Ray McGovern and Glenn Diesen discuss Russia's strategic posture, the Russia-China alliance, and the risks of European escalation
Glenn Diesen interviews former CIA analyst Ray McGovern on Russia's military escalation, the deepening Russia-China alliance, and the dangers of continued European provocations.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst of 27 years who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief. McGovern argues that two tectonic shifts now define the global strategic landscape: the Russia-China alliance is closer than at any point in history, and the United States no longer holds a decisive advantage in either conventional or nuclear weaponry. McGovern contends that Putin's primary strategic objective is to manage Donald Trump — flattering him, differentiating him from the "crazy Europeans," and calling him directly to dissuade him from dangerous decisions such as arming Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles or attacking Iran. He also warns that Russian intelligence has explicitly threatened Latvia by name, stating that NATO membership will not protect it from retaliation if it continues allowing missile and drone strikes into Russian territory. McGovern expresses cautious optimism that Putin's restraint and his relationship with Xi Jinping will prevent catastrophic escalation, but acknowledges that continued European provocations — particularly attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure — risk crossing a threshold that changes Russia's calculus entirely.
McGovern describes Russia's Oreshnik strike as a direct response to a drone attack that killed young women studying at a college, interpreting it as a calibrated signal rather than the beginning of broader escalation — though he acknowledges it marks a shift from earlier Russian restraint.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: Tectonic Shifts in the Global Strategic Order
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We have the great pleasure of being joined again by Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, who chaired the National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief. Thank you as always for coming back on the program. I've been looking forward to speaking to you. For decades you kept a very close eye on Moscow, and I therefore wanted to ask you how you're assessing where we seem to be heading, because a lot of what we're seeing now was quite unthinkable during the Cold War. We see NATO now being — I would say — directly involved in attacks on Russia, especially from the territory of the Baltic states, and this seems to be becoming normalized. Also, the Russians appear to be responding with quite a radical escalation. We see the Oreshnik being used, and this too is being normalized. And Kyiv, which had been treated more carefully by the Russians, has now seen what was probably the most brutal attack on it. So where is all of this headed?
Ray McGovern: Glenn, let me talk a little first about the tectonic shifts that I've noticed. I've been around for six decades watching this very closely. My first portfolio was the Sino-Soviet conflict. Suffice it to recall that China was claiming 1.5 million square kilometers of Russian Siberia, taken by unjust treaties in the 17th century. Did they have a leg to stand on? They sure as hell did. The Russians had sent explorers out there with a Russian flag and stuck it in Siberia at the Tsar's behest. So there was that. There was shooting across the border.
Here's a little thing that most people don't know. The Uyghurs. In Xinjiang, they have the Uyghurs, and they were considered to be a threat to the Chinese. We analysts wondered: are the Russians trying to exploit the Uyghurs? We found a Uyghur speaker in the United States and said, "Hey, there are these broadcasts going out — we can't figure out what they are, they're in Uyghur." The answer came back: they were inciting insurrection. The Kremlin was inciting insurrection in China. That, plus the fact that Soviet divisions were massing on their common border, made it clear that they hated each other and were very ripe for somebody intelligent to take advantage of their preoccupation with fighting each other and the draining of resources they were expending in that way.
Long story short, Nixon and Kissinger were smart enough to do that. When we saw the effects of their initial attempts, we said, "Looks like it's working." We had the SALT agreements in May of 1972 — I was privileged to be there — and we had a thaw, and then we had détente, and a real movement toward closeness with the United States.
Now, how about Russia and China? Well, as you know, I used to brief Secretary of State George Shultz every other morning with the President's Daily Brief. After I was removed from that position, I kept in touch with him at his request. I remember taking him little essays written by people I could trust on Russian foreign policy, saying, "Look, we told you two years ago that they would hate each other forever, but it looks like they're wising up to how they've been taken advantage of by the US. They're not going to hate each other. When more enlightened leadership comes in, we expect there'll be a thaw in those relationships."
Well, we never dreamed that Russia and China would be so close — never closer. And that was indicated when Putin went to see Xi just last week. So that's the tectonic shift. Two against one, clear as a bell. It's Russia and China against what's left of the Western Alliance, principally the United States.
The other tectonic shift that needs to be mentioned right up front is that Trump may say our armed forces are the strongest in the world, the most expert, and so on. It ain't true anymore. Now, for an analyst of US-Russian relations for so many decades, I still hear myself saying — can you really be saying that, Ray? Yeah. The Russians not only match but outmatch us in conventional forces, and they have the kind of nuclear deterrent that just won't quit. They did that because Biden, Obama, and the rest of them wouldn't talk to the Russians. And so Putin said, "All right, we're not going to waste a lot of money on an ABM system. We're going to find more clever ways of defeating or at least deterring what you have in mind." He made that explicit ten years ago. Then in his state of the nation address in 2018, he said, "Okay, I'm going to have a show-and-tell here. It's a little unusual for a state of the nation address, but watch these six videos." And he showcased what Russia had been developing — some already deployed. We're talking about the Avangard, we're talking about Poseidon, we're talking about missiles that go around the South Pole, a missile that stays aloft powered by a nuclear power pack.
The only thing I want to finish up here by saying is: not only are Russia and China together as never before, but the US no longer has the advantage in either strategic or conventional weaponry. The saving grace — and I say this deliberately — the saving grace is a very perspicacious, very cautious, very levelheaded Putin in Moscow and Xi in Beijing. They are not going to be provoked into letting a very irascible, very unpredictable person with his fingers on the nuclear codes — I speak of Donald Trump — they're not going to be put in a position where they give him no other option than to even think about nuclear weapons or something really more drastic.
So the way I see it — and this is different from many of my colleagues — Putin especially has set as his primary objective, since Trump came in, the placating of Trump: giving him all the praise, massaging his ego, and making sure to differentiate from the crazy Europeans and the Americans who have now left NATO in effect. So you placate the Americans, you distance yourself from the Europeans. This happened very quickly. Trump decided he would talk to Putin, and Putin welcomed that enthusiastically and said, "All right, we'll keep talking." The talks continue, and when Putin wants something from Trump, he calls him up and they spend two and a half hours on the phone, or one and a half hours as more recently.
What was it — two and a half hours? That was last year, when Trump was saying things like, "Oh, Zelensky is coming to town and I think I'll give him Tomahawk missiles." Putin took the initiative, called Trump, and said, "Very bad idea. Very, very bad idea." The next day, Zelensky showed up at the White House and Trump said, "Well, you know, we really need those Tomahawks for ourselves. Sorry, we're not going to give you Tomahawks."
The most recent thing was Putin calling Trump again and saying, "Look, Iran is a real problem. Let me just put it this way — we say in Russia: altogether unacceptable." That's as strong as you can get. "If you restart this war, and more so if you land troops in Iran, that is totally unacceptable." The last thing I'll say on that: it took two days for Wang Yi, the foreign minister of China, to repeat that warning in exactly the same words — "totally unacceptable." That's a concrete manifestation of how together they are.
When Putin calls Trump — it was only one and a half hours this time — when he wants Trump to do something or not to do something, he calls him up and takes the initiative. Two and a half hours a year ago, one and a half hours now. And Trump relented. So Putin's priority is to cool-hand-Luke it — make sure that he doesn't excite Trump into doing something that we would all regret.
The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the Road to the Russia-China Alliance
Glenn Diesen: Well, China and Russia coming closer together — I agree. If you were sitting there in the 1960s observing it, it would have been difficult to predict. But the unfair treaties — I think the Russians dealt with them in a good way, because in 1858 and 1860, when the Russians acquired about a million square kilometers from the Chinese, the Chinese were obviously never really happy about this. And the consequences have continued, because this sliver of land the Russians took — where Vladivostok is now — meant the northeastern parts of China became landlocked, and they're less developed than other parts of the country simply because of that. So this of course builds tensions toward the future. Will the Chinese at some point want this territory? Will they try to conquer it because of domestic problems with uneven development? All of these issues.
But instead of building up a powerful army and triggering a security competition along the border, the Russians did the opposite. They began to modernize a lot of their ports, they developed railroads and bridges to connect with the Chinese region. So instead of having this as a security threat hanging over them, they're making money from it — connecting these Chinese regions to the sea. It's a good way of dealing with the issue. And I think beyond this, both the Chinese and Russians see the US as well as the European maritime powers as having a long history of keeping all the Eurasian powers divided so they can rule from the periphery. While you can integrate the Eurasian continent through physical transportation corridors, new banks, trading currencies, tech hubs — all of this is fine and well — they have different formats. However, both the Chinese and Russians recognize they need each other. So there is an incentive to cooperate. It shouldn't have been that unpredictable that at some point they could come together if wiser, less ideological people were in power.
For the life of me, I can't understand why there are still analysts across the West arguing that this is a marriage of convenience and they will start fighting over who can dominate Kazakhstan in the future. It doesn't matter who can dominate Kazakhstan, because if they don't get along, the whole Eurasian format begins to fragment.
Ray McGovern: That's exactly right, Glenn. I'm reminded that you know a lot about this stuff — you're a historian, you've studied these things academically. You mentioned the unequal treaties. You didn't mention the Treaty of Nerchinsk — 1689, if memory serves — which was the supreme indignity, which took all this territory from what China had a legitimate claim to and was concretized in the treaty itself.
As I said before, we always put a last paragraph in our essays on how much the Russians and Chinese hated each other, because that last paragraph needed to say: when more enlightened leadership comes in, when Mao dies and other people — well, they will have to see how stupid this is and they will combine together or have a thaw in their relationships.
The big thing was Nixon and Kissinger deciding to exploit this conflict. Chas Freeman was doing the Chinese side of this. He was with Nixon in Beijing in January 1972 — Kissinger had been there the year before — and he was translating for Nixon and developing this One China policy which would do away with the Taiwan issue, at least temporarily. I was watching it from the Russian side. What I didn't know was that, as Chas mentioned, there were not 15 Soviet divisions on the Chinese border but 40. I was overseas at the time and didn't follow this closely. Chas said there were 40. And that's when Kissinger and Nixon said, "Oh my god, the Chinese must be a little bit afraid of the Russians." So let's work with the Chinese. The Chinese gave us the possibility to collect really good information on the Russians, and that changed everything.
After we did the Russians and the Chinese the favor of driving them together against this common enemy — now it is a common enemy, and this enemy is unpredictable — that's why I say we should be grateful for cautious people at the top who are not going to let Trump have any pretext to use nuclear weapons or something of that sort.
Russian Restraint, European Escalation, and the Limits of Patience
Glenn Diesen: But how cautious do you think they will be on the Russian side now? Because I think they were cautious for quite some time — not just four years, but since 2014. The impression I get from Moscow these days is that they perceive their restraint as having been interpreted by the West as weakness. And it's hard to deny this. Anyone looking at the newspapers sees them essentially mocking the idea that Russia would ever dare to retaliate against a NATO country — too afraid. Not just attack a NATO country, but even retaliate. We can launch a missile straight into their capital and they wouldn't do anything. Even as the Europeans are escalating and the Americans are now signaling they're checking out or at least handing this over to the Europeans, there's still this assumption that Russia won't retaliate.
I'm getting the impression these days that the Russians are planning to bring some fear back into the hearts of the Europeans, because this was unthinkable during the Cold War. Who would talk the way they talk now? We have leaders openly saying, "We are very proud — we're making drones, they're going to go deep into Russia and blow up their energy infrastructure." No one talked like this in the past. It's a very strange thing to watch.
So where do you see it heading from here? Can we be at the end station? Is this going to escalate more? Do you think Europeans have the common sense or the rationality to stop the escalation and at least pick up the phone and talk to the other side?
Ray McGovern: Well, one interesting aspect of this, Glenn, which not many people refer to, is that in that extraordinary Q&A that Putin held after the victory celebrations on Red Square on the 9th of May, he very clearly differentiated the US from those crazy Europeans. He said, "The US and we Russians see Ukraine the same way." Wow. That's a biggie. That's what he said.
So he's making a distinction between what he sees as Trump's policy — which is destroying NATO in effect, since NATO has no power without the United States — and the Europeans doing these crazy things. Again, his primary vision is to make sure that Trump doesn't do something really stupid. He says it's crazy to try to negotiate with people who kidnap leaders of countries and all that, but "we believe the United States is sincere in trying to tamp down the Ukrainian situation, and once we get rid of the Iran issue, it'll be possible to work out something sensible."
So what am I saying? Number one, NATO is nothing without the United States. They can bluster. They can actually fire long-range drones into deep Russia. The last one, of course, killed so many young women at that college. Well, that was a bridge too far for Putin, and Putin retaliated with Oreshnik, for God's sake. You can't defend against Oreshnik, and it was very clear that he was provoked into doing that.
Will he be provoked into hitting NATO countries? I don't think so. Why? Because this is still Article Five of the NATO treaty, and even if there's only a 5% chance — as I read Putin — even if there's only a 5% chance that Trump would say, "My God, we are still part of NATO, we're going to respond," he doesn't want to take that chance.
With the Oreshnik strike, I believe Putin has diffused a lot of the popular sentiment saying, "Can't we get this war over?" The notion going around — in Norway, in The Economist, and elsewhere — that the Russians are stymied and have no possibility to move forward because of powerful Ukrainian forces with drones and so on: well, with drones and so on, the Russians have air defense, they have drone defense. Some would get through, but unlike Ukraine, as was just shown with that big Oreshnik attack, the Russians can defend themselves from these missiles.
I used to call these attacks pin pricks — including the attack on that airfield with bombers, part of the triad. They're no longer pin pricks when they kill 18 or so young women studying to be teachers in a village. And so when that happens, Putin retaliates. I don't think he's going to be too much incited to do more.
Now, there have been people — it was Pyanski, the deputy head of the UN mission in New York, I know him, he's now the chief Russian representative to the OECD in Vienna — he was interviewed by Danny Davis. Danny Davis kind of said, "Well, what he told us was that it's already too late to avert Russian strikes in Europe." Well, I understand how that can be obfuscated by the next person. But what Pyanski really said — and I'll read it to you — was: "If Russia is provoked into striking in the future" — talking about striking against Europe — "people will wonder why it happened, but by then it will have been too late."
Now that's a distinction with a difference. "It will have been" — if I remember correctly, that's the future perfect tense. It depends on this "if," and that's a big if. So again, going back to my frame of reference: Putin sees, number one, that he's got a guy he can talk to. Number two, he's got a guy he can call up and dissuade from doing really stupid things. He's going to try to prevent a situation where it will have been too late.
Karaganov, Deterrence, and the Changing Mood in Moscow
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. Well, I spoke to Pyanski as well, and he did mention — I think almost a direct quote — that talk about nuclear war, or striking with a tactical nuke, is becoming less taboo. That's very different from claiming the government is considering the option. But this was in reference to an interview I did with Karaganov, when he said that his views on retaliating against Europe used to represent a small minority, and now he said the overwhelming majority believes the time has come to focus on restoring deterrence as opposed to turning the other cheek.
I'm not sure — as you said, there's a lot at stake here. But it feels like we're reaching a point where it's difficult to turn the other cheek yet again. I often think about George Beebe. He gave an interview in December of 2021 and made the point that the Russians didn't want to start a war, but they were reaching the point where inaction was more dangerous than action. In other words, if they waited much longer, NATO countries would entrench themselves too heavily in Ukraine and it would be too late to dislodge them. Essentially: now or never. And two months later, the Russians invaded.
So I'm wondering if we're reaching some dangerous point here. When you spoke, I was thinking that the pragmatism the Russians have toward the US now — that it's possible to work with them — versus the hostility toward Europeans, is very different from when Biden was in government, and it fills me with some optimism. The hatred of Europe instead of the US signals that the Russians are pragmatic: as soon as the US began to say, "Listen, we can get along with Russia, we can talk," even with fighting still ongoing in Ukraine, the Russians are showing that they can work with this. Perhaps they can end this. It shows there's a lot of room for maneuver if the West wants to open up diplomacy.
Sorry — I was going to get to my last question, which is Germany. How do you make sense of this? Because it came as a bit of a surprise to many people how Germany has essentially put itself at the forefront of anti-Russian rhetoric and actions. How do you make sense of this?
Germany, European Brainwashing, and the Long Game
Ray McGovern: Glenn, I don't know if I showed you this before, but here's a little button. It says "Versteher" — which means "one who understands." Six or seven years ago, I was in Germany on one of my visits and I saw this. I said, "Oh my God, get me one of those buttons." My friend said, "No, no, don't do that." Why? Because "Versteher" is a pejorative — understanding is a pejorative. People say you're in Putin's camp.
Now, here's a literal manifestation of the mood in Germany. A very intelligent, cultured people have once again been brainwashed. Their entire media is worse than ours, and that's saying something. Most intelligent people who know which end is up in Germany are afraid to speak out. That's how bad it is.
But the Germans are going to spend hundreds of thousands of euros on weapons that will not defend them against anyone, and risk the social safety net that has made German democracy so secure and so admired around the world. I don't think so. And that's what it will come to — there's a limited amount of money. Scholz is as unpopular as any German chancellor in the history of the chancellorship in Germany. He's going to be gone pretty soon. So will Macron. Starmer is on his way out. These guys are looked on — advisedly — as superannuated vestiges of what's trying to hang on as long as it can.
So again, cool-hand-Luke Putin is playing the long game here. He realized: the US has decided not to put intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Germany, as they undertook with Chancellor Scholz back at the NATO meeting in Washington two years ago. They're not going to do that anymore. So without the US, NATO is nothing. Let's keep calm here.
The SVR Warning to Latvia and the Limits of NATO's Article Five
Now, one thing I wanted to mention is that the SVR — the Russian equivalent of the CIA — has a press office. I didn't know that. They made a statement five days ago. They were talking about tactics that will significantly reduce the time of approach of these missiles if they're put in Latvia. Latvia is said to be willing to accept these missiles, and the SVR named five sites from which they could be fired.
Here's the bottom line. It would be useful to recall that the coordinates of decision-making in Riga, in Latvia, are well known, and — here it is — "the country's membership in NATO will not protect the accomplices of terrorists from fair retribution."
This is from May 19th, six days ago. A very unusual statement, and it's just warning the Latvians: if you fire missiles or drones into deep Russia, just realize that your membership in NATO will not protect you from retribution. I haven't kept up on whether the Latvians have taken that seriously or not, but I'm about 80% sure that they will.
The retribution sites have been named. The Russians made fun of the Latvians who, as the Russians say, lack critical thinking. The Ukrainians were able to persuade them that the Russians would never retaliate because they couldn't tell where the missiles came from. As the SVR said: "We know we can tell where the missiles come from, so don't do it."
Now, that's an example of how the upstart Baltic states would let themselves be drawn into this unless the Russian intelligence service warns the world: look, membership in NATO might not save you from this kind of retaliation.
My prediction is that if this happens, it could be that the Russians could strike into a NATO member state, namely Latvia. But I think on balance that's unlikely, because as Putin weighs the cost-benefit analysis — if there's only a 5% chance that Trump would go off half-cocked and say, "No, Article Five — I never rescinded Article Five, I'm going to respond" — even if there's just a 5% chance of that, the game is not worth the candle.
Take that for what it's worth. Many of my colleagues disagree. When Karaganov or Mezyaev — these people speak out — well, they've been saying this for a long, long time. Karaganov especially, forever. And yes, Karaganov can interview Putin at these big meetings at Valdai and elsewhere. But I never had the thought that Karaganov was fully persuasive with Putin. I'm persuaded that Putin is too cautious for that kind of thing. I may be completely wrong, but I do adduce six decades of watching Russian and Soviet leaders, and this one is different.
I will say this: we should be grateful for his caution, for his perspicaciousness, and for his foresight in developing the kind of relationship with Beijing, with Xi personally. Let's add one thing here. When Putin was leaving Beijing, Xi walked with him. The camaraderie — Xi is a little bit inscrutable, doesn't smile much, but this time it was almost a smile. They're standing next to each other, and Putin is waiting — will he give me the great big bear hug that Trump advertised he was going to give him when he went and never got? And then Xi goes like this — it wasn't a great big bear hug, but it was very symptomatic of their relationship. And then as Putin wanders off to the plane or the train or whatever it was, Xi looks after him. I usually rely on more reliable indicators of such things, but that spoke volumes to me. No big bear hug for Trump — just a cursory warning about Taiwan, nothing else. They're together as never before.
That is the tectonic shift that gives Putin the latitude to bear with some of these indignities without going off half-cocked. I hope I'm right.
Kennedy's Warning, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Danger of Humiliating a Nuclear Power
Glenn Diesen: I hope you're right as well. It just seems — I've been a bit pessimistic about the possibility of peace. But usually in history, countries get all the way up to the edge of catastrophe, and that's usually when leaders begin to wake up. My concern is that many of our leaders now are essentially arguing that this is pressure tactics and we will not yield to pressure — we will go off that cliff. I'm hoping that when the Macrons and Starmers of this world go away, perhaps we'll get some common sense again. It seems we're at a very dangerous point: either we go to war or we have some reopening of diplomacy. At the moment, the Europeans at least are speaking both about starting to talk to the Russians — after boycotting diplomacy for all these years — but also about fighting Russia in war. So I'm hoping peace comes first. Any final thoughts?
Ray McGovern: Well, it takes two to tango — two to make war. One final thought is this. As you know, I came down to Washington under John F. Kennedy. Just two months after I joined the CIA, he made that wonderful speech at American University, 10 June 1963. One of the things he said there was: look, unique among great powers, Russia and the United States have never been in a frontal war, one against the other. Bear in mind this is eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it almost happened — when you and I might not be making this nice little discussion today.
He said: the thing we have to avoid at all costs, given what almost happened eight months ago, is challenging another nuclear-armed country with a choice between humiliating retreat and using nuclear weapons. My God. Khrushchev was himself chastened and wondering about how this all went down, and made the right decisions. Thank the Lord.
But since then — ever since then, up until Ukraine — when the US took it into its head, Biden and the rest of them, to challenge a nuclear-armed power by moving Ukraine into NATO, that's when this all changed. So you're right, Glenn. This is a new shift and it's happened.
Now the question is: do the Russians have the upper hand in Ukraine to the degree that they're not too worried about these pin pricks? Or will they retaliate for killing a whole bunch of girls in a school? Are they willing to attrit the Ukrainian forces, defend themselves against these drones — a defense that the Ukrainians do not have against drones — and bide their time, and see how long it takes Scholz to fall, Starmer to fall, and the US, for now, is pretty much on the side of Russia on this? Putin said that explicitly at that May 9th press conference. One ought to read that — it's full of gems, also having to do with Ukraine and also having to do with Iran.
Glenn Diesen: Well, when the Europeans talk about increasing the pressure on the Russians, I always make the point that all these pin pricks — we should be happy they're not having more effect, because if they were having an important effect, to the extent that Russia now sees it as an existential threat, they would react in a very different way. My concern is that a lot of these attacks on the energy infrastructure are starting to get an impact on the Russian economy, and while the Europeans are celebrating, they should be aware: if this means that Russia can't afford to absorb this pain anymore, that means the considerations are changing. Now they have to strike back. And this is what keeps me up at night.
Ray McGovern: I understand. I agree. The only thing is how you proportion it. The way I come at it is that as Putin looks at what he's done the last 25 years — how he's brought Russia back, how Russia can defend itself, how his people are prospering, just like those 700,000 peasants brought out of poverty in China — he's not going to risk that at all. And so he's going to say: look, these guys, some of them are crazy. We've got the US separated from them. Without the US, NATO is nothing. So even though — in other words, it's how you proportion the priorities that Putin has in the back of his head. No one can be sure. Perhaps not even Putin. But that's my read on it, and it's different from others. But I think that's the bottom line, at least for me. We'll see what happens.
Glenn Diesen: Well, at least your optimism will make me sleep better at night. I hope you're right on this one. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Ray McGovern: You're most welcome. Thanks for having me.