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Mar 28 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Really grateful for the opportunity to join @Morning_Joe this morning. Excellent conversation on Ukraine with @McFaul @stavridisj @EdwardGLuce @JoeNBC & @morningmika. Genuine props for keeping the conversation on the substance & significance of the Biden speech this weekend.
Mika mentioned that today was her father's birthday. I used to have lunch with him every so often and we would have these wide-ranging discussions about the world but in the end, he always placed things in a historic and strategic concept.
As a historian of the NSC, I'd rank him as the best strategic thinker to ever hold the job of national security advisor precisely because he would always take two steps back from the headlines and focus on the big picture, what really mattered long term.
Couldn't help but think that after a weekend of hyperventilating over one comment Biden made (for which Biden ought to be commended, btw) today's discussion would have pleased Zbig...as would have Biden's performance this weekend and throughout this crisis.

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More from @djrothkopf

David Rothkopf Profile picture
Mar 28
What an embarrassing display by the White House press corps. Over and over and over they asked the president about his comment that Putin should not remain in power. He said he was expressing his moral outrage and not signaling a policy change. His answer could not be clearer.
But they did not want an answer. They did not want to accept the story at its face value. They wanted a controversy. Somehow they seemed to feel that it was more important to badger @POTUS over nine words that expressed the view of every sentient moral being on the planet...
...than it was to focus on the tens of thousands of deaths caused by Putin. Somehow they felt that the story was how the president might have hurt the feelings of a war criminal rather than it being that we finally had a president who would call out Putin and stand up to him.
Read 15 tweets
David Rothkopf Profile picture
Mar 27
Brief, cool-headed, foreign policy analysis on why the President saying Putin has got to go is not a problem.
1.) It's true. So long as Putin is at the helm in Russia, the country will be isolated and its people will needlessly suffer.
2.) Offending a sociopathic mass-murderer who has serially violated internationally law, committed countless war crimes and crimes against humanity, and has the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents on his hands, is not actually the wrong thing to do.
3.) No, seriously, what is he going to do that he has not already done? (And please, he is not going to escalate the war because Biden called for him to go when countless others have done so, called him a war criminal, and worse.) He's not that thin skinned.
Read 7 tweets
David Rothkopf Profile picture
Mar 26
Naturally, much press attention is being devoted to Biden's final remark. First, it shouldn't distract from the historical significance of the speech. We're a watershed in history. Biden described the stakes well & is correct that this will be the defining struggle of our times.
Next, Russian "outrage" at the remark is transparent, hypocritical & they would have found reason for outrage no matter what Biden said. They are serially committed war crimes against an innocent neighbor. They have attacked American democracy directly.
They have actually tried to choose who America's leader was and depose the leader of Ukraine. They have no moral standing to make any criticism of Biden whatsoever. Finally, while Biden's final comment, that Putin has to go, may have distracted from the foreign policy thrust...
Read 5 tweets
David Rothkopf Profile picture
Mar 26
President Biden's historic speech will be seen as defining a line in history, a moment when the world was once again formally divided between the forces of democracy and those of autocracy, between those who value freedom and those who fear it.
It was resonant because it echoed the past. It was resonant because not far from where the President spoke, the brutality of the enemy we are facing, the stakes in this battle and the courage of those we fight alongside were all being made so clear in Ukraine.
But it was also resonant for Americans because unlike in the past, we know the dividing line about which @POTUS spoke cuts through our country like a knife. The forces of authoritarianism have already attacked our democracy and continue to do so.
Read 13 tweets
David Rothkopf Profile picture
Mar 26
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has revealed a geopolitical landscape quite different from that officials and many experts thought was in place. On the one hand, as many have noted, the Atlantic alliance has come together and is now more unified than in decades.
There are countries that have indicated that within that alliance that they are less reliable and more sympathetic to Russia, like Hungary. Next, Russia and China have revealed they are committed to a close working partnership.
China may be ill at ease with some of the conduct of this war but has committed to assisting Russia. Both Xi and Putin see the U.S. as a threat to their ambitions and their desire to counter U.S. influence is one of the primary motivations behind the partnership.
Read 18 tweets
David Rothkopf Profile picture
Mar 25
Before the invasion began, it looked like there were a couple possibilities for the Russians, strengthen claims to Donbas, Luhansk, Crimea or expand them westward possibly to Dnieper or go for all of Ukraine, take Kiev and decapitate the government.
They tried the last option, the big one, and are failing. Now there are rumblings they may fall back to the least ambitious option--after having devastated Ukraine and their own army. If they do, and it's a way out for Ukraine...well, that's up to Ukraine.
But, by any other metric it will have been a failure, a black eye for Russia, the economic consequences of sanctions and the war itself will take many years from which to recover and even if Ukraine cedes those territories, it can be a win for Kiev and Zelenskyy.
Read 6 tweets

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