Is the U.S. Sleeping on Threats from Russia and China?

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Before we get to our episode, I’d like to invite you to come see Freakonomics Radio live: I’ll be in San Francisco on January 3rd and in Los Angeles on February 13th. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/liveshows. They are selling briskly, so hustle up. Again, that’s freakonomics.com/liveshows.

One more thing: the episode you’re about to hear is what audio people call a two-way — or what normal people call a one-on-one conversation. Most Freakonomics Radio episodes aren’t like this. We typically feature multiple voices, multiple angles, sometimes even multiple stories. But there’s a real opportunity to be had by going deep with one person. So for the month of December, we’re featuring some one-on-one conversations. You’ll be hearing about the revolution in the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs; you’ll hear from one of the best magazine editors of this generation; and in a special episode of the podcast People I (Mostly) Admire, you’ll hear a mind-blowing conversation between Steve Levitt and an astonishingly creative neuroscientist. In today’s episode: a conversation with a political figure who, several times over his career, has been in the room where it happened — with Donald Trump, with Joe Biden, and with Vladimir Putin.

And one last reminder about our upcoming live shows, with very special guests: San Francisco on January 3rd and Los Angeles on February 13th. You can get tickets at freakonomics.com/liveshows. As always, thanks for listening.

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We begin this story on June 16th of 2021.

John SULLIVAN: This is a one-on-one meeting in Geneva. Nothing else going on. Both presidents fly in just for this meeting.   

The two presidents are Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.

SULLIVAN: So let me set the scene for you. For Biden, he has, I think, five days of meetings before this in London and Brussels — G7, NATO leaders, etc. Biden looks great. He flies in. Putin flies in. He’s coming from Moscow. He lands, he looks great, physically, was relaxed, cracking jokes, some of them at our expense.  

The one-on-one meeting isn’t truly a one-on-one; it’s what State Department folks call a one-plus-one:

SULLIVAN: It’s Biden with Secretary Blinken sitting next to him, but not speaking. Putin and his foreign minister, Lavrov, sitting next to him.

The timing was significant.

SULLIVAN: It’s been a rocky spring between the United States and Russia. We expel some Russian diplomats. They expel some of my colleagues from Embassy Moscow. Biden called Putin a killer. Navalny’s imprisoned.

The one-plus-one would be followed by a second meeting.

SULLIVAN: They have what’s called an expanded bilat, an expanded bilateral meeting. Those of us who were going into the expanded bilat — there was a break, Secretary Blinken told us what the two leaders had talked about in the one-on-one meeting.   

What did they talk about?

SULLIVAN: Biden gave a reassurance to Putin, “Look, I’m not looking for regime change in Russia. We’re looking for” — the phrase that was used at the time was, “guardrails for our relationship with Russia.” 

And what did Biden and Putin talk about in that second meeting?

SULLIVAN: The headline is: what did they not talk about? Ukraine. I look back now and I say the way Putin conducted himself, he had decided he was going to invade Ukraine. He was going to take what he thought was his.  

As we all know, Putin did invade Ukraine, several months after that sitdown. Today on Freakonomics Radio: a conversation with John J. Sullivan, a lifelong Republican who has served under five U.S. presidents, including Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Sullivan happened to be on duty in Moscow, as U.S. ambassador, during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He has just published a book called Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia’s War Against the West. It reads a bit like a thriller — spies and subterfuge, threats and bluffs, enormously high stakes. The bulk of the book explains, from inside the house, the Russian Federation’s decision to escalate its war in Ukraine. It’s a train wreck that you can’t look away from. And it left John Sullivan thinking that U.S. foreign policy these days is a bit of a mess.

SULLIVAN: Our politicians aren’t leading, Republicans or Democrats. 

He sees frequent miscalculations.

SULLIVAN: If you think cutting off Ukraine is going to assist your pressure campaign on Iran, you’re crazy. 

And he sees multiple flash points:

SULLIVAN: These are countries governed by leaders and governments that are immensely hostile to the United States.  

In the book, Sullivan isn’t quite an alarmist. But in conversation? Different story:

SULLIVAN: There may not be a Pearl Harbor-like incident, but my fear is that it’s going to come, and we’re not prepared.  

I learned a great deal from this conversation with John Sullivan, and I suspect you will too. Let’s get it started.

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John Sullivan now splits his time between Washington, D.C., and Connecticut. He grew up in Boston, attended Brown University and then Columbia Law School, and launched a perfectly respectable, but — if we’re being honest — slightly dull career as a corporate lawyer. There were already a lot of lawyers in his family, even a family law firm in Providence. But there was also an uncle, Bill. He was a combat naval officer during World War II, and afterward he joined the Foreign Service:

SULLIVAN: He was a three-time ambassador. He served in Saigon during the early part of the Vietnam War, ambassador to the Philippines, and then the last U.S. ambassador to Iran. 

This had made an impression on his nephew.

SULLIVAN: As a young kid, I remember just being hooked on this conception of public service. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not an easy life. It’s hard on family life. But boy, the rewards are fantastic. Serving the United States abroad, and standing for the United States and all that we aspire to stand for, and seeing the American flag flying over a mission in a country like Russia, it’s really gratifying.

Sullivan has spent the past several decades toggling between corporate law and government service. He worked in the Justice Department under the first President Bush, and in Commerce and Defense under the second Bush. In 2016, he was back in private practice when Trump was elected. “I was as surprised as many were,” he writes in his book. “I was not an active Trump supporter, but I did still believe in Ronald Reagan’s famous Eleventh Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.’” Sullivan had voted for Trump — “with no thought that I ever would be invited to work in his administration,” he writes. He adds that his wife Grace — also a high-powered lawyer, who has since died — “had not voted for Trump and would not have been supportive if I were going to work for him at the White House.” But it wasn’t the White House that called — it was the Defense Department. Secretary Jim Mattis wanted Sullivan as his general counsel, and that’s where Sullivan was heading — until he got a better offer: Deputy Secretary of State, under Rex Tillerson. That job, he took — and when Tillerson was fired (by tweet) after barely a year on the job, Sullivan became Acting Secretary. He reverted to deputy when Mike Pompeo took over as Secretary. Sullivan liked Pompeo, and they worked well together. But that first Trump administration was an exercise in chaos — “nothing like its Republican predecessors,” Sullivan writes, “undisciplined and unconventional.” So when he learned that the U.S. ambassador to Russia was resigning, Sullivan put himself up for the post. It’s hard to emphasize how unusual this was, trading in a high-status job in Foggy Bottom for a diplomatic post in Moscow. What did President Trump think of this move?

SULLIVAN: He thought Secretary Pompeo wanted to get rid of me. And the look on his face said, “If that’s not the reason, then why would anybody in their right mind want to do that?” 

But Sullivan made it clear to Trump that no, he wasn’t getting fired by Pompeo; he was just ready for a new challenge.

SULLIVAN: So that was my last conversation with him, in August of 2019. Never spoke to him as ambassador. The last time I spoke to him was, he asked me if I really wanted to go to Russia. Did have a lot of interactions with him, though, as deputy secretary.

And what were Sullivan’s impressions then?

SULLIVAN: President Trump looks at our overseas relationships — entanglements, whatever you want to call it — looks at it purely from a transactional, economic standpoint. If it makes sense for the United States economically — and he defines economically narrowly, and a lot of economists disagree with that, but Putin’s got a very similar outlook, if you think about it.

And so it was that John Sullivan gave up the chaos of Washington, D.C., for a new chaos, in Moscow. Here’s how he puts it in his book: “I believed the Russian government did not want any physical harm to come to me while I was in Russia. On the other hand, the Russian government devoted a huge number of personnel and resources to try to annoy, provoke, criticize, frustrate, embarrass, and compromise me.”

SULLIVAN: I mean, I knew what the Russians were about, because I’d been Deputy Secretary of State for three years. What I saw when I went there, it was a government different from any other government I’d dealt with before. Their characterization of us as an enemy — they are at war with us, and we in the United States and particularly in Washington, it’s hard to get people to really believe it, including at the State Department. We in Moscow, at Embassy Moscow, would be looking for support, for reciprocity. If the Russians did something to our mission, we’d be looking for Washington to give a little payback to the Russian side. The response was, “Jeez, that’s really kind of nasty. We’d never do” — and I’m like, you have no idea what we’re dealing with here. That’s my message, we don’t understand how different these governments in Moscow and Beijing are from us, with leaders that are willing to use military force.  

When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, he spoke warmly of Vladimir Putin.

TRUMP: If Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability. 

By the time John Sullivan got to Moscow, in early 2020, things had changed. The Trump administration had imposed a variety of sanctions on prominent Russians and on Russia itself. One sanction came after a Russian malware attack on U.S. financial institutions; another, after attempted Russian interference in the 2018 U.S. elections. Trump included more sanctions in a 2019 executive order, in response to a Russian assassination attempt in Salisbury, England. The target was a former Russian spy, who was exposed to a nerve agent that had been applied to his front door. He survived, but a British civilian died when she reportedly sprayed herself with perfume containing the same nerve agent; her boyfriend had found it in a collection bin. In addition to imposing these sanctions on Russia, the Trump administration had been backing Ukraine as it faced increasing Russian aggression. This was a few years after Russia annexed Crimea and started backing Russian separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine — but it was a couple of years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Then, in 2020, Trump lost the election to Joe Biden; John Sullivan was asked by the Biden administration to stay on as their man in Moscow; and Biden announced that the U.S. would be pulling out of Afghanistan.

SULLIVAN: President Biden — always skeptical, going back to his days as vice president in the Obama administration, skeptical of the U.S. being a presence in Afghanistan. He decides in the spring we’re getting out, and he’s following through on the plan that had been negotiated in the Trump administration. He says, we’re out by September 11th, 20 years from the attack on September 11th, 2001. We’re out of Afghanistan. 

And this brings us back to that meeting in Geneva between Biden and Putin; it’s the summer of 2021.

SULLIVAN: It’s been a rocky spring between the United States and Russia. 

This was only the second time that Putin and Biden had met face-to-face. The first was in 2011, when Biden was vice president under Barack Obama. After that meeting, Biden said that Putin “had no soul.” And now recently, as president, Biden had called Putin “a killer.” Like John Sullivan said, it had been a rocky spring.

SULLIVAN: By the way, the Russians are increasing their troop presence in southwestern Russia, threatening an invasion of Ukraine. And out of it all, Biden suggests a meeting with Putin, in Geneva. Footnote: in April, after Biden called Putin a killer, Putin withdrew his ambassador from the United States. And the Russian government said to me, “You need to go home too.” I said, “Are you declaring me persona non grata? Are you expelling the U.S. ambassador?” And they said, “Oh God, no, but you do need to go home because no one is going to talk to you.” Putin said this in one of his phone calls during this period with Biden. He said, “You should bring your ambassador home because he’s going to have nothing to do, because no one will talk to him.” Biden says, “Let’s meet.” Putin agrees. 

So they meet in Geneva, at an 18th-century villa.

SULLIVAN: People ask me, you know, “What was Biden like? Was he healthy? Was he with it?” Biden shows up in Geneva and he looked great. I mean, he looked like a healthy man in his late ‘70s. I did not see any of the decline, which was then obvious a few years later. So there were two meetings.  

We heard about this earlier: the one-plus-one, and then the expanded bilateral meeting. John Sullivan was in that second meeting. And what did the U.S. want out of this meeting?

SULLIVAN: I got the sense, both under the Trump and Biden administrations, we want to pivot to Asia. Make this Russia problem go away. Tell them to put a sock in it. Put this guy Prigozhin in a cage. Just calm down. We — and you — can move on to bigger and better things. 

DUBNER: And what was your impression of that message?

SULLIVAN: Well, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, let me tell you what I saw. In the expanded bilateral meeting, they spent more time talking about Afghanistan than they did Ukraine. Biden’s asking for the Russians not to oppose the U.S. having a counterterrorism presence in Afghanistan. This will help Russia. We’re going to keep al Qaeda, the Taliban — we want to keep them under wraps, and that helps Russia. We will cooperate with you. 

DUBNER: That sounds like a pretty smart ploy, right? Let’s create a common enemy. Team up on this, we’ll get over our differences, and move on. 

SULLIVAN: If you were dealing with a normal country and a normal leader — and you’re not. So what does Putin do? Putin says, “Okay, well, we’re not a big fan of that. But, you know, just spitballing here, maybe we’ll let you share our 201st base in Tajikistan, which is right on the border with Afghanistan.” That is a huge Russian military base in Central Asia, one of their key military installations — 

DUBNER: This is not some little counterterrorism, intel-monitoring —

SULLIVAN: This is a big, important Russian military facility. Putin says it. I’m sitting directly across from Colonel General Gerasimov, who is not KGB-trained. So his eyes wide, and he sort of gasped a little bit, like, whoa. And it’s clearly a joke. Putin starts to chuckle. 

DUBNER: Did Biden take it as a joke? 

SULLIVAN: So, Biden is — we’re all, on our side, like, “What the heck?” And then his foreign minister, Lavrov is talking about something else. Putin interrupts him, puts his hand over Lavrov’s mouth and looks at Biden and says, “Be careful negotiating with this guy, he’s Armenian.” It’s an ethnic joke, right? It’s like, “He’s going to fleece you, he’ll pick your pocket, he’s Armenian.” He chuckled. And how loose he was — this is not a man who sat down and said, “I’ve got a serious problem in Ukraine that’s threatening the existence of my country. Let’s talk, buddy.” But fast forward, in November, that was his position.  

DUBNER: So, listening between the lines to you now, John — and please correct me if I’m wrong —  at that meeting in Geneva, the U.S. was getting ready to pull out of Afghanistan, that ended up happening in August of 2021, and then Russia ends up going into Ukraine about six months after, in February of 2022, correct? 

SULLIVAN: Correct.

DUBNER: So listening between the lines, what I hear is that Putin is sizing up Biden here and saying, “Well, he’s not very substantial, he doesn’t seem to have much of a plan or a spine, and therefore I’m going to take this meeting, we’ll joke a bit, I’ll tease him a bit, I’ll see how he pushes back.” Sounds like he doesn’t push back very much. And it sounds as though you’re saying that even though Putin had decided long ago that he would be going into Ukraine hard with force, that this meeting, if nothing else, assured him that he wasn’t going to get a lot of trouble from the U.S. Is that right? 

SULLIVAN: I would quibble. I think it’s unfair to Biden. I think Biden — and he said this in his press conference after the meeting in Geneva — he said, “Look, I’m giving this guy one last chance. Can we stabilize this relationship”? 

DUBNER: But isn’t that a little bit like telling your, you know, seven-year-old, “Listen, you got one more chance to put down the paint?” 

SULLIVAN: Yeah. After the meeting, they did back-to-back press conferences. The first question that’s asked by Russian state media — so, this is Putin asking himself the question — “What did you talk about?” You know, “The most important issue for all of Russia is Ukraine. What did you discuss with Biden of Ukraine?” And Putin says, “Well, it really didn’t come up that much. Biden said he wants Ukraine to enforce the Minsk agreements. And if that’s his view, that’s productive. But he really didn’t talk about it.” But let’s talk about Afghanistan, and how that factors in. Because some people make the claim, once Putin saw Afghanistan —

DUBNER: That that was the green light.

SULLIVAN: No, no, no, no. He decided to do this long ago. What I will say is, in criticism — I include myself in this, as I look back — maybe he had decided, but he hadn’t yet pulled the trigger. Could we have stopped him? I think Afghanistan was the nail in the coffin. The withdrawal is underway while we’re meeting in June. What really has an impact is the calamity that starts in July and then into August. The culmination is the terrorist attack on the 26th of August, and then the missile strike that killed 10 innocent Afghans. 

DUBNER: The U.S. missile strike. 

SULLIVAN: The missile strike. One of Putin’s most senior and important advisors, a guy named Nikolai Patrushev, he gives an interview — again, to Russian state media, in Russian — directed to Ukraine. He says, “I have no idea why you people think it’s in your interests to associate with the United States and its vassals. Look what they’re doing to their major non-NATO ally in Kabul. Do you think they’re going to defend you? Absolutely not. You’re crazy. We’re your Slavic sisters and brothers. Why are you shunning us? Looking for protection from this feckless North American giant who goes around the world and creates wars and problems and then leaves disasters in its wake. Look what they’re doing in Afghanistan.”  

DUBNER: Donald Trump said during this campaign, the 2024 campaign, he said Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if he had been president. I’m curious what you make of that claim generally.

SULLIVAN: That’s just as wrong as it can be. Putin is going to achieve his aims in Ukraine, which he and everyone who speaks for his government have said consistently since the day the special military operation began, February 24th, 2022: we’re going to denazify and demilitarize. He was going to achieve those means either by Ukrainian capitulation or by what the Russians call military technical means, which is an invasion. Maybe if Trump had been re-elected instead of Biden winning in November 2020, if he had changed course, stopped supporting Ukraine, maybe Ukraine would have had to capitulate. Putin was going to accomplish his war aims by hook or by crook, by capitulation or by invasion.  So what I say, particularly to my Republican friends, “Okay, you don’t support Ukraine. What’s your Russia policy? If your Russia policy starts with cutting off Ukraine, not only is your Russia policy going to fail, but if you think cutting off Ukraine is going to assist your pressure campaign on Iran, you’re crazy. And oh, by the way, how is this going to influence President Trump’s friend Little Rocket Man in Pyongyang? And Xi in Beijing?

DUBNER: And how would you say Trump’s winning the 2024 election will  affect Putin’s thinking, and at least the short-term future for Putin and Russia?  

SULLIVAN: They’re celebrating Trump’s victory. But there are a fair number of people around Putin who say, “Wait a minute, let’s not get carried away. We remember what the first Trump administration was like. He wanted to have conversations and a relationship with Putin, but they imposed all these sanctions.” The other thing they’re concerned about is Trump’s energy policy. What if it reduces dramatically the price of oil? That could have a bigger effect on the Russian economy than all the sanctions and export controls, which I support, that the Biden administration has imposed.  

DUBNER: Could reduce the price of oil by producing much more in the U.S.?  

SULLIVAN: Exactly, exactly. From the Russian perspective, it’s all about the price of oil. If that price of oil dipped significantly, that affects their ability to continue to fund the war. 

DUBNER: There is a political scientist at the University of Chicago, Robert Pape, who argues that these economic sanctions that the U.S. levies against Russia — Trump used sanctions, as did Obama before him and Biden after him — but Pape argues that sanctions essentially don’t work, that they’re a nice fallback for folks like you, people in State, for ambassadors, etc., to feel like you’re doing something. What’s your view on that? 

SULLIVAN: That’s a great question. The obvious answer — and anyone who says anything different is just blinking at reality — sanctions did not and will not, unless they’re much more vigorously enforced, influence Russia’s policies with respect to — you name it — Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, etc. A couple of things, though. You know, they are necessary, but not sufficient. It’s not as though, “Okay, well, then we should just continue to do business with Russia and forget that they committed a murder in Salisbury, England.” An innocent woman, Dawn Sturgess. They sent an F.S.B. colonel who committed a cold-blooded murder on the streets of Berlin, shot a person to death, a Chechnyan opposition leader. Election interference, cyber — are we then just supposed to ignore it? So I think sanctions have had a significant impact on the Russian economy. The current prime lending rate in Russia is 21 percent. It reminds me a little bit of the United States in the ‘60s and ‘70s. With the Great Society, spending on Vietnam, and the price the U.S. economy pays in the ’70s and into the early ’80s is rampant inflation. That’s what Putin is doing now. They’re pumping money into their defense-industrial base. They’re paying off their own people, those who are being killed, their families. Average Russians seeing pensions, salaries, etc., increasing because he doesn’t want to lose popular support. The Russian people and their economy, they’re going to pay a price for it. So he’s gritting his teeth, and he’s going to accomplish his goals in this special military operation. But the Russian economy five, ten years from now, is going to pay the price.

Coming up: how does Vladimir Putin sell this story to the Russian public?

SULLIVAN: I may be a peasant but boy, I’m part of a special country with a special mission in the world.  

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John Sullivan was U.S. ambassador to Russia from February 2020 until September 2022. So he was on duty when Russia launched what it called a special military operation in Ukraine. The rest of the world calls it a war; the war has lasted nearly three years and has killed tens of thousands on both sides. The U.S. has invested in the Ukrainian cause significantly but also cautiously: when it comes to poking a bear, the Russian bear is perhaps the worst bear to poke. Embassy Moscow was John Sullivan’s last government posting, and he has since retired from the Foreign Service. I asked if he would accept a role in the new Trump administration.

SULLIVAN: I can assure you that I will not be taking a role in the Trump administration, as evidenced by the fact that two people who I’ve remained close with have been ruled out as potential candidates for a new administration: Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley. I am on that list, I’m afraid.  

DUBNER: For anyone old enough to remember, or anyone who has read some Russian history or literature, there is this deep sense of loss. This was a country and a culture full of brilliant writers, thinkers, artists, scientists, philosophers — a lot of dissidents too, of course. But it seems, from the outside at least, as though that history has been paved over entirely, that the Russian Federation of today bears no resemblance.

SULLIVAN: It’s tragic. I went to Russia as an amateur Russophile for all the reasons you said, all they have accomplished in science, technology, engineering, medicine, etc. During the pandemic, instead of working for the betterment of humankind, they’re falsely promoting their Sputnik V vaccine, which was never properly tested. It was seized by the Kremlin as an instrument to promote Russian nationalism. “Look, we’re the best.” That’s the Kremlin hijacking the strengths of the Russian people, whether it’s in science, technology, their religion — the Russian Orthodox Church is now an instrument, I’m sorry to say, of the Kremlin, of Putin. So he has turned all of those strengths to his purpose of re-creating this Russian empire. And there are a lot of Russian people who agree with him, who are saying, “Attaboy. You go and do that for us.” 

DUBNER: You write about the famous idea that Putin really has three advisers: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great. 

SULLIVAN: Correct. 

DUBNER: So other than his nostalgia for the Russian empire, what are his goals, would you say? 

SULLIVAN: It’s not nostalgia. He is looking to re-create. There are a lot of ordinary Russians, who lament the weakened state of their Russia. Just as hope is a powerful tool in the United States, that vision of empire — “Yeah, I may be a kulak, I may be a peasant here in Russia, but boy, I’m part of something big. I’m part of a special country with a special mission in the world.”  

DUBNER: I don’t know if you’re a betting man, but given his position at this moment, given his accomplishments at this moment, and given the lack of ability of the U.S., the U.N. and others to fight back, what do you think are his chances of achieving that goal?  

SULLIVAN: Well, he thinks he’s in — and it’s probably true in the short-term — a better position than he was, say, in early 2023, roughly a year after the war had started. The Russian military had not just failed, but been embarrassed. So, things were really looking bad for him. In September of ‘22, he had to order mobilization. It included some conscription, which was very unpopular. It’s a different world now. And it’s not just the election of Trump. It’s what’s happened in Berlin with the breakdown in the current coalition, Chancellor Scholz going to have to stand for reelection. And the Germans themselves, the German government, announcing that it’s not going to be providing as much support for Ukraine as it had earlier in the war. So from Putin’s point of view, things are a lot better now than they were a year or a year and a half ago.  

DUBNER: So John, I can imagine some Americans who didn’t vote for Trump listening to this and saying, you know, I don’t see much daylight between Trump and Putin.  

SULLIVAN: That’s a misunderstanding of who Putin is and what Putin does. It’s not rhetoric, it’s reality. Look, Donald Trump — when he gets confirmed on January 20th, 2025 at 12:01 p.m., he’s a lame duck. Now, he’ll have lots of influence. He’s got coattails. But he’s never running again. And the jockeying for who succeeds him is going to start. And, you know, he’s going to be limited by Republicans in the Senate. There are Republicans in the Senate, even with a 53-vote majority, who are — and I don’t know what the Secretary of Defense nominee would say if asked about, for example, the importance of our NATO alliance — but I guarantee you that any nominee who said we should withdraw from NATO would never get confirmed, by a wide margin. The Putin-Trump analogy — I mean, that’s a vast overstatement. And that type of political rhetoric, in fact, undermines marshaling the American people and leading the American people to oppose Putin.  

DUBNER: But if Trump just wants to cut Ukraine loose, what’s to stop him?

SULLIVAN: There are things he can do as commander-in-chief that Congress wouldn’t be able to stop. The military cooperation, the intelligence cooperation can all be cut off. If that happens — and more importantly, the American leadership that’s influenced the Europeans, if that goes away — how long can the Ukrainians hold out? Then maybe this special military operation after three years of failure, they accomplish what they originally set out to do on February 24th, 2022. That’s certainly possible. 

DUBNER: But it sounds as though you have a substantial amount of hope that the constitutional separation of powers remains intact.  

SULLIVAN: Oh absolutely. I guess the right way to characterize me as an institutionalist. And particularly the federal judiciary. I never traveled to the PRC when I was deputy secretary of state. I traveled there a lot 10, 12 years before, when I was Deputy Secretary of Commerce. And what the Chinese government could not understand was, they would never accept the concept of an independent judiciary. The idea that a single federal judge or a court of appeals or even nine justices on the Supreme Court could issue an order in, for example, a matter of national security, that a court could order the president to do something, and that he would have to do it. They could not believe that that would happen. So I do have faith. You know, people ask me all the time, you know “He’s going to stay after his —.” He’s not going to stay after his term.  

DUBNER: This is Trump you’re talking about. But what makes you say that? Because he certainly tried last time.  

SULLIVAN: Well, he certainly tried last time, but he is, by the terms of the amended constitution, is limited to two terms. He says things off the top of his head, I’ve seen it in person, that he knows can’t happen, like that big, beautiful wall on the southwestern border of the United States that was going to be paid for by Mexico. Trust me, he’s got one term left, and that’s it. He’s 78 years old. What condition is he going to be in at the end of his term? Think about what happened to Biden.  

Coming up: we hear about some worst-case scenarios.

SULLIVAN: I am not Winston Churchill, and I hope I’m wrong. 

And some mildly encouraging news.

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John J. Sullivan, former State Department official and U.S. ambassador to Russia, still has a lot to say about American foreign policy, especially when it comes to China, or what he calls the PRC, the People’s Republic of China, and of course, Russia.

SULLIVAN: There are no opposition leaders left in Russia. There literally is no independent media left.  It is a police state, just as the Soviet Union was, even more so. 

DUBNER: Let’s say that for whatever reason, Putin vanished tomorrow. 

SULLIVAN: Yep. 

DUBNER: What would happen? Who would be running the Russian Federation? What would that look like? Because you do make the argument that Putin has kept a lid on certain kinds of things.  

SULLIVAN: There are some, I believe, who have been urging him to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, or maybe an unconventional weapon. I thought they might use a chemical weapon in Mariupol, the last holdout in southern Ukraine. So my answer to that question is, if Putin doesn’t wake up tomorrow, the war continues. The war is not unpopular. Once the war starts, the average Russian doesn’t want to see, as they call it, “their boys” slaughtered, or lose, in Ukraine.

DUBNER: Given the state of Russian media, how much information do people get? 

SULLIVAN: Very little. And you have to work hard to  get anything other than the state media. What they do see, though, is bodies coming back.

DUBNER: How surprised would you be if you woke up tomorrow and Russia did use nuclear weapons against Ukraine?  

SULLIVAN: I’d be shocked. 

DUBNER: Because why? 

SULLIVAN: Well, first, as I understand it from military experts, there isn’t a real practical use for a tactical nuclear weapon. So it’s strictly a political use of the weapon. And if it’s a political use, if Putin were, for example, to decide — all right, my mission to denazify Ukraine hasn’t proceeded quickly enough, I’m just going to nuke Kyiv. What is his dear friend in Beijing going to think? I come back to the PRC as a key. Putin meets with Xi at the start of the Olympics in 2022. They issued this extraordinary document, lengthy statement, page after page, declaring how they’ve got this — it’s stronger than an alliance. “Dear friends.” The Russians have since used that phrase frequently. My recollection is that Xi and his government haven’t used that phrase since. And what happened since? It started the day of the invasion. Putin’s threats to use a nuclear weapon. Xi has said more than once, the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, the PRC would not support. If Kyiv or a portion of Kyiv disappears under a mushroom cloud, that’s heat, and Putin doesn’t want that.  That’s the type of shock that’s going to wake up the American people. We spend, if you include the Department of Defense and the budgets for the intelligence community, we spend $1 trillion a year to defend our country. The two principal threats to the United States — 1a) PRC, 1b) the Russian Federation. The amount of money we already spend to defend ourselves against Russia is astronomical. My ultimate point is, we need to oppose Russian aggression that is now exhibiting itself in brutal form in Ukraine. We need to recognize that the Russian Federation is as aggressive — maybe more aggressive — than the Soviet Union. Anybody who’s got a heart or a brain wants this violence to stop. But it’s not going to stop, because the Russians aren’t going to quit until they accomplish their war aims. Their war aims, I guarantee, are broader than just Ukraine. You know, there’s a history here. There are 15 Soviet republics that Putin thinks are his. And that’s what he’s looking to reestablish. 

DUBNER: Let’s pretend for a minute that you’re not on the outs with the Trump crowd and that you were invited back. Let’s say you were invited back as Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State. Put three things on the table that we can do to turn the heat down or to change the leverage that Russia is pursuing. 

SULLIVAN: Yeah, it’s a little difficult to do that without also engaging the PRC. The North Koreans sending troops to fight with the Russians in Europe not only has unnerved and infuriated the South Koreans, but Beijing isn’t happy about this. 

DUBNER: And you think there’s an avenue there for Trump and Xi to discuss?

SULLIVAN: Possibly.

DUBNER: If you were advising Trump, what would you offer as an incentive? 

SULLIVAN: An incentive for the Chinese?

DUBNER: Yes.

SULLIVAN: Well, you know, there are a lot of things on the table. My fear is, we can’t offer Taiwan. You know, they’re worried about, would he really come and defend us? And not just the Taiwanese — the South Koreans, too. So what I would say to the incoming Trump administration we have to let them know that the war that they are supporting and perpetuating in Europe has now become globalized in ways that adversely impact them. Because you see quotes from the South Koreans now saying, can Trump be trusted?  Can the Americans be trusted, not just Trump? And do we need a nuclear weapon to protect ourselves?

DUBNER: What kind of deal do you think Trump will pursue with Putin over Ukraine? Because he seems to see it as a mess on his desk that he just wants to get rid of. 

SULLIVAN: Right. So that’s been the attitude going back to the Obama administration, maybe even the Bush 43 administration. My charge as ambassador was, “Make the Russia problem go away. We want guardrails.” Now, there has been this this horrific war in Ukraine. We got to make it stop. Why? Because we got to pivot to Asia. So here’s my problem with the political discussion in the United States: our leaders, Republicans and Democrats, don’t talk about these types of issues. Rewind 44 years. The Carter administration has started to rebuild, reinvest post-Vietnam in the Defense Department, right? We don’t go to the Summer Olympics in Moscow. Our leaders, our presidents, talk to the American people about these issues, whether it was Reagan with the Evil Empire, the Strategic Defense Initiative, putting intermediate-range nuclear missiles in West Germany. Presidents used to talk in detail about security issues, and the American people knew about them. We don’t have that discussion. It’s childish. It’s not serious. President Biden himself — I’ve not heard him say this, but it’s been reported — that he has, since the war started in Ukraine, said, “We, in the Obama administration, we sort of blew it in 2014. We let this guy get away with it.”

DUBNER: Crimea, you’re talking about? 

SULLIVAN: Crimea and in the Donbas. Remember, there’s real conflict in the Donbas, with Russian military units involved shooting down a commercial airliner that kills a couple of hundred people. We have not taken seriously this threat that an aggressive nationalist Russia poses. A country that’s the largest landmass in the world with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, with a seat as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. 

DUBNER: Russia’s one of just five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, but that certainly didn’t keep them from invading Ukraine. What does that say about the U.N.? Should we consider it as toothless, as obsolete, as critics say? 

SULLIVAN: Yeah, I’m as big a critic — I haven’t gone so far as my friend John Bolton and say we can cut off the top half of the headquarters and save the money. And my State Department colleagues — particularly those who have worked on international organizations issues for decades, devoted their careers to it — wince when I say this, but it’s just completely ineffective. We now have had the U.N. secretary general go to the BRICs summit in Russia, shake hands with Putin. Imagine if there were such a thing, if the League of Nations still existed, and in January of 1940, the Secretary of the League went to Berlin and shook hands with Hitler.

DUBNER: So, John, It strikes me that most Americans, probably most people everywhere, are primarily concerned with short-term problems, right? We get very distraught if the price of gas goes up 50 cents a gallon. But in terms of elections or policy decisions halfway around the world that may affect things 5 or 10 years later, we don’t have much patience for that. And I’m curious, if you’re calling for a significant reassessment, realignment of how we think about foreign policy and downstream effects. You know, I go back to Syria. The Obama administration’s red line in Syria, which it then essentially ignored, later triggered this massive outflow of refugees from Syria into Europe, which further destabilized those countries that were already turning against immigrants. The list goes on and on. So I’m curious what kind of decisions you see on the near horizon that we should pay attention to now because they will reverberate.

SULLIVAN: It’s coming. Something is coming that is going to shake the establishment and the American people. If there is a greater global conflict, for example, between Israel and Iran, that closes the Persian Gulf, that makes the Houthi violence in the strait that leads into the Red Sea — you know, increases that, and, God forbid, with Taiwan, the effect on the global economy? You talk about supply chain disruption? Oh my God. The analogy I draw to where we are today is the late 1930s. If you look at the old Movietone newsreels and you got the man on the street in the United States being interviewed, you know, “The chancellor, yeah, he’s rough around the edges. What he’s doing with the Jews, that’s really bad. But look, Germany was in tough straits after the war and the peace treaty. And, you know, once Germany gets back on its feet, he’ll soften.” At the same time, Churchill, much more closely observing —

DUBNER: And in harm’s way, let’s say. 

SULLIVAN: And in harm’s way. Churchill gives these speeches warning about what’s coming. And they’re combined into a book that’s published in the United States and the title of it is While England Slept.

DUBNER: So you’re saying we’re asleep now? 

SULLIVAN: We’re asleep! And our politicians aren’t leading, Republicans or Democrats. Now, I don’t know, I may be completely wrong. There may not be a Pearl Harbor-like incident, but my fear is that it’s going to come, and we’re not prepared. And the American people haven’t been told how serious these risks are. Putin calls the United States Russia’s enemy. J.D. Vance was asked recently would he call Russia an enemy? And he said no. Well, Putin calls you an enemy.  

DUBNER: So you’re trying to shake us all by the shoulders and wake us up.   

SULLIVAN: I am not Winston Churchill, and I hope I’m wrong, but it’s more dangerous than you think. 

“The only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is … a prison.” That’s a line written in the late 19th century, by Leo Tolstoy. I have a feeling John Sullivan can identify. My thanks to him for this conversation. Again, his book is called Midnight in Moscow. The last time we had a U.S. ambassador on the show, it was Rahm Emanuel, who has been posted in Japan. You can hear that episode, no. 553, wherever you get our show; it’s called “The Suddenly Diplomatic Rahm Emanuel.” Meanwhile, next week on the show, we go one-on-one with Rahm’s big brother Zeke Emanuel, to talk about one of the biggest medical advances in recent history:

EMANUEL: You know, this is why people do science.

What does the GLP-1 revolution mean for you — and for the U.S. healthcare system?

EMANUEL: Don’t get me started. We’ve got to have a whole ‘nother conversation about that issue. 

That’s next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski, with help from Dalvin Aboagye. Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilley, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.