Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned in Brief, I’m Preet Bharara. President Trump has been making waves on the foreign policy front, often with unpredictable consequences. His tense meeting with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy a couple of weeks ago and broader stance on Russia, have raised new questions about his approach and its impact.

To unpack all this, I’m joined by veteran diplomat, Richard Haass, who is now the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. And journalist Julia Ioffe, a co-founder of Puck News and an expert on Russia and national security, and also author of the new book, Motherland. Julia, Richard, welcome to the show.

Richard Haass:

Thank you, Preet.

Julia Ioffe:

Thanks for having us.

Preet Bharara:

So I should note for listeners in this turbulent time where things change by the hour, if not the minute, that we are having this conversation on the early afternoon of Thursday, March 13th, and lots of things are subject to change. But we should start with where we are, maybe not on the most micro level in connection with the possible deal, whether it’s a ceasefire or a peace deal.

I know, Richard, you distinguish between those two things, and that’s an important distinction that not everyone focuses on. Sort of big picture, where are we at this moment, now that the United States and Ukraine have made a particular pitch? We have heard in the last few hours from the Russians that they’re not fully satisfied. How do you think, starting with you, Julia, where are we exactly?

Julia Ioffe:

Well, earlier this week, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, traveled to Saudi Arabia where he met with a Ukrainian delegation and hammered out a ceasefire proposal, that would involve a ceasefire for 30 days and restored American military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Then Marco Rubio said, “The ball is in Russia’s court and we’re waiting to see what they say.”

And if they say no, it’ll tell us a lot about their motivations and intent essentially. Then Steve Witkoff, Trump’s negotiator, went to Moscow, talked to Putin. And Putin at a press conference said that he was open to the idea, but he had a few buts, which were, as always the root causes, as he puts it, of the conflict.

And this code for or rather shorthand for his maximalist demands that he laid out in the winter of 2021, 2022, in the months and days leading up to his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has still not backed off of any of those. And he is basically saying like, “Yeah, we’re open to the idea of a 30-day ceasefire, but it has to be not just a way to rearm Ukraine.”

Reports out of Russia and my sources in Moscow are telling me that any kind of ceasefire that involves military aid going to Ukraine, would be a nonstarter for the Russian side. Basically, the Russians have all kinds of ifs, ands, and buts to the very general proposal that Marco Rubio and the Ukrainian delegation put on the table.

Preet Bharara:

So Richard, I think a lot of people, who are not paying the closest attention, think this is only a dispute between Russia and Ukraine.

And that the concessions, whether they be about land or other things, pertain only to Ukraine. What is it that Russia will demand from the West generally or the alliance generally? And will those things necessarily be a deal breaker?

Richard Haass:

Well, actually I think we have a pretty good idea of what Russia wants. It goes way beyond territory. What Russia wants to do is essentially one way or another, eliminate or curtail Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign, liberal country with organic ties to the West. Russia cannot countenance with any degree of comfort, this example of a Slavic country on its border.

It’s a dangerous thing if you’re Putin because it represents something that Russians may say, “Hey, if it’s good enough for our neighbor, why isn’t it good enough for us?” So I think that’s the first reality here, this is about a lot more than territory. Russia does not want to appear to be against peace.

So what you are going to get are various Russian proposals that agree to peace in principle, and then as Julia suggested, the list of buts will be profound. And they’re hoping they can essentially push the ball back in Ukraine’s court, or more likely our court.

And Preet, I actually think the most important thing now is not what Ukraine says, because we know that Ukraine has come around to the idea of accepting an interim ceasefire. Not a peace treaty, an interim ceasefire, that would essentially reflect where the battle lines are. They would not be required to give up any of their long-term goals.

They would not be required to give up their security or sovereignty. They are willing to accept such a deal. Russia, we know again, has a long list of requirements, so I actually think the most interesting question is what does the United States do? We are going to be presented with this Russian position.

There’s an enormous gap between where Russia and Ukraine stand, and to me, the most interesting question is how does the United States define its role? Do we see ourselves as being a mediator? Does that mean we’re in the middle? Or do we see ourselves as being a mediator, which means we stand by a country that is one much more of a partner of ours, a de facto ally?

And stands on the side of what we presumably used to want in international relations, which is the nonacquisition of territory by force. So I actually think the biggest question is not Zelenskyy or Putin. We’ve got a pretty good feel for those guys. I actually think the biggest question, it’s not even Steve Witkoff, who’s the intermediary.

It’s Donald Trump, which is how much does he want peace and on what terms? And I think that is where this is all going to come down to sooner rather than later.

Preet Bharara:

So this may seem unrelated, but to what extent, so you said we know what Putin wants, we know what Ukraine wants. The question is what does the US want? Well, the person making that decision is one Donald Trump.

We know that Donald Trump has his own feeling of acquisitiveness via his statements and comments, and threats and actions relating to Canada and to Greenland.

Is there anything that we can infer about his feelings about Russia and Ukraine from his interests in expanding the United States, even if he doesn’t, at least at this moment, purport to do so through means of force?

Richard Haass:

Well, I would say one thing, which is historically the United States has carried out the security policy we have in Europe for 80 years on the basis that it was good for the United States. That we saw America’s interests being promoted by the avoidance of war and the existence of a balance of power for four decades during the Cold War, the containment of communism.

That was, if you will, the payback or the reward we got for our involvement in NATO, and at times our paying a significant amount of resources towards that end. Donald Trump clearly has a very different idea and he sees foreign policy much more, not simply transactionally, but in an immediate, tangible way.

So whether it’s the surprising emphasis on acquisitions in this hemisphere, Canada, Panama, what he’s been saying about Greenland and so forth, or with Ukraine, whether it was the minerals deal or what have you. So rather than seeing the reward for American foreign policy as being intrinsic in what was either accomplished or avoided. We have a president and administration who see foreign policy much more almost in balance sheet terms.

And ironically enough, we see it in the trade domain as well with this emphasis on bilateral imbalances. Rather than anyone taking a step back and say, “Hey, American economy is in pretty good shape. We’ve done pretty well over the last 80 years. Maybe the international trade system is not quite as broken as we seem to think.”

But no, everything is done, is measured in very narrow “What’s in it for us terms?” And I think it actually distorts both our economic and our security policy.

Preet Bharara:

Julia, do you think there’s anything about Trump’s acquisitiveness that causes him to sympathize with, empathize with, totally get where Putin is coming from?

You’re a large and powerful country, you want to have more. What’s wrong with that?

Julia Ioffe:

Well, I totally agree with Richard. I think that this is what happens. This is the natural, logical outcome of wanting to run your country like a business, and especially if you want to run it like a Trump business. If the benefit for the last 80 years to the US of the transatlantic order was an absence of war, you can’t put big, gold Trump letters on an absence.

You can’t say, “This was the Trump piece, or this continues to be the Trump piece.” There needs to be something more tangible, as you said. One of my friends put it really well. He said, “Beachfront property is the most important moving piece of how Donald Trump thinks about foreign policy.” We see it in how he talks about Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

We see it in how he talks about Greenland, et cetera, and that’s one aspect. The other is that, I think, he fundamentally shares a worldview with Vladimir Putin, and it is one of the strongman. And I heard somebody the other day talking about how we don’t want to live in a world where it might make strife.

Well, that’s exactly the kind of world Donald Trump lives in, and that’s the kind of world he and his supporters want us to live in. And in that, again, he is very much simpatico with Putin. It struck me that during his address to the joint session of Congress or whatever, the State of the Union, whatever they called it that night.

He talked about Greenland in terms that I found eerily redolent of the way Putin talked about Crimea, a referendum. He essentially floated the idea of a referendum in Greenland. Let Greenlanders decide whether they want to be part of Denmark, little, puny Denmark, or big, bold, beautiful America, right?

Which is how Putin talked about the sham, phony referendum he staged in Crimea in February of 2014. Yeah, and so I think they think in similar terms. One last thing I’ll say is that I wrote about this about a year, a year and a half ago, about this floating around Moscow circles close to the Kremlin. And now it’s emerging fully with the arrival of Trump.

And you see it on Russian propaganda TV, that the Russian elite has been increasingly infatuated with this idea that it’s time for a Yalta 2.0. In 1945, it was Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin dividing up the world after World War II. Now it should be Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump carving up the world.

And they talk about the Big Three, Russia, China and America, carving up the world in a Yalta 2.0, so yeah, I think that. And I think with that comes also this distaste for Ukraine as the victim. As somebody as this small, weak entity that we naturally, not only do we not side with the underdog, we hate the underdog.

There’s something pathetic and gross about the underdog, and we don’t want their stench to pollute us.

Richard Haass:

Can I just riff off of that for one second? One of the interesting differences between Trump’s first term and this one, is the first term, the foreign policy was marked more by a minimalism to deal with Afghanistan, pushing, moving back from certain alliances. This time some of that’s still there, but there is also, I think you used the word, acquisitiveness.

There is a funny combination of both a limited foreign policy, but also a policy that is acquisitive, that has shades of McKinley in it. And building on what Julia said, then what it translates into is something of a spheres of influence approach. That rather than thinking about global orders based upon rules, we’re thinking about three regional orders.

A China-led regional order in the Asia-Pacific, a Russian-led order in Europe, a US-led order in the Western Hemisphere. And we can talk, if you want or not, about the pros and mainly cons of such an approach to the world. But I didn’t see it in Trump 1.0, I didn’t see it during the campaign. And I think it’s actually an interesting, new twist on the approach to the world that I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t see coming.

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this.

I’m still a little confused about whether or not Trump’s acquisitiveness means he’s an imperialist or he’s a businessman, or a little bit of both? But I want to go back to the origins of the conflict, and the differences in the points of view of the various people about the origins of the conflict.

So Jeffrey Sachs now going on two years ago, placed the blame in part, like Putin does and some others do, on the US. He wrote, “Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

“In fact, the war was provoked by the US in ways that leading US diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead up to the war.” Our friend and frequent Stay Tuned Podcast guest, Ian Bremmer, and Jeffrey Sachs got into a bit of a debate about that. As a trained lawyer, I’d like to know what terms mean. A, do you agree with Jeffrey Sachs or not? And what the hell do we mean by unprovoked and provoked?

Richard Haass:

I’ll start, go very quick, I expect we might agree more than disagree. I think that position is preposterous, let me just say that.

Preet Bharara:

All right. Ian will be pleased to hear you say that.

Richard Haass:

And just to be clear, that Jeffrey Sachs’s position is preposterous, not Ian Bremmer’s position. If this was provoked by talk of NATO enlargement, it would have happened a long time ago when NATO surfaced the idea. It did not.

And NATO was never making good on that idea either in 2014, when Russia first went into Ukraine to take Crimea and parts of the east, much less in 2022. It wasn’t as though anything was imminent to enlarge NATO, put Western troops in there and all that.

So the idea that there’s a causality between a statement back when at the Bucharest NATO Summit and what Russia has done in recent years just doesn’t pass the serious test. Plus, if you read Mr. Putin’s, I’m not sure what one calls it, his oped of sorts.

Julia Ioffe:

Diatribe?

Richard Haass:

Diatribe, fair enough, of the summer just before the February 2022 intervention, he wasn’t focusing on NATO. He was focusing on his views or dreams of Russian history and Ukraine’s importance to Russia and the like. So no, this is almost the law of parsimony, sometimes the simplest analysis is right.

This was a case of an unprovoked aggression, and in Putin’s defense, my guess is he thought this would be pretty easy to get away with. He watched Afghanistan, he saw what happened there. He had a pretty dismal view of the willingness of the United States and Europe and Ukraine to stand up to him.

So my guess, and he probably had an exaggerated view of his own military. So you add all that up, my sense is he saw a massive opportunity and he went to take it. So again, I don’t think it’s that hard to offer up an assessment of what has happened and why.

But the idea that somehow this was provoked, again, that’s the kind of apology I expect to come out of the Kremlin, not out of Western academics.

Preet Bharara:

Julia?

Julia Ioffe:

I’m going to yes and Richard, but I’m going to do it much less eloquently. I’m going to say that’s total fucking bullshit.

Preet Bharara:

Can you also say that in Russian?

Julia Ioffe:

[foreign language 00:18:03].

Preet Bharara:

It sounds so much better in Russian, can I just say that?

Richard Haass:

It does.

Preet Bharara:

It has an element of disdain.

Julia Ioffe:

Oh, I don’t know that my mother would agree. [foreign language 00:18:14] is what I want to say to Jeffrey Sachs, who by the way, made a killing in Russia in the ’90s, but let’s just rewind. I agree with Richard. If this was, in fact, the root cause and not grandpa went a little crazy in isolation reading weird history blogs on the internet.

Then yeah, it would have happened a lot earlier. But if you looked at what happened earlier, in fact, as late as 2014, Russia was doing joint exercises with NATO. Why would Russia have been doing that if it was so provocative? Why did Russia, during the Obama administration, if NATO was such a threat on its borders, and NATO enlargement up to its borders was such a threat?

Why did Russia allow a NATO transit point inside Russian territory at Ulyanovsk, to help NATO get men and material, or troops and material to Afghanistan, if NATO was such a threat? Maybe because it wasn’t, maybe because this is all bullshit. And also, if the issue was NATO, if NATO or the US was so provocative, why did it attack Ukraine?

Why not attack NATO? Why not attack the US? Because in fact, it’s not about NATO and the US, it is about Ukraine and it is about Ukraine drifting toward the West. It is exactly as Richard said, it’s because Ukraine, in Putin’s mistaken view, is basically Russia with a made-up identity and a made-up language.

Putin has always had a very mistaken view fed by sycophantic intelligence, that Ukrainians are basically Russian and they want to be part of Russia, and that they’d be greeted as liberators. And the idea that if they became democratic, and they did, in fact. When the Maidan happened in 2014, they did give a lot of hope to Russian liberals who said, “Hey, if the Ukrainians can do it, why can’t we? Why can’t we build a Western-style democracy?”

So the one other thing I’ll say is that America is responsible for this, in so far as I would say, two things. The first is what George W. Bush did at Bucharest in 2008 was, in fact, provocative because it opened the door further for Ukraine to join the West. So it did anger Putin, but it didn’t offer any protection to the Ukrainians. So it was the worst of both worlds.

It angered Putin, but then left Ukraine twisting in the wind. Closed the door right in front of their face, as the bullies chasing them down the street. And then I think the Biden administration made a mistake in microdosing military aid and having to do this, making the Ukrainians do this whole song and dance for months and months each time for each new military capability.

And there was an article in The Wall Street Journal, I think, that very accurately diagnosed the problem by saying that it was basically like introducing different types of antibiotics very slowly, and giving the bacteria time to evolve resistance each time. So I think those are the mistakes that the US made. But again, if NATO was so provocative, why did Putin allow a NATO base on Russian territory?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. The problem I have, not being a foreign policy expert, not having the background that you two have, is lots of things can be a provocation. Putin could say, “Unless you increase spending on soccer, I’m going to be provoked.”

But is a provocation reasonable or is it not? We don’t have time to get into that, but at some point in the future, I’d love to talk about that. Where do we go from here? What are we going to be doing in six months? Predictions?

Richard Haass:

When the year began, I actually was pretty optimistic about a ceasefire. Julia won’t like this, where Julia and I will disagree, but I thought the Trump administration had one valuable insight that the Biden administration had but wasn’t willing to recognize or act on. Which was that Ukraine was not going to militarily liberate Crimea and the Eastern Provinces.

And that to define success in those terms allowed people to say the war is failing. So I think the administration has correctly come to the position early on that we have to define success as stopping the war. And I still think there’s a decent chance, if it is predicated on one thing, so this is a hedge prediction.

If this administration is willing to stand by Ukraine and keep the spigot of intelligence and military support open, then I think there’s a chance we will get an interim ceasefire. Because that will teach Putin the lesson, if you will, or make the argument that time is not his friend. That even Donald Trump is willing to stand by Ukraine and that Ukraine will not fall into Russia’s lap.

So it’s less a prediction than it is a comment. If Donald Trump wants his peace in Ukraine, he has to end the contradiction in his own policy. And the way to get peace in Ukraine is not to pressure Russia through sanctions and tariffs. Tariffs are ridiculous because Russia doesn’t send stuff to us.

We’ve already done most of the sanctioning we’re going to do. It’s to help Ukraine to disabuse Putin of the notion that the passage of time will give him what he wants. That will create some urgency. So the prediction I will make is we will have a ceasefire if the United States is supportive of Ukraine.

And we will not have one if the administration distances itself from Ukraine and turns off the spigot. Or essentially takes Russia’s side in a negotiation, then I think we will not have a ceasefire.

Preet Bharara:

Julia, your view, but also answer the question of whether or not Zelenskyy will still be in power in six months?

Julia Ioffe:

Oh, geez.

Preet Bharara:

Are you going to curse in Russian again?

Julia Ioffe:

No, no. No, I’m done.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Julia Ioffe:

Again, with the caveat that we’re dealing with two leaders, Trump and Putin, whose trademarks are unpredictability, they like to literally trade on it. They want to be the most predictable guy in the room, that is part of their power as they see it. So we don’t actually know what’s going to happen in six months, but I think that there will be a ceasefire. I think the Russians will violate it, then they will blame it on Ukraine.

I think Zelenskyy will be in power, because everything coming out of Ukraine seems to indicate that all of this is just empowering Zelenskyy, that the people are rallying behind him. His approval rating shot up after that Oval Office beat down. An Economist poll came out right before we went to record this podcast. And it showed that Ukrainians are by wide, wide margins, willing to fight, even if the US withdraws all military aid.

That they are not willing to concede territory, that they are not willing to stop fighting without military guarantees, that they don’t trust the Russians at all. I think what we can bank on is that Putin and now Trump are wrong, will continue being wrong about the Ukrainians and their will to fight. Who, by the way, along with Richard, were quite optimistic when Donald Trump was elected.

They thought that with Trump’s election, there would be at least a chance. I think like a lot of Palestinians thought, “Okay, maybe we can try something different. The old way was not working for us. It was just a lot of bloodletting and maybe with Trump, we can get some kind of resolution to this.” They’ve been quickly disabused of that notion.

The other thing that I think will ultimately happen in six months, and this is back to your first question about Trump and his acquisitive nature, and what it means to run the country in the world like a business. I think he wants to get points on the board very quickly. And if he can get a ceasefire, he’ll take it and then I think he’ll get bored and move on.

I don’t think he thinks Ukraine is worth all this stuff about, it’s Trump’s blaming, it’s Trump apologia, but all this stuff about, “Oh, this is just a negotiating tactic. Take him seriously, not literally. He’s playing six-dimensional chess.” I think that’s all bunk. I think he’s going to get bored with Ukraine, and he doesn’t want something small and pathetic led by a small and pathetic…

As from what I’ve heard, he doesn’t like Zelenskyy, not just because he was the cause of his first impeachment, because remember, he’s been impeached twice. It’s because Zelenskyy is small and he doesn’t look, he doesn’t have that lantern jaw that a president out of central casting should have. I think he’s going to get bored.

And he doesn’t want something small and pathetic like Ukraine to ruin his relationship with Putin, and ruin something big and beautiful like the Big Three and Yalta 2.0.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to end with a note to the producers to make sure that you folks are on in six months and we’ll see how you did.

Julia Ioffe:

Oh, God. Are you going to provide forks and plates so we can eat our words?

Richard Haass:

Eat our crow.

Preet Bharara:

Crow, yes. Filet of crow. Richard, Julia, thank you so much. Great to have you.

Richard Haass:

Take care.

Preet Bharara:

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You can also now reach me on Bluesky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@CAFE.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.