EXPERT Q&A — Russia’s massive drone attack overnight on six Ukrainian regions, which hit energy and gas transport infrastructure and cut off power to over 100,000 people, is the latest sign that Moscow is nowhere near peace. Coupled with the Kremlin’s rejection of meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine, it’s clear that President Vladimir Putin is still pursuing his maximalist war goals. That doesn’t surprise General (Ret.) Philip Breedlove, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, who said the U.S. has been “completely deterred” by Putin for the last 11 years, across four presidents, which has built a “sanctuary” for Russia and allowed it to escalate in Ukraine unchecked.
Cipher Brief COO and Executive Editor of the Open Source Report, Brad Christian spoke with Gen. Breedlove about how that dynamic and is shaping the war and peace negotiations, as well as other global security challenges — from the threat posed by Iranian drones to the true relationship between members of the Axis of Authoritarians. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s start in the Middle East. Broadly speaking, how are you thinking about all of the changes and all of the action that is happening in the region and what it might be pointing to?
General Breedlove: I’m in the Middle East now and have been here for almost seven days. I’m in my second capital and we’re working through some of the issues that are left over after the 12-day war such as how the Middle East is continuing to react to that and what we expect out of Iran following the pretty good beating they took. And then, what does that mean for our good friends and partners in the Middle East?
This is a time where I think many of the leaders of these nations are still reeling from what happened. I was talking with some very senior leaders today and I pointed out that in the first three and a half days of this 12-day war, Iran shot nearly 1,500 drones and missiles in the fight. And I asked them, “Is your country ready to defend against 1,500 rockets and missiles?” And of course, there’s really only one nation in the Middle East that’s set up for that and that’s Israel, who was of course attacked. And so, others here in this region are trying to think this through.
And while these other countries are good, maybe even great partners of the U.S., we haven’t fought together before. For example, how would they connect to the Navy ships and the US Air Force airplanes that have done so much in the Middle East in these recent challenges? And frankly, there’s a lot of scratching of heads going on because those type’s of challenges can’t be solved overnight and nobody, including Israel, is ready to face that kind of onslaught without help from the United States.
So, there’s a lot of concern and a lot of angst about how countries get ready for this? You’ve heard that the Axis of Evil countries, Iran and others, Russia, are starting to build these Shahed drones by the hundreds and thousands and starting new factories in South America. These adversarial nations are unable to use what we would call normal, Western style air power so they are substituting it with these drone attacks and it’s a tough problem for many countries to defend against.
And then, frankly, while the nations I’m dealing with are not necessarily concerned about Israel attacking them, they are taken aback that Israel can launch aircraft, fly 1,000 miles and establish air superiority over a nation in two days. And so, there’s a lot of people rethinking where they are and how it all works here based on the actions of the recent Israel-Iran conflict.
I think the good news is that the threat of Iran is somewhat diminished. Iran is going to spend some time rebuilding its defenses because especially its air defense network was pretty much decimated.
It’s a busy time in the Middle East. It’s a time where we need to find peace. It’s a time where we don’t need another distraction, as we’re facing multiple theaters of conflict right now.
The Cipher Brief: On the topic of peace and some normalcy, what is the mood there? What’s happening in Gaza is both incredibly complicated and terribly upsetting to much of the world. Is there going to be a return to some regional normalcy in the relatively near future?
General Breedlove: I don’t think I see or hear that right now. There’s a lot of concern that the political situation, that the leadership of Israel is in with their own people and the desire for getting the hostages back either dead or alive is very much alive. And even inside of Israel, there are now protests against what’s going on in Gaza. So, I can’t imagine a more concerning and more confused situation and there is angst of how this is all going to work out. I must say that there is concern about how the people of Gaza have been treated. But I will tell you this, Brad, as I move around these capitals in this region, the recognized threat is Iran.
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The Cipher Brief: I want to shift gears a little bit here to the other topic that is dominating the national security space and that’s Russia’s war with Ukraine. You’ve said consistently from the beginning of Russia’s full scale invasion that, “Mr. Putin has us deterred and we have not established deterrence over either Russia or Vladimir Putin.” I’d just like to get your take on where we are with the negotiations. So many people seem to be scratching their heads at some of the things that we’re seeing play out in the public facing side of the negotiations. How are you thinking about it?
General Breedlove: Well, bottom line upfront, nothing has changed. We remain deterred. In the press you hear people talking about this war being three and a half years long. This war is over 11 years long. It started in the spring of ’14 when I was still serving as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, and it hasn’t stopped. It was hot for a few years and then it went warm. Russians were killing Ukrainians and Ukrainians were killing Russians on the line of contact. And then, after some six years or so of that warm war on the line of contact, Russia re-invaded, and I call this the third phase of the 11-year-long war.
This war has covered four presidents, Obama, Trump twice and Biden once, and all four of them have been nearly and completely deterred from the very beginning. We, as we always do in the military, offered options for how to address this conflict in Ukraine back in 2014. And the answer was, “We’re not going to take any action because the war will escalate if we take action.” Well, we gave them options from very small movements to larger more bellicose movements, they chose none of them and here we are. What we do know is we did not take action for fear of escalation. We were deterred and we didn’t take action and Russia escalated anyway. And so our lack of action ended up in the escalation of the problem by the Russians. And that has repeated itself through four administrations for the past 11 years. We are still deterred. We have taken precious little action to stop the fight in Ukraine and we still find ourselves saying, “We’re not going to do that because we’ve got to give peace a chance and we don’t want to escalate the problem.” And that formula is not working now and has not worked for 11 years.
We have virtually enabled the Russian war on Ukraine by our lack of action in a more severe way. Many of us from military backgrounds say that we have built sanctuary for Russia. From that sanctuary, we allow them to attack Ukraine. If you can think of a map, up in the northwest corner of the map is Belarus all the way to the east around through Russia all the way to the south, into the Black Sea and west across the Black Sea. We have allowed Russia to attack Ukraine from nearly 300 degrees on the map, and we still cannot determine that we should allow Ukraine to fire back deeply into Russia with our kit.
Mr. Elbridge Colby, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, at times seems to be out of sync with President Trump because the President recently said, “You can’t win a war that way.” And Mr. Colby, once again, announced in the last day or so that, “We’re not going to let them do long-range fires with American kit.” This is an absurd policy, and it’s guaranteed to be a loser and we’ve got to get past being so completely deterred by Russia’s threats. Their program of reflexive control is working excellent on our leadership and we’ve got to break free of it.
The Cipher Brief: The US and Europe could inflict significant pressure on Russia through the expanded use of sanctions, yet President Trump has not yet approved the use of the sanctions that could really bite. Would increasing sanctions really cause that much of a risk of escalation on the part of Russia?
General Breedlove: Folks who follow Putin and Russia will say something to the following effect, I actually say it all the time- Sanctions have never changed Putin’s actions on the battlefield. Sanctions have hurt Russia. Sanctions have hurt the Russian people. Sanctions have hurt the Russian economy. All those things are true, but they have never changed Russian actions on the battlefield. And so, we either need to double and triple the really crushing sanctions and take all of the frozen Russian money and use it to help Ukraine. We’ve got to physically stop the Russian shadow fleet from moving oil around the world. There’s a whole host of things we could do that would truly bring Russia to their knees and we haven’t done it.
It’s hard to understand. We’re all hoping that the President will regain his gumption, like he did going into the conversation in Alaska with Mr. Putin. You remember it was very, very clear, he said it multiple times, “If we don’t get a ceasefire, there is no second meeting.” Well, we didn’t get a ceasefire and now we’re negotiating a second meeting. And there was also the 50-day that turned into 10 days that turned into 12 days. Well, those 12 days are gone. We don’t have a ceasefire, and we haven’t announced new sanctions. So, there are many tools that we haven’t taken that we need to take. Mr. Putin is not going to stop. Mr. Putin will have to be stopped.
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The Cipher Brief: What are NATO and Ukraine’s next best moves, given everything that’s in play right now?
General Breedlove: It’s a confusing issue about what America is going to do or not do in any possible peace-enforcement capacity. The best move right now, not under a NATO hat, because clearly, Mr. Putin believes he’s in charge and he said there will be no NATO involvement, but if NATO or European Union nations were to volunteer for a coalition of the willing presence in Ukraine, then that’s what, I think, needs to happen. We need the big nations- the UK, the French, the Germans, to step up but they’re waiting and watching for American leadership. Is America going to be that backbone and offer what the president talked about in his post-talk news conference and so forth? We need for all of that to happen. We need for America to make a decision to supply air power, command and control, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, et cetera, those non-boots on the ground capabilities. And then, we need the European nations who’ve already intimated they may be willing to provide boots on the ground to get in there and get a stoppage of the fighting.
Mr. Putin’s entire objective however is to keep kicking the can to the right, run right up to the red line, wave a bright shiny object, get another red line, run right up to the red line, wave another shiny object, get another deadline. He is very good and has had great success at moving our red lines to the right.
The Cipher Brief: I want to ask if you could give us your best and worst-case scenario about how the axis relationship between China- Russia- Iran- North Korea could evolve over the next six months and what that might mean for America and our allies?
General Breedlove: I recently heard someone use a new construct that I had never heard, but it’s beginning to make even more sense. This particular author labeled Russia as a proxy of China fighting against America. We’ve heard several times people describe Russia as the little brother, and China’s going to use Russia, as opposed to Russia using China in this conflict. There does appear to be a definite relationship there where China is positioning Russia to do as much damage as they can to the United States’ interests in the region. And so I think that we’re going to see continued cooperation amongst these nations. They’re doing this, every one of them, to benefit their nation. Russia’s getting what they need from China by way of parts for the Shahed drones and other things.
Russia, of course, now is using three tranches of North Koreans to fight and to man their factories. And now, we hear they’re even looking for women in South America who might want to come over and man factories. Russia is in trouble. I’d like to finish the conversation with the fact that I see Russia as losing the war against Ukraine now, not winning it.
But back to the cooperation. There’s a lot of mutual benefit there for these countries. Iran has got to rebuild its air defenses; they were decimated by Israel. Russia desperately needs manpower. They can’t staff their factories, and they still haven’t totally retaken all the land that was taken by Ukraine and they’re having to use North Koreans to help them do that. China needs them all because they want American power diminished, tied up, canceled, in any way they can, and they see Russia as a useful tool to do that. So, they all have their needs and desires and I think the mutual affray will only increase over time.
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