The following conversation has been edited for clarity.
Rick Landgraf: With me today is Alexander Vershbow who served as the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2012 to 2016, the US Ambassador to Russia from 2001 to 2005, and the US Ambassador to NATO from 1997 to 2001. Sandy, welcome to the show.
First, I'd like to ask you a little bit about your background and how you became interested in public service, foreign policy, and international security issues.
Alexander Vershbow: That's one of these classic cases of one thing leading to another without any master plan. I was always interested in international affairs growing up. I remember my parents putting on the TV at dinnertime during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But I think it was my interest in foreign languages that was the most important thing. I took Russian in high school and put Russian Studies as my intended college major at Yale, and I actually did that. So I learned a lot about Russia during the late part of the Cold War and kind of got a sense of how interesting it would be to work abroad and to be part of the foreign policy machinery of the United States. So I took the foreign service exam after getting my degree, a Master's degree at Columbia, joined the service six months later, and the rest is history.
RL: You have a unique perspective because you've served in a variety of roles, diplomatic roles, ambassador to NATO, later ambassador to Russia, and then ultimately the Deputy NATO Secretary General. But on a more fundamental level and how you see it, why is NATO so important for US national security?
AV: Well, I think the short answer is NATO is important because Europe is still very important to our security and our interests. NATO is indispensable to maintaining the security and stability and freedom of our allies. We've been hearing a lot this year when NATO celebrates its 75th anniversary, how it's the most successful alliance in human history. But there have also been skeptical voices who've been asking whether it's time for NATO to take a dignified retirement. I think my time serving at NATO, I was the Deputy Chief of Mission, then the ambassador in the late nineties, and back as the Deputy Secretary General, including the time of the first Russian aggression against Ukraine. I've come to be convinced that NATO is really the indispensable alliance for the United States and for its other members. And it is so important because it works. People always say you have too many members to ever reach consensus on on anything, but in fact, because NATO is of such existential importance to to member states, they have a kind of first imperative always in the back of their minds that there has to be a consensus of NATO, it’s too important to fail.
NATO's original mission, of course, deterring Russian aggression during the Cold War, was fulfilled. But now we're facing an aggressive Russia yet again. NATO has been adaptable in other ways, adopting crisis management as a mission and putting out the civil wars in the Balkans in Bosnia and Kosovo. It took on the War on Terror after 9/11. And of course, the United States was the first beneficiary of NATO's Article 5, when it was the one and only time that our allies invoked Article 5 to counter the attacks of 9/11. So NATO is important in many different ways. I think that even though it's 75 years, you would think it's time for the gold watch. I think it shows its flexibility and adaptability in many ways, and of course the number one crisis of the day is Russia's war in Ukraine. Here, too, I think we've seen—after some hesitation and even some denial at just how serious the threat was—I think NATO is now more unified than ever, recognizing that if Russia gets away with annexing somebody else's territory by force and continues to seek to overturn the results of the Cold War, it will create a much more dangerous world for all of us.
And that's why I think that NATO has surprised Mr. Putin in its unity and its resolve in helping Ukraine to resist Russian aggression and adopted the US line that we're going to support Ukraine for as long as it takes. At the summit, there'll be a lot of attention to the Ukraine fight and what's the next step that we should be taking. I think what's been missing in the US and NATO approach thus far has been the lack of a coherent strategy for victory by Ukraine in this war. And I'm hoping that the summit in Washington NATO will agree on some additional measures of military support to Ukraine. At the same time, we'll take steps to put Ukraine on a clearer path to NATO membership so that we can send the signal to Putin that we're in this for the long haul. We're not gonna lose patience or abandon Ukraine. On the contrary, if we give Ukraine sufficient support, it will be able to regain the initiative on the ground and defeat Russia. So sooner or later, Putin will have to accept the reality and he will need to pursue a fair negotiated solution rather than the kind that he's been offering since the invasion began in 2022.
RL: You mentioned why NATO is important for US national security. And one of the cornerstones, of course, of the NATO charter is Article 5, the mutual defense pledge: If one ally is attacked, all other allies will respond in defense of that ally. But on a more basic level, in light of the presidential election in a few months, why should your average American voter, whether they're in Philadelphia or Phoenix, care about Europe and care about small countries in Europe? For example, the Baltic states, which a lot of the observers have said over the years are indefensible: Why should the average American voter care about security in far-flung places such as the Baltic States or other smaller NATO allies?
AV: Well, first of all, Article 5 is indeed kind of the linchpin of NATO, the most solemn fundamental commitment that Allies accept when they become members of the Alliance. The commitment to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. I think this, together with the strong capabilities that Allies deploy, creates a strong deterrent against aggression by Russia or any other state. If we want to prevent war and not have to face the same disintegration of the European security system that we saw after World War I, then it's important for the US to stay engaged and remember the lessons of history. That's why keeping NATO strong is in our interest in avoiding a much more costly direct intervention down the road if Russia were to attack.
And at the same time we are protecting our political and economic interests because Europe is our biggest trading partner.Security is the key to keeping investments and trade flows going. Without security in Europe our economy would be damaged too. So I think that's a very important reason to continue to support NATO and continue to provide the military capabilities to keep it strong and keep the deterrence credible. And of course, what happened in Ukraine made clear that what we were hoping after the end of the Cold War—that we would be able to develop a Europe whole and free with Russia as a partner, which was something we'd made a lot of progress on actually in the ‘90s—but after Mr. Putin came to power, he revealed his true colors after a few years that he was interested in rolling back a lot of the changes at the end of the Cold War and reestablishing a new version of the Russian Empire. Soviet Union light, I sometimes like to call it.
We thought we had made war unthinkable with the enlargement of NATO and with the NATO-Russia Founding Act, a very important agreement that we reached with Russia in 1997. But Putin made clear that war is very thinkable for him. And with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we're seeing that Russia is prepared to endure tremendous casualties and equipment losses, but it's not backing away from its extremist objectives, which are nothing short of erasing Ukraine as a sovereign country from the map of Europe, erasing Ukrainian national identity. So for Ukraine, of course, it's a genocidal war. It's an existential war. And I think if we don't want to be more directly engaged, now is the time to ramp up our military support to Ukraine, not be so selective or incremental as we have been since this war began, but to pull out all the stops. Give them everything they need to put Russia on the back foot and eventually to drive Russia out of occupied lands in Ukraine. And then hopefully new leaders will emerge sooner or later in Russia, more interested than Putin in going back to that path of partnership and cooperation that we had offered Russia in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
RL: You served as the US ambassador to Russia from 2001 to 2005. This was a much different time in US-Russian relations, arguably a much, much better time. How did the US/NATO relationship with Russia go so far off track? And what role, in your view, has enlargement had in this downward spiral?
AV: Well, that was, as I mentioned earlier, a very hopeful time, particularly after 1991 when the Soviet Union itself dissolved peacefully before our very eyes and the Berlin Wall was down and the Warsaw Pact was gone. It was an opportunity to erase dividing lines in Europe that had existed since the Yalta Conference during World War II. And our vision always included not only enlarging NATO to accept new members, but a strategic partnership with Russia, recognizing its place in European security.
We made some headway during the Yeltsin years, and even at the beginning of the Putin years. Putin seemed fairly pragmatic and was interested in deepening the relationship with NATO. He even attended a special summit in Rome in 2002, where NATO and Russia upgraded their partnership, established a new permanent council, and started to work together on missile defense, on counter-terrorism, and many other issues. I think what caused Putin to kind of sour on his relationship with NATO in the West, was not primarily NATO enlargement. Remember there was a second and third round of enlargement during Putin's time, including the admission of the Baltic states, which people used to think were a non-starter for Putin. There was hardly a peep out of Moscow. I think they recognized that there was no military danger.
And they continued, in fact, to move more and more of their troops away from the Western flank to the South and to the East to deal with terrorism and other problems. For Putin, the real driver of his anti-NATO policies, that began with a vengeance in 2007, at the time of his famous speech to the Munich Security Conference, was his sense that he was losing control over the former Soviet space and in particular Ukraine, which had almost mystical significance in his version of history. And the first big watershed event was the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, where the Russians interfered in an election, hoping to install their favorite son, Viktor Yanukovych, as president.
Like many of Putin's interventions in Ukraine, it backfired and made things worse. Yet in 2010, he got Yanukovych in there fair and square, but then undermined Yanukovych who had accepted neutrality and who gave the Russians a 40-year lease on the Black Sea fleets of base in Sevastopol. But he was greedy and he wanted to dominate Ukraine and ended up prompting the popular revolution first in 2004, and then in 2014, the Maidan revolution. So it was really about, always about controlling Ukraine, not about what NATO was doing.
That being said, I wouldn't say Putin was happy about what happened at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, when NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia will become members one day. Although allies thought they were just kicking the can down the road, Putin seized on this, at least in his rhetoric, and it was at least a factor in his decision to escalate against Ukraine first in 2014 and then in 2022. But I think other things were much more significant, including our withdrawal from the ABM treaty, the Iraq War, the legacy of the Kosovo campaign, which irritated Putin because we acted without a UN Security Council resolution.
So there are many different factors, but I think Putin's main driver has always been to control Ukraine. He couldn't afford to have a successful democratic state on Russia's borders, which would tell Russians that they could have a democracy rather than an autocracy, as Putin is insisting is the only way for Russia to go forward.
RL: You served as the NATO Deputy Secretary General from 2012 to 2016. During that time, as you mentioned, was the popular uprising in Ukraine, leading to Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014, and then stoking separatism in southeastern Ukraine. What were the biggest challenges and successes that you experienced in that role as Deputy Secretary General of this huge international organization?
AV: Inevitably with the security agenda being so complex and diverse, there's many challenges. Things were relatively quiet before 2014, but only relatively. I think the biggest challenge came with the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the illegal annexation of Crimea and the stirring up of would-be separatists, really Russian regulars in different uniforms in the Donbass, which was yet another way of Putin trying to destabilize Ukraine in order to control it going forward. The biggest challenge in the immediate aftermath of the Russian military aggression was denial by some nations that this was really a fundamental change in the security landscape and the security paradigm that included a partnership with Russia as a central pillar. So my role as Deputy Secretary General was sometimes to work behind the scenes, even as the Secretary General had his own contacts with ministers, but to try to get allies more and more on the same page,assessing what was going on in Russia and agreeing, or at least coming to a tentative agreement on what needs to be done to deal with what was clearly a new strategic reality, as we called it, with Russia. I think it was clear to most allies at the time that we had to do what NATO called going back to basics. This meant re-elevating Article 5 and collective defense as job number one for NATO, but also recognizing that achieving a more effective deterrence against Russian aggression was going to take years, given the major cuts and defense capabilities that allies had indulged in since 1991.
And we needed to come up with somewhat improvisatory steps to prevent the Russians from moving beyond attacks on Ukraine, to attacks on other neighbors, even against NATO members such as the Baltic states. So fighting denial was important. I think the most significant concrete accomplishment, which is not as well-recognized, was helping reform and expand NATO's intelligence capabilities, establishing a whole new division and an Assistant Secretary General for intelligence, which led to a kind of quantum increase in intelligence sharing among allies. This inevitably leads to consultations, comparisons of different views from different nations, that leads to getting most of the nations on the same page on what is the threat and what are the key responses that we should be taking. There were many other things going on at the time. Of course, in the wake of the first aggression against Ukraine, there was a massive escalation in Russian disinformation led in Brussels by their intrepid ambassador Alexander Grushko.
I was assigned with the task of beating up Brushko every couple of weeks on the unacceptable nature of Russian aggression in Ukraine. He gave as good as he could get, but I think it was reassuring to allies to see the Deputy Secretary General sort of going into verbal combat with the Russian ambassador and not putting up with some of the lies that they were peddling about NATO-sponsored coups in Ukraine and things like that.
One other thing I would mention is an important role for the Deputy Secretary General is to help bridge gaps between different allies from different geographic parts of the Alliance. This time, the allies in the Mediterranean region in particular were very anxious that their security concerns and problems, particularly relating to North Africa and the Middle East, terrorism, instability, failing states, were going to be neglected by NATO in its post-Crimea strategy.
I played a role in trying to shape a NATO Southern strategy that helped show that NATO was attending to the security risks facing all allies and not becoming so Eastern European centric. I think NATO has done a good job in balancing its approach to these different issues so that everybody feels that they're being heard and that the policy is evolving to address every nation's most significant concerns.
RL: NATO is holding the 75th anniversary summit in Washington July 9-11th. What big announcements or decisions do you expect or hope to see come out of that summit?
AV: I think there'll be a lot of attention to these different programs that have been undertaken over the last ten years since the annexation of Crimea to transform NATO's defense and deterrence strategy, force posture, and to start marshaling the significant resources that are needed to deliver on these plans, particularly what's called the new family of defense plans in which we now are pre-assigning forces to ensure that we have the significant capabilities able to beat back Russian aggression, whether it's in the north and the south, or in the middle.
And I think, related to this, there will be initiatives to ramp up defense industrial production because one of the main problems in supplying Ukraine has been the cupboards are increasingly bare and the production lines are not as active, and need to be activated on a much more urgent basis if we're going to be able to keep up with the Russians who have reconstituted their forces very rapidly. This means keeping up with their superior numbers in artillery, ammunition, drones, tactical ballistic missiles, etc. So a defense industrial initiative is likely. But of course, the spotlight will be on the larger political strategy toward Ukraine. Do we have a strategy for victory? Are we still united and ready to give them everything they need to reverse some of the recent losses which were exacerbated by the impasse in the US Congress over funding?
Whether we'll stop micromanaging every single supply decision, giving the Russians the impression that they can sometimes threaten and intimidate us and get us to kind of self-deter from giving the Ukrainians all they need. Alongside arming Ukraine and winning the war is securing the peace. And I think allies are increasingly in agreement that in the long term, Ukraine will never be secure unless it's a member of NATO.
Without that Article 5 deterrent, they might try something again in a few years' time. But it's still a sensitive point on when and how Ukraine can join, even though allies agree that Ukraine's future is in NATO. I'm hoping that there'll be some, at least, positive steps towards integrating Ukrainian armed forces and defense policy makers more in the NATO consultative framework, putting NATO more directly in charge of the overall military support effort for Ukraine.
And as a result, kind of putting Ukraine closer to walking through the open door, even though a political decision on that may have to wait until the end of the war, or a substantial dying down of the fighting. So Ukraine will probably be the litmus test issue for the media. And so it's important that strong signals be sent to the Ukrainians that we are with them to the fullest. And to send the message to Putin that we're in this for the long haul, you can't wait us out and we aren't going to let you get away with it in Ukraine or anywhere else.
RL: It's been a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
AV: You're very welcome.