Trump’s National-Security Adviser Explains How Biden Botched U.S. Deterrence with Putin

R obert O’Brien, Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, this week sought to rally the largest group of conservative lawmakers in the House behind a hawkish approach to countering Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We need to make it very clear to everybody when you’re out talking to your constituents and talking to the media: As weak as the Biden administration has been on this issue, and deterrence has clearly failed, this is Vladimir Putin’s fault,” O’Brien said Wednesday, speaking at the Republican Study Committee’s weekly lunch meeting. “Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and this is not a good man. This is a terrible guy.”

The RSC, which is led by Representative Jim Banks (Ind.), has hosted similar gatherings with several Republicans interested in running for president and with conservative foreign-policy experts. The hawkish tilt of O’Brien’s comments — and his alignment with a slew of hawkish proposals put forward by the RSC to counter Russian aggression — is noteworthy, as it suggests that populist Republicans who oppose robust policies in support of Ukraine are in the minority.

O’Brien’s comments while addressing the closed-door RSC meeting — to which National Review had exclusive access — were also some of his frankest to date on the crisis. In addition to denying claims that he distanced himself from Trump by calling Putin a “killer” in a speech to CPAC last month, he explained to lawmakers why the Biden administration’s approach to deterrence failed to stop Putin from invading, offered his own recommendations, and predicted Russia’s next moves.

Biden’s decision to publicly rule out introducing U.S. forces into Ukraine is a significant factor in why his approach to the crisis went awry, according to O’Brien.

“When we took that off the table early on, instead of saying all options are on the table, and letting their planners have to worry, let their generals have to worry about, what would happen if the A-10s showed up, what would happen if the F-22s or the F-35s showed up and created a combat air patrol and secured dominance over Ukraine, how would we operate in that environment,” he said.

“Instead of giving them that risk to calculate,” he continued, “we took it off the table, and we basically said that risk will no longer exist to you.”

It’s not that the former Trump adviser wants to send U.S. forces to Ukraine — he said that he doesn’t and that he opposes implementing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. But in his view, the Biden administration has dropped the ball by declining to immediately impose tougher sanctions on Russia, including on its oil and gas industry.

O’Brien also said repeatedly on Wednesday that the U.S. should send more Stinger missiles to Ukraine and made the case for moving the lion’s share of U.S. forces from their bases in Germany to Poland and other frontline countries.

“Germany’s not a frontline state, and we need them in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Let’s leave the airbases and leave the hospitals there, but other than that, let’s get our troops out to the frontlines.”

He said another operation by the Russians targeting Moldova “wouldn’t surprise me,” because Putin already considers the country to be Russian and Alexander Lukashenko, the Putin-aligned dictator of Belarus, was recently pictured with a map depicting invasion plans. But, he said, Putin is less likely to target the Baltic countries, all of which are NATO members: Doing so would pit Russian forces against the U.K., France, and the U.S., and “his air force could get wiped out.”

“He’s utterly defeated if he tries to invade . . . a NATO country,” said O’Brien, adding that the most capable core of the Russian military, which includes some 200,000 troops, is “pretty bogged down in Ukraine right now.”

Those forces have made slower progress over the past several days than many observers expected they would, though they are making gradual advances. They’ve also undertaken brutal artillery attacks, shelling major cities and even a nuclear plant.

Although Putin has hinted that Russia could resort to using nuclear weapons, O’Brien dismissed that as unlikely, considering that there’s no big concentration of U.S. troops nearby that would enable him to use a tactical nuclear strike to gain a military advantage.

O’Brien said he’s more concerned that “you’re going to have something more like Grozny in Chechnya, where the Russians had a very difficult time in the Chechen war and they decided just to wipe out entire cities.”

As for the speculation about whether he was splitting with Trump during his CPAC speech, O’Brien tamped it down: “There was some concern that I had somehow put daylight between myself and the former president, which is not true. I’ve spoken to the former president. He agrees 100 percent. Putin is a killer, and he’s trying to rebuild the Russian empire.”

In fact, he said that when he spoke with Trump “the other day,” his former boss told him that Putin and Xi didn’t act on their respective designs on Ukraine and Taiwan because they “were always scared because they didn’t know if they did something [whether] we’d commit U.S. troops in the field or not,” even when there might only have been a 10 percent chance of that happening. According to O’Brien, Trump said, “they weren’t sure what I’d do, and so they didn’t take aggressive action.”