Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s Washington bureau chief, having previously covered defense and national security for the publication for eight years.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shashank Joshi discuss why Russia is escalating its hybrid warfare campaign against Europe, whether NATO’s political cohesion can survive the Trump era, and how the United States has changed over the last 20 years.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I think the last time you were here, we may have teased that you’re going to have a new role. What is your new role?
Shashank Joshi: Having covered defense and national security for eight years at The Economist, I’m now The Economist’s Washington bureau chief here in Washington, DC. So, tracking America’s place in the world, or lack of place in the world, as well as all the great and not so great developments in American politics, looking ahead to the midterms, looking ahead to 2028, and everything this administration does.
Mounk: Perhaps at the end we can get your impression as an outsider in the United States and how you’re seeing things there. I was struck by a meeting in the Élysée Palace about a week ago at this point, a little less than that, in which Emmanuel Macron invited all of the heads of the French political parties, including the far left and the far right, and seems to have warned them about the worsening security situation for France, for Europe. It sounded as though he warned about the possibility of real hybrid, perhaps non-hybrid, attacks by Russia on Europe. How bad is the situation in Europe now?
Joshi: This is the big question of the week, Yascha. Amid all the noise, this is the real concern. There are a few things going on. You noted the French meeting, which was, of course, very interesting because it included opposition parties, and you saw these kind of leftist opposition parties come out of this and say, wow, we’re pretty chastened by what we heard, by the security situation.
Mounk: By the way, the far right as well. The Rassemblement National came out—which has taken loans from Russian banks before, I wouldn’t say they were pro-Russia, but certainly anti-anti-Russia—and Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella made a pretty remarkable statement, saying that of course, when Russia is threatening French and European security, they’re going to be patriots and they’re going to be on the side of French security. Whether or not to fully trust that is a different question, but it is still a clear break with the kind of rhetoric they had in the past.
Joshi: I suspect if you saw the same thing in Britain, Reform and other hard-right parties would probably respond in the same way. My colleague in Berlin, Tom Nuttall, made an interesting point, which is that that would be very unusual in Germany. That’s not what you’d expect to see in Germany, because you would never brief the AfD with sensitive intelligence in that way. But that’s beside the point. The point is the French government clearly sees a worsening security situation.
But the real news of the week in some ways was not just that—there were many other things afoot. Let me give you some examples. Germany, along with the Swedes, sent reinforcements with live ammunition to the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, and they said clearly this is not an exercise. In other words, they saw reason to be concerned by the prospect of a potential Russian operation against Gotland, which, in case you don’t know, is this island in the middle of the Baltic that is very strategically positioned, because if you can put air defenses and missiles on it, you can control a great deal of airspace and sea corridors in the Baltic Sea.
At the same time, we saw the Polish government—or specifically Donald Tusk—say that there was intelligence suggesting the risk of a Russian attack on Poland and other NATO allies. Not a conventional ground attack, but drones and missiles landing on NATO territory that he said the Russians might attempt to portray as accidental. He sounded a very grave and serious tone when he issued these remarks. Now, some of this was caught up in politicking at the highest levels of the Polish government.
Mounk: The Polish president, who is allied at least with the party of Law and Justice, the previous government—I think said something like, in a tweet, I think it was just an unfortunate tweet, he said, even if we’re going to cede territory, the Polish nation will never bow. And then Tusk saw, quite rightly, the opportunity to score political points, saying, what are you talking about? We have a government, we’re never going to cede any Polish territory.
Joshi: Yes. And the very fact that they’re discussing cession or non-cession of territory is a disturbing thing. But the point is the most alarming signal came from the Poles this week. Now, how do we interpret this? I think it’s very important to be fair and even-handed here and note that I spoke to a lot of other governments and officials, and some of them were public. The Latvians, for example, the Latvian leadership, including the country’s chief of defense, including I think the Latvian president, said there’s no reason for alarm, there’s no reason for panic here, we’re not seeing any heightened risk of action. The Estonians said we see no risk to Estonia, to the Baltics, there’s no risk of Russian aggression in this way that we see elevated.
So what is going on here, Yascha? There are mixed messages. Here’s how I see it, from all the conversations I’ve had. First of all, there is no risk of a Russian conventional ground attack on NATO. This is not right now a January 2022 type situation, where the alarm bells are ringing, the Russians are mobilizing, there’s a risk of an attack. That is not the case. That’s not what the intelligence says. I’ve spoken to lots of intelligence officials from multiple countries—there’s no reason to fear that.
Mounk: Let’s be precise about this. So we don’t have to worry about Russia trying to occupy Warsaw. You’re saying we also don’t have to worry about Russia trying to occupy some slice of Baltic territory or anything like that.
Joshi: No. I believe that we would see the antecedents of such an operation—we would see Russian activity. Look, these are countries that have—if you’re Estonia or Finland, the entire raison d’être of your entire security apparatus is to spot those kinds of things. Believe me, you have spies and technical sensors spread throughout the Russian west. In every port, in every naval base, around every army base, in every forest route to the border—believe me, that is stuffed with intelligence, and you will see Russian movements. So there is little risk of that.
However—and I think this is the key point—there are other sorts of concerns. The Russians shut the border with Estonia in the last week to stop people escaping, and one of the reasons for that may be because they are preparing the ground for mobilization within Russia to get manpower for the war in Ukraine. So that could be one reason for escalation.
But I think there is a debate, and I don’t think it is a settled debate, over Russia’s willingness to intensify its campaign of what we now call hybrid activity that is below the threshold of Article V. We’ve seen this already. We’ve seen it in the Russian willingness to put drones up against Ukrainian cargo planes that may be carrying shipments bound for Ukraine, which could have brought a plane down over Europe. We’ve seen it in the willingness to put explosives in DHL packages in Leipzig, in a German airport, in ways that could have caused a mass casualty incident. We’ve seen a string of other incidents around sabotage of power plants and railway lines across Europe.
So the Russian risk tolerance of putting pressure on Europe to try to force it to back down on Ukraine—that risk tolerance is rising. But would they really launch a missile against a Polish facility? That, I think, is a live debate in Europe, and the Poles are not the only voice in that debate; others disagree that the Russians would go that far. My view is that the Russians are still quite cautious. They would like to avoid an escalation to anything that could drag NATO into a wider conflict, and I still see the Russians as operating with some red lines on their side here.
Mounk: Part of the context here, I assume, is the fact that Russia hasn’t made significant territorial progress over the course of the last year. More strikingly, Russia itself is now a theater in this war in a way that wasn’t true for much of this. Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, he started this war. Most people expected him to waltz into Ukraine, possibly be in Kyiv within a week or two of the start of what he called, and still insists on calling, a “special military operation.”
Even though that plan thankfully failed, and Ukraine has been very effective in defending itself, the majority of this horrible war has been on Ukrainian territory. It’s been Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities that have had to deal with bombardments and drone attacks and so on. Increasingly, Ukrainians are now able to strike Moscow, to strike deep into Russian territory. So the war that Putin started, tragically—because I don’t wish for any Russian civilian casualties any more than for any Ukrainian civilian casualties—has come back home to roost. There must be fears that this is increasing the risk tolerance from Moscow, that they feel at this point Moscow is part of this war, so why not make Warsaw or Tallinn or, if they can, Berlin part of a war?
Joshi: I think you’re right. It’s undeniable that the Russian homeland is not a sanctuary anymore. It’s not only strikes on Moscow, it’s also a huge impact on Russian refining capacity and export capacity for oil and energy. This is probably having an impact on markets to a degree that it’s irritating Donald Trump as well, who keeps blaming Zelenskyy for this too.
From the Russian perspective, I think there are two things going on here. One of them is that they say, well, if we’re being attacked, the Ukrainian rear areas—which they see as NATO territory, where drones are being assembled, where weapons are being transported—should also be part of this battlefield. Why should we sanctuarize NATO soil? Although they still want to keep this in check, I think they want to turn the temperature up. Now, that’s not entirely new. We saw a Bulgarian arms depot blown up—Bulgarian arms depots were being blown up ten years ago. The CEO of Rheinmetall, the German arms company, was subject to assassination threats two years ago. So none of this is entirely new, but the Russians are turning the temperature up.
There are two other aspects to this, Yascha. One is that Ukrainian drones are striking Russian northern ports in the Baltic area and the High North area, and some of those drones are coming quite close to the Baltic states’ territory. From Russia’s perspective—whether sincerely believed or whether confected—they say Ukrainian drones are flying over Baltic territory to take more efficient routes to Russia. So they are beginning to say, if you’re going to do that, you’re becoming part of the war, and we’re going to strike you back. I should say very clearly, the Baltic states deny that their territory is being used, but there is an element of ambiguity here.
The other element, of course, is that when the Russian hybrid campaign was escalating eighteen months ago, Jake Sullivan in the Biden administration called up the Russians and said, if this continues, you are risking us entering the war on Ukraine’s side. You are risking a mass casualty incident, and we will retaliate. Now, in the Trump administration, does Russia truly believe that Donald Trump is going to intervene in a crisis in the same way? So you have an opportunity here not just to push back against the increasing attacks on Russia, but also to test the cohesion of NATO, to test the boundaries. Because if a drone lands on Polish soil and blows up a depot and you say it was an accident, and Trump then says, I spoke to Putin, he assured me it was an accident, you are really laying bare the divisions inside the alliance. That is a very valuable thing, because the Russian political objective here is to corrode the political cohesion of NATO. It isn’t to conquer NATO territory and take over Western Europe, it is to undermine and dissolve that solidarity.
Mounk: Clearly, Europe is quite divided on the question of how much to support Ukraine. The United States is even more divided, including Donald Trump and other important voices in the White House who have always been very skeptical of giving too much assistance to Ukraine, though they are continuing to assist Ukraine in some important ways.
The Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) has had a more mixed showing, but they also are establishing themselves as a player in German politics, and one of their key issues is opposing too much aid to Ukraine. At the same time, we are seeing these quite remarkable statements from the French far left and the French far right. The more you see actual attacks on the territory of Central and Western Europe, the more you might imagine that this is going to unify a response, going to force the people who want to stake out this kind of ambiguous attitude toward Russia to actually rally around the flag and show that they don’t just claim to be patriots, that they actually are patriots. It’s harder to see how much an American audience would care if there’s a mass casualty event somewhere in Western Europe caused by one of those bombs in a package, or by a drone that supposedly was a mistake. But there is at least a chance that this attempt to divide NATO is going to backfire if Russia goes too far with it.
Joshi: I think that’s right. We have to also step back, Yascha, and look at the visit by John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, to Moscow a few weeks ago. From all the people I’ve spoken to, it seems that the main purpose of his visit was to deliver a message about Russia’s poor performance in the war and the need to strike a deal.
But what you can see there is that Ratcliffe is becoming a more important figure in the Trump administration on these debates. He met Zelenskyy, I think, just now in the buildup to the UN General Assembly. That’s a good sign for Europeans, because Ratcliffe is much more hawkish on Russia. I think the Russians have to be mindful of that as well—that the debate in the White House is not cut and dry, and if they go too far, they could precipitate a move by the Americans to step in. One example of this, by the way, is that on the day of the Polish warnings by Donald Tusk, we also saw America announce that it was advancing and proceeding on a new potential army base in Poland—which is not what we expect of the Trump administration, which we typically associate with pulling back from Europe and pulling forces out of Europe. In fact, the messages are somewhat mixed.
Mounk: Just to stay with the United States for one more second: it’s clear that Trump has had a very contentious relationship with Zelenskyy, that he lambasted Biden for giving too much aid to Ukraine too unconditionally, and he continues to make some of those noises. What has actually been the record of a Trump White House? Have they totally abandoned Ukraine, or even as they’re doing this rhetoric, in practice have they actually continued to support the country? It can be a little bit hard to make heads or tails of what the actual actions have been.
Joshi: I would say that Trump has offered quite limited levels of support for Ukraine, considerably down from those that were offered by Joe Biden.
In the last week, we just had the biggest-ever foreign military sale—kind of an aid package to Ukraine—from this administration that we’ve seen in its second term. That’s very unusual; that had not happened until just now. They had allowed U.S. aid effectively to lapse in the form of weapons. Ukraine is in desperate need of interceptors for its Patriot missile defense systems, which, as you know, are the only weapon systems capable of intercepting many of Russia’s ballistic missiles. America is very short of those because it expended so much in the Iran war, and it hasn’t given many, or indeed any, to Ukraine, I think, in the recent period. Europeans have given some. So that’s quite a blow.
We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community
In terms of its diplomacy, the administration has really leaned toward Russia in the concessions it has expected Ukraine to make. But the exception to all of this, I’ll say, is two things. One is the new Graham bill, the tariff and sanctions bill that the president has essentially assented to. That will result in new sanctions on Russian entities, and it will force Trump to impose at least some tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil and are not reducing those purchases—which right now means effectively China and India, as well as possibly some Central European countries on top of that. So that’s progress.
The other element of progress, I’ll say, is that Trump, covertly—not openly—has been providing intelligence to the Ukrainians to help them conduct their strike campaign, which you discussed earlier, against Russian energy facilities and other targets. That’s the strange, topsy-turvy nature of this. Trump has by and large been quite critical of Ukraine, he hasn’t done very much to support them, but there is some clandestine assistance going on still.
Mounk: Tell us how you see this playing out in Europe.
Joshi: I think in Europe we can see some divisions. You saw Robert Fico say that Slovakia will not support any campaign in Eastern Europe, but that’s a stuck record—we’ve known that’s the Slovak position for some time.
In other ways, the politics has changed more favorably in the last eighteen months, in Poland, of course. I think you’re absolutely right to note that there are limits to how far the European populist right can be seen to be pro-Russia, because the European public are not fundamentally pro-Russian. They see the reality of Ukraine, they don’t want Russia to win in Ukraine, they see a threat from Russia. That’s what everyone believes. Even in England, where you have Nigel Farage, who has taken some pretty anti-Ukraine positions in the past, and whose party has some dubious associations with Russia as well, he has essentially had to back away from some of this—he has had to maintain distance from his earlier positions, because that’s not where the British public are.
So as the Russians get more aggressive, in a way they are forcing some of their natural allies in Europe to back away from these pro-Russian positions. But what does this amount to? If the Russians blew up a plane, that’s one thing. The question in front of Europe today is: will they continue to support Ukraine to the tune of tens of billions of euros in perpetuity for the duration of this war? That’s a much more difficult position. I think one of the issues you’re going to see come back to the forefront of European debates is whether and how to seize some portion of these Russian frozen assets that are sitting in European accounts. Right now the Belgians have been the principal block to this, but as we see the debate unfold and as the Americans step back, I think Europeans are going to have to confront whether they take this money, even though it will provoke some very difficult legal questions around how you can use Russian frozen assets.
Mounk: Your ability to give a high-level overview with lots of details and lots of ways to actually make sense of these big topics is unrivaled. So thank you for doing that on Russia, Ukraine, as well as the support for Ukraine in Europe and North America. Next little topic: what on earth is going on in the Middle East? Are we still at war with Iran? Are we not at war with Iran? Is this a zombie war? Explain the Houthis to us—give us the one-on-one.
Joshi: The U.S.-Iran war, which of course the Trump administration insists is not a war—President Trump has called it an “excursion”—the Strait of Hormuz is still broadly closed. Some traffic is getting through, but by and large, levels of oil traffic through Hormuz are considerably lower than they were prior to the war.
There is no deal with Iran, there is no settlement. Iran has no formal restrictions on its nuclear program, there is no formal commitment to reopen Hormuz. President Trump has midterms in a month, so he desperately needs to avoid a sharp flaring up of the campaign in ways that would spike the oil price. But he is, at the end of the day, politically unable to deliver the kinds of concessions to Iran he would need to deliver to get a deal, because they would be so humiliating and so obviously tantamount to defeat that it would also look extremely bad prior to these elections. So we’re stuck in this state of limbo, where Iran has considerable control over the strait, and there is occasional skirmishing—occasional skirmishing with America bombing Iranian coastal missile sites, Iran striking oil tankers attempting to traverse Hormuz—and that is going on on a kind of up-and-down basis. I think that’s where the war will continue.
Now, why have oil prices not spiked more than they have, Yascha? Partly because one reason is people are reflagging tankers and covertly moving them through Hormuz without putting their transponders on. They are trying to invisibly move through Hormuz and then switching them back on at the other end, and the U.S. Navy is assisting in that process. But the other reason is Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have been moving oil overland through the East-West pipeline, getting it out through the Red Sea, which then has to exit through a choke point called the Bab-el-Mandeb. That can’t replicate Hormuz, but it can push some oil out west through that way.
What has been happening in recent times is that the Houthis—who have occupied large swathes of Yemen in recent years, and the conventional way to refer to them is as an Iran-backed rebel movement, but they really maintain considerable independence from Iran as well, even though they are heavily armed by it—have demonstrated remarkable capacity to conduct missile strikes in the last two years. Just to give you an example, they’ve been firing missiles at Israel, which, if you look at a map, if you’re not familiar with this, is a pretty long way away.
Mounk: So you have to traverse all of Saudi Arabia and then most likely Jordan or possibly Egypt in order to get to Israeli territory. That is what, thousands of kilometers?
Joshi : Therefore the Israelis are intercepting these things exo-atmospherically, which is a fancy way of saying you have to intercept the missile in space. If you told someone six years ago the Houthis are making Israel intercept stuff in space, you’d think, what are you talking about? These guys are kind of ragtag rebels. But they’ve proven themselves to be an incredibly capable military force—probably the best-armed and most capable non-state military actor anywhere in the Middle East today, surpassing Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, which was also backed by Iran.
Now, what have the Houthis done? A couple of things. They have successfully bombed the East-West pipeline, taking oil out through this alternative route, and that’s a big problem, because the Saudis will have real trouble repairing the pumping stations necessary to get oil out past some of these mountains, out through the Red Sea.
Mounk: To be clear here, just to give listeners who don’t have a map in front of them a little bit of a sense geographically: you have the Arabian Peninsula, and the part it occupies stretches from east to west. When we’re talking about the Strait of Hormuz, which is on the side of the peninsula that is opposite Iran, that is one way we could get out. So you have a problem, because Iran is blockading the strait, as you were saying, mostly successfully. So then you can say, well, let’s go to the west of Saudi Arabia and move through there. But that is precisely where Saudi Arabia borders Yemen, and that is the part that the Houthis have now basically been able to undermine, choke to some extent, perhaps block completely. So that’s why suddenly all of that oil produced in that region just cannot get out.
Joshi: You’ve summarized it very well. But that’s not all, folks, because the Houthis—who were involved in a long-standing war with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for many years, in which they backed the internationally recognized government against the Houthis—the Houthis are now also on the advance. They have advanced particularly along the coastline, and they’ve taken a few things. They’ve taken several islands in the Red Sea that are very close to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which is that choke point you need to get out of to get from the Red Sea into the open ocean if you’re carrying oil. So that’s problem number one. They’ve also taken coastal territory in Mocha, along the Red Sea coastline, which again gives them heightened control over these choke points. Essentially, they can fire missiles at ships, and that makes life very hard for anyone trying to get oil out through these waterways.
Mounk: Give us a little bit of background on the Houthis. Again, as you were saying, this was sort of a ragtag bunch of rebels that were rebelling against the Sunni government of Yemen that was allied with Saudi Arabia. It was a rebellion like we’ve seen in many countries, where you have a deep ethnic or religious split in a country, and a minority group that is out of power, at least, is not happy with the government. They’re able to control some territory. It’s very hard to pull those kinds of rebellions down if you’re in mountainous territory, or in the desert, or in other kinds of areas where it’s just very hard to project complete control. How is it that they’ve gone from what seemed like a bloody civil war, a humanitarian catastrophe, but ultimately a kind of local skirmish, to this geopolitical force?
Joshi: Part of it is the war in Iran, because it gave the Houthis enormous leverage when oil markets were already tight. This is not new—a year ago, before the war in Iran, the Houthis were attacking shipping in the Red Sea, and it was causing a big problem. Donald Trump bombed the hell out of the Houthis for a long time and basically failed to reopen the Red Sea, and at the end of it said, my job here is done, I’m off, thank you everyone. Everyone said, you haven’t done anything, the strait—the Houthis have won. But he said, I can’t pound these guys into submission, and he left. The Houthis emerged from that, I would say, triumphant. European navies tried to mount a mission, but they struggled as well to take out the incoming missiles—European navies were showing up as well, very badly.
But that was bad enough, but in the context of the Strait of Hormuz also being closed, with other choke points cut off, with oil markets tight—that collectively, I think, put a lot of pressure on global energy markets, so the Houthis had more leverage. The other reason, Yascha, is that I think this also revealed certain geopolitical alignments. The Saudis just now have said to the Americans, we need you to step in, we need help with the Houthis, and Donald Trump has said, I’m not going to do that, I’m going to stay out of this.
Mounk: They cut a separate deal, in fact, right? So there’s a kind of U.S.-Houthi non-aggression pact that excludes Saudi Arabia.
Joshi: Yeah. That was a while ago, and that was seen as throwing the Israelis and the Saudis under the bus. But now the Saudis are saying, come and help us—they’re saying that now, and Trump is saying, I’m not going to do that. So in the context of the war in Iran, where the United States already appears to have been somewhat defeated and ceded control of the strait to Iran to a considerable degree—there are discussions in Washington saying they might have to pull out of frontline U.S. bases, particularly in the UAE and Bahrain, and pull back to Jordan and Israel and other places. If you’re Saudi Arabia, and you’re looking at that situation, and you are looking at the U.S. reluctance to become involved with the Houthis, this then becomes part of a broader realignment in the Middle East, whereby you have deeper questions over America’s ability to act as a security guarantor. If you’re Saudi Arabia, of course, you still want the United States involved, you want a good relationship with them, but you now see the United States is not going to be coming to your rescue.
I think this will have all sorts of consequences in terms of the rearmament of Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia’s relationship with China and Turkey and Israel and other non-US actors. Even the Europeans—the UK has this week said it will help with defensive refueling for Saudi Arabian flights. So you can see Europeans becoming involved in all of this.
But to me, this also gets back to a topic, Yascha, I think you and I discussed last time I was on—quite advanced military technology, that these long-range anti-ship missiles are becoming available more and more to these groups. One anecdote to give you on that: when Anthropic, the AI company, published its report on harmful uses of Claude, its AI model, a week ago, one of the examples was the Houthis using Claude to improve their ballistic missile program—which I thought was just fascinating. This group that was widely viewed as technologically primitive is using the most cutting-edge AI on the planet to refine the guidance systems on the ballistic missiles it’s using to fire at shipping in the Middle East.
Mounk: Being able—at least until, hopefully, that gets cut off—to access cutting-edge American technology in order to strike at America and America’s allies is itself a fascinating story. I wonder whether there is a deeper conceptual point here about the state of modern warfare, which bridges the discussion we had of Ukraine and Russia and the discussion we’re now having of the Houthis.
When you look at the war in Ukraine, it is absolutely striking that the frontline has not moved very much over the last year. I’m sure that’s a simplification, and there were some important movements, but effectively Russia is throwing tremendous manpower and tremendous treasure at the frontline and gaining a little bit of territory as a result, but it’s really not a very big result.
So in the age-old fight in military history between offensive capabilities and defensive capabilities, when it comes to ground troops, it seems like the defensive capabilities are currently king. It is hard to advance, it is hard to control territory. Now, at the same time, when it comes to aerial warfare, because of the ability to build these huge swarms of cheap drones—which you build cheaply, and then others have to use extremely sophisticated and expensive missiles to shoot down—the ability to penetrate into airspace, you have an improvement in the offensive capabilities. So Russia is able to strike at Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities again and again, exacting these terrible civilian casualties, but Ukraine is able to strike Moscow. That’s really striking. I don’t know the last war where each side was able to hit the capital of the other at the same time. I’m sure there are other examples, but it’s kind of striking.
So you have this weird thing where the defensive capabilities on the ground are king, but the offensive capabilities in the air are king. That’s partially, I think, the Houthis’ story, isn’t it? Saudi Arabia has not been able to dislodge the Houthis from the territories they controlled. Eventually they were able to take the capital in Yemen and now effectively control the country of Yemen—not all of it, I believe—but they’re still considered a non-state actor, though in some ways they are now a state actor. At the same time, because of this advantage to offensive capabilities in the air, they’re able to strike at Israel and they’re able to strike at ships in the part of the Red Sea that is adjacent to Yemen. That is just a fundamental change in the nature of warfare.
It’s going to have very deep consequences, including these alarming developments where Macron calls everybody together because he’s saying, in principle, we’re now vulnerable in a way that we didn’t used to be.
Joshi: I think your point’s very astute. Here’s how to reconcile those two things—apparent defense dominance on certain battlefields combined with the ability to strike deep in other parts of the front. How do you reconcile that? Here’s my attempt at doing so: it’s all about sensing.
If you bear with me, Yascha, it’s a little bit tricky, but to hit something, you need to sense it. You need to find it on the battlefield and then fire something at it. That is much harder than it sounds. Sensing is the preeminent problem of the battlefield; the actual firing at it is kind of secondary, although cheap missiles, of course, help you do that en masse. So if you’re looking at the Ukrainian frontline, it’s a very sensor-saturated environment. You have lots of drones, little tiny drones up everywhere, spotting anything that moves, with thermal cameras spotting movement at night, infrareds—you have radar spotting things through foliage, you have satellites targeted on this area. It’s very heavily surveilled and watched, and therefore anything that moves gets struck. It’s a kill zone.
That is the defense dominance we talk about, because it’s very hard to do ground maneuver. You can’t move a traditional armored brigade through it to take ground unless you deceive, or you find a hole in the sensing, or whatever else—as we saw with the Kursk offensive, as we saw with the Houthi offensives. You get these opportunities, but you have to work hard for those opportunities to become free of being watched before you can move.
So why then do missiles have such luck? If you had a missile launcher in the kill zone, it’s going to be found and it’s going to be hit. So it’s not easy to do that. However, you can’t sense everywhere equally easily. You can have drones up and see ten kilometers behind the battlefield, but if you look fifty kilometers behind the battlefield, your satellite coverage is going to be patchy, because your satellites can only see so many places. You don’t have any drones that can go that far, or maybe you have a couple, but they are roaming behind enemy lines and can only spot a couple of places. There are going to be gaps, there are going to be holes.
Did you ever, like me, waste part of your teenage years playing real-time strategy games like Command and Conquer, where you had to move little forces on a map and there was a simulated fog of war which would clear as you sent units out, but stayed foggy where you hadn’t moved? That is what the sensing problem is like.
So look at Iran. America and Israel are bombing Iran. They have massive air superiority over Iran, they can fly over it at will. Yet Iran is still able to fire ballistic missiles, it’s still able to protect its depots, and it can keep firing these things weeks into a war, despite the supposed transparency of the battlefield. The answer is that when you go deep into Iran, well behind the frontlines, into mountainous, craggy terrain—because geography is important here as well—you can’t sense things as well.
That is where we are. At the frontlines you can sense, and therefore it’s a kill zone and the defense dominates. If you go behind the frontlines to an Iranian cave in the middle of the mountains, you can have the world’s most advanced surveillance apparatus, as the U.S. Air Force and the Israeli Air Force do, and there will always be fog. There will always be gaps, and those gaps allow people to project force at you—whether that is Shahed drones at the Strait of Hormuz, whether that is Houthi missiles from the mountains of Yemen to the Red Sea, or indeed Russian projectiles fired at Europe from some sort of offshore tanker in the Baltic. That is how we reconcile these two positions. Does that make sense?
Mounk: That makes perfect sense. It helps me flesh out this intuition that I had from reporting and my understanding of these facts that seem to sit uneasily next to each other, with a real technical account. I really think the general public is only at the very beginning of understanding the implications of that, which is to include that it’s going to be much easier for foreign adversaries, even perhaps non-state actors, to do serious damage within countries that once felt safe from actual attack. Certainly, I think a lot of Western militaries have not sufficiently updated what weapons they’re developing, what money they’re spending, where they’re investing, to the realities of this new warfare.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Shashank discuss how the United States has changed in 20 years, the similarities between now and 2007, and why it feels like the center is no longer holding. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Yascha Mounk to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
