National Security Analyst Steve Yates Talks Ukraine with C&B

BUCK: Why don’t we bring Stephen Yates on with us now, Clay. He’s senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute, former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Cheney. Stephen, thanks for being with us.

YATES: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

BUCK: Hey, Stephen. I’ve known you now for many, many years, and this audience may not know you. You are a fluent Mandarin speaker as well as being a general student and policymaker in the realm of geopolitics. What did you make of that — Clay pointed this out — Biden not prepared to talk about whether he’s putting pressure on China to try to put further pressure on Putin during this situation? What was your takeaway from that?

YATES: Well, I think that’s a very dangerous proposition. I think we have to first begin with the reality that President Trump actually warned NATO about overdependence on energy from Russia, underinvestment in their defenses and that Europe needed to take better care of Europe. We’re reaping those consequences now. But the problem is the demonstration effect of this failure of that alliance and the failure of Europe is provocative and will spread to other places.

I think it’s incredibly shortsighted to think that agent provocateurs in Tehran — you know, the Iranians on pursuit of a nuclear deal — the Chinese with pressure towards Taiwan or other areas… This is just an open invitation for revisionism and aggression, and the president seems barely able to read through his script, much less to pull a coalition of people together to roll back this aggression.

CLAY: All right. So, he’s not commenting on basically his conversations with China as it pertains to Russia. We know that China has been, I would, say aggressively pushing the bounds of what is acceptable as it pertains to Taiwan. We’re gonna asking, I’m sure, about Ukraine, but just hearing that answer and that question, how nervous do you think Americans — certainly people who are in Taiwan, in the Pacific, how nervous should we — be about the situation not only in Ukraine, but about Taiwan and China right now?

YATES: I think we have to be nervous just because we have this steady cascade of failure. It began unraveling with Afghanistan, but when you spy weakness in one area and aggressors take advantage, it’s just only natural that it will lead to further problems. Taiwan is a much different kind of challenge for China than Ukraine was for Russia in this instance, and it remains to be seen whether the Ukrainian people grind this out and come out the other end in some form or fashion.

It’s travesty now. But when it comes to Taiwan, Americans don’t fully understand how the important the supply chain from Taiwan is to the United States. All of our smart world — our devices, our cars, our GPS, all kinds of things in our life — depends on that natural flow of technology, in addition to the values of standing with a free and democratic people, really make that situation dire.

BUCK: Stephen, how well do you think Taiwan would be…? Clay and I talked to former president Trump about this earlier in the week. He is concerned about the possibility that this situation in Europe presents an opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party to just go for it while the world already feels like it’s focused in on and unable to maybe even cope with more than one challenge at a time in Ukraine. How serious do you think the defense of Taiwan would be absent a major U.S. military intervention?

YATES: It would be serious, but it would be probably outmatched by what China would seek to bring to the table in the early stages. And if we learn anything from the Ukraine situation that should apply in this Asia context, it is don’t wait until after the aggression is underway to put sanctions or other deterrents in place. Don’t wait to bolster and make more independently capable your allies until it’s needed in the time of conflict. We’re behind on this.

People in the Biden administration have talked about a “pivot” to Asia basically in the Obama years and these years, but nothing has happened, and so I think we start from behind. The people of Taiwan, the people of Japan who would be most affected by this. There really would be a pretty significant resistance. But China has the potential to bring all kinds of trouble, including the cyber capabilities we saw Russia employ in Ukraine. That would be a significant challenge there and here.

CLAY: We’re talking to Steve Yates, senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute, former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Cheney. So how impactful do you expect for all of these rules and regulations — the sanctions that Joe Biden announced even more stringent just now in his press availability and statement, how impactful do you anticipate those — will be on Russia, on Putin and on the ruling class of the country?

YATES: Well, I think the only thing we can use as a gauge to measure is the fact that it had to have been anticipated that sanctions would be coming. There was lots of talk about them being super-duper strong. And so Vladimir Putin had to expect that the first tranche wouldn’t be the last tranche. And so it didn’t change their strategic behavior at all. And so Russia was still very willing to use traditional military capabilities, nontraditional capabilities in cyber.

They seemed to be taking Chernobyl, and who knows what that can of worms might imply. And we still don’t know whether this is a smash-and-grab to put a new government in Ukraine and they pull back, or whether this is a broader strategic campaign. And so with all that uncertainty, it’s just all the more important that Americans get back to our energy independence, get back to hardening the United States and having our own capabilities and urging our other allies to do the same.

BUCK: Stephen, what do you think Putin’s real end state goal is here? He’s already gone with the full, three-pronged invasion. There’s air, sea, land assets of the Russian military deployed. What do you think he is trying to get out of this? Because that obviously factors into how long this will go, how high the casualties are likely to be, and what could end it.

YATES: Well, I think I have to humbly say I can’t tell where Putin defines the end state. But it sure looks like he has every intention of installing a puppet or friendly government in all of Russia’s near abroad, that in some ways reestablishes the sphere of influence that the Soviet Union had. So whether that is the individual dream of Putin that the Russian people will tolerate and whether the pain that may come from that, or whether it’s somewhat a dying man late stage in life leader just going for the dream he’s had since what he called “the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century,” the fall of the Soviet Union, gets reversed.

CLAY: Steve, do we have any sense how well or how long or how committed Ukraine might be to fighting against the Russian rule in an insurgent basis? Do we have any early reads or any idea what to expect there, how long this could drag on?

YATES: Well, they certainly have the capability to grind this out for a good, long time. I think they would be very difficult people to actually have govern, which is why I expect Russia would not actually seek to make Ukraine part of the Russian Federation, but instead to try to enact a regime change where they had a friendly puppet government doing its bidding instead. But they certainly have the capability.

They have — maybe interesting by some people — somewhat of a Second Amendment situation where they have armed citizens who are there to protect their households against invaders, and so they have this ability to ground it out. But we’ve seen in recent times that when people feel abandoned, they might abandon the materiel that we sold them, and we just can’t know whether this is one of those quick-fold situations or they’ll hold on.

BUCK: Stephen, how did you think the policies that Biden laid out in that speech that just finished moments ago…? Is that everything that should be and could be done at this point? Is there something else that you think should have been added into the mix?

YATES: I think it just all begins and ends with Europe having to grow up and take care of Europe. Just the president needed to ride very hard on that responsibility. Yes, Putin is responsible for being an evil man, imposing his will on his neighbor. But this is Europe failing in its own responsibility, and until we get that right, sanctions and movement of troops from the United States to bolster NATO isn’t gonna change the status quo.

CLAY: Steve, should we be concerned about this spiraling outside of Ukraine? How concerned are you that somehow NATO gets drawn in, that another country that the United States does have to commit men and materiel in a substantial fashion gets drawn in here? How much should Americans be concerned about that idea?

YATES: I think we have to be very concerned about the Baltic states. We have in some ways encouraged them to poke the bear next door, and we sort of celebrate their pluckiness and independence. But they’re in a very vulnerable military position. And given NATO’s ineffectualness in determining the movement against Ukraine, we should under treaty obligation under NATO to have to intervene in a very untenable situation with the Baltics. And so I hope that that is not the direction this goes. But I fear that this could spiral across Europe and the U.S. homeland when it comes to our power lines, our pipelines, and our cyber security situation because Russia has threatened “unconventional resistance” to anyone who intervenes.

BUCK: Steve Yates, senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute, former deputy national security adviser to VP Cheney. Steve, always insightful, my friend. Thanks for being with us here.

YATES: My pleasure. Thank you both.