Ben Rhodes: Is Trump Stumbling into a Wider War?

**Tim Miller** (0:12)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, Deputy National Security Advisor for Barack Hussein Obama and co-host of Pod Save the World. His latest book, Always Say, The Battle for American Identity was released earlier this year. It's Ben Rhodes. What's up, man?

**Ben Rhodes** (0:28)
Hey, Tim. Good to see you.

**Tim Miller** (0:29)
It's good to see you as well. Yesterday, at the beginning in this little intro, I said that Trump had been quiet this week, so I had seen him on. We did a lot of silly stuff. By the time the show aired, he was already renaming Lakes again.

**Ben Rhodes** (0:43)
Yeah.

**Tim Miller** (0:45)
I don't even know that it's worth talking about it. He's such a loser and it's so embarrassing. But that did happen between the taping and the airing yesterday.

**Ben Rhodes** (0:54)
The Canadians have a former head of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada, who's like methodically and rigorously in his own hand, probably going through the terrors that he's going to reimpose on us, and Trump with his own hand is just drawing on Lakes and renaming things as usual.

**Tim Miller** (1:10)
Yeah. Expanding the area of the hurricane. Yeah. I liked how Carney really mugged us with the use of the word hydronyms in his statement.
He's like, Trump is obsessed with hydronyms. I was like, all right. Well, Trump certainly doesn't know that word. I had to Google it. It's good. It's good. It's good usage.

**Ben Rhodes** (1:33)
You got to go to the thesaurus. Yeah. Mark Carney is like a walking thesaurus, man. We're not fighting someone in our own weight class in the trade war here.

**Tim Miller** (1:41)
We have a bunch of domestic politics to talk about. At the end, on your substack notes, on the stories we tell, you've had two good ones in the last two weeks that touch on things that affect me, Resistance 1 discourse and hatred of Enes Kanter. So we will get to both of those things at the end.
But I got to start with foreign policy, you know your expertise. I guess we'll tie this Enes Kanter. I want to do the Brian Windhorst thing about connecting dots on a couple of stories I've been reading in the news. And since you actually have sources you talked to, I'm wondering what you think about all this. So CIA Director visits Moscow.
The Wall Street Journal reports that depletion of our weapons stocks in the Iran War could be motivating Putin to consider making a move on NATO. The NATO Secretary General has a meeting with US. Under Secretary Elbridge Colby, which is a little unusual. US. Intel, we've seen these reports for a while now, warning Eastern European countries about Russia plans to test NATO. There was a leak of a letter that three Baltic commissioners sent to the EU President about a deteriorating security environment and increased frequency of airspace violations in the Baltics. And the Sun tabloid has Kremlin insiders fearing Putin is prepared to drop a tactical nuke. So, you know, I'm tying like Elbridge and Ratcliffe and the warnings. And it feels kind of like the lead up to the Ukraine War, when a lot of people are like not taking that seriously. And our Intel people are like, no, really, like this is happening. I don't know. What do you think about all that?

**Ben Rhodes** (3:09)
Yeah. And I've been talking to people, you know, in Europe, and some of the people kind of worked on these types of things over the last decade.
And I think there is a feeling that there's rising concern that Russia could do something in Europe that could take different forms. One is like a direct attack on European soil, targeting places where they manufacture some of the drones and rockets that are going deep into Russia. The Russian idea being, okay, if you're giving them the weapons that are hitting places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, then we have a right to attack the factory in Germany that is producing that. There's lesser things they could do. They've been doing sabotage operations, like there have been fires set in Europe, there have been things blowing up in Europe.

**Tim Miller** (3:56)
The drones at the German air base.

**Ben Rhodes** (3:59)
Yeah, drones just showing up. They could also just begin a more aggressive version of what they did in Ukraine in one of the Baltic states or Moldova.
There was a great story recently at Times about literally Russian training camps, dudes with guns and preparing sabotage operations in Serbia, ostensibly for Moldova. You had NATO undertaking military exercises to show some deterrence. But yeah, I think it is a tenuous time. There is a feeling that as Russia is on the back foot here because of the Ukrainian drone capability that one way they might lash out is by trying to impose a cost on Europe and test whether the NATO alliance can respond to it.