Fog of War - with Fred Kagan
Vladimir Putin may be unpredictable, but his direction seems to be clear. That’s the view of our guest today, Fred Kagan, who is a return guest.
As of what we know now, February 25th, there are at least 1,100 Russian casualties in Ukraine, and Russian forces are entering Kiev. President Biden has announced new sanctions, but oil and natural gas are still exempt from sanctions, and Russia is still part of the SWIFT BANKING SYSTEM. So it’s not clear how tight the economic noose is tightening around Moscow.
Fred is the Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. Fred is a former professor of military history at the US Military Academy at West Point. He completed his PhD in Soviet and Russian military history at Yale University.
We want to talk to Fred less about minute to minute developments and more about where this is going with a longer sweep of history as our backdrop.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] The entire post Cold War order has rested on the assumption that there was no major Russian conventional military threat to NATO. That assumption has just been invalidated. That is an absolutely seismic shift in the geostrategic landscape of the world as it has been since 1991.
Vladimir Putin may be unpredictable, but his direction seems to be clear. That's the view, at least, of our guest today, Fred Kagan, who's a return guest. We had him on last summer during the crisis in Afghanistan. As of what we know now, today, February 25th, is there are at least 1, 100 Russian casualties in Ukraine, and Russian forces are entering Kiev, President [00:01:00] Biden has announced new sanctions, but oil and gas and are still exempt from Western sanctions, and Russia is still part of the SWIFT banking system.
So it's not clear how tight the economic noose is tightening around Moscow, and of course we're still living through the fog of war, so many details are murky. Fred Kagan is the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He's also working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War.
both the Critical Threats Project and the Institute for the Study of War. Our organizations, I highly recommend following for day to day updates on this crisis. Fred's a former professor of military history at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point. He completed his PhD in Soviet and Russian military history at Yale University.
Fred's also in close contact with military officials in the U. S., NATO, and a range of sources in Ukraine and Russia. We want to talk to Fred [00:02:00] less about the minute to minute developments and more about where this is going. going with a longer sweep of history as our backdrop. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome my friend Fred Kagan to the podcast.
As I mentioned in the intro, Fred runs the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He's a Ph. D. in Soviet and Russian military history, a fluent Or near fluent Russian speaker and he also is working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. One of the most important think tanks in Washington in terms of tracking military developments in just operational developments in real time in conflicts and theaters around the world.
Fred, thank you for joining the conversation. It's wonderful to be back with you, Dan. Thank you so much for having me. I feel like I call you whenever, you know, the, the, you know, things are hitting the fan. So I, I always get you when you're at your busiest, so [00:03:00] we will try to be, uh, efficient. I, I want to start by trying to put what's going on in perspective for our listeners.
The Russia Ukraine border is about 5, 000 miles, give or take, from the United States. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Russia's economy is about a fifth of the size of the U. S. economy. You know, one could argue it's a skirmish happening. In another part of the world, between countries, some would argue, that don't really matter to the United States anymore.
Can you explain why you feel so strongly that what is happening right now has enormously high stakes for us? Absolutely, Dan. Americans have every right to ask this question, why do things far away matter to us? Especially when the issue of spending American blood and treasure [00:04:00] is on the table. I think it's always important to respect those questions and always important to have a good answer to them.
So thank you for teeing that up. Look, let's just start by breaking this down a little bit. Uh, Russia is, you know, let's say 5, 000 miles from where I'm sitting right here. Or about 20 minutes as the intercontinental ballistic missile flies. So, we, we need to start by recognizing that Russia's economy is what it is and Russia's conventional military power is what it is.
Russia remains, uh, one, the second largest, uh, nuclear power in the world with the capacity to obliterate the United States in a nuclear strike. So, this is not just some random tinpot third world dictator going after his neighbor. This is one of the most powerful countries in the world measured by the ability to end the world.
And that's, we have to keep that in mind. Now secondly, there's always the question of does it matter if one country [00:05:00] far away attacks and destroys another country far away, if the U. S. has no specific major economic interest or alliance obligation and so on. I can never get out of my head when people ask that question or put that that way.
the Neville Chamberlain's memorable phrase, a far off land of which we know little, and what followed. Now, one, that analogy has been overused and one, it's not an answer to a question. But it's always worth remembering for those who just throw that out glibly, not as you just have, um, why should we care, that the presupposition there is that anything far away doesn't matter, but the truth is that history has demonstrated repeatedly to the U.
S. and other countries that that's not the case. Things that happen around the world actually do, can sometimes come back to affect us in a very devastating way. There's a general answer to the question that we must not lose sight of, which is, [00:06:00] that the United States has been the principal beneficiary of a peaceful rules based international order ever since we labored at great cost to create it following the Second World War.
We became the richest country on earth by any measure, and we still are, uh, whatever people want to say about China, the richest country on earth by any measure that matters. Uh, Americans have benefited overwhelmingly. compared to other people in the world. Our whole economy, the whole global economy, rests on the order that we and our allies created at great cost after the Second World War.
We have to realize that the steady erosion And now accelerating destruction of that world order will have negative consequences for us just as the perpetuation of that world order has had very positive consequences for us. We will be the first to suffer and are the first to suffer when there is a major disruption in global trade.[00:07:00]
Americans will be hurt here at home. American jobs depend on our trade with Europe. The American and European economies are deeply interwoven. We talk about how tightly interwoven we are with China and the need for decoupling and so on with China, and that's real, and it's very important. We don't talk about how tightly bound we are economically with Europe because we have no intention of changing that.
But the Russians do. The Russians have the intention of driving us out of Europe. The Russians have the intention of breaking the United States relationship with Europe and driving us back into being a Western hemispheric power. That's the explicit statement, uh, stated objective of Putin and his thugs.
So we have to start by understanding how very much the lives of ordinary Americans actually are bound up with the continuation of a peaceful world order, which is now, that's no longer, it is no longer a peaceful world order, but bad as it is, it can get much worse. And then [00:08:00] secondly, with the well being and prosperity of Europe.
So I would start with that, um, and then there are specific things to say about Ukraine, if you'd like. Please, please, uh, yeah, why, why does Ukraine matter to United States, the UK, the West? So, you can make a very glib statement that the United States has no treaty obligations to Ukraine, and Ukraine is not a NATO member, and therefore it has no bearing on NATO one way or the other, whether the Russians attack Ukraine.
And in a very straightforward, if we were in a courthouse, uh, arguing a case in front of a judge on legal merits, uh, the judge would find in favor of that argument. The problem is that the international order is in the courtroom, and there is no judge listening for the legal merits of arguments like that.
So here's the actual situation. First of all, when the Soviet Union collapsed, large numbers of Soviet nuclear weapons were left in three countries [00:09:00] outside of Russia. Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Those three countries all agreed, under tremendous pressure from the United States, mind you, to give their nuclear weapons back to Russia.
And the Ukrainians did so. They did so in exchange for an agreement in 1994 between the United States, the Great Britain, and Russia, in which all three parties committed to respecting the territorial integrity of Ukraine as it was in 1994. The Budapest Agreement. The Budapest Agreement. Now that's not a binding treaty that imposes no obligations on the United States other than to raise the matter of the Russian invasion to the United Nations Security Council, which we are doing.
Um, but one should not be quick to just say, well, it's not a binding agreement, so we don't need to pay any attention to it, because here's the question. Um, do you believe in nuclear nonproliferation? Do you think that it's important for lots of [00:10:00] other countries not to run around and suddenly try to acquire nuclear technology, which, by the way, is not all that hard to acquire?
Because if you do, then you need to think about the message that we're in the process of sending to any country that is contemplating getting a nuclear program or giving up a nuclear program. And the general message that we're sending is, if you're worried that somebody might attack you, You really ought to have a nuclear weapon because if Ukraine had retained its nuclear weapons in 1994 and had them today We would not be sitting here having this conversation in this way And the Ukrainians are well aware of that and everybody who's thinking about acquiring a nuclear weapon is thinking about that also So that's another sort of general issue that we should think about but now let me get concrete
What has already happened in the last few months is that Russia has moved its de facto border about 300 miles west By deploying [00:11:00] Russian troops in numbers, something like 30, 000 into Belarus, which has already put Russian forces in large numbers on the Eastern Polish border. And Poland is a NATO member and not one of the Baltic states because we tend to talk about the Baltic states in NATO.
And lots of people have asterisks in their minds about. The baltic states nobody should have an asterisk in his or her mind about that to begin with because nato is nato And article five is article five, but we just to be clear just to be clear latvia lithuania estonia all three Are members of nato?
So there's correct. We have a treaty obligation to them. Correct. And at least in the case of Latvia, there is a minority Russian population, which is not unlike the, the composition, if you will, that exists in Ukraine in terms of Russian separatists that Putin used, that Putin uses a pretext to defend those separatists or protect those separatists as a basis for incursion.
So [00:12:00] if he moves into Ukraine, he could easily move into those other countries, those Baltic states, except. using the same argument, except with those states, we actually have a binding treaty obligation. That's correct. But beyond that, Poland is now at great risk. And Poland is also a NATO member. Um, and the risk is not because there's a Russian population in Poland.
There isn't a Russian population in Poland. The risk is because the Poles are rightly concerned about now having a large Russian conventional military force on their eastern border. They have long had a large Russian conventional. and nuclear capable force to the north where the Kaliningrad exclave Uh is a sort of a russian aircraft carrier on the baltic coast um, and in addition now they have to Uh expect that there will be russian forces to their southeast positioned in ukraine And so the poles are first of all have been [00:13:00] leaning into trying to defend ukraine as best they can without sending without violating any any International law without fighting the russians or anything, but the poles will certainly support the ukrainian insurgency that will certainly follow This Russian attack, and that the Russians will use any Western support, and Putin has said this, that the Russians will use any Western support, uh, for any insurgency in Ukraine as a provocation, he will declaim that it is a provocation, um, and he will use it as justification for pressure, and he could use it as justification for for attack.
Um, so we have to be concerned with Can I just pause you right there? So, so, so, some, let's call them explainers rather than apologists, some explainers for Russia's recent moves argue that Putin has no designs on Poland. What, what his, his frustration with Poland is that Poland is a democracy that used to be part of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War [00:14:00] and If Poland is an independent democracy, that's fine He doesn't want Ukraine to be this independent democracy democracy right on Russia's borders problems is with Ukraine not with Poland He's just as well leaving Poland alone.
He just wants Ukraine not to become like Poland and be sitting there as a model for the Russian people to look at, uh, Ukraine and seeing it as a Poland. He wants Ukraine to look like, you know, Belarus South, if you will. And that's his issue. It's not about Poland. It's about Ukraine not looking like Poland.
So here's the thing, Dan, you know, we can reason to each other about what we think Putin wants or what we think Putin's worried about, or we can listen to what he actually says. And he says a
He mourns the death of the Soviet Union, and he's clearly in the process of attempting to reconstitute it in some form. [00:15:00] But he's very fascinated by long periods of Russian history and not just the Soviet period, and he spends a lot of time talking about the Tsarist period as well, and referring back to the period of Kievan Rus and so forth.
So, it's first of all important to recognize that there's very little evidence that Putin is actually restricting his concern about things solely to the territories of the Soviet Union and the Soviet borders. He clearly has demarcated the Soviet border as being, you know, Russia's exclusive sphere of influence and different from other areas, but his conversations and the conversations of those around him about the Russian imperial heritage should concern us because, as you know perfectly well, Big parts of Poland, including Warsaw, used to be in the Russian Empire up until 1917.
Uh, Finland also for that matter. And Russian commentators have been, have talked about those things. So, we, we need to be very careful being very, very confident in our conversations with ourselves about what Putin is or isn't concerned about. But [00:16:00] beyond that, it's noteworthy that the demands that Putin made, as in effect the ultimatum, we had to concede to these demands or else he would attack Ukraine, included Withdrawing all NATO military infrastructure for many NATO members that added, were joined to the alliance after 1997, which is to say all of the Eastern European member states, including Poland.
He, that was one of his explicit demands. And that should tell us something because those demands were not primarily focused on Ukraine. And he has been at pains to yell at us about this and scold us for this as we've come back with conversations about Ukraine. He's kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don't, you're not hearing me.
This isn't about Ukraine. This is about NATO. This is about NATO's expansion in the 90s. This is about the incorporation of any territory that was beyond NATO's border at the end of the Cold [00:17:00] War. Even including the movement of military equipment into East Germany. That, he says, was a violation. of commitments to Russia.
This isn't so for Putin explicitly, this has never just been about Ukraine and this has never just been about Ukraine as a model of democracy that he's concerned about. This has always been about Ukraine and about NATO and specifically about the role that the Eastern member states play in the alliance, which he is demanding that we change.
So I would submit that we should not be calm when contemplating the future security Of poland and the other eastern european nato states given the demands that putin has made, you know your your point about him having Czarist dreams in terms of him seeing himself in that mold, uh, Lionel Bar Barber, Lionel Barber, uh, formerly with the, uh, the editor in chief of the Financial Times, did an interview with, uh, [00:18:00] interviewed Putin in 2019, and he had a, um, he, uh, Barber writes, quote, A towering bronze statue of the visionary czar looms over, I guess this was, which czar was this, was this, uh, Peter the Great?
Probably Peter the Great, yeah. Yeah, a towering bronze statue of the visionary Czar looms over his ceremonial desk in the cabinet room, noted Barber. Peter the Great was Putin's, quote, favorite leader. He will live, declared the Russian president, as long as his cause is alive. Listen, there's, yes, there's all that sort of thing.
There's the weirdness of the way that Putin has named Russian ballistic missile submarines. after obscure, uh, Muscovite rulers, um, that no one else has ever heard of. There is a ballistic missile submarine christened the Vladimir Monomakh. No one who is not a Russian historian has ever heard of [00:19:00] Vladimir Monomakh.
Now my, my hypothesis is that Putin has looked for everyone in the, in Russia's history named Vladimir and to name submarines after, and the list is not long. So he went there, but this is on his mind. He's named, he named a submarine after the Tsar Alexander III. Which is an absolutely bizarre choice and extremely worrisome by the way for those who are familiar at all with Russia's history with well Alexander the third oversaw in among other things the most vicious anti semitic pogroms Of any of the of any of the Russian czars sure.
I don't think that that's what Putin had in mind, but it's a worrisome Thing but he this is alive in his mind you you wrote recently that what Putin has done in recent days Has altered the world as we know it altered the world as we know it or at least altered the world Since the end of the Cold War as we know it [00:20:00] So, can you explain what you mean the entire post cold war order the US national security strategies?
US national defense strategies U. S. defense budgets, NATO structure, NATO defense budgets, NATO strategies, everything has rested on one central pillar. And that pillar has been the absence of a significant Russian conventional military threat to NATO's east. Every single aspect of the way the Alliance has built its defensive structure, has reduced its defensive structure, has moved forces around, has redeployed, the U.
S. has redeployed forces from Europe, and so on and so on, all has rested on the assumption that there was no major Russian conventional military threat to NATO. That assumption has just been invalidated. Putin has amassed a mechanized force, backed with air and missile and naval power, That is a [00:21:00] major conventional threat to NATO.
That is it an absolutely seismic shift in the geostrategic landscape of the world, as it has been since 1991. And can you also explain what. U. S. national security strategy has, or can you, can you explain the national security strategy that existed up until recently that basically assumed that the U. S.
should be in a position to fight two conventional wars in two separate theaters around the world? simultaneously. Just, just explain what that was about. Why, why that two war, simultaneous two war, two theater structure had undergirded our defense strategy. So, to begin with the Cold War, which is where this really emerges in the first [00:22:00] place, the, the United States recognized that we had Vital interests in facing the Soviet union in two theaters, because the Soviet union spans 13 time zones and threatened both Europe and our allies in the Pacific.
And so we had to be concerned at the time about defending Japan, uh, to begin with and Europe against the Soviet threat. And then when China went communist, and then we got into the Korean war and that we had the additional communist threat from China at the same time as we had the threat in Europe. So throughout the cold war.
So, the United States recognized that it had the requirement to be able to defend its allies in Europe against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, and its allies in Asia against the Soviet Union and or China. And so we had this construct. It was an innovation when Jimmy Carter added the Carter Doctrine and began to think about requirements that the United States [00:23:00] might need to defend its interests in the Middle East.
By the end of the Cold War, we were actually in sort of a two and a half war framework where we were prepared ostensibly to fight in both Asia and Europe and also to be ready to do something in the Middle East on a smaller scale. When the Cold War ended, we took the peace dividend and we treated the peace dividend, frankly, like, like grandma's birthday money.
We spent it repeatedly. Um, and in fact, we sort of stopped being very serious at all about whether what military capabilities we really were. Uh, maintaining and it was all justified exactly as I just said earlier in The context of, well, there's no more Soviet military threats. So we don't, you know, we don't need all that stuff we built up for the Soviets.
Even so throughout the nineties, we've, we've retained the formal requirement to be able to fight what we call two major regional conflicts simultaneously. And that was a reflection of two realities. One was that we still [00:24:00] had interest in Europe and Asia, or we had interest in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
And. Although the Soviet Union had fallen, we didn't have to worry about falling, fighting the Soviets in Europe. There were other things that were going on in Europe, but primarily we were looking at the Middle East because remember that as the Soviet Union was collapsing, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and then we found ourselves fighting a major war then to prevent a country again with which we had no alliance.
to prevent it from being extinguished as a sovereign state. Um, and then we were drawn into, uh, that, uh, prolonged conflict with, uh, Saddam Hussein. And at the same time in the Far East, we were not so much worried about China at the time, but we were very worried, rightly, about North, North Korea. And we had a treaty obligation to defend South Korea, which we still do.
And so that was a basis for the requirement for two major regional conflict, um, capability in the 1990s. As we moved into the period of, uh, after the Iraq war when we destroyed Saddam Hussein completely, [00:25:00] um, and we became The first Iraq war. The, well, no, after the second Iraq war, actually. Okay. Um, because we retained this, this two MRC framework after the first Iraq war.
Yeah, yeah. Um, but when we MRC military Sorry. Major, major regional Major regional conflict, yeah. Um, but after 2003 when we eliminated Saddam Hussein and his army Um, and we were focused on the war on terror. We began to erode, um, first informally and then formally unwind the, the two MRC framework. Now here's the problem.
And this was, uh, this was a point that I was, I and others were arguing all along. There are concrete geostrategic reasons to say, look, we can point to this threat and we can point to that threat in two theaters and we need to be able to fight them both if, if it should happen that they both attack at the same time.
And that you could make that argument empirically and concretely, and we did, but there's also a principled argument to make here, which is that if you have only a one [00:26:00] major regional conflict capability, you actually have a zero major regional conflict capability because we lived in a world even then, when we could not be confident that if we committed our one MRC force somewhere and a war elsewhere would not break out that involved U.
S. treaty commitments. And so I and many others were very concerned that as we shrunk down to basically one plus MRC capability, we would in fact find ourselves self deterred, even from fighting defensive conflicts that we should fight in, lest we uncover other positions. And frankly, we're in something like that, exactly that position right now, as we are so, uh, torn between our, the requirement to defend Our NATO allies in Europe against possible further Russian aggression.
Um, you know, notwithstanding that we're not going to fight in Ukraine, but at the same time, we're very concerned about, uh, whether China will take advantage of this, [00:27:00] our distraction, um, by attacking Taiwan. And I would remind people that we still have treaty obligations to South Korea and the North Koreans are still not very nice people.
So or or some kind of conflict broke out in the persian gulf I I have no idea What would make you think that that could possibly happen given that the iranians and the israelis are slinging lead almost every day And that the iranians are shooting at american positions in them at least on a regular basis also So, right.
Um, this is the problem. You can look at the American military budget in two ways. You can look at it and say, this is a vast heaping fortune of money. Surely the United States should be able to, and it's more than any other country or collection of country spends on its military. Surely the United States can do whatever it needs to do with that amount of money.
That's, that's what it looks like if you don't actually. Look into what the requirements are, or you can say the United States is the only actual remaining global military power in the world for now. We have treaty obligations that span the [00:28:00] globe, and they're all under threat and the requirement to maintain a military able to meet those obligations in the world as it is and as the world as it has just become.
As Putin has reconstituted a major Russian conventional military threat Actually far exceed the defense budget that we currently have and are planning to have I don't want to say that No american wants to hear that but it is important that we face reality Now we can then have a debate about whether we actually feel like spending what I think we should spend or other people think We should spend what do you think we should spend?
I'm not a budgeteer. There's a fantastic tool that AEI's foreign defense policy Uh department has has put together to help you look at various options for defense budgets I encourage you to go to the defense simulator defense budget simulator at the aei website Yeah, but what I will tell you is it is a lot more than anybody is talking about right now by Probably a couple a few hundred billion dollars Um, [00:29:00] we need to be talking about additional percentages of gdp on defense And again, we're a democracy.
We can decide that we don't want to do this and we're going to accept whatever risk, but we need to have that conversation honestly. And we need to understand the risks we're taking and the prices that we're very likely going to pay. And how. Worried are you about this exact scenario that while we're completely consumed and focused on the crisis with Russia that Iran makes that sorry that China makes a move for Taiwan or Something flares up with Iran whether all these countries are coordinating or not They can all see what's what's happening and they can see distractions They can see the US and the West distracted and it may be a ripe time to move anytime the United States shows hesitation to come to the aid of allies.
I'm concerned about the message that that sends. Anytime the United States [00:30:00] shows an unwillingness to defend the international order that it created and that favors it, that concerns me greatly. I'm not going to try to estimate what Xi Jinping might do now or when or what might cause him to attack or not to attack.
I'm, I'm simply going to say that I am certain that Xi has been watching our behavior all through this and is going to watch our behavior now. And I doubt that he is going to draw any conclusion other than that. If he was thinking about attacking Taiwan, he should continue to think about that and make his plans and have some hope that the United States either will not defend it or will not defend it adequately or will not defend it in time.
And this is a, this worries me quite a lot. I mentioned earlier that Russia's economy is something like 20 percent of, uh, U. S. GDP based on, you know, purchasing power parity. [00:31:00] Russia's economy is smaller than that of South Korea's. How much, I mean, so, so Russia going to Ukraine Putin definitely extends Russia maybe into a economically unsafe zone.
How do you respond to the argument that it's, it's such a, it's economy is such a speck of the size of the global economy and such a speck of the size of the U. S. economy, that there, there's a limit to how much damage, uh, Putin can make because at the end of the day, as provocative as he is and as cavalier as he is.
There are economic hard facts. They're going to reign him in how large is the economy of north korea compared to the economy of south korea Right, everybody googled that now. Let me give you this the following fact The north korean military is capable of obliterating seoul with artillery tubes I don't think that they can invade and defeat South Korea, but they could impose [00:32:00] fearful damage on South Korea with the military capabilities that they have.
Why? Well, geography, it's unfortunate, it's an unfortunate fact that South, South Korean geography, that Seoul is with an artillery range of the DMZ, but also because of this fact, which I learned as a Soviet historian, a dictatorship can generally accomplish any one thing that it sets out to do. The Soviets built the largest military the world has ever known on a deeply flawed and messed up economy that was completely fundamentally, completely dysfunctional and incapable of taking care of the needs of its people, which is one of the reasons it finally fell.
But you know, the height of Soviet military power coincided with the acceleration of the collapse of the Soviet economy. And those two facts might have been related to each other. Now, Putin's economy is [00:33:00] a wreck, it's small, it's a kleptocracy, it has all kinds of problems, we're going to do all kinds of damage to it.
And yet, in the process of allowing his economy to continue to be a wreck And lead to dissatisfaction among his population and do various other things. Putin has invested in his military. Putin has modernized it. Putin has expanded it. And now he's using it. That's a Soviet approach. So we cannot count on economic factors.
abstract economic factors to rein in this threat for us, certainly not before it has caused absolutely unacceptable amounts of damage to our allies and possibly also to us. It's worth, uh, it's also worth considering the economic Size of the aggressor states at the outbreak of World War Two, uh, one British historian, Angus Madison, economic historian that we've cited on this [00:34:00] podcast in the past, estimated that the Soviet Union's GDP at the outbreak of World War Two was roughly half that of the U.
S. Germany's was 43%, Japan's was less than 25 percent of the U. S. GDP, Italy's was 18%, so those are the aggressor states, right? Italy, Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union. And as, uh, as our friend Neil Ferguson pointed out, you don't, quote, you don't need to be a Goliath to start a war. Uh, I guess, uh, Fred, my final question for you is not anticipating how the West will respond.
Will the West, you know, kick, rush out of the SWIFT system or not? How severe will the sanctions get or not? I want to ask you about Ukraine, the Ukrainian will to fight based on how you know it. Uh, I'm quoting from a friend here who wrote, I know Ukraine well enough to be sure that surrender is not an option.
And then he quotes a Ukrainian friend that tells quote, tells me that his people will fight Putin's army the way the Afghan Mujahideen [00:35:00] fought the Red Army in the 1980s. Do you agree with that? Well, the Ukrainians are fighting hard right now. Uh, as Russian, uh, air attacks came in and as Russian armored, uh, columns are moving, the Ukrainians are fighting.
The Ukrainians are using U. S. provided Javelin missiles to destroy Russian tanks. Uh, they're using air defense systems to bring down Russian planes. We've had at least. Uh, one dog fight, uh, Ukrainian Fighter, uh, mixing it up with a Russian fighter. I don't know who got the better of that engagement. Um, but the Ukrainians are fighting.
See, here's the thing, uh, lemme just put it to you this way. We don't need to get into the, into the, uh, relative, uh, manhood question of, of Ukrainians versus others. And by the way, if you know Ukrainians, you'll know that that's not a, a conversation that you actually wanna start with a Ukrainian anyway. Um.
But leave that aside. Um, why don't we, so 1941, it's 1941. All right. Um, Hitler [00:36:00] invades the Soviet Union. We're at the height of the Stalinist purges. Stalin has destroyed his own military with vicious purges. He's killed literally millions of Russians. He's deeply hated. He's in power only because he's feared.
There's almost no one in the Soviet Union who's interested in fighting for Stalin, right? And then Hitler invades. And what do the Russians do? And the Ukrainians and all of the other, uh, most of the other nationalities in the Soviet Union, what do they do? They fight like lions against the Nazis. Why?
Because Hitler had made clear what awaited them upon defeat. He had made it clear that he intended to enslave them, exterminate lots of them, and replace them with, you know, with Germans and Aryan peoples and so forth. Putin has done the near equivalent of that in Ukraine. He's not threatening to exterminate them or anything like that.
But he has made it clear that there will be no Ukraine when he's done. [00:37:00] His last few speeches this week have made it clear what he has in mind. That Ukraine has no right to exist as a nation, as a country, as a state. It has no right to sovereignty. It has no right to its own government. It's Russian. And the ultimate fate that awaits Ukraine, according to Putin, is reincorporation into Russia.
Now that's not an attractive prospect to anybody right now. But it's particularly not attractive to a population of Ukrainians who broke free of Russia at the end of the Cold War. They didn't have to. They were not required to. If Ukrainians were, as Putin claims so much, nationally the same as Russians, then why didn't Ukraine immediately establish the same kind of relationship with Russia that Belarus did?
And the answer is because Ukrainians actually do have an identity, and it is independent, and it is separate. And Putin is promising to exterminate that identity. [00:38:00] And then one more thing that's important to mention, Dan. Putin has moved a particular group of individuals into Belarus. They are a group of Chechens commanded by a guy named Ramazan Kavirov.
They are professional war criminals. They specialize in the most horrific atrocities you can imagine. When you put those guys on the border of a country that you're invading, you are telling the people of that country what to expect when you win. I will tell you something right now. Ukrainians know what awaits them when Putin's tanks come through.
They will fight, and they will fight for a long time. All right, Fred, we will leave it there. We're grateful for your time. We will, uh, we don't want to overstay our welcome, so, uh, because we want, we want you back, uh, on this podcast as, uh, things develop. Uh, certainly this story, sadly, [00:39:00] is not going away. Uh, so thanks for joining us and, um, just keep up the great work following everything you're, you're writing and reporting and all your analysis.
Take care, Fred. Thank you so much, Dan. Great to be with you.
That's our show for today. To follow Fred Kagan's work, you should go to criticalthreats. org and you can also follow the work of another think tank he's working closely with, the Institute for the Study of War, whose work you can find at understandingwar. org. And we're also posting the show notes fred's most recent piece on the russia ukraine crisis Call me back.
It's produced by Ilan Benatar until next time. I'm your host Dan Senor.