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- [00:01]
Scott R. Anderson
The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad free version of the Lawfare Podcast. Become a material supporter of lawfare@patreon.com lawfare that's patreon.com Lawfair also check out Lawfare's other podcast offerings, Rational Security, Chatter, Lawfare, no Bull and the Aftermath.
- [00:32]
Ben Wittes
Quince believes.
- [00:33]
Eric Charmela
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- [01:00]
Unknown
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- [01:31]
Ben Wittes
Have you all flown back through Reagan National Airport recently? Particularly since they just like renovated their whole security area?
- [01:39]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, yeah, but I got diverted to Dulles because the President said that he might be going somewhere and so a flight got diverted to Dulles and then all our bags were going to go through to national. So I actually stayed on the plane for a nine minute flight to national that then never happened.
- [02:02]
Ben Wittes
Well, there you go. That's like a very D.C. traditional travel story. I feel like in all ways I had the weirdest experience where they've renovated their security all around good improvements. But on the way out of the airport or the way out of the gated area, before you go to the, you know, past the point of no return out of the secure area, you have to walk through these double gates where you walk through one door and it closes behind you, walk the other one. And they have what can only be described as, to my ear sounds a little bit German woman's voice making announcements saying please proceed, please proceed. And it is so distinctly dystopian. I don't know what led to this particular design choice, especially because there are three of them right next to each other. So you hear the same robotic German woman's voice saying, please Proceed overlapping with each other kind of in like a U2 remix sort of vibe, I think is the only way to describe it. And I'm just like, man, we have really. We've really kind of lost the thread a little bit on travel redesign. Better in so many ways. I think we really lost on this particular one.
- [03:00]
Eric Charmela
But aren't you excited about not having to take your shoes off anymore? That's, like, major victory.
- [03:05]
Scott R. Anderson
But I was pre anyway, so we didn't have to do that anyway.
- [03:09]
Eric Charmela
Well, you're fancy.
- [03:11]
Scott R. Anderson
I mean, so am I, but, yeah, so were you. I mean, come on. Everybody here uses pre.
- [03:16]
Ben Wittes
I actually. I actually have lazily never gotten pre, which I'm a little embarrassed by. I. Ben, I assumed you were just barefoot this whole time. You seem like a barefoot flyer. Am I wrong on this?
- [03:25]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, you're not wrong. I don't. It's not exactly barefoot, but I only wear, you know, shoes that I can slip on and off. And I don't wear any clothes with pockets when I fly because I wear dog shirts and then, you know, like, sweatpants or something. And So I am TSA's dream.
- [03:45]
Ben Wittes
I feel like that is actually the feature in your dog shirt that it's missing, particularly that dog shirt you're wearing now, which is of a very wrinkly, peculiar creature, because you could hide a pocket in that face of that dog so easily underneath one of those wrinkles, and it'd be like the ultimate security pouch. You could just slide it under one jowl or on an ear flap, and then no one would even know. It would be the wiser.
- [04:04]
Scott R. Anderson
See, you're giving away all my tradecraft for hijacking airplanes right here on the show, and it hurts.
- [04:13]
Ben Wittes
Scott, we'll get Ben on a. On a no travel list. That's fine. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security, the podcast where we invite you to join members of the Lawfare team as we try to make sense of the week's biggest national security news stories. I am thrilled to be joined once again by. By Rational Security co host emeritus. Host emeritus. Not even really co host. There's a little while it was just him. Not even. Not even any other guest. There's one episode where it's just Ben and his cell phone. I thought it's Benjamin Wittis.
- [04:48]
Scott R. Anderson
Of course, you know, the thing is, like, that episode was ahead of its time because for those who remember don't remember that episode. That episode was, after all, my co hosts, Shane, Susan, and Tamara had all abandoned me, and I was all alone. And and so I decided to have, you know, just me, Alexa and, and Siri. And the thing is like now if you did one with an AI, it would be like, yeah, you and three dozen other people have, you know, interviewed ChatGPT as a. But like, then it was like, it took a lot of editing and it was kind of novel and it was, I thought it was pretty original.
- [05:31]
Ben Wittes
Six months from now, the fact if we still have one live person and not an AI on a podcast, that will be novel and original.
- [05:36]
Scott R. Anderson
That's right.
- [05:37]
Ben Wittes
That's the real secret. When I phase out a co host, no co hosts are coming after me. Believe me, this is the end of the line for the human host of national security. But until then, we are also thrilled to be joined by Lawfare contributing editor, Carnegie Endowment fellow, Ukraine maven of all things, Eric Charmela. Eric, thank you for coming back on the podcast.
- [05:55]
Eric Charmela
Thanks, Scott. Good to be with you.
- [05:57]
Ben Wittes
Well, we have a lot of things in the news we're recording a little bit early today. For the regular listeners, we're recording Monday, July 14, a little bit in the afternoon.
- [06:05]
Scott R. Anderson
Bastille Day.
- [06:05]
Ben Wittes
Man, it's Bastille Day. That's right. Oh yeah, this is the usual day. For years in a row, I watch people race each other in stiletto heels towards some sort of French cake somewhere in Adams Morgan. But now that I don't do that tradition, I've lost track of it. It's sad. Well, regardless, we have a lot to talk about in the news. I'm glad we're able to get together a little bit early. So let's go ahead and get started. Topic 1 for today with arms wide open. After years of open skepticism towards Ukraine and uncharacteristic deference to Russia, it seems President Trump may, big question mark there, may have turned a bit of a page. His rhetoric has grown cooler towards Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent weeks, and he has proven more willing to provide arms to Ukraine, even over contrary efforts by some of his advisors, including an agreement just announced today to provide Ukraine with Patriot missiles and other US Made weapons in a manner funded by Europeans. What explains this switch? How big a switch is it and how durable is it likely to prove? Topic 2 hitting foggy bottom. Just days after the Supreme Court removed a preliminary injunction barring such action, the State Department went forward with planned cuts to personnel, riffing 1,350 roughly foreign and civil service personnel in and around Washington, D.C. a major cut, I think, combined with the people who took optional outs of about 20% to the State Department workforce here in D.C. or at least that's the final objective. It's all part of a much broader reorgan organization that the State Department leadership claims will make the department leaner and more efficient, but also has the coincidental effect, entirely coincidental, of gutting various personnel working on issues disabled by the Trump administration. What should we make of this big shift in the organization and staffing of the State Department, and what will its impact be on American diplomacy and topic three waiting for the intel impressment since the Trump administration's June 21 airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, a heated debate has raged over their effects. The administration maintains the strikes were historically successful and permanently set back the Iranian nuclear program. But media reports sourced to people inside the intelligence community have suggested a much more limited and temporary effect. How should we weigh these competing claims, and when will we know the truth? So for our first topic, Eric, I want to turn to you as our closest Ukraine watcher here and somebody who spent a great deal of time working on these issues and in Ukraine relatively recently, I recently learned. Talk to us about this pivot we're seeing and let me lay out the kind of basis facts as I understand it. A few months ago, March, April timeframe, we know we had that big blow up of the White House meeting with Zelenskyy. It seemed like US Support for Ukraine was really on the rocks. And it became really clear around that incident that there were some people who were highly skeptical of it, seeming in particular vice president J.D. vance and a couple people who were in kind of the orbit of the slightly more isolationist wing, substantially more isolationist wing of the kind of MAGA movement and the president's supporters, a combination, I should say, of people who are genuinely kind of isolationist and people who are extreme sort of China hawks and worried about shifting U.S. priorities away from anything but China, including Ukraine. We saw that relationship get ironed out through a major minerals deal between the U.S. ukraine and assorted other arrangements, including some sort of mechanism that's going to result in U.S. rights to some sort of mineral production or other revenue coming from Ukraine in exchange for arms sales and other types of assistance. Exact details still still haven't been fully publicly disclosed, but we've seen that hiccup get ironed over. We've seen the relationship gradually improve in the last few weeks. We've seen something that seems pretty remarkable, particularly as Russia has proven really resistant to the administration's efforts to push forward some sort of cease fire, some sort of arrangement has actually amplified and speeded up Its summer offensive hitting Kyiv and other cities with pretty, pretty dramatic drone attacks and other military campaign. We've seen President Trump at least begin to shift his rhetoric a little bit. He's been a little more, at least to my ear, openly critical of Putin, at least not as vocally cold and skeptical of the Ukrainians, though there's still a little bit of that from time to time. And we have seen him, perhaps most notably, when senior Defense Department officials cut off a flow of support to the Ukrainians. It seems like, at least from media reports, he played a personal role in getting that started. And now we have this notable agreement where the Europeans are going to be paying for, to provide the Ukrainians with U. S made weapons, patriot systems, other sorts of technology, with an arrangement where Trump is very clear, we are not footing the bill for this anymore. The United States is not paying for it, the Europeans are, NATO is. But we're still willing to provide the support and provide these sorts of arms that's essential to Ukraine's defense. And in particular, he's clearly putting the onus on Russia now for some sort of ceasefire. He's laid out a kind of rough 50 day timeline for Russia to come to the negotiating table, although it's not clear exactly what happens after that point. So how big a shift is this trajectory that I've laid out? Am I being too generous in saying this is even a shift? Is there more continuity here than being appreciated by the media, who I think has increasingly painted this as actually a new trajectory for Ukraine policy, or is there a genuine change in how the President appears to be thinking about these issues, and if so, what's driving it?
- [11:11]
Eric Charmela
Well, Scott, I think it's definitely a shift in tone. There's no question about that. I mean, Trump early in his term was, you know, kind of blaming both sides equally, and he was, as you were mentioning, pretty harsh on the Ukrainians, culminating in that Oval Office blow up at the end of February and then some really, really tough weeks and months thereafter where a lot of pressure was being put by the Trump administration on the Ukrainians to offer up compromises and concessions in order to incentivize Russia to the table. Of course, the Ukrainians pivoted. President Zelensky pivoted pretty, I would say pretty adeptly after the Oval Office meeting in both trying to do damage control and repair the relationship with Trump personally and with the administration more broadly, but also to show that Ukraine was not going to be the obstacle to a ceasefire. So whereas last year, and for the first three years of the war. The Ukrainian official position was very much, we won't accept a ceasefire because we want to liberate all of our territory, or we expect a Russian withdrawal as a precondition, so on and so forth. Zelenskyy basically stated clearly, we want a ceasefire with no preconditions. And I think after a while, that began to sink in with the Trump folks, that basically there was not much more that they could ask of the Ukrainians because they accepted pretty much all of Trump's terms. Whereas you have the Russians on the other side not only stonewalling the negotiations, but actually ramping up military pressure on Ukraine, including, as you mentioned, over the past four to six weeks, significantly increasing the pace and scope of missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian cities. I mean, we're talking almost an order of magnitude larger strikes than you'd had at this time last year, just because Russian drone and missile production has gone up so significantly. So I think you get those two factors together. The Ukrainians playing ball with Trump and really doing some great diplomatic spade work behind the scenes. The Russians showing themselves to be really uninterested in the deal and basically embarrassing Trump, who had kind of got out on a limb to give Putin. You know, what I would say analytically is a pretty good deal for the Russians. I mean, it certainly wasn't everything that they wanted, but what he put on the table was stuff like no NATO membership for Ukraine and a ceasefire in place where there would be de facto, not de jure, but de facto recognition of the occupied territories as being controlled by Russia, and the beginning of easing of sanctions, which the Russians have asked for for a long time. You know, again, that would have been a pretty good deal for the Russians to get under any circumstance. Trump put it on the table, and Putin seemed to think he could get more. And part of it was that he was winning on the battlefield and still is, bit by bit, albeit at enormous cost. So you have those two factors kind of working really in tandem over the first six months. Then you've got two other key players. First, the Europeans, who I think did an excellent job first in the wake of the Oval Office meeting led by the French and the Brits doing this kind of marriage counseling between Washington and Kyiv, repairing the relationship there, taking leadership on the diplomatic efforts to show that Europe deserved a seat at the table and had something to offer. And then over the past couple of months, Mark Ruta, who was in the Oval Office Today, Monday the 14th, with President Trump, ran an excellent NATO summit last month where the vibes were Very good for Trump. And I mean, there was this announcement about 5% spending on defense and defense related expenditures, which was a huge diplomatic win for Trump. And then again, incorporating Ukraine into the conversation in a way that kind of drew Trump in rather than showed kind of transatlantic divides. And again, all this, there was a lot of backroom diplomacy trying to iron out this deal that was announced today where the Europeans would purchase American weapons for Ukraine. That was a lot of Rutte Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, the Germans, particularly the German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, doing a lot of that work with U.S. counterparts. So the Europeans deserve a lot of credit. And then finally, you know, I think there were folks in the President's party, particularly in the Senate, who were uncomfortable, I think, with the, you know, really generous position that the administration was taking towards the Russians, which became politically more and more challenging as, you know, the Russian military lobbed more and more missiles at Ukrainian cities. And you've got this sanctions bill that has been working its way through the Senate, the Lindsey Graham, Richard Blumenthal bill. And so I think at some point, all four of those actors, Ukraine, Russia, the Europeans and congressional Republicans sort of were all rowing in the same direction of showing Trump that his initial proposition that he could achieve a quick ceasefire, you know, his great relationship with Putin would lead to this magical breakthrough, peace would break out, everything would be great, and we could move on and do something else, was a bit naive. And so I do think that's, that's the backstory to this pivot. I do think it is significant, but the devil is always in the details. And hopefully we can talk about that a little bit more, you know, because I listened to the entire Oval Office kind of press gaggle today, and, you know, it was 45 minutes long, and still Trump was very thin on the details. And as always, you know, he, he kind of says a lot in, in meandering ways. And you're trying to pick out the bits and pieces of concrete information that foreshadow the specific policies that he's going to put into place. And there are a few nuggets in there, but it was still not the kind of detailed explanation of a new policy or a rollout of new strategy that I think we would expect under any traditional administration. So we're kind of left reading the tea leaves a bit.
- [17:04]
Ben Wittes
I want to come to Ben for your perspective, but let me get one more data point out of you, Eric, because it's something we actually haven't gotten to revisit or talk about much. In the last six or eight weeks or so, which is the state of Russia's summer offensive. The things that get the big media attention in American media, I imagine a lot of Western media are the drone strikes, the rocket strikes, the impacts in Kyiv and other places where a lot of the international media is centered and focused and densest. So it makes sense. You get a lot of coverage there. But the strategic objectives really are. That is a psychological effect they're trying to have. The strategic objectives are on the ground in the east. Efforts to reclaim territory, particularly I think the state is objective, as I understand of the Russians, was we want to control more of Donetsk, Lhansk, the other kind of Russian sympathetic areas that they've typified its breakout and other parts of Ukraine as well. Talk to us about how that's succeeding. And you mentioned that it is succeeding slowly but at a high cost. What does that mean and what does that mean for this 50 day window TRUMP has now trotted out, which then takes us into the fall and into close to the end of, I think, the summer offensive season, if you will. Do we have a sense about how Russia is going to feel like its trajectory coming out of this, especially as at least some media reports I've said have said that even senior Russian officials have kind of sold this as one last push. Are they going to come out of this push feeling like they've changed a lot of facts on the ground?
- [18:28]
Eric Charmela
Yeah. So, you know, the summer offensive, spring offensive, whatever, has been underway for some time now. The goals have been, you know, pretty consistently to seize the remainder of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast and probably make significant progress in the other two oblast, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, that Russia, you know, purported to annex illegally. And, you know, what has happened is the offensive in Donetsk, it stalled for a while and then around this city called Pokrovsk. And then the Russians have basically gone around it and started seizing additional villages in sort of an effort to cut off Ukrainian lines of communication and put pressure elsewhere. Another big change was after the Ukrainians had to fall back from their position positions in Kursk Oblast in Russia, which the Ukrainians first went into in August of last year. What the Russians did was they crossed the the state border and went into Sumy Oblast in northern Ukraine and created what Putin has described as a buffer zone around Kursk Oblast. And that's, you know, I don't know, about 15, 20 miles into Sumy, which hadn't seen any Russian occupation since the early months of the invasion. When, you Know, when Russia was launching its lightning attack, Kyiv, they came in through one of the axes, through Sumy. And so that was sort of a big moment for the Ukrainians. But again, we're talking villages here and there. I don't want to minimize it because, you know, again, these are people's homes and, and all of that. And I do think it is. You know, the Ukrainians are fighting tough for every position and every tree line and every village, certainly. But these are not strategically significant points. And so this, the logic of this war of attrition, I think it's still very hard to understand what Putin and the Kremlin think is going to be the end result here, because at the rate that they're going, assuming Ukraine can put up this continued kind of steady state of defense, they're not going to get anywhere fast. And they're losing a tremendous number of soldiers. I mean, Mark Ruta in the Oval Office today cited 100,000 dead, not just dead and wounded, dead Russian soldiers since January of this year, which, again, I don't have. I'm not in government anymore. I don't have the exact figures. But presumably he's citing information available to the NATO Secretary General that's fairly credible. That's enormous. That's an enormous number. And it doesn't seem to be phasing Putin, I think, because he's been operating under this assumption that Trump really was on the verge of total abandonment of Ukraine and that the Europeans couldn't step up anyway. And so in that calculation, yes, from the Russian standpoint, we're suffering a ton. This is not going super well, but we're chipping away. And the geopolitical circumstances, once the Biden presidential drawdown packages run out, which is around this time, you know, sometime in the summer, once exhaustion sets in, the Europeans can't do anything. The Americans step away, then we'll be able to, you know, clutch victory and sometime in the fall. But today's announcement, you know, throws that into a bit of uncertainty, because if we've got a new pipeline, a new kind of strategic setup where there's going to be a continued supply of major American weapons systems, albeit financed by the Europeans, that kind of really messes with Putin's theory of victory. I don't know if he realizes that yet, but certainly to me as an analyst, it suggests the Ukrainians are going to have a lot more staying power throughout the remainder of this year and into next year.
- [22:13]
Ben Wittes
So, Ben, I want to come to you on this. How big a shift this is. I mean, I Think you have been in a podcast that features a number of people skeptical of Trump's approach to Ukraine. I think it's fair to say you have been among the most persistent and consistently skeptical.
- [22:28]
Scott R. Anderson
It's never led me wrong.
- [22:30]
Ben Wittes
Yet there you go, particularly on the durability when we've seen these flashes of moments saying, well, maybe this is something that will bring Trump around. I think you so far have been pretty skeptical of that. Do you have the same reaction this time? Do you find this to be a little more smoke than fire, or is there maybe something to it this time?
- [22:46]
Scott R. Anderson
I don't have the same reaction to it this time, which is not to say that I believe it is definitely durable, but I do think there are reasons to think it might be durable that have not been the case in the past. The first is a point that Eric touched on, but I want to dwell on a little bit, which is that Putin has really humiliated Trump. And Trump put a great deal of emphasis on the idea that he could resolve this easily and that Biden was a warmonger and that this war never would have happened if he had been president because he and Putin get along. And by the way, Putin never would have tried this with him, implying some measure of accommodation. And, you know, that he's a tough guy. Right. And it's never been clear what exactly he means by that. But now he's had, you know, six months, in addition to the 24 hours that he promised it would take him to get a ceasefire, and we're no closer to a ceasefire than we were when he came in. And I think, you know, one thing Trump does know is when somebody is making him look ridiculous, and Putin has been making him look ridiculous, and also not, you know, I don't think it's an accident that this happens at a time that he's not been able to exactly control the Israelis, and we'll. We'll talk about that later, but has had to follow Israel into battle in Iran. Right. He hasn't been able to get a ceasefire in Gaza. These various things that he told everybody he was going to be able to do, he hasn't really managed any of them. And I do think that puts him in a position where, you know, you have to decide, does Putin continue to be able to make you look goofy? And I do think that's had some effect on him. If you listen to his rhetoric. You know, he keeps saying things like, you know, Putin's very nice, and then that evening, there are a lot of missiles. You know, so, like, he Sort of almost admits it. And that's different. That's about as close to acknowledging error as he ever gets. You know. So do I think this is definitely the turning point or a turning point? No. Am I as dismissive of it as I was of previous times when, you know, when, for example, Zelinsky went to Mar a Lago or Justin Trudeau goes and, you know, pays homage? Right. No, I'm not as dismissive of it. I think Trump has a good sense of when, when something is damaging his image and that's what I believe is really behind this. Now, that said, I have some, you know, non trivial reservations about it. One is that, you know, we have, I, Eric, will correct me if I get the numbers here wrong, but I think we have only about $4 billion left in drawdown authority from the last supplemental. And while I think Europe should be buying a lot of US Weapons and sending them, I think that's a great deal, by the way. And I love, you know, if Trump wants to say, hey, we used to give our own taxpayer money and now we're, it's creating jobs in America, Europeans are paying for it, fine, I love that. But we also need our own, you know, continued drawdown authority. We need our own appropriations on this subject because it is still a proposition that's more hypothesis than certainty that Europe actually coughs up big sums of money for Ukraine when the United States is not doing it itself. And so this strikes me as a very positive step if it happens. And I don't want to not take it seriously. But I also think we have this other question which is, and then what, and is what comes next? You know, Lindsey Graham was on television this weekend talking a huge game about massive new sanctions and tariffs and going after foreign assets. And, you know, is that what comes next? Or is what comes next what should really come next? Which is, yeah, all of that stuff, but also another appropriate, another supplemental appropriations package of the type that I think it would be very hard psychologically for Trump to seek.
- [27:54]
Ben Wittes
Well, let's take it in that direction. Let me turn it back to you, Eric, on that question about what does come next. We've got this 50 day period the President has kind of laid out saying we're expecting some turnaround in this period. Presumably they're going to be ratcheting up pressure, discussion of secondary tariffs. We've got this question about drawdown authority, which presumably is going to be neat. You can obviously do direct sales and stuff like that to provide types of security assistance, but to get stuff to Ukraine quick enough to make a difference on the battlefield. Drawdown seems to be really the only realistic way to do this. We have to bear in mind the impetus behind the concern at the defensive department that triggered the stoppage in Ukraine assistance last week or the week before was concern that US Stocks had drawn down too far to a point that it disadvantaged it in a potential conflict with China or might or got too close for comfort. For Elbridge Colby and other people who are in the China hawk camp and in leadership positions at the Defense Department, Trump overrode them on that. But there might be some inkling of legitimacy to those concerns. And if nothing else, those people clearly have those concerns and they are sincerely held and they're not going away. Presumably, if they're going to continue drawing down stocks, which even if you get additional drawdown authority, that doesn't change the number of weapons you have in stock immediately talk to us about what is likely to come next. What does the administration saying we're going to see in the next two months or three months, but do we actually need to see that maybe they're not talking about.
- [29:21]
Eric Charmela
Yeah, I mean, I think that's where the details fall off. And Trump is just sort of talking a bit in circles. And he put this 50 day timeline ultimatum to Putin saying, you know, after 50 days there would be severe what he called secondary tariffs, which I think someone subsequently confirmed. He meant tariffs on purchasers of Russian oil, which means China, India, Turkey, much of the world, which has its own economic dynamics. And I think there's real questions about whether the United States would be willing and able to impose those kinds of tariffs and sustain them on all these other countries and whether it really would have the effect, the direct effect on Russia that he's trying to seek. I mean, the fundamental issue is because we've sanctioned Russia, you know, in many of the strategic sectors of their economy, there's very little trade between the United States and Russia now. So any tariffs are pretty meaningless on the Russians. So you have to, again, go through these secondary routes and so on. But that introduces other spillover effects that are, that are hard to manage. So I'm skeptical about that. And again, you know, within this 50 days, okay, so we start providing Ukraine some additional patriot systems, maybe some other, you know, strike capabilities, so on and so forth. Is there going to be another attempt to bring the parties together for another round of negotiations? Is there going to be a kind of common vision of the strategy on the ground? My great colleague at the Carnegie Endowment, who was a former Defense Minister of Ukraine Andrei Zagora Nuk just published a wonderful piece for us about a kind of a new strategy under conditions of protracted war where there's a very systematic, what he argues for systematic disabling or denial of Russian capabilities across various sectors, kind of like you saw in the Black Sea, but extended to land, to air, to cyber, and so on and so forth. So there are strategic concepts out there for what can be done under the present circumstance, recognizing that Russia's defense industrial base has kicked up into high gear and the Russians have what seems like pretty limitless manpower to throw at this issue, at least for the time being. But everyone needs to be bought into that. And it's still not clear that Trump is willing to be kind of a co pilot in this war in the way that the previous administration was to work with Ukrainians on a common concept to bring the Europeans in to talk in a structured way about military supplies and so on and so forth. So I have a lot more questions than answers when it comes to this next 50 day period. I think what should happen is like Ben was saying, we will need an additional supplemental of some sort. It's not going to have to be the size of the Biden era supplemental packages again, because you, you don't need quite as much given the battlefield situation, largely defensive board that they're fighting right now. And you know, you've got the Europeans kicking in hopefully quite a bit of money. But there will still need to be something because you need to be able to pull from US Stocks quickly. I mean, can it be packaged in a way that it's more about focusing on U.S. readiness and kind of dealing with the global competitive landscape that includes China, Iran, North Korea, Russia as you know, US Adversaries, and not doing it in a specific Ukraine specific way that I think might be more problematic politically for the president's base. I think it's possible. I haven't heard any talk of it, but again, I could imagine a very good case for a supplemental in the fall that would focus on replenishing stockpiles of key munitions like air defense interceptors and so on. And then that would definitely benefit Ukraine and the Europeans. But I don't see any of that concrete thinking happening now. I should say also General Keith Kellogg, who's the president's special envoy in Ukraine, is in Kyiv this week. He just met President Zelenskyy today, met with the leadership of the Defense Ministry, the chief of the armed forces. And so I think that, you know, General Kellogg's take on what the mood is in Kiev. And. And what they're thinking on military strategy will probably factor into what the President is thinking next. And so, again, I hope he's able to bring back a clear picture of where the Ukrainians are, what the capabilities are, what the gaps are. And then this summer, you'd see a little bit more kind of dedicated planning, but that remains to be seen.
- [34:09]
Ben Wittes
How about you, Ben? What else are you hoping to see in this next period, or do you expect to see, and how much of that is realistic versus what we might actually get out of the Trump administration? I'll say. I think the. But the part that I'm impressed by, I think, is very clever diplomacy by the Ukrainians and by Europeans is that they've really found a way to play into Trump's transactional kind of worldview in that this is a very transactional arrangement, like the minerals deal, everything else. This is something where the bottom line of Trump and Americans is good. And it's coincided with this period where Putin has done the exact opposite, where he has publicly humiliated Trump, clearly resisted him, and we've seen this break down their relationship. I think the transactional part is pretty sustainable, especially when you get industry kind of bought in on some of this, when you see an economic price tag that the President doesn't want to go away. The Putin side is the wilder side, to me. I mean, how quickly can they amend relations, particularly given Trump's weird dynamics with Putin in the past? I think, to me, that's the big question I have. But am I off on that, or is there something else that you're looking at in the medium term?
- [35:14]
Scott R. Anderson
I don't think you're off on that. I think, you know, Trump's relationship with an affection for Putin has never been explained. You know, I have nothing to add on that conversation, but whenever you're dealing with Trump and Putin and the fact that he has this weird solicitude for Putin, you always have to add a certain amount of variability into the range of possibility, because we just don't freaking understand it, you know, and remember that it was only two weeks ago that the Defense Department cut off the supply of air defense interceptors to the Ukrainians. And so we're. We're vacillating. You know, the periodicity of this curve is fast. And. And so I don't ever want to claim that we are at a point of, you know, where we've settled on a new policy, and now we kind of know what it is. We're in a pendulum swing that swings really Quickly and sometimes really far. And that's unfortunate because, you know, this is a war with a right side and a wrong side and in which all of our allies are on one side and all of our equities are really, except not blowing up the world are on one side. And so it really is unfortunate that it's the case, but it is the case. And so my view is while he's in this good mood vis a vis Ukraine and this bad mood vis a vis Putin, it's a very good time to lock in good things. So Lindsey Graham and Dick Blumenthal have this bill on, you know, giving the President a lot more sanctions power. It's a really good time, if we could pass that to do that. It's a really good time, if there is a supplemental that to be done, to think about doing that because the mood's going to shift. Putin's going to propose some, I don't know if it's a Trump Tower Moscow or a joint cybersecurity force or, you know, they'll have a meeting in Helsinki or, I mean, remember, these are all things that really happened. And you know, Trump is going to change his mind again. And so, you know, it's important not to confuse this ever with stable policy that you know is based in US interests that will be the same tomorrow as they are today. I don't think we live in that world right now. And so it's, I do think to the extent you can, and I'm not, I'm not wired in enough to the administration's thinking or to Congress's thinking on this. I don't know how much of this is doable, but it's a very good time to try to lock in what you can get. You know, folks, most of us are numb to it now, but wow, this has been a wild ride. AI is coming for your job. Geopolitical changes are disrupting century old alliances and the market is reacting in ways we've never seen before. So it's no wonder that most of us are buckling down, saving and looking for ways to protect our futures. One way sure to protect your future is life insurance. I hate to say it, but you're probably underinsured, you're overpaying and underprotected, especially if your policy is, is through your job. That's why I'm finding a new life insurance policy with Selectquote. For more than 40 years, SelectQuote has been one of the most trusted brokers in insurance, helping More than 2 million Americans secure over $700 billion in coverage. Their mission is simple to find you the right insurance policy for your unique needs. They shop, you save. No medical exam. No problem. They partner with providers offering same day coverage of up to $2 million without needing to visit your doctor. It's not like one size fits all. Life insurance companies Select Quote licenses agents to work for you in as little as 15 minutes. They'll compare policies from top rated carriers to find you the best fit for your health and your budget. And they work for you for free. Have high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease. Selectquote has partners with policies designed for many pre existing health conditions so you get the protection you deserve. Head to selectquote.com and a licensed insurance agent will call you right away with the right policy for your life and your budget. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Select Quote they shop, you save. So get the right life insurance for you for less and Save more than 50%@SelectQuote.com LawFair Save more than 50% on term life insurance@SelectQuote.com LawFair today to get started. That's Select Quote.
- [41:02]
Ben Wittes
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- [42:03]
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- [43:20]
Ben Wittes
Well, speaking of pendulum swings, we are seeing another pendulum swinging, although it's a pendulum that tends to only swing in one way. In recent years here in Washington D.C. in my former beloved environs of Foggy Bottom, it was a very difficult day this past Friday at the U.S. department of State where we saw a plan that has been a long time coming. That is not a surprise in its broad contours, although it's in effect on specific employees. Was very much a surprise where we saw 1,350, give or take a few State Department employees, Foreign Service and Civil Service based in Washington D.C. get notified that they were no longer going to be employees after 60 to 120 days of the department. It sounds like a smaller cut. It is a smaller cut than a lot of other agencies in absolute numbers. Of course we've seen other agencies pursue five digit cuts and targets, but State Department is a smaller agency, particularly that components working in Washington D.C. i think it's estimated to be combined with with the substantial number of people. Even more than that, I think closer to almost 2,000 people who took early buyouts and retirement plans. An overall cut of 20% or more of the State Department's workforce in Washington D.C. when everything is said and done and it's not being applied evenly, of course we're seeing whole bureaus and offices being shut down and the leadership is being pretty transparent. Secretary Rubio himself basically said we're not trying to get rid of people, but when you close an office you just don't need those positions anymore and they're letting people go who are inhabiting those positions in many cases regardless of seniority or experience or performance reviews, but just kind of lopping off parts of bureaucracy or restructuring them so substantially that they're getting rid of whole administrative offices and components. One example is most of the bureaus which have operated with their own sort of personnel and human resources components in their own front offices. Those are all now being consolidated, which is a pretty mind boggling thing if you're a former State Department employee, because they were never that efficient to begin. The idea of doing it all at once out of one State Department office is pretty mind boggling, but that is the plan. And so a lot of those people are finding themselves suddenly out of work. The excuse we get is that it's a lean it's going to make the state payment more lean and efficient. And nobody who's ever interacted with the State Department has emerged without criticisms of the State Department about how it operates, how efficient it is perceived. It is like the Postal Service and getting the most bad rep. I think among a lot of people, among federal agencies in ways that are maybe slightly parts of which are fair, many parts of which are not fair, at least in my fairly biased perspective. But this is a dramatic change in how it's structured, how it's operated far more than even the changes instituted by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson eight years ago, which had a lasting impact on morale at the State Department. And I will say, at least talking to my friends, my former colleagues, morale is at an all time low, even for people who were there through the Bush years, to the Iraq war and Afghanistan war. This is the worst they've seen. Eric, I want to start with you on this one again, because you are I don't believe you spent time at the State Department. I could be wrong in your career, but I have no doubt you worked with them very closely through a good part of your career and you have a better understanding from the inside and outside of the US Foreign policy apparatus than most people. Talk to us about what you make of these cuts and the explanation of them. There's obviously an ideological drive through part of it. When you cut the Democracy Rights and Labor Bureau, that's because this administration is not that into them and they're not they're transparent about that. That's why they're cutting it. But they also say other cuts across the board are going to make us leaner, more efficient, make the State Department better at its job. What do you make of that?
- [46:57]
Eric Charmela
Yeah, I mean, I think we should unpack for listeners a bit just how kind of chaotic these cuts were because as far as I understand it, and Scott, correct me if I'm Wrong. From a legal perspective, this administration was not able to institute quick and drastic cuts based on performance because that would have required a certain period of time with performance, you know, evaluations and improvement programs and so on and so forth. You would have had to do a lot of individual work with low performing employees, et cetera, et cetera. There's often an argument that in the government, you know, once you're tenured, if you're not doing a very good job, you can't be fired. And so some people thought that, you know, you need to be able to make it easier to let go really poorly performing people. That's not what happened here. So these reductions in force riffs basically, instead of being tied to, people were being tied to positions. And what happened was almost a. Basically an organizational level musical chairs where the music stopped and they had decided, I don't want to say at random, but you know, in consultation with each senior bureau official, which is like, you know, that the person who's standing in for the Assistant Secretary, because most of them are not confirmed yet by the Senate, trying to say, like, what parts of our body can we cut off and have the least damage to our overall mission. So, for example, in the bureau I've worked most closely with my career, the European Affairs Bureau, there was one particular regional office which was covering a region of the European and Eurasian continent that is still important, and they decided to cut it and merge it with another one. But instead of finding new positions for these people who just happen to be on a tour covering whatever country at that moment, they said, we're cutting it, and all those people are immediately fired. So, I mean, it's kind of shocking when you think about it. It's not necessarily that that office's functions are no longer needed by the department. They just had to. They had to find specific organizational units to actually do away with in order to shed the positions and be able to, you know, get through a congressional notification procedure that was much more expedited than actually going through some sort of review based on performance. So it's really unfortunate. You had a lot of people who were on detail or, you know, on rotation to a particular office. It just happened to be in the wrong office at the wrong time. They might have been excellent, in most cases, excellent State Department employees, and they were let go. And it's really crazy. I mean, I've heard stories of people who were in transit to foreign service posts, but their paperwork hadn't somehow flipped over yet. And so they were kind of stopped as they were going to the airport and told, sorry, you're fired. Even though they and their family were about to make this transition to a new overseas posting. So very, very chaotic and I think traumatic for the organization because it was, despite what they claim, there was this whole procedure to identify parts of the Department that weren't needed. It was done very hastily and basically it was chop off the limbs that you think you need the least to continue performing the vital bodily functions. And that's really not a way to run, you know, the arm of diplomacy of the United States. Not to mention that the State Department had taken on the functions of usaid, which had already been gutted several months earlier. So the State Department actually has more to do now than it did a few months ago. Its mission hasn't shrunk. So I think the administration has done serious damage to the State Department. I agree with you. Morale is at an extreme low. And when you pair it with some of the other really kind of disorganized changes and cuts the administration is making to the national security decision making apparatus, for example, the gutting of the National Security Council and having Secretary Rubio as the acting National Security Advisor. So you've got no usaid, you've got a significantly cut down State Department. The NSC basically has ceased to exist for all intents and purposes and the National Security Advisor is the Secretary of State. No wonder you get decisions like the Pentagon suspension of military aid to Ukraine that are not coordinated and the President is kind of surprised by them. That's what you have these structures for. And you know, I was at the NSC for two years and the main responsibility was to coordinate the interagency and the departments and agencies to fulfill the President's foreign policy objectives and make sure that the United States government was implementing decisions and strategies in a coordinated fashion. And you're just totally busting up that apparatus. So, you know, for an administration that's already prone to, I think, really kind of chaotic and erratic decision making, you wipe out the, the sort of mid level bureaucratic element that's meant to support that. And I think we're in for really rocky times ahead.
- [52:02]
Ben Wittes
Yeah, it is pretty extraordinary when you think about the suggestion of what this means, this cut. The National Security Advisor cut Marco Rubio serving in dual hatted capacity. The basic logic is that appears to be that foreign policy is set by 20 important people and everybody is just an implementer and that those 20 important people don't really need to connect the rest of it. It's just top down. You see that in the rhetoric that this administration has embraced, a series of executive orders talking about implementing the President's foreign policy and threatening with career consequences anybody who second guesses it or abuts it as if they're disloyal as opposed to if they might be trying to provide constructive feedback or input from the perspective of experience or advice that the 20 people in the room at the White House don't have. It is a wild way to direct any organization, any company. But that appears to be the philosophy that is guiding, frankly, a lot of the policy making in this administration, but particularly in the national security space. Ben, what do you make of it? I mean, you are somebody who's married to a State Department alum, a multi time State Department alum, has lots of friends there, lots of colleagues. Do you see it the same way Eric and I do? Do you have a sense of there being a maybe more to justify this or more logic to it? I will say legally, the State Department, unlike certain other agencies, has at least gone through a lot of the steps that they're supposed to. Like they have notified this to the Senate. There aren't as clear statutory restrictions for a lot of this. I think a few of them do raise questions about certain statutory obligations on the department. But this State Department restructuring is something that other administrations have done in a substantial way. So there may not be that kind of like separation, that separation of powers angle, although there's still the general question of like, are they actually complying with RIF requirements? Which is a big open question for a lot of these people. But how do you view this? How do you kind of put this big shift in the perspective of the trajectory of American diplomacy and what its consequences might be?
- [53:57]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah. So first of all, I don't see it differently from the two of you to the extent that I think it should be situated in context. However, the context is not the history of other State Department restructurings. The context is in the doging of the rest of the federal government by this administration. That is, if you want to understand what happened at the State Department on Friday, you could do worse than to look at what happened to the National Cancer Institute over the last few months. Right. What happened to ICE over the last few months. So let's take those two examples. We used to be in the business as a US Federal government of massive worldwide diplomacy. And to do that, you need a lot of expertise in all kinds of areas of the world, both functional expertise and regional expertise. So you have a big State Department. Now. The State Department's never been that big. I know that, you know, people in outside the beltway world think of it as a sprawling bureaucracy with, you know, tunnels, and they're actually thinking of a complex that is sort of some combination of the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA. Right. Sort of everybody who does foreign policy.
- [55:28]
Eric Charmela
Right.
- [55:28]
Scott R. Anderson
State of Mormon is not that big an agency, as Scott mentioned before. If you decide, pardon me, fuck the rest of the world, which is one of the foundational policy inflections of the current administration, you don't actually think you need a State Department. And because you're going to do all this in deals yourself with, you know, the 20 people that you referred to before now, why they've decided we shouldn't be in the cures for major diseases business is an interesting question, seeing as how one of their slogans is make America healthy again. But if you. Once you decide that you don't need the leading funder of cancer research in the world anymore, so you can gut it, right? And once you decide that the foundational policy priority of the United States is getting rid of as many undocumented immigrants as human, humanly possible, you need a gigantic ice. You need a big increase in the border patrol, you need a lot of detention capacity. And so if you look at their investments in government and disinvestments in government, it's actually follows their rhetoric reasonably closely, with the exception of the biomedical research stuff, they're at war with government that's not involved in deporting people, and they're massively investing in government that is. And, you know, if you're basic to go back to the State Department for a minute, if your basic view of the rest of the world is we don't want to trade with them, we don't want to have alliances, and only fools have alliances with them. And by the way, we're going to do all these deals on the basis of the personal relationship between the president and the leader of these other countries, you don't really need diplomats, you only need diplomat. Or you think you don't need diplomats, you still actually do. But I think the policy, this behavior really follows from, from that set of instincts. And is it destructive? Absolutely. Is it going to take a generation to rebuild from it? Absolutely. But I think that's exactly what we're seeing at the NIH Institutes. It's exactly what we're seeing in the foreign aid department. It's exactly what we're seeing in the Justice Department, which there it isn't. It's more politically motivated, and it's what we're seeing in lots of other places, too. It's an effort to make government as personal as possible and to reduce its capacity to act independent of the leader.
- [58:38]
Ben Wittes
Well, speaking of the foreign policy bureaucracy, that takes us to our third topic, where we're seeing what might be signs of a bit of a fight or a struggle within the administration between the political leadership and the intelligence community, or at least some points of disagreement. I think quiet in this particular case, although not so quiet that they aren't finding their way into conversations with media personnel and around a very sensitive topic, and that is the strikes on Iran's nuclear program the Trump administration pursued last month. Those strikes, executed with a high degree of secrecy, took many people by surprise in their timing, including the Iranians, it seems, hit a number of heavily fortified facilities in Iran in a manner using arms designed for that purpose, in many cases uniquely possessed by the Americans unique capacity, and then was used by the Trump administration to pivot towards an end of the Israeli initiated and led military campaign against Iran. Within a few days, we had a ceasefire on the logic, as the Trump administration put forward, that your campaign had succeeded. We went ahead and permanently knocked Iran's nuclear program into the stone age, and therefore you don't need to continue the rest of this military campaign. But within days of that, we got a lot of media reports, many of them sourced to people within the intelligence community or within the executive branch, saying we're not so sure. At least preliminary assessments say we don't really know what the amount of damage was. There are signs of activity around these facilities. We're telling signs of people still getting access to them. In one pretty dramatic case, we saw a leak of an audio recording that appeared to be, or purported to be a discussion among Iranian officials saying they were surprised by how undamaged the Iranian nuclear program was by the attacks and how much it emerged unscathed. I think we have to take all this with a grain of salt. We don't know the sourcing. They're all piecemeal, particularly that sort of little bit of intercept. There's obviously going to be a kind of counterintelligence, counter narrative effort on the part of the Iranians, who have a sophisticated, if not as fully resourced as others, intelligence community, intelligence agencies on their own hand, they know how to play these games. But nonetheless, there's a real tension between what we're hearing from media reports, from the people in the intelligence community in the executive branch via media reports, what a lot of outside experts are saying about what we can know, what we can be confident happened and what the Trump administration is saying, which is essentially unmitigated success. Eric, I'm going to start with you again. Apologies. I'm coming to you all three times for the first at bat, but this is so squarely in your lane as a former intelligence officer. Talk to us about what your gut instinct is when you see these sorts of disagreements bubbling up. We should be fair to the Trump administration. They are not the only ones to have these sorts of situations emerge. Lots of high profile military action, high profile diplomatic incidents. We often rumors about people with contrary views in the executive branch, in the intelligence community or elsewhere coming out through media sources, hinting that it may not be entirely the way the administration is framing it. And of course, the administration, like every administration, is going to frame things in a light that lends itself to its political narrative and political objectives. But does this seem to go beyond that to you, or how are you assessing these kind of competing claims about this particular incident, even though I know you worked on a very different set of issues when you were in the intelligence community?
- [62:00]
Eric Charmela
Yeah, I mean, one of the first things you learn as an intelligence analyst is speak truth to power and don't let your analysis be politicized. And so there is a sort of spirit among IC analysts that they are the experts on particular topics and regions of the world, and when they're asked a question by policymakers, they respond in a brutally honest and objective way. That wasn't always the case. The IC got itself into a lot of hot water in the past, and particularly traumatizing was the experience of Iraq wmd. And, you know, there was a lot of learning after that to create processes that would promote objectivity in analysis. And so, again, I would imagine that the analysts were asked for some sort of battle damage assessment after the strike strikes, you know, how far back was Iran's nuclear program set by these strikes? They came up with a response. Again, it's an analytic judgment. There's no right or wrong answer to this. Then you have to put together a lot of disparate pieces of information. You have to make judgments based on understanding of, you know, how long it takes to generate certain capabilities and so on. It was always a, you know, a certain amount of educated guessing about how long it would take Iran to get from where they were to actually having. Having the bomb. And so, again, that educated guesswork is what the analysts with a lot of expertise on, you know, nuclear science and weaponeering and all this stuff, what they put together when they're asked by Policymakers. So clearly the administration didn't like the response that they got and started to spar very openly, which I think was, to me, you know, maybe not surprising for this administration, but it is a bit startling because. Because even though you're right to say that previous presidents and administrations have had differences of opinions with the IC to kind of directly attack the analysts producing it and claim that, you know, they're somehow in their analytic assessment, trying to subvert the presidency and their deep state shills and so on and so forth, and then putting out just kind of groundless assertions just to counter what the official assessment is to me is, is both ham handed and very, very disturbing from the standpoint of the continued independence of these agencies. I think what's been interesting to watch is the position of someone like Tulsi Gabbard, who is the DNI and who, you know, certainly has been a Trump loyalist. But you know, she seemed to, I think maybe for her own personal ideological views, although perhaps partly because of her institutional position, she took, you know, more the side of the, the IC and has been somewhat defensive of, of their analytic positions. Also released that very strange video that, you know, was warning of political elites basically barreling us into nuclear war. I mean, that was very odd to me.
- [65:09]
Ben Wittes
So it was a uniquely Tulsi Gabbard type of odd. It was like with such a uniquely Tulsi flavor.
- [65:14]
Eric Charmela
Yeah. And then again, Trump basically saying, well, she has no idea what she's talking about. Which again, under any normal administration, this would be an incredibly large scandal that you have the White House directly attacking IC analysis on a very important strategic military topic, ignoring it, saying not only are they wrong, they're like kind of criminally trying to undercut the President. But here's what you should think, and let me just put out a bunch of assertions that, that have no grounding in fact, and then everyone go about their day. I mean, that's crazy. But of course that was barely even, you know, a headline for a couple of days.
- [65:53]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, it doesn't measure up against the Epstein files dispute that was curdling the administration at the same time.
- [66:01]
Eric Charmela
Yeah, yeah, but I think we need to pay a lot of attention to this because, you know, we talked about the morale of State Department colleagues, but again, this is the bread and butter of what I see analysts, analysts do and they, they take information and they try to be brutally honest in order to give whatever the democratically elected leadership of this country is the right information to make the best possible decisions. And when you're being attacked for that. And then there's these alternative facts being put out into the ether on a really important topic. I mean, that's, that's deeply disturbing.
- [66:34]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah. I have a few things to add to that. The first is that the President and the Secretary of Defense's obliteration comments are clearly analytically incorrect. This is not just to say that they conflict with a certain amount of intelligence assessment. It's to say that they can't be correct. This is 1940s technology we're dealing with. The Iranians know how to spin centrifuges and enrich uranium. The information about how to create a device out of enough enriched uranium in metal form, which they also know how to do, is generally available. And by the way, the North Koreans and the Pakistanis are, you know, are whispering in their ears about it. So you're not talking about a situation in which you can obliterate the, the ability for them to, to develop a nuclear weapon. You're talking about a situation where a successful operation is that it sets it back X months and an unsuccessful operation is that it sets it back only X minus Y months. And when you go out and you say we've obliterated it, that is the program is over. You were going to be proved wrong at some point. Now, that point may be a long way away because the Iranians make a strategic decision not to do it right. In which case that's the, the actual success of the operation is that it changes the Iranian strategic calculus. But assuming that that's not what happened, and assuming that they decide they want to push forward, they will at some point be successful. And at that point, do you really want to be the president or the Secretary of Defense who said obliterated its own over its total mission success? It's the most important military operation in U.S. history. And so it is not just. I mean, the problem with their behavior is not just that they're, you know, demoralizing and misincentivizing intelligence analysts, though that is all true. It's also that they're conveying something to the public about what we accomplished, whatever it was we accomplished. And I'm, I'm open to the possibility that it was a very substantial accomplishment. It was not a total obliteration. And it is not the end of the story of the struggle to convince Iran not to be a nuclear power. And you know, when you oversell your winds, you undersell when the other shoe drops. And that's going to happen. It's not going to wait for a democratic president so that you can blame it on a Democratic president. We're talking about months or a small number of years and there will be, there will be a next act to this story. And how do you credibly, how do you credibly lead the country in that next act when you've said it's never going to happen?
- [70:16]
Ben Wittes
So I agree with everything you all have said, but it strikes me that there's actually this situation raises or might raise a kind of difficult policy trade off question that I've never actually heard totally satisfactorily answered. But maybe because I've never completely faced it straight on, I said before on this podcast, I think there is a, the friendliest possible framing for the president's decision to strike the Iranian nuclear sites, I think would be less about actually setting Iran back, although that has to be part of the equation, but as much about removing the basis for Israeli military action that Israel was increasingly using to push Iran towards the direction of collapse by essentially saying, look, we did your job for you. We took out out their most sensitive nuclear facilities, we set their timeline back. You can and should end your military campaign now so that we don't end up with a completely destabilized Iran in the Middle East. And in that sort of logic, I can see the logic of those strikes in that moment where Israel had already undertaken.
- [71:18]
Scott R. Anderson
Fair enough. It doesn't justify making up the truth about those strikes.
- [71:24]
Ben Wittes
So that's really the question I have. I mean, there is, there's obviously a range of possible outcomes. We don't know the full range of outcomes. What is the appropriate way to approach how you frame the results? When the strategic objective, let's say hypothetically, because I don't know if that's what the Trump administration was doing. But in a hypothetical where your strategic objective is contingent upon how you frame the results of what you've done, how do you approach that with this level of uncertainty? Is it that you have to be an honest broker with all sides at all times, or is it that you just have to accept the limits of what you can actually adequately represent? Does it depend on the intelligence capacity of the other actor, the extent to which they know you were being accurate or not being accurate or being overly optimistic or unamopistic?
- [72:11]
Scott R. Anderson
I mean, look, there's no question we hit the targets, right?
- [72:15]
Ben Wittes
We're in a band between, they're clearly not 100% lying. We can't say, rule out that they did something they didn't want to do. Somewhere they're on the spectrum Between a setback and a major setback, minor setback and a major setback, and we don't know 100% where.
- [72:30]
Scott R. Anderson
I have no problem. First of all, all you have to say the day of the event is our jets hit the following three plants with, you know, Fordo is Shan, and I forget the other one's name, and the mission was successful. We believe we did substantial damage. A full assessment is going to take three weeks. That's kind of all you need to say now to the Israelis, who, by the way, have better, I think, better intelligence on, judging from the number of nuclear scientists whose windows they can penetrate with drones, whose intelligence is exquisite and whom we might be relying on some of the intelligence for in our damage assessment, you're not going to fool them with a grandiose claim. So why is the. The right response now? You know, look, we did what we can do. We've hit these targets. Now you cut it out. If that's the right. Like you're not. If, if you bullshit about what you've pulled off with respect to those targets, that's not credible to them anyway. Why not just say, if you're pointing is we did it for you, so you don't have to do it now. Stop. Just say that.
- [73:54]
Ben Wittes
That sound right to you? Eric, I'm kind of curious about your perspectives from a professional intelligence community. Professional. Is there not space for spin and framing in how we represent these results? Does it depend on the sophistication of the audience, the extent to which they can know you're bluffing? I mean, it strikes me as actually a hard, harder moral question when you're operating in an area of genuine ambiguity than I would have thought going into it, as I've kind of reasoned through it, it's different if you're lying about what you did, but here it's just genuinely, we don't know within the spectrum of outcomes.
- [74:27]
Eric Charmela
Yeah, I think. I mean, part of the issue is there's a political imperative, I think, to get an assessment out quickly and kind of confirm whether or not the mission was accomplished in the broad sense. And the trade off there is the quicker you get some sort of battle damage assessment out there, the less information you're going to have underpinning it. And so I don't know the process by which they went through some sort of assessment. Was it a single agency? Did they try to, you know, create an IC coordinated product? But I think. I think the challenge here is that this whole ruffle between the White House and the IC was sort of triggered by leaked intelligence assessments that may or may not have been complete, but that the media, I think, got a hold of. And, you know, again, whether this was just some sort of preliminary assessment and hadn't been fully vetted or, you know, so on, it put out there a challenge, I think, to the President because the initial media reports were the strike did very little. And so then it put them in defense mode and they kind of overcorrected by significantly cranking the gears towards this obliteration assessment. So I think Ben is right. And in a normal circumstance, what would have been better would have been for the White House to, you know, issue a request to the IC through the DNI and say, we want an IC coordinated product. Take your time. Take three to four weeks to gather data points, go out to various collection platforms and try to find data that's going to inform us about what kind of damage the nuclear program, you know, took on and then come up with a coordinated view. And instead, you know, you had analysts, I'd imagine, working around the clock trying to put something together faster because they felt like they needed something quickly. And so you end up with this kind of telephone game and, and, you know, just kind of playing out through anonymous leaks, which is unfortunate. And, you know, makes me kind of sad as a former intelligence professional, because that's not how it's supposed to go. And there should have been a more fulsome debate, I think, inside the government before any of this, you know, went public.
- [76:46]
Ben Wittes
Well, folks, that brings us to the end of our time together this week. But this would not be Rational Security if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come. Ben, what do you have for us this week?
- [76:57]
Scott R. Anderson
I have a shameless fundraising pitch. So, you know, as has not escaped the notice of longtime listeners of Rational Security, occasionally people come out of the government under somewhat difficult circumstances of one sort or another. And Lawfare, you know, tries to be helpful. You may have noticed some of these people around and about at different times. People like Jim Baker from the FBI, people like Alex Vindman. You know, it happens every now and then. Recently we have decided to formalize this program and to create what we call a Public Service Fellowship, which is for people coming out of government who have important things to say and who have sometimes important stories to tell, sometimes important analytic points to make and who, for one reason or another left suddenly or are leaving suddenly and are in need of, you know, a temporary landing spot. And we have created the Lawfare Public Service Fellowship for such people so that we can get the benefit of their wisdom, knowledge and expertise while we help them land on their feet. Our current Public Service Fellows are the very estimable James Pierce, formerly of the Special Counsel's office and, and starting in September, the very estimable Mike Feinberg, late of the FBI. You may have read about him or seen him on TV in any of a number of contexts. I am going to leave in the show notes a link to the Public Service Fellowship crowdfunding page because we have some big donor support for this, but we are trying to support as many people as we can and we decided that a lot of listeners, readers, viewers might want to chip in and help this program. And so if you are moved to help out people, help Lawfare, help people in the public sector who are coming out with important stories to tell. Chip in a bit.
- [79:31]
Ben Wittes
Yes, second that, and not only that, it is an invaluable way in an era where a lot of our institutional memory and expertise around national security in government are at risk of going away. It is a great way to memorialize that institutional knowledge and expertise outside of government by writing for podcasting and otherwise contributing to Lawfare. So fully encourage folks to give that a thought and give us your support in any way you can. For my object lesson this week I am going to Given Quinta's recent departure, I'll take over the endorsing a New Yorker article portfolio here at Rational Security. I read a great piece that I thought was really, I found really compelling and really touching. It's by Hanif Abdurra Aqeeb, who's a poet and I think critic of sorts, kind of cultural critic who's written for the New Yorker, I think a few other times and a number of other places. It's an article that came out, I don't know if it's in the print edition, may just be online called Zoran Madani and Mahmoud Khalil are in on the joke and it describes this pretty amazing show by the comedian Rami Youssef where he brought the Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil, the gentleman and Columbia student who spent a good part of 2025 in detention from ICE that was freed a few weeks ago on stage to talk about their experiences. And it's kind of amazing because they're two people who are representative of what I think is an under discussed and underappreciated, incredibly difficult moment for Muslims in America and Muslim American in that in this period where we see administration so focused and cracking down on any sort of dissent around Palestine and palest support for Palestine and Palestinian issues in an area we're seeing a new travel ban to a community that I think still suffers from a lot of trauma and other discrimination coming from the post 911 era and long before that really hasn't been discussed that much. And I really, I think does a phenomenal job channeling of personal perspective and what the experience is being a Muslim American this particular moment and under assault and doing it through the lens of comedy and laughing and good humor, which all three of these individuals were able to do, which is kind of amazing, particularly on Khalil's part, who actually gets kind of the takeaway line at the end of the article and sounds like at the end of the show. I thought it was really touching, a phenomenal piece. I really can't recommend it enough. I think it's a really important aspect of recent events that folks aren't aren't paying enough attention. So I really encourage you all to check it out again. That is Hanif Abdurraqib's piece. Zoran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil are in on the joke in the New Yorker. Finally, Eric, bring us home. What do you have for us this week?
- [82:01]
Eric Charmela
Well, I've gotten hooked on a new For Me but not so New for the Rest of the World podcast that some listeners may already be fans of.
- [82:10]
Ben Wittes
If it's not Rational Security, I'm going to be furious.
- [82:12]
Eric Charmela
Not Rational Security. It's called the Rest is History, and it is a history podcast by two British historians, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, where they go back and forth and tell listeners in a very compelling and funny narrative style about a lot of different historical episodes. I got hooked after listening to the series on the Great Northern War between, you know, Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden, some much of which was fought in Ukraine, today's modern day Ukraine. It's very compelling. It's really interesting. There's like 800 different episodes on things ranging from World War II to, you know, the Aztecs, you know, the Irish War of Independence, the French Revolution episodes in American history. And so there's an endless amount of things to listen about and refresh your memory from high school and college history lessons for long car rides and plane rides and so on. And I listened on some long car rides when I was recently going to and from Ukraine and was greatly entertained. So I recommend that one to our listeners.
- [83:23]
Ben Wittes
A wonderful suggestion as I'm about to spend most of this week on really interminably long airplane rides and airport waits in between airplane rides. I appreciate that. So good recommendation. I'll be downloading it after we're done with recording and with that. That brings us to the end of this week's episode. Rational Security is of course a production of Lawfare, so be sure to Visit us@lawfairmedia.org for our show page, for links to past episodes, for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to follow Lawfare on social media. Wherever you socialize your media. Be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening and sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon. For an ad free version of this podcast and other special benefits. For more information, visit law firmmedia.org support our audio engineer and producer this week was me, with a little help from Kara Shillin of Goat Rodeo, and our music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan and we are once again edited by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my guests Eric and Ben, I am Scott R. Andersen and we will talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye.
- [84:28]
Scott R. Anderson
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