Is Anyone Still Afraid of the United States?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Last fall, Bob Gates, the former [U.S.] secretary of defense, took to the pages of Foreign Affairs to issue a warning: with America facing the most dangerous geopolitical landscape in decades, dysfunction in Washington threatened to turn that danger into disaster.

Today, Russia and China are testing the international order, Iranian proxies are attacking U.S. forces on a daily basis, and, as Gates writes, “at the very moment that events demand a strong and coherent response, America cannot provide one.” Gates worries that such dysfunction at home could prompt America’s foes to make risky bets—with catastrophic consequences for both the country and the world.

Secretary Gates, thank you for the trenchant essay, “The Dysfunctional Superpower,” that you wrote for our November/December issue, and for joining me today.

ROBERT GATES

My pleasure.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, I want to start with something in the headlines that seems like such a stark demonstration of the point that drove your recent piece. We’re at a moment when it seems increasingly likely that the United States will not pass an additional assistance package for Ukraine, given congressional dysfunction. As you see it, what will the consequences of not passing that package be for both the war in Ukraine and for American leadership in the world?

ROBERT GATES

The interesting thing is that actually, not passing this package or a similar package not only impacts Ukraine, but also Israel, humanitarian assistance to Gaza, and Taiwan. So it’s very comprehensive in its incompetence. In terms of Russia and Ukraine, I think this is very dangerous.

The good news is the European Union, just in the last few days, has muscled through $54 billion worth of economic assistance to Ukraine, which is both a morale lifter for the Ukrainians, but also an economic lifeline for the country in terms of paying pensions and government costs and so on. What the Europeans can’t do is backfill on the military side, weapons and ammunition and so on. They have some capability, but it’s very limited. They are promising to do more in the future, but adding that capacity will take at least six months to a year.

So we are at a point where the Ukrainians are on the defensive. I wouldn’t characterize it necessarily as a stalemate because the Russians are being very aggressive in the east. They now have more troops in the east than they’ve had at any time during the course of the war, having lost somewhere between 315,000 and 350,000 troops wounded, and killed two-thirds of their tank force, and so on. But they have mobilized the country. Putin has mobilized the Russian economy. He’s mobilized their defense industries, and so now they’re cranking out a lot of new equipment in addition to what they’re receiving from the Iranians and from the North Koreans.

So the Ukrainians are really in a spot. And, you know, there are some dribs and drabs that can come out of the Pentagon—as a friend of mine puts it, the Pentagon finds a lot of money between the cushions in the sofa—but not enough to provide the kind of support that Ukraine really needs.

So I think that absent this military support package for Ukraine, Zelensky will come under enormous pressure later this spring or this summer to enter into some kind of a negotiation. The Russians are pressing their maximum demands. People who have talked to people in Putin’s circle say that he is adamant in terms of not only Ukraine ceding those four districts in the east, but also the southern coast down to and including Odessa, a change of government in Kyiv, putting a pro-Russian government in power, and promises that Ukraine will never join either the EU or NATO. So that’s where Congress has put us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Yeah, I wish we could say that your piece was OBE [overcome by events] in this regard at this point, but I’m afraid that we’re seeing a pretty good demonstration of everything you laid out. One of the critiques you hear from some of the skeptics of aid is that neither Ukraine nor its supporters in the Biden administration have laid out a clear theory of victory or really laid out a viable strategy. Is there anything you would adjust about U.S. policy if you were sitting in one of your many old jobs helping make American foreign policy?

ROBERT GATES

Well, my old friend and colleague Steve Hadley and a colleague at the Atlantic Council have published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal just in the last few days in which they lay out what I think is a pretty persuasive strategy, that realizes there’s probably not going to be a ceasefire and the Ukrainians are not going to be able to dislodge the Russians, but basically calls for the Ukrainians to be given the wherewithal and to adjust their strategy to a defensive strategy in the east to make sure that the Russians can’t have a breakthrough with the forces they’ve assembled.

So to defend what they have, massive support of military equipment, giving them additional capabilities that would enable them to strike Russian military targets—particularly in Crimea, but also in western Russia—that supply those forces as they ask. There’s no reason for the Kerch Bridge to remain standing. They then call for Ukraine to be put on a path to NATO membership, and for Ukraine to focus on rebuilding their own defense industries. And that’s not a solution to the problem. There is no solution to this problem short of Russian withdrawal, which isn’t going to happen.

The interesting thing, though, is that the one piece of this Ukrainian war that could create real problems for Putin is the potential loss or significant destruction in Crimea, which is the part that’s so critical as far as he’s concerned. So I think Hadley and his colleague have put forward a pretty good strategy, and I think the key is persuading the Ukrainians that that’s their best bet now, given where they are. But, like every other sensible strategy, it will require more assistance—particularly more military assistance to Ukraine so that they can hold their own against Putin.

If we don’t do anything, the Russian forces will eventually break through in eastern Ukraine. It’s just inevitable without significant military assistance for the Ukrainians. And the long-term consequences for Europe—and, frankly, for global security—I think are huge.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a school of thought, I think especially in parts of the Republican foreign policy establishment, including people close to former—and perhaps future—President Trump, who argue that Ukraine is really a distraction from the greater challenge we face in the Pacific from China, and that every dollar we spend on Ukraine, every weapon we send to Ukraine, should instead be going to Taiwan or other places in the Pacific. How do you understand the relationship between the two theaters? And there are certainly some trade-offs there, but there are also some more complicated dimensions to that connection.

ROBERT GATES

So the irony in that is that those who are arguing that point of view are just now voting down support for Taiwan as well as support for Ukraine. So, where’s the logical consistency in that? I think that the problem with that line of thinking is—and we’ve seen it too often in the past—that people don’t see the connectedness of different challenges around the world. For example, the greatest international beneficiaries of the Hamas attack on Israel have been Putin, because that conflict in the Middle East has drawn attention away from Ukraine, and Xi Jinping, because it helps him in his relationship with Iran, but also distracts the United States from the Far East.

So, the problem with that thinking is that I just can’t believe that people would think that the United States failing to stand by Ukraine would not undermine Taiwan’s confidence that the United States would stand by it—and, furthermore, the confidence of our other allies in the Pacific. If the United States won’t work with and cooperate with its NATO allies in blocking this aggression in Europe, why would anyone have confidence in Asia that we would stand up for Taiwan, where the risks of a major confrontation with China are far greater, and the costs of a conflict are far greater and more likely to involve the United States directly? I can’t imagine people not understanding that Xi Jinping is watching this very closely.

Look, one of the concerns that I have, Dan, is that, because we’ve had three presidents in a row essentially signaling we wanted to get out of the Middle East and that we wanted to focus on Asia, we have given the attitudes toward the NATO alliance by former President Trump and by many Republicans that the United States—people are questioning whether we will be there as an ally. And what I see is countries all over the world, our allies and friends, hedging, trying to calibrate whether or not the United States will be there for them if they get into trouble, if there’s an aggressor against them. And a failure to support Ukraine, and then a potential Russian takeover of Ukraine, would be a gigantic strategic setback. And to think that wouldn’t impact Xi’s thinking about what we would do in Taiwan, I think, is incredibly naive.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When you address Xi Jinping in the recent Foreign Affairs essay, you bring up the rather disquieting analogy of World War I. You note that while there was nothing inevitable about World War I, you had stupid and arrogant leaders in Europe who led us to war. That’s a worrying comparison that many historians have brought up in looking at the global landscape right now, including the U.S.-Chinese relationship. When you think about the kind of policy mistakes that might lead us down that path in China, what worries you? And as you look at our China strategy now, how close do you think we are to having it right? What would you change if you were back in one of your old jobs?

ROBERT GATES

Well, I think a big part of the problem is, and the challenge is to have a sufficient deterrent force in Asia that the costs for China of trying to invade Taiwan are just too high—economic, political and so on. And part of the paralysis in the Congress includes the failure to pass a Defense Appropriations bill. So all this wonderful rhetoric from the Hill—and, frankly, from the administration—about all these new programs and replicator drones and more ships and submarines and so on and so forth, is just that: it’s rhetoric. There isn’t a single dime in the National Defense Authorization Act for the Department of Defense. You have to have an appropriations [bill].

The Department of Defense has not had an approved appropriation at the start of the fiscal year in 14 years. That is an abdication of responsibility by the Congress of one of its primary responsibilities. And when you have these continuing resolutions, nothing new can get started, nothing more can be done. Everybody agrees that we need to upgrade and expand our shipyards and our submarine capability. But right now, all it is is rhetoric. Nobody’s spending any money to do any of those things.

And that’s what the Chinese are looking at; and they do take a long view of these things. So they’re looking at five, ten, fifteen years in terms of their objectives, both in Asia, globally, but also with respect to Taiwan. And so, if we wanted to signal to the Chinese our determination to prevent them from taking Taiwan through an invasion, we would get moving on all these things. We would be voting [through] this assistance. Again, the rhetoric just is belied by the facts. There is a $19 billion backlog of weapons that we have agreed to sell to Taiwan that we have not delivered; it’s a multi-year backlog.

So, this goes to the heart of my article. In each of these cases, the failure of the administration or the Congress to actually do things—to get the money, vote the money, and then to spend it effectively and with urgency—is sending the wrong signals to China and is sending the wrong signals to our allies and friends.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you worry at all about our overdoing it when it comes to sending a strong signal to China? I mean, you can see us as an inverse Teddy Roosevelt at this point, where we say a lot of sharp things—you see escalating rhetoric on Taiwan and other issues—without really backing it up in a consistent way. Is that a risk in terms of setting off an escalatory cycle without being really ready to respond when there is an escalation?

ROBERT GATES

Well, I think the administration has been pretty careful in terms of trying to lower the temperature in the relationship with China. Frankly, I think the Chinese do not want a war with us. They do not want a war in the far east. Their whole approach historically, going back to Sun Tzu and so on, is how to win without fighting. So we need to be thinking in those terms.

And so the political signals we send are important, but I think that we do have a lot of military power out there. We may not have as many ships as they do, but ours are, at least at this point, technologically more advanced. And in particular, we have a significant lead in terms of the quality of our submarine force.

So it’s not like we’re playing with a bad hand in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea right now, but if you look out five or ten years, that hand looks worse and worse if we can’t get moving on some of these measures that are being taken. The fortification of Guam, the dispersal of U.S. air forces in the region—these are all smart things to be doing, but we need to back it up with additional capabilities.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And some of that we’ve been talking about since you were secretary of defense.

ROBERT GATES

Well, I mean, my favorite example—so, I said that the area where we have a significant technological lead is in submarines. Well, there are a lot of people on the Hill that are arguing we ought to be producing three Virginia-class attack submarines every year. The actual budget contains the funds for two, but industry can only build 1.2 a year. So that’s the reality: no matter how much money you throw at the problem, if you don’t expand the production capacity, we’re going to fall behind.

You know, the Navy’s been shrinking year after year as they decommission older ships, but the pace of shipbuilding can’t even begin to keep up, not to mention maintenance. So again, this is one of those cases where the rhetoric is one thing, but the reality is quite another.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You refer in the Foreign Affairs piece to a Chinese-Russian alliance. Do you see that convergence as an enduring feature of the geopolitical landscape the United States is going to be facing for years or decades to come? Or is there some way to split or manage that as you and your colleagues did in the late Cold War?

ROBERT GATES

I think it’s a partnership of convenience. I don’t think it’s a true alliance. I think it’s been very interesting to watch the Chinese. They certainly are sending a lot of dual-use equipment and technology to the Russians, but they have been very careful to stay within the redlines the United States has drawn in terms of providing weapons and actual military equipment to the Russians.

They are certainly enabling them. The economic relationship has dramatically expanded over the last two years since the invasion of Ukraine; the Chinese love buying discounted oil and gas. But I think at times Xi might be wondering if he’s hooked his country and himself to a problematic state.

So when I began my career at CIA, that same year, the Soviets had a million troops on the Chinese border and there was a huge clash on the Amur River that had resulted in huge casualties on both sides. And you even had Soviet diplomats making discrete inquiries of the United States on whether we would object or how we would react if they used nuclear weapons against China. And I think the Russians also worry about Chinese influence in Central Asia, which used to be part of the Soviet Union. And now the Chinese are all over those countries with investments and Belt and Road projects, and influence, and propaganda, and so on. Putin’s got to wonder, “Am I losing that part of the country?”

And frankly, what the Russians have done in Ukraine has made countries like Kazakhstan very nervous, because if the whole business is about taking care of Russians who were abandoned when the Soviet Union collapsed, there are millions of Russians living in Kazakhstan. And so I think all these guys are kind of nervous.

So I think it’s a partnership or an alliance of convenience. And it is a convenience also in that they have complimentary objectives in terms of weakening the United States, distracting the United States, and overturning the global rules-based order that the United States established after World War II.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you were back at CIA or the National Security Council, is there anything you’d be doing to try to break apart that partnership of convenience or to fan mistrust?

ROBERT GATES

Absolutely, and this is something that I feel pretty strongly about, and in fact wrote a book about. The Cold War took place against the backdrop of the greatest arms race in the history of the world, but because we were able to avoid a war with the Soviet Union, the outcome of the Cold War was actually determined by non-military instruments of power—economic, technological, but also strategic communication. So the USIA, United States Information Agency, was everywhere in the world, and it wasn’t just the radios—Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America—it was smuggling materials into the Soviet Union, it was libraries, and it was people-to-people things and so on.

Congress abolished USIA. Just think about the power of USIA and the Reagan administration when Charlie Wick was running it, or even in the Kennedy administration when Edward R. Murrow was running it. Now, Congress abolished that whole agency in 1998, and now it’s a part of the State Department that’s fairly small. And the undersecretary in charge of it for public diplomacy, that position has been vacant 40 percent of the time since it was created in the late 1990s, and it’s been vacant 90 percent of the time in the Trump and Biden administrations. There’s now a confirmed undersecretary, but just in the last couple of months.

So we have nothing to compete with the global strategic communications capabilities that the Chinese have created. And it didn’t start with Xi Jinping. Hu Jintao invested $7 billion in creating this global propaganda communications structure back in the early 2000s, and they’ve continued to pour money in. There isn’t a single country on the planet that doesn’t have access to the Chinese internet, social media, printed materials, television, radio, and so on. So this is one of those areas—and we don’t have a strategy, for example, to compete with Belt and Road. We can’t go head-to-head with them, but we ought to have a more creative strategy.

So in terms of this partnership of convenience, going back to the question you asked, they have—the Russians and the Chinese, and particularly the Chinese—have developed these non-military instruments of power that were so important to us in succeeding in the Cold War. But now they’re using them, and we are basically just walking, not running.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs, four years ago now, on the overmilitarization of American foreign policy. It’s a drum you’ve been beating for many years before that. It seems like we’re still going in the wrong direction, from what I can see.

ROBERT GATES

Yeah. One of the more interesting news stories when I was secretary was when I gave a speech calling for more resources for the State Department. It was kind of a “man bites dog” story. Nobody could ever remember the secretary of defense calling for more money for state, but it’s like General [James] Mattis, when he was secretary, said: “If you don’t give the State Department the budget they need, I’m going to have to buy more ammunition.”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So I want to turn to the Middle East. You referenced this briefly earlier. Your piece was published at the end of September and finished at the end of September, right before the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war on Gaza. How do you think the world has changed since you wrote the piece? And another way to put this: if you had to add an epilogue to your essay today on events in the Middle East, what would it say?

ROBERT GATES

I think the Middle East is on fire. You have four different conflicts going on simultaneously. Obviously, the biggest and most painful for everybody began with the horrible Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and now the Israeli retaliation and determination to get rid of Hamas. That’s one.

The second is the Houthis’ efforts to close the Red Sea to commercial traffic, fundamentally. I’ve read that, in terms of global shipping, that the revenues for Egypt from the Suez Canal are down 40 percent in the month of January, showing how many ships are avoiding that area. We still have to see how that affects the global supply chain, but that’s a second conflict. And we’re basically, I think, playing whack-a-mole in terms of going after the Houthi sites.

The third active conflict is on the Israeli border, and how long will the Israelis tolerate the current situation? They’ve evacuated 80,000 people from the northern part of Israel. The economy up there is at a standstill. Most of those people are in hotels. The Israelis are saying to Hezbollah, “You’ve got to withdraw north of the Litani River,” which is between 12 and 18 miles from the northern Israeli border, and they’re already firing at one another regularly. The question is, does that turn into a full-fledged conflict? And some of the ministers in the Israeli cabinet are urging just that as early as this spring.

And then the fourth is clearly the militia attacks in Syria and Iraq against American forces in Syria, Jordan, and in Iraq.

So you’ve got four conflicts basically going on at the same time. And some would like to say they’re all connected, and in some ways they are—but they are also discrete, and they all trace back to Iran.

You know, the phrase in the Reagan administration often was, “You’ve got to go to the source.” Well, the source is Iran, and I think the [Biden] administration is right in understanding that the American people do not want another war in the Middle East, do not want a war with Iran. But how do you stop the Iranians from going after the role that they’re playing, frankly, in all four of these conflicts? And I think that’s a huge challenge.

And part of it is—it goes back to the question we were talking about with Xi Jinping and others, and that is, has U.S. policy over the last number of years basically undermined or weakened the deterrent effect of U.S. policy and U.S. power? Clearly, nobody seems to be afraid of us. And the question is, how do you change that over time? And that brings me back to what’s going on in the Congress right now, and that is, how do we demonstrate to the rest of the world that we will continue to play the role, not as world policeman, but as trying to protect a rules-based order for the rest of the world—and one that encourages our allies to be there with us and to support us and so on?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When it comes to deterring Iran without starting another major war, what would you do to change or escalate Washington’s response?

ROBERT GATES

I think this is actually a pretty fragile regime in Iran. I think, you know, it used to be when there were demonstrations in Iran, they would be in Tehran and they would be from university students and maybe shopkeepers and so on. But beginning in January of 2018 and subsequently, many of these demonstrations have been all over the country and in small towns and cities that the theocracy has sort of designated as their base. This is where their base of support has been in the past. So I think this is a pretty fragile regime, and frankly, I would be doing everything we could both overtly and covertly to undermine that regime and to empower those inside Iran who are opposed to that regime.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And that would mean that regime change in Tehran would come sooner rather than later, in your view?

ROBERT GATES

Either you would have regime change or a significant change in policies by the regime. I mean, regime change has all these negative connotations because of Iraq and everything else. And we certainly—I think our experience in trying to bring that about militarily is not a satisfactory one, to say the least. But I think there are other ways to encourage change that we should be employing.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me ask one more question about the Middle East, going back to the first of those four theaters of conflict that you mentioned earlier, and that’s the war in Gaza. Do you see an Israeli strategy that has a chance of working? Do you see a theory of victory when it comes to destroying Hamas that you think is viable? Or do you see a need for a shift by Israel and by the United States in hopes of getting it there?

ROBERT GATES

I think that their objective is completely understandable, of destroying Hamas and its military capabilities and holding accountable—meaning killing—the leaders who planned what happened on October 7. The problem is, after several months of full-scale military operations, based on what I’ve read, they’ve killed maybe a third of the Hamas fighters. Hamas is anticipated to have about 25,000, 30,000 fighters. Israelis apparently have killed about a third of those. They’ve killed fewer than half of the leaders that they’ve been looking for.

And Israel was so traumatized by what happened on October 7. The country was founded to provide a place for Jews where they would never again have to experience either a holocaust or pogroms of the kind that they had experienced historically. And what happened on October 7 was kind of a combination of a localized holocaust and a pogrom, with all those innocent people. In all the wars that Israel has fought, the four wars, they’ve never experienced anything like what happened on October 7.

So the trauma in Israel is understandable, and I think they reacted quickly and are kind of making up their strategy as they go because they wanted to respond as quickly as possible. And I think one of the consequences of that has been some of the blunt force approach that has been taken and led to what I think everybody now agrees is a pretty serious humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

I don’t see an Israeli path to the complete destruction of Hamas. If you’ve been at it for four months and they say now that they’re moving on to Rafah in the southern part of Gaza and so on, they will kill a lot more Hamas fighters, they may kill some of the leaders. But let’s stipulate that there is at some point an end to the full-scale fighting and you have much more targeted and small-scale operations. What then? What is the future? And that’s where I think Israel hasn’t thought about what happens next.

I mean, they talk about maintaining a security posture, but who’s going to police it? Who’s going to feed [Gazans]? Who’s going to rebuild? And I don’t think they’ve thought about any of those things. And frankly, the administration’s beginning to move in that direction. But my only worry about hinting at—or declaring, as David Cameron did in the United Kingdom—a readiness to recognize the Palestinian state—there is no Palestinian state now to recognize. Everybody knows the West Bank government is corrupt, incompetent, and doesn’t have the support of the people. So this may be the point at which the administration has a strategy of trying to get the Arab states to take some responsibility for changing the Palestinian governance.

But it’s going to take a while, and I think this is one thing that I’m not sure the administration’s fully taking into account. It’s going to take a while to build some measure of confidence on the part of the Israelis that whatever governing authority exists in the West Bank, even if it’s a new one, isn’t going to be a threat to Israel. You know, we had a period, we were training, we had a three-star [general] in Israel training the Palestinian police and security forces, and the Israelis had some measure of confidence in those forces. Rebuilding that now is going to take time and a lot of energy and a lot of smart policies. But I think that moving quickly to a Palestinian state ignores the threat that Israel feels and the reality that there is no Palestinian entity that can govern even the West Bank, much less Gaza, at this point.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you worry about the United States once again getting tangled up in the Middle East and being distracted from Russia and China and other long-term challenges? This is the fourth administration, going back to the second term of George W. Bush, where the United States has been trying to focus elsewhere but often failing.

ROBERT GATES

Well, I think the notion of the United States turning its attention away from the Middle East was always an ephemeral goal. It’s just, historically, the Middle East is important. And not just for oil and gas, but because of its location, the geography, where it sits, the shipping lanes for the rest of the world, not to mention the role of Israel in the region and what happens there in the future. That was one of the great things, one of the few positive things happening in the Middle East until October 7, and that was the reconciliation going on between Israel and the Arab states, particularly the Gulf Arabs, but others as well. This is where Iran is a big winner from the Hamas attack, because it has put on pause that reconciliation process that began with the Abraham Accords and was moving in the direction of a solution with respect to Saudi Arabia and Israel. And that may still be in the cards, but not in the near term.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We appear to be in the early stages of a presidential campaign between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. You mentioned the rules-based order as a good thing a little while ago. Donald Trump, I think, would see that as an example of all that’s wrong with the foreign policy establishment. What would his return mean for American leadership in the world when it comes to all of these challenges?

ROBERT GATES

Well, I think the biggest consequence of him coming back is unpredictability. I don’t know. I mean, the Abraham Accords took place during his administration, so that was a positive thing. That was a good thing that happened. But in terms of our allies and so on, the facts are that one of his concerns—which, frankly, all of us involved in defense [shared], going back forever—was that the Europeans weren’t doing their share. Well, in large measure because of the invasion of Ukraine, the allies really have stepped up their spending on defense and security matters. And so I think there’s been some response to the criticisms that he had, if they’re willing to pay attention to the reality that the Europeans have done a lot since he left the presidency—well, mainly since the invasion of Ukraine.

But I think unpredictability is the big concern. I understand the frustration and anger of Americans about 20 years of war—and what did it gain us? The failure to deal with the global financial crisis in 2008, 2009. There are a lot of problems and a lot of mistakes that were made, frankly, and I get that, but that doesn’t change the world we live in today. We can’t just pull back and expect the rest of the world to continue on—and to believe, as Americans believed for so long, that events in distant places, whether it’s Sarajevo or the Sudetenland or in Dien Bien Phu or training camps in Afghanistan, don’t have consequences for us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That is a good note to end on. Secretary Gates, thanks for the great essay in our November/December issue called “The Dysfunctional Superpower.” And thanks so much for joining me today.

ROBERT GATES

My pleasure, Dan.