Ben Rhodes: Is Trump Stumbling into a Wider War?

The Bulwark Daily

Ben Rhodes joins Tim Miller on The Bulwark Daily to discuss escalating global tensions, including Russia's potential actions in Europe, the

Key takeaways

Russia may be testing NATO's resolve through sabotage operations and drone attacks in Europe, potentially escalating into direct aggression.
The U.S. missed a critical opportunity to adopt Ukraine's proven drone defense technology, weakening its position in the Middle East conflict.

Main topics

U.S. foreign policy under Trump
Russia's potential aggression in Europe

Notable quotes

We're just learning to live with more and more violence and conflict.

Conclusion

The episode underscores a growing global instability fueled by strategic missteps, shifting

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:12) Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show Deputy National Security Advisor for Barack Hussein Obama and co-host of Pod Save the World. His latest book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, was released earlier this year. It's Ben Rhodes. What's up, man? Hey, Speaker 4 (0:28) Tim. Good to see you. Speaker 1 (0:29) It's good to see you as well. Yesterday, at the beginning in this little intro, I said that Trump had been kind of quiet this week, so I had Sam on. We did a lot of silly stuff. And by the time the show aired, Like he was already renaming Lakes again. Yeah. You know? And I don't even know that it's worth talking about it. He's such a loser and it's so embarrassing. But that did happen between the taping and the airing yesterday. The Speaker 4 (0:54) Canadians have a former head of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada who's like methodically and rigorously in his own hand probably going through the tariffs that he's going to reimpose on us. And Trump with his own hand is just drawing on Lakes. Renaming things as usual. Speaker 1 (1:10) Yeah, expanding the area of the hurricane. Yeah, I liked how Carney really mogged us with the use of the word hydronyms in his statement. He's like, Trump is... Trump is obsessed with hydronyms. And I was like, all right, well, Trump certainly doesn't know that word. I had to Google it. It's good. It's good. It's good usage. You got to go to the thesaurus. Speaker 4 (1:35) Yeah. Mark Carney's like a walk-in thesaurus, man. Like we're not fighting someone in our own weight class in the trade war here. Speaker 1 (1:41) We have a bunch of domestic politics to talk about. At the end, on your sub-stack notes on the stories we tell, you've had two good ones in the last two weeks that touch on things that affect me, resistance one discourse and hatred of Ennis Cantor. So we will get to both of those things at the end. But I got to start with foreign policy. You know your expertise. I guess we'll tie this Ennis Cantor. I want to do the Brian Windhorst thing about connecting dots on a couple of stories I've been reading in the news. And since you actually have sources you talk to, I'm wondering. wondering what you think about all this. So CIA director visits Moscow. The Wall Street Journal reports that depletion of our weapons stocks in the Iran war could be motivating Putin to consider making a move on NATO. The NATO Secretary General has a meeting with U.S. Undersecretary Elbridge Colby, which is a little unusual. U.S. Intel, we've seen these reports for a while now, warning Eastern European countries about Russia plans to test NATO. There was a leak of a letter that three Baltic commissioners sent to the EU president about a deteriorating security environment and increased frequency of airspace violations in the Baltics. And the Sun tabloid has Kremlin insiders fearing Putin is prepared to drop a tactical nuke. So, you know, I'm tying like Elbridge and Ratcliffe and the warnings. And it feels kind of like the lead up to the Ukraine war. When a lot of people were like not taking that that seriously and our Intel people are like, no, really like this is happening. I don't know. What do you think about all that? Speaker 4 (3:09) Yeah, and I've been talking to people in Europe and some of the people who have worked on these types of things over the last decade. And I think there is a feeling that there's rising concern that Russia could do something in Europe that could take different forms. One is a direct attack on European soil, targeting places where they manufacture. you know some of the drones and rockets that are going deep into russia the you know the russian idea being okay if you're giving them the weapons that are hitting you know places like moscow and you know st petersburg then we have a right to attack the factory in germany that is producing that um there's lesser Things they could do, like they've been doing sabotage operations, like there have been fires set in Speaker 1 (3:55) Europe, there have been things blowing up in Europe. The drones at the German air base. Speaker 4 (3:59) Yeah, drones just showing up. They could also just begin a more aggressive version of what they did in Ukraine in one of the Baltic states or Moldova. You know, there was a great story recently at Times about like literally Russian training camps, dudes with like guns and preparing sabotage operations in Serbia, ostensibly for Moldova. You had NATO undertaking kind of military exercises to kind of show some deterrence. But yeah, I think it is a tenuous time. And there is a feeling that as Russia is kind of on the back foot here because of the Ukrainian drone capability, that one way they might lash out is by trying to impose a cost on Europe and test whether the NATO alliance can respond to it. Speaker 1 (4:42) I want to do kind of flashbacks of how we got here. And there's a... Really embarrassing Axios story from March about the Trump administration's lack of preparations I want to talk about. But like, even going back to Biden, as you sit here now, like, does it feel like we were outweighing, you know, World War III concerns and underweighing how much we could have been helping Ukraine, you know, kind of given where we are now? And it seems like we might be walking into... I mean, not World War III in, like, the nuclear sense, but, like, you know, an increasingly globalized conflict anyway. Speaker 4 (5:18) Yeah, I worry about two things. The increasing globalized conflict, right, the way in which this comes together with the war in Iran, the closer collaboration between Russia, China, North Korea, Iran. as against the United States and Europe. I also worry about something that doesn't look like World War Three, but there's just this kind of creeping violence into Europe, you know, like more and more of these sabotage things, drone strikes, cyber attacks and reprisals on Russia. And it's not right to tactical nukes, but we're just learning to live with more and more and more violence and conflict. You know, on this one, as someone who's been willing to second guess the Biden administration on things, they had a tough fucking problem here yeah i i think in retrospect and i again i say this like with empathy that this was not easy to deal with at the time there were kind of two paths that might have been able to have been taken like one is kind of kind of premise your question hey we're not that concerned that putin's actually going to use nuclear weapons and we're really going to start pouring more and more weapons in as fast as possible to give the ukrainians an advantage another is frankly if you look at the contours of the front line, it's not that dissimilar from where it was pretty early on in the war, like after the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023. And so the other road not taken might have been like, what would it have looked like? And it might not have worked to kind of really drive towards a negotiated settlement earlier, like beginning in like 2023. Now the Ukrainians didn't necessarily want that, Speaker 2 (6:48) but Speaker 4 (6:49) the reality is what concerns me is that where this thing ends up. is probably not going to be that dissimilar from where it could have ended up if somehow you'd been able to do that then. And meanwhile, a lot of people have died. I can sense that Hippie Speaker 1 (7:05) Rhodes is more interested in the negotiated settlement path. Well, I'm intrigued by the weapons path. Speaker 4 (7:12) Yeah, well, but I hear Speaker 1 (7:14) you on the weapons path. Speaker 4 (7:14) The national security people, I've been in all these meetings, you tend to take the middle option, you know? Speaker 1 (7:20) It's like anything else. It's like back when I was in PR and you had a client. You're like, we're going to give you a crazy option or a very conservative option. Speaker 4 (7:29) So we've been kind of living with the middle option for years now. And the Ukrainians, by the way, have broken out of that because their drone manufacturing basically is the more aggressive weapons option. And they're actually having some success with that, to your point. So I think that does bear some scrutiny, but we'll see where it goes. Speaker 1 (7:45) Speaking of paths not taken, this is the aforementioned March story about drones. This is my guy Mark Caputo that broke this. Ukrainian officials tried to sell the U.S. their battle-proven technology for downing Iranian-made drones. They made a PowerPoint presentation showing how it could protect American forces and their allies in the Middle East war. Trump administration dismissed the Ukrainians only to eventually reverse course a little while ago. Yikes. That is a miss that has a ton of implications, actually. Speaker 4 (8:18) It has a ton of implications because the first point is, and Tim, I've been talking about this endlessly, but like everybody you talk to in the Middle East is like the damage to these U.S. bases and facilities is far worse than you know or being told, right? I mean, we took some hits that we might not have taken had we moved more aggressively to adopt this Ukrainian technology. I think the other important lesson going forward, though, Tim, is like you innovate on the battlefield. The Ukrainians have been in it for years. And they've made breakthroughs in both offensive drone technology and in defenses. And my sense, Tim, is that like at the same time that the Pentagon is shoveling massive contracts out the door to like Don Jr.'s drone company, and we're building like the world's most expensive drones, what the Ukrainians and the Iranians have shown is that... Like you can make pretty cheap drones in your garage that are like more effective. Like smaller drones swarming are more effective than like the Battlestar Galactica being designed in Silicon Valley, you know, or Don Jr.'s company that is getting like no bid contracts. And so I do think that there's a, you know, the hippie in me, but who also realizes national security is necessary. It's like, hey, we could probably save some money on the defense budget. by, you know, embracing some of the technology that the Ukrainians have innovated on the battlefield rather than, you know, giving Don Jr. a blank check. Speaker 1 (9:36) A lot of talk from the Silicon Valley guys. You know, it was like Palmer Lucky, that Andrew guy, talking about how great that they're going to do to help us militarily. I had lunch with him once and he picked his nose and ate it. And so maybe that should have been a warning that maybe these guys weren't as good as... as they seem. What Speaker 4 (9:56) is Speaker 3 (9:56) clear is Ukrainians are the best in the world at this right now. Speaker 4 (9:59) And this gets to the future of Ukraine's defense. They need this on the back end of the war as part of their deterrence. And we'd be dumb not... I assume that Trump just doesn't like Ukraine, so he's probably like, I've got to get out of here with that drone technology. And that's a big miss. Speaker 1 (10:16) Yeah, and now this is impacting kind of the nexus of all this, right? I mean, you know, who knows? Russia, the Iranian president and Putin are meeting next week at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Kyrgyzstan. They're talking about like nuclear energy production and sharing. But who the hell knows what else they're talking about? And I do think that like the depletion of our patriots is kind of informing. different tactical options for both Russia and Iran in both wars that we're entangled in. Speaker 4 (10:52) Yeah. And, you know, I mean, on the far end of risk, potentially Taiwan, right? I mean, because, you know, the window that people who worry about Taiwan worry about is the second half of the Trump administration, right? When the U.S. is probably at its low point in terms of global standing. God willing. Yeah, distracted by a million. Yeah, God willing, seriously. Allies are divided. The Donald Trump Jr. Speaker 1 (11:19) administration in 29. We might not even be able to see the bottom for a hair. Yeah, Speaker 4 (11:25) that's Speaker 1 (11:25) a good Speaker 4 (11:25) point. That's Speaker 1 (11:26) a Speaker 4 (11:26) good Speaker 1 (11:26) point. So Speaker 4 (11:27) yeah, I mean, it's never good at a time of heightened global conflict and active wars to be running out of munitions, particularly defensive ones that you need to protect your allies. Speaker 1 (11:36) We talked about this a couple times ago when you were on and your previous book, After the Fall. And, you know, a lot of that is like reflective of us and, you know, kind of the mistakes of the American-led world order and things we could have done differently. But another part of it is like fears of what a different-led world order would look like and why it's so important that we do better. And as we're sitting here now, and you wrote that, what, eight years ago? It's been a long time. Seven, eight years ago. And we're sitting here now and the like prospect of a China-led world order. is feeling even more likely than it did when you wrote that book. And I'm just kind of curious kind of how you see sort of the China interplay as it stands today. I Speaker 4 (12:21) think it is more likely because their strategy for Trump has been to kind of punch him back in the face when he picks on them. But meanwhile, like kind of quietly go about building their own parallel world order. And so as Trump is, you know, pissing everybody off with his tariffs. The Chinese are there to say, hey, look, you may not like the terms of your deals with us, but at least you know what the terms are, and they don't change. Mark Carney had this line that the U.S. now makes deals in pencil, not pen. The Chinese make deals in pen, and guess where Mark Carney's going? He's going to go to China. That's one thing, the AI of it all. The U.S. is building the most expensive AI in the world. We've got Claude. We've got ChatGPT. But what most countries want is cheaper, open-source models that can create efficiencies, robots to do shit, industrial efficiencies. And I think we're going to look up in a couple of years, and there might be these giant IPOs for anthropic and open AI. But meanwhile, most of the world could be running on Chinese AI. And then meanwhile, they're kind of parallel institutions. They're kind of Belt Road Initiative institutions. They're just kind of spreading out. They're getting pretty almost near dominance on certain critical minerals. Trump, despite all his talk about that, has not really done anything about it. So, yeah, I think we're beginning to see the outlines of not a Chinese-dominated one, but let's just say in a fractured world order, a place where the Chinese are potentially in a stronger position than the United States in everything Trump is doing. He's literally just driving countries into the arms of the Chinese. And in the long run, Tim, the dollar as a reserve currency is one of the ultimate targets of the Chinese. And they don't want to get there tomorrow because it would be too disruptive, but, you know. The moment in which the world starts to move away from the dollar, our standard of living becomes impossible. Speaker 1 (14:06) Where are all the China hawks that criticize you? It's funny to go back to think six months ago when the Iran war started, some of the right-wing hawks. You're seeing this galaxy brain Twitter threads about how Trump is doing 4D chess. And this really isn't even about Iran. It's about China. It's about solidifying our power. And boy. That doesn't look very good. Well, Speaker 4 (14:28) because they thought it was like this kind of board game where we were going to take the Iranian oil somehow and take it away from the Chinese. And we were bombing railroads that the Chinese use as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. But losing sight of the fact that that's not how the world works. You don't just bomb a country and then get all of its oil. And the underlying... fear caused by the united states being this bull in a china shop and doing something like the iran war confirms exactly what the chinese have been saying about us for a very long Speaker 1 (14:57) time look at kuwait for example like this is just one example this week i was reading a story about how kuwait has had very good feelings about the united states uh given the way that we came to their defense when saddam invaded them gulf war one But like, how are things looking right now? Iran's targeting their civilian infrastructure. They're targeting their water desalination plants, energy installations. And they're looking around and like, are these U.S. bases here helping us or making us less safe? So two Speaker 4 (15:24) things I point to, because you kind of want to look at the world's kind of swing states, right? And the Gulf states are the ultimate swing states. Waukesha County of the Speaker 3 (15:32) Gulf. Speaker 4 (15:33) Yeah, they literally are, you know, because they've got... In a cash-poor world, they have tons of cash. They obviously have tons of natural resources. And they've kind of been on our side. But like the UAE, the Saudis, they play footsie with the Chinese on a bunch of stuff. And look, you're right. It's not just that the bases don't make them safer. The bases are endangering them. They are being attacked because they host U.S. bases. And that could lead them on the back end of this war to make some pretty fundamental choices about... who they want to be aligned with and at least wanting to hedge against reliance on the U.S. What about South Korea? Like in the middle of a war in which the United States yanked away the THAAD missile defense system, that's like the most important missile defense system for the South Koreans in a potential conflict, he then just decides... to reignite his unrequited love affair with Kim Jong-un, who no longer even writes love letters. He just sends troops to Ukraine to fight with Putin. And he's canceling military exercises. What if South Korea is like, you know what, we're just going to have to cut a deal with the Chinese. We don't like it, but we've got no other choice. Europe, same thing, like on the tech issues, right? There's a lot of concern in Europe about being overly reliant on American tech because...