 and welcome to World of Books. I am Nihaila Stoops, and I'm hosting this talk show on books from my home in Honolua Maui. The war in Ukraine has worldwide consequences, and we all wonder when and how it will end. But to forecast the future, we must understand the past. This is why today we will discuss Marvin Kelb's book, Imperial Gamble, because it offers an excellent account of Ukrainian history up until the annexation of Crimea by Russia. My guest today is Dallas Thompson. He is a retired Air Force Major General. He is an author and commentator on national security and defense issues. And I would need about half the time allotted to the show to recite all the medals, awards, and all the accomplishments that Dallas had in his career. So Dallas, I feel so privileged to have you here today and to be able to pick your brains on this topic. Thanks, Mahaila. That was very kind. That was very kind of you. Well, thank you. So let's dive into it. On August 24th, 1991, Ukraine declares its independence from USSR and outlaws the Communist Party. According to Marvin Kelb, Ukraine has not find its way out of an impasse between intolerable communism and unachievable capitalism. So notwithstanding the war, where do you think that Ukraine is right now? Is it a democracy? Is it a free market economy? And if you could tell me why you think it's a yes or a no? Well, seven years ago when Mr. Kelb wrote this book, he clearly did not think they were idle. Petro Poroshenko was still the president. Very much like Russia itself, Ukraine was beleaguered with corruption, participation of oligarchs in the government and the economy. And there was much reason. And he had much doubt in 2015 when the book was published that Ukraine would ever rise to the level of being a functional democracy that could in any way be considered for either EU or NATO membership. I read the book when it first came out. So late 2015, early 2016. And I told you, I just re-read it again in preparation for our discussion. And one of the things that struck me is, I wonder how much Mr. Kelb's opinions would be changed now. Can I state that Ukraine is a fully functional democracy and a completely uncorrupt capitalist economy? No, I don't think so. I don't think anybody believes that. I do believe that since Poroshenko was president, that they have made tremendous advantages that should be taken into account when we discuss the current situation with Russia and Ukraine. In other words, what I'm saying, Mr. Kelb wrote this book through a lens that is seven years old. And I think one of the things we need to appreciate is how much things have changed in those seven years. You know, I find this book, even if it was written seven years ago, there was a lot of information that was very valuable, first of all. It's almost like an excellent textbook to prepare any experts in this area of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. And it also occurred to me that this book is, there are so many issues that kind of repeat themselves. So that's why, you know, I feel like history repeats itself. It's nothing new what we see with the war in Ukraine right now in a way. And the question that Marvin Kelb put seven years ago, if what's happening with Ukraine is just Vladimir Putin's plan or is it Russia's plan? Is actually Vladimir Putin a reflection of Russia? Well, that issue applies today as well as we see things unfolding in Ukraine. And as we see various experts come up with solutions to the crisis. I think Mr. Kelb would agree that what we're seeing today is merely a continuation of what happened. Actually, it's a continuation of what began in Georgia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008. And when Putin realized that he could cement those or freeze those conflicts in his favor, Crimea in 2014 was a relatively, as Kelb describes it, was a relatively easy gamble for him. You asked about whether this is Putin's plan or Russia's plan. If you believe what Kelb writes and if you believe what I think most, there's very few Soviet or Russian experts anymore, but the people that do have their ear to this, they would say that Russia and Putin are the same thing, that this is wholly Putin's Russia and that this is happening primarily, if not solely, because of Putin's will and Putin's very deeply held desire to reconstitute not the Soviet Union, but the former Russian empire. And what we see unfolding, I think, is a continuation after a strategic pause is a continuation of what he began in Crimea and then later in the Donbass, in Luhansk and the other breakaway republic in the East. So what do you think it's next? We know and we've discussed prior to the show that there are some hot areas already that there's probability that this conflict in Ukraine is not gonna stay just in Ukraine. So what's next? Any number of things. Putin's pretext to most of his actions have been to protect Russian speaking peoples that fell into other countries, other governments, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That would include NATO members, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. It would include the breakaway area of Moldova, Transnistria. It would include Moldova itself. It could include a move against the O-blast or the Kaliningrad O-blast between Poland and Lithuania. Lithuania has attempted to enforce EU sanctions by limiting Russian imports into Kaliningrad. That was a red line for the Russians for Putin. I understand Lithuania has since backed down to a degree, but any of these, Putin creates the pretext on his own. There's no limit, frankly, to what he could declare as an irritant or a reason to go to war. So he's long wanted to control the south of Ukraine for the warm water ports, continuing to the east from Odessa, if they could reach Odessa, I'm sorry, to the west, into Transnistria and Moldova is one possibility. A land bridge to Kaliningrad from Belarus through Lithuania into Kaliningrad is another. The populations of the Baltic states, I believe I'm not sure which goes with which, but are as high as 28% Russian speakers and one 23% Russian speakers and another, and I think 8% in the third. There's a distinct possibility that this would be the most dangerous for him because it would, on paper and in theory, and by treaty, it would trip an Article V response from all of NATO if they were to go into any of the Baltic states. But we know that his plan has been thwarted. He originally planned to go into Kiev, decapitate the existing government and replace it with a puppet government due to the Russians incompetence and the Ukrainians' bravery and resolve that was thwarted. So now he's working on the east and the Donbas and in the south. So, in my opinion, the most likely is to solidify those gains, perhaps Tecodesa, Landlok, Ukraine, maybe continue further west into Transnistria and Modova. So according to the author, under USSR or during USSR ruling, there were 186 different nationalities. That all had the right to self-determination with only one condition, and that condition was that they were all subservient to the Communist Party. There's no more Communist Party of sorts, but it seems like that subservience is still expected from these countries and these nations. And my question to you is, what really makes national identity? It's cultural, is it location-related? Is it religious-based? How far back does one have to go to accurately determine national identity? Well, that's a great question and the answer is I don't know. I mean, you can look at our own country and we've only been around a little over 200 years and we pride ourselves on being a melting pot. So what is our identity? We're, there's no singular religion, there's no singular race, there's no singular ethnicity of any kind. But even though that's the truth, we have found for the most part, a way to describe ourselves and see ourselves as being part of this experiment, as being America. Mr. Kal does, as you talked about, Mahila, the first part of the book is an outstanding history of the region and the intertwining of Ukrainian and Russian and Belarus and all of the Slavic nations and how they view Kiev on one hand as the originator of the Russian Empire. They view Crimea as the soul or the heart of the Orthodox Church because that's where Vladimir I was baptized, the first Russian Tsar to be baptized in the Orthodox Church. So if you have, if the question is, is that your national identity has to be determined by centuries of homogenation of race, religion and so forth, then there would be no American identity. So my point to you is, why do the Ukrainians, why are they any less able to determine their identity and their future than the United States was 200 and some years ago? I think the answer to that question lies with the Ukrainians. Mr. Kal, again, does a great job of describing the difference between the West of the country and the East. In language, more Russian speakers are in the East, more Western looking Ukrainians live in the West. That's been that way apparently since the country began, even before while it was still a part of the Russian Empire, while it was a Soviet Republic. I don't see that changing. So maybe the future lies somewhere in acknowledging the difference between those two regions and accepting those and providing accommodation to both if there's going to be a single unified Ukraine. But to bottom line, to answer your question, I think it's for the Ukrainians to tell us what their national identity is. It's definitely a very loaded question. And I have to say that as an immigrant myself, I also ask myself, I am an American citizen, but I was born in Romania and I lived there until the age of 26. And sometimes I feel more American, sometimes I feel more Romanian and I can't quite define it. Well, so you mentioned article five of NATO. And what's something very interesting in the book is that the author points out its ambiguity, that it is purposefully ambiguous as to give an American president all the options and not draw US into the war. So looking at that and knowing what's happening in Ukraine right now, do you feel that NATO and US and European Union have done enough to support Ukraine? That's a loaded question too. If you listen to recent Supreme Allied Commanders of Europe, like Jim Stavridis or Phil Breedlove, they would say no. That there were things that we could have done early that would have been more demonstrative, that would clearly have given Russia pause and we have chosen instead to incrementalize our support over time with, and it's hard to say, looking at this amount of money, it's insulting to say it's drips and drabs, but by comparison, it has come piecemeal. A military professional would have told you had they been asked that if there had been a more demonstrative commitment early in the conflict that not only could lives been saved, the refugee problem could have been not eliminated but ameliorated to some degree. Now, having said that, are we doing enough? It may well be. When you talked about Article 5, Ukraine's not a NATO member, Article 5 doesn't apply, but if this conflict or the next one, if Putin achieves his aims or significant objectives in Ukraine, there's no reason to believe, and very respected Russian analysts believe that there's every reason that Putin is successful, that he will continue to escalate and press on, even if he has to take a strategic pause like he did between 2015 and this past February. So the real challenge, and Mr. Kalb, frankly, in the book, Nehala, he does not give NATO or American leadership very much credit. Frankly, he called into question whether any American president would honor Article 5 in Europe, in the NATO Article 5 Charter, if it involved conflict with Russia. I found that very interesting that, and he, now again, this was written in 2015 or was published in 15, but he made somewhat a blanket, it was ambiguous so that no American president would ever have to honor it. I hope that's not true. I hope when we sign a treaty and the treaties ratified by the Senate that we stick to our treaty obligations, but I'm not a politician. Yeah, it makes me wonder if this article is ambiguous and we don't have any certainty that NATO would jump into the defense of one of its members, then why would anybody would do anything for a country that is not a member yet, even if obviously one of the contention issues and supposedly one of the biggest concerns coming from Russia is that Ukraine may become a NATO member. Which is a red line for Putin, obviously. It was a red line in Georgia. In 2007, I visited Tbilisi with a group of senior officers and we had the opportunity to meet the equivalent of the chairman of their Joint Chiefs of Staff, who happened to be a major. The president, Mikhail Shalikashvili, had fired all the old Soviet senior officers and he had stalled this Georgian major to be the chair of the general staff. When we met him in his office and sitting around his conference table, behind his desk were two flags. One was the NATO flag, the other was the EU flag. Less than a year later, Russia invaded. When Poroshenko in late 14 revived the notion that Ukraine would seek eventual NATO membership, again, that was a red line for Putin. So, but Kalb also describes the idea that Russia had somehow been left out of this new world order after the fall of the Soviet Union and that NATO had on its own expanded eastward and Russia didn't have a vote in the matter. And I found that interesting the way he portrayed it as if NATO was out selling membership tickets to the former Warsaw Pact countries when in fact it was the opposite, it was all the Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltic Soviet republics that were beating down NATO's door, looking to join for just that very Article V protection purpose. So, Kalb takes Putin to task in the book and I think accurately for rewriting history or not rewriting cherry picking which pieces of history apply to his worldview and discounting others. And I think that's in fact true. But I think one of the, at the end of the book, one of the things that disappointed me about Mr. Kalb's analysis was number one, his dismissiveness of the United States commitment Article V, he was very dismissive of the Ukrainian military but he also seemed to imply that the future way out of this conflict with Russia was to renegotiate the future of Eastern Europe as if we could take Poland and Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Baltic States and say, okay, sorry, it's like Lucy pulling away the football from Charlie Brown. We were just kidding, you're now gonna go back into the Russian sphere of influence. That cannot happen. That genie cannot be put back in the bottle. But Mr. Kalb seemed to imply that that was part of the future. So we only have a few minutes left and I want to ask you, do you have hope? How do you think this is going to end? Or have you figured that out yet or is you're still thinking about it? Hey, I'm just a poor fighter pilot that was able to graduate with a history degree out of the Air Force Academy. So I have no crystal ball. I did read what I thought was a very excellent piece just a couple of days ago and I wish I could attribute it. I can't remember the author, but their premise was that perhaps a template for Ukraine going forward is the one that we left Korea with in 1953, which was, you could call it a frozen conflict, that the war in Korea has never been, no peace treaty has ever been signed. We are technically still at armistice 70 years later next year. Their point was is that perhaps we'll end up with a frozen conflict with Russia exerting control over the Donbass, perhaps solidifying gains in the South. That would severely limit Ukraine's ability to operate as a sovereign nation without access to the Black Sea. But that we end up with another stalemate. It's frozen. We have this agreement not to go forward and it remains a stalemate for years and years to come. Their point again being is is that we've all through the Cold War, we fought proxy wars with the Russians and we never discussed considered the use of nuclear weapons to achieve victory in any of these proxy wars. One of the best things that's happened lately is just last week, Russian leadership has walked back all of the irresponsible talk that Putin and others were using at the beginning where they were flippantly talking about the use of nuclear weapons. So that's been a positive change in the past few weeks. Well, I have confidence in American and European Union diplomacy and I can only hope that the resolution that satisfies all the parties will become apparent. But again, I want to thank you for allowing me to ask you these hard questions and I thank you for your input. And to our viewers, all I could say is you have to read Marvin Kelb's book, Imperial Gamble and you have to read everything on this topic because it will give you a foresight into what's coming. So until then, we hope and read, read, read. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.