are
0:00:29 selling riskily, I believe is the word, so hustle up. Again, that is Freakonomics.com/LiveShows.
0:00:34 One more thing, the episode you’re about to hear is what audio people call a two-way,
0:00:40 what normal people call a one-on-one conversation. Most Freakonomics Radio episodes aren’t like
0:00:46 this. We typically feature multiple voices, multiple angles, sometimes even multiple stories,
0:00:52 but there is a real opportunity to be had by going deep with one person. So, for the month
0:00:56 of December, we are featuring some one-on-one conversations. You will be hearing about the
0:01:01 revolution in the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. You’ll hear from one of the best magazine
0:01:08 editors of this generation. And in a special episode of the podcast “People I Mostly Admire,”
0:01:12 you’ll hear a mind-blowing conversation between Steve Levitt and an astonishingly creative
0:01:19 neuroscientist. In today’s episode, a conversation with a political figure who, several times
0:01:25 over his career, has been in the room where it happened with Donald Trump, with Joe Biden,
0:01:31 and with Vladimir Putin. And one last reminder about our upcoming live shows with very special
0:01:42 guests. San Francisco, January 3rd, Los Angeles, February 13th. You can get tickets at Freakonomics.com/LiveShows.
0:01:50 As always, thanks for listening.
0:01:55 We begin this story on June 16th of 2021.
0:02:01 This is a one-on-one meeting in Geneva, nothing else going on. Both presidents fly in just
0:02:02 for this meeting.
0:02:06 The two presidents are Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.
0:02:13 So let me set the scene for you. For Biden, he has, I think, five days of meetings before
0:02:20 this in London and Brussels, G7, NATO leaders, etc. Biden looks great, he flies in. Putin
0:02:30 flies in. He’s coming from Moscow. He lands. He looks great, physically. Was relaxed. Cracking
0:02:34 jokes. Some of them at our expense.
0:02:38 The one-on-one meeting isn’t truly a one-on-one. It’s what State Department folks call a one-plus
0:02:46 one. It’s Biden, with Secretary Blinken sitting next to him, but not speaking. Putin and his
0:02:50 foreign minister, Lavrov, sitting next to him.
0:02:52 The timing was significant.
0:02:58 It’s been a rocky spring between the United States and Russia. We expel some Russian diplomats.
0:03:05 They expel some of my colleagues from embassy Moscow. Biden calls Putin a killer. Navalny
0:03:06 is imprisoned.
0:03:10 The one-plus one would be followed by a second meeting.
0:03:15 They have what’s called an expanded bilat, an expanded bilateral meeting. Those of us
0:03:20 who were going into the expanded bilat, there was a break. Secretary Blinken told us what
0:03:24 the two leaders had talked about in the one-on-one meeting.
0:03:26 What did they talk about?
0:03:31 Biden gave a reassurance to Putin, look, I’m not looking for regime change in Russia. We’re
0:03:37 looking for the phrase that was used at the time was guardrails for our relationship with
0:03:38 Russia.
0:03:42 And what did Biden and Putin talk about in that second meeting?
0:03:49 The headline is, what did they not talk about? Ukraine. I look back now and I say, the way
0:03:57 Putin conducted himself, he had decided he was going to invade Ukraine. He was going
0:03:59 to take what he thought was his.
0:04:06 As we all know, Putin did invade Ukraine several months after that sit-down. Today, on Freakinomics
0:04:11 Radio, a conversation with John J. Sullivan, a lifelong Republican who has served under
0:04:16 five U.S. presidents, including Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Sullivan happened to be on
0:04:23 duty in Moscow as U.S. ambassador during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He’s just published
0:04:29 a book called Midnight in Moscow, a memoir from the front lines of Russia’s war against
0:04:37 the West. It reads a bit like a thriller, spies and subterfuge threats and bluffs enormously
0:04:44 high stakes. The bulk of the book explains from inside the house the Russian Federation’s
0:04:49 decision to escalate its war in Ukraine. It is a train wreck that you can’t look away
0:04:56 from. And it left John Sullivan thinking that U.S. foreign policy these days is a bit of
0:04:57 a mess.
0:05:01 Our politicians aren’t leading Republicans or Democrats.
0:05:09 He sees frequent miscalculations. If you think cutting off Ukraine is going to assist your
0:05:16 pressure campaign on Iran, you’re crazy. And he sees multiple flashpoints. These are
0:05:24 countries governed by leaders and governments that are immensely hostile to the United States.
0:05:31 In the book, Sullivan isn’t quite an alarmist, but in conversation, different story.
0:05:37 There may not be a Pearl Harbor-like incident, but my fear is that it’s going to come and
0:05:39 we’re not prepared.
0:05:43 I learned a great deal from this conversation with John Sullivan, and I suspect you will
0:05:56 too. Let’s get it started.
0:06:02 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:06:12 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:06:16 John Sullivan now splits his time between Washington, D.C. and Connecticut. He grew
0:06:22 up in Boston, attended Brown University, and then Columbia Law School, and launched a
0:06:29 perfectly respectable, but if we’re being honest, slightly dull career as a corporate
0:06:35 lawyer. There were already a lot of lawyers in his family, even a family law firm in Providence.
0:06:41 But there was also an uncle, Bill. He was a combat naval officer during World War II,
0:06:44 and afterward he joined the Foreign Service.
0:06:49 He was a three-time ambassador. He served in Saigon during the early part of the Vietnam
0:06:55 War, ambassador of the Philippines, and then the last U.S. ambassador to Iran.
0:06:58 This had made an impression on his nephew.
0:07:05 He’s a young kid. I remember just being hooked on this conception of public service. Don’t
0:07:11 get me wrong. It’s not an easy life. It’s hard on family life, but boy, the rewards
0:07:17 are fantastic. Serving the United States abroad and standing for the United States
0:07:23 and all that we aspire to stand for and seeing the American flag flying over a mission in
0:07:26 a country like Russia, it’s really gratifying.
0:07:30 Sullivan has spent the past several decades toggling between corporate law and government
0:07:35 service. He worked in the Justice Department under the First President Bush, and in commerce
0:07:41 and defense under the Second Bush. In 2016, he was back in private practice when Trump
0:07:47 was elected. I was as surprised as many were, he writes in his book. I was not an active
0:07:51 Trump supporter, but I did still believe in Ronald Reagan’s famous 11th commandment,
0:07:56 “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”
0:08:01 Sullivan had voted for Trump with no thought that I would ever be invited to work in his
0:08:06 administration, he writes. He adds that his wife, Grace, also a high-powered lawyer who
0:08:11 has since died, had not voted for Trump and would not have been supportive if I were going
0:08:17 to work for him at the White House. But it wasn’t the White House that called, it was
0:08:22 the Defense Department. Secretary Jim Mattis wanted Sullivan as his general counsel, and
0:08:29 that’s where Sullivan was heading until he got a better offer. Deputy Secretary of State
0:08:36 under Rex Tillerson. That job he took, and when Tillerson was fired by Tweet after barely
0:08:41 a year on the job, Sullivan became acting secretary. He reverted to deputy when Mike
0:08:47 Pompeo took over as secretary. Sullivan liked Pompeo, and they worked well together. But
0:08:55 that first Trump administration was an exercise in chaos. Nothing like its Republican predecessors,
0:09:02 Sullivan writes, undisciplined and unconventional. So, when he learned that the U.S. Ambassador
0:09:08 to Russia was resigning, Sullivan put himself up for the post. It’s hard to emphasize how
0:09:14 unusual this was, trading in a high-status job in Foggy Bottom for a diplomatic post
0:09:19 in Moscow. What did President Trump think of this move?
0:09:24 He thought Secretary Pompeo wanted to get rid of me, and the look on his face said, “If
0:09:28 that’s not the reason, then why would anybody in their right mind want to do that?”
0:09:33 But Sullivan made it clear to Trump that no, he wasn’t getting fired by Pompeo. He was
0:09:35 just ready for a new challenge.
0:09:43 So that was my last conversation with him in August of 2019. Never spoke to him as ambassador.
0:09:49 The last time I spoke to him was, he asked me if I really wanted to go to Russia. Did
0:09:53 have a lot of interactions with him, though, as deputy secretary.
0:09:56 And what were Sullivan’s impressions then?
0:10:04 President Trump looks at our overseas relationships, entanglements, whatever you want to call it,
0:10:10 looks at it purely from a transactional economic standpoint. If it makes sense for the United
0:10:17 States economically, and he defines economically narrowly, and a lot of economists disagree
0:10:21 with that, but Putin’s got a very similar outlook if you think about it.
0:10:27 And so it was that John Sullivan gave up the chaos of Washington, D.C. for a new chaos
0:10:32 in Moscow. Here’s how he puts it in his book, “I believed the Russian government did not
0:10:37 want any physical harm to come to me while I was in Russia. On the other hand, the Russian
0:10:43 government devoted a huge number of personnel and resources to try to annoy, provoke, criticize,
0:10:46 frustrate, embarrass, and compromise me.”
0:10:51 I mean, I knew what the Russians were about because I’d been deputy secretary of state
0:10:58 for three years. What I saw when I went there, it was a government different from any other
0:11:07 government I dealt with before. Their characterization of us as an enemy, they are at war with us.
0:11:12 And we in the United States, and particularly in Washington, it’s hard to get people to
0:11:20 really believe it, including at the State Department. We in Moscow at Embassy Moscow would be looking
0:11:27 for support for reciprocity. If the Russians did something to our mission, we’d be looking
0:11:33 for Washington to give a little payback to the Russian side. The response, well, geez,
0:11:40 that’s really kind of nasty. We’d never do, I’m like, you have no idea what we’re dealing
0:11:49 with here. That’s my message. We don’t understand how different these governments in Moscow
0:11:58 and Beijing are from us with leaders that are willing to use military force.
0:12:04 When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, he spoke warmly of Vladimir Putin. If Putin
0:12:11 likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability. By the time John Sullivan
0:12:17 got to Moscow in early 2020, things had changed. The Trump administration had imposed a variety
0:12:23 of sanctions on prominent Russians and on Russia itself. One sanction came after a Russian
0:12:29 malware attack on US financial institutions, another after attempted Russian interference
0:12:36 in the 2018 US elections. Trump included more sanctions in a 2019 executive order in response
0:12:42 to a Russian assassination attempt in Salisbury, England. The target was a former Russian spy
0:12:47 who was exposed to a nerve agent that had been applied to his front door. He survived,
0:12:52 but a British civilian died when she reportedly sprayed herself with perfume containing the
0:12:58 same nerve agent. Her boyfriend had found it in a collection bin. In addition to imposing
0:13:04 these sanctions on Russia, the Trump administration had been backing Ukraine as it faced increasing
0:13:10 Russian aggression. This was a few years after Russia annexed Crimea and started backing
0:13:16 Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine, but it was a couple years before
0:13:22 Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Then, in 2020, Trump lost the election to
0:13:29 Joe Biden. John Sullivan was asked by the Biden administration to stay on as their man
0:13:35 in Moscow. Biden announced that the US would be pulling out of Afghanistan.
0:13:42 Biden, always skeptical, going back to his days as vice president in the Obama administration,
0:13:49 skeptical of the US being a presence in Afghanistan, he decides in the spring we’re getting out.
0:13:56 He’s following through on the plan that had been negotiated in the Trump administration.
0:14:03 He says, “We’re out by September 11th. 20 years from the attack on September 11th, 2001,
0:14:08 we’re out of Afghanistan.” And this brings us back to that meeting in Geneva between
0:14:15 Biden and Putin. It’s the summer of 2021. It’s been a rocky spring between the United
0:14:20 States and Russia. This was only the second time that Putin and Biden had met face-to-face.
0:14:26 The first was in 2011, when Biden was vice president under Barack Obama. After that meeting,
0:14:32 Biden had said that Putin had no soul. And now recently, as president, Biden had called
0:14:38 Putin a killer. Like John Sullivan said, it had been a rocky spring.
0:14:43 By the way, the Russians are increasing their troop presence in Southwestern Russia, threatening
0:14:54 an invasion of Ukraine. And out of it all, Biden suggests a meeting with Putin in Geneva.
0:15:03 Good note, in April, after Biden called Putin a killer, Putin withdrew his ambassador from
0:15:10 the United States. And the Russian government said to me, “You need to go home too.” I
0:15:16 said, “Are you declaring me persona non grata? Are you expelling the U.S. ambassador?” And
0:15:20 they said, “Oh, God, no. But you do need to go home because no one is going to talk
0:15:26 to you.” Putin said this at one of his phone calls during this period with Biden. He said,
0:15:29 “You should bring your ambassador home because he’s going to have nothing to do because no
0:15:33 one will talk to him.” Biden says, “Let’s meet.” Putin agrees.
0:15:38 So they meet in Geneva at an 18th-century villa. People asked me, you know, what was
0:15:44 Biden like? Was he healthy? Was he with it? Biden shows up in Geneva and he looked great.
0:15:51 I mean, he looked like a healthy man in his late 70s. I did not see any of the decline
0:15:58 which was then obvious a few years later. So the meetings, there were two meetings.
0:16:04 We heard about this earlier, the one-plus-one and then the expanded bilateral meeting. John
0:16:09 Sullivan was in that second meeting. And what did the U.S. want out of this meeting?
0:16:16 I got the sense both under the Trump and Biden administrations, we want to pivot to Asia,
0:16:22 make this Russia problem go away, tell them to put a sock in it, put this guy, Progosian,
0:16:30 in a cage. Just calm down, calm, right? We and you can move on to bigger and better things.
0:16:35 And what was your impression of that message? Well, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, let
0:16:41 me tell you what I saw. In the expanded bilateral meeting, they spent more time talking about
0:16:48 Afghanistan than they did Ukraine. Biden’s asking for the Russians not to oppose the
0:16:54 U.S. having a counterterrorism presence in Afghanistan. This will help Russia. We’re
0:17:01 going to keep al-Qaeda, the Taliban, we want to keep them under wraps. And that helps Russia.
0:17:06 We will cooperate with you. That sounds like a pretty smart ploy, right? Let’s create a common
0:17:11 enemy team up on this. We’ll get over our differences and move on. If you were dealing
0:17:16 with a normal country and a normal leader and you’re not, so what does Putin do? Putin says,
0:17:24 “Okay, well, we’re not a big fan of that, but just spitballing here. Maybe we’ll let you share
0:17:32 our 201st base in Tajikistan, which is right on the border with Afghanistan.” That is a huge
0:17:40 Russian military base in Central Asia, one of their key military installations. This is not
0:17:47 some little counterterrorism intel monitoring. This is a big, important Russian military facility.
0:17:55 Putin says it. I’m sitting directly across from Colonel General Gerasimov, who is not KGB-trained.
0:18:04 His eyes widened and he sort of gasped a little bit like, “Whoa.” And it’s clearly a joke. Putin
0:18:09 starts to chuckle. Did Biden take it as a joke? So Biden is, we’re all on our side like, “What the
0:18:16 heck?” And then his foreign minister Lavrov is talking about something else. Putin interrupts him,
0:18:23 puts his hand over Lavrov’s mouth and looks at Biden and says, “Be careful negotiating with this
0:18:30 guy. He’s Armenian.” It’s an ethnic joke, right? It’s like he’s going to fleece you. He’ll pick your
0:18:40 pocket. He’s Armenian. He chuckled and how loose he was. This is not a man who sat down and said,
0:18:48 “I’ve got a serious problem in Ukraine that’s threatening the existence of my country.
0:18:54 Let’s talk, buddy.” But fast forward, in November, that was his position.
0:18:59 So listening between the lines to you now, John, and please correct me if I’m wrong,
0:19:04 at that meeting in Geneva, the US was getting ready to pull out of Afghanistan. That ended up
0:19:12 happening in August of 2021. And then Russia ends up going into Ukraine about six months after in
0:19:18 February of 2022, correct? Correct. So listening between the lines, what I hear is that Putin is
0:19:23 sizing up Biden here and saying, “Well, he’s not very substantial. He doesn’t seem to have much
0:19:31 of a plan or a spine. And therefore, I’m going to take this meeting. We’ll joke a bit. I’ll tease
0:19:35 him a bit. I’ll see how he pushes back. Sounds like he doesn’t push back very much.” And it
0:19:40 sounds as though you’re saying that even though Putin had decided long ago that he would be going
0:19:46 into Ukraine hard with force, that this meeting, if nothing else, assured him that he wasn’t going
0:19:51 to get a lot of trouble from the US. Is that right? I would quibble. I think it’s unfair to Biden.
0:19:56 I think Biden, and he said this in his press conference after the meeting in Geneva, he said,
0:20:03 “Look, I’m giving this guy one last chance. Can we stabilize this relationship?”
0:20:06 But isn’t that a little bit like telling your seven-year-old, “Listen, you’ve got one more
0:20:12 chance to put down the paint?” After the meeting, they did back-to-back press conferences.
0:20:18 The first question that’s asked by Russian state media, so this is Putin asking himself the question,
0:20:24 “What did you talk about the most important issue for all of Russia is Ukraine? What did
0:20:28 you discuss with Biden about Ukraine?” And Putin says, “Well, really didn’t come up that much.”
0:20:33 Biden said he wants Ukraine to enforce the Minsk agreements, and if that’s his view,
0:20:37 that’s productive, but we really didn’t talk about it. But let’s talk about Afghanistan and
0:20:42 how that factors in, because some people make the claim once Putin saw Afghanistan—
0:20:44 But that was the green light.
0:20:50 No, no, no, no, no. He decided to do this long ago. What I will say is, in criticism,
0:20:59 I clued myself in this. As I look back, maybe he had decided, but he hadn’t yet pulled the trigger.
0:21:06 Could we have stopped him? I think Afghanistan was the nail in the coffin. The withdrawal
0:21:16 is underway while we’re meeting in June. What really has an impact is the calamity that starts
0:21:25 in July and then into August. The culmination is the terrorist attack on the 26th of August,
0:21:30 and then the missile strike that killed 10 innocent Afghans.
0:21:31 The US missile strike.
0:21:37 The missile strike. One of Putin’s most senior and important advisors, a guy named
0:21:42 Nikolai Patreshov, he gives an interview, again, to Russian state media in Russian,
0:21:52 directed to Ukraine. He says, “I have no idea why you people think it’s in your interest to
0:22:00 associate with the United States and its vassals. Look what they’re doing to their major non-NATO
0:22:07 ally in Kabul. Do you think they’re going to defend you? Absolutely not. You’re crazy. We’re
0:22:15 your Slavic sisters and brothers. Why are you shunning us looking for protection from this
0:22:23 feckless North American giant who goes around the world and creates wars and problems and then
0:22:28 leaves disasters in its wake? Look what they’re doing in Afghanistan.”
0:22:34 Donald Trump said during this campaign, the 2024 campaign, he said Russia would not have
0:22:39 invaded Ukraine if he had been president. I’m curious what you make of that claim generally.
0:22:47 That’s just as wrong as it can be. Putin is going to achieve his aims in Ukraine,
0:22:54 which he and everyone who speaks for his government have said consistently since the day the special
0:23:02 military operation began. February 24th, 2022, we’re going to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine.
0:23:11 He was going to achieve those means either by Ukrainian capitulation or by what the Russians
0:23:19 call military technical means, which is an invasion. Maybe if Trump had been reelected
0:23:27 instead of Biden winning in November 2020, if he had changed course, stopped supporting Ukraine,
0:23:32 maybe Ukraine would have had a capitulate. Putin was going to accomplish his war aims
0:23:38 by hook or by crook, by capitulation or by invasion. So what I say particularly to my
0:23:44 Republican friends, okay, you don’t support Ukraine. What’s your Russia policy? If your
0:23:51 Russia policy starts with cutting off Ukraine, not only is your Russia policy going to fail,
0:23:59 but if you think cutting off Ukraine is going to assist your pressure campaign
0:24:07 on Iran, you’re crazy. And oh, by the way, how is this going to influence President Trump’s friend
0:24:13 Little Rocket Man and Pyongyang and Xi in Beijing? And how would you say Trump’s winning the 2024
0:24:19 election will affect Putin’s thinking and at least the short-term future for Putin and Russia?
0:24:26 They’re celebrating Trump’s victory, but there are a fair number of people around Putin
0:24:32 who say, wait a minute, let’s not get carried away. We remember what the first Trump administration
0:24:37 was like. He wanted to have conversations in a relationship with Putin, but they imposed
0:24:42 all these sanctions. The other thing they’re concerned about is Trump’s energy policy.
0:24:48 What if it reduces dramatically the price of oil? That could have a bigger effect
0:24:53 on the Russian economy than all the sanctions and export controls, which I support that the
0:24:58 Biden administration has imposed. Could reduce the price of oil by producing much more in the US?
0:25:05 Exactly, exactly. From the Russian perspective, it’s all about the price of oil. If that price of
0:25:12 oil dips significantly, that affects their ability to continue to fund the war. There’s a political
0:25:17 scientist at the University of Chicago, Robert Pape, who argues that these economic sanctions
0:25:23 at the US levy is against Russia. Trump used sanctions, as did Obama before him and Biden
0:25:29 after him. Pape argues that sanctions essentially don’t work, that they’re a nice fallback for
0:25:35 folks like you, people in state, for ambassadors, et cetera, to feel like you’re doing something.
0:25:41 What’s your view on that? That’s a great question. The obvious answer, and anyone who says anything
0:25:48 different is just blinking at reality. Sanctions did not and will not, unless they’re much more
0:25:57 vigorously enforced, influence Russia’s policies with respect to, you name it, Ukraine, Iran,
0:26:04 North Korea, et cetera. A couple of things, though, they are necessary but not sufficient.
0:26:10 It’s not as though, okay, well, then we should just continue to do business with Russia and forget
0:26:15 that they committed a murder in Salisbury, England, an innocent woman, Don Sturgis.
0:26:23 They sent an FSB colonel who committed a cold-blooded murder on the streets of Berlin, shot a person
0:26:30 to death, a Chechen opposition leader, election interference, cyber. Are we then just supposed
0:26:38 to ignore it? I think sanctions have had a significant impact on the Russian economy.
0:26:45 The current prime lending rate in Russia is 21%. It reminds me a little bit of the United States
0:26:52 in the ’60s and ’70s with the great society spending on Vietnam and the price the US economy
0:26:58 pays in the ’70s and into the early ’80s is rampant inflation. That’s what Putin’s doing now.
0:27:03 They’re pumping money into their defense industrial base. They’re paying off their own people,
0:27:09 those who are being killed, their families, average Russians seeing pensions, salaries,
0:27:14 et cetera, increasing because he doesn’t want to lose popular support. The Russian people
0:27:18 in their economy, they’re going to pay a price for it. So he’s gritting his teeth
0:27:23 and he’s going to accomplish his goals in the special military operation,
0:27:28 but the Russian economy five, 10 years from now is going to pay the price.
0:27:36 Coming up after the break, how does Vladimir Putin sell this story to the Russian public?
0:27:45 I may be a peasant, but boy, I’m part of a special country with a special mission in the world.
0:27:50 More from John J. Sullivan coming up. I’m Stephen Dubner and you are listening to Freakonomics Radio.
0:28:06 John Sullivan was US ambassador to Russia from February 2020 until September 2022.
0:28:12 So he was on duty when Russia launched what it called a special military operation in Ukraine.
0:28:18 The rest of the world calls it a war. The war has lasted nearly three years and has killed tens of
0:28:25 thousands on both sides. The US has invested in the Ukrainian cause significantly, but also
0:28:32 cautiously. When it comes to poking a bear, the Russian bear is perhaps the worst bear to poke.
0:28:37 Embassy Moscow was John Sullivan’s last government posting and he has since retired
0:28:42 from the Foreign Service. I asked if he would accept a role in the new Trump administration.
0:28:49 I can assure you that I will not be taking a role in the Trump administration as evidenced by the
0:28:54 fact that two people I remain close with have been ruled out as potential candidates for a new
0:28:59 administration, Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley. I’m on that list, I’m afraid.
0:29:05 For anyone old enough to remember or anyone who’s read some Russian history or literature,
0:29:12 there is this deep sense of loss. This was a country and a culture full of brilliant writers,
0:29:19 thinkers, artists, scientists, philosophers, a lot of dissidents too, of course, but it seems
0:29:25 from the outside at least as though that history has been paved over entirely, that the Russian
0:29:32 Federation of today bears no resemblance. It’s tragic. I went to Russia as an amateur Russell
0:29:39 file for all the reasons you said. All live accomplished in science, technology, engineering,
0:29:45 medicine, etc. During the pandemic, instead of working for the betterment of humankind,
0:29:53 they’re falsely promoting their Sputnik V vaccine, which was never properly tested.
0:29:59 It was seized by the Kremlin as an instrument to promote Russian nationalism. Look, we’re the
0:30:06 best. That’s the Kremlin hijacking the strengths of the Russian people, whether it’s in science,
0:30:13 technology, their religion, the Russian Orthodox Church is now an instrument, I’m sorry to say,
0:30:23 of the Kremlin, of Putin. He has turned all of those strengths to his purpose of recreating this
0:30:28 Russian Empire. There are a lot of Russian people who agree with him who are saying, “Ada boy,
0:30:34 you go and do that for us.” You write about the famous idea that Putin really has three advisors,
0:30:37 Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.
0:30:43 Correct. Other than his nostalgia for the Russian Empire, what are his goals, would you say?
0:30:52 It’s not nostalgia. He is looking to recreate. There are a lot of ordinary Russians who lament
0:30:59 the weakened state of their Russia. Just as hope is a powerful tool in the United States,
0:31:08 that vision of empire, yeah, I may be a kulak, I may be a peasant here in Russia, but boy,
0:31:15 I’m part of something big. I’m part of a special country with a special mission in the world.
0:31:19 I don’t know if you’re a betting man, but given his position at this moment, given his
0:31:25 accomplishments at this moment, and given the lack of ability of the US, the UN, and others to
0:31:28 fight back, what do you think are his chances of achieving that goal?
0:31:34 Well, he thinks he’s in, and it’s probably true in the short term, a better position than he was,
0:31:43 say, in early 2023, roughly a year after the war had started, the Russian military had not just
0:31:52 failed but been embarrassed. So things were really looking bad for him. In September of ’22,
0:31:59 he had to order mobilization. It included some conscription, which was very unpopular.
0:32:04 It’s a different world now, and it’s not just the election of Trump. It’s what’s happened in
0:32:10 Berlin with the breakdown in the current coalition, Chancellor Schultz going to have to stand for
0:32:17 reelection, and the Germans themselves, the German government, announcing that it’s not going to be
0:32:23 providing as much support for Ukraine as it had earlier in the war. So from Putin’s point of view,
0:32:29 things are a lot better now than they were a year or a year and a half ago.
0:32:34 So John, I can imagine some Americans who didn’t vote for Trump listening to this and saying,
0:32:37 you know, I don’t see much daylight between Trump and Putin.
0:32:44 That’s a misunderstanding of who Putin is and what Putin does. It’s not rhetoric. It’s reality.
0:32:54 Look, Donald Trump, when he gets confirmed on January 20th, 2025, at 12.01 p.m., he’s a lame duck.
0:32:59 Now, he’ll have lots of influence. He’s got coattails, but he’s never running again,
0:33:05 and the jockeying for who succeeds him is going to start. And, you know, he’s going to be limited
0:33:14 by Republicans in the Senate. There are Republicans in the Senate, even with the 53-vote majority,
0:33:20 who are, and I don’t know what the Secretary of Defense nominee would say if asked about,
0:33:28 for example, the importance of our NATO alliance. But I guarantee you that any nominee who said
0:33:34 we should withdraw from NATO would never get confirmed by a wide margin. The Putin-Trump
0:33:42 analogy, I mean, that’s a vast overstatement. And that type of political rhetoric, in fact,
0:33:49 undermines marshaling the American people and leading the American people to oppose Putin.
0:33:53 But if Trump just wants to cut Ukraine loose, what’s to stop him?
0:34:00 There are things he can do as Commander-in-Chief that Congress wouldn’t be able to stop. The
0:34:07 military cooperation, the intelligence cooperation can all be cut off. If that happens, and more
0:34:12 importantly, the American leadership that’s influenced the Europeans, if that goes away,
0:34:20 how long can the Ukrainians hold out, then maybe this Russian special military operation after,
0:34:25 you know, three years of failure, they accomplish what they originally set out to do
0:34:30 on February 24, 2022. That’s certainly possible.
0:34:37 But it sounds as though you have a substantial amount of hope that the constitutional separation
0:34:38 of powers remains intact.
0:34:44 Oh, absolutely. I guess the right way to characterize me as an institutionalist,
0:34:50 and particularly the federal judiciary. I never traveled to the PRC when I was
0:34:56 Deputy Secretary of State. I traveled there a lot 10, 12 years before when I was Deputy
0:35:03 Secretary of Commerce. And what the Chinese government could not understand was they would
0:35:10 never accept the concept of an independent judiciary. The idea that a single federal judge
0:35:16 or a court of appeals or even nine justices on the Supreme Court could issue an order
0:35:23 in, for example, a matter of national security that a court could order the president to do
0:35:28 something and that he would have to do it. They could not believe that that would happen.
0:35:34 So I do have faith. You know, people ask me all the time, you know, he’s going to stay
0:35:37 after his term. He’s not going to stay after his term.
0:35:41 This is Trump you’re talking about. But what makes you say that? Because he certainly
0:35:42 tried last time.
0:35:48 Well, he certainly tried last time, but he has, by the terms of the amended constitution,
0:35:53 is limited to two terms. He says things off the top of his head. I’ve seen it in person
0:35:59 that he knows can’t happen like that big beautiful wall on the southwestern border of
0:36:05 the United States that was going to be paid for by Mexico. Trust me, he’s got one term left
0:36:12 and that’s it. He’s 78 years old. What condition is he going to be in at the end of his term?
0:36:13 Think about what happened to Biden.
0:36:19 After the break, we hear about some worst case scenarios.
0:36:22 I am not Winston Churchill and I hope I’m wrong.
0:36:29 And some mildly encouraging news. I’m Steven Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right back.
0:36:46 John Jay Sullivan, former State Department official and U.S. Ambassador to Russia,
0:36:52 still has a lot to say about American foreign policy, especially when it comes to China or
0:36:57 what he calls the PRC, the People’s Republic of China and, of course, Russia.
0:37:04 There are no opposition leaders left in Russia. There literally is no independent media left.
0:37:09 It is a police state just as the Soviet Union was, even more so.
0:37:13 Let’s say that for whatever reason, Putin vanished tomorrow.
0:37:17 What would happen? Who would be running the Russian Federation? What would that look like?
0:37:21 Because you do make the argument that Putin has kept a lid on certain kinds of things.
0:37:30 There are some, I believe, who have been urging him to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine,
0:37:36 or maybe an unconventional weapon. I thought they might use a chemical weapon in Mariupol,
0:37:42 the last holdout in southern Ukraine. So my answer to that question is,
0:37:48 if Putin doesn’t wake up tomorrow, the war continues. The war is not unpopular.
0:37:52 Once the war starts, the average Russian
0:38:00 doesn’t want to see, as they call it, their boys slaughtered or lose in Ukraine.
0:38:03 Given the state of Russian media, how much information do people get?
0:38:08 Very little. And you have to work hard to get anything other than the state media.
0:38:12 What they do see, though, is bodies coming back.
0:38:17 How surprised would you be if you woke up tomorrow and Russia did use nuclear weapons against Ukraine?
0:38:18 I’d be shocked.
0:38:19 Because why?
0:38:26 Well, first, as I understand it from military experts, there isn’t a real practical use for a
0:38:33 tactical nuclear weapon. So it’s strictly a political use of the weapon. And if it’s a political
0:38:42 use, if Putin were, for example, to decide, all right, my mission to denazify Ukraine hasn’t
0:38:48 proceeded quickly enough, I’m just going to nuke Kiev. What is his dear friend in Beijing going
0:38:56 to think? I come back to the PRC as a key. Putin meets with Xi at the start of the Olympics in
0:39:04 2022. They issued this extraordinary document, lengthy statement, page after page, declaring how
0:39:11 they’ve got this, it’s stronger than an alliance. Dear friends, the Russians have since used that
0:39:19 phrase frequently. My recollection is that Xi and his government haven’t used that phrase since.
0:39:29 And what happened since? It started the day of the invasion. Putin’s threats to use a nuclear
0:39:37 weapon. Xi has said more than once the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, the PRC would
0:39:46 not support. If a portion of Kiev disappears under a mushroom cloud, that’s heat, and Putin doesn’t
0:39:55 want that. That’s the type of shock that’s going to wake up the American people. We spend, if you
0:40:04 include the Department of Defense and the budgets for the intelligence community, we spend a trillion
0:40:12 dollars a year to defend our country. The two principal threats to the United States,
0:40:22 1A, the PRC, 1B, the Russian Federation. The amount of money we already spend to defend ourselves
0:40:29 against Russia is astronomical. My ultimate point is we need to oppose Russian aggression
0:40:37 that is now exhibiting itself in brutal form in Ukraine. We need to recognize that the Russian
0:40:44 Federation is as aggressive, maybe more aggressive than the Soviet Union. Anybody who’s got a heart
0:40:52 or a brain wants this violence to stop, but it’s not going to stop because the Russians aren’t going
0:40:59 to quit until they accomplish their war aims. Their war aims, I guarantee, are broader than
0:41:05 just Ukraine. You know, there’s a history here. There are 15 Soviet republics that Putin thinks
0:41:10 are his. That’s what he’s looking to reestablish. Let’s pretend for a minute that you’re not on
0:41:14 the outs with the Trump crowd and that you were invited back. Let’s say you were invited back
0:41:20 as Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State. Put three things on the table that we can do
0:41:24 to turn the heat down or to change the leverage that Russia is pursuing.
0:41:32 Yeah, it’s a little difficult to do that without also engaging the PRC. The North
0:41:40 Korean sending troops to fight with the Russians in Europe not only has unnerved and infuriated
0:41:44 the South Koreans, but Beijing isn’t happy about this.
0:41:48 And you think there’s an avenue there for Trump and Xi to discuss?
0:41:49 Possibly.
0:41:52 If you were advising Trump, what would you offer as an incentive?
0:41:54 An incentive for the Chinese?
0:41:54 Yes.
0:42:02 Well, you know, there are a lot of things on the table. My fear is we can’t offer Taiwan.
0:42:08 You know, they’re worried about would he really come and defend us and not just the Taiwanese,
0:42:13 the South Koreans too. So what I would say to the incoming Trump administration,
0:42:21 we have to let them know that the war that they’re supporting and perpetuating in Europe
0:42:27 has now become globalized in ways that adversely impact them because you see quotes from the South
0:42:34 Koreans now saying, you know, can Trump be trusted? Can the Americans be trusted, not just Trump?
0:42:37 And do we need a nuclear weapon to protect ourselves?
0:42:41 What kind of deal do you think Trump will pursue with Putin over Ukraine?
0:42:46 Because he seems to see it as a mess on his desk that he just wants to get rid of.
0:42:53 Right. So that’s been the attitude going back to the Obama administration,
0:43:02 maybe even the Bush 43 administration. My charge as ambassador was make the Russia problem go away.
0:43:10 We want guardrails. Now there’s been this horrific war in Ukraine. We got to make it stop.
0:43:16 Why? Because we got to pivot to Asia. So here’s my problem with the political discussion in the
0:43:23 United States. Our leaders, Republicans and Democrats, don’t talk about these types of issues.
0:43:32 Rewind 44 years. The Carter administration has started to rebuild, reinvest post-Vietnam in
0:43:38 the Defense Department, right? We don’t go to the Summer Olympics in Moscow. Our leaders,
0:43:44 our presidents, talk to the American people about these issues, whether it was Reagan with
0:43:50 the Evil Empire, the Strategic Defense Initiative, putting intermediate-range nuclear missiles in
0:43:57 West Germany. Presidents used to talk in detail about security issues, and the American people
0:44:06 knew about them. We don’t have that discussion. It’s childish. It’s not serious. President Biden
0:44:12 himself, I’ve not heard him say this, but it’s been reported that he has, since the war started
0:44:22 in Ukraine, said we in the Obama administration, we sort of blew it in 2014. We let this guy get
0:44:27 away with it. Crimea you’re talking about. Crimea and in the Donbas. Remember, there’s real conflict
0:44:34 in the Donbas with Russian military units involved shooting down a commercial airliner
0:44:42 that kills a couple hundred people. We have not taken seriously this threat that an aggressive
0:44:48 nationalist Russia opposes a country that’s the largest landmass in the world with the largest
0:44:55 stockpile of nuclear weapons with a seat as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
0:45:00 Russia is one of just five permanent members of the UN Security Council, but that certainly didn’t
0:45:07 keep them from invading Ukraine. What does that say about the UN? Should we consider it as toothless,
0:45:12 as obsolete as critics say? Yeah, I’m as big a critic. I haven’t gone so far as my friend John
0:45:18 Bolton and say we can cut off the top half of the headquarters and save the money. My State
0:45:24 Department colleagues, particularly those who have worked on international organizations issues for
0:45:33 decades, devoted their careers to it, wince when I say this, but it’s just completely ineffective.
0:45:44 We now have had the UN Secretary General go to the BRICS summit in Russia, shake hands with Putin,
0:45:56 imagine if there were such a thing, if the League of Nations still existed, and in January of 1940,
0:46:01 the Secretary of the League went to Berlin and shook hands with Hitler.
0:46:07 So John, it strikes me that most Americans, probably most people everywhere, are primarily
0:46:13 concerned with short-term problems, right? We get very distraught if the price of gas goes
0:46:19 up 50 cents a gallon, but in terms of elections or policy decisions halfway around the world
0:46:25 that may affect things five or ten years later, we don’t have much patience for that.
0:46:30 And I’m curious if you’re calling for a significant reassessment, realignment of how
0:46:35 we think about foreign policy and downstream effects. You know, I go back to Syria,
0:46:41 the Obama administration’s red line in Syria, which it then essentially ignored later, triggered
0:46:46 this massive outflow of refugees from Syria into Europe, which further destabilized those
0:46:51 countries that were already turning against immigrants. The list goes on and on. So I’m
0:46:56 curious what kind of decisions you see on the near horizon that we should pay attention to now,
0:47:03 because they will reverberate. It’s coming. Something is coming that is going to shake
0:47:10 the establishment and the American people. If there is a greater global conflict,
0:47:16 for example, between Israel and Iran that closes the Persian Gulf, that makes the
0:47:21 Houthi violence in the strait that leads into the Red Sea, you know, increases that,
0:47:28 and God forbid, with Taiwan, the effect on the global economy, you talk about supply chain
0:47:37 disruption. Oh my God. The analogy I draw to where we are today is the late 1930s. If you
0:47:43 look at the old movie tone newsreels, and you got, you know, the man on the street in the United
0:47:50 States being interviewed, you know, the chancellor, yeah, he’s rough around the edges. What he’s
0:47:56 doing with the Jews, that’s really bad. But look, Germany was in tough straits after the war and,
0:48:02 you know, the peace treaty and, you know, once Germany gets back on its feet, it’ll soften.
0:48:10 At the same time, Churchill, much more closely observing. And in harm’s way, let’s say. And in
0:48:20 harm’s way, Churchill gives these speeches warning about what’s coming. And they’re combined into a
0:48:25 book that’s published in the United States, and the title of it is “While England Slept.”
0:48:29 So you’re saying we’re asleep now? We’re asleep. And our politicians aren’t leading
0:48:36 Republicans or Democrats. Now, I don’t know, I may be completely wrong, there may not be a
0:48:42 Pearl Harbor-like incident. But my fear is that it’s going to come. And we’re not prepared. And
0:48:50 the American people haven’t been told how serious these risks are. Putin calls the United States
0:48:56 Russia’s enemy. J.D. Vance was asked recently, would he call Russia an enemy? And he said no.
0:49:02 Well, Putin calls you an enemy. So you’re trying to shake us all by the shoulders and wake us up?
0:49:07 I am not Winston Churchill. And I hope I’m wrong. But it’s more dangerous than you think.
0:49:15 The only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison.
0:49:23 That’s a line written in the late 19th century by Leo Tolstoy. I have a feeling John Sullivan can
0:49:29 identify. My thanks to him for this conversation. Again, his book is called Midnight in Moscow.
0:49:36 The last time we had a U.S. Ambassador on the show, it was Rom Emanuel, who had been posted in
0:49:42 Japan. You can hear that episode number 553 wherever you get our show. It’s called
0:49:49 The Suddenly Diplomatic Rom Emanuel. Meanwhile, next week on the show, we go one-on-one with
0:49:56 Rom’s big brother, Zeke Emanuel, to talk about one of the biggest medical advances in recent history.
0:50:03 You know, this is why people do science. What does the GLP-1 revolution mean for you
0:50:08 and for the U.S. healthcare system? Don’t get me started. We’ve got to have a whole
0:50:12 another conversation about that issue. That’s next time on the show. Until then,
0:50:18 take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher
0:50:25 and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com,
0:50:30 where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski,
0:50:35 with help from Dalvin Abouaji. Our staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman,
0:50:40 Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger,
0:50:45 Jason Gambrel, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Caruth,
0:50:50 Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune”
0:50:55 by the Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.
0:51:07 I don’t know what got me off on this rant, but pardon me, I’ve kissed the Blarney Stone twice.
0:51:16 The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.
0:51:24 Stitcher.
0:00:14 to come see Freakonomics Radio Live. I will be in San Francisco on January 3rd and in
0:00:20 Los Angeles on February 13th. For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com/LiveShows. They are
0:00:29 selling riskily, I believe is the word, so hustle up. Again, that is Freakonomics.com/LiveShows.
0:00:34 One more thing, the episode you’re about to hear is what audio people call a two-way,
0:00:40 what normal people call a one-on-one conversation. Most Freakonomics Radio episodes aren’t like
0:00:46 this. We typically feature multiple voices, multiple angles, sometimes even multiple stories,
0:00:52 but there is a real opportunity to be had by going deep with one person. So, for the month
0:00:56 of December, we are featuring some one-on-one conversations. You will be hearing about the
0:01:01 revolution in the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. You’ll hear from one of the best magazine
0:01:08 editors of this generation. And in a special episode of the podcast “People I Mostly Admire,”
0:01:12 you’ll hear a mind-blowing conversation between Steve Levitt and an astonishingly creative
0:01:19 neuroscientist. In today’s episode, a conversation with a political figure who, several times
0:01:25 over his career, has been in the room where it happened with Donald Trump, with Joe Biden,
0:01:31 and with Vladimir Putin. And one last reminder about our upcoming live shows with very special
0:01:42 guests. San Francisco, January 3rd, Los Angeles, February 13th. You can get tickets at Freakonomics.com/LiveShows.
0:01:50 As always, thanks for listening.
0:01:55 We begin this story on June 16th of 2021.
0:02:01 This is a one-on-one meeting in Geneva, nothing else going on. Both presidents fly in just
0:02:02 for this meeting.
0:02:06 The two presidents are Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.
0:02:13 So let me set the scene for you. For Biden, he has, I think, five days of meetings before
0:02:20 this in London and Brussels, G7, NATO leaders, etc. Biden looks great, he flies in. Putin
0:02:30 flies in. He’s coming from Moscow. He lands. He looks great, physically. Was relaxed. Cracking
0:02:34 jokes. Some of them at our expense.
0:02:38 The one-on-one meeting isn’t truly a one-on-one. It’s what State Department folks call a one-plus
0:02:46 one. It’s Biden, with Secretary Blinken sitting next to him, but not speaking. Putin and his
0:02:50 foreign minister, Lavrov, sitting next to him.
0:02:52 The timing was significant.
0:02:58 It’s been a rocky spring between the United States and Russia. We expel some Russian diplomats.
0:03:05 They expel some of my colleagues from embassy Moscow. Biden calls Putin a killer. Navalny
0:03:06 is imprisoned.
0:03:10 The one-plus one would be followed by a second meeting.
0:03:15 They have what’s called an expanded bilat, an expanded bilateral meeting. Those of us
0:03:20 who were going into the expanded bilat, there was a break. Secretary Blinken told us what
0:03:24 the two leaders had talked about in the one-on-one meeting.
0:03:26 What did they talk about?
0:03:31 Biden gave a reassurance to Putin, look, I’m not looking for regime change in Russia. We’re
0:03:37 looking for the phrase that was used at the time was guardrails for our relationship with
0:03:38 Russia.
0:03:42 And what did Biden and Putin talk about in that second meeting?
0:03:49 The headline is, what did they not talk about? Ukraine. I look back now and I say, the way
0:03:57 Putin conducted himself, he had decided he was going to invade Ukraine. He was going
0:03:59 to take what he thought was his.
0:04:06 As we all know, Putin did invade Ukraine several months after that sit-down. Today, on Freakinomics
0:04:11 Radio, a conversation with John J. Sullivan, a lifelong Republican who has served under
0:04:16 five U.S. presidents, including Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Sullivan happened to be on
0:04:23 duty in Moscow as U.S. ambassador during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He’s just published
0:04:29 a book called Midnight in Moscow, a memoir from the front lines of Russia’s war against
0:04:37 the West. It reads a bit like a thriller, spies and subterfuge threats and bluffs enormously
0:04:44 high stakes. The bulk of the book explains from inside the house the Russian Federation’s
0:04:49 decision to escalate its war in Ukraine. It is a train wreck that you can’t look away
0:04:56 from. And it left John Sullivan thinking that U.S. foreign policy these days is a bit of
0:04:57 a mess.
0:05:01 Our politicians aren’t leading Republicans or Democrats.
0:05:09 He sees frequent miscalculations. If you think cutting off Ukraine is going to assist your
0:05:16 pressure campaign on Iran, you’re crazy. And he sees multiple flashpoints. These are
0:05:24 countries governed by leaders and governments that are immensely hostile to the United States.
0:05:31 In the book, Sullivan isn’t quite an alarmist, but in conversation, different story.
0:05:37 There may not be a Pearl Harbor-like incident, but my fear is that it’s going to come and
0:05:39 we’re not prepared.
0:05:43 I learned a great deal from this conversation with John Sullivan, and I suspect you will
0:05:56 too. Let’s get it started.
0:06:02 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:06:12 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:06:16 John Sullivan now splits his time between Washington, D.C. and Connecticut. He grew
0:06:22 up in Boston, attended Brown University, and then Columbia Law School, and launched a
0:06:29 perfectly respectable, but if we’re being honest, slightly dull career as a corporate
0:06:35 lawyer. There were already a lot of lawyers in his family, even a family law firm in Providence.
0:06:41 But there was also an uncle, Bill. He was a combat naval officer during World War II,
0:06:44 and afterward he joined the Foreign Service.
0:06:49 He was a three-time ambassador. He served in Saigon during the early part of the Vietnam
0:06:55 War, ambassador of the Philippines, and then the last U.S. ambassador to Iran.
0:06:58 This had made an impression on his nephew.
0:07:05 He’s a young kid. I remember just being hooked on this conception of public service. Don’t
0:07:11 get me wrong. It’s not an easy life. It’s hard on family life, but boy, the rewards
0:07:17 are fantastic. Serving the United States abroad and standing for the United States
0:07:23 and all that we aspire to stand for and seeing the American flag flying over a mission in
0:07:26 a country like Russia, it’s really gratifying.
0:07:30 Sullivan has spent the past several decades toggling between corporate law and government
0:07:35 service. He worked in the Justice Department under the First President Bush, and in commerce
0:07:41 and defense under the Second Bush. In 2016, he was back in private practice when Trump
0:07:47 was elected. I was as surprised as many were, he writes in his book. I was not an active
0:07:51 Trump supporter, but I did still believe in Ronald Reagan’s famous 11th commandment,
0:07:56 “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”
0:08:01 Sullivan had voted for Trump with no thought that I would ever be invited to work in his
0:08:06 administration, he writes. He adds that his wife, Grace, also a high-powered lawyer who
0:08:11 has since died, had not voted for Trump and would not have been supportive if I were going
0:08:17 to work for him at the White House. But it wasn’t the White House that called, it was
0:08:22 the Defense Department. Secretary Jim Mattis wanted Sullivan as his general counsel, and
0:08:29 that’s where Sullivan was heading until he got a better offer. Deputy Secretary of State
0:08:36 under Rex Tillerson. That job he took, and when Tillerson was fired by Tweet after barely
0:08:41 a year on the job, Sullivan became acting secretary. He reverted to deputy when Mike
0:08:47 Pompeo took over as secretary. Sullivan liked Pompeo, and they worked well together. But
0:08:55 that first Trump administration was an exercise in chaos. Nothing like its Republican predecessors,
0:09:02 Sullivan writes, undisciplined and unconventional. So, when he learned that the U.S. Ambassador
0:09:08 to Russia was resigning, Sullivan put himself up for the post. It’s hard to emphasize how
0:09:14 unusual this was, trading in a high-status job in Foggy Bottom for a diplomatic post
0:09:19 in Moscow. What did President Trump think of this move?
0:09:24 He thought Secretary Pompeo wanted to get rid of me, and the look on his face said, “If
0:09:28 that’s not the reason, then why would anybody in their right mind want to do that?”
0:09:33 But Sullivan made it clear to Trump that no, he wasn’t getting fired by Pompeo. He was
0:09:35 just ready for a new challenge.
0:09:43 So that was my last conversation with him in August of 2019. Never spoke to him as ambassador.
0:09:49 The last time I spoke to him was, he asked me if I really wanted to go to Russia. Did
0:09:53 have a lot of interactions with him, though, as deputy secretary.
0:09:56 And what were Sullivan’s impressions then?
0:10:04 President Trump looks at our overseas relationships, entanglements, whatever you want to call it,
0:10:10 looks at it purely from a transactional economic standpoint. If it makes sense for the United
0:10:17 States economically, and he defines economically narrowly, and a lot of economists disagree
0:10:21 with that, but Putin’s got a very similar outlook if you think about it.
0:10:27 And so it was that John Sullivan gave up the chaos of Washington, D.C. for a new chaos
0:10:32 in Moscow. Here’s how he puts it in his book, “I believed the Russian government did not
0:10:37 want any physical harm to come to me while I was in Russia. On the other hand, the Russian
0:10:43 government devoted a huge number of personnel and resources to try to annoy, provoke, criticize,
0:10:46 frustrate, embarrass, and compromise me.”
0:10:51 I mean, I knew what the Russians were about because I’d been deputy secretary of state
0:10:58 for three years. What I saw when I went there, it was a government different from any other
0:11:07 government I dealt with before. Their characterization of us as an enemy, they are at war with us.
0:11:12 And we in the United States, and particularly in Washington, it’s hard to get people to
0:11:20 really believe it, including at the State Department. We in Moscow at Embassy Moscow would be looking
0:11:27 for support for reciprocity. If the Russians did something to our mission, we’d be looking
0:11:33 for Washington to give a little payback to the Russian side. The response, well, geez,
0:11:40 that’s really kind of nasty. We’d never do, I’m like, you have no idea what we’re dealing
0:11:49 with here. That’s my message. We don’t understand how different these governments in Moscow
0:11:58 and Beijing are from us with leaders that are willing to use military force.
0:12:04 When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, he spoke warmly of Vladimir Putin. If Putin
0:12:11 likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability. By the time John Sullivan
0:12:17 got to Moscow in early 2020, things had changed. The Trump administration had imposed a variety
0:12:23 of sanctions on prominent Russians and on Russia itself. One sanction came after a Russian
0:12:29 malware attack on US financial institutions, another after attempted Russian interference
0:12:36 in the 2018 US elections. Trump included more sanctions in a 2019 executive order in response
0:12:42 to a Russian assassination attempt in Salisbury, England. The target was a former Russian spy
0:12:47 who was exposed to a nerve agent that had been applied to his front door. He survived,
0:12:52 but a British civilian died when she reportedly sprayed herself with perfume containing the
0:12:58 same nerve agent. Her boyfriend had found it in a collection bin. In addition to imposing
0:13:04 these sanctions on Russia, the Trump administration had been backing Ukraine as it faced increasing
0:13:10 Russian aggression. This was a few years after Russia annexed Crimea and started backing
0:13:16 Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine, but it was a couple years before
0:13:22 Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Then, in 2020, Trump lost the election to
0:13:29 Joe Biden. John Sullivan was asked by the Biden administration to stay on as their man
0:13:35 in Moscow. Biden announced that the US would be pulling out of Afghanistan.
0:13:42 Biden, always skeptical, going back to his days as vice president in the Obama administration,
0:13:49 skeptical of the US being a presence in Afghanistan, he decides in the spring we’re getting out.
0:13:56 He’s following through on the plan that had been negotiated in the Trump administration.
0:14:03 He says, “We’re out by September 11th. 20 years from the attack on September 11th, 2001,
0:14:08 we’re out of Afghanistan.” And this brings us back to that meeting in Geneva between
0:14:15 Biden and Putin. It’s the summer of 2021. It’s been a rocky spring between the United
0:14:20 States and Russia. This was only the second time that Putin and Biden had met face-to-face.
0:14:26 The first was in 2011, when Biden was vice president under Barack Obama. After that meeting,
0:14:32 Biden had said that Putin had no soul. And now recently, as president, Biden had called
0:14:38 Putin a killer. Like John Sullivan said, it had been a rocky spring.
0:14:43 By the way, the Russians are increasing their troop presence in Southwestern Russia, threatening
0:14:54 an invasion of Ukraine. And out of it all, Biden suggests a meeting with Putin in Geneva.
0:15:03 Good note, in April, after Biden called Putin a killer, Putin withdrew his ambassador from
0:15:10 the United States. And the Russian government said to me, “You need to go home too.” I
0:15:16 said, “Are you declaring me persona non grata? Are you expelling the U.S. ambassador?” And
0:15:20 they said, “Oh, God, no. But you do need to go home because no one is going to talk
0:15:26 to you.” Putin said this at one of his phone calls during this period with Biden. He said,
0:15:29 “You should bring your ambassador home because he’s going to have nothing to do because no
0:15:33 one will talk to him.” Biden says, “Let’s meet.” Putin agrees.
0:15:38 So they meet in Geneva at an 18th-century villa. People asked me, you know, what was
0:15:44 Biden like? Was he healthy? Was he with it? Biden shows up in Geneva and he looked great.
0:15:51 I mean, he looked like a healthy man in his late 70s. I did not see any of the decline
0:15:58 which was then obvious a few years later. So the meetings, there were two meetings.
0:16:04 We heard about this earlier, the one-plus-one and then the expanded bilateral meeting. John
0:16:09 Sullivan was in that second meeting. And what did the U.S. want out of this meeting?
0:16:16 I got the sense both under the Trump and Biden administrations, we want to pivot to Asia,
0:16:22 make this Russia problem go away, tell them to put a sock in it, put this guy, Progosian,
0:16:30 in a cage. Just calm down, calm, right? We and you can move on to bigger and better things.
0:16:35 And what was your impression of that message? Well, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, let
0:16:41 me tell you what I saw. In the expanded bilateral meeting, they spent more time talking about
0:16:48 Afghanistan than they did Ukraine. Biden’s asking for the Russians not to oppose the
0:16:54 U.S. having a counterterrorism presence in Afghanistan. This will help Russia. We’re
0:17:01 going to keep al-Qaeda, the Taliban, we want to keep them under wraps. And that helps Russia.
0:17:06 We will cooperate with you. That sounds like a pretty smart ploy, right? Let’s create a common
0:17:11 enemy team up on this. We’ll get over our differences and move on. If you were dealing
0:17:16 with a normal country and a normal leader and you’re not, so what does Putin do? Putin says,
0:17:24 “Okay, well, we’re not a big fan of that, but just spitballing here. Maybe we’ll let you share
0:17:32 our 201st base in Tajikistan, which is right on the border with Afghanistan.” That is a huge
0:17:40 Russian military base in Central Asia, one of their key military installations. This is not
0:17:47 some little counterterrorism intel monitoring. This is a big, important Russian military facility.
0:17:55 Putin says it. I’m sitting directly across from Colonel General Gerasimov, who is not KGB-trained.
0:18:04 His eyes widened and he sort of gasped a little bit like, “Whoa.” And it’s clearly a joke. Putin
0:18:09 starts to chuckle. Did Biden take it as a joke? So Biden is, we’re all on our side like, “What the
0:18:16 heck?” And then his foreign minister Lavrov is talking about something else. Putin interrupts him,
0:18:23 puts his hand over Lavrov’s mouth and looks at Biden and says, “Be careful negotiating with this
0:18:30 guy. He’s Armenian.” It’s an ethnic joke, right? It’s like he’s going to fleece you. He’ll pick your
0:18:40 pocket. He’s Armenian. He chuckled and how loose he was. This is not a man who sat down and said,
0:18:48 “I’ve got a serious problem in Ukraine that’s threatening the existence of my country.
0:18:54 Let’s talk, buddy.” But fast forward, in November, that was his position.
0:18:59 So listening between the lines to you now, John, and please correct me if I’m wrong,
0:19:04 at that meeting in Geneva, the US was getting ready to pull out of Afghanistan. That ended up
0:19:12 happening in August of 2021. And then Russia ends up going into Ukraine about six months after in
0:19:18 February of 2022, correct? Correct. So listening between the lines, what I hear is that Putin is
0:19:23 sizing up Biden here and saying, “Well, he’s not very substantial. He doesn’t seem to have much
0:19:31 of a plan or a spine. And therefore, I’m going to take this meeting. We’ll joke a bit. I’ll tease
0:19:35 him a bit. I’ll see how he pushes back. Sounds like he doesn’t push back very much.” And it
0:19:40 sounds as though you’re saying that even though Putin had decided long ago that he would be going
0:19:46 into Ukraine hard with force, that this meeting, if nothing else, assured him that he wasn’t going
0:19:51 to get a lot of trouble from the US. Is that right? I would quibble. I think it’s unfair to Biden.
0:19:56 I think Biden, and he said this in his press conference after the meeting in Geneva, he said,
0:20:03 “Look, I’m giving this guy one last chance. Can we stabilize this relationship?”
0:20:06 But isn’t that a little bit like telling your seven-year-old, “Listen, you’ve got one more
0:20:12 chance to put down the paint?” After the meeting, they did back-to-back press conferences.
0:20:18 The first question that’s asked by Russian state media, so this is Putin asking himself the question,
0:20:24 “What did you talk about the most important issue for all of Russia is Ukraine? What did
0:20:28 you discuss with Biden about Ukraine?” And Putin says, “Well, really didn’t come up that much.”
0:20:33 Biden said he wants Ukraine to enforce the Minsk agreements, and if that’s his view,
0:20:37 that’s productive, but we really didn’t talk about it. But let’s talk about Afghanistan and
0:20:42 how that factors in, because some people make the claim once Putin saw Afghanistan—
0:20:44 But that was the green light.
0:20:50 No, no, no, no, no. He decided to do this long ago. What I will say is, in criticism,
0:20:59 I clued myself in this. As I look back, maybe he had decided, but he hadn’t yet pulled the trigger.
0:21:06 Could we have stopped him? I think Afghanistan was the nail in the coffin. The withdrawal
0:21:16 is underway while we’re meeting in June. What really has an impact is the calamity that starts
0:21:25 in July and then into August. The culmination is the terrorist attack on the 26th of August,
0:21:30 and then the missile strike that killed 10 innocent Afghans.
0:21:31 The US missile strike.
0:21:37 The missile strike. One of Putin’s most senior and important advisors, a guy named
0:21:42 Nikolai Patreshov, he gives an interview, again, to Russian state media in Russian,
0:21:52 directed to Ukraine. He says, “I have no idea why you people think it’s in your interest to
0:22:00 associate with the United States and its vassals. Look what they’re doing to their major non-NATO
0:22:07 ally in Kabul. Do you think they’re going to defend you? Absolutely not. You’re crazy. We’re
0:22:15 your Slavic sisters and brothers. Why are you shunning us looking for protection from this
0:22:23 feckless North American giant who goes around the world and creates wars and problems and then
0:22:28 leaves disasters in its wake? Look what they’re doing in Afghanistan.”
0:22:34 Donald Trump said during this campaign, the 2024 campaign, he said Russia would not have
0:22:39 invaded Ukraine if he had been president. I’m curious what you make of that claim generally.
0:22:47 That’s just as wrong as it can be. Putin is going to achieve his aims in Ukraine,
0:22:54 which he and everyone who speaks for his government have said consistently since the day the special
0:23:02 military operation began. February 24th, 2022, we’re going to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine.
0:23:11 He was going to achieve those means either by Ukrainian capitulation or by what the Russians
0:23:19 call military technical means, which is an invasion. Maybe if Trump had been reelected
0:23:27 instead of Biden winning in November 2020, if he had changed course, stopped supporting Ukraine,
0:23:32 maybe Ukraine would have had a capitulate. Putin was going to accomplish his war aims
0:23:38 by hook or by crook, by capitulation or by invasion. So what I say particularly to my
0:23:44 Republican friends, okay, you don’t support Ukraine. What’s your Russia policy? If your
0:23:51 Russia policy starts with cutting off Ukraine, not only is your Russia policy going to fail,
0:23:59 but if you think cutting off Ukraine is going to assist your pressure campaign
0:24:07 on Iran, you’re crazy. And oh, by the way, how is this going to influence President Trump’s friend
0:24:13 Little Rocket Man and Pyongyang and Xi in Beijing? And how would you say Trump’s winning the 2024
0:24:19 election will affect Putin’s thinking and at least the short-term future for Putin and Russia?
0:24:26 They’re celebrating Trump’s victory, but there are a fair number of people around Putin
0:24:32 who say, wait a minute, let’s not get carried away. We remember what the first Trump administration
0:24:37 was like. He wanted to have conversations in a relationship with Putin, but they imposed
0:24:42 all these sanctions. The other thing they’re concerned about is Trump’s energy policy.
0:24:48 What if it reduces dramatically the price of oil? That could have a bigger effect
0:24:53 on the Russian economy than all the sanctions and export controls, which I support that the
0:24:58 Biden administration has imposed. Could reduce the price of oil by producing much more in the US?
0:25:05 Exactly, exactly. From the Russian perspective, it’s all about the price of oil. If that price of
0:25:12 oil dips significantly, that affects their ability to continue to fund the war. There’s a political
0:25:17 scientist at the University of Chicago, Robert Pape, who argues that these economic sanctions
0:25:23 at the US levy is against Russia. Trump used sanctions, as did Obama before him and Biden
0:25:29 after him. Pape argues that sanctions essentially don’t work, that they’re a nice fallback for
0:25:35 folks like you, people in state, for ambassadors, et cetera, to feel like you’re doing something.
0:25:41 What’s your view on that? That’s a great question. The obvious answer, and anyone who says anything
0:25:48 different is just blinking at reality. Sanctions did not and will not, unless they’re much more
0:25:57 vigorously enforced, influence Russia’s policies with respect to, you name it, Ukraine, Iran,
0:26:04 North Korea, et cetera. A couple of things, though, they are necessary but not sufficient.
0:26:10 It’s not as though, okay, well, then we should just continue to do business with Russia and forget
0:26:15 that they committed a murder in Salisbury, England, an innocent woman, Don Sturgis.
0:26:23 They sent an FSB colonel who committed a cold-blooded murder on the streets of Berlin, shot a person
0:26:30 to death, a Chechen opposition leader, election interference, cyber. Are we then just supposed
0:26:38 to ignore it? I think sanctions have had a significant impact on the Russian economy.
0:26:45 The current prime lending rate in Russia is 21%. It reminds me a little bit of the United States
0:26:52 in the ’60s and ’70s with the great society spending on Vietnam and the price the US economy
0:26:58 pays in the ’70s and into the early ’80s is rampant inflation. That’s what Putin’s doing now.
0:27:03 They’re pumping money into their defense industrial base. They’re paying off their own people,
0:27:09 those who are being killed, their families, average Russians seeing pensions, salaries,
0:27:14 et cetera, increasing because he doesn’t want to lose popular support. The Russian people
0:27:18 in their economy, they’re going to pay a price for it. So he’s gritting his teeth
0:27:23 and he’s going to accomplish his goals in the special military operation,
0:27:28 but the Russian economy five, 10 years from now is going to pay the price.
0:27:36 Coming up after the break, how does Vladimir Putin sell this story to the Russian public?
0:27:45 I may be a peasant, but boy, I’m part of a special country with a special mission in the world.
0:27:50 More from John J. Sullivan coming up. I’m Stephen Dubner and you are listening to Freakonomics Radio.
0:28:06 John Sullivan was US ambassador to Russia from February 2020 until September 2022.
0:28:12 So he was on duty when Russia launched what it called a special military operation in Ukraine.
0:28:18 The rest of the world calls it a war. The war has lasted nearly three years and has killed tens of
0:28:25 thousands on both sides. The US has invested in the Ukrainian cause significantly, but also
0:28:32 cautiously. When it comes to poking a bear, the Russian bear is perhaps the worst bear to poke.
0:28:37 Embassy Moscow was John Sullivan’s last government posting and he has since retired
0:28:42 from the Foreign Service. I asked if he would accept a role in the new Trump administration.
0:28:49 I can assure you that I will not be taking a role in the Trump administration as evidenced by the
0:28:54 fact that two people I remain close with have been ruled out as potential candidates for a new
0:28:59 administration, Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley. I’m on that list, I’m afraid.
0:29:05 For anyone old enough to remember or anyone who’s read some Russian history or literature,
0:29:12 there is this deep sense of loss. This was a country and a culture full of brilliant writers,
0:29:19 thinkers, artists, scientists, philosophers, a lot of dissidents too, of course, but it seems
0:29:25 from the outside at least as though that history has been paved over entirely, that the Russian
0:29:32 Federation of today bears no resemblance. It’s tragic. I went to Russia as an amateur Russell
0:29:39 file for all the reasons you said. All live accomplished in science, technology, engineering,
0:29:45 medicine, etc. During the pandemic, instead of working for the betterment of humankind,
0:29:53 they’re falsely promoting their Sputnik V vaccine, which was never properly tested.
0:29:59 It was seized by the Kremlin as an instrument to promote Russian nationalism. Look, we’re the
0:30:06 best. That’s the Kremlin hijacking the strengths of the Russian people, whether it’s in science,
0:30:13 technology, their religion, the Russian Orthodox Church is now an instrument, I’m sorry to say,
0:30:23 of the Kremlin, of Putin. He has turned all of those strengths to his purpose of recreating this
0:30:28 Russian Empire. There are a lot of Russian people who agree with him who are saying, “Ada boy,
0:30:34 you go and do that for us.” You write about the famous idea that Putin really has three advisors,
0:30:37 Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.
0:30:43 Correct. Other than his nostalgia for the Russian Empire, what are his goals, would you say?
0:30:52 It’s not nostalgia. He is looking to recreate. There are a lot of ordinary Russians who lament
0:30:59 the weakened state of their Russia. Just as hope is a powerful tool in the United States,
0:31:08 that vision of empire, yeah, I may be a kulak, I may be a peasant here in Russia, but boy,
0:31:15 I’m part of something big. I’m part of a special country with a special mission in the world.
0:31:19 I don’t know if you’re a betting man, but given his position at this moment, given his
0:31:25 accomplishments at this moment, and given the lack of ability of the US, the UN, and others to
0:31:28 fight back, what do you think are his chances of achieving that goal?
0:31:34 Well, he thinks he’s in, and it’s probably true in the short term, a better position than he was,
0:31:43 say, in early 2023, roughly a year after the war had started, the Russian military had not just
0:31:52 failed but been embarrassed. So things were really looking bad for him. In September of ’22,
0:31:59 he had to order mobilization. It included some conscription, which was very unpopular.
0:32:04 It’s a different world now, and it’s not just the election of Trump. It’s what’s happened in
0:32:10 Berlin with the breakdown in the current coalition, Chancellor Schultz going to have to stand for
0:32:17 reelection, and the Germans themselves, the German government, announcing that it’s not going to be
0:32:23 providing as much support for Ukraine as it had earlier in the war. So from Putin’s point of view,
0:32:29 things are a lot better now than they were a year or a year and a half ago.
0:32:34 So John, I can imagine some Americans who didn’t vote for Trump listening to this and saying,
0:32:37 you know, I don’t see much daylight between Trump and Putin.
0:32:44 That’s a misunderstanding of who Putin is and what Putin does. It’s not rhetoric. It’s reality.
0:32:54 Look, Donald Trump, when he gets confirmed on January 20th, 2025, at 12.01 p.m., he’s a lame duck.
0:32:59 Now, he’ll have lots of influence. He’s got coattails, but he’s never running again,
0:33:05 and the jockeying for who succeeds him is going to start. And, you know, he’s going to be limited
0:33:14 by Republicans in the Senate. There are Republicans in the Senate, even with the 53-vote majority,
0:33:20 who are, and I don’t know what the Secretary of Defense nominee would say if asked about,
0:33:28 for example, the importance of our NATO alliance. But I guarantee you that any nominee who said
0:33:34 we should withdraw from NATO would never get confirmed by a wide margin. The Putin-Trump
0:33:42 analogy, I mean, that’s a vast overstatement. And that type of political rhetoric, in fact,
0:33:49 undermines marshaling the American people and leading the American people to oppose Putin.
0:33:53 But if Trump just wants to cut Ukraine loose, what’s to stop him?
0:34:00 There are things he can do as Commander-in-Chief that Congress wouldn’t be able to stop. The
0:34:07 military cooperation, the intelligence cooperation can all be cut off. If that happens, and more
0:34:12 importantly, the American leadership that’s influenced the Europeans, if that goes away,
0:34:20 how long can the Ukrainians hold out, then maybe this Russian special military operation after,
0:34:25 you know, three years of failure, they accomplish what they originally set out to do
0:34:30 on February 24, 2022. That’s certainly possible.
0:34:37 But it sounds as though you have a substantial amount of hope that the constitutional separation
0:34:38 of powers remains intact.
0:34:44 Oh, absolutely. I guess the right way to characterize me as an institutionalist,
0:34:50 and particularly the federal judiciary. I never traveled to the PRC when I was
0:34:56 Deputy Secretary of State. I traveled there a lot 10, 12 years before when I was Deputy
0:35:03 Secretary of Commerce. And what the Chinese government could not understand was they would
0:35:10 never accept the concept of an independent judiciary. The idea that a single federal judge
0:35:16 or a court of appeals or even nine justices on the Supreme Court could issue an order
0:35:23 in, for example, a matter of national security that a court could order the president to do
0:35:28 something and that he would have to do it. They could not believe that that would happen.
0:35:34 So I do have faith. You know, people ask me all the time, you know, he’s going to stay
0:35:37 after his term. He’s not going to stay after his term.
0:35:41 This is Trump you’re talking about. But what makes you say that? Because he certainly
0:35:42 tried last time.
0:35:48 Well, he certainly tried last time, but he has, by the terms of the amended constitution,
0:35:53 is limited to two terms. He says things off the top of his head. I’ve seen it in person
0:35:59 that he knows can’t happen like that big beautiful wall on the southwestern border of
0:36:05 the United States that was going to be paid for by Mexico. Trust me, he’s got one term left
0:36:12 and that’s it. He’s 78 years old. What condition is he going to be in at the end of his term?
0:36:13 Think about what happened to Biden.
0:36:19 After the break, we hear about some worst case scenarios.
0:36:22 I am not Winston Churchill and I hope I’m wrong.
0:36:29 And some mildly encouraging news. I’m Steven Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right back.
0:36:46 John Jay Sullivan, former State Department official and U.S. Ambassador to Russia,
0:36:52 still has a lot to say about American foreign policy, especially when it comes to China or
0:36:57 what he calls the PRC, the People’s Republic of China and, of course, Russia.
0:37:04 There are no opposition leaders left in Russia. There literally is no independent media left.
0:37:09 It is a police state just as the Soviet Union was, even more so.
0:37:13 Let’s say that for whatever reason, Putin vanished tomorrow.
0:37:17 What would happen? Who would be running the Russian Federation? What would that look like?
0:37:21 Because you do make the argument that Putin has kept a lid on certain kinds of things.
0:37:30 There are some, I believe, who have been urging him to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine,
0:37:36 or maybe an unconventional weapon. I thought they might use a chemical weapon in Mariupol,
0:37:42 the last holdout in southern Ukraine. So my answer to that question is,
0:37:48 if Putin doesn’t wake up tomorrow, the war continues. The war is not unpopular.
0:37:52 Once the war starts, the average Russian
0:38:00 doesn’t want to see, as they call it, their boys slaughtered or lose in Ukraine.
0:38:03 Given the state of Russian media, how much information do people get?
0:38:08 Very little. And you have to work hard to get anything other than the state media.
0:38:12 What they do see, though, is bodies coming back.
0:38:17 How surprised would you be if you woke up tomorrow and Russia did use nuclear weapons against Ukraine?
0:38:18 I’d be shocked.
0:38:19 Because why?
0:38:26 Well, first, as I understand it from military experts, there isn’t a real practical use for a
0:38:33 tactical nuclear weapon. So it’s strictly a political use of the weapon. And if it’s a political
0:38:42 use, if Putin were, for example, to decide, all right, my mission to denazify Ukraine hasn’t
0:38:48 proceeded quickly enough, I’m just going to nuke Kiev. What is his dear friend in Beijing going
0:38:56 to think? I come back to the PRC as a key. Putin meets with Xi at the start of the Olympics in
0:39:04 2022. They issued this extraordinary document, lengthy statement, page after page, declaring how
0:39:11 they’ve got this, it’s stronger than an alliance. Dear friends, the Russians have since used that
0:39:19 phrase frequently. My recollection is that Xi and his government haven’t used that phrase since.
0:39:29 And what happened since? It started the day of the invasion. Putin’s threats to use a nuclear
0:39:37 weapon. Xi has said more than once the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, the PRC would
0:39:46 not support. If a portion of Kiev disappears under a mushroom cloud, that’s heat, and Putin doesn’t
0:39:55 want that. That’s the type of shock that’s going to wake up the American people. We spend, if you
0:40:04 include the Department of Defense and the budgets for the intelligence community, we spend a trillion
0:40:12 dollars a year to defend our country. The two principal threats to the United States,
0:40:22 1A, the PRC, 1B, the Russian Federation. The amount of money we already spend to defend ourselves
0:40:29 against Russia is astronomical. My ultimate point is we need to oppose Russian aggression
0:40:37 that is now exhibiting itself in brutal form in Ukraine. We need to recognize that the Russian
0:40:44 Federation is as aggressive, maybe more aggressive than the Soviet Union. Anybody who’s got a heart
0:40:52 or a brain wants this violence to stop, but it’s not going to stop because the Russians aren’t going
0:40:59 to quit until they accomplish their war aims. Their war aims, I guarantee, are broader than
0:41:05 just Ukraine. You know, there’s a history here. There are 15 Soviet republics that Putin thinks
0:41:10 are his. That’s what he’s looking to reestablish. Let’s pretend for a minute that you’re not on
0:41:14 the outs with the Trump crowd and that you were invited back. Let’s say you were invited back
0:41:20 as Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State. Put three things on the table that we can do
0:41:24 to turn the heat down or to change the leverage that Russia is pursuing.
0:41:32 Yeah, it’s a little difficult to do that without also engaging the PRC. The North
0:41:40 Korean sending troops to fight with the Russians in Europe not only has unnerved and infuriated
0:41:44 the South Koreans, but Beijing isn’t happy about this.
0:41:48 And you think there’s an avenue there for Trump and Xi to discuss?
0:41:49 Possibly.
0:41:52 If you were advising Trump, what would you offer as an incentive?
0:41:54 An incentive for the Chinese?
0:41:54 Yes.
0:42:02 Well, you know, there are a lot of things on the table. My fear is we can’t offer Taiwan.
0:42:08 You know, they’re worried about would he really come and defend us and not just the Taiwanese,
0:42:13 the South Koreans too. So what I would say to the incoming Trump administration,
0:42:21 we have to let them know that the war that they’re supporting and perpetuating in Europe
0:42:27 has now become globalized in ways that adversely impact them because you see quotes from the South
0:42:34 Koreans now saying, you know, can Trump be trusted? Can the Americans be trusted, not just Trump?
0:42:37 And do we need a nuclear weapon to protect ourselves?
0:42:41 What kind of deal do you think Trump will pursue with Putin over Ukraine?
0:42:46 Because he seems to see it as a mess on his desk that he just wants to get rid of.
0:42:53 Right. So that’s been the attitude going back to the Obama administration,
0:43:02 maybe even the Bush 43 administration. My charge as ambassador was make the Russia problem go away.
0:43:10 We want guardrails. Now there’s been this horrific war in Ukraine. We got to make it stop.
0:43:16 Why? Because we got to pivot to Asia. So here’s my problem with the political discussion in the
0:43:23 United States. Our leaders, Republicans and Democrats, don’t talk about these types of issues.
0:43:32 Rewind 44 years. The Carter administration has started to rebuild, reinvest post-Vietnam in
0:43:38 the Defense Department, right? We don’t go to the Summer Olympics in Moscow. Our leaders,
0:43:44 our presidents, talk to the American people about these issues, whether it was Reagan with
0:43:50 the Evil Empire, the Strategic Defense Initiative, putting intermediate-range nuclear missiles in
0:43:57 West Germany. Presidents used to talk in detail about security issues, and the American people
0:44:06 knew about them. We don’t have that discussion. It’s childish. It’s not serious. President Biden
0:44:12 himself, I’ve not heard him say this, but it’s been reported that he has, since the war started
0:44:22 in Ukraine, said we in the Obama administration, we sort of blew it in 2014. We let this guy get
0:44:27 away with it. Crimea you’re talking about. Crimea and in the Donbas. Remember, there’s real conflict
0:44:34 in the Donbas with Russian military units involved shooting down a commercial airliner
0:44:42 that kills a couple hundred people. We have not taken seriously this threat that an aggressive
0:44:48 nationalist Russia opposes a country that’s the largest landmass in the world with the largest
0:44:55 stockpile of nuclear weapons with a seat as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
0:45:00 Russia is one of just five permanent members of the UN Security Council, but that certainly didn’t
0:45:07 keep them from invading Ukraine. What does that say about the UN? Should we consider it as toothless,
0:45:12 as obsolete as critics say? Yeah, I’m as big a critic. I haven’t gone so far as my friend John
0:45:18 Bolton and say we can cut off the top half of the headquarters and save the money. My State
0:45:24 Department colleagues, particularly those who have worked on international organizations issues for
0:45:33 decades, devoted their careers to it, wince when I say this, but it’s just completely ineffective.
0:45:44 We now have had the UN Secretary General go to the BRICS summit in Russia, shake hands with Putin,
0:45:56 imagine if there were such a thing, if the League of Nations still existed, and in January of 1940,
0:46:01 the Secretary of the League went to Berlin and shook hands with Hitler.
0:46:07 So John, it strikes me that most Americans, probably most people everywhere, are primarily
0:46:13 concerned with short-term problems, right? We get very distraught if the price of gas goes
0:46:19 up 50 cents a gallon, but in terms of elections or policy decisions halfway around the world
0:46:25 that may affect things five or ten years later, we don’t have much patience for that.
0:46:30 And I’m curious if you’re calling for a significant reassessment, realignment of how
0:46:35 we think about foreign policy and downstream effects. You know, I go back to Syria,
0:46:41 the Obama administration’s red line in Syria, which it then essentially ignored later, triggered
0:46:46 this massive outflow of refugees from Syria into Europe, which further destabilized those
0:46:51 countries that were already turning against immigrants. The list goes on and on. So I’m
0:46:56 curious what kind of decisions you see on the near horizon that we should pay attention to now,
0:47:03 because they will reverberate. It’s coming. Something is coming that is going to shake
0:47:10 the establishment and the American people. If there is a greater global conflict,
0:47:16 for example, between Israel and Iran that closes the Persian Gulf, that makes the
0:47:21 Houthi violence in the strait that leads into the Red Sea, you know, increases that,
0:47:28 and God forbid, with Taiwan, the effect on the global economy, you talk about supply chain
0:47:37 disruption. Oh my God. The analogy I draw to where we are today is the late 1930s. If you
0:47:43 look at the old movie tone newsreels, and you got, you know, the man on the street in the United
0:47:50 States being interviewed, you know, the chancellor, yeah, he’s rough around the edges. What he’s
0:47:56 doing with the Jews, that’s really bad. But look, Germany was in tough straits after the war and,
0:48:02 you know, the peace treaty and, you know, once Germany gets back on its feet, it’ll soften.
0:48:10 At the same time, Churchill, much more closely observing. And in harm’s way, let’s say. And in
0:48:20 harm’s way, Churchill gives these speeches warning about what’s coming. And they’re combined into a
0:48:25 book that’s published in the United States, and the title of it is “While England Slept.”
0:48:29 So you’re saying we’re asleep now? We’re asleep. And our politicians aren’t leading
0:48:36 Republicans or Democrats. Now, I don’t know, I may be completely wrong, there may not be a
0:48:42 Pearl Harbor-like incident. But my fear is that it’s going to come. And we’re not prepared. And
0:48:50 the American people haven’t been told how serious these risks are. Putin calls the United States
0:48:56 Russia’s enemy. J.D. Vance was asked recently, would he call Russia an enemy? And he said no.
0:49:02 Well, Putin calls you an enemy. So you’re trying to shake us all by the shoulders and wake us up?
0:49:07 I am not Winston Churchill. And I hope I’m wrong. But it’s more dangerous than you think.
0:49:15 The only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison.
0:49:23 That’s a line written in the late 19th century by Leo Tolstoy. I have a feeling John Sullivan can
0:49:29 identify. My thanks to him for this conversation. Again, his book is called Midnight in Moscow.
0:49:36 The last time we had a U.S. Ambassador on the show, it was Rom Emanuel, who had been posted in
0:49:42 Japan. You can hear that episode number 553 wherever you get our show. It’s called
0:49:49 The Suddenly Diplomatic Rom Emanuel. Meanwhile, next week on the show, we go one-on-one with
0:49:56 Rom’s big brother, Zeke Emanuel, to talk about one of the biggest medical advances in recent history.
0:50:03 You know, this is why people do science. What does the GLP-1 revolution mean for you
0:50:08 and for the U.S. healthcare system? Don’t get me started. We’ve got to have a whole
0:50:12 another conversation about that issue. That’s next time on the show. Until then,
0:50:18 take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher
0:50:25 and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com,
0:50:30 where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski,
0:50:35 with help from Dalvin Abouaji. Our staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman,
0:50:40 Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger,
0:50:45 Jason Gambrel, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Caruth,
0:50:50 Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune”
0:50:55 by the Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.
0:51:07 I don’t know what got me off on this rant, but pardon me, I’ve kissed the Blarney Stone twice.
0:51:16 The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.
0:51:24 Stitcher.
John J. Sullivan, a former State Department official and U.S. ambassador, says yes: “Our politicians aren’t leading — Republicans or Democrats.” He gives a firsthand account of a fateful Biden-Putin encounter, talks about his new book Midnight in Moscow, and predicts what a second Trump term means for Russia, Ukraine, China — and the U.S.
- SOURCES:
- John Sullivan, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia.
- RESOURCES:
- Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia’s War Against the West, by John Sullivan (2024).
- “The ‘Deathonomics’ Powering Russia’s War Machine,” by Georgi Kantchev and Matthew Luxmoore (The Wall Street Journal, 2024).
- War, by Bob Woodward (2024).
- “On the Record: The U.S. Administration’s Actions on Russia,” by Alina Polyakova and Filippos Letsas (Brookings, 2019).
- “Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work,” by Robert A. Pape (International Security, 1998).
- EXTRAS:
- “The Suddenly Diplomatic Rahm Emanuel,” by Freakonomics Radio (2023).