Donald Trump, meanwhile, spent August 1991 trying to dig out of a financial hole so big it had the New York Times jokingly comparing him to the Soviet Union. “Both the developer and the country,” the newspaper wrote, “are motivated by the same impulse: survival.”
Trump made it through that crisis even if the Soviet Union did not, and now he and Putin are an unlikely pair at the pinnacle of world power—and yet both are obsessed still by questions of their own political survival amid crises internal and external.
For this week’s Global POLITICO, we offer a special edition on Trump and Putin, Russia and Russiagate, at a time when the country looms as large as ever in American politics.
Veteran Russia hands Angela Stent and Dan Yergin—Stent is a former U.S. national intelligence officer for Russia; Yergin, a Pulitzer-winning historian and expert on the geopolitics of energy—argue that it may loom too large, noting that even many anti-Putin Russians find themselves puzzled, as Stent put it, “about the extent to which now Russia has been made into this kind of boogeyman in the United States, as if they really have the power to destroy our democracy.”
Instead, Yergin argues, developments like Russia’s “pivot east” to China—what some are calling a new “strategic alliance”—has been little covered, as has the scrambling of the economic prospects for Russia’s heavily oil-and-gas-dominated economy, now that the shale revolution has turned the United States into a global energy powerhouse on the same level as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
And Putin may be weaker than he looks from the outside, Stent adds. The political foundations of his authoritarian regime more than 17 years into his reign, she argues, bear watching headed toward his presumed 2018 reelection. Regime insiders with whom she’s spoken, Stent says, are “very concerned” about the election and whether a Putin win will be seen as legitimate, given Russia’s heavily rigged system and penchant for running up the total in certain regions to implausible 90 percent-plus tallies.
No one doubts another term is Putin’s for the asking, since the one potential candidate seen as a genuine potential opponent, anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, is technically barred from running. But protests among young people have been spreading through Russia this year and, as Stent notes, few have any idea what agenda Putin plans to pursue assuming he is granted another six-year presidential term, one that would make him Russia’s longest-serving leader since Stalin.
In a separate conversation, investor Bill Browder talks about what it’s like to be the man in the middle of the story behind the U.S. sanctions that infuriated Putin—sanctions that, as Browder explains, were almost certainly what Putin’s envoys were discussing with Trump’s son and campaign advisers at the now-famous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Repealing the Magnitsky Act sanctions, named for Browder’s murdered lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, Browder argues, is “the most important thing in the world” for Putin and the Russian government insiders who are on the sanctioned list.
Of course, those sanctions remain in place today—and the U.S. Congress has just voted to impose additional new sanctions on Russia in response to the 2016 election hacking—seven months into a Trump presidency that has the world very much confused about just what America’s policy is toward the strongman in the Kremlin.
“We don’t have a Russia policy in the United States,” Stent says. “We have at least two, if not more.” One recent survey, she notes, even found a “majority of Europeans now believe that Russia at least is a more predictable power and has a more stable leadership than the United States does.”
“Unpredictable may be an understatement,” says Yergin.
And in fact, Yergin saw that firsthand himself last week; a member of Trump’s advisory council of business leaders, Yergin recounted in the interview how the group decided to disband itself after Trump’s equivocation over a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was, Yergin notes, very much “a comment about what’s happening to our politics.”
One thing on which they all tend to agree with Trump is that relations between the two countries are at a low point 26 years after that last fateful August for the Soviet Union. Things are “frigid, antagonistic, confrontational,” Yergin says.
“Cold War 2.0,” Stent says.
Yergin isn’t sold on that. “Maybe the phrase we should use is a breakdown,” he says. “And a breakdown between the world’s two major nuclear powers is something to be very concerned about.”
***
From Russia … to Russiagate: a special Global POLITICO this week. We’ll look at whether America and Russia are really doomed to clash on the world stage, how we got Putin so wrong—and what’s next for the Kremlin leader. And of course we’ll talk Trump and his strange obsession with Putin. And how it’s led not to one Russia policy for the United States—but many conflicting ones.
My guests this week offer a master class in the subject. Angela Stent heads Russian studies at Georgetown University; before that, she was the national intelligence officer for Russia during George W. Bush’s presidency, our chief U.S. intelligence analyst in effect trying to understand Putin’s Russia. Dan Yergin is one of the world’s premier experts on energy, vice chairman of IHS Markit and Pulitzer-winning author of The Prize and The Quest and a true expert on Russia as one of the world’s leading petrostates. They are also, by the way, the first husband and wife dynamic duo we’ve had on The Global POLITICO.
I learned so much in our conversation—which covered everything from Russia’s new strategic alliance with China to the tough new competition it faces from the United States on the global energy markets. We heard Angela’s report from Moscow that regime insiders are in fact quite worried about Putin’s seemingly guaranteed reelection next year. So is it a new Cold War? Are we Russian hands too obsessed with making Putin and his country a boogeyman in American politics today?
But first we have part one of our special Russia episode. We’ll hear about Russiagate from a key player, Western investor Bill Browder, whose push for a sanctions bill named after his dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky might have started the whole Russian lobbying campaign of Donald Trump in the first place.
Susan Glasser: I’m Susan Glasser and welcome back to The Global POLITICO. Our guest again is Bill Browder. I was trying to think of a concise way of introducing him. I guess the most concise way I can think of is to say Bill was probably the very first person, I think, outside of maybe a random Russian pundit, that I interviewed when I moved to Moscow in January of 2001. He, at the time, and now as well, is the CEO and founder of Hermitage Capital Management. At the time, the largest outside investor in Russia. This was in a very different context in January of 2001, when both of us thought a little bit differently about Vladimir Putin.
Bill Browder: Yeah. Well, a lot of people remind me that I was a Putin fan in the early days, and I was. Maybe more than you were, in fact. I think you’re being polite.
Glasser: I did write a whole story, I believe, called “Vladimir Putin’s Apologists.” No, but I wanted to understand the case, and I believe I quoted you in it.
Browder: I was definitely, in the early days of Vladimir Putin, thinking he was a good guy. Part of it was based on naivete, of course. But part of it was based on the fact that he had replaced Yeltsin, who had basically let Russia become a chaotic, oligarchic state; where 22 guys owned the whole country, and everybody else ate dirt, and lived in poverty. Yeltsin was drunk, and disorganized, and letting the whole thing sort of turn into a Mad Max type of world.
And so I, along with everybody else, was hoping for some kind of order to come around. Putin was this, at the time, this fresh-faced technocrat. Nobody really knew what he was saying, but he wasn’t drunk, and he seemed to be—he spoke a little bit of English. So the idea was, or the hope was, that he was going to restore order in Russia, and it was all going to sort of normalize. And I actually believe from the first couple of years of his presidency, he didn’t have the same sense of bravado and self-confidence that he has right now. And so he was—
Glasser: “The appetite grows while eating” is an old Russian phrase.
Browder: Yes. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. But in his case, he didn’t have absolute power, and he didn’t have that much self-confidence. One could make a case, based on what he was doing, that he was sort of a technocrat, doing the right thing, reforming the economy. And so for some time, I was a fan.
And I was also a fan because he was starting to crack down on the oligarchs who were, in my mind, the biggest source of all trouble. And I thought he was going to return the power of the oligarchs—the power that the oligarchs had taken from the president—back to the state.
Glasser: Well, that’s right. In fact, the first time that we talked, it wasn’t in the context of Vladimir Putin, as I remember it, but in the context of your crusade at the time—you’ve always been a crusader, it seems to me, in a way—about the lack of accountability and transparency at Gazprom, the state natural gas monopoly. And you had a very impressive financial presentation about the misuse of resources in Gazprom, which had reached almost epic scale.
Browder: Well, you’re being very polite calling them misuse of resources. The absolute brazen theft and stealing.
Glasser: Well, epic misuse of resources. That’s right. But that was our first encounter. And the reason I bring it up is because, flash forward, obviously, all these years later. We met in Putin’s Moscow at a time when we didn’t quite know what Putin’s Moscow was. I’ve seen you almost all the time. You know, every year, I think, since then, along the way. But I don’t think either one of us ever anticipated that we would be meeting again in Donald Trump’s Washington.
Where you have been here, testifying on Capitol Hill about the unbelievable convergence, in effect, between what’s happened to you in your business, in your professional life, and the electoral integrity of the United States; questions about foreign lobbyists and how they operate here; questions about what kind of Russian intelligence operation was being launched in 2016; have somehow amazingly and bizarrely converged with the fight that you’ve been waging.
Browder: Right. I found myself right in the middle of every single one of these issues. And perhaps for your listeners, we should fast-forward a little bit, and outline the story of how I got to this crazy moment right now. So, as you said, I was exposing corruption at companies like Gazprom, and guess what? The guys who were stealing the billions of dollars weren’t so happy about me exposing it. I was kicked out of the country in 2005. All this terrible stuff started happening. My offices were raided. The police seized all of our documents. I ended up hiring a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky to investigate.
Sergei discovered that the reason that they had seized our documents was to steal $230 million of taxes that we had paid in the previous year, in a highly complex fraud. But Sergei, my lawyer, and I were so convinced that this must be a rogue operation because at the time I still had these illusions that Putin was a nationalist. He might not have been, at that point—this was 2005—I had kind of gotten over the fact. I no longer thought he was honest, but I thought that maybe he was still a patriot.
And the idea that that $230 million of tax money could be stolen, I thought he wouldn’t like that. And so we publicized the scandal.
Sergei then testified against these, what we thought were rogue officers involved. And we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys, and that would be the end of the story. And it turned out that in Putin’s Russia, there are no good guys. Six weeks after Sergei testified, he was arrested by the same people he testified against. He was put into pretrial detention. He was then tortured in pretrial detention to get him to withdraw his testimony.
They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds; left the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat, and no windowpanes, in December in Moscow, so he nearly froze to death. They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up.
And they were doing all this stuff because they wanted him not only to retract his testimony, but they wanted to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the $230 million, and he did so on my instruction. And Sergei, while he was just a tax lawyer—wore a white shirt, and a red tie, and blue suit, and got a Starbucks in the morning—when they threw him in jail, and they thought he would buckle in a week, it turns out that they found a man of absolute integrity who refused to buckle under any circumstances.
Glasser: Well, he documented all of this and was able to pass it out to you, which is how you got this information. So now, he got his name on an act here, passed by Congress. You learned a lot about Washington in the process of basically reinventing your career and your business around—
Browder: Human rights.
Glasser: —righting this wrong.
Browder: Well, let me just interject one thing. They killed him. Let’s not forget, they killed him. They tortured him and they killed him.
Glasser: A young man in his 30s.
Browder: He was 37 years old. He left a wife and two children. He was killed on the 16th of November, in the evening. I got the call at 7:45 a.m. on the 17th of November. And it was by far the most heartbreaking, life-changing, terrible, terrible phone call I could have ever gotten. Sergei Magnitsky was killed because of me. If he hadn’t been my lawyer, he’d still be alive today. He died at the age of 37, and I just, to this day, just can’t process that.
The only way that I can really go on from day to day, in my own life, was when I made the decision very quickly after that that I was going to go out and get justice for Sergei. And I was going to reorient my whole life, put aside everything else I was doing, and go after the people who killed him, and make sure they face justice.
Glasser: So what on earth does Sergei Magnitsky have to do with Donald Trump?
Browder: So in my quest for justice, first of all, I should point out that there was no chance of getting justice in Russia. Vladimir Putin circled the wagons and exonerated everybody involved, gave special promotions and state honors to the people who were most complicit. And so I came to America. I came to Washington. And I told the story of Sergei Magnitsky to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, a Democrat, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican.
I said, “Can we freeze the assets and ban the visas of the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky?” And they said yes. As a result, we ended up with something called the Magnitsky Act, which does exactly that. It freezes assets and bans visas. And it doesn’t just apply to the people who killed Sergei. It applies to people in Russia who do all sorts of other similar, terrible things.
In December of 2012, President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act into law. And all of a sudden, Vladimir Putin went out of his mind. Vladimir Putin, who thought that he could control things both inside and outside his country, found a situation which was completely out of his control. He went out of his mind partially because he personally is at risk of having his $200 billion of wealth frozen. He’s the richest man in the world.
Glasser: When you say he went out of his mind—let’s just be clear for the listeners—his retaliation for the United States passing the Magnitsky Act was?
Browder: He banned adoption of Russian orphans by American families. And let me just give a little color to that because it’s important. It sounds pretty horrible as it is. It’s much more than horrible. The previous 10 years or so, the Russians had a big program of Americans adopting Russian children. However, they didn’t let the Americans adopt the healthy ones. They basically took the unhealthy ones, the children with heart conditions, with Down syndrome, with HIV, with spina bifida, and they allowed them to take those children. And Americans came to Russia, in large numbers.
Glasser: Yes, you and I both knew every time you would get on the airplane back to the United States, it would be filled with children.
Browder: The Delta flight was filled with these uncertain parents, and these crying children as they were all getting used to each other. But these parents would come with open hearts, and open minds, and big love. They would take these children in and they would nurse them to health. It was a very successful program.
Vladimir Putin looked around to say, “How can I retaliate against the Magnitsky Act, which I hate?” And first he looked at freezing assets of American banks in Russia, and realized that the retaliation would be the freezing of Russian assets in America, so he couldn’t do that. They then even considered closing the supply routes, or the exit routes, for American military equipment out of Afghanistan. They realized that if they did that that Americans would stop their supplies into Syria.
And they said, “What can we do that the Americans can’t retaliate on?” They said, “They love adopting our children. Let’s just”—
Glasser: And by the way, that was clearly a hasty decision on Putin’s part. This gets forgotten a lot.
Browder: What makes this so incredibly heinous is that the children who were being adopted could not get the medical care they needed in Russia, that they were getting in America. The orphanages were very poor in Russia. And so, effectively, Putin was sentencing orphans to death in order to retaliate against American’s sanctioning him and his corrupt officers.
That actually had a huge negative impact in Russia. I can remember right after they announced that, the Russians called it Herod’s law. Herod is a famous character in the Bible who kills the children in Israel. And that’s what they called it. And like 100,000 people—and these were not the normal demonstrators. These were like schoolteachers, and doctors and so on—went out into the street to demonstrate. And Putin was very surprised.
Glasser: And it was at a time of threat to Putin’s rule, which is relevant to this whole question not only of his response to the Magnitsky Act, but also to his response to the American election. Why he hated Hillary Clinton so much. Why they might have intervened in our election. This moment in time, when your Magnitsky Act was passed here in the U.S. Congress, was a moment when Putin faced unprecedented demonstrations against the continuation of his regime.
He was returning to the presidency after allowing Dmitry Medvedev to be his placeholder for a term, and he sat out as the prime minister, and Medvedev was the figurehead president. He announced he was going to return, and there were really serious demonstrations.
Browder: In Russia, because it’s such a prison-yard mentality, you show disrespect, and then that gives everybody else the feeling that they can show disrespect. That’s when the whole thing falls apart for the president.
Here was a situation where everybody was starting to show him disrespect. When I say everybody, I mean a few hundred thousand people. And it just carried on from there. And so, as you said, there was all this, for the first time, demonstrations as Putin had come back into the official role of the president. He viewed, rightly or wrongly—certainly, wrongly—that somehow all these demonstrations were being organized by Hillary Clinton and the State Department.
Glasser: That’s right. He publicly blamed her for it. He also blamed Obama for the Magnitsky Act, even though they were somewhat reluctant, as I understand it.
Browder: Somewhat reluctant is an understatement. The Obama administration tried every possible trick to get in our way, to stop the Magnitsky Act from passing. And it only passed because of the way the U.S. Constitution is written; that the legislative branch, when acting in concert, has more power than the executive branch.
Glasser: Well, it really is an irony, actually, of the politics of where we find the politics of Russia in Washington today; that at the time, it really was the Democratic administration that was concerned about its hands being tied with Russia, and not wanting to—
Browder: Indeed. But getting back onto where does it all fit in with Donald Trump. Anyways, so Putin got crazy about the Magnitsky Act. He really doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it because his own money is potentially at risk. He also doesn’t like it because his whole system of kleptocracy, of stealing money, how did he get his $200 billion—which we’ll talk about in a minute. He gets it from, effectively, extortion, coercion, etc. He gets it from oligarchs and other people. Anyone who doesn’t cooperate gets arrested, tortured and possibly even killed.
The people who do all the arresting, torturing and killing, in order for them to do so on an industrial scale, they have to be guaranteed impunity. There’s 10,000 people that work for him. And historically, they could do all these terrible things to people and nothing would happen. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, because of Sergei Magnitsky, this law is passed, which basically creates a consequence. A real, serious consequence to people, which means that their assets that they’ve gotten will be frozen offshore, and they can’t travel. That makes the whole system of kleptocracy not work the way it worked before.
Glasser: Okay. So when we hear the word “adoption,” and we hear the word “Trump Tower,” and we hear the word “meeting,” they weren’t really talking about adoption.
Browder: There was nothing to do with adoption. That’s a code word for sanctions, and sanctions repeal. So Putin goes on this major fight to get the sanctions repealed. And he tries everything. He tries everything. He tries to coerce people. He makes threats. He does all this type of stuff, and it’s not working.
In 2016, Putin began a sort of Washington political campaign in order to get the Magnitsky Act repealed. He does so through a woman named Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Glasser: And when was the first time you heard of Natalia Veselnitskaya?
Browder: Well, I knew about Natalia Veselnitskaya as far back as 2014, because she was a Russian lawyer representing a Russian oligarch, whose assets were frozen and seized by the Department of Justice, in the United States, in New York, because they were connected to—the money had come from the crime that Sergei Magnitsky had exposed and was killed over.
Glasser: So they were directly connected to Magnitsky?
Browder: They’re directly connected to the Magnitsky case. They were culprits of receiving the money. And they were under indictment.
Glasser: So she surfaced as the lawyer?
Browder: She surfaces as the lawyer. She’s basically been deputized by the Putin regime since she’s in that place anyways, not just to do the legal defense on the money, but to repeal the Magnitsky Act. And so what does she do? Well, she’s, by the way, got an unlimited budget. I’ve never seen somebody throw so much money around so freely. She’s got an unlimited budget, and she goes out and then hires a sort of general contractor for the project. This is sort of frizzy-haired guy. A former Russian intelligence, or Soviet intelligence, officer named Rinat Akhmetshin.
Glasser: Another person who I’m sure our listeners have now heard of because he also attended the famous meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr.
Browder: Exactly. So Rinat—
Glasser: When did you hear of him?
Browder: I only heard about him in 2016. So I heard about her in 2014. He emerges onto the scene—and I wouldn’t say emerges onto the scene. I would say he’s a shadowy character. His fingerprints start showing up in places as early as early 2016. He is a former GRU officer. GRU is military intelligence. I should also point out that after the hacking of the election, when Obama imposed sanctions, one of the organizations he imposed sanctions on was the Russian GRU.
So Rinat Akhmetshin was a former GRU officer who had immigrated to the United States, naturalized, but continued to effectively be loyal to the Russian government. There was one further person, whose name is Anatoli Samochornov.
Glasser: The translator.
Browder: The translator. And I’ve seen him, because he was accompanying Natalia Veselnitskaya all over the world. Her anti-Magnitsky campaign wasn’t just limited to the United States. She was traveling all over the world, at the European Parliament, and various other places.
Browder: This project was going on in 2016. So she’s running around. She gets Akhmetshin in Washington. And Akhmetshin, who’s an insider in Washington. He knows his way around the corridors of power like nobody else. He then, with her pocketbook, and her budget, goes out and hires Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, a guy named Chris Cooper of Potomac Square Group, former Wall Street Journal reporters. He hires Ron Dellums, a former Democratic congressman. A firm called Cozen O’Connor, which is a guy named Howard Schweitzer, who’s a former Ex-Im Bank employee.
And then with this team of people, they then fan out across Capitol Hill, and try to get Congress both to repeal the Magnitsky Act, which is a pretty big lift, but they also wanted to get Sergei Magnitsky’s name deleted from the Global Magnitsky Act, which was just under consideration at the time. They even found one congressman, a guy named Dana Rohrabacher, a representative from Orange County, California, who’s known to be Putin’s favorite congressman. Anyway, so they go around trying to get Sergei’s name removed from the Global Magnitsky Act. This guy introduced it.
Glasser: This is all in the spring of last year?
Browder: This was all April through June of last year.
Glasser: So while Donald Trump is rolling up primary victories and emerging as the overwhelming front-runner for the Republican nomination, saying favorable things about Putin, questioning the sanctions publicly, this lobbying campaign is simultaneously occurring here in Washington?
Browder: That’s right. And then, on June 9th, Natalia flies in from Russia. She’s got to be in court earlier in that day because we’re in the process of disqualifying her lawyer, a guy with a funny name, John Moscow, for ethical violations because he had been our lawyer, and then switched sides to become her lawyer.
So she was in court on his behalf because he was about to be disqualified in the appeals court. And then after that, she runs over with this whole cast of dodgy Russians over to Trump Tower, to meet with Donald Trump Jr., to meet with Jared Kushner.
Browder: It was June 9th. And then after June 9th, they come back to Washington. And they have this movie. It’s an anti-Magnitsky movie. Very high budget, high production value, documentary, which is a Putin propaganda film, basically trying to turn the whole Magnitsky story on its head. They organize a screening at the Newseum in Washington, which is supposed to be the museum of free speech and journalism.
They invite members of Congress, members of the State Department, journalists. They get Seymour Hersh to introduce it. And Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS character, is running around trying to get different journalists to write about it. The movie’s basic premise was that Sergei Magnitsky actually wasn’t murdered, that he just died of natural causes, that it was nobody’s fault. And that Sergei Magnitsky wasn’t a whistleblower; that he was actually a criminal, and that I, Bill Browder, had lied to Congress about Sergei Magnitsky. That was the premise of the movie.
And so they put this movie on. They were not successful in getting any articles written. A bunch of Russian opposition activists showed up and jeered, and challenged him at every step of the way at the end of the movie. And it didn’t have the impact that they wanted it to have. And Sergei Magnitsky’s name was never taken off the Global Magnitsky Act.
And so their entire operation failed, completely and absolutely, and all money was wasted. But that’s sort of beside the point because we got a first-hand look at who these people were.
Glasser: Well, right. And of course, at the time, did you have any understanding that they were simultaneously seeking to influence the Republican candidate for president?
Browder: I had no idea. Having said that, it didn’t surprise me when I learned it because they were lifting up every stone, knocking on every door, trying to figure out where they could get some kind of positive treatment. And of course, it would seem plausible that if the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who’s been saying nice things about Putin, why wouldn’t they go to him and give it a shot?
Glasser: And Paul Manafort was already involved in the campaign at that time?
Browder: Paul Manafort was there. Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner were all in the meeting. They showed up with one ask, which was, “If your dad becomes president, can you repeal the Magnitsky Act?”
Glasser: Well, it’s interesting that they’ve all basically acknowledged it by saying that adoption was discussed. I find it very interesting that President Trump himself said that he recently, at his face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G-20, he also volunteered, in fact, in his interview with The New York Times, that adoption came up.
Browder: Nobody was talking about adoption. What they care about is the sanctions. That was the conversation. And reference to adoptions is a code word for that. One shouldn’t be mistaken about that.
Glasser: So how do you interpret the convergence of your Magnitsky Act story and this Trump investigation? And was that related to the election hacking, in your view, or were these separate Russian intelligence operations?
Browder: I have no idea. All I really know is what I know from the surface and from the evidence. And the evidence is that there was a big initiative to get the Magnitsky Act repealed. And we’ve seen that from all sorts of direct and indirect evidence. So what’s the big question? The big question is we know what the Russians wanted, we just don’t know what they were ready to offer in return. That’s the big question.
We’re going to know everything eventually. The beautiful thing about these situations where—I mean, you had so many different people. Nobody wants to get into trouble. We’re going to know absolutely every detail, and every piece of paper that was left, and every email that was sent, and every thought of the individuals in that meeting. So it’s just a matter of time before it all comes out, and to find out whether this is something significant, or this was just a really bad judgment meeting that these people had.
Glasser: When you testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee recently, you said, “This is Vladimir Putin’s single most important foreign policy priority.” I want to push you on that. More important than Syria? More important than Ukraine?
Browder: A hundred times because it affects his personal money. You know, all this other stuff, these are all sort of political activities. Why is he in Syria and Ukraine? He’s there because he needs to have some enemies to fight a war to keep everybody distracted. This affects his own money. You have to understand these people kill for money. They killed a lot of people to get that money. And if someone wants to take it away from them, that’s the most important thing in the world for them.
Glasser: You’ve been here in Washington, and there is a sense of, kind of, Russia fever. A lot of Republicans, even ones who are skeptical of Donald Trump, will say, you know, “This is hysteria on the part of Democrats. This is all about just getting Trump out of office.” Is the Russia investigation, in your view, something that should be taken seriously? Are Trump’s opponents just being hysterical?
Browder: Well, let me just challenge you on your assumption. There was a vote for sanctions on Russia to tie the president’s hands so that he can’t ever change those sanctions. And there’s only three people in the House of Representatives that voted against it, and two people in the Senate. I mean, there’s absolute unanimity in the legislative branch of the U.S.
Glasser: It’s one of the only bipartisan things there is right now.
Browder: And it’s absolutely almost unanimous. People want to take that power away from the president because he said all the stuff about Russia. That’s pretty compelling. That tells you really where their head is at.
Glasser: OK. And my final question. If you got Donald Trump under oath, and Bob Mueller designated his investigatory powers to you, what are the three questions you would ask the president?
Browder: I wouldn’t ask the president any questions. I would read out loud my book, Red Notice, to him. And once he heard the whole story, maybe he’d change his mind about whether Putin’s a good guy or not.
Glasser: All right. We’ll leave it at that. Bill, it’s very good to see you. It’s amazing to me that our paths are intersecting 16 years, I guess, maybe or more since we first—
Browder: You look exactly the same.
Glasser: So do you. No, it’s an incredible story, and I think Senator Lindsey Graham said today, “You wouldn’t believe it if it was written down in a novel. You’d send it back.” But you know, here we are, and we’ve gone from Putin’s Moscow to Trump’s Washington. So thank you for joining us here at POLITICO’s offices, and we will look forward to having you back when we know what the next chapter in this book brings.
***
And now for part two of this week’s Global POLITICO, a master class in Russia with Angela Stent and Dan Yergin. Dan and Angela, as I mentioned, are not only among America’s preeminent experts on Russia, they also happen to be married. They’ve taught me much over the years about Russia the petrostate, how the United States has looked at it.
They raise some important questions about where Russia’s at today—and our own current obsession with it. As with Bill Browder, I talked with them about the question of whether and how we misread Vladimir Putin, and just what they think is going to happen with American policy toward Russia now that Donald Trump is president—and proposing a reconciliation with Russia that his own party in Congress is more or less absolutely opposed to.
So thanks to Dan and Angela for joining us on The Global POLITICO.
Glasser: Angela, you were the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, yes?
Stent: Yes.
Glasser: Dan, you can’t write about energy without thinking an awful lot about Russia and how it fits into the world today. So I just noticed the cover of the new National Interest, a publication you contribute to, Angela, for September: Are Russia and the United States doomed to conflict with each other? What do you guys think?
Stent: Well, I actually have one of the pieces in that issue of The National Interest. And essentially what I said is we have a fundamentally different view of the world; we have fundamentally different interests. But we are in some ways doomed to cooperate because there are some issues like the nuclear arsenal, like nuclear nonproliferation, where we are the two nuclear superpowers. And if we don’t work together, then the world is a much more dangerous place.
There are conflicts like the one in Syria where, again, we have to work together to avoid further exacerbation of the conflict and hopefully find some way of a more lasting cease-fire. And then there’s the conflict in Ukraine, where we at least have to talk to each other, even though we’re not making much progress there. So we aren’t inevitably doomed to conflict, but what we have to, I think, understand is that there are fundamental ways in which we’re never going to see eye to eye, and at this—can at best be a sort of limited partnership where we work together on issues where we have narrowly defined similar interests, and where we will probably agree to disagree and continue to disagree for a very long time, certainly as long as Russia continues to have the kind of political system it does.
Glasser: What do you think, Dan?
Yergin: Well, I think first I should note that Angela talked about a limited partnership, and that is the title of her book, The Limited Partnership, about U.S.-Russian relations, so an interesting observation.
Glasser: Which by the way, is a lot more clear-eyed than either the sort of grand sweeping partnership that people occasionally propose, or the Russia and the United States as intractable enemy that you will inevitably be locked in mortal combat with until the end of days.
Yergin: Well, Susan, as you and Peter know from your own work on Russia, it was not inevitable that we would have this degree of estrangement. And if you go back, you can say, “Well, why?” After all, there isn’t the ideological conflict. Russia is not the Soviet Union. Its population is only half of it. Its GDP is perhaps the size of Spain or something along those lines. How and why has this come about? And I think that probably this latest phase really began when Edward Snowden went to Moscow and the summit got canceled between Obama and Putin. And from there on, the sort of channels of communication broke down. Ukraine happened, the sanctions happened, Russia pivoted to the east to China.
And then of course, you get to the 2016 election and the Russian interference, which the intelligence community is very strong about. And so it’s now gone down past that, and new sanctions that seem to make it very difficult to get back to a kind of a more working relationship. And it’s amazing that Russia, which is not the Soviet Union, is not leading a communist revolution, should loom so large in our international relations when we have other really serious issues that need to be dealt with.
Glasser: I think you’re totally right about that. We’re obsessed with Russia in a way that I can’t remember ever.
Stent: I was in Russia a few months ago talking to Russians, both those who I would say are more supportive of the government and those who aren’t. And all of them, to a man and woman, said, “We can’t understand why you Americans are so obsessed with what Russia may or may not have done.” They said, “You’ve now made us into this colossus, as if we kind of control what’s happening in the United States. You’re really attributing to our leadership, to the Kremlin, to Putin, whatever, much greater power than we think they have.”
And they sort of said, “We can’t understand such a great country like the United States, most powerful country militarily in the world, why do you have so little self-confidence? Why are you—you think that we can destroy your democracy.” So there’s a real puzzlement there about the extent to which now Russia has been made into this kind of boogeyman in the United States, as if they really have the power to destroy our democracy.
Glasser: Both of you, I don't know if it’s for the same reason or a different reason, expressed concerns about the sanctions bill that was just passed by the U.S. Congress. Now, this was obviously a very significant measure, if only because it probably represents the most significant example of Congress seizing the initiative from a president on a foreign policy issue of major concern since, really—some people argue since the Reagan era and the imposition of sanctions against South Africa. It was 98-2 in the Senate; it was obviously a very significant statement by the Republican-dominated Congress that they weren’t willing to see the president of their own party take policy in a direction. And yet, interestingly, many of the Europeans who also have many concerns about President Putin, were also concerned about this sanctions bill.
Yergin: Yes, I think that there are a couple of reasons. I mean what is the purpose of sanctions? Sanctions are meant to be leveraged, that you can use to achieve objectives. Once you lock sanctions into law as opposed to presidential discretion, then you lose that ability. It becomes a domestic political issue and it takes away the flexibility that this president or the next president may have to adjust relations.
I think one of the Russians pointed out that these were sanctions, as he put it, not merely on the Russians, these were sanctions on President Trump, because it reflected a lack of trust on President Trump to manage this relationship. The European reaction to it was, first of all, don’t do unilateral sanctions, because they usually don’t work. They create conflict. Secondly, some of the things were the U.S. saying to Europe, “We know what your energy security needs and problems are, and we’re going to intervene to affect them.” And the Europeans say, “Well, wait, it’s our energy security. Let us determine that.” I mean, should Brussels, should the EU, pass sanctions on pipelines in the United States? I mean that kind of question is there.
Stent: So I think a little history is illustrative here. In the Kennedy administration, going back that far, to 1962, the United States tried to prevent its European allies from selling pipeline equipment, pipelines to the Soviet Union to construct an oil pipeline from Eastern Europe. That didn’t work. In the Reagan administration, they tried to prevent the European allies again from providing equipment to build a gas pipeline from Yamal. And in the end, even Margaret Thatcher, who was Ronald Reagan’s great friend and soulmate, personally traveled to the shipyards in Scotland from which they were exporting the components and defied the U.S.
So I think we have an unsuccessful history of trying to prevent our allies, particularly in the energy field, from providing equipment or getting involved in the construction of these oil and gas pipelines from the Soviet Union and Russia. And it usually doesn’t work. The Obama administration worked very hard to craft sanctions with the Europeans that were multilateral that we all agreed on, and they worked remarkably well. Chancellor Merkel was key here. With this new sanctions bill, and if the Europeans feel that they’re now being pressured to do things they don’t want to do, they could well say, well, they’re not going to adhere to the sanctions that they imposed on Russia.
And I think the other thing is that we’ve had these particular Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia since 2014. Russia’s policy in Ukraine hasn’t changed at all. There is absolutely no—the sanctions have hurt Russia economically, but there’s absolutely no sign that they’re going to change their policy because of this. So I think that’s why, again, you need the flexibility, you need to offer the Russians the potential for some sanctions relief if they were to do—to make moves in Ukraine of which we approve. And we lose that when we pass these kinds of sanctions.
Glasser: Well, Dan, I’m glad Angela brought up the energy piece of it. It always does seem to come back to that, right?
Yergin: Right.
Glasser: How dependent are the Europeans still on Russian resources?
Yergin: I think that there’s always been, and Angela referred to the fear of European dependence upon Russian gas, Russian energy. But the world has really changed. It’s no longer that it’s Russia or no one; it’s a competitive global market. Russian gas is now going to compete in Europe with U.S. LNG, liquefied natural gas, liquefied natural gas from other countries.
In fact, the Europeans, there’s some language in the bill that really got the Europeans in this latest sanction bill because it talked about the promotion of U.S. energy exports. And so they were saying, “Well, wait, this is really trying—”
Glasser: “Maybe that’s the real agenda behind this.”
Yergin: Yes. I don’t think it is, but it kind of led to this view and this—so Russia is going to continue to be a big gas supplier to Europe and the question is just which pipelines is it going to come from? Right now, Europe, about a third of its gas imports come from Russia.
And so now the Russians are realizing they have to compete on price or there’s going to be all this surplus LNG that’s going to land in the market. So I think, actually, if you take away the rhetoric, a lot of the geopolitics has actually been drained out of the gas market because the market forces are so much stronger now and because you have multiple sources. That makes a huge difference.
Glasser: So this is—OK, so let’s get this onto the table then, which is the shale revolution. It has, in the last decade, basically absolutely scrambled the energy picture in the world, right? The United States is—now we’re talking about exporting rather than importing, we’re talking about the United States along with Russia and the OPEC countries as being basically a new pillar of the global energy market.
Yergin: Yes. It’s a different game, Susan. I remember in about 2009 we did an article together and the title line that you wrote is “There Will Be Oil.” And that was at the point when everybody is saying peak oil, it’s all finished.
Glasser: That’s right. That was a special issue of Foreign Policy magazine. It was a fantastic issue all about oil, and it was totally outdated within a year of its publication.
Yergin: Well, no, it wasn’t, because, I mean, we would have just changed the headline. Instead of “There Will Be Oil,” “There Will Be Lots of Oil.”
Glasser: Lots of oil.
Yergin: And that’s what there’s been: lots of oil. And it was just when the shale gas revolution was beginning and the oil was just beginning, but it’s now been transformative. People talk about OPEC and non-OPEC; that’s the kind of parameters, the division of the world. But now you also have to talk about the big three: Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States. And some think the United States will be the world’s largest oil producer.
We’ve gone from importing 60 percent of our oil to about 23 percent of our oil. And on natural gas, we were going to run short and we were going to be the biggest importer of LNG; well, we’re going to be one of the big three of LNG exports sometime in the 2020s. Maybe the largest. That will be debated back and forth.
U.S. LNG has gone to Lithuania. In June of this year, the first shipment of U.S. LNG went to Poland. And that changes the pricing structure. So what it’s done is it’s made the global energy markets much more competitive. I remember at our conference that we call our CERAWeek conference in Houston in 2014, just after he had stepped down as head of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke said that the shale revolution had been one of the most positive, maybe the most positive thing to have happened to the U.S. economy since the 2008 downturn. It was a very big stimulus.
And so it’s really been transformative in so many different ways and it puts the U.S. in a different position. And economically it puts us in a different position. And I’ll tell you, you travel elsewhere in the world, people are very conscious and very aware at how the energy balance has changed in a way that’s a positive for the United States.
Glasser: So, Angela, Russia has often tried to use its energy resources as a tool of foreign policy. Putin is facing reelection, not too much suspense in the outcome of that contest; but nonetheless, there are politics in Russia, and they often have revolved around the use of resources. Especially at a time when the economy is under sanction. Oil prices have fallen in recent years as a result of not only the shale revolution but then there’s also the toll that sanctions have taken on the Russian economy.
So what kind of shape, first of all, is Putin in, headed into 2018?
Stent: Well, that’s a very important question. It’s interesting because when you go to Russia and you talk to people who claim to know what’s happening in the Kremlin, they all say well, they’re still very concerned about the election, which is going to be held next March 18th on the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea four years before. They’re very concerned.
And you say, “Well, why are you concerned? If you look at President Putin’s poll numbers, they’re very high.” I think they’re concerned, A, to have the high poll numbers and then to make people—to ensure that people believe that this was a clean election and there weren’t falsified results. Because clearly in past elections, people have questioned whether these really were the results. We know in the Duma in the last parliamentary elections, for instance, there were people who said that only 25 percent of the population of Moscow, for instance, voted. So I think one of the concerns is to make this look like a legitimate election.
Glasser: Can it be legitimate if there’s no opponent?
Stent: This is the system there. Of course, for the people who want a really truly competitive election, it’s not legitimate. I mean, the one potential challenger to Putin is Alexei Navalny, who has been very active and who’s built quite an organization countrywide, but he’s probably not going to be able to run because he’s been convicted on various charges, and that I think disqualifies him from running.
So the only other candidates will be ones from the four parties that are approved that are in the Duma: the Communists, the Liberal Democrats. They’re all led by people who are older than Putin; they’re about Trump’s age. So yeah, that’s the way it goes. So for Putin, the Russian economy obviously took a huge hit from falling oil prices, first of all, then from just the structural problems of the economy. And then, thirdly, the sanctions, which did affect the economy badly. The growth numbers are somewhat better now. The economy is somewhat recovered.
So the way that Putin has dealt with this population, of course, is appealing to patriotism, the anti-Americanism, which is obviously rather easy to do with everything that’s happening now with the sanctions, that he has made Russia a great country again, and then invoking we’ve suffered through worse things before. We Russians are strong and we don’t want anyone to try and limit our own sovereignty or try and overthrow us. So that’s his appeal to the population.
And so far, we think, it’s working. I think you have to be very careful with the poll numbers in Russia. But I think you can say that he still remains popular, at least in wide swaths of the country, partly because there’s no alternative.
So I think the result is that Putin will undoubtedly be reelected. I think the much more serious issue is what happens then? And when I go to Russia and I ask Russians again of different political persuasions, “What’s the plan? What’s he going to do in his next term?”
And they all say, “Nobody knows. Is there going to be economic reform? He has all these proposals that have been made. Is he going to do anything? Or is it just about remaining in power, him and the people around him? And the results for Russia could be really quite detrimental because if Russia doesn’t reform economically, if they don’t move away from just being a petrostate, they’re going to become progressively less modern.
Yergin: I think one point, a basic point to understand about Putin is that his goal is the restoration of Russia as a great power. That’s his project, and he has pursued it in many different ways.
The Russian economy, as Angela said, seems to be back, growing somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, and when you have a declining population, that’s not bad. It’s not the 4 percent that it needs. But the oil industry has adopted to lower prices, and it hasn’t hurt to the degree that we thought. And the reason is because the ruble is down. So the government receives and the companies receive dollars, but they only may receive half as many dollars. But those dollars, because the ruble is down, buy the same amount of rubles. And actually since the sanctions were put in place in 2014, Russian oil production has gone up.
The other thing that’s part of this strategy is that you see this burgeoning cooperation between Russia and Saudi Arabia that has been at the center of this OPEC/non-OPEC effort to stabilize the oil markets. And it’s because these two countries see their self-interest in terms of stabilizing the market as very congruent.
Glasser: Well, that is a really interesting development when you think about how they’re both watching this new ascendance of the United States as the other major energy superpower now.
But somebody said to me recently, “Well, the thing that’s really different,” this was a non-U.S. very senior diplomat, the United States, in this person’s view, is now the No. 1 source of geopolitical uncertainty—if not instability, at least uncertainty, in the world. I’m wondering, first of all, if you guys both agree with that, and second of all, what does it mean for places like Russia? They may now be more incentivized to act more responsibly.
Yergin: I don't know how you rank it as No. 1 or or No. 3, but certainly if you’re in any other country and you’re trying to understand where is the U.S. going, where is this great aircraft carrier called the U.S. sailing, and it seems to be on a very jittery course where you just don’t know what’s going to happen. That obviously creates uncertainty in the minds of countries all around the world.
I mean, what’s striking is it hasn’t so far had economic impact. We’ve seen stock markets go up, we see Europe recovering, the world economy looking better, growth rate projections up. But it’s—to say unpredictable might be a slight understatement.
Stent: I would like to come back to the issue of America as the greatest source of instability in the world and how the Russians view this.
But I think they were very surprised when Trump won, and then they were initially very hopeful. Now, we know that in the Duma they broke out the champagne because they thought that President Trump would be able to implement what he had talked about during the entire campaign. President Putin was the one world leader that he consistently said positive things about.
Glasser: And still does, by the way, even with everything that’s happened since then. Donald Trump has had every opportunity to criticize Putin, and he still refused to do so.
Stent: Right. So he said that, then he said we can make a deal with the Russians, why shouldn’t we be friendly with them. And so there was great hope. And then I think the Kremlin began to realize that as all of these Russiagate investigations unfolded, that this wasn’t going to happen. And now I think they themselves are very concerned about the unpredictability.
We don’t have a Russian policy in the United States; we have at least two, if not more. We have what President Trump and some people around him appear to believe, which is that we can still do a deal with Russia, that we can work together, we can jointly defeat Islamic State. We can maybe jointly work together on North Korea. Then, of course, you have a much more skeptical, I would say, Defense Department, I would say National Security Council, and also the State Department where Secretary Tillerson himself has said, “The kind of policy we should pursue”—and I have to say this sounds very much like what both Obama and Bush said because that really is the only kind of policy—“is one where we push against Russian aggression. But on the other hand, we have to find ways where we can work with Russia, and we have to try and create a sense of strategic stability.”
And then, of course, you have a Russia policy from the Congress (and we’ve talked about the sanctions already), which if anything wants to be even tougher on Russia. So I think that the Kremlin has began to realize that there is no predictability; that even if President Trump’s instincts are to keep pushing forward and trying to improve relations with Russia, he may not be able to do that just because of all his domestic problems.
And so I think they’re sitting back, and then to come to the second point, so now Russia is really trying to present itself as the more moderate and reasonable power. They have put forward now a plan for what we have to do—we should be doing with North Korea, I mean, in conjunction with the Chinese, which is to sit down and have talks. They will continuously say we have to continue working together in Syria. So Putin himself has said in the past few weeks consistently, “We want to try and work together with the United States,” even though there’s the anti-American strand there.
And I think a public opinion poll was released today or yesterday showing that a lot of Europeans now believe that Russia at least is a more predictable power and has a more stable leadership than the United States does. So this is really unprecedented. And I’m sure you’ve had the same experience. But when you travel abroad as an American, it’s very interesting to see that everybody wants to know what is happening in your country and what has happened to what America was.
Glasser: Dan, you’ve been doing a lot of this traveling. What are they saying to you?
Yergin: I think very similar things, that everywhere you go, people want to know what’s happening in Washington and how does this work. And they see the drop, they’re watching CNN, they’re following this very closely. They’re confused. They don’t know who to talk to. And see a U.S. government that seems somewhat dysfunctional, is not getting things done.
Susan, I think something that you know going back to your own Russian experience, there is a fundamental difference of view when Putin talks about sovereignty, about non-interference in country’s affairs versus the U.S. with universal values.
And on that, Putin has found a soulmate, and the soulmate is Xi Jinping, the president of China. And this pivot to China is on very practical terms that Russia sees its growth market for energy on gas and oil in China. But it’s also very much that they’re united on this principle of sovereignty. You don’t interfere in our political system. And you’ve seen this, people say it’s a strategic partnership, what’s going on between Russia and China. Russia’s just done something that it had refused to do before; sold these very advanced SU-35 jets to China. They didn’t want to sell it before because they were afraid the Chinese would reverse-engineer them. Now it’s part of this relationship.
Stent: But on the other hand, I would also say that President Trump himself, go back to his inaugural address, he said, “It’s not our business to interfere in other countries.” So in fact—
Glasser: Right. I thought you were going to say the soulmate was Trump on that.
Yergin: Yes. I did too, because I think in some ways Trump is also the soulmate on this. I mean he has repeatedly said, “I’m not interested in interfering in other people’s domestic affairs, and we’re not going to do that.”
And again, I think this is not a united policy yet. This may be President Trump’s view; it’s obviously not the view of people who work permanently in organizations like the State Department.
And I would just say, I mean the Russians on the one hand say, “Well, we don’t interfere in other people’s domestic affairs,” but look at Ukraine. Look at Georgia. I mean there are many examples where of course that’s not true.
Glasser: Angela, I want to ask you, you have seen how it works inside the U.S. government and watched the full arc of our intelligence agencies trying to analyze and understand Vladimir Putin since he came to power. All three of us have had different perspectives on watching Putin since he came to power. You’ve gone to this Valdai forum, it’ll be 14 straight years in a row where you get the opportunity to see President Putin in action. I was there back in the very first interview he gave to the U.S. press in 2001 after President Bush’s famous first summit with him, where he looked into his soul.
Dan, you have made the study of Russia a key part of your understanding of the global economics of oil over this—generations. So did the U.S. misread Vladimir Putin, and is that part of the reason why we’re in this sort of saber-rattling, almost not even talking phase of the relationship?
Stent: I think that first of all, you have to go back to the 1990s. And I think that the U.S. had expectations about what was going to happen in Russia, which it turns out were very unrealistic and misplaced. We somehow thought that Russia was going to make a transition from Point A to Point B, and Point B was going to be a Russia that while it wouldn’t look completely like the West, would look much more like the West.
So I think that was a fundamental miscalculation and failure to understand the kind of historical influences then. And I think we—progressively what happened is that Putin himself got disillusioned.
I think we were also late to come to the realization of how important it was for Putin to restore Russia’s greatness. Again, you go back to the speech he made at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 where he basically served notice that Russia was going to be back again and that the U.S. couldn’t dictate to Russia. And I think that—so we underestimated. And then the extent to which Russia was in the end willing to use force in Georgia and in Ukraine to achieve these goals.
Glasser: Did your colleagues inside the government, though, was there a debate about these issues? Would you say that we were—
Stent: Oh, yes. I mean, the thing is that the debate inside the government isn’t really very different from the debate outside the government among journalists, think tankers, academics, whatever. There are these debates about Putin. And I think the thing you realize the further along you go is how little we really understand about the inner workings of the Kremlin. I mean, the joke is the people who know don’t talk and the people who talk don’t know.
Glasser: Which is why, Dan, many people have said, “Screw the Kremlinology, let’s look at the more basic facts that we do know about the society, including its economy.” A lot of people believe, for example, that it was the crash of oil prices back in the 1980s that had an awful lot, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, that had an awful lot to do with the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yergin: Oh, I think that’s absolutely true. I think Mikhail Gorbachev had bad luck, which was plunging oil prices. Boris Yeltsin had bad luck in plunging oil prices, and Vladimir Putin had very good luck for a long time because oil prices, Russia’s oil earnings, increased about sevenfold during the time from 2000 to around 2013, 2014.
Glasser: Dan, by the way, you were on this strategy and policy board that was just disbanded this week.
Yergin: It disbanded itself.
Glasser: It disbanded itself; OK. Did you get anything out of it? I mean, do you think—
Yergin: Well, I think there were some major things that—it was meant to bring perspectives from different parts of the economy in an unfiltered way. So I think it was very important in helping to prevent a currency war with China because the discussion was that China is not a currency manipulator now; it spent a trillion dollars defending its currency.
I think it was doing important work on the relationship between education and the needs of the workforce in the 21st century, work on infrastructure. I mean, it was a dialogue, it was information, it was points of view. So I think it was bringing things to bear, but, of course, it got overwhelmed by the political turmoil that’s engulfed both our nation’s capital and our national politics.
Glasser: Was there a vote of this group or—
Yergin: I think it was a general view within it that when we had the conference call to go around the room, that it was time to disband. It lost sight of what it was trying to contribute on the economy, and it had become a symbol. And I think everybody just decided that it was just—it should not go on and it was time to bring it to an end.
Glasser: It’s one of those examples, we all know that crazy, unpredictable things can happen. But even so, if you said this group would break up, I would say, “OK, well, I can imagine scenarios where there would be something too controversial.” That it would be over Confederate monuments, I think, is not something that any of us would have predicted.
Yergin: Yes. And I think that’s right. It’s just the way these things have happened, and it was just not going to be able to function. So to have this and the manufacturing council, to have these group of—most of the members are CEOs—to just say that we can’t go on was a comment about what’s happening to our politics. This is at a very high level of people thinking strategically. But I think by a Wednesday in August, it was time to disband.
Glasser: Amazing. Amazing times. So Angela, our old friend and your longtime colleague Fiona Hill has the unenviable job right now of being inside that White House as a senior director for Russia. What would you advise her? You’ve already said in our conversation today that we don’t really have a Russia policy, or perhaps we have multiple different Russia policies. When Fiona hits the red button and says, “Angela, help, what should I do?” what are you going to tell her?
Stent: Well, I think they should continue doing what my understanding is that they are doing in the National Security Council, and that is look at the areas where you can and have to work together with Russia. So we already mentioned Syria. There are some very serious arms control and nuclear arms questions coming. The United States believes, for instance, that Russia is in violation of the Treaty on Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces. We have to talk to the Russians about this. We have to figure out what we’re going to do. The New Start Agreement on strategic nuclear weapons that was worked out under the Obama administration, that expires in 2021. That’s not that far away, and we have to start thinking about how do we renew that, because if we don’t, then we don’t have any agreements working on this.
I personally think that we should be having a dialogue with the Russians on cyber issues. That may seem strange given the fact that we’re talking about their interference in our election, but we do have such an agreement with the Chinese, and even though it doesn’t work perfectly, it is worth sitting down and trying to talk to the Russians about the rules of the road. I mean, interestingly, Putin himself has suggested that, and apparently that’s something that came up during their meeting. It’s not going to go away. The Russians aren’t going to stop doing this. But we at least—it’s better if we can try and agree on some rules of the road. So I think on all of those issues, we need to talk to the Russians.
What Putin would like would be a new tri-polar Yalta Agreement. That you re-divide the world, Russia, China and the United States. We have our sphere of influence, they do, the Chinese do and we just—hands off everybody else’s. I don’t think that we’re going to agree with that ever, and that’s certainly—so it comes back to what I said at the beginning. We have different views of how the world should function and what drives international politics.
But I think to go back to what the National Security Council is doing, those are the things that they should be working on. And I think they are; the problem is to what extent can they pursue these policies if you have a wild card in the White House?
Glasser: A wild card in the White House. OK. We’re going to end it on this final quick question. “New Cold War.” A lot of people throw that around. Is that the right term? If it isn’t, do you have some better frame for understanding what’s happening between the U.S. and Russia?
Stent: I think it’s very reminiscent of the old Cold War. I mean, Dan said at the beginning there isn’t an ideological conflict. But you know there is in many ways because Russia now puts itself forward as the leader of conservative internationale—against regime change, against decadent Western morals. So it resembles the Cold War. The difference is the U.S. is infinitely stronger than the Russians, militarily. They certainly can project power in their own neighborhood in Syria, but we’re not military rivals in the way that we were before. We’re becoming geopolitical rivals more than we were before. So it’s a sort of Cold War 2.0.
Glasser: Dan, you get the last word.
Yergin: I don’t think “New Cold War” is a way to describe it because it suggests that there’s kind of no way out of it. Frigid, antagonistic, confrontational in some ways, yes. But I think it’s more a great power clash, and although I take what Angela says, it’s not as ideological. It’s not a vanguard of world revolution. Maybe the phrase we should use is a breakdown. And a breakdown in relations between the world’s two major nuclear powers is something to be very concerned about.
Original Article
Source: politico.com
Author: SUSAN B. GLASSER
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