Michael Medved: No one better to answer those questions than John J. Sullivan, who was ambassador to Russia under both President Trump, appointed by President Trump, and then he continued to serve our country as ambassador to Russia for two years under President Joe Biden. John J. Sullivan has written a remarkable book that I just told him is shockingly readable. It is a book about the realities of the Putin regime. It is called Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia's War Against the West. John J. Sullivan is a longtime public servant and particularly involved with the US State Department and its modernization drive. Congratulations, Ambassador Sullivan, on the new book.
John J. Sullivan: Well, thank you, Michael. You're very kind.
Michael Medved: Well, again, I'm thoroughly enjoying the book, so I'm grateful for it. The one thing that leaps to mind is you had—and you go into this in your book—a great deal of direct interaction with President Biden during his presidency and your service in the Biden administration. And before that, you had served in the Trump administration. Did you have a lot of personal interaction with President Trump?
John J. Sullivan: I did. I was the Deputy Secretary of State for the first three years or so of the Trump administration. So in that connection, I did have frequent interaction with the former president as I describe in my book, although much of it was completely, well, mostly unrelated to Russia.
Michael Medved: But when you were ambassador, I was shocked to read that apparently you did not have any contact with Donald Trump. You had a connection with Secretary Pompeo, your boss, the Secretary of State, but you didn't have any contact with Donald Trump.
John J. Sullivan: Yeah, no, I write about it in the book. I tried to set up a final meeting with the president before I departed for Moscow. And my then-boss and friend, Mike Pompeo, set that up for me, and Trump got busy with other things that day, and I never wound up speaking to him right before I departed for Moscow. And then for the next year, while I was his ambassador, I never spoke to him or was involved in any video conference with him. You know, it was a chaotic time here in Washington, in the Trump administration. But that contrasts with my engagement with the Biden administration, where the president participated in more National Security Council meetings, that I participated in by secure video from Moscow. And then, of course, I accompanied President Biden to his meeting with Putin in Geneva in June of ‘21.
Michael Medved: Now you're one of those few Americans who has first-hand knowledge of the midnight in Moscow. You couldn’t have called your book Mission to Moscow, which was a very different point of view from a previous ambassador to Russia. You saw some of the realities of the Putin regime. Was there something particularly that surprised you and that would probably surprise the American public to learn from your book?
John J. Sullivan: Well, you know, Michael, my purpose in writing the book was to convey my firm conviction based on three years in Moscow that when Putin says he’s at war with the United States and the West and we are the enemy, he really means it. I'd heard this type of rhetoric from Russian leaders and people in his government before I left for Moscow. I knew how bad the relationship was. But when I got there and engaged with senior Kremlin leaders, and occasionally with Putin himself, the level of hostility was eye-opening. And when he says he believes that we in the West are Satanists, and we're the enemy, and we've been at war with Russia because of NATO's eastward expansion, it's not nationalist rhetoric that's designed for the Russian people. He really believes that.
Michael Medved: What you get very clearly in the book is that what Putin believes is the only way for Russia to rise is for the United States and our allies to fall.
John J. Sullivan: Exactly. It’s a restoration of empire. And Putin is famously quoted as saying that he thought the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the demise of the Soviet Union. What we in the West think he means by that is he laments the demise of the communist system. That’s not what he’s talking about. In fact, when asked about communism he frequently invokes a Russian saying, “If you don’t have nostalgia for how we lived under Soviet communism, you don’t have a heart. But if you want to return to that system, you don’t have a brain.” What he laments is the demise of the control from the center, as they call it, from Moscow, of what was originally the Russian Empire before the revolution, and then a Soviet empire during the Soviet days with control over, for example, Ukraine—which is something that is front and center in his mind now. Restoring that control is the essence of his vision for Russia post-Putin. When he departs this world, he wants a Russia that looks more like the Soviet Union, not as a communist entity, but as an empire with control over what they commonly call the ‘near abroad’, principally, but especially Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, many other Eastern European countries that feel threatened by Putin's aggressive nationalism.
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Michael Medved: The war against Ukraine has been blamed—by some voices in our public discourse including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, the vice-presidential nominee—as much on the US, NATO, and Ukraine as on Putin and the Russian Federation. What is your response to that, Ambassador?
John J. Sullivan: Well, that’s about as wrong as it can be. It’s blaming the victim and not the aggressor. It’s the equivalent of, I think—and I’m not saying that Putin is Hitler or that the Russian Federation is Nazi Germany—but imagine saying in the summer of 1939, I don’t care about Poland. Ignoring the fact that the real concern for the United States and the West was Nazi Germany. Saying that you don’t care about Ukraine or “Why are we wasting money on that?” is focusing on the wrong end of this war. The threat to the United States is posed by Russia's aggression, which will not stop at Ukraine. And the fact that a permanent member of the UN Security Council with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world is waging the largest land war in Europe since the Second World War ought to shock—not just motivate to support—the conscience of any American concerned about U.S. national security. We spend an extraordinary amount of money to defend the United States against Russia. What money we spend in supporting Ukraine is defending not just Ukraine, but the West against Russian aggression.
Michael Medved: And when you talk about defending the West against Russian aggression, one of the questions that people raise constantly is, “China is the real threat. Russia is not as substantial a threat. Would the United States still have the wherewithal to defend Taiwan, if necessary, if Taiwan were invaded by the Chinese communists?”
John J. Sullivan: We, the United States, spend a trillion dollars on defense, including both the public and classified budgets—I wouldn’t be able to give any precise detail on the classified budget of the United States. A large chunk of that money is to defend ourselves against Russia. And that’s exactly what we’re doing in Ukraine. The threat to the United States in the Pacific from the PRC is real. But saying that we’re going to ignore this problem, this catastrophe in Europe, is giving short shrift to the national security of the United States. Imagine someone saying, again, going back to World War II—one of Putin’s favorite subjects, by the way—"Well, we can ignore Japan. It’s on the other side of the Pacific” or “The real threat is Nazi Germany.” We don’t have that luxury to say we’re only going to focus on China. And it used to be the United States was willing to step up to meet these challenges, not only to our own national security, but that of our allies and partners as well. And we need to do that again, unfortunately.
Michael Medved: President Trump has said repeatedly that the Ukraine war never would have started—Russia would not have attacked its neighbor, and this entire war would not have come into being—if he had still been president. Do you think that’s a defensible proposition?
John J. Sullivan: Well, the way I think about it, Michael—and I get asked this question all the time, of course—is focusing on Putin. Putin was going to accomplish his objectives in Ukraine, which are, as he says repeatedly, to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine. He was going to accomplish those objectives either by the capitulation of Ukraine or by what the Russians call “military-technical means,” which was an invasion of Ukraine.
And if by his statement, President Trump means that Putin wouldn't have invaded because we were going to not support Ukraine, I'll point out that his administration—people like Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary Pompeo—provided (unlike the Obama administration) military support Javelins to Ukraine. So the short answer is no, Putin was going to achieve his objectives in Ukraine, whether it was President Trump or President Biden or whoever the next president is going to be. He is not going to deviate from those objectives.
If he could have achieved those objectives short of war, of course, he would have taken Ukraine on a silver platter. But the only way to have avoided war was to surrender Ukraine. The West cutting Ukraine loose, so to speak, would have been the only way to avoid this calamity.
Michael Medved: Do you think a solution to the war—some kind of truce or accommodation—could be negotiated in the next presidential term, whoever is in power?
John J. Sullivan: Yes, but it should never be considered a solution to the problem. Putin will never surrender his war objectives. I was asked often as ambassador after the war started, “What's his off-ramp?” He has no off-ramp. He'll take a rest area, like a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike, to rest and regroup and refit. But he's continuing on that journey to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine. He may pause it because of Ukrainian resistance, and the West’s support for Ukraine, but he will never surrender that objective of crushing Ukraine and its independence.
Michael Medved: And it is clear in the book. The book is Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia's War Against the West. It is clear that Ambassador Sullivan had a great deal of contact with what is going on and has been going on in Ukraine, and he is deeply sympathetic to their struggle for survival. I salute you, Ambassador Sullivan, for your work on behalf of our country, and may you continue to thrive and get the attention of the American people.
Thanks for bringing Ambassador Sullivan's book to our attention. I'm having trouble squaring this statement from the rest of the story: "when he says he believes that we in the West are Satanists, and we're the enemy, and we've been at war with Russia because of NATO's eastward expansion, it's not nationalist rhetoric that's designed for the Russian people. He really believes that."
That "we've been at war with Russia because of NATO's eastward expansion" is one of Kennedy's arguments. Is Kennedy and several other like minded people wrong? He must be aware that Sec of State Baker promised the NATO borders would not move "one inch" when the Russian nukes were removed from Ukraine. What does Amb Sullivan think about that promise and what we did? Some followup there would have been helpful.