State Dept counselor Derek Chollet talks with IntelMattersPod host Michael Morell about topics including the path forward in Ukraine, and whether China is providing lethal assistance to Russia.
MICHAEL MORELL: Derek, welcome back to Intelligence Matters. It's great to have you on the show again.MICHAEL MORELL: So, obviously, Derek, there's a ton to talk about. Lots going on in the world and we want to get to that. But we are called. And given that, I wanted to ask you about the intelligence you consume. Obviously, you do that. I, I assume you do that.MICHAEL MORELL: Excellent. And I wanted to ask you how you do that.
And then I also have a human being that will come by usually twice a week. It's actually the same briefer that Secretary Blinken has and other senior officials here at the department. He'll swing by a couple of days a week and we'll go over any material that I might administer.
Well, of course, he totally failed at that. And so I think from a strategic point of view, a couple of things. I think in many ways, Russia's already faced a strategic defeat in terms of what it was trying to do in Ukraine, whether it's the slow decoupling we have seen between Russia and Europe when it comes to energy – I mean, if you think about it, it's a project that was decades in the making to have the Soviet Union and Russia be Europe's chief energy supplier.
So now we've just got to stick to it, I think. And the basic lines of effort that were put in place a year ago remain, which is to punish and isolate Russia, make it harder for Russia to conduct this fight by choking off its resources and isolating it. By, second, to strengthen Ukraine and to ensure that Ukraine, as best we can, has the means at its disposal to defend itself and regain territory and put itself in a position where we can have a just and durable peace.
And that's why whatever peace that is possible, and of course, we fully, sincerely hope we can have peace and that this war ends soon, that that peace be just, that Russia is notAnd by the way, it's not just gobbling up territory or trying to gobble up territory. It's also, as President Biden was clear this week in his speech in Poland, conducting crimes against humanity.
MICHAEL MORELL: The second question people ask me is, what are the objectives of the United States? What do we want here? Is it the Russians totally out of Ukraine? Or is it just what the Ukrainians want? You know, if they are willing to go to the negotiating table,DEREK CHOLLET: Well, again, fundamentally, it's allowing Ukraine, as it defines it, to regain its sovereignty and territory. We were kind of guided by several basic precepts here.
But so our view is that therefore, the best we can do is ensure that Ukraine is in the best possible position it can when the time comes to enter negotiation. And that means having a Ukraine that can defend itself and a Ukraine that has the ability to take back territory that Russia has tried to take away from it.
But a year ago it was all about getting them stingers, you know, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, then to javelins, anti-tank missiles to then, you know, armored personnel vehicles, then sophisticated air defense like Patriots, and now tanks. So this has been a kind of a constant conversation. We've been having the Ukrainians, both in terms of their own needs and what they can use as well as also what's available.
And obviously, countries are going to make different decisions based on their own needs, based on their own politics and their own assessments. It's not for us to decide what particular countries are doing, and we often are getting asked and try to get sort of dragged into the debates of other countries about what they're doing or not doing.
But there's just this sense, right, in that at least outside of government that you read in the paper that there's some sort of timeline here. I think, I think, it was after the State of the Union, there was a senior administration official who was quoted as saying, you know,"There's a timeline here on on how much we can give and how long we can give."
But the other thing I can say is that I feel like over the last year-plus now, the obituary of our common resolve here and the international coalition has been written multiple times and it's proven to be wrong. And I think many are surprised that Europe has stepped up in the ways that it has in terms of willingness to impose meaningful, serious sanctions which have done real harm to European economies.
It's important to note as well, I think a huge amount of credit for that, if not most of the credit, needs to go to the Ukrainians because not just in the skill in which they have conducted themselves and President Zelenskyy has been a real historic figure along these lines, just the way that he has made the case for his own country since the beginning of this war by speaking to basically every major democratic parliament around the world, to an amazing visit here to Washington late last...
You know, I'm a little surprised by this, because my sense was that Xi, like President Biden, wanted to make some progress in the bilateral relationship. And so it seems odd from that perspective and it seems odd from the perspective that they had stayed away from this for a year. What's driving this on their part? What can we do to deter them? How do we think about that?
DEREK CHOLLET: This is true. I mean, it would only add to what is already a challenging moment in our relationship, only more challenging, to state the obvious. And it really seemed to me that both President Biden and President Xi wanted to make some progress in bilateral relations. And this balloon got in the way of that. And so I'm just wondering if responding in intelligence channels, you know, kicking out the senior Chinese intelligence official here in D.C., you know, would have made more sense than canceling the secretary's visit.
And I can say, Michael, it's important, like we feel and Secretary Blinken often says that he feels the responsibility and the expectation that we, the United States, will manage this relationship responsibly. He hears that from allies and partners who, you know, are not in any way naive about the various challenges and indeed threats the PRC poses, but nevertheless wants to see this relationship managed.DEREK CHOLLET: Absolutely.
And so there was a sense that we needed to be better organized, to have sort of a more of a single purpose of our mission here. And so this is a bureaucratic fix to to ensure that we're not stovepiped internally and that we're better coordinated. Organized. Now with Russia, Ukraine, whether it's their efforts to undermine regimes that are friendly to us in the region – you know, threats, direct threats, these real attacks on U.S. personnel in the region – every indicator has gotten worse over the last 4 to 6 years, I would say. And I think, unfortunately, there are no silver bullets here, as you know.DEREK CHOLLET: Exactly, long ago. But I think first it starts with our presence. And, you know, again, it's been said too often that the U.S.
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