Dmitri Alperovitch's "World on the Brink" with Bruce Mehlman (May 22 2024)

Thanks so much for having me, Bruce. Really great to be with you.

Yeah, absolutely. So I was born in Moscow in the early 1980s and grew up behind the curtain. My dad was actually a nuclear physicist in Russia. He was helping to design nuclear power plants. And in 1986, this thing called Chernobyl happens, of course, and he gets very lucky. He does not get sent. A lot of his colleagues get sent. And in typical Soviet fashion, no one actually gets told what happened. They're just told fly to Kiev, a helicopter will pick you up and take you to Chernobyl, which is about 30 minutes away, and you'll figure things out on site. And as they land and they're walking towards the reactor building, the ground is black and they start picking up the rocks and they realize it's graphite from the reactor that had blown. And a lot of them got cancers after returning. But that actually was a seminal moment in my family's life because after Chernobyl, there was an effort in Congress, US Congress, to work jointly together with the Soviet scientists on nuclear reactor safety issues and build simulators to train operators in nuclear power plants. And as part of that program, my dad was able to come here to the United States, actually to Maryland, in 1990 and spent a year here working on this joint venture with American scientists. And after returning back to the Soviet Union, he said to my mom, who had always wanted to immigrate but he was kind of always opposed, he said, you know, what are we going to do in this new country? He didn't speak English well. And after returning, he said, you know what, America is not so bad. We should try to come here. So we eventually immigrated and I ended up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which I can tell you was a huge culture shock. It's not the same as Moscow. No, not at all. And ultimately went to Georgia Tech, focusing on cybersecurity and a lot of international relations as well, of course. And then went into the startup world and ultimately founded a company that is now one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world called CrowdStrike, about an $80 billion market cap today. And retired from there after taking it public in 2020 and been focusing on giving back in philanthropy and starting Silverado Policy Accelerator, our think tank that focuses on really ensuring that America remains competitive and the leading nation in the world in this century and that this century remains an American century.

Well, the policy was always a passion of mine. As I mentioned, in college at Georgia Tech, I was really focused on international affairs even while getting a fairly technical degree. And then when I went into the cyber career, I found the two getting completely intertwined, particularly in the 2010s when a lot of the activity that I was doing in the cyber domain was confronting nation states like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea from trying to steal our intellectual property, interfering in our elections, destroying networks. So I've had the privilege to work on some of the largest hacking cases of the past decade, whether it was the hack of Sony Pictures by North Korea or the hack of the DNC by the Russians in 2016 and many others. And that enabled me to transition from just doing technical work to doing a lot of policy work. I was an adviser to the Department of Defense and worked closely with the intelligence community on many of these issues. And then when I retired from CrowdStrike, I really wanted to move policy forward in this town. Having lived in DC for a long time and done a lot of work with the government, I know that a lot of people in Silicon Valley have a very inaccurate representation of how to get things done in Washington. They tend to think that these big ideas that they have are the ones that really can transform the country and can get things done. And the reality is that it's very, very difficult in this town, as you know, Bruce, to get a huge idea moving. You may have once in a generation type of ability to do that, but you can make progress every single day that's small and incremental. But I'd rather make one step forward today than run a marathon in 10 years. And that's kind of our approach to things at Silverado and trying to get this country in the right position. But the book itself, I actually started writing right after the start of the war in Ukraine. So at Silverado, our primary focus is China, what I believe is the main threat to America and American leadership in the world, American status as a global superpower. But I felt a little bit like President Obama in 2021, 2022, trying to pivot to Asia and getting dragged back into other conflicts, particularly in Europe. And in late 2021, I was paying very close attention to what was happening on the borders of Ukraine, the mobilization of the Russian military. I've obviously, with my background in the Soviet Union, have always kept a close eye on Putin and what he was up to. And I became convinced back in December that he was going to invade before the end of that winter. And I came out publicly with an articulation of why I thought that. Ultimately, that got a lot of coverage at the time, a lot of notice. And the war begins and I get an email from this individual in the UK who was born in Ukraine, who had encountered my writings, became convinced by my arguments that the war was going to start, and convinced his family after much prodding and pressure to leave Ukraine literally a week before the war began. They lived in the eastern city of Kharkiv and their neighborhood was essentially destroyed by Russian artillery. A lot of their neighbors perished. And he wrote me a really emotional letter thanking me for bringing this to his attention and pushing his family, again, their own thinking, to leave the country and potentially saving their lives. And you know, I've done a lot of good work over the course of my career in cybersecurity, but I don't think anything will come near that level of impact in my life. And the causes for that conflict in Ukraine, the reason why I believed Putin was going to invade Ukraine, I think are completely transferable to the Indo-Pacific. They're the same reasons Xi Jinping would invade Taiwan: history, destiny, security, geography, and ego, most importantly. And I wanted to write this book to raise the alarm bells about the potential future war and that that war, should it occur, is going to be much more disastrous for American national security, American lives, the global economy. And we have to do whatever it takes to deter it. And unlike Ukraine, we still have time.

Yeah, certainly one of the first, three months before the war began. And again, I've been a close watcher of Putin for his entire career since the 90s. And I feel I understand him pretty well, having the Russian background, being able to listen to him in the native language. I think that has been a great help to me. I feel like I understand how he thinks. A lot of people in the West have this caricature view of Putin that they think of him as just an old KGB agent. And he's certainly that, but more importantly, he's a thug. And I believe that the transformative period for his life was not his career in the 1980s in the KGB at the sort of decline of Soviet power, where he was really a mid-rate bureaucrat focused on counterintelligence and not very successfully in the intelligence services, but his career as a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s. And the reason that's really important is that in the 1990s, St. Petersburg was known in common parlance in Russia as Bandit Petersburg. It was effectively run by organized crime. And as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin had responsibility for casino licenses, export licenses, business registrations. I mean, all of the things that a mobster would put you into direct involvement with Russian organized crime. And I believe that's where he learned how to do corruption. That's where he got a taste for the good life and bribery. I don't just believe that, I know people that have dealt with him back in those days and have told me that they had to bring in a suitcase of cash to see him to solve problems. And his gangster persona, which he adopted from dealing with these people on a daily basis, really comes through every once in a while. He hides it fairly well under this bureaucratic persona, but every once in a while he lets it slip. And the first time it happened was when he had just become Prime Minister of Russia in 1999 and he launched a second war in Chechnya. And at a press conference he said, you know, we're going to kill them in the outhouse. Well, that's not the language of a government bureaucrat. That's not even the language of a KGB officer. That's the language of a thug. And more recently, when he was just a couple of weeks away from launching his war on Ukraine and he was having this shuttle diplomacy with Macron and others that were coming to visit him to try to deter this conflict, and remember there was this press conference with Macron where he quoted a lyric, a gangster lyric, that basically talked about a woman being raped and basically the lyrics he was using in the context of Ukraine, whether you like it or not, my dear, you have to take it. Right, again, that's not a language that you would typically hear from politicians or bureaucrats. That's the language of thugs. And the reason why that's important to understand Putin is that he feels like Ukraine is his. It's Russia's first and foremost, but of course he views himself as the new Tsar of Russia, so anything that's Russian is his. And that was one of the key motivators for him to invade this country, is that he was looking at the flirtation that Ukraine was engaged in with the European Union, with NATO, with the West, with democracy, and he was thinking, how dare you? You're mine. You're my girl. And I'm going to show you and everyone else that you belong to me, just like a thug, like a gangster would. And as a typical gangster, he's also a coward, so he's not going to take on the big powerful competitor, NATO, but he's going to take it out on the woman and beat her up. And that's exactly what he's doing with Ukraine now, is he's in his mind teaching her a lesson for this flirtation with someone else, something else. He's done that's certainly thuggish. People who are critics, particularly Russian oligarch critics, have been known to get poisoned with radioactive stuff.

Well, one would hope so. So I was sanctioned by Putin two years ago, which I was actually fairly pleased to see, because if you're on the sanction list, you're not probably on the other list. One would hope so. That gives me a little bit of hope.

Yeah, that's a really good question. So someone asked me this question about six months into the war and I said, and I still hold that view, that this war likely ends in regime change. But there are three possibilities for regime change: a regime change in Moscow that brings in someone other than Putin that is not emotionally committed to this war and would be much easier for them to end it; a regime change in Washington where you could have a president and Congress in this country that declines to support Ukraine and then they will lose; or regime change in Taiwan where China invades Taiwan, plug the book, and we are in an existential conflict with China and our ability to do anything for Ukraine is going out the window and they're going to lose as well. So I still hold that those are the more likely alternatives, unfortunately. And look, this war since about April of 2022, since Ukraine survived as a country, since they won the Battle of Kyiv and pushed the Russians back away from the capital, had entered the attritional stage where really both sides are now in this conflict over territory that neither of them really consider strategic at the end of the day. Right, Putin, as much as he celebrates victories in places like Bakhmut or Avdiivka, these tiny villages that most Russians can't even find on a map, it doesn't actually accomplish any of his goals of controlling the country. And similarly for Ukraine, the irony is that they're also fighting over territory and they would certainly like to take that territory back, but more importantly than the territory, they are fighting for their nation and for their durable security. And taking back, let's say, Bakhmut or Avdiivka doesn't actually accomplish that either. So you've got both sides that are in this World War I-style attritional conflict without the front line really moving a whole lot and without their end goals being accomplished. And it's really a question of who wears each other out, whose will ultimately breaks. But it can go on for a long time. In some ways, this war has been going on for 10 years since 2014 when, of course, he took Crimea and first invaded the Donbas. And now you have a second phase of that war, but it can unfortunately easily go on for another 10 years.

Yeah, so the book is non-fiction but it starts with a fictional prologue that's set in November of 2028, November 13, 2028, 6 AM Taiwan time. And it lays out how an invasion of Taiwan might unfold. I spent a lot of time in Taiwan and with US military and Taiwanese military and others thinking through that scenario. A lot of people have this very simplistic view, I think, of how this invasion would happen, sort of having flashbacks to Normandy. It's about to be the 80th anniversary of D-Day, so thinking that this would be a Chinese D-Day, you know, Saving Private Ryan, Chinese Edition. That's just not the reality of the terrain. Taiwan is a natural fortress of an island. It's hellishly difficult to invade. I can't think of a worse place to try to invade. There's probably only a couple of ways to do that and I think I describe in the book one of the few that could be successful. But I argue in the book that 2028 through 2032, that four-year period, is probably going to be the most dangerous, hopefully the most dangerous, hopefully nothing else will be more dangerous, period in the century, because I think that's when China is likely to invade Taiwan. Now, why that period? Well, first of all, they're not yet ready. They're still building up their military capabilities. They still have a lot of work to do to be able to pull this off. As you know, the CIA has announced that they've gotten intelligence that Xi has given his military an order to be ready to invade by 2027. Now, that's not necessarily a deadline for invasion. I think that's a political goal more than anything else, because in 2027, of course, he's up for re-election in the Chinese Communist Party Congress in the fall of that year. So I'm sure he would like to go in front of his Congress and say, hey, we're now ready whenever we want to take this action. And 27, I think, A, the PLA, just because you gave them an order to be ready doesn't mean that they actually will be, so there'll be inevitable delays. And two, it's a terrible time to launch an invasion because you're very distracted with the preparation for the Congress, which is all-consuming, making sure you lock up all of your loyalists' support. And you're also thinking of the next five-year program. And post that Congress, that will take place either in late October, early November based on historical dates, you're going to be sort of in this transitional period where you're going to put in new bureaucrats in various places, cementing the ideology and the goals for the next five years. And you get past all of that really in the second half of 2028, where your window basically opens. You've got a free hand, you've been re-elected, you're no longer distracted. And at the same time, your adversaries are very distracted because here's what else is going to happen: 2028, you've got the Taiwanese elections in January of that year with a potential new inauguration, well, a new inauguration of the president in May. It could be the current one that gets re-elected or someone else, but either way, you've got a national security establishment that's going to be in transition in Taiwan. You've got the Olympics in Los Angeles that are going to be fairly distracting for us. And of course, you've got the big election in November of that year, where regardless of who wins in November this year, we know that that person is not going to be running in 2028 because obviously they'll be term-limited. So you potentially have a new president coming into office, or being elected in November, coming into office in January of '29. So the national security establishment also sort of on the way out, looking for jobs here in the United States. So we're distracted, Taiwan is distracted, China kind of has a free hand. So I think the window opens up. Doesn't mean it will happen then, but I think in Xi's mind it might close in 2032 because in 2032 his term would end. And theoretically he could run again, but he's going to be 79 and the Chinese system, perhaps unlike ours, they don't tend to elect their leaders into their 80s. The economy, of course, is not going well at all and is likely to continue getting worse, so he may have more and more competition inside the party for leadership. And beyond that, he's got to think about his own mortality. He's not exactly a slim guy, so who knows if he even lives that long and what health state he'll be in. So because I believe he wants to do this on his own watch, he wants to get credit for it. It's not an accident that both Putin and Xi are in their 70s. They're thinking about their legacy, they're thinking about their place in Chinese or Russian history. And that time frame, '28 through '32, is a perfect time for him to do that, where if he's successful, he can get credit for it.

Well, you know, look, you said World on the Brink, the title sounds ominous. I think the book is actually very optimistic because it argues that we have all the ingredients for victory, both us and our allies. The big question mark that I leave unanswered in the book, because it's really up to all of us to answer it, is do we have the political will to use those strengths to win this conflict? And we will see that over the coming years. And the same thing holds true of Taiwan. You're absolutely right, it is a natural fortress. It is so difficult to invade. By the way, that we ourselves, Americans, did not invade it in 1945 when the Japanese were entrenched on this island. We bypassed it to attack Okinawa because of the difficulty of taking Formosa, Taiwan was called at the time. Very, very challenging. The Taiwanese are making some changes, in fairness to them. They're reforming their training, the military training, extending from four months to one year. They're starting to focus more on asymmetric defense. They're trying to procure more missiles, more drones. Not nearly fast enough, I would argue, but you're seeing some progress. But yeah, they're still enamored with these big, sexy weapons platforms. They're not going to do them a whole lot of good. You know, when I was there at the invitation of the president last fall, she was very proud to announce Taiwan's first indigenously built submarine that cost them about $2 billion, which is not a small amount for Taiwan's defense budget. And she announced that she plans to build seven more. Well, there are two problems with that submarine. One is that the Taiwan Strait is too shallow to put the submarine in. It's only about 300 feet. And when I pressed their chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who I met with, about how their concept of operation for that submarine is going to go, I got very murky answers about that submarine kind of hanging out on the eastern coast of Taiwan combating Chinese aircraft carriers. And my response was, okay, they've got two aircraft carriers now, a third one about to launch, dozens upon dozens of destroyers, numerous subs, and your one 1960s technology Dutch technology submarine is going to do what exactly? So you just basically took $2 billion and lit it with a match. They're buying F-16s, which they need some F-16s to kind of combat Chinese invasions of their air defense zones and the like, but they're not going to be fighting an air war over Taiwan. The reason is that they only have a couple of dozen runways from which to launch these F-16s and you can expect that the Chinese will crater them all with their rocket and missile forces. So none of these F-16s will be flying. Now they're trying to do something, training basically, taking off these F-16s from highways, but that's more of a gimmick because of course you don't have fuel facilities, maintenance facilities on those highways. So you can take off once, but you won't have a place to land and maintain them. So it's not really going to help you. And they're buying M1 Abrams tanks, which, you know, having spent time in Taiwan, I can tell you it's a mountainous terrain. This is not Ukraine. You're not going to have tank battles there. So you've got generals in their military that are enamored with these highly prestigious, sexy programs that are not going to do them a whole lot of good and cost a lot of money that could be better spent on trying to sink the Chinese fleet that's going to be coming across that strait with missiles, mines, coastal defense batteries, air defenses, and the like. And they're not nearly as focused on that.