Fmr NSC Official: Halting US Aid Means “Ukraine Loses”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, with wars raging around the world, American foreign policy is under the spotlight. It’s something our next guest should be — says people should be urgent and feeling urgent about. It’s a top priority for the United States.Kori Schake’s latest piece for the magazine “Foreign Affairs” outlines her vision for a Republican foreign policy, as she explains to Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. And Kori Schake, welcome to the show.

KORI SCHAKE, DIRECTOR OF FOREIGN AND DEFENSE POLICY STUDIES, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: Thank you.

ISAACSON: So, it seems very iffy that the U.S. is going to continue aid to Ukraine for the long-term and maybe even in the short-term if Congress can’t do it. What would that mean for Ukraine?

SCHAKE: Well, it would mean Ukraine loses its war against Russia’s invasion. The United States provides fully half of the weapons assistance that’s going to Ukraine. And my experience running coalitions in the American government is that when the United States steps back, other countries step back even further. And so, you know, Ukraine is wholly dependent on the armaments of the free world and also on budget support to keep its government running. Russia has what increasingly looks like a successful strategy of playing for time, waiting for western countries to be distracted, to — for our weapons caches to run short, for our publics to start demanding concern about other things. And it — despite the president of the United States saying, we will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, it increasingly looks like we don’t have a strategy for victory in Ukraine.

ISAACSON: I’ve read your piece in “Foreign Affairs.” I know you’re strongly supportive of Ukraine and aiding Ukraine. But given what you just said, what’s plan B? What should the U.S. and Ukraine be doing if this is not sustainable? Is there some possible truce or ceasefire or is it just going to be surrender?

SCHAKE: I do not believe a truce or a ceasefire are possible because I don’t believe Russia will be satisfied with that. And I don’t believe, even if you could get a near-term agreement with Russia over a settlement for Ukraine, that it wouldn’t just be buying Russia time for rearmament and getting out from under western sanctions in order to return to the conquest of Ukraine, because I don’t believe their political objective has changed. I am, as you suggest, increasingly worried that even the Biden administration begins to talk about what Ukraine should be compromising out or that Ukraine should be realistic, by which they mean to say not hold the United States at our word that we will help them regain all of their people and all of their internationally recognized territory. I think plan B is more assistance faster to Ukraine to break the back of Russia’s invasion.

ISAACSON: Well, let me push back. I mean, that sounds great. And I understand why you feel that way, but it’s pretty clear Congress is not going to rush more aid. So, don’t we have to have a strategy if that’s the facts on the ground?

SCHAKE: So, my read of congressional opposition to aid to Ukraine is that the votes are there for aid to Ukraine provided that the White House agrees to border control measures, because Ukraine is justifiably not the only thing people are concerned about. I do think the votes are there on a bipartisan basis for aid to Ukraine. I also think we should be thinking, as you suggest, Walter, of creative ways to finance continued aid to Ukraine, like taking the interest off of the $300 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves that western countries are holding under sanctions. That was Michele Flournoy’s great suggestion. There are other things we can and should be doing. We can push international organizations into more (ph). The United States government should continue to fund Ukraine, in my judgment. But we should also, as you suggest, be thinking of backup plans of how to do it if Congress becomes truculent about it.

ISAACSON: We’ve talked about how aid to Ukraine in Congress, the issue, is now being tied to the border issue. You discuss in your piece, I think you call it chaotic, the border situation we have. Exactly what would you do and what’s in the Republican plans that you think are good for dealing with the asylum issue and dealing with the border in general?

SCHAKE: Yes. So, there’s not one magic bullet that’s going to fix this. It’s a complicated problem. But there are 200,000 attempts per month for illegal entry into the United States across the southern border. We need to do a bunch of things. We need to spend more money on Customs and Border Patrol agents. We need more people. We need more technology so that we have visible depth to our border instead of just encountering people right at the border. We need to have transparency to see broader. We need deeper cooperation with Mexico and with other countries in Central America. So, the United States is a wonderful place to come for refuge, but it’s not the only place that people can come for refuge. And helping think that through, we need more courts to adjudicate asylum claims. People are coming into the country and waiting years to find out their status and have difficulty working in that time. So, there are a whole bunch of things we need to do different and better, but they’re not rocket science. They’re just basic good governance issues that we need to turn our attention to.

ISAACSON: How is the situation in Gaza and the Israeli Palestinian conflict made it more difficult to deal with our situation in Ukraine, and in general, made it more difficult for American foreign policy around the world?

SCHAKE: I think it has made things more difficult for American policy around the world. Because we want the support of countries beyond Europe and beyond the West for Ukraine and for the security of Israel. And the terrorist attack by Hamas into Israel they have achieved their objective, which is isolating Israel internationally. And that’s terrible. It’s bad for Palestinians. It’s bad for Israelis. It’s bad for the United States. A second way in which it has made American foreign policy more challenging is just the bandwidth issue of paying attention to Ukraine and paying attention to the war in Gaza and identifying other potential hotspots like Chinese attempts to intimidate the Philippines in the China Sea, East China Sea. Those are all perking problems. And adversaries like Iran, like China may be tempted to take advantage of them. I guess the third way that I think both the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine have complicated American foreign policy is that they have made clear that we have shortchanged our defense industrial base and need to really race to be able to become an arsenal of democracy for ourselves and for our allies, because over the course of the last 20 years, administrations of both political parties have allowed a shrinking of the defense industrial base that is inconsistent with our own needs, much less the needs of our allies.

ISAACSON: In your, “Foreign Affairs” piece, it’s a case for conservative internationalism. Why has the Republican Party and a lot of the conservative movement in the United States now become so non- internationalist?

SCHAKE: I think there are a couple of reasons. One is the long shadow of the mistakes of the invasion and management of the Iraq war. I think there’s a fair amount of weariness that it feels like the United States has been at war for a long time with not enough to show for it.

ISAACSON: Well, let me let me stop you there. Doesn’t that have, as Dr. Kissinger would have said, the odious smell of truth that we’ve been in a lot of forever wars without much to show for it.

SCHAKE: Well, I reject the framing of forever wars. But I do agree that, yes, I mean, Americans expect us to do better than that and they deserve to expect us to do better than that.

ISAACSON: And what has hamstrung us?

SCHAKE: You mean in the Afghan and Iraq wars?

ISAACSON: Afghan, Iraq. Basically, since Vietnam, we haven’t had a clean ability to fight a new type of war successfully.

SCHAKE: I don’t know. I think we did pretty well in the 1991 Gulf War. I think there are other interventions, like the intervention in the Balkans that we did with NATO allies and in conjunction with the United Nations that we did well. I think the problem in both Afghanistan and Iraq wars was that we were nowhere near committing the resources consistent with our political objectives. And so, things bogged down. And we didn’t narrow our political objectives, we just kept doing the same thing over and over. Afghanistan, I think, they’re — you know, Iraq up until the surge in 2006, where we did get a winning strategy and did adequately resource it and did change our relationship with Iraqis and the Iraqi government in order to make it successful, but then turned it off around 2008 and ’10. In Afghanistan, we did take, eventually, what I think is the right strategy, which was transferring responsibility to Afghanistan and helping support them until they had the ability to do the work we wanted to have done. But again, I think the declining legitimacy of the Afghan government made that incredibly difficult to achieve.

ISAACSON: Well, you say, we needed more resources, and in your piece, you talk about the importance of more military funding. I think the U.S. probably spends more in military than the next nine countries combined. Is it that we’re not spending enough money or we haven’t figured out how to do it more effectively?

SCHAKE: It’s predominantly that we’re not spending enough money. You know, 13 percent of U.S. GDP went to defense in the Eisenhower administration, which is, one, you won’t remember it, but I do, that was thought of as cheap on national defense. We now spend 3.2 percent of U.S. GDP on defense and we act like it’s an intolerable burden. It’s actually not. You could easily double defense spending and it wouldn’t be an intolerable burden. The problem is that whereas entitlement spending was 19 percent of the budget in 1970, it’s now 63 percent. So, all discretionary spending, whether for education or defense, is being crowded out by entitlements. That’s the problem we need to fix to free up discretionary spending for our other urgent national needs.

ISAACSON: In your “Foreign Affairs” piece, you do talk about entitlement spending, and there are a few Republicans who’ve taken that on. But do you mainly mean that we should cut Social Security and, Medicare and Medicaid?

SCHAKE: Yes, I do. And I think, you know, we’ve done it before, they did it in the Reagan administration. And the Obama administration commissioned work, the Simpson Bowles Commission, that came up with a number of very solid recommendations. The key with changes to entitlement spending is to perk them in slowly so that people can make retirement decisions and healthcare decisions consistent with available resources. And if we don’t do it soon — I mean, interest on the federal debt is going to surpass defense spending in the next three years, and it’s going to become unsustainable to pay for the entitlements we have promised Americans. So, defense or non-defense, we actually need to do this for keeping our promise to our fellow Americans.

ISAACSON: You wrote a book a while back about the transfer of hegemony from the British Empire to America. Given all you’ve just said, do you think and do you worry about the fact that the era of American hegemony might be waning?

SCHAKE: I do worry about it. But I probably worry too much about it. I think every good strategist is fundamentally a desperate paranoia. So, I worry a lot about it. But the — I don’t worry about China overtaking the United States, because I think you can feel the gears meshing of American society and American government policy acknowledging the risks that a China that is repressive at home and aggressive internationally pose for us. But we are preparing for the problems of a stampedingly successful China, and that’s no longer the China we are dealing with. We are now looking at a China that is marooned in the middle-income trap and unlikely to be able to make the political choices and economic choices that will restore vitality. What I worry about American foreign policy, and here I agree with many aspects of Biden administration policy, is that, you know, for the United States to fail, we will fail because of our own choices, not because of other choices of allowing democracy to become less institutionalized and less trusted in the United States, electing people who are hostile to the transition of power from their hands, to economic policies and secondary sanctions becoming so profligate that they impinge on the centrality of the dollar as a major holding currency. We make a lot of mistakes in American policy, domestic and international. Our saving grace is that we also are pretty good at fixing our problems. And that’s ultimately where I think the hope — my hope for the sustainment of an American international order, which, after all, is not only beneficial to the United States, it’s not only beneficial to our friends, it’s the best power structure for small and middle-sized states because we voluntarily limit our power into rules and institutions.

ISAACSON: Kori Schake, thank you so much for joining us.

SCHAKE: Thank you, Walter.