Episode 715: Securing Ukraine's Future Security, with Emma Ashford

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for you at a time of your convenience. And for today's show, it's we worked on scheduling this for a few weeks, but we'd be hard pressed to have found a better time to come on to talk about if we're looking for a firm and lasting piece cease fire, something involving the Russio Ukrainian conflict that started over three years ago this weekend, that's been part of the shop top shelf of the news. Is everybody after that meeting in the Oval Office at the end of last week,

what are we looking at going forward? Can we find a way to get the parties to the peace table? What would that piece look like? Who will be involved in it? Or is the slog just going to continue going on? And the best way to get that piece? Is it the West? Is it bilateral? Is it something different? And how do you have that piece ongoing? And is that ultimate solution where it is with most nations internally to Ukraine. And we're going to pick up that topic

with a great reference point with our guest today. It's her most recent article is titled Ukraine must guarantee its own security and coming back to mid Rats is going to be Emma Ashford, Emma, welcome back to.

eighteenth of February. But I think what's really nice about it, and I know it makes you happy, is, in spite of everything that's gone on in the last forty eight hours at the Paul Mill level involving the Ukraine conflict, a lot of the issues and the points and options that you bring up in your article, they still are applicable now is today you wrote them, and I would be remissed to our guest and everybody else if I

didn't ask you. Here we are on late Sunday afternoon, forty eight hours after that Zelenski dvance and President Trump meaning the Oval Office all the back and forth that we've seen in the late breaking news. How do things look from your perch?

it actually goes and whether it's worth it. And you know, so we are still having these debates and they're really not new. What's new is the context in which we're having them. I think That's where the last forty eight hours becomes really interesting.

didn't get signed is not all that important. But we ended up in this spat right where Zolensky very much kind of stood his ground and argued back with Trump, with Vance, with others in the room in a way that foreign leaders I think have learned over time it's not particularly wise to do with Donald Trump, and ends up getting in this big argument with the Vice president and after that meeting ends up leaving before the follow

up press conference before signing it. It was it was a huge spat and Zelensky then went off to London. I believe he had tea with the King today. But also you know, the British government's been hosting an emergency summit of European leaders, trying to get them together to talk about how they can do this potentially without the US, but I think you know, again, I'll make sort of

a point. I'm sure we're going to pull on more later, which is I think it's really notable that what came out of that, you know, Vice President sorry, Prime Minister Kiir Starmer said basically that Ukraine kind of needs to get on board with peace. We need to figure out the details, but you know, we've got to work with the Americans on this. I'm not sure that was necessarily

for the Ukrainians. We're hoping that this would come down. So, as I say, very busy weekend, happy to talk about whatever from that sort of giant pool of things you're interested in.

but talk about what the effect of that agreement. As on the Ukrainians, Yeah.

but nonetheless it had nuclear weapons. They were still under the control of the Soviets in Moscow. The Ukrainians couldn't have used them. But this is actually one of these successes of early US diplomacy in the post Cold War period, is negotiating with these countries to remove these weapons, send them back to Russia proper, and so we don't have like three or four more nuclear states on the world stage.

The document signed in the case of Ukraine is this Budapest Memorandum, and in it the countries that signed, including the US and including Russia, promised that they will assure Ukraine's future security, and there's been some back and forth about what this actually meant. There's nothing concrete written in the document. It's notable that in Ukrainian the word for a shurer and guarantee are very similar, they might even

be the same, So there's some jubaiety here. But if you listen to the diplomats who actually negotiated this thing talking, they will tell you there was no guarantee to provide truth in case of an invasion of Ukraine in the future. So that is kind of the background here, and you can see why today the Ukrainians are very wary of anything called the guarantee that doesn't actually include a concrete, explicit guarantee, because they have this in the back of their minds.

And I think you hit the high points perfectly because a lot of the same people that are in high warrible about how they want to commit people to do things, are the same people who are constantly hitting on this, you know, rules based international order, okay, nineteen ninety four of the Budapest Miner Memorandum. Twenty years later Russia in essence, I think if they called the world bluff and stepped

right in there. So when we're looking at if you want to be you want to be charitable for what happened at the end of the week in the Oval Office, you can understand, especially from the Ukrainian point of view, and if you go back with their history, don't have to go too, but I'd just go back to the battles and the wars from nineteen seventeen on up through the nineteen nineteen early nineteen twenties in Ukraine that there is a long and deep history of them signing agreements

and in not going anywhere, and the meeting they had in Europe with a lot of those same players. There's a lot of talk, so to speak. So when you look at the environment of trying to get people to the table, I'm not sure the same worldview, the same procedures, and the same players that we're working in the nineteen nineties from Ukraine through the Balkans, are really going to pave a smooth pass for anybody who wants to have a serious conversation at a table to try to stop this war.

made it into NATO. They're inside that Article five guarantee. Now the Ukrainians have remained outside it. And that's I mean, in large part geographic right, they are on the edge right between you know, Eastern Europe and Russia. And so they never made it inside that umbrella. There are plenty of reasons why US policymakers didn't want them to. But even as the West is talking about liberal values and

standing up for democracy and all of these things. It really is very much a real politique calculation for the Eastern European.

They're going to be playing both ends against the metal.

So you know, what we've seen over the last three years in Europe is European states very much committing to standing up support Ukraine, bolstering their own defenses. You might even remember in Germany there's this whole thing about the Zeit and vendor right, the changing of the times, we're going to start looking at the world differently. This was a speech that the Chancellor gave just after the invasion, and then a lot of that spending didn't materialize, and

that's actually quite common across Europe. So you know, we've got these very strong pledges of assistance that have been met with, you know, some assistance, and Europeans have stepped up a little more as the US has become you know, less likely to do so, but they're nowhere near ready to stand on their own feet. And what we have is pretty much three years of squandered time that they could have been building armament's capacity, and that's simply not been doing it.

budget that's spent on weapons and material. So you know, if you have a military that's basically a social welfare program and you're not buying any weapons, you know you don't get the credit. And the bottom left hand corner, you've got Canada, you've got Belgium, you've got Slovenia. A lot of nations had made progress to try to push above two percent, and you know, there's nothing like reality.

Wake people up. In Poland, Poland has really taking a leadership position here and seeing the environment along with the Baltics and stepping forward. It's I think they're north of three and a half percent. They're going to push to four percent or more. And there's a real interesting comment when we look at Europeans, as many of us for two decades have been asking them to take a firmer role in the security on their continent. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk had a neat phrase that he did on

the tarmac. Quote, five hundred million of Europeans are asking three hundred million Americans to defend them against one hundred and forty million Russians. The Europe today lacked the belief that we truly are a global force. So it's not just individually, it's Europe itself and Poland stepped forward in a leadership position, but besides some smaller nations. When he looks behind him, who has his back? France and Germany and even the UK in many ways, the sense of

urgency just isn't there. So Bz to the Poles, but the rest of continental NATO, it's a lot of their statements have been a little hollow recently.

in the Alliance, aside from Canada, which you noted, is Spain. Right, And if you're sitting in Madrid, this situation looks very different than if you're sitting in Warsaw and so you know, the divergent threat perceptions don't help. The lack of a common institutional structure doesn't help. You have the US as partly guilty here. We've spent years insisting that all defense stuff has to be done through NATO rather than the

European Union. That only changed in the last sort of maybe one two administration, and so they don't have clay institutional structures for doing it too. And so I fully upset and acknowledge that it is difficult for European states to step up on defense. It is easy for countries like Germany to just pass the bot back to the United States or even to other European states. The problem is, you know, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem, right.

If they can't solve this problem, then the US can't leave, can't pull back, can't shift the burden. But at the same time, what will actually take to make them do that? Maybe it's the US leaving, And so I think that's one of the active debates in trying to understand how

to make Europe step up more. And then Ukraine, of course, is another complication because I think I would probably be remiss if I didn't point out that there are trade offs, right for some of these NATO states, particularly ones like Poland, Arm yourselves or armed Ukraine. That's a tough.

confront the Russians in any stage. They do participate in various NATO activities, but not necessarily at the level we want. So I was struck by one of those phrases in your piece called bluff and prey. Talk a little bit about bluff and pray.

it in German, I cannot pronounce it. But she suggested this bluff and Prey, basically saying, look, if you want a European security force to guarantee peace in Ukraine, and again to be very clear here, we're not talking about peacekeeping, We're talking about detendance against Russia in the future, right, so it's preventing a future war. And she basically says, look,

there's a couple of options, right. You can either bring them into NATO, rely on Article five's to terran abilities, and then you probably don't need as many troops on the ground because the Russians will believe the US will come in swinging if they as they attack. You can if that's not an option, she says, you can send

an adequately resourced force to do this. And I think her estimate was about two hundred thousand, but I've seen estimates all the way up to half a million European troops and all the enablers that they need to actually get there, which they don't have all of necessarily, But that's another option for deterrants. And then the third option, which is the one she calls bluff and prey is

the one where the Europeans send forty thousand troops. That is doable given their current military staffing, given the resources they have at hand. It'll be tough, but it's doable. But then they're basically bluffing, and they're saying they're hoping that Russia doesn't test that bluff because if Russia does, then what is actually behind those forty thousand troops to

flow into theater. You know, if this is just a trip wire force and it gets wipes out by the Russians, the Europeans don't actually have the forces to backstop fighting the war that that would cause. So that I think is why she she went with this very evocative phrase because it's not a realistic approach. It's just an approach to hoping that the problem doesn't occur.

the real fancy feathers that come off the top of their hat, you know they're there. They're on a trip tripwire.

That was just you're referring to. Even if US policymakers were clear upfront that NATO's Article five would not apply to the deployed European troops, the pressure to respond in the event of a Russian attack would be overwhelming, potentially pulling the United States into war. End of quote. That spotlo.

We can all see the news reports and the questions, and in many ways such a force would be and I'm going to be a little snarky here, but it privatizes European virtue signaling about their desires for peace, but americanized as risk because Article five or not, it will create it own logic. And what everybody's trying to avoid is you've got full scale warfare on the European continent again with Americans.

a good outcome for these European countries. And I think it's again it's very notable that we are conflating I think the notion of keeping the peace right, so something like a UN peacekeeping mission or OSSEE monitoring that's you know, focused on some kind of demilitarized zone, on keeping weapons in their appropriate places. We're kind of conflating that with we're going to send Europeans to defend Ukraine in the future.

And I think, you know, in addition to that, the other thing that's really worth pointing out here is this is offering something that has not been offered to Ukraine previously. This is something that was not offered to Ukraine prior to the war. This is something that was not offered to Ukraine during the war, the idea that foreign forces

would go and fight. And you know, from my point of view, maybe I'm just cynical, but if I feel like I'm sitting in the Kremlin and I'm looking at this and I'm saying, well, you know, the UK and France, they weren't willing to send troops to die for Ukraine during a war. They're gonna flinch and they're not actually going to fight when it comes to it, It's probably fine to me. It increases the risks of this kind of deterrence failure.

but they can't do anything without us support. I mean that we have created this thing for command control, are refueling, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, all kinds of good stuff that's useful in war fighting or even peace monitoring that our European allies haven't developed for themselves, or if they have developed it, it's not quite the same level as the US.

broached it again. But if you go into the nighties and you look at speeches from you know, folks in the Clinton administration, Madeline Albright had one infamous speech to where she talked about the three d's, and one of those ds was we need to avoid duple, by which she meant European states should not build the infrastructure that they would need to actually fight in a contingency on their own, because this might weaken NAIL. And that was the you know that this might weaken the US role

and the continent. So this was actually again part of the strategy until as little as ten years ago. But the problem is you say that means that the capabilities to deploy at scale and then manage that deployment. The European states have some of them, They definitely don't have all of them. And I think that you know, you mentioned a couple you mentioned ISR being one of them. I think that's very likely they would need US support

on that. But also logistics, the Europeans really don't have the capability to deploy forces and keep them supplied the way that they would need to for some kind of long term deployment like this that would ploy acquire US capabilities.

So again we're talking you know, maybe there's no US troops on the ground, but I think what what Europeans are still asking for or insofar as I read all the comments today and this weekend, they're still asking for the US to not just come to their aid if something goes wrong, but also to provide these kind of ancillary or enabling capabilities that are kind of on the edge of whether the US is actually involved or not.

They could could, they couldn't make the logistics happen. So I think it was a combination of marines and army got together US and fixed it. And there's these assumptions that they have and their planning assumptions that those US enablers that you outlined are always going to be there.

And you also brought up in your article something else that is familiar for those that are familiar with how NATO has the Our European NATO allies have these familiar habits, and I keep wanting to dismiss it, Emma, this call for bringing Ukraine into NATO, because it just doesn't survive serious follow on questions of serious people but here we have again today and an interview President Zelenski said that you know, you know, I'm willing to resign if that

will get you know, NATO membership for Ukraine. So he and others keep bringing this up, and you mentioned I want to do another little quote from your article here. Quote. Kiev itself has long been insistent that the only way to resolve this concern is to provide Ukraine with NATO membership as part of an eventual peace deal. This is ideal from Kiev's point of view because it offloads the problem of preventing a future war to the United States.

It would also be beneficial for European states. Cost effective is one EU leader recently put it, as it would rely less on spending arms or military deployments and more

on the paper guarantee provided by NATO's Article five end quote. As an American, I read that as we're going to have another NATO nation, this time a front load nation, and we're ignoring whether Russia would ever accree to something like this, which I don't know a serious person that

really can make that argument successfully today. But with that again, we have another dependent nation, this one who is one of the poorest in Europe even before the Wars, was one of the most corrupt nations, if not the most corrupt nation in Europe, so that civil society would still need to be rebuilt that would again rely on NATO read US deterrence to keep them safe. You're closer to these people in DC, the serious people, the people we respect that still bring up membership is an option. I

can't understand it. Can you explain their position from somebody that has I know it's with them on a regular basis.

They go and work for NATO for a few years, they interface with them in jobs at the Pentagon, and when you get to know people, it becomes very hard to think purely in terms of national interest, and European states have a real incentive to talk about our common interests are common defense, implying that there is no divergence in interests between the US and its allies. And I mean, look, this is something that we've seen kind of over and

over in this in this conflict. We saw Violensky do it again on Friday in the Oval Office, you know, saying, you know, if Ukraine falls, the US will be next. You know, your security depends on our security, and you know you can I think saell a very weak version of that argument that it would not necessarily be good for US security in general if Ukraine were to be

conquered by Russia. Right. I think that's a reasonable argument, But the idea that Ukrainian security is you know, an absolutely essential thing for the US, I can't sell that right, That to me doesn't make any sense. And so I just think socialization. Hearing these points repeated again and again, I think goes at least some way to explaining why folks are so bought in on NATO in terms of the you know, Ukraine in NATO part of the debate.

I agree with you. I mean, my brain says that this is off the table, and it's been off the table for you know, a decade or more, and yet people in Washington talk about it a lot, and I think it's a fundamental you know, either misunderstanding or purposeful obslustication of the fact that you know, NATO as it currently stands is almost entirely dependent on US and military four and NATO expansion in the post Cold War period

has been in some ways almost a Ponzi scheme. Right, we admit new members, we don't necessarily have the troops on the ground to adequately defend those countries. What we're relying on is that the US thinks Article five is so important that it will come in swinging with lots of troops if something were to happen in one of those states. And to be frank the you know, the

debate over Ukraine and NATO. The White House has always had an effective veto on this, because if the US isn't willing to go and defend Ukraine, then it's not

going to happen. But it's very notable. I think as well that other states in Europe have kind of resisted this behind the scenes, particularly the Germans, because I think there's a real acknowledgment that, you know, if you start to extend the security guarantees so far out they become questionable, then maybe the whole enterprise gets called into question, and so I mean again, I do think the politics suggests that NATO is just not on the table for Ukraine

at this point, and that's why they're pushing for compatible guarantee. But yeah, it is a debate that just won't die.

a hedgehog, a ceasefire and total rearming. What are you envision?

isn't credible. I actually continue to think, and I know other people have said this too, that the closest parallel to what Ukraine has been going through for the last three years really is the Winter War, in which the Soviet Union in nineteen thirty nine, I believe, attacked Finland and again very similar to the Ukraine case, right, they made these massive demands about giving up on various kinds of Finnish sovereignty. The Finnish government said absolutely not, and

the Soviets invaded. They fought an insurgency for a couple of years, very successfully, and then this sort of rolls into World War Two. But at the end of the day, the upshot was the Finns. After the war, the Soviets were like, I don't really think we want to keep doing this. That was pretty brutal, and they managed to actually negotiate a form of neutrality in which the Finns

basically were armed to the teeth. Their entire population was ready to fight if it came to it, and you know, that was enough to, along with some of these foreign policy concessions, to deter the Soviets from coming back in. So it wasn't NATO that provided a guarantee. No other country in Europe provided guarantees. I think it's notable in that case, when the Finns asked for help, nobody in Europe sent helped because they were also busy arming themselves

in the run up to the Second World War. And so for me, that's a really interesting and good model for the Ukraine case, because what we've seen in the last three years is that Ukraine can defend itself. Yeah, they're not, you know, completely destroying the Russian forces. They're not about to drive all the way to Moscow and topple put In reclaimed some of their territory they lost in the initial stages of this. They're holding the Russians even now to a very slow advance, and you know,

they've built their own defense industrial capabilities pretty well. And to me, that says that Ukraine itself would be built top partly with Western aid and partly through its own means, to become so unappetizing through Russia that they don't actually want to invade. Again. You mentioned Hedgehog. This is sort of we hear about this a lot in the context of Taiwan these days. The porcupine model, the Hedgehog model, just making yourself so indigestible to an aggressor that they

can't come in. And I really do think this is the most viable option for Ukraine. It doesn't rely on paper guarantees, it doesn't rely on hopes that the US will come in eventually. It doesn't rely on holding on in this war and just hoping. Instead, it relies on kind of taking what you have managed to achieve now and then building up so that you don't necessarily have to face it again.

not just history, but view of things. So the Finnish example also can give you some insight to what the Russians have as a benchmark. And Finland managed to get its independence, it had to give up some land to do it, not a whole bunch of land. I think it was ten percent or fifteen percent of their land they eventually gave up to get their peace, And of course there was Finlandization afterwards, which probably Ukraine wouldn't have to go through something like that, but you never know

what will happened in the negotiating table. But a core of that is the Fins were armed to the teeth during the Cold Wars, were armed to the teeth, had their own independent They built some of the best fighter They still do build some of the best fighter planes,

the best tanks out there. And you also had the Swiss, who to maintain their neutrality, did, like you said, very undigestible appearing country that regardless of what's happening around them, that somebody is just not going to mess with them or will go around them. And I've thought that regardless of what happens, if we can get people to the negotiating table, put aside what if any land exchanges you're

going to do. But what would really be helpful in the US and Europe, I think is, irrespective of security,

have those institutions if they can work on civil society, because even before the war, Ukraine's rule of law issues were spotty to be charitable, they also have a demographic nightmare where there's just not going to be any Ukrainians in twenty or thirty years. But I really think that that from a military point of view, and when you were talking about the ultimate answer to Ukraine's security guarantees is internal the Swiss, the Swedes to a lesser extent

that bends. They've set a template in Europe for nations that have similar challenges while being a neutral party.

forms of neutrality. And I think one of the problems in today's debate is that we tend to think of neutrality as basically the worst parts of Finlandization or even potentially you know, the partition of Poland. Right, that's what neutrality does. It just lets the great powers rip you apart and play in your domestic politics. But we actually have all these other examples that are really interesting the Swiss right, they date their neutrality back to the Napoleonic era.

Why didn't Napoleon fight the Swiss? Why did he negotiate with them? Because of geography and because they had basically every man in the country under arms and they were one of the few that was able to actually negotiate from this position of strength versus Napoleon. The Austrians, right,

that's a slightly sadder case. That's a neutrality that comes out of being conquered at the end of the Second World War, and as a result, the Austrians are demilitarized and their internal politics are very much grown to getting interfered in. And then I think the more positive examples genuinely are you know, the Finns we mentioned, the Swedes, that we mentioned, the Irish right. They're obviously a long way off the continent, but have neutrality too for different reasons.

And so I think talking a little more about these models and how you might apply that in the Ukrainian case could be a little more useful than just saying, you know, neutrality will leave the Ukrainians at the mercy of Moscow.

their productivity of artillery shells and stuff. But I know the Polls are also ericturing themselves into a pretty heavyly armed country because they've been through this path a few times. So talk a little bit about how this work for the benefit of the European and NATO slash NATO countries.

to fire us ass out there? We need anti ship missiles and so in the US case, you know, producing those things flows in the opposite direction for a lot of the lot of the things that Ukraine might need. That's not at all true for the Europeans. Right, If the Germans wanted to build up their own defense, build up their own defense industrial base, they'd want to be producing pretty much the same things as the Ukrainians need because they want to fight a land war, that's what

they need. So from my point of view, there is a there is a commonality here where some of those arguments that don't ring true in the US case about building up the US industrial base, actually I think they

do work in Europe much better. There are a variety of options in states like the Czech Republic where there are decommissioned or old Soviet ammunition production facilities, some of which have already been reactivated, but others can be I do think I should you know, to be frank here, the European Union has actually begun to take some steps on some of these things. There's a new European Union funding mechanism that allows states to take out defense to do this, sorry to take out debt in order to

improve their defense capabilities. So they are taking steps. It's just not nearly fast enough. And I think the biggest states, in particular the Germans, are absent from this at the moment. And I continue to find this really perplexing because one of the side effects of the war has been recession in Germany. Right, They've lost a quarter of their industrial output in the last three years because they've lost cheap

gas from Russia. You know, one of the ways that a normal non German government would handle that would be to take some debt on and plow it into, you know, things like building up defense production in some of these areas, switching over factories to make things our defense relevant. The Germans have not done that. Potentially they may do it slightly more under this new government that seems to be forming and which is I think a little more forward

leaning than the Schultz government was. But I mean, to me, that just seems like a win win, And so that's if I were sitting in the White House, I'd be very much pushing European states to move in that direction, because again I think, you know, that's the sort of

thing that the Europeans can help Ukraine with. And then also finally here Ukraine itself had a very extensive defense space, going all the way back to the Soviet period, they made a lot of the more advanced arms that the Soviet Union used in One of the horrible ironies of this conflict is a lot of the weapons the Russians are using, probably the older ones were probably made in Ukraine some of them, but they've rebuilt some of that, and they've began to produce lots of things like drones

that are small, che easy to manufacture domestically, and if they are not constantly getting bombs right, they'll be able to build up that capability much more during a ceasefire. Piece. So again, I really do think Europe and Ukraine can do this together. They just need to get over some of their political hang ups, which I realize having studied Europe for a long time, that's a little easier said than done.

as to why but nothing I can fix on. I was thinking in your in your reply to Mark's question, that frustration that comes when I really start looking at the responses, especially over the last few days, it really

goes for a few weeks. Is in these meetings. I hope that this is helping to break some of the adhesions and open some eyes as a fact that as happens in many points of friction, is that there's an opportunity here and to push towards some enlightened self interest and to take advantage of some people looking at resident

Ukrainian and European military capabilities. Because there's been a conversation going on since even before November, and I'll use because there's been a lot of debate about it involving everybody's everybody's favorite Colby, a Bridge Colby, and the debate about him coming in in his policy, and he has been a pacific primis for a long time about addressing the People's Republic China, and we can all run through the scenarios and have maybe been involved in some of those

war games where should America find itself engaged in a large pacific war, Europe will become an economy of force operation even as a NATO player that we are simply because of the challenge that China will present, which means, should something come up in Europe, they have got to be able to stand on their own, not just for those things we've talked about that they are used to

using US for logistics or ORR. If anybody in Europe thinks they can get on the phone to the Pentagon when we're at D plus ninety in a Pacific war and say, hey, we would really like some of your RC one thirty five's to come over here our squadron we're with the C seventeens to help us with something that's happening that's not going to happen. That Europe really

should use this as an opportunity in a friendly and non confrontational way to become more independent because it's in their enlightened self interest to do so. Because of the People's Republic. As China decides to challenge the US and the specific allies, we're not going to be doing much with Europe.

He's going to pool US out of NATO. He's going to do it tomorrow, and that's what's going to happen. But we actually looked not just at that scenario, but we looked at one in which the US presence in Europe slowly withers because of a US debt crisis and cuts to the defense budget. And then we looked at the Taimewan scenario. And one of the things that we actually found is despite all of this crosstop about you know, well, you need different things for Europe and the Indo Pacific.

A lot of the particularly the high end enablers, so the ISR targeting stuff and the logistics support all of those things that we talked about earlier in this conversation that the Europeans can't provide themselves. Those have to go almost immediately and a bunch of the troops in Europe who are there right now, primarily in Europe, to support

those capabilities. They also then have to go to somewhere closer to conflicts in the Pacific if this is happening, you know, whether that's back to the continental US or even further. And so you know, the scenario in which the US does get into some conflict in the end of Pacific, which I really hope never happens, but that

would basically be a whol out, not overnight. But we assessed that if the war, you know, assuming this isn't a war that goes nuclear in a day, right, we assessed that within a couple of months and any of the most important capabilities would be gone from the European theaters. So you know, again I adree with you that is in Europe, it's in the interests of European leaders, in European publics for these states to step up. Again. The problem really comes back to this question of what will

cause them to step up. And you know, I've some colleagues that have done some work on this over the last few years. But you know, basically people point to their two cases where you can see European states actually starting to do something on defense. One of them is immediately after the invasion of Ukraine in February twenty twenty two. You actually do see states suddenly turn around, commit lots of money to defense, start talking about it seriously, start

taking steps. It then kind of withers away within about three months. It becomes apparent the Russians aren't succeeding in overthrowing the government in Kiev. The US surges a bunch of troops to the region, and so that fizzles out. The other case that's interesting is during the nine seventies under Nixon, the US was committing significant forces to be at naw and the European states get very fearful that, you know, the US is just not going to be

able to do both. Particularly, I mean, you remember that decade is just all financial crises all the time, and so they start to fear the US is going to withdraw, and states like Germany or West Germany then start to

actually step up. So, I mean, look, I think the takeaway from those cases is, you know, the US presence and reassurance of the kind that we see in February twenty twenty two, that tends to suppress the ability or the willingness of European leaders to make tough choices on defense, and fears of US withdrawal or actual US withdrawal ends to elevate those So, you know, I think for me, coming out of this weekend, one of the more interesting questions is going to be whether what happened in the

Oval Office on Friday is enough actually convince European leaders at last that there's an administration in Washington that's serious about burden shifting or will that take actual troop draw downs of some kind. The European leaders may see this is just about creen and not apply it to NATO. How do you actually get to that place where they

make those tough choices to invest in defense. I think that's a really difficult problem, and it's one that so far European policy or US pols meekers have not managed to find an answer to.

discussions about whether we what to do about NATO has an opening negotiation ploy for getting the Europeans to step up. But aside from that, let's let's talk a little bit about what the Ukraine cease fire agreements, whatever settlement light

look like. I mean, they're going to have to give up that part of eastern Ukraine that Samuel Huntington said clashes civilization or whether it is that really don't belong to the West or more much more Russian outlook, are they going to have to just bite the bullet and accept the borders that exist at the end at the day the cease fighting, we have a DMZ situation with the North and South Korea? What are you envision?

or strangely, is actually probably the easiest to resolve. I think there's actually a pretty widespread acceptance at this point that defacto where we are on the ground is probably going to determine who holds what territory going forward, and that there's going to be a demilitarized zone of some size,

and there's a wide range of DMZs. In previous conflicts, there's been a massive range of from like five miles to fifty miles, So probably somewhere in the middle, but I actually think that's one of the easier ones to figure out. Question of sovereignty and arms, these are some of the things we've already talked about a little here tonight.

To what extent is Ukraine going to be allowed, you know, again to join NATO is one question, But to what extent can they you know, host foreign troops for training on their soil? Are there going to be restrictions on Kiev's domestic politics?

because we've talked about armed neutrality. But one of the things that came up in the Istanbul negotiations which were held in May twenty twenty two, was the notion that both sides want some kind of conventional arms control in the region, right, So you know, Ukraine needs to be able to defend itself, but it would be better for everybody if that were in some kind of framework where neither side could have heavy weapons too near the front that kind of thing. So that's a very tricky one

to sort of negotiators. And then finally there's the finance question. The Russians really want sanctions relief. The Trump administration can probably get them some, but the Biden administration made it harder to do that because it's now got to go through Congress. The Europeans have to make their own decisions on sanctions, and they also are the final parties with a say in what happens to those like two hundred billion dollars worth of frozen Russian sets in European bank.

So again, you know, complex questions and complex questions that will probably require more folks to be at the negotiating table than just the US and Russia on all of these. I mean, certainly, I think you can't do this without the Ukrainians. There's going to have to be at least a parallel track with the Europeans on on finance, because I don't think you get there otherwise.

an eye on you? And are you working on anything that you're going to be putting out here pretty soon that we should keep an eye open for as well.

and yeah, most of my work. As you mentioned at the Star, I am a book coming out a little later this year, so I'm excited to start promoting that and one of the main thesies of that book is that the US would benefit from leaning into multipolarity by both bring the capabilities of allies in Europe, in Asia and elsewhere to try and you know, even things out a little with China and Russia and others. So I'm expecting I'll be rating a lot more on this topic over the next few months.