Leadership Advice to White House and NATO Leaders on War Against Ukraine from COL Jeff McCausland

Tensions rise in Ukraine as Putin says that peace talks had reached a dead end and Russia would succeed in its war against Ukraine. Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer meets with Putin. Biden has no plans to go to Ukraine, according to the White House, while his approval ratings hit an all-time low. New Zealand sends its troops, marking the first time a partner is entering the war against Ukraine. Here to help us make sense of all this is Dr. Jeffrey McCausland. Jeffrey McCausland is national security consultant for CBS News on television and radio, retired U.S. Army colonel, and author of Battle Tested. He is CEO of a leadership consulting firm, Diamond Six. Diamond Six was Jeff's radio call sign during the first Gulf War as commander of the 3rd Battalion, 17th Field Artillery, a unit of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. McCausland led 750 soldiers into Iraq to spearhead the VII Corps attack with no casualties. Welcome, Jeff. So great to have you here today. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

I have so many questions for you here today, and I wanted to start really with, uh, Karl Nehammer and his, uh, his visit with Putin. Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer met with Vladimir Putin on Monday. Becoming the first European leader to discuss Russia's invasion of Ukraine directly with Putin. And Nehammer said the meeting was tough and tense as he raised the issue of reported Russian atrocities against civilians and called for safe evacuation corridors for trapped Ukrainians. Nehammer was quoted in a statement, 'This is not a friendly visit. I have just come from Ukraine and have seen with my own eyes the immeasurable suffering caused by the Russian war of aggression, and in the past day, war of Ukraine has intensified. So president Putin insisted today that Russia would succeed in its war against Ukraine and that peace talks had reached a dead end. I'm particularly interested in, in this, Jeff, is, you know, what you know of Nehammer, and, you know, what are we to conclude about Nehammer's relationship with Putin? Is there some sort of relationship, someone one could make between what Putin's escalated responses have been and his meeting with Nehammer?

Well, first of all, it's obviously a fascinating subject when you talk about the Austrian chancellor meeting with Mr. Putin. The one thing I think we need to point out, of course, is Austria is not a NATO member, and unlike even Sweden or Finland, who are not NATO members, there seems to be a very high probability right now that Sweden and Finland might join NATO. So once again, I think it would be difficult for them for any NATO leader to actually now travel to Moscow. Many did prior to the war in an effort to find some type of a diplomatic solution. We saw President Macron of France, we saw Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, uh, go to Moscow in an effort, obviously fruitless, to find a diplomatic solution. So Nehammer is the first one, but he has that unique status of being a significant country which is not a NATO member, uh, in Europe and not a frontline state like Moldova or somewhere else. That obviously is directly involved. Clearly from this we can take a couple of things. One is, I think, any expectations that the Russians might be considering, uh, some type of a negotiation that might bring to a close these hostilities does not seem very likely. As you said, he left there not terribly optimistic about that. Second of all, of course, Mr. Putin emphasized that we're going to succeed. One has to obviously ask the obvious question: what does success for Russia look like? And at this point, they've clearly failed in their attempts to take over Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, decapitate the government, install a government in Kyiv that'll be much more amenable to what Moscow wants to do, not unlike Lukashenko perhaps in Belarus. And that has failed. And now they're repositioning forces for an upcoming offensive, which clearly is going to happen down in the Donbas region in the southeastern portion of the country. I think there's a sort of a timeline here as well, that Mr. Putin would like to see some measure of success by the 9th of May. 9th of May being the anniversary of the end of World War II and always a day that is celebrated with massive military parades and speeches in the Russian Federation. So were he successful in this offensive coming up to at least occupy the Donbas, perhaps capture Mariupol in the south and secure that land bridge that connects Russia to the Crimea. At that point, it's possible, I guess, on the 9th of May, he could declare success, perhaps say, "I'm willing to do a ceasefire, let's negotiate." But obviously, he would be negotiating from a position of great strength, occupying a significant portion of Ukrainian territory. It seems unclear to me, however, whether that would be successful or be, uh, something that the Ukrainians might find interesting.

Why is it that Nehammer was the only one that was chosen to speak one-on-one? Besides not being a NATO member, was there anything about Nehammer and the relationship with Putin that made him particularly, uh, responsible for having this one-on-one?

You know, not to my knowledge. His— my understanding of Nehammer, I don't think he's been Chancellor of Austria all that terribly long, but I really think it comes down to that not being a NATO member and not being a frontline state. That has actually a border between, uh, Russia and their particular country. Second of all, the best of my knowledge, Nehammer and the Austrians have not trumpeted some of the claims against the Russian Federation of so-called war crimes, even alluding to Mr. Putin as being a war criminal. And though that seems to be very clear to me that war crimes have in fact been committed by Russian forces, and I firmly believe, quite frankly, those are not just the aberrant behavior of renegade units, this is actually a concerted strategy and tactics to terrorize the population, we have to be clear-eyed in understanding any type of negotiations with Russia future are going to be complicated by the fact that we've identified them and Mr. Putin more particularly as a war criminal. How do you negotiate with a war criminal about anything?

Excellent. Well said. You know, I'm moving on to leaders who have visited Ukraine, and in particular Kyiv. Czech, Polish, Slovenian, UK prime ministers, and now Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, among other world leaders, have visited Ukraine since the start of the war to show their support. However, according to the White House, President Biden does not have any plans to visit Ukraine, and meanwhile, Biden's approval rating has dropped to an all-time low of 42%. According to CBS poll, and with 58% of respondents disapproving of how he's handled domestic and foreign affairs while in office. Could you tell me more about what you make of President Biden's response to the war in Ukraine?

I think President Biden's been walking kind of a tightrope, and frankly, I think any administration regardless of party would be walking the same tightrope, and that tightrope is providing the maximum material support for Ukraine for them to defend themselves against this totally uncalled-for aggression by a country that posed no national security threat to the Russian Federation, while at the same time not allowing that to tip over into a confrontation directly between the United States, NATO, and the Russian Federation, which could bring on the possibility of at least threats of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons. I think we have to be very clear-eyed Lou, that in my opinion, we are at the greatest nuclear crisis right now that the United States has faced probably since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. So that's that balancing act I think Mr. Biden has been trying to achieve. Secondly, the other thing that the administration has got to do— and I worked in the White House on the NSC staff during Kosovo, so witnessed this kind of firsthand— is how difficult it is to keep, if you will, all 30 members of the alliance, you know, singing off the same hymnal, keep everybody kind of heading in the same direction. And so far, at least ostensibly, uh, the Biden administration has been successful. I think that has surprised the Russians in terms of the cohesion of the alliance in the face of Russian, uh, Russian aggression. I think the Russians made two very, uh, awful strategic assumptions, the first being that Ukraine would fold very quickly and Russia would be successful militarily in a few days. Obviously, that was untrue. And the second one was that Russia— or that the— I'm sorry, that NATO would not be having a cohesive response. I thought a German actually summarized this well the other day when he said, you know, in a matter of a couple of weeks, uh, Russia has undermined several decades of Swedish neutrality and German pacifism all in a matter of a couple of weeks. So I think they've helped, helped the alliance stay in a pretty, pretty solid same direction. That being said, could the administration be more bold in some ways? I think they could. I think particularly providing more heavy military assistance in terms of tanks, in terms of high-altitude air defense, in terms of longer-range artillery. Doing that— this imbroglio over the MiG-29s, I think, was a faux pas on the part of not only the Biden administration, but, but the alliance as a whole. So I think there's some bolder things that the administration could do. As far as Mr. Biden's political pinholes, uh, I'm still not convinced that the vast majority of Americans, um, are dissatisfied so much with his handling of the crisis in Ukraine because they would understand the fear of a confrontation with the Russians, what that might mean for us here at home. But they are very upset about the fact that we are now having record levels of inflation here in the United States. I think I saw the Wall Street Journal estimate that we could have 8.5% inflation for the current quarter. We've seen a dramatic rise in the price of gasoline. I was out in California last week, price of gasoline almost hitting $7 a barrel. And it's without a doubt, if one looks back historically, that Americans vote their wallet. And when they see those kind of things happening, they usually blame an administration for those rises in prices, though oftentimes, at least in my experience, administrations are, you know, praised more than they deserve when the economy does well and praised more than they deserve when the economy does poorly.

I think it's brilliant what you said about the allegory to the Cuban Missile Crisis and how sensitive this situation really is, near the brink of— it could be nuclear disaster. In the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular, there were some diplomatic talks that had occurred really in the eve of disaster, and I know in your book Battle-Tested, you speak of how to really have the more of that diplomatic leadership at a very high level, and particularly you speak of, of Lincoln and his work in the Battle of Gettysburg. How is that important now, especially as Biden and other NATO leaders are part of this, uh, this, uh, war against Ukraine?

Well, I think a couple things are illustrative there, uh, if you will, and that is, you know, Lincoln was very careful, uh, as he said, to have one war at a time. And there was some chances, particularly in 1862, that the United States might go to war with the, uh, with Britain over the so-called Trent Affair. And there were clear efforts by the Confederacy to elicit support by the Brits and the French, uh, in the war, in the American Civil War. And through some pretty deft diplomatic efforts, obviously Mr. Lincoln was able to avoid that. Secondly, you know, you're right about this being an interesting to compare the Cuban Missile Crisis. Frankly, one of the worrisome things to me about this is during the Cuban Missile Crisis, of course, the primary two protagonists were, of course, John Kennedy on the one side and Mr. Khrushchev on the other side. That being said, Mr. Kennedy created a special committee of advisors called the— they called it, I think, the Executive Committee, which was a close series of advisors, military advisors, national security advisors, State Department, his brother Bobby Kennedy, who was an advisor. So he had this close group of people around him that he trusted to, to bounce ideas off and decide what they were going to do. In a similar fashion, you might say Mr. Khrushchev was hardly a singular actor. He had to respond to the Politburo. So it was much more of a committee action, even on the Russian side. One of the things I worry about in this particular case is Mr. Putin, after really being in power in Russia for 22 years— I think it's important to remember he comes to power in 2000 and has essentially been in charge for the last 22 years. Yes, there was a few years when he was prime minister, but he was still largely calling the shots. So he's a lot more of a unitary actor than John Kennedy was, Khrushchev was, or even Lincoln, who had that close group of advisors around him, as Doris Kearns Goodman describes, the so-called team of rivals. And it's that isolation of Putin to information coming in and to advice and making choice that I actually worry about a good deal. Furthermore, I think you're right in terms of looking at battle-tested, the American Civil War, and what lessons that can cast for us in the current crisis. Lincoln, when he goes to Gettysburg on the 19th of November, 1863, what he does really, I think, in a brilliant fashion, in about 2 and a half minutes, which is how long the Gettysburg Address takes, is he basically underscores what's the mission of the organization, in this case the United States, which was preserving the Union. Up until that point, beginning with his first inaugural address, the purpose of the war was to to preserve the Union. But he takes this unique opportunity after a victory to expand on that vision. And don't forget, he ends that speech then with those immortal words, "We're going to a new birth of freedom." And what he's suggesting in that is, no, clearly preserving the Union remains the mission, but we're going to tie that now to an expanded vision, which is preserving the Union and ending slavery. Those two things are inextricably linked. And he will insist in 1864 when he runs for reelection, only a year after the Gettysburg Address, that part of the platform of the Republican Party includes ending slavery, even though many senior Republicans had said, no, that's a loser, you need to drop that one and we'll pick it up after you're reelected. He said, I can't do that. At this point, over 200,000 African Americans had joined the Union Army, many having been killed or wounded, and he thought that having that occur, morally he could not back off on that particular promise. So here today, what we have is leaders that have a responsibility and a great need right now to cast a vision for the future. Mr. Zelensky, you might say, has been the best of the lot and has been almost Churchillian in describing a vision for the future and inspiring the population of Ukraine, and has carried that message now, I think, to 18 different, uh, parliaments or congresses around the world, as well as the UN Security Council. Mr. Putin has largely failed I think, except for one rally in which he appears with a concocted crowd to celebrate the annexation of Crimea, and it kind of looks like a football rally. Mr. Biden, I think, made an attempt at it and did fair in his remarks in Warsaw after his visit to Poland in trying to cast a vision that this particular war was not a war just between Ukraine and Russia over historical differences, This was really a war about values. This was a war about democracy against autocracy. I think that's something leaders need to talk about more in this particular contest, because it seems to me at least the moral clarity of this war is absolutely crystal clear. Russians have now conducted an unjust, aggressive attack on a neighboring state that did not threaten them in the least in terms of national security. They have conducted themselves in a totally unprofessional manner in violation of international law repeatedly in terms of war crimes I believe they have committed. So any individual or country that observes this to me has a pretty clear choice of, do you want to be on the side of justice or do you want to be on the side of evil? And that's a, that's a vision statement I think more leaders in the West, Mr. Biden included, need to talk about repeatedly.

Speaking of war crimes, do you expect that after the war, as you said, perhaps even in May, that there will be calls to action for a war tribunal, an international war tribunal, to bring Russian military leaders, including Putin, to justice?

No, I absolutely do, and that's already begun with the International Criminal Court. Now, quite candidly, we Americans have got to understand that's a bit awkward because our government, particularly because of opposition in the United States Congress, has never voted to be part of the International Criminal Court. We Americans, though we want to send others to the International Criminal Court for conducting war crimes in the Balkans or war crimes in Africa, don't want an American soldier appearing in front of the International Criminal Court for war crimes somewhere else. So we We have not, we have not gotten involved in that. In fact, Mr. Trump went so far as to sanction several of the justices of the International Criminal Court because of his political opposition to the court. But I think there will be continued insistence in their ongoing investigation. A colleague of mine who's an international jurist is involved to conduct investigations to identify the perpetrators, and some of them actually, uh, military officers in particular, could end up in Ukrainian hands as prisoners of war. And if that occurs, then we can see them actually being tried in the aftermath. Even beyond that, I think we could see some of them being tried in absentia. And that's what occurred already, because don't forget, back in 2014, it was a Russian anti-air defense, air defense battery that shot a missile and shot down a Malayan airliner that was traveling over Ukrainian airspace. And killed well over 200 innocent civilians. And though the Russians never allowed us access to those perpetrators, that case is ongoing and has been conducted, uh, in The Hague. And then last but not least, I think in the aftermath of this war, uh, as those trials are conducted, there might actually be then some sort of a legal effort to say that a lot of the funds of the Russian Federation that have been frozen or impounded in banks, or perhaps even assets belonging to some of the oligarchs that have been impounded in the West might end up being part and parcel of reparations being paid to individuals or to the Ukrainian government more broadly in response to this unjust and unnecessary war.

Sounds like there's a lot of players in this who may be making the wrong moves in the next week to month. What kind of suggestions would you give? Right now, New Zealand is, uh, they just sent 50 soldiers into Europe to distribute aid to Ukraine. It's the first partner-led effort, and Ukraine has sent away the German president Steinmeier because of his connections to high-level Moscow officials. How do we level this playing field? What is the endgame going to happen in your opinion?

Yeah, well, of course, you level the playing field diplomatically and militarily and economically, and diplomatically I don't think the fact that the Ukrainians have refused to host Mr. Steinmeier is going to be anything but a passing story. Yes, he is important. Yes, he's the president of Germany, but he's not— the president of Germany is largely a figurehead position. And don't forget, the other person that I'm sure would never have been welcomed in Germany would be Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor of Germany who's on the board of Gazprom and is a very close personal friend of Mrs. Putin. I doubt very seriously they would they would host him either. But our ability to broaden the number of countries diplomatically that support our efforts to support the Ukrainians and to convince the Russians to cease this war, I think, will be a part and parcel of the effort. So those countries who are particularly large ones that are sitting on the fence about this, most notably the Indians, uh, Middle Eastern countries, obviously the Chinese, more and more pressure needs to be brought to bear on them diplomatically to ensure that they make the right choice by candlelight. Economically, obviously, the sanctions will continue. We need to think through now, if there was a cessation of hostilities, what does that mean for the sanctions? I would still argue the sanctions should remain in place. And furthermore, in keeping with that diplomatic effort, the key problem with sanctions is sanctions are only as good as the weakest link. So it's not the depth of the sanctions in terms of sanctioning one more oligarch or one more member of the Duma or whatever. It's the breadth of those sanctions in terms of the number of countries that participate. So the degree that we can keep pointing out these— the egregious, uh, conduct of the Russian Federation in this war, hopefully over time will bring pressure on those countries to participate in the sanctions. And then finally, militarily, it's clear the Russian Federation is now preparing for this offensive into the Donbas. It's going to take them some time to prepare because they pulled their forces who were attacking Kyiv back to Belarus and back to Russia. These units got beat up pretty bad, and there's a widespread belief that may have taken 10 to 15% casualties— that's killed and wounded. Uh, when a unit suffers that level of casualties, we in the United States would deem them combat ineffective. So what the Russians have to do is pull those units out give them replacements, provide them additional military hardware based on what's been destroyed. The Russians may have lost up to 500 tanks already. Uh, provide them repairs on equipment that's just been worn out, replenish their stocks, particularly of fuel, water, chow, and ammo, and then reposition them around a pretty long journey to get them in the right positions to make that attack in the Donbas. That will take them some time. It's a matter of force generation, uh, probably at least a week to 10 days, and puts a real pressure on the Russian army, which is still— for the regular army— only about 325,000 troops, and they've already committed about half of that force to the war in the Ukraine. On the other side, of course, that means in this period of time it is totally incumbent upon the West, the United States especially, to expand our military assistance to the Ukrainians particularly in the area of heavier equipment— tanks, long-range artillery, high-altitude air defense— so the Ukrainians are better prepared to blunt that offensive that we know is coming. Because the character of war in the southeastern part of Ukraine will be very different than the character of war up around Kyiv. Around Kyiv, you got a lot more towns and villages which can be choke points for advancing armor, a large number of forests, which forced those armored columns into staying on the road networks that we witnessed and filmed and photographed. You get down to the Donbas, this is like, this is like going to Kansas. This is pretty wide open farmland, uh, which will allow the Russians using their armored formations to maneuver more and as a consequence make a requirement for that heavier military hardware that I mentioned before that the Ukrainians are going to need.

Enormous amounts of critical intelligence to share with the White House there about what must happen. I think those were excellent advice that you just provided. I wanted to end up this final part of the interview looking back at February 20th in history as well, and the lessons that perhaps all of us didn't learn from history in this, in the creation or the beginning of this war in February 20th. What— tell us the conditions by which this war began and Putin made this decision to commit his war crimes against Ukraine. You know, why, why were they, uh, sort of the perfect storm?

Do you see that? Well, on the one hand, I think that, you know, PhDs will be written from now until eternity, uh, about what happened at the end of the Soviet Union back in the early 1990s. And did we, by working our way through an enlarged NATO, uh, encourage animosity in the Russian Federation that ended up bringing us this confrontation? Now, the Russians will tell you categorically that's exactly what happened. I would say that's largely nonsense. That being said, one lesson we might take from that is, were there things we could have done to try to seek a different or alternative security architecture that would have offered those countries in Eastern Europe an opportunity to move towards democracy and market economies and provide them a level of security while at the same time not totally alienating or antagonizing the Russian Federation? Were the things that we could have done to better encourage the possibility of liberal democracy in the Russian Federation. We know that didn't occur, and unfortunately, a guy named Vladimir Putin comes to power as the deputy prime minister to an ailing Boris Yeltsin. And as Yeltsin becomes more and more sick, then Putin has an opportunity to take control, and that's, that's what turned out. But what really has happened, I think— they used to tell Russians this— when Russians, even long before this war, would complain to me about, well, NATO enlargement, NATO is moving east, and that is a threat to us. My response was always the same: NATO did not move east. NATO did not move east. Eastern Europe moved west. And that's an important distinction, because if you were a Pole, a Slovak, a Czech, a Hungarian, a Romanian, a Bulgarian, or in the Baltic republics at the end of the Cold War, you looked around and said, economically, politically, militarily, I've got two alternatives. I can align myself to this large place called Russia that, oh, by the way, I know a lot about because they've occupied me for the last 40 years, or I can try to align myself with Western democracies. And they made that choice. So those countries moved west. But in 2004, Mr. Putin, of course, will give that famous speech in which he says the end of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy, greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. And since then, I think he has pursued a strategy which focused on 3 things, and this is just further evidence of that strategy. And that— those points were: 1, undermine liberal democracy and U.S. leadership on the globe. Second, drive fissures between the United States and NATO, and hopefully over time undermine, if not neuterize, NATO. And number 3, regain control over what was the Russian Empire. Those areas of the former Soviet Union where particularly Russians live. And since 2004, he's pursued that strategy vigorously by interfering in our elections, interfering in European elections, interfering in the Brexit vote, uh, ordering the killing of, uh, Russians living on other countries' soil using nerve gas, like in Great Britain. In 2008, of course, he invades Georgia and occupies two provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. 2014, of course, he invades Crimea and occupies Crimea in Ukraine, as well as fomenting this ongoing rebellion in the eastern provinces, which since 2014 has resulted in 14,000, 14,000 dead Ukrainians. And over time, of course, Putin was very more and more adamant about what he called Russkiy Mir, which means in Russian, the Russian world. I've got to achieve the Russian world. These people are the so-called near abroad. Where there are Russians, there is Russia, and that is our responsibility. And so now this particular unjust war, I think, is just the latest, perhaps largest, but latest iteration of that particular strategy. I think it's imperative for us to understand that because even if this war was to end tomorrow afternoon, don't, don't forget that's where he's coming from. And I firmly believe if he remains in power and lives long enough, he would come back and attempt to continue to pursue that strategy in another form in a couple of years.

That's brilliant. I mean, in your book Battle Tested, you say, in order to be a truly effective leader, it is necessary to learn as much as possible from the examples of history, the disasters as well as the triumphs. You've given us a lot today to learn on that. And I wonder if you could tell us just in a moment, or even just in sort of a statement or a few statements, what does that triumph look like in terms of the 3D chess tournament we have going on here for our leaders who really must triumph for Western civilization to continue in its democracy and for freedom itself?

Well, I think first of all, we need to recognize that at this point we are at a major inflection point in our history. You know, if you go back historically, I believe every 75 years roughly the United States has a major inflection point that lasts about 5 years. And if you look back, 1783, of course, we become a country, but it's about 5 years until we get a Constitution. And if you add 75 years to that, you're at the American Civil War. Well, that takes about 5 years and we're a different country in 1865 than we were in 1860. And if you add 75 years to that, well, you're at 1940. Well, that's kind of an inflection point, and we go from being an isolated country to the world's global superpower in 5 years. And if you add 75 years to that, well, then you're at 2020, and here we are. And I think what we've seen now in the last couple of years is we have, uh, major challenges and inflection in terms of the economic impact of the pandemic the pandemic itself in terms of the health of Americans and the death of many Americans. Sadly, within our society, I would not call it so much polarization, but a lack of trust in institutions that's grown over time we need to repair. And now we have this external challenge that will be sustained for a long period of time. You know, in the 20th century, we fought wars against fascism and communism. We need to understand as Americans with our allies around the world, European and others, the 21st century, at least for the first half of it, is going to be some kind of a confrontation between autocracies and democracies as exemplified not only by the Russian Federation but obviously by the Chinese. We need to gird ourselves for that particular inflection point and what we have to do to preserve freedom.

Wow, Colonel Koslyn, it's a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Louis Carter, great pleasure and thank you for having me.