Newt Gingrich (2:57)

George, welcome and thank you for joining me again on Newsworld.

George Beebe (3:01)

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Newt Gingrich (3:03)

Let's start with the most recent news. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner just met with Vladimir Putin. It was Witkoff's sixth meeting, but the first time Kushner has joined. This is also the first in person discussion between Putin and Trump's team since the Alaska summit. What do you think is the significance of this meeting?

George Beebe (3:24)

Well, it's clear at this point that we've gotten very serious about finding a compromise settlement to the war in Ukraine. And that means that neither side is going to get all the things that it wants. Both sides are going to have to make some concessions. And I think we're pretty close now to a point where Ukraine's core interests can be addressed. And I think the biggest ones that they have to ensure that they can survive as a sovereign, independent state, that they have assurances that their security concerns about a Russian reinvasion will be addressed as part of this settlement, and that they can rebuild the country, recover from the devastation that this war has inflicted on Ukraine, and look forward to some sort of prosperous future. So that is a part of this deal. And I think the Russians understand that unless those concerns are addressed that Ukraine has, we're not going to get a compromise. We're not going to get an end to the war, and they want one. And that's a part of this that you don't really hear a lot about in the public debate. But Russia's concerns in this are less about Ukraine and more about what they perceive as threats posed by the United States and NATO to Russia. Russia's biggest issues in this war are also security. They want to make sure that Russia is not going to be threatened by the prospect of US Or NATO military infrastructure on Ukrainian territory that can be used in some way to threaten Russia either politically or militarily to strike Russia's strategic nuclear infrastructure in some way. So what they're looking at here is not so much how do I compromise with Ukraine, but how do we compromise with the United States so that our concerns about the military threats posed by NATO and by the US Military are a part of this settlement. So what I think has been going on is the United States, its negotiators, had been engaging with both Ukraine and Russia to find a way to address both of these core interests that the Ukrainians and Russians have. And I think we're close. I think we're zeroing in on a compromise that both sides are not going to like, but they will recognize that it will ensure that their most important interests are addressed. And I think that's what the focus of these talks really is on right now.

Newt Gingrich (6:09)

When Putin talks about the fact that Ukraine is not a legitimate state and that his real goal is to eliminate Ukraine and guarantee that it could never function as a part of NATO or any would be a threat, do you think that's mostly bluff, or do you think he means it?

George Beebe (6:31)

Well, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding surrounding this question of whether Putin regards Ukraine as a legitimate state or not. On the one hand, he has argued repeatedly that Ukraine in its current borders, its current condition, is something of a historical accident, that it is the results of conquest wars repeatedly over the centuries, the breakup of empires, one of which was the Soviet empire, of course, but another was the Austro Hungarian empire. And of course, when you're talking about Crimea, there's also the prospect of Turkey and its involvement and all of this. So it is a complicated history. And I think what Putin is saying here is we have wound up with an artificial state that has been sewn together from the remnants of these old empires, and it can't continue to exist if it continues to be the object of a geopolitical tug of war between NATO and Russia. We're going to have to find a way to address that bigger geopolitical context, or Ukraine itself will come apart. It won't continue to exist in its current form. Now, that's something he's been warning about since the early 2000s. He had conversations with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush about this warning about what would happen if the United States and NATO tried to pull Ukraine into the alliance. His warning essentially was this country will come apart. It will break apart at the seams because it can't hold together under that kind of geopolitical competition. It's going to have to be a neutral state. Now, Putin has never said that Ukraine as a neutral state should not exist or that Russia will not recognize Ukraine as a neutral state. I think he's been careful to say in that kind of geopolitical context, Russia can live with an independent Ukraine. Now, does he want to have very strong influence over Ukraine? Absolutely. Has he decided, given the geopolitical tug of war that has gone on over the past couple of decades, that the Donbas region, which is largely populated by Russian speakers, Russian Orthodox believers, and has a history of association with Russia in various forms, has he concluded that that should be part of Russia, that it can no longer viably be Part of a Ukrainian independent state? Absolutely, he has, but that wasn't his plan. A what people forget in all of this was after the Maidan Revolution in 2014, the Russians assisted a separatist movement in the Donbas region that essentially said, we want either independence from Ukraine or annexation from Russia. But Putin refused to recognize them as independent, and he refused to annex that region for eight years. And there's a very good reason why he didn't want to break that part of Ukraine off from the rest of Ukraine, and that is that this part of Ukraine did not want to be in the NATO alliance. And Putin wanted a reliable domestic Ukrainian group that would oppose that kind of move, that would serve as a counterweight to parts of western Ukraine that were very enthusiastic about integrating Ukraine into NATO. And Putin took a lot of criticism inside Russia for his refusal to recognize Donbas independence or annex them. A lot of the hardline nationalist patriots in Russia thought that Putin was too weak, not willing to protect these, as they saw them, compatriots in the Donbas, and too eager to seek some sort of compromise with the West. They thought he was essentially a Germanist, not somebody that was sufficiently hardline Russian patriotic. So all of that, I think, is a very useful historical context to understand where the Russians are on this. This war that they launched, this full scale invasion of Ukraine that they launched in 2022 is not primarily about acquiring land or conquering all of Ukraine or bringing it as a whole into a rebuilt Russian empire. It is largely driven by security concerns, their belief that Ukraine was, over time, steadily becoming more and more of a direct military and intelligence partner to the United States and NATO. And they were seeing military infrastructure and military cooperation deepening. And the worry in Russia was, if those trends continued, that it would reach a point in a few years where the only way Russia could prevent Ukraine from actually becoming a member of the NATO alliance would be to fight NATO itself, which they were not willing to do. They thought the window was closing, that if they waited, this would no longer be Russia against Ukraine. This would be Russia against the United States and its allies. And that was a prospect that I think they found very threatening, and they wanted to include that. So all that tells me is if we're going to get out of the mess that we're in and end this war, we're going to have to address the core security concerns that the Russians have as well as the core security concerns that the Ukrainians have. And that's really the trick. That's a balancing act that US Negotiators are, I think, making some progress in carrying out.

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I'm okay. She's okay. Folks, we do your human resources right so you can do right by your people. Jess works for your people.

Newt Gingrich (14:19)

4, Ukraine to retain enough military capability that you wouldn't have two or three or four years from now, a sort of third Russian assault. If you count what happened in 14 as sort of the first wave, this is the second wave. It seems to the Russians been pretty clear that they will not accept a Ukraine strong enough to defend itself.

George Beebe (14:45)

Well, I'm not sure that's true now the devil's in the details on that. And that's obviously a key aspect of these negotiations. Now at the Alaska summit, in the concluding press conference that Putin and President Trump had, Putin did say, look, we understand that Ukraine has security concerns here that have to be addressed. And he went on to say, and naturally we are willing to discuss that. So now that by itself doesn't say exactly what the Russians are willing to live with, but what I would imagine here, if you go back to the istanbul negotiations in 2022 between Russia and Ukraine, that was mediated by several different mediators, one of which was the Turks. The Russians put down on paper their demands for limits on the Ukrainian military and the kinds of things they're concerned about a are size. How large is that military? And the Russian demand at that time was for a military of 85,000 troops as a standing peacetime army, which is ridiculous. That's not a military that can defend itself against Russia in any way. But they also wanted to cap on long range strike missiles. And that term, long range is not a precise term. But now you're in a discussion over what kind of range limitations might the Ukrainians agree to in its ability to strike deep into Russian territory. And so that's a negotiation. You know, one man's defensive capability is another man's offensive capability. So that is going to be an issue that will require us some hard negotiating. But if you look at the so called 28 point plan that got leaked to the media a few weeks ago that envisioned a cap on the Ukrainian military of 600,000 men, which quite honestly is not a cap at all on Ukraine. They don't have the population base or the economic wherewithal to sustain a peacetime army of that size that's many times larger than any European NATO ally. The United States larger than the Brits by, you know, several orders of magnitude larger than the German military. Very expensive to maintain. The Ukrainians couldn't do it. So that figure, I think is an indication that things are moving. And this question of the size of the Ukrainian military and what qualitative caps might be involved in this is under discussion Russian right now. And this is going to be a central issue. Are the Russians willing to compromise on this? My guess is yes, we're going to find out here. But they have engaged with the Ukrainians on this question before. They didn't reach a satisfactory compromise. The Ukrainian proposal in April of 2022 was for a military cap of 250,000. So we're now many times greater than that in the current numbers being discussed. But this is something that the Russians understand they're going to have to compromise on. My guess is that we can find some numbers here that are large enough that the Ukrainians can defend themselves, but not so large that the Russians feel that their strategic capabilities are threatened in some way. And they have, of course, an eye not on Ukraine itself, but on Ukraine as an element of the military threat posed by the United States and Europe toward Russia. That's the balance they're looking at. So that's why they want to talk to the United States. Really. The Russians think that this is really a negotiation with the United States over the European security order, over the threats that they perceive pointed at them from the United States and NATO.

Newt Gingrich (19:14)

Do you think that Putin and his team were shocked when they could not get to Kyiv?

George Beebe (19:21)

Well, yeah, I do. Their military plan really was to launch a lightning strike that would seize the airport outside of Kyiv, and in so doing, force the Ukrainian leadership essentially to flee and then allow some sort of puppet regime friendly toward Russia to step in. And that, in turn, wouldn't require a long war and they could get this over with, and then they're in a position to dictate the terms of some kind of settlement. And that failed. They basically put all their chips on that bid to seize the airport and institute regime change. And what happened, of course, was the United States, the CIA, got a hold of Russia's war plan. We knew exactly what they were going to do. We knew that it was going to be Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead pipe at noon on Thursday. And we told the Ukrainians, here's what's coming. Now, the Ukrainians, of course, were skeptical initially and kind of went, ah, you know, what do you know? But they, after a little bit of discussion, understood, yeah, this is serious, and, yeah, we better prepare. So that made the difference here between success and failure for the Russians. The Ukrainians were ready for them. They defeated that attempt to seize the airport, and then the Russians were in trouble because they had not done the kind of planning that they needed to do. What if Plan A fails? You know, what do we do? What's the backup plan? And that threw them into disarray, quite honestly, and led to some major changes in Russia's approach. You know, we're living with several years of attritional warfare that have flowed from that.

Newt Gingrich (21:19)

Do you think that it would have been politically impossible at home for Putin to have said, well, that didn't work. Let's go back to the status quo ending.

George Beebe (21:31)

I don't think it was so much politically impossible as it was strategically impossible. This is an issue that a lot of people in the west don't understand, but the Russians view the prospect of US Or NATO military infrastructure in Ukraine as an existential threat, as something that threatens the very viability of the Russian Federation. So this is not a nice to do for them. This is a must do. They don't think they have a choice. And a lot of Americans don't grasp this. They look at this war as an elective, as an ambition, as something that the Russians would like to do, because they're looking over at Ukraine and saying, hey, that territory should be ours. That country should be in our sphere of influence. Let's go make that happen. And as a result, our approach to that has been, well, let's raise the costs of this invasion. Let's show Russia that the benefits of this ambition are far outweighed by the costs and damages that this invasion is doing to Russia, economically, et cetera, diplomatically. Let's crank up the pressure on the economy. Let's turn Russia into an international diplomatic pariah. Let's expand the NATO alliance and show Putin that all the things that he wants actually he can't get. And then he'll look at the cost and benefits and say, yeah, it's not worth it. It's just too costly. Let's end this invasion. And that idea really animated the Biden administration's approach to this. And I think it was a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia's perceptions of its own interests and what motivated this invasion. The Russians thought their back was against the wall, that the prospect of NATO being in Ukraine was so threatening to them that they felt they had to do something. The west made clear that we weren't willing to strike a diplomatic bargain over this. We essentially said, no, Russia doesn't get a voice in whether NATO is in Ukraine or whether Ukraine is in NATO. That is a sacred sovereign decision for the Ukrainians to make, and the Russians don't get a veto over that. And the Russians reaction to that was, okay, you know, we hear you, but if you're not willing to discuss this and compromise at the diplomatic table, we will exercise our veto over this on the battlefield. Now, the only way you're going to fix a problem like that, which is what international relations theorists call a security dilemma, you know, a situation where one country takes steps that it believes enhances its own security, but another state finds those same steps threatening. So you get into this escalatory cycle of action, reaction. This is much like what happened in World War I. The only way you get out of a situation like that is through a diplomatic process, some compromise, where you address both sides security concerns in ways that don't cross the line into being too threatening to the other. That's really the kind of problem we're dealing with. And I think had the Biden administration approached this like that kind of problem, we probably wouldn't be in the confrontation that we're in right now, there is still time to get out of it. And I think that's exactly what the Trump administration is doing. I think it recognizes what has to be done. And now the question is, can we exercise the kind of statesmanship and diplomatic skill that will be necessary to strike this kind of compromise and address all of the details that have to be addressed in this? And the devil will be in the details on all this. This is not an easy negotiation, not something that you can do very quickly, as they have found out over the past year. But I think we're really getting close, and we shall see.

Newt Gingrich (26:16)

Part of the estimate by some Americans and Europeans has been that in a war of attrition, that the number of people Putin is losing is so significant, given their already existing demographic challenge of not having enough young males. In your judgment, can he sustain this kind of trench warfare for three or four more years if he has to?

George Beebe (26:41)

Well, you know, there's the old joke about the campers. Two guys that are out, you know, in the back country, pitch their tent and they see a bear coming. And one of the guys starts putting on his shoes, and his camp mate says, what are you doing? You can't outrun a bear. And the guy says, I don't have to outrun a bear. I just have to outrun you. And that analogy, I think, is absolutely right here. This is not a question of can Russia sustain this kind of warfare absolutely for as long as necessary. The question is, can it sustain it longer than the Ukrainians can? And I think we're already seeing the answer to that question. The Russians are meeting their monthly recruitment goals and even exceeding them in many respects. Yes, they're taking a lot of losses, but they are more than replacing those losses on the battlefield. Their numbers are going up. They outnumber the Ukrainians along the line of contact by several multiples right now. And the Ukrainians are not meeting their monthly recruitment goals. They are falling short. The rates of desertion are going up rather significantly. So the question is not, can Russia sustain this for many more years? The question really is, how long can the Ukrainians sustain this war of attrition? And I think the answer is not for much longer. You know, this is an intangible question. A lot of this has to do with optimism and morality, morale and resilience and determination. But those qualities are not infinite. And there are signs that the Ukrainians are reaching the exhaustion point. And what I'm hearing from my contacts in Ukraine is that the vast majority of Ukrainians want this war done. They're ready for a compromise. They're not willing to surrender. They're not willing to capitulate, but they are interested in a compromise way to end this war. And I think that provides Zelenskyy with both an opportunity and an incentive to find a compromise way forward here. So I think the time is right now inside Ukraine. The other part of this is the corruption scandal, which provides Zelenskyy with a major political incentive to change the narrative inside the country away from corruption and graft and towards peace. And I think that's part of why we're seeing some progress right now.

Newt Gingrich (29:19)

Do you think it's plausible that they will give up the Donbas, even the areas that the Russians have not conquered?

George Beebe (29:26)

Well, I don't think there's any prospect that the Ukrainians are going to legally cede that territory to recognize it as Russian and not Ukrainian. I think the most one can hope for is the Ukrainians will say, we are not going to cede the territory, but we will also agree that its future status will be determined politically and not by force, not by war on the battlefield. A lot of wars have ended in just that kind of pragmatic compromise. Now the next question is, will they withdraw their forces from parts of Donetsk that they now hold? And that, I think, is going to be the focus of these discussions. In a lot of ways, that's another core issue. And what the 28 point plan envisioned was, I think, a fairly pragmatic and creative compromise on this. It would not demand that the Ukrainians say, okay, yeah, the Donetsk is yours, and we recognize that, but it would allow for a withdrawal and not a Russian military occupation of the parts that the Ukrainians had withdrawn from. In other words, this would become a demilitarized zone under some sort of international supervision. That would allow the Russians to say, hey, this is our territory. The Ukrainians could also say, no, that's our territory. But neither one would have its forces in that part of disputed Donetsk. And we could move forward pragmatically on that and say, okay, this is now the basis for a ceasefire. The Russians can maintain the fiction that they own all of this. Nobody else is going to recognize that legally. But we will all just pragmatically say we're going to move forward on ending this fighting and leave the negotiation over the future status of this in much the way the United States did with the Baltic states under Soviet rule. Every US Map produced during the Cold War had a little box in it that said the United States government does not recognize the incorporation of Estonia, Latvian, Lithuania into the Soviet Union. But that didn't prevent us from having a diplomatic relationship with the Soviet Union addressing the many multitude of security and other issues that we had to deal with with them.

Newt Gingrich (32:04)

One last thing on the SO question of the Donbas, which is if they will not accept any NATO. When you talk about somebody being there maybe as a guarantor, who do you imagine would be acceptable to the Russians as a guarantor to. They certainly don't want us, and they certainly don't want the rest of NATO.

George Beebe (32:26)

Well, here you have to make a distinction between what I would call a deterrence force and a peacekeeping force. Peacekeeping force monitors a ceasefire line, ensures that there is a separation of armies, that there is a demilitarized zone that is not violated. That's the kind of thing that an international organization can handle. The United nations, the osce, and the job of that kind of force is not to serve as a deterrent to Russian reinvasion. It's not meant to be a combat force. Now, a lot of people when they're talking about this, conflate this question of a deterrence force, a combat force, a tripwire that would be on Ukrainian soil, whose purpose would be to fight against the Russians should they be tempted to reinvade. That's not something the Russians are going to agree to. They're not going to say, yes, sure, let us put a combat force on Ukrainian territory that would have the purpose of fighting against us. If we think maybe we want to advance our position at some point years down the road, what I think they will agree to is some sort of peacekeeping force, and that's going to have to be under some sort of international supervision.

Newt Gingrich (33:50)

I don't know whether President Trump read your book the Russia How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe, but I have a distinct sense that somehow over the last eight years or nine years, he got the understanding of how Truly catastrophic a nuclear war would be and that he is bounded at one level from putting too much pressure on Putin because he doesn't want to run a risk of Putin starting with tactile nukes, and then who knows how the escalation ladder works? Do you have the same sense that, in fact, if really pushed into a corner, Putin would be capable of at least going to limited nuclear weapons and that it is a threat. That should be a part of our calculus.

George Beebe (34:44)

Yeah, I do. I mentioned that I think this war for Russia is existential, then, yes, you're going to use a nuclear arsenal. If that becomes the ultimate guarantor, that you're not going to be destroyed or threatened or face that kind of threat. That's obviously not Plan A for the Russians, that that would be hugely problematic for all kinds of reasons for them. But here I think John Kennedy's admonition after the Cuban missile Crisis is very apt. He said the big lesson of that crisis was don't put a nuclear superpower in a position where it faces a choice between humiliation and nuclear weapons use. And I think President Trump has certainly internalized that advice, and that is clearly one of the considerations that he has in saying, how do we get ourselves out of this situation, and what kind of leverage do we have to apply here? And, you know, I think he understands that in a negotiation, you get farther with, you know, a smile and a gun than you do with just a smile. You know, he knows that there has to be pressure on Russia, but you have to be careful about how far you go, because you could risk kicking off some sort of escalatory spiral where people feel like their humiliation is at play in some way and things could start to get out of control. And that's not an escalation ladder we want to start climbing up. In my opinion.

Newt Gingrich (36:21)

I have the greatest desire to make sure we avoid nuclear war. I think people generally have no idea how bad it is.

George Beebe (36:29)

Yeah, that's right. We do have to bear in mind that this is a real threat. We can't be complacent about it. And there's nothing else more important to American security.

Newt Gingrich (36:39)

George, I want to thank you for joining me again. It's always educational. You do remarkable work. Our listeners can follow the work you're doing. As Director of Grand Strategy at Quincy Inst. Dot. I really look forward to talking with you again in the future.

George Beebe (36:57)

Great. Well, thank you for having me on.

Newt Gingrich (37:01)

Thank you to my guest, George Beebe. Newts World is produced by Gingrich360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnzi Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich 360. If you've been enjoying Newts World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on substat@gingrich360.net I'm Newt Gingrich. This is NewtWorld.

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