ExclusiveFormer Intelligence Officer: The Russia Ukraine War is a Wake-up Call for Europe | James Fanell

Hi, welcome to Focus Talk. The Russia-Ukraine war has been going on for over a month. It has already had major impacts on the whole world. Today, we invite Captain James Fennell, former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Navy, to share with us his insights about the cause of the war and its impact. Hi, James. It's great to have you back with us. Hi, Jenny. It's great to be with you again. Thank you. Thank you. So, James, you're in Europe, so I wanted to first ask you, in general, what are European people's reaction to this war? I think the war that Putin has invaded Ukraine has really been a wake-up call for the European Union and the NATO members. I think for several years, maybe a few decades now, there has been this kind of thinking that things wouldn't really go bad and that Russia was something that they were having economic interdependence with the sale of oil and gas, and that while Putin had done some bad things, that they didn't really believe that he would do something to this level in terms of invading another country and the death and destruction that he's levied over the last month and a half. Yeah, you mentioned NATO and all that. So let's go right into this question. Many wonder what caused the war. Some think that the NATO expansion is an important factor and that it made Russia feel that its national security is under threat. Some say that Putin has a greater Russian empire dream that he wants to pursue. So what are your thoughts on this? Well, there's no question that in the 22 years that Putin's been in power in Russia, that he has been working on an effort to rebuild what he believes is the Russian empire. And if you go back to July 12th of 2021, he wrote an article, a 5,000 word article that was entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. And he states that Russia and the Ukrainians are one people. And so that was a year, just about a year ago, that he told us what he thought. Now, we know from 2014 that he already implemented that when he took Crimea. And so Putin has in his own mind, a vision of this greater historic Rus or Russia. And he seems to be pursuing that. And it's beyond just a kind of restoration of the old Soviet empire in many ways. At least that's what he says. And so I think the idea that NATO caused this, I don't buy that. I think NATO had some role and responsibilities, and so did America in terms of as a member of NATO, in not deterring Putin. We didn't arm ourselves up, we didn't deter him, and we didn't send the right signals. In January 24th, President Biden was asked, what would you do if Putin invaded the Ukraine? And he said, well, if it's a minor incursion, maybe some sanctions. Well, that's not deterrence. And so it's not an either or. But clearly, Putin is the aggressor. Clearly, Putin is implementing a strategic grand vision that he has. And part of it is linked up with the PRC, the People's Republic of China, and Xi's great rejuvenation, which is to separate out and destroy America and the West. And one of the ways to do that is to lash up with Russia. And now, you have people talking about the economy and the currency and moving away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency. And now you have just in the last 24 or 48 hours, Putin saying, if you want my oil, then you have to pay me in rubles. China is now backing up Russia in terms of economic support and military support. So I think it's very clear that Russia and China now are working together to destroy the United States and the world order, because it has implications and other thoughts for some people. But the freedom and the liberty that came out of the end of World War II that said that people could live in freedom and democracy in the nations that they lived in, and not have to worry about other nations controlling them, that those concepts, the post World War II freedom and prosperity that the world enjoyed, are being put under a severe test right now by Putin's invasion of the Ukraine and his support from Xi Jinping and China. You mentioned China. So let's talk a bit more about China's role in all this. On one hand, the West believed that they were behind this and they were supporting Russia's invasion. But on the other hand, the West also wants China to play a mediator role in all of this. So what do you think is China's or the Chinese Communist Party's true stance on this? And do you think that they will be the mediator? I think it's a fool's errand to ask the People's Republic of China to be a mediator in a war that Russia launched into Europe, in Eastern Europe, on the doorstep of NATO. That's not China's area of responsibility. It's not their area of influence. And so the idea that you'd ask somebody and ask a nation that's been openly hostile to the West, openly supportive of Putin, even though they play diplomatic word games and they have the Ministry of Foreign Affairs speak out of one side of their mouth while their actions and their policies are speaking out of the other side of their mouth. And we know behind closed doors that we just had Lazarov and Wang Yi, the foreign minister, meet again or meet in China. These are coordinations. You remember on the 4th of February, Putin went to China and had a declaration, a joint statement with Xi Xi Jinping on their condemnation of NATO expansionism. So there is no question that China and Russia are in an alliance. And so any Western leader that would say, well, we need to ask China to help us resolve this is simply foolish and ignorant or even worse. And I won't speculate any further, but it's not an option that's realistic. Now, the West is trying to, especially the United States, is trying to pressure the CCP not to support Russia militarily or economically. And they tell the CCP there will be huge consequences. And I think the CCP sees all the sanctions that were put on Russia. So do you think the pressure from the United States and the West would somehow change the CCP's behavior? Well, the pressures that we put on are sanctions against oligarchs and sanctions against the Russian people in large sense. But the one area of the sanctions that hasn't occurred is against the oil. Even the SWIFT sanctions kicking Russia off the SWIFT system, the financial banking system, didn't apply to oil sales. And so the price of oil continues to be very high. And it's felt here in Europe, just like in America. And that high oil price at over $100 a barrel, that is funding the Russian invasion, funded its buildup and the ability for Russia to invade. So if this administration really wants to stop the Russian war machine, as the leaders in the Ukraine have said, you have to drive down the price of oil so that Putin won't have that money to spend on its military. And China is just filling in the voids wherever those sanctions are. And China's already been working under sanctions from the United States since the Trump administration. We're in phase, quote, unquote, phase one of those tariffs that President Trump implemented onto China. They were supposed to go to phase two and beyond. And the Biden administration has not done that. So in all respects, the Biden administration is asking China to do something that's not clearly in their strategic interest, and is ignorant in the idea that these sanctions have had any effect on China. And you can ask, you can just look at another practical example. We had U.S. leaders under the Obama administration and the Clinton administration that were very supportive of the six party talks on the peninsula. And those didn't really help at all, as we've seen over the last month and a half with what Kim Jong Un is doing with testing of his ballistic missile and nuclear capable ballistic missiles. So the idea that China is an interlocutor to help bring regional peace and stability is not supported by any empirical facts. But the pressure from the West, do you think this pressure will keep the CCP at bay, or at least refrain them from providing further support to Russia? I do not think that the pressure is having any impact on China. We may see it in the press releases from the Chinese Communist Party and mouthpieces like People's Daily and Xinhua and Global Times, but that's not really affecting what's happening, as we say in the Navy, at the deck plate. Oil and gas are being traded from Russia to China. Money is being transferred from China to Russia to prop up their war machine. Wheat and grains will be sold from Russia to China, and that money from China will go back to Russia to prop up their war machine. And we don't have any more details, but I am convinced that now China is also, in terms of supplying Russia with armaments where they're needed in niche areas, China will do that as well. So what do you think the world leaders should do about CCP's involvement in all of this? They should implement updated and newer, hard levels of sanctions against the People's Republic of China, and start by passing legislation that moves American companies, especially investment funds like BlackRock, from investing American taxpayer dollars into China's market. We need to ramp up the effort to decouple our economies from China and make them really feel that. Do you think the Biden administration's attention somehow was distracted by this Russia-Ukraine war, so they could not focus on the CCP? I think right now that they are in some sense distracted, but I think in another way, it's part of a larger approach that this administration is taking, which is the same as the Obama administration, because 90% of the people, as President Obama said, 90% of the people in the Biden administration are from the Obama administration. And so there's a predilection from this idea of leading from behind, that the United States is now a spent world power, and that we need to manage our decline as China rises. And so I think that there's great risk right now. You just saw in the last week, the White House submitted their defense budget, and for the first time ever, or not the first time ever, but they submitted their defense budget, which will decline the size of the United States Navy at the most critical juncture, where the United States Navy should be growing dramatically. This administration submitted a that will bring the size of the United States Navy down from 297 ships to 280 ships, even though over the last decade, we've been talking about how we needed to be at 350, 355, or people like me have argued that we should be at 450 or 500. And so this is critically important to understand that we have an administration that's trying to manage what they perceive as a and to manage America's some kind of survival in a new world order. So overall, do you think the CCP will gain from the Russia-Ukraine situation or lose? Particularly, some people said that, oh, at least this war may be a deterrence to CCP's, especially to Xi Jinping's ambition to take Taiwan by force. What do you think? Yeah, I'm following those arguments. And so on one hand, there's people that say, because of the struggle that the Russian army has had in taking even one major city in the Ukraine, that this is a wake up call for Xi and the Central Military Commission and the PLA to understand how difficult it would be to take Taiwan. And in one sense, that's true. On the other hand, Xi and the Central Military Commission and the leaders of their services will be learning from this. They have a close military relationship with Russia, so they'll be privy to details that you and I won't see. And they'll understand what are the weaknesses of Western-trained, NATO-trained forces that we have in the Ukraine and where the weaknesses and gaps in how the West defends itself or fights. And so I think there's two sides to this. And I think I err on the side that Xi and the Central Military Commission are taking notes, they're learning. And like they've done over the last 20, 25 years, they're skipping technology. We call skip echelon. So they don't have to learn all the same mistakes that we've learned through fighting in other areas. They will take those lessons that they see others conduct, and they will incorporate that into the PLA doctrine. And so I think there's a good chance that the Chinese will be even more capable in any invasion that they would launch against Taiwan because they will have learned some of the critical lessons. Yeah, very true. I agree. They're probably studying the West defense in this whole situation. Now, as you said, Russia and the CCP now forming some kind of a strategic alliance. Certainly, they're closer than they were ever before. But some argue that it's the mistake of America's foreign policy over the past years that pushed Russia into the CCP's arms. What are your thoughts? Well, I think we can, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at all the press over the Trump administration that was literally on a daily basis for four years, talking about Russian collusion and the evils of Russia. I'm no pleader for Russia. I spent most of my Navy career fighting communism. And I started off with fighting the Soviet Union and tracking Soviet ballistic missile submarines. So my focus is on defeating Russia and communism and Chinese communism. But the fact of the matter is, our approach to Russia, with the rise of China over the last two decades, we have, I think, in a strategic sense, failed to reach out to Russia in a way that we could try to leverage them as the same way that Kissinger tried to leverage China against the Soviet Union. I'm not saying it would have worked, but I think we didn't even try it. And it was all wrapped up in domestic politics here in the United States that prevented us from having those kind of abilities to make sensitive, you know, clandestine reaching out that Trump maybe could have done or even before that. But we weren't interested in doing that. And so we, in essence, drove Russia and China together. And it's been a very unfortunate outcome, because it seems to me that they're very aligned right now. And I know that many of the experts have even antagonisms towards each other, and therefore they're never going to be close. And that may be true in 50 years. But right now, what matters is what we're seeing, and China and Russia are working together to defeat the United States of America and our Western allies. Now, let's talk a little bit about Europe. Some argue even if the war is not over yet, there's already a major impact on Europe, both politically and economically. What are your thoughts on that end? Well, I live in Switzerland, eastern Switzerland, and already we're seeing Ukrainian refugees flow into Switzerland. My wife's a schoolteacher. She's got Ukrainian students at our school now. So the impact of the refugee status, which I think is over six million, maybe I'm a little bit behind it, maybe even higher. So six million people flowing out of the Ukraine into Europe is obviously a humanitarian crisis. It's also, you know, the idea that now that NATO nations are recognizing that they need to pay more for their own defense is something that, you know, many of us wish they would have recognized years ago, even more than before the Trump administration, earlier than the Trump administration, but certainly after he called them out in public and they didn't do it. And now all of a sudden, it seems to be a priority. Gas prices, food prices are dramatically rising as global inflation comes. And so I think Europe right now is in a really critical juncture on how they're going to respond to this. And I think one of the things that Russia and Putin have wanted is to drive a wedge between the United States and the EU and NATO. And so this is another way to do that, as you see the French leader and, you know, the German leaders talk about, you know, at least before this current chancellor in Germany, but Merkel and Macron talking about, you know, doing things on their own outside of the United States. And so that was one of the goals of Putin, was to drive a wedge and separate the United States and Europe. And that's not a good thing either. What do you think of this energy independence thing that Europe is facing? Because now they're relying a lot on Russia's energy, but Putin said you have to pay by ruble. And if you don't, we're going to cut the supply. How are they going to deal with the situation? Well, the Germans already this week have come out and said to their people that you're now going to have to think about rationing gas. Think about that. Rationing gas in Europe and in Germany, not heard, not spoken about since 80 years ago, since World War II. And what's incredible to me, I was in Germany, I was in Hamburg in January speaking at their defense college. And every German I talked to, I was there to talk about China. But every German citizen and military member and government official that I spoke with, I asked, why did you shut down all of your nuclear energy power plants? Why are you doing that when you know that you're going to be now 100 percent reliant upon Russian oil for your warmth in the winter? And it gets quite cold up there in northern Germany. And the answer that I got from almost everyone was we don't really believe that Putin would ever cut off our oil. And so I took that answer and I applied it to my lifetime and experience in Asia with the people that said, I really don't think that China will take Hong Kong. I really don't think China will put one million people in prison camps and concentration camps in Xinjiang. I don't think China will ever try to invade Taiwan. There is this mindset amongst the elites in America's defense community and Taiwan and in Europe's and in Japan's and in India's that all seem to want to, you know, reflexively say, I don't think this will happen. And then it's happened. And so I think there's really a major lesson here. It's the lesson that we learned in World War Two and World War One, which is to say, there are nations that hate us. There are nations that hate the way we think and operate, and they will do whatever it takes to get what they want. And if you think that just by having a trade deal over oil, you give me oil and I give you, you know, euros. If you give me wheat, I'll give you money. If I give you this, you'll give me that. If you have a McDonald's in Moscow, there won't be a war. This is retarded. This is this thinking that's been promoted for the last 50 years in Western defense and security circles in the think tanks in Washington, D.C. has got to stop because it's clearly wrong. It's clearly failed. And this idea that we're going to defend ourselves by becoming more entangled with an adversary just doesn't work. And it's led to war, and it's led to six million people being displaced, and it's led to tens of thousands of people being killed. It's wrong. It's immoral. So where do you see this war headed? Do you think it will end soon? I think right now that Putin is probably going to try to consolidate his military adventures and try to take the two regions, Donetsk and Luhansk, and keep those, maybe even go as far as the Dnieper River and consolidate everything that he's gained over the Sea of Azov from Mariupol all the way through. And what that essentially would do is give him control of that entire Sea of Azov and essentially threaten the last remaining port of what would be a new Ukraine, which would be west of the Dnieper River, and that port is Odessa. And like we saw Putin do since the Crimea War of 2014, what he essentially did is he was using the Russian Navy to essentially strangle the Ukrainian ability to use the Sea of Azov, not completely, but largely in many ways. And I think he could try to do the same thing against Odessa, which would essentially strangle Ukraine from having any maritime capacity to offload their products from the wheat and other things that they have in that half of the country. I think that's what he may try to do. But many people feel that Putin has already lost the war on the strategic level. So do you think he still has the upper hand in terms of this war and the negotiation? Well, it depends on what you define as strategic. If you define it from the western Brussels, Washington, D.C. perspective, then yes, he's lost it because everyone's angry with Putin. Everybody is condemning him, isolating him. But if you have a secret agenda with Xi Jinping, your brother, in Beijing, which is to create a new economic system whereby the world's reserve currencies are the RMB or maybe the ruble, but most likely the RMB, all of a sudden, now you say maybe they won. Maybe they've created a new framework that has destroyed the value of the U.S. dollar and taken the world off of the dollar as the main currency of the world. For instance, we saw Saudi Arabia said that they're considering allowing China to buy their oil with RMB. This would be unprecedented. So there is another side to this, which is to say that Putin and Russia and Xi and the PRC are actually strategically in a better position because they've broken America's influence and structure in the system, the Bretton Woods agreement and accords from post-World War II, that they've broken that. It's kind of been a glass egg, and it's been crushed now because of the reactions from this administration. Okay. So lastly, on the Asia side, we see that the Russia-Ukraine war also has impact there. We see that Japan is seriously considering rewriting its constitution. We see the North Korean doing this long-range missile testing. And of course, the Taiwan Strait situation, everyone is worried about it. So overall, what are your thoughts about the impacts in the East Asia area? I think it's very important, the things that you just mentioned, what China is doing, where they're active, what we're seeing on the Korean Peninsula, the increased operations around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. We've got reports of China's new security agreement with the Solomon Islands. So now that at the request of the Solomon Islands Prime Minister, Chinese warships and Chinese military can come into that South Pacific nation, which is a fulfillment of what the Chinese told us in 2017 with their three blue economic corridors, one of them heading out into the South Pacific, which is an extension of the Belt and Road. We see China's operations around Australia and their threats to Australia last July, two intelligence collection ships operating off of an observing exercise, Talibans and Sabre. Then just a month and a half ago, you had a four-ship Chinese surface action group operating near the Torres Strait, which separates Northern Australia, Darwin, from Indonesia. And one of those frigates in that four-ship group lased an Australian P-8 surveillance aircraft. It's a very volatile action, could be considered an act of war in some cases. So you have a very aggressive China operating inside the Indo-Pacific right now. Since the COVID, they've kind of pulled back from operating in the Mediterranean, the Baltic and other areas, and they've really expanded their operations into the Pacific. And so I think what you're seeing is kind of a coordinated effort between what Russia's doing and then Xi being able to push out and expand his influence of the PRC in pursuit of their great rejuvenation. So these are not isolated, independent actions. I think Xi is purposefully aware of what's happening, and he's adjusting his operations in coordination with Putin. We know that Putin wanted to do the invasion earlier, and Xi asked Putin and Russia to delay it until after the Winter Olympics in Beijing. So I think it's very clear that what we're seeing is an aggression from both of these nations to expand and to take what they believe in their minds is their territory. I guess the South China Sea or the East Asia, these could be a more dangerous area, or the next area that could have dangerous things happening. Correct. It's very possible, and we need to be very aware of that. I will say, to give some credit to this administration, they've been very active in terms of naval operations in the South China Sea and the first island chain in the Philippine Sea over the last year. I think that's good. But as I said earlier in our discussion, the budget submission that just came in this last week will actually reduce the size of the United States Navy from 297 ships to 280. So last year in 2021, the PLA Navy commissioned 22 warships. The United States commissioned just three, and two of those were small littoral combat ships. So that's a seven to one ratio. Previous year, it was five to one. Previous years going back, probably a half a decade, we're five to one or four to one. So what we're actually seeing is the Chinese are increasing their production compared to ours. And now we submit a budget that says we're going to decrease our production. It's unfathomable how this could be occurring. And they're using buzz terms like integrated defense. It's a classic Washington, D.C., Beltway, Pentagon phrase, integrated defense, which means we'll have less ships to do more tasking. And so it's a recipe for disaster if we don't turn this around. Yeah, yeah. So CCP, I think it's still the biggest threat. And really, we need all the determination and all the power that we have to counter that. I agree. And I think we talked about some of the lessons learned here. Let's just be honest, there's a huge lesson for Taiwan in this entire Russian invasion of Ukraine. And I'm glad to see some of it starting to take action in Taiwan, but it needs to be accelerated. There needs to be a massive increase in Taiwan's defense budget. There needs to be a call up of a civil defense force. There needs to be an arming of a citizenry. There needs to be this mindset that if the PRC invades Taiwan, that their only survival is if every citizen is willing to fight for their country. And before this invasion, those were topics that were kind of taboo or became politicized in Taiwan. And my recommendation to all political parties in Taiwan is to put aside your domestic concerns and realize that you'll be debating and having domestic fights over something that'll be irrelevant because you'll all be in prison camps for the PRC. Very, very important advice. I have a guest last night who actually gave out the same advice to Taiwan people. So thank you so much for sharing with us your insights on this important situation. Thank you, Jenny. Well, thank you for watching Focus Talk. We'll see you next time.