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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Before we get to your calls on how you'll celebrate Lunar New Year, with all the headlines about Russia possibly about to invade Ukraine, here are two questions you might be asking yourself. One, what in the world are Biden and Putin up to? Two, what is NATO for in 2022? A coalition that was created in and for the Cold War that ended 30 years ago.

We'll try to answer those questions now. What we do know is this, yesterday, here in New York City, the two superpowers faced off at a UN Security Council meeting. Here's a clip of US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, characterizing Russia's movement so far as an invasion.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield: The United States along with our European allies and partners and other nations around the globe, concerned by Russia's threat to Ukraine, have continued to do everything we can to resolve this crisis peacefully. In all of these talks, our messages have been clear and consistent. We seek the path of peace. We seek the path of dialogue. We do not want confrontation, but we will be decisive, swift, and united should Russia further invade Ukraine.

Brian Lehrer: "Further invade Ukraine," says US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Here's Russia's representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, through a translator accusing the US of stoking hysteria.

Vassily Nebenzia's Translator: You are almost calling for this. You want it to happen. You're waiting for it to happen as if you want to make your words become a reality.

Brian Lehrer: Meanwhile, in statements made at the White House yesterday, President Biden emphasized finding a solution through diplomacy but said the US is ready.

President Biden: Today, in the United Nations, we've laid out [unintelligible 00:02:21] of Russia's threat to Ukraine sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Ukraine as well as the core tenets of a rule-based international order. We continue to urge diplomacy as the best way forward, but with Russia continuing its build-up of its forces around Ukraine, we are ready no matter what happens.

Brian Lehrer: We are ready no matter what happens, but ready for what? Also, just this morning, Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is expected to have a phone call with Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, to continue discussions on the US proposal to Russia to de-escalate tensions and address their security concerns, chief among them, a guarantee that NATO end its open-door policy on membership, that's what Russia wants, including to bar Ukraine from ever joining. To talk about the crisis and Russia's demands in the context of NATO, joining us now is Fred Kaplan.

He is Slate's War Stories columnist, the author of many books, including The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. He wrote the article on Slate, his latest, What in the World Are Biden and Putin Up To? Back in the '90s, he was The Boston Globe's Moscow correspondent. Hi, Fred, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fred Kaplan: Thanks. Always good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with Biden. What does he want?

Fred Kaplan: [chuckles] I think Biden would rather this thing end as quickly as possible so he can go back to dealing with more interesting and valuable things in the Asia Pacific. Presidents always say, "I'm going to leave all this nonsense behind, whether it's a conflict in the Middle East or the war in Afghanistan." It's like the only memorable line from The Godfather: Part III where Michael Corleone, wanting to break away from the mafia family, says, "They keep pulling me back in." Presidents, at last, don't often get to choose what they're going to end up being focused on.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote in one of your columns that it's still unclear what Putin ultimately wants.

Fred Kaplan: Yes, that's the big mystery. It would be a lot easier to deal with this problem if we knew what he wanted. If what he really wants to do is to invade Ukraine with 150,000 troops or whatever and just occupy the whole country, if it's that, or if it's just to slice off another piece of Eastern Ukraine or try to overthrow the government, all of them would require different responses and may be prevented or deterred through different means. Apparently, there are even fairly senior Russian officials who don't quite know what the man wants, which is why sometimes you see Foreign Minister Lavrov saying two things that are contradictory to each other. He's covering all of his bases depending on what Putin ends up deciding.

Brian Lehrer: Why would it make sense from Russia's perspective to be forcing the issue on Ukraine now?

Fred Kaplan: Now is an interesting question, but we should put this in perspective. I should preface this by saying, what I'm about to say, in no way justifies or makes excuses for what Putin is doing, but I do think that often it's a good idea to try to understand someone's motives and frame of mind to understand what's going on, and therefore to come up with a good response to it. Putin has often said that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. It may have been from Russia point of view.

The minute that the Soviet Union imploded, NATO started expanding to the East, and it was able to do this because Russia was so weak. In fact, the officials doing it were surprised that first Gorbachev and then Yeltsin didn't demand more in exchange. Toward the end of this expansion, we were basically buying it off. Russia was broke. We were giving Yeltsin more money, we let Russia into the G8. That was a big deal for another round of expansion. Putin was there. First, he was in the KGB watching all this happen in East Germany as the Wall came down.

Then he was Putin's Prime Minister. Again, he has this Russia is a great power mentality, and he is filled with resentment over how much was taken away from the empire while Russia was down on its luck. Now the military is rebuilt, higher oil prices have allowed the economy to recover, and he wants to lay some chips on the table to get some of this ground back. He once told, I think it was President Bush, that Ukraine isn't really a country. He views it as a natural part of Russia. Again, I don't agree with this, but you have to understand where he's coming from.

Brian Lehrer: His perspective. It makes it sound like it's just about glory, it's just about the size of his empire, as opposed to any concrete benefits that would accrue to the Russian people.

Fred Kaplan: Well, Ukraine has been a large part of Russian culture and the economy and politics. It's the big buffer state between Russia and what they might see as Western encroachment, but there is an interesting coincidence to consider. Remember, Yeltsin annexed Crimea and then made an incursion into the eastern part of Ukraine in 2014. This was right after--

Brian Lehrer: Putin. You said Yeltsin. You mean Putin, right?

Fred Kaplan: Oh, I'm sorry, I meant Putin. This was right after a Russia-backed President of Ukraine had to flee the country under protest, and Ukraine looked like it was about to become a member of the European Union, which means it would be cut off from Russia and join the West. That is when Putin took his steps. That wasn't about NATO. It was about the European Union, but all of this is about losing Ukraine to the West.

Brian Lehrer: You point out in one of your pieces that after the Soviet Union fell, and Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary rushed to join NATO, Ukraine was always seen as a separate issue.

Fred Kaplan: That's the other interesting thing. We're standing up for the principle of letting Ukraine join NATO someday while it's got a gun to its head. Biden has said this several times, "There is no chance that Ukraine is going to join NATO anytime soon." There are certain qualifications that a country has to fulfill to join NATO. You have to achieve a certain level of democratization, a lack of corruption, a military that's under civilian control and able to contribute to common defense. Ukraine really isn't there yet.

Then another thing to consider, Brian, NATO, it's not a club. Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization says we will consider an attack on any member as an attack on all of the members. Do you really want to go put your life on the line for Ukraine? Article V has been invoked only once and that was when we were attacked by Al-Qaeda. A lot of NATO countries came in with this to Afghanistan, but it's supposed to be the other way around. We're supposed to go help.

I personally think in this enlargement, NATO got too big. There used to be 16 countries in NATO. They all had Britain, France, West Germany. They had a lot in common with the United States and Canada. Now there are 30 countries in NATO. They include Slovenia, Slovakia, Northern Montenegro. It's bizarre and yet there has always been a reluctance to bring Ukraine in, partly because it was viewed that this would just be too provocative to Russia.

Brian Lehrer: It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as you said, NATO, and some of those countries certainly don't border the north Atlantic. Let's do a little NATO explainer because it started in 1949, post world war II, beginning of the Cold War, and has evolved over time. What even is NATO in 2022? We remember that Donald Trump said NATO is obsolete. I think that was because he didn't want to be pressured by the Western European democracies to continue to be aligned with them and be a democracy ourselves. A lot of people looked up and said, "Maybe NATO is obsolete."

Fred Kaplan: Well, this is the irony of what Putin is doing. Putin has strengthened NATO more than any other person or fact or event in the last 20 years. When the Cold War ended, you're right, people said, and it was a good question, "Do we need NATO anymore?" Because the whole idea of NATO was to contain and repel a Soviet attack on Western Europe. That's what it was about.

After the Cold War and Afghanistan happened, we started thinking about, "Well, maybe NATO can be a joint expeditionary force to fight terrorism. Maybe NATO can be this. Maybe NATO can be that." Well, what Putin has done first in 2014 and now with this, is to reunify NATO as an Alliance, join to its common purpose, which is to provide a common defense and a notion of deterrence to Russian expansion.

There are countries like Sweden and Finland which border on Russia, but have always remained militarily neutral, whose leaders are now saying, "Maybe we ought to think about joining NATO." Putin wants the United States to be disconnected from Europe. He once told the NATO secretary general, "My intent is to have your organization disappear." Well, one strategy of his entire foreign policy is to weaken the cohesiveness of Europe and to drive wedges between the United States and its European allies.

He has now strengthened this. He has bind the two together. We're sending more troops to Estonia and Poland to shore up their insecurity about Russia's intentions. This has been an enormous backfire compared to--

Brian Lehrer: For Vladimir Putin.

Fred Kaplan: Yes, in terms of his own strategic goals.

Brian Lehrer: That's interesting. Your description there I think is very illuminating for a lot of listeners on why we're sending troops to those countries. People might have heard these headlines just going by briefly in recent weeks and thinking, "Wait, it's Ukraine that may be under attack from Russia, but we're sending troops to countries like Estonia. Isn't that a little bit like if New Jersey was being attacked, we would send troops to Pennsylvania?"

Fred Kaplan: Well, yes, if you didn't want to send troops to New Jersey, maybe it'd be good to send them to Pennsylvania to keep them-- for the invasion from hitting Pennsylvania. Basically, it's actually a strategic thing to do. It's dealing with Putin's overall strategy, which has to do with conflicting concepts of European security. Look, we're not going into Ukraine. Biden has said that in very many ways. We have about a hundred troops there who are training Ukraine army in the use of US weapons. There are probably special forces and the CIA in there doing who knows what. We might help guerillas, resistance fighters if there is an invasion. We're not sending troops there.

Nobody in NATO is sending troops there. However, countries bordering Ukraine and also Russia are saying, are we next? We're sending troops to say, "NATO is still behind-- We've got your back. NATO is a cohesive forest. It's more purposeful than ever and this works against Putin's larger aims here.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is Fred Kaplan who writes the War Stories column for Slate. He's been covering Russia and following Russian US relations for a long time. He was the Moscow Bureau Chief for The Boston Globe for a while, among many other things. I want to play one more clip of secretary of state Antony Blinken, who made it quite clear that the US is aligned with the rest of NATO on this open-door policy that Ukraine or any other country that wants to, as long as it meets certain requirements, can join the North Atlantic countries. Here's a clip of an exchange with a reporter last week at a news conference in Washington.

Antony Blinken: Without going into the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks and in a sense, for many years, that we will uphold the principle of NATO's open door.

Reporter: There is no change in the US and NATO position in this document.

Antony Blinken: First of all, there is no change. There will be no change. Second, we reiterate that principle. Of course it is for NATO, not the United States unilaterally to discuss the open door policy. These are decisions that NATO makes as an Alliance, not the United States unilaterally.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go from that quote right to a caller. It's Sonich in Newark. Sonich, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in today.

Sonich: Oh, thanks for taking my call. I was born in the Soviet Union in Kiev, Ukraine and studied in Moscow for five years. I'm a US citizen. I have no other citizenship. I have really, little sympathy for either Russians or Ukrainians. I'm Jew, although I have a little bit less sympathy for Ukrainians because they named their streets after people who were murdering Jews.

Anyway, what I'm going to say is that this issue with NATO and Ukraine, it's been going on for many, many years, not since 2014. It was our state department, Victoria Nuland and so forth, who unbalanced the Ukraine. In order to understand what Ukraine is, you have to think of two Ukraines. One was part of Russia since 1654 and another one, the Western Ukraine, was part of Austria, Hungary, Poland, et cetera.

It has a different culture, different even Language. Essentially what happened was, they're also very nationalistic. When we saw this [unintelligible 00:18:06] in 2014 and I was watching it very carefully, they were screaming, let's hang Russians. [foreign language] or so forth. Before they used to scream, let's drown Russians in Jewish blood.

It is not really very pretty people. Right now, as your guest correctly said, NATO is already in Ukraine, and Russia had faced Western invasions for many, many centuries. They look at this with a lot of concern. What they said right now is that this has to stop and the foreign troops have to be taken out of [unintelligible 00:18:49] countries like Estonia or all these Baltic countries that are basically facing Russia.

It is extremely complicated. The last thing I'm going to say is that they said that if there is a war with NATO, they're going to use tactical nuclear weapons. That's not a very good idea to start this whole over something that really was more aggressive and belligerent policy that our state department took toward Russia.

Brian Lehrer: From what you've described, do you think it might be a good idea for Ukraine to break up into an Eastern part of the country nation and a Western part if they're so culturally different like Czechoslovakia broke up after the cold war?

Sonich: I think so. As a matter of fact, this [unintelligible 00:19:40] region, which is Russian-speaking, they're already saying like, "How can we be part of Ukraine if they were shooting us and bombing us and stuff like that?" Well, I'm not going to give them a specific answer or whatever, but again, it's a very convoluted, problematic situation. Again, we are part of that. I don't know. [unintelligible 00:20:01] said that war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means. This whole thing with diplomacy started a long, long time ago.

Again, we have to look at this, is it really something that we need to do? Why our state department was pushing it, unbalancing Ukraine, having all of these belligerent policies toward Russia, and right now, they, I think, genuinely think that they're threatened. If you look at Crimea, for example, Crimea was part of Russia for centuries and it was Khrushchev in 1954, on 300 university of unification of Ukraine and Russia that gave it to Ukrainians. You have to look at this history and understand all of the complexity of it. It's not that simple.

Brian Lehrer: Sonich, do one more favor for us on a lighter note, say again the name of the capital of Ukraine.

Sonich: Kiev. They say in Ukrainian Kyiv, in Russian it's Kiev, in Ukrainian they say Kyiv.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Sonich. Thank you for everything you put on the table there. On that lighter note, Fred, for the media which Keeps saying Kiev sometimes and Kyiv other times, I think we just learned something from Sonich. If you say Kiev, you're favoring the Russians, and if you say Kyiv, you're favoring the Ukrainians.

Fred Kaplan: I think this is why the spelling was changed to show our sympathies. Somebody once asked me when I got back from Moscow, "Do they say Moscow or Moscow?" I said, "Well, actually they say Moscow." Different people say different things in different ways, but your caller, I agree with, really, everything that he said. One big horrible pivot to all this was in 2008, George W. Bush. There's a conference in Bucharest where he told Georgia and Ukraine that yes, you will join NATO someday. We'll see.

I think president Zelensky of Ukraine is actually doing nobody any favors by bringing up this point over and over and over, we want to be a member of NATO. We want to be a member of NATO. People think it's absurd, how could any Russian think that NATO is an offensive force against Russia? It is true that no Western country was ever clamoring to join the Warsaw pact, whereas after the cold war, countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, they wanted into NATO.

They didn't want to be stranded in the no man's land without any security, but it's sometimes worth looking at a situation, even if you disagree with that point of view from the other person's point of view to see what he thinks is going on and what might remedy or modify the situation.

Brian Lehrer: Chris in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Fred Kaplan from Slate. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hi, Brian, how are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good. You told our screener you were the head of Russia's largest bank.

Chris: Well, I was the head of the US division of Russia's largest bank. It's a broker dealer part of SpareBank. We were actually an independent investment bank that started in the early '90s that was acquired by SpareBank in 2012. Then we had the pleasure of being sanctioned by the US and the EU because of the Crimean annexation.

Brian Lehrer: Got it.

Chris: We were selling Russian stocks and bonds to US investors.

Brian Lehrer: What do you want to add?

Chris: Well, I thought the costs were just absurdly high for an all out invasion from Russia's point of view from the get go. I think they're even higher now. I think that US and NATO are doing the right things in terms of deterrence, I think it's probably like 95 to 5 ratio of military versus sanctions. Sanctions have not worked. I don't think they would work on their own, but sending troops to Estonia, in fact, and sending military hardware is exactly what we need to be doing, because what Putin is doing by amassing troops on the border is he's trying to negotiate from a position of strength, which has worked for him in Ukraine already.

I think that step one, de-escalation, I think that that can be worked out. I think Russia is going to look for an off-ramp and I think we can prevent an all out invasion, but after that, we're going to have to figure out a way to simultaneously ensure Ukrainian sovereignty and figure out a lasting security structure for Europe that can accommodate both NATO and Russia's concerns. What I wanted to ask Mr. Kaplan is, have you heard anything from your sources that looks promising in that regard? A sign of getting beyond this crisis, I hope I'm right. Then getting into a situation where the security architecture of Europe is changed to accommodate both parties' interests.

Fred Kaplan: Well, there are two things that I see as possible off-ramps, as you put it. One, over the last month, both secretary Blinken and one of the Russian deputy foreign ministers has mentioned the Minsk agreements, implementation of the Minsk agreements as a way out of this thing. I won't go into all the details. It was a ceasefire and political agreement that Russia and Ukraine negotiated in 2015 that neither side has ever implemented.

You have both of those players saying that might be the way out. You also had a very interesting statement from Putin just yesterday. We have made the point that in the Helsinki Final Act of 1990, I believe, it says that every country has a right to figure out its own defense arrangements and alliances, and Putin said, "Yes, that's right, but there's also another line in that statement which says that all countries' concept of security should be-- Nobody should expand their security at the cost of someone else's security. What are you going to do about that?"

It seems to me that if Putin is looking for a way out of this, that might have been an invitation for us to make a very broad statement saying, "Yes, you're right about that point in general, we have different ideas what that means, but let's have a big conference, some bilateral, some with other NATO nations involved, to figure out what this means." I think it is time, whether or not there are all these troops on the border, it is time to figure out a concept of European security that is sustainable and that addresses all side's interests. Maybe Putin was putting out a signal to that.

He's meeting with the Hungarian president right now and we'll have a press conference afterwards. He hasn't really said anything about this crisis or what he's going to do. Maybe this will be the first time that he says something about that.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it. We're just about out of time, Fred. I'm going to ask you one more question on a different one of your articles, and maybe this is just going to wind up as a tease for people to go to Slate and read it. You have such an intriguing headline from your latest piece the other day, why every president is terrible at foreign policy now. Really?

Fred Kaplan: Yes, well, it's hard because it used to be in the old days and I'm simplifying here, but most global problems during the Cold War could be lassoed into the one big confrontation between the East and the West. Even if the crisis or conflict had nothing to do with that, one superpower or another would make it so. There were forums where you could deal with this. There were clear interests. If we were allied with country A about issue three, we were probably also allied on issues four, five, and six.

That is no longer true. There are no power blocs. There is no center of gravity. We might be aligned with one country on a certain issue, but in absolute conflict with them on another. The issues involve military, economic, environmental, all kinds of things and so I'm saying, even if George Kennan was secretary of state right now, he would have a hard time piecing together what is a grand strategy to be able to deal with this. How to solve one problem or deal with one problem without exacerbating another problem. I guess to put it very simply, it's just hard, and harder than it has ever been in the era in which the United States has been a global power.

Brian Lehrer: Foreign policy, it's complicated. Fred Kaplan, Slate's War Stories columnist and author of many books, including his most recent, The Bomb: President, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Fred, thanks as always.

Fred Kaplan: Sure. Anytime.

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