Edward N Luttwak is a military strategist, political scientist, and historian who has published works on military strategy, history, and international relations. He is now a Contractual Strategic Advisor to the US Department of Defense. Previously, he has served on US presidential transition teams, testified before committees of the US House of Representatives and the Senate, and advised the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the US National Security Council, and the White House Chief of Staff. Luttwak was born in Arad, Romania, and raised in Italy and England. He is an alumnus of the London School of Economics (BS) and Johns Hopkins University (PhD). From 1967 to 1972, he was a volunteer and then military contractor for the Israel Defense Forces. In 1975, he was retained as a strategic consultant to the immediate Office of the Secretary of Defense under James R Schlesinger.
***
The Trump administration, in its second term, is heading to the midterm election in November. Has President Trump so far lived up to expectations?
He is a president who is taking very high risks every day. He does courageous things, but some of the things he does fail. He knows he will not be re-elected. So this is his time, and then he has to go home. Therefore, he is not interested so much in having political support. He is operating even without that, and he’s willing to take big risks because he wants big results. He failed on one big risk: he paid the price for not calling Putin a criminal and forgiving him credit. So when President Trump went to Anchorage, Alaska, he was waiting for Putin to come and give something, let’s say, a good suggestion for Ukraine to end the war, a deal, but he got nothing at all. Putin went all the way to Anchorage to say ‘niet’, like Gromyko in Soviet history time.
But Trump has plans to end the war.
He has no plans. He has the intention. In order to end the war, you have to have either Russia win or lose. Russia could lose, because there is a big crisis in the country, and Putin has one enemy he cannot deal with, which is the Russian Central Bank run by Elvira Nabiullina, and she told them they are not able to continue.
President Zelenskyy said Trump had told him that June was the deadline for ending the war. Do you believe that he can succeed?
Absolutely. Trump says he wants to end the war, and you have to have one of two conditions. Condition number one: Russia loses three battles in a row and realizes that they are doing very badly. They did badly from the first day, because when Russia invaded Ukraine, the war was supposed to end in five days. That’s what the CIA prediction was. Kyiv falls on the first night, and Ukraine falls before the first week. The failure of the Russian army has caused this entire phenomenon. And moreover, Putin invaded Ukraine because Ukraine should not be independent, because it has always been Russia. But not that Ukraine is part of Russia, Russia is part of Ukraine, because Russia started in Kyiv, Kyivan Rus.
‘In order to end the war, you have to have either Russia win or lose. Russia could lose, because there is a big crisis in the country’
So, unfortunately, Putin became a victim of quantum physics. In quantum physics, when you look for the cat, there’s no Schrödinger’s cat. He invaded Ukraine, and by failing to conquer Ukraine in one week, he created the Ukrainian nation.
But 20 per cent of the territories are under Russian occupation at the moment.
But there should have been 99 per cent up to one week. That is a failure; then the nation of Ukraine is now present. For the first time in history, there’s a fully defined Ukrainian nation. They will not accept the peace treaty that Trump offers; they certainly will not give up territory that the Russians couldn’t conquer. The Russians are trying to conquer Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast, but they cannot even do that.
Yes, but the Russian army is advancing, and Ukraine will probably need to make a decision about territorial concessions, right?
Yes, but unfortunately, you cannot have any Ukrainian government—it doesn’t matter who it is, not just Zelenskyy, anybody—that accepts the loss of Donetsk and Luhansk unless Kyiv is threatened. If Kyiv is threatened, then they can accept losing Donetsk and Luhansk. The weakness of the Russian army is prolonging the war.
If we see the situation in terms of win and lose, who will finally win this war?
Well, Russia has already lost, actually, because Russia should have won in a week. Russia, the biggest country in the world, invaded such a divided and weak country as Ukraine, and didn’t win. If the Russian army at least conquers everything in Donetsk, the Ukrainian government can give it to them. But they have to conquer that.
What will be the fate of Ukraine?
It’s very bright. It fought the war. Remember what happens after a war? Soldiers come back, and they get women, and they make children. When the war stops, the population increases, and there is reconstruction, which is very fast and big. That is what happened in Europe.
Who will finance it?
Finance is nothing. What you need is, first, to make children. Secondly, reconstruction. And reconstruction begins by taking pieces of brick and rebuilding. Financing: don’t believe that Europe was rebuilt after every war with financing. They were rebuilt by working, as the Germans did. That is the engine that empowered Europe. That’s how even small European states like the Netherlands built colonies all over the world. The little European countries defeated big Asian empires with the energy of war.
‘When the war stops, the population increases, and there is reconstruction, which is very fast and big’
If the war ends, and there’s still Ukraine, the Ukrainian nation is going to rise.
And should it be part of the European Union soon?
Eventually, Europe will beg it on its knees, because Ukrainians will make children. They will have children, not like in Europe, and they’re going to rebuild, and Kyiv is going to be a great big city, full of energy and modernity.
But Ukraine’s NATO membership is impossible.
NATO is a failed alliance. If NATO were a successful one, there would have been no Ukrainian war because it would have deterred the Russian invasion. But it failed. And the reason is that NATO has become a comedy. Do you know that there are more soldiers in NATO than in the Russian and Chinese armies combined? NATO has more than two million people eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in uniform. It has all these soldiers, but if a European prime minister wants to send 4,000 soldiers to Ukraine, he loses power the next day in Parliament. So it is based on a lie. The lie is that they’re soldiers. They’re not soldiers, they’re just people in uniform.
Russia, after this war, will be dependent on China for energy and exports.
It will not be totally different, but it will be more dependent than American interests would favour.
How strong is China?
Mr Xi Jinping has now become the military commander because he has destroyed the military command structure. He just removed the last of the generals. He put them in prison, so he is responsible for everything now. The Chinese are just as post-heroic as Europeans and Russians. They are even worse, because all the wars of Europe were sustained by the second and third male sons of the family. If such a boy dies, everybody cries, but the family continues. Once you have no spare boys, you have no wars in Europe, no capacity for war. Chinese are the same. In China, if you die, you’ll become a national hero. Your name will be known. It can be written all over China because they also cannot tolerate casualties. They have no boys in China. No boys, no war.
But China is an emerging power, a world power.
Yes, if they can do it without fighting. For example, if they invade Taiwan, they will send some ships there, and not four will die, but 4,000 on the first day. If 4,000 die, and a lot of Chinese ships are sunk, that may be the end of the whole regime. Just as every European government has sent troops to help Ukraine.
Some analysts say that in ten years’ time, the geopolitics will be so changed in the Pacific that China might have the willingness and the capacity to make a decision on Taiwan.
There are no boys. There’s no military anything, unless you can do it without losing soldiers. If they lose 4,000 out of a population of over a billion, the Xi Jinping government would disappear overnight, and there would be no more Xi Jinping.
It means you don’t believe that China will attack Taiwan in the future.
The Chinese have a history. They were not born yesterday. It’s an old country. They lost every war in history against any foreigners.
‘Once you have no spare boys, you have no wars in Europe, no capacity for war. Chinese are the same’
Now, the Taiwanese are Chinese themselves, so they have no intention of fighting. But when you send ships and aeroplanes, then some ships will sink, and it’s not clear who will sink them, because the Japanese have very good submarines, and the Chinese won’t be able to find them. They don’t have any capacity for war.
What about the trade? How can the US contain the Chinese threat?
Well, the US created the Chinese economy by opening its arms and liberalizing trade. The same wrong theory as every time: that if they become rich, they will become friendly. Now they become rich and unfriendly. But you know, the American economy is a pirate ship that changes identities very often. America is like a protein thing. It’s not a stable thing at all. I first arrived in America as a tourist in 1969 and only came back accidentally in 1970 to do a doctorate, and America is completely changed in every respect. So America is completely changing, and the Chinese are declining. The Chinese population is getting smaller and older. This process of being smaller is very slow. The process of getting older is very fast.
Two questions about the Middle East. Iran is a burning geopolitical issue.
If the Iranians sign an agreement, will they keep it? The answer is no. There’s no possibility for the Iranian regime to keep the nuclear agreement. The Iranian regime forced the population of Iran, 90 million people, to suffer for years and years to have a nuclear programme. So if they give that away, they’re telling 90 million people that all the suffering was for nothing. First, we made you suffer to get this, and now you don’t get it. They are locked into the nuclear programme, because if they say yes to giving it up, they cannot look themselves in the mirror.
About the Palestinian issue: Do you believe that an independent Palestinian state will exist in the future anytime soon?
The Palestinian state is an invention of professional peace processor diplomats. You know, wars have always ended when fighting exhausts people, when you finish your energy, you’ll have peace.
‘The Iranian regime forced the population of Iran, 90 million people, to suffer for years and years to have a nuclear programme’
When you’re trying to make peace with diplomats, they start a peace process, which is like a woman who needs to cook vegetable soup for a family, but instead of that, she reads, writes and improves recipes. So that’s what diplomats do. When there is a war, and people kill each other, finally, they call the diplomats, and they make peace. The Iranians live in the world of invention, and then reality comes to them. And the Israelis never used to visit Iran before; now they know how to get there, and they will return. And so if Trump does not negotiate, the Israelis will negotiate with bombs. And they know that.
My last question is, do you think that the US will be the same dominant country in global politics in ten years’ time?
Yes, but I don’t say this optimistically. The reason why the US will be a world power is that it has a gratitude, not because it’s leading the world, but because it’s behind the world. The leading countries are countries like Korea, whose population is declining. And that ideology is right across Europe, and now it has reached countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, where women don’t make children anymore. So there is a general decline. But the Americans have Latin America. A Latin American immigrant who arrives in America is different from the immigrant who arrives in Europe. The immigrant who comes from Latin America is named Jose Martinez. After a short time, he calls himself Joe Martinez, then he calls himself Joe Martin, and when he calls himself Joe Martin, his son goes to the Marine Corps. He is more American than anybody else.
So right now, there are too many immigrants, so Trump wants to kick them all out. In reality, we can absorb any number of Mexicans. They are not Muslims, they’re Christians, and they’re willing and eager to become Americans. So Biden was completely irresponsible to open the frontier to everybody, including Afghans, Asians, Muslims and so on. So, closing the border is very important, but our closure should be selective. If the Mexicans tumble over, or any Latino, they still assimilate very easily. So America is a country that has the possibility of positive immigration. Europe only has negative immigration. You don’t have Latinos. You don’t have proto-Europeans waiting to complete the Europeanization. We have proto-Europeans.
Watch the full podcast below:
Related articles:
At a time when public debate is increasingly polarized and superficial, Hungarian Conservative remains committed to depth, intellectual honesty, and independent conservative thought.
Producing high-quality journalism requires resources. Your contribution helps us expand our coverage, reach new audiences, and keep our content accessible.
Please consider supporting our mission.
