Welcome back to Washington Post Live, Mr. Secretary.
DR. GATES: Thanks, David.
MR. IGNATIUS: So we’ve got a lot to talk about. I’d like to get started with Russia. You were a Russia analyst early in your career at CIA. You wrote a doctoral dissertation about Russia. I want to begin by asking you about the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison over the weekend. Do you think that Putin ordered his killing, and in general, why did this happen now, on the eve of Russia’s presidential election? I want to say so-called “election.” Why now?
DR. GATES: I think now because he thinks he can get away with it. You know, whether he directly ordered it or whether like Henry II, he said, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest,” just I think Mr. Navalny is the latest in a long line of victims of Putin’s determination to have no opposition.
The killing of Boris Nemtsov on a bridge right outside the Kremlin, the poisoning of Litvinenko and various others, now Navalny, the woman journalist several years ago, the list is pretty long, and not to mention Mr. Prigozhin, who had the temerity to actually challenge Putin, who died in a, quote/unquote, “mysterious plane crash.” So there’s a long list of people that Putin has had removed from the scene one way or another.
And I think–as I suggested, I think he did it now because he could get away with it, and he wanted to make sure that in the Russian election next year–or next month that there was no opposition to speak of.
MR. IGNATIUS: So when you say could get away with it, that implies that he has no reason to be worried about the political reaction, about demonstrations, protest, anger among the Russian public. Is that so? Is he really that insulated now from domestic dissent?
DR. GATES: I think so. I think that he–you know, the Russian intelligence services have such pervasive sources and have such pervasive surveillance techniques around the country, that any time a group of people, whether through the internet or some other means, want to have a demonstration or protest something, the police are there when they arrive, essentially. And so he really has, I think, imposed his will.
And frankly, he also doesn’t have much to fear from the West, in his view. It’s not just his own people that he’s not worried about at this point. I think he’s feeling, actually, pretty smug. The Russian economy has recovered from the initial months of sanctions. They’ve actually got a pretty good cash balance, thanks to selling oil and gas, and they’re getting a lot of consumer goods from China and from Central Asia and Turkey and elsewhere. So the daily lives of most Russians have not been affected very much, except, of course, the families of those who–the many families who have lost their sons, husbands, brothers in Ukraine. But I think he’s feeling like things are going his way inside Russia in terms of the economy and control, and I think he believes that at this point, the West has done all they can do to make life more difficult for him, and that, in fact, as the West begins to fracture, that his position will only get stronger.
MR. IGNATIUS: That’s a chilling assessment of things going his way. I want to press you on the question of what the U.S. can do about it. The White House said two days ago that they will announce new sanctions tomorrow, after the death of Navalny. Can you think of sanctions, things the president could announce tomorrow that would actually make a difference and penetrate this sense Putin has, as you say, of growing in vulnerability?
DR. GATES: I think if there were sanctions that actually could influence his behavior, we would have already imposed them on Russia. I don’t have any idea what the administration has in mind. It may be sanctions against specific individuals, against oligarchs. I don’t know what they have in mind.
But in terms of really impacting the Russian economy or Putin’s position and so on, it’s hard for me to believe they will come up with something that is qualitatively more impactful than what they’ve already done.
MR. IGNATIUS: I was in Munich on Friday as the news of Navalny’s death came across the wires and watched as his suddenly-widowed wife, Yulia, addressed the Munich security conference, very moving, her face just showing the grief that she was experiencing.
She now has said that she wants to lead a Russian opposition movement, pursuing the same goals as her late husband. Do you think that she can make any difference, and in general, what can an opposition do, not in terms of tomorrow, next week, next year even, but over the long run to alter the trajectory of Russia?
DR. GATES: I think it certainly is not a short-term prospect. I hope that if she does go forward in leading the Russian opposition, that she does it from the outside, from outside of Russia, because if she’s inside Russia, she may be arrested just as quickly as this young former ballerina was just arrested, I think, for making a $50 contribution to the Ukrainian cause. So I think what needs to happen, the one thing that we have not done sufficiently, in my view, is use our strategic communications capabilities to communicate directly with the Russian people about what their government is doing, not just in Ukraine, but the corruption, the wealth, the siphoning of Russia’s wealth, the repression, the killing of people like Mr. Navalny and others, the kind of regime they actually have. And I think we have been reluctant to press the kind of effort inside Russia that, frankly, we did a lot of during the Cold War, when the Soviets were in charge of the country. We infiltrated all kinds of things into Russia over time, and not to mention the radios, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and so on.
We still have those, but I think we’ve been very cautious about using them against the regime and using internet, social media like Telegram and some of these other venues to try and send a message to the Russian people about the kind of government they had, so we could be actually helping those in the opposition or who want to create some kind of an opposition inside Russia.
MR. IGNATIUS: So just to close out this area of our conversation, if you were back at the CIA today as director, would you be looking for ways to use that agency and other agencies of the government to increase the pressure on Putin and to encourage, to the extent possible, efforts to challenge that regime?
MR. IGNATIUS: Do you want to say anything more about it, about how you do that?
MR. IGNATIUS: No, I think that–I think that says it all. I think that the direction clearly has to come from the president. CIA isn’t going to go off and do these things on their own, but it requires a strategic decision on the part of the president that we are going to be supportive of the Russian opposition. So it’s not just what CIA might do. It’s what the State Department does overtly. It’s what we do in terms of providing assistance to some of those groups.
Always before, when we talked about this kind of thing, the question was, well, if you support them, doesn’t that compromise them at home as just being tools of the United States? My reaction generally has always been, they’re already suspected or accused by their governments of being supported by CIA and the United States. So what’s the point? We’re–they’re getting blamed for something that is not happening. Maybe we ought to make it happen.
MR. IGNATIUS: So let’s turn to another grim topic. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, February 24. Give us your assessment, Mr. Secretary, of the war after two years and where you think Ukraine stands against the Russian invaders.
DR. GATES: As so often has happened in Russian history, their military performance at the outset was very bad, and over time, they have recovered. They have suffered enormous losses, 315,000 or so killed and wounded, half to two-thirds of the tank force that they had before the invasion, and armor and so on. So they’ve had enormous losses.
But that’s characteristic of the Russians also over history, and meanwhile, they have got their defense industries back up and running. They have–and producing a lot of stuff. They’re getting a lot of drones from Iran, building a facility with Iranian help inside Russia to build drones, getting ammunition from North Korea for artillery and so on. And a lot of people are referring to the war at this point as a stalemate. I’m afraid I believe that, at this point, it’s actually not so much a stalemate, but that the Russians have regained momentum. And it’s not breakthrough kind of momentum, but it is the sense that they are now the ones pressing the offensive.
The loss of Avdiivka was important. It’s not–you know, it creates an opportunity for the Russians to move the lines further to the east. And everything I’m reading is that the Russians are sort of on the offensive all along at various different places along the 600-mile frontier.
And they have more and more supplies coming in. I’ve read that for every artillery shell that the Ukrainians fire, the Russians are firing 10, and so the Ukrainians now are facing this shortage of ammunition, artillery. They’re facing shortages when it comes to air defense and so on.
So I think that the Russians are feeling that the tide has turned, and that while there’s still a lot fighting to be done, that the initiative has passed to them.
And the question, of course, is what is to be done about that? The Europeans, who we so often criticize, have come through with some $55 billion in economic assistance for Ukraine, a real lifeline for the Ukrainian government. The European governments have pledged a lot of military support for the Ukrainians, have signed security agreements. Both the French and the Germans have signed security agreements with the Ukrainian government. The problem is the Europeans just don’t have much in their stockpiles, and they say they’re going to do more and produce more, increase the production of these weapons and ammunition and so on. But it won’t appear on the battlefield until 2025 or perhaps even beyond.
So while the Europeans have extended an economic lifeline to the Ukrainians, the only real military lifeline is the one from the United States, and as we all know, that one is, shall we say, on pause right now.
MR. IGNATIUS: So we’ll come to the politics of that inability to pass the supplemental military assistance to Ukraine, but one thing that President Biden could do right now, I believe, with his existing legal authorities, is to send what are called “ATACMS 300s,” longer-range missiles that could range targets in Russian-occupied Crimea, for example.
I wrote this morning that when President Zelensky spoke in Munich with a group of bipartisan members of Congress, he said, “This is what I need to get through this period where Russians have the momentum. We need this now.” First, do you think that’s a good idea to send the ATACMS now? Do you worry about the risks, and do you think it would have any difference in this momentum shift that you described earlier?
DR. GATES: One of my concerns has been that the U.S. decision-making process in providing more advanced weapons to Ukraine has been deliberative, slow, and often too late. The government will deliberate for months about whether to send tanks and then ultimately decide to send the tanks. The government will debate for a year or more whether to allow F-16s to go to the Ukrainians, and then will finally decide yes, and we and others can provide F-16s. We could have begun Ukrainian pilot training on the F-16s a year and a half ago, and then when the planes became available, the decision was made to make the planes available, the Ukrainians could actually step into the cockpits and start flying and not have to begin the training at that point.
So I think we’ve been slow to provide the kind of weaponry that could have made a difference in the way the flow of this conflict has happened, and I think the same thing is true of the ATACMS, of the longer-range tactical missiles. I think, you know, giving the Ukrainians the ability to attack targets, for example, in Crimea seems to me to be a no-brainer. It’s their territory. If they choose to attack targets, they’re attacking targets inside Ukraine, not targets inside Russia, no matter what Putin claims.
And, you know, I mean, if you want to give the Russians pause, if you want to interrupt that sense of momentum that they have, why not be able to do things like drop the Kerch Strait Bridge? That would have a big impact on the Russians, I think, psychologically as well as militarily.
So I think giving the Ukrainians the ability to strike some of these strategic targets in Crimea, as they have attacked the Black Sea Fleet successfully, I think is really important and could at least psychologically change the tenor of where we are at this point.
MR. IGNATIUS: So it’s been argued by people who advocate doing what you just described, providing capability to hit Crimea, that more broadly, Ukraine facing this growing Russian momentum, Putin’s willingness to just keep stuffing human beings into the meat grinder, that Ukraine would be wise to try to hunker down in 2024, to protect the territory it has, to refrain from efforts to go all the way to the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov, as they tried to last year in their counteroffensive which didn’t work, but to try to get through 2024 as intact as they can, hoping that next year, 2025, would provide new opportunities for going on the offensive again. Do you think that’s basically the right strategy?
DR. GATES: I think that you can do both things. I think you can do two things. I think, first of all, we do–I mean, the whole–I think one of the main values of the package of assistance, military assistance that’s on the Hill right now, would be able to give the–would be able to provide the Ukrainians with significant additional air defense capability and would give them the wherewithal to establish a strong defense essentially where they are in the eastern part of the country. So I think for the time being, the first and most important thing for them to do is not to hunker down but to establish a very strong defensive barrier in eastern Ukraine, so they don’t lose any more territory, so the Russians cannot have a successful offensive that takes back more territory or takes more Ukrainian territory and thickens the Ukrainian ability to respond to these Russian attacks with artillery shells and so on, but also helps them rebuild their own defense industrial capability for the longer term, both in the near and longer term, because they have some of that capability, particularly in producing drones and some other things like that, but to keep the Russians–keep the Russians at bay at the same time that you hit some of the strategic Russian targets in Crimea and so on that I just was talking about.
So I think you can do both things and, at the same time, make it–use this year to make sure that Russia cannot go any further–any farther to the east than they already are and to so strengthen Ukraine that the Russians come to see the futility of trying to accomplish what their current goals are. And what the Russians have told us and told others is they want both four provinces that they’ve occupied. They want the southern coast up to and including Odesa. They want a change of government in Kyiv of a pro-Russian government, and they want pledges that Ukraine will never join the EU or NATO.
I think we counter all of those things, help the Ukrainians counter all of those things, keep them at bay, and maybe at some point the Russians decide enough is enough, particularly if we impose some additional pain on them with respect to the Black Sea Fleet and with respect to the Kerch Bridge and various other targets that I think have both psychological and military value for them.
So I think this is all of a package, and so you can call it hunkering down or being defensive, but I think it’s basically recognizing, first of all, the Russian advantages en masse, particularly just a significant demographic advantage that they have over Ukraine, and their ability to bring to bear tremendous industrial capability for their own forces. What I’ve just suggested is an approach and what others have suggested is an approach that prevents Ukraine from losing any more territory to the Russians, holds the Russians at bay, strengthens Ukraine for the long term, and also imposes some strategic costs on the Russians.
MR. IGNATIUS: And let me ask, as Biden pursued a program like that, let’s say, what about diplomacy? General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used to say often that as much as we were doing to help Ukraine fight the war, we needed to do more diplomatically to try to see if we could help them get a settlement that was not a concessionary to Putin. What do you think about that? Do we need to do more on the diplomatic front as well?
DR. GATES: It’s not clear to me what to do. We’ve seen no indication that Putin is– mean, the idea of a negotiation or a diplomacy is that there’s something to negotiate. I haven’t seen any evidence whatsoever that Putin is prepared to negotiate anything that he has done in Ukraine or negotiate about his longer-term objectives in Ukraine. So, you know, it takes two to negotiate, and so, essentially, if you’re pressing Zelensky and the Ukrainians to negotiate, then there has to be some expectation of some give on the other side.
You know, a lot of the critics of the war and so on say, “How does this end? What’s the strategy that we’re going to pursue?” I think the strategy is what I just described, and that is helping Ukraine prevent any further Russian gains, bring this thing–give the Russians every reason to believe they’re not going to be successful in achieving their goals. And maybe at that point, you can have, not necessarily a negotiated cease-fire, but essentially a practical stand-down in which the level of violence significantly is reduced. And Ukraine can focus on its economic and military strength, rebuilding the country, and then pursuing the relationships with the EU and NATO. It seems to me that’s the strategy, and that’s probably as positive an end game as you can see right now.
I mean, my–I think realistically, it’s going to be very difficult in the foreseeable future for Ukraine to get back those four provinces and to get back Crimea. My view is, though, that the West–and all the countries that we can get to join us–position ought to be, with respect to those provinces and Crimea, essentially our position during the entire Cold War with respect to the Baltic states: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. We never recognized Soviet sovereignty over those three countries, and we even–they even maintained legations in Washington all through the Cold War, diplomatic legations. So we never recognized Soviet control. I think no country should recognize Soviet control over those provinces or Crimea, that according to international law, that’s all still Ukrainian territory. And maybe someday, under a different kind of Russian government, there can be a negotiation that returns some, if not all, of that to Ukraine. But it’s not going to happen under Putin.
MR. IGNATIUS: Another dimension of Russia’s current sense of dominance here is its continued nuclear saber-rattling. The most recent example was last weekend. Former President Dmitry Medvedev made some comments that were, to me, just stunningly irresponsible. I want to just read you a brief excerpt. He said, “Attempts to return Russia to the borders of 1991,” which means to someday get those four provinces of Ukraine back in Ukraine’s hands, “will lead to only one thing, that the global war with Western countries using all the strategic arsenal of our state against Kyiv, Berlin, London, Washington, against all other beautiful historical places that have long ago been included in the flight targets of our nuclear triad.” So that kind of nuclear rhetoric has been a feature of this conflict. I want to ask you how you respond to it yourself. There are some people who think these Russian efforts really have taken us to a more dangerous place than we’ve been in since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, where they speak directly about the use of tactical and, in this case strategic, nuclear weapons. And how do you think more broadly about the question of deterrence in this era, where the people being deterred seem to be us, while the Russians make ever-greater threats about their willingness to risk nuclear war?
DR. GATES: Well, I think, first of all, Dmitry Medvedev has kind of gone off the deep end in recent years. Once Putin told him his time as president was up and it was time for him to recede, his rhetoric has been far more outlandish, I might say, than Putin’s or anybody else’s, for that matter, in an official position in Russia. So I pretty much discount what Medvedev has to say.
And, you know, there was, I think, legitimate concern at the very beginning of the war about the potential use of Russian use tactical nuclear weapons. My view is that, particularly after the first few months, that that concern has been considerably exaggerated.
First of all, tactical nuclear weapons are tactical. They don’t change the strategic environment. So the use of two or three nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons, on the Ukrainian front may have some impact in the immediate vicinity. They don’t change the overall strategic outlook.
Second, the consequences of crossing the nuclear threshold are enormous, and it will bring countries that are sort of in the middle right now, like India, off the sidelines. And then you have Xi Jinping twice publicly warning Putin not to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine or with respect to Ukraine. There’s a final sort of realistic factor, and that is that, you know, in that part of the world, in that area, the winds blow from West to East. Setting off tactical nuclear weapons is going to end up with Russia getting most of the radioactive fallout. So, you know, just logically speaking, I think that in terms of where we are in Ukraine now, that that’s an exaggerated–that’s an exaggerated threat, and frankly, I think it’s as you suggested. The result has been we’ve ended up being deterred rather than the Russians.
MR. IGNATIUS: Another strange new dimension of the Russian threat came last week when Representative Mike Turner prompted a discussion of new Russian space weapons. The details are still unclear and classified, but as best we know, these are systems, perhaps nuclear-powered, that could disable the enormous growth of commercial networks, constellations in space, as well as U.S. military and communications capabilities. You’ve studied these matters for decades. What was your reaction to this disclosure about new Russian efforts? And more generally, how should we think about space as a future military domain?
DR. GATES: Well, it’s not terribly surprising to me that they would explore these kinds of weapons. You know, back in the 1970s, they were experimenting with what was called the “fractional orbital bombardment system,” which was essentially the use of space in terms of launching nuclear weapons. So–and the idea of disabling satellites is not exactly a new one.
Again, the challenge is how do you set off that kind of–if you’re using actually a nuclear weapon in space, how do you prevent it from simultaneously taking out all the Russian satellites that are up there? How are you going to differentiate between a Russian satellite, a Chinese satellite, and an American satellite, if you’re setting off something as crude as a nuclear–as a nuclear device? So it has a lot of–it has a lot of complications, it seems to me.
But the notion of countries figuring out–and Russia in particular–figuring out or trying to figure out how to disable an adversary’s satellites and disrupt military communications and targeting capabilities and intelligence is not at all surprising to me.
MR. IGNATIUS: So I mentioned, Mr. Secretary, the mood last weekend in Munich as being pretty grim, and one theme, sometimes stated but often unstated, was a concern about what Donald Trump’s election, again, as president, might mean. We have a question from a member of our audience, Eric Povel from Belgium, who asks, “Will a second Trump term mean the end of NATO?” What do you think?
DR. GATES: Well, you hear different things from different elements of the former president’s camp, some that this is all about pressure on the Europeans, on NATO members to do more for their own defense, and less about actually walking away from the alliance. I think nobody actually knows right now what a reelected President Trump would do with respect to NATO.
NATO’s made some pretty significant strides in recent years in terms of additional resources for security and defense. When I was secretary, there were, I think, five countries that met the 2 percent threshold of GDP for defense. There are now 18 of 32 by the end of this year, and most of the countries in the alliance are headed in the right direction.
Part of the reason is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but the other reason is–and it goes back several years, has less to do with our prospective election than it does with previous elections, and that is questions in Europe–and I would say among all of our allies and friends–about whether the United States is still prepared to accept the responsibilities and the burdens of global leadership. And most of our allies and friends are hedging. They are building up their own defenses because they’re not sure whether the United States is going to be there for them in the event of a future threat from Russia or somebody else.
I think that the challenge that they face is whether Trump is a one-off or whether Biden is a one-off, and it’s that unpredictability about the future of America’s role in the world that is causing this hedging to take place.
One of the points I like to make is that the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel, there have been more visits to Beijing and Moscow by the leaders of those three countries in the last three years than there have been to Washington, D.C. So the rest of the world is not quite sure where America is headed, regardless of who is president, and they’re all hedging because they don’t know. And this is a very real concern for our long-term vital interests, our long-term strategic interests, because if we can’t–if they can’t count on us, we can’t count on them.
MR. IGNATIUS: Let’s switch to another crisis where American power and diplomacy, certainly our interests, are engaged in, and that’s the Gaza War. The United States just vetoed another UN resolution yesterday calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza War. I want to ask you whether you think that veto was wise; but more broadly, President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu increasingly seem to be on a collision course in which Biden tries to get a de-escalation of the crisis in Gaza, and Netanyahu seems to be resisting. You’re a longtime watcher of Bibi Netanyahu. What advice have you got for President Biden now in dealing with this crisis, which has caused so much suffering on both sides, but also still has the risk of becoming a much, much bigger, much worse conflict?
DR. GATES: I think that part of the problem is the United States needs to understand that unlike on a lot of other policies, Netanyahu on the two-state solution has a lot of popular support in Israel. I think there continues to be an underestimate outside of Israel on the traumatic effect on Israel of October 7th.
And Israel was created to prevent another Holocaust and to prevent pogroms, that there would be a safe place for Jews in the world. And in all of Israel’s wars with the Arab states, they have never experienced anything like the massacre of innocent civilians that they suffered on October 7th, and I think it has had a huge impact psychologically inside Israel.
And so I think that the administration was correct after October 7th in the very strong support that they provided for Israel under those circumstances. I think that as the–that the retaliation against Hamas in Gaza has proceeded, I think the administration has also taken the right position in terms of pressing harder for more humanitarian relief–more food, more medicine, and so on–and more effort to prevent collateral damage, to prevent the killing of innocent Palestinians.
This has been made much tougher by Hamas’s approach, which is to integrate themselves with the civilian population so that there is no way to getting at Hamas without going through innocent civilians. This is what the Taliban did. This is what Hamas does, and it makes the situation all the more complicated for Israel. My own view, David, is that while we have to state that ultimately a two-state solution is the only solution, we have to recognize that it is going to be a long path to get there, and the notion of recognizing a Palestinian Authority as a state now, I think, is a huge mistake. There has to be a process, a sequence of events, and some established criteria, of changes that have to happen in the West Bank, in the Palestinian Authority, and among the Palestinians themselves with Arab support that over time will allow some confidence to be built on the part of the Israelis that a Palestinian state next door is not going to be an existential threat to Israel, is not going to be a threat for another October 7th. And that is going to take time.
And we can move in that direction. We’ve had a three-star U.S. general for years in Israel training, in charge of training Palestinian Security Forces, and over time, the Israeli security folks began to develop some confidence in those Palestinian security people. And so there are some things that can be done, but this is going to be a long process, because it is going to require–before there can ever be a two-state solution, it is going to require a rebuilding or a building of confidence on the part of the Israelis that this new state is not going to be a threat to them.
And I think that is what the diplomacy in the West is kind of–right now is missing, is the notion that yes, we have to stipulate that someday there will be a two-state solution, but here are the things that have to be done. Here is the path that gets us to that at some point in the future.
You know, Neta–I have disagreed with Netanyahu on a lot of things over a lot of years, but he does have a point when he says, “When you want me to negotiate with the Palestinians, am I negotiating with the Palestinian Authority that might be willing to recognize Israel, or am I negotiating with Hamas that declares the existence of Israel to be something they will always fight against and try to destroy this country? Which Palestinians am I negotiating with?” Until we can give the Israelis some confidence on that score, I think we are not going to have much success on the diplomatic front.
MR. IGNATIUS: So it has been a wonderful chance to tour this poor world and all its problems with one of the wisest foreign policy observers I know, former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for being with us today.
DR. GATES: My pleasure, David.
MR. IGNATIUS: So please join us on Washington Post Live for our future programming. We invite you to subscribe, to sign up, see what we’ve got coming. Thank you for joining us today for this conversation about global crises.
