Filmed May 7, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined today by Phillips O’Brien, historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews. He’s written important books on World War II, air and sea power in World War II, his most recent book, it’s called more broadly, War and Power. Many of people have come to know him beyond his fellow specialists and experts and professors for his work on social media and more recently his excellent Substack in which he’s particularly been… I mean, commented on many, many things. But I’d say particularly on Ukraine and where you were contrarian, Phil, in thinking Ukraine was not doomed at the beginning. And then I think providing not just interesting analysis, not just perceptive, but actually accurate analysis of what was happening there. So anyway, Phil, thanks for joining me today and we’ll talk mostly about Ukraine and its broader implications.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Yeah. I’m delighted to be here, Bill. And as I said just a little minute ago when we were talking privately, this is going to be an interesting conversation because it’ll be different than the conversation we might’ve had 12 months ago.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Well, let’s get to that. No, I do recommend your Substack, which has been really excellent. And I was looking it up this morning to remind myself, what’s it called? I must have some fancy title like people like you always give these things. “Grand Strategy,” “War and Power,” and instead it’s called “Phillips’s Substack.”
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Yeah, that’s it.
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s very modest of you or something. I don’t know. Well, either it’s modest or the opposite. Either that it’s like you’re so… Philips… You don’t need some fancy title like “Grand Strategy.”
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
I did it because I got tired of doing tweet threads. I started it because I was doing tweet threads and they took too long and someone said, “Oh, just put them on Substack.” And so that’s all I did.
BILL KRISTOL:
They were good. They were good tweet threads. And you’re still active on social media. Okay. So Ukraine, you were always less of a doom and gloom person on Ukraine. I think much quicker to see right from the beginning, the possibility that Ukraine could hold its own at the beginning. And then obviously it’s been lots of ups and downs over three, four years, four plus years now. But as you said, we’d be having different conversation a year ago and looked sort of grim on the ground, I think it’s fair to say. And the US was cutting off the support, which had been considerable. So talk a little bit about where we are now and why you’re more cheerful as a friend of Ukraine than you would’ve been a year ago.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Well, I think why we were down, and I don’t think anyone gave up hope, but just the reality for the Ukrainians was the US was changing sides. So as soon as Trump became president, US aid ended. And so much of Ukraine’s military posture had been based on getting aid from the United States, and that really ended. And then they were able to buy some things through Europe, or Europe was able to buy some things, but much less than they were getting before. And so the real worry was that the Ukrainians were going to run out of certain vital defensive components, things like patriot anti-air missiles, to which their entire security over their cities was based, and that they would run short in areas like 155 ammunition and whatever, and that without the United States backing them, the Europeans would fracture, that the Europeans wouldn’t be as reliable, and that they would end up being forced to take a very bad deal.
I mean, they weren’t going to collapse. That wasn’t going to happen because the Russian army’s not good enough to advance quickly. Just isn’t. It’s been a terribly overrated force in many ways, and there was no way the Russians were going to break through Ukrainian lines and make mass advances. I don’t think they had that capability. But the worry was that Ukraine would basically be forced to take a Trump-Putin deal. You surrender all of the Donbas, you surrender land that the Russians haven’t conquered and you in a sense become under the Russian heel. Now, why that didn’t happen and why things are better now, I think you have to divide into a number of areas, and they are sort of the land war, the ranged war, and the geopolitical war.
But let’s start with the land war. The land war is the one that we see at the front line. Now you might say what’s fascinating about the land war is the line doesn’t change. I mean, there are tiny, tiny changes in historical standards. We are now looking at less than World War I type changes in the last few months that it’s like the World War I Western front where people couldn’t break through and change much on the line, or we’re talking a kilometer here, a kilometer there, a village here, a village there. It’s not a lot of change.
But why that’s good for Ukraine is because the Ukrainians are doing what they’re doing with very few troops. They’ve changed the way they’re fighting. Their frontline is manned overwhelmingly now by equipment, by machinery, particularly millions of drones, of small first-person view drones primarily. And what they’re doing in that line is they’re protecting their own army. So they’re keeping their casualties down a great deal. Ukrainian casualties, they won’t release the figures, and I’ve heard some pretty good ones from Ukrainians, and that they really are saving their soldiers’ lives now. They’re keeping their soldiers away from the front. They’re letting the drones do fighting. And by the way, increasingly unmanned vehicles. So you might have tiny little tanks rolling around, little robot tanks, robot supply vehicles, robot even evacuation vehicles are all doing a lot of the work on the front.
And the Russians, on the other hand, are still suffering massive casualties, well over a thousand a day. The Ukrainian figure for April… And by the way, the Ukrainian figures on Russian casualties, people say, “Oh, can we trust Ukrainian figures?” Yeah, you know why? Because it’s really gruesome, but they have a picture of almost every Russian they kill because they take a picture from the drone. Over 90% of the Russians killed or wounded are being hit by drones now. It’s just an—
BILL KRISTOL:
When you say a word about the drone thing, just for those of us who aren’t nearly as much or at all military experts, I mean, where did this come from? How much of a surprise are these drone stuff? How much of this is developed in Ukraine? I mean, we can spend hours on this, but I think a little bit, because I think it is key to understanding what’s happened. So a little bit of what are we talking about? And now it’s also affecting things in the Gulf, in Iran and so forth.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
I mean, there are many, many types of drones, but most of them are ones that you might see being slightly souped up versions of ones you’ll see flying over beaches this summer, or ones that you would see flying over tourist sites. These are what we’d call first person view drones. And they’re controlled by a human being. They often have four small propellers and they aren’t that large. I mean, they can be a little bit larger than that, but they’re not that dissimilar from a basic first person view drone that you would see someone controlling.
They’re a little bit bigger because one, they have to have a camera. That’s really important. And secondly, they have to carry a charge, many of them, i.e., something like a grenade size, but they’re not wildly sophisticated vehicles. They’re quite simple. But what the Ukrainians have been able to do is adapt them and build them in the millions. Ukraine’s capacity to build this year is estimated at seven million drones—
BILL KRISTOL:
Wow.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
… and that includes a small number of very advanced ones, but millions of those are these small first-person view ones. And what they mean is that the both sides, but the Ukrainians are better at it right now, and we hope the Russians don’t catch up, is that both sides basically can see almost anything on this battlefield. Because imagine the battlefields is being covered by swarms of drones with cameras that can see anything.
BILL KRISTOL:
Which are launched from how far away? I mean, pretty close by or—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Well, that’s another interesting thing. Now that to begin with, a lot of the drones had no connection. They were connected by GPS, so they were radio-controlled. But then both sides found way to break that. Remember, you probably heard the phrase electronic warfare a lot, 2023, 2024. And what electronic warfare was is it was breaking the connection between the drone and the operator because it was done wirelessly. Now, what a lot of them now, you’ll be really surprised, a lot of them are actually connected by a very thin cable, fiber optic cable, because that can’t be broken by electronic warfare. So there’s a combination of ones that are still flying without a cable and those flying with a cable because the ones flying with a cable can’t be jammed. And there’s nothing that the defenders can do to stop them except shoot them down because they can’t interrupt.
So it’s a combination of those that are actually tethered to the operator and those that are flying freely. And the amazing… And I got this wrong. I didn’t think the tethered ones could stretch as long as they have. They can stretch the tethered ones 25 kilometers now, sometimes 30 kilometers. I mean, they’re eating up the world’s supply of fiber optic cable. It’s all going to the Russians and the Ukrainians because they’re building these things. But it just means that the battlefield is transparent. So people said, “Oh, it’s like a First World War battlefield.” But no, it’s not.
There’s lots of trenches, but the Ukrainians have no one in the trenches because being in the trenches is really deadly. You can’t just be in a trench to save yourself. You actually have to be undercover where no one can see you. That’s the only way to survive. And the Russians can’t do that because they have to move forward. And what has happened is the Ukrainians are just taking a horror… I mean, they’re doing what we might call the most brutal mathematics of war. So last month, April, and so the Ukrainians do have very good statistics on the casualties they’re inflicting. They’ve inflicted for two straight months now 35,000 killed and wounded on the Russians. There’s 70,000 soldiers in the Russians have lost in two months. And what’s also important about that is it’s higher than the Russians can replace. So the Russians are in a net loss in the previous few months, and that is the kind of thing that tends to snowball.
If the Russians can’t stop that trend, their army is just going to get smaller and smaller, and that ends up having complicated problems that they have to rush through training, which is already very poor. They’ll have to rush the fewer soldiers they can generate to the front. So Russian advances have almost stopped dead. They occasionally will run forward. I mean, the only thing keeping a lot of Russian soldiers alive is their ability, their desire to live. They are literally just running madly forward to try and find cover to stay alive. That’s often what the Russian attack system is, but they’re suffering a horrible loss and they can’t seem to generate any kind of forward momentum. And the Ukrainians have actually liberated slightly more territory than they’ve lost the last few months while inflicting these horrible casualties on the Russians. So that’s sort of where we stand on the land war.
And the Ukrainians have a phrase. It’s the growth of what we call the kill zone or the gray zone, the black zone. They could use it, but it’s that area where a human being can’t live.
BILL KRISTOL:
And you expect no particular breakthroughs one way or the other there in the near future. I mean, that’s most likely going to be World War I-ish in that respect.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
It’s going to be very hard to keep vehicles to survive in that for very long. I mean, human beings can be spotted quickly, vehicles can be spotted even more quickly. So it’s not going to be that… You’re not going to be able to mass, say, tanks near the front and have a breakthrough and then go streaking 30 miles down the road, like people assumed would happen at the start of this war. I mean, there aren’t that many tanks around. They’ve been destroyed in large numbers. What might happen is you could have small collapses along the line where either side runs out of force, more likely the Russians if this trajectory continues, but that will take a few months till we get to that stage one assume. So I don’t want to be too optimistic here. I think we have to be realistic, but what we can assume is that the Ukrainians are going to keep tumbling the Russian army and causing these unsustainably high losses if they keep going on for a while.
And last year—
BILL KRISTOL:
And that part of the from… Oh, go ahead.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Yeah, that last year, that’s a change. I mean, Ukrainian casualties are down, Russian casualties are up, and the Russian army can’t move forward. And that’s a big difference from 2025. And then I don’t know if you want to go into the range war, that’s also—
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, I mean. Well, when—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
… switched to the Ukrainians.
BILL KRISTOL:
… someone like me who watches the headlines, at least you see, well, what about all this long range stuff, but could that change the dynamics of the war? Or is that a bit of a tit for a tat just in a sort of… Well, just say, what is it? I mean, it is striking how much… And the Russians can do a lot of damage obviously to civilians in Kyiv and elsewhere, and also to the electric grid and stuff in Ukraine. On the other end, the Ukrainians seem to be hitting pretty deep into Russia. So how does that play out?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Well, the range war in many ways is exactly what you said. The Russians are doing what they have been doing and to certain degrees effectively as well for the last two years. And their attack is basically against Ukrainian cities and Ukrainian power generation. So you might say it’s a combination terror power campaign that they are hitting Ukrainian cities. They are trying to cause civilian loss of will, civilian casualties. I think a lot of it was being aimed at forcing the Ukrainian population to put pressure on the government to accept a bad deal. Remember that’s a lot of this is to get Ukraine to accept a really, really bad ceasefire, not the end of the war. I don’t think we should stop using the word peace, but to accept a really bad deal in the short term. And that’s what they did. It was a really hard winter in Ukraine.
I was there in January, and believe me, it was brutally cold. It was in Fahrenheit terms for Americans, it was zero or below. It was really cold. And heat was rationed. It was only a few hours a day. People had to often go to these special warm tents to stay alive because the power generation had been so limited because of the Russian campaign and people were really tired. So the Ukrainians, it was not a great winter in Ukraine, but in some sense, that’s what the Russians have been doing. So the bad part about this last winter was it was just such a bad winter. It was much colder than earlier winters, but the Russians have been doing that. That’s how the way the Russians have been fighting. And we don’t see a massive change in that, except they are having a few more systems such as these adapted from the drones that they took from the Iranians and have updated the Shaheds, which the Iranians have been using against Americans.
So that’s what the Russians are doing. The real change is the Ukrainians are getting better. So we have to be very careful, again, not for saying Ukraine’s about to destroy everything Russian, but Ukrainian long range systems have always been a bit patchy. And I don’t know how technical you want me to get. The issue is they’re not as accurate as American stuff or German stuff or British and French stuff. They’re pretty accurate, but not accurate in the way we would. So an American system, we’d be expected to hit within two or three feet of the target, really close to the target. The Ukrainian stuff was maybe 20 to 30 feet. It wasn’t as close to the target. And when you’re talking about disabling an economic target, you have to hit it. You can’t beat 20 feet off or 15 feet off. Their accuracy has gotten better, their payloads are getting better, their penetrating ability.
So their ability to destroy targets is better than it was. It’s still not, let’s say, the Americans could do with their long-range stuff, but it’s a lot better and the Russians seem to be struggling with air defense. So the Ukrainians have been able to take out some pretty high value economic targets in the last two months. I would say particularly that the oil exporting facilities around St. Petersburg, a lot of Russian oil is being shipped out of St. Petersburg area, and also the Russian oil exporting facilities on the Black Sea, and that hurts. So the Ukrainians have been able to do that and get things through Russian air defense and hit them and in a far greater range. I mean, the last week they hit targets 1,500 kilometers. That’s a thousand miles from Ukraine itself. They have been hitting across Russia. So if that keeps up, that’s a real problem for Putin because for the Russians, all of a sudden, the war’s coming home. If you’re—
BILL KRISTOL:
And what are they hitting them with? What kind of…
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Long-range drones. We might call them drones or cruise missile. There’s a bit of a definitional argument here. It’s the “flamingo,” was that a cruise missile? Probably that’s more what we call a cruise missile than a drone. But you just call them “unpiloted long range systems.”
BILL KRISTOL:
And these are not as cheap as the little things they use at the front, but they’re not wildly expensive, is that right? I mean, they’re not running out of them, so they’re not bankrupting themselves using those?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
No, no. I mean, the problem, the issue they have is getting parts to make all of the long range ones, they require better parts and they’re more expensive to make. So they have the capacity to make more than they are making because they can’t always source all the components and they can’t always raise all the capital to make it. Though they are getting a lot of investment now. So it’s interesting to see that people are investing in the Ukrainian defense industry because it’s shown the ability to produce the thing the rest of the world wants, like these anti-drone drones. And that’s another thing we can talk about, but we maybe put that off for a little bit. But that they are making longer range systems that are effective.
I mean, it’s taken them years and they’re still not as effective as the kind of things we could have given them back in 2023 had we really wanted to help them, but they are at the point now where Putin is worried. I mean, you should see the air defense systems the Russians now have protecting Moscow. But Moscow is probably the most heavily air defensed city in the world because Putin’s terrified. I’m really worried about the parade on Saturday that the Ukrainians are going to be able to attack that. And that is a change. It used to be they might get one or two drones through and they were pretty simple drones and not terribly effective. Now the worry the Russians face is the Ukrainians can get stuff in and I think that is important.
So the military ends of the war, both the range war and the land war are better for Ukraine in 2026 than they were in 2025. The trend lines are very positive for Ukraine. Geopolitically—
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, just one more. On the economic side of the military side, their combination of their own economy and aid from Europe is enough for them, so far as one can tell, to keep going. You don’t see a crisis there. I mean, as I know there’s more speculation actually about the Russian economy a little bit. But anyway, on the Ukrainian side, some people were worried about that also a couple years ago, right?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Well, they were very worried. And the Ukraine can’t fight indefinitely without European aid. And they would have had a real problem had Orbán won the election in Hungary and continued to block the 90 billion from Europe. But with the unblocking of that 90 billion…And so don’t underrate the importance of Orbán losing.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting, yeah.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
That was really important, that basically the Ukrainian economy is going to be funded throughout 2026 and into 2027. And Europe can always raise more money at that point. So I think that as long as Europe remains focused on helping Ukraine, that Ukraine can stay in the fight because Europe has the money to actually pay for things. They don’t have all the parts and the components, but they have the money to fund a lot of the Ukrainian defense economy. And so that seems to be one of the big advances of the last few weeks.
So the Ukrainians are not worried about economic failure in 2026 by running out of money, which was Putin’s plan and Trump’s plan in many ways through Orbán was to starve the Ukrainians of cash to try to force them to take a really bad deal, force them to throw in the towel. And the Ukrainians just don’t believe they’re in that kind of situation. So they’re actually feeling … Be very careful with the words I use. They are feeling much better. And they believe that they now are taking a bit of the initiative in the war and have the ability to hurt Russia very badly, the Russian military and the Russian economy. And so they think Putin’s now being faced, I think, with more dilemmas than they are.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s amazing and given where… I was very worried. And I mean, I’ve been worried from the beginning. I mean, obviously and heartened then by their performance and they didn’t think it didn’t go quite as well in 2023, I guess, as maybe they had hoped or some people on the outside had hoped, and so that was a little worrisome. But mostly our aid was, I don’t know where we’d put it on the spectrum, it was real, but it wasn’t maybe what it could have been.
Europeans, I think … Well, I’m curious on your judgment on this, and then we can get to the broader geopolitical state of the war too. I mean, Europe has basically come through more than we might have expected. Am I right about that? And now is, I mean, you mentioned the 90 billion is, well, of course, once Orbán’s gone, they’re just going to cough up 90 billion. But to be fair, it’s not like the Europeans are doing so great economically. That’s real money for them. And they do see, I think, how important it is to them to Putin not win. But anyway, I won’t put words in your mouth, but you tell me about that whole side of it.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
No, I mean, Europe’s been very heartening, thankfully, thanks to Donald Trump. Well, you have to say Trump was a real double-edged sword in 2025, but really helpful in 2026. And you can tell from my accent, I’m an American, but I live in Europe. So I live in the United Kingdom and it’s been very frustrating. I mean, 2025, the Europeans were actually desperate to keep on the side of Trump. This is the year of Mark Russo calling him Daddy, which that was a bit extreme. But many European states, including I’d say the British didn’t want to do anything to offend the United States, because to them maintaining NATO in 2025 was the number one priority. And they were talking about putting Ukraine under pressure to accept a bad deal. I mean, if you had said to the European states, “Ukraine give up the Donbas, if that makes Trump happy,” I think a lot of them would have said yes, that it’s more important for us to keep good relations with the United States.
But thankfully for Ukraine, Trump went too far and he really went…This was a fascinating … I was just in America in April and I was giving a bunch of talks. And I would ask people in the talks, “Do you remember what happened in January 2026 about Greenland?” And the Americans would say, “Oh, yeah, there was a crisis, but it’s over now. We had a few bad few days, but it was worked out. And since then, we haven’t thought about Greenland. It hasn’t really figured in our thinking.” For Europe, Greenland was traumatic, and it changed things so that Europe was different after the Greenland crisis than before, because European states actually thought the United States was going to invade another NATO country. And even though they didn’t send a lot of troops, the French and Germans sent about 100 troops to Greenland to fight Americans if the United States invaded. And Trump has this way of this unbearable lightness of being here he has a memory and then it disappears. There’s no hinterland to Trump’s memory. He forgets something and he moves on. That is not the case in Europe. I think Greenland was like, “Oh, United States actually is no longer not our friend. It could be a potential foe.”
BILL KRISTOL:
And this was on top of obviously a year of, as you say, them bending over backwards, understandably in some ways to try to keep it all together and try to pretend they weren’t hearing what they were hearing from Vance and Hegseth in Munich in February of ’25 and so forth.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Oh, God.
BILL KRISTOL:
But you think it really has…It’s ironic that it’s helping Ukraine of all things. I mean that…
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Absolutely. I mean, believe me, they bent over backwards in 2025. If they could debase themselves, they would. And I say this to someone who was deeply frustrated about it and trying to say Europe has to start looking after itself. They really didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to face the real world. Greenland forced them. And by the way, the US decision to bomb Iran and start that war up again, you might say, finished the process because the Europeans were not involved in the discussions, they weren’t consulted. They are suffering a lot more. I mean, there is real worry that airline fuel’s going to run out here in a few weeks’ time. The European economies are much more exposed to the Gulf than the US economy. And the feeling was the United States just went to this war that was hugely damaging to Europe, but Europeans weren’t involved.
So I think that they have basically understood their security is not now going to be given by the United States. United States is not to be trusted as a defense partner, at least for the next few years. And in that case, Ukraine has become more important. Then all of a sudden they go, “Oh my God, we have this enormous asset in Ukraine.” It really is an asset as a defense industrial sector, the most experienced armed forces now in the world, we’d say. What other army has the kind of combat experience that the Ukrainians have? And the other European states have nothing like that. They’ve not done any combat beyond Afghanistan for a long time, most of them. And so they all of a sudden said, “Well, actually, it’s in our interest. We can’t trust the United States. Ukraine becomes more important.”
So it wasn’t a case of US and Ukrainian. It’s almost been Ukraine instead of the USA. And as the Ukrainians have shown that they have been able to do things more effectively, that has also…Success breeds success. And the Europeans are now saying, “Actually, maybe Ukraine can bring this war to a much better conclusion than we thought. Let’s keep it going.”
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s so important, I think, because I was talking to a Ukrainian here in, probably was 2023-ish. And, unhelpfully, I said—I mean, she was very concerned about US public support, which was still strong at that point and bipartisan, but Trump was running, and he was against it and America First, and so it was clear that there were risks. And then there was that long delay for the vote in 2024 and all that. So I can’t remember if this was in that period—and I remember saying, it’d be so good if people here could understand that Ukraine could be a real asset, not to use your term, an ally, something that we should be—it’s in our interest to help, not a sort of charity case.
And I said, it’s so obvious, obviously, the point that we’ve had bad experiences. I mean, it’s not fair to blame these people. I said, but from South Vietnam on through Afghanistan, we helped weaker countries and we did our best. I think we thought we were doing our best, and it ended up badly. And so, there’s a sense of, ugh, this is just another case where we’re going to try to do the right thing, and it’s good to do the right thing, but, on the other hand, it’s not going to end well.
And I remember saying at the time, I don’t know anything about this stuff but, I mean, it feels to me like Ukraine could be different. They held off Russia by themselves with aid obviously from us and Europe, but literally by themselves in the sense of fighting by themselves, and they still are fighting by themselves, that first year or two, and maybe they could become more than, as I say, someone who morally we should be helping, but someone who politically, geopolitically, it’s in our interest to help and to view as an ally, not as I say, as a kind of a beneficiary of ours. It’s so interesting what you say that you think that’s really changed in Europe in that direction?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Entirely. I mean, you actually hit on the key point there, Bill, which is the difference from Vietnam or Afghanistan is the Ukrainians are actually doing the fighting. I think our problem, and I say this as an American, in both Afghanistan and Vietnam is we couldn’t actually put in place people to fight for the new governments without us. They were utterly reliant on us. And when the United States pulled out forces, the Vietnamese lasted for a year, the Afghanis lasted for a few hours. But that was never going to be the situation in Ukraine.
The Ukrainians, they were determined to fight for themselves from the beginning and they’ve never actually… They would love, of course, ground troops to come from their partners, but their resistance is not based on the fact that other soldiers are going to come to their rescue. What they’ve really wanted is military aid and to be allowed to fight the war they want.
So I mean, I think it’s actually the template. I mean, that’s the frustrating thing to me is that Ukraine for the United States provided, I thought, a brilliant template of the kind of interventions the United States could do because the United States wasn’t going to micromanage it. It could provide aid to the Ukrainians and let the Ukrainians do the fighting. And that’s where the war is now. I mean, I don’t think, by the way, you could put a European unit on the front line in Ukraine because it would be massacred. You put any Western unit in the frontline in Ukraine, they wouldn’t know what to do. It’s a completely different environment than the one they’ve been trained for, and they would suffer huge casualties if you put them up there. I think [inaudible].
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s amazing, actually. Yeah. Well, I want to get back to the geostrategic position of Ukraine, and then it’s broader implications of how things might go in terms of Russia and Europe and everything in the world. But just a word more on the actual war, because what you just said is so striking. I mean, how much of a transformation is, I don’t even know what to call it, I’ll just go shorthand, drone warfare as a military historian? I mean, some people think it’s just utterly the world has changed. Other people say, “Oh, come on, there were all these incremental changes.” I mean, how big is it? How far along are we in this transformation? I suppose one has to combine it with AI and other technological things as well. But I mean, where are we in the kind of range of its air power has been introduced into wars which had never happened before, versus we’ve upgraded from, I’m making this up, from one kind of slow tank to a much faster and better armored tank, or whatever the kind of normal progress of military technology is.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
It’s a great question. And there is a massive transformation. I don’t like to use the phrase “revolution” because I don’t believe in revolutions in war. I mean, there are technological transformations, but a lot of the process of war remains the same. This transformation is ongoing and deep and profound and will not be stopped until someone can come up with a cheap way to destroy drones. And so, the problem that they have is drones themselves are so cheap that there’s no way to counter them with earlier equipment. You can’t use a tank or an artillery piece to shoot down drones because the cost of those is so much higher than the cost of a drone. So you’re going to have to have a way to get rid of the drones, which can be mass produced in the millions with a system that is cost-efficient. You’re going to have to find that cheaper system to take down the drone.
BILL KRISTOL:
And it can’t be Patriots and FAADs and stuff, which are also very expensive, right?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Yeah. Well, that’s the problem the US has faced in the Gulf is that they didn’t have a cheap system. I mean, Ukrainians are the only ones that have come up with a cheap system. But even then, they don’t have that in the mass numbers that they need and it’s not always as effective. They can take down 50% of the Russian drones coming at them. So until someone can come up with a cheap, mass-produced system to take down drones, the drone is going to determine the land war.
And I know you might say that the unpiloted drone is going to determine a lot of the range war because they can be made in such large numbers and they’re going to get through. And you’re going to have to find some way to get transparency off the battlefields if you want to move vehicles forward. If that’s your goal. “I want to have a battlefield where vehicles can move quickly forward,” like Patton or Rommel or tanks streaking down the road, well, then you’re going to have to find a way that those vehicles won’t be seen within minutes as they are now, and that they can actually survive and shoot down what comes at them in swarms of drones.
Maybe the US or China with their technological and industrial capacity can come up with that system, but right now no one has. And until that kind of counter can be constructed, the drone is going to rule the battlefield because it’s cheap and it provides such benefits for the cost of building them.
BILL KRISTOL:
And I suppose one answer could be, I mean, theory that, well, you don’t need the ground advances that you and I are used to reading about and in your case studying because you can do it from the air. But actually Iran, ironically, it seems to me, has in that respect, proven a new and old truth that hasn’t been transformed despite the improvements of air power in so many ways and missiles and all, which is it doesn’t seem possible—Iran seems to cut in the direction of you don’t get regime change, you don’t get decisive victory, you don’t get the kind of victory you really need just from the air. So maybe you could, I don’t know.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
You got to…I mean, the thing about Iran, believe me, I would love a regime change in Iran and I would celebrate that excitedly. But you need to actually have someone on the ground in Iran with whom you can work. The Iran thing seemed to be, we’ll drop some bombs and some magical opposition force will rise up and take power. That you can’t do with air power. Airpower can do the attacking, but it can’t do the replacing. And if you have good people in Iran with whom you’re working and whom you had prepared, you could have perhaps put in a new regime, but they hadn’t done the work. And they didn’t have a plan to do it.
BILL KRISTOL:
And also you probably need some American, who knows, but you’d probably need some outside forces at first to stabilize it and so forth. Who knows? But I mean, that was sort of the theory in Iraq at least. And ultimately sort of worked. I mean, once we got to the counterinsurgency, we were able to draw down and leave a friendly-ish government sort of in charge of a sort of stable situation after going through a horrible civil war where we didn’t have enough troops. So I mean, all I’m saying anyway is that your point about the drones seems decisive here too.
And so, will they—? I mean, I guess the defense will may catch up at some point or may not, but I mean, before we get to the offense-defense thing, which maybe you’ve already discussed in a way, which is I think they haven’t defense hasn’t yet caught up. But just the amount, the cheapness of them, the ability to manufacture them at scale, I mean, that’s a pretty big change, isn’t it? I mean that it?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
That in itself—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
It’s balanced.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
I mean, by the way, it should really terrify us about China. I mean, if I were to put brass tack, Chinese manufacturing capacity is so large that what we’re seeing is that the Chinese are in a brilliant economic strategic position. I mean, by the way, we talk about Ukrainian drones and Russian drones, what we’re actually talking about are Chinese drones adapted by the Ukrainians and the Russian system.
BILL KRISTOL:
Is that right?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Because the components, the components are overwhelmingly coming from China. So the cameras, which are vital to all these drones, the cameras are almost all made in China. And a lot of the parts are all made in China. The engines, the motors, the small motors are all made in China. So China makes about 75% of the drone components in the world. And they’re supplying both the Ukrainians and the Russians. So really, we’re talking about Chinese drones, fighting Chinese drones if we wanted to talk brass tacks or Chinese components.
And the United States has got a long way to go to catch up with… To have anything like the innate manufacturing capacity of Chinese drones. But the point is it’s not offensive versus defensive. It’s cheap versus expensive. I think that’s the way to frame it intellectually. And the cheap now, it’s very easy to make the cheap. And the Iranians can make the cheap. A lot of people can make the cheap.
And the United States has fetishized for the past 40 years the expensive, the exquisite. And it was much better than anyone else’s. American missiles still made 40 years ago are probably better than almost anyone else’s. Tomahawks are an old system now, but very, very effective. But if you only make 80 tomahawks a year or 100 Tomahawks a year, it doesn’t matter if I can make 30,000 Shaheds a month. The benefit of having those 100 Tomahawks is not enough to make up for those 30,000 Shaheds.
So that’s what the United States is going to have to do, I think to prepare itself for a war. Or the United States has to assume that China is the dominant power in Asia. And the idea of the United States taking it on is, I think, pretty farfetched for a while now because of the ability of the Chinese to just churn out manufactured goods. But the countries most likely to balance China now aren’t the US, it’s Japan and India.
BILL KRISTOL:
Because they can churn out manufactured goods too. And I guess Korea a little bit too. I mean, yeah, it’s a—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
A lot. I mean, Japan and South Korea are the two and three states of shipbuilding in the world. United States doesn’t even figure in the top 20, but Japan and South Korea—
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, the cheapness issue … Yeah, it’s so interesting. It helps China, presumably for now against us a lot. And that has its own implications for the next several years. But I suppose ultimately, if you’re China, maybe you’re a little worried that suddenly, I don’t know, 20 nations can make these things. I mean, Ukraine’s 40 million people, but there are a lot of other countries with 40 million people. And some of them are pretty good at this kind of stuff if they ever put their mind to it. I mean, in theory, why can’t Germany make 30,000 drones a month? I mean—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Oh yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Or why can’t Japan?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Yeah, Germany’s not making more 155 ammunition. But if you’re China, you’re worried about a lot of countries on your board. You’re worried about Vietnam, which can manufacture a lot. And by the way, the last war China fought was against Vietnam in 1979 and it lost.
BILL KRISTOL:
Didn’t go so well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
And India is getting its act together economically. And so India could set up a manufacturing capacity to build drones in mass terms. So it’s very worrying for the US, which has favored, on the whole, the exquisite. And it provides support for China versus the US, but it’s not wonderful for China when you’re looking to have on your border South Korea with a highly developed defense industry, Japan, a developing defense industry. Taiwan, a defense industry, Vietnam. Malaysia and Indonesia are growing, though Indonesia is a bit unreliable when it comes to China, and India is growing. So the Chinese are going to have their own problems in dealing with a lot of manufacturing capacity on their border.
BILL KRISTOL:
But more broadly, we’re drifting away from Iran. Ukraine, I want to come back to it and make sure you’ve said what everyone needs to hear. But one question on this, because I’ve been very struck. And I’ve certainly been a subscriber to the thesis, I guess Bob Kagan’s argued it may be the most strongly, but a lot of people have. You have as well, I think, and others.
We had 80 years of a US anchored world order, some disorder in the midst of that order, but that had its benefits. It had its costs as well. That’s cracked probably. And so we go to a very different world, which is, I think Bob has argued, and I’m inclined to agree with this, people can talk about bipolar and tripolar and offshore balancing. And it could be a stable world of a different kind, balance of power world. I think those things don’t end up being so stable historically usually.
But it seems to be what you said here. I haven’t really thought about this side of it. The combination of that development with the technological developments that you’re talking about really goes in a direction of… I mean, “multipolar” doesn’t even begin to describe it, right? I mean, a kind of multi-multipolar world, which again, it could be stable. I mean, you could have China, India, Korea, Vietnam, all these countries, Japan, just a standoff, I suppose, and not invading each other, obviously. And they’ll all have a lot of drones. You could also have a pretty crazy situation, couldn’t you? I mean…
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Totally. I mean, by the way, nuclear weapons’ are gonna start spreading pretty quickly now that Russia has shown the enormous benefit of having nuclear weapons.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. [inaudible}.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
They’ve been treated with kid gloves and with the United States not looking like a reliable defense partner. And by the way, that doesn’t look like a reliable defense partner to Asian states as well. I mean, Japan and South Korea, they’re not being as vocal about it as Europeans, but they’re thinking the same thoughts.
The idea that states might say, “Well, we need our own nuclear weapons.” Watch South Korea on that, by the way. South Koreans are having actually an open debate on this now. It’s not hidden. And I think in the latest poll, a majority of South Koreans wanted an independent nuclear deterrent. So that’s one thing.
But absolutely, this year we are going to see the ability, if states want to take it up, to build threatening cheap weapons in large numbers until that defensive counter appears. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But until that point, it’ll be easy to be threatening in a way that Iran is showing how threatening they can be with a small number of systems.
So Europe, I think by the European point you brought up, of course, is the key one. Europe can be a pole in this world if it wishes to be. What we don’t know is what Europe wishes to be. And even whether there will be a Europe. It’s still the long-term political structures in Europe are very much open for debate. I think we can say that in the political structure they have now, it’s not ideal to be a pole.
On the other hand, the Europeans have the innate manufacturing capacity to be pretty powerful, not a China, but pretty powerful if they wish to be. So it’s more a question of what political will and whether the Europeans can actually see themselves.
I was going to say one thing that really surprised… I get surprised by a lot of things. I’ve lived in Europe for decades now, but I always thought, oh, maybe Europeans were chafing a little bit under American dominance. That isn’t true. They love the United States. Oh yeah, they might’ve complained about the United States, but it was all crocodile tears.
They were delighted that the Americans were providing their security, and then they didn’t have to think about it. The Europeans hadn’t had a serious thinking about security for decades because they were outsourcing it to the United States. So all this talk about Europeans being anti-American, they loved the United States. They just didn’t want to admit it, but they basically said to the United States, “You take care of us and we’ll go and retire earlier.” And they did.
But now I think we could see the unhealthy aspects of that relationship. And that Europeans tried to hold onto it, but it’s over with now, I would say. And the question is, will they grasp the opportunity to start looking after themselves or not? And there’s some positive signs or some less positive signs. I think in some ways the longer the United States is on this present trajectory, the better it will be for Europe to start looking after itself. But it’s been a big change.
BILL KRISTOL:
And Putin is certainly right there. I’m struck when I’m in Europe recently, and I haven’t been that far east either, how much that’s obviously on their mindset in a way it isn’t here. And therefore… And the truth is, I mean, if you go a little further east though, and you think of Ukraine and Poland, those are not small countries and they’re not poor countries. They’re not the US or Germany exactly, but they’re not far behind. I think Poland’s, I think per capita GDP is now the same as Britain or something like that. So we, I think—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
You know Poland’s fastest growing large economy. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
People like me are just, you’re younger than I am, but too much living in… Everyone’s shaped by the world one grows up in. So there’s Western Europe which is advanced. And then there’s Central and Eastern Europe countries we all liked when we were hoping that they could be liberated from the Soviet Union. And then they were liberated. And then people like me were enthusiastic about incorporating them in the West, both the EU and NATO. And I think a lot of that worked out pretty well.
But yeah, I mean, Poland, Ukraine, and that if Germany is serious, that’s not nothing, right? That’s all, I don’t know what is, 150, 180 million people and big GDPs and big technological capacity. Throw in the Scandinavian states, with the Nordic states with their technology. And I don’t know, it could be serious, right? I mean it’s—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Various, I mean Russia is economically the size of Spain.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right, right.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
It’s not like it’s this amazing power that could overwhelm Europe. I mean, if Europeans get their act together, they could absolutely… I mean, they are now showing what they can do a little bit by just helping Ukraine. But you pointed… There’s a big reservoir if they want to take advantage of it.
The Nordics alone, if you add Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, I think you’re basically the size of Russia economically and very rich, very technologically advanced. And by the way, willing to fight. I don’t think you can underrate the importance of the Fins and the Swedes now. And they don’t want Russia to expand. They don’t want to set up a precedent that Russia can take territories from other countries.
And you couldn’t be more hard line the Baltics that they want to fight. The Poles are pretty hard line. There’s some internal funkiness and Polish politics that you have to watch out with. And this is one of the things, but getting Orbán out of the way has also been brilliant. So I mean, you can now see this… By the way, they don’t like to be called Eastern European, as I’ve learned.
BILL KRISTOL:
I know. Yeah.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Central and Eastern Europeans.
BILL KRISTOL:
Central Europeans. Well, that’s fair enough. I mean you know.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Yeah, absolutely.
BILL KRISTOL:
I guess.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
I’m trying to think—you could see this Central-Nordic axis driving a lot of European policy with Ukraine on board. And that becomes then a very, very powerful force. And it’s the frontline force because that’s the one that’s going to be on the frontline with any war with Russia in the future. And they’re feeling it. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
So come back to a little bit more on… So Ukraine, I mean, I guess what else do we need to think about geopolitically? Where does it go over the next year or two or three? How fundamental? I mean, I’ve been struck, obviously we’re all concerned about Iran and what has to be and focused on it in terms of the news coverage.
One reason I wanted to have this conversation is I feel Ukraine has moved out of the US too much though, because it is still still the largest war in the world, and certainly in Europe. But I guess in the world, right? And I think the most important for the 21st century, but tell me if I’m wrong. And then anyway, give us the big picture on where you think it goes here.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Well, I mean, had Trump not come to Putin’s aid by raising the price of oil by 50%, I think the Russians would be in real serious trouble economically because Putin has in some ways fired a lot of his economic bows… Or sorry, he fired his economic arrows, that he went into the war with a very large sovereign wealth fund that he’d built up by selling oil and salting that money away. That’s all gone now. And he now has got his economy at… Defense industry is at full employment that there’s this very few unemployed people in Russia. There’s now growing inflation.
So there’s not so much free capital. The capital is very difficult to raise to keep the war effort growing in Russia. So they might be bumping up very serious natural constraints now in their economic ability to grow. That’s why having Ukraine backed by Europe is the difference because Ukraine, backed by Europe, will have much more money than Russia, particularly a Russia whose oil infrastructure is damaged, which is what the Ukrainians are trying to do.
So as long as the United States and China don’t come in to really help Russia economically, that’s the nightmare scenario for Ukraine. The nightmare scenario for Ukraine is that China basically says, “Screw it. We are going to help Russia and we’re going to send finished munitions.”
Right now, they send lots of components, but they’re very careful not to send a lot of advanced finished weapons to Russia. If the Chinese say, “Forget it, we’re going to just give Russia what we want,” then that could be a real problem for Ukraine because China could flood them with stuff. Likewise, the United States could basically say, “We’re getting back to business with Russia,” which is something Trump wants to do. He wants to get rid of these sanctions. He doesn’t want to have sanctions on Russia anymore but watch Belarus. They’re already getting rid of many sanctions on Belarus, so US trade with Belarus might start going up soon. And that’s trade with Russia. I mean, Belarus is simply a conduit to Russia.
So that’s where it could go bad for Ukraine economically vis-à-vis Russia as if China and the United States really decide to go in and help Putin. That will be hard for Trump after the midterm elections, one assumes. So actually, I’m less worried about the United States, assuming the midterms are handled freely. China, I don’t know. I mean, China’s been quite cautious because it’s making money from both sides. It doesn’t want Russia to lose, but it’s not invested in an overwhelming Russian victory.
So that’s the thing is the Europeans are poorer than the Americans or the Chinese say, but they’re more committed to Ukraine, so that they have that interest. So it’s a bit of a balancing going on there, but it’s not like Ukraine’s out of the woods geopolitically now. And I think that’s why we have to be cautious because the two biggest dogs in the world are the US and China. And they are both playing somewhat ambiguous roles in the war now, and we have to watch them very carefully.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. It’s so interesting. I mean, when you said it that, it’s just so crazy. It’s just such a different situation than the old days, obviously where US was usually on one side and China, well, Russia will have a unit. Obviously, then Russia recently came back to be on the other side.
China, everyone was forecasting as the great rival, the great pure competitor. A little more complicated with Trump. It’s not so clear how much stomach he has for any real peer competition as opposed to talking tough on China and then cutting trade deals basically so far as I can tell. And sending them some chips that a lot of his supporters thought he would never do that. So I don’t know. I mean, it’s an awfully fluid world out there suddenly, right?
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Well, the United States is not the leader of the free world anymore. So the United States is a rogue superpower, I think is the only way to describe it. It’s completely unreliable. It’s, on the whole, transactional. So it doesn’t see any difference. In fact, right now, the United States government seems to prefer dictators to democracies. Certainly doesn’t like democracies and doesn’t believe it has any role to look after democracy. And when it comes to Asia, I think the reality, and we’re seeing this in the Iran world, United States can’t fight China and in the Western Pacific. China can’t attack the United States… And the US, effectively, but the US now can’t attack China. That’s it. China doesn’t have to worry about the US in the way that it probably did in the past. So the United States’ ability to threaten military force around the world is going to be limited except in its own hemisphere.
So it’ll present a big threat to Venezuela or Cuba if it wants to, but I think it’s going to be very less threatening. And we’re seeing that in the reaction of the Gulf States these days. I don’t think they… From what we can tell, they basically called time on Trump’s guard policy on shipping. So I think that’s… We’re in a very unpredictable world. I would say a more regional world where there could be a lot of regional conflicts. And the United States and China, who are the dominant powers, aren’t as dominant as we are used to thinking about powers being.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, I think that’s so important because I think a lot of the international relations theorists and your colleagues in different political science and history departments and around the world, we’re not unintelligent in saying, “Well, we could go to a sort of…” And this is in a way what Trump probably had in mind, insofar as he had something in mind, in maybe a tripartite world… Balance of power or three regional powers, if you want to call it that, Russia there and it’s area and China, obviously, in Asia and us in the Western hemisphere, for whatever that is worth, that’s worth something. But then it turns out the technological advances and the weaknesses in a way of each of those three nations, different kinds of weaknesses, I would say in each case maybe, means they’re not so dominant even in their own region, I guess us in the Western hemisphere.
I don’t know. I mean, Canada’s not nothing. And incidentally, Venezuela turned out fine. If you wanted to remove a dictator and let his vice president take over, I’m not so sure it would be that easy for us to do actual transformative things in some of those countries. But certainly, in Europe, Russia’s totally stymied now by Ukraine and China, big question mark with Japan and South Korea and others, and Australia. So it really is… It’s both a more regional world, but also the regions don’t have individual, the dominant parish and the regions aren’t as dominant as we thought they might be. And finally, and I’ll let you develop this any way you want, I mean, this is… Famously, regional wars don’t stay regional all the time.
I mean, you could’ve looked around in 1931 or ’35 and ‘6, I guess, and say, “Well, there’s a European situation, that’s Germany and it’s ambitions and who will check it? There’s an Asian situation, that’s Japan and China, obviously stuff going on there. There’s other things, imperial questions and elsewhere where the empires were reaching.” Turns out, it all kind of got merged together or one part led to events in another part. And I guess… I don’t know. So I feel like the situation is just… I don’t think the world… Certainly, as I think in the American political world, which I know better, and to some degree in the American foreign policy establishment world, people have not really internalized how different the world we are sailing into is the world we have lived in.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
I mean, I have to say, this is where I think the Washington voice just doesn’t get it. And in any way, the Washington voice is based in some ways on pretending what is happening hasn’t happened. So for much of 2025, in Europe, I was hearing Washington think tanks, Washington diplomats saying, “Don’t worry, everything’s fine. I mean, we’re really committed to NATO and this is just a phase,” or, “Trump will be better than you think.” There was a constant attempt—because in many ways the Americans were speaking from the point of view where they were the most listened-to person in the room. You could go to a European security conference for the past 40 years. And the American voice was, in many ways, genuflected towards because the United States provided the security. And that was a very nice situation. If you were an American think tanker, you could come speak to a group of Europeans and you were the big boy in the room.
And that’s over with now. And I think that’s probably a good thing. And in terms of the regions, there’s so much going on there. I mean, Russia’s not a region… Russia’s not a great power. So I think that’s the way Trump thought it was for a while. And I don’t know what he thinks now. I mean, he’s interesting hedging a little bit on that. But Russia was never going to be this three, tripartite power with China and the United States because it’s the first economy in the world, the second economy in the world and I don’t know, the 12th economy in the world. It’s never going to work on… And by the way, a resource extraction economy. It’s not even a productive economy. It pumps things and minerals out of its ground and it sells them. And those are always weaker economies than things that actually make things.
But if you look at the US and China regionally, they have very different strengths and weaknesses too. The US benefit is they don’t actually have a scary country on its border in terms of one that could invade it. I mean, it’s sitting there in the Western hemisphere. Canada is a problem, but it’s not going to invade the United States. Mexico’s not going to invade the United States. The United States has not got a security concern, but China does in the sense that it’s got powerful states on its border it really has to reckon with, and that could actually fight and do that. So China would be in a better situation vis-a-vis fighting the USA, but in many ways, the United States has this still quite luxurious regional situation of no real security threat on its border.
And partly, that has made the United States, I think, a little soft in the brain about what it’s like to be in a dangerous world, because it’s never had a dangerous world on its border, probably since what, 1847, the end of the Mexican-American war. But that was the last time the United States had a serious security challenge on its border, and it just hasn’t had to face it. So it thinks the American position is normal when the American position has been fundamentally abnormal.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. And then the people who want to be tough without actually doing any of the hard work of trying to stabilize the world or help our friends around the world get to be tough, write strategy documents about how we’re going to be really dominant in the Western hemisphere, which A, in my view, is sort of just childish, that’s never… As you say, it’s never been a problem. It’s not like World War I… The way I put it here, World War War I, World War II happened not because of anything that happened in the Western hemisphere. So the idea that we are going to really be a happy country without having to deal with anything around the world, if we just can really beat up Venezuela or liberate Cuba, which would be a nice thing if the Cubans could finally get rid of that horrible regime, and we could help them, I’m not even against that, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental challenges of what the 21st century could look like.
And so that’s kind of, in my view, a bit of a distraction or, I don’t know, just a fake kind of toughness, but that’s not clear what the US stomach is for dealing with the real world that’s out there. And Iran, it’s interesting how much Trump just seems to want it to end. And for all the talk about how tough we’re going to be, we’ll see what he ends up accepting in terms of the Strait. He’ll accept things that we wouldn’t have accepted. I mean, I think your point about the Washington Foreign Policy Establishment is very strong. I’ve had so many conversations here with people, I’d say who I’ve been sort of in sync with in the past because they’ve been on the center right, more hawkish than not kind of thing.
And they keep telling me, “Well, he can’t allow Iran to in any way be able to dominate or threaten the Strait and he’s got to reestablish the principle of free passage, build free passage.” The Seas has been a core principle of US foreign policy since… I guess it has been, honestly, and certainly Anglo-American foreign policy forever. And I’m for it. It was a good world when that happened, when that existed, but you can’t unsee what’s happened in the Strait, right? They closed it and they’re going to get away with… I mean, they may not get fully away with it, but they’re not going to pay a huge price, it doesn’t look to me, for having done that. And it’s not like everyone else doesn’t look up and say, “Well, okay, that could happen again.” And that affects energy markets, and it affects the Gulf countries that were hawkish to begin with.
And I think people have underestimated, while I’m going on here, the interesting fact that they seem now to want the thing to end. I don’t think the Saudis are privately telling us, “Go beat them…” I mean, if they could trust us to really do away with the Iranian regime, they would be happy, of course, and pulverize Iran. But if the alternative is us sort of half hitting them and then kind of stepping back again, and in the meanwhile, Iran’s sitting there with the ability to lob drones at UAE and Saudis and others. Anyway, I think people are underestimating what kind of world we’re entering here.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
No, I think you’re right. And I think what’s happened is it’s not the US has no clothes, the emperor has no clothes, it’s just the clothes aren’t as good as they thought they were. And in particular, what the US can’t do is it can’t defend the Gulf States in the way that those Gulf States thought they would be defended by the… I mean, the United States had to, in their mind, at least protect them from Iran. And it’s been the inability of the United States to protect them and also to protect US military facilities that I think has been most striking. So if the Saudis… The report was a month ago, the Saudis wanted to keep going. I think what we’re hearing now, and I’m no Saudi expert, is exactly as you say, the Saudis and most of the regional, the Omanis, the Kuwaitis, they want it over. In some ways, they have to come up now with a new relationship with Iran and find a way to make that relationship work. And Iran will always have the ability to close the Strait. That’s the reality now that all we’ve done is—
BILL KRISTOL:
And others, presumably, you talk about Putin, the lesson that leads to nuclear proliferation, but others are going to look around and say, “Well, okay, you know what? We could make some money off our… We’ve sort of tolerated this principle of free navigation of the seas or whatever, but maybe we don’t have to tolerate it as much.” I just think all these things that we’ve taken for granted that we’re kind of a product really of a US-led world order and maybe before that, British to some degree, they’re not written in stone, right? I mean—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
No, they weren’t historical. Historically, there was no freedom of the seas. That’s not the way it worked. So we just have to hope in some ways that there’s going to be general tolerance. I mean, I’m fascinated to see what kind of deal they reach on the Strait with Iran. I mean, there will be a deal at some point, unless the United States simply goes home. If Trump gets so worried about oil prices and then he can’t bring an end to it that he goes home, but assuming there’s some kind of one or two-page deal, I have no idea what’s going to happen with the Strait. One thing I said, the nuclear deal will basically be Obama’s JCPOA in another language. So we’ll get some kind of JCPOA language on the nuclear deal, but I have no idea what they’re going to agree on the Strait.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. I mean, some murky thing where they sort of promise to let people go through, but then they cut some side deals where people, they get bribed… Who knows, you could imagine, but that has its own… A, it’s not so stable, presumably. B, it has its own precedential problems for elsewhere. Final words, I mean, this has been so interesting, really, and stimulating. What should we all look for maybe is the best way to put it, especially with regard to Ukraine and Russia.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Well, I mean, Ukraine and Russia… I mean, Ukraine can win the war. First of all, I think that needs to be the clarion call of now is for years we’ve heard, “Well, Ukraine really can’t win. I mean, they can survive, they could do well, but Ukraine’s going to have to give up territory, Ukraine’s going to have to concede this.” There was never any talk about Russia having to make concessions. The only concession Russian was being asked to made was not to take all of Ukraine, as if that was some kind of concession. I think the reality of it we are seeing right now is Ukraine can win the war as it can… It can really deconstruct a lot of the Russian military and the Russian economy. That’s not to say that Ukraine will win the war because it’s still a heavy ask, but we need to recalibrate the language and our strategic understanding and realize that Ukraine can win. And if we help it, Ukraine probably will win. So it’s a question of the kind of support we want to give Ukraine.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s really interesting. And so much at stake over the next months and years, right? Just very short term, I mean, any moment people should look for for a sign of more or less progress, more or less… I don’t know what the right term is, sharper or less sharp inflection points over the summer. I mean, fall, I mean, any—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Pay attention to… This is something that’s not being talked about, but something that I’ve been trying to raise in my Substack. Pay attention to Ukrainian mid-range strike. We hear a lot about the battlefield. We hear it a lot about long range strike. Pay attention to Ukrainian mid-range strike. More talk about Ukraine hitting targets from 50 kilometers from the frontline, to 300 kilometers. So 30 miles to 200 miles from the frontline. Ukrainians are getting better and better at that, and that could be a massive problem for the Russian army because if the Ukrainians can really exercise control over mid-range strike, then the Russian army cannot get resupplied. And that could lead to a real downward spiral. So it’s the kind of thing that isn’t being talked about. I mean, you’ll hear about it from the ISW.
Certain other people will mention it, who discuss military things in a bit of a nerdy way like I do, but pay attention to mid-range strike. When you start hearing, “Oh, Ukrainians are hitting this 100 miles from the front, 75 miles from the front.” And if those stories pick up, because a lot of the Ukrainians who I trust, they pay attention to our mid-range strike.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting. Okay. Well, we’ll pay attention to that and we’ll have to have another conversation maybe in, I don’t know, three months, six months to really see where things stand, both with Ukraine and Russia, but also Europe and the world. It really is such an interesting though not reassuring time, I wouldn’t say, but important time, right? I mean—
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
But better than it was last year for Ukraine and Europe.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s really an important point.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
And that’s good for the United States… I mean, ultimately, the United States, I hope, regains its sanity. And then for the United States, successfully Ukraine and Europe is a really good thing. So I think this is actually good for the United States.
BILL KRISTOL:
Such an important point to make and a good one to end on. So Phillips O’Brien, thank you so much for joining me today, and I really appreciate it.
PHILLIPS O’BRIEN:
Thanks, Bill. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. It’s been a lot of fun.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
